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Text generation has received a lot of attention in computational argumentation research as of recent. A particularly challenging task is the generation of {\em counter}-arguments. So far, approaches largely focus on rebutting a given conclusion, yet other ways to counter an argument exist. In this work, we go beyond previous research by exploring argument {\em undermining}, that is, countering an argument by attacking one of its premises. We hypothesize that identifying the argument&#39;s weak premises is key to effective countering. Accordingly, we propose an approach to assess the strength of a premise to then generate a counter-argument specifically targeting the weak ones. On the one hand, both manual and automatic evaluation proves the importance of identifying weak premises in counter-argument generation. On the other hand, when considering {\em correctness} and {\em content richness}, human annotators favored our approach over state-of-the-art counter-argument generation.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Counter-Argument Generation by Attacking Weak Premises

argumentation

argument mining

argument generation

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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).

Text generation has received a lot of attention in computational argumentation research as of recent. A particularly challenging task is the generation of {\em counter}-arguments. So far, approaches largely focus on rebutting a given conclusion, yet other ways to counter an argument exist. In this work, we go beyond previous research by exploring argument {\em undermining}, that is, countering an argument by attacking one of its premises. We hypothesize that identifying the argument's weak premises is key to effective countering. Accordingly, we propose an approach to assess the strength of a premise to then generate a counter-argument specifically targeting the weak ones. On the one hand, both manual and automatic evaluation proves the importance of identifying weak premises in counter-argument generation. On the other hand, when considering {\em correctness} and {\em content richness}, human annotators favored our approach over state-of-the-art counter-argument generation.

technical paper

The performance of fine-tuning pre-trained language models largely depends on the hyperparameter configuration. 
In this paper, we investigate the performance of modern hyperparameter optimization methods (HPO) on fine-tuning pre-trained language models. 
First, we study and report three HPO algorithms' performances on fine-tuning two state-of-the-art language models on the GLUE dataset. We find that using the same time budget, HPO often fails to outperform grid search due to two reasons: insufficient time budget and overfitting. We propose two general strategies and an experimental procedure to systematically troubleshoot HPO's failure cases. By applying the procedure, we observe that HPO can succeed with more appropriate settings in the search space and time budget; however, in certain cases overfitting remains. Finally, we make suggestions for future work. Our implementation can be found in \url{https://github.com/microsoft/FLAML/tree/main/flaml/nlp/}

An Empirical Study on Hyperparameter Optimization for Fine-Tuning Pre-trained Language Models

Evaluation in NLP is usually done by comparing the scores of competing systems independently averaged over a common set of test instances.
In this work, we question the use of averages for aggregating evaluation scores into a final number used to decide which system is best, since the average, as well as alternatives such as the median, ignores the pairing arising from the fact that systems are evaluated on the same test instances.
We illustrate the importance of taking the instance\hyp level pairing of evaluation scores into account and demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, the advantages of aggregation methods based on pairwise comparisons, such as the Bradley--Terry (BT) model, a mechanism based on the estimated probability that a given system scores better than another on the test set. By re-evaluating 296 real NLP evaluation setups across four tasks and 18 evaluation metrics, we show that the choice of aggregation mechanism matters and yields different conclusions as to which systems are state of the art in about 30% of the setups.
To facilitate the adoption of pairwise evaluation, we release a practical tool for performing the full analysis of evaluation scores with the mean, median, BT, and two variants of BT (Elo and TrueSkill), alongside functionality for appropriate statistical testing.

Better than Average: Paired Evaluation of NLP systems

The cross-database context-dependent Text-to-SQL (XDTS) problem has attracted considerable attention in recent years due to its wide range of potential applications. However, we identify two biases in existing datasets for XDTS: (1) a high proportion of context-independent questions and (2) a high proportion of easy SQL queries. These biases conceal the major challenges in XDTS to some extent. In this work, we present Chase, a large-scale and pragmatic Chinese dataset for XDTS. It consists of 5,459 coherent question sequences (17,940 questions with their SQL queries annotated) over 280 databases, in which only 35% of questions are context-independent, and 28% of SQL queries are easy. We experiment on Chase with three state-of-the-art XDTS approaches. The best approach only achieves an exact match accuracy of 40% over all questions and 16% over all question sequences, indicating that Chase highlights the challenging problems of XDTS. We believe that XDTS can provide fertile soil for addressing the problems.

Chase: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Dataset for Cross-Database Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL

Despite pre-trained language models have proven useful for learning high-quality semantic representations, these models are still vulnerable to simple perturbations. Recent works aimed to improve the robustness of pre-trained models mainly focus on adversarial training from perturbed examples with similar semantics, neglecting the utilization of different or even opposite semantics. Different from the image processing field, the text is discrete and few word substitutions can cause significant semantic changes. To study the impact of semantics caused by small perturbations, we conduct a series of pilot experiments and surprisingly find that adversarial training is useless or even harmful for the model to detect these semantic changes. To address this problem, we propose Contrastive Learning with semantIc Negative Examples (CLINE), which constructs semantic negative examples unsupervised to improve the robustness under semantically adversarial attacking. By comparing with similar and opposite semantic examples, the model can effectively perceive the semantic changes caused by small perturbations. Empirical results show that our approach yields substantial improvements on a range of sentiment analysis, reasoning, and reading comprehension tasks. And CLINE also ensures the compactness within the same semantics and separability across different semantics in sentence-level.

CLINE: Contrastive Learning with Semantic Negative Examples for Natural Language Understanding

Topic modeling has been widely used for discovering the latent semantic structure of documents, but most existing methods learn topics with a flat structure. Although probabilistic models can generate topic hierarchies by introducing nonparametric priors like Chinese restaurant process, such methods have data scalability issues. In this study, we develop a tree-structured topic model by leveraging nonparametric neural variational inference. Particularly, the latent components of the stick-breaking process are first learned for each document, then the affiliations of latent components are modeled by the dependency matrices between network layers. Utilizing this network structure, we can efficiently extract a tree-structured topic hierarchy with reasonable structure, low redundancy, and adaptable widths. Experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.

Tree-Structured Topic Modeling with Nonparametric Neural Variational Inference

A comprehensive knowledge graph (KG) contains an instance-level entity graph and an ontology-level concept graph. The two-view KG provides a testbed for models to "simulate" human's abilities on knowledge abstraction, concretization, and completion (KACC), which are crucial for human to recognize the world and manage learned knowledge. Existing studies mainly focus on partial aspects of KACC. In order to promote thorough analyses for KACC abilities of models, we propose a unified KG benchmark by improving existing benchmarks in terms of dataset scale, task coverage, and difficulty. Specifically, we collect new datasets that contain larger concept graphs, abundant cross-view links as well as dense entity graphs. Based on the datasets, we propose novel tasks such as multi-hop knowledge abstraction (MKA), multi-hop knowledge concretization (MKC) and then design a comprehensive benchmark. For MKA and MKC tasks, we further annotate multi-hop hierarchical triples as harder samples. The experimental results of existing methods demonstrate the challenges of our benchmark. The resource is available at https://github.com/thunlp/KACC.

KACC: A Multi-task Benchmark for Knowledge Abstraction, Concretization and Completion

Topic modeling is an unsupervised method for revealing the hidden semantic structure of a corpus. It has been increasingly widely adopted as a tool in the social sciences, including political science, digital humanities and sociological research in general. One desirable property of topic models is to allow users to find topics describing a specific aspect of the corpus. A possible solution is to incorporate domain-specific knowledge into topic modeling, but this requires a specification from domain experts. We propose a novel query-driven topic model that allows users to specify a simple query in words or phrases and return query-related topics, thus avoiding tedious work from domain experts. Our proposed approach is particularly attractive when the user-specified query has a low occurrence in a text corpus, making it difficult for traditional topic models built on word cooccurrence patterns to identify relevant topics. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in comparison with both classical topic models and neural topic models.

A Query-Driven Topic Model

Applying reinforcement learning to dialogue policy learning requires prohibitively large rounds of human-machine interactions. To improve the learning performance, the Deep Dyna-Q framework with a world model that imitates real users is widely used in recent years. Unfortunately, how to build an effective world model and how to evaluate the experiences generated by the world model efficiently have not been well studied. In order to further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of dialogue policy learning, we present a novel Gaussian Process based Deep Dyna-Q approach in this paper. The Gaussian Process model, which is analytically tractable and fits for small-sample problems, is introduced to build the world model. In addition, we design a highly efficient Kullback-Leibler divergence based discriminator to evaluate the quality of experiences generated by the world model. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed approach. The task-completion success rate can be improved by about 20\% with fewer human-machine interactions.

Gaussian Process based Deep Dyna-Q approach for Dialogue Policy Learning

Scientific document understanding is challenging as the data is highly domain specific and diverse. However, datasets for tasks with scientific text require expensive manual annotation and tend to be small and limited to only one or a few fields. At the same time, scientific documents contain many potential training signals, such as citations, which can be used to build large labelled datasets. Given this, we present an in-depth study of cite-worthiness detection in English, where a sentence is labelled for whether or not it cites an external source. To accomplish this, we introduce CiteWorth, a large, contextualized, rigorously cleaned labelled dataset for cite-worthiness detection built from a massive corpus of extracted plain-text scientific documents. We show that CiteWorth is high-quality, challenging, and suitable for studying problems such as domain adaptation. Our best performing cite-worthiness detection model is a paragraph-level contextualized sentence labelling model based on Longformer, exhibiting a 5 F1 point improvement over SciBERT which considers only individual sentences. Finally, we demonstrate that language model fine-tuning with cite-worthiness as a secondary task leads to improved performance on downstream scientific document understanding tasks.

CiteWorth: Cite-Worthiness Detection for Improved Scientific Document Understanding

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key Natural Language Processing task. However, most existing work on NER targets flat named entities (NEs) and ignores the recognition of nested structures, where entities can be enclosed within other NEs. Moreover, evaluation of Nested Named Entity Recognition (NNER) across domains remains challenging, mainly due to the limited availability of datasets. To address these gaps, we present EWT-NNER, a dataset covering five web domains annotated for nested named entities on top of the English Web Treebank (EWT). We present the corpus and an empirical evaluation, including transfer results from German and Danish. EWT-NNER is annotated for four major entity types, including suffixes for derivational entity markers and partial named entities, spanning a total of 12 classes. We envision the public release of EWT-NNER to encourage further research on nested NER, particularly on cross-lingual cross-domain evaluation.

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