NAACL 2021 论文列表

Representation learning approaches for knowledge graphs have been mostly designed for static data. However, many knowledge graphs involve evolving data, e.g., the fact (The President of the United States is Barack Obama) is valid only from 2009 to 2017. This introduces important challenges for knowledge representation learning since the knowledge graphs change over time. In this paper, we present a novel time-aware knowledge graph embebdding approach, TeLM, which performs 4th-order tensor factorization of a Temporal knowledge graph using a Linear temporal regularizer and Multivector embeddings. Moreover, we investigate the effect of the temporal dataset’s time granularity on temporal knowledge graph completion. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed models trained with the linear temporal regularizer achieve the state-of-the-art performances on link prediction over four well-established temporal knowledge graph completion benchmarks.

Template filling is generally tackled by a pipeline of two separate supervised systems – one for role-filler extraction and another for template/event recognition. Since pipelines consider events in isolation, they can suffer from error propagation. We introduce a framework based on end-to-end generative transformers for this task (i.e., GTT). It naturally models the dependence between entities both within a single event and across the multiple events described in a document. Experiments demonstrate that this framework substantially outperforms pipeline-based approaches, and other neural end-to-end baselines that do not model between-event dependencies. We further show that our framework specifically improves performance on documents containing multiple events.

Building automatic technical support system is an important yet challenge task. Conceptually, to answer a user question on a technical forum, a human expert has to first retrieve relevant documents, and then read them carefully to identify the answer snippet. Despite huge success the researchers have achieved in coping with general domain question answering (QA), much less attentions have been paid for investigating technical QA. Specifically, existing methods suffer from several unique challenges (i) the question and answer rarely overlaps substantially and (ii) very limited data size. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of deep transfer learning to effectively address technical QA across tasks and domains. To this end, we present an adjustable joint learning approach for document retrieval and reading comprehension tasks. Our experiments on the TechQA demonstrates superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Hierarchical multi-label text classification (HMTC) aims to tag each document with a set of classes from a taxonomic class hierarchy. Most existing HMTC methods train classifiers using massive human-labeled documents, which are often too costly to obtain in real-world applications. In this paper, we explore to conduct HMTC based on only class surface names as supervision signals. We observe that to perform HMTC, human experts typically first pinpoint a few most essential classes for the document as its “core classes”, and then check core classes’ ancestor classes to ensure the coverage. To mimic human experts, we propose a novel HMTC framework, named TaxoClass. Specifically, TaxoClass (1) calculates document-class similarities using a textual entailment model, (2) identifies a document’s core classes and utilizes confident core classes to train a taxonomy-enhanced classifier, and (3) generalizes the classifier via multi-label self-training. Our experiments on two challenging datasets show TaxoClass can achieve around 0.71 Example-F1 using only class names, outperforming the best previous method by 25%.

We present a simple yet effective Targeted Adversarial Training (TAT) algorithm to improve adversarial training for natural language understanding. The key idea is to introspect current mistakes and prioritize adversarial training steps to where the model errs the most. Experiments show that TAT can significantly improve accuracy over standard adversarial training on GLUE and attain new state-of-the-art zero-shot results on XNLI. Our code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

Opinion target extraction and opinion term extraction are two fundamental tasks in Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). Many recent works on ABSA focus on Target-oriented Opinion Words (or Terms) Extraction (TOWE), which aims at extracting the corresponding opinion words for a given opinion target. TOWE can be further applied to Aspect-Opinion Pair Extraction (AOPE) which aims at extracting aspects (i.e., opinion targets) and opinion terms in pairs. In this paper, we propose Target-Specified sequence labeling with Multi-head Self-Attention (TSMSA) for TOWE, in which any pre-trained language model with multi-head self-attention can be integrated conveniently. As a case study, we also develop a Multi-Task structure named MT-TSMSA for AOPE by combining our TSMSA with an aspect and opinion term extraction module. Experimental results indicate that TSMSA outperforms the benchmark methods on TOWE significantly; meanwhile, the performance of MT-TSMSA is similar or even better than state-of-the-art AOPE baseline models.

The goal of stance detection is to identify whether the author of a text is in favor of, neutral or against a specific target. Despite substantial progress on this task, one of the remaining challenges is the scarcity of annotations. Data augmentation is commonly used to address annotation scarcity by generating more training samples. However, the augmented sentences that are generated by existing methods are either less diversified or inconsistent with the given target and stance label. In this paper, we formulate the data augmentation of stance detection as a conditional masked language modeling task and augment the dataset by predicting the masked word conditioned on both its context and the auxiliary sentence that contains target and label information. Moreover, we propose another simple yet effective method that generates target-aware sentence by replacing a target mention with the other. Experimental results show that our proposed methods significantly outperforms previous augmentation methods on 11 targets.

Existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) are often computationally expensive in inference, making them impractical in various resource-limited real-world applications. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic token reduction approach to accelerate PLMs’ inference, named TR-BERT, which could flexibly adapt the layer number of each token in inference to avoid redundant calculation. Specially, TR-BERT formulates the token reduction process as a multi-step token selection problem and automatically learns the selection strategy via reinforcement learning. The experimental results on several downstream NLP tasks show that TR-BERT is able to speed up BERT by 2-5 times to satisfy various performance demands. Moreover, TR-BERT can also achieve better performance with less computation in a suite of long-text tasks since its token-level layer number adaption greatly accelerates the self-attention operation in PLMs. The source code and experiment details of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/TR-BERT.

In this paper, we focus on the problem of keyword and document matching by considering different relevance levels. In our recommendation system, different people follow different hot keywords with interest. We need to attach documents to each keyword and then distribute the documents to people who follow these keywords. The ideal documents should have the same topic with the keyword, which we call topic-aware relevance. In other words, topic-aware relevance documents are better than partially-relevance ones in this application. However, previous tasks never define topic-aware relevance clearly. To tackle this problem, we define a three-level relevance in keyword-document matching task: topic-aware relevance, partially-relevance and irrelevance. To capture the relevance between the short keyword and the document at above-mentioned three levels, we should not only combine the latent topic of the document with its deep neural representation, but also model complex interactions between the keyword and the document. To this end, we propose a Two-stage Interaction and Topic-Aware text matching model (TITA). In terms of “topic-aware”, we introduce neural topic model to analyze the topic of the document and then use it to further encode the document. In terms of “two-stage interaction”, we propose two successive stages to model complex interactions between the keyword and the document. Extensive experiments reveal that TITA outperforms other well-designed baselines and shows excellent performance in our recommendation system.

Existing work on tabular representation-learning jointly models tables and associated text using self-supervised objective functions derived from pretrained language models such as BERT. While this joint pretraining improves tasks involving paired tables and text (e.g., answering questions about tables), we show that it underperforms on tasks that operate over tables without any associated text (e.g., populating missing cells). We devise a simple pretraining objective (corrupt cell detection) that learns exclusively from tabular data and reaches the state-of-the-art on a suite of table-based prediction tasks. Unlike competing approaches, our model (TABBIE) provides embeddings of all table substructures (cells, rows, and columns), and it also requires far less compute to train. A qualitative analysis of our model’s learned cell, column, and row representations shows that it understands complex table semantics and numerical trends.

We release a new benchmark for lexical substitution, the task of finding appropriate substitutes for a target word in a context. For writing, lexical substitution systems can assist humans by suggesting words that humans cannot easily think of. However, existing benchmarks depend on human recall as the only source of data, and therefore lack coverage of the substitutes that would be most helpful to humans. Furthermore, annotators often provide substitutes of low quality, which are not actually appropriate in the given context. We collect higher-coverage and higher-quality data by framing lexical substitution as a classification problem, guided by the intuition that it is easier for humans to judge the appropriateness of candidate substitutes than conjure them from memory. To this end, we use a context-free thesaurus to produce candidates and rely on human judgement to determine contextual appropriateness. Compared to the previous largest benchmark, our Swords benchmark has 3x as many substitutes per target word for the same level of quality, and its substitutes are 1.4x more appropriate (based on human judgement) for the same number of substitutes.

We present a tool that provides automated feedback to students studying Spanish writing. The feedback is given for four categories: topic development, coherence, writing conventions, and essay organization. The tool is made freely available via a Google Docs add-on. A small user study with third-level students in Mexico shows that students found the tool generally helpful and that most of them plan to continue using it as they work to improve their writing skills.

Unsupervised clustering aims at discovering the semantic categories of data according to some distance measured in the representation space. However, different categories often overlap with each other in the representation space at the beginning of the learning process, which poses a significant challenge for distance-based clustering in achieving good separation between different categories. To this end, we propose Supporting Clustering with Contrastive Learning (SCCL) – a novel framework to leverage contrastive learning to promote better separation. We assess the performance of SCCL on short text clustering and show that SCCL significantly advances the state-of-the-art results on most benchmark datasets with 3%-11% improvement on Accuracy and 4%-15% improvement on Normalized Mutual Information. Furthermore, our quantitative analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of SCCL in leveraging the strengths of both bottom-up instance discrimination and top-down clustering to achieve better intra-cluster and inter-cluster distances when evaluated with the ground truth cluster labels.

Previous pre-neural work on structured prediction has produced very effective supervised clustering algorithms using linear classifiers, e.g., structured SVM or perceptron. However, these cannot exploit the representation learning ability of neural networks, which would make supervised clustering even more powerful, i.e., general clustering patterns can be learned automatically. In this paper, we design neural networks based on latent structured prediction loss and Transformer models to approach supervised clustering. We tested our methods on the task of automatically recreating categories of intents from publicly available question intent corpora. The results show that our approach delivers 95.65% of F1, outperforming the state of the art by 17.24%.

We present the first supertagging-based parser for linear context-free rewriting systems (LCFRS). It utilizes neural classifiers and outperforms previous LCFRS-based parsers in both accuracy and parsing speed by a wide margin. Our results keep up with the best (general) discontinuous parsers, particularly the scores for discontinuous constituents establish a new state of the art. The heart of our approach is an efficient lexicalization procedure which induces a lexical LCFRS from any discontinuous treebank. We describe a modification to usual chart-based LCFRS parsing that accounts for supertagging and introduce a procedure that transforms lexical LCFRS derivations into equivalent parse trees of the original treebank. Our approach is evaluated on the English Discontinuous Penn Treebank and the German treebanks Negra and Tiger.

Recent psychological studies indicate that individuals exhibiting suicidal ideation increasingly turn to social media rather than mental health practitioners. Personally contextualizing the buildup of such ideation is critical for accurate identification of users at risk. In this work, we propose a framework jointly leveraging a user’s emotional history and social information from a user’s neighborhood in a network to contextualize the interpretation of the latest tweet of a user on Twitter. Reflecting upon the scale-free nature of social network relationships, we propose the use of Hyperbolic Graph Convolution Networks, in combination with the Hawkes process to learn the historical emotional spectrum of a user in a time-sensitive manner. Our system significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on this task, showing the benefits of both socially and personally contextualized representations.

Text style transfer aims to controllably generate text with targeted stylistic changes while maintaining core meaning from the source sentence constant. Many of the existing style transfer benchmarks primarily focus on individual high-level semantic changes (e.g. positive to negative), which enable controllability at a high level but do not offer fine-grained control involving sentence structure, emphasis, and content of the sentence. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale benchmark, StylePTB, with (1) paired sentences undergoing 21 fine-grained stylistic changes spanning atomic lexical, syntactic, semantic, and thematic transfers of text, as well as (2) compositions of multiple transfers which allow modeling of fine-grained stylistic changes as building blocks for more complex, high-level transfers. By benchmarking existing methods on StylePTB, we find that they struggle to model fine-grained changes and have an even more difficult time composing multiple styles. As a result, StylePTB brings novel challenges that we hope will encourage future research in controllable text style transfer, compositional models, and learning disentangled representations. Solving these challenges would present important steps towards controllable text generation.

Learning to capture text-table alignment is essential for tasks like text-to-SQL. A model needs to correctly recognize natural language references to columns and values and to ground them in the given database schema. In this paper, we present a novel weakly supervised Structure-Grounded pretraining framework (STRUG) for text-to-SQL that can effectively learn to capture text-table alignment based on a parallel text-table corpus. We identify a set of novel pretraining tasks: column grounding, value grounding and column-value mapping, and leverage them to pretrain a text-table encoder. Additionally, to evaluate different methods under more realistic text-table alignment settings, we create a new evaluation set Spider-Realistic based on Spider dev set with explicit mentions of column names removed, and adopt eight existing text-to-SQL datasets for cross-database evaluation. STRUG brings significant improvement over BERTLARGE in all settings. Compared with existing pretraining methods such as GRAPPA, STRUG achieves similar performance on Spider, and outperforms all baselines on more realistic sets. All the code and data used in this work will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.

Abstractive conversation summarization has received much attention recently. However, these generated summaries often suffer from insufficient, redundant, or incorrect content, largely due to the unstructured and complex characteristics of human-human interactions. To this end, we propose to explicitly model the rich structures in conversations for more precise and accurate conversation summarization, by first incorporating discourse relations between utterances and action triples (“who-doing-what”) in utterances through structured graphs to better encode conversations, and then designing a multi-granularity decoder to generate summaries by combining all levels of information. Experiments show that our proposed models outperform state-of-the-art methods and generalize well in other domains in terms of both automatic evaluations and human judgments. We have publicly released our code at https://github.com/GT-SALT/Structure-Aware-BART.