Jonathan H. Clark

Also published as: Jonathan Clark


2023

pdf bib
XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages
Sebastian Ruder | Jonathan Clark | Alexander Gutkin | Mihir Kale | Min Ma | Massimo Nicosia | Shruti Rijhwani | Parker Riley | Jean-Michel Sarr | Xinyi Wang | John Wieting | Nitish Gupta | Anna Katanova | Christo Kirov | Dana Dickinson | Brian Roark | Bidisha Samanta | Connie Tao | David Adelani | Vera Axelrod | Isaac Caswell | Colin Cherry | Dan Garrette | Reeve Ingle | Melvin Johnson | Dmitry Panteleev | Partha Talukdar
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Data scarcity is a crucial issue for the development of highly multilingual NLP systems. Yet for many under-represented languages (ULs) — languages for which NLP research is particularly far behind in meeting user needs — it is feasible to annotate small amounts of data. Motivated by this, we propose XTREME-UP, a benchmark defined by: its focus on the scarce-data scenario rather than zero-shot; its focus on user-centric tasks — tasks with broad adoption by speakers of high-resource languages; and its focus on under-represented languages where this scarce-data scenario tends to be most realistic. XTREME-UP evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks that are of general utility. We create new datasets for OCR, autocomplete, semantic parsing, and transliteration, and build on and refine existing datasets for other tasks. XTREME-UP provides methodology for evaluating many modeling scenarios including text only, multi-modal (vision, audio, and text), supervised parameter tuning, and in-context learning. We evaluate commonly used models on the benchmark. We release all code and scripts to train and evaluate models.

pdf bib
Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages
Odunayo Ogundepo | Tajuddeen Gwadabe | Clara Rivera | Jonathan Clark | Sebastian Ruder | David Adelani | Bonaventure Dossou | Abdou Diop | Claytone Sikasote | Gilles Hacheme | Happy Buzaaba | Ignatius Ezeani | Rooweither Mabuya | Salomey Osei | Chris Emezue | Albert Kahira | Shamsuddeen Muhammad | Akintunde Oladipo | Abraham Owodunni | Atnafu Tonja | Iyanuoluwa Shode | Akari Asai | Anuoluwapo Aremu | Ayodele Awokoya | Bernard Opoku | Chiamaka Chukwuneke | Christine Mwase | Clemencia Siro | Stephen Arthur | Tunde Ajayi | Verrah Otiende | Andre Rubungo | Boyd Sinkala | Daniel Ajisafe | Emeka Onwuegbuzia | Falalu Lawan | Ibrahim Ahmad | Jesujoba Alabi | Chinedu Mbonu | Mofetoluwa Adeyemi | Mofya Phiri | Orevaoghene Ahia | Ruqayya Iro | Sonia Adhiambo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems – those that retrieve answer content from other languages while serving people in their native language—offer a means of filling this gap. To this end, we create Our Dataset, the first cross-lingual QA dataset with a focus on African languages. Our Dataset includes 12,000+ XOR QA examples across 10 African languages. While previous datasets have focused primarily on languages where cross-lingual QA augments coverage from the target language, Our Dataset focuses on languages where cross-lingual answer content is the only high-coverage source of answer content. Because of this, we argue that African languages are one of the most important and realistic use cases for XOR QA. Our experiments demonstrate the poor performance of automatic translation and multilingual retrieval methods. Overall, Our Dataset proves challenging for state-of-the-art QA models. We hope that the dataset enables the development of more equitable QA technology.

pdf bib
Evaluating and Modeling Attribution for Cross-Lingual Question Answering
Benjamin Muller | John Wieting | Jonathan Clark | Tom Kwiatkowski | Sebastian Ruder | Livio Soares | Roee Aharoni | Jonathan Herzig | Xinyi Wang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Trustworthy answer content is abundant in many high-resource languages and is instantly accessible through question answering systems — yet this content can be hard to access for those that do not speak these languages. The leap forward in cross-lingual modeling quality offered by generative language models offers much promise, yet their raw generations often fall short in factuality. To improve trustworthiness in these systems, a promising direction is to attribute the answer to a retrieved source, possibly in a content-rich language different from the query. Our work is the first to study attribution for cross-lingual question answering. First, we collect data in 5 languages to assess the attribution level of a state-of-the-art cross-lingual QA system. To our surprise, we find that a substantial portion of the answers is not attributable to any retrieved passages (up to 50% of answers exactly matching a gold reference) despite the system being able to attend directly to the retrieved text. Second, to address this poor attribution level, we experiment with a wide range of attribution detection techniques. We find that Natural Language Inference models and PaLM 2 fine-tuned on a very small amount of attribution data can accurately detect attribution. With these models, we improve the attribution level of a cross-lingual QA system. Overall, we show that current academic generative cross-lingual QA systems have substantial shortcomings in attribution and we build tooling to mitigate these issues.

pdf bib
The Devil Is in the Errors: Leveraging Large Language Models for Fine-grained Machine Translation Evaluation
Patrick Fernandes | Daniel Deutsch | Mara Finkelstein | Parker Riley | André Martins | Graham Neubig | Ankush Garg | Jonathan Clark | Markus Freitag | Orhan Firat
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation

Automatic evaluation of machine translation (MT) is a critical tool driving the rapid iterative development of MT systems. While considerable progress has been made on estimating a single scalar quality score, current metrics lack the informativeness of more detailed schemes that annotate individual errors, such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). In this paper, we help fill this gap by proposing AutoMQM, a prompting technique which leverages the reasoning and in-context learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and asks them to identify and categorize errors in translations. We start by evaluating recent LLMs, such as PaLM and PaLM-2, through simple score prediction prompting, and we study the impact of labeled data through in-context learning and finetuning. We then evaluate AutoMQM with PaLM-2 models, and we find that it improves performance compared to just prompting for scores (with particularly large gains for larger models) while providing interpretability through error spans that align with human annotations.

pdf bib
Beyond Contrastive Learning: A Variational Generative Model for Multilingual Retrieval
John Wieting | Jonathan Clark | William Cohen | Graham Neubig | Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Contrastive learning has been successfully used for retrieval of semantically aligned sentences, but it often requires large batch sizes or careful engineering to work well. In this paper, we instead propose a generative model for learning multilingual text embeddings which can be used to retrieve or score sentence pairs. Our model operates on parallel data in N languages and, through an approximation we introduce, efficiently encourages source separation in this multilingual setting, separating semantic information that is shared between translations from stylistic or language-specific variation. We show careful large-scale comparisons between contrastive and generation-based approaches for learning multilingual text embeddings, a comparison that has not been done to the best of our knowledge despite the popularity of these approaches. We evaluate this method on a suite of tasks including semantic similarity, bitext mining, and cross-lingual question retrieval - the last of which we introduce in this paper. Overall, our model outperforms both a strong contrastive and generative baseline on these tasks.

2022

pdf bib
Canine: Pre-training an Efficient Tokenization-Free Encoder for Language Representation
Jonathan H. Clark | Dan Garrette | Iulia Turc | John Wieting
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 10

Pipelined NLP systems have largely been superseded by end-to-end neural modeling, yet nearly all commonly used models still require an explicit tokenization step. While recent tokenization approaches based on data-derived subword lexicons are less brittle than manually engineered tokenizers, these techniques are not equally suited to all languages, and the use of any fixed vocabulary may limit a model’s ability to adapt. In this paper, we present Canine, a neural encoder that operates directly on character sequences—without explicit tokenization or vocabulary—and a pre-training strategy that operates either directly on characters or optionally uses subwords as a soft inductive bias. To use its finer-grained input effectively and efficiently, Canine combines downsampling, which reduces the input sequence length, with a deep transformer stack, which encodes context. Canine outperforms a comparable mBert model by 5.7 F1 on TyDi QA, a challenging multilingual benchmark, despite having fewer model parameters.

pdf bib
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA)
Akari Asai | Eunsol Choi | Jonathan H. Clark | Junjie Hu | Chia-Hsuan Lee | Jungo Kasai | Shayne Longpre | Ikuya Yamada | Rui Zhang
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA)

pdf bib
MIA 2022 Shared Task: Evaluating Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for 16 Diverse Languages
Akari Asai | Shayne Longpre | Jungo Kasai | Chia-Hsuan Lee | Rui Zhang | Junjie Hu | Ikuya Yamada | Jonathan H. Clark | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA)

We present the results of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA) 2022 Shared Task, evaluating cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (QA) systems in 16 typologically diverse languages. In this task, we adapted two large-scale cross-lingual open-retrieval QA datasets in 14 typologically diverse languages, and newly annotated open-retrieval QA data in 2 underrepresented languages: Tagalog and Tamil. Four teams submitted their systems. The best constrained system uses entity-aware contextualized representations for document retrieval, thereby achieving an average F1 score of 31.6, which is 4.1 F1 absolute higher than the challenging baseline. The best system obtains particularly significant improvements in Tamil (20.8 F1), whereas most of the other systems yield nearly zero scores. The best unconstrained system achieves 32.2 F1, outperforming our baseline by 4.5 points.

2021

pdf bib
XOR QA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering
Akari Asai | Jungo Kasai | Jonathan Clark | Kenton Lee | Eunsol Choi | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Multilingual question answering tasks typically assume that answers exist in the same language as the question. Yet in practice, many languages face both information scarcity—where languages have few reference articles—and information asymmetry—where questions reference concepts from other cultures. This work extends open-retrieval question answering to a cross-lingual setting enabling questions from one language to be answered via answer content from another language. We construct a large-scale dataset built on 40K information-seeking questions across 7 diverse non-English languages that TyDi QA could not find same-language answers for. Based on this dataset, we introduce a task framework, called Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering (XOR QA), that consists of three new tasks involving cross-lingual document retrieval from multilingual and English resources. We establish baselines with state-of-the-art machine translation systems and cross-lingual pretrained models. Experimental results suggest that XOR QA is a challenging task that will facilitate the development of novel techniques for multilingual question answering. Our data and code are available at https://nlp.cs.washington.edu/xorqa/.

pdf bib
Learning to Recognize Dialect Features
Dorottya Demszky | Devyani Sharma | Jonathan Clark | Vinodkumar Prabhakaran | Jacob Eisenstein
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Building NLP systems that serve everyone requires accounting for dialect differences. But dialects are not monolithic entities: rather, distinctions between and within dialects are captured by the presence, absence, and frequency of dozens of dialect features in speech and text, such as the deletion of the copula in “He ∅ running”. In this paper, we introduce the task of dialect feature detection, and present two multitask learning approaches, both based on pretrained transformers. For most dialects, large-scale annotated corpora for these features are unavailable, making it difficult to train recognizers. We train our models on a small number of minimal pairs, building on how linguists typically define dialect features. Evaluation on a test set of 22 dialect features of Indian English demonstrates that these models learn to recognize many features with high accuracy, and that a few minimal pairs can be as effective for training as thousands of labeled examples. We also demonstrate the downstream applicability of dialect feature detection both as a measure of dialect density and as a dialect classifier.

2020

pdf bib
CapWAP: Image Captioning with a Purpose
Adam Fisch | Kenton Lee | Ming-Wei Chang | Jonathan Clark | Regina Barzilay
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The traditional image captioning task uses generic reference captions to provide textual information about images. Different user populations, however, will care about different visual aspects of images. In this paper, we propose a new task, Captioning with A Purpose (CapWAP). Our goal is to develop systems that can be tailored to be useful for the information needs of an intended population, rather than merely provide generic information about an image. In this task, we use question-answer (QA) pairs—a natural expression of information need—from users, instead of reference captions, for both training and post-inference evaluation. We show that it is possible to use reinforcement learning to directly optimize for the intended information need, by rewarding outputs that allow a question answering model to provide correct answers to sampled user questions. We convert several visual question answering datasets into CapWAP datasets, and demonstrate that under a variety of scenarios our purposeful captioning system learns to anticipate and fulfill specific information needs better than its generic counterparts, as measured by QA performance on user questions from unseen images, when using the caption alone as context.

pdf bib
TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages
Jonathan H. Clark | Eunsol Choi | Michael Collins | Dan Garrette | Tom Kwiatkowski | Vitaly Nikolaev | Jennimaria Palomaki
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 8

Confidently making progress on multilingual modeling requires challenging, trustworthy evaluations. We present TyDi QA—a question answering dataset covering 11 typologically diverse languages with 204K question-answer pairs. The languages of TyDi QA are diverse with regard to their typology—the set of linguistic features each language expresses—such that we expect models performing well on this set to generalize across a large number of the world’s languages. We present a quantitative analysis of the data quality and example-level qualitative linguistic analyses of observed language phenomena that would not be found in English-only corpora. To provide a realistic information-seeking task and avoid priming effects, questions are written by people who want to know the answer, but don’t know the answer yet, and the data is collected directly in each language without the use of translation.

2014

pdf bib
Locally Non-Linear Learning for Statistical Machine Translation via Discretization and Structured Regularization
Jonathan H. Clark | Chris Dyer | Alon Lavie
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 2

Linear models, which support efficient learning and inference, are the workhorses of statistical machine translation; however, linear decision rules are less attractive from a modeling perspective. In this work, we introduce a technique for learning arbitrary, rule-local, non-linear feature transforms that improve model expressivity, but do not sacrifice the efficient inference and learning associated with linear models. To demonstrate the value of our technique, we discard the customary log transform of lexical probabilities and drop the phrasal translation probability in favor of raw counts. We observe that our algorithm learns a variation of a log transform that leads to better translation quality compared to the explicit log transform. We conclude that non-linear responses play an important role in SMT, an observation that we hope will inform the efforts of feature engineers.

2013

pdf bib
Scalable Modified Kneser-Ney Language Model Estimation
Kenneth Heafield | Ivan Pouzyrevsky | Jonathan H. Clark | Philipp Koehn
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2012

pdf bib
One System, Many Domains: Open-Domain Statistical Machine Translation via Feature Augmentation
Jonathan Clark | Alon Lavie | Chris Dyer
Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas: Research Papers

In this paper, we introduce a simple technique for incorporating domain information into a statistical machine translation system that significantly improves translation quality when test data comes from multiple domains. Our approach augments (conjoins) standard translation model and language model features with domain indicator features and requires only minimal modifications to the optimization and decoding procedures. We evaluate our method on two language pairs with varying numbers of domains, and observe significant improvements of up to 1.0 BLEU.

2011

pdf bib
Unsupervised Word Alignment with Arbitrary Features
Chris Dyer | Jonathan H. Clark | Alon Lavie | Noah A. Smith
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

pdf bib
Better Hypothesis Testing for Statistical Machine Translation: Controlling for Optimizer Instability
Jonathan H. Clark | Chris Dyer | Alon Lavie | Noah A. Smith
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

pdf bib
The CMU-ARK German-English Translation System
Chris Dyer | Kevin Gimpel | Jonathan H. Clark | Noah A. Smith
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2010

pdf bib
LoonyBin: Keeping Language Technologists Sane through Automated Management of Experimental (Hyper)Workflows
Jonathan H. Clark | Alon Lavie
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

Many contemporary language technology systems are characterized by long pipelines of tools with complex dependencies. Too often, these workflows are implemented by ad hoc scripts; or, worse, tools are run manually, making experiments difficult to reproduce. These practices are difficult to maintain in the face of rapidly evolving workflows while they also fail to expose and record important details about intermediate data. Further complicating these systems are hyperparameters, which often cannot be directly optimized by conventional methods, requiring users to determine which combination of values is best via trial and error. We describe LoonyBin, an open-source tool that addresses these issues by providing: 1) a visual interface for the user to create and modify workflows; 2) a well-defined mechanism for tracking metadata and provenance; 3) a script generator that compiles visual workflows into shell scripts; and 4) a new workflow representation we call a HyperWorkflow, which intuitively and succinctly encodes small experimental variations within a larger workflow.

pdf bib
Improved Features and Grammar Selection for Syntax-Based MT
Greg Hanneman | Jonathan Clark | Alon Lavie
Proceedings of the Joint Fifth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and MetricsMATR

2009

pdf bib
An Improved Statistical Transfer System for French-English Machine Translation
Greg Hanneman | Vamshi Ambati | Jonathan H. Clark | Alok Parlikar | Alon Lavie
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation

2008

pdf bib
Toward Active Learning in Data Selection: Automatic Discovery of Language Features During Elicitation
Jonathan Clark | Robert Frederking | Lori Levin
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

Data Selection has emerged as a common issue in language technologies. We define Data Selection as the choosing of a subset of training data that is most effective for a given task. This paper describes deductive feature detection, one component of a data selection system for machine translation. Feature detection determines whether features such as tense, number, and person are expressed in a language. The database of the The World Atlas of Language Structures provides a gold standard against which to evaluate feature detection. The discovered features can be used as input to a Navigator, which uses active learning to determine which piece of language data is the most important to acquire next.

pdf bib
Inductive Detection of Language Features via Clustering Minimal Pairs: Toward Feature-Rich Grammars in Machine Translation
Jonathan H. Clark | Robert Frederking | Lori Levin
Proceedings of the ACL-08: HLT Second Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation (SSST-2)

Search
Co-authors