ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Modeling Endorsement for Multi-Document Abstractive Summarization (2021)

A crucial difference between single- and multi-document summarization is how salient content manifests itself in the document(s). While such content may appear at the beginning of a single document, essential information is frequently reiterated in a set of documents related to a particular topic, resulting in an endorsement effect that increases information salience. In this paper, we model the cross-document endorsement effect and its utilization in multiple document summarization. Our method generates a synopsis from each document, which serves as an endorser to identify salient content from other documents. Strongly endorsed text segments are used to enrich a neural encoder-decoder model to consolidate them into an abstractive summary. The method has a great potential to learn from fewer examples to identify salient content, which alleviates the need for costly retraining when the set of documents is dynamically adjusted. Through extensive experiments on benchmark multi-document summarization datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method over strong published baselines. Finally, we shed light on future research directions and discuss broader challenges of this task using a case study.
SUBSUME: A Dataset for Subjective Summary Extraction from Wikipedia Documents (2021)

Many applications require generation of summaries tailored to the user`s information needs, i.e., their intent. Methods that express intent via explicit user queries fall short when query interpretation is subjective. Several datasets exist for summarization with objective intents where, for each document and intent (e.g., {\textquotedblleft}weather{\textquotedblright}), a single summary suffices for all users. No datasets exist, however, for subjective intents (e.g., {\textquotedblleft}interesting places{\textquotedblright}) where different users will provide different summaries. We present SUBSUME, the first dataset for evaluation of SUBjective SUMmary Extraction systems. SUBSUME contains 2,200 (document, intent, summary) triplets over 48 Wikipedia pages, with ten intents of varying subjectivity, provided by 103 individuals over Mechanical Turk. We demonstrate statistically that the intents in SUBSUME vary systematically in subjectivity. To indicate SUBSUME`s usefulness, we explore a collection of baseline algorithms for subjective extractive summarization and show that (i) as expected, example-based approaches better capture subjective intents than query-based ones, and (ii) there is ample scope for improving upon the baseline algorithms, thereby motivating further research on this challenging problem.
TLDR9+: A Large Scale Resource for Extreme Summarization of Social Media Posts (2021)

Recent models in developing summarization systems consist of millions of parameters and the model performance is highly dependent on the abundance of training data. While most existing summarization corpora contain data in the order of thousands to one million, generation of large-scale summarization datasets in order of couple of millions is yet to be explored. Practically, more data is better at generalizing the training patterns to unseen data. In this paper, we introduce TLDR9+ {--}a large-scale summarization dataset{--} containing over 9 million training instances extracted from Reddit discussion forum ([HTTP]). This dataset is specifically gathered to perform \textit{extreme} summarization (i.e., generating one-sentence summary in high compression and abstraction) and is more than twice larger than the previously proposed dataset. We go one step further and with the help of human annotations, we distill a more fine-grained dataset by sampling High-Quality instances from TLDR9+ and call it TLDRHQ dataset. We further pinpoint different state-of-the-art summarization models on our proposed datasets.
A New Dataset and Efficient Baselines for Document-level Text Simplification in German (2021)

The task of document-level text simplification is very similar to summarization with the additional difficulty of reducing complexity. We introduce a newly collected data set of German texts, collected from the Swiss news magazine 20 Minuten ({\textquoteleft}20 Minutes') that consists of full articles paired with simplified summaries. Furthermore, we present experiments on automatic text simplification with the pretrained multilingual mBART and a modified version thereof that is more memory-friendly, using both our new data set and existing simplification corpora. Our modifications of mBART let us train at a lower memory cost without much loss in performance, in fact, the smaller mBART even improves over the standard model in a setting with multiple simplification levels.
Learning General Event Schemas with Episodic Logic (2021)

We present a system for learning generalized, stereotypical patterns of events{---}or {\textquotedblleft}schemas{\textquotedblright}{---}from natural language stories, and applying them to make predictions about other stories. Our schemas are represented with Episodic Logic, a logical form that closely mirrors natural language. By beginning with a {\textquotedblleft}head start{\textquotedblright} set of protoschemas{---} schemas that a 1- or 2-year-old child would likely know{---}we can obtain useful, general world knowledge with very few story examples{---}often only one or two. Learned schemas can be combined into more complex, composite schemas, and used to make predictions in other stories where only partial information is available.
Applied Medical Code Mapping with Character-based Deep Learning Models and Word-based Logic (2021)

Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) is a standard set of codes that enable clinicians to communicate about medical tests. Laboratories depend on LOINC to identify what tests a doctor orders for a patient. However, clinicians often use site specific, custom codes in their medical records systems that can include shorthand, spelling mistakes, and invented acronyms. Software solutions must map from these custom codes to the LOINC standard to support data interoperability. A key challenge is that LOINC is comprised of six elements. Mapping requires not only extracting those elements, but also combining them according to LOINC logic. We found that character-based deep learning excels at extracting LOINC elements while logic based methods are more effective for combining those elements into complete LOINC values. In this paper, we present an ensemble of machine learning and logic that is currently used in several medical facilities to map from
Attentive Tree-structured Network for Monotonicity Reasoning (2021)

Many state-of-art neural models designed for monotonicity reasoning perform poorly on downward inference. To address this shortcoming, we developed an attentive tree-structured neural network. It consists of a tree-based long-short-term-memory network (Tree-LSTM) with soft attention. It is designed to model the syntactic parse tree information from the sentence pair of a reasoning task. A self-attentive aggregator is used for aligning the representations of the premise and the hypothesis. We present our model and evaluate it using the Monotonicity Entailment Dataset (MED). We show and attempt to explain that our model outperforms existing models on MED.
Transferring Representations of Logical Connectives (2021)

In modern natural language processing pipelines, it is common practice to {\textquotedblleft}pretrain{\textquotedblright} a generative language model on a large corpus of text, and then to {\textquotedblleft}finetune{\textquotedblright} the created representations by continuing to train them on a discriminative textual inference task. However, it is not immediately clear whether the logical meaning necessary to model logical entailment is captured by language models in this paradigm. We examine this pretrain-finetune recipe with language models trained on a synthetic propositional language entailment task, and present results on test sets probing models' knowledge of axioms of first order logic.
Monotonic Inference for Underspecified Episodic Logic (2021)

We present a method of making natural logic inferences from Unscoped Logical Form of Episodic Logic. We establish a correspondence between inference rules of scope resolved Episodic Logic and the natural logic treatment by S{\'a}nchez Valencia (1991a), and hence demonstrate the ability to handle foundational natural logic inferences from prior literature as well as more general nested monotonicity inferences.
Supporting Context Monotonicity Abstractions in Neural NLI Models (2021)

Natural language contexts display logical regularities with respect to substitutions of related concepts: these are captured in a functional order-theoretic property called monotonicity. For a certain class of NLI problems where the resulting entailment label depends only on the context monotonicity and the relation between the substituted concepts, we build on previous techniques that aim to improve the performance of NLI models for these problems, as consistent performance across both upward and downward monotone contexts still seems difficult to attain even for state of the art models. To this end, we reframe the problem of context monotonicity classification to make it compatible with transformer-based pre-trained NLI models and add this task to the training pipeline. Furthermore, we introduce a sound and complete simplified monotonicity logic formalism which describes our treatment of contexts as abstract units. Using the notions in our formalism, we adapt targeted challenge sets to investigate whether an intermediate context monotonicity classification task can aid NLI models' performance on examples exhibiting monotonicity reasoning.
Bayesian Classification and Inference in a Probabilistic Type Theory with Records (2021)

We propose a probabilistic account of semantic inference and classification formulated in terms of probabilistic type theory with records, building on Cooper et. al. (2014) and Cooper et. al. (2015). We suggest probabilistic type theoretic formulations of Naive Bayes Classifiers and Bayesian Networks. A central element of these constructions is a type-theoretic version of a random variable. We illustrate this account with a simple language game combining probabilistic classification of perceptual input with probabilistic (semantic) inference.
From compositional semantics to Bayesian pragmatics via logical inference (2021)

Formal semantics in the Montagovian tradition provides precise meaning characterisations, but usually without a formal theory of the pragmatics of contextual parameters and their sensitivity to background knowledge. Meanwhile, formal pragmatic theories make explicit predictions about meaning in context, but generally without a well-defined compositional semantics. We propose a combined framework for the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of sentences in the face of probabilistic knowledge. We do so by (1) extending a Montagovian interpretation scheme to generate a distribution over possible meanings, and (2) generating a posterior for this distribution using a variant of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) models, but generalised to arbitrary propositions. These aspects of our framework are tied together by evaluating entailment under probabilistic uncertainty. We apply our model to anaphora resolution and show that it provides expected biases under suitable assumptions about the distributions of lexical and world-knowledge. Further, we observe that the model`s output is robust to variations in its parameters within reasonable ranges.
A (Mostly) Symbolic System for Monotonic Inference with Unscoped Episodic Logical Forms (2021)

We implement the formalization of natural logic-like monotonic inference using Unscoped Episodic Logical Forms (ULFs) by Kim et al. (2020). We demonstrate this system`s capacity to handle a variety of challenging semantic phenomena using the FraCaS dataset (Cooper et al., 1996). These results give empirical evidence for prior claims that ULF is an appropriate representation to mediate natural logic-like inferences.
Knowledge Router: Learning Disentangled Representations for Knowledge Graphs (2021)

The design of expressive representations of entities and relations in a knowledge graph is an important endeavor. While many of the existing approaches have primarily focused on learning from relational patterns and structural information, the intrinsic complexity of KG entities has been more or less overlooked. More concretely, we hypothesize KG entities may be more complex than we think, i.e., an entity may wear many hats and relational triplets may form due to more than a single reason. To this end, this paper proposes to learn disentangled representations of KG entities - a new method that disentangles the inner latent properties of KG entities. Our disentangled process operates at the graph level and a neighborhood mechanism is leveraged to disentangle the hidden properties of each entity. This disentangled representation learning approach is model agnostic and compatible with canonical KG embedding approaches. We conduct extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets, equipping a variety of models (DistMult, SimplE, and QuatE) with our proposed disentangling mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach substantially improves performance on key metrics.
Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction with Sentence Reconstruction and Knowledge Base Priors (2021)

We propose a multi-task, probabilistic approach to facilitate distantly supervised relation extraction by bringing closer the representations of sentences that contain the same Knowledge Base pairs. To achieve this, we bias the latent space of sentences via a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that is trained jointly with a relation classifier. The latent code guides the pair representations and influences sentence reconstruction. Experimental results on two datasets created via distant supervision indicate that multi-task learning results in performance benefits. Additional exploration of employing Knowledge Base priors into theVAE reveals that the sentence space can be shifted towards that of the Knowledge Base, offering interpretability and further improving results.
Cross-Task Instance Representation Interactions and Label Dependencies for Joint Information Extraction with Graph Convolutional Networks (2021)

Existing works on information extraction (IE) have mainly solved the four main tasks separately (entity mention recognition, relation extraction, event trigger detection, and argument extraction), thus failing to benefit from inter-dependencies between tasks. This paper presents a novel deep learning model to simultaneously solve the four tasks of IE in a single model (called FourIE). Compared to few prior work on jointly performing four IE tasks, FourIE features two novel contributions to capture inter-dependencies between tasks. First, at the representation level, we introduce an interaction graph between instances of the four tasks that is used to enrich the prediction representation for one instance with those from related instances of other tasks. Second, at the label level, we propose a dependency graph for the information types in the four IE tasks that captures the connections between the types expressed in an input sentence. A new regularization mechanism is introduced to enforce the consistency between the golden and predicted type dependency graphs to improve representation learning. We show that the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for joint IE on both monolingual and multilingual learning settings with three different languages.
Abstract Meaning Representation Guided Graph Encoding and Decoding for Joint Information Extraction (2021)

The tasks of Rich Semantic Parsing, such as Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), share similar goals with Information Extraction (IE) to convert natural language texts into structured semantic representations. To take advantage of such similarity, we propose a novel AMR-guided framework for joint information extraction to discover entities, relations, and events with the help of a pre-trained AMR parser. Our framework consists of two novel components: 1) an AMR based semantic graph aggregator to let the candidate entity and event trigger nodes collect neighborhood information from AMR graph for passing message among related knowledge elements; 2) an AMR guided graph decoder to extract knowledge elements based on the order decided by the hierarchical structures in AMR. Experiments on multiple datasets have shown that the AMR graph encoder and decoder have provided significant gains and our approach has achieved new state-of-the-art performance on all IE subtasks.
A Frustratingly Easy Approach for Entity and Relation Extraction (2021)

End-to-end relation extraction aims to identify named entities and extract relations between them. Most recent work models these two subtasks jointly, either by casting them in one structured prediction framework, or performing multi-task learning through shared representations. In this work, we present a simple pipelined approach for entity and relation extraction, and establish the new state-of-the-art on standard benchmarks (ACE04, ACE05 and SciERC), obtaining a 1.7{\%}-2.8{\%} absolute improvement in relation F1 over previous joint models with the same pre-trained encoders. Our approach essentially builds on two independent encoders and merely uses the entity model to construct the input for the relation model. Through a series of careful examinations, we validate the importance of learning distinct contextual representations for entities and relations, fusing entity information early in the relation model, and incorporating global context. Finally, we also present an efficient approximation to our approach which requires only one pass of both entity and relation encoders at inference time, achieving an 8-16{\texttimes} speedup with a slight reduction in accuracy.
Event Time Extraction and Propagation via Graph Attention Networks (2021)

Grounding events into a precise timeline is important for natural language understanding but has received limited attention in recent work. This problem is challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of language and the requirement for information propagation over inter-related events. This paper first formulates this problem based on a 4-tuple temporal representation used in entity slot filling, which allows us to represent fuzzy time spans more conveniently. We then propose a graph attention network-based approach to propagate temporal information over document-level event graphs constructed by shared entity arguments and temporal relations. To better evaluate our approach, we present a challenging new benchmark on the ACE2005 corpus, where more than 78{\%} of events do not have time spans mentioned explicitly in their local contexts. The proposed approach yields an absolute gain of 7.0{\%} in match rate over contextualized embedding approaches, and 16.3{\%} higher match rate compared to sentence-level manual event time argument annotation.
Probing Word Translations in the Transformer and Trading Decoder for Encoder Layers (2021)

Due to its effectiveness and performance, the Transformer translation model has attracted wide attention, most recently in terms of probing-based approaches. Previous work focuses on using or probing source linguistic features in the encoder. To date, the way word translation evolves in Transformer layers has not yet been investigated. Naively, one might assume that encoder layers capture source information while decoder layers translate. In this work, we show that this is not quite the case: translation already happens progressively in encoder layers and even in the input embeddings. More surprisingly, we find that some of the lower decoder layers do not actually do that much decoding. We show all of this in terms of a probing approach where we project representations of the layer analyzed to the final trained and frozen classifier level of the Transformer decoder to measure word translation accuracy. Our findings motivate and explain a Transformer configuration change: if translation already happens in the encoder layers, perhaps we can increase the number of encoder layers, while decreasing the number of decoder layers, boosting decoding speed, without loss in translation quality? Our experiments show that this is indeed the case: we can increase speed by up to a factor 2.3 with small gains in translation quality, while an 18-4 deep encoder configuration boosts translation quality by +1.42 BLEU (En-De) at a speed-up of 1.4.
Mediators in Determining what Processing BERT Performs First (2021)

Probing neural models for the ability to perform downstream tasks using their activation patterns is often used to localize what parts of the network specialize in performing what tasks. However, little work addressed potential mediating factors in such comparisons. As a test-case mediating factor, we consider the prediction`s context length, namely the length of the span whose processing is minimally required to perform the prediction. We show that not controlling for context length may lead to contradictory conclusions as to the localization patterns of the network, depending on the distribution of the probing dataset. Indeed, when probing BERT with seven tasks, we find that it is possible to get 196 different rankings between them when manipulating the distribution of context lengths in the probing dataset. We conclude by presenting best practices for conducting such comparisons in the future.
Automatic Generation of Contrast Sets from Scene Graphs: Probing the Compositional Consistency of GQA (2021)

Recent works have shown that supervised models often exploit data artifacts to achieve good test scores while their performance severely degrades on samples outside their training distribution. Contrast sets (Gardneret al., 2020) quantify this phenomenon by perturbing test samples in a minimal way such that the output label is modified. While most contrast sets were created manually, requiring intensive annotation effort, we present a novel method which leverages rich semantic input representation to automatically generate contrast sets for the visual question answering task. Our method computes the answer of perturbed questions, thus vastly reducing annotation cost and enabling thorough evaluation of models' performance on various semantic aspects (e.g., spatial or relational reasoning). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the GQA dataset and its semantic scene graph image representation. We find that, despite GQA`s compositionality and carefully balanced label distribution, two high-performing models drop 13-17{\%} in accuracy compared to the original test set. Finally, we show that our automatic perturbation can be applied to the training set to mitigate the degradation in performance, opening the door to more robust models.
Multilingual Language Models Predict Human Reading Behavior (2021)

We analyze if large language models are able to predict patterns of human reading behavior. We compare the performance of language-specific and multilingual pretrained transformer models to predict reading time measures reflecting natural human sentence processing on Dutch, English, German, and Russian texts. This results in accurate models of human reading behavior, which indicates that transformer models implicitly encode relative importance in language in a way that is comparable to human processing mechanisms. We find that BERT and XLM models successfully predict a range of eye tracking features. In a series of experiments, we analyze the cross-domain and cross-language abilities of these models and show how they reflect human sentence processing.