Korea, Republic of

With the success of contextualized language models, much research explores what these models really learn and in which cases they still fail. Most of this work focuses on specific NLP tasks and on the learning outcome. Little research has attempted to decouple the models’ weaknesses from specific tasks and focus on the embeddings per se and their mode of learning. In this paper, we take up this research opportunity: based on theoretical linguistic insights, we explore whether the semantic constraints of function words are learned and how the surrounding context impacts their embeddings. We create suitable datasets, provide new insights into the inner workings of LMs vis-a-vis function words and implement an assisting visual web interface for qualitative analysis.

COLING 2022

Negation, Coordination, and Quantifiers in Contextualized Language Models

function words

explainability

language models

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

poster

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

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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.

We propose a new approach, Knowledge Distillation using Optimal Transport (KNOT), to distill the natural language semantic knowledge from multiple teacher networks to a student network. KNOT aims to train a (global) student model by learning to minimize the optimal transport cost of its assigned probability distribution over the labels to the weighted sum of probabilities predicted by the (local) teacher models, under the constraints that the student model does not have access to teacher models' parameters or training data. To evaluate the quality of knowledge transfer, we introduce a new metric, Semantic Distance (SD), that measures semantic closeness between the predicted and ground truth label distributions. The proposed method shows improvements in the global model's SD performance over the baseline across three NLP tasks while performing on par with Entropy-based distillation on standard accuracy and F1 metrics.

KNOT: Knowledge Distillation using Optimal Transport for Solving NLP Tasks

Diagnosis prediction on admission notes is a core clinical task.
However, these notes may incompletely describe the patient.
Also, clinical language models may suffer from idiosyncratic language or imbalanced vocabulary for describing diseases or symptoms.
We tackle the task of diagnosis prediction, which consists of predicting future patient diagnoses from clinical texts at the time of admission. We improve the performance on this task by introducing an additional signal from support sets of diagnostic codes from prior admissions or as they emerge during differential diagnosis.
To enhance the robustness of diagnosis prediction methods, we propose to augment clinical text with potentially complementary set data from diagnosis codes from previous patient visits or from codes that emerge from the current admission as they become available through diagnostics.
We discuss novel attention network architectures and augmentation strategies to solve this problem.
Our experiments reveal that support sets improve the performance drastically to predict less common diagnosis codes. Our approach clearly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art PubMedBERT baseline by up 3% points. Furthermore, we find that support sets drastically improve the performance for pregnancy- and gynecology-related diagnoses up to 32.9% points compared to the baseline.

Attention Networks for Augmenting Clinical Text with Support Sets for Diagnosis Prediction

Multi-modal named entity recognition (MNER) aims at identifying entity spans and recognizing their categories in social media posts with the aid of images. However, in dominant MNER approaches, the interaction of different modalities is usually carried out through the alternation of self-attention and cross-attention or over-reliance on the gating machine, which results in imprecise and biased correspondence between fine-grained semantic units of text and image. To address this issue, we propose a Flat Multi-modal Interaction Transformer (FMIT) for MNER. Specifically, we first utilize noun phrases in sentences and general domain words to obtain visual cues. Then, we transform the fine-grained semantic representation of the vision and text into a unified lattice structure and design a novel relative position encoding to match different modalities in Transformer. Meanwhile, we propose to leverage entity boundary detection as an auxiliary task to alleviate visual bias. Experiments show that our methods achieve the new state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.

Flat Multi-modal Interaction Transformer for Named Entity Recognition

In this work, we present CSL, a large-scale Chinese Scientific Literature dataset, which contains the titles, abstracts, keywords and academic fields of 396k papers. To our knowledge, CSL is the first scientific document dataset in Chinese.

CSL: A Large-scale Chinese Scientific Literature Dataset

Deploying large-scale pre-trained models in the prompt-tuning paradigm has demonstrated promising performance in few-shot learning. Particularly, vision-language pre-training models (VL-PTMs) have been intensively explored in various few-shot downstream tasks. However, most existing works only apply VL-PTMs to visual tasks like image classification, with few attempts being made on language tasks like text classification. In few-shot text classification, a feasible paradigm for deploying VL-PTMs is to align the input samples and their category names via the text encoders. However, it leads to the waste of visual information learned by the image encoders of VL-PTMs. To overcome this drawback, we propose a novel method named Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT). To our best knowledge, this method is the first attempt to deploy VL-PTM in few-shot text classification task. The main idea is to generate the image embeddings w.r.t. category names as visual prompt and then add them to the aligning process. Extensive experiments show that our VPT can achieve significant improvements under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Importantly, our VPT even outperforms the most recent prompt-tuning methods on five public text classification datasets.

Visual Prompt Tuning for Few-Shot Text Classification

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task, which focuses on detecting the sentiment polarity towards the aspect in a sentence. However, it is always sensitive to the multi-aspect challenge, where features of multiple aspects in a sentence will affect each other. To mitigate this issue, we design a novel training framework, called Contrastive Cross-Channel Data Augmentation
(C3DA), which leverages an in-domain generator to construct more multi-aspect samples and then boosts the robustness of ABSA models via contrastive learning on these generated data. In practice, given a generative pretrained language model and some limited ABSA labeled data, we first employ some parameter-efficient 
approaches to perform the in-domain fine-tuning. Then, the obtained in-domain generator is used to generate the synthetic sentences from two channels, i.e., Aspect Augmentation Channel and Polarity Augmentation Channel, which generate the sentence condition on a given aspect and polarity respectively. Specifically, our C3DA performs the sentence generation in a cross-channel manner to obtain more sentences, and proposes an Entropy-Minimization Filter to filter low-quality generated samples. Extensive experiments show that our C3DA can outperform those baselines without any augmentations by about 1% on accuracy and MacroF1.

A Contrastive Cross-Channel Data Augmentation Framework for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Recently, Transformer has achieved great success in Chinese named entity recognition (NER) owing to its good parallelism and ability to model long-range dependencies, which utilizes self-attention to encode context. However, the fully connected way of self-attention may scatter the attention distribution and allow some irrelevant character information to be integrated, leading to entity boundaries being misidentified. In this paper, we propose a data-driven Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention (ATSSA) mechanism that aims to dynamically select the most relevant characters to enhance the Transformer architecture for Chinese NER. In ATSSA, the attention score threshold of each query is automatically generated, and characters with attention score higher than the threshold are selected by the query while others are discarded, so as to address irrelevant attention integration. Experiments on four benchmark Chinese NER datasets show that the proposed ATSSA brings 1.68 average F1 score improvements to the baseline model and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention for Chinese NER

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance gains across numerous downstream tasks in natural language understanding. Various Chinese PLMs have been successively proposed for learning better Chinese language representation. However, most current models use Chi- nese characters as inputs and are not able to encode semantic information contained in Chinese words. While recent pre-trained models incorporate both words and characters simultaneously, they usually suffer from deficient semantic interactions and fail to capture the semantic relation between words and characters. To address the above issues, we propose a simple yet effective PLM CLOWER, which adopts the Contrastive Learning Over Word and charactER representations. In particular, CLOWER im- plicitly encodes the coarse- grained information (i.e., words) into the fine-grained representations (i.e., characters) through contrastive learning on multi-grained information. CLOWER is of great value in realistic scenarios since it can be easily incorporated into any existing fine-grained based PLMs without modifying the production pipelines. Extensive experiments conducted on a range of downstream tasks demonstrate the superior performance of CLOWER over several state-of-the-art baselines.

CLOWER: A Pre-trained Language Model with Contrastive Learning over Word and Character Representations

We introduce a new type of problems for math word problem (MWP) solvers, named Noun-MWPs, whose answer is a non-numerical string containing a noun from the problem text. 
We present a novel method to empower existing MWP solvers to handle Noun-MWPs, and apply the method on Expression-Pointer Transformer (EPT).
Our model, N-EPT, solves Noun-MWPs significantly better than other models, and at the same time, solves conventional MWPs as well. 
Solving Noun-MWPs may lead to bridging MWP solvers and traditional question-answering NLP models.

Noun-MWP: Math Word Problems Meet Noun Answers

This paper explores the task of identifying the overall sentiment expressed towards volitional entities (persons and organizations) in a document -- what we refer to as Entity-Level Sentiment Analysis (ELSA). While identifying sentiment conveyed towards an entity is well researched for shorter texts like tweets, we find little to no research on this specific task for longer texts with multiple mentions and opinions towards the same entity. This lack of research would be understandable if ELSA can be derived from existing tasks and models. To assess this, we annotate a set of professional reviews for their overall sentiment towards each volitional entity in the text. We sample from data already annotated for document-level, sentence-level, and target-level sentiment in a multi-domain review corpus, and our results indicate that there is no single proxy task that provides this overall sentiment we seek for the entities at a satisfactory level of performance. We present a suite of experiments aiming to assess the contribution towards ELSA provided by document-, sentence-, and target-level sentiment analysis, and provide a discussion of their shortcomings. We show that sentiment in our dataset is expressed not only with an entity mention as target, but also towards targets with a sentiment-relevant relation to a volitional entity. In our data, these relations extend beyond anaphoric coreference resolution, and our findings call for further research of the topic. Finally, we also present a survey of previous relevant work.

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