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Natural-language processing of historical documents is complicated by the abundance of variant spellings and lack of annotated data. A common approach is to normalize the spelling of historical words to modern forms. We explore the…
Machine transliteration is the process of automatically transforming the script of a word from a source language to a target language, while preserving pronunciation. Sequence to sequence learning has recently emerged as a new paradigm in…
Both grammatical error correction and text style transfer can be viewed as monolingual sequence-to-sequence transformation tasks, but the scarcity of directly annotated data for either task makes them unfeasible for most languages. We…
In the traditional cascading architecture for spoken language understanding (SLU), it has been observed that automatic speech recognition errors could be detrimental to the performance of natural language understanding. End-to-end (E2E) SLU…
Recent multilingual pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable zero-shot performance, where the model is only finetuned on one source language and directly evaluated on target languages. In this work, we propose a self-learning…
Pre-training large-scale neural language models on raw texts has made a significant contribution to improving transfer learning in natural language processing (NLP). With the introduction of transformer-based language models, such as…
While achieving state-of-the-art results in multiple tasks and languages, translation-based cross-lingual transfer is often overlooked in favour of massively multilingual pre-trained encoders. Arguably, this is due to its main limitations:…
Unsupervised learning of cross-lingual word embedding offers elegant matching of words across languages, but has fundamental limitations in translating sentences. In this paper, we propose simple yet effective methods to improve…
Neural abstractive summarization methods often require large quantities of labeled training data. However, labeling large amounts of summarization data is often prohibitive due to time, financial, and expertise constraints, which has…
We trained a model to automatically transliterate Judeo-Arabic texts into Arabic script, enabling Arabic readers to access those writings. We employ a recurrent neural network (RNN), combined with the connectionist temporal classification…
Unsupervised pre-training is now the predominant approach for both text and speech understanding. Self-attention models pre-trained on large amounts of unannotated data have been hugely successful when fine-tuned on downstream tasks from a…
Multilingual transformer models like mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa have obtained great improvements for many NLP tasks on a variety of languages. However, recent works also showed that results from high-resource languages could not be easily…
We introduce the Globally Normalized Autoregressive Transducer (GNAT) for addressing the label bias problem in streaming speech recognition. Our solution admits a tractable exact computation of the denominator for the sequence-level…
Recently, there has been significant progress made in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of code-switched speech, leading to gains in accuracy on code-switched datasets in many language pairs. Code-switched speech co-occurs with monolingual…
Research on prompting has shown excellent performance with little or even no supervised training across many tasks. However, prompting for machine translation is still under-explored in the literature. We fill this gap by offering a…
Integrating an external language model into a sequence-to-sequence speech recognition system is non-trivial. Previous works utilize linear interpolation or a fusion network to integrate external language models. However, these approaches…
Variations in writing styles are commonly used to adapt the content to a specific context, audience, or purpose. However, applying stylistic variations is still by and large a manual process, and there have been little efforts towards…
In this work we focus on transferring supervision signals of natural language generation (NLG) tasks between multiple languages. We propose to pretrain the encoder and the decoder of a sequence-to-sequence model under both monolingual and…
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable successes in acquiring a wide range of linguistic knowledge, relying solely on self-supervised training on text streams. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of this language-agnostic…
Multilingual speech foundation models such as Whisper are trained on web-scale data, where data for each language consists of a myriad of regional varieties. However, different regional varieties often employ different scripts to write the…