Ireland

In lexicalist linguistic theories, argument structure is assumed to be predictable from the meaning of verbs. As a result, the verb is the primary determinant of the meaning of a clause. In contrast, construction grammarians propose that argument structure is encoded in constructions (or form-meaning pairs) that are distinct from verbs. Two decades of psycholinguistic research have produced substantial empirical evidence in favor of the construction view. Here we adapt several psycholinguistic studies to probe for the existence of argument structure constructions (ASCs) in Transformer-based language models (LMs). First, using a sentence sorting experiment, we find that sentences sharing the same construction are closer in embedding space than sentences sharing the same verb. Furthermore, LMs increasingly prefer grouping by construction with more input data, mirroring the behavior of non-native language learners. Second, in a &quot;Jabberwocky&quot; priming-based experiment, we find that LMs associate ASCs with meaning, even in semantically nonsensical sentences. Our work offers the first evidence for ASCs in LMs and highlights the potential to devise novel probing methods grounded in psycholinguistic research.

ACL 2022

Neural reality of argument structure constructions

construction grammar

probing

psycholinguistics

**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).

In lexicalist linguistic theories, argument structure is assumed to be predictable from the meaning of verbs. As a result, the verb is the primary determinant of the meaning of a clause. In contrast, construction grammarians propose that argument structure is encoded in constructions (or form-meaning pairs) that are distinct from verbs. Two decades of psycholinguistic research have produced substantial empirical evidence in favor of the construction view. Here we adapt several psycholinguistic studies to probe for the existence of argument structure constructions (ASCs) in Transformer-based language models (LMs). First, using a sentence sorting experiment, we find that sentences sharing the same construction are closer in embedding space than sentences sharing the same verb. Furthermore, LMs increasingly prefer grouping by construction with more input data, mirroring the behavior of non-native language learners. Second, in a "Jabberwocky" priming-based experiment, we find that LMs associate ASCs with meaning, even in semantically nonsensical sentences. Our work offers the first evidence for ASCs in LMs and highlights the potential to devise novel probing methods grounded in psycholinguistic research.

poster

# 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. 
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Synthetic Question Value Estimation for Domain Adaptation of Question Answering

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Towards Robustness of Text-to-SQL Models Against Natural and Realistic Adversarial Table Perturbation

Retrieval-based methods have been shown to be effective in NLP tasks via introducing external knowledge. However, the indexing and retrieving of large-scale corpora bring considerable computational cost. Surprisingly, we found that REtrieving from the traINing datA (REINA) only can lead to significant gains on multiple NLG and NLU tasks. We retrieve the labeled training instances most similar to the input text and then concatenate them with the input to feed into the model to generate the output. Experimental results show that this simple method can achieve significantly better performance on a variety of NLU and NLG tasks, including summarization, machine translation, language modeling, and question answering tasks. For instance, our proposed method achieved state-of-the-art results on XSum, BigPatent, and CommonsenseQA. Our code is released, https://github.com/microsoft/REINA .

Training Data is More Valuable than You Think: A Simple and Effective Method by Retrieving from Training Data

High-quality phrase representations are essential to finding topics and related terms in documents (a.k.a. topic mining). Existing phrase representation learning methods either simply combine unigram representations in a context-free manner or rely on extensive annotations to learn context-aware knowledge. In this paper, we propose UCTopic, a novel unsupervised contrastive learning framework for context-aware phrase representations and topic mining. UCTopic is pretrained on a large scale to distinguish if the contexts of two phrase mentions have the same semantics. The key to pretraining is positive pair construction from our phrase-oriented assumptions. However, we find traditional in-batch negatives cause performance decay when finetuning on a dataset with small topic numbers. Hence, we propose cluster-assisted contrastive learning(CCL) which largely reduces noisy negatives by selecting negatives from clusters and further improves phrase representations for topics accordingly. UCTopic outperforms the state-of-the-art phrase representation model by 38.2% NMI in average on four entity cluster-ing tasks. A comprehensive evaluation of topic mining shows that UCTopic can extract coherent and diverse topical phrases.

UCTopic: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Phrase Representations and Topic Mining

Social media is a breeding ground for threat narratives and related conspiracy theories. In these, an outside group threatens the integrity of an inside group, leading to the emergence of sharply defined group identities: Insiders -- agents with whom the authors identify and Outsiders -- agents who threaten the insiders. Inferring the members of these groups constitutes a challenging new NLP task: (i) Information is distributed over many poorly-constructed posts; (ii) Threats and threat agents are highly contextual, with the same post potentially having multiple agents assigned to membership in either group; (iii) An agent's identity is often implicit and transitive; and (iv) Phrases used to imply Outsider status often do not follow common negative sentiment patterns. 

To address these challenges, in this talk, we define a novel Insider-Outsider classification task. Because we are not aware of any appropriate existing datasets or attendant models, we introduce a labeled dataset (CT5K) and design a model (NP2IO) to address this task. NP2IO leverages pretrained language modeling to classify Insiders and Outsiders. We show that NP2IO is robust, generalizing to noun phrases not seen during training, and exceeding the performance of non-trivial baseline models by 20%.

Which side are you on? Insider-Outsider classification in conspiracy-theoretic social media

Modern writing assistance applications are always equipped with a Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) model to correct errors in user-entered sentences. Different scenarios have varying requirements for correction behavior, e.g., performing more precise corrections (high precision) or providing more candidates for users (high recall). However, previous works adjust such trade-off only for sequence labeling approaches. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective counterpart -- Align-and-Predict Decoding (APD) for the most popular sequence-to-sequence models to offer more flexibility for the precision-recall trade-off. During inference, APD aligns the already generated sequence with input and adjusts scores of the following tokens. Experiments in both English and Chinese GEC benchmarks show that our approach not only adapts a single model to precision-oriented and recall-oriented inference, but also maximizes its potential to achieve state-of-the-art results. Our code is available at https://github.com/AutoTemp/Align-and-Predict.

Adjusting the Precision-Recall Trade-Off with Align-and-Predict Decoding for Grammatical Error Correction

In this work, we focus on the problem of distinguishing a human written news article from a news article that is created by manipulating entities in a human written news article (e.g., replacing entities with factually incorrect entities). Such manipulated articles can mislead the reader by posing as a human written news article. We propose a neural network based detector that detects manipulated news articles by reasoning about the facts mentioned in the article. Our proposed detector exploits factual knowledge via graph convolutional neural network along with the textual information in the news article. We also create challenging datasets for this task by considering various strategies to generate the new replacement entity (e.g., entity generation from GPT-2). In all the settings, our proposed model either matches or outperforms the state-of-the-art detector in terms of accuracy. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/manipulated_entity_detection.

Automatic Detection of Entity-Manipulated Text using Factual Knowledge

Our goal is to study the novel task of distant supervision for multilingual relation extraction (Multi DS-RE). Research in Multi DS-RE has remained limited due to the absence of a reliable benchmarking dataset. The only available dataset for this task, RELX-Distant (Köksal and Özgür, 2020), displays several unrealistic characteristics, leading to a systematic overestimation of model performance. To alleviate these concerns, we release a new benchmark dataset for the task, named DiS-ReX. We also modify the widely-used bag attention models using an mBERT encoder and provide the first baseline results on the proposed task. We show that DiS-ReX serves as a more challenging dataset than RELX-Distant, leaving ample room for future research in this domain.

DiS-ReX: A Multilingual Dataset for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

Large-scale pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models like BART and T5 achieve state-of-the-art performance on many generative NLP tasks. However, such models pose a great challenge in resource-constrained scenarios owing to their large memory requirements and high latency. To alleviate this issue, we propose to jointly distill and quantize the model, where knowledge is transferred from the full-precision teacher model to the quantized and distilled low-precision student model. Empirical analyses show that, despite the challenging nature of generative tasks, we were able to achieve a 16.5x model footprint compression ratio with little performance drop relative to the full-precision counterparts on multiple summarization and QA datasets. We further pushed the limit of compression ratio to 27.7x and presented the performance-efficiency trade-off for generative tasks using pre-trained models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work aiming to effectively distill and quantize sequence-to-sequence pre-trained models for language generation tasks.

DQ-BART: Efficient Sequence-to-Sequence Model via Joint Distillation and Quantization

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However, it is still unclear which measures are the best to automatically evaluate content preservation between original and generated text. According to our observations, many researchers still use BLEU-like measures, while there exist more advanced measures including neural-based that significantly outperform classic approaches. The current problem is the lack of a thorough evaluation of the available measures. We close this gap by conducting a large-scale computational study by comparing 57 measures based on different principles on 19 annotated datasets. We show that measures based on cross-encoder models outperform alternative approaches in almost all cases.
We also introduce the Mutual Implication Score (MIS), a measure that uses the idea of paraphrasing as a bidirectional entailment and outperforms all other measures on the paraphrase detection task and performs on par with the best measures in the text style transfer task.

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