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We analyze various methods for single-label and multi-label text classification across well-known datasets, categorizing them into bag-of-words, sequence-based, graph-based, and hierarchical approaches. Despite the surge in methods like…

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models has recently become a common practice in building NLP models for various tasks, especially few-shot tasks. We argue that under the few-shot setting, formulating fine-tuning closer to the pre-training…

Encoder transformer models compress information from all tokens in a sequence into a single [CLS] token to represent global context. This approach risks diluting fine-grained or hierarchical features, leading to information loss in…

State-of-the-art performance on language understanding tasks is now achieved with increasingly large networks; the current record holder has billions of parameters. Given a language model pre-trained on massive unlabeled text corpora, only…

Learning high-quality text representations is fundamental to a wide range of NLP tasks. While encoder pretraining has traditionally relied on Masked Language Modeling (MLM), recent evidence suggests that decoder models pretrained with…

Large Transformer-based language models are pre-trained on corpora of varying sizes, for a different number of steps and with different batch sizes. At the same time, more fundamental components, such as the pre-training objective or…

Pre-training by language modeling has become a popular and successful approach to NLP tasks, but we have yet to understand exactly what linguistic capacities these pre-training processes confer upon models. In this paper we introduce a…

The ability of machine learning models to store input information in hidden layer vector embeddings, analogous to the concept of `memory', is widely employed but not well characterized. We find that language model embeddings typically…

The existing machine translation systems, whether phrase-based or neural, have relied almost exclusively on word-level modelling with explicit segmentation. In this paper, we ask a fundamental question: can neural machine translation…

Transformer based pre-trained models such as BERT and its variants, which are trained on large corpora, have demonstrated tremendous success for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Most of academic works are based on the English…

The transformer has been shown to outperform recurrent neural network-based sequence-to-sequence models in various word-level NLP tasks. Yet for character-level transduction tasks, e.g. morphological inflection generation and historical…

Multi-encoder models are a broad family of context-aware neural machine translation systems that aim to improve translation quality by encoding document-level contextual information alongside the current sentence. The context encoding is…

The pre-training of text encoders normally processes text as a sequence of tokens corresponding to small text units, such as word pieces in English and characters in Chinese. It omits information carried by larger text granularity, and thus…

The practical success of much of NLP depends on the availability of training data. However, in real-world scenarios, training data is often scarce, not least because many application domains are restricted and specific. In this work, we…

Tokenization is fundamental to pretrained language models (PLMs). Existing tokenization methods for Chinese PLMs typically treat each character as an indivisible token. However, they ignore the unique feature of the Chinese writing system…

Subword tokenization is an essential part of modern large language models (LLMs), yet its specific contributions to training efficiency and model performance remain poorly understood. In this work, we decouple the effects of subword…

The effectiveness of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models largely depends on the vocabulary used at training; small vocabularies can lead to out-of-vocabulary problems -- large ones, to memory issues. Subword (SW) tokenization has been…

Recently, pre-trained contextual models, such as BERT, have shown to perform well in language related tasks. We revisit the design decisions that govern the applicability of these models for the passage re-ranking task in open-domain…

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems operate primarily on words (or sub-words), ignoring lower-level patterns of morphology. We present a character-aware decoder designed to capture such patterns when translating into morphologically…

Compared to humans, machine learning models generally require significantly more training examples and fail to extrapolate from experience to solve previously unseen challenges. To help close this performance gap, we augment single-task…