Thailand

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have shown superior performance on various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, conventional pre-training objectives do not explicitly model relational facts in text, which are crucial for textual understanding. To address this issue, we propose a novel contrastive learning framework ERICA to obtain a deep understanding of the entities and their relations in text. Specifically, we define two novel pre-training tasks to better understand entities and relations: (1) the entity discrimination task to distinguish which tail entity can be inferred by the given head entity and relation; (2) the relation discrimination task to distinguish whether two relations are close or not semantically, which involves complex relational reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that ERICA can improve typical PLMs (BERT and RoBERTa) on several language understanding tasks, including relation extraction, entity typing and question answering, especially under low-resource settings.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning

relation

entity

pre-trained language models

contrastive learning

**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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Registration is now open

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

Visual Question Answering (VQA) methods aim at leveraging visual input to answer questions that may require complex reasoning over entities. Current models are trained on labelled data that may be insufficient to learn complex knowledge representations. In this paper, we propose a new method to enhance the reasoning capabilities of a multi-modal pretrained model (Vision+Language BERT) by integrating facts extracted from an external knowledge base. Evaluation on the KVQA dataset benchmark demonstrates that our method outperforms competitive baselines by 19%, achieving new state-of-the-art results. We also perform an extensive analysis highlighting the limitations of our best performing model through an ablation study.

In Factuality: Efficient Integration of Relevant Facts for Visual Question Answering

This paper introduces the task of factual error correction: performing edits to a claim so that the generated rewrite is better supported by evidence. This extends the well-studied task of fact verification by providing a mechanism to correct written texts that are refuted or only partially supported by evidence. We demonstrate that it is feasible to train factual error correction systems from existing fact checking datasets which only contain labeled claims accompanied by evidence, but not the correction. 
We achieve this by employing a two-stage distant supervision approach that incorporates evidence into masked claims when generating corrections. Our approach, based on the T5 transformer and using retrieved evidence, achieved better results than existing work which used a pointer copy network and gold evidence, producing accurate factual error corrections for 5x more instances in human evaluation and a .125 increase in SARI score. The evaluation is conducted on a dataset of 65,000 instances based on a recent fact verification shared task and we release it to enable further work on the task.

Evidence-based Factual Error Correction

We present algorithms for aligning components of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs to spans in English sentences.
We leverage unsupervised learning in combination with heuristics, taking the best of both worlds from previous AMR aligners. Our unsupervised models, however, are more sensitive to graph substructures, without requiring a separate syntactic parse.
Our approach covers a wider variety of AMR substructures than previously considered, achieves higher coverage of nodes and edges, and does so with higher accuracy.
We will release our LEAMR datasets and aligner for use in research on AMR parsing, generation, and evaluation.

Probabilistic, Structure-Aware Algorithms for Improved Variety, Accuracy, and Coverage of AMR Alignments

Natural language is compositional; the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of its parts. This property allows humans to create and interpret novel sentences, generalizing robustly outside their prior experience. Neural networks have been shown to struggle with this kind of generalization, in particular performing poorly on tasks designed to assess compositional generalization (i.e. where training and testing distributions differ in ways that would be trivial for a compositional strategy to resolve).
Their poor performance on these tasks may in part be due to the nature of supervised learning which assumes training and testing data to be drawn from the same distribution. We implement a meta-learning augmented version of supervised learning whose objective directly optimizes for out-of-distribution generalization. We construct pairs of tasks for meta-learning by sub-sampling existing training data. Each pair of tasks is constructed to contain relevant examples, as determined by a similarity metric, in an effort to inhibit models from memorizing their input. Experimental results on the COGS and SCAN datasets show that our similarity-driven meta-learning can improve generalization performance.

Meta-Learning to Compositionally Generalize

Large pre-trained models such as BERT are known to improve different downstream NLP tasks, even when such a model is trained on a generic domain.
Moreover, recent studies have shown that when large domain-specific corpora are available, continued pre-training on domain-specific data can further improve the performance of in-domain tasks. 
However, this practice requires significant domain-specific data and computational resources which may not always be available. 
In this paper, we aim to adapt a generic pretrained model with a relatively small amount of domain-specific data.
We demonstrate that by explicitly incorporating multi-granularity information of unseen and domain-specific words via the adaptation of (word based) n-grams, the performance of a generic pretrained model can be greatly improved.
Specifically, we introduce a Transformer-based Domain-aware N-gram Adaptor, T-DNA, to effectively learn and incorporate the semantic representation of different combinations of words in the new domain.
Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of T-DNA on eight low-resource downstream tasks from four domains.
We show that T-DNA is able to achieve significant improvements compared to existing methods on most tasks using limited data with lower computational costs.
Moreover, further analyses demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of both unseen words and the information of different granularities. Our code is available at https://github.com/shizhediao/T-DNA.

Taming Pre-trained Language Models with N-gram Representations for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation

Discovering whether words are semantically related and identifying the specific semantic relation that holds between them is of crucial importance for automatic reasoning on text data. For that purpose, different methodologies have been proposed that either (1) tackle feature engineering, (2) fine-tune latent semantic spaces, or (3) take advantage of cognitive links between semantic relations in multitask settings. In this paper, we investigate how feature engineering and multitask architectures can be improved and consequently combined to identify lexico-semantic relations. Evaluation results over a set of gold-standard datasets show that (1) combinations of similar features are beneficial (features sets), (2) asymmetric distributional features are a strong cue to discriminate asymmetric relations as well as they play an important role in multitask architectures, (3) shared-private models improve over binary and fully-shared classifiers as well as they correctly balance the focus on features between private and shared layers\footnote{Both the code and the datasets are available at https://anonymous for reproducibility.}.

Understanding Feature Focus in Multitask Settings for Lexico-semantic Relation Identification

Increasing studies leverage pre-trained language models and meta-learning frameworks to solve few-shot text classification problems. Most of the current studies focus on building a meta-learner from the information of input texts but ignore abundant semantic information beneath class labels. In this work, we show that class-label information can be utilized for exacting more discriminative feature representation of the input text from a pre-trained language model like BERT, and can achieve a performance boost when the samples are scarce. Building on top of this discovery, we propose a framework called label-semantic augmented meta-learner (LaSAML) to make full use of label semantics. We systematically investigate various factors in this framework and show that it can be plugged into the existing few-shot text classification system. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the few-shot text classification system upgraded by LaSAML can lead to significant performance improvement over its original counter-parts.

Don't Miss the Labels: Label-semantic Augmented Meta-Learner for Few-Shot Text Classification

Among the various modes of communication in social media, the use of Internet memes has emerged as a powerful means to convey political, psychological, and socio-cultural opinions. Although memes are typically humorous in nature, recent days have witnessed a proliferation of harmful memes targeted to abuse various social entities. As most harmful memes are highly satirical and abstruse without appropriate contexts, off-the-shelf multimodal models may not be adequate to understand their underlying semantics. 
In this work, we propose two novel problem formulations: detecting harmful memes and the social entities that these harmful memes target. 
To this end, we present HarMeme, the first benchmark dataset, containing 3,544 memes related to COVID-19. Each meme went through a rigorous two-stage annotation process. In the first stage, we labeled a meme as very harmful, partially harmful, or harmless; in the second stage, we further annotated the type of target(s) that each harmful meme points to individual, organization, community, or society/general public/other. The evaluation results using ten unimodal and multimodal models highlight the importance of using multimodal signals for both tasks. We further discuss the limitations of these models and we argue that more research is needed to address these problems.

Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) significantly accelerates the inference process via predicting the entire target sequence. However, recent studies show that NAT is weak at learning high-mode of knowledge such as one-to-many translations. We argue that modes can be divided into various granularities which can be learned from easy to hard. In this study, we empirically show that NAT models are prone to learn fine-grained lower-mode knowledge, such as words and phrases, compared with sentences. Based on this observation, we propose progressive multi-granularity training for NAT. More specifically, to make the most of the training data, we break down the sentence-level examples into three types, i.e. words, phrases, sentences, and with the training goes, we progressively increase the granularities. Experiments on Romanian-English, English-German, Chinese-English and Japanese-English demonstrate that our approach improves the phrase translation accuracy and model reordering ability, therefore resulting in better translation quality against strong NAT baselines. Also, we show that more deterministic fine-grained knowledge can further enhance performance.

Progressive Multi-Granularity Training for Non-Autoregressive Translation

Despite the recent advancement in NLP research, cross-lingual transfer for natural language generation is relatively understudied. In this work, we transfer supervision from high resource language (HRL) to multiple low-resource languages (LRLs) for natural language generation (NLG). We consider four NLG tasks (text summarization, question generation, news headline generation, and distractor generation) and three syntactically diverse languages, i.e., English, Hindi, and Japanese. We propose an unsupervised cross-lingual language generation framework (called ZmBART) that does not use any parallel or pseudo-parallel/back-translated data. In this framework, we further pre-train mBART sequence-to-sequence denoising auto-encoder model with an auxiliary task using monolingual data of three languages. The objective function of the auxiliary task is close to the target tasks which enriches the multi-lingual latent representation of mBART and provides good initialization for target tasks. Then, this model is fine-tuned with task-specific supervised English data and directly evaluated with low-resource languages in the Zero-shot setting. To overcome catastrophic forgetting and spurious correlation issues, we applied freezing model component and data argumentation approaches respectively. This simple modeling approach gave us promising results. We experimented with few-shot training (with 1000 supervised data points) which boosted the model performance further. We performed several ablations and cross-lingual transferability analyses to demonstrate the robustness of ZmBART.

ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning

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