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Our understanding of why Transformer-based NLP models have been achieving their recent success lags behind our ability to continue scaling these models. To increase the transparency of Transformer-based language models, we present Ecco -- an open-source library for the explainability of Transformer-based NLP models. 

Ecco provides a set of tools to capture, analyze, visualize, and interactively explore inner mechanics of these models. This includes 
1) Gradient-based feature attribution for natural language generation 
2) Hidden states and their evolution between model layers 
3) Convenient access and examination tools for neuron activations in the under-explored Feed-Forward Neural Network sublayer of Transformer layers. 
4) Convenient examination of activation vectors via canonical correlation analysis (CCA), non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), and probing classifiers. 

We find that syntactic information can be retrieved from BERT&#39;s FFNN representations in levels comparable to those in hidden state representations. More curiously, we find that the model builds up syntactic information in its hidden states even when intermediate FFNNs indicate diminished levels of syntactic information. Ecco is available at https://www.eccox.io/.

ACL 2021

Ecco: An Open Source Library for the Explainability of Transformer Language Models

**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.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

Registration is now open

Our understanding of why Transformer-based NLP models have been achieving their recent success lags behind our ability to continue scaling these models. To increase the transparency of Transformer-based language models, we present Ecco -- an open-source library for the explainability of Transformer-based NLP models. 

Ecco provides a set of tools to capture, analyze, visualize, and interactively explore inner mechanics of these models. This includes 
1) Gradient-based feature attribution for natural language generation 
2) Hidden states and their evolution between model layers 
3) Convenient access and examination tools for neuron activations in the under-explored Feed-Forward Neural Network sublayer of Transformer layers. 
4) Convenient examination of activation vectors via canonical correlation analysis (CCA), non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), and probing classifiers. 

We find that syntactic information can be retrieved from BERT's FFNN representations in levels comparable to those in hidden state representations. More curiously, we find that the model builds up syntactic information in its hidden states even when intermediate FFNNs indicate diminished levels of syntactic information. Ecco is available at https://www.eccox.io/.

demo

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems are usually trained on clean parallel data. They can perform very well for translating clean in-domain texts. However, as demonstrated by previous work, the translation quality significantly worsens when translating noisy texts, such as user-generated texts (UGT) from online social media. Given the lack of parallel data of UGT that can be used to train or adapt NMT systems, we synthesize parallel data of UGT, exploiting monolingual data of UGT through cross-lingual language model pre-training and zero-shot NMT systems. This paper presents two different but complementary approaches: one alters given clean parallel data into UGT-like parallel data whereas the other generates translations from monolingual data of UGT. On the MTNT translation tasks, we show that our synthesized parallel data can lead to better NMT systems for UGT while making them more robust in translating texts from various domains and styles.

Synthesizing Parallel Data of User-Generated Texts with Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation

We study the problem of building entity tagging systems by using a few rules as weak supervision. Previous methods mostly focus on disambiguating entity types based on contexts and expert-provided rules, while assuming entity spans are given. In this work, we propose a novel method TALLOR that bootstraps high-quality logical rules to train a neural tagger in a fully automated manner. Specifically, we introduce compound rules that are composed from simple rules to increase the precision of boundary detection and generate more diverse pseudo labels. We further design a dynamic label selection strategy to ensure pseudo label quality and therefore avoid overfitting the neural tagger. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other weakly supervised methods and even rivals a state-of-the-art distantly supervised tagger with a lexicon of over 2,000 terms when starting from only 20 simple rules. Our method can serve as a tool for rapidly building taggers in emerging domains and tasks. Case studies show that learned rules can potentially explain the predicted entities.

Weakly Supervised Named Entity Tagging with Learnable Logical Rules

Fine-tuning is the de facto way of leveraging large pretrained language models for downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning modifies all the language model parameters and therefore necessitates storing a full copy for each task. In this paper, we propose prefix-tuning, a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning for natural language generation tasks, which keeps language model parameters frozen and instead optimizes a sequence of continuous task-specific vectors, which we call the prefix. Prefix-tuning draws inspiration from prompting for language models, allowing subsequent tokens to attend to this prefix as if it were “virtual tokens”. We apply prefix-tuning to GPT-2 for table-to-text generation and to BART for summarization. We show that by learning only 0.1% of the parameters, prefix-tuning obtains comparable performance in the full data setting, outperforms fine-tuning in low-data settings, and extrapolates better to examples with topics that are unseen during training.

Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation

Domain experts often need to extract structured information from large corpora. We advocate for a search paradigm called ``extractive search'', in which a search query is enriched with capture-slots, to allow for such rapid extraction. Such an extractive search system can be built around syntactic structures, resulting in high-precision, low-recall results. We show how the recall can be improved using neural retrieval and alignment. The goals of this paper are to concisely introduce the extractive-search paradigm; and to demonstrate a prototype neural retrieval system for extractive search and its benefits and potential.
Our prototype is available at \url{https://spike.neural-sim.apps.allenai.org/} and a video demonstration is available at \url{https://vimeo.com/559586687}.

Neural Extractive Search

CLTR is an end-to-end system for table question answering (QA). It can retrieve tables from a large table corpus for given natural language questions and locate table cells to answer the questions.

The system integrates the Row-Column Intersection (RCI) model with traditional information retrieval methods. CLTR is the current state-of-the-art system for table retrieval. It can accurately answer user-given natural language questions using table cells and create heatmap over tables.

With the CLTR system, we introduce two new benchmarks to the community for end-to-end table QA evaluation. 


CLTR: An End-to-End, Transformer-Based System for Cell Level Table Retrieval and Table Question Answering

Probing (or diagnostic classification) has become a popular strategy for investigating
whether a given set of intermediate features is present in the representations of neural models. Probing studies may have misleading results, but various recent works have suggested more reliable methodologies that compensate for the possible pitfalls of probing. However, these best practices are numerous and fast-evolving. To simplify the process of running a set of probing experiments in line with suggested methodologies, we introduce Probe-Ably: an extendable probing framework which supports and automates the application of probing methods
to the user's inputs.

Does My Representation Capture X? Probe-Ably

Online abuse and offensive language on social media have become widespread problems in today’s digital age. In this paper, we contribute a Reddit-based dataset, consisting of 68, 159 insults and 51, 102 compliments targeted at individuals instead of targeting a particular community or race. Secondly, we benchmark multiple existing state-of-the-art models for both classification and unsupervised style transfer on the dataset. Finally, we analyse the experimental results and conclude that the transfer task is challenging, requiring the models to understand the high degree of creativity exhibited in the data.

Jibes & Delights: A Dataset of Targeted Insults and Compliments to Tackle Online Abuse​

Abusive language is a growing phenomenon on social media platforms. Its effects can reach beyond the online context, contributing to mental or emotional stress on users. Automatic tools for detecting abuse can alleviate the issue. In practice, developing automated methods to detect abusive language relies on good quality data. However, there is currently a lack of standards for creating datasets in the field. These standards include definitions of what is considered abusive language, annotation guidelines and reporting on the process. This paper introduces an anno- tation framework inspired by legal concepts to define abusive language in the context of online harassment. The framework uses a 7- point Likert scale for labelling instead of class labels. We also present ALYT – a dataset of Abusive Language on YouTube. ALYT includes YouTube comments in English extracted from videos on different controversial topics and labelled by Law students. The comments were sampled from the actual collected data, without artificial methods for increasing the abusive content. The paper describes the annotation process thoroughly, including all its guidelines and training steps.

Abusive Language on Social Media Through the Legal Looking Glass

Automatic detection of toxic language plays an essential role in protecting social media users, especially minority groups, from verbal abuse. However, biases toward some attributes, including gender, race, and dialect, exist in most training datasets for toxicity detection. The biases make the learned models unfair and can even exacerbate the marginalization of people. Considering that current debiasing methods for general natural language understanding tasks cannot effectively mitigate the biases in the toxicity detectors, we propose to use invariant rationalization (InvRat), a game-theoretic framework consisting of a rationale generator and a predictor, to rule out the spurious correlation of certain syntactic patterns (e.g., identity mentions, dialect) to toxicity labels. We empirically show that our method yields lower false positive rate in both lexical and dialectal attributes than previous debiasing methods.

Mitigating Biases in Toxic Language Detection through Invariant Rationalization

As socially unacceptable language become pervasive in social media platforms, the need for automatic content moderation become more pressing. This contribution introduces the Dutch Abusive Language Corpus (DALC v1.0), a new dataset with tweets manually an- notated for abusive language. The resource address a gap in language resources for Dutch and adopts a multi-layer annotation scheme modeling the explicitness and the target of the abusive messages. Baselines experiments on all annotation layers have been conducted, achieving a macro F1 score of 0.748 for binary classification of the explicitness layer and .489 for target classification.

Ecco: An Open Source Library for the Explainability of Transformer Language Models

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Synthesizing Parallel Data of User-Generated Texts with Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation

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