Anthony Sicilia, Tristan D. Maidment, Pat Healy, Malihe Alikhani
{"title":"Modeling Non-Cooperative Dialogue: Theoretical and Empirical Insights","authors":"Anthony Sicilia, Tristan D. Maidment, Pat Healy, Malihe Alikhani","doi":"10.1162/tacl_a_00507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00507","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Investigating cooperativity of interlocutors is central in studying pragmatics of dialogue. Models of conversation that only assume cooperative agents fail to explain the dynamics of strategic conversations. Thus, we investigate the ability of agents to identify non-cooperative interlocutors while completing a concurrent visual-dialogue task. Within this novel setting, we study the optimality of communication strategies for achieving this multi-task objective. We use the tools of learning theory to develop a theoretical model for identifying non-cooperative interlocutors and apply this theory to analyze different communication strategies. We also introduce a corpus of non-cooperative conversations about images in the GuessWhat?! dataset proposed by De Vries et al. (2017). We use reinforcement learning to implement multiple communication strategies in this context and find that empirical results validate our theory.","PeriodicalId":33559,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"10 1","pages":"1084-1102"},"PeriodicalIF":10.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43827179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Getting BART to Ride the Idiomatic Train: Learning to Represent Idiomatic Expressions","authors":"Ziheng Zeng, S. Bhat","doi":"10.1162/tacl_a_00510","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00510","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Idiomatic expressions (IEs), characterized by their non-compositionality, are an important part of natural language. They have been a classical challenge to NLP, including pre-trained language models that drive today’s state-of-the-art. Prior work has identified deficiencies in their contextualized representation stemming from the underlying compositional paradigm of representation. In this work, we take a first-principles approach to build idiomaticity into BART using an adapter as a lightweight non-compositional language expert trained on idiomatic sentences. The improved capability over baselines (e.g., BART) is seen via intrinsic and extrinsic methods, where idiom embeddings score 0.19 points higher in homogeneity score for embedding clustering, and up to 25% higher sequence accuracy on the idiom processing tasks of IE sense disambiguation and span detection.","PeriodicalId":33559,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"10 1","pages":"1120-1137"},"PeriodicalIF":10.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46430433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Meta-Learning the Difference: Preparing Large Language Models for Efficient Adaptation","authors":"Zejiang Hou, Julian Salazar, George Polovets","doi":"10.1162/tacl_a_00517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00517","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Large pretrained language models (PLMs) are often domain- or task-adapted via finetuning or prompting. Finetuning requires modifying all of the parameters and having enough data to avoid overfitting while prompting requires no training and few examples but limits performance. Instead, we prepare PLMs for data- and parameter-efficient adaptation by learning to learn the difference between general and adapted PLMs. This difference is expressed in terms of model weights and sublayer structure through our proposed dynamic low-rank reparameterization and learned architecture controller. Experiments on few-shot dialogue completion, low-resource abstractive summarization, and multi-domain language modeling show improvements in adaptation time and performance over direct finetuning or preparation via domain-adaptive pretraining. Ablations show our task-adaptive reparameterization (TARP) and model search (TAMS) components individually improve on other parameter-efficient transfer like adapters and structure-learning methods like learned sparsification.","PeriodicalId":33559,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"10 1","pages":"1249-1265"},"PeriodicalIF":10.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41946630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Parallelism Tradeoff: Limitations of Log-Precision Transformers","authors":"William Cooper Merrill, Ashish Sabharwal","doi":"10.1162/tacl_a_00562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00562","url":null,"abstract":"Despite their omnipresence in modern NLP, characterizing the computational power of transformer neural nets remains an interesting open question. We prove that transformers whose arithmetic precision is logarithmic in the number of input tokens (and whose feedforward nets are computable using space linear in their input) can be simulated by constant-depth logspace-uniform threshold circuits. This provides insight on the power of transformers using known results in complexity theory. For example, if L≠P (i.e., not all poly-time problems can be solved using logarithmic space), then transformers cannot even accurately solve linear equalities or check membership in an arbitrary context-free grammar with empty productions. Our result intuitively emerges from the transformer architecture’s high parallelizability. We thus speculatively introduce the idea of a fundamental parallelism tradeoff: any model architecture as parallelizable as the transformer will obey limitations similar to it. Since parallelism is key to training models at massive scale, this suggests a potential inherent weakness of the scaling paradigm.","PeriodicalId":33559,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"11 1","pages":"531-545"},"PeriodicalIF":10.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46501624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"InSCIt: Information-Seeking Conversations with Mixed-Initiative Interactions","authors":"Zeqiu Wu, Ryu Parish, Hao Cheng, Sewon Min, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Mari Ostendorf, Hannaneh Hajishirzi","doi":"10.1162/tacl_a_00559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00559","url":null,"abstract":"In an information-seeking conversation, a user may ask questions that are under-specified or unanswerable. An ideal agent would interact by initiating different response types according to the available knowledge sources. However, most current studies either fail to or artificially incorporate such agent-side initiative. This work presents InSCIt, a dataset for Information-Seeking Conversations with mixed-initiative Interactions. It contains 4.7K user-agent turns from 805 human-human conversations where the agent searches over Wikipedia and either directly answers, asks for clarification, or provides relevant information to address user queries. The data supports two subtasks, evidence passage identification and response generation, as well as a human evaluation protocol to assess model performance. We report results of two systems based on state-of-the-art models of conversational knowledge identification and open-domain question answering. Both systems significantly underperform humans, suggesting ample room for improvement in future studies.1","PeriodicalId":33559,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"11 1","pages":"453-468"},"PeriodicalIF":10.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43591966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conditional Generation with a Question-Answering Blueprint","authors":"Shashi Narayan, Joshua Maynez, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Kuzman Ganchev, Annie Louis, Fantine Huot, Dipanjan Das, Mirella Lapata","doi":"10.1162/tacl_a_00583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00583","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The ability to convey relevant and faithful information is critical for many tasks in conditional generation and yet remains elusive for neural seq-to-seq models whose outputs often reveal hallucinations and fail to correctly cover important details. In this work, we advocate planning as a useful intermediate representation for rendering conditional generation less opaque and more grounded. We propose a new conceptualization of text plans as a sequence of question-answer (QA) pairs and enhance existing datasets (e.g., for summarization) with a QA blueprint operating as a proxy for content selection (i.e., what to say) and planning (i.e., in what order). We obtain blueprints automatically by exploiting state-of-the-art question generation technology and convert input-output pairs into input-blueprint-output tuples. We develop Transformer-based models, each varying in how they incorporate the blueprint in the generated output (e.g., as a global plan or iteratively). Evaluation across metrics and datasets demonstrates that blueprint models are more factual than alternatives which do not resort to planning and allow tighter control of the generation output.","PeriodicalId":33559,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"11 1","pages":"974-996"},"PeriodicalIF":10.9,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45704432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Zorik Gekhman, Nadav Oved, Orgad Keller, Idan Szpektor, Roi Reichart
{"title":"On the Robustness of Dialogue History Representation in Conversational Question Answering: A Comprehensive Study and a New Prompt-based Method","authors":"Zorik Gekhman, Nadav Oved, Orgad Keller, Idan Szpektor, Roi Reichart","doi":"10.1162/tacl_a_00549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00549","url":null,"abstract":"Most work on modeling the conversation history in Conversational Question Answering (CQA) reports a single main result on a common CQA benchmark. While existing models show impressive results on CQA leaderboards, it remains unclear whether they are robust to shifts in setting (sometimes to more realistic ones), training data size (e.g., from large to small sets) and domain. In this work, we design and conduct the first large-scale robustness study of history modeling approaches for CQA. We find that high benchmark scores do not necessarily translate to strong robustness, and that various methods can perform extremely differently under different settings. Equipped with the insights from our study, we design a novel prompt-based history modeling approach and demonstrate its strong robustness across various settings. Our approach is inspired by existing methods that highlight historic answers in the passage. However, instead of highlighting by modifying the passage token embeddings, we add textual prompts directly in the passage text. Our approach is simple, easy to plug into practically any model, and highly effective, thus we recommend it as a starting point for future model developers. We also hope that our study and insights will raise awareness to the importance of robustness-focused evaluation, in addition to obtaining high leaderboard scores, leading to better CQA systems.1","PeriodicalId":33559,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"11 1","pages":"351-366"},"PeriodicalIF":10.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45171232","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dependency Parsing with Backtracking using Deep Reinforcement Learning","authors":"Franck Dary, M. Petit, Alexis Nasr","doi":"10.1162/tacl_a_00496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00496","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Greedy algorithms for NLP such as transition-based parsing are prone to error propagation. One way to overcome this problem is to allow the algorithm to backtrack and explore an alternative solution in cases where new evidence contradicts the solution explored so far. In order to implement such a behavior, we use reinforcement learning and let the algorithm backtrack in cases where such an action gets a better reward than continuing to explore the current solution. We test this idea on both POS tagging and dependency parsing and show that backtracking is an effective means to fight against error propagation.","PeriodicalId":33559,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"10 1","pages":"888-903"},"PeriodicalIF":10.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46573267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Robin Algayres, Tristan Ricoul, Julien Karadayi, Hugo Laurenccon, Salah Zaiem, Abdel-rahman Mohamed, Benoît Sagot, E. Dupoux
{"title":"DP-Parse: Finding Word Boundaries from Raw Speech with an Instance Lexicon","authors":"Robin Algayres, Tristan Ricoul, Julien Karadayi, Hugo Laurenccon, Salah Zaiem, Abdel-rahman Mohamed, Benoît Sagot, E. Dupoux","doi":"10.1162/tacl_a_00505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00505","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Finding word boundaries in continuous speech is challenging as there is little or no equivalent of a ‘space’ delimiter between words. Popular Bayesian non-parametric models for text segmentation (Goldwater et al., 2006, 2009) use a Dirichlet process to jointly segment sentences and build a lexicon of word types. We introduce DP-Parse, which uses similar principles but only relies on an instance lexicon of word tokens, avoiding the clustering errors that arise with a lexicon of word types. On the Zero Resource Speech Benchmark 2017, our model sets a new speech segmentation state-of-the-art in 5 languages. The algorithm monotonically improves with better input representations, achieving yet higher scores when fed with weakly supervised inputs. Despite lacking a type lexicon, DP-Parse can be pipelined to a language model and learn semantic and syntactic representations as assessed by a new spoken word embedding benchmark. 1","PeriodicalId":33559,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"10 1","pages":"1051-1065"},"PeriodicalIF":10.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49380439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Devendra Singh Sachan, M. Lewis, Dani Yogatama, Luke Zettlemoyer, J. Pineau, M. Zaheer
{"title":"Questions Are All You Need to Train a Dense Passage Retriever","authors":"Devendra Singh Sachan, M. Lewis, Dani Yogatama, Luke Zettlemoyer, J. Pineau, M. Zaheer","doi":"10.1162/tacl_a_00564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00564","url":null,"abstract":"We introduce ART, a new corpus-level autoencoding approach for training dense retrieval models that does not require any labeled training data. Dense retrieval is a central challenge for open-domain tasks, such as Open QA, where state-of-the-art methods typically require large supervised datasets with custom hard-negative mining and denoising of positive examples. ART, in contrast, only requires access to unpaired inputs and outputs (e.g., questions and potential answer passages). It uses a new passage-retrieval autoencoding scheme, where (1) an input question is used to retrieve a set of evidence passages, and (2) the passages are then used to compute the probability of reconstructing the original question. Training for retrieval based on question reconstruction enables effective unsupervised learning of both passage and question encoders, which can be later incorporated into complete Open QA systems without any further finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ART obtains state-of-the-art results on multiple QA retrieval benchmarks with only generic initialization from a pre-trained language model, removing the need for labeled data and task-specific losses.1 Our code and model checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/DevSinghSachan/art.","PeriodicalId":33559,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics","volume":"11 1","pages":"600-616"},"PeriodicalIF":10.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43642220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}