pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Cross-Lingual Knowledge Distillation for Answer Sentence Selection in Low-Resource Languages
Authors: Shivanshu Gupta, Yoshitomo Matsubara, Ankit Chadha, Alessandro Moschitti
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

While impressive performance has been achieved on the task of Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) for English, the same does not hold for languages that lack large labeled datasets. In this work, we propose Cross-Lingual Knowledge Distillation (CLKD) from a strong English AS2 teacher as a method to train AS2 models for low-resource languages in the tasks without the need of labeled data for the target language. To evaluate our method, we introduce 1) Xtr-WikiQA, a translation-based WikiQA dataset for 9 additional languages, and 2) TyDi-AS2, a multilingual AS2 dataset with over 70K questions spanning 8 typologically diverse languages. We conduct extensive experiments on Xtr-WikiQA and TyDi-AS2 with multiple teachers, diverse monolingual and multilingual pretrained language models (PLMs) as students, and both monolingual and multilingual training. The results demonstrate that CLKD either outperforms or rivals even supervised fine-tuning with the same amount of labeled data and a combination of machine translation and the teacher model. Our method can potentially enable stronger AS2 models for low-resource languages, while TyDi-AS2 can serve as the largest multilingual AS2 dataset for further studies in the research community.
UNITE: A Unified Benchmark for Text-to-SQL Evaluation
Authors: Wuwei Lan, Zhiguo Wang, Anuj Chauhan, Henghui Zhu, Alexander Li, Jiang Guo, Sheng Zhang, Chung-Wei Hang, Joseph Lilien, Yiqun Hu, Lin Pan, Mingwen Dong, Jun Wang, Jiarong Jiang, Stephen Ash, Vittorio Castelli, Patrick Ng, Bing Xiang
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

A practical text-to-SQL system should generalize well on a wide variety of natural language questions, unseen database schemas, and novel SQL query structures. To comprehensively evaluate text-to-SQL systems, we introduce a UNIfied benchmark for Text-to-SQL Evaluation (UNITE). It is composed of publicly available text-to-SQL datasets, containing natural language questions from more than 12 domains, SQL queries from more than 3.9K patterns, and 29K databases. Compared to the widely used Spider benchmark, we introduce $\sim$120K additional examples and a threefold increase in SQL patterns, such as comparative and boolean questions. We conduct a systematic study of six state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-SQL parsers on our new benchmark and show that: 1) Codex performs surprisingly well on out-of-domain datasets; 2) specially designed decoding methods (e.g. constrained beam search) can improve performance for both in-domain and out-of-domain settings; 3) explicitly modeling the relationship between questions and schemas further improves the Seq2Seq models. More importantly, our benchmark presents key challenges towards compositional generalization and robustness issues -- which these SOTA models cannot address well. Our code and data processing script are available at https://github.com/awslabs/unified-text2sql-benchmark
Uncovering and Categorizing Social Biases in Text-to-SQL
Authors: Yan Liu, Yan Gao, Zhe Su, Xiaokang Chen, Elliott Ash, Jian-Guang Lou
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

Content Warning: This work contains examples that potentially implicate stereotypes, associations, and other harms that could be offensive to individuals in certain social groups.} Large pre-trained language models are acknowledged to carry social biases towards different demographics, which can further amplify existing stereotypes in our society and cause even more harm. Text-to-SQL is an important task, models of which are mainly adopted by administrative industries, where unfair decisions may lead to catastrophic consequences. However, existing Text-to-SQL models are trained on clean, neutral datasets, such as Spider and WikiSQL. This, to some extent, cover up social bias in models under ideal conditions, which nevertheless may emerge in real application scenarios. In this work, we aim to uncover and categorize social biases in Text-to-SQL models. We summarize the categories of social biases that may occur in structured data for Text-to-SQL models. We build test benchmarks and reveal that models with similar task accuracy can contain social biases at very different rates. We show how to take advantage of our methodology to uncover and assess social biases in the downstream Text-to-SQL task. We will release our code and data.
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Massively Multilingual Continual Learning
Authors: Genta Indra Winata, Lingjue Xie, Karthik Radhakrishnan, Shijie Wu, Xisen Jin, Pengxiang Cheng, Mayank Kulkarni, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Scheduling

Real-life multilingual systems should be able to efficiently incorporate new languages as data distributions fed to the system evolve and shift over time. To do this, systems need to handle the issue of catastrophic forgetting, where the model performance drops for languages or tasks seen further in its past. In this paper, we study catastrophic forgetting, as well as methods to minimize this, in a massively multilingual continual learning framework involving up to 51 languages and covering both classification and sequence labeling tasks. We present LR ADJUST, a learning rate scheduling method that is simple, yet effective in preserving new information without strongly overwriting past knowledge. Furthermore, we show that this method is effective across multiple continual learning approaches. Finally, we provide further insights into the dynamics of catastrophic forgetting in this massively multilingual setup.
Surface-Based Retrieval Reduces Perplexity of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models
Authors: Ehsan Doostmohammadi, Tobias Norlund, Marco Kuhlmann, Richard Johansson
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Semantic Retrieval

Augmenting language models with a retrieval mechanism has been shown to significantly improve their performance while keeping the number of parameters low. Retrieval-augmented models commonly rely on a semantic retrieval mechanism based on the similarity between dense representations of the query chunk and potential neighbors. In this paper, we study the state-of-the-art Retro model and observe that its performance gain is better explained by surface-level similarities, such as token overlap. Inspired by this, we replace the semantic retrieval in Retro with a surface-level method based on BM25, obtaining a significant reduction in perplexity. As full BM25 retrieval can be computationally costly for large datasets, we also apply it in a re-ranking scenario, gaining part of the perplexity reduction with minimal computational overhead.
Multi-lingual and Multi-cultural Figurative Language Understanding
Authors: Anubha Kabra, Emmy Liu, Simran Khanuja, Alham Fikri Aji, Genta Indra Winata, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Perez Ogayo, Graham Neubig
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00

Figurative language permeates human communication, but at the same time is relatively understudied in NLP. Datasets have been created in English to accelerate progress towards measuring and improving figurative language processing in language models (LMs). However, the use of figurative language is an expression of our cultural and societal experiences, making it difficult for these phrases to be universally applicable. In this work, we create a figurative language inference dataset, \datasetname, for seven diverse languages associated with a variety of cultures: Hindi, Indonesian, Javanese, Kannada, Sundanese, Swahili and Yoruba. Our dataset reveals that each language relies on cultural and regional concepts for figurative expressions, with the highest overlap between languages originating from the same region. We assess multilingual LMs' abilities to interpret figurative language in zero-shot and few-shot settings. All languages exhibit a significant deficiency compared to English, with variations in performance reflecting the availability of pre-training and fine-tuning data, emphasizing the need for LMs to be exposed to a broader range of linguistic and cultural variation during training.
Multimodal Relation Extraction with Cross-Modal Retrieval and Synthesis
Authors: Xuming Hu, Zhijiang Guo, Zhiyang Teng, Irwin King, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Object, Relation, Relation Extraction, Retrieval, Sentence

Multimodal relation extraction (MRE) is the task of identifying the semantic relationships between two entities based on the context of the sentence image pair. Existing retrieval-augmented approaches mainly focused on modeling the retrieved textual knowledge, but this may not be able to accurately identify complex relations. To improve the prediction, this research proposes to retrieve textual and visual evidence based on the object, sentence, and whole image. We further develop a novel approach to synthesize the object-level, image-level, and sentence-level information for better reasoning between the same and different modalities. Extensive experiments and analyses show that the proposed method is able to effectively select and compare evidence across modalities and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models.
Training Data Extraction From Pre-trained Language Models: A Survey
Authors: Shotaro Ishihara
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization, Survey

As the deployment of pre-trained language models (PLMs) expands, pressing security concerns have arisen regarding the potential for malicious extraction of training data, posing a threat to data privacy. This study is the first to provide a comprehensive survey of training data extraction from PLMs. Our review covers more than 100 key papers in fields such as natural language processing and security. First, preliminary knowledge is recapped and a taxonomy of various definitions of memorization is presented. The approaches for attack and defense are then systemized. Furthermore, the empirical findings of several quantitative studies are highlighted. Finally, future research directions based on this review are suggested.
Revisiting Non-Autoregressive Translation at Scale
Authors: Zhihao Wang, Longyue Wang, Jinsong Su, Junfeng Yao, Zhaopeng Tu
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Translation

In real-world systems, scaling has been critical for improving the translation quality in autoregressive translation (AT), which however has not been well studied for non-autoregressive translation (NAT). In this work, we bridge the gap by systematically studying the impact of scaling on NAT behaviors. Extensive experiments on six WMT benchmarks over two advanced NAT models show that scaling can alleviate the commonly-cited weaknesses of NAT models, resulting in better translation performance. To reduce the side-effect of scaling on decoding speed, we empirically investigate the impact of NAT encoder and decoder on the translation performance. Experimental results on the large-scale WMT20 En-De show that the asymmetric architecture (e.g. bigger encoder and smaller decoder) can achieve comparable performance with the scaling model, while maintaining the superiority of decoding speed with standard NAT models. To this end, we establish a new benchmark by validating scaled NAT models on the scaled dataset, which can be regarded as a strong baseline for future works. We release code and system outputs at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/Scaling4NAT.
Give Me More Details: Improving Fact-Checking with Latent Retrieval
Authors: Xuming Hu, Junzhe Chen, Zhijiang Guo, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Claim Verification, Fact Checking, Retrieval

Evidence plays a crucial role in automated fact-checking. When verifying real-world claims, existing fact-checking systems either assume the evidence sentences are given or use the search snippets returned by the search engine. Such methods ignore the challenges of collecting evidence and may not provide sufficient information to verify real-world claims. Aiming at building a better fact-checking system, we propose to incorporate full text from source documents as evidence and introduce two enriched datasets. The first one is a multilingual dataset, while the second one is monolingual (English). We further develop a latent variable model to jointly extract evidence sentences from documents and perform claim verification. Experiments indicate that including source documents can provide sufficient contextual clues even when gold evidence sentences are not annotated. The proposed system is able to achieve significant improvements upon best-reported models under different settings.
VioLA: Unified Codec Language Models for Speech Recognition, Synthesis, and Translation
Authors: Tianrui Wang, Long Zhou, Ziqiang Zhang, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Yashesh Gaur, Zhuo Chen, Jinyu Li, Furu Wei
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multi-Task Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Translation

Recent research shows a big convergence in model architecture, training objectives, and inference methods across various tasks for different modalities. In this paper, we propose VioLA, a single auto-regressive Transformer decoder-only network that unifies various cross-modal tasks involving speech and text, such as speech-to-text, text-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech-to-speech tasks, as a conditional codec language model task via multi-task learning framework. To accomplish this, we first convert all the speech utterances to discrete tokens (similar to the textual data) using an offline neural codec encoder. In such a way, all these tasks are converted to token-based sequence conversion problems, which can be naturally handled with one conditional language model. We further integrate task IDs (TID) and language IDs (LID) into the proposed model to enhance the modeling capability of handling different languages and tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed VioLA model can support both single-modal and cross-modal tasks well, and the decoder-only model achieves a comparable and even better performance than the strong baselines.
Multijugate Dual Learning for Low-Resource Task-Oriented Dialogue System
Authors: ShiMin Li, Xiaotian Zhang, Yanjun Zheng, Linyang Li, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Dialogue data in real scenarios tend to be sparsely available, rendering data-starved end-to-end dialogue systems trained inadequately. We discover that data utilization efficiency in low-resource scenarios can be enhanced by mining alignment information uncertain utterance and deterministic dialogue state. Therefore, we innovatively implement dual learning in task-oriented dialogues to exploit the correlation of heterogeneous data. In addition, the one-to-one duality is converted into a multijugate duality to reduce the influence of spurious correlations in dual training for generalization. Without introducing additional parameters, our method could be implemented in arbitrary networks. Extensive empirical analyses demonstrate that our proposed method improves the effectiveness of end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems under multiple benchmarks and obtains state-of-the-art results in low-resource scenarios.
ASR and Emotional Speech: A Word-Level Investigation of the Mutual Impact of Speech and Emotion Recognition
Authors: Yuanchao Li, Zeyu Zhao, Ondrej Klejch, Peter Bell, Catherine Lai
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In Speech Emotion Recognition (SER), textual data is often used alongside audio signals to address their inherent variability. However, the reliance on human annotated text in most research hinders the development of practical SER systems. To overcome this challenge, we investigate how Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) performs on emotional speech by analyzing the ASR performance on emotion corpora and examining the distribution of word errors and confidence scores in ASR transcripts to gain insight into how emotion affects ASR. We utilize four ASR systems, namely Kaldi ASR, wav2vec2, Conformer, and Whisper, and three corpora: IEMOCAP, MOSI, and MELD to ensure generalizability. Additionally, we conduct text-based SER on ASR transcripts with increasing word error rates to investigate how ASR affects SER. The objective of this study is to uncover the relationship and mutual impact of ASR and SER, in order to facilitate ASR adaptation to emotional speech and the use of SER in real world.
Efficient Document Embeddings via Self-Contrastive Bregman Divergence Learning
Authors: Daniel Saggau, Mina Rezaei, Bernd Bischl, Ilias Chalkidis
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings, Topic Classification

Learning quality document embeddings is a fundamental problem in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), recommendation systems, and search engines. Despite recent advances in the development of transformer-based models that produce sentence embeddings with self-contrastive learning, the encoding of long documents (Ks of words) is still challenging with respect to both efficiency and quality considerations. Therefore, we train Longfomer-based document encoders using a state-of-the-art unsupervised contrastive learning method (SimCSE). Further on, we complement the baseline method -- siamese neural network -- with additional convex neural networks based on functional Bregman divergence aiming to enhance the quality of the output document representations. We show that overall the combination of a self-contrastive siamese network and our proposed neural Bregman network outperforms the baselines in two linear classification settings on three long document topic classification tasks from the legal and biomedical domains.
NaSGEC: a Multi-Domain Chinese Grammatical Error Correction Dataset from Native Speaker Texts
Authors: Yue Zhang, Bo Zhang, Haochen Jiang, Zhenghua Li, Chen Li, Fei Huang, Min Zhang
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Grammatical Error Correction

We introduce NaSGEC, a new dataset to facilitate research on Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) for native speaker texts from multiple domains. Previous CGEC research primarily focuses on correcting texts from a single domain, especially learner essays. To broaden the target domain, we annotate multiple references for 12,500 sentences from three native domains, i.e., social media, scientific writing, and examination. We provide solid benchmark results for NaSGEC by employing cutting-edge CGEC models and different training data. We further perform detailed analyses of the connections and gaps between our domains from both empirical and statistical views. We hope this work can inspire future studies on an important but under-explored direction--cross-domain GEC.
Visually grounded few-shot word acquisition with fewer shots
Authors: Leanne Nortje, Benjamin van Niekerk, Herman Kamper
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00

We propose a visually grounded speech model that acquires new words and their visual depictions from just a few word-image example pairs. Given a set of test images and a spoken query, we ask the model which image depicts the query word. Previous work has simplified this problem by either using an artificial setting with digit word-image pairs or by using a large number of examples per class. We propose an approach that can work on natural word-image pairs but with less examples, i.e. fewer shots. Our approach involves using the given word-image example pairs to mine new unsupervised word-image training pairs from large collections of unlabelled speech and images. Additionally, we use a word-to-image attention mechanism to determine word-image similarity. With this new model, we achieve better performance with fewer shots than any existing approach.
BUCA: A Binary Classification Approach to Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering
Authors: Jie He, Simon Chi Lok U, Víctor Gutiérrez-Basulto, Jeff Z. Pan
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Knowledge Graphs, Multiple-choice, Question Answering

Unsupervised commonsense reasoning (UCR) is becoming increasingly popular as the construction of commonsense reasoning datasets is expensive, and they are inevitably limited in their scope. A popular approach to UCR is to fine-tune language models with external knowledge (e.g., knowledge graphs), but this usually requires a large number of training examples. In this paper, we propose to transform the downstream multiple choice question answering task into a simpler binary classification task by ranking all candidate answers according to their reasonableness. To this end, for training the model, we convert the knowledge graph triples into reasonable and unreasonable texts. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach on various multiple choice question answering benchmarks. Furthermore, compared with existing UCR approaches using KGs, ours is less data hungry. Our code is available at https://github.com/probe2/BUCA.
Emergence of a phonological bias in ChatGPT
Authors: Juan Manuel Toro
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Current large language models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, have captured the public's attention because how remarkable they are in the use of language. Here, I demonstrate that ChatGPT displays phonological biases that are a hallmark of human language processing. More concretely, just like humans, ChatGPT has a consonant bias. That is, the chatbot has a tendency to use consonants over vowels to identify words. This is observed across languages that differ in their relative distribution of consonants and vowels such as English and Spanish. Despite the differences in how current artificial intelligence language models are trained to process linguistic stimuli and how human infants acquire language, such training seems to be enough for the emergence of a phonological bias in ChatGPT
Reliable Detection and Quantification of Selective Forces in Language Change
Authors: Juan Guerrero Montero, Andres Karjus, Kenny Smith, Richard A. Blythe
Date: 2023-05-25 00:00:00

Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to corpus data to quantify the strength of selection in specific instances of historical language change. We first demonstrate, in the context of English irregular verbs, that this method is more reliable and interpretable than similar methods that have previously been applied. We further extend this study to demonstrate that a bias towards phonological simplicity overrides that favouring grammatical simplicity when these are in conflict. Finally, with reference to Spanish spelling reforms, we show that the method can also detect points in time at which selection strengths change, a feature that is generically expected for socially-motivated language change. Together, these results indicate how hypotheses for mechanisms of language change can be tested quantitatively using historical corpus data.