mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Towards Efficient Dialogue Pre-training with Transferable and Interpretable Latent Structure
Authors: Lemao Liu, Tingchen Fu, Shuming Shi, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan Xueliang Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: With the availability of massive general-domain dialogue data, pre-trained dialogue generation appears to be super appealing to transfer knowledge from the general domain to downstream applications. In most existing work, such transferable ability is mainly obtained by fitting a large model with hundreds of millions of parameters on massive data in an exhaustive way, leading to inefficient running and poor interpretability. This paper proposes a novel dialogue generation model with a latent structure that is easily transferable from the general domain to downstream tasks in a lightweight and transparent way. Experiments on two benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Thanks to the transferable latent structure, our model is able to yield better dialogue responses than four strong baselines in terms of both automatic and human evaluations, and our model with about 22% parameters particularly delivers a 5x speedup in running time compared with the strongest baseline. Moreover, the proposed model is explainable by interpreting the discrete latent variables.
An Empirical Revisiting of Linguistic Knowledge Fusion in Language Understanding Tasks
Authors: Tianyi Xiao, Lingpeng Kong, Yangqiu Song, Wilfred Ng Changlong Yu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Though linguistic knowledge emerges during large-scale language model pretraining, recent work attempt to explicitly incorporate human-defined linguistic priors into task-specific fine-tuning. Infusing language models with syntactic or semantic knowledge from parsers has shown improvements on many language understanding tasks. To further investigate the effectiveness of structural linguistic priors, we conduct empirical study of replacing parsed graphs or trees with trivial ones (rarely carrying linguistic knowledge e.g., balanced tree) for tasks in the GLUE benchmark. Encoding with trivial graphs achieves competitive or even better performance in fully-supervised and few-shot settings. It reveals that the gains might not be significantly attributed to explicit linguistic priors but rather to more feature interactions brought by fusion layers. Hence we call for attention to using trivial graphs as necessary baselines to design advanced knowledge fusion methods in the future.
Unsupervised Non-transferable Text Classification
Authors: Wei Lu Guangtao Zeng
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Training a good deep learning model requires substantial data and computing resources, which makes the resulting neural model a valuable intellectual property. To prevent the neural network from being undesirably exploited, non-transferable learning has been proposed to reduce the model generalization ability in specific target domains. However, existing approaches require labeled data for the target domain which can be difficult to obtain. Furthermore, they do not have the mechanism to still recover the model`s ability to access the target domain.In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised non-transferable learning method for the text classification task that does not require annotated target domain data. We further introduce a secret key component in our approach for recovering the access to the target domain, where we design both an explicit and an implicit method for doing so. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Adaptive Contrastive Learning on Multimodal Transformer for Review Helpfulness Prediction
Authors: Xiaobao Wu, Anh Tuan Luu, Zhen Hai, Lidong Bing Thong Nguyen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Modern Review Helpfulness Prediction systems are dependent upon multiple modalities, typically texts and images. Unfortunately, those contemporary approaches pay scarce attention to polish representations of cross-modal relations and tend to suffer from inferior optimization. This might cause harm to model`s predictions in numerous cases. To overcome the aforementioned issues, we propose Multi-modal Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction (MRHP) problem, concentrating on mutual information between input modalities to explicitly elaborate cross-modal relations. In addition, we introduce Adaptive Weighting scheme for our contrastive learning approach in order to increase flexibility in optimization. Lastly, we propose Multimodal Interaction module to address the unalignment nature of multimodal data, thereby assisting the model in producing more reasonable multimodal representations. Experimental results show that our method outperforms prior baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results on two publicly available benchmark datasets for MRHP problem.
Adaptive Token-level Cross-lingual Feature Mixing for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Kaiyu Huang, Jiuyi Li, Huan Liu, Jinsong Su, Degen Huang Junpeng Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation aims to translate multiple language pairs in a single model and has shown great success thanks to the knowledge transfer across languages with the shared parameters. Despite promising, this share-all paradigm suffers from insufficient ability to capture language-specific features. Currently, the common practice is to insert or search language-specific networks to balance the shared and specific features. However, those two types of features are not sufficient enough to model the complex commonality and divergence across languages, such as the locally shared features among similar languages, which leads to sub-optimal transfer, especially in massively multilingual translation. In this paper, we propose a novel token-level feature mixing method that enables the model to capture different features and dynamically determine the feature sharing across languages. Based on the observation that the tokens in the multilingual model are usually shared by different languages, we we insert a feature mixing layer into each Transformer sublayer and model each token representation as a mix of different features, with a proportion indicating its feature preference. In this way, we can perform fine-grained feature sharing and achieve better multilingual transfer. Experimental results on multilingual datasets show that our method outperforms various strong baselines and can be extended to zero-shot translation. Further analyses reveal that our method can capture different linguistic features and bridge the representation gap across languages.
A Dataset for Hyper-Relational Extraction and a Cube-Filling Approach
Authors: Lidong Bing, Sharifah Mahani Aljunied, Luo Si, Soujanya Poria Yew Ken Chia
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Relation extraction has the potential for large-scale knowledge graph construction, but current methods do not consider the qualifier attributes for each relation triplet, such as time, quantity or location. The qualifiers form hyper-relational facts which better capture the rich and complex knowledge graph structure. For example, the relation triplet (Leonard Parker, Educated At, Harvard University) can be factually enriched by including the qualifier (End Time, 1967). Hence, we propose the task of hyper-relational extraction to extract more specific and complete facts from text. To support the task, we construct HyperRED, a large-scale and general-purpose dataset. Existing models cannot perform hyper-relational extraction as it requires a model to consider the interaction between three entities. Hence, we propose CubeRE, a cube-filling model inspired by table-filling approaches and explicitly considers the interaction between relation triplets and qualifiers. To improve model scalability and reduce negative class imbalance, we further propose a cube-pruning method. Our experiments show that CubeRE outperforms strong baselines and reveal possible directions for future research. Our code and data are available at github.com/declare-lab/HyperRED.
Low-resource Neural Machine Translation with Cross-modal Alignment
Authors: Qingkai Fang, Yang Feng Zhe Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: How to achieve neural machine translation with limited parallel data? Existing techniques often rely on large-scale monolingual corpus, which is impractical for some low-resource languages. In this paper, we turn to connect several low-resource languages to a particular high-resource one by additional visual modality. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal contrastive learning method to learn a shared space for all languages, where both a coarse-grained sentence-level objective and a fine-grained token-level one are introduced. Experimental results and further analysis show that our method can effectively learn the cross-modal and cross-lingual alignment with a small amount of image-text pairs, and achieves significant improvements over the text-only baseline under both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios.
Prompt-based Distribution Alignment for Domain Generalization in Text Classification
Authors: Yue Zhang Chen Jia
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Prompt-based learning (a.k.a. prompting) achieves high performance by bridging the gap between the objectives of language modeling and downstream tasks. Domain generalization ability can be improved by prompting since classification across different domains can be unified into the prediction of the same set of label words. The remaining challenge for domain generalization by prompting comes from discrepancies between the data distribution of different domains. To improve domain generalization with prompting, we learn distributional invariance across source domains via two alignment regularization loss functions. The first is vocabulary distribution alignment, which uses a Kullback-Leibler divergence regularization on source-domain vocabulary distributions. The second is feature distribution alignment, which uses a novel adversarial training strategy to learn domain invariant representation across source domains. Experiments on sentiment analysis and natural language inference show the effectiveness of our method and achieve state-of-the-art results on six datasets.
Two is Better than Many? Binary Classification as an Effective Approach to Multi-Choice Question Answering
Authors: Navonil Majumder, Rada Mihalcea, Soujanya Poria Deepanway Ghosal
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose a simple refactoring of multi-choice question answering (MCQA) tasks as a series of binary classifications. The MCQA task is generally performed by scoring each (question, answer) pair normalized over all the pairs, and then selecting the answer from the pair that yield the highest score. For n answer choices, this is equivalent to an n-class classification setup where only one class (true answer) is correct. We instead show that classifying (question, true answer) as positive instances and (question, false answer) as negative instances is significantly more effective across various models and datasets. We show the efficacy of our proposed approach in different tasks -- abductive reasoning, commonsense question answering, science question answering, and sentence completion. Our DeBERTa binary classification model reaches the top or close to the top performance on public leaderboards for these tasks. The source code of the proposed approach is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/TEAM.
HEGEL: Hypergraph Transformer for Long Document Summarization
Authors: Xiao Liu, Jiawei Zhang Haopeng Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Extractive summarization for long documents is challenging due to the extended structured input context. The long-distance sentence dependency hinders cross-sentence relations modeling, the critical step of extractive summarization. This paper proposes HEGEL, a hypergraph neural network for long document summarization by capturing high-order cross-sentence relations. HEGEL updates and learns effective sentence representations with hypergraph transformer layers and fuses different types of sentence dependencies, including latent topics, keywords coreference, and section structure. We validate HEGEL by conducting extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of HEGEL.
Adapting a Language Model While Preserving its General Knowledge
Authors: Yijia Shao, Haowei Lin, Hu Xu, Lei Shu, Bing Liu Zixuan Ke
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Domain-adaptive pre-training (or DA-training for short), also known as post-training, aimsto train a pre-trained general-purpose language model (LM) using an unlabeled corpus of aparticular domain to adapt the LM so that end-tasks in the domain can give improved performances. However, existing DA-training methods are in some sense blind as they do not explicitly identify what knowledge in the LM should be preserved and what should be changed by the domain corpus. This paper shows that the existing methods are suboptimal and proposes a novel method to perform a more informed adaptation of the knowledge in the LM by (1) soft-masking the attention heads based on their importance to best preserve the general knowledge in the LM and (2) contrasting the representations of the general and the full (both general and domain knowledge) to learn an integrated representation with both general and domain-specific knowledge. Experimental results will demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Human Guided Exploitation of Interpretable Attention Patterns in Summarization and Topic Segmentation
Authors: Wen Xiao, Linzi Xing, Lanjun Wang, Gabriel Murray, Giuseppe Carenini Raymond Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The multi-head self-attention mechanism of the transformer model has been thoroughly investigated recently. In one vein of study, researchers are interested in understanding why and how transformers work. In another vein, researchers propose new attention augmentation methods to make transformers more accurate, efficient and interpretable. In this paper, we combine these two lines of research in a human-in-the-loop pipeline to first discover important task-specific attention patterns. Then those patterns are injected, not only to smaller models, but also to the original model. The benefits of our pipeline and discovered patterns are demonstrated in two case studies with extractive summarization and topic segmentation. After discovering interpretable patterns in BERT-based models fine-tuned for the two downstream tasks, experiments indicate that when we inject the patterns into attention heads, the models show considerable improvements in accuracy and efficiency.
Continual Training of Language Models for Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Haowei Lin, Yijia Shao, Hu Xu, Lei Shu, Bing Liu Zixuan Ke
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent work on applying large language models (LMs) achieves impressive performance in many NLP applications. Adapting or posttraining an LM using an unlabeled domain corpus can produce even better performance for end-tasks in the domain. This paper proposes the problem of continually extending an LM by incrementally post-train the LM with a sequence of unlabeled domain corpora to expand its knowledge without forgetting its previous skills. The goal is to improve the few-shot end-task learning in these domains. The resulting system is called CPT (Continual PostTraining), which to our knowledge, is the first continual post-training system. Experimental results verify its effectiveness.
Dictionary-Assisted Supervised Contrastive Learning
Authors: Richard Bonneau, Joshua A. Tucker, Jonathan Nagler Patrick Y. Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Text analysis in the social sciences often involves using specialized dictionaries to reason with abstract concepts, such as perceptions about the economy or abuse on social media. These dictionaries allow researchers to impart domain knowledge and note subtle usages of words relating to a concept(s) of interest. We introduce the dictionary-assisted supervised contrastive learning (DASCL) objective, allowing researchers to leverage specialized dictionaries when fine-tuning pretrained language models. The text is first keyword simplified: a common, fixed token replaces any word in the corpus that appears in the dictionary(ies) relevant to the concept of interest. During fine-tuning, a supervised contrastive objective draws closer the embeddings of the original and keyword-simplified texts of the same class while pushing further apart the embeddings of different classes. The keyword-simplified texts of the same class are more textually similar than their original text counterparts, which additionally draws the embeddings of the same class closer together. Combining DASCL and cross-entropy improves classification performance metrics in few-shot learning settings and social science applications compared to using cross-entropy alone and alternative contrastive and data augmentation methods.
Fine-Tuning Pre-trained Transformers into Decaying Fast Weights
Authors: Huanru Henry Mao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Autoregressive Transformers are strong language models but incur O(T) complexity during per-token generation due to the self-attention mechanism. Recent work proposes kernel-based methods to approximate causal self-attention by replacing it with recurrent formulations with various update rules and feature maps to achieve O(1) time and memory complexity. We explore these approaches and find that they are unnecessarily complex, and propose a simple alternative - decaying fast weights - that runs fast on GPU, outperforms prior methods, and retains 99% of attention`s performance for GPT-2. We also show competitive performance on WikiText-103 against more complex attention substitutes.
PRO-CS : An Instance-Based Prompt Composition Technique for Code-Switched Tasks
Authors: Suraj Tripathi, Sumit Agarwal, Teruko Mitamura, Eric Nyberg Srijan Bansal
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Code-switched (CS) data is ubiquitous in today`s globalized world, but the dearth of annotated datasets in code-switching poses a significant challenge for learning diverse tasks across different language pairs. Parameter-efficient prompt-tuning approaches conditioned on frozen language models have shown promise for transfer learning in limited-resource setups. In this paper, we propose a novel instance-based prompt composition technique, PRO-CS, for CS tasks that combine language and task knowledge. We compare our approach with prompt-tuning and fine-tuning for code-switched tasks on 10 datasets across 4 language pairs. Our model outperforms the prompt-tuning approach by significant margins across all datasets and outperforms or remains at par with fine-tuning by using just 0.18% of total parameters. We also achieve competitive results when compared with the fine-tuned model in the low-resource cross-lingual and cross-task setting, indicating the effectiveness of our approach to incorporate new code-switched tasks.
SentBS: Sentence-level Beam Search for Controllable Summarization
Authors: Liying Cheng, Lidong Bing, Yang You, Luo Si Chenhui Shen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: A wide range of control perspectives have been explored in controllable text generation. Structure-controlled summarization is recently proposed as a useful and interesting research direction. However, current structure-controlling methods have limited effectiveness in enforcing the desired structure. To address this limitation, we propose a sentence-level beam search generation method (SentBS), where evaluation is conducted throughout the generation process to select suitable sentences for subsequent generations. We experiment with different combinations of decoding methods to be used as sub-components by SentBS and evaluate results on the structure-controlled dataset MReD. Experiments show that all explored combinations for SentBS can improve the agreement between the generated text and the desired structure, with the best method significantly reducing the structural discrepancies suffered by the existing model, by approximately 68%.
A Fine-grained Chinese Software Privacy Policy Dataset for Sequence Labeling and Regulation Compliant Identification
Authors: Le Yu, Shiyao Zhou, Jing Li, Xiapu Luo, Yat Fei Aemon Chiu, Yutong Liu Kaifa Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Privacy protection raises great attention on both legal levels and user awareness. To protect user privacy, countries enact laws and regulations requiring software privacy policies to regulate their behavior. However, privacy policies are written in professional languages with many legal terms and software jargon that prevent users from understanding and even reading them. It is necessary and urgent to use NLP techniques to analyze privacy policies. However, existing datasets ignore law requirements and are limited to English. In this paper, we construct the first Chinese privacy policy dataset, namely CA4P-483, to facilitate the sequence labeling tasks and regulation compliance identification between privacy policies and software. Our dataset includes 483 Chinese Android application privacy policies, over 11K sentences, and 52K fine-grained annotations. We evaluate families of robust and representative baseline models on our dataset. Based on baseline performance, we provide findings and potential research directions on our dataset. Finally, we investigate the potential applications of CA4P-483 combing regulation requirements and program analysis.
Saving Dense Retriever from Shortcut Dependency in Conversational Search
Authors: Gangwoo Kim Sungdong Kim
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Conversational search (CS) needs a holistic understanding of conversational inputs to retrieve relevant passages. In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of a \textitretrieval shortcut in CS, which causes models to retrieve passages solely relying on partial history while disregarding the latest question. With in-depth analysis, we first show that naively trained dense retrievers heavily exploit the shortcut and hence perform poorly when asked to answer history-independent questions. To build more robust models against shortcut dependency, we explore various hard negative mining strategies. Experimental results show that training with the model-based hard negatives effectively mitigates the dependency on the shortcut, significantly improving dense retrievers on recent CS benchmarks. In particular, our retriever outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model by 11.0 in Recall@10 on QReCC.
Graph-Induced Transformers for Efficient Multi-Hop Question Answering
Authors: Jeonghwan Kim, Junmo Kang, Sung-Hyon Myaeng Giwon Hong
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: A graph is a suitable data structure to represent the structural information of text. Recently, multi-hop question answering (MHQA) tasks, which require inter-paragraph/sentence linkages, have come to exploit such properties of a graph. Previous approaches to MHQA relied on leveraging the graph information along with the pre-trained language model (PLM) encoders. However, this trend exhibits the following drawbacks: (i) sample inefficiency while training in a low-resource setting; (ii) lack of reusability due to changes in the model structure or input. Our work proposes the Graph-Induced Transformer (GIT) that applies graph-derived attention patterns directly into a PLM, without the need to employ external graph modules. GIT can leverage the useful inductive bias of graphs while retaining the unperturbed Transformer structure and parameters. Our experiments on HotpotQA successfully demonstrate both the sample efficient characteristic of GIT and its capacity to replace the graph modules while preserving model performance.
DiscoSense: Commonsense Reasoning with Discourse Connectives
Authors: Vincent Ng Prajjwal Bhargava
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We present DiscoSense, a benchmark for commonsense reasoning via understanding a wide variety of discourse connectives. We generate compelling distractors in DiscoSense using Conditional Adversarial Filtering, an extension of Adversarial Filtering that employs conditional generation. We show that state-of-the-art pre-trained language models struggle to perform well on DiscoSense, which makes this dataset ideal for evaluating next-generation commonsense reasoning systems.
Boosting Document-Level Relation Extraction by Mining and Injecting Logical Rules
Authors: Shasha Mo, Jianwei Niu Shengda Fan
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims at extracting relations of all entity pairs in a document. A key challenge to DocRE lies in the complex interdependency between the relations of entity pairs. Unlike most prior efforts focusing on implicitly powerful representations, the recently proposed LogiRE (Ru et al., 2021) explicitly captures the interdependency by learning logical rules. However, LogiRE requires extra parameterized modules to reason merely after training backbones, and this disjointed optimization of backbones and extra modules may lead to sub-optimal results. In this paper, we propose MILR, a logic enhanced framework that boosts DocRE by Mining and Injecting Logical Rules. MILR first mines logical rules from annotations based on frequencies. Then in training, consistency regularizationis leveraged as an auxiliary loss to penalize instances that violate mined rules. Finally, MILR infers from a global perspective based on integer programming. Compared with LogiRE, MILR does not introduce extra parameters and injects logical rules during both training and inference. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that MILR not only improves the relation extraction performance (1.1%-3.8% F1) but also makes predictions more logically consistent (over 4.5% Logic). More importantly, MILR also consistently outperforms LogiRE on both counts. Code is available at https://github.com/XingYing-stack/MILR.
MOCHA: A Multi-Task Training Approach for Coherent Text Generation from Cognitive Perspective
Authors: Hou Pong Chan, Lifu Huang Zhe Hu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Teaching neural models to generate narrative coherent texts is a critical problem. Recent pre-trained language models have achieved promising results, but there is still a gap between human written texts and machine-generated outputs. In this work, we propose a novel multi-task training strategy for long text generation grounded on the cognitive theory of writing, which empowers the model to learn essential subskills needed for writing including planning and reviewing besides end-to-end generation. We extensively evaluate our model on three open-ended generation tasks including story generation, news article writing and argument generation. Experiments show that our model achieves better results on both few-shot and fully-supervised settings than strong baselines, and human evaluations confirm that our model can generate more coherent outputs.
Variational Autoencoder with Disentanglement Priors for Low-Resource Task-Specific Natural Language Generation
Authors: Lizhen Qu, Qiongkai Xu, Tongtong Wu, Tianyang Zhan, Gholamreza Haffari Zhuang Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a variational autoencoder with disentanglement priors, VAE-Dprior, for task-specific natural language generation with none or a handful of task-specific labeled examples. In order to tackle compositional generalization across tasks, our model performs disentangled representation learning by introducing a conditional prior for the latent content space and another conditional prior for the latent label space. Both types of priors satisfy a novel property called $ε$-disentangled. We show both empirically and theoretically that the novel priors can disentangle representations even without specific regularizations as in the prior work. The content prior enables directly sampling diverse content representations from the content space learned from the seen tasks, and fuse them with the representations of novel tasks for generating semantically diverse texts in the low-resource settings. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our model over competitive baselines in terms of i) data augmentation in continuous zero/few-shot learning, and ii) text style transfer in the few-shot setting.
CISLR: Corpus for Indian Sign Language Recognition
Authors: Ashwani Bhat, Pradeep S, Priya Gole, Shashwat Gupta, Shreyansh Agarwal, Ashutosh Modi Abhinav Joshi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Indian Sign Language, though used by a diverse community, still lacks well-annotated resources for developing systems that would enable sign language processing. In recent years researchers have actively worked for sign languages like American Sign Languages, however, Indian Sign language is still far from data-driven tasks like machine translation. To address this gap, in this paper, we introduce a new dataset CISLR (Corpus for Indian Sign Language Recognition) for word-level recognition in Indian Sign Language using videos. The corpus has a large vocabulary of around 4700 words covering different topics and domains. Further, we propose a baseline model for word recognition from sign language videos. To handle the low resource problem in the Indian Sign Language, the proposed model consists of a prototype-based one-shot learner that leverages resource rich American Sign Language to learn generalized features for improving predictions in Indian Sign Language. Our experiments show that gesture features learned in another sign language can help perform one-shot predictions in CISLR.
Mask the Correct Tokens: An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Error Correction
Authors: Yichong Leng, Xu Tan, Siliang Tang, Yuan Zhang, Wenjie Liu, Edward Lin Kai Shen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Text error correction aims to correct the errors in text sequences such as those typed by humans or generated by speech recognition models.Previous error correction methods usually take the source (incorrect) sentence as encoder input and generate the target (correct) sentence through the decoder. Since the error rate of the incorrect sentence is usually low (e.g., 10%), the correction model can only learn to correct on limited error tokens but trivially copy on most tokens (correct tokens), which harms the effective training of error correction. In this paper, we argue that the correct tokens should be better utilized to facilitate effective training and then propose a simple yet effective masking strategy to achieve this goal.Specifically, we randomly mask out a part of the correct tokens in the source sentence and let the model learn to not only correct the original error tokens but also predict the masked tokens based on their context information. Our method enjoys several advantages: 1) it alleviates trivial copy; 2) it leverages effective training signals from correct tokens; 3) it is a plug-and-play module and can be applied to different models and tasks. Experiments on spelling error correction and speech recognition error correction on Mandarin datasets and grammar error correction on English datasets with both autoregressive and non-autoregressive generation models show that our method improves the correctionaccuracy consistently.
AMAL: Meta Knowledge-Driven Few-Shot Adapter Learning
Authors: Tae Young Jang S. K. Hong
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: NLP has advanced greatly together with the proliferation of Transformer-based pre-trained language models. To adapt to a downstream task, the pre-trained language models need to be fine-tuned with a sufficient supply of annotated examples. In recent years, Adapter-based fine-tuning methods have expanded the applicability of pre-trained language models by substantially lowering the required amount of annotated examples. However, existing Adapter-based methods still fail to yield meaningful results in the few-shot regime where only a few annotated examples are provided. In this study, we present a meta-learning-driven low-rank adapter pooling method, called AMAL, for leveraging pre-trained language models even with just a few data points. We evaluate our method on five text classification benchmark datasets. The results show that AMAL significantly outperforms previous few-shot learning methods and achieves a new state-of-the-art.
Discourse Context Predictability Effects in Hindi Word Order
Authors: Marten van Schijndel, Sumeet Agarwal, Rajakrishnan Rajkumar Sidharth Ranjan
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We test the hypothesis that discourse predictability influences Hindi syntactic choice. While prior work has shown that a number of factors (e.g., information status, dependency length, and syntactic surprisal) influence Hindi word order preferences, the role of discourse predictability is underexplored in the literature. Inspired by prior work on syntactic priming, we investigate how the words and syntactic structures in a sentence influence the word order of the following sentences. Specifically, we extract sentences from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB), permute the preverbal constituents of those sentences, and build a classifier to predict which sentences actually occurred in the corpus against artificially generated distractors. The classifier uses a number of discourse-based features and cognitive features to make its predictions, including dependency length, surprisal, and information status. We find that information status and LSTM-based discourse predictability influence word order choices, especially for non-canonical object-fronted orders. We conclude by situating our results within the broader syntactic priming literature.
“Covid vaccine is against Covid but Oxford vaccine is made at Oxford!” Semantic Interpretation of Proper Noun Compounds
Authors: Gabriel Stanovsky, Mausam - Keshav Kolluru
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Proper noun compounds, e.g., “Covid vaccine”, convey information in a succinct manner (a “Covid vaccine” is a “vaccine that immunizes against the Covid disease”). These are commonly used in short-form domains, such as news headlines, but are largely ignored in information-seeking applications. To address this limitation, we release a new manually annotated dataset, ProNCI, consisting of 22.5K proper noun compounds along with their free-form semantic interpretations. ProNCI is 60 times larger than prior noun compound datasets and also includes non-compositional examples, which have not been previously explored. We experiment with various neural models for automatically generating the semantic interpretations from proper noun compounds, ranging from few-shot prompting to supervised learning, with varying degrees of knowledge about the constituent nouns. We find that adding targeted knowledge, particularly about the common noun, results in performance gains of upto 2.8%. Finally, we integrate our model generated interpretations with an existing Open IE system and observe an 7.5% increase in yield at a precision of 85%. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/dair-iitd/pronci.
Context Limitations Make Neural Language Models More Human-Like
Authors: Yohei Oseki, Ana Brassard, Kentaro Inui Tatsuki Kuribayashi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Language models (LMs) have been used in cognitive modeling as well as engineering studies---they compute information-theoretic complexity metrics that simulate humans' cognitive load during reading.This study highlights a limitation of modern neural LMs as the model of choice for this purpose: there is a discrepancy between their context access capacities and that of humans.Our results showed that constraining the LMs' context access improved their simulation of human reading behavior.We also showed that LM-human gaps in context access were associated with specific syntactic constructions; incorporating syntactic biases into LMs' context access might enhance their cognitive plausibility.
A Generative Model for End-to-End Argument Mining with Reconstructed Positional Encoding and Constrained Pointer Mechanism
Authors: Yuhang He, Yang Sun, Bin Liang, Jiachen Du, Bing Qin, Min Yang, Ruifeng Xu Jianzhu Bao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Argument mining (AM) is a challenging task as it requires recognizing the complex argumentation structures involving multiple subtasks.To handle all subtasks of AM in an end-to-end fashion, previous works generally transform AM into a dependency parsing task.However, such methods largely require complex pre- and post-processing to realize the task transformation.In this paper, we investigate the end-to-end AM task from a novel perspective by proposing a generative framework, in which the expected outputs of AM are framed as a simple target sequence. Then, we employ a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language model with a constrained pointer mechanism (CPM) to model the clues for all the subtasks of AM in the light of the target sequence. Furthermore, we devise a reconstructed positional encoding (RPE) to alleviate the order biases induced by the autoregressive generation paradigm.Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two AM benchmarks.
Reflect, Not Reflex: Inference-Based Common Ground Improves Dialogue Response Quality
Authors: Hyundong Cho, Pegah Jandaghi, Dong-Ho Lee, Bill Yuchen Lin, Jay Pujara, Xiang Ren Pei Zhou
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Human communication relies on common ground (CG), the mutual knowledge and beliefs shared by participants, to produce coherent and interesting conversations. In this paper, we demonstrate that current response generation (RG) models produce generic and dull responses in dialogues because they act reflexively, failing to explicitly model CG, both due to the lack of CG in training data and the standard RG training procedure. We introduce Reflect, a dataset that annotates dialogues with explicit CG (materialized as inferences approximating shared knowledge and beliefs) and solicits 9k diverse human-generated responses each following one common ground. Using Reflect, we showcase the limitations of current dialogue data and RG models: less than half of the responses in current data is rated as high quality (sensible, specific, and interesting) and models trained using this data have even lower quality, while most Reflect responses are judged high quality. Next, we analyze whether CG can help models produce better quality responses by using Reflect CG to guide RG models. Surprisingly, we find that simply prompting GPT3 to “think” about CG generates 30% more quality responses, showing promising benefits to integrating CG into the RG process.
FlowEval: A Consensus-Based Dialogue Evaluation Framework Using Segment Act Flows
Authors: Yanyang Li, Wanyu Du, Yangfeng Ji, Dong Yu, Michael Lyu, Liwei Wang Jianqiao Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Despite recent progress in open-domain dialogue evaluation, how to develop automatic metrics remains an open problem. We explore the potential of dialogue evaluation featuring dialog act information, which was hardly explicitly modeled in previous methods. However, defined at the utterance level in general, dialog act is of coarse granularity, as an utterance can contain multiple segments possessing different functions. Hence, we propose segment act, an extension of dialog act from utterance level to segment level, and crowdsource a large-scale dataset for it. To utilize segment act flows, sequences of segment acts, for evaluation, we develop the first consensus-based dialogue evaluation framework, FlowEval. This framework provides a reference-free approach for dialog evaluation by finding pseudo-references. Extensive experiments against strong baselines on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and other desirable characteristics of our FlowEval, pointing out a potential path for better dialogue evaluation.
FaD-VLP: Fashion Vision-and-Language Pre-training towards Unified Retrieval and Captioning
Authors: Licheng Yu, Mengjiao Wang, Animesh Sinha, Wenwen Jiang, Tao Xiang, Ning Zhang Suvir Mirchandani
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Multimodal tasks in the fashion domain have significant potential for e-commerce, but involve challenging vision-and-language learning problems---e.g., retrieving a fashion item given a reference image plus text feedback from a user. Prior works on multimodal fashion tasks have either been limited by the data in individual benchmarks, or have leveraged generic vision-and-language pre-training but have not taken advantage of the characteristics of fashion data. Additionally, these works have mainly been restricted to multimodal understanding tasks. To address these gaps, we make two key contributions. First, we propose a novel fashion-specific pre-training framework based on weakly-supervised triplets constructed from fashion image-text pairs. We show the triplet-based tasks are an effective addition to standard multimodal pre-training tasks. Second, we propose a flexible decoder-based model architecture capable of both fashion retrieval and captioning tasks. Together, our model design and pre-training approach are competitive on a diverse set of fashion tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, image retrieval with text feedback, image captioning, relative image captioning, and multimodal categorization.
MM-Align: Learning Optimal Transport-based Alignment Dynamics for Fast and Accurate Inference on Missing Modality Sequences
Authors: Hui Chen, Min-Yen Kan, Soujanya Poria Wei Han
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Existing multimodal tasks mostly target at the complete input modality setting, i.e., each modality is either complete or completely missing in both training and test sets. However, the randomly missing situations have still been underexplored. In this paper, we present a novel approach named MM-Align to address the missing-modality inference problem. Concretely, we propose 1) an alignment dynamics learning module based on the theory of optimal transport (OT) for missing data imputation; 2) a denoising training algorithm to enhance the quality of imputation as well as the accuracy of model predictions. Compared with previous generative methods which devote to restoring the missing inputs, MM-Align learns to capture and imitate the alignment dynamics between modality sequences. Results of comprehensive experiments on two multimodal tasks empirically demonstrate that our method can perform more accurate and faster inference and alleviate the overfitting issue under different missing conditions.
Evaluating the Knowledge Dependency of Questions
Authors: Yoonseok Yang, Hangyeol Yu, Seunghyun Lee, Myeongho Jeong, Juneyoung Park, Jamin Shin, Minsam Kim, Seungtaek Choi Hyeongdon Moon
Published in: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The automatic generation of Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) has the potential to reduce the time educators spend on student assessment significantly. However, existing evaluation metrics for MCQ generation, such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR, focus on the n-gram based similarity of the generated MCQ to the gold sample in the dataset and disregard their educational value.They fail to evaluate the MCQ`s ability to assess the student`s knowledge of the corresponding target fact. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel automatic evaluation metric, coined Knowledge Dependent Answerability (KDA), which measures the MCQ`s answerability given knowledge of the target fact. Specifically, we first show how to measure KDA based on student responses from a human survey.Then, we propose two automatic evaluation metrics, KDA_disc and KDA_cont, that approximate KDA by leveraging pre-trained language models to imitate students' problem-solving behavior.Through our human studies, we show that KDA_disc and KDA_soft have strong correlations with both (1) KDA and (2) usability in an actual classroom setting, labeled by experts. Furthermore, when combined with n-gram based similarity metrics, KDA_disc and KDA_cont are shown to have a strong predictive power for various expert-labeled MCQ quality measures.