Dominican Republic

Supervised systems have nowadays become the standard recipe for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), with Transformer-based language models as their primary ingredient. However, while these systems have certainly attained unprecedented performances, virtually all of them operate under the constraining assumption that, given a context, each word can be disambiguated individually with no account of the other sense choices. To address this limitation and drop this assumption, we propose CONtinuous SEnse Comprehension (ConSeC), a novel approach to WSD: leveraging a recent re-framing of this task as a text extraction problem, we adapt it to our formulation and introduce a feedback loop strategy that allows the disambiguation of a target word to be conditioned not only on its context but also on the explicit senses assigned to nearby words. We evaluate ConSeC and examine how its components lead it to surpass all its competitors and set a new state of the art on English WSD. We also explore how ConSeC fares in the cross-lingual setting, focusing on 8 languages with various degrees of resource availability, and report significant improvements over prior systems. We release our code at https://github.com/sapienzanlp/consec.

EMNLP 2021

ConSeC: Word Sense Disambiguation as Continuous Sense Comprehension

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.

technical paper

Pretrained Masked Language Models (MLMs) have revolutionised NLP in recent years. However, previous work has indicated that off-the-shelf MLMs are not effective as universal lexical or sentence encoders without further task-specific fine-tuning on NLI, sentence similarity, or paraphrasing tasks using annotated task data. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to turn MLMs into effective universal lexical and sentence encoders even without any additional data and without any supervision. We propose an extremely simple, fast and effective contrastive learning technique, termed Mirror-BERT, which converts MLMs (e.g., BERT and RoBERTa) into such encoders in 20-30 seconds without any additional external knowledge. Mirror-BERT relies on fully identical or slightly modified string pairs as positive (i.e., synonymous) fine-tuning examples, and aims to maximise their similarity during identity fine-tuning. We report huge gains over off-the-shelf MLMs with Mirror-BERT in both lexical-level and sentence-level tasks, across different domains and different languages. Notably, in the standard sentence semantic similarity (STS) tasks, our self-supervised Mirror-BERT model even matches the performance of the task-tuned Sentence-BERT models from prior work. Finally, we delve deeper into the inner workings of MLMs, and suggest some evidence on why this simple approach can yield effective universal lexical and sentence encoders.

Fast, Effective, and Self-Supervised: Transforming Masked Language Models into Universal Lexical and Sentence Encoders

Multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) learns to translate multiple language pairs with a single model, potentially improving both the accuracy and the memoryefficiency of deployed models. However, the heavy data imbalance between languages hinders the model from performing uniformly across language pairs. In this paper, we propose a new learning objective for MNMT based on distributionally robust optimization, which minimizes the worst-case expected loss over the set of language pairs. We further show how to practically optimize this objective for large translation corpora using an iterated best response scheme, which is both effective and incurs negligible additional computational cost compared to standard empirical risk minimization. We perform extensive experiments on three sets of languages from two datasets and show that our method consistently outperforms strong baseline methods in terms of average and per-language performance under both many-to-one and one-to-many translation settings.

Distributionally Robust Multilingual Machine Translation

While pre-trained language models (PLMs) are the go-to solution to tackle many natural language processing problems, they are still very limited in their ability to capture and to use common-sense knowledge. In fact, even if information is available in the form of approximate (soft) logical rules, it is not clear how to transfer it to a PLM in order to improve its performance for deductive reasoning tasks. Here, we aim to bridge this gap by teaching PLMs how to reason with soft Horn rules. We introduce a classification task where, given facts and soft rules, the PLM should return a prediction with a probability for a given hypothesis. We release the first dataset for this task, and we propose a revised loss function that enables the PLM to learn how to predict precise probabilities for the task. Our evaluation results show that the resulting fine-tuned models achieve very high performance, even on logical rules that were unseen at training. Moreover, we demonstrate that logical notions expressed by the rules are transferred to the fine-tuned model, yielding state-of-the-art results on external datasets.

RuleBERT: Teaching Soft Rules to Pre-Trained Language Models

Transformers that are pre-trained on multilingual corpora, such as, mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa, have achieved impressive cross-lingual transfer capabilities. In the zero-shot transfer setting, only English training data is used, and the fine-tuned model is evaluated on another target language. While this works surprisingly well, substantial variance has been observed in target language performance between different fine-tuning runs, and in the zero-shot setup, no target-language development data is available to select among multiple fine-tuned models. Prior work has relied on English dev data to select among models that are fine-tuned with different learning rates, number of steps and other hyperparameters, often resulting in suboptimal choices. In this paper, we show that it is possible to select consistently better models when small amounts of annotated data are available in auxiliary pivot languages. We propose a machine learning approach to model selection that uses the fine-tuned model's own internal representations to predict its cross-lingual capabilities. In extensive experiments we find that this method consistently selects better models than English validation data across twenty five languages (including eight low-resource languages), and often achieves results that are comparable to model selection using target language development data.

Model Selection for Cross-lingual Transfer

We investigate stereotypical information captured by pre-trained language models. We present a dataset comprising stereotypical attributes of a range of social groups and propose a method to elicit stereotypes encoded by pretrained language models in an unsupervised fashion. Moreover, we link the emergent stereotypes to their manifestation as basic emotions and demonstrate how our methods can be used to analyze emotion and stereotype shifts due to linguistic experience. Our experiments expose how attitudes towards different social groups vary across models and how quickly emotions and stereotypes can shift at the fine-tuning stage.

Stepmothers are mean and academics are pretentious: What do pretrained language models learn about you?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is increasingly relying on general end-to-end systems that need to handle many different linguistic phenomena and nuances. For example, a Natural Language Inference (NLI) system has to recognize sentiment, handle numbers, perform coreference, etc. Our solutions to complex problems are still far from perfect, so it is important to create systems that can learn to correct mistakes quickly, incrementally, and with little training data. In this work, we propose a continual few-shot learning (CFL) task, in which a system is challenged with a difficult phenomenon and asked to learn to correct mistakes with only a few (10 to 15) training examples. To this end, we first create benchmarks based on previously annotated data: two NLI (ANLI and SNLI) and one sentiment analysis (IMDB) datasets. Next, we present various baselines from diverse paradigms (e.g., memory-aware synapses and Prototypical networks) and compare them on few-shot learning and continual few-shot learning setups. Our contributions are in creating a benchmark suite and evaluation protocol for continual few-shot learning on the text classification tasks, and making several interesting observations on the behavior of similarity-based methods. We hope that our work serves as a useful starting point for future work on this important topic.

Continual Few-Shot Learning for Text Classification

Asking questions about a situation is an inherent step towards understanding it. To this end, we introduce the task of role question generation, which, given a predicate mention and a passage, requires producing a set of questions asking about all possible semantic roles of the predicate. We develop a two-stage model for this task, which first produces a context-independent question prototype for each role and then revises it to be contextually appropriate for the passage. Unlike most existing approaches to question generation, our approach does not require conditioning on existing answers in the text. Instead, we condition on the type of information to inquire about, regardless of whether the answer appears explicitly in the text, could be inferred from it, or should be sought elsewhere. Our evaluation demonstrates that we generate diverse and well-formed questions for a large, broad-coverage ontology of predicates and roles.

Asking It All: Generating Contextualized Questions for any Semantic Role

Storytelling, whether via fables, news reports, documentaries, or memoirs, can be thought of as the communication of interesting and related events that, taken together, form a concrete process. It is desirable to extract the event chains that represent such processes. However, this extraction remains a challenging problem. We posit that this is due to the nature of the texts from which chains are discovered. Natural language text interleaves a narrative of concrete, salient events with background information, contextualization, opinion, and other elements that are important for a variety of necessary discourse and pragmatics acts but are not part of the principal chain of events being communicated. We introduce methods for extracting this principal chain from natural language text, by filtering away non-salient events and supportive sentences. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods at isolating critical event chains by comparing their effect on downstream tasks. We show that by pretraining large language models on our extracted chains, we obtain improvements in two tasks that benefit from a clear understanding of event chains: narrative prediction and event-based temporal question answering. The demonstrated improvements and ablative studies confirm that our extraction method isolates critical event chains.

Salience-Aware Event Chain Modeling for Narrative Understanding

Adversarial regularization has been shown to improve the generalization performance of deep learning models in various natural language processing tasks. Existing works usually formulate the method as a zero-sum game, which is solved by alternating gradient descent/ascent algorithms. Such a formulation treats the adversarial and the defending players equally, which is undesirable because only the defending player contributes to the generalization performance. To address this issue, we propose Stackelberg Adversarial Regularization (SALT), which formulates adversarial regularization as a Stackelberg game. This formulation induces a competition between a leader and a follower, where the follower generates perturbations, and the leader trains the model subject to the perturbations. Different from conventional approaches, in SALT, the leader is in an advantageous position. When the leader moves, it recognizes the strategy of the follower and takes the anticipated follower's outcomes into consideration. Such a leader's advantage enables us to improve the model fitting to the unperturbed data. The leader's strategic information is captured by the Stackelberg gradient, which is obtained using an unrolling algorithm. Our experimental results on a set of machine translation and natural language understanding tasks show that SALT outperforms existing adversarial regularization baselines across all tasks.

Adversarial Regularization as Stackelberg Game: An Unrolled Optimization Approach

Automatic construction of relevant Knowledge Bases (KBs) from text, and generation of semantically meaningful text from KBs are both long-standing goals in Machine Learning. In this presentation, we present ReGen, a bidirectional generation of text and graph leveraging Reinforcement Learning (RL) to improve performance. Graph linearization enables us to re-frame both tasks as a sequence to sequence generation problem regardless of the generative direction, which in turn allows the use of Reinforcement Learning for sequence training where the model itself is employed as its own critic leading to Self-Critical Sequence Training (SCST). We present an extensive investigation demonstrating that the use of RL via SCST benefits graph and text generation on WebNLG+ 2020 and TekGen datasets. Our system provides state-of-the-art results on WebNLG+ 2020 by significantly improving upon published results from the WebNLG 2020+ Challenge for both text-to-graph and graph-to-text generation tasks. More details at https://github.com/IBM/regen

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Fast, Effective, and Self-Supervised: Transforming Masked Language Models into Universal Lexical and Sentence Encoders

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