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Tokenization is fundamental to pretrained language models (PLMs). Existing tokenization methods for Chinese PLMs typically treat each character as an indivisible token. However, they ignore the unique feature of the Chinese writing system where additional linguistic information exists below the character level, i.e., at the sub-character level. To utilize such information, we propose sub-character (SubChar for short) tokenization. Specifically, we first encode the input text by converting each Chinese character into a short sequence based on its glyph or pronunciation, and then construct the vocabulary based on the encoded text with sub-word segmentation. Experimental results show that SubChar tokenizers have two main advantages over existing tokenizers: 1) They can tokenize inputs into much shorter sequences, thus improving the computational efficiency. 2) Pronunciation-based SubChar tokenizers can encode Chinese homophones into the same transliteration sequences and produce the same tokenization output, hence being robust to homophone typos. At the same time, models trained with SubChar tokenizers perform competitively on downstream tasks. We release our code and models at https://github.com/thunlp/SubCharTokenization to facilitate future work.

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ACL 2023

Sub-Character Tokenization for Chinese Pretrained Language Models

efficiency

tokenization

pretrained language models

chinese nlp

robustness

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Tokenization is fundamental to pretrained language models (PLMs). Existing tokenization methods for Chinese PLMs typically treat each character as an indivisible token. However, they ignore the unique feature of the Chinese writing system where additional linguistic information exists below the character level, i.e., at the sub-character level. To utilize such information, we propose sub-character (SubChar for short) tokenization. Specifically, we first encode the input text by converting each Chinese character into a short sequence based on its glyph or pronunciation, and then construct the vocabulary based on the encoded text with sub-word segmentation. Experimental results show that SubChar tokenizers have two main advantages over existing tokenizers: 1) They can tokenize inputs into much shorter sequences, thus improving the computational efficiency. 2) Pronunciation-based SubChar tokenizers can encode Chinese homophones into the same transliteration sequences and produce the same tokenization output, hence being robust to homophone typos. At the same time, models trained with SubChar tokenizers perform competitively on downstream tasks. We release our code and models at https://github.com/thunlp/SubCharTokenization to facilitate future work.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/d74d21ab-9548-46bd-8f43-430be1c33820" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

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### 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.

Generalising dialogue state tracking (DST) to new data is especially challenging due to the strong reliance on abundant and fine-grained supervision during training. Sample sparsity, distributional shift and the occurrence of new concepts and topics frequently lead to severe performance degradation during inference. In this paper we propose a training strategy to build extractive DST models without the need for fine-grained manual span labels. Two novel input-level dropout methods mitigate the negative impact of sample sparsity. We propose a new model architecture with a unified encoder that supports value as well as slot independence by leveraging the attention mechanism. We combine the strengths of triple copy strategy DST and value matching to benefit from complementary predictions without violating the principle of ontology independence. Our experiments demonstrate that an extractive DST model can be trained without manual span labels. Our architecture and training strategies improve robustness towards sample sparsity, new concepts and topics, leading to state-of-the-art performance on a range of benchmarks.   We further highlight our model's ability to effectively learn from non-dialogue data.

Robust Dialogue State Tracking with Weak Supervision and Sparse Data

Many current NLP systems are built from language models trained to optimize unsupervised objectives on large amounts of raw text. Under what conditions might such a procedure acquire meaning? Our systematic experiments with synthetic data reveal that, with languages where all expressions have context-independent denotations (i.e., languages with strong transparency), both autoregressive and masked language models successfully learn to emulate semantic relations between expressions.However, when denotations are changed to be context-dependent with the language otherwise unmodified, this ability degrades. Turning to natural language, our experiments with a specific phenomenon -- referential opacity -- add to the growing body of evidence that current language models do not represent natural language semantics well. We show this failure relates to the context-dependent nature of natural language form-meaning mappings.

Transparency Helps Reveal When Language Models Learn Meaning

It has been suggested that pretrained language models can be viewed as knowledge bases. One of the prerequisites for using language models as knowledge bases is how accurately they can store and retrieve world knowledge. It is already revealed that language models can store much 1-to-1 relational knowledge, such as ''country and its capital,'' with high memorization accuracy.

On the other hand, world knowledge includes not only 1-to-1 but also 1-to-N relational knowledge, such as ''parent and children.'' However, it is not clear how accurately language models can handle 1-to-N relational knowledge. To investigate language models' abilities toward 1-to-N relational knowledge, we start by designing the problem settings. Specifically, we organize the character of 1-to-N relational knowledge and define two essential skills: (i) memorizing multiple objects individually and (ii) retrieving multiple stored objects without excesses or deficiencies at once. We inspect LMs' ability to handle 1-to-N relational knowledge on the controlled synthesized data.

As a result, we report that it is possible to memorize multiple objects with high accuracy, but generalizing the retrieval ability (expressly, enumeration) is challenging.

Can LMs Store and Retrieve 1-to-N Relational Knowledge?

With the success of neural language models (LMs), their language acquisition has gained much attention. This work sheds light on the second language (L2) acquisition of LMs, while previous work has explored their first language (L1) acquisition. Specifically, we trained bilingual LMs with a scenario similar to human L2 acquisition and analyzed their cross-lingual transfer from linguistic perspectives. Our experiments demonstrated that the L1 pretraining accelerated their linguistic generalization in L2, and language transfer configurations (e.g., the L1 choice, presence of parallel texts) substantially affected their generalizations. These also highlight that their L2 acquisition is not human-like in particular aspects.

Second Language Acquisition of Neural Language Models

Gender Stereotyping in Popular Children's Videos

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Gender Stereotyping in Popular Children's Videos

In this paper, we study the viability of the deployment of language models towards non-playable character (NPC) scripts, by introducing a novel pipeline for the automatic construction of NPC scripts using Transformer-based believable scripts for a variety of game genres and specifications. In addition, we propose a self-diagnosis method inspired by previous work to develop language models, tailored specifically to desirable NPC qualities such as coherency, believability, and degree of repetition. Finally, we propose a new benchmark, called The Turing Quest, which we use to show that the pipeline, when applied to GPT-3, can generate for a variety of game genres and contexts, NPC scripts that can fool judges in thinking they have been written by humans. We believe that these findings can greatly benefit both the gaming industry and its global community of users, since many current games continue to base their NPCs on manually-curated scripts that are resource-demanding and may curb the immersiveness and enjoyment of the user.

The Turing Quest: Can Transformers Make Good NPCs?

Recent advances in large language models have led to renewed interest in natural language processing in healthcare using the free text of clinical notes. One distinguishing characteristic of clinical notes is their long time span over multiple long documents. The unique structure of clinical notes creates a new design choice: when the context length for a language model predictor is limited, which part of clinical notes should we choose as the input? Existing studies either choose the inputs with domain knowledge or simply truncate them. We propose a framework to analyze the sections with high predictive power. Using MIMIC-III, we show that: 1) predictive power distribution is different between nursing notes and discharge notes and 2) combining different types of notes could improve performance when the context length is large. Our findings suggest that a carefully selected sampling function could enable more efficient information extraction from clinical notes.

Making the Most Out of the Limited Context Length: Predictive Power Varies with Clinical Note Type and Note Section

The Ninth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9) is a standardized coding system used to classify health conditions. It is used for billing, tracking individual patient conditions, and for epidemiology. The highly detailed and technical nature of the codes and their associated medical conditions make it difficult for humans to accurately record them. Researchers have explored the use of neural networks, particularly language models, for automated ICD-9 code assignment. However, the imbalanced distribution of ICD-9 codes leads to poor performance. One solution is to use domain knowledge to incorporate a useful prior. This paper evaluates the usefulness of the correlation bias: we hypothesize that correlations between ICD-9 codes and other medical codes could help improve language models' performance. We showed that while the correlation bias worsens the overall performance, the effect on individual class can be negative or positive. Performance on classes that are more imbalanced and less correlated with other codes is more sensitive to incorporating the correlation bias. This suggests that while the correlation bias has potential to improve ICD-9 code assignment in certain cases, the applicability criteria need to be more carefully studied.

Intriguing Effect of the Correlation Prior on ICD-9 Code Assignment

With the fast-growing popularity of current large pre-trained language models (LLMs), it is necessary to dedicate efforts to making them more reliable. In this thesis proposal, we aim to improve the reliability of natural language generation systems (NLG) by researching the semantic accuracy of their outputs. We look at this problem from the outside (evaluation) and from the inside (interpretability). We propose a novel method for evaluating semantic accuracy and discuss the importance of working towards a unified and objective benchmark for NLG metrics. We also review interpretability approaches which could help us pinpoint the sources of inaccuracies within the models and explore potential mitigation strategies.

Semantic Accuracy in Natural Language Generation: A Thesis Proposal

Misinformation poses a critical societal challenge, and current approaches have yet to produce an effective solution. We propose focusing on generalization, soft classification, and leveraging recent large language models to create more practical tools in contexts where perfect predictions remain unattainable. We begin by demonstrating that GPT-4 and other language models can outperform existing methods in the literature. Next, we explore their generalization, revealing that GPT-4 and RoBERTa-large exhibit critical differences in failure modes, which offer potential for significant performance improvements. Finally, we show that these models can be employed in soft classification frameworks to better quantify uncertainty. We discover that models with inferior hard classification results can achieve superior soft classification performance. Overall, our research lays the groundwork for future tools that can drive real-world progress on misinformation.

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Robust Dialogue State Tracking with Weak Supervision and Sparse Data

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