Croatia

We report on an experiment in case outcome classification on European Court of Human Rights cases where our model first learns to identify the convention articles allegedly violated by the state from case facts descriptions, and subsequently uses that information to classify whether the court finds a violation of those articles. We assess the dependency between these two tasks at the feature and outcome level. Furthermore, we leverage a hierarchical contrastive loss to pull together article-specific representations of cases at the higher level, leading to distinctive article clusters. The cases in each article cluster are further pulled closer based on their outcome, leading to subclusters of cases with similar outcomes. Our experiment results demonstrate that, given a static pre-trained encoder, our models produce a small but consistent improvement in classification performance over single-task and joint models without contrastive loss.


EACL 2023

Leveraging Task Dependency and Contrastive Learning for Case Outcome Classification on European Court of Human Rights Cases

legal judgement prediction

legal nlp

multi task learning

contrastive learning

poster

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Due to their similarity-based learning objectives, pretrained sentence encoders often internalize stereotypical assumptions that reflect the social biases that exist within their training corpora. In this paper, we describe several kinds of stereotypes concerning different communities that are present in popular sentence representation models, including pretrained next sentence prediction and contrastive sentence representation models. We compare such models to textual entailment models that learn language logic for a variety of downstream language understanding tasks. By comparing strong pretrained models based on text similarity with textual entailment learning, we conclude that the explicit logic learning with textual entailment can significantly reduce bias and improve the recognition of social communities, without an explicit de-biasing process

Logic Against Bias: Textual Entailment Mitigates Stereotypical Sentence Reasoning

Cross-task knowledge transfer via multi-task learning has recently made remarkable progress in general NLP tasks. However, entity tracking on the procedural text has not benefited from such knowledge transfer because of its distinct formulation, i.e., tracking the event flow while following structural constraints. State-of-the-art entity tracking approaches either design complicated model architectures or rely on task-specific pre-training to achieve good results. To this end, we propose MeeT, a Multi-task learning-enabled entity Tracking approach, which utilizes knowledge gained from general domain tasks to improve entity tracking. Specifically, MeeT first fine-tunes T5, a pre-trained multi-task learning model, with entity tracking-specialized QA formats, and then employs our customized decoding strategy to satisfy the structural constraints. MeeT achieves state-of-the-art performances on two popular entity tracking datasets, even though it does not require any task-specific architecture design or pre-training.

Entity Tracking via Effective Use of Multi-Task Learning Model and Mention-guided Decoding

Multilingual sentence representations from large models encode semantic information from two or more languages and can be used for different cross-lingual information retrieval and matching tasks. In this paper, we integrate contrastive learning into multilingual representation distillation and use it for quality estimation of parallel sentences (i.e., find semantically similar sentences that can be used as translations of each other). We validate our approach with multilingual similarity search and corpus filtering tasks. Experiments across different low-resource languages show that our method greatly outperforms previous sentence encoders such as LASER, LASER3, and LaBSE.

Multilingual Representation Distillation with Contrastive Learning

Back-translation is widely known for its effectiveness in neural machine translation when there is little to no parallel data. In this approach, a source-to-target model is coupled with a target-to-source model trained in parallel. The target-to-source model generates noisy sources, while the source-to-target model is trained to reconstruct the targets and vice versa. Recent developments of multilingual pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models for programming languages have been very effective for a broad spectrum of downstream software engineering tasks. Hence, training them to build programming language translation systems via back-translation is compelling. However, these models cannot be further trained via back-translation since they learn to output sequences in the same language as the inputs during pre-training. As an alternative, we propose performing back-translation via code summarization and generation. In code summarization, a model learns to generate natural language (NL) summaries given code snippets. In code generation, the model learns to do the opposite. Therefore, target-to-source generation in back-translation can be viewed as a target-to-NL-to-source generation. We show that our proposed approach performs competitively with state-of-the-art methods.

Summarize and Generate to Back-translate: Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages

Pretrained language models have achieved super-human performances on many Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) benchmarks. Nevertheless, their relative inability to defend against adversarial attacks has spurred skepticism about their natural language understanding. In this paper, we ask whether training with unanswerable questions in SQuAD 2.0 can help improve the robustness of MRC models against adversarial attacks. To explore that question, we fine-tune three state-of-the-art language models on either SQuAD 1.1 or SQuAD 2.0 and then evaluate their robustness under adversarial attacks. Our experiments reveal that current models fine-tuned on SQuAD 2.0 do not initially appear to be any more robust than ones fine-tuned on SQuAD 1.1, yet they reveal a measure of hidden robustness that can be leveraged to realize actual performance gains. Furthermore, we find that robustness of models fine-tuned on SQuAD 2.0 extends on additional out-of-domain datasets. Finally, we introduce a new adversarial attack to reveal of SQuAD 2.0 that current MRC models are learning.

The Impacts of Unanswerable Questions on the Robustness of Machine Reading Comprehension Models

Auto-regressive neural sequence models have been shown to be effective across text generation tasks. However, their left-to-right decoding order prevents generation from being parallelized. Insertion Transformer (Stern et al., 2019) is an attractive alternative that allows outputting multiple tokens in a single generation step. Nevertheless, due to the incompatibility between absolute positional encoding and insertion-based generation schemes, it needs to refresh the encoding of every token in the generated partial hypothesis at each step, which could be costly. We design a novel reusable positional encoding scheme for Insertion Transformers called Fractional Positional Encoding (FPE), which allows reusing representations calculated in previous steps. Empirical studies on various text generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of FPE, which leads to floating-point operation reduction and latency improvements on batched decoding.

Towards More Efficient Insertion Transformer with Fractional Positional Encoding

A common limitation of diagnostic tests for detecting social biases in NLP models is that they may only detect stereotypic associations that are pre-specified by the designer of the test. Since enumerating all possible problematic associations is infeasible, it is likely these tests fail to detect biases that are present in a model but not pre-specified by the designer. To address this limitation, we propose SODAPOP (SOcial bias Discovery from Answers about PeOPle), an approach for automatic social bias discovery in social commonsense question-answering. The SODAPOP pipeline generates modified instances from the Social IQa dataset (Sap et al., 2019b) by (1) substituting names associated with different demographic groups, and (2) generating many distractor answers from a masked language model. By using a social commonsense model to score the generated distractors, we are able to uncover the model's stereotypic associations between demographic groups and an open set of words. We also test SODAPOP on debiased models and show the limitations of multiple state-of-the-art debiasing algorithms.

SODAPOP: Open-Ended Discovery of Social Biases in Social Commonsense Reasoning Models

Event coreference models cluster event mentions pertaining to the same real-world event. Recent models rely on contextualized representations to recognize coreference among lexically or contextually similar mentions. However, models typically fail to leverage commonsense inferences, which is particularly limiting for resolving lexically-divergent mentions. We propose a model that extends event mentions with temporal commonsense inferences. Given a complex sentence with multiple events, e.g., "the man killed his wife and got arrested'', with the target event "arrested'', our model generates plausible events that happen before the target event – such as "the police arrived'', and after it, such as "he was sentenced''. We show that incorporating such inferences into an existing event coreference model improves its performance, and we analyze the coreferences in which such temporal knowledge is required.

What happens before and after: Multi-Event Commonsense in Event Coreference Resolution

In task-oriented dialog (ToD) new intents emerge on regular basis, with a handful of available utterances at best. This renders effective Few-Shot Intent Classification (FSIC) a central challenge for modular ToD systems. Recent FSIC methods appear to be similar: they use pretrained language models (PLMs) to encode utterances and predominantly resort to nearest-neighbor-based inference. However, they also differ in major components: they start from different PLMs, use different encoding architectures and utterance similarity functions, and adopt different training regimes.Coupling of these vital components together with the lack of informative ablations prevents the identification of factors that drive the (reported) FSIC performance. We propose a unified framework to evaluate these components along the following key dimensions:(1) Encoding architectures: Cross-Encoder vs Bi-Encoders;
(2) Similarity function: Parameterized (i.e., trainable) vs non-parameterized; 
(3) Training regimes: Episodic meta-learning vs conventional (i.e., non-episodic) training. Our experimental results on seven FSIC benchmarks reveal three new important findings. First, the unexplored combination of cross-encoder architecture and episodic meta-learning consistently yields the best FSIC performance. Second, episodic training substantially outperforms its non-episodic counterpart. Finally, we show that splitting episodes into support and query sets has a limited and inconsistent effect on performance. Our findings show the importance of ablations and fair comparisons in FSIC. We publicly release our code and data.

The Devil is in the Details: On Models and Training Regimes for Few-Shot Intent Classification

Recent years have witnessed interest in Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (TKGQA), resulting in the development of multiple methods. However, these are highly engineered, thereby limiting their generalizability, and they do not automatically discover relevant parts of the KG during multi-hop reasoning. Relational graph convolutional networks (RGCN) provide an opportunity to address both of these challenges -- we explore this direction in the paper. Specifically, we propose a novel, intuitive and interpretable scheme to modulate the messages passed through a KG edge during convolution based on the relevance of its associated period to the question. We also introduce a gating device to predict if the answer to a complex temporal question is likely to be a KG entity or time and use this prediction to guide our scoring mechanism. We evaluate the resulting system, which we call TwiRGCN, on a recent challenging dataset for multi-hop complex temporal QA called TimeQuestions. We show that TwiRGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on this dataset across diverse question types. Interestingly, TwiRGCN improves accuracy by 9--10 percentage points for the most difficult ordinal and implicit question types.

Leveraging Task Dependency and Contrastive Learning for Case Outcome Classification on European Court of Human Rights Cases

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Logic Against Bias: Textual Entailment Mitigates Stereotypical Sentence Reasoning