ACL 2022 Papers

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) starts translating while receiving the streaming source inputs, and hence the source sentence is always incomplete during translating. Different from the full-sentence MT using the conventional seq-to-seq architecture, SiMT often applies prefix-to-prefix architecture, which forces each target word to only align with a partial source prefix to adapt to the incomplete source in streaming inputs. However, the source words in the front positions are always illusoryly considered more important since they appear in more prefixes, resulting in position bias, which makes the model pay more attention on the front source positions in testing. In this paper, we first analyze the phenomenon of position bias in SiMT, and develop a Length-Aware Framework to reduce the position bias by bridging the structural gap between SiMT and full-sentence MT. Specifically, given the streaming inputs, we first predict the full-sentence length and then fill the future source position with positional encoding, thereby turning the streaming inputs into a pseudo full-sentence. The proposed framework can be integrated into most existing SiMT methods to further improve performance. Experiments on two representative SiMT methods, including the state-of-the-art adaptive policy, show that our method successfully reduces the position bias and thereby achieves better SiMT performance.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the preliminary step for training non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models, which eases the training of NAT models at the cost of losing important information for translating low-frequency words. In this work, we provide an appealing alternative for NAT – monolingual KD, which trains NAT student on external monolingual data with AT teacher trained on the original bilingual data. Monolingual KD is able to transfer both the knowledge of the original bilingual data (implicitly encoded in the trained AT teacher model) and that of the new monolingual data to the NAT student model. Extensive experiments on eight WMT benchmarks over two advanced NAT models show that monolingual KD consistently outperforms the standard KD by improving low-frequency word translation, without introducing any computational cost. Monolingual KD enjoys desirable expandability, which can be further enhanced (when given more computational budget) by combining with the standard KD, a reverse monolingual KD, or enlarging the scale of monolingual data. Extensive analyses demonstrate that these techniques can be used together profitably to further recall the useful information lost in the standard KD. Encouragingly, combining with standard KD, our approach achieves 30.4 and 34.1 BLEU points on the WMT14 English-German and German-English datasets, respectively. Our code and trained models are freely available at https://github.com/alphadl/RLFW-NAT.mono.

Long-form question answering (LFQA) aims to generate a paragraph-length answer for a given question. While current work on LFQA using large pre-trained model for generation are effective at producing fluent and somewhat relevant content, one primary challenge lies in how to generate a faithful answer that has less hallucinated content. We propose a new end-to-end framework that jointly models answer generation and machine reading. The key idea is to augment the generation model with fine-grained, answer-related salient information which can be viewed as an emphasis on faithful facts. State-of-the-art results on two LFQA datasets, ELI5 and MS MARCO, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, in comparison with strong baselines on automatic and human evaluation metrics. A detailed analysis further proves the competency of our methods in generating fluent, relevant, and more faithful answers.

A common method for extractive multi-document news summarization is to re-formulate it as a single-document summarization problem by concatenating all documents as a single meta-document. However, this method neglects the relative importance of documents. We propose a simple approach to reorder the documents according to their relative importance before concatenating and summarizing them. The reordering makes the salient content easier to learn by the summarization model. Experiments show that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with more complex architectures.

Training a referring expression comprehension (ReC) model for a new visual domain requires collecting referring expressions, and potentially corresponding bounding boxes, for images in the domain. While large-scale pre-trained models are useful for image classification across domains, it remains unclear if they can be applied in a zero-shot manner to more complex tasks like ReC. We present ReCLIP, a simple but strong zero-shot baseline that repurposes CLIP, a state-of-the-art large-scale model, for ReC. Motivated by the close connection between ReC and CLIP’s contrastive pre-training objective, the first component of ReCLIP is a region-scoring method that isolates object proposals via cropping and blurring, and passes them to CLIP. However, through controlled experiments on a synthetic dataset, we find that CLIP is largely incapable of performing spatial reasoning off-the-shelf. We reduce the gap between zero-shot baselines from prior work and supervised models by as much as 29% on RefCOCOg, and on RefGTA (video game imagery), ReCLIP’s relative improvement over supervised ReC models trained on real images is 8%.

Code completion, which aims to predict the following code token(s) according to the code context, can improve the productivity of software development. Recent work has proved that statistical language modeling with transformers can greatly improve the performance in the code completion task via learning from large-scale source code datasets. However, current approaches focus only on code context within the file or project, i.e. internal context. Our distinction is utilizing ”external” context, inspired by human behaviors of copying from the related code snippets when writing code. Specifically, we propose a retrieval-augmented code completion framework, leveraging both lexical copying and referring to code with similar semantics by retrieval. We adopt a stage-wise training approach that combines a source code retriever and an auto-regressive language model for programming language. We evaluate our approach in the code completion task in Python and Java programming languages, achieving a state-of-the-art performance on CodeXGLUE benchmark.

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a crucial problem in the natural language processing (NLP) community. Current methods achieve decent performance by utilizing supervised learning and large pre-trained language models. However, the imbalanced training dataset leads to poor performance on rare senses and zero-shot senses. There are more training instances and senses for words with top frequency ranks than those with low frequency ranks in the training dataset. We investigate the statistical relation between word frequency rank and word sense number distribution. Based on the relation, we propose a Z-reweighting method on the word level to adjust the training on the imbalanced dataset. The experiments show that the Z-reweighting strategy achieves performance gain on the standard English all words WSD benchmark. Moreover, the strategy can help models generalize better on rare and zero-shot senses.

Recent studies have determined that the learned token embeddings of large-scale neural language models are degenerated to be anisotropic with a narrow-cone shape. This phenomenon, called the representation degeneration problem, facilitates an increase in the overall similarity between token embeddings that negatively affect the performance of the models. Although the existing methods that address the degeneration problem based on observations of the phenomenon triggered by the problem improves the performance of the text generation, the training dynamics of token embeddings behind the degeneration problem are still not explored. In this study, we analyze the training dynamics of the token embeddings focusing on rare token embedding. We demonstrate that the specific part of the gradient for rare token embeddings is the key cause of the degeneration problem for all tokens during training stage. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel method called, adaptive gradient gating(AGG). AGG addresses the degeneration problem by gating the specific part of the gradient for rare token embeddings. Experimental results from language modeling, word similarity, and machine translation tasks quantitatively and qualitatively verify the effectiveness of AGG.

We propose a novel approach that jointly utilizes the labels and elicited rationales for text classification to speed up the training of deep learning models with limited training data. We define and optimize a ranking-constrained loss function that combines cross-entropy loss with ranking losses as rationale constraints. We evaluate our proposed rationale-augmented learning approach on three human-annotated datasets, and show that our approach provides significant improvements over classification approaches that do not utilize rationales as well as other state-of-the-art rationale-augmented baselines.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown great potentials in natural language processing (NLP) including rhetorical structure theory (RST) discourse parsing. Current PLMs are obtained by sentence-level pre-training, which is different from the basic processing unit, i.e. element discourse unit (EDU).To this end, we propose a second-stage EDU-level pre-training approach in this work, which presents two novel tasks to learn effective EDU representations continually based on well pre-trained language models. Concretely, the two tasks are (1) next EDU prediction (NEP) and (2) discourse marker prediction (DMP).We take a state-of-the-art transition-based neural parser as baseline, and adopt it with a light bi-gram EDU modification to effectively explore the EDU-level pre-trained EDU representation. Experimental results on a benckmark dataset show that our method is highly effective,leading a 2.1-point improvement in F1-score. All codes and pre-trained models will be released publicly to facilitate future studies.

A release note is a technical document that describes the latest changes to a software product and is crucial in open source software development. However, it still remains challenging to generate release notes automatically. In this paper, we present a new dataset called RNSum, which contains approximately 82,000 English release notes and the associated commit messages derived from the online repositories in GitHub. Then, we propose classwise extractive-then-abstractive/abstractive summarization approaches to this task, which can employ a modern transformer-based seq2seq network like BART and can be applied to various repositories without specific constraints. The experimental results on the RNSum dataset show that the proposed methods can generate less noisy release notes at higher coverage than the baselines. We also observe that there is a significant gap in the coverage of essential information when compared to human references. Our dataset and the code are publicly available.

Existing KBQA approaches, despite achieving strong performance on i.i.d. test data, often struggle in generalizing to questions involving unseen KB schema items. Prior ranking-based approaches have shown some success in generalization, but suffer from the coverage issue. We present RnG-KBQA, a Rank-and-Generate approach for KBQA, which remedies the coverage issue with a generation model while preserving a strong generalization capability. Our approach first uses a contrastive ranker to rank a set of candidate logical forms obtained by searching over the knowledge graph. It then introduces a tailored generation model conditioned on the question and the top-ranked candidates to compose the final logical form. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on GrailQA and WebQSP datasets. In particular, our method surpasses the prior state-of-the-art by a large margin on the GrailQA leaderboard. In addition, RnG-KBQA outperforms all prior approaches on the popular WebQSP benchmark, even including the ones that use the oracle entity linking. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the interplay between ranking and generation, which leads to the superior performance of our proposed approach across all settings with especially strong improvements in zero-shot generalization.

Humanities scholars commonly provide evidence for claims that they make about a work of literature (e.g., a novel) in the form of quotations from the work. We collect a large-scale dataset (RELiC) of 78K literary quotations and surrounding critical analysis and use it to formulate the novel task of literary evidence retrieval, in which models are given an excerpt of literary analysis surrounding a masked quotation and asked to retrieve the quoted passage from the set of all passages in the work. Solving this retrieval task requires a deep understanding of complex literary and linguistic phenomena, which proves challenging to methods that overwhelmingly rely on lexical and semantic similarity matching. We implement a RoBERTa-based dense passage retriever for this task that outperforms existing pretrained information retrieval baselines; however, experiments and analysis by human domain experts indicate that there is substantial room for improvement.

It is very common to use quotations (quotes) to make our writings more elegant or convincing. To help people find appropriate quotes efficiently, the task of quote recommendation is presented, aiming to recommend quotes that fit the current context of writing. There have been various quote recommendation approaches, but they are evaluated on different unpublished datasets. To facilitate the research on this task, we build a large and fully open quote recommendation dataset called QuoteR, which comprises three parts including English, standard Chinese and classical Chinese. Any part of it is larger than previous unpublished counterparts. We conduct an extensive evaluation of existing quote recommendation methods on QuoteR. Furthermore, we propose a new quote recommendation model that significantly outperforms previous methods on all three parts of QuoteR. All the code and data of this paper can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/QuoteR.

Reading is integral to everyday life, and yet learning to read is a struggle for many young learners. During lessons, teachers can use comprehension questions to increase engagement, test reading skills, and improve retention. Historically such questions were written by skilled teachers, but recently language models have been used to generate comprehension questions. However, many existing Question Generation (QG) systems focus on generating extractive questions from the text, and have no way to control the type of the generated question. In this paper, we study QG for reading comprehension where inferential questions are critical and extractive techniques cannot be used. We propose a two-step model (HTA-WTA) that takes advantage of previous datasets, and can generate questions for a specific targeted comprehension skill. We propose a new reading comprehension dataset that contains questions annotated with story-based reading comprehension skills (SBRCS), allowing for a more complete reader assessment. Across several experiments, our results show that HTA-WTA outperforms multiple strong baselines on this new dataset. We show that the HTA-WTA model tests for strong SCRS by asking deep inferential questions.

We propose a pre-training objective based on question answering (QA) for learning general-purpose contextual representations, motivated by the intuition that the representation of a phrase in a passage should encode all questions that the phrase can answer in context. To this end, we train a bi-encoder QA model, which independently encodes passages and questions, to match the predictions of a more accurate cross-encoder model on 80 million synthesized QA pairs. By encoding QA-relevant information, the bi-encoder’s token-level representations are useful for non-QA downstream tasks without extensive (or in some cases, any) fine-tuning. We show large improvements over both RoBERTa-large and previous state-of-the-art results on zero-shot and few-shot paraphrase detection on four datasets, few-shot named entity recognition on two datasets, and zero-shot sentiment analysis on three datasets.

Event extraction is typically modeled as a multi-class classification problem where event types and argument roles are treated as atomic symbols. These approaches are usually limited to a set of pre-defined types. We propose a novel event extraction framework that uses event types and argument roles as natural language queries to extract candidate triggers and arguments from the input text. With the rich semantics in the queries, our framework benefits from the attention mechanisms to better capture the semantic correlation between the event types or argument roles and the input text. Furthermore, the query-and-extract formulation allows our approach to leverage all available event annotations from various ontologies as a unified model. Experiments on ACE and ERE demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on each dataset and significantly outperforms existing methods on zero-shot event extraction.

This paper describes and tests a method for carrying out quantified reproducibility assessment (QRA) that is based on concepts and definitions from metrology. QRA produces a single score estimating the degree of reproducibility of a given system and evaluation measure, on the basis of the scores from, and differences between, different reproductions. We test QRA on 18 different system and evaluation measure combinations (involving diverse NLP tasks and types of evaluation), for each of which we have the original results and one to seven reproduction results. The proposed QRA method produces degree-of-reproducibility scores that are comparable across multiple reproductions not only of the same, but also of different, original studies. We find that the proposed method facilitates insights into causes of variation between reproductions, and as a result, allows conclusions to be drawn about what aspects of system and/or evaluation design need to be changed in order to improve reproducibility.

Paraphrase generation has been widely used in various downstream tasks. Most tasks benefit mainly from high quality paraphrases, namely those that are semantically similar to, yet linguistically diverse from, the original sentence. Generating high-quality paraphrases is challenging as it becomes increasingly hard to preserve meaning as linguistic diversity increases. Recent works achieve nice results by controlling specific aspects of the paraphrase, such as its syntactic tree. However, they do not allow to directly control the quality of the generated paraphrase, and suffer from low flexibility and scalability. Here we propose QCPG, a quality-guided controlled paraphrase generation model, that allows directly controlling the quality dimensions. Furthermore, we suggest a method that given a sentence, identifies points in the quality control space that are expected to yield optimal generated paraphrases. We show that our method is able to generate paraphrases which maintain the original meaning while achieving higher diversity than the uncontrolled baseline. The models, the code, and the data can be found in https://github.com/IBM/quality-controlled-paraphrase-generation.