Dominican Republic

To gain insight into the role neurons play, we study the activation patterns corresponding to meaning-preserving paraphrases (e.g., active-passive). We compile a dataset of controlled syntactic paraphrases in English with their reference German translations and demonstrate our model-agnostic approach with the Transformer translation model. First, we identify neurons that correlate across paraphrases and dissect the observed correlation into possible confounds. Although lower-level components are found as the cause of similar activations, no sentence-level semantics or syntax are detected locally. Later, we manipulate neuron activations to influence translation towards a particular syntactic form. We find that a simple value shift is effective, and more so when many neurons are modified. These suggest that complex syntactic constructions are indeed encoded in the model. We conclude by discussing how to better manipulate it using the correlations we first obtained.

EMNLP 2021

On Neurons Invariant to Sentence Structural Changes in Neural Machine Translation

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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Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

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

We study the problem of training named entity recognition (NER) models using only distantly-labeled data, which can be automatically obtained by matching entity mentions in the raw text with entity types in a knowledge base. The biggest challenge of distantly-supervised NER is that the distant supervision may induce incomplete and noisy labels, rendering the straightforward application of supervised learning ineffective. In this paper, we propose (1) a noise-robust learning scheme comprised of a new loss function and a noisy label removal step, for training NER models on distantly-labeled data, and (2) a self-training method that uses contextualized augmentations created by pre-trained language models to improve the generalization ability of the NER model. On three benchmark datasets, our method achieves superior performance, outperforming existing distantly-supervised NER models by significant margins.

Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Noise-Robust Learning and Language Model Augmented Self-Training

Sentence embedding refers to a set of effective and versatile techniques for converting raw text into numerical vector representations that can be used in a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) applications. The majority of these techniques are either supervised or unsupervised. Compared to the unsupervised methods, the supervised ones make less assumptions about optimization objectives and usually achieve better results. However, the training requires a large amount of labeled sentence pairs, which is not available in many industrial scenarios. To that end, we propose a generic and end-to-end approach -- PAUSE (Positive and Annealed Unlabeled Sentence Embedding), capable of learning high-quality sentence embeddings from a partially labeled dataset. We experimentally show that PAUSE achieves, and sometimes surpasses, state-of-the-art results using only a small fraction of labeled sentence pairs on various benchmark tasks. When applied to a real industrial use case where labeled samples are scarce, PAUSE encourages us to extend our dataset without the burden of extensive manual annotation work.

PAUSE: Positive and Annealed Unlabeled Sentence Embedding

Noun phrases and Relation phrases in open knowledge graphs are not canonicalized, leading to an explosion of redundant and ambiguous subject-relation-object triples. Existing approaches to solve this problem take a two-step approach. First, they generate embedding representations for both noun and relation phrases, then a clustering algorithm is used to group them using the embeddings as features. In this work, we propose Canonicalizing Using Variational Autoencoders (CUVA), a joint model to learn both embeddings and cluster assignments in an end-to-end approach, which leads to a better vector representation for the noun and relation phrases. Our evaluation over multiple benchmarks shows that CUVA outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we introduce CanonicNell, a novel dataset to evaluate entity canonicalization systems.

Open Knowledge Graphs Canonicalization using Variational Autoencoders

Transformer-based architectures have become the de-facto standard models for a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks. However, their memory footprint and high latency are prohibitive for efficient deployment and inference on resource-limited devices. In this work, we explore quantization for transformers. We show that transformers have unique quantization challenges -- namely, high dynamic activation ranges that are difficult to represent with a low bit fixed-point format. We establish that these activations contain structured outliers in the residual connections that encourage specific attention patterns, such as attending to the special separator token. To combat these challenges, we present three solutions based on post-training quantization and quantization-aware training, each with a different set of compromises for accuracy, model size, and ease of use. In particular, we introduce a novel quantization scheme -- per-embedding-group quantization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on the GLUE benchmark using BERT, establishing state-of-the-art results for post-training quantization. Finally, we show that transformer weights and embeddings can be quantized to ultra-low bit-widths, leading to significant memory savings with a minimum accuracy loss. Our source code is available at~\url{https://github.com/qualcomm-ai-research/transformer-quantization}.

Understanding and Overcoming the Challenges of Efficient Transformer Quantization

**Anthology paper link:**

https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.831/

**Abstract:**



How to Train BERT with an Academic Budget

Recent work has shown evidence that the knowledge acquired by multilingual BERT (mBERT) has two components: a language-specific and a language-neutral one. This paper analyses the relationship between them, in the context of fine-tuning on two tasks -- POS tagging and natural language inference -- which require the model to bring to bear different degrees of language-specific knowledge. Visualisations reveal that mBERT loses the ability to cluster representations by language after fine-tuning, a result that is supported by evidence from language identification experiments. However, further experiments on `unlearning' language-specific representations using gradient reversal and iterative adversarial learning are shown not to add further improvement to the language-independent component over and above the effect of fine-tuning. The results presented here suggest that the process of fine-tuning causes a reorganisation of the model's limited representational capacity, enhancing language-independent representations at the expense of language-specific ones.

On the Language-specificity of Multilingual BERT and the Impact of Fine-tuning

The recent increase in dataset size has brought
about significant advances in natural language
understanding. These large datasets are usually collected through automation (search engines or web crawlers) or crowdsourcing
which inherently introduces incorrectly labeled data. Training on these datasets leads to
memorization and poor generalization. Thus,
it is pertinent to develop techniques that help in
the identification and isolation of mislabelled
data. In this paper, we study the applicability
of the Area Under the Margin (AUM) metric to
identify and remove/rectify mislabelled examples in NLP datasets. We find that mislabelled
samples can be filtered using the AUM metric
in NLP datasets but it also removes a significant number of correctly labeled points and
leads to the loss of a large amount of relevant
language information. We show that models
rely on the distributional information instead
of relying on syntactic and semantic representations.

Training Dynamic based data filtering may not work for NLP datasets

Despite agreement on the importance of detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) examples, there is little consensus on the formal definition of OOD examples and how to best detect them. We categorize these examples by whether they exhibit a background shift or a semantic shift, and find that the two major approaches to OOD detection, model calibration and density estimation (language modeling for text), have distinct behavior on these types of OOD data. Across 14 pairs of in-distribution and OOD English natural language understanding datasets, we find that density estimation methods consistently beat calibration methods in background shift settings, while performing worse in semantic shift settings. In addition, we find that both methods generally fail to detect examples from challenge data, highlighting a weak spot for current methods. Since no single method works well across all settings, our results call for an explicit definition of OOD examples when evaluating different detection methods.

Types of Out-of-Distribution Texts and How to Detect Them

The capacity of neural networks like the widely adopted transformer is known to be very high. Evidence is emerging that they learn successfully due to inductive bias in the training routine, typically a variant of gradient descent (GD). To better understand this bias, we study the tendency for transformer parameters to grow in magnitude ($\ell_2$ norm) during training, and its implications for the emergent representations within self attention layers. Empirically, we document norm growth in the training of transformer language models, including T5 during its pretraining. As the parameters grow in magnitude, we prove that the network approximates a discretized network with saturated activation functions. Such "saturated" networks are known to have a reduced capacity compared to the full network family that can be described in terms of formal languages and automata. Our results suggest saturation is a new characterization of an inductive bias implicit in GD of particular interest for NLP. We leverage the emergent discrete structure in a saturated transformer to analyze the role of different attention heads, finding that some focus locally on a small number of positions, while other heads compute global averages, allowing counting. We believe understanding the interplay between these two capabilities may shed further light on the structure of computation within large transformers.

Effects of Parameter Norm Growth During Transformer Training: Inductive Bias from Gradient Descent

While pre-trained language models have obtained state-of-the-art performance for several natural language understanding tasks, they are quite opaque in terms of their decision-making process. While some recent works focus on rationalizing neural predictions by highlighting salient concepts in the text as justifications or rationales, they rely on thousands of labeled training examples for both task labels as well as an-notated rationales for every instance. Such extensive large-scale annotations are infeasible to obtain for many tasks. To this end, we develop a multi-task teacher-student framework based on self-training language models with limited task-specific labels and rationales, and judicious sample selection to learn from informative pseudo-labeled examples. We study several characteristics of what constitutes a good rationale and demonstrate that the neural model performance can be significantly improved by making it aware of its rationalized predictions, particularly in low-resource settings.

Self-training with Few-shot Rationalization

technical paper

poster

https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/underline.prod/cache/transcript/44557/subtitle/e78c096b9967b119b542512bfc804e3e.vtt?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAZP4XRUPAQFEPSF6P%2F20240727%2Feu-west-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20240727T054739Z&X-Amz-Expires=900&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=e1e3ca5ed491bf0bc7f89f90a3289578d6720f8d64aade6fd0279700dc354f8f

On Neurons Invariant to Sentence Structural Changes in Neural Machine Translation

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Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Noise-Robust Learning and Language Model Augmented Self-Training

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On Neurons Invariant to Sentence Structural Changes in Neural Machine Translation

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Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Noise-Robust Learning and Language Model Augmented Self-Training

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Mind the Context: The Impact of Contextualization in Neural Module Networks for Grounding Visual Referring Expressions

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