Dominican Republic

Inductive transfer learning has taken the entire NLP field by storm, with models such as BERT and BART setting new state of theart on countless NLU tasks. However, most of the available models and research have been conducted for English. In this work, we introduce BARThez, the first large-scale pretrained seq2seq model for French. Being based on BART, BARThez is particularly well-suited for generative tasks. We evaluate BARThez on five discriminative tasks from the FLUE benchmark and two generative tasks from a novel summarization dataset, OrangeSum, that we created for this research. We show BARThez to be very competitive with state-of-the-art BERT-based French language models such as CamemBERT and FlauBERT. We also continue the pretraining of a multilingual BART on BARThez’ corpus, and show our resulting model, mBARThez, to significantly boost BARThez’ generative performance.

EMNLP 2021

BARThez: a Skilled Pretrained French Sequence-to-Sequence Model

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.

poster

Generating goal-oriented questions in Visual Dialogue tasks is a challenging and long-standing problem. State-Of-The-Art systems are shown to generate questions that, although grammatically correct, often lack an effective strategy and sound unnatural to humans. Inspired by the cognitive literature on information search and cross-situational word learning, we design Confirm-it, a model based on a beam search re-ranking algorithm that guides an effective goal-oriented strategy by asking questions that confirm the model's conjecture about the referent. We take the GuessWhat?! game as a case-study. We show that dialogues generated by Confirm-it are more natural and effective than beam search decoding without re-ranking.

Looking for Confirmations: An Effective and Human-Like Visual Dialogue Strategy

The recently introduced hateful meme challenge demonstrates the difficulty of determining whether a meme is hateful or not. Specifically, both unimodal language models and multimodal vision-language models cannot reach the human level of performance. Motivated by the need to model the contrast between the image content and the overlayed text, we suggest applying an off-the-shelf image captioning tool in order to capture the first. We demonstrate that the incorporation of such automatic captions during fine-tuning improves the results for various unimodal and multimodal models. Moreover, in the unimodal case, continuing the pre-training of language models on augmented and original caption pairs, is highly beneficial to the classification accuracy.

Caption Enriched Samples for Improving Hateful Memes Detection

While interest in models that generalize at test time to new compositions has risen in recent years, benchmarks in the visually-grounded domain have thus far been restricted to synthetic images. In this work, we propose COVR, a new test-bed for visually-grounded compositional generalization with real images. To create COVR, we use real images annotated with scene graphs, and propose an almost fully automatic procedure for generating question-answer pairs along with a set of context images. COVR focuses on questions that require complex reasoning, including higher-order operations such as quantification and aggregation. Due to the automatic generation process, COVR facilitates the creation of compositional splits, where models at test time need to generalize to new concepts and compositions in a zero- or few-shot setting. We construct compositional splits using COVR and demonstrate a myriad of cases where state-of-the-art pre-trained language-and-vision models struggle to compositionally generalize.

COVR: A Test-Bed for Visually Grounded Compositional Generalization with Real Images

Pretrained vision-and-language BERTs aim to learn representations that combine information from both modalities. We propose a diagnostic method based on cross-modal input ablation to assess the extent to which these models actually integrate cross-modal information. This method involves ablating inputs from one modality, either entirely or selectively based on cross-modal grounding alignments, and evaluating the model prediction performance on the other modality. Model performance is measured by modality-specific tasks that mirror the model pretraining objectives (e.g. masked language modelling for text). Models that have learned to construct cross-modal representations using both modalities are expected to perform worse when inputs are missing from a modality. We find that recently proposed models have much greater relative difficulty predicting text when visual information is ablated, compared to predicting visual object categories when text is ablated, indicating that these models are not symmetrically cross-modal.

Vision-and-Language or Vision-for-Language? On Cross-Modal Influence in Multimodal Transformers

Interpolation-based regularisation methods for data augmentation have proven to be effective for various tasks and modalities. These methods involve performing mathematical operations over the raw input samples or their latent states representations - vectors that often possess complex hierarchical geometries. However, these operations are performed in the Euclidean space, simplifying these representations, which may lead to distorted and noisy interpolations. We propose HypMix, a novel model-, data-, and modality-agnostic interpolative data augmentation technique operating in the hyperbolic space, which captures the complex geometry of input and hidden state hierarchies better than its contemporaries. We evaluate HypMix on benchmark and low resource datasets across speech, text, and vision modalities, showing that HypMix consistently outperforms state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques. In addition, we demonstrate the use of HypMix in semi-supervised settings. We further probe into the adversarial robustness and qualitative inferences we draw from HypMix that elucidate the efficacy of the Riemannian hyperbolic manifolds for interpolation-based data augmentation.

HypMix: Hyperbolic Interpolative Data Augmentation

Recent work on opinion summarization produces general summaries based on a set of input reviews and the popularity of opinions expressed in them. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows the generation of customized summaries based on aspect queries (e.g., describing the location and room of a hotel). Using a review corpus, we create a synthetic training dataset of (review, summary) pairs enriched with aspect controllers which are induced by a multi-instance learning model that predicts the aspects of a document at different levels of granularity. We fine-tune a pretrained model using our synthetic dataset and generate aspect-specific summaries by modifying the aspect controllers. Experiments on two benchmarks show that our model outperforms the previous state of the art and generates personalized summaries by controlling the number of aspects discussed in them.

Aspect-Controllable Opinion Summarization

In this paper, we propose a controllable neural generation framework that can flexibly guide dialogue summarization with personal named entity planning. The conditional sequences are modulated to decide what types of information or what perspective to focus on when forming summaries to tackle the under-constrained problem in summarization tasks. This framework supports two types of use cases: (1) Comprehensive Perspective, which is a general-purpose case with no user-preference specified, considering summary points from all conversational interlocutors and all mentioned persons; (2) Focus Perspective, positioning the summary based on a user-specified personal named entity, which could be one of the interlocutors or one of the persons mentioned in the conversation. During training, we exploit occurrence planning of personal named entities and coreference information to improve temporal coherence and to minimize hallucination in neural generation. Experimental results show that our proposed framework generates fluent and factually consistent summaries under various planning controls using both objective metrics and human evaluations.

Controllable Neural Dialogue Summarization with Personal Named Entity Planning

Summarization evaluation remains an open research problem: current metrics such as ROUGE are known to be limited and to correlate poorly with human judgments. To alleviate this issue, recent work has proposed evaluation metrics that rely on question answering models to assess whether a summary contains all the relevant information in its source document. Though promising, the proposed approaches have so far failed to correlate better than ROUGE with human judgments. In this paper, we extend previous approaches and propose a unified framework, named QuestEval. In contrast to established metrics such as ROUGE or BERTScore, QuestEval does not require any ground-truth reference. Nonetheless, QuestEval substantially improves the correlation with human judgments over four evaluation dimensions (consistency, coherence, fluency, and relevance), as shown in the extensive experiments we report.

BARThez: a Skilled Pretrained French Sequence-to-Sequence Model

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