Croatia

While multilingual language models can improve NLP performance on low-resource languages by leveraging higher-resource languages, they also reduce average performance on all languages (the `curse of multilinguality&#39;). Here we show another problem with multilingual models: grammatical structures in higher-resource languages bleed into lower-resource languages, a phenomenon we call grammatical structure bias. We show this bias via a novel method for comparing the fluency of multilingual models to the fluency of monolingual Spanish and Greek models: testing their preference for two carefully-chosen variable grammatical structures (optional pronoun-drop in Spanish and optional Subject-Verb ordering in Greek). We find that multilingual BERT is biased toward the English-like setting (explicit pronouns and Subject-Verb-Object ordering) as compared to our monolingual control language model. With our case studies, we hope to bring to light the fine-grained ways in which multilingual models can be biased, and encourage more linguistically-aware fluency evaluation.

EACL 2023

Multilingual BERT has an accent: Evaluating English influences on fluency in multilingual models

fluency evaluation

constructions

multilingual

While multilingual language models can improve NLP performance on low-resource languages by leveraging higher-resource languages, they also reduce average performance on all languages (the `curse of multilinguality'). Here we show another problem with multilingual models: grammatical structures in higher-resource languages bleed into lower-resource languages, a phenomenon we call grammatical structure bias. We show this bias via a novel method for comparing the fluency of multilingual models to the fluency of monolingual Spanish and Greek models: testing their preference for two carefully-chosen variable grammatical structures (optional pronoun-drop in Spanish and optional Subject-Verb ordering in Greek). We find that multilingual BERT is biased toward the English-like setting (explicit pronouns and Subject-Verb-Object ordering) as compared to our monolingual control language model. With our case studies, we hope to bring to light the fine-grained ways in which multilingual models can be biased, and encourage more linguistically-aware fluency evaluation.

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.

Vision-and-language (V&L) models pretrained on large-scale multimodal data have demonstrated strong performance on various tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering (VQA). The quality of such models is commonly assessed by measuring their performance on unseen data that typically comes from the same distribution as the training data. However, when evaluated under out-of-distribution (out-of-dataset) settings for VQA, we observe that these models exhibit poor generalization. We comprehensively evaluate two pretrained V&L models under different settings (i.e. classification and open-ended text generation) by conducting cross-dataset evaluations. We find that these models tend to learn to solve the benchmark, rather than learning the high-level skills required by the VQA task. We also find that in most cases generative models are less susceptible to shifts in data distribution compared to discriminative ones, and that multimodal pretraining is generally helpful for OOD generalization. Finally, we revisit assumptions underlying the use of automatic VQA evaluation metrics, and empirically show that their stringent nature repeatedly penalizes models for correct responses.

Reassessing Evaluation Practices in Visual Question Answering: A Case Study on Out-of-Distribution Generalization

This paper investigates the identification of populist rhetoric in text and presents a novel cross-lingual dataset for this task. Our work is based on the definition of populism as a "communication style of political actors that refers to the people" but also includes anti-elitism as another core feature of populism. Accordingly, we annotate references to The People and The Elite in German and English parliamentary debates with a hierarchical scheme. The paper describes our dataset and annotation procedure and reports inter-annotator agreement for this task. Next, we compare and evaluate different transformer-based model architectures on a German dataset and report results for zero-shot learning on a smaller English dataset. We then show that semi-supervised tri-training can improve results in the cross-lingual setting. Our dataset can be used to investigate how political actors talk about The Elite and The People and to study how populist rhetoric is used as a strategic device.

Our kind of people? Detecting populist references in political debates

With the prominence of large pretrained language models, low-resource languages are rarely modelled monolingually and become victims of the "curse of multilinguality" in massively multilingual models. Recently, AfriBERTa showed that training transformer models from scratch on 1GB of data from many unrelated African languages outperforms massively multilingual models on downstream NLP tasks. Here we extend this direction, focusing on the use of related languages. We propose that training on smaller amounts of data but from related languages could match the performance of models trained on large, unrelated data. We test our hypothesis on the Niger-Congo family and its Bantu and Volta-Niger sub-families, pretraining models with data solely from Niger-Congo languages and finetuning on 4 downstream tasks: NER, part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis and text classification. We find that models trained on genetically related languages achieve equal performance on downstream tasks in low-resource languages despite using less training data. We recommend selecting training data based on language-relatedness when pretraining language models for low-resource languages.

Mini But Mighty: Efficient Multilingual Pretraining with Linguistically-Informed Data Selection

Open Information Extraction (OIE) is the task of extracting tuples of the form (subject, predicate, object), without any knowledge of the type and lexical form of the predicate, the subject, or the object. In this work, we focus on improving OIE quality by exploiting domain knowledge about the subject and object. 
More precisely, knowing that the subjects and objects in sentences are oftentimes named entities, we explore how to inject constraints in the extraction through constrained inference and constraint-aware training. 
Our work leverages the state-of-the-art OpenIE6 platform, which we adapt to our setting. Through a carefully constructed training dataset and constrained training, we obtain a 29.17% F1-score improvement in the CaRB metric and a 24.37% F1-score improvement in the WIRe57 metric. Our technique has important applications -- one of them is investigative journalism, where automatically extracting conflict-of-interest between scientists and funding organizations helps understand the type of relations companies engage with the scientists.

Open Information Extraction with Entity Focused Constraints

In this paper, we focus on video-to-text summarization and investigate how to best utilize multimodal information for summarizing long inputs (e.g., an hour-long TV show) into long outputs (e.g., a multi-sentence summary). We extend SummScreen (Chen et al., 2022), a dialogue summarization dataset consisting of transcripts of TV episodes with reference summaries, and create a multimodal variant by collecting corresponding full-length videos. We incorporate multimodal information into a pre-trained textual summarizer efficiently using adapter modules augmented with a hierarchical structure while tuning only 3.8% of model parameters. Our experiments demonstrate that multimodal information offers superior performance over more memory-heavy and fully fine-tuned textual summarization methods.

Hierarchical3D Adapters for Long Video-to-text Summarization

Code comments are critical for maintaining and comprehending software programs, but they are often missing, mismatched, or outdated in practice. Code comment generation task aims to automatically produce descriptive comments for code snippets. 
Recently, methods based on the neural encoder-decoder architecture have achieved impressive performance. These methods assume that all the information required to generate comments is encoded in the target function itself, yet in most realistic situations, it is hard to understand a function in isolation from the surrounding context. Furthermore, the global context may contain redundant information that should not be introduced. 
To address the above issues, we present a novel graph-based learning framework to capture various relations among functions in a class file. Our approach is based on a common real-world scenario in which only a few functions in the source file have human-written comments. Guided by intra-class function relations, our model incorporates contextual information extracted from both the source code and available comments to generate missing comments. We conduct experiments on a Java dataset collected from real-world projects. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms competitive baseline models on all automatic and human evaluation metrics.

An Intra-Class Relation Guided Approach for Code Comment Generation

Usage-based theories of language acquisition have extensively documented the processes by which children acquire language through communicative interaction. Notably, Tomasello (2003) distinguishes two main cognitive capacities that underlie human language acquisition: intention reading and pattern finding. Intention reading is the process by which children try to continuously reconstruct the intended meaning of their interlocutors. Pattern finding refers to the process that allows them to distil linguistic schemata from multiple communicative interactions. Even though the fields of cognitive science and psycholinguistics have studied these processes in depth, no faithful computational operationalisations of these mechanisms through which children learn language exist to date. The research on which we report in this paper aims to fill part of this void by introducing a computational operationalisation of syntactico-semantic pattern finding. Concretely, we present a methodology for learning grammars based on similarities and differences in the form and meaning of linguistic observations alone. Our methodology is able to learn compositional lexical and item-based constructions of variable extent and degree of abstraction, along with a network of emergent syntactic categories. We evaluate our methodology on the CLEVR benchmark dataset and show that the methodology allows for fast, incremental and effective learning. The constructions and categorial network that result from the learning process are fully transparent and bidirectional, facilitating both language comprehension and production. Theoretically, our model provides computational evidence for the learnability of usage-based constructionist theories of language acquisition. Practically, the techniques that we present facilitate the learning of computationally tractable, usage-based construction grammars, which are applicable for natural language understanding and production tasks.

Modelling Language Acquisition through Syntactico-Semantic Pattern Finding

The COVID-19 pandemic has made a huge global impact and cost millions of lives. As COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, they were quickly met with widespread hesitancy. To address the concerns of hesitant people, we launched VIRA, a public dialogue system aimed at addressing questions and concerns surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines. Here, we release VIRADialogs, a dataset of over 8k dialogues conducted by actual users with VIRA, providing a unique real-world conversational dataset. In light of rapid changes in users' intents, due to updates in guidelines or in response to new information, we highlight the important task of intent discovery in this use-case. We introduce a novel automatic evaluation framework for intent discovery, leveraging the existing intent classifier of VIRA. We use this framework to report baseline intent discovery results over VIRADialogs, that highlight the difficulty of this task.

Benchmark Data and Evaluation Framework for Intent Discovery Around COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy

Disentangling the encodings of neural models is a fundamental aspect for improving interpretability, semantic control and downstream task performance in Natural Language Processing. Currently, most disentanglement methods are unsupervised or rely on synthetic datasets with known generative factors. We argue that recurrent syntactic and semantic regularities in textual data can be used to provide the models with both structural biases and generative factors. We leverage the semantic structures present in a representative and semantically dense category of sentence types, definitional sentences, for training a Variational Autoencoder to learn disentangled representations. Our experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms unsupervised baselines on several qualitative and quantitative benchmarks for disentanglement, and it also improves the results in the downstream task of definition modeling.

Learning Disentangled Representations for Natural Language Definitions

Recent years have witnessed increasing interests in prompt-based learning in which models can be trained on only a few annotated instances, making them suitable in low-resource settings. It is even challenging in fine-grained classification as the pre-trained language models tend to generate similar output embedding which makes it difficult to discriminate for the prompt-based classifier. In this work, we alleviate this information diffusion issue by proposing a calibration method based on a transformation which rotates the embedding feature into a new metric space where we adapt the ratio of each dimension to a uniform distribution to guarantee the distinguishability of learned embeddings. Furthermore, we take the advantage of hyperbolic embedding to capture the relation between dimensions by a coarse-fine metric learning strategy to enhance interpretability. Extensive experiments on the three datasets under various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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Reassessing Evaluation Practices in Visual Question Answering: A Case Study on Out-of-Distribution Generalization