United Arab Emirates

Most Neural Topic Models (NTM) use a variational auto-encoder framework producing K topics limited to the size of the encoder&#39;s output. These topics are interpreted through the selection of the top activated words via the weights or reconstructed vector of the decoder that are directly connected to each neuron. In this paper, we present a model-free two-stage process to reinterpret NTM and derive further insights on the state of the trained model. Firstly, building on the original information from a trained NTM, we generate a pool of potential candidate &quot;composite topics&quot; by exploiting possible co-occurrences within the original set of topics, which decouples the strict interpretation of topics from the original NTM. This is followed by a combinatorial formulation to select a final set of composite topics, which we evaluate for coherence and diversity on a large external corpus. Lastly, we employ a user study to derive further insights on the reinterpretation process.

EMNLP 2022

Towards Reinterpreting Neural Topic Models via Composite Activations

user

topic

interpretation

neural

evaluation

Most Neural Topic Models (NTM) use a variational auto-encoder framework producing K topics limited to the size of the encoder's output. These topics are interpreted through the selection of the top activated words via the weights or reconstructed vector of the decoder that are directly connected to each neuron. In this paper, we present a model-free two-stage process to reinterpret NTM and derive further insights on the state of the trained model. Firstly, building on the original information from a trained NTM, we generate a pool of potential candidate "composite topics" by exploiting possible co-occurrences within the original set of topics, which decouples the strict interpretation of topics from the original NTM. This is followed by a combinatorial formulation to select a final set of composite topics, which we evaluate for coherence and diversity on a large external corpus. Lastly, we employ a user study to derive further insights on the reinterpretation process.

poster

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Disagreements are frequently studied from the perspective of either detecting toxicity or analysing argument structure. We propose a framework of dispute tactics which unifies these two perspectives, as well as other dialogue acts which play a role in resolving disputes, such as asking questions and providing clarification. This framework includes a preferential ordering among rebuttal-type tactics, ranging from ad hominem attacks to refuting the central argument. Using this framework, we annotate 213 disagreements (3,865 utterances) from Wikipedia Talk pages. This allows us to investigate research questions around the tactics used in disagreements; for instance, we provide empirical validation of the approach to disagreement recommended by Wikipedia. We develop models for multilabel prediction of dispute tactics in an utterance, achieving the best performance with a transformer-based label powerset model. Adding an auxiliary task to incorporate the ordering of rebuttal tactics further yields a statistically significant increase. Finally, we show that these annotations can be used to provide useful additional signals to improve performance on the task of predicting escalation.

How to disagree well: Investigating the dispute tactics used on Wikipedia

With the increase in availability of large pre-trained language models (LMs) in Natural Language Processing (NLP), it becomes critical to assess their fit for a specific target task a priori—as fine-tuning the entire space of available LMs is computationally prohibitive and unsustainable. However, encoder transferability estimation has received little to no attention in NLP. In this paper, we propose to generate quantitative evidence to predict which LM, out of a pool of models, will perform best on a target task without having to fine-tune all candidates. We provide a comprehensive study on LM ranking for 10 NLP tasks spanning the two fundamental problem types of classification and structured prediction. We adopt the state-of-the-art Logarithm of Maximum Evidence (LogME) measure from Computer Vision (CV) and find that 
it positively correlates with final LM performance in 94% of the setups.
In the first study of its kind, we further compare transferability measures with the de facto standard of human practitioner ranking, finding that evidence from quantitative metrics is more robust than pure intuition and can help identify unexpected LM candidates.

Evidence > Intuition: Transferability Estimation for Encoder Selection

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but they are under-represented in NLP research and development. Multiple challenges exist, including the limited availability of annotated training and evaluation datasets as well as the lack of understanding of which settings, languages, and recently proposed methods like cross-lingual transfer will be effective. In this paper, we aim to move towards solutions for these challenges, focusing on the task of named entity recognition (NER). We present the creation of the largest to-date human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African languages. We study the behaviour of state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an Africa-centric setting, empirically demonstrating that the choice of source transfer language significantly affects performance. While much previous work defaults to using English as the source language, our results show that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 scores by an average of 14\% over 20 languages as compared to using English.

MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition

The task of query rewrite aims to convert an in-context query to its fully-specified version where ellipsis and coreference are completed and referred-back according to the history context. Although much progress has been made, less efforts have been paid to real scenario conversations that involve drawing information from more than one modalities. In this paper, we propose the task of multimodal conversational query rewrite (McQR), which performs query rewrite under the multimodal visual conversation setting. We collect a large-scale dataset named McQueen based on manual annotation, which contains 15k visual conversations and over 80k queries where each one is associated with a fully-specified rewrite version. In addition, for entities appearing in the rewrite, we provide the corresponding image box annotation. We then use the McQueen dataset to benchmark a state-of-the-art method for effectively tackling the McQR task, which is based on a multimodal pre-trained model with pointer generator. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on this task.

McQueen: a Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Query Rewrite

Existing sentiment analysis models have achieved great advances with the help of sufficient sentiment annotations. Unfortunately, many languages do not have sufficient sentiment corpus. To this end, recent studies have proposed cross-lingual sentiment analysis to transfer sentiment analysis models from resource-rich languages to low-resource languages. However, these studies either rely on external cross-lingual supervision (e.g., parallel corpora and translation model), or are limited by the cross-lingual gaps. In this work, based on the intuitive assumption that the relationships between emojis and sentiments are consistent across different languages, we investigate transferring sentiment knowledge across languages with the help of emojis. To this end, we propose a novel cross-lingual sentiment analysis approach dubbed Curriculum Knowledge Distiller (CKD). The core idea of CKD is to use emojis to bridge the source and target languages. Note that, compared with texts, emojis are more transferable, but cannot reveal the precise sentiment. Thus, we distill multiple Intermediate Sentiment Classifiers (ISC) on source language corpus with emojis to get ISCs with different attention weights of texts. To transfer them into the target language, we distill ISCs into the Target Language Sentiment Classifier (TSC) following the curriculum learning mechanism. In this way, TSC can learn delicate sentiment knowledge, meanwhile, avoid being affected by cross-lingual gaps. Experimental results on five cross-lingual benchmarks clearly verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Curriculum Knowledge Distillation for Emoji-supervised Cross-lingual Sentiment Analysis

Intermediate-task transfer can benefit a wide range of NLP tasks with properly selected source datasets. However, it is computationally infeasible to experiment with all intermediate transfer combinations, making choosing a useful source task a challenging problem. In this paper, we anticipate that task-specific parameters updated in parameter-efficient tuning methods are likely to encode task-specific information. Therefore, such parameters can be predictive for inter-task transferability. Thus, we propose to exploit these efficiently tuned parameters as off-the-shelf task embeddings for the efficient selection of source datasets for intermediate-task transfer. We experiment with 11 text classification tasks and 11 question answering tasks. Experimental results show that our approach consistently outperforms existing inter-task transferability prediction methods while being conceptually simple and computationally efficient. Our analysis also reveals that the ability of efficiently tuned parameters on transferability prediction is disentangled with their in-task performance. This allows us to use parameters from early checkpoints as task embeddings to further improve efficiency.

Efficiently Tuned Parameters Are Task Embeddings

Linguistic acceptability (LA) attracts the attention of the research community due to its many uses, such as testing the grammatical knowledge of language models and filtering implausible texts with acceptability classifiers.
However, the application scope of LA in languages other than English is limited due to the lack of high-quality resources.
To this end, we introduce the Russian Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (RuCoLA), built from the ground up under the well-established binary LA approach. 
RuCoLA consists of 9.8k in-domain sentences from linguistic publications and 3.6k out-of-domain sentences produced by generative models. The out-of-domain set is created to facilitate the practical use of acceptability for improving language generation.
Our paper describes the data collection protocol and presents a fine-grained analysis of acceptability classification experiments with a range of baseline approaches.
In particular, we demonstrate that the most widely used language models still fall behind humans by a large margin, especially when detecting morphological and semantic errors. We release RuCoLA, the code of experiments, and a public leaderboard to assess the linguistic competence of language models for Russian.

RuCoLA: Russian Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability

As pre-trained models have shown successful performance in program language processing as well as natural language processing, adversarial attacks on these models also attract attention.
However, previous works on black-box adversarial attacks generated adversarial examples in a very inefficient way with simple greedy search. 
They also failed to find out better adversarial examples because it was hard to reduce the search space without performance loss.
In this paper, we propose TABS, an efficient beam search black-box adversarial attack method. 
We adopt beam search to find out better adversarial examples, and contextual semantic filtering to effectively reduce the search space. 
Contextual semantic filtering reduces the number of candidate adversarial words considering the surrounding context and the semantic similarity.
Our proposed method shows good performance in terms of attack success rate, the number of queries, and semantic similarity in attacking models for two tasks: NL code search classification and retrieval tasks.

TABS: Efficient Textual Adversarial Attack for Pre-trained NL Code Model Using Semantic Beam Search

The primary goal of drug safety researchers and regulators is to promptly identify adverse drug reactions. Doing so may in turn prevent or reduce the harm to patients and ultimately improve public health. Evaluating and monitoring drug safety (i.e., pharmacovigilance) involves analyzing an ever growing collection of spontaneous reports from health professionals, physicians, and pharmacists, and information voluntarily submitted by patients. In this scenario, facilitating analysis of such reports via automation has the potential to rapidly identify safety signals. Unfortunately, public resources for developing natural language models for this task are scant. We present PHEE, a novel dataset for pharmacovigilance comprising over 5000 annotated events from medical case reports and biomedical literature, making it the largest such public dataset to date. We describe the hierarchical event schema designed to provide coarse and fine-grained information about patients' demographics, treatments and (side) effects. Along with the discussion of the dataset, we present a thorough experimental evaluation of current state-of-the-art approaches for biomedical event extraction, point out their limitations, and highlight open challenges to foster future research in this area.

PHEE: A Dataset for Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction from Text

Detractors of neural machine translation admit that while its translations are fluent, it sometimes gets key facts wrong. This is particularly important in simultaneous interpretation where translations have to be provided as fast as possible: before a sentence is complete. Yet, evaluations of simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) fail to capture if systems correctly translate the most salient elements of a question: people, places, and dates. To address this problem, we introduce a downstream word-by-word question answering evaluation task (SimQA): given a source language question, translate the question word by word into the target language, and answer as soon as possible. SimQA jointly measures whether the SimulMT models translate the question quickly and accurately, and can reveal shortcomings in existing neural systems—hallucinating or omitting facts.

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How to disagree well: Investigating the dispute tactics used on Wikipedia

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