Korea, Republic of

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.

COLING 2022

Improving code-switched ASR with linguistic information

linguistic theory

speech recognition

text generation

code-switching

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



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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.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

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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.

poster

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.

A Closer Look at Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Intent Detection

Existing distantly supervised relation extractors usually rely on noisy data for both model training and evaluation, which may lead to garbage-in-garbage-out systems. To alleviate the problem, we study whether a small clean dataset could help improve the quality of distantly supervised models. We show that besides getting a more convincing evaluation of models, a small clean dataset also helps us to build more robust denoising models. Specifically, we propose a new criterion for clean instance selection based on influence functions. It collects sample-level evidence for recognizing good instances (which is more informative than loss-level evidence). We also propose a teacher-student mechanism for controlling purity of intermediate results when bootstrapping the clean set. The whole approach is modelagnostic and demonstrates strong performances on both denoising real (NYT) and synthetic
noisy datasets.

Few Clean Instances Help Denoising Distant Supervision

We present a new dataset comprising tweets for the novel task of detecting biographically relevant utterances. Biographically relevant utterances are all those utterances that reveal some persistent and non-trivial information about the author of a tweet, e.g. habits, (dis)likes, family status, physical appearance, employment information, health issues etc. Unlike previous research we do not restrict biographical relevance to a small fixed set of pre-defined relations. Next to classification experiments employing state-of-the-art classifiers to establish strong baselines for future work, we carry out a linguistic analysis that compares the predictiveness of various high-level features. We also show that the task is different from established tasks, such as aspectual classification or sentiment analysis.

Biographically Relevant Tweets -- A New Dataset, Linguistic Analysis and Classification Experiments

Semantic parsing (SP) is a core component of modern virtual assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. While sequence-to-sequence based auto-regressive (AR) approaches are common for conversational SP, recent studies (Shrivastava et al., 2021) employ non-autoregressive (NAR) decoders and reduce inference latency while maintaining competitive parsing quality. However, a major drawback of NAR decoders is the difficulty of generating top-k (i.e., k-best) outputs with approaches such as beam search. To address this challenge, we propose a novel NAR semantic parser that introduces intent conditioning on the decoder. Inspired by the traditional intent and slot tagging parsers, we decouple the top-level intent prediction from the rest of a parse. As the top-level intent largely governs the syntax and semantics of a parse, the intent conditioning allows the model to better control beam search and improves the quality and diversity of top-k outputs. We introduce a hybrid teacher-forcing approach to avoid training and inference mismatch. We evaluate the proposed NAR on conversational SP datasets, TOP & TOPv2. Like the existing NAR models, we maintain the O(1) decoding time complexity while generating more diverse outputs and improving top-3 exact match (EM) by 2.4 points. In comparison with AR models, our model speeds up beam search inference by 6.7 times on CPU with competitive top-k EM.

Improving Top-K Decoding for Non-Autoregressive Semantic Parsing via Intent Conditioning

We present a simple yet effective self-training approach, named as STAD, for low-resource relation extraction. The approach first classifies the auto-annotated instances into two groups: confident instances and uncertain instances, according to the probabilities predicted by a teacher model. In contrast to most previous studies, which mainly only use the confident instances for self-training, we make use of the uncertain instances. To this end, we propose a method to identify ambiguous but useful instances from the uncertain instances and then divide the relations into candidate-label set and negative-label set for each ambiguous instance. Next, we propose a set-negative training method on the negative-label sets for the ambiguous instances and a positive training method for the confident instances. Finally, a joint-training method is proposed to build the final relation extraction system on all data. Experimental results on two widely used datasets SemEval2010 Task-8 and Re-TACRED with low-resource settings demonstrate that this new self-training approach indeed achieves significant and consistent improvements when comparing to several competitive self-training systems.

STAD: Self-Training with Ambiguous Data for Low-Resource Relation Extraction

As a key natural language processing (NLP) task, word sense disambiguation (WSD) evaluates how well NLP models can understand the lexical semantics of words under specific contexts. Benefited from the large-scale annotation, current WSD systems have achieved impressive performances in English by combining supervised learning with lexical knowledge. However, such success is hard to be replicated in other languages, where we only have limited annotations.In this paper, based on the multilingual lexicon BabelNet describing the same set of concepts across languages, we propose building knowledge and supervised-based Multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation (MWSD) systems. We build unified sense representations for multiple languages and address the annotation scarcity problem for MWSD by transferring annotations from rich-sourced languages to poorer ones. With the unified sense representations, annotations from multiple languages can be jointly trained to benefit the MWSD tasks. Evaluations of SemEval-13 and SemEval-15 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology.

Multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation with Unified Sense Representation

Most of the contemporary approaches for multi-hop Natural Language Inference (NLI) construct explanations considering each test case in isolation. However, this paradigm is known to suffer from semantic drift, a phenomenon that causes the construction of spurious explanations leading to wrong conclusions. In contrast, this paper proposes an abductive framework for multi-hop NLI exploring the retrieve-reuse-refine paradigm in Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). Specifically, we present Case-Based Abductive Natural Language Inference (CB-ANLI), a model that addresses unseen inference problems by analogical transfer of prior explanations from similar examples. We empirically evaluate the abductive framework on commonsense and scientific question answering tasks, demonstrating that CB-ANLI can be effectively integrated with sparse and dense pre-trained encoders to improve multihop inference, or adopted as an evidence retriever for Transformers. Moreover, an empirical analysis of semantic drift reveals that the CBR paradigm boosts the quality of the most challenging explanations, a feature that has a direct impact on robustness and accuracy in downstream inference tasks.


Case-Based Abductive Natural Language Inference

Distance metric learning has become a popular solution for few-shot Named Entity Recognition~(NER). The typical setup aims to learn a similarity metric for measuring the semantic similarity between test samples and referents, where each referent represents an entity class. The effect of this setup may, however, be compromised for two reasons. First, there is typically a limited optimization exerted on the representations of entity tokens after initing by pre-trained language models. Second, the referents may be far from representing corresponding entity classes due to the label scarcity in the few-shot setting. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach named COntrastive learning with Prompt guiding for few-shot NER (COPNER). We introduce a novel prompt composed of class-specific words to COPNER to serve as 1) supervision signals for conducting contrastive learning to optimize token representations; 2) metric referents for distance-metric inference on test samples. Experimental results demonstrate that COPNER outperforms state-of-the-art models with a significant margin in most cases. Moreover, COPNER shows great potential in the zero-shot setting.

COPNER: Contrastive Learning with Prompt Guiding for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa have dramatically improved the performance of various natural language processing tasks. Although these models are trained on large amounts of raw text, they have no explicit grounding in real-world entities. Knowledge graphs (KGs) are manually annotated with factual knowledge and store the relations between nodes corresponding to entities as labeled edges. This paper proposes a mechanism called KG-attention, which integrates the structure of a KG into recent PLM architectures. Unlike the existing PLM+KG integration methods, KG-attention generalizes the embeddings of neighboring entities using the relation embeddings; accordingly, it can handle relations between unconnected entities in the KG. Experimental results demonstrated that our method achieved significant improvements in a relation classification task, an entity typing task, and several language comprehension tasks.

Enhancing Contextual Word Representations Using Embedding of Neighboring Entities in Knowledge Graphs

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have been shown to exhibit sociodemographic biases, such as against gender and race, raising concerns about downstream biases in language technologies. However, PLMs' biases against people with disabilities (PWDs) have received little attention despite their potential to cause similar harm. Using perturbation sensitivity analysis, we test an assortment of popular word embedding-based and transformer-based PLMs and show significant biases against PWDs in all of them. The results demonstrate how models trained on large corpora widely favor ableist language.

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Improving code-switched ASR with linguistic information

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