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Word vectors and Language Models (LMs) pretrained on a large amount of unlabelled data can dramatically improve various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the measure and impact of similarity between pretraining data and…

While monolingual data has been shown to be useful in improving bilingual neural machine translation (NMT), effectively and efficiently leveraging monolingual data for Multilingual NMT (MNMT) systems is a less explored area. In this work,…

Unsupervised cross-lingual pretraining has achieved strong results in neural machine translation (NMT), by drastically reducing the need for large parallel data. Most approaches adapt masked-language modeling (MLM) to sequence-to-sequence…

This thesis focuses on improving the pre-training of natural language models using unsupervised raw data to make them more efficient and aligned with downstream applications. In the first part, we introduce three alternative pre-training…

Transfer learning (TL) in natural language processing (NLP) has seen a surge of interest in recent years, as pre-trained models have shown an impressive ability to transfer to novel tasks. Three main strategies have emerged for making use…

Despite the remarkable success of pre-trained language models (PLMs), they still face two challenges: First, large-scale PLMs are inefficient in terms of memory footprint and computation. Second, on the downstream tasks, PLMs tend to rely…

Pre-trained models have become indispensable for efficiently building models across a broad spectrum of downstream tasks. The advantages of pre-trained models have been highlighted by empirical studies on scaling laws, which demonstrate…

Multilingual models are often particularly dependent on scaling to generalize to a growing number of languages. Compression techniques are widely relied upon to reconcile the growth in model size with real world resource constraints, but…

Entailment has been recognized as an important metric for evaluating natural language understanding (NLU) models, and recent studies have found that entailment pretraining benefits weakly supervised fine-tuning. In this work, we design a…

While the Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate a majority of language understanding tasks, previous work shows that some of these results are supported by modelling spurious correlations of training datasets. Authors commonly assess model…

Recently, mT5 - a massively multilingual version of T5 - leveraged a unified text-to-text format to attain state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of multilingual NLP tasks. In this paper, we investigate the impact of incorporating…

Pre-trained language models are trained on large-scale unsupervised data, and they can fine-turn the model only on small-scale labeled datasets, and achieve good results. Multilingual pre-trained language models can be trained on multiple…

Named entity recognition (NER) models generally perform poorly when large training datasets are unavailable for low-resource domains. Recently, pre-training a large-scale language model has become a promising direction for coping with the…

Recent research has revealed that neural language models at scale suffer from poor temporal generalization capability, i.e., the language model pre-trained on static data from past years performs worse over time on emerging data. Existing…

Exploiting large pretrained models for various NMT tasks have gained a lot of visibility recently. In this work we study how BERT pretrained models could be exploited for supervised Neural Machine Translation. We compare various ways to…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach to complex decision making. However, one issue that limits its practical application is its brittleness, sometimes failing to train in the presence of small changes in the environment.…

In the development of neural text-to-speech systems, model pre-training with a large amount of non-target speakers' data is a common approach. However, in terms of ultimately achieved system performance for target speaker(s), the actual…

Multitask learning has been applied successfully to a range of tasks, mostly morphosyntactic. However, little is known on when MTL works and whether there are data characteristics that help to determine its success. In this paper we…

Demonstration-based learning has shown great potential in stimulating pretrained language models' ability under limited data scenario. Simply augmenting the input with some demonstrations can significantly improve performance on few-shot…

Scarcity of parallel data causes formality style transfer models to have scarce success in preserving content. We show that fine-tuning pre-trained language (GPT-2) and sequence-to-sequence (BART) models boosts content preservation, and…