GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Generating Deep Questions with Commonsense Reasoning Ability from the Text by Disentangled Adversarial Inference
Authors: Jianxing Yu; Shiqi Wang; Libin Zheng; Qinliang Su; Wei Liu; Baoquan Zhao; Jian Yin
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: This paper proposes a new task of commonsense question generation, which aims to yield deep-level and to-the-point questions from the text. Their answers need to reason over disjoint relevant contexts and external commonsense knowledge, such as encyclopedic facts and causality. The knowledge may not be explicitly mentioned in the text but is used by most humans for problem-shooting. Such complex reasoning with hidden contexts involves deep semantic understanding. Thus, this task has great application value, such as making high-quality quizzes in advanced exams. Due to the lack of modeling complexity, existing methods may produce shallow questions that can be answered by simple word matching. To address these challenges, we propose a new QG model by simultaneously considering asking contents, expressive ways, and answering complexity. We first retrieve text-related commonsense context. Then we disentangle the key factors that control questions in terms of reasoning content and verbalized way. Independence priors and constraints are imposed to facilitate disentanglement. We further develop a discriminator to promote the deep results by considering their answering complexity. Through adversarial inference, we learn the latent factors from data. By sampling the expressive factor from the data distributions, diverse questions can be yielded. Evaluations of two typical data sets show the effectiveness of our approach.
TADA: Efficient Task-Agnostic Domain Adaptation for Transformers
Authors: Chia-Chien Hung; Lukas Lange; Jannik Strötgen
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Intermediate training of pre-trained transformer-based language models on domain-specific data leads to substantial gains for downstream tasks. To increase efficiency and prevent catastrophic forgetting alleviated from full domain-adaptive pre-training, approaches such as adapters have been developed. However, these require additional parameters for each layer, and are criticized for their limited expressiveness. In this work, we introduce TADA, a novel task-agnostic domain adaptation method which is modular, parameter-efficient, and thus, data-efficient. Within TADA, we retrain the embeddings to learn domain-aware input representations and tokenizers for the transformer encoder, while freezing all other parameters of the model. Then, task-specific fine-tuning is performed. We further conduct experiments with meta-embeddings and newly introduced meta-tokenizers, resulting in one model per task in multi-domain use cases. Our broad evaluation in 4 downstream tasks for 14 domains across single- and multi-domain setups and high- and low-resource scenarios reveals that TADA is an effective and efficient alternative to full domain-adaptive pre-training and adapters for domain adaptation, while not introducing additional parameters or complex training steps.
Robust Natural Language Understanding with Residual Attention Debiasing
Authors: Fei Wang; James Y. Huang; Tianyi Yan; Wenxuan Zhou; Muhao Chen
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Natural language understanding (NLU) models often suffer from unintended dataset biases. Among bias mitigation methods, ensemble-based debiasing methods, especially product-of-experts (PoE), have stood out for their impressive empirical success. However, previous ensemble-based debiasing methods typically apply debiasing on top-level logits without directly addressing biased attention patterns. Attention serves as the main media of feature interaction and aggregation in PLMs and plays a crucial role in providing robust prediction. In this paper, we propose REsidual Attention Debiasing (READ), an end-to-end debiasing method that mitigates unintended biases from attention. Experiments on three NLU benchmarks show that READ significantly improves the OOD performance of BERT-based models, including +12.9% accuracy on HANS, +11.0% accuracy on FEVER-Symmetric, and +2.7% F1 on PAWS. Detailed analyses demonstrate the crucial role of unbiased attention in robust NLU models and that READ effectively mitigates biases in attention.
MoNET: Tackle State Momentum via Noise-Enhanced Training for Dialogue State Tracking
Authors: Haoning Zhang; Junwei Bao; Haipeng Sun; Youzheng Wu; Wenye Li; Shuguang Cui; Xiaodong He
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to convert the dialogue history into dialogue states which consist of slot-value pairs. As condensed structural information memorizes all history information, the dialogue state in the previous turn is typically adopted as the input for predicting the current state by DST models. However, these models tend to keep the predicted slot values unchanged, which is defined as state momentum in this paper. Specifically, the models struggle to update slot values that need to be changed and correct wrongly predicted slot values in the previous turn. To this end, we propose MoNET to tackle state momentum via noise-enhanced training. First, the previous state of each turn in the training data is noised via replacing some of its slot values. Then, the noised previous state is used as the input to learn to predict the current state, improving the model’s ability to update and correct slot values. Furthermore, a contrastive contextmatching framework is designed to narrow the representation distance between a state and itscorresponding noised variant, which reduces the impact of noised state and makes the model better understand the dialogue history. Experimental results on MultiWOZ datasets show that MoNET outperforms previous DST methods. Ablations and analysis verify the effectiveness of MoNET in alleviating state momentum issues and improving the anti-noise ability.
PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation
Authors: Jiale Cheng; Sahand Sabour; Hao Sun; Zhuang Chen; Minlie Huang
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Due to the lack of human resources for mental health support, there is an increasing demand for employing conversational agents for support. Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of dialogue models in providing emotional support. As previous studies have demonstrated that seekers’ persona is an important factor for effective support, we investigate whether there are benefits to modeling such information in dialogue models for support. In this paper, our empirical analysis verifies that persona has an important impact on emotional support. Therefore, we propose a framework for dynamically inferring and modeling seekers’ persona. We first train a model for inferring the seeker’s persona from the conversation history. Accordingly, we propose PAL, a model that leverages persona information and, in conjunction with our strategy-based controllable generation method, provides personalized emotional support. Automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that PAL achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming the baselines on the studied benchmark. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/chengjl19/PAL.
Farewell to Aimless Large-scale Pretraining: Influential Subset Selection for Language Model
Authors: Xiao Wang; Weikang Zhou; Qi Zhang; Jie Zhou; SongYang Gao; Junzhe Wang; Menghan Zhang; Xiang Gao; Yun Wen Chen; Tao Gui
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. However, pretraining has recently shifted toward larger models and larger data, which has resulted in significant computational and energy costs. In this paper, we propose Influence Subset Selection (ISS) for language model, which explicitly utilizes end-task knowledge to select a tiny subset of the pretraining corpus. Specifically, the ISS selects the samples that will provide the most positive influence on the performance of the end task. Furthermore, we design a gradient matching-based influence estimation method, which can drastically reduce the computation time of influence. With only 0.45% of the data and a three-orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost, ISS outperformed pretrained models (e.g., RoBERTa) on eight datasets covering four domains.
Exclusive Supermask Subnetwork Training for Continual Learning
Authors: Prateek Yadav; Mohit Bansal
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Continual Learning (CL) methods focus on accumulating knowledge over time while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Recently, Wortsman et al. (2020) proposed a CL method, SupSup, which uses a randomly initialized, fixed base network (model) and finds a supermask for each new task that selectively keeps or removes each weight to produce a subnetwork. They prevent forgetting as the network weights are not being updated. Although there is no forgetting, the performance of SupSup is sub-optimal because fixed weights restrict its representational power. Furthermore, there is no accumulation or transfer of knowledge inside the model when new tasks are learned. Hence, we propose ExSSNeT (Exclusive Supermask SubNetwork Training), that performs exclusive and non-overlapping subnetwork weight training. This avoids conflicting updates to the shared weights by subsequent tasks to improve performance while still preventing forgetting. Furthermore, we propose a novel KNN-based Knowledge Transfer (KKT) module that utilizes previously acquired knowledge to learn new tasks better and faster. We demonstrate that ExSSNeT outperforms strong previous methods on both NLP and Vision domains while preventing forgetting. Moreover, ExSSNeT is particularly advantageous for sparse masks that activate 2-10% of the model parameters, resulting in an average improvement of 8.3% over SupSup. Furthermore, ExSSNeT scales to a large number of tasks (100).
Transferring General Multimodal Pretrained Models to Text Recognition
Authors: Junyang Lin; Xuancheng Ren; Yichang Zhang; Gao Liu; Peng Wang; An Yang; Chang Zhou
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: This paper proposes a new method, OFA-OCR, to transfer multimodal pretrained models to text recognition. Specifically, we recast text recognition as image captioning and directly transfer a unified vision-language pretrained model to the end task. Without pretraining on large-scale annotated or synthetic text recognition data, OFA-OCR outperforms the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance in the Chinese text recognition benchmark. Additionally, we construct an OCR pipeline with OFA-OCR, and we demonstrate that it can achieve competitive performance with the product-level API.
A Formal Perspective on Byte-Pair Encoding
Authors: Vilém Zouhar; Clara Meister; Juan Gastaldi; Li Du; Tim Vieira; Mrinmaya Sachan; Ryan Cotterell
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is a popular algorithm used for tokenizing data in NLP, despite being devised initially as a compression method.BPE appears to be a greedy algorithm at face value, but the underlying optimization problem that BPE seeks to solve has not yet been laid down. We formalize BPE as a combinatorial optimization problem. Via submodular functions, we prove that the iterative greedy version is a 1/sigma*(1-e(-sigma))-approximation of an optimal merge sequence, where sigma is the total backward curvature with respect to the optimal merge sequence. Empirically the lower bound of the approximation is approx0.37.We provide a faster implementation of BPE which improves the runtime complexity from O(NM) to O(N log M), where N is the sequence length and M is the merge count. Finally, we optimize the brute-force algorithm for optimal BPE using memoization.
Automatic Named Entity Obfuscation in Speech
Authors: Judita Preiss
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Sharing data containing personal information often requires its anonymization, even when consent for sharing was obtained from the data originator. While approaches exist for automated anonymization of text, the area is not as thoroughly explored in speech. This work focuses on identifying, replacing and inserting replacement named entities synthesized using voice cloning into original audio thereby retaining prosodic information while reducing the likelihood of deanonymization. The approach employs a novel named entity recognition (NER) system built directly on speech by training HuBERT (Hsu et al, 2021) using the English speech NER dataset (Yadav et al, 2020). Name substitutes are found using a masked language model and are synthesized using text to speech voice cloning (Eren and team, 2021), upon which the substitute named entities are re-inserted into the original text. The approach is prototyped on a sample of the LibriSpeech corpus (Panyatov et al, 2015) with each step evaluated individually.
Recursion of Thought: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach to Multi-Context Reasoning with Language Models
Authors: Soochan Lee; Gunhee Kim
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Generating intermediate steps, or Chain of Thought (CoT), is an effective way to significantly improve language models’ (LM) multi-step reasoning capability. However, the CoT lengths can grow rapidly with the problem complexity, easily exceeding the maximum context size. Instead of increasing the context limit, which has already been heavily investigated, we explore an orthogonal direction: making LMs divide a problem into multiple contexts. We propose a new inference framework, called Recursion of Thought (RoT), which introduces several special tokens that the models can output to trigger context-related operations. Extensive experiments with multiple architectures including GPT-3 show that RoT dramatically improves LMs’ inference capability to solve problems, whose solution consists of hundreds of thousands of tokens.
UniS-MMC: Multimodal Classification via Unimodality-supervised Multimodal Contrastive Learning
Authors: Heqing Zou; Meng Shen; Chen Chen; Yuchen Hu; Deepu Rajan; Eng Siong Chng
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Multimodal learning aims to imitate human beings to acquire complementary information from multiple modalities for various downstream tasks. However, traditional aggregation-based multimodal fusion methods ignore the inter-modality relationship, treat each modality equally, suffer sensor noise, and thus reduce multimodal learning performance. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal contrastive method to explore more reliable multimodal representations under the weak supervision of unimodal predicting. Specifically, we first capture task-related unimodal representations and the unimodal predictions from the introduced unimodal predicting task. Then the unimodal representations are aligned with the more effective one by the designed multimodal contrastive method under the supervision of the unimodal predictions. Experimental results with fused features on two image-text classification benchmarks UPMC-Food-101 and N24News show that our proposed Unimodality-Supervised MultiModal Contrastive UniS-MMC learning method outperforms current state-of-the-art multimodal methods. The detailed ablation study and analysis further demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method.
Robustness-Aware Word Embedding Improves Certified Robustness to Adversarial Word Substitutions
Authors: Yibin Wang; Yichen Yang; Di He; Kun He
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) models have gained great success on clean texts, but they are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples typically crafted by synonym substitutions. In this paper, we target to solve this problem and find that word embedding is important to the certified robustness of NLP models. Given the findings, we propose the Embedding Interval Bound Constraint (EIBC) triplet loss to train robustness-aware word embeddings for better certified robustness. We optimize the EIBC triplet loss to reduce distances between synonyms in the embedding space, which is theoretically proven to make the verification boundary tighter. Meanwhile, we enlarge distances among non-synonyms, maintaining the semantic representation of word embeddings. Our method is conceptually simple and componentized. It can be easily combined with IBP training and improves the certified robust accuracy from 76.73% to 84.78% on the IMDB dataset. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms various state-of-the-art certified defense baselines and generalizes well to unseen substitutions. The code is available at https://github.com/JHL-HUST/EIBC-IBP/.
Exploring the Compositional Generalization in Context Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing
Authors: Aiwei Liu; Wei Liu; Xuming Hu; Shuang Li; Fukun Ma; Yawen Yang; Lijie Wen
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: In the context-dependent Text-to-SQL task, the generated SQL statements are refined iteratively based on the user input utterance from each interaction. The input text from each interaction can be viewed as component modifications to the previous SQL statements, which could be further extracted as the modification patterns. Since these modification patterns could also be combined with other SQL statements, the models are supposed to have the compositional generalization to these novel combinations. This work is the first exploration of compositional generalization in context-dependent Text-to-SQL scenarios. To facilitate related studies, we constructed two challenging benchmarks named CoSQL-CG and SParC-CG by recombining the modification patterns and existing SQL statements. The following experiments show that almost all current models struggle on our proposed benchmarks. Furthermore, we found that better aligning the previous SQL statements with the input utterance could give models better combinatorial generalization ability. Based on these observations, we propose a method name p-align to improve the combinatorial generalization of Text-to-SQL models. Further experiments validate the effectiveness of our model.
Towards Generative Event Factuality Prediction
Authors: John Murzaku; Tyler Osborne; Amittai Aviram; Owen Rambow
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: We present a novel end-to-end generative task and system for predicting event factuality holders, targets, and their associated factuality values. We perform the first experiments using all sources and targets of factuality statements from the FactBank corpus. We perform multi-task learning with other tasks and event-factuality corpora to improve on the FactBank source and target task. We argue that careful domain specific target text output format in generative systems is important and verify this with multiple experiments on target text output structure. We redo previous state-of-the-art author-only event factuality experiments and also offer insights towards a generative paradigm for the author-only event factuality prediction task.
Can Language Models Be Specific? How?
Authors: Jie Huang; Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang; Jinjun Xiong; Wen-mei Hwu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: “He is a person”, “Paris is located on the earth”. Both statements are correct but meaningless - due to lack of specificity. In this paper, we propose to measure how specific the language of pre-trained language models (PLMs) is. To achieve this, we introduce a novel approach to build a benchmark for specificity testing by forming masked token prediction tasks with prompts. For instance, given “Toronto is located in [MASK].”, we want to test whether a more specific answer will be better filled in by PLMs, e.g., Ontario instead of Canada. From our evaluations, we show that existing PLMs have only a slight preference for more specific answers. We identify underlying factors affecting the specificity and design two prompt-based methods to improve the specificity. Results show that the specificity of the models can be improved by the proposed methods without additional training. We hope this work can bring to awareness the notion of specificity of language models and encourage the research community to further explore this important but understudied problem.
The Web Can Be Your Oyster for Improving Language Models
Authors: Junyi Li; Tianyi Tang; Wayne Xin Zhao; Jingyuan Wang; Jian-Yun Nie; Ji-Rong Wen
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Pretrained language models (PLMs) encode a large amount of world knowledge. However, as such knowledge is frozen at the time of model training, the models become static and limited by the training data at that time. In order to further improve the capacity of PLMs for knowledge-intensive tasks, we consider augmenting PLMs with the large-scale web using search engine. Unlike previous augmentation sources (e.g., Wikipedia data dump), the web provides broader, more comprehensive and constantly updated information. In this paper, we present a web-augmented PLM – UniWeb, which is trained over 16 knowledge-intensive tasks in a unified text-to-text format. Instead of simply using the retrieved contents from web, our approach has made two major improvements. Firstly, we propose an adaptive search engine assisted learning method that can self-evaluate the confidence level of PLM’s predictions, and adaptively determine when to refer to the web for more data, which can avoid useless or noisy augmentation from web. Secondly, we design a pretraining task, i.e., continual knowledge learning, based on salient spans prediction, to reduce the discrepancy between the encoded and retrieved knowledge. Experiments on a wide range of knowledge-intensive tasks show that our model significantly outperforms previous retrieval-augmented methods.
Enhancing Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer with Target Language Peculiar Examples
Authors: Hwichan Kim; Mamoru Komachi
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Few-shot cross-lingual transfer, fine-tuning Multilingual Masked Language Model (MMLM) with source language labeled data and a small amount of target language labeled data, provides excellent performance in the target language. However, if no labeled data in the target language are available, they need to be created through human annotations. In this study, we devise a metric to select annotation candidates from an unlabeled data pool that efficiently enhance accuracy for few-shot cross-lingual transfer. It is known that training a model with hard examples is important to improve the model’s performance. Therefore, we first identify examples that MMLM cannot solve in a zero-shot cross-lingual transfer setting and demonstrate that it is hard to predict peculiar examples in the target language, i.e., the examples distant from the source language examples in cross-lingual semantic space of the MMLM.We then choose high peculiarity examples as annotation candidates and perform few-shot cross-lingual transfer. In comprehensive experiments with 20 languages and 6 tasks, we demonstrate that the high peculiarity examples improve the target language accuracy compared to other candidate selection methods proposed in previous studies.