Dominican Republic

Large pre-trained language models have repeatedly shown their ability to produce fluent text. Yet even when starting from a prompt, generation can continue in many plausible directions. Current decoding methods with the goal of controlling generation, e.g., to ensure specific words are included, either require additional models or fine-tuning, or work poorly when the task at hand is semantically unconstrained, e.g., story generation. In this work, we present a plug-and-play decoding method for controlled language generation that is so simple and intuitive, it can be described in a single sentence: given a topic or keyword, we add a shift to the probability distribution over our vocabulary towards semantically similar words. We show how annealing this distribution can be used to impose hard constraints on language generation, something no other plug-and-play method is currently able to do with SOTA language generators. Despite the simplicity of this approach, we see it works incredibly well in practice: decoding from GPT-2 leads to diverse and fluent sentences while guaranteeing the appearance of given guide words. We perform two user studies, revealing that (1) our method outperforms competing methods in human evaluations; and (2) forcing the guide words to appear in the generated text has no impact on the fluency of the generated text.

EMNLP 2021

A Plug-and-Play Method for Controlled Text Generation

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

Few-shot table-to-text generation is a task of composing fluent and faithful sentences to convey table content using limited data. Despite many efforts having been made towards generating impressive fluent sentences by fine-tuning powerful pre-trained language models, the faithfulness of generated content still needs to be improved. To this end, this paper proposes a novel approach Attend, Memorize and Generate (called AMG), inspired by the text generation process of humans. In particular, AMG (1) attends over the multi-granularity of context using a novel strategy based on table slot level and traditional token-by-token level attention to exploit both the table structure and natural linguistic information; (2) dynamically memorizes the table slot allocation states; and (3) generates faithful sentences according to both the context and memory allocation states. Comprehensive experiments with human evaluation on three domains (i.e., humans, songs, and books) of the Wiki dataset show that our model can generate higher qualified texts when compared with several state-of-the-art baselines, in both fluency and faithfulness.

Attend, Memorize and Generate: Towards Faithful Table-to-Text Generation in Few Shots

Written language carries explicit and implicit biases that can distract from meaningful signals. For example, letters of reference may describe male and female candidates differently, or their writing style may indirectly reveal demographic characteristics. At best, such biases distract from the meaningful content of the text; at worst they can lead to unfair outcomes. We investigate the challenge of re-generating input sentences to ‘neutralize’ sensitive attributes while maintaining the semantic meaning of the original text (e.g. is the candidate qualified?). We propose a gradient-based rewriting framework, Detect and Perturb to Neutralize (DEPEN), that first detects sensitive components and masks them for regeneration, then perturbs the generation model at decoding time under a neutralizing constraint that pushes the (predicted) distribution of sensitive attributes towards a uniform distribution. Our experiments in two different scenarios show that DEPEN can regenerate fluent alternatives that are neutral in the sensitive attribute while maintaining the semantics of other attributes.

Detect and Perturb: Neutral Rewriting of Biased and Sensitive Text via Gradient-based Decoding

Variational autoencoders have been studied as a promising approach to model one-to-many mappings from context to response in chat response generation. However, they often fail to learn proper mappings. One of the reasons for this failure is the discrepancy between a response and a latent variable sampled from an approximated distribution in training. Inappropriately sampled latent variables hinder models from constructing a modulated latent space. As a result, the models stop handling uncertainty in conversations. To resolve that, we propose speculative sampling of latent variables.
Our method chooses the most probable one from redundantly sampled latent variables
for tying up the variable with a given response. We confirm the efficacy of our method in response generation with massive dialogue data constructed from Twitter posts.

Speculative Sampling in Variational Autoencoders for Dialogue Response Generation

While large-scale language models (LMs) are able to imitate the distribution of natural language well enough to generate realistic text, it is difficult to control which regions of the distribution they generate. This is especially problematic because datasets used for training large LMs usually contain significant toxicity, hate, bias, and negativity. One promising approach to address this is to use discriminators to guide decoding from LMs, but existing methods for this are too slow to be useful in practice for many applications. We present GeDi as a significantly faster discriminator-based approach for guiding decoding. GeDi guides generation at each step by computing classification probabilities for all possible next tokens via Bayes rule by normalizing over two class-conditional distributions; one conditioned on the desired attribute, or control code, and another conditioned on the undesired attribute, or anti control code. We find that GeDi gives controllability on par with or better than the state of the art discriminator-based method in a variety of settings, while also achieving generation speeds more than 30 times faster. We also show that GeDi can make GPT-2 and GPT-3 significantly less toxic while maintaining linguistic fluency, without sacrificing significantly on generation speed. Lastly, we find training GeDi on only three topics allows us to controllably generate new topics zero-shot from just a keyword.

GeDi: Generative Discriminator Guided Decoding for Faster Controllable Sequence Generation

Understanding the semantic meaning of content on the web through the lens of entities and concepts has many practical advantages. 
However, when building large-scale entity extraction systems, practitioners are facing unique challenges involving finding the best ways to leverage the scale and variety of data available on internet platforms. 
We present learnings from our efforts in building an entity extraction system for multiple document types at large scale using multi-modal Transformers. 
We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-lingual, multi-task and cross-document type learning. 
We also discuss the label collection schemes that help to minimize the amount of noise in the collected data.

A Web Scale Entity Extraction System

Document-level event extraction is critical to various natural language processing tasks for providing structured information. Existing approaches by sequential modeling neglect the complex logic structures for long texts. In this paper, we leverage the entity interactions and sentence interactions within long documents and transform each document into an undirected unweighted graph by exploiting the relationship between sentences. We introduce the Sentence Community to represent each event as a subgraph. Furthermore, our framework SCDEE maintains the ability to extract multiple events by sentence community detection using graph attention networks and alleviate the role overlapping issue by predicting arguments in terms of roles. Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves competitive results over state-of-the-art methods on the large-scale document-level event extraction dataset.

Exploring Sentence Community for Document-Level Event Extraction

To alleviate human efforts from obtaining large-scale annotations, Semi-Supervised Relation Extraction methods aim to leverage unlabeled data in addition to learning from limited samples. Existing self-training methods suffer from the gradual drift problem, where noisy pseudo labels on unlabeled data are incorporated during training. To alleviate the noise in pseudo labels, we propose a method called MetaSRE, where a Relation Label Generation Network generates accurate quality assessment on pseudo labels by (meta) learning from the successful and failed attempts on Relation Classification Network as an additional meta-objective. To reduce the influence of noisy pseudo labels, MetaSRE adopts a pseudo label selection and exploitation scheme which assesses pseudo label quality on unlabeled samples and only exploits high-quality pseudo labels in a self-training fashion to incrementally augment labeled samples for both robustness and accuracy. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Semi-supervised Relation Extraction via Incremental Meta Self-Training

Aiming to generate a set of keyphrases, Keyphrase Generation (KG) is a classical task for capturing the central idea from a given document.
Based on Seq2Seq models, the previous reinforcement learning framework on KG tasks utilizes the evaluation metrics to further improve the well-trained neural models.
However, these KG evaluation metrics such as $F_1@5$ and $F_1@M$ are only aware of the exact correctness of predictions on phrase-level and ignore the semantic similarities between similar predictions and targets, which inhibits the model from learning deep linguistic patterns.
In response to this problem, we propose a new fine-grained evaluation metric to improve the RL framework, which considers different granularities: token-level $F_1$ score, edit distance, duplication, and prediction quantities.
On the whole, the new framework includes two reward functions: the fine-grained evaluation score and the vanilla $F_1$ score.
This framework helps the model identifying some partial match phrases which can be further optimized as the exact match ones.
Experiments on KG benchmarks show that our proposed training framework outperforms the previous RL training frameworks among all evaluation scores. In addition, our method can effectively ease the synonym problem and generate a higher quality prediction.
The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/xuyige/FGRL4KG}.

Keyphrase Generation with Fine-Grained Evaluation-Guided Reinforcement Learning

Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) efficiently reduces labor costs but meanwhile intrinsically suffers from the label noise due to the strong assumption of distant supervision. Typically, the wrongly labeled instances comprise numbers of incomplete and inaccurate annotations, while most prior denoising works are only concerned with one kind of noise and fail to fully explore useful information in the training set. To address this issue, we propose a robust learning paradigm named Self-Collaborative Denoising Learning (SCDL), which jointly trains two teacher-student networks in a mutually-beneficial manner to iteratively perform noisy label refinery. Each network is designed to exploit reliable labels via self denoising, and two networks communicate with each other to explore unreliable annotations by collaborative denoising. Extensive experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate that SCDL is superior to state-of-the-art DS-NER denoising methods.

Improving Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Self-Collaborative Denoising Learning

In this work, we study the problem of named entity recognition (NER) in a low resource
scenario, focusing on few-shot and zero-shot settings. Built upon large-scale pre-trained language models, we propose a novel NER framework, namely SpanNER, which learns from natural language supervision and enables the identification of never-seen entity classes without using in-domain labeled data. We perform extensive experiments on 5 benchmark datasets and evaluate the proposed method in the few-shot learning, domain transfer and zero-shot learning settings. The experimental results show that the proposed method can bring 10%, 23% and 26% improvements in average over the best baselines in few-shot learning, domain transfer and zero-shot learning settings respectively.

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