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Incorporating syntax into neural approaches in NLP has a multitude of practical and scientific benefits. For instance, a language model that is syntax-aware is likely to be able to produce better samples; even a discriminative model like BERT with a syntax module could be used for core NLP tasks like unsupervised syntactic parsing. Rapid progress in recent years was arguably spurred on by the empirical success of the Parsing-Reading-Predict architecture of (Shen et al., 2018a), later simplified by the Order Neuron LSTM of (Shen et al., 2019). Most notably, this is the first time neural approaches were able to successfully perform unsupervised syntactic parsing (evaluated by various metrics like F-1 score). 

However, even heuristic (much less fully mathematical) understanding of why and when these architectures work is lagging severely behind. In this work, we answer representational questions raised by the architectures in (Shen et al., 2018a, 2019), as well as some transition-based syntax-aware language models (Dyer et al., 2016): what kind of syntactic structure can current neural approaches to syntax represent? Concretely, we ground this question in the sandbox of probabilistic context-free-grammars (PCFGs), and identify a key aspect of the representational power of these approaches: the amount and directionality of context that the predictor has access to when forced to make parsing decision. We show that with limited context (either bounded, or unidirectional), there are PCFGs, for which these approaches cannot represent the max-likelihood parse; conversely, if the context is unlimited, they can represent the max-likelihood parse of any PCFG.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The Limitations of Limited Context for Constituency Parsing

left-to-right parsing

bidirectional context

unidirectional context

max-likelihood parse

pcfg

probabilistic context-free grammar

representational power

context

constituency parsing

syntax

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

Pre-training of text and layout has proved effective in a variety of visually-rich document understanding tasks due to its effective model architecture and the advantage of large-scale unlabeled scanned/digital-born documents. We propose LayoutLMv2 architecture with new pre-training tasks to model the interaction among text, layout, and image in a single multi-modal framework. Specifically, with a two-stream multi-modal Transformer encoder, LayoutLMv2 uses not only the existing masked visual-language modeling task but also the new text-image alignment and text-image matching tasks, which make it better capture the cross-modality interaction in the pre-training stage. Meanwhile, it also integrates a spatial-aware self-attention mechanism into the Transformer architecture so that the model can fully understand the relative positional relationship among different text blocks. Experiment results show that LayoutLMv2 outperforms LayoutLM by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of downstream visually-rich document understanding tasks, including FUNSD (0.7895 to 0.8420), CORD (0.9493 to 0.9601), SROIE (0.9524 to 0.9781), Kleister-NDA (0.8340 to 0.8520), RVL-CDIP (0.9443 to 0.9564), and DocVQA (0.7295 to 0.8672).

LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding

Existed pre-training methods either focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal tasks, and cannot effectively adapt to each other. They can only utilize single-modal data (i.e., text or image) or limited multi-modal data (i.e., image-text pairs). In this work, we propose a UNIfied-MOdal pre-training architecture, namely UNIMO, which can effectively adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. Large scale of free text corpus and image collections are utilized to improve the capability of visual and textual understanding, and cross-modal contrastive learning (CMCL) is leveraged to align the textual and visual information into a unified semantic space, over a corpus of image-text pairs augmented with related images and texts. With the help of rich non-paired single-modal data, our model is able to learn more generalizable representations, by allowing textual knowledge and visual knowledge to enhance each other in the unified semantic space. The experimental results show that UNIMO greatly improves the performance of several single-modal and multi-modal downstream tasks. Our code and pre-trained models are public at \url{https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/NLP/UNIMO}.

UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning

Multimodal fusion has been proved to improve emotion recognition performance in previous works.
However, in real-world applications, we often encounter the problem of missing modality, and which modalities will be missing is uncertain. It makes the fixed multimodal fusion fail in such cases.
In this work, we propose a unified model, Missing Modality Imagination Network (MMIN), to deal with the uncertain missing modality problem. MMIN learns robust joint multimodal representations, which can predict the representation of any missing modality given available modalities under different missing modality conditions.Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the unified MMIN model significantly improves emotion recognition performance under both uncertain missing-modality testing conditions and full-modality ideal testing condition. The code will be available at https://github.com/AIM3-RUC/MMIN.

Missing Modality Imagination Network for Emotion Recognition with Uncertain Missing Modalities

Encoder pre-training is promising in end-to-end Speech Translation (ST), given the fact that speech-to-translation data is scarce.
But ST encoders are not simple instances of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) or Machine Translation (MT) encoders.
For example, we find that ASR encoders lack the global context representation, which is necessary for translation, whereas MT encoders are not designed to deal with long but locally attentive acoustic sequences.
In this work, we propose a Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding (SATE) method for speech translation.
Our encoder begins with processing the acoustic sequence as usual, but later behaves more like an MT encoder for a global representation of the input sequence.
In this way, it is straightforward to incorporate the pre-trained models into the system.
Also, we develop an adaptor module to alleviate the representation inconsistency between the pre-trained ASR encoder and MT encoder, and develop a multi-teacher knowledge distillation method to preserve the pre-training knowledge.
Experimental results on the LibriSpeech En-Fr and MuST-C En-De ST tasks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art BLEU scores of 18.3 and 25.2.
To our knowledge, we are the first to develop an end-to-end ST system that achieves comparable or even better BLEU performance than the cascaded ST counterpart when large-scale ASR and MT data is available.

Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders

In this paper, we study the task of graph-based constituent parsing in the setting that binarization is not conducted as a pre-processing step, where a constituent tree may consist of nodes with more than two children. Previous graph-based methods on this setting typically generate hidden nodes with the dummy label inside the n-ary nodes, in order to transform the tree into a binary tree for prediction. The limitation is that the hidden nodes break the sibling relations of the n-ary node's children. Consequently, the dependencies of such sibling constituents might not be accurately modeled and is being ignored. To solve this limitation, we propose a novel graph-based framework, which is called "recursive semi-Markov model". The main idea is to utilize 1-order semi-Markov model to predict the immediate children sequence of a constituent candidate, which then recursively serves as a child candidate of its parent. In this manner, the dependencies of sibling constituents can be described by 1-order transition features, which solves the above limitation. Through experiments, the proposed framework obtains the F1 of 95.92% and 92.50% on the datasets of PTB and CTB 5.1 respectively. Specially, the recursive semi-Markov model shows advantages in modeling nodes with more than two children, whose average F1 can be improved by 0.3-1.1 points in PTB and 2.3-6.8 points in CTB 5.1.

N-ary Constituent Tree Parsing with Recursive Semi-Markov Model

Pretrained contextualized embeddings are powerful word representations for structured prediction tasks. Recent work found that better word representations can be obtained by concatenating different types of embeddings. However, the selection of embeddings to form the best concatenated representation usually varies depending on the task and the collection of candidate embeddings, and the ever-increasing number of embedding types makes it a more difficult problem. In this paper, we propose Automated Concatenation of Embeddings (ACE) to automate the process of finding better concatenations of embeddings for structured prediction tasks, based on a formulation inspired by recent progress on neural architecture search. Specifically, a controller alternately samples a concatenation of embeddings, according to its current belief of the effectiveness of individual embedding types in consideration for a task, and updates the belief based on a reward. We follow strategies in reinforcement learning to optimize the parameters of the controller and compute the reward based on the accuracy of a task model, which is fed with the sampled concatenation as input and trained on a task dataset. Empirical results on 6 tasks and 21 datasets show that our approach outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance with fine-tuned embeddings in all the evaluations.

Automated Concatenation of Embeddings for Structured Prediction

In structured prediction problems, cross-lingual transfer learning is an efficient way to train quality models for low-resource languages, and further improvement can be obtained by learning from multiple source languages. However, not all source models are created equal and some may hurt performance on the target language. Previous work has explored the similarity between source and target sentences as an approximate measure of strength for different source models. In this paper, we propose a multi-view framework, by leveraging a small number of labeled target sentences, to effectively combine multiple source models into an aggregated source view at different granularity levels (language, sentence, or sub-structure), and transfer it to a target view based on a task-specific model. By encouraging the two views to interact with each other, our framework can dynamically adjust the confidence level of each source model and improve the performance of both views during training. Experiments for three structured prediction tasks on sixteen data sets show that our framework achieves significant improvement over all existing approaches, including these with access to additional source language data.

Multi-View Cross-Lingual Structured Prediction with Minimum Supervision

Retrofitting is a technique used to move word vectors closer together or further apart in their space to reflect their relationships in a Knowledge Base (KB). However, retrofitting only works on concepts that are present in that KB. RetroGAN uses a pair of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to learn a one-to-one mapping between concepts and their
retrofitted counterparts. It applies that mapping (post-specializes) to handle concepts that
do not appear in the original KB in a manner similar to how some natural language systems handle out-of-vocabulary entries. We test our system on three word-similarity benchmarks and a downstream sentence simplification task, and achieve the state of the art (CARD-660). Altogether, our results demonstrate our system’s effectiveness for out-of-knowledge and rare word generalization.

RetroGAN: A Cyclic Post-Specialization System for Improving Out-of-Knowledge and Rare Word Representations

The task of ICD coding is to automatically extract International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes from unstructured clinical notes or discharge summaries, which not only saves time and money but also reduces errors. Although several studies are proposed to solve this challenging task, none of them distinguishes the importance of different phrases with a word window. Intuitively, informative phrases should be more useful for the prediction. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective feature compressed ICD coding model named Fusion to address this issue. In particular, we propose a novel attentive soft-pooling approach to compress the sparse and redundant word representations into informative and dense ones as local features. Besides, we use the key-query attention mechanism for modeling the inner relations among local features to generate the global features, which are further used to predict ICD codes. Experiments on two widely used datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms baselines. However, on the MIMIC-III Full dataset, we find that none of the state-of-the-art approaches significantly perform better than others. Thus, automated ICD coding is still a challenging task.

Fusion: Towards Automated ICD Coding via Feature Compression

In this paper, we introduce an event-driven trading strategy that predicts stock movements by detecting corporate events from news articles. Unlike existing models that utilize textual features (e.g., bag-of-words) and sentiments to directly make stock predictions, we consider corporate events as the driving force behind stock movements and aim to profit from the temporary stock mispricing that may occur when corporate events take place. The core of the proposed strategy is a bi-level event detection model. The low-level event detector identifies events' existences from each token, while the high-level event detector incorporates the entire article's representation and the low-level detected results to discover events at the article-level. We also develop an elaborately-annotated dataset EDT for corporate event detection and news-based stock prediction benchmark. EDT includes 9721 news articles with token-level event labels as well as 303893 news articles with minute-level timestamps and comprehensive stock price labels. Experiments on EDT indicate that the proposed strategy outperforms all the baselines in winning rate, excess returns over the market, and the average return on each transaction.

The Limitations of Limited Context for Constituency Parsing

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The Limitations of Limited Context for Constituency Parsing

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Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2021

LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding

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A Conditional Splitting Framework for Efficient Constituency Parsing

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