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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.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

How does Attention Affect the Model?

explanation

attention

recurrent neural networks

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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

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

Datasets for data-to-text generation typically focus either on multi-domain, single-sentence generation or on single-domain, long-form generation. In this work, we cast generating Wikipedia sections as a data-to-text generation task and create a large-scale dataset, WikiTableT, that pairs Wikipedia sections with their corresponding tabular data and various metadata. WikiTableT contains millions of instances, covering a broad range of topics, as well as a variety of flavors of generation tasks with different levels of flexibility. We benchmark several training and decoding strategies on WikiTableT. Our qualitative analysis shows that the best approaches can generate fluent and high quality texts but they struggle with coherence and factuality, showing the potential for our dataset to inspire future work on long-form generation.

WikiTableT: A Large-Scale Data-to-Text Dataset for Generating Wikipedia Article Sections

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

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) provide human knowledge with nodes and edges being entities and relations among them, respectively. Multi-hop question answering over KGs---which aims to find answer entities of given questions through reasoning paths in KGs---has attracted great attention from both academia and industry recently. However, this task remains challenging, as it requires to accurately identify answers in a large candidate entity set, of which the size grows exponentially with the number of reasoning hops. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Deep Cognitive Reasoning Network (DCRN), which is inspired by the dual process theory in cognitive science. Specifically, DCRN consists of two phases---the unconscious phase and the conscious phase. The unconscious phase first retrieves informative evidence from candidate entities by leveraging their semantic information. Then, the conscious phase accurately identifies answers by performing sequential reasoning according to the graph structure on the retrieved evidence. Experiments demonstrate that DCRN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

Deep Cognitive Reasoning Network for Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

Visual dialog, which aims to hold a meaningful conversation with humans about a given image, is a challenging task that requires models to reason the complex dependencies among visual content, dialog history, and current questions. Graph neural networks are recently applied to model the implicit relations between objects in an image or dialog. However, they neglect the importance of 1) coreference relations among dialog history and dependency relations between words for the question understanding; and 2) the understanding of the image based on the fully understood question. Therefore, we propose a novel relation-aware graph-over-graph network (GoG) for visual dialog. Specifically, GoG consists of three sequential graphs: 1) H-Graph, which aims to capture the coreference relations among dialog history; 2) History-aware Q-Graph, which aims to fully understand the question through capturing the dependency relations between words based on coreference resolution on the dialog history; and 3) Question-aware I-Graph, which aims to capture the relations between objects in an image based on fully question understanding. As an additional feature representation module, we add GoG to the existing visual dialogue model. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the strong baseline in both generative and discriminative settings by a significant margin and achieves comparable performance.

GoG: Relation-aware Graph-over-Graph Network for Visual Dialog

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.

How does Attention Affect the Model?

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How does Attention Affect the Model?

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Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2021

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