Articles

AbstractWord order, an essential property of natural languages, is injected in Transformer-based neural language models using position encoding. However, recent experiments have shown that explicit position encoding is not always useful, since some models without such feature managed to achieve state-of-the art performance on some tasks. To understand better this …...

AbstractWhether the media faithfully communicate scientific information has long been a core issue to the science community. Automatically identifying paraphrased scientific findings could enable large-scale tracking and analysis of information changes in the science communication process, but this requires systems to understand the similarity between scientific information across multiple domains. …...

AbstractDemonstration-based learning has shown great potential in stimulating pretrained language models’ ability under limited data scenario. Simply augmenting the input with some demonstrations can significantly improve performance on few-shot NER. However, why such demonstrations are beneficial for the learning process remains unclear since there is no explicit alignment between the …...

AbstractWhile large pre-trained language models are powerful, their predictions often lack logical consistency across test inputs. For example, a state-of-the-art Macaw question-answering (QA) model answers Yes to Is a sparrow a bird? and Does a bird have feet? but answers No to Does a sparrow have feet?. To address this …...

AbstractExisting automatic story evaluation methods place a premium on story lexical level coherence, deviating from human preference. We go beyond this limitation by considering a novel Story Evaluation method that mimics human preference when judging a story, namely StoryER, which consists of three sub-tasks: Ranking, Rating and Reasoning.Given either a …...

AbstractRelation extraction (RE) has achieved remarkable progress with the help of pre-trained language models. However, existing RE models are usually incapable of handling two situations: implicit expressions and long-tail relation types, caused by language complexity and data sparsity. In this paper, we introduce a simple enhancement of RE using k …...

AbstractTransformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) mostly suffer from excessive overhead despite their advanced capacity. For resource-constrained devices, there is an urgent need for a spatially and temporally efficient model which retains the major capacity of PLMs. However, existing statically compressed models are unaware of the diverse complexities between input instances, …...

AbstractThis paper considers continual learning of large-scale pretrained neural machine translation model without accessing the previous training data or introducing model separation. We argue that the widely used regularization-based methods, which perform multi-objective learning with an auxiliary loss, suffer from the misestimate problem and cannot always achieve a good balance …...

AbstractMachine learning models usually assume i.i.d data during training and testing, but data and tasks in real world often change over time. To emulate the transient nature of real world, we propose a challenging but practical task: text classification in-the-wild, which introduces different non-stationary training/testing stages. Decomposing a complex task …...

AbstractThe rapid development of single-modal pre-training has prompted researchers to pay more attention to cross-modal pre-training methods. In this paper, we propose a unified-modal speech-unit-text pre-training model, SpeechUT, to connect the representations of a speech encoder and a text decoder with a shared unit encoder. Leveraging hidden-unit as an interface …...

AbstractMulti-hop knowledge graph (KG) reasoning has been widely studied in recent years to provide interpretable predictions on missing links with evidential paths. Most previous works use reinforcement learning (RL) based methods that learn to navigate the path towards the target entity. However, these methods suffer from slow and poor convergence, …...

AbstractThe construction of open-domain dialogue systems requires high-quality dialogue datasets. The dialogue data admits a wide variety of responses for a given dialogue history, especially responses with different semantics. However, collecting high-quality such a dataset in most scenarios is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation …...

AbstractTraining language models to learn from human instructions for zero-shot cross-task generalization has attracted much attention in NLP communities. Recently, instruction tuning (IT), which fine-tunes a pre-trained language model on a massive collection of tasks described via human-craft instructions, has been shown effective in instruction learning for unseen tasks. However, …...

AbstractIn this study, we propose a Bayesian model that can jointly estimate the number of senses of words and their changes through time. The model combines a dynamic topic model on Gaussian Markov random fields with a logistic stick-breaking process that realizes Dirichlet process. In the experiments, we evaluated the …...

AbstractMost computational models of dependency syntax consist of distributions over spanning trees. However, the majority of dependency treebanks require that every valid dependency tree has a single edge coming out of the ROOT node, a constraint that is not part of the definition of spanning trees. For this reason all …...

AbstractIn this paper, we propose a new task of sub-event generation for an unseen process to evaluate the understanding of the coherence of sub-event actions and objects. To solve the problem, we design SubeventWriter, a sub-event sequence generation framework with a coherence controller. Given an unseen process, the framework can …...

AbstractPart-of-Speech (POS) tagging is an important component of the NLP pipeline, but many low-resource languages lack labeled data for training. An established method for training a POS tagger in such a scenario is to create a labeled training set by transferring from high-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a …...

AbstractMost evaluations of attribution methods focus on the English language. In this work, we present a multilingual approach for evaluating attribution methods for the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task in terms of faithfulness and plausibility. First, we introduce a novel cross-lingual strategy to measure faithfulness based on word alignments, which …...

AbstractIn this paper, we present the results of a manual classification of all ethical consideration sections for ACL 2021. We also compare how many papers had an ethics consideration section per track and per world region in ACL 2021. We classified papers according to the ethical issues covered (research benefits, …...

AbstractRelation prediction in knowledge graphs (KGs) aims at predicting missing relations in incomplete triples, whereas the dominant embedding paradigm has a restriction on handling unseen entities during testing. In the real-world scenario, the inductive setting is more common because entities in the training process are finite. Previous methods capture an …...