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To improve deep learning models&#39; robustness, adversarial training has been frequently used in computer vision with satisfying results. However, adversarial perturbation on text have turned out to be more challenging due to the discrete nature of text. The generated adversarial text might not sound natural or does not preserve semantics, which is the key for real world applications where text classification is based on semantic meaning. In this paper, we describe a new way for generating adversarial samples by using pseudo-labeled in-domain text data to train a seq2seq model for adversarial generation and combine it with paraphrase detection. We showcase the benefit of our approach for a real-world Natural Language Understanding (NLU) task, which maps a user&#39;s request to an intent. Furthermore, we experiment with gradient-based training for the NLU task and try using token importance scores to guide the adversarial text generation. We show that our approach can generate realistic and relevant adversarial samples compared to other state-of-the-art adversarial training methods. Applying adversarial training using these generated samples helps the NLU model to recover up to 70% of these types of errors and makes the model more robust, especially in the tail distribution in a large scale real world application.

EMNLP 2022

Semi-supervised Adversarial Text Generation based on Seq2Seq models

semi-supervised adversarial generation

adversarial training

adversarial robustness

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AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

To improve deep learning models' robustness, adversarial training has been frequently used in computer vision with satisfying results. However, adversarial perturbation on text have turned out to be more challenging due to the discrete nature of text. The generated adversarial text might not sound natural or does not preserve semantics, which is the key for real world applications where text classification is based on semantic meaning. In this paper, we describe a new way for generating adversarial samples by using pseudo-labeled in-domain text data to train a seq2seq model for adversarial generation and combine it with paraphrase detection. We showcase the benefit of our approach for a real-world Natural Language Understanding (NLU) task, which maps a user's request to an intent. Furthermore, we experiment with gradient-based training for the NLU task and try using token importance scores to guide the adversarial text generation. We show that our approach can generate realistic and relevant adversarial samples compared to other state-of-the-art adversarial training methods. Applying adversarial training using these generated samples helps the NLU model to recover up to 70% of these types of errors and makes the model more robust, especially in the tail distribution in a large scale real world application.

poster

## 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:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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Welcome!
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.

Complex knowledge base question answering can be achieved by converting questions into sequences of predefined actions. However, there is a significant semantic and structural gap between natural language and action sequences, which makes this conversion difficult. In this paper, we introduce an alignment-enhanced complex question answering framework, called ALCQA, which mitigates this gap through question-to-action alignment and question-to-question alignment. We train a question rewriting model to align the question and each action, and utilize a pretrained language model to implicitly align the question and KG artifacts. Moreover, considering that similar questions correspond to similar action sequences, we retrieve top-k similar question-answer pairs at the inference stage through question-to-question alignment and propose a novel reward-guided action sequence selection strategy to select from candidate action sequences. We conduct experiments on CQA and WQSP datasets, and the results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and obtains a 9.88\% improvements in the F1 metric on CQA dataset. Our source code is available at \url{
https://github.com/TTTTTTTTy/ALCQA}.

Improving Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering via Question-to-Action and Question-to-Question Alignment

The instruction learning paradigm---where a model learns to perform new tasks from task descriptions alone---has become popular in research on general-purpose models. The capabilities of large transformer models as instruction learners, however, remain poorly understood. We use a controlled synthetic environment to characterize such capabilities. Specifically, we use the task of deciding whether a given string matches a regular expression (viewed as an instruction) to identify properties of tasks, instructions, and instances that make instruction learning challenging. For instance, we find that our model, a fine-tuned T5-based text2text transformer, struggles with large regular languages, suggesting that less precise instructions are challenging for models. Instruction executions that require tracking longer contexts of prior steps are also difficult. We use our findings to systematically construct a challenging instruction learning dataset, which we call Hard RegSet. Fine-tuning on Hard RegSet, our large transformer learns to correctly interpret (with at least 90\% accuracy) only 65.6\% of test instructions, and 11\%-24\% of the instructions in out-of-distribution generalization settings. We thus propose Hard RegSet as a challenging instruction learning dataset, and a controlled environment for studying instruction learning.

What Makes Instruction Learning Hard? An Investigation and a New Challenge in a Synthetic Environment

We propose a sentence-incremental neural coreference resolution system which incrementally builds clusters after marking mention boundaries in a shift-reduce method. The system is aimed at bridging two recent approaches at coreference resolution: (1) state-of-the-art non-incremental models that incur quadratic complexity in document length with high computational cost, and (2) memory network-based models which operate incrementally but do not generalize beyond pronouns. For comparison, we simulate an incremental setting by constraining non-incremental systems to form partial coreference chains before observing new sentences. In this setting, our system outperforms comparable state-of-the-art methods by 2 F1 on OntoNotes and 6.8 F1 on the CODI-CRAC 2021 corpus. In a conventional coreference setup, our system achieves 76.3 F1 on OntoNotes and 45.5 F1 on CODI-CRAC 2021, which is comparable to state-of-the-art baselines. We also analyze variations of our system and show that the degree of incrementality in the encoder has a surprisingly large effect on the resulting performance.

Sentence-Incremental Neural Coreference Resolution

Large-scale pretrained language models have made significant advances in solving downstream language understanding tasks. However, they generally suffer from reporting bias, the phenomenon describing the lack of explicit commonsense knowledge in written text, e.g., ''an orange is orange''. To overcome this limitation, we develop a novel approach, Z-LaVI, to endow language models with visual imagination capabilities. Specifically, we leverage two complementary types of ''imaginations'': (i) recalling existing images through retrieval and (ii) synthesizing nonexistent images via text-to-image generation. Jointly exploiting the language inputs and the imagination, a pretrained vision-language model (e.g., CLIP) eventually composes a zero-shot solution to the original language tasks. Notably, fueling language models with imagination can effectively leverage visual knowledge to solve plain language tasks. In consequence, Z-LaVI consistently improves the zero-shot performance of existing language models across a diverse set of language tasks.

Z-LaVI: Zero-Shot Language Solver Fueled by Visual Imagination

Identifying the release of new products and their predicted demand in advance is highly valuable for E-Commerce marketplaces and retailers. The information of an upcoming product release is used for inventory management, marketing campaigns and pre-order suggestions. Often, the announcement of an upcoming product release is widely available in multiple web pages such as blogs, chats or news articles. However, to the best of our knowledge, an automatic system to extract future product releases from web data has not been presented. In this work we describe an ML-powered multi-stage pipeline to automatically identify future product releases and rank their predicted demand from unstructured pages across the whole web. Our pipeline includes a novel Longformer-based model which uses a global attention mechanism guided by pre-calculated Named Entity Recognition predictions related to product releases. The model training data is based on a new corpus of 30K web pages manually annotated to identify future product releases. We made the dataset openly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6894770.

Is it out yet? Automatic Future Product Releases Extraction from Web Data

End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems represent the state of the art, but they rely on thousands of hours of manually annotated speech for training, as well as heavyweight computation for inference. Of course, this impedes commercialization since most companies lack vast human and computational resources. In this paper, we explore training and deploying an ASR system in the label-scarce, compute-limited setting. To reduce human labor, we use a third-party ASR system as a weak supervision source, supplemented with labeling functions derived from implicit user feedback. To accelerate inference, we propose to route production-time queries across a pool of CUDA graphs of varying input lengths, the distribution of which best matches the traffic's. Compared to our third-party ASR, we achieve a relative improvement in word-error rate of 8% and a speedup of 600%. Our system, called SpeechNet, currently serves 12 million queries per day on our voice-enabled smart television. To our knowledge, this is the first time a large-scale, Wav2vec-based deployment has been described in the academic literature.

SpeechNet: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale

Conversational Question Answering (CQA) aims to answer questions contained within dialogues, which are not easily interpretable without context. Developing a model to rewrite conversational questions into self-contained ones is an emerging solution in industry settings as it allows using existing single-turn QA systems to avoid training a CQA model from scratch. Previous work trains rewriting models using human rewrites as supervision. However, such objectives are disconnected with QA models and therefore more human-like rewrites do not guarantee better QA performance. 

In this paper we propose using QA feedback to supervise the rewriting model with reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our approach can effectively improve QA performance over baselines for both extractive and retrieval QA. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that our method can generate more accurate and detailed rewrites when compared to human annotations.

Reinforced Question Rewriting for Conversational Question Answering

Unexpected responses or repeated clarification questions from conversational agents detract from the users' experience with technology meant to streamline their daily tasks. To reduce these frictions, Query Rewriting (QR) techniques replace transcripts of faulty queries with alternatives that lead to responses that
satisfy the users' needs. Despite their successes, existing QR approaches are limited in their ability to fix queries that require considering users' personal preferences.
We improve QR by proposing Personalized Adaptive Interactions Graph Encoder (PAIGE).
PAIGE is the first QR architecture that jointly models user's affinities and query semantics end-to-end.
The core idea is to represent previous user-agent interactions and world knowledge in a structured form --- a heterogeneous graph --- and apply message passing to propagate latent representations of users' affinities to refine utterance embeddings.
Using these embeddings, PAIGE can potentially provide different rewrites given the same query for users with different preferences. Our model, trained without any human-annotated data, improves the rewrite retrieval precision of state-of-the-art baselines by 12.5--17.5% while having nearly ten times fewer parameters.

PAIGE: Personalized Adaptive Interactions Graph Encoder for Query Rewriting in Dialogue Systems

Real-world business applications require a trade-off between language model performance and size. We propose a new method for model compression that relies on vocabulary transfer. We evaluate the method on various vertical domains and downstream tasks. Our results indicate that vocabulary transfer can be effectively used in combination with other compression techniques, yielding a significant reduction in model size and inference time while marginally compromising on performance.

Fast Vocabulary Transfer for Language Model Compression

Multi-modality support has become an integral part of creating a seamless user experience with modern voice assistants with smart displays. Users refer to images, video thumbnails, or the accompanying text descriptions on the screen through voice communication with AI powered devices. This raises the need to either augment existing commercial voice only dialogue systems with state-of-the-art multimodal components, or to introduce entirely new architectures; where the latter can lead to costly system revamps. To support the emerging visual navigation and visual product selection use cases, we propose to augment commercially deployed voice-only dialogue systems with additional multi-modal components. In this work, we present a novel yet pragmatic approach to expand an existing dialogue-based context carryover system (Chen et al., 2019a) in a voice assistant with state-of-the-art multimodal components to facilitate quick delivery of visual modality support with minimum changes. We demonstrate a 35% accuracy improvement over the existing system on an in-house multi-modal visual navigation data set.

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Improving Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering via Question-to-Action and Question-to-Question Alignment

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