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Modern models for event causality identification (ECI) are mainly based on supervised learning, which are prone to the data lacking problem. Unfortunately, the existing NLP-related augmentation methods cannot directly produce available data required for this task. To solve the data lacking problem, we introduce a new approach to augment training data for event causality identification, by iteratively generating new examples and classifying event causality in a dual learning framework. On the one hand, our approach is knowledge guided, which can leverage existing knowledge bases to generate well-formed new sentences. On the other hand, our approach employs a dual mechanism, which is a learnable augmentation framework, and can interactively adjust the generation process to generate task-related sentences. Experimental results on two benchmarks EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank show that 1) our method can augment suitable task-related training data for ECI; 2) our method outperforms previous methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.5 and +2.1 points on F1 value respectively).

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

LearnDA: Learnable Knowledge-Guided Data Augmentation for Event Causality Identification

event relation extraction

event causality identification

data augmentation

**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

Existing slot filling models can only recognize pre-defined in-domain slot types from a limited slot set. In the practical application, a reliable dialogue system should know what it does not know. In this paper, we introduce a new task, Novel Slot Detection (NSD), in the task-oriented dialogue system. NSD aims to discover unknown or out-of-domain slot types to strengthen the capability of a dialogue system based on in-domain training data. Besides, we construct two public NSD datasets, propose several strong NSD baselines, and establish a benchmark for future work. Finally, we conduct exhaustive experiments and qualitative analysis to comprehend key challenges and provide new guidance for future directions.

Novel Slot Detection: A Benchmark for Discovering Unknown Slot Types in the Task-Oriented Dialogue System

Generating some appealing questions in open-domain conversations is an effective way to improve human-machine interactions and lead the topic to a broader or deeper direction. To avoid dull or deviated questions, some researchers tried to utilize answer, the "future" information, to guide question generation. However, they separate a post-question-answer (PQA) triple into two parts: post-question (PQ) and question-answer (QA) pairs, which may hurt the overall coherence. Besides, the QA relationship is modeled as a one-to-one mapping that is not reasonable in open-domain conversations. To tackle these problems, we propose a generative triple-wise model with hierarchical variations for open-domain conversational question generation (CQG). Latent variables in three hierarchies are used to represent the shared background of a triple and one-to-many semantic mappings in both PQ and QA pairs. Experimental results on a large-scale CQG dataset show that our method significantly improves the quality of questions in terms of fluency, coherence and diversity over competitive baselines.

GTM: A Generative Triple-wise Model for Conversational Question Generation

Neural dialogue generation models trained with the one-hot target distribution suffer from the over-confidence issue, which leads to poor generation diversity as widely reported in the literature. Although existing approaches such as label smoothing can alleviate this issue, they fail to adapt to diverse dialog contexts. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Label Smoothing (AdaLabel) approach that can adaptively estimate a target label distribution at each time step for different contexts. The maximum probability in the predicted distribution is used to modify the soft target distribution produced by a novel light-weight bi-directional decoder module. The resulting target distribution is aware of both previous and future contexts and is adjusted to avoid over-training the dialogue model. Our model can be trained in an endto-end manner. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our approach outperforms various competitive baselines in producing diverse responses.

Diversifying Dialog Generation via Adaptive Label Smoothing

Out-of-scope intent detection is of practical importance in task-oriented dialogue systems. Since the distribution of outlier utterances is arbitrary and unknown in the training stage, existing methods commonly rely on strong assumptions on data distribution such as mixture of Gaussians to make inference, resulting in either complex multi-step training procedures or hand-crafted rules such as confidence threshold selection for outlier detection. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to train an out-of-scope intent classifier in a fully end-to-end manner by simulating the test scenario in training, which requires no assumption on data distribution and no additional post-processing or threshold setting. Specifically, we construct a set of pseudo outliers in the training stage, by generating synthetic outliers using inliner features via self-supervision and sampling out-of-scope sentences from easily available open-domain datasets. The pseudo outliers are used to train a discriminative classifier that can be directly applied to and generalize well on the test task. We evaluate our method extensively on four benchmark dialogue datasets and observe significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches. Our code has been released at https://github.com/liam0949/DCLOOS.

Out-of-Scope Intent Detection with Self-Supervision and Discriminative Training

This ability to learn consecutive tasks without forgetting how to perform previously trained problems is essential for developing an online dialogue system. This paper proposes an effective continual learning method for the task-oriented dialogue system with iterative network pruning, expanding, and masking (TPEM), which preserves performance on previously encountered tasks while accelerating learning progress on subsequent tasks. Specifically, TPEM (i) leverages network pruning to keep the knowledge for old tasks, (ii) adopts network expanding to create free weights for new tasks, and (iii) introduces task-specific network masking to alleviate the negative impact of fixed weights of old tasks on new tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on seven different tasks from three benchmark datasets and show empirically that TPEM leads to significantly improved results over the strong competitors.

Continual Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue System with Iterative Network Pruning, Expanding and Masking

Document-level event extraction aims to recognize event information from a whole piece of article.
Existing methods are not effective due to two challenges of this task: a) the target event arguments are scattered across sentences; b) the correlation among events in a document is non-trivial to model.
In this paper, we propose Heterogeneous Graph-based Interaction Model with a Tracker (GIT) to solve the aforementioned two challenges.
For the first challenge, GIT constructs a heterogeneous graph interaction network to capture global interactions among different sentences and entity mentions.
For the second, GIT introduces a Tracker module to track the extracted events and hence capture the interdependency among the events.
Experiments on a large-scale dataset (Zheng et al, 2019) show GIT outperforms the previous methods by 2.8 F1.
Further analysis reveals \modelname is effective in extracting multiple correlated events and event arguments that scatter across the document.

Document-level Event Extraction via Heterogeneous Graph-based Interaction Model with a Tracker

This paper presents a novel method for nested named entity recognition. As a layered method, our method extends the prior second-best path recognition method by explicitly excluding the influence of the best path. Our method maintains a set of hidden states at each time step and selectively leverages them to build a different potential function for recognition at each level. In addition, we demonstrate that recognizing innermost entities first results in better performance than the conventional outermost entities first scheme. We provide extensive experimental results on ACE2004, ACE2005, and GENIA datasets to show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

Nested Named Entity Recognition via Explicitly Excluding the Influence of the Best Path

Generative linguistic steganography mainly utilized language models and applied steganographic sampling (stegosampling) to generate high-security steganographic text (stegotext). However, previous methods generally lead to statistical differences between the conditional probability distributions of stegotext and natural text, which brings about security risks. In this paper, to further ensure security, we present a novel provably secure generative linguistic steganographic method ADG, which recursively embeds secret information by Adaptive Dynamic Grouping of tokens according to their probability given by an off-the-shelf language model. We not only prove the security of ADG mathematically, but also conduct extensive experiments on three public corpora to further verify its imperceptibility. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method is able to generate stegotext with nearly perfect security.

Provably Secure Generative Linguistic Steganography

Recently, Text-to-SQL for multi-turn dialogue has attracted great interest. Here, the user input of the current turn is parsed into the corresponding SQL query of the appropriate database, given all previous dialogue history. Current approaches mostly employ end-to-end models and consequently face two challenges. First, dialogue history modeling and Text-to-SQL parsing are implicitly combined, hence it is hard to carry out interpretable analysis and obtain targeted improvement. Second, SQL annotation of multi-turn dialogue is very expensive, leading to training data sparsity. In this paper, we propose a novel decoupled multi-turn Text-to-SQL framework, where an utterance rewrite model first explicitly solves the completion of dialogue context and then a single-turn Text-to-SQL parser follows. A dual learning approach is also proposed for the utterance rewrite model to address the data sparsity problem. Compared with end-to-end approaches, the proposed decoupled method can achieve excellent performance without any annotated in-domain data. With just a few annotated rewrite cases, the decoupled method outperforms the released state-of-the-art end-to-end models on both SParC and CoSQL datasets.

Decoupled Dialogue Modeling and Semantic Parsing for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL

Relational fact extraction aims to extract semantic triples from unstructured text. In this work, we show that all of the relational fact extraction models can be organized according to a graph-oriented analytical perspective. An efficient model, aD}acency lIst oRiented rElational faCT (DIRECT), is proposed based on this analytical framework. To alleviate challenges of error propagation and sub-task loss equilibrium, DIRECT employs a novel adaptive multi-task learning strategy with dynamic sub-task loss balancing. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, and results prove that the proposed model outperforms a series of state-of-the-art (SoTA) models for relational triple extraction.

LearnDA: Learnable Knowledge-Guided Data Augmentation for Event Causality Identification

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