mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Event Causality Extraction via Implicit Cause-Effect Interactions
Authors: Zequn Zhang, Kaiwen Wei, Zhi Guo, Xian Sun, Li Jin, Xiaoyu Li Jintao Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Event Causality Extraction (ECE) aims to extract the cause-effect event pairs from the given text, which requires the model to possess a strong reasoning ability to capture event causalities. However, existing works have not adequately exploited the interactions between the cause and effect event that could provide crucial clues for causality reasoning. To this end, we propose an Implicit Cause-Effect interaction (ICE) framework, which formulates ECE as a template-based conditional generation problem. The proposed method captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information (ground truth event types and arguments) for reasoning, and a knowledge distillation mechanism is introduced to alleviate the unavailability of privileged information in the test stage. Furthermore, to facilitate knowledge transfer from teacher to student, we design an event-level alignment strategy named Cause-Effect Optimal Transport (CEOT) to strengthen the semantic interactions of cause-effect event types and arguments. Experimental results indicate that ICE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ECE-CCKS dataset.
Evaluation of African American Language Bias in Natural Language Generation
Authors: Jessica Grieser, Shana Kleiner, Desmond Patton, Elsbeth Turcan, Kathleen McKeown Nicholas Deas
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: While biases disadvantaging African American Language (AAL) have been uncovered in models for tasks such as speech recognition and toxicity detection, there has been little investigation of these biases for language generation models like ChatGPT. We evaluate how well LLMs understand AAL in comparison to White Mainstream English (WME), the encouraged “standard” form of English taught in American classrooms. We measure large language model performance on two tasks: a counterpart generation task, where a model generates AAL given WME and vice versa, and a masked span prediction (MSP) task, where models predict a phrase hidden from their input. Using a novel dataset of AAL texts from a variety of regions and contexts, we present evidence of dialectal bias for six pre-trained LLMs through performance gaps on these tasks.
A Systematic Study of Performance Disparities in Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Authors: Han Zhou, Moy Yuan, Milan Gritta, Guchun Zhang, Ignacio Iacobacci, Anna Korhonen, Ivan Vulić Songbo Hu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Achieving robust language technologies that can perform well across the world`s many languages is a central goal of multilingual NLP. In this work, we take stock of and empirically analyse task performance disparities that exist between multilingual task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems. We first define new quantitative measures of absolute and relative equivalence in system performance, capturing disparities across languages and within individual languages. Through a series of controlled experiments, we demonstrate that performance disparities depend on a number of factors: the nature of the ToD task at hand, the underlying pretrained language model, the target language, and the amount of ToD annotated data. We empirically prove the existence of the adaptation and intrinsic biases in current ToD systems: e.g., ToD systems trained for Arabic or Turkish using annotated ToD data fully parallel to English ToD data still exhibit diminished ToD task performance. Beyond providing a series of insights into the performance disparities of ToD systems in different languages, our analyses offer practical tips on how to approach ToD data collection and system development for new languages.
Cognate Transformer for Automated Phonological Reconstruction and Cognate Reflex Prediction
Authors: Arnab Bhattacharya V.S.D.S.Mahesh Akavarapu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Phonological reconstruction is one of the central problems in historical linguistics where a proto-word of an ancestral language is determined from the observed cognate words of daughter languages. Computational approaches to historical linguistics attempt to automate the task by learning models on available linguistic data. Several ideas and techniques drawn from computational biology have been successfully applied in this area of computational historical linguistics. Following these lines, we adapt MSA Transformer, a protein language model, to the problem of automated phonological reconstruction. MSA Transformer trains on multiple sequence alignments as input and is, thus, apt for application on aligned cognate words. We, hence, name our model as Cognate Transformer. We also apply the model on another associated task, namely, cognate reflex prediction where a reflex word in a daughter language is predicted based on cognate words from other daughter languages. We show that our model outperforms the existing models on both the tasks, especially when it is pre-trained on masked word prediction task.
Inference-Time Policy Adapters (IPA): Tailoring Extreme-Scale LMs without Fine-tuning
Authors: Faeze Brahman, Peter West, Jaehun Jung, Khyathi Chandu, Abhilasha Ravichander, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Liwei Jiang, Sahana Ramnath, Nouha Dziri, Jillian Fisher, Bill Lin, Skyler Hallinan, Lianhui Qin, Xiang Ren, Sean Welleck, Yejin Choi Ximing Lu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: While extreme-scale language models have demonstrated exceptional performance on a variety of language tasks, the degree of control over these language models through pure prompting can often be limited. Directly fine-tuning such language models can be effective for tailoring them, but it can be either extremely costly (e.g., GPT-3) or not even feasible for the broader community (e.g., GPT-4). We propose Inference-time Policy Adapters (IPA), which efficiently tailors a language model such as GPT-3 without fine-tuning it. IPA guides a large base model during decoding time through a lightweight policy adapter trained to optimize an arbitrary user objective with reinforcement learning. On five challenging text generation tasks, such as toxicity reduction and lexically constrained generation, IPA consistently brings significant improvements over off-the-shelf language models. It outperforms competitive baseline methods, sometimes even including expensive fine-tuning. In particular, tailoring GPT-2 with IPA can outperform GPT-3, while tailoring GPT-3 with IPA brings a major performance boost over GPT-3 (and sometimes even over GPT-4). Our promising results highlight the potential of IPA as a lightweight alternative to tailoring extreme-scale language models.
Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing with Execution-based Spurious Program Filtering
Authors: Segwang Kim, Kyomin Jung Kang-il Lee
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The problem of spurious programs is a longstanding challenge when training a semantic parser from weak supervision. To eliminate such programs that have wrong semantics but correct denotation, existing methods focus on exploiting similarities between examples based on domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we propose a domain-agnostic filtering mechanism based on program execution results. Specifically, for each program obtained through the search process, we first construct a representation that captures the program`s semantics as execution results under various inputs. Then, we run a majority vote on these representations to identify and filter out programs with significantly different semantics from the other programs. In particular, our method is orthogonal to the program search process so that it can easily augment any of the existing weakly supervised semantic parsing frameworks. Empirical evaluations on the Natural Language Visual Reasoning and WikiTableQuestions demonstrate that applying our method to the existing semantic parsers induces significantly improved performances.
Taxonomy Expansion for Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Yogarshi Vyas, Jie Ma, Giovanni Paolini, Neha John, Shuai Wang, Yassine Benajiba, Vittorio Castelli, Dan Roth, Miguel Ballesteros Karthikeyan K
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Training a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model often involves fixing a taxonomy of entity types. However, requirements evolve and we might need the NER model to recognize additional entity types. A simple approach is to re-annotate entire dataset with both existing and additional entity types and then train the model on the re-annotated dataset. However, this is an extremely laborious task. To remedy this, we propose a novel approach called Partial Label Model (PLM) that uses only partially annotated datasets. We experiment with 6 diverse datasets and show that PLM consistently performs better than most other approaches (0.5 - 2.5 F1), including in novel settings for taxonomy expansion not considered in prior work. The gap between PLM and all other approaches is especially large in settings where there is limited data available for the additional entity types (as much as 11 F1), thus suggesting a more cost effective approaches to taxonomy expansion.
Rather a Nurse than a Physician - Contrastive Explanations under Investigation
Authors: Ilias Chalkidis, Laura Cabello, Stephanie Brandl Oliver Eberle
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Contrastive explanations, where one decision is explained *in contrast to another*, are supposed to be closer to how humans explain a decision than non-contrastive explanations, where the decision is not necessarily referenced to an alternative. This claim has never been empirically validated. We analyze four English text-classification datasets (SST2, DynaSent, BIOS and DBpedia-Animals). We fine-tune and extract explanations from three different models (RoBERTa, GTP-2, and T5), each in three different sizes and apply three post-hoc explainability methods (LRP, GradientxInput, GradNorm). We furthermore collect and release human rationale annotations for a subset of 100 samples from the BIOS dataset for contrastive and non-contrastive settings. A cross-comparison between model-based rationales and human annotations, both in contrastive and non-contrastive settings, yields a high agreement between the two settings for models as well as for humans. Moreover, model-based explanations computed in both settings align equally well with human rationales. Thus, we empirically find that humans do not necessarily explain in a contrastive manner.
EtiCor: Corpus for Analyzing LLMs for Etiquettes
Authors: Pradhyumna Lavania, Ashutosh Modi Ashutosh Dwivedi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Etiquettes are an essential ingredient of day-to-day interactions among people. Moreover, etiquettes are region-specific, and etiquettes in one region might contradict those in other regions. In this paper, we propose EtiCor, an Etiquettes Corpus, having texts about social norms from five different regions across the globe. The corpus provides a test bed for evaluating LLMs for knowledge and understanding of region-specific etiquettes. Additionally, we propose the task of Etiquette Sensitivity. We experiment with state-of-the-art LLMs (Delphi, Falcon40B, and GPT-3.5). Initial results indicate that LLMs, mostly fail to understand etiquettes from regions from non-Western world.
An Investigation of LLMs' Inefficacy in Understanding Converse Relations
Authors: Bowen Li, Binyuan Hui, Bailin Wang, Jinyang Li, Jinwang Wu, Yuanjun Laili Chengwen Qi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many formal language oriented tasks, such as structural data-to-text and semantic parsing. However current benchmarks mostly follow the data distribution of the pre-training data of LLMs. Therefore, a natural question rises that do LLMs really understand the structured semantics of formal languages. In this paper, we investigate this problem on a special case, converse binary relation. We introduce a new benchmark ConvRe focusing on converse relations, which contains 17 relations and 1240 triples extracted from popular knowledge graph completion datasets. Our ConvRE features two tasks, Re2Text and Text2Re, which are formulated as multi-choice question answering to evaluate LLMs' ability to determine the matching between relations and associated text. For the evaluation protocol, apart from different prompting methods, we further introduce variants to the test text and few-shot example text. We conduct experiments on three popular LLM families and have observed various scaling trends. The results suggest that LLMs often resort to shortcut learning and still face challenges on our proposed benchmark.
Towards Low-Resource Automatic Program Repair with Meta-Learning and Pretrained Language Models
Authors: Yue Wang, Steven Hoi, Shafiq Joty Weishi Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Automatic program repair (APR) has gained increasing attention as an essential technique in software development to reduce manual debugging efforts and boost developers' productivity. Recent advances in deep learning (DL) based models have demonstrated promising results by learning from large-scale bug-fix examples in a data-driven manner. However, in practical scenarios, software bugs have an imbalanced distribution, and the fixing knowledge learned by APR models often only capture the patterns of frequent error types, making it inapplicable to handle the rare error types. To address this limitation, we investigate a novel task of low-resource APR, and propose Meta-APR, a new meta-learning framework integrated with code pretrained language models to generate fixes for low-resource bugs with limited training samples. Our Meta-APR learns better error-specific knowledge from high-resource bugs through efficient first-order meta-learning optimization, which allows for a faster adaptation to the target low-resource bugs. Besides, while we adopt CodeT5, a pretrained code-aware encoder-decoder Transformer, as the backbone model for Meta-APR, it is a model-agnostic framework that can be integrated with any neural models. Extensive experimental results on three benchmarks in various programming languages verify the superiority of our method over existing DL-based APR approaches.
ZGUL: Zero-shot Generalization to Unseen Languages using Multi-source Ensembling of Language Adapters
Authors: Rajdeep Dhingra, Parag Singla, Mausam Vipul Rathore
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We tackle the problem of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in NLP tasks via the use of language adapters (LAs). Most of the earlier works have explored training with adapter of a single source (often English), and testing either using the target LA or LA of another related language. Training target LA requires unlabeled data, which may not be readily available for low resource *unseen* languages: those that are neither seen by the underlying multilingual language model (e.g., mBERT), nor do we have any (labeled or unlabeled) data for them. We posit that for more effective cross-lingual transfer, instead of just one source LA, we need to leverage LAs of multiple (linguistically or geographically related) source languages, both at train and test-time - which we investigate via our novel neural architecture, ZGUL. Extensive experimentation across four language groups, covering 15 unseen target languages, demonstrates improvements of up to 3.2 average F1 points over standard fine-tuning and other strong baselines on POS tagging and NER tasks. We also extend ZGUL to settings where either (1) some unlabeled data or (2) few-shot training examples are available for the target language. We find that ZGUL continues to outperform baselines in these settings too.
Log-FGAER: Logic-Guided Fine-Grained Address Entity Recognition from Multi-Turn Spoken Dialogue
Authors: Yitong Wang, Qian Hu, Pengwei Hu, Chao Deng, Junlan Feng Xue Han
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Fine-grained address entity recognition (FGAER) from multi-turn spoken dialogues is particularly challenging. The major reason lies in that a full address is often formed through a conversation process. Different parts of an address are distributed through multiple turns of a dialogue with spoken noises. It is nontrivial to extract by turn and combine them. This challenge has not been well emphasized by main-stream entity extraction algorithms. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a logic-guided fine-grained address recognition method (Log-FGAER), where we formulate the address hierarchy relationship as the logic rule and softly apply it in a probabilistic manner to improve the accuracy of FGAER. In addition, we provide an ontology-based data augmentation methodology that employs ChatGPT to augment a spoken dialogue dataset with labeled address entities. Experiments are conducted using datasets generated by the proposed data augmentation technique and derived from real-world scenarios. The results of the experiment demonstrate the efficacy of our proposal.
Unified Low-Resource Sequence Labeling by Sample-Aware Dynamic Sparse Finetuning
Authors: Ranran Haoran Zhang, Peng Shi, Wenpeng Yin, Rui Zhang Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Unified Sequence Labeling that articulates different sequence labeling problems such as Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Semantic Role Labeling, etc. in a generalized sequence-to-sequence format opens up the opportunity to make the maximum utilization of large language model knowledge toward structured prediction. Unfortunately, this requires formatting them into specialized augmented format unknown to the base pretrained language model (PLMs) necessitating finetuning to the target format. This significantly bounds its usefulness in data-limited settings where finetuning large models cannot properly generalize to the target format. To address this challenge and leverage PLM knowledge effectively, we propose FISH-DIP, a sample-aware dynamic sparse finetuning strategy that selectively focuses on a fraction of parameters, informed by feedback from highly regressing examples, during the fine-tuning process. By leveraging the dynamism of sparsity, our approach mitigates the impact of well-learned samples and prioritizes underperforming instances for improvement in generalization. Across five tasks of sequence labeling, we demonstrate that FISH-DIP can smoothly optimize the model in low resource settings offering upto 40% performance improvements over full fine-tuning depending on target evaluation settings. Also, compared to in-context learning and other parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches, FISH-DIP performs comparably or better, notably in extreme low-resource settings. The source code of FISH-DIP will be available at [this URL](https://github.com/psunlpgroup/FISH-DIP)
On the Representational Capacity of Recurrent Neural Language Models
Authors: Anej Svete, Li Du, Ryan Cotterell Franz Nowak
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This work investigates the computational expressivity of language models (LMs) based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Siegelmann and Sontag (1992) famously showed that RNNs with rational weights and hidden states and unbounded computation time are Turing complete. However, LMs define weightings over strings in addition to just (unweighted) language membership and the analysis of the computational power of RNN LMs (RLMs) should reflect this. We extend the Turing completeness result to the probabilistic case, showing how a rationally weighted RLM with unbounded computation time can simulate any deterministic probabilistic Turing machine (PTM) with rationally weighted transitions. Since, in practice, RLMs work in real-time, processing a symbol at every time step, we treat the above result as an upper bound on the expressivity of RLMs. We also provide a lower bound by showing that under the restriction to real-time computation, such models can simulate deterministic real-time rational PTMs.
A Mechanistic Interpretation of Arithmetic Reasoning in Language Models using Causal Mediation Analysis
Authors: Yonatan Belinkov, Mrinmaya Sachan Alessandro Stolfo
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Mathematical reasoning in large language models (LMs) has garnered significant attention in recent work, but there is a limited understanding of how these models process and store information related to arithmetic tasks within their architecture. In order to improve our understanding of this aspect of language models, we present a mechanistic interpretation of Transformer-based LMs on arithmetic questions using a causal mediation analysis framework. By intervening on the activations of specific model components and measuring the resulting changes in predicted probabilities, we identify the subset of parameters responsible for specific predictions. This provides insights into how information related to arithmetic is processed by LMs. Our experimental results indicate that LMs process the input by transmitting the information relevant to the query from mid-sequence early layers to the final token using the attention mechanism. Then, this information is processed by a set of MLP modules, which generate result-related information that is incorporated into the residual stream. To assess the specificity of the observed activation dynamics, we compare the effects of different model components on arithmetic queries with other tasks, including number retrieval from prompts and factual knowledge questions.
Benchmarking and Improving Text-to-SQL Generation under Ambiguity
Authors: Tushar Tomar, Ashutosh Sathe, Sunita Sarawagi Adithya Bhaskar
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Research in Text-to-SQL conversion has been largely benchmarked against datasets where each text query corresponds to one correct SQL. However, natural language queries over real-life databases frequently involve significant ambiguity about the intended SQL due to overlapping schema names and multiple confusing relationship paths. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel benchmark called AmbiQT with over 3000 examples where each text is interpretable as two plausible SQLs due to lexical and/or structural ambiguity. When faced with ambiguity, an ideal top-$k$ decoder should generate all valid interpretations for possible disambiguation by the user. We evaluate several Text-to-SQL systems and decoding algorithms, including those employing state-of-the-art LLMs, and find them to be far from this ideal. The primary reason is that the prevalent beam search algorithm and its variants, treat SQL queries as a string and produce unhelpful token-level diversity in the top-$k$. We propose LogicalBeam, a new decoding algorithm that navigates the SQL logic space using a blend of plan-based template generation and constrained infilling. Counterfactually generated plans diversify templates while in-filling with a beam-search that branches solely on schema names provides value diversity. LogicalBeam is up to 2.5 times more effective than state-of-the-art models at generating all candidate SQLs in the top-$k$ ranked outputs. It also enhances the top-5 Exact and Execution Match Accuracies on SPIDER and Kaggle DBQA.
Non-autoregressive Text Editing with Copy-aware Latent Alignments
Authors: Yue Zhang, Leyang Cui, Guohong Fu Yu Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent work has witnessed a paradigm shift from Seq2Seq to Seq2Edit in the field of text editing, with the aim of addressing the slow autoregressive inference problem posed by the former. Despite promising results, Seq2Edit approaches still face several challenges such as inflexibility in generation and difficulty in generalizing to other languages. In this work, we propose a novel non-autoregressive text editing method to circumvent the above issues, by modeling the edit process with latent CTC alignments. We make a crucial extension to CTC by introducing the copy operation into the edit space, thus enabling more efficient management of textual overlap in editing. We conduct extensive experiments on GEC and sentence fusion tasks, showing that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing Seq2Edit models and achieves similar or even better results than Seq2Seq with over $4\times$ speedup. Moreover, it demonstrates good generalizability on German and Russian. In-depth analyses reveal the strengths of our method in terms of the robustness under various scenarios and generating fluent and flexible outputs.
Translating away Translationese without Parallel Data
Authors: Koel Chowdhury, Cristina España-Bonet, Josef van Genabith Rricha Jalota
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Translated texts exhibit systematic linguistic differences compared to original texts in the same language, and these differences are referred to as translationese. Translationese has effects on various cross-lingual natural language processing tasks, potentially leading to biased results. In this paper, we explore a novel approach to reduce translationese in translated texts: translation-based style transfer. As there are no parallel human-translated and original data in the same language, we use a self-supervised approach that can learn from comparable (rather than parallel) mono-lingual original and translated data. However, even this self-supervised approach requires some parallel data for validation. We show how we can eliminate the need for parallel validation data by combining the self-supervised loss with an unsupervised loss. This unsupervised loss leverages the original language model loss over the style-transferred output and a semantic similarity loss between the input and style-transferred output. We evaluate our approach in terms of original vs. translationese binary classification in addition to measuring content preservation and target-style fluency. The results show that our approach is able to reduce translationese classifier accuracy to a level of a random classifier after style transfer while adequately preserving the content and fluency in the target original style.
Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy Planning
Authors: Maximillian Chen, Zhou Yu Xiao Yu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Planning for goal-oriented dialogue often requires simulating future dialogue interactions and estimating task progress. Many approaches thus consider training neural networks to perform look-ahead search algorithms such as A* search and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). However, this training often require abundant annotated data, which creates challenges when faced with noisy annotations or low-resource settings. We introduce GDP-Zero, an approach using Open-Loop MCTS to perform goal-oriented dialogue policy planning without any model training. GDP-Zero prompts a large language model to act as a policy prior, value function, user simulator, and system model during the tree search. We evaluate GDP-Zero on the goal-oriented task PersuasionForGood, and find that its responses are preferred over ChatGPT up to 59.32% of the time, and are rated more persuasive than ChatGPT during interactive evaluations.
UniMath: A Foundational and Multimodal Mathematical Reasoner
Authors: Tianyu Yang, Jipeng Zhang, Xiangliang Zhang Zhenwen Liang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: While significant progress has been made in natural language processing (NLP), existing methods exhibit limitations in effectively interpreting and processing diverse mathematical modalities. Therefore, we introduce UniMath, a versatile and unified system designed for multimodal mathematical reasoning tasks. Tackling complex problem-solving in arithmetic, geometry, and table-based math, UniMath utilizes a fine-tuned T5 model augmented with a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based image tokenizer. By jointly training and evaluating the model on three diverse datasets - SVAMP, GeoQA, and TableMWP, UniMath achieves state-of-the-art performance. The model`s generalization ability is further demonstrated via fine-tuning on two additional datasets, MathQA and Geo-Proving. Through comprehensive evaluations, we showcase that joint training across diverse math tasks improves overall model performance and enhances its ability to generalize across different mathematical reasoning tasks. This pioneering approach provides a blueprint and inspires further efforts on unified mathematical reasoning with deep learning systems.
CaseEncoder: A Knowledge-enhanced Pre-trained Model for Legal Case Encoding
Authors: Yueyue Wu, Weihang Su, Qingyao Ai, Yiqun Liu Yixiao Ma
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Legal case retrieval is a critical process for modern legal information systems. While recent studies have utilized pre-trained language models (PLMs) based on the general domain self-supervised pre-training paradigm to build models for legal case retrieval, there are limitations in using general domain PLMs as backbones. Specifically, these models may not fully capture the underlying legal features in legal case documents. To address this issue, we propose CaseEncoder, a legal document encoder that leverages fine-grained legal knowledge in both the data sampling and pre-training phases. In the data sampling phase, we enhance the quality of the training data by utilizing fine-grained law article information to guide the selection of positive and negative examples. In the pre-training phase, we design legal-specific pre-training tasks that align with the judging criteria of relevant legal cases. Based on these tasks, we introduce an innovative loss function called Biased Circle Loss to enhance the model`s ability to recognize case relevance in fine grains. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that CaseEncoder significantly outperforms both existing general pre-training models and legal-specific pre-training models in zero-shot legal case retrieval. The source code of CaseEncoder can be found at https://github.com/Anonymous-EMNLP2023/CaseEncoder.
HiddenTables and PyQTax: A Cooperative Game and Dataset For TableQA to Ensure Scale and Data Privacy Across a Myriad of Taxonomies
Authors: Nicole Cho, Tucker Balch, Manuela Veloso William Watson
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: A myriad of different Large Language Models (LLMs) face a common challenge in contextually analyzing table question-answering tasks. These challenges are engendered from (1) finite context windows for large tables, (2) multi-faceted discrepancies amongst tokenization patterns against cell boundaries, and (3) various limitations stemming from data confidentiality in the process of using external models such as gpt-35-turbo. We propose a cooperative game dubbed “HiddenTables” as a potential resolution to this challenge. In essence, “HiddenTables” is played between the code-generating LLM “Solver” and the “Oracle” which evaluates the ability of the LLM agents to solve TableQA tasks. This game is based on natural language schemas and importantly, ensures the security of the underlying data. We provide evidential experiments on a diverse set of tables that demonstrate an LLM`s collective inability to generalize and perform on complex queries, handle compositional dependencies, and align natural language to programmatic commands when concrete table schemas are provided. Unlike encoder-based models, we have pushed the boundaries of “HiddenTables” to not be limited by the number of rows - therefore we exhibit improved efficiency in prompt and completion tokens. Our infrastructure has spawned a new dataset “PyQTax” that spans across 116,671 question-table-answer triplets and provides additional fine-grained breakdowns and labels for varying question taxonomies. Therefore, in tandem with our academic contributions regarding LLMs' deficiency in TableQA tasks, “HiddenTables” is a tactile manifestation of how LLMs can interact with massive datasets while ensuring data security and minimizing generation costs.
Causal Document-Grounded Dialogue Pre-training
Authors: Bowen Yu, Bowen Li, Haiyang Yu, Jinyang Li, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Nevin Zhang Yingxiu Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The goal of document-grounded dialogue (DocGD) is to generate a response by anchoring the evidence in a supporting document in accordance with the dialogue context. This entails four causally interconnected variables. While task-specific pre-training has significantly enhanced performances on numerous downstream tasks, existing DocGD methods still rely on general pre-trained language models without a specifically tailored pre-training approach that explicitly captures the causal relationships. To address this, we present the first causally-complete dataset construction strategy for developing million-scale DocGD pre-training corpora. Additionally, we propose a causally-perturbed pre-training strategy to better capture causality by introducing perturbations on the variables and optimizing the overall causal effect. Experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our causal pre-training yields substantial and consistent improvements in fully-supervised, low-resource, few-shot, and zero-shot settings.
Accented Speech Recognition With Accent-specific Codebooks
Authors: Preethi Jyothi, Sriram Ganapathy, Vinit Unni Darshan Prabhu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Speech accents pose a significant challenge to state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Degradation in performance across underrepresented accents is a severe deterrent to the inclusive adoption of ASR. In this work, we propose a novel accent adaptation approach for end-to-end ASR systems using cross-attention with a trainable set of codebooks. These learnable codebooks capture accent-specific information and are integrated within the ASR encoder layers. The model is trained on accented English speech, while the test data also contained accents which were not seen during training. On the Mozilla Common Voice multi-accented dataset, we show that our proposed approach yields significant performance gains not only on the seen English accents (up to 37% relative improvement in word error rate) but also on the unseen accents (up to 5% relative improvement in WER). Further, we illustrate benefits for a zero-shot transfer setup on the L2Artic dataset. We also compare the performance with other approaches based on accent adversarial training.
Linking Surface Facts to Large-Scale Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Kiril Gashteovski, Chia-Chien Hung, Carolin Lawrence, Goran Glavaš Gorjan Radevski
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Open Information Extraction (OIE) methods extract facts from natural language text in the form of (“subject”; “relation”; “object”) triples. These facts are, however, merely surface forms, the ambiguity of which impedes their downstream usage; e.g., the surface phrase “Michael Jordan” may refer to either the former basketball player or the university professor. Knowledge Graphs (KGs), on the other hand, contain facts in a canonical (i.e., unambiguous) form, but their coverage is limited by a static schema (i.e., a fixed set of entities and predicates). To bridge this gap, we need the best of both worlds: (i) high coverage of free-text OIEs, and (ii) semantic precision (i.e., monosemy) of KGs. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a new benchmark with novel evaluation protocols that can, for example, measure fact linking performance on a granular triple slot level, while also measuring if a system has the ability to recognize that a surface form has no match in the existing KG. Our extensive evaluation of several baselines show that detection of out-of-KG entities and predicates is more difficult than accurate linking to existing ones, thus calling for more research efforts on this difficult task. We publicly release all resources (data, benchmark and code) on https://github.com/nec-research/fact-linking.
Sentiment Analysis on Streaming User Reviews via Dual-Channel Dynamic Graph Neural Network
Authors: Linhai Zhang, Deyu Zhou Xin Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Sentiment analysis on user reviews has achieved great success thanks to the rapid growth of deep learning techniques. The large number of online streaming reviews also provides the opportunity to model temporal dynamics for users and products on the timeline. However, existing methods model users and products in the real world based on a static assumption and neglect their time-varying characteristics. In this paper, we present DC-DGNN, a dual-channel framework based on a dynamic graph neural network (DGNN) that models temporal user and product dynamics for sentiment analysis. Specifically, a dual-channel text encoder is employed to extract current local and global contexts from review documents for users and products. Moreover, user review streams are integrated into the dynamic graph neural network by treating users and products as nodes and reviews as new edges. Node representations are dynamically updated along with the evolution of the dynamic graph and used for the final score prediction. Experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.
DUMB: A Benchmark for Smart Evaluation of Dutch Models
Authors: Martijn Wieling, Malvina Nissim Wietse de Vries
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce the Dutch Model Benchmark: DUMB. The benchmark includes a diverse set of datasets for low-, medium- and high-resource tasks. The total set of nine tasks includes four tasks that were previously not available in Dutch. Instead of relying on a mean score across tasks, we propose Relative Error Reduction (RER), which compares the DUMB performance of language models to a strong baseline which can be referred to in the future even when assessing different sets of language models. Through a comparison of 14 pre-trained language models (mono- and multi-lingual, of varying sizes), we assess the internal consistency of the benchmark tasks, as well as the factors that likely enable high performance. Our results indicate that current Dutch monolingual models under-perform and suggest training larger Dutch models with other architectures and pre-training objectives. At present, the highest performance is achieved by DeBERTaV3 (large), XLM-R (large) and mDeBERTaV3 (base). In addition to highlighting best strategies for training larger Dutch models, DUMB will foster further research on Dutch. A public leaderboard is available at https://dumbench.nl.
OssCSE: Overcoming Surface Structure Bias in Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding
Authors: Guoyin Wang, Ke Bai, Jiwei Li, Xiang Li, Qingjun Cui, Belinda Zeng, Trishul Chilimbi, Xiaodan Zhu Zhan Shi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Contrastive learning has been demonstrated effective in unsupervised sentence representation learning. Given one sentence, positive pairs are obtained by passing the sentence to the encoder twice using the different dropout masks, and negative pairs are obtained by taking another sentence in the same mini-batch. However, the method suffers from the surface structure bias, i.e., sentences with similar surface structures will be regarded as close in semantics while sentences with dissimilar surface structures will be viewed as distinct in semantics. This leads to the result that paraphrasing a sentence that is dissimilar in surface structure will receive a lower semantic similarity score than inserting a negative word into the sentence. In this paper, we first verify the bias by collecting a sentence transformation testset. Then we systematically probe the existing models by proposing novel splits based on benchmark datasets in accordance with semantic and surface structure similarity. We tackle the bias in two aspects: balancing the learning target by augmenting with data that counters the bias, and meanwhile preserving word semantics by leveraging recall loss to prevent catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate our model on standard semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks using different pre-trained backbones and achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across the STS benchmarks. Particularly, our models that are fine-tuned with $RoBERTa_base$ and $RoBERTa_large$ achieve significantly better performance on most benchmark datasets.
End-to-End Single-Channel Speaker-Turn Aware Conversational Speech Translation
Authors: Zhaocheng Huang, Xing Niu, Rohit Paturi, Sundararajan Srinivasan, Prashant Mathur, Brian Thompson, Marcello Federico Juan Pablo Zuluaga-Gomez
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Conventional speech-to-text translation (ST) systems are trained on single-speaker utterances, and they may not generalize to real-life scenarios where the audio contains conversations by multiple speakers. In this paper, we tackle single-channel multi-speaker conversational ST with an end-to-end and multi-task training model, named Speaker-Turn Aware Conversational Speech Translation, that combines automatic speech recognition, speech translation and speaker turn detection using special tokens in a serialized labeling format. We run experiments on the Fisher-CALLHOME corpus, which we adapted by merging the two single-speaker channels into one multi-speaker channel, thus representing the more realistic and challenging scenario with multi-speaker turns and cross-talk. Experimental results across single- and multi-speaker conditions and against conventional ST systems, show that our model outperforms the reference systems on the multi-speaker condition, while attaining comparable performance on the single-speaker condition. We release scripts for data processing and model training.
A Fine-Grained Taxonomy of Replies to Hate Speech
Authors: Ashley Zhao, Eduardo Blanco, Lingzi Hong Xinchen Yu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Countering rather than censoring hate speech has emerged as a promising strategy to address hatred. There are many types of counterspeech in user-generated content: addressing the hateful content or its author, generic requests, well-reasoned counter arguments, insults, etc. The effectiveness of counterspeech, which we define as subsequent incivility, depends on these types. In this paper, we present a theoretically grounded taxonomy of replies to hate speech and a new corpus. We work with real, user-generated hate speech and all the replies it elicits rather than replies generated by a third party. Our analyses provide insights into the content real users reply with as well as which replies are empirically most effective. We also experiment with models to characterize the replies to hate speech, thereby opening the door to estimating whether a reply to hate speech will result in further incivility.
JointMatch: A Unified Approach for Diverse and Collaborative Pseudo-Labeling to Semi-Supervised Text Classification
Authors: Cornelia Caragea Henry Zou
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Semi-supervised text classification (SSTC) has gained increasing attention due to its ability to leverage unlabeled data. However, existing approaches based on pseudo-labeling suffer from the issues of pseudo-label bias and error accumulation. In this paper, we propose JointMatch, a holistic approach for SSTC that addresses these challenges by unifying ideas from recent semi-supervised learning and the task of learning with noise. JointMatch adaptively adjusts classwise thresholds based on the learning status of different classes to mitigate model bias towards current easy classes. Additionally, JointMatch alleviates error accumulation by utilizing two differently initialized networks to teach each other in a cross-labeling manner. To maintain divergence between the two networks for mutual learning, we introduce a strategy that weighs more disagreement data while also allowing the utilization of high-quality agreement data for training. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of JointMatch, achieving a significant 5.13% improvement on average. Notably, JointMatch delivers impressive results even in the extremely-scarce-label setting, obtaining 86% accuracy on AG News with only 5 labels per class. We make our code available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/JointMatch.