Dominican Republic

A flaw in QA evaluation is that annotations often only provide one gold answer. Thus, model predictions semantically equivalent to the answer but superficially different are considered incorrect. This work explores mining alias entities from knowledge bases and using them as additional gold answers (i.e., equivalent answers). We incorporate answers for two settings: evaluation with additional answers and model training with equivalent answers. We analyse three QA benchmarks: Natural Questions, TriviaQA, and SQuAD. Answer expansion increases the exact match score on all datasets for evaluation, while incorporating it helps model training over real-world datasets. We ensure the additional answers are valid through a human post hoc evaluation.

EMNLP 2021

What&#39;s in a Name? Answer Equivalence For Open-Domain Question Answering

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.

What's in a Name? Answer Equivalence For Open-Domain Question Answering

technical paper

Open-domain question answering answers a question based on evidence retrieved from a large corpus. State-of-the-art neural approaches require intermediate evidence annotations for training. However, such intermediate annotations are expensive, and methods that rely on them cannot transfer to the more common setting, where only question–answer pairs are available. This paper investigates whether models can learn to find evidence from a large corpus, with only distant supervision from answer labels for model training, thereby generating no additional annotation cost. We introduce a novel approach (DistDR) that iteratively improves over a weak retriever by alternately finding evidence from the up-to-date model and encouraging the model to learn the most likely evidence. Without using any evidence labels, DistDR is on par with fully-supervised state-of-the-art methods on both multi-hop and single-hop QA benchmarks. Our analysis confirms that DistDR finds more accurate evidence over iterations, which leads to model improvements.

Distantly-Supervised Dense Retrieval Enables Open-Domain Question Answering without Evidence Annotation

Open-domain Question Answering models which directly leverage question-answer (QA) pairs, such as closed-book QA (CBQA) models and QA-pair retrievers, show promise in terms of speed and memory compared to conventional models which retrieve and read from text corpora. QA-pair retrievers also offer interpretable answers, a high degree of control, and are trivial to update at test time with new knowledge. However, these models lack the accuracy of retrieve-and-read systems, as substantially less knowledge is covered by the available QA-pairs relative to text corpora like Wikipedia. To facilitate improved QA-pair models, we introduce Probably Asked Questions (PAQ), a very large resource of 65M automatically-generated QA-pairs. We introduce a new QA-pair retriever, RePAQ, to complement PAQ. We find that PAQ preempts and caches test questions, enabling RePAQ to match the accuracy of recent retrieve-and-read models, whilst being significantly faster. Using PAQ, we train CBQA models which outperform comparable baselines by 5%, but trail RePAQ by over 15%, indicating the effectiveness of explicit retrieval. RePAQ can be configured for size (under 500MB) or speed (over 1K questions per second) whilst retaining high accuracy. Lastly, we demonstrate RePAQ's strength at selective QA, abstaining from answering when it is likely to be incorrect. This enables RePAQ to ``back-off" to a more expensive state-of-the-art model, leading to a combined system which is both more accurate and 2x faster than the state-of-the-art model alone.

PAQ: 65 Million Probably-Asked Questions and What You Can Do With Them

Notwithstanding the growing interest in cross-lingual techniques for Natural Language Processing, there has been a surprisingly small number of efforts aimed at the development of easy-to-use tools for cross-lingual Semantic Role Labeling. In this paper, we fill this gap and present InVeRo-XL, an off-the-shelf state-of-the-art system capable of annotating text with predicate sense and semantic role labels from 7 predicate-argument structure inventories in more than 40 languages. We hope that our system -- with its easy-to-use RESTful API and Web interface -- will become a valuable tool for the research community, encouraging the integration of sentence-level semantics into cross-lingual downstream tasks. InVeRo-XL is available online at http://nlp.uniroma1.it/invero.

InVeRo-XL: Making Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling Accessible with Intelligible Verbs and Roles

Named Entity Recognition is a fundamental task in information extraction. Adversarial attacks have been shown to greatly affect the performance of text classification systems. In this presentation, we explore the portability of adversarial attacks from text classification to named entity recognition, their efficacy, and the effect of adversarial training.

SeqAttack: On Adversarial Attacks for Named Entity Recognition

To truly grasp reasoning ability, a Natural Language Inference model should be evaluated on counterfactual data. TABPERT facilitates this by assisting in the generation of such counterfactual data for assessing model tabular reasoning issues. TABPERT allows a user to update a table, change its associated hypotheses, change their labels, and highlight rows that are important for hypothesis classification. TABPERT also captures information about the techniques used to automatically produce the table, as well as the strategies employed to generate the challenging hypotheses. These counterfactual tables and hypotheses, as well as the metadata, can then be used to explore an existing model’s shortcomings methodically and quantitatively.

An Effective Platform for Tabular Perturbation

In this paper, we revisit the task of negation resolution, which includes the subtasks of cue detection (e.g. “not”, “never”) and scope resolution. In the context of previous shared tasks, a variety of evaluation metrics have been proposed. Subsequent works usually use different subsets of these, including variations and custom implementations, rendering meaningful comparisons between systems difficult. Examining the problem both froma linguistic perspective and from a downstream viewpoint, we here argue for a negation-instance based approach to evaluating negation resolution. Our proposed metrics correspond to expectations over per-instance scores and hence are intuitively interpretable. To render research comparable and to foster future work, we provide results for a set of current state-of-the-art systems for negation resolution on three English corpora, and make our implementation of the evaluation scripts publicly available.

Negation-Instance Based Evaluation of End-to-End Negation Resolution

Relation classification (sometimes called `extraction') requires trustworthy datasets for fine-tuning large language models, as well as for evaluation. Data collection is challenging for Indian languages, because they are syntactically and morphologically diverse, as well as different from resource-rich languages like English.
Despite recent interest in deep generative models for Indian languages, relation classification is still not well-served by public data sets. In response, we present IndoRE, a dataset with 21K entity- and relation-tagged gold sentences in three Indian languages, plus English.
We start with a multilingual BERT (mBERT) based system that captures entity span positions and type information and provides competitive monolingual relation classification. Using this system, we explore and compare transfer mechanisms between languages. 
In particular, we study the accuracy-efficiency tradeoff between expensive gold instances vs. translated and aligned `silver' instances.

A Data Bootstrapping Recipe for Low-Resource Multilingual Relation Classification

Since late 2019, COVID-19 has quickly emerged as the newest biomedical domain, resulting in a surge of new information. As with other emergent domains, the discussion surrounding the topic has been rapidly changing, leading to the spread of misinformation. This has created the need for a public space for users to ask questions and receive credible, scientific answers. To fulfill this need, we turn to the task of open-domain question-answering, which we can use to efficiently find answers to free-text questions from a large set of documents. In this work, we present such a system for the emergent domain of COVID-19. Despite the small data size available, we are able to successfully train the system to retrieve answers from a large-scale corpus of published COVID-19 scientific papers. Furthermore, we incorporate effective re-ranking and question-answering techniques, such as document diversity and multiple answer spans. Our open-domain question-answering system can further act as a model for the quick development of similar systems that can be adapted and modified for other developing emergent domains.

Open-Domain Question-Answering for COVID-19 and Other Emergent Domains

Numerical reasoning in machine reading comprehension (MRC) has shown drastic improvements over the past few years. While the previous models for numerical MRC are able to interpolate the learned numerical reasoning capabilities, it is not clear whether they can perform just as well on numbers unseen in the training dataset. Our work rigorously tests state-of-the-art models on DROP, a numerical
MRC dataset, to see if they can handle passages that contain out-of-range numbers. One of the key findings is that the models fail to extrapolate to unseen numbers. Presenting numbers as digit-by-digit input to the model, we also propose the E-digit number form that alleviates the lack of extrapolation in models and reveals the need to treat numbers differently from regular words in the text. Our work provides a valuable insight into the numerical MRC models and the way to represent number
forms in MRC.

Have You Seen That Number? Investigating Extrapolation in Question Answering Models

Large language models have shown promising results in zero-shot settings (Brown et al.,2020; Radford et al., 2019). For example, they can perform multiple choice tasks simply by conditioning on a question and selecting the answer with the highest probability.

However, ranking by string probability can be problematic due to surface form competition-wherein different surface forms compete for probability mass, even if they represent the same underlying concept, e.g. "computer" and "PC." Since probability mass is finite, this lowers the probability of the correct answer, due to competition from other strings that are valid answers (but not one of the multiple choice options).

We introduce Domain Conditional Pointwise Mutual Information, an alternative scoring function that directly compensates for surface form competition by simply reweighing each option according to a term that is proportional to its a priori likelihood within the context of the specific zero-shot task. It achieves consistent gains in zero-shot performance over both calibrated (Zhao et al., 2021) and uncalibrated scoring functions on all GPT-2 and GPT-3 models over a variety of multiple choice datasets.

What's in a Name? Answer Equivalence For Open-Domain Question Answering

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