ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Making Better Use of Training Corpus: Retrieval-based Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction via Label Interpolation (2023)

In this paper, we aim to adapt the idea of retrieval-based neural approaches to the Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) task. Different from previous studies retrieving semantic similar neighbors, the ASTE task has its specialized challenges when adapting, i.e., the purpose includes predicting the sentiment polarity and it is usually aspect-dependent. Semantic similar neighbors with different polarities will be infeasible even counterproductive. To tackle this issue, we propose a retrieval-based neural ASTE approach, named RLI (Retrieval-based Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction via Label Interpolation), which exploits the label information of neighbors. Given an aspect-opinion term pair, we retrieve semantic similar triplets from the training corpus and interpolate their label information into the augmented representation of the target pair. The retriever is jointly trained with the whole ASTE framework, and neighbors with both similar semantics and sentiments can be recalled with the aid of this distant supervision. In addition, we design a simple yet effective pre-train method for the retriever that implicitly encodes the label similarities. Extensive experiments and analysis on two widely-used benchmarks show that the proposed model establishes a new state-of-the-art on ASTE.
Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking with Disentangled Domain-Slot Attention (2023)

As the core of task-oriented dialogue systems, dialogue state tracking (DST) is designed to track the dialogue state through the conversation between users and systems. Multi-domain DST has been an important challenge in which the dialogue states across multiple domains need to consider. In recent mainstream approaches, each domain and slot are aggregated and regarded as a single query feeding into attention with the dialogue history to obtain domain-slot specific representations. In this work, we propose disentangled domain-slot attention for multi-domain dialogue state tracking. The proposed approach disentangles the domain-slot specific information extraction in a flexible and context-dependent manner by separating the query about domains and slots in the attention component. Through a series of experiments on MultiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.4 datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the standard multi-head attention with aggregated domain-slot query.
Improved Visual Story Generation with Adaptive Context Modeling (2023)

Diffusion models developed on top of powerful text-to-image generation models like Stable Diffusion achieve remarkable success in visual story generation. However, the best-performing approach considers historically generated results as flattened memory cells, ignoring the fact that not all preceding images contribute equally to the generation of the characters and scenes at the current stage. To address this, we present a simple method that improves the leading system with adaptive context modeling, which is not only incorporated in the encoder but also adopted as additional guidance in the sampling stage to boost the global consistency of the generated story. We evaluate our model on PororoSV and FlintstonesSV datasets and show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art FID scores on both story visualization and continuation scenarios. We conduct detailed model analysis and show that our model excels at generating semantically consistent images for stories.
Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph Modeling over Key Utterances for Dialogue Reading Comprehension (2023)

We focus on dialogue reading comprehension (DRC) that extracts answers from dialogues. Compared to standard RC tasks, DRC has raised challenges because of the complex speaker information and noisy dialogue context. Essentially, the challenges come from the speaker-centric nature of dialogue utterances {---} an utterance is usually insufficient in its surface form, but requires to incorporate the role of its speaker and the dialogue context to fill the latent pragmatic and intention information. We propose to deal with these problems in two folds. First, we propose a new key-utterances-extracting method, which can realize more answer-contained utterances. Second, based on the extracted utterances, we then propose a Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph (QuISG). QuISG involves the question and question-mentioning speaker as nodes. To realize interlocutor scopes, utterances are connected with corresponding speakers in the dialogue. Experiments on the benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance against previous works.
Speech-to-Speech Translation for a Real-world Unwritten Language (2023)

We study speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) that translates speech from one language into another language and focuses on building systems to support languages without standard text writing systems. We use English-Taiwanese Hokkien as a case study, and present an end-to-end solution from training data collection, modeling choices to benchmark dataset release. First, we present efforts on creating human annotated data, automatically mining data from large unlabeled speech datasets, and adopting pseudo-labeling to produce weakly supervised data. On the modeling, we take advantage of recent advances in applying self-supervised discrete representations as target for prediction in S2ST and show the effectiveness of leveraging additional text supervision from Mandarin, a language similar to Hokkien, in model training. Finally, we release an S2ST benchmark set to facilitate future research in this field.
Code Execution with Pre-trained Language Models (2023)

Code execution is a fundamental aspect of programming language semantics that reflects the exact behavior of the code. However, most pre-trained models for code intelligence ignore the execution trace and only rely on source code and syntactic structures. In this paper, we investigate how well pre-trained models can understand and perform code execution. We develop a mutation-based data augmentation technique to create a large-scale and realistic Python dataset and task for code execution, which challenges existing models such as Codex. We then present CodeExecutor, a Transformer model that leverages code execution pre-training and curriculum learning to enhance its semantic comprehension. We evaluate CodeExecutor on code execution and show its promising performance and limitations. We also demonstrate its potential benefits for code intelligence tasks such as zero-shot code-to-code search and text-to-code generation. Our analysis provides insights into the learning and generalization abilities of pre-trained models for code execution.
BertNet: Harvesting Knowledge Graphs with Arbitrary Relations from Pretrained Language Models (2023)

It is crucial to automatically construct knowledge graphs (KGs) of diverse new relations to support knowledge discovery and broad applications. Previous KG construction methods, based on either crowdsourcing or text mining, are often limited to a small predefined set of relations due to manual cost or restrictions in text corpus. Recent research proposed to use pretrained language models (LMs) as implicit knowledge bases that accept knowledge queries with prompts. Yet, the implicit knowledge lacks many desirable properties of a full-scale symbolic KG, such as easy access, navigation, editing, and quality assurance. In this paper, we propose a new approach of harvesting massive KGs of arbitrary relations from pretrained LMs. With minimal input of a relation definition (a prompt and a few shot of example entity pairs), the approach efficiently searches in the vast entity pair space to extract diverse accurate knowledge of the desired relation. We develop an effective search-and-rescore mechanism for improved efficiency and accuracy. We deploy the approach to harvest KGs of over 400 new relations, from LMs of varying capacities such as RoBERTaNet. Extensive human and automatic evaluations show our approach manages to extract diverse accurate knowledge, including tuples of complex relations (e.g., {\textquotedblleft}A is capable of but not good at B{\textquotedblright}). The resulting KGs as a symbolic interpretation of the source LMs also reveal new insights into the LMs' knowledge capacities.
Sequential Path Signature Networks for Personalised Longitudinal Language Modeling (2023)

Longitudinal user modeling can provide a strong signal for various downstream tasks. Despite the rapid progress in representation learning, dynamic aspects of modelling individuals' language have only been sparsely addressed. We present a novel extension of neural sequential models using the notion of path signatures from rough path theory, which constitute graduated summaries of continuous paths and have the ability to capture non-linearities in trajectories. By combining path signatures of users' history with contextual neural representations and recursive neural networks we can produce compact time-sensitive user representations. Given the magnitude of mental health conditions with symptoms manifesting in language, we show the applicability of our approach on the task of identifying changes in individuals' mood by analysing their online textual content. By directly integrating signature transforms of users' history in the model architecture we jointly address the two most important aspects of the task, namely sequentiality and temporality. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on macro-average F1 score on the two available datasets for the task, outperforming or performing on-par with state-of-the-art models utilising only historical posts and even outperforming prior models which also have access to future posts of users.
A Multi-modal Debiasing Model with Dynamical Constraint for Robust Visual Question Answering (2023)

Recent studies have pointed out that many well-developed Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems suffer from bias problem. Despite the remarkable performance gained on In-Distribution (ID) datasets, the VQA model might merely capture the superficial correlation from question to answer rather than showing real reasoning abilities. Therefore, when switching to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) dataset, whose test distribution is unknown or even reversed with the training set, significant drops might be demonstrated. Although efforts have been devoted to easing the negative bias effect brought by language prior and analysing its inherent cause, they are still limited by the following two aspects. First, most current debiasing methods achieve promising OOD generalization ability with a major sacrifice of the ID performance. Second, existing researches are restricted by exploiting comprehensive biases, since weakening the language bias is mainly focused, while only a few works consider vision bias. In this paper, we investigate a straightforward way to mitigate bias problem for VQA task. Specifically, we reduce bias effect by subtracting bias score from standard VQA base score. Based on such a direct strategy, we design two bias learning branches to detect more bias information, which are combined with a dynamical constraint loss to alleviate the problem of over-correction and insufficient debiasing effect. We evaluate our method on the challenging VQA v2.0 and VQA-CP V2,0 datasets and the proposed method achievessignificant improvement.
Trigger-Argument based Explanation for Event Detection (2023)

Event Detection (ED) is a critical task that aims to identify events of certain types in plain text. Neural models have achieved great success on ED, thus coming with a desire for higher interpretability. Existing works mainly exploit words or phrases of the input text to explain models' inner mechanisms. However, for ED, the event structure, comprising of an event trigger and a set of arguments, are more enlightening clues to explain model behaviors. To this end, we propose a Trigger-Argument based Explanation method (TAE), which can utilize event structure knowledge to uncover a faithful interpretation for the existing ED models at neuron level. Specifically, we design group, sparsity, support mechanisms to construct the event structure from structuralization, compactness, and faithfulness perspectives. We evaluate our model on the large-scale MAVEN and the widely-used ACE 2005 datasets, and observe that TAE is able to reveal the process by which the model predicts. Experimental results also demonstrate that TAE can not only improve the interpretability on standard evaluation metrics, but also effectively facilitate the human understanding.
Interactive Concept Learning for Uncovering Latent Themes in Large Text Collections (2023)

Experts across diverse disciplines are often interested in making sense of large text collections. Traditionally, this challenge is approached either by noisy unsupervised techniques such as topic models, or by following a manual theme discovery process. In this paper, we expand the definition of a theme to account for more than just a word distribution, and include generalized concepts deemed relevant by domain experts. Then, we propose an interactive framework that receives and encodes expert feedback at different levels of abstraction. Our framework strikes a balance between automation and manual coding, allowing experts to maintain control of their study while reducing the manual effort required.
NormMark: A Weakly Supervised Markov Model for Socio-cultural Norm Discovery (2023)

Norms, which are culturally accepted guidelines for behaviours, can be integrated into conversational models to generate utterances that are appropriate for the socio-cultural context. Existing methods for norm recognition tend to focus only on surface-level features of dialogues and do not take into account the interactions within a conversation. To address this issue, we propose NormMark, a probabilistic generative Markov model to carry the latent features throughout a dialogue. These features are captured by discrete and continuous latent variables conditioned on the conversation history, and improve the model`s ability in norm recognition. The model is trainable on weakly annotated data using the variational technique. On a dataset with limited norm annotations, we show that our approach achieves higher F1 score, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods, including GPT3.
VoteTRANS: Detecting Adversarial Text without Training by Voting on Hard Labels of Transformations (2023)

Adversarial attacks reveal serious flaws in deep learning models. More dangerously, these attacks preserve the original meaning and escape human recognition. Existing methods for detecting these attacks need to be trained using original/adversarial data. In this paper, we propose detection without training by voting on hard labels from predictions of transformations, namely, VoteTRANS. Specifically, VoteTRANS detects adversarial text by comparing the hard labels of input text and its transformation. The evaluation demonstrates that VoteTRANS effectively detects adversarial text across various state-of-the-art attacks, models, and datasets.
Fusion or Defusion? Flexible Vision-and-Language Pre-Training (2023)

Existing approaches in the vision-and-language pre-training (VLP) paradigm mainly deploy either fusion-based encoders or dual-encoders, failing to achieve both effectiveness and efficiency in downstream multimodal tasks. In this paper, we build a flexible VLP model by incorporating cross-modal fusions into a dual-encoder architecture, where the introduced fusion modules can be easily decoupled from the dual encoder so as to switch the model to a fusion-free one. To better absorb cross-modal features from the fusion modules, we design a cross-modal knowledge transfer strategy along with other comprehensive pre-training tasks to guide the training process, which can further strengthen both the fusion-based and fusion-free representation learning. Extensive experiments conducted on various downstream vision-language tasks show that our proposed model is well-equipped with effectiveness as well as efficiency, demonstrating a superior performance compared with other strong VLP models.
COCKATIEL: COntinuous Concept ranKed ATtribution with Interpretable ELements for explaining neural net classifiers on NLP (2023)

Transformer architectures are complex and their use in NLP, while it has engendered many successes, makes their interpretability or explainability challenging. Recent debates have shown that attention maps and attribution methods are unreliable (Pruthi et al., 2019; Brunner et al., 2019). In this paper, we present some of their limitations and introduce COCKATIEL, which successfully addresses some of them. COCKATIEL is a novel, post-hoc, concept-based, model-agnostic XAI technique that generates meaningful explanations from the last layer of a neural net model trained on an NLP classification task by using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to discover the concepts the model leverages to make predictions and by exploiting a Sensitivity Analysis to estimate accurately the importance of each of these concepts for the model. It does so without compromising the accuracy of the underlying model or requiring a new one to be trained. We conduct experiments in single and multi-aspect sentiment analysis tasks and we show COCKATIEL`s superior ability to discover concepts that align with humans' on Transformer models without any supervision, we objectively verify the faithfulness of its explanations through fidelity metrics, and we showcase its ability to provide meaningful explanations in two different datasets. Our code is freely available: \url{https://github.com/fanny-jourdan/cockatiel}
Code-Switched Text Synthesis in Unseen Language Pairs (2023)

Existing efforts on text synthesis for code-switching mostly require training on code-switched texts in the target language pairs, limiting the deployment of the models to cases lacking code-switched data. In this work, we study the problem of synthesizing code-switched texts for language pairs absent from the training data. We introduce GLOSS, a model built on top of a pre-trained multilingual machine translation model (PMMTM) with an additional code-switching module. This module, either an adapter or extra prefixes, learns code-switching patterns from code-switched data during training, while the primary component of GLOSS, i.e., the PMMTM, is frozen. The design of only adjusting the code-switching module prevents our model from overfitting to the constrained training data for code-switching. Hence, GLOSS exhibits the ability to generalize and synthesize code-switched texts across a broader spectrum of language pairs. Additionally, we develop a self-training algorithm on target language pairs further to enhance the reliability of GLOSS. Automatic evaluations on four language pairs show that GLOSS achieves at least 55{\%} relative BLEU and METEOR scores improvements compared to strong baselines. Human evaluations on two language pairs further validate the success of GLOSS.
Imagination is All You Need! Curved Contrastive Learning for Abstract Sequence Modeling Utilized on Long Short-Term Dialogue Planning (2023)

Inspired by the curvature of space-time, we introduce Curved Contrastive Learning (CCL), a novel representation learning technique for learning the relative turn distance between utterance pairs in multi-turn dialogues. The resulting bi-encoder models can guide transformers as a response ranking model towards a goal in a zero-shot fashion by projecting the goal utterance and the corresponding reply candidates into a latent space. Here the cosine similarity indicates the distance/reachability of a candidate utterance toward the corresponding goal. Furthermore, we explore how these forward-entailing language representations can be utilized for assessing the likelihood of sequences by the entailment strength i.e. through the cosine similarity of its individual members (encoded separately) as an emergent property in the curved space. These non-local properties allow us to imagine the likelihood of future patterns in dialogues, specifically by ordering/identifying future goal utterances that are multiple turns away, given a dialogue context. As part of our analysis, we investigate characteristics that make conversations (un)plannable and find strong evidence of planning capability over multiple turns (in 61.56{\%} over 3 turns) in conversations from the DailyDialog dataset. Finally, we show how we achieve higher efficiency in sequence modeling tasks compared to previous work thanks to our relativistic approach, where only the last utterance needs to be encoded and computed during inference.
Data-Efficient French Language Modeling with CamemBERTa (2023)

Recent advances in NLP have significantly improved the performance of language models on a variety of tasks. While these advances are largely driven by the availability of large amounts of data and computational power, they also benefit from the development of better training methods and architectures. In this paper, we introduce CamemBERTa, a French DeBERTa model that builds upon the DeBERTaV3 architecture and training objective. We evaluate our model`s performance on a variety of French downstream tasks and datasets, including question answering, part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing, named entity recognition, and the FLUE benchmark, and compare against CamemBERT, the state-of-the-art monolingual model for French. Our results show that, given the same amount of training tokens, our model outperforms BERT-based models trained with MLM on most tasks. Furthermore, our new model reaches similar or superior performance on downstream tasks compared to CamemBERT, despite being trained on only 30{\%} of its total number of input tokens. In addition to our experimental results, we also publicly release the weights and code implementation of CamemBERTa, making it the first publicly available DeBERTaV3 model outside of the original paper and the first openly available implementation of a DeBERTaV3 training objective.
Coupling Large Language Models with Logic Programming for Robust and General Reasoning from Text (2023)

While large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3, appear to be robust and general, their reasoning ability is not at a level to compete with the best models trained for specific natural language reasoning problems. In this study, we observe that a large language model can serve as a highly effective few-shot semantic parser. It can convert natural language sentences into a logical form that serves as input for answer set programs, a logic-based declarative knowledge representation formalism. The combination results in a robust and general system that can handle multiple question-answering tasks without requiring retraining for each new task. It only needs a few examples to guide the LLM`s adaptation to a specific task, along with reusable ASP knowledge modules that can be applied to multiple tasks. We demonstrate that this method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP benchmarks, including bAbI, StepGame, CLUTRR, and gSCAN. Additionally, it successfully tackles robot planning tasks that an LLM alone fails to solve.