mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Leveraging Training Dynamics and Self-Training for Text Classification
Authors: Cornelia Caragea Tiberiu Sosea
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: The effectiveness of pre-trained language models in downstream tasks is highly dependent on the amount of labeled data available for training. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is a promising technique that has seen wide attention recently due to its effectiveness in improving deep learning models when training data is scarce. Common approaches employ a teacher-student self-training framework, where a teacher network generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled data, which are then used to iteratively train a student network. In this paper, we propose a new self-training approach for text classification that leverages training dynamics of unlabeled data. We evaluate our approach on a wide range of text classification tasks, including emotion detection, sentiment analysis, question classification and gramaticality, which span a variety of domains, e.g, Reddit, Twitter, and online forums. Notably, our method is successful on all benchmarks, obtaining an average increase in F1 score of 3.5% over strong baselines in low resource settings.
Learning to Infer from Unlabeled Data: A Semi-supervised Learning Approach for Robust Natural Language Inference
Authors: Cornelia Caragea Mobashir Sadat
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Natural Language Inference (NLI) or Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) aims at predicting the relation between a pair of sentences (premise and hypothesis) as entailment, contradiction or semantic independence. Although deep learning models have shown promising performance for NLI in recent years, they rely on large scale expensive human-annotated datasets. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is a popular technique for reducing the reliance on human annotation by leveraging unlabeled data for training. However, despite its substantial success on single sentence classification tasks where the challenge in making use of unlabeled data is to assign “good enough” pseudo-labels, for NLI tasks, the nature of unlabeled data is more complex: one of the sentences in the pair (usually the hypothesis) along with the class label are missing from the data and require human annotations, which makes SSL for NLI more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel way to incorporate unlabeled data in SSL for NLI where we use a conditional language model, BART to generate the hypotheses for the unlabeled sentences (used as premises). Our experiments show that our SSL framework successfully exploits unlabeled data and substantially improves the performance of four NLI datasets in low-resource settings. We release our code here: https://github.com/msadat3/SSL_for_NLI
Unsupervised Text Deidentification
Authors: Justin Chiu, Ramin Zabih, Alexander Rush John Morris
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Deidentification seeks to anonymize textual data prior to distribution. Automatic deidentification primarily uses supervised named entity recognition from human-labeled data points. We propose an unsupervised deidentification method that masks words that leak personally-identifying information. The approach utilizes a specially trained reidentification model to identify individuals from redacted personal documents. Motivated by K-anonymity based privacy, we generate redactions that ensure a minimum reidentification rank for the correct profile of the document. To evaluate this approach, we consider the task of deidentifying Wikipedia Biographies, and evaluate using an adversarial reidentification metric. Compared to a set of unsupervised baselines, our approach deidentifies documents more completely while removing fewer words. Qualitatively, we see that the approach eliminates many identifying aspects that would fall outside of the common named entity based approach.
Federated Continual Learning for Text Classification via Selective Inter-client Transfer
Authors: Pranav Rai, Matthias Schubert, Hinrich Schütze, Pankaj Gupta Yatin Chaudhary
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In this work, we combine the two paradigms: Federated Learning (FL) and Continual Learning (CL) for text classification task in cloud-edge continuum. The objective of Federated Continual Learning (FCL) is to improve deep learning models over life time at each client by (relevant and efficient) knowledge transfer without sharing data. Here, we address challenges in minimizing inter-client interference while knowledge sharing due to heterogeneous tasks across clients in FCL setup. In doing so, we propose a novel framework, Federated Selective Inter-client Transfer (FedSeIT) which selectively combines model parameters of foreign clients. To further maximize knowledge transfer, we assess domain overlap and select informative tasks from the sequence of historical tasks at each foreign client while preserving privacy. Evaluating against the baselines, we show improved performance, a gain of (average) 12.4% in text classification over a sequence of tasks using five datasets from diverse domains. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that applies FCL to NLP.
DOROTHIE: Spoken Dialogue for Handling Unexpected Situations in Interactive Autonomous Driving Agents
Authors: Benjamin VanDerPloeg, Cristian-Paul Bara, Yidong Huang, Eui-In Kim, Felix Gervits, Matthew Marge, Joyce Chai Ziqiao Ma
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In the real world, autonomous driving agents navigate in highly dynamic environments full of unexpected situations where pre-trained models are unreliable. In these situations, what is immediately available to vehicles is often only human operators. Empowering autonomous driving agents with the ability to navigate in a continuous and dynamic environment and to communicate with humans through sensorimotor-grounded dialogue becomes critical. To this end, we introduce Dialogue On the ROad To Handle Irregular Events (DOROTHIE), a novel interactive simulation platform that enables the creation of unexpected situations on the fly to support empirical studies on situated communication with autonomous driving agents. Based on this platform, we created the Situated Dialogue Navigation (SDN), a navigation benchmark of 183 trials with a total of 8415 utterances, around 18.7 hours of control streams, and 2.9 hours of trimmed audio. SDN is developed to evaluate the agent`s ability to predict dialogue moves from humans as well as generate its own dialogue moves and physical navigation actions. We further developed a transformer-based baseline model for these SDN tasks. Our empirical results indicate that language guided-navigation in a highly dynamic environment is an extremely difficult task for end-to-end models. These results will provide insight towards future work on robust autonomous driving agents
He Said, She Said: Style Transfer for Shifting the Perspective of Dialogues
Authors: Graham Neubig, Matthew R. Gormley Amanda Bertsch
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In this work, we define a new style transfer task: perspective shift, which reframes a dialouge from informal first person to a formal third person rephrasing of the text. This task requires challenging coreference resolution, emotion attribution, and interpretation of informal text. We explore several baseline approaches and discuss further directions on this task when applied to short dialogues. As a sample application, we demonstrate that applying perspective shifting to a dialogue summarization dataset (SAMSum) substantially improves the zero-shot performance of extractive news summarization models on this data. Additionally, supervised extractive models perform better when trained on perspective shifted data than on the original dialogues. We release our code publicly.
Dynamic Augmentation Data Selection for Few-shot Text Classification
Authors: Lifeng Jin, Owen Yuan, Jiayu Zhou Guangliang Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Data augmentation has been a popular method for fine-tuning pre-trained language models to increase model robustness and performance. With augmentation data coming from modifying gold train data (in-sample augmentation) or being harvested from general domain unlabeled data (out-of-sample augmentation), the quality of such data is the key to successful fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose a dynamic data selection method to select effective augmentation data from different augmentation sources according to the model`s learning stage, by identifying a set of augmentation samples that optimally facilitates the learning process of the most current model. The method firstly filters out augmentation samples with noisy pseudo labels through a curriculum learning strategy, then estimates the effectiveness of reserved augmentation data by its influence scores on the current model at every update, allowing the data selection process tightly tailored to model parameters. And the two-stage augmentation strategy considers in-sample augmentation and out-of-sample augmentation in different learning stages. Experiments with both kinds of augmentation data on a variety of sentence classification tasks show that our method outperforms strong baselines, proving the effectiveness of our method. Analysis confirms the dynamic nature of the data effectiveness and the importance of model learning stages in utilization of augmentation data.
KPDROP: Improving Absent Keyphrase Generation
Authors: Seo Yeon Park, Tuhin Kundu, Cornelia Caragea Jishnu Ray Chowdhury
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Keyphrase generation is the task of generating phrases (keyphrases) that summarize the main topics of a given document. Keyphrases can be either present or absent from the given document. While the extraction of present keyphrases has received much attention in the past, only recently a stronger focus has been placed on the generation of absent keyphrases. However, generating absent keyphrases is challenging; even the best methods show only a modest degree of success. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic approach called keyphrase dropout (or KPDrop) to improve absent keyphrase generation. In this approach, we randomly drop present keyphrases from the document and turn them into artificial absent keyphrases during training. We test our approach extensively and show that it consistently improves the absent performance of strong baselines in both supervised and resource-constrained semi-supervised settings.
Natural Language Deduction through Search over Statement Compositions
Authors: Zayne Sprague, Swarat Chaudhuri, Greg Durrett Kaj Bostrom
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In settings from fact-checking to question answering, we frequently want to know whether a collection of evidence (premises) entails a hypothesis. Existing methods primarily focus on the end-to-end discriminative version of this task, but less work has treated the generative version in which a model searches over the space of statements entailed by the premises to constructively derive the hypothesis. We propose a system for doing this kind of deductive reasoning in natural language by decomposing the task into separate steps coordinated by a search procedure, producing a tree of intermediate conclusions that faithfully reflects the system`s reasoning process. Our experiments on the EntailmentBank dataset (Dalvi et al., 2021) demonstrate that the proposed system can successfully prove true statements while rejecting false ones. Moreover, it produces natural language explanations with a 17% absolute higher step validity than those produced by an end-to-end T5 model.
EnDex: Evaluation of Dialogue Engagingness at Scale
Authors: Ruibo Liu, Fabrice Harel-Canada, Nischal Reddy Chandra, Nanyun Peng Guangxuan Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose EnDex, the first human-reaction based model to evaluate dialogue engagingness. EnDex is trained on 80k Reddit-based Engagement Dataset (RED) curated using a novel distant-supervision framework. Engagingness is a key measure that captures high-level quality of AI dialogue systems and closely reflects actual user experience. However, data shortage, plus the abstract and extensive definition of engagingness makes it challenging to develop an automatic metric. Our work departs from mainstream approaches that use synthetic negative examples to train binary classifiers, and instead, proposes a solution using distant-supervision from human-reaction feedback. To support the soundness of our EnDex metric, we offer a theoretical foundation for engagement, an extensive ablation study, and empirical evidence of high correlation on five engagingness related datasets. We will release code, off-the-shelf EnDex model, and a large-scale dataset upon paper publication to facilitate future research.
LOPS: Learning Order Inspired Pseudo-Label Selection for Weakly Supervised Text Classification
Authors: Chengyu Dong, Jingbo Shang Dheeraj Mekala
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Weakly supervised text classification methods typically train a deep neural classifier based on pseudo-labels. The quality of pseudo-labels is crucial to final performance but they are inevitably noisy due to their heuristic nature, so selecting the correct ones has a huge potential for performance boost. One straightforward solution is to select samples based on the softmax probability scores in the neural classifier corresponding to their pseudo-labels. However, we show through our experiments that such solutions are ineffective and unstable due to the erroneously high-confidence predictions from poorly calibrated models. Recent studies on the memorization effects of deep neural models suggest that these models first memorize training samples with clean labels and then those with noisy labels. Inspired by this observation, we propose a novel pseudo-label selection method LOPS that takes learning order of samples into consideration. We hypothesize that the learning order reflects the probability of wrong annotation in terms of ranking, and therefore, propose to select the samples that are learnt earlier. LOPS can be viewed as a strong performance-boost plug-in to most existing weakly-supervised text classification methods, as confirmed in extensive experiments on four real-world datasets.
Train Flat, Then Compress: Sharpness-Aware Minimization Learns More Compressible Models
Authors: Sanket Vaibhav Mehta, Emma Strubell Clara Na
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Model compression by way of parameter pruning, quantization, or distillation has recently gained popularity as an approach for reducing the computational requirements of modern deep neural network models for NLP. Inspired by prior works suggesting a connection between simpler, more generalizable models and those that lie within wider loss basins, we hypothesize that optimizing for flat minima should lead to simpler parameterizations and thus more compressible models. We propose to combine sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) with various task-specific model compression methods, including iterative magnitude pruning (IMP), structured pruning with a distillation objective, and post-training dynamic quantization. Empirically, we show that optimizing for flatter minima consistently leads to greater compressibility of parameters compared to vanilla Adam when fine-tuning BERT models, with little to no loss in accuracy on the GLUE text classification and SQuAD question answering benchmarks. Moreover, SAM finds superior winning tickets during IMP that 1) are amenable to vanilla Adam optimization, and 2) transfer more effectively across tasks.
Structural Contrastive Representation Learning for Zero-shot Multi-label Text Classification
Authors: Zhaozhuo Xu, Tharun Medini, Anshumali Shrivastava Tianyi Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Zero-shot multi-label text classification (ZMTC) is a fundamental task in natural language processing with applications in the cold start problem of recommendation systems. Ideally, one would learn an expressive representation of both input text and label features so that ZMTC is transformed into a nearest neighbor search problem. However, the existing representation learning approaches for ZMTC struggle with accuracy as well as poor training efficiency. Firstly, the input text is structural, consisting of both short title sentences and long content paragraphs. It is challenging to model the correlation between short label descriptions and long structural input documents. Secondly, the enormous label space in ZMTC forces the existing approaches to perform multi-stage learning with label engineering. As a result, the training overhead is significant. In this paper, we address both problems by introducing an end-to-end structural contrastive representation learning approach. We propose a randomized text segmentation (RTS) technique to generate high-quality contrastive pairs. This RTS technique allows us to model title-content correlation. Additionally, we simplify the multi-stage ZMTC learning strategy by avoiding label engineering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach leads to up to 2.33% improvement in precision@1 and 5.94x speedup in training time on publicly available datasets. Our code is available publicly.
Improving Generalization of Pre-trained Language Models via Stochastic Weight Averaging
Authors: Ivan Kobyzev, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Ahmad Rashid, Ali Ghodsi, Phillippe Langlais Peng Lu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a commonly used technique for improving the generalization of compact Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) on downstream tasks. However, such methods impose the additional burden of training a separate teacher model for every new dataset.Alternatively, one may directly work on the improvement of the optimization procedure of the compact model towards better generalization. Recent works observe that the flatness of the local minimum correlates well with better generalization.In this work, we adapt Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWA), a method encouraging convergence to a flatter minimum, to fine-tuning PLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on various NLP tasks (text classification, question answering, and generation) and different model architectures and demonstrate that our adaptation improves the generalization without extra computation cost. Moreover, we observe that this simple optimization technique is able to outperform the state-of-the-art KD methods for compact models.
Learn What Is Possible, Then Choose What Is Best: Disentangling One-To-Many Relations in Language Through Text-based Games
Authors: Ke Zhou Benjamin Towle
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Language models pre-trained on large self-supervised corpora, followed by task-specific fine-tuning has become the dominant paradigm in NLP. These pre-training datasets often have a one-to-many structure---e.g. in dialogue there are many valid responses for a given context. However, only some of these responses will be desirable in our downstream task. This raises the question of how we should train the model such that it can emulate the desirable behaviours, but not the undesirable ones. Current approaches train in a one-to-one setup---only a single target response is given for a single dialogue context---leading to models only learning to predict the average response, while ignoring the full range of possible responses. Using text-based games as a testbed, our approach, PASA, uses discrete latent variables to capture the range of different behaviours represented in our larger pre-training dataset. We then use knowledge distillation to distil the posterior probability distribution into a student model. This probability distribution is far richer than learning from only the hard targets of the dataset, and thus allows the student model to benefit from the richer range of actions the teacher model has learned. Results show up to 49% empirical improvement over the previous state-of-the-art model on the Jericho Walkthroughs dataset.
Structurally Diverse Sampling for Sample-Efficient Training and Comprehensive Evaluation
Authors: Sameer Singh, Matt Gardner Shivanshu Gupta
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: A growing body of research has demonstrated the inability of NLP models to generalize compositionally and has tried to alleviate it through specialized architectures, training schemes, and data augmentation, among other approaches. In this work, we study a different approach: training on instances with diverse structures. We propose a model-agnostic algorithm for subsampling such sets of instances from a labeled instance pool with structured outputs. Evaluating on both compositional template splits and traditional IID splits of 5 semantic parsing datasets of varying complexity, we show that structurally diverse training using our algorithm leads to comparable or better generalization than prior algorithms in 9 out of 10 dataset-split type pairs. In general, we find structural diversity to consistently improve sample efficiency compared to random train sets. Moreover, we show that structurally diverse sampling yields comprehensive test sets that are a lot more challenging than IID test sets. Finally, we provide two explanations for improved generalization from diverse train sets: 1) improved coverage of output substructures, and 2) a reduction in spurious correlations between these substructures.
Unsupervised Multi-Granularity Summarization
Authors: Yang Liu, Suyu Ge, Yuning Mao, Yizhu Jiao, Xingxing Zhang, Yichong Xu, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng, Jiawei Han Ming Zhong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Text summarization is a user-preference based task, i.e., for one document, users often have different priorities for the summary. As a key aspect of customization in summarization, granularity is used to measure the semantic coverage between the summary and source document. However, developing systems that can generate summaries with customizable semantic coverage is still an under-explored topic. In this paper, we propose the first unsupervised multi-granularity summarization framework, GranuSum. We take events as the basic semantic units of the source documents and propose to rank these events by their salience. We also develop a model to summarize input documents with given events as anchors and hints. By inputting different numbers of events, GranuSum is capable of producing multi-granular summaries in an unsupervised manner. Meanwhile, we annotate a new benchmark GranuDUC that contains multiple summaries at different granularities for each document cluster. Experimental results confirm the substantial superiority of GranuSum on multi-granularity summarization over strong baselines. Furthermore, by exploiting the event information, GranuSum also exhibits state-of-the-art performance under the conventional unsupervised abstractive setting.
HeLo: Learning-Free Lookahead Decoding for Conversation Infilling
Authors: Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick Ivan Lee
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose Heuristic Guided Lookahead Decoding (HeLo), a novel decoding strategy for conversation infilling. Conversation infilling aims to generate a seamless bridge of utterances connecting a given pair of source and target utterances. HeLo does not require fine-tuning or extra models -- only the generating model itself. Instead, HeLo leverages a greedy lookahead phase before committing to any token. The HeLo framework is simple and can augment conventional decoding strategies paired with any autoregressive language model. Smooth transitions between utterances are encouraged with an annealing schedule. Our experiments show HeLo outperforms several baselines when evaluated with both automatic and human evaluation metrics, which, we argue, are appropriate for the task.
Invernet: An Inversion Attack Framework to Infer Fine-Tuning Datasets through Word Embeddings
Authors: Zijun Yao, Bo Luo Ishrak Hayet
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Word embedding aims to learn the dense representation of words and has become a regular input preparation in many NLP tasks. Due to the data and computation intensive nature of learning embeddings from scratch, a more affordable way is to borrow the pretrained embedding available in public and fine-tune the embedding through a domain specific downstream dataset. A privacy concern can arise if a malicious owner of the pretrained embedding gets access to the fine-tuned embedding and tries to infer the critical information from the downstream datasets. In this study, we propose a novel embedding inversion framework called Invernet that materializes the privacy concern by inferring the context distribution in the downstream dataset, which can lead to key information breach. With extensive experimental studies on two real-world news datasets: Antonio Gulli`s News and New York Times, we validate the feasibility of proposed privacy attack and demonstrate the effectiveness of Invernet on inferring downstream datasets based on multiple word embedding methods.
LawngNLI: A Long-Premise Benchmark for In-Domain Generalization from Short to Long Contexts and for Implication-Based Retrieval
Authors: Dan Roth William Bruno
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Natural language inference has trended toward studying contexts beyond the sentence level. An important application area is law: past cases often do not foretell how they apply to new situations and implications must be inferred. This paper introduces LawngNLI, constructed from U.S. legal opinions with automatic labels with high human-validated accuracy. Premises are long and multigranular. Experiments show two use cases. First, LawngNLI can benchmark for in-domain generalization from short to long contexts. It has remained unclear if large-scale long-premise NLI datasets actually need to be constructed: near-top performance on long premises could be achievable by fine-tuning using short premises. Without multigranularity, benchmarks cannot distinguish lack of fine-tuning on long premises versus domain shift between short and long datasets. In contrast, our long and short premises share the same examples and domain. Models fine-tuned using several past NLI datasets and/or our short premises fall short of top performance on our long premises. So for at least certain domains (such as ours), large-scale long-premise datasets are needed. Second, LawngNLI can benchmark for implication-based retrieval. Queries are entailed or contradicted by target documents, allowing users to move between arguments and evidence. Leading retrieval models perform reasonably zero shot on a LawngNLI-derived retrieval task. We compare different systems for re-ranking, including lexical overlap and cross-encoders fine-tuned using a modified LawngNLI or past NLI datasets. LawngNLI can train and test systems for implication-based case retrieval and argumentation.
Distillation-Resistant Watermarking for Model Protection in NLP
Authors: Lei Li, Yu-Xiang Wang Xuandong Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: How can we protect the intellectual property of trained NLP models? Modern NLP models are prone to stealing by querying and distilling from their publicly exposed APIs. However, existing protection methods such as watermarking only work for images but are not applicable to text. We propose Distillation-Resistant Watermarking (DRW), a novel technique to protect NLP models from being stolen via distillation. DRW protects a model by injecting watermarks into the victim`s prediction probability corresponding to a secret key and is able to detect such a key by probing a suspect model. We prove that a protected model still retains the original accuracy within a certain bound. We evaluate DRW on a diverse set of NLP tasks including text classification, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition. Experiments show that DRW protects the original model and detects stealing suspects at 100% mean average precision for all four tasks while the prior method fails on two.
NeuroCounterfactuals: Beyond Minimal-Edit Counterfactuals for Richer Data Augmentation
Authors: Gadi Singer, Vasudev Lal, Yejin Choi, Swabha Swayamdipta Phillip Howard
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: While counterfactual data augmentation offers a promising step towards robust generalization in natural language processing, producing a set of counterfactuals that offer valuable inductive bias for models remains a challenge. Most existing approaches for producing counterfactuals, manual or automated, rely on small perturbations via minimal edits, resulting in simplistic changes. We introduce NeuroCounterfactuals, designed as loose counterfactuals, allowing for larger edits which result in naturalistic generations containing linguistic diversity, while still bearing similarity to the original document. Our novel generative approach bridges the benefits of constrained decoding, with those of language model adaptation for sentiment steering. Training data augmentation with our generations results in both in-domain and out-of-domain improvements for sentiment classification, outperforming even manually curated counterfactuals, under select settings. We further present detailed analyses to show the advantages of NeuroCounterfactuals over approaches involving simple, minimal edits.
Don`t Just Clean It, Proxy Clean It: Mitigating Bias by Proxy in Pre-Trained Models
Authors: Ari Kobren, Michael Wick, Qinlan Shen Swetasudha Panda
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Transformer-based pre-trained models are known to encode societal biases not only in their contextual representations, but also in downstream predictions when fine-tuned on task-specific data.We present D-Bias, an approach that selectively eliminates stereotypical associations (e.g, co-occurrence statistics) at fine-tuning, such that the model doesn`t learn to excessively rely on those signals.D-Bias attenuates biases from both identity words and frequently co-occurring proxies, which we select using pointwise mutual information.We apply D-Bias to a) occupation classification, and b) toxicity classification and find that our approach substantially reduces downstream biases (e.g. by \ensuremath> 60% in toxicity classification, for identities that are most frequently flagged as toxic on online platforms).In addition, we show that D-Bias dramatically improves upon scrubbing, i.e., removing only the identity words in question.We also demonstrate that D-Bias easily extends to multiple identities, and achieves competitive performance with two recently proposed debiasing approaches: R-LACE and INLP.
The Undesirable Dependence on Frequency of Gender Bias Metrics Based on Word Embeddings
Authors: Germán Rosati, Diego Fernandez Slezak, Edgar Altszyler Francisco Valentini
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Numerous works use word embedding-based metrics to quantify societal biases and stereotypes in texts. Recent studies have found that word embeddings can capture semantic similarity but may be affected by word frequency. In this work we study the effect of frequency when measuring female vs. male gender bias with word embedding-based bias quantification methods. We find that Skip-gram with negative sampling and GloVe tend to detect male bias in high frequency words, while GloVe tends to return female bias in low frequency words. We show these behaviors still exist when words are randomly shuffled. This proves that the frequency-based effect observed in unshuffled corpora stems from properties of the metric rather than from word associations. The effect is spurious and problematic since bias metrics should depend exclusively on word co-occurrences and not individual word frequencies. Finally, we compare these results with the ones obtained with an alternative metric based on Pointwise Mutual Information. We find that this metric does not show a clear dependence on frequency, even though it is slightly skewed towards male bias across all frequencies.
BioNLI: Generating a Biomedical NLI Dataset Using Lexico-semantic Constraints for Adversarial Examples
Authors: Mihai Surdeanu, Niranjan Balasubramanian Mohaddeseh Bastan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Natural language inference (NLI) is critical in many domains requiring complex decision-making, such as the biomedical domain. We introduce a novel semi-supervised procedure that bootstraps biomedical NLI datasets from positive entailment examples present in abstracts of biomedical publications. We focus on challenging texts where the hypothesis includes mechanistic information such as biochemical interactions between two entities. A key contribution of this work is automating the creation of negative examples that are informative without being simplistic. We generate a range of negative examples using nine strategies that manipulate the structure of the underlying mechanisms both with rules, e.g., flip the roles of the entities in the interaction, and, more importantly, by imposing the perturbed conditions as logical constraints in a neuro-logical decoding system (CITATION).We use this procedure to create a novel dataset for NLI in the biomedical domain, called . The accuracy of neural classifiers on this dataset is in the mid 70s F1, which indicates that this NLI task remains to be solved. Critically, we observe that the performance on the different classes of negative examples varies widely, from 97% F1 on the simple negative examples that change the role of the entities in the hypothesis, to barely better than chance on the negative examples generated using neuro-logic decoding.
Self-supervised Cross-modal Pretraining for Speech Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Ziyi Chen, Xinlu Yu, Mei Han, Jing Xiao, Peng Chang Iek-Heng Chu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Multimodal speech emotion recognition (SER) and sentiment analysis (SA) are important techniques for human-computer interaction. Most existing multimodal approaches utilize either shallow cross-modal fusion of pretrained features, or deep cross-modal fusion with raw features. Recently, attempts have been made to fuse pretrained feature representations in a deep fusion manner during fine-tuning stage. However those approaches have not led to improved results, partially due to their relatively simple fusion mechanisms and lack of proper cross-modal pretraining. In this work, leveraging single-modal pretrained models (RoBERTa and HuBERT), we propose a novel deeply-fused audio-text bi-modal transformer with carefully designed cross-modal fusion mechanism and a stage-wise cross-modal pretraining scheme to fully facilitate the cross-modal learning. Our experiment results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the public IEMOCAP emotion and CMU-MOSEI sentiment datasets, exceeding the previous benchmarks by a large margin.
Multimodal Conversation Modelling for Topic Derailment Detection
Authors: Marek Rei, Lucia Specia Zhenhao Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Conversations on social media tend to go off-topic and turn into different and sometimes toxic exchanges. Previous work focuses on analysing textual dialogues that have derailed into toxic content, but the range of derailment types is much broader, including spam or bot content, tangential comments, etc. In addition, existing work disregards conversations that involve visual information (i.e. images or videos), which are prevalent on most platforms. In this paper, we take a broader view of conversation derailment and propose a new challenge: detecting derailment based on the “change of conversation topic”, where the topic is defined by an initial post containing both a text and an image. For that, we (i) create the first Multimodal Conversation Derailment (MCD) dataset, and (ii) introduce a new multimodal conversational architecture (MMConv) that utilises visual and conversational contexts to classify comments for derailment. Experiments show that MMConv substantially outperforms previous text-based approaches to detect conversation derailment, as well as general multimodal classifiers. MMConv is also more robust to textual noise, since it relies on richer contextual information.
Active Learning for Abstractive Text Summarization
Authors: Ivan Lysenko, Danila Sedashov, Ivan Lazichny, Eldar Damirov, Vladimir Karlov, Artemy Belousov, Leonid Sanochkin, Maxim Panov, Alexander Panchenko, Mikhail Burtsev, Artem Shelmanov Akim Tsvigun
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Construction of human-curated annotated datasets for abstractive text summarization (ATS) is very time-consuming and expensive because creating each instance requires a human annotator to read a long document and compose a shorter summary that would preserve the key information relayed by the original document. Active Learning (AL) is a technique developed to reduce the amount of annotation required to achieve a certain level of machine learning model performance. In information extraction and text classification, AL can reduce the amount of labor up to multiple times. Despite its potential for aiding expensive annotation, as far as we know, there were no effective AL query strategies for ATS. This stems from the fact that many AL strategies rely on uncertainty estimation, while as we show in our work, uncertain instances are usually noisy, and selecting them can degrade the model performance compared to passive annotation. We address this problem by proposing the first effective query strategy for AL in ATS based on diversity principles. We show that given a certain annotation budget, using our strategy in AL annotation helps to improve the model performance in terms of ROUGE and consistency scores. Additionally, we analyze the effect of self-learning and show that it can additionally increase the performance of the model.
Finding Memo: Extractive Memorization in Constrained Sequence Generation Tasks
Authors: Arul Menezes Vikas Raunak
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Memorization presents a challenge for several constrained Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT), wherein the proclivity of neural models to memorize noisy and atypical samples reacts adversely with the noisy (web crawled) datasets. However, previous studies of memorization in constrained NLG tasks have only focused on counterfactual memorization, linking it to the problem of hallucinations. In this work, we propose a new, inexpensive algorithm for extractive memorization (exact training data generation under insufficient context) in constrained sequence generation tasks and use it to study extractive memorization and its effects in NMT. We demonstrate that extractive memorization poses a serious threat to NMT reliability by qualitatively and quantitatively characterizing the memorized samples as well as the model behavior in their vicinity. Based on empirical observations, we develop a simple algorithm which elicits non-memorized translations of memorized samples from the same model, for a large fraction of such samples. Finally, we show that the proposed algorithm could also be leveraged to mitigate memorization in the model through finetuning. We have released the code to reproduce our results at https://github.com/vyraun/Finding-Memo.
SALTED: A Framework for SAlient Long-tail Translation Error Detection
Authors: Matt Post, Arul Menezes Vikas Raunak
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Traditional machine translation (MT) metrics provide an average measure of translation quality that is insensitive to the long tail of behavioral problems. Examples include translation of numbers, physical units, dropped content and hallucinations. These errors, which occur rarely and unpredictably in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), greatly undermine the reliability of state-of-the-art MT systems. Consequently, it is important to have visibility into these problems during model development.Towards this end, we introduce SALTED, a specifications-based framework for behavioral testing of NMT models. At the core of our approach is the use of high-precision detectors that flag errors (or alternatively, verify output correctness) between a source sentence and a system output. These detectors provide fine-grained measurements of long-tail errors, providing a trustworthy view of problems that were previously invisible. We demonstrate that such detectors could be used not just to identify salient long-tail errors in MT systems, but also for higher-recall filtering of the training data, fixing targeted errors with model fine-tuning in NMT and generating novel data for metamorphic testing to elicit further bugs in models.
Discord Questions: A Computational Approach To Diversity Analysis in News Coverage
Authors: Chien-Sheng Wu, Lidiya Murakhovs′ka, Xiang Chen, Caiming Xiong Philippe Laban
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: There are many potential benefits to news readers accessing diverse sources. Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing the news, offering readers a plethora of source options, but choosing which source to read remains challenging.We propose a new framework to assist readers in identifying source differences and gaining an understanding of news coverage diversity.The framework is based on the generation of Discord Questions: questions with a diverse answer pool, explicitly illustrating source differences.To assemble a prototype of the framework, we focus on two components: (1) discord question generation, the task of generating questions answered differently by sources, for which we propose an automatic scoring method, and create a model that improves performance from current question generation (QG) methods by 5%, (2) answer consolidation, the task of grouping answers to a question that are semantically similar, for which we collect data and repurpose a method that achieves 81% balanced accuracy on our realistic test set.We illustrate the framework`s feasibility through a prototype interface. Even though model performance at discord QG still lags human performance by more than 15%, generated questions are judged to be more interesting than factoid questions and can reveal differences in the level of detail, sentiment, and reasoning of sources in news coverage. Code is available at https://github.com/Salesforce/discord_questions.
FocusQA: Open-Domain Question Answering with a Context in Focus
Authors: Ivano Lauriola, Alessandro Moschitti, Marco Del Tredici, Xiaoyu Shen, Thuy Vu, Bill Byrne, Adrià de Gispert Gianni Barlacchi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We introduce question answering with a cotext in focus, a task that simulates a free interaction with a QA system. The user reads on a screen some information about a topic, and they can follow-up with questions that can be either related or not to the topic; and the answer can be found in the document containing the screen content or from other pages. We call such information context. To study the task, we construct FocusQA, a dataset for answer sentence selection (AS2) with 12,165011unique question/context pairs, and a total of 109,940 answers. To build the dataset, we developed a novel methodology that takes existing questions and pairs them with relevant contexts. To show the benefits of this approach, we present a comparative analysis with a set of questions written by humans after reading the context, showing that our approach greatly helps in eliciting more realistic question/context pairs. Finally, we show that the task poses several challenges for incorporating contextual information. In this respect, we introduce strong baselines for answer sentence selection that outperform the precision of state-of-the-art models for AS2 up to 21.3% absolute points.
Challenges and Opportunities in Information Manipulation Detection: An Examination of Wartime Russian Media
Authors: Julia Mendelsohn, Anjalie Field, Yulia Tsvetkov Chan Young Park
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: NLP research on public opinion manipulation campaigns has primarily focused on detecting overt strategies such as fake news and disinformation. However, information manipulation in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war exemplifies how governments and media also employ more nuanced strategies. We release a new dataset, VoynaSlov, containing 38M+ posts from Russian media outlets on Twitter and VKontakte, as well as public activity and responses, immediately preceding and during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. We apply standard and recently-developed NLP models on VoynaSlov to examine agenda setting, framing, and priming, several strategies underlying information manipulation, and reveal variation across media outlet control, social media platform, and time. Our examination of these media effects and extensive discussion of current approaches' limitations encourage further development of NLP models for understanding information manipulation in emerging crises, as well as other real-world and interdisciplinary tasks.