Related papers: Improving negation detection with negation-focused…

Transformer-based language models have been shown to be highly effective for several NLP tasks. In this paper, we consider three transformer models, BERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet, in both small and large versions, and investigate how faithful…

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has improved exponentially in recent years thanks to the development of sequence-to-sequence deep learning technologies such as Transformer-based language models. This advancement has led to more fluent and…

Pre-trained multilingual language models such as mBERT have shown immense gains for several natural language processing (NLP) tasks, especially in the zero-shot cross-lingual setting. Most, if not all, of these pre-trained models rely on…

Multilingual machine translation systems aim to make knowledge accessible across languages, yet learning effective cross-lingual representations remains challenging. These challenges are especially pronounced for low-resource languages,…

One crucial aspect of sentiment analysis is negation handling, where the occurrence of negation can flip the sentiment of a sentence and negatively affects the machine learning-based sentiment classification. The role of negation in Arabic…

BERT set many state-of-the-art results over varied NLU benchmarks by pre-training over two tasks: masked language modelling (MLM) and next sentence prediction (NSP), the latter of which has been highly criticized. In this paper, we 1)…

Mitigation of gender bias in NLP has a long history tied to debiasing static word embeddings. More recently, attention has shifted to debiasing pre-trained language models. We study to what extent the simplest projective debiasing methods,…

Despite recent advances in deep learning-based language modelling, many natural language processing (NLP) tasks in the financial domain remain challenging due to the paucity of appropriately labelled data. Other issues that can limit task…

Despite their outstanding performance, large language models (LLMs) suffer notorious flaws related to their preference for simple, surface-level textual relations over full semantic complexity of the problem. This proposal investigates a…

Masked language modeling (MLM) plays a key role in pretraining large language models. But the MLM objective is often dominated by high-frequency words that are sub-optimal for learning factual knowledge. In this work, we propose an approach…

Neural Chat Translation (NCT) aims to translate conversational text between speakers of different languages. Despite the promising performance of sentence-level and context-aware neural machine translation models, there still remain…

Language models built from various sources are the foundation of today's NLP progress. However, for many low-resource languages, the diversity of domains is often limited, more biased to a religious domain, which impacts their performance…

Semantic representation learning for sentences is an important and well-studied problem in NLP. The current trend for this task involves training a Transformer-based sentence encoder through a contrastive objective with text, i.e.,…

Language model pre-training has been shown to capture a surprising amount of world knowledge, crucial for NLP tasks such as question answering. However, this knowledge is stored implicitly in the parameters of a neural network, requiring…

Hate speech detection is a crucial area of research in natural language processing, essential for ensuring online community safety. However, detecting implicit hate speech, where harmful intent is conveyed in subtle or indirect ways,…

Dialects introduce syntactic and lexical variations in language that occur in regional or social groups. Most NLP methods are not sensitive to such variations. This may lead to unfair behavior of the methods, conveying negative bias towards…

State-of-the-art supervised NLP models achieve high accuracy but are also susceptible to failures on inputs from low-data regimes, such as domains that are not represented in training data. As an approximation to collecting ground-truth…

This thesis provides methods and analysis of models which make progress on this goal. The techniques outlined are task agnostic, and should provide benefit when used with nearly any transformer LM. We introduce two new finetuning methods…

Model robustness to bias is often determined by the generalization on carefully designed out-of-distribution datasets. Recent debiasing methods in natural language understanding (NLU) improve performance on such datasets by pressuring…

We propose a novel task-agnostic in-domain pre-training method that sits between generic pre-training and fine-tuning. Our approach selectively masks in-domain keywords, i.e., words that provide a compact representation of the target…