scholarly journals Concept recognition as a machine translation problem

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (S1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mayla R. Boguslav ◽  
Negacy D. Hailu ◽  
Michael Bada ◽  
William A. Baumgartner ◽  
Lawrence E. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Automated Assignment ◽  
Concept Recognition ◽  
Alternative Approaches

Abstract Background Automated assignment of specific ontology concepts to mentions in text is a critical task in biomedical natural language processing, and the subject of many open shared tasks. Although the current state of the art involves the use of neural network language models as a post-processing step, the very large number of ontology classes to be recognized and the limited amount of gold-standard training data has impeded the creation of end-to-end systems based entirely on machine learning. Recently, Hailu et al. recast the concept recognition problem as a type of machine translation and demonstrated that sequence-to-sequence machine learning models have the potential to outperform multi-class classification approaches. Methods We systematically characterize the factors that contribute to the accuracy and efficiency of several approaches to sequence-to-sequence machine learning through extensive studies of alternative methods and hyperparameter selections. We not only identify the best-performing systems and parameters across a wide variety of ontologies but also provide insights into the widely varying resource requirements and hyperparameter robustness of alternative approaches. Analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of such systems suggest promising avenues for future improvements as well as design choices that can increase computational efficiency with small costs in performance. Results Bidirectional encoder representations from transformers for biomedical text mining (BioBERT) for span detection along with the open-source toolkit for neural machine translation (OpenNMT) for concept normalization achieve state-of-the-art performance for most ontologies annotated in the CRAFT Corpus. This approach uses substantially fewer computational resources, including hardware, memory, and time than several alternative approaches. Conclusions Machine translation is a promising avenue for fully machine-learning-based concept recognition that achieves state-of-the-art results on the CRAFT Corpus, evaluated via a direct comparison to previous results from the 2019 CRAFT shared task. Experiments illuminating the reasons for the surprisingly good performance of sequence-to-sequence methods targeting ontology identifiers suggest that further progress may be possible by mapping to alternative target concept representations. All code and models can be found at: https://github.com/UCDenver-ccp/Concept-Recognition-as-Translation.

scholarly journals Concept Recognition as a Machine Translation Problem

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mayla R Boguslav ◽  
Negacy D Hailu ◽  
Michael Bada ◽  
William A Baumgartner ◽  
Lawrence E Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Automated Assignment ◽  
Concept Recognition ◽  
Alternative Approaches

AbstractBackgroundAutomated assignment of specific ontology concepts to mentions in text is a critical task in biomedical natural language processing, and the subject of many open shared tasks. Although the current state of the art involves the use of neural network language models as a post-processing step, the very large number of ontology classes to be recognized and the limited amount of gold-standard training data has impeded the creation of end-to-end systems based entirely on machine learning. Recently, Hailu et al. recast the concept recognition problem as a type of machine translation and demonstrated that sequence-to-sequence machine learning models had the potential to outperform multi-class classification approaches. Here we systematically characterize the factors that contribute to the accuracy and efficiency of several approaches to sequence-to-sequence machine learning.ResultsWe report on our extensive studies of alternative methods and hyperparameter selections. The results not only identify the best-performing systems and parameters across a wide variety of ontologies but also illuminate about the widely varying resource requirements and hyperparameter robustness of alternative approaches. Analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of such systems suggest promising avenues for future improvements as well as design choices that can increase computational efficiency with small costs in performance. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for Biomedical Text Mining (BioBERT) for span detection (as previously found) along with the Open-source Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation (OpenNMT) for concept normalization achieve state-of-the-art performance for most ontologies in CRAFT Corpus. This approach uses substantially fewer computational resources, including hardware, memory, and time than several alternative approaches.ConclusionsMachine translation is a promising avenue for fully machine-learning-based concept recognition that achieves state-of-the-art results on the CRAFT Corpus, evaluated via a direct comparison to previous results from the 2019 CRAFT Shared Task. Experiments illuminating the reasons for the surprisingly good performance of sequence-to-sequence methods targeting ontology identifiers suggest that further progress may be possible by mapping to alternative target concept representations. All code and models can be found at: https://github.com/UCDenver-ccp/Concept-Recognition-as-Translation.

scholarly journals Biomedical Concept Recognition Using Deep Neural Sequence Models

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Negacy D. Hailu ◽  
Michael Bada ◽  
Asmelash Teka Hadgu ◽  
Lawrence E. Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Conditional Random Field ◽  
Concept Recognition ◽  
Performance Improvements ◽  
Art Performance

AbstractBackgroundthe automated identification of mentions of ontological concepts in natural language texts is a central task in biomedical information extraction. Despite more than a decade of effort, performance in this task remains below the level necessary for many applications.Resultsrecently, applications of deep learning in natural language processing have demonstrated striking improvements over previously state-of-the-art performance in many related natural language processing tasks. Here we demonstrate similarly striking performance improvements in recognizing biomedical ontology concepts in full text journal articles using deep learning techniques originally developed for machine translation. For example, our best performing system improves the performance of the previous state-of-the-art in recognizing terms in the Gene Ontology Biological Process hierarchy, from a previous best F1 score of 0.40 to an F1 of 0.70, nearly halving the error rate. Nearly all other ontologies show similar performance improvements.ConclusionsA two-stage concept recognition system, which is a conditional random field model for span detection followed by a deep neural sequence model for normalization, improves the state-of-the-art performance for biomedical concept recognition. Treating the biomedical concept normalization task as a sequence-to-sequence mapping task similar to neural machine translation improves performance.

scholarly journals CloudLM: a Cloud-based Language Model for Machine Translation

2016 ◽  
Vol 105 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Ferrández-Tordera ◽  
Sergio Ortiz-Rojas ◽  
Antonio Toral
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Language Model ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Language Modelling ◽  
Statistical Approaches

Abstract Language models (LMs) are an essential element in statistical approaches to natural language processing for tasks such as speech recognition and machine translation (MT). The advent of big data leads to the availability of massive amounts of data to build LMs, and in fact, for the most prominent languages, using current techniques and hardware, it is not feasible to train LMs with all the data available nowadays. At the same time, it has been shown that the more data is used for a LM the better the performance, e.g. for MT, without any indication yet of reaching a plateau. This paper presents CloudLM, an open-source cloud-based LM intended for MT, which allows to query distributed LMs. CloudLM relies on Apache Solr and provides the functionality of state-of-the-art language modelling (it builds upon KenLM), while allowing to query massive LMs (as the use of local memory is drastically reduced), at the expense of slower decoding speed.

scholarly journals Towards Making the Most of BERT in Neural Machine Translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9378-9385
Author(s):  
Jiacheng Yang ◽  
Mingxuan Wang ◽  
Hao Zhou ◽  
Chengqi Zhao ◽  
Weinan Zhang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Language Models ◽  
German Language ◽  
Neural Machine Translation ◽  
Dynamic Switching ◽  
Previous State ◽  
Language Pair

GPT-2 and BERT demonstrate the effectiveness of using pre-trained language models (LMs) on various natural language processing tasks. However, LM fine-tuning often suffers from catastrophic forgetting when applied to resource-rich tasks. In this work, we introduce a concerted training framework (CTnmt) that is the key to integrate the pre-trained LMs to neural machine translation (NMT). Our proposed CTnmt} consists of three techniques: a) asymptotic distillation to ensure that the NMT model can retain the previous pre-trained knowledge; b) a dynamic switching gate to avoid catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge; and c) a strategy to adjust the learning paces according to a scheduled policy. Our experiments in machine translation show CTnmt gains of up to 3 BLEU score on the WMT14 English-German language pair which even surpasses the previous state-of-the-art pre-training aided NMT by 1.4 BLEU score. While for the large WMT14 English-French task with 40 millions of sentence-pairs, our base model still significantly improves upon the state-of-the-art Transformer big model by more than 1 BLEU score.

A Machine Learning Application for Raising WASH Awareness in the Times of COVID-19 Pandemic (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohan Pandey ◽  
Vaibhav Gautam ◽  
Ridam Pal ◽  
Harsh Bandhey ◽  
Lovedeep Singh Dhingra ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
User Feedback ◽  
Who Guidelines ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Right ◽  
Local Languages

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered the potential of digital misinformation in shaping the health of nations. The deluge of unverified information that spreads faster than the epidemic itself is an unprecedented phenomenon that has put millions of lives in danger. Mitigating this ‘Infodemic’ requires strong health messaging systems that are engaging, vernacular, scalable, effective and continuously learn the new patterns of misinformation. OBJECTIVE We created WashKaro, a multi-pronged intervention for mitigating misinformation through conversational AI, machine translation and natural language processing. WashKaro provides the right information matched against WHO guidelines through AI, and delivers it in the right format in local languages. METHODS We theorize (i) an NLP based AI engine that could continuously incorporate user feedback to improve relevance of information, (ii) bite sized audio in the local language to improve penetrance in a country with skewed gender literacy ratios, and (iii) conversational but interactive AI engagement with users towards an increased health awareness in the community. RESULTS A total of 5026 people who downloaded the app during the study window, among those 1545 were active users. Our study shows that 3.4 times more females engaged with the App in Hindi as compared to males, the relevance of AI-filtered news content doubled within 45 days of continuous machine learning, and the prudence of integrated AI chatbot “Satya” increased thus proving the usefulness of an mHealth platform to mitigate health misinformation. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that a multi-pronged machine learning application delivering vernacular bite-sized audios and conversational AI is an effective approach to mitigate health misinformation. CLINICALTRIAL Not Applicable

Towards corpus and model: Hierarchical structured-attention-based features for Indonesian named entity recognition

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Yingwen Fu ◽  
Nankai Lin ◽  
Xiaotian Lin ◽  
Shengyi Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Named Entity Recognition ◽  
Entity Recognition ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Neural Models ◽  
Performance Models ◽  
Named Entity ◽  
High Resource ◽  
Benchmark Datasets

Named entity recognition (NER) is fundamental to natural language processing (NLP). Most state-of-the-art researches on NER are based on pre-trained language models (PLMs) or classic neural models. However, these researches are mainly oriented to high-resource languages such as English. While for Indonesian, related resources (both in dataset and technology) are not yet well-developed. Besides, affix is an important word composition for Indonesian language, indicating the essentiality of character and token features for token-wise Indonesian NLP tasks. However, features extracted by currently top-performance models are insufficient. Aiming at Indonesian NER task, in this paper, we build an Indonesian NER dataset (IDNER) comprising over 50 thousand sentences (over 670 thousand tokens) to alleviate the shortage of labeled resources in Indonesian. Furthermore, we construct a hierarchical structured-attention-based model (HSA) for Indonesian NER to extract sequence features from different perspectives. Specifically, we use an enhanced convolutional structure as well as an enhanced attention structure to extract deeper features from characters and tokens. Experimental results show that HSA establishes competitive performance on IDNER and three benchmark datasets.

scholarly journals Efficient Embedded Decoding of Neural Network Language Models in a Machine Translation System

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (09) ◽  
pp. 1850007
Author(s):  
Francisco Zamora-Martinez ◽  
Maria Jose Castro-Bleda
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Computational Cost ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Translation System ◽  
Neural Net ◽  
Network Language

Neural Network Language Models (NNLMs) are a successful approach to Natural Language Processing tasks, such as Machine Translation. We introduce in this work a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system which fully integrates NNLMs in the decoding stage, breaking the traditional approach based on [Formula: see text]-best list rescoring. The neural net models (both language models (LMs) and translation models) are fully coupled in the decoding stage, allowing to more strongly influence the translation quality. Computational issues were solved by using a novel idea based on memorization and smoothing of the softmax constants to avoid their computation, which introduces a trade-off between LM quality and computational cost. These ideas were studied in a machine translation task with different combinations of neural networks used both as translation models and as target LMs, comparing phrase-based and [Formula: see text]-gram-based systems, showing that the integrated approach seems more promising for [Formula: see text]-gram-based systems, even with nonfull-quality NNLMs.

scholarly journals Attending to Entities for Better Text Understanding

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 7554-7561
Author(s):  
Pengxiang Cheng ◽  
Katrin Erk
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Human Performance ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Language Models ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Text Understanding

Recent progress in NLP witnessed the development of large-scale pre-trained language models (GPT, BERT, XLNet, etc.) based on Transformer (Vaswani et al. 2017), and in a range of end tasks, such models have achieved state-of-the-art results, approaching human performance. This clearly demonstrates the power of the stacked self-attention architecture when paired with a sufficient number of layers and a large amount of pre-training data. However, on tasks that require complex and long-distance reasoning where surface-level cues are not enough, there is still a large gap between the pre-trained models and human performance. Strubell et al. (2018) recently showed that it is possible to inject knowledge of syntactic structure into a model through supervised self-attention. We conjecture that a similar injection of semantic knowledge, in particular, coreference information, into an existing model would improve performance on such complex problems. On the LAMBADA (Paperno et al. 2016) task, we show that a model trained from scratch with coreference as auxiliary supervision for self-attention outperforms the largest GPT-2 model, setting the new state-of-the-art, while only containing a tiny fraction of parameters compared to GPT-2. We also conduct a thorough analysis of different variants of model architectures and supervision configurations, suggesting future directions on applying similar techniques to other problems.

scholarly journals Pseudotext Injection and Advance Filtering of Low-Resource Corpus for Neural Machine Translation

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Michael Adjeisah ◽  
Guohua Liu ◽  
Douglas Omwenga Nyabuga ◽  
Richard Nuetey Nortey ◽  
Jinling Song
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Similarity Metrics ◽  
Mahalanobis Distances ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Sentence Level

Scaling natural language processing (NLP) to low-resourced languages to improve machine translation (MT) performance remains enigmatic. This research contributes to the domain on a low-resource English-Twi translation based on filtered synthetic-parallel corpora. It is often perplexing to learn and understand what a good-quality corpus looks like in low-resource conditions, mainly where the target corpus is the only sample text of the parallel language. To improve the MT performance in such low-resource language pairs, we propose to expand the training data by injecting synthetic-parallel corpus obtained by translating a monolingual corpus from the target language based on bootstrapping with different parameter settings. Furthermore, we performed unsupervised measurements on each sentence pair engaging squared Mahalanobis distances, a filtering technique that predicts sentence parallelism. Additionally, we extensively use three different sentence-level similarity metrics after round-trip translation. Experimental results on a diverse amount of available parallel corpus demonstrate that injecting pseudoparallel corpus and extensive filtering with sentence-level similarity metrics significantly improves the original out-of-the-box MT systems for low-resource language pairs. Compared with existing improvements on the same original framework under the same structure, our approach exhibits tremendous developments in BLEU and TER scores.

scholarly journals Comparative Quality Estimation for Machine Translation Observations on Machine Learning and Features

2017 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 307-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleftherios Avramidis
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Feature Selection ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Linear Method ◽  
The State ◽  
Quality Estimation ◽  
Art Methods ◽  
Improved Performance

AbstractA deeper analysis on Comparative Quality Estimation is presented by extending the state-of-the-art methods with adequacy and grammatical features from other Quality Estimation tasks. The previously used linear method, unable to cope with the augmented features, is replaced with a boosting classifier assisted by feature selection. The methods indicated show improved performance for 6 language pairs, when applied on the output from MT systems developed over 7 years. The improved models compete better with reference-aware metrics.Notable conclusions are reached through the examination of the contribution of the features in the models, whereas it is possible to identify common MT errors that are captured by the features. Many grammatical/fluency features have a good contribution, few adequacy features have some contribution, whereas source complexity features are of no use. The importance of many fluency and adequacy features is language-specific.

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