Dominican Republic

A private learning scheme TextHide was recently proposed to protect the private text data during the training phase via so-called instance encoding. We propose a novel reconstruction attack to break TextHide by recovering the private training data, and thus unveil the privacy risks of instance encoding. We have experimentally validated the effectiveness of the reconstruction attack with two commonly-used datasets for sentence classification. Our attack would advance the development of privacy preserving machine learning in the context of natural language processing.

EMNLP 2021

Reconstruction Attack on Instance Encoding for Language Understanding

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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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

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

technical paper

Gender is widely discussed in the context of language tasks and when examining the stereotypes propagated by language models. However, current discussions primarily treat gender as binary, which can perpetuate harms such as the cyclical erasure of non-binary gender identities. These harms are driven by model and dataset biases, which are consequences of the non-recognition and lack of understanding of non-binary genders in society. In this paper, we explain the complexity of gender and language around it, and survey non-binary persons to understand harms associated with the treatment of gender as binary in English language technologies. We also detail how current language representations (e.g., GloVe, BERT) capture and perpetuate these harms and related challenges that need to be acknowledged and addressed for representations to equitably encode gender information.

Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies

Text style can reveal sensitive attributes of the author (e.g. race or age) to the reader, which can, in turn, lead to privacy violations and bias in both human and algorithmic decisions based on text. For example, the style of writing in job applications might reveal protected attributes of the candidate which could lead to bias in hiring decisions, regardless of whether hiring decisions are made algorithmically or by humans. We propose a VAE-based framework that obfuscates stylistic features of human-generated text through style transfer by automatically re-writing the text itself. Our framework operationalizes the notion of obfuscated style in a flexible way that enables two distinct notions of obfuscated style: (1) a minimal notion that effectively intersects the various styles seen in training, and (2) a maximal notion that seeks to obfuscate by adding stylistic features of all sensitive attributes to text, in effect, computing a union of styles. Our style-obfuscation framework can be used for multiple purposes, however, we demonstrate its effectiveness in improving the fairness of downstream classifiers. We also conduct a comprehensive study on style pooling's effect on fluency, semantic consistency, and attribute removal from text, in two and three-domain style obfuscation.

Style Pooling: Automatic Text Style Obfuscation for Improved Classification Fairness

Pre-trained multilingual language encoders, such as multilingual BERT and XLM-R, show great potential for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. However, these multilingual encoders do not precisely align words and phrases across languages. Especially, learning alignments in the multilingual embedding space usually requires sentence-level or word-level parallel corpora, which are expensive to be obtained for low-resource languages. An alternative is to make the multilingual encoders more robust; when fine-tuning the encoder using downstream task, we train the encoder to tolerate noise in the contextual embedding spaces such that even if the representations of different languages are not aligned well, the model can still achieve good performance on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we propose a learning strategy for training robust models by drawing connections between adversarial examples and the failure cases of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. We adopt two widely used robust training methods, adversarial training and randomized smoothing, to train the desired robust model. The experimental results demonstrate that robust training improves zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on text classification tasks. The improvement is more significant in the generalized cross-lingual transfer setting, where the pair of input sentences belong to two different languages.

Improving Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning via Robust Training

In cross-lingual language models, representations for many different languages live in the same space. Here, we investigate the linguistic and non-linguistic factors affecting sentence-level alignment in cross-lingual pretrained language models for 101 languages and 5,050 language pairs. Using BERT-based LaBSE and BiLSTM-based LASER as our models, and the Bible as our corpus, we compute a task-based measure of cross-lingual alignment in the form of bitext retrieval performance, as well as four intrinsic measures of vector space alignment and isomorphism. We then examine a range of linguistic, quasi-linguistic, and training-related features as potential predictors of these alignment metrics. The results of our analyses show that word order agreement and agreement in morphological complexity are two of the strongest linguistic predictors of cross-linguality. We also note in-family training data as a stronger predictor than language-specific training data across the board. We verify some of our linguistic findings by looking at the effect of morphological segmentation on English-Inuktitut alignment, in addition to examining the effect of word order agreement on isomorphism for 66 zero-shot language pairs from a different corpus.

A Massively Multilingual Analysis of Cross-linguality in Shared Embedding Space

The availability of corpora has led to significant advances in training semantic parsers in English. Unfortunately, for languages other than English, annotated data is limited and so is the performance of the developed parsers. Recently, pretrained multilingual models have been proven useful for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in many NLP tasks. What else does it require to apply a parser trained in English to other languages for zero-shot cross-lingual semantic parsing? Will simple language-independent features help? To this end, we experiment with six Discourse Representation Structure (DRS) semantic parsers in English, and generalize them to Italian, German and Dutch, where there are only a small number of manually annotated parses available. Extensive experiments show that despite its simplicity, adding Universal Dependency (UD) relations and Universal POS tags (UPOS) as model-agnostic features achieves surprisingly strong improvement on all parsers.

Frustratingly Simple but Surprisingly Strong: Using Language-Independent Features for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Semantic Parsing

Simultaneous translation is vastly different from full-sentence translation, in the sense that it starts translation before the source sentence ends, with only a few words delay. However, due to the lack of large-scale, high-quality simultaneous translation datasets, most such systems are still trained on conventional full-sentence bitexts. This is far from ideal for the simultaneous scenario due to the abundance of unnecessary long-distance reorderings in those bitexts. We propose a novel method that rewrites the target side of existing full-sentence corpora into simultaneous-style translation. Experiments on Zh->En and Ja->En simultaneous translation show substantial improvements (up to +2.7 BLEU) with the addition of these generated pseudo-references.

Improving Simultaneous Translation by Incorporating Pseudo-References with Fewer Reorderings

Broader disclosive transparency—truth and clarity in communication regarding the function of AI systems—is widely considered desirable. Unfortunately, it is a nebulous concept, difficult to both define and quantify. This is problematic, as previous work has demonstrated possible trade-offs and negative consequences to disclosive transparency, such as a confusion effect, where “too much information” clouds a reader’s understanding of what a system description means. Disclosive transparency’s subjective nature has rendered deep study into these problems and their remedies difficult. To improve this state of affairs, We introduce neural language model-based probabilistic metrics to directly model disclosive transparency, and demonstrate that they correlate with user and expert opinions of system transparency, making them a valid objective proxy. Finally, we demonstrate the use of these metrics in a pilot study quantifying the relationships between transparency, confusion, and user perceptions in a corpus of real NLP system descriptions.

Modeling Disclosive Transparency in NLP Application Descriptions

This paper presents an interactive data dashboard that provides users with an overview of the preservation of discourse relations among 28 language pairs. We display a graph network depicting the cross-lingual discourse relations between a pair of languages for multilingual TED talks and provide a search function to look for sentences with specific keywords or relation types, facilitating ease of analysis on the cross-lingual discourse relations.

Visualizing Cross‑Lingual Discourse Relations in Multilingual TED Corpora

Development environments for spoken dialogue systems are popular today because they enable rapid creation of the dialogue systems in times when usage of the voice AI Assistants is constantly growing. We describe a graphical Discourse-Driven Integrated Dialogue Development Environment (DD-IDDE) for spoken open-domain dialogue systems. The DD-IDDE allows dialogue architects to interactively define dialogue flows of their skills/chatbots with the aid of the discourse-driven recommendation system, enhance these flows in the Python-based DSL, deploy, and then further improve based on the skills/chatbots usage statistics. We show how these skills/chatbots can be specified through a graphical user interface within the VS Code Extension, and then run on top of the Dialog Flow Framework (DFF). An earlier version of this framework has been adopted in one of the Alexa Prize 4 socialbots while the updated version was specifically designed to power the described DD-IDDE solution.

Discourse-Driven Integrated Dialogue Development Environment for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems

As a part of the Icelandic Government’s three-year Language Technology Programme we have been implementing NMT systems for translation between Icelandic and English for the last two years.

All project data and tooling is open and public, including our submission to WMT 2021. We host a website at https://velthyding.is where our models can be tested.

Icelandic is morphologically rich low-to-medium resource language in the Germanic language family, most related to Norwegian, Danish and Swedish.

Reconstruction Attack on Instance Encoding for Language Understanding

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Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies

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Phrase-BERT: Improved Phrase Embeddings from BERT with an Application to Corpus Exploration

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