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Vision-language pre-training (VLP) on large-scale image-text pairs has achieved huge success for the cross-modal downstream tasks. The most existing pre-training methods mainly adopt a two-step training procedure, which firstly employs a pre-trained object detector to extract region-based visual features, then concatenates the image representation and text embedding as the input of Transformer to train. However, these methods face problems of using task-specific visual representation of the specific object detector for generic cross-modal understanding, and the computation inefficiency of two-stage pipeline.

In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end vision-language pre-trained model for both V+L understanding and generation, namely E2E-VLP, where we build a unified Transformer framework to jointly learn visual representation, and semantic alignments between image and text. We incorporate the tasks of object detection and image captioning into pre-training with a unified Transformer encoder-decoder architecture for enhancing visual learning. An extensive set of experiments have been conducted on well-established vision-language downstream tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of this novel VLP paradigm.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning

visual learning

vision-language pre-training

end-to-end

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

With the recent success of pre-trained models in NLP, a significant focus was put on interpreting their representations. One of the most prominent approaches is structural probing (Hewitt and Manning, 2019), where a linear projection of word embeddings is performed in order to approximate the topology of dependency structures. In this work, we introduce a new type of structural probing, where the linear projection is decomposed into 1. iso-morphic space rotation; 2. linear scaling that identifies and scales the most relevant dimensions. In addition to syntactic dependency, we evaluate our method on two novel tasks (lexical hypernymy and position in a sentence). We jointly train the probes for multiple tasks and experimentally show that lexical and syntactic information is separated in the representations. Moreover, the orthogonal constraint makes the Structural Probes less vulnerable to memorization.

Introducing Orthogonal Constraint in Structural Probes

Backdoor attacks are a kind of insidious security threat against machine learning models. After being injected with a backdoor in training, the victim model will produce adversary-specified outputs on the inputs embedded with predesigned triggers but behave properly on normal inputs during inference. As a sort of emergent attack, backdoor attacks in natural language processing (NLP) are investigated insufficiently. As far as we know, almost all existing textual backdoor attack methods insert additional contents into normal samples as triggers, which causes the trigger-embedded samples to be detected and the backdoor attacks to be blocked without much effort. In this paper, we propose to use the syntactic structure as the trigger in textual backdoor attacks. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that the syntactic trigger-based attack method can achieve comparable attack performance (almost 100% success rate) to the insertion-based methods but possesses much higher invisibility and stronger resistance to defenses. These results also reveal the significant insidiousness and harmfulness of textual backdoor attacks. All the code and data of this paper can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/HiddenKiller.

Hidden Killer: Invisible Textual Backdoor Attacks with Syntactic Trigger

Despite the success of contextualized language models on various NLP tasks, it is still unclear what these models really learn. In this paper, we contribute to the current efforts of explaining such models by exploring the continuum between function and content words with respect to contextualization in BERT, based on linguistically-informed insights. In particular, we utilize scoring and visual analytics techniques: we use an existing similarity-based score to measure contextualization and integrate it into a novel visual analytics technique, presenting the model's layers simultaneously and highlighting intra-layer properties and inter-layer differences. We show that contextualization is neither driven by polysemy nor by pure context variation. We also provide insights on why BERT fails to model words in the middle of the functionality continuum.

Explaining Contextualization in Language Models using Visual Analytics

Neural network architectures in natural language processing often use attention mechanisms to produce probability distributions over input token representations. Attention has empirically been demonstrated to improve performance in various tasks, while its weights have been extensively used as explanations for model predictions. Recent studies (Jain and Wallace, 2019; Serrano and Smith, 2019; Wiegreffe and Pinter, 2019) have showed that it cannot generally be considered as a faithful explanation (Jacovi and Goldberg, 2020) across encoders and tasks. In this paper, we seek to improve the faithfulness of attention-based explanations for text classification. We achieve this by proposing a new family of Task-Scaling (TaSc) mechanisms that learn task-specific non-contextualised information to scale the original attention weights. Evaluation tests for explanation faithfulness, show that the three proposed variants of TaSc improve attention-based explanations across two attention mechanisms, five encoders and five text classification datasets without sacrificing predictive performance. Finally, we demonstrate that TaSc consistently provides more faithful attention-based explanations compared to three widely-used interpretability techniques.

Improving the Faithfulness of Attention-based Explanations with Task-specific Information for Text Classification

Recent work has shown that Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) can be effectively performed by Gradual Machine Learning (GML), which begins with some automatically labeled easy instances, and then gradually labels more challenging instances by iterative factor graph inference without manual intervention. In GML, shared features serve as the medium for knowledge conveyance between unlabeled and labeled instances. However, the existing GML solution extracts features based on lexicons, which may not be accurate nor complete and thus lead to insufficient knowledge conveyance.

In this paper, we propose a Deep Neural Network (DNN) driven GML approach for ATSA, which can effectively leverage the strength of DNN in feature representation. It first uses an unsupervised neural network to cluster the automatically extracted features by their sentiment polarities. Then, it models the clustered features as factors to enable implicit knowledge conveyance for gradual inference in a factor graph. Furthermore, provided with labeled training data, we present a hybrid solution that similarly enables gradual learning by fusing the influence of DNN predictions and implicit knowledge conveyance. Finally, we have empirically evaluated the performance of the proposed approach on real benchmark data. Our extensive experiments have shown that the proposed approach consistently achieves the state-of-the-art performance across all the test datasets in both unsupervised and supervised settings and the improvement margins are considerable.

DNN-driven Gradual Machine Learning for Aspect-term Sentiment Analysis

Large-scale conversational assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant process every utterance using multiple models for domain, intent and named entity recognition. Given the decoupled nature of model development and large traffic volumes, it is extremely difficult to identify utterances processed erroneously by such systems. We address this challenge to detect domain classification errors using offline Transformer models. We leverage N-best domain hypotheses produced by the production system and combine them with the utterance encodings from RoBERTa model. We fine-tune end-to-end in a multi-task setting using a small dataset of human-annotated utterances. We tested our approach for detecting misclassifications from one domain that accounts for <0.5% of the traffic in a large-scale conversational AI system. Our approach achieves an F1 score of 30% outperforming the bi-LSTM baseline by 16.9 points and a strong RoBERTa model by 4.8 points. We improve this further by 2.3 points to 32.3% by ensembling multiple models.

Error Detection in Large-Scale Natural Language Understanding Systems Using Transformer Models

Out-of-domain (OOD) input detection is vital in a task-oriented dialogue system since the acceptance of unsupported inputs could lead to an incorrect response of the system. This paper proposes OutFlip, a method to generate out-of-domain samples using only in-domain training dataset automatically. A white-box natural language attack method HotFlip is revised to generate out-of-domain samples instead of adversarial examples. Our evaluation results showed that integrating OutFlip-generated out-of-domain samples into the training dataset could significantly improve an intent classification model's out-of-domain detection performance.

OutFlip: Generating Examples for Unknown Intent Detection with Natural Language Attack

Automatic math problem solving has recently attracted increasing attention as a long-standing AI benchmark. In this paper, we focus on solving geometric problems, which requires a comprehensive understanding of textual descriptions, visual diagrams, and theorem knowledge. However, the existing methods were highly dependent on handcraft rules and were merely evaluated on small-scale datasets.
Therefore, we propose a Geometric Question Answering dataset GeoQA, containing 5,010 geometric problems with corresponding annotated programs, which illustrate the solving process of the given problems. Compared with another publicly available dataset GeoS, GeoQA is 25 times larger, in which the program annotations can provide a practical testbed for future research on explicit and explainable numerical reasoning. Moreover, we introduce a Neural Geometric Solver (NGS) to address geometric problems by comprehensively parsing multimodal information and generating interpretable programs. We further add multiple self-supervised auxiliary tasks on NGS to enhance cross-modal semantic representation. Extensive experiments on GeoQA validate the effectiveness of our proposed NGS and auxiliary tasks. However, the results are still significantly lower than human performance, which leaves large room for future research. Our benchmark and code are released at https://github.com/chen-judge/GeoQA

GeoQA: A Geometric Question Answering Benchmark Towards Multimodal Numerical Reasoning

We present a novel method for relation extraction (RE) from a single sentence, mapping the sentence and two given entities to a canonical fact in a knowledge graph (KG). Especially in this presumed sentential RE setting, the context of a single sentence is often sparse. This paper introduces the KGPool method to address this sparsity, dynamically expanding the context with additional facts from the KG. It learns the representation of these facts (entity alias, entity descriptions, etc.) using neural methods, supplementing the sentential context. Unlike existing methods that statically use all expanded facts, KGPool conditions this expansion on the sentence. We study the efficacy of KGPool by evaluating it with different neural models and KGs (Wikidata and NYT Freebase). Our experimental evaluation on standard datasets shows that by feeding the KGPool representation into a Graph Neural Network, the overall method is significantly more accurate than state-of-the-art methods.

KGPool: Dynamic Knowledge Graph Context Selection for Relation Extraction

Paraphrase generation is an important but challenging natural language generation problem. In this work, we propose a new Identification-then-Aggregation (IA) framework to tackle this task. 
In the identification step, the input tokens are sorted into two groups by a novel Primary/Secondary Identification (PSI) algorithm. In the aggregation step, these groups are separately encoded, before being aggregated by a custom designed decoder, which autoregressively generates the paraphrased sentence. In extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our model outperforms previous studies by a notable margin. We also show that the proposed approach can generate paraphrases in an interpretable and controllable way.

E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning

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