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Pretrained contextualized embeddings are powerful word representations for structured prediction tasks. Recent work found that better word representations can be obtained by concatenating different types of embeddings. However, the selection of embeddings to form the best concatenated representation usually varies depending on the task and the collection of candidate embeddings, and the ever-increasing number of embedding types makes it a more difficult problem. In this paper, we propose Automated Concatenation of Embeddings (ACE) to automate the process of finding better concatenations of embeddings for structured prediction tasks, based on a formulation inspired by recent progress on neural architecture search. Specifically, a controller alternately samples a concatenation of embeddings, according to its current belief of the effectiveness of individual embedding types in consideration for a task, and updates the belief based on a reward. We follow strategies in reinforcement learning to optimize the parameters of the controller and compute the reward based on the accuracy of a task model, which is fed with the sampled concatenation as input and trained on a task dataset. Empirical results on 6 tasks and 21 datasets show that our approach outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance with fine-tuned embeddings in all the evaluations.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Automated Concatenation of Embeddings for Structured Prediction

chunking

neural architecture search

sentiment analysis

part-of-speech tagging

named entity recognition

parsing

structured prediction

sequence labeling

**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.


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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

Document-level contextual information has shown benefits to text-based machine translation, but whether and how context helps end-to-end (E2E) speech translation (ST) is still under-studied. We fill this gap through extensive experiments using a simple concatenation-based context-aware ST model, paired with adaptive feature selection on speech encodings for computational efficiency. We investigate several decoding approaches, and introduce in-model ensemble decoding which jointly performs document- and sentence-level translation using the same model. Our results on the MuST-C benchmark with Transformer demonstrate the effectiveness of context to E2E ST. Compared to sentence-level ST, context-aware ST obtains better translation quality (+0.18-2.61 BLEU), improves pronoun and homophone translation, shows better robustness to (artificial) audio segmentation errors, and reduces latency and flicker to deliver higher quality for simultaneous translation.

Beyond Sentence-Level End-to-End Speech Translation: Context Helps

Pre-training of text and layout has proved effective in a variety of visually-rich document understanding tasks due to its effective model architecture and the advantage of large-scale unlabeled scanned/digital-born documents. We propose LayoutLMv2 architecture with new pre-training tasks to model the interaction among text, layout, and image in a single multi-modal framework. Specifically, with a two-stream multi-modal Transformer encoder, LayoutLMv2 uses not only the existing masked visual-language modeling task but also the new text-image alignment and text-image matching tasks, which make it better capture the cross-modality interaction in the pre-training stage. Meanwhile, it also integrates a spatial-aware self-attention mechanism into the Transformer architecture so that the model can fully understand the relative positional relationship among different text blocks. Experiment results show that LayoutLMv2 outperforms LayoutLM by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of downstream visually-rich document understanding tasks, including FUNSD (0.7895 to 0.8420), CORD (0.9493 to 0.9601), SROIE (0.9524 to 0.9781), Kleister-NDA (0.8340 to 0.8520), RVL-CDIP (0.9443 to 0.9564), and DocVQA (0.7295 to 0.8672).

LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding

Existed pre-training methods either focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal tasks, and cannot effectively adapt to each other. They can only utilize single-modal data (i.e., text or image) or limited multi-modal data (i.e., image-text pairs). In this work, we propose a UNIfied-MOdal pre-training architecture, namely UNIMO, which can effectively adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. Large scale of free text corpus and image collections are utilized to improve the capability of visual and textual understanding, and cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL) is leveraged to align the textual and visual information into a unified semantic space, over a corpus of image-text pairs augmented with related images and texts. With the help of rich non-paired single-modal data, our model is able to learn more generalizable representations, by allowing textual knowledge and visual knowledge to enhance each other in the unified semantic space. The experimental results show that UNIMO greatly improves the performance of several single-modal and multi-modal downstream tasks. Our code and pre-trained models are public at \url{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/NLP/UNIMO}.

UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning

Multimodal fusion has been proved to improve emotion recognition performance in previous works.
However, in real-world applications, we often encounter the problem of missing modality, and which modalities will be missing is uncertain. It makes the fixed multimodal fusion fail in such cases.
In this work, we propose a unified model, Missing Modality Imagination Network (MMIN), to deal with the uncertain missing modality problem. MMIN learns robust joint multimodal representations, which can predict the representation of any missing modality given available modalities under different missing modality conditions.Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the unified MMIN model significantly improves emotion recognition performance under both uncertain missing-modality testing conditions and full-modality ideal testing condition. The code will be available at https://github.com/AIM3-RUC/MMIN.

Missing Modality Imagination Network for Emotion Recognition with Uncertain Missing Modalities

Encoder pre-training is promising in end-to-end Speech Translation (ST), given the fact that speech-to-translation data is scarce.
But ST encoders are not simple instances of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) or Machine Translation (MT) encoders.
For example, we find that ASR encoders lack the global context representation, which is necessary for translation, whereas MT encoders are not designed to deal with long but locally attentive acoustic sequences.
In this work, we propose a Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding (SATE) method for speech translation.
Our encoder begins with processing the acoustic sequence as usual, but later behaves more like an MT encoder for a global representation of the input sequence.
In this way, it is straightforward to incorporate the pre-trained models into the system.
Also, we develop an adaptor module to alleviate the representation inconsistency between the pre-trained ASR encoder and MT encoder, and develop a multi-teacher knowledge distillation method to preserve the pre-training knowledge.
Experimental results on the LibriSpeech En-Fr and MuST-C En-De ST tasks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art BLEU scores of 18.3 and 25.2.
To our knowledge, we are the first to develop an end-to-end ST system that achieves comparable or even better BLEU performance than the cascaded ST counterpart when large-scale ASR and MT data is available.

Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders

In this paper, we study the task of graph-based constituent parsing in the setting that binarization is not conducted as a pre-processing step, where a constituent tree may consist of nodes with more than two children. Previous graph-based methods on this setting typically generate hidden nodes with the dummy label inside the n-ary nodes, in order to transform the tree into a binary tree for prediction. The limitation is that the hidden nodes break the sibling relations of the n-ary node's children. Consequently, the dependencies of such sibling constituents might not be accurately modeled and is being ignored. To solve this limitation, we propose a novel graph-based framework, which is called "recursive semi-Markov model". The main idea is to utilize 1-order semi-Markov model to predict the immediate children sequence of a constituent candidate, which then recursively serves as a child candidate of its parent. In this manner, the dependencies of sibling constituents can be described by 1-order transition features, which solves the above limitation. Through experiments, the proposed framework obtains the F1 of 95.92% and 92.50% on the datasets of PTB and CTB 5.1 respectively. Specially, the recursive semi-Markov model shows advantages in modeling nodes with more than two children, whose average F1 can be improved by 0.3-1.1 points in PTB and 2.3-6.8 points in CTB 5.1.

N-ary Constituent Tree Parsing with Recursive Semi-Markov Model

Previous studies have argued that pre-trained language models encode commonsense relational knowledge (e.g. that apples are edible). However, simultaneous work has revealed that such models are often insensitive to context, even ignoring overt contextual cues such as negations. In this paper, we investigate whether masked language models (the BERT family), can move beyond naive associative biases (e.g., apple -> edible) when the context warrants (e.g. ranking inedible higher when presented with the information that the apple is rotten). We introduce the WinoVenti procedure, which adversarially exploits associative biases in masked language models to create model-specific Winograd-style entailment schemas. Using our constructed WinoVenti challenges set of over 2000 schemas, we discover that language models in the BERT family experience a steep drop in performance on prompts that require them to pick answers which require reasoning about context (e.g., from 89.8% to 18.4% for BERT Large). We present evidence to show that language models exhibit different associative biases, suggesting a need for future work in developing and analyzing frameworks similar to WinoVenti that are tuned to model-specific weaknesses.

Are Rotten Apples Edible? Challenging Commonsense Inference Ability with Exceptions

Retrofitting is a technique used to move word vectors closer together or further apart in their space to reflect their relationships in a Knowledge Base (KB). However, retrofitting only works on concepts that are present in that KB. RetroGAN uses a pair of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to learn a one-to-one mapping between concepts and their
retrofitted counterparts. It applies that mapping (post-specializes) to handle concepts that
do not appear in the original KB in a manner similar to how some natural language systems handle out-of-vocabulary entries. We test our system on three word-similarity benchmarks and a downstream sentence simplification task, and achieve the state of the art (CARD-660). Altogether, our results demonstrate our system’s effectiveness for out-of-knowledge and rare word generalization.

RetroGAN: A Cyclic Post-Specialization System for Improving Out-of-Knowledge and Rare Word Representations

The task of ICD coding is to automatically extract International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes from unstructured clinical notes or discharge summaries, which not only saves time and money but also reduces errors. Although several studies are proposed to solve this challenging task, none of them distinguishes the importance of different phrases with a word window. Intuitively, informative phrases should be more useful for the prediction. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective feature compressed ICD coding model named Fusion to address this issue. In particular, we propose a novel attentive soft-pooling approach to compress the sparse and redundant word representations into informative and dense ones as local features. Besides, we use the key-query attention mechanism for modeling the inner relations among local features to generate the global features, which are further used to predict ICD codes. Experiments on two widely used datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms baselines. However, on the MIMIC-III Full dataset, we find that none of the state-of-the-art approaches significantly perform better than others. Thus, automated ICD coding is still a challenging task.

Fusion: Towards Automated ICD Coding via Feature Compression

In this paper, we introduce an event-driven trading strategy that predicts stock movements by detecting corporate events from news articles. Unlike existing models that utilize textual features (e.g., bag-of-words) and sentiments to directly make stock predictions, we consider corporate events as the driving force behind stock movements and aim to profit from the temporary stock mispricing that may occur when corporate events take place. The core of the proposed strategy is a bi-level event detection model. The low-level event detector identifies events' existences from each token, while the high-level event detector incorporates the entire article's representation and the low-level detected results to discover events at the article-level. We also develop an elaborately-annotated dataset EDT for corporate event detection and news-based stock prediction benchmark. EDT includes 9721 news articles with token-level event labels as well as 303893 news articles with minute-level timestamps and comprehensive stock price labels. Experiments on EDT indicate that the proposed strategy outperforms all the baselines in winning rate, excess returns over the market, and the average return on each transaction.

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