Language Models are the core for almost any Natural Language Processing system nowadays. One of their particularities is their contextualized representations, a game changer feature when a disambiguation between word senses is necessary. In this paper we aim to explore to what extent language models are capable of discerning among senses at inference time. We performed this analysis by prompting commonly used Languages Models such as BERT or RoBERTa to perform the task of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). We leverage the relation between word senses and domains, and cast WSD as a textual entailment problem, where the different hypothesis refer to the domains of the word senses. Our results show that this approach is indeed effective, close to supervised systems.
Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks rely on labeled data to train machine learning models to achieve high performance. However, data annotation can be a time-consuming and expensive process, especially when the task involves a large amount of data or requires specialized domains. Recently, GPT-3.5 series models have demonstrated remarkable few-shot and zero-shot ability across various NLP tasks. In this paper, we first claim that large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5, can serve as an excellent crowdsourced annotator by providing them with sufficient guidance and demonstrated examples. To make LLMs to be better annotators, we propose a two-step approach, 'explain-then-annotate'. To be more precise, we begin by creating prompts for every demonstrated example, which we subsequently utilize to prompt a LLM to provide an explanation for why the specific ground truth answer/label was chosen for that particular example. Following this, we construct the few-shot chain-of-thought prompt with the self-generated explanation and employ it to annotate the unlabeled data. We conduct experiments on three tasks, including user input and keyword relevance assessment, BoolQ and WiC. The annotation results from GPT-3.5 surpasses those from crowdsourced annotation for user input and keyword relevance assessment. Additionally, for the other two tasks, GPT-3.5 achieves results that are comparable to those obtained through crowdsourced annotation.
Self-supervised pre-trained transformers have improved the state of the art on a variety of speech tasks. Due to the quadratic time and space complexity of self-attention, they usually operate at the level of relatively short (e.g., utterance) segments. In this paper, we study the use of context, i.e., surrounding segments, during fine-tuning and propose a new approach called context-aware fine-tuning. We attach a context module on top of the last layer of a pre-trained model to encode the whole segment into a context embedding vector which is then used as an additional feature for the final prediction. During the fine-tuning stage, we introduce an auxiliary loss that encourages this context embedding vector to be similar to context vectors of surrounding segments. This allows the model to make predictions without access to these surrounding segments at inference time and requires only a tiny overhead compared to standard fine-tuned models. We evaluate the proposed approach using the SLUE and Libri-light benchmarks for several downstream tasks: Automatic speech recognition (ASR), named entity recognition (NER), and sentiment analysis (SA). The results show that context-aware fine-tuning not only outperforms a standard fine-tuning baseline but also rivals a strong context injection baseline that uses neighboring speech segments during inference.
Analysing and modelling interactive behaviour is an important topic in human-computer interaction (HCI) and a key requirement for the development of intelligent interactive systems. Interactive behaviour has a sequential (actions happen one after another) and hierarchical (a sequence of actions forms an activity driven by interaction goals) structure, which may be similar to the structure of natural language. Designed based on such a structure, natural language processing (NLP) methods have achieved groundbreaking success in various downstream tasks. However, few works linked interactive behaviour with natural language. In this paper, we explore the similarity between interactive behaviour and natural language by applying an NLP method, byte pair encoding (BPE), to encode mouse and keyboard behaviour. We then analyse the vocabulary, i.e., the set of action sequences, learnt by BPE, as well as use the vocabulary to encode the input behaviour for interactive task recognition. An existing dataset collected in constrained lab settings and our novel out-of-the-lab dataset were used for evaluation. Results show that this natural language-inspired approach not only learns action sequences that reflect specific interaction goals, but also achieves higher F1 scores on task recognition than other methods. Our work reveals the similarity between interactive behaviour and natural language, and presents the potential of applying the new pack of methods that leverage insights from NLP to model interactive behaviour in HCI.
Pretrained language models (PLMs) are trained on massive corpora, but often need to specialize to specific domains. A parameter-efficient adaptation method suggests training an adapter for each domain on the task of language modeling. This leads to good in-domain scores but can be impractical for domain- or resource-restricted settings. A solution is to use a related-domain adapter for the novel domain at test time. In this paper, we introduce AdapterSoup, an approach that performs weight-space averaging of adapters trained on different domains. Our approach is embarrassingly parallel: first, we train a set of domain-specific adapters; then, for each novel domain, we determine which adapters should be averaged at test time. We present extensive experiments showing that AdapterSoup consistently improves performance to new domains without extra training. We also explore weight averaging of adapters trained on the same domain with different hyper-parameters, and show that it preserves the performance of a PLM on new domains while obtaining strong in-domain results. We explore various approaches for choosing which adapters to combine, such as text clustering and semantic similarity. We find that using clustering leads to the most competitive results on novel domains.
When it comes to deploying deep vision models, the behavior of these systems must be explicable to ensure confidence in their reliability and fairness. A common approach to evaluate deep learning models is to build a labeled test set with attributes of interest and assess how well it performs. However, creating a balanced test set (i.e., one that is uniformly sampled over all the important traits) is often time-consuming, expensive, and prone to mistakes. The question we try to address is: can we evaluate the sensitivity of deep learning models to arbitrary visual attributes without an annotated test set? This paper argues the case that Zero-shot Model Diagnosis (ZOOM) is possible without the need for a test set nor labeling. To avoid the need for test sets, our system relies on a generative model and CLIP. The key idea is enabling the user to select a set of prompts (relevant to the problem) and our system will automatically search for semantic counterfactual images (i.e., synthesized images that flip the prediction in the case of a binary classifier) using the generative model. We evaluate several visual tasks (classification, key-point detection, and segmentation) in multiple visual domains to demonstrate the viability of our methodology. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of producing counterfactual images and offering sensitivity analysis for model diagnosis without the need for a test set.
The excellent generative capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models suggest they learn informative representations of image-text data. However, what knowledge their representations capture is not fully understood, and they have not been thoroughly explored on downstream tasks. We investigate diffusion models by proposing a method for evaluating them as zero-shot classifiers. The key idea is using a diffusion model's ability to denoise a noised image given a text description of a label as a proxy for that label's likelihood. We apply our method to Imagen, using it to probe fine-grained aspects of Imagen's knowledge and comparing it with CLIP's zero-shot abilities. Imagen performs competitively with CLIP on a wide range of zero-shot image classification datasets. Additionally, it achieves state-of-the-art results on shape/texture bias tests and can successfully perform attribute binding while CLIP cannot. Although generative pre-training is prevalent in NLP, visual foundation models often use other methods such as contrastive learning. Based on our findings, we argue that generative pre-training should be explored as a compelling alternative for vision and vision-language problems.
The explosion of data in recent years is driving individuals to leverage technology to generate insights. Traditional tools bring heavy learning overheads and the requirement for understanding complex charting techniques. Such barriers can hinder those who may benefit from harnessing data for informed decision making. The emerging field of generating data visualisations from natural language text (NL2VIS) addresses this issue. This study showcases Chat2VIS, a state-of-the-art NL2VIS solution. It capitalises on the latest in AI technology with the upsurge in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, Codex, and ChatGPT. Furthermore, the rise in natural language interfaces (NLI) and chatbots is taking centre stage. This work illustrates how Chat2VIS leverages similar techniques to fine-tune data visualisation components beyond that demonstrated in previous approaches. In addition, this paper presents the flexibility of Chat2VIS to comprehend multilingual natural language requests. No other NL2VIS system has demonstrated this unique talent. In concluding, this research provides quantitative benchmarking evaluations to contribute to the paucity of NL2VIS standards.
Large language models are typically trained densely: all parameters are updated with respect to all inputs. This requires synchronization of billions of parameters across thousands of GPUs. We introduce a simple but effective method to asynchronously train large, sparse language models on arbitrary text corpora. Our method clusters a corpus into sets of related documents, trains a separate expert language model on each cluster, and combines them in a sparse ensemble for inference. This approach generalizes embarrassingly parallel training by automatically discovering the domains for each expert, and eliminates nearly all the communication overhead of existing sparse language models. Our technique outperforms dense baselines on multiple corpora and few-shot tasks, and our analysis shows that specializing experts to meaningful clusters is key to these gains. Performance also improves with the number of experts and size of training data, suggesting this is a highly efficient and accessible approach to training large language models.
The notion of "in-domain data" in NLP is often over-simplistic and vague, as textual data varies in many nuanced linguistic aspects such as topic, style or level of formality. In addition, domain labels are many times unavailable, making it challenging to build domain-specific systems. We show that massive pre-trained language models implicitly learn sentence representations that cluster by domains without supervision -- suggesting a simple data-driven definition of domains in textual data. We harness this property and propose domain data selection methods based on such models, which require only a small set of in-domain monolingual data. We evaluate our data selection methods for neural machine translation across five diverse domains, where they outperform an established approach as measured by both BLEU and by precision and recall of sentence selection with respect to an oracle.
Transformer-based models are now widely used in NLP, but we still do not understand a lot about their inner workings. This paper describes what is known to date about the famous BERT model (Devlin et al. 2019), synthesizing over 40 analysis studies. We also provide an overview of the proposed modifications to the model and its training regime. We then outline the directions for further research.