Ife Adebara
Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics (PhD)
Research Topic
Inclusive by Design: Natural Language Technology for Africa
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Associate Professor
Research Classification
Research Interests
Deep Learning
Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning
Computational Linguistics
Social Media Mining
Arabic
Relevant Degree Programs
Affiliations to Research Centres, Institutes & Clusters
Research Methodology
Deep Learning
Natural Language Processing
machine learning
Social Media
Arabic
Recruitment
Master's students
Doctoral students
Postdoctoral Fellows
Any time / year round
Deep Learning. Deep learning of natural language. Natural Language Processing. Computational Linguistics. Natural Language Inference. Machine Translation. Misinformation. Detection of Negative and Abusive Content Online. Applications of deep learning in health and well-being.
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Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
Investigating the impact of normalizing flows on latent variable machine translation (2020)
Natural language processing (NLP) has pervasive applications in everyday life, and has recently witnessed rapid progress. Incorporating latent variables in NLP systems can allow for explicit representations of certain types of information. In neural machine translation systems, for example, latent variables have the potential of enhancing semantic representations. This could help improve general translation quality. Previous work has focused on using variational inference with diagonal covariance Gaussian distributions, which we hypothesize cannot sufficiently encode latent factors of language which could exhibit multi-modal distributive behavior. Normalizing flows are an approach that enables more flexible posterior distribution estimates by introducing a change of variables with invertible functions. They have previously been successfully used in computer vision to enable more flexible posterior distributions of image data. In this work, we investigate the impact of normalizing flows in autoregressive neural machine translation systems. We do so in the context of two currently successful approaches, attention mechanisms, and language models. Our results suggest that normalizing flows can improve translation quality in some scenarios, and require certain modelling assumptions to achieve such improvements.
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