Probing is a popular approach to understand what linguistic information is contained in the representations of pre-trained language models. However, the mechanism of selecting the probe model has recently been subject to intense debate, as it is not clear if the probes are merely extracting information or modelling the linguistic property themselves. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a novel model-free approach to probing via prompting, which formulates probing as a prompting task. We conduct experiments on five probing tasks and show that PP is comparable or better at extracting information than diagnostic probes while learning much less on its own. We further combine the probing via prompting approach with pruning to analyze where the model stores the linguistic information in its architecture. Finally, we apply the probing via prompting approach to examine the usefulness of a linguistic property for pre-training by removing the heads that are essential to it and evaluating the resulting model’s performance on language modeling.

Standard automatic metrics, e.g. BLEU, are not reliable for document-level MT evaluation. They can neither distinguish document-level improvements in translation quality from sentence-level ones, nor identify the discourse phenomena that cause context-agnostic translations. This paper introduces a novel automatic metric BlonDe to widen the scope of automatic MT evaluation from sentence to document level. BlonDe takes discourse coherence into consideration by categorizing discourse-related spans and calculating the similarity-based F1 measure of categorized spans. We conduct extensive comparisons on a newly constructed dataset BWB. The experimental results show that BlonDe possesses better selectivity and interpretability at the document-level, and is more sensitive to document-level nuances. In a large-scale human study, BlonDe also achieves significantly higher Pearson’s r correlation with human judgments compared to previous metrics.

Many natural language processing tasks, e.g., coreference resolution and semantic role labeling, require selecting text spans and making decisions about them. A typical approach to such tasks is to score all possible spans and greedily select spans for task-specific downstream processing. This approach, however, does not incorporate any inductive bias about what sort of spans ought to be selected, e.g., that selected spans tend to be syntactic constituents. In this paper, we propose a novel grammar-based structured span selection model which learns to make use of the partial span-level annotation provided for such problems. Compared to previous approaches, our approach gets rid of the heuristic greedy span selection scheme, allowing us to model the downstream task on an optimal set of spans. We evaluate our model on two popular span prediction tasks: coreference resolution and semantic role labeling; and show improvements on both.

Human-translated text displays distinct features from naturally written text in the same language. This phenomena, known as translationese, has been argued to confound the machine translation (MT) evaluation. Yet, we find that existing work on translationese neglects some important factors and the conclusions are mostly correlational but not causal. In this work, we collect CausalMT, a dataset where the MT training data are also labeled with the human translation directions. We inspect two critical factors, the train-test direction match (whether the human translation directions in the training and test sets are aligned), and data-model direction match (whether the model learns in the same direction as the human translation direction in the dataset). We show that these two factors have a large causal effect on the MT performance, in addition to the test-model direction mismatch highlighted by existing work on the impact of translationese. In light of our findings, we provide a set of suggestions for MT training and evaluation. Our code and data are at https://github.com/EdisonNi-hku/CausalMT

Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various distributional factors associate with language change, but how they causally affect it. In particular, we study slang, which is an informal language that is typically restricted to a specific group or social setting. We analyze the semantic change and frequency shift of slang words and compare them to those of standard, nonslang words. With causal discovery and causal inference techniques, we measure the effect that word type (slang/nonslang) has on both semantic change and frequency shift, as well as its relationship to frequency, polysemy and part of speech. Our analysis provides some new insights in the study of language change, e.g., we show that slang words undergo less semantic change but tend to have larger frequency shifts over time.

In typical machine learning systems, an estimate of the probability of the prediction is used to assess the system’s confidence in the prediction.This confidence measure is usually uncalibrated; i.e. the system’s confidence in the prediction does not match the true probability of the predicted output.In this paper, we present an investigation into calibrating open setting machine reading systemssuch as open-domain question answering and claim verification systems.We show that calibrating such complex systems which contain discrete retrieval and deep reading components is challenging and current calibration techniques fail to scale to these settings. We propose simple extensions to existing calibration approaches that allows us to adapt them to these settings.Our experimental results reveal that the approach works well, and can be useful to selectively predict answers when question answering systems are posed with unanswerable or out-of-the-training distribution questions.

In this paper, we present an approach to improve the robustness of BERT language models against word substitution-based adversarial attacks by leveraging adversarial perturbations for self-supervised contrastive learning. We create a word-level adversarial attack generating hard positives on-the-fly as adversarial examples during contrastive learning. In contrast to previous works, our method improves model robustness without using any labeled data. Experimental results show that our method improves robustness of BERT against four different word substitution-based adversarial attacks, and combining our method with adversarial training gives higher robustness than adversarial training alone. As our method improves the robustness of BERT purely with unlabeled data, it opens up the possibility of using large text datasets to train robust language models against word substitution-based adversarial attacks.

Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in NLP towards using pretrained language models (PLM) for a wide range of tasks. However, there are many difficult design decisions to represent structures (e.g. tagged text, coreference chains) in a way such that they can be captured by PLMs. Prior work on structured prediction with PLMs typically flattens the structured output into a sequence, which limits the quality of structural information being learned and leads to inferior performance compared to classic discriminative models. In this work, we describe an approach to model structures as sequences of actions in an autoregressive manner with PLMs, allowing in-structure dependencies to be learned without any loss. Our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art on all the structured prediction tasks we looked at, namely, named entity recognition, end-to-end relation extraction, and coreference resolution.

A number of knowledge integration (KI) methods have recently been proposed to incorporate external knowledge into pretrained language models (LMs). Even though knowledge-enhanced LMs (KELMs) outperform base LMs on knowledge-intensive tasks, the inner-workings of these KI methods are not well-understood. For instance, it is unclear which knowledge is effectively integrated into KELMs and which is not; and if such integration led to catastrophic forgetting of already learned knowledge. We show that existing model interpretation methods such as linear probes and prompts have some key limitations in answering these questions. Then, we revisit KI from an information-theoretic view and propose a new theoretically sound probe model called Graph Convolution Simulator (GCS) for KI interpretation. GCS is eventually quite simple – it uses graph attention on the corresponding knowledge graph for interpretation.We conduct various experiments to verify that GCS provides reasonable interpretation results for two well-known KELMs: ERNIE and K-Adapter. Our experiments reveal that only little knowledge is successfully integrated in these models, and simply increasing the size of the KI corpus may not lead to better KELMs.

Large language models appear to learn facts from the large text corpora they are trained on. Such facts are encoded implicitly within their many parameters, making it difficult to verify or manipulate what knowledge has been learned. Language models have recently been extended to multilingual language models (MLLMs), enabling knowledge to be learned across hundreds of languages. Meanwhile, knowledge graphs contain facts in an explicit triple format, which require careful and costly curation and are only available in a few high-resource languages, restricting their research and application. To address these issues, we propose to enhance MLLMs with knowledge from multilingual knowledge graphs (MLKGs) so as to tackle language and knowledge graph tasks across many languages, including low-resource ones. Specifically, we introducea lightweight adapter set to enhance MLLMs with cross-lingual entity alignment and facts from MLKGs for many languages. Experiments on common benchmarks show that such enhancement benefits both MLLMs and MLKGs, achieving: (1) comparable or improved performance for knowledge graph completion and entity alignment relative to baselines, especially for low-resource languages (for which knowledge graphs are unavailable); and (2) improved MLLM performance on language understanding tasks that require multilingual factual knowledge; all while maintaining performance on other general language tasks.

Reasoning is central to human intelligence. However, fallacious arguments are common, and some exacerbate problems such as spreading misinformation about climate change. In this paper, we propose the task of logical fallacy detection, and provide a new dataset (Logic) of logical fallacies generally found in text, together with an additional challenge set for detecting logical fallacies in climate change claims (LogicClimate). Detecting logical fallacies is a hard problem as the model must understand the underlying logical structure of the argument. We find that existing pretrained large language models perform poorly on this task. In contrast, we show that a simple structure-aware classifier outperforms the best language model by 5.46% F1 scores on Logic and 4.51% on LogicClimate. We encourage future work to explore this task since (a) it can serve as a new reasoning challenge for language models, and (b) it can have potential applications in tackling the spread of misinformation. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/causalNLP/logical-fallacy

Labeled data for the task of Coreference Resolution is a scarce resource, requiring significant human effort. While state-of-the-art coreference models rely on such data, we propose an approach that leverages an end-to-end neural model in settings where labeled data is unavailable. Specifically, using weak supervision, we transfer the linguistic knowledge encoded by Stanford?s rule-based coreference system to the end-to-end model, which jointly learns rich, contextualized span representations and coreference chains. Our experiments on the English OntoNotes corpus demonstrate that our approach effectively benefits from the noisy coreference supervision, producing an improvement over Stanford?s rule-based system (+3.7 F1) and outperforming the previous best unsupervised model (+0.9 F1). Additionally, we validate the efficacy of our method on two other datasets: PreCo and Litbank (+2.5 and +5 F1 on Stanford’s system, respectively).

Socratic questioning is an educational method that allows students to discover answers to complex problems by asking them a series of thoughtful questions. Generation of didactically sound questions is challenging, requiring understanding of the reasoning process involved in the problem. We hypothesize that such questioning strategy can not only enhance the human performance, but also assist the math word problem (MWP) solvers.In this work, we explore the ability of large language models (LMs) in generating sequential questions for guiding math word problem-solving. We propose various guided question generation schemes based on input conditioning and reinforcement learning.On both automatic and human quality evaluations, we find that LMs constrained with desirable question properties generate superior questions and improve the overall performance of a math word problem solver. We conduct a preliminary user study to examine the potential value of such question generation models in the education domain. Results suggest that the difficulty level of problems plays an important role in determining whether questioning improves or hinders human performance. We discuss the future of using such questioning strategies in education.

To protect the privacy of individuals whose data is being shared, it is of high importance to develop methods allowing researchers and companies to release textual data while providing formal privacy guarantees to its originators. In the field of NLP, substantial efforts have been directed at building mechanisms following the framework of local differential privacy, thereby anonymizing individual text samples before releasing them. In practice, these approaches are often dissatisfying in terms of the quality of their output language due to the strong noise required for local differential privacy. In this paper, we approach the problem at hand using global differential privacy, particularly by training a generative language model in a differentially private manner and consequently sampling data from it. Using natural language prompts and a new prompt-mismatch loss, we are able to create highly accurate and fluent textual datasets taking on specific desired attributes such as sentiment or topic and resembling statistical properties of the training data. We perform thorough experiments indicating that our synthetic datasets do not leak information from our original data and are of high language quality and highly suitable for training models for further analysis on real-world data. Notably, we also demonstrate that training classifiers on private synthetic data outperforms directly training classifiers with DP-SGD.

Recent work has demonstrated that pre-trained language models (PLMs) are zero-shot learners. However, most existing zero-shot methods involve heavy human engineering or complicated self-training pipelines, hindering their application to new situations. In this work, we show that zero-shot text classification can be improved simply by clustering texts in the embedding spaces of PLMs. Specifically, we fit the unlabeled texts with a Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model after initializing cluster positions and shapes using class names. Despite its simplicity, this approach achieves superior or comparable performance on both topic and sentiment classification datasets and outperforms prior works significantly on unbalanced datasets. We further explore the applicability of our clustering approach by evaluating it on 14 datasets with more diverse topics, text lengths, and numbers of classes. Our approach achieves an average of 20% absolute improvement over prompt-based zero-shot learning. Finally, we compare different PLM embedding spaces and find that texts are well-clustered by topics even if the PLM is not explicitly pre-trained to generate meaningful sentence embeddings. This work indicates that PLM embeddings can categorize texts without task-specific fine-tuning, thus providing a new way to analyze and utilize their knowledge and zero-shot learning ability.

The principle of independent causal mechanisms (ICM) states that generative processes of real world data consist of independent modules which do not influence or inform each other. While this idea has led to fruitful developments in the field of causal inference, it is not widely-known in the NLP community. In this work, we argue that the causal direction of the data collection process bears nontrivial implications that can explain a number of published NLP findings, such as differences in semi-supervised learning (SSL) and domain adaptation (DA) performance across different settings. We categorize common NLP tasks according to their causal direction and empirically assay the validity of the ICM principle for text data using minimum description length. We conduct an extensive meta-analysis of over 100 published SSL and 30 DA studies, and find that the results are consistent with our expectations based on causal insights. This work presents the first attempt to analyze the ICM principle in NLP, and provides constructive suggestions for future modeling choices.

Abstract Multi-head attention, a collection of several attention mechanisms that independently attend to different parts of the input, is the key ingredient in the Transformer. Recent work has shown, however, that a large proportion of the heads in a Transformer’s multi-head attention mechanism can be safely pruned away without significantly harming the performance of the model; such pruning leads to models that are noticeably smaller and faster in practice. Our work introduces a new head pruning technique that we term differentiable subset pruning. ntuitively, our method learns per- head importance variables and then enforces a user-specified hard constraint on the number of unpruned heads. he importance variables are learned via stochastic gradient descent. e conduct experiments on natural language inference and machine translation; we show that differentiable subset pruning performs comparably or better than previous works while offering precise control of the sparsity level.1

When reading a literary piece, readers often make inferences about various characters’ roles, personalities, relationships, intents, actions, etc. While humans can readily draw upon their past experiences to build such a character-centric view of the narrative, understanding characters in narratives can be a challenging task for machines. To encourage research in this field of character-centric narrative understanding, we present LiSCU – a new dataset of literary pieces and their summaries paired with descriptions of characters that appear in them. We also introduce two new tasks on LiSCU: Character Identification and Character Description Generation. Our experiments with several pre-trained language models adapted for these tasks demonstrate that there is a need for better models of narrative comprehension.

NLP has a rich history of representing our prior understanding of language in the form of graphs. Recent work on analyzing contextualized text representations has focused on hand-designed probe models to understand how and to what extent do these representations encode a particular linguistic phenomenon. However, due to the inter-dependence of various phenomena and randomness of training probe models, detecting how these representations encode the rich information in these linguistic graphs remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a new information-theoretic probe, Bird’s Eye, which is a fairly simple probe method for detecting if and how these representations encode the information in these linguistic graphs. Instead of using model performance, our probe takes an information-theoretic view of probing and estimates the mutual information between the linguistic graph embedded in a continuous space and the contextualized word representations. Furthermore, we also propose an approach to use our probe to investigate localized linguistic information in the linguistic graphs using perturbation analysis. We call this probing setup Worm’s Eye. Using these probes, we analyze the BERT models on its ability to encode a syntactic and a semantic graph structure, and find that these models encode to some degree both syntactic as well as semantic information; albeit syntactic information to a greater extent.

Text-based games (TBGs) have emerged as useful benchmarks for evaluating progress at the intersection of grounded language understanding and reinforcement learning (RL). Recent work has proposed the use of external knowledge to improve the efficiency of RL agents for TBGs. In this paper, we posit that to act efficiently in TBGs, an agent must be able to track the state of the game while retrieving and using relevant commonsense knowledge. Thus, we propose an agent for TBGs that induces a graph representation of the game state and jointly grounds it with a graph of commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet. This combination is achieved through bidirectional knowledge graph attention between the two symbolic representations. We show that agents that incorporate commonsense into the game state graph outperform baseline agents.

Knowledge graph (KG) representation learning techniques that learn continuous embeddings of entities and relations in the KG have become popular in many AI applications. With a large KG, the embeddings consume a large amount of storage and memory. This is problematic and prohibits the deployment of these techniques in many real world settings. Thus, we propose an approach that compresses the KG embedding layer by representing each entity in the KG as a vector of discrete codes and then composes the embeddings from these codes. The approach can be trained end-to-end with simple modifications to any existing KG embedding technique. We evaluate the approach on various standard KG embedding evaluations and show that it achieves 50-1000x compression of embeddings with a minor loss in performance. The compressed embeddings also retain the ability to perform various reasoning tasks such as KG inference.

To ensure readability, text is often written and presented with due formatting. These text formatting devices help the writer to effectively convey the narrative. At the same time, these help the readers pick up the structure of the discourse and comprehend the conveyed information. There have been a number of linguistic theories on discourse structure of text. However, these theories only consider unformatted text. Multimedia text contains rich formatting features that can be leveraged for various NLP tasks. In this article, we study some of these discourse features in multimedia text and what communicative function they fulfill in the context. As a case study, we use these features to harvest structured subject knowledge of geometry from textbooks. We conclude that the discourse and text layout features provide information that is complementary to lexical semantic information. Finally, we show that the harvested structured knowledge can be used to improve an existing solver for geometry problems, making it more accurate as well as more explainable.

We propose a simple modification to existing neural machine translation (NMT) models that enables using a single universal model to translate between multiple languages while allowing for language specific parameterization, and that can also be used for domain adaptation. Our approach requires no changes to the model architecture of a standard NMT system, but instead introduces a new component, the contextual parameter generator (CPG), that generates the parameters of the system (e.g., weights in a neural network). This parameter generator accepts source and target language embeddings as input, and generates the parameters for the encoder and the decoder, respectively. The rest of the model remains unchanged and is shared across all languages. We show how this simple modification enables the system to use monolingual data for training and also perform zero-shot translation. We further show it is able to surpass state-of-the-art performance for both the IWSLT-15 and IWSLT-17 datasets and that the learned language embeddings are able to uncover interesting relationships between languages.

Standardized tests have recently been proposed as replacements to the Turing test as a driver for progress in AI (Clark, 2015). These include tests on understanding passages and stories and answering questions about them (Richardson et al., 2013; Rajpurkar et al., 2016a, inter alia), science question answering (Schoenick et al., 2016, inter alia), algebra word problems (Kushman et al., 2014, inter alia), geometry problems (Seo et al., 2015; Sachan et al., 2016), visual question answering (Antol et al., 2015), etc. Many of these tests require sophisticated understanding of the world, aiming to push the boundaries of AI. For this tutorial, we broadly categorize these tests into two categories: open domain tests such as reading comprehensions and elementary school tests where the goal is to find the support for an answer from the student curriculum, and closed domain tests such as intermediate level math and science tests (algebra, geometry, Newtonian physics problems, etc.). Unlike open domain tests, closed domain tests require the system to have significant domain knowledge and reasoning capabilities. For example, geometry questions typically involve a number of geometry primitives (lines, quadrilaterals, circles, etc) and require students to use axioms and theorems of geometry (Pythagoras theorem, alternating angles, etc) to solve them. These closed domains often have a formal logical basis and the question can be mapped to a formal language by semantic parsing. The formal question representation can then provided as an input to an expert system to solve the question.

Building curious machines that can answer as well as ask questions is an important challenge for AI. The two tasks of question answering and question generation are usually tackled separately in the NLP literature. At the same time, both require significant amounts of supervised data which is hard to obtain in many domains. To alleviate these issues, we propose a self-training method for jointly learning to ask as well as answer questions, leveraging unlabeled text along with labeled question answer pairs for learning. We evaluate our approach on four benchmark datasets: SQUAD, MS MARCO, WikiQA and TrecQA, and show significant improvements over a number of established baselines on both question answering and question generation tasks. We also achieved new state-of-the-art results on two competitive answer sentence selection tasks: WikiQA and TrecQA.

Textbooks are rich sources of information. Harvesting structured knowledge from textbooks is a key challenge in many educational applications. As a case study, we present an approach for harvesting structured axiomatic knowledge from math textbooks. Our approach uses rich contextual and typographical features extracted from raw textbooks. It leverages the redundancy and shared ordering across multiple textbooks to further refine the harvested axioms. These axioms are then parsed into rules that are used to improve the state-of-the-art in solving geometry problems.

Humans as well as animals are good at imitation. Inspired by this, the learning by demonstration view of machine learning learns to perform a task from detailed example demonstrations. In this paper, we introduce the task of question answering using natural language demonstrations where the question answering system is provided with detailed demonstrative solutions to questions in natural language. As a case study, we explore the task of learning to solve geometry problems using demonstrative solutions available in textbooks. We collect a new dataset of demonstrative geometry solutions from textbooks and explore approaches that learn to interpret these demonstrations as well as to use these interpretations to solve geometry problems. Our approaches show improvements over the best previously published system for solving geometry problems.