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In Natural Language Processing (NLP), finding data augmentation techniques that can produce high-quality human-interpretable examples has always been challenging. Recently, leveraging kNN such that augmented examples are retrieved from large repositories of unlabelled sentences has made a step toward interpretable augmentation. Inspired by this paradigm, we introduce Minimax-kNN, a sample efficient data augmentation strategy tailored for Knowledge Distillation (KD). We exploit a semi-supervised approach based on KD to train a model on augmented data. In contrast to existing kNN augmentation techniques that blindly incorporate all samples, our method dynamically selects a subset of augmented samples that maximizes KL-divergence between the teacher and student models. This step aims to extract the most efficient samples to ensure our augmented data covers regions in the input space with maximum loss value. We evaluated our technique on several text classification tasks and demonstrated that Minimax-kNN consistently outperforms strong baselines. Our results show that Minimax-kNN requires fewer augmented examples and less computation to achieve superior performance over the state-of-the-art kNN-based augmentation techniques.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Not Far Away, Not So Close: Sample Efficient Nearest Neighbour Data Augmentation via MiniMax

nearest neighbour search

knowledge distillation

data augmentation

**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).

workshop paper

Task-oriented dialogue systems typically rely on large amounts of high-quality training data or require complex handcrafted rules. However, existing datasets are often limited in size considering the complexity of the dialogues. Additionally, conventional training signal inference does not support non-deterministic agent behaviour, i.e. agents considering multiple actions as valid in identical dialogue states. We propose the Conversation Graph (ConvGraph), a graphbased representation of dialogues that can be exploited for data augmentation, and
multi-reference training and evaluation of non-deterministic agents. ConvGraph generates novel dialogue paths to augment data volume and diversity. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation across three datasets shows that data augmentation and multi-reference training with ConvGraph can improve dialogue success rates by up to 6.4%.

Conversation Graph: Data Augmentation, Training and Evaluation for Non-Deterministic Dialogue Management

In this paper we explore the improvement of intent recognition in conversational systems by the use of meta-knowledge embedded in intent identifiers. Developers often include such knowledge, structure as taxonomies, in the documentation of chatbots. By using neuro-symbolic algorithms to incorporate those taxonomies into embeddings of the output space, we were able to improve accuracy in intent recognition. In datasets with intents and example utterances from 200 professional chatbots, we saw decreases in the equal error rate (EER) in more than 40% of the chatbots in comparison to the baseline of the same algorithm without the meta-knowledge. The meta-knowledge proved also to be effective in detecting out-of-scope utterances, improving the false acceptance rate (FAR) in two thirds of the chatbots, with decreases of 0.05 or more in FAR in almost 40% of the chatbots. When considering only the well-developed workspaces with a high level use of taxonomies, FAR decreased more than 0.05 in 77% of them, and more than 0.1 in 39% of the chatbots.

Using Meta-Knowledge Mined from Identifiers to Improve Intent Recognition in Conversational Systems

To improve the coherence and knowledge retrieval capabilities of non-task-oriented dialogue systems, recent Transformer-based models aim to integrate fixed background context. This often comes in the form of knowledge graphs, and the integration is done by creating pseudo utterances through paraphrasing knowledge triples, added into the accumulated dialogue context. However, the context length is fixed in these architectures, which restricts how much background or dialogue context can be kept. In this work, we propose a more concise encoding for background context structured in the form of knowledge graphs, by expressing the graph connections through restrictions on the attention weights. The results of our human evaluation show that this encoding reduces space requirements without negative effects on the precision of reproduction of knowledge and perceived consistency. Further, models trained with our proposed context encoding generate dialogues that are judged to be more comprehensive and interesting.

Space Efficient Context Encoding for Non-Task-Oriented Dialogue Generation with Graph Attention Transformer

When collecting annotations and labeled data from humans, a standard practice is to use inter-rater reliability (IRR) as a measure of data goodness (Hallgren, 2012). Metrics such as Krippendorff’s alpha or Cohen’s kappa are typically required to be above a threshold of 0.6 (Landis and Koch, 1977). These absolute thresholds are unreasonable for crowdsourced data from annotators with high cultural and training variances, especially on subjective topics. We present a new alternative to interpreting IRR that is more empirical and contextualized. It is based upon benchmarking IRR against baseline measures in a replication, one of which is a novel cross-replication reliability (xRR) measure based on Cohen’s (1960) kappa. We call this approach the xRR framework. We opensource a replication dataset of 4 million human judgements of facial expressions and analyze it with the proposed framework. We argue this framework can be used to measure the quality of crowdsourced datasets.

Cross-replication Reliability - An Empirical Approach to Interpreting Inter-rater Reliability

For many (minority) languages, the resources needed to train large models are not available. We investigate the performance of zero-shot transfer learning with as little data as possible, and the influence of language similarity in this process. We retrain the lexical layers of four BERT-based models using data from two low-resource target language varieties, while the Transformer layers are independently fine-tuned on a POS-tagging task in the model's source language. By combining the new lexical layers and fine-tuned Transformer layers, we achieve high task performance for both target languages. With high language similarity, 10MB of data appears sufficient to achieve substantial monolingual transfer performance. Monolingual BERT-based models generally achieve higher downstream task performance after retraining the lexical layer than multilingual BERT, even when the target language is included in the multilingual model.

Adapting Monolingual Models: Data can be Scarce when Language Similarity is High

Recently, unsupervised parsing of syntactic trees has gained considerable attention. A prototypical approach to such unsupervised parsing employs reinforcement learning and auto-encoders. However, no mechanism ensures that the learnt model leverages the well-understood language grammar. We propose an approach that utilizes very generic lingustic knowledge of the language present in the form of syntactic rules, thus inducing better syntactic structures. We introduce a novel formulation that takes advantage of the syntactic grammar rules and is independent of the base system. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on two benchmarks datasets, MNLI and WSJ.

Rule Augmented Unsupervised Constituency Parsing

Ever since the advent of deep learning, cross-modal representation learning has been dominated by the approaches involving convolutional neural networks for visual representation and recurrent neural networks for language representation. Transformer architecture, however, has rapidly taken over the recurrent neural networks in natural language processing tasks, and it has also been shown that vision tasks can be handled with transformer architecture, with compatible performance to convolutional neural networks. Such results naturally lead to speculation upon the possibility of tackling cross-modal representation for vision and language exclusively with transformer. This paper examines transformer-exclusive cross-modal representation to explore such possibility, demonstrating its potentials as well as discussing its current limitations and its prospects.

Transformer-Exclusive Cross-Modal Representation for Vision and Language

Recent studies on the analysis of the multilingual representations focus on identifying whether there is an emergence of language-independent representations, or whether a multilingual model partitions its weights among different languages. While most of such work has been conducted in a "black-box" manner, this paper aims to analyze individual components of a multilingual neural translation (NMT) model. In particular, we look at the encoder self-attention and encoder-decoder attention heads (in a many-to-one NMT model) that are more specific to the translation of a certain language pair than others by (1) employing metrics that quantify some aspects of the attention weights such as "variance" or "confidence", and (2) systematically ranking the importance of attention heads with respect to translation quality. Experimental results show that surprisingly, the set of most important attention heads are very similar across the language pairs and that it is possible to remove nearly one-third of the less important heads without hurting the translation quality greatly.

Do Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models Contain Language Pair Speciﬁc Attention Heads?

Data augmentation with mixup has shown to be effective on various computer vision tasks. Despite its great success, there has been a hurdle to apply mixup to NLP tasks since text consists of discrete tokens with variable length. In this work, we propose SSMix, a novel mixup method where the operation is performed on input text rather than on hidden vectors like previous approaches. SSMix synthesizes a sentence while preserving the locality of two original texts by span-based mixing and keeping more tokens related to the prediction relying on saliency information. With extensive experiments, we empirically validate that our method outperforms hidden-level mixup methods on a wide range of text classification benchmarks, including textual entailment, sentiment classification, and questiontype classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/ssmix

SSMix: Saliency-based Span Mixup for Text Classification

Knowledge Graph (KG) completion has been excessively studied with a massive number of models proposed for the Link Prediction (LP) task. The main limitation of such models is their insensitivity to time. Indeed, the temporal aspect of stored facts is often ignored. To this end, more and more works consider time as a parameter to complete KGs. In this paper, we first demonstrate that, by simply increasing the number of negative samples, the recent AttH model can achieve competitive or even better performance than the state-of-the-art on Temporal KGs (TKGs), albeit its nontemporality. We further propose Hercules, a time-aware extension of AttH model, which defines the curvature of a Riemannian manifold as the product of both relation and time. Our experiments show that both Hercules and AttH achieve competitive or new state-of-the-art performances on ICEWS04 and ICEWS05-15 datasets. Therefore, one should raise awareness when learning TKGs representations to identify whether time truly boosts performances.

Next from ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Conversation Graph: Data Augmentation, Training and Evaluation for Non-Deterministic Dialogue Management

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MATE-KD: Masked Adversarial TExt, a Companion to Knowledge Distillation