yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: Evaluating and Characterizing Human Rationales
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Two main approaches for evaluating the quality of machine-generated rationales are: 1) using human rationales as a gold standard; and 2) automated metrics based on how rationales affect model behavior. An open question, however, is how human rationales fare with these automatic metrics. Analyzing a variety of datasets and models, we find that human rationales do not necessarily perform well on these metrics. To unpack this finding, we propose improved metrics to account for model-dependent baseline performance. We then propose two methods to further characterize rationale quality, one based on model retraining and one on using “fidelity curves” to reveal properties such as irrelevance and redundancy. Our work leads to actionable suggestions for evaluating and characterizing rationales.
Title: On Extractive and Abstractive Neural Document Summarization with Transformer Language Models
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: summarization
Abstract: We present a method to produce abstractive summaries of long documents that exceed several thousand words via neural abstractive summarization. We perform a simple extractive step before generating a summary, which is then used to condition the transformer language model on relevant information before being tasked with generating a summary. We also show that this approach produces more abstractive summaries compared to prior work that employs a copy mechanism while still achieving higher ROUGE scores. We provide extensive comparisons with strong baseline methods, prior state of the art work as well as multiple variants of our approach including those using only transformers, only extractive techniques and combinations of the two. We examine these models using four different summarization tasks and datasets: arXiv papers, PubMed papers, the Newsroom and BigPatent datasets. We find that transformer based methods produce summaries with fewer n-gram copies, leading to n-gram copying statistics that are more similar to human generated abstracts. We include a human evaluation, finding that transformers are ranked highly for coherence and fluency, but purely extractive methods score higher for informativeness and relevance. We hope that these architectures and experiments may serve as strong points of comparison for future work. Note: The abstract above was collaboratively written by the authors and one of the models presented in this paper based on an earlier draft of this paper.
Title: Multi-Fact Correction in Abstractive Text Summarization
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: summarization
Abstract: Pre-trained neural abstractive summarization systems have dominated extractive strategies on news summarization performance, at least in terms of ROUGE. However, system-generated abstractive summaries often face the pitfall of factual inconsistency: generating incorrect facts with respect to the source text. To address this challenge, we propose Span-Fact, a suite of two factual correction models that leverages knowledge learned from question answering models to make corrections in system-generated summaries via span selection. Our models employ single or multi-masking strategies to either iteratively or auto-regressively replace entities in order to ensure semantic consistency w.r.t. the source text, while retaining the syntactic structure of summaries generated by abstractive summarization models. Experiments show that our models significantly boost the factual consistency of system-generated summaries without sacrificing summary quality in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluation.
Title: Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: The most common metrics for assessing summarization algorithms do not account for whether summaries are factually consistent with source documents. We propose a weakly-supervised, model-based approach for verifying factual consistency and identifying conflicts between source documents and generated summaries. Training data is generated by applying a series of rule-based transformations to the sentences of source documents. The factual consistency model is then trained jointly for three tasks: 1) predict whether each summary sentence is factually consistent or not, 2) in either case, extract a span in the source document to support this consistency prediction, 3) for each summary sentence that is deemed inconsistent, extract the inconsistent span from it. Transferring this model to summaries generated by several neural models reveals that this highly scalable approach outperforms previous models, including those trained with strong supervision using datasets from related domains, such as natural language inference and fact checking. Additionally, human evaluation shows that the auxiliary span extraction tasks provide useful assistance in the process of verifying factual consistency. We also release a manually annotated dataset for factual consistency verification, code for training data generation, and trained model weights at https://github.com/salesforce/factCC.
Title: Re-evaluating Evaluation in Text Summarization
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Automated evaluation metrics as a stand-in for manual evaluation are an essential part of the development of text-generation tasks such as text summarization. However, while the field has progressed, our standard metrics have not – for nearly 20 years ROUGE has been the standard evaluation in most summarization papers. In this paper, we make an attempt to re-evaluate the evaluation method for text summarization: assessing the reliability of automatic metrics using top-scoring system outputs, both abstractive and extractive, on recently popular datasets for both system-level and summary-level evaluation settings. We find that conclusions about evaluation metrics on older datasets do not necessarily hold on modern datasets and systems. We release a dataset of human judgments that are collected from 25 top-scoring neural summarization systems (14 abstractive and 11 extractive).
Title: VMSMO: Learning to Generate Multimodal Summary for Video-based News Articles
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: A popular multimedia news format nowadays is providing users with a lively video and a corresponding news article, which is employed by influential news media including CNN, BBC, and social media including Twitter and Weibo. In such a case, automatically choosing a proper cover frame of the video and generating an appropriate textual summary of the article can help editors save time, and readers make the decision more effectively. Hence, in this paper, we propose the task of Video-based Multimodal Summarization with Multimodal Output (VMSMO) to tackle such a problem. The main challenge in this task is to jointly model the temporal dependency of video with semantic meaning of article. To this end, we propose a Dual-Interaction-based Multimodal Summarizer (DIMS), consisting of a dual interaction module and multimodal generator. In the dual interaction module, we propose a conditional self-attention mechanism that captures local semantic information within video and a global-attention mechanism that handles the semantic relationship between news text and video from a high level. Extensive experiments conducted on a large-scale real-world VMSMO dataset show that DIMS achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations.
Title: OpenUE: An Open Toolkit of Universal Extraction from Text
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Natural language processing covers a wide variety of tasks with token-level or sentence-level understandings. In this paper, we provide a simple insight that most tasks can be represented in a single universal extraction format. We introduce a prototype model and provide an open-source and extensible toolkit called OpenUE for various extraction tasks. OpenUE allows developers to train custom models to extract information from the text and supports quick model validation for researchers. Besides, OpenUE provides various functional modules to maintain sufficient modularity and extensibility. Except for the toolkit, we also deploy an online demo with restful APIs to support real-time extraction without training and deploying. Additionally, the online system can extract information in various tasks, including relational triple extraction, slot & intent detection, event extraction, and so on. We release the source code, datasets, and pre-trained models to promote future researches in http://github.com/zjunlp/openue.
Title: BERTweet: A pre-trained language model for English Tweets
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: We present BERTweet, the first public large-scale pre-trained language model for English Tweets. Our BERTweet, having the same architecture as BERT-base (Devlin et al., 2019), is trained using the RoBERTa pre-training procedure (Liu et al., 2019). Experiments show that BERTweet outperforms strong baselines RoBERTa-base and XLM-R-base (Conneau et al., 2020), producing better performance results than the previous state-of-the-art models on three Tweet NLP tasks: Part-of-speech tagging, Named-entity recognition and text classification. We release BERTweet under the MIT License to facilitate future research and applications on Tweet data. Our BERTweet is available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/BERTweet
Title: NeuralQA: A Usable Library for Question Answering (Contextual Query Expansion + BERT) on Large Datasets
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: question answering
Abstract: Existing tools for Question Answering (QA) have challenges that limit their use in practice. They can be complex to set up or integrate with existing infrastructure, do not offer configurable interactive interfaces, and do not cover the full set of subtasks that frequently comprise the QA pipeline (query expansion, retrieval, reading, and explanation/sensemaking). To help address these issues, we introduce NeuralQA - a usable library for QA on large datasets. NeuralQA integrates well with existing infrastructure (e.g., ElasticSearch instances and reader models trained with the HuggingFace Transformers API) and offers helpful defaults for QA subtasks. It introduces and implements contextual query expansion (CQE) using a masked language model (MLM) as well as relevant snippets (RelSnip) - a method for condensing large documents into smaller passages that can be speedily processed by a document reader model. Finally, it offers a flexible user interface to support workflows for research explorations (e.g., visualization of gradient-based explanations to support qualitative inspection of model behaviour) and large scale search deployment. Code and documentation for NeuralQA is available as open source on Github.
Title: Wikipedia2Vec: An Efficient Toolkit for Learning and Visualizing the Embeddings of Words and Entities from Wikipedia
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: The embeddings of entities in a large knowledge base (e.g., Wikipedia) are highly beneficial for solving various natural language tasks that involve real world knowledge. In this paper, we present Wikipedia2Vec, a Python-based open-source tool for learning the embeddings of words and entities from Wikipedia. The proposed tool enables users to learn the embeddings efficiently by issuing a single command with a Wikipedia dump file as an argument. We also introduce a web-based demonstration of our tool that allows users to visualize and explore the learned embeddings. In our experiments, our tool achieved a state-of-the-art result on the KORE entity relatedness dataset, and competitive results on various standard benchmark datasets. Furthermore, our tool has been used as a key component in various recent studies. We publicize the source code, demonstration, and the pretrained embeddings for 12 languages at https://wikipedia2vec.github.io/.
Title: ARES: A Reading Comprehension Ensembling Service
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: We introduce ARES (A Reading Comprehension Ensembling Service): a novel Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) demonstration system which utilizes an ensemble of models to increase F1 by 2.3 points. While many of the top leaderboard submissions in popular MRC benchmarks such as the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and Natural Questions (NQ) use model ensembles, the accompanying papers do not publish their ensembling strategies. In this work, we detail and evaluate various ensembling strategies using the NQ dataset. ARES leverages the CFO (Chakravarti et al., 2019) and ReactJS distributed frameworks to provide a scalable interactive Question Answering experience that capitalizes on the agreement (or lack thereof) between models to improve the answer visualization experience.
Title: Transformers: State-of-the-Art Natural Language Processing
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Recent progress in natural language processing has been driven by advances in both model architecture and model pretraining. Transformer architectures have facilitated building higher-capacity models and pretraining has made it possible to effectively utilize this capacity for a wide variety of tasks. Transformers is an open-source library with the goal of opening up these advances to the wider machine learning community. The library consists of carefully engineered state-of-the art Transformer architectures under a unified API. Backing this library is a curated collection of pretrained models made by and available for the community. Transformers is designed to be extensible by researchers, simple for practitioners, and fast and robust in industrial deployments. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.
Title: AdapterHub: A Framework for Adapting Transformers
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: The current modus operandi in NLP involves downloading and fine-tuning pre-trained models consisting of millions or billions of parameters. Storing and sharing such large trained models is expensive, slow, and time-consuming, which impedes progress towards more general and versatile NLP methods that learn from and for many tasks. Adapters—small learnt bottleneck layers inserted within each layer of a pre-trained model— ameliorate this issue by avoiding full fine-tuning of the entire model. However, sharing and integrating adapter layers is not straightforward. We propose AdapterHub, a framework that allows dynamic “stiching-in” of pre-trained adapters for different tasks and languages. The framework, built on top of the popular HuggingFace Transformers library, enables extremely easy and quick adaptations of state-of-the-art pre-trained models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa, XLM-R) across tasks and languages. Downloading, sharing, and training adapters is as seamless as possible using minimal changes to the training scripts and a specialized infrastructure. Our framework enables scalable and easy access to sharing of task-specific models, particularly in low-resource scenarios. AdapterHub includes all recent adapter architectures and can be found at AdapterHub.ml
Title: HUMAN: Hierarchical Universal Modular ANnotator
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: A lot of real-world phenomena are complex and cannot be captured by single task annotations. This causes a need for subsequent annotations, with interdependent questions and answers describing the nature of the subject at hand. Even in the case a phenomenon is easily captured by a single task, the high specialisation of most annotation tools can result in having to switch to another tool if the task only slightly changes. We introduce HUMAN, a novel web-based annotation tool that addresses the above problems by a) covering a variety of annotation tasks on both textual and image data, and b) the usage of an internal deterministic state machine, allowing the researcher to chain different annotation tasks in an interdependent manner. Further, the modular nature of the tool makes it easy to define new annotation tasks and integrate machine learning algorithms e.g., for active learning. HUMAN comes with an easy-to-use graphical user interface that simplifies the annotation task and management.
Title: DeezyMatch: A Flexible Deep Learning Approach to Fuzzy String Matching
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: We present DeezyMatch, a free, open-source software library written in Python for fuzzy string matching and candidate ranking. Its pair classifier supports various deep neural network architectures for training new classifiers and for fine-tuning a pretrained model, which paves the way for transfer learning in fuzzy string matching. This approach is especially useful where only limited training examples are available. The learned DeezyMatch models can be used to generate rich vector representations from string inputs. The candidate ranker component in DeezyMatch uses these vector representations to find, for a given query, the best matching candidates in a knowledge base. It uses an adaptive searching algorithm applicable to large knowledge bases and query sets. We describe DeezyMatch’s functionality, design and implementation, accompanied by a use case in toponym matching and candidate ranking in realistic noisy datasets.
Title: CoSaTa: A Constraint Satisfaction Solver and Interpreted Language for Semi-Structured Tables of Sentences
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: This work presents CoSaTa, an intuitive constraint satisfaction solver and interpreted language for knowledge bases of semi-structured tables expressed as text. The stand-alone CoSaTa solver allows easily expressing complex compositional “inference patterns” for how knowledge from different tables tends to connect to support inference and explanation construction in question answering and other downstream tasks, while including advanced declarative features and the ability to operate over multiple representations of text (words, lemmas, or part-of-speech tags). CoSaTa also includes a hybrid imperative/declarative interpreted language for expressing simple models through minimally-specified simulations grounded in constraint patterns, helping bridge the gap between question answering, question explanation, and model simulation. The solver and interpreter are released as open source. Screencast Demo: https://youtu.be/t93Acsz7LyE
Title: InVeRo: Making Semantic Role Labeling Accessible with Intelligible Verbs and Roles
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is deeply dependent on complex linguistic resources and sophisticated neural models, which makes the task difficult to approach for non-experts. To address this issue we present a new platform named Intelligible Verbs and Roles (InVeRo). This platform provides access to a new verb resource, VerbAtlas, and a state-of-the-art pretrained implementation of a neural, span-based architecture for SRL. Both the resource and the system provide human-readable verb sense and semantic role information, with an easy to use Web interface and RESTful APIs available at http://nlp.uniroma1.it/invero.
Title: Youling: an AI-assisted Lyrics Creation System
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Recently, a variety of neural models have been proposed for lyrics generation. However, most previous work completes the generation process in a single pass with little human intervention. We believe that lyrics creation is a creative process with human intelligence centered. AI should play a role as an assistant in the lyrics creation process, where human interactions are crucial for high-quality creation. This paper demonstrates Youling, an AI-assisted lyrics creation system, designed to collaborate with music creators. In the lyrics generation process, Youling supports traditional one pass full-text generation mode as well as an interactive generation mode, which allows users to select the satisfactory sentences from generated candidates conditioned on preceding context. The system also provides a revision module which enables users to revise undesired sentences or words of lyrics repeatedly. Besides, Youling allows users to use multifaceted attributes to control the content and format of generated lyrics. The demo video of the system is available at https://youtu.be/DFeNpHk0pm4.
Title: A Technical Question Answering System with Transfer Learning
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: question answering
Abstract: In recent years, the need for community technical question-answering sites has increased significantly. However, it is often expensive for human experts to provide timely and helpful responses on those forums. We develop TransTQA, which is a novel system that offers automatic responses by retrieving proper answers based on correctly answered similar questions in the past. TransTQA is built upon a siamese ALBERT network, which enables it to respond quickly and accurately. Furthermore, TransTQA adopts a standard deep transfer learning strategy to improve its capability of supporting multiple technical domains.
Title: ENTYFI: A System for Fine-grained Entity Typing in Fictional Texts
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Fiction and fantasy are archetypes of long-tail domains that lack suitable NLP methodologies and tools. We present ENTYFI, a web-based system for fine-grained typing of entity mentions in fictional texts. It builds on 205 automatically induced high-quality type systems for popular fictional domains, and provides recommendations towards reference type systems for given input texts. Users can exploit the richness and diversity of these reference type systems for fine-grained supervised typing, in addition, they can choose among and combine four other typing modules: pre-trained real-world models, unsupervised dependency-based typing, knowledge base lookups, and constraint-based candidate consolidation. The demonstrator is available at: https://d5demos.mpi-inf.mpg.de/entyfi.
Title: The Language Interpretability Tool: Extensible, Interactive Visualizations and Analysis for NLP Models
Venue: EMNLP (2020)
Topic: ethics, bias, and fairness
Abstract: We present the Language Interpretability Tool (LIT), an open-source platform for visualization and understanding of NLP models. We focus on core questions about model behavior: Why did my model make this prediction? When does it perform poorly? What happens under a controlled change in the input? LIT integrates local explanations, aggregate analysis, and counterfactual generation into a streamlined, browser-based interface to enable rapid exploration and error analysis. We include case studies for a diverse set of workflows, including exploring counterfactuals for sentiment analysis, measuring gender bias in coreference systems, and exploring local behavior in text generation. LIT supports a wide range of models—including classification, seq2seq, and structured prediction—and is highly extensible through a declarative, framework-agnostic API. LIT is under active development, with code and full documentation available at https://github.com/pair-code/lit.