Taiwan

Large pre-trained language models (LMs) have demonstrated the ability to obtain good performance on downstream tasks with limited examples in cross-lingual settings. However, this was mostly studied for relatively resource-rich languages, where at least enough unlabeled data is available to be included in pre-training a multilingual language model. In this paper, we explore the problem of cross-lingual transfer in unseen languages, where no unlabeled data is available for pre-training a model. We use a downstream sentiment analysis task across 12 languages, including 8 unseen languages, to analyze the effectiveness of several few-shot learning strategies across the three major types of model architectures and their learning dynamics. We also compare strategies for selecting languages for transfer and contrast findings across languages seen in pre-training compared to those that are not. Our findings contribute to the body of knowledge on cross-lingual models for low-resource settings that is paramount to increasing coverage, diversity, and equity in access to NLP technology. We show that, in few-shot learning, linguistically similar and geographically similar languages are useful for cross-lingual adaptation, but taking the context from a mixture of random source languages is surprisingly more effective. We also compare different model architectures and show that the encoder-only model, XLM-R, gives the best downstream task performance.

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

Cross-lingual Few-Shot Learning on Unseen Languages

unseen

prompt

few-shot

few-shot learning

cross-lingual

multilingual

low-resource

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

poster

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 
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A registration is required to access this event. Access to the event site will be granted to all registered attendees on **November 16th**. If you have not already done so, please register using the link below:
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<br>https://conference.iis.sinica.edu.tw/servlet/Register?ConferenceID=411

Registration Is Required

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

Authorship attribution is the task of identifying the author of a given text. The key is finding representations that can differentiate between authors. Existing approaches typically use manually designed features that capture a dataset's content and style, but these approaches are dataset-dependent and yield inconsistent performance across corpora. In this work, we propose \textit{learning} author-specific representations by fine-tuning pre-trained generic language representations with a contrastive objective (Contra-X). We show that Contra-X learns representations that form highly separable clusters for different authors. It advances the state-of-the-art on multiple human and machine authorship attribution benchmarks, enabling improvements of up to 6.8% over cross-entropy fine-tuning. However, we find that Contra-X improves overall accuracy at the cost of sacrificing performance for some authors. Resolving this tension will be an important direction for future work. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to integrate contrastive learning with pre-trained language model fine-tuning for authorship attribution.

Whodunit? Learning to Contrast for Authorship Attribution

Questions regarding implicitness, ambiguity and underspecification are crucial for understanding the task validity and ethical concerns of multimodal image+text systems, yet have received little attention to date. This position paper maps out a conceptual framework to address this gap, focusing on systems which generate images depicting scenes from scene descriptions. In doing so, we account for how texts and images convey meaning differently. We outline a set of core challenges concerning textual and visual ambiguity, as well as risks that may be amplified by ambiguous and underspecified elements. We propose and discuss strategies for addressing these challenges, including generating visually ambiguous images, and generating a set of diverse images.

Underspecification in Scene Description-to-Depiction Tasks

One characteristic that makes humans superior to modern artificially intelligent models is the ability to interpret images beyond what is visually apparent. Consider the following two natural language search queries -- (i) "a queue of customers patiently waiting to buy ice cream" and (ii) "a queue of tourists going to see a famous Mughal architecture in India." Interpreting these queries requires one to reason with (i) Commonsense such as interpreting people as customers or tourists, actions as waiting to buy or going to see; and (ii)Fact or world knowledge associated with named visual entities, for example, whether the store in the image sells ice cream or whether the landmark in the image is a Mughal architecture located in India. Such reasoning goes beyond just visual recognition. To enable both commonsense and factual reasoning in the image search, we present a unified framework, namely Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Transformer (KRAMT), that treats the named visual entities in an image as a gateway to encyclopedic knowledge and leverages them along with natural language query to ground relevant knowledge. Further, KRAMT seamlessly integrates visual content and grounded knowledge to learn alignment between images and search queries. This unified framework is then used to perform image search requiring commonsense and factual reasoning. The retrieval performance of KRAMT is evaluated and compared with related approaches on a new dataset we introduce – namely COFAR.

COFAR: Commonsense and Factual Reasoning in Image Search

Neural Text-to-Speech has made great advances in the zero-shot multispeaker task (cloning voice and speaking style of an unlabelled reference audio). This however requires lots of data, which is infeasible for thousands of languages. We show a way to transfer multispeaker knowledge learned in resource-rich languages to underresourced languages. An interactive demo, code and models are available.

Low-Resource Multilingual and Zero-Shot Multispeaker TTS

In this work, we study the importance of content frequency on abstractive summarization, where we define the content as "semantic units." We propose a two-stage training framework to let the model automatically learn the frequency of each semantic unit in the source text. Our model is trained in an unsupervised manner since the frequency information can be inferred from source text only. During inference, our model identifies sentences with high-frequency semantic units and utilizes frequency information to generate summaries from the filtered sentences. Our model performance on the CNN/Daily Mail summarization task outperforms the other unsupervised methods under the same settings. Furthermore, we achieve competitive ROUGE scores with far fewer model parameters compared to several large-scale pre-trained models. Our model can be trained under low-resource language settings and thus can serve as a potential solution for real-world applications where pre-trained models are not applicable.

Unsupervised Single Document Abstractive Summarization using Semantic Units

Natural language understanding (NLU) tasks are typically defined by creating an annotated dataset in which each utterance is encountered once. Such data does not resemble real-world natural language interactions in which certain utterances are encountered frequently, others rarely. For deployed NLU systems, this is a vital problem, since the underlying machine learning (ML) models are often fine-tuned on typical NLU data, in which utterance frequency is never factored in, and then applied to real-world data with a very different distribution. Such systems need to maintain interpretation consistency for the high-frequency (head) utterances, while also doing well on low-frequency (tail) utterances. We propose an alternative strategy that explicitly uses utterance frequency in training data to learn models that are more robust to unknown distributions. We present a methodology to simulate utterance usage in two public corpora and create two new corpora with head, body and tail segments. We evaluate several methods for joint intent classification and named entity recognition (referred to as IC-NER), and propose to use two domain generalization (DG) approaches that we adapt to sequence labeling task. The DG approaches demonstrate up to 7.02% relative improvement in semantic accuracy over baselines on the tail data. We provide insights as to why the proposed approaches work and show that the reasons for the observed improvements do not align with those reported in previous work.

Learning with Data Sampling Biases for Natural Language Understanding

Vision-language models can encode societal biases and stereotypes, but there are challenges to measuring and mitigating these multimodal harms due to lacking measurement robustness and feature degradation. To address these challenges, we investigate bias measures and apply ranking metrics for image-text representations. We then investigate debiasing methods and show that prepending learned embeddings to text queries that are jointly trained with adversarial debiasing and a contrastive loss reduces various bias measures with minimal degradation to the image-text representation.

A Prompt Array Keeps the Bias Away: Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Adversarial Learning

Data augmentation techniques have been proven useful in many applications in NLP
fields. Most augmentations are task-specific, and cannot be used as a general-purpose tool. In our work, we present AugCSE, a unified framework to utilize diverse sets of data augmentations to achieve a better, general purpose, sentence embedding model. Building upon the latest sentence embedding models, our approach uses a simple antagonistic discriminator that differentiates the augmentation types. With the finetuning objective borrowed from domain adaptation, we show that diverse augmentations, which often lead to conflicting
contrastive signals, can be tamed to produce a better and more robust sentence representation. Our methods1 achieve state-of-the-art results on downstream transfer tasks and perform competitively on semantic textual similarity tasks, using only unsupervised data.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.30/)

AugCSE: Contrastive Sentence Embedding with Diverse Augmentations

Word embeddings learned using the distributional hypothesis (e.g., GloVe, Word2vec) do not capture the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, which are present inherently in words. We present a novel retrofitting method for updating embeddings of words for their affective meaning. It learns a non-linear transformation function that maps pre-trained embeddings to an affective vector space, in a representation learning setting. We investigate word embeddings for their capacity to cluster emotion-bearing words. The affective embeddings learned by our method achieve better inter-cluster and intra-cluster distance for words having the same emotions, as evaluated through different cluster quality metrics. For the downstream tasks on sentiment analysis and sarcasm detection, simple classification models, viz. SVM and Attention Net, learned using our affective embeddings perform better than their pre-trained counterparts (more than 1.5% improvement in F1-score) and other benchmarks. Furthermore, the difference in performance is more pronounced in limited data setting.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.42/)

Affective Retrofitted Word Embeddings

Models based on large-pretrained language models, such as S(entence)BERT, provide effective and efficient sentence embeddings that show high correlation to human similarity ratings, but lack interpretability. On the other hand, graph metrics for graph-based meaning representations (e.g., Abstract Meaning Representation, AMR) can make explicit the semantic aspects in which two sentences are similar. However, such metrics tend to be slow, rely on parsers, and do not reach state-of-the-art performance when rating sentence similarity.
In this work, we aim at the best of both worlds, by learning to induce Semantically Structured Sentence BERT embeddings (S3BERT). Our S3BERT embeddings are composed of explainable sub-embeddings that emphasize various semantic sentence features (e.g., semantic roles, negation, or quantification). We show how to i) learn a decomposition of the sentence embeddings into semantic features, through approximation of a suite of interpretable AMR graph metrics, and how to ii) preserve the overall power of the neural embeddings by controlling the decomposition learning process with a second objective that enforces consistency with the similarity ratings of an SBERT teacher model. In our experimental studies, we show that our approach offers interpretability -- while fully preserving the effectiveness and efficiency of the neural sentence embeddings.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.48/)

Cross-lingual Few-Shot Learning on Unseen Languages

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