Croatia

The detection and normalization of temporal expressions is an important task and preprocessing step for many applications. 
However, prior work on normalization is rule-based, which severely limits the applicability in real-world multilingual settings, due to the costly creation of new rules. 
We propose a novel neural method for normalizing temporal expressions based on masked language modeling. 
Our multilingual method outperforms prior rule-based systems in many languages, and in particular, for low-resource languages with performance improvements of up to 33 F1 on average compared to the state of the art.

EACL 2023

Multilingual Normalization of Temporal Expressions with Masked Language Models

temporal tagging

masked language modeling

normalization

cross-lingual

information extraction

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.

Conversational interfaces provide a flexible and easy way for users to seek information that may otherwise be difficult or inconvenient to obtain. 
However, existing interfaces generally fall into one of two categories: FAQs, where users must have a concrete question in order to retrieve a general answer, or dialogs, where users must follow a pre-defined path but may receive a personalized answer. 
In this paper, we introduce Conversational Tree Search (CTS) as a new task that bridges the gap between FAQ-style information retrieval and task-oriented dialog, allowing domain-experts to define dialog trees which can then be converted to an efficient dialog policy that learns only to ask the questions necessary to navigate a user to their goal.
We collect a dataset for the travel reimbursement domain and demonstrate a baseline as well as a novel deep Reinforcement Learning architecture for this task. 
Our results show that the new architecture combines the positive aspects of both the FAQ and dialog system used in the baseline and achieves higher goal completion while skipping unnecessary questions.

Conversational Tree Search: A New Hybrid Dialog Task

We propose a novel approach to learn domain-specific plausible materials for components in the vehicle repair domain by probing Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) in a cloze task style setting to overcome the lack of annotated datasets. We devise a new method to aggregate salient predictions from a set of cloze query templates and show that domain-adaptation using either a small, high-quality or a customized Wikipedia corpus boosts performance. When exploring resource-lean alternatives, we find a distilled PLM clearly outperforming a classic pattern-based algorithm. Further, given that 98\% of our domain-specific components are multiword expressions, we successfully exploit the compositionality assumption as a way to address data sparsity.

Made of Steel? Learning Plausible Materials for Components in the Vehicle Repair Domain

Recent studies have demonstrated the usefulness of contextualized word embeddings in unsupervised semantic frame induction. However, they have also revealed that generic contextualized embeddings are not always consistent with human intuitions about semantic frames, which causes unsatisfactory performance for frame induction based on contextualized embeddings. In this paper, we address supervised semantic frame induction, which assumes the existence of frame-annotated data for a subset of predicates in a corpus and aims to build a frame induction model that leverages the annotated data. We propose a model that uses deep metric learning to fine-tune a contextualized embedding model, and we apply the fine-tuned contextualized embeddings to perform semantic frame induction. Our experiments on FrameNet show that fine-tuning with deep metric learning considerably improves the clustering evaluation scores, namely, the B-cubed F-score and Purity F-score, by about 8 points or more. We also demonstrate that our approach is effective even when the number of training instances is small.

Semantic Frame Induction with Deep Metric Learning

Large-scale language-agnostic sentence embedding models such as LaBSE (Feng et al., 2022) obtain state-of-the-art performance for parallel sentence alignment. However, these large-scale models can suffer from inference speed and computation overhead. This study systematically explores learning language-agnostic sentence embeddings with lightweight models. We demonstrate that a thin-deep encoder can construct robust low-dimensional sentence embeddings for 109 languages. With our proposed distillation methods, we achieve further improvements by incorporating knowledge from a teacher model. Empirical results on Tatoeba, United Nations, and BUCC show the effectiveness of our lightweight models. We release our lightweight language-agnostic sentence embedding models LEALLA on TensorFlow Hub.

LEALLA: Learning Lightweight Language-agnostic Sentence Embeddings with Knowledge Distillation

The information bottleneck (IB) principle has been proven effective in various NLP applications.
The existing work, however, only used either generative or information compression models to improve the performance of the target task. 
In this paper, we propose to combine the two types of IB models into one system to enhance Named Entity Recognition (NER).
For one type of IB model, we incorporate two unsupervised generative components, span reconstruction and synonym generation, into a span-based NER system.
The span reconstruction ensures that the contextualised span representation keeps the span information, while the synonym generation makes synonyms have similar representations even in different contexts. 
For the other type of IB model, we add a supervised IB layer that performs information compression into the system to preserve useful features for NER in the resulting span representations.
Experiments on five different corpora indicate that jointly training both generative and information compression models can enhance the performance of the baseline span-based NER system.
Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/nguyennth/joint-ib-models.

Span-based Named Entity Recognition by Generating and Compressing Information

NLP tasks are typically defined extensionally through datasets containing example instantiations (e.g., pairs of image \_i\_ and text \_t\_), but motivated intensionally through capabilities invoked in verbal descriptions of the task (e.g., "\_t\_ is a description of \_i\_, for which the content of \_i\_ needs to be recognised and understood").
We present Pento-DIARef, a diagnostic dataset in a visual domain of puzzle pieces where referring expressions are generated by a well-known symbolic algorithm (the "Incremental Algorithm"),
which itself is motivated by appeal to a hypothesised capability (eliminating distractors through application of Gricean maxims). Our question then is whether the extensional description (the dataset) is sufficient for a neural model to pick up the underlying regularity and exhibit this capability given the simple task definition of producing expressions from visual inputs. We find that a model supported by a vision detection step and a targeted data generation scheme 
achieves an almost perfect BLEU@1 score and sentence accuracy, whereas simpler baselines do not.

Pento-DIARef: A Diagnostic Dataset for Learning the Incremental Algorithm for Referring Expression Generation from Examples

Named Entity Recognition is a key Natural Language Processing task whose performance is sensitive to choice of genre and language. A unified NER model across multiple genres and languages is more practical and efficient by leveraging commonalities across genres or languages. In this paper, we propose a novel setup for NER which includes multi-domain and multilingual training and evaluation across 13 domains and 4 languages. We explore a range of approaches to building a unified model using domain and language adaptation techniques. Our experiments highlight multiple nuances to consider while building a unified model, including that naive data pooling fails to obtain good performance, that domain-specific adaptations are more important than language-specific ones and that including domain-specific adaptations in a unified model nears the performance of training multiple dedicated monolingual models at a fraction of their parameter count.

Towards a Unified Multi-Domain Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Model

We investigate in this paper how distributions of occupations with respect to gender is reflected in pre-trained language models. Such distributions are not always aligned to normative ideals, nor do they necessarily reflect a descriptive assessment of reality. In this paper, we introduce an approach for measuring to what degree pre-trained language models are aligned to normative and descriptive occupational distributions. To this end, we use official demographic information about gender--occupation distributions provided by the national statistics agencies of France, Norway, United Kingdom, and the United States. We manually generate template-based sentences combining gendered pronouns and nouns with occupations, and subsequently probe a selection of ten language models covering the English, French, and Norwegian languages. The scoring system we introduce in this work is language independent, and can be used on any combination of template-based sentences, occupations, and languages. The approach could also be extended to other dimensions of national census data and other demographic variables.

Measuring Normative and Descriptive Biases in Language Models Using Census Data

Multilingual transformer-based models demonstrate remarkable zero and few-shot transfer across languages by learning and reusing language-agnostic features. However, as a fixed-size model acquires more languages, its performance across all languages degrades. Those who attribute this interference phenomenon to limited model capacity address the problem by adding additional parameters, despite evidence that transformer-based models are overparameterized. In this work, we show that it is possible to reduce interference by instead identifying and pruning language-specific attention heads. First, we use Shapley Values, a credit allocation metric from coalitional game theory, to identify attention heads that introduce interference. Then, we show that pruning such heads from a fixed model improves performance for a target language on both sentence classification and structural prediction. Finally, we provide insights on language-agnostic and language-specific attention heads using attention visualization.

Shapley Head Pruning: Identifying and Removing Interference in Multilingual Transformers

Annotators' disagreement in linguistic data has been recently the focus of multiple initiatives aimed at raising awareness on issues related to `majority voting' when aggregating diverging annotations. Disagreement can indeed reflect different aspects of linguistic annotation, from annotators' subjectivity to sloppiness or lack of enough context to interpret a text. 
In this work we first propose a taxonomy of possible reasons leading to annotators' disagreement in subjective tasks. Then, we manually label part of a Twitter dataset for offensive language detection in English following this taxonomy, identifying how the different categories are distributed. Finally we run a set of experiments aimed at assessing the impact of the different types of disagreement on classification performance. In particular, we investigate how accurately tweets belonging to different categories of disagreement can be classified as offensive or not, and how injecting data with different types of disagreement in the training set affects performance. We also perform offensive language detection as a multi-task framework, using disagreement classification as an auxiliary task.

Downloads

Next from EACL 2023

Conversational Tree Search: A New Hybrid Dialog Task