mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Re-appraising the Schema Linking for Text-to-SQL
Authors: Xinyun Chen, Matthew Purver Yujian Gan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Most text-to-SQL models, even though based on the same grammar decoder, generate the SQL structure first and then fill in the SQL slots with the correct schema items. This second step depends on schema linking: aligning the entity references in the question with the schema columns or tables. This is generally approached via Exact Match based Schema Linking (EMSL) within a neural network-based schema linking module. EMSL has become standard in text-to-SQL: many state-of-the-art models employ EMSL, with performance dropping significantly when the EMSL component is removed. In this work, however, we show that EMSL reduces robustness, rendering models vulnerable to synonym substitution and typos. Instead of relying on EMSL to make up for deficiencies in question-schema encoding, we show that using a pre-trained language model as an encoder can improve performance without using EMSL, giving a more robust model. We also study the design choice of the schema linking module, finding that a suitable design benefits performance and interoperability. Finally, based on the above study of schema linking, we introduce the grammar linking to help model align grammar references in the question with the SQL keywords.
Echoes from Alexandria: A Large Resource for Multilingual Book Summarization
Authors: Simone Conia, Simone Ciciliano, Roberto Navigli Alessandro Scirè
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In recent years, research in text summarization has mainly focused on the news domain, where texts are typically short and have strong layout features. The task of full-book summarization presents additional challenges which are hard to tackle with current resources, due to their limited size and availability in English only. To overcome these limitations, we present “Echoes from Alexandria”, or in shortened form, “Echoes”, a large resource for multilingual book summarization. Echoes featuresthree novel datasets: i) Echo-Wiki, for multilingual book summarization, ii) Echo-XSum, for extremely-compressive multilingual book summarization, and iii) Echo-FairySum, for extractive book summarization. To the best of our knowledge, Echoes -- with its thousands of books and summaries -- is the largest resource, and the first to be multilingual, featuring 5 languages and 25 language pairs. In addition to Echoes, we also introduce a new extractive-then-abstractive baseline, and, supported by our experimental results and manual analysis of the summaries generated, we argue that this baseline is more suitable for book summarization than purely-abstractive approaches. We release our resource and software at r̆lhttps://github.com/Babelscape/echoes-from-alexandria in the hope of fostering innovative research in multilingual booksummarization.
When Gradient Descent Meets Derivative-Free Optimization: A Match Made in Black-Box Scenario
Authors: Liqing Cui, Renyu Zhu, Jianing Wang, Nuo Chen, Qiushi Sun, Xiang Li, Ming Gao Chengcheng Han
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have garnered significant attention for their versatility and potential for solving a wide spectrum of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the cost of running these PLMs may be prohibitive. Furthermore, PLMs may not be open-sourced due to commercial considerations and potential risks of misuse, such as GPT-3. The parameters and gradients of PLMs are unavailable in this scenario. To solve the issue, black-box tuning has been proposed, which utilizes derivative-free optimization (DFO), instead of gradient descent, for training task-specific continuous prompts. However, these gradient-free methods still exhibit a significant gap compared to gradient-based methods. In this paper, we introduce gradient descent into black-box tuning scenario through knowledge distillation. Furthermore, we propose a novel method GDFO, which integrates gradient descent and derivative-free optimization to optimize task-specific continuous prompts in a harmonized manner. Experimental results show that GDFO can achieve significant performance gains over previous state-of-the-art methods.
Align-then-Enhance: Multilingual Entailment Graph Enhancement with Soft Predicate Alignment
Authors: Yutong Hu, Yansong Feng, Tianyi Li, Mark Steedman, Dongyan Zhao Yuting Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Entailment graphs (EGs) with predicates as nodes and entailment relations as edges are typically incomplete, while EGs in different languages are often complementary to each other. In this paper, we propose a new task, multilingual entailment graph enhancement, which aims to utilize the entailment information from one EG to enhance another EG in a different language. The ultimate goal is to obtain an enhanced EG containing richer and more accurate entailment information. We present an align-then-enhance framework (ATE) to achieve accurate multilingual entailment graph enhancement, which first exploits a cross-graph guided interaction mechanism to automatically discover potential equivalent predicates between different EGs and then constructs more accurate enhanced entailment graphs based on soft predicate alignments. Extensive experiments show that ATE achieves better and more robust predicate alignment results between different EGs, and the enhanced entailment graphs generated by ATE outperform the original graphs for entailment detection.
Few-shot Classification with Hypersphere Modeling of Prototypes
Authors: Yulin Chen, Ganqu Cui, Xiaobin Wang, Haitao Zheng, Zhiyuan Liu, Pengjun Xie Ning Ding
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Metric-based meta-learning is one of the de facto standards in few-shot learning. It composes of representation learning and metrics calculation designs. Previous works construct class representations in different ways, varying from mean output embedding to covariance and distributions. However, using embeddings in space lacks expressivity and cannot capture class information robustly, while statistical complex modeling poses difficulty to metric designs. In this work, we use tensor fields (“areas”) to model classes from the geometrical perspective for few-shot learning. We present a simple and effective method, dubbed as hypersphere prototypes (HyperProto), where class information is represented by hyperspheres with dynamic sizes with two sets of learnable parameters: the hypersphere`s center and the radius. Extending from points to areas, hyperspheres are much more expressive than embeddings. Moreover, it is more convenient to perform metric-based classification with hypersphere prototypes than statistical modeling, as we only need to calculate the distance from a data point to the surface of the hypersphere. Following this idea, we also develop two variants of prototypes under other measurements. Extensive experiments and analysis on few-shot NLP tasks and comparison with 20+ competitive baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Structured Mean-Field Variational Inference for Higher-Order Span-Based Semantic Role Labeling
Authors: Songlin Yang, Kewei Tu Wei Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In this work, we enhance higher-order graph-based approaches for span-based semantic role labeling (SRL) by means of structured modeling. To decrease the complexity of higher-order modeling, we decompose the edge from predicate word to argument span into three different edges, predicate-to-head (P2H), predicate-to-tail (P2T), and head-to-tail (H2T), where head/tail means the first/last word of the semantic argument span. As such, we use a CRF-based higher-order dependency parser and leverage Mean-Field Variational Inference (MFVI) for higher-order inference. Moreover, since semantic arguments of predicates are often constituents within a constituency parse tree, we can leverage such nice structural property by defining a TreeCRF distribution over all H2T edges, using the idea of partial marginalization to define structural training loss. We further leverage structured MFVI to enhance inference. We experiment on span-based SRL benchmarks, showing the effectiveness of both higher-order and structured modeling and the combination thereof. In addition, we show superior performance of structured MFVI against vanilla MFVI.
AQE: Argument Quadruplet Extraction via a Quad-Tagging Augmented Generative Approach
Authors: Liying Cheng, Wenxuan Zhang, Stanley Kok, Xin Li, Lidong Bing Jia Guo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Argument mining involves multiple sub-tasks that automatically identify argumentative elements, such as claim detection, evidence extraction, stance classification, etc. However, each subtask alone is insufficient for a thorough understanding of the argumentative structure and reasoning process. To learn a complete view of an argument essay and capture the interdependence among argumentative components, we need to know what opinions people hold (i.e., claims), why those opinions are valid (i.e., supporting evidence), which source the evidence comes from (i.e., evidence type), and how those claims react to the debating topic (i.e., stance). In this work, we for the first time propose a challenging argument quadruplet extraction task (AQE), which can provide an all-in-one extraction of four argumentative components, i.e., claims, evidence, evidence types, and stances. To support this task, we construct a large-scale and challenging dataset. However, there is no existing method that can solve the argument quadruplet extraction. To fill this gap, we propose a novel quad-tagging augmented generative approach, which leverages a quadruplet tagging module to augment the training of the generative framework. The experimental results on our dataset demonstrate the empirical superiority of our proposed approach over several strong baselines.
The Dangers of trusting Stochastic Parrots: Faithfulness and Trust in Open-domain Conversational Question Answering
Authors: Dimitris Dimakopoulos, Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo, Arash Eshghi, Ioannis Papaioannou, Verena Rieser, Ioannis Konstas Sabrina Chiesurin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models are known to produce output which sounds fluent and convincing, but is also often wrong, e.g. “unfaithful” with respect to a rationale as retrieved from a knowledge base. In this paper, we show that task-based systems which exhibit certain advanced linguistic dialog behaviors, such as lexical alignment (repeating what the user said), are in fact preferred and trusted more, whereas other phenomena, such as pronouns and ellipsis are dis-preferred. We use open-domain question answering systems as our test-bed for task based dialog generation and compare several open- and closed-book models. Our results highlight the danger of systems that appear to be trustworthy by parroting user input while providing an unfaithful response.
Discrete Prompt Optimization via Constrained Generation for Zero-shot Re-ranker
Authors: Soyeong Jeong, Jeong yeon Seo, Jong Park Sukmin Cho
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Re-rankers, which order retrieved documents with respect to the relevance score on the given query, have gained attention for the information retrieval (IR) task. Rather than fine-tuning the pre-trained language model (PLM), the large-scale language model (LLM) is utilized as a zero-shot re-ranker with excellent results. While LLM is highly dependent on the prompts, the impact and the optimization of the prompts for the zero-shot re-ranker are not explored yet. Along with highlighting the impact of optimization on the zero-shot re-ranker, we propose a novel discrete prompt optimization method, Constrained Prompt generation (Co-Prompt), with the metric estimating the optimum for re-ranking. Co-Prompt guides the generated texts from PLM toward optimal prompts based on the metric without parameter update. The experimental results demonstrate that Co-Prompt leads to outstanding re-ranking performance against the baselines. Also, Co-Prompt generates more interpretable prompts for humans against other prompt optimization methods.
Triggering Multi-Hop Reasoning for Question Answering in Language Models using Soft Prompts and Random Walks
Authors: Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Siamak Shakeri Kanishka Misra
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite readily memorizing world knowledge about entities, pre-trained language models (LMs) struggle to compose together two or more facts to perform multi-hop reasoning in question-answering tasks. In this work, we propose techniques that improve upon this limitation by relying on random-walks over structured knowledge graphs. Specifically, we use soft-prompts to guide LMs to chain together their encoded knowledge by learning to map multi-hop questions to random-walk paths that lead to the answer. Applying our methods on two T5 LMs shows substantial improvements over standard tuning approaches in answering questions that require multi-hop reasoning.
Multimedia Generative Script Learning for Task Planning
Authors: Manling Li, Hou Pong Chan, Lifu Huang, Julia Hockenmaier, Girish Chowdhary, Heng Ji Qingyun Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Goal-oriented generative script learning aims to generate subsequent steps to reach a particular goal, which is an essential task to assist robots or humans in performing stereotypical activities. An important aspect of this process is the ability to capture historical states visually, which provides detailed information that is not covered by text and will guide subsequent steps. Therefore, we propose a new task, Multimedia Generative Script Learning, to generate subsequent steps by tracking historical states in both text and vision modalities, as well as presenting the first benchmark containing 5,652 tasks and 79,089 multimedia steps. This task is challenging in three aspects: the multimedia challenge of capturing the visual states in images, the induction challenge of performing unseen tasks, and the diversity challenge of covering different information in individual steps. We propose to encode visual state changes through a selective multimedia encoder to address the multimedia challenge, transfer knowledge from previously observed tasks using a retrieval-augmented decoder to overcome the induction challenge, and further present distinct information at each step by optimizing a diversity-oriented contrastive learning objective. We define metrics to evaluate both generation and inductive quality. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines.
Label Agnostic Pre-training for Zero-shot Text Classification
Authors: Yuzhao Heng, Yiping Kang, Krisztian Flautner, Lingjia Tang, Jason Mars Christopher Clarke
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Conventional approaches to text classification typically assume the existence of a fixed set of predefined labels to which a given text can be classified. However, in real-world applications, there exists an infinite label space for describing a given text. In addition, depending on the aspect (sentiment, topic, etc.) and domain of the text (finance, legal, etc.), the interpretation of the label can vary greatly. This makes the task of text classification, particularly in the zero-shot scenario, extremely challenging. In this paper, we investigate the task of zero-shot text classification with the aim of improving the ability of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to generalize to both seen and unseen data across varying aspects and domains. To solve this we introduce two new simple yet effective pre-training strategies, Implicit and Explicit pre-training. These methods inject aspect-level understanding into the model at train time with the goal of conditioning the model to build task-level understanding. To evaluate this, we construct and release UTCD, a new benchmark dataset for evaluating text classification in zero-shot settings. Experimental results on UTCD show that our approach achieves improved zero-shot generalization on a suite of challenging datasets across an array of zero-shot formalizations.
Click: Controllable Text Generation with Sequence Likelihood Contrastive Learning
Authors: Pei Ke, Zheng Zhang, Minlie Huang Chujie Zheng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: It has always been an important yet challenging problem to control language models to avoid generating texts with undesirable attributes, such as toxic language and unnatural repetition. We introduce Leo for controllable text generation, which needs no modification to the model architecture and facilitates out-of-the-box use of trained models. It employs a contrastive loss on sequence likelihood, which fundamentally decreases the generation probability of negative samples (i.e., generations with undesirable attributes). It also adopts a novel likelihood ranking-based strategy to construct contrastive samples from model generations. On the tasks of language detoxification, sentiment steering, and repetition reduction, we show that Leo outperforms strong baselines of controllable text generation and demonstrate the superiority of Leo`s sample construction strategy.
Improving Embedding-based Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction by Incorporating Structural Information
Authors: Huafeng Liu, Yi Feng, Liping Jing Mingyang Song
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Keyphrase extraction aims to extract a set of phrases with the central idea of the source document. In a structured document, there are certain locations (e.g., the title or the first sentence) where a keyphrase is most likely to appear. However, when extracting keyphrases from the document, most existing embedding-based unsupervised keyphrase extraction models ignore the indicative role of the highlights in certain locations, leading to wrong keyphrases extraction. In this paper, we propose a new Highlight-Guided Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction model (HGUKE) to address the above issue. Specifically, HGUKE first models the phrase-document relevance via the highlights of the documents. Next, HGUKE calculates the cross-phrase relevance between all candidate phrases. Finally, HGUKE aggregates the above two relevance as the importance score of each candidate phrase to rank and extract keyphrases. The experimental results on three benchmarks demonstrate that HGUKE outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised keyphrase extraction baselines.
Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey
Authors: Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang Jie Huang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.
Transitioning from benchmarks to a real-world case of information-seeking in Scientific Publications
Authors: Aurore Bochnakian, Patrick Haouat, Xavier Tannier Chyrine Tahri
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Although recent years have been marked by incredible advances in the whole development process of NLP systems, there are still blind spots in characterizing what is still hampering real-world adoption of models in knowledge-intensive settings. In this paper, we illustrate through a real-world zero-shot text search case for information seeking in scientific papers, the masked phenomena that the current process of measuring performance might not reflect, even when benchmarks are, in appearance, faithfully representative of the task at hand. In addition to experimenting with TREC-COVID and NFCorpus, we provide an industrial, expert-carried/annotated, case of studying vitamin B`s impact on health. We thus discuss the misalignment between solely focusing on single-metric performance as a criterion for model choice and relevancy as a subjective measure for meeting a user`s need.
CLIPText: A New Paradigm for Zero-shot Text Classification
Authors: Weiyun Wang, Qiguang Chen, Wanxiang Che Libo Qin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: While CLIP models are useful for zero-shot vision-and-language (VL) tasks or computer vision tasks, little attention has been paid to the application of CLIP for language tasks. Intuitively, CLIP model have a rich representation pre-trained with natural language supervision, in which we argue that it is useful for language tasks. Hence, this work bridge this gap by investigating a CLIP model for zero-shot text classification. Specifically, we introduce CLIPText, a novel paradigm for zero-shot text classification, which reformulates zero-shot text classification into a text-image matching problem that CLIP can be applied to. In addition, we further incorporate prompt into CLIPText (Prompt-CLIPText) to better derive knowledge from CLIP. Experimental results on seven publicly available zero-shot text classification datasets show that both CLIPText and Prompt-CLIPText attain promising performance. Besides, extensive analysis further verifies that knowledge from CLIP can benefit zero-shot text classification task. We hope this work can attract more breakthroughs on applying VL pre-trained models for language tasks.
Rethinking Dictionaries and Glyphs for Chinese Language Pre-training
Authors: Jack Wang, Dongyan Zhao, Zilong Zheng Yuxuan Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce CDBert, a new learning paradigm that enhances the semantics understanding ability of the Chinese PLMs with dictionary knowledge and structure of Chinese characters. We name the two core modules of CDBert as Shuowen and Jiezi, where Shuowen refers to the process of retrieving the most appropriate meaning from Chinese dictionaries and Jiezi refers to the process of enhancing characters' glyph representations with structure understanding. To facilitate dictionary understanding, we propose three pre-training tasks, i.e.\quotedblbase Masked Entry Modeling, Contrastive Learning for Synonym and Antonym, and Example Learning. We evaluate our method on both modern Chinese understanding benchmark CLUE and ancient Chinese benchmark CCLUE. Moreover, we propose a new polysemy discrimination task PolyMRC based on the collected dictionary of ancient Chinese. Our paradigm demonstrates consistent improvements on previous Chinese PLMs across all tasks. Moreover, our approach yields significant boosting on few-shot setting of ancient Chinese understanding.
One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings
Authors: Weijia Shi, Jungo Kasai, Yizhong Wang, Yushi Hu, Mari Ostendorf, Wen-tau Yih, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu Hongjin Su
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at r̆lhttps://instructor-embedding.github.io.
Towards Speech Dialogue Translation Mediating Speakers of Different Languages
Authors: Chenhui Chu, Sheng Li, Sadao Kurohashi Shuichiro Shimizu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We present a new task, speech dialogue translation mediating speakers of different languages. We construct the SpeechBSD dataset for the task and conduct baseline experiments. Furthermore, we consider context to be an important aspect that needs to be addressed in this task and propose two ways of utilizing context, namely monolingual context and bilingual context. We conduct cascaded speech translation experiments using Whisper and mBART, and show that bilingual context performs better in our settings.
Adaptation Approaches for Nearest Neighbor Language Models
Authors: George Polovets, Monica Sunkara Rishabh Bhardwaj
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Semi-parametric Nearest Neighbor Language Models (kNN-LMs) have produced impressive gains over purely parametric LMs, by leveraging large-scale neighborhood retrieval over external memory datastores. However, there has been little investigation into adapting such models for new domains. This work attempts to fill that gap and suggests the following approaches for adapting kNN-LMs --- 1) adapting the underlying LM (using Adapters), 2) expanding neighborhood retrieval over an additional adaptation datastore, and 3) adapting the weights (scores) of retrieved neighbors using a learned Rescorer module. We study each adaptation strategy separately, as well as the combined performance improvement through ablation experiments and an extensive set of evaluations run over seven adaptation domains. Our combined adaptation approach consistently outperforms purely parametric adaptation and zero-shot (kNN-LM) baselines that construct datastores from the adaptation data. On average, we see perplexity improvements of 17.1% and 16% for these respective baselines, across domains.
Language Models for German Text Simplification: Overcoming Parallel Data Scarcity through Style-specific Pre-training
Authors: Joshua Oehms, Thomas Wimmer, Bartłomiej Jezierski, Georg Groh Miriam Anschütz
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Automatic text simplification systems help to reduce textual information barriers on the internet. However, for languages other than English, only few parallel data to train these systems exists. We propose a two-step approach to overcome this data scarcity issue. First, we fine-tuned language models on a corpus of German Easy Language, a specific style of German. Then, we used these models as decoders in a sequence-to-sequence simplification task. We show that the language models adapt to the style characteristics of Easy Language and output more accessible texts. Moreover, with the style-specific pre-training, we reduced the number of trainable parameters in text simplification models. Hence, less parallel data is sufficient for training. Our results indicate that pre-training on unaligned data can reduce the required parallel data while improving the performance on downstream tasks.
Client-Customized Adaptation for Parameter-Efficient Federated Learning
Authors: Junho Kim, Wing-Lam Mok, Jun-Hyung Park, SangKeun Lee Yeachan Kim
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite the versatility of pre-trained language models (PLMs) across domains, their large memory footprints pose significant challenges in federated learning (FL), where the training model has to be distributed between a server and clients. One potential solution to bypass such constraints might be the use of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) in the context of FL. However, we have observed that typical PEFT tends to severely suffer from heterogeneity among clients in FL scenarios, resulting in unstable and slow convergence. In this paper, we propose Client-Customized Adaptation (C2A), a novel hypernetwork-based FL framework that generates client-specific adapters by conditioning the client information. With the effectiveness of the hypernetworks in generating customized weights through learning to adopt the different characteristics of inputs, C2A can maximize the utility of shared model parameters while minimizing the divergence caused by client heterogeneity. To verify the efficacy of C2A, we perform extensive evaluations on FL scenarios involving heterogeneity in label and language distributions. Comprehensive evaluation results clearly support the superiority of C2A in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness in FL scenarios.
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery
Authors: Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin Changlong Yu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Understanding users' intentions in e-commerce platforms requires commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we present FolkScope, an intention knowledge graph construction framework, to reveal the structure of humans' minds about purchasing items. As commonsense knowledge is usually ineffable and not expressed explicitly, it is challenging to perform information extraction. Thus, we propose a new approach that leverages the generation power of large language models (LLMs) and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the knowledge graph. LLMs first generate intention assertions via e-commerce specific prompts to explain shopping behaviors, where the intention can be an open reason or a predicate falling into one of 18 categories aligning with ConceptNet, e.g., IsA, MadeOf, UsedFor, etc. Then we annotate plausibility and typicality labels of sampled intentions as training data in order to populate human judgments to all automatic generations. Last, to structurize the assertions, we propose pattern mining and conceptualization to form more condensed and abstract knowledge. Extensive evaluations and study demonstrate that our constructed knowledge graph can well model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications.
I am PsyAM: Modeling Happiness with Cognitive Appraisal Dimensions
Authors: Kokil Jaidka Xuan Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper proposes and evaluates PsyAM (r̆lhttps://anonymous.4open.science/r/BERT-PsyAM-10B9), a framework that incorporates adaptor modules in a sequential multi-task learning setup to generate high-dimensional feature representations of hedonic well-being (momentary happiness) in terms of its psychological underpinnings. PsyAM models emotion in text through its cognitive antecedents through auxiliary models that achieve multi-task learning through novel feature fusion methods. We show that BERT-PsyAM has cross-task validity and cross-domain generalizability through experiments with emotion-related tasks -- on new emotion tasks and new datasets, as well as against traditional methods and BERT baselines. We further probe the robustness of BERT-PsyAM through feature ablation studies, as well as discuss the qualitative inferences we can draw regarding the effectiveness of the framework for representing emotional states. We close with a discussion of a future agenda of psychology-inspired neural network architectures.
Value type: the bridge to a better DST model
Authors: Mingyang Sun, Yutao Mou, Chen Zeng, Weiran Xu Gao Qixiang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Value type of the slots can provide lots of useful information for DST tasks. However, it has been ignored in most previous works. In this paper, we propose a new framework for DST task based on these value types. Firstly, we extract the type of token from each turn. Specifically, we divide the slots in the dataset into 9 categories according to the type of slot value, and then train a Ner model to extract the corresponding type-entity from each turn of conversation according to the token. Secondly, we improve the attention mode which is integrated into value type information between the slot and the conversation history to help each slot pay more attention to the turns that contain the same value type. Meanwhile, we introduce a sampling strategy to integrate these types into the attention formula, which decrease the error of Ner model. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive experiment on two multi-domain task-oriented conversation datasets, MultiWOZ 2.1 and MultiWOZ 2.4. The ablation experimental results show that our method is effective on both datasets, which verify the necessity of considering the type of slot value.
Hypothetical Training for Robust Machine Reading Comprehension of Tabular Context
Authors: Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Hanwang Zhang, Qifan Wang, Tat-Seng Chua Moxin Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models easily learn spurious correlations from complex contexts such as tabular data. Counterfactual training---using the factual and counterfactual data by augmentation---has become a promising solution. However, it is costly to construct faithful counterfactual examples because it is tricky to maintain the consistency and dependency of the tabular data. In this paper, we take a more efficient fashion to ask \textbfhypothetical questions like \textit“in which year would the net profit be larger if the revenue in 2019 were \$38,298?”, whose effects on the answers are equivalent to those expensive counterfactual tables. We propose a hypothetical training framework that uses paired examples with different hypothetical questions to supervise the direction of model gradient towards the counterfactual answer change. The superior generalization results on tabular MRC datasets, including a newly constructed stress test and MultiHiertt, validate our effectiveness.
BanglaBook: A Large-scale Bangla Dataset for Sentiment Analysis from Book Reviews
Authors: Obayed Bin Mahfuz, Syed Rifat Raiyan, Hasan Mahmud, Md Kamrul Hasan Mohsinul Kabir
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The analysis of consumer sentiment, as expressed through reviews, can provide a wealth of insight regarding the quality of a product. While the study of sentiment analysis has been widely explored in many popular languages, relatively less attention has been given to the Bangla language, mostly due to a lack of relevant data and cross-domain adaptability. To address this limitation, we present BanglaBook, a large-scale dataset of Bangla book reviews consisting of 158,065 samples classified into three broad categories: positive, negative, and neutral. We provide a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset and employ a range of machine learning models to establish baselines including SVM, LSTM, and Bangla-BERT. Our findings demonstrate a substantial performance advantage of pre-trained models over models that rely on manually crafted features, emphasizing the necessity for additional training resources in this domain. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth error analysis by examining sentiment unigrams, which may provide insight into common classification errors in under-resourced languages like Bangla. Our codes and data are publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/mohsinulkabir14/BanglaBook.
Risks and NLP Design: A Case Study on Procedural Document QA
Authors: Alice Gao, Noah A. Smith Nikita Haduong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: As NLP systems are increasingly deployed at scale, concerns about their potential negative impacts have attracted the attention of the research community, yet discussions of risk have mostly been at an abstract level and focused on generic AI or NLP applications. We argue that clearer assessments of risks and harms to users---and concrete strategies to mitigate them---will be possible when we specialize the analysis to more concrete applications and their plausible users. As an illustration, this paper is grounded in cooking recipe procedural document question answering (ProcDocQA), where there are well-defined risks to users such as injuries or allergic reactions. Our case study shows that an existing language model, applied in “zero-shot” mode, quantitatively answers real-world questions about recipes as well or better than the humans who have answered the questions on the web. Using a novel questionnaire informed by theoretical work on AI risk, we conduct a risk-oriented error analysis that could then inform the design of a future system to be deployed with lower risk of harm and better performance.
The Diminishing Returns of Masked Language Models to Science
Authors: Aswathy Ajith, James Pauloski, Eamon Duede, Kyle Chard, Ian Foster Zhi Hong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Transformer-based masked language models such as BERT, trained on general corpora, have shown impressive performance on downstream tasks. It has also been demonstrated that the downstream task performance of such models can be improved by pretraining larger models for longer on more data. In this work, we empirically evaluate the extent to which these results extend to tasks in science. We use 14 domain-specific transformer-based models (including ScholarBERT, a new 770Mparameter science-focused masked language model pretrained on up to 225B tokens) to evaluate the impact of training data, model size, pretraining and finetuning time on 12 downstream scientific tasks. Interestingly, we find that increasing model size, training data, or compute time does not always lead to significant improvements (i.e., \ensuremath>1% F1), if any, in scientific information extraction tasks. We offer possible explanations for this surprising result.
Causal Matching with Text Embeddings: A Case Study in Estimating the Causal Effects of Peer Review Policies
Authors: Neha Nayak Kennard, Daniel Smith, Daniel McFarland, Andrew McCallum, Katherine Keith Raymond Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: A promising approach to estimate the causal effects of peer review policies is to analyze data from publication venues that shift policies from single-blind to double-blind from one year to the next. However, in these settings the content of the manuscript is a confounding variable---each year has a different distribution of scientific content which may naturally affect the distribution of reviewer scores. To address this textual confounding, we extend variable ratio nearest neighbor matching to incorporate text embeddings. We compare this matching method to a widely-used causal method of stratified propensity score matching and a baseline of randomly selected matches. For our case study of the ICLR conference shifting from single- to double-blind review from 2017 to 2018, we find human judges prefer manuscript matches from our method in 70% of cases. While the unadjusted estimate of the average causal effect of reviewers' scores is -0.25, our method shifts the estimate to -0.17, a slightly smaller difference between the outcomes of single- and double-blind policies. We hope this case study enables exploration of additional text-based causal estimation methods and domains in the future.
Learning to Generalize for Cross-domain QA
Authors: Linyi Yang, Ruihai Dong, Yue Zhang Yingjie Niu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: There have been growing concerns regarding the out-of-domain generalization ability of natural language processing (NLP) models, particularly in question-answering (QA) tasks. Current synthesized data augmentation methods for QA are hampered by increased training costs. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach that combines prompting methods and linear probing with fine-tuning strategy, which does not entail additional cost. Our method has been theoretically and empirically shown to be effective in enhancing the generalization ability of both generative and discriminative models. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with an average increase in F1 score of 4.5%-7.9%. Furthermore, our method can be easily integrated into any pre-trained models and offers a promising solution to the under-explored cross-domain QA task.
Enhanced Chart Understanding via Visual Language Pre-training on Plot Table Pairs
Authors: Yi Fung, Long Chen, Christopher Thomas, Heng Ji, Shih-Fu Chang Mingyang Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Building cross-model intelligence that can understand charts and communicate the salient information hidden behind them is an appealing challenge in the vision and language (V+L) community. The capability to uncover the underlined table data of chart figures is a critical key to automatic chart understanding. We introduce ChartT5, a V+L model that learns how to interpret table information from chart images via cross-modal pre-training on plot table pairs. Specifically, we propose two novel pre-training objectives: Masked Header Prediction (MHP) and Masked Value Prediction (MVP) to facilitate the model with different skills to interpret the table information. We have conducted extensive experiments on chart question answering and chart summarization to verify the effectiveness of the proposed pre-training strategies. In particular, on the ChartQA benchmark, our ChartT5 outperforms the state-of-the-art non-pretraining methods by over 8% performance gains.
Importance of Synthesizing High-quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing
Authors: Yiyun Zhao, Jiarong Jiang, Wuwei Lan, Henghui Zhu, Anuj Chauhan, Alexander Hanbo Li, Lin Pan, Jun Wang, Chung-Wei Hang, Sheng Zhang, Jiang Guo, Mingwen Dong, Joseph Lilien, Patrick Ng, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Bing Xiang Yiqun Hu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: There has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented synthetic data. We observed three shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling, arbitrary table joins, and language gaps between the synthesized SQL and natural language question (NLQ) pair. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that imposes strong typing constraints, incorporates key relationships from schema, and conducts schema-distance-weighted column sampling. We also adopt an intermediate representation (IR) for the SQL-to-text task to further improve the quality of the generated NLQ. When existing powerful text-to-SQL parsers are pretrained on our high-quality synthesized data, these models have significant accuracy boosts and achieve new state-of-the-art performance on Spider. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques with ablation studies
Exploring Schema Generalizability of Text-to-SQL
Authors: Lu Chen, Ruisheng Cao, Su Zhu, Hongshen Xu, Zhi Chen, Hanchong Zhang, Kai Yu Jieyu Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Exploring the generalizability of a text-to-SQL parser is essential for a system to automatically adapt the real-world databases. Previous investigation works mostly focus on lexical diversity, including the influence of the synonym and perturbations in both natural language questions and databases. However, the structural variability of database schema (DS), as a widely seen real-world scenario, is yet underexplored. Specifically, confronted with the same input question, the target SQL may be represented in different ways when the DS comes to a different structure. In this work, we provide in-depth discussions about the schema generalizability challenge of text-to-SQL tasks. We observe that current datasets are too templated to study schema generalization. To collect suitable test data, we propose a framework to generate novel text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. When evaluating state-of-the-art text-to-SQL models on the synthetic samples, performance is significantly degraded, which demonstrates the limitation of current research regarding schema generalization.
Enhancing Cross-lingual Natural Language Inference by Soft Prompting with Multilingual Verbalizer
Authors: Xuming Hu, Aiwei Liu, Yawen Yang, Fukun Ma, Philip S. Yu, Lijie Wen Shuang Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Cross-lingual natural language inference is a fundamental problem in cross-lingual language understanding. Many recent works have used prompt learning to address the lack of annotated parallel corpora in XNLI.However, these methods adopt discrete prompting by simply translating the templates to the target language and need external expert knowledge to design the templates. Besides, discrete prompts of human-designed template words are not trainable vectors and can not be migrated to target languages in the inference stage flexibly. In this paper, we propose a novel Soft prompt learning framework with the Multilingual Verbalizer (SoftMV) for XNLI. SoftMV first constructs cloze-style question with soft prompts for the input sample. Then we leverage bilingual dictionaries to generate an augmented multilingual question for the original question. SoftMV adopts a multilingual verbalizer to align the representations of original and augmented multilingual questions into a unified semantic space with consistency regularization. Experimental results on XNLI demonstrate that SoftMV can achieve state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperform the previous methods under the few-shot and full-shot cross-lingual transfer settings.