Dominican Republic

Our goal, in the context of open-domain textual question-answering (QA), is to explain answers by showing the line of reasoning from what is known to the answer, rather than simply showing a fragment of textual evidence (a &quot;rationale&quot;). If this could be done, new opportunities for understanding and debugging the system’s reasoning become possible. Our approach is to generate explanations in the form of entailment trees, namely a tree of multipremise entailment steps from facts that are known, through intermediate conclusions, to the hypothesis of interest (namely the question + answer). To train a model with this skill, we created ENTAILMENTBANK , the first dataset to contain multistep entailment trees. Given a hypothesis (question + answer), we define three increasingly difficult explanation tasks: generate a valid entailment tree given (a) all relevant sentences (b) all relevant and some irrelevant sentences, or (c) a corpus. We show that a strong language model can partially solve these tasks, in particular when the relevant sentences are included in the input (e.g., 35% of trees for (a) are perfect), and with indications of generalization to other domains. This work is significant as it provides a new type of dataset (multistep entailments) and baselines, offering a new avenue for the community to generate richer, more systematic explanations.

EMNLP 2021

Explaining Answers with Entailment Trees

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.

Our goal, in the context of open-domain textual question-answering (QA), is to explain answers by showing the line of reasoning from what is known to the answer, rather than simply showing a fragment of textual evidence (a "rationale"). If this could be done, new opportunities for understanding and debugging the system’s reasoning become possible. Our approach is to generate explanations in the form of entailment trees, namely a tree of multipremise entailment steps from facts that are known, through intermediate conclusions, to the hypothesis of interest (namely the question + answer). To train a model with this skill, we created ENTAILMENTBANK , the first dataset to contain multistep entailment trees. Given a hypothesis (question + answer), we define three increasingly difficult explanation tasks: generate a valid entailment tree given (a) all relevant sentences (b) all relevant and some irrelevant sentences, or (c) a corpus. We show that a strong language model can partially solve these tasks, in particular when the relevant sentences are included in the input (e.g., 35% of trees for (a) are perfect), and with indications of generalization to other domains. This work is significant as it provides a new type of dataset (multistep entailments) and baselines, offering a new avenue for the community to generate richer, more systematic explanations.

poster

Aspect category sentiment analysis has attracted increasing research attention. The dominant methods make use of pre-trained language models by learning effective aspect category-specific representations, and adding specific output layers to its pre-trained representation. We consider a more direct way of making use of pre-trained language models, by casting the ACSA tasks into natural language generation tasks, using natural language sentences to represent the output. Our method al- lows more direct use of pre-trained knowledge in seq2seq language models by directly following the task setting during pre-training. Experiments on several benchmarks show that our method gives the best reported results, having large advantages in few-shot and zero-shot settings.

Solving Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis as a Text Generation Task

The task of learning from only a few examples (called a few-shot setting) is of key importance and relevance to a real-world setting. For question answering (QA), the current state-of-the-art pre-trained models typically need fine-tuning on tens of thousands of examples to obtain good results. Their performance degrades significantly in a few-shot setting (< 100 examples). To address this, we propose a simple fine-tuning framework that leverages pre-trained text-to-text models and is directly aligned with their pre-training framework.

FewshotQA: A simple framework for few-shot learning of question answering tasks using pre-trained text-to-text models

Dialogue summarization has drawn much attention recently. Especially in the customer service domain, agents could use dialogue summaries to help boost their works by quickly knowing customer’s issues and service progress. These applications require summaries to contain the perspective of a single speaker and have a clear topic flow structure, while neither are available in existing datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel Chinese dataset for Customer Service Dialogue Summarization (CSDS). CSDS improves the abstractive summaries in two aspects: (1) In addition to the overall summary for the whole dialogue, role-oriented summaries are also provided to acquire different speakers’ viewpoints. (2) All the summaries sum up each topic separately, thus containing the topic-level structure of the dialogue. We define tasks in CSDS as generating the overall summary and different role-oriented summaries for a given dialogue. Next, we compare various summarization methods on CSDS, and experiment results show that existing methods are prone to generate redundant and incoherent summaries. Besides, the performance becomes much worse when analyzing the performance on role-oriented summaries and topic structures. We hope that this study could benchmark Chinese dialogue summarization and benefit further studies.

CSDS: A Fine-Grained Chinese Dataset for Customer Service Dialogue Summarization

Sentiment analysis systems have been shown to exhibit sensitivity to protected attributes. Round-trip translation, on the other hand, has been shown to normalize text. We explore the impact of round-trip translation on the demographic parity of sentiment classifiers and show how round-trip translation consistently improves classification fairness at test time (reducing up to 27\% of between-group gaps). We also explore the idea of retraining sentiment classifiers on round-trip-translated data.

The Effect of Round-Trip Translation on Fairness in Sentiment Analysis

Humor detection has gained attention in recent years due to the desire to understand user-generated content with figurative language. However, substantial individual and cultural differences in humor perception make it very difficult to collect a large-scale humor dataset with reliable humor labels. We propose CHoRaL, a framework to generate perceived humor labels on Facebook posts, using the naturally available user reactions to these posts with no manual annotation needed. CHoRaL provides both binary labels and continuous scores of humor and non-humor. We present the largest dataset to date with labeled humor on 785K posts related to COVID-19. Additionally, we analyze the expression of COVID-related humor in social media by extracting lexico-semantic and affective features from the posts, and build humor detection models with performance similar to humans. CHoRaL enables the development of large-scale humor detection models on any topic and opens a new path to the study of humor on social media.

CHoRaL: Collecting Humor Reaction Labels from Millions of Social Media Users

In this paper, we develop bilingual transfer learning approaches to improve Arabic coreference resolution by leveraging additional English annotation via bilingual or multilingual pre-trained transformers. We show that bilingual transfer learning improves the strong transformer-based neural coreference models by 2-4 F1. We also systemically investigate the effectiveness of several pre-trained transformer models that differ in training corpora, languages covered, and model capacity. Our best model achieves a new state-of-the-art performance of 64.55 F1 on the Arabic OntoNotes dataset. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/bnmin/arabic_coref.

Exploring Pre-Trained Transformers and Bilingual Transfer Learning for Arabic Coreference Resolution

Coreference decisions among event mentions and among co-occurring entity mentions are highly interdependent, thus motivating joint inference. Capturing the uncertainty over each variable can be crucial for inference among multiple dependent variables. Previous work on joint coreference employs heuristic approaches, lacking well-defined objectives, and lacking modeling of uncertainty on each side of the joint problem. We present a new approach of joint coreference, including (1) a formal cost function inspired by Dasgupta's cost for hierarchical clustering, and (2) a representation for uncertainty of clustering of event and entity mentions, again based on a hierarchical structure. We describe an alternating optimization method for inference that when clustering event mentions, considers the uncertainty of the clustering of entity mentions and vice-versa. We show that our proposed joint model provides empirical advantages over state-of-the-art independent and joint models.

Event and Entity Coreference using Trees to Encode Uncertainty in Joint Decisions

This paper presents a new corpus and annotation guideline for a novel coreference resolution task on fictional texts, and analyzes its unique characteristics. FantasyCoref contains 211 stories of Grimms’ Fairy Tales and 3 other fantasy literature annotated in the omniscient writer’s point of view (OWV) to handle distinctive aspects in this genre. This task is more challenging than general coreference resolution in two ways. First, documents in our corpus are 2.5 times longer than the ones in OntoNotes, raising a new layer of difficulty in resolving long-distant referents. Second, annotation of literary styles and concepts raise several issues which are not sufficiently addressed in the existing annotation guidelines. Hence, considerations on such issues and the concept of OWV are necessary to achieve high inter-annotator agreement (IAA) in coreference resolution of fictional texts. We carefully conduct annotation tasks in four stages to ensure the quality of our annotation. As a result, a high IAA score of 87% is achieved using the standard coreference evaluation metric. Finally, state-of-the-art coreference resolution approaches are evaluated on our corpus. After training with our annotated dataset, there was a 2.59% and 3.06% improvement over the model trained on the OntoNotes dataset. Also, we observe that the portion of errors specific to fictional texts declines after the training.

FantasyCoref: Coreference Resolution on Fantasy Literature Through Omniscient Writer’s Point of View

SOTA coreference resolution produces increasingly impressive scores on the OntoNotes benchmark. However lack of comparable data following the same scheme for more genres makes it difficult to evaluate generalizability to open domain data. Zhu et al. (2021) introduced the creation of the OntoGUM corpus for evaluating geralizability of the latest neural LM-based end-to-end systems. This paper covers details of the mapping process which is a set of deterministic rules applied to the rich syntactic and discourse annotations manually annotated in the GUM corpus. Out-of-domain evaluation across 12 genres shows nearly 15-20% degradation for both deterministic and deep learning systems, indicating a lack of generalizability or covert overfitting in existing coreference resolution models.

Anatomy of OntoGUM---Adapting GUM to the OntoNotes Scheme to Evaluate Robustness of SOTA Coreference Algorithms

Issues with coreference resolution are one of the most frequently mentioned challenges for information extraction from the biomedical literature. Thus, the biomedical genre has long been the second most researched genre for coreference resolution after the news domain, and the subject of a great deal of research for NLP in general. In recent years this interest has grown enormously leading to the development of a number of substantial datasets, of domain-specific contextual language models, and of several architectures. In this paper we review the state of-the-art of coreference in the biomedical domain with a particular attention on these most recent developments.

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Solving Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis as a Text Generation Task

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Explaining Answers with Entailment Trees

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