mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learning From Failure: Data Capture in an Australian Aboriginal Community
Authors: Eric Le Ferrand, Steven Bird, Laurent Besacier
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Most low resource language technology development is premised on the need to collect data for training statistical models. When we follow the typical process of recording and transcribing text for small Indigenous languages, we hit up against the so-called “transcription bottleneck.” Therefore it is worth exploring new ways of engaging with speakers which generate data while avoiding the transcription bottleneck. We have deployed a prototype app for speakers to use for confirming system guesses in an approach to transcription based on word spotting. However, in the process of testing the app we encountered many new problems for engagement with speakers. This paper presents a close-up study of the process of deploying data capture technology on the ground in an Australian Aboriginal community. We reflect on our interactions with participants and draw lessons that apply to anyone seeking to develop methods for language data collection in an Indigenous community.
Deep Inductive Logic Reasoning for Multi-Hop Reading Comprehension
Authors: Wenya Wang, Sinno Pan
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Multi-hop reading comprehension requires an ability to reason across multiple documents. On the one hand, deep learning approaches only implicitly encode query-related information into distributed embeddings which fail to uncover the discrete relational reasoning process to infer the correct answer. On the other hand, logic-based approaches provide interpretable rules to infer the target answer, but mostly work on structured data where entities and relations are well-defined. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning based inductive logic reasoning method that firstly extracts query-related (candidate-related) information, and then conducts logic reasoning among the filtered information by inducing feasible rules that entail the target relation. The reasoning process is accomplished via attentive memories with novel differentiable logic operators. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we evaluate it on two reading comprehension datasets, namely WikiHop and MedHop.
CICERO: A Dataset for Contextualized Commonsense Inference in Dialogues
Authors: Deepanway Ghosal, Siqi Shen, Navonil Majumder, Rada Mihalcea, Soujanya Poria
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of dialogue reasoning with contextualized commonsense inference. We curate CICERO, a dataset of dyadic conversations with five types of utterance-level reasoning-based inferences: cause, subsequent event, prerequisite, motivation, and emotional reaction. The dataset contains 53,105 of such inferences from 5,672 dialogues. We use this dataset to solve relevant generative and discriminative tasks: generation of cause and subsequent event; generation of prerequisite, motivation, and listener`s emotional reaction; and selection of plausible alternatives. Our results ascertain the value of such dialogue-centric commonsense knowledge datasets. It is our hope that CICERO will open new research avenues into commonsense-based dialogue reasoning.
A Comparative Study of Faithfulness Metrics for Model Interpretability Methods
Authors: Chun Sik Chan, Huanqi Kong, Liang Guanqing
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Interpretable methods to reveal the internal reasoning processes behind machine learning models have attracted increasing attention in recent years. To quantify the extent to which the identified interpretations truly reflect the intrinsic decision-making mechanisms, various faithfulness evaluation metrics have been proposed. However, we find that different faithfulness metrics show conflicting preferences when comparing different interpretations. Motivated by this observation, we aim to conduct a comprehensive and comparative study of the widely adopted faithfulness metrics. In particular, we introduce two assessment dimensions, namely diagnosticity and complexity. Diagnosticity refers to the degree to which the faithfulness metric favors relatively faithful interpretations over randomly generated ones, and complexity is measured by the average number of model forward passes. According to the experimental results, we find that sufficiency and comprehensiveness metrics have higher diagnosticity and lower complexity than the other faithfulness metrics.
SPoT: Better Frozen Model Adaptation through Soft Prompt Transfer
Authors: Tu Vu, Brian Lester, Noah Constant, Rami Al-Rfou′, Daniel Cer
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: There has been growing interest in parameter-efficient methods to apply pre-trained language models to downstream tasks. Building on the Prompt Tuning approach of Lester et al. (2021), which learns task-specific soft prompts to condition a frozen pre-trained model to perform different tasks, we propose a novel prompt-based transfer learning approach called SPoT: Soft Prompt Transfer. SPoT first learns a prompt on one or more source tasks and then uses it to initialize the prompt for a target task. We show that SPoT significantly boosts the performance of Prompt Tuning across many tasks. More remarkably, across all model sizes, SPoT matches or outperforms standard Model Tuning (which fine-tunes all model parameters) on the SuperGLUE benchmark, while using up to 27,000× fewer task-specific parameters. To understand where SPoT is most effective, we conduct a large-scale study on task transferability with 26 NLP tasks in 160 combinations, and demonstrate that many tasks can benefit each other via prompt transfer. Finally, we propose an efficient retrieval approach that interprets task prompts as task embeddings to identify similar tasks and predict the most transferable source tasks for a novel target task.
Pass off Fish Eyes for Pearls: Attacking Model Selection of Pre-trained Models
Authors: Biru Zhu, Yujia Qin, Fanchao Qi, Yangdong Deng, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Ming Gu
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Selecting an appropriate pre-trained model (PTM) for a specific downstream task typically requires significant efforts of fine-tuning. To accelerate this process, researchers propose feature-based model selection (FMS) methods, which assess PTMs' transferability to a specific task in a fast way without fine-tuning. In this work, we argue that current FMS methods are vulnerable, as the assessment mainly relies on the static features extracted from PTMs. However, such features are derived without training PTMs on downstream tasks, and are not necessarily reliable indicators for the PTM`s transferability. To validate our viewpoints, we design two methods to evaluate the robustness of FMS: (1) model disguise attack, which post-trains an inferior PTM with a contrastive objective, and (2) evaluation data selection, which selects a subset of the data points for FMS evaluation based on K-means clustering. Experimental results prove that both methods can successfully make FMS mistakenly judge the transferability of PTMs. Moreover, we find that these two methods can further be combined with the backdoor attack to misguide the FMS to select poisoned models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate the defects of current FMS algorithms and evaluate their potential security risks. By identifying previously unseen risks of FMS, our study indicates new directions for improving the robustness of FMS.
Educational Question Generation of Children Storybooks via Question Type Distribution Learning and Event-centric Summarization
Authors: Zhenjie Zhao, Yufang Hou, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Chengzhong Liu, Xiaojuan Ma
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Generating educational questions of fairytales or storybooks is vital for improving children`s literacy ability. However, it is challenging to generate questions that capture the interesting aspects of a fairytale story with educational meaningfulness. In this paper, we propose a novel question generation method that first learns the question type distribution of an input story paragraph, and then summarizes salient events which can be used to generate high-cognitive-demand questions. To train the event-centric summarizer, we finetune a pre-trained transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model using silver samples composed by educational question-answer pairs. On a newly proposed educational question-answering dataset FairytaleQA, we show good performance of our method on both automatic and human evaluation metrics. Our work indicates the necessity of decomposing question type distribution learning and event-centric summary generation for educational question generation.
HeterMPC: A Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Response Generation in Multi-Party Conversations
Authors: Jia-Chen Gu, Chao-Hong Tan, Chongyang Tao, Zhen-Hua Ling, Huang Hu, Xiubo Geng, Daxin Jiang
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Recently, various response generation models for two-party conversations have achieved impressive improvements, but less effort has been paid to multi-party conversations (MPCs) which are more practical and complicated. Compared with a two-party conversation where a dialogue context is a sequence of utterances, building a response generation model for MPCs is more challenging, since there exist complicated context structures and the generated responses heavily rely on both interlocutors (i.e., speaker and addressee) and history utterances. To address these challenges, we present HeterMPC, a heterogeneous graph-based neural network for response generation in MPCs which models the semantics of utterances and interlocutors simultaneously with two types of nodes in a graph. Besides, we also design six types of meta relations with node-edge-type-dependent parameters to characterize the heterogeneous interactions within the graph. Through multi-hop updating, HeterMPC can adequately utilize the structural knowledge of conversations for response generation. Experimental results on the Ubuntu Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel benchmark show that HeterMPC outperforms various baseline models for response generation in MPCs.
The patient is more dead than alive: exploring the current state of the multi-document summarisation of the biomedical literature
Authors: Yulia Otmakhova, Karin Verspoor, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Although multi-document summarisation (MDS) of the biomedical literature is a highly valuable task that has recently attracted substantial interest, evaluation of the quality of biomedical summaries lacks consistency and transparency. In this paper, we examine the summaries generated by two current models in order to understand the deficiencies of existing evaluation approaches in the context of the challenges that arise in the MDS task. Based on this analysis, we propose a new approach to human evaluation and identify several challenges that must be overcome to develop effective biomedical MDS systems.
A Multi-Document Coverage Reward for RELAXed Multi-Document Summarization
Authors: Jacob Parnell, Inigo Jauregi Unanue, Massimo Piccardi
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Multi-document summarization (MDS) has made significant progress in recent years, in part facilitated by the availability of new, dedicated datasets and capacious language models. However, a standing limitation of these models is that they are trained against limited references and with plain maximum-likelihood objectives. As for many other generative tasks, reinforcement learning (RL) offers the potential to improve the training of MDS models; yet, it requires a carefully-designed reward that can ensure appropriate leverage of both the reference summaries and the input documents. For this reason, in this paper we propose fine-tuning an MDS baseline with a reward that balances a reference-based metric such as ROUGE with coverage of the input documents. To implement the approach, we utilize RELAX (Grathwohl et al., 2018), a contemporary gradient estimator which is both low-variance and unbiased, and we fine-tune the baseline in a few-shot style for both stability and computational efficiency. Experimental results over the Multi-News and WCEP MDS datasets show significant improvements of up to +0.95 pp average ROUGE score and +3.17 pp METEOR score over the baseline, and competitive results with the literature. In addition, they show that the coverage of the input documents is increased, and evenly across all documents.
KNN-Contrastive Learning for Out-of-Domain Intent Classification
Authors: Yunhua Zhou, Peiju Liu, Xipeng Qiu
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: The Out-of-Domain (OOD) intent classification is a basic and challenging task for dialogue systems. Previous methods commonly restrict the region (in feature space) of In-domain (IND) intent features to be compact or simply-connected implicitly, which assumes no OOD intents reside, to learn discriminative semantic features. Then the distribution of the IND intent features is often assumed to obey a hypothetical distribution (Gaussian mostly) and samples outside this distribution are regarded as OOD samples. In this paper, we start from the nature of OOD intent classification and explore its optimization objective. We further propose a simple yet effective method, named KNN-contrastive learning. Our approach utilizes k-nearest neighbors (KNN) of IND intents to learn discriminative semantic features that are more conducive to OOD detection. Notably, the density-based novelty detection algorithm is so well-grounded in the essence of our method that it is reasonable to use it as the OOD detection algorithm without making any requirements for the feature distribution. Extensive experiments on four public datasets show that our approach can not only enhance the OOD detection performance substantially but also improve the IND intent classification while requiring no restrictions on feature distribution.
A Neural Network Architecture for Program Understanding Inspired by Human Behaviors
Authors: Renyu Zhu, Lei Yuan, Xiang Li, Ming Gao, Wenyuan Cai
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Program understanding is a fundamental task in program language processing. Despite the success, existing works fail to take human behaviors as reference in understanding programs. In this paper, we consider human behaviors and propose the PGNN-EK model that consists of two main components. On the one hand, inspired by the “divide-and-conquer” reading behaviors of humans, we present a partitioning-based graph neural network model PGNN on the upgraded AST of codes. On the other hand, to characterize human behaviors of resorting to other resources to help code comprehension, we transform raw codes with external knowledge and apply pre-training techniques for information extraction. Finally, we combine the two embeddings generated from the two components to output code embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments to show the superior performance of PGNN-EK on the code summarization and code clone detection tasks. In particular, to show the generalization ability of our model, we release a new dataset that is more challenging for code clone detection and could advance the development of the community. Our codes and data are publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/RecklessRonan/PGNN-EK.
FaVIQ: FAct Verification from Information-seeking Questions
Authors: Jungsoo Park, Sewon Min, Jaewoo Kang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Despite significant interest in developing general purpose fact checking models, it is challenging to construct a large-scale fact verification dataset with realistic real-world claims. Existing claims are either authored by crowdworkers, thereby introducing subtle biases thatare difficult to control for, or manually verified by professional fact checkers, causing them to be expensive and limited in scale. In this paper, we construct a large-scale challenging fact verification dataset called FAVIQ, consisting of 188k claims derived from an existing corpus of ambiguous information-seeking questions. The ambiguities in the questions enable automatically constructing true and false claims that reflect user confusions (e.g., the year of the movie being filmed vs. being released). Claims in FAVIQ are verified to be natural, contain little lexical bias, and require a complete understanding of the evidence for verification. Our experiments show that the state-of-the-art models are far from solving our new task. Moreover, training on our data helps in professional fact-checking, outperforming models trained on the widely used dataset FEVER or in-domain data by up to 17% absolute. Altogether, our data will serve as a challenging benchmark for natural language understanding and support future progress in professional fact checking.
Simulating Bandit Learning from User Feedback for Extractive Question Answering
Authors: Ge Gao, Eunsol Choi, Yoav Artzi
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: We study learning from user feedback for extractive question answering by simulating feedback using supervised data. We cast the problem as contextual bandit learning, and analyze the characteristics of several learning scenarios with focus on reducing data annotation. We show that systems initially trained on few examples can dramatically improve given feedback from users on model-predicted answers, and that one can use existing datasets to deploy systems in new domains without any annotation effort, but instead improving the system on-the-fly via user feedback.
Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation
Authors: Jing Xu, Arthur Szlam, Jason Weston
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Despite recent improvements in open-domain dialogue models, state of the art models are trained and evaluated on short conversations with little context. In contrast, the long-term conversation setting has hardly been studied. In this work we collect and release a human-human dataset consisting of multiple chat sessions whereby the speaking partners learn about each other`s interests and discuss the things they have learnt from past sessions. We show how existing models trained on existing datasets perform poorly in this long-term conversation setting in both automatic and human evaluations, and we study long-context models that can perform much better. In particular, we find retrieval-augmented methods and methods with an ability to summarize and recall previous conversations outperform the standard encoder-decoder architectures currently considered state of the art.
ReCLIP: A Strong Zero-Shot Baseline for Referring Expression Comprehension
Authors: Sanjay Subramanian, William Merrill, Trevor Darrell, Matt Gardner, Sameer Singh, Anna Rohrbach
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Training a referring expression comprehension (ReC) model for a new visual domain requires collecting referring expressions, and potentially corresponding bounding boxes, for images in the domain. While large-scale pre-trained models are useful for image classification across domains, it remains unclear if they can be applied in a zero-shot manner to more complex tasks like ReC. We present ReCLIP, a simple but strong \textitzero-shot baseline that repurposes CLIP, a state-of-the-art large-scale model, for ReC. Motivated by the close connection between ReC and CLIP`s contrastive pre-training objective, the first component of ReCLIP is a region-scoring method that isolates object proposals via cropping and blurring, and passes them to CLIP. However, through controlled experiments on a synthetic dataset, we find that CLIP is largely incapable of performing spatial reasoning off-the-shelf. We reduce the gap between zero-shot baselines from prior work and supervised models by as much as 29% on RefCOCOg, and on RefGTA (video game imagery), ReCLIP`s relative improvement over supervised ReC models trained on real images is 8%.
Dynamic Prefix-Tuning for Generative Template-based Event Extraction
Authors: Xiao Liu, Heyan Huang, Ge Shi, Bo Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: We consider event extraction in a generative manner with template-based conditional generation. Although there is a rising trend of casting the task of event extraction as a sequence generation problem with prompts, these generation-based methods have two significant challenges, including using suboptimal prompts and static event type information. In this paper, we propose a generative template-based event extraction method with dynamic prefix (GTEE-DynPref) by integrating context information with type-specific prefixes to learn a context-specific prefix for each context. Experimental results show that our model achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art classification-based model OneIE on ACE 2005 and achieves the best performances on ERE.Additionally, our model is proven to be portable to new types of events effectively.
E-LANG: Energy-Based Joint Inferencing of Super and Swift Language Models
Authors: Mohammad Akbari, Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi, Yong Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Building huge and highly capable language models has been a trend in the past years. Despite their great performance, they incur high computational cost. A common solution is to apply model compression or choose light-weight architectures, which often need a separate fixed-size model for each desirable computational budget, and may lose performance in case of heavy compression. This paper proposes an effective dynamic inference approach, called E-LANG, which distributes the inference between large accurate Super-models and light-weight Swift models. To this end, a decision making module routes the inputs to Super or Swift models based on the energy characteristics of the representations in the latent space. This method is easily adoptable and architecture agnostic. As such, it can be applied to black-box pre-trained models without a need for architectural manipulations, reassembling of modules, or re-training. Unlike existing methods that are only applicable to encoder-only backbones and classification tasks, our method also works for encoder-decoder structures and sequence-to-sequence tasks such as translation. The E-LANG performance is verified through a set of experiments with T5 and BERT backbones on GLUE, SuperGLUE, and WMT. In particular, we outperform T5-11B with an average computations speed-up of 3.3X on GLUE and 2.9X on SuperGLUE. We also achieve BERT-based SOTA on GLUE with 3.2X less computations. Code and demo are available in supplementary materials.
PRIMERA: Pyramid-based Masked Sentence Pre-training for Multi-document Summarization
Authors: Wen Xiao, Iz Beltagy, Giuseppe Carenini, Arman Cohan
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: We introduce PRIMERA, a pre-trained model for multi-document representation with a focus on summarization that reduces the need for dataset-specific architectures and large amounts of fine-tuning labeled data. PRIMERA uses our newly proposed pre-training objective designed to teach the model to connect and aggregate information across documents. It also uses efficient encoder-decoder transformers to simplify the processing of concatenated input documents. With extensive experiments on 6 multi-document summarization datasets from 3 different domains on zero-shot, few-shot and full-supervised settings, PRIMERA outperforms current state-of-the-art dataset-specific and pre-trained models on most of these settings with large margins.
Dynamic Global Memory for Document-level Argument Extraction
Authors: Xinya Du, Sha Li, Heng Ji
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Extracting informative arguments of events from news articles is a challenging problem in information extraction, which requires a global contextual understanding of each document. While recent work on document-level extraction has gone beyond single-sentence and increased the cross-sentence inference capability of end-to-end models, they are still restricted by certain input sequence length constraints and usually ignore the global context between events. To tackle this issue, we introduce a new global neural generation-based framework for document-level event argument extraction by constructing a document memory store to record the contextual event information and leveraging it to implicitly and explicitly help with decoding of arguments for later events. Empirical results show that our framework outperforms prior methods substantially and it is more robust to adversarially annotated examples with our constrained decoding design.
Measuring the Impact of (Psycho-)Linguistic and Readability Features and Their Spill Over Effects on the Prediction of Eye Movement Patterns
Authors: Daniel Wiechmann, Yu Qiao, Elma Kerz, Justus Mattern
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: There is a growing interest in the combined use of NLP and machine learning methods to predict gaze patterns during naturalistic reading. While promising results have been obtained through the use of transformer-based language models, little work has been undertaken to relate the performance of such models to general text characteristics. In this paper we report on experiments with two eye-tracking corpora of naturalistic reading and two language models (BERT and GPT-2). In all experiments, we test effects of a broad spectrum of features for predicting human reading behavior that fall into five categories (syntactic complexity, lexical richness, register-based multiword combinations, readability and psycholinguistic word properties). Our experiments show that both the features included and the architecture of the transformer-based language models play a role in predicting multiple eye-tracking measures during naturalistic reading. We also report the results of experiments aimed at determining the relative importance of features from different groups using SP-LIME.
Alternative Input Signals Ease Transfer in Multilingual Machine Translation
Authors: Simeng Sun, Angela Fan, James Cross, Vishrav Chaudhary, Chau Tran, Philipp Koehn, Francisco Guzmán
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent work in multilingual machine translation (MMT) has focused on the potential of positive transfer between languages, particularly cases where higher-resourced languages can benefit lower-resourced ones. While training an MMT model, the supervision signals learned from one language pair can be transferred to the other via the tokens shared by multiple source languages. However, the transfer is inhibited when the token overlap among source languages is small, which manifests naturally when languages use different writing systems. In this paper, we tackle inhibited transfer by augmenting the training data with alternative signals that unify different writing systems, such as phonetic, romanized, and transliterated input. We test these signals on Indic and Turkic languages, two language families where the writing systems differ but languages still share common features. Our results indicate that a straightforward multi-source self-ensemble -- training a model on a mixture of various signals and ensembling the outputs of the same model fed with different signals during inference, outperforms strong ensemble baselines by 1.3 BLEU points on both language families. Further, we find that incorporating alternative inputs via self-ensemble can be particularly effective when training set is small, leading to +5 BLEU when only 5% of the total training data is accessible. Finally, our analysis demonstrates that including alternative signals yields more consistency and translates named entities more accurately, which is crucial for increased factuality of automated systems.
Phone-ing it in: Towards Flexible Multi-Modal Language Model Training by Phonetic Representations of Data
Authors: Colin Leong, Daniel Whitenack
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Multi-modal techniques offer significant untapped potential to unlock improved NLP technology for local languages. However, many advances in language model pre-training are focused on text, a fact that only increases systematic inequalities in the performance of NLP tasks across the world`s languages. In this work, we propose a multi-modal approach to train language models using whatever text and/or audio data might be available in a language. Initial experiments using Swahili and Kinyarwanda data suggest the viability of the approach for downstream Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks, with models pre-trained on phone data showing an improvement of up to 6% F1-score above models that are trained from scratch. Preprocessing and training code will be uploaded to r̆lhttps://github.com/sil-ai/phone-it-in.
Noisy Channel Language Model Prompting for Few-Shot Text Classification
Authors: Sewon Min, Mike Lewis, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke Zettlemoyer
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: We introduce a noisy channel approach for language model prompting in few-shot text classification. Instead of computing the likelihood of the label given the input (referred as direct models), channel models compute the conditional probability of the input given the label, and are thereby required to explain every word in the input. We use channel models for recently proposed few-shot learning methods with no or very limited updates to the language model parameters, via either in-context demonstration or prompt tuning. Our experiments show that, for both methods, channel models significantly outperform their direct counterparts, which we attribute to their stability, i.e., lower variance and higher worst-case accuracy. We also present extensive ablations that provide recommendations for when to use channel prompt tuning instead of other competitive models (e.g., direct head tuning): channel prompt tuning is preferred when the number of training examples is small, labels in the training data are imbalanced, or generalization to unseen labels is required.
Multilingual unsupervised sequence segmentation transfers to extremely low-resource languages
Authors: C. Downey, Shannon Drizin, Levon Haroutunian, Shivin Thukral
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: We show that unsupervised sequence-segmentation performance can be transferred to extremely low-resource languages by pre-training a Masked Segmental Language Model (Downey et al., 2021) multilingually. Further, we show that this transfer can be achieved by training over a collection of low-resource languages that are typologically similar (but phylogenetically unrelated) to the target language. In our experiments, we transfer from a collection of 10 Indigenous American languages (AmericasNLP, Mager et al., 2021) to K`iche', a Mayan language. We compare our multilingual model to a monolingual (from-scratch) baseline, as well as a model pre-trained on Quechua only. We show that the multilingual pre-trained approach yields consistent segmentation quality across target dataset sizes, exceeding the monolingual baseline in 6/10 experimental settings. Our model yields especially strong results at small target sizes, including a zero-shot performance of 20.6 F1. These results have promising implications for low-resource NLP pipelines involving human-like linguistic units, such as the sparse transcription framework proposed by Bird (2020).
KinyaBERT: a Morphology-aware Kinyarwanda Language Model
Authors: Antoine Nzeyimana, Andre Niyongabo Rubungo
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Pre-trained language models such as BERT have been successful at tackling many natural language processing tasks. However, the unsupervised sub-word tokenization methods commonly used in these models (e.g., byte-pair encoding - BPE) are sub-optimal at handling morphologically rich languages. Even given a morphological analyzer, naive sequencing of morphemes into a standard BERT architecture is inefficient at capturing morphological compositionality and expressing word-relative syntactic regularities. We address these challenges by proposing a simple yet effective two-tier BERT architecture that leverages a morphological analyzer and explicitly represents morphological compositionality.Despite the success of BERT, most of its evaluations have been conducted on high-resource languages, obscuring its applicability on low-resource languages. We evaluate our proposed method on the low-resource morphologically rich Kinyarwanda language, naming the proposed model architecture KinyaBERT. A robust set of experimental results reveal that KinyaBERT outperforms solid baselines by 2% in F1 score on a named entity recognition task and by 4.3% in average score of a machine-translated GLUE benchmark. KinyaBERT fine-tuning has better convergence and achieves more robust results on multiple tasks even in the presence of translation noise.
On the Calibration of Pre-trained Language Models using Mixup Guided by Area Under the Margin and Saliency
Authors: Seo Yeon Park, Cornelia Caragea
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: A well-calibrated neural model produces confidence (probability outputs) closely approximated by the expected accuracy. While prior studies have shown that mixup training as a data augmentation technique can improve model calibration on image classification tasks, little is known about using mixup for model calibration on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this paper, we explore mixup for model calibration on several NLU tasks and propose a novel mixup strategy for pre-trained language models that improves model calibration further. Our proposed mixup is guided by both the Area Under the Margin (AUM) statistic (Pleiss et al., 2020) and the saliency map of each sample (Simonyan et al., 2013). Moreover, we combine our mixup strategy with model miscalibration correction techniques (i.e., label smoothing and temperature scaling) and provide detailed analyses of their impact on our proposed mixup. We focus on systematically designing experiments on three NLU tasks: natural language inference, paraphrase detection, and commonsense reasoning. Our method achieves the lowest expected calibration error compared to strong baselines on both in-domain and out-of-domain test samples while maintaining competitive accuracy.
IMPLI: Investigating NLI Models' Performance on Figurative Language
Authors: Kevin Stowe, Prasetya Utama, Iryna Gurevych
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Natural language inference (NLI) has been widely used as a task to train and evaluate models for language understanding. However, the ability of NLI models to perform inferences requiring understanding of figurative language such as idioms and metaphors remains understudied. We introduce the IMPLI (Idiomatic and Metaphoric Paired Language Inference) dataset, an English dataset consisting of paired sentences spanning idioms and metaphors. We develop novel methods to generate 24k semiautomatic pairs as well as manually creating 1.8k gold pairs. We use IMPLI to evaluate NLI models based on RoBERTa fine-tuned on the widely used MNLI dataset. We then show that while they can reliably detect entailment relationship between figurative phrases with their literal counterparts, they perform poorly on similarly structured examples where pairs are designed to be non-entailing. This suggests the limits of current NLI models with regard to understanding figurative language and this dataset serves as a benchmark for future improvements in this direction.
QAConv: Question Answering on Informative Conversations
Authors: Chien-Sheng Wu, Andrea Madotto, Wenhao Liu, Pascale Fung, Caiming Xiong
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: This paper introduces QAConv, a new question answering (QA) dataset that uses conversations as a knowledge source. We focus on informative conversations, including business emails, panel discussions, and work channels. Unlike open-domain and task-oriented dialogues, these conversations are usually long, complex, asynchronous, and involve strong domain knowledge. In total, we collect 34,608 QA pairs from 10,259 selected conversations with both human-written and machine-generated questions. We use a question generator and a dialogue summarizer as auxiliary tools to collect and recommend questions. The dataset has two testing scenarios: chunk mode and full mode, depending on whether the grounded partial conversation is provided or retrieved. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art pretrained QA systems have limited zero-shot performance and tend to predict our questions as unanswerable. Our dataset provides a new training and evaluation testbed to facilitate QA on conversations research.
Prix-LM: Pretraining for Multilingual Knowledge Base Construction
Authors: Wenxuan Zhou, Fangyu Liu, Ivan Vulić, Nigel Collier, Muhao Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Knowledge bases (KBs) contain plenty of structured world and commonsense knowledge. As such, they often complement distributional text-based information and facilitate various downstream tasks. Since their manual construction is resource- and time-intensive, recent efforts have tried leveraging large pretrained language models (PLMs) to generate additional monolingual knowledge facts for KBs. However, such methods have not been attempted for building and enriching multilingual KBs. Besides wider application, such multilingual KBs can provide richer combined knowledge than monolingual (e.g., English) KBs. Knowledge expressed in different languages may be complementary and unequally distributed: this implies that the knowledge available in high-resource languages can be transferred to low-resource ones. To achieve this, it is crucial to represent multilingual knowledge in a shared/unified space. To this end, we propose a unified representation model, Prix-LM, for multilingual KB construction and completion. We leverage two types of knowledge, monolingual triples and cross-lingual links, extracted from existing multilingual KBs, and tune a multilingual language encoder XLM-R via a causal language modeling objective. Prix-LM integrates useful multilingual and KB-based factual knowledge into a single model. Experiments on standard entity-related tasks, such as link prediction in multiple languages, cross-lingual entity linking and bilingual lexicon induction, demonstrate its effectiveness, with gains reported over strong task-specialised baselines.
Semantic Composition with PSHRG for Derivation Tree Reconstruction from Graph-Based Meaning Representations
Authors: Chun Hei Lo, Wai Lam, Hong Cheng
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: We introduce a data-driven approach to generating derivation trees from meaning representation graphs with probabilistic synchronous hyperedge replacement grammar (PSHRG). SHRG has been used to produce meaning representation graphs from texts and syntax trees, but little is known about its viability on the reverse. In particular, we experiment on Dependency Minimal Recursion Semantics (DMRS) and adapt PSHRG as a formalism that approximates the semantic composition of DMRS graphs and simultaneously recovers the derivations that license the DMRS graphs. Consistent results are obtained as evaluated on a collection of annotated corpora. This work reveals the ability of PSHRG in formalizing a syntax--semantics interface, modelling compositional graph-to-tree translations, and channelling explainability to surface realization.
HOLM: Hallucinating Objects with Language Models for Referring Expression Recognition in Partially-Observed Scenes
Authors: Volkan Cirik, Louis-Philippe Morency, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: AI systems embodied in the physical world face a fundamental challenge of partial observability; operating with only a limited view and knowledge of the environment. This creates challenges when AI systems try to reason about language and its relationship with the environment: objects referred to through language (e.g. giving many instructions) are not immediately visible. Actions by the AI system may be required to bring these objects in view. A good benchmark to study this challenge is Dynamic Referring Expression Recognition (dRER) task, where the goal is to find a target location by dynamically adjusting the field of view (FoV) in a partially observed 360 scenes. In this paper, we introduce HOLM, Hallucinating Objects with Language Models, to address the challenge of partial observability. HOLM uses large pre-trained language models (LMs) to infer object hallucinations for the unobserved part of the environment. Our core intuition is that if a pair of objects co-appear in an environment frequently, our usage of language should reflect this fact about the world. Based on this intuition, we prompt language models to extract knowledge about object affinities which gives us a proxy for spatial relationships of objects. Our experiments show that HOLM performs better than the state-of-the-art approaches on two datasets for dRER; allowing to study generalization for both indoor and outdoor settings.
Multi Task Learning For Zero Shot Performance Prediction of Multilingual Models
Authors: Kabir Ahuja, Shanu Kumar, Sandipan Dandapat, Monojit Choudhury
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Massively Multilingual Transformer based Language Models have been observed to be surprisingly effective on zero-shot transfer across languages, though the performance varies from language to language depending on the pivot language(s) used for fine-tuning. In this work, we build upon some of the existing techniques for predicting the zero-shot performance on a task, by modeling it as a multi-task learning problem. We jointly train predictive models for different tasks which helps us build more accurate predictors for tasks where we have test data in very few languages to measure the actual performance of the model. Our approach also lends us the ability to perform a much more robust feature selection, and identify a common set of features that influence zero-shot performance across a variety of tasks.
$ınfty$-former: Infinite Memory Transformer
Authors: Pedro Henrique Martins, Zita Marinho, Andre Martins
Published in: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2022

Abstract: Transformers are unable to model long-term memories effectively, since the amount of computation they need to perform grows with the context length. While variations of efficient transformers have been proposed, they all have a finite memory capacity and are forced to drop old information. In this paper, we propose the $ınfty$-former, which extends the vanilla transformer with an unbounded long-term memory. By making use of a continuous-space attention mechanism to attend over the long-term memory, the $ınfty$-former`s attention complexity becomes independent of the context length, trading off memory length with precision.In order to control where precision is more important, $ınfty$-former maintains “sticky memories,” being able to model arbitrarily long contexts while keeping the computation budget fixed.Experiments on a synthetic sorting task, language modeling, and document grounded dialogue generation demonstrate the $ınfty$-former`s ability to retain information from long sequences.