Thailand

While there has been significant progress towards developing NLU resources for Indic languages, syntactic evaluation has been relatively less explored. Unlike English, Indic languages have rich morphosyntax, grammatical genders, free linear word-order, and highly inflectional morphology. In this paper, we introduce Vyakarana: a benchmark of gender-balanced Colorless Green sentences
in Indic languages for syntactic evaluation of multilingual language models. The benchmark comprises four syntax-related tasks: PoS Tagging, Syntax Tree-depth Prediction, Grammatical Case Marking, and Subject-Verb Agreement. We use the datasets from the evaluation tasks to probe five multilingual language models of varying architectures for syntax in Indic languages. Due to its prevalence, we also include a code-switching setting in our experiments. Our results show that the token-level and sentence-level representations from the Indic language models (IndicBERT and MuRIL) do not capture the syntax in Indic languages
as efficiently as the other highly multilingual language models. Further, our layer-wise probing experiments reveal that while mBERT, DistilmBERT, and XLM-R localize the syntax in middle layers, the Indic language models do not show such syntactic localization.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Vyākarana A Colorless Green Benchmark for Syntactic Evaluation in Indic Languages

indic nlp

multilingual nlp

syntax

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

workshop paper

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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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).

Interpretability is an important aspect of the trustworthiness of a model's predictions. Transformer's predictions are widely explained by the attention weights, i.e., a probability distribution generated at its self-attention unit (head). Current empirical studies provide shreds of evidence that attention weights are not explanations by proving that they are not unique. A recent study showed theoretical justifications to this observation by proving the non-identifiability of attention weights. For a given input to a head and its output, if the attention weights generated in it are unique, we call the weights identifiable. In this work, we provide deeper theoretical analysis and empirical observations on the identifiability of attention weights. Ignored in the previous works, we find the attention weights are more identifiable than we currently perceive by uncovering the hidden role of the key vector. However, the weights are still prone to be non-unique attentions that make them unfit for interpretation. To tackle this issue, we provide a variant of the encoder layer that decouples the relationship between key and value vector and provides identifiable weights up to the desired length of the input. We prove the applicability of such variations by providing empirical justifications on varied text classification tasks. The implementations are available at https://github.com/declare-lab/identifiable-transformers.

More Identifiable yet Equally Performant Transformers for Text Classification

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is a key component in a task-oriented dialogue system, which converts the structured meaning representation (MR) to the natural language.
For large-scale conversational systems, where it is common to have over hundreds of intents and thousands of slots, neither template-based approaches nor model-based approaches are scalable.
Recently, neural NLGs started leveraging transfer learning and showed promising results in few-shot settings.
This paper proposes AugNLG, a novel data augmentation approach that combines a self-trained neural retrieval model with a few-shot learned NLU model, to automatically create MR-to-Text data from open-domain texts.
The proposed system mostly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the FewshotWOZ data in both BLEU and Slot Error Rate. 
We further confirm improved results on the FewshotSGD data and provide comprehensive analysis results on key components of our system. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/XinnuoXu/AugNLG.

AugNLG: Few-shot Natural Language Generation using Self-trained Data Augmentation

Sequential sentence classification aims to classify each sentence in the document based on the context in which sentences appear. Most existing work addresses this problem using a hierarchical sequence labeling network. However, they ignore considering the latent segment structure of the document, in which contiguous sentences often have coherent semantics. In this paper, we proposed a span-based dynamic local attention model that could explicitly capture the structural information by the proposed supervised dynamic local attention. We further introduce an auxiliary task called span-based classification to explore the span-level representations. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves better or competitive performance against state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmark datasets.

A Span-based Dynamic Local Attention Model for Sequential Sentence Classification

Ordered word sequences contain the rich structures that define language. However, it's often not clear if or how modern pretrained language models utilize these structures. We show that the token representations and self-attention activations within BERT are surprisingly resilient to shuffling the order of input tokens, and that for several GLUE language understanding tasks, shuffling only minimally degrades performance, e.g., by 4% for QNLI. While bleak from the perspective of language understanding, our results have positive implications for cases where copyright or ethics necessitates the consideration of bag-of-words data (vs. full documents). We simulate such a scenario for three sensitive classification tasks, demonstrating minimal performance degradation vs. releasing full language sequences.

How effective is BERT without word ordering? Implications for language understanding and data privacy

In this paper we implement and compare 7 different data augmentation strategies for the task of automatic scoring of children's ability to understand others' thoughts, feelings, and desires (or ``mindreading''). 

We recruit in-domain experts to re-annotate augmented samples and determine to what extent each strategy preserves the original rating. We also carry out multiple experiments to measure how much each augmentation strategy improves the performance of automatic scoring systems. To determine the capabilities of automatic systems to generalize to unseen data, we create UK-MIND-20 - a new corpus of children's performance on tests of mindreading, consisting of 10,320 question-answer pairs.

We obtain a new state-of-the-art performance on the MIND-CA corpus, improving macro-F1-score by 6 points. Results indicate that both the number of training examples and the quality of the augmentation strategies affect the performance of the systems. The task-specific augmentations generally outperform task-agnostic augmentations. Automatic augmentations based on vectors (GloVe, FastText) perform the worst. 

We find that systems trained on MIND-CA generalize well to UK-MIND-20. We demonstrate that data augmentation strategies also improve the performance on unseen data.

Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children’s mindreading ability

Reply suggestion models help users process emails and chats faster. Previous work only studies English reply suggestion. Instead, we present MRS, a multilingual reply suggestion dataset with ten languages. MRS can be used to compare two families of models: 1) retrieval models that select the reply from a fixed set and 2) generation models that produce the reply from scratch. Therefore, MRS complements existing cross-lingual generalization benchmarks that focus on classification and sequence labeling tasks. We build a generation model and a retrieval model as baselines for MRS.
The two models have different strengths in the monolingual setting, and they require different strategies to generalize across languages. MRS is publicly available at https://github.com/zhangmozhi/mrs.

A Dataset and Baselines for Multilingual Reply Suggestion

**Read paper:**
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-srw.30/

Most earlier work on text summarization is carried out on news article datasets. The summary in these datasets is naturally located at the beginning of the text. Hence, a model can spuriously utilize this correlation for summary gen- eration instead of truly learning to summarize. To address this issue, we constructed a new dataset, SUMPUBMED, using scientific articles from the PubMed archive. We conducted a human analysis of summary coverage, redundancy, readability, coherence, and informativeness on SUMPUBMED. SUMPUBMED is challenging because (a) the summary is distributed throughout the text (not-localized on top), and (b) it contains rare domain-specific scientific terms. We observe that seq2seq models that adequately summarize news articles struggle to summarize SUMPUBMED. Thus, SUMPUBMED opens new avenues for the future improvement of models as well as the development of new evaluation metrics.

SUMPUBMED: Summarization Dataset of PubMed Scientific Articles

Human-like syntactic generalization abilities of neural language models (LMs) have received wide attention, but discourse-level knowledge in these models has been less explored. In this study, we analyze the LMs with respect to a particular aspect of discourse, topic-comment structure, a crucial part of text production. To separately analyze the knowledge of LMs on topic-comment structure, we chose the Japanese language, a topic-prominent language, for designing probing tasks. Experimental results suggest that LMs have different generalizations from humans in terms of the topic-comment structure. These results imply that LMs do not perform human-like discourse processing in text generation.

Topicalization in Language Models: A Case Study on Japanese

The events that took place at the Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11-12, 2017 caused intense reaction on social media from users across the political spectrum. We present a novel application of psycholinguistics - specifically, construal level theory - to analyze the language on social media around this event of social import through topic models. We find that including psycholinguistic measures of concreteness as covariates in topic models can lead to informed analysis of the language surrounding an event of political import.

A Case Study of Analysis of Construals in Language on Social Media Surrounding a Crisis Event

Misleading information spreads on the Internet at an incredible speed, which can lead to irreparable consequences in some cases. Therefore, it is becoming essential to develop fake news detection technologies. While substantial work has been done in this direction, one of the limitations of the current approaches is that these models are focused only on one language and do not use multilingual information. In this work, we propose a new technique based on cross-lingual evidence (CE) that can be used for fake news detection and improve existing approaches. The hypothesis of the usage of cross-lingual evidence as a feature for fake news detection is confirmed, firstly, by manual experiment based on a set of known true and fake news. Besides, we compared our fake news classification system based on the proposed feature with several strong baselines on two multi-domain datasets of general-topic news and one newly fake COVID-19 news dataset showing that combining cross-lingual evidence with strong baselines such as RoBERTa yields significant improvements in fake news detection.

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Vyākarana: A Colorless Green Benchmark for Syntactic Evaluation in Indic Languages

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More Identifiable yet Equally Performant Transformers for Text Classification

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Vyākarana: A Colorless Green Benchmark for Syntactic Evaluation in Indic Languages

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