Croatia

This work empirically investigates punctuation insertions as adversarial attacks on NLP systems. Data from experiments on three tasks, five datasets, and six models with four attacks show that punctuation insertions, when limited to a few symbols (apostrophes and hyphens), are a superior attack vector compared to character insertions due to 1) a lower after-attack accuracy ($A_{aft-atk}$) than alphabetical character insertions; 2) higher semantic similarity between the resulting and original texts; and 3) a resulting text that is easier and faster to read as assessed with the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE)). The tests also indicate that 4) grammar checking does not mitigate punctuation insertions and 5) punctuation insertions outperform word-level attacks in settings with a limited number of word synonyms and queries to the victim&#39;s model. Our findings indicate that inserting a few punctuation types that result in easy-to-read samples is a general attack mechanism. In light of this threat, we assess the impact of punctuation insertions, potential mitigations, the mitigation&#39;s tradeoffs, punctuation insertion&#39;s worst-case scenarios and summarize our findings in a qualitative casual map, so that developers can design safer, more secure systems.

EACL 2023

Using Punctuation as an Adversarial Attack on Deep Learning-Based NLP Systems: An Empirical Study

punctuation insertions.

adversarial attacks

adversarial defence

This work empirically investigates punctuation insertions as adversarial attacks on NLP systems. Data from experiments on three tasks, five datasets, and six models with four attacks show that punctuation insertions, when limited to a few symbols (apostrophes and hyphens), are a superior attack vector compared to character insertions due to 1) a lower after-attack accuracy ($A_{aft-atk}$) than alphabetical character insertions; 2) higher semantic similarity between the resulting and original texts; and 3) a resulting text that is easier and faster to read as assessed with the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE)). The tests also indicate that 4) grammar checking does not mitigate punctuation insertions and 5) punctuation insertions outperform word-level attacks in settings with a limited number of word synonyms and queries to the victim's model. Our findings indicate that inserting a few punctuation types that result in easy-to-read samples is a general attack mechanism. In light of this threat, we assess the impact of punctuation insertions, potential mitigations, the mitigation's tradeoffs, punctuation insertion's worst-case scenarios and summarize our findings in a qualitative casual map, so that developers can design safer, more secure systems.

findings / work in progress

### 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.

While multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) has gained much attention over the last few years, the main focus of most work on MSA has been limited to constructing multimodal representations that capture interactions between different modalities in a single task. This was largely due to a lack of unimodal annotations in MSA benchmark datasets. However, training a model using only multimodal representations can lead to suboptimal performance due to insufficient learning of each uni-modal representation. In this work, to fully optimize learning representations from multimodal data, we propose SUGRM which jointly trains multimodal and unimodal tasks using recalibrated features. The features are recalibrated such that the model learns to weight the features differently based on the features of other modalities. Further, to leverage unimodal tasks, we auto-generate unimodal annotations via a unimodal label generation module (ULGM). The experiment results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our framework.

Self-Supervised Unimodal Label Generation Strategy Using Recalibrated Modality Representations for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Searching troves of videos with textual descriptions is a core multimodal retrieval task. Owing to the lack of a purpose-built dataset for text-to-video retrieval, video captioning datasets have been re-purposed to evaluate models by (1) treating captions as positive matches to their respective videos and (2) assuming all other videos to be negatives. However, this methodology leads to a fundamental flaw during evaluation: since captions are marked as relevant only to their original video, many alternate videos also match the caption, which introduces false-negative caption-video pairs.
We show that when these false negatives are corrected, a recent state-of-the-art model gains 25% recall points---a difference that threatens the validity of the benchmark itself. To diagnose and mitigate this issue, we annotate and release 683K additional caption-video pairs. Using these, we recompute effectiveness scores for three models on two standard benchmarks (MSR-VTT and MSVD). We find that (1) the recomputed metrics are up to 25% recall points higher for the best models, (2) these benchmarks are nearing saturation for Recall@10, (3) caption length (generality) is related to the number of positives, and (4) annotation costs can be mitigated through sampling. We recommend retiring these benchmarks in their current form, and we make recommendations for future text-to-video retrieval benchmarks.

Fighting FIRe with FIRE: Assessing the Validity of Text-to-Video Retrieval Benchmarks

Numbers have unique characteristics to words. Teaching models to understand numbers in text is an open-ended research question. Instead of discussing the required calculation skills, this paper focuses on a more fundamental topic: understanding numerals. We point out that innumeracy—the inability to handle basic numeral concepts—exists in most pretrained language models (LMs), and we propose a method to solve this issue by exploring the notation of numbers. Further, we discuss whether changing notation and pre-finetuning along with the comparing-number task can improve performance in three benchmark datasets containing quantitative-related tasks. The results of this study indicate that input reframing and the proposed pre-finetuning task is useful for RoBERTa.

Improving Numeracy by Input Reframing and Quantitative Pre-Finetuning Task

Recent advances in text-to-image synthesis make it possible to visualize machine imaginations for a given context. On the other hand, when generating text, human writers are gifted at creative visualization, which enhances their writings by forming imaginations as blueprints before putting down the stories in words. Inspired by such a cognitive process, we ask the natural question of whether we can endow machines with the same ability to utilize visual information and construct a general picture of the context to guide text generation. 

In this work, we propose iNLG that uses machine-generated images to guide language models (LM) in open-ended text generation. The experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of iNLG on open-ended text generation tasks, including text completion, story generation, and concept-to-text generation in both few-shot and full-data scenarios. Both automatic metrics and human evaluations verify that the text snippets generated by our iNLG are coherent and informative while displaying minor degeneration.

Visualize Before You Write: Imagination-Guided Open-Ended Text Generation

Automatic evaluations for natural language generation (NLG) conventionally rely on token-level or embedding-level comparisons with text references. 
This differs from human language processing, for which visual imagination often improves comprehension. 

In this work, we propose ImaginE, an imagination-based automatic evaluation metric for natural language generation. With the help of StableDiffusion, a state-of-the-art text-to-image generator, we automatically generate an image as the embodied imagination for the text snippet and compute the imagination similarity using contextual embeddings. 

Experiments spanning several text generation tasks demonstrate that adding machine-generated images with our ImaginE displays great potential in introducing multi-modal information into NLG evaluation, and improves existing automatic metrics' correlations with human similarity judgments in both reference-based and reference-free evaluation scenarios.

ImaginE: An Imagination-Based Automatic Evaluation Metric for Natural Language Generation

Fake news and misinformation spread rapidly on the Internet. How to identify it and how to interpret the identification results have become important issues. In this paper, we propose a Dual Co-Attention Network (Dual-CAN) for fake news detection, which takes news content, social media replies, and external knowledge into consideration. Our experimental results support that the proposed Dual-CAN outperforms current representative models in two benchmark datasets. We further make in-depth discussions by comparing how models work in both datasets with empirical analysis of attention weights.

Entity-Aware Dual Co-Attention Network for Fake News Detection

We propose a new commonsense reasoning benchmark to motivate commonsense reasoning progress from two perspectives: (1) Evaluating whether models can distinguish knowledge quality by predicting if the knowledge is enough to answer the question; (2) Evaluating whether models can develop commonsense inference capabilities that generalize across tasks. We first extract supporting knowledge for each question and ask humans to annotate whether the auto-extracted knowledge is enough to answer the question or not. After that, we convert different tasks into a unified question-answering format to evaluate the models' generalization capabilities. We name the benchmark Commonsense Inference with Knowledge-in-the-loop Question Answering (\name). Experiments show that with our learning paradigm, models demonstrate encouraging generalization capabilities. At the same time, we also notice that distinguishing knowledge quality remains challenging for current commonsense reasoning models.

CIKQA: Learning Commonsense Inference with a Unified Knowledge-in-the-loop QA Paradigm

Scarcity of large-scale datasets, especially for resource-impoverished languages motivates exploration of data-efficient methods for hate speech detection. Hateful intents are expressed explicitly (use of cuss, swear, abusive words) and implicitly (indirect and contextual). 

In this work, we progress implicit and explicit hate speech detection using an input-level data augmentation technique, task reformulation using entailment and cross-learning across five languages. 

Our proposed data augmentation technique EasyMix, improves the performance across all english datasets by ~1\% and across multilingual datasets by ~1-9\%. We also observe substantial gains of ~2-8% by reformulating hate speech detection as entail problem. We further probe the contextual models and observe that higher layers encode implicit hate while lower layers focus on explicit hate, highlighting the importance of token-level understanding for explicit and context-level for implicit hate speech detection. 

Code and Dataset splits - https://anonymous.4open.science/r/data_efficient_hatedetect/

Data-Efficient Methods For Improving Hate Speech Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) handle physical commonsense information inadequately. As a result of being trained in a disembodied setting, LLMs often fail to predict an action's outcome in a given environment. However, predicting the effects of an action before it is executed is crucial in planning, where coherent sequences of actions are often needed to achieve a goal. Therefore, we introduce the multi-modal task of predicting the outcomes of actions solely from realistic sensory inputs (images and text). Next, we extend an LLM to model latent representations of objects to better predict action outcomes in an environment. We show that multi-modal models can capture physical commonsense when augmented with visual information. Finally, we evaluate our model's performance on novel actions and objects and find that combining modalities help models to generalize and learn physical commonsense reasoning better.

Learning the Effects of Physical Actions in a Multi-modal Environment

The widely used Fact-based Visual Question Answering (FVQA) dataset contains visually-grounded questions that require information retrieval using common sense knowledge graphs to answer. It has been observed that the original dataset is highly imbalanced and concentrated on a small portion of its associated knowledge graph. We introduce FVQA 2.0 which contains adversarial variants of test questions to address this imbalance. We show that systems trained with the original FVQA train sets can be vulnerable to adversarial samples and we demonstrate an augmentation scheme to reduce this vulnerability without human annotations.

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Self-Supervised Unimodal Label Generation Strategy Using Recalibrated Modality Representations for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis