United Arab Emirates

Discovering new slots is critical to the success of dialogue systems. Most existing methods rely on automatic slot induction in unsupervised fashion or perform domain adaptation across zero or few-shot scenarios. They have difficulties in providing high-quality supervised signals to learn clustering-friendly features, and are limited in effectively transferring the prior knowledge from known slots to new slots. In this work, we propose a Semi-supervised Incremental Clustering method (SIC), to discover new slots with the aid of existing linguistic annotation models and limited known slot data. Specifically, we harvest slot value candidates with NLP model cues and innovatively formulate the slot discovery task under an incremental clustering framework. The model gradually calibrate slot representations under the supervision of generated pseudo-labels, and automatically learns to terminate when no more salient slot remains. Our thorough evaluation on five public datasets demonstrates that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models.

EMNLP 2022

Semi-supervised New Slot Discovery with Incremental Clustering

semi-supervised learning

clustering

dialogue system

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

findings / work in progress

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

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***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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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.

Knowledge distillation addresses the problem of transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model.
In this process, we typically have multiple types of knowledge extracted from the teacher model.
The problem is to make full use of them to train the student model.
Our preliminary study shows that: (1) not all of the knowledge is necessary for learning a good student model, and (2) knowledge distillation can benefit from certain knowledge at different training steps.
In response to these, we propose an actor-critic approach to selecting appropriate knowledge to transfer during the process of knowledge distillation.
In addition, we offer a refinement of the training algorithm to ease the computational burden.
Experimental results on the GLUE datasets show that our method outperforms several strong knowledge distillation baselines significantly.

Improved Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models via Knowledge Selection

Status is widely used to incentivize user engagement online. However, visible status indicators could inadvertently bias online deliberation to favor high-status users. In this work, we design and deploy a randomized experiment on the ChangeMyView platform to quantify status biases in deliberation online. We find strong evidence of status bias: hiding status on ChangeMyView increases the persuasion rate of moderate-status users by 84% and decreases the persuasion rate of high-status users by 41% relative to the control group. We also find that the persuasive power of status is moderated by verbosity, suggesting that status is used as an information-processing heuristic under cognitive load. Finally, we find that a user's status influences the argumentation behavior of other users they interact with in a manner that disadvantages low and moderate-status users.

Status Biases in Deliberation Online: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on ChangeMyView

Investigating better ways to reuse the released pre-trained language models (PLMs) can significantly reduce the computational cost and the potential environmental side-effects. This paper explores a novel PLM reuse paradigm, Knowledge Integration (KI). Without human annotations available, KI aims to merge the knowledge from different teacher-PLMs, each of which specializes in a different classification problem, into a versatile student model. To achieve this, we first derive the correlation between virtual golden supervision and teacher predictions. We then design a Model Uncertainty--aware Knowledge Integration (MUKI) framework to recover the golden supervision for the student. Specifically, MUKI adopts Monte-Carlo Dropout to estimate model uncertainty for the supervision integration. An instance-wise re-weighting mechanism based on the margin of uncertainty scores is further incorporated, to deal with the potential conflicting supervision from teachers.
Experimental results demonstrate that MUKI achieves substantial improvements over baselines on benchmark datasets. Further analysis shows that MUKI can generalize well for merging teacher models with heterogeneous architectures, and even teachers major in cross-lingual datasets.

From Mimicking to Integrating: Knowledge Integration for Pre-Trained Language Models

In this work, we study the large-scale pretraining of BERT-Large (Devlin et al., 2019) with differentially private SGD (DP-SGD). We show that combined with a careful implementation, scaling up the batch size to millions (i.e., mega-batches) improves the utility of the DP-SGD step for BERT; we also enhance the training efficiency by using an increasing batch size schedule. Our implementation builds on the recent work of Subramani et al (2020), who demonstrated that the overhead of a DP-SGD step is minimized with effective use of JAX (Bradbury et al., 2018; Frostig et al., 2018) primitives in conjunction with the XLA compiler (XLA team and collaborators, 2017). Our implementation achieves a masked language model accuracy of 60.5% at a batch size of 2M, for epsilon=5, which is a reasonable privacy setting. To put this number in perspective, non-private BERT models achieve an accuracy of ∼70%.

Large-Scale Differentially Private BERT

The many-to-many multilingual neural machine translation can translate between language pairs unseen during training, i.e., zero-shot translation. Improving zero-shot translation requires the model to learn universal representations and cross-mapping relationships to transfer the knowledge learned on the supervised directions to the zero-shot directions. In this work, we propose the state mover's distance based on the optimal theory to model the difference of the representations output by the encoder. Then, we bridge the gap between the semantic-equivalent representations of different languages at the token level by minimizing the proposed distance to learn universal representations. Besides, we propose an agreement-based training scheme, which can help the model make consistent predictions based on the semantic-equivalent sentences to learn universal cross-mapping relationships for all translation directions. The experimental results on diverse multilingual datasets show that our method can improve consistently compared with the baseline system and other contrast methods. The analysis proves that our method can better align the semantic space and improve the prediction consistency.

Improving Zero-Shot Multilingual Translation with Universal Representations and Cross-Mapping

Recent works in cyber deception study how to deter malicious intrusion by generating multiple fake versions of a critical document to impose costs on adversaries who need to identify the correct information. However, existing approaches are context-agnostic, resulting in sub-optimal and unvaried outputs. We propose a novel context-aware model, Fake Document Infilling (FDI), by converting the problem to a controllable mask-then-infill procedure. FDI masks important concepts of varied lengths in the document, then infills a realistic but fake alternative considering both the previous and future contexts. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on technical documents and news stories. Results show that FDI outperforms the baselines in generating highly believable fakes with moderate modification to protect critical information and deceive adversaries.

Controllable Fake Document Infilling for Cyber Deception

Is it possible to build a general and automatic natural language generation (NLG) evaluation metric? Existing learned metrics either perform unsatisfactorily or are restricted to tasks where large human rating data is already available. We introduce SESCORE, a model-based metric that is highly correlated with human judgements without requiring human annotation, by utilizing a novel, iterative error synthesis and severity scoring pipeline. This pipeline applies a series of plausible errors to raw text and assigns severity labels by simulating human judgements with entailment. We evaluate SESCORE against existing metrics by comparing how their scores correlate with human ratings. SESCORE outperforms all prior unsupervised metrics on multiple diverse NLG tasks including machine translation, image captioning, and WebNLG text generation. For WMT 20/21
En-De and Zh-En, SESCORE improve the average Kendall correlation with human judgement from 0.154 to 0.195. SESCORE even achieves comparable performance to the best supervised metric COMET, despite receiving no human annotated training data.

Not All Errors are Equal: Learning Text Generation Metrics using Stratified Error Synthesis

Relation extraction (RE) models have been challenged by their reliance on training data with expensive annotations. Considering that summarization tasks aim at acquiring concise expressions of synoptical information from the longer context, these tasks naturally align with the objective of RE, i.e., extracting a kind of synoptical information that describes the relation of entity mentions. We present SuRE, which converts RE into a summarization formulation. SuRE leads to more precise and resource-efficient RE based on indirect supervision from summarization tasks. To achieve this goal, we develop sentence and relation conversion techniques that essentially bridge the formulation of summarization and RE tasks. We also incorporate constraint decoding techniques with Trie scoring to further enhance summarization-based RE with robust inference. Experiments on three RE datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SuRE in both full-dataset and low-resource settings, showing that summarization is a promising source of indirect supervision signals to improve RE models.

Summarization as Indirect Supervision for Relation Extraction

News recommendation (NR) is essential for online news services. Existing NR methods typically adopt a news-user representation learning framework, facing two potential limitations. First, in news encoder, single candidate news encoding suffers from an insufficient semantic information problem. Second, existing graph-based NR methods are promising but lack effective news-user feature interaction, rendering the graph-based recommendation suboptimal. To overcome these limitations, we propose dual-interactive graph attention networks (DIGAT) consisting of news- and user-graph channels. In the news-graph channel, we enrich the semantics of single candidate news by incorporating the semantically relevant news information with a semantic-augmented graph (SAG). In the user-graph channel, multi-level user interests are represented with a news-topic graph. Most notably, we design a dual-graph interaction process to perform effective feature interaction between the news and user graphs, which facilitates accurate news-user representation matching. Experiment results on the benchmark dataset MIND show that DIGAT outperforms existing news recommendation methods. Further ablation studies and analyses validate the effectiveness of (1) semantic-augmented news graph modeling and (2) dual-graph interaction.

DIGAT: Modeling News Recommendation with Dual-Graph Interaction

In this paper, we propose the task of consecutive question generation (CQG), which generates a set of logically related question-answer pairs to understand a whole passage, with a comprehensive consideration of the aspects including accuracy, coverage, and informativeness.
To achieve this, we first examine the four key elements of CQG, i.e., question, answer, rationale, and context history, and propose a novel dynamic multitask framework with one main task generating a question-answer pair, and four auxiliary tasks generating other elements. It directly helps the model generate good questions through both joint training and self-reranking. At the same time, to fully explore the worth-asking information in a given passage, we make use of the reranking losses to sample the rationales and search for the best question series globally.
Finally, we measure our strategy by QA data augmentation and manual evaluation, as well as a novel application of generated question-answer pairs on DocNLI. We prove that our strategy can improve question generation significantly and benefit multiple related NLP tasks.

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