Thailand

The Emotion Cause Extraction (ECE) task aims to identify clauses which contain emotion-evoking information for a particular emotion expressed in text. We observe that a widely-used ECE dataset exhibits a bias that the majority of annotated cause clauses are either directly before their associated emotion clauses or are the emotion clauses themselves. Existing models for ECE tend to explore such relative position information and suffer from the dataset bias. To investigate the degree of reliance of existing ECE models on clause relative positions, we propose a novel strategy to generate adversarial examples in which the relative position information is no longer the indicative feature of cause clauses. We test the performance of existing models on such adversarial examples and observe a significant performance drop. To address the dataset bias, we propose a novel graph-based method to explicitly model the emotion triggering paths by leveraging the commonsense knowledge to enhance the semantic dependencies between a candidate clause and an emotion clause. Experimental results show that our proposed approach performs on par with the existing state-of-the-art methods on the original ECE dataset, and is more robust against adversarial attacks compared to existing models.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Position Bias Mitigation: A Knowledge-Aware Graph Model for Emotion Cause Extraction

emotion cause extraction

dataset bias

knowledge graph

**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

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

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.

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

Neural models for automated fact verification have achieved promising results thanks to the availability of large, human-annotated datasets. However, for each new domain that requires fact verification, creating a dataset by manually writing claims and linking them to their supporting evidence is expensive. We develop QACG, a framework for training a robust fact verification model by using automatically generated claims that can be supported, refuted, or unverifiable from evidence from Wikipedia. QACG generates question-answer pairs from the evidence and then converts them into different types of claims. Experiments on the FEVER dataset show that our QACG framework significantly reduces the demand for human-annotated training data. In a zero-shot scenario, QACG improves a RoBERTa model's F1 from 50% to 77%, equivalent in performance to 2K+ manually-curated examples. Our QACG code is publicly available.

Zero-shot Fact Verification by Claim Generation

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.

ZmBART: An Unsupervised Cross-lingual Transfer Framework for Language Generation

Recent studies on the analysis of the multilingual representations focus on identifying whether there is an emergence of language-independent representations, or whether a multilingual model partitions its weights among different languages.
While most of such work has been conducted in a "black-box" manner, this paper aims to analyze individual components of a multilingual neural translation (NMT) model.
In particular, we look at the encoder self-attention and encoder-decoder attention heads (in a many-to-one NMT model) that are more specific to the translation of a certain language pair than others by (1) employing metrics that quantify some aspects of the attention weights such as "variance" or "confidence", and (2) systematically ranking the importance of attention heads with respect to translation quality.
Experimental results show that surprisingly, the set of most important attention heads are very similar across the language pairs and that it is possible to remove nearly one-third of the less important heads without hurting the translation quality greatly.

Do Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models Contain Language Pair Specific Attention Heads?

We propose a model that learns both the sequential and the structural features of code for source code summarization.
We adopt the abstract syntax tree (AST) and graph convolution to model the structural information and the Transformer to model the sequential information.
We convert code snippets into ASTs and apply graph convolution to obtain structurally-encoded node representations.
Then, the sequences of the graph-convolutioned AST nodes are processed by the Transformer layers.
Since structurally-neighboring nodes will have similar representations in graph-convolutioned trees, the Transformer layers can effectively capture not only the sequential information but also the structural information such as sentences or blocks of source code.
We show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art for source code summarization by experiments and human evaluations.

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