TACL 2022 论文列表

Common designs of model evaluation typically focus on monolingual settings, where different models are compared according to their performance on a single data set that is assumed to be representative of all possible data for the task at hand. While this may be reasonable for a large data set, this assumption is difficult to maintain in low-resource scenarios, where artifacts of the data collection can yield data sets that are outliers, potentially making conclusions about model performance coincidental. To address these concerns, we investigate model generalizability in crosslinguistic low-resource scenarios. Using morphological segmentation as the test case, we compare three broad classes of models with different parameterizations, taking data from 11 languages across 6 language families. In each experimental setting, we evaluate all models on a first data set, then examine their performance consistency when introducing new randomly sampled data sets with the same size and when applying the trained models to unseen test sets of varying sizes. The results demonstrate that the extent of model generalization depends on the characteristics of the data set, and does not necessarily rely heavily on the data set size. Among the characteristics that we studied, the ratio of morpheme overlap and that of the average number of morphemes per word between the training and test sets are the two most prominent factors. Our findings suggest that future work should adopt random sampling to construct data sets with different sizes in order to make more responsible claims about model evaluation.

Accurately extracting structured content from PDFs is a critical first step for NLP over scientific papers. Recent work has improved extraction accuracy by incorporating elementary layout information, for example, each token’s 2D position on the page, into language model pretraining. We introduce new methods that explicitly model VIsual LAyout (VILA) groups, that is, text lines or text blocks, to further improve performance. In our I-VILA approach, we show that simply inserting special tokens denoting layout group boundaries into model inputs can lead to a 1.9% Macro F1 improvement in token classification. In the H-VILA approach, we show that hierarchical encoding of layout-groups can result in up to 47% inference time reduction with less than 0.8% Macro F1 loss. Unlike prior layout-aware approaches, our methods do not require expensive additional pretraining, only fine-tuning, which we show can reduce training cost by up to 95%. Experiments are conducted on a newly curated evaluation suite, S2-VLUE, that unifies existing automatically labeled datasets and includes a new dataset of manual annotations covering diverse papers from 19 scientific disciplines. Pre-trained weights, benchmark datasets, and source code are available at https://github.com/allenai/VILA.

While many methods purport to explain predictions by highlighting salient features, what aims these explanations serve and how they ought to be evaluated often go unstated. In this work, we introduce a framework to quantify the value of explanations via the accuracy gains that they confer on a student model trained to simulate a teacher model. Crucially, the explanations are available to the student during training, but are not available at test time. Compared with prior proposals, our approach is less easily gamed, enabling principled, automatic, model-agnostic evaluation of attributions. Using our framework, we compare numerous attribution methods for text classification and question answering, and observe quantitative differences that are consistent (to a moderate to high degree) across different student model architectures and learning strategies.1

Text augmentation is an effective technique in alleviating overfitting in NLP tasks. In existing methods, text augmentation and downstream tasks are mostly performed separately. As a result, the augmented texts may not be optimal to train the downstream model. To address this problem, we propose a three-level optimization framework to perform text augmentation and the downstream task end-to- end. The augmentation model is trained in a way tailored to the downstream task. Our framework consists of three learning stages. A text summarization model is trained to perform data augmentation at the first stage. Each summarization example is associated with a weight to account for its domain difference with the text classification data. At the second stage, we use the model trained at the first stage to perform text augmentation and train a text classification model on the augmented texts. At the third stage, we evaluate the text classification model trained at the second stage and update weights of summarization examples by minimizing the validation loss. These three stages are performed end-to-end. We evaluate our method on several text classification datasets where the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/Sai-Ashish/End-to-End-Text-Augmentation.

We introduce the Probabilistic Worldbuilding Model (PWM), a new fully symbolic Bayesian model of semantic parsing and reasoning, as a first step in a research program toward more domain- and task-general NLU and AI. Humans create internal mental models of their observations that greatly aid in their ability to understand and reason about a large variety of problems. In PWM, the meanings of sentences, acquired facts about the world, and intermediate steps in reasoning are all expressed in a human-readable formal language, with the design goal of interpretability. PWM is Bayesian, designed specifically to be able to generalize to new domains and new tasks. We derive and implement an inference algorithm that reads sentences by parsing and abducing updates to its latent world model that capture the semantics of those sentences, and evaluate it on two out-of-domain question-answering datasets: (1) ProofWriter and (2) a new dataset we call FictionalGeoQA, designed to be more representative of real language but still simple enough to focus on evaluating reasoning ability, while being robust against heuristics. Our method outperforms baselines on both, thereby demonstrating its value as a proof-of-concept.

Persuasion games are fundamental in economics and AI research and serve as the basis for important applications. However, work on this setup assumes communication with stylized messages that do not consist of rich human language. In this paper we consider a repeated sender (expert) – receiver (decision maker) game, where the sender is fully informed about the state of the world and aims to persuade the receiver to accept a deal by sending one of several possible natural language reviews. We design an automatic expert that plays this repeated game, aiming to achieve the maximal payoff. Our expert is implemented within the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm, with deep learning models that exploit behavioral and linguistic signals in order to predict the next action of the decision maker, and the future payoff of the expert given the state of the game and a candidate review. We demonstrate the superiority of our expert over strong baselines and its adaptability to different decision makers and potential proposed deals.1

Most widely used pre-trained language models operate on sequences of tokens corresponding to word or subword units. By comparison, token-free models that operate directly on raw text (bytes or characters) have many benefits: They can process text in any language out of the box, they are more robust to noise, and they minimize technical debt by removing complex and error-prone text preprocessing pipelines. Because byte or character sequences are longer than token sequences, past work on token-free models has often introduced new model architectures designed to amortize the cost of operating directly on raw text. In this paper, we show that a standard Transformer architecture can be used with minimal modifications to process byte sequences. We characterize the trade-offs in terms of parameter count, training FLOPs, and inference speed, and show that byte-level models are competitive with their token-level counterparts. We also demonstrate that byte-level models are significantly more robust to noise and perform better on tasks that are sensitive to spelling and pronunciation. As part of our contribution, we release a new set of pre-trained byte-level Transformer models based on the T5 architecture, as well as all code and data used in our experiments.1

We present mGENRE, a sequence-to- sequence system for the Multilingual Entity Linking (MEL) problem—the task of resolving language-specific mentions to a multilingual Knowledge Base (KB). For a mention in a given language, mGENRE predicts the name of the target entity left-to-right, token-by-token in an autoregressive fashion. The autoregressive formulation allows us to effectively cross-encode mention string and entity names to capture more interactions than the standard dot product between mention and entity vectors. It also enables fast search within a large KB even for mentions that do not appear in mention tables and with no need for large-scale vector indices. While prior MEL works use a single representation for each entity, we match against entity names of as many languages as possible, which allows exploiting language connections between source input and target name. Moreover, in a zero-shot setting on languages with no training data at all, mGENRE treats the target language as a latent variable that is marginalized at prediction time. This leads to over 50% improvements in average accuracy. We show the efficacy of our approach through extensive evaluation including experiments on three popular MEL benchmarks where we establish new state-of-the-art results. Source code available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/GENRE.

Many facts come with an expiration date, from the name of the President to the basketball team Lebron James plays for. However, most language models (LMs) are trained on snapshots of data collected at a specific moment in time. This can limit their utility, especially in the closed-book setting where the pretraining corpus must contain the facts the model should memorize. We introduce a diagnostic dataset aimed at probing LMs for factual knowledge that changes over time and highlight problems with LMs at either end of the spectrum—those trained on specific slices of temporal data, as well as those trained on a wide range of temporal data. To mitigate these problems, we propose a simple technique for jointly modeling text with its timestamp. This improves memorization of seen facts from the training time period, as well as calibration on predictions about unseen facts from future time periods. We also show that models trained with temporal context can be efficiently “refreshed” as new data arrives, without the need for retraining from scratch.

We introduce a neuro-symbolic natural logic framework based on reinforcement learning with introspective revision. The model samples and rewards specific reasoning paths through policy gradient, in which the introspective revision algorithm modifies intermediate symbolic reasoning steps to discover reward-earning operations as well as leverages external knowledge to alleviate spurious reasoning and training inefficiency. The framework is supported by properly designed local relation models to avoid input entangling, which helps ensure the interpretability of the proof paths. The proposed model has built-in interpretability and shows superior capability in monotonicity inference, systematic generalization, and interpretability, compared with previous models on the existing datasets.

Pretrained contextualized language models such as BERT and T5 have established a new state-of-the-art for ad-hoc search. However, it is not yet well understood why these methods are so effective, what makes some variants more effective than others, and what pitfalls they may have. We present a new comprehensive framework for Analyzing the Behavior of Neural IR ModeLs (ABNIRML), which includes new types of diagnostic probes that allow us to test several characteristics—such as writing styles, factuality, sensitivity to paraphrasing and word order—that are not addressed by previous techniques. To demonstrate the value of the framework, we conduct an extensive empirical study that yields insights into the factors that contribute to the neural model’s gains, and identify potential unintended biases the models exhibit. Some of our results confirm conventional wisdom, for example, that recent neural ranking models rely less on exact term overlap with the query, and instead leverage richer linguistic information, evidenced by their higher sensitivity to word and sentence order. Other results are more surprising, such as that some models (e.g., T5 and ColBERT) are biased towards factually correct (rather than simply relevant) texts. Further, some characteristics vary even for the same base language model, and other characteristics can appear due to random variations during model training.1

This paper presents a new task of predicting the coverage of a text document for relation extraction (RE): Does the document contain many relational tuples for a given entity? Coverage predictions are useful in selecting the best documents for knowledge base construction with large input corpora. To study this problem, we present a dataset of 31,366 diverse documents for 520 entities. We analyze the correlation of document coverage with features like length, entity mention frequency, Alexa rank, language complexity, and information retrieval scores. Each of these features has only moderate predictive power. We employ methods combining features with statistical models like TF-IDF and language models like BERT. The model combining features and BERT, HERB, achieves an F1 score of up to 46%. We demonstrate the utility of coverage predictions on two use cases: KB construction and claim refutation.

Fact-checking has become increasingly important due to the speed with which both information and misinformation can spread in the modern media ecosystem. Therefore, researchers have been exploring how fact-checking can be automated, using techniques based on natural language processing, machine learning, knowledge representation, and databases to automatically predict the veracity of claims. In this paper, we survey automated fact-checking stemming from natural language processing, and discuss its connections to related tasks and disciplines. In this process, we present an overview of existing datasets and models, aiming to unify the various definitions given and identify common concepts. Finally, we highlight challenges for future research.

In the summarization domain, a key requirement for summaries is to be factually consistent with the input document. Previous work has found that natural language inference (NLI) models do not perform competitively when applied to inconsistency detection. In this work, we revisit the use of NLI for inconsistency detection, finding that past work suffered from a mismatch in input granularity between NLI datasets (sentence-level), and inconsistency detection (document level). We provide a highly effective and light-weight method called SummaCConv that enables NLI models to be successfully used for this task by segmenting documents into sentence units and aggregating scores between pairs of sentences. We furthermore introduce a new benchmark called SummaC (Summary Consistency) which consists of six large inconsistency detection datasets. On this dataset, SummaCConv obtains state-of-the-art results with a balanced accuracy of 74.4%, a 5% improvement compared with prior work.

We present Samanantar, the largest publicly available parallel corpora collection for Indic languages. The collection contains a total of 49.7 million sentence pairs between English and 11 Indic languages (from two language families). Specifically, we compile 12.4 million sentence pairs from existing, publicly available parallel corpora, and additionally mine 37.4 million sentence pairs from the Web, resulting in a 4× increase. We mine the parallel sentences from the Web by combining many corpora, tools, and methods: (a) Web-crawled monolingual corpora, (b) document OCR for extracting sentences from scanned documents, (c) multilingual representation models for aligning sentences, and (d) approximate nearest neighbor search for searching in a large collection of sentences. Human evaluation of samples from the newly mined corpora validate the high quality of the parallel sentences across 11 languages. Further, we extract 83.4 million sentence pairs between all 55 Indic language pairs from the English-centric parallel corpus using English as the pivot language. We trained multilingual NMT models spanning all these languages on Samanantar which outperform existing models and baselines on publicly available benchmarks, such as FLORES, establishing the utility of Samanantar. Our data and models are available publicly at Samanantar and we hope they will help advance research in NMT and multilingual NLP for Indic languages.

Discourse parsing has been studied for decades. However, it still remains challenging to utilize discourse parsing for real-world applications because the parsing accuracy degrades significantly on out-of-domain text. In this paper, we report and discuss the effectiveness and limitations of bootstrapping methods for adapting modern BERT-based discourse dependency parsers to out-of-domain text without relying on additional human supervision. Specifically, we investigate self-training, co-training, tri-training, and asymmetric tri-training of graph-based and transition-based discourse dependency parsing models, as well as confidence measures and sample selection criteria in two adaptation scenarios: monologue adaptation between scientific disciplines and dialogue genre adaptation. We also release COVID-19 Discourse Dependency Treebank (COVID19-DTB), a new manually annotated resource for discourse dependency parsing of biomedical paper abstracts. The experimental results show that bootstrapping is significantly and consistently effective for unsupervised domain adaptation of discourse dependency parsing, but the low coverage of accurately predicted pseudo labels is a bottleneck for further improvement. We show that active learning can mitigate this limitation.

Recent efforts to create challenge benchmarks that test the abilities of natural language understanding models have largely depended on human annotations. In this work, we introduce the “Break, Perturb, Build” (BPB) framework for automatic reasoning-oriented perturbation of question-answer pairs. BPB represents a question by decomposing it into the reasoning steps that are required to answer it, symbolically perturbs the decomposition, and then generates new question-answer pairs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BPB by creating evaluation sets for three reading comprehension (RC) benchmarks, generating thousands of high-quality examples without human intervention. We evaluate a range of RC models on our evaluation sets, which reveals large performance gaps on generated examples compared to the original data. Moreover, symbolic perturbations enable fine-grained analysis of the strengths and limitations of models. Last, augmenting the training data with examples generated by BPB helps close the performance gaps, without any drop on the original data distribution.

Majority voting and averaging are common approaches used to resolve annotator disagreements and derive single ground truth labels from multiple annotations. However, annotators may systematically disagree with one another, often reflecting their individual biases and values, especially in the case of subjective tasks such as detecting affect, aggression, and hate speech. Annotator disagreements may capture important nuances in such tasks that are often ignored while aggregating annotations to a single ground truth. In order to address this, we investigate the efficacy of multi-annotator models. In particular, our multi-task based approach treats predicting each annotators’ judgements as separate subtasks, while sharing a common learned representation of the task. We show that this approach yields same or better performance than aggregating labels in the data prior to training across seven different binary classification tasks. Our approach also provides a way to estimate uncertainty in predictions, which we demonstrate better correlate with annotation disagreements than traditional methods. Being able to model uncertainty is especially useful in deployment scenarios where knowing when not to make a prediction is important.

Pipelined NLP systems have largely been superseded by end-to-end neural modeling, yet nearly all commonly used models still require an explicit tokenization step. While recent tokenization approaches based on data-derived subword lexicons are less brittle than manually engineered tokenizers, these techniques are not equally suited to all languages, and the use of any fixed vocabulary may limit a model’s ability to adapt. In this paper, we present Canine, a neural encoder that operates directly on character sequences—without explicit tokenization or vocabulary—and a pre-training strategy that operates either directly on characters or optionally uses subwords as a soft inductive bias. To use its finer-grained input effectively and efficiently, Canine combines downsampling, which reduces the input sequence length, with a deep transformer stack, which encodes context. Canine outperforms a comparable mBert model by 5.7 F1 on TyDi QA, a challenging multilingual benchmark, despite having fewer model parameters.