Yichong Leng


2024

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AIR-Bench: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models via Generative Comprehension
Qian Yang | Jin Xu | Wenrui Liu | Yunfei Chu | Ziyue Jiang | Xiaohuan Zhou | Yichong Leng | Yuanjun Lv | Zhou Zhao | Chang Zhou | Jingren Zhou
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recently, instruction-following audio-language models have received broad attention for human-audio interaction. However, the absence of benchmarks capable of evaluating audio-centric interaction capabilities has impeded advancements in this field. Previous models primarily focus on assessing different fundamental tasks, such as automatic speech recognition, and lack an assessment of the open-ended generative capabilities centered around audio. Thus, it is challenging to track the progression in the Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) domain and to provide guidance for future improvement.In this paper, we introduce AIR-Bench (Audio InstRuction Benchmark), the first benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LALMs to understand various types of audio signals (including human speech, natural sounds, and music), and furthermore, to interact with humans in the textual format. AIR-Bench encompasses two dimensions: foundation and chat benchmarks. The former consists of 19 tasks with approximately 19k single-choice questions, intending to inspect the basic single-task ability of LALMs. The latter one contains 2k instances of open-ended question-and-answer data, directly assessing the comprehension of the model on complex audio and its capacity to follow instructions. Both benchmarks require the model to generate hypotheses directly. We design a unified framework that leverages advanced language models, such as GPT-4, to evaluate the scores of generated hypotheses given the meta-information of the audio. Experimental results demonstrate a high level of consistency between GPT-4-based evaluation and human evaluation. By revealing the limitations of existing LALMs through evaluation results, AIR-Bench can provide insights into the direction of future research. Dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/AIR-Bench.

2023

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Extract and Attend: Improving Entity Translation in Neural Machine Translation
Zixin Zeng | Rui Wang | Yichong Leng | Junliang Guo | Shufang Xie | Xu Tan | Tao Qin | Tie-Yan Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

While Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved great progress in recent years, it still suffers from inaccurate translation of entities (e.g., person/organization name, location), due to the lack of entity training instances. When we humans encounter an unknown entity during translation, we usually first look up in a dictionary and then organize the entity translation together with the translations of other parts to form a smooth target sentence. Inspired by this translation process, we propose an Extract-and-Attend approach to enhance entity translation in NMT, where the translation candidates of source entities are first extracted from a dictionary and then attended to by the NMT model to generate the target sentence. Specifically, the translation candidates are extracted by first detecting the entities in a source sentence and then translating the entities through looking up in a dictionary. Then, the extracted candidates are added as a prefix of the decoder input to be attended to by the decoder when generating the target sentence through self-attention. Experiments conducted on En-Zh and En-Ru demonstrate that the proposed method is effective on improving both the translation accuracy of entities and the overall translation quality, with up to 35% reduction on entity error rate and 0.85 gain on BLEU and 13.8 gain on COMET.

2022

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Mask the Correct Tokens: An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Error Correction
Kai Shen | Yichong Leng | Xu Tan | Siliang Tang | Yuan Zhang | Wenjie Liu | Edward Lin
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Text error correction aims to correct the errors in text sequences such as those typed by humans or generated by speech recognition models.Previous error correction methods usually take the source (incorrect) sentence as encoder input and generate the target (correct) sentence through the decoder. Since the error rate of the incorrect sentence is usually low (e.g., 10%), the correction model can only learn to correct on limited error tokens but trivially copy on most tokens (correct tokens), which harms the effective training of error correction. In this paper, we argue that the correct tokens should be better utilized to facilitate effective training and then propose a simple yet effective masking strategy to achieve this goal.Specifically, we randomly mask out a part of the correct tokens in the source sentence and let the model learn to not only correct the original error tokens but also predict the masked tokens based on their context information. Our method enjoys several advantages: 1) it alleviates trivial copy; 2) it leverages effective training signals from correct tokens; 3) it is a plug-and-play module and can be applied to different models and tasks. Experiments on spelling error correction and speech recognition error correction on Mandarin datasets and grammar error correction on English datasets with both autoregressive and non-autoregressive generation models show that our method improves the correctionaccuracy consistently.

2021

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FastCorrect 2: Fast Error Correction on Multiple Candidates for Automatic Speech Recognition
Yichong Leng | Xu Tan | Rui Wang | Linchen Zhu | Jin Xu | Wenjie Liu | Linquan Liu | Xiang-Yang Li | Tao Qin | Edward Lin | Tie-Yan Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Error correction is widely used in automatic speech recognition (ASR) to post-process the generated sentence, and can further reduce the word error rate (WER). Although multiple candidates are generated by an ASR system through beam search, current error correction approaches can only correct one sentence at a time, failing to leverage the voting effect from multiple candidates to better detect and correct error tokens. In this work, we propose FastCorrect 2, an error correction model that takes multiple ASR candidates as input for better correction accuracy. FastCorrect 2 adopts non-autoregressive generation for fast inference, which consists of an encoder that processes multiple source sentences and a decoder that generates the target sentence in parallel from the adjusted source sentence, where the adjustment is based on the predicted duration of each source token. However, there are some issues when handling multiple source sentences. First, it is non-trivial to leverage the voting effect from multiple source sentences since they usually vary in length. Thus, we propose a novel alignment algorithm to maximize the degree of token alignment among multiple sentences in terms of token and pronunciation similarity. Second, the decoder can only take one adjusted source sentence as input, while there are multiple source sentences. Thus, we develop a candidate predictor to detect the most suitable candidate for the decoder. Experiments on our inhouse dataset and AISHELL-1 show that FastCorrect 2 can further reduce the WER over the previous correction model with single candidate by 3.2% and 2.6%, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging multiple candidates in ASR error correction. FastCorrect 2 achieves better performance than the cascaded re-scoring and correction pipeline and can serve as a unified post-processing module for ASR.

2019

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Unsupervised Pivot Translation for Distant Languages
Yichong Leng | Xu Tan | Tao Qin | Xiang-Yang Li | Tie-Yan Liu
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) has attracted a lot of attention recently. While state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised translation usually perform well between similar languages (e.g., English-German translation), they perform poorly between distant languages, because unsupervised alignment does not work well for distant languages. In this work, we introduce unsupervised pivot translation for distant languages, which translates a language to a distant language through multiple hops, and the unsupervised translation on each hop is relatively easier than the original direct translation. We propose a learning to route (LTR) method to choose the translation path between the source and target languages. LTR is trained on language pairs whose best translation path is available and is applied on the unseen language pairs for path selection. Experiments on 20 languages and 294 distant language pairs demonstrate the advantages of the unsupervised pivot translation for distant languages, as well as the effectiveness of the proposed LTR for path selection. Specifically, in the best case, LTR achieves an improvement of 5.58 BLEU points over the conventional direct unsupervised method.

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Microsoft Research Asia’s Systems for WMT19
Yingce Xia | Xu Tan | Fei Tian | Fei Gao | Di He | Weicong Chen | Yang Fan | Linyuan Gong | Yichong Leng | Renqian Luo | Yiren Wang | Lijun Wu | Jinhua Zhu | Tao Qin | Tie-Yan Liu
Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (Volume 2: Shared Task Papers, Day 1)

We Microsoft Research Asia made submissions to 11 language directions in the WMT19 news translation tasks. We won the first place for 8 of the 11 directions and the second place for the other three. Our basic systems are built on Transformer, back translation and knowledge distillation. We integrate several of our rececent techniques to enhance the baseline systems: multi-agent dual learning (MADL), masked sequence-to-sequence pre-training (MASS), neural architecture optimization (NAO), and soft contextual data augmentation (SCA).