United Arab Emirates

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&#39;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.

EMNLP 2022

IDK-MRC: Unanswerable Questions for Indonesian Machine Reading Comprehension

low-resource language

question generation

question answering

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

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.

poster

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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.

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.

Cross-stitching Text and Knowledge Graph Encoders for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

Most evaluations of attribution methods focus on the English language. In this work, we present a multilingual approach for evaluating attribution methods for the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task in terms of faithfulness and plausibility.
First, we introduce a novel cross-lingual strategy to measure faithfulness based on word alignments, which eliminates the drawbacks of erasure-based evaluations.
We then perform a comprehensive evaluation of attribution methods, considering different output mechanisms and aggregation methods.
Finally, we augment the XNLI dataset with highlight-based explanations, providing a multilingual NLI dataset with highlights, to support future exNLP studies. Our results show that attribution methods performing best for plausibility and faithfulness are different.

A Multilingual Perspective Towards the Evaluation of Attribution Methods in Natural Language Inference

Live commentary plays an important role in sports broadcasts and video games, making spectators more excited and immersed. In this context, though approaches for automatically generating such commentary have been proposed in the past, they have been generally concerned with specific fields, where it is possible to leverage domain-specific information. In light of this, we propose the task of generating video commentary in an open-domain fashion. We detail the construction of a new large-scale dataset of transcribed commentary aligned with videos containing various human actions in a variety of domains, and propose approaches based on well-known neural architectures to tackle the task. To understand the strengths and limitations of current approaches, we present an in-depth empirical study based on our data. Our results suggest clear trade-offs between textual and visual inputs for the models and highlight the importance of relying on external knowledge in this open-domain setting, resulting in a set of robust baselines for our task.

Open-domain Video Commentary Generation

Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable successes in natural language processing tasks, coming at the cost of increasing model size. To address this issue, knowledge distillation (KD) has been widely applied to compress language models. However, typical KD approaches for language models have overlooked the difficulty of training examples, suffering from incorrect teacher prediction transfer and sub-efficient training. In this paper, we propose a novel KD framework, Tutor-KD, which improves the distillation effectiveness by controlling the difficulty of training examples during pre-training. We introduce a tutor network that generates samples that are easy for the teacher but difficult for the student, with training on a carefully designed policy gradient method. Experimental results show that Tutor-KD significantly and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art KD methods with variously sized student models on the GLUE benchmark, demonstrating that the tutor can effectively generate training examples for the student.

Tutoring Helps Students Learn Better: Improving Knowledge Distillation for BERT with Tutor Network

Instead of using a single ground truth for language processing tasks, several recent studies have examined how to represent and predict the labels of the set of annotators. However, often little or no information about annotators is known, or the set of annotators is small. In this work, we examine a corpus of social media posts about conflict from a set of 13k annotators and 210k judgements of social norms. We provide a novel experimental setup that applies personalization methods to the modeling of annotators and compare their effectiveness for predicting the perception of social norms. We further provide an analysis of performance across subsets of social situations that vary by the closeness of the relationship between parties in conflict, and assess where personalization helps the most.

Unifying Data Perspectivism and Personalization: An Application to Social Norms

Debiasing language models from unwanted behaviors in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks is a topic with rapidly increasing interest in the NLP community. Spurious statistical correlations in the data allow models to perform shortcuts and avoid uncovering more advanced and desirable linguistic features.
A multitude of effective debiasing approaches has been proposed, but flexibility remains a major issue. For the most part, models must be retrained to find a new set of weights with debiased behavior.
We propose a new debiasing method in which we identify debiased pruning masks that can be applied to a finetuned model. This enables the selective and conditional application of debiasing behaviors.
We assume that bias is caused by a certain subset of weights in the network; our method is, in essence, a mask search to identify and remove biased weights.
Our masks show equivalent or superior performance to the standard counterparts, while offering important benefits.
Pruning masks can be stored with high efficiency in memory, and it becomes possible to switch among several debiasing behaviors (or revert back to the original biased model) at inference time. Finally, it opens the doors to further research on how biases are acquired by studying the generated masks. For example, we observed that the early layers and attention heads were pruned more aggressively, possibly hinting towards the location in which biases may be encoded.

Debiasing Masks: A New Framework for Shortcut Mitigation in NLU

Existing summarization datasets come with two main drawbacks: 
(1) They tend to focus on overly exposed domains, such as news articles or wiki-like texts, and 
(2) are primarily monolingual, with few multilingual datasets.
In this work, we propose a novel dataset, called EUR-Lex-Sum, based on manually curated document summaries of legal acts from the European Union law platform (EUR-Lex). Documents and their respective summaries exist as cross-lingual paragraph-aligned data in several of the 24 official European languages, enabling access to various cross-lingual and lower-resourced summarization setups. We obtain up to 1,500 document/summary pairs per language, including a subset of 375 cross-lingually aligned legal acts with texts available in *all* 24 languages. 
In this work, the data acquisition process is detailed and key characteristics of the resource are compared to existing summarization resources. In particular, we illustrate challenging sub-problems and open questions on the dataset that could help the facilitation of future research in the direction of domain-specific cross-lingual summarization.
Limited by the extreme length and language diversity of samples, we further conduct experiments with suitable extractive monolingual and cross-lingual baselines for future work. 
Code for the extraction as well as access to our data and baselines is available online at: [https://github.com/achouhan93/eur-lex-sum](https://github.com/achouhan93/eur-lex-sum).

EUR-Lex-Sum: A Multi- and Cross-lingual Dataset for Long-form Summarization in the Legal Domain

Massively multilingual models are promising for transfer learning across tasks and languages. However, existing methods are unable to fully leverage training data when it is available in different task-language combinations. To exploit such heterogeneous supervision, we propose Hyper-X, a single hypernetwork that unifies multi-task and multilingual learning with efficient adaptation. It generates weights for adapter modules conditioned on both tasks and language embeddings. By learning to combine task and language-specific knowledge, our model enables zero-shot transfer for unseen languages and task-language combinations. Our experiments on a diverse set of languages demonstrate that Hyper-X achieves the best or competitive gain when a mixture of multiple resources is available, while on par with strong baseline in the standard scenario. Hyper-X is also considerably more efficient in terms of parameters and resources compared to methods that train separate adapters. Finally, Hyper-X consistently produces strong results in few-shot scenarios for new languages, showing the versatility of our approach beyond zero-shot transfer.

Hyper-X: A Unified Hypernetwork for Multi-Task Multilingual Transfer

Most Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering (OK-VQA) systems employ a two-stage framework that first retrieves external knowledge given the visual question and then predicts the answer based on the retrieved content. However, the retrieved knowledge is often inadequate. Retrievals are frequently too general and fail to cover specific knowledge needed to answer the question. Also, the naturally available supervision (whether the passage contains the correct answer) is weak and does not guarantee question relevancy. To address these issues, we propose an Entity-Focused Retrieval (EnFoRe) model that provides stronger supervision during training and recognizes question-relevant entities to help retrieve more specific knowledge. Experiments show that our EnFoRe model achieves superior retrieval performance on OK-VQA, the currently largest outside-knowledge VQA dataset. We also combine the retrieved knowledge with state-of-the-art VQA models, and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on OK-VQA.

Entity-Focused Dense Passage Retrieval for Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering

In this paper, we look at the case of a Generic text-to-text NMT model that has to deal with data coming from various modalities, like speech, images, or noisy text extracted from the web. We propose a two-step method, based on composable adapters, to deal with this problem of Multimodal Robustness. In a first step, we separately learn domain adapters and modality specific adapters, to deal with noisy input coming from various sources: ASR, OCR, or noisy text (UGC). In a second step, we combine these components at runtime via dynamic routing or, when the source of noise is unknown, via two new transfer learning mechanisms (Fast Fusion and Multi Fusion). We show that our method provides a flexible, state-of-the-art, architecture able to deal with noisy multimodal inputs.

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Cross-stitching Text and Knowledge Graph Encoders for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

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