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For Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), their susceptibility to noise has recently been linked to subword segmentation. However, it is unclear which aspects of segmentation affect their understanding. This study assesses the robustness of PLMs against various disrupted segmentation caused by noise. An evaluation framework for subword segmentation, named Contrastive Lexical Semantic (CoLeS) probe, is proposed. It provides a systematic categorization of segmentation corruption under noise and evaluation protocols by generating contrastive datasets with canonical-noisy word pairs. Experimental results indicate that PLMs are unable to accurately compute word meanings if the noise introduces completely different subwords, small subword fragments, or a large number of additional subwords, particularly when they are inserted within other subwords.

ACL 2023

Can Pretrained Language Models Derive Correct Semantics from Corrupt Subwords under Noise?

noise robustness

subword segmentation

language models

workshop paper

### 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.

Lexical Semantic Change is the study of how the meaning of words evolves through time. Another related question is whether and how lexical relations over pairs of words, such as synonymy, change over time. There are currently two competing, apparently opposite hypotheses in the historical linguistic literature regarding how synonymous words evolve: the Law of Differentiation (LD) argues that synonyms tend to take on different meanings over time, whereas the Law of Parallel Change (LPC) claims that synonyms tend to undergo the same semantic change and therefore remain synonyms. So far, there has been little research using distributional models to assess to what extent these laws apply on historical corpora. In this work, we take a first step toward detecting whether LD or LPC operates for given word pairs. After recasting the problem into a more tractable task, we combine two linguistic resources to propose the first complete evaluation framework on this problem and provide empirical evidence in favor of a dominance of LD. We then propose various computational approaches to the problem using Distributional Semantic Models and grounded in recent literature on Lexical Semantic Change detection. Our best approaches achieve a balanced accuracy above 0.6 on our dataset. We discuss challenges still faced by these approaches, such as polysemy or the potential confusion between synonymy and hypernymy.

A Tale of Two Laws of Semantic Change: Predicting Synonym Changes with Distributional Semantic Models

In psycholinguistics, semantic attraction is a sentence processing phenomenon in which a given argument violates the selectional requirements of a verb, but this violation is not perceived by comprehenders due to its attraction to another noun in the same sentence, which is syntactically unrelated but semantically sound.

In our study, we use autoregressive language models to compute the sentence-level and the target phrase-level Surprisal scores of a psycholinguistic dataset on semantic attraction. 

Our results show that the models are sensitive to semantic attraction, leading to reduced Surprisal scores, although none of them perfectly matches the human behavioral patterns.

Are Language Models Sensitive to Semantic Attraction? A Study on Surprisal

Negation has been shown to be a major bottleneck for masked language models, such as BERT. However, whether this finding still holds for larger-sized auto-regressive language models (``LLMs'') has not been studied comprehensively. With the ever-increasing volume of research and applications of LLMs, we take a step back to evaluate the ability of current-generation LLMs to handle negation, a fundamental linguistic phenomenon that is central to language understanding. We evaluate different LLMs --- including the open-source GPT-neo, GPT-3, and InstructGPT --- against a wide range of negation benchmarks. Through systematic experimentation with varying model sizes and prompts, we show that LLMs have several limitations including insensitivity to the presence of negation, an inability to capture the lexical semantics of negation, and a failure to reason under negation.

Language models are not naysayers: an analysis of language models on negation benchmarks

Negation scope resolution is the process of detecting the negated part of a sentence. Unlike the syntax-based approach employed in previous researches, state-of-the-art methods performed better without the explicit use of syntactic structure. This work revisits the syntax-based approach and re-evaluates the effectiveness of syntactic structure in negation scope resolution. We replace the parser utilized in the prior works with state-of-the-art parsers and modify the syntax-based heuristic rules. The experimental results demonstrate that the simple modifications enhance the performance of the prior syntax-based method to the same level as state-of-the-art end-to-end neural-based methods.

Revisiting Syntax-Based Approach in Negation Scope Resolution

Paraphrase detection is useful in many naturallanguage understanding applications. Current works typically formulate this problem as a sentence pair binary classification task. However, this setup is not a good fit for many of the intended applications of paraphrase models. In particular, such applications often involve finding the closest paraphrases of the target sentence from a group of candidate sentences where they exhibit different degrees of semantic overlap with the target sentence. To apply models to this paraphrase retrieval scenario, the model must be sensitive to the degree to which two sentences are paraphrases of one another. However, many existing datasets ignore and fail to test models in this setup. In response, we propose adversarial paradigms to create evaluation datasets, which could examine the sensitivity to different degrees of semantic overlap. Empirical results show that, while paraphrase models and different sentence encoders appear successful on standard evaluations, measuring the degree of semantic overlap still remains a big challenge for them.

Testing Paraphrase Models on Recognising Sentence Pairs at Different Degrees of Semantic Overlap

While many real-life tasks require reasoning over multi-step sequential instructions, collecting fine-grained annotations for each intermediate step can be prohibitively expensive. In this work, we study how general pretrained sequence-to-sequence transformers perform under varying types of annotation for sequential instruction understanding. We conduct experiments using T5 (Raffel et al., 2020) on a commonly-used multi-step instruction understanding dataset SCONE (Long et al., 2016) that includes three sub-tasks. First, we show that with only gold supervision for the final step of a multi-step instruction sequence, depending on the sequential properties of different tasks, transformers may exhibit extremely bad performance on intermediate steps, in stark contrast with their performance on the final step. Next, we explore two directions to relieve this problem. We show that with the same limited annotation budget, using supervision uniformly distributed across different steps (instead of only final-step supervision), we can greatly improve the performance on intermediate steps with a drop in final-step performance. Further, we explore a contrastive learning approach to provide training signals on intermediate steps with zero intermediate gold supervision. This, however, achieves mixed results. It significantly improves the model’s bad intermediate-step performance on one subtask, but also shows decreased performance on another subtask.

Can Sequence-to-Sequence Transformers Naturally Understand Sequential Instructions?

Foveate, Attribute, and Rationalize: Towards Safe and Trustworthy AI

We present Claim-Dissector: a novel latent variable model for fact-checking and analysis, which given a claim and a set of retrieved evidences jointly learns to identify: (i) the relevant evidences to the given claim, (ii) the veracity of the claim. We propose to disentangle the per-evidence relevance probability and its contribution to the final veracity probability in an interpretable way -- the final veracity probability is proportional to a linear ensemble of per-evidence relevance probabilities. In this way, the individual contributions of evidences towards the final predicted probability can be identified. In per-evidence relevance probability, our model can further distinguish whether each relevant evidence is supporting (S) or refuting (R) the claim. This allows to quantify how much the S/R probability contributes to the final verdict or to detect disagreeing evidence.
Despite its interpretable nature, our system achieves results competitive with state-of-the-art on the FEVER dataset, as compared to typical two-stage system pipelines, while using significantly fewer parameters. It also sets new state-of-the-art on FAVIQ and RealFC datasets. Furthermore, our analysis shows that our model can learn fine-grained relevance cues while using coarse-grained supervision, and we demonstrate it in 2 ways. (i) We show that our model can achieve competitive sentence recall while using only paragraph-level relevance supervision. (ii) Traversing towards the finest granularity of relevance, we show that our model is capable of identifying relevance at the token level. To do this, we present a new benchmark TLR-FEVER focusing on token-level interpretability -- humans annotate tokens in relevant evidences they considered essential when making their judgment. Then we measure how similar are these annotations to the tokens our model is focusing on.

Claim-Dissector: An Interpretable Fact-Checking System with Joint Re-ranking and Veracity Prediction

Generating intermediate steps, or Chain of Thought (CoT), is an effective way to significantly improve language models' (LM) multi-step reasoning capability. However, the CoT lengths can grow rapidly with the problem complexity, easily exceeding the maximum context size. Instead of increasing the context limit, which has already been heavily investigated, we explore an orthogonal direction: making LMs divide a problem into multiple contexts. We propose a new inference framework, called Recursion of Thought (RoT), which introduces several special tokens that the models can output to trigger context-related operations. Extensive experiments with multiple architectures including GPT-3 show that RoT dramatically improves LMs' inference capability to solve problems, whose solution consists of hundreds of thousands of tokens.

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Can Pretrained Language Models Derive Correct Semantics from Corrupt Subwords under Noise?

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A Tale of Two Laws of Semantic Change: Predicting Synonym Changes with Distributional Semantic Models

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