GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Multi-armed bandits for resource efficient, online optimization of language model pre-training: the use case of dynamic masking
Authors: Inigo Urteaga; Moulay Zaidane Draidia; Tomer Lancewicki; Shahram Khadivi
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: We design and evaluate a Bayesian optimization framework for resource efficient pre-training of Transformer-based language models (TLMs). TLM pre-training requires high computational resources and introduces many unresolved design choices, such as selecting its pre-training hyperparameters.We propose a multi-armed bandit framework for the sequential selection of pre-training hyperparameters, aimed at optimizing language model performance, in a resource efficient manner. We design a Thompson sampling algorithm, with a surrogate Gaussian process reward model of the Masked Language Model (MLM) pre-training objective, for its sequential minimization. Instead of MLM pre-training with fixed masking probabilities, the proposed Gaussian process-based Thompson sampling (GP-TS) accelerates pre-training by sequentially selecting masking hyperparameters that improve performance. We empirically demonstrate how GP-TS pre-trains language models efficiently, i.e., it achieves lower MLM loss in fewer epochs, across a variety of settings. In addition, GP-TS pre-trained TLMs attain competitive downstream performance, while avoiding expensive hyperparameter grid search. GP-TS provides an interactive framework for efficient and optimized TLM pre-training that, by circumventing costly hyperparameter selection, enables substantial computational savings.
ERNIE-Code: Beyond English-Centric Cross-lingual Pretraining for Programming Languages
Authors: Yekun Chai; Shuohuan Wang; Chao Pang; Yu Sun; Hao Tian; Hua Wu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Software engineers working with the same programming language (PL) may speak different natural languages (NLs) and vice versa, erecting huge barriers to communication and working efficiency. Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of generative pre-training in computer programs, yet they are always English-centric. In this work, we step towards bridging the gap between multilingual NLs and multilingual PLs for large language models (LLMs). We release ERNIE-Code, a unified pre-trained language model for 116 NLs and 6 PLs. We employ two methods for universal cross-lingual pre-training: span-corruption language modeling that learns patterns from monolingual NL or PL; and pivot-based translation language modeling that relies on parallel data of many NLs and PLs. Extensive results show that ERNIE-Code outperforms previous multilingual LLMs for PL or NL across a wide range of end tasks of code intelligence, including multilingual code-to-text, text-to-code, code-to-code, and text-to-text generation. We further show its advantage of zero-shot prompting on multilingual code summarization and text-to-text translation. We release our code and pre-trained checkpoints.
PromptAttack: Probing Dialogue State Trackers with Adversarial Prompts
Authors: Xiangjue Dong; Yun He; Ziwei Zhu; James Caverlee
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: A key component of modern conversational systems is the Dialogue State Tracker (or DST), which models a user’s goals and needs. Toward building more robust and reliable DSTs, we introduce a prompt-based learning approach to automatically generate effective adversarial examples to probe DST models. Two key characteristics of this approach are: (i) it only needs the output of the DST with no need for model parameters, and (ii) it can learn to generate natural language utterances that can target any DST. Through experiments over state-of-the-art DSTs, the proposed framework leads to the greatest reduction in accuracy and the best attack success rate while maintaining good fluency and a low perturbation ratio. We also show how much the generated adversarial examples can bolster a DST through adversarial training. These results indicate the strength of prompt-based attacks on DSTs and leave open avenues for continued refinement.
Understanding Programs by Exploiting (Fuzzing) Test Cases
Authors: Jianyu Zhao; Yuyang Rong; Yiwen Guo; Yifeng He; Hao Chen
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Semantic understanding of programs has attracted great attention in the community. Inspired by recent successes of large language models (LLMs) in natural language understanding, tremendous progress has been made by treating programming language as another sort of natural language and training LLMs on corpora of program code. However, programs are essentially different from texts after all, in a sense that they are normally heavily structured and syntax-strict. In particular, programs and their basic units (i.e., functions and subroutines) are designed to demonstrate a variety of behaviors and/or provide possible outputs, given different inputs. The relationship between inputs and possible outputs/behaviors represents the functions/subroutines and profiles the program as a whole. Hence, we propose to incorporate such a relationship into learning, for achieving a deeper semantic understanding of programs. To obtain inputs that are representative enough to trigger the execution of most part of the code, we resort to fuzz testing and propose fuzz tuning to boost the performance of program understanding and code representation learning, given a pre-trained LLM. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on two program understanding tasks including code clone detection and code classification, and it outperforms current state-of-the-arts by large margins. Code is available at https://github.com/rabbitjy/FuzzTuning.
Hybrid Hierarchical Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering
Authors: Manoj Ghuhan Arivazhagan; Lan Liu; Peng Qi; Xinchi Chen; William Yang Wang; Zhiheng Huang
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Retrieval accuracy is crucial to the performance of open-domain question answering (ODQA) systems. Recent work has demonstrated that dense hierarchical retrieval (DHR), which retrieves document candidates first and then relevant passages from the refined document set, can significantly outperform the single stage dense passage retriever (DPR). While effective, this approach requires document structure information to learn document representation and is hard to adopt to other domains without this information. Additionally, the dense retrievers tend to generalize poorly on out-of-domain data comparing with sparse retrievers such as BM25. In this paper, we propose Hybrid Hierarchical Retrieval (HHR) to address the existing limitations. Instead of relying solely on dense retrievers, we can apply sparse retriever, dense retriever, and a combination of them in both stages of document and passage retrieval. We perform extensive experiments on ODQA benchmarks and observe that our framework not only brings in-domain gains, but also generalizes better to zero-shot TriviaQA and Web Questions datasets with an average of 4.69% improvement on recall@100 over DHR. We also offer practical insights to trade off between retrieval accuracy, latency, and storage cost. The code is available on github.
Coherent or Not? Stressing a Neural Language Model for Discourse Coherence in Multiple Languages
Authors: Dominique Brunato; Felice Dell’Orletta; Irene Dini; Andrea Amelio Ravelli
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: In this study, we investigate the capability of a Neural Language Model (NLM) to distinguish between coherent and incoherent text, where the latter has been artificially created to gradually undermine local coherence within text. While previous research on coherence assessment using NLMs has primarily focused on English, we extend our investigation to multiple languages. We employ a consistent evaluation framework to compare the performance of monolingual and multilingual models in both in-domain and out-domain settings. Additionally, we explore the model’s performance in a cross-language scenario.
Understanding Differential Search Index for Text Retrieval
Authors: Xiaoyang Chen; Yanjiang Liu; Ben He; Le Sun; Yingfei Sun
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: The Differentiable Search Index (DSI) is a novel information retrieval (IR) framework that utilizes a differentiable function to generate a sorted list of document identifiers in response to a given query. However, due to the black-box nature of the end-to-end neural architecture, it remains to be understood to what extent DSI possesses the basic indexing and retrieval abilities. To mitigate this gap, in this study, we define and examine three important abilities that a functioning IR framework should possess, namely, exclusivity, completeness, and relevance ordering. Our analytical experimentation shows that while DSI demonstrates proficiency in memorizing the unidirectional mapping from pseudo queries to document identifiers, it falls short in distinguishing relevant documents from random ones, thereby negatively impacting its retrieval effectiveness. To address this issue, we propose a multi-task distillation approach to enhance the retrieval quality without altering the structure of the model and successfully endow it with improved indexing abilities. Through experiments conducted on various datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous DSI baselinesThe code and data for this work can be found at https://github.com/VerdureChen/Understang_DSI.
Masked Audio Text Encoders are Effective Multi-Modal Rescorers
Authors: Jinglun Cai; Monica Sunkara; Xilai Li; Anshu Bhatia; Xiao Pan; Sravan Bodapati
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Masked Language Models (MLMs) have proven to be effective for second-pass rescoring in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. In this work, we propose Masked Audio Text Encoder (MATE), a multi-modal masked language model rescorer which incorporates acoustic representations into the input space of MLM. We adopt contrastive learning for effectively aligning the modalities by learning shared representations. We show that using a multi-modal rescorer is beneficial for domain generalization of the ASR system when target domain data is unavailable. MATE reduces word error rate (WER) by 4%-16% on in-domain, and 3%-7% on out-of-domain datasets, over the text-only baseline. Additionally, with very limited amount of training data (0.8 hours) MATE achieves a WER reduction of 8%-23% over the first-pass baseline.
Replace and Report: NLP Assisted Radiology Report Generation
Authors: Kaveri Kale; Pushpak Bhattacharyya; Kshitij Jadhav
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Clinical practice frequently uses medical imaging for diagnosis and treatment. A significant challenge for automatic radiology report generation is that the radiology reports are long narratives consisting of multiple sentences for both abnormal and normal findings. Therefore, applying conventional image captioning approaches to generate the whole report proves to be insufficient, as these are designed to briefly describe images with short sentences. We propose a template-based approach to generate radiology reports from radiographs. Our approach involves the following: i) using a multilabel image classifier, produce the tags for the input radiograph; ii) using a transformer-based model, generate pathological descriptions (a description of abnormal findings seen on radiographs) from the tags generated in step (i); iii) using a BERT-based multi-label text classifier, find the spans in the normal report template to replace with the generated pathological descriptions; and iv) using a rule-based system, replace the identified span with the generated pathological description. We performed experiments with the two most popular radiology report datasets, IU Chest X-ray and MIMIC-CXR and demonstrated that the BLEU-1, ROUGE-L, METEOR, and CIDEr scores are better than the State-of-the-Art models by 25%, 36%, 44% and 48% respectively, on the IU X-RAY dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to generate chest X-ray radiology reports by first creating small sentences for abnormal findings and then replacing them in the normal report template.
Pre-trained Personalized Review Summarization with Effective Salience Estimation
Authors: Hongyan Xu; Hongtao Liu; Zhepeng Lv; Qing Yang; Wenjun Wang
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Personalized review summarization in recommender systems is a challenging task of generating condensed summaries for product reviews while preserving the salient content of reviews. Recently, Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have become a new paradigm in text generation for the strong ability of natural language comprehension. However, it is nontrivial to apply PLMs in personalized review summarization directly since there are rich personalized information (e.g., user preferences and product characteristics) to be considered, which is crucial to the salience estimation of input review. In this paper, we propose a pre-trained personalized review summarization method, which aims to effectively incorporate the personalized information of users and products into the salience estimation of the input reviews. We design a personalized encoder that could identify the salient contents of the input sequence by jointly considering the semantic and personalized information respectively (i.e., ratings, user and product IDs, and linguistic features), yielding personalized representations for the input reviews and history summaries separately. Moreover, we design an interactive information selection mechanism that further identifies the salient contents of the input reviews and selects relative information from the history summaries. The results on real-world datasets show that our method performs better than the state-of-the-art baselines and could generate more readable summaries.
CaPE: Contrastive Parameter Ensembling for Reducing Hallucination in Abstractive Summarization
Authors: Prafulla Kumar Choubey; Alex Fabbri; Jesse Vig; Chien-Sheng Wu; Wenhao Liu; Nazneen Rajani
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Hallucination is a known issue for neural abstractive summarization models. Recent work suggests that the degree of hallucination may depend on factual errors in the training data. In this work, we propose a new method called Contrastive Parameter Ensembling (CaPE) to use training data more effectively, utilizing variations in noise in training samples to reduce hallucination. Starting with a base model fine-tuned on an entire dataset, we additionally train expert and anti-expert models on clean and noisy subsets of the data, respectively. We then adjust the parameters of the base model by adding (subtracting) the parameters of the expert (anti-expert), advancing the recent work on additive parameter ensembling approaches. Trained on a much smaller data subset, expert and anti-expert models only fractionally (<14%) increases the total training time. Further, CaPE uses parameter ensembling and does not increase the inference time. Experimental results show that CaPE improves performance across different automatic factual metrics and human evaluation, with a maximum improvement of 16.69% and 15.38% on summary-level dependency-arc entailment accuracy for the XSUM and CNN/DM datasets. The CaPE model performs comparably to the base model on metrics of informativeness such as ROUGE.
OpineSum: Entailment-based self-training for abstractive opinion summarization
Authors: Annie Louis; Joshua Maynez
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: A typical product or place often has hundreds of reviews, and summarization of these texts is an important and challenging problem. Recent progress on abstractive summarization in domains such as news has been driven by supervised systems trained on hundreds of thousands of news articles paired with human-written summaries. However for opinion texts, such large scale datasets are rarely available. Unsupervised methods, self-training, and few-shot learning approaches bridge that gap. In this work, we present a novel self-training approach, OpineSum for abstractive opinion summarization. The self-training summaries in this approach are built automatically using a novel application of textual entailment and capture the consensus of opinions across the various reviews for an item. This method can be used to obtain silver-standard summaries on a large scale and train both unsupervised and few-shot abstractive summarization systems. OpineSum outperforms strong peer systems in both settings.
A Call for Standardization and Validation of Text Style Transfer Evaluation
Authors: Phil Ostheimer; Mayank Nagda; Marius Kloft; Sophie Fellenz
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Text Style Transfer (TST) evaluation is, in practice, inconsistent. Therefore, we conduct a meta-analysis on human and automated TST evaluation and experimentation that thoroughly examines existing literature in the field. The meta-analysis reveals a substantial standardization gap in human and automated evaluation. In addition, we also find a validation gap: only few automated metrics have been validated using human experiments. To this end, we thoroughly scrutinize both the standardization and validation gap and reveal the resulting pitfalls. This work also paves the way to close the standardization and validation gap in TST evaluation by calling out requirements to be met by future research.
Bridging the Granularity Gap for Acoustic Modeling
Authors: Chen Xu; Yuhao Zhang; Chengbo Jiao; Xiaoqian Liu; Chi Hu; Xin Zeng; Tong Xiao; Anxiang Ma; Huizhen Wang; Jingbo Zhu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: While Transformer has become the de-facto standard for speech, modeling upon the fine-grained frame-level features remains an open challenge of capturing long-distance dependencies and distributing the attention weights. We propose Progressive Down-Sampling (PDS) which gradually compresses the acoustic features into coarser-grained units containing more complete semantic information, like text-level representation. In addition, we develop a representation fusion method to alleviate information loss that occurs inevitably during high compression. In this way, we compress the acoustic features into 1/32 of the initial length while achieving better or comparable performances on the speech recognition task. And as a bonus, it yields inference speedups ranging from 1.20x to 1.47x.By reducing the modeling burden, we also achieve competitive results when training on the more challenging speech translation task.
MMSD2.0: Towards a Reliable Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection System
Authors: Libo Qin; Shijue Huang; Qiguang Chen; Chenran Cai; Yudi Zhang; Bin Liang; Wanxiang Che; Ruifeng Xu
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Multi-modal sarcasm detection has attracted much recent attention. Nevertheless, the existing benchmark (MMSD) has some shortcomings that hinder the development of reliable multi-modal sarcasm detection system: (1) There are some spurious cues in MMSD, leading to the model bias learning; (2) The negative samples in MMSD are not always reasonable. To solve the aforementioned issues, we introduce MMSD2.0, a correction dataset that fixes the shortcomings of MMSD, by removing the spurious cues and re-annotating the unreasonable samples. Meanwhile, we present a novel framework called multi-view CLIP that is capable of leveraging multi-grained cues from multiple perspectives (i.e., text, image, and text-image interaction view) for multi-modal sarcasm detection. Extensive experiments show that MMSD2.0 is a valuable benchmark for building reliable multi-modal sarcasm detection systems and multi-view CLIP can significantly outperform the previous best baselines.
Learn to Not Link: Exploring NIL Prediction in Entity Linking
Authors: Fangwei Zhu; Jifan Yu; Hailong Jin; Lei Hou; Juanzi Li; Zhifang Sui
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Entity linking models have achieved significant success via utilizing pretrained language models to capture semantic features. However, the NIL prediction problem, which aims to identify mentions without a corresponding entity in the knowledge base, has received insufficient attention. We categorize mentions linking to NIL into Missing Entity and Non-Entity Phrase, and propose an entity linking dataset NEL that focuses on the NIL prediction problem.NEL takes ambiguous entities as seeds, collects relevant mention context in the Wikipedia corpus, and ensures the presence of mentions linking to NIL by human annotation and entity masking. We conduct a series of experiments with the widely used bi-encoder and cross-encoder entity linking models, results show that both types of NIL mentions in training data have a significant influence on the accuracy of NIL prediction. Our code and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/solitaryzero/NIL_EL.
On Text-based Personality Computing: Challenges and Future Directions
Authors: Qixiang Fang; Anastasia Giachanou; Ayoub Bagheri; Laura Boeschoten; Erik-Jan van Kesteren; Mahdi Shafiee Kamalabad; Daniel Oberski
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: Text-based personality computing (TPC) has gained many research interests in NLP. In this paper, we describe 15 challenges that we consider deserving the attention of the NLP research community. These challenges are organized by the following topics: personality taxonomies, measurement quality, datasets, performance evaluation, modelling choices, as well as ethics and fairness. When addressing each challenge, not only do we combine perspectives from both NLP and social sciences, but also offer concrete suggestions. We hope to inspire more valid and reliable TPC research.
Structured Pruning for Efficient Generative Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Chaofan Tao; Lu Hou; Haoli Bai; Jiansheng Wei; Xin Jiang; Qun Liu; Ping Luo; Ngai Wong
Venue: ACL 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023)

Abstract: The increasing sizes of large generative Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) hinder their deploymentin real-world applications. To obtain efficient PLMs, previous studies mostly focus on pruning the attention heads and feed-forward networks (FFNs) of the Transformer. Nevertheless, we find that in generative PLMs, the hidden dimension shared by many other modules (e.g., embedding layer and layer normalization) contains persistent outliers regardless of the network input. This study comprehensively investigates the structured pruning of generative PLMs with all the above compressible components. To identify redundant network structures, we assign learnable masks over compressible components followed by sparse training. Various sizes of PLMs can be flexibly extracted via different thresholds, and are then task-specifically fine-tuned for further improvement. Extensive experiments on language modeling, summarization and machine translation validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. For example, the pruned BART brings 1.51x/6.96x inference speedup on GPU/CPU with 67% size reduction, and can be further combined with quantization for more than 25× compression.