Canada

Answering multi-hop questions over hybrid factual knowledge from the given text and table (TextTableQA) is a challenging task. Existing models mainly adopt a retriever-reader framework, which have several deficiencies, such as noisy labeling in training retriever, insufficient utilization of heterogeneous information over text and table, and deficient ability for different reasoning operations. In this paper, we propose a three-stage TextTableQA framework S3HQA, which comprises of retriever, selector, and reasoner. We use a retriever with refinement training to solve the noisy labeling problem. Then, a hybrid selector considers the linked relationships between heterogeneous data to select the most relevant factual knowledge. For the final stage, instead of adapting a reading comprehension module like in previous methods, we employ a generation-based reasoner to obtain answers. This includes two approaches: a row-wise generator and an LLM prompting generator~(first time used in this task). The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results in the few-shot setting. When trained on the full dataset, our approach outperforms all baseline methods, ranking first on the HybridQA leaderboard.

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ACL 2023

S3HQA: A Three-Stage Approach for Multi-hop Text-Table Hybrid Question Answering

hybrid question answering

tableqa

question answering

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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Answering multi-hop questions over hybrid factual knowledge from the given text and table (TextTableQA) is a challenging task. Existing models mainly adopt a retriever-reader framework, which have several deficiencies, such as noisy labeling in training retriever, insufficient utilization of heterogeneous information over text and table, and deficient ability for different reasoning operations. In this paper, we propose a three-stage TextTableQA framework S3HQA, which comprises of retriever, selector, and reasoner. We use a retriever with refinement training to solve the noisy labeling problem. Then, a hybrid selector considers the linked relationships between heterogeneous data to select the most relevant factual knowledge. For the final stage, instead of adapting a reading comprehension module like in previous methods, we employ a generation-based reasoner to obtain answers. This includes two approaches: a row-wise generator and an LLM prompting generator~(first time used in this task). The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results in the few-shot setting. When trained on the full dataset, our approach outperforms all baseline methods, ranking first on the HybridQA leaderboard.

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poster

Position modeling plays a critical role in Transformers. In this paper, we focus on length extrapolation, i.e., training on short texts while evaluating longer sequences. We define \textit{attention resolution} as an indicator of extrapolation. Then we propose two designs to improve the above metric of Transformers. Specifically, we introduce a relative position embedding to explicitly maximize attention resolution. Moreover, we use blockwise causal attention during inference for better resolution. We evaluate different Transformer variants with language modeling. Experimental results show that our model achieves strong performance in both interpolation and extrapolation settings. The code will be available at \url{https://aka.ms/LeX-Transformer}.

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A Length-Extrapolatable Transformer

Neural language models are increasingly valued in computational psycholinguistics, due to their ability to provide conditional probability distributions over the lexicon that are predictive of human processing times. Given the vast array of available models, it is of both theoretical and methodological importance to assess what features of a model influence its psychometric quality. In this work we focus on parameter size, showing that larger Transformer-based language models generate probabilistic estimates that are less predictive of early eye-tracking measurements reflecting lexical access and early semantic integration. However, relatively bigger models show an advantage in capturing late eye-tracking measurements that reflect the full semantic and syntactic integration of a word into the current language context. Our results are supported by eye movement data in ten languages and consider four models, spanning from 564M to 4.5B parameters.

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Scaling in Cognitive Modelling: a Multilingual Approach to Human Reading Times

Automatic sign language processing is gaining popularity in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research (Yin et al., 2021). In machine translation (MT) in particular, sign language translation based on glosses is a prominent approach. In this paper, we review recent works on neural gloss translation. We find that limitations of glosses in general and limitations of specific datasets are not discussed in a transparent manner and that there is no common standard for evaluation.To address these issues, we put forward concrete recommendations for future research on gloss translation. Our suggestions advocate awareness of the inherent limitations of gloss-based approaches, realistic datasets, stronger baselines and convincing evaluation.

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Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses

Language Models (LM) are becoming more and more useful for providing representations upon which to train Natural Language Processing applications. However, there is now clear evidence that attention-based transformers require a critical amount of language data to produce good enough LMs. The question we have addressed in this paper is to what extent the critical amount of data varies for languages of different morphological typology, in particular those that have a rich inflectional morphology, and whether the tokenization method to preprocess the data can make a difference. These details can be important for low-resourced languages that need to plan the production of datasets. We evaluated intrinsically and extrinsically the differences of five different languages with different pretraining dataset sizes and three different tokenization methods for each. The results confirm that the size of the vocabulary due to morphological characteristics is directly correlated with both the LM perplexity and the performance of two typical downstream tasks such as NER identification and POS labeling. The experiments also provide new evidence that a canonical tokenizer can reduce perplexity by more than a half for a polysynthetic language like Quechua as well as raising F1 from 0.8 to more than 0.9 in both downstream tasks with a LM trained with only 6M tokens.

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Hints on the data for language modeling of synthetic languages with transformers

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been shown to deliver impressive performance in various NLP tasks. To tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, Few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting includes a few manually crafted step-by-step reasoning demonstrations which enable LLMs to explicitly generate reasoning steps and improve their reasoning task accuracy. To eliminate the manual efforts, Zero-shot-CoT concatenates the target problem statement with ``\textit{Let's think step by step}'' as an input prompt to LLMs. Despite the success of Zero-shot-CoT, it still suffers from three pitfalls: calculation errors, missing-step errors, and semantic misunderstanding errors. To address the missing-step errors, we propose Plan-and-Solve (PS) Prompting. It consists of two components: first, devising a plan to divide the entire task into smaller subtasks, and then carrying out the subtasks according to the plan. To address the calculation errors and improve the quality of generated reasoning steps, we extend PS prompting with more detailed instructions and derive PS+ prompting. We evaluate our proposed prompting strategy on ten datasets across three reasoning problems. The experimental results over GPT-3 show that our proposed zero-shot prompting consistently outperforms Zero-shot-CoT across all datasets by a large margin, is comparable to or exceeds Zero-shot-Program-of-Thought Prompting, and has comparable performance with 8-shot CoT prompting on the math reasoning problem. The code can be found at https://github.com/AGI-Edgerunners/Plan-and-Solve-Prompting.

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Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models

The ingrained principles of fairness in a dialogue system's decision-making process and generated responses are crucial for user engagement, satisfaction, and task achievement. Absence of equitable and inclusive principles can hinder the formation of common ground, which in turn negatively impacts the overall performance of the system. For example, misusing pronouns in a user interaction may cause ambiguity about the intended subject. Yet, there is no comprehensive study of equitable text generation in dialogue. Aptly, in this work, we use theories of computational learning to study this problem. We provide formal definitions of equity in text generation, and further, prove formal connections between learning human-likeness and learning equity: algorithms for improving equity ultimately reduce to algorithms for improving human-likeness (on augmented data). With this insight, we also formulate reasonable conditions under which text generation algorithms can learn to generate equitable text without any modifications to the biased training data on which they learn. To exemplify our theory in practice, we look at a group of algorithms for the GuessWhat?! visual dialogue game and, using this example, test our theory empirically. Our theory accurately predicts relative-performance of multiple algorithms in generating equitable text as measured by both human and automated evaluation.

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Learning to Generate Equitable Text in Dialogue from Biased Training Data

Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (AED) are two widely used frameworks for speech-to-text tasks. They are designed for different purposes and each has its own benefits and drawbacks for speech-to-text tasks. In order to leverage strengths of both modeling methods, we propose a solution by combining Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (TAED) for speech-to-text tasks. The new method leverages AED's strength in non-monotonic sequence to sequence learning while retaining Transducer's streaming property. In the proposed framework, Transducer and AED share the same speech encoder. The predictor in Transducer is replaced by the decoder in the AED model, and the outputs of the decoder are conditioned on the speech inputs instead of outputs from an unconditioned language model. The proposed solution ensures that the model is optimized by covering all possible read/write scenarios and creates a matched environment for streaming applications. We evaluate the proposed approach on the \textsc{MuST-C} dataset and the findings demonstrate that TAED performs significantly better than Transducer for offline automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech-to-text translation (ST) tasks. In the streaming case, TAED outperforms Transducer in the ASR task and one ST direction while comparable results are achieved in another translation direction.

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Hybrid Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder Modeling for Speech-to-Text Tasks

For text summarization, the role of discourse structure is pivotal in discerning the core content of a text. Regrettably, prior studies on incorporating Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) into transformer-based summarization models only consider the nuclearity annotation, thereby overlooking the variety of discourse relation types. This paper introduces the 'RSTformer', a novel summarization model that comprehensively incorporates both the types and uncertainty of rhetorical relations. Our RST-attention mechanism, rooted in document-level rhetorical structure, is an extension of the recently devised Longformer framework. Through rigorous evaluation, the model proposed herein exhibits significant superiority over state-of-the-art models, as evidenced by its notable performance on several automatic metrics and human evaluation.

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Incorporating Distributions of Discourse Structure for Long Document Abstractive Summarization

While pretrained language models (PLMs) primarily serve as general-purpose text encoders that can be fine-tuned for a wide variety of downstream tasks, recent work has shown that they can also be rewired to produce high-quality word representations (i.e., static word embeddings) and yield good performance in type-level lexical tasks. While existing work primarily focused on the lexical specialization of monolingual PLMs with immense quantities of monolingual constraints, in this work we expose massively multilingual transformers (MMTs, e.g., mBERT or XLM-R) to multilingual lexical knowledge at scale, leveraging BabelNet as the readily available rich source of multilingual and cross-lingual type-level lexical knowledge. Concretely, we use BabelNet's multilingual synsets to create synonym pairs (or synonym-gloss pairs) across 50 languages and then subject the MMTs (mBERT and XLM-R) to a lexical specialization procedure guided by a contrastive objective. We show that such massively multilingual lexical specialization brings substantial gains in two standard cross-lingual lexical tasks, bilingual lexicon induction and cross-lingual word similarity, as well as in cross-lingual sentence retrieval. Crucially, we observe gains for languages unseen in specialization, indicating that multilingual lexical specialization enables generalization to languages with no lexical constraints. In a series of subsequent controlled experiments, we show that the number of specialization constraints plays a much greater role than the set of languages from which they originate.

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Massively Multilingual Lexical Specialization of Multilingual Transformers

The accurate prediction of lexical relations between words is a challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The most recent advances in this direction come with the use of pre-trained language models (PTLMs). A PTLM typically needs ``well-formed" verbalized text to interact with it, either to fine-tune it or to exploit it. However, there are indications that commonly used PTLMs already encode enough linguistic knowledge to allow the use of minimal (or none) textual context for some linguistically motivated tasks, thus notably reducing human effort, the need for data pre-processing, and favoring techniques that are language neutral since do not rely on syntactic structures. In this work, we explore this idea for the tasks of lexical relation classification (LRC) and graded Lexical Entailment (LE). After fine-tuning PTLMs for LRC with different verbalizations, our evaluation results show that very simple prompts are competitive for LRC and significantly outperform graded LE SoTA. In order to gain a better insight into this phenomenon, we perform a number of quantitative statistical analyses on the results, as well as a qualitative visual exploration based on embedding projections.

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