Korea, Republic of

Brain encoding aims at reconstructing fMRI brain activity given a stimulus. Earlier neural encoding models focused on brain encoding for single-mode stimuli: visual (pretrained CNNs) or text (pretrained language models). Few recent papers have also obtained separate visual and text representation models and performed late-fusion using simple heuristics. However, the human brain perceives the environment using information from multiple modalities, and previous works have not explored the co-attentive multi-modal encoding for visual and text reasoning. This paper systematically explores image and multi-modal Transformers&#39; efficacy for brain encoding.Extensive experiments on two popular datasets, BOLD5000 and Pereira, provide the following insights.

(1) We find that VisualBERT, a multi-modal Transformer, significantly outperforms previously proposed single-mode CNNs, image Transformers, and other previously proposed multi-modal models, thereby establishing new state-of-the-art. 
(2) The regions such as LPTG, LMTG, LIFG, and STS, which have dual functionalities for language and vision, have a higher correlation with multi-modal models, which reinforces the fact that these models are good at mimicking the human brain behavior.
(3) The supremacy of visio-linguistic models raises the question of whether the responses elicited in the visual regions are affected implicitly by linguistic processing even when passively viewing images.

COLING 2022

Visio-Linguistic Brain Encoding

brain encoding

multi-modal

transformers

# 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. 
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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). 

Brain encoding aims at reconstructing fMRI brain activity given a stimulus. Earlier neural encoding models focused on brain encoding for single-mode stimuli: visual (pretrained CNNs) or text (pretrained language models). Few recent papers have also obtained separate visual and text representation models and performed late-fusion using simple heuristics. However, the human brain perceives the environment using information from multiple modalities, and previous works have not explored the co-attentive multi-modal encoding for visual and text reasoning. This paper systematically explores image and multi-modal Transformers' efficacy for brain encoding.Extensive experiments on two popular datasets, BOLD5000 and Pereira, provide the following insights.

(1) We find that VisualBERT, a multi-modal Transformer, significantly outperforms previously proposed single-mode CNNs, image Transformers, and other previously proposed multi-modal models, thereby establishing new state-of-the-art. 
(2) The regions such as LPTG, LMTG, LIFG, and STS, which have dual functionalities for language and vision, have a higher correlation with multi-modal models, which reinforces the fact that these models are good at mimicking the human brain behavior.
(3) The supremacy of visio-linguistic models raises the question of whether the responses elicited in the visual regions are affected implicitly by linguistic processing even when passively viewing images.

technical paper

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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 automatic text summarization (ATS) has been researched for several decades, the application of graph neural networks (GNNs) to this task started relatively recently. In this survey we provide an overview on the rapidly evolving approach of using GNNs for the task of automatic text summarization. In particular we provide detailed information on the functionality of GNNs in the context of ATS, and a comprehensive overview of models utilizing this approach.

A Survey of Automatic Text Summarization using Graph Neural Networks

Keyphrase Prediction (KP) is an established NLP task, aiming to yield representative phrases to summarize the main content of a given document. Despite major progress in recent years, existing works on KP have mainly focused on formal texts such as scientific papers or weblogs. The challenges of KP in informal-text domains are not yet fully studied. To this end, this work studies new challenges of KP in transcripts of videos, an understudied domain for KP that involves informal texts and non-cohesive presentation styles. A bottleneck for KP research in this domain involves the lack of high-quality and large-scale annotated data that hinders the development of advanced KP models. To address this issue, we introduce a large-scale manually-annotated KP dataset in the domain of live-stream video transcripts obtained by automatic speech recognition tools. Concretely, transcripts of 500+ hours of videos streamed on the {\tt behance.net} platform are manually labeled with important keyphrases. Our analysis of the dataset reveals the challenging nature of KP in transcripts. Moreover, for the first time in KP, we demonstrate the idea of improving KP for long documents (i.e., transcripts) by feeding models with paragraph-level keyphrases, i.e., hierarchical extraction. To foster future research, we will publicly release the dataset and code.

Keyphrase Prediction from Video Transcripts: New Dataset and Directions

Templated answers are used extensively in customer support scenarios, providing an efficient way to cover a plethora of topics, with an easily maintainable collection of templates. However, the number of templates is often too high for an agent to manually search. Automatically suggesting the correct template for a given question can thus improve the service efficiency, reducing costs and leading to a better customer satisfaction. In this work, we propose a dense retrieval framework for the customer support scenario, adapting a standard in-batch negatives technique to support unpaired sampling of queries and templates. We also propose a novel loss that extends the typical query-centric similarity, exploiting other similarity relations in the training data. Experiments show that our approach achieves considerable improvements, in terms of performance and training speed, over more standard dense retrieval methods. This includes methods such as DPR, and also ablated versions of the proposed approach.

Dense Template Retrieval for Customer Support

Event extraction (EE) is one of the fundamental tasks for information extraction whose goal is to identify mentions of events and their participants in text. Due to its importance, different methods and datasets have been introduced for EE. However, existing EE datasets are limited to formally written documents such as news articles or scientific papers. As such, the challenges of EE in informal and noisy texts are not adequately studied. In particular, video transcripts constitute an important domain that can benefit tremendously from EE systems (e.g., video retrieval), but has not been studied in EE literature due to the lack of necessary datasets. To address this limitation, we propose the first large-scale EE dataset obtained for transcripts of streamed videos on the video hosting platform Behance to promote future research in this area. In addition, we extensively evaluate existing state-of-the-art EE methods on our new dataset. We demonstrate that such systems cannot achieve adequate performance on the proposed dataset, revealing challenges and opportunities for further research effort.

Event Extraction in Video Transcripts

This paper introduces our Diversity Advanced Actor-Critic reinforcement learning (A2C) framework (DAAC) to improve the generalization and accuracy of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We show that the diversification of training samples alleviates overfitting and improves model generalization and accuracy. We quantify diversity on a set of samples using the max dispersion, convex hull volume, and graph entropy based on sentence embeddings in high-dimensional metric space. We also introduce A2C to select such a diversified training subset efficiently. Our experiments achieve up to +23.8 accuracy increase (38.0% relatively) in sentiment analysis, -44.7 perplexity decrease (37.9% relatively) in language modeling, and consistent improvements in named entity recognition over various domains. In particular, our method outperforms both domain adaptation and generalization baselines without using any target domain knowledge.

Can Data Diversity Enhance Learning Generalization?

Recently, neural topic models (NTMs) have been incorporated into pre-trained language models (PLMs), to capture the global semantic information for text summarization. However, in these methods, there remain limitations in the way they capture and integrate the global semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel model, the graph contrastive topic enhanced language model (GRETEL), that incorporates the graph contrastive topic model with the pre-trained language model, to fully leverage both the global and local contextual semantics for long document extractive summarization. To better capture and incorporate the global semantic information into PLMs, the graph contrastive topic model integrates the hierarchical transformer encoder and the graph contrastive learning to fuse the semantic information from the global document context and the gold summary. To this end, GRETEL encourages the model to efficiently extract salient sentences that are topically related to the gold summary, rather than redundant sentences that cover sub-optimal topics. Experimental results on both general domain and biomedical datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms SOTA methods.

GRETEL: Graph Contrastive Topic Enhanced Language Model for Long Document Extractive Summarization

A shift in data distribution can have a significant impact on performance of a text classification model. Recent methods addressing unsupervised domain adaptation for textual tasks typically extracted domain-invariant representations through balancing between multiple objectives to align feature spaces between source and target domains. While effective, these methods induce various new domain-sensitive hyperparameters, thus are impractical as largescale language models are drastically growing bigger to achieve optimal performance. To this end, we propose to leverage meta-learning framework to train a neural network-based self-paced learning procedure in an end-to-end manner. Our method, called Meta Self-Paced Domain Adaption (MSP-DA), follows a novel but intuitive domain-shift variation of cluster assumption to derive the meta train-test dataset split based on the self-pacing difficulties of source domain’s examples. As a result, MSP-DA effectively leverages self-training and self-tuning domain-specific hyperparameters simultaneously throughout the learning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate our framework substantially improves performance on target domains, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches. Detailed analyses validate our method and provide insight into how each domain affects the learned hyperparameters.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Text Classification via Meta Self-Paced Learning

As manually labelling data can be costly, some recent studies tend to augment the training data for improving the generalization power of machine learning models, known as data augmentation(DA). Meanwhile, with the arise of pre-trained language models (PLMs), some recent works on DA try to synthesize new samples benefiting from the knowledge learned from PLM's pre-training. Along the same direction, we in this paper propose to integrate text-to-text language models and construct a new two-phase framework for augmentation: 1) a fine-tuning phase where PLMs are well adapted to downstream classification with the help of two novel schemes, and 2) a generation phase where the fine-tuned models are leveraged to create new samples for performance lifting. This paradigm opens up a new way of designing fine-tuning scheme to better serve DA in an easy-to-implement manner, and can be easily extended to other desired tasks. We evaluate our proposal on two public classification datasets and demonstrate its effectiveness with remarkable gains.

Rethinking Data Augmentation in Text-to-text Paradigm

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is the task of labeling semantic arguments for marked semantic predicates. Semantic arguments and their predicates are related in various distinct manners, of which certain semantic arguments are a necessity while others serve as an auxiliary to their predicates. To consider such roles and relations of the arguments in the labeling order, we introduce iterative argument identification (IAI), which combines global decoding and iterative identification for the semantic arguments. In experiments, we first realize that the model with random argument labeling orders outperforms other heuristic orders such as the conventional left-to-right labeling order. Combined with simple reinforcement learning, the proposed model spontaneously learns the optimized labeling orders that are different from existing heuristic orders. The proposed model with the IAI algorithm achieves competitive or outperforming results from the existing models in the standard benchmark datasets of span-based SRL: CoNLL-2005 and CoNLL-2012.

Iterative Span Selection: Self-Emergence of Resolving Orders in Semantic Role Labeling

To evaluate the performance of a multi-domain goal-oriented Dialogue System (DS), it is important to understand what the users’ goals are for the conversations and whether those goals are successfully achieved. The success rate of goals directly correlates with user satisfaction and perceived usefulness of the DS. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic dialogue evaluation framework that jointly performs two tasks: goal segmentation and goal success prediction. We extend the RoBERTa-IQ model (Gupta et al., 2021) by adding multi-task learn ing heads for goal segmentation and success prediction. Using an annotated dataset from a commercial DS, we demonstrate that our proposed model reaches an accuracy that is on-par with single-pass human annotation comparing to a three-pass gold annotation benchmark.

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