Dense Passage Retrieval at SEA with Akari Asai and Arnold Overwijk


Details
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IMPORTANT: You will be able to view the Zoom link once you 'attend' the meetup on this page.
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SEA is back again in October! This month's SEA features Akari Asai (U. of Washington) and Arnold Overwijk (Microsoft).
17.00: Akari Asai (U. of Washington)
Title: One Question Answering Model for Many Languages with Cross-lingual Dense Passage Retrieval
Abstract: We present CORA, a Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Answer Generation model that can answer questions across many languages even when language-specific annotated data or knowledge sources are unavailable. We introduce a new dense passage retrieval algorithm that is trained to retrieve documents across languages for a question. Combined with a multilingual autoregressive generation model, CORA answers directly in the target language without any translation or in-language retrieval modules as used in prior work. We propose an iterative training method that automatically extends annotated data available only in high-resource languages to low-resource ones. Our results show that CORA substantially outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on multilingual open question answering benchmarks across 26 languages, 9 of which are unseen during training. Our analyses show the significance of cross-lingual retrieval and generation in many languages, particularly under low-resource settings.
17.30: Arnold Overwijk (Microsoft)
Title: Document Understanding at Microsoft
Abstract: Arnold Overwijk is leading the document understanding team. His team develops state-of-the-art deep learning technologies for natural language problems, which are applied to large scale production systems for search and recommendation scenarios. Technologies they develop include: information retrieval, ranking, question answering, machine reading comprehension, key phrase extraction, topic modeling and semantic document (a logical understanding of the document based on visual and text information in a multi-modal setting, e.g. identify section headings, paragraphs, publication date, author, etc.).
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This is (still) an online event. The URL will be shared close to the day of the event. All times are Amsterdam times.

Dense Passage Retrieval at SEA with Akari Asai and Arnold Overwijk