Zhisong Zhang

In this work we propose a pragmatic method that reduces the annotation cost for structured label spaces using active learning. Our approach leverages partial annotation, which reduces labeling costs for structured outputs by selecting only the most informative sub-structures for annotation. We also utilize self-training to incorporate the current model's automatic predictions as pseudo-labels for un-annotated sub-structures. A key challenge in effectively combining partial annotation with self-training to reduce annotation cost is determining which sub-structures to select to label. To address this challenge, we adopt an error estimator to adaptively decide the partial selection ratio according to the current model's capability. In evaluations spanning four structured prediction tasks, we show that our combination of partial annotation and self-training using an adaptive selection ratio reduces annotation cost over strong full annotation baselines under a fair comparison scheme that takes reading time into consideration.

In this work, we provide a survey of active learning (AL) for its applications in natural language processing (NLP). In addition to a fine-grained categorization of query strategies, we also investigate several other important aspects of applying AL to NLP problems. These include AL for structured prediction tasks, annotation cost, model learning (especially with deep neural models), and starting and stopping AL. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of related topics and future directions.

Auto-regressive neural sequence models have been shown to be effective across text generation tasks. However, their left-to-right decoding order prevents generation from being parallelized. Insertion Transformer (Stern et al., 2019) is an attractive alternative that allows outputting multiple tokens in a single generation step. Nevertheless, due to the incompatibility between absolute positional encoding and insertion-based generation schemes, it needs to refresh the encoding of every token in the generated partial hypothesis at each step, which could be costly. We design a novel reusable positional encoding scheme for Insertion Transformers called Fractional Positional Encoding (FPE), which allows reusing representations calculated in previous steps. Empirical studies on various text generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of FPE, which leads to floating-point operation reduction and latency improvements on batched decoding.

Zhisong Zhang, Emma Strubell, Eduard Hovy. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023. 2023.

Zhisong Zhang, Yizhe Zhang, Bill Dolan. Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2023.

Zhisong Zhang, Emma Strubell, Eduard Hovy. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2022.

Zhisong Zhang, Emma Strubell, Eduard Hovy. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2022.

Cross-lingual transfer is an effective way to build syntactic analysis tools in low-resource languages. However, transfer is difficult when transferring to typologically distant languages, especially when neither annotated target data nor parallel corpora are available. In this paper, we focus on methods for cross-lingual transfer to distant languages and propose to learn a generative model with a structured prior that utilizes labeled source data and unlabeled target data jointly. The parameters of source model and target model are softly shared through a regularized log likelihood objective. An invertible projection is employed to learn a new interlingual latent embedding space that compensates for imperfect cross-lingual word embedding input. We evaluate our method on two syntactic tasks: part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing. On the Universal Dependency Treebanks, we use English as the only source corpus and transfer to a wide range of target languages. On the 10 languages in this dataset that are distant from English, our method yields an average of 5.2% absolute improvement on POS tagging and 8.3% absolute improvement on dependency parsing over a direct transfer method using state-of-the-art discriminative models.

In this work, we introduce a novel local autoregressive translation (LAT) mechanism into non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models so as to capture local dependencies among tar-get outputs. Specifically, for each target decoding position, instead of only one token, we predict a short sequence of tokens in an autoregressive way. We further design an efficient merging algorithm to align and merge the out-put pieces into one final output sequence. We integrate LAT into the conditional masked language model (CMLM; Ghazvininejad et al.,2019) and similarly adopt iterative decoding. Empirical results on five translation tasks show that compared with CMLM, our method achieves comparable or better performance with fewer decoding iterations, bringing a 2.5xspeedup. Further analysis indicates that our method reduces repeated translations and performs better at longer sentences.

Cross-lingual transfer learning has become an important weapon to battle the unavailability of annotated resources for low-resource languages. One of the fundamental techniques to transfer across languages is learning \emph{language-agnostic} representations, in the form of word embeddings or contextual encodings. In this work, we propose to leverage unannotated sentences from auxiliary languages to help learning language-agnostic representations. Specifically, we explore adversarial training for learning contextual encoders that produce invariant representations across languages to facilitate cross-lingual transfer. We conduct experiments on cross-lingual dependency parsing where we train a dependency parser on a source language and transfer it to a wide range of target languages. Experiments on 28 target languages demonstrate that adversarial training significantly improves the overall transfer performances under several different settings. We conduct a careful analysis to evaluate the language-agnostic representations resulted from adversarial training.