pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Coreference Reasoning in Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Mingzhu Wu, Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Dan Roth, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Machine Reading Comprehension, Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

Coreference resolution is essential for natural language understanding and has been long studied in NLP. In recent years, as the format of Question Answering (QA) became a standard for machine reading comprehension (MRC), there have been data collection efforts, e.g., Dasigi et al. (2019), that attempt to evaluate the ability of MRC models to reason about coreference. However, as we show, coreference reasoning in MRC is a greater challenge than earlier thought; MRC datasets do not reflect the natural distribution and, consequently, the challenges of coreference reasoning. Specifically, success on these datasets does not reflect a model's proficiency in coreference reasoning. We propose a methodology for creating MRC datasets that better reflect the challenges of coreference reasoning and use it to create a sample evaluation set. The results on our dataset show that state-of-the-art models still struggle with these phenomena. Furthermore, we develop an effective way to use naturally occurring coreference phenomena from existing coreference resolution datasets when training MRC models. This allows us to show an improvement in the coreference reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art models. The code and the resulting dataset are available at https://github.com/UKPLab/coref-reasoning-in-qa.
HateCheck: Functional Tests for Hate Speech Detection Models
Authors: Paul Röttger, Bertram Vidgen, Dong Nguyen, Zeerak Waseem, Helen Margetts, Janet B. Pierrehumbert
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Diagnostic, Hate Speech Detection

Detecting online hate is a difficult task that even state-of-the-art models struggle with. Typically, hate speech detection models are evaluated by measuring their performance on held-out test data using metrics such as accuracy and F1 score. However, this approach makes it difficult to identify specific model weak points. It also risks overestimating generalisable model performance due to increasingly well-evidenced systematic gaps and biases in hate speech datasets. To enable more targeted diagnostic insights, we introduce HateCheck, a suite of functional tests for hate speech detection models. We specify 29 model functionalities motivated by a review of previous research and a series of interviews with civil society stakeholders. We craft test cases for each functionality and validate their quality through a structured annotation process. To illustrate HateCheck's utility, we test near-state-of-the-art transformer models as well as two popular commercial models, revealing critical model weaknesses.
How Good is Your Tokenizer? On the Monolingual Performance of Multilingual Language Models
Authors: Phillip Rust, Jonas Pfeiffer, Ivan Vulić, Sebastian Ruder, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Pretrained Multilingual Language Models

In this work, we provide a systematic and comprehensive empirical comparison of pretrained multilingual language models versus their monolingual counterparts with regard to their monolingual task performance. We study a set of nine typologically diverse languages with readily available pretrained monolingual models on a set of five diverse monolingual downstream tasks. We first aim to establish, via fair and controlled comparisons, if a gap between the multilingual and the corresponding monolingual representation of that language exists, and subsequently investigate the reason for any performance difference. To disentangle conflating factors, we train new monolingual models on the same data, with monolingually and multilingually trained tokenizers. We find that while the pretraining data size is an important factor, a designated monolingual tokenizer plays an equally important role in the downstream performance. Our results show that languages that are adequately represented in the multilingual model's vocabulary exhibit negligible performance decreases over their monolingual counterparts. We further find that replacing the original multilingual tokenizer with the specialized monolingual tokenizer improves the downstream performance of the multilingual model for almost every task and language.
Open Korean Corpora: A Practical Report
Authors: Won Ik Cho, Sangwhan Moon, YoungSook Song
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (NLPOSS) 2020 11

Korean is often referred to as a low-resource language in the research community. While this claim is partially true, it is also because the availability of resources is inadequately advertised and curated. This work curates and reviews a list of Korean corpora, first describing institution-level resource development, then further iterate through a list of current open datasets for different types of tasks. We then propose a direction on how open-source dataset construction and releases should be done for less-resourced languages to promote research.
TexSmart: A Text Understanding System for Fine-Grained NER and Enhanced Semantic Analysis
Authors: Haisong Zhang, Lemao Liu, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Jianchen Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, Zhanhui Kang, Shuming Shi
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

This technique report introduces TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. Compared to most previous publicly available text understanding systems and tools, TexSmart holds some unique features. First, the NER function of TexSmart supports over 1,000 entity types, while most other public tools typically support several to (at most) dozens of entity types. Second, TexSmart introduces new semantic analysis functions like semantic expansion and deep semantic representation, that are absent in most previous systems. Third, a spectrum of algorithms (from very fast algorithms to those that are relatively slow but more accurate) are implemented for one function in TexSmart, to fulfill the requirements of different academic and industrial applications. The adoption of unsupervised or weakly-supervised algorithms is especially emphasized, with the goal of easily updating our models to include fresh data with less human annotation efforts. The main contents of this report include major functions of TexSmart, algorithms for achieving these functions, how to use the TexSmart toolkit and Web APIs, and evaluation results of some key algorithms.
CoCoLM: COmplex COmmonsense Enhanced Language Model with Discourse Relations
Authors: Changlong Yu, Hongming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Wilfred Ng
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Large-scale pre-trained language models have demonstrated strong knowledge representation ability. However, recent studies suggest that even though these giant models contains rich simple commonsense knowledge (e.g., bird can fly and fish can swim.), they often struggle with the complex commonsense knowledge that involves multiple eventualities (verb-centric phrases, e.g., identifying the relationship between ``Jim yells at Bob'' and ``Bob is upset'').To address this problem, in this paper, we propose to help pre-trained language models better incorporate complex commonsense knowledge. Different from existing fine-tuning approaches, we do not focus on a specific task and propose a general language model named CoCoLM. Through the careful training over a large-scale eventuality knowledge graphs ASER, we successfully teach pre-trained language models (i.e., BERT and RoBERTa) rich complex commonsense knowledge among eventualities. Experiments on multiple downstream commonsense tasks that requires the correct understanding of eventualities demonstrate the effectiveness of CoCoLM.
Vocabulary Learning via Optimal Transport for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Jingjing Xu, Hao Zhou, Chun Gan, Zaixiang Zheng, Lei LI
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: GPU, Machine Translation, Translation

The choice of token vocabulary affects the performance of machine translation. This paper aims to figure out what is a good vocabulary and whether one can find the optimal vocabulary without trial training. To answer these questions, we first provide an alternative understanding of the role of vocabulary from the perspective of information theory. Motivated by this, we formulate the quest of vocabularization -- finding the best token dictionary with a proper size -- as an optimal transport (OT) problem. We propose VOLT, a simple and efficient solution without trial training. Empirical results show that VOLT outperforms widely-used vocabularies in diverse scenarios, including WMT-14 English-German and TED's 52 translation directions. For example, VOLT achieves almost 70% vocabulary size reduction and 0.5 BLEU gain on English-German translation. Also, compared to BPE-search, VOLT reduces the search time from 384 GPU hours to 30 GPU hours on English-German translation. Codes are available at https://github.com/Jingjing-NLP/VOLT .
ERNIE-M: Enhanced Multilingual Representation by Aligning Cross-lingual Semantics with Monolingual Corpora
Authors: Xuan Ouyang, Shuohuan Wang, Chao Pang, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Sentence, Translation

Recent studies have demonstrated that pre-trained cross-lingual models achieve impressive performance in downstream cross-lingual tasks. This improvement benefits from learning a large amount of monolingual and parallel corpora. Although it is generally acknowledged that parallel corpora are critical for improving the model performance, existing methods are often constrained by the size of parallel corpora, especially for low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-M, a new training method that encourages the model to align the representation of multiple languages with monolingual corpora, to overcome the constraint that the parallel corpus size places on the model performance. Our key insight is to integrate back-translation into the pre-training process. We generate pseudo-parallel sentence pairs on a monolingual corpus to enable the learning of semantic alignments between different languages, thereby enhancing the semantic modeling of cross-lingual models. Experimental results show that ERNIE-M outperforms existing cross-lingual models and delivers new state-of-the-art results in various cross-lingual downstream tasks.
A Closer Look at Few-Shot Crosslingual Transfer: The Choice of Shots Matters
Authors: Mengjie Zhao, Yi Zhu, Ehsan Shareghi, Ivan Vulić, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen, Hinrich Schütze
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot crosslingual transfer has been shown to outperform its zero-shot counterpart with pretrained encoders like multilingual BERT. Despite its growing popularity, little to no attention has been paid to standardizing and analyzing the design of few-shot experiments. In this work, we highlight a fundamental risk posed by this shortcoming, illustrating that the model exhibits a high degree of sensitivity to the selection of few shots. We conduct a large-scale experimental study on 40 sets of sampled few shots for six diverse NLP tasks across up to 40 languages. We provide an analysis of success and failure cases of few-shot transfer, which highlights the role of lexical features. Additionally, we show that a straightforward full model finetuning approach is quite effective for few-shot transfer, outperforming several state-of-the-art few-shot approaches. As a step towards standardizing few-shot crosslingual experimental designs, we make our sampled few shots publicly available.
ERNIE-Doc: A Retrospective Long-Document Modeling Transformer
Authors: Siyu Ding, Junyuan Shang, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis, Text Classification

Transformers are not suited for processing long documents, due to their quadratically increasing memory and time consumption. Simply truncating a long document or applying the sparse attention mechanism will incur the context fragmentation problem or lead to an inferior modeling capability against comparable model sizes. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-Doc, a document-level language pretraining model based on Recurrence Transformers. Two well-designed techniques, namely the retrospective feed mechanism and the enhanced recurrence mechanism, enable ERNIE-Doc, which has a much longer effective context length, to capture the contextual information of a complete document. We pretrain ERNIE-Doc to explicitly learn the relationships among segments with an additional document-aware segment-reordering objective. Various experiments were conducted on both English and Chinese document-level tasks. ERNIE-Doc improved the state-of-the-art language modeling result of perplexity to 16.8 on WikiText-103. Moreover, it outperformed competitive pretraining models by a large margin on most language understanding tasks, such as text classification and question answering.
Better Robustness by More Coverage: Adversarial Training with Mixup Augmentation for Robust Fine-tuning
Authors: Chenglei Si, Zhengyan Zhang, Fanchao Qi, Zhiyuan Liu, Yasheng Wang, Qun Liu, Maosong Sun
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Data Augmentation, Text Augmentation, text-classification, Text Classification

Pretrained language models (PLMs) perform poorly under adversarial attacks. To improve the adversarial robustness, adversarial data augmentation (ADA) has been widely adopted to cover more search space of adversarial attacks by adding textual adversarial examples during training. However, the number of adversarial examples for text augmentation is still extremely insufficient due to the exponentially large attack search space. In this work, we propose a simple and effective method to cover a much larger proportion of the attack search space, called Adversarial and Mixup Data Augmentation (AMDA). Specifically, AMDA linearly interpolates the representations of pairs of training samples to form new virtual samples, which are more abundant and diverse than the discrete text adversarial examples in conventional ADA. Moreover, to fairly evaluate the robustness of different models, we adopt a challenging evaluation setup, which generates a new set of adversarial examples targeting each model. In text classification experiments of BERT and RoBERTa, AMDA achieves significant robustness gains under two strong adversarial attacks and alleviates the performance degradation of ADA on the clean data. Our code is available at: https://github.com/thunlp/MixADA .
BinaryBERT: Pushing the Limit of BERT Quantization
Authors: Haoli Bai, Wei zhang, Lu Hou, Lifeng Shang, Jing Jin, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Michael Lyu, Irwin King
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Binarization, Model Compression, Quantization

The rapid development of large pre-trained language models has greatly increased the demand for model compression techniques, among which quantization is a popular solution. In this paper, we propose BinaryBERT, which pushes BERT quantization to the limit by weight binarization. We find that a binary BERT is hard to be trained directly than a ternary counterpart due to its complex and irregular loss landscape. Therefore, we propose ternary weight splitting, which initializes BinaryBERT by equivalently splitting from a half-sized ternary network. The binary model thus inherits the good performance of the ternary one, and can be further enhanced by fine-tuning the new architecture after splitting. Empirical results show that our BinaryBERT has only a slight performance drop compared with the full-precision model while being 24x smaller, achieving the state-of-the-art compression results on the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks.
Revisiting Robust Neural Machine Translation: A Transformer Case Study
Authors: Peyman Passban, Puneeth S. M. Saladi, Qun Liu
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Denoising, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Transformers (Vaswani et al., 2017) have brought a remarkable improvement in the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) systems but they could be surprisingly vulnerable to noise. In this work, we try to investigate how noise breaks Transformers and if there exist solutions to deal with such issues. There is a large body of work in the NMT literature on analyzing the behavior of conventional models for the problem of noise but Transformers are relatively understudied in this context. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel data-driven technique called Target Augmented Fine-tuning (TAFT) to incorporate noise during training. This idea is comparable to the well-known fine-tuning strategy. Moreover, we propose two other novel extensions to the original Transformer: Controlled Denoising (CD) and Dual-Channel Decoding (DCD), that modify the neural architecture as well as the training process to handle noise. One important characteristic of our techniques is that they only impact the training phase and do not impose any overhead at inference time. We evaluated our techniques to translate the English--German pair in both directions and observed that our models have a higher tolerance to noise. More specifically, they perform with no deterioration where up to 10% of entire test words are infected by noise.
FGraDA: A Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Domain Adaptation in Machine Translation
Authors: Wenhao Zhu, ShuJian Huang, Tong Pu, Pingxuan Huang, Xu Zhang, Jian Yu, Wei Chen, Yanfeng Wang, Jiajun Chen
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Diversity, Domain Adaptation, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Previous research for adapting a general neural machine translation (NMT) model into a specific domain usually neglects the diversity in translation within the same domain, which is a core problem for domain adaptation in real-world scenarios. One representative of such challenging scenarios is to deploy a translation system for a conference with a specific topic, e.g., global warming or coronavirus, where there are usually extremely less resources due to the limited schedule. To motivate wider investigation in such a scenario, we present a real-world fine-grained domain adaptation task in machine translation (FGraDA). The FGraDA dataset consists of Chinese-English translation task for four sub-domains of information technology: autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone. Each sub-domain is equipped with a development set and test set for evaluation purposes. To be closer to reality, FGraDA does not employ any in-domain bilingual training data but provides bilingual dictionaries and wiki knowledge base, which can be easier obtained within a short time. We benchmark the fine-grained domain adaptation task and present in-depth analyses showing that there are still challenging problems to further improve the performance with heterogeneous resources.
Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners
Authors: Tianyu Gao, Adam Fisch, Danqi Chen
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Text Classification

The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF--better few-shot fine-tuning of language models--a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning.
Learning from the Worst: Dynamically Generated Datasets to Improve Online Hate Detection
Authors: Bertie Vidgen, Tristan Thrush, Zeerak Waseem, Douwe Kiela
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

We present a human-and-model-in-the-loop process for dynamically generating datasets and training better performing and more robust hate detection models. We provide a new dataset of ~40,000 entries, generated and labelled by trained annotators over four rounds of dynamic data creation. It includes ~15,000 challenging perturbations and each hateful entry has fine-grained labels for the type and target of hate. Hateful entries make up 54% of the dataset, which is substantially higher than comparable datasets. We show that model performance is substantially improved using this approach. Models trained on later rounds of data collection perform better on test sets and are harder for annotators to trick. They also perform better on HateCheck, a suite of functional tests for online hate detection. We provide the code, dataset and annotation guidelines for other researchers to use. Accepted at ACL 2021.
Few-Shot Text Ranking with Meta Adapted Synthetic Weak Supervision
Authors: Si Sun, Yingzhuo Qian, Zhenghao Liu, Chenyan Xiong, Kaitao Zhang, Jie Bao, Zhiyuan Liu, Paul Bennett
Date: 2020-12-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Learning-To-Rank, Retrieval

The effectiveness of Neural Information Retrieval (Neu-IR) often depends on a large scale of in-domain relevance training signals, which are not always available in real-world ranking scenarios. To democratize the benefits of Neu-IR, this paper presents MetaAdaptRank, a domain adaptive learning method that generalizes Neu-IR models from label-rich source domains to few-shot target domains. Drawing on source-domain massive relevance supervision, MetaAdaptRank contrastively synthesizes a large number of weak supervision signals for target domains and meta-learns to reweight these synthetic "weak" data based on their benefits to the target-domain ranking accuracy of Neu-IR models. Experiments on three TREC benchmarks in the web, news, and biomedical domains show that MetaAdaptRank significantly improves the few-shot ranking accuracy of Neu-IR models. Further analyses indicate that MetaAdaptRank thrives from both its contrastive weak data synthesis and meta-reweighted data selection. The code and data of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/MetaAdaptRank.