Dominican Republic

Incremental processing allows interactive systems to respond based on partial inputs, which is a desirable property e.g. in dialogue agents. The currently popular Transformer architecture inherently processes sequences as a whole, abstracting away the notion of time. Recent work attempts to apply Transformers incrementally via restart-incrementality by repeatedly feeding, to an unchanged model, increasingly longer input prefixes to produce partial outputs. However, this approach is computationally costly and does not scale efficiently for long sequences. In parallel, we witness efforts to make Transformers more efficient, e.g. the Linear Transformer (LT) with a recurrence mechanism. In this work, we examine the feasibility of LT for incremental NLU in English. Our results show that the recurrent LT model has better incremental performance and faster inference speed compared to the standard Transformer and LT with restart-incrementality, at the cost of part of the non-incremental (full sequence) quality. We show that the performance drop can be mitigated by training the model to wait for right context before committing to an output and that training with input prefixes is beneficial for delivering correct partial outputs.

EMNLP 2021

Towards Incremental Transformers: An Empirical Analysis of Transformer Models for Incremental NLU

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

Dialog is a core building block of human natural language interactions. It contains multiparty utterances used to convey information from one party to another in a dynamic and evolving manner. The ability to compare dialogs is beneficial in many real world use cases, such as conversation analytics for contact center calls and virtual agent design. We propose a novel adaptation of the edit distance metric to the scenario of dialog similarity. Our approach takes into account various conversation aspects such as utterance semantics, conversation flow, and the participants. We evaluate this new approach and compare it to existing document similarity measures on two publicly available datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms the other approaches in capturing dialog flow, and is better aligned with the human perception of conversation similarity.

We've had this conversation before: A Novel Approach to Measuring Dialog Similarity

Recent progress in task-oriented neural dialogue systems is largely focused on a handful of languages, as annotation of training data is tedious and expensive. Machine translation has been used to make systems multilingual, but this can introduce a pipeline of errors. Another promising solution is using cross-lingual transfer learning through pretrained multilingual models. Existing methods train multilingual models with additional codemixed task data or refine the cross-lingual representations through parallel ontologies. In this work, we enhance the transfer learning process by intermediate fine-tuning of pretrained multilingual models, where the multilingual models are fine-tuned with different but related data and/or tasks. Specifically, we use parallel and conversational movie subtitles datasets to design cross-lingual intermediate tasks suitable for downstream dialogue tasks. We use only 200K lines of parallel data for intermediate fine-tuning which is already available for 1782 language pairs. We test our approach on the cross-lingual dialogue state tracking task for the parallel MultiWoZ (English→Chinese, Chinese→English) and Multilingual WoZ (English→German, English→Italian) datasets. We achieve impressive improvements (> 20% on joint goal accuracy) on the parallel MultiWoZ dataset and the Multilingual WoZ dataset over the vanilla baseline with only 10% of the target language task data and zero-shot setup respectively

Cross-lingual Intermediate Fine-tuning improves Dialogue State Tracking

As NLP systems become better at detecting opinions and beliefs from text, it is important to ensure not only that models are accurate but also that they arrive at their predictions in ways that align with human reasoning. In this work, we present a method for imparting human-like rationalization to a stance detection model using crowdsourced annotations on a small fraction of the training data. We show that in a data-scarce setting, our approach can improve the reasoning of a state-of-the-art classifier--particularly for inputs containing challenging phenomena such as sarcasm--at no cost in predictive performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that attention weights surpass a leading attribution method in providing faithful explanations of our model's predictions, thus serving as a computationally cheap and reliable source of attributions for our model.

Human Rationales as Attribution Priors for Explainable Stance Detection

Multi-task learning with transformer encoders (MTL) has emerged as a powerful technique to improve performance on closely-related tasks for both accuracy and efficiency while a question still remains whether or not it would perform as well on tasks that are distinct in nature. We first present MTL results on five NLP tasks, POS, NER, DEP, CON, and SRL, and depict its deficiency over single-task learning. We then conduct an extensive pruning analysis to show that a certain set of attention heads get claimed by most tasks during MTL, who interfere with one another to fine-tune those heads for their own objectives. Based on this finding, we propose the Stem Cell Hypothesis to reveal the existence of attention heads naturally talented for many tasks that cannot be jointly trained to create adequate embeddings for all of those tasks. Finally, we design novel parameter-free probes to justify our hypothesis and demonstrate how attention heads are transformed across the five tasks during MTL through label analysis.

The Stem Cell Hypothesis: Dilemma behind Multi-Task Learning with Transformer Encoders

We study the problem of generating counterfactual text for a classifier as a means for understanding and debugging classification. Given a textual input and a classification model, we aim to minimally alter the text to change the model's prediction. White-box approaches have been successfully applied to similar problems in vision where one can directly optimize the continuous input. Optimization-based approaches become difficult in the language domain due to the discrete nature of text. We bypass this issue by directly optimizing in the latent space and leveraging a language model to generate candidate modifications from optimized latent representations. We additionally use Shapley values to estimate the combinatoric effect of multiple changes. We then use these estimates to guide a beam search for the final counterfactual text. We achieve favorable performance compared to recent white-box and black-box baselines using human and automatic evaluations. Ablation studies show that both latent optimization and the use of Shapley values improve success rate and the quality of the generated counterfactuals.

Text Counterfactuals via Latent Optimization and Shapley-Guided Search

**Anthology paper link:**

https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.88/

**Abstract:**

Transformer-based language models (LMs) pretrained on large text collections are proven to store a wealth of semantic knowledge. However, 1) they are not effective as sentence encoders when used off-the-shelf, and 2) thus typically lag behind conversationally pretrained (e.g., via response selection) encoders on conversational tasks such as intent detection (ID). In this work, we propose ConvFiT, a simple and efficient two-stage procedure which turns any pretrained LM into a universal conversational encoder (after Stage 1 ConvFiT-ing) and task-specialised sentence encoder (after Stage 2). We demonstrate that 1) full-blown conversational pretraining is not required, and that LMs can be quickly transformed into effective conversational encoders with much smaller amounts of unannotated data; 2) pretrained LMs can be fine-tuned into task-specialised sentence encoders, optimised for the fine-grained semantics of a particular task. Consequently, such specialised sentence encoders allow for treating ID as a simple semantic similarity task based on interpretable nearest neighbours retrieval. We validate the robustness and versatility of the ConvFiT framework with such similarity-based inference on the standard ID evaluation sets: ConvFiT-ed LMs achieve state-of-the-art ID performance across the board, with particular gains in the most challenging, few-shot setups.

ConvFiT: Conversational Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Language Models

As neural language models approach human performance on NLP benchmark tasks, their advances are widely seen as evidence of an increasingly complex understanding of syntax. This view rests upon a hypothesis that has not yet been empirically tested: that word order encodes meaning essential to performing these tasks. We refute this hypothesis in many cases: in the GLUE suite and in various genres of English text, the words in a sentence or phrase can rarely be permuted to form a phrase carrying substantially different information. Our surprising result relies on inference by iterative shuffling (IBIS), a novel, efficient procedure that finds the ordering of a bag of words having the highest likelihood under a fixed language model. IBIS can use any black-box model without additional training and is superior to existing word ordering algorithms. Coalescing our findings, we discuss how shuffling inference procedures such as IBIS can benefit language modeling and constrained generation.

Studying word order through iterative shuffling

We introduce ASQ, a tool to automatically mine questions and answers from a sentence using its Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). Previous work has used question-answer pairs to specify the predicate-argument structure of a sentence using natural language, which does not require linguistic expertise or training, and created datasets such as QA-SRL and QAMR, for which the question-answer (QA) pair annotations were crowdsourced. Our goal is to build a tool (ASQ) that maps from the traditional meaning representation AMR to a question-answer meaning representation (QMR). This enables construction of QMR datasets automatically in
various domains using existing high-quality AMR parsers, and provides an automatic mapping AMR to QMR for ease of understanding by non-experts. A qualitative evaluation of the output generated by ASQ from the AMR 2.0 data shows that the question-answer pairs are natural and valid, and demonstrate good coverage of the content. We run ASQ on the sentences from the QAMR dataset, to observe that the semantic roles in QAMR are also captured by ASQ.

ASQ: Automatically Generating Question-Answer Pairs using AMRs

In this paper, we focus on the classification of tweets as sources of potential signals for adverse drug effects. Following the intuition that text and drug structure representations are complementary, we introduce a multimodal model with two components. These components are state-of-the-art BERT-based models for language understanding and molecular property prediction. Experiments were carried out on multilingual benchmarks of the Social Media Mining for Health Research and Applications (#SMM4H) initiative. Our models obtained state-of-the-art results of 0.61 F1-measure and 0.57 F1-measure on #SMM4H 2021 Shared Tasks 1a and 2 in English and Russian, respectively. On the classification of French tweets from SMM4H 2020 Task 1, our approach pushes the state of the art by an absolute gain of 8% F1. Our experiments show that the molecular information obtained from neural networks is more beneficial for ADE classification than traditional molecular descriptors.

Adverse Drug Reaction Classification of Tweets with Fusion of Text and Drug Representations

Explanations for AI systems have been used to improve the trustworthiness of these systems. These explanations can be used to find the undesirable implicit biases that machine learning models can rely on for their outputs. We apply this concept to detect gender bias in sentiment analysis models for textual data. With the help of an Equity Evaluation Corpus (EEC), we used different gender signals for otherwise identical input to the system and use explanations from LIME and SHAP to find a trend of bias, and identify terms that contribute the most to it.

Towards Incremental Transformers: An Empirical Analysis of Transformer Models for Incremental NLU

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We've had this conversation before: A Novel Approach to Measuring Dialog Similarity

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