GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Revisiting Non-Autoregressive Translation at Scale
Authors: Zhihao Wang; Longyue Wang; Jinsong Su; Junfeng Yao; Zhaopeng Tu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: In real-world systems, scaling has been critical for improving the translation quality in autoregressive translation (AT), which however has not been well studied for non-autoregressive translation (NAT). In this work, we bridge the gap by systematically studying the impact of scaling on NAT behaviors. Extensive experiments on six WMT benchmarks over two advanced NAT models show that scaling can alleviate the commonly-cited weaknesses of NAT models, resulting in better translation performance. To reduce the side-effect of scaling on decoding speed, we empirically investigate the impact of NAT encoder and decoder on the translation performance. Experimental results on the large-scale WMT20 En-De show that the asymmetric architecture (e.g. bigger encoder and smaller decoder) can achieve comparable performance with the scaling model, while maintaining the superiority of decoding speed with standard NAT models. To this end, we establish a new benchmark by validating scaled NAT models on the scaled dataset, which can be regarded as a strong baseline for future works. We release code and system outputs at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/Scaling4NAT.
Improving Radiology Summarization with Radiograph and Anatomy Prompts
Authors: Jinpeng Hu; Zhihong Chen; Yang Liu; Xiang Wan; Tsung-Hui Chang
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: The impression is crucial for the referring physicians to grasp key information since it is concluded from the findings and reasoning of radiologists. To alleviate the workload of radiologists and reduce repetitive human labor in impression writing, many researchers have focused on automatic impression generation. However, recent works on this task mainly summarize the corresponding findings and pay less attention to the radiology images. In clinical, radiographs can provide more detailed valuable observations to enhance radiologists’ impression writing, especially for complicated cases. Besides, each sentence in findings usually focuses on single anatomy, such that they only need to be matched to corresponding anatomical regions instead of the whole image, which is beneficial for textual and visual features alignment. Therefore, we propose a novel anatomy-enhanced multimodal model to promote impression generation. In detail, we first construct a set of rules to extract anatomies and put these prompts into each sentence to highlight anatomy characteristics. Then, two separate encoders are applied to extract features from the radiograph and findings. Afterward, we utilize a contrastive learning module to align these two representations at the overall level and use a co-attention to fuse them at the sentence level with the help of anatomy-enhanced sentence representation. The experimental results on two benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art results.
Explanation Regeneration via Information Bottleneck
Authors: Qintong Li; Zhiyong Wu; Lingpeng Kong; Wei Bi
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Explaining the black-box predictions of NLP models naturally and accurately is an important open problem in natural language generation. These free-text explanations are expected to contain sufficient and carefully-selected evidence to form supportive arguments for predictions. Thanks to the superior generative capacity of large pretrained language models (PLM), recent work built on prompt engineering enables explanations generated without specific training. However, explanations generated through single-pass prompting often lack sufficiency and conciseness, due to the prompt complexity and hallucination issues. To discard the dross and take the essence of current PLM’s results, we propose to produce sufficient and concise explanations via the information bottleneck (EIB) theory. EIB regenerates explanations by polishing the single-pass output of PLM but retaining the information that supports the contents being explained by balancing two information bottleneck objectives. Experiments on two different tasks verify the effectiveness of EIB through automatic evaluation and thoroughly-conducted human evaluation.
Improving Zero-shot Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Leveraging Cross-lingual Consistency Regularization
Authors: Pengzhi Gao; Liwen Zhang; Zhongjun He; Hua Wu; Haifeng Wang
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: The multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) model has a promising capability of zero-shot translation, where it could directly translate between language pairs unseen during training. For good transfer performance from supervised directions to zero-shot directions, the multilingual NMT model is expected to learn universal representations across different languages. This paper introduces a cross-lingual consistency regularization, CrossConST, to bridge the representation gap among different languages and boost zero-shot translation performance. The theoretical analysis shows that CrossConST implicitly maximizes the probability distribution for zero-shot translation, and the experimental results on both low-resource and high-resource benchmarks show that CrossConST consistently improves the translation performance. The experimental analysis also proves that CrossConST could close the sentence representation gap and better align the representation space. Given the universality and simplicity of CrossConST, we believe it can serve as a strong baseline for future multilingual NMT research.
ReactIE: Enhancing Chemical Reaction Extraction with Weak Supervision
Authors: Ming Zhong; Siru Ouyang; Minhao Jiang; Vivian Hu; Yizhu Jiao; Xuan Wang; Jiawei Han
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Structured chemical reaction information plays a vital role for chemists engaged in laboratory work and advanced endeavors such as computer-aided drug design. Despite the importance of extracting structured reactions from scientific literature, data annotation for this purpose is cost-prohibitive due to the significant labor required from domain experts. Consequently, the scarcity of sufficient training data poses an obstacle to the progress of related models in this domain. In this paper, we propose ReactIE, which combines two weakly supervised approaches for pre-training. Our method utilizes frequent patterns within the text as linguistic cues to identify specific characteristics of chemical reactions. Additionally, we adopt synthetic data from patent records as distant supervision to incorporate domain knowledge into the model. Experiments demonstrate that ReactIE achieves substantial improvements and outperforms all existing baselines.
Expand, Rerank, and Retrieve: Query Reranking for Open-Domain Question Answering
Authors: Yung-Sung Chuang; Wei Fang; Shang-Wen Li; Wen-tau Yih; James Glass
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: We propose EAR, a query Expansion And Reranking approach for improving passage retrieval, with the application to open-domain question answering. EAR first applies a query expansion model to generate a diverse set of queries, and then uses a query reranker to select the ones that could lead to better retrieval results. Motivated by the observation that the best query expansion often is not picked by greedy decoding, EAR trains its reranker to predict the rank orders of the gold passages when issuing the expanded queries to a given retriever. By connecting better the query expansion model and retriever, EAR significantly enhances a traditional sparse retrieval method, BM25. Empirically, EAR improves top-5/20 accuracy by 3-8 and 5-10 points in in-domain and out-of-domain settings, respectively, when compared to a vanilla query expansion model, GAR, and a dense retrieval model, DPR.
Neural Networks Against (and For) Self-Training: Classification with Small Labeled and Large Unlabeled Sets
Authors: Payam Karisani
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: We propose a semi-supervised text classifier based on self-training using one positive and one negative property of neural networks. One of the weaknesses of self-training is the semantic drift problem, where noisy pseudo-labels accumulate over iterations and consequently the error rate soars. In order to tackle this challenge, we reshape the role of pseudo-labels and create a hierarchical order of information. In addition, a crucial step in self-training is to use the classifier confidence prediction to select the best candidate pseudo-labels. This step cannot be efficiently done by neural networks, because it is known that their output is poorly calibrated. To overcome this challenge, we propose a hybrid metric to replace the plain confidence measurement. Our metric takes into account the prediction uncertainty via a subsampling technique. We evaluate our model in a set of five standard benchmarks, and show that it significantly outperforms a set of ten diverse baseline models. Furthermore, we show that the improvement achieved by our model is additive to language model pretraining, which is a widely used technique for using unlabeled documents.
Inducing Character-level Structure in Subword-based Language Models with Type-level Interchange Intervention Training
Authors: Jing Huang; Zhengxuan Wu; Kyle Mahowald; Christopher Potts
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Language tasks involving character-level manipulations (e.g., spelling corrections, arithmetic operations, word games) are challenging for models operating on subword units. To address this, we develop a causal intervention framework to learn robust and interpretable character representations inside subword-based language models. Our method treats each character as a typed variable in a causal model and learns such causal structures by adapting the interchange intervention training method of Geiger et al. (2021). We additionally introduce a suite of character-level tasks that systematically vary in their dependence on meaning and sequence-level context. While character-level models still perform best on purely form-based tasks like string reversal, our method outperforms character-level models on more complex tasks that blend form, meaning, and context, such as spelling correction in context and word search games. Compared with standard subword-based models, our approach also significantly improves robustness on unseen token sequences and leads to human-interpretable internal representations of characters.
Efficient Document Embeddings via Self-Contrastive Bregman Divergence Learning
Authors: Daniel Saggau; Mina Rezaei; Bernd Bischl; Ilias Chalkidis
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Learning quality document embeddings is a fundamental problem in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), recommendation systems, and search engines. Despite recent advances in the development of transformer-based models that produce sentence embeddings with self-contrastive learning, the encoding of long documents (Ks of words) is still challenging with respect to both efficiency and quality considerations. Therefore, we train Longfomer-based document encoders using a state-of-the-art unsupervised contrastive learning method (SimCSE). Further on, we complement the baseline method -siamese neural network- with additional convex neural networks based on functional Bregman divergence aiming to enhance the quality of the output document representations. We show that overall the combination of a self-contrastive siamese network and our proposed neural Bregman network outperforms the baselines in two linear classification settings on three long document topic classification tasks from the legal and biomedical domains.
QAP: A Quantum-Inspired Adaptive-Priority-Learning Model for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Authors: Ziming Li; Yan Zhou; Yaxin Liu; Fuqing Zhu; Chuanpeng Yang; Songlin Hu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Multimodal emotion recognition for video has gained considerable attention in recent years, in which three modalities (i.e., textual, visual and acoustic) are involved. Due to the diverse levels of informational content related to emotion, three modalities typically possess varying degrees of contribution to emotion recognition. More seriously, there might be inconsistencies between the emotion of individual modality and the video. The challenges mentioned above are caused by the inherent uncertainty of emotion. Inspired by the recent advances of quantum theory in modeling uncertainty, we make an initial attempt to design a quantum-inspired adaptive-priority-learning model (QAP) to address the challenges. Specifically, the quantum state is introduced to model modal features, which allows each modality to retain all emotional tendencies until the final classification. Additionally, we design Q-attention to orderly integrate three modalities, and then QAP learns modal priority adaptively so that modalities can provide different amounts of information based on priority. Experimental results on the IEMOCAP and MOSEI datasets show that QAP establishes new state-of-the-art results.
Language acquisition: do children and language models follow similar learning stages?
Authors: Linnea Evanson; Yair Lakretz; Jean Rémi King
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: During language acquisition, children follow a typical sequence of learning stages, whereby they first learn to categorize phonemes before they develop their lexicon and eventually master increasingly complex syntactic structures. However, the computational principles that lead to this learning trajectory remain largely unknown. To investigate this, we here compare the learning trajectories of deep language models to those of human children. Specifically, we test whether, during its training, GPT-2 exhibits stages of language acquisition comparable to those observed in children aged between 18 months and 6 years. For this, we train 48 GPT-2 models from scratch and evaluate their syntactic and semantic abilities at each training step, using 96 probes curated from the BLiMP, Zorro and BIG-Bench benchmarks. We then compare these evaluations with the behavior of 54 children during language production. Our analyses reveal three main findings. First, similarly to children, the language models tend to learn linguistic skills in a systematic order. Second, this learning scheme is parallel: the language tasks that are learned last improve from the very first training steps. Third, some – but not all – learning stages are shared between children and these language models. Overall, these results shed new light on the principles of language acquisition, and highlight important divergences in how humans and modern algorithms learn to process natural language.
The Role of Output Vocabulary in T2T LMs for SPARQL Semantic Parsing
Authors: Debayan Banerjee; Pranav Nair; Ricardo Usbeck; Chris Biemann
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: In this work, we analyse the role of output vocabulary for text-to-text (T2T) models on the task of SPARQL semantic parsing. We perform experiments within the the context of knowledge graph question answering (KGQA), where the task is to convert questions in natural language to the SPARQL query language. We observe that the query vocabulary is distinct from human vocabulary. Language Models (LMs) are pre-dominantly trained for human language tasks, and hence, if the query vocabulary is replaced with a vocabulary more attuned to the LM tokenizer, the performance of models may improve. We carry out carefully selected vocabulary substitutions on the queries and find absolute gains in the range of 17% on the GrailQA dataset.
UniCOQE: Unified Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction As A Set
Authors: Zinong Yang; Feng Xu; Jianfei Yu; Rui Xia
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction (COQE) aims to identify comparative opinion sentences in product reviews, extract comparative opinion elements in the sentences, and then incorporate them into quintuples. Existing methods decompose the COQE task into multiple primary subtasks and then solve them in a pipeline manner. However, these approaches ignore the intrinsic connection between subtasks and the error propagation among stages. This paper proposes a unified generative model, UniCOQE, to solve the COQE task in one shot. We design a generative template where all the comparative tuples are concatenated as the target output sequence. However, the multiple tuples are inherently not an ordered sequence but an unordered set. The pre-defined order will force the generative model to learn a false order bias and hinge the model’s training. To alleviate this bias, we introduce a new “predict-and-assign” training paradigm that models the golden tuples as a set. Specifically, we utilize a set-matching strategy to find the optimal order of tuples. The experimental results on multiple benchmarks show that our unified generative model significantly outperforms the SOTA method, and ablation experiments prove the effectiveness of the set-matching strategy.
Response-conditioned Turn-taking Prediction
Authors: Bing’er Jiang; Erik Ekstedt; Gabriel Skantze
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Previous approaches to turn-taking and response generation in conversational systems have treated it as a two-stage process: First, the end of a turn is detected (based on conversation history), then the system generates an appropriate response. Humans, however, do not take the turn just because it is likely, but also consider whether what they want to say fits the position. In this paper, we present a model (an extension of TurnGPT) that conditions the end-of-turn prediction on both conversation history and what the next speaker wants to say. We found that our model consistently outperforms the baseline model in a variety of metrics. The improvement is most prominent in two scenarios where turn predictions can be ambiguous solely from the conversation history: 1) when the current utterance contains a statement followed by a question; 2) when the end of the current utterance semantically matches the response. Treating the turn-prediction and response-ranking as a one-stage process, our findings suggest that our model can be used as an incremental response ranker, which can be applied in various settings.
A Unified One-Step Solution for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction
Authors: Junxian Zhou; Haiqin Yang; Yuxuan He; Hao Mou; JunBo Yang
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) is a challenging yet significant subtask in aspectbased sentiment analysis as it provides a complete aspect-level sentiment structure. However, existing ASQP datasets are usually small and low-density, hindering technical advancement. To expand the capacity, in this paper, we release two new datasets for ASQP, which contain the following characteristics: larger size, more words per sample, and higher density. With such datasets, we unveil the shortcomings of existing strong ASQP baselines and therefore propose a unified one-step solution for ASQP, namely One-ASQP, to detect the aspect categories and to identify the aspectopinion-sentiment (AOS) triplets simultaneously. Our One-ASQP holds several unique advantages: (1) by separating ASQP into two subtasks and solving them independently and simultaneously, we can avoid error propagation in pipeline-based methods and overcome slow training and inference in generation-based methods; (2) by introducing sentiment-specific horns tagging schema in a token-pair-based two-dimensional matrix, we can exploit deeper interactions between sentiment elements and efficiently decode the AOS triplets; (3) we design "[NULL]” token can help us effectively identify the implicit aspects or opinions. Experiments on two benchmark datasets and our released two datasets demonstrate the advantages of our One-ASQP. The two new datasets are publicly released at https://www.github.com/Datastory-CN/ASQP-Datasets.
On Isotropy, Contextualization and Learning Dynamics of Contrastive-based Sentence Representation Learning
Authors: Chenghao Xiao; Yang Long; Noura Al Moubayed
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Incorporating contrastive learning objectives in sentence representation learning (SRL) has yielded significant improvements on many sentence-level NLP tasks. However, it is not well understood why contrastive learning works for learning sentence-level semantics. In this paper, we aim to help guide future designs of sentence representation learning methods by taking a closer look at contrastive SRL through the lens of isotropy, contextualization and learning dynamics. We interpret its successes through the geometry of the representation shifts and show that contrastive learning brings isotropy, and drives high intra-sentence similarity: when in the same sentence, tokens converge to similar positions in the semantic space. We also find that what we formalize as “spurious contextualization” is mitigated for semantically meaningful tokens, while augmented for functional ones. We find that the embedding space is directed towards the origin during training, with more areas now better defined. We ablate these findings by observing the learning dynamics with different training temperatures, batch sizes and pooling methods.
Few-shot Fine-tuning vs. In-context Learning: A Fair Comparison and Evaluation
Authors: Marius Mosbach; Tiago Pimentel; Shauli Ravfogel; Dietrich Klakow; Yanai Elazar
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Few-shot fine-tuning and in-context learning are two alternative strategies for task adaptation of pre-trained language models. Recently, in-context learning has gained popularity over fine-tuning due to its simplicity and improved out-of-domain generalization, and because extensive evidence shows that fine-tuned models pick up on spurious correlations. Unfortunately, previous comparisons of the two approaches were done using models of different sizes. This raises the question of whether the observed weaker out-of-domain generalization of fine-tuned models is an inherent property of fine-tuning or a limitation of the experimental setup. In this paper, we compare the generalization of few-shot fine-tuning and in-context learning to challenge datasets, while controlling for the models used, the number of examples, and the number of parameters, ranging from 125M to 30B. Our results show that fine-tuned language models can in fact generalize well out-of-domain. We find that both approaches generalize similarly; they exhibit large variation and depend on properties such as model size and the number of examples, highlighting that robust task adaptation remains a challenge.