United Arab Emirates

This position paper proposes a conceptual framework for the design of Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems that follow efficient and effective production strategies in order to achieve complex communicative goals. In this general framework, efficiency is characterised as the parsimonious regulation of production and comprehension costs while effectiveness is measured with respect to task-oriented and contextually grounded communicative goals. 
We provide concrete suggestions for the estimation of goals, costs, and utility via modern statistical methods, demonstrating applications of our framework to the classic pragmatic task of visually grounded referential games and to abstractive text summarisation, two popular generation tasks with real-world applications. In sum, we advocate for the development of NLG systems that learn to make pragmatic production decisions from experience, by reasoning about goals, costs, and utility in a human-like way.

EMNLP 2022

Towards Pragmatic Production Strategies for Natural Language Generation Tasks

utility

collaborative effort

communicative goals

language production

task-oriented

natural language generation

pragmatics

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CogSci 2022

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





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## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

This paper describes a neural transducer that maintains the flexibility of standard sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models while incorporating hierarchical phrases as a source of inductive bias during training and as explicit constraints during inference. Our approach trains two models: a discriminative parser based on a bracketing transduction grammar whose derivation tree hierarchically aligns source and target phrases, and a neural seq2seq model that learns to translate the aligned phrases one-by-one. We use the same seq2seq model to translate at all phrase scales, which results in two inference modes: one mode in which the parser is discarded and only the seq2seq component is used at the sequence-level, and another in which the parser is combined with the seq2seq model. Decoding in the latter mode is done with the cube-pruned CKY algorithm, which is more involved but can make use of new translation rules during inference. We formalize our model as a source-conditioned synchronous grammar and develop an efficient variational inference algorithm for training. When applied on top of both randomly initialized and pretrained seq2seq models, we find that it performs well compared to baselines on small scale machine translation benchmarks.

Hierarchical Phrase-Based Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

In recent years, multilingual machine translation models have achieved promising performance on low-resource language pairs by sharing information between similar languages, thus enabling zero-shot translation. To overcome the "curse of multilinguality", these models often opt for scaling up the number of parameters, which makes their use in resource-constrained environments challenging. We introduce SMaLL-100, a distilled version of the M2M-100(12B) model, a massively multilingual machine translation model covering 100 languages. We train SMaLL-100 with uniform sampling across all language pairs and therefore focus on preserving the performance of low-resource languages. We evaluate SMaLL-100 on different low-resource benchmarks: FLORES-101, Tatoeba, and TICO-19 and demonstrate that it outperforms previous massively multilingual models of comparable sizes (200-600M) while improving inference latency and memory usage. Additionally, our model achieves comparable results to M2M-100 (1.2B), while being 3.6x smaller and 4.3x faster at inference.

SMaLL-100: Introducing Shallow Multilingual Machine Translation Model for Low-Resource Languages

The DocRED dataset is one of the most popular and widely used benchmarks for document-level relation extraction (RE). It adopts a recommend-revise annotation scheme so as to have a large-scale annotated dataset. However, we find that the annotation of DocRED is incomplete, i.e., false negative samples are prevalent. We analyze the causes and effects of the overwhelming false negative problem in the DocRED dataset. To address the shortcoming, we re-annotate 4,053 documents in the DocRED dataset by adding the missed relation triples back to the original DocRED. We name our revised DocRED dataset Re-DocRED. We conduct extensive experiments with state-of-the-art neural models on both datasets, and the experimental results show that the models trained and evaluated on our Re-DocRED achieve performance improvements of around 13 F1 points. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive analysis to identify the potential areas for further improvement.

Revisiting DocRED - Addressing the False Negative Problem in Relation Extraction

Recent work has demonstrated that pre-trained language models (PLMs) are zero-shot learners. However, most existing zero-shot methods involve heavy human engineering or complicated self-training pipelines, hindering their application to new situations. In this work, we show that zero-shot text classification can be improved simply by clustering texts in the embedding spaces of PLMs. Specifically, we fit the unlabeled texts with a Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model after initializing cluster positions and shapes using class names. Despite its simplicity, this approach achieves superior or comparable performance on both topic and sentiment classification datasets and outperforms prior works significantly on unbalanced datasets. We further explore the applicability of our clustering approach by evaluating it on 14 datasets with more diverse topics, text lengths, and numbers of classes. Our approach achieves an average of 20% absolute improvement over prompt-based zero-shot learning. Finally, we compare different PLM embedding spaces and find that texts are well-clustered by topics even if the PLM is not explicitly pre-trained to generate meaningful sentence embeddings. This work indicates that PLM embeddings can categorize texts without task-specific fine-tuning, thus providing a new way to analyze and utilize their knowledge and zero-shot learning ability.

Beyond prompting: Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Zero-shot Learners by Clustering Representations

Language diversity in NLP is critical in enabling the development of tools for a wide range of users.
However, there are limited resources for building such tools for many languages, particularly those spoken in Africa.
For search, most existing datasets feature few or no African languages, directly impacting researchers' ability to build and improve information access capabilities in those languages.
Motivated by this, we created AfriCLIRMatrix, a test collection for cross-lingual information retrieval research in 15 diverse African languages.
In total, our dataset contains 6 million queries in English and 23 million relevance judgments automatically mined from Wikipedia inter-language links, covering many more African languages than any existing information retrieval test collection.
In addition, we release BM25, dense retrieval, and sparse--dense hybrid baselines to provide a starting point for the development of future systems.
We hope that these efforts can spur additional work in search for African languages.
AfriCLIRMatrix can be downloaded at https://github.com/castorini/africlirmatrix.

AfriCLIRMatrix: Enabling Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval for African Languages

This paper introduces ArtELingo, a new benchmark and dataset, designed to encourage work on diversity across languages and cultures. Following ArtEmis, a collection of 80k artworks from WikiArt with 0.45M emotion labels and English-only captions, ArtELingo adds another 0.79M annotations in Arabic and Chinese, plus 4.8K in Spanish to evaluate "cultural-transfer” performance. 51K artworks have 5 annotations or more in 3 languages. This diversity makes it possible to study similarities and differences across languages and cultures. Further, we investigate captioning tasks, and find diversity improves the performance of baseline models. ArtELingo is publicly available at `www.artelingo.org` with standard splits and baseline models. We hope our work will help ease future research on multilinguality and culturally-aware AI.

ArtELingo: A Million Emotion Annotations of WikiArt with Emphasis on Diversity over Language and Culture

Compositionality, the phenomenon where the meaning of a phrase can be derived from its constituent parts, is a hallmark of human language. At the same time, many phrases are non-compositional, carrying a meaning beyond that of each part in isolation. Representing both of these types of phrases is critical for language understanding, but it is an open question whether modern language models (LMs) learn to do so; in this work we examine this question. We first formulate a problem of predicting the LM-internal representations of longer phrases given those of their constituents. We find that the representation of a parent phrase can be predicted with some accuracy given an affine transformation of its children. While we would expect the predictive accuracy to correlate with human judgments of semantic compositionality, we find this is largely not the case, indicating that LMs may not accurately distinguish between compositional and non-compositional phrases. We perform a variety of analyses, shedding light on when different varieties of LMs do and do not generate compositional representations, and discuss implications for future modeling work.

Are representations built from the ground up? An empirical examination of local composition in language models

Explicit decomposition modeling, which involves breaking down complex tasks into more straightforward and often more interpretable sub-tasks, has long been a central theme in developing robust and interpretable NLU systems. However, despite the many datasets and resources built as part of this effort, the majority have small-scale annotations and limited scope, which is insufficient to solve general decomposition tasks. In this paper, we look at large-scale intermediate pre-training of decomposition-based transformers using distant supervision from comparable texts, particularly large-scale parallel news. We show that with such intermediate pre-training, developing robust decomposition-based models for a diverse range of tasks becomes more feasible. For example, on semantic parsing, our model, DecompT5, improves 20% to 30% on two datasets, Overnight and TORQUE, over the baseline language model. We further use DecompT5 to build a novel decomposition-based QA system named DecompEntail, improving over state-of-the-art models, including GPT-3, on both HotpotQA and StrategyQA by 8% and 4%, respectively.

Learning to Decompose: Hypothetical Question Decomposition Based on Comparable Texts

Prior work on ideology prediction has largely focused on single modalities, i.e., text or images. In this work, we introduce the task of multimodal ideology prediction, where a model predicts binary or five-point scale ideological leanings, given a text-image pair with political content. We first collect five new large-scale datasets with English documents and images along with their ideological leanings, covering news articles from a wide range of mainstream media in US and social media posts from Reddit and Twitter. We conduct in-depth analyses on news articles and reveal differences in image content and usage across the political spectrum. Furthermore, we perform extensive experiments and ablation studies, demonstrating the effectiveness of targeted pretraining objectives on different model components. Our best-performing model, a late-fusion architecture pretrained with a triplet objective over multimodal content, outperforms the state-of-the-art text-only model by almost 4% and a strong multimodal baseline with no pretraining by over 3%.

Late Fusion with Triplet Margin Objective for Multimodal Ideology Prediction and Analysis

Dynamic evaluation of language models (LMs) adapts model parameters at test time using gradient information from previous tokens and substantially improves LM performance. However, it requires over 3x more compute than standard inference. We present Fast Weight Layers (FWLs), a neural component that provides the benefits of dynamic evaluation much more efficiently by expressing gradient updates as linear attention. A key improvement over dynamic evaluation is that FWLs can also be applied at training time, so the model learns to make good use of gradient updates. FWLs can easily be added on top of existing transformer models, require relatively little extra compute or memory to run, and significantly improve language modeling perplexity.

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Hierarchical Phrase-Based Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

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