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The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF—better few-shot fine-tuning of language models—a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners

automatic prompt search

prompt

demonstration

language model

few-shot

**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

teedman (2020) proposes as a formal universal of natural language grammar that grammatical permutations of the kind that have given rise to transformational rules are limited to a class known to mathematicians and computer scientists as the “separable” permutations. This class of permutations is exactly the class that can be expressed in combinatory categorial grammars (CCGs). The excluded non-separable permutations do in fact seem to be absent in a number of studies of crosslinguistic variation in word order in nominal and verbal constructions.

The number of permutations that are separable grows in the number n of lexical elements in the construction as the Large Schröder Number Sn−1. Because that number grows much more slowly than the n! number of all permutations, this generalization is also of considerable practical interest for computational applications such as parsing and machine translation.

The present article examines the mathematical and computational origins of this restriction, and the reason it is exactly captured in CCG without the imposition of any further constraints.


Formal Basis of a Language Universal


The famous "laurel/yanny" phenomenon references an audio clip that elicits dramatically different responses from different listeners. For the original clip, roughly half the population hears the word "laurel," while the other half hears "yanny."

How common are such "polyperceivable" audio clips? In this paper we apply ML techniques to study the prevalence of polyperceivability in spoken language. We devise a metric that correlates with polyperceivability of audio clips, use it to efficiently find new "laurel/yanny"-type examples, and validate these results with human experiments.

Our results suggest that polyperceivable examples are surprisingly prevalent in natural language, existing for >2% of English words.

Beyond Laurel/Yanny: An Autoencoder-Enabled Search for Polyperceivable Audio

Despite their impressive performance in NLP, self-attention networks were recently proved to be limited for processing formal languages with hierarchical structure, such as Dyck-k, the language consisting of well-nested parentheses of k types. This suggested that natural language can be approximated well with models that are too weak for formal languages, or that the role of hierarchy and recursion in natural language might be limited. We qualify this implication by proving that self-attention networks can process Dyck-(k, D), the subset of Dyck-k with depth bounded by D, which arguably better captures the bounded hierarchical structure of natural language. Specifically, we construct a hard-attention network with D+1 layers and O(log k) memory size (per token per layer) that recognizes Dyck-(k, D), and a soft-attention network with two layers and O(log k) memory size that generates Dyck-(k, D). Experiments show that self-attention networks trained on Dyck-(k, D) generalize to longer inputs with near-perfect accuracy, and also verify the theoretical memory advantage of self-attention networks over recurrent networks.

Self-Attention Networks Can Process Bounded Hierarchical Languages

We present a novel approach to the problem of text style transfer. Unlike previous approaches requiring style-labeled training data, our method makes use of readily-available unlabeled text by relying on the implicit connection in style between adjacent sentences, and uses labeled data only at inference time. We adapt T5 (Raffel et al., 2020), a strong pretrained text-to-text model, to extract a style vector from text and use it to condition the decoder to perform style transfer. As our label-free training results in a style vector space encoding many facets of style, we recast transfers as ``targeted restyling'' vector operations that adjust specific attributes of the input while preserving others. We demonstrate that training on unlabeled Amazon reviews data results in a model that is competitive on sentiment transfer, even compared to models trained fully on labeled data. Furthermore, applying our novel method to a diverse corpus of unlabeled web text results in a single model capable of transferring along multiple dimensions of style (dialect, emotiveness, formality, politeness, sentiment) despite no additional training and using only a handful of exemplars at inference time.

TextSETTR: Few-Shot Text Style Extraction and Tunable Targeted Restyling

As describe an efficient hierarchical method to compute attention in the Transformer architecture. The proposed attention mechanism exploits a matrix structure similar to the Hierarchical Matrix (H-Matrix) developed by the numerical analysis community, and has linear run time and memory complexity. We perform extensive experiments to show that the inductive bias embodied by our hierarchical attention is effective in capturing the hierarchical structure in the sequences typical for natural language and vision tasks. Our method is superior to alternative sub-quadratic proposals by over +6 points on average on the Long Range Arena benchmark.
It also sets a new SOTA test perplexity on One-Billion Word dataset with 5x fewer model parameters than that of the previous-best Transformer-based models.

H-Transformer-1D: Fast One-Dimensional Hierarchical Attention for Sequences

Abstractive neural summarization models have seen great improvements in recent years, as shown by ROUGE scores of the generated summaries. But despite these improved metrics, there is limited understanding of the strategies different models employ, and how those strategies relate their understanding of language. To understand this better, we run several experiments to characterize how one popular abstractive model, the pointer-generator model of See et al. (2017), uses its explicit copy/generation switch to control its level of abstraction (generation) vs extraction (copying). On an extractive-biased dataset, the model utilizes syntactic boundaries to truncate sentences that are otherwise often copied verbatim. When we modify the copy/generation switch and force the model to generate, only simple paraphrasing abilities are revealed alongside factual inaccuracies and hallucinations. On an abstractive-biased dataset, the model copies infrequently but shows similarly limited abstractive abilities. In line with previous research, these results suggest that abstractive summarization models lack the semantic understanding necessary to generate paraphrases that are both abstractive and faithful to the source document.

To Point or Not to Point: Understanding How Abstractive Summarizers Paraphrase Text

We aim to renew interest in a particular multi-document summarization (MDS) task which we call AgreeSum: agreement-oriented multi-document summarization. Given a cluster of articles, the goal is to provide abstractive summaries that represent information common and faithful to all input articles. Given the lack of existing datasets, we create a dataset for AgreeSum, and provide annotations on article-summary entailment relations for a subset of the clusters in the dataset. We aim to create strong baselines for the task by applying the top-performing pretrained single-document summarization model PEGASUS onto AgreeSum, leveraging both annotated clusters by supervised losses, and unannotated clusters by T5-based entailment-related and language-related losses. Compared to other baselines, both automatic evaluation and human evaluation show better article-summary and cluster-summary entailment in generated summaries. On a separate note, we hope that our article-summary entailment annotations contribute to the community's effort in improving abstractive summarization faithfulness.

AgreeSum: Agreement-Oriented Multi-Document Summarization

Multiple studies have shown that Transformers are remarkably robust to pruning. Contrary to this received wisdom, we demonstrate that pre-trained Transformer encoders are surprisingly fragile to the removal of a very small number of features in the layer outputs (<0.0001% of model weights). In case of BERT and other pre-trained encoder Transformers, the affected component is the scaling factors and biases in the LayerNorm. The outliers are high-magnitude normalization parameters that emerge early in pre-training and show up consistently in the same dimensional position throughout the model. We show that disabling them significantly degrades both the MLM loss and the downstream task performance. This effect is observed across several BERT-family models and other popular pre-trained Transformer architectures, including BART, XLNet and ELECTRA; we also show a similar effect in GPT-2.

BERT Busters: Outlier Dimensions that Disrupt Transformers

In an election campaign, political parties pledge to implement various projects--should they be elected. But do they follow through? 
To track election pledges from parties' election manifestos, 
we need to distinguish between pledges and general statements.
In this paper, we use election manifestos of Swedish and Indian political parties to learn neural models that distinguish actual pledges from generic political positions. 
Since pledges might vary by election year and party, we implement a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) setup, predicting election year and manifesto's party as auxiliary tasks.
Pledges can also span several sentences, so we use hierarchical models that incorporate contextual information.
Lastly, we evaluate the models in a Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) framework across countries and languages.
Our results indicate that year and party have predictive power even in ZSL, while context introduces some noise. 
We finally discuss the linguistic features of pledges.

"We will Reduce Taxes" - Identifying Election Pledges with Language Models

Methodologies for training visual question answering (VQA) models assume the availability of datasets with human-annotated \textit{Image-Question-Answer} (I-Q-A) triplets.
This has led to heavy reliance on datasets and a lack of generalization to new types of questions and scenes. Linguistic priors along with biases and errors due to annotator subjectivity have been shown to percolate into VQA models trained on such samples.
We study whether models can be trained without any human-annotated Q-A pairs, but only with images and their associated textual descriptions or captions.
We present a method to train models with synthetic Q-A pairs generated procedurally from captions.
Additionally, we demonstrate the efficacy of spatial-pyramid image patches as a simple but effective alternative to dense and costly object bounding box annotations used in existing VQA models.
Our experiments on three VQA benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of this weakly-supervised approach, especially on the VQA-CP challenge, which tests performance under changing linguistic priors.

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