Croatia

In open-retrieval conversational machine reading (OR-CMR) task, machines are required to do multi-turn question answering given dialogue history and a textual knowledge base. Existing works generally utilize two independent modules to approach this problem&#39;s two successive sub-tasks: first with a hard-label decision making and second with a question generation aided by various entailment reasoning methods. Such usual cascaded modeling is vulnerable to error propagation and prevents the two sub-tasks from being consistently optimized. In this work, we instead model OR-CMR as a unified text-to-text task in a fully end-to-end style. Experiments on the ShARC and OR-ShARC dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed end-to-end framework on both sub-tasks by a large margin, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Further ablation studies support that our framework can generalize to different backbone models.

EACL 2023

Towards End-to-End Open Conversational Machine Reading

end-to-end optimization

open-retrieval

conversational machine reading

In open-retrieval conversational machine reading (OR-CMR) task, machines are required to do multi-turn question answering given dialogue history and a textual knowledge base. Existing works generally utilize two independent modules to approach this problem's two successive sub-tasks: first with a hard-label decision making and second with a question generation aided by various entailment reasoning methods. Such usual cascaded modeling is vulnerable to error propagation and prevents the two sub-tasks from being consistently optimized. In this work, we instead model OR-CMR as a unified text-to-text task in a fully end-to-end style. Experiments on the ShARC and OR-ShARC dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed end-to-end framework on both sub-tasks by a large margin, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Further ablation studies support that our framework can generalize to different backbone models.

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.

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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.

Knowledge selection is the key in knowledge-grounded dialogues (KGD), which aims to select an appropriate knowledge snippet to be used in the utterance based on dialogue history. Previous studies mainly employ the classification approach to classify each candidate snippet as "relevant” or "irrelevant” independently. However, such approaches neglect the interactions between snippets, leading to difficulties in inferring the meaning of snippets. Moreover, they lack modeling of the discourse structure of dialogue-knowledge interactions. We propose a simple yet effective generative approach for knowledge selection, called GenKS. GenKS learns to select snippets by generating their identifiers with a sequence-to-sequence model. GenKS therefore captures intra-knowledge interaction inherently through attention mechanisms. Meanwhile, we devise a hyperlink mechanism to model the dialogue-knowledge interactions explicitly. We conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets, and verify GenKS achieves the best results on both knowledge selection and response generation.

Generative Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogues

Neural models for abstractive summarization tend to generate output that is fluent and well-formed but lacks semantic faithfulness, or factuality, with respect to the input documents. In this paper, we analyze the tradeoff between abstractiveness and factuality of generated summaries across multiple datasets and models, using extensive human evaluations of factuality. In our analysis, we visualize the rates of change in factuality as we gradually increase abstractiveness using a decoding constraint, and we observe that, while increased abstractiveness generally leads to a drop in factuality, the rate of factuality decay depends on factors such as the data that the system was trained on. We introduce two datasets with human factuality judgements; one containing 10.2k generated summaries with systematically varied degrees of abstractiveness; the other containing 4.2k summaries from five different summarization models. We propose new factuality metrics that adjust for the degree of abstractiveness, and we use them to compare the abstractiveness-adjusted factuality of previous summarization works, providing baselines for future work.

Evaluating the Tradeoff Between Abstractiveness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization

With language models becoming increasingly ubiquitous, it has become essential to address their inequitable treatment of diverse demographic groups and factors. Most research on evaluating and mitigating fairness harms has been concentrated on English, while multilingual models and non-English languages have received comparatively little attention. In this paper, we survey different aspects of fairness in languages beyond English and multilingual contexts. This paper presents a survey of fairness in multilingual and non-English contexts, highlighting the shortcomings of current research and the difficulties faced by methods designed for English. We contend that the multitude of diverse cultures and languages across the world makes it infeasible to achieve comprehensive coverage in terms of constructing fairness datasets. Thus, the measurement and mitigation of biases must evolve beyond the current dataset-driven practices that are narrowly focused on specific dimensions and types of biases and, therefore, impossible to scale across languages and cultures.

Fairness in Language Models Beyond English: Gaps and Challenges

The ability to recognize emotions in conversations is necessary and important for the online chatbot to do tasks such as empathetic response generation and emotional support. Present researches mainly focus on recognizing emotions through a speaker's utterance, while research on emotion inference predicts emotions of addressees through previous utterances. Because of the lack of the addressee's utterance, emotion inference is more challenging than emotion recognition. In this paper, we propose a global-local modeling method based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) and pre-trained language models (PLM) to do emotion inference, which utilizes the sequence modeling ability of RNNs and abundant knowledge from PLMs. Moreover, we take the whole dialogue history as input of PLM to generate knowledge by in-context learning. Experimental results show that our model with knoledge enhancement achieves state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets.

Global-Local Modeling with Prompt-Based Knowledge Enhancement for Emotion Inference in Conversation

The news subheading summarizes an article's contents in several sentences to support the headline limited to solely conveying the main contents. So, it is necessary to generate compelling news subheadings in consideration of the structural characteristics of the news. In this paper, we propose a subheading generation model using topical headline information. We introduce a discriminative learning method that utilizes the prediction result of masked headline tokens. Experiments show that the proposed model is effective and outperforms the comparative models on three news datasets written in two languages. We also show that our model performs robustly on a small dataset and various masking ratios. Qualitative analysis and human evaluations also show that the overall quality of generated subheadings improved over the comparative models.

Headline Token-based Discriminative Learning for Subheading Generation in News Article

Solving substitution ciphers involves mapping sequences of cipher symbols to fluent text in a target language. This has conventionally been formulated as a search problem, to find the decipherment key using a character-level language model to constrain the search space. This work instead frames decipherment as a sequence prediction task, using a Transformer-based causal language model to learn recurrences between characters in a ciphertext. We introduce a novel technique for transcribing arbitrary substitution ciphers into a common recurrence encoding. By leveraging this technique, we (i) create a large synthetic dataset of homophonic ciphers using random keys, and (ii) train a decipherment model that predicts the plaintext sequence given a recurrence-encoded ciphertext. Our method achieves strong results on synthetic 1:1 and homophonic ciphers, and cracks several real historic homophonic ciphers. Our analysis shows that the model learns recurrence relations between cipher symbols and recovers decipherment keys in its self-attention.

Decipherment as Regression: Solving Historical Substitution Ciphers by Learning Symbol Recurrence Relations

Keyphrase Extraction (KE) is a critical component in Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems for selecting a set of phrases from the document that could summarize the important information discussed in the document. Typically, a keyphrase extraction system can significantly accelerate the speed of information retrieval and help people get first-hand information from a long document quickly and accurately. Specifically, keyphrases are capable of providing semantic metadata characterizing documents and producing an overview of the content of a document. In this paper, we introduce keyphrase extraction, present a review of the recent studies based on pre-trained language models, offer interesting insights on the different approaches, highlight open issues, and give a comparative experimental study of popular supervised as well as unsupervised techniques on several datasets. To encourage more instantiations, we release the related files mentioned in this paper.

A Survey on Recent Advances in Keyphrase Extraction from Pre-trained Language Models

Explanation prompts ask language models to not only assign a particular label to a given
input, such as true, entailment, or contradiction in the case of natural language inference but also to generate a free-text explanation that supports this label. For example: "This is {label} because {explanation}.” While this type of prompt was originally introduced with the aim of improving model interpretability, we show
here that explanation prompts also improve robustness to adversarial perturbations in natural
language inference benchmarks. Compared to prompting for labels only, explanation prompting consistently yields stronger performance on adversarial benchmarks, outperforming the state of the art on Adversarial Natural Language Inference, Counterfactually-Augmented Natural Language Inference, and SNLI-Hard datasets. We argue that the increase in robustness is due to the fact that prompting for explanations weakens superficial cues. Specifically, single tokens that are highly predictive of the correct answer in the label-only setting become uninformative when the model also has to generate explanations.

Prompting for explanations improves Adversarial NLI. Is this true? {Yes} it is {true} because {it weakens superficial cues}

We introduce \dataset, a novel vision-language benchmark for human activity planning. It is designed for a task where embodied AI agents can reason and forecast future actions of humans based on video clips about their initial activities and intents in text. The dataset consists of 2.9k videos from \charades extended with intents via crowdsourcing, a multi-choice question test set, and four strong baselines. One of the baselines implements a neurosymbolic approach based on a multi-modal knowledge base (MKB), while the other ones are deep generative models adapted from recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. According to our extensive experiments, the key challenges are compositional generalization and effective use of information from both modalities.

ViLPAct: A Benchmark for Compositional Generalization on Multimodal Human Activities

Machine translation (MT) operates on the premise of an interlingua which abstracts away from surface form while preserving meaning. A decade ago the idea of using round-trip MT to guide grammatical error correction was proposed as a way to abstract away from potential errors in surface forms (Madnani _et_ _al_., 2012). At the time, it did not pan out due to the low quality of MT systems of the day. Today much stronger MT systems are available so we re-evaluate this idea across five languages and models of various sizes. We find that for extra large models input augmentation through round-trip MT has little to no effect. For more 'workable' model sizes, however, it yields consistent improvements, sometimes bringing the performance of a _base_ or _large_ model up to that of a _large_ or _xl_ model, respectively. The round-trip translation comes at a computational cost though, so one would have to determine whether to opt for a larger model or for input augmentation on a case-by-case basis.

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Generative Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogues