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Adversarial training (AT) as a regularization method has proved its effectiveness on various tasks. Though there are successful applications of AT on some NLP tasks, the distinguishing characteristics of NLP tasks have not been exploited. In this paper, we aim to apply AT on machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks. Furthermore, we adapt AT for MRC tasks by proposing a novel adversarial training method called PQAT that perturbs the embedding matrix instead of word vectors. To differentiate the roles of passages and questions, PQAT uses additional virtual P/Q-embedding matrices to gather the global perturbations of words from passages and questions separately. We test the method on a wide range of MRC tasks, including span-based extractive RC and multiple-choice RC. The results show that adversarial training is effective universally, and PQAT further improves the performance.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Adversarial Training for Machine Reading Comprehension with Virtual Embeddings

machine reading comprehension

robustness

adversarial training

**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.


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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).

workshop paper

Distant supervision tackles the data bottleneck in NER by automatically generating training instances via dictionary matching. Unfortunately, the learning of DS-NER is severely dictionary-biased, which suffers from spurious correlations and therefore undermines the effectiveness and the robustness of the learned models. In this paper, we fundamentally explain the dictionary bias via a Structural Causal Model (SCM), categorize the bias into intra-dictionary and inter-dictionary biases, and identify their causes. Based on the SCM, we learn de-biased DS-NER via causal interventions. For intra-dictionary bias, we conduct backdoor adjustment to remove the spurious correlations introduced by the dictionary confounder. For inter-dictionary bias, we propose a causal invariance regularizer which will make DS-NER models more robust to the perturbation of dictionaries. Experiments on four datasets and three DS-NER models show that our method can significantly improve the performance of DS-NER.

De-biasing Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Causal Intervention

Research on overlapped and discontinuous named entity recognition (NER) has received increasing attention.
The majority of previous work focuses on either overlapped or discontinuous entities.
In this paper, we propose a novel span-based model that can recognize both overlapped and discontinuous entities jointly.
The model includes two major steps.
First, entity fragments are recognized by traversing over all possible text spans,
thus, overlapped entities can be recognized.
Second, we perform relation classification to judge whether a given pair of entity fragments to be overlapping or succession.
In this way, we can recognize not only discontinuous entities, and meanwhile doubly check the overlapped entities.
As a whole, our model can be regarded as a relation extraction paradigm essentially.
Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets (i.e., CLEF, GENIA and ACE05) show that our model is highly competitive for overlapped and discontinuous NER.

A Span-Based Model for Joint Overlapped and Discontinuous Named Entity Recognition

We consider the problem of collectively detecting multiple events, particularly in cross-sentence settings. The key to dealing with the problem is to encode semantic information and model event inter-dependency at a document-level. In this paper, we reformulate it as a Seq2Seq task and propose a \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{L}ayer \textbf{Bi}directional \textbf{Net}work (MLBiNet) to capture the document-level association of events and semantic information simultaneously. Specifically, a bidirectional decoder is firstly devised to model event inter-dependency within a sentence when decoding the event tag vector sequence. Secondly, an information aggregation module is employed to aggregate sentence-level semantic and event tag information. Finally, we stack multiple bidirectional decoders and feed cross-sentence information, forming a multi-layer bidirectional tagging architecture to iteratively propagate information across sentences. We show that our approach provides significant improvement in performance compared to the current state-of-the-art results.

MLBiNet: A Cross-Sentence Collective Event Detection Network

We study the problem of event coreference resolution (ECR) that seeks to group coreferent event mentions into the same clusters. Deep learning methods have recently been applied for this task to deliver state-of-the-art performance. However, existing deep learning models for ECR are limited in that they cannot exploit important interactions between relevant objects for ECR, e.g., context words and entity mentions, to support the encoding of document-level context. In addition, consistency constraints between golden and predicted clusters of event mentions have not been considered to improve representation learning in prior deep learning models for ECR. This work addresses such limitations by introducing a novel deep learning model for ECR. At the core of our model are document structures to explicitly capture relevant objects for ECR. Our document structures introduce diverse knowledge sources (discourse, syntax, semantics) to compute edges/interactions between structure nodes for document-level representation learning. We also present novel regularization techniques based on consistencies of golden and predicted clusters for event mentions in documents. Extensive experiments show that our model achieve state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.

Exploiting Document Structures and Cluster Consistencies for Event Coreference Resolution

With the increasing interest in low-resource languages, unsupervised morphological segmentation has become an active area of research, where approaches based on Adaptor Grammars achieve state-of-the-art results. We demonstrate the power of harnessing linguistic knowledge as priors within Adaptor Grammars in a minimally-supervised learning fashion. 
We introduce two types of priors: 1) grammar definition, where we design language-specific grammars; and 2) linguist-provided affixes, collected by an expert in the language 
and seeded into the grammars. We use Japanese and Georgian as respective case studies for the two types of priors and introduce new datasets for these languages, with gold morphological segmentation for evaluation. We show that the use of priors results in error reductions of 8.9% and 34.2%, respectively, over the equivalent state-of-the-art unsupervised system.

Minimally-Supervised Morphological Segmentation using Adaptor Grammars with Linguistic Priors

Detecting what emotions are expressed in text is a well-studied problem in natural language processing. However, research on finer-grained emotion analysis such as what causes an emotion is still in its infancy. We present solutions that tackle both emotion recognition and emotion cause detection in a joint fashion. Considering that common-sense knowledge plays an important role in understanding implicitly expressed emotions and the reasons for those emotions, we propose novel methods that combine common-sense knowledge via adapted knowledge models with multi-task learning to perform joint emotion classification and emotion cause tagging. We show performance improvement on both tasks when including common-sense reasoning and a multi-task framework. We provide a thorough analysis to gain insights into model performance.

Multi-Task Learning and Adapted Knowledge Models for Emotion-Cause Extraction

Recent papers have introduced methods to incorporate gazetteer features and entity segmentation techniques in neural named entity recognition models. These papers rely on different resources and 
include features not related to the use of gazetteers, rendering impossible the comparison of the relative effectiveness of the approaches. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of methods for incorporating gazetteers and for entity segmentation. We evaluate representative methods from each in similar settings for a fair comparison and identify the ones that are consistently better across datasets and input representations.
We further show that gazetteers improve entity segmentation and not just entity typing. Hence, we explore their utility in recognizing long entities, a problem for which entity segmentation techniques were developed.
Our work explains the mechanisms via which gazetteers improve the performance of neural NER models.

The Utility and Interplay of Gazetteers and Entity Segmentation for Named Entity Recognition in English

Modern natural language understanding models depend on pretrained subword embeddings, but applications may need to reason about words that were never or rarely seen during pretraining. We show that examples that depend critically on a rarer word are more challenging for natural language inference models. Then we explore how a model could learn to use definitions, provided in natural text, to overcome this handicap. Our model’s understanding of a definition is usually weaker than a well-modeled word embedding, but it recovers most of the performance gap from using a completely untrained word.

Overcoming Poor Word Embeddings with Word Definitions

Transformer-based language models (LMs) continue to advance state-of-the-art performance on NLP benchmark tasks, including tasks designed to mimic human-inspired "commonsense" competencies. To better understand the degree to which LMs can be said to have certain linguistic reasoning skills, researchers are beginning to adapt the tools and concepts of the field of psychometrics. But to what extent can the benefits flow in the other direction? I.e., can LMs be of use in predicting what the psychometric properties of test items will be when those items are given to human participants? We gather responses from numerous human participants and LMs (transformer- and non-transformer-based) on a broad diagnostic test of linguistic competencies. We then use the responses to calculate standard psychometric properties of the items in the diagnostic test, using the human responses and the LM responses separately. We then determine how well these two sets of predictions match.
We find cases in which transformer-based LMs predict psychometric properties consistently well in certain categories but consistently poorly in others, thus providing new insights into fundamental similarities and differences between human and LM reasoning.

Can Transformer Langauge Models Predict Psychometric Properties?

Disentangling conversation threads is tantamount to the success of many downstream tasks. Structured information accompanying the text, such as user turn, user mentions, and timestamps, has been shown to be important for disentanglement. DAG-LSTMs, a generalization of TreeLSTMs, are a way to incorporate the non- sequential nature of this information. Working with the Ubuntu IRC dataset (Kummerfeld et al, 2019), we propose a model that achieves state-of-the-art results on the task of recovering reply-to relations. It achieves competitive results on other disentanglement metrics.

Next from ACL-IJCNLP 2021

De-biasing Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Causal Intervention

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