Articles

AbstractWe propose the Detailed Outline Control (DOC) framework for improving long-range plot coherence when automatically generating several-thousand-word-long stories. DOC consists of two complementary components: a detailed outliner and a detailed controller. The detailed outliner creates a more detailed, hierarchically structured outline, shifting creative burden from the main drafting procedure to …...

AbstractEllipsis is a linguistic phenomenon characterized by the omission of one or more sentence elements. Solving such a linguistic construction is not a trivial issue in natural language processing since it involves the retrieval of non-overtly expressed verbal material, which might in turn require the model to integrate human-like syntactic …...

AbstractZero pronouns (ZPs) are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages (e.g. Chinese, Hungarian, and Hindi), but should be recalled in non-pro-drop languages (e.g. English). This phenomenon has been studied extensively in machine translation (MT), as it poses a significant challenge for MT systems due to the difficulty in determining the correct …...

AbstractThis work explores the feasibility of eliciting knowledge from language models (LMs) to decode symbolism, recognizing something (e.g.,roses) as a stand-in for another (e.g., love). We present our evaluative framework, Symbolism Analysis (SymbA), which compares LMs (e.g., RoBERTa, GPT-J) on different types of symbolism and analyze the outcomes along multiple …...

AbstractWe investigate response generation for multi-turn dialogue in generative chatbots. Existing generative modelsbased on RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks) usually employ the last hidden state to summarize the history, which makesmodels unable to capture the subtle variability observed in different dialogues and cannot distinguish the differencesbetween dialogues that are similar in …...

AbstractHumans often make creative use of words to expressnovel senses. A long-standing effort in natural language processing hasbeen focusing on word sense disambiguation (WSD), but little has been explored about how the sense inventory of a word may be extended toward novel meanings. We present a paradigm of word sense …...

AbstractThe potential choices for news article headlines are enormous, and finding the right balance between conveying the essential message and capturing the reader’s attention is key to effective headlining. However, presenting the same news headline to all readers is a suboptimal strategy, because it does not take into account the …...

AbstractIn order to build self-consistent personalized dialogue agents, previous research has mostly focused on textual persona that delivers personal facts or personalities. However, to fully describe the multi-faceted nature of persona, image modality can help better reveal the speaker’s personal characteristics and experiences in episodic memory (Rubin et al., 2003; …...

AbstractLanguage models with the Transformers structure have shown great performance in natural language processing. However, there still poses problems when fine-tuning pre-trained language models on downstream tasks, such as over-fitting or representation collapse. In this work, we propose HyPe, a simple yet effective fine-tuning technique to alleviate such problems by …...

AbstractLong-form question answering (LFQA) enables answering a wide range of questions, but its flexibility poses enormous challenges for evaluation. We perform the first targeted study of the evaluation of long-form answers, covering both human and automatic evaluation practices. We hire domain experts in seven areas to provide preference judgments over …...

AbstractDespite the extensive applications of relation extraction (RE) tasks in various domains, little has been explored in the historical context, which contains promising data across hundreds and thousands of years. To promote the historical RE research, we present HistRED constructed from Yeonhaengnok. Yeonhaengnok is a collection of records originally written …...

AbstractControlled generation refers to the problem of creating text that contains stylistic or semantic attributes of interest. Many approaches reduce this problem to training a predictor of the desired attribute. For example, researchers hoping to deploy a large language model to produce non-toxic content may use a toxicity classifier to …...

AbstractAutomatic image captioning evaluation is critical for benchmarking and promoting advances in image captioning research. Existing metrics only provide a single score to measure caption qualities, which are less explainable and informative. Instead, we humans can easily identify the problems of captions in details, e.g., which words are inaccurate and …...

AbstractInteractive semantic parsing based on natural language (NL) feedback, where users provide feedback to correct the parser mistakes, has emerged as a more practical scenario than the traditional one-shot semantic parsing. However, prior work has heavily relied on human-annotated feedback data to train the interactive semantic parser, which is prohibitively …...

AbstractWe propose using automatically generated natural language definitions of contextualised word usages as interpretable word and word sense representations. Given a collection of usage examples for a target word, and the corresponding data-driven usage clusters (i.e., word senses), a definition is generated for each usage with a specialised Flan-T5 language …...

AbstractThis paper explores how Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) learn representations of phonological phenomena. We analyze how GANs encode contrastive and non-contrastive nasality in French and English vowels by applying the ciwGAN architecture (Begus, 2021). Begus claims that ciwGAN encodes linguistically meaningful representations with categorical variables in its latent space and …...

AbstractEstablishing retrieval-based dialogue systems that can select appropriate responses from the pre-built index has gained increasing attention. Recent common practice is to construct a two-stage pipeline with a fast retriever (e.g., bi-encoder) for first-stage recall followed by a smart response reranker (e.g., cross-encoder) for precise ranking. However, existing studies either …...

AbstractOntological knowledge, which comprises classes and properties and their relationships, is integral to world knowledge. It is significant to explore whether Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) know and understand such knowledge. However, existing PLM-probing studies focus mainly on factual knowledge, lacking a system- atic probing of ontological knowledge. In this paper, …...

AbstractLarge language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in following natural language instructions to solve unseen tasks. However, it remains unclear whether models truly understand task definitions and whether the human-written definitions are optimal. In this paper, we systematically study the role of task definitions in instruction learning. We first …...

AbstractCollaborative stories, which are texts created through the collaborative efforts of multiple authors with different writing styles and intentions, pose unique challenges for NLP models. Understanding and generating such stories remains an underexplored area due to the lack of open-domain corpora. To address this, we introduce StoryWars, a new dataset …...