ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Zero-shot Fact Verification by Claim Generation (2021)

Neural models for automated fact verification have achieved promising results thanks to the availability of large, human-annotated datasets. However, for each new domain that requires fact verification, creating a dataset by manually writing claims and linking them to their supporting evidence is expensive. We develop QACG, a framework for training a robust fact verification model by using automatically generated claims that can be supported, refuted, or unverifiable from evidence from Wikipedia. QACG generates question-answer pairs from the evidence and then converts them into different types of claims. Experiments on the FEVER dataset show that our QACG framework significantly reduces the demand for human-annotated training data. In a zero-shot scenario, QACG improves a RoBERTa model`s F1 from 50{\%} to 77{\%}, equivalent in performance to 2K+ manually-curated examples. Our QACG code is publicly available.
Thank you BART! Rewarding Pre-Trained Models Improves Formality Style Transfer (2021)

Scarcity of parallel data causes formality style transfer models to have scarce success in preserving content. We show that fine-tuning pre-trained language (GPT-2) and sequence-to-sequence (BART) models boosts content preservation, and that this is possible even with limited amounts of parallel data. Augmenting these models with rewards that target style and content {--}the two core aspects of the task{--} we achieve a new state-of-the-art.
Deep Context- and Relation-Aware Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2021)

Existing works for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) have adopted a unified approach, which allows the interactive relations among subtasks. However, we observe that these methods tend to predict polarities based on the literal meaning of aspect and opinion terms and mainly consider relations implicitly among subtasks at the word level. In addition, identifying multiple aspect{--}opinion pairs with their polarities is much more challenging. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of contextual information w.r.t. the aspect and opinion are further required in ABSA. In this paper, we propose Deep Contextualized Relation-Aware Network (DCRAN), which allows interactive relations among subtasks with deep contextual information based on two modules (i.e., Aspect and Opinion Propagation and Explicit Self-Supervised Strategies). Especially, we design novel self-supervised strategies for ABSA, which have strengths in dealing with multiple aspects. Experimental results show that DCRAN significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by large margins on three widely used benchmarks.
Towards Generative Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2021)

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has received increasing attention recently. Most existing work tackles ABSA in a discriminative manner, designing various task-specific classification networks for the prediction. Despite their effectiveness, these methods ignore the rich label semantics in ABSA problems and require extensive task-specific designs. In this paper, we propose to tackle various ABSA tasks in a unified generative framework. Two types of paradigms, namely annotation-style and extraction-style modeling, are designed to enable the training process by formulating each ABSA task as a text generation problem. We conduct experiments on four ABSA tasks across multiple benchmark datasets where our proposed generative approach achieves new state-of-the-art results in almost all cases. This also validates the strong generality of the proposed framework which can be easily adapted to arbitrary ABSA task without additional task-specific model design.
Bilingual Mutual Information Based Adaptive Training for Neural Machine Translation (2021)

Recently, token-level adaptive training has achieved promising improvement in machine translation, where the cross-entropy loss function is adjusted by assigning different training weights to different tokens, in order to alleviate the token imbalance problem. However, previous approaches only use static word frequency information in the target language without considering the source language, which is insufficient for bilingual tasks like machine translation. In this paper, we propose a novel bilingual mutual information (BMI) based adaptive objective, which measures the learning difficulty for each target token from the perspective of bilingualism, and assigns an adaptive weight accordingly to improve token-level adaptive training. This method assigns larger training weights to tokens with higher BMI, so that easy tokens are updated with coarse granularity while difficult tokens are updated with fine granularity. Experimental results on WMT14 English-to-German and WMT19 Chinese-to-English demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with the Transformer baseline and previous token-level adaptive training approaches. Further analyses confirm that our method can improve the lexical diversity.
Continual Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue System with Iterative Network Pruning, Expanding and Masking (2021)

This ability to learn consecutive tasks without forgetting how to perform previously trained problems is essential for developing an online dialogue system. This paper proposes an effective continual learning method for the task-oriented dialogue system with iterative network pruning, expanding, and masking (TPEM), which preserves performance on previously encountered tasks while accelerating learning progress on subsequent tasks. Specifically, TPEM (i) leverages network pruning to keep the knowledge for old tasks, (ii) adopts network expanding to create free weights for new tasks, and (iii) introduces task-specific network masking to alleviate the negative impact of fixed weights of old tasks on new tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on seven different tasks from three benchmark datasets and show empirically that TPEM leads to significantly improved results over the strong competitors.
TIMERS: Document-level Temporal Relation Extraction (2021)

We present TIMERS - a TIME, Rhetorical and Syntactic-aware model for document-level temporal relation classification in the English language. Our proposed method leverages rhetorical discourse features and temporal arguments from semantic role labels, in addition to traditional local syntactic features, trained through a Gated Relational-GCN. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms previous methods by 5-18{\%} on the TDDiscourse, TimeBank-Dense, and MATRES datasets due to our discourse-level modeling.
Improving Arabic Diacritization with Regularized Decoding and Adversarial Training (2021)

Arabic diacritization is a fundamental task for Arabic language processing. Previous studies have demonstrated that automatically generated knowledge can be helpful to this task. However, these studies regard the auto-generated knowledge instances as gold references, which limits their effectiveness since such knowledge is not always accurate and inferior instances can lead to incorrect predictions. In this paper, we propose to use regularized decoding and adversarial training to appropriately learn from such noisy knowledge for diacritization. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that, even with quite flawed auto-generated knowledge, our model can still learn adequate diacritics and outperform all previous studies, on both datasets.
When is Char Better Than Subword: A Systematic Study of Segmentation Algorithms for Neural Machine Translation (2021)

Subword segmentation algorithms have been a \textit{de facto} choice when building neural machine translation systems. However, most of them need to learn a segmentation model based on some heuristics, which may produce sub-optimal segmentation. This can be problematic in some scenarios when the target language has rich morphological changes or there is not enough data for learning compact composition rules. Translating at fully character level has the potential to alleviate the issue, but empirical performances of character-based models has not been fully explored. In this paper, we present an in-depth comparison between character-based and subword-based NMT systems under three settings: translating to typologically diverse languages, training with low resource, and adapting to unseen domains. Experiment results show strong competitiveness of character-based models. Further analyses show that compared to subword-based models, character-based models are better at handling morphological phenomena, generating rare and unknown words, and more suitable for transferring to unseen domains.
More than Text: Multi-modal Chinese Word Segmentation (2021)

Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is undoubtedly an important basic task in natural language processing. Previous works only focus on the textual modality, but there are often audio and video utterances (such as news broadcast and face-to-face dialogues), where textual, acoustic and visual modalities normally exist. To this end, we attempt to combine the multi-modality (mainly the converted text and actual voice information) to perform CWS. In this paper, we annotate a new dataset for CWS containing text and audio. Moreover, we propose a time-dependent multi-modal interactive model based on Transformer framework to integrate multi-modal information for word sequence labeling. The experimental results on three different training sets show the effectiveness of our approach with fusing text and audio.
A Mixture-of-Experts Model for Antonym-Synonym Discrimination (2021)

Discrimination between antonyms and synonyms is an important and challenging NLP task. Antonyms and synonyms often share the same or similar contexts and thus are hard to make a distinction. This paper proposes two underlying hypotheses and employs the mixture-of-experts framework as a solution. It works on the basis of a divide-and-conquer strategy, where a number of localized experts focus on their own domains (or subspaces) to learn their specialties, and a gating mechanism determines the space partitioning and the expert mixture. Experimental results have shown that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the task.
Learning Domain-Specialised Representations for Cross-Lingual Biomedical Entity Linking (2021)

Injecting external domain-specific knowledge (e.g., UMLS) into pretrained language models (LMs) advances their capability to handle specialised in-domain tasks such as biomedical entity linking (BEL). However, such abundant expert knowledge is available only for a handful of languages (e.g., English). In this work, by proposing a novel cross-lingual biomedical entity linking task (XL-BEL) and establishing a new XL-BEL benchmark spanning 10 typologically diverse languages, we first investigate the ability of standard knowledge-agnostic as well as knowledge-enhanced monolingual and multilingual LMs beyond the standard monolingual English BEL task. The scores indicate large gaps to English performance. We then address the challenge of transferring domain-specific knowledge in resource-rich languages to resource-poor ones. To this end, we propose and evaluate a series of cross-lingual transfer methods for the XL-BEL task, and demonstrate that general-domain bitext helps propagate the available English knowledge to languages with little to no in-domain data. Remarkably, we show that our proposed domain-specific transfer methods yield consistent gains across all target languages, sometimes up to 20 Precision@1 points, without any in-domain knowledge in the target language, and without any in-domain parallel data.
A Cluster-based Approach for Improving Isotropy in Contextual Embedding Space (2021)

The representation degeneration problem in Contextual Word Representations (CWRs) hurts the expressiveness of the embedding space by forming an anisotropic cone where even unrelated words have excessively positive correlations. Existing techniques for tackling this issue require a learning process to re-train models with additional objectives and mostly employ a global assessment to study isotropy. Our quantitative analysis over isotropy shows that a local assessment could be more accurate due to the clustered structure of CWRs. Based on this observation, we propose a local cluster-based method to address the degeneration issue in contextual embedding spaces. We show that in clusters including punctuations and stop words, local dominant directions encode structural information, removing which can improve CWRs performance on semantic tasks. Moreover, we find that tense information in verb representations dominates sense semantics. We show that removing dominant directions of verb representations can transform the space to better suit semantic applications. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed cluster-based method can mitigate the degeneration problem on multiple tasks.
Unsupervised Enrichment of Persona-grounded Dialog with Background Stories (2021)

Humans often refer to personal narratives, life experiences, and events to make a conversation more engaging and rich. While persona-grounded dialog models are able to generate responses that follow a given persona, they often miss out on stating detailed experiences or events related to a persona, often leaving conversations shallow and dull. In this work, we equip dialog models with {\textquoteleft}background stories' related to a persona by leveraging fictional narratives from existing story datasets (e.g. ROCStories). Since current dialog datasets do not contain such narratives as responses, we perform an unsupervised adaptation of a retrieved story for generating a dialog response using a gradient-based rewriting technique. Our proposed method encourages the generated response to be fluent (i.e., highly likely) with the dialog history, minimally different from the retrieved story to preserve event ordering and consistent with the original persona. We demonstrate that our method can generate responses that are more diverse, and are rated more engaging and human-like by human evaluators, compared to outputs from existing dialog models.
Beyond Laurel/Yanny: An Autoencoder-Enabled Search for Polyperceivable Audio (2021)

The famous {\textquotedblleft}laurel/yanny{\textquotedblright} phenomenon references an audio clip that elicits dramatically different responses from different listeners. For the original clip, roughly half the population hears the word {\textquotedblleft}laurel,{\textquotedblright} while the other half hears {\textquotedblleft}yanny.{\textquotedblright} How common are such {\textquotedblleft}polyperceivable{\textquotedblright} audio clips? In this paper we apply ML techniques to study the prevalence of polyperceivability in spoken language. We devise a metric that correlates with polyperceivability of audio clips, use it to efficiently find new {\textquotedblleft}laurel/yanny{\textquotedblright}-type examples, and validate these results with human experiments. Our results suggest that polyperceivable examples are surprisingly prevalent in natural language, existing for {\ensuremath{>}}2{\%} of English words.
Don`t Let Discourse Confine Your Model: Sequence Perturbations for Improved Event Language Models (2021)

Event language models represent plausible sequences of events. Most existing approaches train autoregressive models on text, which successfully capture event co-occurrence but unfortunately constrain the model to follow the discourse order in which events are presented. Other domains may employ different discourse orders, and for many applications, we may care about different notions of ordering (e.g., temporal) or not care about ordering at all (e.g., when predicting related events in a schema). We propose a simple yet surprisingly effective strategy for improving event language models by perturbing event sequences so we can relax model dependence on text order. Despite generating completely synthetic event orderings, we show that this technique improves the performance of the event language models on both applications and out-of-domain events data.
The Curse of Dense Low-Dimensional Information Retrieval for Large Index Sizes (2021)

Information Retrieval using dense low-dimensional representations recently became popular and showed out-performance to traditional sparse-representations like BM25. However, no previous work investigated how dense representations perform with large index sizes. We show theoretically and empirically that the performance for dense representations decreases quicker than sparse representations for increasing index sizes. In extreme cases, this can even lead to a tipping point where at a certain index size sparse representations outperform dense representations. We show that this behavior is tightly connected to the number of dimensions of the representations: The lower the dimension, the higher the chance for false positives, i.e. returning irrelevant documents
Cross-lingual Text Classification with Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (2021)

Cross-lingual text classification aims at training a classifier on the source language and transferring the knowledge to target languages, which is very useful for low-resource languages. Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLM) achieve impressive results in cross-lingual classification tasks, but rarely consider factors beyond semantic similarity, causing performance degradation between some language pairs. In this paper we propose a simple yet effective method to incorporate heterogeneous information within and across languages for cross-lingual text classification using graph convolutional networks (GCN). In particular, we construct a heterogeneous graph by treating documents and words as nodes, and linking nodes with different relations, which include part-of-speech roles, semantic similarity, and document translations. Extensive experiments show that our graph-based method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on all tasks, and also achieves consistent performance gain over baselines in low-resource settings where external tools like translators are unavailable.
Towards more equitable question answering systems: How much more data do you need? (2021)

Question answering (QA) in English has been widely explored, but multilingual datasets are relatively new, with several methods attempting to bridge the gap between high- and low-resourced languages using data augmentation through translation and cross-lingual transfer. In this project we take a step back and study which approaches allow us to take the most advantage of existing resources in order to produce QA systems in many languages. Specifically, we perform extensive analysis to measure the efficacy of few-shot approaches augmented with automatic translations and permutations of context-question-answer pairs. In addition, we make suggestions for future dataset development efforts that make better use of a fixed annotation budget, with a goal of increasing the language coverage of QA datasets and systems.
Embedding Time Differences in Context-sensitive Neural Networks for Learning Time to Event (2021)

We propose an effective context-sensitive neural model for time to event (TTE) prediction task, which aims to predict the amount of time to/from the occurrence of given events in streaming content. We investigate this problem in the context of a multi-task learning framework, which we enrich with time difference embeddings. In addition, we develop a multi-genre dataset of English events about soccer competitions and academy awards ceremonies, and their relevant tweets obtained from Twitter. Our model is 1.4 and 3.3 hours more accurate than the current state-of-the-art model in estimating TTE on English and Dutch tweets respectively. We examine different aspects of our model to illustrate its source of improvement.
Improving Compositional Generalization in Classification Tasks via Structure Annotations (2021)

Compositional generalization is the ability to generalize systematically to a new data distribution by combining known components. Although humans seem to have a great ability to generalize compositionally, state-of-the-art neural models struggle to do so. In this work, we study compositional generalization in classification tasks and present two main contributions. First, we study ways to convert a natural language sequence-to-sequence dataset to a classification dataset that also requires compositional generalization. Second, we show that providing structural hints (specifically, providing parse trees and entity links as attention masks for a Transformer model) helps compositional generalization.
Learning to Generate Task-Specific Adapters from Task Description (2021)

Pre-trained text-to-text transformers such as BART have achieved impressive performance across a range of NLP tasks. Recent study further shows that they can learn to generalize to novel tasks, by including task descriptions as part of the source sequence and training the model with (source, target) examples. At test time, these fine-tuned models can make inferences on new tasks using the new task descriptions as part of the input. However, this approach has potential limitations, as the model learns to solve individual (source, target) examples (i.e., at the instance level), instead of learning to solve tasks by taking all examples within a task as a whole (i.e., at the task level). To this end, we introduce Hypter, a framework that improves text-to-text transformer`s generalization ability to unseen tasks by training a hypernetwork to generate task-specific, light-weight adapters from task descriptions. Experiments on ZEST dataset and a synthetic SQuAD dataset demonstrate that Hypter improves upon fine-tuning baselines. Notably, when using BART-Large as the main network, Hypter brings 11.3{\%} comparative improvement on ZEST dataset.
QA-Driven Zero-shot Slot Filling with Weak Supervision Pretraining (2021)

Slot-filling is an essential component for building task-oriented dialog systems. In this work, we focus on the zero-shot slot-filling problem, where the model needs to predict slots and their values, given utterances from new domains without training on the target domain. Prior methods directly encode slot descriptions to generalize to unseen slot types. However, raw slot descriptions are often ambiguous and do not encode enough semantic information, limiting the models' zero-shot capability. To address this problem, we introduce QA-driven slot filling (QASF), which extracts slot-filler spans from utterances with a span-based QA model. We use a linguistically motivated questioning strategy to turn descriptions into questions, allowing the model to generalize to unseen slot types. Moreover, our QASF model can benefit from weak supervision signals from QA pairs synthetically generated from unlabeled conversations. Our full system substantially outperforms baselines by over 5{\%} on the SNIPS benchmark.
Domain-Adaptive Pretraining Methods for Dialogue Understanding (2021)

Language models like BERT and SpanBERT pretrained on open-domain data have obtained impressive gains on various NLP tasks. In this paper, we probe the effectiveness of domain-adaptive pretraining objectives on downstream tasks. In particular, three objectives, including a novel objective focusing on modeling predicate-argument relations, are evaluated on two challenging dialogue understanding tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that domain-adaptive pretraining with proper objectives can significantly improve the performance of a strong baseline on these tasks, achieving the new state-of-the-art performances.