Much recent progress in applications of machine learning models to NLP has been driven by benchmarks that evaluate models across a wide variety of tasks. However, these broad-coverage benchmarks have been mostly limited to English, and despite an increasing interest in multilingual models, a benchmark that enables the comprehensive evaluation of such methods on a diverse range of languages and tasks is still missing. To this end, we introduce the Cross-lingual TRansfer Evaluation of Multilingual Encoders XTREME benchmark, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the cross-lingual generalization capabilities of multilingual representations across 40 languages and 9 tasks. We demonstrate that while models tested on English reach human performance on many tasks, there is still a sizable gap in the performance of cross-lingually transferred models, particularly on syntactic and sentence retrieval tasks. There is also a wide spread of results across languages. We release the benchmark to encourage research on cross-lingual learning methods that transfer linguistic knowledge across a diverse and representative set of languages and tasks.
We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
Recently, neural methods have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks for many languages without the need for manually crafted features. However, these models still require manually annotated training data, which is not available for many languages. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised cross-lingual NER model that can transfer NER knowledge from one language to another in a completely unsupervised way without relying on any bilingual dictionary or parallel data. Our model achieves this through word-level adversarial learning and augmented fine-tuning with parameter sharing and feature augmentation. Experiments on five different languages demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming existing models by a good margin and setting a new SOTA for each language pair.
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 +13.8% average accuracy on XNLI, +12.3% average F1 score on MLQA, and +2.1% average F1 score on NER. XLM-R performs particularly well on low-resource languages, improving 11.8% in XNLI accuracy for Swahili and 9.2% for Urdu over the previous XLM model. We also present a detailed empirical evaluation 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-Ris very competitive with strong monolingual models on the GLUE and XNLI benchmarks. We will make XLM-R code, data, and models publicly available.
Learning distributed sentence representations is one of the key challenges in natural language processing. Previous work demonstrated that a recurrent neural network (RNNs) based sentence encoder trained on a large collection of annotated natural language inference data, is efficient in the transfer learning to facilitate other related tasks. In this paper, we show that joint learning of multiple tasks results in better generalizable sentence representations by conducting extensive experiments and analysis comparing the multi-task and single-task learned sentence encoders. The quantitative analysis using auxiliary tasks show that multi-task learning helps to embed better semantic information in the sentence representations compared to single-task learning. In addition, we compare multi-task sentence encoders with contextualized word representations and show that combining both of them can further boost the performance of transfer learning.
Generating natural language requires conveying content in an appropriate style. We explore two related tasks on generating text of varying formality: monolingual formality transfer and formality-sensitive machine translation. We propose to solve these tasks jointly using multi-task learning, and show that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance for formality transfer and are able to perform formality-sensitive translation without being explicitly trained on style-annotated translation examples.
Most existing sentiment analysis approaches heavily rely on a large amount of labeled data that usually involve time-consuming and error-prone manual annotations. The distribution of this labeled data is significantly imbalanced among languages, e.g., more English texts are labeled than texts in other languages, which presents a major challenge to cross-lingual sentiment analysis. There have been several cross-lingual representation learning techniques that transfer the knowledge learned from a language with abundant labeled examples to another language with much fewer labels. Their performance, however, is usually limited due to the imperfect quality of machine translation and the scarce signal that bridges two languages. In this paper, we employ emojis, a ubiquitous and emotional language, as a new bridge for sentiment analysis across languages. Specifically, we propose a semi-supervised representation learning approach through the task of emoji prediction to learn cross-lingual representations of text that can capture both semantic and sentiment information. The learned representations are then utilized to facilitate cross-lingual sentiment classification. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach on a representative Amazon review data set that covers three languages and three domains.
Multilingual topic models enable document analysis across languages through coherent multilingual summaries of the data. However, there is no standard and effective metric to evaluate the quality of multilingual topics. We introduce a new intrinsic evaluation of multilingual topic models that correlates well with human judgments of multilingual topic coherence as well as performance in downstream applications. Importantly, we also study evaluation for low-resource languages. Because standard metrics fail to accurately measure topic quality when robust external resources are unavailable, we propose an adaptation model that improves the accuracy and reliability of these metrics in low-resource settings.
The recent years have seen a revival of interest in textual entailment, sparked by i) the emergence of powerful deep neural network learners for natural language processing and ii) the timely development of large-scale evaluation datasets such as SNLI. Recast as natural language inference, the problem now amounts to detecting the relation between pairs of statements: they either contradict or entail one another, or they are mutually neutral. Current research in natural language inference is effectively exclusive to English. In this paper, we propose to advance the research in SNLI-style natural language inference toward multilingual evaluation. To that end, we provide test data for four major languages: Arabic, French, Spanish, and Russian. We experiment with a set of baselines. Our systems are based on cross-lingual word embeddings and machine translation. While our best system scores an average accuracy of just over 75%, we focus largely on enabling further research in multilingual inference.
Person re-identification (re-id) is a critical problem in video analytics applications such as security and surveillance. The public release of several datasets and code for vision algorithms has facilitated rapid progress in this area over the last few years. However, directly comparing re-id algorithms reported in the literature has become difficult since a wide variety of features, experimental protocols, and evaluation metrics are employed. In order to address this need, we present an extensive review and performance evaluation of single- and multi-shot re-id algorithms. The experimental protocol incorporates the most recent advances in both feature extraction and metric learning. To ensure a fair comparison, all of the approaches were implemented using a unified code library that includes 11 feature extraction algorithms and 22 metric learning and ranking techniques. All approaches were evaluated using a new large-scale dataset that closely mimics a real-world problem setting, in addition to 16 other publicly available datasets: VIPeR, GRID, CAVIAR, DukeMTMC4ReID, 3DPeS, PRID, V47, WARD, SAIVT-SoftBio, CUHK01, CHUK02, CUHK03, RAiD, iLIDSVID, HDA+ and Market1501. The evaluation codebase and results will be made publicly available for community use.
Scientific publications have evolved several features for mitigating vocabulary mismatch when indexing, retrieving, and computing similarity between articles. These mitigation strategies range from simply focusing on high-value article sections, such as titles and abstracts, to assigning keywords, often from controlled vocabularies, either manually or through automatic annotation. Various document representation schemes possess different cost-benefit tradeoffs. In this paper, we propose to model different representations of the same article as translations of each other, all generated from a common latent representation in a multilingual topic model. We start with a methodological overview on latent variable models for parallel document representations that could be used across many information science tasks. We then show how solving the inference problem of mapping diverse representations into a shared topic space allows us to evaluate representations based on how topically similar they are to the original article. In addition, our proposed approach provides means to discover where different concept vocabularies require improvement.