Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Synchronous Refinement for Neural Machine Translation

Machine translation typically adopts an encoder-to-decoder framework, in which the decoder generates the target sentence word-by-word in an auto-regressive manner. However, the auto-regressive decoder faces a deep-rooted one-pass issue whereby each generated word is considered as one element of the final output regardless of whether it is correct or not. These generated wrong words further constitute the target historical context to affect the generation of subsequent target words. This paper proposes a novel synchronous refinement method to revise potential errors in the generated words by considering part of the target future context. Particularly, the proposed approach allows the auto-regressive decoder to refine the previously generated target words and generate the next target word synchronously. The experimental results on three widely-used machine translation tasks demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Learning Adaptive Axis Attentions in Fine-tuning: Beyond Fixed Sparse Attention Patterns

We present a comprehensive study of sparse attention patterns in Transformer models. We first question the need for pre-training with sparse attention and present experiments showing that an efficient fine-tuning only approach yields a slightly worse but still competitive model. Then we compare the widely used local attention pattern and the less-well-studied global attention pattern, demonstrating that global patterns have several unique advantages. We also demonstrate that a flexible approach to attention, with different patterns across different layers of the model, is beneficial for some tasks. Drawing on this insight, we propose a novel Adaptive Axis Attention method, which learns—during fine-tuning—different attention patterns for each Transformer layer depending on the downstream task. Rather than choosing a fixed attention pattern, the adaptive axis attention method identifies important tokens—for each task and model layer—and focuses attention on those. It does not require pre-training to accommodate the sparse patterns and demonstrates competitive and sometimes better performance against fixed sparse attention patterns that require resource-intensive pre-training.
Closing the NLP Gap Documentary Linguistics and NLP Need a Shared Software Infrastructure

For decades, researchers in natural language processing and computational linguistics have been developing models and algorithms that aim to serve the needs of language documentation projects. However, these models have seen little use in language documentation despite their great potential for making documentary linguistic artefacts better and easier to produce. In this work, we argue that a major reason for this NLP gap is the lack of a strong foundation of application software which can on the one hand serve the complex needs of language documentation and on the other hand provide effortless integration with NLP models. We further present and describe a work-in-progress system we have developed to serve this need, Glam.
Online Semantic Parsing for Latency Reduction in Task-Oriented Dialogue

Standard conversational semantic parsing maps a complete user utterance into an executable program, after which the program is executed to respond to the user. This could be slow when the program contains expensive function calls. We investigate the opportunity to reduce latency by predicting and executing function calls while the user is still speaking. We introduce the task of online semantic parsing for this purpose, with a formal latency reduction metric inspired by simultaneous machine translation. We propose a general framework with first a learned prefix-to-program prediction module, and then a simple yet effective thresholding heuristic for subprogram selection for early execution. Experiments on the SMCalFlow and TreeDST datasets show our approach achieves large latency reduction with good parsing quality, with a 30%–65% latency reduction depending on function execution time and allowed cost.
Extraction of Diagnostic Reasoning Relations for Clinical Knowledge Graphs

Clinical knowledge graphs lack meaningful diagnostic relations (e.g. comorbidities, sign/symptoms), limiting their ability to represent real-world diagnostic processes. Previous methods in biomedical relation extraction have focused on concept relations, such as gene-disease and disease-drug, and largely ignored clinical processes. In this thesis, we leverage a clinical reasoning ontology and propose methods to extract such relations from a physician-facing point-of-care reference wiki and consumer health resource texts. Given the lack of data labeled with diagnostic relations, we also propose new methods of evaluating the correctness of extracted triples in the zero-shot setting. We describe a process for the intrinsic evaluation of new facts by triple confidence filtering and clinician manual review, as well extrinsic evaluation in the form of a differential diagnosis prediction task.
DepressionOne@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Using Machine Learning with SMOTE and Random UnderSampling to Detect Signs of Depression on Social Media Text.

Depression is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think, and how you act. Detecting depression is essential as it must be treated early to avoid painful consequences. Nowadays, people are broadcasting how they feel via posts and comments. Using social media, we can extract many comments related to depression and use NLP techniques to train and detect depression. This work presents the submission of the DepressionOne team at LT-EDI-2022 for the shared task, detecting signs of depression from social media text. The depression data is small and unbalanced. Thus, we have used oversampling and undersampling methods such as SMOTE and RandomUnderSampler to represent the data. Later, we used machine learning methods to train and detect the signs of depression.
Intrinsic Gradient Compression for Scalable and Efficient Federated Learning

Federated learning is a rapidly growing area of research, holding the promise of privacy-preserving distributed training on edge devices. The largest barrier to wider adoption of federated learning is the communication cost of model updates, which is accentuated by the fact that many edge devices are bandwidth-constrained. At the same time, within the machine learning theory community, a separate line of research has emerged around optimizing networks within a subspace of the full space of all parameters. The dimension of the smallest subspace for which these methods still yield strong results is called the intrinsic dimension. In this work, we prove a general correspondence between the notions of intrinsic dimension and gradient compressibility, and we show that a family of low-bandwidth federated learning algorithms, which we call intrinsic gradient compression algorithms, naturally emerges from this correspondence. Finally, we conduct large-scale NLP experiments using transformer models with over 100M parameters (GPT-2 and BERT), and show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in gradient compression.
Uncovering Values: Detecting Latent Moral Content from Natural Language with Explainable and Non-Trained Methods

Moral values as commonsense norms shape our everyday individual and community behavior. The possibility to extract moral attitude rapidly from natural language is an appealing perspective that would enable a deeper understanding of social interaction dynamics and the individual cognitive and behavioral dimension. In this work we focus on detecting moral content from natural language and we test our methods on a corpus of tweets previously labeled as containing moral values or violations, according to Moral Foundation Theory. We develop and compare two different approaches: (i) a frame-based symbolic value detector based on knowledge graphs and (ii) a zero-shot machine learning model fine-tuned on a task of Natural Language Inference (NLI) and a task of emotion detection. The final outcome from our work consists in two approaches meant to perform without the need for prior training process on a moral value detection task.
Down and Across: Introducing Crossword-Solving as a New NLP Benchmark

Solving crossword puzzles requires diverse reasoning capabilities, access to a vast amount of knowledge about language and the world, and the ability to satisfy the constraints imposed by the structure of the puzzle. In this work, we introduce solving crossword puzzles as a new natural language understanding task. We release a corpus of crossword puzzles collected from the New York Times daily crossword spanning 25 years and comprised of a total of around nine thousand puzzles. These puzzles include a diverse set of clues: historic, factual, word meaning, synonyms/antonyms, fill-in-the-blank, abbreviations, prefixes/suffixes, wordplay, and cross-lingual, as well as clues that depend on the answers to other clues. We separately release the clue-answer pairs from these puzzles as an open-domain question answering dataset containing over half a million unique clue-answer pairs. For the question answering task, our baselines include several sequence-to-sequence and retrieval-based generative models. We also introduce a non-parametric constraint satisfaction baseline for solving the entire crossword puzzle. Finally, we propose an evaluation framework which consists of several complementary performance metrics.
Simultaneous Neural Machine Translation with Prefix Alignment

Simultaneous translation is a task that requires starting translation before the speaker has finished speaking, so we face a trade-off between latency and accuracy. In this work, we focus on prefix-to-prefix translation and propose a method to extract alignment between bilingual prefix pairs. We use the alignment to segment a streaming input and fine-tune a translation model. The proposed method demonstrated higher BLEU than those of baselines in low latency ranges in our experiments on the IWSLT simultaneous translation benchmark.
JHU IWSLT 2022 Dialect Speech Translation System Description

This paper details the Johns Hopkins speech translation (ST) system used in the IWLST2022 dialect speech translation task. Our system uses a cascade of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT). We use a Conformer model for ASR systems and a Transformer model for machine translation. Surprisingly, we found that while using additional ASR training data resulted in only a negligible change in performance as measured by BLEU or word error rate (WER), aggressive text normalization improved BLEU more significantly. We also describe an approach, similar to back-translation, for improving performance using synthetic dialectal source text produced from source sentences in mismatched dialects.
TwittIrish: A Universal Dependencies Treebank of Tweets in Modern Irish

Modern Irish is a minority language lacking sufficient computational resources for the task of accurate automatic syntactic parsing of user-generated content such as tweets. Although language technology for the Irish language has been developing in recent years, these tools tend to perform poorly on user-generated content. As with other languages, the linguistic style observed in Irish tweets differs, in terms of orthography, lexicon, and syntax, from that of standard texts more commonly used for the development of language models and parsers. We release the first Universal Dependencies treebank of Irish tweets, facilitating natural language processing of user-generated content in Irish. In this paper, we explore the differences between Irish tweets and standard Irish text, and the challenges associated with dependency parsing of Irish tweets. We describe our bootstrapping method of treebank development and report on preliminary parsing experiments.
Hard and Soft Evaluation of NLP models with BOOtSTrap SAmpling - BooStSa

Natural Language Processing (NLP) ‘s applied nature makes it necessary to select the most effective and robust models. Producing slightly higher performance is insufficient; we want to know whether this advantage will carry over to other data sets. Bootstrapped significance tests can indicate that ability.So while necessary, computing the significance of models’ performance differences has many levels of complexity. It can be tedious, especially when the experimental design has many conditions to compare and several runs of experiments.We present BooStSa, a tool that makes it easy to compute significance levels with the BOOtSTrap SAmpling procedure to evaluate models that predict not only standard hard labels but soft-labels (i.e., probability distributions over different classes) as well.
KaFSP: Knowledge-Aware Fuzzy Semantic Parsing for Conversational Question Answering over a Large-Scale Knowledge Base

In this paper, we study two issues of semantic parsing approaches to conversational question answering over a large-scale knowledge base: (1) The actions defined in grammar are not sufficient to handle uncertain reasoning common in real-world scenarios. (2) Knowledge base information is not well exploited and incorporated into semantic parsing. To mitigate the two issues, we propose a knowledge-aware fuzzy semantic parsing framework (KaFSP). It defines fuzzy comparison operations in the grammar system for uncertain reasoning based on the fuzzy set theory. In order to enhance the interaction between semantic parsing and knowledge base, we incorporate entity triples from the knowledge base into a knowledge-aware entity disambiguation module. Additionally, we propose a multi-label classification framework to not only capture correlations between entity types and relations but also detect knowledge base information relevant to the current utterance. Both enhancements are based on pre-trained language models. Experiments on a large-scale conversational question answering benchmark demonstrate that the proposed KaFSP achieves significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art models, setting new SOTA results on 8 out of 10 question types, gaining improvements of over 10% F1 or accuracy on 3 question types, and improving overall F1 from 83.01% to 85.33%. The source code of KaFSP is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/KaFSP.
SafetyKit: First Aid for Measuring Safety in Open-domain Conversational Systems

The social impact of natural language processing and its applications has received increasing attention. In this position paper, we focus on the problem of safety for end-to-end conversational AI. We survey the problem landscape therein, introducing a taxonomy of three observed phenomena: the Instigator, Yea-Sayer, and Impostor effects. We then empirically assess the extent to which current tools can measure these effects and current systems display them. We release these tools as part of a “first aid kit” (SafetyKit) to quickly assess apparent safety concerns. Our results show that, while current tools are able to provide an estimate of the relative safety of systems in various settings, they still have several shortcomings. We suggest several future directions and discuss ethical considerations.
Learning and Evaluating Character Representations in Novels

We address the problem of learning fixed-length vector representations of characters in novels. Recent advances in word embeddings have proven successful in learning entity representations from short texts, but fall short on longer documents because they do not capture full book-level information. To overcome the weakness of such text-based embeddings, we propose two novel methods for representing characters: (i) graph neural network-based embeddings from a full corpus-based character network; and (ii) low-dimensional embeddings constructed from the occurrence pattern of characters in each novel. We test the quality of these character embeddings using a new benchmark suite to evaluate character representations, encompassing 12 different tasks. We show that our representation techniques combined with text-based embeddings lead to the best character representations, outperforming text-based embeddings in four tasks. Our dataset and evaluation script will be made publicly available to stimulate additional work in this area.
Learning Non-Autoregressive Models from Search for Unsupervised Sentence Summarization

Text summarization aims to generate a short summary for an input text. In this work, we propose a Non-Autoregressive Unsupervised Summarization (NAUS) approach, which does not require parallel data for training. Our NAUS first performs edit-based search towards a heuristically defined score, and generates a summary as pseudo-groundtruth. Then, we train an encoder-only non-autoregressive Transformer based on the search result. We also propose a dynamic programming approach for length-control decoding, which is important for the summarization task. Experiments on two datasets show that NAUS achieves state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised summarization, yet largely improving inference efficiency. Further, our algorithm is able to perform explicit length-transfer summary generation.
Buy Tesla, Sell Ford: Assessing Implicit Stock Market Preference in Pre-trained Language Models

Pretrained language models such as BERT have achieved remarkable success in several NLP tasks. With the wide adoption of BERT in real-world applications, researchers begin to investigate the implicit biases encoded in the BERT. In this paper, we assess the implicit stock market preferences in BERT and its finance domain-specific model FinBERT. We find some interesting patterns. For example, the language models are overall more positive towards the stock market, but there are significant differences in preferences between a pair of industry sectors, or even within a sector. Given the prevalence of NLP models in financial decision making systems, this work raises the awareness of their potential implicit preferences in the stock markets. Awareness of such problems can help practitioners improve robustness and accountability of their financial NLP pipelines .
Using Cross-Lingual Part of Speech Tagging for Partially Reconstructing the Classic Language Family Tree Model

The tree model is well known for expressing the historic evolution of languages. This model has been considered as a method of describing genetic relationships between languages. Nevertheless, some researchers question the model’s ability to predict the proximity between two languages, since it represents genetic relatedness rather than linguistic resemblance. Defining other language proximity models has been an active research area for many years. In this paper we explore a part-of-speech model for defining proximity between languages using a multilingual language model that was fine-tuned on the task of cross-lingual part-of-speech tagging. We train the model on one language and evaluate it on another; the measured performance is then used to define the proximity between the two languages. By further developing the model, we show that it can reconstruct some parts of the tree model.
Keywords and Instances: A Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework Unifying Hybrid Granularities for Text Generation

Contrastive learning has achieved impressive success in generation tasks to militate the “exposure bias” problem and discriminatively exploit the different quality of references. Existing works mostly focus on contrastive learning on the instance-level without discriminating the contribution of each word, while keywords are the gist of the text and dominant the constrained mapping relationships. Hence, in this work, we propose a hierarchical contrastive learning mechanism, which can unify hybrid granularities semantic meaning in the input text. Concretely, we first propose a keyword graph via contrastive correlations of positive-negative pairs to iteratively polish the keyword representations. Then, we construct intra-contrasts within instance-level and keyword-level, where we assume words are sampled nodes from a sentence distribution. Finally, to bridge the gap between independent contrast levels and tackle the common contrast vanishing problem, we propose an inter-contrast mechanism that measures the discrepancy between contrastive keyword nodes respectively to the instance distribution. Experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms competitive baselines on paraphrasing, dialogue generation, and storytelling tasks.
Improving Specificity in Review Response Generation with Data-Driven Data Filtering

Responding to online customer reviews has become an essential part of successfully managing and growing a business both in e-commerce and the hospitality and tourism sectors. Recently, neural text generation methods intended to assist authors in composing responses have been shown to deliver highly fluent and natural looking texts. However, they also tend to learn a strong, undesirable bias towards generating overly generic, one-size-fits-all outputs to a wide range of inputs. While this often results in ‘safe’, high-probability responses, there are many practical settings in which greater specificity is preferable. In this work we examine the task of generating more specific responses for online reviews in the hospitality domain by identifying generic responses in the training data, filtering them and fine-tuning the generation model. We experiment with a range of data-driven filtering methods and show through automatic and human evaluation that, despite a 60% reduction in the amount of training data, filtering helps to derive models that are capable of generating more specific, useful responses.
Utilizing Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning to Improve Item Categorization BERT Model

Item categorization (IC) is a core natural language processing (NLP) task in e-commerce. As a special text classification task, fine-tuning pre-trained models, e.g., BERT, has become a mainstream solution. To improve IC performance further, other product metadata, e.g., product images, have been used. Although multimodal IC (MIC) systems show higher performance, expanding from processing text to more resource-demanding images brings large engineering impacts and hinders the deployment of such dual-input MIC systems. In this paper, we proposed a new way of using product images to improve text-only IC model: leveraging cross-modal signals between products’ titles and associated images to adapt BERT models in a self-supervised learning (SSL) way. Our experiments on the three genres in the public Amazon product dataset show that the proposed method generates improved prediction accuracy and macro-F1 values than simply using the original BERT. Moreover, the proposed method is able to keep using existing text-only IC inference implementation and shows a resource advantage than the deployment of a dual-input MIC system.
On Target Representation in Continuous-output Neural Machine Translation

Continuous generative models proved their usefulness in high-dimensional data, such as image and audio generation. However, continuous models for text generation have received limited attention from the community. In this work, we study continuous text generation using Transformers for neural machine translation (NMT). We argue that the choice of embeddings is crucial for such models, so we aim to focus on one particular aspect”:" target representation via embeddings. We explore pretrained embeddings and also introduce knowledge transfer from the discrete Transformer model using embeddings in Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces. Our results on the WMT Romanian-English and English-Turkish benchmarks show such transfer leads to the best-performing continuous model.