Related papers: Augmented SBERT: Data Augmentation Method for Impr…

We present SpanBERT, a pre-training method that is designed to better represent and predict spans of text. Our approach extends BERT by (1) masking contiguous random spans, rather than random tokens, and (2) training the span boundary…

Building conversational systems in new domains and with added functionality requires resource-efficient models that work under low-data regimes (i.e., in few-shot setups). Motivated by these requirements, we introduce intent detection…

Motivation: Biomedical named-entity normalization involves connecting biomedical entities with distinct database identifiers in order to facilitate data integration across various fields of biology. Existing systems for biomedical named…

We introduce two pre-trained retrieval focused multilingual sentence encoding models, respectively based on the Transformer and CNN model architectures. The models embed text from 16 languages into a single semantic space using a multi-task…

Cross-lingual word sense disambiguation (WSD) tackles the challenge of disambiguating ambiguous words across languages given context. The pre-trained BERT embedding model has been proven to be effective in extracting contextual information…

Data augmentation has attracted a lot of research attention in the deep learning era for its ability in alleviating data sparseness. The lack of labeled data for unseen evaluation databases is exactly the major challenge for cross-domain…

We previously proposed contextual spelling correction (CSC) to correct the output of end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models with contextual information such as name, place, etc. Although CSC has achieved reasonable…

Reasoning about implied relationships (e.g., paraphrastic, common sense, encyclopedic) between pairs of words is crucial for many cross-sentence inference problems. This paper proposes new methods for learning and using embeddings of word…

Data sparsity is a main problem hindering the development of code-switching (CS) NLP systems. In this paper, we investigate data augmentation techniques for synthesizing dialectal Arabic-English CS text. We perform lexical replacements…

In recent years, self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved tremendous success in various speech tasks due to its power to extract representations from massive unlabeled data. However, compared with tasks such as speech recognition (ASR),…

With the rapid advancement of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), enhancing translation efficiency and quality has become a focal point of research. Despite the commendable performance of general models such as the Transformer in various…

Sequence-to-sequence models have shown promising improvements on the temporal task of video captioning, but they optimize word-level cross-entropy loss during training. First, using policy gradient and mixed-loss methods for reinforcement…

Large pre-trained sentence encoders like BERT start a new chapter in natural language processing. A common practice to apply pre-trained BERT to sequence classification tasks (e.g., classification of sentences or sentence pairs) is by…

Contrastive learning has shown great potential in unsupervised sentence embedding tasks, e.g., SimCSE. However, We find that these existing solutions are heavily affected by superficial features like the length of sentences or syntactic…

Data augmentation is commonly used for generating additional data from the available training data to achieve a robust estimation of the parameters of complex models like the one for speaker verification (SV), especially for under-resourced…

Topic-controlled summarisation enables users to generate summaries focused on specific aspects of source documents. This paper investigates a data augmentation strategy for training small language models (sLMs) to perform topic-controlled…

Multilingual end-to-end automatic speech recognition models are attractive due to its simplicity in training and deployment. Recent work on large-scale training of such models has shown promising results compared to monolingual models.…

In this paper, we adopted a retrospective approach to examine and compare five existing popular sentence encoders, i.e., Sentence-BERT, Universal Sentence Encoder (USE), LASER, InferSent, and Doc2vec, in terms of their performance on…

Sentence embedding models play a key role in various Natural Language Processing tasks, such as in Topic Modeling, Document Clustering and Recommendation Systems. However, these models rely heavily on parallel data, which can be scarce for…

General-purpose pretrained sentence encoders such as BERT are not ideal for real-world conversational AI applications; they are computationally heavy, slow, and expensive to train. We propose ConveRT (Conversational Representations from…