pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
UM6P-CS at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Enhancing Multilingual and Code-Mixed Complex Named Entity Recognition via Pseudo Labels using Multilingual Transformer
Authors: Abdellah El Mekki, Abdelkader El Mahdaouy, Mohammed Akallouch, Ismail Berrada, Ahmed Khoumsi
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: SemEval (NAACL) 2022 7
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, token-classification, Token Classification

Building real-world complex Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems is a challenging task. This is due to the complexity and ambiguity of named entities that appear in various contexts such as short input sentences, emerging entities, and complex entities. Besides, real-world queries are mostly malformed, as they can be code-mixed or multilingual, among other scenarios. In this paper, we introduce our submitted system to the Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER) shared task. We approach the complex NER for multilingual and code-mixed queries, by relying on the contextualized representation provided by the multilingual Transformer XLM-RoBERTa. In addition to the CRF-based token classification layer, we incorporate a span classification loss to recognize named entities spans. Furthermore, we use a self-training mechanism to generate weakly-annotated data from a large unlabeled dataset. Our proposed system is ranked 6th and 8th in the multilingual and code-mixed MultiCoNER's tracks respectively.
RobBERTje: a Distilled Dutch BERT Model
Authors: Pieter Delobelle, Thomas Winters, Bettina Berendt
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Lightweight Deployment, model

Pre-trained large-scale language models such as BERT have gained a lot of attention thanks to their outstanding performance on a wide range of natural language tasks. However, due to their large number of parameters, they are resource-intensive both to deploy and to fine-tune. Researchers have created several methods for distilling language models into smaller ones to increase efficiency, with a small performance trade-off. In this paper, we create several different distilled versions of the state-of-the-art Dutch RobBERT model and call them RobBERTje. The distillations differ in their distillation corpus, namely whether or not they are shuffled and whether they are merged with subsequent sentences. We found that the performance of the models using the shuffled versus non-shuffled datasets is similar for most tasks and that randomly merging subsequent sentences in a corpus creates models that train faster and perform better on tasks with long sequences. Upon comparing distillation architectures, we found that the larger DistilBERT architecture worked significantly better than the Bort hyperparametrization. Interestingly, we also found that the distilled models exhibit less gender-stereotypical bias than its teacher model. Since smaller architectures decrease the time to fine-tune, these models allow for more efficient training and more lightweight deployment of many Dutch downstream language tasks.
On the Effect of Pretraining Corpora on In-context Learning by a Large-scale Language Model
Authors: Seongjin Shin, Sang-Woo Lee, Hwijeen Ahn, Sungdong Kim, HyoungSeok Kim, Boseop Kim, Kyunghyun Cho, Gichang Lee, WooMyoung Park, Jung-Woo Ha, Nako Sung
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Many recent studies on large-scale language models have reported successful in-context zero- and few-shot learning ability. However, the in-depth analysis of when in-context learning occurs is still lacking. For example, it is unknown how in-context learning performance changes as the training corpus varies. Here, we investigate the effects of the source and size of the pretraining corpus on in-context learning in HyperCLOVA, a Korean-centric GPT-3 model. From our in-depth investigation, we introduce the following observations: (1) in-context learning performance heavily depends on the corpus domain source, and the size of the pretraining corpus does not necessarily determine the emergence of in-context learning, (2) in-context learning ability can emerge when a language model is trained on a combination of multiple corpora, even when each corpus does not result in in-context learning on its own, (3) pretraining with a corpus related to a downstream task does not always guarantee the competitive in-context learning performance of the downstream task, especially in the few-shot setting, and (4) the relationship between language modeling (measured in perplexity) and in-context learning does not always correlate: e.g., low perplexity does not always imply high in-context few-shot learning performance.
Post-Training Dialogue Summarization using Pseudo-Paraphrasing
Authors: Qi Jia, Yizhu Liu, Haifeng Tang, Kenny Q. Zhu
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (NAACL) 2022 7

Previous dialogue summarization techniques adapt large language models pretrained on the narrative text by injecting dialogue-specific features into the models. These features either require additional knowledge to recognize or make the resulting models harder to tune. To bridge the format gap between dialogues and narrative summaries in dialogue summarization tasks, we propose to post-train pretrained language models (PLMs) to rephrase from dialogue to narratives. After that, the model is fine-tuned for dialogue summarization as usual. Comprehensive experiments show that our approach significantly improves vanilla PLMs on dialogue summarization and outperforms other SOTA models by the summary quality and implementation costs.
Simplifying Multilingual News Clustering Through Projection From a Shared Space
Authors: João Santos, Afonso Mendes, Sebastião Miranda
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Clustering

The task of organizing and clustering multilingual news articles for media monitoring is essential to follow news stories in real time. Most approaches to this task focus on high-resource languages (mostly English), with low-resource languages being disregarded. With that in mind, we present a much simpler online system that is able to cluster an incoming stream of documents without depending on language-specific features. We empirically demonstrate that the use of multilingual contextual embeddings as the document representation significantly improves clustering quality. We challenge previous crosslingual approaches by removing the precondition of building monolingual clusters. We model the clustering process as a set of linear classifiers to aggregate similar documents, and correct closely-related multilingual clusters through merging in an online fashion. Our system achieves state-of-the-art results on a multilingual news stream clustering dataset, and we introduce a new evaluation for zero-shot news clustering in multiple languages. We make our code available as open-source.
HPT: Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning for Hierarchical Text Classification
Authors: Zihan Wang, Peiyi Wang, Tianyu Liu, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Zhifang Sui, Houfeng Wang
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, text-classification, Text Classification

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging subtask of multi-label classification due to its complex label hierarchy. Recently, the pretrained language models (PLM)have been widely adopted in HTC through a fine-tuning paradigm. However, in this paradigm, there exists a huge gap between the classification tasks with sophisticated label hierarchy and the masked language model (MLM) pretraining tasks of PLMs and thus the potentials of PLMs can not be fully tapped. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose HPT, a Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning method to handle HTC from a multi-label MLM perspective. Specifically, we construct a dynamic virtual template and label words that take the form of soft prompts to fuse the label hierarchy knowledge and introduce a zero-bounded multi-label cross entropy loss to harmonize the objectives of HTC and MLM. Extensive experiments show HPT achieves state-of-the-art performances on 3 popular HTC datasets and is adept at handling the imbalance and low resource situations. Our code is available at https://github.com/wzh9969/HPT.
Placing M-Phasis on the Plurality of Hate: A Feature-Based Corpus of Hate Online
Authors: Dana Ruiter, Liane Reiners, Ashwin Geet D'Sa, Thomas Kleinbauer, Dominique Fohr, Irina Illina, Dietrich Klakow, Christian Schemer, Angeliki Monnier
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Articles, Hate Speech Detection

Even though hate speech (HS) online has been an important object of research in the last decade, most HS-related corpora over-simplify the phenomenon of hate by attempting to label user comments as "hate" or "neutral". This ignores the complex and subjective nature of HS, which limits the real-life applicability of classifiers trained on these corpora. In this study, we present the M-Phasis corpus, a corpus of ~9k German and French user comments collected from migration-related news articles. It goes beyond the "hate"-"neutral" dichotomy and is instead annotated with 23 features, which in combination become descriptors of various types of speech, ranging from critical comments to implicit and explicit expressions of hate. The annotations are performed by 4 native speakers per language and achieve high (0.77 <= k <= 1) inter-annotator agreements. Besides describing the corpus creation and presenting insights from a content, error and domain analysis, we explore its data characteristics by training several classification baselines.
D3: A Massive Dataset of Scholarly Metadata for Analyzing the State of Computer Science Research
Authors: Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Saif M. Mohammad, Bela Gipp
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Articles

DBLP is the largest open-access repository of scientific articles on computer science and provides metadata associated with publications, authors, and venues. We retrieved more than 6 million publications from DBLP and extracted pertinent metadata (e.g., abstracts, author affiliations, citations) from the publication texts to create the DBLP Discovery Dataset (D3). D3 can be used to identify trends in research activity, productivity, focus, bias, accessibility, and impact of computer science research. We present an initial analysis focused on the volume of computer science research (e.g., number of papers, authors, research activity), trends in topics of interest, and citation patterns. Our findings show that computer science is a growing research field (approx. 15% annually), with an active and collaborative researcher community. While papers in recent years present more bibliographical entries in comparison to previous decades, the average number of citations has been declining. Investigating papers' abstracts reveals that recent topic trends are clearly reflected in D3. Finally, we list further applications of D3 and pose supplemental research questions. The D3 dataset, our findings, and source code are publicly available for research purposes.
Tailor: A Prompt-Based Approach to Attribute-Based Controlled Text Generation
Authors: Kexin Yang, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Baosong Yang, Mingfeng Xue, Boxing Chen, Jun Xie
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Position, Text Generation

Attribute-based Controlled Text Generation (CTG) refers to generating sentences that satisfy desirable attributes (e.g., emotions and topics). Existing works often utilize fine-tuning or resort to extra attribute classifiers, yet suffer from storage and inference time increases. To address these concerns, we explore attribute-based CTG in a prompt-based manner. In short, the proposed Tailor represents each attribute as a pre-trained continuous vector (i.e., single-attribute prompt) and guides the generation of a fixed PLM switch to a pre-specified attribute. We experimentally find that these prompts can be simply concatenated as a whole to multi-attribute CTG without any re-training, yet raises problems of fluency decrease and position sensitivity. To this end, Tailor provides a multi-attribute prompt mask and a re-indexing position-ids sequence to bridge the gap between the training (one prompt for each task) and testing stage (concatenating more than one prompt). To further enhance such single-attribute prompt combinations, Tailor also introduces a trainable prompt connector, which can be concatenated with any two single-attribute prompts to multi-attribute text generation. Experiments on 11 attribute-specific generation tasks demonstrate strong performances of Tailor on both single-attribute and multi-attribute CTG, with 0.08\% training parameters of a GPT-2.
Neighbors Are Not Strangers: Improving Non-Autoregressive Translation under Low-Frequency Lexical Constraints
Authors: Chun Zeng, Jiangjie Chen, Tianyi Zhuang, Rui Xu, Hao Yang, Ying Qin, Shimin Tao, Yanghua Xiao
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Translation

However, current autoregressive approaches suffer from high latency. In this paper, we focus on non-autoregressive translation (NAT) for this problem for its efficiency advantage. We identify that current constrained NAT models, which are based on iterative editing, do not handle low-frequency constraints well. To this end, we propose a plug-in algorithm for this line of work, i.e., Aligned Constrained Training (ACT), which alleviates this problem by familiarizing the model with the source-side context of the constraints. Experiments on the general and domain datasets show that our model improves over the backbone constrained NAT model in constraint preservation and translation quality, especially for rare constraints.
The Copenhagen Corpus of Eye Tracking Recordings from Natural Reading of Danish Texts
Authors: Nora Hollenstein, Maria Barrett, Marina Björnsdóttir
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

Eye movement recordings from reading are one of the richest signals of human language processing. Corpora of eye movements during reading of contextualized running text is a way of making such records available for natural language processing purposes. Such corpora already exist in some languages. We present CopCo, the Copenhagen Corpus of eye tracking recordings from natural reading of Danish texts. It is the first eye tracking corpus of its kind for the Danish language. CopCo includes 1,832 sentences with 34,897 tokens of Danish text extracted from a collection of speech manuscripts. This first release of the corpus contains eye tracking data from 22 participants. It will be extended continuously with more participants and texts from other genres. We assess the data quality of the recorded eye movements and find that the extracted features are in line with related research. The dataset available here: https://osf.io/ud8s5/.
Improving robustness of language models from a geometry-aware perspective
Authors: Bin Zhu, Zhaoquan Gu, Le Wang, Jinyin Chen, Qi Xuan
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Recent studies have found that removing the norm-bounded projection and increasing search steps in adversarial training can significantly improve robustness. However, we observe that a too large number of search steps can hurt accuracy. We aim to obtain strong robustness efficiently using fewer steps. Through a toy experiment, we find that perturbing the clean data to the decision boundary but not crossing it does not degrade the test accuracy. Inspired by this, we propose friendly adversarial data augmentation (FADA) to generate friendly adversarial data. On top of FADA, we propose geometry-aware adversarial training (GAT) to perform adversarial training on friendly adversarial data so that we can save a large number of search steps. Comprehensive experiments across two widely used datasets and three pre-trained language models demonstrate that GAT can obtain stronger robustness via fewer steps. In addition, we provide extensive empirical results and in-depth analyses on robustness to facilitate future studies.
Cross-modal Memory Networks for Radiology Report Generation
Authors: Zhihong Chen, Yaling Shen, Yan Song, Xiang Wan
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Decoder, Medical Diagnosis, Text Generation

Medical imaging plays a significant role in clinical practice of medical diagnosis, where the text reports of the images are essential in understanding them and facilitating later treatments. By generating the reports automatically, it is beneficial to help lighten the burden of radiologists and significantly promote clinical automation, which already attracts much attention in applying artificial intelligence to medical domain. Previous studies mainly follow the encoder-decoder paradigm and focus on the aspect of text generation, with few studies considering the importance of cross-modal mappings and explicitly exploit such mappings to facilitate radiology report generation. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal memory networks (CMN) to enhance the encoder-decoder framework for radiology report generation, where a shared memory is designed to record the alignment between images and texts so as to facilitate the interaction and generation across modalities. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, where state-of-the-art performance is achieved on two widely used benchmark datasets, i.e., IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR. Further analyses also prove that our model is able to better align information from radiology images and texts so as to help generating more accurate reports in terms of clinical indicators.
HybriDialogue: An Information-Seeking Dialogue Dataset Grounded on Tabular and Textual Data
Authors: Kai Nakamura, Sharon Levy, Yi-Lin Tuan, Wenhu Chen, William Yang Wang
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Response Generation, Retrieval

A pressing challenge in current dialogue systems is to successfully converse with users on topics with information distributed across different modalities. Previous work in multiturn dialogue systems has primarily focused on either text or table information. In more realistic scenarios, having a joint understanding of both is critical as knowledge is typically distributed over both unstructured and structured forms. We present a new dialogue dataset, HybriDialogue, which consists of crowdsourced natural conversations grounded on both Wikipedia text and tables. The conversations are created through the decomposition of complex multihop questions into simple, realistic multiturn dialogue interactions. We propose retrieval, system state tracking, and dialogue response generation tasks for our dataset and conduct baseline experiments for each. Our results show that there is still ample opportunity for improvement, demonstrating the importance of building stronger dialogue systems that can reason over the complex setting of information-seeking dialogue grounded on tables and text.
Derivation of Learning Rules for Coupled Principal Component Analysis in a Lagrange-Newton Framework
Authors: Ralf Möller
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00

We describe a Lagrange-Newton framework for the derivation of learning rules with desirable convergence properties and apply it to the case of principal component analysis (PCA). In this framework, a Newton descent is applied to an extended variable vector which also includes Lagrange multipliers introduced with constraints. The Newton descent guarantees equal convergence speed from all directions, but is also required to produce stable fixed points in the system with the extended state vector. The framework produces "coupled" PCA learning rules which simultaneously estimate an eigenvector and the corresponding eigenvalue in cross-coupled differential equations. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach for two PCA learning rules, one for the estimation of the principal, the other for the estimate of an arbitrary eigenvector-eigenvalue pair (eigenpair).
Benchmarking the Hooke-Jeeves Method, MTS-LS1, and BSrr on the Large-scale BBOB Function Set
Authors: Ryoji Tanabe
Date: 2022-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

This paper investigates the performance of three black-box optimizers exploiting separability on the 24 large-scale BBOB functions, including the Hooke-Jeeves method, MTS-LS1, and BSrr. Although BSrr was not specially designed for large-scale optimization, the results show that BSrr has a state-of-the-art performance on the five separable large-scale BBOB functions. The results show that the asymmetry significantly influences the performance of MTS-LS1. The results also show that the Hooke-Jeeves method performs better than MTS-LS1 on unimodal separable BBOB functions.
Online Distributed Evolutionary Optimization of Time Division Multiple Access Protocols
Authors: Anil Yaman, Tim Van der Lee, Giovanni Iacca
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00

With the advent of cheap, miniaturized electronics, ubiquitous networking has reached an unprecedented level of complexity, scale and heterogeneity, becoming the core of several modern applications such as smart industry, smart buildings and smart cities. A crucial element for network performance is the protocol stack, namely the sets of rules and data formats that determine how the nodes in the network exchange information. A great effort has been put to devise formal techniques to synthesize (offline) network protocols, starting from system specifications and strict assumptions on the network environment. However, offline design can be hard to apply in the most modern network applications, either due to numerical complexity, or to the fact that the environment might be unknown and the specifications might not available. In these cases, online protocol design and adaptation has the potential to offer a much more scalable and robust solution. Nevertheless, so far only a few attempts have been done towards online automatic protocol design. Here, we envision a protocol as an emergent property of a network, obtained by an environment-driven Distributed Hill Climbing algorithm that uses node-local reinforcement signals to evolve, at runtime and without any central coordination, a network protocol from scratch. We test this approach with a 3-state Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and we observe its emergence in networks of various scales and with various settings. We also show how Distributed Hill Climbing can reach different trade-offs in terms of energy consumption and protocol performance.
Asymptotic Inference for Infinitely Imbalanced Logistic Regression
Authors: Dorian Goldman, Bo Zhang
Date: 2022-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

In this paper we extend the work of Owen (2007) by deriving a second order expansion for the slope parameter in logistic regression, when the size of the majority class is unbounded and the minority class is finite. More precisely, we demonstrate that the second order term converges to a normal distribution and explicitly compute its variance, which surprisingly once again depends only on the mean of the minority class points and not their arrangement under mild regularity assumptions. In the case that the majority class is normally distributed, we illustrate that the variance of the the limiting slope depends exponentially on the z-score of the average of the minority class's points with respect to the majority class's distribution. We confirm our results by Monte Carlo simulations.