Dominican Republic

While pre-trained language models (PLMs) are the go-to solution to tackle many natural language processing problems, they are still very limited in their ability to capture and to use common-sense knowledge. In fact, even if information is available in the form of approximate (soft) logical rules, it is not clear how to transfer it to a PLM in order to improve its performance for deductive reasoning tasks. Here, we aim to bridge this gap by teaching PLMs how to reason with soft Horn rules. We introduce a classification task where, given facts and soft rules, the PLM should return a prediction with a probability for a given hypothesis. We release the first dataset for this task, and we propose a revised loss function that enables the PLM to learn how to predict precise probabilities for the task. Our evaluation results show that the resulting fine-tuned models achieve very high performance, even on logical rules that were unseen at training. Moreover, we demonstrate that logical notions expressed by the rules are transferred to the fine-tuned model, yielding state-of-the-art results on external datasets.

EMNLP 2021

RuleBERT: Teaching Soft Rules to Pre-Trained Language Models

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 describe two approaches to single-root dependency parsing that yield significant speed ups in such parsing. One approach has been previously used in dependency parsers in practice, but remains undocumented in the parsing literature, and is considered a heuristic. We show that this approach actually finds the optimal dependency tree. The second approach relies on simple reweighting of the inference graph being input to the dependency parser and has an optimal running time. Here, we again show that this approach is fully correct and identifies the highest-scoring parse tree. Our experiments demonstrate a manyfold speed up compared to a previous graph-based state-of-the-art parser without any loss in accuracy or optimality.

A Root of a Problem: Optimizing Single-Root Dependency Parsing

QuestEval is a reference-less metric used in text-to-text tasks, that compares the generated summaries directly to the source text, by automatically asking and answering questions. Its adaptation to Data-to-Text tasks is not straightforward, as it requires multimodal Question Generation and Answering systems on the considered tasks, which are seldom available. To this purpose, we propose a method to build synthetic multimodal corpora enabling to train multimodal components for a data-QuestEval metric.

Data-QuestEval: A Referenceless Metric for Data-to-Text Semantic Evaluation

Since state-of-the-art approaches to offensive language detection rely on supervised learning, it is crucial to quickly adapt them to the continuously evolving scenario of social media. While several approaches have been proposed to tackle the problem from an algorithmic perspective, so to reduce the need for annotated data, less attention has been paid to the quality of these data. Following a trend that has emerged recently, we focus on the level of agreement among annotators while selecting data to create offensive language datasets, a task involving a high level of subjectivity. Our study comprises the creation of three novel datasets of English tweets covering different topics and having five crowd-sourced judgments each. We also present an extensive set of experiments showing that selecting training and test data according to different levels of annotators' agreement has a strong effect on classifiers performance and robustness. Our findings are further validated in cross-domain experiments and studied using a popular benchmark dataset. We show that such hard cases, where low agreement is present, are not necessarily due to poor-quality annotation and we advocate for a higher presence of ambiguous cases in future datasets, particularly in test sets, to better account for the different points of view expressed online.

Agreeing to Disagree: Annotating Offensive Language Datasets with Annotators' Disagreement

Style transfer aims to rewrite a source text in a different target style while preserving its content. We propose a novel approach to this task that leverages generic resources, and without using any task-specific parallel (source-target) data outperforms existing un- supervised approaches on the two most popular style transfer tasks: formality transfer and polarity swap. In practice, we adopt a multi-step procedure which builds on a generic pre- trained sequence-to-sequence model (BART). First, we strengthen the model’s ability to rewrite by further pre-training BART on both an existing collection of generic paraphrases, as well as on synthetic pairs created using a general-purpose lexical resource. Second, through an iterative back-translation approach, we train two models, each in a transfer direction, so that they can provide each other with synthetically generated pairs, dynamically in the training process. Lastly, we let our best resulting model generate static synthetic pairs to be used in a supervised training regime.

Generic resources are what you need: Style transfer tasks without task-specific parallel training data

In social settings, much of human behavior is governed by unspoken rules of conduct rooted in societal norms. For artificial systems to be fully integrated into social environments, adherence to such norms is a central prerequisite. To investigate whether language generation models can serve as behavioral priors for systems deployed in social settings, we evaluate their ability to generate action descriptions that achieve predefined goals under normative constraints. Moreover, we examine if models can anticipate likely consequences of actions that either observe or violate known norms, or explain why certain actions are preferable by generating relevant norm hypotheses. For this purpose, we introduce Moral Stories, a crowd-sourced dataset of structured, branching narratives for the study of grounded, goal-oriented social reasoning. Finally, we propose decoding strategies that combine multiple expert models to significantly improve the quality of generated actions, consequences, and norms compared to strong baselines.

Moral Stories: Situated Reasoning about Norms, Intents, Actions, and their Consequences

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.

Explaining NLP Models via Minimal Contrastive Editing (MiCE)

Dynamic early exiting aims to accelerate the inference of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by emitting predictions in internal layers without passing through the entire model. In this paper, we empirically analyze the working mechanism of dynamic early exiting and find that it faces a performance bottleneck under high speed-up ratios. On one hand, the PLMs' representations in shallow layers lack high-level semantic information and thus are not sufficient for accurate predictions. On the other hand, the exiting decisions made by internal classifiers are unreliable, leading to wrongly emitted early predictions. We instead propose a new framework for accelerating the inference of PLMs, CascadeBERT, which dynamically selects proper-sized and complete models in a cascading manner, providing comprehensive representations for predictions. We further devise a difficulty-aware objective, encouraging the model to output the class probability that reflects the real difficulty of each instance for a more reliable cascading mechanism. Experimental results show that CascadeBERT can achieve an overall 15\% improvement under 4× speed-up compared with existing dynamic early exiting methods on six classification tasks, yielding more calibrated and accurate predictions.

CascadeBERT: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade

The ability to detect Out-of-Domain (OOD) inputs has been a critical requirement in many real-world NLP applications. For example, intent classification in dialogue systems. The reason is that the inclusion of unsupported OOD inputs may lead to catastrophic failure of systems. However, it remains an empirical question whether current methods can tackle such problems reliably in a realistic scenario where zero OOD training data is available. In this study, we propose ProtoInfoMax, a new architecture that extends Prototypical Networks to simultaneously process in-domain and OOD sentences via Mutual Information Maximization (InfoMax) objective. Experimental results show that our proposed method can substantially improve performance up to 20% for OOD detection in low resource settings of text classification. We also show that ProtoInfoMax is less prone to typical overconfidence errors of Neural Networks, leading to more reliable prediction results.

ProtoInfoMax: Prototypical Networks with Mutual Information Maximization for Out-of-Domain Detection

The task of organizing a shuffled set of sentences into a coherent text has been used to evaluate a machine's understanding of causal and temporal relations. We formulate the sentence ordering task as a conditional text-to-marker generation problem. We present Reorder-BART (Re-BART) that leverages a pre-trained Transformer-based model to identify a coherent order for a given set of shuffled sentences. The model takes a set of shuffled sentences with sentence-specific markers as input and generates a sequence of position markers of the sentences in the ordered text. Re-BART achieves the state-of-the-art performance across 7 datasets in Perfect Match Ratio (PMR) and Kendall's tau (τ). We perform evaluations in a zero-shot setting, showcasing that our model is able to generalize well across other datasets. We additionally perform several experiments to understand the functioning and limitations of our framework.

Is Everything in Order? A Simple Way to Order Sentences

Enthymemes are defined as arguments where a premise or conclusion is left implicit. We tackle the task of generating the implicit premise in an enthymeme, which requires not only an understanding of the stated conclusion and premise but also additional inferences that could depend on commonsense knowledge. The largest available dataset for enthymemes (Habernal et al., 2018) consists of 1.7k samples, which is not large enough to train a neural text generation model. To address this issue, we take advantage of a similar task and dataset: Abductive reasoning in narrative text (Bhagavatula et al., 2020). However, we show that simply using a state-of-the-art seq2seq model fine-tuned on this data might not generate meaningful implicit premises associated with the given enthymemes. We demonstrate that encoding discourse-aware commonsense during fine-tuning improves the quality of the generated implicit premises and outperforms all other baselines both in automatic and human evaluations on three different datasets.

RuleBERT: Teaching Soft Rules to Pre-Trained Language Models

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A Root of a Problem: Optimizing Single-Root Dependency Parsing

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