ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Self-training Reduces Flicker in Retranslation-based Simultaneous Translation (2023)

In simultaneous translation, the retranslation approach has the advantage of requiring no modifications to the inference engine. However, in order to reduce the undesirable flicker in the output, previous work has resorted to increasing the latency through masking, and introducing specialised inference, thus losing the simplicity of the approach. In this work, we show that self-training improves the flicker-latency tradeoff, while maintaining similar translation quality to the original. Our analysis indicates that self-training reduces flicker by controlling monotonicity. Furthermore, self-training can be combined with biased beam search to further improve the flicker-latency tradeoff.
Social Commonsense for Explanation and Cultural Bias Discovery (2023)

Social commonsense contains many human biases due to social and cultural influence (Sap et al., 2020; Emelin et al., 2020). We focus on identifying cultural biases in data, specifically causal assumptions and commonsense implications, that strongly influence model decisions for a variety of tasks designed for social impact. This enables us to examine data for bias by making explicit the causal (if-then, inferential) relations in social commonsense knowledge used for decision making, furthering interpretable commonsense reasoning from a dataset perspective. We apply our methods on 2 social tasks: emotion detection and perceived value detection. We identify influential social commonsense knowledge to explain model behavior in the following ways. First, we augment large-scale language models with social knowledge and show improvements for the tasks, indicating the implicit assumptions a model requires to be successful on each dataset. Second, we identify influential events in the datasets by using social knowledge to cluster data and demonstrate the influence that these events have on model behavior via leave-K-out experiments. This allows us to gain a dataset-level understanding of the events and causal commonsense relationships that strongly influence predictions. We then analyze these relationships to detect influential cultural bias in each dataset. Finally, we use our influential event identification for detecting mislabeled examples and improve training and performance through their removal. We support our findings with manual analysis.
Counter-GAP: Counterfactual Bias Evaluation through Gendered Ambiguous Pronouns (2023)

Bias-measuring datasets play a critical role in detecting biased behavior of language models and in evaluating progress of bias mitigation methods. In this work, we focus on evaluating gender bias through coreference resolution, where previous datasets are either hand-crafted or fail to reliably measure an explicitly defined bias. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel method to collect diverse, natural, and minimally distant text pairs via counterfactual generation, and construct Counter-GAP, an annotated dataset consisting of 4008 instances grouped into 1002 quadruples. We further identify a bias cancellation problem in previous group-level metrics on Counter-GAP, and propose to use the difference between inconsistency across genders and within genders to measure bias at a quadruple level. Our results show that four pre-trained language models are significantly more inconsistent across different gender groups than within each group, and that a name-based counterfactual data augmentation method is more effective to mitigate such bias than an anonymization-based method.
The NLP Task Effectiveness of Long-Range Transformers (2023)

Transformer models cannot easily scale to long sequences due to their O(N{\textasciicircum}2) time and space complexity. This has led to Transformer variants seeking to lower computational complexity, such as Longformer and Performer. While such models have theoretically greater efficiency, their effectiveness on real NLP tasks has not been well studied. We benchmark 7 variants of Transformer models on 5 difficult NLP tasks and 7 datasets. We design experiments to isolate the effect of pretraining and hyperparameter settings, to focus on their capacity for long-range attention. Moreover, we present various methods to investigate attention behaviors to illuminate model details beyond metric scores. We find that the modified attention in long-range transformers has advantages on content selection and query-guided decoding, but they come with previously unrecognized drawbacks such as insufficient attention to distant tokens and accumulated approximation error.
Creation and evaluation of timelines for longitudinal user posts (2023)

There is increasing interest to work with user generated content in social media, especially textual posts over time. Currently there is no consistent way of segmenting user posts into timelines in a meaningful way that improves the quality and cost of manual annotation. Here we propose a set of methods for segmenting longitudinal user posts into timelines likely to contain interesting moments of change in a user`s behaviour, based on their online posting activity. We also propose a novel framework for evaluating timelines and show its applicability in the context of two different social media datasets. Finally, we present a discussion of the linguistic content of highly ranked timelines.
Semi-supervised New Event Type Induction and Description via Contrastive Loss-Enforced Batch Attention (2023)

Most event extraction methods have traditionally relied on an annotated set of event types. However, creating event ontologies and annotating supervised training data are expensive and time-consuming. Previous work has proposed semi-supervised approaches which leverage seen (annotated) types to learn how to automatically discover new event types. State-of-the-art methods, both semi-supervised or fully unsupervised, use a form of reconstruction loss on specific tokens in a context. In contrast, we present a novel approach to semi-supervised new event type induction using a masked contrastive loss, which learns similarities between event mentions by enforcing an attention mechanism over the data minibatch. We further disentangle the discovered clusters by approximating the underlying manifolds in the data, which allows us to achieve an adjusted rand index score of 48.85{\%}. Building on these clustering results, we extend our approach to two new tasks: predicting the type name of the discovered clusters and linking them to FrameNet frames.
Multilingual Content Moderation: A Case Study on Reddit (2023)

Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content. While prior works have focused on identifying hateful/offensive language, they are not adequate for meeting the challenges of content moderation since 1) moderation decisions are based on violation of rules, which subsumes detection of offensive speech, and 2) such rules often differ across communities which entails an adaptive solution. We propose to study the challenges of content moderation by introducing a multilingual dataset of 1.8 Million Reddit comments spanning 56 subreddits in English, German, Spanish and French1. We perform extensive experimental analysis to highlight the underlying challenges and suggest related research problems such as cross-lingual transfer, learning under label noise (human biases), transfer of moderation models, and predicting the violated rule. Our dataset and analysis can help better prepare for the challenges and opportunities of auto moderation.
GrIPS: Gradient-free, Edit-based Instruction Search for Prompting Large Language Models (2023)

Providing natural language instructions in prompts is a useful new paradigm for improving task performance of large language models in a zero-shot setting. Recent work has aimed to improve such prompts via manual rewriting or gradient-based tuning. However, manual rewriting is time-consuming and requires subjective interpretation, while gradient-based tuning can be extremely computationally demanding for large models and may not be feasible for API-based models. In this work, we introduce Gradient-free Instructional Prompt Search (GrIPS), a gradient-free, edit-based search approach for improving task instructions for large language models. GrIPS takes in instructions designed for humans and automatically returns an improved, edited prompt, while allowing for API-based tuning. With InstructGPT models, GrIPS improves the average task performance by up to 4.30 percentage points on eight classification tasks from the Natural Instructions dataset (with similar improvements for OPT, BLOOM, and FLAN-T5). We see improvements for both instruction-only prompts and instruction + k-shot examples prompts. Notably, GrIPS outperforms manual rewriting and purely example-based prompts while controlling for the available compute and data budget. Further, performance of GrIPS is comparable to select gradient-based tuning approaches. Qualitatively, we show our edits can simplify instructions and at times make them incoherent but nonetheless improve accuracy.
DiscoScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT and Discourse Coherence (2023)

Recently, there has been a growing interest in designing text generation systems from a discourse coherence perspective, e.g., modeling the interdependence between sentences. Still, recent BERT-based evaluation metrics are weak in recognizing coherence, and thus are not reliable in a way to spot the discourse-level improvements of those text generation systems. In this work, we introduce DiscoScore, a parametrized discourse metric, which uses BERT to model discourse coherence from different perspectives, driven by Centering theory. Our experiments encompass 16 non-discourse and discourse metrics, including DiscoScore and popular coherence models, evaluated on summarization and document-level machine translation (MT). We find that (i) the majority of BERT-based metrics correlate much worse with human rated coherence than early discourse metrics, invented a decade ago; (ii) the recent state-of-the-art BARTScore is weak when operated at system level{---}which is particularly problematic as systems are typically compared in this manner. DiscoScore, in contrast, achieves strong system-level correlation with human ratings, not only in coherence but also in factual consistency and other aspects, and surpasses BARTScore by over 10 correlation points on average. Further, aiming to understand DiscoScore, we provide justifications to the importance of discourse coherence for evaluation metrics, and explain the superiority of one variant over another. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/AIPHES/DiscoScore}.
Know your audience: specializing grounded language models with listener subtraction (2023)

Effective communication requires adapting to the idiosyncrasies of each communicative context{---}such as the common ground shared with each partner. Humans demonstrate this ability to specialize to their audience in many contexts, such as the popular game Dixit. We take inspiration from Dixit to formulate a multi-agent image reference game where a (trained) speaker model is rewarded for describing a target image such that one (pretrained) listener model can correctly identify it among distractors, but another listener cannot. To adapt, the speaker must exploit differences in the knowledge it shares with the different listeners. We show that finetuning an attention-based adapter between a CLIP vision encoder and a large language model in this contrastive, multi-agent setting gives rise to context-dependent natural language specialization from rewards only, without direct supervision. Through controlled experiments, we show that training a speaker with two listeners that perceive differently, using our method, allows the speaker to adapt to the idiosyncracies of the listeners. Furthermore, we show zero-shot transfer of the specialization to real-world data. Our experiments demonstrate a method for specializing grounded language models without direct supervision and highlight the interesting research challenges posed by complex multi-agent communication.
Meeting the Needs of Low-Resource Languages: The Value of Automatic Alignments via Pretrained Models (2023)

Large multilingual models have inspired a new class of word alignment methods, which work well for the model`s pretraining languages. However, the languages most in need of automatic alignment are low-resource and, thus, not typically included in the pretraining data. In this work, we ask: How do modern aligners perform on unseen languages, and are they better than traditional methods? We contribute gold-standard alignments for Bribri{--}Spanish, Guarani{--}Spanish, Quechua{--}Spanish, and Shipibo-Konibo{--}Spanish. With these, we evaluate state-of-the-art aligners with and without model adaptation to the target language. Finally, we also evaluate the resulting alignments extrinsically through two downstream tasks: named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging. We find that although transformer-based methods generally outperform traditional models, the two classes of approach remain competitive with each other.
Addressing Issues of Cross-Linguality in Open-Retrieval Question Answering Systems For Emergent Domains (2023)

Open-retrieval question answering systems are generally trained and tested on large datasets in well-established domains. However, low-resource settings such as new and emerging domains would especially benefit from reliable question answering systems. Furthermore, multilingual and cross-lingual resources in emergent domains are scarce, leading to few or no such systems. In this paper, we demonstrate a cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering system for the emergent domain of COVID-19.Our system adopts a corpus of scientific articles to ensure that retrieved documents are reliable. To address the scarcity of cross-lingual training data in emergent domains, we present a method utilizing automatic translation, alignment, and filtering to produce English-to-all datasets. We show that a deep semantic retriever greatly benefits from training on our English-to-all data and significantly outperforms a BM25 baseline in the cross-lingual setting. We illustrate the capabilities of our system with examples and release all code necessary to train and deploy such a system.
CodeAnno: Extending WebAnno with Hierarchical Document Level Annotation and Automation (2023)

WebAnno is one of the most popular annotation tools that supports generic annotation types and distributive annotation with multiple user roles. However, WebAnno focuses on annotating span-level mentions and relations among them, making document-level annotation complicated. When it comes to the annotation and analysis of social science materials, it usually involves the creation of codes to categorize a given document. The codes, which are known as codebooks, are typically hierarchical, which enables to code the document either with a general category or more fine-grained subcategories. CodeAnno is forked from WebAnno and designed to solve the coding problems faced by many social science researchers with the following main functionalities. 1) Creation of hierarchical codebooks, with functionality to move and sort categories in the hierarchy 2) an interactive UI for codebook annotation 3) import and export of annotations in CSV format, hence being compatible with existing annotations conducted using spreadsheet applications 4) integration of an external automation component to facilitate coding using machine learning 5) project templating that allows duplicating a project structure without copying the actual documents. We present different use-cases to demonstrate the capability of CodeAnno. A shot demonstration video of the system is available here: \url{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmCdTghBe-s}
NLP Workbench: Efficient and Extensible Integration of State-of-the-art Text Mining Tools (2023)

NLP Workbench is a web-based platform for text mining that allows non-expert users to obtain semantic understanding of large-scale corpora using state-of-the-art text mining models. The platform is built upon latest pre-trained models and open source systems from academia that provide semantic analysis functionalities, including but not limited to entity linking, sentiment analysis, semantic parsing, and relation extraction. Its extensible design enables researchers and developers to smoothly replace an existing model or integrate a new one. To improve efficiency, we employ a microservice architecture that facilitates allocation of acceleration hardware and parallelization of computation. This paper presents the architecture of NLP Workbench and discusses the challenges we faced in designing it. We also discuss diverse use cases of NLP Work- bench and the benefits of using it over other approaches. The platform is under active devel- opment, with its source code released under the MIT license. A website and a short video demonstrating our platform are also available.
jTLEX: a Java Library for TimeLine EXtraction (2023)

jTLEX is a programming library that provides a Java implementation of the TimeLine EXtraction algorithm (TLEX; Finlayson et al.,2021), along with utilities for programmatic manipulation of TimeML graphs. Timelines are useful for a number of natural language understanding tasks, such as question answering, cross-document event coreference, and summarization {\&} visualization. jTLEX provides functionality for (1) parsing TimeML annotations into Java objects, (2) construction of TimeML graphs from scratch, (3) partitioning of TimeML graphs into temporally connected subgraphs, (4) transforming temporally connected subgraphs into point algebra (PA) graphs, (5) extracting exact timeline of TimeML graphs, (6) detecting inconsistent subgraphs, and (7) calculating indeterminate sections of the timeline. The library has been tested on the entire TimeBank corpus, and comes with a suite of unit tests. We release the software as open source with a free license for non-commercial use.
CovRelex-SE: Adding Semantic Information for Relation Search via Sequence Embedding (2023)

In recent years, COVID-19 has impacted all aspects of human life. As a result, numerous publications relating to this disease have been issued. Due to the massive volume of publications, some retrieval systems have been developed to provide researchers with useful information. In these systems, lexical searching methods are widely used, which raises many issues related to acronyms, synonyms, and rare keywords. In this paper, we present a hybrid relation retrieval system, CovRelex-SE, based on embeddings to provide high-quality search results. Our system can be accessed through the following URL: \url{https://www.jaist.ac.jp/is/labs/nguyen-lab/systems/covrelex-se/}
ITMT: Interactive Topic Model Trainer (2023)

Topic Modeling is a commonly used technique for analyzing unstructured data in various fields, but achieving accurate results and useful models can be challenging, especially for domain experts who lack the knowledge needed to optimize the parameters required by this natural language processing technique. From this perspective, we introduce an Interactive Topic Model Trainer (ITMT) developed within the EU-funded project IntelComp. ITMT is a user-in-the-loop topic modeling tool presented with a graphical user interface that allows the training and curation of different state-of-the-art topic extraction libraries, including some recent neural-based methods, oriented toward the usage by domain experts. This paper reviews ITMT`s functionalities and key implementation aspects in this paper, including a comparison with other tools for topic modeling analysis.
FISH: A Financial Interactive System for Signal Highlighting (2023)

In this system demonstration, we seek to streamline the process of reviewing financial statements and provide insightful information for practitioners. We develop FISH, an interactive system that extracts and highlights crucial textual signals from financial statements efficiently and precisely. To achieve our goal, we integrate pre-trained BERT representations and a fine-tuned BERT highlighting model with a newly-proposed two-stage classify-then-highlight pipeline. We also conduct the human evaluation, showing FISH can provide accurate financial signals. FISH overcomes the limitations of existing research andmore importantly benefits both academics and practitioners in finance as they can leverage state-of-the-art contextualized language models with their newly gained insights. The system is available online at \url{https://fish-web-fish.de.r.appspot.com/}, and a short video for introduction is at \url{https://youtu.be/ZbvZQ09i6aw}.
Yu Sheng: Human-in-Loop Classical Chinese Poetry Generation System (2023)

The development of poetry generation system mainly focuses on enhancing the capacity of generation model. However, the demands of customization and polishing are generally ignored, which highly reduces the scope of application. In this work, we present Yu Sheng, a web-based poetry generation system that is featured a human-in-loop generation framework, providing various customization options for users with different backgrounds to engage in the process of poetry composition. To this end, we propose two methods and train the models that can perform constrained generation and fine-grained polishing. The automatic and human evaluation results show that our system has a strong ability to generate and polish poetry compared to other vanilla models. Our system is publicly accessible at: \url{https://yusheng.cis.um.edu.mo}.
PANACEA: An Automated Misinformation Detection System on COVID-19 (2023)

In this demo, we introduce a web-based misinformation detection system PANACEA on COVID-19 related claims, which has two modules, fact-checking and rumour detection. Our fact-checking module, which is supported by novel natural language inference methods with a self-attention network, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. It is also able to give automated veracity assessment and ranked supporting evidence with the stance towards the claim to be checked. In addition, PANACEA adapts the bi-directional graph convolutional networks model, which is able to detect rumours based on comment networks of related tweets, instead of relying on the knowledge base. This rumour detection module assists by warning the users in the early stages when a knowledge base may not be available.
NxPlain: A Web-based Tool for Discovery of Latent Concepts (2023)

The proliferation of deep neural networks in various domains has seen an increased need for the interpretability of these models, especially in scenarios where fairness and trust are as important as model performance. A lot of independent work is being carried out to: i) analyze what linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge is learned within these models, and ii) highlight the salient parts of the input. We present NxPlain, a web-app that provides an explanation of a model`s prediction using latent concepts. NxPlain discovers latent concepts learned in a deep NLP model, provides an interpretation of the knowledge learned in the model, and explains its predictions based on the used concepts. The application allows users to browse through the latent concepts in an intuitive order, letting them efficiently scan through the most salient concepts with a global corpus-level view and a local sentence-level view. Our tool is useful for debugging, unraveling model bias, and for highlighting spurious correlations in a model. A hosted demo is available here: \url{https://nxplain.qcri.org}