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Many machine learning-based low-code or no-code applications involve generating code that interacts with structured knowledge. For example, one of the most studied tasks in this area is generating SQL code from a natural language statement. Prior work shows that incorporating context information from the database schema, such as table and column names, is beneficial to model performance on this task. In this work we present a large pretraining dataset and strategy for learning representations of text, tables, and SQL code that leverages the entire context of the problem. Specifically, we build on existing encoder-decoder architecture by introducing a multitask pretraining framework that complements the unique attributes of our diverse pretraining data. Our work represents the first study on large-scale pretraining of encoder-decoder models for interacting with structured knowledge, and offers a new state-of-the-art foundation model in text-to-SQL generation. We validate our approach with experiments on two SQL tasks, showing improvement over existing methods, including a 1.7 and 2.2 percentage point improvement over prior state-of-the-arts on Spider and CoSQL.

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ACL 2023

Multitask Pretraining with Structured Knowledge for Text-to-SQL Generation

large language model

tables

text-to-sql

multitask learning

pretraining

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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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.

Many machine learning-based low-code or no-code applications involve generating code that interacts with structured knowledge. For example, one of the most studied tasks in this area is generating SQL code from a natural language statement. Prior work shows that incorporating context information from the database schema, such as table and column names, is beneficial to model performance on this task. In this work we present a large pretraining dataset and strategy for learning representations of text, tables, and SQL code that leverages the entire context of the problem. Specifically, we build on existing encoder-decoder architecture by introducing a multitask pretraining framework that complements the unique attributes of our diverse pretraining data. Our work represents the first study on large-scale pretraining of encoder-decoder models for interacting with structured knowledge, and offers a new state-of-the-art foundation model in text-to-SQL generation. We validate our approach with experiments on two SQL tasks, showing improvement over existing methods, including a 1.7 and 2.2 percentage point improvement over prior state-of-the-arts on Spider and CoSQL.

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poster

Zero-shot event extraction (EE) methods infer richly structured event records from text, based only on a minimal user specification and no training examples, which enables flexibility in exploring and developing applications. Most event extraction research uses the Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) annotated dataset to evaluate supervised EE methods, but can it be used to evaluate zero-shot and other low-supervision EE? We describe ACE's event structures and identify significant ambiguities and issues in current evaluation practice, including (1) coreferent argument mentions, (2) conflicting argument head conventions, and (3) ignorance of modality and event class details. By sometimes mishandling these subtleties, current work may dramatically understate the actual performance of zero-shot and other low-supervision EE, considering up to 32% of correctly identified arguments and 25% of correctly ignored event mentions as false negatives. For each issue, we propose recommendations for future evaluations so the research community can better utilize ACE as an event evaluation resource.

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Evaluating Zero-Shot Event Structures: Recommendations for Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) Annotations

Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is challenging for reasons such as the one-to-many problem, i.e., many appropriate responses other than just the golden response. As of now, automatic evaluation methods need better consistency with humans, while reliable human evaluation can be time- and cost-intensive. To this end, we propose the Reference-Assisted Dialogue Evaluation (RADE) approach under the multi-task learning framework, which leverages the pre-created utterance as reference other than the gold response to relief the one-to-many problem. Specifically, RADE explicitly compares reference and the candidate response to predict their overall scores.Moreover, an auxiliary response generation task enhances prediction via a shared encoder.To support RADE, we extend three datasets with additional rated responses other than just a golden response by human annotation.Experiments on our three datasets and two existing benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, where Pearson, Spearman, and Kendall correlations with human evaluation outperform state-of-the-art baselines.

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RADE: Reference-Assisted Dialogue Evaluation for Open-Domain Dialogue

We present a framework that formulates visual question answering as modular code generation. In contrast to prior work on modular approaches to VQA, our approach requires no additional training and relies on pre-trained language models (LMs), visual models pre-trained on image-caption pairs, and fifty VQA examples used for in-context learning. The generated Python programs invoke and compose the outputs of the visual models using arithmetic and conditional logic. Our approach improves accuracy on the COVR dataset by at least 3% and on the GQA dataset by 2% compared to the few-shot baseline that does not employ code generation.

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Modular Visual Question Answering via Code Generation

Second language acquisition (SLA) research has extensively studied cross-linguistic transfer, the influence of linguistic structure of a speaker's native language [L1] on the successful acquisition of a foreign language [L2]. Effects of such transfer can be positive (facilitating acquisition) or negative (impeding acquisition). We find that NLP literature has not given enough attention to the phenomenon of negative transfer. To understand patterns of both positive and negative transfer between L1 and L2, we model sequential second language acquisition in LMs. Further, we build a Mutlilingual Age Ordered CHILDES (MAO-CHILDES)a dataset consisting of 5 typologically diverse languages, i.e., German, French, Polish, Indonesian, and Japaneseto understand the degree to which native Child-Directed Speech (CDS) [L1] can help or conflict with English language acquisition [L2]. To examine the impact of native CDS, we use the TILT-based cross lingual transfer learning approach established by Papadimitriou and Jurafsky (2020) and find that, as in human SLA, language family distance predicts more negative transfer. Additionally, we find that conversational speech data shows greater facilitation for language acquisition than scripted speech data. Our findings call for further research using our novel Transformer-based SLA models and we would like to encourage it by releasing our code, data, and models.

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SLABERT Talk Pretty One Day: Modeling Second Language Acquisition with BERT

Multimodal relation extraction (MRE) is the task of identifying the semantic relationships between two entities based on the context of the sentence image pair. Existing retrieval-augmented approaches mainly focused on modeling the retrieved textual knowledge, but this may not be able to accurately identify complex relations. To improve the prediction, this research proposes to retrieve textual and visual evidence based on the object, sentence, and whole image. We further develop a novel approach to synthesize the object-level, image-level, and sentence-level information for better reasoning between the same and different modalities. Extensive experiments and analyses show that the proposed method is able to effectively select and compare evidence across modalities and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models.

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Multimodal Relation Extraction with Cross-Modal Retrieval and Synthesis

Collaborative stories, which are texts created through the collaborative efforts of multiple authors with different writing styles and intentions, pose unique challenges for NLP models. Understanding and generating such stories remains an underexplored area due to the lack of open-domain corpora.To address this, we introduce StoryWars, a new dataset of over 40,000 collaborative stories written by 9,400 different authors from an online platform. We design 12 task types, comprising 7 understanding and 5 generation task types, on \storywars, deriving 101 diverse story-related tasks in total as a multi-task benchmark covering all fully-supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios.Furthermore, we present our instruction-tuned model, InstructStory, for the story tasks showing that instruction tuning, in addition to achieving superior results in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, can also obtain the best performance on the fully-supervised tasks in StoryWars, establishing strong multi-task benchmark performances on StoryWars.

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StoryWars: A Dataset and Instruction Tuning Baselines for Collaborative Story Understanding and Generation

Mathematical language in scientific communications and educational scenarios is important yet relatively understudied compared to natural languages. Recent works on mathematical language focus either on representing stand-alone mathematical expressions, especially in their natural tree format, or mathematical reasoning in pre-trained natural language models. Existing works on jointly modeling and generating natural and mathematical languages simply treat mathematical expressions as text, without accounting for the rigid structural properties of mathematical expressions. In this paper, we propose a series of modifications to existing language models to jointly represent and generate text and math: representing mathematical expressions as sequences of node tokens in their operator tree format, using math symbol and tree position embeddings to preserve the semantic and structural properties of mathematical expressions, and using a constrained decoding method to generate mathematically valid expressions. We ground our modifications in GPT-2, resulting in a model MathGPT, and demonstrate that it outperforms baselines on mathematical expression generation tasks.

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Tree-Based Representation and Generation of Natural and Mathematical Language

Conversational Question Generation (CQG) is a critical task for machines to assist humans in fulfilling their information needs through conversations. The task is generally cast into two different settings: answer-aware and answer-unaware. While the former facilitates the models by exposing the expected answer, the latter is more realistic and receiving growing attentions recently. What-to-ask and how-to-ask are the two main challenges in the answer-unaware setting. To address the first challenge, existing methods mainly select sequential sentences in context as the rationales. We argue that the conversation generated using such naive heuristics may not be natural enough as in reality, the interlocutors often talk about the relevant contents that are not necessarily sequential in context. Additionally, previous methods decide the type of question to be generated (boolean/span-based) implicitly. Modeling the question type explicitly is crucial as the answer, which hints the models to generate a boolean or span-based question, is unavailable. To this end, we present SG-CQG, a two-stage CQG framework. For the what-to-ask stage, a sentence is selected as the rationale from a semantic graph that we construct, and extract the answer span from it. For the how-to-ask stage, a classifier determines the target answer type of the question via two explicit control signals before generating and filtering. In addition, we propose Conv-Distinct, a novel evaluation metric for CQG, to evaluate the diversity of the generated conversation from a context. Compared with the existing answer-unaware CQG models, the proposed SG-CQG achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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Modeling What-to-ask and How-to-ask for Answer-unaware Conversational Question Generation

Commonsense reasoning is omnipresent in human communications and thus is an important feature for open-domain dialogue systems. However, evaluating commonsense in dialogue systems is still an open challenge. We take the first step by focusing on {\em event commonsense} that considers events and their relations, and is crucial in both dialogues and general commonsense reasoning. We propose \textbf{ACCENT}, an event commonsense evaluation metric empowered by commonsense knowledge bases (CSKBs). ACCENT first extracts event-relation tuples from a dialogue, and then evaluates the response by scoring the tuples in terms of their compatibility with the CSKB. To evaluate ACCENT, we construct the first public event commonsense evaluation dataset for open-domain dialogues.Our experiments show that ACCENT is an efficient metric for event commonsense evaluation, which achieves higher correlations with human judgments than existing baselines.

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ACCENT: An Automatic Event Commonsense Evaluation Metric for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems

Recent studies find existing self-supervised speech encoders contain primarily acoustic rather than semantic information. As a result, pipelined supervised automatic speech recognition (ASR) to large language model (LLM) systems achieve state-of-the-art results on semantic spoken language tasks by utilizing rich semantic representations from the LLM. These systems come at the cost of labeled audio transcriptions, which is expensive and time-consuming to obtain. We propose a task-agnostic unsupervised way of incorporating semantic information from LLMs into self-supervised speech encoders without labeled audio transcriptions. By introducing semantics, we improve existing speech encoder spoken language understanding performance by over 5% on intent classification, with modest gains in named entity resolution and slot filling, and spoken question answering FF1 score by over 2%. Our approach, which uses no ASR data, achieves similar performance as methods trained on over 100 hours of labeled audio transcripts, demonstrating the feasibility of unsupervised semantic augmentations to existing speech encoders.

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Evaluating Zero-Shot Event Structures: Recommendations for Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) Annotations

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