Dominican Republic

The success of bidirectional encoders using masked language models, such as BERT, on numerous natural language processing tasks has prompted researchers to attempt to incorporate these pre-trained models into neural machine translation (NMT) systems. However, proposed methods for incorporating pre-trained models are non-trivial and mainly focus on BERT, which lacks a comparison of the impact that other pre-trained models may have on translation performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that simply using the output (contextualized embeddings) of a tailored and suitable bilingual pre-trained language model (dubbed BiBERT) as the input of the NMT encoder achieves state-of-the-art translation performance. Moreover, we also propose a stochastic layer selection approach and a concept of dual-directional translation model to ensure the sufficient utilization of contextualized embeddings. In the case of without using back translation, our best models achieve BLEU scores of 30.45 for En→De and 38.61 for De→En on the IWSLT’14 dataset, and 31.26 for En→De and 34.94 for De→En on the WMT’14 dataset, which exceeds all published numbers.

EMNLP 2021

BERT, mBERT, or BiBERT? A Study on Contextualized Embeddings for Neural Machine Translation

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.

technical paper

We consider the problem of multilingual unsupervised machine translation, translating to and from languages that only have monolingual data by using auxiliary parallel language pairs. For this problem the standard procedure so far to leverage the monolingual data is back-translation which is computationally costly and hard to tune. In this paper we propose instead to use denoising adapters, adapter layers with a denoising objective, on top of pre-trained mBART-50. In addition to the modularity and flexibility of such an approach we show that the resulting translations are on-par with back-translating as measured by BLEU, and furthermore it allows adding unseen languages incrementally.

Multilingual Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Denoising Adapters

This survey/position paper discusses ways to improve coverage of resources such as WordNet. Rapp estimated correlations, ρ, between corpus statistics and psycholinguistic norms. ρ improves with quantity (corpus size) and quality (balance). 1M words are enough for simple estimates (unigram frequencies), but at least 100M are required for pairs of words (word associations, edges). Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) attempts to learn missing links in WN18. Unfortunately, WN18 is flawed with information leaking from train to test. More seriously, WN18 is based on SemCor (just 200k words) and dated (collected in 1960s). KGC cannot learn anything that happened since the 1960s, or associations requiring 100M words.

Data Collection vs. Knowledge Graph Completion: What is Needed to Improve Coverage?

The quality of a summarization evaluation metric is quantified by calculating the correlation between its scores and human annotations across a large number of summaries. Currently, it is unclear how precise these correlation estimates are, nor whether differences between two metrics' correlations reflect a true difference or if it is due to mere chance. In this work, we address these two problems by proposing methods for calculating confidence intervals and running hypothesis tests for correlations using two resampling methods, bootstrapping and permutation. After evaluating which of the proposed methods is most appropriate for summarization through two simulation experiments, we analyze the results of applying these methods to several different automatic evaluation metrics across three sets of human annotations. We find that the confidence intervals are rather wide, demonstrating high uncertainty in the reliability of automatic metrics. Further, although many metrics fail to show statistical improvements over ROUGE, two recent works, QAEval and BERTScore, do in some evaluation settings.

A Statistical Analysis of Summarization Evaluation Metrics Using Resampling Methods

In order to simplify sentences, several rewriting operations can be performed such as replacing complex words per simpler synonyms, deleting unnecessary information, and splitting long sentences. Despite this multi-operation nature, evaluation of automatic simplification systems relies on metrics that moderately correlate with human judgements on the simplicity achieved by executing specific operations (e.g.\ simplicity gain based on lexical replacements). In this article, we investigate how well existing metrics can assess sentence-level simplifications where multiple operations may have been applied and which, therefore, require more general simplicity judgements. For that, we first collect a new and more reliable dataset for evaluating the correlation of metrics and human judgements of overall simplicity. Second, we conduct the first meta-evaluation of automatic metrics in Text Simplification, using our new dataset (and other existing data) to analyse the variation of the correlation between metrics' scores and human judgements across three dimensions: the perceived simplicity level, the system type and the set of references used for computation. We show that these three aspects affect the correlations and, in particular, highlight the limitations of commonly-used operation-specific metrics. Finally, based on our findings, we propose a set of recommendations for automatic evaluation of multi-operation simplifications, suggesting which metrics to compute and how to interpret their scores.

The (Un)Suitability of Automatic Evaluation Metrics for Text Simplification

News media structure their reporting of events or issues using certain perspectives. When describing an incident involving gun violence, for example, some journalists may focus on mental health or gun regulation, while others may emphasize the discussion of gun rights. Such perspectives are called “frames” in communication research.We study, for the first time, the value of combining lead images and their contextual information with text to identify the frame of a given news article. We observe that using multiple modes of information (article- and image-derived features) improves prediction of news frames over any single mode of information when the images are relevant to the frames of the headlines. We also observe that frame image relevance is related to the ease of conveying frames via images, which we call frame concreteness. Additionally, we release the first multimodal news framing dataset related to gun violence in the U.S., curated and annotated by communication researchers. The dataset will allow researchers to further examine the use of multiple information modalities for studying media framing.

Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Lead Images in U.S. Gun Violence Coverage

Reviewing contracts is a time-consuming procedure that incurs large expenses to companies and social inequality to those who cannot afford it. In this work, we propose "document-level natural language inference (NLI) for contracts", a novel, real-world application of NLI that addresses such problems. In this task, a system is given a set of hypotheses (such as "Some obligations of Agreement may survive termination.") and a contract, and it is asked to classify whether each hypothesis is "entailed by", "contradicting to" or "not mentioned by" (neutral to) the contract as well as identifying "evidence" for the decision as spans in the contract. We annotated and release the largest corpus to date consisting of 607 annotated contracts. We then show that existing models fail badly on our task and introduce a strong baseline, which (1) models evidence identification as multi-label classification over spans instead of trying to predict start and end tokens, and (2) employs more sophisticated context segmentation for dealing with long documents. We also show that linguistic characteristics of contracts, such as negations by exceptions, are contributing to the difficulty of this task and that there is much room for improvement.

ContractNLI: A Dataset for Document-level Natural Language Inference for Contracts

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the political and the medical aspects of disinformation merged as the problem got elevated to a whole new level to become the first global infodemic. Fighting this infodemic has been declared one of the most important focus areas of the World Health Organization, with dangers ranging from promoting fake cures, rumors, and conspiracy theories to spreading xenophobia and panic. Addressing the issue requires solving a number of challenging problems such as identifying messages containing claims, determining their check-worthiness and factuality, and their potential to do harm as well as the nature of that harm, to mention just a few. To address this gap, we release a large dataset of 16K manually annotated tweets for fine-grained disinformation analysis that (i) focuses on COVID-19, (ii) combines the perspectives and the interests of journalists, fact-checkers, social media platforms, policy makers, and society, and (iii) covers Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, and English. Finally, we show strong evaluation results using pretrained Transformers, thus confirming the practical utility of the dataset in monolingual vs. multilingual, and single task vs. multitask settings.

Fighting the COVID-19 Infodemic: Modeling the Perspective of Journalists, Fact-Checkers, Social Media Platforms, Policy Makers, and the Society

In this talk, I'll discuss our published work on multitask learning for news discourse. We showed we could improve accuracy on a recent discourse dataset by incorporating prior iterations of the same schema, as well as similar datasets. Using our approach, we do not "waste" generations of prior work, and we lower the startup costs for introducing new datasets and labelset updates.

We discuss why we see such improvements, comparing our multitask approach with data ablations. We also show that our architecture has a 4.9% Micro F1-score imrpovement overall, with the greatest effect on underrepresented classes. We compute correlations between predictions on tasks to give insights into why this is occurring. We also test numerous other approaches for class imbalanced classification problems, and report mainly negative results.

Multitask Semi-Supervised Learning for Class-Imbalanced Discourse Classification

We use a dataset of U.S. first names with labels based on predominant gender and racial group to examine the effect of training corpus frequency on tokenization, contextualization, similarity to initial representation, and bias in BERT, GPT-2, T5, and XLNet. We show that predominantly female and non-white names are less frequent in the training corpora of these four language models. We find that infrequent names are more self-similar across contexts, with Spearman's rho between frequency and self-similarity as low as -.763. Infrequent names are also less similar to initial representation, with Spearman's rho between frequency and linear centered kernel alignment (CKA) similarity to initial representation as high as .702. Moreover, we find Spearman's rho between racial bias and name frequency in BERT of .492, indicating that lower-frequency minority group names are more associated with unpleasantness. Representations of infrequent names undergo more processing, but are more self-similar, indicating that models rely on less context-informed representations of uncommon and minority names which are overfit to a lower number of observed contexts.

Low Frequency Names Exhibit Bias and Overfitting in Contextualizing Language Models

BERT and other large-scale language models (LMs) contain gender and racial bias. They also exhibit other dimensions of social bias, most of which have not been studied in-depth, and some of which vary depending on the language. In this paper, we study ethnic bias and how it varies across languages by analyzing and mitigating ethnic bias in monolingual BERT for English, German, Spanish, Korean, Turkish, and Chinese. To observe and quantify ethnic bias, we develop a novel metric called Categorical Bias score. Then we pro- pose two methods for mitigation; first using a multilingual model, and second using contextual word alignment of two monolingual models. We compare our proposed methods with monolingual BERT and show that these methods effectively alleviate the ethnic bias. Which of the two methods works better de- pends on the amount of NLP resources available for that language. We additionally experiment with Arabic and Greek to verify that our proposed methods work for a wider variety of languages.

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