Korea, Republic of


Reasoning and knowledge-related skills are considered as two fundamental skills for natu- ral language understanding (NLU) tasks such as machine reading comprehension (MRC) and natural language inference (NLI). However, it is not clear to what extent an NLU task defined on a dataset correlates to a specific NLU skill. On the one hand, evaluating the correlation re- quires an understanding of the significance of the NLU skill in a dataset. Significance judges whether a dataset includes sufficient material to help the model master this skill. On the other hand, it is also necessary to evaluate the dependence of the task on the NLU skill. De- pendence is a measure of how much the task defined on a dataset depends on the skill. In this paper, we propose a systematic method to diagnose the correlations between an NLU dataset and a specific skill, and then take a fun- damental reasoning skill, logical reasoning, as an example for analysis. The method adopts a qualitative indicator to indicate the significance while adopting a quantitative indicator to mea- sure the dependence. We perform diagnosis on 8 MRC datasets (including two types) and 3 NLI datasets and acquire intuitively reason- able results. We then perform the analysis to further understand the results and the proposed indicators. Based on the analysis, although the diagnostic method has some limitations, it is still an effective method to perform a basic di- agnosis of the correlation between the dataset and logical reasoning skill, which also can be generalized to other NLU skills.


COLING 2022

To What Extent Do Natural Language Understanding Datasets Correlate to Logical Reasoning? A Method for Diagnosing Logical Reasoning.

diagnosis

logical reason

language model

# 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. 

 
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ACL 2022

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). 

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First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Although the fluency of automatically generated abstractive summaries has improved significantly with advanced methods, the inconsistency that remains in summarization is recognized as an issue to be addressed.
In this study, we propose a methodology for localizing inconsistency errors in summarization.
A synthetic dataset that contains a variety of factual errors likely to be produced by a common summarizer is created by applying sentence fusion, compression, and paraphrasing operations.
In creating the dataset, we automatically label erroneous phrases and the dependency relations between them as ``inconsistent,'' which can contribute to detecting errors more adequately than existing models that rely only on dependency arc-level labels.
Subsequently, this synthetic dataset is employed as weak supervision to train a model called SumPhrase, which jointly localizes errors in a summary and their corresponding sentences in the source document.
The empirical results demonstrate that our SumPhrase model can detect factual errors in summarization more effectively than existing weakly supervised methods owing to the phrase-level labeling.
Moreover, the joint identification of error-corresponding original sentences is proven to be effective in improving error detection accuracy.

Phrase-Level Localization of Inconsistency Errors in Summarization by Weak Supervision

Target-oriented multimodal sentiment classification (TMSC) is a new subtask of aspect-based sentiment analysis, which aims to determine the sentiment polarity of the opinion target mentioned in a (sentence, image) pair. Recently, dominant works employ the attention mechanism to capture the corresponding visual representations of the opinion target, and then aggregate them as evidence to make sentiment predictions. However, they still suffer from two problems: (1) The granularity of the opinion target in two modalities is inconsistent, which causes visual attention sometimes fail to capture the corresponding visual representations of the target; (2) Even though it is captured, there are still significant differences between the visual representations expressing the same mood, which brings great difficulty to sentiment prediction. To this end, we propose a novel Knowledge-enhanced Framework (KEF) in this paper, which can successfully exploit adjective-noun pairs extracted from the image to improve the visual attention capability and sentiment prediction capability of the TMSC task. Extensive experimental results show that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art works on two public datasets.

Learning from Adjective-Noun Pairs: A Knowledge-enhanced Framework for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification

Recently, Mixture-of-Experts (short as MoE) architecture has achieved remarkable success in increasing the model capacity of large-scale language models. However, MoE requires incorporating significantly more parameters than the base model being extended. In this paper, we propose building a parameter-efficient MoE architecture by sharing information across experts. We adopt the matrix product operator (MPO, a tensor decomposition from quantum many-body physics) to reconstruct the parameter matrix in the expert layer and increase model capacity for pre-trained language models by sharing parameters of the central tensor (containing the core information) among different experts while enabling the specificity through the auxiliary tensors (complementing the central tensor) of different experts. To address the unbalanced optimization issue, we further design the gradient mask strategy for the MPO-based MoE architecture. Extensive experiments based on T5 and GPT-2 show improved performance and efficiency of the pre-trained language model (27.2x reduction in total parameters for the superior model performance, compared with the Switch Transformers).

Parameter-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Architecture for Pre-trained Language Models

Extracting spatial relations from texts is a fundamental task for natural language understanding and previous studies only regard it as a classification task, ignoring those spatial relations with null roles due to their poor information. To address the above issue, we first view spatial relation extraction as a generation task and propose a novel hybrid model HMCGR for this task. HMCGR contains a generation and a classification model, while the former can generate those null-role relations and the latter can extract those non-null-role relations to complement each other. Moreover, a reflexivity evaluation mechanism is applied to further improve the accuracy based on the reflexivity principle of spatial relation. Experimental results on SpaceEval show that HMCGR outperforms the SOTA baselines significantly.

A Hybrid Model of Classification and Generation for Spatial Relation Extraction

Text-to-SQL has attracted attention from both the natural language processing and database communities because of its ability to convert the semantics in natural language into SQL queries and its practical application in building natural language interfaces to database systems. The major challenges in text-to-SQL lie in encoding the meaning of natural utterances, decoding to SQL queries, and translating the semantics between these two forms. These challenges have been addressed to different extents by the recent advances. How- ever, there is still a lack of comprehensive surveys for this task. To this end, we review recent progress on text-to-SQL for datasets, methods, and evaluation and provide this systematic survey, addressing the aforementioned challenges and discussing potential future directions. We hope that this survey can serve as quick access to existing work and motivate future research.

Recent Advances in Text-to-SQL: A Survey of What We Have and What We Expect

Pre-trained models have brought remarkable success on the text summarization task. For dialogue summarization, the subdomain of text summarization, utterances are concatenated to flat text before being processed. As a result, existing summarization systems based on pre-trained models are unable to recognize the unique format of the speaker-utterance pair well in the dialogue. To investigate this issue, we conduct probing tests and manual analysis, and find that the powerful pre-trained model can not identify different speakers well in the conversation, which leads to various factual errors. Moreover, we propose three speaker-aware supervised contrastive learning (SCL) tasks: Token-level SCL, Turn-level SCL, and Global-level SCL. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve significant performance improvement on two mainstream dialogue summarization datasets. According to detailed human evaluations, pre-trained models equipped with SCL tasks effectively generate summaries with better factual consistency.

Improving Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Speaker-Aware Supervised Contrastive Learning

Abstractive dialogue summarization aims to convert a long dialogue content into its short form where the salient information is preserved, while the redundant pieces are ignored. Different from the well-structured text, such as news and scientific articles, dialogues often consist of utterances coming from two or more interlocutors, where the conversations are often informal, verbose, and repetitive, sprinkled with false-starts, backchanneling, reconfirmations, hesitations, speaker interruptions and the salient information is often scattered across the whole chat. The above properties of conversations make it difficult to directly concentrate on scattered outstanding utterances and thus present new challenges of summarizing dialogues. In this work, we propose to explicitly have the model perceive the redundant parts of an input dialogue history, so that the model is able to pay more attention to the salient pieces. To be specific, we design two strategies to construct examples without salient pieces as negative cues. Then, the sequence-to-sequence likelihood loss is cooperated with the unlikelihood objective to drive the model focus less on the unimportant information as well as pay more attention to the salient pieces. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our simple method outperforms baselines with regard to both semantic matching and factual consistent based metrics. The human evaluation also proves the performance gains led by our approach.

Summarizing Dialogues with Negative Cues

Building query graphs from natural language
questions is an important step in complex question answering over knowledge graph (Complex KGQA). In general, a question can be correctly answered if its query graph is built correctly and the right answer is then retrieved by
issuing the query graph against the KG. Therefore, this paper focuses on query graph generation from natural language questions. Existing approaches for query graph generation
ignore the semantic structure of a question, resulting in a large number of noisy query graph
candidates that undermine prediction accuracies. In this paper, we define six semantic
structures from common questions in KGQA
and develop a novel Structure-BERT to predict the semantic structure of a question. By
doing so, we can first filter out noisy candidate query graphs, and then rank the remaining
candidates with a BERT-based ranking model.
Extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks MetaQA and WebQuestionsSP (WSP)
demonstrate the effectiveness of our method as
compared to state-of-the-arts.

Semantic Structure based Query Graph Prediction for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is the foundation of global health statistics and epidemiology. The ICD is designed to translate health conditions into alphanumeric codes. A number of approaches have been proposed for automatic ICD coding, since manual coding is labor-intensive and there is a global shortage of healthcare workers. However, existing studies did not exploit the discourse structure of clinical notes, which provides rich contextual information for code assignment. In this paper, we exploit the discourse structure by leveraging section type classification and section type embeddings. We also focus on the class-imbalanced problem and the heterogeneous writing style between clinical notes and ICD code definitions. The proposed reconciled embedding approach is able to tackle them simultaneously. Experimental results on the MIMIC dataset show that our model outperforms all previous state-of-the-art models by a large margin.
The source code is available at https://github.com/discnet2022/discnet


Automatic ICD coding exploiting discourse structure and reconciled code embeddings

Unsupervised contrastive sentence embedding models, e.g., unsupervised SimCSE, use the InfoNCE loss function in training. Theoretically, we expect to use larger batches to get more adequate comparisons among samples and avoid overfitting. However, increasing batch size leads to performance degradation when it exceeds a threshold, which is probably due to the introduction of false-negative pairs through statistical observation. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a simple smoothing strategy upon the InfoNCE loss function, termed Gaussian Smoothed InfoNCE (GS-InfoNCE). In other words, we add random Gaussian noise as an extension to the negative pairs without increasing the batch size. Through experiments on the semantic text similarity tasks, though simple, the proposed smoothing strategy brings improvements to unsupervised SimCSE.

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