mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Sharpness-Aware Minimization with Dynamic Reweighting
Authors: Wenxuan Zhou, Fangyu Liu, Huan Zhang, Muhao Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Deep neural networks are often overparameterized and may not easily achieve model generalization. Adversarial training has shown effectiveness in improving generalization by regularizing the change of loss on top of adversarially chosen perturbations. The recently proposed sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) algorithm conducts adversarial weight perturbation, encouraging the model to converge to a flat minima. SAM finds a common adversarial weight perturbation per-batch. Although per-instance adversarial weight perturbations are stronger adversaries and can potentially lead to better generalization performance, their computational cost is very high and thus it is impossible to use per-instance perturbations efficiently in SAM. In this paper, we tackle this efficiency bottleneck and propose sharpness-aware minimization with dynamic reweighting (delta-SAM). Our theoretical analysis motivates that it is possible to approach the stronger, per-instance adversarial weight perturbations using reweighted per-batch weight perturbations. delta-SAM dynamically reweights perturbation within each batch according to the theoretically principled weighting factors, serving as a good approximation to per-instance perturbation. Experiments on various natural language understanding tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of delta-SAM.
Predicting Long-Term Citations from Short-Term Linguistic Influence
Authors: Sandeep Soni, David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: A standard measure of the influence of a research paper is the number of times it is cited. However, papers may be cited for many reasons, and citation count is not informative about the extent to which a paper affected the content of subsequent publications. We therefore propose a novel method to quantify linguistic influence in timestamped document collections. There are two main steps: first, identify lexical and semantic changes using contextual embeddings and word frequencies; second, aggregate information about these changes into per-document influence parameters by estimating a high-dimensional Hawkes process with a low-rank parameter matrix. The resulting measures of linguistic influence are predictive of \textitfuture citations. Specifically, the estimate of linguistic influence from the two years after a paper`s publication is correlated with and predictive of its citation count in the following three years. This is demonstrated using an online evaluation with incremental temporal training/test splits, in comparison with a strong baseline that includes predictors for initial citation counts, topics, and lexical features.
Joint Audio/Text Training for Transformer Rescorer of Streaming Speech Recognition
Authors: Suyoun Kim, Ke Li, Lucas Kabela, Ron Huang, Jiedan Zhu, Ozlem Kalinli, Duc Le
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recently, there has been an increasing interest in two-pass streaming end-to-end speech recognition (ASR) that incorporates a 2nd-pass rescoring model on top of the conventional 1st-pass streaming ASR model to improve recognition accuracy while keeping latency low. One of the latest 2nd-pass rescoring model, Transformer Rescorer, takes the n-best initial outputs and audio embeddings from the 1st-pass model, and then choose the best output by re-scoring the n-best initial outputs. However, training this Transformer Rescorer requires expensive paired audio-text training data because the model uses audio embeddings as input. In this work, we present our Joint Audio/Text training method for Transformer Rescorer, to leverage unpaired text-only data which is relatively cheaper than paired audio-text data. We evaluate Transformer Rescorer with our Joint Audio/Text training on Librispeech dataset as well as our large-scale in-house dataset and show that our training method can improve word error rate (WER) significantly compared to standard Transformer Rescorer without requiring any extra model parameters or latency.
TyDiP: A Dataset for Politeness Classification in Nine Typologically Diverse Languages
Authors: Anirudh Srinivasan, Eunsol Choi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We study politeness phenomena in nine typologically diverse languages. Politeness is an important facet of communication and is sometimes argued to be cultural-specific, yet existing computational linguistic study is limited to English. We create TyDiP, a dataset containing three-way politeness annotations for 500 examples in each language, totaling 4.5K examples. We evaluate how well multilingual models can identify politeness levels -- they show a fairly robust zero-shot transfer ability, yet fall short of estimated human accuracy significantly. We further study mapping the English politeness strategy lexicon into nine languages via automatic translation and lexicon induction, analyzing whether each strategy`s impact stays consistent across languages. Lastly, we empirically study the complicated relationship between formality and politeness through transfer experiments. We hope our dataset will support various research questions and applications, from evaluating multilingual models to constructing polite multilingual agents.
Probing Cross-modal Semantics Alignment Capability from the Textual Perspective
Authors: Zheng Ma, Shi Zong, Mianzhi Pan, Jianbing Zhang, Shujian Huang, Xinyu Dai, Jiajun Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In recent years, vision and language pre-training (VLP) models have advanced the state-of-the-art results in a variety of cross-modal downstream tasks. Aligning cross-modal semantics is claimed to be one of the essential capabilities of VLP models. However, it still remains unclear about the inner working mechanism of alignment in VLP models. In this paper, we propose a new probing method that is based on image captioning to first empirically study the cross-modal semantics alignment of VLP models. Our probing method is built upon the fact that given an image-caption pair, the VLP models will give a score, indicating how well two modalities are aligned; maximizing such scores will generate sentences that VLP models believe are of good alignment. Analyzing these sentences thus will reveal in what way different modalities are aligned and how well these alignments are in VLP models. We apply our probing method to five popular VLP models, including UNITER, ROSITA, ViLBERT, CLIP, and LXMERT, and provide a comprehensive analysis of the generated captions guided by these models. Our results show that VLP models (1) focus more on just aligning objects with visual words, while neglecting global semantics; (2) prefer fixed sentence patterns, thus ignoring more important textual information including fluency and grammar; and (3) deem the captions with more visual words are better aligned with images. These findings indicate that VLP models still have weaknesses in cross-modal semantics alignment and we hope this work will draw researchers' attention to such problems when designing a new VLP model.
Hidden State Variability of Pretrained Language Models Can Guide Computation Reduction for Transfer Learning
Authors: Shuo Xie, Jiahao Qiu, Ankita Pasad, Li Du, Qing Qu, Hongyuan Mei
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: While transferring a pretrained language model, common approaches conventionally attach their task-specific classifiers to the top layer and adapt all the pretrained layers. We investigate whether one could make a task-specific selection on which subset of the layers to adapt and where to place the classifier. The goal is to reduce the computation cost of transfer learning methods (e.g. fine-tuning or adapter-tuning) without sacrificing its performance.We propose to select layers based on the variability of their hidden states given a task-specific corpus. We say a layer is already “well-specialized” in a task if the within-class variability of its hidden states is low relative to the between-class variability. Our variability metric is cheap to compute and doesn`t need any training or hyperparameter tuning. It is robust to data imbalance and data scarcity. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark demonstrate that selecting layers based on our metric can yield significantly stronger performance than using the same number of top layers and often match the performance of fine-tuning or adapter-tuning the entire language model.
Combinatory Grammar Tells Underlying Relevance among Entities
Authors: Yuanhe Tian, Yan Song
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Relation extraction (RE) is an important task in natural language processing which aims to annotate the relation between two given entities, which requires a deep understanding of the running text. To import model performance, existing approaches leverage syntactic information to facilitate the relation extraction process, where they mainly focus on dependencies among words while paying limited attention to other types of syntactic structure. Considering that combinatory categorial grammar (CCG) is a lexicalized grammatical formalism that carries the syntactic and semantic knowledge for text understanding, we propose an alternative solution for RE that takes advantage of CCG to detect the relation between entities. In doing so, we perform a multi-task learning process to learn from RE and auto-annotated CCG supertags, where an attention mechanism is performed over all input words to distinguish the important ones for RE with the attention weights guided by the supertag decoding process. We evaluate our model on two widely used English benchmark datasets (i.e., ACE2005EN and SemEval 2010 Task 8 datasets) for RE, where the effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by the experimental results with our approach achieving state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.
Leveraging Open Data and Task Augmentation to Automated Behavioral Coding of Psychotherapy Conversations in Low-Resource Scenarios
Authors: Zhuohao Chen, Nikolaos Flemotomos, Zac Imel, David Atkins, Shrikanth Narayanan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In psychotherapy interactions, the quality of a session is assessed by codifying the communicative behaviors of participants during the conversation through manual observation and annotation. Developing computational approaches for automated behavioral coding can reduce the burden on human coders and facilitate the objective evaluation of the intervention. In the real world, however, implementing such algorithms is associated with data sparsity challenges since privacy concerns lead to limited available in-domain data. In this paper, we leverage a publicly available conversation-based dataset and transfer knowledge to the low-resource behavioral coding task by performing an intermediate language model training via meta-learning. We introduce a task augmentation method to produce a large number of “analogy tasks” --- tasks similar to the target one --- and demonstrate that the proposed framework predicts target behaviors more accurately than all the other baseline models.
Learning to Detect Noisy Labels Using Model-Based Features
Authors: Zhihao Wang, Zongyu Lin, Junjie Wen, Xianxin Chen, Peiqi Liu, Guidong Zheng, Yujun Chen, Zhilin Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Label noise is ubiquitous in various machine learning scenarios such as self-labeling with model predictions and erroneous data annotation. Many existing approaches are based on heuristics such as sample losses, which might not be flexible enough to achieve optimal solutions. Meta learning based methods address this issue by learning a data selection function, but can be hard to optimize. In light of these pros and cons, we propose SENT (Selection-Enhanced Noisy label Training) that does not rely on meta learning while having the flexibility of being data-driven. SENT transfers the noise distribution to a clean set and trains a model to distinguish noisy labels from clean ones using model-based features. Empirically, on a wide range of tasks including text classification and speech recognition, SENT improves performance over strong baselines under the settings of self-training and label corruption.
Keyphrase Generation Beyond the Boundaries of Title and Abstract
Authors: Krishna Garg, Jishnu Ray Chowdhury, Cornelia Caragea
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Keyphrase generation aims at generating important phrases (keyphrases) that best describe a given document. In scholarly domains, current approaches have largely used only the title and abstract of the articles to generate keyphrases. In this paper, we comprehensively explore whether the integration of additional information from the full text of a given article or from semantically similar articles can be helpful for a neural keyphrase generation model or not. We discover that adding sentences from the full text, particularly in the form of the extractive summary of the article can significantly improve the generation of both types of keyphrases that are either present or absent from the text. Experimental results with three widely used models for keyphrase generation along with one of the latest transformer models suitable for longer documents, Longformer Encoder-Decoder (LED) validate the observation. We also present a new large-scale scholarly dataset FullTextKP for keyphrase generation. Unlike prior large-scale datasets, FullTextKP includes the full text of the articles along with the title and abstract. We release the source code at https://github.com/kgarg8/FullTextKP.
Composition, Attention, or Both?
Authors: Ryo Yoshida, Yohei Oseki
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called Composition Attention Grammars (CAGs) that recursively compose subtrees into a single vector representation with a composition function, and selectively attend to previous structural information with a self-attention mechanism. We investigate whether these components---the composition function and the self-attention mechanism---can both induce human-like syntactic generalization. Specifically, we train language models (LMs) with and without these two components with the model sizes carefully controlled, and evaluate their syntactic generalization performance against six test circuits on the SyntaxGym benchmark. The results demonstrated that the composition function and the self-attention mechanism both play an important role to make LMs more human-like, and closer inspection of linguistic phenomenon implied that the composition function allowed syntactic features, but not semantic features, to percolate into subtree representations.
CDGP: Automatic Cloze Distractor Generation based on Pre-trained Language Model
Authors: Shang-Hsuan Chiang, Ssu-Cheng Wang, Yao-Chung Fan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Manually designing cloze test consumes enormous time and efforts. The major challenge lies in wrong option (distractor) selection. Having carefully-design distractors improves the effectiveness of learner ability assessment. As a result, the idea of automatically generating cloze distractor is motivated. In this paper, we investigate cloze distractor generation by exploring the employment of pre-trained language models (PLMs) as an alternative for candidate distractor generation. Experiments show that the PLM-enhanced model brings a substantial performance improvement. Our best performing model advances the state-of-the-art result from 14.94 to 34.17 (NDCG@10 score). Our code and dataset is available at https://github.com/AndyChiangSH/CDGP.
G3: Geolocation via Guidebook Grounding
Authors: Grace Luo, Giscard Biamby, Trevor Darrell, Daniel Fried, Anna Rohrbach
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We demonstrate how language can improve geolocation: the task of predicting the location where an image was taken. Here we study explicit knowledge from human-written guidebooks that describe the salient and class-discriminative visual features humans use for geolocation. We propose the task of Geolocation via Guidebook Grounding that uses a dataset of StreetView images from a diverse set of locations and an associated textual guidebook for GeoGuessr, a popular interactive geolocation game. Our approach predicts a country for each image by attending over the clues automatically extracted from the guidebook. Supervising attention with country-level pseudo labels achieves the best performance. Our approach substantially outperforms a state-of-the-art image-only geolocation method, with an improvement of over 5% in Top-1 accuracy. Our dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/g-luo/geolocation_via_guidebook_grounding.
Controlling Bias Exposure for Fair Interpretable Predictions
Authors: Zexue He, Yu Wang, Julian McAuley, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent work on reducing bias in NLP models usually focuses on protecting or isolating information related to a sensitive attribute (like gender or race). However, when sensitive information is semantically entangled with the task information of the input, e.g., gender information is predictive for a profession, a fair trade-off between task performance and bias mitigation is difficult to achieve. Existing approaches perform this trade-off by eliminating bias information from the latent space, lacking control over how much bias is necessarily required to be removed. We argue that a favorable debiasing method should use sensitive information \textquoteleftfairly', rather than blindly eliminating it (Caliskan et al., 2017; Sun et al., 2019; Bogen et al., 2020). In this work, we provide a novel debiasing algorithm by adjustingthe predictive model`s belief to (1) ignore the sensitive information if it is not useful for the task; (2) use sensitive information minimally as necessary for the prediction (while also incurring a penalty). Experimental results on two text classification tasks (influenced by gender) and an open-ended generation task (influenced by race) indicate that our model achieves a desirable trade-off between debiasing and task performance along with producing debiased rationales as evidence.
Investigating the Benefits of Free-Form Rationales
Authors: Jiao Sun, Swabha Swayamdipta, Jonathan May, Xuezhe Ma
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Free-form rationales aim to aid model interpretability by supplying the background knowledge that can help understand model decisions. Crowdsourced rationales are provided for commonsense QA instances in popular datasets such as CoS-E and ECQA, but their utility remains under-investigated. We present human studies which show that ECQA rationales indeed provide additional background information to understand a decision, while over 88% of CoS-E rationales do not. Inspired by this finding, we ask: can the additional context provided by free-form rationales benefit models, similar to human users? We investigate the utility of rationales as an additional source of supervision, by varying the quantity and quality of rationales during training. After controlling for instances where rationales leak the correct answer while not providing additional background knowledge, we find that incorporating only 5% of rationales during training can boost model performance by 47.22% for CoS-E and 57.14% for ECQA during inference. Moreover, we also show that rationale quality matters: compared to crowdsourced rationales, T5-generated rationales provide not only weaker supervision to models, but are also not helpful for humans in aiding model interpretability.
Data-Efficient Concept Extraction from Pre-trained Language Models for Commonsense Explanation Generation
Authors: Yanbo Fang, Yongfeng Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Predicting the key explanation concept is essential for generating commonsense explanations. This paper introduces a method to predict the concept from pre-trained language models for commonsense explanation generation. Our experiment found that adopting a language model as the concept extractor and fine-tuning it with 20% training data can improve the quality and accuracy of the generated explanations over multiple evaluation metrics. Compared with conventional methods that search concepts over knowledge graphs, our method does not require the preparation and training models to search through knowledge graphs. To better understand the results from pre-trained language models, we also designed a metric to evaluate the retrieved concepts. Through analysis and experiments, we show the correlation between this metric and the performance of the generators, and we also show the importance of attaching concepts for generating high-quality sentences.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Joint Information Extraction
Authors: Nghia Ngo, Bonan Min, Thien Nguyen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Joint Information Extraction (JIE) aims to jointly solve multiple tasks in the Information Extraction pipeline (e.g., entity mention, event trigger, relation, and event argument extraction). Due to their ability to leverage task dependencies and avoid error propagation, JIE models have presented state-of-the-art performance for different IE tasks. However, an issue with current JIE methods is that they only focus on standard supervised learning setting where training and test data comes from the same domain. Cross-domain/domain adaptation learning with training and test data in different domains have not been explored for JIE, thus hindering the application of this technology to different domains in practice. To address this issue, our work introduces the first study to evaluate performance of JIE models in unsupervised domain adaptation setting. In addition, we present a novel method to induce domain-invariant representations for the tasks in JIE, called Domain Adaptation for Joint Information Extraction (DA4JIE). In DA4JIE, we propose an Instance-relational Domain Adaptation mechanism that seeks to align representations of task instances in JIE across domains through a generalized version of domain-adversarial learning approach. We further devise a Context-invariant Structure Learning technique to filter domain-specialized contextual information from induced representations to boost performance of JIE models in new domains. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that DA4JIE can significantly improve out-of-domain performance for current state-of-the-art JIE systems for all IE tasks.
Foiling Training-Time Attacks on Neural Machine Translation Systems
Authors: Jun Wang, Xuanli He, Benjamin Rubinstein, Trevor Cohn
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Neural machine translation (NMT) systems are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, whereby an attacker injects poisoned samples into training such that a trained model produces malicious translations. Nevertheless, there is little research on defending against such backdoor attacks in NMT. In this paper, we first show that backdoor attacks that have been successful in text classification are also effective against machine translation tasks. We then present a novel defence method that exploits a key property of most backdoor attacks: namely the asymmetry between the source and target language sentences, which is used to facilitate malicious text insertions, substitutions and suchlike. Our technique uses word alignment coupled with language model scoring to detect outlier tokens, and thus can find and filter out training instances which may contain backdoors. Experimental results demonstrate that our technique can significantly reduce the success of various attacks by up to 89.0%, while not affecting predictive accuracy.
Learning Action-Effect Dynamics for Hypothetical Vision-Language Reasoning Task
Authors: Shailaja Keyur Sampat, Pratyay Banerjee, Yezhou Yang, Chitta Baral
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: \textquoteleftActions' play a vital role in how humans interact with the world. Thus, autonomous agents that would assist us in everyday tasks also require the capability to perform \textquoteleftReasoning about Actions & Change' (RAC). This has been an important research direction in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general, but the study of RAC with visual and linguistic inputs is relatively recent. The CLEVR_HYP (Sampat et. al., 2021) is one such testbed for hypothetical vision-language reasoning with actions as the key focus. In this work, we propose a novel learning strategy that can improve reasoning about the effects of actions. We implement an encoder-decoder architecture to learn the representation of actions as vectors. We combine the aforementioned encoder-decoder architecture with existing modality parsers and a scene graph question answering model to evaluate our proposed system on the CLEVR_HYP dataset. We conduct thorough experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and discuss its advantages over previous baselines in terms of performance, data efficiency, and generalization capability.
Named Entity and Relation Extraction with Multi-Modal Retrieval
Authors: Xinyu Wang, Jiong Cai, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Kewei Tu, Wei Lu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Multi-modal named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) aim to leverage relevant image information to improve the performance of NER and RE. Most existing efforts largely focused on directly extracting potentially useful information from images (such as pixel-level features, identified objects, and associated captions).However, such extraction processes may not be knowledge aware, resulting in information that may not be highly relevant.In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-modal Retrieval based framework (MoRe).MoRe contains a text retrieval module and an image-based retrieval module, which retrieve related knowledge of the input text and image in the knowledge corpus respectively.Next, the retrieval results are sent to the textual and visual models respectively for predictions.Finally, a Mixture of Experts (MoE) module combines the predictions from the two models to make the final decision.Our experiments show that both our textual model and visual model can achieve state-of-the-art performance on four multi-modal NER datasets and one multi-modal RE dataset.With MoE, the model performance can be further improved and our analysis demonstrates the benefits of integrating both textual and visual cues for such tasks.
Calibrating Factual Knowledge in Pretrained Language Models
Authors: Qingxiu Dong, Damai Dai, Yifan Song, Jingjing Xu, Zhifang Sui, Lei Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Previous literature has proved that Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) can store factual knowledge. However, we find that facts stored in the PLMs are not always correct. It motivates us to explore a fundamental question: How do we calibrate factual knowledge in PLMs without re-training from scratch? In this work, we propose a simple and lightweight method CaliNet to achieve this goal. To be specific, we first detect whether PLMs can learn the right facts via a contrastive score between right and fake facts. If not, we then use a lightweight method to add and adapt new parameters to specific factual texts. Experiments on the knowledge probing task show the calibration effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, through closed-book question answering, we find that the calibrated PLM possesses knowledge generalization ability after finetuning.Beyond the calibration performance, we further investigate and visualize the knowledge calibration mechanism.
MCPG: A Flexible Multi-Level Controllable Framework for Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation
Authors: Yi Chen, Haiyun Jiang, Lemao Liu, Rui Wang, Shuming Shi, Ruifeng Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We present MCPG: a simple and effectiveapproach for controllable unsupervised paraphrase generation, which is also flexible toadapt to specific domains without extra training. MCPG is controllable in different levels: local lexicons, global semantics, and universal styles. The unsupervised paradigm ofMCPG combines factual keywords and diversified semantic embeddings as local lexical andglobal semantic constraints. The semantic embeddings are diversified by standard dropout,which is exploited for the first time to increaseinference diversity by us. Moreover, MCPGis qualified with good domain adaptability byadding a transfer vector as a universal style constraint, which is refined from the exemplars retrieved from the corpus of the target domain in atraining-free way. Extensive experiments showthat MCPG outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised baselines by a margin. Meanwhile,our domain-adapted MCPG also achieves competitive performance with strong supervisedbaselines even without training.
WordTies: Measuring Word Associations in Language Models via Constrained Sampling
Authors: Peiran Yao, Tobias Renwick, Denilson Barbosa
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Word associations are widely used in psychology to provide insights on how humans perceive and understand concepts. Comparing word associations in language models (LMs) to those generated by human subjects can serve as a proxy to uncover embedded lexical and commonsense knowledge in language models. While much helpful work has been done applying direct metrics, such as cosine similarity, to help understand latent spaces, these metrics are symmetric, while human word associativity is asymmetric. We propose WordTies, an algorithm based on constrained sampling from LMs, which allows an asymmetric measurement of associated words, given a cue word as the input. Comparing to existing methods, word associations found by this method share more overlap with associations provided by humans, and observe the asymmetric property of human associations. To examine possible reasons behind associations, we analyze the knowledge and reasoning behind the word pairings as they are linked to lexical and commonsense knowledge graphs.When the knowledge about the nature of the word pairings is combined with a probability that the LM has learned that information, we have a new way to examine what information is captured in LMs.
Exploring The Landscape of Distributional Robustness for Question Answering Models
Authors: Anas Awadalla, Mitchell Wortsman, Gabriel Ilharco, Sewon Min, Ian Magnusson, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ludwig Schmidt
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We conduct a large empirical evaluation to investigate the landscape of distributional robustness in question answering. Our investigation spans over 350 models and 16 question answering datasets, including a diverse set of architectures, model sizes, and adaptation methods (e.g., fine-tuning, adapter tuning, in-context learning, etc.). We find that, in many cases, model variations do not affect robustness and in-distribution performance alone determines out-of-distribution performance.Moreover, our findings indicate thati) zero-shot and in-context learning methods are more robust to distribution shifts than fully fine-tuned models;ii) few-shot prompt fine-tuned models exhibit better robustness than few-shot fine-tuned span prediction models;iii) parameter-efficient and robustness enhancing training methods provide no significant robustness improvements.In addition, we publicly release all evaluations to encourage researchers to further analyze robustness trends for question answering models.
Collaborative Reasoning on Multi-Modal Semantic Graphs for Video-Grounded Dialogue Generation
Authors: Xueliang Zhao, Yuxuan Wang, Chongyang Tao, Chenshuo Wang, Dongyan Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We study video-grounded dialogue generation, where a response is generated based on the dialogue context and the associated video. The primary challenges of this task lie in (1) the difficulty of integrating video data into pre-trained language models (PLMs) which presents obstacles to exploiting the power of large-scale pre-training; and (2) the necessity of taking into account the complementarity of various modalities throughout the reasoning process. Although having made remarkable progress in video-grounded dialogue generation, existing methods still fall short when it comes to integrating with PLMs in a way that allows information from different modalities to complement each other. To alleviate these issues, we first propose extracting pertinent information from videos and turning it into reasoning paths that are acceptable to PLMs. Additionally, we propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning method to collaboratively perform reasoning on different modalities (i.e., video and dialogue context). Empirical experiment results on two public datasets indicate that the proposed model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art models by large margins on both automatic and human evaluations.
Partitioned Gradient Matching-based Data Subset Selection for Compute-Efficient Robust ASR Training
Authors: Ashish Mittal, Durga Sivasubramanian, Rishabh Iyer, Preethi Jyothi, Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Training state-of-the-art ASR systems such as RNN-T often has a high associated financial and environmental cost. Training with a subset of training data could mitigate this problem if the subset selected could achieve on-par performance with training with the entire dataset. Although there are many data subset selection(DSS) algorithms, direct application to the RNN-T is difficult, especially the DSS algorithms that are adaptive and use learning dynamics such as gradients, as RNN-T tend to have gradients with a significantly larger memory footprint. In this paper, we propose Partitioned Gradient Matching (PGM) a novel distributable DSS algorithm, suitable for massive datasets like those used to train RNN-T. Through extensive experiments on Librispeech 100H and Librispeech 960H, we show that PGM achieves between 3x to 6x speedup with only a very small accuracy degradation (under 1% absolute WER difference). In addition, we demonstrate similar results for PGM even in settings where the training data is corrupted with noise.
Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for Knowledge Graph Entity Alignment
Authors: Renbo Zhu, Xukun Luo, Meng Ma, Ping Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify equivalent entities from different Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which is a fundamental task for integrating KGs. Throughout its development, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has become one of the mainstream methods for EA. These GCN-based methods learn the representations of entities from two KGs by message passing mechanism and then make alignments via measuring the similarity between entity embeddings. The key idea that GCN works in EA is that entities with similar neighbor structures are highly likely to be aligned. However, the noisy neighbors of entities transfer invalid information, drown out equivalent information, lead to inaccurate entity embeddings, and finally reduce the performance of EA. Based on the Sinkhorn algorithm, we design a reliability measure for potential equivalent entities and propose Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network to deal with neighbor noises in GCN. During the training, the network dynamically updates the adaptive weights of relation triples to weaken the propagation of noises. While calculating entity similarity, it comprehensively considers the self-similarity and neighborhood similarity of the entity pair to alleviate the influence of noises. Furthermore, we design a straightforward but efficient strategy to construct pseudo alignments for unsupervised EA. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both supervised and unsupervised settings.
Towards Robust NLG Bias Evaluation with Syntactically-diverse Prompts
Authors: Arshiya Aggarwal, Jiao Sun, Nanyun Peng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We present a robust methodology for evaluating biases in natural language generation(NLG) systems. Previous works use fixed hand-crafted prefix templates with mentions of various demographic groups to prompt models to generate continuations for bias analysis. These fixed prefix templates could themselves be specific in terms of styles or linguistic structures, which may lead to unreliable fairness conclusions that are not representative of the general trends from tone varying prompts. To study this problem, we paraphrase the prompts with different syntactic structures and use these to evaluate demographic bias in NLG systems. Our results suggest similar overall bias trends but some syntactic structures lead to contradictory conclusions compared to past works. We show that our methodology is more robust and that some syntactic structures prompt more toxic content while others could prompt less biased generation. This suggests the importance of not relying on a fixed syntactic structure and using tone-invariant prompts. Introducing syntactically-diverse prompts can achieve more robust NLG (bias) evaluation.
PcMSP: A Dataset for Scientific Action Graphs Extraction from Polycrystalline Materials Synthesis Procedure Text
Authors: Xianjun Yang, Ya Zhuo, Julia Zuo, Xinlu Zhang, Stephen Wilson, Linda Petzold
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Scientific action graphs extraction from materials synthesis procedures is important for reproducible research, machine automation, and material prediction. But the lack of annotated data has hindered progress in this field. We demonstrate an effort to annotate Polycrystalline Materials Synthesis Procedures PcMSP from 305 open access scientific articles for the construction of synthesis action graphs. This is a new dataset for material science information extraction that simultaneously contains the synthesis sentences extracted from the experimental paragraphs, as well as the entity mentions and intra-sentence relations. A two-step human annotation and inter-annotator agreement study guarantee the high quality of the PcMSP corpus. We introduce four natural language processing tasks: sentence classification, named entity recognition, relation classification, and joint extraction of entities and relations. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of several state-of-the-art models for these challenges while leaving large space for improvement. We also perform the error analysis and point out some unique challenges that require further investigation. We will release our annotation scheme, the corpus, and codes to the research community to alleviate the scarcity of labeled data in this domain.
Validity Assessment of Legal Will Statements as Natural Language Inference
Authors: Alice Kwak, Jacob Israelsen, Clayton Morrison, Derek Bambauer, Mihai Surdeanu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: This work introduces a natural language inference (NLI) dataset that focuses on the validity of statements in legal wills. This dataset is unique because: (a) each entailment decision requires three inputs: the statement from the will, the law, and the conditions that hold at the time of the testator`s death; and (b) the included texts are longer than the ones in current NLI datasets. We trained eight neural NLI models in this dataset. All the models achieve more than 80% macro F1 and accuracy, which indicates that neural approaches can handle this task reasonably well. However, group accuracy, a stricter evaluation measure that is calculated with a group of positive and negative examples generated from the same statement as a unit, is in mid 80s at best, which suggests that the models' understanding of the task remains superficial. Further ablative analyses and explanation experiments indicate that all three text segments are used for prediction, but some decisions rely on semantically irrelevant tokens. This indicates that overfitting on these longer texts likely happens, and that additional research is required for this task to be solved.
AdaPrompt: Adaptive Model Training for Prompt-based NLP
Authors: Yulong Chen, Yang Liu, Li Dong, Shuohang Wang, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng, Yue Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Prompt-based learning, with its capability to tackle zero-shot and few-shot NLP tasks, has gained much attention in the community.The main idea is to bridge the gap between NLP downstream tasks and language modeling (LM), by mapping these tasks into natural language prompts, which are then filled by pre-trained language models (PLMs).However, for prompt learning, there are still two salient gaps between NLP tasks and pretraining.First, prompt information is not necessarily sufficiently present during LM pre-training. Second, task-specific data are not necessarily well represented during pre-training. We address these two issues by proposing AdaPrompt, adaptively retrieving external data for continual pretraining of PLMs by making use of both task and prompt characteristics. In addition, we make use of knowledge in Natural Language Inference models for deriving adaptive verbalizers.Experimental results on five NLP benchmarks show that AdaPrompt can improve over standard PLMs in few-shot settings. In addition, in zero-shot settings, our method outperforms standard prompt-based methods by up to 26.35% relative error reduction.
Code Generation From Flowcharts with Texts: A Benchmark Dataset and An Approach
Authors: Zejie Liu, Xiaoyu Hu, Deyu Zhou, Lin Li, Xu Zhang, Yanzheng Xiang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Currently, researchers focus on generating codes from the requirement documents. However, current approaches still perform poorly on some requirements needing complex problem-solving skills. In reality, to tackle such complex requirements, instead of directly translating requirement documents into codes, software engineers write codes via unified modeling language diagrams, such as flowcharts, an intermediate tool to analyze and visualize the system. Therefore, we propose a new source code generation task, that is, to generate source code from flowcharts with texts. We manually construct a benchmark dataset containing 320 flowcharts with their corresponding source codes. Obviously, it is not straightforward to employ the current approaches for the new source code generation task since (1) the flowchart is a graph that contains various structures, including loop, selection, and others which is different from texts; (2) the connections between nodes in the flowchart are abundant and diverse which need to be carefully handled. To solve the above problems, we propose a two-stage code generation model. In the first stage, a structure recognition algorithm is employed to transform the flowchart into pseudo-code containing the structural conventions of a typical programming language such as while, if. In the second stage, a code generation model is employed to convert the pseudo-code into code. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve some improvement over the baselines.
Focus! Relevant and Sufficient Context Selection for News Image Captioning
Authors: Mingyang Zhou, Grace Luo, Anna Rohrbach, Zhou Yu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: News Image Captioning requires describing an image by leveraging additional context derived from a news article. Previous works only coarsely leverage the article to extract the necessary context, which makes it challenging for models to identify relevant events and named entities. In our paper, we first demonstrate that by combining more fine-grained context that captures the key named entities (obtained via an oracle) and the global context that summarizes the news, we can dramatically improve the model`s ability to generate accurate news captions. This begs the question, how to automatically extract such key entities from an image? We propose to use pre-trained vision and language retrieval model CLIP to localize the visually grounded entities in the news article, and then capture the non-visual entities via a open relation extraction model. Our experiments demonstrate that by simply selecting better context from the article, we can significantly improve the performance of existing models and achieve the new state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks.
Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Contrastive Learning and Expressive Structure
Authors: Joseph Peper, Lu Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Generative models have demonstrated impressive results on Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) tasks, particularly for the emerging task of extracting Aspect-Category-Opinion-Sentiment (ACOS) quadruples. However, these models struggle with implicit sentiment expressions, which are commonly observed in opinionated content such as online reviews. In this work, we introduce GEN-SCL-NAT, which consists of two techniques for improved structured generation for ACOS quadruple extraction. First, we propose GEN-SCL, a supervised contrastive learning objective that aids quadruple prediction by encouraging the model to produce input representations that are discriminable across key input attributes, such as sentiment polarity and the existence of implicit opinions and aspects. Second, we introduce GEN-NAT, a new structured generation format that better adapts pre-trained autoregressive encoder-decoder models to extract quadruples in a generative fashion. Experimental results show that GEN-SCL-NAT achieves top performance across three ACOS datasets, averaging 1.48% F1 improvement, with a maximum 1.73% increase on the LAPTOP-L1 dataset. Additionally, we see significant gains on implicit aspect and opinion splits that have been shown as challenging for existing ACOS approaches.