Korea, Republic of

Current language models have been criticised for learning language from text alone without connection between words and their meaning. Consequently, multimodal training has been proposed as a way for creating models with better language understanding by providing the lacking connection. We focus on pre-trained multimodal vision-and-language (VL) models for which there already are some results on their language understanding capabilities. An unresolved issue with evaluating the linguistic skills of these models, however, is that there is no established method for adapting them to text-only input without out-of-distribution uncertainty. To find the best approach, we investigate and compare seven possible methods for adapting three different pre-trained VL models to text-only input. Our evaluations on both GLUE and Visual Property Norms (VPN) show that care should be put into adapting VL models to zero-shot text-only tasks, while the models are less sensitive to how we adapt them to non-zero-shot tasks. We also find that the adaptation methods perform differently for different models and that unimodal model counterparts perform on par with the VL models regardless of adaptation, indicating that current VL models do not necessarily gain better language understanding from their multimodal training.

COLING 2022

How to Adapt Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Models to a Text-only Input?

text-only tasks

vision-and-language-models

multimodal models

language understanding

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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.

poster

With the boom of e-commerce, Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction (MRHP), which aims to sort product reviews according to the predicted helpfulness scores has become a research hotspot. Previous work on this task focuses on attention-based modality fusion, information integration, and relation modeling, which primarily exposes the following drawbacks: 1) the model may fail to capture the really essential information due to its indiscriminate attention formulation; 2) lack appropriate modeling methods that take full advantage of correlation among provided data. In this paper, we propose SANCL: Selective Attention and Natural Contrastive Learning for MRHP. SANCL adopts a probe-based strategy to enforce high attention weights on the regions of greater significance. It also constructs a contrastive learning framework based on natural matching properties in the dataset. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets with three categories show that SANCL achieves state-of-the-art baseline performance with lower memory consumption.

SANCL: Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction with Selective Attention and Natural Contrastive Learning

Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis

The evaluation of recent embedding-based evaluation metrics for text generation is primarily based on measuring their correlation with human evaluations on standard benchmarks. However, these benchmarks are mostly from similar domains to those used for pretraining word embeddings. This raises concerns about the (lack of) generalization of embedding-based metrics to new and noisy domains that contain a different vocabulary than the pretraining data. In this paper, we examine the robustness of BERTScore, one of the most popular embedding-based metrics for text generation. We show that (a) an embedding-based metric that has the highest correlation with human evaluations on a standard benchmark can have the lowest correlation if the amount of input noise or unknown tokens increases, (b) taking embeddings from the first layer of pretrained models improves the robustness of all metrics, and (c) the highest robustness is achieved when using character-level embeddings, instead of token-based embeddings, from the first layer of the pretrained model.

Layer or Representation Space: What makes BERT-based Evaluation Metrics Robust?

In this paper, we explore the relation between gestures and language. Using a multimodal dataset, consisting of {\sc Ted} talks where the language is aligned with the gestures made by the speakers, we adapt a semi-supervised multimodal model to learn gesture embeddings. We show that gestures are predictive of the native language of the speaker, and that gesture embeddings further improve language prediction result. In addition, gesture embeddings might contain some linguistic information, as we show by probing embeddings for psycholinguistic categories. Finally, we analyze the words that lead to the most expressive gestures and find that function words drive the expressiveness of gestures. Our code is available at https://github.com/MichiganNLP/gestures-language.

Towards Understanding the Relation between Gestures and Language

The spread of fake news can have devastating ramifications, and recent advancements to neural fake news generators have made it challenging to understand how misinformation generated by these models may best be confronted. We conduct a feature-based study to gain an interpretative understanding of the linguistic attributes that neural fake news generators may most successfully exploit. When comparing models trained on subsets of our features and confronting the models with increasingly advanced neural fake news, we find that stylistic features may be the most robust. We discuss our findings, subsequent analyses, and broader implications in the pages within.

Demystifying Neural Fake News via Linguistic Feature-Based Interpretation

Learnable Dependency-based Double Graph Structure for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

The paper aims to identify cited text spans in the reference paper related to the given citance in the citing paper. We refer to it as cited text span retrieval (CTSR). Most current methods attempt this task by relying on pre-trained off-the-shelf deep learning models like SciBERT. Though these models are pre-trained on large datasets, they underperform in out-of-domain settings. We introduce CitRet, a novel hybrid model for CTSR that leverages unique semantic and syntactic structural characteristics of scientific documents. This enables us to use significantly less data for finetuning. We use only 1040 documents for finetuning. Our model augments mildly-trained SBERT-based contextual embeddings with pre-trained non-contextual
Word2Vec embeddings to calculate semantic textual similarity. We demonstrate the performance of our model on the CLSciSumm shared tasks. It improves the state-of-the-art results by over 15% on the F1 score evaluation.

CitRet: A Hybrid Model for Cited Text Span Retrieval

Despite recent advancements in automated speech recognition (ASR) technologies, reports of unequal performance across speakers of different demographic groups abound. At the same time, the focus on performance metrics such as the Word Error Rate (WER) in prior studies limit the specificity and scope of recommendations that can be offered for system engineering to overcome these challenges. The current
study bridges this gap by investigating the performance of Otter’s automatic captioning system on native and non-native English speakers of different language background through a linguistic analysis of segment-level errors. By examining language-specific error profiles for vowels and consonants motivated by linguistic theory, we find that certain categories of errors can be predicted from the phonological structure of a speaker’s native language.

Language-specific Effects on Automatic Speech Recognition Errors for World Englishes

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) poses new challenges over logical reasoning, which aims to understand the implicit logical relations entailed in the given contexts and perform inference over them. Due to the complexity of logic, logical relations exist at different granularity levels. However, most existing methods of logical reasoning individually focus on either entity-aware or discourse-based information but ignore the hierarchical relations that may even have mutual effects. In this paper, we propose a holistic graph network (HGN) which deals with context at both discourse level and word level, as the basis for logical reasoning, to provide a more fine-grained relation extraction. Specifically, node-level and type-level relations, which can be interpreted as bridges in the reasoning process, are modeled by a hierarchical interaction mechanism to improve the interpretation of MRC systems. Experimental results on logical reasoning QA datasets (ReClor and LogiQA) and natural language inference datasets (SNLI and ANLI) show the effectiveness and generalization of our method, and in-depth analysis verifies its capability to understand complex logical relations.

Modeling Hierarchical Reasoning Chains by Linking Discourse Units and Key Phrases for Reading Comprehension

The ability to generalize compositionally is key to understanding the potentially infinite number of sentences that can be constructed in a human language from only a finite number of words. Investigating whether NLP models possess this ability has been a topic of interest: SCAN (Lake and Baroni, 2018) is one task specifically proposed to test for this property. Previous work has achieved impressive empirical results using a group-equivariant neural network that naturally encodes a useful inductive bias for SCAN (Gordon et al., 2020). Inspired by this, we introduce a novel group-equivariant architecture that incorporates a group-invariant hard alignment mechanism. We find that our network's structure allows it to develop stronger equivariance properties than existing group-equivariant approaches. We additionally find that it outperforms previous group-equivariant networks empirically on the SCAN task. Our results suggest that integrating group-equivariance into a variety of neural architectures is a potentially fruitful avenue of research, and demonstrate the value of careful analysis of the theoretical properties of such architectures.

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