Searchable Hidden Intermediates for End-to-End Models of Decomposable Sequence Tasks

Siddharth Dalmia, Brian Yan, Vikas Raunak, Florian Metze, Shinji Watanabe


Abstract
End-to-end approaches for sequence tasks are becoming increasingly popular. Yet for complex sequence tasks, like speech translation, systems that cascade several models trained on sub-tasks have shown to be superior, suggesting that the compositionality of cascaded systems simplifies learning and enables sophisticated search capabilities. In this work, we present an end-to-end framework that exploits compositionality to learn searchable hidden representations at intermediate stages of a sequence model using decomposed sub-tasks. These hidden intermediates can be improved using beam search to enhance the overall performance and can also incorporate external models at intermediate stages of the network to re-score or adapt towards out-of-domain data. One instance of the proposed framework is a Multi-Decoder model for speech translation that extracts the searchable hidden intermediates from a speech recognition sub-task. The model demonstrates the aforementioned benefits and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by around +6 and +3 BLEU on the two test sets of Fisher-CallHome and by around +3 and +4 BLEU on the English-German and English-French test sets of MuST-C.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.151
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1882–1896
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.151
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.151
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siddharth Dalmia, Brian Yan, Vikas Raunak, Florian Metze, and Shinji Watanabe. 2021. Searchable Hidden Intermediates for End-to-End Models of Decomposable Sequence Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1882–1896, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Searchable Hidden Intermediates for End-to-End Models of Decomposable Sequence Tasks (Dalmia et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.151.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.151.mp4