Malta

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems are vulnerable when trained on limited data. This is a common scenario in low-resource tasks in the real world. To increase robustness, a solution is to intently add realistic noise in the training phase. Noise simulation using text perturbation has been proven to be efficient in writing systems that use Latin letters. In this study, we further explore perturbation techniques on more complex abugida writing systems, for which the visual similarity of complex glyphs is considered to capture the essential nature of these writing systems. Besides the generated noise, we propose a training strategy to improve robustness. We conducted experiments on six languages: Bengali, Hindi, Myanmar, Khmer, Lao, and Thai. By overcoming the introduced noise, we obtained non-degenerate NMT systems with improved robustness for low-resource tasks for abugida glyphs.

EACL 2024

Robust Neural Machine Translation for Abugidas by Glyph Perturbation

abugidas

robustness

low-resource

machine translation

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

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.<br><br>
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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.

A subtle difference in context results in totally different nuances even for lexically identical words. On the other hand, two words can convey similar meanings given a homogeneous context. As a result, considering only word spelling information is not sufficient to obtain quality text representation. We propose SentenceLDA, a sentence-level topic model. We combine modern SentenceBERT and classical LDA to extend the semantic unit from word to sentence. By extending the semantic unit, we verify that SentenceLDA returns more discriminative document representation than other topic models, while maintaining LDA's elegant probabilistic interpretability. We also verify the robustness of SentenceLDA by comparing the inference results on original and paraphrased texts. Additionally, we implement one possible application of SentenceLDA on corpus-level key opinion mining by applying SentenceLDA on an argumentative corpus, DebateSum.

SentenceLDA: Discriminative and Robust Document Representation with Sentence Level Topic Model

Large language models (LLMs) can solve problems step-by-step.
While this chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning boosts LLMs' performance, it is unclear if LLMs know when to use CoT and whether those CoT are always necessary to answer the question. 
This paper shows that LLMs tend to generate redundant calculations and reasoning on a manually constructed math QA dataset, GSM8K-Zero.
GSM8K-Zero is constructed such that the questions can be answered without any calculations, but LLMs, including Llama-2 models and Claude-2, tend to generate lengthy and unnecessary calculations to answer the questions.
We also conduct experiments to explain why LLMs generate redundant calculations and reasonings.

Over-Reasoning and Redundant Calculation of Large Language Models

Natural Language Processing (NLP) research is increasingly focusing on the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), with some of the most popular ones being either fully or partially closed-source. The lack of access to model details, especially regarding training data, has repeatedly raised concerns about data contamination among researchers. Several attempts have been made to address this issue, but they are limited to anecdotal evidence and trial and error. Additionally, they overlook the problem of indirect data leaking, where models
are iteratively improved by using data coming from users. In this work, we conduct the first systematic analysis of work using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the most prominently used LLMs today, in the context of data contamination. By analysing 255 papers and considering OpenAI’s data usage policy, we extensively document the amount of data leaked to these models during the first year after the model’s release. We report that these models have been globally exposed to ∼4.7M samples from 263 benchmarks. At the same time, we document a number of evaluation malpractices emerging in the reviewed papers, such as unfair or missing baseline comparisons and reproducibility issues. We release our results as a collaborative project on https://leak-llm.github.io/, where other researchers can contribute to our efforts.

Leak, Cheat, Repeat: Data Contamination and Evaluation Malpractices in Closed-Source LLMs

Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human entities, has shaped conversations about the impacts and possibilities of technology. We present AnthroScore, an automatic metric of implicit anthropomorphism in language. We use a masked language model to quantify how non-human entities are implicitly framed as human by the surrounding context. We show that AnthroScore corresponds with human judgments of anthropomorphism and dimensions of anthropomorphism described in social science literature. Motivated by concerns of misleading anthropomorphism in computer science discourse, we use AnthroScore to analyze 15 years of research papers and downstream news articles. In research papers, we find that anthropomorphism has steadily increased over time, and that papers related to language models have the most anthropomorphism. Within ACL papers, temporal increases in anthropomorphism are correlated with key neural advancements. Building upon concerns of scientific misinformation in mass media, we identify higher levels of anthropomorphism in news headlines compared to the research papers they cite. Since AnthroScore is lexicon-free, it can be directly applied to a wide range of text sources.

AnthroScore: A Computational Linguistic Measure of Anthropomorphism

Self-supervised learning has achieved impressive results in speech processing, but current models are computationally expensive, generating environmental concerns because of their high energy consumption. Therefore, we propose an efficient self-supervised approach to address high computational costs, using a single GPU during 24 to 48 hours of pretraining. The proposed approach combines linear, convolutional, and self-attention layers with several optimizations, including dynamic batching, flash attention, mixed-precision training, gradient accumulation, and acoustic feature extraction with input preprocessing. Computational cost estimations for our proposed model represent up to two orders of magnitude improvements in computational efficiency against existing speech models.

Towards efficient self-supervised representation learning in speech processing

The training of large language models (LLMs) necessitates substantial data and computational resources, and updating outdated LLMs entails significant efforts and resources. While numerous model editing techniques (METs) have emerged to efficiently update model outputs without retraining, their effectiveness in multilingual LLMs, where knowledge is stored in diverse languages, remains an underexplored research area. This research paper introduces the cross-lingual model editing (XME) paradigm, wherein a fact is edited in one language, and the subsequent update propagation is observed across other languages. To investigate the XME paradigm, we conducted experiments using BLOOM, mBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa using the two writing scripts: Latin (English, French, and Spanish) and Indic (Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali). The results reveal notable performance limitations of state-of-the-art METs under the XME setting, mainly when the languages involved belong to two distinct script families. These findings highlight the need for further research and development of XME techniques to address these challenges. For more comprehensive information, the dataset used in this research and the associated code are publicly available at the following [URL](https://github.com/lingo-iitgn/XME).

Cross-lingual Editing in Multilingual Language Models

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a widely popular text generation task, yet there is a considerable research gap in the development of privacy-preserving NMT models, despite significant data privacy concerns for NMT systems. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is a popular method for training machine learning models with concrete privacy guarantees; however, the implementation specifics of training a model with DP-SGD are not always clarified in existing models, with differing software libraries used and code bases not always being public, leading to reproducibility issues. To tackle this, we introduce DP-NMT, an open-source framework for carrying out research on privacy-preserving NMT with DP-SGD, bringing together numerous models, datasets, and evaluation metrics in one systematic software package. Our goal is to provide a platform for researchers to advance the development of privacy-preserving NMT systems, keeping the specific details of the DP-SGD algorithm transparent and intuitive to implement. We run a set of experiments on datasets from both general and privacy-related domains to demonstrate our framework in use. We make our framework publicly available and welcome feedback from the community.

DP-NMT: Scalable Differentially Private Machine Translation

The recent development and success of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitate an evaluation of their performance across diverse NLP tasks in different languages. Although several frameworks have been developed and made publicly available, their customization capabilities for specific tasks and datasets are often complex for different users. In this study, we introduce the LLMeBench framework, which can be seamlessly customized to evaluate LLMs for any NLP task, regardless of language. The framework features generic dataset loaders, several model providers, and pre-implements most standard evaluation metrics. It supports in-context learning with zero- and few-shot settings. A specific dataset and task can be evaluated for a given LLM in less than 20 lines of code while allowing full flexibility to extend the framework for custom datasets, models, or tasks. The framework has been tested on 31 unique NLP tasks using 53 publicly available datasets within 90 experimental setups, involving approximately 296K data points. We open-sourced LLMeBench for the community (https://github.com/qcri/LLMeBench/) and a video demonstrating the framework is available online (https://youtu.be/9cC2m_abk3A).

LLMeBench: A Flexible Framework for Accelerating LLMs Benchmarking

We present an open-source, pip installable toolkit, Sig-Networks, the first of its kind for longitudinal language modelling. A central focus is the incorporation of Signature-based Neural Network models, which have recently shown success in temporal tasks. We apply and extend published research providing a full suite of signature-based models. Their components can be used as PyTorch building blocks in future architectures. Sig-Networks enables task-agnostic dataset plug-in, seamless pre-processing for sequential data, parameter flexibility, automated tuning across a range of models. We examine signature networks under three different NLP tasks of varying temporal granularity: counselling conversations, rumour stance switch and mood changes in social media threads, showing SOTA performance in all three, and provide guidance for future tasks. We release the Toolkit as a PyTorch package with an introductory video, Git repositories for preprocessing and modelling including sample notebooks on the modeled NLP tasks.

Sig-Networks Toolkit: Signature Networks for Longitudinal Language Modelling

Pretrained character-level and byte-level language models have been shown to be competitive with popular subword models across a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks.
However, there has been little research on their effectiveness for neural machine translation (NMT), particularly within the popular pretrain-then-finetune paradigm.
This work performs an extensive comparison across multiple languages and experimental conditions of character- and subword-level pretrained models (ByT5 and mT5, respectively) on NMT. 
We show the effectiveness of character-level modeling in translation, particularly in cases where fine-tuning data is limited.
In our analysis, we show how character models' gains in translation quality are reflected in better translations of orthographically similar words and rare words. While evaluating the importance of source texts in driving model predictions, we highlight word-level patterns within ByT5, suggesting an ability to modulate word-level and character-level information during generation. 
We conclude by assessing the efficiency tradeoff of byte models, suggesting their usage in non-time-critical scenarios to boost translation quality.

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SentenceLDA: Discriminative and Robust Document Representation with Sentence Level Topic Model

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SentenceLDA: Discriminative and Robust Document Representation with Sentence Level Topic Model

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Revisiting Robust Neural Machine Translation: A Transformer Case Study

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