Another large NLP conference that must have taken place in a virtual environment, EMNLP 2020, is over, and here are my notes from the conference. The ACL in the summer that had most Q&A sessions on Zoom, which meant most of the authors waiting forever if someone takes the courage to enter the room. EMNLP sort of simulated the standard conference format that hopefully reduced the communication barrier. There were public Q&A sessions with short presentations and poster sessions in […]

This week, I am going to discuss the paper “Long-Short Term Masking Transformer: A Simple but Effective Baseline for Document-level Neural Machine Translation” by authors from Alibaba Group. The preprint of the paper appeared a month ago on arXiv and will be presented at this year’s EMNLP. Including document-level context into machine translation is one of the biggest challenges of current machine translation. It has several reasons. One is the lack of document-level training data, which is partially caused by […]

This week, I am going to have a closer look at a paper that creatively uses methods for bilingual word embeddings for social media analysis. The paper’s preprint was uploaded last week on arXiv. The title is “We Don’t Speak the Same Language: Interpreting Polarization through Machine Translation,” and most of the authors CMU in Pittsburgh. The paper’s central assumption is that the polarization of different opinion groups, especially in the USA, went so far that some words have totally […]

Back in 2013, a friend of mine enthusiastically told me, how excited he was about deep learning democratizing AI (and way saying it was not relevant for NLP at all): there was no need for large CPU clusters, all you needed was buying a gaming PC and start training models and publishing ground-breaking papers. Now, it is 2020 and there is GPT-3… Some weeks ago OpenAI published a pre-print about their giant language model that they call GPT-3. It was […]

Pre-trained multilingual representations promise to make the current best NLP model available even for low-resource languages. With a truly language-neutral pre-trained multilingual representation, we could train a task-specific model for English (or another language with available training data) and such a model would work for all languages the representation model can work with. (Except that by doing so, the models might transfer Western values into low-resource language applications.) There are several multilingual contextual embeddings models (such as multilingual BERT or […]