Unsupervised and Distributional Detection of Machine-Generated Text

The power of natural language generation models has provoked a flurry of interest in automatic methods to detect if a piece of text is human or machine-authored. The problem so far has been framed in a standard supervised way and consists in training a classifier on annotated data to predict the origin of one given new document. In this paper, we frame the problem in an unsupervised and distributional way: we assume that we have access to a large collection of unannotated documents, a big fraction of which is machine-generated. We propose a method to detect those machine-generated documents leveraging repeated higher-order n-grams, which we show over-appear in machine-generated text as compared to human ones. That weak signal is the starting point of a self-training setting where pseudo-labelled documents are used to train an ensemble of classifiers. Our experiments show that leveraging that signal allows us to rank suspicious documents accurately. Precision at 5000 is over 90% for top-k sampling strategies, and over 80% for nucleus sampling for the largest model we used (GPT2-large). The drop with increased size of model is small, which could indicate that the results hold for other current and future large language models.

Energy-Based Models for Code Generation under Compilability Constraints

Neural language models can be successfully trained on source code, leading to applications such as code completion. However, their versatile autoregressive self-supervision objective overlooks important global sequence-level features that are present in the data such as syntactic correctness or compilability. In this work, we pose the problem of learning to generate compilable code as constraint satisfaction. We define an Energy-Based Model (EBM) representing a pre-trained generative model with an imposed constraint of generating only compilable sequences. We then use the KL-Adaptive Distributional Policy Gradient algorithm (Khalifa et al., 2021) to train a generative model approximating the EBM. We conduct experiments showing that our proposed approach is able to improve compilability rates without sacrificing diversity and complexity of the generated samples.

References in Wikipedia: The Editors' Perspective

References are an essential part of Wikipedia. Each statement in Wikipedia should be referenced. In this paper, we explore the creation and collection of references for new Wikipedia articles from an editors' perspective. We map out the workflow of editors when creating a new article, emphasising how they select references.

A Distributional Approach to Controlled Text Generation

We propose a Distributional Approach to address Controlled Text Generation from pre-trained Language Models (LMs). This view permits to define, in a single formal framework, "pointwise" and "distributional" constraints over the target LM -- to our knowledge, this is the first approach with such generality -- while minimizing KL divergence with the initial LM distribution. The optimal target distribution is then uniquely determined as an explicit EBM (Energy-Based Model) representation. From that optimal representation we then train the target controlled autoregressive LM through an adaptive distributional variant of Policy Gradient. We conduct a first set of experiments over pointwise constraints showing the advantages of our approach over a set of baselines, in terms of obtaining a controlled LM balancing constraint satisfaction with divergence from the initial LM (GPT-2). We then perform experiments over distributional constraints, a unique feature of our approach, demonstrating its potential as a remedy to the problem of Bias in Language Models. Through an ablation study we show the effectiveness of our adaptive technique for obtaining faster convergence.

Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages

Research in NLP lacks geographic diversity, and the question of how NLP can be scaled to low-resourced languages has not yet been adequately solved. "Low-resourced"-ness is a complex problem going beyond data availability and reflects systemic problems in society. In this paper, we focus on the task of Machine Translation (MT), that plays a crucial role for information accessibility and communication worldwide. Despite immense improvements in MT over the past decade, MT is centered around a few high-resourced languages. As MT researchers cannot solve the problem of low-resourcedness alone, we propose participatory research as a means to involve all necessary agents required in the MT development process. We demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of participatory research with a case study on MT for African languages. Its implementation leads to a collection of novel translation datasets, MT benchmarks for over 30 languages, with human evaluations for a third of them, and enables participants without formal training to make a unique scientific contribution. Benchmarks, models, data, code, and evaluation results are released under https://github.com/masakhane-io/masakhane-mt.

Self-Supervised and Controlled Multi-Document Opinion Summarization

We address the problem of unsupervised abstractive summarization of collections of user generated reviews with self-supervision and control. We propose a self-supervised setup that considers an individual document as a target summary for a set of similar documents. This setting makes training simpler than previous approaches by relying only on standard log-likelihood loss. We address the problem of hallucinations through the use of control codes, to steer the generation towards more coherent and relevant summaries.Finally, we extend the Transformer architecture to allow for multiple reviews as input. Our benchmarks on two datasets against graph-based and recent neural abstractive unsupervised models show that our proposed method generates summaries with a superior quality and relevance.This is confirmed in our human evaluation which focuses explicitly on the faithfulness of generated summaries We also provide an ablation study, which shows the importance of the control setup in controlling hallucinations and achieve high sentiment and topic alignment of the summaries with the input reviews.

Learning to Generate Wikipedia Summaries for Underserved Languages from Wikidata

While Wikipedia exists in 287 languages, its content is unevenly distributed among them. In this work, we investigate the generation of open domain Wikipedia summaries in underserved languages using structured data from Wikidata. To this end, we propose a neural network architecture equipped with copy actions that learns to generate single-sentence and comprehensible textual summaries from Wikidata triples. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by evaluating it against a set of baselines on two languages of different natures: Arabic, a morphological rich language with a larger vocabulary than English, and Esperanto, a constructed language known for its easy acquisition.

Zero-Shot Question Generation from Knowledge Graphs for Unseen Predicates and Entity Types

We present a neural model for question generation from knowledge base triples in a "Zero-Shot" setup, that is generating questions for triples containing predicates, subject types or object types that were not seen at training time. Our model leverages triples occurrences in the natural language corpus in an encoder-decoder architecture, paired with an original part-of-speech copy action mechanism to generate questions. Benchmark and human evaluation show that our model sets a new state-of-the-art for zero-shot QG.