Canada

Jointly extracting entity pairs and their relations is challenging when working on distantly-supervised data with ambiguous or noisy labels.To mitigate such impact, we propose uncertainty-aware bootstrap learning, which is motivated by the intuition that the higher uncertainty of an instance, the more likely the model confidence is inconsistent with the ground truths.Specifically, we first explore instance-level data uncertainty to create an initial high-confident examples. Such subset serves as filtering noisy instances and facilitating the model to converge fast at the early stage.During bootstrap learning, we propose self-ensembling as a regularizer to alleviate inter-model uncertainty produced by noisy labels. We further define probability variance of joint tagging probabilities to estimate inner-model parametric uncertainty, which is used to select and build up new reliable training instances for the next iteration.Experimental results on two large datasets reveal that our approach outperforms existing strong baselines and related methods.

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ACL 2023

Uncertainty-Aware Bootstrap Learning for Joint Extraction on Distantly-Supervised Data

bootstrap learning

joint extraction

uncertainty

distant supervision

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

Jointly extracting entity pairs and their relations is challenging when working on distantly-supervised data with ambiguous or noisy labels.To mitigate such impact, we propose uncertainty-aware bootstrap learning, which is motivated by the intuition that the higher uncertainty of an instance, the more likely the model confidence is inconsistent with the ground truths.Specifically, we first explore instance-level data uncertainty to create an initial high-confident examples. Such subset serves as filtering noisy instances and facilitating the model to converge fast at the early stage.During bootstrap learning, we propose self-ensembling as a regularizer to alleviate inter-model uncertainty produced by noisy labels. We further define probability variance of joint tagging probabilities to estimate inner-model parametric uncertainty, which is used to select and build up new reliable training instances for the next iteration.Experimental results on two large datasets reveal that our approach outperforms existing strong baselines and related methods.

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
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This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Researchers usually come up with new ideas only after thoroughly comprehending vast quantities of literature. The difficulty of this procedure is exacerbated by the fact that the number of academic publications is growing exponentially. In this study, we devise a framework based on concept co-occurrence for academic idea inspiration, which has been integrated into a research assistant system. From our perspective, the emergence of a new idea can be regarded as the fusion of two concepts that co-occur in an academic paper. We construct evolving concept graphs according to the co-occurrence relationship of concepts from 20 disciplines or topics. Then we design a temporal link prediction method based on masked language model to explore potential connections between different concepts. To verbalize the newly discovered connections, we also utilize the pretrained language model to generate a description of an idea based on a new data structure called co-occurrence citation quintuple. We evaluate our proposed system using both automatic metrics and human assessment. The results demonstrate that our system has broad prospects and can assist researchers in expediting the process of discovering new ideas.

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Exploring and Verbalizing Academic Ideas by Concept Co-occurrence

We introduce a method that self trains (or bootstraps) neural relation and explanation classifiers. Our work expands the supervised approach of \cite{10.1162/coli_a_00463}, which jointly trains a relation classifier with an explanation classifier that identifies context words important for the relation at hand, to semi-supervised scenarios. In particular, our approach iteratively converts the explainable models' outputs to rules and applies them to unlabeled text to produce new annotations.Our evaluation on the TACRED dataset shows that our method outperforms the rule-based model we started from by 15 F1 points, outperforms traditional self-training that relies just on the relation classifier by 5 F1 points, and performs comparatively with the prompt-based approach of \citet{sainz-etal-2021-label} (without requiring an additional natural language inference component).

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Bootstrapping Neural Relation and Explanation Classifiers

Multi-hop QA requires reasoning over multiple supporting facts to answer the question. However, the existing QA models always rely on shortcuts, e.g., providing the true answer by only one fact, rather than multi-hop reasoning, which is referred as disconnected reasoning problem. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel counterfactual multihop QA, a causal-effect approach that enables to reduce the disconnected reasoning. It builds upon explicitly modeling of causality: 1) the direct causal effects of disconnected reasoning and 2) the causal effect of true multi-hop reasoning from the total causal effect. With the causal graph, a counterfactual inference is proposed to disentangle the disconnected reasoning from the total causal effect, which provides us a new perspective and technology to learn a QA model that exploits the true multi-hop reasoning instead of shortcuts. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the benchmark HotpotQA dataset, which demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve notable improvement on reducing disconnected reasoning. For example, our method achieves 5.8% higher points of its Supps score on HotpotQA through true multihop reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/guowzh/CFMQA.

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Counterfactual Multihop QA: A Cause-Effect Approach for Reducing Disconnected Reasoning

Knowledge distillation has attracted a great deal of interest recently to compress large language models. However, existing knowledge distillation methods suffer from two limitations. First, the student model simply imitates the teacher's behavior while ignoring the reasoning behind it. Second, these methods usually focus on the transfer of sophisticated model-specific knowledge but overlook data-specific knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel attribution-driven knowledge distillation approach, which explores the token-level rationale behind the teacher model based on Integrated Gradients (IG) and transfers attribution knowledge to the student model. To enhance the knowledge transfer of model reasoning and generalization, we further explore multi-view attribution distillation on all potential decisions of the teacher. Comprehensive experiments are conducted with BERT on the GLUE benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach to several state-of-the-art methods.

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AD-KD: Attribution-Driven Knowledge Distillation for Language Model Compression

Given a language model (LM), maximum probability is a poor decoding objective for open-ended generation, because it produces short and repetitive text. On the other hand, sampling can often produce incoherent text that drifts from the original topics. We propose contrastive decoding (CD), a reliable decoding approach that optimizes a contrastive objective subject to a plausibility constraint. The contrastive objective returns the difference between the likelihood under a large LM (called the expert, e.g. OPT-13B) and a small LM (called the amateur, e.g. OPT-125M), and the constraint ensures that the outputs are plausible. CD is inspired by the fact that the failures of larger LMs (e.g., repetition, inco- herence) are even more prevalent in smaller LMs, and that this difference signals which texts should be preferred. CD requires zero additional training, and produces higher quality text than decoding from the larger LM alone. It also works across model scales (OPT-13B and GPT2-1.5B) and significantly outperforms four strong decoding algorithms (e.g., nucleus, top-k) in automatic and human evaluations across wikipedia, news and story domains.

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Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization

Large-scale vision language (VL) models use Transformers to perform cross-modal interactions between the input text and image. These cross-modal interactions are computationally expensive and memory-intensive due to the quadratic complexity of processing the input image and text. We present PuMer: a token reduction framework that uses text-informed Pruning and modality-aware Merging strategies to progressively reduce the tokens of input image and text, improving model inference speed and reducing memory footprint. PuMer learns to keep salient image tokens related to the input text and merges similar textual and visual tokens by adding lightweight token reducer modules at several cross-modal layers in the VL model. Training PuMer is mostly the same as finetuning the original VL model but faster. Our evaluation for two vision language models on four downstream VL tasks shows PuMer increases inference throughput by up to 2x and reduces memory footprint by over 50% while incurring less than a 1% accuracy drop.

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PuMer: Pruning and Merging Tokens for Efficient Vision Language Models

Current state-of-the-art models for natural language understanding require a preprocessing step to convert raw text into discrete tokens. This process known as tokenization relies on a pre-built vocabulary of words or sub-word morphemes. This fixed vocabulary limits the model's robustness to spelling errors and its capacity to adapt to new domains. In this work, we introduce a novel open-vocabulary language model that adopts a hierarchical two-level approach: one at the word level and another at the sequence level. Concretely, we design an intra-word module that uses a shallow Transformer architecture to learn word representations from their characters, and a deep inter-word Transformer module that contextualizes each word representation by attending to the entire word sequence. Our model thus directly operates on character sequences with explicit awareness of word boundaries, but without biased sub-word or word-level vocabulary. Experiments on various downstream tasks show that our method outperforms strong baselines. We also demonstrate that our hierarchical model is robust to textual corruption and domain shift.

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From Characters to Words: Hierarchical Pre-trained Language Model for Open-vocabulary Language Understanding

Online resources such as WikiHow compile a wide range of scripts for performing everyday tasks, which can assist models in learning to reason about procedures. However, the scripts are always presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life. For example, in the CrossTask Dataset, 64.5% of consecutive step pairs are also observed in the reverse order, suggesting their ordering is not fixed. In addition, each step has an average of 2.56 frequent next steps, demonstrating "branching". In this paper, we propose the new challenging task of non-sequential graph script induction, aiming to capture optional and interchangeable steps in procedural planning. To automate the induction of such graph scripts for given tasks, we propose to take advantage of loosely aligned videos of people performing the tasks. In particular, we design a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps and thus transform each video into an observed step path on the latent ground truth graph script. This key transformation enables us to train a script knowledge model capable of both generating explicit graph scripts for learnt tasks and predicting future steps given a partial step sequence. Our best model outperforms the strongest pure text/vision baselines by 17.52% absolute gains on F1@3 for next step prediction and 13.8% absolute gains on Acc@1 for partial sequence completion. Human evaluation shows our model outperforming the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% absolute gains in capturing sequential and non-sequential step relationships.

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Non-Sequential Graph Script Induction via Multimedia Grounding

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) aims to convert speech from one language into another, and has demonstrated significant progress to date. Despite the recent success, current S2ST models still suffer from distinct degradation in noisy environments and fail to translate visual speech (i.e., the movement of lips and teeth). In this work, we present AV-TranSpeech, the first audio-visual speech-to-speech (AV-S2ST) translation model without relying on intermediate text. AV-TranSpeech complements the audio stream with visual information to promote system robustness and opens up a host of practical applications: dictation or dubbing archival films. To mitigate the data scarcity with limited parallel AV-S2ST data, we 1) explore self-supervised pre-training with unlabeled audio-visual data to learn contextual representation, and 2) introduce cross-modal distillation with S2ST models trained on the audio-only corpus to further reduce the requirements of visual data. Experimental results on two language pairs demonstrate that AV-TranSpeech outperforms audio-only models under all settings regardless of the type of noise. With low-resource audio-visual data (10h, 30h), cross-modal distillation yields an improvement of 7.6 BLEU on average compared with baselines.\footnote{Audio samples are available at https://AV-TranSpeech.github.io/.

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AV-TranSpeech: Audio-Visual Robust Speech-to-Speech Translation

Similes occur in the creative context of describing a concept (i.e., tenor) by making a literally false yet figuratively meaningful comparison to another (i.e., vehicle). Previous efforts form simile generation as a context-free generation task, focusing on simile-style transfer or writing a simile from a given prefix. However, generated texts under such settings might be undesirable, such as hardly meeting the simile definition (e.g., missing vehicle) or difficult to address certain preferences of content as humans wish (e.g., describe the color of apples through the simile). We believe that a simile could be more qualified and user-oriented if incorporated with pre-specified constraints. To this end, we introduce controllable simile generation (CSG), a new task that requires the model to generate a simile with multiple simile elements, e.g., context and vehicle. To facilitate this task, we present GraCe, including 61.3k simile-element annotated Chinese similes. Based on it, we propose a CSG model Similor to benchmark this task, including a vehicle retrieval module Scorer to obtain the explicable comparison for a given tenor in the vehicle-unknown situation. Both statistical and experimental analyses show that GraCe is of high quality beyond all other Chinese simile datasets, in terms of the number (8 vs. 3) of annotation elements, Is-Simile accuracy (98.9% vs. 78.7%), and increasing model-performance gains for both uncontrollable and controllable simile generation. Meanwhile, Similor can serve as a strong baseline for CSG, especially with Scorer, which beats model-based retrieval methods without any re-training.

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