Thailand

Although automated metrics are commonly used to evaluate NLG systems, they often correlate poorly with human judgements. Newer metrics such as BERTScore have addressed many weaknesses in prior metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE, which rely on n-gram matching. These newer methods, however, are still limited in that they do not consider the generation context, so they cannot properly reward generated text that is correct but deviates from the given reference. 
In this paper, we propose Language Model Augmented Relevance Score (MARS), a new context-aware metric for NLG evaluation. MARS leverages off-the-shelf language models, guided by reinforcement learning, to create augmented references that consider both the generation context and available human references, which are then used as additional references to score generated text. Compared with seven existing metrics in three common NLG tasks, MARS not only achieves higher correlation with human reference judgements, but also differentiates well-formed candidates from adversarial samples to a larger degree.

ACL 2021

Language Model Augmented Relevance Score

natural langauge generation

human evaluation

augmentation

correlation

language model

reinforcement learning

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

This Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021) was to be held in Bangkok, Thailand, during August 1-6, 2021 and is now virtual on the Underline platform.

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

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technical paper

Recent work on training neural retrievers for open-domain question answering (OpenQA) has employed both supervised and unsupervised approaches. However, it remains unclear how unsupervised and supervised methods can be used most effectively for neural retrievers. In this work, we systematically study retriever pre-training. We first propose an approach of unsupervised pre-training with the Inverse Cloze Task and masked salient spans, followed by supervised finetuning using question-context pairs. This approach leads to absolute gains of 2+ points over the previous best result in the top-20 retrieval accuracy on Natural Questions and TriviaQA datasets. We next explore two approaches for end-to-end training of the reader and retriever components in OpenQA models, which differ in the manner the reader ingests the retrieved documents. 
Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches as we obtain state-of-the-art results. On the Natural Questions dataset, we obtain a top-20 retrieval accuracy of 84%, an improvement of 5 points over the recent DPR model. We also achieve good results on answer extraction, outperforming recent models like REALM and RAG by 3+ points.

End-to-End Training of Neural Retrievers for Open-Domain Question Answering

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (Temporal KGs) extend regular Knowledge Graphs by providing temporal scopes (start and end times) on each edge in the KG. While Question Answering over KG (KGQA) has received some attention from the research community, QA over Temporal KGs (Temporal KGQA) is a relatively unexplored area. Lack of broad coverage datasets has been another factor limiting progress in this area. We address this challenge by presenting CRONQUESTIONS, the largest known Temporal KGQA dataset, clearly stratified into buckets of structural complexity. CRONQUESTIONS expands the only known previous dataset by a factor of 340x. We find that various state-of-the-art KGQA methods fall far short of the desired performance on this new dataset. In response, we also propose CRONKGQA, a transformer-based solution that exploits recent advances in Temporal KG embeddings, and achieves performance superior to all baselines, with an increase of 120% in accuracy over the next best performing method. Through extensive experiments, we give detailed insights into the workings of CRONKGQA, as well as situations where significant further improvements appear possible. In addition to the dataset, we have released our code as well.

Question Answering Over Temporal Knowledge Graphs

With the explosion of chatbot applications, Conversational Question Answering (CQA) has generated a lot of interest in recent years. Among proposals, reading comprehension models which take advantage of the conversation history (previous QA) seem to answer better than those which only consider the current question. Nevertheless, we note that the CQA evaluation protocol has a major limitation. In particular, models are allowed, at each turn of the conversation, to access the ground truth answers of the previous turns. Not only does this severely prevent their applications in fully autonomous chatbots, it also leads to unsuspected biases in their behavior. In this paper, we highlight this effect and propose new tools for evaluation and training in order to guard against the noted issues. The new results that we bring come to reinforce methods of the current state of the art.

Towards a more Robust Evaluation for Conversational Question Answering

Existing models on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) require complex model architecture for effectively modeling long texts with paragraph representation and classification, thereby making inference computationally inefficient for production use. In this work, we propose VAULT: a light-weight and parallel-efficient paragraph representation for MRC based on contextualized representation from long document input, trained using a new Gaussian distribution-based objective that pays close attention to the partially correct instances that are close to the ground-truth. We validate our VAULT architecture showing experimental results on two benchmark MRC datasets that require long context modeling; one Wikipedia-based (Natural Questions (NQ)) and the other on TechNotes (TechQA). VAULT can achieve comparable performance on NQ with a state-of-the-art (SOTA) complex document modeling approach while being 16 times faster, demonstrating the efficiency of our proposed model. We also demonstrate that our model can also be effectively adapted to a completely different domain -- TechQA -- with large improvement over a model fine-tuned on a previously published large PLM.

VAULT: VAriable Unified Long Text Representation for Machine Reading Comprehension

Named Entity Recognition (NER) in low-resource languages has been a long-standing challenge in NLP. Recent work has shown great progress in two directions: developing cross-lingual features/models to transfer knowledge to low-resource languages, and translating source-language training data into low-resource target-language training data by projecting annotations with cheap resources. We focus on the second direction in this study. Existing methods suffer from the low quality of the resulting annotated data in the target language; for example, they cannot handle word order and lexical ambiguity well. To handle these limitations we propose a novel approach that uses the projected annotation to generate pseudo supervised data with a transformer language model and a constrained beam search. This allows us to generate more diverse, higher quality, as well as higher quantities of annotated data in the target language. Experiments demonstrate that, when combining our method with available cross-lingual features, it achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on NER in a low-resource setting, especially for languages that are distant from our source language, English.

Constrained Labeled Data Generation for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition

Social biases with respect to demographics (e.g., gender, age, race) in datasets are often encoded in the large pre-trained language models trained on them. Prior works have largely focused on mitigating biases in context-free representations, with recent shift to contextual ones. While this is useful for several word and sentence-level classification tasks, mitigating biases in only the representations may not suffice to use these models for language generation tasks, such as auto-completion, summarization, or dialogue generation. In this paper, we propose an approach to mitigate social biases in BERT, a large pre-trained contextual language model, and show its effectiveness in the fill-in-the-blank sentence completion task and summarization tasks. In addition to mitigating biases in BERT, which in general acts as an encoder, we propose lexical co-occurrence-based bias penalization in the decoder units in generation frameworks, and show bias mitigation in summarization. Finally, our approach results in better debiasing of BERT-based representations compared to post training bias mitigation, thus illustrating the efficacy of our approach to not just mitigate biases in representations, but also generate text with reduced biases.

He is very intelligent, she is very beautiful? {O}n {M}itigating {S}ocial {B}iases in {L}anguage {M}odelling and {G}eneration

To highlight the challenges of achieving representation disentanglement for text domain in an unsupervised setting, in this paper we select a representative set of successfully applied models from the image domain. We evaluate these models on 6 disentanglement metrics, as well as on downstream classification tasks and homotopy. To facilitate the evaluation, we propose two synthetic datasets with known generative factors. Our experiments highlight the existing gap in the text domain and illustrate that certain elements such as representation sparsity (as an inductive bias), or representation coupling with the decoder could impact disentanglement. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt on the intersection of unsupervised representation disentanglement and text, and provides the experimental framework and datasets for examining future developments in this direction.

Unsupervised Representation Disentanglement of Text: An Evaluation on Synthetic Datasets

Existing supervised models for text clustering find it difficult to directly optimize for clustering results. This is because clustering is a discrete process and it is difficult to estimate meaningful gradient of any discrete function that can drive gradient based optimization algorithms. So, existing supervised clustering algorithms indirectly optimize for some continuous function that approximates the clustering process. We propose a scalable training strategy that directly optimizes for a discrete clustering metric. We train a BERT-based embedding model using our method and evaluate it on two publicly available datasets. We show that our method outperforms another BERT-based embedding model employing Triplet loss and other unsupervised baselines. This suggests that optimizing directly for the clustering outcome indeed yields better representations suitable for clustering.

Learn The Big Picture: Representation Learning for Clustering

We present an efficient training approach to text retrieval with dense representations that applies knowledge distillation using the Col- BERT late-interaction ranking model. Specif- ically, we propose to transfer the knowledge from a bi-encoder teacher to a student by distilling knowledge from ColBERT’s expres- sive MaxSim operator into a simple dot product. The advantage of the bi-encoder teacher– student setup is that we can efficiently add in-batch negatives during knowledge distillation, enabling richer interactions between teacher and student models. In addition, using ColBERT as the teacher reduces training cost com- pared to a full cross-encoder. Experiments on the MS MARCO passage and document rank- ing tasks and data from the TREC 2019 Deep Learning Track demonstrate that our approach helps models learn robust representations for dense retrieval effectively and efficiently.

In-Batch Negatives for Knowledge Distillation with Tightly-Coupled Teachers for Dense Retrieval

Word Embedding maps words to vectors of real numbers. It is derived from a large corpus and is known to capture semantic knowledge from the corpus. Word Embedding is a critical component of many state-of-the-art Deep Learning techniques. However, generating good Word Embeddings is a special challenge for low-resource languages such as Nepali due to the unavailability of large text corpus. In this paper, we present NPVec1 which consists of 25 state-of-art Word Embeddings for Nepali that we have derived from a large corpus using GloVe, Word2Vec, fastText, and BERT. We further provide intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations of these Embeddings using well established metrics and methods. These models are trained using 279 million word tokens and are the largest Embeddings ever trained for Nepali language. Furthermore, we have made these Embeddings publicly available to accelerate the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications in Nepali.

Language Model Augmented Relevance Score

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