pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Neural Network Augmented Compartmental Pandemic Models
Authors: Lorenz Kummer, Kevin Sidak
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Epidemiology

Compartmental models are a tool commonly used in epidemiology for the mathematical modelling of the spread of infectious diseases, with their most popular representative being the Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model and its derivatives. However, current SIR models are bounded in their capabilities to model government policies in the form of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and weather effects and offer limited predictive power. More capable alternatives such as agent based models (ABMs) are computationally expensive and require specialized hardware. We introduce a neural network augmented SIR model that can be run on commodity hardware, takes NPIs and weather effects into account and offers improved predictive power as well as counterfactual analysis capabilities. We demonstrate our models improvement of the state-of-the-art modeling COVID-19 in Austria during the 03.2020 to 03.2021 period and provide an outlook for the future up to 01.2024.
Planting and Mitigating Memorized Content in Predictive-Text Language Models
Authors: C. M. Downey, Wei Dai, Huseyin A. Inan, Kim Laine, Saurabh Naik, Tomasz Religa
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: L2 Regularization, Memorization, Privacy Preserving

Language models are widely deployed to provide automatic text completion services in user products. However, recent research has revealed that language models (especially large ones) bear considerable risk of memorizing private training data, which is then vulnerable to leakage and extraction by adversaries. In this study, we test the efficacy of a range of privacy-preserving techniques to mitigate unintended memorization of sensitive user text, while varying other factors such as model size and adversarial conditions. We test both "heuristic" mitigations (those without formal privacy guarantees) and Differentially Private training, which provides provable levels of privacy at the cost of some model performance. Our experiments show that (with the exception of L2 regularization), heuristic mitigations are largely ineffective in preventing memorization in our test suite, possibly because they make too strong of assumptions about the characteristics that define "sensitive" or "private" text. In contrast, Differential Privacy reliably prevents memorization in our experiments, despite its computational and model-performance costs.
Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations in Machine Translation: Model Internal Workings Alone Do Well, Sentence Similarity Even Better
Authors: David Dale, Elena Voita, Loïc Barrault, Marta R. Costa-jussà
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Sentence Similarity, Translation

While the problem of hallucinations in neural machine translation has long been recognized, so far the progress on its alleviation is very little. Indeed, recently it turned out that without artificially encouraging models to hallucinate, previously existing methods fall short and even the standard sequence log-probability is more informative. It means that characteristics internal to the model can give much more information than we expect, and before using external models and measures, we first need to ask: how far can we go if we use nothing but the translation model itself ? We propose to use a method that evaluates the percentage of the source contribution to a generated translation. Intuitively, hallucinations are translations "detached" from the source, hence they can be identified by low source contribution. This method improves detection accuracy for the most severe hallucinations by a factor of 2 and is able to alleviate hallucinations at test time on par with the previous best approach that relies on external models. Next, if we move away from internal model characteristics and allow external tools, we show that using sentence similarity from cross-lingual embeddings further improves these results.
Fine-grained Czech News Article Dataset: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Trustworthiness Analysis
Authors: Matyáš Boháček, Michal Bravanský, Filip Trhlík, Václav Moravec
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

We present the Verifee Dataset: a novel dataset of news articles with fine-grained trustworthiness annotations. We develop a detailed methodology that assesses the texts based on their parameters encompassing editorial transparency, journalist conventions, and objective reporting while penalizing manipulative techniques. We bring aboard a diverse set of researchers from social, media, and computer sciences to overcome barriers and limited framing of this interdisciplinary problem. We collect over $10,000$ unique articles from almost $60$ Czech online news sources. These are categorized into one of the $4$ classes across the credibility spectrum we propose, raging from entirely trustworthy articles all the way to the manipulative ones. We produce detailed statistics and study trends emerging throughout the set. Lastly, we fine-tune multiple popular sequence-to-sequence language models using our dataset on the trustworthiness classification task and report the best testing F-1 score of $0.52$. We open-source the dataset, annotation methodology, and annotators' instructions in full length at https://verifee.ai/research to enable easy build-up work. We believe similar methods can help prevent disinformation and educate in the realm of media literacy.
Context-aware Fine-tuning of Self-supervised Speech Models
Authors: Suwon Shon, Felix Wu, Kwangyoun Kim, Prashant Sridhar, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Sentiment Analysis, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Self-supervised pre-trained transformers have improved the state of the art on a variety of speech tasks. Due to the quadratic time and space complexity of self-attention, they usually operate at the level of relatively short (e.g., utterance) segments. In this paper, we study the use of context, i.e., surrounding segments, during fine-tuning and propose a new approach called context-aware fine-tuning. We attach a context module on top of the last layer of a pre-trained model to encode the whole segment into a context embedding vector which is then used as an additional feature for the final prediction. During the fine-tuning stage, we introduce an auxiliary loss that encourages this context embedding vector to be similar to context vectors of surrounding segments. This allows the model to make predictions without access to these surrounding segments at inference time and requires only a tiny overhead compared to standard fine-tuned models. We evaluate the proposed approach using the SLUE and Libri-light benchmarks for several downstream tasks: Automatic speech recognition (ASR), named entity recognition (NER), and sentiment analysis (SA). The results show that context-aware fine-tuning not only outperforms a standard fine-tuning baseline but also rivals a strong context injection baseline that uses neighboring speech segments during inference.
Check-worthy Claim Detection across Topics for Automated Fact-checking
Authors: Amani S. Abumansour, Arkaitz Zubiaga
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Fact Checking, Few-Shot Learning

An important component of an automated fact-checking system is the claim check-worthiness detection system, which ranks sentences by prioritising them based on their need to be checked. Despite a body of research tackling the task, previous research has overlooked the challenging nature of identifying check-worthy claims across different topics. In this paper, we assess and quantify the challenge of detecting check-worthy claims for new, unseen topics. After highlighting the problem, we propose the AraCWA model to mitigate the performance deterioration when detecting check-worthy claims across topics. The AraCWA model enables boosting the performance for new topics by incorporating two components for few-shot learning and data augmentation. Using a publicly available dataset of Arabic tweets consisting of 14 different topics, we demonstrate that our proposed data augmentation strategy achieves substantial improvements across topics overall, where the extent of the improvement varies across topics. Further, we analyse the semantic similarities between topics, suggesting that the similarity metric could be used as a proxy to determine the difficulty level of an unseen topic prior to undertaking the task of labelling the underlying sentences.
BLASER: A Text-Free Speech-to-Speech Translation Evaluation Metric
Authors: Mingda Chen, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pierre Andrews, Justine Kao, Alexandre Mourachko, Holger Schwenk, Marta R. Costa-jussà
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Sentence, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Speech Translation, Translation

End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score of the translation quality that can be used as a proxy to human evaluation. To evaluate our approach, we construct training and evaluation sets from more than 40k human annotations covering seven language directions. The best results of BLASER are achieved by training with supervision from human rating scores. We show that when evaluated at the sentence level, BLASER correlates significantly better with human judgment compared to ASR-dependent metrics including ASR-SENTBLEU in all translation directions and ASR-COMET in five of them. Our analysis shows combining speech and text as inputs to BLASER does not increase the correlation with human scores, but best correlations are achieved when using speech, which motivates the goal of our research. Moreover, we show that using ASR for references is detrimental for text-based metrics.
Implementation of general formal translators
Authors: Iosif Iulian Petrila
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00

The general translator formalism and computing specific implementations are proposed. The implementation of specific elements necessary to process the source and destination information within the translators are presented. Some common directives or instructions, such as classes and procedures, were unified and generalized in order to allow general translations implementations. In order to cover general cases, two levels of processing are required, related to the source and destination information appropriate transformations, with the related control and processing instructions. The proposed general translator elements are useful for processing natural or artificial information described through any types of languages or systems.
Experiments on Generalizability of BERTopic on Multi-Domain Short Text
Authors: Muriël de Groot, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Marcel R. Haas
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Diversity

Topic modeling is widely used for analytically evaluating large collections of textual data. One of the most popular topic techniques is Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is flexible and adaptive, but not optimal for e.g. short texts from various domains. We explore how the state-of-the-art BERTopic algorithm performs on short multi-domain text and find that it generalizes better than LDA in terms of topic coherence and diversity. We further analyze the performance of the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm utilized by BERTopic and find that it classifies a majority of the documents as outliers. This crucial, yet overseen problem excludes too many documents from further analysis. When we replace HDBSCAN with k-Means, we achieve similar performance, but without outliers.
Utilizing distilBert transformer model for sentiment classification of COVID-19's Persian open-text responses
Authors: Fatemeh Sadat Masoumi, Mohammad bahrani
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused drastic alternations in human life in all aspects. The government's laws in this regard affected the lifestyle of all people. Due to this fact studying the sentiment of individuals is essential to be aware of the future impacts of the coming pandemics. To contribute to this aim, we proposed an NLP (Natural Language Processing) model to analyze open-text answers in a survey in Persian and detect positive and negative feelings of the people in Iran. In this study, a distilBert transformer model was applied to take on this task. We deployed three approaches to perform the comparison, and our best model could gain accuracy: 0.824, Precision: 0.824, Recall: 0.798, and F1 score: 0.804.
Metaphorical Polysemy Detection: Conventional Metaphor meets Word Sense Disambiguation
Authors: Rowan Hall Maudslay, Simone Teufel
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Sentence, Word Sense Disambiguation

Linguists distinguish between novel and conventional metaphor, a distinction which the metaphor detection task in NLP does not take into account. Instead, metaphoricity is formulated as a property of a token in a sentence, regardless of metaphor type. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of treating conventional metaphors in this way, and advocate for an alternative which we name 'metaphorical polysemy detection' (MPD). In MPD, only conventional metaphoricity is treated, and it is formulated as a property of word senses in a lexicon. We develop the first MPD model, which learns to identify conventional metaphors in the English WordNet. To train it, we present a novel training procedure that combines metaphor detection with word sense disambiguation (WSD). For evaluation, we manually annotate metaphor in two subsets of WordNet. Our model significantly outperforms a strong baseline based on a state-of-the-art metaphor detection model, attaining an ROC-AUC score of .78 (compared to .65) on one of the sets. Additionally, when paired with a WSD model, our approach outperforms a state-of-the-art metaphor detection model at identifying conventional metaphors in text (.659 F1 compared to .626).
Homonymy Information for English WordNet
Authors: Rowan Hall Maudslay, Simone Teufel
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: gwll (LREC) 2022 6
Tasks: Language Modelling

A widely acknowledged shortcoming of WordNet is that it lacks a distinction between word meanings which are systematically related (polysemy), and those which are coincidental (homonymy). Several previous works have attempted to fill this gap, by inferring this information using computational methods. We revisit this task, and exploit recent advances in language modelling to synthesise homonymy annotation for Princeton WordNet. Previous approaches treat the problem using clustering methods; by contrast, our method works by linking WordNet to the Oxford English Dictionary, which contains the information we need. To perform this alignment, we pair definitions based on their proximity in an embedding space produced by a Transformer model. Despite the simplicity of this approach, our best model attains an F1 of .97 on an evaluation set that we annotate. The outcome of our work is a high-quality homonymy annotation layer for Princeton WordNet, which we release.
FewFedWeight: Few-shot Federated Learning Framework across Multiple NLP Tasks
Authors: Weilong Dong, Xinwei Wu, Junzhuo Li, Shuangzhi Wu, Chao Bian, Deyi Xiong
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Few-Shot Learning, Multi-Task Learning

Massively multi-task learning with large language models has recently made substantial progress on few-shot generalization. However, this is usually performed in a centralized learning fashion, ignoring the privacy sensitivity issue of (annotated) data used in multiple tasks. To mitigate this issue, we propose FewFedWeight, a few-shot federated learning framework across multiple tasks, to achieve the best of both worlds: privacy preservation and cross-task generalization. FewFedWeight trains client models in isolated devices without sharing data. It broadcasts the global model in the server to each client and produces pseudo data for clients so that knowledge from the global model can be explored to enhance few-shot learning of each client model. An energy-based algorithm is further proposed to weight pseudo samples in order to reduce the negative impact of noise from the generated pseudo data. Adaptive model weights of client models are also tuned according to their performance. We use these model weights to dynamically aggregate client models to update the global model. Experiments on 118 NLP tasks show that FewFedWeight can significantly improve the performance of client models on 61% tasks with an average performance improvement rate of 30.5% over the baseline and substantially outperform FedAvg and other decentralized learning methods.
Law to Binary Tree -- An Formal Interpretation of Legal Natural Language
Authors: Ha-Thanh Nguyen, Vu Tran, Ngoc-Cam Le, Thi-Thuy Le, Quang-Huy Nguyen, Le-Minh Nguyen, Ken Satoh
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Legal Reasoning, Sentence

Knowledge representation and reasoning in law are essential to facilitate the automation of legal analysis and decision-making tasks. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on legal science, specifically legal taxonomy, for representing and reasoning with legal documents. Our approach interprets the regulations in legal documents as binary trees, which facilitates legal reasoning systems to make decisions and resolve logical contradictions. The advantages of this approach are twofold. First, legal reasoning can be performed on the basis of the binary tree representation of the regulations. Second, the binary tree representation of the regulations is more understandable than the existing sentence-based representations. We provide an example of how our approach can be used to interpret the regulations in a legal document.
Text-to-speech synthesis based on latent variable conversion using diffusion probabilistic model and variational autoencoder
Authors: Yusuke Yasuda, Tomoki Toda
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) is a task to convert texts into speech. Two of the factors that have been driving TTS are the advancements of probabilistic models and latent representation learning. We propose a TTS method based on latent variable conversion using a diffusion probabilistic model and the variational autoencoder (VAE). In our TTS method, we use a waveform model based on VAE, a diffusion model that predicts the distribution of latent variables in the waveform model from texts, and an alignment model that learns alignments between the text and speech latent sequences. Our method integrates diffusion with VAE by modeling both mean and variance parameters with diffusion, where the target distribution is determined by approximation from VAE. This latent variable conversion framework potentially enables us to flexibly incorporate various latent feature extractors. Our experiments show that our method is robust to linguistic labels with poor orthography and alignment errors.
Investigation of Japanese PnG BERT language model in text-to-speech synthesis for pitch accent language
Authors: Yusuke Yasuda, Tomoki Toda
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

End-to-end text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) can generate highly natural synthetic speech from raw text. However, rendering the correct pitch accents is still a challenging problem for end-to-end TTS. To tackle the challenge of rendering correct pitch accent in Japanese end-to-end TTS, we adopt PnG~BERT, a self-supervised pretrained model in the character and phoneme domain for TTS. We investigate the effects of features captured by PnG~BERT on Japanese TTS by modifying the fine-tuning condition to determine the conditions helpful inferring pitch accents. We manipulate content of PnG~BERT features from being text-oriented to speech-oriented by changing the number of fine-tuned layers during TTS. In addition, we teach PnG~BERT pitch accent information by fine-tuning with tone prediction as an additional downstream task. Our experimental results show that the features of PnG~BERT captured by pretraining contain information helpful inferring pitch accent, and PnG~BERT outperforms baseline Tacotron on accent correctness in a listening test.
Controllable Text Generation via Probability Density Estimation in the Latent Space
Authors: Yuxuan Gu, Xiaocheng Feng, Sicheng Ma, Lingyuan Zhang, Heng Gong, Weihong Zhong, Bing Qin
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Density Estimation, Diversity, Text Generation

Previous work on controllable text generation has explored the idea of control from the latent space, such as optimizing a representation with attribute-related classifiers or sampling a representation from relevant discrete samples. However, they are not effective enough in modeling both the latent space and the control, leaving controlled text with low quality and diversity. In this work, we propose a novel control framework using probability density estimation in the latent space. Our method utilizes an invertible transformation function, the Normalizing Flow, that maps the complex distributions in the latent space to simple Gaussian distributions in the prior space. Thus, we can perform sophisticated and flexible control in the prior space and feed the control effects back into the latent space owing to the one-one-mapping property of invertible transformations. Experiments on single-attribute controls and multi-attribute control reveal that our method outperforms several strong baselines on attribute relevance and text quality and achieves the SOTA. Further analysis of control strength adjustment demonstrates the flexibility of our control strategy.
ALERT: Adapting Language Models to Reasoning Tasks
Authors: Ping Yu, Tianlu Wang, Olga Golovneva, Badr Alkhamissy, Gargi Ghosh, Mona Diab, Asli Celikyilmaz
Date: 2022-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Inference

Current large language models can perform reasonably well on complex tasks that require step-by-step reasoning with few-shot learning. Are these models applying reasoning skills they have learnt during pre-training and reason outside of their training context, or are they simply memorizing their training corpus at finer granularity and have learnt to better understand their context? To tease apart these possibilities, we introduce ALERT, a benchmark and suite of analyses for assessing language models' reasoning ability comparing pre-trained and finetuned models on complex tasks that require reasoning skills to solve. ALERT provides a test bed to asses any language model on fine-grained reasoning skills, which spans over 20 datasets and covers 10 different reasoning skills. We leverage ALERT to further investigate the role of finetuning. With extensive empirical analysis we find that language models learn more reasoning skills such as textual entailment, abductive reasoning, and analogical reasoning during finetuning stage compared to pretraining state. We also find that when language models are finetuned they tend to overfit to the prompt template, which hurts the robustness of models causing generalization problems.