Korea, Republic of

Does BERT store surface knowledge in its bottom layers, syntactic knowledge in its middle layers, and semantic knowledge in its upper layers? In re-examining Jawahar et al. (2019) and Tenney et al.&#39;s (2019) probes into the structure of BERT, we have found that the pipeline-like separation that they were seeking lacks conclusive empirical support. BERT&#39;s structure is, however, linguistically grounded, although perhaps in a way that is more nuanced than can be explained by layers alone. We introduce a novel probe, called GridLoc, through which we can also take into account token positions, training rounds, and random seeds. Using GridLoc, we are able to detect other, stronger regularities that suggest that pseudo-cognitive appeals to layer depth may not be the preferred mode of explanation for BERT&#39;s inner workings.

COLING 2022

Does BERT Rediscover a Classical NLP Pipeline?

classical nlp pipeline

probing

bert

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

Does BERT store surface knowledge in its bottom layers, syntactic knowledge in its middle layers, and semantic knowledge in its upper layers? In re-examining Jawahar et al. (2019) and Tenney et al.'s (2019) probes into the structure of BERT, we have found that the pipeline-like separation that they were seeking lacks conclusive empirical support. BERT's structure is, however, linguistically grounded, although perhaps in a way that is more nuanced than can be explained by layers alone. We introduce a novel probe, called GridLoc, through which we can also take into account token positions, training rounds, and random seeds. Using GridLoc, we are able to detect other, stronger regularities that suggest that pseudo-cognitive appeals to layer depth may not be the preferred mode of explanation for BERT's inner workings.

technical paper

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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.

The presentation first provides a brief background of the entity alignment between temporal knowledge graphs, then introduces some related work and illustrates the motivation, presents the proposed approach and experiment result, and finally gives a conclusion.

A Simple Temporal Information Matching Mechanism for Entity Alignment Between Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Figurative language generation is the task of reformulating a given text in the desired figure of speech while still being faithful to the original context. We take the first step towards multi-figurative language modelling by providing a benchmark for the automatic generation of five common figurative forms in English. We train mFLAG employing a scheme for multi-figurative language pre-training on top of BART, and a mechanism for injecting the target figurative information into the encoder; this enables the generation of text with the target figurative form from another figurative form without parallel figurative-figurative sentence pairs. Our approach outperforms all strong baselines. We also offer some qualitative analysis and reflections on the relationship between the different figures of speech.

Multi-Figurative Language Generation

In this work, we explore the fitness of various word/concept representations in analyzing an experimental verbal fluency dataset providing human responses to 10 different category numeration tasks. Based on human annotations of so-called clusters and switches between sub-categories in the verbal fluency sequences,
we analyze whether lexical semantic knowledge represented in word embedding spaces (GloVe, fastText, ConceptNet, BERT) is suitable for detecting these conceptual clusters and switches within and across different categories. Our results indicate that ConceptNet embeddings, a distributional semantics method enriched with taxonomical relations, outperforms other semantic representations by a large margin. Moreover, category-specific analysis suggests that individual thresholds per category are more suited for the analysis of clustering and switching in particular embedding sub-space instead of a one-fits-all cross-category solution. The results point to interesting directions for future work on probing word embedding models
on the verbal fluency task.

Exploring Semantic Spaces for Detecting Clustering and Switching in Verbal Fluency

The recently proposed capability-based NLP testing allows model developers to test the functional capabilities of NLP models, revealing functional failures that cannot be detected by the traditional heldout mechanism. However, existing work on capability-based testing requires extensive manual efforts and domain expertise in creating the test cases. In this paper, we investigate a low-cost approach for the test case generation by leveraging the GPT-3 engine. We further propose to use a classifier to remove the invalid outputs from GPT-3 and expand the outputs into templates to generate more test cases. Our experiments show that TestAug has three advantages over the existing work on behavioral testing: (1) TestAug can find more bugs than existing work; (2) The test cases in TestAug are more diverse; and (3) TestAug largely saves the manual efforts in creating the test suites. The code and data for TestAug can be found at https://github.com/guanqun-yang/testaug.

TestAug: A Framework for Augmenting Capability-based NLP Tests

Modern neural machine translation (NMT) models have been shown to suffer limitation in compositional generalization, failing to effectively learn the translation of atoms (e.g., words) and their semantic composition (e.g., modification) from seen compounds (e.g., phrases), and thus suffering from significantly weakened translation performance on unseen compounds during inference. We address this issue by introducing categorization to the source contextualized representations. The main idea is to enhance generalization by reducing sparsity and overfitting, which is achieved by finding prototypes of token representations over the training set and integrating their embeddings into the source encoding. Experiments on a dedicated MT dataset (i.e., CoGnition) show that our method reduces compositional generalization error rates by 24\% error reduction.

Categorizing Semantic Representations for Neural Machine Translation

Few-shot table understanding is a critical and challenging problem in real-world scenario as annotations over large amount of tables are usually costly. Pre-trained language models (PLMs), which have recently flourished on tabular data, have demonstrated their effectiveness for table understanding tasks. However, few-shot table understanding is rarely explored due to the deficiency of public table pre-training corpus and well-defined downstream benchmark tasks, especially in Chinese. In this paper, we establish a benchmark dataset, FewTUD, which consists of 5 different tasks with human annotations to systematically explore the few-shot table understanding in depth. Since there is no large number of public Chinese tables, we also collect a large-scale, multi-domain tabular corpus to facilitate future Chinese table pre-training, which includes one million tables and related natural language text with auxiliary supervised interaction signals. Finally, we present FewTPT, a novel table PLM with rich interactions over tabular data, and evaluate its performance comprehensively on the benchmark.

Few-Shot Table Understanding: A Benchmark Dataset and Pre-Training Baseline

Nominal metaphors are frequently used in human language and have been shown to be effective in persuading, expressing emotion, and stimulating interest. This paper tackles the problem of Chinese Nominal Metaphor (NM) generation. We introduce a novel neural framework, which jointly optimizes three tasks: NM identification, NM component identification, and NM generation. The metaphor identification module is able to perform a self-training procedure, which discovers novel metaphors from a large-scale unlabeled corpus for NM generation. The NM component identification module emphasizes components during training and conditions the generation on these NM components for more coherent results. To train the NM identification and component identification modules, we construct an annotated corpus consisting of 6.3k sentences that contain diverse metaphorical patterns. Automatic metrics show that our method can produce diverse metaphors with good readability, where 92\% of them are novel metaphorical comparisons. Human evaluation shows our model significantly outperforms baselines on consistency and creativity.

CM-Gen: A Neural Framework for Chinese Metaphor Generation with Explicit Context Modelling

Named entity recognition has become an in- creasingly useful tool for digital humanities research, specially when it comes to historical texts. However, historical texts pose a wide range of challenges to both named entity recognition and natural language processing in general that are still difficult to address even with modern neural methods. In this article we focus in named entity recognition for historical French, and in particular for Early Mod- ern French (16th-18th c.), i.e. Ancien Régime French. However, instead of developing a specialised architecture to tackle the particularities of this state of language, we opt for a data- driven approach by developing a new corpus with fine-grained entity annotation, covering three centuries of literature corresponding to the early modern period; we try to annotate as much data as possible producing a corpus that is many times bigger than the most popular NER evaluation corpora for both Contemporary English and French. We then fine-tune existing state-of-the-art architectures for Early Modern and Contemporary French, obtaining results that are on par with those of the current state-of-the-art NER systems for Contemporary English. Both the corpus and the fine-tuned models are released.

A Data-driven Approach to Named Entity Recognition for Early Modern French

Language evolves over time, and word meaning changes accordingly. This is especially true in social media, since its dynamic nature leads to faster semantic shifts, making it challenging for NLP models to deal with new content and trends. However, the number of datasets and models that specifically address the dynamic nature of these social platforms is scarce. To bridge this gap, we present TempoWiC, a new benchmark especially aimed at accelerating research in social media-based meaning shift. Our results show that TempoWiC is a challenging benchmark, even for recently-released language models specialized in social media.

TempoWiC: An Evaluation Benchmark for Detecting Meaning Shift in Social Media

Despite the recent success of pretrained lan-
guage models as on-the-fly knowledge sources
for various downstream tasks, they have been
shown to inadequately represent trivial com-
mon facts that vision typically captures. This
limits their application to natural language un-
derstanding tasks that require commonsense
knowledge. We seek to determine the capa-
bility of pretrained visual–linguistic models as
knowledge sources on demand. To this end,
we systematically compare language-only and
visual–linguistic models in a zero-shot com-
monsense question answering inference task.
We find that visual–linguistic models are highly
promising regarding their benefit for text-only
tasks on certain types of commonsense knowl-
edge associated with the visual world. Sur-
prisingly, this knowledge can be activated even
when no visual input is given during inference,
suggesting effective multimodal fusion during
pretraining. However, we also reveal that there
is still a huge scope for improvements towards
better cross-modal reasoning abilities and pre-
training strategies for event understanding.

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Does BERT Rediscover a Classical NLP Pipeline?

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A Simple Temporal Information Matching Mechanism for Entity Alignment Between Temporal Knowledge Graphs

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