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Data augmentation aims to enrich training samples for alleviating the overfitting issue in low-resource or class-imbalanced situations. Traditional methods first devise task-specific operations such as Synonym Substitute, then preset the corresponding parameters such as the substitution rate artificially, which require a lot of prior knowledge and are prone to fall into the sub-optimum. Besides, the number of editing operations is limited in the previous methods, which decreases the diversity of the augmented data and thus restricts the performance gain. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a framework named Text AutoAugment (TAA) to establish a compositional and learnable paradigm for data augmentation. We regard a combination of various operations as an augmentation policy and utilize an efficient Bayesian Optimization algorithm to automatically search for the best policy, which substantially improves the generalization capability of models. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show that TAA boosts classification accuracy in low-resource and class-imbalanced regimes by an average of 8.8% and 9.7%, respectively, outperforming strong baselines.

EMNLP 2021

Text AutoAugment: Learning Compositional Augmentation Policy for Text Classification

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AAAI 2021

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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. 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.

Data augmentation has attracted a lot of research attention in the deep learning era for its ability in alleviating data sparseness. The lack of labeled data for unseen evaluation databases is exactly the major challenge for cross-domain text-to-SQL parsing. Previous works either require human intervention to guarantee the qual- ity of generated data, or fail to handle complex SQL queries. This paper presents a simple yet effective data augmentation framework. First, given a database, we automatically produce a large number of SQL queries based on an abstract syntax tree grammar. For better distribution matching, we require that at least 80% of SQL patterns in the training data are covered by generated queries. Second, we propose a hierarchical SQL-to-question generation model to obtain high-quality natural language questions, which is the major contribution of this work. Finally, we design a simple sampling strategy that can greatly improve training efficiency given large amounts of generated data. Experiments on three cross-domain datasets, i.e., WikiSQL and Spider in English, and DuSQL in Chinese, show that our proposed data augmentation framework can consistently improve performance over strong baselines, and the hierarchical generation component is the key for the improvement.

Data Augmentation with Hierarchical SQL-to-Question Generation for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL Parsing

To translate natural language questions into executable database queries, most approaches rely on a fully annotated training set. Annotating a large dataset with queries is difficult as it requires query-language expertise. We reduce this burden using grounded in databases intermediate question representations. These representations are simpler to collect and were originally crowdsourced within the Break dataset (Wolfson et al., 2020). Our pipeline consists of two parts: a neural semantic parser that converts natural language questions into the intermediate representations and a non-trainable transpiler to the SPARQL query language (a standard language for accessing knowledge graphs and semantic web). We chose SPARQL because its queries are structurally closer to our intermediate representations (compared to SQL). We observe that the execution accuracy of queries constructed by our model on the challenging Spider dataset is comparable with the state-of-the-art text-to-SQL methods trained with annotated SQL queries. Our code and data are publicly available (https://github.com/yandex-research/sparqling-queries).

SPARQLing Database Queries from Intermediate Question Decompositions

Entity alignment aims to identify equivalent entity pairs between different knowledge graphs (KGs). A bunch of embedding-based approaches have been proposed for entity alignment, which embed entities and relations of different KGs into a vector space and measure the similarities between entity embeddings. Recently, the availability of temporal KGs (TKGs) that contain time information created the need for reasoning over time in such TKGs. Existing embedding-based entity alignment approaches disregard time information that commonly exists in many large-scale KGs, leaving much room for improvement. In this paper, we focus on the task of aligning entity pairs between TKGs and propose a novel Time-aware Entity Alignment approach based on Graph Neural Networks (TEA-GNN). We embed entities, relations and timestamps of different KGs into a vector space and use GNNs to learn entity representations. To incorporate both relation and time information into the GNN structure of our model, we use a time-aware attention mechanism which assigns different weights to different nodes with orthogonal transformation matrices computed from embeddings of the relevant relations and timestamps in a neighborhood. Experimental results on multiple real-world TKG datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods due to the inclusion of time information.

Time-aware Graph Neural Network for Entity Alignment between Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Stance detection concerns the classification of a writer's viewpoint towards a target. There are different task variants, e.g., stance of a tweet vs. a full article, or stance with respect to a claim vs. an (implicit) topic. Moreover, task definitions vary, which includes the label inventory, the data collection, and the annotation protocol. All these aspects hinder cross-domain studies, as they require changes to standard domain adaptation approaches. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of 16 stance detection datasets, and we explore the possibility for cross-domain learning from them. Moreover, we propose an end-to-end unsupervised framework for out-of-domain prediction of unseen, user-defined labels. In particular, we combine domain adaptation techniques such as mixture of experts and domain-adversarial training with label embeddings, and we demonstrate sizable performance gains over strong baselines, both (i) in-domain, i.e., for seen targets, and (ii) out-of-domain, i.e., for unseen targets. Finally, we perform an exhaustive analysis of the cross-domain results, and we highlight the important factors influencing the model performance.

Cross-Domain Label-Adaptive Stance Detection

Recent years have seen an increasing need for gender-neutral and inclusive language. Within the field of NLP, there are various mono- and bilingual use cases where gender inclusive language is appropriate, if not preferred due to ambiguity or uncertainty in terms of the gender of referents. In this work, we present a rule-based and a neural approach to gender-neutral rewriting for English along with manually curated synthetic data (WinoBias+) and natural data (OpenSubtitles and Reddit) benchmarks. A detailed manual and automatic evaluation highlights how our NeuTral Rewriter, trained on data generated by the rule-based approach, obtains word error rates (WER) below 0.18% on synthetic, in-domain and out-domain test sets.

NeuTral Rewriter: A Rule-Based and Neural Approach to Automatic Rewriting into Gender Neutral Alternatives

Reasoning over commonsense knowledge bases (CSKBs) whose elements are in the form of free-text is an important yet hard task in NLP. While CSKB completion only fills the missing links within the domain of the CSKB, CSKB population is alternatively proposed with the goal of reasoning unseen assertions from external resources. In this task, CSKBs are grounded to a large-scale eventuality (activity, state, and event) graph to discriminate whether novel triples from the eventuality graph are plausible or not. However, existing evaluations on the population task are either not accurate (automatic evaluation with randomly sampled negative examples) or of small scale (human annotation). In this paper, we benchmark the CSKB population task with a new large-scale dataset by first aligning four popular CSKBs, and then presenting a high-quality human-annotated evaluation set to probe neural models’ commonsense reasoning ability. We also propose a novel inductive commonsense reasoning model that reasons over graphs. Experimental results show that generalizing commonsense reasoning on unseen assertions is inherently a hard task. Models achieving high accuracy during training perform poorly on the evaluation set, with a large gap between human performance. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CSKB-Population.

Benchmarking Commonsense Knowledge Base Population with an Effective Evaluation Dataset

Natural Language Generation (NLG) evaluation is a multifaceted task requiring assessment of multiple desirable criteria, e.g., fluency, coherency, coverage, relevance, adequacy, overall quality, etc. Across existing datasets for 6 NLG tasks, we observe that the human evaluation scores on these multiple criteria are often not correlated. For example, there is a very low correlation between human scores on fluency and data coverage for the task of structured data to text generation. This suggests that the current recipe of proposing new automatic evaluation metrics for NLG by showing that they correlate well with scores assigned by humans for a single criteria (overall quality) alone is inadequate. Indeed, our extensive study involving 25 automatic evaluation metrics across 6 different tasks and 18 different evaluation criteria shows that there is no single metric which correlates well with human scores on all desirable criteria, for most NLG tasks. Given this situation, we propose CheckLists for better design and evaluation of automatic metrics. We design templates which target a specific criteria (e.g., coverage) and perturb the output such that the quality gets affected only along this specific criteria (e.g., the coverage drops). We show that existing evaluation metrics are not robust against even such simple perturbations and disagree with scores assigned by humans to the perturbed output. The proposed templates thus allow for a fine-grained assessment of automatic evaluation metrics exposing their limitations and will facilitate better design, analysis and evaluation of such metrics. Our templates and code are available at https://iitmnlp.github.io/EvalEval/

Perturbation CheckLists for Evaluating NLG Evaluation Metrics

We introduce a high-quality and large-scale Vietnamese-English parallel dataset of 3.02M sentence pairs, which is 2.9M pairs larger than the benchmark Vietnamese-English machine translation corpus IWSLT15. We conduct experiments comparing strong neural baselines and well-known automatic translation engines on our dataset and find that in both automatic and human evaluations: the best performance is obtained by fine-tuning the pre-trained sequence-to-sequence denoising auto-encoder mBART. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale Vietnamese-English machine translation study. We hope our publicly available dataset and study can serve as a starting point for future research and applications on Vietnamese-English machine translation. We release our dataset at: https://github.com/VinAIResearch/PhoMT

PhoMT: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Vietnamese-English Machine Translation

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is dedicated to recognizing the semantic predicate-argument structure of a sentence. 
Previous studies in terms of traditional models have shown syntactic information can make remarkable contributions to SRL performance; however, the necessity of syntactic information was challenged by a few recent neural SRL studies that demonstrate impressive performance without syntactic backbones and suggest that syntax information becomes much less important for neural semantic role labeling, especially when paired with recent deep neural network and large-scale pre-trained language models. Despite this notion, the neural SRL field still lacks a systematic and full investigation on the relevance of syntactic information in SRL, for both dependency and both monolingual and multilingual settings. This paper intends to quantify the importance of syntactic information for neural SRL in the deep learning framework. We introduce three typical SRL frameworks (baselines), sequence-based, tree-based, and graph-based, which are accompanied by two categories of exploiting syntactic information: syntax pruning-based and syntax feature-based. Experiments are conducted on the CoNLL-2005, 2009, and 2012 benchmarks for all languages available, and results show that neural SRL models can still benefit from syntactic information under certain conditions. Furthermore, we show the quantitative significance of syntax to neural SRL models together with a thorough empirical survey using existing models.

Syntax Role for Neural Semantic Role Labeling

To obtain high-quality sentence embeddings from pretrained language models (PLMs), they must either be augmented with additional pretraining objectives or finetuned on a large set of labeled text pairs. While the latter approach typically outperforms the former, it requires great human effort to generate suitable datasets of sufficient size. In this paper, we show how PLMs can be leveraged to obtain high-quality sentence embeddings without the need for labeled data, finetuning or modifications to the pretraining objective: We utilize the generative abilities of large and high-performing PLMs to generate entire datasets of labeled text pairs from scratch, which we then use for finetuning much smaller and more efficient models. Our fully unsupervised approach outperforms strong baselines on several semantic textual similarity datasets.

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Data Augmentation with Hierarchical SQL-to-Question Generation for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL Parsing

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