Croatia

Acquiring factual knowledge with Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) has attracted increasing attention, showing promising performance in many knowledge-intensive tasks. Their good performance has led the community to believe that the models do possess a modicum of reasoning competence rather than merely memorising the knowledge. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the learnable deductive (also known as explicit) reasoning capability of PLMs. Through a series of controlled experiments, we posit two main findings. 1) PLMs inadequately generalise learned logic rules and perform inconsistently against simple adversarial surface form edits. 2) While the deductive reasoning fine-tuning of PLMs does improve their performance on reasoning over unseen knowledge facts, it results in catastrophically forgetting the previously learnt knowledge. Our main results suggest that PLMs cannot yet perform reliable deductive reasoning, demonstrating the importance of controlled examinations and probing of PLMs&#39; deductive reasoning abilities; we reach beyond (misleading) task performance, revealing that PLMs are still far from robust reasoning capabilities, even for simple deductive tasks.

EACL 2023

Can Pretrained Language Models (Yet) Reason Deductively?

deductive reasoning

knowledge probing

pretrained language models

model analysis

Acquiring factual knowledge with Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) has attracted increasing attention, showing promising performance in many knowledge-intensive tasks. Their good performance has led the community to believe that the models do possess a modicum of reasoning competence rather than merely memorising the knowledge. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the learnable deductive (also known as explicit) reasoning capability of PLMs. Through a series of controlled experiments, we posit two main findings. 1) PLMs inadequately generalise learned logic rules and perform inconsistently against simple adversarial surface form edits. 2) While the deductive reasoning fine-tuning of PLMs does improve their performance on reasoning over unseen knowledge facts, it results in catastrophically forgetting the previously learnt knowledge. Our main results suggest that PLMs cannot yet perform reliable deductive reasoning, demonstrating the importance of controlled examinations and probing of PLMs' deductive reasoning abilities; we reach beyond (misleading) task performance, revealing that PLMs are still far from robust reasoning capabilities, even for simple deductive tasks.

poster

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

In this paper, we prove that separable negative log-likelihood losses for structured prediction are not necessarily Bayes consistent, that is minimizing these losses may not result in a model that predicts the most probable structure in the data distribution for a given input.
This fact opens the question of whether these losses are well-adapted for structured prediction and, if so, why.

On the inconsistency of separable losses for structured prediction

Integrating human feedback in models can improve the performance of natural language pro-
cessing (NLP) models. Feedback can be either explicit (e.g. ranking used in training language
models) or implicit (e.g. using human cognitive signals in the form of eyetracking). Prior eye
tracking and NLP research reveal that cognitive processes, such as human scanpaths, gleaned
from human gaze patterns aid in the understanding and performance of NLP models. However, the collection of real eyetracking data for NLP tasks is challenging due to the requirement
of expensive and precise equipment coupled with privacy invasion issues. To address this
challenge, we propose ScanTextGAN, a novel model for generating human scanpaths over text. We show that ScanTextGAN-generated scanpaths can approximate meaningful cognitive signals in human gaze patterns. We include synthetically generated scanpaths in four popular NLP tasks spanning six different datasets as proof of concept and show that the models augmented with generated scanpaths improve the performance of all downstream NLP tasks.

Synthesizing Human Gaze Feedback for Improved NLP Performance

Decision-makers in the humanitarian sector rely on timely and exact information during crisis events. Knowing how many civilians were injured during an earthquake is vital to allocate aids properly. Information about such victim counts are however often only available within full-text event descriptions from newspapers and other reports. Extracting numbers from text is challenging: numbers have different formats and may require numeric reasoning. This renders purely tagging approaches insufficient. As a consequence, fine-grained counts of injured, displaced, or abused victims beyond fatalities are often not extracted and remain unseen. We cast victim count extraction as a question answering (QA) task with a regression or classification objective. We compare tagging approaches: regex, dependency parsing, semantic role labeling, and advanced text-to-text models. Beyond model accuracy, we analyze extraction reliability and robustness which are key for this sensitive task. In particular, we discuss model calibration and investigate out-of-distribution and few-shot performance. Ultimately, we make a comprehensive recommendation on which model to select for different desiderata and data domains. Our work is among the first to apply numeracy-focused large language models in a real-world use case with a positive impact.

Extracting Victim Counts from Text

A universal classification model aims to generalize to diverse classification tasks in both zero and few shot settings. A promising way toward universal classification is to cast heterogeneous data formats into a dataset-agnostic "meta-task" (e.g., textual entailment, question answering) then pretrain a model on the combined meta dataset. The existing work is either pretrained on specific subsets of classification tasks, or pretrained on both classification and generation data but the model could not fulfill its potential in universality and reliability. These also leave a massive amount of annotated data under-exploited. To fill these gaps, we propose ConEntail, a new framework for universal zero and few shot classification with supervised contrastive pretraining. Our unified meta-task for classification is based on nested entailment. It can be interpreted as "Does sentence a entails [sentence b entails label c]". This formulation enables us to make better use of 57 annotated classification datasets for supervised contrastive pretraining and universal evaluation. In this way, ConEntail helps the model (1) absorb knowledge from different datasets, and (2) gain consistent performance gain with more pretraining data. In experiments, we compare our model with discriminative and generative models pretrained on the same dataset. The results confirm that our framework effectively exploits existing annotated data and consistently outperforms baselines in both zero (9.4\% average improvement) and few shot settings (3.5\% average improvement). Our code is available in supplementary materials.

ConEntail: An Entailment-based Framework for Universal Zero and Few Shot Classification with Supervised Contrastive Pretraining

Memes can sway people's opinions over social media as they combine visual and textual information in an easy-to-consume manner. Since memes instantly turn viral, it becomes crucial to infer their intent and potentially associated harmfulness to take timely measures as needed. A common problem associated with meme comprehension lies in detecting the entities referenced and characterizing the role of each of these entities. Here, we aim to understand whether the meme glorifies, vilifies, or victimizes each entity it refers to. To this end, we address the task of role identification of entities in harmful memes, i.e., detecting who is the ‘hero', the ‘villain', and the ‘victim' in the meme, if any. We utilize HVVMemes – a memes dataset on US Politics and Covid-19 memes, released recently as part of the CONSTRAINT@ACL-2022 shared-task. It contains memes, entities referenced, and their associated roles: hero, villain, victim, and other. We further design VECTOR (Visual-semantic role dEteCToR), a robust multi-modal framework for the task, which integrates entity-based contextual information in the multi-modal representation and compare it to several standard unimodal (text-only or image-only) or multi-modal (image+text) models. Our experimental results show that our proposed model achieves an improvement of 4\% over the best baseline and 1\% over the best competing stand-alone submission from the shared-task. Besides divulging an extensive experimental setup with comparative analyses, we finally highlight the challenges encountered in addressing the complex task of semantic role labeling within memes.

Characterizing the Entities in Harmful Memes: Who is the Hero, the Villain, the Victim?

Seq2seq models have been shown to struggle with compositional generalisation, i.e. generalising to new and potentially more complex structures than seen during training. Taking inspiration from grammar-based models that excel at compositional generalisation, we present a flexible end-to-end differentiable neural model that composes two structural operations: a fertility step, which we introduce in this work, and a reordering step based on previous work (Wang et al., 2021). To ensure differentiability, we use the expected value of each step, which we compute using dynamic programming. Our model outperforms seq2seq models by a wide margin on challenging compositional splits of realistic semantic parsing tasks that require generalisation to longer examples. It also compares favourably to other models targeting compositional generalisation.

Compositional Generalisation with Structured Reordering and Fertility Layers

In recent years, active learning has been successfully applied to an array of NLP tasks.
However, prior work often assumes that training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. This is problematic, as in real-life settings data may stem from several sources of varying relevance and quality. We show that four popular active learning schemes fail to outperform random selection when applied to unlabelled pools comprised of multiple data sources on the task of natural language inference. We reveal that uncertainty-based strategies perform poorly due to the acquisition of collective outliers, i.e., hard-to-learn instances that hamper learning and generalisation. When outliers are removed, strategies are found to recover and outperform random baselines. In further analysis, we find that collective outliers vary in form between sources, and show that hard-to-learn data is not always categorically harmful. Lastly, we leverage dataset cartography to introduce difficulty-stratified testing and find that different strategies are affected differently by example learnability and difficulty.

Investigating Multi-source Active Learning for Natural Language Inference

Despite significant progress in understanding and improving faithfulness in abstractive summarization, the question of how decoding strategies affect faithfulness is less studied. We present a systematic study of the effect of generation techniques such as beam search and nucleus sampling on faithfulness in abstractive summarization. We find a consistent trend where beam search with large beam sizes produces the most faithful summaries while nucleus sampling generates the least faithful ones. We propose two faithfulness-aware generation methods to further improve faithfulness over current generation techniques: (1) ranking candidates generated by beam search using automatic faithfulness metrics and (2) incorporating lookahead heuristics that produce a faithfulness score on the future summary. We show that both generation methods significantly improve faithfulness across two datasets as evaluated by four automatic faithfulness metrics and human evaluation. To reduce computational cost, we demonstrate a simple distillation approach that allows the model to generate faithful summaries with just greedy decoding.

Faithfulness-Aware Decoding Strategies for Abstractive Summarization

Although named entity recognition (NER) helps us to extract domain-specific entities from text (e.g., artists in the music domain), it is costly to create a large amount of training data or a structured knowledge base to perform accurate NER in the target domain. Here, we propose self-adaptive NER, which retrieves external knowledge from unstructured text to learn the usages of entities that have not been learned well. To retrieve useful knowledge for NER, we design an effective two-stage model that retrieves unstructured knowledge using uncertain entities as queries. Our model predicts the entities in the input and then finds those of which the prediction is not confident. Then, it retrieves knowledge by using these uncertain entities as queries and concatenates the retrieved text to the original input to revise the prediction. Experiments on CrossNER datasets demonstrated that our model outperforms 
strong baselines by 2.35 points in F1 metric.

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On the inconsistency of separable losses for structured prediction

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