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Despite the recent success of multi-task learning and pre-finetuning for natural language understanding, few works have studied the effects of task families on abstractive text summarization. Task families are a form of task grouping during the pre-finetuning stage to learn common skills, such as reading comprehension. To close this gap, we analyze the influence of multi-task learning strategies using task families for the English abstractive text summarization task. We group tasks into one of three strategies, i.e., sequential, simultaneous, and continual multi-task learning, and evaluate trained models through two downstream tasks. We find that certain combinations of task families (e.g., advanced reading comprehension and natural language inference) positively impact downstream performance. Further, we find that choice and combinations of task families influence downstream performance more than the training scheme, supporting the use of task families for abstractive text

EMNLP 2022

Analyzing Multi-Task Learning for Abstractive Text Summarization

task families

pre-finetuning

abstractive text summarization

analysis

multi-task learning

workshop paper

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One of the biggest challenges of natural language generation (NLG) is the proper handling of named entities. Named entities are a common source of grammar mistakes such as wrong prepositions, wrong article handling, or incorrect entity inflection. Without factoring linguistic representation, such errors are often underrepresented when evaluating on a small set of arbitrarily picked argument values, or when translating a dataset from a linguistically simpler language, like English, to a linguistically complex language, like Russian. However, for some applications, broadly precise grammatical correctness is critical -- native speakers may find entity-related grammar errors silly, jarring, or even offensive. To enable the creation of more linguistically diverse NLG datasets, we release a Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities~(CLSE) annotated by linguist experts. The corpus includes 34 languages and covers 74 different semantic types to support various applications from airline ticketing to video games. To demonstrate one possible use of CLSE, we produce an augmented version of the Schema-Guided Dialog Dataset, SGD-CLSE. Using the CLSE's entities and a small number of human translations, we create a linguistically representative NLG evaluation benchmark in three languages: French (high-resource), Marathi (low-resource), and Russian (highly inflected language). We establish quality baselines for neural, template-based, and hybrid NLG systems and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

CLSE: Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities

Scoring the factuality of a generated summary involves measuring the degree to which a target text contains factual information using the input document as support. Given the similarities in the problem formulation, previous work has shown that Natural Language Inference models can be effectively repurposed to perform this task. As these models are trained to score entailment at a sentence level, several recent studies have shown that decomposing either the input document or the summary into sentences helps with factuality scoring. But is fine-grained decomposition always a winning strategy? In this paper we systematically compare different granularities of decomposition - from document to sub-sentence level, and we show that the answer is no. Our results show that incorporating additional context can yield improvement, but that this does not necessarily apply to all datasets. We also show that small changes to previously proposed entailment-based scoring methods can result in better performance, highlighting the need for caution in model and methodology selection for downstream tasks.

Revisiting text decomposition methods for NLI-based factuality scoring of summaries

In this work, we use sentence similarity as a lens through which to investigate the representation of meaning in graphs vs. vectors. On semantic textual similarity data, we examine how similarity metrics based on vectors alone (SENTENCE-BERT and BERTSCORE) fare compared to metrics based on AMR graphs (SMATCH and S2MATCH). Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the AMR-based metrics can better capture meanings dependent on sentence structures, but can also be distracted by structural differences—whereas the BERT-based metrics represent finer-grained meanings of individual words, but often fail to capture the ordering effect of words within sentences and suffer from interpretability problems. These findings contribute to our understanding of each approach to semantic representation and motivate distinct use cases for graph and vector-based representations.

Semantic Similarity as a Window into Vector- and Graph-Based Metrics

Reflection is an essential counselling strategy, where the therapist listens actively and responds with their own interpretation of the client's words. Recent work leveraged pre-trained language models (PLMs) to approach reflection generation as a promising tool to aid counsellor training. However, those studies used limited dialogue context for modelling and simplistic error analysis for human evaluation. In this work, we take the first step towards addressing those limitations. First, we fine-tune PLMs on longer dialogue contexts for reflection generation. Then, we collect free-text error descriptions from non-experts about generated reflections, identify common patterns among them, and accordingly establish discrete error categories using thematic analysis. Based on this scheme, we plan for future work a mass non-expert error annotation phase for generated reflections followed by an expert-based validation phase, namely "whether a coherent and consistent response is a good reflection".

Towards In-Context Non-Expert Evaluation of Reflection Generation for Counselling Conversations

Language models have demonstrated the ability to generate highly fluent text; however, it remains unclear whether their output retains coherent high-level structure (e.g., story progression). Here, we propose to apply a statistical tool, model criticism in latent space, to evaluate the high-level structure of the generated text. Model criticism compares the distributions between real and generated data in a latent space obtained according to an assumptive generative process. Different generative processes identify specific failure modes of the underlying model. We perform experiments on three representative aspects of high-level discourse---coherence, coreference, and topicality---and find that transformer-based language models are able to capture topical structures but have a harder time maintaining structural coherence or modeling coreference structures.

Model Criticism for Long-Form Text Generation

Human Evaluation (HE) of automatically generated responses is necessary for the advancement of human-machine dialogue research. Current automatic evaluation measures are poor surrogates, at best. There are no agreed-upon HE protocols and it is difficult to develop them. As a result, researchers either perform non-replicable, non-transparent and inconsistent procedures or, worse, limit themselves to automated metrics. We propose to standardize the human evaluation of response generation models by publicly sharing a detailed protocol. The proposal includes the task design, annotators recruitment, task execution, and annotation reporting. Such protocol and process can be used as-is, as-a-whole, in-part, or modified and extended by the research community. We validate the protocol by evaluating two conversationally fine-tuned state-of-the-art models (GPT-2 and T5) for the complex task of personalized response generation. We invite the community to use this protocol - or its future community amended versions - as a transparent, replicable, and comparable approach to HE of generated responses.

Evaluation of Response Generation Models: Shouldn't It Be Shareable and Replicable?

Logic-to-text generation is an important yet underrepresented area of natural language generation (NLG). In particular, most previous works on this topic lack sound evaluation. We address this limitation by building and evaluating a system that generates high-quality English text given a first-order logic (FOL) formula as input. We start by analyzing the performance of Ranta (2011)'s system. Based on this analysis, we develop an extended version of the system, which we name LoLa, that performs formula simplification based on logical equivalences and syntactic transformations. We carry out an extensive evaluation of LoLa using standard automatic metrics and human evaluation. We compare the results against a baseline and Ranta (2011)'s system. The results show that LoLa outperforms the other two systems in most aspects.

Enhancing and Evaluating the Grammatical Framework Approach to Logic-to-Text Generation

To be trusted and perceived as natural and coherent, conversational systems must adapt to the language of their users. While personalized dialogue is a promising direction, controlling generation for fine-grained language features remains a challenge in this approach. A recent line of research showed the effectiveness of leveraging pre-trained language models toward adapting to a text's topic or sentiment. In this study, we build on these approaches and focus on a higher-level dimension of language variation: speakers' age. We frame the task as a dialogue response generation, and test methods based on bag-of-words (BoW) and neural discriminators (Disc) to condition the output of GPT-2 and DialoGPT without altering the parameters of the language models. We show that Disc models achieve a higher degree of detectable control than BoW models based on automatic evaluation. In contrast, humans can partially detect age differences in BoW but not Disc responses. Since BoW responses are deemed better than Disc ones by humans, simple controllable methods thus appear to be a better tradeoff between adaptation and language quality. Our work confirms the challenges of adapting to higher-level dimensions of language variation. Moreover, it highlights the need to evaluate natural language generation thoroughly.

Controllable Text Generation for All Ages: Evaluating a Plug-and-Play Approach to Age-Adapted Dialogue

Text generation has long been a popular research topic in NLP. However, the task of generating contact emails from recruiters to candidates in the job recommendation scenario has received little attention by the research community. This work aims at defining the topic of automatic email generation for job recommendation, identifying the challenges, and providing a baseline template-based solution for Danish jobs. Evaluation by human experts shows that our method is effective. We wrap up by discussing the future research directions for better solving this task.

Template-based Contact Email Generation for Job Recommendation

Evaluating natural language generation is difficult. We propose a general framework that helps solve this difficulty by unifying the evaluation with a common central operation. Our uniformly designed metrics outperform state-of-the-art metrics specially designed for diverse tasks such as summarization, style transfer, and knowledge-grounded dialog.

Analyzing Multi-Task Learning for Abstractive Text Summarization

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CLSE: Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities

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