pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Asynchronous Decentralized Distributed Training of Acoustic Models
Authors: Xiaodong Cui, Wei zhang, Abdullah Kayi, Mingrui Liu, Ulrich Finkler, Brian Kingsbury, George Saon, David Kung
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Large-scale distributed training of deep acoustic models plays an important role in today's high-performance automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper we investigate a variety of asynchronous decentralized distributed training strategies based on data parallel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to show their superior performance over the commonly-used synchronous distributed training via allreduce, especially when dealing with large batch sizes. Specifically, we study three variants of asynchronous decentralized parallel SGD (ADPSGD), namely, fixed and randomized communication patterns on a ring as well as a delay-by-one scheme. We introduce a mathematical model of ADPSGD, give its theoretical convergence rate, and compare the empirical convergence behavior and straggler resilience properties of the three variants. Experiments are carried out on an IBM supercomputer for training deep long short-term memory (LSTM) acoustic models on the 2000-hour Switchboard dataset. Recognition and speedup performance of the proposed strategies are evaluated under various training configurations. We show that ADPSGD with fixed and randomized communication patterns cope well with slow learners. When learners are equally fast, ADPSGD with the delay-by-one strategy has the fastest convergence with large batches. In particular, using the delay-by-one strategy, we can train the acoustic model in less than 2 hours using 128 V100 GPUs with competitive word error rates.
Modeling Performance in Open-Domain Dialogue with PARADISE
Authors: Marilyn Walker, Colin Harmon, James Graupera, Davan Harrison, Steve Whittaker
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Spoken Dialogue Systems

There has recently been an explosion of work on spoken dialogue systems, along with an increased interest in open-domain systems that engage in casual conversations on popular topics such as movies, books and music. These systems aim to socially engage, entertain, and even empathize with their users. Since the achievement of such social goals is hard to measure, recent research has used dialogue length or human ratings as evaluation metrics, and developed methods for automatically calculating novel metrics, such as coherence, consistency, relevance and engagement. Here we develop a PARADISE model for predicting the performance of Athena, a dialogue system that has participated in thousands of conversations with real users, while competing as a finalist in the Alexa Prize. We use both user ratings and dialogue length as metrics for dialogue quality, and experiment with predicting these metrics using automatic features that are both system dependent and independent. Our goal is to learn a general objective function that can be used to optimize the dialogue choices of any Alexa Prize system in real time and evaluate its performance. Our best model for predicting user ratings gets an R$^2$ of .136 with a DistilBert model, and the best model for predicting length with system independent features gets an R$^2$ of .865, suggesting that conversation length may be a more reliable measure for automatic training of dialogue systems.
Improving Non-autoregressive Generation with Mixup Training
Authors: Ting Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Furu Wei, Haizhen Huang, Liangjie Zhang, Qi Zhang
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Paraphrase Generation, Question Generation, Question-Generation

While pre-trained language models have achieved great success on various natural language understanding tasks, how to effectively leverage them into non-autoregressive generation tasks remains a challenge. To solve this problem, we present a non-autoregressive generation model based on pre-trained transformer models. To bridge the gap between autoregressive and non-autoregressive models, we propose a simple and effective iterative training method called MIx Source and pseudo Target (MIST). Unlike other iterative decoding methods, which sacrifice the inference speed to achieve better performance based on multiple decoding iterations, MIST works in the training stage and has no effect on inference time. Our experiments on three generation benchmarks including question generation, summarization and paraphrase generation, show that the proposed framework achieves the new state-of-the-art results for fully non-autoregressive models. We also demonstrate that our method can be used to a variety of pre-trained models. For instance, MIST based on the small pre-trained model also obtains comparable performance with seq2seq models.
Neuro-Symbolic Reinforcement Learning with First-Order Logic
Authors: Daiki Kimura, Masaki Ono, Subhajit Chaudhury, Ryosuke Kohita, Akifumi Wachi, Don Joven Agravante, Michiaki Tatsubori, Asim Munawar, Alexander Gray
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), text-based games

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods often require many trials before convergence, and no direct interpretability of trained policies is provided. In order to achieve fast convergence and interpretability for the policy in RL, we propose a novel RL method for text-based games with a recent neuro-symbolic framework called Logical Neural Network, which can learn symbolic and interpretable rules in their differentiable network. The method is first to extract first-order logical facts from text observation and external word meaning network (ConceptNet), then train a policy in the network with directly interpretable logical operators. Our experimental results show RL training with the proposed method converges significantly faster than other state-of-the-art neuro-symbolic methods in a TextWorld benchmark.
CNewSum: A Large-scale Chinese News Summarization Dataset with Human-annotated Adequacy and Deducibility Level
Authors: Danqing Wang, Jiaze Chen, Xianze Wu, Hao Zhou, Lei LI
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: News Summarization, Text Summarization

Automatic text summarization aims to produce a brief but crucial summary for the input documents. Both extractive and abstractive methods have witnessed great success in English datasets in recent years. However, there has been a minimal exploration of text summarization in Chinese, limited by the lack of large-scale datasets. In this paper, we present a large-scale Chinese news summarization dataset CNewSum, which consists of 304,307 documents and human-written summaries for the news feed. It has long documents with high-abstractive summaries, which can encourage document-level understanding and generation for current summarization models. An additional distinguishing feature of CNewSum is that its test set contains adequacy and deducibility annotations for the summaries. The adequacy level measures the degree of summary information covered by the document, and the deducibility indicates the reasoning ability the model needs to generate the summary. These annotations can help researchers analyze and target their model performance bottleneck. We examine recent methods on CNewSum and release our dataset to provide a solid testbed for automatic Chinese summarization research.
Principled Representation Learning for Entity Alignment
Authors: Lingbing Guo, Zequn Sun, Mingyang Chen, Wei Hu, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Alignment, Entity Embeddings, Representation Learning

Embedding-based entity alignment (EEA) has recently received great attention. Despite significant performance improvement, few efforts have been paid to facilitate understanding of EEA methods. Most existing studies rest on the assumption that a small number of pre-aligned entities can serve as anchors connecting the embedding spaces of two KGs. Nevertheless, no one investigates the rationality of such an assumption. To fill the research gap, we define a typical paradigm abstracted from existing EEA methods and analyze how the embedding discrepancy between two potentially aligned entities is implicitly bounded by a predefined margin in the scoring function. Further, we find that such a bound cannot guarantee to be tight enough for alignment learning. We mitigate this problem by proposing a new approach, named NeoEA, to explicitly learn KG-invariant and principled entity embeddings. In this sense, an EEA model not only pursues the closeness of aligned entities based on geometric distance, but also aligns the neural ontologies of two KGs by eliminating the discrepancy in embedding distribution and underlying ontology knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate consistent and significant improvement in performance against the best-performing EEA methods.
An Open Natural Language Processing Development Framework for EHR-based Clinical Research: A case demonstration using the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)
Authors: Sijia Liu, Andrew Wen, LiWei Wang, Huan He, Sunyang Fu, Robert Miller, Andrew Williams, Daniel Harris, Ramakanth Kavuluru, Mei Liu, Noor Abu-el-rub, Dalton Schutte, Rui Zhang, Masoud Rouhizadeh, John D. Osborne, Yongqun He, Umit Topaloglu, Stephanie S Hong, Joel H Saltz, Thomas Schaffter, Emily Pfaff, Christopher G. Chute, Tim Duong, Melissa A. Haendel, Rafael Fuentes, Peter Szolovits, Hua Xu, Hongfang Liu, Natural Language Processing, Subgroup, National COVID Cohort Collaborative
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

While we pay attention to the latest advances in clinical natural language processing (NLP), we can notice some resistance in the clinical and translational research community to adopt NLP models due to limited transparency, interpretability, and usability. In this study, we proposed an open natural language processing development framework. We evaluated it through the implementation of NLP algorithms for the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). Based on the interests in information extraction from COVID-19 related clinical notes, our work includes 1) an open data annotation process using COVID-19 signs and symptoms as the use case, 2) a community-driven ruleset composing platform, and 3) a synthetic text data generation workflow to generate texts for information extraction tasks without involving human subjects. The corpora were derived from texts from three different institutions (Mayo Clinic, University of Kentucky, University of Minnesota). The gold standard annotations were tested with a single institution's (Mayo) ruleset. This resulted in performances of 0.876, 0.706, and 0.694 in F-scores for Mayo, Minnesota, and Kentucky test datasets, respectively. The study as a consortium effort of the N3C NLP subgroup demonstrates the feasibility of creating a federated NLP algorithm development and benchmarking platform to enhance multi-institution clinical NLP study and adoption. Although we use COVID-19 as a use case in this effort, our framework is general enough to be applied to other domains of interest in clinical NLP.
Contrastive Document Representation Learning with Graph Attention Networks
Authors: Peng Xu, Xinchi Chen, Xiaofei Ma, Zhiheng Huang, Bing Xiang
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Document Classification, Graph Attention, Representation Learning, Retrieval

Recent progress in pretrained Transformer-based language models has shown great success in learning contextual representation of text. However, due to the quadratic self-attention complexity, most of the pretrained Transformers models can only handle relatively short text. It is still a challenge when it comes to modeling very long documents. In this work, we propose to use a graph attention network on top of the available pretrained Transformers model to learn document embeddings. This graph attention network allows us to leverage the high-level semantic structure of the document. In addition, based on our graph document model, we design a simple contrastive learning strategy to pretrain our models on a large amount of unlabeled corpus. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches in document classification and document retrieval tasks.
SciXGen: A Scientific Paper Dataset for Context-Aware Text Generation
Authors: Hong Chen, Hiroya Takamura, Hideki Nakayama
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Text Generation

Generating texts in scientific papers requires not only capturing the content contained within the given input but also frequently acquiring the external information called \textit{context}. We push forward the scientific text generation by proposing a new task, namely \textbf{context-aware text generation} in the scientific domain, aiming at exploiting the contributions of context in generated texts. To this end, we present a novel challenging large-scale \textbf{Sci}entific Paper Dataset for Conte\textbf{X}t-Aware Text \textbf{Gen}eration (SciXGen), consisting of well-annotated 205,304 papers with full references to widely-used objects (e.g., tables, figures, algorithms) in a paper. We comprehensively benchmark, using state-of-the-arts, the efficacy of our newly constructed SciXGen dataset in generating description and paragraph. Our dataset and benchmarks will be made publicly available to hopefully facilitate the scientific text generation research.
Better than Average: Paired Evaluation of NLP Systems
Authors: Maxime Peyrard, Wei Zhao, Steffen Eger, Robert West
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5

Evaluation in NLP is usually done by comparing the scores of competing systems independently averaged over a common set of test instances. In this work, we question the use of averages for aggregating evaluation scores into a final number used to decide which system is best, since the average, as well as alternatives such as the median, ignores the pairing arising from the fact that systems are evaluated on the same test instances. We illustrate the importance of taking the instance-level pairing of evaluation scores into account and demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, the advantages of aggregation methods based on pairwise comparisons, such as the Bradley-Terry (BT) model, a mechanism based on the estimated probability that a given system scores better than another on the test set. By re-evaluating 296 real NLP evaluation setups across four tasks and 18 evaluation metrics, we show that the choice of aggregation mechanism matters and yields different conclusions as to which systems are state of the art in about 30% of the setups. To facilitate the adoption of pairwise evaluation, we release a practical tool for performing the full analysis of evaluation scores with the mean, median, BT, and two variants of BT (Elo and TrueSkill), alongside functionality for appropriate statistical testing.
A Self-Explainable Stylish Image Captioning Framework via Multi-References
Authors: Chengxi Li, Brent Harrison
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning

In this paper, we propose to build a stylish image captioning model through a Multi-style Multi modality mechanism (2M). We demonstrate that with 2M, we can build an effective stylish captioner and that multi-references produced by the model can also support explaining the model through identifying erroneous input features on faulty examples. We show how this 2M mechanism can be used to build stylish captioning models and show how these models can be utilized to provide explanations of likely errors in the models.
Evaluating the Evaluation Metrics for Style Transfer: A Case Study in Multilingual Formality Transfer
Authors: Eleftheria Briakou, Sweta Agrawal, Joel Tetreault, Marine Carpuat
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Formality Style Transfer, Style Transfer

While the field of style transfer (ST) has been growing rapidly, it has been hampered by a lack of standardized practices for automatic evaluation. In this paper, we evaluate leading ST automatic metrics on the oft-researched task of formality style transfer. Unlike previous evaluations, which focus solely on English, we expand our focus to Brazilian-Portuguese, French, and Italian, making this work the first multilingual evaluation of metrics in ST. We outline best practices for automatic evaluation in (formality) style transfer and identify several models that correlate well with human judgments and are robust across languages. We hope that this work will help accelerate development in ST, where human evaluation is often challenging to collect.
Overview of the 2021 Key Point Analysis Shared Task
Authors: Roni Friedman, Lena Dankin, Yufang Hou, Ranit Aharonov, Yoav Katz, Noam Slonim
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (ArgMining) 2021 11
Tasks: Argument Mining, Text Summarization

We describe the 2021 Key Point Analysis (KPA-2021) shared task on key point analysis that we organized as a part of the 8th Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining 2021) at EMNLP 2021. We outline various approaches and discuss the results of the shared task. We expect the task and the findings reported in this paper to be relevant for researchers working on text summarization and argument mining.
SocialVisTUM: An Interactive Visualization Toolkit for Correlated Neural Topic Models on Social Media Opinion Mining
Authors: Gerhard Johann Hagerer, Martin Kirchhoff, Hannah Danner, Robert Pesch, Mainak Ghosh, Archishman Roy, Jiaxi Zhao, Georg Groh
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: RANLP 2021 9
Tasks: Opinion Mining, Topic Models

Recent research in opinion mining proposed word embedding-based topic modeling methods that provide superior coherence compared to traditional topic modeling. In this paper, we demonstrate how these methods can be used to display correlated topic models on social media texts using SocialVisTUM, our proposed interactive visualization toolkit. It displays a graph with topics as nodes and their correlations as edges. Further details are displayed interactively to support the exploration of large text collections, e.g., representative words and sentences of topics, topic and sentiment distributions, hierarchical topic clustering, and customizable, predefined topic labels. The toolkit optimizes automatically on custom data for optimal coherence. We show a working instance of the toolkit on data crawled from English social media discussions about organic food consumption. The visualization confirms findings of a qualitative consumer research study. SocialVisTUM and its training procedures are accessible online.
Continual Learning in Multilingual NMT via Language-Specific Embeddings
Authors: Alexandre Berard
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: WMT (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Continual Learning, NMT

This paper proposes a technique for adding a new source or target language to an existing multilingual NMT model without re-training it on the initial set of languages. It consists in replacing the shared vocabulary with a small language-specific vocabulary and fine-tuning the new embeddings on the new language's parallel data. Some additional language-specific components may be trained to improve performance (e.g., Transformer layers or adapter modules). Because the parameters of the original model are not modified, its performance on the initial languages does not degrade. We show on two sets of experiments (small-scale on TED Talks, and large-scale on ParaCrawl) that this approach performs as well or better as the more costly alternatives; and that it has excellent zero-shot performance: training on English-centric data is enough to translate between the new language and any of the initial languages.
Multilingual Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Denoising Adapters
Authors: Ahmet Üstün, Alexandre Bérard, Laurent Besacier, Matthias Gallé
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Denoising, Machine Translation, Translation, Unsupervised Machine Translation

We consider the problem of multilingual unsupervised machine translation, translating to and from languages that only have monolingual data by using auxiliary parallel language pairs. For this problem the standard procedure so far to leverage the monolingual data is back-translation, which is computationally costly and hard to tune. In this paper we propose instead to use denoising adapters, adapter layers with a denoising objective, on top of pre-trained mBART-50. In addition to the modularity and flexibility of such an approach we show that the resulting translations are on-par with back-translating as measured by BLEU, and furthermore it allows adding unseen languages incrementally.
Interpreting Deep Learning Models in Natural Language Processing: A Review
Authors: Xiaofei Sun, Diyi Yang, Xiaoya Li, Tianwei Zhang, Yuxian Meng, Han Qiu, Guoyin Wang, Eduard Hovy, Jiwei Li
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Neural network models have achieved state-of-the-art performances in a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, a long-standing criticism against neural network models is the lack of interpretability, which not only reduces the reliability of neural NLP systems but also limits the scope of their applications in areas where interpretability is essential (e.g., health care applications). In response, the increasing interest in interpreting neural NLP models has spurred a diverse array of interpretation methods over recent years. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of various interpretation methods for neural models in NLP. We first stretch out a high-level taxonomy for interpretation methods in NLP, i.e., training-based approaches, test-based approaches, and hybrid approaches. Next, we describe sub-categories in each category in detail, e.g., influence-function based methods, KNN-based methods, attention-based models, saliency-based methods, perturbation-based methods, etc. We point out deficiencies of current methods and suggest some avenues for future research.
Knowledge Graph informed Fake News Classification via Heterogeneous Representation Ensembles
Authors: Boshko Koloski, Timen Stepišnik-Perdih, Marko Robnik-Šikonja, Senja Pollak, Blaž Škrlj
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Fake News Detection, Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, News Classification, Representation Learning

Increasing amounts of freely available data both in textual and relational form offers exploration of richer document representations, potentially improving the model performance and robustness. An emerging problem in the modern era is fake news detection -- many easily available pieces of information are not necessarily factually correct, and can lead to wrong conclusions or are used for manipulation. In this work we explore how different document representations, ranging from simple symbolic bag-of-words, to contextual, neural language model-based ones can be used for efficient fake news identification. One of the key contributions is a set of novel document representation learning methods based solely on knowledge graphs, i.e. extensive collections of (grounded) subject-predicate-object triplets. We demonstrate that knowledge graph-based representations already achieve competitive performance to conventionally accepted representation learners. Furthermore, when combined with existing, contextual representations, knowledge graph-based document representations can achieve state-of-the-art performance. To our knowledge this is the first larger-scale evaluation of how knowledge graph-based representations can be systematically incorporated into the process of fake news classification.