ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DuQM: A Chinese Dataset of Linguistically Perturbed Natural Questions for Evaluating the Robustness of Question Matching Models (2022)

In this paper, we focus on the robustness evaluation of Chinese Question Matching (QM) models. Most of the previous work on analyzing robustness issues focus on just one or a few types of artificial adversarial examples. Instead, we argue that a comprehensive evaluation should be conducted on natural texts, which takes into account the fine-grained linguistic capabilities of QM models. For this purpose, we create a Chinese dataset namely DuQM which contains natural questions with linguistic perturbations to evaluate the robustness of QM models. DuQM contains 3 categories and 13 subcategories with 32 linguistic perturbations. The extensive experiments demonstrate that DuQM has a better ability to distinguish different models. Importantly, the detailed breakdown of evaluation by the linguistic phenomena in DuQM helps us easily diagnose the strength and weakness of different models. Additionally, our experiment results show that the effect of artificial adversarial examples does not work on natural texts. Our baseline codes and a leaderboard are now publicly available.
DivEMT: Neural Machine Translation Post-Editing Effort Across Typologically Diverse Languages (2022)

We introduce DivEMT, the first publicly available post-editing study of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) over a typologically diverse set of target languages. Using a strictly controlled setup, 18 professional translators were instructed to translate or post-edit the same set of English documents into Arabic, Dutch, Italian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. During the process, their edits, keystrokes, editing times and pauses were recorded, enabling an in-depth, cross-lingual evaluation of NMT quality and post-editing effectiveness. Using this new dataset, we assess the impact of two state-of-the-art NMT systems, Google Translate and the multilingual mBART-50 model, on translation productivity. We find that post-editing is consistently faster than translation from scratch. However, the magnitude of productivity gains varies widely across systems and languages, highlighting major disparities in post-editing effectiveness for languages at different degrees of typological relatedness to English, even when controlling for system architecture and training data size. We publicly release the complete dataset including all collected behavioral data, to foster new research on the translation capabilities of NMT systems for typologically diverse languages.
Bridging Fairness and Environmental Sustainability in Natural Language Processing (2022)

Fairness and environmental impact are important research directions for the sustainable development of artificial intelligence. However, while each topic is an active research area in natural language processing (NLP), there is a surprising lack of research on the interplay between the two fields. This lacuna is highly problematic, since there is increasing evidence that an exclusive focus on fairness can actually hinder environmental sustainability, and vice versa. In this work, we shed light on this crucial intersection in NLP by (1) investigating the efficiency of current fairness approaches through surveying example methods for reducing unfair stereotypical bias from the literature, and (2) evaluating a common technique to reduce energy consumption (and thus environmental impact) of English NLP models, knowledge distillation (KD), for its impact on fairness. In this case study, we evaluate the effect of important KD factors, including layer and dimensionality reduction, with respect to: (a) performance on the distillation task (natural language inference and semantic similarity prediction), and (b) multiple measures and dimensions of stereotypical bias (e.g., gender bias measured via the Word Embedding Association Test). Our results lead us to clarify current assumptions regarding the effect of KD on unfair bias: contrary to other findings, we show that KD can actually decrease model fairness.
UniMSE: Towards Unified Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition (2022)

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) and emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) are key research topics for computers to understand human behaviors. From a psychological perspective, emotions are the expression of affect or feelings during a short period, while sentiments are formed and held for a longer period. However, most existing works study sentiment and emotion separately and do not fully exploit the complementary knowledge behind the two. In this paper, we propose a multimodal sentiment knowledge-sharing framework (UniMSE) that unifies MSA and ERC tasks from features, labels, and models. We perform modality fusion at the syntactic and semantic levels and introduce contrastive learning between modalities and samples to better capture the difference and consistency between sentiments and emotions. Experiments on four public benchmark datasets, MOSI, MOSEI, MELD, and IEMOCAP, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and achieve consistent improvements compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Is the Brain Mechanism for Hierarchical Structure Building Universal Across Languages? An fMRI Study of Chinese and English (2022)

Evidence from psycholinguistic studies suggests that the human brain builds a hierarchical syntactic structure during language comprehension. However, it is still unknown whether the neural basis of such structures is universal across languages. In this paper, we first analyze the differences in language structure between two diverse languages: Chinese and English. By computing the working memory requirements when applying parsing strategies to different language structures, we find that top-down parsing generates less memory load for the right-branching English and bottom-up parsing is less memory-demanding for Chinese.Then we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether the brain has different syntactic adaptation strategies in processing Chinese and English. Specifically, for both Chinese and English, we extract predictors from the implementations of different parsing strategies, i.e., bottom-up and top-down. Then, these predictors are separately associated with fMRI signals. Results show that for Chinese and English, the brain utilizes bottom-up and top-down parsing strategies separately. These results reveal that the brain adopts parsing strategies with less memory processing load according to different language structures.
HashFormers: Towards Vocabulary-independent Pre-trained Transformers (2022)

Transformer-based pre-trained language models are vocabulary-dependent, mapping by default each token to its corresponding embedding. This one-to-one mapping results into embedding matrices that occupy a lot of memory (i.e. millions of parameters) and grow linearly with the size of the vocabulary. Previous work on on-device transformers dynamically generate token embeddings on-the-fly without embedding matrices using locality-sensitive hashing over morphological information. These embeddings are subsequently fed into transformer layers for text classification. However, these methods are not pre-trained. Inspired by this line of work, we propose HashFormers, a new family of vocabulary-independent pre-trained transformers that support an unlimited vocabulary (i.e. all possible tokens in a corpus) given a substantially smaller fixed-sized embedding matrix. We achieve this by first introducing computationally cheap hashing functions that bucket together individual tokens to embeddings. We also propose three variants that do not require an embedding matrix at all, further reducing the memory requirements. We empirically demonstrate that HashFormers are more memory efficient compared to standard pre-trained transformers while achieving comparable predictive performance when fine-tuned on multiple text classification tasks. For example, our most efficient HashFormer variant has a negligible performance degradation (0.4{\%} on GLUE) using only 99.1K parameters for representing the embeddings compared to 12.3-38M parameters of state-of-the-art models.
MatchPrompt: Prompt-based Open Relation Extraction with Semantic Consistency Guided Clustering (2022)

Relation clustering is a general approach for open relation extraction (OpenRE). Current methods have two major problems. One is that their good performance relies on large amounts of labeled and pre-defined relational instances for pre-training, which are costly to acquire in reality. The other is that they only focus on learning a high-dimensional metric space to measure the similarity of novel relations and ignore the specific relational representations of clusters. In this work, we propose a new prompt-based framework named MatchPrompt, which can realize OpenRE with efficient knowledge transfer from only a few pre-defined relational instances as well as mine the specific meanings for cluster interpretability. To our best knowledge, we are the first to introduce a prompt-based framework for unlabeled clustering. Experimental results on different datasets show that MatchPrompt achieves the new SOTA results for OpenRE.
Improving Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction via Template-Order Data Augmentation (2022)

Recently, aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) has become a popular task in the field of aspect-level sentiment analysis. Previous work utilizes a predefined template to paraphrase the original sentence into a structure target sequence, which can be easily decoded as quadruplets of the form (aspect category, aspect term, opinion term, sentiment polarity). The template involves the four elements in a fixed order. However, we observe that this solution contradicts with the order-free property of the ASQP task, since there is no need to fix the template order as long as the quadruplet is extracted correctly. Inspired by the observation, we study the effects of template orders and find that some orders help the generative model achieve better performance. It is hypothesized that different orders provide various views of the quadruplet. Therefore, we propose a simple but effective method to identify the most proper orders, and further combine multiple proper templates as data augmentation to improve the ASQP task. Specifically, we use the pre-trained language model to select the orders with minimal entropy. By fine-tuning the pre-trained language model with these template orders, our approach improves the performance of quad prediction, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly in low-resource settings.
SocioProbe: What, When, and Where Language Models Learn about Sociodemographics (2022)

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have outperformed other NLP models on a wide range of tasks. Opting for a more thorough understanding of their capabilities and inner workings, researchers have established the extend to which they capture lower-level knowledge like grammaticality, and mid-level semantic knowledge like factual understanding. However, there is still little understanding of their knowledge of higher-level aspects of language. In particular, despite the importance of sociodemographic aspects in shaping our language, the questions of whether, where, and how PLMs encode these aspects, e.g., gender or age, is still unexplored. We address this research gap by probing the sociodemographic knowledge of different single-GPU PLMs on multiple English data sets via traditional classifier probing and information-theoretic minimum description length probing. Our results show that PLMs do encode these sociodemographics, and that this knowledge is sometimes spread across the layers of some of the tested PLMs. We further conduct a multilingual analysis and investigate the effect of supplementary training to further explore to what extent, where, and with what amount of pre-training data the knowledge is encoded. Our overall results indicate that sociodemographic knowledge is still a major challenge for NLP. PLMs require large amounts of pre-training data to acquire the knowledge and models that excel in general language understanding do not seem to own more knowledge about these aspects.
When does Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning Work for Machine Translation? (2022)

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods (PEFTs) offer the promise of adapting large pre-trained models while only tuning a small number of parameters. They have been shown to be competitive with full model fine-tuning for many downstream tasks. However, prior work indicates that PEFTs may not work as well for machine translation (MT), and there is no comprehensive study showing when PEFTs work for MT. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of PEFTs for MT, considering (1) various parameter budgets, (2) a diverse set of language-pairs, and (3) different pre-trained models. We find that {\textquoteleft}adapters', in which small feed-forward networks are added after every layer, are indeed on par with full model fine-tuning when the parameter budget corresponds to 10{\%} of total model parameters. Nevertheless, as the number of tuned parameters decreases, the performance of PEFTs decreases. The magnitude of this decrease depends on the language pair, with PEFTs particularly struggling for distantly related language-pairs. We find that using PEFTs with a larger pre-trained model outperforms full fine-tuning with a smaller model, and for smaller training data sizes, PEFTs outperform full fine-tuning for the same pre-trained model.
Hyper-X: A Unified Hypernetwork for Multi-Task Multilingual Transfer (2022)

Massively multilingual models are promising for transfer learning across tasks and languages. However, existing methods are unable to fully leverage training data when it is available in different task-language combinations. To exploit such heterogeneous supervision, we propose Hyper-X, a single hypernetwork that unifies multi-task and multilingual learning with efficient adaptation. It generates weights for adapter modules conditioned on both tasks and language embeddings. By learning to combine task and language-specific knowledge, our model enables zero-shot transfer for unseen languages and task-language combinations. Our experiments on a diverse set of languages demonstrate that Hyper-X achieves the best or competitive gain when a mixture of multiple resources is available, while on par with strong baseline in the standard scenario. Hyper-X is also considerably more efficient in terms of parameters and resources compared to methods that train separate adapters. Finally, Hyper-X consistently produces strong results in few-shot scenarios for new languages, showing the versatility of our approach beyond zero-shot transfer.
Towards Robust Numerical Question Answering: Diagnosing Numerical Capabilities of NLP Systems (2022)

Numerical Question Answering is the task of answering questions that require numerical capabilities. Previous works introduce general adversarial attacks to Numerical Question Answering, while not systematically exploring numerical capabilities specific to the topic. In this paper, we propose to conduct numerical capability diagnosis on a series of Numerical Question Answering systems and datasets. A series of numerical capabilities are highlighted, and corresponding dataset perturbations are designed. Empirical results indicate that existing systems are severely challenged by these perturbations. E.g., Graph2Tree experienced a 53.83{\%} absolute accuracy drop against the {\textquotedblleft}Extra{\textquotedblright} perturbation on ASDiv-a, and BART experienced 13.80{\%} accuracy drop against the {\textquotedblleft}Language{\textquotedblright} perturbation on the numerical subset of DROP. As a counteracting approach, we also investigate the effectiveness of applying perturbations as data augmentation to relieve systems' lack of robust numerical capabilities. With experiment analysis and empirical studies, it is demonstrated that Numerical Question Answering with robust numerical capabilities is still to a large extent an open question. We discuss future directions of Numerical Question Answering and summarize guidelines on future dataset collection and system design.
Enhancing Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling with Global Intent-Slot Co-occurrence (2022)

Multi-intent detection and slot filling joint model attracts more and more attention since it can handle multi-intent utterances, which is closer to complex real-world scenarios. Most existing joint models rely entirely on the training procedure to obtain the implicit correlation between intents and slots. However, they ignore the fact that leveraging the rich global knowledge in the corpus can determine the intuitive and explicit correlation between intents and slots. In this paper, we aim to make full use of the statistical co-occurrence frequency between intents and slots as prior knowledge to enhance joint multiple intent detection and slot filling. To be specific, an intent-slot co-occurrence graph is constructed based on the entire training corpus to globally discover correlation between intents and slots. Based on the global intent-slot co-occurrence, we propose a novel graph neural network to model the interaction between the two subtasks. Experimental results on two public multi-intent datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models.
Towards Pragmatic Production Strategies for Natural Language Generation Tasks (2022)

This position paper proposes a conceptual framework for the design of Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems that follow efficient and effective production strategies in order to achieve complex communicative goals. In this general framework, efficiency is characterised as the parsimonious regulation of production and comprehension costs while effectiveness is measured with respect to task-oriented and contextually grounded communicative goals. We provide concrete suggestions for the estimation of goals, costs, and utility via modern statistical methods, demonstrating applications of our framework to the classic pragmatic task of visually grounded referential games and to abstractive text summarisation, two popular generation tasks with real-world applications. In sum, we advocate for the development of NLG systems that learn to make pragmatic production decisions from experience, by reasoning about goals, costs, and utility in a human-like way.
LiteVL: Efficient Video-Language Learning with Enhanced Spatial-Temporal Modeling (2022)

Recent large-scale video-language pre-trained models have shown appealing performance on various downstream tasks. However, the pre-training process is computationally expensive due to the requirement of millions of video-text pairs and the redundant data structure of each video. To mitigate these problems, we propose LiteVL, which adapts a pre-trained image-language model BLIP into a video-text model directly on downstream tasks, without heavy pre-training. To enhance the temporal modeling lacking in the image-language model, we propose to add temporal attention modules in the image encoder of BLIP with dynamic temporal scaling. Besides the model-wise adaptation, we also propose a non-parametric pooling mechanism to adaptively reweight the fine-grained video embedding conditioned on the text. Experimental results on text-video retrieval and video question answering show that the proposed LiteVL even outperforms previous video-language pre-trained models by a clear margin, though without any video-language pre-training.
Communication breakdown: On the low mutual intelligibility between human and neural captioning (2022)

We compare the 0-shot performance of a neural caption-based image retriever when given as input either human-produced captions or captions generated by a neural captioner. We conduct this comparison on the recently introduced ImageCoDe data-set (Krojer et al. 2022), which contains hard distractors nearly identical to the images to be retrieved. We find that the neural retriever has much higher performance when fed neural rather than human captions, despite the fact that the former, unlike the latter, were generated without awareness of the distractors that make the task hard. Even more remarkably, when the same neural captions are given to human subjects, their retrieval performance is almost at chance level. Our results thus add to the growing body of evidence that, even when the {\textquotedblleft}language{\textquotedblright} of neural models resembles English, this superficial resemblance might be deeply misleading.
Normalizing Mutual Information for Robust Adaptive Training for Translation (2022)

Despite the success of neural machine translation models, tensions between fluency of optimizing target language modeling and source-faithfulness remain as challenges. Previously, Conditional Bilingual Mutual Information (CBMI), a scoring metric for the importance of target sentences and tokens, was proposed to encourage fluent and faithful translations. The score is obtained by combining the probability from the translation model and the target language model, which is then used to assign different weights to losses from sentences and tokens. Meanwhile, we argue this metric is not properly normalized, for which we propose Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (NPMI). NPMI utilizes an additional language model on source language to approximate the joint likelihood of source-target pair and the likelihood of the source, which is then used for normalizing the score. We showed that NPMI better captures the dependence between source-target and that NPMI-based token-level adaptive training brings improvements over baselines with empirical results from En-De, De-En, and En-Ro translation tasks.
Bilingual Synchronization: Restoring Translational Relationships with Editing Operations (2022)

Machine Translation (MT) is usually viewed as a one-shot process that generates the target language equivalent of some source text from scratch. We consider here a more general setting which assumes an initial target sequence, that must be transformed into a valid translation of the source, thereby restoring parallelism between source and target. For this bilingual synchronization task, we consider several architectures (both autoregressive and non-autoregressive) and training regimes, and experiment with multiple practical settings such as simulated interactive MT, translating with Translation Memory (TM) and TM cleaning. Our results suggest that one single generic edit-based system, once fine-tuned, can compare with, or even outperform, dedicated systems specifically trained for these tasks.
Human-Machine Collaboration Approaches to Build a Dialogue Dataset for Hate Speech Countering (2022)

Fighting online hate speech is a challenge that is usually addressed using Natural Language Processing via automatic detection and removal of hate content. Besides this approach, counter narratives have emerged as an effective tool employed by NGOs to respond to online hate on social media platforms. For this reason, Natural Language Generation is currently being studied as a way to automatize counter narrative writing. However, the existing resources necessary to train NLG models are limited to 2-turn interactions (a hate speech and a counter narrative as response), while in real life, interactions can consist of multiple turns. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach for dialogical data collection, which combines the intervention of human expert annotators over machine generated dialogues obtained using 19 different configurations. The result of this work is DIALOCONAN, the first dataset comprising over 3000 fictitious multi-turn dialogues between a hater and an NGO operator, covering 6 targets of hate.