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A quick guide to Amazon’s 45-plus NAACL papers

The breadth and originality of Amazon’s natural-language-processing research are on display at the annual meeting of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

By Staff writer
July 7, 2022
6 min read
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Amazon’s 45-plus papers at the annual meeting of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, which begins next week, sorted by research area.

Continual learning

Lifelong pretraining: Continually adapting language models to emerging corpora
Xisen Jin, Dejiao Zhang, Henghui Zhu, Wei Xiao, Shang-Wen Li, Xiaokai Wei, Andrew O. Arnold, Xiang Ren

Local-to-global learning for iterative training of production SLU models on new features
Yulia Grishina, Daniil Sorokin

Overcoming catastrophic forgetting during domain adaptation of seq2seq language generation
Dingcheng Li, Zheng Chen, Eunah Cho, Jie Hao, Xiaohu Liu, Xing Fan, Chenlei (Edward) Guo, Yang Liu

Overcoming catastrophic forgetting.png
In "Overcoming catastrophic forgetting during domain adaptation of seq2seq language generation", Amazon researchers propose a method for estimating how much data representations shift when an existing model is trained on a new task (right).

Temporal generalization for spoken language understanding
Judith Gaspers, Anoop Kumar, Greg Ver Steeg, Aram Galstyan

Data augmentation

Constraining word alignments with posterior regularization for label transfer
Kevin Martin Jose, Thomas Gueudré

Word alignments.png
An example of the difficulty in using word alignment to transfer textual labels from one language to another. In English, the article "the" is assigned the label "o", for "other"; in French, the abbreviated article is combined with its noun, and both receive the same label ("type"). From "Constraining word alignments with posterior regularization for label transfer".

Controlled data generation via insertion operations for NLU
Manoj Kumar, Haidar Khan, Yuval Merhav, Wael Hamza, Anna Rumshisky, Rahul Gupta

Efficient semi supervised consistency training for natural language understanding
George Leung, Joshua Tan

Learning to generate examples for semantic processing tasks
Danilo Croce, Simone Filice, Giuseppe Castellucci, Roberto Basili

Dialogue

Learning dialogue representations from consecutive utterances
Zhihan Zhou, Dejiao Zhang, Wei Xiao, Nicholas Dingwall, Xiaofei Ma, Andrew O. Arnold, Bing Xiang

Massive-scale decoding for text generation using lattices
Jiacheng Xu, Siddhartha Reddy Jonnalagadda, Greg Durrett

Entity linking, resolution, and typing

Contrastive representation learning for cross-document coreference resolution of events and entities
Benjamin Hsu, Graham Horwood

Improving entity disambiguation by reasoning over a knowledge base
Tom Ayoola, Joseph Fisher, Andrea Pierleoni

ReFinED: An efficient zero-shot-capable approach to end-to-end entity linking
Tom Ayoola, Shubhi Tyagi, Joseph Fisher, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Andrea Pierleoni

Instilling type knowledge in language models via multi-task QA
Shuyang Li, Mukund Sridhar, Chandana Satya Prakash, Jin Cao, Wael Hamza, Julian McAuley

Explainable AI

Entailment trees.png
In "Entailment tree explanations via iterative retrieval-generation reasoner", Amazon researchers propose a method for explaining the outputs of large language models by logically recombining premises extracted from supporting textual evidence.

Entailment tree explanations via iterative retrieval-generation reasoner
Danilo Neves Ribeiro, Shen Wang, Xiaofei Ma, Rui Dong, Xiaokai Wei, Henry Zhu, Xinchi Chen, Zhiheng Huang, Peng Xu, Andrew O. Arnold, Dan Roth

Locally aggregated feature attribution on natural language model understanding
Sheng Zhang, Jin Wang, Haitao Jiang, Rui Song

Extreme multilabel classification

Augmenting training data for massive semantic matching models in low-traffic e-commerce stores
Ashutosh Joshi, Shankar Vishwanath, Choon Hui Teo, Vaclav Petricek, Vishy Vishwanathan, Rahul Bhagat, Jonathan May

Extreme zero shot learning for extreme text classification
Yuanhao Xiong, Wei-Cheng Chang, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Hsiang-Fu Yu, Inderjit S. Dhillon

Federated learning

Federated learning with noisy user feedback
Rahul Sharma, Anil Ramakrishna, Ansel MacLaughlin, Anna Rumshisky, Jimit Majmudar, Clement Chung, Salman Avestimehr, Rahul Gupta

Keyword spotting

AB/BA analysis: A framework for estimating keyword spotting recall improvement while maintaining audio privacy
Raphael Petegrosso, Vasistakrishna Baderdinni, Thibaud Senechal, Benjamin L. Bullough

Machine translation

CoCoA-MT: A dataset and benchmark for contrastive controlled MT with application to formality
Maria Nadejde, Anna Currey, Benjamin Hsu, Xing Niu, Marcello Federico, Georgiana Dinu

Dynamic pulling.png
In federated learning, distributed copies of a neural network are trained locally, and only their updates (red) are sent to a central model. "Training mixed-domain translation models via federated learning" introduces a technique called dynamic pulling, in which distributed models with large shifts in parameter values between training rounds (lower left) see their parameters pulled into the central model separately from those of models with smaller shifts.

The devil is in the details: On the pitfalls of vocabulary selection in neural machine translation
Tobias Domhan, Eva Hasler, Ke Tran, Sony Trenous, Bill Byrne, Felix Hieber

Training mixed-domain translation models via federated learning
Peyman Passban, Tanya G. Roosta, Rahul Gupta, Ankit Chadha, Clement Chung

Multitask learning

Asynchronous convergence in multi-task learning via knowledge distillation from converged tasks
Weiyi Lu, Sunny Rajagopalan, Priyanka Nigam, Jaspreet Singh, Xiaodi Sun, Yi Xu, Belinda Zeng, Trishul Chilimbi

Exploring the role of task transferability in large-scale multi-task learning
Vishakh Padmakumar, Leonard Lausen, Miguel Ballesteros, Sheng Zha, He He, George Karypis

Named-entity recognition

Dynamic gazetteer integration in multilingual models for cross-lingual and cross-domain named entity recognition
Besnik Fetahu, Anjie Fang, Oleg Rokhlenko, Shervin Malmasi

NER-MQMRC: Formulating named entity recognition as multi question machine reading comprehension
Anubhav Shrimal, Avi Jain, Kartik Mehta, Promod Yenigalla

Question answering

Answer consolidation: Formulation and benchmarking
Wenxuan Zhou, Qiang Ning, Heba Elfardy, Kevin Small, Muhao Chen

Paragraph-based transformer pre-training for multi-sentence inference
Luca Di Liello, Siddhant Garg, Luca Soldaini, Alessandro Moschitti

PerKGQA: Question answering over personalized knowledge graphs
Ritam Dutt, Kasturi Bhattacharjee, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, Dan Roth, Carolyn Penstein Rosé

Product answer generation from heterogeneous sources: A new benchmark and best practices
Xiaoyu Shen, Gianni Barlacchi, Marco Del Tredici, Weiwei Cheng, Adria de Gispert, Bill Byrne

Recommender systems

CERES: Pretraining of graph-conditioned transformer for semi-structured session data
Rui Feng, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Tuo Zhao, Chao Zhang

Self-learning

Failure point isolation.png
In "FPI: Failure point isolation in large-scale conversational assistants", Amazon researchers propose a method for deducing where in a conversational agent's processing pipeline an error has occurred.

FPI: Failure point isolation in large-scale conversational assistants
Rinat Khaziev, Usman Shahid, Tobias Röding, Rakesh Chada, Emir Kapanci, Pradeep Natarajan

Scalable and robust self-learning for skill routing in large-scale conversational AI systems
Mohammad Kachuee, Jinseok Nam, Sarthak Ahuja, Jin-Myung Won, Sungjin Lee

Self-aware feedback-based self-learning in large-scale conversational AI
Pragaash Ponnusamy, Clint Solomon Mathialagan, Gustavo Aguilar, Chengyuan Ma, Chenlei (Edward) Guo

Task-oriented parsing.png
An example of task-oriented semantic parsing, which converts natural language into a formal representation that an AI agent can act on. From "Compositional task-oriented parsing as abstractive question answering".

Semantic parsing

Compositional task oriented parsing as abstractive question answering
Wenting Zhao, Konstantine Arkoudas, Weiqi Sun, Claire Cardie

SeqZero: Few-shot compositional semantic parsing with sequential prompts and zero-shot models
Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Qingyu Yin, Danqing Zhang, Bing Yin, Diyi Yang

Task adaptation

Attention fusion: A light yet efficient late fusion mechanism for task adaptation in NLU
Jin Cao, Chandana Satya Prakash, Wael Hamza

Empowering parameter-efficient transfer learning by recognizing the kernel structure in attention
Yifan Chen, Devamanyu Hazarika, Mahdi Namazifar, Yang Liu, Di Jin, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Text mining

Distantly supervised aspect clustering and naming for e-commerce reviews
Prateek Sircar, Aniket Chakrabarti, Deepak Gupta, Anirban Majumdar

Efficient few-shot fine-tuning for opinion summarization
Arthur Bražinskas, Ramesh Nallapati, Mohit Bansal, Markus Dreyer

FactGraph: Evaluating factuality in summarization with semantic graph representations
Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro, Mengwen Liu, Iryna Gurevych, Markus Dreyer, Mohit Bansal

Knowledge selection.png
An example of how a conversational agent might incorporate facts gleaned form online sources (white boxes) into its conversational replies (blue boxes). From "Enhanced knowledge selection for grounded dialogues via document semantic graphs".

Enhanced knowledge selection for grounded dialogues via document semantic graphs
Sha Li, Madhi Namazifar, Di Jin, Mohit Bansal, Heng Ji, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Retrieval-augmented multilingual keyphrase generation with retriever-generator iterative training
Yifan Gao, Qingyu Yin, Zheng Li, Rui Meng, Tong Zhao, Bing Yin, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu

What do users care about? Detecting actionable insights from user feedback
Kasturi Bhattacharjee, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, Kathleen McKeown, Dan Roth

Text-to-speech

Empathic machines: using intermediate features as levers to emulate emotions in text-to-speech systems
Saiteja Kosgi, Sarath Sivaprasad, Niranjan Pedanekar, Anil Nelakanti, Vineet Gandhi

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Key job responsibilities - Drive independent research initiatives across the robotics stack, including robot co-design, dexterous manipulation mechanisms, innovative actuation strategies, state estimation, low-level control, system identification, reinforcement learning, sim-to-real transfer, as well as foundation models focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation, for example open-vocabulary panoptic scene understanding, scaling up multi-modal LLMs, sim2real/real2sim techniques, end-to-end vision-language-action models, efficient model inference, video tokenization - Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish - Guide technical direction for full-stack robotics projects from conceptualization through deployment, taking a system-level approach that integrates hardware considerations with algorithmic development, ensuring robust performance in production environments - Collaborate with platform and hardware teams to ensure seamless integration across the entire robotics stack, optimizing and scaling models for real-world applications - Contribute to team's technical decisions and influence implementation strategies to help shape our approach to next-generation robotics challenges - Mentor fellow researchers while maintaining solid individual technical contributions A day in the life - Design and implement novel foundation model architectures and innovative systems and algorithms, leveraging our extensive infrastructure to prototype and evaluate at scale - Collaborate with our world-class research team to solve complex technical challenges across the full robotics stack - Lead focused technical initiatives from conception through deployment, ensuring successful integration with production systems - Drive technical discussions and brainstorming sessions with team leaders, fellow researchers and key stakeholders - Conduct experiments and prototype new ideas using our massive compute cluster and extensive robotics infrastructure - Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that can handle the complexities of real-world robotics applications About the team At Frontier AI & Robotics, we're not just advancing robotics – we're reimagining it from the ground up. 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We are seeking a Sr. Applied Scientist to develop cutting-edge machine learning algorithms for motor control systems in robots. In this role, you will focus on creating and optimizing intelligent motor control strategies to enable robots to perform complex, whole-body tasks. Your contributions will be essential in advancing robotics by enabling fluid, reliable, and safe interactions between robots and their environments. Key job responsibilities - Develop controllers that leverage reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or other advanced AI techniques to achieve natural, robust, and adaptive motor behaviors - Collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams to integrate motor control systems with robotic hardware, ensuring alignment with real-world constraints such as actuator dynamics and energy efficiency - Use simulation and real-world testing to refine and validate control algorithms - Stay updated on advancements in robotics, AI, and control systems to apply advanced techniques to robotic motion challenges - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - Mentor junior scientists and engineers - Bridge research initiatives with practical engineering implementation About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We’re building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful. At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you. an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you.
Member of Technical Staff - Hardware Science, Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR)
US, CA, San Francisco
Amazon’s Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR) team is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to drive foundational research and build intelligent robotic systems from the ground up. In this role, you will operate at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and real-world robotics - conducting original research, publishing, and deploying your innovations into production systems at Amazon scale. We’re looking for researchers who think from first principles, push the boundaries of what’s possible, and take full ownership of turning breakthrough ideas into working systems.  You will join the next revolution in robotics, where you'll work alongside world-renowned AI pioneers to push the boundaries of what's possible in robotic intelligence. As a Member of Technical Staff, you'll be at the forefront of developing breakthrough foundation models and full-stack robotics systems that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways. You'll drive technical excellence and independent research initiatives in areas such as locomotion, manipulation, perception, sim2real transfer, multi-modal, multi-task robot learning, designing novel frameworks that bridge the gap between state-of-the-art research and real-world deployment at Amazon scale. In this role, you'll balance innovative technical exploration with practical implementation, collaborating with platform teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly in dynamic real-world environments. You’ll have the freedom to pursue ambitious research directions while leveraging Amazon’s vast computational resources to tackle ambiguous problems in areas like very large multi-modal robotic foundation models and efficient, promptable model architectures that can scale across diverse robotic applications. Key job responsibilities - Drive independent research initiatives across the robotics stack, driving breakthrough approaches through hands-on research and development in areas including robot co-design, dexterous manipulation mechanisms, innovative actuation strategies, state estimation, low-level control, system identification, reinforcement learning, sim-to-real transfer, as well as foundation models focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation. - Lead and Guide technical direction for full-stack robotics projects from conceptualization through deployment, taking a system-level approach that integrates hardware considerations with algorithmic development - Develop and optimize control algorithms and sensing pipelines that enable robust performance in production environments - Collaborate with platform and hardware teams to ensure seamless integration across the entire robotics stack, optimizing and scaling models for real-world applications - Contribute to team's technical decisions and influence implementation strategies to help shape our approach to next-generation robotics challenges - Mentor fellow researchers while maintaining solid individual technical contributions A day in the life - Design and implement novel foundation model architectures and innovative systems and algorithms, leveraging our extensive infrastructure to prototype and evaluate at scale - Collaborate with our world-class research team to solve complex technical challenges across the full robotics stack - Lead focused technical initiatives from conception through deployment, ensuring successful integration with production systems - Drive technical discussions and brainstorming sessions with team leaders, fellow researchers and key stakeholders - Conduct experiments and prototype new ideas using our massive compute cluster and extensive robotics infrastructure - Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that can handle the complexities of real-world robotics applications About the team At Frontier AI & Robotics, we're not just advancing robotics – we're reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through innovative foundation models and end-to-end learned systems. We tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real-world scenarios. What sets us apart is our unique combination of ambitious research vision and practical impact. We leverage Amazon's massive computational infrastructure and rich real-world datasets to train and deploy state-of-the-art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence – from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We're building systems that don't just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon's global operations. Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world-class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.
Applied Scientist I
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientists with machine learning background to help build industry-leading Speech and Language technology. Our mission is to provide a delightful experience to Amazon’s customers by pushing the envelope in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning (ML) and Computer Vision (CV). Key job responsibilities Amazon is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientists with machine learning background to help build industry-leading Speech and Language technology. Our mission is to provide a delightful experience to Amazon’s customers by pushing the envelope in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Machine Learning (ML) and Computer Vision (CV). As part of our AI team in Amazon AWS, you will work alongside internationally recognized experts to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state-of-the-art in human language technology. Your work will directly impact millions of our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will gain hands on experience with Amazon’s heterogeneous speech, text, and structured data sources, and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in spoken language understanding. We are hiring in all areas of human language technology: ASR, MT, NLU, text-to-speech (TTS), and Dialog Management, in addition to Computer Vision. We are also looking for talents with experiences/expertise in building large-scale, high-performing systems. A day in the life 0
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