mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Targeted Data Generation: Finding and Fixing Model Weaknesses
Authors: Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Fereshte Khani Zexue He
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Even when aggregate accuracy is high, state-of-the-art NLP models often fail systematically on specific subgroups of data, resulting in unfair outcomes and eroding user trust. Additional data collection may not help in addressing these weaknesses, as such challenging subgroups may be unknown to users, and underrepresented in the existing and new data. We propose Targeted Data Generation (TDG), a framework that automatically identifies challenging subgroups, and generates new data for those subgroups using large language models (LLMs) with a human in the loop. TDG estimates the expected benefit and potential harm of data augmentation for each subgroup, and selects the ones most likely to improve within-group performance without hurting overall performance. In our experiments, TDG significantly improves the accuracy on challenging subgroups for state-of-the-art sentiment analysis and natural language inference models, while also improving overall test accuracy.
HiFi: High-Information Attention Heads Hold for Parameter-Efficient Model Adaptation
Authors: Han Xiao Anchun Gui
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: To fully leverage the advantages of large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) on downstream tasks, it has become a ubiquitous adaptation paradigm to fine-tune the entire parameters of PLMs. However, this paradigm poses issues of inefficient updating and resource over-consuming for fine-tuning in data-scarce and resource-limited scenarios, because of the large scale of parameters in PLMs. To alleviate these concerns, in this paper, we propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method HiFi, that is, only the highly informative and strongly correlated attention heads for the specific task are fine-tuned. To search for those significant attention heads, we develop a novel framework to analyze the effectiveness of heads. Specifically, we first model the relationship between heads into a graph from two perspectives of information richness and correlation, and then apply PageRank algorithm to determine the relative importance of each head. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and show that HiFi obtains state-of-the-art performance over the prior baselines.
CFSum Coarse-to-Fine Contribution Network for Multimodal Summarization
Authors: Junnan Zhu, Haitao Lin, Yu Zhou, Chengqing Zong Min Xiao
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Multimodal summarization usually suffers from the problem that the contribution of the visual modality is unclear. Existing multimodal summarization approaches focus on designing the fusion methods of different modalities, while ignoring the adaptive conditions under which visual modalities are useful. Therefore, we propose a novel Coarse-to-Fine contribution network for multimodal Summarization (CFSum) to consider different contributions of images for summarization. First, to eliminate the interference of useless images, we propose a pre-filter module to abandon useless images. Second, to make accurate use of useful images, we propose two levels of visual complement modules, word level and phrase level. Specifically, image contributions are calculated and are adopted to guide the attention of both textual and visual modalities. Experimental results have shown that CFSum significantly outperforms multiple strong baselines on the standard benchmark. Furthermore, the analysis verifies that useful images can even help generate non-visual words which are implicitly represented in the image.
On “Scientific Debt” in NLP: A Case for More Rigour in Language Model Pre-Training Research
Authors: Haryo Wibowo, Alham Fikri Aji, Genta Winata, Radityo Eko Prasojo, Phil Blunsom, Adhiguna Kuncoro Made Nindyatama Nityasya
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: This evidence-based position paper critiques current research practices within the language model pre-training literature. Despite rapid recent progress afforded by increasingly better pre-trained language models (PLMs), current PLM research practices often conflate different possible sources of model improvement, without conducting proper ablation studies and principled comparisons between different models under comparable conditions. These practices (i) leave us ill-equipped to understand which pre-training approaches should be used under what circumstances; (ii) impede reproducibility and credit assignment; and (iii) render it difficult to understand: “How exactly does each factor contribute to the progress that we have today?” We provide a case in point by revisiting the success of BERT over its baselines, ELMo and GPT-1, and demonstrate how --- under comparable conditions where the baselines are tuned to a similar extent --- these baselines (and even-simpler variants thereof) can, in fact, achieve competitive or better performance than BERT. These findings demonstrate how disentangling different factors of model improvements can lead to valuable new insights. We conclude with recommendations for how to encourage and incentivize this line of work, and accelerate progress towards a better and more systematic understanding of what factors drive the progress of our foundation models today.
End-to-end Knowledge Retrieval with Multi-modal Queries
Authors: Zhiyuan Fang, Tejas Gokhale, Yezhou Yang, Chitta Baral Man Luo
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: We investigate knowledge retrieval with multi-modal queries, i.e. queries containing information split across image and text inputs, a challenging task that differs from previous work on cross-modal retrieval. We curate a new dataset called ReMuQ for benchmarking progress on this task. ReMuQ requires a system to retrieve knowledge from a large corpus by integrating contents from both text and image queries. We introduce a retriever model “ReViz” that can directly process input text and images to retrieve relevant knowledge in an end-to-end fashion without being dependent on intermediate modules such as object detectors or caption generators. We introduce a new pretraining task that is effective for learning knowledge retrieval with multimodal queries and also improves performance on downstream tasks. We demonstrate superior performance in retrieval on two datasets (ReMuQ and OK-VQA) under zero-shot settings as well as further improvements when finetuned on these datasets.
AV-TranSpeech: Audio-Visual Robust Speech-to-Speech Translation
Authors: Huadai Liu, Xize Cheng, Yi Ren, Linjun Li, Zhenhui Ye, Jinzheng He, Lichao Zhang, Jinglin Liu, Xiang Yin, Zhou Zhao Rongjie Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) aims to convert speech from one language into another, and has demonstrated significant progress to date. Despite the recent success, current S2ST models still suffer from distinct degradation in noisy environments and fail to translate visual speech (i.e., the movement of lips and teeth). In this work, we present AV-TranSpeech, the first audio-visual speech-to-speech (AV-S2ST) translation model without relying on intermediate text. AV-TranSpeech complements the audio stream with visual information to promote system robustness and opens up a host of practical applications: dictation or dubbing archival films. To mitigate the data scarcity with limited parallel AV-S2ST data, we 1) explore self-supervised pre-training with unlabeled audio-visual data to learn contextual representation, and 2) introduce cross-modal distillation with S2ST models trained on the audio-only corpus to further reduce the requirements of visual data. Experimental results on two language pairs demonstrate that AV-TranSpeech outperforms audio-only models under all settings regardless of the type of noise. With low-resource audio-visual data (10h, 30h), cross-modal distillation yields an improvement of 7.6 BLEU on average compared with baselines. Audio samples are available at r̆lhttps://AV-TranSpeech.github.io/.
Dual Class Knowledge Propagation Network for Multi-label Few-shot Intent Detection
Authors: Wei Chen, Fei Ding, Tengjiao Wang Feng Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Multi-label intent detection aims to assign multiple labels to utterances and attracts increasing attention as a practical task in task-oriented dialogue systems. As dialogue domains change rapidly and new intents emerge fast, the lack of annotated data motivates multi-label few-shot intent detection. However, previous studies are confused by the identical representation of the utterance with multiple labels and overlook the intrinsic intra-class and inter-class interactions. To address these two limitations, we propose a novel dual class knowledge propagation network in this paper. In order to learn well-separated representations for utterances with multiple intents, we first introduce a label-semantic augmentation module incorporating class name information. For better consideration of the inherent intra-class and inter-class relations, an instance-level and a class-level graph neural network are constructed, which not only propagate label information but also propagate feature structure. And we use a simple yet effective method to predict the intent count of each utterance. Extensive experimental results on two multi-label intent datasets have demonstrated that our proposed method outperforms strong baselines by a large margin.
VendorLink: An NLP approach for Identifying & Linking Vendor Migrants & Potential Aliases on Darknet Markets
Authors: Nils Rethmeier, Gijs van Dijck, Gerasimos Spanakis Vageesh Saxena
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: The anonymity on the Darknet allows vendors to stay undetected by using multiple vendor aliases or frequently migrating between markets. Consequently, illegal markets and their connections are challenging to uncover on the Darknet. To identify relationships between illegal markets and their vendors, we propose VendorLink, an NLP-based approach that examines writing patterns to verify, identify, and link unique vendor accounts across text advertisements (ads) on seven public Darknet markets. In contrast to existing literature, VendorLink utilizes the strength of supervised pre-training to perform closed-set vendor verification, open-set vendor identification, and low-resource market adaption tasks. Through VendorLink, we uncover (i) 15 migrants and 71 potential aliases in the Alphabay-Dreams-Silk dataset, (ii) 17 migrants and 3 potential aliases in the Valhalla-Berlusconi dataset, and (iii) 75 migrants and 10 potential aliases in the Traderoute-Agora dataset. Altogether, our approach can help Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) make more informed decisions by verifying and identifying migrating vendors and their potential aliases on existing and Low-Resource (LR) emerging Darknet markets.
Element-aware Summarization with Large Language Models: Expert-aligned Evaluation and Chain-of-Thought Method
Authors: Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang Yiming Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Automatic summarization generates concise summaries that contain key ideas of source documents. As the most mainstream datasets for the news sub-domain, CNN/DailyMail and BBC XSum have been widely used for performance benchmarking. However, the reference summaries of those datasets turn out to be noisy, mainly in terms of factual hallucination and information redundancy. To address this challenge, we first annotate new expert-writing Element-aware test sets following the “Lasswell Communication Model” proposed by Lasswell, allowing reference summaries to focus on more fine-grained news elements objectively and comprehensively. Utilizing the new test sets, we observe the surprising zero-shot summary ability of LLMs, which addresses the issue of the inconsistent results between human preference and automatic evaluation metrics of LLMs' zero-shot summaries in prior work. Further, we propose a Summary Chain-of-Thought (SumCoT) technique to elicit LLMs to generate summaries step by step, which helps them integrate more fine-grained details of source documents into the final summaries that correlate with the human writing mindset. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art fine-tuned PLMs and zero-shot LLMs by +4.33/+4.77 in ROUGE-L on the two datasets, respectively. Dataset and code are publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/Alsace08/SumCoT.
Efficient Shapley Values Estimation by Amortization for Text Classification
Authors: Fan Yin, He He, Kai-Wei Chang, Xiaofei Ma, Bing Xiang Chenghao Yang
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 popularity of Shapley Values in explaining neural text classification models, computing them is prohibitive for large pretrained models due to a large number of model evaluations. In practice, Shapley Values are often estimated with a small number of stochastic model evaluations. However, we show that the estimated Shapley Values are sensitive to random seed choices -- the top-ranked features often have little overlap across different seeds, especially on examples with longer input texts. This can only be mitigated by aggregating thousands of model evaluations, which on the other hand, induces substantial computational overheads. To mitigate the trade-off between stability and efficiency, we develop an amortized model that directly predicts each input feature`s Shapley Value without additional model evaluations. It is trained on a set of examples whose Shapley Values are estimated from a large number of model evaluations to ensure stability. Experimental results on two text classification datasets demonstrate that our amortized model estimates Shapley Values accurately with up to 60 times speedup compared to traditional methods. Further, our model does not suffer from stability issues as inference is deterministic. We release our code at r̆lhttps://github.com/yangalan123/Amortized-Interpretability.
PeerDA: Data Augmentation via Modeling Peer Relation for Span Identification Tasks
Authors: Xin Li, Yang Deng, Wai Lam, Lidong Bing Weiwen Xu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Span identification aims at identifying specific text spans from text input and classifying them into pre-defined categories. Different from previous works that merely leverage the Subordinate (SUB) relation (i.e. if a span is an instance of a certain category) to train models, this paper for the first time explores the Peer (PR) relation, which indicates that two spans are instances of the same category and share similar features. Specifically, a novel Peer Data Augmentation (PeerDA) approach is proposed which employs span pairs with the PR relation as the augmentation data for training. PeerDA has two unique advantages: (1) There are a large number of PR span pairs for augmenting the training data. (2) The augmented data can prevent the trained model from over-fitting the superficial span-category mapping by pushing the model to leverage the span semantics. Experimental results on ten datasets over four diverse tasks across seven domains demonstrate the effectiveness of PeerDA. Notably, PeerDA achieves state-of-the-art results on six of them.
Dynamic Regularization in UDA for Transformers in Multimodal Classification
Authors: Adrian Pastor Lopez Monroy, Fernando Sanchez-Vega Ivonne Monter-Aldana
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Multimodal machine learning is a cutting-edge field that explores ways to incorporate information from multiple sources into models. As more multimodal data becomes available, this field has become increasingly relevant. This work focuses on two key challenges in multimodal machine learning. The first is finding efficient ways to combine information from different data types. The second is that often, one modality (e.g., text) is stronger and more relevant, making it difficult to identify meaningful patterns in the weaker modality (e.g., image). Our approach focuses on more effectively exploiting the weaker modality while dynamically regularizing the loss function. First, we introduce a new two-stream model called Multimodal BERT-ViT, which features a novel intra-CLS token fusion. Second, we utilize a dynamic adjustment that maintains a balance between specialization and generalization during the training to avoid overfitting, which we devised. We add this dynamic adjustment to the Unsupervised Data Augmentation (UDA) framework. We evaluate the effectiveness of these proposals on the task of multi-label movie genre classification using the Moviescope and MM-IMDb datasets. The evaluation revealed that our proposal offers substantial benefits, while simultaneously enabling us to harness the weaker modality without compromising the information provided by the stronger.
Conflicts, Villains, Resolutions: Towards models of Narrative Media Framing
Authors: Jiatong Li, Shima Khanehzar, Gosia Mikolajczak Lea Frermann
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite increasing interest in the automatic detection of media frames in NLP, the problem is typically simplified as single-label classification and adopts a topic-like view on frames, evading modelling the broader document-level narrative. In this work, we revisit a widely used conceptualization of framing from the communication sciences which explicitly captures elements of narratives, including conflict and its resolution, and integrate it with the narrative framing of key entities in the story as heroes, victims or villains. We adapt an effective annotation paradigm that breaks a complex annotation task into a series of simpler binary questions, and present an annotated data set of English news articles, and a case study on the framing of climate change in articles from news outlets across the political spectrum. Finally, we explore automatic multi-label prediction of our frames with supervised and semi-supervised approaches, and present a novel retrieval-based method which is both effective and transparent in its predictions. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities and challenges for future work on document-level models of narrative framing.
bgGLUE: A Bulgarian General Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark
Authors: Pepa Atanasova, Todor Mihaylov, Galia Angelova, Kiril Simov, Petya Osenova, Veselin Stoyanov, Ivan Koychev, Preslav Nakov, Dragomir Radev Momchil Hardalov
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 bgGLUE (Bulgarian General Language Understanding Evaluation), a benchmark for evaluating language models on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks in Bulgarian. Our benchmark includes NLU tasks targeting a variety of NLP problems (e.g., natural language inference, fact-checking, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, question answering, etc.) and machine learning tasks (sequence labeling, document-level classification, and regression). We run the first systematic evaluation of pre-trained language models for Bulgarian, comparing and contrasting results across the nine tasks in the benchmark. The evaluation results show strong performance on sequence labeling tasks, but there is a lot of room for improvement for tasks that require more complex reasoning. We make bgGLUE publicly available together with the fine-tuning and the evaluation code, as well as a public leaderboard at r̆lhttps://bgglue.github.io, and we hope that it will enable further advancements in developing NLU models for Bulgarian.
DuNST: Dual Noisy Self Training for Semi-Supervised Controllable Text Generation
Authors: Xiaoyuan Yi, Xiting Wang, V.S., Laks Lakshmanan, Xing Xie Yuxi Feng
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Self-training (ST) has prospered again in language understanding by augmenting the fine-tuning of big pre-trained models when labeled data is insufficient. However, it remains challenging to incorporate ST into attribute-controllable language generation. Augmented only by self-generated pseudo text, generation models \textitover-exploit the previously learned text space and \textitfail to explore a larger one, suffering from a restricted generalization boundary and limited controllability. In this work, we propose DuNST, a novel ST framework to tackle these problems. DuNST jointly models text generation and classification as a dual process and further perturbs and escapes from the collapsed space by adding two kinds of flexible noise. In this way, our model could construct and utilize both pseudo text generated from given labels and pseudo labels predicted from available unlabeled text, which are gradually refined during the ST phase. We theoretically demonstrate that DuNST can be regarded as enhancing the exploration of the potentially larger real text space while maintaining exploitation, guaranteeing improved performance. Experiments on three controllable generation tasks show that DuNST significantly boosts control accuracy with comparable generation fluency and diversity against several strong baselines.
What does the Failure to Reason with “Respectively” in Zero/Few-Shot Settings Tell Us about Language Models?
Authors: Seolhwa Lee, Daniel Hershcovich, Anders Søgaard Ruixiang Cui
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Humans can effortlessly understand the coordinate structure of sentences such as “Niels Bohr and Kurt Cobain were born in Copenhagen and Seattle, *respectively*”. In the context of natural language inference (NLI), we examine how language models (LMs) reason with respective readings (Gawron and Kehler, 2004) from two perspectives: syntactic-semantic and commonsense-world knowledge. We propose a controlled synthetic dataset WikiResNLI and a naturally occurring dataset NatResNLI to encompass various explicit and implicit realizations of “respectively”. We show that fine-tuned NLI models struggle with understanding such readings without explicit supervision. While few-shot learning is easy in the presence of explicit cues, longer training is required when the reading is evoked implicitly, leaving models to rely on common sense inferences. Furthermore, our fine-grained analysis indicates models fail to generalize across different constructions. To conclude, we demonstrate that LMs still lag behind humans in generalizing to the long tail of linguistic constructions.
BLIND: Bias Removal With No Demographics
Authors: Yonatan Belinkov Hadas Orgad
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Models trained on real-world data tend to imitate and amplify social biases. Common methods to mitigate biases require prior information on the types of biases that should be mitigated (e.g., gender or racial bias) and the social groups associated with each data sample. In this work, we introduce BLIND, a method for bias removal with no prior knowledge of the demographics in the dataset. While training a model on a downstream task, BLIND detects biased samples using an auxiliary model that predicts the main model`s success, and down-weights those samples during the training process. Experiments with racial and gender biases in sentiment classification and occupation classification tasks demonstrate that BLIND mitigates social biases without relying on a costly demographic annotation process. Our method is competitive with other methods that require demographic information and sometimes even surpasses them.
How do humans perceive adversarial text? A reality check on the validity and naturalness of word-based adversarial attacks
Authors: Salah Ghamizi, Maxime Cordy Salijona Dyrmishi
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) models based on Machine Learning (ML) are susceptible to adversarial attacks -- malicious algorithms that imperceptibly modify input text to force models into making incorrect predictions. However, evaluations of these attacks ignore the property of imperceptibility or study it under limited settings. This entails that adversarial perturbations would not pass any human quality gate and do not represent real threats to human-checked NLP systems. To bypass this limitation and enable proper assessment (and later, improvement) of NLP model robustness, we have surveyed 378 human participants about the perceptibility of text adversarial examples produced by state-of-the-art methods. Our results underline that existing text attacks are impractical in real-world scenarios where humans are involved. This contrasts with previous smaller-scale human studies, which reported overly optimistic conclusions regarding attack success. Through our work, we hope to position human perceptibility as a first-class success criterion for text attacks, and provide guidance for research to build effective attack algorithms and, in turn, design appropriate defence mechanisms.
Soft Alignment Objectives for Robust Adaptation of Language Generation
Authors: Marek Kadlcik, Petr Sojka Michal Štefánik
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Domain adaptation allows generative language models to address specific flaws caused by the domain shift of their application. However, the traditional adaptation by further training on in-domain data rapidly weakens the model`s ability to generalize to other domains, making the open-ended deployments of the adapted models prone to errors. This work introduces novel training objectives built upon a semantic similarity of the predicted tokens to the reference. Our results show that (1) avoiding the common assumption of a single correct prediction by constructing the training target from tokens' semantic similarity can largely mitigate catastrophic forgetting of adaptation, while (2) preserving the adaptation in-domain quality, (3) with negligible additions to compute costs. In the broader context, the objectives grounded in a continuous token similarity pioneer the exploration of the middle ground between the efficient but naive exact-match token-level objectives and expressive but computationally- and resource-intensive sequential objectives.
The CRINGE Loss: Learning what language not to model
Authors: Tianyu Gao, Jing Xu, Kurt Shuster, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Jason Weston Leonard Adolphs
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Standard language model training employs gold human documents or human-human interaction data, and treats all training data as positive examples. Growing evidence shows that even with very large amounts of positive training data, issues remain that can be alleviated with relatively small amounts of negative data -- examples of what the model should not do. In this work, we propose a novel procedure to train with such data called the “CRINGE” loss (ContRastive Iterative Negative GEneration). We show the effectiveness of this approach across three different experiments on the tasks of safe generation, contradiction avoidance, and open-domain dialogue. Our models outperform multiple strong baselines and are conceptually simple, easy to train and implement.
Modeling User Satisfaction Dynamics in Dialogue via Hawkes Process
Authors: Zhiyuan Hu, Emine Yilmaz Fanghua Ye
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Dialogue systems have received increasing attention while automatically evaluating their performance remains challenging. User satisfaction estimation (USE) has been proposed as an alternative. It assumes that the performance of a dialogue system can be measured by user satisfaction and uses an estimator to simulate users. The effectiveness of USE depends heavily on the estimator. Existing estimators independently predict user satisfaction at each turn and ignore satisfaction dynamics across turns within a dialogue. In order to fully simulate users, it is crucial to take satisfaction dynamics into account. To fill this gap, we propose a new estimator ASAP (sAtisfaction eStimation via HAwkes Process) that treats user satisfaction across turns as an event sequence and employs a Hawkes process to effectively model the dynamics in this sequence. Experimental results on four benchmark dialogue datasets demonstrate that ASAP can substantially outperform state-of-the-art baseline estimators.
Towards Identifying Fine-Grained Depression Symptoms from Memes
Authors: Cornelia Caragea, Chenye Zhao, Naincy Kumari, Marvin Solberg, Tanmay Sharma Shweta Yadav
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: The past decade has observed significant attention toward developing computational methods for classifying social media data based on the presence or absence of mental health conditions. In the context of mental health, for clinicians to make an accurate diagnosis or provide personalized intervention, it is crucial to identify fine-grained mental health symptoms. To this end, we conduct a focused study on depression disorder and introduce a new task of identifying fine-grained depressive symptoms from memes. Toward this, we create a high-quality dataset (RESTORE) annotated with 8 fine-grained depression symptoms based on the clinically adopted PHQ-9 questionnaire. We benchmark RESTORE on 20 strong monomodal and multimodal methods. Additionally, we show how imposing orthogonal constraints on textual and visual feature representations in a multimodal setting can enforce the model to learn non-redundant and de-correlated features leading to a better prediction of fine-grained depression symptoms. Further, we conduct an extensive human analysis and elaborate on the limitations of existing multimodal models that often overlook the implicit connection between visual and textual elements of a meme.
SLUE Phase-2: A Benchmark Suite of Diverse Spoken Language Understanding Tasks
Authors: Siddhant Arora, Chyi-Jiunn Lin, Ankita Pasad, Felix Wu, Roshan Sharma, Wei-Lun Wu, Hung-yi Lee, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe Suwon Shon
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks have been studied for many decades in the speech research community, but have not received as much attention as lower-level tasks like speech and speaker recognition. In this work, we introduce several new annotated SLU benchmark tasks based on freely available speech data, which complement existing benchmarks and address gaps in the SLU evaluation landscape. We contribute four tasks: question answering and summarization involve inference over longer speech sequences; named entity localization addresses the speech-specific task of locating the targeted content in the signal; dialog act classification identifies the function of a given speech utterance. In order to facilitate the development of SLU models that leverage the success of pre-trained speech representations, we will release a new benchmark suite, including for each task (i) curated annotations for a relatively small fine-tuning set, (ii) reproducible pipeline (speech recognizer + text model) and end-to-end baseline models and evaluation metrics, (iii) baseline model performance in various types of systems for easy comparisons. We present the details of data collection and annotation and the performance of the baseline models. We also analyze the sensitivity of pipeline models' performance to the speech recognition accuracy, using more than 20 publicly availablespeech recognition models.
My side, your side and the evidence: Discovering aligned actor groups and the narratives they weave
Authors: David Chong, Timothy Tangherlini, Vwani Roychowdhury Pavan Holur
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: News reports about emerging issues often include several conflicting story lines. Individual stories can be conceptualized as samples from an underlying mixture of competing narratives. The automated identification of these distinct narratives from unstructured text is a fundamental yet difficult task in Computational Linguistics since narratives are often intertwined and only implicitly conveyed in text. In this paper, we consider a more feasible proxy task: Identify the distinct sets of aligned story actors responsible for sustaining the issue-specific narratives. Discovering aligned actors, and the groups these alignments create, brings us closer to estimating the narrative that each group represents. With the help of Large Language Models (LLM), we address this task by: (i) Introducing a corpus of text segments rich in narrative content associated with six different current issues; (ii) Introducing a novel two-step graph-based framework that (a) identifies alignments between actors (INCANT) and (b) extracts aligned actor groups using the network structure (TAMPA). Amazon Mechanical Turk evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Across domains, alignment relationships from INCANT are accurate (macro F1 \ensuremath>= 0.75) and actor groups from TAMPA are preferred over 2 non-trivial baseline models (ACC \ensuremath>= 0.75).
Characterizing and Measuring Linguistic Dataset Drift
Authors: Kishaloy Halder, Neha Anna John, Yogarshi Vyas, Yassine Benajiba, Miguel Ballesteros, Dan Roth Tyler Chang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: NLP models often degrade in performance when real world data distributions differ markedly from training data. However, existing dataset drift metrics in NLP have generally not considered specific dimensions of linguistic drift that affect model performance, and they have not been validated in their ability to predict model performance at the individual example level, where such metrics are often used in practice. In this paper, we propose three dimensions of linguistic dataset drift: vocabulary, structural, and semantic drift. These dimensions correspond to content word frequency divergences, syntactic divergences, and meaning changes not captured by word frequencies (e.g. lexical semantic change). We propose interpretable metrics for all three drift dimensions, and we modify past performance prediction methods to predict model performance at both the example and dataset level for English sentiment classification and natural language inference. We find that our drift metrics are more effective than previous metrics at predicting out-of-domain model accuracies (mean 16.8% root mean square error decrease), particularly when compared to popular fine-tuned embedding distances (mean 47.7% error decrease). Fine-tuned embedding distances are much more effective at ranking individual examples by expected performance, but decomposing into vocabulary, structural, and semantic drift produces the best example rankings of all considered model-agnostic drift metrics (mean 6.7% ROC AUC increase).
WebCPM: Interactive Web Search for Chinese Long-form Question Answering
Authors: Zihan Cai, Dian Jin, Lan Yan, Shihao Liang, Kunlun Zhu, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Ning Ding, Huadong Wang, Ruobing Xie, Fanchao Qi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou Yujia Qin
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Long-form question answering (LFQA) aims at answering complex, open-ended questions with detailed, paragraph-length responses. The de facto paradigm of LFQA necessitates two procedures: information retrieval, which searches for relevant supporting facts, and information synthesis, which integrates these facts into a coherent answer. In this paper, we introduce WebCPM, the first Chinese LFQA dataset. One unique feature of WebCPM is that its information retrieval is based on interactive web search, which engages with a search engine in real time. Following WebGPT, we develop a web search interface. We recruit annotators to search for relevant information using our interface and then answer questions. Meanwhile, the web search behaviors of our annotators would be recorded. In total, we collect 5,500 high-quality question-answer pairs, together with 15,372 supporting facts and 125,954 web search actions. We fine-tune pre-trained language models to imitate human behaviors for web search and to generate answers based on the collected facts. Our LFQA pipeline, built on these fine-tuned models, generates answers that are no worse than human-written ones in 32.5% and 47.5% of the cases on our dataset and DuReader, respectively. The interface, dataset, and codes are publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/thunlp/WebCPM.
Synthesize, Prompt and Transfer: Zero-shot Conversational Question Generation with Pre-trained Language Model
Authors: Bifan Wei, Jun Liu, Weiping Fu Hongwei Zeng
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Conversational question generation aims to generate questions that depend on both context and conversation history. Conventional works utilizing deep learning have shown promising results, but heavily rely on the availability of large-scale annotated conversations. In this paper, we introduce a more realistic and less explored setting, Zero-shot Conversational Question Generation (ZeroCQG), which requires no human-labeled conversations for training. To solve ZeroCQG, we propose a multi-stage knowledge transfer framework, Synthesize, Prompt, and trAnsfer with pRe-Trained lAnguage model (SPARTA) to effectively leverage knowledge from single-turn question generation instances. To validate the zero-shot performance of SPARTA, we conduct extensive experiments on three conversational datasets: CoQA, QuAC, and DoQA by transferring knowledge from three single-turn datasets: MS MARCO, NewsQA, and SQuAD. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Specifically, SPARTA has achieved 14.81 BLEU-4 (88.2% absolute improvement compared to T5) in CoQA with knowledge transferred from SQuAD.
FormNetV2: Multimodal Graph Contrastive Learning for Form Document Information Extraction
Authors: Chun-Liang Li, Hao Zhang, Timothy Dozat, Vincent Perot, Guolong Su, Xiang Zhang, Kihyuk Sohn, Nikolay Glushnev, Renshen Wang, Joshua Ainslie, Shangbang Long, Siyang Qin, Yasuhisa Fujii, Nan Hua, Tomas Pfister Chen-Yu Lee
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: The recent advent of self-supervised pre-training techniques has led to a surge in the use of multimodal learning in form document understanding. However, existing approaches that extend the mask language modeling to other modalities require careful multi-task tuning, complex reconstruction target designs, or additional pre-training data. In FormNetV2, we introduce a centralized multimodal graph contrastive learning strategy to unify self-supervised pre-training for all modalities in one loss. The graph contrastive objective maximizes the agreement of multimodal representations, providing a natural interplay for all modalities without special customization. In addition, we extract image features within the bounding box that joins a pair of tokens connected by a graph edge, capturing more targeted visual cues without loading a sophisticated and separately pre-trained image embedder. FormNetV2 establishes new state-of-the-art performance on FUNSD, CORD, SROIE and Payment benchmarks with a more compact model size.
MixCE: Training Autoregressive Language Models by Mixing Forward and Reverse Cross-Entropies
Authors: Shijie Wu, Ozan Irsoy, Steven Lu, Mohit Bansal, Mark Dredze, David Rosenberg Shiyue Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Autoregressive language models are trained by minimizing the cross-entropy of the model distribution Q relative to the data distribution P -- that is, minimizing the forward cross-entropy, which is equivalent to maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). We have observed that models trained in this way may “over-generalize”, in the sense that they produce non-human-like text. Moreover, we believe that reverse cross-entropy, i.e., the cross-entropy of P relative to Q, is a better reflection of how a human would evaluate text generated by a model. Hence, we propose learning with MixCE, an objective that mixes the forward and reverse cross-entropies. We evaluate models trained with this objective on synthetic data settings (where P is known) and real data, and show that the resulting models yield better generated text without complex decoding strategies.
Knowledgeable Parameter Efficient Tuning Network for Commonsense Question Answering
Authors: Linmei Hu, Hanyu Zhao, Yingxia Shao, Yequan Wang Ziwang Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Commonsense question answering is important for making decisions about everyday matters. Although existing commonsense question answering works based on fully fine-tuned PLMs have achieved promising results, they suffer from prohibitive computation costs as well as poor interpretability. Some works improve the PLMs by incorporating knowledge to provide certain evidence, via elaborately designed GNN modules which require expertise. In this paper, we propose a simple knowledgeable parameter efficient tuning network to couple PLMs with external knowledge for commonsense question answering. Specifically, we design a trainable parameter-sharing adapter attached to a parameter-freezing PLM to incorporate knowledge at a small cost. The adapter is equipped with both entity- and query-related knowledge via two auxiliary knowledge-related tasks (i.e., span masking and relation discrimination). To make the adapter focus on the relevant knowledge, we design gating and attention mechanisms to respectively filter and fuse the query information from the PLM. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that KPE is parameter-efficient and can effectively incorporate knowledge for improving commonsense question answering.
BLASER: A Text-Free Speech-to-Speech Translation Evaluation Metric
Authors: Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pierre Andrews, Justine Kao, Alexandre Mourachko, Holger Schwenk, Marta R. Costa-jussà Mingda Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score of the translation quality that can be used as a proxy to human evaluation. To evaluate our approach, we construct training and evaluation sets from more than 40k human annotations covering seven language directions. The best results of BLASER are achieved by training with supervision from human rating scores. We show that when evaluated at the sentence level, BLASER correlates significantly better with human judgment compared to ASR dependent metrics including ASR-SENTBLEU in all translation directions and ASR-COMET in five of them. Our analysis shows combining speech and text as inputs to BLASER does not increase the correlation with human scores, but best correlations are achieved when using speech, which motivates the goal of our research. Moreover, we show that using ASR for references is detrimental for text-based metrics.
NLPositionality: Characterizing Design Biases of Datasets and Models
Authors: Jenny Liang, Ronan Le Bras, Katharina Reinecke, Maarten Sap Sebastin Santy
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Design biases in NLP systems, such as performance differences for different populations, often stem from their creator`s positionality, i.e., views and lived experiences shaped by identity and background. Despite the prevalence and risks of design biases, they are hard to quantify because researcher, system, and dataset positionality is often unobserved. We introduce NLPositionality, a framework for characterizing design biases and quantifying the positionality of NLP datasets and models. Our framework continuously collects annotations from a diverse pool of volunteer participants on LabintheWild, and statistically quantifies alignment with dataset labels and model predictions. We apply NLPositionality to existing datasets and models for two tasks---social acceptability and hate speech detection. To date, we have collected 16,299 annotations in over a year for 600 instances from 1,096 annotators across 87 countries. We find that datasets and models align predominantly with Western, White, college-educated, and younger populations. Additionally, certain groups, such as non-binary people and non-native English speakers, are further marginalized by datasets and models as they rank least in alignment across all tasks. Finally, we draw from prior literature to discuss how researchers can examine their own positionality and that of their datasets and models, opening the door for more inclusive NLP systems.