Articles

AbstractDue to the compelling improvements brought by BERT, many recent representation models adopted the Transformer architecture as their main building block, consequently inheriting the wordpiece tokenization system despite it not being intrinsically linked to the notion of Transformers. While this system is thought to achieve a good balance between the …...

AbstractA major hurdle in data-driven research on typology is having sufficient data in many languages to draw meaningful conclusions. We present VoxClamantis v1.0, the first large-scale corpus for phonetic typology, with aligned segments and estimated phoneme-level labels in 690 readings spanning 635 languages, along with acoustic-phonetic measures of vowels and …...

AbstractEvidence retrieval is a critical stage of question answering (QA), necessary not only to improve performance, but also to explain the decisions of the QA method. We introduce a simple, fast, and unsupervised iterative evidence retrieval method, which relies on three ideas: (a) an unsupervised alignment approach to soft-align questions …...

AbstractCorrectly resolving textual mentions of people fundamentally entails making inferences about those people. Such inferences raise the risk of systemic biases in coreference resolution systems, including biases that can harm binary and non-binary trans and cis stakeholders. To better understand such biases, we foreground nuanced conceptualizations of gender from sociology …...

AbstractKnowledge Graphs (KG) are multi-relational graphs consisting of entities as nodes and relations among them as typed edges. Goal of the Question Answering over KG (KGQA) task is to answer natural language queries posed over the KG. Multi-hop KGQA requires reasoning over multiple edges of the KG to arrive at …...

AbstractIn many settings it is important for one to be able to understand why a model made a particular prediction. In NLP this often entails extracting snippets of an input text ‘responsible for’ corresponding model output; when such a snippet comprises tokens that indeed informed the model’s prediction, it is …...

AbstractMachine reading comprehension has made great progress in recent years owing to large-scale annotated datasets. In the clinical domain, however, creating such datasets is quite difficult due to the domain expertise required for annotation. Recently, Pampari et al. (EMNLP’18) tackled this issue by using expert-annotated question templates and existing i2b2 …...

AbstractState-of-the-art models in NLP are now predominantly based on deep neural networks that are opaque in terms of how they come to make predictions. This limitation has increased interest in designing more interpretable deep models for NLP that reveal the ‘reasoning’ behind model outputs. But work in this direction has …...

AbstractQuestion Answering (QA) is in increasing demand as the amount of information available online and the desire for quick access to this content grows. A common approach to QA has been to fine-tune a pretrained language model on a task-specific labeled dataset. This paradigm, however, relies on scarce, and costly …...

AbstractIn an era where generating content and publishing it is so easy, we are bombarded with information and are exposed to all kinds of claims, some of which do not always rank high on the truth scale. This paper suggests that the key to a longer-term, holistic, and systematic approach …...

AbstractTransformer-based QA models use input-wide self-attention – i.e. across both the question and the input passage – at all layers, causing them to be slow and memory-intensive. It turns out that we can get by without input-wide self-attention at all layers, especially in the lower layers. We introduce DeFormer, a …...

AbstractWord embedding models learn semantically rich vector representations of words and are widely used to initialize natural processing language (NLP) models. The popular continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) model of word2vec learns a vector embedding by masking a given word in a sentence and then using the other words as a context …...

AbstractThe ability to learn from large unlabeled corpora has allowed neural language models to advance the frontier in natural language understanding. However, existing self-supervision techniques operate at the word form level, which serves as a surrogate for the underlying semantic content. This paper proposes a method to employ weak-supervision directly …...

AbstractSocial biases are encoded in word embeddings. This presents a unique opportunity to study society historically and at scale, and a unique danger when embeddings are used in downstream applications. Here, we investigate the extent to which publicly-available word embeddings accurately reflect beliefs about certain kinds of people as measured …...

AbstractNatural language allows us to refer to novel composite concepts by combining expressions denoting their parts according to systematic rules, a property known as compositionality. In this paper, we study whether the language emerging in deep multi-agent simulations possesses a similar ability to refer to novel primitive combinations, and whether …...

AbstractThis paper introduces a method that efficiently reduces the computational cost and parameter size of Transformer. The proposed model, refer to as Group-Transformer, splits feature space into multiple groups, factorizes the calculation paths, and reduces computations for the group interaction. Extensive experiments on two benchmark tasks, enwik8 and text8, prove …...

AbstractAbstractive summarization at controllable lengths is a challenging task in natural language processing. It is even more challenging for domains where limited training data is available or scenarios in which the length of the summary is not known beforehand. At the same time, when it comes to trusting machine-generated summaries, …...

AbstractIn this paper, we introduce personalized word embeddings, and examine their value for language modeling. We compare the performance of our proposed prediction model when using personalized versus generic word representations, and study how these representations can be leveraged for improved performance. We provide insight into what types of words …...

AbstractA central concern in Computational Social Sciences (CSS) is fairness: where the role of NLP is to scale up text analysis to large corpora, the quality of automatic analyses should be as independent as possible of textual properties. We analyze the performance of a state-of-the-art neural model on the task …...

AbstractParody is a figurative device used to imitate an entity for comedic or critical purposes and represents a widespread phenomenon in social media through many popular parody accounts. In this paper, we present the first computational study of parody. We introduce a new publicly available data set of tweets from …...