Malta

Large pre-trained language models have recently been expanded and applied to programming language tasks with great success, often through further pre-training of a strictly-natural language model--where training sequences typically contain both natural and (linearised) programming language. Such approaches effectively map both modalities of the sequence into the same embedding space. However, programming language keywords (e.g. ``while&#39;&#39;) often have very strictly defined semantics. As such, transfer learning from their natural language usage may not necessarily be beneficial to their code application and vise versa. Assuming an already pre-trained language model, in this work we investigate how sequence tokens can be adapted and represented differently, depending on which modality they belong to, and to the ultimate benefit of the downstream task. We experiment with separating embedding spaces between modalities during further model pre-training with modality-relative training objectives. We focus on text-to-code generation and observe consistent improvements across two backbone models and two test sets, measuring pass@$k$ and a novel incremental variation.

EACL 2024

Text-to-Code Generation with Modality-relative Pre-training

text-to-code generation

code language models

functional correctness

modality

code generation

pre-training

Large pre-trained language models have recently been expanded and applied to programming language tasks with great success, often through further pre-training of a strictly-natural language model--where training sequences typically contain both natural and (linearised) programming language. Such approaches effectively map both modalities of the sequence into the same embedding space. However, programming language keywords (e.g. ``while'') often have very strictly defined semantics. As such, transfer learning from their natural language usage may not necessarily be beneficial to their code application and vise versa. Assuming an already pre-trained language model, in this work we investigate how sequence tokens can be adapted and represented differently, depending on which modality they belong to, and to the ultimate benefit of the downstream task. We experiment with separating embedding spaces between modalities during further model pre-training with modality-relative training objectives. We focus on text-to-code generation and observe consistent improvements across two backbone models and two test sets, measuring pass@$k$ and a novel incremental variation.

technical paper

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

The rapid advancement of natural language processing, information retrieval (IR), computer vision, and other technologies has presented significant challenges in evaluating the performance of these systems. One of the main challenges is the scarcity of human-labeled data, which hinders the fair and accurate assessment of these systems. In this work, we specifically focus on evaluating IR systems with sparse labels, borrowing from recent research on evaluating computer vision tasks.
taking inspiration from the success of using Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) in assessing text-to-image generation systems. We propose leveraging the Fréchet Distance to measure the distance between the distributions of relevant judged items and retrieved results. Our experimental results on MS MARCO V1 dataset and TREC Deep Learning Tracks query sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the Fréchet Distance as a metric for evaluating IR systems, 
particularly in settings where a few labels are available.
This approach contributes to the advancement of evaluation methodologies in real-world scenarios such as the assessment of generative IR systems.

Fréchet Distance for Offline Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems with Sparse Labels

Code switching (CS) is a very common phenomenon in written and spoken communication, but is handled poorly by many NLP applications. Looking to the application of building CS corpora, we explore CS language identification for corpus building. We make the task more realistic by scaling it to more languages and considering models with simpler architectures for faster inference. We also reformulate the task as a sentence-level multi-label tagging problem to make it more tractable. Having defined the task, we investigate three reasonable architectures for this task and define metrics which better reflect desired performance. We present empirical evidence that no current approach is adequate, and finally provide recommendations for future work in this area.

Code-Switched Language Identification is Harder Than You Think

State-space models are a low-complexity alternative to transformers for encoding long sequences and capturing long-term dependencies. We propose LOCOST: an encoder-decoder architecture based on state-space models for conditional text generation with long context inputs. With a computational complexity of $\mathcal{O}(L \log L)$, this architecture can handle significantly longer sequences than state-of-the-art models that are based on sparse attention patterns. We evaluate our model on a series of long document abstractive summarization tasks. The model reaches a performance level that is 93-96% comparable to the top-performing sparse transformers of the same size while saving up to 50% memory during training and up to 87% during inference. Additionally, LOCOST effectively handles input texts exceeding 600K tokens at inference time, setting new state-of-the-art results on full-book summarization and opening new perspectives for long input processing.

LOCOST: State-Space Models for Long Document Abstractive Summarization

Generative retrieval models encode pointers to information in a corpus as an index within the model's parameters. These models serve as part of a larger pipeline, where retrieved information conditions generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, we identify two limitations: the generative retrieval does not account for contextual information. Secondly, the retrieval can't be tuned for the downstream readers as decoding the page title is a non-differentiable operation. This paper introduces Re3val, trained with generative reranking and reinforcement learning using limited data. Re3val leverages context acquired via Dense Passage Retrieval to rerank the retrieved page titles and utilizes REINFORCE to maximize rewards generated by constrained decoding. Additionally, we generate questions from our pre-training dataset to mitigate epistemic uncertainty and bridge the domain gap between the pre-training and fine-tuning datasets. Subsequently, we extract and rerank contexts from the KILT database using the rerank page titles. Upon grounding the top five reranked contexts, Re3val demonstrates the Top 1 KILT scores compared to all other generative retrieval models across five KILT datasets.

Re3val: Reinforced and Reranked Generative Retrieval

Natural language definitions possess a recursive, self-explanatory semantic structure that can support representation learning methods able to preserve explicit conceptual relations and constraints in the latent space. This paper presents a multi-relational model that explicitly leverages such a structure to derive word embeddings from definitions. By automatically extracting the relations linking defined and defining terms from dictionaries, we demonstrate how the problem of learning word embeddings can be formalised via a translational framework in Hyperbolic space and used as a proxy to capture the global semantic structure of definitions. An extensive empirical analysis demonstrates that the framework can help imposing the desired structural constraints while preserving the semantic mapping required for controllable and interpretable traversal. Moreover, the experiments reveal the superiority of the Hyperbolic word embeddings over the Euclidean counterparts and demonstrate that the multi-relational approach can obtain competitive results when compared to state-of-the-art neural models, with the advantage of being intrinsically more efficient and interpretable

Multi-Relational Hyperbolic Word Embeddings from Natural Language Definitions

Despite the widespread adoption, there is a lack of research into how various critical aspects of pretrained language models (PLMs) affect their performance in hate speech detection. Through five research questions, our findings and recommendations lay the groundwork for empirically investigating different aspects of PLMs' use in hate speech detection. We deep dive into comparing different pretrained models, evaluating their seed robustness, finetuning settings, and the impact of pretraining data collection time. Our analysis reveals early peaks for downstream tasks during pretraining, the limited benefit of employing a more recent pretraining corpus, and the significance of specific layers during finetuning. We further call into question the use of domain-specific models and highlight the need for dynamic datasets for benchmarking hate speech detection.

Probing Critical Learning Dynamics of PLMs for Hate Speech Detection

There is an intricate relation between the properties of an image and how humans behave while describing the image. This behavior shows ample variation, as manifested in human signals such as eye movements and when humans start to describe the image. Despite the value of such signals of visuo-linguistic variation, they are virtually disregarded in the training of current pretrained models, which motivates further investigation. Using a corpus of Dutch image descriptions with concurrently collected eye-tracking data, we explore the nature of the variation in visuo-linguistic signals, and find that they correlate with each other. Given this result, we hypothesize that variation stems partly from the properties of the images, and explore whether image representations encoded by pretrained vision encoders can capture such variation. Our results indicate that pretrained models do so to a weak-to-moderate degree, suggesting that the models lack biases about what makes a stimulus complex for humans and what leads to variations in human outputs.

Describing Images Fast and Slow: Quantifying and Predicting the Variation in Human Signals during Visuo-Linguistic Processes

Kremlin propaganda campaigns aim to minimize public support for Ukraine, foster a climate of mistrust and disunity, and shape elections. To address this challenge, we developed “Check News in 1 Click”, the first NLP-empowered pro-Kremlin propaganda detection app available in 7 languages. It provides the lay user with feedback on their news and explains manipulative linguistic features and keywords. The conducted user study shows positive feedback from users and sheds light on the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed solution.


Check News in One Click: NLP-Empowered Pro-Kremlin Propaganda Detection

We present the DURel tool that implements the annotation of semantic proximity between uses of words into an online, open source interface. The tool supports standardized human annotation as well as computational annotation, building on recent advances with Word-in-Context models. Annotator judgments are clustered with automatic graph clustering techniques and visualized for analysis. This allows to measure word senses with simple and intuitive micro-task judgments between use pairs, requiring minimal preparation efforts. The tool offers additional functionalities to compare the agreement between annotators to guarantee the inter-subjectivity of the obtained judgments and to calculate summary statistics giving insights into sense frequency distributions, semantic variation or changes of senses over time.

The DURel Annotation Tool: Human and Computational Measurement of Semantic Proximity, Sense Clusters and Semantic Change

The abundance of news sources and the urgent
demand for reliable information have led to se-
rious concerns about the threat of misleading
information. In this paper, we present FRAPPE,
a FRAming, Persuasion, and Propaganda Ex-
plorer system. FRAPPE goes beyond conven-
tional news analysis of articles and unveils the
intricate linguistic techniques used to shape
readers’ opinions and emotions. Our system
allows users not only to analyze individual arti-
cles for their genre, framings, and use of persua-
sion techniques, but also to draw comparisons
between the strategies of persuasion and fram-
ing adopted by a diverse pool of news outlets
and countries across multiple languages for dif-
ferent topics, thus providing a comprehensive
understanding of how information is presented
and manipulated. FRAPPE1 is publicly acces-
sible at https://frappe.streamlit.
app/ and a video explaining our system
is available at https://youtu.be/3RlTfSVnZmk

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