United Arab Emirates

The ability to extract high-quality translation dictionaries from monolingual word embedding spaces depends critically on the geometric similarity of the spaces---their degree of &quot;isomorphism.&quot; We address the root-cause of faulty cross-lingual mapping: that word embedding training resulted in the underlying spaces being non-isomorphic. 
We incorporate global measures of isomorphism directly into the skipgram loss function, successfully increasing the relative isomorphism of trained word embedding spaces and improving their ability to be mapped to a shared cross-lingual space. The result is improved bilingual lexicon induction in general data conditions, under domain mismatch, and with training algorithm dissimilarities. 
We release IsoVec at https://github.com/kellymarchisio/isovec.

EMNLP 2022

IsoVec: Controlling the Relative Isomorphism of Word Embedding Spaces

embedding space

bilingual lexicon induction

multilinguality

unsupervised

machine translation

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

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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).

The ability to extract high-quality translation dictionaries from monolingual word embedding spaces depends critically on the geometric similarity of the spaces---their degree of "isomorphism." We address the root-cause of faulty cross-lingual mapping: that word embedding training resulted in the underlying spaces being non-isomorphic. 
We incorporate global measures of isomorphism directly into the skipgram loss function, successfully increasing the relative isomorphism of trained word embedding spaces and improving their ability to be mapped to a shared cross-lingual space. The result is improved bilingual lexicon induction in general data conditions, under domain mismatch, and with training algorithm dissimilarities. 
We release IsoVec at https://github.com/kellymarchisio/isovec.

poster

## 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.

A key component of fact verification is the evidence retrieval, often from multiple documents. Recent approaches use dense representations and condition the retrieval of each document on the previously retrieved ones. The latter step is performed over all the documents in the collection, requiring storing their dense representations in an index, thus incurring a high memory footprint. An alternative paradigm is retrieve-and-rerank, where documents are retrieved using methods such as BM25, their sentences are reranked, and further documents are retrieved conditioned on these sentences, reducing the memory requirements. However, such approaches can be brittle as they rely on heuristics and assume hyperlinks between documents.

We propose a novel retrieve-and-rerank method for multi-hop retrieval, that consists of a retriever that 
jointly scores documents in the knowledge source and sentences from previously retrieved documents using an autoregressive formulation and is guided by a proof system based on natural logic that dynamically terminates the retrieval process if the evidence is deemed sufficient.

This method exceeds or is on par with the current state-of-the-art on FEVER, HoVer and FEVEROUS-S, 
while using 5 to 10 times less memory than competing systems. Evaluation on an adversarial dataset indicates improved stability of our approach compared to commonly deployed threshold-based methods. Finally, the proof system helps humans predict model decisions correctly more often than using the evidence alone.

Natural Logic-guided Autoregressive Multi-hop Document Retrieval for Fact Verification

Answering questions in narratives about {why events happened often requires commonsense knowledge external to the text. What aspects of this knowledge are available in large language models? What aspects can be made accessible via external commonsense resources? We study these questions in the context of answering questions in the TellMeWhy dataset using COMET as a source of relevant commonsense relations. We analyze the effects of model size (T5 and GPT3) along with methods of injecting knowledge (COMET) into these models. Results show that the largest models, as expected, yield substantial improvements over base models. Injecting external knowledge helps models of various sizes, but the amount of improvement decreases with larger model size. We also find that the format in which knowledge is provided is critical, and that smaller models benefit more from larger amounts of knowledge. Finally, we develop an ontology of knowledge types and analyze the relative coverage of the models across these categories.

Using Commonsense Knowledge to Answer Why-Questions

Controllable text simplification is a crucial assistive technique for language learning and teaching. 
One of the primary factors hindering its advancement is the lack of a corpus annotated with sentence difficulty levels based on language ability descriptions. 
To address this problem, we created the CEFR-based Sentence Profile (CEFR-SP) corpus, containing 17k English sentences annotated with the levels based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages assigned by English-education professionals. 
In addition, we propose a sentence-level assessment model to handle unbalanced level distribution because the most basic and highly proficient sentences are naturally scarce. 
In the experiments in this study, our method achieved a macro-F1 score of 84.5% in the level assessment, thus outperforming strong baselines employed in readability assessment.

CEFR-Based Sentence Difficulty Annotation and Assessment

We argue that disentangling content selection from the budget used to cover salient content improves the performance and applicability of abstractive summarizers. Our method, FactorSum, does this disentanglement by factorizing summarization into two steps through an energy function: (1) generation of abstractive summary views covering salient information in subsets of the input document (document views); (2) combination of these views into a final summary, following a budget and content guidance. This guidance may come from different sources, including from an advisor model such as BART or BigBird, or in oracle mode -- from the reference. This factorization achieves significantly higher ROUGE scores on multiple benchmarks for long document summarization, namely PubMed, arXiv, and GovReport. Most notably, our model is effective for domain adaptation. When trained only on PubMed samples, it achieves a 46.29 ROUGE-1 score on arXiv, outperforming PEGASUS trained in domain by a large margin. Our experimental results indicate that the performance gains are due to more flexible budget adaptation and processing of shorter contexts provided by partial document views.

Factorizing Content and Budget Decisions in Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents

Knowledge distillation (KD) has been a ubiquitous method for model compression to strengthen the capability of a lightweight model with the transferred knowledge from the teacher. In particular, KD has been employed in quantization-aware training (QAT) of Transformer encoders like BERT to improve the accuracy of the student model with the reduced-precision weight parameters. However, little is understood about which of the various KD approaches best fits the QAT of Transformers. In this work, we provide an in-depth analysis of the mechanism of KD on attention recovery of quantized large Transformers. In particular, we reveal that the previously adopted MSE loss on the attention score is insufficient for recovering the self-attention information. Therefore, we propose two KD methods; attention-map and attention-output losses. Furthermore, we explore the unification of both losses to address task-dependent preference between attention-map and output losses. The experimental results on various Transformer encoder models demonstrate that the proposed KD methods achieve state-of-the-art accuracy for QAT with sub-2-bit weight quantization.

Understanding and Improving Knowledge Distillation for Quantization Aware Training of Large Transformer Encoders

Translation has played a crucial role in improving the performance on multilingual tasks: (1) to generate the target language data from the source language data for training and (2) to generate the source language data from the target language data for inference. However, prior works have not considered the use of both translations simultaneously. This paper shows that combining them can synergize the results on various multilingual sentence classification tasks. We empirically find that translation artifacts stylized by translators are the main factor of the performance gain. Based on this analysis, we adopt two training methods, SupCon and MixUp, considering translation artifacts. Furthermore, we propose a cross-lingual fine-tuning algorithm called MUSC, which uses SupCon and MixUp jointly and improves the performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/jongwooko/MUSC.

Synergy with Translation Artifacts for Training and Inference in Multilingual Tasks

The task of topical segmentation is well studied, but previous work has mostly addressed it in the context of structured, well-defined segments, such as segmentation into paragraphs, chapters, or segmenting text that originated from multiple sources. We tackle the task of segmenting running (spoken) narratives, which poses hitherto unaddressed challenges. As a test case, we address Holocaust survivor testimonies, given in English. Other than the importance of studying these testimonies for Holocaust research, we argue that they provide an interesting test case for topical segmentation, due to their unstructured surface level, relative abundance (tens of thousands of such testimonies were collected), and the relatively confined domain that they cover. We hypothesize that boundary points between segments correspond to low mutual information between the sentences proceeding and following the boundary. Based on this hypothesis, we explore a range of algorithmic approaches to the task, building on previous work on segmentation that uses generative Bayesian modeling and state-of-the-art neural machinery. Compared to manually annotated references, we find that the developed approaches show considerable improvements over previous work.

Topical Segmentation of Spoken Narratives: A Test Case on Holocaust Survivor Testimonies

Knowledge-enhanced language representation learning has shown promising results across various knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, prior methods are limited in efficient utilization of multilingual knowledge graph (KG) data for language model (LM) pretraining. They often train LMs with KGs in indirect ways, relying on extra entity/relation embeddings to facilitate knowledge injection. In this work, we explore methods to make better use of the multilingual annotation and language agnostic property of KG triples, and present novel knowledge based multilingual language models (KMLMs) trained directly on the knowledge triples. We first generate a large amount of multilingual synthetic sentences using the Wikidata KG triples. Then based on the intra- and inter-sentence structures of the generated data, we design pretraining tasks to enable the LMs to not only memorize the factual knowledge but also learn useful logical patterns. Our pretrained KMLMs demonstrate significant performance improvements on a wide range of knowledge-intensive cross-lingual tasks, including named entity recognition (NER), factual knowledge retrieval, relation classification, and a newly designed logical reasoning task.

Enhancing Multilingual Language Model with Massive Multilingual Knowledge Triples

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become one of the essential tasks in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) as it is often included in several NLU benchmarks (Liang et al., 2020; Wilie et al., 2020). However, most MRC datasets only have answerable question type, overlooking the importance of unanswerable questions. MRC models trained only on answerable questions will select the span that is most likely to be the answer, even when the answer does not actually exist in the given passage (Rajpurkar et al., 2018). This problem especially remains in medium- to low-resource languages like Indonesian. Existing Indonesian MRC datasets (Purwarianti et al., 2007; Clark et al., 2020) are still inadequate because of the small size and limited question types, i.e., they only cover answerable questions. To fill this gap, we build a new Indonesian MRC dataset called I(n)don'tKnow- MRC (IDK-MRC) by combining the automatic and manual unanswerable question generation to minimize the cost of manual dataset construction while maintaining the dataset quality. Combined with the existing answerable questions, IDK-MRC consists of more than 10K questions in total. Our analysis shows that our dataset significantly improves the performance of Indonesian MRC models, showing a large improvement for unanswerable questions.

IDK-MRC: Unanswerable Questions for Indonesian Machine Reading Comprehension

Bi-encoder architectures for distantly-supervised relation extraction are designed to make use of the complementary information found in text and knowledge graphs (KG).
However, current architectures suffer from two drawbacks. They either do not allow any sharing between the text encoder and the KG encoder at all, or, in case of models with KG-to-text attention, only share information in one direction. Here, we introduce cross-stitch bi-encoders, which allow full interaction between the text encoder and the KG encoder via a cross-stitch mechanism. The cross-stitch mechanism allows sharing and updating representations between the two encoders at any layer, with the amount of sharing being dynamically controlled via cross-attention-based gates. Experimental results on two relation extraction benchmarks from two different domains show that enabling full interaction between the two encoders yields strong improvements.

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Natural Logic-guided Autoregressive Multi-hop Document Retrieval for Fact Verification

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