pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Gender and Racial Stereotype Detection in Legal Opinion Word Embeddings
Authors: Sean Matthews, John Hudzina, Dawn Sepehr
Date: 2022-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Word Embeddings

Studies have shown that some Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems encode and replicate harmful biases with potential adverse ethical effects in our society. In this article, we propose an approach for identifying gender and racial stereotypes in word embeddings trained on judicial opinions from U.S. case law. Embeddings containing stereotype information may cause harm when used by downstream systems for classification, information extraction, question answering, or other machine learning systems used to build legal research tools. We first explain how previously proposed methods for identifying these biases are not well suited for use with word embeddings trained on legal opinion text. We then propose a domain adapted method for identifying gender and racial biases in the legal domain. Our analyses using these methods suggest that racial and gender biases are encoded into word embeddings trained on legal opinions. These biases are not mitigated by exclusion of historical data, and appear across multiple large topical areas of the law. Implications for downstream systems that use legal opinion word embeddings and suggestions for potential mitigation strategies based on our observations are also discussed.
GPT-D: Inducing Dementia-related Linguistic Anomalies by Deliberate Degradation of Artificial Neural Language Models
Authors: Changye Li, David Knopman, Weizhe Xu, Trevor Cohen, Serguei Pakhomov
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5

Deep learning (DL) techniques involving fine-tuning large numbers of model parameters have delivered impressive performance on the task of discriminating between language produced by cognitively healthy individuals, and those with Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, questions remain about their ability to generalize beyond the small reference sets that are publicly available for research. As an alternative to fitting model parameters directly, we propose a novel method by which a Transformer DL model (GPT-2) pre-trained on general English text is paired with an artificially degraded version of itself (GPT-D), to compute the ratio between these two models' \textit{perplexities} on language from cognitively healthy and impaired individuals. This technique approaches state-of-the-art performance on text data from a widely used "Cookie Theft" picture description task, and unlike established alternatives also generalizes well to spontaneous conversations. Furthermore, GPT-D generates text with characteristics known to be associated with AD, demonstrating the induction of dementia-related linguistic anomalies. Our study is a step toward better understanding of the relationships between the inner workings of generative neural language models, the language that they produce, and the deleterious effects of dementia on human speech and language characteristics.
Automatic Song Translation for Tonal Languages
Authors: Fenfei Guo, Chen Zhang, Zhirui Zhang, Qixin He, Kejun Zhang, Jun Xie, Jordan Boyd-Graber
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Translation

This paper develops automatic song translation (AST) for tonal languages and addresses the unique challenge of aligning words' tones with melody of a song in addition to conveying the original meaning. We propose three criteria for effective AST -- preserving meaning, singability and intelligibility -- and design metrics for these criteria. We develop a new benchmark for English--Mandarin song translation and develop an unsupervised AST system, Guided AliGnment for Automatic Song Translation (GagaST), which combines pre-training with three decoding constraints. Both automatic and human evaluations show GagaST successfully balances semantics and singability.
Plagiarism Detection in the Bengali Language: A Text Similarity-Based Approach
Authors: Satyajit Ghosh, Aniruddha Ghosh, Bittaswer Ghosh, Abhishek Roy
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), text similarity

Plagiarism means taking another person's work and not giving any credit to them for it. Plagiarism is one of the most serious problems in academia and among researchers. Even though there are multiple tools available to detect plagiarism in a document but most of them are domain-specific and designed to work in English texts, but plagiarism is not limited to a single language only. Bengali is the most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and the second most spoken language in India with 300 million native speakers and 37 million second-language speakers. Plagiarism detection requires a large corpus for comparison. Bengali Literature has a history of 1300 years. Hence most Bengali Literature books are not yet digitalized properly. As there was no such corpus present for our purpose so we have collected Bengali Literature books from the National Digital Library of India and with a comprehensive methodology extracted texts from it and constructed our corpus. Our experimental results find out average accuracy between 72.10 % - 79.89 % in text extraction using OCR. Levenshtein Distance algorithm is used for determining Plagiarism. We have built a web application for end-user and successfully tested it for Plagiarism detection in Bengali texts. In future, we aim to construct a corpus with more books for more accurate detection.
Striking a Balance: Alleviating Inconsistency in Pre-trained Models for Symmetric Classification Tasks
Authors: Ashutosh Kumar, Aditya Joshi
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Classification

While fine-tuning pre-trained models for downstream classification is the conventional paradigm in NLP, often task-specific nuances may not get captured in the resultant models. Specifically, for tasks that take two inputs and require the output to be invariant of the order of the inputs, inconsistency is often observed in the predicted labels or confidence scores. We highlight this model shortcoming and apply a consistency loss function to alleviate inconsistency in symmetric classification. Our results show an improved consistency in predictions for three paraphrase detection datasets without a significant drop in the accuracy scores. We examine the classification performance of six datasets (both symmetric and non-symmetric) to showcase the strengths and limitations of our approach.
EmoCaps: Emotion Capsule based Model for Conversational Emotion Recognition
Authors: Zaijing Li, Fengxiao Tang, Ming Zhao, Yusen Zhu
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition, Emotion Recognition in Conversation, Sentence

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to analyze the speaker's state and identify their emotion in the conversation. Recent works in ERC focus on context modeling but ignore the representation of contextual emotional tendency. In order to extract multi-modal information and the emotional tendency of the utterance effectively, we propose a new structure named Emoformer to extract multi-modal emotion vectors from different modalities and fuse them with sentence vector to be an emotion capsule. Furthermore, we design an end-to-end ERC model called EmoCaps, which extracts emotion vectors through the Emoformer structure and obtain the emotion classification results from a context analysis model. Through the experiments with two benchmark datasets, our model shows better performance than the existing state-of-the-art models.
Single Model Ensemble for Subword Regularized Models in Low-Resource Machine Translation
Authors: Sho Takase, Tatsuya Hiraoka, Naoaki Okazaki
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Segmentation, Translation

Subword regularizations use multiple subword segmentations during training to improve the robustness of neural machine translation models. In previous subword regularizations, we use multiple segmentations in the training process but use only one segmentation in the inference. In this study, we propose an inference strategy to address this discrepancy. The proposed strategy approximates the marginalized likelihood by using multiple segmentations including the most plausible segmentation and several sampled segmentations. Because the proposed strategy aggregates predictions from several segmentations, we can regard it as a single model ensemble that does not require any additional cost for training. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy improves the performance of models trained with subword regularization in low-resource machine translation tasks.
Modeling Target-Side Morphology in Neural Machine Translation: A Comparison of Strategies
Authors: Marion Weller-Di Marco, Matthias Huck, Alexander Fraser
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, LEMMA, Machine Translation, Sentence, TAG, Translation

Morphologically rich languages pose difficulties to machine translation. Machine translation engines that rely on statistical learning from parallel training data, such as state-of-the-art neural systems, face challenges especially with rich morphology on the output language side. Key challenges of rich target-side morphology in data-driven machine translation include: (1) A large amount of differently inflected word surface forms entails a larger vocabulary and thus data sparsity. (2) Some inflected forms of infrequent terms typically do not appear in the training corpus, which makes closed-vocabulary systems unable to generate these unobserved variants. (3) Linguistic agreement requires the system to correctly match the grammatical categories between inflected word forms in the output sentence, both in terms of target-side morpho-syntactic wellformedness and semantic adequacy with respect to the input. In this paper, we re-investigate two target-side linguistic processing techniques: a lemma-tag strategy and a linguistically informed word segmentation strategy. Our experiments are conducted on a English-German translation task under three training corpus conditions of different magnitudes. We find that a stronger Transformer baseline leaves less room for improvement than a shallow-RNN encoder-decoder model when translating in-domain. However, we find that linguistic modeling of target-side morphology does benefit the Transformer model when the same system is applied to out-of-domain input text. We also successfully apply our approach to English to Czech translation.
MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation
Authors: Quan Tu, Yanran Li, Jianwei Cui, Bin Wang, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5

Applying existing methods to emotional support conversation -- which provides valuable assistance to people who are in need -- has two major limitations: (a) they generally employ a conversation-level emotion label, which is too coarse-grained to capture user's instant mental state; (b) most of them focus on expressing empathy in the response(s) rather than gradually reducing user's distress. To address the problems, we propose a novel model \textbf{MISC}, which firstly infers the user's fine-grained emotional status, and then responds skillfully using a mixture of strategy. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and reveal the benefits of fine-grained emotion understanding as well as mixed-up strategy modeling. Our code and data could be found in \url{https://github.com/morecry/MISC}.
ZS4IE: A toolkit for Zero-Shot Information Extraction with simple Verbalizations
Authors: Oscar Sainz, Haoling Qiu, Oier Lopez de Lacalle, Eneko Agirre, Bonan Min
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (ACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Zero-Shot Learning

The current workflow for Information Extraction (IE) analysts involves the definition of the entities/relations of interest and a training corpus with annotated examples. In this demonstration we introduce a new workflow where the analyst directly verbalizes the entities/relations, which are then used by a Textual Entailment model to perform zero-shot IE. We present the design and implementation of a toolkit with a user interface, as well as experiments on four IE tasks that show that the system achieves very good performance at zero-shot learning using only 5--15 minutes per type of a user's effort. Our demonstration system is open-sourced at https://github.com/BBN-E/ZS4IE . A demonstration video is available at https://vimeo.com/676138340 .
Semi-Supervised Formality Style Transfer with Consistency Training
Authors: Ao Liu, An Wang, Naoaki Okazaki
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Formality Style Transfer, Sentence

Formality style transfer (FST) is a task that involves paraphrasing an informal sentence into a formal one without altering its meaning. To address the data-scarcity problem of existing parallel datasets, previous studies tend to adopt a cycle-reconstruction scheme to utilize additional unlabeled data, where the FST model mainly benefits from target-side unlabeled sentences. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective semi-supervised framework to better utilize source-side unlabeled sentences based on consistency training. Specifically, our approach augments pseudo-parallel data obtained from a source-side informal sentence by enforcing the model to generate similar outputs for its perturbed version. Moreover, we empirically examined the effects of various data perturbation methods and propose effective data filtering strategies to improve our framework. Experimental results on the GYAFC benchmark demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art results, even with less than 40% of the parallel data.
Learning to Mediate Disparities Towards Pragmatic Communication
Authors: Yuwei Bao, Sayan Ghosh, Joyce Chai
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5

Human communication is a collaborative process. Speakers, on top of conveying their own intent, adjust the content and language expressions by taking the listeners into account, including their knowledge background, personalities, and physical capabilities. Towards building AI agents with similar abilities in language communication, we propose Pragmatic Rational Speaker (PRS), a framework extending Rational Speech Act (RSA). The PRS attempts to learn the speaker-listener disparity and adjust the speech accordingly, by adding a light-weighted disparity adjustment layer into working memory on top of speaker's long-term memory system. By fixing the long-term memory, the PRS only needs to update its working memory to learn and adapt to different types of listeners. To validate our framework, we create a dataset that simulates different types of speaker-listener disparities in the context of referential games. Our empirical results demonstrate that the PRS is able to shift its output towards the language that listener are able to understand, significantly improve the collaborative task outcome.
UKP-SQUARE: An Online Platform for Question Answering Research
Authors: Tim Baumgärtner, Kexin Wang, Rachneet Sachdeva, Max Eichler, Gregor Geigle, Clifton Poth, Hannah Sterz, Haritz Puerto, Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro, Jonas Pfeiffer, Nils Reimers, Gözde Gül Şahin, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Explainable Models, Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Retrieval

Recent advances in NLP and information retrieval have given rise to a diverse set of question answering tasks that are of different formats (e.g., extractive, abstractive), require different model architectures (e.g., generative, discriminative), and setups (e.g., with or without retrieval). Despite having a large number of powerful, specialized QA pipelines (which we refer to as Skills) that consider a single domain, model or setup, there exists no framework where users can easily explore and compare such pipelines and can extend them according to their needs. To address this issue, we present UKP-SQUARE, an extensible online QA platform for researchers which allows users to query and analyze a large collection of modern Skills via a user-friendly web interface and integrated behavioural tests. In addition, QA researchers can develop, manage, and share their custom Skills using our microservices that support a wide range of models (Transformers, Adapters, ONNX), datastores and retrieval techniques (e.g., sparse and dense). UKP-SQUARE is available on https://square.ukp-lab.de.
Probing Pre-Trained Language Models for Cross-Cultural Differences in Values
Authors: Arnav Arora, Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, Isabelle Augenstein
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00

Language embeds information about social, cultural, and political values people hold. Prior work has explored social and potentially harmful biases encoded in Pre-Trained Language models (PTLMs). However, there has been no systematic study investigating how values embedded in these models vary across cultures. In this paper, we introduce probes to study which values across cultures are embedded in these models, and whether they align with existing theories and cross-cultural value surveys. We find that PTLMs capture differences in values across cultures, but those only weakly align with established value surveys. We discuss implications of using mis-aligned models in cross-cultural settings, as well as ways of aligning PTLMs with value surveys.
L3Cube-MahaHate: A Tweet-based Marathi Hate Speech Detection Dataset and BERT models
Authors: Abhishek Velankar, Hrushikesh Patil, Amol Gore, Shubham Salunke, Raviraj Joshi
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: TRAC (COLING) 2022 10
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

Social media platforms are used by a large number of people prominently to express their thoughts and opinions. However, these platforms have contributed to a substantial amount of hateful and abusive content as well. Therefore, it is important to curb the spread of hate speech on these platforms. In India, Marathi is one of the most popular languages used by a wide audience. In this work, we present L3Cube-MahaHate, the first major Hate Speech Dataset in Marathi. The dataset is curated from Twitter, annotated manually. Our dataset consists of over 25000 distinct tweets labeled into four major classes i.e hate, offensive, profane, and not. We present the approaches used for collecting and annotating the data and the challenges faced during the process. Finally, we present baseline classification results using deep learning models based on CNN, LSTM, and Transformers. We explore mono-lingual and multi-lingual variants of BERT like MahaBERT, IndicBERT, mBERT, and xlm-RoBERTa and show that mono-lingual models perform better than their multi-lingual counterparts. The MahaBERT model provides the best results on L3Cube-MahaHate Corpus. The data and models are available at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/MarathiNLP .
Searching for fingerspelled content in American Sign Language
Authors: Bowen Shi, Diane Brentari, Greg Shakhnarovich, Karen Livescu
Date: 2022-03-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Retrieval, Translation

Natural language processing for sign language video - including tasks like recognition, translation, and search - is crucial for making artificial intelligence technologies accessible to deaf individuals, and is gaining research interest in recent years. In this paper, we address the problem of searching for fingerspelled key-words or key phrases in raw sign language videos. This is an important task since significant content in sign language is often conveyed via fingerspelling, and to our knowledge the task has not been studied before. We propose an end-to-end model for this task, FSS-Net, that jointly detects fingerspelling and matches it to a text sequence. Our experiments, done on a large public dataset of ASL fingerspelling in the wild, show the importance of fingerspelling detection as a component of a search and retrieval model. Our model significantly outperforms baseline methods adapted from prior work on related tasks
Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)
Authors: Shijie Geng, Shuchang Liu, Zuohui Fu, Yingqiang Ge, Yongfeng Zhang
Date: 2022-03-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Recommendation Systems, Review Generation, Sequential Recommendation

For a long time, different recommendation tasks typically require designing task-specific architectures and training objectives. As a result, it is hard to transfer the learned knowledge and representations from one task to another, thus restricting the generalization ability of existing recommendation approaches, e.g., a sequential recommendation model can hardly be applied or transferred to a review generation method. To deal with such issues, considering that language can describe almost anything and language grounding is a powerful medium to represent various problems or tasks, we present a flexible and unified text-to-text paradigm called "Pretrain, Personalized Prompt, and Predict Paradigm" (P5) for recommendation, which unifies various recommendation tasks in a shared framework. In P5, all data such as user-item interactions, user descriptions, item metadata, and user reviews are converted to a common format -- natural language sequences. The rich information from natural language assists P5 to capture deeper semantics for personalization and recommendation. Specifically, P5 learns different tasks with the same language modeling objective during pretraining. Thus, it serves as the foundation model for various downstream recommendation tasks, allows easy integration with other modalities, and enables instruction-based recommendation based on prompts. P5 advances recommender systems from shallow model to deep model to big model, and will revolutionize the technical form of recommender systems towards universal recommendation engine. With adaptive personalized prompt for different users, P5 is able to make predictions in a zero-shot or few-shot manner and largely reduces the necessity for extensive fine-tuning. On several recommendation benchmarks, we conduct experiments to show the effectiveness of P5. We release the source code at https://github.com/jeykigung/P5.
CodeGen: An Open Large Language Model for Code with Multi-Turn Program Synthesis
Authors: Erik Nijkamp, Bo Pang, Hiroaki Hayashi, Lifu Tu, Huan Wang, Yingbo Zhou, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Program Synthesis

Program synthesis strives to generate a computer program as a solution to a given problem specification, expressed with input-output examples or natural language descriptions. The prevalence of large language models advances the state-of-the-art for program synthesis, though limited training resources and data impede open access to such models. To democratize this, we train and release a family of large language models up to 16.1B parameters, called CODEGEN, on natural language and programming language data, and open source the training library JAXFORMER. We show the utility of the trained model by demonstrating that it is competitive with the previous state-of-the-art on zero-shot Python code generation on HumanEval. We further investigate the multi-step paradigm for program synthesis, where a single program is factorized into multiple prompts specifying subproblems. To this end, we construct an open benchmark, Multi-Turn Programming Benchmark (MTPB), consisting of 115 diverse problem sets that are factorized into multi-turn prompts. Our analysis on MTPB shows that the same intent provided to CODEGEN in multi-turn fashion significantly improves program synthesis over that provided as a single turn. We make the training library JAXFORMER and model checkpoints available as open source contribution: https://github.com/salesforce/CodeGen.