yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: ALToolbox: A Set of Tools for Active Learning Annotation of Natural Language Texts
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We present ALToolbox – an open-source framework for active learning (AL) annotation in natural language processing. Currently, the framework supports text classification, sequence tagging, and seq2seq tasks. Besides state-of-the-art query strategies, ALToolbox provides a set of tools that help to reduce computational overhead and duration of AL iterations and increase annotated data reusability. The framework aims to support data scientists and researchers by providing an easy-to-deploy GUI annotation tool directly in the Jupyter IDE and an extensible benchmark for novel AL methods. We prepare a small demonstration of ALToolbox capabilities available online. The code of the framework is published under the MIT license.
Title: TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: generation
Abstract: To facilitate research on text generation, this paper presents a comprehensive and unified library, TextBox 2.0, focusing on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs). To be comprehensive, our library covers 13 common text generation tasks and their corresponding 83 datasets and further incorporates 45 PLMs covering general, translation, Chinese, dialogue, controllable, distilled, prompting, and lightweight PLMs. We also implement 4 efficient training strategies and provide 4 generation objectives for pre-training new PLMs from scratch. To be unified, we design the interfaces to support the entire research pipeline (from data loading to training and evaluation), ensuring that each step can be fulfilled in a unified way. Despite the rich functionality, it is easy to use our library, either through the friendly Python API or command line. To validate the effectiveness of our library, we conduct extensive experiments and exemplify four types of research scenarios. The project is released at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TextBox#2.0.
Title: Unsupervised Term Extraction for Highly Technical Domains
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Term extraction is an information extraction task at the root of knowledge discovery platforms. Developing term extractors that are able to generalize across very diverse and potentially highly technical domains is challenging, as annotations for domains requiring in-depth expertise are scarce and expensive to obtain. In this paper, we describe the term extraction subsystem of a commercial knowledge discovery platform that targets highly technical fields such as pharma, medical, and material science. To be able to generalize across domains, we introduce a fully unsupervised annotator (UA). It extracts terms by combining novel morphological signals from sub-word tokenization with term-to-topic and intra-term similarity metrics, computed using general-domain pre-trained sentence-encoders. The annotator is used to implement a weakly-supervised setup, where transformer-models are fine-tuned (or pre-trained) over the training data generated by running the UA over large unlabeled corpora. Our experiments demonstrate that our setup can improve the predictive performance while decreasing the inference latency on both CPUs and GPUs. Our annotators provide a very competitive baseline for all the cases where annotations are not available.
Title: DynaMaR: Dynamic Prompt with Mask Token Representation
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Recent research has shown that large language models pretrained using unsupervised approaches can achieve significant performance improvement on many downstream tasks. Typically when adapting these language models to downstream tasks, like a classification or regression task, we employ a fine-tuning paradigm in which the sentence representation from the language model is input to a task-specific head; the model is then fine-tuned end-to-end. However, with the emergence of models like GPT-3, prompt-based fine-tuning has been proven to be a successful approach for few-shot tasks. Inspired by this work, we study discrete prompt technologies in practice. There are two issues that arise with the standard prompt approach. First, it can overfit on the prompt template. Second, it requires manual effort to formulate the downstream task as a language model problem. In this paper, we propose an improvement to prompt-based fine-tuning that addresses these two issues. We refer to our approach as DynaMaR – Dynamic Prompt with Mask Token Representation. Results show that DynaMaR can achieve an average improvement of 10% in few-shot settings and improvement of 3.7% in data-rich settings over the standard fine-tuning approach on four e-commerce applications.
Title: A Hybrid Approach to Cross-lingual Product Review Summarization
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: summarization
Abstract: We present a hybrid approach for product review summarization which consists of: (i) an unsupervised extractive step to extract the most important sentences out of all the reviews, and (ii) a supervised abstractive step to summarize the extracted sentences into a coherent short summary. This approach allows us to develop an efficient cross-lingual abstractive summarizer that can generate summaries in any language, given the extracted sentences out of thousands of reviews in a source language. In order to train and test the abstractive model, we create the Cross-lingual Amazon Reviews Summarization (CARS) dataset which provides English summaries for training, and English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Hindi summaries for testing based on selected English reviews. We show that the summaries generated by our model are as good as human written summaries in coherence, informativeness, non-redundancy, and fluency.
Title: Augmenting Operations Research with Auto-Formulation of Optimization Models From Problem Descriptions
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We describe an augmented intelligence system for simplifying and enhancing the modeling experience for operations research. Using this system, the user receives a suggested formulation of an optimization problem based on its description. To facilitate this process, we build an intuitive user interface system that enables the users to validate and edit the suggestions. We investigate controlled generation techniques to obtain an automatic suggestion of formulation. Then, we evaluate their effectiveness with a newly created dataset of linear programming problems drawn from various application domains.
Title: Knowledge Distillation based Contextual Relevance Matching for E-commerce Product Search
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: Online relevance matching is an essential task of e-commerce product search to boost the utility of search engines and ensure a smooth user experience. Previous work adopts either classical relevance matching models or Transformer-style models to address it. However, they ignore the inherent bipartite graph structures that are ubiquitous in e-commerce product search logs and are too inefficient to deploy online. In this paper, we design an efficient knowledge distillation framework for e-commerce relevance matching to integrate the respective advantages of Transformer-style models and classical relevance matching models. Especially for the core student model of the framework, we propose a novel method using k-order relevance modeling. The experimental results on large-scale real-world data (the size is 6 174 million) show that the proposed method significantly improves the prediction accuracy in terms of human relevance judgment. We deploy our method to JD.com online search platform. The A/B testing results show that our method significantly improves most business metrics under price sort mode and default sort mode.
Title: Accelerating the Discovery of Semantic Associations from Medical Literature: Mining Relations Between Diseases and Symptoms
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Medical literature is a vast and constantly expanding source of information about diseases, their diagnoses and treatments. One of the ways to extract insights from this type of data is through mining association rules between such entities. However, existing solutions do not take into account the semantics of sentences from which entity co-occurrences are extracted. We propose a scalable solution for the automated discovery of semantic associations between different entities such as diseases and their symptoms. Our approach employs the UMLS semantic network and a binary relation classification model trained with distant supervision to validate and help ranking the most likely entity associations pairs extracted with frequency-based association rule mining algorithms. We evaluate the proposed system on the task of extracting disease-symptom associations from a collection of over 14M PubMed abstracts and validate our results against a publicly available known list of disease-symptom pairs.
Title: PENTATRON: PErsonalized coNText-Aware Transformer for Retrieval-based cOnversational uNderstanding
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: Conversational understanding is an integral part of modern intelligent devices. In a large fraction of the global traffic from customers using smart digital assistants, frictions in dialogues may be attributed to incorrect understanding of the entities in a customer’s query due to factors including ambiguous mentions, mispronunciation, background noise and faulty on-device signal processing. Such errors are compounded by two common deficiencies from intelligent devices namely, (1) the device not being tailored to individual customers, and (2) the device responses being unaware of the context in the conversation session. Viewing this problem via the lens of retrieval-based search engines, we build and evaluate a scalable entity correction system, PENTATRON. The system leverages a parametric transformer-based language model to learn patterns from in-session customer-device interactions coupled with a non-parametric personalized entity index to compute the correct query, which aids downstream components in reasoning about the best response. In addition to establishing baselines and demonstrating the value of personalized and context-aware systems, we use multitasking to learn the domain of the correct entity. We also investigate the utility of language model prompts. Through extensive experiments, we show a significant upward movement of the key metric (Exact Match) by up to 500.97% (relative to the baseline).
Title: Machine translation impact in E-commerce multilingual search
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: Previous work suggests that performance of cross-lingual information retrieval correlates highly with the quality of Machine Translation. However, there may be a threshold beyond which improving query translation quality yields little or no benefit to further improve the retrieval performance. This threshold may depend upon multiple factors including the source and target languages, the existing MT system quality and the search pipeline. In order to identify the benefit of improving an MT system for a given search pipeline, we investigate the sensitivity of retrieval quality to the presence of different levels of MT quality using experimental datasets collected from actual traffic. We systematically improve the performance of our MT systems quality on language pairs as measured by MT evaluation metrics including Bleu and Chrf to determine their impact on search precision metrics and extract signals that help to guide the improvement strategies. Using this information we develop techniques to compare query translations for multiple language pairs and identify the most promising language pairs to invest and improve.
Title: Ask-and-Verify: Span Candidate Generation and Verification for Attribute Value Extraction
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: The product attribute value extraction (AVE) task aims to capture key factual information from product profiles, and is useful for several downstream applications in e-Commerce platforms. Previous contributions usually formulate this task using sequence labeling or reading comprehension architectures. However, sequence labeling models tend to be conservative in their predictions resulting in a high false negative rate. Existing reading comprehension formulations, on the other hand, can over-generate attribute values which hinders precision. In the present work we address these limitations with a new end-to-end pipeline framework called Ask-and-Verify. Given a product and an attribute query, the Ask step detects the top-K span candidates (i.e. possible attribute values) from the product profiles, then the Verify step filters out false positive candidates. We evaluate Ask-and-Verify model on Amazon’s product pages and AliExpress public dataset, and present a comparative analysis as well as a detailed ablation study. Despite its simplicity, we show that Ask-and-Verify outperforms recent state-of-the-art models by up to 3.1% F1 absolute improvement points, while also scaling to thousands of attributes.
Title: Consultation Checklists: Standardising the Human Evaluation of Medical Note Generation
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Evaluating automatically generated text is generally hard due to the inherently subjective nature of many aspects of the output quality. This difficulty is compounded in automatic consultation note generation by differing opinions between medical experts both about which patient statements should be included in generated notes and about their respective importance in arriving at a diagnosis. Previous real-world evaluations of note-generation systems saw substantial disagreement between expert evaluators. In this paper we propose a protocol that aims to increase objectivity by grounding evaluations in Consultation Checklists, which are created in a preliminary step and then used as a common point of reference during quality assessment. We observed good levels of inter-annotator agreement in a first evaluation study using the protocol; further, using Consultation Checklists produced in the study as reference for automatic metrics such as ROUGE or BERTScore improves their correlation with human judgements compared to using the original human note.
Title: Towards Need-Based Spoken Language Understanding Model Updates: What Have We Learned?
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: speech processing and spoken language understanding
Abstract: In productionized machine learning systems, online model performance is known to deteriorate over time when there is a distributional drift between offline training and online application data. As a remedy, models are typically retrained at fixed time intervals, implying high computational and manual costs. This work aims at decreasing such costs in productionized, large-scale Spoken Language Understanding systems. In particular, we develop a need-based re-training strategy guided by an efficient drift detector and discuss the arising challenges including system complexity, overlapping model releases, observation limitation and the absence of annotated resources at runtime. We present empirical results on historical data and confirm the utility of our design decisions via an online A/B experiment.
Title: Knowledge Distillation Transfer Sets and their Impact on Downstream NLU Tasks
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Teacher-student knowledge distillation is a popular technique for compressing today’s prevailing large language models into manageable sizes that fit low-latency downstream applications. Both the teacher and the choice of transfer set used for distillation are crucial ingredients in creating a high quality student. Yet, the generic corpora used to pretrain the teacher and the corpora associated with the downstream target domain are often significantly different, which raises a natural question: should the student be distilled over the generic corpora, so as to learn from high-quality teacher predictions, or over the downstream task corpora to align with finetuning? Our study investigates this trade-off using Domain Classification (DC) and Intent Classification/Named Entity Recognition (ICNER) as downstream tasks. We distill several multilingual students from a larger multilingual LM with varying proportions of generic and task-specific datasets, and report their performance after finetuning on DC and ICNER. We observe significant improvements across tasks and test sets when only task-specific corpora is used. We also report on how the impact of adding task-specific data to the transfer set correlates with the similarity between generic and task-specific data. Our results clearly indicate that, while distillation from a generic LM benefits downstream tasks, students learn better using target domain data even if it comes at the price of noisier teacher predictions. In other words, target domain data still trumps teacher knowledge.
Title: Exploiting In-Domain Bilingual Corpora for Zero-Shot Transfer Learning in NLU of Intra-Sentential Code-Switching Chatbot Interactions
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: Code-switching (CS) is a very common phenomenon in regions with various co-existing languages. Since CS is such a frequent habit in informal communications, both spoken and written, it also arises naturally in Human-Machine Interactions. Therefore, in order for natural language understanding (NLU) not to be degraded, CS must be taken into account when developing chatbots. The co-existence of multiple languages in a single NLU model has become feasible with multilingual language representation models such as mBERT. In this paper, the efficacy of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning with mBERT for NLU is evaluated on a Basque-Spanish CS chatbot corpus, comparing the performance of NLU models trained using in-domain chatbot utterances in Basque and/or Spanish without CS. The results obtained indicate that training joint multi-intent classification and entity recognition models on both languages simultaneously achieves best performance, better capturing the CS patterns.
Title: Calibrating Imbalanced Classifiers with Focal Loss: An Empirical Study
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Imbalanced data distribution is a practical and common challenge in building production-level machine learning (ML) models in industry, where data usually exhibits long-tail distributions. For instance, in virtual AI Assistants, such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, the “play music” or “set timer” utterance is exposed to an order of magnitude more traffic than other skills. This can easily cause trained models to overfit to the majority classes, categories or intents, lead to model miscalibration. The uncalibrated models output unreliable (mostly overconfident) predictions, which are at high risk of affecting downstream decision-making systems. In this work, we study the calibration of production models in the industry use-case of predicting product return reason codes in customer service conversations of an online retail store; The returns reasons also exhibit class imbalance. To alleviate the resulting miscalibration in the production ML model, we streamline the model development and deployment using focal loss (CITATION).We empirically show the effectiveness of model training with focal loss in learning better calibrated models, as compared to standard cross-entropy loss. Better calibration, in turn, enables better control of the precision-recall trade-off for the models deployed in production.
Title: Unsupervised training data re-weighting for natural language understanding with local distribution approximation
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: One of the major challenges of training Natural Language Understanding (NLU) production models lies in the discrepancy between the distributions of the offline training data and of the online live data, due to, e.g., biased sampling scheme, cyclic seasonality shifts, annotated training data coming from a variety of different sources, and a changing pool of users. Consequently, the model trained by the offline data is biased. We often observe this problem especially in task-oriented conversational systems, where topics of interest and the characteristics of users using the system change over time. In this paper we propose an unsupervised approach to mitigate the offline training data sampling bias in multiple NLU tasks. We show that a local distribution approximation in the pre-trained embedding space enables the estimation of importance weights for training samples guiding re-sampling for an effective bias mitigation. We illustrate our novel approach using multiple NLU datasets and show improvements obtained without additional annotation, making this a general approach for mitigating effects of sampling bias.
Title: Cross-Encoder Data Annotation for Bi-Encoder Based Product Matching
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Matching a seller listed item to an appropriate product is an important step for an e-commerce platform. With the recent advancement in deep learning, there are different encoder based approaches being proposed as solution. When textual data for two products are available, cross-encoder approaches encode them jointly while bi-encoder approaches encode them separately. Since cross-encoders are computationally heavy, approaches based on bi-encoders are a common practice for this challenge. In this paper, we propose cross-encoder data annotation; a technique to annotate or refine human annotated training data for bi-encoder models using a cross-encoder model. This technique enables us to build a robust model without annotation on newly collected training data or further improve model performance on annotated training data. We evaluate the cross-encoder data annotation on the product matching task using a real-world e-commerce dataset containing 104 million products. Experimental results show that the cross-encoder data annotation improves 4% absolute accuracy when no annotation for training data is available, and 2% absolute accuracy when annotation for training data is available.
Title: Deploying a Retrieval based Response Model for Task Oriented Dialogues
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: Task-oriented dialogue systems in industry settings need to have high conversational capability, be easily adaptable to changing situations and conform to business constraints. This paper describes a 3-step procedure to develop a conversational model that satisfies these criteria and can efficiently scale to rank a large set of response candidates. First, we provide a simple algorithm to semi-automatically create a high-coverage template set from historic conversations without any annotation. Second, we propose a neural architecture that encodes the dialogue context and applicable business constraints as profile features for ranking the next turn. Third, we describe a two-stage learning strategy with self-supervised training, followed by supervised fine-tuning on limited data collected through a human-in-the-loop platform. Finally, we describe offline experiments and present results of deploying our model with human-in-the-loop to converse with live customers online.
Title: Tackling Temporal Questions in Natural Language Interface to Databases
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Temporal aspect is one of the most challenging areas in Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDB). This paper addresses and examines how temporal questions being studied and supported by the research community at both levels: popular annotated dataset (e.g. Spider) and recent advanced models. We present a new dataset with accompanied databases supporting temporal questions in NLIDB. We experiment with two SOTA models (Picard and ValueNet) to investigate how our new dataset helps these models learn and improve performance in temporal aspect.