Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Semi-Supervised Text Classification with Balanced Deep Representation Distributions

Semi-Supervised Text Classification (SSTC) mainly works under the spirit of self-training. They initialize the deep classifier by training over labeled texts; and then alternatively predict unlabeled texts as their pseudo-labels and train the deep classifier over the mixture of labeled and pseudo-labeled texts. Naturally, their performance is largely affected by the accuracy of pseudo-labels for unlabeled texts. Unfortunately, they often suffer from low accuracy because of the margin bias problem caused by the large difference between representation distributions of labels in SSTC. To alleviate this problem, we apply the angular margin loss, and perform Gaussian linear transformation to achieve balanced label angle variances, i.e., the variance of label angles of texts within the same label. More accuracy of predicted pseudo-labels can be achieved by constraining all label angle variances balanced, where they are estimated over both labeled and pseudo-labeled texts during self-training loops. With this insight, we propose a novel SSTC method, namely Semi-Supervised Text Classification with Balanced Deep representation Distributions (S2TC-BDD). To evaluate S2TC-BDD, we compare it against the state-of-the-art SSTC methods. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of S2TC-BDD, especially when the labeled texts are scarce.
Fast and Accurate Neural Machine Translation with Translation Memory

It is generally believed that a translation memory (TM) should be beneficial for machine translation tasks. Unfortunately, existing wisdom demonstrates the superiority of TM-based neural machine translation (NMT) only on the TM-specialized translation tasks rather than general tasks, with a non-negligible computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate approach to TM-based NMT within the Transformer framework: the model architecture is simple and employs a single bilingual sentence as its TM, leading to efficient training and inference; and its parameters are effectively optimized through a novel training criterion. Extensive experiments on six TM-specialized tasks show that the proposed approach substantially surpasses several strong baselines that use multiple TMs, in terms of BLEU and running time. In particular, the proposed approach also advances the strong baselines on two general tasks (WMT news Zh->En and En->De).
Surprisal Estimators for Human Reading Times Need Character Models

While the use of character models has been popular in NLP applications, it has not been explored much in the context of psycholinguistic modeling. This paper presents a character model that can be applied to a structural parser-based processing model to calculate word generation probabilities. Experimental results show that surprisal estimates from a structural processing model using this character model deliver substantially better fits to self-paced reading, eye-tracking, and fMRI data than those from large-scale language models trained on much more data. This may suggest that the proposed processing model provides a more humanlike account of sentence processing, which assumes a larger role of morphology, phonotactics, and orthographic complexity than was previously thought.
Poisoning Knowledge Graph Embeddings via Relation Inference Patterns

We study the problem of generating data poisoning attacks against Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) models for the task of link prediction in knowledge graphs. To poison KGE models, we propose to exploit their inductive abilities which are captured through the relationship patterns like symmetry, inversion and composition in the knowledge graph. Specifically, to degrade the model’s prediction confidence on target facts, we propose to improve the model’s prediction confidence on a set of decoy facts. Thus, we craft adversarial additions that can improve the model’s prediction confidence on decoy facts through different inference patterns. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed poisoning attacks outperform state-of-art baselines on four KGE models for two publicly available datasets. We also find that the symmetry pattern based attacks generalize across all model-dataset combinations which indicates the sensitivity of KGE models to this pattern.
Unsupervised Extractive Summarization-Based Representations for Accurate and Explainable Collaborative Filtering

We pioneer the first extractive summarization-based collaborative filtering model called ESCOFILT. Our proposed model specifically produces extractive summaries for each item and user. Unlike other types of explanations, summary-level explanations closely resemble real-life explanations. The strength of ESCOFILT lies in the fact that it unifies representation and explanation. In other words, extractive summaries both represent and explain the items and users. Our model uniquely integrates BERT, K-Means embedding clustering, and multilayer perceptron to learn sentence embeddings, representation-explanations, and user-item interactions, respectively. We argue that our approach enhances both rating prediction accuracy and user/item explainability. Our experiments illustrate that ESCOFILT’s prediction accuracy is better than the other state-of-the-art recommender models. Furthermore, we propose a comprehensive set of criteria that assesses the real-life explainability of explanations. Our explainability study demonstrates the superiority of and preference for summary-level explanations over other explanation types.
ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF A RECTANGULAR DIELECTRIC RESONATOR ANTENNA FED BY DIELECTRIC IMAGE LINE THROUGH NARROW

Analysis and design of a narrow aperture coupled rectangular dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) fed by dielectric image line (DIL) are presented. The modal expansion method is used to describe the fields in the dielectric resonator side and the change in the modal voltage of the image line at the aperture is developed to analyze the single element DRA. The DIL is connected to the Xband rectangular waveguide through a waveguide transition and DIL tapering is used to match between the waveguide and the DIL.
How effective is BERT without word ordering? Implications for language understanding and data privacy

Ordered word sequences contain the rich structures that define language. However, it’s often not clear if or how modern pretrained language models utilize these structures. We show that the token representations and self-attention activations within BERT are surprisingly resilient to shuffling the order of input tokens, and that for several GLUE language understanding tasks, shuffling only minimally degrades performance, e.g., by 4% for QNLI. While bleak from the perspective of language understanding, our results have positive implications for cases where copyright or ethics necessitates the consideration of bag-of-words data (vs. full documents). We simulate such a scenario for three sensitive classification tasks, demonstrating minimal performance degradation vs. releasing full language sequences.
Neural Stylistic Response Generation with Disentangled Latent Variables

Generating open-domain conversational responses in the desired style usually suffers from the lack of parallel data in the style. Meanwhile, using monolingual stylistic data to increase style intensity often leads to the expense of decreasing content relevance. In this paper, we propose to disentangle the content and style in latent space by diluting sentence-level information in style representations. Combining the desired style representation and a response content representation will then obtain a stylistic response. Our approach achieves a higher BERT-based style intensity score and comparable BLEU scores, compared with baselines. Human evaluation results show that our approach significantly improves style intensity and maintains content relevance.
LexFit: Lexical Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Language Models

Transformer-based language models (LMs) pretrained on large text collections implicitly store a wealth of lexical semantic knowledge, but it is non-trivial to extract that knowledge effectively from their parameters. Inspired by prior work on semantic specialization of static word embedding (WE) models, we show that it is possible to expose and enrich lexical knowledge from the LMs, that is, to specialize them to serve as effective and universal “decontextualized” word encoders even when fed input words “in isolation” (i.e., without any context). Their transformation into such word encoders is achieved through a simple and efficient lexical fine-tuning procedure (termed LexFit) based on dual-encoder network structures. Further, we show that LexFit can yield effective word encoders even with limited lexical supervision and, via cross-lingual transfer, in different languages without any readily available external knowledge. Our evaluation over four established, structurally different lexical-level tasks in 8 languages indicates the superiority of LexFit-based WEs over standard static WEs (e.g., fastText) and WEs from vanilla LMs. Other extensive experiments and ablation studies further profile the LexFit framework, and indicate best practices and performance variations across LexFit variants, languages, and lexical tasks, also directly questioning the usefulness of traditional WE models in the era of large neural models.
A Large-Scale Chinese Multimodal NER Dataset with Speech Clues

In this paper, we aim to explore an uncharted territory, which is Chinese multimodal named entity recognition (NER) with both textual and acoustic contents. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale human-annotated Chinese multimodal NER dataset, named CNERTA. Our corpus totally contains 42,987 annotated sentences accompanying by 71 hours of speech data. Based on this dataset, we propose a family of strong and representative baseline models, which can leverage textual features or multimodal features. Upon these baselines, to capture the natural monotonic alignment between the textual modality and the acoustic modality, we further propose a simple multimodal multitask model by introducing a speech-to-text alignment auxiliary task. Through extensive experiments, we observe that: (1) Progressive performance boosts as we move from unimodal to multimodal, verifying the necessity of integrating speech clues into Chinese NER. (2) Our proposed model yields state-of-the-art (SoTA) results on CNERTA, demonstrating its effectiveness. For further research, the annotated dataset is publicly available at http://github.com/DianboWork/CNERTA.
Structure–property relationships in super-toughened polypropylene-based ternary blends of core–shell morphology

Structure–property relationships in PP/EPDM-g-MA/PA6 (70/15/15) ternary blends were studied in detail. PP-based reactive ternary blends with greatly improved impact strength were obtained via manipulation of phase morphology by applying different processing methods. SEM and TEM techniques were employed to study the phase morphology, which was shown to have a significant effect on the different properties, especially a tremendous improvement in the impact toughness. Reactive ternary blends showed core–shell morphology (core: PA6, shell: EPDM-g-MA in PP matrix) with quite different dispersed structures, in the form of mainly individual core–shells, clusters of core–shell particles, or percolation of clusters. Phase compatibility and thermal properties of the blends were studied by DMA and DSC analysis. A super-toughened PP-based reactive ternary blend with an impact strength much higher than the PP/EPDM (70/30) binary blend and about 15 times higher than that of pure PP was achieved. This was ascribed to a unique “percolated” structure of core–shell particles in the matrix, indicating the importance of the dispersion state of modifier particles in enhancing the impact strength. Fracture behavior and toughening micro-mechanisms were rationalized by post-mortem fractography of the impact-fractured surfaces. Synergistic effects of the interconnected structure and suitable interfacial adhesion together with cavitation and irreversible plastic growth of micro-voids caused massive shear yielding of the matrix material in the super-toughened blends.
Issues with Entailment-based Zero-shot Text Classification

The general format of natural language inference (NLI) makes it tempting to be used for zero-shot text classification by casting any target label into a sentence of hypothesis and verifying whether or not it could be entailed by the input, aiming at generic classification applicable on any specified label space. In this opinion piece, we point out a few overlooked issues that are yet to be discussed in this line of work. We observe huge variance across different classification datasets amongst standard BERT-based NLI models and surprisingly find that pre-trained BERT without any fine-tuning can yield competitive performance against BERT fine-tuned for NLI. With the concern that these models heavily rely on spurious lexical patterns for prediction, we also experiment with preliminary approaches for more robust NLI, but the results are in general negative. Our observations reveal implicit but challenging difficulties in entailment-based zero-shot text classification.
Cross-modal Memory Networks for Radiology Report Generation

Medical imaging plays a significant role in clinical practice of medical diagnosis, where the text reports of the images are essential in understanding them and facilitating later treatments. By generating the reports automatically, it is beneficial to help lighten the burden of radiologists and significantly promote clinical automation, which already attracts much attention in applying artificial intelligence to medical domain. Previous studies mainly follow the encoder-decoder paradigm and focus on the aspect of text generation, with few studies considering the importance of cross-modal mappings and explicitly exploit such mappings to facilitate radiology report generation. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal memory networks (CMN) to enhance the encoder-decoder framework for radiology report generation, where a shared memory is designed to record the alignment between images and texts so as to facilitate the interaction and generation across modalities. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, where state-of-the-art performance is achieved on two widely used benchmark datasets, i.e., IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR. Further analyses also prove that our model is able to better align information from radiology images and texts so as to help generating more accurate reports in terms of clinical indicators.
Dielectric Properties of Some Ethoxylated Primary Amines in Nonaqueous Medium. Effect of Added Alcohol on Dipole Moment and CMC Values

ne and octadecylamine ethoxylates in benzene solutions has been studied over the frequency range 0.2 to 18 GHz at 20, 30 and 40°C. The critical micelle concentration (CMC) values of these surfactants have been determined from the dipole moment-concentration plots through the least-squares regression analysis. The effects of the hydrophobic chain length (R), the hydrophilic polyoxyethylene (POE) chain length and added butanol on the determined CMC values, have been investigated. The thermodynamic parameters (AF, AH and AS) which represent the change of free energy, activation energy and entropy upon micelle formation, were obtained and discussed in terms of the molecular behaviour.
In Factuality: Efficient Integration of Relevant Facts for Visual Question Answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) methods aim at leveraging visual input to answer questions that may require complex reasoning over entities. Current models are trained on labelled data that may be insufficient to learn complex knowledge representations. In this paper, we propose a new method to enhance the reasoning capabilities of a multi-modal pretrained model (Vision+Language BERT) by integrating facts extracted from an external knowledge base. Evaluation on the KVQA dataset benchmark demonstrates that our method outperforms competitive baselines by 19%, achieving new state-of-the-art results. We also perform an extensive analysis highlighting the limitations of our best performing model through an ablation study.
Value-Agnostic Conversational Semantic Parsing

Conversational semantic parsers map user utterances to executable programs given dialogue histories composed of previous utterances, programs, and system responses. Existing parsers typically condition on rich representations of history that include the complete set of values and computations previously discussed. We propose a model that abstracts over values to focus prediction on type- and function-level context. This approach provides a compact encoding of dialogue histories and predicted programs, improving generalization and computational efficiency. Our model incorporates several other components, including an atomic span copy operation and structural enforcement of well-formedness constraints on predicted programs, that are particularly advantageous in the low-data regime. Trained on the SMCalFlow and TreeDST datasets, our model outperforms prior work by 7.3% and 10.6% respectively in terms of absolute accuracy. Trained on only a thousand examples from each dataset, it outperforms strong baselines by 12.4% and 6.4%. These results indicate that simple representations are key to effective generalization in conversational semantic parsing.
SemEval-2021 Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection

The Toxic Spans Detection task of SemEval-2021 required participants to predict the spans of toxic posts that were responsible for the toxic label of the posts. The task could be addressed as supervised sequence labeling, using training data with gold toxic spans provided by the organisers. It could also be treated as rationale extraction, using classifiers trained on potentially larger external datasets of posts manually annotated as toxic or not, without toxic span annotations. For the supervised sequence labeling approach and evaluation purposes, posts previously labeled as toxic were crowd-annotated for toxic spans. Participants submitted their predicted spans for a held-out test set and were scored using character-based F1. This overview summarises the work of the 36 teams that provided system descriptions.
Discovering Dialogue Slots with Weak Supervision

Task-oriented dialogue systems typically require manual annotation of dialogue slots in training data, which is costly to obtain. We propose a method that eliminates this requirement: We use weak supervision from existing linguistic annotation models to identify potential slot candidates, then automatically identify domain-relevant slots by using clustering algorithms. Furthermore, we use the resulting slot annotation to train a neural-network-based tagger that is able to perform slot tagging with no human intervention. This tagger is trained solely on the outputs of our method and thus does not rely on any labeled data. Our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in slot tagging without labeled training data on four different dialogue domains. Moreover, we find that slot annotations discovered by our model significantly improve the performance of an end-to-end dialogue response generation model, compared to using no slot annotation at all.
Learning to Solve NLP Tasks in an Incremental Number of Languages

In real scenarios, a multilingual model trained to solve NLP tasks on a set of languages can be required to support new languages over time. Unfortunately, the straightforward retraining on a dataset containing annotated examples for all the languages is both expensive and time-consuming, especially when the number of target languages grows. Moreover, the original annotated material may no longer be available due to storage or business constraints. Re-training only with the new language data will inevitably result in Catastrophic Forgetting of previously acquired knowledge. We propose a Continual Learning strategy that updates a model to support new languages over time, while maintaining consistent results on previously learned languages. We define a Teacher-Student framework where the existing model “teaches” to a student model its knowledge about the languages it supports, while the student is also trained on a new language. We report an experimental evaluation in several tasks including Sentence Classification, Relational Learning and Sequence Labeling.
Discovering Dialog Structure Graph for Coherent Dialog Generation

Learning discrete dialog structure graph from human-human dialogs yields basic insights into the structure of conversation, and also provides background knowledge to facilitate dialog generation. However, this problem is less studied in open-domain dialogue. In this paper, we conduct unsupervised discovery of discrete dialog structure from chitchat corpora, and then leverage it to facilitate coherent dialog generation in downstream systems. To this end, we present an unsupervised model, Discrete Variational Auto-Encoder with Graph Neural Network (DVAE-GNN), to discover discrete hierarchical latent dialog states (at the level of both session and utterance) and their transitions from corpus as a dialog structure graph. Then we leverage it as background knowledge to facilitate dialog management in a RL based dialog system. Experimental results on two benchmark corpora confirm that DVAE-GNN can discover meaningful dialog structure graph, and the use of dialog structure as background knowledge can significantly improve multi-turn coherence.
DLJUST at SemEval-2021 Task 7: Hahackathon: Linking Humor and Offense

Humor detection and rating poses interesting linguistic challenges to NLP; it is highly subjective depending on the perceptions of a joke and the context in which it is used. This paper utilizes and compares transformers models; BERT base and Large, BERTweet, RoBERTa base and Large, and RoBERTa base irony, for detecting and rating humor and offense. The proposed models, where given a text in cased and uncased type obtained from SemEval-2021 Task7: HaHackathon: Linking Humor and Offense Across Different Age Groups. The highest scored model for the first subtask: Humor Detection, is BERTweet base cased model with 0.9540 F1-score, for the second subtask: Average Humor Rating Score, it is BERT Large cased with the minimum RMSE of 0.5555, for the fourth subtask: Average Offensiveness Rating Score, it is BERTweet base cased model with minimum RMSE of 0.4822.
Matching Distributions between Model and Data: Cross-domain Knowledge Distillation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer the knowledge of source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Existing methods typically require to learn to adapt the target model by exploiting the source data and sharing the network architecture across domains. However, this pipeline makes the source data risky and is inflexible for deploying the target model. This paper tackles a novel setting where only a trained source model is available and different network architectures can be adapted for target domain in terms of deployment environments. We propose a generic framework named Cross-domain Knowledge Distillation (CdKD) without needing any source data. CdKD matches the joint distributions between a trained source model and a set of target data during distilling the knowledge from the source model to the target domain. As a type of important knowledge in the source domain, for the first time, the gradient information is exploited to boost the transfer performance. Experiments on cross-domain text classification demonstrate that CdKD achieves superior performance, which verifies the effectiveness in this novel setting.