United States

Large pretrained language models (LMs) have become the central building block of many NLP applications. Training these models requires ever more computational resources and most of the existing models are trained on English text only. It is exceedingly expensive to train these models in other languages. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a novel method -- called WECHSEL -- to efficiently and effectively transfer pretrained LMs to new languages. WECHSEL can be applied to any model which uses subword-based tokenization and learns an embedding for each subword. The tokenizer of the source model (in English) is replaced with a tokenizer in the target language and token embeddings are initialized such that they are semantically similar to the English tokens by utilizing multilingual static word embeddings covering English and the target language. We use WECHSEL to transfer the English RoBERTa and GPT-2 models to four languages (French, German, Chinese and Swahili). We also study the benefits of our method on very low-resource languages. WECHSEL improves over proposed methods for cross-lingual parameter transfer and outperforms models of comparable size trained from scratch with up to 64x less training effort. Our method makes training large language models for new languages more accessible and less damaging to the environment. We make our code and models publicly available.

NAACL 2022

WECHSEL: Effective initialization of subword embeddings for cross-lingual transfer of monolingual language models

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

**Whova App** 
Stay in touch with your fellow conference attendees via the [Whova App](https://whova.com/portal/webapp/nacon_202106/)

**Conference Structure**
https://2021.naacl.org/blog/conference-structure/

**Walkthrough video of how to NAACL 2021** 

Please take a moment to view this video explaining how to navigate the platform, attend sessions network with other attendees. 


<figure class="video_container">
 <iframe src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/crhwbGVh3vx?v=6&ff=1&title=0&controls=1" width=640 height=350 frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"> </iframe>
</figure>

NAACL 2021

technical paper

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Large pre-trained neural language models have supported the effectiveness of many NLP tasks, yet are still prone to generating toxic language hindering the safety of their use. Using empathetic data, we improve over recent work on controllable text generation that aims to reduce the toxicity of generated text. We find we are able to dramatically reduce the size of fine-tuning data to 7.5-30k samples while at the same time making significant improvements over state-of-the-art toxicity mitigation of up to 3.4% absolute reduction (26% relative) from the original work on 2.3m samples, by strategically sampling data based on empathy scores. We observe that the degree of improvement is subject to specific communication components of empathy. In particular, the cognitive components of empathy significantly beat the original dataset in almost all experiments, while emotional empathy was tied to less improvement and even underperforming random samples of the original data. This is a particularly implicative insight for NLP work concerning empathy as until recently the research and resources built for it have exclusively considered empathy as an emotional concept.

Mitigating Toxic Degeneration with Empathetic Data: Exploring the Relationship Between Toxicity and Empathy

It is challenging to train a good intent classifier for a task-oriented dialogue system with only a few annotations. Recent studies have shown that fine-tuning pre-trained language models with a small amount of labeled utterances from public benchmarks in a supervised manner is extremely helpful. However, we find that supervised pre-training yields an anisotropic feature space, which may suppress the expressive power of the semantic representations. Inspired by recent research in isotropization, we propose to improve supervised pre-training by regularizing the feature space towards isotropy. We propose two regularizers based on contrastive learning and correlation matrix respectively, and demonstrate their effectiveness through extensive experiments. Our main finding is that it is promising to regularize supervised pre-training with isotropization to further improve the performance of few-shot intent detection.

Fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models for Few-shot Intent Detection: Supervised Pre-training and Isotropization

In recent years, transformer-based coreference resolution systems have achieved remarkable improvements on the CoNLL dataset. However, how coreference resolvers can benefit from discourse coherence is still an open question. In this paper, we propose to incorporate centering transitions derived from centering theory in the form of a graph into a neural coreference model. Our method improves the performance over the SOTA baselines, especially on pronoun resolution in long documents, formal well-structured text, and clusters with scattered mentions.

Incorporating Centering Theory into Neural Coreference Resolution

As using they/them as personal pronouns becomes increasingly common in English, it is important that coreference resolution systems work as well for individuals who use personal "they” as they do for those who use gendered personal pronouns. We introduce a new benchmark for coreference resolution systems which evaluates singular personal “they” recognition. Using these WinoNB schemas, we evaluate a number of publicly available coreference resolution systems and confirm their bias toward resolving “they” pronouns as plural.

Recognition of They/Them as Singular Personal Pronouns in Coreference Resolution

Language representations are an efficient tool used across NLP, but they are strife with encoded societal biases. These biases are studied extensively, but with a primary focus on English language representations and biases common in the context of Western society. In this work, we investigate the biases present in Hindi language representations such as caste and religion associated biases. We demonstrate how biases are unique to specific language representations based on the history and culture of the region they are widely spoken in, and also how the same societal bias (such as binary gender associated biases) when investigated across languages is encoded by different words and text spans. With this work, we emphasize on the necessity of social-awareness along with linguistic and grammatical artefacts when modeling language representations, in order to understand the biases encoded.

Socially Aware Bias Measurements for Hindi Language Representations

Existing approaches to mitigate demographic biases evaluate on monolingual data, however, multilingual data has not been examined. In this work, we treat the gender as domains (e.g., male vs. female) and present a standard domain adaptation model to reduce the gender bias and improve performance of text classifiers under multilingual settings. We evaluate our approach on two text classification tasks, hate speech detection and rating prediction, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with three fair-aware baselines.

Easy Adaptation to Mitigate Gender Bias in Multilingual Text Classification

Recently, Multi-modal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) has attracted a lot of attention. Most of the work utilizes image information through region-level visual representations obtained from a pretrained object detector and relies on an attention mechanism to model the interactions between image and text representations. However, it is difficult to model such interactions as image and text representations are trained separately on the data of their respective modality and are not aligned in the same space. As text representations take the most important role in MNER, in this paper, we propose \bf Image-\bf text \bf Alignments (ITA) to align image features into the textual space, so that the attention mechanism in transformer-based pretrained textual embeddings can be better utilized. ITA first aligns the image into regional object tags, image-level captions and optical characters as visual contexts, concatenates them with the input texts as a new cross-modal input, and then feeds it into a pretrained textual embedding model. This makes it easier for the attention module of a pretrained textual embedding model to model the interaction between the two modalities since they are both represented in the textual space. ITA further aligns the output distributions predicted from the cross-modal input and textual input views so that the MNER model can be more practical in dealing with text-only inputs and robust to noises from images. In our experiments, we show that ITA models can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on multi-modal Named Entity Recognition datasets, even without image information.

ITA: Image-Text Alignments for Multi-Modal Named Entity Recognition

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to determine the relation between two entities from a document of multiple sentences. Recent studies typically represent the entire document by sequence- or graph-based models to predict the relations of all entity pairs. However, we find that such a model is not robust and exhibits bizarre behaviors: it predicts correctly when an entire test document is fed as input, but errs when non-evidence sentences are removed. To this end, we propose a Sentence Importance Estimation and Focusing (SIEF) framework for DocRE, where we design a sentence importance score and a sentence focusing loss, encouraging DocRE models to focus on evidence sentences. Experimental results on two domains show that our SIEF not only improves overall performance, but also makes DocRE models more robust. Moreover, SIEF is a general framework, shown to be effective when combined with a variety of base DocRE models.

Document-Level Relation Extraction with Sentences Importance Estimation and Focusing

Non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) suffers from the multi-modality problem: the source sentence may have multiple correct translations, but the loss function is calculated only according to the reference sentence. Sequence-level knowledge distillation makes the target more deterministic by replacing the target with the output from an autoregressive model. However, the multi-modality problem in the distilled dataset is still nonnegligible. Furthermore, learning from a specific teacher limits the upper bound of the model capability, restricting the potential of NAT models. In this paper, we argue that one reference is not enough and propose diverse distillation with reference selection (DDRS) for NAT. Specifically, we first propose a method called SeedDiv for diverse machine translation, which enables us to generate a dataset containing multiple high-quality reference translations for each source sentence. During the training, we compare the NAT output with all references and select the one that best fits the NAT output to train the model. Experiments on widely-used machine translation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DDRS, which achieves 29.82 BLEU with only one decoding pass on WMT14 En-De, improving the state-of-the-art performance for NAT by over 1 BLEU.\footnote{Source code: https://github.com/ictnlp/DDRS-NAT.}

One Reference Is Not Enough: Diverse Distillation with Reference Selection for Non-Autoregressive Translation

The application of supervised methods to automatic summarization requires the availability of adequate corpora consisting of a set of document-summary pairs. As in most Natural Language Processing tasks, the great majority of available datasets for summarization are in English, making it difficult to develop automatic summarization models for other languages. Although Spanish is gradually forming part of some recent summarization corpora, it is not the same for minority languages such as Catalan.
In this work, we describe the construction of a corpus of Catalan and Spanish newspapers, the Dataset for Automatic summarization of Catalan and Spanish newspaper Articles (DACSA) corpus. It is a high-quality large-scale corpus that can be used to train summarization models for Catalan and Spanish.
We have carried out an analysis of the corpus, both in terms of the style of the summaries and the difficulty of the summarization task. In particular, we have used a set of well-known metrics in the summarization field in order to characterize the corpus. Additionally, for benchmarking purposes, we have evaluated the performances of some extractive and abstractive summarization systems on the DACSA corpus.

WECHSEL: Effective initialization of subword embeddings for cross-lingual transfer of monolingual language models

Downloads

Next from NAACL 2022

Mitigating Toxic Degeneration with Empathetic Data: Exploring the Relationship Between Toxicity and Empathy

Similar lecture

Training Data Augmentation for Code-Mixed Translation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

WECHSEL: Effective initialization of subword embeddings for cross-lingual transfer of monolingual language models

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from NAACL 2022

Mitigating Toxic Degeneration with Empathetic Data: Exploring the Relationship Between Toxicity and Empathy

Similar lecture

Training Data Augmentation for Code-Mixed Translation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads