United Arab Emirates

Natural Language Generation (NLG) for non-English languages is hampered by the scarcity of datasets in these languages. We present the IndicNLG Benchmark, a collection of datasets for benchmarking NLG for 11 Indic languages. We focus on five diverse tasks, namely, biography generation using Wikipedia infoboxes, news headline generation, sentence summarization, paraphrase generation and, question generation. We describe the created datasets and use them to benchmark the performance of several monolingual and multilingual baselines that leverage pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models. Our results exhibit the strong performance of multilingual language-specific pre-trained models, and the utility of models trained on our dataset for other related NLG tasks. Our dataset creation methods can be easily applied to modest-resource languages as they involve simple steps such as scraping news articles and Wikipedia infoboxes, light cleaning, and pivoting through machine translation data. To the best of our knowledge, the IndicNLG Benchmark is the first NLG benchmark for Indic languages and the most diverse multilingual NLG dataset, with approximately 8M examples across 5 tasks and 11 languages. The datasets and models will be publicly available.

EMNLP 2022

IndicNLG Benchmark: Multilingual Datasets for Diverse NLG Tasks in Indic Languages

indic

indicbart

resources

datasets

indian languages

natural language generation

benchmark

# 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). 

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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.

Social media is daily creating massive multimedia content with paired image and text, presenting the pressing need to automate the vision and language understanding for various multimodal classification tasks. Compared to the commonly researched visual-lingual data, social media posts tend to exhibit more implicit image-text relations. To better glue the cross-modal semantics therein, we capture hinting features from user comments, which are retrieved via jointly leveraging visual and lingual similarity. Afterwards, the classification tasks are explored via self-training in a teacher-student framework, motivated by the usually limited labeled data scales in existing benchmarks. Substantial experiments are conducted on four multimodal social media benchmarks for image-text relation classification, sarcasm detection, sentiment classification, and hate speech detection. The results show that our method further advances the performance of previous state-of-the-art models, which do not employ comment modeling or self-training.

Borrowing Human Senses: Comment-Aware Self-Training for Social Media Multimodal Classification

The topic of summarization evaluation has recently attracted a surge of attention due to the rapid development of abstractive summarization systems. However, the formulation of the task is rather ambiguous, neither the linguistic nor the natural language processing communities have succeeded in giving a mutually agreed-upon definition. Due to this lack of well-defined formulation, a large number of popular abstractive summarization datasets are constructed in a manner that neither guarantees validity nor meets one of the most essential criteria of summarization: factual consistency. In this paper, we address this issue by combining state-of-the-art factual consistency models to identify the problematic instances present in popular summarization datasets. We release SummFC, a filtered summarization dataset with improved factual consistency, and demonstrate that models trained on this dataset achieve improved performance in nearly all quality aspects. We argue that our dataset should become a valid benchmark for developing and evaluating summarization systems.

Questioning the Validity of Summarization Datasets and Improving Their Factual Consistency

Human ratings are the gold standard in NLG evaluation. The standard protocol is to collect ratings of generated text, average across annotators, and rank NLG systems by their average scores. However, little consideration has been given as to whether this approach faithfully captures human preferences. Analyzing this standard protocol through the lens of utility theory in economics, we identify the implicit assumptions it makes about annotators. These assumptions are often violated in practice, in which case annotator ratings cease to reflect their preferences. The most egregious violations come from using Likert scales, which provably reverse the direction of the true preference in certain cases. We suggest improvements to the standard protocol to make it more theoretically sound, but even in its improved form, it cannot be used to evaluate open-ended tasks like story generation. For the latter, we propose a new human evaluation protocol called system-level probabilistic assessment (SPA). When human evaluation of stories is done with SPA, we can recover the ordering of GPT-3 models by size, with statistically significant results. However, when human evaluation is done with the standard protocol, less than half of the expected preferences can be recovered (e.g., there is no significant difference between curie and davinci, despite using a highly powered test).

The Authenticity Gap in Human Evaluation

Cognitive psychologists have documented that humans use cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to make quick decisions while expending less effort. While performing annotation work on crowdsourcing platforms, we hypothesize that such heuristic use among annotators cascades on to data quality and model robustness. In this work, we study cognitive heuristic use in the context of annotating multiple-choice reading comprehension datasets. We propose tracking annotator heuristic traces, where we tangibly measure low-effort annotation strategies that could indicate usage of various cognitive heuristics. We find evidence that annotators might be using multiple such heuristics, based on correlations with a battery of psychological tests. Importantly, heuristic use among annotators determines data quality along several dimensions: (1) known biased models, such as partial input models, more easily solve examples authored
by annotators that rate highly on heuristic use, (2) models trained on annotators scoring highly on heuristic use don't generalize as well, and (3) heuristic-seeking annotators tend to create qualitatively less challenging examples. Our findings suggest that tracking heuristic usage among annotators can potentially help with collecting challenging datasets and diagnosing model biases.

Cascading Biases: Investigating the Effect of Heuristic Annotation Strategies on Data and Models

Image-to-text tasks such as open-ended image captioning and controllable image description have received extensive attention for decades. Here we advance this line of work further, presenting Visual Spatial Description (VSD), a new perspective for image-to-text toward spatial semantics. Given an image and two objects inside it, VSD aims to produce one description focusing on the spatial perspective between the two objects. Accordingly, we annotate a dataset manually to facilitate the investigation of the newly-introduced task, and then build several benchmark encoder-decoder models by using VL-BART and VL-T5 as backbones. In addition, we investigate visual spatial relationship classification (VSRC) information into our model by pipeline and end-to-end architectures. Finally, we conduct experiments on our benchmark dataset to evaluate all our models. Results show that our models are awe-inspiring, offering accurate and human-like spatial-oriented text descriptions. Besides, VSRC has great potential for VSD, and the joint end-to-end architecture is the better choice for their integration. We will make the dataset and codes publicly available for research purposes.

Visual Spatial Description: Controlled Spatial-Oriented Image-to-Text Generation

Abstractive summarization models often produce factually inconsistent summaries that are not supported by the original article. Recently, a number of fact-consistent evaluation techniques have been proposed to address this issue; however, a detailed analysis of how these metrics agree with one another has yet to be conducted. In this paper, we present X-FACTOR, a cross-evaluation of three high-performing fact-aware abstractive summarization methods. First, we show that summarization models are often fine-tuned on datasets that contain factually inconsistent summaries and propose a fact-aware filtering mechanism that improves the quality of training data and, consequently, the factuality of these models. Second, we propose a corrector module that can be used to improve the factual consistency of generated summaries. Third, we present a re-ranking technique that samples summary instances from the output distribution of a summarization model and re-ranks the sampled instances based on their factuality. Finally, we provide a detailed cross-metric agreement analysis that shows how tuning a model to output summaries based on a particular factuality metric influences factuality as determined by the other metrics. Our goal in this work is to facilitate research that improves the factuality and faithfulness of abstractive summarization models.

X-FACTOR: A Cross-metric Evaluation of Factual Correctness in Abstractive Summarization

Image captioning models require the high-level generalization ability to describe the contents of various images in words. Most existing approaches treat the image--caption pairs equally in their training without considering the differences in their learning difficulties. Several image captioning approaches introduce curriculum learning methods that present training data with increasing levels of difficulty. However, their difficulty measurements are either based on domain-specific features or prior model training. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient difficulty measurement for image captioning using cross-modal similarity calculated by a pretrained vision--language model. Experiments on the COCO and Flickr30k datasets show that our proposed approach achieves superior performance and competitive convergence speed to baselines without requiring heuristics or incurring additional training costs. Moreover, the higher model performance on difficult examples and unseen data also demonstrates the generalization ability.

Cross-Modal Similarity-Based Curriculum Learning for Image Captioning

Linguistic information is encoded at varying timescales (subwords, phrases, etc.) and communicative levels, such as syntax and semantics. Contextualized embeddings have analogously been found to capture these phenomena at distinctive layers and frequencies. Leveraging these findings, we develop a fully learnable frequency filter to identify spectral profiles for any given task. It enables vastly more granular analyses than prior handcrafted filters, and improves on efficiency. After demonstrating the informativeness of spectral probing over manual filters in a monolingual setting, we investigate its multilingual characteristics across seven diverse NLP tasks in six languages. Our analyses identify distinctive spectral profiles which quantify cross-task similarity in a linguistically intuitive manner, while remaining consistent across languages—highlighting their potential as robust, lightweight task descriptors.

Spectral Probing

Numerical Question Answering is the task of answering questions that require numerical capabilities. Previous works introduce general adversarial attacks to Numerical Question Answering, while not systematically exploring numerical capabilities specific to the topic. In this paper, we propose to conduct numerical capability diagnosis on a series of Numerical Question Answering systems and datasets. A series of numerical capabilities are highlighted, and corresponding dataset perturbations are designed. Empirical results indicate that existing systems are severely challenged by these perturbations. E.g., Graph2Tree experienced a 53.83% absolute accuracy drop against the "Extra” perturbation on ASDiv-a, and BART experienced 13.80% accuracy drop against the "Language” perturbation on the numerical subset of DROP. As a counteracting approach, we also investigate the effectiveness of applying perturbations as data augmentation to relieve systems' lack of robust numerical capabilities. With experiment analysis and empirical studies, it is demonstrated that Numerical Question Answering with robust numerical capabilities is still to a large extent an open question. We discuss future directions of Numerical Question Answering and summarize guidelines on future dataset collection and system design.

Towards Robust Numerical Question Answering: Diagnosing Numerical Capabilities of NLP Systems

Most sentence embedding techniques heavily rely on expensive human-annotated sentence pairs as the supervised signals. Despite the use of large-scale unlabeled data, the performance of unsupervised methods typically lags far behind that of the supervised counterparts in most downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised sentence embedding framework, GenSE, that effectively leverages large-scale unlabeled data. Our method include three parts: 1) Generate: A generator/discriminator model is jointly trained to synthesize sentence pairs from open-domain unlabeled corpus; 2) Discriminate: Noisy sentence pairs are filtered out by the discriminator to acquire high-quality positive and negative sentence pairs; 3) Contrast: A prompt-based contrastive approach is presented for sentence representation learning with both annotated and synthesized data. Comprehensive experiments show that GenSE achieves an average correlation score of 85.19 on the STS datasets and consistent performance improvement on four domain adaptation tasks, significantly surpassing the state-of-the-art methods and convincingly corroborating its effectiveness and generalization ability.

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Borrowing Human Senses: Comment-Aware Self-Training for Social Media Multimodal Classification

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IndicBART: A Pre-trained Model for Indic Natural Language Generation