United Arab Emirates

Text games present opportunities for natural language understanding (NLU) methods to tackle reinforcement learning (RL) challenges. However, recent work has questioned the necessity of NLU by showing random text hashes could perform decently. In this paper, we pursue a fine-grained investigation into the roles of text in the face of different RL challenges, and reconcile that semantic and non-semantic language representations could be complementary rather than contrasting. Concretely, we propose a simple scheme to extract relevant contextual information into an approximate state hash as extra input for an RNN-based text agent. Such a lightweight plug-in achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art text agents using advanced NLU techniques such as knowledge graph and passage retrieval, suggesting non-NLU methods might suffice to tackle the challenge of partial observability. However, if we remove RNN encoders and use approximate or even ground-truth state hash alone, the model performs miserably, which confirms the importance of semantic function approximation to tackle the challenge of combinatorially large observation and action spaces. Our findings and analysis provide new insights for designing better text game task setups and agents.

EMNLP 2022

Revisiting the Roles of &quot;Text” in Text Games

state representation

interaction

text game

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Revisiting the Roles of "Text” in Text Games

findings / work in progress

Recently, prompt tuning (PT) has gained increasing attention as a parameter-efficient way of tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs). Despite extensively reducing the number of tunable parameters and achieving satisfying performance, PT is training-inefficient due to its slow convergence. To improve PT's training efficiency, we first make some novel observations about the prompt transferability of "partial PLMs”, which are defined by compressing a PLM in depth or width. We observe that the soft prompts learned by different partial PLMs of various sizes are similar in the parameter space, implying that these soft prompts could potentially be transferred among partial PLMs. Inspired by these observations, we propose Fast Prompt Tuning (FPT), which starts by conducting PT using a small-scale partial PLM, and then progressively expands its depth and width until the full-model size. After each expansion, we recycle the previously learned soft prompts as initialization for the enlarged partial PLM and then proceed PT. We demonstrate the feasibility of FPT on 5 tasks and show that FPT could save over 30% training computations while achieving comparable performance. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/FastPromptTuning.

FPT: Improving Prompt Tuning Efficiency via Progressive Training

Sanskrit Word Segmentation (SWS) is essential in making digitized texts available and in deploying downstream tasks. It is, however, non-trivial because of the sandhi phenomenon that modifies the characters at the word boundaries, and needs special treatment. Existing lexicon driven approaches for SWS make use of Sanskrit Heritage Reader, a lexicon-driven shallow parser, to generate the complete candidate solution space, over which various methods are applied to produce the most valid solution. However, these approaches fail while encountering out-of-vocabulary tokens. On the other hand, purely engineering methods for SWS have made use of recent advances in deep learning, but cannot make use of the latent word information on availability. 

To mitigate the shortcomings of both families of approaches, we propose Transformer based Linguistically Informed Sanskrit Tokenizer (TransLIST) consisting of (1) a module that encodes the character input along with latent-word information, which takes into account the sandhi phenomenon specific to SWS and is apt to work with partial or no candidate solutions, (2) a novel soft-masked attention to prioritize potential candidate words and (3) a novel path ranking algorithm to rectify the corrupted predictions. Experiments on the benchmark datasets for SWS show that TransLIST outperforms the current state-of-the-art system by an average 7.2 points absolute gain in terms of perfect match (PM) metric.

TransLIST: A Transformer-Based Linguistically Informed Sanskrit Tokenizer

Encoded text representations often capture sensitive attributes about individuals (e.g., race or gender), which raise privacy concerns and can make downstream models unfair to certain groups. In this work, we propose FEDERATE, an approach that combines ideas from differential privacy and adversarial training to learn private text representations which also induces fairer models. We empirically evaluate the trade-off between the privacy of the representations and the fairness and accuracy of the downstream model on four NLP datasets. Our results show that FEDERATE consistently improves upon previous methods, and thus suggest that privacy and fairness can positively reinforce each other.

Fair NLP Models with Differentially Private Text Encoders

Document-level machine translation leverages inter-sentence dependencies to produce more coherent and consistent translations. However, these models, predominantly based on transformers, are difficult to scale to long documents as their attention layers have quadratic complexity in the sequence length. Recent efforts on efficient attention improve scalability, but their effect on document translation remains unexplored. In this work, we investigate the efficacy of a recent linear attention model by Peng et al. (2021) on document translation and augment it with a sentential gate to promote a recency inductive bias. We evaluate the model on IWSLT 2015 and OpenSubtitles 2018 against the transformer, demonstrating substantially increased decoding speed on long sequences with similar or better BLEU scores. We show that sentential gating further improves translation quality on IWSLT.

Modeling Context With Linear Attention for Scalable Document-Level Translation

Large language models (LMs) have rapidly become a mainstay in Natural Language Processing. These models are known to acquire rich linguistic knowledge from training on large amounts of text. In this paper, we investigate if pre-training on text also confers these models with helpful `inductive biases' for non-linguistic reasoning. On a set of 19 diverse non-linguistic tasks involving quantitative computations, recognizing regular expressions and reasoning over strings. We find that pretrained models significantly outperform comparable non-pretrained neural models. This remains true also in experiments with training non-pretrained models with fewer parameters to account for model regularization effects. We further explore the effect of text domain on LMs by pretraining models from text from different domains and provenances. Our experiments surprisingly reveal that the positive effects of pre-training persist even when pretraining on multi-lingual text or computer code, and even for text generated from synthetic languages. Our findings suggest a hithertho unexplored deep connection between pre-training and inductive learning abilities of language models

What do Large Language Models Learn beyond Language?

Transformer-based language model approaches to automated story generation currently provide state-of-the-art results. However, they still suffer from plot incoherence when generating
narratives over time, and critically lack basic
commonsense reasoning. Furthermore, existing methods generally focus only on single-character stories, or fail to track characters
at all. To improve the coherence of generated narratives and to expand the scope of
character-centric narrative generation, we introduce Commonsense-inference Augmented
neural StoryTelling (CAST), a framework for
introducing commonsense reasoning into the
generation process with the option to model the
interaction between multiple characters. We
find that our CAST method produces significantly more coherent, on-topic, enjoyable and
fluent stories than existing models in both the
single-character and two-character settings in
three storytelling domains.

Inferring the Reader: Guiding Automated Story Generation with Commonsense Reasoning

In hate speech detection, developing training and evaluation datasets across various domains is the critical issue. Whereas, major approaches crawl social media texts and hire crowd-workers to annotate the data. Following this convention often restricts the scope of pejorative expressions to a single domain lacking generalization. Sometimes domain overlap between training corpus and evaluation set overestimate the prediction performance when pretraining language models on low-data language. To alleviate these problems in Korean, we propose APEACH that asks unspecified users to generate hate speech examples followed by minimal post-labeling. We find that APEACH can collect useful datasets that are less sensitive to the lexical overlaps between the pretraining corpus and the evaluation set, thereby properly measuring the model performance.

APEACH: Attacking Pejorative Expressions with Analysis on Crowd-Generated Hate Speech Evaluation Datasets

Automated storytelling has long captured the attention of researchers for the ubiquity of narratives in everyday life. However, it is challenging to maintain coherence and stay on-topic
toward a specific ending when generating narratives with neural language models. In this paper, we introduce Story generation with Reader
Models (StoRM), a framework in which a
reader model is used to reason about the story
should progress. A reader model infers what
a human reader believes about the concepts,
entities, and relations about the fictional story
world. We show how an explicit reader model
represented as a knowledge graph affords the story
coherence and provides controllability in the
form of achieving a given story world state
goal. Experiments show that our model produces significantly more coherent and on-topic
stories, outperforming baselines in dimensions
including plot plausibility and staying on topic

Guiding Neural Story Generation with Reader Models

The scarcity of gold standard code-mixed to pure language parallel data makes it difficult to train translation models reliably.
Prior work has addressed the paucity of parallel data with data augmentation techniques.
Such methods rely heavily on external resources making systems difficult to train and scale effectively for multiple languages.
We present a simple yet highly effective two-stage back-translation based training scheme for adapting multilingual models to the task of code-mixed translation which eliminates dependence on external resources.
We show a substantial improvement in translation quality (measured through BLEU), beating existing prior work by up to +3.8 BLEU on code-mixed Hi$\rightarrow$En, Mr$\rightarrow$En, and Bn$\rightarrow$En tasks. On the LinCE Machine Translation leader board, we achieve the highest score for code-mixed Es$\rightarrow$En, beating existing best baseline by +6.5 BLEU, and our own stronger baseline by +1.1 BLEU.

Adapting Multilingual Models for Code-Mixed Translation

When we execute the typical fine-tuning paradigm on continuously sequential tasks, the model will suffer from the catastrophic forgetting problem (i.e., the model tends to adjust old parameters according to the new knowledge, which leads to the loss of previously acquired concepts). People proposed replay-based methods by accessing old data from extra storage and maintaining the parameters of old concepts, which actually raise the privacy issue and larger memory requirements. In this work, we aim to achieve the sequential/continual learning of knowledge without accessing the old data. The core idea is to calibrate the parameters and logits (output) so that preserving old parameters and generalized learning on new concepts can be solved simultaneously. Our proposed framework includes two major components, Logits Calibration (LC) and Parameter Calibration (PC). The LC focuses on calibrating the learning of novel models with old models, and PC aims to preserve the parameters of old models. These two operations can maintain the old knowledge while learning new tasks without storing previous data. We conduct experiments on various scenarios of the GLUE (the General Language Understanding Evaluation) benchmark. The experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in all scenarios.

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