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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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Sr. Applied Scientist, Alexa Excellence AI Ops, Alexa Excellence AI Ops
IN, TN, Chennai
We are seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to join the Alexa Availability team within Alexa Excellence. This role leads the research and development of machine learning and statistical models that power Alexa's reliability at massive scale — serving hundreds of millions of customers globally. The ideal candidate will tackle complex, ambiguous problems spanning time series multivariate modeling, statistical anomaly detection, LLM-based operational intelligence, and adaptive threshold systems. They will design production-grade ML solutions, establish rigorous evaluation frameworks, and ensure AI systems are grounded, reliable, and free from systematic bias — leveraging techniques such as RAG, confidence scoring, knowledge graph integration, and counterfactual testing. This scientist will partner with engineers, product managers, and operations leaders to translate scientific innovation into production systems that directly impact Alexa's availability worldwide. They will drive the scientific agenda for the team, mentor fellow scientists, and influence the broader Alexa Excellence organization through technical leadership and cross-team collaboration. Key Focus Areas: Anomaly detection and predictive failure modeling Cross-service correlation and LLM-driven operational intelligence Production ML at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems and applied science Model reliability, hallucination mitigation, and grounding for operational AI Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist on the Alexa Availability team, you will lead the research and development of machine learning and statistical models that power Alexa's reliability at scale. You will work on some of the most complex and ambiguous problems in the space — from time series multivariate modeling and statistical anomaly detection to LLM-based operational intelligence and adaptive threshold systems. A day in the life You will design and implement production-grade ML solutions, establish rigorous model evaluation frameworks, and ensure our LLM-powered systems are grounded, reliable, and free from systematic bias. You will apply techniques such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), confidence scoring, knowledge graph integration, and counterfactual testing to ensure our AI systems make trustworthy operational decisions at scale. You will partner closely with software engineers, product managers, and operations leaders to translate scientific innovation into production systems that directly impact Alexa's availability for customers worldwide. You will drive the scientific agenda for your team, mentor fellow scientists, and influence the broader Alexa Excellence organization through your technical leadership and cross-team collaboration. About the team The Alexa Excellence team is at the heart of delivering a world-class Alexa experience to hundreds of millions of customers globally. Within Alexa Excellence, the Alexa Availability team is responsible for ensuring Alexa is always on, always responsive, and always reliable. We own the systems, signals, and science that detect, diagnose, and drive resolution of availability issues at scale — before customers ever notice. We are building the next generation of intelligent availability solutions powered by machine learning, large language models, and advanced statistical modeling. Our work spans anomaly detection, predictive failure modeling, cross-service correlation, and LLM-driven operational intelligence — all operating at the scale and reliability bar that Alexa demands. We operate at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, applied machine learning, and operational excellence, and we are looking for scientists who can bring both deep technical rigor and a bias for production impact.
Senior Applied Scientist, Funnel Agentic Intel
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon Ads is building Ads Agent, an AI-powered agent that understands advertiser intent, reasons over campaign strategy, and executes across the full Amazon Ads portfolio. If you want to work at the frontier of agentic AI and large language models while directly impacting a multi-billion dollar business, this is your team. We are seeking an experienced Applied Scientist passionate about building intelligent agents that reason, plan, and act across complex advertising workflows. Ads Agent is an AI agent that simplifies how advertisers plan, launch, and optimize campaigns. Powered by AI, Ads Agent works alongside advertisers to automate time-consuming tasks, like identifying targeting segments, adjusting pacing across hundreds of campaigns, and generating SQL queries for advanced analytics. It also provides data-driven recommendations and simplifies analysis—all while providing transparency and control. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we need applied scientists to define and build the future of advertising. Key job responsibilities - Design, build, and evaluate agentic systems that plan multi-step workflows, invoke tools, and take autonomous actions across Amazon Ads products on behalf of advertisers. - Define evaluation frameworks and benchmarks for agent reliability, correctness, safety, and advertiser satisfaction. - Analyze agent behavior through deep data analysis and rigorous A/B experimentation to identify failure modes, measure effectiveness, and derive business insights. - Partner with engineers, product managers, and UX designers to ship end-to-end agent experiences that are scalable, efficient, and reliable at Amazon scale. About the team We are a small, fast-moving team building a unified AI-native interface to all of Amazon Advertising. We sit at the intersection of large language models, agentic AI, and one of the world's most complex advertising ecosystems. If you want to shape how millions of advertisers interact with Amazon Ads, come build with us.
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