Dominican Republic

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.

EMNLP 2021

Simple Conversational Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised Abstractive Dialogue 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

Adversarial regularization has been shown to improve the generalization performance of deep learning models in various natural language processing tasks. Existing works usually formulate the method as a zero-sum game, which is solved by alternating gradient descent/ascent algorithms. Such a formulation treats the adversarial and the defending players equally, which is undesirable because only the defending player contributes to the generalization performance. To address this issue, we propose Stackelberg Adversarial Regularization (SALT), which formulates adversarial regularization as a Stackelberg game. This formulation induces a competition between a leader and a follower, where the follower generates perturbations, and the leader trains the model subject to the perturbations. Different from conventional approaches, in SALT, the leader is in an advantageous position. When the leader moves, it recognizes the strategy of the follower and takes the anticipated follower's outcomes into consideration. Such a leader's advantage enables us to improve the model fitting to the unperturbed data. The leader's strategic information is captured by the Stackelberg gradient, which is obtained using an unrolling algorithm. Our experimental results on a set of machine translation and natural language understanding tasks show that SALT outperforms existing adversarial regularization baselines across all tasks.

Adversarial Regularization as Stackelberg Game: An Unrolled Optimization Approach

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

Recent text generation research has increasingly focused on open-ended domains such as story and poetry generation. Because models built for such tasks are difficult to evaluate automatically, most researchers in the space justify their modeling choices by collecting crowdsourced human judgments of text quality (e.g., Likert scores of coherence or grammaticality) from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In this paper, we first conduct a survey of 45 open-ended text generation papers and find that the vast majority of them fail to report crucial details about their AMT tasks, hindering reproducibility. We then run a series of story evaluation experiments with both AMT workers and English teachers and discover that even with strict qualification filters, AMT workers (unlike teachers) fail to distinguish between model-generated text and human-generated references. We show that AMT worker judgments improve when they are shown model-generated output alongside human-generated references, which enables the workers to better calibrate their ratings. Finally, interviews with the English teachers provide deeper insights into the challenges of the evaluation process, particularly when rating model-generated text.

The Perils of Using Mechanical Turk to Evaluate Open-Ended Text Generation

As the world continues to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, it is simultaneously fighting an ‘infodemic' -- a flood of disinformation and spread of conspiracy theories leading to health threats and the division of society. To combat this infodemic, there is an urgent need for benchmark datasets that can help researchers develop and evaluate models geared towards automatic detection of disinformation. While there are increasing efforts to create adequate, open-source benchmark datasets for English, comparable resources are virtually unavailable for German, leaving research for the German language lagging significantly behind. In this paper, we introduce the new benchmark dataset FANG-COVID consisting of 28,056 real and 13,186 fake German news articles related to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as data on their propagation on Twitter. Furthermore, we propose an explainable textual- and social context-based model for fake news detection, compare its performance to "black-box" models and perform feature ablation to assess the relative importance of human-interpretable features in distinguishing fake news from authentic news.

FANG-COVID: A New Large-Scale Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection in German

In this paper, we propose a novel fact checking and verification system to check claims against Wikipedia content. Our system retrieves relevant Wikipedia pages using Anserini, uses BERT-large-cased question answering model to select correct evidence, and verifies claims using XLNET natural language inference model by comparing it with the evidence. Table cell evidence is obtained through looking for entity-matching cell values and TAPAS table question answering model. The pipeline utilizes zero-shot capabilities of existing models and all the models used in the pipeline requires no additional training. Our system got a FEVEROUS score of 0.06 and a label accuracy of 0.39 in FEVEROUS challenge.

A Fact Checking and Verification System for FEVEROUS Using a Zero-Shot Learning Approach

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

In this paper, we provide a bilingual parallel human-to-human recommendation dialog dataset (DuRecDial 2.0) to enable researchers to explore a challenging task of multilingual and cross-lingual conversational recommendation. The difference between DuRecDial 2.0 and existing conversational recommendation datasets is that the data item (Profile, Goal, Knowledge, Context, Response) in DuRecDial 2.0 is annotated in two languages, both English and Chinese, while other datasets are built with the setting of a single language. We collect 8.2k dialogs aligned across English and Chinese languages (16.5k dialogs and 255k utterances in total) that are annotated by crowdsourced workers with strict quality control procedure.
We then build monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual conversational recommendation baselines on DuRecDial 2.0. Experiment results show that the use of additional English data can bring performance improvement for Chinese conversational recommendation, indicating the benefits of DuRecDial 2.0. Finally, this dataset provides a challenging testbed for future studies of monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual conversational recommendation.

DuRecDial 2.0: A Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Conversational Recommendation

An ideal integration of autonomous agents in a human world implies that they are able to collaborate on human terms. In particular, theory of mind plays an important role in maintaining common ground during human collaboration and communication. To enable theory of mind modeling in situated interactions, we introduce a fine-grained dataset of collaborative tasks performed by pairs of human subjects in the 3D virtual blocks world of Minecraft. It provides information that captures partners' beliefs of the world and of each other as an interaction unfolds, bringing abundant opportunities to study human collaborative behaviors in situated language communication. As a first step towards our goal of developing embodied AI agents able to infer belief states of collaborative partners in situ, we build and present results on computational models for several theory of mind tasks.

MindCraft: Theory of Mind Modeling for Situated Dialogue in Collaborative Tasks

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.

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