Dominican Republic

A possible explanation for the impressive performance of masked language model (MLM) pre-training is that such models have learned to represent the syntactic structures prevalent in classical NLP pipelines. In this paper, we propose a different explanation: MLMs succeed on downstream tasks almost entirely due to their ability to model higher-order word co-occurrence statistics. To demonstrate this, we pre-train MLMs on sentences with randomly shuffled word order, and show that these models still achieve high accuracy after fine-tuning on many downstream tasks -- including on tasks specifically designed to be challenging for models that ignore word order. Our models perform surprisingly well according to some parametric syntactic probes, indicating possible deficiencies in how we test representations for syntactic information. Overall, our results show that purely distributional information largely explains the success of pre-training, and underscore the importance of curating challenging evaluation datasets that require deeper linguistic knowledge.

EMNLP 2021

Masked Language Modeling and the Distributional Hypothesis: Order Word Matters Pre-training for Little

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

poster

Pimentel et al. (2020) recently analysed probing from an information-theoretic perspective. They argue that probing should be seen as approximating a mutual information. This led to the rather unintuitive conclusion that representations encode exactly the same information about a target task as the original sentences. The mutual information, however, assumes the true probability distribution of a pair of random variables is known, leading to unintuitive results in settings where it is not. This paper proposes a new framework to measure what we term Bayesian mutual information, which analyses information from the perspective of Bayesian agents -- allowing for more intuitive findings in scenarios with finite data. For instance, under Bayesian MI we have that data can add information, processing can help, and information can hurt, which makes it more intuitive for machine learning applications. Finally, we apply our framework to probing where we believe Bayesian mutual information naturally operationalises ease of extraction by explicitly limiting the available background knowledge to solve a task.

A Bayesian Framework for Information-Theoretic Probing

Cross-lingual entity alignment (EA) aims to find the equivalent entities between cross-lingual KGs (Knowledge Graphs), which is a crucial step for integrating KGs. Recently, many GNN-based EA methods are proposed and show decent performance improvements on several public datasets. However, existing GNN-based EA methods inevitably inherit poor interpretability and low efficiency from neural networks. Motivated by the isomorphic assumption of GNN-based methods, we successfully transform the cross-lingual EA problem into an assignment problem. Based on this re-definition, we propose a frustratingly Simple but Effective Unsupervised entity alignment method (SEU) without neural networks. Extensive experiments have been conducted to show that our proposed unsupervised approach even beats advanced supervised methods across all public datasets while having high efficiency, interpretability, and stability.

From Alignment to Assignment: Frustratingly Simple Unsupervised Entity Alignment

Most recent studies for relation extraction (RE) leverage the dependency tree of the input sentence to incorporate syntax-driven contextual information to improve model performance, with little attention paid to the limitation where high-quality dependency parsers in most cases unavailable, especially for in-domain scenarios. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose attentive graph convolutional networks (A-GCN) to improve neural RE methods in an unsupervised manner to build the context graph, without relying on the existence of a dependency parser. Specifically, we construct the graph from n-grams extracted from a lexicon built from pointwise mutual information (PMI) and apply attention to the graph. Therefore, different word pairs from the contexts within and across n-grams are weighted in the model and facilitate RE accordingly. Experimental results with further analyses on two English benchmark datasets for RE demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, where state-of-the-art performance is observed on both datasets.

Relation Extraction with Word Graphs from N-grams

The semantic matching capabilities of neural information retrieval can ameliorate synonymy and polysemy problems of symbolic approaches. However, neural models' dense representations are more suitable for re-ranking, due to their inefficiency. Sparse representations, either in symbolic or latent form, are more efficient with an inverted index. Taking the merits of the sparse and dense representations, we propose an ultra-high dimensional (UHD) representation scheme equipped with directly controllable sparsity. UHD's large capacity and minimal noise and interference among the dimensions allow for binarized representations, which are highly efficient for storage and search. Also proposed is a bucketing method, where the embeddings from multiple layers of BERT are selected/merged to represent diverse linguistic aspects. We test our models with MS MARCO and TREC CAR, showing that our model outperforms other sparse models.

Ultra-High Dimensional Sparse Representations with Binarization for Efficient Text Retrieval

Neural topic models (NTMs) apply deep neural networks to topic modelling. Despite their success, NTMs generally ignore two important aspects: (1) only document-level word count information is utilized for the training, while more fine-grained sentence-level information is ignored, and (2) external semantic knowledge regarding documents, sentences and words are not exploited for the training. To address these issues, we propose a variational autoencoder (VAE) NTM model that jointly reconstructs the sentence and document word counts using combinations of bag-of-words (BoW) topical embeddings and pre-trained semantic embeddings. The pre-trained embeddings are first transformed into a common latent topical space to align their semantics with the BoW embeddings. Our model also features hierarchical KL divergence to leverage embeddings of each document to regularize those of their sentences, thereby paying more attention to semantically relevant sentences. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments have shown the efficacy of our model in 1) lowering the reconstruction errors at both the sentence and document levels, and 2) discovering more coherent topics from real-world datasets.

Neural Attention-Aware Hierarchical Topic Model

How difficult is it for English-as-a-second language (ESL) learners to read noisy English texts? Do ESL learners need lexical normalization to read noisy English texts?
These questions may also affect community formation on social networking sites where differences can be attributed to ESL learners and native English speakers.
However, few studies have addressed these questions.
To this end, we built highly accurate readability assessors to evaluate the readability of texts for ESL learners. We then applied these assessors to noisy English texts to further assess the readability of the texts.
The experimental results showed that although intermediate-level ESL learners can read most noisy English texts in the first place, lexical normalization significantly improves the readability of noisy English texts for ESL learners.

To What Extent Does Lexical Normalization Help English-as-a-Second Language Learners to Read Noisy English Texts?

In this paper we study pejorative language, an under-explored topic in computational linguistics. Unlike existing models of offensive language and hate speech, pejorative language manifests itself primarily at the lexical level, and describes a word that is used with a negative connotation, making it different from offensive language or other more studied categories. Pejorativity is also context-dependent: the same word can be used with or without pejorative connotations, thus pejorativity detection is essentially a problem similar to word sense disambiguation. We leverage online dictionaries to build a multilingual lexicon of pejorative terms for English, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian. We additionally release a dataset of tweets annotated for pejorative use. Based on these resources, we present an analysis of the usage and occurrence of pejorative words in social media, and present an attempt to automatically disambiguate pejorative usage in our dataset.

A Computational Exploration of Pejorative Language in Social Media

Much of natural language processing is focused on leveraging large capacity language models, typically trained over single messages with a task of predicting one or more tokens. However, modeling human language at higher-levels of context (i.e., sequences of messages) is under-explored. In stance detection and other social media tasks where the goal is to predict an attribute of a message, we have contextual data that is loosely semantically connected by authorship. Here, we introduce Message-Level Transformer (MeLT) -- a hierarchical message-encoder pre-trained over Twitter and applied to the task of stance prediction. 
We focus on stance prediction as a task benefiting from knowing the context of the message (i.e., the sequence of previous messages). The model is trained using a variant of masked-language modeling; where instead of predicting tokens, it seeks to generate an entire masked (aggregated) message vector via reconstruction loss. We find that applying this pre-trained masked message-level transformer to the downstream task of stance detection achieves F1 performance of 67%.

MeLT: Message-Level Transformer with Masked Document Representations as Pre-Training for Stance Detection

In order to address several typical challenges of the healthcare domain, we proposed to treat Adverse Event (AE) Detection, and AE/Drug/Dosage Extraction tasks as sequence-to-sequence problems, adapting the T5 architecture and improving over all the baselines in both the Detection and the Extraction tasks. To maximize the benefit of multi-task and multi-dataset learning, we introduced a new training strategy that extends origina multi task learning, showing that our approach accounts for multiple and diverse datasets and leads to consistent improvements over the original T5 proposal. Finally, we also shows some language transfer abilities of the models in the zero shot setting, leaving the door open for future experiments to extend our training framework towards multilinguality.

Exploring a Unified Sequence-To-Sequence Transformer for Medical Product Safety Monitoring in Social Media

Entity Linking (EL) systems have achieved impressive results on standard benchmarks, mainly thanks to the contextualized representations provided by recent pretrained language models.
However, such systems still require massive amounts of data -- millions of labeled examples -- to perform at their best, with training times that often exceed several days, especially when limited computational resources are available.
In this paper, we look at how Named Entity Recognition (NER) can be exploited to narrow the gap between EL systems trained on high and low amounts of labeled data.
More specifically, we show how and to what extent an EL system can benefit from NER to enhance its entity representations, improve candidate selection, select more effective negative samples and enforce hard and soft constraints on its output entities.

Masked Language Modeling and the Distributional Hypothesis: Order Word Matters Pre-training for Little

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A Bayesian Framework for Information-Theoretic Probing

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