Korea, Republic of

Prompting, which casts downstream applications as language modeling tasks, has shown to be sample efficient compared to standard fine-tuning with pre-trained models. However, one pitfall of prompting is the need of manually-designed patterns, whose outcome can be unintuitive and requires large validation sets to tune. To tackle the challenge, we propose AutoSeq, a fully automatic prompting method: (1) We adopt natural language prompts on sequence-to-sequence models, enabling free-form generation and larger label search space; (2) We propose label sequences -- phrases with indefinite lengths to verbalize the labels -- which eliminate the need of manual templates and are more expressive than single label words; (3) We use beam search to automatically generate a large amount of label sequence candidates and propose contrastive re-ranking to get the best combinations. AutoSeq significantly outperforms other no-manual-design methods, such as soft prompt tuning, adapter tuning, and automatic search on single label words; the generated label sequences are even better than curated manual ones on a variety of tasks. Our method reveals the potential of sequence-to-sequence models in few-shot learning and sheds light on a path to generic and automatic prompting.

COLING 2022

Automatic Label Sequence Generation for Prompting Sequence-to-sequence Models

automatic prompting

sequence-to-sequence models

few-shot learning

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**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.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!<br><br><br>

To gain access to this event page you are required to register.<br> Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

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

technical paper

Multi-hop question answering (QA) requires reasoning over multiple documents to answer a complex question and provide interpretable supporting evidence. However, providing supporting evidence is not enough to demonstrate that a model has performed the desired reasoning to reach the correct answer. Most existing multi-hop QA methods fail to answer a large fraction of sub-questions, even if their parent questions are answered correctly. In this paper, we propose the Prompt-based Conservation Learning (PCL) framework for multi-hop QA, which acquires new knowledge from multi-hop QA tasks while conserving old knowledge learned on single-hop QA tasks, mitigating forgetting. Specifically, we first train a model on existing single-hop QA tasks, and then freeze this model and expand it by allocating additional sub-networks for the multi-hop QA task. Moreover, to condition pre-trained language models to stimulate the kind of reasoning required for specific multi-hop questions, we learn soft prompts for the novel sub-networks to perform type-specific reasoning. Experimental results on the HotpotQA benchmark show that PCL is competitive for multi-hop QA and retains good performance on the corresponding single-hop sub-questions, demonstrating the efficacy of PCL in mitigating knowledge loss by forgetting.

Prompt-based Conservation Learning for Multi-hop Question Answering

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models, which eliminate the sequential dependencies within the target sentence, have achieved remarkable inference speed, but suffer from inferior translation quality. Towards exploring the underlying causes, we carry out a thorough preliminary study on the attention mechanism, which demonstrates the serious weakness in capturing localness compared with conventional autoregressive translation (AT). In response to this problem, we propose to improve the localness of NAT models by explicitly introducing the information about surrounding words. Specifically, temporal convolutions are incorporated into both encoder and decoder sides to obtain localness-aware representations. Extensive experiments on several typical translation datasets show that the proposed method can achieve consistent and significant improvements over strong NAT baselines. Further analyses on the WMT14 En-De translation task reveal that compared with baselines, our approach accelerates the convergence in training and can achieve equivalent performance with a reduction of 70% training steps.

Improving Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation via Modeling Localness

Dependency-aware Prototype Learning for Few-shot Relation Classification

Today the pre-trained language models achieve great success for question generation (QG) task and significantly outperform traditional sequence-to-sequence approaches. However, the pre-trained models treat the input passage as a flat sequence and are thus not aware of the text structure of input passage. For QG
task, we model text structure as answer position and syntactic dependency, and propose answer localness modeling and syntactic mask attention to address these limitations. Specially, we present localness modeling with a Gaussian bias to enable the model to focus on answer-surrounded context, and propose a mask attention mechanism to make the syntactic structure of input passage accessible in question generation process. Experiments on SQuAD dataset show that our proposed two modules improve performance over the strong pre-trained model ProphetNet, and combing them together achieves very competitive results with the state-of-the-art pre-trained model.

Enhancing Pre-trained Models with Text Structure Knowledge for Question Generation

Detecting Suicide Risk in Online Counseling Services: A Study in a Low-Resource Language

Document-level Event Factuality Identification (DEFI) predicts the factuality of a specific event based on a document from which the event can be derived, which is a fundamental and crucial task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, most previous studies only considered sentence-level task and did not adopt document-level knowledge. Moreover, they modelled DEFI as a typical text classification task depending on annotated information heavily, and limited to the task-specific corpus only, which resulted in data scarcity. To tackle these issues, we propose a new framework formulating DEFI as Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks considering both Span-Extraction (Ext) and Multiple-Choice (Mch). Our model does not employ any other explicit annotated information, and utilizes Transfer Learning (TL) to extract knowledge from universal large-scale MRC corpora for cross-domain data augmentation. The empirical results on DLEFM corpus demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-arts.

Document-level Event Factuality Identification via Machine Reading Comprehension Frameworks with Transfer Learning

Deep prompt tuning (DPT) has gained great success in most natural language processing~(NLP) tasks. However, it is not well-investigated in dense retrieval where fine-tuning~(FT) still dominates. When deploying multiple retrieval tasks using the same backbone model~(e.g., RoBERTa), FT-based methods are unfriendly in terms of deployment cost: each new retrieval model needs to repeatedly deploy the backbone model without reuse. To reduce the deployment cost in such a scenario, this work investigates applying DPT in dense retrieval. The challenge is that directly applying DPT in dense retrieval largely underperforms FT methods. To compensate for the performance drop, we propose two model-agnostic and task-agnostic strategies for DPT-based retrievers, namely retrieval-oriented intermediate pretraining and unified negative mining, as a general approach that could be compatible with any pre-trained language model and retrieval task. The experimental results show that the proposed method (called DPTDR) outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on both MS-MARCO and Natural Questions. We also conduct ablation studies to examine the effectiveness of each strategy in DPTDR. We believe this work facilitates the industry, as it saves enormous efforts and costs of deployment and increases the utility of computing resources. Our code is available at https://github.com/tangzhy/DPTDR.

DPTDR: Deep Prompt Tuning for Dense Passage Retrieval

The existing research efforts in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) have focused on developing the expressive ability of neural networks to fuse information from different modalities. However, these approaches lack a mechanism to understand the complex relations within and across different modalities, since some sentiments may be scattered in different modalities. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical graph contrastive learning (HGraph-CL) framework for MSA,
aiming to explore the intricate relations of intra- and inter-modal representations for sentiment extraction. Specifically, regarding the intra-modal level, we build a unimodal graph for each modality representation to account for the modality-specific sentiment implications. Based on it, a graph contrastive learning strategy is adopted to explore the potential relations based on unimodal graph augmentations. Furthermore, we construct a multimodal graph of each instance based on the unimodal graphs to grasp the sentiment relations between different modalities. Then, in light of the multimodal augmentation graphs, a graph contrastive learning strategy over the inter-modal level is proposed to ulteriorly seek the possible graph structures for precisely learning sentiment relations. This essentially allows the framework to understand the appropriate graph structures for learning intricate relations among different modalities. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in MSA.

Modeling Intra- and Inter-Modal Relations: Hierarchical Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

A personification is a figure of speech that endows inanimate entities with properties and actions typically seen as requiring animacy. In this paper, we explore the task of personification generation. To this end, we propose PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation. We curate a corpus of personifications called PersonifCorp, together with automatically generated de-personified literalizations of these personifications. We demonstrate the usefulness of this parallel corpus by training a seq2seq model to personify a given literal input. Both automatic and human evaluations show that fine-tuning with PersonifCorp leads to significant gains in personification-related qualities such as animacy and interestingness. A detailed qualitative analysis also highlights key strengths and imperfections of PINEAPPLE over baselines, demonstrating a strong ability to generate diverse and creative personifications that enhance the overall appeal of a sentence.

PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation

The human recognition system has presented the remarkable ability to effortlessly learn novel knowledge from only a few trigger events based on prior knowledge, which is called insight learning. Mimicking such behavior on Knowledge Graph Reasoning (KGR) is an interesting and challenging research problem with many practical applications. Simultaneously, existing works, such as knowledge embedding and few-shot learning models, have been limited to conducting KGR in either ``seen-to-seen'' or ``unseen-to-unseen'' scenarios. To this end, we propose a neural insight learning framework named Eureka to bridge the ``seen'' to ``unseen'' gap. Eureka is empowered to learn the seen relations with sufficient training triples while providing the flexibility of learning unseen relations given only one trigger without sacrificing its performance on seen relations. Eureka meets our expectation of the model to acquire seen and unseen relations at no extra cost, and eliminate the need to retrain when encountering emerging unseen relations. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework also outperforms various state-of-the-art baselines on datasets of both seen and unseen relations.

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Prompt-based Conservation Learning for Multi-hop Question Answering

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