United States

Traditional approaches for creating natural language inference datasets from semi-structured datasets either involve manually constructing datasets, which is a computationally expensive and time-consuming operation which limits generation to small-scale datasets, or use fully automated methods, which while capable of producing large-scale datasets frequently produce basic statements that may lack reasoning. In this paper, we produce a semiautomated framework for data generation from entity based tabular data. We use the INFOTABS (Gupta et al., 2020) dataset to generate a large-scale human-like synthetic data that includes counterfactual entity-based tables. Through thorough experiments we demonstrate
the performance of the generated dataset

NAACL 2022

Efficient Realistic Data Generation Framework for Semi-Structured
Tabular Inference

table to text generation

table nli

infotabs

semi-structured inference

tabular reasoning

data augmentation

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workshop paper

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Presentation on the paper "Multi-sense Language Modelling": recap, observations and findings

Multi-sense Language Modelling

Automated scoring technology for short-answer questions has been attracting attention to improve the fairness of scoring and reduce the burden on the scorer. In general, a large amount of data is required to train an automated scoring model. The training data consists of the answer texts and the scoring data assigned to them. It may also include annotations indicating key word sequences. Many previous studies have created models with large amounts of training data specific to each question. This paper aims to achieve equivalent performance with less training data by utilizing a BERT model that has been pre-trained on a large amount of general text data not necessarily related to short answer questions. On the RIKEN dataset, the proposed method reduces the training data from the 800 data required in the past to about 400 data, and still achieves scoring accuracy comparable to that of humans. Annotating 400 data is still costly, but it is beneficial to reduce the number of data needed.

Automatic scoring of short answers using justification cues estimated by BERT

The role of an author's L1 in SLA can be challenging for automated CEFR classification, in that texts from different L1 groups may be too heterogeneous to be combined as training data. We experiment with recent debiasing approaches by attempting to devoid textual representations of L1 features. This results in a more homogeneous group when aggregating CEFR-annotated texts from different L1 groups, leading to better classification performance. Using iterative null-space projection, we marginally improve classification performance for a linear classifier by 1 point. An MLP (e.g. non-linear) classifier remains unaffected by this procedure. We discuss possible directions for future work to attempt to increase this performance gain.

Mitigating Learnerese Effects for CEFR classification

Reduced form pronunciations are widely used by native English speakers, especially in casual conversations. Second language (L2) learners have difficulty in processing reduced form pronunciations in listening comprehension and face challenges in production too. Meanwhile, training applications dedicated to reduced forms are still few. To solve this issue, we report on our first effort of using deep learning to evaluate L2 learners’ reduced form pronunciations. Compared with a baseline solution that uses an ASR to determine regular or reduced-formed pronunciations, a classifier that learns representative features via a convolution neural network (CNN) on low-level acoustic features, yields higher detection performance. F-1 metric has been increased from 0.690 to 0.757 on the reduction task. Furthermore, adding word entities to compute attention weights to better adjust the features learned by the CNN model helps increasing F-1 to 0.763.

Automatically Detecting Reduced-formed English Pronunciations by
Using Deep Learning

In this study, we developed the first baseline readability model for the Cebuano language. Cebuano is the second most-used native language in the Philippines with about 27.5 million speakers. As the baseline, we extracted traditional or surface-based features, syllable patterns based from Cebuano's documented orthography, and neural embeddings from the multilingual BERT model. Results show that the use of the first two handcrafted linguistic features obtained the best performance trained on an optimized Random Forest model with approximately 87% across all metrics. The feature sets and algorithm used also is similar to previous results in readability assessment for the Filipino language showing potential of crosslingual application. To encourage more work for readability assessment in Philippine languages such as Cebuano, we open-sourced both code and data.

A Baseline Readability Model for Cebuano

We report on our work-in-progress to generate a synthetic error dataset for Swedish by replicating errors observed in the authentic errorannotated dataset. We analyze a small subset of authentic errors, capture regular patterns based on parts of speech, and design a set of rules to corrupt new data. We explore the approach and identify its capabilities, advantages and limitations as a way to enrich the existing collection of error-annotated data. This work focuses on word order errors, specifically those involving the placement of finite verbs in a sentence.

Generation of Synthetic Error Data of Verb Order Errors for Swedish

Peer assessment is an effective and efficient pedagogical strategy for delivering feedback to learners. Asking students to provide quality feedback, which contains suggestions and mentions problems, can promote metacognition by reviewers and better assist reviewees in revising their work. Thus, various supervised machine learning algorithms have been proposed to detect quality feedback. However, all these powerful algorithms have the same Achilles' heel: the reliance on sufficient historical data. In other words, collecting adequate peer feedback for training a supervised algorithm can take several semesters before the model can be deployed to a new class. In this paper, we present a new paradigm, called incremental zero-shot learning (IZSL), to tackle the problem of lacking sufficient historical data. Our results show that the method can achieve acceptable "cold-start" performance without needing any domain data, and it outperforms BERT when trained on the same data collected incrementally.

Starting from "Zero": An Incremental Zero-shot Learning Approach for Assessing Peer Feedback Comments

Spoken grammatical error correction (SGEC) is an important process 
to provide feedback for second language learning. Due to a lack of 
end-to-end training data, SGEC is often implemented as a cascaded, 
modular, system: speech recognition; disfluency removal; and grammatical 
error correction (GEC). This cascaded structure enables efficient use of 
training data for each module. It is, however, difficult to compare 
and evaluate the system performance as upstreams modules 
may introduce errors. For example, the GEC module input depends on the 
output of non-native speech recognition and disfluency detection, both 
challenging tasks for learner data. This work focuses on the assessment and de- velopment of SGEC systems. To mitigate error propagation in cascaded SGEC systems, semi-supervised finetuning and self-distillation approaches are investigated. Lastly, confidence based filtering is adopted to improve the feedback quality.

On Assessing and Developing Spoken ’Grammatical Error Correction’ Systems

In field of teaching, true/false questioning is an important educational method for assessing students' general understanding of learning materials. Manually creating such questions requires extensive human effort and expert knowledge. Question Generation (QG) technique offers the possibility to automatically generate a large number of questions. However, there is limited work on automatic true/false question generation due to the lack of training data and difficulty finding question-worthy content. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised True/False Question Generation approach (TF-QG) that automatically generates true/false questions from a given passage for reading comprehension test. TF-QG consists of a template-based framework that aims to test the specific knowledge in the passage by leveraging various NLP techniques, and a generative framework to generate more flexible and complicated questions by using a novel masking-and-infilling strategy. Human evaluation shows that our approach can generate high-quality and valuable true/false questions. In addition, simulated testing on the generated questions challenges the state-of-the-art inference models from NLI, QA, and fact verification tasks.

Automatic True/False Question Generation for Educational Purpose

“Talk moves” are specific discursive strategies used by teachers and students to facilitate conversations in which students share their thinking, and actively consider the ideas of others, and engage in rich discussions. Experts in instructional practices often rely on cues to identify and document these strategies, for example by annotating classroom transcripts. Prior efforts to develop automated systems to classify teacher talk moves using transformers achieved a performance of 76.32% F1. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using enriched contextual cues to improve model performance. We applied state-of-the-art deep learning approaches for Natural Language Processing (NLP), including Robustly optimized bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (Roberta) with a special input representation that supports previous and subsequent utterances as context for talk moves classification. We worked with the publically available TalkMoves dataset, which contains utterances sourced from real-world classroom sessions (human- transcribed and annotated). Through a series of experimentations, we found that a combination of previous and subsequent utterances improved the transformers' ability to differentiate talk moves (by 2.6% F1). These results constitute a new state of the art over previously published results and provide actionable insights to those in the broader NLP community who are working to develop similar transformer-based classification models.

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Multi-sense Language Modelling

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