Papers by Todd Ward
The TechQA Dataset (2020.acl-main)
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Vittorio Castelli, Rishav Chakravarti, Saswati Dana, Anthony Ferritto, Radu Florian, Martin Franz, Dinesh Garg, Dinesh Khandelwal, Scott McCarley, Michael McCawley, Mohamed Nasr, Lin Pan, Cezar Pendus, John Pitrelli, Saurabh Pujar, Salim Roukos, Andrzej Sakrajda, Avi Sil, Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Todd Ward, Rong Zhang
| Challenge: | TECHQA is a domain-adaptation question answering dataset for the technical support domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-adaptation question-answering dataset for the technical support domain that contains actual questions posed by users on a technical forum . |
| Outcome: | The TECHQA dataset highlights two real-world issues from the automated customer support domain. |
Bootstrapping Multilingual AMR with Contextual Word Alignments (2021.eacl-main)
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Janaki Sheth, Young-Suk Lee, Ramón Fernandez Astudillo, Tahira Naseem, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos, Todd Ward
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a sentence-level graph that is biased towards English. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique for foreign-text-to-English AMR alignment using contextual word alignment between English and foreign language tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms the best results for German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese. |
Scalable Cross-lingual Treebank Synthesis for Improved Production Dependency Parsers (2020.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | scalable Universal Dependency (UD) treebank synthesis techniques are used to improve production-grade parsers. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation technique that uses synthetic treebanks to improve production-grade parsers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves LAS performance on seven languages by up to two points on production models trained on original UD treebanks. |
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Task-Specific Attention (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual machine translation is a task of building a system capable of translating between multiple source and target languages. |
| Approach: | They propose task-specific attention models to retain parameter sharing generalization . they observe improved translation quality even in low-resource zero-shot directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains parameter sharing generalization while allowing language-specific specialization . it improves translation quality even in low-resource zero-shot translation directions . |
Multi-Stage Pre-training for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation (2020.emnlp-main)
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Rong Zhang, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Md Arafat Sultan, Vittorio Castelli, Anthony Ferritto, Radu Florian, Efsun Sarioglu Kayi, Salim Roukos, Avi Sil, Todd Ward
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to transfer learning target data to in-domain text . prior work has adapted pre-trained LMs to specific domains . |
| Approach: | They extend the vocabulary of a pretrained language model with domain-specific terms to create synthetic tasks that help it transfer to downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches show significant performance gains on extractive reading comprehension, document ranking and duplicate question detection tasks. |