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CausaLM: Causal Model Explanation Through Counterfactual Language Models

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

causal explanations

model explanations

interpretability

causal inference

**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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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

poster

We propose an alternate approach to quantifying how well language models learn natural language: we ask how well they match the statistical tendencies of natural language. To answer this question, we analyze whether text generated from language models exhibits the statistical tendencies present in the human-generated text on which they were trained. We provide a framework--paired with significance tests--for evaluating the fit of language models to these trends. We find that neural language models appear to learn only a subset of the tendencies considered, but align much more closely with empirical trends than proposed theoretical distributions (when present). Further, the fit to different distributions is highly-dependent on both model architecture and generation strategy. As concrete examples, text generated under the nucleus sampling scheme adheres more closely to the type--token relationship of natural language than text produced using standard ancestral sampling; text from LSTMs reflects the natural language distributions over length, stopwords, and symbols surprisingly well.

Language Model Evaluation Beyond Perplexity

The importance of explaining the outcome of a machine learning model, especially a black-box model, is widely acknowledged. Recent approaches explain an outcome by identifying the contributions of input features to this outcome. In environments involving large black-box models or complex inputs, this leads to computationally demanding algorithms. Further, these algorithms often suffer from low stability, with explanations varying significantly across similar examples. In this paper, we propose a Learning to Explain (L2E) approach that learns the behaviour of an underlying explanation algorithm simultaneously from all training examples. Once the explanation algorithm is distilled into an explainer network, it can be used to explain new instances. Our experiments on three classification tasks, which compare our approach to six explanation algorithms, show that L2E is between 5 and 7.5×10^4 times faster than these algorithms, while generating more stable explanations, and having comparable faithfulness to the black-box model.

Learning to Explain: Generating Stable Explanations Fast

Deep learning models have achieved great success on the task of Natural Language Inference (NLI), though only a few attempts try to explain their behaviors. Existing explanation methods usually pick prominent features such as words or phrases from the input text. However, for NLI, alignments among words or phrases are more enlightening clues to explain the model. To this end, this paper presents AREC, a post-hoc approach to generate alignment rationale explanations for co-attention based models in NLI. The explanation is based on feature selection, which keeps few but sufficient alignments while maintaining the same prediction of the target model. Experimental results show that our method is more faithful and human-readable compared with many existing approaches. We further study and re-evaluate three typical models through our explanation beyond accuracy, and propose a simple method that greatly improves the model robustness.

Alignment Rationale for Natural Language Inference

This paper presents a novel pre-trained language models (PLM) compression approach based on the matrix product operator (short as MPO) from quantum many-body physics. It can decompose an original matrix into central tensors (containing the core information) and auxiliary tensors (with only a small proportion of parameters). With the decomposed MPO structure, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy by only updating the parameters from the auxiliary tensors, and design an optimization algorithm for MPO-based approximation over stacked network architectures. Our approach can be applied to the original or the compressed PLMs in a general way, which derives a lighter network and significantly reduces the parameters to be fine-tuned. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach in model compression, especially the reduction in fine-tuning parameters (91% reduction on average). The code to reproduce the results of this paper can be found at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/MPOP.

Enabling Lightweight Fine-tuning for Pre-trained Language Model Compression based on Matrix Product Operators

In the recent advances of natural language processing, the scale of the state-of-the-art models and datasets is usually extensive, which challenges the application of sample-based explanation methods in many aspects, such as explanation interpretability, efficiency, and faithfulness. In this work, for the first time, we can improve the interpretability of explanations by allowing arbitrary text sequences as the explanation unit.
On top of this, we implement a hessian-free method with a model faithfulness guarantee. 
Finally, to compare our method with the others, we propose a semantic-based evaluation metric that can better align with humans' judgment of explanations than the widely adopted diagnostic or re-training measures.
The empirical results on multiple real data sets demonstrate the proposed method's superior performance to popular explanation techniques such as Influence Function or TracIn on semantic evaluation.

On Sample Based Explanation Methods for NLP: Faithfulness, Efficiency and Semantic Evaluation

Timeline Summarisation (TLS) aims to generate a concise, time-ordered list of events described in sources such as news articles. However, current systems do not provide an adequate way to adapt to new domains nor to focus on the aspects of interest to a particular user. Therefore, we propose a method for interactively learning abstractive TLS using Reinforcement Learning (RL). We define a compound reward function and use RL to fine-tune an abstractive Multi-document Summarisation (MDS) model, which avoids the need to train using reference summaries. One of the sub-reward functions will be learned interactively from user feedback to ensure the consistency between users’ demands and the generated timeline. The other sub-reward functions contribute to topical coherence and linguistic fluency. We plan experiments to evaluate whether our approach could generate accurate and precise timelines tailored for each user.

A Proposal: Interactively Learning to Summarise Timelines by Reinforcement Learning

Much of NLP research has focused on crowd-sourced static datasets and the supervised learning paradigm of training once and then evaluating test performance. As argued in de Vries et al. (2020), crowdsourced data has the issues of lack of naturalness and relevance to real-world use cases, while the static dataset paradigm does not allow for a model to learn from its experiences of using language (Silver et al., 2013). In contrast, one might hope for machine learning systems that become more useful as they interact with people. In this work, we build and deploy a role-playing game, whereby human players converse with learning agents situated in an open-domain fantasy world. We show that by training models on the conversations they have with humans in the game the models progressively improve, as measured by automatic metrics and online engagement scores. This learning is shown to be more efficient than crowdsourced data when applied to conversations with real users, as well as being far cheaper to collect.

Dialogue in the Wild: Learning from a Deployed Role-Playing Game with Humans and Bots

We investigate the question of how adaptive feedback from a virtual agent impacts the linguistic input of the user in a shared world game environment. To do so, we carry out an exploratory pilot study to observe how individualized linguistic feedback affects the user's speech input. We introduce a speech-controlled game, Apple Core-dination, in which an agent learns complex tasks using a base knowledge of simple actions. 
The agent is equipped with a learning mechanism for mapping new commands to sequences of simple actions, as well as the ability to incorporate user input into written responses. The agent repeatedly shares its internal knowledge state by responding to what it knows and does not know about language meaning and the shared environment. 
We focus on the linguistic feedback loop in order to analyze the nature of user input. Feedback from the agent is provided in the form of visual movement and written linguistic responses. Particular attention is given to incorporating user input into agent responses and updating the speech-to-action mappings based on commands provided by the user. Through our pilot study, we analyze task success and compare the lexical features of user input. Results show variation in input length and lexical variety across users, suggesting a correlation between the two that can be studied further.

Apple Core-dination: Linguistic Feedback and Learning in a Speech-to-Action Shared World Game

The Reading Machine, is a parsing framework that takes as input raw text and performs six standard nlp tasks: tokenization, pos tagging, morphological analysis, lemmatization, dependency parsing and sentence segmentation. It is built upon Transition Based Parsing, and allows implementing a large number of parsing configurations, among which a fully incremental one. Three case studies are presented to highlight the versatility of the framework. The first one explores whether an incremental parser is able to take into account top-down dependencies (i.e. the influence of high level decisions on low level ones), the second compares the performances of an incremental and a pipe-line architecture and the third quantifies the impact of the right context on the predictions made by an incremental parser.

The Reading Machine: a Versatile Framework for Studying Incremental Parsing Strategies

Coupled with biaffine decoders, transformers have been effectively adapted to text-to-graph transduction and achieved state-of-the-art performance on AMR parsing.
Many prior works, however, rely on the biaffine decoder for either or both arc and label predictions although most features used by the decoder may be learned by the transformer already.
This paper presents a novel approach to AMR parsing by combining heterogeneous data (tokens, concepts, labels) as one input to a transformer to learn attention, and use only attention matrices from the transformer to predict all elements in AMR graphs (concepts, arcs, labels).
Although our models use significantly fewer parameters than the previous state-of-the-art graph parser, they show similar or better accuracy on AMR 2.0 and 3.0.

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