mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
MM-SHAP: A Performance-agnostic Metric for Measuring Multimodal Contributions in Vision and Language Models & Tasks
Authors: Letitia Parcalabescu, Anette Frank
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Vision and language models (VL) are known to exploit unrobust indicators in individual modalities (e.g., introduced by distributional biases) instead of focusing on relevant information in each modality. That a unimodal model achieves similar accuracy on a VL task to a multimodal one, indicates that so-called unimodal collapse occurred. However, accuracy-based tests fail to detect e.g., when the model prediction is wrong, while the model used relevant information from a modality. Instead, we propose MM-SHAP, a performance-agnostic multimodality score based on Shapley values that reliably quantifies in which proportions a multimodal model uses individual modalities. We apply MM-SHAP in two ways: (1) to compare models for their average degree of multimodality, and (2) to measure for individual models the contribution of individual modalities for different tasks and datasets. Experiments with six VL models -- LXMERT, CLIP and four ALBEF variants -- on four VL tasks highlight that unimodal collapse can occur to different degrees and in different directions, contradicting the wide-spread assumption that unimodal collapse is one-sided. Based on our results, we recommend MM-SHAP for analysing multimodal tasks, to diagnose and guide progress towards multimodal integration. Code available at r̆lhttps://github.com/Heidelberg-NLP/MM-SHAP.
Towards Boosting the Open-Domain Chatbot with Human Feedback
Authors: Hua Lu, Siqi Bao, Huang He, Fan Wang, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Many open-domain dialogue models pre-trained with social media comments can generate coherent replies but have difficulties producing engaging responses. This phenomenon might mainly result from the deficiency of annotated human-human conversations and the misalignment with human preference. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient framework Diamante to boost the open-domain chatbot, where two kinds of human feedback (including explicit demonstration and implicit preference) are collected and leveraged. By asking annotators to select or amend the model-generated candidate responses, Diamante efficiently collects the human demonstrated responses and constructs a Chinese chit-chat dataset. To enhance the alignment with human preference, Diamante leverages the implicit preference in the data collection process and introduces the generation-evaluation joint training. Comprehensive experiments indicate that the Diamante dataset and joint training paradigm can significantly boost the performance of pre-trained dialogue models. The overall engagingness of the previous state-of-the-art model has been improved remarkably by 50% in Chinese open-domain conversations.
Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations
Authors: Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yifei Yuan, Wai Lam
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation. In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiative ESC where the user and system can both take the initiative in leading the conversation. Specifically, we conduct a novel analysis on mixed-initiative ESC systems with a tailor-designed schema that divides utterances into different types with speaker roles and initiative types. Four emotional support metrics are proposed to evaluate the mixed-initiative interactions. The analysis reveals the necessity and challenges of building mixed-initiative ESC systems. In the light of this, we propose a knowledge-enhanced mixed-initiative framework (KEMI) for ESC, which retrieves actual case knowledge from a large-scale mental health knowledge graph for generating mixed-initiative responses. Experimental results on two ESC datasets show the superiority of KEMI in both content-preserving evaluation and mixed initiative related analyses.
UTC-IE: A Unified Token-pair Classification Architecture for Information Extraction
Authors: Hang Yan, Yu Sun, Xiaonan Li, Yunhua Zhou, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Information Extraction (IE) spans several tasks with different output structures, such as named entity recognition, relation extraction and event extraction. Previously, those tasks were solved with different models because of diverse task output structures. Through re-examining IE tasks, we find that all of them can be interpreted as extracting spans and span relations. They can further be decomposed into token-pair classification tasks by using the start and end token of a span to pinpoint the span, and using the start-to-start and end-to-end token pairs of two spans to determine the relation. Based on the reformulation, we propose a Unified Token-pair Classification architecture for Information Extraction (UTC-IE), where we introduce Plusformer on top of the token-pair feature matrix. Specifically, it models axis-aware interaction with plus-shaped self-attention and local interaction with Convolutional Neural Network over token pairs. Experiments show that our approach outperforms task-specific and unified models on all tasks in 10 datasets, and achieves better or comparable results on 2 joint IE datasets. Moreover, UTC-IE speeds up over state-of-the-art models on IE tasks significantly in most datasets, which verifies the effectiveness of our architecture.
Social-Group-Agnostic Bias Mitigation via the Stereotype Content Model
Authors: Ali Omrani, Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari, Charles Yu, Preni Golazizian, Brendan Kennedy, Mohammad Atari, Heng Ji, Morteza Dehghani
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Existing bias mitigation methods require social-group-specific word pairs (e.g., “man” -- “woman”) for each social attribute (e.g., gender), restricting the bias mitigation to only one specified social attribute. Further, this constraint renders such methods impractical and costly for mitigating bias in understudied and/or unmarked social groups. We propose that the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) --- a theoretical framework developed in social psychology for understanding the content of stereotyping --- can help debiasing efforts to become social-group-agnostic by capturing the underlying connection between bias and stereotypes. SCM proposes that the content of stereotypes map to two psychological dimensions of warmth and competence. Using only pairs of terms for these two dimensions (e.g., warmth: “genuine” -- “fake”; competence: “smart” -- “stupid”), we perform debiasing with established methods on both pre-trained word embeddings and large language models. We demonstrate that our social-group-agnostic, SCM-based debiasing technique performs comparably to group-specific debiasing on multiple bias benchmarks, but has theoretical and practical advantages over existing approaches.
Revisiting the Gold Standard: Grounding Summarization Evaluation with Robust Human Evaluation
Authors: Yixin Liu, Alex Fabbri, Pengfei Liu, Yilun Zhao, Linyong Nan, Ruilin Han, Simeng Han, Shafiq Joty, Chien-Sheng Wu, Caiming Xiong, Dragomir Radev
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Human evaluation is the foundation upon which the evaluation of both summarization systems and automatic metrics rests. However, existing human evaluation studies for summarization either exhibit a low inter-annotator agreement or have insufficient scale, and an in-depth analysis of human evaluation is lacking. Therefore, we address the shortcomings of existing summarization evaluation along the following axes: (1) We propose a modified summarization salience protocol, Atomic Content Units (ACUs), which is based on fine-grained semantic units and allows for a high inter-annotator agreement. (2) We curate the Robust Summarization Evaluation (RoSE) benchmark, a large human evaluation dataset consisting of 22,000 summary-level annotations over 28 top-performing systems on three datasets. (3) We conduct a comparative study of four human evaluation protocols, underscoring potential confounding factors in evaluation setups. (4) We evaluate 50 automatic metrics and their variants using the collected human annotations across evaluation protocols and demonstrate how our benchmark leads to more statistically stable and significant results. The metrics we benchmarked include recent methods based on large language models (LLMs), GPTScore and G-Eval. Furthermore, our findings have important implications for evaluating LLMs, as we show that LLMs adjusted by human feedback (e.g., GPT-3.5) may overfit unconstrained human evaluation, which is affected by the annotators' prior, input-agnostic preferences, calling for more robust, targeted evaluation methods.
FIREBALL: A Dataset of Dungeons and Dragons Actual-Play with Structured Game State Information
Authors: Andrew Zhu, Karmanya Aggarwal, Alexander Feng, Lara J. Martin, Chris Callison-Burch
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a tabletop roleplaying game with complex natural language interactions between players and hidden state information. Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) that have access to state information can generate higher quality game turns than LLMs that use dialog history alone. However, previous work used game state information that was heuristically created and was not a true gold standard game state. We present FIREBALL, a large dataset containing nearly 25,000 unique sessions from real D&D gameplay on Discord with true game state info. We recorded game play sessions of players who used the Avrae bot, which was developed to aid people in playing D&D online, capturing language, game commands and underlying game state information. We demonstrate that FIREBALL can improve natural language generation (NLG) by using Avrae state information, improving both automated metrics and human judgments of quality. Additionally, we show that LLMs can generate executable Avrae commands, particularly after finetuning.
A fine-grained comparison of pragmatic language understanding in humans and language models
Authors: Jennifer Hu, Sammy Floyd, Olessia Jouravlev, Evelina Fedorenko, Edward Gibson
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication, and present a long-standing challenge for artificial language models. We perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven pragmatic phenomena, using zero-shot prompting on an expert-curated set of English materials. We ask whether models (1) select pragmatic interpretations of speaker utterances, (2) make similar error patterns as humans, and (3) use similar linguistic cues as humans to solve the tasks. We find that the largest models achieve high accuracy and match human error patterns: within incorrect responses, models favor literal interpretations over heuristic-based distractors. We also find preliminary evidence that models and humans are sensitive to similar linguistic cues. Our results suggest that pragmatic behaviors can emerge in models without explicitly constructed representations of mental states. However, models tend to struggle with phenomena relying on social expectation violations.
Counterfactual Multihop QA: A Cause-Effect Approach for Reducing Disconnected Reasoning
Authors: Wangzhen Guo, Qinkang Gong, Yanghui Rao, Hanjiang Lai
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Multi-hop QA requires reasoning over multiple supporting facts to answer the question. However, the existing QA models always rely on shortcuts, e.g., providing the true answer by only one fact, rather than multi-hop reasoning, which is referred as disconnected reasoning problem. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel counterfactual multihop QA, a causal-effect approach that enables to reduce the disconnected reasoning. It builds upon explicitly modeling of causality: 1) the direct causal effects of disconnected reasoning and 2) the causal effect of true multi-hop reasoning from the total causal effect. With the causal graph, a counterfactual inference is proposed to disentangle the disconnected reasoning from the total causal effect, which provides us a new perspective and technology to learn a QA model that exploits the true multi-hop reasoning instead of shortcuts. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the benchmark HotpotQA dataset, which demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve notable improvement on reducing disconnected reasoning. For example, our method achieves 5.8% higher points of its Supps score on HotpotQA through true multihop reasoning. The code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/guowzh/CFMQA.
Causal-Debias: Unifying Debiasing in Pretrained Language Models and Fine-tuning via Causal Invariant Learning
Authors: Fan Zhou, Yuzhou Mao, Liu Yu, Yi Yang, Ting Zhong
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Demographic biases and social stereotypes are common in pretrained language models (PLMs), and a burgeoning body of literature focuses on removing the unwanted stereotypical associations from PLMs. However, when fine-tuning these bias-mitigated PLMs in downstream natural language processing (NLP) applications, such as sentiment classification, the unwanted stereotypical associations resurface or even get amplified. Since pretrain&fine-tune is a major paradigm in NLP applications, separating the debiasing procedure of PLMs from fine-tuning would eventually harm the actual downstream utility. In this paper, we propose a unified debiasing framework Causal-Debias to remove unwanted stereotypical associations in PLMs during fine-tuning. Specifically, CausalDebias mitigates bias from a causal invariant perspective by leveraging the specific downstream task to identify bias-relevant and labelrelevant factors. We propose that bias-relevant factors are non-causal as they should have little impact on downstream tasks, while labelrelevant factors are causal. We perform interventions on non-causal factors in different demographic groups and design an invariant risk minimization loss to mitigate bias while maintaining task performance. Experimental results on three downstream tasks show that our proposed method can remarkably reduce unwanted stereotypical associations after PLMs are finetuned, while simultaneously minimizing the impact on PLMs and downstream applications.
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning without Introducing New Latency
Authors: Baohao Liao, Yan Meng, Christof Monz
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of pre-trained language models has recently demonstrated remarkable achievements, effectively matching the performance of full fine-tuning while utilizing significantly fewer trainable parameters, and consequently addressing the storage and communication constraints. Nonetheless, various PEFT methods are limited by their inherent characteristics. In the case of sparse fine-tuning, which involves modifying only a small subset of the existing parameters, the selection of fine-tuned parameters is task- and domain-specific, making it unsuitable for federated learning. On the other hand, PEFT methods with adding new parameters typically introduce additional inference latency. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of generating a sparse mask in a task-agnostic manner, wherein all downstream tasks share a common mask. Our approach, which relies solely on the magnitude information of pre-trained parameters, surpasses existing methodologies by a significant margin when evaluated on the GLUE benchmark. Additionally, we introduce a novel adapter technique that directly applies the adapter to pre-trained parameters instead of the hidden representation, thereby achieving identical inference speed to that of full fine-tuning. Through extensive experiments, our proposed method attains a new state-of-the-art outcome in terms of both performance and storage efficiency, storing only 0.03% parameters of full fine-tuning.
MANNER: A Variational Memory-Augmented Model for Cross Domain Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Jinyuan Fang, Xiaobin Wang, Zaiqiao Meng, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Yong Jiang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper focuses on the task of cross domain few-shot named entity recognition (NER), which aims to adapt the knowledge learned from source domain to recognize named entities in target domain with only a few labeled examples. To address this challenging task, we propose MANNER, a variational memory-augmented few-shot NER model. Specifically, MANNER uses a memory module to store information from the source domain and then retrieve relevant information from the memory to augment few-shot task in the target domain. In order to effectively utilize the information from memory, MANNER uses optimal transport to retrieve and process information from memory, which can explicitly adapt the retrieved information from source domain to target domain and improve the performance in the cross domain few-shot setting. We conduct experiments on English and Chinese cross domain few-shot NER datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that MANNER can achieve superior performance.
MASSIVE: A 1M-Example Multilingual Natural Language Understanding Dataset with 51 Typologically-Diverse Languages
Authors: Jack FitzGerald, Christopher Hench, Charith Peris, Scott Mackie, Kay Rottmann, Ana Sanchez, Aaron Nash, Liam Urbach, Vishesh Kakarala, Richa Singh, Swetha Ranganath, Laurie Crist, Misha Britan, Wouter Leeuwis, Gokhan Tur, Prem Natarajan
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: We present the MASSIVE dataset--Multilingual Amazon Slu resource package (SLURP) for Slot-filling, Intent classification, and Virtual assistant Evaluation. MASSIVE contains 1M realistic, parallel, labeled virtual assistant utterances spanning 51 languages, 18 domains, 60 intents, and 55 slots. MASSIVE was created by tasking professional translators to localize the English-only SLURP dataset into 50 typologically diverse languages from 29 genera. We also present modeling results on XLM-R and mT5, including exact match accuracy, intent classification accuracy, and slot-filling F1 score. We have released our dataset, modeling code, and models publicly.
Distilling Script Knowledge from Large Language Models for Constrained Language Planning
Authors: Siyu Yuan, Jiangjie Chen, Ziquan Fu, Xuyang Ge, Soham Shah, Charles Jankowski, Yanghua Xiao, Deqing Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: In everyday life, humans often plan their actions by following step-by-step instructions in the form of goal-oriented scripts. Previous work has exploited language models (LMs) to plan for abstract goals of stereotypical activities (e.g., “make a cake”), but leaves more specific goals with multi-facet constraints understudied (e.g., “make a cake for diabetics”). In this paper, we define the task of constrained language planning for the first time. We propose an over-generate-then-filter approach to improve large language models (LLMs) on this task, and use it to distill a novel constrained language planning dataset, Coscript, which consists of 55,000 scripts. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the constrained language planning ability of LLMs, especially on constraint faithfulness. Furthermore, Coscript is demonstrated to be quite effective in endowing smaller LMs with constrained language planning ability.
RED$^\textrmFM$: a Filtered and Multilingual Relation Extraction Dataset
Authors: ‪Pere-Lluís Huguet Cabot, Simone Tedeschi, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Roberto Navigli
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Relation Extraction (RE) is a task that identifies relationships between entities in a text, enabling the acquisition of relational facts and bridging the gap between natural language and structured knowledge. However, current RE models often rely on small datasets with low coverage of relation types, particularly when working with languages other than English.In this paper, we address the above issue and provide two new resources that enable the training and evaluation of multilingual RE systems. First, we present SRED$^\textrmFM$, an automatically annotated dataset covering 18 languages, 400 relation types, 13 entity types, totaling more than 40 million triplet instances. Second, we propose RED$^\textrmFM$, a smaller, human-revised dataset for seven languages that allows for the evaluation of multilingual RE systems. To demonstrate the utility of these novel datasets, we experiment with the first end-to-end multilingual RE model, mREBEL, that extracts triplets, including entity types, in multiple languages. We release our resources and model checkpoints at [r̆lhttps://www.github.com/babelscape/rebel](\l̆https://www.github.com/babelscape/rebel).
Modeling Appropriate Language in Argumentation
Authors: Timon Ziegenbein, Shahbaz Syed, Felix Lange, Martin Potthast, Henning Wachsmuth
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Online discussion moderators must make ad-hoc decisions about whether the contributions of discussion participants are appropriate or should be removed to maintain civility. Existing research on offensive language and the resulting tools cover only one aspect among many involved in such decisions. The question of what is considered appropriate in a controversial discussion has not yet been systematically addressed. In this paper, we operationalize appropriate language in argumentation for the first time. In particular, we model appropriateness through the absence of flaws, grounded in research on argument quality assessment, especially in aspects from rhetoric. From these, we derive a new taxonomy of 14 dimensions that determine inappropriate language in online discussions. Building on three argument quality corpora, we then create a corpus of 2191 arguments annotated for the 14 dimensions. Empirical analyses support that the taxonomy covers the concept of appropriateness comprehensively, showing several plausible correlations with argument quality dimensions. Moreover, results of baseline approaches to assessing appropriateness suggest that all dimensions can be modeled computationally on the corpus.
CELDA: Leveraging Black-box Language Model as Enhanced Classifier without Labels
Authors: Hyunsoo Cho, Youna Kim, Sang-goo Lee
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Utilizing language models (LMs) without internal access is becoming an attractive paradigm in the field of NLP as many cutting-edge LMs are released through APIs and boast a massive scale. The de-facto method in this type of black-box scenario is known as prompting, which has shown progressive performance enhancements in situations where data labels are scarce or unavailable. Despite their efficacy, they still fall short in comparison to fully supervised counterparts and are generally brittle to slight modifications. In this paper, we propose Clustering-enhanced Linear Discriminative Analysis (CELDA), a novel approach that improves the text classification accuracy with a very weak-supervision signal (i.e., name of the labels).Our framework draws a precise decision boundary without accessing weights or gradients of the LM model or data labels. The core ideas of CELDA are twofold:(1) extracting a refined pseudo-labeled dataset from an unlabeled dataset, and (2) training a lightweight and robust model on the top of LM, which learns an accurate decision boundary from an extracted noisy dataset. Throughout in-depth investigations on various datasets, we demonstrated that CELDA reaches new state-of-the-art in weakly-supervised text classification and narrows the gap with a fully-supervised model. Additionally, our proposed methodology can be applied universally to any LM and has the potential to scale to larger models, making it a more viable option for utilizing large LMs.
MvP: Multi-view Prompting Improves Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction
Authors: Zhibin Gou, Qingyan Guo, Yujiu Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Generative methods greatly promote aspect-based sentiment analysis via generating a sequence of sentiment elements in a specified format. However, existing studies usually predict sentiment elements in a fixed order, which ignores the effect of the interdependence of the elements in a sentiment tuple and the diversity of language expression on the results. In this work, we propose Multi-view Prompting (MVP) that aggregates sentiment elements generated in different orders, leveraging the intuition of human-like problem-solving processes from different views. Specifically, MVP introduces element order prompts to guide the language model to generate multiple sentiment tuples, each with a different element order, and then selects the most reasonable tuples by voting. MVP can naturally model multi-view and multi-task as permutations and combinations of elements, respectively, outperforming previous task-specific designed methods on multiple ABSA tasks with a single model. Extensive experiments show that MVP significantly advances the state-of-the-art performance on 10 datasets of 4 benchmark tasks, and performs quite effectively in low-resource settings. Detailed evaluation verified the effectiveness, flexibility, and cross-task transferability of MVP.
ACCENT: An Automatic Event Commonsense Evaluation Metric for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems
Authors: Sarik Ghazarian, Yijia Shao, Rujun Han, Aram Galstyan, Nanyun Peng
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Commonsense reasoning is omnipresent in human communications and thus is an important feature for open-domain dialogue systems. However, evaluating commonsense in dialogue systems is still an open challenge. We take the first step by focusing on \textitevent commonsense that considers events and their relations, and is crucial in both dialogues and general commonsense reasoning. We propose \textbfACCENT, an event commonsense evaluation metric empowered by commonsense knowledge bases (CSKBs). ACCENT first extracts event-relation tuples from a dialogue, and then evaluates the response by scoring the tuples in terms of their compatibility with the CSKB. To evaluate ACCENT, we construct the first public event commonsense evaluation dataset for open-domain dialogues.Our experiments show that ACCENT is an efficient metric for event commonsense evaluation, which achieves higher correlations with human judgments than existing baselines.
Explanation-based Finetuning Makes Models More Robust to Spurious Cues
Authors: Josh Magnus Ludan, Yixuan Meng, Tai Nguyen, Saurabh Shah, Qing Lyu, Marianna Apidianaki, Chris Callison-Burch
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are so powerful that they sometimes learn correlations between labels and features that are irrelevant to the task, leading to poor generalization on out-of-distribution data. We propose explanation-based finetuning as a general approach to mitigate LLMs' reliance on spurious correlations. Unlike standard finetuning where the model only predicts the answer given the input, we finetune the model to additionally generate a free-text explanation supporting its answer. To evaluate our method, we finetune the model on artificially constructed training sets containing different types of spurious cues, and test it on a test set without these cues. Compared to standard finetuning, our method makes GPT-3 (davinci) remarkably more robust against spurious cues in terms of accuracy drop across four classification tasks: ComVE (+1.2), CREAK (+9.1), e-SNLI (+15.4), and SBIC (+6.5). The efficacy generalizes across multiple model families and scales, with greater gains for larger models. Finally, our method also works well with explanations generated by the model, implying its applicability to more datasets without human-written explanations.
CAME: Confidence-guided Adaptive Memory Efficient Optimization
Authors: Yang Luo, Xiaozhe Ren, Zangwei Zheng, Zhuo Jiang, Xin Jiang, Yang You
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Adaptive gradient methods, such as Adam and LAMB, have demonstrated excellent performance in the training of large language models. Nevertheless, the need for adaptivity requires maintaining second-moment estimates of the per-parameter gradients, which entails a high cost of extra memory overheads. To solve this problem, several memory-efficient optimizers (e.g., Adafactor) have been proposed to obtain a drastic reduction in auxiliary memory usage, but with a performance penalty. In this paper, we first study a confidence-guided strategy to reduce the instability of existing memory efficient optimizers. Based on this strategy, we propose CAME to simultaneously achieve two goals: fast convergence as in traditional adaptive methods, and low memory usage as in memory-efficient methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the training stability and superior performance of CAME across various NLP tasks such as BERT and GPT-2 training. Notably, for BERT pre-training on the large batch size of 32,768, our proposed optimizer attains faster convergence and higher accuracy compared with the Adam optimizer. The implementation of CAME is publicly available.
On Second Thought, Let`s Not Think Step by Step! Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot Reasoning
Authors: Omar Shaikh, Hongxin Zhang, William Held, Michael Bernstein, Diyi Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Generating a Chain of Thought (CoT) has been shown to consistently improve large language model (LLM) performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. However, prior work has mainly focused on logical reasoning tasks (e.g. arithmetic, commonsense QA); it remains unclear whether improvements hold for more diverse types of reasoning, especially in socially situated contexts. Concretely, we perform a controlled evaluation of zero-shot CoT across two socially sensitive domains: harmful questions and stereotype benchmarks. We find that zero-shot CoT reasoning in sensitive domains significantly increases a model`s likelihood to produce harmful or undesirable output, with trends holding across different prompt formats and model variants. Furthermore, we show that harmful CoTs increase with model size, but decrease with improved instruction following. Our work suggests that zero-shot CoT should be used with caution on socially important tasks, especially when marginalized groups or sensitive topics are involved.
Solving Math Word Problems via Cooperative Reasoning induced Language Models
Authors: Xinyu Zhu, Junjie Wang, Lin Zhang, Yuxiang Zhang, Yongfeng Huang, Ruyi Gan, Jiaxing Zhang, Yujiu Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) bring new opportunities to challenging problems, especially those that need high-level intelligence, such as the math word problem (MWPs). However, directly applying existing PLMs to MWPs can fail as the generation process lacks sufficient supervision and thus lacks fast adaptivity as humans. We notice that human reasoning has a dual reasoning framework that consists of an immediate reaction system (system 1) and a delicate reasoning system (system 2), where the entire reasoning is determined by their interaction. This inspires us to develop a cooperative reasoning-induced PLM for solving MWPs, called Cooperative Reasoning (CoRe), resulting in a human-like reasoning architecture with system 1 as the generator and system 2 as the verifier. In our approach, the generator is responsible for generating reasoning paths, and the verifiers are used to supervise the evaluation in order to obtain reliable feedback for the generator. We evaluate our CoRe framework on several mathematical reasoning datasets and achieve decent improvement over state-of-the-art methods, up to 9.6% increase over best baselines.
Exploiting Biased Models to De-bias Text: A Gender-Fair Rewriting Model
Authors: Chantal Amrhein, Florian Schottmann, Rico Sennrich, Samuel Läubli
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Natural language generation models reproduce and often amplify the biases present in their training data. Previous research explored using sequence-to-sequence rewriting models to transform biased model outputs (or original texts) into more gender-fair language by creating pseudo training data through linguistic rules. However, this approach is not practical for languages with more complex morphology than English. We hypothesise that creating training data in the reverse direction, i.e. starting from gender-fair text, is easier for morphologically complex languages and show that it matches the performance of state-of-the-art rewriting models for English. To eliminate the rule-based nature of data creation, we instead propose using machine translation models to create gender-biased text from real gender-fair text via round-trip translation. Our approach allows us to train a rewriting model for German without the need for elaborate handcrafted rules. The outputs of this model increased gender-fairness as shown in a human evaluation study.
Early Discovery of Disappearing Entities in Microblogs
Authors: Satoshi Akasaki, Naoki Yoshinaga, Masashi Toyoda
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: We make decisions by reacting to changes in the real world, particularly the emergence and disappearance of impermanent entities such as restaurants, services, and events. Because we want to avoid missing out on opportunities or making fruitless actions after those entities have disappeared, it is important to know when entities disappear as early as possible. We thus tackle the task of detecting disappearing entities from microblogs where various information is shared timely. The major challenge is detecting uncertain contexts of disappearing entities from noisy microblog posts. To collect such disappearing contexts, we design time-sensitive distant supervision, which utilizes entities from the knowledge base and time-series posts. Using this method, we actually build large-scale Twitter datasets of disappearing entities. To ensure robust detection in noisy environments, we refine pretrained word embeddings for the detection model on microblog streams in a timely manner. Experimental results on the Twitter datasets confirmed the effectiveness of the collected labeled data and refined word embeddings; the proposed method outperformed a baseline in terms of accuracy, and more than 70% of the detected disappearing entities in Wikipedia are discovered earlier than the update on Wikipedia, with the average lead-time is over one month.
DiffusionBERT: Improving Generative Masked Language Models with Diffusion Models
Authors: Zhengfu He, Tianxiang Sun, Qiong Tang, Kuanning Wang, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: We present DiffusionBERT, a new generative masked language model based on discrete dif- fusion models. Diffusion models and many pre- trained language models have a shared training objective, i.e., denoising, making it possible to combine the two powerful models and enjoy the best of both worlds. On the one hand, dif- fusion models offer a promising training strat- egy that helps improve the generation quality. On the other hand, pre-trained denoising lan- guage models (e.g., BERT) can be used as a good initialization that accelerates convergence. We explore training BERT to learn the reverse process of a discrete diffusion process with an absorbing state and elucidate several designs to improve it. First, we propose a new noise schedule for the forward diffusion process that controls the degree of noise added at each step based on the information of each token. Sec- ond, we investigate several designs of incorpo- rating the time step into BERT. Experiments on unconditional text generation demonstrate that DiffusionBERT achieves significant improve- ment over existing diffusion models for text (e.g., D3PM and Diffusion-LM) and previous generative masked language models in terms of perplexity and BLEU score. Promising re- sults in conditional generation tasks show that DiffusionBERT can generate texts of compa- rable quality and more diverse than a series of established baselines.
Lifting the Curse of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models
Authors: Chen Zhang, Yang Yang, Jiahao Liu, Jingang Wang, Yunsen Xian, Benyou Wang, Dawei Song
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Pretrained language models (LMs) have shown compelling performance on various downstream tasks, but unfortunately they require a tremendous amount of inference compute. Knowledge distillation finds a path to compress LMs to small ones with a teacher-student paradigm. However, when the capacity gap between the teacher and the student is large, a curse of capacity gap appears, invoking a deficiency in distilling LMs. While a few studies have been carried out to fill the gap, the curse is not yet well tackled. In this paper, we aim at lifting the curse of capacity gap via enlarging the capacity of the student without notably increasing the inference compute. Largely motivated by sparse activation regime of mixture of experts (MoE), we propose a mixture of minimal experts (MiniMoE), which imposes extra parameters to the student but introduces almost no additional inference compute. Experimental results on GLUE and CoNLL demonstrate the curse of capacity gap is lifted by the magic of MiniMoE to a large extent. MiniMoE also achieves the state-of-the-art performance at small FLOPs compared with a range of competitive baselines. With a compression rate as much as ~50$\times$, MiniMoE preserves ~95% GLUE score of the teacher.
Towards Faithful Dialogues via Focus Learning
Authors: Yifan Deng, Xingsheng Zhang, Heyan Huang, Yue Hu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Maintaining faithfulness between responses and knowledge is an important research topic for building reliable knowledge-grounded dialogue systems. Existing models heavily rely on elaborate data engineering or increasing the model`s parameters ignoring to track the tokens that significantly influence losses, which is decisive for the optimization direction of the model in each iteration. To address this issue, we propose Focus Learning (FocusL), a novel learning approach that adjusts the contribution of each token to the optimization direction by directly scaling the corresponding objective loss. Specifically, we first introduce a positioning method by utilizing similarity distributions between knowledge and each response token to locate knowledge-aware tokens. Then, we further design a similarity-to-weight transformation to provide dynamic token-level weights for the cross-entropy loss. Finally, we use the weighted loss to encourage the model to pay special attention to the knowledge utilization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art results and generates more reliable responses while maintaining training stability.
Back Translation for Speech-to-text Translation Without Transcripts
Authors: Qingkai Fang, Yang Feng
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: The success of end-to-end speech-to-text translation (ST) is often achieved by utilizing source transcripts, e.g., by pre-training with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) tasks, or by introducing additional ASR and MT data. Unfortunately, transcripts are only sometimes available since numerous unwritten languages exist worldwide. In this paper, we aim to utilize large amounts of target-side monolingual data to enhance ST without transcripts. Motivated by the remarkable success of back translation in MT, we develop a back translation algorithm for ST (BT4ST) to synthesize pseudo ST data from monolingual target data. To ease the challenges posed by short-to-long generation and one-to-many mapping, we introduce self-supervised discrete units and achieve back translation by cascading a target-to-unit model and a unit-to-speech model. With our synthetic ST data, we achieve an average boost of 2.3 BLEU on MuST-C En-De, En-Fr, and En-Es datasets. More experiments show that our method is especially effective in low-resource scenarios.
Prompter: Zero-shot Adaptive Prefixes for Dialogue State Tracking Domain Adaptation
Authors: Taha Aksu, Min-Yen Kan, Nancy Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: A challenge in the Dialogue State Tracking (DST) field is adapting models to new domains without using any supervised data --- zero-shot domain adaptation. Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) has the potential to address this problem due to its robustness. However, it has yet to be applied to the zero-shot scenarios, as it is not clear how to apply it unsupervisedly. Our method, Prompter, uses descriptions of target domain slots to generate dynamic prefixes that are concatenated to the key and values at each layer`s self-attention mechanism. This allows for the use of prefix-tuning in zero-shot. Prompter outperforms previous methods on both the MultiWOZ and SGD benchmarks. In generating prefixes, our analyses find that Prompter not only utilizes the semantics of slot descriptions but also how often the slots appear together in conversation. Moreover, Prompter`s gains are due to its improved ability to distinguish ”none”-valued dialogue slots, compared against baselines.
Enhancing Dialogue Generation via Dynamic Graph Knowledge Aggregation
Authors: Chen Tang, Hongbo Zhang, Tyler Loakman, Chenghua Lin, Frank Guerin
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: Incorporating external graph knowledge into neural chatbot models has been proven effective for enhancing dialogue generation. However, in conventional graph neural networks (GNNs), message passing on a graph is independent from text, resulting in the graph representation hidden space differing from that of the text. This training regime of existing models therefore leads to a semantic gap between graph knowledge and text. In this study, we propose a novel framework for knowledge graph enhanced dialogue generation. We dynamically construct a multi-hop knowledge graph with pseudo nodes to involve the language model in feature aggregation within the graph at all steps. To avoid the semantic biases caused by learning on vanilla subgraphs, the proposed framework applies hierarchical graph attention to aggregate graph features on pseudo nodes and then attains a global feature. Therefore, the framework can better utilise the heterogeneous features from both the post and external graph knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines on dialogue generation. Further analysis also shows that our representation learning framework can fill the semantic gap by coagulating representations of both text and graph knowledge. Moreover, the language model also learns how to better select knowledge triples for a more informative response via exploiting subgraph patterns within our feature aggregation process. Our code and resources are available at r̆lhttps://github.com/tangg555/SaBART.
Multi-modal Action Chain Abductive Reasoning
Authors: Mengze Li, Tianbao Wang, Jiahe Xu, Kairong Han, Shengyu Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Jiaxu Miao, Wenqiao Zhang, Shiliang Pu, Fei Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2023

Abstract: \textitAbductive Reasoning, has long been considered to be at the core ability of humans, which enables us to infer the most plausible explanation of incomplete known phenomena in daily life. However, such critical reasoning capability is rarely investigated for contemporary AI systems under such limited observations. To facilitate this research community, this paper sheds new light on \textitAbductive Reasoning by studying a new vision-language task, \textbfMulti-modal \textbfAction chain abductive \textbfReasoning (\textbfMAR), together with a large-scale \textitAbductive Reasoning dataset: Given an incomplete set of language described events, MAR aims to imagine the most plausible event by spatio-temporal grounding in past video and then infer the hypothesis of subsequent action chain that can best explain the language premise. To solve this task, we propose a strong baseline model that realizes MAR from two perspectives: (i) we first introduce the transformer, which learns to encode the observation to imagine the plausible event with explicitly interpretable event grounding in the video based on the commonsense knowledge recognition ability. (ii) To complete the assumption of a follow-up action chain, we design a novel symbolic module that can complete strict derivation of the progressive action chain layer by layer. We conducted extensive experiments on the proposed dataset, and the experimental study shows that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing video-language models in terms of effectiveness on our newly created MAR dataset.