mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Generating User-Engaging News Headlines
Authors: Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho, Hongwei Wang, Xiaoyang Wang, Hong Yu, Fei Liu, Dong Yu Pengshan Cai
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: The potential choices for news article headlines are enormous, and finding the right balance between conveying the essential message and capturing the reader`s attention is key to effective headlining. However, presenting the same news headline to all readers is a suboptimal strategy, because it does not take into account the different preferences and interests of diverse readers, who may be confused about why a particular article has been recommended to them and do not see a clear connection between their interests and the recommended article. In this paper, we present a novel framework that addresses these challenges by incorporating user profiling to generate personalized headlines, and a combination of automated and human evaluation methods to determine user preference for personalized headlines. Our framework utilizes a learnable relevance function to assign personalized signature phrases to users based on their reading histories, which are then used to personalize headline generation. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in generating personalized headlines that meet the needs of a diverse audience. Our framework has the potential to improve the efficacy of news recommendations and facilitate creation of personalized content.
Word sense extension
Authors: Yang Xu Lei Yu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Humans often make creative use of words to expressnovel senses. A long-standing effort in natural language processing hasbeen focusing on word sense disambiguation (WSD), but little has been explored about how the sense inventory of a word may be extended toward novel meanings. We present a paradigm of word sense extension (WSE) thatenables words to spawn new senses toward novel context. We develop a framework that simulates novel word sense extension by first partitioning a polysemous word type into two pseudo-tokens that mark its different senses, and then inferring whether the meaning of a pseudo-token can be extended to convey the sense denoted by the token partitioned from the same word type. Our framework combines cognitivemodels of chaining with a learning scheme that transforms a language model embedding space to supportvarious types of word sense extension. We evaluate our frameworkagainst several competitive baselines and show that it is superior in predicting plausible novel senses for over 7,500 English words. Furthermore, we show that our WSE framework improves performance over a range of transformer-based WSD models in predicting rare word senses with few or zero mentions in the training data.
PVGRU: Generating Diverse and Relevant Dialogue Responses via Pseudo-Variational Mechanism
Authors: Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Yifei Zhang, Hinrich Schütze Yongkang Liu
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 response generation for multi-turn dialogue in generative chatbots. Existing generative modelsbased on RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks) usually employ the last hidden state to summarize the history, which makesmodels unable to capture the subtle variability observed in different dialogues and cannot distinguish the differencesbetween dialogues that are similar in composition. In this paper, we propose Pseudo-Variational Gated Recurrent Unit (PVGRU). The key novelty of PVGRU is a recurrent summarizing variable thataggregates the accumulated distribution variations of subsequences. We train PVGRU without relying on posterior knowledge, thus avoiding the training-inference inconsistency problem. PVGRU can perceive subtle semantic variability through summarizing variables that are optimized by two objectives we employ for training: distribution consistency and reconstruction. In addition, we build a Pseudo-Variational Hierarchical Dialogue(PVHD) model based on PVGRU. Experimental results demonstrate that PVGRU can broadly improve the diversity andrelevance of responses on two benchmark datasets.
Decoding Symbolism in Language Models
Authors: Rebecca Hwa, Adriana Kovashka Meiqi Guo
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: This work explores the feasibility of eliciting knowledge from language models (LMs) to decode symbolism, recognizing something (e.g.,roses) as a stand-in for another (e.g., love). We present our evaluative framework, Symbolism Analysis (SymbA), which compares LMs (e.g., RoBERTa, GPT-J) on different types of symbolism and analyze the outcomes along multiple metrics. Our findings suggest that conventional symbols are more reliably elicited from LMs while situated symbols are more challenging. Results also reveal the negative impact of the bias in pre-trained corpora. We further demonstrate that a simple re-ranking strategy can mitigate the bias and significantly improve model performances to be on par with human performances in some cases.
A Survey on Zero Pronoun Translation
Authors: Siyou Liu, Mingzhou Xu, Linfeng Song, Shuming Shi, Zhaopeng Tu Longyue Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Zero pronouns (ZPs) are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages (e.g. Chinese, Hungarian, and Hindi), but should be recalled in non-pro-drop languages (e.g. English). This phenomenon has been studied extensively in machine translation (MT), as it poses a significant challenge for MT systems due to the difficulty in determining the correct antecedent for the pronoun. This survey paper highlights the major works that have been undertaken in zero pronoun translation (ZPT) after the neural revolution so that researchers can recognize the current state and future directions of this field. We provide an organization of the literature based on evolution, dataset, method, and evaluation. In addition, we compare and analyze competing models and evaluation metrics on different benchmarks. We uncover a number of insightful findings such as: 1) ZPT is in line with the development trend of large language model; 2) data limitation causes learning bias in languages and domains; 3) performance improvements are often reported on single benchmarks, but advanced methods are still far from real-world use; 4) general-purpose metrics are not reliable on nuances and complexities of ZPT, emphasizing the necessity of targeted metrics; 5) apart from commonly-cited errors, ZPs will cause risks of gender bias.
We Understand Elliptical Sentences, and Language Models should Too: A New Dataset for Studying Ellipsis and its Interaction with Thematic Fit
Authors: Emmanuele Chersoni, Alessandro Lenci Davide Testa
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Ellipsis is a linguistic phenomenon characterized by the omission of one or more sentence elements. Solving such a linguistic construction is not a trivial issue in natural language processing since it involves the retrieval of non-overtly expressed verbal material, which might in turn require the model to integrate human-like syntactic and semantic knowledge. In this paper, we explored the issue of how the prototypicality of event participants affects the ability of Language Models (LMs) to handle elliptical sentences and to identify the omitted arguments at different degrees of thematic fit, ranging from highly typical participants to semantically anomalous ones. With this purpose in mind, we built ELLie, the first dataset composed entirely of utterances containing different types of elliptical constructions, and structurally suited for evaluating the effect of argument thematic fit in solving ellipsis and reconstructing the missing element. Our tests demonstrated that the probability scores assigned by the models are higher for typical events than for atypical and impossible ones in different elliptical contexts, confirming the influence of prototypicality of the event participants in interpreting such linguistic structures. Finally, we conducted a retrieval task of the elided verb in the sentence in which the low performance of LMs highlighted a considerable difficulty in reconstructing the correct event.
MPCHAT: Towards Multimodal Persona-Grounded Conversation
Authors: Yeda Song, Sangdoo Yun, Gunhee Kim Jaewoo Ahn
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: In order to build self-consistent personalized dialogue agents, previous research has mostly focused on textual persona that delivers personal facts or personalities. However, to fully describe the multi-faceted nature of persona, image modality can help better reveal the speaker`s personal characteristics and experiences in episodic memory (Rubin et al., 2003; Conway, 2009). In this work, we extend persona-based dialogue to the multimodal domain and make two main contributions. First, we present the first multimodal persona-based dialogue dataset named MPCHAT, which extends persona with both text and images to contain episodic memories. Second, we empirically show that incorporating multimodal persona, as measured by three proposed multimodal persona-grounded dialogue tasks (i.e., next response prediction, grounding persona prediction, and speaker identification), leads to statistically significant performance improvements across all tasks. Thus, our work highlights that multimodal persona is crucial for improving multimodal dialogue comprehension, and our MPCHAT serves as a high-quality resource for this research.
DOC: Improving Long Story Coherence With Detailed Outline Control
Authors: Dan Klein, Nanyun Peng, Yuandong Tian Kevin Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: We propose the Detailed Outline Control (DOC) framework for improving long-range plot coherence when automatically generating several-thousand-word-long stories. DOC consists of two complementary components: a detailed outliner and a detailed controller. The detailed outliner creates a more detailed, hierarchically structured outline, shifting creative burden from the main drafting procedure to the planning stage. The detailed controller ensures the more detailed outline is still respected during generation by controlling story passages to align with outline details. In human evaluations of automatically generated stories, DOC substantially outperforms a strong Re3 baseline (Yang et al., 2022) on plot coherence (22.5% absolute gain), outline relevance (28.2%), and interestingness (20.7%). Humans also judged DOC to be much more controllable in an interactive generation setting.
Dual-Alignment Pre-training for Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding
Authors: Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Zhi-Hong Deng, Qiang Lou, Haizhen Huang, Jian Jiao, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang Ziheng Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that dual encoder models trained with the sentence-level translation ranking task are effective methods for cross-lingual sentence embedding. However, our research indicates that token-level alignment is also crucial in multilingual scenarios, which has not been fully explored previously. Based on our findings, we propose a dual-alignment pre-training (DAP) framework for cross-lingual sentence embedding that incorporates both sentence-level and token-level alignment. To achieve this, we introduce a novel representation translation learning (RTL) task, where the model learns to use one-side contextualized token representation to reconstruct its translation counterpart. This reconstruction objective encourages the model to embed translation information into the token representation. Compared to other token-level alignment methods such as translation language modeling, RTL is more suitable for dual encoder architectures and is computationally efficient. Extensive experiments on three sentence-level cross-lingual benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve sentence embedding. Our code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/ChillingDream/DAP.
Exploring Better Text Image Translation with Multimodal Codebook
Authors: Jiawei Yu, Xiang Li, Wen Zhang, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Degen Huang, Jinsong Su Zhibin Lan
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Text image translation (TIT) aims to translate the source texts embedded in the image to target translations, which has a wide range of applications and thus has important research value. However, current studies on TIT are confronted with two main bottlenecks: 1) this task lacks a publicly available TIT dataset, 2) dominant models are constructed in a cascaded manner, which tends to suffer from the error propagation of optical character recognition (OCR). In this work, we first annotate a Chinese-English TIT dataset named OCRMT30K, providing convenience for subsequent studies. Then, we propose a TIT model with a multimodal codebook, which is able to associate the image with relevant texts, providing useful supplementary information for translation. Moreover, we present a multi-stage training framework involving text machine translation, image-text alignment, and TIT tasks, which fully exploits additional bilingual texts, OCR dataset and our OCRMT30K dataset to train our model. Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model and training framework.
FEDLEGAL: The First Real-World Federated Learning Benchmark for Legal NLP
Authors: Xiangjing Hu, Jingyuan Zhang, Yating Zhang, Hui Wang, Lizhen Qu, Zenglin Xu Zhuo Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: The inevitable private information in legal data necessitates legal artificial intelligence to study privacy-preserving and decentralized learning methods. Federated learning (FL) has merged as a promising technique for multiple participants to collaboratively train a shared model while efficiently protecting the sensitive data of participants. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no work on applying FL to legal NLP. To fill this gap, this paper presents the first real-world FL benchmark for legal NLP, coined FEDLEGAL, which comprises five legal NLP tasks and one privacy task based on the data from Chinese courts. Based on the extensive experiments on these datasets, our results show that FL faces new challenges in terms of real-world non-IID data. The benchmark also encourages researchers to investigate privacy protection using real-world data in the FL setting, as well as deploying models in resource-constrained scenarios. The code and datasets of FEDLEGAL are available here.
A Gradient Control Method for Backdoor Attacks on Parameter-Efficient Tuning
Authors: Peng Fu, Xiyu Liu, Zhengxiao Liu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang Naibin Gu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Tuning (PET) has shown remarkable performance by fine-tuning only a small number of parameters of the pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the downstream tasks, while it is also possible to construct backdoor attacks due to the vulnerability of pre-trained weights. However, a large reduction in the number of attackable parameters in PET will cause the user`s fine-tuning to greatly affect the effectiveness of backdoor attacks, resulting in backdoor forgetting. We find that the backdoor injection process can be regarded as multi-task learning, which has a convergence imbalance problem between the training of clean and poisoned data. And this problem might result in forgetting the backdoor. Based on this finding, we propose a gradient control method to consolidate the attack effect, comprising two strategies. One controls the gradient magnitude distribution cross layers within one task and the other prevents the conflict of gradient directions between tasks. Compared with previous backdoor attack methods in the scenario of PET, our method improve the effect of the attack on sentiment classification and spam detection respectively, which shows that our method is widely applicable to different tasks.
History Semantic Graph Enhanced Conversational KBQA with Temporal Information Modeling
Authors: Yang Li, Liwei Deng, Bowen Li, Binyuan Hui, Binhua Li, Yunshi Lan, Yan Zhang, Yongbin Li Hao Sun
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Context information modeling is an important task in conversational KBQA. However, existing methods usually assume the independence of utterances and model them in isolation. In this paper, we propose a History Semantic Graph Enhanced KBQA model (HSGE) that is able to effectively model long-range semantic dependencies in conversation history while maintaining low computational cost. The framework incorporates a context-aware encoder, which employs a dynamic memory decay mechanism and models context at different levels of granularity. We evaluate HSGE on a widely used benchmark dataset for complex sequential question answering. Experimental results demonstrate that it outperforms existing baselines averaged on all question types.
From the One, Judge of the Whole: Typed Entailment Graph Construction with Predicate Generation
Authors: Yansong Feng, Dongyan Zhao Zhibin Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Entailment Graphs (EGs) have been constructed based on extracted corpora as a strong and explainable form to indicate context-independent entailment relation in natural languages. However, EGs built by previous methods often suffer from the severe sparsity issues, due to limited corpora available and the long-tail phenomenon of predicate distributions. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage method, Typed Predicate-Entailment Graph Generator (TP-EGG), to tackle this problem. Given several seed predicates, TP-EGG builds the graphs by generating new predicates and detecting entailment relations among them. The generative nature of TP-EGG helps us leverage the recent advances from large pretrained language models (PLMs), while avoiding the reliance on carefully prepared corpora. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that TP-EGG can generate high-quality and scale-controllable entailment graphs, achieving significant in-domain improvement over state-of-the-art EGs and boosting the performance of down-stream inference tasks.
Alleviating Over-smoothing for Unsupervised Sentence Representation
Authors: Linjun Shou, Jian Pei, Ming Gong, Bowen Cao, Jianhui Chang, Jia Li, Daxin Jiang Nuo Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Currently, learning better unsupervised sentence representations is the pursuit of many natural language processing communities. Lots of approaches based on pre-trained language models (PLMs) and contrastive learning have achieved promising results on this task. Experimentally, we observe that the over-smoothing problem reduces the capacity of these powerful PLMs, leading to sub-optimal sentence representations. In this paper, we present a Simple method named Self-Contrastive Learning (SSCL) to alleviate this issue, which samples negatives from PLMs intermediate layers, improving the quality of the sentence representation. Our proposed method is quite simple and can be easily extended to various state-of-the-art models for performance boosting, which can be seen as a plug-and-play contrastive framework for learning unsupervised sentence representation. Extensive results prove that SSCL brings the superior performance improvements of different strong baselines (e.g., BERT and SimCSE) on Semantic Textual Similarity and Transfer datasets
Memory-efficient NLLB-200: Language-specific Expert Pruning of a Massively Multilingual Machine Translation Model
Authors: Alexandre Berard, Vassilina Nikoulina Yeskendir Koishekenov
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: The recently released NLLB-200 is a set of multilingual Neural Machine Translation models that cover 202 languages. The largest model is based on a Mixture of Experts architecture and achieves SoTA results across many language pairs. It contains 54.5B parameters and requires at least four 32GB GPUs just for inference. In this work, we propose a pruning method that enables the removal of up to 80% of experts without further finetuning and with a negligible loss in translation quality, which makes it feasible to run the model on a single 32GB GPU. Further analysis suggests that our pruning metrics can identify language-specific experts.
DAMP: Doubly Aligned Multilingual Parser for Task-Oriented Dialogue
Authors: Christopher Hidey, Fei Liu, Eric Zhu, Rahul Goel, Diyi Yang, Rushin Shah William Held
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Modern virtual assistants use internal semantic parsing engines to convert user utterances to actionable commands. However, prior work has demonstrated multilingual models are less robust for semantic parsing compared to other tasks. In global markets such as India and Latin America, robust multilingual semantic parsing is critical as codeswitching between languages is prevalent for bilingual users. In this work we dramatically improve the zero-shot performance of a multilingual and codeswitched semantic parsing system using two stages of multilingual alignment. First, we show that contrastive alignment pretraining improves \textitboth English performance and transfer efficiency. We then introduce a constrained optimization approach for hyperparameter-free adversarial alignment during finetuning. Our Doubly Aligned Multilingual Parser (DAMP) improves mBERT transfer performance by 3x, 6x, and 81x on the Spanglish, Hinglish and Multilingual Task Oriented Parsing benchmarks respectively and outperforms XLM-R and mT5-Large using 3.2x fewer parameters.
From Characters to Words: Hierarchical Pre-trained Language Model for Open-vocabulary Language Understanding
Authors: Florian Luisier, Kayhan Batmanghelich, Dinei Florencio, Cha Zhang Li Sun
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Current state-of-the-art models for natural language understanding require a preprocessing step to convert raw text into discrete tokens. This process known as tokenization relies on a pre-built vocabulary of words or sub-word morphemes. This fixed vocabulary limits the model`s robustness to spelling errors and its capacity to adapt to new domains. In this work, we introduce a novel open-vocabulary language model that adopts a hierarchical two-level approach: one at the word level and another at the sequence level. Concretely, we design an intra-word module that uses a shallow Transformer architecture to learn word representations from their characters, and a deep inter-word Transformer module that contextualizes each word representation by attending to the entire word sequence. Our model thus directly operates on character sequences with explicit awareness of word boundaries, but without biased sub-word or word-level vocabulary. Experiments on various downstream tasks show that our method outperforms strong baselines. We also demonstrate that our hierarchical model is robust to textual corruption and domain shift.
MatSci-NLP: Evaluating Scientific Language Models on Materials Science Language Tasks Using Text-to-Schema Modeling
Authors: Santiago Miret, Bang Liu Yu Song
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 MatSci-NLP, a natural language benchmark for evaluating the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models on materials science text. We construct the benchmark from publicly available materials science text data to encompass seven different NLP tasks, including conventional NLP tasks like named entity recognition and relation classification, as well as NLP tasks specific to materials science, such as synthesis action retrieval which relates to creating synthesis procedures for materials. We study various BERT-based models pretrained on different scientific text corpora on MatSci-NLP to understand the impact of pretraining strategies on understanding materials science text. Given the scarcity of high-quality annotated data in the materials science domain, we perform our fine-tuning experiments with limited training data to encourage the generalize across MatSci-NLP tasks. Our experiments in this low-resource training setting show that language models pretrained on scientific text outperform BERT trained on general text. MatBERT, a model pretrained specifically on materials science journals, generally performs best for most tasks. Moreover, we propose a unified text-to-schema for multitask learning on \pasted macro \textquoteleftBENCHMARK'\ and compare its performance with traditional fine-tuning methods. In our analysis of different training methods, we find that our proposed text-to-schema methods inspired by question-answering consistently outperform single and multitask NLP fine-tuning methods. The code and datasets are publicly available r̆lhttps://github.com/BangLab-UdeM-Mila/NLP4MatSci-ACL23.
Code4Struct: Code Generation for Few-Shot Event Structure Prediction
Authors: Sha Li, Heng Ji Xingyao Wang
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 Model (LLM) trained on a mixture of text and code has demonstrated impressive capability in translating natural language (NL) into structured code. We observe that semantic structures can be conveniently translated into code and propose Code4Struct to leverage such text-to-structure translation capability to tackle structured prediction tasks. As a case study, we formulate Event Argument Extraction (EAE) as converting text into event-argument structures that can be represented as a class object using code. This alignment between structures and code enables us to take advantage of Programming Language (PL) features such as inheritance and type annotation to introduce external knowledge or add constraints. We show that, with sufficient in-context examples, formulating EAE as a code generation problem is advantageous over using variants of text-based prompts. Despite only using 20 training event instances for each event type, Code4Struct is comparable to supervised models trained on 4,202 instances and outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) trained on 20-shot data by 29.5% absolute F1. Code4Struct can use 10-shot training data from a sibling event type to predict arguments for zero-resource event types and outperforms the zero-shot baseline by 12% absolute F1.
GENEVA: Benchmarking Generalizability for Event Argument Extraction with Hundreds of Event Types and Argument Roles
Authors: I-Hung Hsu, Kuan-Hao Huang, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng Tanmay Parekh
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 in Event Argument Extraction (EAE) have focused on improving model generalizability to cater to new events and domains. However, standard benchmarking datasets like ACE and ERE cover less than 40 event types and 25 entity-centric argument roles. Limited diversity and coverage hinder these datasets from adequately evaluating the generalizability of EAE models. In this paper, we first contribute by creating a large and diverse EAE ontology. This ontology is created by transforming FrameNet, a comprehensive semantic role labeling (SRL) dataset for EAE, by exploiting the similarity between these two tasks. Then, exhaustive human expert annotations are collected to build the ontology, concluding with 115 events and 220 argument roles, with a significant portion of roles not being entities. We utilize this ontology to further introduce GENEVA, a diverse generalizability benchmarking dataset comprising four test suites aimed at evaluating models' ability to handle limited data and unseen event type generalization. We benchmark six EAE models from various families. The results show that owing to non-entity argument roles, even the best-performing model can only achieve 39% F1 score, indicating how GENEVA provides new challenges for generalization in EAE. Overall, our large and diverse EAE ontology can aid in creating more comprehensive future resources, while GENEVA is a challenging benchmarking dataset encouraging further research for improving generalizability in EAE. The code and data can be found at r̆lhttps://github.com/PlusLabNLP/GENEVA.
Efficient Semiring-Weighted Earley Parsing
Authors: Ran Zmigrod, Tim Vieira, Ryan Cotterell, Jason Eisner Andreas Opedal
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 Earley`s (1970) context-free parsing algorithm as a deduction system, incorporating various known and new speed-ups. In particular, our presentation supports a known worst-case runtime improvement from Earley`s (1970) $O(N^3|G||R|)$, which is unworkable for the large grammars that arise in natural language processing, to $O(N^3|G|)$, which matches the complexity of CKY on a binarized version of the grammar G. Here N is the length of the sentence, |R| is the number of productions in G, and |G| is the total length of those productions. We also provide a version that achieves runtime of $O(N^3|M|)$ with $|M| łeq |G|$ when the grammar is represented compactly as a single finite-state automaton M (this is partly novel). We carefully treat the generalization to semiring-weighted deduction, preprocessing the grammar like Stolcke (1995) to eliminate the possibility of deduction cycles, and further generalize Stolcke`s method to compute the weights of sentence prefixes. We also provide implementation details for efficient execution, ensuring that on a preprocessed grammar, the semiring-weighted versions of our methods have the same asymptotic runtime and space requirements as the unweighted methods, including sub-cubic runtime on some grammars.
Tree-Based Representation and Generation of Natural and Mathematical Language
Authors: Andrew Lan Alexander Scarlatos
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Mathematical language in scientific communications and educational scenarios is important yet relatively understudied compared to natural languages. Recent works on mathematical language focus either on representing stand-alone mathematical expressions, especially in their natural tree format, or mathematical reasoning in pre-trained natural language models. Existing works on jointly modeling and generating natural and mathematical languages simply treat mathematical expressions as text, without accounting for the rigid structural properties of mathematical expressions. In this paper, we propose a series of modifications to existing language models to jointly represent and generate text and math: representing mathematical expressions as sequences of node tokens in their operator tree format, using math symbol and tree position embeddings to preserve the semantic and structural properties of mathematical expressions, and using a constrained decoding method to generate mathematically valid expressions. We ground our modifications in GPT-2, resulting in a model MathGPT, and demonstrate that it outperforms baselines on mathematical expression generation tasks.
ParaLS: Lexical Substitution via Pretrained Paraphraser
Authors: Kang Liu, Yun Li, Yunhao Yuan, Yi Zhu Jipeng Qiang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Lexical substitution (LS) aims at finding appropriate substitutes for a target word in a sentence. Recently, LS methods based on pretrained language models have made remarkable progress, generating potential substitutes for a target word through analysis of its contextual surroundings. However, these methods tend to overlook the preservation of the sentence`s meaning when generating the substitutes. This study explores how to generate the substitute candidates from a paraphraser, as the generated paraphrases from a paraphraser contain variations in word choice and preserve the sentence`s meaning. Since we cannot directly generate the substitutes via commonly used decoding strategies, we propose two simple decoding strategies that focus on the variations of the target word during decoding. Experimental results show that our methods outperform state-of-the-art LS methods based on pre-trained language models on three benchmarks.
Peer-Label Assisted Hierarchical Text Classification
Authors: Feifei Wang, Yang Yang Junru Song
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging task, in which the labels of texts can be organized into a category hierarchy. To deal with the HTC problem, many existing works focus on utilizing the parent-child relationships that are explicitly shown in the hierarchy. However, texts with a category hierarchy also have some latent relevancy among labels in the same level of the hierarchy. We refer to these labels as peer labels, from which the peer effects are originally utilized in our work to improve the classification performance. To fully explore the peer-label relationship, we develop a PeerHTC method. This method innovatively measures the latent relevancy of peer labels through several metrics and then encodes the relevancy with a Graph Convolutional Neural Network. We also propose a sample importance learning method to ameliorate the side effects raised by modelling the peer label relevancy. Our experiments on several standard datasets demonstrate the evidence of peer labels and the superiority of PeerHTC over other state-of-the-art HTC methods in terms of classification accuracy.
Free Lunch for Efficient Textual Commonsense Integration in Language Models
Authors: Xingran Chen Wanyun Cui
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the emergence of textual commonsense knowledge bases, aimed at providing more nuanced and context-rich knowledge. The integration of external commonsense into language models has been shown to be a key enabler in advancing the state-of-the-art for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, incorporating textual commonsense descriptions is computationally expensive, as compared to encoding conventional symbolic knowledge. In this paper, we propose a method to improve its efficiency without modifying the model. Our idea is to group training samples with similar commonsense descriptions into a single batch, thus reusing the encoded description across multiple samples. We theoretically investigate this problem and demonstrate that its upper bound can be reduced to the classic \textitgraph k-cut problem. Consequently, we propose a spectral clustering-based algorithm to solve this problem. Extensive experiments illustrate that the proposed batch partitioning approach effectively reduces the computational cost while preserving performance. The efficiency improvement is more pronounced on larger datasets and on devices with more memory capacity, attesting to its practical utility for large-scale applications.
A Probabilistic Framework for Discovering New Intents
Authors: Guofeng Quan, Xipeng Qiu Yunhua Zhou
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Discovering new intents is of great significance for establishing the Task-Oriented Dialogue System. Most existing methods either cannot transfer prior knowledge contained in known intents or fall into the dilemma of forgetting prior knowledge in the follow-up. Furthermore, these methods do not deeply explore the intrinsic structure of unlabeled data, and as a result, cannot seek out the characteristics that define an intent in general. In this paper, starting from the intuition that discovering intents could be beneficial for identifying known intents, we propose a probabilistic framework for discovering intents where intent assignments are treated as latent variables. We adopt the Expectation Maximization framework for optimization. Specifically, In the E-step, we conduct intent discovery and explore the intrinsic structure of unlabeled data by the posterior of intent assignments. In the M-step, we alleviate the forgetting of prior knowledge transferred from known intents by optimizing the discrimination of labeled data. Extensive experiments conducted on three challenging real-world datasets demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of the proposed framework and implementation.
MultiTACRED: A Multilingual Version of the TAC Relation Extraction Dataset
Authors: Philippe Thomas, Sebastian Möller Leonhard Hennig
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Relation extraction (RE) is a fundamental task in information extraction, whose extension to multilingual settings has been hindered by the lack of supervised resources comparable in size to large English datasets such as TACRED (Zhang et al., 2017). To address this gap, we introduce the MultiTACRED dataset, covering 12 typologically diverse languages from 9 language families, which is created by machine-translating TACRED instances and automatically projecting their entity annotations. We analyze translation and annotation projection quality, identify error categories, and experimentally evaluate fine-tuned pretrained mono- and multilingual language models in common transfer learning scenarios. Our analyses show that machine translation is a viable strategy to transfer RE instances, with native speakers judging more than 83% of the translated instances to be linguistically and semantically acceptable. We find monolingual RE model performance to be comparable to the English original for many of the target languages, and that multilingual models trained on a combination of English and target language data can outperform their monolingual counterparts. However, we also observe a variety of translation and annotation projection errors, both due to the MT systems and linguistic features of the target languages, such as pronoun-dropping, compounding and inflection, that degrade dataset quality and RE model performance.
Towards Higher Pareto Frontier in Multilingual Machine Translation
Authors: Xiaocheng Feng, Xinwei Geng, Baohang Li, Bing Qin Yichong Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years. However, the long-tailed distribution of multilingual corpora poses a challenge of Pareto optimization, i.e., optimizing for some languages may come at the cost of degrading the performance of others. Existing balancing training strategies are equivalent to a series of Pareto optimal solutions, which trade off on a Pareto frontierIn Pareto optimization, Pareto optimal solutions refer to solutions in which none of the objectives can be improved without sacrificing at least one of the other objectives. The set of all Pareto optimal solutions forms a Pareto frontier..In this work, we propose a new training framework, Pareto Mutual Distillation (Pareto-MD), towards pushing the Pareto frontier outwards rather than making trade-offs. Specifically, Pareto-MD collaboratively trains two Pareto optimal solutions that favor different languages and allows them to learn from the strengths of each other via knowledge distillation. Furthermore, we introduce a novel strategy to enable stronger communication between Pareto optimal solutions and broaden the applicability of our approach. Experimental results on the widely-used WMT and TED datasets show that our method significantly pushes the Pareto frontier and outperforms baselines by up to +2.46 BLEUOur code will be released upon acceptance..
Small Pre-trained Language Models Can be Fine-tuned as Large Models via Over-Parameterization
Authors: Kun Zhou, Peiyu Liu, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen Ze-Feng Gao
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: By scaling the model size, large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks, mostly outperforming small PLMs by a large margin. However, due to the high computational cost, the huge number of parameters also restricts the applicability of large PLMs in real-world systems. In this paper, we focus on scaling up the parameters of PLMs \textitonly during fine-tuning, to benefit from the over-parameterization, while without increasing \textitthe inference latency. Given a relatively small PLM, we over-parameterize it by employing a matrix product operator, an efficient and almost lossless decomposition method to factorize its contained parameter matrices into a set of higher-dimensional tensors.Considering the efficiency, we further propose both static and dynamic strategies to select the most important parameter matrices for over-parameterization.Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our approach can significantly boost the fine-tuning performance of small PLMs and even help small PLMs outperform $3\times$ parameterized larger ones.Our code is publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/zfgao66/OPF.
Entity Tracking in Language Models
Authors: Sebastian Schuster Najoung Kim
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Keeping track of how states of entities change as a text or dialog unfolds is a key prerequisite to discourse understanding. Yet, there have been few systematic investigations into the ability of large language models (LLMs) to track discourse entities. In this work, we present a task probing to what extent a language model can infer the final state of an entity given an English description of the initial state and a series of state-changing operations. We use this task to first investigate whether Flan-T5, GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 can track the state of entities, and find that only GPT-3.5 models, which have been pretrained on large amounts of code, exhibit this ability. We then investigate whether smaller models pretrained primarily on text can learn to track entities, through finetuning T5 on several training/evaluation splits. While performance degrades for more complex splits, we find that even when evaluated on a different set of entities from training or longer operation sequences, a finetuned model can perform non-trivial entity tracking. Taken together, these results suggest that language models can learn to track entities but pretraining on text corpora alone does not make this capacity surface.
A Textual Dataset for Situated Proactive Response Selection
Authors: Jun Araki, HyeongSik Kim, Eduard Hovy Naoki Otani
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent data-driven conversational models are able to return fluent, consistent, and informative responses to many kinds of requests and utterances in task-oriented scenarios. However, these responses are typically limited to just the immediate local topic instead of being wider-ranging and proactively taking the conversation further, for example making suggestions to help customers achieve their goals. This inadequacy reflects a lack of understanding of the interlocutor`s situation and implicit goal. To address the problem, we introduce a task of proactive response selection based on situational information. We present a manually-curated dataset of 1.7k English conversation examples that include situational background information plus for each conversation a set of responses, only some of which are acceptable in the situation. A responsive and informed conversation system should select the appropriate responses and avoid inappropriate ones; doing so demonstrates the ability to adequately understand the initiating request and situation. Our benchmark experiments show that this is not an easy task even for strong neural models, offering opportunities for future research.
DiffusionNER: Boundary Diffusion for Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Dongsheng Li, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang Yongliang Shen
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 propose DiffusionNER, which formulates the named entity recognition task as a boundary-denoising diffusion process and thus generates named entities from noisy spans. During training, DiffusionNER gradually adds noises to the golden entity boundaries by a fixed forward diffusion process and learns a reverse diffusion process to recover the entity boundaries. In inference, DiffusionNER first randomly samples some noisy spans from a standard Gaussian distribution and then generates the named entities by denoising them with the learned reverse diffusion process. The proposed boundary-denoising diffusion process allows progressive refinement and dynamic sampling of entities, empowering DiffusionNER with efficient and flexible entity generation capability. Experiments on multiple flat and nested NER datasets demonstrate that DiffusionNER achieves comparable or even better performance than previous state-of-the-art models.