United Arab Emirates

Neural Machine Translation systems built on top of Transformer-based architectures are routinely improving the state-of-the-art in translation quality according to word-overlap metrics. However, a growing number of studies also highlight the inherent gender bias that these models incorporate during training, which reflects poorly in their translations. In this work, we investigate whether these models can be instructed to fix their bias during inference using targeted, guided instructions as contexts. By translating relevant contextual sentences during inference along with the input, we observe large improvements in reducing the gender bias in translations, across three popular test suites (WinoMT, BUG, SimpleGen). We further propose a novel metric to assess several large pre-trained models (OPUS-MT, M2M-100) on their sensitivity towards using contexts during translation to correct their biases. Our approach requires no fine-tuning, and thus can be used easily in production systems to de-bias translations from stereotypical gender-occupation bias. We hope our method, along with our metric, can be used to build better, bias-free translation systems.

EMNLP 2022

How sensitive are translation systems to extra contexts? Mitigating gender bias in Neural Machine Translation models through relevant contexts.

gender bias

natural language processing

machine translation

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

findings / work in progress

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Automatic document summarization aims to produce a concise summary covering the input document's salient information. Within a report document, the salient information can be scattered in the textual and non-textual content. However, existing document summarization datasets and methods usually focus on the text and filter out the non-textual content. Missing tabular data can limit produced summaries' informativeness, especially when summaries require covering quantitative descriptions of critical metrics in tables. Existing datasets and methods cannot meet the requirements of summarizing long text and multiple tables in each report. To deal with the scarcity of available data, we propose FINDSum, the first large-scale dataset for long text and multi-table summarization. Built on 21,125 annual reports from 3,794 companies, it has two subsets for summarizing each company's results of operations and liquidity. To summarize the long text and dozens of tables in each report, we present three types of summarization methods. Besides, we propose a set of evaluation metrics to assess the usage of numerical information in produced summaries. Dataset analyses and experimental results indicate the importance of jointly considering input textual and tabular data when summarizing report documents.

Long Text and Multi-Table Summarization: Dataset and Method

Text ranking plays a key role in providing content that best answers user queries. It is usually divided into two sub-tasks to perform efficient information retrieval given a query: text retrieval and text re-ranking. Recent research on pretrained language models (PLM) has demonstrated efficiency and gain on both sub-tasks. However, while existing methods have benefited from pre-trained language models and achieved high recall rates on passage retrieval, the ranking performance still demands further improvement. In this paper, we propose MatRank, which learns to re-rank the text retrieved for a given query by learning to predict the most relevant passage based on a latent preference matrix. Specifically, MatRank uses a PLM to generate an asymmetric latent matrix of relative preference scores between all pairs of retrieved passages. Then, the latent matrix is aggregated row-wise and column-wise to obtain global preferences and predictions of the most relevant passage in two of these directions, respectively. We conduct extensive experiments on MS MACRO, WikiAQ, and SemEval datasets. Experimental results show that MatRank has achieved new state-of-the-art results on these datasets, outperforming all prior methods on ranking performance metrics.

MatRank: Text Re-ranking by Latent Preference Matrix

Recent progress regarding the use of language models (LMs) as knowledge bases (KBs) has shown that language models can act as structured knowledge bases for storing relational facts. However, most existing works only considered the LM-as-KB paradigm in a static setting, which ignores the analysis of temporal dynamics of world knowledge. Furthermore, a basic function of KBs, i.e., the ability to store conflicting information (i.e., 1-N, N-1, and N-M relations), is underexplored. In this paper, we formulate two practical requirements for treating LMs as temporal KBs: (i) The capacity to store temporally-scoped knowledge that contains conflicting information and (ii) the ability to use stored knowledge for temporally-scoped knowledge queries. We introduce a new dataset called LAMA-TK which is aimed at probing temporally-scoped knowledge, and investigate the two above requirements to explore the LM-as-KB paradigm in the temporal domain. On the one hand, experiments show that LMs can memorize millions of temporally-scoped facts with relatively high accuracy and transfer stored knowledge to temporal knowledge queries, thereby expanding the LM-as-KB paradigm to the temporal domain. On the other hand, we show that memorizing conflicting information, which has been neglected by previous works, is still challenging for LMs and hinders the memorization of other unrelated one-to-one relationships.

Can Language Models Serve as Temporal Knowledge Bases?

Are Large Pre-Trained Language Models Leaking Your Personal Information? In this paper, we analyze whether Pre-Trained Language Models (PLMs) are prone to leaking personal information. Specifically, we query PLMs for email addresses with contexts of the email address or prompts containing the owner's name. We find that PLMs do leak personal information due to memorization. However, since the models are weak at association, the risk of specific personal information being extracted by attackers is low. We hope this work could help the community to better understand the privacy risk of PLMs and bring new insights to make PLMs safe.

Are Large Pre-Trained Language Models Leaking Your Personal Information?

News articles both shape and reflect public opinion across the political spectrum. Analyzing them for social bias can thus provide valuable insights, such as prevailing stereotypes in society and the media, which are often adopted by NLP models trained on respective data. Recent work has relied on word embedding bias measures, such as WEAT. However, several representation issues of embeddings can harm the measures' accuracy, including low-resource settings and token frequency differences. In this work, we study what kind of embedding algorithm serves best to accurately measure types of social bias known to exist in US online news articles. To cover the whole spectrum of political bias in the US, we collect 500k articles and review psychology literature with respect to expected social bias. We then quantify social bias using WEAT along with embedding algorithms that account for the aforementioned issues. We compare how models trained with the algorithms on news articles represent the expected social bias. Our results suggest that the standard way to quantify bias does not align well with knowledge from psychology. While the proposed algorithms reduce the~gap, they still do not fully match the literature.

No Word Embedding Model Is Perfect: Evaluating the Representation Accuracy for Social Bias in the Media

This paper examines the encoding of analogy in large-scale pretrained language models, such as BERT and GPT-2. Existing analogy datasets typically focus on a limited set of analogical relations, with a high similarity of the two domains between which the analogy holds. As a more realistic setup, we introduce the Scientific and Creative Analogy dataset (SCAN), a novel analogy dataset containing systematic mappings of multiple attributes and relational structures across dissimilar domains. Using this dataset, we test the analogical reasoning capabilities of several widely-used pretrained language models (LMs). We find that state-of-the-art LMs achieve low performance on these complex analogy tasks, highlighting the challenges still posed by analogy understanding.

Scientific and Creative Analogies in Pretrained Language Models

Scaling multilingual representation learning beyond the hundred most frequent languages is challenging, in particular to cover the long tail of low-resource languages. We move away from the popular one-for-all multilingual models and focus on training multiple language (family) specific representations, but most prominently enable all languages to still be encoded in the same representational space. We focus on teacher-student training, allowing all encoders to be mutually compatible for bitext mining, and enabling fast learning of new languages. We also combine supervised and self-supervised training, allowing encoders to take advantage of monolingual training data.

Our approach significantly outperforms the original LASER encoder. We study very low-resource languages and handle 44 African languages, many of which are not covered by any other model. For these languages, we train sentence encoders and mine bitexts. Adding these mined bitexts yielded an improvement of 3.8 BLEU for NMT into English.

Bitext Mining Using Distilled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Languages

We present EdiT5 - a novel semi-autoregressive text-editing approach designed to combine the strengths of non-autoregressive text-editing and autoregressive decoding. EdiT5 is faster at inference times than conventional sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, while being capable of modeling flexible input-output transformations.

This is achieved by decomposing the generation process into three sub-tasks: (1) tagging to decide on the subset of input tokens to be preserved in the output, (2) re-ordering to define their order in the output text, and (3) insertion to infill the missing tokens that are not present in the input. The tagging and re-ordering steps, which are responsible for generating the largest portion of the output, are non-autoregressive, while the insertion uses an autoregressive decoder.

Depending on the task, EdiT5 requires significantly fewer autoregressive steps demonstrating speedups of up to 25x when compared to classic seq2seq models. Quality-wise, EdiT5 is initialized with a pre-trained T5 checkpoint yielding comparable performance to T5 in high-resource settings and clearly outperforms it on low-resource settings when evaluated on three NLG tasks: Sentence Fusion, Grammatical Error Correction, and Decontextualization.

EdiT5: Semi-Autoregressive Text Editing with T5 Warm-Start

We review the state of research on empathy in natural language processing and identify the following issues: (1) empathy definitions are absent or abstract, which (2) leads to low construct validity and reproducibility. Moreover, (3) emotional empathy is overemphasized, skewing our focus to a narrow subset of simplified tasks. We believe these issues hinder research progress and argue that current directions will benefit from a clear conceptualization that includes operationalizing cognitive empathy components. Our main objectives are to provide insight and guidance on empathy conceptualization for NLP research objectives and to encourage researchers to pursue the overlooked opportunities in this area, highly relevant, e.g., for clinical and educational sectors.

A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing

Automatic Peer-review Aspect Score Prediction (PASP) of academic papers can be a helpful assistant tool for both reviewers and authors. Most existing works on PASP utilize supervised learning techniques. However, the limited number of peer-review data deteriorates the performance of PASP. This paper presents a novel semi-supervised learning (SSL) method that incorporates the Transformer fine-tuning into the Γ-model, a variant of the Ladder network, to leverage contextual features from unlabeled data. Backpropagation simultaneously minimizes the sum of supervised and unsupervised cost functions, avoiding the need for layer-wise pre-training. The experimental results show that our model outperforms the supervised and naive semi-supervised learning baselines. Our source codes are available online.

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