ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
In-Context Analogical Reasoning with Pre-Trained Language Models (2023)

Analogical reasoning is a fundamental capacity of human cognition that allows us to reason abstractly about novel situations by relating them to past experiences. While it is thought to be essential for robust reasoning in AI systems, conventional approaches require significant training and/or hard-coding of domain knowledge to be applied to benchmark tasks. Inspired by cognitive science research that has found connections between human language and analogy-making, we explore the use of intuitive language-based abstractions to support analogy in AI systems. Specifically, we apply large pre-trained language models (PLMs) to visual Raven`s Progressive Matrices (RPM), a common relational reasoning test. By simply encoding the perceptual features of the problem into language form, we find that PLMs exhibit a striking capacity for zero-shot relational reasoning, exceeding human performance and nearing supervised vision-based methods. We explore different encodings that vary the level of abstraction over task features, finding that higher-level abstractions further strengthen PLMs' analogical reasoning. Our detailed analysis reveals insights on the role of model complexity, in-context learning, and prior knowledge in solving RPM tasks.
Peek Across: Improving Multi-Document Modeling via Cross-Document Question-Answering (2023)

The integration of multi-document pre-training objectives into language models has resulted in remarkable improvements in multi-document downstream tasks. In this work, we propose extending this idea by pre-training a generic multi-document model from a novel cross-document question answering pre-training objective. To that end, given a set (or cluster) of topically-related documents, we systematically generate semantically-oriented questions from a salient sentence in one document and challenge the model, during pre-training, to answer these questions while {\textquotedblleft}peeking{\textquotedblright} into other topically-related documents. In a similar manner, the model is also challenged to recover the sentence from which the question was generated, again while leveraging cross-document information. This novel multi-document QA formulation directs the model to better recover cross-text informational relations, and introduces a natural augmentation that artificially increases the pre-training data. Further, unlike prior multi-document models that focus on either classification or summarization tasks, our pre-training objective formulation enables the model to perform tasks that involve both short text generation (e.g., QA) and long text generation (e.g., summarization).Following this scheme, we pre-train our model - termed QAmden - and evaluate its performance across several multi-document tasks, including multi-document QA, summarization, and query-focused summarization, yielding improvements of up to 7{\%}, and significantly outperforms zero-shot GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.
Tailoring Instructions to Student`s Learning Levels Boosts Knowledge Distillation (2023)

It has been commonly observed that a teacher model with superior performance does not necessarily result in a stronger student, highlighting a discrepancy between current teacher training practices and effective knowledge transfer. In order to enhance the guidance of the teacher training process, we introduce the concept of distillation influence to determine the impact of distillation from each training sample on the student`s generalization ability. In this paper, we propose Learning Good Teacher Matters (LGTM), an efficient training technique for incorporating distillation influence into the teacher`s learning process. By prioritizing samples that are likely to enhance the student`s generalization ability, our LGTM outperforms 10 common knowledge distillation baselines on 6 text classification tasks in the GLUE benchmark.
REV: Information-Theoretic Evaluation of Free-Text Rationales (2023)

Generating free-text rationales is a promising step towards explainable NLP, yet evaluating such rationales remains a challenge. Existing metrics have mostly focused on measuring the association between the rationale and a given label. We argue that an ideal metric should focus on the new information uniquely provided in the rationale that is otherwise not provided in the input or the label. We investigate this research problem from an information-theoretic perspective using conditional V-information (Hewitt et al., 2021). More concretely, we propose a metric called REV (Rationale Evaluation with conditional V-information), to quantify the amount of new, label-relevant information in a rationale beyond the information already available in the input or the label. Experiments across four benchmarks with reasoning tasks, including chain-of-thought, demonstrate the effectiveness of REV in evaluating rationale-label pairs, compared to existing metrics. We further demonstrate REV is consistent with human judgments on rationale evaluations and provides more sensitive measurements of new information in free-text rationales. When used alongside traditional performance metrics, REV provides deeper insights into models' reasoning and prediction processes.
ELQA: A Corpus of Metalinguistic Questions and Answers about English (2023)

We present ELQA, a corpus of questions and answers in and about the English language. Collected from two online forums, the {\ensuremath{>}}70k questions (from English learners and others) cover wide-ranging topics including grammar, meaning, fluency, and etymology. The answers include descriptions of general properties of English vocabulary and grammar as well as explanations about specific (correct and incorrect) usage examples. Unlike most NLP datasets, this corpus is metalinguistic{---}it consists of language about language. As such, it can facilitate investigations of the metalinguistic capabilities of NLU models, as well as educational applications in the language learning domain. To study this, we define a free-form question answering task on our dataset and conduct evaluations on multiple LLMs (Large Language Models) to analyze their capacity to generate metalinguistic answers.
Divide, Conquer, and Combine: Mixture of Semantic-Independent Experts for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking (2023)

Zero-shot transfer learning for Dialogue State Tracking (DST) helps to handle a variety of task-oriented dialogue domains without the cost of collecting in-domain data. Existing works mainly study common data- or model-level augmentation methods to enhance the generalization but fail to effectively decouple semantics of samples, limiting the zero-shot performance of DST. In this paper, we present a simple and effective {\textquotedblleft}divide, conquer and combine{\textquotedblright} solution, which explicitly disentangles the semantics of seen data, and leverages the performance and robustness with the mixture-of-experts mechanism. Specifically, we divide the seen data into semantically independent subsets and train corresponding experts, the newly unseen samples are mapped and inferred with mixture-of-experts with our designed ensemble inference. Extensive experiments on MultiWOZ2.1 upon T5-Adapter show our schema significantly and consistently improves the zero-shot performance, achieving the SOTA on settings without external knowledge, with only 10M trainable parameters.
BIG-C: a Multimodal Multi-Purpose Dataset for Bemba (2023)

We present BIG-C (Bemba Image Grounded Conversations), a large multimodal dataset for Bemba. While Bemba is the most populous language of Zambia, it exhibits a dearth of resources which render the development of language technologies or language processing research almost impossible. The dataset is comprised of multi-turn dialogues between Bemba speakers based on images, transcribed and translated into English. There are more than 92,000 utterances/sentences, amounting to more than 180 hours of audio data with corresponding transcriptions and English translations. We also provide baselines on speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT) and speech translation (ST) tasks, and sketch out other potential future multimodal uses of our dataset. We hope that by making the dataset available to the research community, this work will foster research and encourage collaboration across the language, speech, and vision communities especially for languages outside the {\textquotedblleft}traditionally{\textquotedblright} used high-resourced ones. All data and code are publicly available: [\url{https://github.com/csikasote/bigc}](\url{https://github.com/csikasote/bigc}).
Schema-Guided User Satisfaction Modeling for Task-Oriented Dialogues (2023)

User Satisfaction Modeling (USM) is one of the popular choices for task-oriented dialogue systems evaluation, where user satisfaction typically depends on whether the user`s task goals were fulfilled by the system. Task-oriented dialogue systems use task schema, which is a set of task attributes, to encode the user`s task goals. Existing studies on USM neglect explicitly modeling the user`s task goals fulfillment using the task schema. In this paper, we propose SG-USM, a novel schema-guided user satisfaction modeling framework. It explicitly models the degree to which the user`s preferences regarding the task attributes are fulfilled by the system for predicting the user`s satisfaction level. SG-USM employs a pre-trained language model for encoding dialogue context and task attributes. Further, it employs a fulfillment representation layer for learning how many task attributes have been fulfilled in the dialogue, an importance predictor component for calculating the importance of task attributes. Finally, it predicts the user satisfaction based on task attribute fulfillment and task attribute importance. Experimental results on benchmark datasets (i.e. MWOZ, SGD, ReDial, and JDDC) show that SG-USM consistently outperforms competitive existing methods. Our extensive analysis demonstrates that SG-USM can improve the interpretability of user satisfaction modeling, has good scalability as it can effectively deal with unseen tasks and can also effectively work in low-resource settings by leveraging unlabeled data. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/amzn/user-satisfaction-modeling}.
Robust Multi-bit Natural Language Watermarking through Invariant Features (2023)

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of valuable original natural language contents found in subscription-based media outlets, web novel platforms, and outputs of large language models. However, these contents are susceptible to illegal piracy and potential misuse without proper security measures. This calls for a secure watermarking system to guarantee copyright protection through leakage tracing or ownership identification. To effectively combat piracy and protect copyrights, a multi-bit watermarking framework should be able to embed adequate bits of information and extract the watermarks in a robust manner despite possible corruption. In this work, we explore ways to advance both payload and robustness by following a well-known proposition from image watermarking and identify features in natural language that are invariant to minor corruption. Through a systematic analysis of the possible sources of errors, we further propose a corruption-resistant infill model. Our full method improves upon the previous work on robustness by +16.8{\%} point on average on four datasets, three corruption types, and two corruption ratios
KALM: Knowledge-Aware Integration of Local, Document, and Global Contexts for Long Document Understanding (2023)

With the advent of pre-trained language models (LMs), increasing research efforts have been focusing on infusing commonsense and domain-specific knowledge to prepare LMs for downstream tasks. These works attempt to leverage knowledge graphs, the de facto standard of symbolic knowledge representation, along with pre-trained LMs. While existing approaches leverage external knowledge, it remains an open question how to jointly incorporate knowledge graphs represented in varying contexts {---} from local (e.g., sentence), document-level, to global knowledge, to enable knowledge-rich and interpretable exchange across contexts. In addition, incorporating varying contexts can especially benefit long document understanding tasks that leverage pre-trained LMs, typically bounded by the input sequence length. In light of these challenges, we propose KALM, a language model that jointly leverages knowledge in local, document-level, and global contexts for long document understanding. KALM firstly encodes long documents and knowledge graphs into the three knowledge-aware context representations. KALM then processes each context with context-specific layers. These context-specific layers are followed by a ContextFusion layer that facilitates knowledge exchange to derive an overarching document representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KALM achieves state-of-the-art performance on three long document understanding tasks across 6 datasets/settings. Further analyses reveal that the three knowledge-aware contexts are complementary and they all contribute to model performance, while the importance and information exchange patterns of different contexts vary on different tasks and datasets.
AtTGen: Attribute Tree Generation for Real-World Attribute Joint Extraction (2023)

Attribute extraction aims to identify attribute names and the corresponding values from descriptive texts, which is the foundation for extensive downstream applications such as knowledge graph construction, search engines, and e-Commerce. In previous studies, attribute extraction is generally treated as a classification problem for predicting attribute types or a sequence tagging problem for labeling attribute values, where two paradigms, i.e., closed-world and open-world assumption, are involved. However, both of these paradigms have limitations in terms of real-world applications. And prior studies attempting to integrate these paradigms through ensemble, pipeline, and co-training models, still face challenges like cascading errors, high computational overhead, and difficulty in training. To address these existing problems, this paper presents Attribute Tree, a unified formulation for real-world attribute extraction application, where closed-world, open-world, and semi-open attribute extraction tasks are modeled uniformly. Then a text-to-tree generation model, AtTGen, is proposed to learn annotations from different scenarios efficiently and consistently. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed paradigm well covers various scenarios for real-world applications, and the model achieves state-of-the-art, outperforming existing methods by a large margin on three datasets. Our code, pretrained model, and datasets are available at \url{https://github.com/lsvih/AtTGen}.
Extractive is not Faithful: An Investigation of Broad Unfaithfulness Problems in Extractive Summarization (2023)

The problems of unfaithful summaries have been widely discussed under the context of abstractive summarization. Though extractive summarization is less prone to the common unfaithfulness issues of abstractive summaries, does that mean extractive is equal to faithful? Turns out that the answer is no. In this work, we define a typology with five types of broad unfaithfulness problems (including and beyond not-entailment) that can appear in extractive summaries, including incorrect coreference, incomplete coreference, incorrect discourse, incomplete discourse, as well as other misleading information. We ask humans to label these problems out of 1600 English summaries produced by 16 diverse extractive systems. We find that 30{\%} of the summaries have at least one of the five issues. To automatically detect these problems, we find that 5 existing faithfulness evaluation metrics for summarization have poor correlations with human judgment. To remedy this, we propose a new metric, ExtEval, that is designed for detecting unfaithful extractive summaries and is shown to have the best performance. We hope our work can increase the awareness of unfaithfulness problems in extractive summarization and help future work to evaluate and resolve these issues.
Improving Translation Quality Estimation with Bias Mitigation (2023)

State-of-the-art translation Quality Estimation (QE) models are proven to be biased. More specifically, they over-rely on monolingual features while ignoring the bilingual semantic alignment. In this work, we propose a novel method to mitigate the bias of the QE model and improve estimation performance. Our method is based on the contrastive learning between clean and noisy sentence pairs. We first introduce noise to the target side of the parallel sentence pair, forming the negative samples. With the original parallel pairs as the positive sample, the QE model is contrastively trained to distinguish the positive samples from the negative ones. This objective is jointly trained with the regression-style quality estimation, so as to prevent the QE model from overfitting to monolingual features. Experiments on WMT QE evaluation datasets demonstrate that our method improves the estimation performance by a large margin while mitigating the bias.
Breeding Machine Translations: Evolutionary approach to survive and thrive in the world of automated evaluation (2023)

We propose a genetic algorithm (GA) based method for modifying $n$-best lists produced by a machine translation (MT) system. Our method offers an innovative approach to improving MT quality and identifying weaknesses in evaluation metrics. Using common GA operations (mutation and crossover) on a list of hypotheses in combination with a fitness function (an arbitrary MT metric), we obtain novel and diverse outputs with high metric scores. With a combination of multiple MT metrics as the fitness function, the proposed method leads to an increase in translation quality as measured by other held-out automatic metrics.With a single metric (including popular ones such as COMET) as the fitness function, we find blind spots and flaws in the metric. This allows for an automated search for adversarial examples in an arbitrary metric, without prior assumptions on the form of such example. As a demonstration of the method, we create datasets of adversarial examples and use them to show that reference-free COMET is substantially less robust than the reference-based version.
MoralDial: A Framework to Train and Evaluate Moral Dialogue Systems via Moral Discussions (2023)

Morality in dialogue systems has raised great attention in research recently. A moral dialogue system aligned with users' values could enhance conversation engagement and user connections. In this paper, we propose a framework, MoralDial to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems. In our framework, we first explore the communication mechanisms of morality and resolve expressed morality into three parts, which indicate the roadmap for building a moral dialogue system. Based on that, we design a simple yet effective method: constructing moral discussions between simulated specific users and the dialogue system. The constructed discussions consist of expressing, explaining, revising, and inferring moral views in dialogue exchanges, which makes conversational models learn morality well in a natural manner. Furthermore, we propose a novel evaluation method under the framework. We evaluate the multiple aspects of morality by judging the relation between dialogue responses and human values in discussions, where the multifaceted nature of morality is particularly considered. Automatic and manual experiments demonstrate that our framework is promising to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems.
Denoising Bottleneck with Mutual Information Maximization for Video Multimodal Fusion (2023)

Video multimodal fusion aims to integrate multimodal signals in videos, such as visual, audio and text, to make a complementary prediction with multiple modalities contents. However, unlike other image-text multimodal tasks, video has longer multimodal sequences with more redundancy and noise in both visual and audio modalities. Prior denoising methods like forget gate are coarse in the granularity of noise filtering. They often suppress the redundant and noisy information at the risk of losing critical information. Therefore, we propose a denoising bottleneck fusion (DBF) model for fine-grained video multimodal fusion. On the one hand, we employ a bottleneck mechanism to filter out noise and redundancy with a restrained receptive field. On the other hand, we use a mutual information maximization module to regulate the filter-out module to preserve key information within different modalities. Our DBF model achieves significant improvement over current state-of-the-art baselines on multiple benchmarks covering multimodal sentiment analysis and multimodal summarization tasks. It proves that our model can effectively capture salient features from noisy and redundant video, audio, and text inputs. The code for this paper will be publicly available at \url{https://github.com/WSXRHFG/DBF}
SimLM: Pre-training with Representation Bottleneck for Dense Passage Retrieval (2023)

In this paper, we propose SimLM (Similarity matching with Language Model pre-training), a simple yet effective pre-training method for dense passage retrieval. It employs a simple bottleneck architecture that learns to compress the passage information into a dense vector through self-supervised pre-training. We use a replaced language modeling objective, which is inspired by ELECTRA (Clark et al., 2020), to improve the sample efficiency and reduce the mismatch of the input distribution between pre-training and fine-tuning. SimLM only requires access to an unlabeled corpus and is more broadly applicable when there are no labeled data or queries. We conduct experiments on several large-scale passage retrieval datasets and show substantial improvements over strong baselines under various settings. Remarkably, SimLM even outperforms multi-vector approaches such as ColBERTv2 (Santhanam et al., 2021) which incurs significantly more storage cost. Our code and model checkpoints are available at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/unilm/tree/master/simlm} .
From Ultra-Fine to Fine: Fine-tuning Ultra-Fine Entity Typing Models to Fine-grained (2023)

For the task of fine-grained entity typing (FET), due to the use of a large number of entity types, it is usually considered too costly to manually annotating a training dataset that contains an ample number of examples for each type. A common way to address this problem is to use distantly annotated training data that contains incorrect labels. However, the performance of models trained solely with such data can be limited by the errors in the automatic annotation. Recently, there are a few approaches that no longer follow this conventional way. But without using sufficient direct entity typing supervision may also cause them to yield inferior performance. In this paper, we propose a new approach that can avoid the need of creating distantly labeled data whenever there is a new type schema. We first train an entity typing model that have an extremely board type coverage by using the ultra-fine entity typing data. Then, when there is a need to produce a model for a newly designed fine-grained entity type schema. We can simply fine-tune the previously trained model with a small number of examples annotated under this schema. Experimental results show that our approach achieves outstanding performance for FET under the few-shot setting. It can also outperform state-of-the-art weak supervision based methods after fine-tuning the model with only a small size manually annotated training set.