mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Entity Alignment
Authors: Yuqiang Han, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen Lingbing Guo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Embedding-based methods have attracted increasing attention in recent entity alignment (EA) studies. Although great promise they can offer, there are still several limitations. The most notable is that they identify the aligned entities based on cosine similarity, ignoring the semantics underlying the embeddings themselves. Furthermore, these methods are shortsighted, heuristically selecting the closest entity as the target and allowing multiple entities to match the same candidate. To address these limitations, we model entity alignment as a sequential decision-making task, in which an agent sequentially decides whether two entities are matched or mismatched based on their representation vectors. The proposed reinforcement learning (RL)-based entity alignment framework can be flexibly adapted to most embedding-based EA methods. The experimental results demonstrate that it consistently advances the performance of several state-of-the-art methods, with a maximum improvement of 31.1% on Hits@1.
Breaking Down Multilingual Machine Translation
Authors: Yi-Pei Chen, Yi-Ting Yeh, Graham Neubig Ting-Rui Chiang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: While multilingual training is now an essential ingredient in machine translation (MT) systems, recent work has demonstrated that it has different effects in different multilingual settings, such as many-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many learning. These training settings expose the encoder and the decoder in a machine translation model with different data distributions. In this paper, we examine how different varieties of multilingual training contribute to learning these two components of the MT model. Specifically, we compare bilingual models with encoders and/or decoders initialized by multilingual training. We show that multilingual training is beneficial to encoders in general, while it only benefits decoders for low-resource languages (LRLs). We further find the important attention heads for each language pair and compare their correlations during inference. Our analysis sheds light on how multilingual translation models work and also enables us to propose methods to improve performance by training with highly related languages. Our many-to-one models for high-resource languages and one-to-many models for LRL outperform the best results reported by Aharoni et al. (2019).
Mitigating Contradictions in Dialogue Based on Contrastive Learning
Authors: Junsheng Kong, Ben Liao, Yi Cai Weizhao Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Chatbot models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years but tend to yield contradictory responses. In this paper, we exploit the advantage of contrastive learning technique to mitigate this issue. To endow the model with the ability of discriminating contradictory patterns, we minimize the similarity between the target response and contradiction related negative example. The negative example is generated with learnable latent noise, which receives contradiction related feedback from the pretrained critic. Experimental results show that our method helps to avoid contradictions in response generation while preserving response fluency, outperforming existing methods on both automatic and human evaluation.
ELLE: Efficient Lifelong Pre-training for Emerging Data
Authors: Jiajie Zhang, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou Yujia Qin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Current pre-trained language models (PLM) are typically trained with static data, ignoring that in real-world scenarios, streaming data of various sources may continuously grow. This requires PLMs to integrate the information from all the sources in a lifelong manner. Although this goal could be achieved by exhaustive pre-training on all the existing data, such a process is known to be computationally expensive. To this end, we propose ELLE, aiming at efficient lifelong pre-training for emerging data. Specifically, ELLE consists of (1) function preserved model expansion, which flexibly expands an existing PLM`s width and depth to improve the efficiency of knowledge acquisition; and (2) pre-trained domain prompts, which disentangle the versatile knowledge learned during pre-training and stimulate the proper knowledge for downstream tasks. We experiment ELLE with streaming data from 5 domains on BERT and GPT. The results show the superiority of ELLE over various lifelong learning baselines in both pre-training efficiency and downstream performances. The codes are publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/thunlp/ELLE.
EnCBP: A New Benchmark Dataset for Finer-Grained Cultural Background Prediction in English
Authors: Samiha Datta, Lili Wang, Soroush Vosoughi Weicheng Ma
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: While cultural backgrounds have been shown to affect linguistic expressions, existing natural language processing (NLP) research on culture modeling is overly coarse-grained and does not examine cultural differences among speakers of the same language. To address this problem and augment NLP models with cultural background features, we collect, annotate, manually validate, and benchmark EnCBP, a finer-grained news-based cultural background prediction dataset in English. Through language modeling (LM) evaluations and manual analyses, we confirm that there are noticeable differences in linguistic expressions among five English-speaking countries and across four states in the US. Additionally, our evaluations on nine syntactic (CoNLL-2003), semantic (PAWS-Wiki, QNLI, STS-B, and RTE), and psycholinguistic tasks (SST-5, SST-2, Emotion, and Go-Emotions) show that, while introducing cultural background information does not benefit the Go-Emotions task due to text domain conflicts, it noticeably improves deep learning (DL) model performance on other tasks. Our findings strongly support the importance of cultural background modeling to a wide variety of NLP tasks and demonstrate the applicability of EnCBP in culture-related research.
Cutting Down on Prompts and Parameters: Simple Few-Shot Learning with Language Models
Authors: Ivana Balazevic, Eric Wallace, Fabio Petroni, Sameer Singh, Sebastian Riedel Robert Logan IV
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Prompting language models (LMs) with training examples and task descriptions has been seen as critical to recent successes in few-shot learning. In this work, we show that finetuning LMs in the few-shot setting can considerably reduce the need for prompt engineering. In fact, one can use null prompts, prompts that contain neither task-specific templates nor training examples, and achieve competitive accuracy to manually-tuned prompts across a wide range of tasks. While finetuning LMs does introduce new parameters for each downstream task, we show that this memory overhead can be substantially reduced: finetuning only the bias terms can achieve comparable or better accuracy than standard finetuning while only updating 0.1% of the parameters. All in all, we recommend finetuning LMs for few-shot learning as it is more accurate, robust to different prompts, and can be made nearly as efficient as using frozen LMs.
uFACT: Unfaithful Alien-Corpora Training for Semantically Consistent Data-to-Text Generation
Authors: Alexandru Coca, Bill Byrne Tisha Anders
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose uFACT (Un-Faithful Alien Corpora Training), a training corpus construction method for data-to-text (d2t) generation models. We show that d2t models trained on uFACT datasets generate utterances which represent the semantic content of the data sources more accurately compared to models trained on the target corpus alone. Our approach is to augment the training set of a given target corpus with alien corpora which have different semantic representations. We show that while it is important to have faithful data from the target corpus, the faithfulness of additional corpora only plays a minor role. Consequently, uFACT datasets can be constructed with large quantities of unfaithful data. We show how uFACT can be leveraged to obtain state-of-the-art results on the WebNLG benchmark using METEOR as our performance metric. Furthermore, we investigate the sensitivity of the generation faithfulness to the training corpus structure using the PARENT metric, and provide a baseline for this metric on the WebNLG (Gardent et al., 2017) benchmark to facilitate comparisons with future work.
Good Night at 4 pm?! Time Expressions in Different Cultures
Authors: Vered Shwartz
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose the task of culture-specific time expression grounding, i.e. mapping from expressions such as “morning” in English or “Manhã” in Portuguese to specific hours in the day. We propose 3 language-agnostic methods, one of which achieves promising results on gold standard annotations that we collected for a small number of languages. We then apply this method to 27 languages and analyze the similarities across languages in the grounding of time expressions.
Extracting Person Names from User Generated Text: Named-Entity Recognition for Combating Human Trafficking
Authors: Pratheeksha Nair, Kellin Pelrine, Reihaneh Rabbany Yifei Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Online escort advertisement websites are widely used for advertising victims of human trafficking. Domain experts agree that advertising multiple people in the same ad is a strong indicator of trafficking. Thus, extracting person names from the text of these ads can provide valuable clues for further analysis. However, Named-Entity Recognition (NER) on escort ads is challenging because the text can be noisy, colloquial and often lacking proper grammar and punctuation. Most existing state-of-the-art NER models fail to demonstrate satisfactory performance in this task. In this paper, we propose NEAT (Name Extraction Against Trafficking) for extracting person names. It effectively combines classic rule-based and dictionary extractors with a contextualized language model to capture ambiguous names (e.g penny, hazel) and adapts to adversarial changes in the text by expanding its dictionary. NEAT shows 19% improvement on average in the F1 classification score for name extraction compared to previous state-of-the-art in two domain-specific datasets.
OneAligner: Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer with One Rich-Resource Language Pair for Low-Resource Sentence Retrieval
Authors: Kazuma Hashimoto, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong Tong Niu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Aligning parallel sentences in multilingual corpora is essential to curating data for downstream applications such as Machine Translation. In this work, we present OneAligner, an alignment model specially designed for sentence retrieval tasks. This model is able to train on only one language pair and transfers, in a cross-lingual fashion, to low-resource language pairs with negligible degradation in performance. When trained with all language pairs of a large-scale parallel multilingual corpus (OPUS-100), this model achieves the state-of-the-art result on the Tateoba dataset, outperforming an equally-sized previous model by 8.0 points in accuracy while using less than 0.6% of their parallel data. When finetuned on a single rich-resource language pair, be it English-centered or not, our model is able to match the performance of the ones finetuned on all language pairs under the same data budget with less than 2.0 points decrease in accuracy. Furthermore, with the same setup, scaling up the number of rich-resource language pairs monotonically improves the performance, reaching a minimum of 0.4 points discrepancy in accuracy, making it less mandatory to collect any low-resource parallel data. Finally, we conclude through empirical results and analyses that the performance of the sentence alignment task depends mostly on the monolingual and parallel data size, up to a certain size threshold, rather than on what language pairs are used for training or evaluation.
Suum Cuique: Studying Bias in Taboo Detection with a Community Perspective
Authors: Jonathan Rusert, Padmini Srinivasan Osama Khalid
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Prior research has discussed and illustrated the need to consider linguistic norms at the community level when studying taboo (hateful/offensive/toxic etc.) language. However, a methodology for doing so, that is firmly founded on community language norms is still largely absent. This can lead both to biases in taboo text classification and limitations in our understanding of the causes of bias. We propose a method to study bias in taboo classification and annotation where a community perspective is front and center. This is accomplished by using special classifiers tuned for each community`s language. In essence, these classifiers represent community level language norms. We use these to study bias and find, for example, biases are largest against African Americans (7/10 datasets and all 3 classifiers examined). In contrast to previous papers we also study other communities and find, for example, strong biases against South Asians. In a small scale user study we illustrate our key idea which is that common utterances, i.e., those with high alignment scores with a community (community classifier confidence scores) are unlikely to be regarded taboo. Annotators who are community members contradict taboo classification decisions and annotations in a majority of instances. This paper is a significant step toward reducing false positive taboo decisions that over time harm minority communities.
Modeling Intensification for Sign Language Generation: A Computational Approach
Authors: Yang Zhong, Sabit Hassan, Lorna Quandt, Malihe Alikhani Mert Inan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: End-to-end sign language generation models do not accurately represent the prosody in sign language. A lack of temporal and spatial variations leads to poor-quality generated presentations that confuse human interpreters. In this paper, we aim to improve the prosody in generated sign languages by modeling intensification in a data-driven manner. We present different strategies grounded in linguistics of sign language that inform how intensity modifiers can be represented in gloss annotations. To employ our strategies, we first annotate a subset of the benchmark PHOENIX-14T, a German Sign Language dataset, with different levels of intensification. We then use a supervised intensity tagger to extend the annotated dataset and obtain labels for the remaining portion of it. This enhanced dataset is then used to train state-of-the-art transformer models for sign language generation. We find that our efforts in intensification modeling yield better results when evaluated with automatic metrics. Human evaluation also indicates a higher preference of the videos generated using our model.
Controllable Natural Language Generation with Contrastive Prefixes
Authors: Li Dong, Yelong Shen, Furu Wei, Weizhu Chen Jing Qian
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: To guide the generation of large pretrained language models (LM), previous work has focused on directly fine-tuning the language model or utilizing an attribute discriminator. In this work, we propose a novel lightweight framework for controllable GPT2 generation, which utilizes a set of small attribute-specific vectors, called prefixes (Li and Liang, 2021), to steer natural language generation. Different from Li and Liang (2021), where each prefix is trained independently, we take the relationship among prefixes into consideration and train multiple prefixes simultaneously. We propose a novel supervised method and also an unsupervised method to train the prefixes for single-aspect control while the combination of these two methods can achieve multi-aspect control. Experimental results on both single-aspect and multi-aspect control show that our methods can guide generation towards the desired attributes while keeping high linguistic quality.
Revisiting the Effects of Leakage on Dependency Parsing
Authors: Miriam Wanner, Antonios Anastasopoulos Nathaniel Krasner
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent work by Søgaard (2020) showed that, treebank size aside, overlap between training and test graphs (termed \textitleakage) explains more of the observed variation in dependency parsing performance than other explanations. In this work we revisit this claim, testing it on more models and languages. We find that it only holds for zero-shot cross-lingual settings. We then propose a more fine-grained measure of such leakage which, unlike the original measure, not only explains but also correlates with observed performance variation. Code and data are available here: r̆lhttps://github.com/miriamwanner/reu-nlp-project
Learning to Describe Solutions for Bug Reports Based on Developer Discussions
Authors: Junyi Jessy Li, Milos Gligoric, Ray Mooney Sheena Panthaplackel
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: When a software bug is reported, developers engage in a discussion to collaboratively resolve it. While the solution is likely formulated within the discussion, it is often buried in a large amount of text, making it difficult to comprehend and delaying its implementation. To expedite bug resolution, we propose generating a concise natural language description of the solution by synthesizing relevant content within the discussion, which encompasses both natural language and source code. We build a corpus for this task using a novel technique for obtaining noisy supervision from repository changes linked to bug reports, with which we establish benchmarks. We also design two systems for generating a description during an ongoing discussion by classifying when sufficient context for performing the task emerges in real-time. With automated and human evaluation, we find this task to form an ideal testbed for complex reasoning in long, bimodal dialogue context.
Perturbations in the Wild: Leveraging Human-Written Text Perturbations for Realistic Adversarial Attack and Defense
Authors: Jooyoung Lee, Kevin Yen, Yifan Hu, Dongwon Lee Thai Le
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We proposes a novel algorithm, ANTHRO, that inductively extracts over 600K human-written text perturbations in the wild and leverages them for realistic adversarial attack. Unlike existing character-based attacks which often deductively hypothesize a set of manipulation strategies, our work is grounded on actual observations from real-world texts. We find that adversarial texts generated by ANTHRO achieve the best trade-off between (1) attack success rate, (2) semantic preservation of the original text, and (3) stealthiness--i.e. indistinguishable from human writings hence harder to be flagged as suspicious. Specifically, our attacks accomplished around 83% and 91% attack success rates on BERT and RoBERTa, respectively. Moreover, it outperformed the TextBugger baseline with an increase of 50% and 40% in terms of semantic preservation and stealthiness when evaluated by both layperson and professional human workers. ANTHRO can further enhance a BERT classifier`s performance in understanding different variations of human-written toxic texts via adversarial training when compared to the Perspective API.
Improving Chinese Grammatical Error Detection via Data augmentation by Conditional Error Generation
Authors: Shulin Liu, Huihui Cai, Tao Yang, Shengkang Song, TingHao Yu Tianchi Yue
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Chinese Grammatical Error Detection(CGED) aims at detecting grammatical errors in Chinese texts. One of the main challenges for CGED is the lack of annotated data. To alleviate this problem, previous studies proposed various methods to automatically generate more training samples, which can be roughly categorized into rule-based methods and model-based methods. The rule-based methods construct erroneous sentences by directly introducing noises into original sentences. However, the introduced noises are usually context-independent, which are quite different from those made by humans. The model-based methods utilize generative models to imitate human errors. The generative model may bring too many changes to the original sentences and generate semantically ambiguous sentences, so it is difficult to detect grammatical errors in these generated sentences. In addition, generated sentences may be error-free and thus become noisy data. To handle these problems, we propose CNEG, a novel Conditional Non-Autoregressive Error Generation model for generating Chinese grammatical errors. Specifically, in order to generate a context-dependent error, we first mask a span in a correct text, then predict an erroneous span conditioned on both the masked text and the correct span. Furthermore, we filter out error-free spans by measuring their perplexities in the original sentences. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves better performance than all compared data augmentation methods on the CGED-2018 and CGED-2020 benchmarks.
Modular and Parameter-Efficient Multimodal Fusion with Prompting
Authors: Mengjie Zhao, Hinrich Schuetze Sheng Liang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent research has made impressive progress in large-scale multimodal pre-training. In the context of the rapid growth of model size, it is necessary to seek efficient and flexible methods other than finetuning. In this paper, we propose to use prompt vectors to align the modalities. Our method achieves comparable performance to several other multimodal fusion methods in low-resource settings. We further show that our method is modular and parameter-efficient for processing tasks involving two or more data modalities.
Synchronous Refinement for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, Rui Wang, Min Zhang Kehai Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Machine translation typically adopts an encoder-to-decoder framework, in which the decoder generates the target sentence word-by-word in an auto-regressive manner. However, the auto-regressive decoder faces a deep-rooted $one$-$pass$ issue whereby each generated word is considered as one element of the final output regardless of whether it is correct or not. These generated wrong words further constitute the target historical context to affect the generation of subsequent target words. This paper proposes a novel synchronous refinement method to revise potential errors in the generated words by considering part of the target future context. Particularly, the proposed approach allows the auto-regressive decoder to refine the previously generated target words and generate the next target word synchronously. The experimental results on three widely-used machine translation tasks demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
HIE-SQL: History Information Enhanced Network for Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing
Authors: Haibin Wang, Baohua Dong, Xingjun Wang, Changshan Li Yanzhao Zheng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recently, context-dependent text-to-SQL semantic parsing which translates natural language into SQL in an interaction process has attracted a lot of attentions. Previous works leverage context dependence information either from interaction history utterances or previous predicted queries but fail in taking advantage of both of them since of the mismatch between the natural language and logic-form SQL. In this work, we propose a History Information Enhanced text-to-SQL model (HIE-SQL) to exploit context dependence information from both history utterances and the last predicted SQL query. In view of the mismatch, we treat natural language and SQL as two modalities and propose a bimodal pre-trained model to bridge the gap between them. Besides, we design a schema-linking graph to enhance connections from utterances and the SQL query to database schema. We show our history information enhanced methods improve the performance of HIE-SQL by a significant margin, which achieves new state-of-the-art results on two context-dependent text-to-SQL benchmarks, the SparC and CoSQL datasets, at the writing time.
CRASpell: A Contextual Typo Robust Approach to Improve Chinese Spelling Correction
Authors: Shengkang Song, Tianchi Yue, Tao Yang, Huihui Cai, TingHao Yu, Shengli Sun Shulin Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recently, Bert-based models have dominated the research of Chinese spelling correction (CSC). These methods have two limitations: (1) they have poor performance on multi-typo texts. In such texts, the context of each typo contains at least one misspelled character, which brings noise information. Such noisy context leads to the declining performance on multi-typo texts. (2) they tend to overcorrect valid expressions to more frequent expressions due to the masked token recovering task of Bert. We attempt to address these limitations in this paper. To make our model robust to contextual noise brought by typos, our approach first constructs a noisy context for each training sample. Then the correction model is forced to yield similar outputs based on the noisy and original contexts. Moreover, to address the overcorrection problem, copy mechanism is incorporated to encourage our model to prefer to choose the input character when the miscorrected and input character are both valid according to the given context. Experiments are conducted on widely used benchmarks. Our model achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art methods by a remarkable gain.
Gaussian Multi-head Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation
Authors: Yang Feng Shaolei Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) outputs translation while receiving the streaming source inputs, and hence needs a policy to determine where to start translating. The alignment between target and source words often implies the most informative source word for each target word, and hence provides the unified control over translation quality and latency, but unfortunately the existing SiMT methods do not explicitly model the alignment to perform the control. In this paper, we propose Gaussian Multi-head Attention (GMA) to develop a new SiMT policy by modeling alignment and translation in a unified manner. For SiMT policy, GMA models the aligned source position of each target word, and accordingly waits until its aligned position to start translating. To integrate the learning of alignment into the translation model, a Gaussian distribution centered on predicted aligned position is introduced as an alignment-related prior, which cooperates with translation-related soft attention to determine the final attention. Experiments on En-Vi and De-En tasks show that our method outperforms strong baselines on the trade-off between translation and latency.
Composing Structure-Aware Batches for Pairwise Sentence Classification
Authors: Tilman Beck, Iryna Gurevych Andreas Waldis
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Identifying the relation between two sentences requires datasets with pairwise annotations. In many cases, these datasets contain instances that are annotated multiple times as part of different pairs. They constitute a structure that contains additional helpful information about the inter-relatedness of the text instances based on the annotations. This paper investigates how this kind of structural dataset information can be exploited during training. We propose three batch composition strategies to incorporate such information and measure their performance over 14 heterogeneous pairwise sentence classification tasks. Our results show statistically significant improvements (up to 3.9%) - independent of the pre-trained language model - for most tasks compared to baselines that follow a standard training procedure. Further, we see that even this baseline procedure can profit from having such structural information in a low-resource setting.
Factual Consistency of Multilingual Pretrained Language Models
Authors: Anders Søgaard Constanza Fierro
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Pretrained language models can be queried for factual knowledge, with potential applications in knowledge base acquisition and tasks that require inference. However, for that, we need to know how reliable this knowledge is, and recent work has shown that monolingual English language models lack consistency when predicting factual knowledge, that is, they fill-in-the-blank differently for paraphrases describing the same fact. In this paper, we extend the analysis of consistency to a multilingual setting. We introduce a resource, mParaRel, and investigate (i) whether multilingual language models such as mBERT and XLM-R are more consistent than their monolingual counterparts;and (ii) if such models are equally consistent across languages. We find that mBERT is as inconsistent as English BERT in English paraphrases, but that both mBERT and XLM-R exhibit a high degree of inconsistency in English and even more so for all the other 45 languages.
Selecting Stickers in Open-Domain Dialogue through Multitask Learning
Authors: Yeshuang Zhu, Zhengcong Fei, Jinchao Zhang, Jie Zhou Zhexin Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: With the increasing popularity of online chatting, stickers are becoming important in our online communication. Selecting appropriate stickers in open-domain dialogue requires a comprehensive understanding of both dialogues and stickers, as well as the relationship between the two types of modalities. To tackle these challenges, we propose a multitask learning method comprised of three auxiliary tasks to enhance the understanding of dialogue history, emotion and semantic meaning of stickers. Extensive experiments conducted on a recent challenging dataset show that our model can better combine the multimodal information and achieve significantly higher accuracy over strong baselines. Ablation study further verifies the effectiveness of each auxiliary task. Our code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/nonstopfor/Sticker-Selection.
ZiNet: Linking Chinese Characters Spanning Three Thousand Years
Authors: Fausto Giunchiglia, Daqian Shi, Xiaolei Diao, Chuntao Li, Hao Xu Yang Chi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Modern Chinese characters evolved from 3,000 years ago. Up to now, tens of thousands of glyphs of ancient characters have been discovered, which must be deciphered by experts to interpret unearthed documents. Experts usually need to compare each ancient character to be examined with similar known ones in whole historical periods. However, it is inevitably limited by human memory and experience, which often cost a lot of time but associations are limited to a small scope. To help researchers discover glyph similar characters, this paper introduces ZiNet, the first diachronic knowledge base describing relationships and evolution of Chinese characters and words. In addition, powered by the knowledge of radical systems in ZiNet, this paper introduces glyph similarity measurement between ancient Chinese characters, which could capture similar glyph pairs that are potentially related in origins or semantics. Results show strong positive correlations between scores from the method and from human experts. Finally, qualitative analysis and implicit future applications are presented.
How Can Cross-lingual Knowledge Contribute Better to Fine-Grained Entity Typing?
Authors: Tiansi Dong, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Hui Chen, Zelin Dai, Qu Yincen Hailong Jin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Cross-lingual Entity Typing (CLET) aims at improving the quality of entity type prediction by transferring semantic knowledge learned from rich-resourced languages to low-resourced languages. In this paper, by utilizing multilingual transfer learning via the mixture-of-experts approach, our model dynamically capture the relationship between target language and each source language, and effectively generalize to predict types of unseen entities in new languages. Extensive experiments on multi-lingual datasets show that our method significantly outperforms multiple baselines and can robustly handle negative transfer. We questioned the relationship between language similarity and the performance of CLET. A series of experiments refute the commonsense that the more source the better, and suggest the Similarity Hypothesis for CLET.
AMR-DA: Data Augmentation by Abstract Meaning Representation
Authors: Yuxin Jiang, Fangzhen Lin Ziyi Shou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic representation for NLP/NLU. In this paper, we propose to use it for data augmentation in NLP. Our proposed data augmentation technique, called AMR-DA, converts a sample sentence to an AMR graph, modifies the graph according to various data augmentation policies, and then generates augmentations from graphs. Our method combines both sentence-level techniques like back translation and token-level techniques like EDA (Easy Data Augmentation). To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we apply it to the tasks of semantic textual similarity (STS) and text classification. For STS, our experiments show that AMR-DA boosts the performance of the state-of-the-art models on several STS benchmarks. For text classification, AMR-DA outperforms EDA and AEDA and leads to more robust improvements.
Using Pre-Trained Language Models for Producing Counter Narratives Against Hate Speech: a Comparative Study
Authors: Helena Bonaldi, Margherita Fanton, Marco Guerini Serra Sinem Tekiroğlu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In this work, we present an extensive study on the use of pre-trained language models for the task of automatic Counter Narrative (CN) generation to fight online hate speech in English. We first present a comparative study to determine whether there is a particular Language Model (or class of LMs) and a particular decoding mechanism that are the most appropriate to generate CNs. Findings show that autoregressive models combined with stochastic decodings are the most promising. We then investigate how an LM performs in generating a CN with regard to an unseen target of hate. We find out that a key element for successful \textquoteleftout of target' experiments is not an overall similarity with the training data but the presence of a specific subset of training data, i. e. a target that shares some commonalities with the test target that can be defined a-priori. We finally introduce the idea of a pipeline based on the addition of an automatic post-editing step to refine generated CNs.
Improving Robustness of Language Models from a Geometry-aware Perspective
Authors: Zhaoquan Gu, Le Wang, Jinyin Chen, Qi Xuan Bin Zhu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent studies have found that removing the norm-bounded projection and increasing search steps in adversarial training can significantly improve robustness. However, we observe that a too large number of search steps can hurt accuracy. We aim to obtain strong robustness efficiently using fewer steps. Through a toy experiment, we find that perturbing the clean data to the decision boundary but not crossing it does not degrade the test accuracy. Inspired by this, we propose friendly adversarial data augmentation (FADA) to generate friendly adversarial data. On top of FADA, we propose geometry-aware adversarial training (GAT) to perform adversarial training on friendly adversarial data so that we can save a large number of search steps. Comprehensive experiments across two widely used datasets and three pre-trained language models demonstrate that GAT can obtain stronger robustness via fewer steps. In addition, we provide extensive empirical results and in-depth analyses on robustness to facilitate future studies.
Task-guided Disentangled Tuning for Pretrained Language Models
Authors: Yufan Jiang, Shuangzhi Wu, Yongjing Yin, Mu Li Jiali Zeng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Pretrained language models (PLMs) trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus are typically fine-tuned on task-specific downstream datasets, which have produced state-of-the-art results on various NLP tasks. However, the data discrepancy issue in domain and scale makes fine-tuning fail to efficiently capture task-specific patterns, especially in low data regime. To address this issue, we propose Task-guided Disentangled Tuning (TDT) for PLMs, which enhances the generalization of representations by disentangling task-relevant signals from the entangled representations. For a given task, we introduce a learnable confidence model to detect indicative guidance from context, and further propose a disentangled regularization to mitigate the over-reliance problem. Experimental results on GLUE and CLUE benchmarks show that TDT gives consistently better results than fine-tuning with different PLMs, and extensive analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our method. Code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/lemon0830/TDT.
Exploring the Impact of Negative Samples of Contrastive Learning: A Case Study of Sentence Embedding
Authors: Yihao Wang, Yuxin Liang, Ling Gao, Jie Zheng, Jie Ren, Zheng Wang Rui Cao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Contrastive learning is emerging as a powerful technique for extracting knowledge from unlabeled data. This technique requires a balanced mixture of two ingredients: positive (similar) and negative (dissimilar) samples. This is typically achieved by maintaining a queue of negative samples during training. Prior works in the area typically uses a fixed-length negative sample queue, but how the negative sample size affects the model performance remains unclear. The opaque impact of the number of negative samples on performance when employing contrastive learning aroused our in-depth exploration. This paper presents a momentum contrastive learning model with negative sample queue for sentence embedding, namely MoCoSE. We add the prediction layer to the online branch to make the model asymmetric and together with EMA update mechanism of the target branch to prevent the model from collapsing. We define a maximum traceable distance metric, through which we learn to what extent the text contrastive learning benefits from the historical information of negative samples. Our experiments find that the best results are obtained when the maximum traceable distance is at a certain range, demonstrating that there is an optimal range of historical information for a negative sample queue. We evaluate the proposed unsupervised MoCoSE on the semantic text similarity (STS) task and obtain an average Spearman`s correlation of 77.27%. Source code is available here.
The Inefficiency of Language Models in Scholarly Retrieval: An Experimental Walk-through
Authors: Mayank Singh Shruti Singh
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Language models are increasingly becoming popular in AI-powered scientific IR systems. This paper evaluates popular scientific language models in handling (i) short-query texts and (ii) textual neighbors. Our experiments showcase the inability to retrieve relevant documents for a short-query text even under the most relaxed conditions. Additionally, we leverage textual neighbors, generated by small perturbations to the original text, to demonstrate that not all perturbations lead to close neighbors in the embedding space. Further, an exhaustive categorization yields several classes of orthographically and semantically related, partially related and completely unrelated neighbors. Retrieval performance turns out to be more influenced by the surface form rather than the semantics of the text.
Fusing Heterogeneous Factors with Triaffine Mechanism for Nested Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Chuanqi Tan, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang Zheng Yuan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Nested entities are observed in many domains due to their compositionality, which cannot be easily recognized by the widely-used sequence labeling framework.A natural solution is to treat the task as a span classification problem. To learn better span representation and increase classification performance, it is crucial to effectively integrate heterogeneous factors including inside tokens, boundaries, labels, and related spans which could be contributing to nested entities recognition. To fuse these heterogeneous factors, we propose a novel triaffine mechanism including triaffine attention and scoring.Triaffine attention uses boundaries and labels as queries and uses inside tokens and related spans as keys and values for span representations.Triaffine scoring interacts with boundaries and span representations for classification. Experiments show that our proposed method outperforms previous span-based methods, achieves the state-of-the-art $F_1$ scores on nested NER datasets GENIA and KBP2017, and shows comparable results on ACE2004 and ACE2005.
UNIMO-2: End-to-End Unified Vision-Language Grounded Learning
Authors: Can Gao, Guocheng Niu, Xinyan Xiao, Hao Liu, Jiachen Liu, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang Wei Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has achieved impressive performance on various cross-modal downstream tasks. However, most existing methods can only learn from aligned image-caption data and rely heavily on expensive regional features, which greatly limits their scalability and performance. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end unified-modal pre-training framework, namely UNIMO-2, for joint learning on both aligned image-caption data and unaligned image-only and text-only corpus. We build a unified Transformer model to jointly learn visual representations, textual representations and semantic alignment between images and texts. In particular, we propose to conduct grounded learning on both images and texts via a sharing grounded space, which helps bridge unaligned images and texts, and align the visual and textual semantic spaces on different types of corpora. The experiments show that our grounded learning method can improve textual and visual semantic alignment for improving performance on various cross-modal tasks. Moreover, benefiting from effective joint modeling of different types of corpora, our model also achieves impressive performance on single-modal visual and textual tasks. Our code and models are public at the UNIMO project page r̆lhttps://unimo-ptm.github.io/.
The Past Mistake is the Future Wisdom: Error-driven Contrastive Probability Optimization for Chinese Spell Checking
Authors: Qingyu Zhou, Yangning Li, Zhongli Li, Ruiyang Liu, Rongyi Sun, Zizhen Wang, Chao Li, Yunbo Cao, Hai-Tao Zheng Yinghui Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors, which are mainly caused by the phonological or visual similarity. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) promote the progress of CSC task. However, there exists a gap between the learned knowledge of PLMs and the goal of CSC task. PLMs focus on the semantics in text and tend to correct the erroneous characters to semantically proper or commonly used ones, but these aren`t the ground-truth corrections. To address this issue, we propose an Error-driven COntrastive Probability Optimization (ECOPO) framework for CSC task. ECOPO refines the knowledge representations of PLMs, and guides the model to avoid predicting these common characters through an error-driven way. Particularly, ECOPO is model-agnostic and it can be combined with existing CSC methods to achieve better performance. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on SIGHAN datasets demonstrate that ECOPO is simple yet effective.
XFUND: A Benchmark Dataset for Multilingual Visually Rich Form Understanding
Authors: Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Guoxin Wang, Yijuan Lu, Dinei Florencio, Cha Zhang, Furu Wei Yiheng Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Multimodal pre-training with text, layout, and image has achieved SOTA performance for visually rich document understanding tasks recently, which demonstrates the great potential for joint learning across different modalities. However, the existed research work has focused only on the English domain while neglecting the importance of multilingual generalization. In this paper, we introduce a human-annotated multilingual form understanding benchmark dataset named XFUND, which includes form understanding samples in 7 languages (Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese). Meanwhile, we present LayoutXLM, a multimodal pre-trained model for multilingual document understanding, which aims to bridge the language barriers for visually rich document understanding. Experimental results show that the LayoutXLM model has significantly outperformed the existing SOTA cross-lingual pre-trained models on the XFUND dataset. The XFUND dataset and the pre-trained LayoutXLM model have been publicly available at r̆lhttps://aka.ms/layoutxlm.