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Sequence-to-sequence transduction is the core problem in language processing applications as diverse as semantic parsing, machine translation, and instruction following. The neural network models that provide the dominant solution to these problems are brittle, especially in low-resource settings: they fail to generalize correctly or systematically from small datasets. Past work has shown that many failures of systematic generalization arise from neural models’ inability to disentangle lexical phenomena from syntactic ones. To address this, we augment neural decoders with a lexical translation mechanism that generalizes existing copy mechanisms to incorporate learned, decontextualized, token-level translation rules. We describe how to initialize this mechanism using a variety of lexicon learning algorithms, and show that it improves systematic generalization on a diverse set of sequence modeling tasks drawn from cognitive science, formal semantics, and machine translation.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Lexicon Learning for Few Shot Sequence Modeling

systematic generalization

sequence-to-sequence

semantic parsing

recurrent neural networks

compositionality

compositional generalization

**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

Human language understanding operates at multiple levels of granularity (e.g., words, phrases, and sentences) with increasing levels of abstraction that can be hierarchically combined.
However, existing deep models with stacked layers do not explicitly model any sort of hierarchical process. 
In this paper, we propose a recursive Transformer model based on differentiable CKY style binary trees to emulate this composition process, and we extend the bidirectional language model pre-training objective to this architecture, attempting to predict each word given its left and right abstraction nodes.
To scale up our approach, we also introduce an efficient pruning and growing algorithm to reduce the time complexity and enable encoding in linear time.
Experimental results on language modeling and unsupervised parsing show the effectiveness of 
our approach.

R2D2: Recursive Transformer based on Differentiable Tree for Interpretable Hierarchical Language Modeling

Zero-shot sequence labeling aims to build a sequence labeler without human-annotated datasets. One straightforward approach is utilizing existing systems (source models) to generate pseudo-labeled datasets and train a target sequence labeler accordingly. However, due to the gap between the source and the target languages/domains, this approach may fail to recover the true labels. In this paper, we propose a novel unified framework for zero-shot sequence labeling with minimum risk training and design a new decomposable risk function that models the relations between the predicted labels from the source models and the true labels. By making the risk function trainable, we draw a connection between minimum risk training and latent variable model learning. We propose a unified learning algorithm based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. We extensively evaluate our proposed approaches on cross-lingual/domain sequence labeling tasks over twenty-one datasets. The results show that our approaches outperform state-of-the-art baseline systems.

Risk Minimization for Zero-shot Sequence Labeling

Transfer learning from pretrained language models recently became the dominant approach for solving many NLP tasks. A common approach to transfer learning for multiple tasks that maximize parameter sharing trains one or more task-specific layers on top of the language model. In this paper, we present an alternative approach based on adversarial reprogramming, which extends earlier work on automatic prompt generation. Adversarial reprogramming attempts to learn task-specific word embeddings that, when concatenated to the input text, instruct the language model to solve the specified task. Using up to 25K trainable parameters per task, this approach outperforms all existing methods with up to 25M trainable parameters on the public leaderboard of the GLUE benchmark. Our method, initialized with task-specific human-readable prompts, also works in a few-shot setting, outperforming GPT-3 on two SuperGLUE tasks with just 32 training samples.

WARP: Word-level Adversarial ReProgramming

Recently, knowledge graph (KG) augmented models have achieved noteworthy success on various commonsense reasoning tasks. However, KG edge (fact) sparsity and noisy edge extraction/generation often hinder models from obtaining useful knowledge to reason over. To address these issues, we propose a new KG-augmented model: Hybrid Graph Network (HGN). Unlike prior methods, HGN learns to jointly contextualize extracted and generated knowledge by reasoning over both within a unified graph structure. Given the task input context and an extracted KG subgraph, HGN is trained to generate embeddings for the subgraph's missing edges to form a ``hybrid" graph, then reason over the hybrid graph while filtering out context-irrelevant edges. We demonstrate HGN's effectiveness through considerable performance gains across four commonsense reasoning benchmarks, plus a user study on edge validness and helpfulness.

Learning Contextualized Knowledge Structures for Commonsense Reasoning

Stereotypes are inferences drawn about people based on their demographic attributes, which may result in harms to users when a system is deployed. In generative language-inference tasks, given a premise, a model produces plausible hypotheses that follow either logically (natural language inference) or commonsensically (commonsense inference). Such tasks are therefore a fruitful setting in which to explore the degree to which NLP systems encode stereotypes. In our work, we study how stereotypes manifest when the potential targets of stereotypes are situated in real-life, neutral contexts. We collect human judgments on the presence of stereotypes in generated inferences, and compare how perceptions of stereotypes vary due to annotator positionality.

Analyzing Stereotypes in Generative Text Inference Tasks

Text-to-Graph extraction aims to automatically extract information graphs consisting of mentions and types from natural language texts. Existing approaches, such as table filling and pairwise scoring, have shown impressive performance on various information extraction tasks, but they are difficult to scale to datasets with longer input texts because of their second-order space/time complexities with respect to the input length. In this work, we propose a Hybrid Span Generator (HySPA) that invertibly maps the information graph to an alternating sequence of nodes and edge types, and directly generates such sequences via a hybrid span decoder which can decode both the spans and the types recurrently in linear time and space complexities. Extensive experiments on the ACE05 dataset show that our approach also significantly outperforms state-of-the-art on the joint entity and relation extraction task.

HySPA: Hybrid Span Generation for Scalable Text-to-Graph Extraction

Multiple different responses are often plausible for a given open domain dialog context.
Prior work has shown the importance of having multiple valid reference responses for meaningful 
and robust automated evaluations. In such cases, common practice has been to collect more human written references. However, such collection can be expensive, time consuming, and not easily scalable. Instead, we propose a novel technique for automatically expanding a human generated reference to a set of candidate references. We fetch plausible references from 
knowledge sources, and adapt them so that they are more fluent in context of the dialog instance in question. More specifically, we use (1) a commonsense knowledge base to elicit a large number of plausible reactions given the dialog history (2) relevant instances retrieved from dialog corpus, using similar past as well as future contexts. We demonstrate that our automatically expanded reference sets lead to large improvements in correlations of automated metrics with human ratings of system outputs for DailyDialog dataset.

Improving Automated Evaluation of Open Domain Dialog via Diverse Reference Augmentation

Accurate recovery of predicate-argument structure from a Universal Dependency (UD) parse is central to downstream tasks such as extraction of semantic roles or event representations. This study introduces compchains, a categorization of the hierarchy of predicate dependency relations present within a UD parse. Accuracy of compchain classification serves as a proxy for measuring accurate recovery of predicate-argument structure from sentences with embedding. We analyzed the distribution of compchains in three UD English treebanks, EWT, GUM and LinES, revealing that these treebanks are sparse with respect to sentences with predicate-argument structure that includes predicate-argument embedding. We evaluated the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task UDPipe (v1.2) baseline (dependency parsing) models as compchain classifiers for the EWT, GUMS and LinES UD treebanks. Our results indicate that these three baseline models exhibit poorer performance on sentences with predicate-argument structure with more than one level of embedding; we used compchains to characterize the errors made by these parsers and present examples of erroneous parses produced by the parser that were identified using compchains. We also analyzed the distribution of compchains in 58 non-English UD treebanks and then used compchains to evaluate the CoNLL'18 Shared Task baseline model for each of these treebanks. Our analysis shows that performance with respect to compchain classification is only weakly correlated with the official evaluation metrics (LAS, MLAS and BLEX). We identify gaps in the distribution of compchains in several of the UD treebanks, thus providing a roadmap for how these treebanks may be supplemented. We conclude by discussing how compchains provide a new perspective on the sparsity of training data for UD parsers, as well as the accuracy of the resulting UD parses.

Evaluating Universal Dependency Parser Recovery of Predicate Argument Structure via CompChain Analysis

We present InferBert, a method to enhance transformer-based inference models with relevant relational knowledge. Our approach facilitates learning generic inference patterns requiring relational knowledge (e.g. inferences related to hypernymy) during training, while injecting on-demand the relevant relational
facts (e.g. pangolin is an animal) at test time. We apply InferBERT to the NLI task over a diverse set of inference types (hypernymy, location, color, and country of origin), for which we collected challenge datasets. In this setting, InferBert succeeds to learn general inference patterns, from a relatively small number of training instances, while not hurting performance on the original NLI data and substantially
outperforming prior knowledge enhancement models on the challenge data. It further applies its inferences successfully at test time to previously unobserved entities. InferBert is computationally more efficient than most prior methods, in terms of number of parameters, memory consumption and training time.

Teach the Rules, Provide the Facts: Targeted Relational-knowledge Enhancement for Textual Inference

Scripts capture commonsense knowledge about everyday activities and their participants. Script knowledge has been shown to be useful in a number of NLP tasks, such as referent prediction, discourse classification, and story generation. A crucial step for the exploitation of script knowledge is, the task of tagging a text with the events and participants from a certain activity. This task is challenging: it requires information both about the ways events and participants are usually realized in surface language as well as the order in which they occur in the world. We show how to do accurate script parsing with a hierarchical sequence model. Our model improves the state of the art of event parsing by over 16 points F-score and, for the first time, accurately tags script participants.

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