Weijia Xu


2023

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Proceedings of the Seventh Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP 2023)
Bonaventure F. P. Dossou | Isidora Tourni | Hatem Haddad | Shaily Bhatt | Fatemehsadat Mireshghallah | Sunipa Dev | Tanvi Anand | Weijia Xu | Atnafu Lambebo Tonja | Alfredo Gomez | Chanjun Park
Proceedings of the Seventh Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP 2023)

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Understanding and Detecting Hallucinations in Neural Machine Translation via Model Introspection
Weijia Xu | Sweta Agrawal | Eleftheria Briakou | Marianna J. Martindale | Marine Carpuat
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11

Neural sequence generation models are known to “hallucinate”, by producing outputs that are unrelated to the source text. These hallucinations are potentially harmful, yet it remains unclear in what conditions they arise and how to mitigate their impact. In this work, we first identify internal model symptoms of hallucinations by analyzing the relative token contributions to the generation in contrastive hallucinated vs. non-hallucinated outputs generated via source perturbations. We then show that these symptoms are reliable indicators of natural hallucinations, by using them to design a lightweight hallucination detector which outperforms both model-free baselines and strong classifiers based on quality estimation or large pre-trained models on manually annotated English-Chinese and German-English translation test beds.

2022

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Constrained Regeneration for Cross-Lingual Query-Focused Extractive Summarization
Elsbeth Turcan | David Wan | Faisal Ladhak | Petra Galuscakova | Sukanta Sen | Svetlana Tchistiakova | Weijia Xu | Marine Carpuat | Kenneth Heafield | Douglas Oard | Kathleen McKeown
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Query-focused summaries of foreign-language, retrieved documents can help a user understand whether a document is actually relevant to the query term. A standard approach to this problem is to first translate the source documents and then perform extractive summarization to find relevant snippets. However, in a cross-lingual setting, the query term does not necessarily appear in the translations of relevant documents. In this work, we show that constrained machine translation and constrained post-editing can improve human relevance judgments by including a query term in a summary when its translation appears in the source document. We also present several strategies for selecting only certain documents for regeneration which yield further improvements

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Proceedings of the Sixth Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP)
Shaily Bhatt | Sunipa Dev | Bonaventure Dossou | Tirthankar Ghosal | Hatem Haddad | Haley M. Lepp | Fatemehsadat Mireshghallah | Surangika Ranathunga | Xanda Schofield | Isidora Tourni | Weijia Xu
Proceedings of the Sixth Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP)

2021

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Soft Layer Selection with Meta-Learning for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer
Weijia Xu | Batool Haider | Jason Krone | Saab Mansour
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Meta Learning and Its Applications to Natural Language Processing

Multilingual pre-trained contextual embedding models (Devlin et al., 2019) have achieved impressive performance on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks. Finding the most effective fine-tuning strategy to fine-tune these models on high-resource languages so that it transfers well to the zero-shot languages is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-optimizer to soft-select which layers of the pre-trained model to freeze during fine-tuning. We train the meta-optimizer by simulating the zero-shot transfer scenario. Results on cross-lingual natural language inference show that our approach improves over the simple fine-tuning baseline and X-MAML (Nooralahzadeh et al., 2020).

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EDITOR: An Edit-Based Transformer with Repositioning for Neural Machine Translation with Soft Lexical Constraints
Weijia Xu | Marine Carpuat
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

We introduce an Edit-Based TransfOrmer with Repositioning (EDITOR), which makes sequence generation flexible by seamlessly allowing users to specify preferences in output lexical choice. Building on recent models for non-autoregressive sequence generation (Gu et al., 2019), EDITOR generates new sequences by iteratively editing hypotheses. It relies on a novel reposition operation designed to disentangle lexical choice from word positioning decisions, while enabling efficient oracles for imitation learning and parallel edits at decoding time. Empirically, EDITOR uses soft lexical constraints more effectively than the Levenshtein Transformer (Gu et al., 2019) while speeding up decoding dramatically compared to constrained beam search (Post and Vilar, 2018). EDITOR also achieves comparable or better translation quality with faster decoding speed than the Levenshtein Transformer on standard Romanian-English, English-German, and English-Japanese machine translation tasks.

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Rule-based Morphological Inflection Improves Neural Terminology Translation
Weijia Xu | Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Current approaches to incorporating terminology constraints in machine translation (MT) typically assume that the constraint terms are provided in their correct morphological forms. This limits their application to real-world scenarios where constraint terms are provided as lemmas. In this paper, we introduce a modular framework for incorporating lemma constraints in neural MT (NMT) in which linguistic knowledge and diverse types of NMT models can be flexibly applied. It is based on a novel cross-lingual inflection module that inflects the target lemma constraints based on the source context. We explore linguistically motivated rule-based and data-driven neural-based inflection modules and design English-German health and English-Lithuanian news test suites to evaluate them in domain adaptation and low-resource MT settings. Results show that our rule-based inflection module helps NMT models incorporate lemma constraints more accurately than a neural module and outperforms the existing end-to-end approach with lower training costs.

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A Non-Autoregressive Edit-Based Approach to Controllable Text Simplification
Sweta Agrawal | Weijia Xu | Marine Carpuat
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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How Does Distilled Data Complexity Impact the Quality and Confidence of Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation?
Weijia Xu | Shuming Ma | Dongdong Zhang | Marine Carpuat
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Improving Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Auxiliary Source Languages
Weijia Xu | Yuwei Yin | Shuming Ma | Dongdong Zhang | Haoyang Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Multilingual neural machine translation models typically handle one source language at a time. However, prior work has shown that translating from multiple source languages improves translation quality. Different from existing approaches on multi-source translation that are limited to the test scenario where parallel source sentences from multiple languages are available at inference time, we propose to improve multilingual translation in a more common scenario by exploiting synthetic source sentences from auxiliary languages. We train our model on synthetic multi-source corpora and apply random masking to enable flexible inference with single-source or bi-source inputs. Extensive experiments on Chinese/English-Japanese and a large-scale multilingual translation benchmark show that our model outperforms the multilingual baseline significantly by up to +4.0 BLEU with the largest improvements on low-resource or distant language pairs.

2020

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Dual Reconstruction: a Unifying Objective for Semi-Supervised Neural Machine Translation
Weijia Xu | Xing Niu | Marine Carpuat
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

While Iterative Back-Translation and Dual Learning effectively incorporate monolingual training data in neural machine translation, they use different objectives and heuristic gradient approximation strategies, and have not been extensively compared. We introduce a novel dual reconstruction objective that provides a unified view of Iterative Back-Translation and Dual Learning. It motivates a theoretical analysis and controlled empirical study on German-English and Turkish-English tasks, which both suggest that Iterative Back-Translation is more effective than Dual Learning despite its relative simplicity.

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End-to-End Slot Alignment and Recognition for Cross-Lingual NLU
Weijia Xu | Batool Haider | Saab Mansour
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Natural language understanding (NLU) in the context of goal-oriented dialog systems typically includes intent classification and slot labeling tasks. Existing methods to expand an NLU system to new languages use machine translation with slot label projection from source to the translated utterances, and thus are sensitive to projection errors. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end model that learns to align and predict target slot labels jointly for cross-lingual transfer. We introduce MultiATIS++, a new multilingual NLU corpus that extends the Multilingual ATIS corpus to nine languages across four language families, and evaluate our method using the corpus. Results show that our method outperforms a simple label projection method using fast-align on most languages, and achieves competitive performance to the more complex, state-of-the-art projection method with only half of the training time. We release our MultiATIS++ corpus to the community to continue future research on cross-lingual NLU.

2019

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Bi-Directional Differentiable Input Reconstruction for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Xing Niu | Weijia Xu | Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

We aim to better exploit the limited amounts of parallel text available in low-resource settings by introducing a differentiable reconstruction loss for neural machine translation (NMT). This loss compares original inputs to reconstructed inputs, obtained by back-translating translation hypotheses into the input language. We leverage differentiable sampling and bi-directional NMT to train models end-to-end, without introducing additional parameters. This approach achieves small but consistent BLEU improvements on four language pairs in both translation directions, and outperforms an alternative differentiable reconstruction strategy based on hidden states.

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Differentiable Sampling with Flexible Reference Word Order for Neural Machine Translation
Weijia Xu | Xing Niu | Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Despite some empirical success at correcting exposure bias in machine translation, scheduled sampling algorithms suffer from a major drawback: they incorrectly assume that words in the reference translations and in sampled sequences are aligned at each time step. Our new differentiable sampling algorithm addresses this issue by optimizing the probability that the reference can be aligned with the sampled output, based on a soft alignment predicted by the model itself. As a result, the output distribution at each time step is evaluated with respect to the whole predicted sequence. Experiments on IWSLT translation tasks show that our approach improves BLEU compared to maximum likelihood and scheduled sampling baselines. In addition, our approach is simpler to train with no need for sampling schedule and yields models that achieve larger improvements with smaller beam sizes.

2018

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The University of Maryland’s Chinese-English Neural Machine Translation Systems at WMT18
Weijia Xu | Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the Third Conference on Machine Translation: Shared Task Papers

This paper describes the University of Maryland’s submission to the WMT 2018 Chinese↔English news translation tasks. Our systems are BPE-based self-attentional Transformer networks with parallel and backtranslated monolingual training data. Using ensembling and reranking, we improve over the Transformer baseline by +1.4 BLEU for Chinese→English and +3.97 BLEU for English→Chinese on newstest2017. Our best systems reach BLEU scores of 24.4 for Chinese→English and 39.0 for English→Chinese on newstest2018.