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Selectional Preference (SP) captures the tendency of a word to semantically select other words to be in direct syntactic relation with it, and thus informs us about syntactic word configurations that are meaningful. Therefore SP is a valuable resource for Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems and for semanticists. Learning SP has generally been seen as a supervised task, because it requires a parsed corpus as a source of syntactically related word pairs. In this paper we show that simple distributional analysis can learn a good amount of SP without the need for an annotated corpus. We extend the general word embedding technique with directional word context windows giving word representations that better capture syntagmatic relations. We test on the SP-10K dataset and demonstrate that syntagmatic embeddings outperform the paradigmatic embeddings. We also evaluate supervised version of these embeddings and show that unsupervised syntagmatic embeddings can be as good as supervised embeddings.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Syntagmatic Word Embeddings for Unsupervised Learning of Selectional Preferences

selectional preference

word embeddings

unsupervised learning

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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

While counterfactual examples are useful for analysis and training of NLP models, current generation methods either rely on manual labor to create very few counterfactuals, or only instantiate limited types of perturbations such as paraphrases or word substitutions. We present Polyjuice, a general-purpose counterfactual generator that allows for control over perturbation types and locations, trained by finetuning GPT-2 on multiple datasets of paired sentences. We show that Polyjuice produces diverse sets of realistic counterfactuals, which in turn are useful in various distinct applications: improving training and evaluation on three different tasks (with around 70% less annotation effort than manual generation), augmenting state-of-the-art explanation techniques, and supporting systematic counterfactual error analysis by revealing behaviors easily missed by human experts.

Polyjuice: Generating Counterfactuals for Explaining, Evaluating, and Improving Models

Generating metaphors is a difficult task as it requires understanding nuanced relationships between abstract concepts. In this paper, we aim to generate a metaphoric sentence given a literal expression by replacing relevant verbs. Guided by conceptual metaphor theory, we propose to control the generation process by encoding conceptual mappings between cognitive domains to generate meaningful metaphoric expressions. To achieve this, we develop two methods: 1) using FrameNet-based embeddings to learn mappings between domains and applying them at the lexical level (CM-Lex), and 2) deriving source/target pairs to train a controlled seq-to-seq generation model (CM-BART). 
We assess our methods through automatic and human evaluation for basic metaphoricity and conceptual metaphor presence. We show that the unsupervised CM-Lex model is competitive with recent deep learning metaphor generation systems, and CM-BART outperforms all other models both in automatic and human evaluations.

Metaphor Generation with Conceptual Mappings

Slang is a common type of informal language, but its flexible nature and paucity of data resources present challenges for existing natural language systems. We take an initial step toward machine generation of slang by developing a framework that models the speaker’s word choice in slang context. Our framework encodes novel slang meaning by relating the conventional and slang senses of a word while incorporating syntactic and contextual knowledge in slang usage. We construct the framework using a combination of probabilistic inference and neural contrastive learning. We perform rigorous evaluations on three slang dictionaries and show that our approach not only outperforms state-of-the-art language models, but also better predicts the historical emergence of slang word usages from 1960s to 2000s. We interpret the proposed models and find that the contrastively learned semantic space is sensitive to the similarities between slang and conventional senses of words. Our work creates opportunities for the automated generation and interpretation of informal language.

Computational Framework for Slang Generation


Identifying relations from dialogues is more challenging than traditional sentence-level relation extraction (RE), since the difficulties of speaker information representation and the long-range semantic reasoning. Despite the successful efforts, existing methods do not fully consider the particularity of dialogues, making them difficult to truly understand the semantics between conversational arguments. In this paper, we propose two beneficial tasks, speaker prediction and trigger words prediction, to enhance the extraction of dialogue-based relations. Specifically, speaker prediction captures the characteristics of speaker-related entities, and the trigger words prediction provides supportive contexts for relations between arguments. Extensive experiments on the DialogRE dataset show noticeable improvements compared to the baseline models, which achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with a 65.5% of F1 score and a 60.5% of F1c score, respectively.

Enhancing Dialogue-based Relation Extraction by Speaker and Trigger Words Prediction

Script reasoning infers subsequent events from a given event chain, which involves the ability to understand relations between events. A human-labeled script reasoning dataset is usually of small size with limited event relations, which highlights the necessity to leverage external eventuality knowledge graphs (KG) consisting of numerous triple facts to describe the inferential relation between events. Existing methods adopt a "retrieval and integration" paradigm to focus merely on the graph triples that have event overlap with a script, but ignore much more supportive triples in the KG with similar inferential patterns, leading to under-exploiting. To fully exploit the KG, we propose a knowledge model to learn the inferential relations between events from the whole eventuality KG and then support downstream models by directly capturing the relation between events in a script. We further present a neural script adapter to extend the knowledge model for inferring the associated relations between an event chain and a subsequent event candidate. We evaluate the proposed approach on a popular multi-choice narrative cloze task for script reasoning and achieve new state-of-the-art accuracy, compared with baselines either incorporating external KG or not.

Modeling Event-Pair Relations in External Knowledge Graphs for Script Reasoning

We present a new probing dataset named *PROST: Physical Reasoning about Objects Through Space and Time*. 
This dataset contains 18,736 multiple-choice questions made from 14 manually curated templates, covering 10 physical reasoning concepts. All questions are designed to probe both causal and masked language models in a zero-shot setting. We conduct an extensive analysis which demonstrates that state-of-the-art pretrained models are inadequate at physical reasoning: they are influenced by the order in which answer options are presented to them, they struggle when the superlative in a question is inverted (e.g., *most* <-> *least*), and increasing the amount of pretraining data and parameters only yields minimal improvements. These results provide support for the hypothesis that current pretrained models' ability to reason about physical interactions is inherently limited by a lack of real world experience. By highlighting these limitations, we hope to motivate the development of models with a human-like understanding of the physical world.

{PROST}: {P}hysical Reasoning about Objects through Space and Time

Static word vectors remain important in applications where word meaning has to be modelled in the absence of context. This paper attampt to learn high-quality static word vectors by utilizing contextualized language models (CLMs).

Deriving Word Vectors from Contextualized Language Models using Topic-Aware Mention Selection

We investigate how sentence-level transformers can be modified into effective sequence labelers at the token level without any direct supervision. Existing approaches to zero-shot sequence labeling do not perform well when applied on transformer-based architectures. As transformers contain multiple layers of multi-head self-attention, information in the sentence gets distributed between many tokens, negatively affecting zero-shot token-level performance. We find that a soft attention module which explicitly encourages sharpness of attention weights can significantly outperform existing methods.

Zero-shot Sequence Labeling for Transformer-based Sentence Classifiers

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown much empirical success in solving perceptual tasks across various cognitive modalities. While they are only loosely inspired by the biological brain, recent studies report considerable similarities between representations extracted from task-optimized DNNs and neural populations in the brain. DNNs have subsequently become a popular model class to infer computational principles underlying complex cognitive functions, and in turn, they have also emerged as a natural testbed for applying methods originally developed to probe information in neural populations. In this work, we utilize mean-field theoretic manifold analysis, a recent technique from computational neuroscience that connects geometry of feature representations with linear separability of classes, to analyze language representations from large-scale contextual embedding models. We explore representations from different model families (BERT, RoBERTa, GPT, etc.) and find evidence for emergence of linguistic manifolds across layer depth (e.g., manifolds for part-of-speech tags), especially in ambiguous data (i.e, words with multiple part-of-speech tags, or part-of-speech classes including many words). In addition, we find that the emergence of linear separability in these manifolds is driven by a combined reduction of manifolds’ radius, dimensionality and inter-manifold correlations.

Emergence of Separable Manifolds in Deep Language Representations

Transfer learning methods, and in particular domain adaptation, help exploit labeled data in one domain to improve the performance of a certain task in another domain. However, it is still not clear what factors affect the success of domain adaptation. This paper models adaptation success and selection of the most suitable source domains among several candidates in text similarity. We use descriptive domain information and cross-domain similarity metrics as predictive features. While mostly positive, the results also point to some domains where adaptation success was difficult to predict.

Syntagmatic Word Embeddings for Unsupervised Learning of Selectional Preferences

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Polyjuice: Generating Counterfactuals for Explaining, Evaluating, and Improving Models

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