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Transformer-based language models (LMs) have shown strong performance on an array of natural language understanding tasks. However, the question of how these models react to implicit meaning has been largely unexplored. We investigate this using the complement coercion phenomenon, which involves sentences like &quot;The student finished the book about sailing&quot; where the action &quot;read&quot; is implicit. We compare LMs&#39; surprisal estimates at various critical sentence regions in sentences with and without implicit meaning. Effects associated with recovering implicit meaning were found at a critical region other than where sentences minimally differ. We then use follow-up experiments to factor out potential confounds, revealing different perspectives that offer a richer and more accurate picture.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Transformer-based language models and complement coercion: Experimental studies

complement coercion

implicit meaning

surprisal

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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).

Transformer-based language models (LMs) have shown strong performance on an array of natural language understanding tasks. However, the question of how these models react to implicit meaning has been largely unexplored. We investigate this using the complement coercion phenomenon, which involves sentences like "The student finished the book about sailing" where the action "read" is implicit. We compare LMs' surprisal estimates at various critical sentence regions in sentences with and without implicit meaning. Effects associated with recovering implicit meaning were found at a critical region other than where sentences minimally differ. We then use follow-up experiments to factor out potential confounds, revealing different perspectives that offer a richer and more accurate picture.

workshop paper

Recent neural text generation models have shown significant improvement in generating descriptive text from structured data such as table formats. One of the remaining important challenges is generating more analytical descriptions that can be inferred from facts in a data source. The use of a template-based generator and a pointer-generator is among the potential alternatives for table-to-text generators. In this paper, we propose a framework consisting of a pre-trained model and a copy mechanism. The pre-trained models are fine-tuned to produce fluent text that is enriched with numerical reasoning. However, it still lacks fidelity to the table contents. The copy mechanism is incorporated in the fine-tuning step by using general placeholders to avoid producing hallucinated phrases that are not supported by a table while preserving high fluency. In summary, our contributions are (1) a new dataset for numerical table-to-text generation using pairs of a table and a paragraph of a table description with richer inference from scientific papers, and (2) a table-to-text generation framework enriched with numerical reasoning.

Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Numerical Reasoning

Recent approaches to data-to-text generation have adopted the very successful encoder-decoder architecture or variants thereof. These models generate text which is fluent (but often imprecise) and perform quite poorly at selecting appropriate content and ordering it coherently. To overcome some of these issues, we propose a neural model with a macro planning stage followed by a generation stage reminiscent of traditional methods which embrace separate modules for planning and surface realization. Macro plans represent high level organization of important content such as entities, events and their interactions; they are learnt from data and given as input to the generator. Extensive experiments on two data-to-text benchmarks (RotoWire and MLB) show that our approach outperforms competitive baselines in terms of automatic and human evaluation.

Data-to-text Generation with Macro Planning

In this paper, we focus on the problem of citing sentence generation, which entails generating a short text to capture the salient information in a cited paper and the connection between the citing and cited paper. We present BACO, a BAckground knowledge- and COntent-based framework for citing sentence generation, which considers two types of information: (1) background knowledge by leveraging structural information from a citation network; and (2) content, which represents in-depth information about what to cite and why to cite. First, a citation network is encoded to provide background knowledge. Second, we apply salience estimation to identify what to cite by estimating the importance of sentences in the cited paper. During the decoding stage, both types of information are combined to facilitate the text generation, and then we conduct a joint training for the generator and citation function classification to make the model aware of why to cite. Our experimental results show that our framework outperforms comparative baselines.

BACO: A Background Knowledge- and Content-Based Framework for Citing Sentence Generation

Current dialogue summarization systems usually encode the text with a number of general semantic features (e.g., keywords and topics) to gain more powerful dialogue modeling capabilities. However, these features are obtained via open-domain toolkits that are dialog-agnostic or heavily relied on human annotations. In this paper, we show how DialoGPT, a pre-trained model for conversational response generation, can be developed as an unsupervised dialogue annotator, which takes advantage of dialogue background knowledge encoded in DialoGPT. We apply DialoGPT to label three types of features on two dialogue summarization datasets, SAMSum and AMI, and employ pre-trained and non pre-trained models as our summarizers. Experimental results show that our proposed method can obtain remarkable improvements on both datasets and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the SAMSum dataset.

Language Model as an Annotator: Exploring DialoGPT for Dialogue Summarization

The growth of online consumer health questions has led to the necessity for reliable and
accurate question answering systems. A recent study showed that manual summarization of consumer health questions brings significant improvement in retrieving relevant answers. However, the automatic summarization
of long questions is a challenging task due to
the lack of training data and the complexity of
the related subtasks, such as the question focus and type recognition. In this paper, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based framework for abstractive question summarization.
We propose two novel rewards obtained from
the downstream tasks of (i) question-type identification and (ii) question-focus recognition
to regularize the question generation model.
These rewards ensure the generation of semantically valid questions and encourage the
inclusion of key medical entities/foci in the
question summary. We evaluated our proposed method on two benchmark datasets and
achieved higher performance over state-of-the-art models. The manual evaluation of the
summaries reveals that the generated questions are more diverse and have fewer factual
inconsistencies than the baseline summaries.
The source code is available here: https://github.com/shwetanlp/CHQ-Summ.

Reinforcement Learning for Abstractive Question Summarization with Question-aware Semantic Rewards

Recent pretrained language models "solved" many reading comprehension benchmarks, where questions are written with access to the evidence document. However, datasets containing information-seeking queries where evidence documents are provided after the queries are written independently remain challenging. 
We analyze why answering information-seeking queries is more challenging and where their prevalent unanswerabilities arise, on Natural Questions and TyDi QA. 
Our controlled experiments suggest two headrooms -- paragraph selection and answerability prediction, i.e. whether the paired evidence document contains the answer to the query or not. When provided with a gold paragraph and knowing when to abstain from answering, existing models easily outperform a human annotator. 
However, predicting answerability itself remains challenging. We manually annotate 800 unanswerable examples across six languages on what makes them challenging to answer. With this new data, we conduct per-category answerability prediction, revealing issues in the current dataset collection as well as task formulation.
Together, our study points to avenues for future research in information-seeking question answering, both for dataset creation and model development. Our code and annotated data is publicly available at https://github.com/AkariAsai/unanswerable_qa.

Challenges in Information-Seeking QA: Unanswerable Questions and Paragraph Retrieval

Metaphors are ubiquitous in human language. The metaphor detection task (MD) aims at detecting and interpreting metaphors from written language, which is crucial in natural language understanding (NLU) research. In this paper, we introduce a pre-trained Transformer-based model into MD. Our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models by large margins in our evaluations, with relative improvements on the F-1 score from 5.33% to 28.39%. Second, we extend MD to a classification task about the metaphoricity of an entire piece of text to make MD applicable in more general NLU scenes. Finally, we clean up the improper or outdated annotations in one of the MD benchmark datasets and re-benchmark it with our Transformer-based model. This approach could be applied to other existing MD datasets as well, since the metaphoricity annotations in these benchmark datasets may be outdated. Future research efforts are also necessary to build an up-to-date and well-annotated dataset consisting of longer and more complex texts.

Improvements and Extensions on Metaphor Detection

In implicit discourse relation classification, we want to predict the relation between adjacent sentences in the absence of any overt discourse connectives. This is challenging even for humans, leading to shortage of annotated data, a fact that makes the task even more difficult for supervised machine learning approaches. In the current study, we perform implicit discourse relation classification without relying on any labeled implicit relation. We sidestep the lack of data through explicitation of implicit relations to reduce the task to two sub-problems: language modeling and explicit discourse relation classification, a much easier problem. Our experimental results show that this method can even marginally outperform the state-of-the-art, in spite of being much simpler than alternative models of comparable performance. Moreover, we show that the achieved performance is robust across domains as suggested by the zero-shot experiments on a completely different domain. This indicates that recent advances in language modeling have made language models sufficiently good at capturing inter-sentence relations without the help of explicit discourse markers.

Let's be explicit about that: Distant supervision for implicit discourse relation classification via connective prediction

While aggregate performance metrics can generate valuable insights at a large scale, their dominance means more complex and nuanced language phenomena, such as vagueness, may be overlooked. Focusing on vague terms (e.g. sunny, cloudy, young, etc.) we inspect the behavior of visually grounded and text-only models, finding systematic divergences from human judgments even when a model’s overall performance is high. To help explain this disparity, we identify two assumptions made by the datasets and models examined and, guided by the philosophy of vagueness, isolate cases where they do not hold.

Human-Model Divergence in the Handling of Vagueness

We conclude that the implicit UCCA parser does not address NFHs consistently, which could result either from inconsistent annotation, insufﬁcient training data or a modelling limitation. We consider this phenomenon important, as it is pervasive in text and critical for correct inference. Careful design and ﬁne-grained annotation of NFHs in Meaning Representations would beneﬁt downstream tasks such as machine translation, natural language inference and question answering, particularly when they require numeric reasoning, as recovering and categorizing them. We are investigating the treatment of this phenomenon by other meaning representations, such as AMR. We encourage researchers in meaning representations, and computational linguistics in general, to address this phenomenon in future research.

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Transformer-based language models and complement coercion: Experimental studies

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