Korea, Republic of

Nowadays, transformer-based models gradually become the default choice for artificial intelligence pioneers. The models also show superiority even in the few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we revisit the classical methods and propose a new few-shot alternative. Specifically, we investigate the few-shot one-class problem, which actually takes a known sample as a reference to detect whether an unknown instance belongs to the same class. This problem can be studied from the perspective of sequence match. It is shown that with meta-learning, the classical sequence match method, i.e. Compare-Aggregate, significantly outperforms transformer ones. The classical approach requires much less training cost. Furthermore, we perform an empirical comparison between two kinds of sequence match approaches under simple fine-tuning and meta-learning. Meta-learning causes the transformer models&#39; features to have high-correlation dimensions. The reason is closely related to the number of layers and heads of transformer models. Experimental codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/hmt2014/FewOne}.

COLING 2022

Classical Sequence Match is a Competitive Few-Shot One-Class Learner

sequence match

one-class

few-shot learning

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
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Nowadays, transformer-based models gradually become the default choice for artificial intelligence pioneers. The models also show superiority even in the few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we revisit the classical methods and propose a new few-shot alternative. Specifically, we investigate the few-shot one-class problem, which actually takes a known sample as a reference to detect whether an unknown instance belongs to the same class. This problem can be studied from the perspective of sequence match. It is shown that with meta-learning, the classical sequence match method, i.e. Compare-Aggregate, significantly outperforms transformer ones. The classical approach requires much less training cost. Furthermore, we perform an empirical comparison between two kinds of sequence match approaches under simple fine-tuning and meta-learning. Meta-learning causes the transformer models' features to have high-correlation dimensions. The reason is closely related to the number of layers and heads of transformer models. Experimental codes and data are available at \url{https://github.com/hmt2014/FewOne}.

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

A recent success in semantic dependency parsing shows that graph neural networks can make significant accuracy improvements, owing to its powerful ability in learning expressive graph representations.
However, this work learns graph representations based on a static graph constructed by an existing parser, suffering from two drawbacks: (1) the static graph might be error-prone (e.g., noisy or incomplete), and (2) graph construction stage and graph representation learning stage are disjoint, the errors introduced in the graph construction stage cannot be corrected and might be accumulated to later stages.
To address these two drawbacks, we propose a dynamic graph learning framework and apply it to semantic dependency parsing, for jointly learning graph structure and graph representations.
Experimental results show that our parser outperforms the previous parsers on the SemEval-2015 Task 18 dataset in three languages (English, Chinese, and Czech).

DynGL-SDP: Dynamic Graph Learning for Semantic Dependency Parsing

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have been applied in NLP tasks and achieve promising results. Nevertheless, the fine-tuning procedure needs labeled data of the target domain, making it difficult to learn in low-resource and non-trivial labeled scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose Prompt-based Text Entailment (PTE) for low-resource named entity recognition, which better leverages knowledge in the PLMs. We first reformulate named entity recognition as the text entailment task. The original sentence with entity type-specific prompts is fed into PLMs to get entailment scores for each candidate. The entity type with the top score is then selected as final label. Then, we inject tagging labels into prompts and treat words as basic units instead of n-gram spans to reduce time complexity in generating candidates by n-grams enumeration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method PTE achieves competitive performance on the CoNLL03 dataset, and better than fine-tuned counterparts on the MIT Movie and Few-NERD dataset in low-resource settings.

Prompt-based Text Entailment for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition

We leverage cross-language data expansion and retraining to enhance neural Event Detection (abbr., ED) on the English ACE corpus. Machine translation is utilized for expanding the English training set of ED from that of Chinese. However, experimental results illustrate that such strategy actually results in performance degradation. The survey of translations suggests that the mistakenly-aligned triggers in the expanded data negatively influence the retraining process. We refer this phenomenon to “trigger falsification”. To overcome the issue, we apply heuristic rules for regulating the expanded data and fixing the distracting samples that contain the
falsified triggers. The supplementary experiments show that the rule-based regulation is beneficial, yielding the improvement of about 1.6% F1 score for ED. We additionally prove that, instead of transfer learning from the translated ED data, the straight data combination by random pouring surprisingly performs better.

Unregulated Chinese-to-English Data Expansion Does NOT Work for Neural Event Detection

Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) is an emerging task in emotion cause analysis, which extracts potential emotion-cause pairs from an emotional document. Most recent studies use end-to-end methods to tackle the ECPE task. However, these methods either suffer from a label sparsity problem or fail to model complicated relations between emotions and causes. Furthermore, they all do not consider explicit semantic information of clauses. To this end, we transform the ECPE task into a document-level machine reading comprehension (MRC) task and propose a Multi-turn MRC framework with Rethink mechanism (MM-R). Our framework can model complicated relations between emotions and causes while avoiding generating the pairing matrix (the leading cause of the label sparsity problem). Besides, the multi-turn structure can fuse explicit semantic information flow between emotions and causes. Extensive experiments on the benchmark emotion cause corpus demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

A Multi-turn Machine Reading Comprehension Framework with Rethink Mechanism for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based models have proven effective in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in recent years. Specifically, in the case of the Extractive Document Summarization (EDS) task, modeling documents under graph structure is able to analyze the complex relations between semantic units (e.g., word-to-word, word-to-sentence, sentence-to-sentence) and enrich valuable information for the sentence representation. However, long-form document summarization using graph-based approaches is still an open research issue. The main challenge is to represent long documents in a graph structure in an effective way. In this regard, this paper proposes a new heterogeneous graph neural network (HeterGNN) model to improve the performance of long document summarization (HeterGraphLongSum). Specifically, the main idea is to add the passage nodes into the heterogeneous graph structure of word and sentence nodes for enriching the final representation of sentences. In this regard, HeterGraphLongSum includes three types of semantic units such as word, sentence, and passage. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for long documents such as Pubmed and Arxiv indicate promising results of the proposed model for the extractive long document summarization problem. Especially, HeterGraphLongSum is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance without relying on any pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT). The source code is available for further exploitation on the Github\footnote{https://github.com/tuananhphan97vn/HeterGraphLongSum}.

HeterGraphLongSum: Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Passage Aggregation for Extractive Long Document Summarization

Current works in the generation of personalized dialogue primarily contribute to the agent presenting a consistent personality and driving a more informative response. However, we found that the generated responses from most previous models tend to be self-centered, with little care for the user in the dialogue. Moreover, we consider that human-like conversation is essentially built based on inferring information about the persona of the other party. Motivated by this, we propose a novel personalized dialogue generator by detecting an implicit user persona. Because it is hard to collect a large number of detailed personas for each user, we attempted to model the user's potential persona and its representation from dialogue history, with no external knowledge. The perception and fader variables were conceived using conditional variational inference. The two latent variables simulate the process of people being aware of each other's persona and producing a corresponding expression in conversation. Finally, posterior-discriminated regularization was presented to enhance the training procedure. Empirical studies demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach is more concerned with the user's persona and achieves a considerable boost across both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

A Personalized Dialogue Generator with Implicit User Persona Detection

This paper studies event causality identification, which aims at predicting the causality relation for a pair of events in a sentence. Regarding event causality identification as a supervised classification task, most existing methods suffer from the problem of insufficient annotated data. In this paper, we propose a new derivative prompt joint learning model for event causality identification, which leverages potential causal knowledge in the pre-trained language model to tackle the data scarcity problem. Specifically, rather than external data or knowledge augmentation, we derive two relevant prompt tasks from event causality identification to enhance the model’s ability to identify explicit and implicit causality. We evaluate our model on two benchmark datasets and the results show that our model has great advantages over previous methods.

Event Causality Identification via Derivative Prompt Joint Learning

There is a lack of reproducibility in the results of experiments that apply the APPRAISAL taxonomy. APPRAISAL is widely used by linguists to study how people judge things or people. Automating APPRAISAL could be beneficial for use cases such as moderating online comments. Past work on APPRAISAL annotation has been descriptive in nature, and the lack of publicly available data sets hinders the progress of automation. In this work, we are interested in two things; first, we are interested in how well humans can reproduce the annotation of APPRAISAL of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) data set. We employed four annotators, each with a similar cultural and linguistics background to reannotate the data set. Second, we are interested in measuring the performance of the existing automated approaches to APPRAISAL classification. Our results show a poor level of agreement at more detailed \Appraisal categories (Fleiss kappa = 0.059) and a fair level of agreement (kappa = 0.372) at coarse-level categories. We find similar results when using automated approaches that are publicly available. Our empirical evidence suggests that, at present, automating APPRAISAL classification is practical only when considering coarse-level categories of the taxonomy.

Reproducibility and automation of the Appraisal taxonomy

This paper seeks to improve the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems operating on code-switched speech.
Code-switching refers to the alternation of languages within a conversation, a phenomenon that is of increasing importance considering the rapid rise in the number of bilingual speakers in the world. It is particularly challenging for ASR owing to the relative scarcity of code-switching speech and text data, even when the individual languages are themselves well-resourced. This paper proposes to overcome this challenge by applying linguistic theories in order to generate more realistic code-switching text, necessary for language modelling in ASR. Working with English-Spanish code-switching, we find that Equivalence Constraint theory and part-of-speech labelling are particularly helpful for text generation, and bring 2% improvement to ASR performance.

Improving code-switched ASR with linguistic information

We consider few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) intent detection, a practical and important problem for the development of task-oriented dialogue systems. Despite its importance, this problem is seldom studied in the literature, let alone examined in a systematic way. In this work, we take a closer look at this problem and identify key issues for research. In our pilot study, we reveal the reason why existing OOD intent detection methods are not adequate in dealing with this problem. Based on the observation, we propose a promising approach to tackle this problem based on latent representation generation and self-supervision. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world intent detection benchmark datasets demonstrate the high effectiveness of our proposed approach and its great potential in improving state-of-the-art methods for few-shot OOD intent detection.

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DynGL-SDP: Dynamic Graph Learning for Semantic Dependency Parsing

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Prompt-Based Meta-Learning For Few-shot Text Classification