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This paper addresses whether masked language models can distinguish (named) entities in internal representations and investigates whether the model&#39;s internal representations of the same entity create a sufficiently compact cluster that is distinct from others. The primary contributions of the paper are two-fold. First, we present a novel method for quantitatively assessing the degree to which pre-trained masked language models distinguish between entities in the internal representations. Our approach investigates whether entities belonging to the same object are separated from other embeddings in the embedding space. Second, we conducted experiments, and the findings revealed that internal representations of masked language models were able to distinguish entities from other concepts to a certain degree, even when there was variation in the surrounding context and mentions. (e.g., BERT could distinguish about 70% of the entities from other concepts.) An implication of these results is the possibility that the distinct entities, as reflected in internal representations, are considered evidence of behavior that effectively processes entity strings.

ACL 2023

Geometric Locality of Entity Embeddings in Masked Language Models

factual knowledge

contextual word embeddings

model analysis

This paper addresses whether masked language models can distinguish (named) entities in internal representations and investigates whether the model's internal representations of the same entity create a sufficiently compact cluster that is distinct from others. The primary contributions of the paper are two-fold. First, we present a novel method for quantitatively assessing the degree to which pre-trained masked language models distinguish between entities in the internal representations. Our approach investigates whether entities belonging to the same object are separated from other embeddings in the embedding space. Second, we conducted experiments, and the findings revealed that internal representations of masked language models were able to distinguish entities from other concepts to a certain degree, even when there was variation in the surrounding context and mentions. (e.g., BERT could distinguish about 70% of the entities from other concepts.) An implication of these results is the possibility that the distinct entities, as reflected in internal representations, are considered evidence of behavior that effectively processes entity strings.

poster

### 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.

Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable results on several NLP tasks. Most of them adopt masked language modeling to learn representations by randomly masking tokens and predicting them based on their context. However, this random selection of tokens to be masked is inefficient to learn some language patterns as it may not consider linguistic information that can be helpful for many NLP tasks, such as multimodal machine translation (MMT). Hence, we propose three novel masking strategies for cross-lingual visual pre-training - more informed visual masking, more informed textual masking, and more informed visual and textual masking - each one focusing on learning different linguistic patterns. We apply them to Vision Translation Language Modelling for video subtitles (Sato et al., 2022) and conduct extensive experiments on the Portuguese-English MMT task. The results show that our masking approaches yield significant improvements over the original random masking strategy for downstream MMT performance. Our models outperform the MMT baseline and we achieve state-of-the-art accuracy (52.70 in terms of BLEU score) on the How2 dataset, indicating that more informed masking helps in acquiring an understanding of specific language structures and has great potential for language understanding.

Choosing What to Mask: More Informed Masking for Multimodal Machine Translation

Chinese modern poetry generation has been a challenging task. One issue is the Chinese word segmentation (CWS) which is critical to comprehend the Chinese language but was not always considered in common tokenization methods. Another is the decoding (sampling) method which may induce repetition and boredom and severely lower the diversity of the generated poetry. To address these issues, we present Lingxi, a diversity-aware Chinese modern poetry generation system. For the CWS issue, we propose a novel framework that incorporates CWS in the tokenization process. The proposed method can achieve a high vocabulary coverage rate with a reasonable vocabulary size. For the decoding method and the diversity issue, we propose a novel sampling algorithm that flattens the high likelihood part of the predicted distribution of the language model to emphasize the comparatively low-likelihood words and increase the diversity of generated poetry. Empirical results show that even when the top 60% of cumulative probability mass of the predicted distribution is flattened, our method achieves comparable or even better performance than baseline sampling methods. Our system is available at http://lingxi.website.

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Lingxi: A Diversity-aware Chinese Modern Poetry Generation System

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is one of the core components of a task-oriented dialogue system, which aims to extract the semantic meaning of user queries (e.g., intents and slots). In this work, we introduce OpenSLU, an open-source toolkit to provide a unified, modularized, and extensible toolkit for spoken language understanding. Specifically, OpenSLU unifies 10 SLU models for both single-intent and multi-intent scenarios, which support both non-pretrained and pretrained models simultaneously. Additionally, OpenSLU is highly modularized and extensible by decomposing the model architecture, inference, and learning process into reusable modules, which allows researchers to quickly set up SLU experiments with highly flexible configurations. OpenSLU is implemented based on PyTorch, and released at https://github.com/LightChen233/OpenSLU.

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OpenSLU: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Toolkit for Spoken Language Understanding

In this work, we present DIAGRAPH, an open-source graphical dialog flow editor built on the ADVISER toolkit. 
Our goal for this tool is threefold: 
1) To support subject-experts to intuitively create complex and flexible dialog systems,
2) To support rapid prototyping of dialog system behavior, e.g., for research, and 
3) To provide a hands-on test bed for students learning about dialog systems.
To facilitate this, DIAGRAPH aims to provide a clean and intuitive graphical interface for creating dialog systems without requiring any coding knowledge.
Once a dialog graph has been created, it is automatically turned into a dialog system using state of the art language models. This allows for rapid prototyping and testing.
Dialog designers can then distribute a link to their finished dialog system or embed it into a website.
Additionally, to support scientific experiments and data collection, dialog designers can access chat logs. 
Finally, to verify the usability of DIAGRAPH, we performed evaluation with subject-experts who extensively worked with the tool and users testing it for the first time, receiving above average System Usability Scale (SUS) scores from both (82 out 100 and 75 out of 100, respectively).
In this way, we hope DIAGRAPH helps reduce the barrier to entry for creating dialog interactions.

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DIAGRAPH: An Open-Source Graphic Interface for Dialog Flow Design

In this paper, we present our open-source neural machine translation (NMT) toolkit called "Yet Another Neural Machine Translation Toolkit" abbreviated as YANMTT - https://github.com/prajdabre/yanmtt, which is built on top of the HuggingFace Transformers library. YANMTT focuses on transfer learning and enables easy pre-training and fine-tuning of sequence-to-sequence models at scale. It can be used for training parameter-heavy models with minimal parameter sharing and efficient, lightweight models via heavy parameter sharing. Additionally, it supports parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) through adapters and prompts. Our toolkit also comes with a user interface that can be used to demonstrate these models and visualize various parts of the model. Apart from these core features, our toolkit also provides other advanced functionalities such as but not limited to document/multi-source NMT, simultaneous NMT, mixtures-of-experts, model compression and continual learning.

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YANMTT: Yet Another Neural Machine Translation Toolkit

Recent years have seen impressive progress in AI-assisted writing, yet the developments in AI-assisted reading are lacking. We propose inline commentary as a natural vehicle for AI-based reading assistance, and present CARE: the first open integrated platform for the study of inline commentary and reading. CARE facilitates data collection for inline commentaries in a commonplace collaborative reading environment, and provides a framework for enhancing reading with NLP-based assistance, such as text classification, generation or question answering. The extensible behavioral logging allows unique insights into the reading and commenting behavior, and flexible configuration makes the platform easy to deploy in new scenarios. To evaluate CARE in action, we apply the platform in a user study dedicated to scholarly peer review. CARE facilitates the data collection and study of inline commentary in NLP, extrinsic evaluation of NLP assistance, and application prototyping. We invite the community to explore and build upon the open source implementation of CARE.

Github Repository: https://github.com/UKPLab/CARE
Public Live Demo: https://care.ukp.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de

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CARE: Collaborative AI-Assisted Reading Environment

There are a growing number of table pre-training methods proposed for reasoning over tabular data (e.g., question answering, fact checking, and faithful text generation). However, most existing methods are benchmarked solely on a limited number of datasets, varying in configuration, which leads to a lack of unified, standardized, fair, and comprehensive comparison between methods. This paper presents OpenRT, the first open-source framework for reasoning over tabular data, to reproduce existing table pre-training models for performance comparison and develop new models quickly. We implemented and compared six table pre-training models on four question answering, one fact checking, and one faithful text generation datasets. Moreover, to enable the community to easily construct new table reasoning datasets, we developed TaRAT, an annotation tool which supports multi-person collaborative annotations for various kinds of table reasoning tasks. The researchers are able to deploy the newly-constructed dataset to OpenRT and compare the performances of different baseline systems.

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OpenRT: An Open-source Framework for Reasoning Over Tabular Data

We demonstrate an interactive system to help operations research (OR) practitioners convert the mathematical formulation of optimization problems from TeX document format into the solver modeling language. In practice, a manual translation is cumbersome and time-consuming. Moreover, it requires an in-depth understanding of the problem description and a technical expertise to produce the modeling code. Thus, our proposed system TeX2Solver helps partially automate this conversion and help the users build optimization models more efficiently. In this paper, we describe its interface and the components of the hierarchical parsing system. A video demo walk-through is available online at http://bit.ly/3kuOm3x

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LaTeX2Solver: a Hierarchical Semantic Parsing of LaTeX Document into Code for an Assistive Optimization Modeling Application

Writing assistants are valuable tools that can help writers improve their writing skills. We introduce Effidit (\textbf{Eff}icient and \textbf{I}ntelligent E\textbf{dit}ing), a digital writing assistant that facilitates users to write higher-quality text more efficiently through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. We significantly expand the capacities of a writing assistant
by providing functions in three modules: text completion, hint recommendation, and writing refinement. Based on the above efforts, Effidit can efficiently assist users in creating their own text. Effidit has been deployed to several Tencent products and publicly released at \url{https://effidit.qq.com/}.

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Effidit: An Assistant for Improving Writing Efficiency

We present Disease Network Constructor (DNC), a system that extracts and visualizes a disease network, in which nodes are entities such as diseases, proteins, and genes, and edges represent regulation relation. We focused on the disease network derived through regulation events found in scientific articles on idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). The front-end web-base user interface of DNC includes two-dimensional (2D) and 3D visualizations of the constructed disease network. The back-end system of DNC includes several natural language processing (NLP) techniques to process biomedical text including BERT-based tokenization on the basis of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), flat and nested named entity recognition (NER), candidate generation and candidate ranking for entity linking (EL) or, relation extraction (RE), and event extraction (EE) tasks. We evaluated the end-to-end EL and end-to-end nested EE systems to determine the DNC's back-end
implementation performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt that addresses neural NER, EL, RE, and EE tasks in an end-to-end manner that constructs a path-way visualization from events, which we name Disease Network Constructor. The demonstration video can be accessed from https://youtu.be/rFhWwAgcXE8. We release an online system for end users and the source code is available at https://github.com/aistairc/PRISM-APIs/.

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Geometric Locality of Entity Embeddings in Masked Language Models

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