pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Modeling User Satisfaction Dynamics in Dialogue via Hawkes Process
Authors: Fanghua Ye, Zhiyuan Hu, Emine Yilmaz
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00

Dialogue systems have received increasing attention while automatically evaluating their performance remains challenging. User satisfaction estimation (USE) has been proposed as an alternative. It assumes that the performance of a dialogue system can be measured by user satisfaction and uses an estimator to simulate users. The effectiveness of USE depends heavily on the estimator. Existing estimators independently predict user satisfaction at each turn and ignore satisfaction dynamics across turns within a dialogue. In order to fully simulate users, it is crucial to take satisfaction dynamics into account. To fill this gap, we propose a new estimator ASAP (sAtisfaction eStimation via HAwkes Process) that treats user satisfaction across turns as an event sequence and employs a Hawkes process to effectively model the dynamics in this sequence. Experimental results on four benchmark dialogue datasets demonstrate that ASAP can substantially outperform state-of-the-art baseline estimators.
Enhancing Few-shot Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models: A Study on Prompt Design Strategies
Authors: Linyong Nan, Yilun Zhao, Weijin Zou, Narutatsu Ri, Jaesung Tae, Ellen Zhang, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, In-Context Learning, Question Answering, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new approach to various natural language processing tasks, utilizing large language models (LLMs) to make predictions based on context that has been supplemented with a few examples or task-specific instructions. In this paper, we aim to extend this method to question answering tasks that utilize structured knowledge sources, and improve Text-to-SQL systems by exploring various prompt design strategies for employing LLMs. We conduct a systematic investigation into different demonstration selection methods and optimal instruction formats for prompting LLMs in the Text-to-SQL task. Our approach involves leveraging the syntactic structure of an example's SQL query to retrieve demonstrations, and we demonstrate that pursuing both diversity and similarity in demonstration selection leads to enhanced performance. Furthermore, we show that LLMs benefit from database-related knowledge augmentations. Our most effective strategy outperforms the state-of-the-art system by 2.5 points (Execution Accuracy) and the best fine-tuned system by 5.1 points on the Spider dataset. These results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in adapting LLMs to the Text-to-SQL task, and we present an analysis of the factors contributing to the success of our strategy.
A Framework for Bidirectional Decoding: Case Study in Morphological Inflection
Authors: Marc E. Canby, Julia Hockenmaier
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, LEMMA, Morphological Inflection

Transformer-based encoder-decoder models that generate outputs in a left-to-right fashion have become standard for sequence-to-sequence tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework for decoding that produces sequences from the "outside-in": at each step, the model chooses to generate a token on the left, on the right, or join the left and right sequences. We argue that this is more principled than prior bidirectional decoders. Our proposal supports a variety of model architectures and includes several training methods, such as a dynamic programming algorithm that marginalizes out the latent ordering variable. Our model sets state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the 2022 and 2023 shared tasks, beating the next best systems by over 4.7 and 2.7 points in average accuracy respectively. The model performs particularly well on long sequences, can implicitly learn the split point of words composed of stem and affix, and performs better relative to the baseline on datasets that have fewer unique lemmas (but more examples per lemma).
Hystoc: Obtaining word confidences for fusion of end-to-end ASR systems
Authors: Karel Beneš, Martin Kocour, Lukáš Burget
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

End-to-end (e2e) systems have recently gained wide popularity in automatic speech recognition. However, these systems do generally not provide well-calibrated word-level confidences. In this paper, we propose Hystoc, a simple method for obtaining word-level confidences from hypothesis-level scores. Hystoc is an iterative alignment procedure which turns hypotheses from an n-best output of the ASR system into a confusion network. Eventually, word-level confidences are obtained as posterior probabilities in the individual bins of the confusion network. We show that Hystoc provides confidences that correlate well with the accuracy of the ASR hypothesis. Furthermore, we show that utilizing Hystoc in fusion of multiple e2e ASR systems increases the gains from the fusion by up to 1\,\% WER absolute on Spanish RTVE2020 dataset. Finally, we experiment with using Hystoc for direct fusion of n-best outputs from multiple systems, but we only achieve minor gains when fusing very similar systems.
Automated Few-shot Classification with Instruction-Finetuned Language Models
Authors: Rami Aly, Xingjian Shi, Kaixiang Lin, Aston Zhang, Andrew Gordon Wilson
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Few-Shot Learning, Retrieval

A particularly successful class of approaches for few-shot learning combines language models with prompts -- hand-crafted task descriptions that complement data samples. However, designing prompts by hand for each task commonly requires domain knowledge and substantial guesswork. We observe, in the context of classification tasks, that instruction finetuned language models exhibit remarkable prompt robustness, and we subsequently propose a simple method to eliminate the need for handcrafted prompts, named AuT-Few. This approach consists of (i) a prompt retrieval module that selects suitable task instructions from the instruction-tuning knowledge base, and (ii) the generation of two distinct, semantically meaningful, class descriptions and a selection mechanism via cross-validation. Over $12$ datasets, spanning $8$ classification tasks, we show that AuT-Few outperforms current state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods. Moreover, AuT-Few is the best ranking method across datasets on the RAFT few-shot benchmark. Notably, these results are achieved without task-specific handcrafted prompts on unseen tasks.
Model-Generated Pretraining Signals Improves Zero-Shot Generalization of Text-to-Text Transformers
Authors: Linyuan Gong, Chenyan Xiong, Xiaodong Liu, Payal Bajaj, Yiqing Xie, Alvin Cheung, Jianfeng Gao, Xia Song
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: MMLU, Zero-shot Generalization

This paper explores the effectiveness of model-generated signals in improving zero-shot generalization of text-to-text Transformers such as T5. We study various designs to pretrain T5 using an auxiliary model to construct more challenging token replacements for the main model to denoise. Key aspects under study include the decoding target, the location of the RTD head, and the masking pattern. Based on these studies, we develop a new model, METRO-T0, which is pretrained using the redesigned ELECTRA-Style pretraining strategies and then prompt-finetuned on a mixture of NLP tasks. METRO-T0 outperforms all similar-sized baselines on prompted NLP benchmarks, such as T0 Eval and MMLU, and rivals the state-of-the-art T0-11B model with only 8% of its parameters. Our analysis on model's neural activation and parameter sensitivity reveals that the effectiveness of METRO-T0 stems from more balanced contribution of parameters and better utilization of their capacity. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/gonglinyuan/metro_t0.
Understanding the Effect of Data Augmentation on Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Ziqi Wang, Chi Han, Wenxuan Bao, Heng Ji
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation (KD) requires sufficient data to transfer knowledge from large-scale teacher models to small-scale student models. Therefore, data augmentation has been widely used to mitigate the shortage of data under specific scenarios. Classic data augmentation techniques, such as synonym replacement and k-nearest-neighbors, are initially designed for fine-tuning. To avoid severe semantic shifts and preserve task-specific labels, those methods prefer to change only a small proportion of tokens (e.g., changing 10% tokens is generally the best option for fine-tuning). However, such data augmentation methods are sub-optimal for knowledge distillation since the teacher model could provide label distributions and is more tolerant to semantic shifts. We first observe that KD prefers as much data as possible, which is different from fine-tuning that too much data will not gain more performance. Since changing more tokens leads to more semantic shifts, we use the proportion of changed tokens to reflect semantic shift degrees. Then we find that KD prefers augmented data with a larger semantic shift degree (e.g., changing 30% tokens is generally the best option for KD) than fine-tuning (changing 10% tokens). Besides, our findings show that smaller datasets prefer larger degrees until the out-of-distribution problem occurs (e.g., datasets with less than 10k inputs may prefer the 50% degree, and datasets with more than 100k inputs may prefer the 10% degree). Our work sheds light on the preference difference in data augmentation between fine-tuning and knowledge distillation and encourages the community to explore KD-specific data augmentation methods.
Wav2SQL: Direct Generalizable Speech-To-SQL Parsing
Authors: Huadai Liu, Rongjie Huang, Jinzheng He, Gang Sun, Ran Shen, Xize Cheng, Zhou Zhao
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: SQL Parsing

Speech-to-SQL (S2SQL) aims to convert spoken questions into SQL queries given relational databases, which has been traditionally implemented in a cascaded manner while facing the following challenges: 1) model training is faced with the major issue of data scarcity, where limited parallel data is available; and 2) the systems should be robust enough to handle diverse out-of-domain speech samples that differ from the source data. In this work, we propose the first direct speech-to-SQL parsing model Wav2SQL which avoids error compounding across cascaded systems. Specifically, 1) to accelerate speech-driven SQL parsing research in the community, we release a large-scale and multi-speaker dataset MASpider; 2) leveraging the recent progress in the large-scale pre-training, we show that it alleviates the data scarcity issue and allow for direct speech-to-SQL parsing; and 3) we include the speech re-programming and gradient reversal classifier techniques to reduce acoustic variance and learned style-agnostic representation, improving generalization to unseen out-of-domain custom data. Experimental results demonstrate that Wav2SQL avoids error compounding and achieves state-of-the-art results by up to 2.5\% accuracy improvement over the baseline.
ToxBuster: In-game Chat Toxicity Buster with BERT
Authors: Zachary Yang, Yasmine Maricar, MohammadReza Davari, Nicolas Grenon-Godbout, Reihaneh Rabbany
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00

Detecting toxicity in online spaces is challenging and an ever more pressing problem given the increase in social media and gaming consumption. We introduce ToxBuster, a simple and scalable model trained on a relatively large dataset of 194k lines of game chat from Rainbow Six Siege and For Honor, carefully annotated for different kinds of toxicity. Compared to the existing state-of-the-art, ToxBuster achieves 82.95% (+7) in precision and 83.56% (+57) in recall. This improvement is obtained by leveraging past chat history and metadata. We also study the implication towards real-time and post-game moderation as well as the model transferability from one game to another.
Multilingual Simplification of Medical Texts
Authors: Sebastian Joseph, Kathryn Kazanas, Keziah Reina, Vishnesh J. Ramanathan, Wei Xu, Byron C. Wallace, Junyi Jessy Li
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Sentence, Text Simplification

Automated text simplification aims to produce simple versions of complex texts. This task is especially useful in the medical domain, where the latest medical findings are typically communicated via complex and technical articles. This creates barriers for laypeople seeking access to up-to-date medical findings, consequently impeding progress on health literacy. Most existing work on medical text simplification has focused on monolingual settings, with the result that such evidence would be available only in just one language (most often, English). This work addresses this limitation via multilingual simplification, i.e., directly simplifying complex texts into simplified texts in multiple languages. We introduce MultiCochrane, the first sentence-aligned multilingual text simplification dataset for the medical domain in four languages: English, Spanish, French, and Farsi. We evaluate fine-tuned and zero-shot models across these languages, with extensive human assessments and analyses. Although models can now generate viable simplified texts, we identify outstanding challenges that this dataset might be used to address.
VAKTA-SETU: A Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation Service in Select Indic Languages
Authors: Shivam Mhaskar, Vineet Bhat, Akshay Batheja, Sourabh Deoghare, Paramveer Choudhary, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis, Translation

In this work, we present our deployment-ready Speech-to-Speech Machine Translation (SSMT) system for English-Hindi, English-Marathi, and Hindi-Marathi language pairs. We develop the SSMT system by cascading Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Disfluency Correction (DC), Machine Translation (MT), and Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) models. We discuss the challenges faced during the research and development stage and the scalable deployment of the SSMT system as a publicly accessible web service. On the MT part of the pipeline too, we create a Text-to-Text Machine Translation (TTMT) service in all six translation directions involving English, Hindi, and Marathi. To mitigate data scarcity, we develop a LaBSE-based corpus filtering tool to select high-quality parallel sentences from a noisy pseudo-parallel corpus for training the TTMT system. All the data used for training the SSMT and TTMT systems and the best models are being made publicly available. Users of our system are (a) Govt. of India in the context of its new education policy (NEP), (b) tourists who criss-cross the multilingual landscape of India, (c) Indian Judiciary where a leading cause of the pendency of cases (to the order of 10 million as on date) is the translation of case papers, (d) farmers who need weather and price information and so on. We also share the feedback received from various stakeholders when our SSMT and TTMT systems were demonstrated in large public events.
A Deeper (Autoregressive) Approach to Non-Convergent Discourse Parsing
Authors: Yoav Tulpan, Oren Tsur
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Discourse Parsing

Online social platforms provide a bustling arena for information-sharing and for multi-party discussions. Various frameworks for dialogic discourse parsing were developed and used for the processing of discussions and for predicting the productivity of a dialogue. However, most of these frameworks are not suitable for the analysis of contentious discussions that are commonplace in many online platforms. A novel multi-label scheme for contentious dialog parsing was recently introduced by Zakharov et al. (2021). While the schema is well developed, the computational approach they provide is both naive and inefficient, as a different model (architecture) using a different representation of the input, is trained for each of the 31 tags in the annotation scheme. Moreover, all their models assume full knowledge of label collocations and context, which is unlikely in any realistic setting. In this work, we present a unified model for Non-Convergent Discourse Parsing that does not require any additional input other than the previous dialog utterances. We fine-tuned a RoBERTa backbone, combining embeddings of the utterance, the context and the labels through GRN layers and an asymmetric loss function. Overall, our model achieves results comparable with SOTA, without using label collocation and without training a unique architecture/model for each label.
Exploring How Generative Adversarial Networks Learn Phonological Representations
Authors: Jingyi Chen, Micha Elsner
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00

This paper explores how Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) learn representations of phonological phenomena. We analyze how GANs encode contrastive and non-contrastive nasality in French and English vowels by applying the ciwGAN architecture (Begus 2021a). Begus claims that ciwGAN encodes linguistically meaningful representations with categorical variables in its latent space and manipulating the latent variables shows an almost one to one corresponding control of the phonological features in ciwGAN's generated outputs. However, our results show an interactive effect of latent variables on the features in the generated outputs, which suggests the learned representations in neural networks are different from the phonological representations proposed by linguists. On the other hand, ciwGAN is able to distinguish contrastive and noncontrastive features in English and French by encoding them differently. Comparing the performance of GANs learning from different languages results in a better understanding of what language specific features contribute to developing language specific phonological representations. We also discuss the role of training data frequencies in phonological feature learning.
Contextualized End-to-End Speech Recognition with Contextual Phrase Prediction Network
Authors: Kaixun Huang, Ao Zhang, Zhanheng Yang, Pengcheng Guo, Bingshen Mu, Tianyi Xu, Lei Xie
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Contextual information plays a crucial role in speech recognition technologies and incorporating it into the end-to-end speech recognition models has drawn immense interest recently. However, previous deep bias methods lacked explicit supervision for bias tasks. In this study, we introduce a contextual phrase prediction network for an attention-based deep bias method. This network predicts context phrases in utterances using contextual embeddings and calculates bias loss to assist in the training of the contextualized model. Our method achieved a significant word error rate (WER) reduction across various end-to-end speech recognition models. Experiments on the LibriSpeech corpus show that our proposed model obtains a 12.1% relative WER improvement over the baseline model, and the WER of the context phrases decreases relatively by 40.5%. Moreover, by applying a context phrase filtering strategy, we also effectively eliminate the WER degradation when using a larger biasing list.
Is Translation Helpful? An Empirical Analysis of Cross-Lingual Transfer in Low-Resource Dialog Generation
Authors: Lei Shen, Shuai Yu, Xiaoyu Shen
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Machine Translation, Translation

Cross-lingual transfer is important for developing high-quality chatbots in multiple languages due to the strongly imbalanced distribution of language resources. A typical approach is to leverage off-the-shelf machine translation (MT) systems to utilize either the training corpus or developed models from high-resource languages. In this work, we investigate whether it is helpful to utilize MT at all in this task. To do so, we simulate a low-resource scenario assuming access to limited Chinese dialog data in the movie domain and large amounts of English dialog data from multiple domains. Experiments show that leveraging English dialog corpora can indeed improve the naturalness, relevance and cross-domain transferability in Chinese. However, directly using English dialog corpora in its original form, surprisingly, is better than using its translated version. As the topics and wording habits in daily conversations are strongly culture-dependent, MT can reinforce the bias from high-resource languages, yielding unnatural generations in the target language. Considering the cost of translating large amounts of text and the strong effects of the translation quality, we suggest future research should rather focus on utilizing the original English data for cross-lingual transfer in dialog generation. We perform extensive human evaluations and ablation studies. The analysis results, together with the collected dataset, are presented to draw attention towards this area and benefit future research.
Self-supervised Predictive Coding Models Encode Speaker and Phonetic Information in Orthogonal Subspaces
Authors: Oli Liu, Hao Tang, Sharon Goldwater
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement

Self-supervised speech representations are known to encode both speaker and phonetic information, but how they are distributed in the high-dimensional space remains largely unexplored. We hypothesize that they are encoded in orthogonal subspaces, a property that lends itself to simple disentanglement. Applying principal component analysis to representations of two predictive coding models, we identify two subspaces that capture speaker and phonetic variances, and confirm that they are nearly orthogonal. Based on this property, we propose a new speaker normalization method which collapses the subspace that encodes speaker information, without requiring transcriptions. Probing experiments show that our method effectively eliminates speaker information and outperforms a previous baseline in phone discrimination tasks. Moreover, the approach generalizes and can be used to remove information of unseen speakers.
Infor-Coef: Information Bottleneck-based Dynamic Token Downsampling for Compact and Efficient language model
Authors: Wenxi Tan
Date: 2023-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The prevalence of Transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) has led to their wide adoption for various natural language processing tasks. However, their excessive overhead leads to large latency and computational costs. The statically compression methods allocate fixed computation to different samples, resulting in redundant computation. The dynamic token pruning method selectively shortens the sequences but are unable to change the model size and hardly achieve the speedups as static pruning. In this paper, we propose a model accelaration approaches for large language models that incorporates dynamic token downsampling and static pruning, optimized by the information bottleneck loss. Our model, Infor-Coef, achieves an 18x FLOPs speedup with an accuracy degradation of less than 8\% compared to BERT. This work provides a promising approach to compress and accelerate transformer-based models for NLP tasks.