United Arab Emirates

In this paper we conduct a set of experiments aimed to improve our understanding of the lack of semantic isometry in BERT, i.e. the lack of correspondence between the embedding and meaning spaces of its contextualized word representations. Our empirical results show that, contrary to popular belief, the anisotropy is not the root cause of the poor performance of these contextual models&#39; embeddings in semantic tasks. What does affect both the anisotropy and semantic isometry is a set of known biases: frequency, subword, punctuation, and case. For each one of them, we measure its magnitude and the effect of its removal, showing that these biases contribute but do not completely explain the phenomenon of anisotropy and lack of semantic isometry of these contextual language models.

EMNLP 2022

Is anisotropy really the cause of BERT embeddings not being semantic?

anisotropy

sentence embeddings

semantic textual similarity

bert

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

In this paper we conduct a set of experiments aimed to improve our understanding of the lack of semantic isometry in BERT, i.e. the lack of correspondence between the embedding and meaning spaces of its contextualized word representations. Our empirical results show that, contrary to popular belief, the anisotropy is not the root cause of the poor performance of these contextual models' embeddings in semantic tasks. What does affect both the anisotropy and semantic isometry is a set of known biases: frequency, subword, punctuation, and case. For each one of them, we measure its magnitude and the effect of its removal, showing that these biases contribute but do not completely explain the phenomenon of anisotropy and lack of semantic isometry of these contextual language models.

findings / work in progress

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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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.

Multilingual neural machine translation models (MNMT) yield state-of-the-art performance when evaluated on data from a domain and language pair seen at training time. However, when a MNMT model is used to translate under domain shift or to a new language pair, performance drops dramatically. We consider a very challenging scenario: adapting the MNMT model both to a new domain and to a new language pair at the same time. In this paper, we propose m^4Adapter (Multilingual Multi-Domain Adaptation for Machine Translation with a Meta-Adapter), which combines domain and language knowledge using meta-learning with adapters. We present results showing that our approach is a parameter-efficient solution which effectively adapts a model to both a new language pair and a new domain, while outperforming other adapter methods. An ablation study also shows that our approach more effectively transfers domain knowledge across different languages and language information across different domains.

m^4 Adapter: Multilingual Multi-Domain Adaptation for Machine Translation with a Meta-Adapter

Recently, very large pre-trained models achieve state-of-the-art results in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but their size makes it more challenging to apply them in resource-constrained environments. Compression techniques allow to drastically reduce the size of the models and therefore their inference time with negligible impact on top-tier metrics. However, the general performance averaged across multiple tasks and/or languages may hide a drastic performance drop on under-represented features, which could result in the amplification of biases encoded by the models. 
In this work, we assess the impact of compression methods on Multilingual Neural Machine Translation models (MNMT) for various language groups, gender, and semantic biases by extensive analysis of compressed models on different machine translation benchmarks, i.e. FLORES-101, MT-Gender, and DiBiMT. We show that the performance of under-represented languages drops significantly, while the average BLEU metric only slightly decreases. Interestingly, the removal of noisy memorization with compression leads to a significant improvement for some medium-resource languages. Finally, we demonstrate that compression amplifies intrinsic gender and semantic biases, even in high-resource languages.

What Do Compressed Multilingual Machine Translation Models Forget?

Building dialogue systems requires a large corpus of annotated dialogues. Such datasets are usually created via crowdsourcing, which is expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose \textsc{Dialogic}, a novel dialogue simulation method based on large language model in-context learning to automate dataset creation. Seeded with a few annotated dialogues, \textsc{Dialogic} automatically selects in-context examples for demonstration and prompts GPT-3 to generate new dialogues and annotations in a controllable way. Our method can rapidly expand a small set of dialogue data with minimum or zero \textit{human involvement} and \textit{parameter update} and is thus much more cost-efficient and time-saving than crowdsourcing. Experimental results on the MultiWOZ dataset demonstrate that training a model on the simulated dialogues leads to even better performance than using the same amount of human-generated dialogues under the challenging low-resource settings, with as few as 85 dialogues as a seed. When enough data is available, our method can still serve as a user simulator to interact with the developed dialogue systems. Human evaluation results also show that our simulated dialogues have near-human fluency and annotation accuracy. The code and data are available at \textbf{\url{https://github.com/Leezekun/dialogic}}.

Controllable Dialogue Simulation with In-context Learning

Neural image-to-text radiology report generation systems offer the potential to improve radiology reporting by reducing the repetitive process of report drafting and identifying possible medical errors. These systems have achieved promising performance as measured by widely used NLG metrics such as BLEU and CIDEr. However, the current systems face important limitations. First, they present an increased complexity in architecture that offers only marginal improvements on NLG metrics. Secondly, these systems that achieve high performance on these metrics are not always factually complete or consistent due to both inadequate training and evaluation. Recent studies have shown the systems can be substantially improved by using new methods encouraging 1) the generation of domain entities consistent with the reference and 2) describing these entities in inferentially consistent ways. So far, these methods rely on weakly-supervised approaches (rule-based) and named entity recognition systems that are not specific to the chest X-ray domain. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new method, the RadGraph reward, to further improve the factual completeness and correctness of generated radiology reports. More precisely, we leverage the RadGraph dataset containing annotated chest X-ray reports with entities and relations between entities. On two open radiology report datasets, our system substantially improves the scores up to 14.2% and 25.3% on metrics evaluating the factual correctness and completeness of reports.

Improving the Factual Correctness of Radiology Report Generation with Semantic Rewards

A recent line of work in NLP focuses on the (dis)ability of models to generalise compositionally for artificial languages.
However, when considering natural language tasks, the data involved is not strictly, or locally, compositional.
Quantifying the compositionality of data is a challenging task, which has been investigated primarily for short utterances.
We use recursive neural models (Tree-LSTMs) with bottlenecks that limit the transfer of information between nodes.
We illustrate that comparing data's representations in models with and without the bottleneck can be used to produce a compositionality metric.
The procedure is applied to the evaluation of arithmetic expressions using synthetic data, and sentiment classification using natural language data.
We demonstrate that compression through a bottleneck impacts non-compositional examples disproportionately
and then use the bottleneck compositionality metric (BCM) to distinguish compositional from non-compositional samples, yielding a compositionality ranking over a dataset.

Recursive Neural Networks with Bottlenecks Diagnose (Non-)Compositionality

While fine-tuned language models perform well on many language tasks, they were also shown to rely on superficial surface features such as lexical overlap. Excessive utilization of such heuristics can lead to failure on challenging inputs. We analyze the use of lexical overlap heuristics in natural language inference, paraphrase detection, and reading comprehension (using a novel contrastive dataset),
and find that larger models are much less susceptible to adopting lexical overlap heuristics. We also find that longer training leads models to abandon lexical overlap heuristics. Finally, We provide evidence that the disparity between models size has its source in the pre-trained model.

Lexical Generalization Improves with Larger Models and Longer Training

Existing approaches to constructing training data for Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks, such as for semi-structured table reasoning, are either via crowdsourcing or fully automatic methods. However, the former is expensive and time consuming and thus limits scale, and the latter often produces naive examples that may lack complex reasoning. This paper develops a realistic semi-automated framework for data augmentation for tabular inference. Instead of manually generating a hypothesis for each table, our methodology generates hypothesis templates transferable to similar tables. In addition, our framework entails the creation of rational counterfactual tables based on human written logical constraints and premise paraphrasing. For our case study, we use the INFOTABS (Gupta et al., 2020), which is an entity centric tabular inference dataset. We observed that our framework could generate human-like tabular inference examples, which could benefit training data augmentation, especially in the scenario with limited supervision.

Realistic Data Augmentation Framework for Enhancing Tabular Reasoning

Transformer language models encode the notion of word order using positional information. Most commonly, this positional information is represented by absolute position embeddings (APEs), that are learned from the pretraining data. However, in natural language, it is not absolute position that matters, but relative position, and the extent to which APEs can capture this type of information has not been studied. In this work, we observe that models trained with APE over-rely on positional information to the point that they break-down when subjected to sentences with shifted position information. Specifically, when models are subjected to sentences starting from a non-zero position (excluding the effect of priming), they exhibit noticeably degraded performance on zero- to full-shot tasks, across a range of model families and model sizes. Our findings raise questions about the efficacy of APEs to model the relativity of position information, and invite further introspection on the sentence and word order processing strategies employed by these models.

The Curious Case of Absolute Position Embeddings

Vision-and-dialog navigation is a recent benchmark for evaluating the AI capabilities of perception, interaction, and decision making. While existing methods developed for this benchmark have demonstrated great successes, they mostly rely on large datasets, where data collection can be a challenge, and the learned policies are not adaptive to domain changes. In this paper, we focus on a new problem, referred to as goal-oriented vision-and-dialog navigation (GVDN), where an agent uses reinforcement learning techniques to compute dialog-navigation policies from trial and error. A robot conducts visual navigation to locate target objects, and can talk to a remote human operator as needed. Our remote human is able to provide guidance on navigation only if the robot correctly conveys its location through dialog. Experiments have been conducted using photo-realistic simulation environments. Results suggest that, our agent outperforms competitive baselines in success rate.

Goal-oriented Vision-and-Dialog Navigation via Reinforcement Learning

Creating challenging tabular inference data is essential for learning complex reasoning. Prior work has mostly relied on two data generation strategies. The first is human annotation, which yields linguistically diverse data but is difficult to scale. The second category for creation is synthetic generation, which is scalable and cost effective but lacks inventiveness. In this research, we present a framework for semi-automatically recasting existing tabular data to make use of the benefits of both approaches. We utilize our framework to build tabular NLI instances from five datasets that were initially intended for tasks like table2text creation, tabular Q/A, and semantic parsing. We demonstrate that recasted data could be used as evaluation benchmarks as well as augmentation data to enhance performance on tabular NLI tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of models trained on recasted data in the zero-shot scenario, and analyse trends in performance across different recasted datasets types.

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