Korea, Republic of

We propose a method to distill language-agnostic meaning embeddings from multilingual sentence encoders for unsupervised quality estimation of machine translation.
Our method facilitates that the meaning embeddings focus on semantics by adversarial training that attempts to eliminate language-specific information.
Experimental results on unsupervised quality estimation reveal that our method achieved higher correlations with human evaluations.

COLING 2022

Adversarial Training on Disentangling Meaning and Language Representations for Unsupervised Quality Estimation

multilingual sentence encoder

quality estimation

unsupervised

**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).

poster

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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.

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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.

Accurate fact veriﬁcation depends on performing ﬁne-grained reasoning over crucial entities by capturing their latent logical relations hidden in multiple evidence clues, which is generally lacking in existing fact veriﬁcation models. In this work, we propose a novel Globalto-Local Aggregation and Fission network (GLAF) to ﬁll this gap. Instead of treating entire sentences or all semantic elements within them as nodes to construct a coarse-grained or unstructured evidence graph as in previous methods, GLAF constructs a ﬁne-grained and structured evidence graph by parsing the rambling sentences into structural triple-level reasoning clues and regarding them as graph nodes to achieve ﬁne-grained and interpretable evidence graph reasoning. Speciﬁcally, to capture latent logical relations between the clues, GLAF ﬁrst employs a local ﬁssion reasoning layer to conduct ﬁne-grained multi-hop reasoning, and then uses a global evidence aggregation layer to achieve information sharing and the interchange of evidence clues for ﬁnal claim label prediction. Experimental results on the FEVER dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of GLAF, showing that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

GLAF: Global-to-Local Aggregation and Fission Network for Semantic Level Fact Verification

Continual learning is one of the key components of human learning and a necessary requirement of artificial intelligence. As dialogue can potentially span infinitely many topics and tasks, a task-oriented dialogue system must have the capability to continually learn, dynamically adapting to new challenges while preserving the knowledge it already acquired. Despite the importance, continual reinforcement learning of the dialogue policy has remained largely unaddressed. The lack of a framework with training protocols, baseline models and suitable metrics, has so far hindered research in this direction. In this work we fill precisely this gap, enabling research in dialogue policy optimisation to go from static to dynamic learning. We provide a continual learning algorithm, baseline architectures and metrics for assessing continual learning models. Moreover, we propose the dynamic dialogue policy transformer (DDPT), a novel dynamic architecture that can integrate new knowledge seamlessly, is capable of handling large state spaces and obtains significant zero-shot performance when being exposed to unseen domains, without any growth in network parameter size. We validate the strengths of DDPT in simulation with two user simulators as well as with humans.

Dynamic Dialogue Policy for Continual Reinforcement Learning

SimCSE adopts dropout as data augmentation and encodes an input sentence twice into two corresponding embeddings to build a positive pair. Since SimCSE is a Transformer-based encoder that directly encodes the length information of sentences through positional embeddings, the two embeddings in a positive pair contain the same length information. Thus, a model trained with these positive pairs is biased, tending to consider that sentences of the same or similar length are more similar in semantics. To alleviate it, we apply a simple but effective repetition operation to modify the input sentence. Then we pass the input sentence and its modified counterpart to the pre-trained Transformer encoder, respectively, to get the positive pair. Additionally, we draw inspiration from the computer vision community and introduce momentum contrast to enlarge the number of negative pairs without additional calculations. The proposed modifications are applied to positive and negative pairs separately and build a new sentence embedding method, termed Enhanced SimCSE (ESimCSE). We evaluate the proposed ESimCSE on several benchmark datasets w.r.t the semantic text similarity (STS) task. Experimental results show that ESimCSE outperforms SimCSE by an average Spearman correlation of 2.02\% on BERT-base.

ESimCSE: Enhanced Sample Building Method for Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Embedding

Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) enables positive knowledge transfer among multiple translation tasks with a shared underlying model, but a unified multilingual model usually suffers from capacity bottleneck when tens or hundreds of languages are involved. A possible solution is to cluster languages and train individual model for each cluster. However, the existing clustering methods based on language similarity cannot handle the asymmetric problem in multilingual NMT, i.e., one translation task A can benefit from another translation task B but task B will be harmed by task A. To address this problem, we propose a fuzzy task clustering method for multilingual NMT. Specifically, we employ task affinity, defined as the loss change of one translation task caused by the training of another, as the clustering criterion. Next, we cluster the translation tasks based on the task affinity, such that tasks from the same cluster can benefit each other. For each cluster, we further find out a set of auxiliary translation tasks that benefit the tasks in this cluster. In this way, the model for each cluster is trained not only on the tasks in the cluster but also on the auxiliary tasks. During training, we design a dynamic task sampling strategy that eliminate the negative influence of auxiliary tasks while exploit the positive knowledge of them. We conduct extensive experiments for one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many translation scenarios to verify the effectiveness of our method.

Addressing Asymmetry in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Fuzzy Task Clustering

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has drawn more and more attention because of its extensive applications. However, towards the sentence carried with more than one aspect, most existing works generate an aspect-specific sentence representation for each aspect term to predict sentiment polarity, which neglects the sentiment relationship among aspect terms. Besides, most current ABSA methods focus on sentences containing only one aspect term or multiple aspect terms with the same sentiment polarity, which makes ABSA degenerate into sentence-level sentiment analysis. In this paper, to deal with this problem, we construct a heterogeneous graph to model inter-aspect relationships and aspect-context relationships simultaneously and propose a novel Composition-based Heterogeneous Graph Multi-channel Attention Network (CHGMAN) to encode the constructed heterogeneous graph. Meanwhile, we conduct extensive experiments on three datasets: MAMS-ATSA, Rest14, and Laptop14, experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.

Composition-based Heterogeneous Graph Multi-channel Attention Network for Multi-aspect Multi-sentiment Classification

Task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems often require interaction with an external knowledge base to retrieve necessary entity (e.g., restaurant) information to support the response generation. Most current end-to-end TOD systems either retrieve the KB information explicitly or embed it into model parameters for implicit access.~While the former approach demands scanning the KB at each turn of response generation, which is inefficient when the KB scales up, the latter approach shows higher flexibility and efficiency. In either approach, the systems may generate a response with conflicting entity information. To address this issue, we propose to generate the entity autoregressively first and leverage it to guide the response generation in an end-to-end system. To ensure entity consistency, we impose a trie constraint on entity generation. We also introduce a logit concatenation strategy to facilitate gradient backpropagation for end-to-end training. Experiments on MultiWOZ 2.1 single and CAMREST show that our system can generate more high-quality and entity-consistent responses.

Autoregressive Entity Generation for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog

With the success of contextualized language models, much research explores what these models really learn and in which cases they still fail. Most of this work focuses on specific NLP tasks and on the learning outcome. Little research has attempted to decouple the models’ weaknesses from specific tasks and focus on the embeddings per se and their mode of learning. In this paper, we take up this research opportunity: based on theoretical linguistic insights, we explore whether the semantic constraints of function words are learned and how the surrounding context impacts their embeddings. We create suitable datasets, provide new insights into the inner workings of LMs vis-a-vis function words and implement an assisting visual web interface for qualitative analysis.

Negation, Coordination, and Quantifiers in Contextualized Language Models

We propose a new approach, Knowledge Distillation using Optimal Transport (KNOT), to distill the natural language semantic knowledge from multiple teacher networks to a student network. KNOT aims to train a (global) student model by learning to minimize the optimal transport cost of its assigned probability distribution over the labels to the weighted sum of probabilities predicted by the (local) teacher models, under the constraints that the student model does not have access to teacher models' parameters or training data. To evaluate the quality of knowledge transfer, we introduce a new metric, Semantic Distance (SD), that measures semantic closeness between the predicted and ground truth label distributions. The proposed method shows improvements in the global model's SD performance over the baseline across three NLP tasks while performing on par with Entropy-based distillation on standard accuracy and F1 metrics.

KNOT: Knowledge Distillation using Optimal Transport for Solving NLP Tasks

Diagnosis prediction on admission notes is a core clinical task.
However, these notes may incompletely describe the patient.
Also, clinical language models may suffer from idiosyncratic language or imbalanced vocabulary for describing diseases or symptoms.
We tackle the task of diagnosis prediction, which consists of predicting future patient diagnoses from clinical texts at the time of admission. We improve the performance on this task by introducing an additional signal from support sets of diagnostic codes from prior admissions or as they emerge during differential diagnosis.
To enhance the robustness of diagnosis prediction methods, we propose to augment clinical text with potentially complementary set data from diagnosis codes from previous patient visits or from codes that emerge from the current admission as they become available through diagnostics.
We discuss novel attention network architectures and augmentation strategies to solve this problem.
Our experiments reveal that support sets improve the performance drastically to predict less common diagnosis codes. Our approach clearly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art PubMedBERT baseline by up 3% points. Furthermore, we find that support sets drastically improve the performance for pregnancy- and gynecology-related diagnoses up to 32.9% points compared to the baseline.

Attention Networks for Augmenting Clinical Text with Support Sets for Diagnosis Prediction

Multi-modal named entity recognition (MNER) aims at identifying entity spans and recognizing their categories in social media posts with the aid of images. However, in dominant MNER approaches, the interaction of different modalities is usually carried out through the alternation of self-attention and cross-attention or over-reliance on the gating machine, which results in imprecise and biased correspondence between fine-grained semantic units of text and image. To address this issue, we propose a Flat Multi-modal Interaction Transformer (FMIT) for MNER. Specifically, we first utilize noun phrases in sentences and general domain words to obtain visual cues. Then, we transform the fine-grained semantic representation of the vision and text into a unified lattice structure and design a novel relative position encoding to match different modalities in Transformer. Meanwhile, we propose to leverage entity boundary detection as an auxiliary task to alleviate visual bias. Experiments show that our methods achieve the new state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.

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GLAF: Global-to-Local Aggregation and Fission Network for Semantic Level Fact Verification

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