We present a comprehensive study of sparse attention patterns in Transformer models. We first question the need for pre-training with sparse attention and present experiments showing that an efficient fine-tuning only approach yields a slightly worse but still competitive model. Then we compare the widely used local attention pattern and the less-well-studied global attention pattern, demonstrating that global patterns have several unique advantages. We also demonstrate that a flexible approach to attention, with different patterns across different layers of the model, is beneficial for some tasks. Drawing on this insight, we propose a novel Adaptive Axis Attention method, which learns—during fine-tuning—different attention patterns for each Transformer layer depending on the downstream task. Rather than choosing a fixed attention pattern, the adaptive axis attention method identifies important tokens—for each task and model layer—and focuses attention on those. It does not require pre-training to accommodate the sparse patterns and demonstrates competitive and sometimes better performance against fixed sparse attention patterns that require resource-intensive pre-training.

We introduce DocTime - a novel temporal dependency graph (TDG) parser that takes as input a text document and produces a temporal dependency graph. It outperforms previous BERT-based solutions by a relative 4-8% on three datasets from modeling the problem as a graph network with path-prediction loss to incorporate longer range dependencies. This work also demonstrates how the TDG graph can be used to improve the downstream tasks of temporal questions answering and NLI by a relative 4-10% with a new framework that incorporates the temporal dependency graph into the self-attention layer of Transformer models (Time-transformer). Finally, we develop and evaluate on a new temporal dependency graph dataset for the domain of contractual documents, which has not been previously explored in this setting.

Approaches to computational argumentation tasks such as stance detection and aspect detection have largely focused on the text of independent claims, losing out on potentially valuable context provided by the rest of the collection. We introduce a general approach to these tasks motivated by syntopical reading, a reading process that emphasizes comparing and contrasting viewpoints in order to improve topic understanding. To capture collection-level context, we introduce the syntopical graph, a data structure for linking claims within a collection. A syntopical graph is a typed multi-graph where nodes represent claims and edges represent different possible pairwise relationships, such as entailment, paraphrase, or support. Experiments applying syntopical graphs to the problems of detecting stance and aspects demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in each domain, significantly outperforming approaches that do not utilize collection-level information.

We present TIMERS - a TIME, Rhetorical and Syntactic-aware model for document-level temporal relation classification in the English language. Our proposed method leverages rhetorical discourse features and temporal arguments from semantic role labels, in addition to traditional local syntactic features, trained through a Gated Relational-GCN. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms previous methods by 5-18% on the TDDiscourse, TimeBank-Dense, and MATRES datasets due to our discourse-level modeling.

While large-scale pretrained language models have significantly improved writing assistance functionalities such as autocomplete, more complex and controllable writing assistants have yet to be explored. We leverage advances in language modeling to build an interactive writing assistant that generates and rephrases text according to fine-grained author specifications. Users provide input to our Intent-Guided Assistant (IGA) in the form of text interspersed with tags that correspond to specific rhetorical directives (e.g., adding description or contrast, or rephrasing a particular sentence). We fine-tune a language model on a dataset heuristically-labeled with author intent, which allows IGA to fill in these tags with generated text that users can subsequently edit to their liking. A series of automatic and crowdsourced evaluations confirm the quality of IGA’s generated outputs, while a small-scale user study demonstrates author preference for IGA over baseline methods in a creative writing task. We release our dataset, code, and demo to spur further research into AI-assisted writing.

Text segmentation aims to uncover latent structure by dividing text from a document into coherent sections. Where previous work on text segmentation considers the tasks of document segmentation and segment labeling separately, we show that the tasks contain complementary information and are best addressed jointly. We introduce Segment Pooling LSTM (S-LSTM), which is capable of jointly segmenting a document and labeling segments. In support of joint training, we develop a method for teaching the model to recover from errors by aligning the predicted and ground truth segments. We show that S-LSTM reduces segmentation error by 30% on average, while also improving segment labeling.

This paper presents a new task, the grounding of spatio-temporal identifying descriptions in videos. Previous work suggests potential bias in existing datasets and emphasizes the need for a new data creation schema to better model linguistic structure. We introduce a new data collection scheme based on grammatical constraints for surface realization to enable us to investigate the problem of grounding spatio-temporal identifying descriptions in videos. We then propose a two-stream modular attention network that learns and grounds spatio-temporal identifying descriptions based on appearance and motion. We show that motion modules help to ground motion-related words and also help to learn in appearance modules because modular neural networks resolve task interference between modules. Finally, we propose a future challenge and a need for a robust system arising from replacing ground truth visual annotations with automatic video object detector and temporal event localization.