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Learning disentangled representations of texts, which encode information pertaining to different aspects in separate representations, is an active area of research in NLP for controllable and interpretable text generation. These methods have, for the most part, been developed in the context of text style transfer, but are limited in their evaluation. In this work, we look at the motivation behind learning disentangled representations of content and style for texts and at the potential use-cases when compared to end-to-end methods, and we propose evaluation metrics that correspond to these use-cases. We further conduct a systematic investigation of previously proposed loss functions for such models and evaluate them on a highly-structured and synthetic natural language dataset which is well-suited for the task of disentangled representation learning, as well as two other parallel style transfer datasets. Our results demonstrate that current models still require considerable amounts of supervision in order to achieve good performance.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

An {E}valuation of {D}isentangled {R}epresentation {L}earning for {T}exts

stylistic variation

disentangled representations

evaluation

**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).

technical paper

Every natural text is written in some style. Style is formed by a complex combination of different stylistic factors, including formality markers, emotions, metaphors, etc. One cannot form a complete understanding of a text without considering these factors. The factors combine and co-vary in complex ways to form styles. Studying the nature of the covarying combinations sheds light on stylistic language in general, sometimes called cross-style language understanding. This paper provides the benchmark corpus (XSLUE) that
combines existing datasets and collects a new one for sentence-level cross-style language understanding and evaluation. The benchmark contains text in 15 different styles under the proposed four theoretical groupings: figurative, personal, affective, and interpersonal groups. For valid evaluation, we collect an additional diagnostic set by annotating all 15 styles on the same text. Using
XSLUE, we propose three interesting cross-style applications in classification, correlation, and generation. First, our proposed cross-style classifier trained with multiple styles together helps improve overall classification performance against individually-trained style
classifiers. Second, our study shows that some styles are highly dependent on each other in human-written text. Finally, we find that combinations of some contradictive styles likely generate stylistically less appropriate text. We believe our benchmark and case studies help explore interesting future directions for cross-style research. The preprocessed datasets and code are publicly available.

Style is NOT a single variable: Case Studies for Cross-Stylistic Language Understanding

We introduce DynaSent ('Dynamic Sentiment'), a new English-language benchmark task for ternary (positive/negative/neutral) sentiment analysis. DynaSent combines naturally occurring sentences with sentences created using the open-source Dynabench Platform, which facilities human-and-model-in-the-loop dataset creation. DynaSent has a total of 121,634 sentences, each validated by five crowdworkers, and its development and test splits are designed to produce chance performance for even the best models we have been able to develop; when future models solve this task, we will use them to create DynaSent version 2, continuing the dynamic evolution of this benchmark. Here, we report on the dataset creation effort, focusing on the steps we took to increase quality and reduce artifacts. We also present evidence that DynaSent's Neutral category is more coherent than the comparable category in other benchmarks, and we motivate training models from scratch for each round over successive fine-tuning.

DynaSent: A Dynamic Benchmark for Sentiment Analysis

In this digital age, online users expect personalized content. To cater to diverse group of audiences across online platforms it is necessary to generate multiple variants of same content with differing degree of characteristics (sentiment, style, formality, etc.). Though text-style transfer is a well explored related area, it focuses on flipping the style attribute polarity instead of regulating a fine-grained attribute transfer. In this paper we propose a hierarchical architecture for finer control over the at- tribute, preserving content using attribute dis- entanglement. We demonstrate the effective- ness of the generative process for two different attributes with varied complexity, namely sentiment and formality. With extensive experiments and human evaluation on five real-world datasets, we show that the framework can generate natural looking sentences with finer degree of control of intensity of a given attribute.

A Hierarchical VAE for Calibrating Attributes while Generating Text using Normalizing Flow

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to identify the aspect terms, their corresponding sentiment polarities, and the opinion terms. There exist seven subtasks in ABSA. Most studies only focus on the subsets of these subtasks, which leads to various complicated ABSA models while hard to solve these subtasks in a unified framework. In this paper, we redefine every subtask target as a sequence mixed by pointer indexes and sentiment class indexes, which converts all ABSA subtasks into a unified generative formulation. Based on the unified formulation, we exploit the pre-training sequence-to-sequence model BART to solve all ABSA subtasks in an end-to-end framework. Extensive experiments on four ABSA datasets for seven subtasks demonstrate that our framework achieves substantial performance gain and provides a real unified end-to-end solution for the whole ABSA subtasks, which could benefit multiple tasks.

A Unified Generative Framework for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

While argument mining has achieved significant success in classifying argumentative relations between statements (support, attack, and neutral), we have a limited computational understanding of logical mechanisms that constitute those relations. Most recent studies rely on black-box models, which are not as linguistically insightful as desired. On the other hand, earlier studies use rather simple lexical features, missing logical relations between statements. To overcome these limitations, our work classifies argumentative relations based on four logical and theory-informed mechanisms between two statements, namely (i) factual consistency, (ii) sentiment coherence, (iii) causal relation, and (iv) normative relation. 
We demonstrate that our operationalization of these logical mechanisms classifies argumentative relations without directly training on data labeled with the relations, significantly better than several unsupervised baselines. We further demonstrate that these mechanisms also improve supervised classifiers through representation learning.

Classifying Argumentative Relations Using Logical Mechanisms and Argumentation Schemes

Task-oriented dialogue systems typically require manual annotation of dialogue slots in training data, which is costly to obtain.
We propose a method that eliminates this requirement:
We use weak supervision from existing linguistic annotation models to identify potential slot candidates, then automatically identify domain-relevant slots by using clustering algorithms.
Furthermore, we use the resulting slot annotation to train a neural-network-based tagger that is able to perform slot tagging with no human intervention. 
This tagger is trained solely on the outputs of our method and thus does not rely on any labeled data.

Our model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in slot tagging without labeled training data on four different dialogue domains. Moreover, we find that slot annotations discovered by our model significantly improve the performance of an end-to-end dialogue response generation model, compared to using no slot annotation at all.

Discovering Dialogue Slots with Weak Supervision

Intent classification is a major task in spoken language understanding (SLU). Since most models are built with pre-collected in-domain (IND) training utterances, their ability to detect unsupported out-of-domain (OOD) utterances has a critical effect in practical use. Recent works have shown that using extra data and labels can improve the OOD detection performance, yet it could be costly to collect such data. This paper proposes to train a model with only IND data while supporting both IND intent classification and OOD detection. Our method designs a novel domain-regularized module (DRM) to reduce the overconfident phenomenon of a vanilla classifier, achieving a better generalization in both cases. Besides, DRM can be used as a drop-in replacement for the last layer in any neural network-based intent classifier, providing a low-cost strategy for a significant improvement. The evaluation on four datasets shows that our method built on BERT and RoBERTa models achieves state-of-the-art performance against existing approaches and the strong baselines we created for the comparisons.

Enhancing the generalization for Intent Classification and Out-of-Domain Detection in SLU

Many task-oriented dialogue systems use deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to learn policies that respond to the user appropriately and complete the tasks successfully. Training DRL agents with diverse dialogue trajectories prepare them well for rare user requests and unseen situations. One effective diversification method is to let the agent interact with a diverse set of learned user models. However, trajectories created by these artificial user models may contain generation errors, which can quickly propagate into the agent's policy. It is thus important to control the quality of the diversification and resist the noise. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue diversification method for task-oriented dialogue systems trained in simulators. Our method, Intermittent Short Extension Ensemble (I-SEE), constrains the intensity to interact with an ensemble of diverse user models and effectively controls the quality of the diversification. Evaluations on the Multiwoz dataset show that I-SEE successfully boosts the performance of several state-of-the-art DRL dialogue agents.

High-Quality Dialogue Diversification by Intermittent Short Extension Ensembles

This paper studies the end-to-end construction of an NLP knowledge graph from scientific papers. We focus on extracting four types of relations: evaluatedOn between tasks and datasets, evaluatedBy between tasks and evaluation metrics, as well as coreferent and related relations between the same type of entities. For instance, “F1 score” is coreferent with “F-measure”. We introduce novel methods for each of these relation types and apply our final framework (SciNLP-KG) to 30,000 NLP papers from the ACL Anthology to build a large-scale knowledge graph, which can facilitate automatically constructing scientific leaderboards for the NLP community. The results of our experiments indicate that the resulting knowledge graph contains high-quality information.

End-to-End Construction of NLP Knowledge Graph

Existing NLU models have been shown to incorporate dataset biases leading to strong performance on in-distribution test sets but poor performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) ones. We introduce a simple yet effective debiasing framework whereby the shallow representations of the main model are used to derive a bias model and both models are trained simultaneously. During training, the bias model is used to down-weight biased samples for the main model and participates in de-emphasizing its biased representations. Conversely, the main model down-weights the unbiased samples for the bias model. We demonstrate on three well studied NLU tasks that despite its simplicity, our method leads to competitive OOD results. It significantly outperforms other debiasing approaches on two tasks, while still delivering high in-distribution performance.

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