Chinese pre-trained language models usually process text as a sequence of characters, while ignoring more coarse granularity, e.g., words. In this work, we propose a novel pre-training paradigm for Chinese — Lattice-BERT, which explicitly incorporates word representations along with characters, thus can model a sentence in a multi-granularity manner. Specifically, we construct a lattice graph from the characters and words in a sentence and feed all these text units into transformers. We design a lattice position attention mechanism to exploit the lattice structures in self-attention layers. We further propose a masked segment prediction task to push the model to learn from rich but redundant information inherent in lattices, while avoiding learning unexpected tricks. Experiments on 11 Chinese natural language understanding tasks show that our model can bring an average increase of 1.5% under the 12-layer setting, which achieves new state-of-the-art among base-size models on the CLUE benchmarks. Further analysis shows that Lattice-BERT can harness the lattice structures, and the improvement comes from the exploration of redundant information and multi-granularity representations. Our code will be available at https://github.com/alibaba/pretrained-language-models/LatticeBERT.

Pretrained language models have shown success in many natural language processing tasks. Many works explore to incorporate the knowledge into the language models. In the biomedical domain, experts have taken decades of effort on building large-scale knowledge bases. For example, UMLS contains millions of entities with their synonyms and defines hundreds of relations among entities. Leveraging this knowledge can benefit a variety of downstream tasks such as named entity recognition and relation extraction. To this end, we propose KeBioLM, a biomedical pretrained language model that explicitly leverages knowledge from the UMLS knowledge bases. Specifically, we extract entities from PubMed abstracts and link them to UMLS. We then train a knowledge-aware language model that firstly applies a text-only encoding layer to learn entity representation and then applies a text-entity fusion encoding to aggregate entity representation. In addition, we add two training objectives as entity detection and entity linking. Experiments on the named entity recognition and relation extraction tasks from the BLURB benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Further analysis on a collected probing dataset shows that our model has better ability to model medical knowledge.

Existing work in multilingual pretraining has demonstrated the potential of cross-lingual transferability by training a unified Transformer encoder for multiple languages. However, much of this work only relies on the shared vocabulary and bilingual contexts to encourage the correlation across languages, which is loose and implicit for aligning the contextual representations between languages. In this paper, we plug a cross-attention module into the Transformer encoder to explicitly build the interdependence between languages. It can effectively avoid the degeneration of predicting masked words only conditioned on the context in its own language. More importantly, when fine-tuning on downstream tasks, the cross-attention module can be plugged in or out on-demand, thus naturally benefiting a wider range of cross-lingual tasks, from language understanding to generation. As a result, the proposed cross-lingual model delivers new state-of-the-art results on various cross-lingual understanding tasks of the XTREME benchmark, covering text classification, sequence labeling, question answering, and sentence retrieval. For cross-lingual generation tasks, it also outperforms all existing cross-lingual models and state-of-the-art Transformer variants on WMT14 English-to-German and English-to-French translation datasets, with gains of up to 1 2 BLEU.

In this paper, we explore the slot tagging with only a few labeled support sentences (a.k.a. few-shot). Few-shot slot tagging faces a unique challenge compared to the other fewshot classification problems as it calls for modeling the dependencies between labels. But it is hard to apply previously learned label dependencies to an unseen domain, due to the discrepancy of label sets. To tackle this, we introduce a collapsed dependency transfer mechanism into the conditional random field (CRF) to transfer abstract label dependency patterns as transition scores. In the few-shot setting, the emission score of CRF can be calculated as a word’s similarity to the representation of each label. To calculate such similarity, we propose a Label-enhanced Task-Adaptive Projection Network (L-TapNet) based on the state-of-the-art few-shot classification model – TapNet, by leveraging label name semantics in representing labels. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms the strongest few-shot learning baseline by 14.64 F1 scores in the one-shot setting.

Querying the knowledge base (KB) has long been a challenge in the end-to-end task-oriented dialogue system. Previous sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) dialogue generation work treats the KB query as an attention over the entire KB, without the guarantee that the generated entities are consistent with each other. In this paper, we propose a novel framework which queries the KB in two steps to improve the consistency of generated entities. In the first step, inspired by the observation that a response can usually be supported by a single KB row, we introduce a KB retrieval component which explicitly returns the most relevant KB row given a dialogue history. The retrieval result is further used to filter the irrelevant entities in a Seq2Seq response generation model to improve the consistency among the output entities. In the second step, we further perform the attention mechanism to address the most correlated KB column. Two methods are proposed to make the training feasible without labeled retrieval data, which include distant supervision and Gumbel-Softmax technique. Experiments on two publicly available task oriented dialog datasets show the effectiveness of our model by outperforming the baseline systems and producing entity-consistent responses.

This paper investigates the problem of learning cross-lingual representations in a contextual space. We propose Cross-Lingual BERT Transformation (CLBT), a simple and efficient approach to generate cross-lingual contextualized word embeddings based on publicly available pre-trained BERT models (Devlin et al., 2018). In this approach, a linear transformation is learned from contextual word alignments to align the contextualized embeddings independently trained in different languages. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer parsing. Experiments show that our embeddings substantially outperform the previous state-of-the-art that uses static embeddings. We further compare our approach with XLM (Lample and Conneau, 2019), a recently proposed cross-lingual language model trained with massive parallel data, and achieve highly competitive results.

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) for CoNLL 2019 shared task: Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing. We extended the basic transition-based parser with two improvements: a) Efficient Training by realizing Stack LSTM parallel training; b) Effective Encoding via adopting deep contextualized word embeddings BERT. Generally, we proposed a unified pipeline to meaning representation parsing, including framework-specific transition-based parsers, BERT-enhanced word representation, and post-processing. In the final evaluation, our system was ranked first according to ALL-F1 (86.2%) and especially ranked first in UCCA framework (81.67%).

In this paper, we propose a new rich resource enhanced AMR aligner which produces multiple alignments and a new transition system for AMR parsing along with its oracle parser. Our aligner is further tuned by our oracle parser via picking the alignment that leads to the highest-scored achievable AMR graph. Experimental results show that our aligner outperforms the rule-based aligner in previous work by achieving higher alignment F1 score and consistently improving two open-sourced AMR parsers. Based on our aligner and transition system, we develop a transition-based AMR parser that parses a sentence into its AMR graph directly. An ensemble of our parsers with only words and POS tags as input leads to 68.4 Smatch F1 score, which outperforms the current state-of-the-art parser.

We study the problem of analyzing tweets with universal dependencies (UD). We extend the UD guidelines to cover special constructions in tweets that affect tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and labeled dependencies. Using the extended guidelines, we create a new tweet treebank for English (Tweebank v2) that is four times larger than the (unlabeled) Tweebank v1 introduced by Kong et al. (2014). We characterize the disagreements between our annotators and show that it is challenging to deliver consistent annotation due to ambiguity in understanding and explaining tweets. Nonetheless, using the new treebank, we build a pipeline system to parse raw tweets into UD. To overcome the annotation noise without sacrificing computational efficiency, we propose a new method to distill an ensemble of 20 transition-based parsers into a single one. Our parser achieves an improvement of 2.2 in LAS over the un-ensembled baseline and outperforms parsers that are state-of-the-art on other treebanks in both accuracy and speed.

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) submitted to the CoNLL 2018 shared task on Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. We base our submission on Stanford’s winning system for the CoNLL 2017 shared task and make two effective extensions: 1) incorporating deep contextualized word embeddings into both the part of speech tagger and parser; 2) ensembling parsers trained with different initialization. We also explore different ways of concatenating treebanks for further improvements. Experimental results on the development data show the effectiveness of our methods. In the final evaluation, our system was ranked first according to LAS (75.84%) and outperformed the other systems by a large margin.

Many natural language processing tasks can be modeled into structured prediction and solved as a search problem. In this paper, we distill an ensemble of multiple models trained with different initialization into a single model. In addition to learning to match the ensemble’s probability output on the reference states, we also use the ensemble to explore the search space and learn from the encountered states in the exploration. Experimental results on two typical search-based structured prediction tasks – transition-based dependency parsing and neural machine translation show that distillation can effectively improve the single model’s performance and the final model achieves improvements of 1.32 in LAS and 2.65 in BLEU score on these two tasks respectively over strong baselines and it outperforms the greedy structured prediction models in previous literatures.

In this paper, we study the problem of data augmentation for language understanding in task-oriented dialogue system. In contrast to previous work which augments an utterance without considering its relation with other utterances, we propose a sequence-to-sequence generation based data augmentation framework that leverages one utterance’s same semantic alternatives in the training data. A novel diversity rank is incorporated into the utterance representation to make the model produce diverse utterances and these diversely augmented utterances help to improve the language understanding module. Experimental results on the Airline Travel Information System dataset and a newly created semantic frame annotation on Stanford Multi-turn, Multi-domain Dialogue Dataset show that our framework achieves significant improvements of 6.38 and 10.04 F-scores respectively when only a training set of hundreds utterances is represented. Case studies also confirm that our method generates diverse utterances.

Classic pipeline models for task-oriented dialogue system require explicit modeling the dialogue states and hand-crafted action spaces to query a domain-specific knowledge base. Conversely, sequence-to-sequence models learn to map dialogue history to the response in current turn without explicit knowledge base querying. In this work, we propose a novel framework that leverages the advantages of classic pipeline and sequence-to-sequence models. Our framework models a dialogue state as a fixed-size distributed representation and use this representation to query a knowledge base via an attention mechanism. Experiment on Stanford Multi-turn Multi-domain Task-oriented Dialogue Dataset shows that our framework significantly outperforms other sequence-to-sequence based baseline models on both automatic and human evaluation.