Total: 42
In this paper, we present MiSS, an assistant for multi-style simultaneous translation. Our proposed translation system has five key features: highly accurate translation, simultaneous translation, translation for multiple text styles, back-translation for translation quality evaluation, and grammatical error correction. With this system, we aim to provide a complete translation experience for machine translation users. Our design goals are high translation accuracy, real-time translation, flexibility, and measurable translation quality. Compared with the free commercial translation systems commonly used, our translation assistance system regards the machine translation application as a more complete and fully-featured tool for users. By incorporating additional features and giving the user better control over their experience, we improve translation efficiency and performance. Additionally, our assistant system combines machine translation, grammatical error correction, and interactive edits, and uses a crowdsourcing mode to collect more data for further training to improve both the machine translation and grammatical error correction models. A short video demonstrating our system is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGCo7KtRKd8.
In this paper, we present an automatic knowledge base construction system from large scale enterprise documents with minimal efforts of human intervention. In the design and deployment of such a knowledge mining system for enterprise, we faced several challenges including data distributional shift, performance evaluation, compliance requirements and other practical issues. We leveraged state-of-the-art deep learning models to extract information (named entities and definitions) at per document level, then further applied classical machine learning techniques to process global statistical information to improve the knowledge base. Experimental results are reported on actual enterprise documents. This system is currently serving as part of a Microsoft 365 service.
Text annotation tools assume that their user’s goal is to create a labeled corpus. However,users view annotation as a necessary evil on the way to deliver business value through NLP.Thus an annotation tool should optimize for the throughput of the global NLP process, not only the productivity of individual annotators. LightTag is a text annotation tool designed and built on that principle. This paper shares our design rationale, data modeling choices, and user interface decisions then illustrates how those choices serve the full NLP lifecycle.
For many use cases, it is required that MT does not just translate raw text, but complex formatted documents (e.g. websites, slides, spreadsheets) and the result of the translation should reflect the formatting. This is challenging, as markup can be nested, apply to spans contiguous in source but non-contiguous in target etc. Here we present TransIns, a system for non-plain text document translation that builds on the Okapi framework and MT models trained with Marian NMT. We develop, implement and evaluate different strategies for reinserting markup into translated sentences using token alignments between source and target sentences. We propose a simple and effective strategy that compiles down all markup to single source tokens and transfers them to aligned target tokens. A first evaluation shows that this strategy yields highly accurate markup in the translated documents that outperforms the markup quality found in documents translated with popular translation services. We release TransIns under the MIT License as open-source software on https://github.com/DFKI-MLT/TransIns. An online demonstrator is available at https://transins.dfki.de.
In this paper we explore the functionalities of ET, a suite designed to support linguistic research and natural language processing tasks using corpora annotated in the CoNLL-U format. These goals are achieved by two integrated environments – Interrogatório, an environment for querying and editing annotated corpora, and Julgamento, an environment for assessing their quality. ET is open-source, built on different Python Web technologies and has Web demonstrations available on-line. ET has been intensively used in our research group for over two years, being the chosen framework for several linguistic and NLP-related studies conducted by its researchers.
We introduce N-LTP, an open-source neural language technology platform supporting six fundamental Chinese NLP tasks: lexical analysis (Chinese word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition), syntactic parsing (dependency parsing), and semantic parsing (semantic dependency parsing and semantic role labeling). Unlike the existing state-of-the-art toolkits, such as Stanza, that adopt an independent model for each task, N-LTP adopts the multi-task framework by using a shared pre-trained model, which has the advantage of capturing the shared knowledge across relevant Chinese tasks. In addition, a knowledge distillation method (Clark et al., 2019) where the single-task model teaches the multi-task model is further introduced to encourage the multi-task model to surpass its single-task teacher. Finally, we provide a collection of easy-to-use APIs and a visualization tool to make users to use and view the processing results more easily and directly. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first toolkit to support six Chinese NLP fundamental tasks. Source code, documentation, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/HIT-SCIR/ltp.
We introduce COMBO – a fully neural NLP system for accurate part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis, lemmatisation, and (enhanced) dependency parsing. It predicts categorical morphosyntactic features whilst also exposes their vector representations, extracted from hidden layers. COMBO is an easy to install Python package with automatically downloadable pre-trained models for over 40 languages. It maintains a balance between efficiency and quality. As it is an end-to-end system and its modules are jointly trained, its training is competitively fast. As its models are optimised for accuracy, they achieve often better prediction quality than SOTA. The COMBO library is available at: https://gitlab.clarin-pl.eu/syntactic-tools/combo.
Timely responses from policy makers to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic rely on a comprehensive grasp of events, their causes, and their impacts. These events are reported at such a speed and scale as to be overwhelming. In this paper, we present ExcavatorCovid, a machine reading system that ingests open-source text documents (e.g., news and scientific publications), extracts COVID-19 related events and relations between them, and builds a Temporal and Causal Analysis Graph (TCAG). Excavator will help government agencies alleviate the information overload, understand likely downstream effects of political and economic decisions and events related to the pandemic, and respond in a timely manner to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. We expect the utility of Excavator to outlive the COVID-19 pandemic: analysts and decision makers will be empowered by Excavator to better understand and solve complex problems in the future. A demonstration video is available at https://vimeo.com/528619007.
Warning: This manuscript contains a certain level of offensive expression. As communication through social media platforms has grown immensely, the increasing prevalence of offensive language online has become a critical problem. Notably in Korea, one of the countries with the highest Internet usage, automatic detection of offensive expressions has recently been brought to attention. However, morphological richness and complex syntax of Korean causes difficulties in neural model training. Furthermore, most of previous studies mainly focus on the detection of abusive language, disregarding implicit offensiveness and underestimating a different degree of intensity. To tackle these problems, we present KOAS, a system that fully exploits both contextual and linguistic features and estimates an offensiveness score for a text. We carefully designed KOAS with a multi-task learning framework and constructed a Korean dataset for offensive analysis from various domains. Refer for a detailed demonstration.
We present RepGraph, an open source visualisation and analysis tool for meaning representation graphs. Graph-based meaning representations provide rich semantic annotations, but visualising them clearly is more challenging than for fully lexicalized representations. Our application provides a seamless, unifying interface with which to visualise, manipulate and analyse semantically parsed graph data represented in a JSON-based serialisation format. RepGraph visualises graphs in multiple formats, with an emphasis on showing the relation between nodes and their corresponding token spans, whilst keeping the representation compact. Additionally, the web-based tool provides NLP researchers with a clear, visually intuitive way of interacting with these graphs, and includes a number of graph analysis features. The tool currently supports the DMRS, EDS, PTG, UCCA, and AMR semantic frameworks. A live demo is available at https://repgraph.vercel.app/.
In the language domain, as in other domains, neural explainability takes an ever more important role, with feature attribution methods on the forefront. Many such methods require considerable computational resources and expert knowledge about implementation details and parameter choices. To facilitate research, we present Thermostat which consists of a large collection of model explanations and accompanying analysis tools. Thermostat allows easy access to over 200k explanations for the decisions of prominent state-of-the-art models spanning across different NLP tasks, generated with multiple explainers. The dataset took over 10k GPU hours (> one year) to compile; compute time that the community now saves. The accompanying software tools allow to analyse explanations instance-wise but also accumulatively on corpus level. Users can investigate and compare models, datasets and explainers without the need to orchestrate implementation details. Thermostat is fully open source, democratizes explainability research in the language domain, circumvents redundant computations and increases comparability and replicability.
While different language models are ubiquitous in NLP, it is hard to contrast their outputs and identify which contexts one can handle better than the other. To address this question, we introduce LMdiff, a tool that visually compares probability distributions of two models that differ, e.g., through finetuning, distillation, or simply training with different parameter sizes. LMdiff allows the generation of hypotheses about model behavior by investigating text instances token by token and further assists in choosing these interesting text instances by identifying the most interesting phrases from large corpora. We showcase the applicability of LMdiff for hypothesis generation across multiple case studies. A demo is available at http://lmdiff.net .
In this paper we present a prototype demonstrator showcasing a novel method to perform semantic exploration of user reviews. The system enables effective navigation in a rich contextual semantic schema with a large number of structured classes indicating relevant information. In order to identify instances of the structured classes in the reviews, we defined a new Information Extraction task called Semantic Context Path (SCP) labeling, which simultaneously assigns types and semantic roles to entity mentions. Reviews can rapidly be explored based on the fine-grained and structured semantic classes. As a proof-of-concept, we have implemented this system for reviews on Points-of-Interest, in English and Korean.
On the way towards general Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems that are able to answer arbitrary questions, the need arises for evaluation beyond single-metric leaderboards for specific datasets. To this end, we propose a browser-based benchmarking tool for researchers and challenge organizers, with an API for easy integration of new models and datasets to keep up with the fast-changing landscape of VQA. Our tool helps test generalization capabilities of models across multiple datasets, evaluating not just accuracy, but also performance in more realistic real-world scenarios such as robustness to input noise. Additionally, we include metrics that measure biases and uncertainty, to further explain model behavior. Interactive filtering facilitates discovery of problematic behavior, down to the data sample level. As proof of concept, we perform a case study on four models. We find that state-of-the-art VQA models are optimized for specific tasks or datasets, but fail to generalize even to other in-domain test sets, for example they can not recognize text in images. Our metrics allow us to quantify which image and question embeddings provide most robustness to a model. All code s publicly available.
Athena 2.0 is an Alexa Prize SocialBot that has been a finalist in the last two Alexa Prize Grand Challenges. One reason for Athena’s success is its novel dialogue management strategy, which allows it to dynamically construct dialogues and responses from component modules, leading to novel conversations with every interaction. Here we describe Athena’s system design and performance in the Alexa Prize during the 20/21 competition. A live demo of Athena as well as video recordings will provoke discussion on the state of the art in conversational AI.
In this paper we present SPRING Online Services, a Web interface and RESTful APIs for our state-of-the-art AMR parsing and generation system, SPRING (Symmetric PaRsIng aNd Generation). The Web interface has been developed to be easily used by the Natural Language Processing community, as well as by the general public. It provides, among other things, a highly interactive visualization platform and a feedback mechanism to obtain user suggestions for further improvements of the system’s output. Moreover, our RESTful APIs enable easy integration of SPRING in downstream applications where AMR structures are needed. Finally, we make SPRING Online Services freely available at http://nlp.uniroma1.it/spring and, in addition, we release extra model checkpoints to be used with the original SPRING Python code.
This paper presents fairseq Sˆ2, a fairseq extension for speech synthesis. We implement a number of autoregressive (AR) and non-AR text-to-speech models, and their multi-speaker variants. To enable training speech synthesis models with less curated data, a number of preprocessing tools are built and their importance is shown empirically. To facilitate faster iteration of development and analysis, a suite of automatic metrics is included. Apart from the features added specifically for this extension, fairseq Sˆ2 also benefits from the scalability offered by fairseq and can be easily integrated with other state-of-the-art systems provided in this framework. The code, documentation, and pre-trained models will be made available at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/speech_synthesis.
Freedom of the press and media is of vital importance for democratically organised states and open societies. We introduce the Press Freedom Monitor, a tool that aims to detect reported press and media freedom violations in news articles and tweets. It is used by press and media freedom organisations to support their daily monitoring and to trigger rapid response actions. The Press Freedom Monitor enables the monitoring experts to get a fast overview over recently reported incidents and it has shown an impressive performance in this regard. This paper presents our work on the tool, starting with the training phase, which comprises defining the topic-related keywords to be used for querying APIs for news and Twitter content and evaluating different machine learning models based on a training dataset specifically created for our use case. Then, we describe the components of the production pipeline, including data gathering, duplicates removal, country mapping, case mapping and the user interface. We also conducted a usability study to evaluate the effectiveness of the user interface, and describe improvement plans for future work.
We present UMR-Writer, a web-based application for annotating Uniform Meaning Representations (UMR), a graph-based, cross-linguistically applicable semantic representation developed recently to support the development of interpretable natural language applications that require deep semantic analysis of texts. We present the functionalities of UMR-Writer and discuss the challenges in developing such a tool and how they are addressed.
Every day, millions of people sacrifice their privacy and browsing habits in exchange for online machine translation. Companies and governments with confidentiality requirements often ban online translation or pay a premium to disable logging. To bring control back to the end user and demonstrate speed, we developed translateLocally. Running locally on a desktop or laptop CPU, translateLocally delivers cloud-like translation speed and quality even on 10 year old hardware. The open-source software is based on Marian and runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS.
The scale, variety, and quantity of publicly-available NLP datasets has grown rapidly as researchers propose new tasks, larger models, and novel benchmarks. Datasets is a community library for contemporary NLP designed to support this ecosystem. Datasets aims to standardize end-user interfaces, versioning, and documentation, while providing a lightweight front-end that behaves similarly for small datasets as for internet-scale corpora. The design of the library incorporates a distributed, community-driven approach to adding datasets and documenting usage. After a year of development, the library now includes more than 650 unique datasets, has more than 250 contributors, and has helped support a variety of novel cross-dataset research projects and shared tasks. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/datasets.
This paper introduces Summary Explorer, a new tool to support the manual inspection of text summarization systems by compiling the outputs of 55 state-of-the-art single document summarization approaches on three benchmark datasets, and visually exploring them during a qualitative assessment. The underlying design of the tool considers three well-known summary quality criteria (coverage, faithfulness, and position bias), encapsulated in a guided assessment based on tailored visualizations. The tool complements existing approaches for locally debugging summarization models and improves upon them. The tool is available at https://tldr.webis.de/
We present MeetDot, a videoconferencing system with live translation captions overlaid on screen. The system aims to facilitate conversation between people who speak different languages, thereby reducing communication barriers between multilingual participants. Currently, our system supports speech and captions in 4 languages and combines automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) in a cascade. We use the re-translation strategy to translate the streamed speech, resulting in caption flicker. Additionally, our system has very strict latency requirements to have acceptable call quality. We implement several features to enhance user experience and reduce their cognitive load, such as smooth scrolling captions and reducing caption flicker. The modular architecture allows us to integrate different ASR and MT services in our backend. Our system provides an integrated evaluation suite to optimize key intrinsic evaluation metrics such as accuracy, latency and erasure. Finally, we present an innovative cross-lingual word-guessing game as an extrinsic evaluation metric to measure end-to-end system performance. We plan to make our system open-source for research purposes.
A fundamental component to the success of modern representation learning is the ease of performing various vector operations. Recently, objects with more geometric structure (eg. distributions, complex or hyperbolic vectors, or regions such as cones, disks, or boxes) have been explored for their alternative inductive biases and additional representational capacity. In this work, we introduce Box Embeddings, a Python library that enables researchers to easily apply and extend probabilistic box embeddings. Fundamental geometric operations on boxes are implemented in a numerically stable way, as are modern approaches to training boxes which mitigate gradient sparsity. The library is fully open source, and compatible with both PyTorch and TensorFlow, which allows existing neural network layers to be replaced with or transformed into boxes easily. In this work, we present the implementation details of the fundamental components of the library, and the concepts required to use box representations alongside existing neural network architectures.
NLP systems are often challenged by difficulties arising from noisy, non-standard, and domain specific corpora. The task of lexical normalisation aims to standardise such corpora, but currently lacks suitable tools to acquire high-quality annotated data to support deep learning based approaches. In this paper, we present LexiClean, the first open-source web-based annotation tool for multi-task lexical normalisation. LexiClean’s main contribution is support for simultaneous in situ token-level modification and annotation that can be rapidly applied corpus wide. We demonstrate the usefulness of our tool through a case study on two sets of noisy corpora derived from the specialised-domain of industrial mining. We show that LexiClean allows for the rapid and efficient development of high-quality parallel corpora. A demo of our system is available at: https://youtu.be/P7_ooKrQPDU.