Ethnologue: Languages of the World

This article addresses a timely problem, especially within the context of the Internet, which is accessible by anyone in any discipline from virtually anywhere in the world. The problem of cross-language retrieval is not new. Then at now, cross-language information retrieval was seen to be a function that would facilitate the effective search for, exchange of, and retrieval information. This chapter reviews research and practice in CLIR that allows users to state queries in their native language and retrieve documents in any other language supported by the system. CLIR can simplify searching by multilingual users and, if translation resources are limited, can allow monolingual users to allocate those resources to the more promising documents. This review begins with an examination of the literature on user needs for CLIR. The chapter largely follows the retrieval system model (document preprocessing, query formulation, matching, selection, and delivery). Each section highlights the unique requirements imposed on one more stages of the model in cross-language retrieval applications. The authors describe evaluation techniques and conclude with observations regarding future directions for CLIR research.

Cross-Language Information Retrieval.

We present the results of the Machine Reading for Question Answering (MRQA) 2019 shared task on evaluating the generalization capabilities of reading comprehension systems. In this task, we adapted and unified 18 distinct question answering datasets into the same format. Among them, six datasets were made available for training, six datasets were made available for development, and the rest were hidden for final evaluation. Ten teams submitted systems, which explored various ideas including data sampling, multi-task learning, adversarial training and ensembling. The best system achieved an average F1 score of 72.5 on the 12 held-out datasets, 10.7 absolute points higher than our initial baseline based on BERT.

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MRQA 2019 Shared Task: Evaluating Generalization in Reading Comprehension

In recent times, deep artificial neural networks have achieved many successes in pattern recognition. Part of this success can be attributed to the reliance on big data to increase generalization. However, in the field of time series recognition, many datasets are often very small. One method of addressing this problem is through the use of data augmentation. In this paper, we survey data augmentation techniques for time series and their application to time series classification with neural networks. We propose a taxonomy and outline the four families in time series data augmentation, including transformation-based methods, pattern mixing, generative models, and decomposition methods. Furthermore, we empirically evaluate 12 time series data augmentation methods on 128 time series classification datasets with six different types of neural networks. Through the results, we are able to analyze the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages, and recommendations of each data augmentation method. This survey aims to help in the selection of time series data augmentation for neural network applications.

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An empirical survey of data augmentation for time series classification with neural networks.

Language is essentially a complex, intricate system of human expressions governed by grammatical rules. It poses a significant challenge to develop capable AI algorithms for comprehending and grasping a language. As a major approach, language modeling has been widely studied for language understanding and generation in the past two decades, evolving from statistical language models to neural language models. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been proposed by pre-training Transformer models over large-scale corpora, showing strong capabilities in solving various NLP tasks. Since researchers have found that model scaling can lead to performance improvement, they further study the scaling effect by increasing the model size to an even larger size. Interestingly, when the parameter scale exceeds a certain level, these enlarged language models not only achieve a significant performance improvement but also show some special abilities that are not present in small-scale language models. To discriminate the difference in parameter scale, the research community has coined the term large language models (LLM) for the PLMs of significant size. Recently, the research on LLMs has been largely advanced by both academia and industry, and a remarkable progress is the launch of ChatGPT, which has attracted widespread attention from society. The technical evolution of LLMs has been making an important impact on the entire AI community, which would revolutionize the way how we develop and use AI algorithms. In this survey, we review the recent advances of LLMs by introducing the background, key findings, and mainstream techniques. In particular, we focus on four major aspects of LLMs, namely pre-training, adaptation tuning, utilization, and capacity evaluation. Besides, we also summarize the available resources for developing LLMs and discuss the remaining issues for future directions.

A Survey of Large Language Models

Progress in cross-lingual modeling depends on challenging, realistic, and diverse evaluation sets. We introduce Multilingual Knowledge Questions and Answers (MKQA), an open-domain question answering evaluation set comprising 10k question-answer pairs aligned across 26 typologically diverse languages (260k question-answer pairs in total). The goal of this dataset is to provide a challenging benchmark for question answering quality across a wide set of languages. Answers are based on a language-independent data representation, making results comparable across languages and independent of language-specific passages. With 26 languages, this dataset supplies the widest range of languages to-date for evaluating question answering. We benchmark state-of-the-art extractive question answering baselines, trained on Natural Questions, including Multilingual BERT, and XLM-RoBERTa, in zero shot and translation settings. Results indicate this dataset is challenging, especially in low-resource languages.

MKQA: A Linguistically Diverse Benchmark for Multilingual Open Domain Question Answering

To produce a domain-agnostic question answering model for the Machine Reading Question Answering (MRQA) 2019 Shared Task, we investigate the relative benefits of large pre-trained language models, various data sampling strategies, as well as query and context paraphrases generated by back-translation. We find a simple negative sampling technique to be particularly effective, even though it is typically used for datasets that include unanswerable questions, such as SQuAD 2.0. When applied in conjunction with per-domain sampling, our XLNet (Yang et al., 2019)-based submission achieved the second best Exact Match and F1 in the MRQA leaderboard competition.

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An Exploration of Data Augmentation and Sampling Techniques for Domain-Agnostic Question Answering

Studies of active learning traditionally assume the target and source data stem from a single domain. However, in realistic applications, practitioners often require active learning with multiple sources of out-of-distribution data, where it is unclear a priori which data sources will help or hurt the target domain. We survey a wide variety of techniques in active learning (AL), domain shift detection (DS), and multi-domain sampling to examine this challenging setting for question answering and sentiment analysis. We ask (1) what family of methods are effective for this task? And, (2) what properties of selected examples and domains achieve strong results? Among 18 acquisition functions from 4 families of methods, we find H-Divergence methods, and particularly our proposed variant DAL-E, yield effective results, averaging 2-3% improvements over the random baseline. We also show the importance of a diverse allocation of domains, as well as room-for-improvement of existing methods on both domain and example selection. Our findings yield the first comprehensive analysis of both existing and novel methods for practitioners faced with multi-domain active learning for natural language tasks.

Active Learning Over Multiple Domains in Natural Language Tasks

Recent work (Feng et al., 2018) establishes the presence of short, uninterpretable input fragments that yield high confidence and accuracy in neural models. We refer to these as Minimal Prediction Preserving Inputs (MPPIs). In the context of question answering, we investigate competing hypotheses for the existence of MPPIs, including poor posterior calibration of neural models, lack of pretraining, and “dataset bias” (where a model learns to attend to spurious, non-generalizable cues in the training data). We discover a perplexing invariance of MPPIs to random training seed, model architecture, pretraining, and training domain. MPPIs demonstrate remarkable transferability across domains achieving significantly higher performance than comparably short queries. Additionally, penalizing over-confidence on MPPIs fails to improve either generalization or adversarial robustness. These results suggest the interpretability of MPPIs is insufficient to characterize generalization capacity of these models. We hope this focused investigation encourages more systematic analysis of model behavior outside of the human interpretable distribution of examples.

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Yi Lu

Papers

MKQA: A Linguistically Diverse Benchmark for Multilingual Open Domain Question Answering

An Exploration of Data Augmentation and Sampling Techniques for Domain-Agnostic Question Answering

An Exploration of Data Augmentation and Sampling Techniques for Domain-Agnostic Question Answering

Active Learning Over Multiple Domains in Natural Language Tasks

On the Transferability of Minimal Prediction Preserving Inputs in Question Answering.