Thailand

Large generative language models have been very successful for English, but other languages lag behind, in part due to data and computational limitations. We propose a method that may overcome these problems by adapting existing pre-trained models to new languages. Specifically, we describe the adaptation of English GPT-2 to Italian and Dutch by retraining lexical embeddings without tuning the Transformer layers. As a result, we obtain lexical embeddings for Italian and Dutch that are aligned with the original English lexical embeddings. Additionally, we scale up complexity by transforming relearned lexical embeddings of GPT-2 small to the GPT-2 medium embedding space. This method minimises the amount of training and prevents losing information during adaptation that was learned by GPT-2. English GPT-2 models with relearned lexical embeddings can generate realistic sentences in Italian and Dutch. Though on average these sentences are still identifiable as artificial by humans, they are assessed on par with sentences generated by a GPT-2 model fully trained from scratch.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

As Good as New. How to Successfully Recycle English GPT-2 to Make Models for Other Languages

adapt

gpt-2

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

**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).

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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).

We present a data-driven, end-to-end approach to transaction-based dialog systems that performs at near-human levels in terms of verbal response quality and factual grounding accuracy. We show that two essential components of the system produce these results: a sufficiently large and diverse, in-domain labeled dataset, and a neural network-based, pre-trained model that generates both verbal responses and API call predictions. In terms of data, we introduce TicketTalk, a movie ticketing dialog dataset with 23,789 annotated conversations. The conversations range from completely open-ended and unrestricted to more structured, both in terms of their knowledge base, discourse features, and number of turns. In qualitative human evaluations, model-generated responses trained on just 10,000 TicketTalk dialogs were rated to “make sense” 86.5% of the time, almost the same as human responses in the same contexts. Our simple, API-focused annotation schema results in a much easier labeling task making it faster and more cost effective. It is also the key component for being able to predict API calls accurately. We handle factual grounding by incorporating API calls in the training data, allowing our model to learn which actions to take and when. Trained on the same 10,000-dialog set, the model’s API call predictions were rated to be correct 93.9% of the time in our evaluations, surpassing the ratings for the corresponding human labels. We show how API prediction and response generation scores improve as the dataset size incrementally increases from 5000 to 21,000 dialogs. Our analysis also clearly illustrates the benefits of pre-training. To facilitate future work on transaction-based dialog systems, we are publicly releasing the TicketTalk dataset at https://git.io/JL8an.

TicketTalk: Toward human-level performance with end-to-end, transaction-based dialog systems

In this paper, we explore the ability to model and infer personality types of opponents, predict their responses, and use this information to adapt a dialog agent's high-level strategy in negotiation tasks. Inspired by the idea of incorporating a theory of mind (ToM) into machines, we introduce a probabilistic formulation to encapsulate the opponent's personality type during both learning and inference. We test our approach on the CraigslistBargain dataset (He et al. 2018) and show that our method using ToM inference achieves a 20% higher dialog agreement rate compared to baselines on a mixed population of opponents. We also demonstrate that our model displays diverse negotiation behavior with different types of opponents.

Improving Dialog Systems for Negotiation with Personality Modeling

In this paper, we propose Inverse Adversarial Training (IAT) algorithm for training neural dialogue systems to avoid generic responses and model dialogue history better. In contrast to standard adversarial training algorithms, IAT encourages the model to be sensitive to the perturbation in the dialogue history and therefore learning from perturbations. By giving higher rewards for responses whose output probability reduces more significantly when dialogue history is perturbed, the model is encouraged to generate more diverse and consistent responses. By penalizing the model when generating the same response given perturbed dialogue history, the model is forced to better capture dialogue history and generate more informative responses. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our approach can better model dialogue history and generate more diverse and consistent responses. In addition, we point out a problem of the widely used maximum mutual information (MMI) based methods for improving the diversity of dialogue response generation models and demonstrate it empirically.

Learning from Perturbations: Diverse and Informative Dialogue Generation with Inverse Adversarial Training

Despite end-to-end neural systems making significant progress in the last decade for task-oriented as well as chit-chat based dialogue systems, most dialogue systems rely on hybrid approaches which use a combination of rule-based, retrieval and generative approaches for generating a set of ranked responses. Such dialogue systems need to rely on a fallback mechanism to respond to out-of-domain or novel user queries which are not answerable within the scope of the dialogue system. While, dialogue systems today rely on static and unnatural responses like "I don't know the answer to that question'' or "I'm not sure about that", we design a neural approach which generates responses which are contextually aware with the user query as well as say no to the user. Such customized responses provide paraphrasing ability and contextualization as well as improve the interaction with the user and reduce dialogue monotonicity. Our simple approach makes use of rules over dependency parses and a text-to-text transformer fine-tuned on synthetic data of question-response pairs generating highly relevant, grammatical as well as diverse questions. We perform automatic and manual evaluations to demonstrate the efficacy of the system.

Saying No is An Art: Contextualized Fallback Responses for Unanswerable Dialogue Queries

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems parse speech into semantic structures like dialog acts and slots. This involves the use of an Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR) to transcribe speech into multiple text alternatives (hypotheses). Transcription errors, ordinary in ASRs, impact downstream SLU performance negatively. Common approaches to mitigate such errors involve using richer information from the ASR, either in form of N-best hypotheses or word-lattices. We hypothesize that transformer models will learn better with a simpler utterance representation using the concatenation of the N-best ASR alternatives, where each alternative is separated by a special delimiter [SEP]. In our work, we test our hypothesis by using the concatenated N-best ASR alternatives as the input to the transformer encoder models, namely BERT and XLM-RoBERTa, and achieve equivalent performance to the prior state-of-the-art model on DSTC2 dataset. We also show that our approach significantly outperforms the prior state-of-the-art when subjected to the low data regime. Additionally, this methodology is accessible to users of third-party ASR APIs which do not provide word-lattice information.

N-Best ASR Transformer: Enhancing SLU Performance using Multiple ASR Hypotheses

Automatically extracting key information from scientific documents has the potential to help scientists work more efficiently and accelerate the pace of scientific progress. Prior work has considered extracting document-level entity clusters and relations end-to-end from raw scientific text, which can improve literature search and help identify methods and materials for a given problem. Despite the importance of this task, most existing works on scientific information extraction (SciIE) consider extraction solely based on the content of an individual paper, without considering the paper's place in the broader literature. In contrast to prior work, we augment our text representations by leveraging a complementary source of document context: the citation graph of referential links between citing and cited papers. On a test set of English-language scientific documents, we show that simple ways of utilizing the structure and content of the citation graph can each lead to significant gains in different scientific information extraction tasks. When these tasks are combined, we observe a sizable improvement in end-to-end information extraction over the state-of-the-art, suggesting the potential for future work along this direction. We release software tools to facilitate citation-aware SciIE development.

CitationIE: Leveraging the Citation Graph for Scientific Information Extraction

We investigate if, given a simple symbol masking strategy,
self-attention models are capable of learning nested structures and
generalise over their depth. We do so in the simplest setting
possible, namely languages consisting of nested parentheses of several
kinds. We use encoder-only models, which we train to predict randomly
masked symbols, in a BERT-like fashion. We find that the accuracy is
well above random baseline, with accuracy consistently above 50% both
when increasing nesting depth and distances between training and
testing. However, we find that the predictions made correspond to a
simple parenthesis counting strategy, rather than a push-down
automaton. This suggests that self-attention models are not suitable
for tasks which require generalisation to more complex instances of
recursive structures than those found in the training set.

Can the Transformer Learn Nested Recursion with Symbol Masking?

Given a video, video grounding aims to retrieve a temporal moment that semantically corresponds to a language query. In this work, we propose a Parallel Attention Network with Sequence matching (SeqPAN) to address the challenges in this task: multi-modal representation learning, and target moment boundary prediction. We design a self-guided parallel attention module to effectively capture self-modal contexts and cross-modal attentive information between video and text. Inspired by sequence labeling tasks in natural language processing, we split the ground truth moment into begin, inside, and end regions. We then propose a sequence matching strategy to guide start/end boundary predictions using region labels. Experimental results on three datasets show that SeqPAN is superior to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the self-guided parallel attention module and the sequence matching module is verified.

Parallel Attention Network with Sequence Matching for Video Grounding

While automatic summarization evaluation methods developed for English are routinely applied to other languages, this is the first attempt to systematically quantify their panlinguistic efficacy. We take a summarization corpus for eight different languages, and manually annotate generated summaries for focus (precision) and coverage (recall). Based on this, we evaluate 19 summarization evaluation metrics, and find that using multilingual BERT within BERTScore performs well across all languages, at a level above that for English.

Evaluating the Efficacy of Summarization Evaluation across Languages

Keyphrase Prediction(KP) task aims at predicting several keyphrases that can summarize the main idea of the given document. Mainstream KP methods can be categorized into purely generative approach and integrated model with extraction and generation. However, these methods either ignore the diversity among keyphrases or only weakly capture the relation across tasks implicitly. In this paper, we propose UniKeyphrase, a novel end-to-end learning framework that jointly learns to extract and generate keyphrases. In UniKeyphrase, stacked relation layer and bag-of-words constraint are proposed to fully exploit the latent semantic relation between extraction and generation in the view of model structure and training process, respectively. Experiments on KP benchmarks demonstrate that our joint approach outperforms mainstream methods by a large margin.

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TicketTalk: Toward human-level performance with end-to-end, transaction-based dialog systems

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Next from ACL-IJCNLP 2021

TicketTalk: Toward human-level performance with end-to-end, transaction-based dialog systems

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Evaluating Bias In Dutch Word Embeddings

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