mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Exploring Strategies for Generalizable Commonsense Reasoning with Pre-trained Models
Authors: Filip Ilievski, Jonathan Francis, Satoru Ozaki, Eric Nyberg, Alessandro Oltramari Kaixin Ma
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Commonsense reasoning benchmarks have been largely solved by fine-tuning language models. The downside is that fine-tuning may cause models to overfit to task-specific data and thereby forget their knowledge gained during pre-training. Recent works only propose lightweight model updates as models may already possess useful knowledge from past experience, but a challenge remains in understanding what parts and to what extent models should be refined for a given task. In this paper, we investigate what models learn from commonsense reasoning datasets. We measure the impact of three different adaptation methods on the generalization and accuracy of models. Our experiments with two models show that fine-tuning performs best, by learning both the content and the structure of the task, but suffers from overfitting and limited generalization to novel answers. We observe that alternative adaptation methods like prefix-tuning have comparable accuracy, but generalize better to unseen answers and are more robust to adversarial splits.
Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Are Key-Value Memories
Authors: Roei Schuster, Jonathan Berant, Omer Levy Mor Geva
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Feed-forward layers constitute two-thirds of a transformer model`s parameters, yet their role in the network remains under-explored. We show that feed-forward layers in transformer-based language models operate as key-value memories, where each key correlates with textual patterns in the training examples, and each value induces a distribution over the output vocabulary. Our experiments show that the learned patterns are human-interpretable, and that lower layers tend to capture shallow patterns, while upper layers learn more semantic ones. The values complement the keys' input patterns by inducing output distributions that concentrate probability mass on tokens likely to appear immediately after each pattern, particularly in the upper layers. Finally, we demonstrate that the output of a feed-forward layer is a composition of its memories, which is subsequently refined throughout the model`s layers via residual connections to produce the final output distribution.
Connecting Attributions and QA Model Behavior on Realistic Counterfactuals
Authors: Rohan Nair, Greg Durrett Xi Ye
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: When a model attribution technique highlights a particular part of the input, a user might understand this highlight as making a statement about counterfactuals (Miller, 2019): if that part of the input were to change, the model`s prediction might change as well. This paper investigates how well different attribution techniques align with this assumption on realistic counterfactuals in the case of reading comprehension (RC). RC is a particularly challenging test case, as token-level attributions that have been extensively studied in other NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis are less suitable to represent the reasoning that RC models perform. We construct counterfactual sets for three different RC settings, and through heuristics that can connect attribution methods' outputs to high-level model behavior, we can evaluate how useful different attribution methods and even different formats are for understanding counterfactuals. We find that pairwise attributions are better suited to RC than token-level attributions across these different RC settings, with our best performance coming from a modification that we propose to an existing pairwise attribution method.
How Do Neural Sequence Models Generalize? Local and Global Cues for Out-of-Distribution Prediction
Authors: Jacob Andreas D. Anthony Bau
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: After a neural sequence model encounters an unexpected token, can its behavior be predicted? We show that RNN and transformer language models exhibit structured, consistent generalization in out-of-distribution contexts. We begin by introducing two idealized models of generalization in next-word prediction: a lexical context model in which generalization is consistent with the last word observed, and a syntactic context model in which generalization is consistent with the global structure of the input. In experiments in English, Finnish, Mandarin, and random regular languages, we demonstrate that neural language models interpolate between these two forms of generalization: their predictions are well-approximated by a log-linear combination of lexical and syntactic predictive distributions. We then show that, in some languages, noise mediates the two forms of generalization: noise applied to input tokens encourages syntactic generalization, while noise in history representations encourages lexical generalization. Finally, we offer a preliminary theoretical explanation of these results by proving that the observed interpolation behavior is expected in log-linear models with a particular feature correlation structure. These results help explain the effectiveness of two popular regularization schemes and show that aspects of sequence model generalization can be understood and controlled.
Comparing Text Representations: A Theory-Driven Approach
Authors: David Mimno Gregory Yauney
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Much of the progress in contemporary NLP has come from learning representations, such as masked language model (MLM) contextual embeddings, that turn challenging problems into simple classification tasks. But how do we quantify and explain this effect? We adapt general tools from computational learning theory to fit the specific characteristics of text datasets and present a method to evaluate the compatibility between representations and tasks. Even though many tasks can be easily solved with simple bag-of-words (BOW) representations, BOW does poorly on hard natural language inference tasks. For one such task we find that BOW cannot distinguish between real and randomized labelings, while pre-trained MLM representations show 72x greater distinction between real and random labelings than BOW. This method provides a calibrated, quantitative measure of the difficulty of a classification-based NLP task, enabling comparisons between representations without requiring empirical evaluations that may be sensitive to initializations and hyperparameters. The method provides a fresh perspective on the patterns in a dataset and the alignment of those patterns with specific labels.
Human Rationales as Attribution Priors for Explainable Stance Detection
Authors: Emily Allaway Sahil Jayaram
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: As NLP systems become better at detecting opinions and beliefs from text, it is important to ensure not only that models are accurate but also that they arrive at their predictions in ways that align with human reasoning. In this work, we present a method for imparting human-like rationalization to a stance detection model using crowdsourced annotations on a small fraction of the training data. We show that in a data-scarce setting, our approach can improve the reasoning of a state-of-the-art classifier---particularly for inputs containing challenging phenomena such as sarcasm---at no cost in predictive performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that attention weights surpass a leading attribution method in providing faithful explanations of our model`s predictions, thus serving as a computationally cheap and reliable source of attributions for our model.
The Stem Cell Hypothesis: Dilemma behind Multi-Task Learning with Transformer Encoders
Authors: Jinho D. Choi Han He
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multi-task learning with transformer encoders (MTL) has emerged as a powerful technique to improve performance on closely-related tasks for both accuracy and efficiency while a question still remains whether or not it would perform as well on tasks that are distinct in nature. We first present MTL results on five NLP tasks, POS, NER, DEP, CON, and SRL, and depict its deficiency over single-task learning. We then conduct an extensive pruning analysis to show that a certain set of attention heads get claimed by most tasks during MTL, who interfere with one another to fine-tune those heads for their own objectives. Based on this finding, we propose the Stem Cell Hypothesis to reveal the existence of attention heads naturally talented for many tasks that cannot be jointly trained to create adequate embeddings for all of those tasks. Finally, we design novel parameter-free probes to justify our hypothesis and demonstrate how attention heads are transformed across the five tasks during MTL through label analysis.
Text Counterfactuals via Latent Optimization and Shapley-Guided Search
Authors: Quintin Pope Xiaoli Fern
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study the problem of generating counterfactual text for a classifier as a means for understanding and debugging classification. Given a textual input and a classification model, we aim to minimally alter the text to change the model`s prediction. White-box approaches have been successfully applied to similar problems in vision where one can directly optimize the continuous input. Optimization-based approaches become difficult in the language domain due to the discrete nature of text. We bypass this issue by directly optimizing in the latent space and leveraging a language model to generate candidate modifications from optimized latent representations. We additionally use Shapley values to estimate the combinatoric effect of multiple changes. We then use these estimates to guide a beam search for the final counterfactual text. We achieve favorable performance compared to recent white-box and black-box baselines using human and automatic evaluations. Ablation studies show that both latent optimization and the use of Shapley values improve success rate and the quality of the generated counterfactuals.
“Average” Approximates “First Principal Component”? An Empirical Analysis on Representations from Neural Language Models
Authors: Chengyu Dong, Jingbo Shang Zihan Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Contextualized representations based on neural language models have furthered the state of the art in various NLP tasks. Despite its great success, the nature of such representations remains a mystery. In this paper, we present an empirical property of these representations---”average” approximates “first principal component”. Specifically, experiments show that the average of these representations shares almost the same direction as the first principal component of the matrix whose columns are these representations. We believe this explains why the average representation is always a simple yet strong baseline. Our further examinations show that this property also holds in more challenging scenarios, for example, when the representations are from a model right after its random initialization. Therefore, we conjecture that this property is intrinsic to the distribution of representations and not necessarily related to the input structure. We realize that these representations empirically follow a normal distribution for each dimension, and by assuming this is true, we demonstrate that the empirical property can be in fact derived mathematically.
Controlled Evaluation of Grammatical Knowledge in Mandarin Chinese Language Models
Authors: Jennifer Hu, Roger Levy, Peng Qian Yiwen Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Prior work has shown that structural supervision helps English language models learn generalizations about syntactic phenomena such as subject-verb agreement. However, it remains unclear if such an inductive bias would also improve language models' ability to learn grammatical dependencies in typologically different languages. Here we investigate this question in Mandarin Chinese, which has a logographic, largely syllable-based writing system; different word order; and sparser morphology than English. We train LSTMs, Recurrent Neural Network Grammars, Transformer language models, and Transformer-parameterized generative parsing models on two Mandarin Chinese datasets of different sizes. We evaluate the models' ability to learn different aspects of Mandarin grammar that assess syntactic and semantic relationships. We find suggestive evidence that structural supervision helps with representing syntactic state across intervening content and improves performance in low-data settings, suggesting that the benefits of hierarchical inductive biases in acquiring dependency relationships may extend beyond English.
GradTS: A Gradient-Based Automatic Auxiliary Task Selection Method Based on Transformer Networks
Authors: Renze Lou, Kai Zhang, Lili Wang, Soroush Vosoughi Weicheng Ma
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: A key problem in multi-task learning (MTL) research is how to select high-quality auxiliary tasks automatically. This paper presents GradTS, an automatic auxiliary task selection method based on gradient calculation in Transformer-based models. Compared to AUTOSEM, a strong baseline method, GradTS improves the performance of MT-DNN with a bert-base-cased backend model, from 0.33% to 17.93% on 8 natural language understanding (NLU) tasks in the GLUE benchmarks. GradTS is also time-saving since (1) its gradient calculations are based on single-task experiments and (2) the gradients are re-used without additional experiments when the candidate task set changes. On the 8 GLUE classification tasks, for example, GradTS costs on average 21.32% less time than AUTOSEM with comparable GPU consumption. Further, we show the robustness of GradTS across various task settings and model selections, e.g. mixed objectives among candidate tasks. The efficiency and efficacy of GradTS in these case studies illustrate its general applicability in MTL research without requiring manual task filtering or costly parameter tuning.
NegatER: Unsupervised Discovery of Negatives in Commonsense Knowledge Bases
Authors: Jing Zhu, Danai Koutra Tara Safavi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Codifying commonsense knowledge in machines is a longstanding goal of artificial intelligence. Recently, much progress toward this goal has been made with automatic knowledge base (KB) construction techniques. However, such techniques focus primarily on the acquisition of positive (true) KB statements, even though negative (false) statements are often also important for discriminative reasoning over commonsense KBs. As a first step toward the latter, this paper proposes NegatER, a framework that ranks potential negatives in commonsense KBs using a contextual language model (LM). Importantly, as most KBs do not contain negatives, NegatER relies only on the positive knowledge in the LM and does not require ground-truth negative examples. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to multiple contrastive data augmentation approaches, NegatER yields negatives that are more grammatical, coherent, and informative---leading to statistically significant accuracy improvements in a challenging KB completion task and confirming that the positive knowledge in LMs can be “re-purposed” to generate negative knowledge.
Instance-adaptive training with noise-robust losses against noisy labels
Authors: Linfeng Song, Kun Xu, Dong Yu Lifeng Jin
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In order to alleviate the huge demand for annotated datasets for different tasks, many recent natural language processing datasets have adopted automated pipelines for fast-tracking usable data. However, model training with such datasets poses a challenge because popular optimization objectives are not robust to label noise induced in the annotation generation process. Several noise-robust losses have been proposed and evaluated on tasks in computer vision, but they generally use a single dataset-wise hyperparamter to control the strength of noise resistance. This work proposes novel instance-adaptive training frameworks to change single dataset-wise hyperparameters of noise resistance in such losses to be instance-wise. Such instance-wise noise resistance hyperparameters are predicted by special instance-level label quality predictors, which are trained along with the main classification models. Experiments on noisy and corrupted NLP datasets show that proposed instance-adaptive training frameworks help increase the noise-robustness provided by such losses, promoting the use of the frameworks and associated losses in NLP models trained with noisy data.
Distributionally Robust Multilingual Machine Translation
Authors: Daniel Levy, Xian Li, Marjan Ghazvininejad, Graham Neubig Chunting Zhou
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) learns to translate multiple language pairs with a single model, potentially improving both the accuracy and the memory-efficiency of deployed models. However, the heavy data imbalance between languages hinders the model from performing uniformly across language pairs. In this paper, we propose a new learning objective for MNMT based on distributionally robust optimization, which minimizes the worst-case expected loss over the set of language pairs. We further show how to practically optimize this objective for large translation corpora using an iterated best response scheme, which is both effective and incurs negligible additional computational cost compared to standard empirical risk minimization. We perform extensive experiments on three sets of languages from two datasets and show that our method consistently outperforms strong baseline methods in terms of average and per-language performance under both many-to-one and one-to-many translation settings.
Model Selection for Cross-lingual Transfer
Authors: Alan Ritter Yang Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Transformers that are pre-trained on multilingual corpora, such as, mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa, have achieved impressive cross-lingual transfer capabilities. In the zero-shot transfer setting, only English training data is used, and the fine-tuned model is evaluated on another target language. While this works surprisingly well, substantial variance has been observed in target language performance between different fine-tuning runs, and in the zero-shot setup, no target-language development data is available to select among multiple fine-tuned models. Prior work has relied on English dev data to select among models that are fine-tuned with different learning rates, number of steps and other hyperparameters, often resulting in suboptimal choices. In this paper, we show that it is possible to select consistently better models when small amounts of annotated data are available in auxiliary pivot languages. We propose a machine learning approach to model selection that uses the fine-tuned model`s own internal representations to predict its cross-lingual capabilities. In extensive experiments we find that this method consistently selects better models than English validation data across twenty five languages (including eight low-resource languages), and often achieves results that are comparable to model selection using target language development data.
Continual Few-Shot Learning for Text Classification
Authors: Veselin Stoyanov, Mohit Bansal Ramakanth Pasunuru
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly relying on general end-to-end systems that need to handle many different linguistic phenomena and nuances. For example, a Natural Language Inference (NLI) system has to recognize sentiment, handle numbers, perform coreference, etc. Our solutions to complex problems are still far from perfect, so it is important to create systems that can learn to correct mistakes quickly, incrementally, and with little training data. In this work, we propose a continual few-shot learning (CFL) task, in which a system is challenged with a difficult phenomenon and asked to learn to correct mistakes with only a few (10 to 15) training examples. To this end, we first create benchmarks based on previously annotated data: two NLI (ANLI and SNLI) and one sentiment analysis (IMDB) datasets. Next, we present various baselines from diverse paradigms (e.g., memory-aware synapses and Prototypical networks) and compare them on few-shot learning and continual few-shot learning setups. Our contributions are in creating a benchmark suite and evaluation protocol for continual few-shot learning on the text classification tasks, and making several interesting observations on the behavior of similarity-based methods. We hope that our work serves as a useful starting point for future work on this important topic.
Efficient Nearest Neighbor Language Models
Authors: Graham Neubig, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick Junxian He
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Non-parametric neural language models (NLMs) learn predictive distributions of text utilizing an external datastore, which allows them to learn through explicitly memorizing the training datapoints. While effective, these models often require retrieval from a large datastore at test time, significantly increasing the inference overhead and thus limiting the deployment of non-parametric NLMs in practical applications. In this paper, we take the recently proposed k-nearest neighbors language model as an example, exploring methods to improve its efficiency along various dimensions. Experiments on the standard WikiText-103 benchmark and domain-adaptation datasets show that our methods are able to achieve up to a 6x speed-up in inference speed while retaining comparable performance. The empirical analysis we present may provide guidelines for future research seeking to develop or deploy more efficient non-parametric NLMs.
STraTA: Self-Training with Task Augmentation for Better Few-shot Learning
Authors: Minh-Thang Luong, Quoc Le, Grady Simon, Mohit Iyyer Tu Vu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Despite their recent successes in tackling many NLP tasks, large-scale pre-trained language models do not perform as well in few-shot settings where only a handful of training examples are available. To address this shortcoming, we propose STraTA, which stands for Self-Training with Task Augmentation, an approach that builds on two key ideas for effective leverage of unlabeled data. First, STraTA uses task augmentation, a novel technique that synthesizes a large amount of data for auxiliary-task fine-tuning from target-task unlabeled texts. Second, STraTA performs self-training by further fine-tuning the strong base model created by task augmentation on a broad distribution of pseudo-labeled data. Our experiments demonstrate that STraTA can substantially improve sample efficiency across 12 few-shot benchmarks. Remarkably, on the SST-2 sentiment dataset, STraTA, with only 8 training examples per class, achieves comparable results to standard fine-tuning with 67K training examples. Our analyses reveal that task augmentation and self-training are both complementary and independently effective.
TADPOLE: Task ADapted Pre-Training via AnOmaLy DEtection
Authors: Ashish Khetan, Zohar Karnin Vivek Madan
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The paradigm of pre-training followed by finetuning has become a standard procedure for NLP tasks, with a known problem of domain shift between the pre-training and downstream corpus. Previous works have tried to mitigate this problem with additional pre-training, either on the downstream corpus itself when it is large enough, or on a manually curated unlabeled corpus of a similar domain. In this paper, we address the problem for the case when the downstream corpus is too small for additional pre-training. We propose TADPOLE, a task adapted pre-training framework based on data selection techniques adapted from \textitDomain Adaptation. We formulate the data selection as an anomaly detection problem that unlike existing methods works well when the downstream corpus is limited in size. It results in a scalable and efficient unsupervised technique that eliminates the need for any manual data curation. We evaluate our framework on eight tasks across four different domains: Biomedical, Computer Science, News, and Movie reviews, and compare its performance against competitive baseline techniques from the area of Domain Adaptation. Our framework outperforms all the baseline methods. On small datasets with less than 5K training examples, we get a gain of 1.82% in performance with additional pre-training for only 5% steps compared to the originally pre-trained models. It also compliments some of the other techniques such as data augmentation known for boosting performance when downstream corpus is small; highest performance is achieved when data augmentation is combined with task adapted pre-training.
Gradient-based Adversarial Attacks against Text Transformers
Authors: Alexandre Sablayrolles, Hervé Jégou, Douwe Kiela Chuan Guo
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose the first general-purpose gradient-based adversarial attack against transformer models. Instead of searching for a single adversarial example, we search for a distribution of adversarial examples parameterized by a continuous-valued matrix, hence enabling gradient-based optimization. We empirically demonstrate that our white-box attack attains state-of-the-art attack performance on a variety of natural language tasks, outperforming prior work in terms of adversarial success rate with matching imperceptibility as per automated and human evaluation. Furthermore, we show that a powerful black-box transfer attack, enabled by sampling from the adversarial distribution, matches or exceeds existing methods, while only requiring hard-label outputs.
Do Transformer Modifications Transfer Across Implementations and Applications?
Authors: Hyung Won Chung, Yi Tay, Liam Fedus, Thibault Fevry, Michael Matena, Karishma Malkan, Noah Fiedel, Noam Shazeer, Zhenzhong Lan, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, Nan Ding, Jake Marcus, Adam Roberts, Colin Raffel Sharan Narang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The research community has proposed copious modifications to the Transformer architecture since it was introduced over three years ago, relatively few of which have seen widespread adoption. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate many of these modifications in a shared experimental setting that covers most of the common uses of the Transformer in natural language processing. Surprisingly, we find that most modifications do not meaningfully improve performance. Furthermore, most of the Transformer variants we found beneficial were either developed in the same codebase that we used or are relatively minor changes. We conjecture that performance improvements may strongly depend on implementation details and correspondingly make some recommendations for improving the generality of experimental results.
Paired Examples as Indirect Supervision in Latent Decision Models
Authors: Sameer Singh, Matt Gardner, Dan Roth Nitish Gupta
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Compositional, structured models are appealing because they explicitly decompose problems and provide interpretable intermediate outputs that give confidence that the model is not simply latching onto data artifacts. Learning these models is challenging, however, because end-task supervision only provides a weak indirect signal on what values the latent decisions should take. This often results in the model failing to learn to perform the intermediate tasks correctly. In this work, we introduce a way to leverage paired examples that provide stronger cues for learning latent decisions. When two related training examples share internal substructure, we add an additional training objective to encourage consistency between their latent decisions. Such an objective does not require external supervision for the values of the latent output, or even the end task, yet provides an additional training signal to that provided by individual training examples themselves. We apply our method to improve compositional question answering using neural module networks on the DROP dataset. We explore three ways to acquire paired questions in DROP: (a) discovering naturally occurring paired examples within the dataset, (b) constructing paired examples using templates, and (c) generating paired examples using a question generation model. We empirically demonstrate that our proposed approach improves both in- and out-of-distribution generalization and leads to correct latent decision predictions.
Pairwise Supervised Contrastive Learning of Sentence Representations
Authors: Shang-Wen Li, Wei Xiao, Henghui Zhu, Ramesh Nallapati, Andrew O. Arnold, Bing Xiang Dejiao Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Many recent successes in sentence representation learning have been achieved by simply fine-tuning on the Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets with triplet loss or siamese loss. Nevertheless, they share a common weakness: sentences in a contradiction pair are not necessarily from different semantic categories. Therefore, optimizing the semantic entailment and contradiction reasoning objective alone is inadequate to capture the high-level semantic structure. The drawback is compounded by the fact that the vanilla siamese or triplet losses only learn from individual sentence pairs or triplets, which often suffer from bad local optima. In this paper, we propose PairSupCon, an instance discrimination based approach aiming to bridge semantic entailment and contradiction understanding with high-level categorical concept encoding. We evaluate PairSupCon on various downstream tasks that involve understanding sentence semantics at different granularities. We outperform the previous state-of-the-art method with 10%--13% averaged improvement on eight clustering tasks, and 5%--6% averaged improvement on seven semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks.
Muppet: Massive Multi-task Representations with Pre-Finetuning
Authors: Anchit Gupta, Akshat Shrivastava, Xilun Chen, Luke Zettlemoyer, Sonal Gupta Armen Aghajanyan
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose pre-finetuning, an additional large-scale learning stage between language model pre-training and fine-tuning. Pre-finetuning is massively multi-task learning (around 50 datasets, over 4.8 million total labeled examples), and is designed to encourage learning of representations that generalize better to many different tasks. We show that pre-finetuning consistently improves performance for pretrained discriminators (e.g. RoBERTa) and generation models (e.g. BART) on a wide range of tasks (sentence prediction, commonsense reasoning, MRC, etc.), while also significantly improving sample efficiency during fine-tuning. We also show that large-scale multi-tasking is crucial; pre-finetuning can hurt performance when few tasks are used up until a critical point (usually above 15) after which performance improves linearly in the number of tasks.
Diverse Distributions of Self-Supervised Tasks for Meta-Learning in NLP
Authors: Karthick Prasad Gunasekaran, Tong Wang, Tsendsuren Munkhdalai, Andrew McCallum Trapit Bansal
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Meta-learning considers the problem of learning an efficient learning process that can leverage its past experience to accurately solve new tasks. However, the efficacy of meta-learning crucially depends on the distribution of tasks available for training, and this is often assumed to be known a priori or constructed from limited supervised datasets. In this work, we aim to provide task distributions for meta-learning by considering self-supervised tasks automatically proposed from unlabeled text, to enable large-scale meta-learning in NLP. We design multiple distributions of self-supervised tasks by considering important aspects of task diversity, difficulty, type, domain, and curriculum, and investigate how they affect meta-learning performance. Our analysis shows that all these factors meaningfully alter the task distribution, some inducing significant improvements in downstream few-shot accuracy of the meta-learned models. Empirically, results on 20 downstream tasks show significant improvements in few-shot learning -- adding up to +4.2% absolute accuracy (on average) to the previous unsupervised meta-learning method, and perform comparably to supervised methods on the FewRel 2.0 benchmark.
A Simple and Effective Method To Eliminate the Self Language Bias in Multilingual Representations
Authors: Yinfei Yang, Daniel Cer, Eric Darve Ziyi Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Language agnostic and semantic-language information isolation is an emerging research direction for multilingual representations models. We explore this problem from a novel angle of geometric algebra and semantic space. A simple but highly effective method “Language Information Removal (LIR)” factors out language identity information from semantic related components in multilingual representations pre-trained on multi-monolingual data. A post-training and model-agnostic method, LIR only uses simple linear operations, e.g. matrix factorization and orthogonal projection. LIR reveals that for weak-alignment multilingual systems, the principal components of semantic spaces primarily encodes language identity information. We first evaluate the LIR on a cross-lingual question answer retrieval task (LAReQA), which requires the strong alignment for the multilingual embedding space. Experiment shows that LIR is highly effectively on this task, yielding almost 100% relative improvement in MAP for weak-alignment models. We then evaluate the LIR on Amazon Reviews and XEVAL dataset, with the observation that removing language information is able to improve the cross-lingual transfer performance.
A Massively Multilingual Analysis of Cross-linguality in Shared Embedding Space
Authors: William Yang Wang, Kyle Mahowald Alexander Jones
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In cross-lingual language models, representations for many different languages live in the same space. Here, we investigate the linguistic and non-linguistic factors affecting sentence-level alignment in cross-lingual pretrained language models for 101 languages and 5,050 language pairs. Using BERT-based LaBSE and BiLSTM-based LASER as our models, and the Bible as our corpus, we compute a task-based measure of cross-lingual alignment in the form of bitext retrieval performance, as well as four intrinsic measures of vector space alignment and isomorphism. We then examine a range of linguistic, quasi-linguistic, and training-related features as potential predictors of these alignment metrics. The results of our analyses show that word order agreement and agreement in morphological complexity are two of the strongest linguistic predictors of cross-linguality. We also note in-family training data as a stronger predictor than language-specific training data across the board. We verify some of our linguistic findings by looking at the effect of morphological segmentation on English-Inuktitut alignment, in addition to examining the effect of word order agreement on isomorphism for 66 zero-shot language pairs from a different corpus. We make the data and code for our experiments publicly available.
Frustratingly Simple but Surprisingly Strong: Using Language-Independent Features for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Semantic Parsing
Authors: Federico Fancellu, Bonnie Webber, Diyi Yang Jingfeng Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The availability of corpora has led to significant advances in training semantic parsers in English. Unfortunately, for languages other than English, annotated data is limited and so is the performance of the developed parsers. Recently, pretrained multilingual models have been proven useful for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in many NLP tasks. What else does it require to apply a parser trained in English to other languages for zero-shot cross-lingual semantic parsing? Will simple language-independent features help? To this end, we experiment with six Discourse Representation Structure (DRS) semantic parsers in English, and generalize them to Italian, German and Dutch, where there are only a small number of manually annotated parses available. Extensive experiments show that despite its simplicity, adding Universal Dependency (UD) relations and Universal POS tags (UPOS) as model-agnostic features achieves surprisingly strong improvement on all parsers.
Improving Simultaneous Translation by Incorporating Pseudo-References with Fewer Reorderings
Authors: Renjie Zheng, Atsuhito Kita, Mingbo Ma, Liang Huang Junkun Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Simultaneous translation is vastly different from full-sentence translation, in the sense that it starts translation before the source sentence ends, with only a few words delay. However, due to the lack of large-scale, high-quality simultaneous translation datasets, most such systems are still trained on conventional full-sentence bitexts. This is far from ideal for the simultaneous scenario due to the abundance of unnecessary long-distance reorderings in those bitexts. We propose a novel method that rewrites the target side of existing full-sentence corpora into simultaneous-style translation. Experiments on Zh$i̊ghtarrow$En and Ja$\g̊htarrow$En simultaneous translation show substantial improvements (up to +2.7 BLEU) with the addition of these generated pseudo-references.
Classification-based Quality Estimation: Small and Efficient Models for Real-world Applications
Authors: Ahmed El-Kishky, Vishrav Chaudhary, James Cross, Lucia Specia, Francisco Guzmán Shuo Sun
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Sentence-level Quality estimation (QE) of machine translation is traditionally formulated as a regression task, and the performance of QE models is typically measured by Pearson correlation with human labels. Recent QE models have achieved previously-unseen levels of correlation with human judgments, but they rely on large multilingual contextualized language models that are computationally expensive and make them infeasible for real-world applications. In this work, we evaluate several model compression techniques for QE and find that, despite their popularity in other NLP tasks, they lead to poor performance in this regression setting. We observe that a full model parameterization is required to achieve SoTA results in a regression task. However, we argue that the level of expressiveness of a model in a continuous range is unnecessary given the downstream applications of QE, and show that reframing QE as a classification problem and evaluating QE models using classification metrics would better reflect their actual performance in real-world applications.
A Large-Scale Study of Machine Translation in Turkic Languages
Authors: Anoop Babu, Duygu Ataman, Sherzod Kariev, Francis Tyers, Otabek Abduraufov, Mammad Hajili, Sardana Ivanova, Abror Khaytbaev, Antonio Laverghetta Jr., Bekhzodbek Moydinboyev, Esra Onal, Shaxnoza Pulatova, Ahsan Wahab, Orhan Firat, Sriram Chellappan Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) have pushed the quality of machine translation systems to the point where they are becoming widely adopted to build competitive systems. However, there is still a large number of languages that are yet to reap the benefits of NMT. In this paper, we provide the first large-scale case study of the practical application of MT in the Turkic language family in order to realize the gains of NMT for Turkic languages under high-resource to extremely low-resource scenarios. In addition to presenting an extensive analysis that identifies the bottlenecks towards building competitive systems to ameliorate data scarcity, our study has several key contributions, including, i) a large parallel corpus covering 22 Turkic languages consisting of common public datasets in combination with new datasets of approximately 1.4 million parallel sentences, ii) bilingual baselines for 26 language pairs, iii) novel high-quality test sets in three different translation domains and iv) human evaluation scores. All models, scripts, and data will be released to the public.
Analyzing the Surprising Variability in Word Embedding Stability Across Languages
Authors: Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Rada Mihalcea Laura Burdick
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Word embeddings are powerful representations that form the foundation of many natural language processing architectures, both in English and in other languages. To gain further insight into word embeddings, we explore their stability (e.g., overlap between the nearest neighbors of a word in different embedding spaces) in diverse languages. We discuss linguistic properties that are related to stability, drawing out insights about correlations with affixing, language gender systems, and other features. This has implications for embedding use, particularly in research that uses them to study language trends.
Rule-based Morphological Inflection Improves Neural Terminology Translation
Authors: Marine Carpuat Weijia Xu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Current approaches to incorporating terminology constraints in machine translation (MT) typically assume that the constraint terms are provided in their correct morphological forms. This limits their application to real-world scenarios where constraint terms are provided as lemmas. In this paper, we introduce a modular framework for incorporating lemma constraints in neural MT (NMT) in which linguistic knowledge and diverse types of NMT models can be flexibly applied. It is based on a novel cross-lingual inflection module that inflects the target lemma constraints based on the source context. We explore linguistically motivated rule-based and data-driven neural-based inflection modules and design English-German health and English-Lithuanian news test suites to evaluate them in domain adaptation and low-resource MT settings. Results show that our rule-based inflection module helps NMT models incorporate lemma constraints more accurately than a neural module and outperforms the existing end-to-end approach with lower training costs.
Data and Parameter Scaling Laws for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Kevin Duh, Jared Kaplan Mitchell A Gordon
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We observe that the development cross-entropy loss of supervised neural machine translation models scales like a power law with the amount of training data and the number of non-embedding parameters in the model. We discuss some practical implications of these results, such as predicting BLEU achieved by large scale models and predicting the ROI of labeling data in low-resource language pairs.
Good-Enough Example Extrapolation
Authors: Jason Wei
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper asks whether extrapolating the hidden space distribution of text examples from one class onto another is a valid inductive bias for data augmentation. To operationalize this question, I propose a simple data augmentation protocol called “good-enough example extrapolation” (GE3). GE3 is lightweight and has no hyperparameters. Applied to three text classification datasets for various data imbalance scenarios, GE3 improves performance more than upsampling and other hidden-space data augmentation methods.
Learning to Selectively Learn for Weakly-supervised Paraphrase Generation
Authors: Dingcheng Li, Alexander Hanbo Li, Xing Fan, Chenlei Guo, Yang Liu, Huan Liu Kaize Ding
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Paraphrase generation is a longstanding NLP task that has diverse applications on downstream NLP tasks. However, the effectiveness of existing efforts predominantly relies on large amounts of golden labeled data. Though unsupervised endeavors have been proposed to alleviate this issue, they may fail to generate meaningful paraphrases due to the lack of supervision signals. In this work, we go beyond the existing paradigms and propose a novel approach to generate high-quality paraphrases with data of weak supervision. Specifically, we tackle the weakly-supervised paraphrase generation problem by: (1) obtaining abundant weakly-labeled parallel sentences via retrieval-based pseudo paraphrase expansion; and (2) developing a meta-learning framework to progressively select valuable samples for fine-tuning a pre-trained language model BART on the sentential paraphrasing task. We demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements over existing unsupervised approaches, and is even comparable in performance with supervised state-of-the-arts.