United Arab Emirates

This work introduces a natural language inference (NLI) dataset that focuses on the validity of statements in legal wills. This dataset is unique because: (a) each entailment decision requires three inputs: the statement from the will, the law, and the conditions that hold at the time of the testator&#39;s death; and (b) the included texts are longer than the ones in current NLI datasets. We trained eight neural NLI models in this dataset. All the models achieve more than 80% macro F1 and accuracy, which indicates that neural approaches can handle this task reasonably well. However, group accuracy, a stricter evaluation measure that is calculated with a group of positive and negative examples generated from the same statement as a unit, is in mid 80s at best, which suggests that the models&#39; understanding of the task remains superficial. Further ablative analyses and explanation experiments indicate that all three text segments are used for prediction, but some decisions rely on semantically irrelevant tokens. This indicates that overfitting on these longer texts likely happens, and that additional research is required for this task to be solved.

EMNLP 2022

Validity Assessment of Legal Will Statements as Natural Language Inference

legal validity assessment

textual entailment

natural language inference

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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 work introduces a natural language inference (NLI) dataset that focuses on the validity of statements in legal wills. This dataset is unique because: (a) each entailment decision requires three inputs: the statement from the will, the law, and the conditions that hold at the time of the testator's death; and (b) the included texts are longer than the ones in current NLI datasets. We trained eight neural NLI models in this dataset. All the models achieve more than 80% macro F1 and accuracy, which indicates that neural approaches can handle this task reasonably well. However, group accuracy, a stricter evaluation measure that is calculated with a group of positive and negative examples generated from the same statement as a unit, is in mid 80s at best, which suggests that the models' understanding of the task remains superficial. Further ablative analyses and explanation experiments indicate that all three text segments are used for prediction, but some decisions rely on semantically irrelevant tokens. This indicates that overfitting on these longer texts likely happens, and that additional research is required for this task to be solved.

findings / work in progress

Currently, researchers focus on generating codes from the requirement documents. However, current approaches still perform poorly on some requirements needing complex problem-solving skills. In reality, to tackle such complex requirements, instead of directly translating requirement documents into codes, software engineers write codes via unified modeling language diagrams, such as flowcharts, an intermediate tool to analyze and visualize the system. Therefore, we propose a new source code generation task, that is, to generate source code from flowcharts with texts. We manually construct a benchmark dataset containing 320 flowcharts with their corresponding source codes. Obviously, it is not straightforward to employ the current approaches for the new source code generation task since (1) the flowchart is a graph that contains various structures, including loop, selection, and others which is different from texts; (2) the connections between nodes in the flowchart are abundant and diverse which need to be carefully handled. To solve the above problems, we propose a two-stage code generation model. In the first stage, a structure recognition algorithm is employed to transform the flowchart into pseudo-code containing the structural conventions of a typical programming language such as while, if. In the second stage, a code generation model is employed to convert the pseudo-code into code. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve some improvement over the baselines.

Code Generation From Flowcharts with Texts: A Benchmark Dataset and An Approach

Syntactic trees have been widely applied in relation extraction (RE). However, since parsing qualities are not stable on different text domains and a pre-defined grammar may not well fit the target relation schema, the introduction of syntactic structures sometimes fails to improve RE performances consistently. In this work, we study RE models with various unsupervised structures mined from pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT). We show that, similar to syntactic trees, unsupervised structures are quite informative for RE task: they are able to obtain competitive (even the best) performance scores on benchmark RE datasets (ACE05, WebNLG, SciERC). We also conduct detailed analyses on their abilities of adapting new RE domains and influence of noise links in those structures. The results suggest that unsupervised structures are reasonable alternatives of commonly used syntactic structures in relation extraction models.

Explore Unsupervised Structures in Pretrained Models for Relation Extraction

Adversarial examples in NLP are receiving increasing research attention. One line of investigation is the generation of word-level adversarial examples against fine-tuned Transformer models that preserve naturalness and grammaticality. Previous work found that human- and machine-generated adversarial examples are comparable in their naturalness and grammatical correctness. Most notably, humans were able to generate adversarial examples much more effortlessly than automated attacks. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of exactly how humans create these adversarial examples. By exploring the behavioural patterns of human workers during the generation process, we identify statistically significant tendencies based on which words humans prefer to select for adversarial replacement (e.g., word frequencies, word saliencies, sentiment) as well as where and when words are replaced in an input sequence. With our findings, we seek to inspire efforts that harness human strategies for more robust NLP models.

Identifying Human Strategies for Generating Word-Level Adversarial Examples

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) has shown great promise at the intersection of vision and language, and generative methods for ZSL are predominant owing to their efficiency. Moreover, textual description or attribute plays a critical role in transferring knowledge from the seen to unseen classes in ZSL. Such generative approaches for ZSL are very costly to train and require the class description of the unseen classes during training. In this work, we propose a non-generative gating-based attribute refinement network for ZSL, which achieves similar accuracies to generative methods of ZSL, at a much lower computational cost. The refined attributes are mapped into the visual domain through an attribute embedder, and the whole network is guided by the circle loss and the well-known softmax cross-entropy loss to obtain a robust class embedding. We refer to our approach as Circle loss guided gating-based Attribute-Refinement Network (CARNet). We perform extensive experiments on the five benchmark datasets over the various challenging scenarios viz., Generalized ZSL (GZSL), Continual GZSL (CGZSL), and conventional ZSL. We observe that the CARNet significantly outperforms recent non-generative ZSL methods and most generative ZSL methods in all three settings by a significant margin. Our extensive ablation study disentangles the performance of various components and justifies their importance. The source code is available at https://github.com/Sethup123/CARNet.

Refinement Matters: Textual Description Needs to be Refined for Zero-shot Learning

Discovering new slots is critical to the success of dialogue systems. Most existing methods rely on automatic slot induction in unsupervised fashion or perform domain adaptation across zero or few-shot scenarios. They have difficulties in providing high-quality supervised signals to learn clustering-friendly features, and are limited in effectively transferring the prior knowledge from known slots to new slots. In this work, we propose a Semi-supervised Incremental Clustering method (SIC), to discover new slots with the aid of existing linguistic annotation models and limited known slot data. Specifically, we harvest slot value candidates with NLP model cues and innovatively formulate the slot discovery task under an incremental clustering framework. The model gradually calibrate slot representations under the supervision of generated pseudo-labels, and automatically learns to terminate when no more salient slot remains. Our thorough evaluation on five public datasets demonstrates that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models.

Semi-supervised New Slot Discovery with Incremental Clustering

Knowledge distillation addresses the problem of transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model.
In this process, we typically have multiple types of knowledge extracted from the teacher model.
The problem is to make full use of them to train the student model.
Our preliminary study shows that: (1) not all of the knowledge is necessary for learning a good student model, and (2) knowledge distillation can benefit from certain knowledge at different training steps.
In response to these, we propose an actor-critic approach to selecting appropriate knowledge to transfer during the process of knowledge distillation.
In addition, we offer a refinement of the training algorithm to ease the computational burden.
Experimental results on the GLUE datasets show that our method outperforms several strong knowledge distillation baselines significantly.

Improved Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models via Knowledge Selection

Status is widely used to incentivize user engagement online. However, visible status indicators could inadvertently bias online deliberation to favor high-status users. In this work, we design and deploy a randomized experiment on the ChangeMyView platform to quantify status biases in deliberation online. We find strong evidence of status bias: hiding status on ChangeMyView increases the persuasion rate of moderate-status users by 84% and decreases the persuasion rate of high-status users by 41% relative to the control group. We also find that the persuasive power of status is moderated by verbosity, suggesting that status is used as an information-processing heuristic under cognitive load. Finally, we find that a user's status influences the argumentation behavior of other users they interact with in a manner that disadvantages low and moderate-status users.

Status Biases in Deliberation Online: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on ChangeMyView

Investigating better ways to reuse the released pre-trained language models (PLMs) can significantly reduce the computational cost and the potential environmental side-effects. This paper explores a novel PLM reuse paradigm, Knowledge Integration (KI). Without human annotations available, KI aims to merge the knowledge from different teacher-PLMs, each of which specializes in a different classification problem, into a versatile student model. To achieve this, we first derive the correlation between virtual golden supervision and teacher predictions. We then design a Model Uncertainty--aware Knowledge Integration (MUKI) framework to recover the golden supervision for the student. Specifically, MUKI adopts Monte-Carlo Dropout to estimate model uncertainty for the supervision integration. An instance-wise re-weighting mechanism based on the margin of uncertainty scores is further incorporated, to deal with the potential conflicting supervision from teachers.
Experimental results demonstrate that MUKI achieves substantial improvements over baselines on benchmark datasets. Further analysis shows that MUKI can generalize well for merging teacher models with heterogeneous architectures, and even teachers major in cross-lingual datasets.

From Mimicking to Integrating: Knowledge Integration for Pre-Trained Language Models

In this work, we study the large-scale pretraining of BERT-Large (Devlin et al., 2019) with differentially private SGD (DP-SGD). We show that combined with a careful implementation, scaling up the batch size to millions (i.e., mega-batches) improves the utility of the DP-SGD step for BERT; we also enhance the training efficiency by using an increasing batch size schedule. Our implementation builds on the recent work of Subramani et al (2020), who demonstrated that the overhead of a DP-SGD step is minimized with effective use of JAX (Bradbury et al., 2018; Frostig et al., 2018) primitives in conjunction with the XLA compiler (XLA team and collaborators, 2017). Our implementation achieves a masked language model accuracy of 60.5% at a batch size of 2M, for epsilon=5, which is a reasonable privacy setting. To put this number in perspective, non-private BERT models achieve an accuracy of ∼70%.

Large-Scale Differentially Private BERT

The many-to-many multilingual neural machine translation can translate between language pairs unseen during training, i.e., zero-shot translation. Improving zero-shot translation requires the model to learn universal representations and cross-mapping relationships to transfer the knowledge learned on the supervised directions to the zero-shot directions. In this work, we propose the state mover's distance based on the optimal theory to model the difference of the representations output by the encoder. Then, we bridge the gap between the semantic-equivalent representations of different languages at the token level by minimizing the proposed distance to learn universal representations. Besides, we propose an agreement-based training scheme, which can help the model make consistent predictions based on the semantic-equivalent sentences to learn universal cross-mapping relationships for all translation directions. The experimental results on diverse multilingual datasets show that our method can improve consistently compared with the baseline system and other contrast methods. The analysis proves that our method can better align the semantic space and improve the prediction consistency.

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