mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Abductive Commonsense Reasoning Exploiting Mutually Exclusive Explanations
Authors: Justin Chiu, Claire Cardie, Alexander Rush Wenting Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Abductive reasoning aims to find plausible explanations for an event. This style of reasoning is critical for commonsense tasks where there are often multiple plausible explanations. Existing approaches for abductive reasoning in natural language processing (NLP) often rely on manually generated annotations for supervision; however, such annotations can be subjective and biased. Instead of using direct supervision, this work proposes an approach for abductive commonsense reasoning that exploits the fact that only a subset of explanations is correct for a given context. The method uses posterior regularization to enforce a mutual exclusion constraint, encouraging the model to learn the distinction between fluent explanations and plausible ones. We evaluate our approach on a diverse set of abductive reasoning datasets; experimental results show that our approach outperforms or is comparable to directly applying pretrained language models in a zero-shot manner and other knowledge-augmented zero-shot methods.
PESCO: Prompt-enhanced Self Contrastive Learning for Zero-shot Text Classification
Authors: Ta-Chung Chi, Ruohong Zhang, Yiming Yang Yau-Shian Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: We present PESCO, a novel contrastive learning framework that substantially improves the performance of zero-shot text classification. We formulate text classification as a neural text retrieval problem where each document is treated as a query, and the system learns the mapping from each query to the relevant class labels by (1) adding prompts to enhance label retrieval, and (2) using retrieved labels to enrich the training set in a self-training loop of contrastive learning. PESCO achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark text classification datasets. On DBpedia, we achieve 98.5% accuracy without any labeled data, which is close to the fully-supervised result. Extensive experiments and analyses show all the components of PESCO are necessary for improving the performance of zero-shot text classification.
Visually-augmented pretrained language models for NLP tasks without images
Authors: Kun Zhou, Wayne Xin Zhao, Qinyu Zhang, Ji-Rong Wen Hangyu Guo
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Although pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown impressive performance by text-only self-supervised training, they are found lack of visual semantics or commonsense. Existing solutions often rely on explicit images for visual knowledge augmentation (requiring time-consuming retrieval or generation), and they also conduct the augmentation for the whole input text, without considering whether it is actually needed in specific inputs or tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel **V**isually-**A**ugmented fine-tuning approach that can be generally applied to various PLMs or NLP tasks, **W**ithout using any retrieved or generated **I**mages, namely **VAWI**. Experimental results show that our approach can consistently improve the performance of BERT, RoBERTa, BART, and T5 at different scales, and outperform several competitive baselines on ten tasks. Our codes and data are publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/RUCAIBox/VAWI.
Using counterfactual contrast to improve compositional generalization for multi-step quantitative reasoning
Authors: Sameena Shah, Carolyn Rosé Armineh Nourbakhsh
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: In quantitative question answering, compositional generalization is one of the main challenges of state of the art models, especially when longer sequences of reasoning steps are required. In this paper we propose CounterComp, a method that uses counterfactual scenarios to generate samples with compositional contrast. Instead of a data augmentation approach, CounterComp is based on metric learning, which allows for direct sampling from the training set and circumvents the need for additional human labels. Our proposed auxiliary metric learning loss improves the performance of three state of the art models on four recently released datasets. We also show how the approach can improve OOD performance on unseen domains, as well as unseen compositions. Lastly, we demonstrate how the method can lead to better compositional attention patterns during training.
A Needle in a Haystack: An Analysis of High-Agreement Workers on MTurk for Summarization
Authors: Simon Mille, Yufang Hou, Daniel Deutsch, Elizabeth Clark, Yixin Liu, Saad Mahamood, Sebastian Gehrmann, Miruna Clinciu, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, João Sedoc Lining Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: To prevent the costly and inefficient use of resources on low-quality annotations, we want a method for creating a pool of dependable annotators who can effectively complete difficult tasks, such as evaluating automatic summarization. Thus, we investigate the recruitment of high-quality Amazon Mechanical Turk workers via a two-step pipeline. We show that we can successfully filter out subpar workers before they carry out the evaluations and obtain high-agreement annotations with similar constraints on resources. Although our workers demonstrate a strong consensus among themselves and CloudResearch workers, their alignment with expert judgments on a subset of the data is not as expected and needs further training in correctness. This paper still serves as a best practice for the recruitment of qualified annotators in other challenging annotation tasks.
TAVT: Towards Transferable Audio-Visual Text Generation
Authors: Tao Jin, Wenwen Pan, Linjun Li, Xize Cheng, Ye Wang, Zhou Zhao Wang Lin
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Audio-visual text generation aims to understand multi-modality contents and translate them into texts. Although various transfer learning techniques of text generation have been proposed, they focused on uni-modal analysis (e.g. text-to-text, visual-to-text) and lack consideration of multi-modal content and cross-modal relation. Motivated by the fact that humans can recognize the timbre of the same low-level concepts (e.g., footstep, rainfall, and laughing), even in different visual conditions, we aim to mitigate the domain discrepancies by audio-visual correlation. In this paper, we propose a novel Transferable Audio-Visual Text Generation framework, named TAVT, which consists of two key components: Audio-Visual Meta-Mapper (AVMM) and Dual Counterfactual Contrastive Learning (DCCL). (1) AVMM first introduces a universal auditory semantic space and drifts the domain-invariant low-level concepts into visual prefixes. Then the reconstruct-based learning encourages the AVMM to learn “which pixels belong to the same sound” and achieve audio-enhanced visual prefix. The well-trained AVMM can be further applied to uni-modal setting. (2) Furthermore, DCCL leverages the destructive counterfactual transformations to provide cross-modal constraints for AVMM from the perspective of feature distribution and text generation. (3) The experimental results show that TAVT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across multiple domains (cross-datasets, cross-categories) and various modal settings (uni-modal, multi-modal).
MeetingQA: Extractive Question-Answering on Meeting Transcripts
Authors: Trung Bui, Seunghyun Yoon, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Franck Dernoncourt, Mohit Bansal Archiki Prasad
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: With the ubiquitous use of online meeting platforms and robust automatic speech recognition systems, meeting transcripts have emerged as a promising domain for natural language tasks. Most recent works on meeting transcripts primarily focus on summarization and extraction of action items. However, meeting discussions also have a useful question-answering (QA) component, crucial to understanding the discourse or meeting content, and can be used to build interactive interfaces on top of long transcripts. Hence, in this work, we leverage this inherent QA component of meeting discussions and introduce MeetingQA, an extractive QA dataset comprising of questions asked by meeting participants and corresponding responses. As a result, questions can be open-ended and actively seek discussions, while the answers can be multi-span and distributed across multiple speakers. Our comprehensive empirical study of several robust baselines including long-context language models and recent instruction-tuned models reveals that models perform poorly on this task (F1 = 57.3) and severely lag behind human performance (F1 = 84.6), thus presenting a challenging new task for the community to improve upon.
FERMAT: An Alternative to Accuracy for Numerical Reasoning
Authors: Nafise Sadat Moosavi Jasivan Sivakumar
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: While pre-trained language models achieve impressive performance on various NLP benchmarks, they still struggle with tasks that require numerical reasoning. Recent advances in improving numerical reasoning are mostly achieved using very large language models that contain billions of parameters and are not accessible to everyone. In addition, numerical reasoning is measured using a single score on existing datasets. As a result, we do not have a clear understanding of the strengths and shortcomings of existing models on different numerical reasoning aspects and therefore, potential ways to improve them apart from scaling them up. Inspired by CheckList (Ribeiro et al., 2020), we introduce a multi-view evaluation set for numerical reasoning in English, called FERMAT. Instead of reporting a single score on a whole dataset, FERMAT evaluates models on various key numerical reasoning aspects such as number understanding, mathematical operations, and training dependency. Apart from providing a comprehensive evaluation of models on different numerical reasoning aspects, FERMAT enables a systematic and automated generation of an arbitrarily large training or evaluation set for each aspect. The datasets and codes are publicly available to generate further multi-view data for ulterior tasks and languages.
Don`t Forget Your ABC`s: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Authors: James D. Finch, Jinho D. Choi Sarah E. Finch
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite tremendous advancements in dialogue systems, stable evaluation still requires human judgments producing notoriously high-variance metrics due to their inherent subjectivity. Moreover, methods and labels in dialogue evaluation are not fully standardized, especially for open-domain chats, with a lack of work to compare and assess the validity of those approaches. The use of inconsistent evaluation can misinform the performance of a dialogue system, which becomes a major hurdle to enhance it. Thus, a dimensional evaluation of chat-oriented open-domain dialogue systems that reliably measures several aspects of dialogue capabilities is desired. This paper presents a novel human evaluation method to estimate the rates of many\pasted macro \textquoteleftLN'\ dialogue system behaviors. Our method is used to evaluate four state-of-the-art open-domain dialogue systems and compared with existing approaches. The analysis demonstrates that our behavior method is more suitable than alternative Likert-style or comparative approaches for dimensional evaluation of these systems.
Decoder Tuning: Efficient Language Understanding as Decoding
Authors: Wentao Li, Ning Ding, Longtao Huang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun Ganqu Cui
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: With the evergrowing sizes of pre-trained models (PTMs), it has been an emerging practice to only provide the inference APIs for users, namely model-as-a-service (MaaS) setting. To adapt PTMs with model parameters frozen, most current approaches focus on the input side, seeking powerful prompts to stimulate models for correct answers. However, we argue that input-side adaptation could be arduous due to the lack of gradient signals and they usually require thousands of API queries, resulting in high computation and time costs. Specifically, DecT first extracts prompt-stimulated output scores for initial predictions. On top of that, we train an additional decoder network on the output representations to incorporate posterior data knowledge. By gradient-based optimization, DecT can be trained within several seconds and requires only one PTM query per sample. Empirically, we conduct extensive natural language understanding experiments and show that DecT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with a 200x speed-up. Our code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/thunlp/DecT.
The KITMUS Test: Evaluating Knowledge Integration from Multiple Sources
Authors: Martin Pömsl, Kaheer Suleman, Adam Trischler, Alexandra Olteanu, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung Akshatha Arodi
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Many state-of-the-art natural language understanding (NLU) models are based on pretrained neural language models. These models often make inferences using information from multiple sources. An important class of such inferences are those that require both background knowledge, presumably contained in a model`s pretrained parameters, and instance-specific information that is supplied at inference time. However, the integration and reasoning abilities of NLU models in the presence of multiple knowledge sources have been largely understudied. In this work, we propose a test suite of coreference resolution subtasks that require reasoning over multiple facts. These subtasks differ in terms of which knowledge sources contain the relevant facts. We also introduce subtasks where knowledge is present only at inference time using fictional knowledge. We evaluate state-of-the-art coreference resolution models on our dataset. Our results indicate that several models struggle to reason on-the-fly over knowledge observed both at pretrain time and at inference time. However, with task-specific training, a subset of models demonstrates the ability to integrate certain knowledge types from multiple sources. Still, even the best performing models seem to have difficulties with reliably integrating knowledge presented only at inference time.
CREST: A Joint Framework for Rationalization and Counterfactual Text Generation
Authors: Alexis Ross, Nuno M. Guerreiro, André Martins Marcos Treviso
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Selective rationales and counterfactual examples have emerged as two effective, complementary classes of interpretability methods for analyzing and training NLP models. However, prior work has not explored how these methods can be integrated to combine their complementary advantages. We overcome this limitation by introducing CREST (ContRastive Edits with Sparse raTionalization), a joint framework for selective rationalization and counterfactual text generation, and show that this framework leads to improvements in counterfactual quality, model robustness, and interpretability. First, CREST generates valid counterfactuals that are more natural than those produced by previous methods, and subsequently can be used for data augmentation at scale, reducing the need for human-generated examples. Second, we introduce a new loss function that leverages CREST counterfactuals to regularize selective rationales and show that this regularization improves both model robustness and rationale quality, compared to methods that do not leverage CREST counterfactuals. Our results demonstrate that CREST successfully bridges the gap between selective rationales and counterfactual examples, addressing the limitations of existing methods and providing a more comprehensive view of a model`s predictions.
Towards Unifying Multi-Lingual and Cross-Lingual Summarization
Authors: Fandong Meng, Duo Zheng, Yunlong Liang, Zhixu Li, Jianfeng Qu, Jie Zhou Jiaan Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: To adapt text summarization to the multilingual world, previous work proposes multi-lingual summarization (MLS) and cross-lingual summarization (CLS). However, these two tasks have been studied separately due to the different definitions, which limits the compatible and systematic research on both of them. In this paper, we aim to unify MLS and CLS into a more general setting, i.e., many-to-many summarization (M2MS), where a single model could process documents in any language and generate their summaries also in any language. As the first step towards M2MS, we conduct preliminary studies to show that M2MS can better transfer task knowledge across different languages than MLS and CLS. Furthermore, we propose Pisces, a pre-trained M2MS model that learns language modeling, cross-lingual ability and summarization ability via three-stage pre-training. Experimental results indicate that our Pisces significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines, especially in the zero-shot directions, where there is no training data from the source-language documents to the target-language summaries.
On Improving Summarization Factual Consistency from Natural Language Feedback
Authors: Budhaditya Deb, Milagro Teruel, Aaron Halfaker, Dragomir Radev, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah Yixin Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite the recent progress in language generation models, their outputs may not always meet user expectations. In this work, we study whether informational feedback in natural language can be leveraged to improve generation quality and user preference alignment. To this end, we consider factual consistency in summarization, the quality that the summary should only contain information supported by the input documents, as the user-expected preference. We collect a high-quality dataset, DeFacto, containing human demonstrations and informational natural language feedback consisting of corrective instructions, edited summaries, and explanations with respect to the factual consistency of the summary. Using our dataset, we study three natural language generation tasks: (1) editing a summary by following the human feedback, (2) generating human feedback for editing the original summary, and (3) revising the initial summary to correct factual errors by generating both the human feedback and edited summary. We show that DeFacto can provide factually consistent human-edited summaries and further insights into summarization factual consistency thanks to its informational natural language feedback. We further demonstrate that fine-tuned language models can leverage our dataset to improve the summary factual consistency, while large language models lack the zero-shot learning ability in our proposed tasks that require controllable text generation.
From Dogwhistles to Bullhorns: Unveiling Coded Rhetoric with Language Models
Authors: Ronan Le Bras, Yejin Choi, Maarten Sap Julia Mendelsohn
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Dogwhistles are coded expressions that simultaneously convey one meaning to a broad audience and a second, often hateful or provocative, meaning to a narrow in-group; they are deployed to evade both political repercussions and algorithmic content moderation. For example, the word “cosmopolitan” in a sentence such as “we need to end the cosmopolitan experiment” can mean “worldly” to many but also secretly mean “Jewish” to a select few. We present the first large-scale computational investigation of dogwhistles. We develop a typology of dogwhistles, curate the largest-to-date glossary of over 300 dogwhistles with rich contextual information and examples, and analyze their usage in historical U.S. politicians' speeches. We then assess whether a large language model (GPT-3) can identify dogwhistles and their meanings, and find that GPT-3`s performance varies widely across types of dogwhistles and targeted groups. Finally, we show that harmful content containing dogwhistles avoids toxicity detection, highlighting online risks presented by such coded language. This work sheds light on the theoretical and applied importance of dogwhistles in both NLP and computational social science, and provides resources to facilitate future research in modeling dogwhistles and mitigating their online harms.
Exploring Large Language Models for Classical Philology
Authors: Anette Frank Frederick Riemenschneider
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent advances in NLP have led to the creation of powerful language models for many languages including Ancient Greek and Latin. While prior work on Classical languages unanimously uses BERT, in this work we create four language models for Ancient Greek that vary along two dimensions to study their versatility for tasks of interest for Classical languages: we explore (i) encoder-only and encoder-decoder architectures using RoBERTa and T5 as strong model types, and create for each of them (ii) a monolingual Ancient Greek and a multilingual instance that includes Latin and English. We evaluate all models on morphological and syntactic tasks, including lemmatization, which demonstrates the added value of T5`s decoding abilities. We further define two probing tasks to investigate the knowledge acquired by models pre-trained on Classical texts. Our experiments provide the first benchmarking analysis of existing models of Ancient Greek. Results show that our models provide significant improvements over the SoTA. The systematic analysis of model types can inform future research in designing language models for Classical languages, including the development of novel generative tasks. We make all our models available as community resources, along with a large curated pre-training corpus for Ancient Greek, to support the creation of a larger, comparable model zoo for Classical Philology.
LayoutMask: Enhance Text-Layout Interaction in Multi-modal Pre-training for Document Understanding
Authors: Ya Guo, Huan Chen, Jinyang Tang Yi Tu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Visually-rich Document Understanding (VrDU) has attracted much research attention over the past years. Pre-trained models on a large number of document images with transformer-based backbones have led to significant performance gains in this field. The major challenge is how to fusion the different modalities (text, layout, and image) of the documents in a unified model with different pre-training tasks. This paper focuses on improving text-layout interactions and proposes a novel multi-modal pre-training model, LayoutMask. LayoutMask uses local 1D position, instead of global 1D position, as layout input and has two pre-training objectives: (1) Masked Language Modeling: predicting masked tokens with two novel masking strategies; (2) Masked Position Modeling: predicting masked 2D positions to improve layout representation learning. LayoutMask can enhance the interactions between text and layout modalities in a unified model and produce adaptive and robust multi-modal representations for downstream tasks. Experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of VrDU problems, including form understanding, receipt understanding, and document image classification.
Hearing Lips in Noise: Universal Viseme-Phoneme Mapping and Transfer for Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition
Authors: Ruizhe Li, Chen Chen, Chengwei Qin, Qiu-Shi Zhu, Eng Siong Chng Yuchen Hu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) provides a promising solution to ameliorate the noise-robustness of audio-only speech recognition with visual information. However, most existing efforts still focus on audio modality to improve robustness considering its dominance in AVSR task, with noise adaptation techniques such as front-end denoise processing. Though effective, these methods are usually faced with two practical challenges: 1) lack of sufficient labeled noisy audio-visual training data in some real-world scenarios and 2) less optimal model generality to unseen testing noises. In this work, we investigate the noise-invariant visual modality to strengthen robustness of AVSR, which can adapt to any testing noises while without dependence on noisy training data, a.k.a., unsupervised noise adaptation. Inspired by human perception mechanism, we propose a universal viseme-phoneme mapping (UniVPM) approach to implement modality transfer, which can restore clean audio from visual signals to enable speech recognition under any noisy conditions. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks LRS3 and LRS2 show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art under various noisy as well as clean conditions. In addition, we also outperform previous state-of-the-arts on visual speech recognition task.
An Extensible Plug-and-Play Method for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation
Authors: Zijun Liu, Peng Li, Tao Li, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu Xuancheng Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, multi-aspect controllable text generation that controls the generated text in multiple aspects (e.g., sentiment, topic, and keywords) has attracted increasing attention. Although methods based on parameter efficient tuning like prefix-tuning could achieve multi-aspect controlling in a plug-and-play way, the mutual interference of multiple prefixes leads to significant degeneration of constraints and limits their extensibility to training-time unseen aspect combinations. In this work, we provide a theoretical lower bound for the interference and empirically found that the interference grows with the number of layers where prefixes are inserted. Based on these analyses, we propose using trainable gates to normalize the intervention of prefixes to restrain the growing interference. As a result, controlling training-time unseen combinations of aspects can be realized by simply concatenating corresponding plugins such that new constraints can be extended at a lower cost. In addition, we propose a unified way to process both categorical and free-form constraints. Experiments on text generation and machine translation demonstrate the superiority of our approach over baselines on constraint accuracy, text quality, and extensibility.
Double-Branch Multi-Attention based Graph Neural Network for Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Junpeng Bao, Wenbo Liu Hongcai Xu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs), which effectively use topological structures in the knowledge graphs (KG) to embed entities and relations in low-dimensional spaces, have shown great power in knowledge graph completion (KGC). KG has abundant global and local structural information, however, many GNN-based KGC models cannot capture these two types of information about the graph structure by designing complex aggregation schemes, and are not designed well to learn representations of seen entities with sparse neighborhoods in isolated subgraphs. In this paper, we find that a simple attention-based method can outperform a general GNN-based approach for KGC. We then propose a double-branch multi-attention based graph neural network (MA-GNN) to learn more expressive entity representations which contain rich global-local structural information. Specifically, we first explore the graph attention network-based local aggregator to learn entity representations. Furthermore, we propose a snowball local attention mechanism by leveraging the semantic similarity between two-hop neighbors to enrich the entity embedding. Finally, we use Transformer-based self-attention to learn long-range dependence between entities to obtain richer representations with the global graph structure and entity features. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets show that MA-GNN achieves significant improvements over strong baselines for inductive KGC.
Dual Cache for Long Document Neural Coreference Resolution
Authors: Xiangkun Hu, Yue Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Zheng Zhang Qipeng Guo
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent works show the effectiveness of cache-based neural coreference resolution models on long documents. These models incrementally process a long document from left to right and extract relations between mentions and entities in a cache, resulting in much lower memory and computation cost compared to computing all mentions in parallel. However, they do not handle cache misses when high-quality entities are purged from the cache, which causes wrong assignments and leads to prediction errors. We propose a new hybrid cache that integrates two eviction policies to capture global and local entities separately, and effectively reduces the aggregated cache misses up to half as before, while improving F1 score of coreference by 0.7 5.7pt. As such, the hybrid policy can accelerate existing cache-based models and offer a new long document coreference resolution solution. Results show that our method outperforms existing methods on four benchmarks while saving up to 83% of inference time against non-cache-based models. Further, we achieve a new state-of-the-art on a long document coreference benchmark, LitBank.
Knowledge Transfer in Incremental Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Peng Li, Jin Ma, Ting Yao, Yang Liu Kaiyu Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: In the real-world scenario, a longstanding goal of multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) is that a single model can incrementally adapt to new language pairs without accessing previous training data. In this scenario, previous studies concentrate on overcoming catastrophic forgetting while lacking encouragement to learn new knowledge from incremental language pairs, especially when the incremental language is not related to the set of original languages. To better acquire new knowledge, we propose a knowledge transfer method that can efficiently adapt original MNMT models to diverse incremental language pairs. The method flexibly introduces the knowledge from an external model into original models, which encourages the models to learn new language pairs, completing the procedure of knowledge transfer. Moreover, all original parameters are frozen to ensure that translation qualities on original language pairs are not degraded. Experimental results show that our method can learn new knowledge from diverse language pairs incrementally meanwhile maintaining performance on original language pairs, outperforming various strong baselines in incremental learning for MNMT.
DisorBERT: A Double Domain Adaptation Model for Detecting Signs of Mental Disorders in Social Media
Authors: A. Pastor López-Monroy, Luis C. González, David E. Losada, Manuel Montes-y-Gómez Mario Ezra Aragón
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Mental disorders affect millions of people worldwide and cause interference with their thinking and behavior. Through the past years, awareness created by health campaigns and other sources motivated the study of these disorders using information extracted from social media platforms. In this work, we aim to contribute to the study of these disorders and to the understanding of how mental problems reflect on social media. To achieve this goal, we propose a double-domain adaptation of a language model. First, we adapted the model to social media language, and then, we adapted it to the mental health domain. In both steps, we incorporated a lexical resource to guide the masking process of the language model and, therefore, to help it in paying more attention to words related to mental disorders. We have evaluated our model in the detection of signs of three major mental disorders: Anorexia, Self-harm, and Depression. Results are encouraging as they show that the proposed adaptation enhances the classification performance and yields competitive results against state-of-the-art methods.
Toward Interactive Dictation
Authors: Jason Eisner, Adam Pauls, Sam Thomson Belinda Z. Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Voice dictation is an increasingly important text input modality. Existing systems that allow both dictation and editing-by-voice restrict their command language to flat templates invoked by trigger words. In this work, we study the feasibility of allowing users to interrupt their dictation with spoken editing commands in open-ended natural language. We introduce a new task and dataset, TERTiUS, to experiment with such systems. To support this flexibility in real-time, a system must incrementally segment and classify spans of speech as either dictation or command, and interpret the spans that are commands. We experiment with using large pre-trained language models to predict the edited text, or alternatively, to predict a small text-editing program. Experiments show a natural trade-off between model accuracy and latency: a smaller model achieves 30% end-state accuracy with 1.3 seconds of latency, while a larger model achieves 55% end-state accuracy with 7 seconds of latency.
CodeIE: Large Code Generation Models are Better Few-Shot Information Extractors
Authors: Tianxiang Sun, Qiong Tang, Hang Yan, Yuanbin Wu, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu Peng Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on massive corpora have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning ability on many NLP tasks. A common practice is to recast the task into a text-to-text format such that generative LLMs of natural language (NL-LLMs) like GPT-3 can be prompted to solve it. However, it is nontrivial to perform information extraction (IE) tasks with NL-LLMs since the output of the IE task is usually structured and therefore is hard to be converted into plain text. In this paper, we propose to recast the structured output in the form of code instead of natural language and utilize generative LLMs of code (Code-LLMs) such as Codex to perform IE tasks, in particular, named entity recognition and relation extraction. In contrast to NL-LLMs, we show that Code-LLMs can be well-aligned with these IE tasks by designing code-style prompts and formulating these IE tasks as code generation tasks. Experiment results on seven benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms fine-tuning moderate-size pre-trained models specially designed for IE tasks (e.g., UIE) and prompting NL-LLMs under few-shot settings. We further conduct a series of in-depth analyses to demonstrate the merits of leveraging Code-LLMs for IE tasks.
Beyond English-Centric Bitexts for Better Multilingual Language Representation Learning
Authors: Saksham Singhal, Shaohan Huang, Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Vishrav Chaudhary, Xia Song Barun Patra
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we elaborate upon recipes for building multilingual representation models that are not only competitive with existing state-of-the-art models but are also more parameter efficient, thereby promoting better adoption in resource-constrained scenarios and practical applications. We show that going beyond English-centric bitexts, coupled with a novel sampling strategy aimed at reducing under-utilization of training data, substantially boosts performance across model sizes for both Electra and MLM pre-training objectives. We introduce XY-LENT: X-Y bitext enhanced Language ENcodings using Transformers which not only achieves state-of-the-art performance over 5 cross-lingual tasks within all model size bands, is also competitive across bands. Our XY-LENT XL variant outperforms XLM-R XXL and exhibits competitive performance with mT5 XXL while being 5x and 6x smaller respectively. We then show that our proposed method helps ameliorate the curse of multilinguality, with the XY-LENT XL achieving 99.3% GLUE performance and 98.5% SQuAD 2.0 performance compared to a SoTA English only model in the same size band. We then analyze our models performance on extremely low resource languages and posit that scaling alone may not be sufficient for improving the performance in this scenario
Bridging The Gap: Entailment Fused-T5 for Open-retrieval Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Heyan Huang, Zewen Chi, Xian-Ling Mao Xiao Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Open-retrieval conversational machine reading comprehension (OCMRC) simulates real-life conversational interaction scenes. Machines are required to make a decision of “Yes/No/Inquire” or generate a follow-up question when the decision is “Inquire” based on retrieved rule texts, user scenario, user question and dialogue history. Recent studies try to reduce the information gap between decision-making and question generation, in order to improve the performance of generation. However, the information gap still persists because these methods are still limited in pipeline framework, where decision-making and question generation are performed separately, making it hard to share the entailment reasoning used in decision-making across all stages. To tackle the above problem, we propose a novel one-stage end-to-end framework, called Entailment Fused-T5 (EFT), to bridge the information gap between decision-making and question generation in a global understanding manner. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the OR-ShARC benchmark. Our model and code are publicly available at an anonymous link.
LiveChat: A Large-Scale Personalized Dialogue Dataset Automatically Constructed from Live Streaming
Authors: Yixin Lian, Ziyi Zhou, Yuzhuo Fu, Baoyuan Wang Jingsheng Gao
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Open-domain dialogue systems have made promising progress in recent years. While the state-of-the-art dialogue agents are built upon large-scale social media data and large pre-trained models, there is no guarantee these agents could also perform well in fast-growing scenarios, such as live streaming, due to the bounded transferability of pre-trained models and biased distributions of public datasets from Reddit and Weibo, etc. To improve the essential capability of responding and establish a benchmark in the live open-domain scenario, we introduce the LiveChat dataset, composed of 1.33 million real-life Chinese dialogues with almost 3800 average sessions across 351 personas and fine-grained profiles for each persona. LiveChat is automatically constructed by processing numerous live videos on the Internet and naturally falls within the scope of multi-party conversations, where the issues of Who says What to Whom should be considered. Therefore, we target two critical tasks of response modeling and addressee recognition and propose retrieval-based baselines grounded on advanced techniques. Experimental results have validated the positive effects of leveraging persona profiles and larger average sessions per persona. In addition, we also benchmark the transferability of advanced generation-based models on LiveChat and pose some future directions for current challenges.
Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performance
Authors: Markus Freitag, Colin Cherry, Jiaming Luo, Viresh Ratnakar, George Foster David Vilar
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) that have been trained on multilingual but not parallel text exhibit a remarkable ability to translate between languages. We probe this ability in an in-depth study of the pathways language model (PaLM), which has demonstrated the strongest machine translation (MT) performance among similarly-trained LLMs to date. We investigate various strategies for choosing translation examples for few-shot prompting, concluding that example quality is the most important factor. Using optimized prompts, we revisit previous assessments of PaLM`s MT capabilities with more recent test sets, modern MT metrics, and human evaluation, and find that its performance, while impressive, still lags that of state-of-the-art supervised systems. We conclude by providing an analysis of PaLM`s MT output which reveals some interesting properties and prospects for future work.
Exploring Lottery Prompts for Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Ning Ding, Xiaobin Wang, Shengding Hu, Haitao Zheng, Zhiyuan Liu, Pengjun Xie Yulin Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Consistently scaling pre-trained language models (PLMs) imposes substantial burdens on model adaptation, necessitating more efficient alternatives to conventional fine-tuning. Given the advantage of prompting in the zero-shot setting and the observed performance fluctuation among different prompts, we explore the instance-level prompt and their generalizability.By searching through the prompt space, we first validate the assumption that for every instance, there is almost always a lottery prompt that induces the correct prediction from the PLM, and such prompt can be obtained at a low cost thanks to the inherent ability of PLMs.Meanwhile, it is shown that some strong lottery prompts have high performance over the whole training set, and they are equipped with distinguishable linguistic features. Lastly, we attempt to generalize the searched strong lottery prompts to unseen data with prompt ensembling method. Experiments are conducted on various types of NLP classification tasks and demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve comparable results with other gradient-free and optimization-free baselines.
A Facial Expression-Aware Multimodal Multi-task Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Multi-party Conversations
Authors: Jianfei Yu, Rui Xia, Shijin Wang Wenjie Zheng
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Multiparty Conversations (MERMC) has recently attracted considerable attention. Due to the complexity of visual scenes in multi-party conversations, most previous MERMC studies mainly focus on text and audio modalities while ignoring visual information. Recently, several works proposed to extract face sequences as visual features and have shown the importance of visual information in MERMC. However, given an utterance, the face sequence extracted by previous methods may contain multiple people`s faces, which will inevitably introduce noise to the emotion prediction of the real speaker. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-stage framework named Facial expressionaware Multimodal Multi-Task learning (FacialMMT). Specifically, a pipeline method is first designed to extract the face sequence of the real speaker of each utterance, which consists of multimodal face recognition, unsupervised face clustering, and face matching. With the extracted face sequences, we propose a multimodal facial expression-aware emotion recognition model, which leverages the frame-level facial emotion distributions to help improve utterance-level emotion recognition based on multi-task learning. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FacialMMT framework on the benchmark MELD dataset. The source code is publicly released at r̆lhttps://github.com/NUSTM/FacialMMT.
TeAST: Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding via Archimedean Spiral Timeline
Authors: Xiangdong Su, Guanglai Gao Jiang Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Temporal knowledge graph embedding (TKGE) models are commonly utilized to infer the missing facts and facilitate reasoning and decision-making in temporal knowledge graph based systems. However, existing methods fuse temporal information into entities, potentially leading to the evolution of entity information and limiting the link prediction performance of TKG. Meanwhile, current TKGE models often lack the ability to simultaneously model important relation patterns and provide interpretability, which hinders their effectiveness and potential applications. To address these limitations, we propose a novel TKGE model which encodes \textbfTemporal knowledge graph \textbfembeddings via \textbfArchimedean \textbfSpiral \textbfTimeline (TeAST), which maps relations onto the corresponding Archimedean spiral timeline and transforms the quadruples completion to 3th-order tensor completion problem. Specifically, the Archimedean spiral timeline ensures that relations that occur simultaneously are placed on the same timeline, and all relations evolve over time. Meanwhile, we present a novel temporal spiral regularizer to make the spiral timeline orderly. In addition, we provide mathematical proofs to demonstrate the ability of TeAST to encode various relation patterns. Experimental results show that our proposed model significantly outperforms existing TKGE methods. Our code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/IMU-MachineLearningSXD/TeAST.