United Arab Emirates

Evidence from psycholinguistic studies suggests that the human brain builds a hierarchical syntactic structure during language comprehension. However, it is still unknown whether the neural basis of such structures is universal across languages. In this paper, we first analyze the differences in language structure between two diverse languages: Chinese and English. 
By computing the working memory requirements when applying parsing strategies to different language structures, we find that top-down parsing generates less memory load for the right-branching English and bottom-up parsing is less memory-demanding for Chinese.
Then we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether the brain has different syntactic adaptation strategies in processing Chinese and English. Specifically, for both Chinese and English, we extract predictors from the implementations of different parsing strategies, i.e., bottom-up and top-down. Then, these predictors are separately associated with fMRI signals. 
Results show that for Chinese and English, the brain utilizes bottom-up and top-down parsing strategies separately. These results reveal that the brain adopts parsing strategies with less memory processing load according to different language structures.

EMNLP 2022

Is the Brain Mechanism for Hierarchical Structure Building Universal Across Languages? An fMRI Study of Chinese and English

cross-language

fmri

syntax

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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).

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Recently, aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) has become a popular task in the field of aspect-level sentiment analysis. Previous work utilizes a predefined template to paraphrase the original sentence into a structure target sequence, which can be easily decoded as quadruplets of the form (aspect category, aspect term, opinion term, sentiment polarity). The template involves the four elements in a fixed order. However, we observe that this solution contradicts with the order-free property of the ASQP task, since there is no need to fix the template order as long as the quadruplet is extracted correctly. Inspired by the observation, we study the effects of template orders and find that some orders help the generative model achieve better performance. It is hypothesized that different orders provide various views of the quadruplet. Therefore, we propose a simple but effective method to identify the most proper orders, and further combine multiple proper templates as data augmentation to improve the ASQP task. Specifically, we use the pre-trained language model to select the orders with minimal entropy. By fine-tuning the pre-trained language model with these template orders, our approach improves the performance of quad prediction, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly in low-resource settings.

Improving Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction via Template-Order Data Augmentation

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown their effectiveness in multiple scenarios. However, KBQA remains challenging, especially regarding coverage and generalization settings. This is due to two main factors: i) understanding the semantics of both questions and relevant knowledge from the KB; ii) generating executable logical forms with both semantic and syntactic correctness. In this paper, we present a new KBQA model, TIARA, which addresses those issues by applying multi-grained retrieval to help the PLM focus on the most relevant KB context, viz., entities, exemplary logical forms, and schema items. Moreover, constrained decoding is used to control the output space and reduce generation errors. Experiments over important benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. TIARA outperforms previous SOTA, including those using PLMs or oracle entity annotations, by at least 4.1 and 1.1 F1 points on GrailQA and WebQuestionsSP, respectively. Specifically on GrailQA, TIARA outperforms previous models in all categories, with an improvement of 4.7 F1 points in zero-shot generalization.

TIARA: Multi-grained Retrieval for Robust Question Answering over Large Knowledge Base

Online forms are widely used to collect data from human and have a multi-billion market. Many software products provide online services for creating semi-structured forms where questions and descriptions are organized by predefined structures. However, the design and creation process of forms is still tedious and requires expert knowledge. To assist form designers, in this work we present FormLM to model online forms (by enhancing pre-trained language model with form structural information) and recommend form creation ideas (including question / options recommendations and block type suggestion). For model training and evaluation, we collect the first public online form dataset with 62K online forms. Experiment results show that FormLM significantly outperforms general-purpose language models on all tasks, with an improvement by 4.71 on Question Recommendation and 10.6 on Block Type Suggestion in terms of ROUGE-1 and Macro-F1, respectively.

FormLM: Recommending Creation Ideas for Online Forms by Modelling Semantic and Structural Information

Prompt-based techniques have demostrated great potential for improving the few-shot generalization of pretrained language models. However, their performance heavily relies on the manual design of prompts and thus requiring a lot of human efforts. In this paper, we introduce Genetic Prompt Search (GPS) to improve few-shot learning with prompts, which utilizes a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt.
GPS is gradient-free and requires no update of model parameters but only a small validation set. 
Experiments on diverse datasets proved the effectiveness of GPS, which outperforms manual prompts by a large margin of 2.6 points. 
Our method is also better than other parameter-efficient tuning methods such as prompt tuning.

GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-Shot Learning

Reasoning about causal and temporal event relations in videos is a new destination of Video Question Answering (VideoQA). The major stumbling block to achieve this purpose is the semantic gap between language and video since they are at different levels of abstraction. Existing efforts mainly focus on designing sophisticated architectures while utilizing frame- or object-level visual representations. In this paper, we reconsider the multi-modal alignment problem in VideoQA from feature and sample perspectives to achieve better performance. From the view of feature, we break down the video into trajectories and first leverage trajectory feature in VideoQA to enhance the alignment between two modalities. Moreover, we adopt a heterogeneous graph architecture and design a hierarchical framework to align both trajectory-level and frame-level visual feature with language feature. In addition, we found that VideoQA models are largely dependent on language
priors and always neglect visual-language interactions. Thus, two effective yet portable training augmentation strategies are designed to strengthen the cross-modal correspondence ability of our model from the view of sample. Extensive results show that our method outperforms all the state-of the-art models on the challenging NExT-QA benchmark.

Rethinking Multi-Modal Alignment in Multi-Choice VideoQA from Feature and Sample Perspectives

Document-level relation extraction (RE) aims to extract the relations between entities from the input document that usually containing many difficultly-predicted entity pairs whose relations can only be predicted through relational inference. Existing methods usually directly predict the relations of all entity pairs of input document in a one-pass manner, ignoring the fact that predictions of some entity pairs heavily depend on the predicted results of other pairs. To deal with this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel document-level RE model with iterative inference. Our model is mainly composed of two modules: 1) a base module expected to provide preliminary relation predictions on entity pairs; 2) an inference module introduced to refine these preliminary predictions by iteratively dealing with difficultly-predicted entity pairs depending on other pairs in an easy-to-hard manner. Unlike previous methods which only consider feature information of entity pairs, our inference module is equipped with two Extended Cross Attention units, allowing it to exploit both feature information and previous predictions of entity pairs during relational inference. Furthermore, we adopt a two-stage strategy to train our model. At the first stage, we only train our base module. During the second stage, we train the whole model, where contrastive learning is introduced to enhance the training of inference module. Experimental results on three commonly-used datasets show that our model consistently outperforms other competitive baselines.

Towards Better Document-level Relation Extraction via Iterative Inference

Adversarial training is one of the most powerful methods to improve the robustness of pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, this approach is typically more expensive than traditional fine-tuning because of the necessity to generate adversarial examples via gradient descent. Delving into the optimization process of adversarial training, we find that robust connectivity patterns emerge in the early training phase (typically $0.15\sim0.3$ epochs), far before parameters converge. Inspired by this finding, we dig out robust early-bird tickets (i.e., subnetworks) to develop an efficient adversarial training method: (1) searching for robust tickets with structured sparsity in the early stage; (2) fine-tuning robust tickets in the remaining time. To extract the robust tickets as early as possible, we design a ticket convergence metric to automatically terminate the searching process. Experiments show that the proposed efficient adversarial training method can achieve up to $7\times \sim 13 \times$ training speedups while maintaining comparable or even better robustness compared to the most competitive state-of-the-art adversarial training methods.

Efficient Adversarial Training with Robust Early-Bird Tickets

Entity typing aims at predicting one or more words that describe the type(s) of a specific mention in a sentence. Due to shortcuts from surface patterns to annotated entity labels and biased training, existing entity typing models are subject to the problem of spurious correlations. To comprehensively investigate the faithfulness and reliability of entity typing methods, we first systematically define distinct kinds of model biases that are reflected mainly from spurious correlations. Particularly, we identify six types of existing model biases, including mention-context bias, lexical overlapping bias, named entity bias, pronoun bias, dependency bias, and overgeneralization bias. To mitigate model biases, we then introduce a counterfactual data augmentation method. By augmenting the original training set with their debiased
counterparts, models are forced to fully comprehend sentences and discover the fundamental cues for entity typing, rather than relying on spurious correlations for shortcuts. Experimental results on the UFET dataset show our counterfactual data augmentation approach helps improve generalization of different entity typing models with consistently better performance on both the original and debiased test sets.

Does Your Model Classify Entities Reasonably? Diagnosing and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Entity Typing

Neural retrieval models have superseded classic bag-of-words methods such as BM25 as the retrieval framework of choice. However, neural systems lack the interpretability of bag-of-words models; it is not trivial to connect a query change to a change in the latent space that ultimately determines the retrieval results. To shed light on this embedding space, we learn a "query decoder" that, given a latent representation of a neural search engine, generates the corresponding query. We show that it is possible to decode a meaningful query from its latent representation and, when moving in the right direction in latent space, to decode a query that retrieves the relevant paragraph. In particular, the query decoder can be useful to understand "what should have been asked" to retrieve a particular paragraph from the collection. We employ the query decoder to generate a large synthetic dataset of query reformulations for MSMarco, leading to improved retrieval performance. On this data, we train a pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) T5 model for the application of query suggestion that outperforms both query reformulation and PRF information retrieval baselines.

Decoding a Neural Retriever's Latent Space for Query Suggestion

Parsing natural language questions into executable logical forms is a useful and interpretable way to perform question answering on structured data such as knowledge bases (KB) or databases (DB). 
However, existing approaches on semantic parsing cannot adapt to both modalities, as they suffer from the exponential growth of the logical form candidates and can hardly generalize to unseen data.
In this work, we propose Uni-Parser, a unified semantic parser for question answering (QA) on both KB and DB. We define the primitive (relation and entity in KB, and table name, column name and cell value in DB) as the essential element in our framework. The number of primitives grows only at a linear rate to the number of retrieved relations in KB and DB, preventing us from exponential logic form candidates. 
We leverage the generator to predict final logical forms by altering and composing top-ranked primitives with different operations (e.g. select, where, count). With sufficiently pruned search space by a contrastive primitive ranker, the generator is empowered to capture the composition of primitives enhancing its generalization ability. We achieve competitive results on multiple KB and DB QA benchmarks with more efficiency, especially in the compositional and zero-shot settings.

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