Dominican Republic

Dialogue summarization comes with its own peculiar challenges as opposed to news or scientific articles summarization. In this work, we explore four different challenges of the task: handling and differentiating parts of the dialogue belonging to multiple speakers, negation understanding, reasoning about the situation, and informal language understanding. Using a pretrained sequence-to-sequence language model, we explore speaker name substitution, negation scope highlighting, multi-task learning with relevant tasks, and pretraining on in-domain data. Our experiments show that our proposed techniques indeed improve summarization performance, outperforming strong baselines.

EMNLP 2021

A Bag of Tricks for Dialogue Summarization

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.

poster

We present two novel unsupervised methods for eliminating toxicity in text. Our first method combines two recent ideas: (1) guidance of the generation process with small style-conditional language models and (2) use of paraphrasing models to perform style transfer. We use a well-performing paraphraser guided by style-trained language models to keep the text content and remove toxicity. Our second method uses BERT to replace toxic words with their non-offensive synonyms. We make the method more flexible by enabling BERT to replace mask tokens with a variable number of words. Finally, we present the first large-scale comparative study of style transfer models on the task of toxicity removal. We compare our models with a number of methods for style transfer. The models are evaluated in a reference-free way using a combination of unsupervised style transfer metrics. Both methods we suggest yield new SOTA results.

Text Detoxification using Large Pre-trained Neural Models

A new metric BaryScore to evaluate text generation based on deep contextualized embeddings (e.g, BERT, Roberta, ELMo) is introduced. This metric is motivated by a new framework relying on optimal transport tools, i.e, Wasserstein distance and barycenter. By modelling the layer output of deep contextualized embeddings as a probability distribution rather than by a vector embedding; this framework provides a natural way to aggregate the different outputs through the Wasserstein space topology. In addition, it provides theoretical grounds to our metric and offers an alternative to available solutions (e.g, MoverScore and BertScore). Numerical evaluation is performed on four different tasks: machine translation, summarization, data2text generation and image captioning. Our results show that BaryScore outperforms other BERT based metrics and exhibits more consistent behaviour in particular for text summarization.

Automatic Text Evaluation through the Lens of Wasserstein Barycenters

The design of widespread vision-and-language datasets and pre-trained encoders directly adopts, or draws inspiration from, the concepts and images of ImageNet. While one can hardly overestimate how much this benchmark contributed to progress in computer vision, it is mostly derived from lexical databases and image queries in English, resulting in source material with a North American or Western European bias. Therefore, we devise a new protocol to construct an ImageNet-style hierarchy representative of more languages and cultures. In particular, we let the selection of both concepts and images be entirely driven by native speakers, rather than scraping them automatically. Specifically, we focus on a typologically diverse set of languages, namely, Indonesian, Mandarin Chinese, Swahili, Tamil, and Turkish. On top of the concepts and images obtained through this new protocol, we create a multilingual dataset for {M}ulticultur{a}l {R}easoning over {V}ision and {L}anguage (MaRVL) by eliciting statements from native speaker annotators about pairs of images. The task consists of discriminating whether each grounded statement is true or false. We establish a series of baselines using state-of-the-art models and find that their cross-lingual transfer performance lags dramatically behind supervised performance in English. These results invite us to reassess the robustness and accuracy of current state-of-the-art models beyond a narrow domain, but also open up new exciting challenges for the development of truly multilingual and multicultural systems.

Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures

The Winograd Schema (WS) has been proposed as a test for measuring commonsense capabilities of models. Recently, pre-trained language model-based approaches have boosted performance on some WS benchmarks but the source of improvement is still not clear. This paper suggests that the apparent progress on WS may not necessarily reflect progress in commonsense reasoning. To support this claim, we first show that the current evaluation method of WS is sub-optimal and propose a modification that uses twin sentences for evaluation. We also propose two new baselines that indicate the existence of artifacts in WS benchmarks. We then develop a method for evaluating WS-like sentences in a zero-shot setting to account for the commonsense reasoning abilities acquired during the pretraining and observe that popular language models perform randomly in this setting when using our more strict evaluation. We conclude that the observed progress is mostly due to the use of supervision in training WS models, which is not likely to successfully support all the required commonsense reasoning skills and knowledge. The code and evaluation are available at: https://github.com/yanaiela/winograd_square_one

Back to Square One: Artifact Detection, Training and Commonsense Disentanglement in the Winograd Schema

Pretrained language models (PLM) have recently advanced graph-to-text generation, where the input graph is linearized into a sequence and fed into the PLM to obtain its representation. However, efficiently encoding the graph structure in PLMs is challenging because such models were pretrained on natural language, and modeling structured data may lead to catastrophic forgetting of distributional knowledge. In this paper, we propose StructAdapt, an adapter method to encode graph structure into PLMs. Contrary to prior work, StructAdapt effectively models interactions among the nodes based on the graph connectivity, only training graph structure-aware adapter parameters. In this way, we incorporate task-specific knowledge while maintaining the topological structure of the graph. We empirically show the benefits of explicitly encoding graph structure into PLMs using StructAdapt, outperforming the state of the art on two AMR-to-text datasets, training only 5.1% of the PLM parameters.

Structural Adapters in Pretrained Language Models for AMR-to-Text Generation

One of the key motivations behind contextualised word-embeddings is handling polysemy. While this is a fundamental problem of language modeling, there are other subtler forms of contextual semantic meaning which are not explicitly lexicalised. Rather than having multiple meanings, some words have underspecified meanings which must be filled in contextually. Our on-going project aims to address the specific case of intersective adjectives (e.g. "Canadian") and strictly subsective adjectives (e.g. "good") in contextual word embeddings. Intersective adjectives have roughly the same meaning regardless of context, whereas subsective adjectives can vary drastically depending on context and in a compositional manner. We find that for BERT models, subsective adjectives have much more variance in their embeddings than intersectives adjectives.

Do contextual language embeddings distinguish between intersective and strictly subsective adjectives?

Neural sequence models trained with maximum likelihood estimation have led to breakthroughs in many tasks, where success is defined by the gap between training and test performance. However, their ability to achieve stronger forms of generalization remains unclear. We consider the problem of symbolic mathematical integration, as it requires generalizing systematically beyond the test set. We develop a methodology for evaluating generalization that takes advantage of the problem domain's structure and access to a verifier. Despite promising in-distribution performance of sequence-to-sequence models in this domain, we demonstrate challenges in achieving robustness, compositionality, and out-of-distribution generalization, through both carefully constructed manual test suites and a genetic algorithm that automatically finds large collections of failures in a controllable manner. Our investigation highlights the difficulty of generalizing well with the predominant modeling and learning approach, and the importance of evaluating beyond the test set, across different aspects of generalization.

Generalization in neural sequence models: a case study in symbolic mathematics

Classification problems having thousands or more classes naturally occur in NLP, for example language models or document classification. A softmax or one-vs-all classifier naturally handles many classes, but it is very slow at inference time, because every class score must be calculated to find the top class. We propose the ``softmax tree'', consisting of a binary tree having sparse hyperplanes at the decision nodes (which make hard, not soft, decisions) and small softmax classifiers at the leaves. This is much faster at inference because the input instance follows a single path to a leaf (whose length is logarithmic on the number of leaves) and the softmax classifier at each leaf operates on a small subset of the classes. Although learning accurate tree-based models has proven difficult in the past, we are able to overcome this by using a variation of a recent algorithm, tree alternating optimization (TAO). Compared to a softmax and other classifiers, the resulting softmax trees are both more accurate in prediction and faster in inference, as shown in NLP problems having from one thousand to one hundred thousand classes.

Softmax Tree: An Accurate, Fast Classifier When the Number of Classes Is Large

Neural models for the various flavours of morphological reinflection tasks have proven to be extremely accurate given ample labeled data, yet labeled data may be slow and costly to obtain. In this work we aim to overcome this annotation bottleneck by bootstrapping labeled data from a seed as small as five labeled inflection tables, accompanied by a large bulk of unlabeled text.
Our bootstrapping method exploits the orthographic and semantic regularities in morphological systems in a two-phased setup, where word tagging based on analogies is followed by word pairing based on distances.
Our experiments with the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem over eight typologically different languages show that in languages with relatively simple morphology, orthographic regularities on their own allow inflection models to achieve respectable accuracy. Combined orthographic and semantic regularities alleviate difficulties with particularly complex morpho-phonological systems. We further show that our bootstrapping methods substantially outperform hallucination-based methods commonly used for overcoming the annotation bottleneck in morphological reinflection tasks.

Minimal Supervision for Morphological Inflection

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).

A Bag of Tricks for Dialogue Summarization

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