Canada

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is one of the most effective approaches to deploying large-scale pre-trained language models in low-latency environments by transferring the knowledge contained in the large-scale models to smaller student models.Prior KD approaches use the soft labels and intermediate activations generated by the teacher to transfer knowledge to the student model parameters alone. In this paper, we show that having access to non-parametric memory in the form of a knowledge base with the teacher&#39;s soft labels and predictions can further improve student generalization. To enable the student to retrieve from the knowledge base effectively, we propose a new framework and loss function that preserves the semantic similarities of teacher and student training examples. We show through extensive experiments that our retrieval mechanism can achieve state-of-the-art performance for task-specific knowledge distillation on the GLUE benchmark.

ACL 2023

ReAugKD: Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Distillation For Pre-trained Language Models

large language model

retrieval

knowledge distillation

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
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Welcome!
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.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is one of the most effective approaches to deploying large-scale pre-trained language models in low-latency environments by transferring the knowledge contained in the large-scale models to smaller student models.Prior KD approaches use the soft labels and intermediate activations generated by the teacher to transfer knowledge to the student model parameters alone. In this paper, we show that having access to non-parametric memory in the form of a knowledge base with the teacher's soft labels and predictions can further improve student generalization. To enable the student to retrieve from the knowledge base effectively, we propose a new framework and loss function that preserves the semantic similarities of teacher and student training examples. We show through extensive experiments that our retrieval mechanism can achieve state-of-the-art performance for task-specific knowledge distillation on the GLUE benchmark.

technical paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Summarization models often generate text that is poorly calibrated to quality metrics because they are trained to maximize the likelihood of a single reference (MLE). To address this, recent work has added a calibration step, which exposes a model to its own ranked outputs to improve relevance or, in a separate line of work, contrasts positive and negative sets to improve faithfulness. While effective, much of this work has focused on \emph{how} to generate and optimize these sets. Less is known about \emph{why} one setup is more effective than another. In this work, we uncover the underlying characteristics of effective sets. For each training instance, we form a large, diverse pool of candidates and systematically vary the subsets used for calibration fine-tuning. Each selection strategy targets distinct aspects of the sets, such as lexical diversity or the size of the gap between positive and negatives. On three diverse scientific long-form summarization datasets (spanning biomedical, clinical, and chemical domains), we find, among others, that faithfulness calibration is optimal when the negative sets are extractive and more likely to be generated, whereas for relevance calibration, the metric margin between candidates should be maximized and surprise--the disagreement between model and metric defined candidate rankings--minimized.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/8PaBoicsuHK7beXFunvrtr/embed/polls/7a3ce662-2ddc-48b8-ad6b-e4dad5a636bd" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

What are the Desired Characteristics of Calibration Sets? Identifying Correlates on Long Form Scientific Summarization

The long-standing one-to-many issue of the open-domain dialogues poses significant challenges for automatic evaluation methods, i.e., there may be multiple suitable responses which differ in semantics for a given a conversational context.To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel learning-based automatic evaluation metric (CMN), which can robustly evaluate open-domain dialogues by augmenting Conditional Variational Autoencoders (CVAEs) with a Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) objective and employing Mutual Information (MI) to model the semantic similarity of text in the latent space. Experimental results on two open-domain dialogue datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with a wide range of baselines, especially in handling responses which are distant to the "golden" reference responses in semantics.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/or9aypsi961h595NQtD7kk/embed/polls/315a1e3e-90d9-4785-99c0-056d08d0d87a" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogues in Latent Space with Next Sentence Prediction and Mutual Information

Empathy is a crucial factor in open-domain conversations, which naturally shows one's caring and understanding to others. Though several methods have been proposed to generate empathetic responses, existing works often lead to monotonous empathy that refers to generic and safe expressions. In this paper, we propose to use explicit control to guide the empathy expression and design a framework DiffusEmp based on conditional diffusion language model to unify the utilization of dialogue context and attribute-oriented control signals. Specifically, communication mechanism, intent, and semantic frame are imported as multi-grained signals that control the empathy realization from coarse to fine levels. We then design a specific masking strategy to reflect the relationship between multi-grained signals and response tokens, and integrate it into the diffusion model to influence the generative process. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset EmpatheticDialogue show that our framework outperforms competitive baselines in terms of controllability, informativeness, and diversity without the loss of context-relatedness.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/iHwnn5G9xYwcAmSbeKA4Au/embed/polls/da86b93a-d2ca-4509-a656-0263e815b0d1" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

DiffusEmp: A Diffusion Model-Based Framework with Multi-Grained Control for Empathetic Response Generation

People often imagine relevant scenes to aid in the writing process. In this work, we aim to utilize visual information for composition in the same manner as humans. We propose a method, LIVE, that makes pre-trained language models (PLMs) Learn to Imagine for Visually-augmented natural language gEneration. First, we imagine the scene based on the text: we use a diffusion model to synthesize high-quality images conditioned on the input texts. Second, we use CLIP to determine whether the text can evoke the imagination in a posterior way. Finally, our imagination is dynamic, and we conduct synthesis for each sentence rather than generate only one image for an entire paragraph. Technically, we propose a novel plug-and-play fusion layer to obtain visually-augmented representations for each text. Our vision-text fusion layer is compatible with Transformer-based architecture. We have conducted extensive experiments on four generation tasks using BART and T5, and the automatic results and human evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. We will release the code, model, and data at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LIVE.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/iHwnn5G9xYwcAmSbeKA4Au/embed/polls/f5bc4994-0289-4aad-ae8e-b1de4c19063f" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Learning to Imagine: Visually-Augmented Natural Language Generation

Explanations of neural models aim to reveal a model's decision-making process for its predictions. However, recent work shows that current methods giving explanations such as saliency maps or counterfactuals can be misleading, as they are prone to present reasons that are unfaithful to the model's inner workings. This work explores the challenging question of evaluating the faithfulness of natural language explanations (NLEs). To this end, we present two tests. First, we propose a counterfactual input editor for inserting reasons that lead to counterfactual predictions but are not reflected by the NLEs. Second, we reconstruct inputs from the reasons stated in the generated NLEs and check how often they lead to the same predictions. Our tests can evaluate emerging NLE models, proving a fundamental tool in the development of faithful NLEs.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/6qSnTPZvioRLfFJpZUjhCw/embed/polls/f8531f97-7e7d-48ec-ab70-f2948cffc598" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Faithfulness Tests for Natural Language Explanations

Multi-party dialogues are more difficult for models to understand than one-to-one two-party dialogues, since they involve multiple interlocutors, resulting in interweaving reply-to relations and information flows. To step over these obstacles, an effective way is to pre-train a model that understands the discourse structure of multi-party dialogues, namely, to whom each utterance is replying. However, due to the lack of explicitly annotated discourse labels in multi-party dialogue corpora, previous works fail to scale up the pre-training process by putting aside the unlabeled multi-party conversational data for nothing. To fully utilize the unlabeled data, we propose to treat the discourse structures as latent variables, then jointly infer them and pre-train the discourse-aware model by unsupervised latent variable inference methods. Experiments on multiple downstream tasks show that our pre-trained model outperforms strong baselines by large margins and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, justifying the effectiveness of our method. The official implementation of this paper is available at https://github.com/EricLee8/MPD_EMVI.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/d4e7c8db-2f36-43cd-8388-6c8c02668d5c" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Pre-training Multi-party Dialogue Models with Latent Discourse Inference

The task of web information extraction is to extract target fields of an object from web pages, such as extracting the name, genre and actor from a movie page. Recent sequential modeling approaches have achieved state-of-the-art results on web information extraction. However, most of these methods only focus on extracting information from textual sources while ignoring the rich information from other modalities such as image and web layout. In this work, we propose a novel MUltimodal Structural Transformer (MUST) that incorporates multiple modalities for web information extraction. Concretely, we develop a structural encoder that jointly encodes the multimodal information based on the HTML structure of the web layout, where high-level DOM nodes, and low-level text and image tokens are introduced to represent the entire page. Structural attention patterns are designed to learn effective cross-modal embeddings for all DOM nodes and low-level tokens. An extensive set of experiments are conducted on WebSRC and Common Crawl benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of MUST over several state-of-the-art baselines.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/8PaBoicsuHK7beXFunvrtr/embed/polls/a3458d22-3c7e-44cf-b64a-fabec727f1a8" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

MUSTIE: Multimodal Structural Transformer for Web Information Extraction

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) attracts more research interest recently. While models achieve consistent performance gains in DocRE, their underlying decision rules are still understudied: Do they make the right predictions according to rationales? In this paper, we take the first step toward answering this question and then introduce a new perspective on comprehensively evaluating a model.Specifically, we first conduct annotations to provide the rationales considered by humans in DocRE. Then, we conduct investigations and discover the fact that: In contrast to humans, the representative state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in DocRE exhibit different reasoning processes. Through our proposed RE-specific attacks, we next demonstrate that the significant discrepancy in decision rules between models and humans severely damages the robustness of models. After that, we introduce mean average precision (MAP) to evaluate the understanding and reasoning capabilities of models. According to the extensive experimental results, we finally appeal to future work to consider evaluating the understanding ability of models because the improved ability renders models more trustworthy and robust to be deployed in real-world scenarios. We make our annotations and code publicly available.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/8PaBoicsuHK7beXFunvrtr/embed/polls/a4d4b038-ec19-4d87-a52e-00722dbdec92" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Did the Models Understand Documents? Benchmarking Models for Language Understanding in Document-Level Relation Extraction

The high annotation costs and diverse demands of various summarization tasks motivate the development of few-shot summarization.However, despite the emergence of many summarization tasks and datasets, the current training paradigm for few-shot summarization systems ignores potentially shareable knowledge in heterogeneous datasets.To this end, we propose \textsc{UniSumm}, a unified few-shot summarization model pre-trained with multiple summarization tasks and can be prefix-tuned to excel at any few-shot summarization task.Meanwhile, to better evaluate few-shot summarizers, under the principles of diversity and robustness, we assemble and release a new benchmark \textsc{SummZoo}. It consists of $8$ summarization tasks with multiple sets of few-shot samples for each task, covering diverse domains.Experimental results and analysis show that \textsc{UniSumm} outperforms strong baselines by a large margin across all sub-tasks in \textsc{SummZoo} under both automatic and human evaluations and achieves comparable results in human evaluation compared with a GPT-3.5 model.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/8PaBoicsuHK7beXFunvrtr/embed/polls/d11b5822-e061-41d2-8dd5-10545654d4d9" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

UniSumm and SummZoo: Unified Model and Diverse Benchmark for Few-Shot Summarization

Most existing cross-lingual summarization (CLS) work constructs CLS corpora by simply and directly translating pre-annotated summaries from one language to another, which can contain errors from both summarization and translation processes.To address this issue, we propose ConvSumX, a cross-lingual conversation summarization benchmark, through a new annotation schema that explicitly considers source input context.ConvSumX consists of 2 sub-tasks under different real-world scenarios, with each covering 3 language directions.We conduct thorough analysis on ConvSumX and 3 widely-used manually annotated CLS corpora and empirically find that ConvSumX is more faithful towards input text.Additionally, based on the same intuition, we propose a 2-Step method, which takes both conversation and summary as input to simulate human annotation process.Experimental results show that 2-Step method surpasses strong baselines on ConvSumX under both automatic and human evaluation.Analysis shows that both source input text and summary are crucial for modeling cross-lingual summaries.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/8PaBoicsuHK7beXFunvrtr/embed/polls/a1eef280-969b-4ef7-8167-638824ab2456" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

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What are the Desired Characteristics of Calibration Sets? Identifying Correlates on Long Form Scientific Summarization

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