United Arab Emirates

How language models process complex input that requires multiple steps of inference is not well understood. Previous research has shown that information about the intermediate results of their inputs can be extracted from the internal state of the models, but it is unclear where that information is encoded and whether that information is indeed used during inference. We analyze a BERT-based model by focusing on equations and their intermediate results. To identify where information about intermediate results is encoded, we measure the correlation between intermediate results and internal state using principal component analysis (PCA). Furthermore, by manipulating the features, we perform causal inference of the model. As a result, we show that the parameters in which the intermediate results information is encoded are not only correlated, but are indeed used in the prediction of the model. Our findings imply that there is locality in the model, and this is useful for increasing the interpretability of the model.

EMNLP 2022

Tracing and Manipulating Intermediate Results in Neural Math Problem Solvers

intermediate results

math problems

interpretability

neural networks

## 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.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

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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.

workshop paper

Recently, pattern-based fine-tuning was introduced as an alternative approach for task adaption, i.e. adapting a pre-trained language model to a downstream tasks,. An interesting property of pattern-based fine-tuning that has received considerable attention recently, is its improved generalization over vanilla fine-tuning when applied in the few-shot setting. However, despite its popularity, pattern-based fine-tuning remains poorly understood. In this work, we show that the improved generalization of pattern-based fine-tuning is not consistent across models and datasets of the same task. Moreover, we show that previous works considerably underestimates the generalization of vanilla fine-tuning and provide a new baseline approach for fine-tuning. Lastly, we argue that it is critical to study the differences between vanilla and pattern-based fine-tuning more thoroughly, as well as to investigate when and why pattern-based fine-tuning works, in order to provide a better understanding of the generalization of fine-tuned language models in general.

A Critical Look at Fine-tuning Generalization: Are Patterns All We Need?

With the rise of AI systems in real-world applications comes the need for reliable and trustworthy AI\@. An essential aspect of this are explainable AI systems. However, there is no agreed standard on how such systems should be assessed. Inspired by the Turing test, we introduce a human-centric assessment framework where a leading domain expert accepts or rejects the solutions of an AI system and another domain expert. By comparing the acceptance rates of provided solutions, we can assess how the AI system performs compared to the domain expert, and whether the AI system's explanations are human-understandable. This setup---comparable to the Turing test---can serve as a framework for a wide range of human-centric AI system assessments. 

A Human-Centric Assessment Framework for AI

Recent success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has stimulated interest in their ability to understand and work with numbers. Yet, the numerical reasoning over measurements has not been formally studied despite their importance. In this study, we show that PLMs lack the capability required for reasoning over measurements. Furthermore, we find that a language model trained on a measurement-rich corpus shows better performance on understanding measurements. We propose a simple embedding strategy to better distinguish between numbers and units, which leads to a significant improvement in the probing tasks.

Do Language Models Understand Measurements?

While Transformer-based language models are generally very robust to pruning, there is the recently discovered outlier phenomenon: disabling only 48 out of 110M parameters in BERT-base drops its performance by nearly 30% on MNLI. We replicate the original evidence for the outlier phenomenon and we link it to the geometry of the embedding space. We find that in both BERT and RoBERTa the magnitude of hidden state coefficients corresponding to outlier dimensions correlate with the frequencies of encoded tokens in pre-training data, and they also contribute to the "vertical" self-attention pattern enabling the model to focus on the special tokens. This explains the drop in performance from disabling the outliers, and it suggests that to decrease anisotopicity in future models we need pre-training schemas that would better take into account the skewed token distributions.

Outlier Dimensions that Disrupt Transformers are Driven by Frequency

Explanation faithfulness of model predictions in natural language processing is typically evaluated on held-out data from the same temporal distribution as the training data (i.e. synchronous settings). While model performance often deteriorates due to temporal variation (i.e. temporal concept drift), it is currently unknown how explanation faithfulness is impacted when the time span of the target data is different from the data used to train the model (i.e. asynchronous settings). For this purpose, we examine the impact of temporal variation on model explanations extracted by eight feature attribution methods and three select-then-predict models across six text classification tasks. Our experiments show that (i) faithfulness is not consistent under temporal variations across feature attribution methods (e.g. it decreases or increases depending on the method), with an attention-based method demonstrating the most robust faithfulness scores across datasets; and (ii) select-then-predict models are mostly robust in asynchronous settings with only small degradation in predictive performance. Finally, feature attribution methods show conflicting behavior when used in FRESH (i.e. a select-and-predict model) and for measuring sufficiency/comprehensiveness (i.e. as post-hoc methods), suggesting that we need more robust metrics to evaluate post-hoc explanation faithfulness. Code will be made publicly available.

On the Impact of Temporal Concept Drift on Model Explanations

While fine-tuned language models perform well on many language tasks, they were also shown to rely on superficial surface features such as lexical overlap. Excessive utilization of such heuristics can lead to failure on challenging inputs. We analyze the use of lexical overlap heuristics in natural language inference, paraphrase detection, and reading comprehension (using a novel contrastive dataset), and find that larger models are much less susceptible to adopting lexical overlap heuristics. We also find that longer training leads models to abandon lexical overlap heuristics. Finally, We provide evidence that the disparity between models size has its source in the pre-trained model.

Lexical Generalization Improves with Larger Models and Longer Training

A number of knowledge integration (KI) methods have recently been proposed to incorporate external knowledge into pretrained language models (LMs). Even though knowledge-enhanced LMs (KELMs) outperform base LMs on knowledge-intensive tasks, the inner-workings of these KI methods are not well-understood. For instance, it is unclear which knowledge is effectively integrated into KELMs and which is not; and if such integration led to catastrophic forgetting of already learned knowledge. We show that existing model interpretation methods such as linear probes and prompts have some key limitations in answering these questions. Then, we revisit KI from an information-theoretic view and propose a new theoretically sound probe model called Graph Convolution Simulator (GCS) for KI interpretation. GCS is eventually quite simple -- it uses graph attention on the corresponding knowledge graph for interpretation. We conduct various experiments to verify that GCS provides reasonable interpretation results for two well-known KELMs: ERNIE and K-Adapter. Our experiments reveal that only little knowledge is successfully integrated in these models, and simply increasing the size of the KI corpus may not lead to better KELMs.

What Has Been Enhanced in my Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model?

Adding interpretability to word embeddings represents an area of active research in text representation. Recent work has explored the potential of embedding words via so-called polar dimensions (e.g. good vs. bad, correct vs. wrong). Examples of such recent approaches include SemAxis, POLAR, FrameAxis, and BiImp. Although these approaches provide interpretable dimensions for words, they have not been designed to deal with polysemy, i.e. they can not easily distinguish between different senses of words. To address this limitation, we present SensePOLAR, an extension of the original POLAR framework that enables wordsense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings. The resulting interpretable word embeddings achieve a level of performance that is comparable to original contextual word embeddings across a variety of natural language processing tasks including the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks. Our work removes a fundamental limitation of existing approaches by offering users sense aware interpretations for contextual word embeddings.

SensePOLAR: Word sense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings

Adversarial examples in NLP are receiving increasing research attention. One line of investigation is the generation of word-level adversarial examples against fine-tuned Transformer models that preserve naturalness and grammaticality. Previous work found that human- and machine-generated adversarial examples are comparable in their naturalness and grammatical correctness. Most notably, humans were able to generate adversarial examples much more effortlessly than automated attacks. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of exactly how humans create these adversarial examples. By exploring the behavioural patterns of human workers during the generation process, we identify statistically significant tendencies based on which words humans prefer to select for adversarial replacement (e.g., word frequencies, word saliencies, sentiment) as well as where and when words are replaced in an input sequence. With our findings, we seek to inspire efforts that harness human strategies for more robust NLP models.

Identifying Human Strategies for Generating Word-Level Adversarial Examples

Causal transformer language models (LMs), such as GPT-3, typically require some form of positional encoding, such as positional embeddings. 
However, we show that LMs without any explicit positional encoding are still competitive with standard models and that this phenomenon is robust across different datasets, model sizes, and sequence lengths.
Probing experiments reveal that such models acquire an implicit notion of absolute positions throughout the network, effectively compensating for the missing information.
We conjecture that causal attention enables the model to infer the number of predecessors that each token can attend to, thereby approximating its absolute position.
Our findings indicate that causal LMs might derive positional awareness not only from the explicit positioning mechanism but also from the effects of the causal mask.

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