Dominican Republic

Standard train-dev-test splits used to benchmark multiple models against each other are ubiquitously used in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this setup, the train data is used for training the model, the development set for evaluating different versions of the proposed model(s) during development, and the test set to confirm the answers to the main research question(s). However, the introduction of neural networks in NLP has led to a different use of these standard splits; the development set is now often used for model selection during the training procedure. Because of this, comparing multiple versions of the same model during development leads to overestimation on the development data. As an effect, people have started to compare an increasing amount of models on the test data, leading to faster overfitting and ``expiration&#39;&#39; of our test sets. We propose to use a tune-set when developing neural network methods, which can be used for model picking so that comparing the different versions of a new model can safely be done on the development data.

EMNLP 2021

We Need to Talk About train-dev-test Splits

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

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

Standard train-dev-test splits used to benchmark multiple models against each other are ubiquitously used in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this setup, the train data is used for training the model, the development set for evaluating different versions of the proposed model(s) during development, and the test set to confirm the answers to the main research question(s). However, the introduction of neural networks in NLP has led to a different use of these standard splits; the development set is now often used for model selection during the training procedure. Because of this, comparing multiple versions of the same model during development leads to overestimation on the development data. As an effect, people have started to compare an increasing amount of models on the test data, leading to faster overfitting and ``expiration'' of our test sets. We propose to use a tune-set when developing neural network methods, which can be used for model picking so that comparing the different versions of a new model can safely be done on the development data.

poster

Word meaning is notoriously difficult to capture, both synchronically and diachronically. In this paper, we describe the creation of the largest resource of graded contextualized, diachronic word meaning annotation in four different languages, based on 100,000 human semantic proximity judgments. We describe in detail the multi-round incremental annotation process, the choice for a clustering algorithm to group usages into senses, and possible – diachronic and synchronic – uses for this dataset.

DWUG: A large Resource of Diachronic Word Usage Graphs in Four Languages

Natural language generation (NLG) benchmarks provide an important avenue to measure progress and develop better NLG systems. Unfortunately, the lack of publicly available NLG benchmarks for low-resource languages poses a challenging barrier for building NLG systems that work well for languages with limited amounts of data. Here we introduce IndoNLG, the first benchmark to measure natural language generation (NLG) progress in three low-resource---yet widely spoken---languages of Indonesia: Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese. Altogether, these languages are spoken by more than 100 million native speakers, and hence constitute an important use case of NLG systems today. Concretely, IndoNLG covers six tasks: summarization, question answering, chit-chat, and three different pairs of machine translation (MT) tasks. We collate a clean pretraining corpus of Indonesian, Sundanese, and Javanese datasets, Indo4B-Plus, which is used to pretrain our models: IndoBART and IndoGPT. We show that IndoBART and IndoGPT achieve competitive performance on all tasks---despite using only one-fifth the parameters of a larger multilingual model, mBART-LARGE (Liu et al., 2020). This finding emphasizes the importance of pretraining on closely related, local languages to achieve more efficient learning and faster inference for very low-resource languages like Javanese and Sundanese.

IndoNLG: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Generation

Counterfactual statements describe events that did not or cannot take place. We consider the problem of counterfactual detection (CFD) in product reviews. For this purpose, we annotate a multilingual CFD dataset from Amazon product reviews covering counterfactual statements written in English, German, and Japanese languages. The dataset is unique as it contains counterfactuals in multiple languages, covers a new application area of e-commerce reviews, and provides high quality professional annotations. We train CFD models using different text representation methods and classifiers. We find that these models are robust against the selectional biases introduced due to cue phrase-based sentence selection. Moreover, our CFD dataset is compatible with prior datasets and can be merged to learn accurate CFD models. Applying machine translation on English counterfactual examples to create multilingual data performs poorly, demonstrating the language-specificity of this problem, which has been ignored so far.

I Wish I Would Have Loved This One, But I Didn't -- A Multilingual Dataset for Counterfactual Detection in Product Review

Coupled with the availability of large-scale datasets, deep learning architectures have enabled rapid progress on Question Answering tasks. However, most of those datasets are in English, and the performances of state-of-the-art multilingual models are significantly lower when evaluated on non-English data. Due to high data collection costs, it is not realistic to obtain annotated data for each language one desires to support. We propose a method to improve Cross-lingual Question Answering performance without requiring additional annotated data, leveraging Question Generation models to produce synthetic samples in a cross-lingual fashion. We show that the proposed method allows to significantly outperform the baselines trained on English data only, establishing thus a new state-of-the-art on four multilingual datasets: MLQA, XQuAD, SQuAD-it and PIAF (fr).

Synthetic Data Augmentation for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Question Answering

End-to-end question answering using a differentiable knowledge graph is a promising technique that requires only weak supervision, produces interpretable results, and is fully differentiable. Previous implementations of this technique (Cohen et al., 2020) have focused on single-entity questions using a relation following operation. In this paper, we propose a model that explicitly handles multiple-entity questions by implementing a new intersection operation, which identifies the shared elements between two sets of entities. We find that introducing intersection improves performance over a baseline model on two datasets, WebQuestionsSP (69.6% to 73.3% Hits@1) and ComplexWebQuestions (39.8% to 48.7% Hits@1), and in particular, improves performance on questions with multiple entities by over 14% on WebQuestionsSP and by 19% on ComplexWebQuestions.

Expanding End-to-End Question Answering on Differentiable Knowledge Graphs with Intersection

We tackle the problem of weakly-supervised conversational Question Answering over large Knowledge Graphs using a neural semantic parsing approach. We introduce a new Logical Form (LF) grammar that can model a wide range of queries on the graph while remaining sufficiently simple to generate supervision data efficiently. Our Transformer-based model takes a JSON-like structure as input, allowing us to easily incorporate both Knowledge Graph and conversational contexts. We validate our approach, both in terms of grammar coverage and LF execution accuracy, on two publicly available datasets, CSQA and ConvQuestions, both grounded in Wikidata. We achieve competitive results with respect to the state-of-the-art.

Structured Context and High-Coverage Grammar for Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

Despite recent progress, state-of-the-art question answering models remain vulnerable to a variety of adversarial attacks. While dynamic adversarial data collection, in which a human annotator tries to write examples that fool a model-in-the-loop, can improve model robustness, this process is expensive which limits the scale of the collected data. In this work, we are the first to use synthetic adversarial data generation to make question answering models more robust to human adversaries. We develop a data generation pipeline that selects source passages, identifies candidate answers, generates questions, then finally filters or re-labels them to improve quality. Using this approach, we amplify a smaller human-written adversarial dataset to a much larger set of synthetic question-answer pairs. By incorporating our synthetic data, we improve the state-of-the-art on the AdversarialQA dataset by 3.7F1 and improve model generalisation on nine of the twelve MRQA datasets. We further conduct a novel human-in-the-loop evaluation to show that our models are considerably more robust to new human-written adversarial examples: crowdworkers can fool our model only 8.8% of the time on average, compared to 17.6% for a model trained without synthetic data.

Improving Question Answering Model Robustness with Synthetic Adversarial Data Generation

Numerical reasoning based machine reading comprehension is a task that involves reading comprehension along with using arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, sorting, and counting. The DROP benchmark (Dua et al., 2019) is a recent dataset that has inspired the design of NLP models aimed at solving this task. The current standings of these models in the DROP leaderboard, over standard metrics, suggest that the models have achieved near-human performance. However, does this mean that these models have learned to reason? In this paper, we present a controlled study on some of the top-performing model architectures for the task of numerical reasoning. Our observations suggest that the standard metrics are incapable of measuring progress towards such tasks.

Numerical reasoning in machine reading comprehension tasks: are we there yet?

"Athena 2.0 is an Alexa Prize SocialBot that has been a finalist in the last two Alexa Prize Grand Challenges. One reason for Athena’s success is its novel dialogue management strategy, which allows it to dynamically construct dialogues and responses from component modules, leading to novel conversations with every
interaction. Here we describe Athena’s system design and performance in the Alexa Prize during the 20/21 competition. A recorded demo conversation is included in the presentation."

Athena 2.0: Contextualized Dialogue Management for an Alexa Prize SocialBot

"Causal inference using observational text data is becoming increasingly popular in many research areas. This paper presents the Bayesian Topic Regression (BTR) model that uses both text and numerical information to model an outcome variable. It allows estimation of both discrete and continuous treatment effects. Furthermore, it allows for the inclusion of additional numerical confounding factors next to text data. To this end, we combine a supervised Bayesian topic model with a Bayesian regression framework and perform supervised representation learning for the text features jointly with the regression parameter training, respecting the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell theorem. Our paper makes two main contributions. First, we provide a regression framework that allows causal inference in settings when both text and numerical confounders are of relevance. We show with synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets that our joint approach recovers ground truth with lower bias than any benchmark model, when text and numerical features are correlated. Second, experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that a joint and supervised learning strategy also yields superior prediction results compared to strategies that estimate regression weights for text and non-text features separately, being even competitive with more complex deep neural networks."

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