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Pretraining deep neural network architectures with a language modeling objective has brought large improvements for many natural language processing tasks. Exemplified by BERT, a recently proposed such architecture, we demonstrate that…

Natural Language Inference (NLI) models are known to learn from biases and artefacts within their training data, impacting how well they generalise to other unseen datasets. Existing de-biasing approaches focus on preventing the models from…

Low-frequency word prediction remains a challenge in modern neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Recent adaptive training methods promote the output of infrequent words by emphasizing their weights in the overall training objectives.…

Learning high-quality embeddings for rare words is a hard problem because of sparse context information. Mimicking (Pinter et al., 2017) has been proposed as a solution: given embeddings learned by a standard algorithm, a model is first…

Unsupervised text classification, with its most common form being sentiment analysis, used to be performed by counting words in a text that were stored in a lexicon, which assigns each word to one class or as a neutral word. In recent…

Modern text classification models are susceptible to adversarial examples, perturbed versions of the original text indiscernible by humans which get misclassified by the model. Recent works in NLP use rule-based synonym replacement…

In recent years, the introduction of the Transformer models sparked a revolution in natural language processing (NLP). BERT was one of the first text encoders using only the attention mechanism without any recurrent parts to achieve…

For different language pairs, word-level neural machine translation (NMT) models with a fixed-size vocabulary suffer from the same problem of representing out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. The common practice usually replaces all these rare or…

Generative language models are usually pretrained on large text corpus via predicting the next token (i.e., sub-word/word/phrase) given the previous ones. Recent works have demonstrated the impressive performance of large generative…

We present FLUKE (Framework for LingUistically-driven and tasK-agnostic robustness Evaluation), a framework for assessing model robustness through systematic minimal variations of test data. FLUKE introduces controlled variations across…

Despite excellent performance on many tasks, NLP systems are easily fooled by small adversarial perturbations of inputs. Existing procedures to defend against such perturbations are either (i) heuristic in nature and susceptible to stronger…

Subword regularization methods such as BPE dropout are typically applied only during fine-tuning, while pretraining is usually done with deterministic tokenization. This creates a potential segmentation mismatch between pretraining and…

We introduce the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT), a new byte-level LLM architecture that, for the first time, matches tokenization-based LLM performance at scale with significant improvements in inference efficiency and robustness. BLT…

In recent years, many generalization benchmarks have shown language models' lack of robustness in natural language inference (NLI). However, manually creating new benchmarks is costly, while automatically generating high-quality ones, even…

Pre-trained word embeddings like ELMo and BERT contain rich syntactic and semantic information, resulting in state-of-the-art performance on various tasks. We propose a very fast variational information bottleneck (VIB) method to…

With the introduction of (large) language models, there has been significant concern about the unintended bias such models may inherit from their training data. A number of studies have shown that such models propagate gender stereotypes,…

Natural Language Inference (NLI) or Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) is the task of predicting the entailment relation between a pair of sentences (premise and hypothesis). This task has been described as a valuable testing ground for…

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is an algorithm commonly used in Natural Language Processing to build a vocabulary of subwords, which has been recently applied to symbolic music. Given that symbolic music can differ significantly from text,…

Subword regularization, used widely in NLP, improves model performance by reducing the dependency on exact tokenizations, augmenting the training corpus, and exposing the model to more unique contexts during training. BPE and MaxMatch, two…

Byte-based machine translation systems have shown significant potential in massively multilingual settings. Unicode encoding, which maps each character to specific byte(s), eliminates the emergence of unknown words, even in new languages.…