Croatia

Recently introduced instruction-paradigm empowers non-expert users to leverage NLP resources by defining a new task in natural language. Instruction-tuned models have significantly outperformed multitask learning models (without instruction); however they are far from state-of-the-art task-specific models. Conventional approaches to improve model performance via creating datasets with large number of task instances or architectural changes in the model may not be feasible for non-expert users. However, they can write alternate instructions to represent an instruction task. Is Instruction-augmentation helpful? We augment a subset of tasks in the expanded version of NATURAL INSTRUCTIONS with additional instructions and find that it significantly improves model performance (up to 35%), especially in the low-data regime. Our results indicate that an additional instruction can be equivalent to ~200 data samples on average across tasks.

EACL 2023

How Many Data Samples is an Additional Instruction Worth?

llms

instructions

prompting

data augmentation

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.

Adversarial attack aims to perturb input sequences and mislead a trained model for false predictions. To enhance the model robustness, defensing methods are accordingly employed by either data augmentation (involving adversarial samples) or model enhancement (modifying the training loss and/or model architecture). In contrast to previous work, this paper revisits the masked language modeling (MLM) and presents a simple yet efficient algorithm against adversarial attacks, termed [MASK] insertion for defensing (MI4D). Specifically, MI4D simply inserts [MASK] tokens to input sequences during training and inference, maximizing the intersection of the new convex hull (MI4D creates) with the original one (the clean input forms). As neither additional adversarial samples nor the model modification is required, MI4D is as computationally efficient as traditional fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted using three benchmark datasets and four attacking methods. MI4D yields a significant improvement (on average) of the accuracy between 3.2 and 11.1 absolute points when compared with six state-of-the-art defensing baselines.

[MASK] Insertion: a robust method for anti-adversarial attacks

This paper presents ViDeBERTa, a new pre-trained monolingual language model for Vietnamese, with three versions - ViDeBERTa_xsmall, ViDeBERTa_base, and ViDeBERTa_large, which are pre-trained on a large-scale corpus of high-quality and diverse Vietnamese texts using DeBERTa architecture. Although many successful pre-trained language models based on Transformer have been widely proposed for the English language, there are still few pre-trained models for Vietnamese, a low-resource language, that perform good results on downstream tasks, especially Question answering. We fine-tune and evaluate our model on three important natural language downstream tasks, Part-of-speech tagging, Named-entity recognition, and Question answering. The empirical results demonstrate that ViDeBERTa with far fewer parameters surpasses the previous state-of-the-art models on multiple Vietnamese-specific natural language understanding tasks. Notably, ViDeBERTa_base with 86M parameters, which is only about 23% of PhoBERT_large with 370M parameters, still performs the same or better results than the previous state-of-the-art model. Our ViDeBERTa models are available at: https://github.com/HySonLab/ViDeBERTa.

ViDeBERTa: A powerful pre-trained language model for Vietnamese

Accessing medical literature is difficult for laypeople as the content is written for specialists and contains medical jargon. Automated text simplification methods offer a potential means to address this issue. In this work, we propose a summarize-then-simplify two-stage strategy, which we call NapSS, identifying the relevant content to simplify while ensuring that the original narrative flow is preserved. In this approach, we first generate reference summaries via sentence matching between the original and the simplified abstracts. These summaries are then used to train an extractive summarizer, learning the most relevant content to be simplified. Then, to ensure the narrative consistency of the simplified text, we synthesize auxiliary narrative prompts combining key phrases derived from the syntactical analyses of the original text. Our model achieves results significantly better than the seq2seq baseline on an English medical corpus, yielding 3%~4% absolute improvements in terms of lexical similarity, and providing a further 1.1% improvement of SARI score when combined with the baseline. We also highlight shortcomings of existing evaluation methods, and introduce new metrics that take into account both lexical and high-level semantic similarity. A human evaluation conducted on a random sample of the test set further establishes the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Codes and models are released here: https://github.com/LuJunru/NapSS.

NapSS: Paragraph-level Medical Text Simplification via Narrative Prompting and Sentence-matching Summarization

Extreme Multi-label Text Classification (XMTC) has been a tough challenge in machine learning research and applications due to the sheer sizes of the label spaces and the severe data scarcity problem associated with the long tail of rare labels in highly skewed distributions. 
This paper addresses the challenge of tail label prediction by leveraging the power of dense neural retrieval model in mapping input documents (as queries) to relevant label descriptions. To further enhance the quality of label descriptions, we propose to generate pseudo label descriptions from a trained bag-of-words (BoW) classifier, which demonstrates better classification performance under severe scarce data conditions.
The proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of overall label prediction on XMTC benchmark datasets and especially outperforms the SOTA models in the tail label prediction. We also provide a theoretical analysis for relating the BoW and neural models w.r.t. performance lower bound.

Long-tailed Extreme Multi-label Text Classification by the Retrieval of Generated Pseudo Label Descriptions

Keyphrase extraction aims at automatically extracting a list of "important" phrases representing the key concepts in a document. Prior approaches for unsupervised keyphrase extraction resorted to heuristic notions of phrase importance via embedding clustering or graph centrality, requiring extensive domain expertise. Our work presents a simple alternative approach which defines keyphrases as document phrases that are salient for predicting the topic of the document. To this end, we propose INSPECT---an approach that uses self-explaining models for identifying influential keyphrases in a document by measuring the predictive impact of input phrases on the downstream task of the document topic classification. We show that this novel method not only alleviates the need for ad-hoc heuristics but also achieves state-of-the-art results in unsupervised keyphrase extraction in four datasets across two domains: scientific publications and news articles.

Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction via Interpretable Neural Networks

Recent literature has shown that large language models (LLMs) are generally excellent few-shot reasoners to solve text reasoning tasks. However, the capability of LLMs on table reasoning tasks is yet to be explored. In this paper, we aim at understanding how well LLMs can perform table-related tasks with few-shot in-context learning. Specifically, we evaluated LLMs on popular table QA and fact verification datasets like WikiTableQuestion, FetaQA, TabFact, and FEVEROUS and found that LLMs are competent at complex reasoning over table structures, though these models are not pre-trained on any table corpus. When combined with `chain of thoughts' prompting, LLMs can achieve very strong performance with only a 1-shot demonstration, even on par with some SoTA models. We show that LLMs are even more competent at generating comprehensive long-form answers on FetaQA than tuned T5-large. We further manually studied the reasoning chains elicited from LLMs and found that these reasoning chains are highly consistent with the underlying semantic form. We believe that LLMs can serve as a simple yet generic baseline for future research. The code and data are released in \url{https://github.com/wenhuchen/TableCoT}.

Large Language Models are few(1)-shot Table Reasoners

Citation count prediction is the task of predicting the future citation counts of academic papers, which is particularly useful for estimating the future impacts of an ever-growing number of academic papers.
Although there have been many studies on citation count prediction, they are not applicable to predicting the citation counts of newly published papers, because they assume the availability of future citation counts for papers that have not had enough time pass since publication.
In this paper, we first identify problems in the settings of existing studies and introduce a realistic citation count prediction task that strictly uses information available at the time of a target paper's publication.
For realistic citation count prediction, we then propose two methods to leverage the citation counts of papers shortly after publication.
Through experiments using papers collected from arXiv and bioRxiv, we demonstrate that our methods considerably improve the performance of citation count prediction for newly published papers in a realistic setting.

Realistic Citation Count Prediction Task for Newly Published Papers

Warning: This paper contains some offensive expressions.

Offensive content is an unavoidable issue on social media. Most existing offensive language identification methods rely on the compilation of labeled datasets. However, existing methods rarely consider low-resource languages that have relatively less data available for training (e.g., Korean). To address these issues, we construct a novel KOrean Dataset for Offensive Language Identification (KODOLI). KODOLI comprises more fine-grained offensiveness categories (i.e., not offensive, likely offensive, and offensive) than existing ones. A likely offensive language refers to texts with implicit offensiveness or abusive language without offensive intentions. In addition, we propose two auxiliary tasks to help identify offensive languages: abusive language detection and sentiment analysis. We provide experimental results for baselines on KODOLI and observe that language models suffer from identifying "LIKELY" offensive statements. Quantitative results and qualitative analysis demonstrate that jointly learning offensive language, abusive language and sentiment information improves the performance of offensive language identification.

``Why do I feel offended?'' - Korean Dataset for Offensive Language Identification

Neural reasoning accuracy improves when generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, the source of this improvement is yet unclear.
Here, we investigate and factorize the benefit of generating intermediate steps for symbolic reasoning.
Specifically, we decompose the reasoning strategy w.r.t. step granularity and chaining strategy. 
With a purely symbolic numerical reasoning dataset (e.g., A=1, B=3, C=A+3, C?), we found that the choice of reasoning strategies significantly affects the performance, with the gap becoming even larger as the extrapolation length becomes longer.
Surprisingly, we also found that certain configurations lead to nearly perfect performance, even in the case of length extrapolation.
Our results indicate the importance of further exploring effective strategies for neural reasoning models.

Empirical Investigation of Neural Symbolic Reasoning Strategies

To explain the predicted answers and evaluate the reasoning abilities of models, several studies have utilized underlying reasoning (UR) tasks in multi-hop question answering (QA) datasets. However, it remains an open question as to how effective UR tasks are for the QA task when training models on both tasks in an end-to-end manner. In this study, we address this question by analyzing the effectiveness of UR tasks (including both sentence-level and entity-level tasks) in three aspects: (1) QA performance, (2) reasoning shortcuts, and (3) robustness. While the previous models have not been explicitly trained on an entity-level reasoning prediction task, we build a multi-task model that performs three tasks together: sentence-level supporting facts prediction, entity-level reasoning prediction, and answer prediction. Experimental results on 2WikiMultiHopQA and HotpotQA-small datasets reveal that (1) UR tasks can improve QA performance. Using four debiased datasets that are newly created, we demonstrate that (2) UR tasks are helpful in preventing reasoning shortcuts in the multi-hop QA task. However, we find that (3) UR tasks do not contribute to improving the robustness of the model on adversarial questions, such as sub-questions and inverted questions. We encourage future studies to investigate the effectiveness of entity-level reasoning in the form of natural language questions (e.g., sub-question forms).

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