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Prompt-based methods have been successfully applied in sentence-level few-shot learning tasks, mostly owing to the sophisticated design of templates and label words. However, when applied to token-level labeling tasks such as NER, it would be time-consuming to enumerate the template queries over all potential entity spans. In this work, we propose a more elegant method to reformulate NER tasks as LM problems without any templates. Specifically, we discard the template construction process while maintaining the word prediction paradigm of pre-training models to predict a class-related pivot word (or label word) at the entity position. Meanwhile, we also explore principled ways to automatically search for appropriate label words that the pre-trained models can easily adapt to. While avoiding complicated template-based process, the proposed LM objective also reduces the gap between different objectives used in pre-training and fine-tuning, thus it can better benefit the few-shot performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over bert-tagger and template-based method under few-shot setting. Moreover, the decoding speed of the proposed method is up to 1930.12 times faster than the template-based method.

NAACL 2022

Template-free Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER

prompt

few-shot

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

technical paper

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Pre-trained large language models have shown successful progress in many language understanding benchmarks. This work explores the capability of these models to predict actionable plans in real-world environments. Given a text instruction, we show that language priors encoded in pre-trained language models allow us to infer fine-grained subgoal sequences. In contrast to recent methods which make strong assumptions about subgoal supervision, our experiments show that language models can infer detailed subgoal sequences from few training sequences without any fine-tuning. We further propose a simple strategy to re-rank language model predictions based on interaction and feedback from the environment. Combined with pre-trained navigation and visual reasoning components, our approach demonstrates competitive performance on subgoal prediction and task completion in the ALFRED benchmark compared to prior methods that assume more subgoal supervision.

Few-shot Subgoal Planning with Language Models

Our commonsense knowledge about objects includes their typical visual attributes; we know that bananas are typically yellow or green, and not purple.
Text and image corpora, being subject to reporting bias, represent this world-knowledge to varying degrees of faithfulness. In this work, we investigate to what degree unimodal (language-only) and multimodal (image and language) models capture a broad range of visually salient attributes. To that end, we create the ViComTe dataset covering 5 property types (color, shape, material, size, and visual co-occurrence) for over 5000 subjects. We validate this dataset by showing that our grounded color data correlates much better than ungrounded text-only data with crowdsourced color judgments. We then use our dataset to evaluate pretrained unimodal models and multimodal models. Our results indicate that multimodal models better reconstruct attribute distributions, but are still subject to reporting bias.

Visual Commonsense in Pretrained Unimodal and Multimodal Models

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable success on various natural language understanding tasks. Simple fine-tuning of PLMs, on the other hand, might be suboptimal for domain-specific tasks because they cannot possibly cover knowledge from all domains. While adaptive pre-training of PLMs can help them obtain domain-specific knowledge, it requires a large training cost. Moreover, adaptive pre-training can harm the PLM's performance on the downstream task by causing catastrophic forgetting of its general knowledge. To overcome such limitations of adaptive pre-training for PLM adaption, we propose a novel domain adaption framework for PLMs coined as Knowledge-Augmented Language model Adaptation (KALA), which modulates the intermediate hidden representations of PLMs with domain knowledge, consisting of entities and their relational facts. We validate the performance of our KALA on question answering and named entity recognition tasks on multiple datasets across various domains. The results show that, despite being computationally efficient, our KALA largely outperforms adaptive pre-training.

KALA: Knowledge-Augmented Language Model Adaptation

When a neural language model (LM) is adapted to perform a new task, what aspects of the task predict the eventual performance of the model? In NLP, systematic features of LM generalization to individual examples are well characterized, but systematic aspects of LM adaptability to new tasks are not nearly as well understood. We present a large-scale empirical study of the features and limits of LM adaptability using a new benchmark, TaskBench500, built from 500 procedurally generated sequence modeling tasks. These tasks combine core aspects of language processing, including lexical semantics, sequence processing, memorization, logical reasoning, and world knowledge. Using TaskBench500, we evaluate three facets of adaptability, finding that: (1) adaptation procedures differ dramatically in their ability to memorize small datasets; (2) within a subset of task types, adaptation procedures exhibit compositional adaptability to complex tasks; and (3) failure to match training label distributions is explained by mismatches in the intrinsic difficulty of predicting individual labels. Our experiments show that adaptability to new tasks, like generalization to new examples, can be systematically described and understood, and we conclude with a discussion of additional aspects of adaptability that could be studied using the new benchmark.

Quantifying Adaptability in Pre-trained Language Models with 500 Tasks

Multilingual pre-trained models are known to suffer from the curse of multilinguality, which causes per-language performance to drop as they cover more languages. We address this issue by introducing language-specific modules, which allows us to grow the total capacity of the model, while keeping the total number of trainable parameters per language constant. In contrast with prior work that learns language-specific components post-hoc, we pre-train the modules of our Cross-lingual Modular (X-Mod) models from the start. Our experiments on natural language inference, named entity recognition and question answering show that our approach not only mitigates the negative interference between languages, but also enables positive transfer, resulting in improved monolingual and cross-lingual performance. Furthermore, our approach enables adding languages post-hoc with no measurable drop in performance, no longer limiting the model usage to the set of pre-trained languages.

Lifting the Curse of Multilinguality by Pre-training Modular Transformers

In this paper, we advocate for using large pre-trained monolingual language models in cross lingual zero-shot word sense disambiguation (WSD) coupled with a contextualized mapping mechanism. We also report rigorous experiments that illustrate the effectiveness of employing sparse contextualized word representations obtained via a dictionary learning procedure. Our experimental results demonstrate that the above modifications yield a significant improvement of nearly 6.5 points of increase in the average F-score (from 62.0 to 68.5) over a collection of 17 typologically diverse set of target languages. We release our source code for replicating our experiments at https://github.com/begab/sparsity_makes_sense.

Combating the Curse of Multilinguality in Cross-Lingual WSD by Aligning Sparse Contextualized Word Representations

Exemplification is a process by which writers explain or clarify a concept by providing an example. While common in all forms of writing, exemplification is particularly useful in the task of long-form question answering (LFQA), where a complicated answer can be made more understandable through simple examples. In this paper, we provide the first computational study of exemplification in QA, performing a fine-grained annotation of different types of examples (e.g., hypotheticals, anecdotes) in three corpora. We show that not only do state-of-the-art LFQA models struggle to generate relevant examples, but also that standard evaluation metrics such as ROUGE are insufficient to judge exemplification quality. We propose to treat exemplification as a \emphretrieval problem in which a partially-written answer is used to query a large set of human-written examples extracted from a corpus. Our approach allows a reliable ranking-type automatic metrics that correlates well with human evaluation. A human evaluation shows that our model's retrieved examples are more relevant than examples generated from a state-of-the-art LFQA model. 

Modeling Exemplification in Long-form Question Answering via Retrieval

The information in tables can be an important complement to text, making table-based question answering (QA) systems of great value. The intrinsic complexity of handling tables often adds an extra burden to both model design and data annotation. In this paper, we aim to develop a simple table-based QA model with minimal annotation effort. Motivated by the fact that table-based QA requires both alignment between questions and tables and the ability to perform complicated reasoning over multiple table elements, we propose an omnivorous pretraining approach that consumes both natural and synthetic data to endow models with these respective abilities. Specifically, given freely available tables, we leverage retrieval to pair them with relevant natural sentences for mask-based pretraining, and synthesize NL questions by converting SQL sampled from tables for pretraining with a QA loss. We perform extensive experiments in both few-shot and full settings, and the results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our model OmniTab, with the best multitasking approach achieving an absolute gain of 16.2% and 2.7% in 128-shot and full settings respectively, also establishing a new state-of-the-art on WikiTableQuestions. Detailed ablations and analyses reveal different characteristics of natural and synthetic data, shedding light on future directions in omnivorous pretraining.

OmniTab: Pretraining with Natural and Synthetic Data for Few-shot Table-based Question Answering

Named entity recognition (NER) in a real- world setting remains challenging and is im- pacted by factors like text genre, corpus quality, and data availability. NER models trained on CoNLL do not transfer well to other domains, even within the same language. This is especially the case for multi-lingual models when applied to low-resource languages, and is mainly due to missing entity information.

We propose an approach that with limited effort and data, addresses the NER knowledge gap across languages and domains. Our novel approach uses a token-level gating layer to augment pre-trained multilingual transformers with gazetteers containing named entities (NE) from a target language or domain. This approach provides the flexibility to jointly integrate both textual and gazetteer information dynamically: entity knowledge from gazetteers is used only when a token’s textual representation is insufficient for the NER task.

Evaluation on several languages and domains demonstrates: (i) a high mismatch of reported NER performance on CoNLL vs. domain specific datasets, (ii) gazetteers significantly improve NER performance across languages and domains, and (iii) gazetteers can be flexibly incorporated to guide knowledge transfer. On cross-lingual transfer we achieve an improvement over the baseline with F1=+17.6%, and with F1=+21.3% for cross-domain transfer.

Dynamic Gazetteer Integration in Multilingual Models for Cross-Lingual and Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition

Providing technologies to communities or domains where training data is scarce or protected e.g., for privacy reasons, is becoming increasingly important. To that end, we generalise methods for unsupervised transfer from multiple input models for structured prediction. We show that the means of aggregating over the input models is critical, and that multiplying marginal probabilities of substructures to obtain high-probability structures for distant supervision is substantially better than taking the union of such structures over the input models, as done in prior work. Testing on 18 languages, we demonstrate that the method works in a cross-lingual setting, considering both dependency parsing and part-of-speech structured prediction problems. Our analyses show that the proposed method produces less noisy labels for the distant supervision.

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