ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Assistive Recipe Editing through Critiquing (2023)

There has recently been growing interest in the automatic generation of cooking recipes that satisfy some form of dietary restrictions, thanks in part to the availability of online recipe data. Prior studies have used pre-trained language models, or relied on small paired recipe data (e.g., a recipe paired with a similar one that satisfies a dietary constraint). However, pre-trained language models generate inconsistent or incoherent recipes, and paired datasets are not available at scale. We address these deficiencies with RecipeCrit, a hierarchical denoising auto-encoder that edits recipes given ingredient-level critiques. The model is trained for recipe completion to learn semantic relationships within recipes. Our work`s main innovation is our unsupervised critiquing module that allows users to edit recipes by interacting with the predicted ingredients; the system iteratively rewrites recipes to satisfy users' feedback. Experiments onthe Recipe1M recipe dataset show that our model can more effectively edit recipes compared to strong language-modeling baselines, creating recipes that satisfy user constraints and are more correct, serendipitous, coherent, and relevant as measured by human judges.
DiTTO: A Feature Representation Imitation Approach for Improving Cross-Lingual Transfer (2023)

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is promising, however has been shown to be sub-optimal, with inferior transfer performance across low-resource languages. In this work, we envision languages as domains for improving zero-shot transfer by jointly reducing the feature incongruity between the source and the target language and increasing the generalization capabilities of pre-trained multilingual transformers. We show that our approach, DiTTO, significantly outperforms the standard zero-shot fine-tuning method on multiple datasets across all languages using solely unlabeled instances in the target language. Empirical results show that jointly reducing feature incongruity for multiple target languages is vital for successful cross-lingual transfer. Moreover, our model enables better cross-lingual transfer than standard fine-tuning methods, even in the few-shot setting.
\textquotedblleftJohn is 50 years old, can his son be 65?\textquotedblright Evaluating NLP Models' Understanding of Feasibility (2023)

In current NLP research, large-scale language models and their abilities are widely being discussed. Some recent works have also found notable failures of these models. Often these failure examples involve complex reasoning abilities. This work focuses on a simple commonsense ability, reasoning about when an action (or its effect) is feasible. To this end, we introduce FeasibilityQA, a question-answering dataset involving binary classification (BCQ) and multi-choice multi-correct questions (MCQ) that test understanding of feasibility. We show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-3, GPT-2, and T5 struggle to answer the feasibility questions correctly. Specifically, on (MCQ, BCQ) questions, GPT-3 achieves accuracy of just (19{\%}, 62{\%}) and (25{\%}, 64{\%}) in zero-shot and few-shot settings, respectively. We also evaluate models by providing relevant knowledge statements required to answer the question and find that the additional knowledge leads to a 7{\%} gain in performance, but the overall performance still remains low. These results make one wonder how much commonsense knowledge about action feasibility is encoded in state-of-the-art models and how well they can reason about it.
Efficient Encoders for Streaming Sequence Tagging (2023)

A naive application of state-of-the-art bidirectional encoders for streaming sequence tagging would require encoding each token from scratch for each new token in an incremental streaming input (like transcribed speech). The lack of re-usability of previous computation leads to a higher number of Floating Point Operations (or FLOPs) and higher number of unnecessary label flips. Increased FLOPs consequently lead to higher wall-clock time and increased label flipping leads to poorer streaming performance. In this work, we present a Hybrid Encoder with Adaptive Restart (HEAR) that addresses these issues while maintaining the performance of bidirectional encoders over the offline (or complete) and improving streaming (or incomplete) inputs. HEAR has a Hybrid unidirectional-bidirectional encoder architecture to perform sequence tagging, along with an Adaptive Restart Module (ARM) to selectively guide the restart of bidirectional portion of the encoder. Across four sequence tagging tasks, HEAR offers FLOP savings in streaming settings upto 71.1{\%} and also outperforms bidirectional encoders for streaming predictions by upto +10{\%} streaming exact match.
Retrieve-and-Fill for Scenario-based Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing (2023)

Task-oriented semantic parsing models have achieved strong results in recent years, but unfortunately do not strike an appealing balance between model size, runtime latency, and cross-domain generalizability. We tackle this problem by introducing scenario-based semantic parsing: a variant of the original task which first requires disambiguating an utterance`s {\textquotedblleft}scenario{\textquotedblright} (an intent-slot template with variable leaf spans) before generating its frame, complete with ontology and utterance tokens. This formulation enables us to isolate coarse-grained and fine-grained aspects of the task, each of which we solve with off-the-shelf neural modules, also optimizing for the axes outlined above. Concretely, we create a Retrieve-and-Fill (RAF) architecture comprised of (1) a retrieval module which ranks the best scenario given an utterance and (2) a filling module which imputes spans into the scenario to create the frame. Our model is modular, differentiable, interpretable, and allows us to garner extra supervision from scenarios. RAF achieves strong results in high-resource, low-resource, and multilingual settings, outperforming recent approaches by wide margins despite, using base pre-trained encoders, small sequence lengths, and parallel decoding.
Document Flattening: Beyond Concatenating Context for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation (2023)

Existing work in document-level neural machine translation commonly concatenates several consecutive sentences as a pseudo-document, and then learns inter-sentential dependencies. This strategy limits the model`s ability to leverage information from distant context. We overcome this limitation with a novel Document Flattening (DocFlat) technique that integrates Flat-Batch Attention (FBA) and Neural Context Gate (NCG) into Transformer model to utilizes information beyond the pseudo-document boundaries. FBA allows the model to attend to all the positions in the batch and model the relationships between positions explicitly and NCG identifies the useful information from the distant context. We conduct comprehensive experiments and analyses on three benchmark datasets for English-German translation, and validate the effectiveness of two variants of DocFlat. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms strong baselines with statistical significance on BLEU, COMET and accuracy on the contrastive test set. The analyses highlight that DocFlat is highly effective in capturing the long-range information.
Scaling Back-Translation with Domain Text Generation for Sign Language Gloss Translation (2023)

Sign language gloss translation aims to translate the sign glosses into spoken language texts, which is challenging due to the scarcity of labeled gloss-text parallel data. Back translation (BT), which generates pseudo-parallel data by translating in-domain spoken language texts into sign glosses, has been applied to alleviate the data scarcity problem. However, the lack of large-scale high-quality in-domain spoken language text data limits the effect of BT. In this paper, to overcome the limitation, we propose a Prompt based domain text Generation (PGen) approach to produce the large-scale in-domain spoken language text data. Specifically, PGen randomly concatenates sentences from the original in-domain spoken language text data as prompts to induce a pre-trained language model (i.e., GPT-2) to generate spoken language texts in a similar style. Experimental results on three benchmarks of sign language gloss translation in varied languages demonstrate that BT with spoken language texts generated by PGen significantly outperforms the compared methods. In addition, as the scale of spoken language texts generated by PGen increases, the BT technique can achieve further improvements, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. We release the code and data for facilitating future research in this field.
Realistic Conversational Question Answering with Answer Selection based on Calibrated Confidence and Uncertainty Measurement (2023)

Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) models aim at answering a question with its relevant paragraph and previous question-answer pairs that occurred during conversation multiple times. To apply such models to a real-world scenario, some existing work uses predicted answers, instead of unavailable ground-truth answers, as the conversation history for inference. However, since these models usually predict wrong answers, using all the predictions without filtering significantly hampers the model performance. To address this problem, we propose to filter out inaccurate answers in the conversation history based on their estimated confidences and uncertainties from the ConvQA model, without making any architectural changes. Moreover, to make the confidence and uncertainty values more reliable, we propose to further calibrate them, thereby smoothing the model predictions. We validate our models, Answer Selection-based realistic Conversation Question Answering, on two standard ConvQA datasets, and the results show that our models significantly outperform relevant baselines. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/starsuzi/AS-ConvQA}.
PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically (2023)

Tongue twisters are meaningful sentences that are difficult to pronounce. The process of automatically generating tongue twisters is challenging since the generated utterance must satisfy two conditions at once: phonetic difficulty and semantic meaning. Furthermore, phonetic difficulty is itself hard to characterize and is expressed in natural tongue twisters through a heterogeneous mix of phenomena such as alliteration and homophony. In this paper, we propose PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically. We leverage phoneme representations to capture the notion of phonetic difficulty, and we train language models to generate original tongue twisters on two proposed task settings. To do this, we curate a dataset called TT-Corp, consisting of existing English tongue twisters. Through automatic and human evaluation, as well as qualitative analysis, we show that PANCETTA generates novel, phonetically difficult, fluent, and semantically meaningful tongue twisters.
A User-Centered, Interactive, Human-in-the-Loop Topic Modelling System (2023)

Human-in-the-loop topic modelling incorporates users' knowledge into the modelling process, enabling them to refine the model iteratively. Recent research has demonstrated the value of user feedback, but there are still issues to consider, such as the difficulty in tracking changes, comparing different models and the lack of evaluation based on real-world examples of use. We developed a novel, interactive human-in-the-loop topic modeling system with a user-friendly interface that enables users compare and record every step they take, and a novel topic words suggestion feature to help users provide feedback that is faithful to the ground truth. Our system also supports not only what traditional topic models can do, i.e., learning the topics from the whole corpus, but also targeted topic modelling, i.e., learning topics for specific aspects of the corpus. In this article, we provide an overview of the system and present the results of a series of user studies designed to assess the value of the system in progressively more realistic applications of topic modelling.
A Survey of Methods for Addressing Class Imbalance in Deep-Learning Based Natural Language Processing (2023)

Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks are naturally imbalanced, as some target categories occur much more frequently than others in the real world. In such scenarios, current NLP models tend to perform poorly on less frequent classes. Addressing class imbalance in NLP is an active research topic, yet, finding a good approach for a particular task and imbalance scenario is difficult. In this survey, the first overview on class imbalance in deep-learning based NLP, we first discuss various types of controlled and real-world class imbalance. Our survey then covers approaches that have been explicitly proposed for class-imbalanced NLP tasks or, originating in the computer vision community, have been evaluated on them. We organize the methods by whether they are based on sampling, data augmentation, choice of loss function, staged learning, or model design. Finally, we discuss open problems and how to move forward.
Extracting or Guessing? Improving Faithfulness of Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2023)

In this paper, we seek to improve the faithfulness of TempRel extraction models from two perspectives. The first perspective is to extract genuinely based on contextual description. To achieve this, we propose to conduct counterfactual analysis to attenuate the effects of two significant types of training biases: the event trigger bias and the frequent label bias. We also add tense information into event representations to explicitly place an emphasis on the contextual description. The second perspective is to provide proper uncertainty estimation and abstain from extraction when no relation is described in the text. By parameterization of Dirichlet Prior over the model-predicted categorical distribution, we improve the model estimates of the correctness likelihood and make TempRel predictions more selective. We also employ temperature scaling to recalibrate the model confidence measure after bias mitigation. Through experimental analysis on MATRES, MATRES-DS, and TDDiscourse, we demonstrate that our model extracts TempRel and timelines more faithfully compared to SOTA methods, especially under distribution shifts.
LoFT: Enhancing Faithfulness and Diversity for Table-to-Text Generation via Logic Form Control (2023)

Logical Table-to-Text (LT2T) generation is tasked with generating logically faithful sentences from tables. There currently exists two challenges in the field: 1) Faithfulness: how to generate sentences that are factually correct given the table content; 2) Diversity: how to generate multiple sentences that offer different perspectives on the table. This work proposes LoFT, which utilizes logic forms as fact verifiers and content planners to control LT2T generation. Experimental results on the LogicNLG dataset demonstrate that LoFT is the first model that addresses unfaithfulness and lack of diversity issues simultaneously. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Yale-LILY/LoFT}.
PromptDA: Label-guided Data Augmentation for Prompt-based Few Shot Learners (2023)

Recent advances in large pre-trained language models (PLMs) lead to impressive gains on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks with task-specific fine-tuning. However, directly fine-tuning PLMs heavily relies on sufficient labeled training instances, which are usually hard to obtain. Prompt-based tuning on PLMs has shown to be powerful for various downstream few-shot tasks. Existing works studying prompt-based tuning for few-shot NLU tasks mainly focus on deriving proper label words with a verbalizer or generating prompt templates to elicit semantics from PLMs. In addition, conventional data augmentation strategies such as synonym substitution are also widely adopted in low-resource scenarios. However, the improvements they bring to prompt-based few-shot learning have been demonstrated to be marginal. Thus, an important research question arises as follows: how to design effective data augmentation methods for prompt-based few-shot tuning? To this end, considering the label semantics are essential in prompt-based tuning, we propose a novel label-guided data augmentation framework PromptDA, which exploits the enriched label semantic information for data augmentation. Extensive experiment results on few-shot text classification tasks show that our proposed framework achieves superior performances by effectively leveraging label semantics and data augmentation for natural language understanding.
Incorporating Question Answering-Based Signals into Abstractive Summarization via Salient Span Selection (2023)

In this work, we propose a method for incorporating question-answering (QA) signals into a summarization model. Our method identifies salient noun phrases (NPs) in the input document by automatically generating wh-questions that are answered by the NPs and automatically determining whether those questions are answered in the gold summaries. This QA-based signal is incorporated into a two-stage summarization model which first marks salient NPs in the input document using a classification model, then conditionally generates a summary. Our experiments demonstrate that the models trained using QA-based supervision generate higher-quality summaries than baseline methods of identifying salient spans on benchmark summarization datasets. Further, we show that the content of the generated summaries can be controlled based on which NPs are marked in the input document. Finally, we propose a method of augmenting the training data so the gold summaries are more consistent with the marked input spans used during training and show how this results in models which learn to better exclude unmarked document content.
Patient Outcome and Zero-shot Diagnosis Prediction with Hypernetwork-guided Multitask Learning (2023)

Multitask deep learning has been applied to patient outcome prediction from text, taking clinical notes as input and training deep neural networks with a joint loss function of multiple tasks. However, the joint training scheme of multitask learning suffers from inter-task interference, and diagnosis prediction among the multiple tasks has the generalizability issue due to rare diseases or unseen diagnoses. To solve these challenges, we propose a hypernetwork-based approach that generates task-conditioned parameters and coefficients of multitask prediction heads to learn task-specific prediction and balance the multitask learning. We also incorporate semantic task information to improve the generalizability of our task-conditioned multitask model. Experiments on early and discharge notes extracted from the real-world MIMIC database show our method can achieve better performance on multitask patient outcome prediction than strong baselines in most cases. Besides, our method can effectively handle the scenario with limited information and improve zero-shot prediction on unseen diagnosis categories.
A Kind Introduction to Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, with a Survey of Computational Approaches (2023)

Aspectual meaning refers to how the internal temporal structure of situations is presented. This includes whether a situation is described as a state or as an event, whether the situation is finished or ongoing, and whether it is viewed as a whole or with a focus on a particular phase. This survey gives an overview of computational approaches to modeling lexical and grammatical aspect along with intuitive explanations of the necessary linguistic concepts and terminology. In particular, we describe the concepts of stativity, telicity, habituality, perfective and imperfective, as well as influential inventories of eventuality and situation types. Aspect is a crucial component of semantics, especially for precise reporting of the temporal structure of situations, and future NLP approaches need to be able to handle and evaluate it systematically.
Incorporating Context into Subword Vocabularies (2023)

Most current popular subword tokenizers are trained based on word frequency statistics over a corpus, without considering information about co-occurrence or context. Nevertheless, the resulting vocabularies are used in language models' highly contextualized settings. We present SaGe, a tokenizer that tailors subwords for their downstream use by baking in the contextualized signal at the vocabulary creation phase. We show that SaGe does a better job than current widespread tokenizers in keeping token contexts cohesive, while not incurring a large price in terms of encoding efficiency or domain robustness. SaGe improves performance on English GLUE classification tasks as well as on NER, and on Inference and NER in Turkish, demonstrating its robustness to language properties such as morphological exponence and agglutination.
LoRaLay: A Multilingual and Multimodal Dataset for Long Range and Layout-Aware Summarization (2023)

Text Summarization is a popular task and an active area of research for the Natural Language Processing community. By definition, it requires to account for long input texts, a characteristic which poses computational challenges for neural models. Moreover, real-world documents come in a variety of complex, visually-rich, layouts. This information is of great relevance, whether to highlight salient content or to encode long-range interactions between textual passages. Yet, all publicly available summarization datasets only provide plain text content. To facilitate research on how to exploit visual/layout information to better capture long-range dependencies in summarization models, we present LoRaLay, a collection of datasets for long-range summarization with accompanying visual/layout information. We extend existing and popular English datasets (arXiv and PubMed) with layout information and propose four novel datasets {--} consistently built from scholar resources {--} covering French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean languages. Further, we propose new baselines merging layout-aware and long-range models {--} two orthogonal approaches {--} and obtain state-of-the-art results, showing the importance of combining both lines of research.
ViHOS: Hate Speech Spans Detection for Vietnamese (2023)

The rise in hateful and offensive language directed at other users is one of the adverse side effects of the increased use of social networking platforms. This could make it difficult for human moderators to review tagged comments filtered by classification systems. To help address this issue, we present the ViHOS (Vietnamese Hate and Offensive Spans) dataset, the first human-annotated corpus containing 26k spans on 11k comments. We also provide definitions of hateful and offensive spans in Vietnamese comments as well as detailed annotation guidelines. Besides, we conduct experiments with various state-of-the-art models. Specifically, XLM-R{\_}Large achieved the best F1-scores in Single span detection and All spans detection, while PhoBERT{\_}Large obtained the highest in Multiple spans detection. Finally, our error analysis demonstrates the difficulties in detecting specific types of spans in our data for future research. Our dataset is released on GitHub.