Dominican Republic

As NLP models are increasingly deployed in socially situated settings such as online abusive content detection, it is crucial to ensure that these models are robust. One way of improving model robustness is to generate counterfactually augmented data (CAD) for training models that can better learn to distinguish between core features and data artifacts. While models trained on this type of data have shown promising out-of-domain generalizability, it is still unclear what the sources of such improvements are. We investigate the benefits of CAD for social NLP models by focusing on three social computing constructs — sentiment, sexism, and hate speech. Assessing the performance of models trained with and without CAD across different types of datasets, we find that while models trained on CAD show lower in-domain performance, they generalize better out-of-domain. We unpack this apparent discrepancy using machine explanations and find that CAD reduces model reliance on spurious features. Leveraging a novel typology of CAD to analyze their relationship with model performance, we find that CAD which acts on the construct directly or a diverse set of CAD leads to higher performance.

EMNLP 2021

How Does Counterfactually Augmented Data Impact Models for Social Computing Constructs?

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

Over the past decade, the field of natural language processing has developed a wide array of computational methods for reasoning about narrative, including summarization, commonsense inference, and event detection. While this work has brought an important empirical lens for examining narrative, it is by and large divorced from the large body of theoretical work on narrative within the humanities, social and cognitive sciences. In this position paper, we introduce the dominant theoretical frameworks to the NLP community, situate current research in NLP within distinct narratological traditions, and argue that linking computational work in NLP to theory opens up a range of new empirical questions that would both help advance our understanding of narrative and open up new practical applications.

Narrative Theory for Computational Narrative Understanding

Stance detection, which aims to determine whether an individual is for or against a target concept, promises to uncover public opinion from large streams of social media data. Yet even human annotation of social media content does not always capture "stance" as measured by public opinion polls. We demonstrate this by directly comparing an individual's self-reported stance to the stance inferred from their social media data. Leveraging a longitudinal public opinion survey with respondent Twitter handles, we conducted this comparison for 1,129 individuals across four salient targets. We find that recall is high for both "Pro" and "Anti"’ stance classifications but precision is variable in a number of cases. We identify three factors leading to the disconnect between text and author stance: temporal inconsistencies, differences in constructs, and measurement errors from both survey respondents and annotators. By presenting a framework for assessing the limitations of stance detection models, this work provides important insight into what stance detection truly measures.

(Mis)alignment Between Stance Expressed in Social Media Data and Public Opinion Surveys

Many NLG tasks such as summarization, dialogue response, or open domain question answering focus primarily on a source text in order to generate a target response. This standard approach falls short, however, when a user’s intent or context of work is not easily recoverable based solely on that source text– a scenario that we argue is more of the rule than the exception. In this work, we argue that NLG systems in general should place a much higher level of emphasis on making use of additional context, and suggest that relevance (as used in Information Retrieval) be thought of as a crucial tool for designing user-oriented text-generating tasks. We further discuss possible harms and hazards around such personalization, and argue that value-sensitive design represents a crucial path forward through these challenges.

Refocusing on Relevance: Personalization in NLG

Data augmentation and adversarial perturbation approaches have recently achieved promising results in solving the over-fitting problem in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks including sentiment classification. However, existing studies aimed to improve the generalization ability by augmenting the training data with synonymous examples or adding random noises to word embeddings, which cannot address the spurious association problem. In this work, we propose an end-toend reinforcement learning framework, which jointly performs counterfactual data generation and dual sentiment classification. Our approach has three characteristics: 1) the generator automatically generates massive and diverse antonymous sentences; 2) the discriminator contains a original-side sentiment predictor and an antonymous-side sentiment predictor, which jointly evaluate the quality of the generated sample and help the generator iteratively generate higher-quality antonymous samples; 3) the discriminator is directly used as the final sentiment classifier without the need to build an extra one. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms strong data augmentation baselines on several benchmark sentiment classification datasets. Further analysis confirms our approach’s advantages in generating more diverse training samples and solving the spurious association problem in sentiment classification

Reinforced Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Dual Sentiment Classification

Recent developments in machine translation and multilingual text generation have led researchers to adopt trained metrics such as COMET or BLEURT, which treat evaluation as a regression problem and use representations from multilingual pre trained models such as XLM-RoBERTa or mBERT. Yet studies on related tasks suggest that these models are most efficient when they are large, which is costly and impractical for evaluation. We investigate the trade-off between multilinguality and model capacity with RemBERT, a stateof-the-art multilingual language model, using data from the WMT Metrics Shared Task. We present a series of experiments which show that model size is indeed a bottleneck for crosslingual transfer, then demonstrate how distillation can help addressing this bottleneck, by leveraging synthetic data generation and transferring knowledge from one teacher to multiple students trained on related languages. Our method yields up to 10.5% improvement over vanilla fine-tuning and reaches 92.6% of RemBERT’s performance using only a third of its parameters.

Learning Compact Metrics for MT

The Future is not One-dimensional: Complex Event Schema Induction by Graph Modeling for Event Prediction

Many recent works use ‘consistency regularisation’ to improve the generalisation of fine-tuned pre-trained models, both multilingual and English-only (Jiang et al., 2020; Aghajanyan et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2021; Zheng et al., 2021; Park et al.,2021; Liang et al., 2021). These works encourage model outputs to be similar between a perturbedand normal version of the input, usually via penalising the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence be-tween the probability distribution of the perturbed and normal model. Perturbations could be e.g. Gaussian noise or BPE dropout.

We believe that consistency losses may be implicitly regularizing the loss landscape. In particular, we build on the work of Jastrzebski et al. (2021), who hypothesize that implicitly or explicitly regularizing trace of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM). We show empirical and theoretical connections between consistency losses and the FIM and use this connection to propose new techniques to improve cross-lingual generalisation.

Regularising Fisher Information Improves Cross-lingual Generalisation

Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT) has been effective in learning robust models under supervised and semi-supervised settings for both computer vision and NLP tasks. However, the efficacy of VAT for multilingual and multilabel text classification has not been explored before. In this work, we explore VAT for multilabel emotion recognition with a focus on leveraging unlabelled data from different languages to improve the model performance. We perform extensive semi-supervised experiments on SemEval2018 multilabel and multilingual emotion recognition dataset and show performance gains of 6.2% (Arabic), 3.8% (Spanish) and 1.8% (English) over supervised learning with same amount of labelled data (10% of training data). We also improve the existing state-of-the-art by 7%, 4.5% and 1% (Jaccard Index) for Spanish, Arabic and English respectively and perform probing experiments for understanding the impact of different layers of the contextual models.

Multilingual and Multilabel Emotion Recognition using Virtual Adversarial Training

Multilingual language models achieve impres-sive zero-shot accuracies in many languages incomplex tasks such as Natural Language Infer-ence (NLI). Examples in NLI (and equivalentcomplex tasks) often pertain to various typesof sub-tasks, requiring different kinds of rea-soning. Certaintypesofreasoninghaveprovento be more difficult to learn in a monolingualcontext, and in the crosslingual context,similarobservations may shed light on zero-shot trans-fer efficiency and few-shot sample selection.Hence, to investigate the effects of types ofreasoningontransferperformance, weproposea category-annotated multilingual NLI datasetanddiscussthechallengestoscalemonolingualannotations to multiple languages. We statisti-cally observe interesting effects that the conflu-ence of reasoning types and language similari-tieshaveontransferperformance.

Analyzing the Effects of Reasoning Types on Cross-Lingual Transfer Performance

In this work, we analyze the performance and properties of cross-lingual word embedding models created by mapping-based alignment
methods. We use several measures of corpus and embedding similarity to predict
BLI scores of cross-lingual embedding mappings over three types of corpora, three embedding methods and 55 language pairs. Our experimental results corroborate that the amount of common content in the training corpora is essential for good mappings.

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Narrative Theory for Computational Narrative Understanding

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How Does Counterfactually Augmented Data Impact Models for Social Computing Constructs?