Croatia

We conducted a human subject study of named entity recognition on a noisy corpus of conversational music recommendation queries, with many irregular and novel named entities. We evaluated the human NER linguistic behaviour in these challenging conditions and compared it with the most common NER systems nowadays, fine-tuned transformers. Our goal was to learn about the task to guide the design of better evaluation methods and NER algorithms. The results showed that NER in our context was quite hard for both human and algorithms under a strict evaluation schema; humans had higher precision, while the model higher recall because of entity exposure especially during pre-training; and entity types had different error patterns (e.g. frequent typing errors for artists). The released corpus goes beyond predefined frames of interaction and can support future work in conversational music recommendation.

EACL 2023

A Human Subject Study of Named Entity Recognition in Conversational Music Recommendation Queries

named entity recognition

technical paper

### 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.

Text Summarization is a popular task and an active area of research for the Natural Language Processing community. By definition, it requires to account for long input texts, a characteristic which poses computational challenges for neural models. Moreover, real-world documents come in a variety of complex, visually-rich, layouts. This information is of great relevance, whether to highlight salient content or to encode long-range interactions between textual passages. Yet, all publicly available summarization datasets only provide plain text content. To facilitate research on how to exploit visual/layout information to better capture long-range dependencies in summarization models, we present LoRaLay, a collection of datasets for long-range summarization with accompanying visual/layout information. We extend existing and popular English datasets (arXiv and PubMed) with layout information and propose four novel datasets -- consistently built from scholar resources -- covering French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean languages. Further, we propose new baselines merging layout-aware and long-range models -- two orthogonal approaches -- and obtain state-of-the-art results, showing the importance of combining both lines of research.

LoRaLay: A Multilingual and Multimodal Dataset for Long Range and Layout-Aware Summarization

Recently, there has been a growing interest in designing text generation systems from a discourse coherence perspective, e.g., modeling the interdependence between sentences. Still, recent BERT-based evaluation metrics are weak in recognizing coherence, and thus are not reliable in a way to spot the discourse-level improvements of those text generation systems.
In this work, we introduce DiscoScore, a parametrized discourse metric, which uses BERT to model discourse coherence from different perspectives, driven by Centering theory. Our experiments encompass 16 non-discourse and discourse metrics, including DiscoScore and popular coherence models, evaluated on summarization and document-level machine translation (MT). We find that (i) the majority of BERT-based metrics correlate much worse with human rated coherence than early discourse metrics, invented a decade ago; (ii) the recent state-of-the-art BARTScore is weak when operated at system level---which is particularly problematic as systems are typically compared in this manner. DiscoScore, in contrast, achieves strong system-level correlation with human ratings, not only in coherence but also in factual consistency and other aspects, and surpasses BARTScore by over 10 correlation points on average. Further, aiming to understand DiscoScore, we provide justifications to the importance of discourse coherence for evaluation metrics, and explain the superiority of one variant over another. Our code is available at \textbackslash{}url\{https://github.com/AIPHES/DiscoScore\}.

DiscoScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT and Discourse Coherence

A modular design encourages neural models to disentangle and recombine different facets of knowledge to generalise more systematically to new tasks. In this work, we assume that each task is associated with a subset of latent skills from an (arbitrary size) inventory. In turn, each skill corresponds to a parameter-efficient (sparse / low-rank) model adapter. By jointly learning adapters and a routing function that allocates skills to each task, the full network is instantiated as the average of the parameters of active skills. We propose several inductive biases that encourage re-usage and composition of the skills, including variable-size skill allocation and a dual-speed learning rate. We evaluate our latent-skill model in two main settings: 1) multitask reinforcement learning for instruction following on 8 levels of the BabyAI platform; and 2) few-shot fine-tuning of language models on 160 NLP tasks of the CrossFit benchmark. We find that the modular design of our network enhances sample efficiency in reinforcement learning and few-shot generalisation in supervised learning, compared to a series of baselines. These include models where parameters are fully shared, task-specific, conditionally generated (HyperFormer), or sparse mixture-of-experts (TaskMoE).

Combining Parameter-efficient Modules for Task-level Generalisation

We introduce our probabilistic robustness rewarded data optimization (PRoDO) approach as a framework to enhance the model's generalization power by selecting training data that optimizes our probabilistic robustness metrics. We use proximal policy optimization (PPO) reinforcement learning to approximately solve the computationally intractable training subset selection problem. 
The PPO's reward is defined as our (\$\textbackslash{}alpha,\textbackslash{}epsilon, \textbackslash{}gamma\$)-Robustness that measures performance consistency over multiple domains by simulating unknown test sets in real-world scenarios using a leaving-one-out strategy. We demonstrate that our PRoDO effectively filters data that lead to significantly higher prediction accuracy and robustness on unknown-domain test sets. Our experiments achieve up to +17.2\textbackslash{}\% increase of accuracy (+25.5\textbackslash{}\% relatively) in sentiment analysis, and -28.05 decrease of perplexity (-32.1\textbackslash{}\% relatively) in language modeling.
In addition, our probabilistic (\$\textbackslash{}alpha,\textbackslash{}epsilon, \textbackslash{}gamma\$)-Robustness definition serves as an evaluation metric with higher levels of agreement with human annotations than typical performance-based metrics.

Probabilistic Robustness for Data Filtering

With the ever-growing size of pretrained models (PMs), fine-tuning them has become more expensive and resource-hungry. As a remedy, low-rank adapters (LoRA) keep the main pretrained weights of the model frozen and just introduce some learnable truncated SVD modules (so-called LoRA blocks) to the model. While LoRA blocks are parameter-efficient, they suffer from two major problems: first, the size of these blocks is fixed and cannot be modified after training (for example, if we need to change the rank of LoRA blocks, then we need to re-train them from scratch); second, optimizing their rank requires an exhaustive search and effort. In this work, we introduce a dynamic low-rank adaptation (DyLoRA) technique to address these two problems together. Our DyLoRA method trains LoRA blocks for a range of ranks instead of a single rank by sorting the representation learned by the adapter module at different ranks during training. We evaluate our solution on different natural language understanding (GLUE benchmark) and language generation tasks (E2E, DART and WebNLG) using different pretrained models such as RoBERTa and GPT with different sizes. Our results show that we can train dynamic search-free models with DyLoRA at least 4 to 7 times (depending to the task) faster than LoRA without significantly compromising performance. Moreover, our models can perform consistently well on a much larger range of ranks compared to LoRA.

DyLoRA: Parameter-Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Models using Dynamic Search-Free Low-Rank Adaptation

We introduce a new benchmark, COVID-VTS, for fact-checking multi-modal information involving short-duration videos with COVID19- focused information from both the real world and machine generation. We propose, TwtrDetective, an effective model incorporating cross-media consistency checking to detect token-level malicious tampering in different modalities, and generate explanations. Due to the scarcity of training data, we also develop an efficient and scalable approach to automatically generate misleading video posts by event manipulation or adversarial matching. We investigate several state-of-the-art models and demonstrate the superiority of TwtrDetective.

COVID-VTS: Fact Extraction and Verification on Short Video Platforms

Large pre-trained models have proved to be remarkable zero- and (prompt-based) few-shot learners in unimodal vision and language tasks. We propose MAPL, a simple and parameter-efficient method that reuses frozen pre-trained unimodal models and leverages their strong generalization capabilities in multimodal vision-language (VL) settings. MAPL learns a lightweight mapping between the representation spaces of unimodal models using aligned image-text data, and can generalize to unseen VL tasks from just a few in-context examples. The small number of trainable parameters makes MAPL effective at low-data and in-domain learning. Moreover, MAPL's modularity enables easy extension to other pre-trained models. Extensive experiments on several visual question answering and image captioning benchmarks show that MAPL achieves superior or competitive performance compared to similar methods while training orders of magnitude fewer parameters. MAPL can be trained in just a few hours using modest computational resources and public datasets. We release our code and pre-trained model weights at https://github.com/oscmansan/mapl.

MAPL: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Unimodal Pre-Trained Models for Vision-Language Few-Shot Prompting

This paper presents EvAlign, a visual analytics framework for quantitative and qualitative evaluation of automatic translation alignment models. EvAlign offers various visualization views enabling developers to visualize their models' predictions and compare the performance of their models with other baseline and state-of-the-art models. Through different search and filter functions, researchers and practitioners can also inspect the frequent alignment errors and their positions. EvAlign hosts nine gold-standard datasets and the predictions of multiple alignment models. The tool is extendable, and adding additional datasets and models is straightforward.

EVALIGN: Visual Evaluation of Translation Alignment Models Authors:

This paper describes SPINDLE – an open source Python module implementing an efficient and accurate parser for written Dutch that transforms raw text input to programs for meaning composition, expressed as λ terms. The parser integrates a number of breakthrough advances made in recent years. Its output consists of hi-res derivations of a multimodal type-logical grammar, capturing two orthogonal axes of syntax, namely deep function-argument structures and dependency relations. These are produced by three interdependent systems: a static type-checker asserting the well-formedness of grammatical analyses, a state-of-the-art, structurally-aware supertagger based on heterogeneous graph convolutions, and a massively parallel proof search component based on Sinkhorn iterations. Packed in the software are also handy utilities and extras for proof visualization and inference, intended to facilitate end-user utilization.

SPINDLE: Spinning Raw Text into Lambda Terms with Graph Attention

Text-based games are a useful way to evaluate virtual agents' abilities in language understanding, problem-solving, and common-sense reasoning. These games take place in environments described entirely in natural language, where agents must complete complex tasks that require domain-specific and common-sense reasoning, such as navigation or following instructions. However, current text-based games have a major limitation in their speed, which is restricted to 300 steps per second due to legacy tooling. In this study, we introduce TextWorldExpress, a high-performance simulator that includes three commonly used text game benchmarks. This simulator significantly improves simulation throughput, increasing it by approximately three orders of magnitude to over one million steps per second on standard desktop hardware. This reduction in runtime allows for experiments with a billion-step scale to be completed in approximately one day.

Downloads

Next from EACL 2023

LoRaLay: A Multilingual and Multimodal Dataset for Long Range and Layout-Aware Summarization