mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
TSGP: Two-Stage Generative Prompting for Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering
Authors: Yu Zhang, Le Qi, Qi Shi Yueqing Sun
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Without training on labeled task data, unsupervised commonsense question answering seems challenging since it requires commonsense knowledge beyond the context of questions. Previous methods typically retrieved from traditional knowledge bases or used pre-trained language models (PrLMs) to generate fixed types of knowledge, which have poor generalization ability.In this paper, we aim to address the above limitation by leveraging the implicit knowledge stored in PrLMs and propose a two-stage prompt-based unsupervised commonsense question answering framework (TSGP). We first use knowledge generation prompts to generate the knowledge required for questions with unlimited types and possible candidate answers independent of specified choices. Then, we further utilize answer generation prompts to generate possible candidate answers independent of specified choices. Experimental results and analysis on three different commonsense reasoning tasks, CommonsenseQA, OpenBookQA, and SocialIQA, demonstrate that TSGP significantly improves the reasoning ability of language models in unsupervised settings.
Subword-Delimited Downsampling for Better Character-Level Translation
Authors: Antonio Toral, Gertjan van Noord Lukas Edman
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Subword-level models have been the dominant paradigm in NLP. However, character-level models have the benefit of seeing each character individually, providing the model with more detailed information that ultimately could lead to better models. Recent works have shown character-level models to be competitive with subword models, but costly in terms of time and computation. Character-level models with a downsampling component alleviate this, but at the cost of quality, particularly for machine translation. This work analyzes the problems of previous downsampling methods and introduces a novel downsampling method which is informed by subwords.This new downsampling method not only outperforms existing downsampling methods, showing that downsampling characters can be done without sacrificing quality, but also leads to promising performance compared to subword models for translation.
Autoregressive Structured Prediction with Language Models
Authors: Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Nicholas Monath, Ryan Cotterell, Mrinmaya Sachan Tianyu Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in NLP towards using pretrained language models (PLM) for a wide range of tasks. However, there are many difficult design decisions to represent structures (e.g. tagged text, coreference chains) in a way such that they can be captured by PLMs. Prior work on structured prediction with PLMs typically flattens the structured output into a sequence, which limits the quality of structural information being learned and leads to inferior performance compared to classic discriminative models. In this work, we describe an approach to model structures as sequences of actions in an autoregressive manner with PLMs, allowing in-structure dependencies to be learned without any loss. Our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art on all the structured prediction tasks we looked at, namely, named entity recognition, end-to-end relation extraction, and coreference resolution.
XDoc: Unified Pre-training for Cross-Format Document Understanding
Authors: Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Cha Zhang, Furu Wei Jingye Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: The surge of pre-training has witnessed the rapid development of document understanding recently. Pre-training and fine-tuning framework has been effectively used to tackle texts in various formats, including plain texts, document texts, and web texts. Despite achieving promising performance, existing pre-trained models usually target one specific document format at one time, making it difficult to combine knowledge from multiple document formats. To address this, we propose XDoc, a unified pre-trained model which deals with different document formats in a single model. For parameter efficiency, we share backbone parameters for different formats such as the word embedding layer and the Transformer layers. Meanwhile, we introduce adaptive layers with lightweight parameters to enhance the distinction across different formats. Experimental results have demonstrated that with only 36.7% parameters, XDoc achieves comparable or even better performance on a variety of downstream tasks compared with the individual pre-trained models, which is cost effective for real-world deployment. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at r̆lhttps://aka.ms/xdoc.
A Few More Examples May Be Worth Billions of Parameters
Authors: Patrick Lewis, Sebastian Riedel, Omer Levy Yuval Kirstain
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We investigate the dynamics of increasing the number of model parameters versus the number of labeled examples across a wide variety of tasks. Our exploration reveals that while scaling parameters consistently yields performance improvements, the contribution of additional examples highly depends on the task`s format. Specifically, in open question answering tasks, enlarging the training set does not improve performance. In contrast, classification, extractive question answering, and multiple choice tasks benefit so much from additional examples that collecting a few hundred examples is often “worth” billions of parameters. We hypothesize that unlike open question answering, which involves recalling specific information, solving strategies for tasks with a more restricted output space transfer across examples, and can therefore be learned with small amounts of labeled data.
MCP: Self-supervised Pre-training for Personalized Chatbots with Multi-level Contrastive Sampling
Authors: Zhicheng Dou, Yutao Zhu, Zhengyi Ma Zhaoheng Huang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Personalized chatbots focus on endowing the chatbots with a consistent personality to behave like real users and further act as personal assistants. Previous studies have explored generating implicit user profiles from the user`s dialogue history for building personalized chatbots. However, these studies only use the response generation loss to train the entire model, thus it is prone to suffer from the problem of data sparsity. Besides, they overemphasize the final generated response`s quality while ignoring the correlations and fusions between the user`s dialogue history, leading to rough data representations and performance degradation. To tackle these problems, we propose a self-supervised learning framework MCP for capturing better representations from users' dialogue history for personalized chatbots. Specifically, we apply contrastive sampling methods to leverage the supervised signals hidden in user dialog history, and generate the pre-training samples for enhancing the model. We design three pre-training tasks based on three types of contrastive pairs from user dialogue history, namely response pairs, sequence augmentation pairs, and user pairs. We pre-train the utterance encoder and the history encoder towards the contrastive objectives and use these pre-trained encoders for generating user profiles while personalized response generation. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show a significant improvement in our proposed model MCP compared with the existing methods.
ExpertPLM: Pre-training Expert Representation for Expert Finding
Authors: Hongtao Liu Qiyao Peng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Expert Finding is an important task in Community Question Answering (CQA) platforms, which could help route questions to potential users to answer. The key is to learn representations of experts based on their historical answered questions accurately. In this paper, inspired by the strong text understanding ability of Pretrained Language modelings (PLMs), we propose a pre-training and fine-tuning expert finding framework. The core is that we design an expert-level pre-training paradigm, that effectively integrates expert interest and expertise simultaneously. Specifically different from the typical corpus-level pre-training, we treat each expert as the basic pre-training unit including all the historical answered question titles of the expert, which could fully indicate the expert interests for questions. Besides, we integrate the vote score information along with each answer of the expert into the pre-training phrase to model the expert ability explicitly. Finally, we propose a novel reputation-augmented Masked Language Model (MLM) pre-training strategy to capture the expert reputation information. In this way, our method could learn expert representation comprehensively, which then will be adopted and fine-tuned in the down-streaming expert-finding task. Extensive experimental results on six real-world CQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
You Truly Understand What I Need : Intellectual and Friendly Dialog Agents grounding Persona and Knowledge
Authors: Myugnhoon Kang, Yuna Hur, Seung Won Jeong, Jinsung Kim, Yoonna Jang, Dongyub Lee, Hyesung Ji, DongHoon Shin, Seungryong Kim, Heuiseok Lim Jungwoo Lim
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: To build a conversational agent that interacts fluently with humans, previous studies blend knowledge or personal profile into the pre-trained language model. However, the model that considers knowledge and persona at the same time is still limited, leading to hallucination and a passive way of using personas. We propose an effective dialogue agent that grounds external knowledge and persona simultaneously. The agent selects the proper knowledge and persona to use for generating the answers with our candidate scoring implemented with a poly-encoder. Then, our model generates the utterance with lesser hallucination and more engagingness utilizing retrieval augmented generation with knowledge-persona enhanced query. We conduct experiments on the persona-knowledge chat and achieve state-of-the-art performance in grounding and generation tasks on the automatic metrics. Moreover, we validate the answers from the models regarding hallucination and engagingness through human evaluation and qualitative results. We show our retriever`s effectiveness in extracting relevant documents compared to the other previous retrievers, along with the comparison of multiple candidate scoring methods. Code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/dlawjddn803/INFO
Faithful to the Document or to the World? Mitigating Hallucinations via Entity-Linked Knowledge in Abstractive Summarization
Authors: John Wieting, Pat Verga Yue Dong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Existing abstractive summarization systems are hampered by content hallucinations in which models generate text that is not directly inferable from the source alone. Annotations from prior work have shown that some of these hallucinations, while being \textquoteleftunfaithful' to the source, are nonetheless factual. Our analysis in this paper suggests that these factual hallucinations occur as a result of the prevalence of factual yet unfaithful entities in summarization datasets. We find that these entities are not aberrations, but instead examples of additional world knowledge being readily used to latently connect entities and concepts -- in this case connecting entities in the source document to those in the target summary. In our analysis and experiments, we demonstrate that connecting entities to an external knowledge base can lend provenance to many of these unfaithful yet factual entities, and further, this knowledge can be used to improve the factuality of summaries without simply making them more extractive.
RL with KL penalties is better viewed as Bayesian inference
Authors: Ethan Perez, Christopher Buckley Tomasz Korbak
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is frequently employed in fine-tuning large language models (LMs), such as GPT-3, to penalize them for undesirable features of generated sequences, such as offensiveness, social bias, harmfulness or falsehood. The RL formulation involves treating the LM as a policy and updating it to maximise the expected value of a reward function which captures human preferences, such as non-offensiveness. In this paper, we analyze challenges associated with treating a language model as an RL policy and show how avoiding those challenges requires moving beyond the RL paradigm. We start by observing that the standard RL approach is flawed as an objective for fine-tuning LMs because it leads to distribution collapse: turning the LM into a degenerate distribution. Then, we analyze KL-regularised RL, a widely used recipe for fine-tuning LMs, which additionally constrains the fine-tuned LM to stay close to its original distribution in terms of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. We show that KL-regularised RL is equivalent to variational inference: approximating a Bayesian posterior which specifies how to update a prior LM to conform with evidence provided by the reward function. We argue that this Bayesian inference view of KL-regularised RL is more insightful than the typically employed RL perspective. The Bayesian inference view explains how KL-regularised RL avoids the distribution collapse problem and offers a first-principles derivation for its objective. While this objective happens to be equivalent to RL (with a particular choice of parametric reward), there exist other objectives for fine-tuning LMs which are no longer equivalent to RL. That observation leads to a more general point: RL is not an adequate formal framework for problems such as fine-tuning language models. These problems are best viewed as Bayesian inference: approximating a pre-defined target distribution.
Evaluating Token-Level and Passage-Level Dense Retrieval Models for Math Information Retrieval
Authors: Jheng-Hong Yang, Yuqing Xie, Jimmy Lin Wei Zhong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: With the recent success of dense retrieval methods based on bi-encoders, studies have applied this approach to various interesting downstream retrieval tasks with good efficiency and in-domain effectiveness.Recently, we have also seen the presence of dense retrieval models in Math Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks,but the most effective systems remain classic retrieval methods that consider hand-crafted structure features.In this work, we try to combine the best of both worlds: a well-defined structure search method for effective formula search and efficient bi-encoder dense retrieval models to capture contextual similarities.Specifically, we have evaluated two representative bi-encoder models for token-level and passage-level dense retrieval on recent MIR tasks.Our results show that bi-encoder models are highly complementary to existing structure search methods, and we are able to advance the state-of-the-art on MIR datasets.
Multi-View Reasoning: Consistent Contrastive Learning for Math Word Problem
Authors: Yongliang Shen, Yanna Ma, Xiaoxia Cheng, Zeqi Tan, Qingpeng Nong, Weiming Lu Wenqi Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Math word problem solver requires both precise relation reasoning about quantities in the text and reliable generation for the diverse equation. Current sequence-to-tree or relation extraction methods regard this only from a fixed view, struggling to simultaneously handle complex semantics and diverse equations. However, human solving naturally involves two consistent reasoning views: top-down and bottom-up, just as math equations also can be expressed in multiple equivalent forms: pre-order and post-order. We propose a multi-view consistent contrastive learning for a more complete semantics-to-equation mapping. The entire process is decoupled into two independent but consistent views: top-down decomposition and bottom-up construction, and the two reasoning views are aligned in multi-granularity for consistency, enhancing global generation and precise reasoning. Experiments on multiple datasets across two languages show our approach significantly outperforms the existing baselines, especially on complex problems. We also show after consistent alignment, multi-view can absorb the merits of both views and generate more diverse results consistent with the mathematical laws.
Few-shot initializing of Active Learner via Meta-Learning
Authors: Vikrant Yadav, Zubair Afzal, George Tsatsaronis Zi Long Zhu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Despite the important evolutions in few-shot and zero-shot learning techniques, domain specific applications still require expert knowledge and significant effort in annotating and labeling a large volume of unstructured textual data. To mitigate this problem, active learning, and meta-learning attempt to reach a high performance with the least amount of labeled data. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to combine both lines of work by initializing an active learner with meta-learned parameters obtained through meta-training on tasks similar to the target task during active learning. In this approach we use the pre-trained BERT as our text-encoder and meta-learn its parameters with LEOPARD, which extends the model-agnostic meta-learning method by generating task dependent softmax weights to enable learning across tasks with different number of classes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by performing active learning on five natural language understanding tasks and six datasets with five different acquisition functions. We train two different meta-initializations, and we use the pre-trained BERT base initialization as baseline. We observe that our approach performs better than the baseline at low budget, especially when closely related tasks were present during meta-learning. Moreover, our results show that better performance in the initial phase, i.e., with fewer labeled samples, leads to better performance when larger acquisition batches are used. We also perform an ablation study of the proposed method, showing that active learning with only the meta-learned weights is beneficial and adding the meta-learned learning rates and generating the softmax have negative consequences for the performance.
Bootstrapping meaning through listening: Unsupervised learning of spoken sentence embeddings
Authors: Zuoyu Tian, Yadong Liu, Cong Zhang, Chia-Wen Lo Jian Zhu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Inducing semantic representations directly from speech signals is a highly challenging task but has many useful applications in speech mining and spoken language understanding. This study tackles the unsupervised learning of semantic representations for spoken utterances. Through converting speech signals into hidden units generated from acoustic unit discovery, we propose WavEmbed, a multimodal sequential autoencoder that predicts hidden units from a dense representation of speech. Secondly, we also propose S-HuBERT to induce meaning through knowledge distillation, in which a sentence embedding model is first trained on hidden units and passes its knowledge to a speech encoder through contrastive learning. The best performing model achieves a moderate correlation (0.5 0.6) with human judgments, without relying on any labels or transcriptions. Furthermore, these models can also be easily extended to leverage textual transcriptions of speech to learn much better speech embeddings that are strongly correlated with human annotations. Our proposed methods are applicable to the development of purely data-driven systems for speech mining, indexing and search.
Progressive Sentiment Analysis for Code-Switched Text Data
Authors: Dheeraj Mekala, Jingbo Shang Sudhanshu Ranjan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Multilingual transformer language models have recently attracted much attention from researchers and are used in cross-lingual transfer learning for many NLP tasks such as text classification and named entity recognition.However, similar methods for transfer learning from monolingual text to code-switched text have not been extensively explored mainly due to the following challenges:(1) Code-switched corpus, unlike monolingual corpus, consists of more than one language and existing methods can`t be applied efficiently,(2) Code-switched corpus is usually made of resource-rich and low-resource languages and upon using multilingual pre-trained language models, the final model might bias towards resource-rich language. In this paper, we focus on code-switched sentiment analysis where we have a labelled resource-rich language dataset and unlabelled code-switched data. We propose a framework that takes the distinction between resource-rich and low-resource language into account.Instead of training on the entire code-switched corpus at once, we create buckets based on the fraction of words in the resource-rich language and progressively train from resource-rich language dominated samples to low-resource language dominated samples. Extensive experiments across multiple language pairs demonstrate that progressive training helps low-resource language dominated samples.
Knowledge Stimulated Contrastive Prompting for Low-Resource Stance Detection
Authors: Qingfeng Sun, Yaming Yang, Fei Xu Kai Zheng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Stance Detection Task (SDT) aims at identifying the stance of the sentence towards a specific target and is usually modeled as a classification problem. Backgound knowledge is often necessary for stance detection with respect to a specific target, especially when there is no target explicitly mentioned in text. This paper focuses on the knowledge stimulation for low-resource stance detection tasks. We firstly explore to formalize stance detection as a prompt based contrastive learning task. At the same time, to make prompt learning suit to stance detection, we design a template mechanism to incorporate corresponding target into instance representation. Furthermore, we propose a masked language prompt joint contrastive learning approach to stimulate the knowledge inherit from the pre-trained model. The experimental results on three benchmarks show that knowledge stimulation is effective in stance detection accompanied with our proposed mechanism.
WSpeller: Robust Word Segmentation for Enhancing Chinese Spelling Check
Authors: Youran Shan, Junwen Duan, Xingliang Mao, Minlie Huang Fangfang Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Chinese spelling check (CSC) detects and corrects spelling errors in Chinese texts. Previous approaches have combined character-level phonetic and graphic information, ignoring the importance of segment-level information. According to our pilot study, spelling errors are always associated with incorrect word segmentation. When appropriate word boundaries are provided, CSC performance is greatly enhanced. Based on these findings, we present WSpeller, a CSC model that takes into account word segmentation. A fundamental component of WSpeller is a W-MLM, which is trained by predicting visually and phonetically similar words. Through modification of the embedding layer`s input, word segmentation information can be incorporated. Additionally, a robust module is trained to assist the W-MLM-based correction module by predicting the correct word segmentations from sentences containing spelling errors. We evaluate WSpeller on the widely used benchmark datasets SIGHAN13, SIGHAN14, and SIGHAN15. Our model is superior to state-of-the-art baselines on SIGHAN13 and SIGHAN15 and maintains equal performance on SIGHAN14.
Extracting Trigger-sharing Events via an Event Matrix
Authors: Weidi Xu, Mengshu Sun, Taifeng Wang, Wei Chu Jun Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: A growing interest emerges in event extraction which aims to extract multiple events with triggers and arguments. Previous methods mitigate the problem of multiple events extraction by predicting the arguments conditioned on the event trigger and event type, assuming that these arguments belong to a single event. However, the assumption is invalid in general as there may be multiple events. Therefore, we present a unified framework called MatEE for trigger-sharing events extraction. It resolves the kernel bottleneck by effectively modeling the relations between arguments by an event matrix, where trigger-sharing events are represented by multiple cliques. We verify the proposed method on 3 widely-used benchmark datasets of event extraction. The experimental results show that it beats all the advanced competitors, significantly improving the state-of-the-art performances in event extraction.
TranS: Transition-based Knowledge Graph Embedding with Synthetic Relation Representation
Authors: Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu Xuanyu Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) aims to learn continuous vector representations of relations and entities in knowledge graph (KG). Recently, transition-based KGE methods have become popular and achieved promising performance. However, scoring patterns like TransE are not suitable for complex scenarios where the same entity pair has different relations. Although some models attempt to employ entity-relation interaction or projection to improve entity representation for one-to-many/many-to-one/many-to-many complex relations, they still continue the traditional scoring pattern, where only a single relation vector in the relation part is used to translate the head entity to the tail entity or their variants. And recent research shows that entity representation only needs to consider entities and their interactions to achieve better performance. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel transition-based method, TranS, for KGE. The single relation vector of the relation part in the traditional scoring pattern is replaced by the synthetic relation representation with entity-relation interactions to solve these issues. And the entity part still retains its independence through entity-entity interactions. Experiments on a large KG dataset, ogbl-wikikg2, show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results.
Sequential Topic Selection Model with Latent Variable for Topic-Grounded Dialogue
Authors: Wei Wei, Xian-Ling Mao Xiao-Fei Wen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recently, topic-grounded dialogue system has attracted significant attention due to its effectiveness in predicting the next topic to yield better responses via the historical context and given topic sequence. However, almost all existing topic prediction solutions focus on only the current conversation and corresponding topic sequence to predict the next conversation topic, without exploiting other topic-guided conversations which may contain relevant topic-transitions to current conversation. To address the problem, in this paper we propose a novel approach, named Sequential Global Topic Attention (SGTA) to exploit topic transition over all conversations in a subtle way for better modeling post-to-response topic-transition and guiding the response generation to the current conversation. Specifically, we introduce a latent space modeled as a Multivariate Skew-Normal distribution with hybrid kernel functions to flexibly integrate the global-level information with sequence-level information, and predict the topic based on the distribution sampling results. We also leverage a topic-aware prior-posterior approach for secondary selection of predicted topics, which is utilized to optimize the response generation task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms competitive baselines on prediction and generation tasks.
Robust Task-Oriented Dialogue Generation with Contrastive Pre-training and Adversarial Filtering
Authors: Xinting Huang, Jey Han Lau, Sarah Erfani Shiquan Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Data artifacts incentivize machine learning models to learn non-transferable generalizations by taking advantage of shortcuts in the data, andthere is growing evidence that data artifacts play a role for the strong results that deep learning models achieve in recent natural language processing benchmarks.In this paper, we focus on task-oriented dialogue and investigate whether popular datasets such as MultiWOZ contain such data artifacts.We found that by only keeping frequent phrases in the trainingexamples, state-of-the-art models perform similarly compared to the variant trained with full data, suggesting they exploit these spurious correlationsto solve the task. Motivated by this, we propose a contrastive learning based framework to encourage the model to ignore these cues and focus on learning generalisable patterns. We also experiment with adversarial filtering to remove easy training instances so that the model would focus on learning from the harder instances. We conduct a number of generalization experiments --- e.g., cross-domain/dataset and adversarial tests --- to assess the robustness of our approach and found that it works exceptionally well.
STAR: SQL Guided Pre-Training for Context-dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing
Authors: Xiangyu Li, Binyuan Hui, Min Yang, Bowen Li, Binhua Li, Zheng Cao, Weijie Li, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yongbin Li Zefeng Cai
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel SQL guided pre-training framework STAR for context-dependent text-to-SQL parsing, which leverages contextual information to enrich natural language (NL) utterance and table schema representations for text-to-SQL conversations. Concretely, we propose two novel pre-training objectives which respectively explore the context-dependent interactions of NL utterances and SQL queries within each text-to-SQL conversation: (i) schema state tracking (SST) objective that tracks and explores the schema states of context-dependent SQL queries in the form of schema-states by predicting and updating the value of each schema slot during interaction; (ii) utterance dependency tracking (UDT) objective that employs weighted contrastive learning to pull together two semantically similar NL utterances and push away the representations of semantically dissimilar NL utterances within each conversation. In addition, we construct a high-quality large-scale context-dependent text-to-SQL conversation corpus to pre-train STAR. Extensive experiments show that STAR achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two downstream benchmarks (SParC and CoSQL), significantly outperforming previous pre-training methods and ranking first on the leaderboard. We believe the release of the constructed corpus, codebase and pre-trained STAR checkpoints would push forward the research in this area.
Is MultiWOZ a Solved Task? An Interactive TOD Evaluation Framework with User Simulator
Authors: Linyang Li, Guofeng Quan, Feng Gao, Xiaofeng Mou, Xipeng Qiu Qinyuan Cheng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems are drawing more and more attention in recent studies.Current methods focus on constructing pre-trained models or fine-tuning strategies while the evaluation of TOD is limited by a policy mismatch problem.That is, during evaluation, the user utterances are from the annotated dataset while these utterances should interact with previous responses which can have many alternatives besides annotated texts.Therefore, in this work, we propose an interactive evaluation framework for TOD. We first build a goal-oriented user simulator based on pre-trained models and then use the user simulator to interact with the dialogue system to generate dialogues.Besides, we introduce a sentence-level and a session-level score to measure the sentence fluency and session coherence in the interactive evaluation. Experimental results show that RL-based TOD systems trained by our proposed user simulator can achieve nearly 98% inform and success rates in the interactive evaluation of MultiWOZ dataset and the proposed scores measure the response quality besides the inform and success rates.We are hoping that our work will encourage simulator-based interactive evaluations in the TOD task.
Translating Hanja Historical Documents to Contemporary Korean and English
Authors: Jiho Jin, Haneul Yoo, JinYeong Bak, Kyunghyun Cho, Alice Oh Juhee Son
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: The Annals of Joseon Dynasty (AJD) contain the daily records of the Kings of Joseon, the 500-year kingdom preceding the modern nation of Korea.The Annals were originally written in an archaic Korean writing system, \textquoteleftHanja', and were translated into Korean from 1968 to 1993.The resulting translation was however too literal and contained many archaic Korean words; thus, a new expert translation effort began in 2012. Since then, the records of only one king have been completed in a decade.In parallel, expert translators are working on English translation, also at a slow pace and produced only one king`s records in English so far.Thus, we propose H2KE, a neural machine translation model, that translates historical documents in Hanja to more easily understandable Korean and to English.Built on top of multilingual neural machine translation, H2KE learns to translate a historical document written in Hanja, from both a full dataset of outdated Korean translation and a small dataset of more recently translated contemporary Korean and English.We compare our method against two baselines:a recent model that simultaneously learns to restore and translate Hanja historical documentand a Transformer based model trained only on newly translated corpora.The experiments reveal that our method significantly outperforms the baselines in terms of BLEU scores for both contemporary Korean and English translations.We further conduct extensive human evaluation which shows that our translation is preferred over the original expert translations by both experts and non-expert Korean speakers.
Exploring Compositional Image Retrieval with Hybrid Compositional Learning and Heuristic Negative Mining
Authors: Ehsan Nezhadarya, Tanmana Sadhu, Shengdong Zhang Chao Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Compositional image retrieval (CIR) is a challenging retrieval task, where the query is composed of a reference image and a modification text, and the target is another image reflecting the modification to the reference image. Due to the great success of the pre-trained vision-and-language model CLIP and its favorable applicability to large-scale retrieval tasks, we propose a CIR model HyCoLe-HNM with CLIP as the backbone. In HyCoLe-HNM, we follow the contrastive pre-training method of CLIP to perform cross-modal representation learning. On this basis, we propose a hybrid compositional learning mechanism, which includes both image compositional learning and text compositional learning. In hybrid compositional learning, we borrow a gated fusion mechanism from a question answering model to perform compositional fusion, and propose a heuristic negative mining method to filter negative samples. Privileged information in the form of image-related texts is utilized in cross-modal representation learning and hybrid compositional learning. Experimental results show that HyCoLe-HNM achieves state-of-the-art performance on three CIR datasets, namely FashionIQ, Fashion200K, and MIT-States.
Outlier Dimensions that Disrupt Transformers are Driven by Frequency
Authors: Anna Rogers, Aleksandr Drozd, Felice Dell′Orletta Giovanni Puccetti
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: While Transformer-based language models are generally very robust to pruning, there is the recently discovered outlier phenomenon: disabling only 48 out of 110M parameters in BERT-base drops its performance by nearly 30% on MNLI. We replicate the original evidence for the outlier phenomenon and we link it to the geometry of the embedding space. We find that in both BERT and RoBERTa the magnitude of hidden state coefficients corresponding to outlier dimensions correlate with the frequencies of encoded tokens in pre-training data, and they also contribute to the “vertical” self-attention pattern enabling the model to focus on the special tokens. This explains the drop in performance from disabling the outliers, and it suggests that to decrease anisotopicity in future models we need pre-training schemas that would better take into account the skewed token distributions.
MiST: a Large-Scale Annotated Resource and Neural Models for Functions of Modal Verbs in English Scientific Text
Authors: Nicole Macher, Stefan Grünewald, Annemarie Friedrich Sophie Henning
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Modal verbs (e.g., can, should or must) occur highly frequently in scientific articles. Decoding their function is not straightforward: they are often used for hedging, but they may also denote abilities and restrictions. Understanding their meaning is important for accurate information extraction from scientific text.To foster research on the usage of modals in this genre, we introduce the MIST (Modals In Scientific Text) dataset, which contains 3737 modal instances in five scientific domains annotated for their semantic, pragmatic, or rhetorical function. We systematically evaluate a set of competitive neural architectures on MIST. Transfer experiments reveal that leveraging non-scientific data is of limited benefit for modeling the distinctions in MIST. Our corpus analysis provides evidence that scientific communities differ in their usage of modal verbs, yet, classifiers trained on scientific data generalize to some extent to unseen scientific domains.
Late Prompt Tuning: A Late Prompt Could Be Better Than Many Prompts
Authors: Tianxiang Sun, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu Xiangyang Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Prompt tuning is a parameter-efficient tuning (PETuning) method for utilizing pre-trained models (PTMs) that simply prepends a soft prompt to the input and only optimizes the prompt to adapt PTMs to downstream tasks. Although it is parameter- and deployment-efficient, its performance still lags behind other state-of-the-art PETuning methods. Besides, the training cost of prompt tuning is not significantly reduced due to the back-propagation through the entire model. Through empirical analyses, we shed some light on the lagging performance of prompt tuning and recognize a trade-off between the propagation distance from label signals to the inserted prompt and the influence of the prompt on model outputs. Further, we present Late Prompt Tuning (LPT) that inserts a late prompt into an intermediate layer of the PTM instead of the input layer or all layers. The late prompt is obtained by a neural prompt generator conditioned on the hidden states before the prompt insertion layer and therefore is instance-dependent. Through extensive experimental results across various tasks and PTMs, we show that LPT can achieve competitive performance to full model tuning and other PETuning methods under both full-data and few-shot scenarios while possessing faster training speed and lower memory cost.
MICO: A Multi-alternative Contrastive Learning Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Representation
Authors: Zihao Wang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Tong Zhang Ying Su
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Commonsense reasoning tasks such as commonsense knowledge graph completion and commonsense question answering require powerful representation learning. In this paper, we propose to learn commonsense knowledge representation by MICO, a Multi-alternative contrastIve learning framework on COmmonsense knowledge graphs (MICO). MICO generates the commonsense knowledge representation by contextual interaction between entity nodes and relations with multi-alternative contrastive learning. In MICO, the head and tail entities in an $(h,r,t)$ knowledge triple are converted to two relation-aware sequence pairs (a premise and an alternative) in the form of natural language. Semantic representations generated by MICO can benefit the following two tasks by simply comparing the similarity score between the representations: 1) zero-shot commonsense question answering tasks; 2) inductive commonsense knowledge graph completion tasks. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method.
Leveraging Only the Category Name for Aspect Detection through Prompt-based Constrained Clustering
Authors: Pengyun Wang, Yasheng Wang, Yong Dai, Yadao Wang, Lujia Pan, Zenglin Xu Yazheng Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Aspect category detection (ACD) aims to automatically identify user-concerned aspects from online reviews, which is of great value for evaluating the fine-grained performance of a product. The most recent solutions tackle this problem via weakly supervised methods, achieving remarkable improvement over unsupervised methods. However, a closer look at these methods reveals that the required human efforts are nontrivial and can sometimes be hard to obtain. In this study, we explore the possibility of minimizing human guidance while improving detection performance, with a deep clustering method that relies merely on the category name of each aspect and a pretrained language model (LM). The LM, combined with prompt techniques, is employed as a knowledge base to automatically generate constraints for clustering, as well as to provide a representation space to perform the clustering. Our method (1) extracts extensive keywords to expand our understanding of each aspect, (2) automatically generates instance-level and concept-level constraints for clustering, and (3) trains the clustering model with the above constraints. We demonstrate the capability of the proposed framework through extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets. Our model not only performs noticeably better than existing unsupervised approaches but also considerably surpasses weakly supervised methods that require more human efforts.
Controllable Factuality in Document-Grounded Dialog Systems Using a Noisy Channel Model
Authors: David Thulke, Christian Dugast, Hermann Ney Nico Daheim
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In this work, we present a model for document-grounded response generation in dialog that is decomposed into two components according to Bayes' theorem.One component is a traditional ungrounded response generation model and the other component models the reconstruction of the grounding document based on the dialog context and generated response.We propose different approximate decoding schemes and evaluate our approach on multiple open-domain and task-oriented document-grounded dialog datasets.Our experiments show that the model is more factual in terms of automatic factuality metrics than the baseline model.Furthermore, we outline how introducing scaling factors between the components allows for controlling the tradeoff between factuality and fluency in the model output.Finally, we compare our approach to a recently proposed method to control factuality in grounded dialog, CTRL (Rashkin et al., 2021), and show that both approaches can be combined to achieve additional improvements.
Transformer Language Models without Positional Encodings Still Learn Positional Information
Authors: Ori Ram, Ofir Press, Peter Izsak, Omer Levy Adi Haviv
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Causal transformer language models (LMs), such as GPT-3, typically require some form of positional encoding, such as positional embeddings. However, we show that LMs without any explicit positional encoding are still competitive with standard models and that this phenomenon is robust across different datasets, model sizes, and sequence lengths.Probing experiments reveal that such models acquire an implicit notion of absolute positions throughout the network, effectively compensating for the missing information.We conjecture that causal attention enables the model to infer the number of predecessors that each token can attend to, thereby approximating its absolute position.Our findings indicate that causal LMs might derive positional awareness not only from the explicit positioning mechanism but also from the effects of the causal mask.
Beyond Model Interpretability: On the Faithfulness and Adversarial Robustness of Contrastive Textual Explanations
Authors: Mariette Awad Julia El Zini
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Contrastive explanation methods go beyond transparency and address the contrastive aspect of explanations. Such explanations are emerging as an attractive option to provide actionable change to scenarios adversely impacted by classifiers' decisions. However, their extension to textual data is under-explored and there is little investigation on their vulnerabilities and limitations. This work motivates textual counterfactuals by highlighting the social limitations of non-contrastive explainability. We also lay the ground for a novel evaluation scheme inspired by the faithfulness of explanations. Accordingly, we extend the computation of three metrics, proximity, connectedness and stability, to textual data and we benchmark two successful contrastive methods, POLYJUICE and MiCE, on our suggested metrics. Experiments on sentiment analysis data show that the connectedness of counterfactuals to their original counterparts is not obvious in both models. More interestingly, the generated contrastive texts are more attainable with POLYJUICE which highlights the significance of latent representations in counterfactual search. Finally, we perform the first semantic adversarial attack on textual recourse methods. The results demonstrate the robustness of POLYJUICE and the role that latent input representations play in robustness and reliability.