Dominican Republic

Image captioning has conventionally relied on reference-based automatic evaluations, where machine captions are compared against captions written by humans. This is in contrast to the reference-free manner in which humans assess caption quality. In this paper, we report the surprising empirical finding that CLIP (Radford et al., 2021), a cross-modal model pretrained on 400M image+caption pairs from the web, can be used for robust automatic evaluation of image captioning without the need for references. Experiments spanning several corpora demonstrate that our new reference-free metric, CLIPScore, achieves the highest correlation with human judgements, outperforming existing reference-based metrics like CIDEr and SPICE. Information gain experiments demonstrate that CLIPScore, with its tight focus on image-text compatibility, is complementary to existing reference-based metrics that emphasize text-text similarities. Thus, we also present a reference-augmented version, RefCLIPScore, which achieves even higher correlation. Beyond literal description tasks, several case studies reveal domains where CLIPScore performs well (clip-art images, alt-text rating), but also where it is relatively weaker in comparison to reference-based metrics, e.g., news captions that require richer contextual knowledge.

EMNLP 2021

CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning

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

To assess the effectiveness of any medical intervention, researchers must conduct a time-intensive and highly manual literature review. NLP systems can help to automate or assist in parts of this expensive process. In support of this goal, we release MS^2 (Multi-Document Summarization of Medical Studies), a dataset of over 470k documents and 20k summaries derived from the scientific literature. This dataset facilitates the development of systems that can assess and aggregate contradictory evidence across multiple studies, and is the first large-scale, publicly available multi-document summarization dataset in the biomedical domain. We experiment with a summarization system based on BART, with promising early results. We formulate our summarization inputs and targets in both free text and structured forms and modify a recently proposed metric to assess the quality of our system's generated summaries. Data and models are available at this https URL

Multi-Document Summarization of Medical Studies

Humans often employ figurative language use in communication, including during interactions with dialog systems. Thus, it is important for real-world dialog systems to be able to handle popular figurative language constructs like metaphor and simile. In this work, we analyze the performance of existing dialog models in situations where the input dialog context exhibits use of figurative language. We observe large gaps in handling of figurative language when evaluating the models on two open domain dialog datasets. When faced with dialog contexts consisting of figurative language, some models show very large drops in performance compared to contexts without figurative language. We encourage future research in dialog modeling to separately analyze and report results on figurative language in order to better test model capabilities relevant to real-world use. Finally, we propose lightweight solutions to help existing models become more robust to figurative language by simply using an external resource to translate figurative language to literal (non-figurative) forms while preserving the meaning to the best extent possible.

Investigating Robustness of Dialog Models to Popular Figurative Language Constructs

Sequence-to-sequence models have been applied to a wide variety of NLP tasks, but how to properly use them for dialogue state tracking has not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we study this problem from the perspectives of pre-training objectives as well as the formats of context representations. We demonstrate that the choice of pre-training objective makes a significant difference to the state tracking quality. In particular, we find that masked span prediction is more effective than auto-regressive language modeling. We also explore using Pegasus, a span prediction-based pre-training objective for text summarization, for the state tracking model. We found that pre-training for the seemingly distant summarization task works surprisingly well for dialogue state tracking. In addition, we found that while recurrent state context representation works also reasonably well, the model may have a hard time recovering from earlier mistakes. We conducted experiments on the MultiWOZ 2.1-2.4, WOZ 2.0, and DSTC2 datasets with consistent observations.

Effective Sequence-to-Sequence Dialogue State Tracking

Human evaluation for summarization tasks is reliable but brings in issues of reproducibility and high costs. Automatic metrics are cheap and reproducible but sometimes poorly correlated with human judgment. In this work, we propose flexible semiautomatic to automatic summary evaluation metrics, following the Pyramid human evaluation method. Semi-automatic Lite2Pyramid retains the reusable human-labeled Summary Content Units (SCUs) for reference(s) but replaces the manual work of judging SCUs' presence in system summaries with a natural language inference (NLI) model. Fully automatic Lite3Pyramid further substitutes SCUs with automatically extracted Semantic Triplet Units (STUs) via a semantic role labeling (SRL) model. Finally, we propose in-between metrics, Lite2.xPyramid, where we use a simple regressor to predict how well the STUs can simulate SCUs and retain SCUs that are more difficult to simulate, which provides a smooth transition and balance between automation and manual evaluation. Comparing to 15 existing metrics, we evaluate human-metric correlations on 3 existing meta-evaluation datasets and our newly-collected PyrXSum (with 100/10 XSum examples/systems). It shows that Lite2Pyramid consistently has the best summary-level correlations; Lite3Pyramid works better than or comparable to other automatic metrics; Lite2.xPyramid trades off small correlation drops for larger manual effort reduction, which can reduce costs for future data collection.

Finding a Balanced Degree of Automation for Summary Evaluation

This paper measures the impact of increased exposure on whether learned construction grammars converge onto shared representations when trained on data from different registers. Register influences the frequency of constructions, with some structures common in formal but not informal usage. We expect that a grammar induction algorithm exposed to different registers will acquire different constructions. To what degree does increased exposure lead to the convergence of register-specific grammars? The experiments in this paper simulate language learning in 12 languages (half Germanic and half Romance) with corpora representing three registers (Twitter, Wikipedia, Web). These simulations are repeated with increasing amounts of exposure, from 100k to 2 million words, to measure the impact of exposure on the convergence of grammars. The results show that increased exposure does lead to converging grammars across all languages. In addition, a shared core of register-universal constructions remains constant across increasing amounts of exposure.

Learned Construction Grammars Converge Across Registers Given Increased Exposure

We consider the following tokenization repair problem: Given a text with spurious and missing spaces, correct those. We identify three key ingredients of high-quality tokenization repair: bidirectional models, training on noisy text, and making use of existing spaces. Our method improves an existing spell checker by correcting more tokenization errors, and to correct more spelling errors once the word boundaries are repaired.

Tokenization Repair in the Presence of Spelling Errors

Automatically extracted interpersonal relationships
of conversation interlocutors can enrich
personal knowledge bases to enhance personalized
search, recommenders and chatbots. To
infer speakers’ relationships from dialogues
we propose PRIDE, a neural multi-label classifier,
based on BERT and Transformer for creating
a conversation representation. PRIDE
utilizes the dialogue structure and augments
it with external knowledge about speaker features
and conversation style. Unlike prior
works, we address multi-label prediction of
fine-grained relationships. We release largescale
datasets, based on screenplays of movies
and TV shows, with directed relationships of
conversation participants. Extensive experiments
on both datasets show superior performance
of PRIDE compared to the state-of-theart
baselines.

PRIDE: Predicting Relationships in Conversations

Recent transformer-based approaches demonstrate promising results on relational scientific information extraction. Existing datasets focus on high-level description of how research is carried out. Instead we focus on the subtleties of how experimental associations are presented by building SciClaim, a dataset of scientific claims drawn from Social and Behavior Science (SBS), PubMed, and CORD-19 papers. Our novel graph annotation schema incorporates not only coarse-grained entity spans as nodes and relations as edges between them, but also fine-grained attributes that modify entities and their relations, for a total of 12,738 labels in the corpus. By including more label types and more than twice the label density of previous datasets, SciClaim captures causal, comparative, predictive, statistical, and proportional associations over experimental variables along with their qualifications, subtypes, and evidence. We extend work in transformer-based joint entity and relation extraction to effectively infer our schema, showing the promise of fine-grained knowledge graphs in scientific claims and beyond.

Extracting Fine-Grained Knowledge Graphs of Scientific Claims: Dataset and Transformer-Based Results

Relating entities and events in text is a key component of natural language understanding. Cross-document coreference resolution, in particular, is important for the growing interest in multi-document analysis tasks.
In this work we propose a new model that extends the efficient sequential prediction paradigm for coreference resolution to cross-document settings and 
achieves competitive results for both entity and event coreference while providing strong evidence of the efficacy of both sequential models and higher-order inference in cross-document settings.
Our model incrementally composes mentions into cluster representations and predicts links between a mention and the already constructed clusters,
approximating a higher-order model. 
In addition, we conduct extensive ablation studies that provide new insights into the importance of various inputs and representation types in coreference.

Sequential Cross-Document Coreference Resolution

State-of-the-art NLP models can adopt shallow heuristics that limit their generalization capability (McCoy et al., 2019). Such heuristics include lexical overlap with the training set in Named-Entity Recognition (Taillé et al., 2020) and Event or Type heuristics in Relation Extraction (Rosenman et al., 2020). In the more realistic end-to-end RE setting, we can expect yet another heuristic: the mere retention of training relation triples. In this work, we propose several experiments confirming that retention of known facts is a key factor of performance on standard benchmarks. Furthermore, our behavioral testing experiment suggests that a pipeline model able to use intermediate type representations is less prone to over-rely on retention.

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