OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Scientific Paper Extractive Summarization Enhanced by Citation Graphs
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

In a citation graph, adjacent paper nodes share related scientific terms and topics. The graph thus conveys unique structure information of document-level relatedness that can be utilized in the paper summarization task, for exploring beyond the intra-document information. In this work, we focus on leveraging citation graphs to improve scientific paper extractive summarization under different settings. We first propose a Multi-granularity Unsupervised Summarization model (MUS) as a simple and low-cost solution to the task. MUS finetunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link prediction tasks. Then, the abstract sentences are extracted from the corresponding paper considering multi-granularity information. Preliminary results demonstrate that citation graph is helpful even in a simple unsupervised framework. Motivated by this, we next propose a Graph-based Supervised Summarization model (GSS) to achieve more accurate results on the task when large-scale labeled data are available. Apart from employing the link prediction as an auxiliary task, GSS introduces a gated sentence encoder and a graph information fusion module to take advantage of the graph information to polish the sentence representation. Experiments on a public benchmark dataset show that MUS and GSS bring substantial improvements over the prior state-of-the-art model.
Hardness-guided domain adaptation to recognise biomedical named entities under low-resource scenarios
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Domain adaptation is an effective solution to data scarcity in low-resource scenarios. However, when applied to token-level tasks such as bioNER, domain adaptation methods often suffer from the challenging linguistic characteristics that clinical narratives possess, which leads to unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective hardness-guided domain adaptation (HGDA) framework for bioNER tasks that can effectively leverage the domain hardness information to improve the adaptability of the learnt model in low-resource scenarios. Experimental results on biomedical datasets show that our model can achieve significant performance improvement over the recently published state-of-the-art (SOTA) MetaNER model
Syntactic Multi-view Learning for Open Information Extraction
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) aims to extract relational tuples from open-domain sentences. Traditional rule-based or statistical models have been developed based on syntactic structures of sentences, identified by syntactic parsers. However, previous neural OpenIE models under-explore the useful syntactic information. In this paper, we model both constituency and dependency trees into word-level graphs, and enable neural OpenIE to learn from the syntactic structures. To better fuse heterogeneous information from both graphs, we adopt multi-view learning to capture multiple relationships from them. Finally, the finetuned constituency and dependency representations are aggregated with sentential semantic representations for tuple generation. Experiments show that both constituency and dependency information, and the multi-view learning are effective.
Kernel-Whitening: Overcome Dataset Bias with Isotropic Sentence Embedding
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Dataset bias has attracted increasing attention recently for its detrimental effect on the generalization ability of fine-tuned models. The current mainstream solution is designing an additional shallow model to pre-identify biased instances. However, such two-stage methods scale up the computational complexity of training process and obstruct valid feature information while mitigating bias. To address this issue, we utilize the representation normalization method which aims at disentangling the correlations between features of encoded sentences. We find it also promising in eliminating the bias problem by providing isotropic data distribution. We further propose Kernel-Whitening, a Nystrom kernel approximation method to achieve more thorough debiasing on nonlinear spurious correlations. Our framework is end-to-end with similar time consumption to fine-tuning. Experiments show that Kernel-Whitening significantly improves the performance of BERT on out-of-distribution datasets while maintaining in-distribution accuracy.
A Unified Positive-Unlabeled Learning Framework for Document-Level Relation Extraction with Different Levels of Labeling
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Document-level relation extraction (RE) aims to identify relations between entities across multiple sentences. Most previous methods focused on document-level RE under full supervision. However, in real-world scenario, it is expensive and difficult to completely label all relations in a document because the number of entity pairs in document-level RE grows quadratically with the number of entities. To solve the common incomplete labeling problem, we propose a unified positive-unlabeled learning framework - shift and squared ranking loss positive-unlabeled (SSR-PU) learning. We use positive-unlabeled (PU) learning on document-level RE for the first time. Considering that labeled data of a dataset may lead to prior shift of unlabeled data, we introduce a PU learning under prior shift of training data. Also, using none-class score as an adaptive threshold, we propose squared ranking loss and prove its Bayesian consistency with multi-label ranking metrics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an improvement of about 14 F1 points relative to the previous baseline with incomplete labeling. In addition, it outperforms previous state-of-the-art results under both fully supervised and extremely unlabeled settings as well.
Automatic Generation of Socratic Subquestions for Teaching Math Word Problems
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Socratic questioning is an educational method that allows students to discover answers to complex problems by asking them a series of thoughtful questions. Generation of didactically sound questions is challenging, requiring understanding of the reasoning process involved in the problem. We hypothesize that such questioning strategy can not only enhance the human performance, but also assist the math word problem (MWP) solvers. In this work, we explore the ability of large language models (LMs) in generating sequential questions for guiding math word problem-solving. We propose various guided question generation schemes based on input conditioning and reinforcement learning. On both automatic and human quality evaluations, we find that LMs constrained with desirable question properties generate superior questions and improve the overall performance of a math word problem solver. We conduct a preliminary user study to examine the potential value of such question generation models in the education domain. Results suggest that the difficulty level of problems plays an important role in determining whether questioning improves or hinders human performance. We discuss the future of using such questioning strategies in education.
Mixture of Attention Heads: Selecting Attention Heads Per Token
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) networks have been proposed as an efficient way to scale up model capacity and implement conditional computing. However, the study of MoE components mostly focused on the feedforward layer in Transformer architecture. This paper proposes the Mixture of Attention Heads (MoA), a new architecture that combines multi-head attention with the MoE mechanism. MoA includes a set of attention heads that each has its own set of parameters. Given an input, a router dynamically selects a subset of $k$ attention heads per token. This conditional computation schema allows MoA to achieve stronger performance than the standard multi-head attention layer. Furthermore, the sparsely gated MoA can easily scale up the number of attention heads and the number of parameters while preserving computational efficiency. In addition to the performance improvements, MoA also automatically differentiates heads' utilities, providing a new perspective to discuss the model's interpretability. We conducted experiments on several important tasks, including Machine Translation and Masked Language Modeling. Experiments have shown promising results on several tasks against strong baselines that involve large and very deep models.
Information-Theoretic Text Hallucination Reduction for Video-grounded Dialogue
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Video-grounded Dialogue (VGD) aims to decode an answer sentence to a question regarding a given video and dialogue context. Despite the recent success of multi-modal reasoning to generate answer sentences, existing dialogue systems still suffer from a text hallucination problem, which denotes indiscriminate text-copying from input texts without an understanding of the question. This is due to learning spurious correlations from the fact that answer sentences in the dataset usually include the words of input texts, thus the VGD system excessively relies on copying words from input texts by hoping those words to overlap with ground-truth texts. Hence, we design Text Hallucination Mitigating (THAM) framework, which incorporates Text Hallucination Regularization (THR) loss derived from the proposed information-theoretic text hallucination measurement approach. Applying THAM with current dialogue systems validates the effectiveness on VGD benchmarks (i.e., AVSD@DSTC7 and AVSD@DSTC8) and shows enhanced interpretability.
Evidence > Intuition: Transferability Estimation for Encoder Selection
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

With the increase in availability of large pre-trained language models (LMs) in Natural Language Processing (NLP), it becomes critical to assess their fit for a specific target task a priori - as fine-tuning the entire space of available LMs is computationally prohibitive and unsustainable. However, encoder transferability estimation has received little to no attention in NLP. In this paper, we propose to generate quantitative evidence to predict which LM, out of a pool of models, will perform best on a target task without having to fine-tune all candidates. We provide a comprehensive study on LM ranking for 10 NLP tasks spanning the two fundamental problem types of classification and structured prediction. We adopt the state-of-the-art Logarithm of Maximum Evidence (LogME) measure from Computer Vision (CV) and find that it positively correlates with final LM performance in 94% of the setups. In the first study of its kind, we further compare transferability measures with the de facto standard of human practitioner ranking, finding that evidence from quantitative metrics is more robust than pure intuition and can help identify unexpected LM candidates.
Chunk-based Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Semi-parametric models, which augment generation with retrieval, have led to impressive results in language modeling and machine translation, due to their ability to retrieve fine-grained information from a datastore of examples. One of the most prominent approaches, $k$NN-MT, exhibits strong domain adaptation capabilities by retrieving tokens from domain-specific datastores \citep{khandelwal2020nearest}. However, $k$NN-MT requires an expensive retrieval operation for every single generated token, leading to a very low decoding speed (around 8 times slower than a parametric model). In this paper, we introduce a \textit{chunk-based} $k$NN-MT model which retrieves chunks of tokens from the datastore, instead of a single token. We propose several strategies for incorporating the retrieved chunks into the generation process, and for selecting the steps at which the model needs to search for neighbors in the datastore. Experiments on machine translation in two settings, static and ``on-the-fly'' domain adaptation, show that the chunk-based $k$NN-MT model leads to significant speed-ups (up to 4 times) with only a small drop in translation quality.
FiE: Building a Global Probability Space by Leveraging Early Fusion in Encoder for Open-Domain Question Answering
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Generative models have recently started to outperform extractive models in Open Domain Question Answering, largely by leveraging their decoder to attend over multiple encoded passages and combining their information. However, generative models tend to be larger than extractive models due to the need for a decoder, run slower during inference due to auto-regressive decoder beam search, and their generated output often suffers from hallucinations. We propose to extend transformer encoders with the ability to fuse information from multiple passages, using global representation to provide cross-sample attention over all tokens across samples. Furthermore, we propose an alternative answer span probability calculation to better aggregate answer scores in the global space of all samples. Using our proposed method, we outperform the current state-of-the-art method by $2.5$ Exact Match score on the Natural Question dataset while using only $25\%$ of parameters and $35\%$ of the latency during inference, and $4.4$ Exact Match on WebQuestions dataset. When coupled with synthetic data augmentation, we outperform larger models on the TriviaQA dataset as well. The latency and parameter savings of our method make it particularly attractive for open-domain question answering, as these models are often compute-intensive.
MT-GenEval: A Counterfactual and Contextual Dataset for Evaluating Gender Accuracy in Machine Translation
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

As generic machine translation (MT) quality has improved, the need for targeted benchmarks that explore fine-grained aspects of quality has increased. In particular, gender accuracy in translation can have implications in terms of output fluency, translation accuracy, and ethics. In this paper, we introduce MT-GenEval, a benchmark for evaluating gender accuracy in translation from English into eight widely-spoken languages. MT-GenEval complements existing benchmarks by providing realistic, gender-balanced, counterfactual data in eight language pairs where the gender of individuals is unambiguous in the input segment, including multi-sentence segments requiring inter-sentential gender agreement. Our data and code is publicly available under a CC BY SA 3.0 license.
A Span-level Bidirectional Network for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a new fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to extract triplets of aspect terms, sentiments, and opinion terms from review sentences. Recently, span-level models achieve gratifying results on ASTE task by taking advantage of the predictions of all possible spans. Since all possible spans significantly increases the number of potential aspect and opinion candidates, it is crucial and challenging to efficiently extract the triplet elements among them. In this paper, we present a span-level bidirectional network which utilizes all possible spans as input and extracts triplets from spans bidirectionally. Specifically, we devise both the aspect decoder and opinion decoder to decode the span representations and extract triples from aspect-to-opinion and opinion-to-aspect directions. With these two decoders complementing with each other, the whole network can extract triplets from spans more comprehensively. Moreover, considering that mutual exclusion cannot be guaranteed between the spans, we design a similar span separation loss to facilitate the downstream task of distinguishing the correct span by expanding the KL divergence of similar spans during the training process; in the inference process, we adopt an inference strategy to remove conflicting triplets from the results base on their confidence scores. Experimental results show that our framework not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, but achieves better performance in predicting triplets with multi-token entities and extracting triplets in sentences contain multi-triplets.
On the Calibration of Massively Multilingual Language Models
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Massively Multilingual Language Models (MMLMs) have recently gained popularity due to their surprising effectiveness in cross-lingual transfer. While there has been much work in evaluating these models for their performance on a variety of tasks and languages, little attention has been paid on how well calibrated these models are with respect to the confidence in their predictions. We first investigate the calibration of MMLMs in the zero-shot setting and observe a clear case of miscalibration in low-resource languages or those which are typologically diverse from English. Next, we empirically show that calibration methods like temperature scaling and label smoothing do reasonably well towards improving calibration in the zero-shot scenario. We also find that few-shot examples in the language can further help reduce the calibration errors, often substantially. Overall, our work contributes towards building more reliable multilingual models by highlighting the issue of their miscalibration, understanding what language and model specific factors influence it, and pointing out the strategies to improve the same.
Finding Dataset Shortcuts with Grammar Induction
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Many NLP datasets have been found to contain shortcuts: simple decision rules that achieve surprisingly high accuracy. However, it is difficult to discover shortcuts automatically. Prior work on automatic shortcut detection has focused on enumerating features like unigrams or bigrams, which can find only low-level shortcuts, or relied on post-hoc model interpretability methods like saliency maps, which reveal qualitative patterns without a clear statistical interpretation. In this work, we propose to use probabilistic grammars to characterize and discover shortcuts in NLP datasets. Specifically, we use a context-free grammar to model patterns in sentence classification datasets and use a synchronous context-free grammar to model datasets involving sentence pairs. The resulting grammars reveal interesting shortcut features in a number of datasets, including both simple and high-level features, and automatically identify groups of test examples on which conventional classifiers fail. Finally, we show that the features we discover can be used to generate diagnostic contrast examples and incorporated into standard robust optimization methods to improve worst-group accuracy.
Retrieval Augmentation for Commonsense Reasoning: A Unified Approach
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

A common thread of retrieval-augmented methods in the existing literature focuses on retrieving encyclopedic knowledge, such as Wikipedia, which facilitates well-defined entity and relation spaces that can be modeled. However, applying such methods to commonsense reasoning tasks faces two unique challenges, i.e., the lack of a general large-scale corpus for retrieval and a corresponding effective commonsense retriever. In this paper, we systematically investigate how to leverage commonsense knowledge retrieval to improve commonsense reasoning tasks. We proposed a unified framework of retrieval-augmented commonsense reasoning (called RACo), including a newly constructed commonsense corpus with over 20 million documents and novel strategies for training a commonsense retriever. We conducted experiments on four different commonsense reasoning tasks. Extensive evaluation results showed that our proposed RACo can significantly outperform other knowledge-enhanced method counterparts, achieving new SoTA performance on the CommonGen and CREAK leaderboards.
Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

We consider the problem of automatically generating longer stories of over two thousand words. Compared to prior work on shorter stories, long-range plot coherence and relevance are more central challenges here. We propose the Recursive Reprompting and Revision framework (Re3) to address these challenges by (a) prompting a general-purpose language model to construct a structured overarching plan, and (b) generating story passages by repeatedly injecting contextual information from both the plan and current story state into a language model prompt. We then revise by (c) reranking different continuations for plot coherence and premise relevance, and finally (d) editing the best continuation for factual consistency. Compared to similar-length stories generated directly from the same base model, human evaluators judged substantially more of Re3's stories as having a coherent overarching plot (by 14% absolute increase), and relevant to the given initial premise (by 20%).
Continued Pretraining for Better Zero- and Few-Shot Promptability
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Recently introduced language model prompting methods can achieve high accuracy in zero- and few-shot settings while requiring few to no learned task-specific parameters. Nevertheless, these methods still often trail behind full model finetuning. In this work, we investigate if a dedicated continued pretraining stage could improve "promptability", i.e., zero-shot performance with natural language prompts or few-shot performance with prompt tuning. We reveal settings where existing continued pretraining methods lack promptability. We also identify current methodological gaps, which we fill with thorough large-scale experiments. We demonstrate that a simple recipe, continued pretraining that incorporates a trainable prompt during multi-task learning, leads to improved promptability in both zero- and few-shot settings compared to existing methods, up to 31% relative. On the other hand, we find that continued pretraining using MAML-style meta-learning, a method that directly optimizes few-shot promptability, yields subpar performance. We validate our findings with two prompt tuning methods, and, based on our results, we provide concrete recommendations to optimize promptability for different use cases.
Less is More: Summary of Long Instructions is Better for Program Synthesis
Venue: Conference EMNLP 2022
Year: 2022

Despite the success of large pre-trained language models (LMs) such as Codex, they show below-par performance on the larger and more complicated programming related questions. We show that LMs benefit from the summarized version of complicated questions. Our findings show that superfluous information often present in problem description such as human characters, background stories, and names (which are included to help humans in understanding a task) does not help models in understanding a task. To this extent, we create a meta-dataset from the frequently used APPS dataset and the newly created CodeContests dataset for the program synthesis task. Our meta-dataset consists of human and synthesized summaries of the long and complicated programming questions. Experimental results on Codex show that our proposed approach outperforms baseline by 8.13% on the APPS dataset and 11.88% on the CodeContests dataset on average in terms of strict accuracy. Our analysis shows that summaries significantly improve performance for introductory (9.86%) and interview (11.48%) programming questions. However, it shows improvement by a small margin (~ 2%) for competitive programming questions, implying scope for future research in this direction.