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Personalized news recommendation methods are widely used in online news services. These methods usually recommend news based on the matching between news content and user interest inferred from historical behaviors. However, these methods usually have difficulties in making accurate recommendations to cold-start users, and tend to recommend similar news with those users have read. In general, popular news usually contain important information and can attract users with different interests. Besides, they are usually diverse in content and topic. Thus, in this paper we propose to incorporate news popularity information to alleviate the cold-start and diversity problems for personalized news recommendation. In our method, the ranking score for recommending a candidate news to a target user is the combination of a personalized matching score and a news popularity score. The former is used to capture the personalized user interest in news. The latter is used to measure time-aware popularity of candidate news, which is predicted based on news content, recency, and real-time CTR using a unified framework. Besides, we propose a popularity-aware user encoder to eliminate the popularity bias in user behaviors for accurate interest modeling. Experiments on two real-world datasets show our method can effectively improve the accuracy and diversity for news recommendation.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

PP-Rec: News Recommendation with Personalized User Interest and Time-aware News Popularity

news recommendation; news popularity; user interest

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

poster

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

A growing body of work makes use of probing in order to investigate the working of neural models, often considered black boxes. Recently, an ongoing debate emerged surrounding the limitations of the probing paradigm. In this work, we point out the inability to infer behavioral conclusions from probing results, and offer an alternative method that focuses on how the information is being used, rather than on what information is encoded. Our method, Amnesic Probing, follows the intuition that the utility of a property for a given task can be assessed by measuring the influence of a causal intervention that removes it from the representation. Equipped with this new analysis tool, we can ask questions that were not possible before, for example, is part-of-speech information important for word prediction? We perform a series of analyses on BERT to answer these types of questions. Our findings demonstrate that conventional probing performance is not correlated to task importance, and we call for increased scrutiny of claims that draw behavioral or causal conclusions from probing results.

Amnesic Probing: Behavioral Explanation With Amnesic Counterfactuals

We study the problem of leveraging the syntactic structure of text to enhance pre-trained models such as BERT and RoBERTa. Existing methods utilize syntax of text either in the pre-training stage or in the fine-tuning stage, so that they suffer from discrepancy between the two stages. Such a problem would lead to the necessity of having human-annotated syntactic information, which limits the application of existing methods to broader scenarios. To address this, we present a model that utilizes the syntax of text in both pre-training and fine-tuning stages. Our model is based on Transformer with a syntax-aware attention layer that considers the dependency tree of the text. We further introduce a new pre-training task of predicting the syntactic distance among tokens in the dependency tree. We evaluate the model on three downstream tasks, including relation classification, entity typing, and question answering. Results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on six public benchmark datasets. We have two major findings. First, we demonstrate that infusing automatically produced syntax of text improves pre-trained models. Second, global syntactic distances among tokens bring larger performance gains compared to local head relations between contiguous tokens.

Syntax-Enhanced Pre-trained Model

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer the knowledge of source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Existing methods typically require to learn to adapt the target model by exploiting the source data and sharing the network architecture across domains. However, this pipeline makes the source data risky and is inflexible for deploying the target model. This paper tackles a novel setting where only a trained source model is available and different network architectures can be adapted for target domain in terms of deployment environments. We propose a generic framework named \emph{Cross-domain Knowledge Distillation} (CdKD) without needing any source data. CdKD matches the joint distributions between a trained source model and a set of target data during distilling the knowledge from the source model to the target domain. As a type of important knowledge in the source domain, for the first time, the gradient information is exploited to boost the transfer performance. Experiments on cross-domain text classification demonstrate that CdKD achieves superior performance, which verifies the effectiveness in this novel setting.

Matching Distributions between Model and Data: Cross-domain Knowledge Distillation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Today's text classifiers inevitably suffer from unintended dataset biases, especially the document-level label bias and word-level keyword bias, which may hurt models' generalization. Many previous studies employed data-level manipulations or model-level balancing mechanisms to recover unbiased distributions and thus prevent models from capturing the two types of biases. Unfortunately, they either suffer from the extra cost of data collection/selection/annotation or need an elaborate design of balancing strategies. Different from traditional factual inference in which debiasing occurs before or during training, counterfactual inference mitigates the influence brought by unintended confounders after training, which can make unbiased decisions with biased observations. Inspired by this, we propose a model-agnostic text classification debiasing framework -- Corsair, which can effectively avoid employing data manipulations or designing balancing mechanisms. Concretely, Corsair first trains a base model on a training set directly, allowing the dataset biases 'poison' the trained model. In inference, given a factual input document, Corsair imagines its two counterfactual counterparts to distill and mitigate the two biases captured by the poisonous model. Extensive experiments demonstrate Corsair's effectiveness, generalizability and fairness.

Counterfactual Inference for Text Classification Debiasing

User interest modeling is critical for personalized news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually learn a single user embedding for each user from their previous behaviors to represent their overall interest. However, user interest is usually diverse and multi-grained, which is difficult to be accurately modeled by a single user embedding. In this paper, we propose a news recommendation method with hierarchical user interest modeling, named HieRec. Instead of a single user embedding, in our method each user is represented in a hierarchical interest tree to better capture their diverse and multi-grained interest in news. We use a three-level hierarchy to represent 1) overall user interest; 2) user interest in coarse-grained topics like sports; and 3) user interest in fine-grained topics like football. Moreover, we propose a hierarchical user interest matching framework to match candidate news with different levels of user interest for more accurate user interest targeting. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate our method can effectively improve the performance of user modeling for personalized news recommendation.

HieRec: Hierarchical User Interest Modeling for Personalized News Recommendation

Few-shot text classification aims to classify inputs whose label has only a few examples. Previous studies overlooked the semantic relevance between label representations. Therefore, they are easily confused by labels that are relevant. To address this problem, we propose a method that generates distinct label representations that embed information specific to each label. Our method is applicable to conventional few-shot classification models. Experimental results show that our method significantly improved the performance of few-shot text classification across models and datasets.

Distinct Label Representations for Few-Shot Text Classification

Domain adaption in syntactic parsing is still a significant challenge. We address the issue of data imbalance between the in-domain and out-of-domain treebank typically used for the problem. We define domain adaptation as a Multi-task learning (MTL) problem, which allows us to train two parsers, one for each domain. Our results show that the MTL approach is beneficial for the smaller treebank. For the larger treebank, we need to use loss weighting in order to avoid a decrease in performance below the single task. In order to determine to what degree the data imbalance between two domains and the domain differences affect results, we also carry out an experiment with two imbalanced in-domain treebanks and show that loss weighting also improves performance in an in-domain setting. Given loss weighting in MTL, we can improve results for both parsers.

Bi-directional Domain Adaptation Using Weighted MTL

Broad-coverage meaning representations in NLP mostly focus on explicitly expressed content. More importantly, the scarcity of datasets annotating diverse implicit roles limits empirical studies into their linguistic nuances. For example, in the web review ``Great service!'', the provider and consumer are implicit arguments of different types. We examine an annotated corpus of fine-grained implicit arguments (Cui and Hershcovich, 2020) by carefully re-annotating it, resolving several inconsistencies. Subsequently, we present the first transition-based neural parser that can handle implicit arguments dynamically, and experiment with two different transition systems on the improved dataset. We find that certain types of implicit arguments are more difficult to parse than others and that the simpler system is more accurate in recovering implicit arguments, despite having a lower overall parsing score, attesting current reasoning limitations of NLP models. This work will facilitate a better understanding of implicit and underspecified language, by incorporating it holistically into meaning representations.

Great Service! Fine-grained Parsing of Implicit Arguments

In this paper, we present the first statistical parser for Lambek categorial grammar (LCG), a grammatical formalism for which the graphical proof method known as proof nets is applicable. Our parser incorporates proof net structure and constraints into a system based on self-attention networks via novel model elements. Our experiments on an English LCG corpus show that incorporating term graph structure is helpful to the model, improving both parsing accuracy and
coverage. Moreover, we derive novel loss functions by expressing proof net constraints as differentiable functions of our model output, enabling us to train our parser without ground-truth derivations.

Proof net structure for neural Lambek categorial parsing

This paper describes the COMBO system which took part in the IWPT 2021 EUD shared task. The goal of this task is to parse raw texts in 17 languages into Enhanced Universal Dependencies (EUD). The proposed approach uses COMBO to predict UD trees and EUD graphs. These structures are then merged into the final EUD graphs. Some EUD edge labels are extended with case information using a single language-independent expansion rule. In the official evaluation, the solution ranked fourth, achieving an average ELAS of 83.79%. The source code is available at https://gitlab.clarin-pl.eu/syntactic-tools/combo.

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Amnesic Probing: Behavioral Explanation With Amnesic Counterfactuals

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