ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Empirical Study of Pipeline vs. Joint approaches to Entity and Relation Extraction (2022)

The Entity and Relation Extraction (ERE) task includes two basic sub-tasks: Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction. In the last several years, much work focused on joint approaches for the common perception that the pipeline approach suffers from the error propagation problem. Recent work reconsiders the pipeline scheme and shows that it can produce comparable results. To systematically study the pros and cons of these two schemes. We design and test eight pipeline and joint approaches to the ERE task. We find that with the same span representation methods, the best joint approach still outperforms the best pipeline model, but improperly designed joint approaches may have poor performance. We hope our work could shed some light on the pipeline-vs-joint debate of the ERE task and inspire further research.
CLASP: Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Data Augmentation for Semantic Parsing (2022)

A bottleneck to developing Semantic Parsing (SP) models is the need for a large volume of human-labeled training data. Given the complexity and cost of human annotation for SP, labeled data is often scarce, particularly in multilingual settings. Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at SP given only a few examples, however LLMs are unsuitable for runtime systems which require low latency. In this work, we propose CLASP, a simple method to improve low-resource SP for moderate-sized models: we generate synthetic data from AlexaTM 20B to augment the training set for a model 40x smaller (500M parameters). We evaluate on two datasets in low-resource settings: English PIZZA, containing either 348 or 16 real examples, and mTOP cross-lingual zero-shot, where training data is available only in English, and the model must generalize to four new languages. On both datasets, we show significant improvements over strong baseline methods.
Plug and Play Knowledge Distillation for kNN-LM with External Logits (2022)

Despite the promising evaluation results by knowledge distillation (KD) in natural language understanding (NLU) and sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) tasks, KD for causal language modeling (LM) remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a novel perspective of knowledge distillation by proposing plug and play knowledge distillation (PP-KD) to improve a (student) kNN-LM that is the state-of-the-art in causal language modeling by leveraging external logits from either a powerful or a heterogeneous (teacher) LM. Unlike conventional logit-based KD where the teacher`s knowledge is built-in during training, PP-KD is plug and play: it stores the teacher`s knowledge (i.e., logits) externally and uses the teacher`s logits of the retrieved k-nearest neighbors during kNN-LM inference at test time. In contrast to marginal perplexity improvement by logit-based KD in conventional neural (causal) LM, PP-KD achieves a significant improvement, enhancing the kNN-LMs in multiple language modeling datasets, showing a novel and promising perspective for causal LM distillation.
How Well Do Multi-hop Reading Comprehension Models Understand Date Information? (2022)

Several multi-hop reading comprehension datasets have been proposed to resolve the issue of reasoning shortcuts by which questions can be answered without performing multi-hop reasoning. However, the ability of multi-hop models to perform step-by-step reasoning when finding an answer to a comparison question remains unclear. It is also unclear how questions about the internal reasoning process are useful for training and evaluating question-answering (QA) systems. To evaluate the model precisely in a hierarchical manner, we first propose a dataset, \textit{HieraDate}, with three probing tasks in addition to the main question: extraction, reasoning, and robustness. Our dataset is created by enhancing two previous multi-hop datasets, HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA, focusing on multi-hop questions on date information that involve both comparison and numerical reasoning. We then evaluate the ability of existing models to understand date information. Our experimental results reveal that the multi-hop models do not have the ability to subtract two dates even when they perform well in date comparison and number subtraction tasks. Other results reveal that our probing questions can help to improve the performance of the models (e.g., by +10.3 F1) on the main QA task and our dataset can be used for data augmentation to improve the robustness of the models.
Dodging the Data Bottleneck: Automatic Subtitling with Automatically Segmented ST Corpora (2022)

Speech translation for subtitling (SubST) is the task of automatically translating speech data into well-formed subtitles by inserting subtitle breaks compliant to specific displaying guidelines. Similar to speech translation (ST), model training requires parallel data comprising audio inputs paired with their textual translations. In SubST, however, the text has to be also annotated with subtitle breaks. So far, this requirement has represented a bottleneck for system development, as confirmed by the dearth of publicly available SubST corpora. To fill this gap, we propose a method to convert existing ST corpora into SubST resources without human intervention. We build a segmenter model that automatically segments texts into proper subtitles by exploiting audio and text in a multimodal fashion, achieving high segmentation quality in zero-shot conditions. Comparative experiments with SubST systems respectively trained on manual and automatic segmentations result in similar performance, showing the effectiveness of our approach.
How to tackle an emerging topic? Combining strong and weak labels for Covid news NER (2022)

Being able to train Named Entity Recognition (NER) models for emerging topics is crucial for many real-world applications especially in the medical domain where new topics are continuously evolving out of the scope of existing models and datasets. For a realistic evaluation setup, we introduce a novel COVID-19 news NER dataset (COVIDNEWS-NER) and release 3000 entries of hand annotated strongly labelled sentences and 13000 auto-generated weakly labelled sentences. Besides the dataset, we propose CONTROSTER, a recipe to strategically combine weak and strong labels in improving NER in an emerging topic through transfer learning. We show the effectiveness of CONTROSTER on COVIDNEWS-NER while providing analysis on combining weak and strong labels for training. Our key findings are: (1) Using weak data to formulate an initial backbone before tuning on strong data outperforms methods trained on only strong or weak data. (2) A combination of out-of-domain and in-domain weak label training is crucial and can overcome saturation when being training on weak labels from a single source.
Emotional Intensity Estimation based on Writer`s Personality (2022)

We propose a method for personalized emotional intensity estimation based on a writer`s personality test for Japanese SNS posts. Existing emotion analysis models are difficult to accurately estimate the writer`s subjective emotions behind the text. We personalize the emotion analysis using not only the text but also the writer`s personality information. Experimental results show that personality information improves the performance of emotional intensity estimation. Furthermore, a hybrid model combining the existing personalized method with ours achieved state-of-the-art performance.
Bipartite-play Dialogue Collection for Practical Automatic Evaluation of Dialogue Systems (2022)

Automation of dialogue system evaluation is a driving force for the efficient development of dialogue systems. This paper introduces the bipartite-play method, a dialogue collection method for automating dialogue system evaluation. It addresses the limitations of existing dialogue collection methods: (i) inability to compare with systems that are not publicly available, and (ii) vulnerability to cheating by intentionally selecting systems to be compared. Experimental results show that the automatic evaluation using the bipartite-play method mitigates these two drawbacks and correlates as strongly with human subjectivity as existing methods.
Toward Building a Language Model for Understanding Temporal Commonsense (2022)

The ability to capture temporal commonsense relationships for time-related events expressed in text is a very important task in natural language understanding. On the other hand, pre-trained language models such as BERT, which have recently achieved great success in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, are still considered to have poor performance in temporal reasoning. In this paper, we focus on the development of language models for temporal commonsense inference over several pre-trained language models. Our model relies on multi-step fine-tuning using multiple corpora, and masked language modeling to predict masked temporal indicators that are crucial for temporal commonsense reasoning. We also experimented with multi-task learning and build a language model that can improve performance on multiple time-related tasks. In our experiments, multi-step fine-tuning using the general commonsense reading task as auxiliary task produced the best results. This result showed a significant improvement in accuracy over standard fine-tuning in the temporal commonsense inference task.
Optimal Summaries for Enabling a Smooth Handover in Chat-Oriented Dialogue (2022)

In dialogue systems, one option for creating a better dialogue experience for the user is to have a human operator take over the dialogue when the system runs into trouble communicating with the user. In this type of handover situation (we call it intervention), it is useful for the operator to have access to the dialogue summary. However, it is not clear exactly what type of summary would be the most useful for a smooth handover. In this study, we investigated the optimal type of summary through experiments in which interlocutors were presented with various summary types during interventions in order to examine their effects. Our findings showed that the best summaries were an abstractive summary plus one utterance immediately before the handover and an extractive summary consisting of five utterances immediately before the handover. From the viewpoint of computational cost, we recommend that extractive summaries consisting of the last five utterances be used.
MUTE: A Multimodal Dataset for Detecting Hateful Memes (2022)

The exponential surge of social media has enabled information propagation at an unprecedented rate. However, it also led to the generation of a vast amount of malign content, such as hateful memes. To eradicate the detrimental impact of this content, over the last few years hateful memes detection problem has grabbed the attention of researchers. However, most past studies were conducted primarily for English memes, while memes on resource constraint languages (i.e., Bengali) are under-studied. Moreover, current research considers memes with a caption written in monolingual (either English or Bengali) form. However, memes might have code-mixed captions (English+Bangla), and the existing models can not provide accurate inference in such cases. Therefore, to facilitate research in this arena, this paper introduces a multimodal hate speech dataset (named MUTE) consisting of 4158 memes having Bengali and code-mixed captions. A detailed annotation guideline is provided to aid the dataset creation in other resource constraint languages. Additionally, extensive experiments have been carried out on MUTE, considering the only visual, only textual, and both modalities. The result demonstrates that joint evaluation of visual and textual features significantly improves ({\ensuremath{\approx}} 3{\%}) the hateful memes classification compared to the unimodal evaluation.
A Simple and Fast Strategy for Handling Rare Words in Neural Machine Translation (2022)

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has currently obtained state-of-the-art in machine translation systems. However, dealing with rare words is still a big challenge in translation systems. The rare words are often translated using a manual dictionary or copied from the source to the target with original words. In this paper, we propose a simple and fast strategy for integrating constraints during the training and decoding process to improve the translation of rare words. The effectiveness of our proposal is demonstrated in both high and low-resource translation tasks, including the language pairs: English {\textrightarrow} Vietnamese, Chinese {\textrightarrow} Vietnamese, Khmer {\textrightarrow} Vietnamese, and Lao {\textrightarrow} Vietnamese. We show the improvements of up to +1.8 BLEU scores over the baseline systems.
C3PO: A Lightweight Copying Mechanism for Translating Pseudocode to Code (2022)

Writing computer programs is a skill that remains inaccessible to most due to the barrier of programming language (PL) syntax. While large language models (LLMs) have been proposed to translate natural language pseudocode to PL code, they are costly in terms of data and compute. We propose a lightweight alternative to LLMs that exploits the property of code wherein most tokens can be simply copied from the pseudocode. We divide the problem into three phases: Copy, Generate, and Combine. In the Copy Phase, a binary classifier is employed to determine and mask the pseudocode tokens that can be directly copied into the code. In the Generate Phase, a Sequence-to-Sequence model is used to generate the masked PL code equivalent. In the Combine Phase, the generated sequence is combined with the tokens that the Copy Phase had masked. We show that our C3PO models achieve similar performance to non-C3PO models while reducing the computational cost of training as well as the vocabulary sizes.
Outlier-Aware Training for Improving Group Accuracy Disparities (2022)

Methods addressing spurious correlations such as Just Train Twice (JTT, Liu et al. 2021) involve reweighting a subset of the training set to maximize the worst-group accuracy. However, the reweighted set of examples may potentially contain unlearnable examples that hamper the model`s learning. We propose mitigating this by detecting outliers to the training set and removing them before reweighting. Our experiments show that our method achieves competitive or better accuracy compared with JTT and can detect and remove annotation errors in the subset being reweighted in JTT.
An Empirical Study on Topic Preservation in Multi-Document Summarization (2022)

Multi-document summarization (MDS) is a process of generating an informative and concise summary from multiple topic-related documents. Many studies have analyzed the quality of MDS dataset or models, however no work has been done from the perspective of topic preservation. In this work, we fill the gap by performing an empirical analysis on two MDS datasets and study topic preservation on generated summaries from 8 MDS models. Our key findings include i) Multi-News dataset has better gold summaries compared to Multi-XScience in terms of its topic distribution consistency and ii) Extractive approaches perform better than abstractive approaches in preserving topic information from source documents. We hope our findings could help develop a summarization model that can generate topic-focused summary and also give inspiration to researchers in creating dataset for such challenging task.
Detecting Urgency in Multilingual Medical SMS in Kenya (2022)

Access to mobile phones in many low- and middle-income countries has increased exponentially over the last 20 years, providing an opportunity to connect patients with healthcare interventions through mobile phones (known as mobile health). A barrier to large-scale implementation of interactive mobile health interventions is the human effort needed to manage participant messages. In this study, we explore the use of natural language processing to improve healthcare workers' management of messages from pregnant and postpartum women in Kenya. Using multilingual, low-resource language text messages from the Mobile solutions for Women and Children`s health (Mobile WACh NEO) study, we developed models to assess urgency of incoming messages. We evaluated models using a novel approach that focuses on clinical usefulness in either triaging or prioritizing messages. Our best-performing models did not reach the threshold for clinical usefulness we set, but have the potential to improve nurse workflow and responsiveness to urgent messages.
Language over Labels: Contrastive Language Supervision Exceeds Purely Label-Supervised Classification Performance on Chest X-Rays (2022)

The multi-modal foundation model CLIP computes representations from texts and images that achieved unprecedented performance on tasks such as zero-shot image classification. However, CLIP was pretrained on public internet data. Thus it lacks highly domain-specific knowledge. We investigate the adaptation of CLIP-based models to the chest radiography domain using the MIMIC-CXR dataset. We show that the features of the pretrained CLIP models do not transfer to this domain. We adapt CLIP to the chest radiography domain using contrastive language supervision and show that this approach yields a model that outperforms supervised learning on labels on the MIMIC-CXR dataset while also generalizing to the CheXpert and RSNA Pneumonia datasets. Furthermore, we do a detailed ablation study of the batch and dataset size. Finally, we show that language supervision allows for better explainability by using the multi-modal model to generate images from texts such that experts can inspect what the model has learned.
Dynamic Topic Modeling by Clustering Embeddings from Pretrained Language Models: A Research Proposal (2022)

A new trend in topic modeling research is to do Neural Topic Modeling by Clustering document Embeddings (NTM-CE) created with a pretrained language model. Studies have evaluated static NTM-CE models and found them performing comparably to, or even better than other topic models. An important extension of static topic modeling is making the models dynamic, allowing the study of topic evolution over time, as well as detecting emerging and disappearing topics. In this research proposal, we present two research questions to understand dynamic topic modeling with NTM-CE theoretically and practically. To answer these, we propose four phases with the aim of establishing evaluation methods for dynamic topic modeling, finding NTM-CE-specific properties, and creating a framework for dynamic NTM-CE. For evaluation, we propose to use both quantitative measurements of coherence and human evaluation supported by our recently developed tool.
Concreteness vs. Abstractness: A Selectional Preference Perspective (2022)

Concrete words refer to concepts that are strongly experienced through human senses (banana, chair, salt, etc.), whereas abstract concepts are less perceptually salient (idea, glory, justice, etc.). A clear definition of abstractness is crucial for the understanding of human cognitive processes and for the development of natural language applications such as figurative language detection. In this study, we investigate selectional preferences as a criterion to distinguish between concrete and abstract concepts and words: we hypothesise that abstract and concrete verbs and nouns differ regarding the semantic classes of their arguments. Our study uses a collection of 5,438 nouns and 1,275 verbs to exploit selectional preferences as a salient characteristic in classifying English abstract vs. concrete words, and in predicting their concreteness scores. We achieve an f1-score of 0.84 for nouns and 0.71 for verbs in classification, and Spearman`s {\ensuremath{\rho}} correlation of 0.86 for nouns and 0.59 for verbs.
VScript: Controllable Script Generation with Visual Presentation (2022)

In order to offer a customized script tool and inspire professional scriptwriters, we present VScript. It is a controllable pipeline that generates complete scripts, including dialogues and scene descriptions, as well as presents visually using video retrieval. With an interactive interface, our system allows users to select genres and input starting words that control the theme and development of the generated script. We adopt a hierarchical structure, which first generates the plot, then the script and its visual presentation. A novel approach is also introduced to plot-guided dialogue generation by treating it as an inverse dialogue summarization. The experiment results show that our approach outperforms the baselines on both automatic and human evaluations, especially in genre control.
TexPrax: A Messaging Application for Ethical, Real-time Data Collection and Annotation (2022)

Collecting and annotating task-oriented dialog data is difficult, especially for highly specific domains that require expert knowledge. At the same time, informal communication channels such as instant messengers are increasingly being used at work. This has led to a lot of work-relevant information that is disseminated through those channels and needs to be post-processed manually by the employees. To alleviate this problem, we present TexPrax, a messaging system to collect and annotate {\_}problems{\_}, {\_}causes{\_}, and {\_}solutions{\_} that occur in work-related chats. TexPrax uses a chatbot to directly engage the employees to provide lightweight annotations on their conversation and ease their documentation work. To comply with data privacy and security regulations, we use an end-to-end message encryption and give our users full control over their data which has various advantages over conventional annotation tools. We evaluate TexPrax in a user-study with German factory employees who ask their colleagues for solutions on problems that arise during their daily work. Overall, we collect 202 task-oriented German dialogues containing 1,027 sentences with sentence-level expert annotations. Our data analysis also reveals that real-world conversations frequently contain instances with code-switching, varying abbreviations for the same entity, and dialects which NLP systems should be able to handle.
PicTalky: Augmentative and Alternative Communication for Language Developmental Disabilities (2022)

Children with language disabilities face communication difficulties in daily life. They are often deprived of the opportunity to participate in social activities due to their difficulty in understanding or using natural language. In this regard, Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) can be a practical means of communication for children with language disabilities. In this study, we propose PicTalky, which is an AI-based AAC system that helps children with language developmental disabilities to improve their communication skills and language comprehension abilities. PicTalky can process both text and pictograms more accurately by connecting a series of neural-based NLP modules. Additionally, we perform quantitative and qualitative analyses on the modules of PicTalky. By using this service, it is expected that those suffering from language problems will be able to express their intentions or desires more easily and improve their quality of life. We have made the models freely available alongside a demonstration of the web interface. Furthermore, we implemented robotics AAC for the first time by applying PicTalky to the NAO robot.