mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Parameter-Efficient Tuning Makes a Good Classification Head
Authors: Ming Ding, Yanhui Guo, Qingsong Lv, Jie Tang Zhuoyi Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In recent years, pretrained models revolutionized the paradigm of natural language understanding (NLU), where we append a randomly initialized classification head after the pretrained backbone, e.g. BERT, and finetune the whole model. As the pretrained backbone makes a major contribution to the improvement, we naturally expect a good pretrained classification head can also benefit the training. However, the final-layer output of the backbone, i.e. the input of the classification head, will change greatly during finetuning, making the usual head-only pretraining ineffective. In this paper, we find that parameter-efficient tuning makes a good classification head, with which we can simply replace the randomly initialized heads for a stable performance gain. Our experiments demonstrate that the classification head jointly pretrained with parameter-efficient tuning consistently improves the performance on 9 tasks in GLUE and SuperGLUE.
STGN: an Implicit Regularization Method for Learning with Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing
Authors: Xiao Ding, Minji Tang, Hao Zhang, Bing Qin, Ting Liu Tingting Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Noisy labels are ubiquitous in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Existing work, namely learning with noisy labels in NLP, is often limited to dedicated tasks or specific training procedures, making it hard to be widely used. To address this issue, SGD noise has been explored to provide a more general way to alleviate the effect of noisy labels by involving benign noise in the process of stochastic gradient descent. However, previous studies exert identical perturbation for all samples, which may cause overfitting on incorrect ones or optimizing correct ones inadequately. To facilitate this, we propose a novel stochastic tailor-made gradient noise (STGN), mitigating the effect of inherent label noise by introducing tailor-made benign noise for each sample. Specifically, we investigate multiple principles to precisely and stably discriminate correct samples from incorrect ones and thus apply different intensities of perturbation to them. A detailed theoretical analysis shows that STGN has good properties, beneficial for model generalization. Experiments on three different NLP tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of STGN. Also, STGN can boost existing robust training methods.
Cross-Modal Similarity-Based Curriculum Learning for Image Captioning
Authors: Saku Sugawara, Akiko Aizawa, Lei Zhou, Ryohei Sasano, Koichi Takeda Hongkuan Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Image captioning models require the high-level generalization ability to describe the contents of various images in words. Most existing approaches treat the image--caption pairs equally in their training without considering the differences in their learning difficulties. Several image captioning approaches introduce curriculum learning methods that present training data with increasing levels of difficulty. However, their difficulty measurements are either based on domain-specific features or prior model training. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient difficulty measurement for image captioning using cross-modal similarity calculated by a pretrained vision--language model. Experiments on the COCO and Flickr30k datasets show that our proposed approach achieves superior performance and competitive convergence speed to baselines without requiring heuristics or incurring additional training costs. Moreover, the higher model performance on difficult examples and unseen data also demonstrates the generalization ability.
Debiasing Masks: A New Framework for Shortcut Mitigation in NLU
Authors: Saku Sugawara, Akiko Aizawa Johannes Mario Meissner
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Debiasing language models from unwanted behaviors in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks is a topic with rapidly increasing interest in the NLP community. Spurious statistical correlations in the data allow models to perform shortcuts and avoid uncovering more advanced and desirable linguistic features.A multitude of effective debiasing approaches has been proposed, but flexibility remains a major issue. For the most part, models must be retrained to find a new set of weights with debiased behavior.We propose a new debiasing method in which we identify debiased pruning masks that can be applied to a finetuned model. This enables the selective and conditional application of debiasing behaviors.We assume that bias is caused by a certain subset of weights in the network; our method is, in essence, a mask search to identify and remove biased weights.Our masks show equivalent or superior performance to the standard counterparts, while offering important benefits.Pruning masks can be stored with high efficiency in memory, and it becomes possible to switch among several debiasing behaviors (or revert back to the original biased model) at inference time. Finally, it opens the doors to further research on how biases are acquired by studying the generated masks. For example, we observed that the early layers and attention heads were pruned more aggressively, possibly hinting towards the location in which biases may be encoded.
Extending Phrase Grounding with Pronouns in Visual Dialogues
Authors: Xin Zhang, Meishan Zhang, Min Zhang Panzhong Lu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Conventional phrase grounding aims to localize noun phrases mentioned in a given caption to their corresponding image regions, which has achieved great success recently. Apparently, sole noun phrase grounding is not enough for cross-modal visual language understanding. Here we extend the task by considering pronouns as well. First, we construct a dataset of phrase grounding with both noun phrases and pronouns to image regions. Based on the dataset, we test the performance of phrase grounding by using a state-of-the-art literature model of this line. Then, we enhance the baseline grounding model with coreference information which should help our task potentially, modeling the coreference structures with graph convolutional networks. Experiments on our dataset, interestingly, show that pronouns are easier to ground than noun phrases, where the possible reason might be that these pronouns are much less ambiguous. Additionally, our final model with coreference information can significantly boost the grounding performance of both noun phrases and pronouns.
EUR-Lex-Sum: A Multi- and Cross-lingual Dataset for Long-form Summarization in the Legal Domain
Authors: Ashish Chouhan, Michael Gertz Dennis Aumiller
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Existing summarization datasets come with two main drawbacks: (1) They tend to focus on overly exposed domains, such as news articles or wiki-like texts, and (2) are primarily monolingual, with few multilingual datasets.In this work, we propose a novel dataset, called EUR-Lex-Sum, based on manually curated document summaries of legal acts from the European Union law platform (EUR-Lex). Documents and their respective summaries exist as cross-lingual paragraph-aligned data in several of the 24 official European languages, enabling access to various cross-lingual and lower-resourced summarization setups. We obtain up to 1,500 document/summary pairs per language, including a subset of 375 cross-lingually aligned legal acts with texts available in *all* 24 languages. In this work, the data acquisition process is detailed and key characteristics of the resource are compared to existing summarization resources. In particular, we illustrate challenging sub-problems and open questions on the dataset that could help the facilitation of future research in the direction of domain-specific cross-lingual summarization.Limited by the extreme length and language diversity of samples, we further conduct experiments with suitable extractive monolingual and cross-lingual baselines for future work. Code for the extraction as well as access to our data and baselines is available online at: [https://github.com/achouhan93/eur-lex-sum](https://github.com/achouhan93/eur-lex-sum).
Differentiable Data Augmentation for Contrastive Sentence Representation Learning
Authors: Wei Lu Tianduo Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Fine-tuning a pre-trained language model via the contrastive learning framework with a large amount of unlabeled sentences or labeled sentence pairs is a common way to obtain high-quality sentence representations. Although the contrastive learning framework has shown its superiority on sentence representation learning over previous methods, the potential of such a framework is under-explored so far due to the simple method it used to construct positive pairs. Motivated by this, we propose a method that makes hard positives from the original training examples. A pivotal ingredient of our approach is the use of prefix that attached to a pre-trained language model, which allows for differentiable data augmentation during contrastive learning. Our method can be summarized in two steps: supervised prefix-tuning followed by joint contrastive fine-tuning with unlabeled or labeled examples. Our experiments confirm the effectiveness of our data augmentation approach. The proposed method yields significant improvements over existing methods under both semi-supervised and supervised settings. Our experiments under a low labeled data setting also show that our method is more label-efficient than the state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods.
Text Style Transferring via Adversarial Masking and Styled Filling
Authors: Richong Zhang, Junfan Chen, Jaein Kim, Yongyi Mao Jiarui Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Text style transfer is an important task in natural language processing with broad applications. Existing models following the masking and filling scheme suffer two challenges: the word masking procedure may mistakenly remove unexpected words and the selected words in the word filling procedure may lack diversity and semantic consistency. To tackle both challenges, in this study, we propose a style transfer model, with an adversarial masking approach and a styled filling technique (AMSF). Specifically, AMSF first trains a mask predictor by adversarial training without manual configuration. Then two additional losses, i.e. an entropy maximization loss and a consistency regularization loss, are introduced in training the word filling module to guarantee the diversity and semantic consistency of the transferred texts. Experimental results and analysis on two benchmark text style transfer data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
Character-level White-Box Adversarial Attacks against Transformers via Attachable Subwords Substitution
Authors: Honghai Yu, Xuming Hu, Shu′ang Li, Li Lin, Fukun Ma, Yawen Yang, Lijie Wen Aiwei Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose the first character-level white-box adversarial attack method against transformer models. The intuition of our method comes from the observation that words are split into subtokens before being fed into the transformer models and the substitution between two close subtokens has a similar effect with the character modification. Our method mainly contains three steps. First, a gradient-based method is adopted to find the most vulnerable words in the sentence. Then we split the selected words into subtokens to replace the origin tokenization result from the transformer tokenizer. Finally, we utilize an adversarial loss to guide the substitution of attachable subtokens in which the Gumbel-softmax trick is introduced to ensure gradient propagation.Meanwhile, we introduce the visual and length constraint in the optimization process to achieve minimum character modifications.Extensive experiments on both sentence-level and token-level tasks demonstrate that our method could outperform the previous attack methods in terms of success rate and edit distance. Furthermore, human evaluation verifies our adversarial examples could preserve their origin labels.
Query-based Instance Discrimination Network for Relational Triple Extraction
Authors: Yongliang Shen, Xuming Hu, Wenqi Zhang, Xiaoxia Cheng, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang Zeqi Tan
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Joint entity and relation extraction has been a core task in the field of information extraction. Recent approaches usually consider the extraction of relational triples from a stereoscopic perspective, either learning a relation-specific tagger or separate classifiers for each relation type. However, they still suffer from error propagation, relation redundancy and lack of high-level connections between triples. To address these issues, we propose a novel query-based approach to construct instance-level representations for relational triples. By metric-based comparison between query embeddings and token embeddings, we can extract all types of triples in one step, thus eliminating the error propagation problem. In addition, we learn the instance-level representation of relational triples via contrastive learning. In this way, relational triples can not only enclose rich class-level semantics but also access to high-order global connections. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the state of the art on five widely used benchmarks.
Learning Inter-Entity-Interaction for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Kui Yu, Xiaoling Huang, Yuhong Zhang Yuling Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Few-shot knowledge graph completion (FKGC) aims to infer unknown fact triples of a relation using its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent FKGC studies focus on learning semantic representations of entity pairs by separately encoding the neighborhoods of head and tail entities. Such practice, however, ignores the inter-entity interaction, resulting in low-discrimination representations for entity pairs, especially when these entity pairs are associated with 1-to-N, N-to-1, and N-to-N relations. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel FKGC model, named Cross-Interaction Attention Network (CIAN) to investigate the inter-entity interaction between head and tail entities. Specifically, we first explore the interactions within entities by computing the attention between the task relation and each entity neighbor, and then model the interactions between head and tail entities by letting an entity to attend to the neighborhood of its paired entity. In this way, CIAN can figure out the relevant semantics between head and tail entities, thereby generating more discriminative representations for entity pairs. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that CIAN outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/cjlyl/FKGC-CIAN.
Empowering the Fact-checkers! Automatic Identification of Claim Spans on Twitter
Authors: Atharva Kulkarni, Vaibhav Pulastya, Md. Shad Akhtar, Tanmoy Chakraborty Megha Sundriyal
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The widespread diffusion of medical and political claims in the wake of COVID-19 has led to a voluminous rise in misinformation and fake news. The current vogue is to employ manual fact-checkers to efficiently classify and verify such data to combat this avalanche of claim-ridden misinformation. However, the rate of information dissemination is such that it vastly outpaces the fact-checkers' strength. Therefore, to aid manual fact-checkers in eliminating the superfluous content, it becomes imperative to automatically identify and extract the snippets of claim-worthy (mis)information present in a post. In this work, we introduce the novel task of Claim Span Identification (CSI). We propose CURT, a large-scale Twitter corpus with token-level claim spans on more than 7.5k tweets. Furthermore, along with the standard token classification baselines, we benchmark our dataset with DABERTa, an adapter-based variation of RoBERTa. The experimental results attest that DABERTa outperforms the baseline systems across several evaluation metrics, improving by about 1.5 points. We also report detailed error analysis to validate the model`s performance along with the ablation studies. Lastly, we release our comprehensive span annotation guidelines for public use.
ClidSum: A Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Dialogue Summarization
Authors: Fandong Meng, Ziyao Lu, Duo Zheng, Zhixu Li, Jianfeng Qu, Jie Zhou Jiaan Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We present ClidSum, a benchmark dataset towards building cross-lingual summarization systems on dialogue documents. It consists of 67k+ dialogue documents and 112k+ annotated summaries in different target languages. Based on the proposed ClidSum, we introduce two benchmark settings for supervised and semi-supervised scenarios, respectively. We then build various baseline systems in different paradigms (pipeline and end-to-end) and conduct extensive experiments on ClidSum to provide deeper analyses. Furthermore, we propose mDialBART which extends mBART via further pre-training, where the multiple objectives help the pre-trained model capture the structural characteristics as well as key content in dialogues and the transformation from source to the target language. Experimental results show the superiority of mDialBART, as an end-to-end model, outperforms strong pipeline models on ClidSum. Finally, we discuss specific challenges that current approaches faced with this task and give multiple promising directions for future research. We have released the dataset and code at https://github.com/krystalan/ClidSum.
Spectral Probing
Authors: Rob van der Goot, Barbara Plank Max Müller-Eberstein
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Linguistic information is encoded at varying timescales (subwords, phrases, etc.) and communicative levels, such as syntax and semantics. Contextualized embeddings have analogously been found to capture these phenomena at distinctive layers and frequencies. Leveraging these findings, we develop a fully learnable frequency filter to identify spectral profiles for any given task. It enables vastly more granular analyses than prior handcrafted filters, and improves on efficiency. After demonstrating the informativeness of spectral probing over manual filters in a monolingual setting, we investigate its multilingual characteristics across seven diverse NLP tasks in six languages. Our analyses identify distinctive spectral profiles which quantify cross-task similarity in a linguistically intuitive manner, while remaining consistent across languages---highlighting their potential as robust, lightweight task descriptors.
QASem Parsing: Text-to-text Modeling of QA-based Semantics
Authors: Eran Hirsch, Ron Eliav, Valentina Pyatkin, Avi Caciularu, Ido Dagan Ayal Klein
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Various works suggest the appeals of incorporating explicit semantic representations when addressing challenging realistic NLP scenarios. Common approaches offer either comprehensive linguistically-based formalisms, like AMR, or alternatively Open-IE, which provides a shallow and partial representation. More recently, an appealing trend introduces semi-structured natural-language structures as an intermediate meaning-capturing representation, often in the form of questions and answers.In this work, we further promote this line of research by considering three prior QA-based semantic representations. These cover verbal, nominalized and discourse-based predications, regarded as jointly providing a comprehensive representation of textual information --- termed QASem. To facilitate this perspective, we investigate how to best utilize pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language models, which seem particularly promising for generating representations that consist of natural language expressions (questions and answers). In particular, we examine and analyze input and output linearization strategies, as well as data augmentation and multitask learning for a scarce training data setup. Consequently, we release the first unified QASem parsing tool, easily applicable for downstream tasks that can benefit from an explicit semi-structured account of information units in text.
Keyphrase Generation via Soft and Hard Semantic Corrections
Authors: Guoshun Yin, Peng Yang, Yu Yao Guangzhen Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Keyphrase generation aims to generate a set of condensed phrases given a source document. Although maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) based keyphrase generation methods have shown impressive performance, they suffer from the bias on the source-prediction sequence pair and the bias on the prediction-target pair. To tackle the above biases, we propose a novel correction model CorrKG on top of the MLE pipeline, where the biases are corrected via the optimal transport (OT) and a frequency-based filtering-and-sorting (FreqFS) strategy. Specifically, OT is introduced as soft correction to facilitate the alignment of salient information and rectify the semantic bias in the source document and predicted keyphrases pair. An adaptive semantic mass learning scheme is conducted on the vanilla OT to achieve a proper pair-wise optimal transport procedure, which promotes the OT learning brought by rectifying semantic masses dynamically. Besides, the FreqFS strategy is designed as hard correction to reduce the bias of predicted and ground truth keyphrases, and thus to generate accurate and sufficient keyphrases. Extensive experiments over multiple benchmark datasets show that our model achieves superior keyphrase generation as compared with the state-of-the-arts.
Modal-specific Pseudo Query Generation for Video Corpus Moment Retrieval
Authors: SeongHo Choi, JooChan Kim, Jin-Hwa Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang Minjoon Jung
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Video corpus moment retrieval (VCMR) is the task to retrieve the most relevant video moment from a large video corpus using a natural language query.For narrative videos, e.g., drama or movies, the holistic understanding of temporal dynamics and multimodal reasoning are crucial.Previous works have shown promising results; however, they relied on the expensive query annotations for the VCMR, i.e., the corresponding moment intervals.To overcome this problem, we propose a self-supervised learning framework: Modal-specific Pseudo Query Generation Network (MPGN).First, MPGN selects candidate temporal moments via subtitle-based moment sampling.Then, it generates pseudo queries exploiting both visualand textual information from the selected temporal moments.Through the multimodal information in the pseudo queries, we show that MPGN successfully learns to localize the video corpus moment without any explicit annotation.We validate the effectiveness of MPGN on TVR dataset, showing the competitive results compared with both supervised models and unsupervised setting models.
DuQM: A Chinese Dataset of Linguistically Perturbed Natural Questions for Evaluating the Robustness of Question Matching Models
Authors: Yan Chen, Jing Yan, Jing Liu, Yu Hong, Ying Chen, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang Hongyu Zhu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In this paper, we focus on the robustness evaluation of Chinese Question Matching (QM) models. Most of the previous work on analyzing robustness issues focus on just one or a few types of artificial adversarial examples. Instead, we argue that a comprehensive evaluation should be conducted on natural texts, which takes into account the fine-grained linguistic capabilities of QM models. For this purpose, we create a Chinese dataset namely DuQM which contains natural questions with linguistic perturbations to evaluate the robustness of QM models. DuQM contains 3 categories and 13 subcategories with 32 linguistic perturbations. The extensive experiments demonstrate that DuQM has a better ability to distinguish different models. Importantly, the detailed breakdown of evaluation by the linguistic phenomena in DuQM helps us easily diagnose the strength and weakness of different models. Additionally, our experiment results show that the effect of artificial adversarial examples does not work on natural texts. Our baseline codes and a leaderboard are now publicly available.
DivEMT: Neural Machine Translation Post-Editing Effort Across Typologically Diverse Languages
Authors: Arianna Bisazza, Ana Guerberof-Arenas, Antonio Toral Gabriele Sarti
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We introduce DivEMT, the first publicly available post-editing study of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) over a typologically diverse set of target languages. Using a strictly controlled setup, 18 professional translators were instructed to translate or post-edit the same set of English documents into Arabic, Dutch, Italian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. During the process, their edits, keystrokes, editing times and pauses were recorded, enabling an in-depth, cross-lingual evaluation of NMT quality and post-editing effectiveness. Using this new dataset, we assess the impact of two state-of-the-art NMT systems, Google Translate and the multilingual mBART-50 model, on translation productivity. We find that post-editing is consistently faster than translation from scratch. However, the magnitude of productivity gains varies widely across systems and languages, highlighting major disparities in post-editing effectiveness for languages at different degrees of typological relatedness to English, even when controlling for system architecture and training data size. We publicly release the complete dataset including all collected behavioral data, to foster new research on the translation capabilities of NMT systems for typologically diverse languages.
Bridging Fairness and Environmental Sustainability in Natural Language Processing
Authors: Emma Strubell, Dirk Hovy, Anne Lauscher Marius Hessenthaler
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Fairness and environmental impact are important research directions for the sustainable development of artificial intelligence. However, while each topic is an active research area in natural language processing (NLP), there is a surprising lack of research on the interplay between the two fields. This lacuna is highly problematic, since there is increasing evidence that an exclusive focus on fairness can actually hinder environmental sustainability, and vice versa. In this work, we shed light on this crucial intersection in NLP by (1) investigating the efficiency of current fairness approaches through surveying example methods for reducing unfair stereotypical bias from the literature, and (2) evaluating a common technique to reduce energy consumption (and thus environmental impact) of English NLP models, knowledge distillation (KD), for its impact on fairness. In this case study, we evaluate the effect of important KD factors, including layer and dimensionality reduction, with respect to: (a) performance on the distillation task (natural language inference and semantic similarity prediction), and (b) multiple measures and dimensions of stereotypical bias (e.g., gender bias measured via the Word Embedding Association Test). Our results lead us to clarify current assumptions regarding the effect of KD on unfair bias: contrary to other findings, we show that KD can actually decrease model fairness.
UniMSE: Towards Unified Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition
Authors: Ting-En Lin, Yi Zhao, Guangming Lu, Yuchuan Wu, Yongbin Li Guimin Hu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) and emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) are key research topics for computers to understand human behaviors. From a psychological perspective, emotions are the expression of affect or feelings during a short period, while sentiments are formed and held for a longer period. However, most existing works study sentiment and emotion separately and do not fully exploit the complementary knowledge behind the two. In this paper, we propose a multimodal sentiment knowledge-sharing framework (UniMSE) that unifies MSA and ERC tasks from features, labels, and models. We perform modality fusion at the syntactic and semantic levels and introduce contrastive learning between modalities and samples to better capture the difference and consistency between sentiments and emotions. Experiments on four public benchmark datasets, MOSI, MOSEI, MELD, and IEMOCAP, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and achieve consistent improvements compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Is the Brain Mechanism for Hierarchical Structure Building Universal Across Languages? An fMRI Study of Chinese and English
Authors: Shaonan Wang, Nan Lin, Chengqing Zong Xiaohan Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Evidence from psycholinguistic studies suggests that the human brain builds a hierarchical syntactic structure during language comprehension. However, it is still unknown whether the neural basis of such structures is universal across languages. In this paper, we first analyze the differences in language structure between two diverse languages: Chinese and English. By computing the working memory requirements when applying parsing strategies to different language structures, we find that top-down parsing generates less memory load for the right-branching English and bottom-up parsing is less memory-demanding for Chinese.Then we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether the brain has different syntactic adaptation strategies in processing Chinese and English. Specifically, for both Chinese and English, we extract predictors from the implementations of different parsing strategies, i.e., bottom-up and top-down. Then, these predictors are separately associated with fMRI signals. Results show that for Chinese and English, the brain utilizes bottom-up and top-down parsing strategies separately. These results reveal that the brain adopts parsing strategies with less memory processing load according to different language structures.
HashFormers: Towards Vocabulary-independent Pre-trained Transformers
Authors: Nikolaos Aletras Huiyin Xue
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Transformer-based pre-trained language models are vocabulary-dependent, mapping by default each token to its corresponding embedding. This one-to-one mapping results into embedding matrices that occupy a lot of memory (i.e. millions of parameters) and grow linearly with the size of the vocabulary. Previous work on on-device transformers dynamically generate token embeddings on-the-fly without embedding matrices using locality-sensitive hashing over morphological information. These embeddings are subsequently fed into transformer layers for text classification. However, these methods are not pre-trained. Inspired by this line of work, we propose HashFormers, a new family of vocabulary-independent pre-trained transformers that support an unlimited vocabulary (i.e. all possible tokens in a corpus) given a substantially smaller fixed-sized embedding matrix. We achieve this by first introducing computationally cheap hashing functions that bucket together individual tokens to embeddings. We also propose three variants that do not require an embedding matrix at all, further reducing the memory requirements. We empirically demonstrate that HashFormers are more memory efficient compared to standard pre-trained transformers while achieving comparable predictive performance when fine-tuned on multiple text classification tasks. For example, our most efficient HashFormer variant has a negligible performance degradation (0.4% on GLUE) using only 99.1K parameters for representing the embeddings compared to 12.3-38M parameters of state-of-the-art models.
MatchPrompt: Prompt-based Open Relation Extraction with Semantic Consistency Guided Clustering
Authors: Lingling Zhang, Jun Liu, Xi Liang, Yujie Zhong, Yaqiang Wu Jiaxin Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Relation clustering is a general approach for open relation extraction (OpenRE). Current methods have two major problems. One is that their good performance relies on large amounts of labeled and pre-defined relational instances for pre-training, which are costly to acquire in reality. The other is that they only focus on learning a high-dimensional metric space to measure the similarity of novel relations and ignore the specific relational representations of clusters. In this work, we propose a new prompt-based framework named MatchPrompt, which can realize OpenRE with efficient knowledge transfer from only a few pre-defined relational instances as well as mine the specific meanings for cluster interpretability. To our best knowledge, we are the first to introduce a prompt-based framework for unlabeled clustering. Experimental results on different datasets show that MatchPrompt achieves the new SOTA results for OpenRE.
Improving Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction via Template-Order Data Augmentation
Authors: Yike Wu, Hang Gao, Yinhao Bai, Shiwan Zhao Mengting Hu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recently, aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) has become a popular task in the field of aspect-level sentiment analysis. Previous work utilizes a predefined template to paraphrase the original sentence into a structure target sequence, which can be easily decoded as quadruplets of the form (aspect category, aspect term, opinion term, sentiment polarity). The template involves the four elements in a fixed order. However, we observe that this solution contradicts with the order-free property of the ASQP task, since there is no need to fix the template order as long as the quadruplet is extracted correctly. Inspired by the observation, we study the effects of template orders and find that some orders help the generative model achieve better performance. It is hypothesized that different orders provide various views of the quadruplet. Therefore, we propose a simple but effective method to identify the most proper orders, and further combine multiple proper templates as data augmentation to improve the ASQP task. Specifically, we use the pre-trained language model to select the orders with minimal entropy. By fine-tuning the pre-trained language model with these template orders, our approach improves the performance of quad prediction, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly in low-resource settings.
SocioProbe: What, When, and Where Language Models Learn about Sociodemographics
Authors: Federico Bianchi, Samuel R. Bowman, Dirk Hovy Anne Lauscher
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have outperformed other NLP models on a wide range of tasks. Opting for a more thorough understanding of their capabilities and inner workings, researchers have established the extend to which they capture lower-level knowledge like grammaticality, and mid-level semantic knowledge like factual understanding. However, there is still little understanding of their knowledge of higher-level aspects of language. In particular, despite the importance of sociodemographic aspects in shaping our language, the questions of whether, where, and how PLMs encode these aspects, e.g., gender or age, is still unexplored. We address this research gap by probing the sociodemographic knowledge of different single-GPU PLMs on multiple English data sets via traditional classifier probing and information-theoretic minimum description length probing. Our results show that PLMs do encode these sociodemographics, and that this knowledge is sometimes spread across the layers of some of the tested PLMs. We further conduct a multilingual analysis and investigate the effect of supplementary training to further explore to what extent, where, and with what amount of pre-training data the knowledge is encoded. Our overall results indicate that sociodemographic knowledge is still a major challenge for NLP. PLMs require large amounts of pre-training data to acquire the knowledge and models that excel in general language understanding do not seem to own more knowledge about these aspects.
When does Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning Work for Machine Translation?
Authors: Asa Cooper Stickland Ahmet Üstün
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods (PEFTs) offer the promise of adapting large pre-trained models while only tuning a small number of parameters. They have been shown to be competitive with full model fine-tuning for many downstream tasks. However, prior work indicates that PEFTs may not work as well for machine translation (MT), and there is no comprehensive study showing when PEFTs work for MT. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of PEFTs for MT, considering (1) various parameter budgets, (2) a diverse set of language-pairs, and (3) different pre-trained models. We find that \textquoteleftadapters', in which small feed-forward networks are added after every layer, are indeed on par with full model fine-tuning when the parameter budget corresponds to 10% of total model parameters. Nevertheless, as the number of tuned parameters decreases, the performance of PEFTs decreases. The magnitude of this decrease depends on the language pair, with PEFTs particularly struggling for distantly related language-pairs. We find that using PEFTs with a larger pre-trained model outperforms full fine-tuning with a smaller model, and for smaller training data sizes, PEFTs outperform full fine-tuning for the same pre-trained model.
Hyper-X: A Unified Hypernetwork for Multi-Task Multilingual Transfer
Authors: Arianna Bisazza, Gosse Bouma, Gertjan van Noord, Sebastian Ruder Ahmet Üstün
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Massively multilingual models are promising for transfer learning across tasks and languages. However, existing methods are unable to fully leverage training data when it is available in different task-language combinations. To exploit such heterogeneous supervision, we propose Hyper-X, a single hypernetwork that unifies multi-task and multilingual learning with efficient adaptation. It generates weights for adapter modules conditioned on both tasks and language embeddings. By learning to combine task and language-specific knowledge, our model enables zero-shot transfer for unseen languages and task-language combinations. Our experiments on a diverse set of languages demonstrate that Hyper-X achieves the best or competitive gain when a mixture of multiple resources is available, while on par with strong baseline in the standard scenario. Hyper-X is also considerably more efficient in terms of parameters and resources compared to methods that train separate adapters. Finally, Hyper-X consistently produces strong results in few-shot scenarios for new languages, showing the versatility of our approach beyond zero-shot transfer.
Towards Robust Numerical Question Answering: Diagnosing Numerical Capabilities of NLP Systems
Authors: Mengyu Zhou, Xinyi He, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang Jialiang Xu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Numerical Question Answering is the task of answering questions that require numerical capabilities. Previous works introduce general adversarial attacks to Numerical Question Answering, while not systematically exploring numerical capabilities specific to the topic. In this paper, we propose to conduct numerical capability diagnosis on a series of Numerical Question Answering systems and datasets. A series of numerical capabilities are highlighted, and corresponding dataset perturbations are designed. Empirical results indicate that existing systems are severely challenged by these perturbations. E.g., Graph2Tree experienced a 53.83% absolute accuracy drop against the “Extra” perturbation on ASDiv-a, and BART experienced 13.80% accuracy drop against the “Language” perturbation on the numerical subset of DROP. As a counteracting approach, we also investigate the effectiveness of applying perturbations as data augmentation to relieve systems' lack of robust numerical capabilities. With experiment analysis and empirical studies, it is demonstrated that Numerical Question Answering with robust numerical capabilities is still to a large extent an open question. We discuss future directions of Numerical Question Answering and summarize guidelines on future dataset collection and system design.
Enhancing Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling with Global Intent-Slot Co-occurrence
Authors: Bowen Yu, Li Quangang, Wang Yubin, Tingwen Liu, Hongbo Xu Mengxiao Song
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Multi-intent detection and slot filling joint model attracts more and more attention since it can handle multi-intent utterances, which is closer to complex real-world scenarios. Most existing joint models rely entirely on the training procedure to obtain the implicit correlation between intents and slots. However, they ignore the fact that leveraging the rich global knowledge in the corpus can determine the intuitive and explicit correlation between intents and slots. In this paper, we aim to make full use of the statistical co-occurrence frequency between intents and slots as prior knowledge to enhance joint multiple intent detection and slot filling. To be specific, an intent-slot co-occurrence graph is constructed based on the entire training corpus to globally discover correlation between intents and slots. Based on the global intent-slot co-occurrence, we propose a novel graph neural network to model the interaction between the two subtasks. Experimental results on two public multi-intent datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models.
Towards Pragmatic Production Strategies for Natural Language Generation Tasks
Authors: Mario Giulianelli
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: This position paper proposes a conceptual framework for the design of Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems that follow efficient and effective production strategies in order to achieve complex communicative goals. In this general framework, efficiency is characterised as the parsimonious regulation of production and comprehension costs while effectiveness is measured with respect to task-oriented and contextually grounded communicative goals. We provide concrete suggestions for the estimation of goals, costs, and utility via modern statistical methods, demonstrating applications of our framework to the classic pragmatic task of visually grounded referential games and to abstractive text summarisation, two popular generation tasks with real-world applications. In sum, we advocate for the development of NLG systems that learn to make pragmatic production decisions from experience, by reasoning about goals, costs, and utility in a human-like way.
LiteVL: Efficient Video-Language Learning with Enhanced Spatial-Temporal Modeling
Authors: Chaofan Tao, Lu Hou, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu Dongsheng Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent large-scale video-language pre-trained models have shown appealing performance on various downstream tasks. However, the pre-training process is computationally expensive due to the requirement of millions of video-text pairs and the redundant data structure of each video. To mitigate these problems, we propose LiteVL, which adapts a pre-trained image-language model BLIP into a video-text model directly on downstream tasks, without heavy pre-training. To enhance the temporal modeling lacking in the image-language model, we propose to add temporal attention modules in the image encoder of BLIP with dynamic temporal scaling. Besides the model-wise adaptation, we also propose a non-parametric pooling mechanism to adaptively reweight the fine-grained video embedding conditioned on the text. Experimental results on text-video retrieval and video question answering show that the proposed LiteVL even outperforms previous video-language pre-trained models by a clear margin, though without any video-language pre-training.
Communication breakdown: On the low mutual intelligibility between human and neural captioning
Authors: Eleonora Gualdoni, Francesca Franzon, Gemma Boleda, Marco Baroni Roberto Dessì
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We compare the 0-shot performance of a neural caption-based image retriever when given as input either human-produced captions or captions generated by a neural captioner. We conduct this comparison on the recently introduced ImageCoDe data-set (Krojer et al. 2022), which contains hard distractors nearly identical to the images to be retrieved. We find that the neural retriever has much higher performance when fed neural rather than human captions, despite the fact that the former, unlike the latter, were generated without awareness of the distractors that make the task hard. Even more remarkably, when the same neural captions are given to human subjects, their retrieval performance is almost at chance level. Our results thus add to the growing body of evidence that, even when the “language” of neural models resembles English, this superficial resemblance might be deeply misleading.