Dominican Republic

Natural language processing systems such as dialogue agents should be able to reason about other people&#39;s beliefs, intentions and desires. This capability, called theory of mind (ToM), is crucial, as it allows a model to predict and interpret the needs of users based on their mental states. A recent line of research evaluates the ToM capability of existing memory-augmented neural models through question-answering. These models perform poorly on false belief tasks where beliefs differ from reality, especially when the dataset contains distracting sentences. In this paper, we propose a new temporally informed approach for improving the ToM capability of memory-augmented neural models. Our model incorporates priors about the entities&#39; minds and tracks their mental states as they evolve over time through an extended passage. It then responds to queries through textual time travel--i.e., by accessing the stored memory of an earlier time step. We evaluate our model on ToM datasets and find that this approach improves performance, particularly by correcting the predicted mental states to match the false belief.

EMNLP 2021

Textual Time Travel: A Temporally Informed Approach to Theory of Mind

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

Natural language processing systems such as dialogue agents should be able to reason about other people's beliefs, intentions and desires. This capability, called theory of mind (ToM), is crucial, as it allows a model to predict and interpret the needs of users based on their mental states. A recent line of research evaluates the ToM capability of existing memory-augmented neural models through question-answering. These models perform poorly on false belief tasks where beliefs differ from reality, especially when the dataset contains distracting sentences. In this paper, we propose a new temporally informed approach for improving the ToM capability of memory-augmented neural models. Our model incorporates priors about the entities' minds and tracks their mental states as they evolve over time through an extended passage. It then responds to queries through textual time travel--i.e., by accessing the stored memory of an earlier time step. We evaluate our model on ToM datasets and find that this approach improves performance, particularly by correcting the predicted mental states to match the false belief.

technical paper

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a widely used topic model, is often employed as a fundamental tool for text analysis in various applications. However, the training process of the LDA model typically requires massive text corpus data. On one hand, such massive data may expose private information in the training data, thereby incurring significant privacy concerns. On the other hand, the efficiency of the LDA model training may be impacted, since LDA training often needs to handle these massive text corpus data. To address the privacy issues in LDA model training, some recent works have combined LDA training algorithms that are based on collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS) with differential privacy. Nevertheless, these works usually have a high accumulative privacy budget due to vast iterations in CGS. Moreover, these works always have low efficiency due to handling massive text corpus data. To improve the privacy guarantee and efficiency, we combine a subsampling method with CGS and propose a novel LDA training algorithm with differential privacy, SUB-LDA. We find that subsampling in CGS naturally improves efficiency while amplifying privacy. We propose a novel metric, the efficiency--privacy function, to evaluate improvements of the privacy guarantee and efficiency. Based on a conventional subsampling method, we propose an adaptive subsampling method to improve the model's utility produced by SUB-LDA when the subsampling ratio is small. We provide a comprehensive analysis of SUB-LDA, and the experiment results validate its efficiency and privacy guarantee improvements.

Improving Privacy Guarantee and Efficiency of Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model Training Under Differential Privacy

Dynamic early exiting aims to accelerate the inference of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by emitting predictions in internal layers without passing through the entire model.
In this paper, we empirically analyze the working mechanism of dynamic early exiting and find that it faces a performance bottleneck under high speed-up ratios. 
On one hand, the PLMs' representations in shallow layers lack high-level semantic information and thus are not sufficient for accurate predictions. 
On the other hand, the exiting decisions made by internal classifiers are unreliable, leading to wrongly emitted early predictions.
We instead propose a new framework for accelerating the inference of PLMs, CascadeBERT, which dynamically selects proper-sized and complete models in a cascading manner, providing comprehensive representations for predictions. 
We further devise a difficulty-aware objective, encouraging the model to output the class probability that reflects the real difficulty of each instance for a more reliable cascading mechanism.
Experimental results show that CascadeBERT can achieve an overall 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing dynamic early exiting methods on six classification tasks, yielding more calibrated and accurate predictions.

{C}ascade{BERT}: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a model compression algorithm that helps transfer the knowledge in a large neural network into a smaller one. Even though KD has shown promise on a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, little is understood about how one KD algorithm compares to another and whether these approaches can be complimentary to each other.
In this work, we evaluate various KD algorithms on in-domain, out-of-domain and adversarial testing. We propose a framework to assess adversarial robustness of multiple KD algorithms. Moreover, we introduce a new KD algorithm, Combined-KD, which takes advantage of two promising approaches (better training scheme and more efficient data augmentation). Our extensive experimental results show that Combined-KD achieves state-of-the-art results on the GLUE benchmark, out-of-domain generalization, and adversarial robustness compared to competitive methods.

How to Select One Among All ? An Empirical Study Towards the Robustness of Knowledge Distillation in Natural Language Understanding

Biomedical entity linking is the task of linking entity mentions in a biomedical document to referent entities in a knowledge base. Recently, many BERT-based models have been introduced for the task. While these models achieve competitive results on many datasets, they are computationally expensive and contain about 110M parameters. Little is known about the factors contributing to their impressive performance and whether the over-parameterization is needed. In this work, we shed some light on the inner workings of these large BERT-based models. Through a set of probing experiments, we have found that the entity linking performance only changes slightly when the input word order is shuffled or when the attention scope is limited to a fixed window size. From these observations, we propose an efficient convolutional neural network with residual connections for biomedical entity linking. Because of the sparse connectivity and weight sharing properties, our model has a small number of parameters and is highly efficient. On five public datasets, our model achieves comparable or even better linking accuracy than the state-of-the-art BERT-based models while having about 60 times fewer parameters.

BERT might be Overkill: A Tiny but Effective Biomedical Entity Linker based on Residual Convolutional Neural Networks

Numeracy plays a key role in natural language understanding. However, existing NLP approaches, not only traditional word2vec approach or contextualized transformer-based language models, fail to learn numeracy. As the result, the performance of these models is limited when they are applied to number-intensive applications in clinical and financial domains. In this work, we propose a simple number embedding approach based on knowledge graph. We construct a knowledge graph consisting of number entities and magnitude relations. Knowledge graph embedding method is then applied to obtain number vectors. Our approach is easy to implement, and experiment results on various numeracy-related NLP tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

Learning Numeracy: A Simple Yet Effective Number Embedding Approach Using Knowledge Graph

Non-autoregressive machine translation (NAT) approaches enable fast generation by utilizing parallelizable generative processes. The remaining bottleneck in these models is their decoder layers; unfortunately unlike in autoregressive models (Kasai et al., 2020), removing decoder layers from NAT models significantly degrades accuracy. This work proposes a sequence-to-lattice model that replaces the decoder with a search lattice. Our approach first constructs a candidate lattice using efficient lookup operations, generates lattice scores from a deep encoder, and finally finds the best path using dynamic programming. Experiments on three machine translation datasets show that our method is faster than past non-autoregressive generation approaches, and more accurate than naively reducing the number of decoder layers.

Sequence-to-Lattice Models for Fast Translation

Computational models of human language often involve combinatorial problems. For instance, a probabilistic parser may marginalize over exponentially many trees to make predictions. Algorithms for such problems often employ dynamic programming and are not always unique. Finding one with optimal asymptotic runtime can be unintuitive, time-consuming, and error-prone. Our work aims to automate this laborious process. Given an initial correct declarative program, we search for a sequence of semantics-preserving transformations to improve its running time as much as possible. To this end, we describe a set of program transformations, a simple metric for assessing the efficiency of a transformed program, and a heuristic search procedure to improve this metric. We show that in practice, automated search—like the mental search performed by human programmers—can find substantial improvements to the initial program. Empirically, we show that many speed-ups described in the NLP literature could have been discovered automatically by our system.

Searching for More Efficient Dynamic Programs

Improving Transformer efficiency has become increasingly attractive recently. A wide range of methods has been proposed, e.g., pruning, quantization, new architectures and etc. But these methods are either sophisticated in implementation or dependent on hardware. In this paper, we show that the efficiency of Transformer can be improved by combining some simple and hardware-agnostic methods, including tuning hyper-parameters, better design choices and training strategies. On the WMT news translation tasks, we improve the inference efficiency of a strong Transformer system by 3.80x on CPU and 2.52x on GPU.

Bag of Tricks for Optimizing Transformer Efficiency

Contextual language models have led to significantly better results, especially when pre-trained on the same data as the downstream task. While this additional pre-training usually improves performance, it can lead to information leakage and therefore risks the privacy of individuals mentioned in the training data. One method to guarantee the privacy of such individuals is to train a differentially-private language model, but this usually comes at the expense of model performance. Also, in the absence of a differentially private vocabulary training, it is not possible to modify the vocabulary to fit the new data, which might further degrade results. In this work we bridge these gaps, and provide guidance to future researchers and practitioners on how to improve privacy while maintaining good model performance. We introduce a novel differentially private word-piece algorithm, which allows training a tailored domain-specific vocabulary while maintaining privacy. We then experiment with entity extraction tasks from clinical notes, and demonstrate how to train a differentially private pre-trained language model (i.e., BERT) with a privacy guarantee of $\epsilon=1.1$ and with only a small degradation in performance. Finally, as it is hard to tell given a privacy parameter $\epsilon$ what was the effect on the trained representation, we present experiments showing that the trained model does not memorize private information.

Learning and Evaluating a Differentially Private Pre-trained Language Model

Recent works have found evidence of gender bias in models of machine translation and coreference resolution using mostly synthetic diagnostic datasets. While these quantify bias in a controlled experiment, they often do so on a small scale and consist mostly of artificial, out-of-distribution sentences.
In this work, we find grammatical patterns indicating stereotypical and non-stereotypical gender-role assignments (e.g., female nurses versus male dancers) in corpora from three domains, resulting in a first large-scale gender bias dataset of 108K diverse real-world English sentences.
We manually verify the quality of our corpus and use it to evaluate gender bias in various coreference resolution and machine translation models. We find that all tested models tend to over-rely on gender stereotypes when presented with natural inputs, which may be especially harmful when deployed in commercial systems.
Finally, we show that our dataset lends itself to finetuning a coreference resolution model, finding it mitigates bias on a held out set.
Our dataset and models are publicly available at github.com/SLAB-NLP/BUG. We hope they will spur future research into gender bias evaluation mitigation techniques in realistic settings.

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