Croatia

Variants of the BERT architecture specialised for producing
full-sentence representations often achieve better performance on
downstream tasks than sentence embeddings extracted from vanilla
BERT. However, there is still little understanding of what
properties of inputs determine the properties of such
representations. In this study, we construct several sets of
sentences with pre-defined lexical and syntactic structures and show
that SOTA sentence transformers have a strong
nominal-participant-set bias: cosine similarities between pairs of
sentences are more strongly determined by the overlap in the set of
their noun participants than by having the same predicates, lengthy
nominal modifiers, or adjuncts. At the same time, the precise
syntactic-thematic functions of the participants are largely
irrelevant.

EACL 2023

Representation biases in sentence transformers

sentence transformers

sentence embeddings

interpretability

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.

Transformer models cannot easily scale to long sequences due to their O(N\^{}2) time and space complexity. This has led to Transformer variants seeking to lower computational complexity, such as Longformer and Performer. While such models have theoretically greater efficiency, their effectiveness on real NLP tasks has not been well studied. We benchmark 7 variants of Transformer models on 5 difficult NLP tasks and 7 datasets. We design experiments to isolate the effect of pretraining and hyperparameter settings, to focus on their capacity for long-range attention. Moreover, we present various methods to investigate attention behaviors to illuminate model details beyond metric scores. We find that the modified attention in long-range transformers has advantages on content selection and query-guided decoding, but they come with previously unrecognized drawbacks such as insufficient attention to distant tokens and accumulated approximation error.

The NLP Task Effectiveness of Long-Range Transformers

Most event extraction methods have traditionally relied on an annotated set of event types. However, creating event ontologies and annotating supervised training data are expensive and time-consuming. Previous work has proposed semi-supervised approaches which leverage seen (annotated) types to learn how to automatically discover new event types. State-of-the-art methods, both semi-supervised or fully unsupervised, use a form of reconstruction loss on specific tokens in a context. In contrast, we present a novel approach to semi-supervised new event type induction using a masked contrastive loss, which learns similarities between event mentions by enforcing an attention mechanism over the data minibatch. We further disentangle the discovered clusters by approximating the underlying manifolds in the data, which allows us to achieve an adjusted rand index score of 48.85\%. Building on these clustering results, we extend our approach to two new tasks: predicting the type name of the discovered clusters and linking them to FrameNet frames.

Semi-supervised New Event Type Induction and Description via Contrastive Loss-Enforced Batch Attention

Discontinuous Combinatory Constituency Parsing

Recent geometric-based approaches have been shown to efficiently model complex logical queries (including the intersection operation) over Knowledge Graphs based on the natural representation of Venn diagram. Existing geometric-based models (using points, boxes embeddings), however, cannot handle the logical negation operation. Further, those using cones embeddings are limited to representing queries by two-dimensional shapes, which reduced their effectiveness in capturing entities query relations for correct answers. To overcome this challenge, we propose unbounded cylinder embeddings (namely CylE), which is a novel geometric-based model based on three-dimensional shapes. Our approach can handle a complete set of basic first-order logic operations (conjunctions, disjunctions and negations). CylE considers queries as Cartesian products of unbounded sector-cylinders and consider a set of nearest boxes corresponds to the set of answer entities. Precisely, the conjunctions can be represented via the intersections of unbounded sector-cylinders. Transforming queries to Disjunctive Normal Form can handle queries with disjunctions. The negations can be represented by considering the closure of complement for an arbitrary unbounded sector-cylinder. Empirical results show that the performance of multi-hop reasoning task using CylE significantly increases over state-of-the-art geometric-based query embedding models for queries without negation. For queries with negation operations, though the performance is on a par with the best performing geometric-based model, CylE significantly outperforms a recent distribution-based model.

CylE: Cylinder Embeddings for Multi-hop Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs

Question Generation (QG) is a fundamental NLP task for many downstream applications. Recent studies on open-book QG, where supportive answer-context pairs are provided to models, have achieved promising progress. However, generating natural questions under a more practical closed-book setting that lacks these supporting documents still remains a challenge. In this work, we propose a new QG model for this closed-book setting that is designed to better understand the semantics of long-form abstractive answers and store more information in its parameters through contrastive learning and an answer reconstruction module. Through experiments, we validate the proposed QG model on both public datasets and a new WikiCQA dataset. Empirical results show that the proposed QG model outperforms baselines in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation. In addition, we show how to leverage the proposed model to improve existing question-answering systems. These results further indicate the effectiveness of our QG model for enhancing closed-book question-answering tasks.

Closed-book Question Generation via Contrastive Learning

Knowledge of syntax includes knowledge of rare, idiosyncratic constructions. LLMs must overcome frequency biases in order to master such constructions. In this study, I prompt GPT-3 to give acceptability judgments on the English-language Article + Adjective + Numeral + Noun construction (e.g., "a lovely five days"). I validate the prompt using the CoLA corpus of acceptability judgments and then zero in on the AANN construction. I compare GPT- 3's judgments to crowdsourced human judgments on a subset of sentences. GPT-3's judgments are broadly similar to human judgments and generally align with proposed constraints in the literature but, in some cases, GPT-3's judgments and human judgments diverge from the literature and from each other.

A Discerning Several Thousand Judgments: GPT-3 Rates the Article + Adjective + Numeral + Noun Construction

Supervised machine learning has become the cornerstone of today’s data-driven society, increasing the need for labeled data. However, the process of acquiring labels is often expensive and tedious. One possible remedy is to use active learning (AL) -- a special family of machine learning algorithms designed to reduce labeling costs. Although AL has been successful in practice, a number of practical challenges hinder its effectiveness and are often overlooked in existing AL annotation tools. To address these challenges, we developed ALANNO, an open-source annotation system for NLP tasks equipped with features to make AL effective in real-world annotation projects. ALANNO facilitates annotation management in a multi-annotator setup and supports a variety of AL methods and underlying models, which are easily configurable and extensible.

ALANNO: An Active Learning Annotation System for Mortals

As Transformers are increasingly relied upon to solve complex NLP problems, there is an increased need for their decisions to be humanly interpretable. While several explainable AI (XAI) techniques for interpreting the outputs of transformer-based models have been proposed, there is still a lack of easy access to using and comparing them. We introduce ferret, a Python library to simplify the use and comparisons of XAI methods on transformer-based classifiers. With ferret, users can visualize and compare transformers-based models output explanations using state-of-the-art XAI methods on any free-text or existing XAI corpora. Moreover, users can also evaluate ad-hoc XAI metrics to select the most faithful and plausible explanations. To align with the recently consolidated process of sharing and using transformers-based models from Hugging Face, ferret interfaces directly with its Python library. In this paper, we showcase ferret to benchmark XAI methods used on transformers for sentiment analysis and hate speech detection. We show how specific methods provide consistently better explanations and are preferable in the context of transformer models.

ferret: a Framework for Benchmarking Explainers on Transformers

In this paper, we propose Learn, a unified, easy-
to-use tool to apply question generation and
selection in classrooms. The tool lets instruc-
tors and TAs create assignments that can write
and re-write themselves. Given existing course
materials, for example a reference textbook,
Learn can generate questions, select the high-
est quality questions, show the questions to
students, adapt question difficulty to student
knowledge, and generate new questions based
on how effectively old questions help students
learn. The modular, composable nature of the
tools for handling each sub-task allow instruc-
tors to use only the parts of the tool necessary
to the course, allowing for integration in a large
number of courses with varied teaching styles.
We also report on the adoption of the tool in
classes at the University of Pennsylvania with
over 1000 students. Learn is publicly released
at https://learn.withmartian.com.

Learn With Martian: A Tool For Creating Assignments That Can Write And Re-Write Themselves

In this paper, we present ALLECS, a lightweight web application to serve grammatical error correction (GEC) systems so that they can be easily used by the general public. We design ALLECS to be accessible to as many users as possible, including users who have a slow Internet connection and who use mobile phones as their main devices to connect to the Internet. ALLECS provides three state-of-the-art base GEC systems using two approaches (sequence-to-sequence generation and sequence tagging), as well as two state-of-the-art GEC system combination methods using two approaches (edit-based and text-based). ALLECS can be accessed at https://sterling8.d2.comp.nus.edu.sg/allecs/

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The NLP Task Effectiveness of Long-Range Transformers