Dominican Republic

The task of generating explanatory notes for language learners is known as feedback comment generation. Although various generation techniques are available, little is known about which methods are appropriate for this task. Nagata (2019) demonstrates the effectiveness of neural-retrieval-based methods in generating feedback comments for preposition use. Retrieval-based methods have limitations in that they can only output feedback comments existing in a given training data. Furthermore, feedback comments can be made on other grammatical and writing items than preposition use, which is still unaddressed. To shed light on these points, we investigate a wider range of methods for generating many feedback comments in this study. Our close analysis of the type of task leads us to investigate three different architectures for comment generation: (i) a neural-retrieval-based method as a baseline, (ii) a pointer-generator-based generation method as a neural seq2seq method, (iii) a retrieve-and-edit method, a hybrid of (i) and (ii). Intuitively, the pointer-generator should outperform neural-retrieval, and retrieve-and-edit should perform best. However, in our experiments, this expectation is completely overturned. We closely analyze the results to reveal the major causes of these counter-intuitive results and report on our findings from the experiments.

EMNLP 2021

Exploring Methods for Generating Feedback Comments for Writing Learning

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

Recent metaphor identification approaches mainly consider the contextual text features within a sentence or introduce external linguistic features to the model. But they usually ignore the extra information that the data can provide, such as the contextual metaphor information and broader discourse information. In this paper, we propose a model augmented with hierarchical contextualized representation to extract more information from both sentence-level and discourse-level. At the sentence level, we leverage the metaphor information of words that except the target word in the sentence to strengthen the reasoning ability of our model via a novel label-enhanced contextualized representation. At the discourse level, the position-aware global memory network is adopted to learn long-range dependency among the same words within a discourse. Finally, our model combines the representations obtained from these two parts. The experiment results on two tasks of the VUA dataset show that our model outperforms every other state-of-the-art method that also does not use any external knowledge except what the pre-trained language model contains.

Label-Enhanced Hierarchical Contextualized Representation for Sequential Metaphor Identification

Pre-trained language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in solving various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. There has been increasing interest in what knowledge these LMs contain and how we can extract that knowledge, treating LMs as knowledge bases (KBs). While there has been much work on probing LMs in the general domain, there has been little attention to whether these powerful LMs can be used as domain-specific KBs. To this end, we create the BioLAMA benchmark, which is comprised of 49K biomedical factual knowledge triples for probing biomedical LMs. We find that biomedical LMs with recently proposed probing methods can achieve up to 18.51% Acc@5 on retrieving biomedical knowledge. Although this seems promising given the task difficulty, our detailed analyses reveal that most predictions are highly correlated with prompt templates without any subjects, hence producing similar results on each relation and hindering their capabilities to be used as domain-specific KBs. We hope that BioLAMA can serve as a challenging benchmark for biomedical factual probing.

Can Language Models be Biomedical Knowledge Bases?

Our paper aims to automate the generation of medical reports from chest X-ray image inputs, a critical yet time-consuming task for radiologists. Existing medical report generation efforts emphasize producing human-readable reports, yet the generated text may not be well aligned to the clinical facts. Our generated medical reports, on the other hand, are fluent and, more importantly, clinically accurate. This is achieved by our fully differentiable and end-to-end paradigm that contains three complementary modules: taking the chest X-ray images and clinical history document of patients as inputs, our classification module produces an internal checklist of disease-related topics, referred to as enriched disease embedding; the embedding representation is then passed to our transformer-based generator, to produce the medical report; meanwhile, our generator also creates a weighted embedding representation, which is fed to our interpreter to ensure consistency with respect to disease-related topics. Empirical evaluations demonstrate very promising results achieved by our approach on commonly-used metrics concerning language fluency and clinical accuracy. Moreover, noticeable performance gains are consistently observed when additional input information is available, such as the clinical document and extra scans from different views.

Automated Generation of Accurate & Fluent Medical X-ray Reports

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.

Wasserstein Selective Transfer Learning for Cross-domain Text Mining

We propose a novel task of jointly repairing program codes and generating commit messages. Code repair and commit message generation are two essential and related tasks for software development. However, existing work usually performs the two tasks independently. We construct a multilingual triple dataset including buggy code, fixed code, and commit messages for this novel task. We provide the cascaded models as baseline, which are enhanced with different training approaches, including the teacher-student method, the multi-task method, and the back-translation method. To deal with the error propagation problem of the cascaded method, the joint model is proposed that can both repair the code and generate the commit message in a unified framework. Experimental results show that the enhanced cascaded model with teacher-student method and multitask-learning method achieves the best score on different metrics of automated code repair, and the joint model behaves better than the cascaded model on commit message generation.

Jointly Learning to Repair Code and Generate Commit Message

This paper proposes a technique for adding a new source or target language to an existing multilingual NMT model without re-training it on the initial set of languages. It consists in replacing the shared vocabulary with a small language-specific vocabulary and fine-tuning the new embeddings on the new language's parallel data. Some additional language-specific components may be trained to improve performance (e.g., Transformer layers or adapter modules). Because the parameters of the original model are not modified, its performance on the initial languages does not degrade. We show on two sets of experiments (small-scale on TED Talks, and large-scale on ParaCrawl) that this approach performs as well or better as the more costly alternatives; and that it has excellent zero-shot performance: training on English-centric data is enough to translate between the new language and any of the initial languages.

Continual Learning in Multilingual NMT via Language-Specific Embeddings

Context-aware neural machine translation (NMT) incorporates contextual information of surrounding texts, that can improve the translation quality of document-level machine translation. Many existing works on context-aware NMT have focused on developing new model architectures for incorporating additional contexts and have shown some promising results. However, most of existing works rely on cross-entropy loss, resulting in limited use of contextual information. In this paper, we propose CorefCL, a novel data augmentation and contrastive learning scheme based on coreference between the source and contextual sentences. By corrupting automatically detected coreference mentions in the contextual sentence, CorefCL can train the model to be sensitive to coreference inconsistency. We experimented with our method on common context-aware NMT models and two document-level translation tasks. In the experiments, our method consistently improved BLEU of compared models on English-German and English-Korean tasks. We also show that our method significantly improves coreference resolution in the English-German contrastive test suite.

Contrastive Learning for Context-aware Neural Machine Translation Using Coreference Information

BERTScore, a recently proposed automatic metric for machine translation quality, uses BERT, a large pre-trained language model to evaluate candidate translations with respect to a gold translation. Taking advantage of BERT's semantic and syntactic abilities, BERTScore seeks to avoid the flaws of earlier approaches like BLEU, instead scoring candidate translations based on their semantic similarity to the gold sentence. However, BERT is not infallible; while its performance on NLP tasks set a new state of the art in general, studies of specific syntactic and semantic phenomena have shown where BERT's performance deviates from that of humans more generally.

This naturally raises the questions we address in this paper: what are the strengths and weaknesses of BERTScore? Do they relate to known weaknesses on the part of BERT? We find that while BERTScore can detect when a candidate differs from a reference in important content words, it is less sensitive to smaller errors, especially if the candidate is lexically or stylistically similar to the reference.

A Fine-Grained Analysis of BERTScore

Automatic metrics are commonly used as the exclusive tool for declaring the superiority of one machine translation system's quality over another. The community choice of automatic metric guides research directions and industrial developments by deciding which models are deemed better. 
Evaluating metrics correlations with sets of human judgements has been limited by the size of these sets. 
In this paper, we corroborate how reliable metrics are in contrast to human judgements on -- to the best of our knowledge -- the largest collection of judgements reported in the literature. Arguably, pairwise rankings of two systems are the most common evaluation tasks in research or deployment scenarios. Taking human judgement as a gold standard, we investigate which metrics have the highest accuracy in predicting translation quality rankings for such system pairs. 
Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of various metrics across different language pairs and domains. Lastly, we show that the sole use of BLEU impeded the development of improved models leading to bad deployment decisions.
We release the collection of 2.3M sentence-level human judgements for 4380 systems for further analysis and replication of our work.

To Ship or Not to Ship: An Extensive Evaluation of Automatic Metrics for Machine Translation

Many works proposed methods to improve the performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models in a domain/multi-domain adaptation scenario. However, an understanding of how NMT baselines represent text domain information internally is still lacking. Here we analyze the sentence representations learned by NMT Transformers and show that these explicitly include the information on text domains, even after only seeing the input sentences without domains labels. Furthermore, we show that this internal information is enough to cluster sentences by their underlying domains without supervision. We show that NMT models produce clusters better aligned to the actual domains compared to pre-trained language models (LMs). Notably, when computed on document-level, NMT cluster-to-domain correspondence nears 100%. We use these findings together with an approach to NMT domain adaptation using automatically extracted domains. Whereas previous work relied on external LMs for text clustering, we propose re-using the NMT model as a source of unsupervised clusters. We perform an extensive experimental study comparing two approaches across two data scenarios, three language pairs, and both sentence-level and document-level clustering, showing equal or significantly superior performance compared to LMs.

Exploring Methods for Generating Feedback Comments for Writing Learning

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