mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Diable: Efficient Dialogue State Tracking as Operations on Tables
Authors: Pietro Lesci, Yoshinari Fujinuma, Momchil Hardalov, Chao Shang, Yassine Benajiba, Lluis Marquez
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Sequence-to-sequence state-of-the-art systems for dialogue state tracking (DST) use the full dialogue history as input, represent the current state as a list with all the slots, and generate the entire state from scratch at each dialogue turn. This approach is inefficient, especially when the number of slots is large and the conversation is long. We propose Diable, a new task formalisation that simplifies the design and implementation of efficient DST systems and allows one to easily plug and play large language models. We represent the dialogue state as a table and formalise DST as a table manipulation task. At each turn, the system updates the previous state by generating table operations based on the dialogue context. Extensive experimentation on the MultiWoz datasets demonstrates that Diable (i) outperforms strong efficient DST baselines, (ii) is 2.4x more time efficient than current state-of-the-art methods while retaining competitive Joint Goal Accuracy, and (iii) is robust to noisy data annotations due to the table operations approach.
Neural Topic Modeling based on Cycle Adversarial Training and Contrastive Learning
Authors: Boyu Wang, Linhai Zhang, Deyu Zhou, Yi Cao, Jiandong Ding
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Neural topic models have been widely used to extract common topics across documents. Recently, contrastive learning has been applied to variational autoencoder-based neural topic models, achieving promising results. However, due to the limitation of the unidirectional structure of the variational autoencoder, the encoder is enhanced with the contrastive loss instead of the decoder, leading to a gap between model training and evaluation. To address the limitation, we propose a novel neural topic modeling framework based on cycle adversarial training and contrastive learning to apply contrastive learning on the generator directly. Specifically, a self-supervised contrastive loss is proposed to make the generator capture similar topic information, which leads to better topic-word distributions. Meanwhile, a discriminative contrastive loss is proposed to cooperate with the self-supervised contrastive loss to balance the generation and discrimination. Moreover, based on the reconstruction ability of the cycle generative adversarial network, a novel data augmentation strategy is designed and applied to the topic distribution directly. Experiments have been conducted on four benchmark datasets and results show that the proposed approach outperforms competitive baselines.
Alleviating Exposure Bias via Multi-level Contrastive Learning and Deviation Simulation in Abstractive Summarization
Authors: Jiawen Xie, Qi Su, Shaoting Zhang, Xiaofan Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Most Transformer based abstractive summarization systems have a severe mismatch between training and inference, i.e., exposure bias. From diverse perspectives, we introduce a simple multi-level contrastive learning framework for abstractive summarization (SimMCS) and a tailored sparse decoder self-attention pattern (SDSA) to bridge the gap between training and inference to improve model performance. Compared with previous contrastive objectives focusing only on the relative order of probability mass assigned to non-gold summaries, SimMCS additionally takes their absolute positions into account, which guarantees that the relatively high-quality (positive) summaries among them could be properly assigned high probability mass, and further enhances the capability of discriminating summary quality beyond exploiting potential artifacts of specific metrics. SDSA simulates the possible inference scenarios of deviation in the training phase to get closer to the ideal paradigm. Our approaches outperform the previous state-of-the-art results on two summarization datasets while just adding fairly low overhead. Further empirical analysis shows our model preserves the advantages of prior contrastive methods and possesses strong few-shot learning ability.
Mapping Brains with Language Models: A Survey
Authors: Antonia Karamolegkou, Mostafa Abdou, Anders Søgaard
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Over the years, many researchers have seemingly made the same observation: Brain and language model activations exhibit some structural similarities, enabling linear partial mappings between features extracted from neural recordings and computational language models. In an attempt to evaluate how much evidence has been accumulated for this observation, we survey over 30 studies spanning 10 datasets and 8 metrics. How much evidence has been accumulated, and what, if anything, is missing before we can draw conclusions? Our analysis of the evaluation methods used in the literature reveals that some of the metrics are less conservative. We also find that the accumulated evidence, for now, remains ambiguous, but correlations with model size and quality provide grounds for cautious optimism.
Parameter-Efficient Finetuning for Robust Continual Multilingual Learning
Authors: Kartikeya Badola, Shachi Dave, Partha Talukdar
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce and study the problem of Continual Multilingual Learning (CML) where a previously trained multilingual model is periodically updated using new data arriving in stages. If the new data is present only in a subset of languages, we find that the resulting model shows improved performance only on the languages included in the latest update (and a few closely related languages) while its performance on all the remaining languages degrade significantly. We address this challenge by proposing LAFT-URIEL, a parameter-efficient finetuning strategy which aims to increase the number of languages on which the model improves after an update, while reducing the magnitude of loss in performance for the remaining languages. LAFT-URIEL uses linguistic knowledge to balance overfitting and knowledge sharing across languages, allowing for an additional 25% of task languages to see an improvement in performance after an update, while also reducing the average magnitude of losses on the remaining languages by 78% relative.
Interpretable Multimodal Misinformation Detection with Logic Reasoning
Authors: Hui Liu, Wenya Wang, Haoliang Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Multimodal misinformation on online social platforms is becoming a critical concern due to increasing credibility and easier dissemination brought by multimedia content, compared to traditional text-only information. While existing multimodal detection approaches have achieved high performance, the lack of interpretability hinders these systems' reliability and practical deployment. Inspired by Neural-Symbolic AI which combines the learning ability of neural networks with the explainability of symbolic learning, we propose a novel logic-based neural model for multimodal misinformation detection which integrates interpretable logic clauses to express the reasoning process of the target task. To make learning effective, we parameterize the symbolic logical elements using neural representations, which facilitate the automatic generation and evaluation of meaningful logic clauses. Additionally, to make our framework generalizable across diverse misinformation sources, we introduce five meta-predicates that can be instantiated with different correlations. Results on three public datasets (Twitter, Weibo, and Sarcasm) demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of our model.
Semantic-conditioned Dual Adaptation for Cross-domain Query-based Visual Segmentation
Authors: Ye Wang, Tao Jin, Wang Lin, Xize Cheng, Linjun Li, Zhou Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Visual segmentation from language queries has attracted significant research interest. Despite the effectiveness, existing works require expensive labeling and suffer severe degradation when deployed to an unseen domain. In this paper, we investigate a novel task Cross-domain Query-based Visual Segmentation (CQVS), aiming to adapt the segmentation model from a labeled domain to a new unlabeled domain. The challenges of CQVS stem from three domain discrepancies: (1) multi-modal content shift, (2) uni-modal feature gap and (3) cross-modal relation bias. Existing domain adaptation methods fail to address them comprehensively and precisely (e.g. at pixel level), thus being suboptimal for CQVS. To overcome this limitation, we propose Semantic-conditioned Dual Adaptation (SDA), a novel framework to achieve precise feature- and relation-invariant across domains via a universal semantic structure. The SDA consists of two key components: Content-aware Semantic Modeling (CSM) and Dual Adaptive Branches (DAB). First, CSM introduces a common semantic space across domains to provide uniform guidance. Then, DAB seamlessly leverages this semantic information to develop a contrastive feature branch for category-wise pixel alignment, and design a reciprocal relation branch for relation enhancement via two complementary masks. Extensive experiments on three video benchmarks and three image benchmarks evidence the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-arts.
Figurative Language Processing: A Linguistically Informed Feature Analysis of the Behavior of Language Models and Humans
Authors: Hyewon Jang, Qi Yu, Diego Frassinelli
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in investigating what Transformer-based language models (TLMs) actually learn from the training data. This is especially relevant for complex tasks such as the understanding of non-literal meaning. In this work, we probe the performance of three black-box TLMs and two intrinsically transparent white-box models on figurative language classification of sarcasm, similes, idioms, and metaphors. We conduct two studies on the classification results to provide insights into the inner workings of such models. With our first analysis on feature importance, we identify crucial differences in model behavior. With our second analysis using an online experiment with human participants, we inspect different linguistic characteristics of the four figurative language types.
Taxonomy of Problems in Lexical Semantics
Authors: Bradley Hauer, Grzegorz Kondrak
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Semantic tasks are rarely formally defined, and the exact relationship between them is an open question. We introduce a taxonomy that elucidates the connection between several problems in lexical semantics, including monolingual and cross-lingual variants. Our theoretical framework is based on the hypothesis of the equivalence of concept and meaning distinctions. Using algorithmic problem reductions, we demonstrate that all problems in the taxonomy can be reduced to word sense disambiguation (WSD), and that WSD itself can be reduced to some problems, making them theoretically equivalent. In addition, we carry out experiments that strongly support the soundness of the concept-meaning hypothesis, and the correctness of our reductions.
Making Pre-trained Language Models both Task-solvers and Self-calibrators
Authors: Yangyi Chen, Xingyao Wang, Heng Ji
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Pre-trained language models (PLMs) serve as backbones for various real-world systems. For high-stake applications, it`s equally essential to have reasonable confidence estimations in predictions. While the vanilla confidence scores of PLMs can already be effectively utilized, PLMs consistently become overconfident in their wrong predictions, which is not desirable in practice. Previous work shows that introducing an extra calibration task can mitigate this issue. The basic idea involves acquiring additional data to train models in predicting the confidence of their initial predictions. However, it only demonstrates the feasibility of this kind of method, assuming that there are abundant extra available samples for the introduced calibration task. In this work, we consider the practical scenario that we need to effectively utilize training samples to make PLMs both task-solvers and self-calibrators. Three challenges are presented, including limited training samples, data imbalance, and distribution shifts. We first conduct pilot experiments to quantify various decisive factors in the calibration task. Based on the empirical analysis results, we propose a training algorithm LM-TOAST to tackle the challenges. Experimental results show that LM-TOAST can effectively utilize the training data to make PLMs have reasonable confidence estimations while maintaining the original task performance. Further, we consider three downstream applications, namely selective classification, adversarial defense, and model cascading, to show the practical usefulness of LM-TOAST.
EmbedTextNet: Dimension Reduction with Weighted Reconstruction and Correlation Losses for Efficient Text Embedding
Authors: Dae Yon Hwang, Bilal Taha, Yaroslav Nechaev
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The size of embeddings generated by large language models can negatively affect system latency and model size in certain downstream practical applications (e.g. KNN search). In this work, we propose EmbedTextNet, a light add-on network that can be appended to an arbitrary language model to generate a compact embedding without requiring any changes in its architecture or training procedure. Specifically, we use a correlation penalty added to the weighted reconstruction loss that better captures the informative features in the text embeddings, which improves the efficiency of the language models. We evaluated EmbedTextNet on three different downstream tasks: text similarity, language modelling, and text retrieval. Empirical results on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of EmbedTextNet compared to state-of-art methodologies in recent works, especially in extremely low dimensional embedding sizes. The developed code for reproducibility is included in the supplementary material.
Denoising Enhanced Distantly Supervised Ultrafine Entity Typing
Authors: Yue Zhang, Hongliang Fei, Ping Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, the task of distantly supervised (DS) ultra-fine entity typing has received significant attention. However, DS data is noisy and often suffers from missing or wrong labeling issues resulting in low precision and low recall. This paper proposes a novel ultra-fine entity typing model with denoising capability. Specifically, we build a noise model to estimate the unknown labeling noise distribution over input contexts and noisy type labels. With the noise model, more trustworthy labels can be recovered by subtracting the estimated noise from the input. Furthermore, we propose an entity typing model, which adopts a bi-encoder architecture, is trained on the denoised data. Finally, the noise model and entity typing model are trained iteratively to enhance each other. We conduct extensive experiments on the Ultra-Fine entity typing dataset as well as OntoNotes dataset and demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms other baseline methods.
INTapt: Information-Theoretic Adversarial Prompt Tuning for Enhanced Non-Native Speech Recognition
Authors: Eunseop Yoon, Hee Suk Yoon, John Harvill, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Chang Yoo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have attained unprecedented performance with large speech models pre-trained based on self-supervised speech representation learning. However, these pre-trained speech models suffer from representational bias as they tend to better represent those prominent accents (i.e., native (L1) English accent) in the pre-training speech corpus than less represented accents, resulting in a deteriorated performance for non-native (L2) English accents. Although there have been some approaches to mitigate this issue, all of these methods require updating the pre-trained model weights. In this paper, we propose Information Theoretic Adversarial Prompt Tuning (INTapt), which introduces prompts concatenated to the original input that can re-modulate the attention of the pre-trained model such that the corresponding input resembles a native (L1) English speech without updating the backbone weights. INTapt is trained simultaneously in the following two manners: (1) adversarial training to reduce accent feature dependence between the original input and the prompt-concatenated input and (2) training to minimize CTC loss for improving ASR performance to a prompt-concatenated input. Experimental results show that INTapt improves the performance of L2 English and increases feature similarity between L2 and L1 accents.
Local Temperature Beam Search: Avoid Neural Text DeGeneration via Enhanced Calibration
Authors: Dongkyu Lee, Gyeonghun Kim, Janghoon Han, Taesuk Hong, Yi-Reun Kim, Stanley Jungkyu Choi, Nevin L. Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Previous studies have constantly observed that a language model repeats itself, creating repetitions in an output sequence. To cope with the issue, stochastic decoding schemes have been the de facto approaches; the strategies add randomness in inference, hence avoiding the “self-loop”. However, the remedy comes at the cost of sacrificing output quality due to the randomness involved. In this work, we introduce a deterministic decoding scheme, local temperature beam search. This inference algorithm is an embarrassingly simple variant of beam search, yet it reduces repetition, whose level is superior to that of a sampling-based decoding algorithm, while maintaining the level of coherence as in beam search. Our idea is rooted in the concept of model calibration; we view a repetition as a casualty from overconfidence in a model. Therefore, our work mitigates the miscalibration present in the course of inference with a post-calibration approach applied in beam-specific manner. Our inference scheme is validated on text completion tasks, in which the repetition problem is seen most clearly, and is exhaustively compared with existing inference schemes.
Explanation Graph Generation via Generative Pre-training over Synthetic Graphs
Authors: Han Cui, Shangzhan Li, Yu Zhang, Qi Shi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The generation of explanation graphs is a significant task that aims to produce explanation graphs in response to user input, revealing the internal reasoning process. This task is challenging due to the significant discrepancy be- tween unstructured user queries and structured explanation graphs. Current research commonly fine-tunes a text-based pre-trained language model on a small downstream dataset that is annotated with labeled graphs. However, due to the limited scale of available datasets, this approach may prove to be insufficient in bridging the gap between natural language text and structured graphs. In this paper, to alleviate the above limitations, we propose a novel pre-trained framework EG3P(for Explanation Graph Generation via Generative Pre-training over synthetic graphs) for the explanation graph generation task. Specifically, we first propose a text-to-graph generative task to pre-train the model with the goal of bridging the text-graph gap. Additionally, we propose an automatic corpus synthesis strategy for synthesizing a large scale of high-quality corpus, reducing the reliance on costly manual annotation methods. Experimental results on ExplaGraphs show the effectiveness of EG3P that our model surpasses all baseline systems with remarkable margins. Besides, further analysis demonstrates that EG3P is able to generate better explanation graphs on actual reasoning tasks such as CommonsenseQA and OpenbookQA.
NaSGEC: a Multi-Domain Chinese Grammatical Error Correction Dataset from Native Speaker Texts
Authors: Yue Zhang, Bo Zhang, Haochen Jiang, Zhenghua Li, Chen Li, Fei Huang, Min Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce NaSGEC, a new dataset to facilitate research on Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) for native speaker texts from multiple domains. Previous CGEC research primarily focuses on correcting texts from a single domain, especially learner essays. To broaden the target domain, we annotate multiple references for 12,500 sentences from three native domains, i.e., social media, scientific writing, and examination. We provide solid benchmark results for NaSGEC by employing cutting-edge CGEC models and different training data. We further perform detailed analyses of the connections and gaps between our domains from both empirical and statistical views. We hope this work can inspire future studies on an important but under-explored direction--cross-domain GEC.
FORK: A Bite-Sized Test Set for Probing Culinary Cultural Biases in Commonsense Reasoning Models
Authors: Shramay Palta, Rachel Rudinger
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: It is common sense that one should prefer to eat a salad with a fork rather than with a chainsaw. However, for eating a bowl of rice, the choice between a fork and a pair of chopsticks is culturally relative. We introduce FORK, a small, manually-curated set of CommonsenseQA-style questions for probing cultural biases and assumptions present in commonsense reasoning systems, with a specific focus on food-related customs. We test several CommonsenseQA systems on FORK, and while we see high performance on questions about the US culture, the poor performance of these systems on questions about non-US cultures highlights systematic cultural assumptions aligned with US over non-US cultures.
FedPETuning: When Federated Learning Meets the Parameter-Efficient Tuning Methods of Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Zhuo Zhang, Yuanhang Yang, Yong Dai, Qifan Wang, Yue Yu, Lizhen Qu, Zenglin Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: With increasing concerns about data privacy, there is an increasing necessity of fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) for adapting to downstream tasks located in end-user devices or local clients without transmitting data to the central server. This urgent necessity therefore calls the research of investigating federated learning (FL) for PLMs. However, large PLMs bring the curse of prohibitive communication overhead and local model adaptation costs for the FL system. To this end, we investigate the parameter-efficient tuning (PETuning) of PLMs and develop a corresponding federated benchmark for four representative PETuning methods, dubbed FedPETuning. Specifically, FedPETuning provides the first holistic empirical study of representative PLMs tuning methods in FL, covering privacy attacks, performance comparisons, and resource-constrained analysis. Intensive experimental results have indicated that FedPETuning can efficiently defend against privacy attacks and maintains acceptable performance with reducing heavy resource consumption. The open-source code and data are available at r̆lhttps://github.com/SMILELab-FL/FedPETuning.
MixPAVE: Mix-Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Product Attribute Value Extraction
Authors: Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xiaojun Quan, Fuli Feng, Yu Chen, Madian Khabsa, Sinong Wang, Zenglin Xu, Dongfang Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The task of product attribute value extraction is to identify values of an attribute from product information. Product attributes are important features, which help improve online shopping experience of customers, such as product search, recommendation and comparison. Most existing works only focus on extracting values for a set of known attributes with sufficient training data. However, with the emerging nature of e-commerce, new products with their unique set of new attributes are constantly generated from different retailers and merchants. Collecting a large number of annotations for every new attribute is costly and time consuming. Therefore, it is an important research problem for product attribute value extraction with limited data. In this work, we propose a novel prompt tuning approach with \textbfMixed \textbfPrompts for few-shot \textbfAttribute \textbfValue \textbfExtraction, namely MixPAVE. Specifically, MixPAVE introduces only a small amount (\ensuremath< 1%) of trainable parameters, i.e., a mixture of two learnable prompts, while keeping the existing extraction model frozen. In this way, MixPAVE not only benefits from parameter-efficient training, but also avoids model overfitting on limited training examples. Experimental results on two product benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over several state-of-the-art baselines. A comprehensive set of ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the prompt design, as well as the efficiency of our approach.
SlowBERT: Slow-down Attacks on Input-adaptive Multi-exit BERT
Authors: Shengyao Zhang, Xudong Pan, Mi Zhang, Min Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: For pretrained language models such as Google`s BERT, recent research designs several input-adaptive inference mechanisms to improve the efficiency on cloud and edge devices. In this paper, we reveal a new attack surface on input-adaptive multi-exit BERT, where the adversary imperceptibly modifies the input texts to drastically increase the average inference cost. Our proposed slow-down attack called \textitSlowBERT integrates a new rank-and-substitute adversarial text generation algorithm to efficiently search for the perturbation which maximally delays the exiting time. With no direct access to the model internals, we further devise a \textittime-based approximation algorithm to infer the exit position as the loss oracle. Our extensive evaluation on two popular instances of multi-exit BERT for GLUE classification tasks validates the effectiveness of SlowBERT. In the worst case, SlowBERT increases the inference cost by $4.57\times$, which would strongly hurt the service quality of multi-exit BERT in practice, e.g., increasing the real-time cloud services' response times for online users.
Compositional Mathematical Encoding for Math Word Problems
Authors: Zhenwen Liang, Jipeng Zhang, Kehan Guo, Xiaodong Wu, Jie Shao, Xiangliang Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Solving math word problem (MWP) remains a challenging task, as it requires to understand both the semantic meanings of the text and the mathematical logic among quantities, i.e., for both semantics modal and quantity modal learning. Current MWP encoders work in a uni-modal setting and map the given problem description to a latent representation, then for decoding. The generalizability of these MWP encoders is thus limited because some problems are semantics-demanding and others are quantity-demanding. To address this problem, we propose a Compositional Math Word Problem Solver (C-MWP) which works in a bi-modal setting encoding in an interactive way. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of C-MWP and show its superiority over state-of-the-art models on public benchmarks.
PREADD: Prefix-Adaptive Decoding for Controlled Text Generation
Authors: Jonathan Pei, Kevin Yang, Dan Klein
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We propose Prefix-Adaptive Decoding (PREADD), a flexible method for controlled text generation. Unlike existing methods that use auxiliary expert models to control for attributes, PREADD does not require an external model, instead relying on linearly combining output logits from multiple prompts. Specifically, PREADD contrasts the output logits generated using a raw prompt against those generated using a prefix-prepended prompt, enabling both positive and negative control with respect to any attribute encapsulated by the prefix. We evaluate PREADD on three tasks---toxic output mitigation, gender bias reduction, and sentiment control---and find that PREADD outperforms not only prompting baselines, but also an auxiliary-expert control method, by 12% or more in relative gain on our main metrics for each task.
EventOA: An Event Ontology Alignment Benchmark Based on FrameNet and Wikidata
Authors: Shaoru Guo, Chenhao Wang, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Ru Li, Jun Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Event ontology provides a shared and formal specification about what happens in the real world and can benefit many natural language understanding tasks. However, the independent development of event ontologies often results in heterogeneous representations that raise the need for establishing alignments between semantically related events. There exists a series of works about ontology alignment (OA), but they only focus on the entity-based OA, and neglect the event-based OA. To fill the gap, we construct an Event Ontology Alignment (EventOA) dataset based on FrameNet and Wikidata, which consists of 900+ event type alignments and 8,000+ event argument alignments. Furthermore, we propose a multi-view event ontology alignment (MEOA) method, which utilizes description information (i.e., name, alias and definition) and neighbor information (i.e., subclass and superclass) to obtain richer representation of the event ontologies. Extensive experiments show that our MEOA outperforms the existing entity-based OA methods and can serve as a strong baseline for EventOA research.
Enhancing Continual Relation Extraction via Classifier Decomposition
Authors: Heming Xia, Peiyi Wang, Tianyu Liu, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Zhifang Sui
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Continual relation extraction (CRE) models aim at handling emerging new relations while avoiding catastrophically forgetting old ones in the streaming data. Though improvements have been shown by previous CRE studies, most of them only adopt a vanilla strategy when models first learn representations of new relations. In this work, we point out that there exist two typical biases after training of this vanilla strategy: classifier bias and representation bias, which causes the previous knowledge that the model learned to be shaded. To alleviate those biases, we propose a simple yet effective classifier decomposition framework that splits the last FFN layer into separated previous and current classifiers, so as to maintain previous knowledge and encourage the model to learn more robust representations at this training stage. Experimental results on two standard benchmarks show that our proposed framework consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art CRE models, which indicates that the importance of the first training stage to CRE models may be underestimated. Our code will be released upon acceptance.
A Comparative Analysis of the Effectiveness of Rare Tokens on Creative Expression using ramBERT
Authors: Youbin Lee, Deokgi Kim, Byung-Won On, Ingyu Lee
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Until now, few studies have been explored on Automated Creative Essay Scoring (ACES), in which a pre-trained model automatically labels an essay as a creative or a non-creative. Since the creativity evaluation of essays is very subjective, each evaluator often has his or her own criteria for creativity. For this reason, quantifying creativity in essays is very challenging. In this work, as one of preliminary studies in developing a novel model for ACES, we deeply investigate the correlation between creative essays and expressiveness. Specifically, we explore how rare tokens affect the evaluation of creativity for essays. For such a journey, we present five distinct methods to extract rare tokens, and conduct a comparative study on the correlation between rare tokens and creative essay evaluation results using BERT. Our experimental results showed clear correlation between rare tokens and creative essays. In all test sets, accuracies of our rare token masking-based BERT (ramBERT) model were improved over the existing BERT model up to 14%.
MTR: A Dataset Fusing Inductive, Deductive, and Defeasible Reasoning
Authors: Yitian Li, Jidong Tian, Caoyun Fan, Wenqing Chen, Hao He, Yaohui Jin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: A long-standing difficulty in AI is the introduction of human-like reasoning in machine reading comprehension. Since algorithmic models can already perform as well as humans on simple quality assurance tasks thanks to the development of deep learning techniques, more difficult reasoning datasets have been presented. However, these datasets mainly focus on a single type of reasoning. There are still significant gaps in the studies when compared to the complex reasoning used in daily life. In this work, we introduce a brand-new dataset, named MTR. There are two parts to it: the first combines deductive and inductive reasoning, and the second does the same with inductive and defeasible reasoning. It consists of more than 30k QA instances, inferring relations between characters in short stories. Results show that state-of-the-art neural models do noticeably worse than expected. Our empirical results highlight the gap in the models' ability to handle sophisticated inference.
NewsMet : A \textquoteleftdo it all' Dataset of Contemporary Metaphors in News Headlines
Authors: Rohan Joseph, Timothy Liu, Aik Beng Ng, Simon See, Sunny Rai
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Metaphors are highly creative constructs of human language that grow old and eventually die. Popular datasets used for metaphor processing tasks were constructed from dated source texts. In this paper, we propose NewsMet, a large high-quality contemporary dataset of news headlines hand-annotated with metaphorical verbs. The dataset comprises headlines from various sources including political, satirical, reliable and fake. Our dataset serves the purpose of evaluation for the tasks of metaphor interpretation and generation. The experiments reveal several insights and limitations of using LLMs to automate metaphor processing tasks as frequently seen in the recent literature. The dataset is publicly available for research purposes r̆lhttps://github.com/AxleBlaze3/NewsMet_Metaphor_Dataset.
Concept2Box: Joint Geometric Embeddings for Learning Two-View Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Zijie Huang, Daheng Wang, Binxuan Huang, Chenwei Zhang, Jingbo Shang, Yan Liang, Zhengyang Wang, Xian Li, Christos Faloutsos, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Knowledge graph embeddings (KGE) have been extensively studied to embed large-scale relational data for many real-world applications. Existing methods have long ignored the fact many KGs contain two fundamentally different views: high-level ontology-view concepts and fine-grained instance-view entities. They usually embed all nodes as vectors in one latent space. However, a single geometric representation fails to capture the structural differences between two views and lacks probabilistic semantics towards concepts' granularity. We propose Concept2Box, a novel approach that jointly embeds the two views of a KG using dual geometric representations. We model concepts with box embeddings, which learn the hierarchy structure and complex relations such as overlap and disjoint among them. Box volumes can be interpreted as concepts' granularity. Different from concepts, we model entities as vectors. To bridge the gap between concept box embeddings and entity vector embeddings, we propose a novel vector-to-box distance metric and learn both embeddings jointly. Experiments on both the public DBpedia KG and a newly-created industrial KG showed the effectiveness of Concept2Box.
Noise-Robust Training with Dynamic Loss and Contrastive Learning for Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Zhiyuan Ma, Jintao Du, Shuheng Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Distantly-supervised named entity recognition (NER) aims at training networks with distantly-labeled data, which is automatically obtained by matching entity mentions in the raw text with entity types in a knowledge base. Distant supervision may induce incomplete and noisy labels, so recent state-of-the-art methods employ sample selection mechanism to separate clean data from noisy data based on the model`s prediction scores. However, they ignore the noise distribution change caused by data selection, and they simply excludes noisy data during training, resulting in information loss. We propose to (1) use a dynamic loss function to better adapt to the changing noise during the training process, and (2) incorporate token level contrastive learning to fully utilize the noisy data as well as facilitate feature learning without relying on labels. Our method achieves superior performance on three benchmark datasets, outperforming existing distantly supervised NER models by significant margins.
Take a Break in the Middle: Investigating Subgoals towards Hierarchical Script Generation
Authors: Xinze Li, Yixin Cao, Muhao Chen, Aixin Sun
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Goal-oriented Script Generation is a new task of generating a list of steps that can fulfill the given goal. In this paper, we propose to extend the task from the perspective of cognitive theory. Instead of a simple flat structure, the steps are typically organized hierarchically --- Human often decompose a complex task into subgoals, where each subgoal can be further decomposed into steps. To establish the benchmark, we contribute a new dataset, propose several baseline methods, and set up evaluation metrics. Both automatic and human evaluation verify the high-quality of dataset, as well as the effectiveness of incorporating subgoals into hierarchical script generation. Furthermore, We also design and evaluate the model to discover subgoal, and find that it is a bit more difficult to decompose the goals than summarizing from segmented steps.
End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Based on Schema
Authors: Wiradee Imrattanatrai, Ken Fukuda
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper presents a schema-aware end-to-end neural network model for handling task-oriented dialogues based on a dynamic set of slots within a schema. Contrary to existing studies that proposed end-to-end approaches for task-oriented dialogue systems by relying on a unified schema across domains, we design our approach to support a domain covering multiple services where diverse schemas are available. To enable better generalizability among services and domains with different schemas, we supply the schema`s context information including slot descriptions and value constraints to the model. The experimental results on a well-known Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset demonstrated the performance improvement by the proposed model compared to state-of-the-art baselines in terms of end-to-end modeling, dialogue state tracking task, and generalization on new services and domains using a limited number of dialogues.
HaVQA: A Dataset for Visual Question Answering and Multimodal Research in Hausa Language
Authors: Shantipriya Parida, Idris Abdulmumin, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Aneesh Bose, Guneet Singh Kohli, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Ketan Kotwal, Sayan Deb Sarkar, Ondřej Bojar, Habeebah Kakudi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper presents “HaVQA”, the first multimodal dataset for visual question answering (VQA) tasks in the Hausa language. The dataset was created by manually translating 6,022 English question-answer pairs, which are associated with 1,555 unique images from the Visual Genome dataset. As a result, the dataset provides 12,044 gold standard English-Hausa parallel sentences that were translated in a fashion that guarantees their semantic match with the corresponding visual information. We conducted several baseline experiments on the dataset, including visual question answering, visual question elicitation, text-only and multimodal machine translation.
Claim-Dissector: An Interpretable Fact-Checking System with Joint Re-ranking and Veracity Prediction
Authors: Martin Fajcik, Petr Motlicek, Pavel Smrz
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We present Claim-Dissector: a novel latent variable model for fact-checking and analysis, which given a claim and a set of retrieved evidence jointly learns to identify: (i) the relevant evidences to the given claim (ii) the veracity of the claim. We propose to disentangle the per-evidence relevance probability and its contribution to the final veracity probability in an interpretable way --- the final veracity probability is proportional to a linear ensemble of per-evidence relevance probabilities. In this way, the individual contributions of evidences towards the final predicted probability can be identified. In per-evidence relevance probability, our model can further distinguish whether each relevant evidence is supporting (S) or refuting (R) the claim. This allows to quantify how much the S/R probability contributes to final verdict or to detect disagreeing evidence. Despite its interpretable nature, our system achieves results competetive with state-of-the-art on the FEVER dataset, as compared to typical two-stage system pipelines, while using significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore, our analysis shows that our model can learn fine-grained relevance cues while using coarse-grained supervision and we demonstrate it in 2 ways. (i) We show that our model can achieve competitive sentence recall while using only paragraph-level relevance supervision. (ii) Traversing towards the finest granularity of relevance, we show that our model is capable of identifying relevance at the token level. To do this, we present a new benchmark TLR-FEVER focusing on token-level interpretability --- humans annotate tokens in relevant evidences they considered essential when making their judgment. Then we measure how similar are these annotations to the tokens our model is focusing on.
StructSP: Efficient Fine-tuning of Task-Oriented Dialog System by Using Structure-aware Boosting and Grammar Constraints
Authors: Truong Do, Phuong Nguyen, Minh Nguyen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We have investigated methods utilizing hierarchical structure information representation in the semantic parsing task and have devised a method that reinforces the semantic awareness of a pre-trained language model via a two-step fine-tuning mechanism: hierarchical structure information strengthening and a final specific task. The model used is better than existing ones at learning the contextual representations of utterances embedded within its hierarchical semantic structure and thereby improves system performance. In addition, we created a mechanism using inductive grammar to dynamically prune the unpromising directions in the semantic structure parsing process. Finally, through experimentsOur code will be published when this paper is accepted. on the TOP and TOPv2 (low-resource setting) datasets, we achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, confirming the effectiveness of our proposed model.
GDA: Generative Data Augmentation Techniques for Relation Extraction Tasks
Authors: Xuming Hu, Aiwei Liu, Zeqi Tan, Xin Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Irwin King, Philip S. Yu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Relation extraction (RE) tasks show promising performance in extracting relations from two entities mentioned in sentences, given sufficient annotations available during training. Such annotations would be labor-intensive to obtain in practice. Existing work adopts data augmentation techniques to generate pseudo-annotated sentences beyond limited annotations. These techniques neither preserve the semantic consistency of the original sentences when rule-based augmentations are adopted, nor preserve the syntax structure of sentences when expressing relations using seq2seq models, resulting in less diverse augmentations. In this work, we propose a dedicated augmentation technique for relational texts, named GDA, which uses two complementary modules to preserve both semantic consistency and syntax structures. We adopt a generative formulation and design a multi-tasking solution to achieve synergies. Furthermore, GDA adopts entity hints as the prior knowledge of the generative model to augment diverse sentences. Experimental results in three datasets under a low-resource setting showed that GDA could bring \textit2.0% F1 improvements compared with no augmentation technique.
WebDP: Understanding Discourse Structures in Semi-Structured Web Documents
Authors: Peilin Liu, Hongyu Lin, Meng Liao, Hao Xiang, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Web documents have become rich data resources in current era, and understanding their discourse structure will potentially benefit various downstream document processing applications. Unfortunately, current discourse analysis and document intelligence research mostly focus on either discourse structure of plain text or superficial visual structures in document, which cannot accurately describe discourse structure of highly free-styled and semi-structured web documents. To promote discourse studies on web documents, in this paper we introduced a benchmark -- WebDP, orienting a new task named Web Document Discourse Parsing. Specifically, a web document discourse structure representation schema is proposed by extending classical discourse theories and adding special features to well represent discourse characteristics of web documents. Then, a manually annotated web document dataset -- WEBDOCS is developed to facilitate the study of this parsing task. We compared current neural models on WEBDOCS and experimental results show that WebDP is feasible but also challenging for current models.