ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ClusterFormer: Neural Clustering Attention for Efficient and Effective Transformer (2022)

Recently, a lot of research has been carried out to improve the efficiency of Transformer. Among them, the sparse pattern-based method is an important branch of efficient Transformers. However, some existing sparse methods usually use fixed patterns to select words, without considering similarities between words. Other sparse methods use clustering patterns to select words, but the clustering process is separate from the training process of the target task, which causes a decrease in effectiveness. To address these limitations, we design a neural clustering method, which can be seamlessly integrated into the Self-Attention Mechanism in Transformer. The clustering task and the target task are jointly trained and optimized to benefit each other, leading to significant effectiveness improvement. In addition, our method groups the words with strong dependencies into the same cluster and performs the attention mechanism for each cluster independently, which improves the efficiency. We verified our method on machine translation, text classification, natural language inference, and text matching tasks. Experimental results show that our method outperforms two typical sparse attention methods, Reformer and Routing Transformer while having a comparable or even better time and memory efficiency.
Bottom-Up Constituency Parsing and Nested Named Entity Recognition with Pointer Networks (2022)

Constituency parsing and nested named entity recognition (NER) are similar tasks since they both aim to predict a collection of nested and non-crossing spans. In this work, we cast nested NER to constituency parsing and propose a novel pointing mechanism for bottom-up parsing to tackle both tasks. The key idea is based on the observation that if we traverse a constituency tree in post-order, i.e., visiting a parent after its children, then two consecutively visited spans would share a boundary. Our model tracks the shared boundaries and predicts the next boundary at each step by leveraging a pointer network. As a result, it needs only linear steps to parse and thus is efficient. It also maintains a parsing configuration for structural consistency, i.e., always outputting valid trees. Experimentally, our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on PTB among all BERT-based models (96.01 F1 score) and competitive performance on CTB7 in constituency parsing; and it also achieves strong performance on three benchmark datasets of nested NER: ACE2004, ACE2005, and GENIA. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/xxxxx}.
Redistributing Low-Frequency Words: Making the Most of Monolingual Data in Non-Autoregressive Translation (2022)

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the preliminary step for training non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models, which eases the training of NAT models at the cost of losing important information for translating low-frequency words. In this work, we provide an appealing alternative for NAT {--} \textit{monolingual KD}, which trains NAT student on external monolingual data with AT teacher trained on the original bilingual data. Monolingual KD is able to transfer both the knowledge of the original bilingual data (implicitly encoded in the trained AT teacher model) and that of the new monolingual data to the NAT student model. Extensive experiments on eight WMT benchmarks over two advanced NAT models show that monolingual KD consistently outperforms the standard KD by improving low-frequency word translation, without introducing any computational cost. Monolingual KD enjoys desirable expandability, which can be further enhanced (when given more computational budget) by combining with the standard KD, a reverse monolingual KD, or enlarging the scale of monolingual data. Extensive analyses demonstrate that these techniques can be used together profitably to further recall the useful information lost in the standard KD. Encouragingly, combining with standard KD, our approach achieves 30.4 and 34.1 BLEU points on the WMT14 English-German and German-English datasets, respectively. Our code and trained models are freely available at \url{https://github.com/alphadl/RLFW-NAT.mono}.
Dependency Parsing as MRC-based Span-Span Prediction (2022)

Higher-order methods for dependency parsing can partially but not fully address the issue that edges in dependency trees should be constructed at the text span/subtree level rather than word level. In this paper, we propose a new method for dependency parsing to address this issue. The proposed method constructs dependency trees by directly modeling span-span (in other words, subtree-subtree) relations. It consists of two modules: the \textit{text span proposal module} which proposes candidate text spans, each of which represents a subtree in the dependency tree denoted by (root, start, end); and the \textit{span linking module}, which constructs links between proposed spans. We use the machine reading comprehension (MRC) framework as the backbone to formalize the span linking module, where one span is used as query to extract the text span/subtree it should be linked to. The proposed method has the following merits: (1) it addresses the fundamental problem that edges in a dependency tree should be constructed between subtrees; (2) the MRC framework allows the method to retrieve missing spans in the span proposal stage, which leads to higher recall for eligible spans. Extensive experiments on the PTB, CTB and Universal Dependencies (UD) benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ShannonAI/mrc-for-dependency-parsing}
Adversarial Soft Prompt Tuning for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis (2022)

Cross-domain sentiment analysis has achieved promising results with the help of pre-trained language models. As GPT-3 appears, prompt tuning has been widely explored to enable better semantic modeling in many natural language processing tasks. However, directly using a fixed predefined template for cross-domain research cannot model different distributions of the [MASK] token in different domains, thus making underuse of the prompt tuning technique. In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{Ad}versarial \textbf{S}oft \textbf{P}rompt \textbf{T}uning method (AdSPT) to better model cross-domain sentiment analysis. On the one hand, AdSPT adopts separate soft prompts instead of hard templates to learn different vectors for different domains, thus alleviating the domain discrepancy of the [MASK] token in the masked language modeling task. On the other hand, AdSPT uses a novel domain adversarial training strategy to learn domain-invariant representations between each source domain and the target domain. Experiments on a publicly available sentiment analysis dataset show that our model achieves the new state-of-the-art results for both single-source domain adaptation and multi-source domain adaptation.
Generating Scientific Claims for Zero-Shot Scientific Fact Checking (2022)

Automated scientific fact checking is difficult due to the complexity of scientific language and a lack of significant amounts of training data, as annotation requires domain expertise. To address this challenge, we propose scientific claim generation, the task of generating one or more atomic and verifiable claims from scientific sentences, and demonstrate its usefulness in zero-shot fact checking for biomedical claims. We propose CLAIMGEN-BART, a new supervised method for generating claims supported by the literature, as well as KBIN, a novel method for generating claim negations. Additionally, we adapt an existing unsupervised entity-centric method of claim generation to biomedical claims, which we call CLAIMGEN-ENTITY. Experiments on zero-shot fact checking demonstrate that both CLAIMGEN-ENTITY and CLAIMGEN-BART, coupled with KBIN, achieve up to 90{\%} performance of fully supervised models trained on manually annotated claims and evidence. A rigorous evaluation study demonstrates significant improvement in generated claim and negation quality over existing baselines
Modeling Dual Read/Write Paths for Simultaneous Machine Translation (2022)

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) outputs translation while reading source sentence and hence requires a policy to decide whether to wait for the next source word (READ) or generate a target word (WRITE), the actions of which form a read/write path. Although the read/write path is essential to SiMT performance, no direct supervision is given to the path in the existing methods. In this paper, we propose a method of dual-path SiMT which introduces duality constraints to direct the read/write path. According to duality constraints, the read/write path in source-to-target and target-to-source SiMT models can be mapped to each other. As a result, the two SiMT models can be optimized jointly by forcing their read/write paths to satisfy the mapping. Experiments on En-Vi and De-En tasks show that our method can outperform strong baselines under all latency.
ExtEnD: Extractive Entity Disambiguation (2022)

Local models for Entity Disambiguation (ED) have today become extremely powerful, in most part thanks to the advent of large pre-trained language models. However, despite their significant performance achievements, most of these approaches frame ED through classification formulations that have intrinsic limitations, both computationally and from a modeling perspective. In contrast with this trend, here we propose ExtEnD, a novel local formulation for ED where we frame this task as a text extraction problem, and present two Transformer-based architectures that implement it. Based on experiments in and out of domain, and training over two different data regimes, we find our approach surpasses all its competitors in terms of both data efficiency and raw performance. ExtEnD outperforms its alternatives by as few as 6 F1 points on the more constrained of the two data regimes and, when moving to the other higher-resourced regime, sets a new state of the art on 4 out of 4 benchmarks under consideration, with average improvements of 0.7 F1 points overall and 1.1 F1 points out of domain. In addition, to gain better insights from our results, we also perform a fine-grained evaluation of our performances on different classes of label frequency, along with an ablation study of our architectural choices and an error analysis. We release our code and models for research purposes at \url{https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/extend}.
Hierarchical Sketch Induction for Paraphrase Generation (2022)

We propose a generative model of paraphrase generation, that encourages syntactic diversity by conditioning on an explicit syntactic sketch. We introduce Hierarchical Refinement Quantized Variational Autoencoders (HRQ-VAE), a method for learning decompositions of dense encodings as a sequence of discrete latent variables that make iterative refinements of increasing granularity. This hierarchy of codes is learned through end-to-end training, and represents fine-to-coarse grained information about the input. We use HRQ-VAE to encode the syntactic form of an input sentence as a path through the hierarchy, allowing us to more easily predict syntactic sketches at test time. Extensive experiments, including a human evaluation, confirm that HRQ-VAE learns a hierarchical representation of the input space, and generates paraphrases of higher quality than previous systems.
Alignment-Augmented Consistent Translation for Multilingual Open Information Extraction (2022)

Progress with supervised Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) has been primarily limited to English due to the scarcity of training data in other languages. In this paper, we explore techniques to automatically convert English text for training OpenIE systems in other languages. We introduce the Alignment-Augmented Constrained Translation (AACTrans) model to translate English sentences and their corresponding extractions consistently with each other {---} with no changes to vocabulary or semantic meaning which may result from independent translations. Using the data generated with AACTrans, we train a novel two-stage generative OpenIE model, which we call Gen2OIE, that outputs for each sentence: 1) relations in the first stage and 2) all extractions containing the relation in the second stage. Gen2OIE increases relation coverage using a training data transformation technique that is generalizable to multiple languages, in contrast to existing models that use an English-specific training loss. Evaluations on 5 languages {---} Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hindi and Telugu {---} show that the Gen2OIE with AACTrans data outperforms prior systems by a margin of 6-25{\%} in F1.
Text-to-Table: A New Way of Information Extraction (2022)

We study a new problem setting of information extraction (IE), referred to as text-to-table. In text-to-table, given a text, one creates a table or several tables expressing the main content of the text, while the model is learned from text-table pair data. The problem setting differs from those of the existing methods for IE. First, the extraction can be carried out from long texts to large tables with complex structures. Second, the extraction is entirely data-driven, and there is no need to explicitly define the schemas. As far as we know, there has been no previous work that studies the problem. In this work, we formalize text-to-table as a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) problem. We first employ a seq2seq model fine-tuned from a pre-trained language model to perform the task. We also develop a new method within the seq2seq approach, exploiting two additional techniques in table generation: table constraint and table relation embeddings. We consider text-to-table as an inverse problem of the well-studied table-to-text, and make use of four existing table-to-text datasets in our experiments on text-to-table. Experimental results show that the vanilla seq2seq model can outperform the baseline methods of using relation extraction and named entity extraction. The results also show that our method can further boost the performances of the vanilla seq2seq model. We further discuss the main challenges of the proposed task. The code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/shirley-wu/text_to_table}.
Accelerating Code Search with Deep Hashing and Code Classification (2022)

Code search is to search reusable code snippets from source code corpus based on natural languages queries. Deep learning-based methods on code search have shown promising results. However, previous methods focus on retrieval accuracy, but lacked attention to the efficiency of the retrieval process. We propose a novel method CoSHC to accelerate code search with deep hashing and code classification, aiming to perform efficient code search without sacrificing too much accuracy. To evaluate the effectiveness of CoSHC, we apply our methodon five code search models. Extensive experimental results indicate that compared with previous code search baselines, CoSHC can save more than 90{\%} of retrieval time meanwhile preserving at least 99{\%} of retrieval accuracy.
Other Roles Matter! Enhancing Role-Oriented Dialogue Summarization via Role Interactions (2022)

Role-oriented dialogue summarization is to generate summaries for different roles in the dialogue, e.g., merchants and consumers. Existing methods handle this task by summarizing each role`s content separately and thus are prone to ignore the information from other roles. However, we believe that other roles' content could benefit the quality of summaries, such as the omitted information mentioned by other roles. Therefore, we propose a novel role interaction enhanced method for role-oriented dialogue summarization. It adopts cross attention and decoder self-attention interactions to interactively acquire other roles' critical information. The cross attention interaction aims to select other roles' critical dialogue utterances, while the decoder self-attention interaction aims to obtain key information from other roles' summaries. Experimental results have shown that our proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines on two public role-oriented dialogue summarization datasets. Extensive analyses have demonstrated that other roles' content could help generate summaries with more complete semantics and correct topic structures.
ClarET: Pre-training a Correlation-Aware Context-To-Event Transformer for Event-Centric Generation and Classification (2022)

Generating new events given context with correlated ones plays a crucial role in many event-centric reasoning tasks. Existing works either limit their scope to specific scenarios or overlook event-level correlations. In this paper, we propose to pre-train a general Correlation-aware context-to-Event Transformer (ClarET) for event-centric reasoning. To achieve this, we propose three novel event-centric objectives, i.e., whole event recovering, contrastive event-correlation encoding and prompt-based event locating, which highlight event-level correlations with effective training. The proposed ClarET is applicable to a wide range of event-centric reasoning scenarios, considering its versatility of (i) event-correlation types (e.g., causal, temporal, contrast), (ii) application formulations (i.e., generation and classification), and (iii) reasoning types (e.g., abductive, counterfactual and ending reasoning). Empirical fine-tuning results, as well as zero- and few-shot learning, on 9 benchmarks (5 generation and 4 classification tasks covering 4 reasoning types with diverse event correlations), verify its effectiveness and generalization ability.
Measuring and Mitigating Name Biases in Neural Machine Translation (2022)

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems exhibit problematic biases, such as stereotypical gender bias in the translation of occupation terms into languages with grammatical gender. In this paper we describe a new source of bias prevalent in NMT systems, relating to translations of sentences containing person names. To correctly translate such sentences, a NMT system needs to determine the gender of the name. We show that leading systems are particularly poor at this task, especially for female given names. This bias is deeper than given name gender: we show that the translation of terms with ambiguous sentiment can also be affected by person names, and the same holds true for proper nouns denoting race. To mitigate these biases we propose a simple but effective data augmentation method based on randomly switching entities during translation, which effectively eliminates the problem without any effect on translation quality.
Understanding and Improving Sequence-to-Sequence Pretraining for Neural Machine Translation (2022)

In this paper, we present a substantial step in better understanding the SOTA sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) pretraining for neural machine translation (NMT). We focus on studying the impact of the jointly pretrained decoder, which is the main difference between Seq2Seq pretraining and previous encoder-based pretraining approaches for NMT. By carefully designing experiments on three language pairs, we find that Seq2Seq pretraining is a double-edged sword: On one hand, it helps NMT models to produce more diverse translations and reduce adequacy-related translation errors. On the other hand, the discrepancies between Seq2Seq pretraining and NMT finetuning limit the translation quality (i.e., domain discrepancy) and induce the over-estimation issue (i.e., objective discrepancy). Based on these observations, we further propose simple and effective strategies, named in-domain pretraining and input adaptation to remedy the domain and objective discrepancies, respectively. Experimental results on several language pairs show that our approach can consistently improve both translation performance and model robustness upon Seq2Seq pretraining.
MSCTD: A Multimodal Sentiment Chat Translation Dataset (2022)

Multimodal machine translation and textual chat translation have received considerable attention in recent years. Although the conversation in its natural form is usually multimodal, there still lacks work on multimodal machine translation in conversations. In this work, we introduce a new task named Multimodal Chat Translation (MCT), aiming to generate more accurate translations with the help of the associated dialogue history and visual context. To this end, we firstly construct a Multimodal Sentiment Chat Translation Dataset (MSCTD) containing 142,871 English-Chinese utterance pairs in 14,762 bilingual dialogues. Each utterance pair, corresponding to the visual context that reflects the current conversational scene, is annotated with a sentiment label. Then, we benchmark the task by establishing multiple baseline systems that incorporate multimodal and sentiment features for MCT. Preliminary experiments on two language directions (English-Chinese) verify the potential of contextual and multimodal information fusion and the positive impact of sentiment on the MCT task. Additionally, we provide a new benchmark on multimodal dialogue sentiment analysis with the constructed MSCTD. Our work can facilitate researches on both multimodal chat translation and multimodal dialogue sentiment analysis.
Learning Disentangled Textual Representations via Statistical Measures of Similarity (2022)

When working with textual data, a natural application of disentangled representations is the fair classification where the goal is to make predictions without being biased (or influenced) by sensible attributes that may be present in the data (e.g., age, gender or race). Dominant approaches to disentangle a sensitive attribute from textual representations rely on learning simultaneously a penalization term that involves either an adversary loss (e.g., a discriminator) or an information measure (e.g., mutual information). However, these methods require the training of a deep neural network with several parameter updates for each update of the representation model. As a matter of fact, the resulting nested optimization loop is both times consuming, adding complexity to the optimization dynamic, and requires a fine hyperparameter selection (e.g., learning rates, architecture). In this work, we introduce a family of regularizers for learning disentangled representations that do not require training. These regularizers are based on statistical measures of similarity between the conditional probability distributions with respect to the sensible attributes. Our novel regularizers do not require additional training, are faster and do not involve additional tuning while achieving better results both when combined with pretrained and randomly initialized text encoders.
On the Sensitivity and Stability of Model Interpretations in NLP (2022)

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a variety of post-hoc interpretations that aim to uncover how natural language processing (NLP) models make predictions. Despite the surge of new interpretation methods, it remains an open problem how to define and quantitatively measure the faithfulness of interpretations, i.e., to what extent interpretations reflect the reasoning process by a model. We propose two new criteria, sensitivity and stability, that provide complementary notions of faithfulness to the existed removal-based criteria. Our results show that the conclusion for how faithful interpretations are could vary substantially based on different notions. Motivated by the desiderata of sensitivity and stability, we introduce a new class of interpretation methods that adopt techniques from adversarial robustness. Empirical results show that our proposed methods are effective under the new criteria and overcome limitations of gradient-based methods on removal-based criteria. Besides text classification, we also apply interpretation methods and metrics to dependency parsing. Our results shed light on understanding the diverse set of interpretations.