United Arab Emirates

In this paper, we investigate to which extent contextual neural language models (LMs) implicitly learn syntactic structure. More concretely, we focus on constituent structure as represented in the Penn Treebank (PTB). Using standard probing techniques based on diagnostic classifiers, we assess the accuracy of representing constituents of different categories within the neuron activations of a LM such as RoBERTa. In order to make sure that our probe focuses on syntactic knowledge and not on implicit semantic generalizations, we also experiment on a PTB version that is obtained by randomly replacing constituents with each other while keeping syntactic structure, i.e., a semantically ill-formed but syntactically well-formed version of the PTB. We find that 4 pretrained transfomer LMs obtain high performance on our probing tasks even on manipulated data, suggesting that semantic and syntactic knowledge in their representations can be separated and that constituency information is in fact learned by the LM. Moreover, we show that a complete constituency tree can be linearly separated from LM representations.

EMNLP 2022

Probing for Constituency Structure in Neural Language Models

interpretability

syntax

language models

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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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.

findings / work in progress

Encoder-only transformer models have been successfully applied to different table understanding tasks, as in TAPAS. A major limitation of these architectures is that they are constrained to classification-like tasks such as cell selection or entailment detection. We present TabT5, an encoder-decoder model that generates natural language text based on tables and textual inputs. TabT5 overcomes the encoder-only limitation by incorporating a decoder component and leverages the input structure with table specific embeddings and pre-training. TabT5 achieves new state-of-the-art results on several domains, including spreadsheet formula prediction with a 15% increase in sequence accuracy, QA with a 2.5% increase in sequence accuracy and data-to-text generation with a 2.5% increase in BLEU.

Table-To-Text generation and pre-training with TabT5

Agents to assist with rescue, surgery, and similar activities could collaborate better with humans if they could learn new strategic behaviors through communication. We introduce a novel POMDP dialogue policy for learning from people. The policy has 3-way grounding of language in the shared physical context, the dialogue context, and persistent knowledge. It can learn distinct but related games, and can continue learning across dialogues for complex games. A novel sensing component supports adaptation to information-sharing differences across people. The single policy performs better than oracle policies customized to specific games and information behavior.

A POMDP Dialogue Policy with 3-way Grounding and Adaptive Sensing for Learning through Communication

Named entity disambiguation (NED) is a critical subtask of entity linking, which seeks to connect knowledge base entities with textual mentions of those entities. Naturally, the performance of a model depends on the domain it was trained on; thus, reducing the amount of data required to train models is advantageous. In this work, we leverage recent research on pattern exploitation for NED and explore whether it can reduce the amount of data required for domain adaptation by reformulating the disambiguation task as a masked language modeling problem. Using ADAPET (Tam et al., 2021), which implements a new approach for few-shot learning using fine-tuned transformer-based language models, we produce an NED model which yields, without any sacrifice of in-domain accuracy, a 7% improvement in zero-shot cross-domain performance as evaluated on NEDMed, a new NED dataset of mental health news which we release with this work.

Improving Few-Shot Domain Transfer for Named Entity Disambiguation with Pattern Exploitation

Differential framing of issues can lead to divergent world views on important issues. This is especially true in domains where the information presented can reach a large audience, such as traditional and social media. Scalable and reliable measurement of such differential framing is an important first step in addressing them. In this work, based on the intuition that framing affects the tone and word choices in written language, we propose a framework for modeling the differential framing of issues through masked token prediction via large-scale fine-tuned language models (LMs). Specifically, we explore three key factors for our framework: 1) prompt generation methods for the masked token prediction; 2) methods for normalizing the output of fine-tuned LMs; 3) robustness to the choice of pre-trained LMs used for fine-tuning. Through experiments on a dataset of articles from traditional media outlets covering five diverse and politically polarized topics, we show that our framework can capture differential framing of these topics with high reliability.

Capturing Topic Framing via Masked Language Modeling

A recurring challenge of crowdsourcing NLP datasets at scale is that human writers often rely on repetitive patterns when crafting examples, leading to a lack of linguistic diversity. We introduce a novel approach for dataset creation based on worker and AI collaboration, which brings together the generative strength of language models and the evaluative strength of humans. Starting with an existing dataset, MultiNLI for natural language inference (NLI), our approach uses dataset cartography to automatically identify examples that demonstrate challenging reasoning patterns, and instructs GPT-3 to compose new examples with similar patterns. Machine generated examples are then automatically filtered, and finally revised and labeled by human crowdworkers. The resulting dataset, WANLI, consists of 107,885 NLI examples and presents unique empirical strengths over existing NLI datasets. Remarkably, training a model on WANLI improves performance on eight out-of-domain test sets we consider, including by 11% on HANS and 9% on Adversarial NLI, compared to training on the 4x larger MultiNLI. Moreover, it continues to be more effective than MultiNLI augmented with other NLI datasets. Our results demonstrate the promise of leveraging natural language generation techniques and re-imagining the role of humans in the dataset creation process.

WANLI: Worker and AI Collaboration for Natural Language Inference Dataset Creation

Text games present opportunities for natural language understanding (NLU) methods to tackle reinforcement learning (RL) challenges. However, recent work has questioned the necessity of NLU by showing random text hashes could perform decently. In this paper, we pursue a fine-grained investigation into the roles of text in the face of different RL challenges, and reconcile that semantic and non-semantic language representations could be complementary rather than contrasting. Concretely, we propose a simple scheme to extract relevant contextual information into an approximate state hash as extra input for an RNN-based text agent. Such a lightweight plug-in achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art text agents using advanced NLU techniques such as knowledge graph and passage retrieval, suggesting non-NLU methods might suffice to tackle the challenge of partial observability. However, if we remove RNN encoders and use approximate or even ground-truth state hash alone, the model performs miserably, which confirms the importance of semantic function approximation to tackle the challenge of combinatorially large observation and action spaces. Our findings and analysis provide new insights for designing better text game task setups and agents.

Revisiting the Roles of "Text” in Text Games

Recently, prompt tuning (PT) has gained increasing attention as a parameter-efficient way of tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs). Despite extensively reducing the number of tunable parameters and achieving satisfying performance, PT is training-inefficient due to its slow convergence. To improve PT's training efficiency, we first make some novel observations about the prompt transferability of "partial PLMs”, which are defined by compressing a PLM in depth or width. We observe that the soft prompts learned by different partial PLMs of various sizes are similar in the parameter space, implying that these soft prompts could potentially be transferred among partial PLMs. Inspired by these observations, we propose Fast Prompt Tuning (FPT), which starts by conducting PT using a small-scale partial PLM, and then progressively expands its depth and width until the full-model size. After each expansion, we recycle the previously learned soft prompts as initialization for the enlarged partial PLM and then proceed PT. We demonstrate the feasibility of FPT on 5 tasks and show that FPT could save over 30% training computations while achieving comparable performance. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/FastPromptTuning.

FPT: Improving Prompt Tuning Efficiency via Progressive Training

Sanskrit Word Segmentation (SWS) is essential in making digitized texts available and in deploying downstream tasks. It is, however, non-trivial because of the sandhi phenomenon that modifies the characters at the word boundaries, and needs special treatment. Existing lexicon driven approaches for SWS make use of Sanskrit Heritage Reader, a lexicon-driven shallow parser, to generate the complete candidate solution space, over which various methods are applied to produce the most valid solution. However, these approaches fail while encountering out-of-vocabulary tokens. On the other hand, purely engineering methods for SWS have made use of recent advances in deep learning, but cannot make use of the latent word information on availability. 

To mitigate the shortcomings of both families of approaches, we propose Transformer based Linguistically Informed Sanskrit Tokenizer (TransLIST) consisting of (1) a module that encodes the character input along with latent-word information, which takes into account the sandhi phenomenon specific to SWS and is apt to work with partial or no candidate solutions, (2) a novel soft-masked attention to prioritize potential candidate words and (3) a novel path ranking algorithm to rectify the corrupted predictions. Experiments on the benchmark datasets for SWS show that TransLIST outperforms the current state-of-the-art system by an average 7.2 points absolute gain in terms of perfect match (PM) metric.

TransLIST: A Transformer-Based Linguistically Informed Sanskrit Tokenizer

Encoded text representations often capture sensitive attributes about individuals (e.g., race or gender), which raise privacy concerns and can make downstream models unfair to certain groups. In this work, we propose FEDERATE, an approach that combines ideas from differential privacy and adversarial training to learn private text representations which also induces fairer models. We empirically evaluate the trade-off between the privacy of the representations and the fairness and accuracy of the downstream model on four NLP datasets. Our results show that FEDERATE consistently improves upon previous methods, and thus suggest that privacy and fairness can positively reinforce each other.

Fair NLP Models with Differentially Private Text Encoders

Document-level machine translation leverages inter-sentence dependencies to produce more coherent and consistent translations. However, these models, predominantly based on transformers, are difficult to scale to long documents as their attention layers have quadratic complexity in the sequence length. Recent efforts on efficient attention improve scalability, but their effect on document translation remains unexplored. In this work, we investigate the efficacy of a recent linear attention model by Peng et al. (2021) on document translation and augment it with a sentential gate to promote a recency inductive bias. We evaluate the model on IWSLT 2015 and OpenSubtitles 2018 against the transformer, demonstrating substantially increased decoding speed on long sequences with similar or better BLEU scores. We show that sentential gating further improves translation quality on IWSLT.

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Table-To-Text generation and pre-training with TabT5

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Probing for Constituency Structure in Neural Language Models

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Probing for Constituency Structure in Neural Language Models

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