Dominican Republic

A challenge in designing high-stakes language assessments is calibrating the test item difficulties, either a priori or from limited pilot test data. While prior work has addressed `cold start&#39; estimation of item difficulties without piloting, we devise a multi-task generalized linear model with BERT features to *jump-start* these estimates, rapidly improving their quality with as few as 500 test-takers and a small sample of item exposures (≈6 each) from a large item bank (≈4,000 items). Our joint model provides a principled way to compare test-taker proficiency, item difficulty, and language proficiency frameworks like the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). This also enables new item difficulty estimates without piloting them first, which in turn limits item exposure and thus enhances test security. Finally, using operational data from the Duolingo English Test, a high-stakes English proficiency test, we find that difficulty estimates derived using this method correlate strongly with lexico-grammatical features that correlate with reading complexity.

EMNLP 2021

Jump-Starting Item Parameters for Adaptive Language Tests

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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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

A challenge in designing high-stakes language assessments is calibrating the test item difficulties, either a priori or from limited pilot test data. While prior work has addressed `cold start' estimation of item difficulties without piloting, we devise a multi-task generalized linear model with BERT features to *jump-start* these estimates, rapidly improving their quality with as few as 500 test-takers and a small sample of item exposures (≈6 each) from a large item bank (≈4,000 items). Our joint model provides a principled way to compare test-taker proficiency, item difficulty, and language proficiency frameworks like the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). This also enables new item difficulty estimates without piloting them first, which in turn limits item exposure and thus enhances test security. Finally, using operational data from the Duolingo English Test, a high-stakes English proficiency test, we find that difficulty estimates derived using this method correlate strongly with lexico-grammatical features that correlate with reading complexity.

poster

Multi-hop Question Answering (QA) is a challenging task because it requires precise reasoning with entity relations at every step towards the answer. The relations can be represented in terms of labels in knowledge graph (e.g., spouse) or text in text corpus (e.g., they have been married for 26 years). Existing models usually infer the answer by predicting the sequential relation path or aggregating the hidden graph features. The former is hard to optimize, and the latter lacks interpretability. In this paper, we propose TransferNet, an effective and transparent model for multi-hop QA, which supports both label and text relations in a unified framework. TransferNet jumps across entities at multiple steps. At each step, it attends to different parts of the question, computes activated scores for relations, and then transfer the previous entity scores along activated relations in a differentiable way. We carry out extensive experiments on three datasets and demonstrate that TransferNet surpasses the state-of-the-art models by a large margin. In particular, on MetaQA, it achieves 100% accuracy in 2-hop and 3-hop questions. By qualitative analysis, we show that TransferNet has transparent and interpretable intermediate results.

TransferNet: An Effective and Transparent Framework for Multi-hop Question Answering over Relation Graph

Weakly-supervised table question-answering (TableQA) models have achieved state-of-art performance by using pre-trained BERT transformer to jointly encoding a question and a table to produce structured query for the question. However, in practical settings TableQA systems are deployed over table corpora having topic and word distributions quite distinct from BERT’s pretraining corpus. In this work we simulate the practical topic shift scenario by designing novel challenge benchmarks WikiSQL-TS and WikiTQ-TS1, consisting of train-dev-test splits in five distinct topic groups, based on the popular WikiSQL and WikiTableQuestions datasets. We empirically show that, despite pre-training on large open-domain text, performance of models degrades significantly when they are evaluated on unseen topics. In response, we propose T3QA (Topic Transferable Table Question Answering) a pragmatic adaptation framework for TableQA comprising of: (1) topic-specific vocabulary injection into BERT, (2) a novel text-to-text transformer generator (such as T5, GPT2) based natural language question generation pipeline focused on generating topic specific training data, and (3) a logical form reranker. We show that T3QA provides a reasonably good baseline for our topic shift benchmarks. We believe our topic split benchmarks will lead to robust TableQA solutions that are better suited for practical deployment.

Topic Transferable Table Question Answering

Recent work learns contextual representations of source code by reconstructing tokens from their context. For downstream semantic understanding tasks like code clone detection, these representations should ideally capture program functionality. However, we show that the popular reconstruction-based RoBERTa model is sensitive to source code edits, even when the edits preserve semantics. We propose ContraCode: a contrastive pre-training task that learns code functionality, not form. ContraCode pre-trains a neural network to identify functionally similar variants of a program among many non-equivalent distractors. We scalably generate these variants using an automated source-to-source compiler as a form of data augmentation. Contrastive pre-training outperforms RoBERTa on an adversarial code clone detection benchmark by 39% AUROC. Surprisingly, improved adversarial robustness translates to better accuracy over natural code; ContraCode improves summarization and TypeScript type inference accuracy by 2 to 13 percentage points over competitive baselines. All source is available at https://github.com/parasj/contracode.

Contrastive Code Representation Learning

We study the problem of generating arithmetic math word problems (MWPs) given a math equation that specifies the mathematical computation and a context that specifies the problem scenario. Existing approaches are prone to generating MWPs that are either mathematically invalid or have unsatisfactory language quality. They also either ignore the context or require manual specification of a problem template, which compromises the diversity of the generated MWPs. In this paper, we develop a novel MWP generation approach that leverages i) pre-trained language models and a context keyword selection model to improve the language quality of the generated MWPs and ii) an equation consistency constraint for math equations to improve the mathematical validity of the generated MWPs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on three real-world MWP datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to various baselines.

Math Word Problem Generation with Mathematical Consistency and Problem Context Constraints

A method for creating a vision-and-language (V&L) model is to extend a language model through structural modifications and V&L pre-training. Such an extension aims to make a V&L model inherit the capability of natural language understanding (NLU) from the original language model. To see how well this is achieved, we propose to evaluate V&L models using an NLU benchmark (GLUE). We compare five V&L models, including single-stream and dual-stream models, trained with the same pre-training. Dual-stream models, with their higher modality independence achieved by approximately doubling the number of parameters, are expected to preserve the NLU capability better. Our main finding is that the dual-stream scores are not much different than the single-stream scores, contrary to expectation. Further analysis shows that pre-training causes the performance drop in NLU tasks with few exceptions. These results suggest that adopting a single-stream structure and devising the pre-training could be an effective method for improving the maintenance of language knowledge in V&L extensions.

Effect of Visual Extensions on Natural Language Understanding in Vision-and-Language Models

Web search is an essential way for humans to obtain information, but it’s still a great challenge for machines to understand the contents of web pages. In this paper, we introduce the task of structural reading comprehension (SRC) on the web. Given a web page and a question about it, the task is to find the answer from the web page. This task requires a system not only to understand the semantics of texts but also the structure of the web page. Moreover, we proposed WebSRC, a novel Web-based Structural Reading Comprehension dataset. WebSRC consists of 400K question-answer pairs, which are collected from 6.4K web pages. Along with the QA pairs, corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata are also provided in our dataset. Each question in WebSRC requires a certain structural understanding of a web page to answer, and the answer is either a text span on the web page or yes/no. We evaluate various baselines on our dataset to show the difficulty of our task. We also investigate the usefulness of structural information and visual features. Our dataset and baselines have been publicly available.

WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension

This paper proposes to study a ﬁne-grained semantic novelty detection task, which can be illustrated with the following example. It is normal that a person walks a dog in the park, but if someone says "A man is walking a chicken in the park," it is novel. Given a set of natural language descriptions of normal scenes, we want to identify descriptions of novel scenes. We are not aware of any existing work that solves the problem. Although existing novelty or anomaly detection algorithms are applicable, since they are usually topic-based, they perform poorly on our ﬁne-grained semantic novelty detection task. This paper proposes an effective model (called GAT-MA) to solve the problem and also contributes a new dataset. Experimental evaluation shows that GAT-MA outperforms 11 baselines by large margins.

Semantic Novelty Detection in Natural Language Descriptions

What, if anything, does ”traditional” feature-based learning to rank has to offer in the age of muppets?

Learning to Rank in the Age of Muppets: Effectiveness–EfficiencyTradeoffs in Multi-Stage Ranking

Despite transformers' impressive accuracy, their computational cost is often prohibitive to use with limited computational resources. Most previous approaches to improve inference efficiency require a separate model for each possible computational budget. In this paper, we extend PoWER-BERT (Goyal et al., 2020) and propose Length-Adaptive Transformer that can be used for various inference scenarios after one-shot training. We train a transformer with LengthDrop, a structural variant of dropout, which stochastically determines a sequence length at each layer. We then conduct a multi-objective evolutionary search to find a length configuration that maximizes the accuracy and minimizes the efficiency metric under any given computational budget. Additionally, we significantly extend the applicability of PoWER-BERT beyond sequence-level classification into token-level classification with Drop-and-Restore process that drops word-vectors temporarily in intermediate layers and restores at the last layer if necessary. We empirically verify the utility of the proposed approach by demonstrating the superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off under various setups, including span-based question answering and text classification. Code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/length-adaptive-transformer.

Length-Adaptive Transformer: Train Once with Length Drop, Use Anytime with Search

We address the problem of link prediction between entities and relations of knowledge graphs. State of the art techniques that address this problem, while increasingly accurate, are computationally intensive. In this paper we cast link prediction as a sparse convex program whose solution defines a quadratic form that is used as a ranking function. The structure of our convex program is such that standard sup- port vector machine software packages, which are numerically robust and efficient, can solve it. We show that on benchmark data sets, our model’s performance is competitive with state of the art models, but training times can be reduced by a factor of 40 using only CPU- based (and not GPU-accelerated) computing resources. This approach may be suitable for applications where balancing the demands of graph completion performance against compu- tational efficiency is a desirable trade-off.

Jump-Starting Item Parameters for Adaptive Language Tests

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Jump-Starting Item Parameters for Adaptive Language Tests

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TransferNet: An Effective and Transparent Framework for Multi-hop Question Answering over Relation Graph

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Invited Talk: Keeping Track of Entities Over Time, Minds, and Knowledge Sources

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