mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-trained Text-to-Text Transformer
01 Jun 2021-pp 483-498
TL;DR: This paper proposed a multilingual variant of T5, mT5, which was pre-trained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages and achieved state-of-the-art performance on many multilingual benchmarks.
Abstract: The recent “Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer” (T5) leveraged a unified text-to-text format and scale to attain state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of English-language NLP tasks. In this paper, we introduce mT5, a multilingual variant of T5 that was pre-trained on a new Common Crawl-based dataset covering 101 languages. We detail the design and modified training of mT5 and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance on many multilingual benchmarks. We also describe a simple technique to prevent “accidental translation” in the zero-shot setting, where a generative model chooses to (partially) translate its prediction into the wrong language. All of the code and model checkpoints used in this work are publicly available.
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TL;DR: In this article , a pure pixel-based model called CLIP-Pixels Only (CLIPPO) is proposed to perform image, text, and multimodal tasks.
Abstract: Multimodal models are becoming increasingly effective, in part due to unified components, such as the Transformer architecture. However, multimodal models still often consist of many task- and modality-specific pieces and training procedures. For example, CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) trains independent text and image towers via a contrastive loss. We explore an additional unification: the use of a pure pixel-based model to perform image, text, and multimodal tasks. Our model is trained with contrastive loss alone, so we call it CLIP-Pixels Only (CLIPPO). CLIPPO uses a single encoder that processes both regular images and text rendered as images. CLIPPO performs image-based tasks such as retrieval and zero-shot image classification almost as well as CLIP, with half the number of parameters and no text-specific tower or embedding. When trained jointly via image-text contrastive learning and next-sentence contrastive learning, CLIPPO can perform well on natural language understanding tasks, without any word-level loss (language modelling or masked language modelling), outperforming pixel-based prior work. Surprisingly, CLIPPO can obtain good accuracy in visual question answering, simply by rendering the question and image together. Finally, we exploit the fact that CLIPPO does not require a tokenizer to show that it can achieve strong performance on multilingual multimodal retrieval without modifications.
9 citations
TL;DR: In this paper , a state-of-the-art Hindi NER system based on MuRIL language model and CRF is proposed. But, the model is not suitable for the Hindi named entity recognition task.
9 citations
21 Oct 2022
TL;DR: This work introduces AfroLID, a neural LID toolkit for 517 African languages and varieties, and compares it to existing LID tools that each cover a small number of African languages, finding it to outperform them on most languages.
Abstract: Language identification (LID) is a crucial precursor for NLP, especially for mining web data. Problematically, most of the world’s 7000+ languages today are not covered by LID technologies. We address this pressing issue for Africa by introducing AfroLID, a neural LID toolkit for 517 African languages and varieties. AfroLID exploits a multi-domain web dataset manually curated from across 14 language families utilizing five orthographic systems. When evaluated on our blind Test set, AfroLID achieves 95.89 F_1-score. We also compare AfroLID to five existing LID tools that each cover a small number of African languages, finding it to outperform them on most languages. We further show the utility of AfroLID in the wild by testing it on the acutely under-served Twitter domain. Finally, we offer a number of controlled case studies and perform a linguistically-motivated error analysis that allow us to both showcase AfroLID’s powerful capabilities and limitations
9 citations
20 Sep 2022
TL;DR: This work presents LINGUIST, a method for generating annotated data for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging (IC+ST), via fine-tuning AlexaTM 5B, a 5-billion-parameter multilingual sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, on a flexible instruction prompt, and is the first to demonstrate instruction fine- tuning of a large-scale seq2seq model to control the outputs of multilingual intent- and slot-labeled data generation
Abstract: We present LINGUIST, a method for generating annotated data for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging (IC+ST), via fine-tuning AlexaTM 5B, a 5-billion-parameter multilingual sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, on a flexible instruction prompt. In a 10-shot novel intent setting for the SNIPS dataset, LINGUIST surpasses state-of-the-art approaches (Back-Translation and Example Extrapolation) by a wide margin, showing absolute improvement for the target intents of +1.9 points on IC Recall and +2.5 points on ST F1 Score. In the zero-shot cross-lingual setting of the mATIS++ dataset, LINGUIST out-performs a strong baseline of Machine Translation with Slot Alignment by +4.14 points absolute on ST F1 Score across 6 languages, while matching performance on IC. Finally, we verify our results on an internal large-scale multilingual dataset for conversational agent IC+ST and show significant improvements over a baseline which uses Back-Translation, Paraphrasing and Slot Catalog Resampling. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate instruction fine-tuning of a large-scale seq2seq model to control the outputs of multilingual intent- and slot-labeled data generation.
9 citations
18 Oct 2022
TL;DR: This work demonstrates that a modality-matched joint speech and text model introduced in [1] can be leveraged to train a massively multilingual ASR model without any supervised (manually transcribed) speech for some languages and shows that Maestro-U can promote knowledge transfer from languages with supervised speech even when there is limited to no graphemic overlap.
Abstract: Training state-of-the-art Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) models typically requires a substantial amount of transcribed speech. In this work, we demonstrate that a modality-matched joint speech and text model introduced in [1] can be leveraged to train a massively multilingual ASR model without any supervised (manually transcribed) speech for some languages. This paper explores the use of jointly learnt speech and text representations in a massively multilingual, zero supervised speech, real-world setting to expand the set of languages covered by ASR with only unlabeled speech and text in the target languages. Using the FLEURS dataset, we define the task to cover 102 languages, where transcribed speech is available in 52 of these languages and can be used to improve end-to-end ASR quality on the remaining 50. First, we show that by combining speech representations with byte-level text representations and use of language embeddings, we can dramatically reduce the Character Error Rate (CER) on languages with no supervised speech from 64.8% to 30.8%, a relative reduction of 53%. Second, using a subset of South Asian languages we show that Maestro-U can promote knowledge transfer from languages with supervised speech even when there is limited to no graphemic overlap. Overall, Maestro-U closes the gap to oracle performance by 68.5% relative and reduces the CER of 19 languages below 15%.
8 citations
References
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Proceedings Article•
12 Jun 2017TL;DR: This paper proposed a simple network architecture based solely on an attention mechanism, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely and achieved state-of-the-art performance on English-to-French translation.
Abstract: The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent orconvolutional neural networks in an encoder and decoder configuration. The best performing such models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attentionm echanisms. We propose a novel, simple network architecture based solely onan attention mechanism, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely.Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superiorin quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less timeto train. Our single model with 165 million parameters, achieves 27.5 BLEU onEnglish-to-German translation, improving over the existing best ensemble result by over 1 BLEU. On English-to-French translation, we outperform the previoussingle state-of-the-art with model by 0.7 BLEU, achieving a BLEU score of 41.1.
52,856 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: It is found that BERT was significantly undertrained, and can match or exceed the performance of every model published after it, and the best model achieves state-of-the-art results on GLUE, RACE and SQuAD.
Abstract: Language model pretraining has led to significant performance gains but careful comparison between different approaches is challenging. Training is computationally expensive, often done on private datasets of different sizes, and, as we will show, hyperparameter choices have significant impact on the final results. We present a replication study of BERT pretraining (Devlin et al., 2019) that carefully measures the impact of many key hyperparameters and training data size. We find that BERT was significantly undertrained, and can match or exceed the performance of every model published after it. Our best model achieves state-of-the-art results on GLUE, RACE and SQuAD. These results highlight the importance of previously overlooked design choices, and raise questions about the source of recently reported improvements. We release our models and code.
13,994 citations
"mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-t..." refers methods in this paper
..., 2020b), and RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019), respectively....
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...It uses data in 26 languages from Wikipedia and CC-News (Liu et al., 2019)....
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...XLM-R (Conneau et al., 2020) is an improved version of XLM based on the RoBERTa model (Liu et al., 2019)....
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..., 2020) is an improved version of XLM based on the RoBERTa model (Liu et al., 2019)....
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...Popular models of this type are mBERT (Devlin, 2018), mBART (Liu et al., 2020a), and XLM-R (Conneau et al., 2020), which are multilingual variants of BERT (Devlin et al., 2019), BART (Lewis et al., 2020b), and RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019), respectively....
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16 Jun 2016
TL;DR: The Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) as mentioned in this paper is a reading comprehension dataset consisting of 100,000+ questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to each question is a segment of text from the corresponding reading passage.
Abstract: We present the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), a new reading comprehension dataset consisting of 100,000+ questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to each question is a segment of text from the corresponding reading passage. We analyze the dataset to understand the types of reasoning required to answer the questions, leaning heavily on dependency and constituency trees. We build a strong logistic regression model, which achieves an F1 score of 51.0%, a significant improvement over a simple baseline (20%). However, human performance (86.8%) is much higher, indicating that the dataset presents a good challenge problem for future research.
The dataset is freely available at this https URL
3,667 citations
01 Jul 2020
TL;DR: It is shown that pretraining multilingual language models at scale leads to significant performance gains for a wide range of cross-lingual transfer tasks, and the possibility of multilingual modeling without sacrificing per-language performance is shown for the first time.
Abstract: This paper shows that pretraining multilingual language models at scale leads to significant performance gains for a wide range of cross-lingual transfer tasks. We train a Transformer-based masked language model on one hundred languages, using more than two terabytes of filtered CommonCrawl data. Our model, dubbed XLM-R, significantly outperforms multilingual BERT (mBERT) on a variety of cross-lingual benchmarks, including +14.6% average accuracy on XNLI, +13% average F1 score on MLQA, and +2.4% F1 score on NER. XLM-R performs particularly well on low-resource languages, improving 15.7% in XNLI accuracy for Swahili and 11.4% for Urdu over previous XLM models. We also present a detailed empirical analysis of the key factors that are required to achieve these gains, including the trade-offs between (1) positive transfer and capacity dilution and (2) the performance of high and low resource languages at scale. Finally, we show, for the first time, the possibility of multilingual modeling without sacrificing per-language performance; XLM-R is very competitive with strong monolingual models on the GLUE and XNLI benchmarks. We will make our code and models publicly available.
3,248 citations
"mT5: A Massively Multilingual Pre-t..." refers background or methods in this paper
...XLM-R (Conneau et al., 2020) is an improved version of XLM based on the RoBERTa model (Liu et al., 2019)....
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...Values used by prior work include α = 0.7 for mBERT (Devlin, 2018), α = 0.3 for XLM-R (Conneau et al., 2020), and α = 0.2 for MMNMT (Arivazhagan et al., 2019)....
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...We therefore take the approach used in (Devlin, 2018; Conneau et al., 2020; Arivazhagan et al., 2019) and boost lower-resource languages by sampling examples according to the probability p(L) ∝ |L|α, where p(L) is the probability of sampling text from a given language during pre-training and |L| is the number of examples in the language....
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...We therefore take the approach used in (Devlin, 2018; Conneau et al., 2020; Arivazhagan et al., 2019) and boost lower-resource languages by sampling examples according to the probability p(L) ∝ |L|α, where p(L) is the probability of sampling text from a given language during pre-training and |L| is…...
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..., 2020a), and XLM-R (Conneau et al., 2020), which are multilingual variants of BERT (Devlin...
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18 Jan 2018
TL;DR: Universal Language Model Fine-tuning (ULMFiT) as mentioned in this paper is an effective transfer learning method that can be applied to any task in NLP, and introduces techniques that are key for finetuning a language model.
Abstract: Inductive transfer learning has greatly impacted computer vision, but existing approaches in NLP still require task-specific modifications and training from scratch. We propose Universal Language Model Fine-tuning (ULMFiT), an effective transfer learning method that can be applied to any task in NLP, and introduce techniques that are key for fine-tuning a language model. Our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on six text classification tasks, reducing the error by 18-24% on the majority of datasets. Furthermore, with only 100 labeled examples, it matches the performance of training from scratch on 100 times more data. We open-source our pretrained models and code.
2,128 citations