Dominican Republic

Recent work on multilingual AMR-to-text generation has exclusively focused on data augmentation strategies that utilize silver AMR. However, this assumes a high quality of generated AMRs, potentially limiting the transferability to the target task. In this paper, we investigate different techniques for automatically generating AMR annotations, where we aim to study which source of information yields better multilingual results. Our models trained on gold AMR with silver (machine translated) sentences outperform approaches which leverage generated silver AMR. We find that combining both complementary sources of information further improves multilingual AMR-to-text generation. Our models surpass the previous state of the art for German, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese by a large margin.

EMNLP 2021

Smelting Gold and Silver for Improved Multilingual AMR-to-Text Generation

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

A new metric BaryScore to evaluate text generation based on deep contextualized embeddings (e.g, BERT, Roberta, ELMo) is introduced. This metric is motivated by a new framework relying on optimal transport tools, i.e, Wasserstein distance and barycenter. By modelling the layer output of deep contextualized embeddings as a probability distribution rather than by a vector embedding; this framework provides a natural way to aggregate the different outputs through the Wasserstein space topology. In addition, it provides theoretical grounds to our metric and offers an alternative to available solutions (e.g, MoverScore and BertScore). Numerical evaluation is performed on four different tasks: machine translation, summarization, data2text generation and image captioning. Our results show that BaryScore outperforms other BERT based metrics and exhibits more consistent behaviour in particular for text summarization.

Automatic Text Evaluation through the Lens of Wasserstein Barycenters

Dialogue summarization comes with its own peculiar challenges as opposed to news or scientific articles summarization. In this work, we explore four different challenges of the task: handling and differentiating parts of the dialogue belonging to multiple speakers, negation understanding, reasoning about the situation, and informal language understanding. Using a pretrained sequence-to-sequence language model, we explore speaker name substitution, negation scope highlighting, multi-task learning with relevant tasks, and pretraining on in-domain data. Our experiments show that our proposed techniques indeed improve summarization performance, outperforming strong baselines.

A Bag of Tricks for Dialogue Summarization

The design of widespread vision-and-language datasets and pre-trained encoders directly adopts, or draws inspiration from, the concepts and images of ImageNet. While one can hardly overestimate how much this benchmark contributed to progress in computer vision, it is mostly derived from lexical databases and image queries in English, resulting in source material with a North American or Western European bias. Therefore, we devise a new protocol to construct an ImageNet-style hierarchy representative of more languages and cultures. In particular, we let the selection of both concepts and images be entirely driven by native speakers, rather than scraping them automatically. Specifically, we focus on a typologically diverse set of languages, namely, Indonesian, Mandarin Chinese, Swahili, Tamil, and Turkish. On top of the concepts and images obtained through this new protocol, we create a multilingual dataset for {M}ulticultur{a}l {R}easoning over {V}ision and {L}anguage (MaRVL) by eliciting statements from native speaker annotators about pairs of images. The task consists of discriminating whether each grounded statement is true or false. We establish a series of baselines using state-of-the-art models and find that their cross-lingual transfer performance lags dramatically behind supervised performance in English. These results invite us to reassess the robustness and accuracy of current state-of-the-art models beyond a narrow domain, but also open up new exciting challenges for the development of truly multilingual and multicultural systems.

Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures

The Winograd Schema (WS) has been proposed as a test for measuring commonsense capabilities of models. Recently, pre-trained language model-based approaches have boosted performance on some WS benchmarks but the source of improvement is still not clear. This paper suggests that the apparent progress on WS may not necessarily reflect progress in commonsense reasoning. To support this claim, we first show that the current evaluation method of WS is sub-optimal and propose a modification that uses twin sentences for evaluation. We also propose two new baselines that indicate the existence of artifacts in WS benchmarks. We then develop a method for evaluating WS-like sentences in a zero-shot setting to account for the commonsense reasoning abilities acquired during the pretraining and observe that popular language models perform randomly in this setting when using our more strict evaluation. We conclude that the observed progress is mostly due to the use of supervision in training WS models, which is not likely to successfully support all the required commonsense reasoning skills and knowledge. The code and evaluation are available at: https://github.com/yanaiela/winograd_square_one

Back to Square One: Artifact Detection, Training and Commonsense Disentanglement in the Winograd Schema

One of the key motivations behind contextualised word-embeddings is handling polysemy. While this is a fundamental problem of language modeling, there are other subtler forms of contextual semantic meaning which are not explicitly lexicalised. Rather than having multiple meanings, some words have underspecified meanings which must be filled in contextually. Our on-going project aims to address the specific case of intersective adjectives (e.g. "Canadian") and strictly subsective adjectives (e.g. "good") in contextual word embeddings. Intersective adjectives have roughly the same meaning regardless of context, whereas subsective adjectives can vary drastically depending on context and in a compositional manner. We find that for BERT models, subsective adjectives have much more variance in their embeddings than intersectives adjectives.

Do contextual language embeddings distinguish between intersective and strictly subsective adjectives?

Neural sequence models trained with maximum likelihood estimation have led to breakthroughs in many tasks, where success is defined by the gap between training and test performance. However, their ability to achieve stronger forms of generalization remains unclear. We consider the problem of symbolic mathematical integration, as it requires generalizing systematically beyond the test set. We develop a methodology for evaluating generalization that takes advantage of the problem domain's structure and access to a verifier. Despite promising in-distribution performance of sequence-to-sequence models in this domain, we demonstrate challenges in achieving robustness, compositionality, and out-of-distribution generalization, through both carefully constructed manual test suites and a genetic algorithm that automatically finds large collections of failures in a controllable manner. Our investigation highlights the difficulty of generalizing well with the predominant modeling and learning approach, and the importance of evaluating beyond the test set, across different aspects of generalization.

Generalization in neural sequence models: a case study in symbolic mathematics

Explainable AI (XAI) systems have received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. In research, XAI is often explored without involving humans. However, by its very definition, XAI is made for humans and should therefore also be evaluated by humans. For example, how can XAI help humans in their decision making? Our goal is to explore this in the context of knowledge graphs.

Human Evaluation Study for Explaining Knowledge Graph Completion

Neural models for the various flavours of morphological reinflection tasks have proven to be extremely accurate given ample labeled data, yet labeled data may be slow and costly to obtain. In this work we aim to overcome this annotation bottleneck by bootstrapping labeled data from a seed as small as five labeled inflection tables, accompanied by a large bulk of unlabeled text.
Our bootstrapping method exploits the orthographic and semantic regularities in morphological systems in a two-phased setup, where word tagging based on analogies is followed by word pairing based on distances.
Our experiments with the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem over eight typologically different languages show that in languages with relatively simple morphology, orthographic regularities on their own allow inflection models to achieve respectable accuracy. Combined orthographic and semantic regularities alleviate difficulties with particularly complex morpho-phonological systems. We further show that our bootstrapping methods substantially outperform hallucination-based methods commonly used for overcoming the annotation bottleneck in morphological reinflection tasks.

Minimal Supervision for Morphological Inflection

To translate natural language questions into executable database queries, most approaches rely on a fully annotated training set. Annotating a large dataset with queries is difficult as it requires query-language expertise. We reduce this burden using grounded in databases intermediate question representations. These representations are simpler to collect and were originally crowdsourced within the Break dataset (Wolfson et al., 2020). Our pipeline consists of two parts: a neural semantic parser that converts natural language questions into the intermediate representations and a non-trainable transpiler to the SPARQL query language (a standard language for accessing knowledge graphs and semantic web). We chose SPARQL because its queries are structurally closer to our intermediate representations (compared to SQL). We observe that the execution accuracy of queries constructed by our model on the challenging Spider dataset is comparable with the state-of-the-art text-to-SQL methods trained with annotated SQL queries. Our code and data are publicly available (https://github.com/yandex-research/sparqling-queries).

SPARQLing Database Queries from Intermediate Question Decompositions

Stance detection concerns the classification of a writer's viewpoint towards a target. There are different task variants, e.g., stance of a tweet vs. a full article, or stance with respect to a claim vs. an (implicit) topic. Moreover, task definitions vary, which includes the label inventory, the data collection, and the annotation protocol. All these aspects hinder cross-domain studies, as they require changes to standard domain adaptation approaches. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of 16 stance detection datasets, and we explore the possibility for cross-domain learning from them. Moreover, we propose an end-to-end unsupervised framework for out-of-domain prediction of unseen, user-defined labels. In particular, we combine domain adaptation techniques such as mixture of experts and domain-adversarial training with label embeddings, and we demonstrate sizable performance gains over strong baselines, both (i) in-domain, i.e., for seen targets, and (ii) out-of-domain, i.e., for unseen targets. Finally, we perform an exhaustive analysis of the cross-domain results, and we highlight the important factors influencing the model performance.

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Automatic Text Evaluation through the Lens of Wasserstein Barycenters

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Smelting Gold and Silver for Improved Multilingual AMR-to-Text Generation

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