GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Unified Language Representation for Question Answering over Text, Tables, and Images
Authors: Bowen Yu; Cheng Fu; Haiyang Yu; Fei Huang; Yongbin Li
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: When trying to answer complex questions, people often rely on multiple sources of information, such as visual, textual, and tabular data. Previous approaches to this problem have focused on designing input features or model structure in the multi-modal space, which is inflexible for cross-modal reasoning or data-efficient training. In this paper, we call for an alternative paradigm, which transforms the images and tables into unified language representations, so that we can simplify the task into a simpler textual QA problem that can be solved using three steps: retrieval, ranking, and generation, all within a language space. This idea takes advantage of the power of pre-trained language models and is implemented in a framework called Solar. Our experimental results show that Solar outperforms all existing methods by 10.6-32.3 pts on two datasets, MultimodalQA and MMCoQA, across ten different metrics. Additionally, Solar achieves the best performance on the WebQA leaderboard.
A Set Prediction Network For Extractive Summarization
Authors: Xiaoxia Cheng; Yongliang Shen; Weiming Lu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Extractive summarization focuses on extracting salient sentences from the source document and incorporating them in the summary without changing their wording or structure. The naive approach for extractive summarization is sentence classification, which makes independent binary decisions for each sentence, resulting in the model cannot detect the dependencies between sentences in the summary. Recent approaches introduce an autoregressive decoder to detect redundancy relationship between sentences by step-by-step sentence selection, but bring train-inference gap. To address these issues, we formulate extractive summarization as a salient sentence set recognition task. To solve the sentence set recognition task, we propose a set prediction network (SetSum), which sets up a fixed set of learnable queries to extract the entire sentence set of the summary, while capturing the dependencies between them.Different from previous methods with an auto-regressive decoder, we employ a non-autoregressive decoder to predict the sentences within the summary in parallel during both the training and inference process, which eliminates the train-inference gap. Experimental results on both single-document and multi-document extracted summary datasets show that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.
Geo-Seq2seq: Twitter User Geolocation on Noisy Data through Sequence to Sequence Learning
Authors: Jingyu Zhang; Alexandra DeLucia; Chenyu Zhang; Mark Dredze
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Location information can support social media analyses by providing geographic context. Some of the most accurate and popular Twitter geolocation systems rely on rule-based methods that examine the user-provided profile location, which fail to handle informal or noisy location names. We propose Geo-Seq2seq, a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model for Twitter user geolocation that rewrites noisy, multilingual user-provided location strings into structured English location names. We train our system on tens of millions of multilingual location string and geotagged-tweet pairs. Compared to leading methods, our model vastly increases coverage (i.e., the number of users we can geolocate) while achieving comparable or superior accuracy. Our error analysis reveals that constrained decoding helps the model produce valid locations according to a location database. Finally, we measure biases across language, country of origin, and time to evaluate fairness, and find that while our model can generalize well to unseen temporal data, performance does vary by language and country.
Predicting Numerals in Text Using Nearest Neighbor Language Models
Authors: Taku Sakamoto; Akiko Aizawa
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Commonsense about quantitative properties is essential for a deep understanding of texts containing numerals. However, naive language models (LMs) treat numerals as string tokens; therefore, they lack an understanding of the magnitudes of numerals, resulting in a difficulty in acquiring the commonsense. In this study, we apply the k-nearest neighbor LM (kNN-LM) to the masked numeral prediction (MNP) task, which measures the quantitative commonsense of LMs.kNN-LM extends pre-trained neural LMs with the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) search.Since it can utilize patterns that appear in the datastore for prediction, we expect an improvement in numeral prediction accuracy, which is associated with a high rate of occurrence of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words.Through experiments, we verified that the retrieval-based method is effective for fine-grained predictions of numerals from context, especially for the OOV numerals.We also compared two different context spans for context representations to improve the accuracy of kNN search by using only the words that are closely related to the masked numeral: the mask and its surrounding words, and the mask and its subsequent words.Our results reveal that using only the embeddings of mask tokens for numerals in kNN search is the most effective approach for realizing MNP tasks.
HonestBait: Forward References for Attractive but Faithful Headline Generation
Authors: Chih Yao Chen; Dennis Wu; Lun-Wei Ku
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Current methods for generating attractive headlines often learn directly from data, which bases attractiveness on the number of user clicks and views. Although clicks or views do reflect user interest, they can fail to reveal how much interest is raised by the writing style and how much is due to the event or topic itself. Also, such approaches can lead to harmful inventions by over-exaggerating the content, aggravating the spread of false information. In this work, we propose HonestBait, a novel framework for solving these issues from another aspect: generating headlines using forward references (FRs), a writing technique often used for clickbait. A self-verification process is included during training to avoid spurious inventions. We begin with a preliminary user study to understand how FRs affect user interest, after which we present PANCO, an innovative dataset containing pairs of fake news with verified news for attractive but faithful news headline generation. Auto matic metrics and human evaluations show that our framework yields more attractive results (+11.25% compared to human-written verified news headlines) while maintaining high veracity, which helps promote real information to fight against fake news.
Few Shot Rationale Generation using Self-Training with Dual Teachers
Authors: Aditya Srikanth Veerubhotla; Lahari Poddar; Jun Yin; György Szarvas; Sharanya Eswaran
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Self-rationalizing models that also generate a free-text explanation for their predicted labels are an important tool to build trustworthy AI applications. Since generating explanations for annotated labels is a laborious and costly process, recent models rely on large pretrained language models (PLMs) as their backbone and few-shot learning. In this work we explore a self-training approach leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data to further improve few-shot models, under the assumption that neither human written rationales nor annotated task labels are available at scale. We introduce a novel dual-teacher learning framework, which learns two specialized teacher models for task prediction and rationalization using self-training and distills their knowledge into a multi-tasking student model that can jointly generate the task label and rationale. Furthermore, we formulate a new loss function, Masked Label Regularization(MLR) which promotes explanations to be strongly conditioned on predicted labels. Evaluation on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods are effective in modeling task labels and generating faithful rationales.
Towards Accurate Translation via Semantically Appropriate Application of Lexical Constraints
Authors: Yujin Baek; Koanho Lee; Dayeon Ki; Cheonbok Park; Hyoung-Gyu Lee; Jaegul Choo
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Lexically-constrained NMT (LNMT) aims to incorporate user-provided terminology into translations. Despite its practical advantages, existing work has not evaluated LNMT models under challenging real-world conditions. In this paper, we focus on two important but understudied issues that lie in the current evaluation process of LNMT studies. The model needs to cope with challenging lexical constraints that are “homographs” or “unseen” during training. To this end, we first design a homograph disambiguation module to differentiate the meanings of homographs. Moreover, we propose PLUMCOT which integrates contextually rich information about unseen lexical constraints from pre-trained language models and strengthens a copy mechanism of the pointer network via direct supervision of a copying score. We also release HOLLY, an evaluation benchmark for assessing the ability of model to cope with “homographic” and “unseen” lexical constraints. Experiments on HOLLY and the previous test setup show the effectiveness of our method. The effects of PLUMCOT are shown to be remarkable in “unseen” constraints. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/papago-lab/HOLLY-benchmark.
NoisywikiHow: A Benchmark for Learning with Real-world Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing
Authors: Tingting Wu; Xiao Ding; Minji Tang; Hao Zhang; Bing Qin; Ting Liu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Large-scale datasets in the real world inevitably involve label noise. Deep models can gradually overfit noisy labels and thus degrade model generalization. To mitigate the effects of label noise, learning with noisy labels (LNL) methods are designed to achieve better generalization performance. Due to the lack of suitable datasets, previous studies have frequently employed synthetic label noise to mimic real-world label noise. However, synthetic noise is not instance-dependent, making this approximation not always effective in practice. Recent research has proposed benchmarks for learning with real-world noisy labels. However, the noise sources within may be single or fuzzy, making benchmarks different from data with heterogeneous label noises in the real world. To tackle these issues, we contribute NoisywikiHow, the largest NLP benchmark built with minimal supervision. Specifically, inspired by human cognition, we explicitly construct multiple sources of label noise to imitate human errors throughout the annotation, replicating real-world noise, whose corruption is affected by both ground-truth labels and instances. Moreover, we provide a variety of noise levels to support controlled experiments on noisy data, enabling us to evaluate LNL methods systematically and comprehensively. After that, we conduct extensive multi-dimensional experiments on a broad range of LNL methods, obtaining new and intriguing findings.
Sampling Better Negatives for Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Lu Xu; Lidong Bing; Wei Lu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) has been proposed to exploit the automatically labeled training data instead of human annotations. The distantly annotated datasets are often noisy and contain a considerable number of false negatives. The recent approach uses a weighted sampling approach to select a subset of negative samples for training. However, it requires a good classifier to assign weights to the negative samples. In this paper, we propose a simple and straightforward approach for selecting the top negative samples that have high similarities with all the positive samples for training. Our method achieves consistent performance improvements on four distantly supervised NER datasets. Our analysis also shows that it is critical to differentiate the true negatives from the false negatives.
Prototype-Based Interpretability for Legal Citation Prediction
Authors: Chu Fei Luo; Rohan Bhambhoria; Samuel Dahan; Xiaodan Zhu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Deep learning has made significant progress in the past decade, and demonstrates potential to solve problems with extensive social impact. In high-stakes decision making areas such as law, experts often require interpretability for automatic systems to be utilized in practical settings. In this work, we attempt to address these requirements applied to the important problem of legal citation prediction (LCP). We design the task with parallels to the thought-process of lawyers, i.e., with reference to both precedents and legislative provisions. After initial experimental results, we refine the target citation predictions with the feedback of legal experts. Additionally, we introduce a prototype architecture to add interpretability, achieving strong performance while adhering to decision parameters used by lawyers. Our study builds on and leverages the state-of-the-art language processing models for law, while addressing vital considerations for high-stakes tasks with practical societal impact.
LMs stand their Ground: Investigating the Effect of Embodiment in Figurative Language Interpretation by Language Models
Authors: Philipp Wicke
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Figurative language is a challenge for language models since its interpretation is based on the use of words in a way that deviates from their conventional order and meaning. Yet, humans can easily understand and interpret metaphors, similes or idioms as they can be derived from embodied metaphors. Language is a proxy for embodiment and if a metaphor is conventional and lexicalised, it becomes easier for a system without a body to make sense of embodied concepts. Yet, the intricate relation between embodiment and features such as concreteness or age of acquisition has not been studied in the context of figurative language interpretation concerning language models. Hence, the presented study shows how larger language models perform better at interpreting metaphoric sentences when the action of the metaphorical sentence is more embodied. The analysis rules out multicollinearity with other features (e.g. word length or concreteness) and provides initial evidence that larger language models conceptualise embodied concepts to a degree that facilitates figurative language understanding.
Making Better Use of Training Corpus: Retrieval-based Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction via Label Interpolation
Authors: Guoxin Yu; Lemao Liu; Haiyun Jiang; Shuming Shi; Xiang Ao
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: In this paper, we aim to adapt the idea of retrieval-based neural approaches to the Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) task. Different from previous studies retrieving semantic similar neighbors, the ASTE task has its specialized challenges when adapting, i.e., the purpose includes predicting the sentiment polarity and it is usually aspect-dependent. Semantic similar neighbors with different polarities will be infeasible even counterproductive. To tackle this issue, we propose a retrieval-based neural ASTE approach, named RLI (Retrieval-based Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction via Label Interpolation), which exploits the label information of neighbors. Given an aspect-opinion term pair, we retrieve semantic similar triplets from the training corpus and interpolate their label information into the augmented representation of the target pair. The retriever is jointly trained with the whole ASTE framework, and neighbors with both similar semantics and sentiments can be recalled with the aid of this distant supervision. In addition, we design a simple yet effective pre-train method for the retriever that implicitly encodes the label similarities. Extensive experiments and analysis on two widely-used benchmarks show that the proposed model establishes a new state-of-the-art on ASTE.
Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking with Disentangled Domain-Slot Attention
Authors: Longfei Yang; Jiyi Li; Sheng Li; Takahiro Shinozaki
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: As the core of task-oriented dialogue systems, dialogue state tracking (DST) is designed to track the dialogue state through the conversation between users and systems. Multi-domain DST has been an important challenge in which the dialogue states across multiple domains need to consider. In recent mainstream approaches, each domain and slot are aggregated and regarded as a single query feeding into attention with the dialogue history to obtain domain-slot specific representations. In this work, we propose disentangled domain-slot attention for multi-domain dialogue state tracking. The proposed approach disentangles the domain-slot specific information extraction in a flexible and context-dependent manner by separating the query about domains and slots in the attention component. Through a series of experiments on MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.4 datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the standard multi-head attention with aggregated domain-slot query.
Improved Visual Story Generation with Adaptive Context Modeling
Authors: Zhangyin Feng; Yuchen Ren; Xinmiao Yu; Xiaocheng Feng; Duyu Tang; Shuming Shi; Bing Qin
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Diffusion models developed on top of powerful text-to-image generation models like Stable Diffusion achieve remarkable success in visual story generation. However, the best-performing approach considers historically generated results as flattened memory cells, ignoring the fact that not all preceding images contribute equally to the generation of the characters and scenes at the current stage. To address this, we present a simple method that improves the leading system with adaptive context modeling, which is not only incorporated in the encoder but also adopted as additional guidance in the sampling stage to boost the global consistency of the generated story. We evaluate our model on PororoSV and FlintstonesSV datasets and show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on both story visualization and continuation scenarios. We conduct detailed model analysis and show that our model excels at generating semantically consistent images for stories.
Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph Modeling over Key Utterances for Dialogue Reading Comprehension
Authors: Jiangnan Li; Mo Yu; Fandong Meng; Zheng Lin; Peng Fu; Weiping Wang; Jie Zhou
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: We focus on dialogue reading comprehension (DRC) that extracts answers from dialogues. Compared to standard RC tasks, DRC has raised challenges because of the complex speaker information and noisy dialogue context. Essentially, the challenges come from the speaker-centric nature of dialogue utterances — an utterance is usually insufficient in its surface form, but requires to incorporate the role of its speaker and the dialogue context to fill the latent pragmatic and intention information. We propose to deal with these problems in two folds. First, we propose a new key-utterances-extracting method, which can realize more answer-contained utterances. Second, based on the extracted utterances, we then propose a Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph (QuISG). QuISG involves the question and question-mentioning speaker as nodes. To realize interlocutor scopes, utterances are connected with corresponding speakers in the dialogue. Experiments on the benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance against previous works.
Speech-to-Speech Translation for a Real-world Unwritten Language
Authors: Peng-Jen Chen; Kevin Tran; Yilin Yang; Jingfei Du; Justine Kao; Yu-An Chung; Paden Tomasello; Paul-Ambroise Duquenne; Holger Schwenk; Hongyu Gong; Hirofumi Inaguma; Sravya Popuri; Changhan Wang; Juan Pino; Wei-Ning Hsu; Ann Lee
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: We study speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) that translates speech from one language into another language and focuses on building systems to support languages without standard text writing systems. We use English-Taiwanese Hokkien as a case study, and present an end-to-end solution from training data collection, modeling choices to benchmark dataset release. First, we present efforts on creating human annotated data, automatically mining data from large unlabeled speech datasets, and adopting pseudo-labeling to produce weakly supervised data. On the modeling, we take advantage of recent advances in applying self-supervised discrete representations as target for prediction in S2ST and show the effectiveness of leveraging additional text supervision from Mandarin, a language similar to Hokkien, in model training. Finally, we release an S2ST benchmark set to facilitate future research in this field.
Code Execution with Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Chenxiao Liu; Shuai Lu; Weizhu Chen; Daxin Jiang; Alexey Svyatkovskiy; Shengyu Fu; Neel Sundaresan; Nan Duan
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Code execution is a fundamental aspect of programming language semantics that reflects the exact behavior of the code. However, most pre-trained models for code intelligence ignore the execution trace and only rely on source code and syntactic structures. In this paper, we investigate how well pre-trained models can understand and perform code execution. We develop a mutation-based data augmentation technique to create a large-scale and realistic Python dataset and task for code execution, which challenges existing models such as Codex. We then present CodeExecutor, a Transformer model that leverages code execution pre-training and curriculum learning to enhance its semantic comprehension. We evaluate CodeExecutor on code execution and show its promising performance and limitations. We also demonstrate its potential benefits for code intelligence tasks such as zero-shot code-to-code search and text-to-code generation. Our analysis provides insights into the learning and generalization abilities of pre-trained models for code execution.