Dominican Republic

In interpretable NLP, we require faithful rationales that reflect the model’s decision-making process for an explained instance. While prior work focuses on extractive rationales (a subset of the input words), we investigate their less-studied counterpart: free-text natural language rationales. We demonstrate that pipelines, models for faithful rationalization on information-extraction style tasks, do not work as well on “reasoning” tasks requiring free-text rationales. We turn to models that jointly predict and rationalize, a class of widely used high-performance models for free-text rationalization. We investigate the extent to which the labels and rationales predicted by these models are associated, a necessary property of faithful explanation. Via two tests, robustness equivalence and feature importance agreement, we find that state-of-the-art T5-based joint models exhibit desirable properties for explaining commonsense question-answering and natural language inference, indicating their potential for producing faithful free-text rationales.

EMNLP 2021

Measuring Association Between Labels and Free-Text Rationales

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

We study Comparative Preference Classification (CPC) which aims at predicting whether a preference comparison exists between two entities in a given sentence and, if so, which entity is preferred over the other. High-quality CPC models can significantly benefit applications such as comparative question answering and review-based recommendations. Among the existing approaches, non-deep learning methods suffer from inferior performances. The state-of-the-art graph neural network-based ED-GAT (Ma et al., 2020) only considers syntactic information while ignoring the critical semantic relations and the sentiments to the compared entities. We proposed sentiment Analysis Enhanced COmparative Network (SAECON) which improves CPC ac-curacy with a sentiment analyzer that learns sentiments to individual entities via domain adaptive knowledge transfer. Experiments on the CompSent-19 (Panchenko et al., 2019) dataset present a significant improvement on the F1 scores over the best existing CPC approaches.

Powering Comparative Classification with Sentiment Analysis via Domain Adaptive Knowledge Transfer

An interpretable system for open-domain reasoning needs to express its reasoning process in a transparent form. Natural language is an attractive representation for this purpose — it is both highly expressive and easy for humans to understand. However, manipulating natural language statements in logically consistent ways is hard: models must cope with variation in how meaning is expressed while remaining precise. In this work, we describe ParaPattern, a method for building models to generate deductive inferences from diverse natural language inputs without direct human supervision. We train BART-based models (Lewis et al., 2020) to generate the result of applying a particular logical operation to one or more premise statements. Crucially, we develop a largely automated pipeline for constructing suitable training examples from Wikipedia. We evaluate our models using out-of-domain sentence compositions from the QASC (Khot et al., 2020) and EntailmentBank (Dalvi et al., 2021) datasets as well as targeted perturbation sets. Our results show that our models are substantially more accurate and flexible than baseline systems. ParaPattern achieves 85% validity on examples of the 'substitution' operation from EntailmentBank without the use of any in-domain training data, matching the performance of a model fine-tuned for EntailmentBank.

Flexible Generation of Natural Language Deductions

We present VideoCLIP, a contrastive approach to pre-train a unified model for zero-shot video and text understanding, without using any labels on downstream tasks. \mbox{VideoCLIP} trains a transformer for video and text by contrasting temporally overlapping positive video-text pairs with hard negatives from nearest neighbor retrieval. Our experiments on a diverse series of downstream tasks, including sequence-level text-video retrieval, VideoQA, token-level action localization, and action segmentation reveal state-of-the-art performance, surpassing prior work, and in some cases even outperforming supervised approaches. Code is made available at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/main/examples/MMPT .

VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding

Recent commonsense-reasoning tasks are typically discriminative in nature, where a model answers a multiple-choice question for a certain context. Discriminative tasks are limiting because they fail to adequately evaluate the model's ability to reason and explain predictions with underlying commonsense knowledge. They also allow such models to use reasoning shortcuts and not be "right for the right reasons". In this work, we present ExplaGraphs, a new generative and structured commonsense-reasoning task (and an associated dataset) of explanation graph generation for stance prediction. Specifically, given a belief and an argument, a model has to predict if the argument supports or counters the belief and also generate a commonsense-augmented graph that serves as non-trivial, complete, and unambiguous explanation for the predicted stance. We collect explanation graphs through a novel Create-Verify-And-Refine graph collection framework that improves the graph quality (up to 90%) via multiple rounds of verification and refinement. A significant 79% of our graphs contain external commonsense nodes with diverse structures and reasoning depths. Next, we propose a multi-level evaluation framework, consisting of automatic metrics and human evaluation, that check for the structural and semantic correctness of the generated graphs and their degree of match with ground-truth graphs. Finally, we present several structured, commonsense-augmented, and text generation models as strong starting points for this explanation graph generation task, and observe that there is a large gap with human performance, thereby encouraging future work for this new challenging task.

ExplaGraphs: An Explanation Graph Generation Task for Structured Commonsense Reasoning

We present work on summarising deliberative processes for non-English languages. Unlike commonly studied datasets, such as news articles, this deliberation dataset reflects difficulties of combining multiple narratives, mostly of poor grammatical quality, in a single text. We report an extensive evaluation of a wide range of abstractive summarisation models in combination with an off-the-shelf machine translation model. Texts are translated into English, summarised, and translated back to the original language. We obtain promising results regarding the fluency, consistency and relevance of the summaries produced. Our approach is easy to implement for many languages for production purposes by simply changing the translation model.

Evaluation of Abstractive Summarisation Models with Machine Translation in Deliberative Processes

Incremental meeting temporal summarization, summarizing relevant information of partial multi-party meeting dialogue, is emerging as the next challenge in summarization research. Here we examine the extent to which human abstractive summaries of the preceding increments (context) can be combined with extractive meeting dialogue to generate abstractive summaries. We find that previous context improves ROUGE scores. Our findings further suggest that contexts begin to outweigh the dialogue. Using keyphrase extraction and semantic role labeling (SRL), we find that SRL captures relevant information without overwhelming the the model architecture. By compressing the previous contexts by ~70%, we achieve better ROUGE scores over our baseline models. Collectively, these results suggest that context matters, as does the way in which context is presented to the model.

Context or No Context? A preliminary exploration of human-in-the-loop approach for Incremental Temporal Summarization in meetings

Current abstractive summarization systems outperform their extractive counterparts, but their widespread adoption is inhibited by the inherent lack of interpretability. Extractive summarization systems, though interpretable, suffer from redundancy and possible lack of coherence. To achieve the best of both worlds, we propose EASE, an extractive-abstractive framework that generates concise abstractive summaries that can be traced back to an extractive summary. Our framework can be applied to any evidence-based text generation problem and can accommodate various pretrained models in its simple architecture. We use the Information Bottleneck principle to jointly train the extraction and abstraction in an end-to-end fashion. Inspired by previous research that humans use a two-stage framework to summarize long documents (Jing and McKeown, 2000), our framework first extracts a pre-defined amount of evidence spans and then generates a summary using only the evidence. Using automatic and human evaluations, we show that the generated summaries are better than strong extractive and extractive- abstractive baselines.

EASE: Extractive-Abstractive Summarization End-to-End using the Information Bottleneck Principle

Differential privacy provides a formal approach to privacy of individuals. Applications of differential privacy in various scenarios, such as protecting users' original utterances, must satisfy certain mathematical properties. Our contribution is a formal analysis of ADePT, a differentially private auto-encoder for text rewriting (Krishna et al, 2021). ADePT achieves promising results on downstream tasks while providing tight privacy guarantees. Our proof reveals that ADePT is not differentially private, thus rendering the experimental results unsubstantiated. We also quantify the impact of the error in its private mechanism, showing that the true sensitivity is higher by at least factor 6 in an optimistic case of a very small encoder's dimension and that the amount of utterances that are not privatized could easily reach 100% of the entire dataset. Our intention is neither to criticize the authors, nor the peer-reviewing process, but rather point out that if differential privacy applications in NLP rely on formal guarantees, these should be outlined in full and put under detailed scrutiny.

When differential privacy meets NLP: The devil is in the detail

Pimentel et al. (2020) recently analysed probing from an information-theoretic perspective. They argue that probing should be seen as approximating a mutual information. This led to the rather unintuitive conclusion that representations encode exactly the same information about a target task as the original sentences. The mutual information, however, assumes the true probability distribution of a pair of random variables is known, leading to unintuitive results in settings where it is not. This paper proposes a new framework to measure what we term Bayesian mutual information, which analyses information from the perspective of Bayesian agents -- allowing for more intuitive findings in scenarios with finite data. For instance, under Bayesian MI we have that data can add information, processing can help, and information can hurt, which makes it more intuitive for machine learning applications. Finally, we apply our framework to probing where we believe Bayesian mutual information naturally operationalises ease of extraction by explicitly limiting the available background knowledge to solve a task.

A Bayesian Framework for Information-Theoretic Probing

Discrete adversarial attacks are symbolic perturbations to a language input that preserve the output label but lead to a prediction error. While such attacks have been extensively explored for the purpose of evaluating model robustness, their utility for improving robustness has been limited to offline augmentation only. Concretely, given a trained model, attacks are used to generate perturbed adversarial) examples, and the model is re-trained exactly once. In this work, we address this gap and leverage discrete attacks for online augmentation, where adversarial examples are generated at every training step, adapting to the changing nature of the model. We propose (i) a new discrete attack, based on best-first search, and (ii) random sampling attacks that unlike prior work are not based on expensive search-based procedures. Surprisingly, we find that random sampling leads to impressive gains in robustness, outperforming the commonly-used offline augmentation, while leading to a speedup at training time of ∼10x. Furthermore, online augmentation with search-based attacks justifies the higher training cost, significantly improving robustness on three datasets. Last, we show that our new attack substantially improves robustness compared to prior methods.

Measuring Association Between Labels and Free-Text Rationales

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Powering Comparative Classification with Sentiment Analysis via Domain Adaptive Knowledge Transfer

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