Although fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) renders strong performance in many NLP tasks, it relies on excessive labeled data. Recently, researchers have resorted to active fine-tuning for enhancing the label efficiency of PLM fine-tuning, but existing methods of this type usually ignore the potential of unlabeled data. We develop AcTune, a new framework that improves the label efficiency of active PLM fine-tuning by unleashing the power of unlabeled data via self-training. AcTune switches between data annotation and model self-training based on uncertainty: the unlabeled samples of high-uncertainty are selected for annotation, while the ones from low-uncertainty regions are used for model self-training. Additionally, we design (1) a region-aware sampling strategy to avoid redundant samples when querying annotations and (2) a momentum-based memory bank to dynamically aggregate the model’s pseudo labels to suppress label noise in self-training. Experiments on 6 text classification datasets show that AcTune outperforms the strongest active learning and self-training baselines and improves the label efficiency of PLM fine-tuning by 56.2% on average. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/yueyu1030/actune.

Weakly-supervised learning (WSL) has shown promising results in addressing label scarcity on many NLP tasks, but manually designing a comprehensive, high-quality labeling rule set is tedious and difficult. We study interactive weakly-supervised learning—the problem of iteratively and automatically discovering novel labeling rules from data to improve the WSL model. Our proposed model, named PRBoost, achieves this goal via iterative prompt-based rule discovery and model boosting. It uses boosting to identify large-error instances and discovers candidate rules from them by prompting pre-trained LMs with rule templates. The candidate rules are judged by human experts, and the accepted rules are used to generate complementary weak labels and strengthen the current model. Experiments on four tasks show PRBoost outperforms state-of-the-art WSL baselines up to 7.1%, and bridges the gaps with fully supervised models.

Self-training achieves enormous success in various semi-supervised and weakly-supervised learning tasks. The method can be interpreted as a teacher-student framework, where the teacher generates pseudo-labels, and the student makes predictions. The two models are updated alternatingly. However, such a straightforward alternating update rule leads to training instability. This is because a small change in the teacher may result in a significant change in the student. To address this issue, we propose DRIFT, short for differentiable self-training, that treats teacher-student as a Stackelberg game. In this game, a leader is always in a more advantageous position than a follower. In self-training, the student contributes to the prediction performance, and the teacher controls the training process by generating pseudo-labels. Therefore, we treat the student as the leader and the teacher as the follower. The leader procures its advantage by acknowledging the follower’s strategy, which involves differentiable pseudo-labels and differentiable sample weights. Consequently, the leader-follower interaction can be effectively captured via Stackelberg gradient, obtained by differentiating the follower’s strategy. Experimental results on semi- and weakly-supervised classification and named entity recognition tasks show that our model outperforms existing approaches by large margins.

We study the problem of extracting N-ary relation tuples from scientific articles. This task is challenging because the target knowledge tuples can reside in multiple parts and modalities of the document. Our proposed method ReSel decomposes this task into a two-stage procedure that first retrieves the most relevant paragraph/table and then selects the target entity from the retrieved component. For the high-level retrieval stage, ReSel designs a simple and effective feature set, which captures multi-level lexical and semantic similarities between the query and components. For the low-level selection stage, ReSel designs a cross-modal entity correlation graph along with a multi-view architecture, which models both semantic and document-structural relations between entities. Our experiments on three scientific information extraction datasets show that ReSel outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly.

We present a new zero-shot dense retrieval (ZeroDR) method, COCO-DR, to improve the generalization ability of dense retrieval by combating the distribution shifts between source training tasks and target scenarios. To mitigate the impact of document differences, COCO-DR continues pretraining the language model on the target corpora to adapt the model to target distributions via COtinuous COtrastive learning. To prepare for unseen target queries, COCO-DR leverages implicit Distributionally Robust Optimization (iDRO) to reweight samples from different source query clusters for improving model robustness over rare queries during fine-tuning. COCO-DR achieves superior average performance on BEIR, the zero-shot retrieval benchmark. At BERT_Base scale, COCO-DR Base outperforms other ZeroDR models with 60x larger size. At BERT_Large scale, COCO-DR Large outperforms the giant GPT-3 embedding model which has 500x more parameters. Our analysis shows the correlation between COCO-DR’s effectiveness in combating distribution shifts and improving zero-shot accuracy. Our code and model can be found at https://github.com/OpenMatch/COCO-DR.

In this paper, we investigate the instability in the standard dense retrieval training, which iterates between model training and hard negative selection using the being-trained model. We show the catastrophic forgetting phenomena behind the training instability, where models learn and forget different negative groups during training iterations. We then propose ANCE-Tele, which accumulates momentum negatives from past iterations and approximates future iterations using lookahead negatives, as “teleportations” along the time axis to smooth the learning process. On web search and OpenQA, ANCE-Tele outperforms previous state-of-the-art systems of similar size, eliminates the dependency on sparse retrieval negatives, and is competitive among systems using significantly more (50x) parameters. Our analysis demonstrates that teleportation negatives reduce catastrophic forgetting and improve convergence speed for dense retrieval training. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/ANCE-Tele.

Fine-tuned pre-trained language models (LMs) have achieved enormous success in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but they still require excessive labeled data in the fine-tuning stage. We study the problem of fine-tuning pre-trained LMs using only weak supervision, without any labeled data. This problem is challenging because the high capacity of LMs makes them prone to overfitting the noisy labels generated by weak supervision. To address this problem, we develop a contrastive self-training framework, COSINE, to enable fine-tuning LMs with weak supervision. Underpinned by contrastive regularization and confidence-based reweighting, our framework gradually improves model fitting while effectively suppressing error propagation. Experiments on sequence, token, and sentence pair classification tasks show that our model outperforms the strongest baseline by large margins and achieves competitive performance with fully-supervised fine-tuning methods. Our implementation is available on https://github.com/yueyu1030/COSINE.

Multi-hop reasoning approaches over knowledge graphs infer a missing relationship between entities with a multi-hop rule, which corresponds to a chain of relationships. We extend existing works to consider a generalized form of multi-hop rules, where each rule is a set of relation chains. To learn such generalized rules efficiently, we propose a two-step approach that first selects a small set of relation chains as a rule and then evaluates the confidence of the target relationship by jointly scoring the selected chains. A game-theoretical framework is proposed to this end to simultaneously optimize the rule selection and prediction steps. Empirical results show that our multi-chain multi-hop (MCMH) rules result in superior results compared to the standard single-chain approaches, justifying both our formulation of generalized rules and the effectiveness of the proposed learning framework.

Active learning is an important technique for low-resource sequence labeling tasks. However, current active sequence labeling methods use the queried samples alone in each iteration, which is an inefficient way of leveraging human annotations. We propose a simple but effective data augmentation method to improve label efficiency of active sequence labeling. Our method, SeqMix, simply augments the queried samples by generating extra labeled sequences in each iteration. The key difficulty is to generate plausible sequences along with token-level labels. In SeqMix, we address this challenge by performing mixup for both sequences and token-level labels of the queried samples. Furthermore, we design a discriminator during sequence mixup, which judges whether the generated sequences are plausible or not. Our experiments on Named Entity Recognition and Event Detection tasks show that SeqMix can improve the standard active sequence labeling method by 2.27%–3.75% in terms of F₁ scores. The code and data for SeqMix can be found at https://github.com/rz-zhang/SeqMix.

In this paper we present GumDrop, Georgetown University’s entry at the DISRPT 2019 Shared Task on automatic discourse unit segmentation and connective detection. Our approach relies on model stacking, creating a heterogeneous ensemble of classifiers, which feed into a metalearner for each final task. The system encompasses three trainable component stacks: one for sentence splitting, one for discourse unit segmentation and one for connective detection. The flexibility of each ensemble allows the system to generalize well to datasets of different sizes and with varying levels of homogeneity.

Generally the existing monolingual corpora are not suitable for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) of code-switching speech. The motivation of this paper is to study the rules and constraints code-switching follows and design a corpus for code-switching LVCSR task. This paper presents the development of a Mandarin-English code-switching corpus. This corpus consists of four parts: 1) conversational meeting speech and its data; 2) project meeting speech data; 3) student interviews speech; 4) text data of on-line news. The speech was transcribed by an annotator and verified by Mandarin-English bilingual speakers manually. We propose an approach for automatically downloading from the web text data that contains code-switching. The corpus includes both intra-sentential code-switching (switch in the middle of a sentence) and inter-sentential code-switching (switch at the end of the sentence). The distribution of part-of-speech (POS) tags and code-switching reasons are reported.