United Arab Emirates

There is a growing body of work in recent years to develop pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the Arabic language. This work addresses two major problems in existing Arabic PLMs that limit the progress of the Arabic NLU and NLG fields. First, existing Arabic PLMs are not well-explored and their pre-training can be improved significantly using a more methodical approach. Second, there is a lack of systematic and reproducible evaluation of these models in the literature. We revisit both the pre-training and evaluation of Arabic PLMs. In terms of pre-training, we explore the impact of the quality of the pretraining data, the size of the model, and the incorporation of character-level information on Arabic PLM. As a result, we release three new Arabic BERT-style models ( JABER, Char-JABER, and SABER), and two T5-style models (AT5S and AT5B). In terms of evaluation, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study to systematically evaluate the performance of existing state-of-the-art models on ALUE, a leaderboard-powered benchmark for Arabic NLU tasks, and on a subset of the Arabic generative tasks. We show that our models significantly outperform existing Arabic PLMs and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on discriminative and generative Arabic NLU and NLG tasks. Our models and source code to reproduce results will be made available upon acceptance.

EMNLP 2022

Revisiting Pre-trained Language Models and their Evaluation for Arabic Natural Language Processing

systematic evaluation

arabic nlg

arabic nlu

arabic plms

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Recent model pruning methods have demonstrated the ability to remove redundant parameters without sacrificing model performance. Common methods remove redundant parameters according to the parameter sensitivity, a gradient-based measure reflecting the contribution of the parameters. In this paper, however, we argue that redundant parameters can be trained to make beneficial contributions. We first highlight the large sensitivity (contribution) gap among high-sensitivity and low-sensitivity parameters and show that the model generalization performance can be significantly improved after balancing the contribution of all parameters. Our goal is to balance the sensitivity of all parameters and encourage all of them to contribute equally. We propose a general task-agnostic method, namely intra-distillation, appended to the regular training loss to balance parameter sensitivity. Moreover, we also design a novel adaptive learning method to control the strength of intra-distillation loss for faster convergence. Our experiments show the strong effectiveness of our methods on machine translation, natural language understanding, and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer across up to 48 languages, e.g., a gain of 3.54 BLEU on average across 8 language pairs from the IWSLT'14 dataset.

The Importance of Being Parameters: An Intra-Distillation Method for Serious Gains

Verifying political claims is a challenging task, as politicians can use various tactics to subtly misrepresent the facts for their agenda. Existing automatic fact-checking systems fall short here, and their predictions like "half-true'' are not very useful in isolation, since it is unclear which parts of a claim are true and which are not. In this work, we focus on decomposing a complex claim into a comprehensive set of yes-no subquestions whose answers influence the veracity of the claim. We present CLAIMDECOMP, a dataset of decompositions for over 1000 claims. Given a claim and its verification paragraph written by fact-checkers, our trained annotators write subquestions covering both explicit propositions of the original claim and its implicit facets, such as asking about additional political context that changes our view of the claim's veracity. We study whether state-of-the-art models can generate such subquestions, showing that these models generate reasonable questions to ask, but predicting the comprehensive set of subquestions from the original claim without evidence remains challenging. We further show that these subquestions can help identify relevant evidence to fact-check the full claim and derive the veracity through their answers, suggesting that they can be useful pieces of a fact-checking pipeline.

Generating Literal and Implied Subquestions to Fact-check Complex Claims

The emergent cross-lingual transfer seen in multilingual pretrained models has sparked significant interest in studying their behavior. However, because these analyses have focused on fully trained multilingual models, little is known about the dynamics of the multilingual pretraining process. We investigate when these models acquire their in-language and cross-lingual abilities by probing checkpoints taken from throughout XLM-R pretraining, using a suite of linguistic tasks. Our analysis shows that the model achieves high in-language performance early on, with lower-level linguistic skills acquired before more complex ones. In contrast, the point in pretraining when the model learns to transfer cross-lingually differs across language pairs. Interestingly, we also observe that, across many languages and tasks, the final model layer exhibits significant performance degradation over time, while linguistic knowledge propagates to lower layers of the network. Taken together, these insights highlight the complexity of multilingual pretraining and the resulting varied behavior for different languages over time.

Analyzing the Mono- and Cross-Lingual Pretraining Dynamics of Multilingual Language Models

Machine learning models are prone to overfitting their training (source) domains, which is commonly believed to be the reason why they falter in novel target domains. Here we examine the contrasting view that multi-source domain generalization (DG) is first and foremost a problem of mitigating source domain underfitting: models not adequately learning the signal already present in their multi-domain training data. Experiments on a reading comprehension DG benchmark show that as a model learns its source domains better—using familiar methods such as knowledge distillation (KD) from a bigger model—its zero-shot out-of-domain utility improves at an even faster pace. Improved source domain learning also demonstrates superior out-of-domain generalization over three popular existing DG approaches that aim to limit overfitting. Our implementation of KD-based domain generalization is available via PrimeQA at: https://ibm.biz/domain-generalization-with-kd.

Not to Overfit or Underfit the Source Domains? An Empirical Study of Domain Generalization in Question Answering

Current Natural Language Inference (NLI) models achieve impressive results, sometimes outperforming humans when evaluating on in-distribution test sets. However, as these models are known to learn from annotation artefacts and dataset biases, it is unclear to what extent the models are learning the task of NLI instead of learning from shallow heuristics in their training data.

We address this issue by introducing a logical reasoning framework for NLI, creating highly transparent model decisions that are based on logical rules. Unlike prior work, we show that improved interpretability can be achieved without decreasing the predictive accuracy. We almost fully retain performance on SNLI, while also identifying the exact hypothesis spans that are responsible for each model prediction.

Using the e-SNLI human explanations, we verify that our model makes sensible decisions at a span level, despite not using any span labels during training. We can further improve model performance and the span-level decisions by using the e-SNLI explanations during training. Finally, our model is more robust in a reduced data setting. When training with only 1,000 examples, out-of-distribution performance improves on the MNLI matched and mismatched validation sets by 13% and 16% relative to the baseline. Training with fewer observations yields further improvements, both in-distribution and out-of-distribution.

Logical Reasoning with Span-Level Predictions for Interpretable and Robust NLI Models

While advances in pre-training have led to dramatic improvements in few-shot learning of NLP tasks, there is limited understanding of what drives successful few-shot adaptation in datasets. In particular, given a new dataset and a pre-trained model, what properties of the dataset make it few-shot learnable, and are these properties independent of the specific adaptation techniques used? We consider an extensive set of recent few-shot learning methods and show that their performance across a large number of datasets is highly correlated, showing that few-shot hardness may be intrinsic to datasets, for a given pre-trained model. To estimate intrinsic few-shot hardness, we then propose a simple and lightweight metric called Spread that captures the intuition that few-shot learning is made possible by exploiting feature-space invariances between training and test samples. Our metric better accounts for few-shot hardness compared to existing notions of hardness and is ~8-100x faster to compute.

On Measuring the Intrinsic Few-Shot Hardness of Datasets

Most existing dialogue systems fail to respond properly to potentially unsafe user utterances by either ignoring or passively agreeing with them. To address this issue, we introduce ProsocialDialog, the first large-scale multi-turn dialogue dataset to teach conversational agents to respond to problematic content following social norms. Covering diverse unethical, problematic, biased, and toxic situations, ProsocialDialog contains responses that encourage prosocial behavior, grounded in commonsense social rules (i.e., rules-of-thumb, RoTs). Created via a human-AI collaborative framework, ProsocialDialog consists of 58K dialogues, with 331K utterances, 160K unique RoTs, and 497K dialogue safety labels accompanied by free-form rationales.

With this dataset, we introduce a dialogue safety detection module, Canary, capable of generating RoTs given conversational context, and a socially-informed dialogue agent, Prost. Empirical results show that Prost generates more socially acceptable dialogues compared to other state-of-the-art language and dialogue models in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Additionally, Canary effectively guides conversational agents and off-the-shelf language models to generate significantly more prosocial responses. Our work highlights the promise and importance of creating and steering conversational AI to be socially responsible.

ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agents

In a citation graph, adjacent paper nodes share related scientific terms and topics. 
The graph thus conveys unique structure information of document-level relatedness that can be utilized in the paper summarization task, for exploring beyond the intra-document information.
In this work, we focus on leveraging citation graphs to improve scientific paper extractive summarization under different settings.
We first propose a Multi-granularity Unsupervised Summarization model (MUS) as a simple and low-cost solution to the task.
MUS finetunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link prediction tasks.
Then, the abstract sentences are extracted from the corresponding paper considering multi-granularity information.
Preliminary results demonstrate that citation graph is helpful even in a simple unsupervised framework.
Motivated by this, we next propose a Graph-based Supervised Summarizationmodel (GSS) to achieve more accurate results on the task when large-scale labeled data are available.
Apart from employing the link prediction as an auxiliary task, GSS introduces a gated sentence encoder and a graph information fusion module to take advantage of the graph information to polish the sentence representation.
Experiments on a public benchmark dataset show that MUS and GSS bring substantial improvements over the prior state-of-the-art model.

Scientific Paper Extractive Summarization Enhanced by Citation Graphs

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) networks have been proposed as an efficient way to scale up model capacity and implement conditional computing. However, the study of MoE components mostly focused on the feedforward layer in Transformer architecture. This paper proposes the Mixture of Attention Heads (MoA), a new architecture that combines multi-head attention with the MoE mechanism. MoA includes a set of attention heads that each has its own set of parameters. Given an input, a router dynamically selects a subset of k attention heads per token. This conditional computation schema allows MoA to achieve stronger performance than the standard multi-head attention layer. Furthermore, the sparsely gated MoA can easily scale up the number of attention heads and the number of parameters while preserving computational efficiency. Despite performance improvements, MoA also automatically differentiates heads' utilities, providing a new perspective to discuss the model's interpretability. We conducted experiments on several important tasks, including Machine Translation and Masked Language Modeling. Experiments have shown promising results on several tasks against strong baselines that involve large and very deep models.

Mixture of Attention Heads: Selecting Attention Heads Per Token

Massively Multilingual Language Models (MMLMs) have recently gained popularity due to their surprising effectiveness in cross-lingual transfer. While there has been much work in evaluating these models for their performance on a variety of tasks and languages, little attention has been paid on how well calibrated these models are with respect to the confidence in their predictions. We first investigate the calibration of MMLMs in the zero-shot setting and observe a clear case of miscalibration in low-resource languages or those which are typologically diverse from English. Next, we empirically show that calibration methods like temperature scaling and label smoothing do reasonably well in improving calibration in the zero-shot scenario. We also find that few-shot examples in the language can further help reduce calibration errors, often substantially. Overall, our work contributes towards building more reliable multilingual models by highlighting the issue of their miscalibration, understanding what language and model-specific factors influence it, and pointing out the strategies to improve the same.

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Revisiting Pre-trained Language Models and their Evaluation for Arabic Natural Language Processing

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