Papers by Kyle Gorman
Quantifying the Hyperparameter Sensitivity of Neural Networks for Character-level Sequence-to-Sequence Tasks (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Neural networks are notoriously hard to interpret and slightly mysterious to researchers and practitioners alike. |
| Approach: | They formalize hyperparameter sensitivity using two metrics: similarity-based sensitivity and performance-based-sensitivity. |
| Outcome: | The transformer is more sensitive to hyperparameters according to both metrics, but not batch size . large models, multilinguality of NLP models and tasks make hyperparametric tuning more expensive . |
Massively Multilingual Pronunciation Modeling with WikiPron (2020.lrec-1)
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Jackson L. Lee, Lucas F.E. Ashby, M. Elizabeth Garza, Yeonju Lee-Sikka, Sean Miller, Alan Wong, Arya D. McCarthy, Kyle Gorman
| Challenge: | WikiPron is an open-source command-line tool for extracting pronunciation data from Wiktionary . the tool generates a database of 1.7 million pronunciations from 165 languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a command-line tool for extracting pronunciation data from Wiktionary . they use it to generate a database of 1.7 million pronunciations from 165 languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed software generates a database of pronunciations for 165 languages . the proposed model is then validated by a grapheme-to-phoneme model . |
What Kind of Language Is Hard to Language-Model? (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | a recent study suggests that language models perform poorly across languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that fits a paired-sample multiplicative mixed-effects model to obtain language difficulty coefficients from at least-pairwise parallel corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to handle missing data and is aware of inter-sentence variation. |
We Need to Talk about Standard Splits (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate systems with a held-out test set are insufficient for system comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple random splits to compare performance of systems . they replicate results on standard split but fail to reproduce some rankings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on multiple random splits to replicate results with a set of part-of-speech taggers. |
Structured abbreviation expansion in context (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Ad hoc abbreviations are commonly found in informal communication channels that favor shorter messages. |
| Approach: | They propose to reverse ad hoc abbreviations in context to recover normalized, expanded versions of abbrevated messages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can recover normalized, expanded abbreviations from text . it is similar to spelling correction, but requires more extensive work . |
Is the Best Better? Bayesian Statistical Model Comparison for Natural Language Processing (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study raises concerns about the use of standard splits to compare models . we compare the performance of six English part-of-speech taggers to those of other models based on standard split analysis . |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian statistical model comparison technique using k-fold cross-validation . they rank six English part-of-speech taggers across two data sets and three evaluation metrics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method ranks English part-of-speech taggers on two data sets and three evaluation metrics. |
UniMorph 4.0: Universal Morphology (2022.lrec-1)
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Khuyagbaatar Batsuren, Omer Goldman, Salam Khalifa, Nizar Habash, Witold Kieraś, Gábor Bella, Brian Leonard, Garrett Nicolai, Kyle Gorman, Yustinus Ghanggo Ate, Maria Ryskina, Sabrina Mielke, Elena Budianskaya, Charbel El-Khaissi, Tiago Pimentel, Michael Gasser, William Abbott Lane, Mohit Raj, Matt Coler, Jaime Rafael Montoya Samame, Delio Siticonatzi Camaiteri, Esaú Zumaeta Rojas, Didier López Francis, Arturo Oncevay, Juan López Bautista, Gema Celeste Silva Villegas, Lucas Torroba Hennigen, Adam Ek, David Guriel, Peter Dirix, Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Andrey Scherbakov, Aziyana Bayyr-ool, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Roberto Zariquiey, Karina Sheifer, Sofya Ganieva, Hilaria Cruz, Ritván Karahóǧa, Stella Markantonatou, George Pavlidis, Matvey Plugaryov, Elena Klyachko, Ali Salehi, Candy Angulo, Jatayu Baxi, Andrew Krizhanovsky, Natalia Krizhanovskaya, Elizabeth Salesky, Clara Vania, Sardana Ivanova, Jennifer White, Rowan Hall Maudslay, Josef Valvoda, Ran Zmigrod, Paula Czarnowska, Irene Nikkarinen, Aelita Salchak, Brijesh Bhatt, Christopher Straughn, Zoey Liu, Jonathan North Washington, Yuval Pinter, Duygu Ataman, Marcin Wolinski, Totok Suhardijanto, Anna Yablonskaya, Niklas Stoehr, Hossep Dolatian, Zahroh Nuriah, Shyam Ratan, Francis M. Tyers, Edoardo M. Ponti, Grant Aiton, Aryaman Arora, Richard J. Hatcher, Ritesh Kumar, Jeremiah Young, Daria Rodionova, Anastasia Yemelina, Taras Andrushko, Igor Marchenko, Polina Mashkovtseva, Alexandra Serova, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Maria Nepomniashchaya, Fausto Giunchiglia, Eleanor Chodroff, Mans Hulden, Miikka Silfverberg, Arya D. McCarthy, David Yarowsky, Ryan Cotterell, Reut Tsarfaty, Ekaterina Vylomova
| Challenge: | The Universal Morphology project provides broad-coverage instantiated morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed schema has added 66 new languages, including 24 endangered languages. |
Don’t Touch My Diacritics (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | a recent paper examines the effects of preprocessing text with diacritics on model performance . we show that inconsistent encoding of diacritized characters and removing diacritical characters can have detrimental downstream effects . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the handling of diacritized text by preserving diacritics and removing them altogether. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the number of errors in the preprocessing process, the authors argue . they show that the proposed approach can reduce the number and complexity of errors . |
Improving homograph disambiguation with supervised machine learning (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | a new system for text-to-speech synthesis uses rule-based homograph disambiguation . a simple application of machine learning produces significant improvements in homograph ambiguity . |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-based homograph disambiguation system for text-to-speech synthesis at Google . they compare it to a new system which performs disambiguations using classifiers trained on labeled data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is more accurate than hand-written rules or machine learning alone. |
UniMorph 3.0: Universal Morphology (2020.lrec-1)
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Arya D. McCarthy, Christo Kirov, Matteo Grella, Amrit Nidhi, Patrick Xia, Kyle Gorman, Ekaterina Vylomova, Sabrina J. Mielke, Garrett Nicolai, Miikka Silfverberg, Timofey Arkhangelskiy, Nataly Krizhanovsky, Andrew Krizhanovsky, Elena Klyachko, Alexey Sorokin, John Mansfield, Valts Ernštreits, Yuval Pinter, Cassandra L. Jacobs, Ryan Cotterell, Mans Hulden, David Yarowsky
| Challenge: | Explicit modeling of morphology has demonstrable benefits for language modeling, speech recognition, word embedding and keyword search. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource for annotated data in diverse languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed schema has been improved to make it more complete and correct, and adds 66 new languages and parts of speech for 12 languages. |
A* shortest string decoding for non-idempotent semirings (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing single shortest path algorithm is undefined for weighted finite-state automata over non-idempotent semirings because such semiring does not guarantee existence of a shortest pathway. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm which finds the shortest string for a weighted non-deterministic automaton over non-idempotent semirings using the backwards shortest distance of an equivalent deterministic algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm only visits a small fraction of the states in the companion semiring, but only visits one state if determinization is performed "on the fly". |