Dominican Republic

Human knowledge is collectively encoded in the roughly 6500 languages spoken around the world, but it is not distributed equally across languages.
Hence, for information-seeking question answering (QA) systems to adequately serve speakers of all languages, they need to operate cross-lingually.
In this work, we investigate the capabilities of multilingually pre-trained language models on cross-lingual QA. We find that explicitly aligning the representations across languages with a post-hoc fine-tuning step generally leads to improved performance. We additionally investigate the effect of data size as well as the language choice in this fine-tuning step, also releasing a dataset for evaluating cross-lingual QA systems.

EMNLP 2021

Investigating Post-pretraining Representation Alignment for Cross-Lingual Question Answering

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.

workshop paper

Stereotypical character roles—also known as archetypes or dramatis personae—play an important function in narratives: they facilitate efficient communication with bundles of default characteristics and associations and ease understanding of those characters’ roles in the overall narrative. We present a fully unsupervised k-means clustering approach for learning stereotypical roles given only structural plot information. We demonstrate the technique on Vladimir Propp’s structural theory of Russian folktales (captured in the extended ProppLearner corpus, with 46 tales), showing that our approach can induce six out of seven of Propp’s dramatis personae with F1 measures of up to 0.70 (0.58 average), with an additional category for minor characters. We have explored various feature sets and variations of a cluster evaluation method. The best performing feature set comprises plot functions, unigrams, tf-idf weights, and embeddings over coreference chain heads. Roles that are mentioned more often (Hero, Villain), or have clearly distinct plot patterns (Princess) are more strongly differentiated than less frequent or distinct roles (Dispatcher, Helper, Donor). Detailed error analysis suggests that the quality of the coreference chain and plot functions annotations are critical for this task. We provide all our data and code for reproducibility.

Inducing Stereotypical Character Roles from Plot Structure

Coreference resolution is key to many natural language processing tasks and yet has been relatively unexplored in Sign Language Processing. In signed languages, space is primarily used to establish reference. Solving coreference resolution for signed languages would not only enable higher-level Sign Language Processing systems, but also enhance our understanding of language in different modalities and of situated references, which are key problems in studying grounded language. In this paper, we: (1) introduce Signed Coreference Resolution (SCR), a new challenge for coreference modeling and Sign Language Processing; (2) collect an annotated corpus of German Sign Language with gold labels for coreference together with an annotation software for the task; (3) explore features of hand gesture, iconicity, and spatial situated properties and move forward to propose a set of linguistically informed heuristics and unsupervised models for the task; (4) put forward several proposals about ways to address the complexities of this challenge effectively.

Signed Coreference Resolution

Recent state-of-the-art approaches in open-domain dialogue include training end-to-end deep-learning models to learn various conversational features like emotional content of response, symbolic transitions of dialogue contexts in a knowledge graph and persona of the agent and the user, among others. While neural models have shown reasonable results, modelling the cognitive processes that humans use when conversing with each other may improve the agent's quality of responses. A key element of natural conversation is to tailor one's response such that it accounts for concepts that the speaker and listener may or may not know and the contextual relevance of all prior concepts used in conversation. We show that a rich representation and explicit modeling of these psychological processes can improve predictions made by existing neural network models. In this work, we propose a novel probabilistic approach using Markov Random Fields (MRF) to augment existing deep-learning methods for improved next utterance prediction. Using human and automatic evaluations, we show that our augmentation approach significantly improves the performance of existing state-of-the-art retrieval models for open-domain conversational agents.

MRF-Chat: Improving Dialogue with Markov Random Fields

We introduce a new variation of the language modeling approach that uses schema-driven prompting to provide task-aware history encoding that is used for both categorical and non-categorical slots. We further improve performance by augmenting the prompting with schema descriptions, a naturally occurring source of in-domain knowledge. Our purely generative system achieves state-of-the-art performance onMultiWOZ 2.2 and achieves competitive performance on two other benchmarks: Multi-WOZ 2.1 and M2M.

Dialogue State Tracking with a Language Model using Schema-Driven Prompting

Politicians often have underlying agendas when reacting to events. Arguments in contexts of various events reflect a fairly consistent set of agendas for a given entity. In spite of recent advances in Pretrained Language Models, those text representations are not designed to capture such nuanced patterns. In this paper, we propose a Compositional Reader model consisting of encoder and composer modules, that captures and leverages such information to generate more effective representations for entities, issues, and events. These representations are contextualized by tweets, press releases, issues, news articles, and participating entities. Our model processes several documents at once and generates composed representations for multiple entities over several issues or events. Via qualitative and quantitative empirical analysis, we show that these representations are meaningful and effective.

Understanding Politics via Contextualized Discourse Processing

Dense retrieval has been shown to be effective for Open Domain Question Answering, surpassing sparse retrieval methods like BM25. One such model, REALM, (Guu et al., 2020) is an end-to-end dense retrieval system that uses MLM based pretraining for improved downstream QA performance. However, the current REALM setup uses limited resources and is not comparable in scale to more recent systems, contributing to its lower performance. Additionally, it relies on noisy supervision for retrieval during fine-tuning. We propose REALM++, where we improve upon the training and inference setups and introduce better supervision signal for improving performance, without any architectural changes. REALM++ achieves ~5.5% absolute accuracy gains over the baseline while being faster to train. It also matches the performance of large models which have 3x more parameters demonstrating the efficiency of our setup.

Simple and Efficient ways to Improve REALM

Deep learning models have shown great success in question answering (QA), however, biases in the training data may lead to them amplifying or reflecting inequity. To probe for bias in QA systems, we create two benchmarks for closed and open domain question answering, consisting of ambiguous questions and bias metrics. We use these benchmarks with four QA models and find that open-domain QA models amplify biases more than their closed-domain counterparts, potentially due to a document multiplication effect of retriever models.

Eliciting Bias in Question Answering Models through Ambiguity

GermanQuAD and GermanDPR: Improving Non-English Question Answering and Passage Retrieval

Multilingual pre-trained models have achieved remarkable performance on cross-lingual transfer learning. Some multilingual models such as mBERT, have been pre-trained on unlabeled corpora, therefore the embeddings of different languages in the models may not be aligned very well. In this paper, we aim to improve the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance by proposing a pre-training task named Word-Exchange Aligning Model (WEAM), which uses the statistical alignment information as the prior knowledge to guide cross-lingual word prediction. We evaluate our model on multilingual machine reading comprehension task MLQA and natural language interface task XNLI. The results show that WEAM can significantly improve the zero-shot performance.

Bilingual Alignment Pre-Training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

NLP research in Hebrew has largely focused on morphology and syntax, where rich annotated datasets in the spirit of Universal Dependencies are available. Semantic datasets, however, are in short supply, hindering crucial advances in the development of NLP technology in Hebrew. In this work, we present ParaShoot, the first question answering dataset in modern Hebrew. The dataset follows the format and crowdsourcing methodology of SQuAD, and contains approximately 3000 annotated examples, similar to other question-answering datasets in low-resource languages. We provide the first baseline results using recently-released BERT-style models for Hebrew, showing that there is significant room for improvement on this task.

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Investigating Post-pretraining Representation Alignment for Cross-Lingual Question Answering

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Inducing Stereotypical Character Roles from Plot Structure

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