pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
In-context Examples Selection for Machine Translation
Authors: Sweta Agrawal, Chunting Zhou, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer, Marjan Ghazvininejad
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Translation

Large-scale generative models show an impressive ability to perform a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks using in-context learning, where a few examples are used to describe a task to the model. For Machine Translation (MT), these examples are typically randomly sampled from the development dataset with a similar distribution as the evaluation set. However, it is unclear how the choice of these in-context examples and their ordering impacts the output translation quality. In this work, we aim to understand the properties of good in-context examples for MT in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. We show that the translation quality and the domain of the in-context examples matter and that 1-shot noisy unrelated example can have a catastrophic impact on output quality. While concatenating multiple random examples reduces the effect of noise, a single good prompt optimized to maximize translation quality on the development dataset can elicit learned information from the pre-trained language model. Adding similar examples based on an n-gram overlap with the test source significantly and consistently improves the translation quality of the outputs, outperforming a strong kNN-MT baseline in 2 out of 4 out-of-domain datasets.
Addressing Distribution Shift at Test Time in Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Ayush Singh, John E. Ortega
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, Test-time Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

State-of-the-art pre-trained language models (PLMs) outperform other models when applied to the majority of language processing tasks. However, PLMs have been found to degrade in performance under distribution shift, a phenomenon that occurs when data at test-time does not come from the same distribution as the source training set. Equally as challenging is the task of obtaining labels in real-time due to issues like long-labeling feedback loops. The lack of adequate methods that address the aforementioned challenges constitutes the need for approaches that continuously adapt the PLM to a distinct distribution. Unsupervised domain adaptation adapts a source model to an unseen as well as unlabeled target domain. While some techniques such as data augmentation can adapt models in several scenarios, they have only been sparsely studied for addressing the distribution shift problem. In this work, we present an approach (MEMO-CL) that improves the performance of PLMs at test-time under distribution shift. Our approach takes advantage of the latest unsupervised techniques in data augmentation and adaptation to minimize the entropy of the PLM's output distribution. MEMO-CL operates on a batch of augmented samples from a single observation in the test set. The technique introduced is unsupervised, domain-agnostic, easy to implement, and requires no additional data. Our experiments result in a 3% improvement over current test-time adaptation baselines.
Fake News and Hate Speech: Language in Common
Authors: Berta Chulvi, Alejandro Toselli, Paolo Rosso
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00

In this paper we raise the research question of whether fake news and hate speech spreaders share common patterns in language. We compute a novel index, the ingroup vs outgroup index, in three different datasets and we show that both phenomena share an "us vs them" narrative.
Entity Set Co-Expansion in StackOverflow
Authors: Yu Zhang, Yunyi Zhang, Yucheng Jiang, Martin Michalski, Yu Deng, Lucian Popa, ChengXiang Zhai, Jiawei Han
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction, Management

Given a few seed entities of a certain type (e.g., Software or Programming Language), entity set expansion aims to discover an extensive set of entities that share the same type as the seeds. Entity set expansion in software-related domains such as StackOverflow can benefit many downstream tasks (e.g., software knowledge graph construction) and facilitate better IT operations and service management. Meanwhile, existing approaches are less concerned with two problems: (1) How to deal with multiple types of seed entities simultaneously? (2) How to leverage the power of pre-trained language models (PLMs)? Being aware of these two problems, in this paper, we study the entity set co-expansion task in StackOverflow, which extracts Library, OS, Application, and Language entities from StackOverflow question-answer threads. During the co-expansion process, we use PLMs to derive embeddings of candidate entities for calculating similarities between entities. Experimental results show that our proposed SECoExpan framework outperforms previous approaches significantly.
Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models via Nearest Neighbor Calibration
Authors: Feng Nie, Meixi Chen, Zhirui Zhang, Xu Cheng
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Few-Shot Text Classification, In-Context Learning, Retrieval, Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have exhibited remarkable few-shot learning capabilities when provided a few examples in a natural language prompt as demonstrations of test instances, i.e., in-context learning. However, the performance of in-context learning is susceptible to the choice of prompt format, training examples and the ordering of the training examples. In this paper, we propose a novel nearest-neighbor calibration framework for in-context learning to ease this issue. It is inspired by a phenomenon that the in-context learning paradigm produces incorrect labels when inferring training instances, which provides a useful supervised signal to calibrate predictions. Thus, our method directly augments the predictions with a $k$-nearest-neighbor ($k$NN) classifier over a datastore of cached few-shot instance representations obtained by PLMs and their corresponding labels. Then adaptive neighbor selection and feature regularization modules are introduced to make full use of a few support instances to reduce the $k$NN retrieval noise. Experiments on various few-shot text classification tasks demonstrate that our method significantly improves in-context learning, while even achieving comparable performance with state-of-the-art tuning-based approaches in some sentiment analysis tasks.
Momentum Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation As Graph Exploration
Authors: Tian Lan, Yixuan Su, Shuhang Liu, Heyan Huang, Xian-Ling Mao
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Open-ended text generation with autoregressive language models (LMs) is one of the core tasks in natural language processing. However, maximization-based decoding methods (e.g., greedy/beam search) often lead to the degeneration problem, i.e., the generated text is unnatural and contains undesirable repetitions. Existing solutions to this problem either introduce randomness prone to incoherence or require a look-ahead mechanism that demands extra computational overhead. In this study, we formulate open-ended text generation from a new perspective, i.e., we view it as an exploration process within a directed graph. Thereby, we understand the phenomenon of degeneration as circular loops within the directed graph. Based on our formulation, we propose a novel decoding method -- \textit{momentum decoding} -- which encourages the LM to \textit{greedily} explore new nodes outside the current graph. Meanwhile, it also allows the LM to return to the existing nodes with a momentum downgraded by a pre-defined resistance function. We extensively test our approach on three benchmarks from different domains through automatic and human evaluations. The results show that momentum decoding performs comparably with the current state of the art while enjoying notably improved inference speed and computation FLOPs. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed analysis to reveal the merits and inner workings of our approach. Our codes and other related resources are publicly available at https://github.com/gmftbyGMFTBY/MomentumDecoding.
Automatic Generation of Factual News Headlines in Finnish
Authors: Maximilian Koppatz, Khalid Alnajjar, Mika Hämäläinen, Thierry Poibeau
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Headline Generation

We present a novel approach to generating news headlines in Finnish for a given news story. We model this as a summarization task where a model is given a news article, and its task is to produce a concise headline describing the main topic of the article. Because there are no openly available GPT-2 models for Finnish, we will first build such a model using several corpora. The model is then fine-tuned for the headline generation task using a massive news corpus. The system is evaluated by 3 expert journalists working in a Finnish media house. The results showcase the usability of the presented approach as a headline suggestion tool to facilitate the news production process.
Video Games as a Corpus: Sentiment Analysis using Fallout New Vegas Dialog
Authors: Mika Hämäläinen, Khalid Alnajjar, Thierry Poibeau
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

We present a method for extracting a multilingual sentiment annotated dialog data set from Fallout New Vegas. The game developers have preannotated every line of dialog in the game in one of the 8 different sentiments: \textit{anger, disgust, fear, happy, neutral, pained, sad } and \textit{surprised}. The game has been translated into English, Spanish, German, French and Italian. We conduct experiments on multilingual, multilabel sentiment analysis on the extracted data set using multilingual BERT, XLMRoBERTa and language specific BERT models. In our experiments, multilingual BERT outperformed XLMRoBERTa for most of the languages, also language specific models were slightly better than multilingual BERT for most of the languages. The best overall accuracy was 54\% and it was achieved by using multilingual BERT on Spanish data. The extracted data set presents a challenging task for sentiment analysis. We have released the data, including the testing and training splits, openly on Zenodo. The data set has been shuffled for copyright reasons.
Impact of Domain-Adapted Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Medical Domain
Authors: Miguel Rios, Raluca-Maria Chereji, Alina Secara, Dragos Ciobanu
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) models leverage many language pairs during training to improve translation quality for low-resource languages by transferring knowledge from high-resource languages. We study the quality of a domain-adapted MNMT model in the medical domain for English-Romanian with automatic metrics and a human error typology annotation which includes terminology-specific error categories. We compare the out-of-domain MNMT with the in-domain adapted MNMT. The in-domain MNMT model outperforms the out-of-domain MNMT in all measured automatic metrics and produces fewer terminology errors.
Query Your Model with Definitions in FrameNet: An Effective Method for Frame Semantic Role Labeling
Authors: Ce Zheng, Yiming Wang, Baobao Chang
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Multi-class Classification, Semantic Role Labeling

Frame Semantic Role Labeling (FSRL) identifies arguments and labels them with frame semantic roles defined in FrameNet. Previous researches tend to divide FSRL into argument identification and role classification. Such methods usually model role classification as naive multi-class classification and treat arguments individually, which neglects label semantics and interactions between arguments and thus hindering performance and generalization of models. In this paper, we propose a query-based framework named ArGument Extractor with Definitions in FrameNet (AGED) to mitigate these problems. Definitions of frames and frame elements (FEs) in FrameNet can be used to query arguments in text. Encoding text-definition pairs can guide models in learning label semantics and strengthening argument interactions. Experiments show that AGED outperforms previous state-of-the-art by up to 1.3 F1-score in two FrameNet datasets and the generalization power of AGED in zero-shot and fewshot scenarios. Our code and technical appendix is available at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/AGED.
GNN-SL: Sequence Labeling Based on Nearest Examples via GNN
Authors: Shuhe Wang, Yuxian Meng, Rongbin Ouyang, Jiwei Li, Tianwei Zhang, Lingjuan Lyu, Guoyin Wang
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Chinese Word Segmentation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS

To better handle long-tail cases in the sequence labeling (SL) task, in this work, we introduce graph neural networks sequence labeling (GNN-SL), which augments the vanilla SL model output with similar tagging examples retrieved from the whole training set. Since not all the retrieved tagging examples benefit the model prediction, we construct a heterogeneous graph, and leverage graph neural networks (GNNs) to transfer information between the retrieved tagging examples and the input word sequence. The augmented node which aggregates information from neighbors is used to do prediction. This strategy enables the model to directly acquire similar tagging examples and improves the general quality of predictions. We conduct a variety of experiments on three typical sequence labeling tasks: Named Entity Recognition (NER), Part of Speech Tagging (POS), and Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) to show the significant performance of our GNN-SL. Notably, GNN-SL achieves SOTA results of 96.9 (+0.2) on PKU, 98.3 (+0.4) on CITYU, 98.5 (+0.2) on MSR, and 96.9 (+0.2) on AS for the CWS task, and results comparable to SOTA performances on NER datasets, and POS datasets.
Wish I Can Feel What You Feel: A Neural Approach for Empathetic Response Generation
Authors: Yangbin Chen, Chunfeng Liang
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Cause Extraction, Empathetic Response Generation, Response Generation

Expressing empathy is important in everyday conversations, and exploring how empathy arises is crucial in automatic response generation. Most previous approaches consider only a single factor that affects empathy. However, in practice, empathy generation and expression is a very complex and dynamic psychological process. A listener needs to find out events which cause a speaker's emotions (emotion cause extraction), project the events into some experience (knowledge extension), and express empathy in the most appropriate way (communication mechanism). To this end, we propose a novel approach, which integrates the three components - emotion cause, knowledge graph, and communication mechanism for empathetic response generation. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and show that incorporating the key components generates more informative and empathetic responses.
Fast and accurate factorized neural transducer for text adaption of end-to-end speech recognition models
Authors: Rui Zhao, Jian Xue, Partha Parthasarathy, Veljko Miljanic, Jinyu Li
Date: 2022-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Neural transducer is now the most popular end-to-end model for speech recognition, due to its naturally streaming ability. However, it is challenging to adapt it with text-only data. Factorized neural transducer (FNT) model was proposed to mitigate this problem. The improved adaptation ability of FNT on text-only adaptation data came at the cost of lowered accuracy compared to the standard neural transducer model. We propose several methods to improve the performance of the FNT model. They are: adding CTC criterion during training, adding KL divergence loss during adaptation, using a pre-trained language model to seed the vocabulary predictor, and an efficient adaptation approach by interpolating the vocabulary predictor with the n-gram language model. A combination of these approaches results in a relative word-error-rate reduction of 9.48\% from the standard FNT model. Furthermore, n-gram interpolation with the vocabulary predictor improves the adaptation speed hugely with satisfactory adaptation performance.
Grounded Keys-to-Text Generation: Towards Factual Open-Ended Generation
Authors: Faeze Brahman, Baolin Peng, Michel Galley, Sudha Rao, Bill Dolan, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Jianfeng Gao
Date: 2022-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Data-to-Text Generation, Text Generation

Large pre-trained language models have recently enabled open-ended generation frameworks (e.g., prompt-to-text NLG) to tackle a variety of tasks going beyond the traditional data-to-text generation. While this framework is more general, it is under-specified and often leads to a lack of controllability restricting their real-world usage. We propose a new grounded keys-to-text generation task: the task is to generate a factual description about an entity given a set of guiding keys, and grounding passages. To address this task, we introduce a new dataset, called EntDeGen. Inspired by recent QA-based evaluation measures, we propose an automatic metric, MAFE, for factual correctness of generated descriptions. Our EntDescriptor model is equipped with strong rankers to fetch helpful passages and generate entity descriptions. Experimental result shows a good correlation (60.14) between our proposed metric and human judgments of factuality. Our rankers significantly improved the factual correctness of generated descriptions (15.95% and 34.51% relative gains in recall and precision). Finally, our ablation study highlights the benefit of combining keys and groundings.
Automaton-Based Representations of Task Knowledge from Generative Language Models
Authors: Yunhao Yang, Jean-Raphaël Gaglione, Cyrus Neary, Ufuk Topcu
Date: 2022-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

Automaton-based representations of task knowledge play an important role in control and planning for sequential decision-making problems. However, obtaining the high-level task knowledge required to build such automata is often difficult. Meanwhile, large-scale generative language models (GLMs) can automatically generate relevant task knowledge. However, the textual outputs from GLMs cannot be formally verified or used for sequential decision-making. We propose a novel algorithm named GLM2FSA, which constructs a finite state automaton (FSA) encoding high-level task knowledge from a brief natural-language description of the task goal. GLM2FSA first sends queries to a GLM to extract task knowledge in textual form, and then it builds an FSA to represent this text-based knowledge. The proposed algorithm thus fills the gap between natural-language task descriptions and automaton-based representations, and the constructed FSA can be formally verified against user-defined specifications. We accordingly propose a method to iteratively refine the queries to the GLM based on the outcomes, e.g., counter-examples, from verification. We demonstrate GLM2FSA's ability to build and refine automaton-based representations of everyday tasks (e.g., crossing a road), and also of tasks that require highly-specialized knowledge (e.g., executing secure multi-party computation).
Democratizing Neural Machine Translation with OPUS-MT
Authors: Jörg Tiedemann, Mikko Aulamo, Daria Bakshandaeva, Michele Boggia, Stig-Arne Grönroos, Tommi Nieminen, Alessandro Raganato, Yves Scherrer, Raul Vazquez, Sami Virpioja
Date: 2022-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

This paper presents the OPUS ecosystem with a focus on the development of open machine translation models and tools, and their integration into end-user applications, development platforms and professional workflows. We discuss our on-going mission of increasing language coverage and translation quality, and also describe on-going work on the development of modular translation models and speed-optimized compact solutions for real-time translation on regular desktops and small devices.
Toward Efficient Language Model Pretraining and Downstream Adaptation via Self-Evolution: A Case Study on SuperGLUE
Authors: Qihuang Zhong, Liang Ding, Yibing Zhan, Yu Qiao, Yonggang Wen, Li Shen, Juhua Liu, Baosheng Yu, Bo Du, Yixin Chen, Xinbo Gao, Chunyan Miao, Xiaoou Tang, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2022-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Natural Language Inference, Question Answering, Word Sense Disambiguation

This technical report briefly describes our JDExplore d-team's Vega v2 submission on the SuperGLUE leaderboard. SuperGLUE is more challenging than the widely used general language understanding evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, containing eight difficult language understanding tasks, including question answering, natural language inference, word sense disambiguation, coreference resolution, and reasoning. [Method] Instead of arbitrarily increasing the size of a pretrained language model (PLM), our aim is to 1) fully extract knowledge from the input pretraining data given a certain parameter budget, e.g., 6B, and 2) effectively transfer this knowledge to downstream tasks. To achieve goal 1), we propose self-evolution learning for PLMs to wisely predict the informative tokens that should be masked, and supervise the masked language modeling (MLM) process with rectified smooth labels. For goal 2), we leverage the prompt transfer technique to improve the low-resource tasks by transferring the knowledge from the foundation model and related downstream tasks to the target task. [Results] According to our submission record (Oct. 2022), with our optimized pretraining and fine-tuning strategies, our 6B Vega method achieved new state-of-the-art performance on 4/8 tasks, sitting atop the SuperGLUE leaderboard on Oct. 8, 2022, with an average score of 91.3.
Constructing Highly Inductive Contexts for Dialogue Safety through Controllable Reverse Generation
Authors: Zhexin Zhang, Jiale Cheng, Hao Sun, Jiawen Deng, Fei Mi, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Minlie Huang
Date: 2022-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation

Large pretrained language models can easily produce toxic or biased content, which is prohibitive for practical use. In order to detect such toxic generations, existing methods rely on templates, real-world data extraction, crowdsourcing workers, or automatic generation to construct adversarial contexts that are likely to induce toxic generations. However, what type of context is more likely to induce unsafe responses is still under-explored. In this paper, we identify that context toxicity and context category (e.g., \textit{profanity}, \textit{insult}, \textit{drugs}, etc.) are two important factors to cause safety issues in response generation. Hence, we propose a method called \emph{reverse generation} to construct adversarial contexts conditioned on a given response, with the flexibility to control category, toxicity level, and inductivity of the generated contexts. Via reverse generation, we augment the existing BAD dataset and construct a new dataset BAD+ which contains more than 120K diverse and highly inductive contexts in 12 categories. We test three popular pretrained dialogue models (Blender, DialoGPT, and Plato2) and find that BAD+ can largely expose their safety problems. Furthermore, we show that BAD+ can greatly enhance the safety of generation and reveal the key factors of safety improvement. Our code and dataset is available at \url{https://github.com/thu-coai/Reverse_Generation}.