Dominican Republic

Humans have been shown to give contrastive explanations, which explain why an observed event happened rather than some other counterfactual event (the contrast case). Despite the influential role that contrastivity plays in how humans explain, this property is largely missing from current methods for explaining NLP models. We present Minimal Contrastive Editing (MiCE), a method for producing contrastive explanations of model predictions in the form of edits to inputs that change model outputs to the contrast case. Our experiments across three tasks–binary sentiment classification, topic classification, and multiple-choice question answering–show that MiCE is able to produce edits that are not only contrastive, but also minimal and fluent, consistent with human contrastive edits. Additionally, we illustrate the utility of MiCE edits in NLP system development by showing how they can be used to uncover dataset artifacts.

EMNLP 2021

Explaining NLP Models via Minimal Contrastive Editing (MiCE)

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.

workshop paper

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

A nominalization uses a deverbal noun to describe an event associated with its underlying verb. Commonly found in academic and formal texts, nominalizations can be difficult to interpret because of ambiguous semantic relations between the deverbal noun and its arguments. Our goal is to interpret nominalizations by generating clausal paraphrases. We address compound nominalizations with both nominal and adjectival modifiers, as well as prepositional phrases. In evaluations on a number of unsupervised methods, we obtained the strongest performance by using a pre-trained contextualized language model to re-rank paraphrase candidates identified by a textual entailment model.

Paraphrasing Compound Nominalizations

“Michael Jordan published a new paper on machine learning”. Did they mean MJ the scientist or MJ the basketball player? The answer is obvious to humans, but for entity linking systems it remains complicated: when in doubt, they tend to output more common entities even if it means losing relevance. We define this phenomenon as entity overshadowing and explore it using ShadowLink, our new dataset made to bring overshadowed entities to light. The results are intriguing: modern state-of-the-art methods get lost and confused, while a good old model from 2011 achieves the best scores. Our presentation will discuss how and why this happens.

Robustness Evaluation of Entity Disambiguation Using Prior Probes: the Case of Entity Overshadowing

We present IndoNLI, the first human-elicited NLI dataset for Indonesian. We adapt the data collection protocol for MNLI and collect nearly 18K sentence pairs annotated by crowd workers and experts. The expert-annotated data is used exclusively as a test set. It is designed to provide a challenging test-bed for Indonesian NLI by explicitly incorporating various linguistic phenomena such as numerical reasoning, structural changes, idioms, or temporal and spatial reasoning. Experiment results show that XLM-R outperforms other pretrained models in our data. The best performance on the expert-annotated data is still far below human performance (13.4% accuracy gap), suggesting that this test set is especially challenging. Furthermore, our analysis shows that our expert-annotated data is more diverse and contains fewer annotation artifacts than the crowd-annotated data. We hope this dataset can help accelerate progress in Indonesian NLP research.

IndoNLI: A Natural Language Inference Dataset for Indonesian

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.

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

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

SCAN and NACS tasks were introduced as benchmarks of compositional generalization capacity. One of the key limitations of neural systems that these tasks revealed was the lack of \emph{systematic} generalization: compositional operations are apparently learned but the solution fails in application to new primitives, such as a new action name (e.g. jump). We apply the Transformer model to different variants of the SCAN/NACS task and show that the (lack of) systematicity is not categorical but graded, varying with the extent to which elements of the new primitive are present in diverse combinations in the training data.

Transformers Scan both Left and Right -- When they Have a Cue

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.

Cross-Domain Label-Adaptive Stance Detection

Pretrained Masked Language Models (MLMs) have revolutionised NLP in recent years. However, previous work has indicated that off-the-shelf MLMs are not effective as universal lexical or sentence encoders without further task-specific fine-tuning on NLI, sentence similarity, or paraphrasing tasks using annotated task data. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to turn MLMs into effective universal lexical and sentence encoders even without any additional data and without any supervision. We propose an extremely simple, fast and effective contrastive learning technique, termed Mirror-BERT, which converts MLMs (e.g., BERT and RoBERTa) into such encoders in 20-30 seconds without any additional external knowledge. Mirror-BERT relies on fully identical or slightly modified string pairs as positive (i.e., synonymous) fine-tuning examples, and aims to maximise their similarity during identity fine-tuning. We report huge gains over off-the-shelf MLMs with Mirror-BERT in both lexical-level and sentence-level tasks, across different domains and different languages. Notably, in the standard sentence semantic similarity (STS) tasks, our self-supervised Mirror-BERT model even matches the performance of the task-tuned Sentence-BERT models from prior work. Finally, we delve deeper into the inner workings of MLMs, and suggest some evidence on why this simple approach can yield effective universal lexical and sentence encoders.

Fast, Effective, and Self-Supervised: Transforming Masked Language Models into Universal Lexical and Sentence Encoders

Drawing inferences between open-domain natural language predicates is a necessity for true language understanding. There has been much progress in unsupervised learning of entailment graphs for this purpose. We make three contributions: (1) we reinterpret the Distributional Inclusion Hypothesis to model entailment between predicates of different valencies, like DEFEAT(Biden, Trump) entails WIN(Biden); (2) we actualize this theory by learning unsupervised Multivalent Entailment Graphs of open-domain predicates; and (3) we demonstrate the capabilities of these graphs on a novel question answering task. We show that directional entailment is more helpful for inference than bidirectional similarity on questions of fine-grained semantics. We also show that drawing on evidence across valencies answers more questions than by using only the same valency evidence.

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Explaining NLP Models via Minimal Contrastive Editing (MiCE)

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