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Toxicity is pervasive in social media and poses a major threat to the health of online communities. The recent introduction of pre-trained language models, which have achieved state-of-the-art results in many NLP tasks, has transformed the way in which we approach natural language processing. However, the inherent nature of pre-training means that they are unlikely to capture task-specific statistical information or learn domain-specific knowledge. Additionally, most implementations of these models typically do not employ conditional random fields, a method for simultaneous token classification. We show that these modifications can improve model performance on the Toxic Spans Detection task at SemEval-2021 to achieve a score within 4 percentage points of the top performing team.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

UoB at SemEval-2021 Task 5: Extending Pre-Trained Language Models to Include Task and Domain-Specific Information for Toxic Span Prediction

distilbert

bert

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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

Neural chat translation aims to translate bilingual conversational text, which has a broad application in international exchanges and cooperation. Despite the impressive performance of sentence-level and context-aware Neural Machine Translation (NMT), there still remain challenges to translate bilingual conversational text due to its inherent characteristics such as role preference, dialogue coherence, and translation consistency. In this paper, we aim to promote the translation quality of conversational text by modeling the above properties. Specifically, we design three latent variational modules to learn the distributions of bilingual conversational characteristics. Through sampling from these learned distributions, the latent variables, tailored for role preference, dialogue coherence, and translation consistency, are incorporated into the NMT model for better translation. We evaluate our approach on the benchmark dataset BConTrasT (English<->German) and a self-collected bilingual dialogue corpus, named BMELD (English<->Chinese). Extensive experiments show that our approach notably boosts the performance over strong baselines by a large margin and significantly surpasses some state-of-the-art context-aware NMT models in terms of BLEU and TER. Additionally, we make the BMELD dataset publicly available for the research community.

Modeling Bilingual Conversational Characteristics for Neural Chat Translation

Multilingual neural machine translation with a single model has drawn much attention due to its capability to deal with multiple languages. However, the current multilingual translation paradigm often makes the model tend to preserve the general knowledge, but ignore the language-specific knowledge. Some previous works try to solve this problem by adding various kinds of language-specific modules to the model, but they suffer from the parameter explosion problem and require specialized manual design. To solve these problems, we propose to divide the model neurons into general and language-specific parts based on their importance across languages. The general part is responsible for preserving the general knowledge and participating in the translation of all the languages, while the language-specific part is responsible for preserving the language-specific knowledge and participating in the translation of some specific languages. Experimental results on several language pairs, covering IWSLT and Europarl corpus datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of the proposed method.

Importance-based Neuron Allocation for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Few-shot crosslingual transfer
has been shown to outperform its
zero-shot counterpart with pretrained encoders like multilingual BERT.
Despite its growing popularity, little to no attention has been paid
to standardizing and analyzing the design of few-shot experiments.
In this work, we highlight a fundamental risk posed by
this shortcoming, illustrating
that the model exhibits a high degree
of sensitivity to the selection of few shots.
We conduct a large-scale experimental study on 40 sets of sampled few
shots for six diverse NLP tasks across up to 40 languages.
We provide an analysis of success and failure cases of few-shot
transfer, which highlights the role of lexical features.
Additionally, we show that a straightforward full model finetuning
approach is quite effective for few-shot transfer, outperforming
several state-of-the-art few-shot approaches.
As a step towards standardizing few-shot crosslingual
experimental designs, we make our sampled few shots publicly
available.

A Closer Look at Few-Shot Crosslingual Transfer: The Choice of Shots Matters

One of the main bottlenecks in developing discourse dependency parsers is the lack of annotated training data. A potential solution is to utilize abundant unlabeled data by using unsupervised techniques, but there is so far little research in unsupervised discourse dependency parsing. Fortunately, unsupervised syntactic dependency parsing has been studied by decades, which could potentially be adapted for discourse parsing. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to adapt unsupervised syntactic dependency parsing methodology for unsupervised discourse dependency parsing. We apply the method to adapt two state-of-the-art unsupervised syntactic dependency parsing methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our adaptation is effective. Moreover, we extend the adapted methods to the semi-supervised and supervised setting and surprisingly, we find that they outperform previous methods specially designed for supervised discourse parsing. Further analysis shows our adaptations result in superiority not only in parsing accuracy but also in time and space efficiency.

Adapting Unsupervised Syntactic Parsing Methodology for Discourse Dependency Parsing

In this paper, we describe our system submitted to SemEval 2021 Task 7: HaHackathon: Detecting and Rating Humor and Offense. The task aims at predicting whether the given text is humorous, the average humor rating given by the annotators, and whether the humor rating is controversial. In addition, the task also involves predicting how offensive the text is. Our approach adopts the DeBERTa architecture with disentangled attention mechanism, where the attention scores between words are calculated based on their content vectors and relative position vectors. We also took advantage of the pre-trained language models and fine-tuned the DeBERTa model on all the four subtasks. We experimented with several BERT-like structures and found that the large DeBERTa model generally performs better. During the evaluation phase, our system achieved an F-score of 0.9480 on subtask 1a, an RMSE of 0.5510 on subtask 1b, an F-score of 0.4764 on subtask 1c, and an RMSE of 0.4230 on subtask 2a (rank 3 on the leaderboard).

HumorHunter at SemEval-2021 Task 7: Humor and Offense Recognition with Disentangled Attention

The present work aims at assigning a complexity score between 0 and 1 to a target word or phrase in a given sentence. For each Single Word Target, a Random Forest Regressor is trained on a feature set consisting of lexical, semantic, and syntactic information about the target. For each Multiword Target, a set of individual word features is taken along with single word complexities in the feature space. The system yielded the Pearson correlation of 0.7402 and 0.8244 on the test set for the Single and Multiword Targets, respectively.

LangResearchLabNC at SemEval-2021 Task 1: Linguistic Feature Based Modelling for Lexical Complexity

Recently, there has been an interest in factual verification and prediction over structured data like tables and graphs. To circumvent any false news incident, it is necessary to not only model and predict over structured data efficiently but also to explain those predictions. In this paper, as part of the SemEval-2021 Task 9, we tackle the problem of fact verification and evidence finding over tabular data. There are two subtasks. Given a table and a statement/fact, subtask A determines whether the statement is inferred from the tabular data, and subtask B determines which cells in the table provide evidence for the former subtask. We make a comparison of the baselines and state-of-the-art approaches over the given SemTabFact dataset. We also propose a novel approach CellBERT to solve evidence finding as a form of the Natural Language Inference task. We obtain a 3- way F1 score of 0.69 on subtask A and an F1 score of 0.65 on subtask B.

BreakingBERT@IITK at SemEval-2021 Task 9 : Statement Verification and Evidence Finding with Tables

This paper describes our system for Task 4 of SemEval-2021: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning (ReCAM). We participated in all subtasks where the main goal was to predict an abstract word missing from a statement.
We fine-tuned the pre-trained masked language models namely BERT and ALBERT and used an Ensemble of these as our submitted system on Subtask 1 (ReCAM-Imperceptibility) and Subtask 2 (ReCAM-Nonspecificity). For Subtask 3 (ReCAM-Intersection), we submitted the ALBERT model as it gives the best results. We tried multiple approaches and found that Masked Language Modeling(MLM) based approach works the best.

ReCAM@IITK at SemEval-2021 Task 4: BERT and ALBERT based Ensemble for Abstract Word Prediction

Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP) involves assigning a difficulty score to a particular word or expression, in a text intended for a target audience. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning system based on a pre-trained transformer encoder, for word and Multi-Word Expression (MWE) complexity prediction. The proposed model is trained to minimize both the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and the auxiliary loss associated to the negative Pearson Correlation. The two losses are combined using the uncertainty loss weighting. We investigate two pre-trained transformer networks, namely BERT and RoBERTa. Moreover, we evaluate both single-task and joint training of word and MWE complexity prediction sub-tasks.

A Deep Learning Model-based Pre-trained Transformer Encoder for Lexical Complexity

Humor detection has become a topic of interest for several research teams, especially those involved in socio-psychological studies, with the aim to detect the humor and the temper of a targeted population (e.g. a community, a city, a country, the employees of a given company). Most of the existing studies have formulated the humor detection problem as a binary classification task, whereas it revolves around learning the sense of humor by evaluating its different degrees. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model to detect and rate humor and offense. It consists of a pre-trained transformer encoder and task-specific attention layers. The model is trained using MTL uncertainty loss weighting to adaptively combine all sub-tasks objective functions. Our MTL model tackles all sub-tasks of the SemEval-2021 Task-7 in one end-to-end deep learning system and shows very promising results.

UoB at SemEval-2021 Task 5: Extending Pre-Trained Language Models to Include Task and Domain-Specific Information for Toxic Span Prediction

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Modeling Bilingual Conversational Characteristics for Neural Chat Translation

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