Dominican Republic

While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how these languages evolve and are used. Assuming that the capacity to process information is roughly constant across human populations, we expect a surprisal--duration trade-off to arise both across and within languages. We analyse this trade-off using a corpus of 600 languages and, after controlling for several potential confounds, we find strong supporting evidence in both settings. Specifically, we find that, on average, phones are produced faster in languages where they are less surprising, and vice versa. Further, we confirm that more surprising phones are longer, on average, in 319 languages out of the 600. We thus conclude that there is strong evidence of a surprisal--duration trade-off in operation, both across and within the world&#39;s languages.

EMNLP 2021

A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world&#39;s languages

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.

While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how these languages evolve and are used. Assuming that the capacity to process information is roughly constant across human populations, we expect a surprisal--duration trade-off to arise both across and within languages. We analyse this trade-off using a corpus of 600 languages and, after controlling for several potential confounds, we find strong supporting evidence in both settings. Specifically, we find that, on average, phones are produced faster in languages where they are less surprising, and vice versa. Further, we confirm that more surprising phones are longer, on average, in 319 languages out of the 600. We thus conclude that there is strong evidence of a surprisal--duration trade-off in operation, both across and within the world's languages.

A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world's languages

technical paper

Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express an unbounded set of emerging ideas. One result of this tension is the formation of new compositions, such that existing linguistic units can be combined with emerging items into novel expressions. We develop a framework that exploits the cognitive mechanisms of chaining and multimodal knowledge to predict emergent compositional expressions through time. We present the syntactic frame extension model (SFEM) that draws on the theory of chaining and knowledge from “percept”, “concept”, and “language” to infer how verbs extend their frames to form new compositions with existing and novel nouns. We evaluate SFEM rigorously on the 1) modalities of knowledge and 2) categorization models of chaining, in a syntactically parsed English corpus over the past 150 years. We show that multimodal SFEM predicts newly emerged verb syntax and arguments substantially better than competing models using purely linguistic or unimodal knowledge. We find support for an exemplar view of chaining as opposed to a prototype view and reveal how the joint approach of multimodal chaining may be fundamental to the creation of literal and figurative language uses including metaphor and metonymy.

Predicting emergent linguistic compositions through time: Syntactic frame extension via multimodal chaining

Pre-trained language models perform well on a variety of linguistic tasks that require symbolic reasoning, raising the question of whether such models implicitly represent abstract symbols and rules. We investigate this question using the case study of BERT's performance on English subject-verb agreement. Unlike prior work, we train multiple instances of BERT from scratch, allowing us to perform a series of controlled interventions at pre-training time. We show that BERT often generalizes well to subject-verb pairs that never occurred in training, suggesting a degree of rule-governed behavior. We also find, however, that performance is heavily influenced by word frequency, with experiments showing that both the absolute frequency of a verb form, as well as the frequency relative to the alternate inflection, are causally implicated in the predictions BERT makes at inference time. Closer analysis of these frequency effects reveals that BERT's behavior is consistent with a system that correctly applies the SVA rule in general but struggles to overcome strong training priors and to estimate agreement features (singular vs. plural) on infrequent lexical items.

Frequency Effects on Syntactic Rule Learning in Transformers

Determining whether two documents were composed by the same author, also known as authorship verification, has traditionally been tackled using statistical methods. Recently, authorship representations learned using neural networks have been found to outperform alternatives, particularly in large-scale settings involving hundreds of thousands of authors. But do such representations learned in a par- ticular domain transfer to other domains? Or are these representations inherently entangled with domain-specific features? To study these questions, we conduct the first large-scale study of cross-domain transfer for authorship verification considering zero-shot transfers involving three disparate domains: Amazon re- views, fanfiction short stories, and Reddit comments. We find that although a surprising degree of transfer is possible between certain domains, it is not so successful between others. We examine properties of these domains that influence generalization and propose simple but effective methods to improve transfer.

Learning Universal Authorship Representations

We cast a suite of information extraction tasks into a text-to-triple translation framework. Instead of solving each task relying on task-specific datasets and models, we formalize the task as a translation between task-specific input text and output triples. By taking the task-specific input, we enable a task-agnostic translation by leveraging the latent knowledge that a pre-trained language model has about the task. We further demonstrate that a simple pretraining task of predicting which relational information corresponds to which input text is an effective way to produce task-specific outputs. This enables the zero-shot transfer of our framework to downstream tasks. We study the zero-shot performance of this framework on open information extraction (OIE2016, NYT, WEB, PENN), relation classification (FewRel and TACRED), and factual probe (Google-RE and T-REx). The model transfers non-trivially to most tasks and is often competitive with a fully supervised method without the need for any task-specific training. For instance, we significantly outperform the F1 score of the supervised open information extraction without needing to use its training set.

Zero-Shot Information Extraction as a Unified Text-to-Triple Translation

We study learning named entity recognizers in the presence of missing entity annotations. We approach this setting as tagging with latent variables and propose a novel loss, the Expected Entity Ratio, to learn models in the presence of systematically missing tags. We show that our approach is both theoretically sound and empirically useful. Experimentally, we find that it meets or exceeds performance of strong and state-of-the-art baselines across a variety of languages, annotation scenarios, and amounts of labeled data. In particular, we find that it significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods from [Mayhew et al. '19] and [Li et al. '21] by +12.7 and +2.3 F1 score in a challenging setting with only 1,000 biased annotations, averaged across 7 datasets. We also show that, when combined with our approach, a novel sparse annotation scheme outperforms exhaustive annotation for modest annotation budgets. We have published our implementation and experimental results at https://github.com/teffland/ner-expected-entity-ratio.

Partially Supervised Named Entity Recognition via the Expected Entity Ratio Loss

We take a step towards addressing the under-representation of the African continent in NLP research by creating the first large publicly available high-quality dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in ten African languages, bringing together a variety of stakeholders. We detail the characteristics of the languages to help researchers understand the challenges that these languages pose for NER. We analyze our datasets and conduct an extensive empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods across both supervised and transfer learning settings. We release the data, code, and models in order to inspire future research on African NLP.

MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages

Pre-trained Transformer language models~(LM) have become go-to text representation encoders. Prior research fine-tunes deep LMs to encode text sequences such as sentences and passages into single dense vector representations for efficient text comparison and retrieval. However, dense encoders require a lot of data and sophisticated techniques to effectively train and suffer in low data situations. This paper finds a key reason is that standard LMs' internal attention structure is not ready-to-use for dense encoders, which needs to aggregate text information into the dense representation. We propose to pre-train towards dense encoder with a novel Transformer architecture, Condenser, where LM prediction CONditions on DENSE Representation. Our experiments show Condenser improves over standard LM by large margins on various text retrieval and similarity tasks.

Condenser: a Pre-training Architecture for Dense Retrieval

This paper uses domain-specific data extracted from publicly available data on social media platforms, Reddit and Twitter, to analyze the psychosocioeconomic factors that affect domestic violence survivors and provide insight into the factors that contribute to their reluctance to leave abusive relationships. We propose a methodology that employs unsupervised machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to extract abstract topics from a large corpus of unstructured text. Further, we provide a few recommendations for policymakers based on the nature of the impact on domestic violence survivors from our analysis.

#WhyDidTheyStay: An NLP-driven approach to analyzing the factors that affect domestic violence victims

Visual Dialog is assumed to require the dialog history to generate correct responses during a dialog. However, it is not clear from previous work how dialog history is needed for visual dialog. In this paper we define what it means for visual questions to require dialog history and we propose a methodology for identifying them. We release a subset of the Guesswhat?! questions for which their dialog history completely changes their responses.
We propose a novel interpretable representation that visually grounds dialog history: the Region under Discussion. It constrains the image's spatial features according to a semantic representation of the history inspired by the information structure notion of Question under Discussion. We evaluate the architecture on task-specific multimodal models and the visual transformer model LXMERT and show that there is still room for improvement.

An interpretable representation that visually grounds dialog history

With synthetic data generation, the required amount of human-generated training data can be reduced significantly. In this work, we explore the usage of automatic paraphrasing models such as GPT-2 and CVAE to directly augment the template carrier phrases for task-oriented dialogue systems while preserving the slots, and we systematically analyze how far manually annotated training data can be reduced. We extrinsically evaluate the performance of a natural language understanding systems on augmented data on various levels of data availability, reducing manually written templates up to 75 percent while preserving the accuracy. We further point out that the typical NLG quality metrics such as BLEU, utterance similarity, or utterance perplexity, are not suitable to assess the intrinsic quality of NLU paraphrases, and that the public task-oriented NLU datasets such as ATIS and SNIPS have severe limitations.

A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world's languages

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Predicting emergent linguistic compositions through time: Syntactic frame extension via multimodal chaining

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Next from EMNLP 2021

Predicting emergent linguistic compositions through time: Syntactic frame extension via multimodal chaining

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Predicting emergent linguistic compositions through time: Syntactic frame extension via multimodal chaining

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