pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Sequence Models for Text Classification Tasks
Authors: Saheed Salahudeen Abdullahi, Sun Yiming, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Abdulrasheed Mustapha, Ahmad Muhammad Aminu, Abdulkadir Abdullahi, Musa Bello, Saminu Mohammad Aliyu
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Information Retrieval, Multi-class Classification, Retrieval, Sentiment Analysis, Spam detection, text-classification, Text Classification

The exponential growth of data generated on the Internet in the current information age is a driving force for the digital economy. Extraction of information is the major value in an accumulated big data. Big data dependency on statistical analysis and hand-engineered rules machine learning algorithms are overwhelmed with vast complexities inherent in human languages. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is equipping machines to understand these human diverse and complicated languages. Text Classification is an NLP task which automatically identifies patterns based on predefined or undefined labeled sets. Common text classification application includes information retrieval, modeling news topic, theme extraction, sentiment analysis, and spam detection. In texts, some sequences of words depend on the previous or next word sequences to make full meaning; this is a challenging dependency task that requires the machine to be able to store some previous important information to impact future meaning. Sequence models such as RNN, GRU, and LSTM is a breakthrough for tasks with long-range dependencies. As such, we applied these models to Binary and Multi-class classification. Results generated were excellent with most of the models performing within the range of 80% and 94%. However, this result is not exhaustive as we believe there is room for improvement if machines are to compete with humans.
MRCLens: an MRC Dataset Bias Detection Toolkit
Authors: Yifan Zhong, Haohan Wang, Eric P. Xing
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Bias Detection, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension

Many recent neural models have shown remarkable empirical results in Machine Reading Comprehension, but evidence suggests sometimes the models take advantage of dataset biases to predict and fail to generalize on out-of-sample data. While many other approaches have been proposed to address this issue from the computation perspective such as new architectures or training procedures, we believe a method that allows researchers to discover biases, and adjust the data or the models in an earlier stage will be beneficial. Thus, we introduce MRCLens, a toolkit that detects whether biases exist before users train the full model. For the convenience of introducing the toolkit, we also provide a categorization of common biases in MRC.
Selection Bias Induced Spurious Correlations in Large Language Models
Authors: Emily McMilin
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Selection bias

In this work we show how large language models (LLMs) can learn statistical dependencies between otherwise unconditionally independent variables due to dataset selection bias. To demonstrate the effect, we developed a masked gender task that can be applied to BERT-family models to reveal spurious correlations between predicted gender pronouns and a variety of seemingly gender-neutral variables like date and location, on pre-trained (unmodified) BERT and RoBERTa large models. Finally, we provide an online demo, inviting readers to experiment further.
PiC: A Phrase-in-Context Dataset for Phrase Understanding and Semantic Search
Authors: Thang M. Pham, Seunghyun Yoon, Trung Bui, Anh Nguyen
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Semantic Retrieval, Semantic Similarity, Sentence, text similarity

While contextualized word embeddings have been a de-facto standard, learning contextualized phrase embeddings is less explored and being hindered by the lack of a human-annotated benchmark that tests machine understanding of phrase semantics given a context sentence or paragraph (instead of phrases alone). To fill this gap, we propose PiC -- a dataset of ~28K of noun phrases accompanied by their contextual Wikipedia pages and a suite of three tasks for training and evaluating phrase embeddings. Training on PiC improves ranking models' accuracy and remarkably pushes span-selection (SS) models (i.e., predicting the start and end index of the target phrase) near-human accuracy, which is 95% Exact Match (EM) on semantic search given a query phrase and a passage. Interestingly, we find evidence that such impressive performance is because the SS models learn to better capture the common meaning of a phrase regardless of its actual context. SotA models perform poorly in distinguishing two senses of the same phrase in two contexts (~60% EM) and in estimating the similarity between two different phrases in the same context (~70% EM).
Multilingual Transformer Encoders: a Word-Level Task-Agnostic Evaluation
Authors: Félix Gaschi, François Plesse, Parisa Rastin, Yannick Toussaint
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Transfer Learning

Some Transformer-based models can perform cross-lingual transfer learning: those models can be trained on a specific task in one language and give relatively good results on the same task in another language, despite having been pre-trained on monolingual tasks only. But, there is no consensus yet on whether those transformer-based models learn universal patterns across languages. We propose a word-level task-agnostic method to evaluate the alignment of contextualized representations built by such models. We show that our method provides more accurate translated word pairs than previous methods to evaluate word-level alignment. And our results show that some inner layers of multilingual Transformer-based models outperform other explicitly aligned representations, and even more so according to a stricter definition of multilingual alignment.
ILASR: Privacy-Preserving Incremental Learning for Automatic Speech Recognition at Production Scale
Authors: Gopinath Chennupati, Milind Rao, Gurpreet Chadha, Aaron Eakin, Anirudh Raju, Gautam Tiwari, Anit Kumar Sahu, Ariya Rastrow, Jasha Droppo, Andy Oberlin, Buddha Nandanoor, Prahalad Venkataramanan, Zheng Wu, Pankaj Sitpure
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Continual Learning, Incremental Learning, Privacy Preserving, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Incremental learning is one paradigm to enable model building and updating at scale with streaming data. For end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks, the absence of human annotated labels along with the need for privacy preserving policies for model building makes it a daunting challenge. Motivated by these challenges, in this paper we use a cloud based framework for production systems to demonstrate insights from privacy preserving incremental learning for automatic speech recognition (ILASR). By privacy preserving, we mean, usage of ephemeral data which are not human annotated. This system is a step forward for production levelASR models for incremental/continual learning that offers near real-time test-bed for experimentation in the cloud for end-to-end ASR, while adhering to privacy-preserving policies. We show that the proposed system can improve the production models significantly(3%) over a new time period of six months even in the absence of human annotated labels with varying levels of weak supervision and large batch sizes in incremental learning. This improvement is 20% over test sets with new words and phrases in the new time period. We demonstrate the effectiveness of model building in a privacy-preserving incremental fashion for ASR while further exploring the utility of having an effective teacher model and use of large batch sizes.
Can You Fool AI by Doing a 180? $\unicode{x2013}$ A Case Study on Authorship Analysis of Texts by Arata Osada
Authors: Jagna Nieuwazny, Karol Nowakowski, Michal Ptaszynski, Fumito Masui
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Authorship Attribution, Ethics

This paper is our attempt at answering a twofold question covering the areas of ethics and authorship analysis. Firstly, since the methods used for performing authorship analysis imply that an author can be recognized by the content he or she creates, we were interested in finding out whether it would be possible for an author identification system to correctly attribute works to authors if in the course of years they have undergone a major psychological transition. Secondly, and from the point of view of the evolution of an author's ethical values, we checked what it would mean if the authorship attribution system encounters difficulties in detecting single authorship. We set out to answer those questions through performing a binary authorship analysis task using a text classifier based on a pre-trained transformer model and a baseline method relying on conventional similarity metrics. For the test set, we chose works of Arata Osada, a Japanese educator and specialist in the history of education, with half of them being books written before the World War II and another half in the 1950s, in between which he underwent a transformation in terms of political opinions. As a result, we were able to confirm that in the case of texts authored by Arata Osada in a time span of more than 10 years, while the classification accuracy drops by a large margin and is substantially lower than for texts by other non-fiction writers, confidence scores of the predictions remain at a similar level as in the case of a shorter time span, indicating that the classifier was in many instances tricked into deciding that texts written over a time span of multiple years were actually written by two different people, which in turn leads us to believe that such a change can affect authorship analysis, and that historical events have great impact on a person's ethical outlook as expressed in their writings.
MoEC: Mixture of Expert Clusters
Authors: Yuan Xie, Shaohan Huang, Tianyu Chen, Furu Wei
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Mixture-of-Experts, Natural Language Understanding

Sparsely Mixture of Experts (MoE) has received great interest due to its promising scaling capability with affordable computational overhead. MoE converts dense layers into sparse experts, and utilizes a gated routing network to make experts conditionally activated. However, as the number of experts grows, MoE with outrageous parameters suffers from overfitting and sparse data allocation. Such problems are especially severe on tasks with limited data, thus hindering the progress for MoE models to improve performance by scaling up. In this work, we propose Mixture of Expert Clusters - a general approach to enable expert layers to learn more diverse and appropriate knowledge by imposing variance-based constraints on the routing stage. We further propose a cluster-level expert dropout strategy specifically designed for the expert cluster structure. Our experiments reveal that MoEC could improve performance on machine translation and natural language understanding tasks, and raise the performance upper bound for scaling up experts under limited data. We also verify that MoEC plays a positive role in mitigating overfitting and sparse data allocation.
Analyzing Bagging Methods for Language Models
Authors: Pranab Islam, Shaan Khosla, Arthur Lok, Mudit Saxena
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding

Modern language models leverage increasingly large numbers of parameters to achieve performance on natural language understanding tasks. Ensembling these models in specific configurations for downstream tasks show even further performance improvements. In this paper, we perform an analysis of bagging language models and compare single language models to bagged ensembles that are roughly equivalent in terms of final model size. We explore an array of model bagging configurations for natural language understanding tasks with final ensemble sizes ranging from 300M parameters to 1.5B parameters and determine that our ensembling methods are at best roughly equivalent to single LM baselines. We note other positive effects of bagging and pruning in specific scenarios according to findings in our experiments such as variance reduction and minor performance improvements.
On the Usability of Transformers-based models for a French Question-Answering task
Authors: Oralie Cattan, Christophe Servan, Sophie Rosset
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: RANLP 2021 9
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Data Augmentation, Question Answering, Transfer Learning

For many tasks, state-of-the-art results have been achieved with Transformer-based architectures, resulting in a paradigmatic shift in practices from the use of task-specific architectures to the fine-tuning of pre-trained language models. The ongoing trend consists in training models with an ever-increasing amount of data and parameters, which requires considerable resources. It leads to a strong search to improve resource efficiency based on algorithmic and hardware improvements evaluated only for English. This raises questions about their usability when applied to small-scale learning problems, for which a limited amount of training data is available, especially for under-resourced languages tasks. The lack of appropriately sized corpora is a hindrance to applying data-driven and transfer learning-based approaches with strong instability cases. In this paper, we establish a state-of-the-art of the efforts dedicated to the usability of Transformer-based models and propose to evaluate these improvements on the question-answering performances of French language which have few resources. We address the instability relating to data scarcity by investigating various training strategies with data augmentation, hyperparameters optimization and cross-lingual transfer. We also introduce a new compact model for French FrALBERT which proves to be competitive in low-resource settings.
Benchmarking Transformers-based models on French Spoken Language Understanding tasks
Authors: Oralie Cattan, Sahar Ghannay, Christophe Servan, Sophie Rosset
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Spoken Language Understanding

In the last five years, the rise of the self-attentional Transformer-based architectures led to state-of-the-art performances over many natural language tasks. Although these approaches are increasingly popular, they require large amounts of data and computational resources. There is still a substantial need for benchmarking methodologies ever upwards on under-resourced languages in data-scarce application conditions. Most pre-trained language models were massively studied using the English language and only a few of them were evaluated on French. In this paper, we propose a unified benchmark, focused on evaluating models quality and their ecological impact on two well-known French spoken language understanding tasks. Especially we benchmark thirteen well-established Transformer-based models on the two available spoken language understanding tasks for French: MEDIA and ATIS-FR. Within this framework, we show that compact models can reach comparable results to bigger ones while their ecological impact is considerably lower. However, this assumption is nuanced and depends on the considered compression method.
On the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual prototypical models across NLU tasks
Authors: Oralie Cattan, Christophe Servan, Sophie Rosset
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL (MetaNLP) 2021 8
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning, Natural Language Understanding, Transfer Learning

Supervised deep learning-based approaches have been applied to task-oriented dialog and have proven to be effective for limited domain and language applications when a sufficient number of training examples are available. In practice, these approaches suffer from the drawbacks of domain-driven design and under-resourced languages. Domain and language models are supposed to grow and change as the problem space evolves. On one hand, research on transfer learning has demonstrated the cross-lingual ability of multilingual Transformers-based models to learn semantically rich representations. On the other, in addition to the above approaches, meta-learning have enabled the development of task and language learning algorithms capable of far generalization. Through this context, this article proposes to investigate the cross-lingual transferability of using synergistically few-shot learning with prototypical neural networks and multilingual Transformers-based models. Experiments in natural language understanding tasks on MultiATIS++ corpus shows that our approach substantially improves the observed transfer learning performances between the low and the high resource languages. More generally our approach confirms that the meaningful latent space learned in a given language can be can be generalized to unseen and under-resourced ones using meta-learning.
Urdu Speech and Text Based Sentiment Analyzer
Authors: Waqar Ahmad, Maryam Edalati
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Discovering what other people think has always been a key aspect of our information-gathering strategy. People can now actively utilize information technology to seek out and comprehend the ideas of others, thanks to the increased availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs. Because of its crucial function in understanding people's opinions, sentiment analysis (SA) is a crucial task. Existing research, on the other hand, is primarily focused on the English language, with just a small amount of study devoted to low-resource languages. For sentiment analysis, this work presented a new multi-class Urdu dataset based on user evaluations. The tweeter website was used to get Urdu dataset. Our proposed dataset includes 10,000 reviews that have been carefully classified into two categories by human experts: positive, negative. The primary purpose of this research is to construct a manually annotated dataset for Urdu sentiment analysis and to establish the baseline result. Five different lexicon- and rule-based algorithms including Naivebayes, Stanza, Textblob, Vader, and Flair are employed and the experimental results show that Flair with an accuracy of 70% outperforms other tested algorithms.
Contextual Similarity is More Valuable than Character Similarity: An Empirical Study for Chinese Spell Checking
Authors: Ding Zhang, Yinghui Li, Qingyu Zhou, Shirong Ma, Yangning Li, Yunbo Cao, Hai-Tao Zheng
Date: 2022-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Chinese Spell Checking

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) task aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. Recently, related researches focus on introducing character similarity from confusion set to enhance the CSC models, ignoring the context of characters that contain richer information. To make better use of contextual information, we propose a simple yet effective Curriculum Learning (CL) framework for the CSC task. With the help of our model-agnostic CL framework, existing CSC models will be trained from easy to difficult as humans learn Chinese characters and achieve further performance improvements. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on widely used SIGHAN datasets show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. More instructively, our study empirically suggests that contextual similarity is more valuable than character similarity for the CSC task.
Using attention methods to predict judicial outcomes
Authors: Vithor Gomes Ferreira Bertalan, Evandro Eduardo Seron Ruiz
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00

Legal Judgment Prediction is one of the most acclaimed fields for the combined area of NLP, AI, and Law. By legal prediction we mean an intelligent systems capable to predict specific judicial characteristics, such as judicial outcome, a judicial class, predict an specific case. In this research, we have used AI classifiers to predict judicial outcomes in the Brazilian legal system. For this purpose, we developed a text crawler to extract data from the official Brazilian electronic legal systems. These texts formed a dataset of second-degree murder and active corruption cases. We applied different classifiers, such as Support Vector Machines and Neural Networks, to predict judicial outcomes by analyzing textual features from the dataset. Our research showed that Regression Trees, Gated Recurring Units and Hierarchical Attention Networks presented higher metrics for different subsets. As a final goal, we explored the weights of one of the algorithms, the Hierarchical Attention Networks, to find a sample of the most important words used to absolve or convict defendants.
Training Large-Vocabulary Neural Language Models by Private Federated Learning for Resource-Constrained Devices
Authors: MingBin Xu, Congzheng Song, Ye Tian, Neha Agrawal, Filip Granqvist, Rogier Van Dalen, Xiao Zhang, Arturo Argueta, Shiyi Han, Yaqiao Deng, Leo Liu, Anmol Walia, Alex Jin
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Federated Learning (FL) is a technique to train models using data distributed across devices. Differential Privacy (DP) provides a formal privacy guarantee for sensitive data. Our goal is to train a large neural network language model (NNLM) on compute-constrained devices while preserving privacy using FL and DP. However, the DP-noise introduced to the model increases as the model size grows, which often prevents convergence. We propose Partial Embedding Updates (PEU), a novel technique to decrease noise by decreasing payload size. Furthermore, we adopt Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) to reduce the memory demands of large models on compute-constrained devices. This combination of techniques makes it possible to train large-vocabulary language models while preserving accuracy and privacy.
Relational Future Captioning Model for Explaining Likely Collisions in Daily Tasks
Authors: Motonari Kambara, Komei Sugiura
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Domestic service robots that support daily tasks are a promising solution for elderly or disabled people. It is crucial for domestic service robots to explain the collision risk before they perform actions. In this paper, our aim is to generate a caption about a future event. We propose the Relational Future Captioning Model (RFCM), a crossmodal language generation model for the future captioning task. The RFCM has the Relational Self-Attention Encoder to extract the relationships between events more effectively than the conventional self-attention in transformers. We conducted comparison experiments, and the results show the RFCM outperforms a baseline method on two datasets.
Formal Algorithms for Transformers
Authors: Mary Phuong, Marcus Hutter
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00

This document aims to be a self-contained, mathematically precise overview of transformer architectures and algorithms (*not* results). It covers what transformers are, how they are trained, what they are used for, their key architectural components, and a preview of the most prominent models. The reader is assumed to be familiar with basic ML terminology and simpler neural network architectures such as MLPs.