Dominican Republic

Transfer learning (TL) seeks to improve thelearning of a data-scarce target domain by us-ing information from source domains. How-ever, the source and target domains usuallyhave different data distributions, which maylead to negative transfer. To alleviate this issue,we propose a Wasserstein Selective TransferLearning (WSTL) method. Specifically, theproposed method considers a reinforced selec-tor to select helpful data for transfer learning.We further use a Wasserstein-based discrimi-nator to maximize the empirical distance be-tween the selected source data and target data.The TL module is then trained to minimizethe estimated Wasserstein distance in an ad-versarial manner and provides domain invari-ant features for the reinforced selector. Weadopt an evaluation metric based on the per-formance of the TL module as delayed rewardand a Wasserstein-based metric as immediaterewards to guide the reinforced selector learn-ing. Compared with the competing TL ap-proaches, the proposed method selects datasamples that are closer to the target domain. Italso provides better state features and rewardsignals that lead to better performance withfaster convergence. Extensive experiments onthree real-world text mining tasks demonstratethe effectiveness of the proposed method.

EMNLP 2021

Wasserstein Selective Transfer Learning for Cross-domain Text Mining

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

Spelling Error Correction (SEC) that requires high-level language understanding is a challenging but useful task. Current SEC approaches normally leverage a pre-training then fine-tuning procedure that treats data equally. By contrast, Curriculum Learning (CL) utilizes training data differently during training and has shown its effectiveness in improving both performance and training efficiency in many other NLP tasks. In NMT, a model's performance has been shown sensitive to the difficulty of training examples, and CL has been shown effective to address this. In SEC, the data from different language learners are naturally distributed at different difficulty levels (some errors made by beginners are obvious to correct while some made by fluent speakers are hard), and we expect that designing a curriculum correspondingly for model learning may also help its training and bring about better performance. In this paper, we study how to further improve the performance of the state-of-the-art SEC method with CL, and propose a Self-Supervised Curriculum Learning (SSCL) approach. Specifically, we directly use the cross-entropy loss as criteria for: 1) scoring the difficulty of training data, and 2) evaluating the competence of the model. In our approach, CL improves the model training, which in return improves the CL measurement. In our experiments on the SIGHAN 2015 Chinese spelling check task, we show that SSCL is superior to previous norm-based and uncertainty-aware approaches, and establish a new state of the art (74.38% F1).

Self-Supervised Curriculum Learning for Spelling Error Correction

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods often require many trials before convergence, and no direct interpretability of trained policies is provided. In order to achieve fast convergence and interpretability for the policy in RL, we propose a novel RL method for text-based games with a recent neuro-symbolic framework called Logical Neural Network, which can learn symbolic and interpretable rules in their differentiable network. The method is first to extract first-order logical facts from text observation and external word meaning network (ConceptNet), then train a policy in the network with directly interpretable logical operators. Our experimental results show RL training with the proposed method converges significantly faster than other state-of-the-art neuro-symbolic methods in a TextWorld benchmark.

Neuro-Symbolic Reinforcement Learning with First-Order Logic

Biomedical Concept Normalization (BCN) is widely used in biomedical text processing as a fundamental module. Owing to numerous sur- face variants of biomedical concepts, BCN still remains challenging and unsolved. In this paper, we exploit biomedical concept hypernyms to facilitate BCN. We propose Biomedical Concept Normalizer with Hypernyms (BCNH), a novel framework that adopts list-wise training to make use of both hypernyms and synonyms, and also employs norm constraint on the representation of hypernym-hyponym entity pairs. The experimental results show that BCNH outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model on the NCBI dataset.

Biomedical Concept Normalization by Leveraging Hypernyms

We demonstrate that a pretrained vocabulary should be updated towards a downstream domain when fine-tuning. We propose a fine-tuning strategy called AVocaDo that adapts the vocabulary to the downstream domain by expanding the vocabulary based on a tokenization statistic and by regularizing the newly added words. AVocaDo is applicable to a wide range of NLP tasks in diverse domains without any restrictions, such as massive computing resources or a large domain-specific corpus.

AVocaDo: Strategy for Adapting Vocabulary to Downstream Domain

Although neural models have shown strong performance in datasets such as SNLI, they lack the ability to generalize out-of-distribution (OOD). In this work, we formulate a few-shot learning setup and examine the effects of natural language explanations on OOD generalization. We leverage the templates in the HANS dataset and construct templated natural language explanations for each template. Although generated explanations show competitive BLEU scores against groundtruth explanations, they fail to improve prediction performance. We further show that generated explanations often hallucinate information and miss key elements that indicate the label.

Investigating the Effect of Natural Language Explanations on Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Few-shot NLI

Much of recent progress in NLU was shown to be due to models' learning dataset-specific heuristics. We conduct a case study of generalization in NLI (from MNLI to the adversarially constructed HANS dataset) in a range of BERT-based architectures (adapters, Siamese Transformers, HEX debiasing), as well as with subsampling the data and increasing the model size. We report 2 successful and 3 unsuccessful strategies, all providing insights into how Transformer-based models learn to generalize.

Generalization in NLI: Ways (Not) To Go Beyond Simple Heuristics

For Semi-Supervised VAEs, a popular data-efficient framework in NLP, we justify and test the removal of 2 components. These are:

- The unobserved latent variable (z)
- Kullback-Leibler term.

The resulting model is smaller, faster, allows for more information}to be absorbed into the latent variables, requires no prior to be chosen, and does not lose accuracy in text classification.

Challenging the Semi-Supervised VAE Framework for Text Classification

Recent work in simultaneous machine translation is often trained with conventional full sentence translation corpora, leading to either excessive latency or necessity to anticipate as-yet-unarrived words, when dealing with a language pair whose word orders significantly differ. This is unlike human simultaneous interpreters who produce largely monotonic translations at the expense of the grammaticality of a sentence being translated. In this paper, we thus propose an algorithm to reorder and refine the target side of a full sentence translation corpus, so that the words/phrases between the source and target sentences are aligned largely monotonically, using word alignment and non-autoregressive neural machine translation. We then train a widely used wait-k simultaneous translation model on this reordered-and-refined corpus. The proposed approach improves BLEU scores and resulting translations exhibit enhanced monotonicity with source sentences.

Monotonic Simultaneous Translation with Chunk-wise Reordering and Refinement

Unlike most work on pruning neural networks, we make inference faster. Group lasso regularisation enables pruning entire rows, columns or blocks of parameters that result in a smaller dense network. Because the network is still dense, efficient matrix multiply routines are still used and only minimal software changes are required to support variable layer sizes. Moreover, pruning is applied during training so there is no separate pruning step. Experiments on top of English->German models, which already have state-of-the-art speed and size, show that two-thirds of feedforward connections can be removed with 0.2 BLEU loss. With 6 decoder layers, the pruned model is 34% faster; with 2 tied decoder layers, the pruned model is 14% faster. Pruning entire heads and feedforward connections in a 12–1 encoder-decoder architecture gains an additional 51% speed-up. These push the Pareto frontier with respect to the trade-off between time and quality compared to strong baselines. In the WMT 2021 Efficiency Task, our pruned and quantised models are 1.9–2.7x faster at the cost 0.9–1.7 BLEU in comparison to the unoptimised baselines. Across language pairs, we see similar sparsity patterns: an ascending or U-shaped distribution in encoder feedforward and attention layers and an ascending distribution in the decoder.

Pruning Neural Machine Translation for Speed Using Group Lasso

The performance of NMT systems has improved drastically in the past few years but the translation of multi-sense words still poses a challenge. Since word senses are not represented uniformly in the parallel corpora used for training, there is an excessive use of the most frequent sense in MT output. In this work, we propose CmBT (Contextually-mined Back-Translation), an approach for improving multi-sense word translation leveraging pre-trained cross-lingual contextual word representations (CCWRs). Because of their contextual sensitivity and their large pre-training data, CCWRs can easily capture word senses that are missing or very rare in parallel corpora used to train MT. Specifically, CmBT applies bilingual lexicon induction on CCWRs to mine sense-specific target sentences from a monolingual dataset, and then back-translates these sentences to generate a pseudo parallel corpus as additional training data for an MT system. We test the translation quality of ambiguous words on the MuCoW test suite, which was built to test the word sense disambiguation effectiveness of MT systems. We show that our system improves on the translation of difficult unseen and low frequency word senses.

Wasserstein Selective Transfer Learning for Cross-domain Text Mining

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Wasserstein Selective Transfer Learning for Cross-domain Text Mining

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Self-Supervised Curriculum Learning for Spelling Error Correction

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AutoAspect: Automatic Annotation of Tense and Aspect for Uniform Meaning Representations

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