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Knowledge distillation has been proven to be effective in model acceleration and compression. It transfers knowledge from a large neural network to a small one by using the large neural network predictions as targets of the small neural network. But this way ignores the knowledge inside the large neural networks, e.g., parameters. Our preliminary study as well as the recent success in pre-training suggests that transferring parameters are more effective in distilling knowledge. In this paper, we propose Weight Distillation to transfer the knowledge in parameters of a large neural network to a small neural network through a parameter generator. On the WMT16 En-Ro, NIST12 Zh-En, and WMT14 En-De machine translation tasks, our experiments show that weight distillation learns a small network that is 1.88~2.94x faster than the large network but with competitive BLEU performance. When fixing the size of small networks, weight distillation outperforms knowledge distillation by 0.51~1.82 BLEU points.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Weight Distillation: Transferring the Knowledge in Neural Network Parameters

model acceleration

knowledge distillation

machine translation

**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).

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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

Dense video event captioning aims to generate a sequence of descriptive captions for each event in a long untrimmed video. Video-level context provides important information and facilities the model to generate consistent and less redundant captions between events. In this paper, we introduce a novel Hierarchical Context-aware Network for dense video event captioning (HCN) to capture context from various aspects. In detail, the model leverages local and global context with different mechanisms to jointly learn to generate coherent captions. The local context module performs full interaction between neighbor frames and the global context module selectively attends to previous or future events. According to our extensive experiment on both Youcook2 and Activitynet Captioning datasets, the video-level HCN model outperforms the event-level context-agnostic model by a large margin. The code is available at https://github.com/KirkGuo/HCN.

Hierarchical Context-aware Network for Dense Video Event Captioning

Generating image captions with user intention is an emerging need. The recently published Localized Narratives dataset takes mouse traces as another input to the image captioning task, which is an intuitive and efficient way for a user to control what to describe in the image. However, how to effectively employ traces to improve generation quality and controllability is still under exploration. This paper aims to solve this problem by proposing a novel model called LoopCAG, which connects Contrastive constraints and Attention Guidance in a Loop manner, engaged explicit spatial and temporal constraints to the generating process. Precisely, each generated sentence is temporally aligned to the corresponding trace sequence through a contrastive learning strategy. Besides, each generated text token is supervised to attend to the correct visual objects under heuristic spatial attention guidance. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our LoopCAG model learns better correspondence among the three modalities (vision, language, and traces) and achieves SOTA performance on trace-controlled image captioning task. Moreover, the controllability and explainability of LoopCAG are validated by analyzing spatial and temporal sensitivity during the generation process.

Control Image Captioning Spatially and Temporally

Active learning promises to alleviate the massive data needs of supervised machine learning: it has successfully improved sample efficiency by an order of magnitude on traditional tasks like topic classification and object recognition. However, we uncover a striking contrast to this promise: across 5 models and 4 datasets on the task of visual question answering, a wide variety of active learning approaches fail to outperform random selection. To understand this discrepancy, we profile 8 active learning methods on a per-example basis, and identify the problem as collective outliers -- groups of examples that active learning methods prefer to acquire but models fail to learn (e.g., questions that ask about text in images or require external knowledge). Through systematic ablation experiments and qualitative visualizations, we verify that collective outliers are a general phenomenon responsible for degrading pool-based active learning. Notably, we show that active learning sample efficiency increases significantly as the number of collective outliers in the active learning pool decreases. We conclude with a discussion and prescriptive recommendations for mitigating the effects of these outliers in future work.

Mind Your Outliers! Investigating the Negative Impact of Outliers on Active Learning for Visual Question Answering

Understanding manipulated media, from automatically generated `deepfakes' to manually edited ones, raises novel research challenges. Because the vast majority of edited or manipulated images are benign, such as photoshopped images for visual enhancements, the key challenge is to understand the complex layers of underlying intents of media edits and their implications with respect to disinformation. 

In this paper, we study Edited Media Frames, a new formalism to understand visual media manipulation as structured annotations with respect to the intents, emotional reactions, attacks on individuals, and the overall implications of disinformation. We introduce a dataset for our task, EMU, with 56k question-answer pairs written in rich natural language. We evaluate a wide variety of vision-and-language models for our task, and introduce a new model PELICAN, which builds upon recent progress in pretrained multimodal representations. Our model obtains promising results on our dataset, with humans rating its answers as accurate 48.2% of the time. At the same time, there is still much work to be done -- and we provide analysis that highlights areas for further progress.

Edited Media Understanding Frames: Reasoning About the Intent and Implications of Visual Misinformation

We propose PIGLeT: a model that learns physical commonsense knowledge through interaction, and then uses this knowledge to ground language. We factorize PIGLeT into a physical dynamics model, and a separate language model. Our dynamics model learns not just what objects are but also what they do: glass cups break when thrown, plastic ones don't. We then use it as the interface to our language model, giving us a unified model of linguistic form and grounded meaning. PIGLeT can read a sentence, simulate neurally what might happen next, and then communicate that result through a literal symbolic representation, or natural language. 

Experimental results show that our model effectively learns world dynamics, along with how to communicate them. It is able to correctly forecast what happens next given an English sentence over 80% of the time, outperforming a 100x larger, text-to-text approach by over 10%. Likewise, its natural language summaries of physical interactions are also judged by humans as more accurate than LM alternatives. We present comprehensive analysis showing room for future work.

PIGLeT: Language Grounding Through Neuro-Symbolic Interaction in a 3D World

Neural entity typing models typically represent fine-grained entity types as vectors in a high-dimensional space, but such spaces are not well-suited to modeling these types' complex interdependencies. We study the ability of box embeddings, which embed concepts as d-dimensional hyperrectangles, to capture hierarchies of types even when these relationships are not defined explicitly in the ontology. Our model represents both types and entity mentions as boxes. Each mention and its context are fed into a BERT-based model to embed that mention in our box space; essentially, this model leverages typological clues present in the surface text to hypothesize a type representation for the mention. Box containment can then be used to derive both the posterior probability of a mention exhibiting a given type and the conditional probability relations between types themselves. We compare our approach with a vector-based typing model and observe state-of-the-art performance on several entity typing benchmarks. In addition to competitive typing performance, our box-based model shows better performance in prediction consistency (predicting a supertype and a subtype together) and confidence (i.e., calibration), demonstrating that the box-based model captures the latent type hierarchies better than the vector-based model does.

Modeling Fine-Grained Entity Types with Box Embeddings

Recent pretraining models in Chinese neglect two important aspects specific to the Chinese language: glyph and pinyin, which carry significant syntax and semantic information for language understanding. In this work, we propose ChineseBERT, which incorporates both the {\it glyph} and {\it pinyin} information of Chinese characters into language model pretraining. The glyph embedding is obtained based on different fonts of a Chinese character, being able to capture character semantics from the visual features, and the pinyin embedding characterizes the pronunciation of Chinese characters, which handles the highly prevalent heteronym phenomenon in Chinese (the same character has different pronunciations with different meanings). Pretrained on large-scale unlabeled Chinese corpus, the proposed ChineseBERT model yields significant performance boost over baseline models with fewer training steps. The proposed model achieves new SOTA performances on a wide range of Chinese NLP tasks, including machine reading comprehension, natural language inference, text classification, sentence pair matching, and competitive performances in named entity recognition and word segmentation.

ChineseBERT: Chinese Pretraining Enhanced by Glyph and Pinyin Information

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract triplets from sentences, where each triplet includes an entity, its associated sentiment, and the opinion span explaining the reason for the sentiment.
Most existing research addresses this problem in a multi-stage pipeline manner, which neglects the mutual information between such three elements and has the problem of error propagation. In this paper, we propose a Semantic and Syntactic Enhanced aspect Sentiment triplet Extraction model S3E2 to fully exploit the syntactic and semantic relationships between the triplet elements and jointly extract them.
Specifically, we design a Graph-Sequence duel representation and modeling paradigm for the task of ASTE: we represent the semantic and syntactic relationships between word pairs in a sentence by graph and encode it by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), as well as modeling the original sentence by LSTM to preserve the sequential information. Under this setting, we further apply a more efficient inference strategy for the extraction of triplets.
Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets show that S3E2 significantly outperforms existing approaches, which proves our S3E2's superiority and flexibility in an end-to-end fashion.

Semantic and Syntactic Enhanced Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Adapting a model to a handful of personalized data is challenging, especially when it has gigantic parameters, such as a Transformer-based pretrained model. The standard way of fine-tuning all the parameters necessitates storing a huge model for each user. In this work, we introduce a lightweight approach dubbed UserAdapter, which clamps hundred millions of parameters of the Transformer model and optimizes a tiny user-specific vector. We take sentiment analysis as a test bed, and collect datasets of reviews from Yelp and IMDB respectively. Results show that, on both datasets, UserAdapter achieves better accuracy than the standard fine-tuned Transformer-based pre-trained model. More importantly, UserAdapter offers an efficient way to produce a personalized Transformer model with less than 0.5\% parameters added for each user.

UserAdapter: Few-Shot User Learning in Sentiment Analysis

Question: I have five fingers but I am not alive. What am I? Answer: a glove. 
Answering such a riddle-style question is a challenging cognitive process, in that it requires complex commonsense reasoning abilities, an understanding of figurative language, and counterfactual reasoning skills, which are all important abilities for advanced natural language understanding (NLU).
However, there is currently no dataset aiming to test these abilities.
In this paper, we present RiddleSense, a new multiple-choice question answering task,
which comes with the first large dataset (5.7k examples) for answering riddle-style commonsense questions. 
We systematically evaluate a wide range of models over the \textsc{RiddleSense} challenge and point out that there is a large gap between the best-supervised model and human performance --- suggesting intriguing future research in the direction of higher-order commonsense reasoning and linguistic creativity towards building advanced NLU systems.

Weight Distillation: Transferring the Knowledge in Neural Network Parameters

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