Ireland

Recent efforts to create challenge benchmarks that test the abilities of natural language understanding models have largely depended on human annotations. In this work, we introduce the &quot;Break, Perturb, Build&quot; (BPB) framework for automatic reasoning-oriented perturbation of question-answer pairs. BPB represents a question by decomposing it into the reasoning steps that are required to answer it, symbolically perturbs the decomposition, and then generates new question-answer pairs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BPB by creating evaluation sets for three reading comprehension (RC) benchmarks, generating thousands of high-quality examples without human intervention. We evaluate a range of RC models on our evaluation sets, which reveals large performance gaps on generated examples compared to the original data. Moreover, symbolic perturbations enable fine-grained analysis of the strengths and limitations of models. Last, augmenting the training data with examples generated by BPB helps close the performance gaps, without any drop on the original data distribution.

ACL 2022

Break, Perturb, Build: Automatic Perturbation of Reasoning Paths Through Question Decomposition

machine reasoning

question generation

question answering

evaluation

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Recent efforts to create challenge benchmarks that test the abilities of natural language understanding models have largely depended on human annotations. In this work, we introduce the "Break, Perturb, Build" (BPB) framework for automatic reasoning-oriented perturbation of question-answer pairs. BPB represents a question by decomposing it into the reasoning steps that are required to answer it, symbolically perturbs the decomposition, and then generates new question-answer pairs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BPB by creating evaluation sets for three reading comprehension (RC) benchmarks, generating thousands of high-quality examples without human intervention. We evaluate a range of RC models on our evaluation sets, which reveals large performance gaps on generated examples compared to the original data. Moreover, symbolic perturbations enable fine-grained analysis of the strengths and limitations of models. Last, augmenting the training data with examples generated by BPB helps close the performance gaps, without any drop on the original data distribution.

technical paper

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

As a recent development in few-shot learning, prompt-based techniques have demonstrated promising potential in a variety of natural language processing tasks. However, despite proving competitive on most tasks in the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks, existing prompt-based techniques fail on the semantic distinction task of the Word-in-Context (WiC) dataset. Specifically, none of the existing few-shot approaches (including the in-context learning of GPT-3) can attain a performance that is meaningfully different from the random baseline.
Trying to fill this gap, we propose a new prompting technique, based on similarity metrics, which boosts few-shot performance to the level of fully supervised methods. Our simple adaptation shows that the failure of existing prompt-based techniques in semantic distinction is due to their improper configuration, rather than lack of relevant knowledge in the representations. We also show that this approach can be effectively extended to other downstream tasks for which a single prompt is sufficient.

Exploiting Language Model Prompts Using Similarity Measures: A Case Study on the Word-in-Context Task

The principal task in supervised neural machine translation (NMT) is to learn to generate target sentences conditioned on the source inputs from a set of parallel sentence pairs, and thus produce a model capable of generalizing to unseen instances. However, it is commonly observed that the generalization performance of the model is highly influenced by the amount of parallel data used in training. Although data augmentation is widely used to enrich the training data, conventional methods with discrete manipulations fail to generate diverse and faithful training samples. In this paper, we present a novel data augmentation paradigm termed Continuous Semantic Augmentation (CSANMT), which augments each training instance with an adjacency semantic region that could cover adequate variants of literal expression under the same meaning. We conduct extensive experiments on both rich-resource and low-resource settings involving various language pairs, including WMT14 English-to-{German,French}, NIST Chinese-to-English and multiple low-resource IWSLT translation tasks. The provided empirical evidences show that CSANMT sets a new level of performance among existing augmentation techniques, improving on the state-of-the-art by a large margin.

Learning to Generalize to More: Continuous Semantic Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation

End-to-end speech translation relies on data that pair source-language speech inputs with corresponding translations into a target language. Such data are notoriously scarce, making synthetic data augmentation by back-translation or knowledge distillation a necessary ingredient of end-to-end training. In this paper, we present a novel approach to data augmentation that leverages audio alignments, linguistic properties, and translation. First, we augment a transcription by sampling from a suffix memory that stores text and audio data. Second, we translate the augmented transcript. Finally, we recombine concatenated audio segments and the generated translation. Besides training an MT-system, we only use basic off-the-shelf components without fine-tuning. While having similar resource demands as knowledge distillation, adding our method delivers consistent improvements of up to 0.9 and 1.1 BLEU points on five language pairs on CoVoST 2 and on two language pairs on Europarl-ST, respectively.

Sample, Translate, Recombine: Leveraging Audio Alignments for Data Augmentation in End-to-end Speech Translation

A key challenge in attribute value extraction (AVE) from e-commerce sites is how to handle a large number of attributes for diverse products. Although this challenge is partially addressed by a question answering (QA) approach which finds a value in product data for a given query (attribute), it does not work effectively for rare and ambiguous queries. We thus propose simple knowledge-driven query expansion
based on possible answers (values) of a query (attribute) for QA-based AVE. We retrieve values of a query (attribute) from the training data to expand the query. We train a model with two tricks, knowledge dropout and knowledge token mixing, which mimic the imperfection of the value knowledge in testing. Experimental results on our cleaned version of AliExpress dataset show that our method improves the performance of AVE (+6.08 macro F1), especially for rare and ambiguous attributes (+7.82 and +6.86 macro F1, respectively).

Simple and Effective Knowledge-Driven Query Expansion for QA-Based Product Attribute Extraction

Pre-trained models have shown very good performances on a number of question answering benchmarks especially when fine-tuned on multiple question answering datasets at once. In this work, we propose an approach for generating a fine-tuning dataset thanks to a rule-based algorithm that generates questions and answers from unannotated sentences. We show that the state-of-the-art model UnifiedQA can greatly benefit from such a system on a multiple-choice benchmark about physics, biology and chemistry it has never been trained on. We further show that improved performances may be obtained by selecting the most challenging distractors (wrong answers), with a dedicated ranker based on a pretrained RoBERTa model.

Unsupervised multiple-choice question generation for out-of-domain Q&A fine-tuning

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has evolved from a pipeline architecture with pronunciation dictionaries, phonetic features and language models to the end-to-end systems performing a direct translation from a raw waveform into a word sequence. With the increase in accuracy and the availability of pre-trained models, the ASR systems are now omnipresent in our daily applications. On the other hand, the models' interpretability and their computational cost have become more challenging, particularly when dealing with less-common languages or identifying regional variations of speakers%\cite{koenecke2020} no citations in abstracts
. This research proposal will follow a four-stage process: 1) Proving an overview of acoustic features and feature extraction algorithms; 2) Exploring current ASR models, tools, and performance assessment techniques; 3) Aligning features with interpretable phonetic transcripts; and 4) Designing a prototype ARPOCA to increase awareness of regional language variation and improve models feedback by developing a semi-automatic acoustic features extraction using PRAAT in conjunction with phonetic transcription.

 Discourse on ASR Measurement: Introducing the ARPOCA Assessment Tool

We present NESL (the Neuro-Episodic Schema Learner), an event schema learning system that combines large language models, FrameNet parsing, a powerful logical representation of language, and a set of simple behavioral schemas meant to bootstrap the learning process. In lieu of a pre-made corpus of stories, our dataset is a continuous feed of "situation samples" from a pre-trained language model, which are then parsed into FrameNet frames, mapped into simple behavioral schemas, and combined and generalized into complex, hierarchical schemas for a variety of everyday scenarios. We show that careful sampling from the language model can help emphasize stereotypical properties of situations and de-emphasize irrelevant details, and that the resulting schemas specify situations more comprehensively than those learned by other systems.

 Mining Logical Event Schemas From Pre-Trained Language Models

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art results across multiple NLP tasks. However, the self-attention mechanism complexity scales quadratically with the sequence length, creating an obstacle for tasks involving long sequences, like in the speech domain. In this paper, we discuss the usefulness of self-attention for Direct Speech Translation. First, we analyze the layer-wise token contributions in the self-attention of the encoder, unveiling local diagonal patterns. To prove that some attention weights are avoidable, we propose to substitute the standard self-attention with a local efficient one, setting the amount of context used based on the results of the analysis. With this approach, our model matches the baseline performance, and improves the efficiency by skipping the computation of those weights that standard attention discards.

 On the Locality of Attention in Direct Speech Translation

In this work we put forward to combine pre-
trained knowledge base graph embeddings
with transformer based language models to
improve performance on the sentential Rela-
tion Extraction task in natural language pro-
cessing. Our proposed model is based on a
simple variation of existing models to incor-
porate off-task pre-trained graph embeddings
with an on-task finetuned BERT encoder. We
perform a detailed statistical evaluation of the
model on standard datasets. We provide ev-
idence that the added graph embeddings im-
prove the performance, making such a simple
approach competitive with the state-of-the-art
models that perform explicit on-task training
of the graph embeddings. Furthermore, we ob-
serve for the underlying BERT model an inter-
esting power-law scaling behavior between the
variance of the F1 score obtained for a relation
class and its support in terms of training exam-
ples.

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Exploiting Language Model Prompts Using Similarity Measures: A Case Study on the Word-in-Context Task

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