ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
\textquotedblleftNo, They Did Not\textquotedblright: Dialogue Response Dynamics in Pre-trained Language Models (2022)

A critical component of competence in language is being able to identify relevant components of an utterance and reply appropriately. In this paper we examine the extent of such dialogue response sensitivity in pre-trained language models, conducting a series of experiments with a particular focus on sensitivity to dynamics involving phenomena of at-issueness and ellipsis. We find that models show clear sensitivity to a distinctive role of embedded clauses, and a general preference for responses that target main clause content of prior utterances. However, the results indicate mixed and generally weak trends with respect to capturing the full range of dynamics involved in targeting at-issue versus not-at-issue content. Additionally, models show fundamental limitations in grasp of the dynamics governing ellipsis, and response selections show clear interference from superficial factors that outweigh the influence of principled discourse constraints.
New or Old? Exploring How Pre-Trained Language Models Represent Discourse Entities (2022)

Recent research shows that pre-trained language models, built to generate text conditioned on some context, learn to encode syntactic knowledge to a certain degree. This has motivated researchers to move beyond the sentence-level and look into their ability to encode less studied discourse-level phenomena. In this paper, we add to the body of probing research by investigating discourse entity representations in large pre-trained language models in English. Motivated by early theories of discourse and key pieces of previous work, we focus on the information-status of entities as discourse-new or discourse-old. We present two probing models, one based on binary classification and another one on sequence labeling. The results of our experiments show that pre-trained language models do encode information on whether an entity has been introduced before or not in the discourse. However, this information alone is not sufficient to find the entities in a discourse, opening up interesting questions about the definition of entities for future work.
Dialo-AP: A Dependency Parsing Based Argument Parser for Dialogues (2022)

While neural approaches to argument mining (AM) have advanced considerably, most of the recent work has been limited to parsing monologues. With an urgent interest in the use of conversational agents for broader societal applications, there is a need to advance the state-of-the-art in argument parsers for dialogues. This enables progress towards more purposeful conversations involving persuasion, debate and deliberation. This paper discusses Dialo-AP, an end-to-end argument parser that constructs argument graphs from dialogues. We formulate AM as dependency parsing of elementary and argumentative discourse units; the system is trained using extensive pre-training and curriculum learning comprising nine diverse corpora. Dialo-AP is capable of generating argument graphs from dialogues by performing all sub-tasks of AM. Compared to existing state-of-the-art baselines, Dialo-AP achieves significant improvements across all tasks, which is further validated through rigorous human evaluation.
ConnPrompt: Connective-cloze Prompt Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2022)

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) is to detect and classify relation sense between two text segments without an explicit connective. Vanilla pre-train and fine-tuning paradigm builds upon a Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) with a task-specific neural network. However, the task objective functions are often not in accordance with that of the PLM. Furthermore, this paradigm cannot well exploit some linguistic evidence embedded in the pre-training process. The recent pre-train, prompt, and predict paradigm selects appropriate prompts to reformulate downstream tasks, so as to utilizing the PLM itself for prediction. However, for its success applications, prompts, verbalizer as well as model training should still be carefully designed for different tasks. As the first trial of using this new paradigm for IDRR, this paper develops a Connective-cloze Prompt (ConnPrompt) to transform the relation prediction task as a connective-cloze task. Specifically, we design two styles of ConnPrompt template: Insert-cloze Prompt (ICP) and Prefix-cloze Prompt (PCP) and construct an answer space mapping to the relation senses based on the hierarchy sense tags and implicit connectives. Furthermore, we use a multi-prompt ensemble to fuse predictions from different prompting results. Experiments on the PDTB corpus show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms, even with fewer training data.
A Distance-Aware Multi-Task Framework for Conversational Discourse Parsing (2022)

Conversational discourse parsing aims to construct an implicit utterance dependency tree to reflect the turn-taking in a multi-party conversation. Existing works are generally divided into two lines: graph-based and transition-based paradigms, which perform well for short-distance and long-distance dependency links, respectively. However, there is no study to consider the advantages of both paradigms to facilitate conversational discourse parsing. As a result, we propose a distance-aware multi-task framework DAMT that incorporates the strengths of transition-based paradigm to facilitate the graph-based paradigm from the encoding and decoding process. To promote multi-task learning on two paradigms, we first introduce an Encoding Interactive Module (EIM) to enhance the flow of semantic information between both two paradigms during the encoding step. And then we apply a Distance-Aware Graph Convolutional Network (DAGCN) in the decoding process, which can incorporate the different-distance dependency links predicted by the transition-based paradigm to facilitate the decoding of the graph-based paradigm. The experimental results on the datasets STAC and Molweni show that our method can significantly improve the performance of the SOTA graph-based paradigm on long-distance dependency links.
Linguistically Motivated Features for Classifying Shorter Text into Fiction and Non-Fiction Genre (2022)

This work deploys linguistically motivated features to classify paragraph-level text into fiction and non-fiction genre using a logistic regression model and infers lexical and syntactic properties that distinguish the two genres. Previous works have focused on classifying document-level text into fiction and non-fiction genres, while in this work, we deal with shorter texts which are closer to real-world applications like sentiment analysis of tweets. Going beyond simple POS tag ratios proposed in Qureshi et al.(2019) for document-level classification, we extracted multiple linguistically motivated features belonging to four categories: Lexical features, POS ratio features, Syntactic features and Raw features. For the task of short-text classification, a model containing 28 best-features (selected via Recursive feature elimination with cross-validation; RFECV) confers an accuracy jump of 15.56 {\%} over a baseline model consisting of 2 POS-ratio features found effective in previous work (cited above). The efficacy of the above model containing a linguistically motivated feature set also transfers over to another dataset viz, Baby BNC corpus. We also compared the classification accuracy of the logistic regression model with two deep-learning models. A 1D CNN model gives an increase of 2{\%} accuracy over the logistic Regression classifier on both corpora. And the BERT-base-uncased model gives the best classification accuracy of 97{\%} on Brown corpus and 98{\%} on Baby BNC corpus. Although both the deep learning models give better results in terms of classification accuracy, the problem of interpreting these models remains unsolved. In contrast, regression model coefficients revealed that fiction texts tend to have more character-level diversity and have lower lexical density (quantified using content-function word ratios) compared to non-fiction texts. Moreover, subtle differences in word order exist between the two genres, i.e., in fiction texts Verbs precede Adverbs (inter-alia).
Semantic Sentence Matching via Interacting Syntax Graphs (2022)

Studies have shown that the sentence`s syntactic structures are important for semantic sentence matching. A typical approach is encoding each sentence`s syntactic structure into an embedding vector, which can be combined with other features to predict the final matching scores. Though successes have been observed, embedding the whole syntactic structures as one vector inevitably overlooks the fine-grained syntax matching patterns, e.g. the alignment of specific term dependencies relations in the two inputted sentences. In this paper, we formalize the task of semantic sentence matching as a problem of graph matching in which each sentence is represented as a directed graph according to its syntactic structures. The syntax matching patterns (i.e. similar syntactic structures) between two sentences, therefore, can be extracted as the sub-graph structure alignments. The proposed method, referred to as Interacted Syntax Graphs (ISG), represents two sentences' syntactic alignments as well as their semantic matching signals into one association graph. After that, the neural quadratic assignment programming (QAP) is adapted to extract syntactic matching patterns from the association graph. In this way, the syntactic structures fully interact in a fine granularity during the matching process. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrated that ISG can outperform the state-of-the-art baselines effectively and efficiently. The empirical analysis also showed that ISG can match sentences in an interpretable way.
Hierarchical Information Matters: Text Classification via Tree Based Graph Neural Network (2022)

Text classification is a primary task in natural language processing (NLP). Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have developed rapidly and been applied to text classification tasks. As a special kind of graph data, the tree has a simpler data structure and can provide rich hierarchical information for text classification. Inspired by the structural entropy, we construct the coding tree of the graph by minimizing the structural entropy and propose HINT, which aims to make full use of the hierarchical information contained in the text for the task of text classification. Specifically, we first establish a dependency parsing graph for each text. Then we designed a structural entropy minimization algorithm to decode the key information in the graph and convert each graph to its corresponding coding tree. Based on the hierarchical structure of the coding tree, the representation of the entire graph is obtained by updating the representation of non-leaf nodes in the coding tree layer by layer. Finally, we present the effectiveness of hierarchical information in text classification. Experimental results show that HINT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on popular benchmarks while having a simple structure and few parameters.
SelfMix: Robust Learning against Textual Label Noise with Self-Mixup Training (2022)

The conventional success of textual classification relies on annotated data, and the new paradigm of pre-trained language models (PLMs) still requires a few labeled data for downstream tasks. However, in real-world applications, label noise inevitably exists in training data, damaging the effectiveness, robustness, and generalization of the models constructed on such data. Recently, remarkable achievements have been made to mitigate this dilemma in visual data, while only a few explore textual data. To fill this gap, we present SelfMix, a simple yet effective method, to handle label noise in text classification tasks. SelfMix uses the Gaussian Mixture Model to separate samples and leverages semi-supervised learning. Unlike previous works requiring multiple models, our method utilizes the dropout mechanism on a single model to reduce the confirmation bias in self-training and introduces a textual level mixup training strategy. Experimental results on three text classification benchmarks with different types of text show that the performance of our proposed method outperforms these strong baselines designed for both textual and visual data under different noise ratios and noise types. Our anonymous code is available at \url{https://github.com/noise-learning/SelfMix}.
Community Topic: Topic Model Inference by Consecutive Word Community Discovery (2022)

We present our novel, hyperparameter-free topic modelling algorithm, Community Topic. Our algorithm is based on mining communities from term co-occurrence networks. We empirically evaluate and compare Community Topic with Latent Dirichlet Allocation and the recently developed top2vec algorithm. We find that Community Topic runs faster than the competitors and produces topics that achieve higher coherence scores. Community Topic can discover coherent topics at various scales. The network representation used by Community Topic results in a natural relationship between topics and a topic hierarchy. This allows sub- and super-topics to be found on demand. These features make Community Topic the ideal tool for downstream applications such as applied research and conversational agents.
Where to Attack: A Dynamic Locator Model for Backdoor Attack in Text Classifications (2022)

Nowadays, deep-learning based NLP models are usually trained with large-scale third-party data which can be easily injected with malicious backdoors. Thus, BackDoor Attack (BDA) study has become a trending research to help promote the robustness of an NLP system. Text-based BDA aims to train a poisoned model with both clean and poisoned texts to perform normally on clean inputs while being misled to predict those trigger-embedded texts as target labels set by attackers. Previous works usually choose fixed Positions-to-Poison (P2P) first, then add triggers upon those positions such as letter insertion or deletion. However, considering the positions of words with important semantics may vary in different contexts, fixed P2P models are severely limited in flexibility and performance. We study the text-based BDA from the perspective of automatically and dynamically selecting P2P from contexts. We design a novel Locator model which can predict P2P dynamically without human intervention. Based on the predicted P2P, four effective strategies are introduced to show the BDA performance. Experiments on two public datasets show both tinier test accuracy gap on clean data and higher attack success rate on poisoned ones. Human evaluation with volunteers also shows the P2P predicted by our model are important for classification. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/jncsnlp/LocatorModel}
Locally Distributed Activation Vectors for Guided Feature Attribution (2022)

Explaining the predictions of a deep neural network (DNN) is a challenging problem. Many attempts at interpreting those predictions have focused on attribution-based methods, which assess the contributions of individual features to each model prediction. However, attribution-based explanations do not always provide faithful explanations to the target model, e.g., noisy gradients can result in unfaithful feature attribution for back-propagation methods. We present a method to learn explanations-specific representations while constructing deep network models for text classification. These representations can be used to faithfully interpret black-box predictions, i.e., highlighting the most important input features and their role in any particular prediction. We show that learning specific representations improves model interpretability across various tasks, for both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, while preserving predictive performance.
Addressing Leakage in Self-Supervised Contextualized Code Retrieval (2022)

We address contextualized code retrieval, the search for code snippets helpful to fill gaps in a partial input program. Our approach facilitates a large-scale self-supervised contrastive training by splitting source code randomly into contexts and targets. To combat leakage between the two, we suggest a novel approach based on mutual identifier masking, dedentation, and the selection of syntax-aligned targets. Our second contribution is a new dataset for direct evaluation of contextualized code retrieval, based on a dataset of manually aligned subpassages of code clones. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach improves retrieval substantially, and yields new state-of-the-art results for code clone and defect detection.
A Domain Knowledge Enhanced Pre-Trained Language Model for Vertical Search: Case Study on Medicinal Products (2022)

We present a biomedical knowledge enhanced pre-trained language model for medicinal product vertical search. Following ELECTRA`s replaced token detection (RTD) pre-training, we leverage biomedical entity masking (EM) strategy to learn better contextual word representations. Furthermore, we propose a novel pre-training task, product attribute prediction (PAP), to inject product knowledge into the pre-trained language model efficiently by leveraging medicinal product databases directly. By sharing the parameters of PAP`s transformer encoder with that of RTD`s main transformer, these two pre-training tasks are jointly learned. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PAP task for pre-trained language model on medicinal product vertical search scenario, which includes query-title relevance, query intent classification, and named entity recognition in query.
CONCRETE: Improving Cross-lingual Fact-checking with Cross-lingual Retrieval (2022)

Fact-checking has gained increasing attention due to the widespread of falsified information. Most fact-checking approaches focus on claims made in English only due to the data scarcity issue in other languages. The lack of fact-checking datasets in low-resource languages calls for an effective cross-lingual transfer technique for fact-checking. Additionally, trustworthy information in different languages can be complementary and helpful in verifying facts. To this end, we present the first fact-checking framework augmented with cross-lingual retrieval that aggregates evidence retrieved from multiple languages through a cross-lingual retriever. Given the absence of cross-lingual information retrieval datasets with claim-like queries, we train the retriever with our proposed Cross-lingual Inverse Cloze Task (X-ICT), a self-supervised algorithm that creates training instances by translating the title of a passage. The goal for X-ICT is to learn cross-lingual retrieval in which the model learns to identify the passage corresponding to a given translated title. On the X-Fact dataset, our approach achieves 2.23{\%} absolute F1 improvement in the zero-shot cross-lingual setup over prior systems. The source code and data are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/khuangaf/CONCRETE}.
E-VarM: Enhanced Variational Word Masks to Improve the Interpretability of Text Classification Models (2022)

Enhancing the interpretability of text classification models can help increase the reliability of these models in real-world applications. Currently, most researchers focus on extracting task-specific words from inputs to improve the interpretability of the model. The competitive approaches exploit the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) to improve the performance of word masking at the word embedding layer to obtain task-specific words. However, these approaches ignore the multi-level semantics of the text, which can impair the interpretability of the model, and do not consider the risk of representation overlap caused by the VIB, which can impair the classification performance. In this paper, we propose an enhanced variational word masks approach, named E-VarM, to solve these two issues effectively. The E-VarM combines multi-level semantics from all hidden layers of the model to mask out task-irrelevant words and uses contrastive learning to readjust the distances between representations. Empirical studies on ten benchmark text classification datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the SOTA methods in simultaneously improving the interpretability and accuracy of the model.
Attribute Injection for Pretrained Language Models: A New Benchmark and an Efficient Method (2022)

Metadata attributes (e.g., user and product IDs from reviews) can be incorporated as additional inputs to neural-based NLP models, by expanding the architecture of the models to improve performance. However, recent models rely on pretrained language models (PLMs), in which previously used techniques for attribute injection are either nontrivial or cost-ineffective. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark for evaluating attribute injection models, which comprises eight datasets across a diverse range of tasks and domains and six synthetically sparsified ones. We also propose a lightweight and memory-efficient method to inject attributes into PLMs. We extend adapters, i.e. tiny plug-in feed-forward modules, to include attributes both independently of or jointly with the text. We use approximation techniques to parameterize the model efficiently for domains with large attribute vocabularies, and training mechanisms to handle multi-labeled and sparse attributes. Extensive experiments and analyses show that our method outperforms previous attribute injection methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on all datasets.
Towards Robust Neural Retrieval with Source Domain Synthetic Pre-Finetuning (2022)

Research on neural IR has so far been focused primarily on standard supervised learning settings, where it outperforms traditional term matching baselines. Many practical use cases of such models, however, may involve previously unseen target domains. In this paper, we propose to improve the out-of-domain generalization of Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) - a popular choice for neural IR - through synthetic data augmentation only in the source domain. We empirically show that pre-finetuning DPR with additional synthetic data in its source domain (Wikipedia), which we generate using a fine-tuned sequence-to-sequence generator, can be a low-cost yet effective first step towards its generalization. Across five different test sets, our augmented model shows more robust performance than DPR in both in-domain and zero-shot out-of-domain evaluation.