ZeroNLG: Aligning and Autoencoding Domains for Zero-Shot Multimodal and Multilingual Natural Language Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Bang, Liu, Fenglin, Zou, Yuexian, Wu, Xian, Wang, Yaowei, Clifton, David A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Yang, Bang
Liu, Fenglin
Zou, Yuexian
Wu, Xian
Wang, Yaowei
Clifton, David A.
author_facet Yang, Bang
Liu, Fenglin
Zou, Yuexian
Wu, Xian
Wang, Yaowei
Clifton, David A.
contents Natural Language Generation (NLG) accepts input data in the form of images, videos, or text and generates corresponding natural language text as output. Existing NLG methods mainly adopt a supervised approach and rely heavily on coupled data-to-text pairs. However, for many targeted scenarios and for non-English languages, sufficient quantities of labeled data are often not available. To relax the dependency on labeled data of downstream tasks, we propose an intuitive and effective zero-shot learning framework, ZeroNLG, which can deal with multiple NLG tasks, including image-to-text (image captioning), video-to-text (video captioning), and text-to-text (neural machine translation), across English, Chinese, German, and French within a unified framework. ZeroNLG does not require any labeled downstream pairs for training. During training, ZeroNLG (i) projects different domains (across modalities and languages) to corresponding coordinates in a shared common latent space; (ii) bridges different domains by aligning their corresponding coordinates in this space; and (iii) builds an unsupervised multilingual auto-encoder to learn to generate text by reconstructing the input text given its coordinate in shared latent space. Consequently, during inference, based on the data-to-text pipeline, ZeroNLG can generate target sentences across different languages given the coordinate of input data in the common space. Within this unified framework, given visual (imaging or video) data as input, ZeroNLG can perform zero-shot visual captioning; given textual sentences as input, ZeroNLG can perform zero-shot machine translation. We present the results of extensive experiments on twelve NLG tasks, showing that, without using any labeled downstream pairs for training, ZeroNLG generates high-quality and believable outputs and significantly outperforms existing zero-shot methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_06458
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ZeroNLG: Aligning and Autoencoding Domains for Zero-Shot Multimodal and Multilingual Natural Language Generation
Yang, Bang
Liu, Fenglin
Zou, Yuexian
Wu, Xian
Wang, Yaowei
Clifton, David A.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Natural Language Generation (NLG) accepts input data in the form of images, videos, or text and generates corresponding natural language text as output. Existing NLG methods mainly adopt a supervised approach and rely heavily on coupled data-to-text pairs. However, for many targeted scenarios and for non-English languages, sufficient quantities of labeled data are often not available. To relax the dependency on labeled data of downstream tasks, we propose an intuitive and effective zero-shot learning framework, ZeroNLG, which can deal with multiple NLG tasks, including image-to-text (image captioning), video-to-text (video captioning), and text-to-text (neural machine translation), across English, Chinese, German, and French within a unified framework. ZeroNLG does not require any labeled downstream pairs for training. During training, ZeroNLG (i) projects different domains (across modalities and languages) to corresponding coordinates in a shared common latent space; (ii) bridges different domains by aligning their corresponding coordinates in this space; and (iii) builds an unsupervised multilingual auto-encoder to learn to generate text by reconstructing the input text given its coordinate in shared latent space. Consequently, during inference, based on the data-to-text pipeline, ZeroNLG can generate target sentences across different languages given the coordinate of input data in the common space. Within this unified framework, given visual (imaging or video) data as input, ZeroNLG can perform zero-shot visual captioning; given textual sentences as input, ZeroNLG can perform zero-shot machine translation. We present the results of extensive experiments on twelve NLG tasks, showing that, without using any labeled downstream pairs for training, ZeroNLG generates high-quality and believable outputs and significantly outperforms existing zero-shot methods.
title ZeroNLG: Aligning and Autoencoding Domains for Zero-Shot Multimodal and Multilingual Natural Language Generation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.06458