Korea, Republic of

One typical approach to long-form document matching is first conducting alignment between cross-document sentence pairs and then aggregating all of the sentence-level matching signals. However, this approach could be problematic because the alignment between documents is partial --- despite two documents as a whole are well-matched, most of the sentences could still be dissimilar. Those dissimilar sentences lead to spurious sentence-level matching signals which may overwhelm the real ones, increasing the difficulties of learning the matching function. 
Therefore, accurately selecting the key sentences for document matching is becoming a urgent problem. To address this issue, we propose a novel matching approach that equips existing document matching models with an Optimal Partial Transport (OPT) based component, namely OPT-Match, which selects the sentences that play a major role in matching. Enjoying the partial transport properties of OPT, the selected key sentences can not only effectively enhance the matching accuracy, but also be explained as the rationales for the matching results.

COLING 2022

Optimal Partial Transport based Sentence Selection for Long-form Document Matching

optimal transport

text matching

natural language processing

# 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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ACL 2022

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). 

technical paper

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Query-focused summaries of foreign-language, retrieved documents can help a user understand whether a document is actually relevant to the query term. A standard approach to this problem is to first translate the source documents and then perform extractive summarization to find relevant snippets. However, in a cross-lingual setting, the query term does not necessarily appear in the translations of relevant documents. In this work, we show that constrained machine translation and constrained post-editing can improve human relevance judgments by including a query term in a summary when its translation appears in the source document. We also present several strategies for selecting only certain documents for regeneration which yield further improvements.

Constrained Regeneration for Cross-Lingual Query-Focused Extractive Summarization

Difficulties with social aspects of language are among the hallmarks of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These communication differences are thought to contribute to the challenges that adults with ASD experience when seeking employment, underscoring the need for interventions that focus on improving areas of weakness in pragmatic and social language. In this paper, we describe a transformer-based framework for identifying linguistic features associated with social aspects of communication using a corpus of conversations between adults with and without ASD and neurotypical conversational partners produced while engaging in collaborative tasks. While our framework yields strong accuracy overall, performance is significantly worse for the language of participants with ASD, suggesting that they use a more diverse set of strategies for some social linguistic functions. These results, while showing promise for the development of automated language analysis tools to support targeted language interventions for ASD, also reveal weaknesses in the ability of large contextualized language models to model neuroatypical language.

Evaluating the Performance of Transformer-based Language Models for Neuroatypical Language

Unsupervised sentence embeddings learning has been recently dominated by contrastive learning methods (e.g., SimCSE), which keep positive pairs similar and push negative pairs apart. The contrast operation aims to keep as much information as possible by maximizing the mutual information between positive instances, which leads to redundant information in sentence embedding. To address this problem, we present an information minimization based contrastive learning (InforMin-CL) model to retain the useful information and discard the redundant information by maximizing the mutual information and minimizing the information entropy between positive instances meanwhile for unsupervised sentence representation learning. Specifically, we find that information minimization can be achieved by simple contrast and reconstruction objectives. The reconstruction operation reconstitutes the positive instance via the other positive instance to minimize the information entropy between positive instances. We evaluate our model on fourteen downstream tasks, including both supervised and unsupervised (semantic textual similarity) tasks. Extensive experimental results show that our InforMin-CL obtains a state-of-the-art performance.

An Information Minimization Based Contrastive Learning Model for Unsupervised Sentence Embeddings Learning

Two of the most fundamental challenges in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) at present are: (a) how to establish whether deep learningbased models score highly on NLU benchmarks for the ‘right’ reasons; and (b) to understand what those reasons would even be. We investigate the behavior of reading comprehension
models with respect to two linguistic ‘skills’: coreference resolution and comparison.
We propose a definition for the reasoning steps expected from a system that would be ‘reading slowly’, and compare that with the behavior of five models of the BERT family of various sizes, observed through saliency scores and counterfactual explanations. We find that for comparison (but not coreference) the systems based on larger encoders are more likely to rely on the ‘right’ information, but even they struggle with generalization, suggesting that they still learn specific lexical patterns rather than the general principles of comparison.

Machine Reading, Fast and Slow: When Do Models "Understand” Language?

Current medical question answering systems have difficulty processing long, detailed and informally worded questions submitted by patients, called Consumer Health Questions (CHQs). To address this issue, we introduce a medical question understanding and answering system with knowledge grounding and semantic self-supervision. Our system is a pipeline that first summarizes a long, medical, user-written question, using a supervised summarization loss. Then, our system performs a two-step retrieval to return answers. The system first matches the summarized user question with an FAQ from a trusted medical knowledge base, and then retrieves a fixed number of relevant sentences from the corresponding answer document. In the absence of labels for question matching or answer relevance, we design 3 novel, self-supervised and semantically-guided losses. We evaluate our model against two strong retrieval-based question answering baselines. Evaluators ask their own questions and rate the answers retrieved by our baselines and own system according to their relevance. They find that our system retrieves more relevant answers, while achieving speeds 20 times faster. Our self-supervised losses also help the summarizer achieve higher scores in ROUGE, as well as in human evaluation metrics. We release our code to encourage further research.

Medical Question Understanding and Answering with Knowledge Grounding and Semantic Self-Supervision

Both real and fake news in various domains, such as politics, health, and entertainment are spread via online social media every day, necessitating fake news detection for multiple domains. Among them, fake news in specific domains like politics and health has more serious potential negative impacts on the real world (e.g., the infodemic led by COVID-19 misinformation). Previous studies focus on multi-domain fake news detection, by equally mining and modeling the correlation between domains. However, these multi-domain methods suffer from a seesaw problem: the performance of some domains is often improved at the cost of hurting the performance of other domains, which could lead to an unsatisfying performance in specific domains. To address this issue, we propose a Domain- and Instance-level Transfer Framework for Fake News Detection (DITFEND), which could improve the performance of specific target domains. To transfer coarse-grained domain-level knowledge, we train a general model with data of all domains from the meta-learning perspective. To transfer fine-grained instance-level knowledge and adapt the general model to a target domain, we train a language model on the target domain to evaluate the transferability of each data instance in source domains and re-weigh each instance's contribution. Offline experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DITFEND. Online experiments show that DITFEND brings additional improvements over the base models in a real-world scenario.

Improving Fake News Detection of Influential Domain via Domain- and Instance-Level Transfer

Recent improvements in KG-to-text generation are due to additional auxiliary pre-training tasks designed to give the fine-tune task a boost in performance. These tasks require extensive computational resources while only suggesting marginal improvements. Here, we demonstrate that by fusing graph-aware elements into existing pre-trained language models, we are able to outperform state-of-the-art models and close the gap imposed by additional pre-training tasks. We do so by proposing a mask structure to capture neighborhood information and a novel type encoder that adds a bias to the graph-attention weights depending on the connection type. Experiments on two KG-to-text benchmark datasets show our models are competitive while involving fewer parameters and no additional pre-training tasks. By formulating the problem as a framework, we can interchange the various proposed components and begin interpreting KG-to-text generative models based on the topological and type information found in a graph.

GAP: A Graph-aware Language Model Framework for Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation

There have been many efforts to try to understand what grammatical knowledge (e.g., ability to understand the part of speech of a token) is encoded in large pre-trained language models (LM). This is done through ‘Edge Probing’
(EP) tests: supervised classification tasks to predict the grammatical properties of a span (whether it has a particular part of speech) using only the token representations coming from the LM encoder. However, most NLP applications
fine-tune these LM encoders for specific tasks. Here, we ask: if an LM is fine-tuned,
does the encoding of linguistic information in it change, as measured by EP tests? Specifically, we focus on the task of Question Answering (QA) and conduct experiments on multiple datasets. We find that EP test results do not change significantly when the fine-tuned model performs well or in adversarial situations where the model is forced to learn wrong correlations. From a similar finding, some recent papers conclude that fine-tuning does not change linguistic knowledge in encoders but they do not provide an explanation. We find that EP models
themselves are susceptible to exploiting spurious correlations in the EP datasets. When this dataset bias is corrected, we do see an improvement in the EP test results as expected.

Can Edge Probing Tests Reveal Linguistic Knowledge in QA Models?

Answer selection task requires finding appropriate answers to questions from informative but crowdsourced candidates. A key factor impeding its solution by current answer selection approaches is the redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers. Recently, Deng et al. (2020) constructed a new dataset, WikiHowQA, which contains a corresponding reference summary for each original lengthy answer. And their experiments show that leveraging the answer summaries helps to attend the essential information in original lengthy answers and improve the answer selection performance under certain circumstances. However, when given a question and a set of long candidate answers, human beings could effortlessly identify the correct answer without the aid of additional answer summaries since the original answers contain all the information volume that answer summaries contain. In addition, pretrained language models have been shown superior or comparable to human beings on many natural language processing tasks. Motivated by those, we design a series of neural models, either pretraining-based or non-pretraining-based, to check wether the additional answer summaries are helpful for ranking the relevancy degrees of question-answer pairs on WikiHowQA dataset. Extensive automated experiments and hand analysis show that the additional answer summaries are not useful for achieving the best performance.

Original Content Is All You Need! An Empirical Study on Leveraging Answer Summary for WikiHowQA Answer Selection Task

Models of natural language understanding often rely on question answering and logical inference benchmark challenges to evaluate the performance of a system. While informative, such task-oriented evaluations do not assess the broader semantic abilities that humans have as part of their linguistic competence when
speaking and interpreting language. We define competence-based (CB) question generation, and focus on queries over lexical semantic knowledge involving implicit argument and subevent structure of verbs. We present a method to generate such questions and a dataset of English cooking recipes we use for implementing the generation method. Our primary experiment shows that even large pretrained
language models perform poorly on CB questions until they are provided with additional contextualized semantic information. The data and the source code is available at

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