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Researcher profile

Alexander Fraser

Alexander Fraser contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Computation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceDatabasesMachine Learning

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Published work

10 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

DiffScore: Text Evaluation Beyond Autoregressive Likelihood

Autoregressive language models are widely used for text evaluation, however, their left-to-right factorization introduces positional bias, i.e., early tokens are scored with only leftward context, conflating architectural asymmetry with true text quality. We propose masked reconstruction as an alternative paradigm, where every token is scored using full bidirectional context. We introduce DiffScore, an evaluation framework built on Masked Large Diffusion Language Models. By measuring text recoverability across continuous masking rates, DiffScore eliminates positional bias and naturally establishes an evaluation hierarchy from local fluency to global coherence. We further provide diagnostic tools unavailable to autoregressive frameworks: multi-timestep quality profiles that decompose scores across masking rates, and bidirectional PMI decomposition that disentangles fluency from faithfulness. Experiments across ten benchmarks show that DiffScore consistently outperforms autoregressive baselines in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. The code is released at: https://github.com/wenlai-lavine/DiffScore.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Addressing the Challenges of Cross-Lingual Hate Speech Detection

The goal of hate speech detection is to filter negative online content aiming at certain groups of people. Due to the easy accessibility of social media platforms it is crucial to protect everyone which requires building hate speech detection systems for a wide range of languages. However, the available labeled hate speech datasets are limited making it problematic to build systems for many languages. In this paper we focus on cross-lingual transfer learning to support hate speech detection in low-resource languages. We leverage cross-lingual word embeddings to train our neural network systems on the source language and apply it to the target language, which lacks labeled examples, and show that good performance can be achieved. We then incorporate unlabeled target language data for further model improvements by bootstrapping labels using an ensemble of different model architectures. Furthermore, we investigate the issue of label imbalance of hate speech datasets, since the high ratio of non-hate examples compared to hate examples often leads to low model performance. We test simple data undersampling and oversampling techniques and show their effectiveness.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Combining Static and Contextualised Multilingual Embeddings

Static and contextual multilingual embeddings have complementary strengths. Static embeddings, while less expressive than contextual language models, can be more straightforwardly aligned across multiple languages. We combine the strengths of static and contextual models to improve multilingual representations. We extract static embeddings for 40 languages from XLM-R, validate those embeddings with cross-lingual word retrieval, and then align them using VecMap. This results in high-quality, highly multilingual static embeddings. Then we apply a novel continued pre-training approach to XLM-R, leveraging the high quality alignment of our static embeddings to better align the representation space of XLM-R. We show positive results for multiple complex semantic tasks. We release the static embeddings and the continued pre-training code. Unlike most previous work, our continued pre-training approach does not require parallel text.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Demonstrating CAT: Synthesizing Data-Aware Conversational Agents for Transactional Databases

Databases for OLTP are often the backbone for applications such as hotel room or cinema ticket booking applications. However, developing a conversational agent (i.e., a chatbot-like interface) to allow end-users to interact with an application using natural language requires both immense amounts of training data and NLP expertise. This motivates CAT, which can be used to easily create conversational agents for transactional databases. The main idea is that, for a given OLTP database, CAT uses weak supervision to synthesize the required training data to train a state-of-the-art conversational agent, allowing users to interact with the OLTP database. Furthermore, CAT provides an out-of-the-box integration of the resulting agent with the database. As a major difference to existing conversational agents, agents synthesized by CAT are data-aware. This means that the agent decides which information should be requested from the user based on the current data distributions in the database, which typically results in markedly more efficient dialogues compared with non-data-aware agents. We publish the code for CAT as open source.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Do Multilingual Language Models Capture Differing Moral Norms?

Massively multilingual sentence representations are trained on large corpora of uncurated data, with a very imbalanced proportion of languages included in the training. This may cause the models to grasp cultural values including moral judgments from the high-resource languages and impose them on the low-resource languages. The lack of data in certain languages can also lead to developing random and thus potentially harmful beliefs. Both these issues can negatively influence zero-shot cross-lingual model transfer and potentially lead to harmful outcomes. Therefore, we aim to (1) detect and quantify these issues by comparing different models in different languages, (2) develop methods for improving undesirable properties of the models. Our initial experiments using the multilingual model XLM-R show that indeed multilingual LMs capture moral norms, even with potentially higher human-agreement than monolingual ones. However, it is not yet clear to what extent these moral norms differ between languages.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Don't Forget Cheap Training Signals Before Building Unsupervised Bilingual Word Embeddings

Bilingual Word Embeddings (BWEs) are one of the cornerstones of cross-lingual transfer of NLP models. They can be built using only monolingual corpora without supervision leading to numerous works focusing on unsupervised BWEs. However, most of the current approaches to build unsupervised BWEs do not compare their results with methods based on easy-to-access cross-lingual signals. In this paper, we argue that such signals should always be considered when developing unsupervised BWE methods. The two approaches we find most effective are: 1) using identical words as seed lexicons (which unsupervised approaches incorrectly assume are not available for orthographically distinct language pairs) and 2) combining such lexicons with pairs extracted by matching romanized versions of words with an edit distance threshold. We experiment on thirteen non-Latin languages (and English) and show that such cheap signals work well and that they outperform using more complex unsupervised methods on distant language pairs such as Chinese, Japanese, Kannada, Tamil, and Thai. In addition, they are even competitive with the use of high-quality lexicons in supervised approaches. Our results show that these training signals should not be neglected when building BWEs, even for distant languages.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Modeling Target-Side Morphology in Neural Machine Translation: A Comparison of Strategies

Morphologically rich languages pose difficulties to machine translation. Machine translation engines that rely on statistical learning from parallel training data, such as state-of-the-art neural systems, face challenges especially with rich morphology on the output language side. Key challenges of rich target-side morphology in data-driven machine translation include: (1) A large amount of differently inflected word surface forms entails a larger vocabulary and thus data sparsity. (2) Some inflected forms of infrequent terms typically do not appear in the training corpus, which makes closed-vocabulary systems unable to generate these unobserved variants. (3) Linguistic agreement requires the system to correctly match the grammatical categories between inflected word forms in the output sentence, both in terms of target-side morpho-syntactic wellformedness and semantic adequacy with respect to the input. In this paper, we re-investigate two target-side linguistic processing techniques: a lemma-tag strategy and a linguistically informed word segmentation strategy. Our experiments are conducted on a English-German translation task under three training corpus conditions of different magnitudes. We find that a stronger Transformer baseline leaves less room for improvement than a shallow-RNN encoder-decoder model when translating in-domain. However, we find that linguistic modeling of target-side morphology does benefit the Transformer model when the same system is applied to out-of-domain input text. We also successfully apply our approach to English to Czech translation.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Neural String Edit Distance

We propose the neural string edit distance model for string-pair matching and string transduction based on learnable string edit distance. We modify the original expectation-maximization learned edit distance algorithm into a differentiable loss function, allowing us to integrate it into a neural network providing a contextual representation of the input. We evaluate on cognate detection, transliteration, and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and show that we can trade off between performance and interpretability in a single framework. Using contextual representations, which are difficult to interpret, we match the performance of state-of-the-art string-pair matching models. Using static embeddings and a slightly different loss function, we force interpretability, at the expense of an accuracy drop.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Why don't people use character-level machine translation?

We present a literature and empirical survey that critically assesses the state of the art in character-level modeling for machine translation (MT). Despite evidence in the literature that character-level systems are comparable with subword systems, they are virtually never used in competitive setups in WMT competitions. We empirically show that even with recent modeling innovations in character-level natural language processing, character-level MT systems still struggle to match their subword-based counterparts. Character-level MT systems show neither better domain robustness, nor better morphological generalization, despite being often so motivated. However, we are able to show robustness towards source side noise and that translation quality does not degrade with increasing beam size at decoding time.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Pragmatic information in translation: a corpus-based study of tense and mood in English and German

Grammatical tense and mood are important linguistic phenomena to consider in natural language processing (NLP) research. We consider the correspondence between English and German tense and mood in translation. Human translators do not find this correspondence easy, and as we will show through careful analysis, there are no simplistic ways to map tense and mood from one language to another. Our observations about the challenges of human translation of tense and mood have important implications for multilingual NLP. Of particular importance is the challenge of modeling tense and mood in rule-based, phrase-based statistical and neural machine translation.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access