Croatia

Scarcity of data and technological limitations for resource-poor languages in developing countries like India poses a threat to the development of sophisticated NLU systems for healthcare. To assess the current status of various state-of-the-art language models in healthcare, this paper studies the problem by initially proposing two different Healthcare datasets, Indian Healthcare Query Intent-WebMD and 1mg (IHQID-WebMD and IHQID-1mg) and one real world Indian hospital query data in English and multiple Indic languages (Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Gujarati) which are annotated with the query intents as well as entities. Our aim is to detect query intents and corresponding entities. We perform extensive experiments on a set of models which in various realistic settings and explore two scenarios based on the access to English data only (less costly) and access to target language data (more expensive). We analyze context specific practical relevancy through empirical analysis. The results, expressed in terms of overall F-score show that our approach is practically useful to identify intents and entities.

EACL 2023

Intent Identification and Entity Extraction for Healthcare Queries in Indic Languages

indian healthcare queries

entity extraction

intent detection

### 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

Anticipating future actions in a video is useful for many autonomous and assistive technologies. Prior action anticipation work mostly treat this as a vision modality problem, where the models learn the task information primarily from the video features in the action anticipation datasets. However, knowledge about action sequences can also be obtained from external textual data. In this work, we show how knowledge in pretrained language models can be adapted and distilled into vision based action anticipation models. We show that a simple distillation technique can achieve effective knowledge transfer and provide consistent gains on a strong vision model (Anticipative Vision Transformer) for two action anticipation datasets (3.5% relative gain on EGTEA-GAZE+ and 7.2% relative gain on EPIC-KITCHEN 55), giving a new state-of-the-art result.

Text-Derived Knowledge Helps Vision: A Simple Cross-modal Distillation for Video-based Action Anticipation

Opinion summarization provides an important solution for summarizing opinions expressed among a large number of reviews. However, generating aspect-specific and general summaries is challenging due to the lack of annotated data. In this work, we propose two simple yet effective unsupervised approaches to generate both aspect-specific and general opinion summaries by training on synthetic datasets constructed with aspect-related review contents. 
Our first approach, Seed Words Based Leave-One-Out (SW-LOO), identifies aspect-related portions of reviews simply by exact-matching aspect seed words and outperforms existing methods by 3.4 ROUGE-L points on Space and 0.5 ROUGE-1 point on Oposum+ for aspect-specific opinion summarization.
Our second approach, Natural Language Inference Based Leave-One-Out (NLI-LOO) identifies aspect-related sentences utilizing an NLI model in a more general setting without using seed words and outperforms existing approaches by 1.2 ROUGE-L points on Space for aspect-specific opinion summarization and remains competitive on other metrics.

Simple Yet Effective Synthetic Dataset Construction for Unsupervised Opinion Summarization

The large number of parameters of some prominent language models, such as BERT, makes their fine-tuning on downstream tasks computationally intensive and energy hungry.
Previously researchers were focused on lower bit-width integer data types for the forward propagation of language models to save memory and computation.
As for the backward propagation, however, only 16-bit floating-point data type has been used for the fine-tuning of BERT.
In this work, we use integer arithmetic for both forward and back propagation in the fine-tuning of BERT.
We study the effects of varying the integer bit-width on the model's metric performance.
Our integer fine-tuning uses integer arithmetic to perform forward propagation and gradient computation of linear, layer-norm, and embedding layers of BERT.
We fine-tune BERT using our integer training method on SQuAD v1.1 and SQuAD v2., and GLUE benchmark.
We demonstrate that metric performance of fine-tuning 16-bit integer BERT matches both 16-bit and 32-bit floating-point baselines.
Furthermore, using the faster and more memory efficient 8-bit integer data type, integer fine-tuning of BERT loses an average of 3.1 points compared to the FP32 baseline.

Towards Fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models with Integer Forward and Backward Propagation

This work considers the development of a text simplification model to help patients better understand their radiology reports. This paper proposes a data augmentation approach to address the data scarcity issue caused by the high cost of manual simplification. It prompts a large foundational pre-trained language model to generate simplifications of unlabeled radiology sentences. In addition, it uses paraphrasing of labeled radiology sentences. Experimental results show that the proposed data augmentation approach enables the training of a significantly more accurate simplification model than the baselines.

Data Augmentation for Radiology Report Simplification

Real-world applications of neural language models often involve running many different models over the same corpus. The high computational cost of these runs has led to interest in techniques that can reuse the contextualized embeddings produced in previous runs to speed training and inference of future ones. We refer to this approach as embedding recycling (ER). While multiple ER techniques have been proposed, their practical effectiveness is still unknown because existing evaluations consider very few models and do not adequately account for overhead costs. We perform an extensive evaluation of ER across eight different models (17 to 900 million parameters) and fourteen tasks in English. We show how a simple ER technique that caches activations from an intermediate layer of a pretrained model, and learns task-specific adapters on the later layers, is broadly effective. For the best-performing baseline in our experiments (DeBERTa-v2 XL), adding a precomputed cache results in a >90% speedup during training and 87-91% speedup for inference, with negligible impact on accuracy. Our analysis reveals important areas of future work.

Embedding Recycling for Language Models

While modern masked language models (LMs) are trained on ever larger corpora, we here explore the effects of down-scaling training to a modestly-sized but representative, well-balanced, and publicly available English text source -- the British National Corpus. We show that pre-training on this carefully curated corpus can reach better performance than the original BERT model. We argue that this type of corpora has great potential as a language modeling benchmark. To showcase this potential, we present fair, reproducible and data-efficient comparative studies of LMs, in which we evaluate several training objectives and model architectures and replicate previous empirical results in a systematic way. We propose an optimized LM architecture called LTG-BERT.

Trained on 100 million words and still in shape: BERT meets British National Corpus

Training end-to-end speech translation (ST) systems requires sufficiently large-scale data, which is unavailable for most language pairs and domains. One practical solution to the data scarcity issue is to convert text-based machine translation (MT) data to ST data via text-to-speech (TTS) systems.Yet, using TTS systems can be tedious and slow. In this work, we propose SpokenVocab, a simple, scalable and effective data augmentation technique to convert MT data to ST data on-the-fly. The idea is to retrieve and stitch audio snippets, corresponding to words in an MT sentence, from a spoken vocabulary bank. Our experiments on multiple language pairs show that stitched speech helps to improve translation quality by an average of 1.83 BLEU score, while performing equally well as TTS-generated speech in improving translation quality. We also showcase how SpokenVocab can be applied in code-switching ST for which often no TTS systems exit.

Generating Synthetic Speech from SpokenVocab for Speech Translation

The limits of open-ended generative models are unclear, yet increasingly important. What causes them to succeed and what causes them to fail? In this paper, we take a prompt-centric approach to analyzing and bounding the abilities of open-ended generative models. We present a generic methodology of analysis with two challenging prompt constraint types: structural and stylistic. These constraint types are categorized into a set of well-defined constraints that are analyzable by a single prompt. We then systematically create a diverse set of simple, natural, and useful prompts to robustly analyze each individual constraint. Using the GPT-3 text-davinci-002 model as a case study, we generate outputs from our collection of prompts and analyze the model's generative failures. We also show the generalizability of our proposed method on other large models like BLOOM and OPT. Our results and our in-context mitigation strategies reveal open challenges for future research.

Bounding the Capabilities of Large Language Models in Open Text Generation with Prompt Constraints

Open domain conversational agents can answer a broad range of targeted queries. However, the sequential nature of interaction with these systems makes knowledge exploration a lengthy task which burdens the user with asking a chain of well phrased questions. In this paper, we present a retrieval based system and associated dataset for predicting the next questions that the user might have. Such a system can proactively assist users in knowledge exploration leading to a more engaging dialog. The retrieval system is trained on a dataset called the Follow-up Query Bank (FQ-Bank). FQ-Bank contains ~14K multi-turn information-seeking conversations with a valid follow-up question and a set of invalid candidates. The invalid candidates are generated to simulate various syntactic and semantic confounders such as paraphrases, partial entity match, irrelevant entity, and ASR errors. We use confounder specific techniques to simulate these negative examples on the OR-QuAC dataset. Then, we train ranking models on FQ-Bank and present results comparing supervised and unsupervised approaches. The results suggest that we can retrieve the valid follow-ups by ranking them in higher positions compared to confounders, but further knowledge grounding can improve ranking performance.
FQ-Bank is publicly available at https://github.com/amazon-science/fq-bank.

Learning to Retrieve Engaging Follow-Up Queries

Recent studies have suggested that neural language models learn and store a large amount of facts and commonsense knowledge from training data. 
The ability of language models to restore such knowledge is often evaluated via zero-shot cloze-style QA tasks. 
However, such evaluations rely only on prediction accuracy without punishing the systems for their mistakes, e.g., simply guessing or hallucinating likely answers. 
Selective prediction is a more informative evaluation framework that takes the confidence of predictions into account. 
Under the selective prediction setting, a model is evaluated not only by the number of correct predictions, but also by the ability to filter out dubious predictions by estimating the confidence of individual predictions. 
Such confidence-aware evaluation is crucial for determining whether to trust zero-shot predictions of language models. 
In this paper, we apply the selective prediction setting to an existing benchmark, LAMA probe, and conduct extensive experiments with recent neural language models and different confidence functions. 
We empirically show that our Selective-LAMA evaluation is more robust to the effect of simple guesses than the conventional accuracy-based evaluation.
Our evaluation reveals the importance of the choice of confidence functions by showing that simply relying on token probabilities is not always the best choice.
Further analysis shows that various confidence functions exhibit different preferences over predicted tokens for a given context.

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Text-Derived Knowledge Helps Vision: A Simple Cross-modal Distillation for Video-based Action Anticipation

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Intent Identification and Entity Extraction for Healthcare Queries in Indic Languages

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