Dominican Republic

A popular approach to decompose the neural bases of language consists in correlating, across individuals, the brain responses to different stimuli (e.g. regular speech versus scrambled words, sentences, or paragraphs). Although successful, this &#39;model-free&#39; approach necessitates the acquisition of a large and costly set of neuroimaging data. Here, we show that a model-based approach can reach equivalent results within subjects exposed to natural stimuli. We capitalize on the recently-discovered similarities between deep language models and the human brain to compute the mapping between i) the brain responses to regular speech and ii) the activations of deep language models elicited by modified stimuli (e.g. scrambled words, sentences, or paragraphs). Our model-based approach successfully replicates the seminal study of Lerner et al. (2011), which revealed the hierarchy of language areas by comparing the functional-magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of seven subjects listening to 7min of both regular and scrambled narratives. We further extend and precise these results to the brain signals of 305 individuals listening to 4.1 hours of narrated stories. Overall, this study paves the way for efficient and flexible analyses of the brain bases of language.

EMNLP 2021

Model-based analysis of brain activity reveals the hierarchy of language in 305 subjects

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.

A popular approach to decompose the neural bases of language consists in correlating, across individuals, the brain responses to different stimuli (e.g. regular speech versus scrambled words, sentences, or paragraphs). Although successful, this 'model-free' approach necessitates the acquisition of a large and costly set of neuroimaging data. Here, we show that a model-based approach can reach equivalent results within subjects exposed to natural stimuli. We capitalize on the recently-discovered similarities between deep language models and the human brain to compute the mapping between i) the brain responses to regular speech and ii) the activations of deep language models elicited by modified stimuli (e.g. scrambled words, sentences, or paragraphs). Our model-based approach successfully replicates the seminal study of Lerner et al. (2011), which revealed the hierarchy of language areas by comparing the functional-magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of seven subjects listening to 7min of both regular and scrambled narratives. We further extend and precise these results to the brain signals of 305 individuals listening to 4.1 hours of narrated stories. Overall, this study paves the way for efficient and flexible analyses of the brain bases of language.

technical paper

Unsupervised PCFG induction models, which build syntactic structures from raw text, can be used to evaluate the extent to which syntactic knowledge can be acquired from distributional information alone. However, many state-of-the-art PCFG induction models are word-based, meaning that they cannot directly inspect functional affixes, which may provide crucial information for syntactic acquisition in child learners. This work first introduces a neural PCFG induction model that allows a clean ablation of the influence of subword information in grammar induction. Experiments on child-directed speech demonstrate first that the incorporation of subword information results in more accurate grammars with categories that word-based induction models have difficulty finding, and second that this effect is amplified in morphologically richer languages that rely on functional affixes to express grammatical relations. A subsequent evaluation on multilingual treebanks shows that the model with subword information achieves state-of-the-art results on many languages, further supporting a distributional model of syntactic acquisition.

Character-based PCFG Induction for Modeling the Syntactic Acquisition of Morphologically Rich Languages

We propose Cartography Active Learning (CAL), a novel Active Learning (AL) algorithm that exploits the behavior of the model on individual instances during training as a proxy to find the most informative instances for labeling. CAL is inspired by data maps, which were recently proposed to derive insights into dataset quality (Swayamdipta et al., 2020). We compare our method on popular text classification tasks to commonly used AL strategies, which instead rely on post-training behavior. We demonstrate that CAL is competitive to other common AL methods, showing that training dynamics derived from small seed data can be successfully used for AL. We provide insights into our new AL method by analyzing batch-level statistics utilizing the data maps. Our results further show that CAL results in a more data-efficient learning strategy, achieving comparable or better results with considerably less training data.

Cartography Active Learning

Backdoor attack introduces artificial vulnerabilities into the model by poisoning a subset of the training data via injecting triggers and modifying labels. Various trigger design strategies have been explored to attack text classifiers, however, defending such attacks remains an open problem. In this work, we propose BFClass, a novel efficient backdoor-free training framework for text classification. 
The backbone of BFClass is a pre-trained discriminator that predicts whether each token in the corrupted input was replaced by a masked language model. To identify triggers, we utilize this discriminator to locate the most suspicious token from each training sample and then distill a concise set by considering their association strengths with particular labels. To recognize the poisoned subset, we examine the training samples with these identified triggers as the most suspicious token, and check if removing the trigger will change the poisoned model's prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BFClass can identify all the triggers, remove 95% poisoned training samples with very limited false alarms, and achieve almost the same performance as the models trained on the benign training data.

BFClass: A Backdoor-free Text Classification Framework

Extracting salient topics from a collection of documents can be a challenging task when
a) the amount of data is large, b) the number of topics is not known a priori, and/or c) "topic noise'' is present. We define "topic noise" as the collection of documents that are irrelevant to any coherent topic and should be filtered out. By design, most clustering algorithms (e.g. k-means, hierarchical clustering) assign all input documents to one of the available clusters, guaranteeing any topic noise to propagate into the result. To address these challenges, we present a novel algorithm, {FANATIC}, that efficiently distinguishes documents from genuine topics and those that are topic noise. We also introduce a new {R}eddit dataset to showcase {FANATIC} as it contains short, noisy data that is difficult to cluster using most clustering algorithms. We find that {FANATIC} clusters 500k {R}eddit titles (of which 20% are topic noise) in 2 minutes and achieves an {AMI} score of 0.59, in contrast with hdbscan (McInnes et al., 2017), a popular algorithm suited for this type of task, which requires over 7 hours and achieves an {AMI} of 0.03. Finally, we test {FANATIC} against a {T}witter dataset and find again that it outperforms the other algorithms with an {AMI} score of 0.60. We make our code and data publicly available.

{FANATIC}: {FA}st {N}oise-{A}ware {T}op{I}c {C}lustering

Pre-training Transformer-based models such as BERT and ELECTRA on a collection of Arabic corpora, demonstrated by both AraBERT and AraELECTRA, shows an impressive result on downstream tasks. However, pre-training Transformer-based language models is computationally expensive, especially for large-scale models. Recently, Funnel Transformer has addressed the sequential redundancy inside Transformer architecture by compressing the sequence of hidden states, leading to a significant reduction in the pre-training cost. This paper empirically studies the performance and efficiency of building an Arabic language model with Funnel Transformer and ELECTRA objective. We find that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on several Arabic downstream tasks despite using less computational resources compared to other BERT-based models.

ArabicTransformer: Efficient Large Arabic Language Model with Funnel Transformer and ELECTRA Objective

Contrastive Learning has emerged as a powerful representation learning method and facilitates various downstream tasks especially when supervised data is limited. How to construct efficient contrastive samples through data augmentation is key to its success. Unlike vision tasks, the data augmentation method for contrastive learning has not been investigated sufficiently in language tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to construct contrastive samples for language tasks using text summarization. We use these samples for supervised contrastive learning to gain better text representations which greatly benefit text classification tasks with limited annotations. To further improve the method, we mix up samples from different classes and add an extra regularization, named Mixsum, in addition to the cross-entropy-loss. Experiments on real-world text classification datasets (Amazon-5, Yelp-5, AG News, and IMDb) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive learning framework with summarization-based data augmentation and Mixsum regularization.

Constructing contrastive samples via summarization for text classification with limited annotations

Mapping natural language instructions to programs that computers can process is a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches focus on likelihood-based training or using reinforcement learning to fine-tune models based on a single reward. In this paper, we pose program generation from language as Inverse Reinforcement Learning. We introduce several interpretable reward components and jointly learn (1) a reward function that linearly combines them, and (2) a policy for program generation. Fine-tuning with our approach achieves significantly better performance than competitive methods using Reinforcement Learning (RL). On the VirtualHome framework, we get improvements of up to 9.0% on the Longest Common Subsequence metric and 14.7% on recall-based metrics over previous work on this framework (Puig et al., 2018). The approach is data-efficient, showing larger gains in performance in the low-data regime. Generated programs are also preferred by human evaluators over an RL-based approach, and rated higher on relevance, completeness, and human-likeness.

Mapping Language to Programs using Multiple Reward Components with Inverse Reinforcement Learning

In cross-lingual text classification, it is required that task-specific training data in high-resource source languages are available, where the task is identical to that of a low-resource target language. However, collecting such training data can be infeasible because of the labeling cost, task characteristics, and privacy concerns. This paper proposes an alternative solution that uses only task-independent word embeddings of high-resource languages and bilingual dictionaries. First, we construct a dictionary-based heterogeneous graph (DHG) from bilingual dictionaries. This opens the possibility to use graph neural networks for cross-lingual transfer. The remaining challenge is the heterogeneity of DHG because multiple languages are considered. To address this challenge, we propose dictionary-based heterogeneous graph neural network (DHGNet) that effectively handles the heterogeneity of DHG by two-step aggregations, which are word-level and language-level aggregations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms pretrained models even though it does not access to large corpora. Furthermore, it can perform well even though dictionaries contain many incorrect translations. Its robustness allows the usage of a wider range of dictionaries such as an automatically constructed dictionary and crowdsourced dictionary, which are convenient for real-world applications.

Cross-lingual Transfer for Text Classification with Dictionary-based Heterogeneous Graph

Humans are capable of learning novel concepts from very few examples; in contrast, state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms typically need thousands of examples to do so. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for learning novel concepts by representing them as programs over existing concepts. This way the concept learning problem is naturally a program synthesis problem and our algorithm learns from a few examples to synthesize a program representing the novel concept. In addition, we perform a theoretical analysis of our approach for the case where the program defining the novel concept over existing ones is context-free. We show that given a learned grammar-based parser and a novel production rule, we can augment the parser with the production rule in a way that provably generalizes. We evaluate our approach by learning concepts in the semantic parsing domain extended to the few-shot novel concept learning setting, showing that our approach significantly outperforms end-to-end neural semantic parsers.

Few-Shot Novel Concept Learning for Semantic Parsing

Large, pre-trained transformer language models, which are pervasive in natural language processing tasks, are notoriously expensive to train. To reduce the cost of training such large models, prior work has developed smaller, more compact models which achieves a significant speedup in training time while maintaining competitive accuracy to the original model on downstream tasks. Though these smaller pre-trained models have been widely adopted by the community, it is not known how well are they calibrated compared to their larger counterparts. In this paper, focusing on a wide range of tasks, we thoroughly investigate the calibration properties of pre-trained transformers, as a function of their size. We demonstrate that when evaluated in-domain, smaller models are able to achieve competitive, and often better, calibration compared to larger models, while achieving significant speedup in training time. Post-hoc calibration techniques further reduce calibration error for all models in-domain. However, when evaluated out-of-domain, larger models tend to be better calibrated, and label-smoothing instead is an effective strategy to calibrate models in this setting.

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