Korea, Republic of

We present LINGUIST, a method for generating annotated data for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging (IC+ST), via fine-tuning AlexaTM 5B, a 5-billion-parameter multilingual sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, on a flexible instruction prompt. In a 10-shot novel intent setting for the SNIPS dataset, LINGUIST surpasses state-of-the-art approaches (Back-Translation and Example Extrapolation) by a wide margin, showing absolute improvement for the target intents of +1.9 points on IC Recall and +2.5 points on ST F1 Score. In the zero-shot cross-lingual setting of the mATIS++ dataset, LINGUIST out-performs a strong baseline of Machine Translation with Slot Alignment by +4.14 points absolute on ST F1 Score across 6 languages, while matching performance on IC. Finally, we verify our results on an internal large-scale multilingual dataset for conversational agent IC+ST and show significant improvements over a baseline which uses Back-Translation, Paraphrasing and Slot Catalog Resampling. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate instruction fine-tuning of a large-scale seq2seq model to control the outputs of multilingual intent- and slot-labeled data generation.

COLING 2022

[DEMO] LINGUIST: Language Model Instruction Tuning to Generate Annotated Utterances for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging

prompting large language models

synthetic data generation

conversational ai

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IJCNLP-AACL 2022

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

technical paper

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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.

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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.

State-of-the-art neural (re)rankers are notoriously data-hungry which – given the lack of large-scale training data in languages other than English – makes them rarely used in multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval settings. Current approaches therefore commonly transfer rankers trained on English data to other languages and cross-lingual setups by means of multilingual encoders: they fine-tune all parameters of pretrained massively multilingual Transformers (MMTs, e.g., multilingual BERT) on English relevance judgments, and then deploy them in the target language(s). In this work, we show that two parameterefficient approaches to cross-lingual transfer, namely Sparse Fine-Tuning Masks (SFTMs) and Adapters, allow for a more lightweight and more effective zero-shot transfer to multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval tasks. We first train language adapters (or SFTMs) via Masked Language Modelling and then train retrieval (i.e., reranking) adapters (SFTMs) on top, while keeping all other parameters fixed. At inference, this modular design allows us to compose the ranker by applying the (re)ranking adapter (or SFTM) trained with source language data together with the language adapter (or SFTM) of a target language. We carry out a large scale evaluation on the CLEF-2003 and HC4 benchmarks and additionally, as another contribution, extend the former with queries in three new languages: Kyrgyz, Uyghur and Turkish. The proposed parameter-efficient methods outperform standard zero-shot transfer with full MMT finetuning, while being more modular and reducing training times. The gains are particularly pronounced for low-resource languages, where our approaches also substantially outperform the competitive machine translation-based rankers.

Parameter-Efficient Neural Reranking for Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Retrieval

Controllable story generation is a challenging task in the field of NLP, which has attracted increasing research interest in recent years.
However, most existing works generate a whole story conditioned on the appointed keywords or emotions, ignoring the psychological changes of the protagonist.
Inspired by psychology theories, we introduce global psychological state chains, which include the needs and emotions of the protagonists, to help a story generation system create more controllable and well-planned stories.
In this paper, we propose a Psychology-guIded Controllable Story Generation System (PICS) to generate stories that adhere to the given leading context and desired psychological state chains for the protagonist.
Specifically, psychological state trackers are employed to memorize the protagonist's local psychological states to capture their inner temporal relationships.
In addition, psychological state planners are adopted to gain the protagonist's global psychological states for story planning.
Eventually, a psychology controller is designed to integrate the local and global psychological states into the story context representation for composing psychology-guided stories.
Automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that PICS outperforms baselines, and each part of PICS shows effectiveness for writing stories with more consistent psychological changes.

Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generation

While there is much research on cross-domain text classification, most existing approaches focus on one-to-one or many-to-one domain adaptation. In this paper, we tackle the more challenging task of domain generalization, in which domain-invariant representations are learned from multiple source domains, without access to any data from the target domains, and classification decisions are then made on test documents in unseen target domains. We propose a novel framework based on supervised contrastive learning with a memory-saving queue. In this way, we explicitly encourage examples of the same class to be closer and examples of different classes to be further apart in the embedding space. We have conducted extensive experiments on two Amazon review sentiment datasets, and one rumour detection dataset. Experimental results show that our domain generalization method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.

Domain Generalization for Text Classification with Memory-Based Supervised Contrastive Learning

Medication recommendation is a crucial task for intelligent healthcare systems. Previous studies mainly recommend medications with electronic health records (EHRs). However, some details of interactions between doctors and patients may be ignored or omitted in EHRs, which are essential for automatic medication recommendation. Therefore, we make the first attempt to recommend medications with the conversations between doctors and patients. In this work, we construct DIALMED, the first high-quality dataset for medical dialogue-based medication recommendation task. It contains 11, 996 medical dialogues related to 16 common diseases from 3 departments and 70 corresponding common medications. Furthermore, we propose a Dialogue structure and Disease knowledge aware Network (DDN), where a QA Dialogue Graph mechanism is designed to model the dialogue structure and the knowledge graph is used to introduce external disease knowledge. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is a promising solution to recommend medications with medical dialogues. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/f-window/DialMed.

DialMed: A Dataset for Dialogue-based Medication Recommendation

Prompt-based fine-tuning for pre-trained models has proven effective for many natural language processing tasks under few-shot settings in general domain. However, tuning with prompt in biomedical domain has not been investigated thoroughly. Biomedical words are often rare in general domain, but quite ubiquitous in biomedical contexts, which dramatically deteriorates the performance of pretrained models on downstream biomedical applications even after fine-tuning, especially in low-resource scenarios. We propose a simple yet effective approach to helping models learn rare biomedical words during tuning with prompt. Experimental results show that our method can achieve up to 6% improvement in biomedical natural language inference task without any extra parameters or training steps using few-shot vanilla prompt settings.

Prompt Combines Paraphrase: Teaching Pre-trained Models to Understand Rare Biomedical Words


K-Nearest Neighbor Neural Machine Translation (kNN-MT) successfully incorporates external corpus by retrieving word-level representations at test time. 
Generally, kNN-MT borrows the off-the-shelf context representation in the translation task, e.g., the output of the last decoder layer, as the query vector of the retrieval task. In this work, we highlight that coupling the representations of these two tasks is sub-optimal for fine-grained retrieval. To alleviate it, we leverage supervised contrastive learning to learn the distinctive retrieval representation derived from the original context representation. We also propose a fast and effective approach to constructing hard negative samples. Experimental results on five domains show that our approach improves the retrieval accuracy and BLEU score compared to vanilla kNN-MT.

Learning Decoupled Retrieval Representation for Nearest Neighbour Neural Machine Translation

We propose a speaker clustering model for textual dialogues, which groups the utterances of a multi-party dialogue without speaker annotations, so that the actual speakers are identical inside each cluster. We find that, without knowing the speakers, the interactions between utterances are still implied in the text, which suggest the relations between speakers. In this work, we model the semantic content of utterance with a pre-trained language model, and the relations between speakers with an utterance-level pairwise matrix. The semantic content representation can be further instructed by cross-corpus dialogue act modeling. The speaker labels are finally generated by spectral clustering. Experiments show that our model outperforms the sequence classification baseline, and benefits from the auxiliary dialogue act classification task. We also discuss the detail of determining the number of speakers (clusters), eliminating the interference caused by semantic similarity, and the impact of utterance distance.

Speaker Clustering in Textual Dialogue with Pairwise Utterance Relation and Cross-corpus Dialogue Act Supervision

Back-translation (BT) has been proven to be effective in unsupervised domain adaptation of neural machine translation (NMT). However, the existing back-translation methods mainly improve domain adaptability by generating in-domain pseudo-parallel data that contains sentence-structural knowledge, paying less attention to the in-domain lexical knowledge, which may lead to poor translation of unseen in-domain words. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Constrained Back-Translation (ICBT) method to incorporate in-domain lexical knowledge on the basis of BT for unsupervised domain adaptation of NMT. Specifically, we apply lexical constraints into back-translation to generate pseudo-parallel data with in-domain lexical knowledge, and then perform round-trip iterations to incorporate more lexical knowledge. Based on this, we further explore sampling strategies of constrained words in ICBT to introduce more targeted lexical knowledge, via domain specificity and confidence estimation. Experimental results on four domains show that our approach achieves state-of-theart results, improving the BLEU score by up to 3.08 compared to the strongest baseline, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

Iterative Constrained Back-Translation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Machine Translation

Generic statements such as “ducks lay eggs” make claims about kinds, e.g., ducks as a category. The generic overgeneralization effect refers to the inclination to accept false universal generalizations such as “all ducks lay eggs” or “all lions have manes” as true. In this paper, we investigate the generic overgeneralization effect in pre-trained language models experimentally. We show that pre-trained language models suffer from overgeneralization and tend to treat quantified generic statements such as “all ducks lay eggs” as if they were true generics. Furthermore, we demonstrate how knowledge embedding methods can lessen this effect by injecting factual knowledge about kinds into pre-trained language models. To this end, we source factual knowledge about two types of generics, minority characteristic generics and majority characteristic generics, and inject this knowledge using a knowledge embedding model. Our results show that knowledge injection reduces, but does not eliminate, generic overgeneralization, and that majority characteristic generics of kinds are more susceptible to overgeneralization bias.

Generic Overgeneralization in Pre-trained Language Models

Existing works on dialogue summarization often view the dialogue, which comprises utterances of different speakers, as a single utterance stream ordered by time. 
However, this single-stream approach without specific attention to the speaker-centered points has some limitations. To better capture the dialogue information, we propose a 2D view of dialogue based on a time-speaker perspective, and a corresponding two-stream model to utilize two streams obtained from the 2D view. Empirical results demonstrate that the effectiveness of proposed methods in improving ROUGE scores and faithfulness. We also show the significant improvements on MRC task compared to the single-stream model, indicating the potential of our method as a universal approach to improving dialogue-based tasks.

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[DEMO] LINGUIST: Language Model Instruction Tuning to Generate Annotated Utterances for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging

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Parameter-Efficient Neural Reranking for Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Retrieval

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