COLING 2022 Papers

This paper presents a language-independent approach for morphological disambiguation which has been regarded as an extension of POS tagging, jointly predicting complex morphological tags. In the proposed approach, all words, roots, POS and morpheme tags are embedded into vectors, and contexts representations from surface word and morphological contexts are calculated. Then the inner products between analyses and the context’s representations are computed to perform the disambiguation. The underlying hypothesis is that the correct morphological analysis should be closer to the context in a vector space. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing models on seven different language datasets. Concretely, compared with the baselines of MarMot and a sophisticated neural model (Seq2Seq), the proposed approach achieves around 6% improvement in average accuracy for all languages while running about 6 and 33 times faster than MarMot and Seq2Seq, respectively.

Knowledge transfer across languages is crucial for multilingual neural machine translation. In this paper, we propose language branch (LB) gated multilingual neural machine translation that encourages knowledge transfer within the same language branch with a LB-gated module that is integrated into both the encoder and decoder. The LB-gated module distinguishes LB-specific parameters from global parameters shared by all languages and routes languages from the same LB to the corresponding LB-specific network. Comprehensive experiments on the OPUS-100 dataset show that the proposed approach substantially improves translation quality on both middle- and low-resource languages over previous methods. Further analysis demonstrates its ability in learning similarities between language branches.

One of AI’s grand challenges consists in the development of autonomous agents with communication systems offering the robustness, flexibility and adaptivity found in human languages. While the processes through which children acquire language are by now relatively well understood, a faithful computational operationalisation of the underlying mechanisms is still lacking. Two main cognitive processes are involved in child language acquisition. First, children need to reconstruct the intended meaning of observed utterances, a process called intention reading. Then, they can gradually abstract away from concrete utterances in a process called pattern finding and acquire productive schemata that generalise over form and meaning. In this paper, we introduce a mechanistic model of the intention reading process and its integration with pattern finding capacities. Concretely, we present an agent-based simulation in which an agent learns a grammar that enables them to ask and answer questions about a scene. This involves the reconstruction of queries that correspond to observed questions based on the answer and scene alone, and the generalization of linguistic schemata based on these reconstructed question-query pairs. The result is a productive grammar which can be used to map between natural language questions and queries without ever having observed the queries.

Current text mining models are trained with 0-1 hard label that indicates whether an instance belongs to a class, ignoring rich information of the relevance degree. Soft label, which involved each label of varying degrees than the hard label, is considered more suitable for describing instances. The process of generating soft labels from hard labels is defined as label smoothing (LS). Classical LS methods focus on universal data mining tasks so that they ignore the valuable text features in text mining tasks. This paper presents a novel keyword-based LS method to automatically generate soft labels from hard labels via exploiting the relevance between labels and text instances. Generated soft labels are then incorporated into existing models as auxiliary targets during the training stage, capable of improving models without adding any extra parameters. Results of extensive experiments on text classification and large-scale text retrieval datasets demonstrate that soft labels generated by our method contain rich knowledge of text features, improving the performance of corresponding models under both balanced and unbalanced settings.

Understanding spatial and visual information is essential for a navigation agent who follows natural language instructions. The current Transformer-based VLN agents entangle the orientation and vision information, which limits the gain from the learning of each information source. In this paper, we design a neural agent with explicit Orientation and Vision modules. Those modules learn to ground spatial information and landmark mentions in the instructions to the visual environment more effectively. To strengthen the spatial reasoning and visual perception of the agent, we design specific pre-training tasks to feed and better utilize the corresponding modules in our final navigation model. We evaluate our approach on both Room2room (R2R) and Room4room (R4R) datasets and achieve the state of the art results on both benchmarks.

We present LINGUIST, a method for generating annotated data for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging (IC+ST), via fine-tuning AlexaTM 5B, a 5-billion-parameter multilingual sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, on a flexible instruction prompt. In a 10-shot novel intent setting for the SNIPS dataset, LINGUIST surpasses state-of-the-art approaches (Back-Translation and Example Extrapolation) by a wide margin, showing absolute improvement for the target intents of +1.9 points on IC Recall and +2.5 points on ST F1 Score. In the zero-shot cross-lingual setting of the mATIS++ dataset, LINGUIST out-performs a strong baseline of Machine Translation with Slot Alignment by +4.14 points absolute on ST F1 Score across 6 languages, while matching performance on IC. Finally, we verify our results on an internal large-scale multilingual dataset for conversational agent IC+ST and show significant improvements over a baseline which uses Back-Translation, Paraphrasing and Slot Catalog Resampling. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate instruction fine-tuning of a large-scale seq2seq model to control the outputs of multilingual intent- and slot-labeled data generation.

In weakly-supervised text classification, only label names act as sources of supervision. Predominant approaches to weakly-supervised text classification utilize a two-phase framework, where test samples are first assigned pseudo-labels and are then used to train a neural text classifier. In most previous work, the pseudo-labeling step is dependent on obtaining seed words that best capture the relevance of each class label. We present LIME, a framework for weakly-supervised text classification that entirely replaces the brittle seed-word generation process with entailment-based pseudo-classification. We find that combining weakly-supervised classification and textual entailment mitigates shortcomings of both, resulting in a more streamlined and effective classification pipeline. With just an off-the-shelf textual entailment model, LIME outperforms recent baselines in weakly-supervised text classification and achieves state-of-the-art in 4 benchmarks.

Question generation over knowledge bases (KBQG) aims at generating natural questions about a subgraph, which can be answered by a given answer entity. Existing KBQG models still face two main challenges: (1) Most models often focus on the most relevant part of the answer entity, while neglecting the rest of the subgraph. (2) There are a large number of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) predicates in real-world scenarios, which are hard to adapt for most KBQG models. To address these challenges, we propose LFKQG, a controlled generation framework for Question Generation over Knowledge Bases. (1) LFKQG employs a simple controlled generation method to generate the questions containing the critical entities in the subgraph, ensuring the question is relevant to the whole subgraph. (2) We propose an optimization strategy called local fine-tuning, which can make good use of the rich information hidden in the pre-trained model to improve the ability of the model to adapt the OOV predicates. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods significantly on three widely-used benchmark datasets SimpleQuestion, PathQuestions, and WebQuestions.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has received increasing attention recently. ABSA can be divided into multiple tasks according to the different extracted elements. Existing generative methods usually treat the output as a whole string rather than the combination of different elements and only focus on a single task at once. This paper proposes a unified generative multi-task framework that can solve multiple ABSA tasks by controlling the type of task prompts consisting of multiple element prompts. Further, the proposed approach can train on simple tasks and transfer to difficult tasks by assembling task prompts, like assembling Lego bricks. We conduct experiments on six ABSA tasks across multiple benchmarks. Our proposed multi-task approach achieves new state-of-the-art results in almost all tasks and competitive results in task transfer scenarios.

As digitized traditional cultural heritage documents have rapidly increased, resulting in an increased need for preservation and management, practical recognition of entities and typification of their classes has become essential. To achieve this, we propose KoCHET - a Korean cultural heritage corpus for the typical entity-related tasks, i.e., named entity recognition (NER), relation extraction (RE), and entity typing (ET). Advised by cultural heritage experts based on the data construction guidelines of government-affiliated organizations, KoCHET consists of respectively 112,362, 38,765, 113,198 examples for NER, RE, and ET tasks, covering all entity types related to Korean cultural heritage. Moreover, unlike the existing public corpora, modified redistribution can be allowed both domestic and foreign researchers. Our experimental results make the practical usability of KoCHET more valuable in terms of cultural heritage. We also provide practical insights of KoCHET in terms of statistical and linguistic analysis. Our corpus is freely available at https://github.com/Gyeongmin47/KoCHET.

A well-formulated benchmark plays a critical role in spurring advancements in the natural language processing (NLP) field, as it allows objective and precise evaluation of diverse models. As modern language models (LMs) have become more elaborate and sophisticated, more difficult benchmarks that require linguistic knowledge and reasoning have been proposed. However, most of these benchmarks only support English, and great effort is necessary to construct benchmarks for other low resource languages. To this end, we propose a new benchmark named Korean balanced evaluation of significant tasks (KoBEST), which consists of five Korean-language downstream tasks. Professional Korean linguists designed the tasks that require advanced Korean linguistic knowledge. Moreover, our data is purely annotated by humans and thoroughly reviewed to guarantee high data quality. We also provide baseline models and human performance results. Our dataset is available on the Huggingface.

Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) has been recently extended to multiple knowledge graph (KG) structures, initiating new research directions, e.g. static KGC, temporal KGC and few-shot KGC. Previous works often design KGC models closely coupled with specific graph structures, which inevitably results in two drawbacks: 1) structure-specific KGC models are mutually incompatible; 2) existing KGC methods are not adaptable to emerging KGs. In this paper, we propose KG-S2S, a Seq2Seq generative framework that could tackle different verbalizable graph structures by unifying the representation of KG facts into “flat” text, regardless of their original form. To remedy the KG structure information loss from the “flat” text, we further improve the input representations of entities and relations, and the inference algorithm in KG-S2S. Experiments on five benchmarks show that KG-S2S outperforms many competitive baselines, setting new state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we analyze KG-S2S’s ability on the different relations and the Non-entity Generations.

The billions, and sometimes even trillions, of parameters involved in pre-trained language models significantly hamper their deployment in resource-constrained devices and real-time applications. Knowledge distillation (KD) can transfer knowledge from the original model (i.e., teacher) into a compact model (i.e., student) to achieve model compression. However, previous KD methods have usually frozen the teacher and applied its immutable output feature maps as soft labels to guide the student’s training. Moreover, the goal of the teacher is to achieve the best performance on downstream tasks rather than knowledge transfer. Such a fixed architecture may limit the teacher’s teaching and student’s learning abilities. Herein, a knowledge distillation method with reptile meta-learning is proposed to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the student. The teacher can continuously meta-learn the student’s learning objective to adjust its parameters for maximizing the student’s performance throughout the distillation process. In this way, the teacher learns to teach, produces more suitable soft labels, and transfers more appropriate knowledge to the student, resulting in improved performance. Unlike previous KD using meta-learning, the proposed method only needs to calculate the first-order derivatives to update the teacher, leading to lower computational cost but better convergence. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark show the competitive performance achieved by the proposed method. For reproducibility, the code for this paper is available at: https://github.com/maxinge8698/ReptileDistil.

Event detection aims to detect events from the text by identifying and classifying event triggers (the most representative words). Most of the existing works rely heavily on complex downstream networks and require sufficient training data. Thus, those models may be structurally redundant and perform poorly when data is scarce. Prompt-based models are easy to build and are promising for few-shot tasks. However, current prompt-based methods may suffer from low precision because they have not introduced event-related semantic knowledge (e.g., part of speech, semantic correlation, etc.). To address these problems, this paper proposes a Knowledge-injected Prompt Tuning (KiPT) model. Specifically, the event detection task is formulated into a condition generation task. Then, knowledge-injected prompts are constructed using external knowledge bases, and a prompt tuning strategy is leveraged to optimize the prompts. Extensive experiments indicate that KiPT outperforms strong baselines, especially in few-shot scenarios.

Keyphrase Prediction (KP) is an established NLP task, aiming to yield representative phrases to summarize the main content of a given document. Despite major progress in recent years, existing works on KP have mainly focused on formal texts such as scientific papers or weblogs. The challenges of KP in informal-text domains are not yet fully studied. To this end, this work studies new challenges of KP in transcripts of videos, an understudied domain for KP that involves informal texts and non-cohesive presentation styles. A bottleneck for KP research in this domain involves the lack of high-quality and large-scale annotated data that hinders the development of advanced KP models. To address this issue, we introduce a large-scale manually-annotated KP dataset in the domain of live-stream video transcripts obtained by automatic speech recognition tools. Concretely, transcripts of 500+ hours of videos streamed on the behance.net platform are manually labeled with important keyphrases. Our analysis of the dataset reveals the challenging nature of KP in transcripts. Moreover, for the first time in KP, we demonstrate the idea of improving KP for long documents (i.e., transcripts) by feeding models with paragraph-level keyphrases, i.e., hierarchical extraction. To foster future research, we will publicly release the dataset and code.

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) aims at extracting relations between entities in a given document. Since different mention pairs may express different relations or even no relation, it is crucial to identify key mention pairs responsible for the entity-level relation labels. However, most recent studies treat different mentions equally while predicting the relations between entities, leading to sub-optimal performance. To this end, we propose a novel DocRE model called Key Mention pairs Guided Relation Extractor (KMGRE) to directly model mention-level relations, containing two modules: a mention-level relation extractor and a key instance classifier. These two modules could be iteratively optimized with an EM-based algorithm to enhance each other. We also propose a new method to solve the multi-label problem in optimizing the mention-level relation extractor. Experimental results on two public DocRE datasets demonstrate that the proposed model is effective and outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

We propose a new approach, Knowledge Distillation using Optimal Transport (KNOT), to distill the natural language semantic knowledge from multiple teacher networks to a student network. KNOT aims to train a (global) student model by learning to minimize the optimal transport cost of its assigned probability distribution over the labels to the weighted sum of probabilities predicted by the (local) teacher models, under the constraints that the student model does not have access to teacher models’ parameters or training data. To evaluate the quality of knowledge transfer, we introduce a new metric, Semantic Distance (SD), that measures semantic closeness between the predicted and ground truth label distributions. The proposed method shows improvements in the global model’s SD performance over the baseline across three NLP tasks while performing on par with Entropy-based distillation on standard accuracy and F1 metrics. The implementation pertaining to this work is publicly available at https://github.com/declare-lab/KNOT.

Designing in-depth educational questions is a time-consuming and cognitively demanding task. Therefore, it is intriguing to study how to build Question Generation (QG) models to automate the question creation process. However, existing QG datasets are not suitable for educational question generation because the questions are not real questions asked by humans during learning and can be solved by simply searching for information. To bridge this gap, we present KHANQ, a challenging dataset for educational question generation, containing 1,034 high-quality learner-generated questions seeking an in-depth understanding of the taught online courses in Khan Academy. Each data sample is carefully paraphrased and annotated as a triple of 1) Context: an independent paragraph on which the question is based; 2) Prompt: a text prompt for the question (e.g., the learner’s background knowledge); 3) Question: a deep question based on Context and coherent with Prompt. By conducting a human evaluation on the aspects of appropriateness, coverage, coherence, and complexity, we show that state-of-the-art QG models which perform well on shallow question generation datasets have difficulty in generating useful educational questions. This makes KHANQ a challenging testbed for educational question generation.

Learning the embeddings of knowledge graphs (KG) is vital in artificial intelligence, and can benefit various downstream applications, such as recommendation and question answering. In recent years, many research efforts have been proposed for knowledge graph embedding (KGE). However, most previous KGE methods ignore the semantic similarity between the related entities and entity-relation couples in different triples since they separately optimize each triple with the scoring function. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet efficient contrastive learning framework for tensor decomposition based (TDB) KGE, which can shorten the semantic distance of the related entities and entity-relation couples in different triples and thus improve the performance of KGE. We evaluate our proposed method on three standard KGE datasets: WN18RR, FB15k-237 and YAGO3-10. Our method can yield some new state-of-the-art results, achieving 51.2% MRR, 46.8% Hits@1 on the WN18RR dataset, 37.8% MRR, 28.6% Hits@1 on FB15k-237 dataset, and 59.1% MRR, 51.8% Hits@1 on the YAGO3-10 dataset.