Croatia

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&#39;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&#39;s performance on novel actions and objects and find that combining modalities help models to generalize and learn physical commonsense reasoning better.

EACL 2023

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

ai2thor

actions

multi-modal

common sense

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.

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.

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.

FVQA 2.0: Introducing Adversarial Samples into Fact-based Visual Question Answering

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a highly promising method for mitigating the computational problems of pre-trained language models (PLMs). Among various KD approaches, Intermediate Layer Distillation (ILD) has been a de facto standard KD method with its performance efficacy in the NLP field. In this paper, we find that existing ILD methods are prone to overfitting to training datasets, although these methods transfer more information than the original KD. Next, we present the simple observations to mitigate the overfitting of ILD: distilling only the last Transformer layer and conducting ILD on supplementary tasks. Based on our two findings, we propose a simple yet effective consistency-regularized ILD (CR-ILD), which prevents the student model from overfitting the training dataset. Substantial experiments on distilling BERT on the GLUE benchmark and several synthetic datasets demonstrate that our proposed ILD method outperforms other KD techniques. Our code is available at https://github.com/jongwooko/CR-ILD.

Revisiting Intermediate Layer Distillation for Compressing Language Models: An Overfitting Perspective

Leveraging contextual knowledge has become standard practice in automated claim verification, yet the impact of temporal reasoning has been largely overlooked. Our study demonstrates that time positively influences the claim verification process of evidence-based fact-checking. The temporal aspects and relations between claims and evidence are first established through grounding on shared timelines, which are constructed using publication dates and time expressions extracted from their text. Temporal information is then provided to RNN-based and Transformer-based classifiers before or after claim and evidence encoding. Our time-aware fact-checking models surpass base models by up to 9% Micro F1 (64.17%) and 15% Macro F1 (47.43%) on the MultiFC dataset. They also outperform prior methods that explicitly model temporal relations between evidence. Our findings show that the presence of temporal information and the manner in which timelines are constructed greatly influence how fact-checking models determine the relevance and supporting or refuting character of evidence documents.

Implicit Temporal Reasoning for Evidence-Based Fact-Checking

To mitigate the impact of the scarcity of labelled data on fact-checking systems, we focus on few-shot claim verification. Despite recent work on few-shot classification by proposing advanced language models, there is a dearth of research in data annotation prioritisation that improves the selection of the few shots to be labelled for optimal model performance. We propose Active PETs, a novel weighted approach that utilises an ensemble of Pattern Exploiting Training (PET) models based on various language models, to actively select unlabelled data as candidates for annotation. Using Active PETs for few-shot data selection shows consistent improvement over the baseline methods, on two technical fact-checking datasets and using six different pretrained language models. We show further improvement with Active PETs-o, which further integrates an oversampling strategy. Our approach enables effective selection of instances to be labelled where unlabelled data is abundant but resources for labelling are limited, leading to consistently improved few-shot claim verification performance. Our code is available.

Active PETs: Active Data Annotation Prioritisation for Few-Shot Claim Verification with Pattern Exploiting Training

Table-to-text generation aims at automatically generating text to help people conveniently obtain salient information in tables. 
Recent works explicitly decompose the generation process into content planning and surface generation stages, employing two autoregressive networks for them respectively.
However, they are computationally expensive due to the non-parallelizable nature of autoregressive decoding and the redundant parameters of two networks.
In this paper, we propose the first totally non-autoregressive table-to-text model (Plan-then-Seam, PTS) that produces its outputs in parallel with one single network.
PTS firstly writes and calibrates one plan of the content to be generated with a novel rethinking pointer predictor, and then takes the plan as the context for seaming to decode the description.
These two steps share parameters and perform iteratively to capture token inter-dependency while keeping parallel decoding.
Experiments on two public benchmarks show that PTS achieves 3.0~5.6 times speedup for inference time, reducing 50% parameters, while maintaining as least comparable performance against strong two-stage table-to-text competitors.

Plan-then-Seam: Towards Efficient Table-to-Text Generation

The paper presents our work on corpus annotation
for metaphor in German. Metaphors denote
entities that are similar to their literal referent,
e.g., when *Licht* ‘light' is used in the sense
of ‘hope'. We are interested in the relation between
metaphor and register, hence, the corpus
includes material from different registers.
We focussed on metaphors that can serve as
register markers and can also be reliably indentified
for annotation. Our results show huge
differences between registers in metaphor usage,
which we interpret in terms of specific
properties of the registers.

A corpus of metaphors as register markers

Prior work in semantic parsing has shown that conventional seq2seq models fail at compositional generalization tasks. This limitation led to a resurgence of methods that model alignments between sentences and their corresponding meaning representations, either implicitly through latent variables or explicitly by taking advantage of alignment annotations. We take the second direction and propose TPol, a two-step approach that first translates input sentences monotonically and then reorders them to obtain the correct output. This is achieved with a modular framework comprising a Translator and a Reorderer component. We test our approach on two popular semantic parsing datasets. Our experiments show that by means of the monotonic translations, TPol can learn reliable lexico-logical patterns from aligned data, significantly improving compositional generalization both over conventional seq2seq models, as well as over other approaches that exploit gold alignments.

Translate First Reorder Later: Leveraging Monotonicity in Semantic Parsing

Incorporating personal preference is crucial in advanced machine translation tasks. Despite the recent advancement of machine translation, it remains a demanding task to properly reflect personal style. In this paper, we introduce a personalized automatic post-editing framework to address this challenge, which effectively generates sentences considering distinct personal behaviors. To build this framework, we first collect post-editing data that connotes the user preference from a live machine translation system. Specifically, real-world users enter source sentences for translation and edit the machine-translated outputs according to the user's preferred style. We then propose a model that combines a discriminator module and user-specific parameters on the APE framework. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other baseline models on four different metrics (i.e., BLEU, TER, YiSi-1, and human evaluation).

PePe: Personalized Post-editing Model utilizing User-generated Post-edits

In multi-turn dialog understanding, semantic frames are constructed by detecting intents and slots within each user utterance.
However, recent works lack the capability of modeling multi-turn dynamics within a dialog in natural language understanding (NLU), instead leaving them for updating dialog states only.
Moreover, humans usually associate relevant background knowledge with the current dialog contexts to better illustrate slot semantics revealed from word connotations, where previous works have explored such possibility mostly in knowledge-grounded response generation.
In this paper, we propose to amend the research gap by equipping a BERT-based NLU framework with knowledge and context awareness.
We first encode dialog contexts with a unidirectional context-aware transformer encoder and select relevant inter-word knowledge with the current word and previous history based on a knowledge attention mechanism. 
Experimental results in two complicated multi-turn dialog datasets have demonstrated significant improvements of our proposed framework. Attention visualization also demonstrates how our modules leverage knowledge across the utterance.

Infusing Context and Knowledge Awareness in Multi-turn Dialog Understanding

While there has been a recent burgeoning of applications at the intersection of natural and programming languages, such as code generation and code summarization, these applications are usually English-centric. This creates a barrier for program developers who are not proficient in English. 
To mitigate this gap in technology development across languages, we propose a multilingual dataset, MCoNaLa, to benchmark code generation from natural language commands extending beyond English. Modeled off of the methodology from the English Code/Natural Language Challenge (CoNaLa) dataset, we annotated a total of 896 NL-Code pairs in three languages: Spanish, Japanese, and Russian. We present a systematic evaluation on MCoNaLa by testing state-of-the-art code generation systems. Although the difficulties vary across three languages, all systems lag significantly behind their English counterparts, revealing the challenges in adapting code generation to new languages.

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Next from EACL 2023

FVQA 2.0: Introducing Adversarial Samples into Fact-based Visual Question Answering