pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Investigating self-supervised, weakly supervised and fully supervised training approaches for multi-domain automatic speech recognition: a study on Bangladeshi Bangla
Authors: Ahnaf Mozib Samin, M. Humayon Kobir, Md. Mushtaq Shahriyar Rafee, M. Firoz Ahmed, Mehedi Hasan, Partha Ghosh, Shafkat Kibria, M. Shahidur Rahman
Date: 2022-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning

Despite huge improvements in automatic speech recognition (ASR) employing neural networks, ASR systems still suffer from a lack of robustness and generalizability issues due to domain shifting. This is mainly because principal corpus design criteria are often not identified and examined adequately while compiling ASR datasets. In this study, we investigate the robustness of the state-of-the-art transfer learning approaches such as self-supervised wav2vec 2.0 and weakly supervised Whisper as well as fully supervised convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for multi-domain ASR. We also demonstrate the significance of domain selection while building a corpus by assessing these models on a novel multi-domain Bangladeshi Bangla ASR evaluation benchmark - BanSpeech, which contains approximately 6.52 hours of human-annotated speech and 8085 utterances from 13 distinct domains. SUBAK.KO, a mostly read speech corpus for the morphologically rich language Bangla, has been used to train the ASR systems. Experimental evaluation reveals that self-supervised cross-lingual pre-training is the best strategy compared to weak supervision and full supervision to tackle the multi-domain ASR task. Moreover, the ASR models trained on SUBAK.KO face difficulty recognizing speech from domains with mostly spontaneous speech. The BanSpeech will be publicly available to meet the need for a challenging evaluation benchmark for Bangla ASR.
Visualizing the Obvious: A Concreteness-based Ensemble Model for Noun Property Prediction
Authors: Yue Yang, Artemis Panagopoulou, Marianna Apidianaki, Mark Yatskar, Chris Callison-Burch
Date: 2022-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Property Prediction

Neural language models encode rich knowledge about entities and their relationships which can be extracted from their representations using probing. Common properties of nouns (e.g., red strawberries, small ant) are, however, more challenging to extract compared to other types of knowledge because they are rarely explicitly stated in texts. We hypothesize this to mainly be the case for perceptual properties which are obvious to the participants in the communication. We propose to extract these properties from images and use them in an ensemble model, in order to complement the information that is extracted from language models. We consider perceptual properties to be more concrete than abstract properties (e.g., interesting, flawless). We propose to use the adjectives' concreteness score as a lever to calibrate the contribution of each source (text vs. images). We evaluate our ensemble model in a ranking task where the actual properties of a noun need to be ranked higher than other non-relevant properties. Our results show that the proposed combination of text and images greatly improves noun property prediction compared to powerful text-based language models.
Event-Centric Question Answering via Contrastive Learning and Invertible Event Transformation
Authors: Junru Lu, Xingwei Tan, Gabriele Pergola, Lin Gui, Yulan He
Date: 2022-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension, Relation

Human reading comprehension often requires reasoning of event semantic relations in narratives, represented by Event-centric Question-Answering (QA). To address event-centric QA, we propose a novel QA model with contrastive learning and invertible event transformation, call TranCLR. Our proposed model utilizes an invertible transformation matrix to project semantic vectors of events into a common event embedding space, trained with contrastive learning, and thus naturally inject event semantic knowledge into mainstream QA pipelines. The transformation matrix is fine-tuned with the annotated event relation types between events that occurred in questions and those in answers, using event-aware question vectors. Experimental results on the Event Semantic Relation Reasoning (ESTER) dataset show significant improvements in both generative and extractive settings compared to the existing strong baselines, achieving over 8.4% gain in the token-level F1 score and 3.0% gain in Exact Match (EM) score under the multi-answer setting. Qualitative analysis reveals the high quality of the generated answers by TranCLR, demonstrating the feasibility of injecting event knowledge into QA model learning. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/LuJunru/TranCLR.
Bootstrapping meaning through listening: Unsupervised learning of spoken sentence embeddings
Authors: Jian Zhu, Zuoyu Tian, Yadong Liu, Cong Zhang, Chia-wen Lo
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic Unit Discovery, Contrastive Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings, Spoken Language Understanding

Inducing semantic representations directly from speech signals is a highly challenging task but has many useful applications in speech mining and spoken language understanding. This study tackles the unsupervised learning of semantic representations for spoken utterances. Through converting speech signals into hidden units generated from acoustic unit discovery, we propose WavEmbed, a multimodal sequential autoencoder that predicts hidden units from a dense representation of speech. Secondly, we also propose S-HuBERT to induce meaning through knowledge distillation, in which a sentence embedding model is first trained on hidden units and passes its knowledge to a speech encoder through contrastive learning. The best performing model achieves a moderate correlation (0.5~0.6) with human judgments, without relying on any labels or transcriptions. Furthermore, these models can also be easily extended to leverage textual transcriptions of speech to learn much better speech embeddings that are strongly correlated with human annotations. Our proposed methods are applicable to the development of purely data-driven systems for speech mining, indexing and search.
EUREKA: EUphemism Recognition Enhanced through Knn-based methods and Augmentation
Authors: Sedrick Scott Keh, Rohit K. Bharadwaj, Emmy Liu, Simone Tedeschi, Varun Gangal, Roberto Navigli
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00

We introduce EUREKA, an ensemble-based approach for performing automatic euphemism detection. We (1) identify and correct potentially mislabelled rows in the dataset, (2) curate an expanded corpus called EuphAug, (3) leverage model representations of Potentially Euphemistic Terms (PETs), and (4) explore using representations of semantically close sentences to aid in classification. Using our augmented dataset and kNN-based methods, EUREKA was able to achieve state-of-the-art results on the public leaderboard of the Euphemism Detection Shared Task, ranking first with a macro F1 score of 0.881. Our code is available at https://github.com/sedrickkeh/EUREKA.
RuCoLA: Russian Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability
Authors: Vladislav Mikhailov, Tatiana Shamardina, Max Ryabinin, Alena Pestova, Ivan Smurov, Ekaterina Artemova
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Linguistic Acceptability, Text Generation

Linguistic acceptability (LA) attracts the attention of the research community due to its many uses, such as testing the grammatical knowledge of language models and filtering implausible texts with acceptability classifiers. However, the application scope of LA in languages other than English is limited due to the lack of high-quality resources. To this end, we introduce the Russian Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (RuCoLA), built from the ground up under the well-established binary LA approach. RuCoLA consists of $9.8$k in-domain sentences from linguistic publications and $3.6$k out-of-domain sentences produced by generative models. The out-of-domain set is created to facilitate the practical use of acceptability for improving language generation. Our paper describes the data collection protocol and presents a fine-grained analysis of acceptability classification experiments with a range of baseline approaches. In particular, we demonstrate that the most widely used language models still fall behind humans by a large margin, especially when detecting morphological and semantic errors. We release RuCoLA, the code of experiments, and a public leaderboard (rucola-benchmark.com) to assess the linguistic competence of language models for Russian.
TAPE: Assessing Few-shot Russian Language Understanding
Authors: Ekaterina Taktasheva, Tatiana Shavrina, Alena Fenogenova, Denis Shevelev, Nadezhda Katricheva, Maria Tikhonova, Albina Akhmetgareeva, Oleg Zinkevich, Anastasiia Bashmakova, Svetlana Iordanskaia, Alena Spiridonova, Valentina Kurenshchikova, Ekaterina Artemova, Vladislav Mikhailov
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Adversarial Text, Ethics, Few-Shot Learning, Logical Reasoning, Question Answering, Zero-Shot Learning

Recent advances in zero-shot and few-shot learning have shown promise for a scope of research and practical purposes. However, this fast-growing area lacks standardized evaluation suites for non-English languages, hindering progress outside the Anglo-centric paradigm. To address this line of research, we propose TAPE (Text Attack and Perturbation Evaluation), a novel benchmark that includes six more complex NLU tasks for Russian, covering multi-hop reasoning, ethical concepts, logic and commonsense knowledge. The TAPE's design focuses on systematic zero-shot and few-shot NLU evaluation: (i) linguistic-oriented adversarial attacks and perturbations for analyzing robustness, and (ii) subpopulations for nuanced interpretation. The detailed analysis of testing the autoregressive baselines indicates that simple spelling-based perturbations affect the performance the most, while paraphrasing the input has a more negligible effect. At the same time, the results demonstrate a significant gap between the neural and human baselines for most tasks. We publicly release TAPE (tape-benchmark.com) to foster research on robust LMs that can generalize to new tasks when little to no supervision is available.
Code4Struct: Code Generation for Few-Shot Event Structure Prediction
Authors: Xingyao Wang, Sha Li, Heng Ji
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Event Argument Extraction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Prediction, Structured Prediction

Large Language Model (LLM) trained on a mixture of text and code has demonstrated impressive capability in translating natural language (NL) into structured code. We observe that semantic structures can be conveniently translated into code and propose Code4Struct to leverage such text-to-structure translation capability to tackle structured prediction tasks. As a case study, we formulate Event Argument Extraction (EAE) as converting text into event-argument structures that can be represented as a class object using code. This alignment between structures and code enables us to take advantage of Programming Language (PL) features such as inheritance and type annotation to introduce external knowledge or add constraints. We show that, with sufficient in-context examples, formulating EAE as a code generation problem is advantageous over using variants of text-based prompts. Despite only using 20 training event instances for each event type, Code4Struct is comparable to supervised models trained on 4,202 instances and outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) trained on 20-shot data by 29.5% absolute F1. Code4Struct can use 10-shot training data from a sibling event type to predict arguments for zero-resource event types and outperforms the zero-shot baseline by 12% absolute F1.
Translation Word-Level Auto-Completion: What can we achieve out of the box?
Authors: Yasmin Moslem, Rejwanul Haque, Andy Way
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Research on Machine Translation (MT) has achieved important breakthroughs in several areas. While there is much more to be done in order to build on this success, we believe that the language industry needs better ways to take full advantage of current achievements. Due to a combination of factors, including time, resources, and skills, businesses tend to apply pragmatism into their AI workflows. Hence, they concentrate more on outcomes, e.g. delivery, shipping, releases, and features, and adopt high-level working production solutions, where possible. Among the features thought to be helpful for translators are sentence-level and word-level translation auto-suggestion and auto-completion. Suggesting alternatives can inspire translators and limit their need to refer to external resources, which hopefully boosts their productivity. This work describes our submissions to WMT's shared task on word-level auto-completion, for the Chinese-to-English, English-to-Chinese, German-to-English, and English-to-German language directions. We investigate the possibility of using pre-trained models and out-of-the-box features from available libraries. We employ random sampling to generate diverse alternatives, which reveals good results. Furthermore, we introduce our open-source API, based on CTranslate2, to serve translations, auto-suggestions, and auto-completions.
Realistic Data Augmentation Framework for Enhancing Tabular Reasoning
Authors: Dibyakanti Kumar, Vivek Gupta, Soumya Sharma, Shuo Zhang
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Data Augmentation, Natural Language Inference

Existing approaches to constructing training data for Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks, such as for semi-structured table reasoning, are either via crowdsourcing or fully automatic methods. However, the former is expensive and time-consuming and thus limits scale, and the latter often produces naive examples that may lack complex reasoning. This paper develops a realistic semi-automated framework for data augmentation for tabular inference. Instead of manually generating a hypothesis for each table, our methodology generates hypothesis templates transferable to similar tables. In addition, our framework entails the creation of rational counterfactual tables based on human written logical constraints and premise paraphrasing. For our case study, we use the InfoTabs, which is an entity-centric tabular inference dataset. We observed that our framework could generate human-like tabular inference examples, which could benefit training data augmentation, especially in the scenario with limited supervision.
When Can Transformers Ground and Compose: Insights from Compositional Generalization Benchmarks
Authors: Ankur Sikarwar, Arkil Patel, Navin Goyal
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Compositional Generalization (AVG)

Humans can reason compositionally whilst grounding language utterances to the real world. Recent benchmarks like ReaSCAN use navigation tasks grounded in a grid world to assess whether neural models exhibit similar capabilities. In this work, we present a simple transformer-based model that outperforms specialized architectures on ReaSCAN and a modified version of gSCAN. On analyzing the task, we find that identifying the target location in the grid world is the main challenge for the models. Furthermore, we show that a particular split in ReaSCAN, which tests depth generalization, is unfair. On an amended version of this split, we show that transformers can generalize to deeper input structures. Finally, we design a simpler grounded compositional generalization task, RefEx, to investigate how transformers reason compositionally. We show that a single self-attention layer with a single head generalizes to novel combinations of object attributes. Moreover, we derive a precise mathematical construction of the transformer's computations from the learned network. Overall, we provide valuable insights about the grounded compositional generalization task and the behaviour of transformers on it, which would be useful for researchers working in this area.
Additive Interventions Yield Robust Multi-Domain Machine Translation Models
Authors: Elijah Rippeth, Matt Post
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, TAG, Translation

Additive interventions are a recently-proposed mechanism for controlling target-side attributes in neural machine translation. In contrast to tag-based approaches which manipulate the raw source sequence, interventions work by directly modulating the encoder representation of all tokens in the sequence. We examine the role of additive interventions in a large-scale multi-domain machine translation setting and compare its performance in various inference scenarios. We find that while the performance difference is small between intervention-based systems and tag-based systems when the domain label matches the test domain, intervention-based systems are robust to label error, making them an attractive choice under label uncertainty. Further, we find that the superiority of single-domain fine-tuning comes under question when training data size is scaled, contradicting previous findings.
Span-based joint entity and relation extraction augmented with sequence tagging mechanism
Authors: Bin Ji, Shasha Li, Hao Xu, Jie Yu, Jun Ma, Huijun Liu, Jing Yang
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Joint Entity and Relation Extraction, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Relation, Relation Extraction

Span-based joint extraction simultaneously conducts named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) in text span form. However, since previous span-based models rely on span-level classifications, they cannot benefit from token-level label information, which has been proven advantageous for the task. In this paper, we propose a Sequence Tagging augmented Span-based Network (STSN), a span-based joint model that can make use of token-level label information. In STSN, we construct a core neural architecture by deep stacking multiple attention layers, each of which consists of three basic attention units. On the one hand, the core architecture enables our model to learn token-level label information via the sequence tagging mechanism and then uses the information in the span-based joint extraction; on the other hand, it establishes a bi-directional information interaction between NER and RE. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that STSN consistently outperforms the strongest baselines in terms of F1, creating new state-of-the-art results.
On the Transformation of Latent Space in Fine-Tuned NLP Models
Authors: Nadir Durrani, Hassan Sajjad, Fahim Dalvi, Firoj Alam
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00

We study the evolution of latent space in fine-tuned NLP models. Different from the commonly used probing-framework, we opt for an unsupervised method to analyze representations. More specifically, we discover latent concepts in the representational space using hierarchical clustering. We then use an alignment function to gauge the similarity between the latent space of a pre-trained model and its fine-tuned version. We use traditional linguistic concepts to facilitate our understanding and also study how the model space transforms towards task-specific information. We perform a thorough analysis, comparing pre-trained and fine-tuned models across three models and three downstream tasks. The notable findings of our work are: i) the latent space of the higher layers evolve towards task-specific concepts, ii) whereas the lower layers retain generic concepts acquired in the pre-trained model, iii) we discovered that some concepts in the higher layers acquire polarity towards the output class, and iv) that these concepts can be used for generating adversarial triggers.
Do Language Models Understand Measurements?
Authors: Sungjin Park, Seungwoo Ryu, Edward Choi
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has stimulated interest in their ability to understand and work with numbers. Yet, the numerical reasoning over measurements has not been formally studied despite their importance. In this study, we show that PLMs lack the capability required for reasoning over measurements. Furthermore, we find that a language model trained on a measurement-rich corpus shows better performance on understanding measurements. We propose a simple embedding strategy to better distinguish between numbers and units, which leads to a significant improvement in the probing tasks.
Focus Is What You Need For Chinese Grammatical Error Correction
Authors: Jingheng Ye, Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma, Rui Xie, Wei Wu, Hai-Tao Zheng
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Grammatical Error Correction, Sentence

Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) aims to automatically detect and correct grammatical errors contained in Chinese text. In the long term, researchers regard CGEC as a task with a certain degree of uncertainty, that is, an ungrammatical sentence may often have multiple references. However, we argue that even though this is a very reasonable hypothesis, it is too harsh for the intelligence of the mainstream models in this era. In this paper, we first discover that multiple references do not actually bring positive gains to model training. On the contrary, it is beneficial to the CGEC model if the model can pay attention to small but essential data during the training process. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy called OneTarget to improve the focus ability of the CGEC models and thus improve the CGEC performance. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the correctness of our discovery and the effectiveness of our proposed method.
How "Multi" is Multi-Document Summarization?
Authors: Ruben Wolhandler, Arie Cattan, Ori Ernst, Ido Dagan
Date: 2022-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Summarization, Multi-Document Summarization

The task of multi-document summarization (MDS) aims at models that, given multiple documents as input, are able to generate a summary that combines disperse information, originally spread across these documents. Accordingly, it is expected that both reference summaries in MDS datasets, as well as system summaries, would indeed be based on such dispersed information. In this paper, we argue for quantifying and assessing this expectation. To that end, we propose an automated measure for evaluating the degree to which a summary is ``disperse'', in the sense of the number of source documents needed to cover its content. We apply our measure to empirically analyze several popular MDS datasets, with respect to their reference summaries, as well as the output of state-of-the-art systems. Our results show that certain MDS datasets barely require combining information from multiple documents, where a single document often covers the full summary content. Overall, we advocate using our metric for assessing and improving the degree to which summarization datasets require combining multi-document information, and similarly how summarization models actually meet this challenge. Our code is available in https://github.com/ariecattan/multi_mds.