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Present language understanding methods have demonstrated extraordinary ability of recognizing patterns in texts via machine learning. However, existing methods indiscriminately use the recognized patterns in the testing phase that is inherently different from us humans who have counterfactual thinking, e.g., to scrutinize for the hard testing samples. Inspired by this, we propose a Counterfactual Reasoning Model, which mimics the counterfactual thinking by learning from few counterfactual samples. In particular, we devise a generation module to generate representative counterfactual samples for each factual sample, and a retrospective module to retrospect the model prediction by comparing the counterfactual and factual samples. Extensive experiments on sentiment analysis (SA) and natural language inference (NLI) validate the effectiveness of our method.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Empowering Language Understanding with Counterfactual Reasoning

retrospection

model inference

counterfactual generation

causality

counterfactual reasoning

**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.


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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

Neural lexicalized PCFGs (L-PCFGs) have been shown effective in grammar induction. However, to reduce computational complexity, they make a strong independence assumption on the generation of the child word and thus bilexical dependencies are ignored. In this paper, we propose an approach to parameterize L-PCFGs without making implausible independence assumptions. Our approach directly models bilexical dependencies and meanwhile reduces both learning and representation complexities of L-PCFGs. Experimental results on the English WSJ dataset confirm the effectiveness of our approach in improving both running speed and unsupervised parsing performance.

Neural Bi-Lexicalized PCFG Induction

On social media platforms, hateful and offensive language negatively impact the mental well-being of users and the participation of people from diverse backgrounds. Automatic methods to detect offensive language have largely relied on datasets with categorical labels. However, comments can vary in their degree of offensiveness. We create the first dataset of English language Reddit comments that has fine-grained, real-valued scores between -1 (maximally supportive) and 1 (maximally offensive). The dataset was annotated using Best--Worst Scaling, a form of comparative annotation that has been shown to alleviate known biases of using rating scales. We show that the method produces highly reliable offensiveness scores. Finally, we evaluate the ability of widely-used neural models to predict offensiveness scores on this new dataset.

Ruddit: Norms of Offensiveness for English Reddit Comments

Automatic dialogue coherence evaluation has attracted increasing attention and is crucial for developing promising dialogue systems.
However, existing metrics have two major limitations:
(a) they are mostly trained in a simplified two-level setting (coherent vs. incoherent), while humans give Likert-type multi-level coherence scores, dubbed as "quantifiable"; (b) their predicted coherence scores cannot align with the actual human rating standards due to the absence of human guidance during training. To address these limitations, we propose Quantifiable Dialogue Coherence Evaluation (QuantiDCE), a novel framework aiming to train a quantifiable dialogue coherence metric that can reflect the actual human rating standards. Specifically, QuantiDCE includes two training stages, Multi-Level Ranking (MLR) pre-training and Knowledge Distillation (KD) fine-tuning. During MLR pre-training, a new MLR loss is proposed for enabling the model to learn the coarse judgement of coherence degrees. Then, during KD fine-tuning, the pretrained model is further finetuned to learn the actual human rating standards with only very few human-annotated data. To advocate the generalizability even with limited fine-tuning data, a novel KD regularization is introduced to retain the knowledge learned at the pre-training stage. Experimental results show that the model trained by QuantiDCE presents stronger correlations with human judgements than the other state-of-the-art metrics.

Towards Quantifiable Dialogue Coherence Evaluation

Ordinal Classification (OC) is an important classification task where the classes are ordinal. For example, an OC task for sentiment analysis could have the following classes: highly positive, positive, neutral, negative, highly negative. Clearly, evaluation measures for an OC task should penalise misclassifications by considering the ordinal nature of the classes. Ordinal Quantification (OQ) is a related task where the gold data is a distribution over ordinal classes, and the system is required to estimate this distribution. Evaluation measures for an OQ task should also take the ordinal nature of the classes into account. However, for both OC and OQ, there are only a small number of known evaluation measures that meet this basic requirement. In the present study, we utilise data from the SemEval and NTCIR communities to clarify the properties of nine evaluation measures in the context of OC tasks, and six measures in the context of OQ tasks.

Evaluating Evaluation Measures for Ordinal Classification and Ordinal Quantification

Current models for event causality identification (ECI) mainly adopt a supervised framework, which heavily rely on labeled data for training. Unfortunately, the scale of current annotated datasets is relatively limited, which cannot provide sufficient support for models to capture useful indicators from causal statements, especially for handing those new, unseen cases. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel approach, shortly named CauSeRL, which leverages external causal statements for event causality identification. First of all, we design a self-supervised framework to learn context-specific causal patterns from external causal statements. Then, we adopt a contrastive transfer strategy to incorporate the learned context-specific causal patterns into the target ECI model. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.0 and +3.4 points on F1 value respectively).

Improving Event Causality Identification via Self-Supervised Representation Learning on External Causal Statement

Recently, dense passage retrieval has become a mainstream approach to ﬁnding relevant information in various natural language processing tasks. A number of studies have been devoted to improving the widely adopted dual-encoder architecture. However, most of the previous studies only consider query-centric similarity relation when learning the dual-encoder retriever. In order to capture more comprehensive similarity relations, we propose a novel approach that leverages both query-centric and PAssage-centric sImilarity Relations (called PAIR) for dense passage retrieval. To implement our approach, we make three major technical contributions by introducing formal formulations of the two kinds of similarity relations, generating high-quality pseudo labeled data via knowledge distillation, and designing an effective two-stage training procedure that incorporates passage-centric similarity relation constraint. Extensive experiments show that our approach signiﬁcantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions datasets.

PAIR: Leveraging Passage-Centric Similarity Relation for Improving Dense Passage Retrieval

A summary quality measure is judged by how well it correlates with quality scores produced by human annotators. A higher correlation with human scores is considered to be a decisive indicator of a better measure. In this work we present observations that cast doubt on this view. We also show a possibility of an alternative indicator for selecting the best measure from a family of measures, a criterion that does not rely on human scores.

Is Human Scoring the Best Criteria for Summary Evaluation?

An important aspect of developing dialogue systems is how to evaluate and compare the performance of different systems. Existing automatic evaluation metrics are based on turn-level quality evaluation and use average scores for system-level comparison. In this paper, we propose to measure the performance of a dialogue system by computing the distribution-wise distance between its generated conversations and real-world conversations. Specifically, two distribution-wise metrics, FBD and PRD, are developed and evaluated. Experiments on several dialogue corpora show that our proposed metrics correlate better with human judgments than existing metrics.

Assessing Dialogue Systems with Distribution Distances

We propose two fast neural combinatory models for constituency parsing: binary and multi-branching. Our models decompose the bottom-up parsing process into 1) classification of tags, labels, and binary orientations or chunks and 2) vector composition based on the computed orientations or chunks. These models have theoretical sub-quadratic complexity and empirical linear complexity. The binary model achieves an F1 score of 92.54 on Penn Treebank, speeding at 1327.2 sents/sec. Both the models with XLNet provide near state-of-the-art accuracies for English. Syntactic branching tendency and headedness of a language are observed during the training and inference processes for Penn Treebank, Chinese Treebank, and Keyaki Treebank (Japanese).

Neural Combinatory Constituency Parsing

Having numerous potential applications and great impact, end-to-end speech translation (ST) has long been treated as an independent task, failing to fully draw strength from the rapid advances of its sibling - text machine translation (MT). With text and audio inputs represented differently, the modality gap has rendered MT data and its end-to-end models incompatible with their ST counterparts. In observation of this obstacle, we propose to bridge this representation gap with Chimera. By projecting audio and text features to a common semantic representation, Chimera unifies MT and ST tasks and boosts the performance on ST benchmarks, MuST-C and Augmented Librispeech, to a new stateof-the-art. Specifically, Chimera obtains 27.1 BLEU on MuST-C ENDE, improving the SOTA by a +1.9 BLEU margin. Further experimental analyses demonstrate that shared semantic space indeed conveys common knowledge between these two tasks and thus paves a new way for augmenting training resources across modalities.

Empowering Language Understanding with Counterfactual Reasoning

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