GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Cross-Domain Argument Quality Estimation
Authors: Michael Fromm; Max Berrendorf; Evgeniy Faerman; Thomas Seidl
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Argumentation is one of society’s foundational pillars, and, sparked by advances in NLP, and the vast availability of text data, automated mining of arguments receives increasing attention. A decisive property of arguments is their strength or quality. While there are works on the automated estimation of argument strength, their scope is narrow:They focus on isolated datasets and neglect the interactions with related argument-mining tasks, such as argument identification and evidence detection. In this work, we close this gap by approaching argument quality estimation from multiple different angles:Grounded on rich results from thorough empirical evaluations, we assess the generalization capabilities of argument quality estimation across diverse domains and the interplay with related argument mining tasks. We find that generalization depends on a sufficient representation of different domains in the training part. In zero-shot transfer and multi-task experiments, we reveal that argument quality is among the more challenging tasks but can improve others. We publish our code at https://github.com/fromm-m/acl-cross-domain-aq.
DiaASQ: A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis
Authors: Bobo Li; Hao Fei; Fei Li; Yuhan Wu; Jinsong Zhang; Shengqiong Wu; Jingye Li; Yijiang Liu; Lizi Liao; Tat-Seng Chua; Donghong Ji
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: The rapid development of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) within recent decades shows great potential for real-world society. The current ABSA works, however, are mostly limited to the scenario of a single text piece, leaving the study in dialogue contexts unexplored. To bridge the gap between fine-grained sentiment analysis and conversational opinion mining, in this work, we introduce a novel task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis, namely DiaASQ, aiming to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. We manually construct a large-scale high-quality DiaASQ dataset in both Chinese and English languages. We deliberately develop a neural model to benchmark the task, which advances in effectively performing end-to-end quadruple prediction, and manages to incorporate rich dialogue-specific and discourse feature representations for better cross-utterance quadruple extraction. We hope the new benchmark will spur more advancements in the sentiment analysis community.
GeoDRL: A Self-Learning Framework for Geometry Problem Solving using Reinforcement Learning in Deductive Reasoning
Authors: Shuai Peng; Di Fu; Yijun Liang; Liangcai Gao; Zhi Tang
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Ensuring both interpretability and correctness is a great challenge in automated geometry problem solving (GPS), and the scarcity of labeled data hinders learning mathematical reasoning from samples. Therefore, we present GeoDRL, a self-learning geometry problem solving framework that integrates logic graph deduction and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to optimize geometry reasoning as a Markov Decision Process. GeoDRL employs a Graph Neural Network on a Geometry Logic Graph, updating the problem state using a symbolic system. Incorporating DRL into deductive reasoning enables GeoDRL to achieve unsupervised self-learning while maintaining correctness. GeoDRL, through unsupervised learning, exhibits enhanced accuracy in the Geometry3K dataset, improving by 11.1% over previous SOTA methods, and simultaneously boosts efficiency and interpretability.
Uncertainty-Aware Unlikelihood Learning Improves Generative Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction
Authors: Mengting Hu; Yinhao Bai; Yike Wu; Zhen Zhang; Liqi Zhang; Hang Gao; Shiwan Zhao; Minlie Huang
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Recently, aspect sentiment quad prediction has received widespread attention in the field of aspect-based sentiment analysis. Existing studies extract quadruplets via pre-trained generative language models to paraphrase the original sentence into a templated target sequence. However, previous works only focus on what to generate but ignore what not to generate. We argue that considering the negative samples also leads to potential benefits. In this work, we propose a template-agnostic method to control the token-level generation, which boosts original learning and reduces mistakes simultaneously. Specifically, we introduce Monte Carlo dropout to understand the built-in uncertainty of pre-trained language models, acquiring the noises and errors. We further propose marginalized unlikelihood learning to suppress the uncertainty-aware mistake tokens. Finally, we introduce minimization entropy to balance the effects of marginalized unlikelihood learning. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on various generation templates.
Adversarial Knowledge Stimulated Contrastive Prompting for Few-shot Language Learners
Authors: Kai Zheng; Qingfeng Sun; Yaming Yang; Tengchao Lv; Yeyong Pi; Changlin Zhao; Fei Xu; Qi Zhang
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted the performance of Pre-trained Language Models(PLMs) on few-shot Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks by employing task-specific prompts. Yet, PLMsare unfamiliar with prompt-style expressionsduring pre-training, which limits the few-shotlearning performance on downstream tasks. It would be desirable if the models can stimulate prompting knowledge while adaptation to specific NLU tasks. We present the Adversarial Knowledge Stimulated Contrastive Prompting (AKSCP) framework, leading to better few-shot NLU tasks for language models by implicitly stimulate knowledge from pretrained language model. In AKSCP, a novel paradigm Cloze-driven prompt is proposed for joint prompt tuning across word cloze task and prompt-based learning, forcing PLMs to stimulate prompting knowledge. We further design an Adversarial Contrastive learning method to improve the generalization ability of PLM for different downstream tasks. Experiments over a variety of NLU tasks show that AKSCP consistently outperforms state-of-the-arts for prompt-based fine-tuning.
Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Learn Few-Shot Spoken Language Understanding in More Practical Scenarios
Authors: Yufan Wang; Jie Mei; Bowei Zou; Rui Fan; Tingting He; Ai Ti Aw
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Most previous few-shot Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models typically need to be trained on a set of data-rich source domains and adapt to the target domain with a few examples. In this paper, we explore a more practical scenario for few-shot SLU, in which we only assume access to a pre-trained language model and a few labeled examples without any other source domain data. We concentrate on understanding how far the few-shot SLU could be pushed in this setting. To this end, we develop a prompt-based intent detection model in few-shot settings, which leverages the BERT original pre-training next sentence prediction task and the prompt template to detect the user’s intent. For slot filling, we propose an approach of reconstructing slot labels, which reduces the training complexity by reducing the number of slot labels in few-shot settings. To evaluate the few-shot SLU for a more practical scenario, we present two benchmarks, FewShotATIS and FewShotSNIPS. And a dynamic sampling strategy is designed to construct the two datasets according to the learning difficulty of each intent and slot. Experiments on FewShotATIS and FewShotSNIPS demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Typology Guided Multilingual Position Representations: Case on Dependency Parsing
Authors: Tao Ji; Yuanbin Wu; Xiaoling Wang
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Recent multilingual models benefit from strong unified semantic representation models. However, due to conflict linguistic regularities, ignoring language-specific features during multilingual learning may suffer from negative transfer. In this work, we analyze the relationbetween a language’s position space and its typological characterization, and suggest deploying different position spaces for different languages. We develop a position generation network which combines prior knowledge from typology features and existing position vectors. Experiments on the multilingual dependency parsing task show that the learned position vectors exhibit meaningful hidden structures, and they can help achieving the best multilingual parsing results.
Learning Event-aware Measures for Event Coreference Resolution
Authors: Yao Yao; Zuchao Li; Hai Zhao
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Researchers are witnessing knowledge-inspired natural language processing shifts the focus from entity-level to event-level, whereas event coreference resolution is one of the core challenges. This paper proposes a novel model for within-document event coreference resolution. On the basis of event but not entity as before, our model learns and integrates multiple representations from both event alone and event pair. For the former, we introduce multiple linguistics-motivated event alone features for more discriminative event representations. For the latter, we consider multiple similarity measures to capture the distinction of event pair. Our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art on the ACE 2005 benchmark, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
Second Language Acquisition of Neural Language Models
Authors: Miyu Oba; Tatsuki Kuribayashi; Hiroki Ouchi; Taro Watanabe
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: With the success of neural language models (LMs), their language acquisition has gained much attention. This work sheds light on the second language (L2) acquisition of LMs, while previous work has typically explored their first language (L1) acquisition. Specifically, we trained bilingual LMs with a scenario similar to human L2 acquisition and analyzed their cross-lingual transfer from linguistic perspectives. Our exploratory experiments demonstrated that the L1 pretraining accelerated their linguistic generalization in L2, and language transfer configurations (e.g., the L1 choice, and presence of parallel texts) substantially affected their generalizations. These clarify their (non-)human-like L2 acquisition in particular aspects.
On the Universal Adversarial Perturbations for Efficient Data-free Adversarial Detection
Authors: SongYang Gao; Shihan Dou; Qi Zhang; Xuanjing Huang; Jin Ma; Ying Shan
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Detecting adversarial samples that are carefully crafted to fool the model is a critical step to socially-secure applications. However, existing adversarial detection methods require access to sufficient training data, which brings noteworthy concerns regarding privacy leakage and generalizability. In this work, we validate that the adversarial sample generated by attack algorithms is strongly related to a specific vector in the high-dimensional inputs. Such vectors, namely UAPs (Universal Adversarial Perturbations), can be calculated without original training data. Based on this discovery, we propose a data-agnostic adversarial detection framework, which induces different responses between normal and adversarial samples to UAPs. Experimental results show that our method achieves competitive detection performance on various text classification tasks, and maintains an equivalent time consumption to normal inference.
Exploring the Effectiveness of Prompt Engineering for Legal Reasoning Tasks
Authors: Fangyi Yu; Lee Quartey; Frank Schilder
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: The use of large language models (LLMs) for zero- or few-shot prompting in natural language processing has given rise to a new research area known as prompt engineering. Recent studies have demonstrated that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts can lead to significant improvements in tasks such as arithmetic and common-sense reasoning. This paper explores the use of such approaches in legal reasoning tasks by conducting experiments on the COLIEE entailment task, which is based on the Japanese Bar exam. We evaluate zero-shot/few-shot and fine-tuning approaches with and without explanations, as well as various prompting strategies. Our results indicate that while CoT prompting and fine-tuning with explanations can improve performance, the best results are achieved with prompts derived from specific legal reasoning techniques, such as IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion). In addition, we observe that few-shot learning where the demonstrations are derived from clustering past training data consistently yields high performance on the COLIEE entailment task for both the years of the data that we tested. Through our experiments, we improve the previous best result on the 2021 COLIEE task from 0.7037 to 0.8025 and surpass the best system from 2022 with an accuracy of 0.789.
End-to-end Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Combinatory Categorial Grammar
Authors: Yuanhe Tian; Weidong Chen; Bo Hu; Yan Song; Fei Xia
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: End-to-end Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (EASA) is a natural language processing (NLP) task that involves extracting aspect terms and identifying the sentiments for them, which provides a fine-grained level of text analysis and thus requires a deep understanding of the running text. Many previous studies leverage advanced text encoders to extract context information and use syntactic information, e.g., the dependency structure of the input sentence, to improve the model performance. However, such models may reach a bottleneck since the dependency structure is not designed to provide semantic information of the text, which is also important for identifying the sentiment and thus leave room for further improvement. Considering that combinatory categorial grammar (CCG) is a formalism that expresses both syntactic and semantic information of a sentence, it has the potential to be beneficial to EASA. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve EASA with CCG supertags, which carry the syntactic and semantic information of the associated words and serve as the most important part of the CCG derivation. Specifically, our approach proposes a CCG supertag decoding process to learn the syntactic and semantic information carried by CCG supertags and use the information to guide the attention over the input words so as to identify important contextual information for EASA. Furthermore, a gate mechanism is used in incorporating the weighted contextual information into the backbone EASA decoding process. We evaluate our approach on three publicly available English datasets for EASA, and show that it outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results on all datasets.
ConKI: Contrastive Knowledge Injection for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Yakun Yu; Mingjun Zhao; Shi-ang Qi; Feiran Sun; Baoxun Wang; Weidong Guo; Xiaoli Wang; Lei Yang; Di Niu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis leverages multimodal signals to detect the sentiment of a speaker. Previous approaches concentrate on performing multimodal fusion and representation learning based on general knowledge obtained from pretrained models, which neglects the effect of domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose Contrastive Knowledge Injection (ConKI) for multimodal sentiment analysis, where specific-knowledge representations for each modality can be learned together with general knowledge representations via knowledge injection based on an adapter architecture. In addition, ConKI uses a hierarchical contrastive learning procedure performed between knowledge types within every single modality, across modalities within each sample, and across samples to facilitate the effective learning of the proposed representations, hence improving multimodal sentiment predictions. The experiments on three popular multimodal sentiment analysis benchmarks show that ConKI outperforms all prior methods on a variety of performance metrics.
On Degrees of Freedom in Defining and Testing Natural Language Understanding
Authors: Saku Sugawara; Shun Tsugita
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Natural language understanding (NLU) studies often exaggerate or underestimate the capabilities of systems, thereby limiting the reproducibility of their findings. These erroneous evaluations can be attributed to the difficulty of defining and testing NLU adequately. In this position paper, we reconsider this challenge by identifying two types of researcher degrees of freedom. We revisit Turing’s original interpretation of the Turing test and reveal that an effective test of NLU does not provide an operational definition; it merely provides inductive evidence that the test subject understands the language sufficiently well to meet stakeholder objectives. In other words, stakeholders are free to arbitrarily define NLU through their objectives. To use the test results as inductive evidence, stakeholders must carefully assess if the interpretation of test scores is valid or not. However, designing and using NLU tests involve other degrees of freedom, such as specifying target skills and defining evaluation metrics. As a result, achieving consensus among stakeholders becomes difficult. To resolve this issue, we propose a validity argument, which is a framework comprising a series of validation criteria across test components. By demonstrating that current practices in NLU studies can be associated with those criteria and organizing them into a comprehensive checklist, we prove that the validity argument can serve as a coherent guideline for designing credible test sets and facilitating scientific communication.
AttenWalker: Unsupervised Long-Document Question Answering via Attention-based Graph Walking
Authors: Yuxiang Nie; Heyan Huang; Wei Wei; Xian-Ling Mao
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Annotating long-document question answering (long-document QA) pairs is time-consuming and expensive. To alleviate the problem, it might be possible to generate long-document QA pairs via unsupervised question answering (UQA) methods. However, existing UQA tasks are based on short documents, and can hardly incorporate long-range information. To tackle the problem, we propose a new task, named unsupervised long-document question answering (ULQA), aiming to generate high-quality long-document QA instances in an unsupervised manner. Besides, we propose AttenWalker, a novel unsupervised method to aggregate and generate answers with long-range dependency so as to construct long-document QA pairs. Specifically, AttenWalker is composed of three modules, i.e. span collector, span linker and answer aggregator. Firstly, the span collector takes advantage of constituent parsing and reconstruction loss to select informative candidate spans for constructing answers. Secondly, with the help of the attention graph of a pre-trained long-document model, potentially interrelated text spans (that might be far apart) could be linked together via an attention-walking algorithm. Thirdly, in the answer aggregator, linked spans are aggregated into the final answer via the mask-filling ability of a pre-trained model. Extensive experiments show that AttenWalker outperforms previous methods on NarrativeQA and Qasper. In addition, AttenWalker also shows strong performance in the few-shot learning setting.
Adaptive Ordered Information Extraction with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Wenhao Huang; Jiaqing Liang; Zhixu Li; Yanghua Xiao; Chuanjun Ji
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Information extraction (IE) has been studied extensively. The existing methods always follow a fixed extraction order for complex IE tasks with multiple elements to be extracted in one instance such as event extraction. However, we conduct experiments on several complex IE datasets and observe that different extraction orders can significantly affect the extraction results for a great portion of instances, and the ratio of sentences that are sensitive to extraction orders increases dramatically with the complexity of the IE task. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel adaptive ordered IE paradigm to find the optimal element extraction order for different instances, so as to achieve the best extraction results. We also propose an reinforcement learning (RL) based framework to generate optimal extraction order for each instance dynamically. Additionally, we propose a co-training framework adapted to RL to mitigate the exposure bias during the extractor training phase. Extensive experiments conducted on several public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method can beat previous methods and effectively improve the performance of various IE tasks, especially for complex ones.
Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao Embedding: Logical Query Embeddings with Local Comparison and Global Transport
Authors: Zihao Wang; Weizhi Fei; Hang Yin; Yangqiu Song; Ginny Wong; Simon See
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Answering complex queries on knowledge graphs is important but particularly challenging because of the data incompleteness. Query embedding methods address this issue by learningbased models and simulating logical reasoning with set operators. Previous works focus on specific forms of embeddings, but scoring functions between embeddings are underexplored. In contrast to existing scorning functions motivated by local comparison or global transport, this work investigates the local and global trade-off with unbalanced optimal transport theory. Specifically, we embed sets as bounded measures in R endowed with a scoring function motivated by the Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao metric. Such a design also facilitates closed-form set operators in the embedding space. Moreover, we introduce a convolution-based algorithm for linear time computation and a block diagonal kernel to enforce the trade-off. Results show that WFRE is capable of outperforming existing query embedding methods on standard datasets, evaluation sets with combinatorially complex queries, and hierarchical knowledge graphs. Ablation study shows that finding a better local and global trade-off is essential for performance improvement.