Ireland

Phonemes are defined by their relationship to words: changing a phoneme changes the word. Learning a phoneme inventory with little supervision has been a longstanding challenge with important applications to under-resourced speech technology. In this paper, we bridge the gap between the linguistic and statistical definition of phonemes and propose a novel neural discrete representation learning model for self-supervised learning of phoneme inventory with raw speech and word labels. Given the availability of phoneme segmentation and some mild conditions, we prove that the phoneme inventory learned by our approach converges to the true one with an exponentially low error rate. Moreover, in experiments on TIMIT and Mboshi benchmarks, our approach consistently learns a better phoneme-level representation and achieves a lower error rate in a zero-resource phoneme recognition task than previous state-of-the-art self-supervised representation learning algorithms.

ACL 2022

Self-supervised Semantic-driven Phoneme Discovery for Zero-resource Speech Recognition

zero-resource speech recognition

phoneme

self-supervised learning

# 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. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
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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). 

poster

Neural language models (LMs) such as GPT-2 estimate the probability distribution over the next word by a softmax over the vocabulary. The softmax layer produces the distribution based on the dot products of a single hidden state and the embeddings of words in the vocabulary. However, we discover that this single hidden state cannot produce all probability distributions regardless of the LM size or training data size because the single hidden state embedding cannot be close to the embeddings of all the possible next words simultaneously when there are other interfering word embeddings between them. In this work, we demonstrate the importance of this limitation both theoretically and practically. Our work not only deepens our understanding of softmax bottleneck and mixture of softmax (MoS) but also inspires us to propose multi-facet softmax (MFS) to address the limitations of MoS. Extensive empirical analyses confirm our findings and show that against MoS, the proposed MFS achieves two-fold improvements in the perplexity of GPT-2.

Softmax Bottleneck Makes Language Models Unable to Represent Multi-mode Word Distributions

Conventional wisdom in pruning Transformer-based language models is that pruning reduces the model expressiveness and thus is more likely to underfit rather than overfit. However, under the trending pretrain-and-finetune paradigm, we postulate a counter-traditional hypothesis, that is: pruning increases the risk of overfitting when performed at the fine-tuning phase. In our work, we aim to address the overfitting problem and improve pruning performance via progressive knowledge distillation with error-bound properties. We show for the first time that reducing the risk of overfitting can help the effectiveness of pruning under the pretrain-and-finetune paradigm.

Sparse Progressive Distillation: Resolving Overfitting under Pretrain-and-Finetune Paradigm

Model-based, reference-free evaluation metrics have been proposed as a fast and cost-effective approach to evaluate Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. Despite promising recent results, we find evidence that reference-free evaluation metrics of summarization and dialog generation may be relying on spurious correlations with measures such as word overlap, perplexity, and length. We further observe that for text summarization, these metrics have high error rates when ranking current state-of-the-art abstractive summarization systems. We demonstrate that these errors can be mitigated by explicitly designing evaluation metrics to avoid spurious features in reference-free evaluation.

Spurious Correlations in Reference-Free Evaluation of Text Generation

We present substructure distribution projection (SUBDP), a technique that projects a distribution over structures in one domain to another, by projecting substructure distributions separately. Models for the target domain can then be trained, using the projected distributions as soft silver labels. We evaluate SUBDP on zero-shot cross-lingual dependency parsing, taking dependency arcs as substructures: we project the predicted dependency arc distributions in the source language(s) to target language(s), and train a target language parser on the resulting distributions. Given an English treebank as the only source of human supervision, SUBDP achieves better unlabeled attachment score than all prior work on the Universal Dependencies v2.2 (Nivre et al., 2020) test set across eight diverse target languages, as well as the best labeled attachment score on six languages. In addition, SUBDP improves zero-shot cross-lingual dependency parsing with very few (e.g., 50) supervised bitext pairs, across a broader range of target languages.

Substructure Distribution Projection for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing

Text summarization helps readers capture salient information from documents, news, interviews, and meetings. However, most state-of-the-art pretrained language models (LM) are unable to efficiently process long text for many summarization tasks. In this paper, we propose Summ^N, a simple, flexible, and effective multi-stage framework for input texts that are longer than the maximum context length of typical pretrained LMs. Summ^N first splits the data samples and generates a coarse summary in multiple stages and then produces the final fine-grained summary based on it. Our framework can process input text of arbitrary length by adjusting the number of stages while keeping the LM input size fixed. Moreover, it can deal with both single-source documents and dialogues, and it can be used on top of different backbone abstractive summarization models. To the best of our knowledge, SummN is the first multi-stage split-then-summarize framework for long input summarization. Our experiments demonstrate that Summ^N outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by improving ROUGE scores on three long meeting summarization datasets AMI, ICSI, and QMSum, two long TV series datasets from SummScreen, and a long document summarization dataset GovReport. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/Summ-N.

Summ$^N$: A Multi-Stage Summarization Framework for Long Input Dialogues and Documents

We introduce SummScreen, a summarization dataset comprised of pairs of TV series transcripts and human written recaps. The dataset provides a challenging testbed for abstractive summarization for several reasons. Plot details are often expressed indirectly in character dialogues and may be scattered across the entirety of the transcript. These details must be found and integrated to form the succinct plot descriptions in the recaps. Also, TV scripts contain content that does not directly pertain to the central plot but rather serves to develop characters or provide comic relief. This information is rarely contained in recaps. Since characters are fundamental to TV series, we also propose two entity-centric evaluation metrics. Empirically, we characterize the dataset by evaluating several methods, including neural models and those based on nearest neighbors. An oracle extractive approach outperforms all benchmarked models according to automatic metrics, showing that the neural models are unable to fully exploit the input transcripts. Human evaluation and qualitative analysis reveal that our non-oracle models are competitive with their oracle counterparts in terms of generating faithful plot events and can benefit from better content selectors. Both oracle and non-oracle models generate unfaithful facts, suggesting future research directions.

SummScreen: A Dataset for Abstractive Screenplay Summarization

We study a new problem setting of information extraction (IE), referred to as text-to-table. In text-to-table, given a text, one creates a table or several tables expressing the main content of the text, while the model is learned from text-table pair data. The problem setting differs from those of the existing methods for IE. First, the extraction can be carried out from long texts to large tables with complex structures. Second, the extraction is entirely data-driven, and there is no need to explicitly define the schemas. As far as we know, there has been no previous work that studies the problem. In this work, we formalize text-to-table as a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) problem. We first employ a seq2seq model fine-tuned from a pre-trained language model to perform the task. We also develop a new method within the seq2seq approach, exploiting two additional techniques in table generation: table constraint and table relation embeddings. We consider text-to-table as an inverse problem of the well-studied table-to-text, and make use of four existing table-to-text datasets in our experiments on text-to-table. Experimental results show that the vanilla seq2seq model can outperform the baseline methods of using relation extraction and named entity extraction. The results also show that our method can further boost the performances of the vanilla seq2seq model. We further discuss the main challenges of the proposed task. The code and data are available at https://github.com/shirley-wu/text_to_table.

Text-to-Table: A New Way of Information Extraction

Processing open-domain Chinese texts has been a critical bottleneck in computational linguistics for decades, partially because text segmentation and word discovery often entangle with each other in this challenging scenario.
No existing methods yet can achieve effective text segmentation and word discovery simultaneously in the open domain.
This study fills in this gap by proposing a novel method called TopWORDS-Seg based on Bayesian inference, which enjoys robust performance and transparent interpretation when no training corpus and domain vocabulary are available.
The advantages of TopWORDS-Seg are demonstrated by a series of experimental studies.

TopWORDS-Seg: Simultaneous Text Segmentation and Word Discovery for Open-Domain Chinese Texts via Bayesian Inference

Podcasts have shown a recent rise in popularity. Summarization of podcasts is of practical benefit to both content providers and consumers. It helps people quickly decide whether they will listen to a podcast and/or reduces the cognitive load of content providers to write summaries. Nevertheless, podcast summarization faces significant challenges including factual inconsistencies of summaries with respect to the inputs. The problem is exacerbated by speech disfluencies and recognition errors in transcripts of spoken language. In this paper, we explore a novel abstractive summarization method to alleviate these issues. Our approach learns to produce an abstractive summary while grounding summary segments in specific regions of the transcript to allow for full inspection of summary details. We conduct a series of analyses of the proposed approach on a large podcast dataset and show that the approach can achieve promising results. Grounded summaries bring clear benefits in locating the summary and transcript segments that contain inconsistent information, and hence improve summarization quality in terms of automatic and human evaluation.

Towards Abstractive Grounded Summarization of Podcast Transcripts

Predicting the approval chance of a patent application is a challenging problem involving multiple facets. The most crucial facet is arguably the novelty --- \emph{35 U.S. Code § 102} rejects more recent applications that have very similar prior arts. Such novelty evaluations differ the patent approval prediction from conventional document classification --- Successful patent applications may share similar writing patterns; however, too-similar newer applications would receive the opposite label, thus confusing standard document classifiers (e.g., BERT). To address this issue, we propose a novel framework \our that unifies the document classifier with handcrafted features, particularly time-dependent novelty scores. Specifically, we formulate the novelty scores by comparing each application with millions of prior arts using a hybrid of efficient filters and a neural bi-encoder. Moreover, we impose a new regularization term into the classification objective to enforce the monotonic change of approval prediction w.r.t. novelty scores. From extensive experiments on a large-scale USPTO dataset, we find that standard BERT fine-tuning can partially learn the correct relationship between novelty and approvals from inconsistent data. However, our time-dependent novelty features offer a boost on top of it. Also, our monotonic regularization, while shrinking the search space, can drive the optimizer to better local optima, yielding a further small performance gain.

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