Dominican Republic

The principle of independent causal mechanisms (ICM) states that generative processes of real world data consist of independent modules which do not influence or inform each other. While this idea has led to fruitful developments in the field of causal inference, it is not widely-known in the NLP community. In this work, we argue that the causal direction of the data collection process bears nontrivial implications that can explain a number of published NLP findings, such as differences in semi-supervised learning (SSL) and domain adaptation (DA) performance across different settings. We categorize common NLP tasks according to their causal direction and empirically assay the validity of the ICM principle for text data using minimum description length. We conduct an extensive meta-analysis of over 100 published SSL and 30 DA studies, and find that the results are consistent with our expectations based on causal insights. This work presents the first attempt to analyze the ICM principle in NLP, and provides constructive suggestions for future modeling choices.

EMNLP 2021

Causal Direction of Data Collection Matters: Implications of Causal and Anticausal Learning for NLP

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

technical paper

We propose a method to distil language-agnostic meaning embedding using a multilingual sentence encoder. By removing language-specific information from the original embedding, we retrieve an embedding that fully represents the meaning of the sentence. The proposed method relies only on parallel corpora without any human annotations. Our meaning embedding allows for efficient cross-lingual sentence similarity estimation using a simple cosine similarity calculation. Experimental results of both the quality estimation of machine translation and cross-lingual semantic textual similarity tasks reveal that our method consistently outperforms the strong baselines using the original multilingual embeddings. The method also consistently improves the performance of any pre-trained multilingual sentence encoder, even in low-resource language pairs, where only tens of thousands of parallel sentence pairs are available.

Language-agnostic Representation from Multilingual Sentence Encoders for Cross-lingual Similarity Estimation

Neural models and symbolic rules such as regular expressions have their respective merits and weaknesses. In this paper, we study the integration of the two approaches for the slot filling task by converting regular expressions into neural networks. Specifically, we first convert regular expressions into a special form of finite-state transducers, then unfold its approximate inference algorithm as a bidirectional recurrent neural model that performs slot filling via sequence labeling. Experimental results show that our model has superior zero-shot and few-shot performance and stays competitive when there are sufficient training data.

Neuralizing Regular Expressions for Slot Filling

We present a prototype demonstrator showcasing a novel method to perform semantic exploration of user reviews The system enables effective navigation in a rich contextual semantic schema with a large number of hierarchically structured classes indicating relevant information. In order to identify instances of the structured classes in the reviews, we defined a new Information Extraction task called Semantic Context Path ( labeling which simultaneously assigns types and semantic roles to entity mentions. Reviews can thus rapidly be explored based on
the fine grained and structured semantic classes. As a proof of concept, we have implemented this system for reviews on Points of Interest, in English and Korean.

Semantic Context Path Labeling for Semantic Exploration of User Reviews

The recurrent neural network (RNN) language model is a powerful tool for learning arbitrary sequential dependencies in language data. Despite its enormous success in representing lexical sequences, little is known about the quality of the lexical representations that it acquires. In this work, we conjecture that it
is straightforward to extract lexical representations (i.e. static word embeddings) from an RNN, but that the amount of semantic information that is encoded is limited when lexical items in the training data provide redundant semantic information. We conceptualize this limitation of the RNN as a failure to learn atomic internal states - states which capture information relevant to single word types without being influenced by redundant information provided by words with which they co-occur.
Using a corpus of artificial language, we verify that redundancy in the training data yields non-atomic internal states, and propose a novel method for inducing atomic internal states. We show that 1) our method successfully induces atomic internal organization in controlled experiments, and 2) under more realistic conditions
in which the training consists of child-directed language, application of our method
improves the performance of lexical representations on a downstream semantic categorization task.

Scaffolded input promotes atomic organization in the recurrent neural network language model

Vision models trained on multimodal datasets can benefit from the wide availability of large image-caption datasets. A recent model (CLIP) was found to generalize well in zero-shot and transfer learning settings. This could imply that linguistic or "semantic grounding" confers additional generalization abilities to the visual feature space. Here, we systematically evaluate various multimodal architectures and vision-only models in terms of unsupervised clustering, few-shot learning, transfer learning and adversarial robustness. In each setting, multimodal training produced no additional generalization capability compared to standard supervised visual training. We conclude that work is still required for semantic grounding to help improve vision models.

Does language help generalization in vision models?

Semantics, morphology and syntax are strongly interdependent. However, the majority of computational methods for semantic change detection use distributional word representations which encode mostly semantics. We investigate an alternative method, grammatical profiling, based entirely on changes in the morphosyntactic behaviour of words. We demonstrate that it can be used for semantic change detection and even outperforms some distributional semantic methods. 
We present an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of the predictions made by our grammatical profiling system, showing that they are plausible and interpretable.

Grammatical Profiling for Semantic Change Detection

Image captioning models generally lack the capability to take into account user interest, and usually default to global descriptions that try to balance readability, informativeness, and information overload. We present a Transformer-based model with the ability to produce captions focused on specific objects, concepts or actions in an image by providing them as guiding text to the model. Further, we evaluate the quality of these guided captions when trained on Conceptual Captions which contain 3.3M image-level captions compared to Visual Genome which contain 3.6M object-level captions. Counter-intuitively, we find that guided captions produced by the model trained on Conceptual Captions generalize better on out-of-domain data. Our human-evaluation results indicate that attempting in-the-wild guided image captioning requires access to large, unrestricted-domain training datasets, and that increased style diversity (even without increasing the number of unique tokens) is a key factor for improved performance.

Understanding Guided Image Captioning Performance across Domains

Recent work has shown that monolingual masked language models learn to represent data-driven notions of language variation which can be used for domain-targeted training data selection. Dataset genre labels are already frequently available, yet remain largely unexplored in cross-lingual setups. We harness this genre metadata as a weak supervision signal for targeted data selection in zero-shot dependency parsing. Specifically, we project treebank-level genre information to the finer-grained sentence level, with the goal to amplify information implicitly stored in unsupervised contextualized representations. We demonstrate that genre is recoverable from multilingual contextual embeddings and that it provides an effective signal for training data selection in cross-lingual, zero-shot scenarios. For 12 low-resource language treebanks, six of which are test-only, our genre-specific methods significantly outperform competitive baselines as well as recent embedding-based methods for data selection. Moreover, genre-based data selection provides new state-of-the-art results for three of these target languages.

Genre as Weak Supervision for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing

We explore the link between the extent to which syntactic relations are preserved in translation and the ease of correctly constructing a parse tree in a zero-shot setting. While previous work suggests such a relation, it tends to focus on the macro level and not on the level of individual edges---a gap we aim to address.
As a test case, we take the transfer of Universal Dependencies (UD) parsing from English to a diverse set of languages and conduct two sets of experiments. In one, we analyze zero-shot performance based on the extent to which English source edges are preserved in translation. In another, we apply three linguistically motivated transformations to UD, creating more cross-lingually stable versions of it, and assess their zero-shot parsability. In order to compare parsing performance across different schemes, we perform extrinsic evaluation on the downstream task of cross-lingual relation extraction (RE) using a subset of a popular English RE benchmark translated to Russian and Korean.
In both sets of experiments, our results suggest a strong relation between cross-lingual stability and zero-shot parsing performance.

On the Relation between Syntactic Divergence and Zero-Shot Performance

For over thirty years, researchers have developed and analyzed methods for latent tree induction as an approach for unsupervised syntactic parsing. Nonetheless, modern systems still do not perform well enough compared to their supervised counterparts to have any practical use as structural annotation of text. In this work, we present a technique that uses distant supervision in the form of span constraints (i.e. phrase bracketing) to improve performance in unsupervised constituency parsing. Using a relatively small number of span constraints we can substantially improve the output from DIORA, an already competitive unsupervised parsing system. Compared with full parse tree annotation, span constraints can be acquired with minimal effort, such as with a lexicon derived from Wikipedia, to find exact text matches. Our experiments show span constraints based on entities improves constituency parsing on English WSJ Penn Treebank by more than 5 F1. Furthermore, our method extends to any domain where span constraints are easily attainable, and as a case study we demonstrate its effectiveness by parsing biomedical text from the CRAFT dataset.

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Language-agnostic Representation from Multilingual Sentence Encoders for Cross-lingual Similarity Estimation

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