Korea, Republic of

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task, which focuses on detecting the sentiment polarity towards the aspect in a sentence. However, it is always sensitive to the multi-aspect challenge, where features of multiple aspects in a sentence will affect each other. To mitigate this issue, we design a novel training framework, called Contrastive Cross-Channel Data Augmentation
(C3DA), which leverages an in-domain generator to construct more multi-aspect samples and then boosts the robustness of ABSA models via contrastive learning on these generated data. In practice, given a generative pretrained language model and some limited ABSA labeled data, we first employ some parameter-efficient 
approaches to perform the in-domain fine-tuning. Then, the obtained in-domain generator is used to generate the synthetic sentences from two channels, i.e., Aspect Augmentation Channel and Polarity Augmentation Channel, which generate the sentence condition on a given aspect and polarity respectively. Specifically, our C3DA performs the sentence generation in a cross-channel manner to obtain more sentences, and proposes an Entropy-Minimization Filter to filter low-quality generated samples. Extensive experiments show that our C3DA can outperform those baselines without any augmentations by about 1% on accuracy and MacroF1.

COLING 2022

A Contrastive Cross-Channel Data Augmentation Framework for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

generative pre-trained language model

parameter-efficient

aspect-based sentiment analysis

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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IJCNLP-AACL 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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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
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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.

Recently, Transformer has achieved great success in Chinese named entity recognition (NER) owing to its good parallelism and ability to model long-range dependencies, which utilizes self-attention to encode context. However, the fully connected way of self-attention may scatter the attention distribution and allow some irrelevant character information to be integrated, leading to entity boundaries being misidentified. In this paper, we propose a data-driven Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention (ATSSA) mechanism that aims to dynamically select the most relevant characters to enhance the Transformer architecture for Chinese NER. In ATSSA, the attention score threshold of each query is automatically generated, and characters with attention score higher than the threshold are selected by the query while others are discarded, so as to address irrelevant attention integration. Experiments on four benchmark Chinese NER datasets show that the proposed ATSSA brings 1.68 average F1 score improvements to the baseline model and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention for Chinese NER

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance gains across numerous downstream tasks in natural language understanding. Various Chinese PLMs have been successively proposed for learning better Chinese language representation. However, most current models use Chi- nese characters as inputs and are not able to encode semantic information contained in Chinese words. While recent pre-trained models incorporate both words and characters simultaneously, they usually suffer from deficient semantic interactions and fail to capture the semantic relation between words and characters. To address the above issues, we propose a simple yet effective PLM CLOWER, which adopts the Contrastive Learning Over Word and charactER representations. In particular, CLOWER im- plicitly encodes the coarse- grained information (i.e., words) into the fine-grained representations (i.e., characters) through contrastive learning on multi-grained information. CLOWER is of great value in realistic scenarios since it can be easily incorporated into any existing fine-grained based PLMs without modifying the production pipelines. Extensive experiments conducted on a range of downstream tasks demonstrate the superior performance of CLOWER over several state-of-the-art baselines.

CLOWER: A Pre-trained Language Model with Contrastive Learning over Word and Character Representations

We introduce a new type of problems for math word problem (MWP) solvers, named Noun-MWPs, whose answer is a non-numerical string containing a noun from the problem text. 
We present a novel method to empower existing MWP solvers to handle Noun-MWPs, and apply the method on Expression-Pointer Transformer (EPT).
Our model, N-EPT, solves Noun-MWPs significantly better than other models, and at the same time, solves conventional MWPs as well. 
Solving Noun-MWPs may lead to bridging MWP solvers and traditional question-answering NLP models.

Noun-MWP: Math Word Problems Meet Noun Answers

This paper explores the task of identifying the overall sentiment expressed towards volitional entities (persons and organizations) in a document -- what we refer to as Entity-Level Sentiment Analysis (ELSA). While identifying sentiment conveyed towards an entity is well researched for shorter texts like tweets, we find little to no research on this specific task for longer texts with multiple mentions and opinions towards the same entity. This lack of research would be understandable if ELSA can be derived from existing tasks and models. To assess this, we annotate a set of professional reviews for their overall sentiment towards each volitional entity in the text. We sample from data already annotated for document-level, sentence-level, and target-level sentiment in a multi-domain review corpus, and our results indicate that there is no single proxy task that provides this overall sentiment we seek for the entities at a satisfactory level of performance. We present a suite of experiments aiming to assess the contribution towards ELSA provided by document-, sentence-, and target-level sentiment analysis, and provide a discussion of their shortcomings. We show that sentiment in our dataset is expressed not only with an entity mention as target, but also towards targets with a sentiment-relevant relation to a volitional entity. In our data, these relations extend beyond anaphoric coreference resolution, and our findings call for further research of the topic. Finally, we also present a survey of previous relevant work.

Entity-Level Sentiment Analysis (ELSA): An exploratory task survey

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to distinguish sentiment polarity of every specific aspect in a given sentence. Previous researches have realized the importance of interactive learning with context and aspects. However, these methods are ill-studied to learn complex sentence with multiple aspects due to overlapped polarity feature. And they do not consider the correlation between aspects to distinguish overlapped feature. In order to solve this problem, we propose a new method called Recurrent Inverse Learning Guided Network (RILGNet). Our RILGNet has two points to improve the modeling of aspect correlation and the selecting of aspect feature. First, we use Recurrent Mechanism to improve the joint representation of aspects, which enhances the aspect correlation modeling iteratively. Second, we propose Inverse Learning Guidance to improve the selection of aspect feature by considering aspect correlation, which provides more useful information to determine polarity. Experimental results on SemEval-2014 Datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of RILGNet, and we further prove that RILGNet is state-of-the-art method in multiaspect scenarios.

Modeling Aspect Correlation for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis via Recurrent Inverse Learning Guidance

Recent research shows that pre-trained language models, built to generate text conditioned on some context, learn to encode syntactic knowledge to a certain degree. This has motivated researchers to move beyond the sentence-level and look into their ability to encode less studied discourse-level phenomena. In this paper, we add to the body of probing research by investigating discourse entity representations in large pre-trained language models in English. Motivated by early theories of discourse and key pieces of previous work, we focus on the information-status of entities as discourse-new or discourse-old. We present two probing models, one based on binary classification and another one on sequence labeling. The results of our experiments show that pre-trained language models do encode information on whether an entity has been introduced before or not in the discourse. However, this information alone is not sufficient to find the entities in a discourse, opening up interesting questions about the definition of entities for future work.

New or Old? Exploring How Pre-Trained Language Models Represent Discourse Entities

When a natural language generation (NLG) component is implemented in a real-world task-oriented dialogue system, it is necessary to generate not only natural utterances as learned on training data but also utterances adapted to the dialogue environment (e.g., noise from environmental sounds) and the user (e.g., users with low levels of understanding ability). Inspired by recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) for language generation tasks, we propose ANTOR, a method for Adaptive Natural language generation for Task-Oriented dialogue via Reinforcement learning. In ANTOR, a natural language understanding (NLU) module, which corresponds to the user's understanding of system utterances, is incorporated into the objective function of RL. If the NLG's intentions are correctly conveyed to the NLU, which understands a system's utterances, the NLG is given a positive reward. We conducted experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset, and we confirmed that ANTOR could generate adaptive utterances against speech recognition errors and the different vocabulary levels of users.

Adaptive Natural Language Generation for Task-oriented Dialogue via Reinforcement Learning

Automated Essay Scoring via Pairwise Contrastive Regression

Without labeled question-answer pairs for necessary training, unsupervised commonsense question-answering (QA) appears to be extremely challenging due to its indispensable unique prerequisite on commonsense source like knowledge bases (KBs), which are usually highly resource consuming in construction. Recently pre-trained language models (PLMs) show effectiveness as an alternative for commonsense clues when they play a role of knowledge generator. However, existing work either relies on large-scale in-domain or out-of-domain labeled data, or fails to generate knowledge of high quality in a general way. Motivated by human thinking experience, we propose an approach of All-round Thinker (ArT) by fully taking association during knowledge generating. In detail, our model first focuses on key parts in the given context, and then generates highly related knowledge on such a basis in an association way like human thinking. Besides, for causal reasoning, a reverse thinking mechanism is especially added to further enhance bidirectional inferring between cause and effect. ArT is totally unsupervised and KBs-free. We evaluate it on three commonsense QA benchmarks: COPA, SocialIQA and SCT. On all scales of PLM backbones, ArT shows its brilliant performance and outperforms previous advanced unsupervised models.

ArT: All-round Thinker for Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering

Knowledge graph embedding aims to represent entities and relations as low-dimensional vectors, which is an effective way for predicting missing links. It is crucial for knowledge graph embedding models to model and infer various relation patterns, such as symmetry/antisymmetry. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in the real world. We propose a new model called HRQE, which represents entities as pure quaternions. The relational embedding consists of two parts: (a) Using unit quaternions to represent the rotation part in 3D space, where the head entities are rotated by the corresponding relations through Hamilton product. (b) Using scale parameters to constrain the modulus of entities to make them have hierarchical distributions. To the best of our knowledge, HRQE is the first model that can encode symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, composition, multiple relation patterns and learn semantic hierarchies simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of HRQE against some of the SOTA methods on four well-established knowledge graph completion benchmarks.

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A Contrastive Cross-Channel Data Augmentation Framework for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

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Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention for Chinese NER

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