United Arab Emirates

Text style transfer is an important task in natural language processing with broad applications. Existing models following the masking and filling scheme suffer two challenges: the word masking procedure may mistakenly remove unexpected words and the selected words in the word filling procedure may lack diversity and semantic consistency. To tackle both challenges, in this study, we propose a style transfer model, with an adversarial masking approach and a styled filling technique (AMSF). Specifically, AMSF first trains a mask predictor by adversarial training without manual configuration. Then two additional losses, i.e. an entropy maximization loss and a consistency regularization loss, are introduced in training the word filling module to guarantee the diversity and semantic consistency of the transferred texts. Experimental results and analysis on two benchmark text style transfer data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

EMNLP 2022

Text Style Transferring via Adversarial Masking and Styled Filling

masked language model

text style transfer

poster

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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.

We propose the first character-level white-box adversarial attack method against transformer models. The intuition of our method comes from the observation that words are split into subtokens before being fed into the transformer models and the substitution between two close subtokens has a similar effect with the character modification. Our method mainly contains three steps. First, a gradient-based method is adopted to find the most vulnerable words in the sentence. Then we split the selected words into subtokens to replace the origin tokenization result from the transformer tokenizer. Finally, we utilize an adversarial loss to guide the substitution of attachable subtokens in which the Gumbel-softmax trick is introduced to ensure gradient propagation.
Meanwhile, we introduce the visual and length constraint in the optimization process to achieve minimum character modifications.
Extensive experiments on both sentence-level and token-level tasks demonstrate that our method could outperform the previous attack methods in terms of success rate and edit distance. Furthermore, human evaluation verifies our adversarial examples could preserve their origin labels.

Character-level White-Box Adversarial Attacks against Transformers via Attachable Subwords Substitution

Multi-intent detection and slot filling joint model attracts more and more attention since it can handle multi-intent utterances, which is closer to complex real-world scenarios. Most existing joint models rely entirely on the training procedure to obtain the implicit correlation between intents and slots. However, they ignore the fact that leveraging the rich global knowledge in the corpus can determine the intuitive and explicit correlation between intents and slots. 
In this paper, we aim to make full use of the statistical co-occurrence frequency between intents and slots as prior knowledge to enhance joint multiple intent detection and slot filling. To be specific, an intent-slot co-occurrence graph is constructed based on the entire training corpus to globally discover correlation between intents and slots. Based on the global intent-slot co-occurrence, we propose a novel graph neural network to model the interaction between the two subtasks. 
Experimental results on two public multi-intent datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

Enhancing Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling with Global Intent-Slot Co-occurrence

Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has demonstrated considerable cross-lingual syntactic ability, whereby it enables effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer of syntactic knowledge. The transfer is more successful between some languages, but it is not well understood what leads to this variation and whether it fairly reflects difference between languages. In this work, we investigate the distributions of grammatical relations induced from mBERT in the context of 24 typologically different languages. We demonstrate that the distance between the distributions of different languages is highly consistent with the syntactic difference in terms of linguistic formalisms. Such difference learnt via self-supervision plays a crucial role in the zero-shot transfer performance and can be predicted by variation in morphosyntactic properties between languages. These results suggest that mBERT properly encodes languages in a way consistent with linguistic diversity and provide insights into the mechanism of cross-lingual transfer.

Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Difference in Multilingual BERT: How Good is It and How Does It Affect Transfer?

Well-annotated data is a prerequisite for good Natural Language Processing models. Too often, though, annotation decisions are governed by optimizing time or annotator agreement. We make a case for nuanced efforts in an interdisciplinary setting for annotating offensive online speech. Detecting offensive content is rapidly becoming one of the most important real-world NLP tasks. However, most datasets use a single binary label, e.g., for hate or incivility, even though each concept is multi-faceted. This modeling choice severely limits nuanced insights, but also performance.
We show that a more fine-grained multi-label approach to predicting incivility and hateful or intolerant content addresses both conceptual and performance issues.
We release a novel dataset of over 40,000 tweets about immigration from the US and UK, annotated with six labels for different aspects of incivility and intolerance.
Our dataset not only allows for a more nuanced understanding of harmful speech online, models trained on it also outperform or match performance on benchmark datasets

"It's Not Just Hate": A Multi-Dimensional Perspective on Detecting Harmful Speech Online

Generating coherent long texts is an important yet challenging task, particularly for
the open-ended generation. Prior work based on discrete latent codes focuses on the modeling of discourse relation, resulting in discrete codes only learning shallow semantics (Ji and Huang, 2021). 
A natural text always revolves around several related topics and the transition across them is natural and smooth.
In this work, we investigate whether discrete latent codes can learn information of topics. To this end, we build a topic-aware latent code-guided text generation model. To encourage discrete codes to model information about topics, we propose a span-level bag-of-words training objective for the model. Automatic and manual evaluation experiments show that our method can generate more topic-relevant and coherent texts.

Long Text Generation with Topic-aware Discrete Latent Variable Model

Although remarkable progress on the neural table-to-text methods has been made, the generalization issues hinder the applicability of these models due to the limited source tables. Large-scale pretrained language models sound like a promising solution to tackle such issues. However, how to effectively bridge the gap between the structured table and the text input by fully leveraging table information to fuel the pretrained model is still not well explored. Besides, another challenge of integrating the deliberation mechanism into the text-to-text pretrained model for solving the table-to-text task remains seldom studied. In this paper, to implement the table-to-text generation with pretrained language model, we propose a table structure understanding and text deliberating approach, namely TASD. To be specific, we devise a three-layered multi-head attention network to realize the table-structureaware text generation model with the help of the pretrained language model. Furthermore, a multi-pass decoder framework is adopted to enhance the capability of polishing generated text for table descriptions. The empirical studies, as well as human evaluation, on two public datasets, validate that our approach can generate faithful and fluent descriptive texts for different types of tables.

Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Model: A Table Structure Understanding and Text Deliberating Approach

Explanations promise to bridge the gap between humans and AI, yet it remains difficult to achieve consistent improvement in AI-augmented human decision making. The usefulness of AI explanations depends on many factors, and always showing the same type of explanation in all cases is suboptimal—so is relying on heuristics to adapt explanations for each scenario. We propose learning to explain
"selectively”: for each decision that the user makes, we use a model to choose the best explanation from a set of candidates and update this model with feedback to optimize human performance. We experiment on a question answering task, Quizbowl, and show that selective explanations improve human performance for both experts and crowdworkers.

Learning to Explain Selectively: A Case Study on Question Answering

We introduce a new open information extraction (OIE) benchmark for pre-trained language models (LM). Recent studies have demonstrated that pre-trained LMs, such as BERT and GPT, may store linguistic and relational knowledge. In particular, LMs are able to answer "fill-in-the-blank" questions when given a pre-defined relation category. Instead of focusing on pre-defined relations, we create an OIE benchmark aiming to fully examine the open relational information present in the pre-trained LMs. We accomplish this by turning pre-trained LMs into zero-shot OIE systems. Surprisingly, pre-trained LMs are able to obtain competitive performance on both standard OIE datasets (CaRB and Re-OIE2016) and two new large-scale factual OIE datasets (TAC KBP-OIE and Wikidata-OIE) that we establish via distant supervision. For instance, the zero-shot pre-trained LMs outperform the F1 score of the state-of-the-art supervised OIE methods on our factual OIE datasets without needing to use any training sets.

IELM: An Open Information Extraction Benchmark for Pre-Trained Language Models

Augmenting pre-trained language models (PLMs) with knowledge graphs (KGs) has demonstrated superior performance on commonsense reasoning. Given a commonsense based QA context (question and multiple choices), existing approaches usually estimate the plausibility of candidate choices separately based on their respective retrieved KGs, without considering the interference among different choices. 
In this paper, we propose an Attention guided Commonsense rEasoning Network (ACENet)\footnote{\url{https://github.com/HAOChuzhan/ACENet}.} to endow the neural network with the capability of integrating hybrid knowledge. Specifically, our model applies the multi-layer interaction of answer choices to continually strengthen correct choice information and guide the message passing of GNN. In addition, we also design a mix attention mechanism of nodes and edges to iteratively select supporting evidence on hybrid knowledge graph. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model through considerable performance gains across CommonsenseQA and OpenbookQA datasets.

ACENet: Attention Guided Commonsense Reasoning on Hybrid Knowledge Graph

Sequence-to-sequence deep neural models fine-tuned for abstractive summarization can achieve great performance on datasets with enough human annotations. Yet, it has been shown that they have not reached their full potential, with a wide gap between the top beam search output and the oracle beam. Recently, re-ranking methods have been proposed, to learn to select a better summary candidate. However, such methods are limited by the summary quality aspects captured by the first-stage candidates. To bypass this limitation, we propose a new paradigm in second-stage abstractive summarization called SummaFusion that fuses several summary candidates to produce a novel abstractive second-stage summary. Our method works well on several summarization datasets, improving both the ROUGE scores and qualitative properties of fused summaries. It is especially good when the candidates to fuse are worse, such as in the few-shot setup where we set a new state-of-the art. We will make our code and checkpoints available at https://github.com/ntunlp/SummaFusion/.

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Text Style Transferring via Adversarial Masking and Styled Filling

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Character-level White-Box Adversarial Attacks against Transformers via Attachable Subwords Substitution

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