Dominican Republic

Learning sentence embeddings often requires a large amount of labeled data. However, for most tasks and domains, labeled data is seldom available and creating it is expensive. In this work, we present a new state-of-the-art unsupervised method based on pre-trained Transformers and Sequential Denoising Auto-Encoder (TSDAE) which outperforms previous approaches by up to 6.4 points. It can achieve up to 93.1% of the performance of in-domain supervised approaches. Further, we show that TSDAE is a strong domain adaptation and pre-training method for sentence embeddings, significantly outperforming other approaches like Masked Language Model.

A crucial shortcoming of previous studies is the narrow evaluation: Most work mainly evaluates on the single task of Semantic Textual Similarity (STS), which does not require any domain knowledge. It is unclear if these proposed methods generalize to other domains and tasks. We fill this gap and evaluate TSDAE and other recent approaches on four different datasets from heterogeneous domains.

EMNLP 2021

TSDAE: Using Transformer-based Sequential Denoising Auto-Encoderfor Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Learning

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

In parataxis languages like Chinese, word meanings are constructed using specific word-formations, which can help to disambiguate word senses. However, such knowledge is rarely explored in previous word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods. In this paper, we propose to leverage word-formation knowledge to enhance Chinese WSD. We first construct a large-scale Chinese lexical sample WSD dataset with word-formations. Then, we propose a model FormBERT to explicitly incorporate word-formations into sense disambiguation. To further enhance generalizability, we design a word-formation predictor module in case word-formation annotations are unavailable. Experimental results show that our method brings substantial performance improvement over strong baselines.

Leveraging Word-Formation Knowledge for Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation

Fact verification based on structured data is challenging as it requires models to understand both natural language and symbolic operations performed over tables. Although pre-trained language models have demonstrated a strong capability in verifying simple statements, they struggle with complex statements that involve multiple operations. In this paper, we improve fact verification by decomposing complex statements into simpler subproblems. Leveraging the programs synthesized by a weakly supervised semantic parser, we propose a program-guided approach to constructing a pseudo dataset for decomposition model training. The subproblems, together with their predicted answers, serve as the intermediate evidence to enhance our fact verification model. Experiments show that our proposed approach achieves the new state-of-the-art performance, an 82.7% accuracy, on the TabFact benchmark.

Exploring Decomposition for Table-based Fact Verification

Multimodal program synthesis, which leverages different types of user input to synthesize a desired program, is an attractive way to scale program synthesis to challenging settings; however, it requires integrating noisy signals from the user, like natural language, with hard constraints on the program's behavior. This paper proposes an \emph{optimal neural synthesis} approach where the goal is to find a program that satisfies user-provided constraints while also maximizing the program's score with respect to a neural model. Specifically, we focus on multimodal synthesis tasks in which the user intent is expressed using a combination of natural language (NL) and input-output examples. At the core of our method is a top-down recurrent neural model that places distributions over abstract syntax trees conditioned on the NL input. This model not only allows for efficient search over the space of syntactically valid programs, but it allows us to leverage automated program analysis techniques for pruning the search space based on infeasibility of partial programs with respect to the user's constraints. The experimental results on a multimodal synthesis dataset (StructuredRegex) show that our method substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art techniques in terms of accuracy and efficiency, and finds model-optimal programs more frequently.

Optimal Neural Program Synthesis from Multimodal Specifications

Parallel texts of Japanese and a non-pro-drop language have the potential of improving the performance of Japanese zero anaphora resolution (ZAR) because pronouns dropped in the former are usually mentioned explicitly in the latter.
However, rule-based cross-lingual transfer is hampered by error propagation in an NLP pipeline and the frequent lack of transparency in translation correspondences.
In this paper, we propose implicit transfer by injecting machine translation (MT) as an intermediate task between pretraining and ZAR.
We employ a pretrained BERT model to initialize the encoder part of the encoder-decoder model for MT, and eject the encoder part for fine-tuning on ZAR.
The proposed framework empirically demonstrates that ZAR performance can be improved by transfer learning from MT.
In addition, we find that the incorporation of the masked language model training into MT leads to further gains.

Japanese Zero Anaphora Resolution Can Benefit from Parallel Texts Through Neural Transfer Learning

Pre-trained language models (PrLM) have to carefully manage input units when training on a very large text with a vocabulary consisting of millions of words. Previous works have shown that incorporating span-level information over consecutive words in pre-training could further improve the performance of PrLMs. However, given that span-level clues are introduced and fixed in pre-training, previous methods are time-consuming and lack of flexibility. To alleviate the inconvenience, this paper presents a novel span fine-tuning method for PrLMs, which facilitates the span setting to be adaptively determined by specific downstream tasks during the fine-tuning phase. In detail, any sentences processed by the PrLM will be segmented into multiple spans according to a pre-sampled dictionary. Then the segmentation information will be sent through a hierarchical CNN module together with the representation outputs of the PrLM and ultimately generate a span-enhanced representation. Experiments on GLUE benchmark show that the proposed span fine-tuning method significantly enhances the PrLM, and at the same time, offer more flexibility in an efficient way.

Span Fine-tuning for Pre-trained Language Models

Entity Linking (EL) systems have achieved impressive results on standard benchmarks mainly thanks to the contextualized representations provided by recent pretrained language models.
However, such systems still require massive amounts of data -- millions of labeled examples -- to perform at their best, with training times that often exceed several days, especially when limited computational resources are available.
In this paper, we look at how Named Entity Recognition (NER) can be exploited to narrow the gap between EL systems trained on high and low amounts of labeled data.
More specifically, we show how and to what extent an EL system can benefit from NER to enhance its entity representations, improve candidate selection, select more effective negative samples and enforce hard and soft constraints on its output entities.
We release our software -- code and model checkpoints -- at https://github.com/Babelscape/ner4el.

{N}amed {E}ntity {R}ecognition for {E}ntity {L}inking: {W}hat Works and What's Next

Weakly supervised semantic parsing (WSP) aims at training a parser via utterance-denotation pairs. This task is challenging because it requires (1) searching consistent logical forms in a huge space; and (2) dealing with spurious logical forms. In this work, we propose Learning from Mistakes (LFM), a simple yet effective learning framework for WSP. LFM utilizes the mistakes made by a parser during searching, i.e., generating logical forms that do not execute to correct denotations, for tackling the two challenges. In a nutshell, LFM additionally trains a parser using utterance-logical form pairs created from mistakes, which can quickly bootstrap the parser to search consistent logical forms. Also, it can motivate the parser to learn the correct mapping between utterances and logical forms, thus dealing with the spuriousness of logical forms. We evaluate LFM on WikiTableQuestions, WikiSQL, and TabFact in the WSP setting. The parser trained with LFM outperforms the previous state-of-the-art semantic parsing approaches on the three datasets. Also, we find that LFM can substantially reduce the need for labeled data. Using only 10% of utterance-denotation pairs, the parser achieves 84.2 denotation accuracy on WikiSQL, which is competitive with the previous state-of-the-art approaches using 100% labeled data.

Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing by Learning from Mistakes

We introduce a new pretraining approach geared for multi-document language modeling, incorporating two key ideas into the masked language modeling self-supervised objective. First, instead of considering documents in isolation, we pretrain over sets of multiple related documents, encouraging the model to learn cross-document relationships. Second, we improve over recent long-range transformers by introducing dynamic global attention that has access to the entire input to predict masked tokens. We release CDLM (Cross-Document Language Model), a new general language model for multi-document setting that can be easily applied to downstream tasks.
Our extensive analysis shows that both ideas are essential for the success of CDLM, and work in synergy to set new state-of-the-art results for several multi-text tasks.

CDLM: Cross-Document Language Modeling

One of the central aspects of contextualised language models is that they should be able to distinguish the meaning of lexically ambiguous words by their contexts. In this paper we investigate the extent to which the contextualised embeddings of word forms that display multiplicity of sense reflect traditional distinctions of polysemy and homonymy. To this end, we introduce an extended, human-annotated dataset of graded word sense similarity and co-predication acceptability, and evaluate how well the similarity of embeddings predicts similarity in meaning.

Both types of human judgements indicate that the similarity of polysemic interpretations falls in a continuum between identity of meaning and homonymy. However, we also observe significant differences within the similarity ratings of polysemes, forming consistent patterns for different types of polysemic sense alternation. Our dataset thus appears to capture a substantial part of the complexity of lexical ambiguity, and can provide a realistic test bed for contextualised embeddings.

Among the tested models, BERT Large shows the strongest correlation with the collected word sense similarity ratings, but struggles to consistently replicate the observed similarity patterns. When clustering ambiguous word forms based on their embeddings, the model displays high confidence in discerning homonyms and some types of polysemic alternations, but consistently fails for others.

Patterns of Polysemy and Homonymy in Contextualised Language Models

Coreference Resolution is an important NLP task and most state-of-the-art methods rely on word embeddings for word representation. 
However, one issue that has been largely overlooked in literature is that of comparing the performance of different embeddings across and within families. 
Therefore, we frame our study in the context of Event and Entity Coreference Resolution (EvCR \& EnCR), and address two questions : 
1) Is there a trade-off between performance (predictive and run-time) and embedding size? 
2) How do the embeddings' performance compare within and across families?
Our experiments reveal several interesting findings. 
First, we observe diminishing returns in performance with respect to embedding size. 
E.g. a model using solely a character embedding achieves 86\% of the performance of the largest model (Elmo, GloVe, Character) while being 1.2\% of its size. 
Second, the larger models using multiple embeddings learns faster despite being slower per epoch. 
However, it is still slower at test time.
Finally, Elmo performs best on both EvCR and EnCR, while GloVe and FastText perform best in EvCR and EnCR respectively.

TSDAE: Using Transformer-based Sequential Denoising Auto-Encoderfor Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Learning

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