United States

We rely on arguments in our daily lives to deliver our opinions and base them on evidence, making them more convincing in turn. However, finding and formulating arguments can be challenging. In this work, we present the Arg-CTRL - a language model for argument generation that can be controlled to generate sentence-level arguments for a given topic, stance, and aspect. We define argument aspect detection as a necessary method to allow this fine-granular control and crowdsource a dataset with 5,032 arguments annotated with aspects. Our evaluation shows that the Arg-CTRL is able to generate high-quality, aspect-specific arguments, applicable to automatic counter-argument generation. We publish the model weights and all datasets and code to train the Arg-CTRL.

NAACL 2021

Aspect-Controlled Neural Argument Generation

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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technical paper

While cross-lingual techniques are finding increasing success in a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks, their application to Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) has been strongly limited by the fact that each language adopts its own linguistic formalism, from PropBank for English to AnCora for Spanish and PDT-Vallex for Czech, inter alia. In this work, we address this issue and present a unified model to perform cross-lingual SRL over heterogeneous linguistic resources. Our model implicitly learns a high-quality mapping for different formalisms across diverse languages without resorting to word alignment and/or translation techniques. We find that, not only is our cross-lingual system competitive with the current state of the art but that it is also robust to low-data scenarios. Most interestingly, our unified model is able to annotate a sentence in a single forward pass with all the inventories it was trained with, providing a tool for the analysis and comparison of linguistic theories across different languages.

Unifying Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling with Heterogeneous Linguistic Resources

The de-facto standard decoding method for semantic parsing in recent years has been to autoregressively decode the abstract syntax tree of the target program using a top-down depthfirst traversal. In this work, we propose an alternative approach: a Semi-autoregressive Bottom-up Parser (SmBoP) that constructs at decoding step t the top-K sub-trees of height ≤ t. Our parser enjoys several benefits compared to top-down autoregressive parsing. From an efficiency perspective, bottom-up parsing allows to decode all sub-trees of a certain height in parallel, leading to logarithmic runtime complexity rather than linear. From a modeling perspective, a bottom-up parser learns representations for meaningful semantic sub-programs at each step, rather than for semantically-vacuous partial trees. We apply SmBoP on Spider, a challenging zero-shot semantic parsing benchmark, and show that SmBoP leads to a 2.2x speed-up in decoding time and a ∼5x speed-up in training time, compared to a semantic parser that uses autoregressive decoding. SMBOP obtains 71.1 denotation accuracy on SPIDER, establishing a new state-of-the-art, and 69.5 exact match, comparable to the 69.6 exact match of the autoregressive RAT-SQL+GRAPPA.

SmBoP: Semi-autoregressive Bottom-up Semantic Parsing

Graph-based semantic parsing aims to represent textual meaning through directed graphs. As one of the most promising general-purpose meaning representations, these structures and their parsing have gained a significant interest momentum during recent years, with several diverse formalisms being proposed. Yet, owing to this very heterogeneity, most of the research effort has focused mainly on solutions specific to a given formalism. In this work, instead, we reframe semantic parsing towards multiple formalisms as Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT), and propose SGL, a many-to-many seq2seq architecture trained with an MNMT objective. Backed by several experiments, we show that this framework is indeed effective once the learning procedure is enhanced with large parallel corpora coming from Machine Translation: we report competitive performances on AMR and UCCA parsing, especially once paired with pre-trained architectures. Furthermore, we find that models trained under this configuration scale remarkably well to tasks such as Cross-Lingual AMR parsing: SGL outperforms all its competitors by a large margin without even explicitly seeing non-English to AMR examples at training time and, once these examples are included as well, sets an unprecedented state of the art in this task.

SGL: Speaking the Graph Languages of Semantic Parsing via Multilingual Translation

The importance of building semantic parsers which can be applied to new domains and generate programs unseen at training has long been acknowledged, and datasets testing out- of-domain performance are becoming increas- ingly available. However, little or no attention has been devoted to learning algorithms or objectives which promote domain general- ization, with virtually all existing approaches relying on standard supervised learning. In this work, we use a meta-learning framework which targets zero-shot domain generalization for semantic parsing. We apply a model- agnostic training algorithm that simulates zero- shot parsing by constructing virtual train and test sets from disjoint domains. The learning objective capitalizes on the intuition that gradient steps that improve source-domain performance should also improve target-domain per- formance, thus encouraging a parser to gen- eralize to unseen target domains. Experimental results on the (English) Spider and Chinese Spider datasets show that the meta-learning ob- jective significantly boosts the performance of a baseline parser.

Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization in Semantic Parsing

**Read the paper on the folowing link:**

https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2021.naacl-srw.1/

**Abstract:**

0

Sampling and Filtering of Neural Machine Translation Distillation Data

In primary school, children's books, as well as in modern language learning apps, multi-modal learning strategies like illustrations of terms and phrases are used to support reading comprehension. Also, several studies in educational psychology suggest that integrating cross-modal information will improve reading comprehension. We claim that state-of-the-art multi-modal transformers, which could be used in a language learner context to improve human reading, will perform poorly because of the short and relatively simple textual data those models are trained with. To prove our hypotheses, we collected a new multi-modal image-retrieval dataset based on data from Wikipedia. In an in-depth data analysis, we highlight the differences between our dataset and other popular datasets. Additionally, we evaluate several state-of-the-art multi-modal transformers on text-image retrieval on our dataset and analyze their meager results, which verify our claims.

Towards Multi-Modal Text-Image Retrieval to improve Human Reading

Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) is the task of generating concise and fluent summaries from one or more documents. In this paper, we present IceSum, the first Icelandic corpus annotated with human-generated summaries. IceSum consists of 1,000 online news articles and their extractive summaries. We train and evaluate several neural network-based models on this dataset, comparing them against a selection of baseline methods. The best model obtains a ROUGE-2 recall score of 71.06, outperforming all baseline methods. Furthermore, we evaluate how the amount of training data affects the quality of the generated summaries. Our results show that while the corpus is sufficiently large to train a well-performing model, there could still be significant gains from increasing the size of the training set.

IceSum: An Icelandic Text Summarization Corpus

Negation is a linguistic universal that poses dif- ficulties for cognitive and computational processing. Despite many advances in text analytics, negation resolution remains an acute and continuously researched question in Natural Language Processing. Reliable negation parsing affects results in biomedical text mining, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and many other fields. The availability of multilingual pre-trained general representation models makes it possible to experiment with negation detection in languages that lack annotated data. In this work we test the performance of two state-of-the-art contextual representation models, Multilingual BERT and XLM-RoBERTa. We resolve negation scope by conducting zero-shot transfer between En- glish, Spanish, French, and Russian. Our best result amounts to a token-level F1-score of 86.86% between Spanish and Russian. We correlate these results with a linguistic negation typology and lexical capacity of the models.

Negation typology and general representation models for cross-lingual zero-shot negation scope resolution in Russian, French, and Spanish.

We propose neural models to generate text from formal meaning representations based on Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs). DRSs are document-level representations which encode rich semantic detail pertaining to rhetorical relations,

Text Generation from Discourse Representation Structures

Natural language often exhibits inherent hierarchical structure ingrained with complex syntax and semantics. However, most state-ofthe-art deep generative models learn embeddings only in Euclidean vector space, without accounting for this structural property of language. We investigate text generation in a hyperbolic latent space to learn continuous hierarchical representations. An Adversarial Poincaré Variational Autoencoder (APo-VAE) is presented, where both the prior and variational posterior of latent variables are defined over a Poincaré ball via wrapped normal distributions. By adopting the primal-dual formulation of Kullback-Leibler divergence, an adversarial learning procedure is introduced to empower robust model training. Extensive experiments in language modeling, unaligned style transfer, and dialog-response generation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed APo-VAE model over VAEs in Euclidean latent space, thanks to its superb capabilities in capturing latent language hierarchies in hyperbolic space.

Aspect-Controlled Neural Argument Generation

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