huashen218/convxai-cia-dataset huggingface dataset:
Non-neural Models Matter: a Re-evaluation of Neural Referring Expression Generation Systems
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: In recent years, neural models have often outperformed rule-based and classic Machine Learning approaches in NLG. These classic approaches are now often disregarded, for example when new neural models are evaluated. We argue that they should not be overlooked, since, for some tasks, well-designed non-neural approaches achieve better performance than neural ones. In this paper, the task of generating referring expressions in linguistic context is used as an example. We examined two very different English datasets (WEBNLG and WSJ), and evaluated each algorithm using both automatic and human evaluations.Overall, the results of these evaluations suggest that rule-based systems with simple rule sets achieve on-par or better performance on both datasets compared to state-of-the-art neural REG systems. In the case of the more realistic dataset, WSJ, a machine learning-based system with well-designed linguistic features performed best. We hope that our work can encourage researchers to consider non-neural models in future.
Bridging the Generalization Gap in Text-to-SQL Parsing with Schema Expansion
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Text-to-SQL parsers map natural language questions to programs that are executable over tables to generate answers, and are typically evaluated on large-scale datasets like Spider (Yu et al., 2018). We argue that existing benchmarks fail to capture a certain out-of-domain generalization problem that is of significant practical importance: matching domain specific phrases to composite operation over columns. To study this problem, we first propose a synthetic dataset along with a re-purposed train/test split of the Squall dataset (Shi et al., 2020) as new benchmarks to quantify domain generalization over column operations, and find existing state-of-the-art parsers struggle in these benchmarks. We propose to address this problem by incorporating prior domain knowledge by preprocessing table schemas, and design a method that consists of two components: schema expansion and schema pruning. This method can be easily applied to multiple existing base parsers, and we show that it significantly outperforms baseline parsers on this domain generalization problem, boosting the underlying parsers{'} overall performance by up to 13.8{\%} relative accuracy gain (5.1{\%} absolute) on the new Squall data split.
Predicate-Argument Based Bi-Encoder for Paraphrase Identification
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Paraphrase identification involves identifying whether a pair of sentences express the same or similar meanings. While cross-encoders have achieved high performances across several benchmarks, bi-encoders such as SBERT have been widely applied to sentence pair tasks. They exhibit substantially lower computation complexity and are better suited to symmetric tasks. In this work, we adopt a bi-encoder approach to the paraphrase identification task, and investigate the impact of explicitly incorporating predicate-argument information into SBERT through weighted aggregation. Experiments on six paraphrase identification datasets demonstrate that, with a minimal increase in parameters, the proposed model is able to outperform SBERT/SRoBERTa significantly. Further, ablation studies reveal that the predicate-argument based component plays a significant role in the performance gain.
MINER: Improving Out-of-Vocabulary Named Entity Recognition from an Information Theoretic Perspective
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: NER model has achieved promising performance on standard NER benchmarks. However, recent studies show that previous approaches may over-rely on entity mention information, resulting in poor performance on out-of-vocabulary(OOV) entity recognition. In this work, we propose MINER, a novel NER learning framework, to remedy this issue from an information-theoretic perspective. The proposed approach contains two mutual information based training objectives: i) generalizing information maximization, which enhances representation via deep understanding of context and entity surface forms; ii) superfluous information minimization, which discourages representation from rotate memorizing entity names or exploiting biased cues in data. Experiments on various settings and datasets demonstrate that it achieves better performance in predicting OOV entities.
Leveraging Wikipedia article evolution for promotional tone detection
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Detecting biased language is useful for a variety of applications, such as identifying hyperpartisan news sources or flagging one-sided rhetoric. In this work we introduce WikiEvolve, a dataset for document-level promotional tone detection. Unlike previously proposed datasets, WikiEvolve contains seven versions of the same article from Wikipedia, from different points in its revision history; one with promotional tone, and six without it. This allows for obtaining more precise training signal for learning models from promotional tone detection. We adapt the previously proposed gradient reversal layer framework to encode two article versions simultaneously and thus leverage this additional training signal. In our experiments, our proposed adaptation of gradient reversal improves the accuracy of four different architectures on both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation.
From text to talk: Harnessing conversational corpora for humane and diversity-aware language technology
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Informal social interaction is the primordial home of human language. Linguistically diverse conversational corpora are an important and largely untapped resource for computational linguistics and language technology. Through the efforts of a worldwide language documentation movement, such corpora are increasingly becoming available. We show how interactional data from 63 languages (26 families) harbours insights about turn-taking, timing, sequential structure and social action, with implications for language technology, natural language understanding, and the design of conversational interfaces. Harnessing linguistically diverse conversational corpora will provide the empirical foundations for flexible, localizable, humane language technologies of the future.
Flooding-X: Improving BERT's Resistance to Adversarial Attacks via Loss-Restricted Fine-Tuning
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Adversarial robustness has attracted much attention recently, and the mainstream solution is adversarial training. However, the tradition of generating adversarial perturbations for each input embedding (in the settings of NLP) scales up the training computational complexity by the number of gradient steps it takes to obtain the adversarial samples. To address this problem, we leverage Flooding method which primarily aims at better generalization and we find promising in defending adversarial attacks. We further propose an effective criterion to bring hyper-parameter-dependent flooding into effect with a narrowed-down search space by measuring how the gradient steps taken within one epoch affect the loss of each batch. Our approach requires zero adversarial sample for training, and its time consumption is equivalent to fine-tuning, which can be 2-15 times faster than standard adversarial training. We experimentally show that our method improves BERT{'}s resistance to textual adversarial attacks by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art robust accuracy on various text classification and GLUE tasks.
RoMe: A Robust Metric for Evaluating Natural Language Generation
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Evaluating Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems is a challenging task. Firstly, the metric should ensure that the generated hypothesis reflects the reference{'}s semantics. Secondly, it should consider the grammatical quality of the generated sentence. Thirdly, it should be robust enough to handle various surface forms of the generated sentence. Thus, an effective evaluation metric has to be multifaceted. In this paper, we propose an automatic evaluation metric incorporating several core aspects of natural language understanding (language competence, syntactic and semantic variation). Our proposed metric, RoMe, is trained on language features such as semantic similarity combined with tree edit distance and grammatical acceptability, using a self-supervised neural network to assess the overall quality of the generated sentence. Moreover, we perform an extensive robustness analysis of the state-of-the-art methods and RoMe. Empirical results suggest that RoMe has a stronger correlation to human judgment over state-of-the-art metrics in evaluating system-generated sentences across several NLG tasks.
Finding Structural Knowledge in Multimodal-BERT
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the knowledge learned in the embeddings of multimodal-BERT models. More specifically, we probe their capabilities of storing the grammatical structure of linguistic data and the structure learned over objects in visual data. To reach that goal, we first make the inherent structure of language and visuals explicit by a dependency parse of the sentences that describe the image and by the dependencies between the object regions in the image, respectively. We call this explicit visual structure the scene tree, that is based on the dependency tree of the language description. Extensive probing experiments show that the multimodal-BERT models do not encode these scene trees.
Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Hyperbolic neural networks have shown great potential for modeling complex data. However, existing hyperbolic networks are not completely hyperbolic, as they encode features in the hyperbolic space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space (a Euclidean subspace) at the origin of the hyperbolic model. This hybrid method greatly limits the modeling ability of networks. In this paper, we propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolic networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting the Lorentz transformations (including boost and rotation) to formalize essential operations of neural networks. Moreover, we also prove that linear transformation in tangent spaces used by existing hyperbolic networks is a relaxation of the Lorentz rotation and does not include the boost, implicitly limiting the capabilities of existing hyperbolic networks. The experimental results on four NLP tasks show that our method has better performance for building both shallow and deep networks. Our code will be released to facilitate follow-up research.
Neural Machine Translation with Phrase-Level Universal Visual Representations
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Multimodal machine translation (MMT) aims to improve neural machine translation (NMT) with additional visual information, but most existing MMT methods require paired input of source sentence and image, which makes them suffer from shortage of sentence-image pairs. In this paper, we propose a phrase-level retrieval-based method for MMT to get visual information for the source input from existing sentence-image data sets so that MMT can break the limitation of paired sentence-image input. Our method performs retrieval at the phrase level and hence learns visual information from pairs of source phrase and grounded region, which can mitigate data sparsity. Furthermore, our method employs the conditional variational auto-encoder to learn visual representations which can filter redundant visual information and only retain visual information related to the phrase. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines on multiple MMT datasets, especially when the textual context is limited.
M3ED: Multi-modal Multi-scene Multi-label Emotional Dialogue Database
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: The emotional state of a speaker can be influenced by many different factors in dialogues, such as dialogue scene, dialogue topic, and interlocutor stimulus. The currently available data resources to support such multimodal affective analysis in dialogues are however limited in scale and diversity. In this work, we propose a Multi-modal Multi-scene Multi-label Emotional Dialogue dataset, M$^3$ED, which contains 990 dyadic emotional dialogues from 56 different TV series, a total of 9,082 turns and 24,449 utterances. M$^3$ED is annotated with 7 emotion categories (happy, surprise, sad, disgust, anger, fear, and neutral) at utterance level, and encompasses acoustic, visual, and textual modalities. To the best of our knowledge, M$^3$ED is the first multimodal emotional dialogue dataset in Chinese.It is valuable for cross-culture emotion analysis and recognition. We apply several state-of-the-art methods on the M$^3$ED dataset to verify the validity and quality of the dataset. We also propose a general Multimodal Dialogue-aware Interaction framework, MDI, to model the dialogue context for emotion recognition, which achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods on the M$^3$ED. The full dataset and codes are available.
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition with Self-describing Networks
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Few-shot NER needs to effectively capture information from limited instances and transfer useful knowledge from external resources. In this paper, we propose a self-describing mechanism for few-shot NER, which can effectively leverage illustrative instances and precisely transfer knowledge from external resources by describing both entity types and mentions using a universal concept set. Specifically, we design Self-describing Networks (SDNet), a Seq2Seq generation model which can universally describe mentions using concepts, automatically map novel entity types to concepts, and adaptively recognize entities on-demand. We pre-train SDNet with large-scale corpus, and conduct experiments on 8 benchmarks from different domains. Experiments show that SDNet achieves competitive performances on all benchmarks and achieves the new state-of-the-art on 6 benchmarks, which demonstrates its effectiveness and robustness.
SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Motivated by the success of T5 (Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer) in pre-trained natural language processing models, we propose a unified-modal SpeechT5 framework that explores the encoder-decoder pre-training for self-supervised speech/text representation learning. The SpeechT5 framework consists of a shared encoder-decoder network and six modal-specific (speech/text) pre/post-nets. After preprocessing the input speech/text through the pre-nets, the shared encoder-decoder network models the sequence-to-sequence transformation, and then the post-nets generate the output in the speech/text modality based on the output of the decoder. Leveraging large-scale unlabeled speech and text data, we pre-train SpeechT5 to learn a unified-modal representation, hoping to improve the modeling capability for both speech and text. To align the textual and speech information into this unified semantic space, we propose a cross-modal vector quantization approach that randomly mixes up speech/text states with latent units as the interface between encoder and decoder. Extensive evaluations show the superiority of the proposed SpeechT5 framework on a wide variety of spoken language processing tasks, including automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech translation, voice conversion, speech enhancement, and speaker identification.
Human Evaluation and Correlation with Automatic Metrics in Consultation Note Generation
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: In recent years, machine learning models have rapidly become better at generating clinical consultation notes; yet, there is little work on how to properly evaluate the generated consultation notes to understand the impact they may have on both the clinician using them and the patient{'}s clinical safety.To address this we present an extensive human evaluation study of consultation notes where 5 clinicians (i) listen to 57 mock consultations, (ii) write their own notes, (iii) post-edit a number of automatically generated notes, and (iv) extract all the errors, both quantitative and qualitative. We then carry out a correlation study with 18 automatic quality metrics and the human judgements. We find that a simple, character-based Levenshtein distance metric performs on par if not better than common model-based metrics like BertScore. All our findings and annotations are open-sourced.
Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Information extraction suffers from its varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas. In this paper, we propose a unified text-to-structure generation framework, namely UIE, which can universally model different IE tasks, adaptively generate targeted structures, and collaboratively learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources. Specifically, UIE uniformly encodes different extraction structures via a structured extraction language, adaptively generates target extractions via a schema-based prompt mechanism {--} structural schema instructor, and captures the common IE abilities via a large-scale pretrained text-to-structure model. Experiments show that UIE achieved the state-of-the-art performance on 4 IE tasks, 13 datasets, and on all supervised, low-resource, and few-shot settings for a wide range of entity, relation, event and sentiment extraction tasks and their unification. These results verified the effectiveness, universality, and transferability of UIE.
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Recent works on knowledge base question answering (KBQA) retrieve subgraphs for easier reasoning. The desired subgraph is crucial as a small one may exclude the answer but a large one might introduce more noises. However, the existing retrieval is either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs, which increases the reasoning bias when the intermediate supervision is missing. This paper proposes a trainable subgraph retriever (SR) decoupled from the subsequent reasoning process, which enables a plug-and-play framework to enhance any subgraph-oriented KBQA model. Extensive experiments demonstrate SR achieves significantly better retrieval and QA performance than existing retrieval methods. Via weakly supervised pre-training as well as the end-to-end fine-tuning, SR achieves new state-of-the-art performance when combined with NSM (He et al., 2021), a subgraph-oriented reasoner, for embedding-based KBQA methods. Codes and datasets are available online (https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/SubgraphRetrievalKBQA)
Pre-training to Match for Unified Low-shot Relation Extraction
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Low-shot relation extraction (RE) aims to recognize novel relations with very few or even no samples, which is critical in real scenario application. Few-shot and zero-shot RE are two representative low-shot RE tasks, which seem to be with similar target but require totally different underlying abilities. In this paper, we propose Multi-Choice Matching Networks to unify low-shot relation extraction. To fill in the gap between zero-shot and few-shot RE, we propose the triplet-paraphrase meta-training, which leverages triplet paraphrase to pre-train zero-shot label matching ability and uses meta-learning paradigm to learn few-shot instance summarizing ability. Experimental results on three different low-shot RE tasks show that the proposed method outperforms strong baselines by a large margin, and achieve the best performance on few-shot RE leaderboard.
Can Prompt Probe Pretrained Language Models? Understanding the Invisible Risks from a Causal View
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Association for Computational Linguistics, Dublin, Ireland, May 2022)

Abstract: Prompt-based probing has been widely used in evaluating the abilities of pretrained language models (PLMs). Unfortunately, recent studies have discovered such an evaluation may be inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable. Furthermore, the lack of understanding its inner workings, combined with its wide applicability, has the potential to lead to unforeseen risks for evaluating and applying PLMs in real-world applications. To discover, understand and quantify the risks, this paper investigates the prompt-based probing from a causal view, highlights three critical biases which could induce biased results and conclusions, and proposes to conduct debiasing via causal intervention. This paper provides valuable insights for the design of unbiased datasets, better probing frameworks and more reliable evaluations of pretrained language models. Furthermore, our conclusions also echo that we need to rethink the criteria for identifying better pretrained language models.