ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Is a Question Decomposition Unit All We Need? (2022)

Large Language Models (LMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many Natural Language Processing (NLP) benchmarks. With the growing number of new benchmarks, we build bigger and more complex LMs. However, building new LMs may not be an ideal option owing to the cost, time and environmental impact associated with it. We explore an alternative route: can we modify data by expressing it in terms of the model`s strengths, so that a question becomes easier for models to answer? We investigate if humans can decompose a hard question into a set of simpler questions that are relatively easier for models to solve. We analyze a range of datasets involving various forms of reasoning and find that it is indeed possible to significantly improve model performance (24{\%} for GPT3 and 29{\%} for RoBERTa-SQuAD along with a symbolic calculator) via decomposition. Our approach provides a viable option to involve people in NLP research in a meaningful way. Our findings indicate that Human-in-the-loop Question Decomposition (HQD) can potentially provide an alternate path to building large LMs.
Discourse-Aware Soft Prompting for Text Generation (2022)

Current efficient fine-tuning methods(e.g., adapters, prefix-tuning, etc.) have optimized conditional text generation via training a small set of extra parameters of the neural language model, while freezing the rest for efficiency. While showing strong performance on some generation tasks, they don`t generalize across all generation tasks. We show that soft-prompt based conditional text generation can be improved with simple and efficient methods that simulate modeling the discourse structure of human written text.We investigate two design choices: First, we apply hierarchical blocking on the prefix parameters to simulate a higher-level discourse structure of human written text. Second, we apply attention sparsity on the prefix parameters at different layers of the network and learn sparse transformations on the softmax-function. We show that structured design of prefix parameters yields more coherent, faithful and relevant generations than the baseline prefix-tuning on all generation tasks.
ExPUNations: Augmenting Puns with Keywords and Explanations (2022)

The tasks of humor understanding and generation are challenging and subjective even for humans, requiring commonsense and real-world knowledge to master. Puns, in particular, add the challenge of fusing that knowledge with the ability to interpret lexical-semantic ambiguity. In this paper, we present the ExPUNations (ExPUN) dataset, in which we augment an existing dataset of puns with detailed crowdsourced annotations of keywords denoting the most distinctive words that make the text funny, pun explanations describing why the text is funny, and fine-grained funniness ratings. This is the first humor dataset with such extensive and fine-grained annotations specifically for puns. Based on these annotations, we propose two tasks: explanation generation to aid with pun classification and keyword-conditioned pun generation, to challenge the current state-of-the-art natural language understanding and generation models' ability to understand and generate humor. We showcase that the annotated keywords we collect are helpful for generating better novel humorous texts in human evaluation, and that our natural language explanations can be leveraged to improve both the accuracy and robustness of humor classifiers.
SLING: Sino Linguistic Evaluation of Large Language Models (2022)

To understand what kinds of linguistic knowledge are encoded by pretrained Chinese language models (LMs), we introduce the benchmark of Sino LINGuistics (SLING), which consists of 38K minimal sentence pairs in Mandarin Chinese grouped into 9 high-level linguistic phenomena. Each pair demonstrates the acceptability contrast of a specific syntactic or semantic phenomenon (e.g., The keys are lost vs. The keys is lost), and an LM should assign lower perplexity to the acceptable sentence. In contrast to the CLiMP dataset (Xiang et al., 2021), which also contains Chinese minimal pairs and was created by translating the vocabulary of the English BLiMP dataset, the minimal pairs in SLING are derived primarily by applying syntactic and lexical transformations to naturally-occurring, linguist-annotated sentences from the Chinese Treebank 9.0, thus addressing severe issues in CLiMP`s data generation process. We test 18 publicly available pretrained monolingual (e.g., BERT-base-zh, CPM) and multi-lingual (e.g., mT5, XLM) language models on SLING. Our experiments show that the average accuracy for LMs is far below human performance (69.7{\%} vs. 97.1{\%}), while BERT-base-zh achieves the highest accuracy (84.8{\%}) of all tested LMs, even much larger ones. Additionally, we find that most LMs have a strong gender and number (singular/plural) bias, and they perform better on local phenomena than hierarchical ones.
Context-Situated Pun Generation (2022)

Previous work on pun generation commonly begins with a given pun word (a pair of homophones for heterographic pun generation and a polyseme for homographic pun generation) and seeks to generate an appropriate pun. While this may enable efficient pun generation, we believe that a pun is most entertaining if it fits appropriately within a given context, e.g., a given situation or dialogue. In this work, we propose a new task, context-situated pun generation, where a specific context represented by a set of keywords is provided, and the task is to first identify suitable pun words that are appropriate for the context, then generate puns based on the context keywords and the identified pun words. We collect a new dataset, CUP (Context-sitUated Pun), containing 4.5k tuples of context words and pun pairs. Based on the new data and setup, we propose a pipeline system for context-situated pun generation, including a pun word retrieval module that identifies suitable pun words for a given context, and a pun generation module that generates puns from context keywords and pun words. Human evaluation shows that 69{\%} of our top retrieved pun words can be used to generate context-situated puns, and our generation module yields successful puns 31{\%} of the time given a plausible tuple of context words and pun pair, almost tripling the yield of a state-of-the-art pun generation model. With an end-to-end evaluation, our pipeline system with the top-1 retrieved pun pair for a given context can generate successful puns 40{\%} of the time, better than all other modeling variations but 32{\%} lower than the human success rate. This highlights the difficulty of the task, and encourages more research in this direction.
Retrieval-Augmented Generative Question Answering for Event Argument Extraction (2022)

Event argument extraction has long been studied as a sequential prediction problem with extractive-based methods, tackling each argument in isolation. Although recent work proposes generation-based methods to capture cross-argument dependency, they require generating and post-processing a complicated target sequence (template). Motivated by these observations and recent pretrained language models' capabilities of learning from demonstrations. We propose a retrieval-augmented generative QA model (R-GQA) for event argument extraction. It retrieves the most similar QA pair and augments it as prompt to the current example`s context, then decodes the arguments as answers. Our approach outperforms substantially prior methods across various settings (i.e. fully supervised, domain transfer, and fewshot learning). Finally, we propose a clustering-based sampling strategy (JointEnc) and conduct a thorough analysis of how different strategies influence the few-shot learning performances.
Concadia: Towards Image-Based Text Generation with a Purpose (2022)

Current deep learning models often achieve excellent results on benchmark image-to-text datasets but fail to generate texts that are useful in practice. We argue that to close this gap, it is vital to distinguish descriptions from captions based on their distinct communicative roles. Descriptions focus on visual features and are meant to replace an image (often to increase accessibility), whereas captions appear alongside an image to supply additional information. To motivate this distinction and help people put it into practice, we introduce the publicly available Wikipedia-based dataset Concadia consisting of 96,918 images with corresponding English-language descriptions, captions, and surrounding context. Using insights from Concadia, models trained on it, and a preregistered human-subjects experiment with human- and model-generated texts, we characterize the commonalities and differences between descriptions and captions. In addition, we show that, for generating both descriptions and captions, it is useful to augment image-to-text models with representations of the textual context in which the image appeared.
Context Matters for Image Descriptions for Accessibility: Challenges for Referenceless Evaluation Metrics (2022)

Few images on the Web receive alt-text descriptions that would make them accessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users. Image-based NLG systems have progressed to the point where they can begin to address this persistent societal problem, but these systems will not be fully successful unless we evaluate them on metrics that guide their development correctly. Here, we argue against current referenceless metrics {--} those that don`t rely on human-generated ground-truth descriptions {--} on the grounds that they do not align with the needs of BLV users. The fundamental shortcoming of these metrics is that they do not take context into account, whereas contextual information is highly valued by BLV users. To substantiate these claims, we present a study with BLV participants who rated descriptions along a variety of dimensions. An in-depth analysis reveals that the lack of context-awareness makes current referenceless metrics inadequate for advancing image accessibility. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a contextual version of the referenceless metric CLIPScore which begins to address the disconnect to the BLV data.
MetaLogic: Logical Reasoning Explanations with Fine-Grained Structure (2022)

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive benchmark to investigate models' logical reasoning capabilities in complex real-life scenarios. Current explanation datasets often employ synthetic data with simple reasoning structures. Therefore, it cannot express more complex reasoning processes, such as the rebuttal to a reasoning step and the degree of certainty of the evidence. To this end, we propose a comprehensive logical reasoning explanation form. Based on the multi-hop chain of reasoning, the explanation form includes three main components: (1) The condition of rebuttal that the reasoning node can be challenged; (2) Logical formulae that uncover the internal texture of reasoning nodes; (3) Reasoning strength indicated by degrees of certainty. The fine-grained structure conforms to the real logical reasoning scenario, better fitting the human cognitive process but, simultaneously, is more challenging for the current models. We evaluate the current best models' performance on this new explanation form. The experimental results show that generating reasoning graphs remains a challenging task for current models, even with the help of giant pre-trained language models.
Explicit Query Rewriting for Conversational Dense Retrieval (2022)

In a conversational search scenario, a query might be context-dependent because some words are referred to previous expressions or omitted. Previous works tackle the issue by either reformulating the query into a self-contained query (query rewriting) or learning a contextualized query embedding from the query context (context modelling). In this paper, we propose a model CRDR that can perform query rewriting and context modelling in a unified framework in which the query rewriting`s supervision signals further enhance the context modelling. Instead of generating a new query, CRDR only performs necessary modifications on the original query, which improves both accuracy and efficiency of query rewriting. In the meantime, the query rewriting benefits the context modelling by explicitly highlighting relevant terms in the query context, which improves the quality of the learned contextualized query embedding. To verify the effectiveness of CRDR, we perform comprehensive experiments on TREC CAsT-19 and TREC CAsT-20 datasets, and the results show that our method outperforms all baseline models in terms of both quality of query rewriting and quality of context-aware ranking.
Efficient Nearest Neighbor Emotion Classification with BERT-whitening (2022)

Retrieval-based methods have been proven effective in many NLP tasks. Previous methods use representations from the pre-trained model for similarity search directly. However, the sentence representations from the pre-trained model like BERT perform poorly in retrieving semantically similar sentences, resulting in poor performance of the retrieval-based methods. In this paper, we propose kNN-EC, a simple and efficient non-parametric emotion classification (EC) method using nearest neighbor retrieval. We use BERT-whitening to get better sentence semantics, ensuring that nearest neighbor retrieval works. Meanwhile, BERT-whitening can also reduce memory storage of datastore and accelerate retrieval speed, solving the efficiency problem of the previous methods. kNN-EC average improves the pre-trained model by 1.17 F1-macro on two emotion classification datasets.
FastClass: A Time-Efficient Approach to Weakly-Supervised Text Classification (2022)

Weakly-supervised text classification aims to train a classifier using only class descriptions and unlabeled data. Recent research shows that keyword-driven methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various tasks. However, these methods not only rely on carefully-crafted class descriptions to obtain class-specific keywords but also require substantial amount of unlabeled data and takes a long time to train. This paper proposes FastClass, an efficient weakly-supervised classification approach. It uses dense text representation to retrieve class-relevant documents from external unlabeled corpus and selects an optimal subset to train a classifier. Compared to keyword-driven methods, our approach is less reliant on initial class descriptions as it no longer needs to expand each class description into a set of class-specific keywords.Experiments on a wide range of classification tasks show that the proposed approach frequently outperforms keyword-driven models in terms of classification accuracy and often enjoys orders-of-magnitude faster training speed.
Neural-Symbolic Inference for Robust Autoregressive Graph Parsing via Compositional Uncertainty Quantification (2022)

Pre-trained seq2seq models excel at graph semantic parsing with rich annotated data, but generalize worse to out-of-distribution (OOD) and long-tail examples. In comparison, symbolic parsers under-perform on population-level metrics, but exhibit unique strength in OOD and tail generalization. In this work, we study compositionality-aware approach to neural-symbolic inference informed by model confidence, performing fine-grained neural-symbolic reasoning at subgraph level (i.e., nodes and edges) and precisely targeting subgraph components with high uncertainty in the neural parser. As a result, the method combines the distinct strength of the neural and symbolic approaches in capturing different aspects of the graph prediction, leading to well-rounded generalization performance both across domains and in the tail. We empirically investigate the approach in the English Resource Grammar (ERG) parsing problem on a diverse suite of standard in-domain and seven OOD corpora. Our approach leads to 35.26{\%} and 35.60{\%} error reduction in aggregated SMATCH score over neural and symbolic approaches respectively, and 14{\%} absolute accuracy gain in key tail linguistic categories over the neural model, outperforming prior state-of-art methods that do not account for compositionality or uncertainty.
A Speaker-Aware Co-Attention Framework for Medical Dialogue Information Extraction (2022)

With the development of medical digitization, the extraction and structuring of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) have become challenging but fundamental tasks. How to accurately and automatically extract structured information from medical dialogues is especially difficult because the information needs to be inferred from complex interactions between the doctor and the patient. To this end, in this paper, we propose a speaker-aware co-attention framework for medical dialogue information extraction. To better utilize the pre-trained language representation model to perceive the semantics of the utterance and the candidate item, we develop a speaker-aware dialogue encoder with multi-task learning, which considers the speaker`s identity into account. To deal with complex interactions between different utterances and the correlations between utterances and candidate items, we propose a co-attention fusion network to aggregate the utterance information. We evaluate our framework on the public medical dialogue extraction datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our method, which can outperform the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Codes will be publicly available upon acceptance.
Towards Interactivity and Interpretability: A Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction Framework (2022)

Legal judgment prediction (LJP) is a fundamental task in legal AI, which aims to assist the judge to hear the case and determine the judgment. The legal judgment usually consists of the law article, charge, and term of penalty. In the real trial scenario, the judge usually makes the decision step-by-step: first concludes the rationale according to the case`s facts and then determines the judgment. Recently, many models have been proposed and made tremendous progress in LJP, but most of them adopt an end-to-end manner that cannot be manually intervened by the judge for practical use. Moreover, existing models lack interpretability due to the neglect of rationale in the prediction process. Following the judge`s real trial logic, in this paper, we propose a novel Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction (RLJP) framework. In the RLJP framework, the LJP process is split into two steps. In the first phase, the model generates the rationales according to the fact description. Then it predicts the judgment based on the fact and the generated rationales. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show RLJP achieves the best results compared to the state-of-the-art models. Meanwhile, the proposed framework provides good interactivity and interpretability which enables practical use.
RelCLIP: Adapting Language-Image Pretraining for Visual Relationship Detection via Relational Contrastive Learning (2022)

Conventional visual relationship detection models only use the numeric ids of relation labels for training, but ignore the semantic correlation between the labels, which leads to severe training biases and harms the generalization ability of representations. In this paper, we introduce compact language information of relation labels for regularizing the representation learning of visual relations. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective visual Relationship prediction framework that transfers natural language knowledge learned from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models to enhance the relationship prediction, termed RelCLIP. Benefiting from the powerful visual-semantic alignment ability of CLIP at image level, we introduce a novel Relational Contrastive Learning (RCL) approach which explores relation-level visual-semantic alignment via learning to match cross-modal relational embeddings. By collaboratively learning the semantic coherence and discrepancy from relation triplets, the model can generate more discriminative and robust representations. Experimental results on the Visual Genome dataset show that RelCLIP achieves significant improvements over strong baselines under full (provide accurate labels) and distant supervision (provide noise labels), demonstrating its powerful generalization ability in learning relationship representations. Code will be available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/RelCLIP.
Candidate Soups: Fusing Candidate Results Improves Translation Quality for Non-Autoregressive Translation (2022)

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) model achieves a much faster inference speed than the autoregressive translation (AT) model because it can simultaneously predict all tokens during inference. However, its translation quality suffers from degradation compared to AT. And existing NAT methods only focus on improving the NAT model`s performance but do not fully utilize it. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method called {\textquotedblleft}Candidate Soups,{\textquotedblright} which can obtain high-quality translations while maintaining the inference speed of NAT models. Unlike previous approaches that pick the individual result and discard the remainders, Candidate Soups (CDS) can fully use the valuable information in the different candidate translations through model uncertainty. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks (WMT`14 EN{--}DE and WMT`16 EN{--}RO) demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our proposed method, which can significantly improve the translation quality of various base models. More notably, our best variant outperforms the AT model on three translation tasks with 7.6{\texttimes} speedup.
Evaluating Parameter Efficient Learning for Generation (2022)

Parameter efficient learning methods (PERMs)have recently gained significant attention asthey provide an efficient way for pre-trainedlanguage models (PLMs) to adapt to a downstream task. However, these conclusions aremostly drawn from in-domain evaluations overthe full training set. In this paper, we presentcomparisons between PERMs and finetuningfrom three new perspectives: (1) the effect ofsample and model size to in-domain evaluations, (2) generalization to unseen domains andnew datasets, and (3) the faithfulness of generations. Our results show that for in-domainsettings (a) there is a cross point of samplesize for which PERMs will perform better thanfinetuning when training with fewer samples,and (b) larger PLMs have larger cross points.For cross-domain and cross-dataset cases, weshow that (a) Adapter (Houlsby et al., 2019)performs the best amongst all the PERMs studied here, and (b) it outperforms finetuning ifthe task dataset is below a certain size. Wealso compare the faithfulness of generationsand show that PERMs can achieve better faithfulness score than finetuning, especially forsmall training set, by as much as 6{\%}. Finally,we apply Adapter to MT-NLG 530b (Smithet al., 2022) and achieve new state-of-the-artresults on Xsum (Narayan et al., 2018) for allROUGE scores (ROUGE-1 49.17, ROUGE-227.20, ROUGE-L 40.98).