Croatia

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.

EACL 2023

PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis

multiparty dialogue

augmentation

synthetic data

prompting

large language models

generation

### 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.

findings / work in progress

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.

MLASK: Multimodal Summarization of Video-based News Articles

Novel intent discovery automates the process of grouping similar messages (questions) to identify previously unknown intents. However, current research focuses on publicly available datasets which have only the question field and significantly differ from real-life datasets. This paper proposes methods to improve the intent discovery pipeline deployed in a large e-commerce platform. We show the benefit of pre-training language models on in-domain data: both self-supervised and with weak supervision. We also devise the best method to utilize the conversational structure (i.e., question and answer) of real-life datasets during fine-tuning for clustering tasks, which we call Conv. All our methods combined to fully utilize real-life datasets give up to 33pp performance boost over state-of-the-art Constrained Deep Adaptive Clustering (CDAC) model for question only. By comparison CDAC model for the question data only gives only up to 13pp performance boost over the naive baseline.

Going beyond research datasets: Novel intent discovery in the industry setting

The rapid development of large pretrained language models has revolutionized not only the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) but also its evaluation. Inspired by the recent work of BARTScore: a metric leveraging the BART language model to evaluate the quality of generated text from various aspects, we introduce DATScore. DATScore uses data augmentation techniques to improve the evaluation of machine translation. Our main finding is that introducing data augmented translations of the source and reference texts is greatly helpful in evaluating the quality of the generated translation. We also propose two novel score averaging and term weighting strategies to improve the original score computing process of BARTScore. Experimental results on WMT show that DATScore correlates better with human meta-evaluations than the other recent state-of-the-art metrics, especially for low-resource languages. Ablation studies demonstrate the value added by our new scoring strategies. Moreover, we report in our extended experiments the performance of DATScore on 3 NLG tasks other than translation.

DATScore: Evaluating Translation with Data Augmented Translations

Humans tend to follow the Uniform Information Density (UID) principle by distributing information evenly in utterances. We study if decoding algorithms implicitly follow this UID principle, and under what conditions adherence to UID might be desirable for dialogue generation. We generate responses using different decoding algorithms with GPT-2 on the Persona-Chat dataset and collect human judgments on their quality using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We find that (i) surprisingly, model-generated responses follow the UID principle to a greater extent than human responses, and (ii) decoding algorithms that promote UID do not generate higher-quality responses. Instead, when we control for surprisal, non-uniformity of information density correlates with the quality of responses with very low/high surprisal. Our findings indicate that encouraging non-uniform responses is a potential solution to the ``likelihood trap'' problem (quality degradation in very high-likelihood text). Our dataset containing multiple candidate responses per dialog history along with human-annotated quality ratings is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/saranya132/dialog_uid_gpt2.

How do decoding algorithms distribute information in dialogue responses?

In order to reliably process natural language, NLP systems must generalize to the long tail of rare utterances. We propose a method to create challenging benchmarks that require generalizing to the tail of the distribution by re-splitting existing datasets. We create 'Likelihood Splits' where examples that are assigned lower likelihood by a pre-trained language model (LM) are placed in the test set, and more likely examples are in the training set. This simple approach can be customized to construct meaningful train-test splits for a wide range of tasks. Likelihood Splits surface more challenges than random splits: relative error rates of state-of-the-art models increase by 59% for semantic parsing on Spider, 93% for natural language inference on SNLI, and 33% for yes/no question answering on BoolQ, on our splits compared with the corresponding random splits. Moreover, Likelihood Splits create fairer benchmarks than adversarial filtering; when the LM used to create the splits is also employed as the task model, our splits do not unfairly penalize the LM.

Benchmarking Long-tail Generalization with Likelihood Splits

Multilingual pretraining approaches in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) have shown that training models to denoise synthetic code-switched data can yield impressive performance gains — owing to better multilingual semantic representations and transfer learning. However, they generated the synthetic code-switched data using non-contextual, one-to-one word translations obtained from lexicons - which can lead to significant noise in a variety of cases, including the poor handling of polysemes and multi-word expressions, violation of linguistic agreement and inability to scale to agglutinative languages. To overcome these limitations, we propose an approach called Contextual Code-Switching (CCS), where contextual, many-to-many word translations are generated using a `base' NMT model. We conduct experiments on 3 different language families - Romance, Uralic, and Indo-Aryan - and show significant improvements (by up to 5.5 spBLEU points) over the previous lexicon-based SOTA approaches. We also observe that small CCS models can perform comparably or better than massive models like mBART50 and mRASP2, depending on the size of data provided. We empirically analyse several key factors responsible for these - including context, many-to-many substitutions, code-switching language count etc. - and prove that they all contribute to enhanced pretraining of multilingual NMT models.

Exploring Enhanced Code-Switched Noising for Pretraining in Neural Machine Translation

Dialogue State Tracking (DST), a crucial component of task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems, keeps track of all important information pertaining to dialogue history: filling slots with the most probable values throughout the conversation. Existing methods generally rely on a predefined set of values and struggle to generalise to previously unseen slots in new domains. To overcome these challenges, we propose a domain-agnostic extractive question answering (QA) approach with shared weights across domains. To disentangle the complex domain information in ToDs, we train our DST with a novel domain filtering strategy by excluding out-of-domain question samples. With an independent classifier that predicts the presence of multiple domains given the context, our model tackles DST by extracting spans in active domains. Empirical results demonstrate that our model can efficiently leverage domain-agnostic QA datasets by two-stage fine-tuning while being both domain-scalable and open vocabulary in DST. It shows strong transferability by achieving zero-shot domain-adaptation results on MultiWOZ 2.1 with an average JGA of 36.7%. It further achieves cross-lingual transfer with state-of-the-art zero-shot results, 66.2% JGA from English to German and 75.7% JGA from English to Italian on WOZ 2.0.

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