Pretrained neural models such as BERT, when fine-tuned to perform natural language inference (NLI), often show high accuracy on standard datasets, but display a surprising lack of sensitivity to word order on controlled challenge sets. We hypothesize that this issue is not primarily caused by the pretrained model's limitations, but rather by the paucity of crowdsourced NLI examples that might convey the importance of syntactic structure at the fine-tuning stage. We explore several methods to augment standard training sets with syntactically informative examples, generated by applying syntactic transformations to sentences from the MNLI corpus. The best-performing augmentation method, subject/object inversion, improved BERT's accuracy on controlled examples that diagnose sensitivity to word order from 0.28 to 0.73, without affecting performance on the MNLI test set. This improvement generalized beyond the particular construction used for data augmentation, suggesting that augmentation causes BERT to recruit abstract syntactic representations.
A machine learning system can score well on a given test set by relying on heuristics that are effective for frequent example types but break down in more challenging cases. We study this issue within natural language inference (NLI), the task of determining whether one sentence entails another. We hypothesize that statistical NLI models may adopt three fallible syntactic heuristics: the lexical overlap heuristic, the subsequence heuristic, and the constituent heuristic. To determine whether models have adopted these heuristics, we introduce a controlled evaluation set called HANS (Heuristic A…
Yonsei University（延世大学）；NAVER AI Lab（NAVER人工智能实验室）；Changwon National University（昌原大学）
Data augmentation has been an important ingredient for boosting performances of learned models. Prior data augmentation methods for few-shot text classification have led to great performance boosts. However, they have not been designed to capture the intricate compositional structure of natural language. As a result, they fail to generate samples with plausible and diverse sentence structures. Motivated by this, we present the data Augmentation using Lexicalized Probabilistic context-free grammars (ALP) that generates augmented samples with diverse syntactic structures with plausible grammar. …
This paper describes a hybrid system for WSD, presented to the English all-words and lexical-sample tasks, that relies on two different unsupervised approaches. The first one selects the senses according to mutual information proximity between a context word a variant of the sense. The second heuristic analyzes the examples of use in the glosses of the senses so that simple syntactic patterns are inferred. This patterns are matched against the disambiguation contexts. We show that the first heuristic obtains a precision and recall of .58 and .35 respectively in the all words task while the sec…
The dissertation addresses the design of parsing grammars for automatic surface-syntactic analysis of unconstrained English text. It consists of a summary and three articles. {\it Morphological disambiguation} documents a grammar for morphological (or part-of-speech) disambiguation of English, done within the Constraint Grammar framework proposed by Fred Karlsson. The disambiguator seeks to discard those of the alternative morphological analyses proposed by the lexical analyser that are contextually illegitimate. The 1,100 constraints express some 23 general, essentially syntactic statements a…
We computed linguistic information at the lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels for Recognizing Inference in Text (RITE) tasks for both traditional and simplified Chinese in NTCIR-9 and NTCIR-10. Techniques for syntactic parsing, named-entity recognition, and near synonym recognition were employed, and features like counts of common words, statement lengths, negation words, and antonyms were considered to judge the entailment relationships of two statements, while we explored both heuristics-based functions and machine-learning approaches. The reported systems showed robustness by simultaneo…
Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) is a problem for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). OOV refers to words with a low occurrence in the training data, or to those that are absent from the training data. To alleviate this, word or phrase-based Data Augmentation (DA) techniques have been used. However, existing DA techniques have addressed only one of these OOV types and limit to considering either syntactic constraints or semantic constraints. We present a word and phrase replacement-based DA technique that consider both types of OOV, by augmenting (1) rare words in the existing parallel corpus, and (2) ne…
Hyundai Motor Company（现代汽车公司）；New York University（纽约大学）；Genentech（基因泰克公司）；CIFAR Fellow（加拿大高等研究院研究员）
Despite the success of mixup in data augmentation, its applicability to natural language processing (NLP) tasks has been limited due to the discrete and variable-length nature of natural languages. Recent studies have thus relied on domain-specific heuristics and manually crafted resources, such as dictionaries, in order to apply mixup in NLP. In this paper, we instead propose an unsupervised learning approach to text interpolation for the purpose of data augmentation, to which we refer as "Learning to INterpolate for Data Augmentation" (LINDA), that does not require any heuristics nor manuall…
Data-hungry deep neural networks have established themselves as the standard for many NLP tasks including the traditional sequence tagging ones. Despite their state-of-the-art performance on high-resource languages, they still fall behind of their statistical counter-parts in low-resource scenarios. One methodology to counter attack this problem is text augmentation, i.e., generating new synthetic training data points from existing data. Although NLP has recently witnessed a load of textual augmentation techniques, the field still lacks a systematic performance analysis on a diverse set of lan…
University College Dublin（都柏林大学）；Huawei Ireland Research Centre（华为爱尔兰研究中心）
Despite recent advancements in Machine Learning, many tasks still involve working in low-data regimes which can make solving natural language problems difficult. Recently, a number of text augmentation techniques have emerged in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which can enrich the training data with new examples, though they are not without their caveats. For instance, simple rule-based heuristic methods are effective, but lack variation in semantic content and syntactic structure with respect to the original text. On the other hand, more complex deep learning approaches can cau…
This paper investigates techniques for knowledge injection into word embeddings learned from large corpora of unannotated data. These representations are trained with word cooccurrence statistics and do not commonly exploit syntactic and semantic information from linguistic knowledge bases, which potentially limits their transferability to domains with differing language distributions or usages. We propose a novel approach for linguistic knowledge injection through data augmentation to learn word embeddings that enforce semantic relationships from the data, and systematically evaluate the impa…
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Thinking aloud is an effective meta-cognitive strategy human reasoners apply to solve difficult problems. We suggest to improve the reasoning ability of pre-trained neural language models in a similar way, namely by expanding a task's context with problem elaborations that are dynamically generated by the language model itself. Our main result is that dynamic problem elaboration significantly improves the zero-shot performance of GPT-2 in a deductive reasoning and natural language inference task: While the model uses a syntactic heuristic for predicting an answer, it is capable (to some degree…
RIKEN（理化学研究所）；Ochanomizu University（御茶水女子大学）；Tohoku University（东北大学）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）
Monotonicity reasoning is one of the important reasoning skills for any intelligent natural language inference (NLI) model in that it requires the ability to capture the interaction between lexical and syntactic structures. Since no test set has been developed for monotonicity reasoning with wide coverage, it is still unclear whether neural models can perform monotonicity reasoning in a proper way. To investigate this issue, we introduce the Monotonicity Entailment Dataset (MED). Performance by state-of-the-art NLI models on the new test set is substantially worse, under 55%, especially on dow…
Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Sign language translation (SLT) is often decomposed into video-to-gloss recognition and gloss-to-text translation, where a gloss is a sequence of transcribed spoken-language words in the order in which they are signed. We focus here on gloss-to-text translation, which we treat as a low-resource neural machine translation (NMT) problem. However, unlike traditional low-resource NMT, gloss-to-text translation differs because gloss-text pairs often have a higher lexical overlap and lower syntactic overlap than pairs of spoken languages. We exploit this lexical overlap and handle syntactic divergen…
Incorporating syntax into neural approaches in NLP has a multitude of practical and scientific benefits. For instance, a language model that is syntax-aware is likely to be able to produce better samples; even a discriminative model like BERT with a syntax module could be used for core NLP tasks like unsupervised syntactic parsing. Rapid progress in recent years was arguably spurred on by the empirical success of the Parsing-Reading-Predict architecture of (Shen et al., 2018a), later simplified by the Order Neuron LSTM of (Shen et al., 2019). Most notably, this is the first time neural approac…
Despite impressive empirical successes of neural machine translation (NMT) on standard benchmarks, limited parallel data impedes the application of NMT models to many language pairs. Data augmentation methods such as back-translation make it possible to use monolingual data to help alleviate these issues, but back-translation itself fails in extreme low-resource scenarios, especially for syntactically divergent languages. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective solution, whereby target-language sentences are re-ordered to match the order of the source and used as an additional source …
Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Bar Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）
The advent of neural-networks in NLP brought with it substantial improvements in supervised relation extraction. However, obtaining a sufficient quantity of training data remains a key challenge. In this work we propose a process for bootstrapping training datasets which can be performed quickly by non-NLP-experts. We take advantage of search engines over syntactic-graphs (Such as Shlain et al. (2020)) which expose a friendly by-example syntax. We use these to obtain positive examples by searching for sentences that are syntactically similar to user input examples. We apply this technique to r…
In this paper, we present a new approach for word sense disambiguation (WSD) using an exemplar-based learning algorithm. This approach integrates a diverse set of knowledge sources to disambiguate word sense, including part of speech of neighboring words, morphological form, the unordered set of surrounding words, local collocations, and verb-object syntactic relation. We tested our WSD program, named {\sc Lexas}, on both a common data set used in previous work, as well as on a large sense-tagged corpus that we separately constructed. {\sc Lexas} achieves a higher accuracy on the common data s…
SUST（沙赫贾拉尔科技大学）；University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）；BRAC University（BRAC大学）
Many areas, such as the biological and healthcare domain, artistic works, and organization names, have nested, overlapping, discontinuous entity mentions that may even be syntactically or semantically ambiguous in practice. Traditional sequence tagging algorithms are unable to recognize these complex mentions because they may violate the assumptions upon which sequence tagging schemes are founded. In this paper, we describe our contribution to SemEval 2022 Task 11 on identifying such complex Named Entities. We have leveraged the ensemble of multiple ELECTRA-based models that were exclusively p…
Neural models often exploit superficial features to achieve good performance, rather than deriving more general features. Overcoming this tendency is a central challenge in areas such as representation learning and ML fairness. Recent work has proposed using data augmentation, i.e., generating training examples where the superficial features fail, as a means of encouraging models to prefer the stronger features. We design a series of toy learning problems to test the hypothesis that data augmentation leads models to unlearn weaker heuristics, but not to learn stronger features in their place. …
Redfin Inc.（Redfin公司）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Content-dense news report important factual information about an event in direct, succinct manner. Information seeking applications such as information extraction, question answering and summarization normally assume all text they deal with is content-dense. Here we empirically test this assumption on news articles from the business, U.S. international relations, sports and science journalism domains. Our findings clearly indicate that about half of the news texts in our study are in fact not content-dense and motivate the development of a supervised content-density detector. We heuristically …
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Qassim University（卡西姆大学）
In pro-drop language like Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and many others, unrealized (null) arguments in certain syntactic positions can refer to a previously introduced entity, and are thus called anaphoric zero pronouns. The existing resources for studying anaphoric zero pronoun interpretation are however still limited. In this paper, we use five data augmentation methods to generate and detect anaphoric zero pronouns automatically. We use the augmented data as additional training materials for two anaphoric zero pronoun systems for Arabic. Our experimental results show that da…
Artificial Intelligence Research Center（人工智能研究中心）；AIST（产业技术综合研究所）
We explore the utilities of explicit negative examples in training neural language models. Negative examples here are incorrect words in a sentence, such as "barks" in "*The dogs barks". Neural language models are commonly trained only on positive examples, a set of sentences in the training data, but recent studies suggest that the models trained in this way are not capable of robustly handling complex syntactic constructions, such as long-distance agreement. In this paper, using English data, we first demonstrate that appropriately using negative examples about particular constructions (e.g.…
Query rewriting (QR) systems are widely used to reduce the friction caused by errors in a spoken language understanding pipeline. However, the underlying supervised models require a large number of labeled pairs, and these pairs are hard and costly to be collected. Therefore, We propose an augmentation framework that learns patterns from existing training pairs and generates rewrite candidates from rewrite labels inversely to compensate for insufficient QR training data. The proposed framework casts the augmentation problem as a sequence-to-sequence generation task and enforces the optimizatio…
Data augmentation methods for Natural Language Processing tasks are explored in recent years, however they are limited and it is hard to capture the diversity on sentence level. Besides, it is not always possible to perform data augmentation on supervised tasks. To address those problems, we propose a neural data augmentation method, which is a combination of Conditional Variational Autoencoder and encoder-decoder Transformer model. While encoding and decoding the input sentence, our model captures the syntactic and semantic representation of the input language with its class condition. Follow…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Bosch Research and Technology Center（博世研究中心）
Instead of using expensive manual annotations, researchers have proposed to train named entity recognition (NER) systems using heuristic labeling rules. However, devising labeling rules is challenging because it often requires a considerable amount of manual effort and domain expertise. To alleviate this problem, we propose \textsc{GLaRA}, a graph-based labeling rule augmentation framework, to learn new labeling rules from unlabeled data. We first create a graph with nodes representing candidate rules extracted from unlabeled data. Then, we design a new graph neural network to augment labeling…
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心（CAiRE））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Task-adaptive pre-training (TAPT) alleviates the lack of labelled data and provides performance lift by adapting unlabelled data to downstream task. Unfortunately, existing adaptations mainly involve deterministic rules that cannot generalize well. Here, we propose Clozer, a sequence-tagging based cloze answer extraction method used in TAPT that is extendable for adaptation on any cloze-style machine reading comprehension (MRC) downstream tasks. We experiment on multiple-choice cloze-style MRC tasks, and show that Clozer performs significantly better compared to the oracle and state-of-the-art…
This paper presents a novel data augmentation technique for text-to-speech (TTS), that allows to generate new (text, audio) training examples without requiring any additional data. Our goal is to increase diversity of text conditionings available during training. This helps to reduce overfitting, especially in low-resource settings. Our method relies on substituting text and audio fragments in a way that preserves syntactical correctness. We take additional measures to ensure that synthesized speech does not contain artifacts caused by combining inconsistent audio samples. The perceptual evalu…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Pionetechs, Inc.（Pionetechs公司）
Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems often demonstrate great performance on in-distribution data, but perform poorly on examples drawn from a shifted distribution. One way to evaluate the generalization ability of NER models is to use adversarial examples, on which the specific variations associated with named entities are rarely considered. To this end, we propose leveraging expert-guided heuristics to change the entity tokens and their surrounding contexts thereby altering their entity types as adversarial attacks. Using expert-guided heuristics, we augmented the CoNLL 2003 test set and ma…
CoUDA: Coherence Evaluation via Unified Data Augmentation
Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Soochow University（苏州大学人工智能研究院）；School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）；Jiangsu Normal University（江苏师范大学）
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）
Data augmentation has been shown to effectively improve the performance of multimodal machine learning models. This paper introduces a generative model for data augmentation by leveraging the correlations among multiple modalities. Different from conventional data augmentation approaches that apply low-level operations with deterministic heuristics, our method learns a generator that generates samples of the target modality conditioned on observed modalities in the variational auto-encoder framework. Additionally, the proposed model is able to quantify the confidence of augmented data by its g…
Universidade da Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学）；CITIC（CITIC信息与通信技术研究中心）
This paper proposes a novel technique that applies case-based reasoning in order to generate templates for reusable parse tree fragments, based on PoS tags of bigrams and trigrams that demonstrate low variability in their syntactic analyses from prior data. The aim of this approach is to improve the speed of dependency parsers by avoiding redundant calculations. This can be resolved by applying the predefined templates that capture results of previous syntactic analyses and directly assigning the stored structure to a new n-gram that matches one of the templates, instead of parsing a similar t…
Text data augmentation, i.e., the creation of new textual data from an existing text, is challenging. Indeed, augmentation transformations should take into account language complexity while being relevant to the target Natural Language Processing (NLP) task (e.g., Machine Translation, Text Classification). Initially motivated by an application of Business Email Compromise (BEC) detection, we propose a corpus and task agnostic augmentation framework used as a service to augment English texts within our company. Our proposal combines different methods, utilizing BERT language model, multi-step b…
In practice, it is common to find oneself with far too little text data to train a deep neural network. This "Big Data Wall" represents a challenge for minority language communities on the Internet, organizations, laboratories and companies that compete the GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft). While most of the research effort in text data augmentation aims on the long-term goal of finding end-to-end learning solutions, which is equivalent to "using neural networks to feed neural networks", this engineering work focuses on the use of practical, robust, scalable and easy-to-imple…
In many applications of machine learning, certain categories of examples may be underrepresented in the training data, causing systems to underperform on such "few-shot" cases at test time. A common remedy is to perform data augmentation, such as by duplicating underrepresented examples, or heuristically synthesizing new examples. But these remedies often fail to cover the full diversity and complexity of real examples. We propose a data augmentation approach that performs neural Example Extrapolation (Ex2). Given a handful of exemplars sampled from some distribution, Ex2 synthesizes new examp…
This paper focuses on the data augmentation for low-resource NLP tasks where the training set is limited. The existing solutions either leverage task-independent heuristic rules (e.g., Synonym Replacement) or fine-tune general-purpose pre-trained language models (e.g., GPT2) using the limited training instances to produce new synthetic data. Consequently, they have trivial task-specific knowledge and are limited to yielding low-quality synthetic data. To combat this issue, we propose Knowledge Mixture Data Augmentation Model (KnowDA) which is an Seq2Seq language model pre-trained on a mixture …
Unsupervised question answering is an attractive task due to its independence on labeled data. Previous works usually make use of heuristic rules as well as pre-trained models to construct data and train QA models. However, most of these works regard named entity (NE) as the only answer type, which ignores the high diversity of answers in the real world. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel unsupervised method by diversifying answers, named DiverseQA. Specifically, the proposed method is composed of three modules: data construction, data augmentation and denoising filter. Firstly, the da…
On-the-fly Denoising for Data Augmentation in Natural Language Understanding
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Tencent AI Lab, Seattle（腾讯AI实验室（西雅图））；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Data Augmentation (DA) -- generating extra training samples beyond original training set -- has been widely-used in today's unbiased VQA models to mitigate the language biases. Current mainstream DA strategies are synthetic-based methods, which synthesize new samples by either editing some visual regions/words, or re-generating them from scratch. However, these synthetic samples are always unnatural and error-prone. To avoid this issue, a recent DA work composes new augmented samples by randomly pairing pristine images and other human-written questions. Unfortunately, to guarantee augmented sa…
