pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
General Framework for Reversible Data Hiding in Texts Based on Masked Language Modeling
Authors: Xiaoyan Zheng, Yurun Fang, Hanzhou Wu
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling

With the fast development of natural language processing, recent advances in information hiding focus on covertly embedding secret information into texts. These algorithms either modify a given cover text or directly generate a text containing secret information, which, however, are not reversible, meaning that the original text not carrying secret information cannot be perfectly recovered unless much side information are shared in advance. To tackle with this problem, in this paper, we propose a general framework to embed secret information into a given cover text, for which the embedded information and the original cover text can be perfectly retrieved from the marked text. The main idea of the proposed method is to use a masked language model to generate such a marked text that the cover text can be reconstructed by collecting the words of some positions and the words of the other positions can be processed to extract the secret information. Our results show that the original cover text and the secret information can be successfully embedded and extracted. Meanwhile, the marked text carrying secret information has good fluency and semantic quality, indicating that the proposed method has satisfactory security, which has been verified by experimental results. Furthermore, there is no need for the data hider and data receiver to share the language model, which significantly reduces the side information and thus has good potential in applications.
SynWMD: Syntax-aware Word Mover's Distance for Sentence Similarity Evaluation
Authors: Chengwei Wei, Bin Wang, C. -C. Jay Kuo
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence, Sentence Classification, Sentence Similarity, STS, text similarity

Word Mover's Distance (WMD) computes the distance between words and models text similarity with the moving cost between words in two text sequences. Yet, it does not offer good performance in sentence similarity evaluation since it does not incorporate word importance and fails to take inherent contextual and structural information in a sentence into account. An improved WMD method using the syntactic parse tree, called Syntax-aware Word Mover's Distance (SynWMD), is proposed to address these two shortcomings in this work. First, a weighted graph is built upon the word co-occurrence statistics extracted from the syntactic parse trees of sentences. The importance of each word is inferred from graph connectivities. Second, the local syntactic parsing structure of words is considered in computing the distance between words. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SynWMD, we conduct experiments on 6 textual semantic similarity (STS) datasets and 4 sentence classification datasets. Experimental results show that SynWMD achieves state-of-the-art performance on STS tasks. It also outperforms other WMD-based methods on sentence classification tasks.
Multilingual HateCheck: Functional Tests for Multilingual Hate Speech Detection Models
Authors: Paul Röttger, Haitham Seelawi, Debora Nozza, Zeerak Talat, Bertie Vidgen
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (WOAH) 2022 7
Tasks: Diagnostic, Hate Speech Detection

Hate speech detection models are typically evaluated on held-out test sets. However, this risks painting an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of model performance because of increasingly well-documented systematic gaps and biases in hate speech datasets. To enable more targeted diagnostic insights, recent research has thus introduced functional tests for hate speech detection models. However, these tests currently only exist for English-language content, which means that they cannot support the development of more effective models in other languages spoken by billions across the world. To help address this issue, we introduce Multilingual HateCheck (MHC), a suite of functional tests for multilingual hate speech detection models. MHC covers 34 functionalities across ten languages, which is more languages than any other hate speech dataset. To illustrate MHC's utility, we train and test a high-performing multilingual hate speech detection model, and reveal critical model weaknesses for monolingual and cross-lingual applications.
Fewer Errors, but More Stereotypes? The Effect of Model Size on Gender Bias
Authors: Yarden Tal, Inbal Magar, Roy Schwartz
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (GeBNLP) 2022 7
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Memorization

The size of pretrained models is increasing, and so is their performance on a variety of NLP tasks. However, as their memorization capacity grows, they might pick up more social biases. In this work, we examine the connection between model size and its gender bias (specifically, occupational gender bias). We measure bias in three masked language model families (RoBERTa, DeBERTa, and T5) in two setups: directly using prompt based method, and using a downstream task (Winogender). We find on the one hand that larger models receive higher bias scores on the former task, but when evaluated on the latter, they make fewer gender errors. To examine these potentially conflicting results, we carefully investigate the behavior of the different models on Winogender. We find that while larger models outperform smaller ones, the probability that their mistakes are caused by gender bias is higher. Moreover, we find that the proportion of stereotypical errors compared to anti-stereotypical ones grows with the model size. Our findings highlight the potential risks that can arise from increasing model size.
The Makerere Radio Speech Corpus: A Luganda Radio Corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition
Authors: Jonathan Mukiibi, Andrew Katumba, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Ali Hussein, Josh Meyer
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Building a usable radio monitoring automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is a challenging task for under-resourced languages and yet this is paramount in societies where radio is the main medium of public communication and discussions. Initial efforts by the United Nations in Uganda have proved how understanding the perceptions of rural people who are excluded from social media is important in national planning. However, these efforts are being challenged by the absence of transcribed speech datasets. In this paper, The Makerere Artificial Intelligence research lab releases a Luganda radio speech corpus of 155 hours. To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available radio dataset in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper describes the development of the voice corpus and presents baseline Luganda ASR performance results using Coqui STT toolkit, an open source speech recognition toolkit.
Boosting Cross-Domain Speech Recognition with Self-Supervision
Authors: Han Zhu, Gaofeng Cheng, Jindong Wang, Wenxin Hou, Pengyuan Zhang, Yonghong Yan
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Domain Adaptation, Pseudo Label, Self-Supervised Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The cross-domain performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) could be severely hampered due to the mismatch between training and testing distributions. Since the target domain usually lacks labeled data, and domain shifts exist at acoustic and linguistic levels, it is challenging to perform unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for ASR. Previous work has shown that self-supervised learning (SSL) or pseudo-labeling (PL) is effective in UDA by exploiting the self-supervisions of unlabeled data. However, these self-supervisions also face performance degradation in mismatched domain distributions, which previous work fails to address. This work presents a systematic UDA framework to fully utilize the unlabeled data with self-supervision in the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. On the one hand, we apply continued pre-training and data replay techniques to mitigate the domain mismatch of the SSL pre-trained model. On the other hand, we propose a domain-adaptive fine-tuning approach based on the PL technique with three unique modifications: Firstly, we design a dual-branch PL method to decrease the sensitivity to the erroneous pseudo-labels; Secondly, we devise an uncertainty-aware confidence filtering strategy to improve pseudo-label correctness; Thirdly, we introduce a two-step PL approach to incorporate target domain linguistic knowledge, thus generating more accurate target domain pseudo-labels. Experimental results on various cross-domain scenarios demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively boosts the cross-domain performance and significantly outperforms previous approaches.
Bilingual by default: Voice Assistants and the role of code-switching in creating a bilingual user experience
Authors: Helin Cihan, Yunhan Wu, Paola Peña, Justin Edwards, Benjamin Cowan
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

Conversational User Interfaces such as Voice Assistants are hugely popular. Yet they are designed to be monolingual by default, lacking support for, or sensitivity to, the bilingual dialogue experience. In this provocation paper, we highlight the language production challenges faced in VA interaction for bilingual users. We argue that, by facilitating phenomena seen in bilingual interaction, such as code-switching, we can foster a more inclusive and improved user experience for bilingual users. We also explore ways that this might be achieved, through the support of multiple language recognition as well as being sensitive to the preferences of code-switching in speech output.
Misspelling Semantics In Thai
Authors: Pakawat Nakwijit, Matthew Purver
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

User-generated content is full of misspellings. Rather than being just random noise, we hypothesise that many misspellings contain hidden semantics that can be leveraged for language understanding tasks. This paper presents a fine-grained annotated corpus of misspelling in Thai, together with an analysis of misspelling intention and its possible semantics to get a better understanding of the misspelling patterns observed in the corpus. In addition, we introduce two approaches to incorporate the semantics of misspelling: Misspelling Average Embedding (MAE) and Misspelling Semantic Tokens (MST). Experiments on a sentiment analysis task confirm our overall hypothesis: additional semantics from misspelling can boost the micro F1 score up to 0.4-2%, while blindly normalising misspelling is harmful and suboptimal.
Studying the role of named entities for content preservation in text style transfer
Authors: Nikolay Babakov, David Dale, Varvara Logacheva, Irina Krotova, Alexander Panchenko
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer, Text Style Transfer

Text style transfer techniques are gaining popularity in Natural Language Processing, finding various applications such as text detoxification, sentiment, or formality transfer. However, the majority of the existing approaches were tested on such domains as online communications on public platforms, music, or entertainment yet none of them were applied to the domains which are typical for task-oriented production systems, such as personal plans arrangements (e.g. booking of flights or reserving a table in a restaurant). We fill this gap by studying formality transfer in this domain. We noted that the texts in this domain are full of named entities, which are very important for keeping the original sense of the text. Indeed, if for example, someone communicates the destination city of a flight it must not be altered. Thus, we concentrate on the role of named entities in content preservation for formality text style transfer. We collect a new dataset for the evaluation of content similarity measures in text style transfer. It is taken from a corpus of task-oriented dialogues and contains many important entities related to realistic requests that make this dataset particularly useful for testing style transfer models before using them in production. Besides, we perform an error analysis of a pre-trained formality transfer model and introduce a simple technique to use information about named entities to enhance the performance of baseline content similarity measures used in text style transfer.
SPBERTQA: A Two-Stage Question Answering System Based on Sentence Transformers for Medical Texts
Authors: Nhung Thi-Hong Nguyen, Phuong Phan-Dieu Ha, Luan Thanh Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen, Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Sentence

Question answering (QA) systems have gained explosive attention in recent years. However, QA tasks in Vietnamese do not have many datasets. Significantly, there is mostly no dataset in the medical domain. Therefore, we built a Vietnamese Healthcare Question Answering dataset (ViHealthQA), including 10,015 question-answer passage pairs for this task, in which questions from health-interested users were asked on prestigious health websites and answers from highly qualified experts. This paper proposes a two-stage QA system based on Sentence-BERT (SBERT) using multiple negatives ranking (MNR) loss combined with BM25. Then, we conduct diverse experiments with many bag-of-words models to assess our system's performance. With the obtained results, this system achieves better performance than traditional methods.
Domain-Adaptive Text Classification with Structured Knowledge from Unlabeled Data
Authors: Tian Li, Xiang Chen, Zhen Dong, Weijiang Yu, Yijun Yan, Kurt Keutzer, Shanghang Zhang
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Domain Adaptation, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Domain adaptive text classification is a challenging problem for the large-scale pretrained language models because they often require expensive additional labeled data to adapt to new domains. Existing works usually fails to leverage the implicit relationships among words across domains. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Domain Adaptation with Structured Knowledge (DASK), to enhance domain adaptation by exploiting word-level semantic relationships. DASK first builds a knowledge graph to capture the relationship between pivot terms (domain-independent words) and non-pivot terms in the target domain. Then during training, DASK injects pivot-related knowledge graph information into source domain texts. For the downstream task, these knowledge-injected texts are fed into a BERT variant capable of processing knowledge-injected textual data. Thanks to the knowledge injection, our model learns domain-invariant features for non-pivots according to their relationships with pivots. DASK ensures the pivots to have domain-invariant behaviors by dynamically inferring via the polarity scores of candidate pivots during training with pseudo-labels. We validate DASK on a wide range of cross-domain sentiment classification tasks and observe up to 2.9% absolute performance improvement over baselines for 20 different domain pairs. Code will be made available at https://github.com/hikaru-nara/DASK.
LUT-GEMM: Quantized Matrix Multiplication based on LUTs for Efficient Inference in Large-Scale Generative Language Models
Authors: Gunho Park, Baeseong Park, Minsub Kim, Sungjae Lee, Jeonghoon Kim, Beomseok Kwon, Se Jung Kwon, Byeongwook Kim, Youngjoo Lee, Dongsoo Lee
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Quantization, Self-Supervised Learning

Recent advances in self-supervised learning and the Transformer architecture have significantly improved natural language processing (NLP), achieving remarkably low perplexity. However, the growing size of NLP models introduces a memory wall problem during the generation phase. To mitigate this issue, recent efforts have focused on quantizing model weights to sub-4-bit precision while preserving full precision for activations, resulting in practical speed-ups during inference on a single GPU. However, these improvements primarily stem from reduced memory movement, which necessitates a resource-intensive dequantization process rather than actual computational reduction. In this paper, we introduce LUT-GEMM, an efficient kernel for quantized matrix multiplication, which not only eliminates the resource-intensive dequantization process but also reduces computational costs compared to previous kernels for weight-only quantization. Furthermore, we proposed group-wise quantization to offer a flexible trade-off between compression ratio and accuracy. The impact of LUT-GEMM is facilitated by implementing high compression ratios through low-bit quantization and efficient LUT-based operations. We show experimentally that when applied to the OPT-175B model with 3-bit quantization, LUT-GEMM substantially accelerates token generation latency, achieving a remarkable 2.1$\times$ improvement on a single GPU when compared to OPTQ, which relies on the costly dequantization process.
MME-CRS: Multi-Metric Evaluation Based on Correlation Re-Scaling for Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue
Authors: Pengfei Zhang, Xiaohui Hu, Kaidong Yu, Jian Wang, Song Han, Cao Liu, Chunyang Yuan
Date: 2022-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Evaluation, MME

Automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation is a crucial component of dialogue systems. Recently, learning-based evaluation metrics have achieved state-of-the-art performance in open-domain dialogue evaluation. However, these metrics, which only focus on a few qualities, are hard to evaluate dialogue comprehensively. Furthermore, these metrics lack an effective score composition approach for diverse evaluation qualities. To address the above problems, we propose a Multi-Metric Evaluation based on Correlation Re-Scaling (MME-CRS) for evaluating open-domain dialogue. Firstly, we build an evaluation metric composed of 5 groups of parallel sub-metrics called Multi-Metric Evaluation (MME) to evaluate the quality of dialogue comprehensively. Furthermore, we propose a novel score composition method called Correlation Re-Scaling (CRS) to model the relationship between sub-metrics and diverse qualities. Our approach MME-CRS ranks first on the final test data of DSTC10 track5 subtask1 Automatic Open-domain Dialogue Evaluation Challenge with a large margin, which proved the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Transfer Learning for Robust Low-Resource Children's Speech ASR with Transformers and Source-Filter Warping
Authors: Jenthe Thienpondt, Kris Demuynck
Date: 2022-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Data Augmentation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are known to exhibit difficulties when transcribing children's speech. This can mainly be attributed to the absence of large children's speech corpora to train robust ASR models and the resulting domain mismatch when decoding children's speech with systems trained on adult data. In this paper, we propose multiple enhancements to alleviate these issues. First, we propose a data augmentation technique based on the source-filter model of speech to close the domain gap between adult and children's speech. This enables us to leverage the data availability of adult speech corpora by making these samples perceptually similar to children's speech. Second, using this augmentation strategy, we apply transfer learning on a Transformer model pre-trained on adult data. This model follows the recently introduced XLS-R architecture, a wav2vec 2.0 model pre-trained on several cross-lingual adult speech corpora to learn general and robust acoustic frame-level representations. Adopting this model for the ASR task using adult data augmented with the proposed source-filter warping strategy and a limited amount of in-domain children's speech significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art results on the PF-STAR British English Children's Speech corpus with a 4.86% WER on the official test set.
Learning Multiscale Transformer Models for Sequence Generation
Authors: Bei Li, Tong Zheng, Yi Jing, Chengbo Jiao, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
Date: 2022-06-19 00:00:00

Multiscale feature hierarchies have been witnessed the success in the computer vision area. This further motivates researchers to design multiscale Transformer for natural language processing, mostly based on the self-attention mechanism. For example, restricting the receptive field across heads or extracting local fine-grained features via convolutions. However, most of existing works directly modeled local features but ignored the word-boundary information. This results in redundant and ambiguous attention distributions, which lacks of interpretability. In this work, we define those scales in different linguistic units, including sub-words, words and phrases. We built a multiscale Transformer model by establishing relationships among scales based on word-boundary information and phrase-level prior knowledge. The proposed \textbf{U}niversal \textbf{M}ulti\textbf{S}cale \textbf{T}ransformer, namely \textsc{Umst}, was evaluated on two sequence generation tasks. Notably, it yielded consistent performance gains over the strong baseline on several test sets without sacrificing the efficiency.
Can Language Models Capture Graph Semantics? From Graphs to Language Model and Vice-Versa
Authors: Tarun Garg, Kaushik Roy, Amit Sheth
Date: 2022-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Knowledge Graphs are a great resource to capture semantic knowledge in terms of entities and relationships between the entities. However, current deep learning models takes as input distributed representations or vectors. Thus, the graph is compressed in a vectorized representation. We conduct a study to examine if the deep learning model can compress a graph and then output the same graph with most of the semantics intact. Our experiments show that Transformer models are not able to express the full semantics of the input knowledge graph. We find that this is due to the disparity between the directed, relationship and type based information contained in a Knowledge Graph and the fully connected token-token undirected graphical interpretation of the Transformer Attention matrix.
Automatic Summarization of Russian Texts: Comparison of Extractive and Abstractive Methods
Authors: Valeriya Goloviznina, Evgeny Kotelnikov
Date: 2022-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

The development of large and super-large language models, such as GPT-3, T5, Switch Transformer, ERNIE, etc., has significantly improved the performance of text generation. One of the important research directions in this area is the generation of texts with arguments. The solution of this problem can be used in business meetings, political debates, dialogue systems, for preparation of student essays. One of the main domains for these applications is the economic sphere. The key problem of the argument text generation for the Russian language is the lack of annotated argumentation corpora. In this paper, we use translated versions of the Argumentative Microtext, Persuasive Essays and UKP Sentential corpora to fine-tune RuBERT model. Further, this model is used to annotate the corpus of economic news by argumentation. Then the annotated corpus is employed to fine-tune the ruGPT-3 model, which generates argument texts. The results show that this approach improves the accuracy of the argument generation by more than 20 percentage points (63.2% vs. 42.5%) compared to the original ruGPT-3 model.