mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Towards Incremental Transformers: An Empirical Analysis of Transformer Models for Incremental NLU
Authors: Brielen Madureira, David Schlangen Patrick Kahardipraja
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Incremental processing allows interactive systems to respond based on partial inputs, which is a desirable property e.g. in dialogue agents. The currently popular Transformer architecture inherently processes sequences as a whole, abstracting away the notion of time. Recent work attempts to apply Transformers incrementally via restart-incrementality by repeatedly feeding, to an unchanged model, increasingly longer input prefixes to produce partial outputs. However, this approach is computationally costly and does not scale efficiently for long sequences. In parallel, we witness efforts to make Transformers more efficient, e.g. the Linear Transformer (LT) with a recurrence mechanism. In this work, we examine the feasibility of LT for incremental NLU in English. Our results show that the recurrent LT model has better incremental performance and faster inference speed compared to the standard Transformer and LT with restart-incrementality, at the cost of part of the non-incremental (full sequence) quality. We show that the performance drop can be mitigated by training the model to wait for right context before committing to an output and that training with input prefixes is beneficial for delivering correct partial outputs.
Feedback Attribution for Counterfactual Bandit Learning in Multi-Domain Spoken Language Understanding
Authors: Patrick Lehnen Tobias Falke
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: With counterfactual bandit learning, models can be trained based on positive and negative feedback received for historical predictions, with no labeled data needed. Such feedback is often available in real-world dialog systems, however, the modularized architecture commonly used in large-scale systems prevents the direct application of such algorithms. In this paper, we study the feedback attribution problem that arises when using counterfactual bandit learning for multi-domain spoken language understanding. We introduce an experimental setup to simulate the problem on small-scale public datasets, propose attribution methods inspired by multi-agent reinforcement learning and evaluate them against multiple baselines. We find that while directly using overall feedback leads to disastrous performance, our proposed attribution methods can allow training competitive models from user feedback.
Label Verbalization and Entailment for Effective Zero and Few-Shot Relation Extraction
Authors: Oier Lopez de Lacalle, Gorka Labaka, Ander Barrena, Eneko Agirre Oscar Sainz
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Relation extraction systems require large amounts of labeled examples which are costly to annotate. In this work we reformulate relation extraction as an entailment task, with simple, hand-made, verbalizations of relations produced in less than 15 min per relation. The system relies on a pretrained textual entailment engine which is run as-is (no training examples, zero-shot) or further fine-tuned on labeled examples (few-shot or fully trained). In our experiments on TACRED we attain 63% F1 zero-shot, 69% with 16 examples per relation (17% points better than the best supervised system on the same conditions), and only 4 points short to the state-of-the-art (which uses 20 times more training data). We also show that the performance can be improved significantly with larger entailment models, up to 12 points in zero-shot, allowing to report the best results to date on TACRED when fully trained. The analysis shows that our few-shot systems are specially effective when discriminating between relations, and that the performance difference in low data regimes comes mainly from identifying no-relation cases.
Extend, don`t rebuild: Phrasing conditional graph modification as autoregressive sequence labelling
Authors: Jannes Münchmeyer, Samuele Garda, Ulf Leser Leon Weber
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deriving and modifying graphs from natural language text has become a versatile basis technology for information extraction with applications in many subfields, such as semantic parsing or knowledge graph construction. A recent work used this technique for modifying scene graphs (He et al. 2020), by first encoding the original graph and then generating the modified one based on this encoding. In this work, we show that we can considerably increase performance on this problem by phrasing it as graph extension instead of graph generation. We propose the first model for the resulting graph extension problem based on autoregressive sequence labelling. On three scene graph modification data sets, this formulation leads to improvements in accuracy over the state-of-the-art between 13 and 24 percentage points. Furthermore, we introduce a novel data set from the biomedical domain which has much larger linguistic variability and more complex graphs than the scene graph modification data sets. For this data set, the state-of-the art fails to generalize, while our model can produce meaningful predictions.
Zero-Shot Information Extraction as a Unified Text-to-Triple Translation
Authors: Xiao Liu, Zui Chen, Haoyun Hong, Jie Tang, Dawn Song Chenguang Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We cast a suite of information extraction tasks into a text-to-triple translation framework. Instead of solving each task relying on task-specific datasets and models, we formalize the task as a translation between task-specific input text and output triples. By taking the task-specific input, we enable a task-agnostic translation by leveraging the latent knowledge that a pre-trained language model has about the task. We further demonstrate that a simple pre-training task of predicting which relational information corresponds to which input text is an effective way to produce task-specific outputs. This enables the zero-shot transfer of our framework to downstream tasks. We study the zero-shot performance of this framework on open information extraction (OIE2016, NYT, WEB, PENN), relation classification (FewRel and TACRED), and factual probe (Google-RE and T-REx). The model transfers non-trivially to most tasks and is often competitive with a fully supervised method without the need for any task-specific training. For instance, we significantly outperform the F1 score of the supervised open information extraction without needing to use its training set.
Learning Logic Rules for Document-Level Relation Extraction
Authors: Changzhi Sun, Jiangtao Feng, Lin Qiu, Hao Zhou, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu, Lei Li Dongyu Ru
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Document-level relation extraction aims to identify relations between entities in a whole document. Prior efforts to capture long-range dependencies have relied heavily on implicitly powerful representations learned through (graph) neural networks, which makes the model less transparent. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose LogiRE, a novel probabilistic model for document-level relation extraction by learning logic rules. LogiRE treats logic rules as latent variables and consists of two modules: a rule generator and a relation extractor. The rule generator is to generate logic rules potentially contributing to final predictions, and the relation extractor outputs final predictions based on the generated logic rules. Those two modules can be efficiently optimized with the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. By introducing logic rules into neural networks, LogiRE can explicitly capture long-range dependencies as well as enjoy better interpretation. Empirical results show that significantly outperforms several strong baselines in terms of relation performance and logical consistency. Our code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/rudongyu/LogiRE.
A Large-Scale Dataset for Empathetic Response Generation
Authors: Yubo Xie, Pearl Pu Anuradha Welivita
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent development in NLP shows a strong trend towards refining pre-trained models with a domain-specific dataset. This is especially the case for response generation where emotion plays an important role. However, existing empathetic datasets remain small, delaying research efforts in this area, for example, the development of emotion-aware chatbots. One main technical challenge has been the cost of manually annotating dialogues with the right emotion labels. In this paper, we describe a large-scale silver dataset consisting of 1M dialogues annotated with 32 fine-grained emotions, eight empathetic response intents, and the Neutral category. To achieve this goal, we have developed a novel data curation pipeline starting with a small seed of manually annotated data and eventually scaling it to a satisfactory size. We compare its quality against a state-of-the-art gold dataset using both offline experiments and visual validation methods. The resultant procedure can be used to create similar datasets in the same domain as well as in other domains.
The Perils of Using Mechanical Turk to Evaluate Open-Ended Text Generation
Authors: Nader Akoury, Mohit Iyyer Marzena Karpinska
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent text generation research has increasingly focused on open-ended domains such as story and poetry generation. Because models built for such tasks are difficult to evaluate automatically, most researchers in the space justify their modeling choices by collecting crowdsourced human judgments of text quality (e.g., Likert scores of coherence or grammaticality) from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In this paper, we first conduct a survey of 45 open-ended text generation papers and find that the vast majority of them fail to report crucial details about their AMT tasks, hindering reproducibility. We then run a series of story evaluation experiments with both AMT workers and English teachers and discover that even with strict qualification filters, AMT workers (unlike teachers) fail to distinguish between model-generated text and human-generated references. We show that AMT worker judgments improve when they are shown model-generated output alongside human-generated references, which enables the workers to better calibrate their ratings. Finally, interviews with the English teachers provide deeper insights into the challenges of the evaluation process, particularly when rating model-generated text.
Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
Authors: Maarten Sap, Ana Marasović, William Agnew, Gabriel Ilharco, Dirk Groeneveld, Margaret Mitchell, Matt Gardner Jesse Dodge
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Large language models have led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks, and researchers are turning to ever-larger text corpora to train them. Some of the largest corpora available are made by scraping significant portions of the internet, and are frequently introduced with only minimal documentation. In this work we provide some of the first documentation for the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4; Raffel et al., 2020), a dataset created by applying a set of filters to a single snapshot of Common Crawl. We begin by investigating where the data came from, and find a significant amount of text from unexpected sources like patents and US military websites. Then we explore the content of the text itself, and find machine-generated text (e.g., from machine translation systems) and evaluation examples from other benchmark NLP datasets. To understand the impact of the filters applied to create this dataset, we evaluate the text that was removed, and show that blocklist filtering disproportionately removes text from and about minority individuals. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for how to created and document web-scale datasets from a scrape of the internet.
AfroMT: Pretraining Strategies and Reproducible Benchmarks for Translation of 8 African Languages
Authors: Junjie Hu, Graham Neubig, Yutaka Matsuo Machel Reid
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Reproducible benchmarks are crucial in driving progress of machine translation research. However, existing machine translation benchmarks have been mostly limited to high-resource or well-represented languages. Despite an increasing interest in low-resource machine translation, there are no standardized reproducible benchmarks for many African languages, many of which are used by millions of speakers but have less digitized textual data. To tackle these challenges, we propose AfroMT, a standardized, clean, and reproducible machine translation benchmark for eight widely spoken African languages. We also develop a suite of analysis tools for system diagnosis taking into account the unique properties of these languages. Furthermore, we explore the newly considered case of low-resource focused pretraining and develop two novel data augmentation-based strategies, leveraging word-level alignment information and pseudo-monolingual data for pretraining multilingual sequence-to-sequence models. We demonstrate significant improvements when pretraining on 11 languages, with gains of up to 2 BLEU points over strong baselines. We also show gains of up to 12 BLEU points over cross-lingual transfer baselines in data-constrained scenarios. All code and pretrained models will be released as further steps towards larger reproducible benchmarks for African languages.
Evaluating the Evaluation Metrics for Style Transfer: A Case Study in Multilingual Formality Transfer
Authors: Sweta Agrawal, Joel Tetreault, Marine Carpuat Eleftheria Briakou
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While the field of style transfer (ST) has been growing rapidly, it has been hampered by a lack of standardized practices for automatic evaluation. In this paper, we evaluate leading automatic metrics on the oft-researched task of formality style transfer. Unlike previous evaluations, which focus solely on English, we expand our focus to Brazilian-Portuguese, French, and Italian, making this work the first multilingual evaluation of metrics in ST. We outline best practices for automatic evaluation in (formality) style transfer and identify several models that correlate well with human judgments and are robust across languages. We hope that this work will help accelerate development in ST, where human evaluation is often challenging to collect.
MS-Mentions: Consistently Annotating Entity Mentions in Materials Science Procedural Text
Authors: Zach Jensen, Sheshera Mysore, Kevin Huang, Rubayyat Mahbub, Elsa Olivetti, Andrew McCallum Tim O′Gorman
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Material science synthesis procedures are a promising domain for scientific NLP, as proper modeling of these recipes could provide insight into new ways of creating materials. However, a fundamental challenge in building information extraction models for material science synthesis procedures is getting accurate labels for the materials, operations, and other entities of those procedures. We present a new corpus of entity mention annotations over 595 Material Science synthesis procedural texts (157,488 tokens), which greatly expands the training data available for the Named Entity Recognition task. We outline a new label inventory designed to provide consistent annotations and a new annotation approach intended to maximize the consistency and annotation speed of domain experts. Inter-annotator agreement studies and baseline models trained upon the data suggest that the corpus provides high-quality annotations of these mention types. This corpus helps lay a foundation for future high-quality modeling of synthesis procedures.
Understanding Politics via Contextualized Discourse Processing
Authors: Dan Goldwasser Rajkumar Pujari
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Politicians often have underlying agendas when reacting to events. Arguments in contexts of various events reflect a fairly consistent set of agendas for a given entity. In spite of recent advances in Pretrained Language Models, those text representations are not designed to capture such nuanced patterns. In this paper, we propose a Compositional Reader model consisting of encoder and composer modules, that captures and leverages such information to generate more effective representations for entities, issues, and events. These representations are contextualized by tweets, press releases, issues, news articles, and participating entities. Our model processes several documents at once and generates composed representations for multiple entities over several issues or events. Via qualitative and quantitative empirical analysis, we show that these representations are meaningful and effective.
Conundrums in Event Coreference Resolution: Making Sense of the State of the Art
Authors: Vincent Ng Jing Lu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Despite recent promising results on the application of span-based models for event reference interpretation, there is a lack of understanding of what has been improved. We present an empirical analysis of a state-of-the-art span-based event reference systems with the goal of providing the general NLP audience with a better understanding of the state of the art and reference researchers with directions for future research.
Weakly supervised discourse segmentation for multiparty oral conversations
Authors: Julie Hunter, Philippe Muller, Thomas Pellegrini, Isabelle Ferrané Lila Gravellier
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Discourse segmentation, the first step of discourse analysis, has been shown to improve results for text summarization, translation and other NLP tasks. While segmentation models for written text tend to perform well, they are not directly applicable to spontaneous, oral conversation, which has linguistic features foreign to written text. Segmentation is less studied for this type of language, where annotated data is scarce, and existing corpora more heterogeneous. We develop a weak supervision approach to adapt, using minimal annotation, a state of the art discourse segmenter trained on written text to French conversation transcripts. Supervision is given by a latent model bootstrapped by manually defined heuristic rules that use linguistic and acoustic information. The resulting model improves the original segmenter, especially in contexts where information on speaker turns is lacking or noisy, gaining up to 13% in F-score. Evaluation is performed on data like those used to define our heuristic rules, but also on transcripts from two other corpora.
Narrative Embedding: Re-Contextualization Through Attention
Authors: Daniel Woolridge, Madeleine Glick Sean Wilner
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Narrative analysis is becoming increasingly important for a number of linguistic tasks including summarization, knowledge extraction, and question answering. We present a novel approach for narrative event representation using attention to re-contextualize events across the whole story. Comparing to previous analysis we find an unexpected attachment of event semantics to predicate tokens within a popular transformer model. We test the utility of our approach on narrative completion prediction, achieving state of the art performance on Multiple Choice Narrative Cloze and scoring competitively on the Story Cloze Task.
Focus on what matters: Applying Discourse Coherence Theory to Cross Document Coreference
Authors: Dan Iter, Dan Jurafsky William Held
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Performing event and entity coreference resolution across documents vastly increases the number of candidate mentions, making it intractable to do the full $n^2$ pairwise comparisons. Existing approaches simplify by considering coreference only within document clusters, but this fails to handle inter-cluster coreference, common in many applications. As a result cross-document coreference algorithms are rarely applied to downstream tasks. We draw on an insight from discourse coherence theory: potential coreferences are constrained by the reader`s discourse focus. We model the entities/events in a reader`s focus as a neighborhood within a learned latent embedding space which minimizes the distance between mentions and the centroids of their gold coreference clusters. We then use these neighborhoods to sample only hard negatives to train a fine-grained classifier on mention pairs and their local discourse features. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results for both events and entities on the ECB+, Gun Violence, Football Coreference, and Cross-Domain Cross-Document Coreference corpora. Furthermore, training on multiple corpora improves average performance across all datasets by 17.2 F1 points, leading to a robust coreference resolution model that is now feasible to apply to downstream tasks.
Salience-Aware Event Chain Modeling for Narrative Understanding
Authors: Muhao Chen, Jonathan May Xiyang Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Storytelling, whether via fables, news reports, documentaries, or memoirs, can be thought of as the communication of interesting and related events that, taken together, form a concrete process. It is desirable to extract the event chains that represent such processes. However, this extraction remains a challenging problem. We posit that this is due to the nature of the texts from which chains are discovered. Natural language text interleaves a narrative of concrete, salient events with background information, contextualization, opinion, and other elements that are important for a variety of necessary discourse and pragmatics acts but are not part of the principal chain of events being communicated. We introduce methods for extracting this principal chain from natural language text, by filtering away non-salient events and supportive sentences. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods at isolating critical event chains by comparing their effect on downstream tasks. We show that by pre-training large language models on our extracted chains, we obtain improvements in two tasks that benefit from a clear understanding of event chains: narrative prediction and event-based temporal question answering. The demonstrated improvements and ablative studies confirm that our extraction method isolates critical event chains.
Asking It All: Generating Contextualized Questions for any Semantic Role
Authors: Paul Roit, Julian Michael, Yoav Goldberg, Reut Tsarfaty, Ido Dagan Valentina Pyatkin
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Asking questions about a situation is an inherent step towards understanding it. To this end, we introduce the task of role question generation, which, given a predicate mention and a passage, requires producing a set of questions asking about all possible semantic roles of the predicate. We develop a two-stage model for this task, which first produces a context-independent question prototype for each role and then revises it to be contextually appropriate for the passage. Unlike most existing approaches to question generation, our approach does not require conditioning on existing answers in the text. Instead, we condition on the type of information to inquire about, regardless of whether the answer appears explicitly in the text, could be inferred from it, or should be sought elsewhere. Our evaluation demonstrates that we generate diverse and well-formed questions for a large, broad-coverage ontology of predicates and roles.
Fast, Effective, and Self-Supervised: Transforming Masked Language Models into Universal Lexical and Sentence Encoders
Authors: Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen, Nigel Collier Fangyu Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Previous work has indicated that pretrained Masked Language Models (MLMs) are not effective as universal lexical and sentence encoders off-the-shelf, i.e., without further task-specific fine-tuning on NLI, sentence similarity, or paraphrasing tasks using annotated task data. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to turn MLMs into effective lexical and sentence encoders even without any additional data, relying simply on self-supervision. We propose an extremely simple, fast, and effective contrastive learning technique, termed Mirror-BERT, which converts MLMs (e.g., BERT and RoBERTa) into such encoders in 20-30 seconds with no access to additional external knowledge. Mirror-BERT relies on identical and slightly modified string pairs as positive (i.e., synonymous) fine-tuning examples, and aims to maximise their similarity during “identity fine-tuning”. We report huge gains over off-the-shelf MLMs with Mirror-BERT both in lexical-level and in sentence-level tasks, across different domains and different languages. Notably, in sentence similarity (STS) and question-answer entailment (QNLI) tasks, our self-supervised Mirror-BERT model even matches the performance of the Sentence-BERT models from prior work which rely on annotated task data. Finally, we delve deeper into the inner workings of MLMs, and suggest some evidence on why this simple Mirror-BERT fine-tuning approach can yield effective universal lexical and sentence encoders.
RuleBERT: Teaching Soft Rules to Pre-Trained Language Models
Authors: Naser Ahmadi, Preslav Nakov, Paolo Papotti Mohammed Saeed
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While pre-trained language models (PLMs) are the go-to solution to tackle many natural language processing problems, they are still very limited in their ability to capture and to use common-sense knowledge. In fact, even if information is available in the form of approximate (soft) logical rules, it is not clear how to transfer it to a PLM in order to improve its performance for deductive reasoning tasks. Here, we aim to bridge this gap by teaching PLMs how to reason with soft Horn rules. We introduce a classification task where, given facts and soft rules, the PLM should return a prediction with a probability for a given hypothesis. We release the first dataset for this task, and we propose a revised loss function that enables the PLM to learn how to predict precise probabilities for the task. Our evaluation results show that the resulting fine-tuned models achieve very high performance, even on logical rules that were unseen at training. Moreover, we demonstrate that logical notions expressed by the rules are transferred to the fine-tuned model, yielding state-of-the-art results on external datasets.
Stepmothers are mean and academics are pretentious: What do pretrained language models learn about you?
Authors: Ekaterina Shutova, Robert van Rooij Rochelle Choenni
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate what types of stereotypical information are captured by pretrained language models. We present the first dataset comprising stereotypical attributes of a range of social groups and propose a method to elicit stereotypes encoded by pretrained language models in an unsupervised fashion. Moreover, we link the emergent stereotypes to their manifestation as basic emotions as a means to study their emotional effects in a more generalized manner. To demonstrate how our methods can be used to analyze emotion and stereotype shifts due to linguistic experience, we use fine-tuning on news sources as a case study. Our experiments expose how attitudes towards different social groups vary across models and how quickly emotions and stereotypes can shift at the fine-tuning stage.
ConSeC: Word Sense Disambiguation as Continuous Sense Comprehension
Authors: Luigi Procopio, Roberto Navigli Edoardo Barba
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Supervised systems have nowadays become the standard recipe for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), with Transformer-based language models as their primary ingredient. However, while these systems have certainly attained unprecedented performances, virtually all of them operate under the constraining assumption that, given a context, each word can be disambiguated individually with no account of the other sense choices. To address this limitation and drop this assumption, we propose CONtinuous SEnse Comprehension (ConSeC), a novel approach to WSD: leveraging a recent re-framing of this task as a text extraction problem, we adapt it to our formulation and introduce a feedback loop strategy that allows the disambiguation of a target word to be conditioned not only on its context but also on the explicit senses assigned to nearby words. We evaluate ConSeC and examine how its components lead it to surpass all its competitors and set a new state of the art on English WSD. We also explore how ConSeC fares in the cross-lingual setting, focusing on 8 languages with various degrees of resource availability, and report significant improvements over prior systems. We release our code at r̆lhttps://github.com/SapienzaNLP/consec.
Shortcutted Commonsense: Data Spuriousness in Deep Learning of Commonsense Reasoning
Authors: António Branco, João António Rodrigues, João Ricardo Silva Ruben Branco
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Commonsense is a quintessential human capacity that has been a core challenge to Artificial Intelligence since its inception. Impressive results in Natural Language Processing tasks, including in commonsense reasoning, have consistently been achieved with Transformer neural language models, even matching or surpassing human performance in some benchmarks. Recently, some of these advances have been called into question: so called data artifacts in the training data have been made evident as spurious correlations and shallow shortcuts that in some cases are leveraging these outstanding results. In this paper we seek to further pursue this analysis into the realm of commonsense related language processing tasks. We undertake a study on different prominent benchmarks that involve commonsense reasoning, along a number of key stress experiments, thus seeking to gain insight on whether the models are learning transferable generalizations intrinsic to the problem at stake or just taking advantage of incidental shortcuts in the data items. The results obtained indicate that most datasets experimented with are problematic, with models resorting to non-robust features and appearing not to be learning and generalizing towards the overall tasks intended to be conveyed or exemplified by the datasets.
When differential privacy meets NLP: The devil is in the detail
Authors: Ivan Habernal
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Differential privacy provides a formal approach to privacy of individuals. Applications of differential privacy in various scenarios, such as protecting users' original utterances, must satisfy certain mathematical properties. Our contribution is a formal analysis of ADePT, a differentially private auto-encoder for text rewriting (Krishna et al, 2021). ADePT achieves promising results on downstream tasks while providing tight privacy guarantees. Our proof reveals that ADePT is not differentially private, thus rendering the experimental results unsubstantiated. We also quantify the impact of the error in its private mechanism, showing that the true sensitivity is higher by at least factor 6 in an optimistic case of a very small encoder`s dimension and that the amount of utterances that are not privatized could easily reach 100% of the entire dataset. Our intention is neither to criticize the authors, nor the peer-reviewing process, but rather point out that if differential privacy applications in NLP rely on formal guarantees, these should be outlined in full and put under detailed scrutiny.
Achieving Model Robustness through Discrete Adversarial Training
Authors: Jonathan Berant Maor Ivgi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Discrete adversarial attacks are symbolic perturbations to a language input that preserve the output label but lead to a prediction error. While such attacks have been extensively explored for the purpose of evaluating model robustness, their utility for improving robustness has been limited to offline augmentation only. Concretely, given a trained model, attacks are used to generate perturbed (adversarial) examples, and the model is re-trained exactly once. In this work, we address this gap and leverage discrete attacks for online augmentation, where adversarial examples are generated at every training step, adapting to the changing nature of the model. We propose (i) a new discrete attack, based on best-first search, and (ii) random sampling attacks that unlike prior work are not based on expensive search-based procedures. Surprisingly, we find that random sampling leads to impressive gains in robustness, outperforming the commonly-used offline augmentation, while leading to a speedup at training time of ~10x. Furthermore, online augmentation with search-based attacks justifies the higher training cost, significantly improving robustness on three datasets. Last, we show that our new attack substantially improves robustness compared to prior methods.
Debiasing Methods in Natural Language Understanding Make Bias More Accessible
Authors: Yonatan Belinkov Michael Mendelson
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Model robustness to bias is often determined by the generalization on carefully designed out-of-distribution datasets. Recent debiasing methods in natural language understanding (NLU) improve performance on such datasets by pressuring models into making unbiased predictions. An underlying assumption behind such methods is that this also leads to the discovery of more robust features in the model`s inner representations. We propose a general probing-based framework that allows for post-hoc interpretation of biases in language models, and use an information-theoretic approach to measure the extractability of certain biases from the model`s representations. We experiment with several NLU datasets and known biases, and show that, counter-intuitively, the more a language model is pushed towards a debiased regime, the more bias is actually encoded in its inner representations.
Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Language Models to Input Perturbations
Authors: Matthias Samwald Milad Moradi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: High-performance neural language models have obtained state-of-the-art results on a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, results for common benchmark datasets often do not reflect model reliability and robustness when applied to noisy, real-world data. In this study, we design and implement various types of character-level and word-level perturbation methods to simulate realistic scenarios in which input texts may be slightly noisy or different from the data distribution on which NLP systems were trained. Conducting comprehensive experiments on different NLP tasks, we investigate the ability of high-performance language models such as BERT, XLNet, RoBERTa, and ELMo in handling different types of input perturbations. The results suggest that language models are sensitive to input perturbations and their performance can decrease even when small changes are introduced. We highlight that models need to be further improved and that current benchmarks are not reflecting model robustness well. We argue that evaluations on perturbed inputs should routinely complement widely-used benchmarks in order to yield a more realistic understanding of NLP systems' robustness.
How much pretraining data do language models need to learn syntax?
Authors: Miguel Ballesteros, Leo Wanner Laura Pérez-Mayos
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Transformers-based pretrained language models achieve outstanding results in many well-known NLU benchmarks. However, while pretraining methods are very convenient, they are expensive in terms of time and resources. This calls for a study of the impact of pretraining data size on the knowledge of the models. We explore this impact on the syntactic capabilities of RoBERTa, using models trained on incremental sizes of raw text data. First, we use syntactic structural probes to determine whether models pretrained on more data encode a higher amount of syntactic information. Second, we perform a targeted syntactic evaluation to analyze the impact of pretraining data size on the syntactic generalization performance of the models. Third, we compare the performance of the different models on three downstream applications: part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and paraphrase identification. We complement our study with an analysis of the cost-benefit trade-off of training such models. Our experiments show that while models pretrained on more data encode more syntactic knowledge and perform better on downstream applications, they do not always offer a better performance across the different syntactic phenomena and come at a higher financial and environmental cost.
Sorting through the noise: Testing robustness of information processing in pre-trained language models
Authors: Allyson Ettinger Lalchand Pandia
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Pre-trained LMs have shown impressive performance on downstream NLP tasks, but we have yet to establish a clear understanding of their sophistication when it comes to processing, retaining, and applying information presented in their input. In this paper we tackle a component of this question by examining robustness of models' ability to deploy relevant context information in the face of distracting content. We present models with cloze tasks requiring use of critical context information, and introduce distracting content to test how robustly the models retain and use that critical information for prediction. We also systematically manipulate the nature of these distractors, to shed light on dynamics of models' use of contextual cues. We find that although models appear in simple contexts to make predictions based on understanding and applying relevant facts from prior context, the presence of distracting but irrelevant content has clear impact in confusing model predictions. In particular, models appear particularly susceptible to factors of semantic similarity and word position. The findings are consistent with the conclusion that LM predictions are driven in large part by superficial contextual cues, rather than by robust representations of context meaning.
Contrastive Explanations for Model Interpretability
Authors: Swabha Swayamdipta, Shauli Ravfogel, Yanai Elazar, Yejin Choi, Yoav Goldberg Alon Jacovi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Contrastive explanations clarify why an event occurred in contrast to another. They are inherently intuitive to humans to both produce and comprehend. We propose a method to produce contrastive explanations in the latent space, via a projection of the input representation, such that only the features that differentiate two potential decisions are captured. Our modification allows model behavior to consider only contrastive reasoning, and uncover which aspects of the input are useful for and against particular decisions. Our contrastive explanations can additionally answer for which label, and against which alternative label, is a given input feature useful. We produce contrastive explanations via both high-level abstract concept attribution and low-level input token/span attribution for two NLP classification benchmarks. Our findings demonstrate the ability of label-contrastive explanations to provide fine-grained interpretability of model decisions.
On the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks against Neural Text Classifier
Authors: Xiaoqing Zheng, Yi Zhou, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Kai-Wei Chang Liping Yuan
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where a small perturbation to an input alters the model prediction. In many cases, malicious inputs intentionally crafted for one model can fool another model. In this paper, we present the first study to systematically investigate the transferability of adversarial examples for text classification models and explore how various factors, including network architecture, tokenization scheme, word embedding, and model capacity, affect the transferability of adversarial examples. Based on these studies, we propose a genetic algorithm to find an ensemble of models that can be used to induce adversarial examples to fool almost all existing models. Such adversarial examples reflect the defects of the learning process and the data bias in the training set. Finally, we derive word replacement rules that can be used for model diagnostics from these adversarial examples.
Conditional probing: measuring usable information beyond a baseline
Authors: Kawin Ethayarajh, Percy Liang, Christopher Manning John Hewitt
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Probing experiments investigate the extent to which neural representations make properties---like part-of-speech---predictable. One suggests that a representation encodes a property if probing that representation produces higher accuracy than probing a baseline representation like non-contextual word embeddings. Instead of using baselines as a point of comparison, we`re interested in measuring information that is contained in the representation but not in the baseline. For example, current methods can detect when a representation is more useful than the word identity (a baseline) for predicting part-of-speech; however, they cannot detect when the representation is predictive of just the aspects of part-of-speech not explainable by the word identity. In this work, we extend a theory of usable information called V-information and propose conditional probing, which explicitly conditions on the information in the baseline. In a case study, we find that after conditioning on non-contextual word embeddings, properties like part-of-speech are accessible at deeper layers of a network than previously thought.
GFST: Gender-Filtered Self-Training for More Accurate Gender in Translation
Authors: Anna Currey, Prashant Mathur, Georgiana Dinu Prafulla Kumar Choubey
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Targeted evaluations have found that machine translation systems often output incorrect gender in translations, even when the gender is clear from context. Furthermore, these incorrectly gendered translations have the potential to reflect or amplify social biases. We propose gender-filtered self-training (GFST) to improve gender translation accuracy on unambiguously gendered inputs. Our GFST approach uses a source monolingual corpus and an initial model to generate gender-specific pseudo-parallel corpora which are then filtered and added to the training data. We evaluate GFST on translation from English into five languages, finding that it improves gender accuracy without damaging generic quality. We also show the viability of GFST on several experimental settings, including re-training from scratch, fine-tuning, controlling the gender balance of the data, forward translation, and back-translation.
“Wikily” Supervised Neural Translation Tailored to Cross-Lingual Tasks
Authors: Chris Callison-Burch, Derry Tanti Wijaya Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli
Published in: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a simple but effective approach for leveraging Wikipedia for neural machine translation as well as cross-lingual tasks of image captioning and dependency parsing without using any direct supervision from external parallel data or supervised models in the target language. We show that first sentences and titles of linked Wikipedia pages, as well as cross-lingual image captions, are strong signals for a seed parallel data to extract bilingual dictionaries and cross-lingual word embeddings for mining parallel text from Wikipedia. Our final model achieves high BLEU scores that are close to or sometimes higher than strong \textitsupervised baselines in low-resource languages; e.g. supervised BLEU of 4.0 versus 12.1 from our model in English-to-Kazakh. Moreover, we tailor our \textitwikily translation models to unsupervised image captioning, and cross-lingual dependency parser transfer. In image captioning, we train a multi-tasking machine translation and image captioning pipeline for Arabic and English from which the Arabic training data is a \textitwikily translation of the English captioning data. Our captioning results on Arabic are slightly \textitbetter than that of its supervised model. In dependency parsing, we translate a large amount of monolingual text, and use it as an artificial training data in an \textitannotation projection framework. We show that our model outperforms recent work on cross-lingual transfer of dependency parsers.