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Discrete adversarial attacks are symbolic perturbations to a language input that preserve the output label but lead to a prediction error. While such attacks have been extensively explored for the purpose of evaluating model robustness, their utility for improving robustness has been limited to offline augmentation only. Concretely, given a trained model, attacks are used to generate perturbed adversarial) examples, and the model is re-trained exactly once. In this work, we address this gap and leverage discrete attacks for online augmentation, where adversarial examples are generated at every training step, adapting to the changing nature of the model. We propose (i) a new discrete attack, based on best-first search, and (ii) random sampling attacks that unlike prior work are not based on expensive search-based procedures. Surprisingly, we find that random sampling leads to impressive gains in robustness, outperforming the commonly-used offline augmentation, while leading to a speedup at training time of ∼10x. Furthermore, online augmentation with search-based attacks justifies the higher training cost, significantly improving robustness on three datasets. Last, we show that our new attack substantially improves robustness compared to prior methods.

EMNLP 2021

Achieving Model Robustness through Discrete Adversarial Training

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

A mind-map is a diagram that represents the central concept and key ideas in a hierarchical way. Converting plain text into a mind-map will reveal its key semantic structure and be easier to understand. Given a document, the existing automatic mind-map generation method extracts the relationships of every sentence pair to generate the directed semantic graph for this document. The computation complexity increases exponentially with the length of the document. Moreover, it is difficult to capture the overall semantics. To deal with the above challenges, we propose an efficient mind-map generation network that converts a document into a graph via sequence-to-graph. To guarantee a meaningful mind-map, we design a graph refinement module to adjust the relation graph in a reinforcement learning manner. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is more effective and efficient than the existing methods. The inference time is reduced by thousands of times compared with the existing methods. The case studies verify that the generated mind-maps better reveal the underlying semantic structures of the document.

Efficient Mind-Map Generation via Sequence-to-Graph and Reinforced Graph Refinement

Pretrained transformer-based models such as BERT have demonstrated state-of-the-art predictive performance when adapted into a range of natural language processing tasks. An open problem is how to improve the faithfulness of explanations (rationales) for the predictions of these models. In this paper, we hypothesize that salient information extracted a priori from the training data can complement the task-specific information learned by the model during fine-tuning on a downstream task. In this way, we aim to help BERT not to forget assigning importance to informative input tokens when making predictions by proposing SALOSS; an auxiliary loss function for guiding the multi-head attention mechanism during training to be close to salient information extracted a priori using TextRank. Experiments for explanation faithfulness across five datasets, show that models trained with SALOSS consistently provide more faithful explanations across four different feature attribution methods compared to vanilla BERT. Using the rationales extracted from vanilla BERT and SALOSS models to train inherently faithful classifiers, we further show that the latter result in higher predictive performance in downstream tasks.

Enjoy the Salience: Towards Better Transformer-based Faithful Explanations with Word Salience

Differential privacy provides a formal approach to privacy of individuals. Applications of differential privacy in various scenarios, such as protecting users' original utterances, must satisfy certain mathematical properties. Our contribution is a formal analysis of ADePT, a differentially private auto-encoder for text rewriting (Krishna et al, 2021). ADePT achieves promising results on downstream tasks while providing tight privacy guarantees. Our proof reveals that ADePT is not differentially private, thus rendering the experimental results unsubstantiated. We also quantify the impact of the error in its private mechanism, showing that the true sensitivity is higher by at least factor 6 in an optimistic case of a very small encoder's dimension and that the amount of utterances that are not privatized could easily reach 100% of the entire dataset. Our intention is neither to criticize the authors, nor the peer-reviewing process, but rather point out that if differential privacy applications in NLP rely on formal guarantees, these should be outlined in full and put under detailed scrutiny.

When differential privacy meets NLP: The devil is in the detail

Text classification is a fundamental task with broad applications in natural language processing. In this paper, a Deep Attention Diffusion Graph Neural Network (DADGNN) model is proposed to learn text representations, bridging the chasm of interaction difficulties between a word and its distant neighbors. Experimental results on various standard benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the present approach.

Deep Attention Diffusion Graph Neural Networks for Text Classification

Automatically extracted interpersonal relationships of conversation interlocutors can enrich personal knowledge bases to enhance personalized search, recommenders and chatbots. To infer speakers’ relationships from dialogues we propose PRIDE, a neural multi-label classifier, based on BERT and Transformer for creating a conversation representation. PRIDE utilizes the dialogue structure and augments it with external knowledge about speaker features and conversation style. Unlike prior works, we address multi-label prediction of fine-grained relationships. We release largescale datasets, based on screenplays of movies and TV shows, with directed relationships of conversation participants. Extensive experiments on both datasets show superior performance of PRIDE compared to the state-of-theart baselines.

PRIDE: Predicting Relationships in Conversations

Mining the causes of political decision-making is an active research area in the field of political science. In the past, most studies have focused on long-term policies that are collected over several decades of time, and have primarily relied on surveys as the main source of predictors. However, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a new political phenomenon, where political decision-making consists of frequent short-term decisions, all on the same controlled topic---the pandemic. In this paper, we focus on the question of how public opinion influences policy decisions, while controlling for confounders such as COVID-19 case increases or unemployment rates. Using a dataset consisting of Twitter data from the 50 US states, we classify the sentiments toward governors of each state, and conduct controlled studies and comparisons. Based on the compiled samples of sentiments, policies, and confounders, we conduct causal inference to discover trends in political decision-making across different states.

Mining the Cause of Political Decision-Making from Social Media: A Case Study of COVID-19 Policies across the US States

The UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) includes the exceptionally valuable cultural and natural heritage to be preserved for mankind. Evaluating and justifying the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) is essential for each site inscribed in the WHL, and yet a complex task, even for experts, since the selection criteria of OUV are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, manual annotation of heritage values and attributes from multi-source textual data, which is currently dominant in heritage studies, is knowledge-demanding and time-consuming, impeding systematic analysis of such authoritative documents in terms of their implications on heritage management. This study applies state-of-the-art NLP models to build a classifier on a new dataset containing Statements of OUV, seeking an explainable and scalable automation tool to facilitate the nomination, evaluation, research, and monitoring processes of World Heritage sites. Label smoothing is innovatively adapted to improve the model performance by adding prior inter-class relationship knowledge to generate soft labels. The study shows that the best models fine-tuned from BERT and ULMFiT can reach 94.3% top-3 accuracy. A human study with expert evaluation on the model prediction shows that the models are sufficiently generalizable. The study is promising to be further developed and applied in heritage research and practice.

WHOSe Heritage Classification of UNESCO World Heritage Statements of Outstanding Universal Value with Soft Labels

State-of-the-art NLP models can adopt shallow heuristics that limit their generalization capability (McCoy et al., 2019). Such heuristics include lexical overlap with the training set in Named-Entity Recognition (Taillé et al., 2020) and Event or Type heuristics in Relation Extraction (Rosenman et al., 2020). In the more realistic end-to-end RE setting, we can expect yet another heuristic: the mere retention of training relation triples. In this work, we propose several experiments confirming that retention of known facts is a key factor of performance on standard benchmarks. Furthermore, our behavioral testing experiment suggests that a pipeline model able to use intermediate type representations is less prone to over-rely on retention.

Separating Retention from Extraction in the Evaluation of End-to-end Relation Extraction

Slow emerging topic detection is a task between event detection, where we aggregate behaviors of different words on short period of time, and language evolution, where we monitor their long term evolution. In this work, we tackle the problem of early detection of slowly emerging new topics. To this end, we gather evidence of weak signals at the word level. We propose to monitor the behavior of words representation in an embedding space and use one of its geometrical properties to characterize the emergence of topics. As evaluation is typically hard for this kind of task, we present a framework for quantitative evaluation. We show positive results that outperform state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets of press and scientific articles.

Monitoring geometrical properties of word embeddings for detecting the emergence of new topics.

With the advent of contextualized embeddings, attention towards neural ranking approaches for Information Retrieval increased considerably. However, two aspects have remained largely neglected: i) queries usually consist of few keywords only, which increases ambiguity and makes their contextualization harder, and ii) performing neural ranking on non-English documents is still cumbersome due to shortage of labeled datasets. In this paper we present SIR (Sense-enhanced Information Retrieval) to mitigate both problems by leveraging word sense information. At the core of our approach lies a novel multilingual query expansion mechanism based on Word Sense Disambiguation that provides sense definitions as additional semantic information for the query. Importantly, we use senses as a bridge across languages, thus allowing our model to perform considerably better than its supervised and unsupervised alternatives across French, German, Italian and Spanish languages on several CLEF benchmarks, while being trained on English Robust04 data only.

Achieving Model Robustness through Discrete Adversarial Training

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