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Syntactic structure is an important component of natural language text. Recent top-performing models in Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) use self-attention and transfer learning, but not syntactic structure. Tree structures have shown strong performance in tasks with sentence pair input like semantic relatedness. We investigate whether tree structures can boost performance in AS2. We introduce the Tree Aggregation Transformer: a novel recursive, tree-structured self-attention model for AS2. The recursive nature of our model is able to represent all levels of syntactic parse trees with only one additional self-attention layer. Without transfer learning, we establish a new state of the art on the popular TrecQA and WikiQA benchmark datasets. Additionally, we evaluate our method on four Community Question Answering datasets, and find that tree-structured representations have limitations with noisy user-generated text. We conduct probing experiments to evaluate how our models leverage tree structures across datasets. Our findings show that the ability of tree-structured models to successfully absorb syntactic information is strongly correlated with a higher performance in AS2.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Recursive Tree-Structured Self-Attention for Answer Sentence Selection

tree transformer

tree structures

community question answering

user-generated text

tree

answer sentence selection

self-attention

question answering

transformer

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

poster

Recent years have witnessed various types of generative models for natural language generation (NLG), especially RNNs or transformer based sequence-to-sequence models, as well as variational autoencoder (VAE) and generative adversarial network (GAN) based models. However, flow-based generative models, which achieve strong performance in image generation due to their invertibility and exact density estimation properties, have been less explored for NLG. In this paper, we propose a flow-based language generation model by adapting previous flow generative models to language generation via continuous input embeddings, adapted affine coupling structures, and a novel architecture for autoregressive text generation. We also apply our framework to Sequence-to-Sequence generation, including text- and video-based Question Generation (QG) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT), and data augmentation for Question Answering (QA). We use our language flow model to provide extra input features for QG and NMT, which achieves improvements over the strong QG baselines on SQuAD and TVQA and NMT baseline on WMT16. We also augment QA data with new context by injecting noise to the latent features of the language flow and show this augmentation leads to a large performance improvement from strong baselines on SQuAD and TVQA.

Continuous Language Generative Flow

Text-to-SQL is the problem of converting a user question into an SQL query, when the question and database are given. In this paper, we present a neural network approach called RYANSQL (Recursively Yielding Annotation Network for SQL) to solve complex Text-to-SQL tasks for cross-domain databases. Statement Position Code (SPC) is defined to transform a nested SQL query into a set of non-nested SELECT statements; a sketch-based slot filling approach is proposed to synthesize each SELECT statement for its corresponding SPC. Additionally, two input manipulation methods are presented to improve generation performance further. RYANSQL achieved competitive result of 58.2% accuracy on the challenging Spider bench- mark. At the time of paper submission (April 2020), RYANSQL v2, a variant of original RYANSQL, is positioned at 3rd place among all systems and 1st place among the systems not using database content with 60.6% exact matching accuracy. The source code is available at https://github.com/kakaoenterprise/RYANSQL.

RYANSQL: Recursively Applying Sketch-based Slot Fillings for Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Databases

Wikipedia abstract generation aims to distill a Wikipedia abstract from web sources and has met significant success by adopting multi-document summarization techniques.
However, previous works generally view the abstract as plain text, ignoring the fact that it is a description of a certain entity and can be decomposed into different topics.
In this paper, we propose a two-stage model TWAG that guides the abstract generation with topical information.
First, we detect the topic of each input paragraph with a classifier trained on existing Wikipedia articles to divide input documents into different topics.
Then, we predict the topic distribution of each abstract sentence, and decode the sentence from topic-aware representations with a Pointer-Generator network.
We evaluate our model on the WikiCatSum dataset, and the results show that TWAG outperforms various existing baselines and is capable of generating comprehensive abstracts.

TWAG: A Topic-Guided Wikipedia Abstract Generator

While there are more than 7000 languages in the world, most translation research efforts have targeted a few high-resource languages.
Commercial translation systems support only one hundred languages or fewer, and do not make these models available for transfer to low resource languages. 
In this work, we present useful tools for machine translation research: MTData, NLCodec, and RTG. We demonstrate their usefulness by creating a multilingual neural machine translation model capable of translating from 500 source languages to English. We make this multilingual model readily downloadable and usable as a service, or as a parent model for transfer learning to even lower-resource languages. Demo website: http://rtg.isi.edu/many-eng Video demo: https://youtu.be/NSY0-MvO1KE

Many-to-English Machine Translation Tools

We present skweak, a versatile, Python-based software toolkit enabling NLP developers to apply weak supervision to a wide range of NLP tasks. Weak supervision is an emerging machine learning paradigm based on a simple idea: instead of labelling data points by hand, we use labelling functions derived from domain knowledge to automatically obtain annotations for a given dataset. The resulting labels are then aggregated with a generative model that estimates the accuracy (and possible confusions) of each labelling function. The skweak toolkit makes it easy to implement a large spectrum of labelling functions (such as heuristics, gazetteers, neural models or linguistic constraints) on text data, apply them on a corpus, and aggregate their results in a fully unsupervised fashion. skweak is especially designed to facilitate the use of weak supervision for NLP tasks such as text classification and sequence labelling. We illustrate the use of skweak for NER and sentiment analysis. skweak is released under an open-source license and is available at: https://github.com/NorskRegnesentral/skweak

skweak: Weak Supervision Made Easy for NLP

We introduce ChrEnTranslate, an online ma­chine translation demonstration system for translation between English and an endangered language Cherokee. It supports both statistical and neural translation models as well as pro­vides quality estimation to inform users of re­liability, two user feedback interfaces for ex­perts and common users respectively, exam­ple inputs to collect human translations for monolingual data, word alignment visualiza­tion, and relevant terms from the Cherokee­-English dictionary. The quantitative evalu­ation demonstrates that our backbone trans­lation models achieve state­of­the­art transla­tion performance and our quality estimation well correlates with both BLEU and human judgment. By analyzing 216 pieces of expert feedback, we find that NMT is preferable be­cause it copies less than SMT, and, in gen­eral, current models can translate fragments of the source sentence but make major mistakes. When we add these 216 expert­-corrected paral­lel texts into the training set and retrain mod­els, equal or slightly better performance is observed, which demonstrates indicates the po­tential of human-­in­-the­-loop learning.

ChrEnTranslate: Cherokee-English Machine Translation Demo with Quality Estimation and Corrective Feedback

The usage of individual words can change over time, for example, when words experience a semantic shift. As text datasets generally comprise documents that were collected over a longer period of time, examining word usage changes in a corpus can often reveal interesting patterns. In this paper, we introduce a simple and intuitive way to track word usage changes via continuously evolving embeddings, computed as a weighted running average of transformer-based contextualized embeddings. We demonstrate our approach on a corpus of recent New York Times article snippets and provide code for an easy to use web app to conveniently explore semantic shifts with interactive plots.

Exploring Word Usage Change with Continuously Evolving Embeddings

Current abusive language detection systems have demonstrated unintended bias towards sensitive features such as nationality or gender. This is a crucial issue, which may harm minorities and underrepresented groups if such systems were integrated in real-world applications. In this paper, we create ad hoc tests through the CheckList tool (Ribeito et al., 2020) to detect biases within abusive language classifiers for English. We compare the behaviour of two BERT-based models, one trained on a generic abusive language dataset and the other on a dataset for misogyny detection. Our evaluation shows that, although BERT-based classifiers achieve high accuracy levels on a variety of natural language processing tasks, they perform very poorly as regards fairness and bias, in particular on samples involving implicit stereotypes, expressions of hate towards minorities and protected attributes such as race or sexual orientation. We release both the notebooks implemented to extend the Fairness tests and the synthetic datasets usable to evaluate systems bias independently of CheckList.

Fine-Grained Fairness Analysis of Abusive Language Detection Systems with CheckList

Hate speech-related lexicons have been proved to be useful for many tasks such as data collection and classification. However, existing Portuguese lexicons do not distinguish between European and Brazilian Portuguese, and do not include neutral terms that are potentially useful to detect a broader spectrum of content referring to minorities. In this work, we present MIN\_PT, a new European Portuguese Lexicon for Minorities-Related Terms specifically designed to tackle the limitations of existing resources. We describe the data collection and annotation process, discuss the limitation and ethical concerns, and prove the utility of the resource by applying it to a use case for the Portuguese 2021 presidential elections.

MIN_PT: An European Portuguese Lexicon for Minorities Related Terms

Social media texts such as blog posts, comments, and tweets often contain offensive languages including racial hate speech comments, personal attacks, and sexual harassment. Detecting inappropriate use of language is, therefore, of utmost importance for the safety of the users as well as for suppressing hateful conduct and aggression. Existing approaches to this problem are mostly available for resource-rich languages such as English and German. In this paper, we characterize the offensive language in Nepali, a low-resource language, highlighting the challenges that need to be addressed for processing Nepali social media text. We also present experiments for detecting offensive language using supervised machine learning. Besides contributing the first baseline approaches of detecting offensive language in Nepali, we also release human annotated data sets to encourage future research on this crucial topic.

Recursive Tree-Structured Self-Attention for Answer Sentence Selection

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