Dominican Republic

Question generation has recently shown impressive results in customizing question answering (QA) systems to new domains. These approaches circumvent the need for manually annotated training data from the new domain and, instead, generate synthetic questionanswer pairs that are used for training. However, existing methods for question generation rely on large amounts of synthetically generated datasets and costly computational resources, which render these techniques widely inaccessible when the text corpora is of limited size. This is problematic as many niche domains rely on small text corpora, which naturally restricts the amount of synthetic data that can be generated. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for domain adaptation called contrastive domain adaptation for QA (CAQA). Specifically, CAQA combines techniques from question generation and domain-invariant learning to answer out-of-domain questions in settings with limited text corpora. Here, we train a QA system on both source data and generated data from the target domain with a contrastive adaptation loss that is incorporated in the training objective. By combining techniques from question generation and domain-invariant learning, our model achieved considerable improvements compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

EMNLP 2021

Contrastive Domain Adaptation for Question Answering using Limited Text Corpora

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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Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

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

We demonstrate a library for the integration of domain knowledge in deep learning architectures. Using this library, the structure of the data is expressed symbolically via graph declarations and the logical constraints over outputs or latent variables can be seamlessly added to the deep models. The domain knowledge can be defined explicitly, which improves the explainability of the models in addition to their performance and generalizability in the low-data regime. Several approaches for such integration of symbolic and sub-symbolic models have been introduced; however, there is no library to facilitate the programming for such integration in a generic way while various underlying algorithms can be used. Our library aims to simplify programming for such integration in both training and inference phases while separating the knowledge representation from learning algorithms. We showcase various NLP benchmark tasks and beyond.

DomiKnowS: A Library for Integration of Symbolic Domain Knowledge in Deep Learning

Following the success of dot-product attention in Transformers, numerous approximations have been recently proposed to address its quadratic complexity with respect to the input length. However, all approximations thus far have ignored the contribution of the value vectors to the quality of approximation. In this work, we argue that research efforts should be directed towards approximating the true output of the attention sub-layer, which includes the value vectors. We propose a valueaware objective, and show theoretically and empirically that an optimal approximation of a value-aware objective substantially outperforms an optimal approximation that ignores values, in the context of language modeling. Moreover, we show that the choice of kernel function for computing attention similarity can substantially affect the quality of sparse approximations, where kernel functions that are less skewed are more affected by the value vectors.

Value-aware Approximate Attention

Backdoor attacks are a kind of emergent training-time threat to deep neural networks (DNNs). They can manipulate the output of DNNs and possess high insidiousness. In the field of natural language processing, some attack methods have been proposed and achieve very high attack success rates on multiple popular models. Nevertheless, there are few stud ies on defending against textual backdoor attacks. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective textual backdoor defense named ONION, which is based on outlier word detection and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first method that can handle all the textual backdoor attack situations.

ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks

Transformers are the dominant architecture in NLP, but their training and fine-tuning is still very challenging. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a visual analytic framework for assisting researchers in such process, by providing them with valuable insights about the model's intrinsic properties and behaviours. Our framework offers an intuitive overview that allows the user to explore different facets of the model (e.g., hidden states, attention) through interactive visualization, and allows a suite of built-in algorithms that compute the importance of model components and different parts of the input sequence. Case studies and feedback from a user focus group indicate that the framework is useful, and suggest several improvements.

T3-Vis: visual analytic for Training and fine-Tuning Transformers in NLP

IrEne is an energy prediction system that accurately predicts the interpretable inference energy consumption of a wide range of Transformer-based NLP models. We present the IrEne-viz tool, an online platform for visualizing and exploring energy consumption of various Transformer-based models easily. Additionally, we release a public API that can be used to access granular information about energy consumption of transformer models and their components. The live demo is available at http://stonybrooknlp. github.io/irene/demo/.

IrEne-viz: Visualizing Energy Consumption of Transformer Models

Humans use countless basic, shared facts about the world to efficiently navigate in their environment. This commonsense knowledge is rarely communicated explicitly, however, understanding how commonsense knowledge is represented in different paradigms is important for both deeper understanding of human cognition and for augmenting automatic reasoning systems. This paper presents an in-depth comparison of two large-scale resources of general knowledge: ConceptNet, an engineered relational database, and SWOW a knowledge graph derived from crowd-sourced word associations. We examine the structure, overlap and differences between the two graphs, as well as the extent to which they encode situational commonsense knowledge. We finally show empirically that both resources improve downstream task performance on commonsense reasoning benchmarks over text-only baselines, suggesting that large-scale word association data, which have been obtained for several languages through crowd-sourcing, can be a valuable complement to curated knowledge graphs

Commonsense Knowledge in Word Associations and ConceptNet

Within the currently dominant Minimalist framework for syntax (Chomsky 1995, 2000), it is not uncommon to encounter multiple proposals for the same natural language pattern in the literature. We investigate the possibility of evaluating and comparing analyses of syntax phenomena, implemented as minimalist grammars (Stabler 1997), from a quantitative point of view. This presentation introduces a principled way of making linguistic generalizations by detecting and eliminating syntactic and phonological redundancies in the data. As proof of concept, we first provide a small step-by-step example transforming a naive grammar over unsegmented words into a linguistically motivated grammar over morphemes, and then discuss a description of the English auxiliary system, passives, and raising verbs produced by a prototype implementation of a procedure for automated grammar optimization.

Deconstructing syntactic generalizations with minimalist grammars

In this paper, we study the identity of textual events from different documents. While the complex nature of event identity is previously studied (Hovy et al., 2013), the case of events across documents is unclear. Prior work on cross-document event coreference has two main drawbacks. First, they restrict the annotations to a limited set of event types. Second, they insufficiently tackle the concept of event identity. Such annotation setup reduces the pool of event mentions and prevents one from considering the possibility of quasi-identity relations. We propose a dense annotation approach for cross-document event coreference, comprising a rich source of event mentions and a dense annotation effort between related document pairs. To this end, we design a new annotation workflow with careful quality control and an easy-to-use annotation interface. In addition to the links, we further collect overlapping event contexts, including time, location, and participants, to shed some light on the relation between identity decisions and context. We present an open-access dataset for cross-document event coreference, CDEC-WN, collected from English Wikinews and open-source our annotation toolkit to encourage further research on cross-document tasks.

Cross-document Event Identity via Dense Annotation

* What cryptic crosswords are, and why they are an interesting problem. * A few examples of cryptic clues and how to solve them. * An overview of Cryptonite, which contains over half a million clues. * How T5-Large fairs against Cryptonite (spoiler: you have more fingers in your hands than this number)

Cryptonite: A Cryptic Crossword Benchmark for Extreme Ambiguity in Language

Compositional reasoning tasks such as multi-hop question answering require models tolearn how to make latent decisions using only weak supervision from the final answer. Crowdsourced datasets gathered forthese tasks, however, often contain only aslice of the underlying task distribution, whichcan induce unanticipated biases such as shal-low word overlap between the question andcontext. Recent works have shown that dis-criminative training results in models that exploit these underlying biases to achieve a better held-out performance, without learning theright way to reason. We propose a generativecontext selection model for multi-hop QA thatreasons about how the given question couldhave been generated given a context pair andnot just independent contexts. We show thaton HotpotQA, our proposed generative pas-sage selection model, while being comparableto the state-of-the-art answering performance, has a better performance (4.9% higher thanbaseline) on an adversarial held-out set thattests the robustness of model’s multi-hop reasoning capabilities.

Contrastive Domain Adaptation for Question Answering using Limited Text Corpora

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