Dominican Republic

Commonsense is defined as the knowledge that is shared by everyone. However, certain types of commonsense knowledge are correlated with culture and geographic locations and they are only shared locally. For example, the scenarios of wedding ceremonies vary across regions due to different customs influenced by historical and religious factors. Such regional characteristics, however, are generally omitted in prior work. In this paper, we construct a Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning dataset (GD-VCR) to test vision-and-language models&#39; ability to understand cultural and geo-location-specific commonsense. In particular, we study two state-of-the-art Vision-and-Language models, VisualBERT and ViLBERT trained on VCR, a standard multimodal commonsense benchmark with images primarily from Western regions. We then evaluate how well the trained models can generalize to answering the questions in GD-VCR. We find that the performance of both models for non-Western regions including East Asia, South Asia, and Africa is significantly lower than that for Western region. We analyze the reasons behind the performance disparity and find that the performance gap is larger on QA pairs that: 1) are concerned with culture-related scenarios, e.g., weddings, religious activities, and festivals; 2) require high-level geo-diverse commonsense reasoning rather than low-order perception and recognition. Dataset and code are released at https://github.com/WadeYin9712/GD-VCR.

EMNLP 2021

Broaden the Vision: Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

Commonsense is defined as the knowledge that is shared by everyone. However, certain types of commonsense knowledge are correlated with culture and geographic locations and they are only shared locally. For example, the scenarios of wedding ceremonies vary across regions due to different customs influenced by historical and religious factors. Such regional characteristics, however, are generally omitted in prior work. In this paper, we construct a Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning dataset (GD-VCR) to test vision-and-language models' ability to understand cultural and geo-location-specific commonsense. In particular, we study two state-of-the-art Vision-and-Language models, VisualBERT and ViLBERT trained on VCR, a standard multimodal commonsense benchmark with images primarily from Western regions. We then evaluate how well the trained models can generalize to answering the questions in GD-VCR. We find that the performance of both models for non-Western regions including East Asia, South Asia, and Africa is significantly lower than that for Western region. We analyze the reasons behind the performance disparity and find that the performance gap is larger on QA pairs that: 1) are concerned with culture-related scenarios, e.g., weddings, religious activities, and festivals; 2) require high-level geo-diverse commonsense reasoning rather than low-order perception and recognition. Dataset and code are released at https://github.com/WadeYin9712/GD-VCR.

technical paper

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.

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

Neural language models typically tokenise input text into sub-word units to achieve an open vocabulary. The standard approach is to use a single canonical tokenisation at both train and test time. We suggest that this approach is unsatisfactory and may bottleneck our evaluation of language model performance. Using only the one-best tokenisation ignores tokeniser uncertainty over alternative tokenisations, which may hurt model out-of-domain performance. In this paper, we argue that instead, language models should be evaluated on their marginal likelihood over tokenisations. We compare different estimators for the marginal likelihood based on sampling, and show that it is feasible to estimate the marginal likelihood with a manageable number of samples. We then evaluate pretrained English and German language models on both the one-best-tokenisation and marginal perplexities, and show that the marginal perplexity can be significantly better than the one best, especially on out-of-domain data. We link this difference in perplexity to the tokeniser uncertainty as measured by tokeniser entropy. We discuss some implications of our results for language model training and evaluation, particularly with regard to tokenisation robustness.

You should evaluate your language model on marginal likelihood over tokenisations

Current approaches to incorporating terminology constraints in machine translation (MT) typically assume that the constraint terms are provided in their correct morphological forms. This limits their application to real-world scenarios where constraint terms are provided as lemmas. In this paper, we introduce a modular framework for incorporating lemma constraints in neural MT (NMT) in which linguistic knowledge and diverse types of NMT models can be flexibly applied. It is based on a novel cross-lingual inflection module that inflects the target lemma constraints based on the source context. We explore linguistically motivated rule-based and data-driven neural-based inflection modules and design English-German health and English-Lithuanian news test suites to evaluate them in domain adaptation and low-resource MT settings. Results show that our rule-based inflection module helps NMT models incorporate lemma constraints more accurately than a neural module and outperforms the existing end-to-end approach with lower training costs.

Rule-based Morphological Inflection Improves Neural Terminology Translation

We observe that the development cross-entropy loss of supervised neural machine translation models scales like a power law with the amount of training data and the number of non-embedding parameters in the model. We discuss some practical implications of these results, such as predicting BLEU achieved by large scale models and predicting the ROI of labeling data in low-resource language pairs.

Data and Parameter Scaling Laws for Neural Machine Translation

This papermodels unsupervised learning of an identity-based pattern (or copying) in speech called reduplication from raw continuous data with deep convolutional neural networks. We use the ciwGAN architecture (Beguˇs, 2021a) in which learning of meaningful representations in speech emerges from a requirement that the CNNs generate informative data. We propose a technique to wug-test CNNs trained on speech and, based on four generative tests, argue that the network learns to represent an identity-based pattern in its latent space. By manipulating only two categorical variables in the latent space, we can actively turn an unreduplicated form into a reduplicated form with no other substantial changes to the output in the majority of cases.We also argue that the network extends the identity-based pattern to unobserved data. Exploration of how meaningful representations of identity-based patterns emerge in CNNs and how the latent space variables outside of the training range correlate with identity-based patterns in the output has general implications for neural network interpretability.

Identity-Based Patterns in Deep Convolutional Networks: Generative Adversarial Phonology and Reduplication

We propose a novel scheme to use the Levenshtein Transformer to perform the task of word-level quality estimation. A Levenshtein Transformer is a natural fit for this task: trained to perform decoding in an iterative manner, a Levenshtein Transformer can learn to post-edit without explicit supervision. To further minimize the mismatch between the translation task and the word-level QE task, we propose a two-stage transfer learning procedure on both augmented data and human post-editing data. We also propose heuristics to construct reference labels that are compatible with subword-level finetuning and inference. Results on WMT 2020 QE shared task dataset show that our proposed method has superior data efficiency under the data-constrained setting and competitive performance under the unconstrained setting.

Levenshtein Training for Word-level Quality Estimation

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (NMT) enables one model to serve all translation directions, including ones that are unseen during training, i.e. zero-shot translation. Despite being theoretically attractive, current models often produce low quality translations -- commonly failing to even produce outputs in the right target language. In this work, we observe that off-target translation is dominant even in strong multilingual systems, trained on massive multilingual corpora. To address this issue, we propose a joint approach to regularize NMT models at both representation-level and gradient-level. At the representation level, we leverage an auxiliary target language prediction task to regularize decoder outputs to retain information about the target language. At the gradient level, we leverage a small amount of direct data (in thousands of sentence pairs) to regularize model gradients. Our results demonstrate that our approach is highly effective in both reducing off-target translation occurrences and improving zero-shot translation performance by +5.59 and +10.38 BLEU on WMT and OPUS datasets respectively. Moreover, experiments show that our method also works well when the small amount of direct data is not available. Codes and rebuilt OPUS data at: https://github.com/yilinyang7/fairseq_multi_fix

Improving Multilingual Translation by Representation and Gradient Regularization

Lexical disambiguation is a major challenge for machine translation systems, especially if some senses of a word are trained less often than others. Identifying patterns of overgeneralization requires evaluation methods that are both reliable and scalable. We propose contrastive conditioning as a reference-free black-box method for detecting disambiguation errors. Specifically, we score the quality of a translation by conditioning on variants of the source that provide contrastive disambiguation cues. After validating our method, we apply it in a case study to perform a targeted evaluation of sequence-level knowledge distillation. By probing word sense disambiguation and translation of gendered occupation names, we show that distillation-trained models tend to overgeneralize more than other models with a comparable BLEU score. Contrastive conditioning thus highlights a side effect of distillation that is not fully captured by standard evaluation metrics. Code and data to reproduce our findings are publicly available.

Contrastive Conditioning for Assessing Disambiguation in MT: A Case Study of Distilled Bias

Copy mechanisms explicitly obtain unchanged tokens from the source (input) sequence to generate the target (output) sequence under the neural seq2seq framework. However, most of the existing copy mechanisms only consider single word copying from the source sentences, which results in losing essential tokens while copying long spans. In this work, we propose a plug-and-play architecture, namely BioCopy, to alleviate the problem aforementioned. Specifically, in the training stage, we construct a BIO tag for each token and train the original model with BIO tags jointly. In the inference stage, the model will firstly predict the BIO tag at each time step, then conduct different mask strategies based on the predicted BIO label to diminish the scope of the probability distributions over the vocabulary list. Experimental results on two separate generative tasks show that they all outperform the baseline models by adding our BioCopy to the original model structure.

BioCopy: A Plug-And-Play Span Copy Mechanism in Seq2Seq Models

In simple open-domain question answering (QA), dense retrieval has become one of the standard approaches for retrieving the relevant passages to infer an answer. Recently, dense retrieval also achieved state-of-the-art results in multi-hop QA, where aggregating information from multiple pieces of information and reasoning over them is required. Despite their success, dense retrieval methods are computationally intensive, requiring multiple GPUs to train. In this work, we introduce a hybrid (lexical and dense) retrieval approach that is highly competitive with the state-of-the-art dense retrieval models, while requiring substantially less computational resources. Additionally, we provide an in-depth evaluation of dense retrieval methods on limited computational resource settings, something that is missing from the current literature.

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