ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SocioFillmore: A Tool for Discovering Perspectives (2022)

SOCIOFILLMORE is a multilingual tool which helps to bring to the fore the focus or the perspective that a text expresses in depicting an event. Our tool, whose rationale we also support through a large collection of human judgements, is theoretically grounded on frame semantics and cognitive linguistics, and implemented using the LOME frame semantic parser. We describe SOCIOFILLMORE`s development and functionalities, show how non-NLP researchers can easily interact with the tool, and present some example case studies which are already incorporated in the system, together with the kind of analysis that can be visualised.
TimeLMs: Diachronic Language Models from Twitter (2022)

Despite its importance, the time variable has been largely neglected in the NLP and language model literature. In this paper, we present TimeLMs, a set of language models specialized on diachronic Twitter data. We show that a continual learning strategy contributes to enhancing Twitter-based language models' capacity to deal with future and out-of-distribution tweets, while making them competitive with standardized and more monolithic benchmarks. We also perform a number of qualitative analyses showing how they cope with trends and peaks in activity involving specific named entities or concept drift. TimeLMs is available at github.com/cardiffnlp/timelms.
Adaptor: Objective-Centric Adaptation Framework for Language Models (2022)

This paper introduces Adaptor library, which transposes traditional model-centric approach composed of pre-training + fine-tuning steps to objective-centric approach, composing the training process by applications of selected objectives. We survey research directions that can benefit from enhanced objective-centric experimentation in multitask training, custom objectives development, dynamic training curricula, or domain adaptation. Adaptor aims to ease reproducibility of these research directions in practice. Finally, we demonstrate the practical applicability of Adaptor in selected unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios.
QuickGraph: A Rapid Annotation Tool for Knowledge Graph Extraction from Technical Text (2022)

Acquiring high-quality annotated corpora for complex multi-task information extraction (MT-IE) is an arduous and costly process for human-annotators. Adoption of unsupervised techniques for automated annotation have thus become popular. However, these techniques rely heavily on dictionaries, gazetteers, and knowledge bases. While such resources are abundant for general domains, they are scarce for specialised technical domains. To tackle this challenge, we present QuickGraph, the first collaborative MT-IE annotation tool built with indirect weak supervision and clustering to maximise annotator productivity. QuickGraph`s main contribution is a set of novel features that enable knowledge graph extraction through rapid and consistent complex multi-task entity and relation annotation. In this paper, we discuss these key features and qualitatively compare QuickGraph to existing annotation tools.
A Gentle Introduction to Deep Nets and Opportunities for the Future (2022)

The first half of this tutorial will make deep nets more accessible to a broader audience, following {\textquotedblleft}Deep Nets for Poets{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}A Gentle Introduction to Fine-Tuning.{\textquotedblright} We will also introduce GFT (general fine tuning), a little language for fine tuning deep nets with short (one line) programs that are as easy to code as regression in statistics packages such as R using glm (general linear models). Based on the success of these methods on a number of benchmarks, one might come away with the impression that deep nets are all we need. However, we believe the glass is half-full: while there is much that can be done with deep nets, there is always more to do. The second half of this tutorial will discuss some of these opportunities.
Towards Reproducible Machine Learning Research in Natural Language Processing (2022)

While recent progress in the field of ML has been significant, the reproducibility of these cutting-edge results is often lacking, with many submissions lacking the necessary information in order to ensure subsequent reproducibility. Despite proposals such as the Reproducibility Checklist and reproducibility criteria at several major conferences, the reflex for carrying out research with reproducibility in mind is lacking in the broader ML community. We propose this tutorial as a gentle introduction to ensuring reproducible research in ML, with a specific emphasis on computational linguistics and NLP. We also provide a framework for using reproducibility as a teaching tool in university-level computer science programs.
Knowledge-Augmented Methods for Natural Language Processing (2022)

Knowledge in natural language processing (NLP) has been a rising trend especially after the advent of large scale pre-trained models. NLP models with attention to knowledge can i) access unlimited amount of external information; ii) delegate the task of storing knowledge from its parameter space to knowledge sources; iii) obtain up-to-date information; iv) make prediction results more explainable via selected knowledge. In this tutorial, we will introduce the key steps in integrating knowledge into NLP, including knowledge grounding from text, knowledge representation and fusing. In addition, we will introduce recent state-of-the-art applications in fusing knowledge into language understanding, language generation and commonsense reasoning.
Non-Autoregressive Sequence Generation (2022)

Non-autoregressive sequence generation (NAR) attempts to generate the entire or partial output sequences in parallel to speed up the generation process and avoid potential issues (e.g., label bias, exposure bias) in autoregressive generation. While it has received much research attention and has been applied in many sequence generation tasks in natural language and speech, naive NAR models still face many challenges to close the performance gap between state-of-the-art autoregressive models because of a lack of modeling power. In this tutorial, we will provide a thorough introduction and review of non-autoregressive sequence generation, in four sections: 1) Background, which covers the motivation of NAR generation, the problem definition, the evaluation protocol, and the comparison with standard autoregressive generation approaches. 2) Method, which includes different aspects: model architecture, objective function, training data, learning paradigm, and additional inference tricks. 3) Application, which covers different tasks in text and speech generation, and some advanced topics in applications. 4) Conclusion, in which we describe several research challenges and discuss the potential future research directions. We hope this tutorial can serve both academic researchers and industry practitioners working on non-autoregressive sequence generation.
Learning with Limited Text Data (2022)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has achieved great progress in the past decade on the basis of neural models, which often make use of large amounts of labeled data to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The dependence on labeled data prevents NLP models from being applied to low-resource settings and languages because of the time, money, and expertise that is often required to label massive amounts of textual data. Consequently, the ability to learn with limited labeled data is crucial for deploying neural systems to real-world NLP applications. Recently, numerous approaches have been explored to alleviate the need for labeled data in NLP such as data augmentation and semi-supervised learning. This tutorial aims to provide a systematic and up-to-date overview of these methods in order to help researchers and practitioners understand the landscape of approaches and the challenges associated with learning from limited labeled data, an emerging topic in the computational linguistics community. We will consider applications to a wide variety of NLP tasks (including text classification, generation, and structured prediction) and will highlight current challenges and future directions.
Zero- and Few-Shot NLP with Pretrained Language Models (2022)

The ability to efficiently learn from little-to-no data is critical to applying NLP to tasks where data collection is costly or otherwise difficult. This is a challenging setting both academically and practically{---}particularly because training neutral models typically require large amount of labeled data. More recently, advances in pretraining on unlabelled data have brought up the potential of better zero-shot or few-shot learning (Devlin et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2020). In particular, over the past year, a great deal of research has been conducted to better learn from limited data using large-scale language models. In this tutorial, we aim at bringing interested NLP researchers up to speed about the recent and ongoing techniques for zero- and few-shot learning with pretrained language models. Additionally, our goal is to reveal new research opportunities to the audience, which will hopefully bring us closer to address existing challenges in this domain.
Vision-Language Pretraining: Current Trends and the Future (2022)

In the last few years, there has been an increased interest in building multimodal (vision-language) models that are pretrained on larger but noisier datasets where the two modalities (e.g., image and text) loosely correspond to each other (e.g., Lu et al., 2019; Radford et al., 2021). Given a task (such as visual question answering), these models are then often fine-tuned on task-specific supervised datasets. (e.g., Lu et al., 2019; Chen et al.,2020; Tan and Bansal, 2019; Li et al., 2020a,b). In addition to the larger pretraining datasets, the transformer architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017) and in particular self-attention applied to two modalities are responsible for the impressive performance of the recent pretrained models on downstream tasks (Hendricks et al., 2021). In this tutorial, we focus on recent vision-language pretraining paradigms. Our goal is to first provide the background on image{--}language datasets, benchmarks, and modeling innovations before the multimodal pretraining area. Next we discuss the different family of models used for vision-language pretraining, highlighting their strengths and shortcomings. Finally, we discuss the limits of vision-language pretraining through statistical learning, and the need for alternative approaches such as causal representation learning.
Natural Language Processing for Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue (2022)

Recent advances in deep learning have also enabled fast progress in the research of task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems. However, the majority of ToD systems are developed for English and merely a handful of other widely spoken languages, e.g., Chinese and German. This hugely limits the global reach and, consequently, transformative socioeconomic potential of such systems. In this tutorial, we will thus discuss and demonstrate the importance of (building) multilingual ToD systems, and then provide a systematic overview of current research gaps, challenges and initiatives related to multilingual ToD systems, with a particular focus on their connections to current research and challenges in multilingual and low-resource NLP. The tutorial will aim to provide answers or shed new light to the following questions: a) Why are multilingual dialogue systems so hard to build: what makes multilinguality for dialogue more challenging than for other NLP applications and tasks? b) What are the best existing methods and datasets for multilingual and cross-lingual (task-oriented) dialog systems? How are (multilingual) ToD systems usually evaluated? c) What are the promising future directions for multilingual ToD research: where can one draw inspiration from related NLP areas and tasks?
Chasing the Tail with Domain Generalization: A Case Study on Frequency-Enriched Datasets (2022)

Natural language understanding (NLU) tasks are typically defined by creating an annotated dataset in which each utterance is encountered once. Such data does not resemble real-world natural language interactions in which certain utterances are encountered frequently, others rarely. For deployed NLU systems this is a vital problem, since the underlying machine learning (ML) models are often fine-tuned on typical NLU data, and then applied to real-world data with a very different distribution. Such systems need to maintain interpretation consistency for both high-frequency utterances and low-frequency utterances. We propose an alternative strategy that explicitly uses utterance frequency in training data to learn models that are more robust to unknown distributions. We present a methodology to simulate utterance usage in two public NLU corpora and create new corpora with head, body and tail segments. We evaluate several methods for joint intent classification and named entity recognition (IC-NER), and use two domain generalization approaches that we adapt to NER. The proposed approaches demonstrate upto 7.02{\%} relative improvement in semantic accuracy over baselines on the tail data. We provide insights as to why the proposed approaches work and show that the reasons for observed improvements do not align with those reported in previous work.
Double Trouble: How to not Explain a Text Classifier`s Decisions Using Counterfactuals Synthesized by Masked Language Models? (2022)

A principle behind dozens of attribution methods is to take the prediction difference between before-and-after an input feature (here, a token) is removed as its attribution. A popular Input Marginalization (IM) method (Kim et al., 2020) uses BERT to replace a token, yielding more plausible counterfactuals. While Kim et al., 2020 reported that IM is effective, we find this conclusion not convincing as the Deletion-BERT metric used in their paper is biased towards IM. Importantly, this bias exists in Deletion-based metrics, including Insertion, Sufficiency, and Comprehensiveness. Furthermore, our rigorous evaluation using 6 metrics and 3 datasets finds no evidence that IM is better than a Leave-One-Out (LOO) baseline. We find two reasons why IM is not better than LOO: (1) deleting a single word from the input only marginally reduces a classifier`s accuracy; and (2) a highly predictable word is always given near-zero attribution, regardless of its true importance to the classifier. In contrast, making LIME samples more natural via BERT consistently improves LIME accuracy under several ROAR metrics.
An Empirical Study on Cross-X Transfer for Legal Judgment Prediction (2022)

Cross-lingual transfer learning has proven useful in a variety of Natural Language (NLP) tasks, but it is understudied in the context of legal NLP, and not at all in Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP). We explore transfer learning techniques on LJP using the trilingual Swiss-Judgment-Prediction (SJP) dataset, including cases written in three languages. We find that Cross-Lingual Transfer (CLT) improves the overall results across languages, especially when we use adapter-based fine-tuning. Finally, we further improve the model`s performance by augmenting the training dataset with machine-translated versions of the original documents, using a 3{\texttimes} larger training corpus. Further on, we perform an analysis exploring the effect of cross-domain and cross-regional transfer, i.e., train a model across domains (legal areas), or regions. We find that in both settings (legal areas, origin regions), models trained across all groups perform overall better, while they also have improved results in the worst-case scenarios. Finally, we report improved results when we ambitiously apply cross-jurisdiction transfer, where we further augment our dataset with Indian legal cases.
CNN for Modeling Sanskrit Originated Bengali and Hindi Language (2022)

Though recent works have focused on modeling high resource languages, the area is still unexplored for low resource languages like Bengali and Hindi. We propose an end to end trainable memory efficient CNN architecture named CoCNN to handle specific characteristics such as high inflection, morphological richness, flexible word order and phonetical spelling errors of Bengali and Hindi. In particular, we introduce two learnable convolutional sub-models at word and at sentence level that are end to end trainable. We show that state-of-the-art (SOTA) Transformer models including pretrained BERT do not necessarily yield the best performance for Bengali and Hindi. CoCNN outperforms pretrained BERT with 16X less parameters and achieves much better performance than SOTA LSTMs on multiple real-world datasets. This is the first study on the effectiveness of different architectures from Convolution, Recurrent, and Transformer neural net paradigm for modeling Bengali and Hindi.
Leveraging Key Information Modeling to Improve Less-Data Constrained News Headline Generation via Duality Fine-Tuning (2022)

Recent language generative models are mostly trained on large-scale datasets, while in some real scenarios, the training datasets are often expensive to obtain and would be small-scale. In this paper we investigate the challenging task of less-data constrained generation, especially when the generated news headlines are short yet expected by readers to keep readable and informative simultaneously. We highlight the key information modeling task and propose a novel duality fine-tuning method by formally defining the probabilistic duality constraints between key information prediction and headline generation tasks. The proposed method can capture more information from limited data, build connections between separate tasks, and is suitable for less-data constrained generation tasks. Furthermore, the method can leverage various pre-trained generative regimes, e.g., autoregressive and encoder-decoder models. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our method is effective and efficient to achieve improved performance in terms of language modeling metric and informativeness correctness metric on two public datasets.
Systematic Evaluation of Predictive Fairness (2022)

Mitigating bias in training on biased datasets is an important open problem. Several techniques have been proposed, however the typical evaluation regime is very limited, considering very narrow data conditions. For instance, the effect of target class imbalance and stereotyping is under-studied. To address this gap, we examine the performance of various debiasing methods across multiple tasks, spanning binary classification (Twitter sentiment), multi-class classification (profession prediction), and regression (valence prediction). Through extensive experimentation, we find that data conditions have a strong influence on relative model performance, and that general conclusions cannot be drawn about method efficacy when evaluating only on standard datasets, as is current practice in fairness research.
Graph-augmented Learning to Rank for Querying Large-scale Knowledge Graph (2022)

Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) based on information retrieval aims to answer a question by retrieving answer from a large-scale knowledge graph. Most existing methods first roughly retrieve the knowledge subgraphs (KSG) that may contain candidate answer, and then search for the exact answer in the KSG. However, the KSG may contain thousands of candidate nodes since the knowledge graph involved in querying is often of large scale, thus decreasing the performance of answer selection. To tackle this problem, we first propose to partition the retrieved KSG to several smaller sub-KSGs via a new subgraph partition algorithm and then present a graph-augmented learning to rank model to select the top-ranked sub-KSGs from them. Our proposed model combines a novel subgraph matching networks to capture global interactions in both question and subgraphs and an Enhanced Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching model to capture local interactions. Finally, we apply an answer selection model on the full KSG and the top-ranked sub-KSGs respectively to validate the effectiveness of our proposed graph-augmented learning to rank method. The experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.
An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Intellectual Property Rights Protection on Recurrent Neural Networks (2022)

Capitalise on deep learning models, offering Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions as a part of the Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has generated handsome revenues. At the same time, it is known that the creation of these lucrative deep models is non-trivial. Therefore, protecting these inventions' intellectual property rights (IPR) from being abused, stolen and plagiarized is vital. This paper proposes a practical approach for the IPR protection on recurrent neural networks (RNN) without all the bells and whistles of existing IPR solutions. Particularly, we introduce the Gatekeeper concept that resembles the recurrent nature in RNN architecture to embed keys. Also, we design the model training scheme in a way such that the protected RNN model will retain its original performance iff a genuine key is presented. Extensive experiments showed that our protection scheme is robust and effective against ambiguity and removal attacks in both white-box and black-box protection schemes on different RNN variants. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhiqin1998/RecurrentIPR}.
WAX: A New Dataset for Word Association eXplanations (2022)

Word associations are among the most common paradigms to study the human mental lexicon. While their structure and types of associations have been well studied, surprisingly little attention has been given to the question of why participants produce the observed associations. Answering this question would not only advance understanding of human cognition, but could also aid machines in learning and representing basic commonsense knowledge. This paper introduces a large, crowd-sourced data set of English word associations with explanations, labeled with high-level relation types. We present an analysis of the provided explanations, and design several tasks to probe to what extent current pre-trained language models capture the underlying relations. Our experiments show that models struggle to capture the diversity of human associations, suggesting WAX is a rich benchmark for commonsense modeling and generation.
Missing Modality meets Meta Sampling (M3S): An Efficient Universal Approach for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Missing Modality (2022)

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) is an important way of observing mental activities with the help of data captured from multiple modalities. However, due to the recording or transmission error, some modalities may include incomplete data. Most existing works that address missing modalities usually assume a particular modality is completely missing and seldom consider a mixture of missing across multiple modalities. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective meta-sampling approach for multimodal sentiment analysis with missing modalities, namely Missing Modality-based Meta Sampling (M3S). To be specific, M3S formulates a missing modality sampling strategy into the modal agnostic meta-learning (MAML) framework. M3S can be treated as an efficient add-on training component on existing models and significantly improve their performances on multimodal data with a mixture of missing modalities. We conduct experiments on IEMOCAP, SIMS and CMU-MOSI datasets, and superior performance is achieved compared with recent state-of-the-art methods.