Dominican Republic

Natural language models often fall short when understanding and generating mathematical notation. 
What is not clear is whether these shortcomings are due to fundamental limitations of the models, or the absence of appropriate tasks. In this paper, we explore the extent to which natural language models can learn semantics between mathematical notation and their surrounding text. We propose two notation prediction tasks, and train a model that selectively masks notation tokens and encodes left and/or right sentences as context. Compared to baseline models trained by masked language modeling, our method achieved significantly better performance at the two tasks, showing that this approach is a good first step towards modeling mathematical texts. However, the current models rarely predict unseen symbols correctly, and token-level predictions are more accurate than symbol-level predictions, indicating more work is needed to represent structural patterns. Based on the results, we suggest future works toward modeling mathematical texts.

EMNLP 2021

Modeling Mathematical Notation Semantics in Academic Papers

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

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) like BERT have made great progress in NLP. News articles usually contain rich textual information, and PLMs have the potentials to enhance news text modeling for various intelligent news applications like news recommendation and retrieval. However, most existing PLMs are in huge size with hundreds of millions of parameters. Many online news applications need to serve millions of users with low latency tolerance, which poses great challenges to incorporating PLMs in these scenarios. Knowledge distillation techniques can compress a large PLM into a much smaller one and meanwhile keeps good performance. However, existing language models are pre-trained and distilled on general corpus like Wikipedia, which has gaps with the news domain and may be suboptimal for news intelligence. In this paper, we propose NewsBERT, which can distill PLMs for efficient and effective news intelligence. In our approach, we design a teacher-student joint learning and distillation framework to collaboratively learn both teacher and student models, where the student model can learn from the learning experience of the teacher model. In addition, we propose a momentum distillation method by incorporating the gradients of teacher model into the update of student model to better transfer the knowledge learned by the teacher model. Thorough experiments on two real-world datasets with three tasks show that NewsBERT can empower various intelligent news applications with much smaller models.

NewsBERT: Distilling Pre-trained Language Model for Intelligent News Application

This paper proposes a transformer over transformer framework, called Transformer^2, to perform neural text segmentation. It consists of two components: bottom-level sentence encoders using pre-trained transformers, and an upper-level transformer-based segmentation model based on the sentence embeddings. The bottom-level component transfers the pre-trained knowledge learnt from large external corpora under both single and pair-wise supervised NLP tasks to model the sentence embeddings for the documents. Given the sentence embeddings, the upper-level transformer is trained to recover the segmentation boundaries as well as the topic labels of each sentence. Equipped with a multi-task loss and the pre-trained knowledge, Transformer^2 can better capture the semantic coherence within the same segments. Our experiments show that (1) Transformer^2$manages to surpass state-of-the-art text segmentation models in terms of a commonly-used semantic coherence measure; (2) in most cases, both single and pair-wise pre-trained knowledge contribute to the model performance; (3) bottom-level sentence encoders pre-trained on specific languages yield better performance than those pre-trained on specific domains.

Transformer over Pre-trained Transformer for Neural Text Segmentation with Enhanced Topic Coherence

Adverse Events (AE) are harmful events resulting from the use of medical products. Although social media may be crucial for early AE detection, the sheer scale of this data makes it logistically intractable to analyze using human agents, with NLP representing the only low-cost and scalable alternative.

In this paper, we frame AE Detection and Extraction as a sequence-to-sequence problem using the T5 model architecture and achieve strong performance improvements over the baselines on several English benchmarks (F1 = 0.71, 12.7% relative improvement for AE Detection; Strict F1 = 0.713, 12.4% relative improvement for AE Extraction). Motivated by the strong commonalities between AE tasks, the class imbalance in AE benchmarks, and the linguistic and structural variety typical of social media texts, we propose a new strategy for multi-task training that accounts, at the same time, for task and dataset characteristics. Our approach increases model robustness, leading to further performance gains. Finally, our framework shows some language transfer capabilities, obtaining higher performance than Multilingual BERT in zero-shot learning on French data.

Exploring a Unified {S}equence-{T}o-{S}equence {T}ransformer for Medical Product Safety Monitoring in Social Media

The relationships that exist between entities can be a reliable indicator for classifying sensitive information, such as commercially sensitive information. For example, the relation person-IsDirectorOf-company can indicate whether an individual’s salary should be considered as sensitive personal information. Representations of such relations are often learned using a knowledge graph to produce embeddings for relation types, generalised across different entity-pairs. However, a relation type may or may not correspond to a sensitivity depending on the entities that participate to the relation. Therefore, generalised relation embeddings are typically insufficient for classifying sensitive information. In this work, we propose a novel method for representing entities and relations within a single embedding to better capture the relationship between the entities. Moreover, we show that our proposed entity-relation-entity embedding approach can significantly improve (McNemar’s test, p <0.05) the effectiveness of sensitivity classification, compared to classification approaches that leverage relation embedding approaches from the literature. (0.426 F1 vs 0.413 F1)

RelDiff: Enriching Knowledge Graph Relation Representations for Sensitivity Classification

Empathy is the link between self and others. Detecting and understanding empathy is a key element for improving human-machine interaction. However, annotating data for detecting empathy at a large scale is a challenging task. This paper employs multi-task training with knowledge distillation to incorporate knowledge from available resources (emotion and sentiment) to detect empathy from the natural language in different domains. This approach yields better results on an existing news-related empathy dataset compared to strong baselines. In addition, we build a new dataset for empathy prediction with fine-grained empathy direction, seeking or providing empathy, from Twitter. We release our dataset for research purposes.

Distilling Knowledge for Empathy Detection

Domain-specific pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success over various downstream tasks in different domains. However, existing domain-specific PLMs mostly rely on self-supervised learning over large amounts of domain text, without explicitly integrating domain-specific knowledge, which can be essential in many domains. Moreover, in knowledge-sensitive areas such as the biomedical domain, knowledge is stored in multiple sources and formats, and existing biomedical PLMs either neglect them or utilize them in a limited manner. In this work, we introduce an architecture to integrate domain knowledge from diverse sources into PLMs in a parameter-efficient way. More specifically, we propose to encode domain knowledge via \textit{adapters}, which are small bottleneck feed-forward networks inserted between intermediate transformer layers in PLMs. These knowledge adapters are pre-trained for individual domain knowledge sources and integrated via an attention-based knowledge controller to enrich PLMs. Taking the biomedical domain as a case study, we explore three knowledge-specific adapters for PLMs based on the UMLS Metathesaurus graph, the Wikipedia articles for diseases, and the semantic grouping information for biomedical concepts. Extensive experiments on different biomedical NLP tasks and datasets demonstrate the benefits of the proposed architecture and the knowledge-specific adapters across multiple PLMs.

Parameter-Efficient Domain Knowledge Integration from Multiple Sources for Biomedical Pre-trained Language Models

Tables provide valuable knowledge that can be used to verify textual statements.
While a number of works have considered table-based fact verification, direct alignments of tabular data with tokens in textual statements are rarely available.
Moreover, training a generalized fact verification model requires abundant labeled training data.
In this paper, we propose a novel system to address these problems.
Inspired by counterfactual causality, our system identifies token-level salience in the statement with probing-based salience estimation.
Salience estimation allows enhanced learning of fact verification from two perspectives.
From one perspective, our system conducts masked salient token prediction to enhance the model for alignment and reasoning between the table and the statement.
From the other perspective, our system applies salience-aware data augmentation to generate a more diverse set of training instances by replacing non-salient terms. 
Experimental results on TabFact show the effective improvement by the proposed salience-aware learning techniques, leading to the new SOTA performance on the benchmark.

Table-based Fact Verification With Salience-aware Learning

News media structure their reporting of events or issues using certain perspectives. When describing an incident involving gun violence, for example, some journalists may focus on mental health or gun regulation, while others may emphasize the discussion of gun rights. Such perspectives are called “frames” in communication research.We study, for the first time, the value of combining lead images and their contextual information with text to identify the frame of a given news article. We observe that using multiple modes of information(article- and image-derived features) improves prediction of news frames over any single mode of information when the images are relevant to the frames of the headlines.We also observe that frame image relevance is related to the ease of conveying frames via images, which we call frame concreteness. Additionally, we release the first multimodal news framing dataset related to gun violence in the U.S., curated and annotated by communication researchers. The dataset will allow researchers to further examine the use of multiple information modalities for studying media framing.

Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Lead Images in U.S. Gun Violence Coverage

Training a robust and reliable deep learning model requires a large amount of data. In the crisis domain, building deep learning models to identify actionable information from the huge influx of data posted by eyewitnesses of crisis events on social media, in a time-critical manner, is central for fast response and relief operations. However, building a large, annotated dataset to train deep learning models is not always feasible in a crisis situation. In this paper, we investigate a multi-task learning approach to concurrently leverage available annotated data for several related tasks from the crisis domain to improve the performance on a main task with limited annotated data. Specifically, we focus on using multi-task learning to improve the performance on the task of identifying location mentions in crisis tweets.

Multi-task Learning to Enable Location Mention Identification in the Early Hours of a Crisis Event

Data annotation is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process for many NLP tasks. Although there exist various methods to produce pseudo data labels, they are often task-specific and require a decent amount of labeled data to start with. Recently, the immense language model GPT-3 with 170 billion parameters has achieved tremendous improvement across many few-shot learning tasks.
In this paper, we explore ways to leverage GPT-3 as a low-cost data labeler to train other models. We find that to make the downstream model achieve the same performance on a variety of NLU and NLG tasks, it costs 50% to 96% less to use labels from GPT-3 than using labels from humans.
Furthermore, we propose a novel framework of combining pseudo labels from GPT-3 with human labels, which leads to even better performance. These results present a cost-effective data labeling methodology that is generalizable to many practical applications.

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