Papers by Angela Fan
Queens are Powerful too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Social biases present in data are often directly reflected in the predictions of models trained on that data. |
| Approach: | They analyze gender bias in dialogue data and propose techniques to mitigate it . they use counterfactual data augmentation, targeted data collection, and bias controlled training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques mitigate gender bias by balancing genderedness of generated dialogue utterances. |
Non-Autoregressive Semantic Parsing for Compositional Task-Oriented Dialog (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Semantic parsing using sequence-to-sequence models is stymied by higher compute requirements and higher latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive approach to predict semantic parse trees with an efficient seq2seq model architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves an 81% reduction in latency on TOP dataset and retains competitive performance over non-pretrained models on three different semantic parsing datasets. |
Multi-Dimensional Gender Bias Classification (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel framework decomposes gender bias in text along several pragmatic and semantic dimensions . language is a primary means by which people communicate, express identities and categorize themselves . unwanted gender biases can affect downstream applications, leading to poor user experiences . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes gender bias in text along several dimensions . they annotate eight large scale datasets with gender information and collect a benchmark . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes gender bias in text along several pragmatic and semantic dimensions. |
Hierarchical Neural Story Generation (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | a hierarchical model that generates a premise and then conditions on it creates fluent text . a novel form of model fusion improves the relevance of the story to the prompt . |
| Approach: | They use a hierarchical model that first generates a premise, then transforms it into a text . they use fusion to improve relevance of the story to the prompt and add a gated mechanism to model context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on strong baselines on automated and human evaluations. |
Do Explanations Help Users Detect Errors in Open-Domain QA? An Evaluation of Spoken vs. Visual Explanations (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | despite interest in explainable AI, there is increasing skepticism as to whether explanations are useful to end-users in downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They conduct user studies to measure whether explanations help users decide when to accept or reject an ODQA system's answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed study shows that explanations outperform baselines across modalities but the best strategy varies with the modality. |
Reasoning over Public and Private Data in Retrieval-Based Systems (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval systems assume relevant corpora are fully (e.g., publicly) accessible, but users are often unwilling to expose their private data to entities hosting public data. |
| Approach: | They propose a split iterative retrieval problem involving iterating retrieval over multiple privacy scopes and propose 'concurrentQA' benchmark to test this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the existing retrieval methods but still suffers performance degradations when applied to a dataset from a public and private distribution. |
Alternative Input Signals Ease Transfer in Multilingual Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work in multilingual machine translation (MMT) has focused on the potential of positive transfer between languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment training data with alternative signals that unify different writing systems, such as phonetic, romanized, and transliterated input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong ensemble baselines on Indic and Turkic languages by 1.3 BLEU points on both languages. |
Generating Biographies on Wikipedia: The Impact of Gender Bias on the Retrieval-Based Generation of Women Biographies (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to encourage article creation focus on reducing the gender gap in Wikipedia articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that retrieves web evidence and generates biographies section by section . they analyze available web evidence to determine the accuracy of the generated text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate biographies section by section, including citation information, using retrieval mechanisms and a cache-based pre-trained encoder-decoder. |
The Flores-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation (2022.tacl-1)
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Naman Goyal, Cynthia Gao, Vishrav Chaudhary, Peng-Jen Chen, Guillaume Wenzek, Da Ju, Sanjana Krishnan, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato, Francisco Guzmán, Angela Fan
| Challenge: | a lack of good evaluation benchmarks hinders progress in low-resource and multilingual machine translation . despite advances in translation quality for a handful of languages, many low-source languages are not even supported by most popular translation engines. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-quality evaluation benchmark for machine translation using 3001 sentences from Wikipedia . they aim to improve evaluation of models on long tail of low-resource languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation benchmarks are based on 3001 sentences extracted from Wikipedia . the results show that the models can be used to evaluate multilingual systems . |
Augmenting Transformers with KNN-Based Composite Memory for Dialog (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has focused on learning architectures with large memories capable of storing external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to augment generative Transformer neural networks with information fetching modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance in generative dialog modeling . external knowledge is retrieved from Wikipedia, images, and human-written dialog utterances . |
Using Local Knowledge Graph Construction to Scale Seq2Seq Models to Multi-Document Inputs (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches extract portions of web text as input to Sequence-to-Sequence models . a problem is generating relevant knowledge from noisy and redundant input such as webpages . |
| Approach: | They propose to restructure free text into local knowledge graphs that are linearized into sequences . they propose to encode the graph as a sequence and then linearize it into a structured sequence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method compresses web search information and reduces redundancy . it can be used for open-domain question answering and multi-document summarization tasks . |
AmericasNLI: Evaluating Zero-shot Natural Language Understanding of Pretrained Multilingual Models in Truly Low-resource Languages (2022.acl-long)
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Abteen Ebrahimi, Manuel Mager, Arturo Oncevay, Vishrav Chaudhary, Luis Chiruzzo, Angela Fan, John Ortega, Ricardo Ramos, Annette Rios, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz, Gustavo Giménez-Lugo, Elisabeth Mager, Graham Neubig, Alexis Palmer, Rolando Coto-Solano, Thang Vu, Katharina Kann
| Challenge: | Pretrained multilingual models can perform cross-lingual transfer in a zero-shot setting, even for unseen languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend XNLI to 10 indigenous languages of the Americas and test multiple zero-shot and translation-based approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform cross-lingual transfer in a zero-shot setting even for languages unseen during pretraining. |
Multilingual AMR-to-Text Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on generating text from structured data into English has focused on bridging the gap between structure and natural language (NL) and semantically underspecified input and fully specified output. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual approach that can decode into 21 different languages . they leverage advances in cross-lingual embeddings and pretraining to generate multilingual models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses baselines that generate into one language in eighteen languages. |
CCMatrix: Mining Billions of High-Quality Parallel Sentences on the Web (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using a curated common crawl corpus, we were able to mine 10.8 billion parallel sentences out of which only 2.9 billions are aligned with English. |
| Approach: | They use 32 snapshots of a curated common crawl corpus totaling 71 billion unique sentences to mine 10.8 billion parallel sentences out of which only 2.9 billions are aligned with English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the best single systems on the WMT’19 test set for English-German/Russian/Chinese and outperformed the best submission at the 2020 WAT workshop. |
Multilingual Translation from Denoising Pre-Training (2021.findings-acl)
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Yuqing Tang, Chau Tran, Xian Li, Peng-Jen Chen, Naman Goyal, Vishrav Chaudhary, Jiatao Gu, Angela Fan
| Challenge: | Recent work shows potential of training one model for multilingual machine translation . but little has been explored on the potential to combine denoising pretraining with multilingual translation in a single model. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine denoising pretraining with multilingual machine translation in a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over models trained from scratch and bilingually for translation into English. |
fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling (N19-4)
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Myle Ott, Sergey Edunov, Alexei Baevski, Angela Fan, Sam Gross, Nathan Ng, David Grangier, Michael Auli
| Challenge: | OpenNMT is a community-built toolkit written in multiple languages with an emphasis on extensibility. |
| Approach: | They propose to use PyTorch to train custom sequence models for translation, summarization, language modeling, and other tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit is fast, extensible, and useful for both research and production. |
Generating Fact Checking Briefs (2020.emnlp-main)
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Angela Fan, Aleksandra Piktus, Fabio Petroni, Guillaume Wenzek, Marzieh Saeidi, Andreas Vlachos, Antoine Bordes, Sebastian Riedel
| Challenge: | Existing work has framed fact checking as classification, often supported by a claim as input. |
| Approach: | They propose to use natural language briefs to increase the accuracy of fact checking . they show that QABriefer increases the accuracy by 10% while QABries reduce time . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases the accuracy of crowdworkers by 10% while reducing the time required by 20%. |
RQUGE: Reference-Free Metric for Evaluating Question Generation by Answering the Question (2023.findings-acl)
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Alireza Mohammadshahi, Thomas Scialom, Majid Yazdani, Pouya Yanki, Angela Fan, James Henderson, Marzieh Saeidi
| Challenge: | Existing metrics for evaluating the quality of automatically generated questions are expensive and penalise valid questions that may not have high lexical or semantic similarity to the reference questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answering and span scorer metric based on the answerability of the candidate question given the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric has higher correlation with human judgment without relying on the reference question. |
Strategies for Structuring Story Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models generate word by word, but fail to capture high-level interactions . a novel decomposition approach allows more abstract representations to be generated first . |
| Approach: | They propose models which abstract over actions and entities to create stories . they generate predicate-argument structure, then replace placeholders with context-sensitive names . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models improve diversity and coherence of events and entities in generated stories. |
MUSS: Multilingual Unsupervised Sentence Simplification by Mining Paraphrases (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | MUSS trains strong models using sentence-level paraphrase data instead of labeled simplification data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual unsupervised sentence simplification system that does not require labeled simplification data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the previous best supervised models on English, French, and Spanish benchmarks despite not using labeled simplification data. |
Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game (D19-1)
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Jack Urbanek, Angela Fan, Siddharth Karamcheti, Saachi Jain, Samuel Humeau, Emily Dinan, Tim Rocktäschel, Douwe Kiela, Arthur Szlam, Jason Weston
| Challenge: | Existing studies on grounded dialogue use only statistical regularities of text data, without explicit understanding of the world that the text describes. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale crowdsourced text adventure game as a research platform for studying grounded dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game allows agents to perceive, emote, and act whilst conducting dialogue with other agents. |
Revisiting Machine Translation for Cross-lingual Classification (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work in cross-lingual learning has pivoted around multilingual models, which are typically pretrained on unlabeled corpora in multiple languages using some form of language modeling objective. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a stronger machine translation system to mitigat mismatch between training on original text and running inference on machine translated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is highly task dependent and calls into question the dominance of multilingual models for cross-lingual classification. |
KILT: a Benchmark for Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks (2021.naacl-main)
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Fabio Petroni, Aleksandra Piktus, Angela Fan, Patrick Lewis, Majid Yazdani, Nicola De Cao, James Thorne, Yacine Jernite, Vladimir Karpukhin, Jean Maillard, Vassilis Plachouras, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel
| Challenge: | Existing models for knowledge-intensive language tasks require access to large, external knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for knowledge-intensive language tasks (KILT) they test a shared dense vector index coupled with a seq2seq model to generate disambiguated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms tailor-made approaches on fact checking, open-domain question answering and dialog by generating disambiguated text. |
Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Wenhan Xiong, Jingyu Liu, Igor Molybog, Hejia Zhang, Prajjwal Bhargava, Rui Hou, Louis Martin, Rashi Rungta, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Barlas Oguz, Madian Khabsa, Han Fang, Yashar Mehdad, Sharan Narang, Kshitiz Malik, Angela Fan, Shruti Bhosale, Sergey Edunov, Mike Lewis, Sinong Wang, Hao Ma
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed and continue to evolve through scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train strong long-context LLMs that are capable of utilizing massive context windows of up to 32,000 tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on long-context benchmarks with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that is free of expensive annotations. |
stopes - Modular Machine Translation Pipelines (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Pierre Andrews, Guillaume Wenzek, Kevin Heffernan, Onur Çelebi, Anna Sun, Ammar Kamran, Yingzhe Guo, Alexandre Mourachko, Holger Schwenk, Angela Fan
| Challenge: | Neural machine translation is a natural language deep learning application that needs data to be trained. |
| Approach: | They describe a framework that empowers scalability and versatility for research use cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework empowers scalability and versatility for research use cases. |
Tricks for Training Sparse Translation Models (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Multitask learning with an unbalanced data distribution skews model learning towards high resource tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a temperature heating mechanism and dense pre-training to mitigate this by training models with a fixed model capacity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques improve performance on two multilingual translation benchmarks compared to BASELayers and Dense scaling baselines and in combination, more than 2x model convergence speed. |
A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation (2022.naacl-main)
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David Adelani, Jesujoba Alabi, Angela Fan, Julia Kreutzer, Xiaoyu Shen, Machel Reid, Dana Ruiter, Dietrich Klakow, Peter Nabende, Ernie Chang, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Freshia Sackey, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Chris Emezue, Colin Leong, Michael Beukman, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Guyo Jarso, Oreen Yousuf, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo, Gilles Hacheme, Eric Peter Wairagala, Muhammad Umair Nasir, Benjamin Ajibade, Tunde Ajayi, Yvonne Gitau, Jade Abbott, Mohamed Ahmed, Millicent Ochieng, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Jonathan Mukiibi, Fatoumata Ouoba Kabore, Godson Kalipe, Derguene Mbaye, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Victoire Memdjokam Koagne, Edwin Munkoh-Buabeng, Valencia Wagner, Idris Abdulmumin, Ayodele Awokoya, Happy Buzaaba, Blessing Sibanda, Andiswa Bukula, Sam Manthalu
| Challenge: | Low-resource languages are left out of large-scale pretraining datasets . authors explore how to leverage existing pre-trained models to create low-resourced translation systems for 16 African languages. |
| Approach: | They investigate how large-scale pre-trained models can be used to create low-resource translation systems for 16 African languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can translate between hundreds of languages even though there is little parallel data available for training. |
ELI5: Long Form Question Answering (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing question answering datasets provide extractive or short answers, but less attention has been paid to open-ended questions that require explanations. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale corpus for long form question answering . they use a Reddit forum to provide elaborate answers to open-ended questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Seq2Seq, language modeling, and other models in human evaluations. |
Small Data, Big Impact: Leveraging Minimal Data for Effective Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Jean Maillard, Cynthia Gao, Elahe Kalbassi, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Vedanuj Goswami, Philipp Koehn, Angela Fan, Francisco Guzman
| Challenge: | Existing datasets are not economical to create large-scale datasets, but for low-resource languages, a few thousand professionally translated sentence pairs can be useful. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to train machine translation models on pre-existing and synthetic data to augment them with millions of sentences through backtranslation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can cover hundreds of languages with high quality training data even when smaller but lower quality datasets are used. |