mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learning the Beauty in Songs: Neural Singing Voice Beautifier
Authors: Chengxi Li, Yi Ren, Zhiying Zhu, Zhou Zhao Jinglin Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: We are interested in a novel task, singing voice beautification (SVB). Given the singing voice of an amateur singer, SVB aims to improve the intonation and vocal tone of the voice, while keeping the content and vocal timbre. Current automatic pitch correction techniques are immature, and most of them are restricted to intonation but ignore the overall aesthetic quality. Hence, we introduce Neural Singing Voice Beautifier (NSVB), the first generative model to solve the SVB task, which adopts a conditional variational autoencoder as the backbone and learns the latent representations of vocal tone. In NSVB, we propose a novel time-warping approach for pitch correction: Shape-Aware Dynamic Time Warping (SADTW), which ameliorates the robustness of existing time-warping approaches, to synchronize the amateur recording with the template pitch curve. Furthermore, we propose a latent-mapping algorithm in the latent space to convert the amateur vocal tone to the professional one. To achieve this, we also propose a new dataset containing parallel singing recordings of both amateur and professional versions. Extensive experiments on both Chinese and English songs demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in terms of both objective and subjective metrics. Audio samples are available at r̆lhttps://neuralsvb.github.io. Codes: \l̆https://github.com/MoonInTheRiver/NeuralSVB.
A Model-agnostic Data Manipulation Method for Persona-based Dialogue Generation
Authors: Wei Bi, Meng Fang, Shuming Shi, Dacheng Tao Yu Cao
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Towards building intelligent dialogue agents, there has been a growing interest in introducing explicit personas in generation models. However, with limited persona-based dialogue data at hand, it may be difficult to train a dialogue generation model well. We point out that the data challenges of this generation task lie in two aspects: first, it is expensive to scale up current persona-based dialogue datasets; second, each data sample in this task is more complex to learn with than conventional dialogue data. To alleviate the above data issues, we propose a data manipulation method, which is model-agnostic to be packed with any persona-based dialogue generation model to improve their performance. The original training samples will first be distilled and thus expected to be fitted more easily. Next, we show various effective ways that can diversify such easier distilled data. A given base model will then be trained via the constructed data curricula, i.e. first on augmented distilled samples and then on original ones. Experiments illustrate the superiority of our method with two strong base dialogue models (Transformer encoder-decoder and GPT2).
LinkBERT: Pretraining Language Models with Document Links
Authors: Jure Leskovec, Percy Liang Michihiro Yasunaga
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Language model (LM) pretraining captures various knowledge from text corpora, helping downstream tasks. However, existing methods such as BERT model a single document, and do not capture dependencies or knowledge that span across documents. In this work, we propose LinkBERT, an LM pretraining method that leverages links between documents, e.g., hyperlinks. Given a text corpus, we view it as a graph of documents and create LM inputs by placing linked documents in the same context. We then pretrain the LM with two joint self-supervised objectives: masked language modeling and our new proposal, document relation prediction. We show that LinkBERT outperforms BERT on various downstream tasks across two domains: the general domain (pretrained on Wikipedia with hyperlinks) and biomedical domain (pretrained on PubMed with citation links). LinkBERT is especially effective for multi-hop reasoning and few-shot QA (+5% absolute improvement on HotpotQA and TriviaQA), and our biomedical LinkBERT sets new states of the art on various BioNLP tasks (+7% on BioASQ and USMLE). We release our pretrained models, LinkBERT and BioLinkBERT, as well as code and data.
Improving Time Sensitivity for Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Guangtao Wang, Peng Qi, Jing Huang Chao Shang
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Question answering over temporal knowledge graphs (KGs) efficiently uses facts contained in a temporal KG, which records entity relations and when they occur in time, to answer natural language questions (e.g., “Who was the president of the US before Obama?”). These questions often involve three time-related challenges that previous work fail to adequately address: 1) questions often do not specify exact timestamps of interest (e.g., “Obama” instead of 2000); 2) subtle lexical differences in time relations (e.g., “before” vs “after”); 3) off-the-shelf temporal KG embeddings that previous work builds on ignore the temporal order of timestamps, which is crucial for answering temporal-order related questions. In this paper, we propose a time-sensitive question answering (TSQA) framework to tackle these problems. TSQA features a timestamp estimation module to infer the unwritten timestamp from the question. We also employ a time-sensitive KG encoder to inject ordering information into the temporal KG embeddings that TSQA is based on. With the help of techniques to reduce the search space for potential answers, TSQA significantly outperforms the previous state of the art on a new benchmark for question answering over temporal KGs, especially achieving a 32% (absolute) error reduction on complex questions that require multiple steps of reasoning over facts in the temporal KG.
Self-supervised Semantic-driven Phoneme Discovery for Zero-resource Speech Recognition
Authors: Siyuan Feng, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Chang Yoo Liming Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Phonemes are defined by their relationship to words: changing a phoneme changes the word. Learning a phoneme inventory with little supervision has been a longstanding challenge with important applications to under-resourced speech technology. In this paper, we bridge the gap between the linguistic and statistical definition of phonemes and propose a novel neural discrete representation learning model for self-supervised learning of phoneme inventory with raw speech and word labels. Under mild assumptions, we prove that the phoneme inventory learned by our approach converges to the true one with an exponentially low error rate. Moreover, in experiments on TIMIT and Mboshi benchmarks, our approach consistently learns a better phoneme-level representation and achieves a lower error rate in a zero-resource phoneme recognition task than previous state-of-the-art self-supervised representation learning algorithms.
Softmax Bottleneck Makes Language Models Unable to Represent Multi-mode Word Distributions
Authors: Andrew McCallum Haw-Shiuan Chang
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Neural language models (LMs) such as GPT-2 estimate the probability distribution over the next word by a softmax over the vocabulary. The softmax layer produces the distribution based on the dot products of a single hidden state and the embeddings of words in the vocabulary. However, we discover that this single hidden state cannot produce all probability distributions regardless of the LM size or training data size because the single hidden state embedding cannot be close to the embeddings of all the possible next words simultaneously when there are other interfering word embeddings between them. In this work, we demonstrate the importance of this limitation both theoretically and practically. Our work not only deepens our understanding of softmax bottleneck and mixture of softmax (MoS) but also inspires us to propose multi-facet softmax (MFS) to address the limitations of MoS. Extensive empirical analyses confirm our findings and show that against MoS, the proposed MFS achieves two-fold improvements in the perplexity of GPT-2 and BERT.
Ditch the Gold Standard: Re-evaluating Conversational Question Answering
Authors: Tianyu Gao, Manan Goenka, Danqi Chen Huihan Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Conversational question answering aims to provide natural-language answers to users in information-seeking conversations. Existing conversational QA benchmarks compare models with pre-collected human-human conversations, using ground-truth answers provided in conversational history. It remains unclear whether we can rely on this static evaluation for model development and whether current systems can well generalize to real-world human-machine conversations. In this work, we conduct the first large-scale human evaluation of state-of-the-art conversational QA systems, where human evaluators converse with models and judge the correctness of their answers. We find that the distribution of human machine conversations differs drastically from that of human-human conversations, and there is a disagreement between human and gold-history evaluation in terms of model ranking. We further investigate how to improve automatic evaluations, and propose a question rewriting mechanism based on predicted history, which better correlates with human judgments. Finally, we analyze the impact of various modeling strategies and discuss future directions towards building better conversational question answering systems.
Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity
Authors: Max Bartolo, Alastair Moore, Sebastian Riedel, Pontus Stenetorp Yao Lu
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: When primed with only a handful of training samples, very large, pretrained language models such as GPT-3 have shown competitive results when compared to fully-supervised, fine-tuned, large, pretrained language models. We demonstrate that the order in which the samples are provided can make the difference between near state-of-the-art and random guess performance: essentially some permutations are “fantastic” and some not. We analyse this phenomenon in detail, establishing that: it is present across model sizes (even for the largest current models), it is not related to a specific subset of samples, and that a given good permutation for one model is not transferable to another. While one could use a development set to determine which permutations are performant, this would deviate from the true few-shot setting as it requires additional annotated data. Instead, we use the generative nature of language models to construct an artificial development set and based on entropy statistics of the candidate permutations on this set, we identify performant prompts. Our method yields a 13% relative improvement for GPT-family models across eleven different established text classification tasks.
Situated Dialogue Learning through Procedural Environment Generation
Authors: Renee Jia, Mark Riedl Prithviraj Ammanabrolu
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: We teach goal-driven agents to interactively act and speak in situated environments by training on generated curriculums. Our agents operate in LIGHT (Urbanek et al. 2019)---a large-scale crowd-sourced fantasy text adventure game wherein an agent perceives and interacts with the world through textual natural language. Goals in this environment take the form of character-based quests, consisting of personas and motivations. We augment LIGHT by learning to procedurally generate additional novel textual worlds and quests to create a curriculum of steadily increasing difficulty for training agents to achieve such goals. In particular, we measure curriculum difficulty in terms of the rarity of the quest in the original training distribution---an easier environment is one that is more likely to have been found in the unaugmented dataset. An ablation study shows that this method of learning from the tail of a distribution results in significantly higher generalization abilities as measured by zero-shot performance on never-before-seen quests.
UniTE: Unified Translation Evaluation
Authors: Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Haibo Zhang, Boxing Chen, Derek Wong, Lidia Chao Yu Wan
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Translation quality evaluation plays a crucial role in machine translation. According to the input format, it is mainly separated into three tasks, \textiti.e., reference-only, source-only and source-reference-combined. Recent methods, despite their promising results, are specifically designed and optimized on one of them. This limits the convenience of these methods, and overlooks the commonalities among tasks. In this paper, we propose , which is the first unified framework engaged with abilities to handle all three evaluation tasks. Concretely, we propose monotonic regional attention to control the interaction among input segments, and unified pretraining to better adapt multi-task training. We testify our framework on WMT 2019 Metrics and WMT 2020 Quality Estimation benchmarks. Extensive analyses show that our \textitsingle model can universally surpass various state-of-the-art or winner methods across tasks.Both source code and associated models are available at r̆lhttps://github.com/NLP2CT/UniTE.
Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases
Authors: Jiaxin Shi, Zijun Yao, Xin Lv, Jifan Yu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Jinghui Xiao Shulin Cao
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Program induction for answering complex questions over knowledge bases (KBs) aims to decompose a question into a multi-step program, whose execution against the KB produces the final answer. Learning to induce programs relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB. However, for most KBs, the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult. In this paper, we propose the approach of program transfer, which aims to leverage the valuable program annotations on the rich-resourced KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for the low-resourced KBs that lack program annotations. For program transfer, we design a novel two-stage parsing framework with an efficient ontology-guided pruning strategy. First, a sketch parser translates the question into a high-level program sketch, which is the composition of functions. Second, given the question and sketch, an argument parser searches the detailed arguments from the KB for functions. During the searching, we incorporate the KB ontology to prune the search space. The experiments on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP show that our method outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of program transfer and our framework. Our codes and datasets can be obtained from r̆lhttps://github.com/THU-KEG/ProgramTransfer.
EAG: Extract and Generate Multi-way Aligned Corpus for Complete Multi-lingual Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Zhen Yang, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou Yulin Xu
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Complete Multi-lingual Neural Machine Translation (C-MNMT) achieves superior performance against the conventional MNMT by constructing multi-way aligned corpus, i.e., aligning bilingual training examples from different language pairs when either their source or target sides are identical. However, since exactly identical sentences from different language pairs are scarce, the power of the multi-way aligned corpus is limited by its scale. To handle this problem, this paper proposes “Extract and Generate” (EAG), a two-step approach to construct large-scale and high-quality multi-way aligned corpus from bilingual data. Specifically, we first extract candidate aligned examples by pairing the bilingual examples from different language pairs with highly similar source or target sentences; and then generate the final aligned examples from the candidates with a well-trained generation model. With this two-step pipeline, EAG can construct a large-scale and multi-way aligned corpus whose diversity is almost identical to the original bilingual corpus. Experiments on two publicly available datasets i.e., WMT-5 and OPUS-100, show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over strong baselines, with +1.1 and +1.4 BLEU points improvements on the two datasets respectively.
Using Context-to-Vector with Graph Retrofitting to Improve Word Embeddings
Authors: Yile Wang, Ge Wang, Jun Xia, Yufei Huang, Guojiang Zhao, Yue Zhang, Stan Li Jiangbin Zheng
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Although contextualized embeddings generated from large-scale pre-trained models perform well in many tasks, traditional static embeddings (e.g., Skip-gram, Word2Vec) still play an important role in low-resource and lightweight settings due to their low computational cost, ease of deployment, and stability. In this paper, we aim to improve word embeddings by 1) incorporating more contextual information from existing pre-trained models into the Skip-gram framework, which we call Context-to-Vec; 2) proposing a post-processing retrofitting method for static embeddings independent of training by employing priori synonym knowledge and weighted vector distribution. Through extrinsic and intrinsic tasks, our methods are well proven to outperform the baselines by a large margin.
Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification in Tweets
Authors: Lin Sun, Yi Liu, Meizhi Shao, Zengwei Zheng Jiquan Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Sarcasm is important to sentiment analysis on social media. Sarcasm Target Identification (STI) deserves further study to understand sarcasm in depth. However, text lacking context or missing sarcasm target makes target identification very difficult. In this paper, we introduce multimodality to STI and present Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification (MSTI) task. We propose a novel multi-scale cross-modality model that can simultaneously perform textual target labeling and visual target detection. In the model, we extract multi-scale visual features to enrich spatial information for different sized visual sarcasm targets. We design a set of convolution networks to unify multi-scale visual features with textual features for cross-modal attention learning, and correspondingly a set of transposed convolution networks to restore multi-scale visual information. The results show that visual clues can improve the performance of TSTI by a large margin, and VSTI achieves good accuracy.
Flexible Generation from Fragmentary Linguistic Input
Authors: Roger Levy Peng Qian
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: The dominant paradigm for high-performance models in novel NLP tasks today is direct specialization for the task via training from scratch or fine-tuning large pre-trained models. But does direct specialization capture how humans approach novel language tasks? We hypothesize that human performance is better characterized by flexible inference through composition of basic computational motifs available to the human language user. To test this hypothesis, we formulate a set of novel fragmentary text completion tasks, and compare the behavior of three direct-specialization models against a new model we introduce, GibbsComplete, which composes two basic computational motifs central to contemporary models: masked and autoregressive word prediction. We conduct three types of evaluation: human judgments of completion quality, satisfaction of syntactic constraints imposed by the input fragment, and similarity to human behavior in the structural statistics of the completions. With no task-specific parameter tuning, GibbsComplete performs comparably to direct-specialization models in the first two evaluations, and outperforms all direct-specialization models in the third evaluation. These results support our hypothesis that human behavior in novel language tasks and environments may be better characterized by flexible composition of basic computational motifs rather than by direct specialization.
Revisiting Over-Smoothness in Text to Speech
Authors: Xu Tan, Tao Qin, Zhou Zhao, Tie-Yan Liu Yi Ren
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Non-autoregressive text to speech (NAR-TTS) models have attracted much attention from both academia and industry due to their fast generation speed. One limitation of NAR-TTS models is that they ignore the correlation in time and frequency domains while generating speech mel-spectrograms, and thus cause blurry and over-smoothed results. In this work, we revisit this over-smoothing problem from a novel perspective: the degree of over-smoothness is determined by the gap between the complexity of data distributions and the capability of modeling methods. Both simplifying data distributions and improving modeling methods can alleviate the problem. Accordingly, we first study methods reducing the complexity of data distributions. Then we conduct a comprehensive study on NAR-TTS models that use some advanced modeling methods. Based on these studies, we find that 1) methods that provide additional condition inputs reduce the complexity of data distributions to model, thus alleviating the over-smoothing problem and achieving better voice quality. 2) Among advanced modeling methods, Laplacian mixture loss performs well at modeling multimodal distributions and enjoys its simplicity, while GAN and Glow achieve the best voice quality while suffering from increased training or model complexity. 3) The two categories of methods can be combined to further alleviate the over-smoothness and improve the voice quality. 4) Our experiments on the multi-speaker dataset lead to similar conclusions as above and providing more variance information can reduce the difficulty of modeling the target data distribution and alleviate the requirements for model capacity.
Coherence boosting: When your pretrained language model is not paying enough attention
Authors: Zhen Wang, Nebojsa Jojic Nikolay Malkin
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Long-range semantic coherence remains a challenge in automatic language generation and understanding. We demonstrate that large language models have insufficiently learned the effect of distant words on next-token prediction. We present coherence boosting, an inference procedure that increases a LM`s focus on a long context. We show the benefits of coherence boosting with pretrained models by distributional analyses of generated ordinary text and dialog responses. It is also found that coherence boosting with state-of-the-art models for various zero-shot NLP tasks yields performance gains with no additional training.
Uncertainty Estimation of Transformer Predictions for Misclassification Detection
Authors: Gleb Kuzmin, Artem Shelmanov, Akim Tsvigun, Evgenii Tsymbalov, Kirill Fedyanin, Maxim Panov, Alexander Panchenko, Gleb Gusev, Mikhail Burtsev, Manvel Avetisian, Leonid Zhukov Artem Vazhentsev
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Uncertainty estimation (UE) of model predictions is a crucial step for a variety of tasks such as active learning, misclassification detection, adversarial attack detection, out-of-distribution detection, etc. Most of the works on modeling the uncertainty of deep neural networks evaluate these methods on image classification tasks. Little attention has been paid to UE in natural language processing. To fill this gap, we perform a vast empirical investigation of state-of-the-art UE methods for Transformer models on misclassification detection in named entity recognition and text classification tasks and propose two computationally efficient modifications, one of which approaches or even outperforms computationally intensive methods.
VALSE: A Task-Independent Benchmark for Vision and Language Models Centered on Linguistic Phenomena
Authors: Michele Cafagna, Lilitta Muradjan, Anette Frank, Iacer Calixto, Albert Gatt Letitia Parcalabescu
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose VALSE (Vision And Language Structured Evaluation), a novel benchmark designed for testing general-purpose pretrained vision and language (V&L) models for their visio-linguistic grounding capabilities on specific linguistic phenomena. VALSE offers a suite of six tests covering various linguistic constructs. Solving these requires models to ground linguistic phenomena in the visual modality, allowing more fine-grained evaluations than hitherto possible. We build VALSE using methods that support the construction of valid foils, and report results from evaluating five widely-used V&L models. Our experiments suggest that current models have considerable difficulty addressing most phenomena. Hence, we expect VALSE to serve as an important benchmark to measure future progress of pretrained V&L models from a linguistic perspective, complementing the canonical task-centred V&L evaluations.
The Grammar-Learning Trajectories of Neural Language Models
Authors: Guy Hacohen, Daphna Weinshall, Omri Abend Leshem Choshen
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: The learning trajectories of linguistic phenomena in humans provide insight into linguistic representation, beyond what can be gleaned from inspecting the behavior of an adult speaker. To apply a similar approach to analyze neural language models (NLM), it is first necessary to establish that different models are similar enough in the generalizations they make. In this paper, we show that NLMs with different initialization, architecture, and training data acquire linguistic phenomena in a similar order, despite their different end performance. These findings suggest that there is some mutual inductive bias that underlies these models' learning of linguistic phenomena. Taking inspiration from psycholinguistics, we argue that studying this inductive bias is an opportunity to study the linguistic representation implicit in NLMs.Leveraging these findings, we compare the relative performance on different phenomena at varying learning stages with simpler reference models. Results suggest that NLMs exhibit consistent “developmental” stages. Moreover, we find the learning trajectory to be approximately one-dimensional: given an NLM with a certain overall performance, it is possible to predict what linguistic generalizations it has already acquired. Initial analysis of these stages presents phenomena clusters (notably morphological ones), whose performance progresses in unison, suggesting a potential link between the generalizations behind them.
Generating Scientific Definitions with Controllable Complexity
Authors: Katharina Reinecke, Noah A. Smith Tal August
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Unfamiliar terminology and complex language can present barriers to understanding science. Natural language processing stands to help address these issues by automatically defining unfamiliar terms. We introduce a new task and dataset for defining scientific terms and controlling the complexity of generated definitions as a way of adapting to a specific reader`s background knowledge. We test four definition generation methods for this new task, finding that a sequence-to-sequence approach is most successful. We then explore the version of the task in which definitions are generated at a target complexity level. We introduce a novel reranking approach and find in human evaluations that it offers superior fluency while also controlling complexity, compared to several controllable generation baselines.
Label Semantic Aware Pre-training for Few-shot Text Classification
Authors: Jason Krone, Salvatore Romeo, Saab Mansour, Elman Mansimov, Yi Zhang, Dan Roth Aaron Mueller
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: In text classification tasks, useful information is encoded in the label names. Label semantic aware systems have leveraged this information for improved text classification performance during fine-tuning and prediction. However, use of label-semantics during pre-training has not been extensively explored. We therefore propose Label Semantic Aware Pre-training (LSAP) to improve the generalization and data efficiency of text classification systems. LSAP incorporates label semantics into pre-trained generative models (T5 in our case) by performing secondary pre-training on labeled sentences from a variety of domains. As domain-general pre-training requires large amounts of data, we develop a filtering and labeling pipeline to automatically create sentence-label pairs from unlabeled text. We perform experiments on intent (ATIS, Snips, TOPv2) and topic classification (AG News, Yahoo! Answers). LSAP obtains significant accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art models for few-shot text classification while maintaining performance comparable to state of the art in high-resource settings.
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation
Authors: Quan Du, Tao Zhou, Yi Jing, Shuhan Zhou, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang Bei Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). This paper explores a deeper relationship between Transformer and numerical ODE methods. We first show that a residual block of layers in Transformer can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE. Inspired by this, we design a new architecture, \textitODE Transformer, which is analogous to the Runge-Kutta method that is well motivated in ODE. As a natural extension to Transformer, ODE Transformer is easy to implement and efficient to use. Experimental results on the large-scale machine translation, abstractive summarization, and grammar error correction tasks demonstrate the high genericity of ODE Transformer. It can gain large improvements in model performance over strong baselines (e.g., 30.77 and 44.11 BLEU scores on the WMT`14 English-German and English-French benchmarks) at a slight cost in inference efficiency.
A Comparison of Strategies for Source-Free Domain Adaptation
Authors: Yiyun Zhao, Steven Bethard Xin Su
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Data sharing restrictions are common in NLP, especially in the clinical domain, but there is limited research on adapting models to new domains without access to the original training data, a setting known as source-free domain adaptation. We take algorithms that traditionally assume access to the source-domain training data---active learning, self-training, and data augmentation---and adapt them for source free domain adaptation. Then we systematically compare these different strategies across multiple tasks and domains. We find that active learning yields consistent gains across all SemEval 2021 Task 10 tasks and domains, but though the shared task saw successful self-trained and data augmented models, our systematic comparison finds these strategies to be unreliable for source-free domain adaptation.
Ethics Sheets for AI Tasks
Authors: Saif Mohammad
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Several high-profile events, such as the mass testing of emotion recognition systems on vulnerable sub-populations and using question answering systems to make moral judgments, have highlighted how technology will often lead to more adverse outcomes for those that are already marginalized. At issue here are not just individual systems and datasets, but also the AI tasks themselves. In this position paper, I make a case for thinking about ethical considerations not just at the level of individual models and datasets, but also at the level of AI tasks. I will present a new form of such an effort, Ethics Sheets for AI Tasks, dedicated to fleshing out the assumptions and ethical considerations hidden in how a task is commonly framed and in the choices we make regarding the data, method, and evaluation. I will also present a template for ethics sheets with 50 ethical considerations, using the task of emotion recognition as a running example. Ethics sheets are a mechanism to engage with and document ethical considerations before building datasets and systems. Similar to survey articles, a small number of carefully created ethics sheets can serve numerous researchers and developers.
Learning Disentangled Representations of Negation and Uncertainty
Authors: Chrysoula Zerva, Makoto Miwa, Sophia Ananiadou Jake Vasilakes
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Negation and uncertainty modeling are long-standing tasks in natural language processing. Linguistic theory postulates that expressions of negation and uncertainty are semantically independent from each other and the content they modify. However, previous works on representation learning do not explicitly model this independence. We therefore attempt to disentangle the representations of negation, uncertainty, and content using a Variational Autoencoder. We find that simply supervising the latent representations results in good disentanglement, but auxiliary objectives based on adversarial learning and mutual information minimization can provide additional disentanglement gains.
latent-GLAT: Glancing at Latent Variables for Parallel Text Generation
Authors: Hao Zhou, Shujian Huang, Dongqi Wang, Lihua Qian, Xinyu Dai, Jiajun Chen, Lei Li Yu Bao
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Recently, parallel text generation has received widespread attention due to its success in generation efficiency. Although many advanced techniques are proposed to improve its generation quality, they still need the help of an autoregressive model for training to overcome the one-to-many multi-modal phenomenon in the dataset, limiting their applications. In this paper, we propose GLAT, which employs the discrete latent variables to capture word categorical information and invoke an advanced curriculum learning technique, alleviating the multi-modality problem. Experiment results show that our method outperforms strong baselines without the help of an autoregressive model, which further broadens the application scenarios of the parallel decoding paradigm.
PPT: Pre-trained Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Learning
Authors: Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Minlie Huang Yuxian Gu
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Prompts for pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable performance by bridging the gap between pre-training tasks and various downstream tasks. Among these methods, prompt tuning, which freezes PLMs and only tunes soft prompts, provides an efficient and effective solution for adapting large-scale PLMs to downstream tasks. However, prompt tuning is yet to be fully explored. In our pilot experiments, we find that prompt tuning performs comparably with conventional full-model tuning when downstream data are sufficient, whereas it is much worse under few-shot learning settings, which may hinder the application of prompt tuning. We attribute this low performance to the manner of initializing soft prompts. Therefore, in this work, we propose to pre-train prompts by adding soft prompts into the pre-training stage to obtain a better initialization. We name this Pre-trained Prompt Tuning framework “PPT”. To ensure the generalization of PPT, we formulate similar classification tasks into a unified task form and pre-train soft prompts for this unified task. Extensive experiments show that tuning pre-trained prompts for downstream tasks can reach or even outperform full-model fine-tuning under both full-data and few-shot settings. Our approach is effective and efficient for using large-scale PLMs in practice.
Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better
Authors: Daphne Ippolito, Andrew Nystrom, Chiyuan Zhang, Douglas Eck, Chris Callison-Burch, Nicholas Carlini Katherine Lee
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: We find that existing language modeling datasets contain many near-duplicate examples and long repetitive substrings. As a result, over 1% of the unprompted output of language models trained on these datasets is copied verbatim from the training data. We develop two tools that allow us to deduplicate training datasets---for example removing from C4 a single 61 word English sentence that is repeated over 60,000 times. Deduplication allows us to train models that emit memorized text ten times less frequently and require fewer training steps to achieve the same or better accuracy. We can also reduce train-test overlap, which affects over 4% of the validation set of standard datasets, thus allowing for more accurate evaluation. Code for deduplication is released at r̆lhttps://github.com/google-research/deduplicate-text-datasets.
Improving the Generalizability of Depression Detection by Leveraging Clinical Questionnaires
Authors: Andrew Yates, Ayah Zirikly, Bart Desmet, Arman Cohan Thong Nguyen
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Automated methods have been widely used to identify and analyze mental health conditions (e.g., depression) from various sources of information, including social media. Yet, deployment of such models in real-world healthcare applications faces challenges including poor out-of-domain generalization and lack of trust in black box models. In this work, we propose approaches for depression detection that are constrained to different degrees by the presence of symptoms described in PHQ9, a questionnaire used by clinicians in the depression screening process. In dataset-transfer experiments on three social media datasets, we find that grounding the model in PHQ9`s symptoms substantially improves its ability to generalize to out-of-distribution data compared to a standard BERT-based approach. Furthermore, this approach can still perform competitively on in-domain data. These results and our qualitative analyses suggest that grounding model predictions in clinically-relevant symptoms can improve generalizability while producing a model that is easier to inspect.
Internet-Augmented Dialogue Generation
Authors: Kurt Shuster, Jason Weston Mojtaba Komeili
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: The largest store of continually updating knowledge on our planet can be accessed via internet search. In this work we study giving access to this information to conversational agents. Large language models, even though they store an impressive amount of knowledge within their weights, are known to hallucinate facts when generating dialogue (Shuster et al., 2021); moreover, those facts are frozen in time at the point of model training. In contrast, we propose an approach that learns to generate an internet search query based on the context, and then conditions on the search results to finally generate a response, a method that can employ up-to-the-minute relevant information. We train and evaluate such models on a newly collected dataset of human-human conversations whereby one of the speakers is given access to internet search during knowledgedriven discussions in order to ground their responses. We find that search-query based access of the internet in conversation provides superior performance compared to existing approaches that either use no augmentation or FAISS-based retrieval (Lewis et al., 2020b).
SUPERB-SG: Enhanced Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark for Semantic and Generative Capabilities
Authors: Heng-Jui Chang, Wen-Chin Huang, Zili Huang, Kushal Lakhotia, Shu-wen Yang, Shuyan Dong, Andy Liu, Cheng-I Lai, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Phil Hall, Hsuan-Jui Chen, Shang-Wen Li, Shinji Watanabe, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Hung-yi Lee Hsiang-Sheng Tsai
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Transfer learning has proven to be crucial in advancing the state of speech and natural language processing research in recent years. In speech, a model pre-trained by self-supervised learning transfers remarkably well on multiple tasks. However, the lack of a consistent evaluation methodology is limiting towards a holistic understanding of the efficacy of such models. SUPERB was a step towards introducing a common benchmark to evaluate pre-trained models across various speech tasks. In this paper, we introduce SUPERB-SG, a new benchmark focusing on evaluating the semantic and generative capabilities of pre-trained models by increasing task diversity and difficulty over SUPERB. We use a lightweight methodology to test the robustness of representations learned by pre-trained models under shifts in data domain and quality across different types of tasks. It entails freezing pre-trained model parameters, only using simple task-specific trainable heads. The goal is to be inclusive of all researchers, and encourage efficient use of computational resources. We also show that the task diversity of SUPERB-SG coupled with limited task supervision is an effective recipe for evaluating the generalizability of model representation.
Knowledge Neurons in Pretrained Transformers
Authors: Li Dong, Yaru Hao, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Furu Wei Damai Dai
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Large-scale pretrained language models are surprisingly good at recalling factual knowledge presented in the training corpus. In this paper, we present preliminary studies on how factual knowledge is stored in pretrained Transformers by introducing the concept of knowledge neurons. Specifically, we examine the fill-in-the-blank cloze task for BERT. Given a relational fact, we propose a knowledge attribution method to identify the neurons that express the fact. We find that the activation of such knowledge neurons is positively correlated to the expression of their corresponding facts. In our case studies, we attempt to leverage knowledge neurons to edit (such as update, and erase) specific factual knowledge without fine-tuning. Our results shed light on understanding the storage of knowledge within pretrained Transformers.
Meta-Learning for Fast Cross-Lingual Adaptation in Dependency Parsing
Authors: Verna Dankers, Phillip Lippe, Sander Bos, Bryan Cardenas Guevara, Helen Yannakoudakis, Ekaterina Shutova Anna Langedijk
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Meta-learning, or learning to learn, is a technique that can help to overcome resource scarcity in cross-lingual NLP problems, by enabling fast adaptation to new tasks. We apply model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) to the task of cross-lingual dependency parsing. We train our model on a diverse set of languages to learn a parameter initialization that can adapt quickly to new languages. We find that meta-learning with pre-training can significantly improve upon the performance of language transfer and standard supervised learning baselines for a variety of unseen, typologically diverse, and low-resource languages, in a few-shot learning setup.
French CrowS-Pairs: Extending a challenge dataset for measuring social bias in masked language models to a language other than English
Authors: Yoann Dupont, Julien Bezançon, Karën Fort Aurélie Névéol
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Warning: This paper contains explicit statements of offensive stereotypes which may be upsetting. Much work on biases in natural language processing has addressed biases linked to the social and cultural experience of English speaking individuals in the United States. We seek to widen the scope of bias studies by creating material to measure social bias in language models (LMs) against specific demographic groups in France. We build on the US-centered CrowS-pairs dataset to create a multilingual stereotypes dataset that allows for comparability across languages while also characterizing biases that are specific to each country and language. We introduce 1,679 sentence pairs in French that cover stereotypes in ten types of bias like gender and age. 1,467 sentence pairs are translated from CrowS-pairs and 212 are newly crowdsourced. The sentence pairs contrast stereotypes concerning underadvantaged groups with the same sentence concerning advantaged groups. We find that four widely used language models (three French, one multilingual) favor sentences that express stereotypes in most bias categories. We report on the translation process from English into French, which led to a characterization of stereotypes in CrowS-pairs including the identification of US-centric cultural traits. We offer guidelines to further extend the dataset to other languages and cultural environments.