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Leveraging large-scale unlabeled web videos such as instructional videos for pre-training followed by task-specific finetuning has become the de facto approach for many video-and-language tasks. However, these instructional videos are very noisy, the accompanying ASR narrations are often incomplete, and can be irrelevant to or temporally misaligned with the visual content, limiting the performance of the models trained on such data. To address these issues, we propose an improved video-and-language pre-training method that first adds automatically-extracted dense region captions from the video frames as auxiliary text input, to provide informative visual cues for learning better video and language associations. Second, to alleviate the temporal misalignment issue, our method incorporates an entropy minimization-based constrained attention loss, to encourage the model to automatically focus on the correct caption from a pool of candidate ASR captions. Our overall approach is named DeCEMBERT (Dense Captions and Entropy Minimization). Comprehensive experiments on three video-and-language tasks (text-to-video retrieval, video captioning, and video question answering) across five datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies on pre-training and downstream tasks show that adding dense captions and constrained attention loss help improve the model performance. Lastly, we also provide attention visualization to show the effect of applying the proposed constrained attention loss.

NAACL 2021

DeCEMBERT: Learning from Noisy Instructional Videos via Dense Captions and Entropy Minimization

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

The speech act of complaining is used by humans to communicate a negative mismatch between reality and expectations as a reaction to an unfavorable situation. Linguistic theory of pragmatics categorizes complaints into various severity levels based on the face-threat that the complainer is willing to undertake. This is particularly useful for understanding the intent of complainers and how humans develop suitable apology strategies. In this paper, we study the severity level of complaints for the first time in computational linguistics. To facilitate this, we enrich a publicly available data set of complaints with four severity categories and train different transformer-based networks combined with linguistic information achieving 55.7 macro F1. We also jointly model binary complaint classification and complaint severity in a multi-task setting achieving new state-of-the-art results on binary complaint detection reaching up to 88.2 macro F1. Finally, we present a qualitative analysis of the behavior of our models in predicting complaint severity levels.

Modeling the Severity of Complaints in Social Media

In common law, the outcome of a new case is determined mostly by precedent cases, rather than by existing statutes. However, how exactly does the precedent influence the outcome of a new case? Answering this question is crucial for guaranteeing fair and consistent judicial decision-making. We are the first to approach this question computationally by comparing two longstanding jurisprudential views; Halsbury's, who believes that the arguments of the precedent are the main determinant of the outcome, and Goodhart's, who believes that what matters most is the precedent's facts. We base our study on the corpus of legal cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which allows us to access not only the case itself, but also cases cited in the judges' arguments (i.e. the precedent cases). Taking an information-theoretic view, and modelling the question as a case outcome classification task, we find that the precedent's arguments share 0.38 nats of information with the case's outcome, whereas precedent's facts only share 0.18 nats of information (i.e., 58% less); suggesting Halsbury's view may be more accurate in this specific court. We found however in a qualitative analysis that there are specific statues where Goodhart's view dominates, and present some evidence these are the ones where the legal concept at hand is less straightforward.

What About the Precedent: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Common Law

Building NLP systems that serve everyone requires accounting for dialect differences. But dialects are not monolithic entities: rather, distinctions between and within dialects are captured by the presence, absence, and frequency of dozens of dialect features in speech and text, such as the deletion of the copula in "He {} running". In this paper, we introduce the task of dialect feature detection, and present two multitask learning approaches, both based on pretrained transformers. For most dialects, large-scale annotated corpora for these features are unavailable, making it difficult to train recognizers. We train our models on a small number of minimal pairs, building on how linguists typically define dialect features. Evaluation on a test set of 22 dialect features of Indian English demonstrates that these models learn to recognize many features with high accuracy, and that a few minimal pairs can be as effective for training as thousands of labeled examples. We also demonstrate the downstream applicability of dialect feature detection both as a measure of dialect density and as a dialect classifier.

Learning to Recognize Dialect Features

Much previous work characterizing language variation across Internet social groups has focused on the types of words used by these groups. We extend this type of study by employing BERT to characterize variation in the senses of words as well, analyzing two months of English comments in 474 Reddit communities. The specificity of different sense clusters to a community, combined with the specificity of a community's unique word types, is used to identify cases where a social group's language deviates from the norm. We validate our metrics using user-created glossaries and draw on sociolinguistic theories to connect language variation with trends in community behavior. We find that communities with highly distinctive language are medium-sized, and their loyal and highly engaged users interact in dense networks.

Characterizing English Variation across Social Media Communities with BERT

Language models (LMs) must be both safe and equitable to be responsibly deployed in practice. With safety in mind, numerous detoxification techniques (e.g., Dathathri et al. 2020; Krause et al. 2020) have been proposed to mitigate toxic LM generations. In this work, we show that current detoxification techniques hurt equity: they decrease the utility of LMs on language used by marginalized groups (e.g., African-American English and minority identity mentions). In particular, we perform automatic and human evaluations of text generation quality when LMs are conditioned on inputs with different dialects and group identifiers. We find that detoxification makes LMs more brittle to distribution shift, especially on language used by marginalized groups. We identify that these failures stem from detoxification methods exploiting spurious correlations in toxicity datasets. Overall, our results highlight the tension between the controllability and distributional robustness of LMs.

Detoxifying Language Models Risks Marginalizing Minority Voices

The ease of access to pre-trained transformers has enabled developers to leverage large-scale language models to build exciting applications for their users.

Towards a Comprehensive Understanding and Accurate Evaluation of Societal Biases in Pre-Trained Transformers

Transformer-based pre-trained language models have significantly improved the performance of various natural language processing (NLP) tasks in recent years. While effective and prevalent, these models are usually prohibitively large for resource-limited deployment scenarios. A thread of research has thus been working on applying network pruning techniques under the pretrain-then-finetune paradigm widely adopted in NLP. However, the existing pruning results on benchmark transformers, such as BERT, are not as re- markable as the pruning results in the literature of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In particular, common wisdom in pruning CNN states that sparse pruning technique compresses a model more than that obtained by reducing the number of channels and layers (Elsen et al., 2020; Zhu and Gupta, 2017), while existing works on sparse pruning of BERT yields inferior results than its small-dense counterparts such as TinyBERT (Jiao et al., 2020). In this work, we aim to fill this gap by studying how knowledge is transferred and lost during the pre-train, fine-tune, and pruning process, and proposing a knowledge-aware sparse pruning process that achieves significantly superior results than existing literature. We show for the first time that sparse pruning compresses a BERT model significantly more than reducing its number of channels and layers. Experiments on multiple data sets of GLUE benchmark show that our method outperforms the leading competitors with a 20-times weight/FLOPs compression and neglectable loss in prediction accuracy.

Rethinking Network Pruning -- under the Pre-train and Fine-tune Paradigm

Language models have revolutionized the field of NLP. However, language models capture and proliferate hurtful stereotypes, especially in text generation. Our results show that 4.3% of the time, language models complete a sentence with a hurtful word. These cases are not random, but follow language and gender-specific patterns.

HONEST: Measuring Hurtful Sentence Completion in Language Models

Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) have been intensively explored in recent years due to their promise for a wide range of applications. However, existing studies focus on improving the final model performance without acknowledging the computational cost of the proposed approaches, in terms of execution time and environmental impact. This paper proposes a simple yet effective KGE framework which can reduce the training time and carbon footprint by orders of magnitudes compared with state-of-the-art approaches, while producing competitive performance. We highlight three technical innovations: full batch learning via relational matrices, closed-form Orthogonal Procrustes Analysis for KGEs, and non-negative-sampling training. In addition, as the first KGE method whose entity embeddings also store full relation information, our trained models encode rich semantics and are highly interpretable. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies involving 13 strong baselines and two standard datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm.

Highly Efficient Knowledge Graph Embedding Learning with {O}rthogonal {P}rocrustes {A}nalysis

This paper studies zero-shot cross-lingual transfer of vision-language models. Specifically, we focus on multilingual text-to-video search and propose a Transformer-based model that learns contextual multilingual multimodal embeddings. Under a zero-shot setting, we empirically demonstrate that performance degrades significantly when we query the multilingual text-video model with non-English sentences. To address this problem, we introduce a multilingual multimodal pre-training strategy, and collect a new multilingual instructional video dataset (Multi-HowTo100M) for pre-training. Experiments on VTT show that our method significantly improves video search in non-English languages without additional annotations. Furthermore, when multilingual annotations are available, our method outperforms recent baselines by a large margin in multilingual text-to-video search on VTT and VATEX; as well as in multilingual text-to-image search on Multi30K.

DeCEMBERT: Learning from Noisy Instructional Videos via Dense Captions and Entropy Minimization

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Modeling the Severity of Complaints in Social Media

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