Thailand

Task-oriented dialogue systems typically rely on large amounts of high-quality training data or require complex handcrafted rules. However, existing datasets are often limited in size considering the complexity of the dialogues. Additionally, conventional training signal inference does not support non-deterministic agent behaviour, i.e. agents considering multiple actions as valid in identical dialogue states. We propose the Conversation Graph (ConvGraph), a graphbased representation of dialogues that can be exploited for data augmentation, and
multi-reference training and evaluation of non-deterministic agents. ConvGraph generates novel dialogue paths to augment data volume and diversity. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation across three datasets shows that data augmentation and multi-reference training with ConvGraph can improve dialogue success rates by up to 6.4%.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Conversation Graph: Data Augmentation, Training and Evaluation for Non-Deterministic Dialogue Management

dialogue management

multiwoz

data augmentation

dialogue

**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.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

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

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.

SimCLS: A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Abstractive Summarization

Static word embeddings that represent words by a single vector 
cannot capture the variability of word meaning in different linguistic
and extralinguistic contexts. Building on prior work on contextualized 
and dynamic word embeddings, we introduce dynamic contextualized 
word embeddings that represent words as a function of both linguistic
and extralinguistic context. Based on a pretrained language model (PLM), 
dynamic contextualized word embeddings model time and social space 
jointly, which makes them attractive for a range of NLP tasks involving
semantic variability. We highlight potential application scenarios by means 
of qualitative and quantitative analyses on four English datasets.

Dynamic Contextualized Word Embeddings

While there is a large amount of research in the field of Lexical Semantic Change Detection, only few approaches go beyond a standard benchmark evaluation of existing models. In this paper, we propose a shift of focus from change detection to change discovery, i.e., discovering novel word senses over time from the full corpus vocabulary. By heavily fine-tuning a type-based and a token-based approach on recently published German data, we demonstrate that both models can successfully be applied to discover new words undergoing meaning change. Furthermore, we provide an almost fully automated framework for both evaluation and discovery.

Lexical Semantic Change Discovery

Transformer-based language models have taken many fields in NLP by storm. BERT and its derivatives dominate most of the existing evaluation benchmarks, including those for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), thanks to their ability in capturing context-sensitive semantic nuances. However, there is still little knowledge about their capabilities and potential limitations in encoding and recovering word senses. In this article, we provide an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of the celebrated BERT model with respect to lexical ambiguity. One of the main conclusions of our analysis is that BERT can accurately capture high-level sense distinctions, even when a limited number of examples is available for each word sense. Our analysis also reveals that in some cases language models come close to solving coarse-grained noun disambiguation under ideal conditions in terms of availability of training data and computing resources. However, this scenario rarely occurs in real-world settings and, hence, many practical challenges remain even in the coarse-grained setting. We also perform an in-depth comparison of the two main language model based WSD strategies, namely, fine-tuning and feature extraction, finding that the latter approach is more robust with respect to sense bias and it can better exploit limited available training data. In fact, the simple feature extraction strategy of averaging contextualized embeddings proves robust even using only three training sentences per word sense, with minimal improvements obtained by increasing the size of this training data.

Analysis and Evaluation of Language Models for Word Sense Disambiguation

Pruning has been demonstrated as an effective way of reducing computational complexity for deep networks, especially CNNs for computer vision tasks. In this paper, we investigate the opportunity to accelerate the inference of large-scale pre-trained language model via pruning. We propose EBERT, a dynamic structured pruning algorithm for efficient BERT inference. Unlike previous methods that randomly prune the model weights for static inference, EBERT dynamically determines and prunes the unimportant heads in multi-head self-attention layers and the unimportant structured computations in feed-forward network for each input sample at run-time. Experimental results show that our proposed EBERT outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on different tasks.

EBERT: Efficient BERT Inference with Dynamic Structured Pruning

How to combine several pieces of evidence to verify a claim is an interesting semantic task. Very complex methods have been proposed, combining different evidence vectors using an evidence interaction graph. In this paper, we show that in case of inference based on transformer models, two effective approaches use either (i) a simple application of max pooling over the Transformer evidence vectors; or (ii) computing a weighted sum of the evidence vectors. Our experiments on the FEVER claim verification task show that the methods above achieve the state of the art, constituting strong baseline for much more computationally complex methods.

Strong and Light Baseline Models for Fact-Checking Joint Inference

Conventional autoregressive models have achieved great success in text generation but suffer from the exposure bias problem in that token sequences in the training and in the generation stages are mismatched.
While generative adversarial networks (GANs) can remedy this problem, existing implementations of GANs directly on the discrete outputs tend to be unstable and lack diversity.
In this work, we propose TILGAN, a Transformer-based Implicit Latent GAN, which combines a Transformer autoencoder and GAN in the latent space with a novel design and distribution matching based on the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence.
Specifically, to improve the local and global coherence, we explicitly introduce a multi-scale discriminator to capture the semantic information at varying scales among the sequence of hidden representations encoded by Transformer. 
Moreover, the decoder is enhanced by an additional KL loss to be consistent with the latent-generator. 
Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of our model, by obtaining significant improvements and a better quality-diversity trade-off in automatic and human evaluation for both unconditional and conditional generation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/shizhediao/TILGAN.

TILGAN: Transformer-based Implicit Latent GAN for Diverse and Coherent Text Generation

Adapting a model to a handful of personalized data is challenging, especially when it has gigantic parameters, such as a Transformer-based pretrained model. The standard way of fine-tuning all the parameters necessitates storing a huge model for each user. In this work, we introduce a lightweight approach dubbed UserAdapter, which clamps hundred millions of parameters of the Transformer model and optimizes a tiny user-specific vector. We take sentiment analysis as a test bed, and collect datasets of reviews from Yelp and IMDB respectively. Results show that, on both datasets, UserAdapter achieves better accuracy than the standard fine-tuned Transformer-based pre-trained model. More importantly, UserAdapter offers an efficient way to produce a personalized Transformer model with less than 0.5\% parameters added for each user.

UserAdapter: Few-Shot User Learning in Sentiment Analysis

Pre-trained transformer language models have shown remarkable performance on a variety of NLP tasks. However, recent research has suggested that phrase-level representations in these models reflect heavy influences of lexical content, but lack evidence of sophisticated, compositional phrase information. Here we investigate the impact of fine-tuning on the capacity of contextualized embeddings to capture phrase meaning information beyond lexical content. Specifically, we fine-tune models on an adversarial paraphrase classification task with high lexical overlap, and on a sentiment classification task. After fine-tuning, we analyze phrasal representations in controlled settings following prior work. We find that fine-tuning largely fails to benefit compositionality in these representations, though training on sentiment yields a small, localized benefit for certain models. In follow-up analyses, we identify confounding cues in the paraphrase dataset that may explain the lack of composition benefits from that task, and we discuss potential factors underlying the localized benefits from sentiment training.

On the Interplay Between Fine-tuning and Composition in Transformers

Ever since the advent of deep learning, cross-modal representation learning has been dominated by the approaches involving convolutional neural networks for visual representation and recurrent neural networks for language representation. Transformer architecture, however, has rapidly taken over the recurrent neural networks in natural language processing tasks, and it has also been shown that vision tasks can be handled with transformer architecture, with compatible performance to convolutional neural networks. Such results naturally lead to speculation upon the possibility of tackling cross-modal representation for vision and language exclusively with transformer. This paper examines transformer-exclusive cross-modal representation to explore such possibility, demonstrating its potentials as well as discussing its current limitations and its prospects.

Conversation Graph: Data Augmentation, Training and Evaluation for Non-Deterministic Dialogue Management

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