Korea, Republic of

Previous works have demonstrated the effectiveness of utilising pre-trained sentence encoders based on their sentence representations for meaning comparison tasks. Though such representations are shown to capture hidden syntax structures, the direct similarity comparison between them exhibits weak sensitivity to word order and structural differences in given sentences. A single similarity score further makes the comparison process hard to interpret. Therefore, we here propose to combine sentence encoders with an alignment component by representing each sentence as a list of predicate-argument spans (where their span representations are derived from sentence encoders), and decomposing the sentence-level meaning comparison into the alignment between
their spans for paraphrase identification tasks. Empirical results show that the alignment component brings in both improved performance and interpretability for various sentence encoders. After closer investigation, the proposed approach indicates increased sensitivity to structural difference and enhanced ability to distinguish non-paraphrases with high lexical overlap.

COLING 2022

Towards Structure-aware Paraphrase Identification with Phrase Alignment Using Sentence Encoders

meaning comparison

phrase alignment

paraphrase identification

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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.

technical paper

Harnessing Abstractive Summarization for Fact-Checked Claim Detection

Distantly supervised relation extraction aims to extract relational facts from texts but suffers from noisy instances. Existing methods usually select reliable sentences that rely on potential noisy labels, resulting in wrongly selecting many noisy training instances or underutilizing a large amount of valuable training data. This paper proposes a sentence-level DSRE method beyond typical instance selection approaches by preventing samples from falling into the wrong classification space on the feature space. Specifically, a theorem for denoising and the corresponding implementation, named Consensus Enhanced Training Approach (CETA), are proposed in this paper. By training the model with CETA, samples of different classes are separated, and samples of the same class are closely clustered in the feature space. Thus the model can easily establish the robust classification boundary to prevent noisy labels from biasing wrongly labeled samples into the wrong classification space. This process is achieved by enhancing the classification consensus between two discrepant classifiers and does not depend on any potential noisy labels, thus avoiding the above two limitations. Extensive experiments on widely-used benchmarks have demonstrated that CETA significantly outperforms the previous methods and achieves new state-of-the-art results.

CETA: A Consensus Enhanced Training Approach for Denoising in Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

This paper addresses a deficiency in existing cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) datasets and provides a robust evaluation of CLIR systems’ disambiguation ability. CLIR is commonly tackled by combining translation and traditional IR. Due to translation ambiguity, the problem of ambiguity is worse in CLIR than in monolingual IR. But existing auto-generated CLIR datasets are dominated by searches for named entity mentions, which does not provide a good measure for disambiguation performance, as named entity mentions can often be transliterated across languages and tend not to have multiple translations. Therefore, we introduce a new evaluation dataset (MuSeCLIR) to address this inadequacy. The dataset focusses on polysemous common nouns with multiple possible translations. MuSeCLIR is constructed from multilingual Wikipedia and supports searches on documents written in European (French, German, Italian) and Asian (Chinese, Japanese) languages. We provide baseline statistical and neural model results on MuSeCLIR which show that MuSeCLIR has a higher requirement on the ability of systems to disambiguate query terms.

MuSeCLIR: A Multiple Senses and Cross-lingual Information Retrieval dataset

As an emerging research topic in natural language processing community, emotion recognition in multi-party conversations has attained increasing interest. Previous approaches that focus either on dyadic or multi-party scenarios exert much effort to cope with the challenge of emotional dynamics and achieve appealing results. However, since emotional interactions among speakers are often more complicated within the entangled multi-party conversations, these works are limited in capturing effective emotional clues in conversational context. In this work, we propose Mutual Conversational Detachment Network (MuCDN) to clearly understand the conversational context by separating conversations into detached threads. Specifically, two detachment ways are devised to perform context and speaker-specific modeling within detached threads and they are bridged through a mutual module. Experimental results on two datasets show that our model achieves better performance over the baseline models.

MuCDN: Mutual Conversational Detachment Network for Emotion Recognition in Multi-Party Conversations

Compounding, a prevalent word-formation process, presents an interesting challenge for computational models. Indeed, the relations between compounds and their constituents are often complicated. It is particularly so in Chinese morphology, where each character is almost simultaneously bound and free when treated as a morpheme. To model such word-formation process, we propose the Notch (Nonlinear Transformation of Character embeddings) model and the character Jacobians. The Notch model first learns the non-linear relations between the constituents and words, and the character Jacobians further describe the character’s role in each word. In a series of experiments, we show that the Notch model predicts the embeddings of the real words from their constituents and helps account for the behavioral data of the pseudowords. Moreover, we also demonstrated that character Jacobians reflect the characters’ meanings. Taken together, the Notch model and character Jacobians may provide a new perspective on studying the word-formation process and morphology with modern deep learning.

Character Jacobian: modeling Chinese character meanings with deep learning model

Adversarial training, which minimizes the loss of adversarially perturbed examples, has received considerable attention. However, these methods require modifying all model parameters and optimizing the model from scratch, which is parameter inefficient and unfriendly to the already deployed models. As an alternative, we propose a pluggable defense module PlugAT, to provide robust predictions by adding a few trainable parameters to the model inputs while keeping the original model frozen. To reduce the potential side effects of using defense modules, we further propose a novel forgetting restricted adversarial training, which filters out bad adversarial examples that impair the performance of original ones. The lugAT-equipped BERT model substantially improves robustness over several strong baselines on various text classification tasks, whilst training only 9.1% parameters. We observe that defense modules trained under the same model architecture have domain adaptation ability between similar text classification datasets.

PlugAT: A Plug and Play Module to Defend against Textual Adversarial Attack

Summaries, keyphrases, and titles are different ways of concisely capturing the content of a document. While most previous work has released the datasets of keyphrases and summarization separately, in this work, we introduce LipKey, the largest news corpus with human-written abstractive summaries, absent keyphrases, and titles. We jointly use the three elements via multi-task training and training as joint structured inputs, in the context of document summarization. We find that including absent keyphrases and titles as additional context to the source document improves transformer-based summarization models.

LipKey: A Large-Scale News Dataset for Absent Keyphrases Generation and Abstractive Summarization

Although the Conditional Variational AutoEncoder (CVAE) model can generate more diversified responses than the traditional Seq2Seq model, the responses often have low relevance with the input words or are illogical with the question. A causal analysis is carried out to study the reasons behind, and a methodology of searching for the mediators and mitigating the confounding bias in dialogues is provided. Specifically, we propose to predict the mediators to preserve relevant information and auto-regressively incorporate the mediators into generating process. Besides, a dynamic topic graph guided conditional variational autoencoder (TGG-CVAE) model is utilized to complement the semantic space and reduce the confounding bias in responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model is able to generate both relevant and informative responses, and outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of automatic metrics and human evaluations.

Incorporating Casual Analysis into Diversified and Logical Response Generation

Measuring Sentence Textual Similarity (STS) is a classic task that can be applied to many downstream NLP applications such as text generation and retrieval. In this paper, we focus on unsupervised STS that works on various domains but only requires minimal data and computational resources. Theoretically, we propose a light-weighted Expectation-Correction (EC) formulation for STS computation. EC formulation unifies unsupervised STS approaches including the cosine similarity of Additively Composed (AC) sentence embeddings (Arora et al., 2017), Optimal Transport (OT) (Kusner et al., 2015), and Tree Kernels (TK) (Le et al., 2018). Moreover, we propose the Recursive Optimal Transport Similarity (ROTS) algorithm to capture the compositional phrase semantics by composing multiple recursive EC formulations. ROTS finishes in linear time and is faster than its predecessors. ROTS is empirically more effective and scalable than previous approaches. Extensive experiments on 29 STS tasks under various settings show the clear advantage of ROTS over existing approaches.1 Detailed ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches.

Unsupervised Sentence Textual Similarity with Compositional Phrase Semantics

We address contextualized code retrieval, the search for code snippets, helpful to fill gaps in a partial input program. Our approach facilitates a large-scale self-supervised contrastive training by splitting source code randomly into contexts and targets. To combat leakage between the two, we suggest a novel approach based on mutual identifier masking, dedentation, and the selection of syntax-aligned targets. Our second contribution is a new dataset for direct evaluation of contextualized code retrieval, based on a dataset of manually aligned subpassages of code clones. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach improves retrieval substantially, and yields new state-of-the-art results for code clone and defect detection.

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