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Existing controllable dialogue generation work focuses on the single-attribute control and lacks generalization capability to out-of-distribution multiple attribute combinations. In this paper, we explore the compositional generalization for multi-attribute controllable dialogue generation where a model can learn from seen attribute values and generalize to unseen combinations. We propose a prompt-based disentangled controllable dialogue generation model, DCG. It learns attribute concept composition by generating attribute-oriented prompt vectors and uses a disentanglement loss to disentangle different attributes for better generalization. Besides, we design a unified reference-free evaluation framework for multiple attributes with different levels of granularities. Experiment results on two benchmarks prove the effectiveness of our method and the evaluation metric.

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ACL 2023

Seen to Unseen: Exploring Compositional Generalization of Multi-Attribute Controllable Dialogue Generation

multi-attribute

controllable dialogue generation

compositional generalization

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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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.

Existing controllable dialogue generation work focuses on the single-attribute control and lacks generalization capability to out-of-distribution multiple attribute combinations. In this paper, we explore the compositional generalization for multi-attribute controllable dialogue generation where a model can learn from seen attribute values and generalize to unseen combinations. We propose a prompt-based disentangled controllable dialogue generation model, DCG. It learns attribute concept composition by generating attribute-oriented prompt vectors and uses a disentanglement loss to disentangle different attributes for better generalization. Besides, we design a unified reference-free evaluation framework for multiple attributes with different levels of granularities. Experiment results on two benchmarks prove the effectiveness of our method and the evaluation metric.

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poster

Coherence is an important aspect of text quality, and various approaches have been applied to coherence modeling. However, existing methods solely focus on a single document's coherence patterns, ignoring the underlying correlation between documents. We investigate a GCN-based coherence model that is capable of capturing structural similarities between documents. Our model first creates a graph structure for each document, from where we mine different subgraph patterns. We then construct a heterogeneous graph for the training corpus, connecting documents based on their shared subgraphs. Finally, a GCN is applied to the heterogeneous graph to model the connectivity relationships. We evaluate our method on two tasks, assessing discourse coherence and automated essay scoring. Results show that our GCN-based model outperforms all baselines, achieving a new state-of-the-art on both tasks.

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Modeling Structural Similarities between Documents for Coherence Assessment with Graph Convolutional Networks

Argument summarisation is a promising but currently under-explored field. Recent work has aimed to provide textual summaries in the form of concise and salient short texts, i.e., key points (KPs), in a task known as Key Point Analysis (KPA). One of the main challenges in KPA is finding high-quality key point candidates from dozens of arguments even in a small corpus. Furthermore, evaluating key points is crucial in ensuring that the automatically generated summaries are useful. Although automatic methods for evaluating summarisation have considerably advanced over the years, they mainly focus on sentence-level comparison, making it difficult to measure the quality of a summary (a set of KPs) as a whole. Aggravating this problem is the fact that human evaluation is costly and unreproducible. To address the above issues, we propose a two-step abstractive summarisation framework based on neural topic modelling with an iterative clustering procedure, to generate key points which are aligned with how humans identify key points. Our experiments show that our framework advances the state of the art in KPA, with performance improvement of up to 14 (absolute) percentage points, in terms of both ROUGE and our own proposed evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we evaluate the generated summaries using a novel set-based evaluation toolkit. Our quantitative analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed evaluation metrics in assessing the quality of generated KPs. Human evaluation further demonstrates the advantages of our approach and validates that our proposed evaluation metric is more consistent with human judgment than ROUGE scores.

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Do You Hear The People Sing? Key Point Analysis via Iterative Clustering and Abstractive Summarisation

Sarcasm, as a form of irony conveying mockery and contempt, has been widespread in social media such as Twitter and Weibo, where the sarcastic text is commonly characterized as an incongruity between the surface positive and negative situation. Naturally, it has an urgent demand to automatically identify sarcasm from social media, so as to illustrate people's real views toward specific targets. In this paper, we develop a novel sarcasm detection method, namely Sarcasm Detector with Augmentation of Potential Result and Reaction (SD-APRR). Inspired by the direct access view, we treat each sarcastic text as an incomplete version without latent content associated with implied negative situations, including the result and human reaction caused by its observable content. To fill the latent content, we estimate the potential result and human reaction for each given training sample by [xEffect] and [xReact] relations inferred by the pre-trained commonsense reasoning tool COMET, and integrate the sample with them as an augmented one. We can then employ those augmented samples to train the sarcasm detector, whose encoder is a graph neural network with a denoising module. We conduct extensive empirical experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of SD-APRR. The results demonstrate that SD-APRR can outperform strong baselines on benchmark datasets.

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Just Like a Human Would, Direct Access to Sarcasm Augmented with Potential Result and Reaction

Existing studies addressing gender bias of pre-trained language models, usually build a small gender-neutral data set and conduct a second phase pre-training on the model with such data. However, given the limited size and concentrated focus of the gender-neutral data, catastrophic forgetting would occur during second-phase pre-training. Forgetting information in the original training data may damage the model's downstream performance by a large margin. In this work, we empirically show that catastrophic forgetting occurs in such methods by evaluating them with general NLP tasks in GLUE. Then, we propose a new method, GEnder Equality Prompt (GEEP), to improve gender fairness of pre-trained models with less forgetting. GEEP freezes the pre-trained model and learns gender-related prompts with gender-neutral data.Empirical results show that GEEP not only achieves SOTA performances on gender fairness tasks, but also forgets less and performs better on GLUE by a large margin.

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Improving Gender Fairness of Pre-Trained Language Models without Catastrophic Forgetting

The Relational Triple Extraction (RTE) task is a fundamental and essential information extraction task. Recently, the table-filling RTE methods have received lots of attention. Despite their success, they suffer from some inherent problems such as underutilizing regional information of triple. In this work, we treat the RTE task based on table-filling method as an Object Detection task and propose a one-stage Object Detection framework for Relational Triple Extraction (OD-RTE). In this framework, the vertices-based bounding box detection, coupled with auxiliary global relational triple region detection, ensuring that regional information of triple could be fully utilized. Besides, our proposed decoding scheme could extract all types of triples. In addition, the negative sampling strategy of relations in the training stage improves the training efficiency while alleviating the imbalance of positive and negative relations. The experimental results show that 1) OD-RTE achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two widely used datasets (i.e., NYT and WebNLG). 2) Compared with the best performing table-filling method, OD-RTE achieves faster training and inference speed with lower GPU memory usage. To facilitate future research in this area, the codes are publicly available at https://github.com/NingJinzhong/ODRTE.

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OD-RTE: A One-Stage Object Detection Framework for Relational Triple Extraction

Question answering (QA) over tables and linked text, also called TextTableQA, has witnessed significant research in recent years, as tables are often found embedded in documents along with related text. HybridQA and OTT-QA are the two best-known TextTableQA datasets, with questions that are best answered by combining information from both table cells and linked text passages. A common challenge in both datasets, and TextTableQA in general, is that the training instances include just the question and answer, where the gold answer may match not only multiple table cells across table rows but also multiple text spans within the scope of a table row and its associated text. This leads to a noisy multi-instance training regime. We present MITQA, a transformer-based TextTableQA system that is explicitly designed to cope with distant supervision along both these axes, through a multi-instance loss objective, together with careful curriculum design. Our experiments show that the proposed multi-instance distant supervision approach helps MITQA get sate-of-the-art results beating the existing baselines for both HybridQA and OTT-QA, putting MITQA at the top of HybridQA leaderboard with best EM and F1 scores on a held out test set.

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Multi-Row, Multi-Span Distant Supervision For Table+Text Question Answering

While paraphrasing is a promising approach for data augmentation in classification tasks, its effect on named entity recognition (NER) is not investigated systematically due to the difficulty of span-level label preservation. In this paper, we utilize simple strategies to annotate entity spans in generations and compare established and novel methods of paraphrasing in NLP such as back translation, specialized encoder-decoder models such as Pegasus, and GPT-3 variants for their effectiveness in improving downstream performance for NER across different levels of gold annotations and paraphrasing strength on 5 datasets. We thoroughly explore the influence of paraphrasers, and dynamics between paraphrasing strength and gold dataset size on the NER performance with visualizations and statistical testing. We find that the choice of the paraphraser greatly impacts NER performance, with one of the larger GPT-3 variants exceedingly capable of generating high quality paraphrases, yielding statistically significant improvements in NER performance with increasing paraphrasing strength, while other paraphrasers show more mixed results. Additionally, inline auto annotations generated by larger GPT-3 are strictly better than heuristic based annotations. We also find diminishing benefits of paraphrasing as gold annotations increase for most datasets. Furthermore, while most paraphrasers promote entity memorization in NER, the proposed GPT-3 configuration performs most favorably among the compared paraphrasers when tested on unseen entities, with memorization reducing further with paraphrasing strength. Finally, we explore mention replacement using GPT-3, which provides additional benefits over base paraphrasing for specific datasets.

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When and how to paraphrase for named entity recognition?

In multilingual pre-training with the objective of MLM (masked language modeling) on multiple monolingual corpora, multilingual models only learn cross-linguality implicitly from isomorphic spaces formed by overlapping different language spaces due to the lack of explicit cross-lingual forward pass. In this work, we present CLPM (Cross-lingual Prototype Masking), a dynamic and token-wise masking scheme, for multilingual pre-training, using a special token $[\mathcal{C}]_{x}$ to replace a random token $x$ in the input sentence. $[\mathcal{C}]_{x}$ is an approximation of a cross-lingual prototype for $x$ and then forms an explicit cross-lingual forward pass. We instantiate CLPM for the multilingual pre-training phase of UNMT (unsupervised neural machine translation), and experiments show that CLPM can consistently improve the performance of UNMT models on $\{De, Ro, Ne \} \leftrightarrow En$. Beyond UNMT or bilingual tasks, we show that CLPM can consistently improve the performance of multilingual models on cross-lingual classification.

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On-the-fly Cross-lingual Masking for Multilingual Pre-training

Generative modeling has been the dominant approach for large-scale pretraining and zero-shot generalization. In this work, we challenge this convention by showing that discriminative approaches perform substantially better than generative ones on a large number of NLP tasks. Technically, we train a single discriminator to predict whether a text sample comes from the true data distribution, similar to GANs. Since many NLP tasks can be formulated as selecting from a few options, we use this discriminator to predict the concatenation of input and which option has the highest probability of coming from the true data distribution. This simple formulation achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot results on the T0 benchmark, outperforming T0 by 16.0%, 7.8%, and 11.5% respectively on different scales. In the finetuning setting, our approach also achieves new state-of-the-art results on a wide range of NLP tasks, with only 1/4 parameters of previous methods. Meanwhile, our approach requires minimal prompting efforts, which largely improves robustness and is essential for real-world applications. Furthermore, we also jointly train a generalized UD in combination with generative tasks, which maintains its advantage on discriminative tasks and simultaneously works on generative tasks.

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A Universal Discriminator for Zero-Shot Generalization

The automatic annotation of direct speech (AADS) in written text has been often used in computational narrative understanding. Methods based on either rules or deep neural networks have been explored, in particular for English or German languages. Yet, for French, our target language, not many works exist. Our goal is to create a unified framework to design and evaluate AADS models in French. For this, we consolidated the largest-to-date French narrative dataset annotated with DS per word; we adapted various baselines for sequence labelling or from AADS in other languages; and we designed and conducted an extensive evaluation focused on generalisation. Results show that the task still requires substantial efforts and emphasise characteristics of each baseline. Although this framework could be improved, it is a step further to encourage more research on the topic.

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Modeling Structural Similarities between Documents for Coherence Assessment with Graph Convolutional Networks

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