ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Discourse Context Predictability Effects in Hindi Word Order (2022)

We test the hypothesis that discourse predictability influences Hindi syntactic choice. While prior work has shown that a number of factors (e.g., information status, dependency length, and syntactic surprisal) influence Hindi word order preferences, the role of discourse predictability is underexplored in the literature. Inspired by prior work on syntactic priming, we investigate how the words and syntactic structures in a sentence influence the word order of the following sentences. Specifically, we extract sentences from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB), permute the preverbal constituents of those sentences, and build a classifier to predict which sentences actually occurred in the corpus against artificially generated distractors. The classifier uses a number of discourse-based features and cognitive features to make its predictions, including dependency length, surprisal, and information status. We find that information status and LSTM-based discourse predictability influence word order choices, especially for non-canonical object-fronted orders. We conclude by situating our results within the broader syntactic priming literature.
\textquotedblleftCovid vaccine is against Covid but Oxford vaccine is made at Oxford!\textquotedblright Semantic Interpretation of Proper Noun Compounds (2022)

Proper noun compounds, e.g., {\textquotedblleft}Covid vaccine{\textquotedblright}, convey information in a succinct manner (a {\textquotedblleft}Covid vaccine{\textquotedblright} is a {\textquotedblleft}vaccine that immunizes against the Covid disease{\textquotedblright}). These are commonly used in short-form domains, such as news headlines, but are largely ignored in information-seeking applications. To address this limitation, we release a new manually annotated dataset, ProNCI, consisting of 22.5K proper noun compounds along with their free-form semantic interpretations. ProNCI is 60 times larger than prior noun compound datasets and also includes non-compositional examples, which have not been previously explored. We experiment with various neural models for automatically generating the semantic interpretations from proper noun compounds, ranging from few-shot prompting to supervised learning, with varying degrees of knowledge about the constituent nouns. We find that adding targeted knowledge, particularly about the common noun, results in performance gains of upto 2.8{\%}. Finally, we integrate our model generated interpretations with an existing Open IE system and observe an 7.5{\%} increase in yield at a precision of 85{\%}. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/dair-iitd/pronci.
Context Limitations Make Neural Language Models More Human-Like (2022)

Language models (LMs) have been used in cognitive modeling as well as engineering studies{---}they compute information-theoretic complexity metrics that simulate humans' cognitive load during reading.This study highlights a limitation of modern neural LMs as the model of choice for this purpose: there is a discrepancy between their context access capacities and that of humans.Our results showed that constraining the LMs' context access improved their simulation of human reading behavior.We also showed that LM-human gaps in context access were associated with specific syntactic constructions; incorporating syntactic biases into LMs' context access might enhance their cognitive plausibility.
A Generative Model for End-to-End Argument Mining with Reconstructed Positional Encoding and Constrained Pointer Mechanism (2022)

Argument mining (AM) is a challenging task as it requires recognizing the complex argumentation structures involving multiple subtasks.To handle all subtasks of AM in an end-to-end fashion, previous works generally transform AM into a dependency parsing task.However, such methods largely require complex pre- and post-processing to realize the task transformation.In this paper, we investigate the end-to-end AM task from a novel perspective by proposing a generative framework, in which the expected outputs of AM are framed as a simple target sequence. Then, we employ a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language model with a constrained pointer mechanism (CPM) to model the clues for all the subtasks of AM in the light of the target sequence. Furthermore, we devise a reconstructed positional encoding (RPE) to alleviate the order biases induced by the autoregressive generation paradigm.Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two AM benchmarks.
Reflect, Not Reflex: Inference-Based Common Ground Improves Dialogue Response Quality (2022)

Human communication relies on common ground (CG), the mutual knowledge and beliefs shared by participants, to produce coherent and interesting conversations. In this paper, we demonstrate that current response generation (RG) models produce generic and dull responses in dialogues because they act reflexively, failing to explicitly model CG, both due to the lack of CG in training data and the standard RG training procedure. We introduce Reflect, a dataset that annotates dialogues with explicit CG (materialized as inferences approximating shared knowledge and beliefs) and solicits 9k diverse human-generated responses each following one common ground. Using Reflect, we showcase the limitations of current dialogue data and RG models: less than half of the responses in current data is rated as high quality (sensible, specific, and interesting) and models trained using this data have even lower quality, while most Reflect responses are judged high quality. Next, we analyze whether CG can help models produce better quality responses by using Reflect CG to guide RG models. Surprisingly, we find that simply prompting GPT3 to {\textquotedblleft}think{\textquotedblright} about CG generates 30{\%} more quality responses, showing promising benefits to integrating CG into the RG process.
FlowEval: A Consensus-Based Dialogue Evaluation Framework Using Segment Act Flows (2022)

Despite recent progress in open-domain dialogue evaluation, how to develop automatic metrics remains an open problem. We explore the potential of dialogue evaluation featuring dialog act information, which was hardly explicitly modeled in previous methods. However, defined at the utterance level in general, dialog act is of coarse granularity, as an utterance can contain multiple segments possessing different functions. Hence, we propose segment act, an extension of dialog act from utterance level to segment level, and crowdsource a large-scale dataset for it. To utilize segment act flows, sequences of segment acts, for evaluation, we develop the first consensus-based dialogue evaluation framework, FlowEval. This framework provides a reference-free approach for dialog evaluation by finding pseudo-references. Extensive experiments against strong baselines on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and other desirable characteristics of our FlowEval, pointing out a potential path for better dialogue evaluation.
FaD-VLP: Fashion Vision-and-Language Pre-training towards Unified Retrieval and Captioning (2022)

Multimodal tasks in the fashion domain have significant potential for e-commerce, but involve challenging vision-and-language learning problems{---}e.g., retrieving a fashion item given a reference image plus text feedback from a user. Prior works on multimodal fashion tasks have either been limited by the data in individual benchmarks, or have leveraged generic vision-and-language pre-training but have not taken advantage of the characteristics of fashion data. Additionally, these works have mainly been restricted to multimodal understanding tasks. To address these gaps, we make two key contributions. First, we propose a novel fashion-specific pre-training framework based on weakly-supervised triplets constructed from fashion image-text pairs. We show the triplet-based tasks are an effective addition to standard multimodal pre-training tasks. Second, we propose a flexible decoder-based model architecture capable of both fashion retrieval and captioning tasks. Together, our model design and pre-training approach are competitive on a diverse set of fashion tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, image retrieval with text feedback, image captioning, relative image captioning, and multimodal categorization.
MM-Align: Learning Optimal Transport-based Alignment Dynamics for Fast and Accurate Inference on Missing Modality Sequences (2022)

Existing multimodal tasks mostly target at the complete input modality setting, i.e., each modality is either complete or completely missing in both training and test sets. However, the randomly missing situations have still been underexplored. In this paper, we present a novel approach named MM-Align to address the missing-modality inference problem. Concretely, we propose 1) an alignment dynamics learning module based on the theory of optimal transport (OT) for missing data imputation; 2) a denoising training algorithm to enhance the quality of imputation as well as the accuracy of model predictions. Compared with previous generative methods which devote to restoring the missing inputs, MM-Align learns to capture and imitate the alignment dynamics between modality sequences. Results of comprehensive experiments on two multimodal tasks empirically demonstrate that our method can perform more accurate and faster inference and alleviate the overfitting issue under different missing conditions.
Evaluating the Knowledge Dependency of Questions (2022)

The automatic generation of Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) has the potential to reduce the time educators spend on student assessment significantly. However, existing evaluation metrics for MCQ generation, such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR, focus on the n-gram based similarity of the generated MCQ to the gold sample in the dataset and disregard their educational value.They fail to evaluate the MCQ`s ability to assess the student`s knowledge of the corresponding target fact. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel automatic evaluation metric, coined Knowledge Dependent Answerability (KDA), which measures the MCQ`s answerability given knowledge of the target fact. Specifically, we first show how to measure KDA based on student responses from a human survey.Then, we propose two automatic evaluation metrics, KDA{\_}disc and KDA{\_}cont, that approximate KDA by leveraging pre-trained language models to imitate students' problem-solving behavior.Through our human studies, we show that KDA{\_}disc and KDA{\_}soft have strong correlations with both (1) KDA and (2) usability in an actual classroom setting, labeled by experts. Furthermore, when combined with n-gram based similarity metrics, KDA{\_}disc and KDA{\_}cont are shown to have a strong predictive power for various expert-labeled MCQ quality measures.
MoSE: Modality Split and Ensemble for Multimodal Knowledge Graph Completion (2022)

Multimodal knowledge graph completion (MKGC) aims to predict missing entities in MKGs. Previous works usually share relation representation across modalities. This results in mutual interference between modalities during training, since for a pair of entities, the relation from one modality probably contradicts that from another modality. Furthermore, making a unified prediction based on the shared relation representation treats the input in different modalities equally, while their importance to the MKGC task should be different. In this paper, we propose MoSE, a Modality Split representation learning and Ensemble inference framework for MKGC. Specifically, in the training phase, we learn modality-split relation embeddings for each modality instead of a single modality-shared one, which alleviates the modality interference. Based on these embeddings, in the inference phase, we first make modality-split predictions and then exploit various ensemble methods to combine the predictions with different weights, which models the modality importance dynamically. Experimental results on three KG datasets show that MoSE outperforms state-of-the-art MKGC methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/OreOZhao/MoSE4MKGC.
Entropy-Based Vocabulary Substitution for Incremental Learning in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2022)

In a practical real-world scenario, the longstanding goal is that a universal multilingual translation model can be incrementally updated when new language pairs arrive. Specifically, the initial vocabulary only covers some of the words in new languages, which hurts the translation quality for incremental learning. Although existing approaches attempt to address this issue by replacing the original vocabulary with a rebuilt vocabulary or constructing independent language-specific vocabularies, these methods can not meet the following three demands simultaneously: (1) High translation quality for original and incremental languages, (2) low cost for model training, (3) low time overhead for preprocessing. In this work, we propose an entropy-based vocabulary substitution (EVS) method that just needs to walk through new language pairs for incremental learning in a large-scale multilingual data updating while remaining the size of the vocabulary. Our method has access to learn new knowledge from updated training samples incrementally while keeping high translation quality for original language pairs, alleviating the issue of catastrophic forgetting. Results of experiments show that EVS can achieve better performance and save excess overhead for incremental learning in the multilingual machine translation task.
Eliciting Knowledge from Large Pre-Trained Models for Unsupervised Knowledge-Grounded Conversation (2022)

Recent advances in large-scale pre-training provide large models with the potential to learn knowledge from the raw text. It is thus natural to ask whether it is possible to leverage these large models as knowledge bases for downstream tasks. In this work, we answer the aforementioned question in unsupervised knowledge-grounded conversation. We explore various methods that best elicit knowledge from large models. Our human study indicates that, though hallucinations exist, large models post the unique advantage of being able to output common sense and summarize facts that cannot be directly retrieved from the search engine. To better exploit such generated knowledge in dialogue generation, we treat the generated knowledge as a noisy knowledge source and propose the posterior-based reweighing as well as the noisy training strategy. Empirical results on two benchmarks show advantages over the state-of-the-art methods.
An Unsupervised, Geometric and Syntax-aware Quantification of Polysemy (2022)

Polysemy is the phenomenon where a single word form possesses two or more related senses. It is an extremely ubiquitous part of natural language and analyzing it has sparked rich discussions in the linguistics, psychology and philosophy communities alike. With scarce attention paid to polysemy in computational linguistics, and even scarcer attention toward quantifying polysemy, in this paper, we propose a novel, unsupervised framework to compute and estimate polysemy scores for words in multiple languages. We infuse our proposed quantification with syntactic knowledge in the form of dependency structures. This informs the final polysemy scores of the lexicon motivated by recent linguistic findings that suggest there is an implicit relation between syntax and ambiguity/polysemy. We adopt a graph based approach by computing the discrete Ollivier Ricci curvature on a graph of the contextual nearest neighbors. We test our framework on curated datasets controlling for different sense distributions of words in 3 typologically diverse languages - English, French and Spanish. The effectiveness of our framework is demonstrated by significant correlations of our quantification with expert human annotated language resources like WordNet. We observe a 0.3 point increase in the correlation coefficient as compared to previous quantification studies in English. Our research leverages contextual language models and syntactic structures to empirically support the widely held theoretical linguistic notion that syntax is intricately linked to ambiguity/polysemy.
Reorder and then Parse, Fast and Accurate Discontinuous Constituency Parsing (2022)

Discontinuous constituency parsing is still kept developing for its efficiency and accuracy are far behind its continuous counterparts. Motivated by the observation that a discontinuous constituent tree can be simply transformed into a pseudo-continuous one by artificially reordering words in the sentence, we propose a novel reordering method, thereby construct fast and accurate discontinuous constituency parsing systems working in continuous way. Specifically, we model the relative position changes of words as a list of actions. By parsing and performing this actions, the corresponding pseudo-continuous sequence is derived. Discontinuous parse tree can be further inferred via integrating a high-performance pseudo-continuous constituency parser. Our systems are evaluated on three classical discontinuous constituency treebanks, achieving new state-of-the-art on two treebanks and showing a distinct advantage in speed.
Making Science Simple: Corpora for the Lay Summarisation of Scientific Literature (2022)

Lay summarisation aims to jointly summarise and simplify a given text, thus making its content more comprehensible to non-experts.Automatic approaches for lay summarisation can provide significant value in broadening access to scientific literature, enabling a greater degree of both interdisciplinary knowledge sharing and public understanding when it comes to research findings. However, current corpora for this task are limited in their size and scope, hindering the development of broadly applicable data-driven approaches. Aiming to rectify these issues, we present two novel lay summarisation datasets, PLOS (large-scale) and eLife (medium-scale), each of which contains biomedical journal articles alongside expert-written lay summaries.We provide a thorough characterisation of our lay summaries, highlighting differing levels of readability and abstractivenessbetween datasets that can be leveraged to support the needs of different applications.Finally, we benchmark our datasets using mainstream summarisation approaches and perform a manual evaluation with domain experts, demonstrating their utility and casting light on the key challenges of this task.
Looking at the Overlooked: An Analysis on the Word-Overlap Bias in Natural Language Inference (2022)

It has been shown that NLI models are usually biased with respect to the word-overlap between the premise and the hypothesis, as they take this feature as a primary cue for predicting the entailment label. In this paper, we focus on an overlooked aspect of the overlap bias in the NLI models: the reverse word-overlap bias. Our experimental results demonstrate that current NLI systems are also highly biased towards the non-entailment label on instances with low overlap and that existing debiasing methods, which are reportedly successful on challenge datasets, are generally ineffective in addressing this category of bias.Through a set of analyses, we investigate the reasons for the emergence of the overlap bias and the role of minority examples in mitigating this bias.For the former, we find that the word overlap bias does not stem from pre-training, and in the latter, we observe that in contrast to the accepted assumption, eliminating minority examples does not affect the generalizability of debiasing methods with respect to the overlap bias.
An Empirical Study on the Transferability of Transformer Modules in Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning (2022)

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning has garnered lots of attention in recent studies.On this subject, we investigate the capability of different transformer modules in transferring knowledge from a pre-trained model to a downstream task. Our empirical results suggest that every transformer module is a winning ticket such that fine-tuning the specific module while the rest of the network is frozen achieves a comparable performance to the full fine-tuning case. Among different modules in LMs, LayerNorms exhibit a significant capacity for transfer learning to the extent that with only 0.003{\%} updateable parameters in the layer-wise analysis, they can show acceptable performance on various target tasks.We argue that the performance of LayerNorms could be attributed to their high-magnitude weights compared to other components in a pre-trained model.
CODER: An efficient framework for improving retrieval through COntextual Document Embedding Reranking (2022)

Contrastive learning has been the dominant approach to training dense retrieval models. In this work, we investigate the impact of ranking context - an often overlooked aspect of learning dense retrieval models. In particular, we examine the effect of its constituent parts: jointly scoring a large number of negatives per query, using retrieved (query-specific) instead of random negatives, and a fully list-wise loss.To incorporate these factors into training, we introduce Contextual Document Embedding Reranking (CODER), a highly efficient retrieval framework. When reranking, it incurs only a negligible computational overhead on top of a first-stage method at run time (approx. 5 ms delay per query), allowing it to be easily combined with any state-of-the-art dual encoder method. Models trained through CODER can also be used as stand-alone retrievers.Evaluating CODER in a large set of experiments on the MS MARCO and TripClick collections, we show that the contextual reranking of precomputed document embeddings leads to a significant improvement in retrieval performance. This improvement becomes even more pronounced when more relevance information per query is available, shown in the TripClick collection, where we establish new state-of-the-art results by a large margin.
AdapterShare: Task Correlation Modeling with Adapter Differentiation (2022)

Thanks to the development of pre-trained language models, multitask learning (MTL) methods achieve a great success in natural language understanding area.However, current MTL methods pay more attention to task selection or model design to fuse as much knowledge as possible, while intrinsic task correlation is often neglected. It is important to learn sharing strategy among multiple tasks rather than sharing everything.{\%}The MTL model is directly shared among all the tasks. {\%}For example, in traditional MTL methods, the last classification layers or the decoder layers are manually separated. More deeply, In this paper, we propose AdapterShare, an adapter differentiation method to explicitly model the task correlation among multiple tasks. AdapterShare is automatically learned based on the gradients on tiny held-out validation data. Compared to single-task learning and fully shared MTL methods, our proposed method obtains obvious performance improvement. Compared to the existing MTL method AdapterFusion, AdapterShare achieves absolute 1.90 average points improvement on five dialogue understanding tasks and 2.33 points gain on NLU tasks.