Yoshinari Fujinuma


2023

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Diable: Efficient Dialogue State Tracking as Operations on Tables
Pietro Lesci | Yoshinari Fujinuma | Momchil Hardalov | Chao Shang | Yassine Benajiba | Lluis Marquez
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Sequence-to-sequence state-of-the-art systems for dialogue state tracking (DST) use the full dialogue history as input, represent the current state as a list with all the slots, and generate the entire state from scratch at each dialogue turn. This approach is inefficient, especially when the number of slots is large and the conversation is long. We propose Diable, a new task formalisation that simplifies the design and implementation of efficient DST systems and allows one to easily plug and play large language models. We represent the dialogue state as a table and formalise DST as a table manipulation task. At each turn, the system updates the previous state by generating table operations based on the dialogue context. Extensive experimentation on the MultiWoz datasets demonstrates that Diable (i) outperforms strong efficient DST baselines, (ii) is 2.4x more time efficient than current state-of-the-art methods while retaining competitive Joint Goal Accuracy, and (iii) is robust to noisy data annotations due to the table operations approach.

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A Multi-Modal Multilingual Benchmark for Document Image Classification
Yoshinari Fujinuma | Siddharth Varia | Nishant Sankaran | Srikar Appalaraju | Bonan Min | Yogarshi Vyas
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Document image classification is different from plain-text document classification and consists of classifying a document by understanding the content and structure of documents such as forms, emails, and other such documents. We show that the only existing dataset for this task (Lewis et al., 2006) has several limitations and we introduce two newly curated multilingual datasets WIKI-DOC and MULTIEURLEX-DOC that overcome these limitations. We further undertake a comprehensive study of popular visually-rich document understanding or Document AI models in previously untested setting in document image classification such as 1) multi-label classification, and 2) zero-shot cross-lingual transfer setup. Experimental results show limitations of multilingual Document AI models on cross-lingual transfer across typologically distant languages. Our datasets and findings open the door for future research into improving Document AI models.

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Comparing Biases and the Impact of Multilingual Training across Multiple Languages
Sharon Levy | Neha John | Ling Liu | Yogarshi Vyas | Jie Ma | Yoshinari Fujinuma | Miguel Ballesteros | Vittorio Castelli | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Studies in bias and fairness in natural language processing have primarily examined social biases within a single language and/or across few attributes (e.g. gender, race). However, biases can manifest differently across various languages for individual attributes. As a result, it is critical to examine biases within each language and attribute. Of equal importance is to study how these biases compare across languages and how the biases are affected when training a model on multilingual data versus monolingual data. We present a bias analysis across Italian, Chinese, English, Hebrew, and Spanish on the downstream sentiment analysis task to observe whether specific demographics are viewed more positively. We study bias similarities and differences across these languages and investigate the impact of multilingual vs. monolingual training data. We adapt existing sentiment bias templates in English to Italian, Chinese, Hebrew, and Spanish for four attributes: race, religion, nationality, and gender. Our results reveal similarities in bias expression such as favoritism of groups that are dominant in each language’s culture (e.g. majority religions and nationalities). Additionally, we find an increased variation in predictions across protected groups, indicating bias amplification, after multilingual finetuning in comparison to multilingual pretraining.

2022

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Match the Script, Adapt if Multilingual: Analyzing the Effect of Multilingual Pretraining on Cross-lingual Transferability
Yoshinari Fujinuma | Jordan Boyd-Graber | Katharina Kann
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Pretrained multilingual models enable zero-shot learning even for unseen languages, and that performance can be further improved via adaptation prior to finetuning. However, it is unclear how the number of pretraining languages influences a model’s zero-shot learning for languages unseen during pretraining. To fill this gap, we ask the following research questions: (1) How does the number of pretraining languages influence zero-shot performance on unseen target languages? (2) Does the answer to that question change with model adaptation? (3) Do the findings for our first question change if the languages used for pretraining are all related? Our experiments on pretraining with related languages indicate that choosing a diverse set of languages is crucial. Without model adaptation, surprisingly, increasing the number of pretraining languages yields better results up to adding related languages, after which performance plateaus. In contrast, with model adaptation via continued pretraining, pretraining on a larger number of languages often gives further improvement, suggesting that model adaptation is crucial to exploit additional pretraining languages.

2021

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Semi-Supervised Joint Estimation of Word and Document Readability
Yoshinari Fujinuma | Masato Hagiwara
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-15)

Readability or difficulty estimation of words and documents has been investigated independently in the literature, often assuming the existence of extensive annotated resources for the other. Motivated by our analysis showing that there is a recursive relationship between word and document difficulty, we propose to jointly estimate word and document difficulty through a graph convolutional network (GCN) in a semi-supervised fashion. Our experimental results reveal that the GCN-based method can achieve higher accuracy than strong baselines, and stays robust even with a smaller amount of labeled data.

2020

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Why Overfitting Isn’t Always Bad: Retrofitting Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings to Dictionaries
Mozhi Zhang | Yoshinari Fujinuma | Michael J. Paul | Jordan Boyd-Graber
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Cross-lingual word embeddings (CLWE) are often evaluated on bilingual lexicon induction (BLI). Recent CLWE methods use linear projections, which underfit the training dictionary, to generalize on BLI. However, underfitting can hinder generalization to other downstream tasks that rely on words from the training dictionary. We address this limitation by retrofitting CLWE to the training dictionary, which pulls training translation pairs closer in the embedding space and overfits the training dictionary. This simple post-processing step often improves accuracy on two downstream tasks, despite lowering BLI test accuracy. We also retrofit to both the training dictionary and a synthetic dictionary induced from CLWE, which sometimes generalizes even better on downstream tasks. Our results confirm the importance of fully exploiting training dictionary in downstream tasks and explains why BLI is a flawed CLWE evaluation.

2019

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A Resource-Free Evaluation Metric for Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings Based on Graph Modularity
Yoshinari Fujinuma | Jordan Boyd-Graber | Michael J. Paul
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Cross-lingual word embeddings encode the meaning of words from different languages into a shared low-dimensional space. An important requirement for many downstream tasks is that word similarity should be independent of language—i.e., word vectors within one language should not be more similar to each other than to words in another language. We measure this characteristic using modularity, a network measurement that measures the strength of clusters in a graph. Modularity has a moderate to strong correlation with three downstream tasks, even though modularity is based only on the structure of embeddings and does not require any external resources. We show through experiments that modularity can serve as an intrinsic validation metric to improve unsupervised cross-lingual word embeddings, particularly on distant language pairs in low-resource settings.

2017

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Substring Frequency Features for Segmentation of Japanese Katakana Words with Unlabeled Corpora
Yoshinari Fujinuma | Alvin Grissom II
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Word segmentation is crucial in natural language processing tasks for unsegmented languages. In Japanese, many out-of-vocabulary words appear in the phonetic syllabary katakana, making segmentation more difficult due to the lack of clues found in mixed script settings. In this paper, we propose a straightforward approach based on a variant of tf-idf and apply it to the problem of word segmentation in Japanese. Even though our method uses only an unlabeled corpus, experimental results show that it achieves performance comparable to existing methods that use manually labeled corpora. Furthermore, it improves performance of simple word segmentation models trained on a manually labeled corpus.

2015

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Distant-supervised Language Model for Detecting Emotional Upsurge on Twitter
Yoshinari Fujinuma | Hikaru Yokono | Pascual Martínez-Gómez | Akiko Aizawa
Proceedings of the 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation