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The attention layer has become a prevalent component in improving the effectiveness of neural network models for NLP tasks. Figuring out why attention is effective and its interpretability has attracted a widespread deliberation. Current studies mostly investigate the effect of attention mechanism based on the attention distribution it generates with one single neural network structure. However they do not consider the changes in semantic capability of different components in the model due to the attention mechanism, which can vary across different network structures. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive analytical framework that exploits a convex hull representation of sequence semantics in an n-dimensional Semantic Euclidean Space and defines a series of indicators to capture the impact of attention on sequence semantics. Through a series of experiments on various NLP tasks and three representative recurrent units, we analyze why and how attention benefits the semantic capacity of different types of recurrent neural networks based on the indicators defined in the proposed framework.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

How does Attention Affect the Model?

explanation

attention

recurrent neural networks

**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

The goal of dialogue state tracking (DST) is to predict the current dialogue state given all previous dialogue contexts. Existing approaches generally predict the dialogue state at every turn from scratch. However, the overwhelming majority of the slots in each turn should simply inherit the slot values from the previous turn. Therefore, the mechanism of treating slots equally in each turn not only is inefficient but also may lead to additional errors because of the redundant slot value generation. To address this problem, we devise the two-stage DSS-DST which consists of the Dual Slot Selector based on the current turn dialogue, and the Slot Value Generator based on the dialogue history. The Dual Slot Selector determines each slot whether to update slot value or to inherit the slot value from the previous turn from two aspects: (1) if there is a strong relationship between it and the current turn dialogue utterances; (2) if a slot value with high reliability can be obtained for it through the current turn dialogue. The slots selected to be updated are permitted to enter the Slot Value Generator to update values by a hybrid method, while the other slots directly inherit the values from the previous turn. Empirical results show that our method achieves 56.93%, 60.73%, and 58.04% joint accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0, MultiWOZ 2.1, and MultiWOZ 2.2 datasets respectively and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements.

Dual Slot Selector via Local Reliability Verification for Dialogue State Tracking

One of the difficulties in training dialogue systems is the lack of training data. We explore the possibility of creating dialogue data through the interaction between a dialogue system and a user simulator. Our goal is to develop a modelling framework that can incorporate new dialogue scenarios through self-play between the two agents. In this framework, we first pre-train the two agents on a collection of source domain dialogues, which equips the agents to converse with each other via natural language. With further fine-tuning on a small amount of target domain data, the agents continue to interact with the aim of improving their behaviors using reinforcement learning with structured reward functions. In experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset, two practical transfer learning problems are investigated: 1) domain adaptation and 2) single-to-multiple domain transfer. We demonstrate that the proposed framework is highly effective in bootstrapping the performance of the two agents in transfer learning. We also show that our method leads to improvements in dialogue system performance on complete datasets.

Transferable Dialogue Systems and User Simulators

Maintaining a consistent persona is essential for dialogue agents. Although tremendous advancements have been brought, the limited-scale of annotated personalized dialogue datasets is still a barrier towards training robust and consistent persona-based dialogue models. This work shows how this challenge can be addressed by disentangling persona-based dialogue generation into two sub-tasks with a novel BERT-over-BERT (BoB) model. Specifically, the model consists of a BERT-based encoder and two BERT-based decoders, where one decoder is for response generation, and another is for consistency understanding. In particular, to learn the ability of consistency understanding from large-scale non-dialogue inference data, we train the second decoder in an unlikelihood manner. Under different limited data settings, both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms strong baselines in response quality and persona consistency.

BoB: BERT Over BERT for Training Persona-based Dialogue Models from Limited Personalized Data

Multi-intent SLU can handle multiple intents in an utterance, which has attracted increasing attention. However, the state-of-the-art joint models heavily rely on autoregressive approaches, resulting in two issues: slow inference speed and information leakage. In this paper, we explore a non-autoregressive model for joint multiple intent detection and slot filling, achieving more fast and accurate. Specifically, we propose a Global-Locally Graph Interaction Network (GL-GIN) where a local slot-aware graph interaction layer is proposed to model slot dependency for alleviating uncoordinated slots problem while a global intent-slot graph interaction layer is introduced to model the interaction between multiple intents and all slots in the utterance. Experimental results on two public datasets show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while being 11.5 times faster.

GL-GIN: Fast and Accurate Non-Autoregressive Model for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling

The introduction of pretrained language models has reduced many complex task-specific NLP models to simple lightweight layers.
An exception to this trend is coreference resolution, where a sophisticated task-specific model is appended to a pretrained transformer encoder.
While highly effective, the model has a very large memory footprint -- primarily due to dynamically-constructed span and span-pair representations -- which hinders the processing of complete documents and the ability to train on multiple instances in a single batch.
We introduce a lightweight end-to-end coreference model that removes the dependency on span representations, handcrafted features, and heuristics.
Our model performs competitively with the current standard model, while being simpler and more efficient.

Coreference Resolution without Span Representations

Both performance and efficiency are crucial factors for sequence labeling tasks in many real-world scenarios. Although the pre-trained models (PTMs) have significantly improved the performance of various sequence labeling tasks, their computational cost is expensive. To alleviate this problem, we extend the recent successful early-exit mechanism to accelerate the inference of PTMs for sequence labeling tasks.
However, existing early-exit mechanisms are specifically designed for sequence-level tasks, rather than sequence labeling. In this paper, we first propose a simple extension of sentence-level early-exit for sequence labeling tasks. To further reduce the computational cost, we also propose a token-level early-exit mechanism that allows partial tokens to exit early at different layers. Considering the local dependency inherent in sequence labeling, we employed a window-based criterion to decide for a token whether or not to exit. The token-level early-exit brings the gap between training and inference, so we introduce an extra self-sampling fine-tuning stage to alleviate it.
The extensive experiments on three popular sequence labeling tasks show that our approach can save up to 66%∼75% inference cost with minimal performance degradation. Compared with competitive compressed models such as DistilBERT, our approach can achieve better performance under the same speed-up ratios of 2×, 3×, and 4×.

Accelerating BERT Inference for Sequence Labeling via Early-Exit

Although the existing Named Entity Recognition (NER) models have achieved promising performance, they suffer from certain drawbacks. The sequence labeling-based NER models do not perform well in recognizing long entities as they focus only on word-level information, while the segment-based NER models which focus on processing segment instead of single word are unable to capture the word-level dependencies within the segment. Moreover, as boundary detection and type prediction may cooperate with each other for the NER task, it is also important for the two sub-tasks to mutually reinforce each other by sharing their information. In this paper, we propose a novel Modularized Interaction Network (MIN) model which utilizes both segment-level information and word-level dependencies, and incorporates an interaction mechanism to support information sharing between boundary detection and type prediction to enhance the performance for the NER task. We have conducted extensive experiments based on three NER benchmark datasets. The performance results have shown that the proposed MIN model has outperformed the current state-of-the-art models.

Modularized Interaction Network for Named Entity Recognition

This paper presents a comparison of unsupervised methods of hypernymy prediction (i.e., to predict which word in a pair of words such as "fish-cod" is the hypernym and which the hyponym). Most importantly, we demonstrate across datasets for English and for German that the predictions of three methods (WeedsPrec, invCL, SLQS Row) strongly overlap and are highly correlated with frequency-based predictions. In contrast, the second-order method SLQS shows an overall lower accuracy but makes correct predictions where the others go wrong. Our study once more confirms the general need to check the frequency bias of a computational method in order to identify frequency-(un)related effects.

More than just Frequency? Demasking Unsupervised Hypernymy Prediction Methods

Translation between natural language and source code can help software development by enabling developers to comprehend, ideate, search, and write computer programs in natural language. Despite growing interest from the industry and the research community, this task is often difficult due to the lack of large standard datasets suitable for training deep neural models, standard noise removal methods, and evaluation benchmarks. This leaves researchers to collect new small-scale datasets, resulting in inconsistencies across published works. In this study, we present CoDesc - a large parallel dataset composed of 4.2 million Java methods and natural language descriptions. With extensive analysis, we identify and remove prevailing noise patterns from the dataset. We demonstrate the proficiency of CoDesc in two complementary tasks for code--description pairs: code summarization and code search. We show that the dataset helps improve code search by up to 22\% and achieves the new state-of-the-art in code summarization. Furthermore, we show CoDesc's effectiveness in pre-training--fine-tuning setup, opening possibilities in building pretrained language models for Java. To facilitate future research, we release the dataset, a data processing tool, and a benchmark at \url{https://github.com/csebuetnlp/CoDesc}.

CoDesc: A Large Code–Description Parallel Dataset

Since traditional tokenizers are isolated from a downstream task and model, they cannot output an appropriate tokenization depending on the task and model, although recent studies imply that the appropriate tokenization improves the performance.
In this paper, we propose a novel method to find an appropriate tokenization to a given downstream model by jointly optimizing a tokenizer and the model.
The proposed method has no restriction except for using loss values computed by the downstream model to train the tokenizer, and thus, we can apply the proposed method to any NLP task.
Moreover, the proposed method can be used to explore the appropriate tokenization for an already trained model as post-processing.
Therefore, the proposed method is applicable to various situations.
We evaluated whether our method contributes to improving performance on text classification in three languages and machine translation in eight language pairs.
Experimental results show that our proposed method improves the performance by determining appropriate tokenizations.

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Next from ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Dual Slot Selector via Local Reliability Verification for Dialogue State Tracking

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Effective Attention Sheds Light On Interpretability

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