United Arab Emirates

Recent relation extraction (RE) works have shown encouraging improvements by conducting contrastive learning on silver labels generated by distant supervision before fine-tuning on gold labels. Existing methods typically assume all these silver labels are accurate and treat them equally; however, distant supervision is inevitably noisy–some silver labels are more reliable than others. In this paper, we propose fine-grained contrastive learning (FineCL) for RE, which leverages fine-grained information about which silver labels are and are not noisy to improve the quality of learned relationship representations for RE. We first assess the quality of silver labels via a simple and automatic approach we call &quot;learning order denoising,&quot; where we train a language model to learn these relations and record the order of learned training instances. We show that learning order largely corresponds to label accuracy–early-learned silver labels have, on average, more accurate labels than later-learned silver labels. Then, during pre-training, we increase the weights of accurate labels within a novel contrastive learning objective. Experiments on several RE benchmarks show that FineCL makes consistent and significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods.

EMNLP 2022

Fine-grained Contrastive Learning for Relation Extraction

relation extraction

distant supervision

information extraction

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Recent relation extraction (RE) works have shown encouraging improvements by conducting contrastive learning on silver labels generated by distant supervision before fine-tuning on gold labels. Existing methods typically assume all these silver labels are accurate and treat them equally; however, distant supervision is inevitably noisy–some silver labels are more reliable than others. In this paper, we propose fine-grained contrastive learning (FineCL) for RE, which leverages fine-grained information about which silver labels are and are not noisy to improve the quality of learned relationship representations for RE. We first assess the quality of silver labels via a simple and automatic approach we call "learning order denoising," where we train a language model to learn these relations and record the order of learned training instances. We show that learning order largely corresponds to label accuracy–early-learned silver labels have, on average, more accurate labels than later-learned silver labels. Then, during pre-training, we increase the weights of accurate labels within a novel contrastive learning objective. Experiments on several RE benchmarks show that FineCL makes consistent and significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods.

technical paper

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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.

Recent advances in vision-and-language modeling have seen the development of Transformer architectures that achieve remarkable performance on multimodal reasoning tasks.
Yet, the exact capabilities of these black-box models are still poorly understood. While much of previous work has focused on studying their ability to learn meaning at the word-level, their ability to track syntactic dependencies between words has received less attention.
We take a first step in closing this gap by creating a new multimodal task targeted at evaluating understanding of predicate-noun dependencies in a controlled setup.
We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art models and find that their performance on the task varies considerably, with some models performing relatively well and others at chance level. In an effort to explain this variability, our analyses indicate that the quality (and not only sheer quantity) of pretraining data is essential. Additionally, the best performing models leverage fine-grained multimodal pretraining objectives in addition to the standard image-text matching objectives.
This study highlights that targeted and controlled evaluations are a crucial step for a precise and rigorous test of the multimodal knowledge of vision-and-language models.

Do Vision-and-Language Transformers Learn Grounded Predicate-Noun Dependencies?

The construction of open-domain dialogue systems requires high-quality dialogue datasets. The dialogue data admits a wide variety of responses for a given dialogue history, especially responses with different semantics. However, collecting high-quality such a dataset in most scenarios is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation method to automatically augment high-quality responses with different semantics by counterfactual inference. Specifically, given an observed dialogue, our counterfactual generation model first infers semantically different responses by replacing the observed reply perspective with substituted ones. Furthermore, our data selection method filters out detrimental augmented responses. Experimental results show that our data augmentation method can augment high-quality responses with different semantics for a given dialogue history, and can outperform competitive baselines on multiple downstream tasks.

Counterfactual Data Augmentation via Perspective Transition for Open-Domain Dialogues

Multi-hop knowledge graph (KG) reasoning has been widely studied in recent years to provide interpretable predictions on missing links with evidential paths. Most previous works use reinforcement learning (RL) based methods that learn to navigate the path towards the target entity. However, these methods suffer from slow and poor convergence, and they may fail to infer a certain path when there is a missing edge along the path. Here we present SQUIRE, the first Sequence-to-sequence based multi-hop reasoning framework, which utilizes an encoder-decoder Transformer structure to translate the query to a path. Our framework brings about two benefits: (1) It can learn and predict in an end-to-end fashion, which gives better and faster convergence; (2) Our transformer model does not rely on existing edges to generate the path, and has the flexibility to complete missing edges along the path, especially in sparse KGs. Experiments on standard and sparse KGs show that our approach yields significant improvement over prior methods, while converging 4x-7x faster.

SQUIRE: A Sequence-to-sequence Framework for Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Most computational models of dependency syntax consist of distributions over spanning trees. However, the majority of dependency treebanks require that every valid dependency tree has a single edge coming out of the ROOT node, a constraint that is not part of the definition of spanning trees. For this reason all standard inference algorithms for spanning trees are sub-optimal for inference over dependency trees.

Zmigrod et al (2021) proposed algorithms for sampling with and without replacement from the dependency tree distribution that incorporate the single-root constraint. In this paper we show that their fastest algorithm for sampling with replacement, Wilson-RC, is in fact producing biased samples and we provide two alternatives that are unbiased. Additionally, we propose two algorithms (one incremental, one parallel) that reduce the asymptotic runtime of algorithm for sampling k trees without replacement to O(kn^3). These algorithms are both asymptotically and practically more efficient.

Unbiased and Efficient Sampling of Dependency Trees

Knowledge-grounded dialogue (KGC) shows excellent potential to deliver an engaging and informative response. However, existing approaches emphasize selecting one golden knowledge given a particular dialogue context, overlooking the one-to-many phenomenon in dialogue. As a result, existing paradigm limits the diversity of knowledge selection and generation. To this end, we establish a multi-reference KGC dataset and propose a series of metrics to systematically assess the one-to-many efficacy of existing KGC models. Furthermore, to extend the hypothesis space of knowledge selection to enhance the mapping relationship between multiple knowledge and multiple responses, we devise a span-based variational model and optimize the model in a wake-sleep style with an ameliorated evidence lower bound objective to learn the one-to-many generalization. Both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

There Is No Standard Answer: Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with Adversarial Activated Multi-Reference Learning

Neural networks have long been at the center of a debate around the cognitive mechanism by which humans process inflectional morphology. This debate has gravitated into NLP by way of the question: Are neural networks a feasible account for human behavior in morphological inflection?
We address that question by measuring the correlation between human judgments and neural network probabilities for unknown word inflections. We test a larger range of architectures than previously studied on two important tasks for the cognitive processing debate: English past tense, and German number inflection. We find evidence that the Transformer may be a better account of human behavior than LSTMs on these datasets, and that LSTM features known to increase inflection accuracy do not always result in more human-like behavior.

A Comprehensive Comparison of Neural Networks as Cognitive Models of Inflection

Recent visuolinguistic pre-trained models show promising progress on various end tasks such as image retrieval and video captioning. Yet, they fail miserably on the recently proposed Winoground dataset, which challenges models to match paired images and English captions, with items constructed to overlap lexically but differ in meaning (e.g., "there is a mug in some grass" vs. "there is some grass in a mug"). By annotating the dataset using new fine-grained tags, we show that solving the Winoground task requires not just compositional language understanding, but a host of other abilities like commonsense reasoning or locating small, out-of-focus objects in low-resolution images. In this paper, we identify the dataset's main challenges through a suite of experiments on related tasks (probing task, image retrieval task), data augmentation, and manual inspection of the dataset. Our analysis suggests that a main challenge in visuolinguistic models may lie in fusing visual and textual representations, rather than in compositional language understanding. We release our annotation and code at https://github.com/ajd12342/why-winoground-hard.

Why is Winoground Hard? Investigating Failures in Visuolinguistic Compositionality

Question answering models can use rich knowledge sources — up to one hundred retrieved passages and parametric knowledge in the large-scale language model (LM). Prior work assumes information in such knowledge sources is consistent with each other, paying little attention to how models blend information stored in their LM parameters with that from retrieved evidence documents. In this paper, we simulate knowledge conflicts (i.e., where parametric knowledge suggests one answer and different passages suggest different answers) and examine model behaviors. We find retrieval performance heavily impacts which sources models rely on, and current models mostly rely on non-parametric knowledge
in their best-performing settings. We discover a troubling trend that contradictions among knowledge sources affect model confidence only marginally. To address this issue, we present a new calibration study, where models are discouraged from presenting any single answer when presented with multiple conflicting answer candidates in retrieved evidences.

Rich Knowledge Sources Bring Complex Knowledge Conflicts: Recalibrating Models to Reflect Conflicting Evidence

Question answering (QA) has recently shown impressive results for answering questions from customized domains. Yet, a common challenge is to adapt QA models to an unseen target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised framework called QADA for QA domain adaptation. QADA introduces a novel data augmentation pipeline used to augment training QA samples. Different from existing methods, we enrich the samples via hidden space augmentation. For questions, we introduce multi-hop synonyms and sample augmented token embeddings with Dirichlet distributions. For contexts, we develop an augmentation method which learns to drop context spans via a custom attentive sampling strategy. Additionally, contrastive learning is integrated in the proposed self-supervised adaptation framework QADA. Unlike existing approaches, we generate pseudo labels and propose to train the model via a novel attention-based contrastive adaptation method. The attention weights are used to build informative features for discrepancy estimation that helps the QA model separate answers and generalize across source and target domains. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to leverage hidden space augmentation and attention-based contrastive adaptation for self-supervised domain adaptation in QA. Our evaluation shows that QADA achieves considerable improvements on multiple target datasets over state-of-the-art baselines in QA domain adaptation.

QA Domain Adaptation using Hidden Space Augmentation and Self-Supervised Contrastive Adaptation

Transformers have become a standard neural network architecture for many NLP problems, motivating theoretical analysis of their power in terms of formal languages. Recent work has shown that transformers with hard attention are quite limited in power (Hahn, 2020), as they can be simulated by constant-depth AND/OR circuits (Hao et al., 2022). However, hard attention is a strong assumption, which may complicate the relevance of these results in practice. In this work, we analyze the circuit complexity of transformers with saturated attention: a generalization of hard attention that more closely captures the attention patterns learnable in practical transformers. We first show that saturated transformers transcend the known limitations of hard-attention transformers. We then prove saturated transformers with floating-point values can be simulated by constant-depth threshold circuits, giving the class TC0 as an upper bound on the formal languages they recognize.

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