Dominican Republic

Computational models of human language often involve combinatorial problems. For instance, a probabilistic parser may marginalize over exponentially many trees to make predictions. Algorithms for such problems often employ dynamic programming and are not always unique. Finding one with optimal asymptotic runtime can be unintuitive, time-consuming, and error-prone. Our work aims to automate this laborious process. Given an initial correct declarative program, we search for a sequence of semantics-preserving transformations to improve its running time as much as possible. To this end, we describe a set of program transformations, a simple metric for assessing the efficiency of a transformed program, and a heuristic search procedure to improve this metric. We show that in practice, automated search—like the mental search performed by human programmers—can find substantial improvements to the initial program. Empirically, we show that many speed-ups described in the NLP literature could have been discovered automatically by our system.

EMNLP 2021

Searching for More Efficient Dynamic Programs

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

Improving Transformer efficiency has become increasingly attractive recently. A wide range of methods has been proposed, e.g., pruning, quantization, new architectures and etc. But these methods are either sophisticated in implementation or dependent on hardware. In this paper, we show that the efficiency of Transformer can be improved by combining some simple and hardware-agnostic methods, including tuning hyper-parameters, better design choices and training strategies. On the WMT news translation tasks, we improve the inference efficiency of a strong Transformer system by 3.80x on CPU and 2.52x on GPU.

Bag of Tricks for Optimizing Transformer Efficiency

Contextual language models have led to significantly better results, especially when pre-trained on the same data as the downstream task. While this additional pre-training usually improves performance, it can lead to information leakage and therefore risks the privacy of individuals mentioned in the training data. One method to guarantee the privacy of such individuals is to train a differentially-private language model, but this usually comes at the expense of model performance. Also, in the absence of a differentially private vocabulary training, it is not possible to modify the vocabulary to fit the new data, which might further degrade results. In this work we bridge these gaps, and provide guidance to future researchers and practitioners on how to improve privacy while maintaining good model performance. We introduce a novel differentially private word-piece algorithm, which allows training a tailored domain-specific vocabulary while maintaining privacy. We then experiment with entity extraction tasks from clinical notes, and demonstrate how to train a differentially private pre-trained language model (i.e., BERT) with a privacy guarantee of $\epsilon=1.1$ and with only a small degradation in performance. Finally, as it is hard to tell given a privacy parameter $\epsilon$ what was the effect on the trained representation, we present experiments showing that the trained model does not memorize private information.

Learning and Evaluating a Differentially Private Pre-trained Language Model

Recent works have found evidence of gender bias in models of machine translation and coreference resolution using mostly synthetic diagnostic datasets. While these quantify bias in a controlled experiment, they often do so on a small scale and consist mostly of artificial, out-of-distribution sentences.
In this work, we find grammatical patterns indicating stereotypical and non-stereotypical gender-role assignments (e.g., female nurses versus male dancers) in corpora from three domains, resulting in a first large-scale gender bias dataset of 108K diverse real-world English sentences.
We manually verify the quality of our corpus and use it to evaluate gender bias in various coreference resolution and machine translation models. We find that all tested models tend to over-rely on gender stereotypes when presented with natural inputs, which may be especially harmful when deployed in commercial systems.
Finally, we show that our dataset lends itself to finetuning a coreference resolution model, finding it mitigates bias on a held out set.
Our dataset and models are publicly available at github.com/SLAB-NLP/BUG. We hope they will spur future research into gender bias evaluation mitigation techniques in realistic settings.

Collecting a Large-Scale Gender Bias Dataset for Coreference Resolution and Machine Translation

Much of the world's population experiences some form of disability during their lifetime. Caution must be exercised while designing natural language processing (NLP) systems to prevent systems from inadvertently perpetuating ableist bias against people with disabilities, i.e., prejudice that favors those with typical abilities. We report on various analyses based on word predictions of a large-scale BERT language model. Statistically significant results demonstrate that people with disabilities can be disadvantaged. Findings also explore overlapping forms of discrimination related to interconnected gender and race identities.

Unpacking the Interdependent Systems of Discrimination: Ableist Bias in NLP Systems through an Intersectional Lens

With the recent surge in social applications relying on knowledge graphs, the need for techniques to ensure fairness in KG based methods is becoming increasingly evident. Previous works have demonstrated that KGs are prone to various social biases, and have proposed multiple methods for debiasing them. However, in such studies, the focus has been on debiasing techniques, while the relations to be debiased are specified manually by the user. As manual specification is itself susceptible to human cognitive bias, there is a need for a system capable of quantifying and exposing biases, that can support more informed decisions on what to debias. To address this gap in the literature, we describe a framework for identifying biases present in knowledge graph embeddings, based on numerical bias metrics. We illustrate the framework with three different bias measures on the task of profession prediction, and it can be flexibly extended to further bias definitions and applications. The relations flagged as biased can then be handed to decision makers for judgement upon subsequent debiasing.

Towards Automatic Bias Detection in Knowledge Graphs

Pre-trained language models learn socially harmful biases from their training corpora, and may repeat these biases when used for generation. We study gender biases associated with the protagonist in model-generated stories. Such biases may be expressed either explicitly (``women can't park'') or implicitly (e.g. an unsolicited male character guides her into a parking space). We focus on implicit biases, and use a commonsense reasoning engine to uncover them. Specifically, we infer and analyze the protagonist's motivations, attributes, mental states, and implications on others. Our findings regarding implicit biases are in line with prior work that studied explicit biases, for example showing that female characters' portrayal is centered around appearance, while male figures' focus on intellect.

Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inference

Unfair stereotypical biases (e.g., gender, racial, or religious biases) encoded in modern pretrained language models (PLMs) have negative ethical implications for widespread adoption of state-of-the-art language technology. To remedy for this, a wide range of debiasing techniques have recently been introduced to remove such stereotypical biases from PLMs. Existing debiasing methods, however, directly modify all of the PLMs parameters, which -- besides being computationally expensive -- comes with the inherent risk of (catastrophic) forgetting of useful language knowledge acquired in pretraining. In this work, we propose a more sustainable modular debiasing approach based on dedicated debiasing adapters, dubbed ADELE. Concretely, we (1) inject adapter modules into the original PLM layers and (2) update only the adapters (i.e., we keep the original PLM parameters frozen) via language modeling training on a counterfactually augmented corpus. We showcase ADELE, in gender debiasing of BERT: our extensive evaluation, encompassing three intrinsic and two extrinsic bias measures, renders ADELE, very effective in bias mitigation. We further show that -- due to its modular nature -- ADELE, coupled with task adapters, retains fairness even after large-scale downstream training. Finally, by means of multilingual BERT, we successfully transfer ADELE, to six target languages.

Sustainable Modular Debiasing of Language Models

A key part of the NLP ethics movement is responsible use of data, but exactly what that means or how it can be best achieved remain unclear. This position paper discusses the core legal and ethical principles for collection and sharing of textual data, and the tensions between them. We propose a potential checklist for responsible data (re-)use that could both standardise the peer review of conference submissions, as well as enable a more in-depth view of published research across the community. Our proposal aims to contribute to the development of a consistent standard for data (re-)use, embraced across NLP conferences.

'Just What do You Think You're Doing, Dave?' A Checklist for Responsible Data Use in NLP

Sentence splitting involves the segmentation of a sentence into two or more shorter sentences. It is a key component of sentence simplification, has been shown to help human comprehension and is a useful preprocessing step for NLP tasks such as summarisation and relation extraction. While several methods and datasets have been proposed for developing sentence splitting models, little attention has been paid to how sentence splitting interacts with discourse structure. In this work, we focus on cases where the input text contains a discourse connective, which we refer to as discourse-based sentence splitting. We create synthetic and organic datasets for discourse-based splitting and explore different ways of combining these datasets using different model architectures. We show that pipeline models which use discourse structure to mediate sentence splitting outperform end-to-end models in learning the various ways of expressing a discourse relation but generate text that is less grammatical; that large scale synthetic data provides a better basis for learning than smaller scale organic data; and that training on discourse-focused, rather than on general sentence splitting data provides a better basis for discourse splitting.

Discourse-Based Sentence Splitting

Recent developments in neural networks have led to the advance in data-to-text generation. However, the lack of ability of neural models to control the structure of generated output can be limiting in certain real-world applications. In this study, we propose a novel Plan-then-Generate (PlanGen) framework to improve the controllability of neural data-to-text models. Extensive experiments and analyses are conducted on two benchmark datasets, ToTTo and WebNLG. The results show that our model is able to control both the intra-sentence and inter-sentence structure of the generated output. Furthermore, empirical comparisons against previous state-of-the-art methods show that our model improves the generation quality as well as the output diversity as judged by human and automatic evaluations.

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