pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. How to choose data for morphological inflection
Authors: Saliha Muradoglu, Mans Hulden
Date: 2022-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Morphological Inflection

Data scarcity is a widespread problem in numerous natural language processing (NLP) tasks for low-resource languages. Within morphology, the labour-intensive work of tagging/glossing data is a serious bottleneck for both NLP and language documentation. Active learning (AL) aims to reduce the cost of data annotation by selecting data that is most informative for improving the model. In this paper, we explore four sampling strategies for the task of morphological inflection using a Transformer model: a pair of oracle experiments where data is chosen based on whether the model already can or cannot inflect the test forms correctly, as well as strategies based on high/low model confidence, entropy, as well as random selection. We investigate the robustness of each strategy across 30 typologically diverse languages. We also perform a more in-depth case study of Nat\"ugu. Our results show a clear benefit to selecting data based on model confidence and entropy. Unsurprisingly, the oracle experiment, where only incorrectly handled forms are chosen for further training, which is presented as a proxy for linguist/language consultant feedback, shows the most improvement. This is followed closely by choosing low-confidence and high-entropy predictions. We also show that despite the conventional wisdom of larger data sets yielding better accuracy, introducing more instances of high-confidence or low-entropy forms, or forms that the model can already inflect correctly, can reduce model performance.
Bi-Link: Bridging Inductive Link Predictions from Text via Contrastive Learning of Transformers and Prompts
Authors: Bohua Peng, Shihao Liang, Mobarakol Islam
Date: 2022-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Entity Linking, Inductive knowledge graph completion, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Prediction

Inductive knowledge graph completion requires models to comprehend the underlying semantics and logic patterns of relations. With the advance of pretrained language models, recent research have designed transformers for link prediction tasks. However, empirical studies show that linearizing triples affects the learning of relational patterns, such as inversion and symmetry. In this paper, we propose Bi-Link, a contrastive learning framework with probabilistic syntax prompts for link predictions. Using grammatical knowledge of BERT, we efficiently search for relational prompts according to learnt syntactical patterns that generalize to large knowledge graphs. To better express symmetric relations, we design a symmetric link prediction model, establishing bidirectional linking between forward prediction and backward prediction. This bidirectional linking accommodates flexible self-ensemble strategies at test time. In our experiments, Bi-Link outperforms recent baselines on link prediction datasets (WN18RR, FB15K-237, and Wikidata5M). Furthermore, we construct Zeshel-Ind as an in-domain inductive entity linking the environment to evaluate Bi-Link. The experimental results demonstrate that our method yields robust representations which can generalize under domain shift.
Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph Modeling over Key Utterances for Dialogue Reading Comprehension
Authors: Jiangnan Li, Mo Yu, Fandong Meng, Zheng Lin, Peng Fu, Weiping Wang, Jie zhou
Date: 2022-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

In this work, we focus on dialogue reading comprehension (DRC), a task extracting answer spans for questions from dialogues. Dialogue context modeling in DRC is tricky due to complex speaker information and noisy dialogue context. To solve the two problems, previous research proposes two self-supervised tasks respectively: guessing who a randomly masked speaker is according to the dialogue and predicting which utterance in the dialogue contains the answer. Although these tasks are effective, there are still urging problems: (1) randomly masking speakers regardless of the question cannot map the speaker mentioned in the question to the corresponding speaker in the dialogue, and ignores the speaker-centric nature of utterances. This leads to wrong answer extraction from utterances in unrelated interlocutors' scopes; (2) the single utterance prediction, preferring utterances similar to the question, is limited in finding answer-contained utterances not similar to the question. To alleviate these problems, we first propose a new key utterances extracting method. It performs prediction on the unit formed by several contiguous utterances, which can realize more answer-contained utterances. Based on utterances in the extracted units, we then propose Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph (QuISG) modeling. As a graph constructed on the text of utterances, QuISG additionally involves the question and question-mentioning speaker names as nodes. To realize interlocutor scopes, speakers in the dialogue are connected with the words in their corresponding utterances. Experiments on the benchmarks show that our method can achieve better and competitive results against previous works.
Smart Speech Segmentation using Acousto-Linguistic Features with look-ahead
Authors: Piyush Behre, Naveen Parihar, Sharman Tan, Amy Shah, Eva Sharma, Geoffrey Liu, Shuangyu Chang, Hosam Khalil, Chris Basoglu, Sayan Pathak
Date: 2022-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Machine Translation, Segmentation, Sentence, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Translation

Segmentation for continuous Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has traditionally used silence timeouts or voice activity detectors (VADs), which are both limited to acoustic features. This segmentation is often overly aggressive, given that people naturally pause to think as they speak. Consequently, segmentation happens mid-sentence, hindering both punctuation and downstream tasks like machine translation for which high-quality segmentation is critical. Model-based segmentation methods that leverage acoustic features are powerful, but without an understanding of the language itself, these approaches are limited. We present a hybrid approach that leverages both acoustic and language information to improve segmentation. Furthermore, we show that including one word as a look-ahead boosts segmentation quality. On average, our models improve segmentation-F0.5 score by 9.8% over baseline. We show that this approach works for multiple languages. For the downstream task of machine translation, it improves the translation BLEU score by an average of 1.05 points.
ReSel: N-ary Relation Extraction from Scientific Text and Tables by Learning to Retrieve and Select
Authors: Yuchen Zhuang, Yinghao Li, Jerry Junyang Cheung, Yue Yu, Yingjun Mou, Xiang Chen, Le Song, Chao Zhang
Date: 2022-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Relation Extraction, Retrieval

We study the problem of extracting N-ary relation tuples from scientific articles. This task is challenging because the target knowledge tuples can reside in multiple parts and modalities of the document. Our proposed method ReSel decomposes this task into a two-stage procedure that first retrieves the most relevant paragraph/table and then selects the target entity from the retrieved component. For the high-level retrieval stage, ReSel designs a simple and effective feature set, which captures multi-level lexical and semantic similarities between the query and components. For the low-level selection stage, ReSel designs a cross-modal entity correlation graph along with a multi-view architecture, which models both semantic and document-structural relations between entities. Our experiments on three scientific information extraction datasets show that ReSel outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly.
Geographic Citation Gaps in NLP Research
Authors: Mukund Rungta, Janvijay Singh, Saif M. Mohammad, Diyi Yang
Date: 2022-10-26 00:00:00

In a fair world, people have equitable opportunities to education, to conduct scientific research, to publish, and to get credit for their work, regardless of where they live. However, it is common knowledge among researchers that a vast number of papers accepted at top NLP venues come from a handful of western countries and (lately) China; whereas, very few papers from Africa and South America get published. Similar disparities are also believed to exist for paper citation counts. In the spirit of "what we do not measure, we cannot improve", this work asks a series of questions on the relationship between geographical location and publication success (acceptance in top NLP venues and citation impact). We first created a dataset of 70,000 papers from the ACL Anthology, extracted their meta-information, and generated their citation network. We then show that not only are there substantial geographical disparities in paper acceptance and citation but also that these disparities persist even when controlling for a number of variables such as venue of publication and sub-field of NLP. Further, despite some steps taken by the NLP community to improve geographical diversity, we show that the disparity in publication metrics across locations is still on an increasing trend since the early 2000s. We release our code and dataset here: https://github.com/iamjanvijay/acl-cite-net
Discourse-Aware Emotion Cause Extraction in Conversations
Authors: Dexin Kong, Nan Yu, Yun Yuan, Guohong Fu, Chen Gong
Date: 2022-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Emotion Entailment, Discourse Parsing, Emotion Cause Extraction, Graph Neural Network, Multi-Task Learning

Emotion Cause Extraction in Conversations (ECEC) aims to extract the utterances which contain the emotional cause in conversations. Most prior research focuses on modelling conversational contexts with sequential encoding, ignoring the informative interactions between utterances and conversational-specific features for ECEC. In this paper, we investigate the importance of discourse structures in handling utterance interactions and conversationspecific features for ECEC. To this end, we propose a discourse-aware model (DAM) for this task. Concretely, we jointly model ECEC with discourse parsing using a multi-task learning (MTL) framework and explicitly encode discourse structures via gated graph neural network (gated GNN), integrating rich utterance interaction information to our model. In addition, we use gated GNN to further enhance our ECEC model with conversation-specific features. Results on the benchmark corpus show that DAM outperform the state-of-theart (SOTA) systems in the literature. This suggests that the discourse structure may contain a potential link between emotional utterances and their corresponding cause expressions. It also verifies the effectiveness of conversationalspecific features. The codes of this paper will be available on GitHub.
Progressive Sentiment Analysis for Code-Switched Text Data
Authors: Sudhanshu Ranjan, Dheeraj Mekala, Jingbo Shang
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification, Transfer Learning

Multilingual transformer language models have recently attracted much attention from researchers and are used in cross-lingual transfer learning for many NLP tasks such as text classification and named entity recognition. However, similar methods for transfer learning from monolingual text to code-switched text have not been extensively explored mainly due to the following challenges: (1) Code-switched corpus, unlike monolingual corpus, consists of more than one language and existing methods can't be applied efficiently, (2) Code-switched corpus is usually made of resource-rich and low-resource languages and upon using multilingual pre-trained language models, the final model might bias towards resource-rich language. In this paper, we focus on code-switched sentiment analysis where we have a labelled resource-rich language dataset and unlabelled code-switched data. We propose a framework that takes the distinction between resource-rich and low-resource language into account. Instead of training on the entire code-switched corpus at once, we create buckets based on the fraction of words in the resource-rich language and progressively train from resource-rich language dominated samples to low-resource language dominated samples. Extensive experiments across multiple language pairs demonstrate that progressive training helps low-resource language dominated samples.
Deploying a Retrieval based Response Model for Task Oriented Dialogues
Authors: Lahari Poddar, György Szarvas, Cheng Wang, Jorge Balazs, Pavel Danchenko, Patrick Ernst
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Task-oriented dialogue systems in industry settings need to have high conversational capability, be easily adaptable to changing situations and conform to business constraints. This paper describes a 3-step procedure to develop a conversational model that satisfies these criteria and can efficiently scale to rank a large set of response candidates. First, we provide a simple algorithm to semi-automatically create a high-coverage template set from historic conversations without any annotation. Second, we propose a neural architecture that encodes the dialogue context and applicable business constraints as profile features for ranking the next turn. Third, we describe a two-stage learning strategy with self-supervised training, followed by supervised fine-tuning on limited data collected through a human-in-the-loop platform. Finally, we describe offline experiments and present results of deploying our model with human-in-the-loop to converse with live customers online.
The Monitor Model and its Misconceptions: A Clarification
Authors: Michael Carl
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Misconceptions, model, Translation

Horizontal (automatic) and vertical (control) processes have been observed and reported for a long time in translation production. Schaeffer and Carl's Monitor Model integrates these two processes into one framework, assuming that priming mechanisms underlie horizontal/automatic processes, while vertical/monitoring processes implement consciously accessible control mechanisms. The Monitor Model has been criticized in various ways and several misconceptions have accumulated over the past years. In this chapter, I update the Monitor Model with additional evidence and argue that it is compatible with an enactivist approach to cognition. I address several misconceptions related to the Monitor Model.
Enhancing Product Safety in E-Commerce with NLP
Authors: Kishaloy Halder, Josip Krapac, Dmitry Goryunov, Anthony Brew, Matti Lyra, Alsida Dizdari, William Gillett, Adrien Renahy, Sinan Tang
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: text-classification, Text Classification

Ensuring safety of the products offered to the customers is of paramount importance to any e- commerce platform. Despite stringent quality and safety checking of products listed on these platforms, occasionally customers might receive a product that can pose a safety issue arising out of its use. In this paper, we present an innovative mechanism of how a large scale multinational e-commerce platform, Zalando, uses Natural Language Processing techniques to assist timely investigation of the potentially unsafe products mined directly from customer written claims in unstructured plain text. We systematically describe the types of safety issues that concern Zalando customers. We demonstrate how we map this core business problem into a supervised text classification problem with highly imbalanced, noisy, multilingual data in a AI-in-the-loop setup with a focus on Key Performance Indicator (KPI) driven evaluation. Finally, we present detailed ablation studies to show a comprehensive comparison between different classification techniques. We conclude the work with how this NLP model was deployed.
RoMQA: A Benchmark for Robust, Multi-evidence, Multi-answer Question Answering
Authors: Victor Zhong, Weijia Shi, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Retrieval

We introduce RoMQA, the first benchmark for robust, multi-evidence, multi-answer question answering (QA). RoMQA contains clusters of questions that are derived from related constraints mined from the Wikidata knowledge graph. RoMQA evaluates robustness of QA models to varying constraints by measuring worst-case performance within each question cluster. Compared to prior QA datasets, RoMQA has more human-written questions that require reasoning over more evidence text and have, on average, many more correct answers. In addition, human annotators rate RoMQA questions as more natural or likely to be asked by people. We evaluate state-of-the-art large language models in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings, and find that RoMQA is challenging: zero-shot and few-shot models perform similarly to naive baselines, while supervised retrieval methods perform well below gold evidence upper bounds. Moreover, existing models are not robust to variations in question constraints, but can be made more robust by tuning on clusters of related questions. Our results show that RoMQA is a challenging benchmark for large language models, and provides a quantifiable test to build more robust QA methods.
Synthetic Text Generation with Differential Privacy: A Simple and Practical Recipe
Authors: Xiang Yue, Huseyin A. Inan, Xuechen Li, Girish Kumar, Julia McAnallen, Hoda Shajari, Huan Sun, David Levitan, Robert Sim
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

Privacy concerns have attracted increasing attention in data-driven products due to the tendency of machine learning models to memorize sensitive training data. Generating synthetic versions of such data with a formal privacy guarantee, such as differential privacy (DP), provides a promising path to mitigating these privacy concerns, but previous approaches in this direction have typically failed to produce synthetic data of high quality. In this work, we show that a simple and practical recipe in the text domain is effective: simply fine-tuning a pretrained generative language model with DP enables the model to generate useful synthetic text with strong privacy protection. Through extensive empirical analyses on both benchmark and private customer data, we demonstrate that our method produces synthetic text that is competitive in terms of utility with its non-private counterpart, meanwhile providing strong protection against potential privacy leakages.
Causal Analysis of Syntactic Agreement Neurons in Multilingual Language Models
Authors: Aaron Mueller, Yu Xia, Tal Linzen
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

Structural probing work has found evidence for latent syntactic information in pre-trained language models. However, much of this analysis has focused on monolingual models, and analyses of multilingual models have employed correlational methods that are confounded by the choice of probing tasks. In this study, we causally probe multilingual language models (XGLM and multilingual BERT) as well as monolingual BERT-based models across various languages; we do this by performing counterfactual perturbations on neuron activations and observing the effect on models' subject-verb agreement probabilities. We observe where in the model and to what extent syntactic agreement is encoded in each language. We find significant neuron overlap across languages in autoregressive multilingual language models, but not masked language models. We also find two distinct layer-wise effect patterns and two distinct sets of neurons used for syntactic agreement, depending on whether the subject and verb are separated by other tokens. Finally, we find that behavioral analyses of language models are likely underestimating how sensitive masked language models are to syntactic information.
Learning Better Intent Representations for Financial Open Intent Classification
Authors: Xianzhi Li, Will Aitken, Xiaodan Zhu, Stephen W. Thomas
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, intent-classification, Intent Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

With the recent surge of NLP technologies in the financial domain, banks and other financial entities have adopted virtual agents (VA) to assist customers. A challenging problem for VAs in this domain is determining a user's reason or intent for contacting the VA, especially when the intent was unseen or open during the VA's training. One method for handling open intents is adaptive decision boundary (ADB) post-processing, which learns tight decision boundaries from intent representations to separate known and open intents. We propose incorporating two methods for supervised pre-training of intent representations: prefix-tuning and fine-tuning just the last layer of a large language model (LLM). With this proposal, our accuracy is 1.63% - 2.07% higher than the prior state-of-the-art ADB method for open intent classification on the banking77 benchmark amongst others. Notably, we only supplement the original ADB model with 0.1% additional trainable parameters. Ablation studies also determine that our method yields better results than full fine-tuning the entire model. We hypothesize that our findings could stimulate a new optimal method of downstream tuning that combines parameter efficient tuning modules with fine-tuning a subset of the base model's layers.
OpenStance: Real-world Zero-shot Stance Detection
Authors: Hanzi Xu, Slobodan Vucetic, Wenpeng Yin
Date: 2022-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Natural Language Inference, Stance Detection, Zero-Shot Stance Detection

Prior studies of zero-shot stance detection identify the attitude of texts towards unseen topics occurring in the same document corpus. Such task formulation has three limitations: (i) Single domain/dataset. A system is optimized on a particular dataset from a single domain; therefore, the resulting system cannot work well on other datasets; (ii) the model is evaluated on a limited number of unseen topics; (iii) it is assumed that part of the topics has rich annotations, which might be impossible in real-world applications. These drawbacks will lead to an impractical stance detection system that fails to generalize to open domains and open-form topics. This work defines OpenStance: open-domain zero-shot stance detection, aiming to handle stance detection in an open world with neither domain constraints nor topic-specific annotations. The key challenge of OpenStance lies in the open-domain generalization: learning a system with fully unspecific supervision but capable of generalizing to any dataset. To solve OpenStance, we propose to combine indirect supervision, from textual entailment datasets, and weak supervision, from data generated automatically by pre-trained Language Models. Our single system, without any topic-specific supervision, outperforms the supervised method on three popular datasets. To our knowledge, this is the first work that studies stance detection under the open-domain zero-shot setting. All data and code are publicly released.