Dominican Republic

Recent work on opinion summarization produces general summaries based on a set of input reviews and the popularity of opinions expressed in them. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows the generation of customized summaries based on aspect queries (e.g., describing the location and room of a hotel). Using a review corpus, we create a synthetic training dataset of (review, summary) pairs enriched with aspect controllers which are induced by a multi-instance learning model that predicts the aspects of a document at different levels of granularity. We fine-tune a pretrained model using our synthetic dataset and generate aspect-specific summaries by modifying the aspect controllers. Experiments on two benchmarks show that our model outperforms the previous state of the art and generates personalized summaries by controlling the number of aspects discussed in them.

EMNLP 2021

Aspect-Controllable Opinion Summarization

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.

technical paper

Abstractive conversation summarization has received growing attention while most current state-of-the-art summarization models heavily rely on human-annotated summaries. To reduce the dependence on labeled summaries, in this work, we present a simple yet effective set of Conversational Data Augmentation (CODA) methods for semisupervised abstractive conversation summarization, such as random swapping/deletion to perturb the discourse relations inside conversations, dialogue-acts-guided insertion to interrupt the development of conversations, and conditional-generation-based substitution to substitute utterances with their paraphrases generated based on the conversation context. To further utilize unlabeled conversations, we combine CODA with two-stage noisy self-training where we first pre-train the summarization model on unlabeled conversations with pseudo summaries and then fine-tune it on labeled conversations. Experiments conducted on the recent conversation summarization datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods over several state-of-the-art data augmentation baselines.

Simple Conversational Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

An important task in NLP applications such as sentence simplification is the ability to take a long, complex sentence and split it into shorter sentences, rephrasing as necessary. We introduce a novel dataset and a new model for this `split and rephrase' task. Our BiSECT training data consists of 1 million long English sentences paired with shorter, meaning-equivalent English sentences. We obtain these by extracting 1-2 sentence alignments in bilingual parallel corpora and then using machine translation to convert both sides of the corpus into the same language. BiSECT contains higher quality training examples than previous Split and Rephrase corpora, with sentence splits that require more significant modifications. We categorize examples in our corpus, and use these categories in a novel model that allows us to target specific regions of the input sentence to be split and edited. Moreover, we show that models trained on BiSECT can perform a wider variety of split operations and improve upon previous state-of-the-art approaches in automatic and human evaluations.

BiSECT: Learning to Split and Rephrase Sentences with Bitexts

Human evaluation for summarization tasks is reliable but brings in issues of reproducibility and high costs. Automatic metrics are cheap and reproducible but sometimes poorly correlated with human judgment. In this work, we propose flexible semiautomatic to automatic summary evaluation metrics, following the Pyramid human evaluation method. Semi-automatic Lite2Pyramid retains the reusable human-labeled Summary Content Units (SCUs) for reference(s) but replaces the manual work of judging SCUs' presence in system summaries with a natural language inference (NLI) model. Fully automatic Lite3Pyramid further substitutes SCUs with automatically extracted Semantic Triplet Units (STUs) via a semantic role labeling (SRL) model. Finally, we propose in-between metrics, Lite2.xPyramid, where we use a simple regressor to predict how well the STUs can simulate SCUs and retain SCUs that are more difficult to simulate, which provides a smooth transition and balance between automation and manual evaluation. Comparing to 15 existing metrics, we evaluate human-metric correlations on 3 existing meta-evaluation datasets and our newly-collected PyrXSum (with 100/10 XSum examples/systems). It shows that Lite2Pyramid consistently has the best summary-level correlations; Lite3Pyramid works better than or comparable to other automatic metrics; Lite2.xPyramid trades off small correlation drops for larger manual effort reduction, which can reduce costs for future data collection.

Finding a Balanced Degree of Automation for Summary Evaluation

Pre-trained language models (PTLMs) have achieved impressive performance on commonsense inference benchmarks, but their ability to employ commonsense to make robust inferences, which is crucial for effective communications with humans, is debated. In the pursuit of advancing fluid human-AI communication, we propose a new challenge, RICA: Robust Inference using Commonsense Axioms, that evaluates robust commonsense inference despite textual perturbations. To generate data for this challenge, we develop a systematic and scalable procedure using commonsense knowledge bases and probe PTLMs across two different evaluation settings. Extensive experiments on our generated probe sets with more than 10k statements show that PTLMs perform no better than random guessing on the zero-shot setting, are heavily impacted by statistical biases, and are not robust to perturbation attacks. We also find that fine-tuning on similar statements offer limited gains, as PTLMs still fail to generalize to unseen inferences. Our new large-scale benchmark exposes a significant gap between PTLMs and human-level language understanding and offers a new challenge for PTLMs to demonstrate commonsense.

RICA: Evaluating Robust Inference Capabilities Based on Commonsense Axioms

Large language models have led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks, and researchers are turning to ever-larger text corpora to train them. Some of the largest corpora available are made by scraping significant portions of the internet, and are frequently introduced with only minimal documentation. In this work we provide some of the first documentation for the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4; Raffel et al., 2020), a dataset created by applying a set of filters to a single snapshot of Common Crawl. We begin by investigating where the data came from, and find a significant amount of text from unexpected sources like patents and US military websites. Then we explore the content of the text itself, and find machine-generated text (e.g., from machine translation systems) and evaluation examples from other benchmark NLP datasets. To understand the impact of the filters applied to create this dataset, we evaluate the text that was removed, and show that blocklist filtering disproportionately removes text from and about minority individuals. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for how to created and document web-scale datasets from a scrape of the internet.

Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus

While the field of style transfer (ST) has been growing rapidly, it has been hampered by a lack of standardized practices for automatic evaluation. In this paper, we evaluate leading ST automatic metrics on the oft-researched task of formality style transfer. Unlike previous evaluations, which focus solely on English, we expand our focus to Brazilian-Portuguese, French, and Italian, making this work the first multilingual evaluation of metrics in ST. We outline best practices for automatic evaluation in (formality) style transfer and identify several models that correlate well with human judgments and are robust across languages. We hope that this work will help accelerate development in ST, where human evaluation is often challenging to collect.

Evaluating the Evaluation Metrics for Style Transfer: A Case Study in Multilingual Formality Transfer

The relationships between entities can be a reliable indicator for classifying sensitive information. For example, the relation person-IsDirectorOf-company can indicate whether an individual’s salary should be considered as sensitive personal information. However, a relation type may or may not correspond to a sensitivity depending on the entities that participate to the relation. Therefore, separately representing entities and relations, as is the case for Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) methods is typically insufficient for sensitivity classification. In this work, we propose a novel method, RelDiff, for representing entity-relation-entity triples within a single embedding. RelDiff shows significant improvements in sensitivity classification effectiveness compared to classification approaches that leverage KGE approaches from the literature (e.g. 0.426 F1 vs 0.413 F1).

RelDiff: Enriching Knowledge Graph Relation Representations for Sensitivity Classification

Extracting relation triplets from raw text is a crucial task in Information Extraction, enabling multiple applications such as populating or validating knowledge bases, factchecking, and other downstream tasks. However, it usually involves multiple-step pipelines that propagate errors or are limited to a small number of relation types. To overcome these issues, we propose the use of autoregressive seq2seq models. Such models have previously been shown to perform well not only in language generation, but also in NLU tasks such as Entity Linking, thanks to their framing as seq2seq tasks.
In this paper, we show how Relation Extraction can be simplified by expressing triplets as a sequence of text and we present REBEL, a seq2seq model based on BART that performs end-to-end relation extraction for more than 200 different relation types. We show our model's flexibility by fine-tuning it on an array of Relation Extraction and Relation Classification benchmarks, with it attaining state-of-the-art performance in most of them.

REBEL: Relation Extraction By End-to-end Language generation

Cross-document event coreference resolution (CDCR) is the task of identifying which event mentions refer to the same events throughout a collection of documents.
Annotating CDCR data is an arduous and expensive process, explaining why existing corpora are small and lack domain coverage.
To overcome this bottleneck, we automatically extract event coreference data from hyperlinks in online news: When referring to a significant real-world event, writers often add a hyperlink to another article covering this event. We demonstrate that collecting hyperlinks which point to the same article(s) produces extensive and high-quality CDCR data and create a corpus of 2M documents and 2.7M silver-standard event mentions called HyperCoref.
We evaluate a state-of-the-art system on three CDCR corpora and find that models trained on small subsets of HyperCoref are highly competitive, with performance similar to models trained on gold-standard data.
With our work, we free CDCR research from depending on costly human-annotated training data and open up possibilities for research beyond English CDCR, as our data extraction approach can be easily adapted to other languages.

Event Coreference Data (Almost) for Free: Mining Hyperlinks from Online News

Politicians often have underlying agendas when reacting to events. Arguments in contexts of various events reflect a fairly consistent set of agendas for a given entity. In spite of recent advances in Pretrained Language Models, those text representations are not designed to capture such nuanced patterns. In this paper, we propose a Compositional Reader model consisting of encoder and composer modules, that captures and leverages such information to generate more effective representations for entities, issues, and events. These representations are contextualized by tweets, press releases, issues, news articles, and participating entities. Our model processes several documents at once and generates composed representations for multiple entities over several issues or events. Via qualitative and quantitative empirical analysis, we show that these representations are meaningful and effective.

Aspect-Controllable Opinion Summarization

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Simple Conversational Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

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Aspect-Controllable Opinion Summarization

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Next from EMNLP 2021

Simple Conversational Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

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Discourse-Based Sentence Splitting

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