Croatia

Context-aware translation can be achieved by processing a concatenation of consecutive sentences with the standard Transformer architecture.
This paper investigates the intuitive idea of providing the model with explicit information about the position of the sentences contained in the concatenation window.
We compare various methods to encode sentence positions into token representations, including novel methods. Our results show that the Transformer benefits from certain sentence position encoding methods on En-Ru, if trained with a context-discounted loss (Lupo et al., 2022). However, the same benefits are not observed on En-De. Further empirical efforts are necessary to define the conditions under which the proposed approach is beneficial.

EACL 2023

Encoding Sentence Position in Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation with Concatenation

sentence position encoding

context-aware

workshop paper

### 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.

Recent research has demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities of several Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) models on the GrailQA dataset. We inspect whether these models can generalize to other datasets in a zero-shot setting. We notice a significant drop in performance and investigate the causes for the same. We observe that the models are dependent not only on the structural complexity of the questions, but also on the linguistic styles of framing a question. Specifically, the linguistic dimensions corresponding to explicitness, readability, coherence, and grammaticality have a significant impact on the performance of state-of-the-art KBQA models. Overall our results showcase the brittleness of such models and the need for creating generalizable systems.

Exploring the Reasons for Non-generalizability of KBQA systems

Entities and events are crucial to natural language reasoning and common in procedural texts. Existing work has focused either exclusively on entity state tracking (e.g., whether a pan is hot) or on event reasoning (e.g., whether one would burn themselves by touching the pan), while these two tasks are often causally related. We propose CREPE, the first benchmark on causal reasoning of event plausibility and entity states. We show that most language models, including GPT-3, perform close to chance at .35 F1, lagging far behind human at .87 F1. We boost model performance to .59 F1 by creatively representing events as programming languages while prompting language models pretrained on code. By injecting the causal relations between entities and events as intermediate reasoning steps in our representation, we further boost the performance to .67 F1. Our findings indicate not only the challenge that CREPE brings for language models, but also the efficacy of code-like prompting combined with chain-of-thought prompting for multihop event reasoning.

Causal Reasoning About Entities and Events in Procedural Texts

Given a sentence "Abby told Brittney that she upset Courtney", one would struggle to understand who "she" refers to, and ask for clarification. However, if the word "upset" were replaced with "hugged", "she" unambiguously refers to Abby. We study if modern coreference resolution models are sensitive to such pronominal ambiguity. To this end, we construct AmbiCoref, a diagnostic corpus of minimal sentence pairs with ambiguous and unambiguous referents. Our examples generalize psycholinguistic studies of human perception of ambiguity around particular arrangements of verbs and their arguments. Analysis shows that (1) humans are less sure of referents in ambiguous AmbiCoref examples than unambiguous ones, and (2) most coreference models show little difference in output between ambiguous and unambiguous pairs. We release AmbiCoref as a diagnostic corpus for testing whether models treat ambiguity similarly to humans.

AMBICOREF: Evaluating Human and Model Sensitivity to Ambiguous Coreference

In this paper, we evaluate a fine-tuned BERT model’s performance on a set of auxiliary probe tasks to gauge whether the model can indirectly encode discourse properties. The focus is on structural properties that have proven important predictors in feature-based Event Coreference Resolution (ECR). We demonstrate that fine-tuning a language model for ECR also increases performance for event prominence and sentiment matching tasks. This contradicts earlier work where coreference models seemed unable to encode any sort of significant structural or discourse information.

What Does BERT actually Learn about Event Coreference? Probing Structural Information in a Fine-Tuned Dutch Language Model

Recent works on tokenizer-free multilingual pretrained models show promising results in improving cross-lingual transfer and reducing engineering overhead compared to subword-based alternatives. However, previous work mainly focuses on reporting accuracy on a limited set of tasks and data settings, placing less emphasis on other important factors when tuning and deploying the models in practice, such as memory usage, inference speed, and fine-tuning data efficiency. We attempt to fill this gap by performing a comprehensive empirical comparison of multilingual tokenizer-free and subword-based models considering the various dimensions. Surprisingly, we find that subword-based models might still be the most practical choice in many settings, achieving better performance for lower inference latency and memory usage. Based on these results, we encourage future work in tokenizer-free methods to consider these factors when designing and evaluating new models.

A Multi-dimensional Evaluation of Tokenizer-free Multilingual Pretrained Models

Numbers have unique characteristics to words. Teaching models to understand numbers in text is an open-ended research question. Instead of discussing the required calculation skills, this paper focuses on a more fundamental topic: understanding numerals. We point out that innumeracy—the inability to handle basic numeral concepts—exists in most pretrained language models (LMs), and we propose a method to solve this issue by exploring the notation of numbers. Further, we discuss whether changing notation and pre-finetuning along with the comparing-number task can improve performance in three benchmark datasets containing quantitative-related tasks. The results of this study indicate that input reframing and the proposed pre-finetuning task is useful for RoBERTa.

Improving Numeracy by Input Reframing and Quantitative Pre-Finetuning Task

While modern masked language models (LMs) are trained on ever larger corpora, we here explore the effects of down-scaling training to a modestly-sized but representative, well-balanced, and publicly available English text source -- the British National Corpus. We show that pre-training on this carefully curated corpus can reach better performance than the original BERT model. We argue that this type of corpora has great potential as a language modeling benchmark. To showcase this potential, we present fair, reproducible and data-efficient comparative studies of LMs, in which we evaluate several training objectives and model architectures and replicate previous empirical results in a systematic way. We propose an optimized LM architecture called LTG-BERT.

Trained on 100 million words and still in shape: BERT meets British National Corpus

Real-world applications of language models entail data privacy constraints
when learning from diverse data domains. Federated learning with pretrained
language models for language tasks has been gaining attention lately but there
are definite confounders that warrants a careful study. Specifically, understanding the limits of federated NLP applications through varying the effects of different aspects (such as data heterogeneity, the trade-off between training time
and performance, the effect of different data, and client distributions and sensitivity of the shared model to learning local distributions) is necessary to evaluate
whether language models indeed learn to generalize by adapting to the different
domains. Towards that, we elaborate different hypotheses over the components
in federated NLP architectures and study them in detail with relevant experiments
over three tasks: Stanford Sentiment Treebank-2, OntoNotes-5.0 and GigaWord.
The experiments with different Transformer inductive biases on the variety of
tasks provide a glimpse at the understanding of federated learning at NLP tasks.
Specifically, the analysis suggests that regularization due to the ensembling effect may be masquerading as domain adaptation of federated learning in NLP
with pre-trained language models.

Practical Takes on Federated Learning with Pretrained Language Models

Embedding representations of text are useful for downstream natural language processing tasks. Several universal sentence representation methods have been proposed with a particular focus on self-supervised pre-training approaches to leverage the vast quantities of unlabelled data. However, there are two challenges for generating rich embedding representations for a new document. 1) The latest rich embedding generators are based on very large costly transformer-based architectures. 2) The rich embedding representation of a new document is limited to only the information provided without access to any explicit contextual and temporal information that could potentially further enrich the representation. We propose efficient retrieval-augmented text embeddings (ERATE) that tackles the first issue and offers a method to tackle the second issue. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to incorporate retrieval to general purpose embeddings as a new paradigm, which we apply to the semantic similarity tasks of SentEval. Despite not reaching state-of-the-art performance, ERATE offers key insights that encourages future work into investigating the potential of retrieval-based embeddings.

ERATE: Efficient Retrieval Augmented Text Embeddings

In this paper, we describe how we unearthed some fundamental problems while building an analogy dataset to evaluate historical Irish embeddings on their ability to detect orthographic, morphological and semantic similarity. Low agreement among field experts and the absence of an editorial standard in available resources make it impossible to build reliable evaluation datasets for computational models and obtain interpretable results. We emphasise the need for a historical text editing standard, particularly for NLP applications, and prompt Celticists and historical linguists to engage in further discussion. We would also like to draw NLP scholars' attention to the role of data and its (extra)linguistic properties in testing new models and evaluation scenarios.

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Encoding Sentence Position in Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation with Concatenation

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