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Professional summaries are written with document-level information, such as the theme of the document, in mind. This is in contrast with most seq2seq decoders which simultaneously learn to focus on salient content, while deciding what to generate, at each decoding step. With the motivation to narrow this gap, we introduce Focus Attention Mechanism, a simple yet effective method to encourage decoders to proactively generate tokens that are similar or topical to the input document. Further, we propose a Focus Sampling method to enable generation of diverse summaries, an area currently understudied in summarization. When evaluated on the BBC extreme summarization task, two state-of-the-art models augmented with Focus Attention generate summaries that are closer to the target and more faithful to their input documents, outperforming their vanilla counterparts on ROUGE and multiple faithfulness measures. We also empirically demonstrate that Focus Sampling is more effective in generating diverse and faithful summaries than top-k or nucleus sampling-based decoding methods.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Focus Attention: Promoting Faithfulness and Diversity in Summarization

focus

diversity

faithfulness

attention

summarization

sampling

**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).

poster

In order to deeply understand the capability of pretrained language models in text generation and conduct a diagnostic evaluation, we propose TGEA, an error-annotated dataset with multiple benchmark tasks for text generation from pretrained language models (PLMs). We use carefully selected prompt words to guide GPT-2 to generate candidate sentences, from which we select 47K for error annotation. Crowdsourced workers manually check each of these sentences and detect 12k erroneous sentences. We create an error taxonomy to cover 24 types of errors occurring in these erroneous sentences according to the nature of errors with respect to linguistics and knowledge (e.g., common sense). For each erroneous span in PLM-generated sentences, we also detect another span that is closely associated with it. Each error is hence manually labeled with comprehensive annotations, including the span of the error, the associated span, minimal correction to the error, the type of the error, and rationale behind the error. Apart from the fully annotated dataset, we also present a detailed description of the data collection procedure, statistics and analysis of the dataset. This is the first dataset with comprehensive annotations for PLM-generated texts, which facilitates the diagnostic evaluation of PLM-based text generation. Furthermore, we use TGEA as a benchmark dataset and propose a series of automatic diagnosis tasks, including error detection, error type classification, associated span detection, error rationale generation, to further promote future study on the automatic error detection and correction on texts generated by pretrained language models.

TGEA: An Error-Annotated Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for TextGeneration from Pretrained Language Models

Recently, question answering (QA) based on machine reading comprehension has become popular. This work focuses on generative QA which aims to generate an abstractive answer to a given question instead of extracting an answer span from a provided passage. Generative QA often suffers from two critical problems: (1) summarizing content irrelevant to a given question, (2) drifting away from a correct answer during generation.

In this paper, we address these problems by a novel Rationale-Enriched Answer Generator (REAG), which incorporates an extractive mechanism into a generative model. Specifically, we add an extraction task on the encoder to obtain the rationale for an answer, which is the most relevant piece of text in an input document to a given question. Based on the extracted rationale and original input, the decoder is expected to generate an answer with high confidence. We jointly train REAG on the MS MARCO QA+NLG task and the experimental results show that REAG improves the quality and semantic accuracy of answers over baseline models.

Addressing Semantic Drift in Generative Question Answering with Auxiliary Extraction

In the field of dialogue summarization, due to the lack of training data, it is often difficult for supervised summary generation methods to learn vital information from dialogue context with limited data. Several attempts on unsupervised summarization for text by leveraging semantic information solely or auto-encoder strategy (i.e., sentence compression), it however cannot be adapted to the dialogue scene due to the limited words in utterances and huge gap between the dialogue and its summary. In this study, we propose a novel unsupervised strategy to address this challenge, which roots from the hypothetical foundation that a superior summary approximates a replacement of the original dialogue, and they are roughly equivalent for auxiliary (self-supervised) tasks, e.g., dialogue generation. The proposed strategy RepSum is applied to generate both extractive and abstractive summary with the guidance of the followed n^{th} utterance generation and classification tasks. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

RepSum: Unsupervised Dialogue Summarization based on Replacement Strategy

Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for the Seq2Seq architecture, as Seq2Seq is not good at analyzing long-distance relations in text.
In this paper, we present BASS, a novel framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph, 
which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of 
context and conveys rich relations between phrases.
Further, a graph-based encoder-decoder model is proposed to improve both the document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure.
Specifically, several graph augmentation methods are designed to encode both the explicit and implicit relations in the text while the graph-propagation attention mechanism is developed in the decoder to select salient content into the summary.
Empirical results show that the proposed architecture brings substantial improvements for both long-document and multi-document summarization tasks.

BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph

Scientific documents are replete with measurements mentioned in various formats and styles. As such, in a document with multiple quantities and measured entities, the task of associating each quantity to its corresponding measured entity is challenging. Thus, it is necessary to have a method to efficiently extract all measurements and attributes related to them. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel model for the task of measurement relation extraction (MRE) whose goal is to recognize the relation between measured entities, quantities and conditions mentioned in a document. Our model employs a deep translation-based architecture to dynamically induce the important words in the document to classify the relation between a pair of entities. Furthermore, we introduce a novel regularization technique based on Information Bottleneck (IB) to filter out the noisy information from the induced set of important words. Our experiments on the recent SemEval 2021 Task 8 datasets reveal the effectiveness of the proposed model.

DPR at SemEval-2021 Task 8: Dynamic Path Reasoning for Measurement Relation Extraction

In this paper, we present our contribution in SemEval-2021 Task 1: Lexical Complexity Prediction, where we integrate linguistic, statistical, and semantic properties of the target word and its context as features within a Machine Learning (ML) framework for predicting lexical complexity.
In particular, we use BERT contextualized word embeddings to represent the semantic meaning of the target word and its context. We participated in the sub-task of predicting the complexity score of single words.

Context-aware Representation for Lexical Complexity Prediction

Detecting spans and classifying used manipulative techniques in those spans by means of the BART EncoderDecoder model to generate a marked up version of the input. How is it done, what are the limitations, and how can these be remedied.

BART for Span Detection and Classification

This paper describes the performance of the team \teamname~at SemEval 2021 Task 1 - Lexical Complexity Prediction. The main contribution of this paper is to fine-tune transformer-based language models pre-trained on several text corpora, some being general (E.g., Wikipedia, BooksCorpus), some being the corpora from which the CompLex Dataset was extracted, and others being from other specific domains such as Finance, Law, etc. We perform ablation studies on selecting the transformer models and how their individual complexity scores are aggregated to get the resulting complexity scores. Our method achieves a best Pearson Correlation of 0.784 in sub-task 1 (single word) and 0.836 in sub-task 2 (multiple word expressions).

SemEval-2021 Task 1 : Lexical Complexity Prediction using Transformer-based Language Models pre-trained on various text corpora

This paper introduces our systems for all three subtasks of SemEval-2021 Task 4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning.
To help our model better represent and understand abstract concepts in natural language, we well-design many simple and effective approaches adapted to the backbone model (RoBERTa).
Specifically, we formalize the subtasks into the multiple-choice question answering format and add special tokens to abstract concepts, then, the final prediction of QA is considered as the result of subtasks. Additionally, we employ many finetuning tricks to improve performance.
Experimental results show that our approach gains significant performance compared with the baseline systems.
Our system achieves eighth rank (87.51\%) and tenth rank (89.64\%) on the official blind test set of subtask 1 and subtask 2 respectively.

IIE-NLP-Eyas at SemEval-2021 Task 4: Enhancing PLM for ReCAM with Special Tokens, Re-Ranking, Siamese Encoders and Back Translation

MeasEval aims at identifying quantities along with the entities that are measured with additional properties within English scientific documents. The variety of styles used makes measurements, a most crucial aspect of scientific writing, challenging to extract. This paper presents ablation studies making the case for several preprocessing steps such as specialized tokenization rules. For linguistic structure, we encode dependency trees in a Deep Graph Convolution Network (DGCNN) for multi-task classification.

Focus Attention: Promoting Faithfulness and Diversity in Summarization

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TGEA: An Error-Annotated Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for TextGeneration from Pretrained Language Models

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