Thailand

We investigate the problem of Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) and present a new framework named Tail-to-Tail (\textbf{TtT}) non-autoregressive sequence prediction to address the deep issues hidden in CGEC. Considering that most tokens are correct and can be conveyed directly from source to target, and the error positions can be estimated and corrected based on the bidirectional context information, thus we employ a BERT-initialized Transformer Encoder as the backbone model to conduct information modeling and conveying. Considering that only relying on the same position substitution cannot handle the variable-length correction cases, various operations such substitution, deletion, insertion, and local paraphrasing are required jointly. Therefore, a Conditional Random Fields (CRF) layer is stacked on the up tail to conduct non-autoregressive sequence prediction by modeling the token dependencies. Since most tokens are correct and easily to be predicted/conveyed to the target, then the models may suffer from a severe class imbalance issue. To alleviate this problem, focal loss penalty strategies are integrated into the loss functions. Moreover, besides the typical fix-length error correction datasets, we also construct a variable-length corpus to conduct experiments. Experimental results on standard datasets, especially on the variable-length datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of TtT in terms of sentence-level Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1-Measure on tasks of error Detection and Correction.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Tail-to-Tail Non-Autoregressive Sequence Prediction for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

grammatical error correction

bert

non-autoregressive generation

**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

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

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.

Lexicon Learning for Few Shot Sequence Modeling

Personalization of natural language generation plays a vital role in a large spectrum of tasks, such as explainable recommendation, review summarization and dialog systems. In these tasks, user and item IDs are important identifiers for personalization. Transformer, which is demonstrated with strong language modeling capability, however, is not personalized and fails to make use of the user and item IDs since the ID tokens are not even in the same semantic space as the words. To address this problem, we present a PErsonalized Transformer for Explainable Recommendation (PETER), on which we design a simple and effective learning objective that utilizes the IDs to predict the words in the target explanation, so as to endow the IDs with linguistic meanings and to achieve personalized Transformer. Besides generating explanations, PETER can also make recommendations, which makes it a unified model for the whole recommendation-explanation pipeline. Extensive experiments show that our small unpretrained model outperforms fine-tuned BERT on the generation task, in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency, which highlights the importance and the nice utility of our design.

Personalized Transformer for Explainable Recommendation

Following each patient visit, 
physicians draft long semi-structured
clinical summaries called SOAP notes.
While invaluable to clinicians and researchers,
creating digital SOAP notes is burdensome,
contributing to physician burnout.
In this paper, we introduce 
the first complete pipelines
to leverage deep summarization models
to generate these notes 
based on transcripts of conversations 
between physicians and patients.
After exploring a spectrum of methods
across the extractive-abstractive spectrum,
we propose Cluster2Sent,
an algorithm that
(i) extracts important utterances
relevant to each summary section;
(ii) clusters together related utterances;
and then (iii) generates 
one summary sentence
per cluster. 
Cluster2Sent outperforms
its purely abstractive counterpart
by 8 ROUGE-1 points,
and produces significantly more 
factual and coherent sentences 
as assessed by expert human evaluators.
For reproducibility, 
we demonstrate similar benefits
on the publicly available AMI dataset. 
Our results speak to the benefits
of structuring summaries into sections 
and annotating supporting evidence 
when constructing summarization corpora.

Generating SOAP Notes from Doctor-Patient Conversations Using Modular Summarization Techniques

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

Understanding who blames or supports whom in news text is a critical research question in computational social science. Traditional methods and datasets for sentiment analysis are, however, not suitable for the domain of political text as they do not consider the direction of sentiments expressed between entities. In this paper, we propose a novel NLP task of identifying directed sentiment relationship between political entities from a given news document, which we call directed sentiment extraction. From a million-scale news corpus, we construct a dataset of news sentences where sentiment relations of political entities are manually annotated. We present a simple but effective approach for utilizing a pretrained transformer, which infers the target class by predicting multiple question-answering tasks and combining the outcomes. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed method for social science research questions by analyzing positive and negative opinions between political entities in two major events: 2016 U.S. presidential election and COVID-19. The newly proposed problem, data, and method will facilitate future studies on interdisciplinary NLP methods and applications.

Who Blames or Endorses Whom? Entity-to-Entity Directed Sentiment Extraction in News Text

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.

Script Parsing with Hierarchical Sequence Modelling

Deep learning (DL) based language models achieve high performance on various benchmarks for Natural Language Inference (NLI). And at this time, symbolic approaches to NLI are receiving less attention. Both approaches (symbolic and DL) have their advantages and weaknesses. However, currently, no method combines them in a system to solve the task of NLI. To merge symbolic and deep learning methods, we propose an inference framework called NeuralLog, which utilizes both a monotonicity-based logical inference engine and a neural network language model for phrase alignment. Our framework models the NLI task as a classic search problem and uses the beam search algorithm to search for optimal inference paths. Experiments show that our joint logic and neural inference system improves accuracy on the NLI task and can achieve state-of-art accuracy on the SICK and MED datasets.

NeuralLog: Natural Language Inference with Joint Neural and Logical Reasoning

Language understanding must identify the logical connections between events in a discourse, but core events are often unstated due to their commonsense nature. This paper fills in these missing events by generating precondition events. Precondition generation can be framed as a sequence-to-sequence problem: given a target event, generate a possible precondition. However, in most real-world scenarios, an event can have several preconditions, requiring diverse generation – a challenge for standard seq2seq approaches. We propose DiP, a Diverse Precondition generation system that can generate unique and diverse preconditions.
DiP uses a generative process with three components – an event sampler, a candidate generator, and a post-processor. The event sampler provides control codes (precondition triggers) which the candidate generator uses to focus its generation. Unlike other conditional generation systems, DiP automatically generates control codes without training on diverse examples. Analysis against baselines reveals that DiP improves the diversity of preconditions significantly while also generating more preconditions.

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