Thailand

Most state-of-the-art open-domain question answering systems use a neural retrieval model to encode passages into continuous vectors and extract them from a knowledge source. However, such retrieval models often require large memory to run because of the massive size of their passage index. In this paper, we introduce Binary Passage Retriever (BPR), a memory-efficient neural retrieval model that integrates a learning-to-hash technique into the state-of-the-art Dense Passage Retriever (DPR) to represent the passage index using compact binary codes rather than continuous vectors. BPR is trained with a multi-task objective over two tasks: efficient candidate generation based on binary codes and accurate reranking based on continuous vectors. Compared with DPR, BPR substantially reduces the memory cost from 65GB to 2GB without a loss of accuracy on two standard open-domain question answering benchmarks: Natural Questions and TriviaQA. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/studio-ousia/bpr.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Efficient Passage Retrieval with Hashing for Open-domain Question Answering

learning to hash

hashing

passage retrieval

question answering

**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).

poster

In news articles the lead bias is a common phenomenon that usually dominates the learning signals for neural extractive summarizers, severely limiting their performance on data with different or even no bias. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique to demote lead bias and make the summarizer focus more on the content semantics. Experiments on two news corpora with different degrees of lead bias show that our method can effectively demote the model's learned lead bias and improve its generality on out-of-distribution data, with little to no performance loss on in-distribution data.

Demoting the Lead Bias in News Summarization via Alternating Adversarial Learning

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a crucial task in natural language processing and has achieved remarkable advancements. However, most of the neural MRC models are still far from robust and fail to generalize well in real-world applications. In order to comprehensively verify the robustness and generalization of MRC models, we introduce a real-world Chinese dataset -- DuReader_robust . It is designed to evaluate the MRC models from three aspects: over-sensitivity, over-stability and generalization. Comparing to previous work, the instances in DuReader_robust are natural texts, rather than the altered unnatural texts. It presents the challenges when applying MRC models to real-world applications. The experimental results show that MRC models do not perform well on the challenge test set. Moreover, we analyze the behavior of existing models on the challenge test set, which may provide suggestions for future model development. The dataset and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/baidu/DuReader.

DuReader_robust: A Chinese Dataset Towards Evaluating Robustness and Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension in Real-World Applications

With the recent advancements in deep learning, neural solvers have gained promising results in solving math word problems. However, these SOTA solvers only generate binary expression trees that contain basic arithmetic operators and do not explicitly use the math formulas. As a result, the expression trees they produce are lengthy and uninterpretable because they need to use multiple operators and constants to
represent one single formula. In this paper, we propose sequence-to-general tree (S2G) that
learns to generate interpretable and executable operation trees where the nodes can be formulas with an arbitrary number of arguments. With nodes now allowed to be formulas, S2G can learn to incorporate mathematical domain knowledge into problem-solving, making the results more interpretable. Experiments show that S2G can achieve a better performance against strong baselines on problems that require domain knowledge.

Sequence to General Tree: Knowledge-Guided Geometry Word Problem Solving

This paper studies the bias problem of multi-hop question answering models, of answering correctly without correct reasoning. One way to robustify these models is by supervising to not only answer right, but also with right reasoning chains. An existing direction is to annotate reasoning chains to train models, requiring expensive additional annotations. In contrast, we propose a new approach to learn evidentiality, deciding whether the answer prediction is supported by correct evidences, without such annotations. Instead, we compare counterfactual changes in answer confidence with and without evidence sentences, to generate "pseudo-evidentiality" annotations. We validate our proposed model on an original set and challenge set in HotpotQA, showing that our method is accurate and robust in multi-hop reasoning.

Robustifying Multi-hop QA through Pseudo-Evidentiality Training

Understanding the multi-scale visual information
in a video is essential for Video Question Answering (VideoQA).
Therefore, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Progressive Attention Network 
(MSPAN)
to achieve relational reasoning between cross-scale video information.
We construct clips of different lengths to represent different 
scales of the video.
Then, the clip-level features are aggregated into node features 
by using max-pool, 
and a graph is generated for each scale of clips.
For cross-scale feature interaction, 
we design a message passing strategy between adjacent scale graphs, 
i.e., top-down scale interaction and bottom-up scale interaction.
Under the question's guidance of progressive attention, 
we realize the fusion of all-scale video features.
Experimental evaluations on three
benchmarks: TGIF-QA, MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA show
our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance.

Multi-Scale Progressive Attention Network for Video Question Answering

This paper describes the system submitted to SemEval 2021 Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection. The task concerns evaluating systems that detect the spans that make a text toxic when detecting such spans are possible. To address the possibly multi-span detection problem, we develop a start-to-end tagging framework on the top of RoBERTa based language model. Besides, we design a custom loss function which take distance into account. In comparison to other participating teams, our system
has achieved 69.03% F1 score, which is slight lower (-1.8 and -1.73) than the top 1
(70.83%) and top 2 (70.77%), respectively.

MedAI at SemEval-2021 Task 5: Start-to-end Tagging Framework for Toxic Spans Detection

This poster describes the Duluth system that participated in SemEval-2021 Task 11, NLP Contribution Graph. It shows the process of extracting contribution sentences and scientific entities and relations from scholarly articles in the domain of Natural Language Processing. Our solution uses DeBERTa for multi-class sentence classification to extract the contributing sentences and their information unit, and dependency parsing to extract phrases from each sentence and format into subject-predicate-object triples.

Duluth at SemEval-2021 Task 11: Applying DeBERTa to Contributing Sentence Selection and Dependency Parsing for Entity Extraction

This work presents our contribution to SemEval-2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation (MCL-WiC). Our experiments cover English (EN-EN) sub-track from the multilingual setting of the task. We experiment with several pre-trained language models and investigate an impact of different top-layers on fine-tuning. We find the combination of Cosine Similarity and ReLU activation leading to the most effective fine-tuning procedure. Our best model results in accuracy 92.7%, which is the fourth-best score in EN-EN sub-track.

Zhestyatsky at SemEval-2021 Task 2: ReLU over Cosine Similarity for BERT Fine-tuning

This paper describes our submission to SemEval-2021 Task 1: predicting the complexity score for single words. 
Our model leverages standard morphosyntactic and frequency-based features that proved helpful for Complex Word Identification (a related task), and combines them with predictions made by Transformer-based pre-trained models that were fine-tuned on the Shared Task data.
Our submission system stacks all previous models with a LightGBM at the top.
One novelty of our approach is the use of multi-task learning for fine-tuning a pre-trained model for both Lexical Complexity Prediction and Word Sense Disambiguation.
Our analysis shows that all independent models achieve a good performance in the task, but that stacking them obtains a Pearson correlation of 0.7704, merely 0.018 points behind the winning submission.

IAPUCP at SemEval-2021 Task 1: Stacking Fine-Tuned Transformers is Almost All You Need for Lexical Complexity Prediction

In this work, we describe our system submission to the SemEval 2021 Task 11: NLP Contribution Graph Challenge. We attempt all the three sub-tasks in the challenge and report our results. Subtask 1 aims to identify the contributing sentences in a given publication. Subtask 2 follows from Subtask 1 to extract the scientific term and predicate phrases from the identified contributing sentences. The final Subtask 3 entails extracting triples (subject, predicate, object) from the phrases and categorizing them under one or more defined information units. With the NLPContributionGraph Shared Task, the organizers formalized the building of a scholarly contributions-focused graph over NLP scholarly articles as an automated task. Our approaches include a BERT-based classification model for identifying the contributing sentences in a research publication, a rule-based dependency parsing for phrase extraction, followed by a CNN-based model for information units classification and a set of rules for triples extraction. The quantitative results show that we obtain the 5th, 5th, and 7th rank respectively in three evaluation phases.

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Demoting the Lead Bias in News Summarization via Alternating Adversarial Learning

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