Korea, Republic of

Few-shot Question Generation (QG) is an important and challenging problem in the Natural Language Generation (NLG) domain. Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has been successfully used in various Natural Language Understanding (NLU) applications. However, the question of how to utilize mBERT for few-shot QG, possibly with cross-lingual transfer, remains. In this paper, we try to explore how mBERT[1] performs in few-shot QG (cross-lingual transfer) and also whether applying meta-learning on mBERT further improves the results. In our setting, we consider mBERT as the base model and fine-tune it using a seq-to-seq language modeling framework in a cross-lingual setting. Further, we apply the model agnostic meta-learning approach to our base model. We evaluate our model for two low-resource Indian languages, Bengali and Telugu, using the TyDi QA[5] dataset. The proposed approach consistently improves the performance of the base model in few-shot settings and even works better than some heavily parameterized models in some settings. Human evaluation also confirms the effectiveness of our approach. 


COLING 2022

Does Meta-learning Help mBERT for Few-shot Question Generation in a Cross-lingual Transfer Setting for Indic Languages?

question generation

cross-lingual

meta-learning

# 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). 

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.

In the developing context of pre-trained models (PTMs), the performance of text classification has been continuously improved by directly employing the features generated by PTMs. However, such a way might not fully explore the knowledge in PTMs as it is constrained by the difficulty of the task. Compared to a difficult task, the learning algorithms tend to saturate early on the simple task. Moreover, the native sentence representations derived from BERT are prone to be collapsed and directly employing such representation for text classification might fail to fully capture discriminative features. 
In order to address these issues, in this paper we propose a novel framework for text classification which implements a two-stage training strategy. In the pre-training stage, auxiliary labels are introduced to increase the task difficulties and to fully exploit the knowledge in the pre-trained model. In the fine-tuning stage, the textual representation learned in the pre-training stage is employed and the classifier is fine-tuned to obtain better classification performance. 
Experiments were conducted on six text classification corpora and the results showed that the proposed framework outperformed several state-of-the-art baselines.

Complicate then Simplify: A Novel Way to Explore Pre-trained Models for Text Classification

Multilingual pre-trained language models have shown impressive performance on cross- lingual tasks. It greatly facilitates the applications of natural language processing on low-resource languages. However, there are still some languages that the current multilingual models do not perform well on. In this paper, we propose CINO (Chinese Minority Pre-trained Language Model), a multilingual pre-trained language model for Chinese minority languages. It covers Standard Chinese, Yue Chinese, and six other ethnic minority languages. To evaluate the cross-lingual ability of the multilingual model on ethnic minority languages, we collect documents from Wikipedia and news websites, and construct two text classification datasets, WCM (Wiki-Chinese-Minority) and CMNews (Chinese-Minority-News). We show that CINO notably outperforms the baselines on various classification tasks. The CINO model and the datasets are publicly available at http: //cino.hfl-rc.com.

CINO: A Chinese Minority Pre-trained Language Model

Commonsense question answering (QA) requires machines to utilize the QA content and external commonsense knowledge graph (KG) for reasoning when answering questions. Existing work uses two independent modules to model the QA contextual text representation and relationships between QA entities in KG, which prevents information sharing between modules for co-reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel model, Co-Reasoning Network (CORN), which adopts a bidirectional multi-level connection structure based on Co-Attention Transformer. The structure builds bridges to connect each layer of the text encoder and graph encoder, which can introduce the QA entity relationship from KG to the text encoder and bring contextual text information to the graph encoder, so that these features can be deeply interactively fused to form comprehensive text and graph node representations. Meanwhile, we propose a QA-aware node based KG subgraph construction method. The QA-aware nodes aggregate the question entity nodes and the answer entity nodes, and further guide the expansion and construction process of the subgraph to enhance the connectivity and reduce the introduction of noise. We evaluate our model on QA benchmarks in the CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA datasets, and CORN achieves state-of-the-art performance.

CORN: Co-Reasoning Network for Commonsense Question Answering

FAQs are important resources to find information. However, especially if a FAQ concerns many question-answer pairs, it can be a difficult and time-consuming job to find the answer you are looking for. A FAQ chatbot can ease this process by automatically retrieving the relevant answer to a user’s question. We present Vac- cinChatNL, a Dutch FAQ corpus on the topic of COVID-19 vaccination. Starting with 50 question-answer pairs we built VaccinChat, a FAQ chatbot, which we used to gather more user questions that were also annotated with the appropriate or new answer classes. This iterative process of gathering user questions, annotating them, and retraining the model with the increased data set led to a corpus that now contains 12,883 user questions divided over 181 answers. We provide the first publicly available Dutch FAQ answering data set of this size with large groups of semantically equivalent human-paraphrased questions. Furthermore, our study shows that before fine-tuning a classifier, continued pre-training of Dutch language models with task- and/or domain-specific data improves classification results. In addition, we show that large groups of semantically similar questions are important for obtaining well-performing intent classification models.

Domain- and Task-Adaptation for VaccinChatNL, a Dutch COVID-19 FAQ Answering Corpus and Classification Model

The task of shallow discourse parsing in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) framework has traditionally been restricted to identifying those relations that are signaled by a discourse connective ("explicit") and those that have no signal at all ("implicit"). The third type, the more flexible group of "AltLex" realizations has been neglected because of its small amount of occurrences in the PDTB2 corpus. Their number has grown significantly in the recent PDTB3, and in this paper, we present the first approaches for recognizing these "alternative lexicalizations". We compare the performance of a pattern-based approach and a sequence labeling model, add an experiment on the pre-classification of candidate sentences, and provide an initial qualitative analysis of the error cases made by both models.

Towards Identifying Alternative-Lexicalization Signals of Discourse Relations

Recently, a new training OAXE loss (Du et al., 2021) has proven effective to ameliorate the effect of multimodality for non-autoregressive translation (NAT), which removes the penalty of word order errors in the standard cross entropy loss. Starting from the intuition that reordering generally occurs between phrases, we extend OAXE by only allowing reordering between ngram phrases and still requiring a strict match of word order within the phrases. Extensive experiments on NAT benchmarks across language pairs and data scales demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of our approach.


ngram-OAXE: Phrase-Based Order-Agnostic Cross Entropy for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation

We propose a new unsupervised method for lexical substitution using pre-trained language models. Compared to previous approaches that use the generative capability of language models to predict substitutes, our method retrieves substitutes based on the similarity of contextualised and decontextualised word embeddings, i.e. the average contextual representation of a word in multiple contexts. We conduct experiments in English and Italian, and show that our method substantially outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art without any explicit supervision or fine-tuning. We further show that our method performs particularly well at predicting low-frequency substitutes, and also generates a diverse list of substitute candidates, reducing morphophonetic or morphosyntactic biases induced by article–noun agreement in English and Italian.

Unsupervised Lexical Substitution with Decontextualised Embeddings

The conventional success of textual classification relies on annotated data, and the new paradigm of pre-trained language models (PLMs) still requires a few labeled data for downstream tasks.
However, in real-world applications, label noise inevitably exists in training data, damaging the effectiveness, robustness, and generalization of the models constructed on such data.
Recently, remarkable achievements have been made to mitigate this dilemma in visual data, while only a few explore textual data.
To fill this gap, we present SelfMix, a simple yet effective method, to handle label noise in text classification tasks.
SelfMix uses the Gaussian Mixture Model to separate samples and leverages semi-supervised learning.
Unlike previous works requiring multiple models, our method utilizes the dropout mechanism on a single model to reduce the confirmation bias in self-training and introduces a textual level mixup training strategy.
Experimental results on three text classification benchmarks with different types of text show that the performance of our proposed method outperforms these strong baselines designed for both textual and visual data under different noise ratios and noise types.
Our anonymous code is available at https://github.com/noise-learning/SelfMix.

SelfMix: Robust Learning Against Textual Label Noise with Self-Mixup Training

Social media platforms host discussions about a wide variety of topics that arise everyday. Making sense of all the content and organising it into categories is an arduous task. A common way to deal with this issue is relying on topic modeling, but topics discovered using this technique are difficult to interpret and can differ from corpus to corpus. We present a new task based on tweet topic classification and release two associated datasets. Given a wide range of topics covering the most important discussion points in social media, we provide training and testing data from recent time periods that can be used to evaluate tweet classification models. Moreover, we perform a quantitative evaluation and analysis of current general- and domain-specific language models on the task, which provide more insights on the challenges and nature of the task.

Twitter Topic Classification

ICD coding is designed to assign the disease codes to electronic health records (EHRs) upon discharge, which is crucial for billing and clinical statistics. In an attempt to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of manual coding, many methods have been proposed to automatically predict ICD codes from clinical notes. However, most previous works ignore the decisive information contained in structured medical data in EHRs, which is hard to be captured from the noisy clinical notes. In this paper, we propose a Tree-enhanced Multimodal Attention Network (TreeMAN) to fuse tabular features and textual features into multimodal representations by enhancing the text representations with tree-based features via the attention mechanism. Tree-based features are constructed according to decision trees learned from structured multimodal medical data, which capture the decisive information about ICD coding. We can apply the same multi-label classifier from previous text models to the multimodal representations to predict ICD codes. Experiments on two MIMIC datasets show that our method outperforms prior state-of-the-art ICD coding approaches.

Does Meta-learning Help mBERT for Few-shot Question Generation in a Cross-lingual Transfer Setting for Indic Languages?

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Complicate then Simplify: A Novel Way to Explore Pre-trained Models for Text Classification

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