Canada

Modern Natural Language Generation (NLG) models come with massive computational and storage requirements. In this work, we study the potential of compressing them, which is crucial for real-world applications serving millions of users. We focus on Knowledge Distillation (KD) techniques, in which a small student model learns to imitate a large teacher model, allowing to transfer knowledge from the teacher to the student. In contrast to much of the previous work, our goal is to optimize the model for a specific NLG task and a specific dataset. Typically in real-world applications, in addition to labeled data there is abundant unlabeled task-specific data, which is crucial for attaining high compression rates via KD. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of task-specific KD techniques for various NLG tasks under realistic assumptions. We discuss the special characteristics of NLG distillation and particularly the exposure bias problem. Following, we derive a family of Pseudo-Target (PT) augmentation methods, substantially extending prior work on sequence-level KD. We propose the Joint-Teaching method, which applies word-level KD to multiple PTs generated by both the teacher and the student.Finally, we validate our findings in an extreme setup with no labeled examples using GPT-4 as the teacher. Our study provides practical model design observations and demonstrates the effectiveness of PT training for task-specific KD in NLG.

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ACL 2023

A Systematic Study of Knowledge Distillation for Natural Language Generation with Pseudo-Target Training

gpt-4

compression

distillation

knowledge distillation

generation

Modern Natural Language Generation (NLG) models come with massive computational and storage requirements. In this work, we study the potential of compressing them, which is crucial for real-world applications serving millions of users. We focus on Knowledge Distillation (KD) techniques, in which a small student model learns to imitate a large teacher model, allowing to transfer knowledge from the teacher to the student. In contrast to much of the previous work, our goal is to optimize the model for a specific NLG task and a specific dataset. Typically in real-world applications, in addition to labeled data there is abundant unlabeled task-specific data, which is crucial for attaining high compression rates via KD. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of task-specific KD techniques for various NLG tasks under realistic assumptions. We discuss the special characteristics of NLG distillation and particularly the exposure bias problem. Following, we derive a family of Pseudo-Target (PT) augmentation methods, substantially extending prior work on sequence-level KD. We propose the Joint-Teaching method, which applies word-level KD to multiple PTs generated by both the teacher and the student.Finally, we validate our findings in an extreme setup with no labeled examples using GPT-4 as the teacher. Our study provides practical model design observations and demonstrates the effectiveness of PT training for task-specific KD in NLG.

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

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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.

Event-centric structured prediction involves predicting structured outputs of events. In most NLP cases, event structures are complex with manifold dependency, and it is challenging to effectively represent these complicated structured events. To address these issues, we propose Structured Prediction with Energy-based Event-Centric Hyperspheres (SPEECH). SPEECH models complex dependency among event structured components with energy-based modeling, and represents event classes with simple but effective hyperspheres. Experiments on two unified-annotated event datasets indicate that SPEECH is predominant in event detection and event-relation extraction tasks.

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SPEECH: Structured Prediction with Energy-Based Event-Centric Hyperspheres

In everyday life, humans often plan their actions by following step-by-step instructions in the form of goal-oriented scripts. Previous work has exploited language models (LMs) to plan for abstract goals of stereotypical activities (e.g., "make a cake"), but leaves more specific goals with multi-facet constraints understudied (e.g., "make a cake for diabetics"). In this paper, we define the task of constrained language planning for the first time. We propose an over-generate-then-filter approach to improve large language models (LLMs) on this task, and use it to distill a novel constrained language planning dataset, Coscript, which consists of 55,000 scripts. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the constrained language planning ability of LLMs, especially on constraint faithfulness. Furthermore, Coscript is demonstrated to be quite effective in endowing smaller LMs with constrained language planning ability.

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Distilling Script Knowledge from Large Language Models for Constrained Language Planning

Despite the extensive applications of relation extraction (RE) tasks in various domains, little has been explored in the historical context, which contains promising data across hundreds and thousands of years. To promote the historical RE research, we present HistRED constructed from Yeonhaengnok. Yeonhaengnok is a collection of records originally written in Hanja, the classical Chinese writing, which has later been translated into Korean. HistRED provides bilingual annotations such that RE can be performed on Korean and Hanja texts. In addition, HistRED supports various self-contained subtexts with different lengths, from a sentence level to a document level, supporting diverse context settings for researchers to evaluate the robustness of their RE models. To demonstrate the usefulness of our dataset, we propose a bilingual RE model that leverages both Korean and Hanja contexts to predict relations between entities. Our model outperforms monolingual baselines on HistRED, showing that employing multiple language contexts supplements the RE predictions. The dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Soyoung/HistRED under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

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HistRED: A Historical Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset

Reasoning about actions and change (RAC) is essential to understand and interact with the ever-changing environment. Previous AI research has shown the importance of fundamental and indispensable knowledge of actions, i.e., preconditions and effects. However, traditional methods rely on logical formalization which hinders practical applications. With recent transformer-based language models (LMs), reasoning over text is desirable and seemingly feasible, leading to the question of whether LMs can effectively and efficiently learn to solve RAC problems. We propose four essential RAC tasks as a comprehensive textual benchmark and generate problems in a way that minimizes the influence of other linguistic requirements (e.g., grounding) to focus on RAC. The resulting benchmark, TRAC, encompassing problems of various complexities, facilitates a more granular evaluation of LMs, precisely targeting the structural generalization ability much needed for RAC. Experiments with three high-performing transformers indicate that additional efforts are needed to tackle challenges raised by TRAC.

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Exploring the Capacity of Pretrained Language Models for Reasoning about Actions and Change

Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to detect and classify entity spans in the text. When entity spans overlap between each other, the task is named as nested NER. Span-based methods have been widely used to tackle nested NER. Most of these methods get a score matrix, where each entry corresponds to a span. However, previous work ignores spatial relations in the score matrix. In this paper, we propose using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to model these spatial relations. Despite being simple, experiments in three commonly used nested NER datasets show that our model surpasses several recently proposed methods with the same pre-trained encoders. Further analysis shows that using CNN can help the model find more nested entities. Besides, we find that different papers use different sentence tokenizations for the three nested NER datasets, which will influence the comparison. Thus, we release a pre-processing script to facilitate future comparison.

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An Embarrassingly Easy but Strong Baseline for Nested Named Entity Recognition

The EAE task extracts a structured event record from an event text. Most existing approaches train the EAE model on each dataset independently and ignore the overlap knowledge across datasets. However, insufficient event records in a single dataset often prevent the existing model from achieving better performance. In this paper, we clearly define the overlap knowledge across datasets and split the knowledge of the EAE task into overlap knowledge across datasets and specific knowledge of the target dataset. We propose APE model to learn the two parts of knowledge in two serial learning phases without causing catastrophic forgetting. In addition, we formulate both learning phases as conditional generation tasks and design Stressing Entity Type Prompt to close the gap between the two phases. The experiments show APE achieves new state-of-the-art with a large margin in the EAE task. When only ten records are available in the target dataset, our model dramatically outperforms the baseline model with average 27.27% F1 gain.

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What Is Overlap Knowledge in Event Argument Extraction? APE: A Cross-datasets Transfer Learning Model for EAE

We investigate the effects of post-training quantization and quantization-aware training on the generalization of Transformer language models. We present a new method called self-distilled quantization (SDQ) that minimizes accumulative quantization errors and outperforms baselines. We apply SDQ to multilingual models XLM-R$_{\text{Base}}$ and InfoXLM$_{\text{Base}}$ and demonstrate that both models can be reduced from 32-bit floating point weights to 8-bit integer weights while maintaining a high level of performance on the XGLUE benchmark. Our results also highlight the challenges of quantizing multilingual models, which must generalize to languages they were not fine-tuned on.

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Self-Distilled Quantization: Achieving High Compression Rates in Transformer-Based Language Models

Pre-trained transformers are popular in state-of-the-art dialogue generation (DG) systems. Such language models are, however, vulnerable to various adversarial samples as studied in traditional tasks such as text classification, which inspires our curiosity about their robustness in DG systems. One main challenge of attacking DG models is that perturbations on the current sentence can hardly degrade the response accuracy because the unchanged chat histories are also considered for decision-making. Instead of merely pursuing pitfalls of performance metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, we observe that crafting adversarial samples to force longer generation outputs benefits attack effectiveness---the generated responses are typically irrelevant, lengthy, and repetitive. To this end, we propose a white-box multi-objective attack method called DGSlow. Specifically, DGSlow balances two objectives---generation accuracy and length, via a gradient-based multi-objective optimizer and applies an adaptive searching mechanism to iteratively craft adversarial samples with only a few modifications. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that DGSlow could significantly degrade state-of-the-art DG models with a higher success rate than traditional accuracy-based methods. Besides, our crafted sentences also exhibit strong transferability in attacking other models.

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White-Box Multi-Objective Adversarial Attack on Dialogue Generation

Prompt tuning is a parameter-efficient approach to adapting pre-trained language models to downstream tasks. Although prompt tuning has been shown to match the performance of full model tuning when training data is sufficient, it tends to struggle in few-shot learning settings. In this paper, we present Multi-task Pre-trained Modular Prompt (MP2) to boost prompt tuning for few-shot learning. MP2 is a set of combinable prompts pre-trained on 38 Chinese tasks. On downstream tasks, the pre-trained prompts are selectively activated and combined, leading to strong compositional generalization to unseen tasks. To bridge the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, we formulate upstream and downstream tasks into a unified machine reading comprehension task. Extensive experiments under two learning paradigms, i.e., gradient descent and black-box tuning, show that MP2 significantly outperforms prompt tuning, full model tuning, and prior prompt pre-training methods in few-shot settings. In addition, we demonstrate that MP2 can achieve surprisingly fast and strong adaptation to downstream tasks by merely learning 8 parameters to combine the pre-trained modular prompts.

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Multitask Pre-training of Modular Prompt for Chinese Few-Shot Learning

While the problem of hallucinations in neural machine translation has long been recognized, so far the progress on its alleviation is very little. Indeed, recently it turned out that without artificially encouraging models to hallucinate, previously existing methods fall short and even the standard sequence log-probability is more informative. It means that internal characteristics of the model can give much more information than we expect, and before using external models and measures, we first need to ask: how far can we go if we use nothing but the translation model itself ? We propose to use a method that evaluates the percentage of the source contribution to a generated translation. Intuitively, hallucinations are translations "detached from the source, hence they can be identified by low source contribution. This method improves detection accuracy for the most severe hallucinations by a factor of 2 and is able to alleviate hallucinations at test time on par with the previous best approach that relies on external models. Next, if we move away from internal model characteristics and allow external tools, we show that using sentence similarity from cross-lingual embeddings further improves these results. We release the code of our experiments.

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A Systematic Study of Knowledge Distillation for Natural Language Generation with Pseudo-Target Training

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SPEECH: Structured Prediction with Energy-Based Event-Centric Hyperspheres

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