Thailand

In this paper, we present a conceptually simple while empirically powerful framework for abstractive summarization, SimCLS, which can bridge the gap between the learning objective and evaluation metrics resulting from the currently dominated sequence-to-sequence learning framework by formulating text generation as a reference-free evaluation problem (i.e., quality estimation) assisted by contrastive learning.
Experimental results show that, with minor modification over existing top-scoring systems, SimCLS can improve the performance of existing top-performing models by a large margin.
Particularly, 2.51 absolute improvement against BART and 2.50 over PEGASUS w.r.t ROUGE-1 on the CNN/DailyMail dataset, driving the state-of-the-art performance to a new level.
We have open-sourced our codes and results: https://github.com/yixinL7/SimCLS.
Results of our proposed models have been deployed into ExplainaBoard platform, which allows researchers to understand our systems in a more fine-grained way.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

SimCLS: A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Abstractive Summarization

two-stage framework

contrastive learning

abstractive summarization

**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

Recent years have brought about an interest in the challenging task of summarizing conversation threads (meetings, online discussions, etc.). Such summaries help analysis of the long text to quickly catch up with the decisions made and thus improve our work or communication efficiency. To spur research in thread summarization, we have developed an abstractive Email Thread Summarization (EmailSum) dataset, which contains human-annotated short (<30 words) and long (<100 words) summaries of 2,549 email threads (each containing 3 to 10 emails) over a wide variety of topics. We perform a comprehensive empirical study to explore different summarization techniques (including extractive and abstractive methods, single-document and hierarchical models, as well as transfer and semisupervised learning) and conduct human evaluations on both short and long summary generation tasks. Our results reveal the key challenges of current abstractive summarization models in this task, such as understanding the sender’s intent and identifying the roles of sender and receiver. Furthermore, we find that widely used automatic evaluation metrics (ROUGE, BERTScore) are weakly correlated with human judgments on this email thread summarization task. Hence, we emphasize the importance of human evaluation and the development of better metrics by the community.

EmailSum: Abstractive Email Thread Summarization

Parallel cross-lingual summarization data is scarce, requiring models to better use the limited available cross-lingual resources. Existing methods to do so often adopt sequence-to-sequence networks with multi-task frameworks. Such approaches apply multiple decoders, each of which is utilized for a specific task. However, these independent decoders share no parameters, hence fail to capture the relationships between the discrete phrases of summaries in different languages, breaking the connections in order to transfer the knowledge of the high-resource languages to low-resource languages. To bridge these connections, we propose a novel Multi-Task framework for Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization (MCLAS) in a low-resource setting. Employing one unified decoder to generate the sequential concatenation of monolingual and cross-lingual summaries, MCLAS makes the monolingual summarization task a prerequisite of the CLS task. In this way, the shared decoder learns interactions involving alignments and summary patterns across languages, which encourages attaining knowledge transfer. Experiments on two CLS datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms three baseline models in both low-resource and full-dataset scenarios. Moreover, in-depth analysis on the generated summaries and attention heads verifies that interactions are learned well using MCLAS, which benefits the CLS task under limited parallel resources.

Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization with Limited Parallel Resources

Despite the prominence of neural abstractive summarization models, we know little about how they actually form summaries and how to understand where their decisions come from.
We propose a two-step method to interpret summarization model decisions. 
We first analyze the model's behavior by ablating the full model to categorize each decoder decision into one of several generation modes: roughly, is the model behaving like a language model, is it relying heavily on the input, or is it somewhere in between?
After isolating decisions that do depend on the input, we explore interpreting these decisions using several different attribution methods.
We compare these techniques based on their ability to select content and reconstruct the model's predicted token from perturbations of the input, thus revealing whether highlighted attributions are truly important for the generation of the next token.
While this machinery can be broadly useful even beyond summarization, we specifically demonstrate its capability to identify phrases the summarization model has memorized and determine where in the training pipeline this memorization happened, as well as study complex generation phenomena like sentence fusion on a per-instance basis.

Dissecting Generation Modes for Abstractive Summarization Models via Ablation and Attribution

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) involves translating source utterances to the target language in real-time before the speaker utterance is completed. This paper proposes the "multilingual" approach to \simt, where a single model simultaneously translates between multiple language-pairs. This not only results in more efficiency in terms of the number of models and parameters (hence simpler deployment), but may also lead to higher performing models by capturing commonalities among the languages. We further explore simple and effective multilingual architectures based on two strong recently proposed SiMT models. Our results on translating from two Germanic languages (German, Dutch) and three Romance languages (French, Italian, Romanian) into English show (i) the single multilingual model is on-par or better than individual models, and (ii) multilingual SiMT models trained based on language families are on-par or better than the universal model trained for all languages.

Multilingual Simultaneous Neural Machine Translation

Supervised learning methods have proven to be effective for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA).
However, the lack of fine-grained labeled data hinders their effectiveness in many domains. To address this issue, unsupervised domain adaptation methods are desired to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to any unlabeled target domain. In this paper, we propose a new domain adaptation paradigm called cross-domain review generation (CDRG), which aims to generate target-domain reviews with fine-grained annotation based on the source-domain labeled reviews. To achieve this goal, we propose a two-step approach as a concrete realization of CDRG. It first converts a source-domain review to a domain-independent review by masking its source-specific attributes, and then converts the domain-independent review to a target-domain review with a masked language model pre-trained in the target domain. We further propose two ways to leverage the generated target-domain reviews for two cross-domain ABSA tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our CDRG-based approaches over the state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.

Cross-Domain Review Generation for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing, these is a long held belief that datasets benefit the model. However, not all the data help with generalization, and some samples may contain ambiguous entities or noisy labels. The existing methods can not distinguish hard samples from noisy samples well, and becomes particularly challenging in the case of overfitting. This paper proposes a new method called Noise-Aware-with-Filter (NAF) to solve the issues from two sides. From the perspective of the data, we design a Logit-Maximum-Difference (LMD) mechanism, which maximizes the diversity between different samples to help the model identify noisy samples. From the perspective of the model, we design an Incomplete-Trust (In-trust) loss function, which boosts $L_{CRF}$ with a robust Distrust-Cross-Entropy(DCE) term. Our proposed In-trust can effectively alleviate the overfitting caused by previous loss function. Experiments on six real-world Chinese and English NER datasets show that NAF outperforms the previous methods, and which obtained the state-of-the-art(SOTA) results on the CoNLL2003 and CoNLL++ datasets.

Named Entity Recognition via Noise Aware Training Mechanism with Data Filter

Respiratory insufficiency is a symptom that requires hospitalization. This work investigates whether it is possible to detect this condition by analyzing patient's speech samples; the analysis was performed on data collected during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and thus limited to respiratory insufficiency in COVID-19 patients. For that, a dataset was created consisting of speech emissions of both COVID-19 patients affected by respiratory insufficiency and a control group. This dataset was used to build a Convolution Neural Network to detect respiratory insufficiency using speech emission MFCC representations. Methodologically, dealing with background noise was a challenge, so we also collected background noise from COVID-19 wards where patients were located.
Due to the difficulty in filtering noise without eliminating crucial information, noise samples were injected in the control group data to prevent bias. Moreover, we investigated (i) two approaches to address the duration variance of audios, and (ii) the ideal number of noise samples to inject in both patients and the control group to prevent bias and overfitting. The techniques developed reached 91.66% accuracy. Thus we validated the project's Leading Hypothesis, namely that it is possible to detect respiratory insufficiency in speech utterances, under real-life environmental conditions; we believe our results justify further enquiries into the use of automated speech analysis to support health professionals in triage procedures.


Deep Learning against COVID-19: Respiratory Insufficiency Detection in Brazilian Portuguese Speech

In multi-hop QA, answering complex questions entails iterative document retrieval for finding the missing entity of the question. The main steps of this process are sub-question detection, document retrieval for the sub-question, and generation of a new query for the final document retrieval. However, building a dataset that contains complex questions with sub-questions and their corresponding documents requires costly human annotation. To address the issue, we propose a new method for weakly supervised multi-hop retriever pre-training without human efforts.
Our method includes 1) a pre-training task for generating vector representations of complex questions, 2) a scalable data generation method that produces the nested structure of question and sub-question as weak supervision for pre-training, and 3) a pre-training model structure based on dense encoders. We conduct experiments to compare the performance of our pre-trained retriever with several state-of-the-art models on end-to-end multi-hop QA as well as document retrieval. The experimental results show that our pre-trained retriever is effective and also robust on limited data and computational resources.

Weakly Supervised Pre-Training for Multi-Hop Retriever

Transformer is the backbone of modern NLPmodels.In this paper, we propose RealFormer, a simple and generic technique to create Residual Attention Layer Transformer networks that significantly outperform the canonical Transformer and its variants (BERT,ETC, etc.) on a wide spectrum of tasks including Masked Language Modeling, GLUE, SQuAD, Neural Machine Translation,WikiHop, HotpotQA, Natural Questions, and OpenKP. We also observe empirically that RealFormer stabilizes training and leads to models with sparser attention.

RealFormer: Transformer Likes Residual Attention

Data augmentation has recently seen increased interest in NLP due to more work in low-resource domains, new tasks, and the popularity of large-scale neural networks that require large amounts of training data. Despite this recent upsurge, this area is still relatively underexplored, perhaps due to the challenges posed by the discrete nature of language data. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and unifying survey of data augmentation for NLP by summarizing the literature in a structured manner. We first introduce and motivate data augmentation for NLP, and then discuss major methodologically representative approaches. Next, we highlight techniques that are used for popular NLP applications and tasks. We conclude by outlining current challenges and directions for future research. Overall, our paper aims to clarify the landscape of existing literature in data augmentation for NLP and motivate additional work in this area. We also present a GitHub repository with a paper list that will be continuously updated at https://github.com/styfeng/DataAug4NLP

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