United Arab Emirates

EMNLP 2022

Knowledge Unlearning for Mitigating Privacy Risks in Language Models

unlearning

large language model

privacy

workshop paper

## 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.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
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***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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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.

TemporalWiki: A Lifelong Benchmark for Training and Evaluating Ever-Evolving Language Models

The Annals of Joseon Dynasty (AJD) contain the daily records of the Kings of Joseon, the 500-year kingdom preceding the modern nation of Korea. The Annals were originally written in an archaic Korean writing system, `Hanja', and were translated into Korean from 1968 to 1993. The resulting translation was however too literal and contained many archaic Korean words; thus, a new expert translation effort began in 2012. Since then, the records of only one king have been completed in a decade. In parallel, expert translators are working on English translation, also at a slow pace and produced only one king's records in English so far. Thus, we propose H2KE, a neural machine translation model, that translates historical documents in Hanja to more easily understandable Korean and to English. Built on top of multilingual neural machine translation, H2KE learns to translate a historical document written in Hanja, from both a full dataset of outdated Korean translation and a small dataset of more recently translated contemporary Korean and English. We compare our method against two baselines: a recent model that simultaneously learns to restore and translate Hanja historical document and a Transformer based model trained only on newly translated corpora. The experiments reveal that our method significantly outperforms the baselines in terms of BLEU scores for both contemporary Korean and English translations. We further conduct extensive human evaluation which shows that our translation is preferred over the original expert translations by both experts and non-expert Korean speakers.

Translating Hanja Historical Documents to Contemporary Korean and English

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are typically trained on heterogeneous data that are concatenated and randomly shuffled. However, not all of the training data are equally useful to the model. Curriculum training aims to present the data to the NMT models in a meaningful order. In this work, we introduce a two-stage training framework for NMT where we fine-tune a base NMT model on subsets of data, selected by both deterministic scoring using pre-trained methods and online scoring that considers prediction scores of the emerging NMT model. Through comprehensive experiments on six language pairs comprising low- and high-resource languages from WMT'21, we have shown that our curriculum strategies consistently demonstrate better quality (up to +2.2 BLEU improvement) and faster convergence (approximately 50% fewer updates).

Data Selection Curriculum for Neural Machine Translation

Scaling multilingual representation learning beyond the hundred most frequent languages is challenging, in particular to cover the long tail of low-resource languages.  We move away from the popular one-for-all multilingual models and focus on training multiple language (family) specific representations, but most prominently enable all languages to still be encoded in the same representational space.  We focus on teacher-student training, allowing all encoders to be mutually compatible for bitext mining, and enabling fast learning of new languages.  We also combine supervised and self-supervised training, allowing encoders to take advantage of monolingual training data. Our approach significantly outperforms the original LASER encoder. We study very low-resource languages and handle 44 African languages, many of which are not covered by any other model. For these languages, we train sentence encoders and mine bitexts.  Adding these mined bitexts yielded an improvement of 3.8 BLEU for NMT into English.

Bitext Mining Using Distilled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Languages

Multilingual neural machine translation models (MNMT) yield state-of-the-art performance when evaluated on data from a domain and language pair seen at training time. However, when a MNMT model is used to translate under domain shift or to a new language pair, performance drops dramatically. We consider a very challenging scenario: adapting the MNMT model both to a new domain and to a new language pair at the same time. In this paper, we propose m^4Adapter (Multilingual Multi-Domain Adaptation for Machine Translation with a Meta-Adapter), which combines domain and language knowledge using meta-learning with adapters. We present results showing that our approach is a parameter-efficient solution which effectively adapts a model to both a new language pair and a new domain, while outperforming other adapter methods. An ablation study also shows that our approach more effectively transfers domain knowledge across different languages and language information across different domains.

m^4 Adapter: Multilingual Multi-Domain Adaptation for Machine Translation with a Meta-Adapter

Recently, very large pre-trained models achieve state-of-the-art results in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but their size makes it more challenging to apply them in resource-constrained environments. Compression techniques allow to drastically reduce the size of the models and therefore their inference time with negligible impact on top-tier metrics.  However,  the general performance averaged across multiple tasks and/or languages may hide a drastic performance drop on under-represented features, which could result in the amplification of biases encoded by the models. 
In this work, we assess the impact of compression methods on Multilingual Neural Machine Translation models (MNMT) for various language groups, gender, and semantic biases by extensive analysis of compressed models on different machine translation benchmarks,  i.e. FLORES-101, MT-Gender, and DiBiMT.  We show that the performance of under-represented languages drops significantly, while the average BLEU metric only slightly decreases. Interestingly, the removal of noisy memorization with compression leads to a significant improvement for some medium-resource languages. Finally, we demonstrate that compression amplifies intrinsic gender and semantic biases, even in high-resource languages.

What Do Compressed Multilingual Machine Translation Models Forget?

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the task of identifying the intended sense of a word in context. While prior work on unsupervised WSD has leveraged lexical knowledge bases, such as WordNet and BabelNet, these resources have proven to be less effective for Chinese. Instead, the most widely used lexical knowledge base for Chinese is HowNet. Previous HowNet-based WSD methods have not exploited contextual translation information. In this paper, we present the first HowNet-based WSD system which combines monolingual contextual information from a pretrained neural language model with bilingual information obtained via machine translation and sense translation information from HowNet. The results of our evaluation experiment on a test set from prior work demonstrate that our new method achieves a new state of the art for unsupervised Chinese WSD.

Improving HowNet-Based Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation with Translations

Memorization presents a challenge for several constrained Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT), wherein the proclivity of neural models to memorize noisy and atypical samples reacts adversely with the noisy (web crawled) datasets. However, previous studies of memorization in constrained NLG tasks have only focused on counterfactual memorization, linking it to the problem of hallucinations. In this work, we propose a new, inexpensive algorithm for extractive memorization (exact training data generation under insufficient context) in constrained sequence generation tasks and use it to study extractive memorization and its effects in NMT. We demonstrate that extractive memorization poses a serious threat to NMT reliability by qualitatively and quantitatively characterizing the memorized samples as well as the model behavior in their vicinity. Based on empirical observations, we develop a simple algorithm which elicits non-memorized translations of memorized samples from the same model, for a large fraction of such samples. Finally, we show that the proposed algorithm could also be leveraged to mitigate memorization in the model through finetuning. We have released the code to reproduce our results at https://github.com/vyraun/Finding-Memo.

Finding Memo: Extractive Memorization in Constrained Sequence Generation Tasks

Traditional machine translation (MT) metrics provide an average measure of translation quality that is insensitive to the long tail of behavioral problems. Examples include translation of numbers, physical units, dropped content and hallucinations. These errors, which occur rarely and unpredictably in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), greatly undermine the reliability of state-of-the-art MT systems. Consequently, it is important to have visibility into these problems during model development. Towards this end, we introduce SALTED, a specifications-based framework for behavioral testing of NMT models. At the core of our approach is the use of high-precision detectors that flag errors (or alternatively, verify output correctness) between a source sentence and a system output. These detectors provide fine-grained measurements of long-tail errors, providing a trustworthy view of problems that were previously invisible. We demonstrate that such detectors could be used not just to identify salient long-tail errors in MT systems, but also for higher-recall filtering of the training data, fixing targeted errors with model fine-tuning in NMT and generating novel data for metamorphic testing to elicit further bugs in models.

SALTED: A Framework for SAlient Long-tail Translation Error Detection

While collecting or generating more parallel data is necessary to improve machine translation (MT) in low-resource settings, we lack an understanding of how the limited amounts of existing data are actually used to help guide the collection of further resources.  In this paper, we apply data cartography techniques (Swayamdipta et al., 2020) to characterize the contribution of training samples in two low-resource MT tasks (Swahili-English and Turkish-English) throughout the training of standard neural MT models.  Our empirical study shows that, unlike in prior work for classification tasks, most samples contribute to model training in low-resource MT, albeit not uniformly throughout the training process. 
 Furthermore, uni-dimensional characterizations of samples -- e.g., based on dual cross-entropy or word frequency -- do not suffice to characterize to what degree they are hard or easy to learn.  Taken together, our results suggest that data augmentation strategies for low-resource MT would benefit from model-in-the-loop strategies to maximize improvements.

Knowledge Unlearning for Mitigating Privacy Risks in Language Models

Next from EMNLP 2022

TemporalWiki: A Lifelong Benchmark for Training and Evaluating Ever-Evolving Language Models

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