Croatia

Machine translation quality estimation (QE) predicts human judgements of a translation hypothesis without seeing the reference. State-of-the-art QE systems based on pretrained language models have been achieving remarkable correlations with human judgements yet they are computationally heavy and require human annotations, which are slow and expensive to create. To address these limitations, we define the problem of metric estimation (ME) where one predicts the automated metric scores also without the reference. We show that even without access to the reference, our model can estimate automated metrics (ρ = 60\% for BLEU, ρ = 51\% for other metrics) at the sentence-level. Because automated metrics correlate with human judgements, we can leverage the ME task for pre-training a QE model. For the QE task, we find that pre-training on TER is better (ρ = 23\%) than training for scratch (ρ = 20\%).

EACL 2023

Poor Man’s Quality Estimation: Predicting Reference-Based MT Metrics Without the Reference

complexity estimation

quality estimation

low resource

machine translation

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.

In this paper, we propose FrameBERT, a BERT-based model that can explicitly learn and incorporate FrameNet Embeddings for concept-level metaphor detection. FrameBERT not only achieves better or comparable performance to the state-of-the-art, but also is more explainable and interpretable compared to existing models, attributing to its ability of accounting for external knowledge of FrameNet.

FrameBERT: Conceptual Metaphor Detection with Frame Embedding Learning

For extreme multi-label classification (XMC), existing classification-based models poorly per- form for tail labels and often ignore the semantic relations among labels, like treating
"Wikipedia” and "Wiki” as independent and separate labels. In this paper, we cast XMC as a generation task (XLGen), where we benefit from pre-trained text-to-text models. However, generating labels from the extremely large label space is challenging without any constraints or guidance. We, therefore, propose to guide label generation using label cluster information to hierarchically generate lower-level labels. We also find that frequency-based label ordering and using decoding ensemble methods are critical factors for the improvements in XLGen. XLGen with cluster guidance significantly outperforms the classification and generation baselines on tail labels, and also generally improves the overall performance in four popular XMC benchmarks. In human evaluation, we also find XLGen generates unseen but plausible labels. Our code is now available at https:// github.com/alexa/xlgen-eacl-2023.

Cluster-Guided Label Generation in Extreme Multi-Label Classification

Several proposals have been put forward in recent years for improving out-of-distribution (OOD) performance through mitigating dataset biases. A popular workaround is to train a robust model by re-weighting training examples based on a secondary biased model. Here, the underlying assumption is that the biased model resorts to shortcut features. Hence, those training examples that are correctly predicted by the biased model are flagged as being biased and are down-weighted during the training of the main model. However, assessing the importance of an instance merely based on the predictions of the biased model may be too naive. It is possible that the prediction of the main model can be derived from another decision-making process that is distinct from the behavior of the biased model. To circumvent this, we introduce a fine-tuning strategy that incorporates the similarity between the main and biased model attribution scores in a Product of Experts (PoE) loss function to further improve OOD performance. With experiments conducted on natural language inference and fact verification benchmarks, we show that our method improves OOD results while maintaining in-distribution (ID) performance.

Guide the Learner: Controlling Product of Experts Debiasing Method Based on Token Attribution Similarities

The research carried out so far in detecting abusive content in social media has primarily focused on overt forms of hate speech. While explicit hate speech (HS) is more easily identifiable by recognizing hateful words, messages containing linguistically subtle and implicit forms of HS (as circumlocution, metaphors and sarcasm) constitute a real challenge for automatic systems. While the sneaky and tricky nature of subtle messages might be perceived as less hurtful with respect to the same content expressed clearly, such abuse is at least as harmful as overt abuse. In this paper, we first provide an in-depth and systematic analysis of 7 standard benchmarks for HS detection, relying on a fine-grained and linguistically-grounded definition of implicit and subtle messages. Then, we experiment with state-of-the-art neural network architectures on two supervised tasks, namely implicit HS and subtle HS message classification. We show that while such models perform satisfactory on explicit messages, they fail to detect implicit and subtle content, highlighting the fact that HS detection is not a solved problem and deserves further investigation.

An In-depth Analysis of Implicit and Subtle Hate Speech Messages

In sensitive domains, the sharing of corpora is restricted due to confidentiality, copyrights or trade secrets. Automatic text generation can help alleviate these issues by producing synthetic texts that mimic the linguistic properties of real documents while preserving confidentiality. In this study, we assess the usability of synthetic corpus as a substitute training corpus for clinical information extraction. Our goal is to automatically produce a clinical case corpus annotated with clinical entities and to evaluate it for a named entity recognition (NER) task. 
We use two auto-regressive neural models partially or fully trained on generic French texts and fine-tuned on clinical cases to produce a corpus of synthetic clinical cases. We study variants of the generation process: (i) fine-tuning on annotated vs. plain text (in that case, annotations are obtained a posteriori) and (ii) selection of generated texts based on models parameters and filtering criteria. We then train NER models with the resulting synthetic text and evaluate them on a gold standard clinical corpus. 
Our experiments suggest that synthetic text is useful for clinical NER.

Can Synthetic Text Help Clinical Named Entity Recognition? A Study of Electronic Health Records in French

Character-level language modeling has been shown empirically to perform well on highly agglutinative or morphologically rich languages while using only a small fraction of the parameters required by (sub)word models. Korean fits nicely into this framework, except that, like other CJK languages, it has a very large character vocabulary of 11,172 unique syllables. However, unlike Japanese Kanji and Chinese Hanzi, each Korean syllable can be uniquely factored into a small set of subcharacters, called jamo.

We explore a "three-hot" scheme, where we exploit the decomposability of Korean characters to model at the syllable level but using only jamo-level representations.

We find that our three-hot embedding and decoding scheme alleviates the two major issues with prior syllable- and jamo-level models. Namely, it requires fewer than 1\% of the embedding parameters of a syllable model, and it does not require tripling the sequence length, as with jamo models. In addition, it addresses a theoretical flaw in a prior three-hot modeling scheme.

Our experiments show that, even when reducing the number of embedding parameters by \textgreater{}99.6\% (from 11.4M to just 36k), our model suffers no loss in translation quality compared to the baseline syllable model.

Parameter-Efficient Korean Character-Level Language Modeling

Discrete prompts have been used for fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models for diverse NLP tasks. In particular, automatic methods that generate discrete prompts from a small set of training instances have reported superior performance. However, a closer look at the learnt prompts reveals that they contain noisy and counter-intuitive lexical constructs that would not be encountered in manually-written prompts. This raises an important yet understudied question regarding the robustness of automatically learnt discrete prompts when used in downstream tasks. To address this question, we conduct a systematic study of the robustness of discrete prompts by applying carefully designed perturbations into an application using AutoPrompt and then measure their performance in two Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets. Our experimental results show that although the discrete prompt-based method remains relatively robust against perturbations to NLI inputs, they are highly sensitive to other types of perturbations such as shuffling and deletion of prompt tokens. Moreover, they generalize poorly across different NLI datasets. We hope our findings will inspire future work on robust discrete prompt learning.

Evaluating the Robustness of Discrete Prompts

Advancements in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) greatly benefit the software localization industry by decreasing the post-editing time of human annotators. Although the volume of the software being localized is growing significantly, techniques for improving NMT for user interface (UI) texts are lacking. These UI texts have different properties than other collections of texts, presenting unique challenges for NMT. For example, they are often very short, causing them to be ambiguous and needing additional context (button, title text, a table item, etc.) for disambiguation. However, no such UI data sets are readily available with contextual information for NMT models to exploit. This work aims to provide a first step in improving UI translations and highlight its challenges. To achieve this, we provide a novel multilingual UI corpus collection (\$\textbackslash{}sim1.3M\$ for English \$\textbackslash{}leftrightarrow\$ German) with a targeted test set and analyze the limitations of state-of-the-art methods on this challenging task. Specifically, we present a targeted test set for disambiguation from English to German to evaluate reliably and emphasize UI translation challenges. Furthermore, we evaluate several state-of-the-art NMT techniques from domain adaptation and document-level NMT on this challenging task. All the scripts to replicate the experiments and data sets are available here.\textbackslash{}footnote\{\textbackslash{}url\{https://github.com/saikoneru/NMT\textbackslash{}\_Localization\}\}\$\^{}\{,\}\$\textbackslash{}footnote\{We crawled this data only for scientific research.\}

Analyzing Challenges in Neural Machine Translation for Software Localization

Despite cross-lingual generalization demonstrated by pre-trained multilingual models, the translate-train paradigm of transferring English datasets across multiple languages remains to be a key mechanism for training task-specific multilingual models. However, for many low-resource languages, the availability of a reliable translation service entails significant amounts of costly human-annotated translation pairs. Further, translation services may continue to be brittle due to domain mismatch between task-specific input text and general-purpose text used for training translation models. For multilingual semantic parsing, we demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility offered by large language models (LLMs) for translating English datasets into several languages via few-shot prompting. Through extensive comparisons on two public datasets, MTOP and MASSIVE, spanning 50 languages and several domains, we show that our method of translating data using LLMs outperforms a strong translate-train baseline on 41 out of 50 languages. We study the key design choices that enable more effective multilingual data translation via prompted LLMs.

Bootstrapping Multilingual Semantic Parsers using Large Language Models

In this paper, we are interested in developing semantic parsers which understand natural language questions embedded in a conversation with a user and ground them to formal queries over definitions in a general purpose knowledge graph (KG) with very large vocabularies (covering thousands of concept names and relations, and millions of entities). To this end, we develop a dataset where user questions are annotated with Sparql parses and system answers correspond to execution results thereof. We present two different semantic parsing approaches and highlight the challenges of the task: dealing with large vocabularies, modelling conversation context, predicting queries with multiple entities, and generalising to new questions at test time. We hope our dataset will serve as useful testbed for the development of conversational semantic parsers. Our dataset and models are released at https://github.com/EdinburghNLP/SPICE.

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Next from EACL 2023

FrameBERT: Conceptual Metaphor Detection with Frame Embedding Learning