Ireland

We proposes a novel algorithm, ANTHRO, that inductively extracts over 600K human-written text perturbations in the wild and leverages them for realistic adversarial attack. Unlike existing character-based attacks which often deductively hypothesize a set of manipulation strategies, our work is grounded on actual observations from real-world texts. We find that adversarial texts generated by {\mymethod} achieve the best trade-off between (1) attack success rate, (2) semantic preservation of the original text, and (3) stealthiness--i.e. indistinguishable from human writings hence harder to be flagged as suspicious. Specifically, our attacks accomplished around 83% and 91% attack success rates on BERT and RoBERTa, respectively. Moreover, it outperformed the TextBugger baseline with an increase of 50% and 40% in terms of semantic preservation and stealthiness when evaluated by both layperson and professional human workers. ANTHRO can further enhance a BERT classifier&#39;s performance in understanding different variations of human-written toxic texts via adversarial training when compared to the Perspective API. Source code will be published at github.com/lethaiq/perturbations-in-the-wild.

ACL 2022

Perturbations in the Wild: Leveraging Human-Written Text Perturbations for Realistic Adversarial Attack and Defense

text perturbation

natural language processing

adversarial attack

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

We proposes a novel algorithm, ANTHRO, that inductively extracts over 600K human-written text perturbations in the wild and leverages them for realistic adversarial attack. Unlike existing character-based attacks which often deductively hypothesize a set of manipulation strategies, our work is grounded on actual observations from real-world texts. We find that adversarial texts generated by {\mymethod} achieve the best trade-off between (1) attack success rate, (2) semantic preservation of the original text, and (3) stealthiness--i.e. indistinguishable from human writings hence harder to be flagged as suspicious. Specifically, our attacks accomplished around 83% and 91% attack success rates on BERT and RoBERTa, respectively. Moreover, it outperformed the TextBugger baseline with an increase of 50% and 40% in terms of semantic preservation and stealthiness when evaluated by both layperson and professional human workers. ANTHRO can further enhance a BERT classifier's performance in understanding different variations of human-written toxic texts via adversarial training when compared to the Perspective API. Source code will be published at github.com/lethaiq/perturbations-in-the-wild.

poster

Active learning is the iterative construction of a classification model through targeted labeling, enabling significant labeling cost savings. As most research on active learning has been carried out before transformer-based language models ("transformers") became popular, despite its practical importance, comparably few papers have investigated how transformers can be combined with active learning to date. This can be attributed to the fact that using state-of-the-art query strategies for transformers induces a prohibitive runtime overhead, which effectively nullifies, or even outweighs the desired cost savings. For this reason, we revisit uncertainty-based query strategies, which had been largely outperformed before, but are particularly suited in the context of fine-tuning transformers. In an extensive evaluation, we connect transformers to experiments from previous research, assessing their performance on five widely used text classification benchmarks. For active learning with transformers, several other uncertainty-based approaches outperform the well-known prediction entropy query strategy, thereby challenging its status as most popular uncertainty baseline in active learning for text classification.

Revisiting Uncertainty-based Query Strategies for Active Learning with Transformers

Current language generation models suffer from issues such as repetition, incoherence, and hallucinations. An often-repeated hypothesis is that this brittleness of generation models is caused by the training and the generation procedure mismatch, also referred to as exposure bias. In this paper, we verify this hypothesis by analyzing exposure bias from an imitation learning perspective. We show that exposure bias leads to an accumulation of errors, analyze why perplexity fails to capture this accumulation, and empirically show that this accumulation results in poor generation quality.

Why Exposure Bias Matters: An Imitation Learning Perspective of Error Accumulation in Language Generation

Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) has many applications in NLP and speech fields. Most existing work focuses heavily on languages with abundant training datasets, which limits the scope of target languages to less than 100 languages. This work attempts to apply zero-shot learning to approximate G2P models for all low-resource and endangered languages in Glottolog (about 8k languages). For any unseen target language, we first build the phylogenetic tree (i.e. language family tree) to identify top-k nearest languages for which we have training sets. Then we run models of those languages to obtain a hypothesis set, which we combine into a confusion network to propose a most likely hypothesis as an approximation to the target language. We test our approach on over 600 unseen languages and demonstrate it significantly outperforms baselines.

Zero-shot Learning for Grapheme to Phoneme Conversion with Language Ensemble

Pre-trained language models have shown stellar performance in various downstream tasks. But, this usually comes at the cost of high latency and computation, hindering their usage in resource-limited settings. In this work, we propose a novel approach for reducing the computational cost of BERT with minimal loss in downstream performance. Our method dynamically eliminates less contributing tokens through layers, resulting in shorter lengths and consequently lower computational cost. To determine the importance of each token representation, we train a Contribution Predictor for each layer using a gradient-based saliency method. Our experiments on several diverse classification tasks show speedups up to 22x during inference time without much sacrifice in performance. We also validate the quality of the selected tokens in our method using human annotations in the ERASER benchmark. In comparison to other widely used strategies for selecting important tokens, such as saliency and attention, our proposed method has a significantly lower false positive rate in generating rationales. Our code is freely available at https://github.com/amodaresi/AdapLeR.

AdapLeR: Speeding up Inference by Adaptive Length Reduction

Pre-trained language models derive substantial linguistic and factual knowledge from the massive corpora on which they are trained, and prompt engineering seeks to align these models to specific tasks. Unfortunately, existing prompt engineering methods require significant amounts of labeled data, access to model parameters, or both. We introduce a new method for selecting prompt templates \textit{without labeled examples} and \textit{without direct access to the model}. Specifically, over a set of candidate templates, we choose the template that maximizes the mutual information between the input and the corresponding model output. Across 8 datasets representing 7 distinct NLP tasks, we show that when a template has high mutual information, it also has high accuracy on the task. On the largest model, selecting prompts with our method gets 90\% of the way from the average prompt accuracy to the best prompt accuracy and requires no ground truth labels.

An Information-theoretic Approach to Prompt Engineering Without Ground Truth Labels

We present MetaDistil, a meta learning approach to improve knowledge distillation by updating the teacher model with student feedback for better knowledge transfer. MetaDistil achieves state-of-the-art task-specific distillation results on BERT distillation.

BERT Learns to Teach: Knowledge Distillation with Meta Learning

In real-world scenarios, a text classification task often begins with a cold start, when labeled data is scarce. In such cases, the common practice of fine-tuning pre-trained models, such as BERT, for a target classification task, is prone to produce poor performance. 
We suggest a method to boost the performance of such models by adding an intermediate unsupervised classification task, between the pre-training and fine-tuning phases. As such an intermediate task, we perform clustering and train the pre-trained model on predicting the cluster labels.
We test this hypothesis on various data sets, and show that this additional classification phase can significantly improve performance, mainly for topical classification tasks, when the number of labeled instances available for fine-tuning is only a couple of dozen to a few hundred.

Cluster & Tune: Boost Cold Start Performance in Text Classification

There is mounting evidence that existing neural network models, in particular the very popular sequence-to-sequence architecture, struggle to systematically generalize to unseen compositions of seen components. We demonstrate that one of the reasons hindering compositional generalization relates to representations being entangled. We propose an extension to sequence-to-sequence models which encourage disentanglement by adaptively re-encoding (at each time step) the source input. Specifically, we condition the source representations on the newly decoded target context which makes it easier for the encoder to exploit specialized information for each prediction rather than capturing it all in a single forward pass. Experimental results on semantic parsing and machine translation empirically show that our proposal delivers more disentangled representations and better generalization.

Disentangled Sequence to Sequence Learning for Compositional Generalization

Since the development and wide use of pretrained language models (PLMs), several approaches have been applied to boost their performance on downstream tasks in specific domains, such as biomedical or scientific domains. Additional pre-training with in-domain texts is the most common approach for providing domain-specific knowledge to PLMs. However, these pre-training methods require considerable in-domain data and training resources and a longer training time. Moreover, the training must be re-performed whenever a new PLM emerges. In this study, we propose a domain knowledge transferring (DoKTra) framework for PLMs without additional in-domain pretraining. Specifically, we extract the domain knowledge from an existing in-domain pretrained language model and transfer it to other PLMs by applying knowledge distillation. In particular, we employ activation boundary distillation, which focuses on the activation of hidden neurons. We also apply an entropy regularization term in both teacher training and distillation to encourage the model to generate reliable output probabilities, and thus aid the distillation. By applying the proposed DoKTra framework to downstream tasks in the biomedical, clinical, and financial domains, our student models can retain a high percentage of teacher performance and even outperform the teachers in certain tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/DMCB-GIST/DoKTra.

Domain Knowledge Transferring for Pre-trained Language Model via Calibrated Activation Boundary Distillation

Early stopping, which is widely used to prevent overfitting, is generally based on a separate validation set. However, in low resource settings, validation-based stopping can be risky because a small validation set may not be sufficiently representative, and the reduction in the number of samples by validation split may result in insufficient samples for training. In this study, we propose an early stopping method that uses unlabeled samples. The proposed method is based on confidence and class distribution similarities. To further improve the performance, we present a calibration method to better estimate the class distribution of the unlabeled samples. The proposed method is advantageous because it does not require a separate validation set and provides a better stopping point by using a large unlabeled set. Extensive experiments are conducted on five text classification datasets and several stop-methods are compared. Our results show that the proposed model even performs better than using an additional validation set as well as the existing stop-methods, in both balanced and imbalanced data settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/DMCB-GIST/BUS-stop.

Perturbations in the Wild: Leveraging Human-Written Text Perturbations for Realistic Adversarial Attack and Defense

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