Croatia

Recent research in cross-lingual learning has found that combining large-scale pretrained multilingual language models with machine translation can yield good performance. We explore this idea for cross-lingual event extraction with a new model architecture that jointly encodes a source language input sentence with its translation to the target language during training, and takes a target language sentence with its translation back to the source language as input during evaluation. However, we observe significant representational gap between the native source language texts during training and the texts translated into source language during evaluation, as well as the texts translated into target language during training and the native target language texts during evaluation. This representational gap undermines the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer learning for event extraction with machine-translated data. In order to mitigate this problem, we propose an adversarial training framework that encourages the language model to produce more similar representations for the translated text and the native text. To be specific, we train the language model such that its hidden representations are able to fool a jointly trained discriminator that distinguishes translated texts&#39; representations from native texts&#39; representations. We conduct experiments on cross-lingual for event extraction across three languages. Results demonstrate that our proposed adversarial training can effectively incorporate machine translation to improve event extraction, while simply adding machine-translated data yields unstable performance due to the representational gap.

EACL 2023

Bridging the Gap between Native Text and Translated Text through Adversarial Learning: A Case Study on Cross-Lingual Event Extraction

cross-lingual learning

adversarial training

information extraction

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

Recent research in cross-lingual learning has found that combining large-scale pretrained multilingual language models with machine translation can yield good performance. We explore this idea for cross-lingual event extraction with a new model architecture that jointly encodes a source language input sentence with its translation to the target language during training, and takes a target language sentence with its translation back to the source language as input during evaluation. However, we observe significant representational gap between the native source language texts during training and the texts translated into source language during evaluation, as well as the texts translated into target language during training and the native target language texts during evaluation. This representational gap undermines the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer learning for event extraction with machine-translated data. In order to mitigate this problem, we propose an adversarial training framework that encourages the language model to produce more similar representations for the translated text and the native text. To be specific, we train the language model such that its hidden representations are able to fool a jointly trained discriminator that distinguishes translated texts' representations from native texts' representations. We conduct experiments on cross-lingual for event extraction across three languages. Results demonstrate that our proposed adversarial training can effectively incorporate machine translation to improve event extraction, while simply adding machine-translated data yields unstable performance due to the representational gap.

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.

Prompt-based learning methods in semi-supervised learning (SSL) settings have been shown to be effective on multiple natural language understanding (NLU) datasets and tasks in the literature. However, manually designing multiple prompts and verbalizers requires domain knowledge and human effort, making it difficult and expensive to scale across different datasets. In this paper, we propose two methods to automatically design multiple prompts and integrate automatic verbalizer in SSL settings without sacrificing performance. The first method uses various demonstration examples with learnable continuous prompt tokens to create diverse prompt models. The second method uses a varying number of soft prompt tokens to encourage language models to learn different prompts. For the verbalizer, we use the prototypical verbalizer to replace the manual one. In summary, we obtained the best average accuracy of 71.5% (a relative improvement of 0.99% over even the previous state-of-the-art SSL method with manual prompts and verbalizers) in different few-shot learning settings.

Scalable Prompt Generation for Semi-supervised Learning with Language Models

A novel feature represents a cluster of semantically equivalent novel user requests e.g., requests to play a song on a service or read user's messages.
Detecting and supporting novel features is crucial towards wider adoption of dialog systems by end users.
Intuitively, features are represented by a combination of intents, slot types and/or their values. For example, while playing a song is a feature represented by a single intent (PlayMusic) only, playing a song on a service is another feature represented by the combination of PlayMusic intent and ServiceName slot type.
Prior work on novelty detection limits the scope of features to those represented by novel single intents, leading to (1) giant clusters spanning several user-perceived fine-grained features belonging to the same intent, (2) incoherent interpretation of clusters from users' perspective (no direct connection to some user-perceived feature), and (3) missing those features spanning several intents.
In this work, we introduce feature discovery as opposed to single intent discovery, which aims at discovering novel features spanning a combination of intents and slots, and present a technique for discovering novel features from user utterances. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and consistently show its ability to detect novel features.

Novel Feature Discovery for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

Closed-book question answering (QA) requires a model to directly answer an open-domain question without access to any external knowledge. Prior work on closed-book QA either directly finetunes or prompts a pretrained language model (LM) to leverage the stored knowledge. However, they do not fully exploit the parameterized knowledge. To address this inefficiency, we propose a two-stage, closed-book QA framework which employs a coarse-to-fine approach to extract the relevant knowledge and answer a question. We first generate a related context for a given question by prompting a pretrained LM. We then prompt the same LM to generate an answer using the generated context and the question. Additionally, we marginalize over the generated contexts to improve the accuracies and reduce context uncertainty. Experimental results on three QA benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms previous closed-book QA methods. For example on TriviaQA, our method improves exact match accuracy from 55.3% to 68.6%, and is on par with open-book QA methods (68.6% vs. 68.0%). Our results show that our new methodology is able to better exploit the stored knowledge in pretrained LMs without adding extra learnable parameters or needing finetuning, and paves the way for hybrid models that integrate pretrained LMs with external knowledge.

Context Generation Improves Open Domain Question Answering

We present Reddit Health Online Talk (RedHOT), a corpus of 22,000 richly annotated social media posts from Reddit spanning 24 health conditions. 
Annotations include demarcations of spans corresponding to medical claims, personal experiences, and questions.
We collect additional granular annotations on identified claims.
Specifically, we mark snippets that describe patient Populations, Interventions, and Outcomes (PIO elements) within these. 
Using this corpus, we introduce the task of retrieving trustworthy evidence relevant to a given claim made on social media. 
We propose a new method to automatically derive (noisy) supervision for this task which we use to train a dense retrieval model; this outperforms baseline models. 
Manual evaluation 
of retrieval results performed by medical doctors indicate that while our system performance is promising, there is considerable room for improvement.
We release all annotations collected (and scripts to assemble the dataset), and all code necessary to reproduce the results in this paper at: https://sominw.com/redhot.

RedHOT: A Corpus of Annotated Medical Questions, Experiences, and Claims on Social Media

Existing language and vision models achieve impressive performance in image-text understanding. Yet, it is an open question to what extent they can be used for language understanding in 3D environments and whether they implicitly acquire 3D object knowledge, e.g. about different views of an object.
In this paper, we investigate whether a state-of-the-art language and vision model, CLIP, is able to ground perspective descriptions of a 3D object and identify canonical views of common objects based on text queries.
We present an evaluation framework that uses a circling camera around a 3D object to generate images from different viewpoints and evaluate them in terms of their similarity to natural language descriptions.
We find that a pre-trained CLIP model performs poorly on most canonical views and that fine-tuning using hard negative sampling and random contrasting yields good results even under conditions with little available training data.

Paparazzi: A Deep Dive into the Capabilities of Language and Vision Models for Grounding Viewpoint Descriptions

Collecting high quality conversational data can be very expensive for most applications and infeasible for others due to privacy, ethical, or similar concerns. A promising direction to tackle this problem is to generate synthetic dialogues by prompting large language models. In this work, we use a small set of expert-written conversations as in-context examples to synthesize a social conversation dataset using prompting. We perform several thorough evaluations of our synthetic conversations compared to human-collected conversations. This includes various dimensions of conversation quality with human evaluation directly on the synthesized conversations, and interactive human evaluation of chatbots fine-tuned on the synthetically generated dataset. We additionally demonstrate that this prompting approach is generalizable to multi-party conversations, providing potential to create new synthetic data for multi-party tasks. Our synthetic multi-party conversations were rated more favorably across all measured dimensions compared to conversation excerpts sampled from a human-collected multi-party dataset.

PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis

Federated learning is a training paradigm that learns from multiple distributed users without aggregating data on a centralized server, promising the ability to deploy machine-learning to a diverse population of users without first collecting large, labeled datasets.
As federated learning involves averaging gradient updates across a decentralized population, there is a growing need for personalization of federated learning systems (i.e. conversational agents must personalize to individual users and the context of an interaction).
In this work, we propose a new direction for personalization research within federated learning, leveraging both personal embeddings and shared context embeddings.
We also present an approach to predict these "preference" embeddings, enabling personalization without backpropagation. 
Compared to state-of-the-art personalization baselines, our approach achieves a 50% improvement in test-time perplexity using 0.001% of the memory required by baseline approaches, and achieving greater sample- and compute-efficiency.

FedPerC: Federated Learning for Language Generation with Personal and Context Preference Embeddings

We consider the problem of segmenting unformatted text and transcripts linearly based on their topical structure. While prior approaches explicitly train to predict segment boundaries, our proposed approach solves this task by inferring the hierarchical segmentation structure associated with the input text fragment. Given the lack of a large annotated dataset for this task, we propose a data curation strategy and create a corpus of over 700K Wikipedia articles with their hierarchical structures. We then propose the first supervised approach to generating hierarchical segmentation structures based on these annotations. Our method, in particular, is based on a neural conditional random field (CRF), which explicitly models the statistical dependency between a node and its constituent child nodes. We introduce a new data augmentation scheme as part of our model training strategy, which involves sampling a variety of node aggregations, permutations, and removals, all of which help capture fine-grained and coarse topical shifts in the data and improve model performance. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms or achieves competitive performance when compared to previous state-of-the-art algorithms in the following settings: rich-resource, cross-domain transferability, few-shot supervision, and segmentation when topic label annotations are provided.

A Neural CRF-based Hierarchical Approach for Linear Text Segmentation

Financial information is generated and distributed across the world, resulting in a vast amount of domain-specific multilingual data. Multilingual models adapted to the financial domain would ease deployment when an organization needs to work with multiple languages on a regular basis. For the development and evaluation of such models, there is a need for multilingual financial language processing datasets. We describe MultiFin -- a publicly available financial dataset consisting of real-world article headlines covering 15 languages across different writing systems and language families. The dataset consists of hierarchical label structure providing two classification tasks: multi-label and multi-class. We develop our annotation schema based on a real-world application and annotate our dataset using both 'label by native-speaker' and 'translate-then-label' approaches. The evaluation of several popular multilingual models, e.g., mBERT, XLM-R, and mT5, show that although decent accuracy can be achieved in high-resource languages, there is substantial room for improvement in low-resource languages.

MultiFin: A Dataset for Multilingual Financial NLP

In recent years, the pattern of news consumption has been changing. The most popular multimedia news formats are now multimodal - the reader is often presented not only with a textual article but also with a short, vivid video. To draw the attention of the reader, such video-based articles are usually presented as a short textual summary paired with an image thumbnail.
In this paper, we introduce MLASK (MultimodaL Article Summarization Kit) - a new dataset of video-based news articles paired with a textual summary and a cover picture, all obtained by automatically crawling several news websites. We demonstrate how the proposed dataset can be used to model the task of multimodal summarization by training a Transformer-based neural model. We also examine the effects of pre-training when the usage of generative pre-trained language models helps to improve the model performance, but (additional) pre-training on the simpler task of text summarization yields even better results. Our experiments suggest that the benefits of pre-training and using additional modalities in the input are not orthogonal.

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