Ireland

Multi-encoder models are a broad family of context-aware neural machine translation systems that aim to improve translation quality by encoding document-level contextual information alongside the current sentence. The context encoding is undertaken by contextual parameters, trained on document-level data. In this work, we discuss the difficulty of training these parameters effectively, due to the sparsity of the words in need of context (i.e., the training signal), and their relevant context. We propose to pre-train the contextual parameters over split sentence pairs, which makes an efficient use of the available data for two reasons. Firstly, it increases the contextual training signal by breaking intra-sentential syntactic relations, and thus pushing the model to search the context for disambiguating clues more frequently. Secondly, it eases the retrieval of relevant context, since context segments become shorter.
We propose four different splitting methods, and evaluate our approach with BLEU and contrastive test sets. Results show that it consistently improves learning of contextual parameters, both in low and high resource settings.

ACL 2022

Divide and Rule: Effective Pre-Training for Context-Aware Multi-Encoder Translation Models

context-aware

pre-training

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

Transformer architectures have achieved state- of-the-art results on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, their attention mechanism comes with a quadratic complexity in sequence lengths, making the computational overhead prohibitive, especially for long sequences. Attention context can be seen as a random-access memory with each token taking a slot. Under this perspective, the memory size grows linearly with the sequence length, and so does the overhead of reading from it. One way to improve the efficiency is to bound the memory size. We show that disparate approaches can be subsumed into one abstraction, attention with bounded-memory control (ABC), and they vary in their organization of the memory. ABC reveals new, unexplored possibilities. First, it connects several efficient attention variants that would otherwise seem apart. Second, this abstraction gives new insights—an established approach (Wang et al., 2020b) previously thought to not be applicable in causal attention, actually is. Last, we present a new instance of ABC, which draws inspiration from existing ABC approaches, but replaces their heuristic memory-organizing functions with a learned, contextualized one. Our experiments on language modeling, machine translation, and masked language model finetuning show that our approach outperforms previous efficient attention models; compared to the strong transformer baselines, it significantly improves the inference time and space efficiency with no or negligible accuracy loss.

ABC: Attention with Bounded-memory Control

Automated simplification models aim to make input texts more readable. Such methods have the potential to make complex information accessible to a wider audience, e.g., providing access to recent medical literature which might otherwise be impenetrable for a lay reader. However, such models risk introducing errors into automatically simplified texts, for instance by inserting statements unsupported by the corresponding original text, or by omitting key information. Providing more readable but inaccurate versions of texts may in many cases be worse than providing no such access at all. The problem of factual accuracy (and the lack thereof) has received heightened attention in the context of summarization models, but the factuality of automatically simplified texts has not been investigated. We introduce a taxonomy of errors that we use to analyze both references drawn from standard simplification datasets, and state-of-the-art model outputs. We find that errors often appear in both that are not captured by existing evaluation metrics, motivating a need for research into ensuring the factual accuracy of automated simplification models.

Evaluating Factuality in Text Simplification

Data-to-text generation focuses on generating fluent natural language responses from structured meaning representations (MRs). Such representations are compositional and it is costly to collect responses for all possible combinations of atomic meaning schemata, thereby necessitating few-shot generalization to novel MRs. In this work, we systematically study the compositional generalization of the state-of-the-art T5 models in few-shot data-to-text tasks. We show that T5 models fail to generalize to unseen MRs, and we propose a template-based input representation that considerably improves the model's generalization capability. To further improve the model’s performance, we propose an approach based on self-training using fine-tuned BLEURT for pseudo-response selection. On the commonly used SGD and Weather benchmarks, the proposed self-training approach improves tree accuracy by 46%+ and reduces the slot error rates by 73%+ over the strong T5 baselines in few-shot settings.

Improving Compositional Generalization with Self-Training for Data-to-Text Generation

We introduce a data-driven approach to generating derivation trees from meaning representation graphs with probabilistic synchronous hyperedge replacement grammar (PSHRG). SHRG has been used to produce meaning representation graphs from texts and syntax trees, but little is known about its viability on the reverse. In particular, we experiment on Dependency Minimal Recursion Semantics (DMRS) and adapt PSHRG as a formalism that approximates the semantic composition of DMRS graphs and simultaneously recovers the derivations that license the DMRS graphs. Consistent results are obtained as evaluated on a collection of annotated corpora. This work reveals the ability of PSHRG in formalizing a syntax–semantics interface, modelling compositional graph-to-tree translations, and channelling explainability to surface realization.

Semantic Composition with PSHRG for Derivation Tree Reconstruction from Graph-Based Meaning Representations

Medical code prediction from clinical notes aims at automatically associating medical codes with clinical notes. Rare code problem, the medical codes with low occurrences, is prominent in medical code prediction. Recent studies employ deep neural networks and external knowledge to tackle it. However, such approaches lack interpretability which is a vital issue in medical application. Moreover, due to the lengthy and noisy clinical notes, such approaches fail to achieve satisfactory results. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel framework based on medical concept-driven attention to incorporate external knowledge for explainable medical code prediction. In specific, both the clinical notes and Wikipedia documents are aligned into topic space to extract medical concepts using topic modeling. Then, the medical concept-driven attention mechanism is applied to uncover the medical code-related concepts which provide explanations for medical code prediction. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset show the superiority of the proposed framework over several state-of-the-art baselines.

A Novel Framework Based on Medical Concept Driven Attention for Explainable Medical Code Prediction via External Knowledge

Early exiting allows instances to exit at different layers according to the estimation of difficulty. Previous works usually adopt heuristic metrics such as the entropy of internal outputs to measure instance difficulty, which suffers from generalization and threshold-tuning. In contrast, learning to exit, or learning to predict instance difficulty is a more appealing way. Though some effort has been devoted to employing such "learn-to-exit" modules, it is still unknown whether and how well the instance difficulty can be learned. As a response, we first conduct experiments on the learnability of instance difficulty, which demonstrates that modern neural models perform poorly on predicting instance difficulty. Based on this observation, we propose a simple-yet-effective Hash-based Early Exiting approach (HashEE) that replaces the learn-to-exit modules with hash functions to assign each token to a fixed exiting layer. Different from previous methods, HashEE requires no internal classifiers nor extra parameters, and therefore is more efficient. Experimental results on classification, regression, and generation tasks demonstrate that HashEE can achieve higher performance with fewer FLOPs and inference time compared with previous state-of-the-art early exiting methods.

A Simple Hash-Based Early Exiting Approach For Language Understanding and Generation

We introduce the new task named Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) and the Sub-Slot based Dialog (SSD) dataset.

A Slot Is Not Built in One Utterance: Spoken Language Dialogs with Sub-Slots

Recent interest in entity linking has focused in the zero-shot scenario, where at test time the entity mention to be labelled is never seen during training, or may belong to a different domain from the source domain. Current work leverage pre-trained BERT with the implicit assumption that it bridges the gap between the source and target domain distributions. However, fine-tuned BERT has a considerable underperformance at zero-shot when applied in a different domain. We solve this problem by proposing a Transformational Biencoder that incorporates a transformation into BERT to perform a zero-shot transfer from the source domain during training. As like previous work, we rely on negative entities to encourage our model to discriminate the golden entities during training. To generate these negative entities, we propose a simple but effective strategy that takes the domain of the golden entity into perspective. Our experimental results on the benchmark dataset Zeshel show effectiveness of our approach and achieve new state-of-the-art.

A Transformational Biencoder with In-Domain Negative Sampling for Zero-Shot Entity Linking

Prompt-based learning, which exploits knowledge from pre-trained language models by providing textual prompts and designing appropriate answer-category mapping methods, has achieved impressive successes on few-shot text classification and natural language inference (NLI). Because of the diverse linguistic expression, there exist many answer tokens for the same category. However, both manual answer design and automatic answer search constrain answer space and therefore hardly achieve ideal performance. To address this issue, we propose an answer space clustered prompting model (ASCM) together with a synonym initialization method (SI) which automatically categorizes all answer tokens in a semantic-clustered embedding space. We also propose a stable semi-supervised method named stair learning (SL) that orderly distills knowledge from better models to weaker models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ASCM+SL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques in few-shot settings.

ASCM: An Answer Space Clustered Prompting Method without Answer Engineering

Attention mechanism has become the dominant module in natural language processing models. It is computationally intensive and depends on massive power-hungry multiplications. In this paper, we rethink variants of attention mechanism from the energy consumption aspects. After reaching the conclusion that the energy costs of several energy-friendly operations are far less than their multiplication counterparts, we build a novel attention model by replacing multiplications with either selective operations or additions. Empirical results on three machine translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed model, against the vanilla one, achieves competitable accuracy while saving 99\% and 66\% energy during alignment calculation and the whole attention procedure. Code is available at: https://github.com/NLP2CT/E-Att.

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ABC: Attention with Bounded-memory Control

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