ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Weakly Supervised Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Relative Representations (2023)

Weakly supervised vision-and-language pre-training (WVLP), which learns cross-modal representations with limited cross-modal supervision, has been shown to effectively reduce the data cost of pre-training while maintaining decent performance on downstream tasks. However, current WVLP methods use only local descriptions of images, i.e., object tags, as cross-modal anchors to construct weakly-aligned image-text pairs for pre-training. This affects the data quality and thus the effectiveness of pre-training. In this paper, we propose to directly take a small number of aligned image-text pairs as anchors, and represent each unaligned image and text by its similarities to these anchors, i.e., relative representations. We build a WVLP framework based on the relative representations, namely RELIT, which collects high-quality weakly-aligned image-text pairs from large-scale image-only and text-only data for pre-training through relative representation-based retrieval and generation. Experiments on four downstream tasks show that RELIT achieves new state-of-the-art results under the weakly supervised setting.
HermEs: Interactive Spreadsheet Formula Prediction via Hierarchical Formulet Expansion (2023)

We propose HermEs, the first approach for spreadsheet formula prediction via HiEraRchical forMulet ExpanSion, where hierarchical expansion means generating formulas following the underlying parse tree structure, and Formulet refers to commonly-used multi-level patterns mined from real formula parse trees. HermEs improves the formula prediction accuracy by (1) guaranteeing correct grammar by hierarchical generation rather than left-to-right generation and (2) significantly streamlining the token-level decoding with high-level Formulet. Notably, instead of generating formulas in a pre-defined fixed order, we propose a novel sampling strategy to systematically exploit a variety of hierarchical and multi-level expansion orders and provided solid mathematical proof, with the aim of meeting diverse human needs of the formula writing order in real applications. We further develop an interactive formula completion interface based on HermEs, which shows a new user experience in \url{https://github.com/formulet/HERMES}.
ArgU: A Controllable Factual Argument Generator (2023)

Effective argumentation is essential towards a purposeful conversation with a satisfactory outcome. For example, persuading someone to reconsider smoking might involve empathetic, well founded arguments based on facts and expert opinions about its ill-effects and the consequences on one`s family. However, the automatic generation of high-quality factual arguments can be challenging. Addressing existing controllability issues can make the recent advances in computational models for argument generation a potential solution. In this paper, we introduce ArgU: a neural argument generator capable of producing factual arguments from input facts and real-world concepts that can be explicitly controlled for stance and argument structure using Walton`s argument scheme-based control codes. Unfortunately, computational argument generation is a relatively new field and lacks datasets conducive to training. Hence, we have compiled and released an annotated corpora of 69,428 arguments spanning six topics and six argument schemes, making it the largest publicly available corpus for identifying argument schemes; the paper details our annotation and dataset creation framework. We further experiment with an argument generation strategy that establishes an inference strategy by generating an {\textquotedblleft}argument template{\textquotedblright} before actual argument generation. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to automatically generate diverse arguments exhibiting different inference patterns for the same set of facts by using control codes based on argument schemes and stance.
Learning Answer Generation using Supervision from Automatic Question Answering Evaluators (2023)

Recent studies show that sentence-level extractive QA, i.e., based on Answer Sentence Selection (AS2), is outperformed by Generation-based QA (GenQA) models, which generate answers using the top-k answer sentences ranked by AS2 models (a la retrieval-augmented generation style). In this paper, we propose a novel training paradigm for GenQA using supervision from automatic QA evaluation models (GAVA). Specifically, we propose three strategies to transfer knowledge from these QA evaluation models to a GenQA model: (i) augmenting training data with answers generated by the GenQA model and labelled by GAVA (either statically, before training, or (ii) dynamically, at every training epoch); and (iii) using the GAVA score for weighting the generator loss during the learning of the GenQA model. We evaluate our proposed methods on two academic and one industrial dataset, obtaining a significant improvement in answering accuracy over the previous state of the art.
RECAP: Retrieval-Enhanced Context-Aware Prefix Encoder for Personalized Dialogue Response Generation (2023)

Endowing chatbots with a consistent persona is essential to an engaging conversation, yet it remains an unresolved challenge. In this work, we propose a new retrieval-enhanced approach for personalized response generation. Specifically, we design a hierarchical transformer retriever trained on dialogue domain data to perform personalized retrieval and a context-aware prefix encoder that fuses the retrieved information to the decoder more effectively. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model at generating more fluent and personalized responses. We quantitatively evaluate our model`s performance under a suite of human and automatic metrics and find it to be superior compared to state-of-the-art baselines on English Reddit conversations.
Don`t Parse, Choose Spans! Continuous and Discontinuous Constituency Parsing via Autoregressive Span Selection (2023)

We present a simple and unified approach for both continuous and discontinuous constituency parsing via autoregressive span selection. Constituency parsing aims to produce a set of non-crossing spans so that they can form a constituency parse tree. We sort gold spans using a predefined order and leverage a pointer network to autoregressively select spans by that order. To deal with discontinuous spans, we consecutively select their subspans from left to right, label all but last subspans with special discontinuous labels and the last subspan as the whole discontinuous spans' labels. We use simple heuristic to output valid trees so that our approach is able to predict all possible continuous and discontinuous constituency trees without sacrificing data coverage and without the need to use expensive chart-based parsing algorithms. Experiments on multiple continuous and discontinuous benchmarks show that our model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance.
Laziness Is a Virtue When It Comes to Compositionality in Neural Semantic Parsing (2023)

Nearly all general-purpose neural semantic parsers generate logical forms in a strictly top-down autoregressive fashion. Though such systems have achieved impressive results across a variety of datasets and domains, recent works have called into question whether they are ultimately limited in their ability to compositionally generalize. In this work, we approach semantic parsing from, quite literally, the opposite direction; that is, we introduce a neural semantic parsing generation method that constructs logical forms from the bottom up, beginning from the logical form`s leaves. The system we introduce is lazy in that it incrementally builds up a set of potential semantic parses, but only expands and processes the most promising candidate parses at each generation step. Such a parsimonious expansion scheme allows the system to maintain an arbitrarily large set of parse hypotheses that are never realized and thus incur minimal computational overhead. We evaluate our approach on compositional generalization; specifically, on the challenging CFQ dataset and two other Text-to-SQL datasets where we show that our novel, bottom-up semantic parsing technique outperforms general-purpose semantic parsers while also being competitive with semantic parsers that have been tailored to each task.
AD-KD: Attribution-Driven Knowledge Distillation for Language Model Compression (2023)

Knowledge distillation has attracted a great deal of interest recently to compress large language models. However, existing knowledge distillation methods suffer from two limitations. First, the student model simply imitates the teacher`s behavior while ignoring the reasoning behind it. Second, these methods usually focus on the transfer of sophisticated model-specific knowledge but overlook data-specific knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel attribution-driven knowledge distillation approach, which explores the token-level rationale behind the teacher model based on Integrated Gradients (IG) and transfers attribution knowledge to the student model. To enhance the knowledge transfer of model reasoning and generalization, we further explore multi-view attribution distillation on all potential decisions of the teacher. Comprehensive experiments are conducted with BERT on the GLUE benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach to several state-of-the-art methods.
(QA)$^2$: Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions (2023)

Naturally occurring information-seeking questions often contain questionable assumptions{---}assumptions that are false or unverifiable. Questions containing questionable assumptions are challenging because they require a distinct answer strategy that deviates from typical answers for information-seeking questions. For instance, the question {\textquotedblleft}When did Marie Curie discover Uranium?{\textquotedblright} cannot be answered as a typical {\textquotedblleft}when{\textquotedblright} question without addressing the false assumption {\textquotedblleft}Marie Curie discovered Uranium{\textquotedblright}. In this work, we propose (QA)2 (Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions), an open-domain evaluation dataset consisting of naturally occurring search engine queries that may or may not contain questionable assumptions. To be successful on (QA)2, systems must be able to detect questionable assumptions and also be able to produce adequate responses for both typical information-seeking questions and ones with questionable assumptions. Through human rater acceptability on end-to-end QA with (QA)2, we find that current models do struggle with handling questionable assumptions, leaving substantial headroom for progress.
Attributable and Scalable Opinion Summarization (2023)

We propose a method for unsupervised opinion summarization that encodes sentences from customer reviews into a hierarchical discrete latent space, then identifies common opinions based on the frequency of their encodings. We are able to generate both abstractive summaries by decoding these frequent encodings, and extractive summaries by selecting the sentences assigned to the same frequent encodings. Our method is attributable, because the model identifies sentences used to generate the summary as part of the summarization process. It scales easily to many hundreds of input reviews, because aggregation is performed in the latent space rather than over long sequences of tokens. We also demonstrate that our appraoch enables a degree of control, generating aspect-specific summaries by restricting the model to parts of the encoding space that correspond to desired aspects (e.g., location or food). Automatic and human evaluation on two datasets from different domains demonstrates that our method generates summaries that are more informative than prior work and better grounded in the input reviews.
Targeted Data Generation: Finding and Fixing Model Weaknesses (2023)

Even when aggregate accuracy is high, state-of-the-art NLP models often fail systematically on specific subgroups of data, resulting in unfair outcomes and eroding user trust. Additional data collection may not help in addressing these weaknesses, as such challenging subgroups may be unknown to users, and underrepresented in the existing and new data. We propose Targeted Data Generation (TDG), a framework that automatically identifies challenging subgroups, and generates new data for those subgroups using large language models (LLMs) with a human in the loop. TDG estimates the expected benefit and potential harm of data augmentation for each subgroup, and selects the ones most likely to improve within-group performance without hurting overall performance. In our experiments, TDG significantly improves the accuracy on challenging subgroups for state-of-the-art sentiment analysis and natural language inference models, while also improving overall test accuracy.
HiFi: High-Information Attention Heads Hold for Parameter-Efficient Model Adaptation (2023)

To fully leverage the advantages of large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) on downstream tasks, it has become a ubiquitous adaptation paradigm to fine-tune the entire parameters of PLMs. However, this paradigm poses issues of inefficient updating and resource over-consuming for fine-tuning in data-scarce and resource-limited scenarios, because of the large scale of parameters in PLMs. To alleviate these concerns, in this paper, we propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method HiFi, that is, only the highly informative and strongly correlated attention heads for the specific task are fine-tuned. To search for those significant attention heads, we develop a novel framework to analyze the effectiveness of heads. Specifically, we first model the relationship between heads into a graph from two perspectives of information richness and correlation, and then apply PageRank algorithm to determine the relative importance of each head. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and show that HiFi obtains state-of-the-art performance over the prior baselines.
CFSum Coarse-to-Fine Contribution Network for Multimodal Summarization (2023)

Multimodal summarization usually suffers from the problem that the contribution of the visual modality is unclear. Existing multimodal summarization approaches focus on designing the fusion methods of different modalities, while ignoring the adaptive conditions under which visual modalities are useful. Therefore, we propose a novel Coarse-to-Fine contribution network for multimodal Summarization (CFSum) to consider different contributions of images for summarization. First, to eliminate the interference of useless images, we propose a pre-filter module to abandon useless images. Second, to make accurate use of useful images, we propose two levels of visual complement modules, word level and phrase level. Specifically, image contributions are calculated and are adopted to guide the attention of both textual and visual modalities. Experimental results have shown that CFSum significantly outperforms multiple strong baselines on the standard benchmark. Furthermore, the analysis verifies that useful images can even help generate non-visual words which are implicitly represented in the image.
On \textquotedblleftScientific Debt\textquotedblright in NLP: A Case for More Rigour in Language Model Pre-Training Research (2023)

This evidence-based position paper critiques current research practices within the language model pre-training literature. Despite rapid recent progress afforded by increasingly better pre-trained language models (PLMs), current PLM research practices often conflate different possible sources of model improvement, without conducting proper ablation studies and principled comparisons between different models under comparable conditions. These practices (i) leave us ill-equipped to understand which pre-training approaches should be used under what circumstances; (ii) impede reproducibility and credit assignment; and (iii) render it difficult to understand: {\textquotedblleft}How exactly does each factor contribute to the progress that we have today?{\textquotedblright} We provide a case in point by revisiting the success of BERT over its baselines, ELMo and GPT-1, and demonstrate how {---} under comparable conditions where the baselines are tuned to a similar extent {---} these baselines (and even-simpler variants thereof) can, in fact, achieve competitive or better performance than BERT. These findings demonstrate how disentangling different factors of model improvements can lead to valuable new insights. We conclude with recommendations for how to encourage and incentivize this line of work, and accelerate progress towards a better and more systematic understanding of what factors drive the progress of our foundation models today.
End-to-end Knowledge Retrieval with Multi-modal Queries (2023)

We investigate knowledge retrieval with multi-modal queries, i.e. queries containing information split across image and text inputs, a challenging task that differs from previous work on cross-modal retrieval. We curate a new dataset called ReMuQ for benchmarking progress on this task. ReMuQ requires a system to retrieve knowledge from a large corpus by integrating contents from both text and image queries. We introduce a retriever model {\textquotedblleft}ReViz{\textquotedblright} that can directly process input text and images to retrieve relevant knowledge in an end-to-end fashion without being dependent on intermediate modules such as object detectors or caption generators. We introduce a new pretraining task that is effective for learning knowledge retrieval with multimodal queries and also improves performance on downstream tasks. We demonstrate superior performance in retrieval on two datasets (ReMuQ and OK-VQA) under zero-shot settings as well as further improvements when finetuned on these datasets.
AV-TranSpeech: Audio-Visual Robust Speech-to-Speech Translation (2023)

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) aims to convert speech from one language into another, and has demonstrated significant progress to date. Despite the recent success, current S2ST models still suffer from distinct degradation in noisy environments and fail to translate visual speech (i.e., the movement of lips and teeth). In this work, we present AV-TranSpeech, the first audio-visual speech-to-speech (AV-S2ST) translation model without relying on intermediate text. AV-TranSpeech complements the audio stream with visual information to promote system robustness and opens up a host of practical applications: dictation or dubbing archival films. To mitigate the data scarcity with limited parallel AV-S2ST data, we 1) explore self-supervised pre-training with unlabeled audio-visual data to learn contextual representation, and 2) introduce cross-modal distillation with S2ST models trained on the audio-only corpus to further reduce the requirements of visual data. Experimental results on two language pairs demonstrate that AV-TranSpeech outperforms audio-only models under all settings regardless of the type of noise. With low-resource audio-visual data (10h, 30h), cross-modal distillation yields an improvement of 7.6 BLEU on average compared with baselines. Audio samples are available at \url{https://AV-TranSpeech.github.io/}.
Dual Class Knowledge Propagation Network for Multi-label Few-shot Intent Detection (2023)

Multi-label intent detection aims to assign multiple labels to utterances and attracts increasing attention as a practical task in task-oriented dialogue systems. As dialogue domains change rapidly and new intents emerge fast, the lack of annotated data motivates multi-label few-shot intent detection. However, previous studies are confused by the identical representation of the utterance with multiple labels and overlook the intrinsic intra-class and inter-class interactions. To address these two limitations, we propose a novel dual class knowledge propagation network in this paper. In order to learn well-separated representations for utterances with multiple intents, we first introduce a label-semantic augmentation module incorporating class name information. For better consideration of the inherent intra-class and inter-class relations, an instance-level and a class-level graph neural network are constructed, which not only propagate label information but also propagate feature structure. And we use a simple yet effective method to predict the intent count of each utterance. Extensive experimental results on two multi-label intent datasets have demonstrated that our proposed method outperforms strong baselines by a large margin.
VendorLink: An NLP approach for Identifying \& Linking Vendor Migrants \& Potential Aliases on Darknet Markets (2023)

The anonymity on the Darknet allows vendors to stay undetected by using multiple vendor aliases or frequently migrating between markets. Consequently, illegal markets and their connections are challenging to uncover on the Darknet. To identify relationships between illegal markets and their vendors, we propose VendorLink, an NLP-based approach that examines writing patterns to verify, identify, and link unique vendor accounts across text advertisements (ads) on seven public Darknet markets. In contrast to existing literature, VendorLink utilizes the strength of supervised pre-training to perform closed-set vendor verification, open-set vendor identification, and low-resource market adaption tasks. Through VendorLink, we uncover (i) 15 migrants and 71 potential aliases in the Alphabay-Dreams-Silk dataset, (ii) 17 migrants and 3 potential aliases in the Valhalla-Berlusconi dataset, and (iii) 75 migrants and 10 potential aliases in the Traderoute-Agora dataset. Altogether, our approach can help Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) make more informed decisions by verifying and identifying migrating vendors and their potential aliases on existing and Low-Resource (LR) emerging Darknet markets.
Element-aware Summarization with Large Language Models: Expert-aligned Evaluation and Chain-of-Thought Method (2023)

Automatic summarization generates concise summaries that contain key ideas of source documents. As the most mainstream datasets for the news sub-domain, CNN/DailyMail and BBC XSum have been widely used for performance benchmarking. However, the reference summaries of those datasets turn out to be noisy, mainly in terms of factual hallucination and information redundancy. To address this challenge, we first annotate new expert-writing Element-aware test sets following the {\textquotedblleft}Lasswell Communication Model{\textquotedblright} proposed by Lasswell, allowing reference summaries to focus on more fine-grained news elements objectively and comprehensively. Utilizing the new test sets, we observe the surprising zero-shot summary ability of LLMs, which addresses the issue of the inconsistent results between human preference and automatic evaluation metrics of LLMs' zero-shot summaries in prior work. Further, we propose a Summary Chain-of-Thought (SumCoT) technique to elicit LLMs to generate summaries step by step, which helps them integrate more fine-grained details of source documents into the final summaries that correlate with the human writing mindset. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art fine-tuned PLMs and zero-shot LLMs by +4.33/+4.77 in ROUGE-L on the two datasets, respectively. Dataset and code are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Alsace08/SumCoT}.