Dominican Republic

We introduce MULTI-EURLEX, a new multilingual dataset for topic classification of legal documents. The dataset comprises 65k European Union (EU) laws, officially translated in 23 languages, annotated with multiple labels from the EUROVOC taxonomy. We highlight the effect of temporal concept drift and the importance of chronological, instead of random splits. We use the dataset as a testbed for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, where we exploit annotated training documents in one language (source) to classify documents in another language (target). We find that fine-tuning a multilingually pre-trained model (XLM-ROBERTA, MT5) in a single source language leads to catastrophic forgetting of multilingual knowledge and, consequently, poor zero-shot transfer to other languages. Adaptation strategies, namely partial fine-tuning, adapters, BITFIT, LNFIT, originally proposed to accelerate fine-tuning for new end-tasks, help retain multilingual knowledge from pretraining, substantially improving zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, but their impact also depends on the pre-trained model used and the size of the label set.

EMNLP 2021

MultiEURLEX - A multi-lingual and multi-label legal document classification dataset for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer

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

The principle of independent causal mechanisms (ICM) states that generative processes of real world data consist of independent modules which do not influence or inform each other. While this idea has led to fruitful developments in the field of causal inference, it is not widely-known in the NLP community. In this work, we argue that the causal direction of the data collection process bears nontrivial implications that can explain a number of published NLP findings, such as differences in semi-supervised learning (SSL) and domain adaptation (DA) performance across different settings. We categorize common NLP tasks according to their causal direction and empirically assay the validity of the ICM principle for text data using minimum description length. We conduct an extensive meta-analysis of over 100 published SSL and 30 DA studies, and find that the results are consistent with our expectations based on causal insights. This work presents the first attempt to analyze the ICM principle in NLP, and provides constructive suggestions for future modeling choices.

Causal Direction of Data Collection Matters: Implications of Causal and Anticausal Learning for NLP

Recent pretrained language models extend from millions to billions of parameters. Thus the need to fine-tune an extremely large pretrained model with a limited training corpus arises in various downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a straightforward yet effective fine-tuning technique, ChildTuning, which updates a subset of parameters (called child network) of large pretrained models via strategically masking out the gradients of the non-child network during the backward process. Experiments on various downstream tasks in GLUE benchmark show that ChildTuning consistently outperforms the vanilla fine-tuning by 1.5~8.6 average score among four different pretrained models, and surpasses the prior fine-tuning techniques by 0.6~1.3 points. Furthermore, empirical results on domain transfer and task transfer show that ChildTuning can obtain better generalization performance by large margins.

Raise a Child in Large Language Model: Towards Effective and Generalizable Fine-tuning

Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) have shown promising performance on link prediction tasks by mapping the entities and relations from a knowledge graph into a geometric space. The capability of KGEs in preserving graph characteristics including structural aspects and semantics highly depends on the design of their score function, as well as the inherited abilities from the underlying geometry. Many KGEs use the Euclidean geometry which renders them incapable of preserving complex structures and consequently causes wrong inferences by the models. To address this problem, we propose a neuro differential KGE that embeds nodes of a KG on the trajectories of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). To this end, we represent each relation (edge) in a KG as a vector field on several manifolds. We specifically parameterize ODEs by a neural network to represent complex manifolds and complex vector fields on the manifolds. Therefore, the underlying embedding space is capable to assume the shape of various geometric forms to encode heterogeneous subgraphs. Experiments on synthetic and benchmark datasets using state-of-the-art KGE models justify the ODE trajectories as a means to enable structure preservation and consequently avoiding wrong inferences.

Knowledge Graph Representation Learning using Ordinary Differential Equations

Every day, millions of people sacrifice their privacy and browsing habits in exchange for online machine translation. Companies and governments with confidentiality requirements often ban online translation or pay a premium to disable logging. To bring control back to the end user and demonstrate speed, we developed translateLocally. Running locally on a desktop or laptop CPU, translateLocally delivers cloud-like translation speed and quality even on 10 year old hardware. The open-source software is based on Marian and runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

TranslateLocally: Blazing-fast translation running on the local CPU

The scale, variety, and quantity of publicly-available NLP datasets has grown rapidly as researchers propose new tasks, larger models, and novel benchmarks. Datasets is a community library for contemporary NLP designed to support this ecosystem. Datasets aims to standardize end-user interfaces, versioning, and documentation, while providing a lightweight front-end that behaves similarly for small datasets as for internet-scale corpora. The design of the library incorporates a distributed, community-driven approach to adding datasets and documenting usage. After a year of development, the library now includes more than 650 unique datasets, has more than 250 contributors, and has helped support a variety of novel cross-dataset research projects and shared tasks. The library is available at this https URL.

Datasets: A Community Library for Natural Language Processing

Image captioning models generally lack the capability to take into account user interest, and usually default to global descriptions that try to balance readability, informativeness, and information overload. We present a Transformer-based model with the ability to produce captions focused on specific objects, concepts or actions in an image by providing them as guiding text to the model. Further, we evaluate the quality of these guided captions when trained on Conceptual Captions which contain 3.3M image-level captions compared to Visual Genome which contain 3.6M object-level captions. Counter-intuitively, we find that guided captions produced by the model trained on Conceptual Captions generalize better on out-of-domain data. Our human-evaluation results indicate that attempting in-the-wild guided image captioning requires access to large, unrestricted-domain training datasets, and that increased style diversity (even without increasing the number of unique tokens) is a key factor for improved performance.

Understanding Guided Image Captioning Performance across Domains

Negation is one of the most fundamental concepts in human cognition and language, and several natural language inference (NLI) probes have been designed to investigate pretrained language models' ability to detect and reason with negation. However, the existing probing datasets are limited to English only, and do not enable controlled probing of performance in the absence or presence of negation. In response, we present a multilingual (English, Bulgarian, German, French and Chinese) benchmark collection of NLI examples that are grammatical and correctly labeled, as a result of manual inspection and editing. We use the benchmark to probe the negation-awareness of multilingual language models and find that models that correctly predict examples with negation cues often fail to correctly predict their counter-examples without negation cues, even when the cues are irrelevant for semantic inference.

A Multilingual Benchmark for Probing Negation-Awareness with Minimal Pairs

For over thirty years, researchers have developed and analyzed methods for latent tree induction as an approach for unsupervised syntactic parsing. Nonetheless, modern systems still do not perform well enough compared to their supervised counterparts to have any practical use as structural annotation of text. In this work, we present a technique that uses distant supervision in the form of span constraints (i.e. phrase bracketing) to improve performance in unsupervised constituency parsing. Using a relatively small number of span constraints we can substantially improve the output from DIORA, an already competitive unsupervised parsing system. Compared with full parse tree annotation, span constraints can be acquired with minimal effort, such as with a lexicon derived from Wikipedia, to find exact text matches. Our experiments show span constraints based on entities improves constituency parsing on English WSJ Penn Treebank by more than 5 F1. Furthermore, our method extends to any domain where span constraints are easily attainable, and as a case study we demonstrate its effectiveness by parsing biomedical text from the CRAFT dataset.

Improved Latent Tree Induction with Distant Supervision via Span Constraints

While numerous attempts have been made to jointly parse syntax and semantics, high performance in one domain typically comes at the price of performance in the other. This trade-off contradicts the large body of research focusing on the rich interactions at the syntax-semantics interface. We explore multiple model architectures which allow us to exploit the rich syntactic and semantic annotations contained in the Universal Decompositional Semantics (UDS) dataset, jointly parsing Universal Dependencies and UDS to obtain state-of-the-art results in both formalisms. We analyze the behaviour of a joint model of syntax and semantics, finding patterns supported by linguistic theory at the syntax-semantics interface. We then investigate to what degree joint modeling generalizes to a multilingual setting, where we find similar trends across 8 languages.

Joint Universal Syntactic and Semantic Parsing

While neural networks produce state-of-the-art performance in several NLP tasks, they depend heavily on lexicalized information, which transfers poorly between domains. Previous work proposed delexicalization as a form of knowledge distillation to reduce dependency on such lexical artifacts. However, a critical unsolved issue that remains is how much delexicalization should be applied? A little helps reduce over-fitting, but too much discards useful information. We propose Group Learning (GL), a knowledge and model distillation approach for fact verification. In our method, while multiple student models have access to different delexicalized data views, they are encouraged to independently learn from each other through pair-wise consistency losses. In several cross-domain experiments between the FEVER and FNC fact verification datasets, we show that our approach learns the best delexicalization strategy for the given training dataset and outperforms state-of-the-art classifiers that rely on the original data.

MultiEURLEX - A multi-lingual and multi-label legal document classification dataset for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer

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Causal Direction of Data Collection Matters: Implications of Causal and Anticausal Learning for NLP

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