Thailand

Recently, various neural models for multi-party conversation (MPC) have achieved impressive improvements on a variety of tasks such as addressee recognition, speaker identification and response prediction. However, these existing methods on MPC usually represent interlocutors and utterances individually and ignore the inherent complicated structure in MPC which may provide crucial interlocutor and utterance semantics and would enhance the conversation understanding process. To this end, we present MPC-BERT, a pre-trained model for MPC understanding that considers learning who says what to whom in a unified model with several elaborated self-supervised tasks. Particularly, these tasks can be generally categorized into (1) interlocutor structure modeling including reply-to utterance recognition, identical speaker searching and pointer consistency distinction, and (2) utterance semantics modeling including masked shared utterance restoration and shared node detection. We evaluate MPC-BERT on three downstream tasks including addressee recognition, speaker identification and response selection. Experimental results show that MPC-BERT outperforms previous methods by large margins and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on all three downstream tasks at two benchmarks.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

MPC-BERT: A Pre-Trained Language Model for Multi-Party Conversation Understanding

multi-party conversation

self-supervision

pre-trained language model

The IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC 2021) aims to bring together researchers interested in and work in the MPC field from both academia and industry. This allows us to reflect and establish the current state-of-the-art and focus on the future development of the MPC field towards relevant directions.

Model predictive control (MPC) is indisputably one of the advanced control techniques that have significantly affected control engineering practice with thousands of controllers implemented in various fields, spanning from the process industry to automotive and robotics. This is due to its unique ability to handle constraints, take preview information about disturbances and setpoint changes into account, and optimize performance. Furthermore, MPC allows the consideration of various types of dynamics, from linear to nonlinear, discrete to continuous, as well as an online adaptation of models and parameters. The research community on MPC is very active, with hundreds of papers published every year. Over the past decades, many theoretical, as well as implementation results, have been achieved.

### **All content presented at NMPC2021, including videos, papers and slides will be available only to registered (regular/student) participants. The content can be accessed until August 31st, 2021.**



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Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Conference 2021

The IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC 2021) aims to bring together researchers interested in and work in the MPC field from both academia and industry. This allows us to reflect and establish the current state-of-the-art and focus on the future development of the MPC field towards relevant directions.

technical paper

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


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Registration is now open

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

We propose to measure fine-grained domain relevance– the degree that a term is relevant to a broad (e.g., computer science) or narrow (e.g., deep learning) domain. Such measurement is crucial for many downstream tasks in natural language processing. To handle long-tail terms, we build a core-anchored semantic graph, which uses core terms with rich description information to bridge the vast remaining fringe terms semantically. To support a fine-grained domain without relying on a matching corpus for supervision, we develop hierarchical core-fringe learning, which learns core and fringe terms jointly in a semi-supervised manner contextualized in the hierarchy of the domain. To reduce expensive human efforts, we employ automatic annotation and hierarchical positive-unlabeled learning. Our approach applies to big or small domains, covers head or tail terms, and requires little human effort. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods outperform strong baselines and even surpass professional human performance.

Measuring Fine-Grained Domain Relevance of Terms: A Hierarchical Core-Fringe Approach

Discrimination between antonyms and synonyms is an important and challenging NLP task. Antonyms and synonyms often share the same or similar contexts and thus are hard to make a distinction. This paper proposes two underlying hypotheses and employs the mixture-of-experts framework as a solution. It works on the basis of a divide-and-conquer strategy, where a number of localized experts focus on their own domains (or subspaces) to learn their specialties, and a gating mechanism determines the space partitioning and the expert mixture. Experimental results have shown that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the task.

A Mixture-of-Experts Model for Antonym-Synonym Discrimination

Injecting external domain-specific knowledge (e.g., UMLS) into pretrained language models (LMs) advances their capability to handle specialised in-domain tasks such as biomedical entity linking (BEL). However, such abundant expert knowledge is available only for a handful of languages (e.g., English). In this work, by proposing a novel cross-lingual biomedical entity linking task (XL-BEL) and establishing a new XL-BEL benchmark spanning 10 typologically diverse languages, we first investigate the ability of standard knowledge-agnostic as well as knowledge-enhanced monolingual and multilingual LMs beyond the standard monolingual English BEL task. The scores indicate large gaps to English performance. We then address the challenge of transferring domain-specific knowledge in resource-rich languages to resource-poor ones. To this end, we propose and evaluate a series of cross-lingual transfer methods for the XL-BEL task, and demonstrate that general-domain bitext helps propagate the available English knowledge to languages with little to no in-domain data. Remarkably, we show that our proposed domain-specific transfer methods yield consistent gains across all target languages, sometimes up to 20 Precision@1 points, without any in-domain knowledge in the target language, and without any in-domain parallel data.

Learning Domain-Specialised Representations for Cross-Lingual Biomedical Entity Linking

The representation degeneration problem in Contextual Word Representations (CWRs) hurts the expressiveness of the embedding space by forming an anisotropic cone where even unrelated words have excessively positive correlations.
Existing techniques for tackling this issue require a learning process to re-train models with additional objectives and mostly employ a global assessment to study isotropy. 
Our quantitative analysis over isotropy shows that a local assessment could be more accurate due to the clustered structure of CWRs. 
Based on this observation, we propose a local cluster-based method to address the degeneration issue in contextual embedding spaces.
We show that in clusters including punctuations and stop words, local dominant directions encode structural information, removing which can improve CWRs performance on semantic tasks. 
Moreover, we find that tense information in verb representations dominates sense semantics. 
We show that removing dominant directions of verb representations can transform the space to better suit semantic applications. 
Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed cluster-based method can mitigate the degeneration problem on multiple tasks.

A Cluster-based Approach for Improving Isotropy in Contextual Embedding Space

Open-domain dialog systems have a user-centric goal: to provide humans with an engaging conversation experience. User engagement is one of the most important metrics for evaluating open-domain dialog systems, and could also be used as real-time feedback to benefit dialog policy learning. Existing work on detecting user disengagement typically requires hand-labeling many dialog samples. We propose HERALD, an efficient annotation framework that reframes the training data annotation process as a denoising problem. Specifically, instead of manually labeling training samples, we first use a set of labeling heuristics to label training samples automatically. We then denoise the weakly labeled data using the Shapley algorithm. Finally, we use the denoised data to train a user engagement detector. Our experiments show that HERALD improves annotation efficiency significantly and achieves 86% user disengagement detection accuracy in two dialog corpora.

HERALD: An Annotation Efficient Method to Detect User Disengagement in Social Conversations

Conversational semantic parsers map user utterances to executable programs given dialogue histories composed of previous utterances, programs, and system responses. Existing parsers typically condition on rich representations of history that include the complete set of values and computations previously discussed. We propose a model that abstracts over values to focus prediction on type- and function-level context. This approach provides a compact encoding of dialogue histories and predicted programs, improving generalization and computational efficiency. Our model incorporates several other components, including an atomic span copy operation and structural enforcement of well-formedness constraints on predicted programs, that are particularly advantageous in the low-data regime. Trained on the SMCalFlow and TreeDST datasets, our model outperforms prior work by 7.3% and 10.6% respectively in terms of absolute accuracy. Trained on only a thousand examples from each dataset, it outperforms strong baselines by 12.4% and 6.4%. These results indicate that simple representations are key to effective generalization in conversational semantic parsing.

Value-Agnostic Conversational Semantic Parsing

In this paper, we investigate few-shot joint
learning for dialogue language understanding.
Most existing few-shot models learn a single task each time with only a few examples. However, dialogue language understanding contains two closely related tasks, i.e., intent detection and slot filling, and often benefits from jointly learning the two tasks. This
calls for new few-shot learning techniques that
are able to capture task relations from only a
few examples and jointly learn multiple tasks.
To achieve this, we propose a similarity-based
few-shot learning scheme, named Contrastive
Prototype Merging network (ConProm), that
learns to bridge metric spaces of intent and
slot on data-rich domains, and then adapt the
bridged metric space to specific few-shot domain. Experiments on two public datasets,
Snips and FewJoint, show that our model significantly outperforms the strong baselines in
one and five shots settings.

Learning to Bridge Metric Spaces: Few-shot Joint Learning of Intent Detection and Slot Filling

Data augmentation with mixup has shown to be effective on various computer vision tasks. 
Despite its great success, there has been a hurdle to apply mixup to NLP tasks since text consists of discrete tokens with variable length. 
In this work, we propose SSMix, a novel mixup method where the operation is performed on input text rather than on hidden vectors like previous approaches.
SSMix synthesizes a sentence while preserving the locality of two original texts by span-based mixing and keeping more tokens related to the prediction relying on saliency information.
With extensive experiments, we empirically validate that our method outperforms hidden-level mixup methods on a wide range of text classification benchmarks, including textual entailment, sentiment classification, and question-type classification. 
Our code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/ssmix}{https://github.com/clovaai/ssmix.

SSMix: Saliency-Based Span Mixup for Text Classification

Language generation models' democratization benefits many domains, from answering health-related questions to enhancing education by providing AI-driven tutoring services. However, language generation models' democratization also makes it easier to generate human-like text at-scale for nefarious activities, from spreading misinformation to targeting specific groups with hate speech. Thus, it is essential to understand how people interact with bots and develop methods to detect bot-generated text. This paper shows that bot-generated text detection methods are more robust across datasets and models if we use information about how people respond to it rather than using the bot's text directly. We also analyze linguistic alignment, providing insight into differences between human-human and human-bot conversations.

Detecting Bot-Generated Text by Characterizing Linguistic Accommodation in Human-Bot Interactions

Ttransformer-based approaches have been successfully used to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on natural language processing (NLP) tasks with semi-structured tables. These model architectures are typically deep, resulting in slow training and inference, especially for long inputs. To improve efficiency while maintaining a high accuracy, we propose a new architecture, DoT, a double transformer model, that decomposes the problem into two sub-tasks: A shallow pruning transformer that selects the top-K tokens, followed by a deep task-specific transformer that takes as input those K tokens. Additionally, we modify the task-specific attention to incorporate the pruning scores. The two transformers are jointly trained by optimizing the task-specific loss. We run experiments on three benchmarks, including entailment and question-answering. We show that for a small drop of accuracy, DoT improves training and inference time by at least 50%. We also show that the pruning transformer effectively selects relevant tokens enabling the end-to-end model to maintain similar accuracy as slower baseline models. Finally, we analyse the pruning and give some insight into its impact on the task model.

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