mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Mind Your Bias: A Critical Review of Bias Detection Methods for Contextual Language Models
Authors: Silke Husse, Andreas Spitz
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: The awareness and mitigation of biases are of fundamental importance for the fair and transparent use of contextual language models, yet they crucially depend on the accurate detection of biases as a precursor. Consequently, numerous bias detection methods have been proposed, which vary in their approach, the considered type of bias, and the data used for evaluation. However, while most detection methods are derived from the word embedding association test for static word embeddings, the reported results are heterogeneous, inconsistent, and ultimately inconclusive. To address this issue, we conduct a rigorous analysis and comparison of bias detection methods for contextual language models. Our results show that minor design and implementation decisions (or errors) have a substantial and often significant impact on the derived bias scores. Overall, we find the state of the field to be both worse than previously acknowledged due to systematic and propagated errors in implementations, yet better than anticipated since divergent results in the literature homogenize after accounting for implementation errors. Based on our findings, we conclude with a discussion of paths towards more robust and consistent bias detection methods.
ZeroPrompt: Scaling Prompt-Based Pretraining to 1,000 Tasks Improves Zero-Shot Generalization
Authors: Hanwei Xu, Yujun Chen, Yulun Du, Nan Shao, Wang Yanggang, Haiyu Li, Zhilin Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose a multitask pretraining approach ZeroPrompt for zero-shot generalization, focusing on task scaling and zero-shot prompting.While previous models are trained on only a few dozen tasks, we scale to 1,000 tasks for the first time using real-world data. This leads to a crucial discovery that task scaling can be an efficient alternative to model scaling; i.e., the model size has less impact on performance with an extremely large number of tasks. Our results show that task scaling can improve training efficiency by 30 times in FLOPs.Empirically, ZeroPrompt substantially improves both the efficiency and the performance of zero-shot learning across a variety of academic and production datasets.
Semantic Role Labeling Meets Definition Modeling: Using Natural Language to Describe Predicate-Argument Structures
Authors: Simone Conia, Edoardo Barba, Alessandro Scirè, Roberto Navigli
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: One of the common traits of past and present approaches for Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is that they rely upon discrete labels drawn from a predefined linguistic inventory to classify predicate senses and their arguments.However, we argue this need not be the case. In this paper, we present an approach that leverages Definition Modeling to introduce a generalized formulation of SRL as the task of describing predicate-argument structures using natural language definitions instead of discrete labels. Our novel formulation takes a first step towards placing interpretability and flexibility foremost, and yet our experiments and analyses on PropBank-style and FrameNet-style, dependency-based and span-based SRL also demonstrate that a flexible model with an interpretable output does not necessarily come at the expense of performance. We release our software for research purposes at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/dsrl.
Is anisotropy really the cause of BERT embeddings not being semantic?
Authors: Alejandro Fuster Baggetto, Victor Fresno
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In this paper we conduct a set of experiments aimed to improve our understanding of the lack of semantic isometry in BERT, i.e. the lack of correspondence between the embedding and meaning spaces of its contextualized word representations. Our empirical results show that, contrary to popular belief, the anisotropy is not the root cause of the poor performance of these contextual models' embeddings in semantic tasks. What does affect both the anisotropy and semantic isometry is a set of known biases: frequency, subword, punctuation, and case. For each one of them, we measure its magnitude and the effect of its removal, showing that these biases contribute but do not completely explain the phenomenon of anisotropy and lack of semantic isometry of these contextual language models.
m$^4$ Adapter: Multilingual Multi-Domain Adaptation for Machine Translation with a Meta-Adapter
Authors: Wen Lai, Alexandra Chronopoulou, Alexander Fraser
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models (MNMT) yield state-of-the-art performance when evaluated on data from a domain and language pair seen at training time. However, when a MNMT model is used to translate under domain shift or to a new language pair, performance drops dramatically. We consider a very challenging scenario: adapting the MNMT model both to a new domain and to a new language pair at the same time. In this paper, we propose m\textasciicircum4Adapter (Multilingual Multi-Domain Adaptation for Machine Translation with a Meta-Adapter), which combines domain and language knowledge using meta-learning with adapters. We present results showing that our approach is a parameter-efficient solution which effectively adapts a model to both a new language pair and a new domain, while outperforming other adapter methods. An ablation study also shows that our approach more effectively transfers domain knowledge across different languages and language information across different domains.
Textual Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Solving Math Word Problems
Authors: Yibin Shen, Qianying Liu, Zhuoyuan Mao, Fei Cheng, Sadao Kurohashi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Solving math word problems is the task that analyses the relation of quantities e and requires an accurate understanding of contextual natural language information. Recent studies show that current models rely on shallow heuristics to predict solutions and could be easily misled by small textual perturbations. To address this problem, we propose a Textual Enhanced Contrastive Learning framework, which enforces the models to distinguish semantically similar examples while holding different mathematical logic. We adopt a self-supervised manner strategy to enrich examples with subtle textual variance by textual reordering or problem re-construction. We then retrieve the hardest to differentiate samples from both equation and textual perspectives and guide the model to learn their representations. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art on both widely used benchmark datasets and also exquisitely designed challenge datasets in English and Chinese.
What Do Compressed Multilingual Machine Translation Models Forget?
Authors: Alireza Mohammadshahi, Vassilina Nikoulina, Alexandre Berard, Caroline Brun, James Henderson, Laurent Besacier
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recently, very large pre-trained models achieve state-of-the-art results in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but their size makes it more challenging to apply them in resource-constrained environments. Compression techniques allow to drastically reduce the size of the models and therefore their inference time with negligible impact on top-tier metrics. However, the general performance averaged across multiple tasks and/or languages may hide a drastic performance drop on under-represented features, which could result in the amplification of biases encoded by the models. In this work, we assess the impact of compression methods on Multilingual Neural Machine Translation models (MNMT) for various language groups, gender, and semantic biases by extensive analysis of compressed models on different machine translation benchmarks, i.e. FLORES-101, MT-Gender, and DiBiMT. We show that the performance of under-represented languages drops significantly, while the average BLEU metric only slightly decreases. Interestingly, the removal of noisy memorization with compression leads to a significant improvement for some medium-resource languages. Finally, we demonstrate that compression amplifies intrinsic gender and semantic biases, even in high-resource languages.
Controllable Dialogue Simulation with In-context Learning
Authors: Zekun Li, Wenhu Chen, Shiyang Li, Hong Wang, Jing Qian, Xifeng Yan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Building dialogue systems requires a large corpus of annotated dialogues. Such datasets are usually created via crowdsourcing, which is expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose Dialogic, a novel dialogue simulation method based on large language model in-context learning to automate dataset creation. Seeded with a few annotated dialogues, Dialogic automatically selects in-context examples for demonstration and prompts GPT-3 to generate new dialogues and annotations in a controllable way. Our method can rapidly expand a small set of dialogue data with minimum or zero \textithuman involvement and \textitparameter update and is thus much more cost-efficient and time-saving than crowdsourcing. Experimental results on the MultiWOZ dataset demonstrate that training a model on the simulated dialogues leads to even better performance than using the same amount of human-generated dialogues under the challenging low-resource settings, with as few as 85 dialogues as a seed. When the full training set is given, our method can still serve as an effective data augmentation method to further improve performance. Human evaluation results also show that our simulated dialogues have near-human fluency and annotation accuracy. The code and data are available at \textbf r̆lhttps://github.com/Leezekun/dialogic.
Improving the Factual Correctness of Radiology Report Generation with Semantic Rewards
Authors: Jean-Benoit Delbrouck, Pierre Chambon, Christian Bluethgen, Emily Tsai, Omar Almusa, Curtis Langlotz
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Neural image-to-text radiology report generation systems offer the potential to improve radiology reporting by reducing the repetitive process of report drafting and identifying possible medical errors. These systems have achieved promising performance as measured by widely used NLG metrics such as BLEU and CIDEr. However, the current systems face important limitations. First, they present an increased complexity in architecture that offers only marginal improvements on NLG metrics. Secondly, these systems that achieve high performance on these metrics are not always factually complete or consistent due to both inadequate training and evaluation. Recent studies have shown the systems can be substantially improved by using new methods encouraging 1) the generation of domain entities consistent with the reference and 2) describing these entities in inferentially consistent ways. So far, these methods rely on weakly-supervised approaches (rule-based) and named entity recognition systems that are not specific to the chest X-ray domain. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new method, the RadGraph reward, to further improve the factual completeness and correctness of generated radiology reports. More precisely, we leverage the RadGraph dataset containing annotated chest X-ray reports with entities and relations between entities. On two open radiology report datasets, our system substantially improves the scores up to 14.2% and 25.3% on metrics evaluating the factual correctness and completeness of reports.
Recursive Neural Networks with Bottlenecks Diagnose (Non-)Compositionality
Authors: Verna Dankers, Ivan Titov
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: A recent line of work in NLP focuses on the (dis)ability of models to generalise compositionally for artificial languages.However, when considering natural language tasks, the data involved is not strictly, or locally, compositional.Quantifying the compositionality of data is a challenging task, which has been investigated primarily for short utterances.We use recursive neural models (Tree-LSTMs) with bottlenecks that limit the transfer of information between nodes.We illustrate that comparing data`s representations in models with and without the bottleneck can be used to produce a compositionality metric.The procedure is applied to the evaluation of arithmetic expressions using synthetic data, and sentiment classification using natural language data.We demonstrate that compression through a bottleneck impacts non-compositional examples disproportionatelyand then use the bottleneck compositionality metric (BCM) to distinguish compositional from non-compositional samples, yielding a compositionality ranking over a dataset.
HumSet: Dataset of Multilingual Information Extraction and Classification for Humanitarian Crises Response
Authors: Selim Fekih, Nicolo′ Tamagnone, Benjamin Minixhofer, Ranjan Shrestha, Ximena Contla, Ewan Oglethorpe, Navid Rekabsaz
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Timely and effective response to humanitarian crises requires quick and accurate analysis of large amounts of text data -- a process that can highly benefit from expert-assisted NLP systems trained on validated and annotated data in the humanitarian response domain. To enable creation of such NLP systems, we introduce and release HumSet, a novel and rich multilingual dataset of humanitarian response documents annotated by experts in the humanitarian response community. The dataset provides documents in three languages (English, French, Spanish) and covers a variety of humanitarian crises from 2018 to 2021 across the globe. For each document, HUMSET provides selected snippets (entries) as well as assigned classes to each entry annotated using common humanitarian information analysis frameworks. HUMSET also provides novel and challenging entry extraction and multi-label entry classification tasks. In this paper, we take a first step towards approaching these tasks and conduct a set of experiments on Pre-trained Language Models (PLM) to establish strong baselines for future research in this domain. The dataset is available at https://blog.thedeep.io/humset/.
Viterbi Decoding of Directed Acyclic Transformer for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation
Authors: Chenze Shao, Zhengrui Ma, Yang Feng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Non-autoregressive models achieve significant decoding speedup in neural machine translation but lack the ability to capture sequential dependency. Directed Acyclic Transformer (DA-Transformer) was recently proposed to model sequential dependency with a directed acyclic graph. Consequently, it has to apply a sequential decision process at inference time, which harms the global translation accuracy. In this paper, we present a Viterbi decoding framework for DA-Transformer, which guarantees to find the joint optimal solution for the translation and decoding path under any length constraint. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the performance of DA-Transformer while maintaining a similar decoding speedup.
Lexical Generalization Improves with Larger Models and Longer Training
Authors: Elron Bandel, Yoav Goldberg, Yanai Elazar
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: While fine-tuned language models perform well on many language tasks, they were also shown to rely on superficial surface features such as lexical overlap. Excessive utilization of such heuristics can lead to failure on challenging inputs. We analyze the use of lexical overlap heuristics in natural language inference, paraphrase detection, and reading comprehension (using a novel contrastive dataset),and find that larger models are much less susceptible to adopting lexical overlap heuristics. We also find that longer training leads models to abandon lexical overlap heuristics. Finally, We provide evidence that the disparity between models size has its source in the pre-trained model.
Realistic Data Augmentation Framework for Enhancing Tabular Reasoning
Authors: Dibyakanti Kumar, Vivek Gupta, Soumya Sharma, Shuo Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Existing approaches to constructing training data for Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks, such as for semi-structured table reasoning, are either via crowdsourcing or fully automatic methods. However, the former is expensive and time consuming and thus limits scale, and the latter often produces naive examples that may lack complex reasoning. This paper develops a realistic semi-automated framework for data augmentation for tabular inference. Instead of manually generating a hypothesis for each table, our methodology generates hypothesis templates transferable to similar tables. In addition, our framework entails the creation of rational counterfactual tables based on human written logical constraints and premise paraphrasing. For our case study, we use the INFOTABS (Gupta et al., 2020), which is an entity centric tabular inference dataset. We observed that our framework could generate human-like tabular inference examples, which could benefit training data augmentation, especially in the scenario with limited supervision.
Inducing Generalizable and Interpretable Lexica
Authors: Yilin Geng, Zetian Wu, Roshan Santhosh, Tejas Srivastava, Lyle Ungar, João Sedoc
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Lexica -- words and associated scores -- are widely used as simple, interpretable, generalizable language features to predict sentiment, emotions, mental health, and personality. They also provide insight into the psychological features behind those moods and traits. Such lexica, historically created by human experts, are valuable to linguists, psychologists, and social scientists, but they take years of refinement and have limited coverage. In this paper, we investigate how the lexica that provide psycholinguistic insights could be computationally induced and how they should be assessed. We identify generalizability and interpretability as two essential properties of such lexica. We induce lexica using both context-oblivious and context-aware approaches, compare their predictive performance both within the training corpus and across various corpora, and evaluate their quality using crowd-worker assessment. We find that lexica induced from context-oblivious models are more generalizable and interpretable than those from more accurate context-aware transformer models. In addition, lexicon scores can identify explanatory words more reliably than a high performing transformer with feature-importance measures like SHAP.
The Curious Case of Absolute Position Embeddings
Authors: Koustuv Sinha, Amirhossein Kazemnejad, Siva Reddy, Joelle Pineau, Dieuwke Hupkes, Adina Williams
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Transformer language models encode the notion of word order using positional information. Most commonly, this positional information is represented by absolute position embeddings (APEs), that are learned from the pretraining data. However, in natural language, it is not absolute position that matters, but relative position, and the extent to which APEs can capture this type of information has not been studied. In this work, we observe that models trained with APE over-rely on positional information to the point that they break-down when subjected to sentences with shifted position information. Specifically, when models are subjected to sentences starting from a non-zero position (excluding the effect of priming), they exhibit noticeably degraded performance on zero- to full-shot tasks, across a range of model families and model sizes. Our findings raise questions about the efficacy of APEs to model the relativity of position information, and invite further introspection on the sentence and word order processing strategies employed by these models.
Goal-oriented Vision-and-Dialog Navigation via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yan Cao, Keting Lu, David DeFazio, Shiqi Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Vision-and-dialog navigation is a recent benchmark for evaluating the AI capabilities of perception, interaction, and decision making. While existing methods developed for this benchmark have demonstrated great successes, they mostly rely on large datasets, where data collection can be a challenge, and the learned policies are not adaptive to domain changes. In this paper, we focus on a new problem, referred to as goal-oriented vision-and-dialog navigation (GVDN), where an agent uses reinforcement learning techniques to compute dialog-navigation policies from trial and error. A robot conducts visual navigation to locate target objects, and can talk to a remote human operator as needed. Our remote human is able to provide guidance on navigation only if the robot correctly conveys its location through dialog. Experiments have been conducted using photo-realistic simulation environments. Results suggest that, our agent outperforms competitive baselines in success rate.
Leveraging Data Recasting to Enhance Tabular Reasoning
Authors: Aashna Jena, Vivek Gupta, Manish Shrivastava, Julian Eisenschlos
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Creating challenging tabular inference data is essential for learning complex reasoning. Prior work has mostly relied on two data generation strategies. The first is human annotation, which yields linguistically diverse data but is difficult to scale. The second category for creation is synthetic generation, which is scalable and cost effective but lacks inventiveness. In this research, we present a framework for semi-automatically recasting existing tabular data to make use of the benefits of both approaches. We utilize our framework to build tabular NLI instances from five datasets that were initially intended for tasks like table2text creation, tabular Q/A, and semantic parsing. We demonstrate that recasted data could be used as evaluation benchmarks as well as augmentation data to enhance performance on tabular NLI tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of models trained on recasted data in the zero-shot scenario, and analyse trends in performance across different recasted datasets types.
Thinking about GPT-3 In-Context Learning for Biomedical IE? Think Again
Authors: Bernal Jimenez Gutierrez, Nikolas McNeal, Clayton Washington, You Chen, Lang Li, Huan Sun, Yu Su
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as GPT-3 have shown strong in-context learning capabilities, which are highly appealing for domains such as biomedicine that feature high and diverse demands of language technologies but also high data annotation costs. In this paper, we present the first systematic and comprehensive study to compare the few-shot performance of GPT-3 in-context learning with fine-tuning smaller (i.e., BERT-sized) PLMs on two representative biomedical information extraction (IE) tasks: named entity recognition and relation extraction. We follow the true few-shot setting to avoid overestimating models' few-shot performance by model selection over a large validation set. We also optimize GPT-3`s performance with known techniques such as contextual calibration and dynamic in-context example retrieval. However, our results show that GPT-3 still significantly underperforms compared to simply fine-tuning a smaller PLM. In addition, GPT-3 in-context learning also yields smaller gains in accuracy when more training data becomes available. More in-depth analyses further reveal issues of in-context learning that may be detrimental to IE tasks in general. Given the high cost of experimenting with GPT-3, we hope our study provides helpful guidance for biomedical researchers and practitioners towards more practical solutions such as fine-tuning small PLMs before better in-context learning is available for biomedical IE.
Attention weights accurately predict language representations in the brain
Authors: Mathis Lamarre, Catherine Chen, Fatma Deniz
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: In Transformer-based language models (LMs) the attention mechanism converts token embeddings into contextual embeddings that incorporate information from neighboring words. The resulting contextual hidden state embeddings have enabled highly accurate models of brain responses, suggesting that the attention mechanism constructs contextual embeddings that carry information reflected in language-related brain representations. However, it is unclear whether the attention weights that are used to integrate information across words are themselves related to language representations in the brain. To address this question we analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings of participants reading English language narratives. We provided the narrative text as input to two LMs (BERT and GPT-2) and extracted their corresponding attention weights. We then used encoding models to determine how well attention weights can predict recorded brain responses. We find that attention weights accurately predict brain responses in much of the frontal and temporal cortices. Our results suggest that the attention mechanism itself carries information that is reflected in brain representations. Moreover, these results indicate cortical areas in which context integration may occur.
Improving HowNet-Based Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation with Translations
Authors: Xiang Zhang, Bradley Hauer, Grzegorz Kondrak
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the task of identifying the intended sense of a word in context. While prior work on unsupervised WSD has leveraged lexical knowledge bases, such as WordNet and BabelNet, these resources have proven to be less effective for Chinese. Instead, the most widely used lexical knowledge base for Chinese is HowNet. Previous HowNet-based WSD methods have not exploited contextual translation information. In this paper, we present the first HowNet-based WSD system which combines monolingual contextual information from a pretrained neural language model with bilingual information obtained via machine translation and sense translation information from HowNet. The results of our evaluation experiment on a test set from prior work demonstrate that our new method achieves a new state of the art for unsupervised Chinese WSD.
Mask-then-Fill: A Flexible and Effective Data Augmentation Framework for Event Extraction
Authors: Jun Gao, Changlong Yu, Wei Wang, Huan Zhao, Ruifeng Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: We present Mask-then-Fill, a flexible and effective data augmentation framework for event extraction. Our approach allows for more flexible manipulation of text and thus can generate more diverse data while keeping the original event structure unchanged as much as possible. Specifically, it first randomly masks out an adjunct sentence fragment and then infills a variable-length text span with a fine-tuned infilling model. The main advantage lies in that it can replace a fragment of arbitrary length in the text with another fragment of variable length, compared to the existing methods which can only replace a single word or a fixed-length fragment. On trigger and argument extraction tasks, the proposed framework is more effective than baseline methods and it demonstrates particularly strong results in the low-resource setting. Our further analysis shows that it achieves a good balance between diversity and distributional similarity.
MOBA-E2C: Generating MOBA Game Commentaries via Capturing Highlight Events from the Meta-Data
Authors: Dawei Zhang, Sixing Wu, Yao Guo, Xiangqun Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games such as Dota2 are currently one of the most popular e-sports gaming genres. Following professional commentaries is a great way to understand and enjoy a MOBA game. However, massive game competitions lack commentaries because of the shortage of professional human commentators. As an alternative, employing machine commentators that can work at any time and place is a feasible solution. Considering the challenges in modeling MOBA games, we propose a data-driven MOBA commentary generation framework, MOBA-E2C, allowing a model to generate commentaries based on the game meta-data. Subsequently, to alleviate the burden of collecting supervised data, we propose a MOBA-FuseGPT generator to generate MOBA game commentaries by fusing the power of a rule-based generator and a generative GPT generator. Finally, in the experiments, we take a popular MOBA game Dota2 as our case and construct a Chinese Dota2 commentary generation dataset Dota2-Commentary. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first Dota2 machine commentator and Dota2-Commentary is the first dataset.
Enhancing Automatic Readability Assessment with Pre-training and Soft Labels for Ordinal Regression
Authors: Jinshan Zeng, Yudong Xie, Xianglong Yu, John Lee, Ding-Xuan Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: The readability assessment task aims to assign a difficulty grade to a text. While neural models have recently demonstrated impressive performance, most do not exploit the ordinal nature of the difficulty grades, and make little effort for model initialization to facilitate fine-tuning. We address these limitations with soft labels for ordinal regression, and with model pre-training through prediction of pairwise relative text difficulty. We incorporate these two components into a model based on hierarchical attention networks, and evaluate its performance on both English and Chinese datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms competitive neural models and statistical classifiers on most datasets.
Opening up Minds with Argumentative Dialogues
Authors: Youmna Farag, Charlotte Brand, Jacopo Amidei, Paul Piwek, Tom Stafford, Svetlana Stoyanchev, Andreas Vlachos
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent research on argumentative dialogues has focused on persuading people to take some action, changing their stance on the topic of discussion, or winning debates. In this work, we focus on argumentative dialogues that aim to open up (rather than change) people`s minds to help them become more understanding to views that are unfamiliar or in opposition to their own convictions. To this end, we present a dataset of 183 argumentative dialogues about 3 controversial topics: veganism, Brexit and COVID-19 vaccination. The dialogues were collected using the Wizard of Oz approach, where wizards leverage a knowledge-base of arguments to converse with participants. Open-mindedness is measured before and after engaging in the dialogue using a questionnaire from the psychology literature, and success of the dialogue is measured as the change in the participant`s stance towards those who hold opinions different to theirs. We evaluate two dialogue models: a Wikipedia-based and an argument-based model. We show that while both models perform closely in terms of opening up minds, the argument-based model is significantly better on other dialogue properties such as engagement and clarity.
You Are My Type! Type Embeddings for Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Mohammed Saeed, Paolo Papotti
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: One reason for the positive impact of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) in NLP tasks is their ability to encode semantic types, such as \textquoteleftEuropean City' or \textquoteleftWoman'. While previous work has analyzed such information in the context of interpretability, it is not clear how to use types to steer the PLM output. For example, in a cloze statement, it is desirable to steer the model to generate a token that satisfies a user-specified type, e.g., predict a date rather than a location. In this work, we introduce Type Embeddings (TEs), an input embedding that promotes desired types in a PLM. Our proposal is to define a type by a small set of word examples. We empirically study the ability of TEs both in representing types and in steering masking predictions without changes to the prompt text in BERT. Finally, using the LAMA datasets, we show how TEs highly improve the precision in extracting facts from PLMs.
Generating Textual Adversaries with Minimal Perturbation
Authors: Xingyi Zhao, Lu Zhang, Depeng Xu, Shuhan Yuan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Many word-level adversarial attack approaches for textual data have been proposed in recent studies. However, due to the massive search space consisting of combinations of candidate words, the existing approaches face the problem of preserving the semantics of texts when crafting adversarial counterparts. In this paper, we develop a novel attack strategy to find adversarial texts with high similarity to the original texts while introducing minimal perturbation. The rationale is that we expect the adversarial texts with small perturbation can better preserve the semantic meaning of original texts. Experiments show that, compared with state-of-the-art attack approaches, our approach achieves higher success rates and lower perturbation rates in four benchmark datasets.
SensePOLAR: Word sense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings
Authors: Jan Engler, Sandipan Sikdar, Marlene Lutz, Markus Strohmaier
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Adding interpretability to word embeddings represents an area of active research in textrepresentation. Recent work has explored the potential of embedding words via so-called polardimensions (e.g. good vs. bad, correct vs. wrong). Examples of such recent approachesinclude SemAxis, POLAR, FrameAxis, and BiImp. Although these approaches provide interpretabledimensions for words, they have not been designed to deal with polysemy, i.e. they can not easily distinguish between different senses of words. To address this limitation, we present SensePOLAR, an extension of the original POLAR framework that enables wordsense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings. The resulting interpretable word embeddings achieve a level ofperformance that is comparable to original contextual word embeddings across a variety ofnatural language processing tasks including the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks. Our workremoves a fundamental limitation of existing approaches by offering users sense aware interpretationsfor contextual word embeddings.
Contextualizing Language Models for Norms Diverging from Social Majority
Authors: Niklas Kiehne, Hermann Kroll, Wolf-Tilo Balke
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: To comprehensibly contextualize decisions, artificial systems in social situations need a high degree of awareness of the rules of conduct of human behavior. Especially transformer-based language models have recently been shown to exhibit some such awareness. But what if norms in some social setting do not adhere to or even blatantly deviate from the mainstream? In this paper, we introduce a novel mechanism based on deontic logic to allow for a flexible adaptation of individual norms by de-biasing training data sets and a task-reduction to textual entailment. Building on the popular \textquoteleftMoral Stories' dataset we on the one hand highlight the intrinsic bias of current language models, on the other hand characterize the adaptability of pre-trained models to deviating norms in fine-tuning settings.
Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Sensitive Emotion Recognition and Sensible Knowledge Selection
Authors: Lanrui Wang, Jiangnan Li, Zheng Lin, Fandong Meng, Chenxu Yang, Weiping Wang, Jie Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Empathy, which is widely used in psychological counseling, is a key trait of everyday human conversations. Equipped with commonsense knowledge, current approaches to empathetic response generation focus on capturing implicit emotion within dialogue context, where the emotions are treated as a static variable throughout the conversations. However, emotions change dynamically between utterances, which makes previous works difficult to perceive the emotion flow and predict the correct emotion of the target response, leading to inappropriate response. Furthermore, simply importing commonsense knowledge without harmonization may trigger the conflicts between knowledge and emotion, which confuse the model to choose the correct information to guide the generation process. To address the above problems, we propose a Serial Encoding and Emotion-Knowledge interaction (SEEK) method for empathetic dialogue generation. We use a fine-grained encoding strategy which is more sensitive to the emotion dynamics (emotion flow) in the conversations to predict the emotion-intent characteristic of response. Besides, we design a novel framework to model the interaction between knowledge and emotion to solve the conflicts generate more sensible response. Extensive experiments on the utterance-level annotated EMPATHETICDIALOGUES demonstrate that SEEK outperforms the strong baseline in both automatic and manual evaluations.
Joint Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion and Alignment
Authors: Vinh Tong, Dat Quoc Nguyen, Trung Thanh Huynh, Tam Thanh Nguyen, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Mathias Niepert
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Knowledge graph (KG) alignment and completion are usually treated as two independent tasks. While recent work has leveraged entity and relation alignments from multiple KGs, such as alignments between multilingual KGs with common entities and relations, a deeper understanding of the ways in which multilingual KG completion (MKGC) can aid the creation of multilingual KG alignments (MKGA) is still limited. Motivated by the observation that structural inconsistencies -- the main challenge for MKGA models -- can be mitigated through KG completion methods, we propose a novel model for jointly completing and aligning knowledge graphs. The proposed model combines two components that jointly accomplish KG completion and alignment. These two components employ relation-aware graph neural networks that we propose to encode multi-hop neighborhood structures into entity and relation representations. Moreover, we also propose (i) a structural inconsistency reduction mechanism to incorporate information from the completion into the alignment component, and (ii) an alignment seed enlargement and triple transferring mechanism to enlarge alignment seeds and transfer triples during KGs alignment. Extensive experiments on a public multilingual benchmark show that our proposed model outperforms existing competitive baselines, obtaining new state-of-the-art results on both MKGC and MKGA tasks.
A Framework for Automatic Generation of Spoken Question-Answering Data
Authors: Merve Ünlü Menevşe, Yusufcan Manav, Ebru Arisoy, Arzucan Özgür
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: This paper describes a framework to automatically generate a spoken question answering (QA) dataset. The framework consists of a question generation (QG) module to generate questions automatically from given text documents, a text-to-speech (TTS) module to convert the text documents into spoken form and an automatic speech recognition (ASR) module to transcribe the spoken content. The final dataset contains question-answer pairs for both the reference text and ASR transcriptions as well as the audio files corresponding to each reference text. For QG and ASR systems we used pre-trained multilingual encoder-decoder transformer models and fine-tuned these models using a limited amount of manually generated QA data and TTS-based speech data, respectively. As a proof of concept, we investigated the proposed framework for Turkish and generated the Turkish Question Answering (TurQuAse) dataset using Wikipedia articles. Manual evaluation of the automatically generated question- answer pairs and QA performance evaluation with state of-the-art models on TurQuAse show that the proposed framework is efficient for automatically generating spoken QA datasets. To the best of our knowledge, TurQuAse is the first publicly available spoken question answering dataset for Turkish. The proposed framework can be easily extended to other languages where a limited amount of QA data is available.
Readability Controllable Biomedical Document Summarization
Authors: Zheheng Luo, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Different from general documents, it is recognised that the ease with which people can understand a biomedical text is eminently varied, owing to the highly technical nature of biomedical documents and the variance of readers' domain knowledge. However, existing biomedical document summarization systems have paid little attention to readability control, leaving users with summaries that are incompatible with their levels of expertise.In recognition of this urgent demand, we introduce a new task of readability controllable summarization for biomedical documents, which aims to recognise users' readability demands and generate summaries that better suit their needs: technical summaries for experts and plain language summaries (PLS) for laymen.To establish this task, we construct a corpus consisting of biomedical papers with technical summaries and PLSs written by the authors, and benchmark multiple advanced controllable abstractive and extractive summarization models based on pre-trained language models (PLMs) with prevalent controlling and generation techniques.Moreover, we propose a novel masked language model (MLM) based metric and its variant to effectively evaluate the readability discrepancy between lay and technical summaries.Experimental results from automated and human evaluations show that though current control techniques allow for a certain degree of readability adjustment during generation, the performance of existing controllable summarization methods is far from desirable in this task.
Beyond Additive Fusion: Learning Non-Additive Multimodal Interactions
Authors: Torsten Wörtwein, Lisa Sheeber, Nicholas Allen, Jeffrey Cohn, Louis-Philippe Morency
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Multimodal fusion addresses the problem of analyzing spoken words in the multimodal context, including visual expressions and prosodic cues. Even when multimodal models lead to performance improvements, it is often unclear whether bimodal and trimodal interactions are learned or whether modalities are processed independently of each other. We propose Multimodal Residual Optimization (MRO) to separate unimodal, bimodal, and trimodal interactions in a multimodal model. This improves interpretability as the multimodal interaction can be quantified. Inspired by Occam`s razor, the main intuition of MRO is that (simpler) unimodal contributions should be learned before learning (more complex) bimodal and trimodal interactions. For example, bimodal predictions should learn to correct the mistakes (residuals) of unimodal predictions, thereby letting the bimodal predictions focus on the remaining bimodal interactions. Empirically, we observe that MRO successfully separates unimodal, bimodal, and trimodal interactions while not degrading predictive performance. We complement our empirical results with a human perception study and observe that MRO learns multimodal interactions that align with human judgments.
Generalization Differences between End-to-End and Neuro-Symbolic Vision-Language Reasoning Systems
Authors: Wang Zhu, Jesse Thomason, Robin Jia
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: For vision-and-language reasoning tasks, both fully connectionist, end-to-end methods and hybrid, neuro-symbolic methods have achieved high in-distribution performance. In which out-of-distribution settings does each paradigm excel? We investigate this question on both single-image and multi-image visual question-answering through four types of generalization tests: a novel segment-combine test for multi-image queries, contrast set, compositional generalization, and cross-benchmark transfer.Vision-and-language end-to-end trained systems exhibit sizeable performance drops across all these tests. Neuro-symbolic methods suffer even more on cross-benchmark transfer from GQA to VQA, but they show smaller accuracy drops on the other generalization tests and their performance quickly improves by few-shot training. Overall, our results demonstrate the complementary benefits of these two paradigms, and emphasize the importance of using a diverse suite of generalization tests to fully characterize model robustness to distribution shift.
Learning to Model Multimodal Semantic Alignment for Story Visualization
Authors: Bowen Li, Thomas Lukasiewicz
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022 (Findings Track), 2022

Abstract: Story visualization aims to generate a sequence of images to narrate each sentence in a multi-sentence story, where the images should be realistic and keep global consistency across dynamic scenes and characters. Current works face the problem of semantic misalignment because of their fixed architecture and diversity of input modalities. To address this problem, we explore the semantic alignment between text and image representations by learning to match their semantic levels in the GAN-based generative model. More specifically, we introduce dynamic interactions according to learning to dynamically explore various semantic depths and fuse the different-modal information at a matched semantic level, which thus relieves the text-image semantic misalignment problem. Extensive experiments on different datasets demonstrate the improvements of our approach, neither using segmentation masks nor auxiliary captioning networks, on image quality and story consistency, compared with state-of-the-art methods.