huashen218/convxai-cia-dataset huggingface dataset:
Improving Disentangled Text Representation Learning with Information-Theoretic Guidance
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Learning disentangled representations of natural language is essential for many NLP tasks, e.g., conditional text generation, style transfer, personalized dialogue systems, etc. Similar problems have been studied extensively for other forms of data, such as images and videos. However, the discrete nature of natural language makes the disentangling of textual representations more challenging (e.g., the manipulation over the data space cannot be easily achieved). Inspired by information theory, we propose a novel method that effectively manifests disentangled representations of text, without any supervision on semantics. A new mutual information upper bound is derived and leveraged to measure dependence between style and content. By minimizing this upper bound, the proposed method induces style and content embeddings into two independent low-dimensional spaces. Experiments on both conditional text generation and text-style transfer demonstrate the high quality of our disentangled representation in terms of content and style preservation.
Understanding Advertisements with BERT
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: We consider a task based on CVPR 2018 challenge dataset on advertisement (Ad) understanding. The task involves detecting the viewer{'}s interpretation of an Ad image captured as text. Recent results have shown that the embedded scene-text in the image holds a vital cue for this task. Motivated by this, we fine-tune the base BERT model for a sentence-pair classification task. Despite utilizing the scene-text as the only source of visual information, we could achieve a hit-or-miss accuracy of 84.95{\%} on the challenge test data. To enable BERT to process other visual information, we append image captions to the scene-text. This achieves an accuracy of 89.69{\%}, which is an improvement of 4.7{\%}. This is the best reported result for this task.
Non-Linear Instance-Based Cross-Lingual Mapping for Non-Isomorphic Embedding Spaces
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: We present InstaMap, an instance-based method for learning projection-based cross-lingual word embeddings. Unlike prior work, it deviates from learning a single global linear projection. InstaMap is a non-parametric model that learns a non-linear projection by iteratively: (1) finding a globally optimal rotation of the source embedding space relying on the Kabsch algorithm, and then (2) moving each point along an instance-specific translation vector estimated from the translation vectors of the point{'}s nearest neighbours in the training dictionary. We report performance gains with InstaMap over four representative state-of-the-art projection-based models on bilingual lexicon induction across a set of 28 diverse language pairs. We note prominent improvements, especially for more distant language pairs (i.e., languages with non-isomorphic monolingual spaces).
Good-Enough Compositional Data Augmentation
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: We propose a simple data augmentation protocol aimed at providing a compositional inductive bias in conditional and unconditional sequence models. Under this protocol, synthetic training examples are constructed by taking real training examples and replacing (possibly discontinuous) fragments with other fragments that appear in at least one similar environment. The protocol is model-agnostic and useful for a variety of tasks. Applied to neural sequence-to-sequence models, it reduces error rate by as much as 87{\%} on diagnostic tasks from the SCAN dataset and 16{\%} on a semantic parsing task. Applied to n-gram language models, it reduces perplexity by roughly 1{\%} on small corpora in several languages.
RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: When translating natural language questions into SQL queries to answer questions from a database, contemporary semantic parsing models struggle to generalize to unseen database schemas. The generalization challenge lies in (a) encoding the database relations in an accessible way for the semantic parser, and (b) modeling alignment between database columns and their mentions in a given query. We present a unified framework, based on the relation-aware self-attention mechanism, to address schema encoding, schema linking, and feature representation within a text-to-SQL encoder. On the challenging Spider dataset this framework boosts the exact match accuracy to 57.2{\%}, surpassing its best counterparts by 8.7{\%} absolute improvement. Further augmented with BERT, it achieves the new state-of-the-art performance of 65.6{\%} on the Spider leaderboard. In addition, we observe qualitative improvements in the model{'}s understanding of schema linking and alignment. Our implementation will be open-sourced at https://github.com/Microsoft/rat-sql.
Temporal Common Sense Acquisition with Minimal Supervision
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Temporal common sense (e.g., duration and frequency of events) is crucial for understanding natural language. However, its acquisition is challenging, partly because such information is often not expressed explicitly in text, and human annotation on such concepts is costly. This work proposes a novel sequence modeling approach that exploits explicit and implicit mentions of temporal common sense, extracted from a large corpus, to build TacoLM, a temporal common sense language model. Our method is shown to give quality predictions of various dimensions of temporal common sense (on UDST and a newly collected dataset from RealNews). It also produces representations of events for relevant tasks such as duration comparison, parent-child relations, event coreference and temporal QA (on TimeBank, HiEVE and MCTACO) that are better than using the standard BERT. Thus, it will be an important component of temporal NLP.
The Sensitivity of Language Models and Humans to Winograd Schema Perturbations
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Large-scale pretrained language models are the major driving force behind recent improvements in perfromance on the Winograd Schema Challenge, a widely employed test of commonsense reasoning ability. We show, however, with a new diagnostic dataset, that these models are sensitive to linguistic perturbations of the Winograd examples that minimally affect human understanding. Our results highlight interesting differences between humans and language models: language models are more sensitive to number or gender alternations and synonym replacements than humans, and humans are more stable and consistent in their predictions, maintain a much higher absolute performance, and perform better on non-associative instances than associative ones.
Temporally-Informed Analysis of Named Entity Recognition
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Natural language processing models often have to make predictions on text data that evolves over time as a result of changes in language use or the information described in the text. However, evaluation results on existing data sets are seldom reported by taking the timestamp of the document into account. We analyze and propose methods that make better use of temporally-diverse training data, with a focus on the task of named entity recognition. To support these experiments, we introduce a novel data set of English tweets annotated with named entities. We empirically demonstrate the effect of temporal drift on performance, and how the temporal information of documents can be used to obtain better models compared to those that disregard temporal information. Our analysis gives insights into why this information is useful, in the hope of informing potential avenues of improvement for named entity recognition as well as other NLP tasks under similar experimental setups.
Towards Open Domain Event Trigger Identification using Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: We tackle the task of building supervised event trigger identification models which can generalize better across domains. Our work leverages the adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) framework to introduce domain-invariance. ADA uses adversarial training to construct representations that are predictive for trigger identification, but not predictive of the example{'}s domain. It requires no labeled data from the target domain, making it completely unsupervised. Experiments with two domains (English literature and news) show that ADA leads to an average F1 score improvement of 3.9 on out-of-domain data. Our best performing model (BERT-A) reaches 44-49 F1 across both domains, using no labeled target data. Preliminary experiments reveal that finetuning on 1{\%} labeled data, followed by self-training leads to substantial improvement, reaching 51.5 and 67.2 F1 on literature and news respectively.
CompGuessWhat?!: A Multi-task Evaluation Framework for Grounded Language Learning
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Approaches to Grounded Language Learning are commonly focused on a single task-based final performance measure which may not depend on desirable properties of the learned hidden representations, such as their ability to predict object attributes or generalize to unseen situations. To remedy this, we present GroLLA, an evaluation framework for Grounded Language Learning with Attributes based on three sub-tasks: 1) Goal-oriented evaluation; 2) Object attribute prediction evaluation; and 3) Zero-shot evaluation. We also propose a new dataset CompGuessWhat?! as an instance of this framework for evaluating the quality of learned neural representations, in particular with respect to attribute grounding. To this end, we extend the original GuessWhat?! dataset by including a semantic layer on top of the perceptual one. Specifically, we enrich the VisualGenome scene graphs associated with the GuessWhat?! images with several attributes from resources such as VISA and ImSitu. We then compare several hidden state representations from current state-of-the-art approaches to Grounded Language Learning. By using diagnostic classifiers, we show that current models{'} learned representations are not expressive enough to encode object attributes (average F1 of 44.27). In addition, they do not learn strategies nor representations that are robust enough to perform well when novel scenes or objects are involved in gameplay (zero-shot best accuracy 50.06{\%}).
Cross-Modality Relevance for Reasoning on Language and Vision
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: This work deals with the challenge of learning and reasoning over language and vision data for the related downstream tasks such as visual question answering (VQA) and natural language for visual reasoning (NLVR). We design a novel cross-modality relevance module that is used in an end-to-end framework to learn the relevance representation between components of various input modalities under the supervision of a target task, which is more generalizable to unobserved data compared to merely reshaping the original representation space. In addition to modeling the relevance between the textual entities and visual entities, we model the higher-order relevance between entity relations in the text and object relations in the image. Our proposed approach shows competitive performance on two different language and vision tasks using public benchmarks and improves the state-of-the-art published results. The learned alignments of input spaces and their relevance representations by NLVR task boost the training efficiency of VQA task.
Learning Web-based Procedures by Reasoning over Explanations and Demonstrations in Context
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: We explore learning web-based tasks from a human teacher through natural language explanations and a single demonstration. Our approach investigates a new direction for semantic parsing that models explaining a demonstration in a context, rather than mapping explanations to demonstrations. By leveraging the idea of inverse semantics from program synthesis to reason backwards from observed demonstrations, we ensure that all considered interpretations are consistent with executable actions in any context, thus simplifying the problem of search over logical forms. We present a dataset of explanations paired with demonstrations for web-based tasks. Our methods show better task completion rates than a supervised semantic parsing baseline (40{\%} relative improvement on average), and are competitive with simple exploration-and-demonstration based methods, while requiring no exploration of the environment. In learning to align explanations with demonstrations, basic properties of natural language syntax emerge as learned behavior. This is an interesting example of pragmatic language acquisition without any linguistic annotation.
Multi-agent Communication meets Natural Language: Synergies between Functional and Structural Language Learning
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: We present a method for combining multi-agent communication and traditional data-driven approaches to natural language learning, with an end goal of teaching agents to communicate with humans in natural language. Our starting point is a language model that has been trained on generic, not task-specific language data. We then place this model in a multi-agent self-play environment that generates task-specific rewards used to adapt or modulate the model, turning it into a task-conditional language model. We introduce a new way for combining the two types of learning based on the idea of reranking language model samples, and show that this method outperforms others in communicating with humans in a visual referential communication task. Finally, we present a taxonomy of different types of language drift that can occur alongside a set of measures to detect them.
HAT: Hardware-Aware Transformers for Efficient Natural Language Processing
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Transformers are ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, but they are difficult to be deployed on hardware due to the intensive computation. To enable low-latency inference on resource-constrained hardware platforms, we propose to design Hardware-Aware Transformers (HAT) with neural architecture search. We first construct a large design space with arbitrary encoder-decoder attention and heterogeneous layers. Then we train a SuperTransformer that covers all candidates in the design space, and efficiently produces many SubTransformers with weight sharing. Finally, we perform an evolutionary search with a hardware latency constraint to find a specialized SubTransformer dedicated to run fast on the target hardware. Extensive experiments on four machine translation tasks demonstrate that HAT can discover efficient models for different hardware (CPU, GPU, IoT device). When running WMT{'}14 translation task on Raspberry Pi-4, HAT can achieve 3{\mbox{$\times$}} speedup, 3.7{\mbox{$\times$}} smaller size over baseline Transformer; 2.7{\mbox{$\times$}} speedup, 3.6{\mbox{$\times$}} smaller size over Evolved Transformer with 12,041{\mbox{$\times$}} less search cost and no performance loss. HAT is open-sourced at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/hardware-aware-transformers.
Hard-Coded Gaussian Attention for Neural Machine Translation
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Recent work has questioned the importance of the Transformer{'}s multi-headed attention for achieving high translation quality. We push further in this direction by developing a {``}hard-coded{''} attention variant without any learned parameters. Surprisingly, replacing all learned self-attention heads in the encoder and decoder with fixed, input-agnostic Gaussian distributions minimally impacts BLEU scores across four different language pairs. However, additionally, hard-coding cross attention (which connects the decoder to the encoder) significantly lowers BLEU, suggesting that it is more important than self-attention. Much of this BLEU drop can be recovered by adding just a single learned cross attention head to an otherwise hard-coded Transformer. Taken as a whole, our results offer insight into which components of the Transformer are actually important, which we hope will guide future work into the development of simpler and more efficient attention-based models.
In Neural Machine Translation, What Does Transfer Learning Transfer?
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Transfer learning improves quality for low-resource machine translation, but it is unclear what exactly it transfers. We perform several ablation studies that limit information transfer, then measure the quality impact across three language pairs to gain a black-box understanding of transfer learning. Word embeddings play an important role in transfer learning, particularly if they are properly aligned. Although transfer learning can be performed without embeddings, results are sub-optimal. In contrast, transferring only the embeddings but nothing else yields catastrophic results. We then investigate diagonal alignments with auto-encoders over real languages and randomly generated sequences, finding even randomly generated sequences as parents yield noticeable but smaller gains. Finally, transfer learning can eliminate the need for a warm-up phase when training transformer models in high resource language pairs.
Learning a Multi-Domain Curriculum for Neural Machine Translation
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Most data selection research in machine translation focuses on improving a single domain. We perform data selection for multiple domains at once. This is achieved by carefully introducing instance-level domain-relevance features and automatically constructing a training curriculum to gradually concentrate on multi-domain relevant and noise-reduced data batches. Both the choice of features and the use of curriculum are crucial for balancing and improving all domains, including out-of-domain. In large-scale experiments, the multi-domain curriculum simultaneously reaches or outperforms the individual performance and brings solid gains over no-curriculum training.
Reducing Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation as a Domain Adaptation Problem
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Training data for NLP tasks often exhibits gender bias in that fewer sentences refer to women than to men. In Neural Machine Translation (NMT) gender bias has been shown to reduce translation quality, particularly when the target language has grammatical gender. The recent WinoMT challenge set allows us to measure this effect directly (Stanovsky et al, 2019) Ideally we would reduce system bias by simply debiasing all data prior to training, but achieving this effectively is itself a challenge. Rather than attempt to create a {`}balanced{'} dataset, we use transfer learning on a small set of trusted, gender-balanced examples. This approach gives strong and consistent improvements in gender debiasing with much less computational cost than training from scratch. A known pitfall of transfer learning on new domains is {`}catastrophic forgetting{'}, which we address at adaptation and inference time. During adaptation we show that Elastic Weight Consolidation allows a performance trade-off between general translation quality and bias reduction. At inference time we propose a lattice-rescoring scheme which outperforms all systems evaluated in Stanovsky et al, 2019 on WinoMT with no degradation of general test set BLEU. We demonstrate our approach translating from English into three languages with varied linguistic properties and data availability.
Translationese as a Language in ``Multilingual'' NMT
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: Machine translation has an undesirable propensity to produce {``}translationese{''} artifacts, which can lead to higher BLEU scores while being liked less by human raters. Motivated by this, we model translationese and original (i.e. natural) text as separate languages in a multilingual model, and pose the question: can we perform zero-shot translation between original source text and original target text? There is no data with original source and original target, so we train a sentence-level classifier to distinguish translationese from original target text, and use this classifier to tag the training data for an NMT model. Using this technique we bias the model to produce more natural outputs at test time, yielding gains in human evaluation scores on both accuracy and fluency. Additionally, we demonstrate that it is possible to bias the model to produce translationese and game the BLEU score, increasing it while decreasing human-rated quality. We analyze these outputs using metrics measuring the degree of translationese, and present an analysis of the volatility of heuristic-based train-data tagging.
Unsupervised Domain Clusters in Pretrained Language Models
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, July 2020)

Abstract: The notion of {``}in-domain data{''} in NLP is often over-simplistic and vague, as textual data varies in many nuanced linguistic aspects such as topic, style or level of formality. In addition, domain labels are many times unavailable, making it challenging to build domain-specific systems. We show that massive pre-trained language models implicitly learn sentence representations that cluster by domains without supervision {--} suggesting a simple data-driven definition of domains in textual data. We harness this property and propose domain data selection methods based on such models, which require only a small set of in-domain monolingual data. We evaluate our data selection methods for neural machine translation across five diverse domains, where they outperform an established approach as measured by both BLEU and precision and recall with respect to an oracle selection.