Thailand

Syntactic Language Models (SLMs) can be trained efficiently to reach relatively high performance; however, they have trouble with inference efficiency due to the explicit generation of syntactic structures. In this paper, we propose a new method dubbed tree-planting: instead of explicitly generating syntactic structures, we &quot;plant&quot; trees into attention weights of unidirectional Transformer LMs to implicitly reflect syntactic structures of natural language. Specifically, unidirectional Transformer LMs trained with tree-planting will be called Tree-Planted Transformers (TPT), which inherit the training efficiency from SLMs without changing the inference efficiency of their underlying Transformer LMs. Targeted syntactic evaluations on the SyntaxGym benchmark demonstrated that TPTs, despite the lack of explicit generation of syntactic structures, significantly outperformed not only vanilla Transformer LMs but also various SLMs that generate hundreds of syntactic structures in parallel. This result suggests that TPTs can learn human-like syntactic knowledge as data-efficiently as SLMs while maintaining the modeling space of Transformer LMs unchanged.

ACL 2024

Tree-Planted Transformers: Unidirectional Transformer Language Models with Implicit Syntactic Supervision

attention weights

syntactic supervision

inductive bias

efficiency

language models

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Syntactic Language Models (SLMs) can be trained efficiently to reach relatively high performance; however, they have trouble with inference efficiency due to the explicit generation of syntactic structures. In this paper, we propose a new method dubbed tree-planting: instead of explicitly generating syntactic structures, we "plant" trees into attention weights of unidirectional Transformer LMs to implicitly reflect syntactic structures of natural language. Specifically, unidirectional Transformer LMs trained with tree-planting will be called Tree-Planted Transformers (TPT), which inherit the training efficiency from SLMs without changing the inference efficiency of their underlying Transformer LMs. Targeted syntactic evaluations on the SyntaxGym benchmark demonstrated that TPTs, despite the lack of explicit generation of syntactic structures, significantly outperformed not only vanilla Transformer LMs but also various SLMs that generate hundreds of syntactic structures in parallel. This result suggests that TPTs can learn human-like syntactic knowledge as data-efficiently as SLMs while maintaining the modeling space of Transformer LMs unchanged.

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) achieves parameter efficient fine-tuning for large language models (LLMs) by decomposing the model weight update into a pair of low-rank projection matrices. Yet, the memory overhead restricts it to scale up when the model size increases. We propose Randomized LoRA (RLoRA) which adopts Randomized Walsh-Hadamard Transform to achieve significant reduction in the size of trainable parameters compared to LoRA. At the same time, it allows a PAC-Bayes regularizer to be efficiently incorporated to improve generalization. We evaluate the effectiveness of RLoRA on LLMs RoBERTa, GPT-2 and LLaMA-7B using GLUE, E2E and math reasoning benchmarks. With a much lower memory requirement, RLoRA can give similar performance as the SOTA low-rank adaptation methods for these three tasks and significantly better performance under few-shot settings.

Fast Randomized Low-Rank Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models with PAC Regularization

This research aims to accelerate the inference speed of large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters. We propose Smart Parallel Auto-Correct dEcoding (SPACE), an approach designed for achieving lossless acceleration of LLMs. By integrating semi-autoregressive inference and speculative decoding capabilities, SPACE uniquely enables autoregressive LLMs to parallelize token generation and verification. This is realized through a specialized semi-autoregressive supervised fine-tuning process that equips existing LLMs with the ability to simultaneously predict multiple tokens. Additionally, an auto-correct decoding algorithm facilitates the simultaneous generation and verification of token sequences within a single model invocation. Through extensive experiments on a range of LLMs, SPACE has demonstrated inference speedup ranging from 2.7x-4.0x on HumanEval-X while maintaining output quality.

Generation Meets Verification: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference with Smart Parallel Auto-Correct Decoding

Large Language Models (LLMs) driven by In-Context Learning (ICL) have significantly improved the performance of text-to-SQL. Previous methods generally employ a two-stage reasoning framework, namely 1) schema linking and 2) logical synthesis, making the framework not only effective but also interpretable. Despite these advancements, the inherent bad nature of the generalization of LLMs often results in hallucinations, which limits the full potential of LLMs. In this work, we first identify and categorize the common types of hallucinations at each stage in text-to-SQL. We then introduce a novel strategy, Task Alignment (TA), designed to mitigate hallucinations at each stage. TA encourages LLMs to take advantage of experiences from similar tasks rather than starting the tasks from scratch. This can help LLMs reduce the burden of generalization, thereby mitigating hallucinations effectively. We further propose TA-SQL, a text-to-SQL framework based on this strategy. The experimental results and comprehensive analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework. Specifically, it enhances the performance of the GPT-4 baseline by 21.23% relatively on BIRD dev and it yields significant improvements across six models and four mainstream, complex text-to-SQL benchmarks.

Before Generation, Align it! A Novel and Effective Strategy for Mitigating Hallucinations in Text-to-SQL Generation

Social media advertising offers a platform for fossil fuel value chain companies and their agents to reinforce their narratives, often emphasizing economic, labor market, and energy security benefits to promote oil and gas policy and products. 
Whether such narratives can be detected automatically and the extent to which the cost of human annotation can be reduced is our research question. 
We introduce a task of classifying narratives into seven categories, based on existing definitions and data.
Experiments showed that RoBERTa-large outperforms other methods, while GPT-4 Turbo can serve as a viable annotator for the task, thereby reducing human annotation costs. Our findings and insights provide guidance to automate climate-related ad analysis and lead to more scalable ad scrutiny.

Predicting Narratives of Climate Obstruction in Social Media Advertising

We use contextualized word definitions generated by large language models as semantic representations in the task of diachronic lexical semantic change detection (LSCD). In short, generated definitions are used as `senses', and the change score of a target word is retrieved by comparing their distributions in two time periods under comparison. On the material of five datasets and three languages, we show that generated definitions are indeed specific and general enough to convey a signal sufficient to rank sets of words by the degree of their semantic change over time. Our approach is on par with or outperforms prior non-supervised sense-based LSCD methods. At the same time, it preserves interpretability and allows to inspect the reasons behind a specific shift in terms of discrete definitions-as-senses. This is another step in the direction of explainable semantic change modeling.

Definition generation for lexical semantic change detection

In this paper, we introduce COCONUT to effectively guide the contextualization of structured commonsense knowledge based on large
language models. COCONUT employs a contextualized knowledge prompting scheme to gather high-quality contextualization examples
from a large language model. These examples are subsequently distilled into small language models to enhance their contextualization capability. Extensive evaluations show that COCONUT considerably improves commonsense reasoning performance across diverse benchmarks, models, and settings, exhibiting its flexibility and universality in generating contextualized commonsense knowledge. Notably,
COCONUT consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art technique by an average of 5.8%.

Coconut: Contextualized Commonsense Unified Transformers for Graph-Based Commonsense Augmentation of Language Models

Combining large language models with logical reasoning enhances their capacity to address problems in a robust and reliable manner. Nevertheless, the intricate nature of logical reasoning poses challenges when gathering reliable data from the web to build comprehensive training datasets, subsequently affecting performance on downstream tasks. To address this, we introduce a novel logic-driven data augmentation approach, AMR-LDA. AMR-LDA converts the original text into an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph, a structured semantic representation that encapsulates the logical structure of the sentence, upon which operations are performed to generate logically modified AMR graphs. The modified AMR graphs are subsequently converted back into text to create augmented data. Notably, our methodology is architecture-agnostic and enhances both generative large language models, such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, through prompt augmentation, and discriminative large language models through contrastive learning with logic-driven data augmentation. Empirical evidence underscores the efficacy of our proposed method with improvement in performance across seven downstream tasks, such as reading comprehension requiring logical reasoning, textual entailment, and natural language inference. Furthermore, our method leads on the ReClor leaderboard\footnote{\url{https://eval.ai/web/challenges/challenge-page/503/leaderboard/1347}}. The source code and data are publicly available\footnote{\href{https://github.com/Strong-AI-Lab/Logical-Equivalence-driven-AMR-Data-Augmentation-for-Representation-Learning}{AMR-LDA GitHub Repository}}

Abstract Meaning Representation-Based Logic-Driven Data Augmentation for Logical Reasoning

Recent advancements in hate speech detection (HSD) in Vietnamese have made significant progress, primarily attributed to the emergence of transformer-based pre-trained language models, particularly those built on the BERT architecture. However, the necessity for specialized fine-tuned models has resulted in the complexity and fragmentation of developing a multitasking HSD system. Moreover, most current methodologies focus on fine-tuning general pre-trained models, primarily trained on formal textual datasets like Wikipedia, which may not accurately capture human behavior on online platforms. In this research, we introduce ViHateT5, a T5-based model pre-trained on our proposed large-scale domain-specific dataset named VOZ-HSD. By harnessing the power of a text-to-text architecture, ViHateT5 can tackle multiple tasks using a unified model and achieve state-of-the-art performance across all standard HSD benchmarks in Vietnamese. Our experiments also underscore the significance of label distribution in pre-training data on model efficacy. We provide our experimental materials for research purposes, including the VOZ-HSD dataset, pre-trained checkpoint, the unified HSD-multitask ViHateT5 model, and related source code on GitHub publicly.

ViHateT5: Enhancing Hate Speech Detection in Vietnamese With a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer Model

Online propaganda poses a severe threat to the integrity of societies. However, existing datasets for detecting online propaganda have a key limitation: they were annotated using weak labels that can be noisy and even incorrect. To address this limitation, our work makes the following contributions: (1) We present HQP: a novel dataset (N=30000) for detecting online propaganda with high-quality labels. To the best of our knowledge, HQP is the first large-scale dataset for detecting online propaganda that was created through human annotation. (2) We show empirically that state-of-the-art language models fail in detecting online propaganda when trained with weak labels (AUC: 64.03). In contrast, state-of-the-art language models can accurately detect online propaganda when trained with our high-quality labels (AUC: 92.25), which is an improvement of 44%. (3) We show that prompt-based learning using a small sample of high-quality labels can still achieve a reasonable performance (AUC: 80.27) while significantly reducing the cost of labeling. (4) We extend HQP to HQP+ to test how well propaganda across different contexts can be detected. Crucially, our work highlights the importance of high-quality labels for sensitive NLP tasks such as propaganda detection.

HQP: A Human-Annotated Dataset for Detecting Online Propaganda

Despite the ubiquity of large language models (LLMs) in AI research, the question of embodiment in LLMs remains underexplored, distinguishing them from embodied systems in robotics where sensory perception directly informs physical action.
Our investigation navigates the intriguing terrain of whether LLMs, despite their non-embodied nature, effectively capture implicit human intuitions about fundamental, spatial building blocks of language. We employ insights from spatial cognitive foundations developed through early sensorimotor experiences, guiding our exploration through the reproduction of three psycholinguistic experiments. Surprisingly, correlations between model outputs and human responses emerge, revealing adaptability without a tangible connection to embodied experiences. Notable distinctions include polarized language model responses and reduced correlations in vision language models. This research contributes to a nuanced understanding of the interplay between language, spatial experiences, and the computations made by large language models.

Project Website: https://cisnlp.github.io/Spatial_Schemas/

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Fast Randomized Low-Rank Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models with PAC Regularization

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