pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Inverse is Better! Fast and Accurate Prompt for Few-shot Slot Tagging
Authors: Yutai Hou, Cheng Chen, Xianzhen Luo, Bohan Li, Wanxiang Che
Date: 2022-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Prediction, Sentence

Prompting methods recently achieve impressive success in few-shot learning. These methods modify input samples with prompt sentence pieces, and decode label tokens to map samples to corresponding labels. However, such a paradigm is very inefficient for the task of slot tagging. Since slot tagging samples are multiple consecutive words in a sentence, the prompting methods have to enumerate all n-grams token spans to find all the possible slots, which greatly slows down the prediction. To tackle this, we introduce an inverse paradigm for prompting. Different from the classic prompts mapping tokens to labels, we reversely predict slot values given slot types. Such inverse prompting only requires a one-turn prediction for each slot type and greatly speeds up the prediction. Besides, we propose a novel Iterative Prediction Strategy, from which the model learns to refine predictions by considering the relations between different slot types. We find, somewhat surprisingly, the proposed method not only predicts faster but also significantly improves the effect (improve over 6.1 F1-scores on 10-shot setting) and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.
BERT-Assisted Semantic Annotation Correction for Emotion-Related Questions
Authors: Abe Kazemzadeh
Date: 2022-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Annotated data have traditionally been used to provide the input for training a supervised machine learning (ML) model. However, current pre-trained ML models for natural language processing (NLP) contain embedded linguistic information that can be used to inform the annotation process. We use the BERT neural language model to feed information back into an annotation task that involves semantic labelling of dialog behavior in a question-asking game called Emotion Twenty Questions (EMO20Q). First we describe the background of BERT, the EMO20Q data, and assisted annotation tasks. Then we describe the methods for fine-tuning BERT for the purpose of checking the annotated labels. To do this, we use the paraphrase task as a way to check that all utterances with the same annotation label are classified as paraphrases of each other. We show this method to be an effective way to assess and revise annotations of textual user data with complex, utterance-level semantic labels.
Deep Speech Based End-to-End Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) for Indian-English Accents
Authors: Priyank Dubey, Bilal Shah
Date: 2022-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Transfer Learning

Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) is an interdisciplinary application of computer science and linguistics that enable us to derive the transcription from the uttered speech waveform. It finds several applications in Military like High-performance fighter aircraft, helicopters, air-traffic controller. Other than military speech recognition is used in healthcare, persons with disabilities and many more. ASR has been an active research area. Several models and algorithms for speech to text (STT) have been proposed. One of the most recent is Mozilla Deep Speech, it is based on the Deep Speech research paper by Baidu. Deep Speech is a state-of-art speech recognition system is developed using end-to-end deep learning, it is trained using well-optimized Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) training system utilizing multiple Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). This training is mostly done using American-English accent datasets, which results in poor generalizability to other English accents. India is a land of vast diversity. This can even be seen in the speech, there are several English accents which vary from state to state. In this work, we have used transfer learning approach using most recent Deep Speech model i.e., deepspeech-0.9.3 to develop an end-to-end speech recognition system for Indian-English accents. This work utilizes fine-tuning and data argumentation to further optimize and improve the Deep Speech ASR system. Indic TTS data of Indian-English accents is used for transfer learning and fine-tuning the pre-trained Deep Speech model. A general comparison is made among the untrained model, our trained model and other available speech recognition services for Indian-English Accents.
Learning Disentangled Semantic Representations for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in Multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Linjuan Wu, Shaojuan Wu, Xiaowang Zhang, Deyi Xiong, Shizhan Chen, Zhiqiang Zhuang, Zhiyong Feng
Date: 2022-04-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Disentanglement, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension, Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

Multilingual pre-trained models are able to zero-shot transfer knowledge from rich-resource to low-resource languages in machine reading comprehension (MRC). However, inherent linguistic discrepancies in different languages could make answer spans predicted by zero-shot transfer violate syntactic constraints of the target language. In this paper, we propose a novel multilingual MRC framework equipped with a Siamese Semantic Disentanglement Model (SSDM) to disassociate semantics from syntax in representations learned by multilingual pre-trained models. To explicitly transfer only semantic knowledge to the target language, we propose two groups of losses tailored for semantic and syntactic encoding and disentanglement. Experimental results on three multilingual MRC datasets (i.e., XQuAD, MLQA, and TyDi QA) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach over models based on mBERT and XLM-100. Code is available at:https://github.com/wulinjuan/SSDM_MRC.
Task2Dial: A Novel Task and Dataset for Commonsense enhanced Task-based Dialogue Grounded in Documents
Authors: Carl Strathearn, Dimitra Gkatzia
Date: 2022-04-03 00:00:00

This paper proposes a novel task on commonsense-enhanced task-based dialogue grounded in documents and describes the Task2Dial dataset, a novel dataset of document-grounded task-based dialogues, where an Information Giver (IG) provides instructions (by consulting a document) to an Information Follower (IF), so that the latter can successfully complete the task. In this unique setting, the IF can ask clarification questions which may not be grounded in the underlying document and require commonsense knowledge to be answered. The Task2Dial dataset poses new challenges: (1) its human reference texts show more lexical richness and variation than other document-grounded dialogue datasets; (2) generating from this set requires paraphrasing as instructional responses might have been modified from the underlying document; (3) requires commonsense knowledge, since questions might not necessarily be grounded in the document; (4) generating requires planning based on context, as task steps need to be provided in order. The Task2Dial dataset contains dialogues with an average $18.15$ number of turns and 19.79 tokens per turn, as compared to 12.94 and 12 respectively in existing datasets. As such, learning from this dataset promises more natural, varied and less template-like system utterances.
A sequence-to-sequence approach for document-level relation extraction
Authors: John Giorgi, Gary D. Bader, Bo wang
Date: 2022-04-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: BioNLP (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Document-level Relation Extraction, Joint Entity and Relation Extraction, Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence

Motivated by the fact that many relations cross the sentence boundary, there has been increasing interest in document-level relation extraction (DocRE). DocRE requires integrating information within and across sentences, capturing complex interactions between mentions of entities. Most existing methods are pipeline-based, requiring entities as input. However, jointly learning to extract entities and relations can improve performance and be more efficient due to shared parameters and training steps. In this paper, we develop a sequence-to-sequence approach, seq2rel, that can learn the subtasks of DocRE (entity extraction, coreference resolution and relation extraction) end-to-end, replacing a pipeline of task-specific components. Using a simple strategy we call entity hinting, we compare our approach to existing pipeline-based methods on several popular biomedical datasets, in some cases exceeding their performance. We also report the first end-to-end results on these datasets for future comparison. Finally, we demonstrate that, under our model, an end-to-end approach outperforms a pipeline-based approach. Our code, data and trained models are available at {\url{https://github.com/johngiorgi/seq2rel}}. An online demo is available at {\url{https://share.streamlit.io/johngiorgi/seq2rel/main/demo.py}}.
Pragmatic constraints and pronoun reference disambiguation: the possible and the impossible
Authors: Ernest Davis
Date: 2022-04-03 00:00:00

Pronoun disambiguation in understanding text and discourse often requires the application of both general pragmatic knowledge and context-specific information. In AI and linguistics research, this has mostly been studied in cases where the referent is explicitly stated in the preceding text nearby. However, pronouns in natural text often refer to entities, collections, or events that are only implicitly mentioned previously; in those cases the need to use pragmatic knowledge to disambiguate becomes much more acute and the characterization of the knowledge becomes much more difficult. Extended literary texts at times employ both extremely complex patterns of reference and extremely rich and subtle forms of knowledge. Indeed, it is occasionally possible to have a pronoun that is far separated from its referent in a text. In the opposite direction, pronoun use is affected by considerations of focus of attention and by formal constraints such as a preference for parallel syntactic structures; these can be so strong that no pragmatic knowledge suffices to overrule them.
PERFECT: Prompt-free and Efficient Few-shot Learning with Language Models
Authors: Rabeeh Karimi Mahabadi, Luke Zettlemoyer, James Henderson, Marzieh Saeidi, Lambert Mathias, Veselin Stoyanov, Majid Yazdani
Date: 2022-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Current methods for few-shot fine-tuning of pretrained masked language models (PLMs) require carefully engineered prompts and verbalizers for each new task to convert examples into a cloze-format that the PLM can score. In this work, we propose PERFECT, a simple and efficient method for few-shot fine-tuning of PLMs without relying on any such handcrafting, which is highly effective given as few as 32 data points. PERFECT makes two key design choices: First, we show that manually engineered task prompts can be replaced with task-specific adapters that enable sample-efficient fine-tuning and reduce memory and storage costs by roughly factors of 5 and 100, respectively. Second, instead of using handcrafted verbalizers, we learn new multi-token label embeddings during fine-tuning, which are not tied to the model vocabulary and which allow us to avoid complex auto-regressive decoding. These embeddings are not only learnable from limited data but also enable nearly 100x faster training and inference. Experiments on a wide range of few-shot NLP tasks demonstrate that PERFECT, while being simple and efficient, also outperforms existing state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/perfect.git.
A Part-of-Speech Tagger for Yiddish
Authors: Seth Kulick, Neville Ryant, Beatrice Santorini, Joel Wallenberg, Assaf Urieli
Date: 2022-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

We describe the construction and evaluation of a part-of-speech tagger for Yiddish. This is the first step in a larger project of automatically assigning part-of-speech tags and syntactic structure to Yiddish text for purposes of linguistic research. We combine two resources for the current work - an 80K-word subset of the Penn Parsed Corpus of Historical Yiddish (PPCHY) and 650 million words of OCR'd Yiddish text from the Yiddish Book Center (YBC). Yiddish orthography in the YBC corpus has many spelling inconsistencies, and we present some evidence that even simple non-contextualized embeddings trained on YBC are able to capture the relationships among spelling variants without the need to first "standardize" the corpus. We also use YBC for continued pretraining of contexualized embeddings, which are then integrated into a tagger model trained and evaluated on the PPCHY. We evaluate the tagger performance on a 10-fold cross-validation split, showing that the use of the YBC text for the contextualized embeddings improves tagger performance. We conclude by discussing some next steps, including the need for additional annotated training and test data.
Diverse Text Generation via Variational Encoder-Decoder Models with Gaussian Process Priors
Authors: Wanyu Du, Jianqiao Zhao, LiWei Wang, Yangfeng Ji
Date: 2022-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Diversity, Gaussian Processes, Paraphrase Generation, Representation Learning, Style Transfer, Text Generation, Text Style Transfer, Variational Inference

Generating high quality texts with high diversity is important for many NLG applications, but current methods mostly focus on building deterministic models to generate higher quality texts and do not provide many options for promoting diversity. In this work, we present a novel latent structured variable model to generate high quality texts by enriching contextual representation learning of encoder-decoder models. Specifically, we introduce a stochastic function to map deterministic encoder hidden states into random context variables. The proposed stochastic function is sampled from a Gaussian process prior to (1) provide infinite number of joint Gaussian distributions of random context variables (diversity-promoting) and (2) explicitly model dependency between context variables (accurate-encoding). To address the learning challenge of Gaussian processes, we propose an efficient variational inference approach to approximate the posterior distribution of random context variables. We evaluate our method in two typical text generation tasks: paraphrase generation and text style transfer. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method improves the generation quality and diversity compared with other baselines.
A Study of Gender Impact in Self-supervised Models for Speech-to-Text Systems
Authors: Marcely Zanon Boito, Laurent Besacier, Natalia Tomashenko, Yannick Estève
Date: 2022-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Fairness, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text

Self-supervised models for speech processing emerged recently as popular foundation blocks in speech processing pipelines. These models are pre-trained on unlabeled audio data and then used in speech processing downstream tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) or speech translation (ST). Since these models are now used in research and industrial systems alike, it becomes necessary to understand the impact caused by some features such as gender distribution within pre-training data. Using French as our investigation language, we train and compare gender-specific wav2vec 2.0 models against models containing different degrees of gender balance in their pre-training data. The comparison is performed by applying these models to two speech-to-text downstream tasks: ASR and ST. Results show the type of downstream integration matters. We observe lower overall performance using gender-specific pre-training before fine-tuning an end-to-end ASR system. However, when self-supervised models are used as feature extractors, the overall ASR and ST results follow more complex patterns in which the balanced pre-trained model does not necessarily lead to the best results. Lastly, our crude 'fairness' metric, the relative performance difference measured between female and male test sets, does not display a strong variation from balanced to gender-specific pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 models.
Using Pre-Trained Language Models for Producing Counter Narratives Against Hate Speech: a Comparative Study
Authors: Serra Sinem Tekiroglu, Helena Bonaldi, Margherita Fanton, Marco Guerini
Date: 2022-04-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Automatic Post-Editing, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

In this work, we present an extensive study on the use of pre-trained language models for the task of automatic Counter Narrative (CN) generation to fight online hate speech in English. We first present a comparative study to determine whether there is a particular Language Model (or class of LMs) and a particular decoding mechanism that are the most appropriate to generate CNs. Findings show that autoregressive models combined with stochastic decodings are the most promising. We then investigate how an LM performs in generating a CN with regard to an unseen target of hate. We find out that a key element for successful `out of target' experiments is not an overall similarity with the training data but the presence of a specific subset of training data, i.e. a target that shares some commonalities with the test target that can be defined a-priori. We finally introduce the idea of a pipeline based on the addition of an automatic post-editing step to refine generated CNs.
Estimating the Entropy of Linguistic Distributions
Authors: Aryaman Arora, Clara Meister, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2022-04-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5

Shannon entropy is often a quantity of interest to linguists studying the communicative capacity of human language. However, entropy must typically be estimated from observed data because researchers do not have access to the underlying probability distribution that gives rise to these data. While entropy estimation is a well-studied problem in other fields, there is not yet a comprehensive exploration of the efficacy of entropy estimators for use with linguistic data. In this work, we fill this void, studying the empirical effectiveness of different entropy estimators for linguistic distributions. In a replication of two recent information-theoretic linguistic studies, we find evidence that the reported effect size is over-estimated due to over-reliance on poor entropy estimators. Finally, we end our paper with concrete recommendations for entropy estimation depending on distribution type and data availability.
LPAttack: A Feasible Annotation Scheme for Capturing Logic Pattern of Attacks in Arguments
Authors: Farjana Sultana Mim, Naoya Inoue, Shoichi Naito, Keshav Singh, Kentaro Inui
Date: 2022-04-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

In argumentative discourse, persuasion is often achieved by refuting or attacking others arguments. Attacking is not always straightforward and often comprise complex rhetorical moves such that arguers might agree with a logic of an argument while attacking another logic. Moreover, arguer might neither deny nor agree with any logics of an argument, instead ignore them and attack the main stance of the argument by providing new logics and presupposing that the new logics have more value or importance than the logics present in the attacked argument. However, no existing studies in the computational argumentation capture such complex rhetorical moves in attacks or the presuppositions or value judgements in them. In order to address this gap, we introduce LPAttack, a novel annotation scheme that captures the common modes and complex rhetorical moves in attacks along with the implicit presuppositions and value judgements in them. Our annotation study shows moderate inter-annotator agreement, indicating that human annotation for the proposed scheme is feasible. We publicly release our annotated corpus and the annotation guidelines.
MetaAID: A Flexible Framework for Developing Metaverse Applications via AI Technology and Human Editing
Authors: Hongyin Zhu
Date: 2022-04-04 00:00:00

Achieving the expansion of domestic demand and the economic internal circulation requires balanced and coordinated support from multiple industries (domains) such as consumption, education, entertainment, engineering infrastructure, etc., which is indispensable for maintaining economic development. Metaverse applications may help with this task and can make many industries more interesting, more efficient, and provide a better user experience. The first challenge is that metaverse application development inevitably requires the support of various artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), knowledge graph (KG), computer vision (CV), and machine learning (ML), etc. However, existing metaverse application development lacks a lightweight AI technology framework. This paper proposes a flexible metaverse AI technology framework metaAID that aims to support language and semantic technologies in the development of digital twins and virtual humans. The second challenge is that the development process of metaverse applications involves both technical development tasks and manual editing work, and often becomes a heavyweight multi-team collaboration project, not to mention the development of metaverse applications in multiple industries. Our framework summarizes common AI technologies and application development templates with common functional modules and interfaces. Based on this framework, we have designed 5 applications for 3 industries around the expansion of domestic demand and economic internal circulation. Experimental results show that our framework can support AI technologies when developing metaverse applications in different industries.
Cross-lingual Self-Supervised Speech Representations for Improved Dysarthric Speech Recognition
Authors: Abner Hernandez, Paula Andrea Pérez-Toro, Elmar Nöth, Juan Rafael Orozco-Arroyave, Andreas Maier, Seung Hee Yang
Date: 2022-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems perform well on healthy speech. However, the performance on impaired speech still remains an issue. The current study explores the usefulness of using Wav2Vec self-supervised speech representations as features for training an ASR system for dysarthric speech. Dysarthric speech recognition is particularly difficult as several aspects of speech such as articulation, prosody and phonation can be impaired. Specifically, we train an acoustic model with features extracted from Wav2Vec, Hubert, and the cross-lingual XLSR model. Results suggest that speech representations pretrained on large unlabelled data can improve word error rate (WER) performance. In particular, features from the multilingual model led to lower WERs than filterbanks (Fbank) or models trained on a single language. Improvements were observed in English speakers with cerebral palsy caused dysarthria (UASpeech corpus), Spanish speakers with Parkinsonian dysarthria (PC-GITA corpus) and Italian speakers with paralysis-based dysarthria (EasyCall corpus). Compared to using Fbank features, XLSR-based features reduced WERs by 6.8%, 22.0%, and 7.0% for the UASpeech, PC-GITA, and EasyCall corpus, respectively.