ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TemporalWiki: A Lifelong Benchmark for Training and Evaluating Ever-Evolving Language Models (2022)

Language Models (LMs) become outdated as the world changes; they often fail to perform tasks requiring recent factual information which was absent or different during training, a phenomenon called temporal misalignment. This is especially a challenging problem because the research community still lacks a coherent dataset for assessing the adaptability of LMs to frequently-updated knowledge corpus such as Wikipedia. To this end, we introduce TemporalWiki, a lifelong benchmark for ever-evolving LMs that utilizes the difference between consecutive snapshots of English Wikipedia and English Wikidata for training and evaluation, respectively. The benchmark hence allows researchers to periodically track an LM`s ability to retain previous knowledge and acquire updated/new knowledge at each point in time. We also find that training an LM on the diff data through continual learning methods achieves similar or better perplexity than on the entire snapshot in our benchmark with 12 times less computational cost, which verifies that factual knowledge in LMs can be safely updated with minimal training data via continual learning.
Bi-Directional Iterative Prompt-Tuning for Event Argument Extraction (2022)

Recently, prompt-tuning has attracted growing interests in event argument extraction (EAE). However, the existing prompt-tuning methods have not achieved satisfactory performance due to the lack of consideration of entity information. In this paper, we propose a bi-directional iterative prompt-tuning method for EAE, where the EAE task is treated as a cloze-style task to take full advantage of entity information and pre-trained language models (PLMs). Furthermore, our method explores event argument interactions by introducing the argument roles of contextual entities into prompt construction. Since template and verbalizer are two crucial components in a cloze-style prompt, we propose to utilize the role label semantic knowledge to construct a semantic verbalizer and design three kind of templates for the EAE task. Experiments on the ACE 2005 English dataset with standard and low-resource settings show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the peer state-of-the-art methods.
Learning Robust Representations for Continual Relation Extraction via Adversarial Class Augmentation (2022)

Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to continually learn new relations from a class-incremental data stream. CRE model usually suffers from catastrophic forgetting problem, i.e., the performance of old relations seriously degrades when the model learns new relations. Most previous work attributes catastrophic forgetting to the corruption of the learned representations as new relations come, with an implicit assumption that the CRE models have adequately learned the old relations. In this paper, through empirical studies we argue that this assumption may not hold, and an important reason for catastrophic forgetting is that the learned representations do not have good robustness against the appearance of analogous relations in the subsequent learning process. To address this issue, we encourage the model to learn more precise and robust representations through a simple yet effective adversarial class augmentation mechanism (ACA), which is easy to implement and model-agnostic.Experimental results show that ACA can consistently improve the performance of state-of-the-art CRE models on two popular benchmarks.
ConvFinQA: Exploring the Chain of Numerical Reasoning in Conversational Finance Question Answering (2022)

With the recent advance in large pre-trained language models, researchers have achieved record performances in NLP tasks that mostly focus on language pattern matching. The community is experiencing the shift of the challenge from how to model language to the imitation of complex reasoning abilities like human beings. In this work, we investigate the application domain of finance that involves real-world, complex numerical reasoning. We propose a new large-scale dataset, ConvFinQA, aiming to study the chain of numerical reasoning in conversational question answering. Our dataset poses great challenge in modeling long-range, complex numerical reasoning paths in real-world conversations. We conduct comprehensive experiments and analyses with both the neural symbolic methods and the prompting-based methods, to provide insights into the reasoning mechanisms of these two divisions. We believe our new dataset should serve as a valuable resource to push forward the exploration of real-world, complex reasoning tasks as the next research focus. Our dataset and code is publicly available at https://github.com/czyssrs/ConvFinQA.
A Span-based Multimodal Variational Autoencoder for Semi-supervised Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2022)

Multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) on social media is a challenging task which aims to extract named entities in free text and incorporate images to classify them into user-defined types. However, the annotation for named entities on social media demands a mount of human efforts. The existing semi-supervised named entity recognition methods focus on the text modal and are utilized to reduce labeling costs in traditional NER. However, the previous methods are not efficient for semi-supervised MNER. Because the MNER task is defined to combine the text information with image one and needs to consider the mismatch between the posted text and image. To fuse the text and image features for MNER effectively under semi-supervised setting, we propose a novel span-based multimodal variational autoencoder (SMVAE) model for semi-supervised MNER. The proposed method exploits modal-specific VAEs to model text and image latent features, and utilizes product-of-experts to acquire multimodal features. In our approach, the implicit relations between labels and multimodal features are modeled by multimodal VAE. Thus, the useful information of unlabeled data can be exploited in our method under semi-supervised setting. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms baselines under supervised setting, but also improves MNER performance with less labeled data than existing semi-supervised methods.
R-TeaFor: Regularized Teacher-Forcing for Abstractive Summarization (2022)

Teacher-forcing is widely used in training sequence generation models to improve sampling efficiency and to stabilize training. However, teacher-forcing is vulnerable to the exposure bias problem. Previous works have attempted to address exposure bias by modifying the training data to simulate model-generated results. Nevertheless, they do not consider the pairwise relationship between the original training data and the modified ones, which provides more information during training. Hence, we propose Regularized Teacher-Forcing (R-TeaFor) to utilize this relationship for better regularization. Empirically, our experiments show that R-TeaFor outperforms previous summarization state-of-the-art models, and the results can be generalized to different pre-trained models.
Modeling Consistency Preference via Lexical Chains for Document-level Neural Machine Translation (2022)

In this paper we aim to relieve the issue of lexical translation inconsistency for document-level neural machine translation (NMT) by modeling consistency preference for lexical chains, which consist of repeated words in a source-side document and provide a representation of the lexical consistency structure of the document. Specifically, we first propose lexical-consistency attention to capture consistency context among words in the same lexical chains. Then for each lexical chain we define and learn a consistency-tailored latent variable, which will guide the translation of corresponding sentences to enhance lexical translation consistency. Experimental results on Chinese{\textrightarrow}English and French{\textrightarrow}English document-level translation tasks show that our approach not only significantly improves translation performance in BLEU, but also substantially alleviates the problem of the lexical translation inconsistency.
Just Fine-tune Twice: Selective Differential Privacy for Large Language Models (2022)

Protecting large language models from privacy leakage is becoming increasingly crucial with their wide adoption in real-world products. Yet applying *differential privacy* (DP), a canonical notion with provable privacy guarantees for machine learning models, to those models remains challenging due to the trade-off between model utility and privacy loss. Utilizing the fact that sensitive information in language data tends to be sparse, Shi et al. (2021) formalized a DP notion extension called *Selective Differential Privacy* (SDP) to protect only the sensitive tokens defined by a policy function. However, their algorithm only works for RNN-based models. In this paper, we develop a novel framework, *Just Fine-tune Twice* (JFT), that achieves SDP for state-of-the-art large transformer-based models. Our method is easy to implement: it first fine-tunes the model with *redacted* in-domain data, and then fine-tunes it again with the *original* in-domain data using a private training mechanism. Furthermore, we study the scenario of imperfect implementation of policy functions that misses sensitive tokens and develop systematic methods to handle it. Experiments show that our method achieves strong utility compared to previous baselines. We also analyze the SDP privacy guarantee empirically with the canary insertion attack.
Factorizing Content and Budget Decisions in Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents (2022)

We argue that disentangling content selection from the budget used to cover salient content improves the performance and applicability of abstractive summarizers. Our method, FactorSum, does this disentanglement by factorizing summarization into two steps through an energy function: (1) generation of abstractive summary views covering salient information in subsets of the input document (document views); (2) combination of these views into a final summary, following a budget and content guidance. This guidance may come from different sources, including from an advisor model such as BART or BigBird, or in oracle mode {--} from the reference. This factorization achieves significantly higher ROUGE scores on multiple benchmarks for long document summarization, namely PubMed, arXiv, and GovReport. Most notably, our model is effective for domain adaptation. When trained only on PubMed samples, it achieves a 46.29 ROUGE-1 score on arXiv, outperforming PEGASUS trained in domain by a large margin. Our experimental results indicate that the performance gains are due to more flexible budget adaptation and processing of shorter contexts provided by partial document views.
Open-Domain Sign Language Translation Learned from Online Video (2022)

Existing work on sign language translation {--} that is, translation from sign language videos into sentences in a written language {--} has focused mainly on (1) data collected in a controlled environment or (2) data in a specific domain, which limits the applicability to real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce OpenASL, a large-scale American Sign Language (ASL) - English dataset collected from online video sites (e.g., YouTube).OpenASL contains 288 hours of ASL videos in multiple domains from over 200 signers and is the largest publicly available ASL translation dataset to date. To tackle the challenges of sign language translation in realistic settings and without glosses, we propose a set of techniques including sign search as a pretext task for pre-training and fusion of mouthing and handshape features. The proposed techniques produce consistent and large improvements in translation quality, over baseline models basedon prior work.
Improving Temporal Generalization of Pre-trained Language Models with Lexical Semantic Change (2022)

Recent research has revealed that neural language models at scale suffer from poor temporal generalization capability, i.e., language model pre-trained on static data from past years performs worse over time on emerging data. Existing methods mainly perform continual training to mitigate such a misalignment. While effective to some extent but is far from being addressed on both the language modeling and downstream tasks. In this paper, we empirically observe that temporal generalization is closely affiliated with lexical semantic change, which is one of the essential phenomena of natural languages. Based on this observation, we propose a simple yet effective lexical-level masking strategy to post-train a converged language model. Experiments on two pre-trained language models, two different classification tasks, and four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method over existing temporal adaptation methods, i.e., continual training with new data. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhaochen0110/LMLM.
ULN: Towards Underspecified Vision-and-Language Navigation (2022)

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a task to guide an embodied agent moving to a target position using language instructions. Despite the significant performance improvement, the wide use of fine-grained instructions fails to characterize more practical linguistic variations in reality. To fill in this gap, we introduce a new setting, namely Underspecified vision-and-Language Navigation (ULN), and associated evaluation datasets. ULN evaluates agents using multi-level underspecified instructions instead of purely fine-grained or coarse-grained, which is a more realistic and general setting. As a primary step toward ULN, we propose a VLN framework that consists of a classification module, a navigation agent, and an Exploitation-to-Exploration (E2E) module. Specifically, we propose to learn Granularity Specific Sub-networks (GSS) for the agent to ground multi-level instructions with minimal additional parameters. Then, our E2E module estimates grounding uncertainty and conducts multi-step lookahead exploration to improve the success rate further. Experimental results show that existing VLN models are still brittle to multi-level language underspecification. Our framework is more robust and outperforms the baselines on ULN by {\textasciitilde}10{\%} relative success rate across all levels.
Federated Model Decomposition with Private Vocabulary for Text Classification (2022)

With the necessity of privacy protection, it becomes increasingly vital to train deep neural models in a federated learning manner for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, recent studies show eavesdroppers (i.e., dishonest servers) can still reconstruct the private input in federated learning (FL). Such a data reconstruction attack relies on the mappings between vocabulary and associated word embedding in NLP tasks, which are unfortunately less studied in current FL methods. In this paper, we propose a fedrated model decomposition method that protects the privacy of vocabularies, shorted as FEDEVOCAB. In FEDEVOCAB, each participant keeps the local embedding layer in the local device and detaches the local embedding parameters from federated aggregation. However, it is challenging to train an accurate NLP model when the private mappings are unknown and vary across participants in a cross-device FL setting. To address this problem, we further propose an adaptive updating technique to improve the performance of local models. Experimental results show that FEDEVOCAB maintains competitive performance and provides better privacy-preserving capacity compared to status quo methods.
ReCo: Reliable Causal Chain Reasoning via Structural Causal Recurrent Neural Networks (2022)

Causal chain reasoning (CCR) is an essential ability for many decision-making AI systems, which requires the model to build reliable causal chains by connecting causal pairs. However, CCR suffers from two main transitive problems: threshold effect and scene drift. In other words, the causal pairs to be spliced may have a conflicting threshold boundary or scenario.To address these issues, we propose a novel Reliable Causal chain reasoning framework (ReCo), which introduces exogenous variables to represent the threshold and scene factors of each causal pair within the causal chain, and estimates the threshold and scene contradictions across exogenous variables via structural causal recurrent neural networks (SRNN). Experiments show that ReCo outperforms a series of strong baselines on both Chinese and English CCR datasets. Moreover, by injecting reliable causal chain knowledge distilled by ReCo, BERT can achieve better performances on four downstream causal-related tasks than BERT models enhanced by other kinds of knowledge.
Video Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms and Challenges (2022)

This survey aims to sort out the recent advances in video question answering (VideoQA) and point towards future directions. We firstly categorize the datasets into 1) normal VideoQA, multi-modal VideoQA and knowledge-based VideoQA, according to the modalities invoked in the question-answer pairs, or 2) factoid VideoQA and inference VideoQA, according to the technical challenges in comprehending the questions and deriving the correct answers. We then summarize the VideoQA techniques, including those mainly designed for Factoid QA (e.g., the early spatio-temporal attention-based methods and the recently Transformer-based ones) and those targeted at explicit relation and logic inference (e.g., neural modular networks, neural symbolic methods, and graph-structured methods). Aside from the backbone techniques, we delve into the specific models and find out some common and useful insights either for video modeling, question answering, or for cross-modal correspondence learning. Finally, we point out the research trend of studying beyond factoid VideoQA to inference VideoQA, as well as towards the robustness and interpretability. Additionally, we maintain a repository, https://github.com/VRU-NExT/VideoQA, to keep trace of the latest VideoQA papers, datasets, and their open-source implementations if available. With these efforts, we strongly hope this survey could shed light on the follow-up VideoQA research.
Retrofitting Multilingual Sentence Embeddings with Abstract Meaning Representation (2022)

We introduce a new method to improve existing multilingual sentence embeddings with Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). Compared with the original textual input, AMR is a structured semantic representation that presents the core concepts and relations in a sentence explicitly and unambiguously. It also helps reduce the surface variations across different expressions and languages. Unlike most prior work that only evaluates the ability to measure semantic similarity, we present a thorough evaluation of existing multilingual sentence embeddings and our improved versions, which include a collection of five transfer tasks in different downstream applications. Experiment results show that retrofitting multilingual sentence embeddings with AMR leads to better state-of-the-art performance on both semantic textual similarity and transfer tasks.
Breaking the Representation Bottleneck of Chinese Characters: Neural Machine Translation with Stroke Sequence Modeling (2022)

Existing research generally treats Chinese character as a minimum unit for representation. However, such Chinese character representation will suffer two bottlenecks: 1) Learning bottleneck, the learning cannot benefit from its rich internal features (e.g., radicals and strokes); and 2) Parameter bottleneck, each individual character has to be represented by a unique vector. In this paper, we introduce a novel representation method for Chinese characters to break the bottlenecks, namely StrokeNet, which represents a Chinese character by a Latinized stroke sequence (e.g., {\textquotedblleft}凹 (concave){\textquotedblright} to {\textquotedblleft}ajaie{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}凸 (convex){\textquotedblright} to {\textquotedblleft}aeaqe{\textquotedblright}). Specifically, StrokeNet maps each stroke to a specific Latin character, thus allowing similar Chinese characters to have similar Latin representations. With the introduction of StrokeNet to neural machine translation (NMT), many powerful but not applicable techniques to non-Latin languages (e.g., shared subword vocabulary learning and ciphertext-based data augmentation) can now be perfectly implemented. Experiments on the widely-used NIST Chinese-English, WMT17 Chinese-English and IWSLT17 Japanese-English NMT tasks show that StrokeNet can provide a significant performance boost over the strong baselines with fewer model parameters, achieving 26.5 BLEU on the WMT17 Chinese-English task which is better than any previously reported results without using monolingual data. Code and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/zjwang21/StrokeNet.
Boundary-Driven Table-Filling for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022)

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract the aspect terms along with the corresponding opinion terms and the expressed sentiments in the review, which is an important task in sentiment analysis. Previous research efforts generally address the ASTE task in an end-to-end fashion through the table-filling formalization, in which the triplets are represented by a two-dimensional (2D) table of word-pair relations. Under this formalization, a term-level relation is decomposed into multiple independent word-level relations, which leads to relation inconsistency and boundary insensitivity in the face of multi-word aspect terms and opinion terms. To overcome these issues, we propose Boundary-Driven Table-Filling (BDTF), which represents each triplet as a relation region in the 2D table and transforms the ASTE task into detection and classification of relation regions. We also notice that the quality of the table representation greatly affects the performance of BDTF. Therefore, we develop an effective relation representation learning approach to learn the table representation, which can fully exploit both word-to-word interactions and relation-to-relation interactions. Experiments on several public benchmarks show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performances.
Attention and Edge-Label Guided Graph Convolutional Networks for Named Entity Recognition (2022)

It has been shown that named entity recognition (NER) could benefit from incorporating the long-distance structured information captured by dependency trees. However, dependency trees built by tools usually have a certain percentage of errors. Under such circumstances, how to better use relevant structured information while ignoring irrelevant or wrong structured information from the dependency trees to improve NER performance is still a challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose the Attention and Edge-Label guided Graph Convolution Network (AELGCN) model. Then, we integrate it into BiLSTM-CRF to form BiLSTM-AELGCN-CRF model. We design an edge-aware node joint update module and introduce a node-aware edge update module to explore hidden in structured information entirely and solve the wrong dependency label information to some extent. After two modules, we apply attention-guided GCN, which automatically learns how to attend to the relevant structured information selectively. We conduct extensive experiments on several standard datasets across four languages and achieve better results than previous approaches. Through experimental analysis, it is found that our proposed model can better exploit the structured information on the dependency tree to improve the recognition of long entities.