Ireland

This papers aims at improving spoken language modeling (LM) using very large amount of automatically transcribed speech. We leverage the INA (French National Audiovisual Institute) collection and obtain 19GB of text after applying ASR on 350,000 hours of diverse TV shows. From this, spoken language models are trained either by fine-tuning an existing LM (FlauBERT) or through training a LM from scratch.
The new models (FlauBERT-Oral) will be shared with the community and are evaluated not only in terms of word prediction accuracy but also for two downstream tasks : classification of TV shows and syntactic parsing of speech. Experimental results show that FlauBERT-Oral is better than its initial FlauBERT version demonstrating that, despite its inherent noisy nature, ASR-Generated text can be useful to improve spoken language modeling.

ACL 2022

Using ASR-Generated Text for Spoken Language Modeling

oral

flaubert

spoken language

speech

language modeling

bert

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

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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).

workshop 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. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
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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). 

Evaluating bias, fairness, and social impact in monolingual language models is a difficult task. This challenge is further compounded when language modeling occurs in a multilingual context. Considering the implication of evaluation biases for large multilingual language models, we situate the discussion of bias evaluation within a wider context of social scientific research with computational work.
We highlight three dimensions of developing multilingual bias evaluation frameworks: (1) increasing transparency through documentation, (2) expanding targets of bias beyond gender, and (3) addressing cultural differences that exist between languages.
We further discuss the power dynamics and consequences of training large language models and recommend that researchers remain cognizant of the ramifications of developing such technologies.

You reap what you sow: On the Challenges of Bias Evaluation Under Multilingual Settings

The maturity level of language models is now at a stage in which many companies rely on them to solve various tasks. However, while research has shown how biased and harmful these models are, systematic ways of integrating social bias tests into development pipelines are still lacking. This short paper suggests how to use these verification techniques in development pipelines. We take inspiration from software testing and suggest addressing social bias evaluation as software testing. We hope to open a discussion on the best methodologies to handle social bias testing in language models.

Pipelines for Social Bias Testing of Large Language Models

In this work, we explore whether the recently demonstrated zero-shot abilities of the T0 model extend to Named Entity Recognition for out-of-distribution languages and time periods. Using a historical newspaper corpus in 3 languages as test-bed, we use prompts to extract possible named entities. Our results show that a naive approach for prompt-based zero-shot multilingual Named Entity Recognition is error-prone, but highlights the potential of such an approach for historical languages lacking labeled datasets. Moreover, we also find that T0-like models can be probed to predict the publication date and language of a document, which could be very relevant for the study of historical texts.

Entities, Dates, and Languages: Zero-Shot on Historical Texts with T0

As ever larger language models grow more ubiquitous, it is crucial to consider their environmental impact. Characterised by extreme size and resource use, recent generations of models have been criticised for their voracious appetite for compute, and thus significant carbon footprint. Although reporting of carbon impact has grown more common in machine learning papers, this reporting is usually limited to compute resources used strictly for training. In this work, we propose a holistic assessment of the footprint of an extreme-scale language model, Noor. We made an exhaustive end-to-end assessment of the energetic and environmental bills of the entire project: starting with data collection and storage costs, including research and development budgets, pretraining costs, future serving estimates, and other exogenous costs necessary for this international cooperation.

A Holistic Assessment of the Carbon Footprint of Noor, a Very Large Arabic Language Model

Large-scale language modeling and natural language prompting have demonstrated exciting capabilities for few and zero shot learning in NLP. However, translating these successes to specialized domains such as biomedicine remains challenging, due in part to biomedical NLP’s significant dataset debt -- the technical costs associated with data that are not consistently documented or easily incorporated into popular machine learning frameworks at scale. To assess this debt, we crowdsourced curation of datasheets for 167 biomedical datasets. We find that only 13% of datasets are available via programmatic access and 30% lack any documentation on licensing and permitted reuse. Our dataset catalog is available at: https://tinyurl.com/bigbio22.

Dataset Debt in Biomedical Language Modeling

Large language models have achieved success on a number of downstream tasks, particularly in a few and zero-shot manner. As a consequence, researchers have been investigating both the kind of information these networks learn and how such information can be encoded in the parameters of the model. We survey the literature on changes in the network during training, drawing from work outside of NLP when necessary, and on learned representations of linguistic features in large language models. We note in particular the lack of sufficient research on the emergence of functional units – subsections of the network where related functions are grouped or organized – within large language models, and motivate future work that grounds the study of language models in an analysis of their changing internal structure during training time.

Emergent Structures and Training Dynamics in Large Language Models

Foundation models pre-trained on large corpora demonstrate significant gains across many natural language processing tasks and domains e.g., law, healthcare, education, etc. However, only limited efforts have investigated the opportunities and limitations of applying these powerful models to science and security applications. In this work, we develop foundation models of scientific knowledge for chemistry to augment scientists with the advanced ability to perceive and reason at scale previously unimagined. Specifically, we build large-scale (1.47B parameter) general-purpose models for chemistry that can be effectively used to perform a wide range of in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. Evaluating these models in a zero-shot setting, we analyze the effect of model and data scaling, knowledge depth, and temporality on model performance in context of model training efficiency.
Our novel findings demonstrate that (1) model size significantly contributes to the task performance when evaluated in a zero-shot setting; (2) data quality (aka diversity) affects model performance more than data quantity; (3) similarly, unlike previous work, temporal order of the documents in the corpus boosts model performance only for specific tasks, e.g., SciQ; and (4) models pre-trained from scratch perform better on in-domain tasks than those tuned from general-purpose models like Open AI’s GPT-2.

Foundation Models of Scientific Knowledge for Chemistry: Opportunities, Challenges and Lessons Learned

The crystallization of modeling methods around the Transformer architecture has been a boon for practitioners. Simple, well-motivated architectural variations that transfer across tasks and scale, increasing the impact of modeling research. However, with the emergence of state-of-the-art 100B+ parameters models, large language models are increasingly expensive to accurately design and train. Notably, it can be difficult to evaluate how modeling decisions may impact emergent capabilities, given that these capabilities arise mainly from sheer scale.Targeting a multilingual language model in the 100B+ parameters scale, our goal is to identify an architecture and training setup that makes the best use of our 1,000,000 A100-GPU-hours budget. Specifically, we perform an ablation study comparing different modeling practices and their impact on zero-shot generalization. We perform all our experiments on 1.3B models, providing a compromise between compute costs and the likelihood that our conclusions will hold for the target 100B+ model. In addition, we study the impact of various popular pretraining corpora on zero-shot generalization. We also study the performance of a multilingual model and how it compares to the English-only one. Finally, we consider the scaling behaviour of Transformers to chose the target model size, shape, and training setup.

What Language Model to Train if You Have One Million GPU Hours?

We benchmark different lightweight strategies for adding new languages (German and Korean) into the BigScience’s pretrained multilingual language model with 1.3 billion parameters that currently supports 13 languages. We investigate the factors that affect the language adaptability of the model and the trade-offs between computational costs and expected performance.


Adapting BigScience Multilingual Model to Unseen Languages

Large NLP models have recently shown impressive performance in language understanding tasks, typically evaluated by fine-tuning tasks. Alternatively, probing has received increasing attention as being a lightweight method for interpreting the intrinsic mechanisms of large NLP models. In probing, post-hoc classifiers are trained on "out-of-domain" datasets that diagnose specific abilities. While probing the language models has led to insightful findings, they appear disjointed from the development of models. This paper explores the utility of probing deep NLP models to extract a proxy signal widely used in model developments, the fine-tuning performance. We find that it is possible to use the accuracies of only three probing results to predict the fine-tuning performance with errors 40%- 80% smaller than baselines. We further show the possibility of incorporating specialized probing datasets into developing deep NLP models.

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