Learning from Teaching Regularization: Generalizable Correlations Should be Easy to Imitate

Generalization remains a central challenge in machine learning. In this work, we propose Learning from Teaching (LoT), a novel regularization technique for deep neural networks to enhance generalization. Inspired by the human ability to capture concise and abstract patterns, we hypothesize that generalizable correlations are expected to be easier to teach. LoT operationalizes this concept to improve the generalization of the main model with auxiliary student learners. The student learners are trained by the main model and improve the main model to capture more generalizable and teachable correlations by providing feedback. Our experimental results across several domains, including Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Reinforcement Learning, demonstrate that the introduction of LoT brings significant benefits compared to merely training models on the original training data. It suggests the effectiveness of LoT in identifying generalizable information without falling into the swamp of complex patterns in data, making LoT a valuable addition to the current machine learning frameworks.

Pragmatic Reasoning Unlocks Quantifier Semantics for Foundation Models

Generalized quantifiers (e.g., few, most) are used to indicate the proportions predicates are satisfied (for example, some apples are red). One way to interpret quantifier semantics is to explicitly bind these satisfactions with percentage scopes (e.g., 30%-40% of apples are red). This approach can be helpful for tasks like logic formalization and surface-form quantitative reasoning (Gordon and Schubert, 2010; Roy et al., 2015). However, it remains unclear if recent foundation models possess this ability, as they lack direct training signals. To explore this, we introduce QuRe, a crowd-sourced dataset of human-annotated generalized quantifiers in Wikipedia sentences featuring percentage-equipped predicates. We explore quantifier comprehension in language models using PRESQUE, a framework that combines natural language inference and the Rational Speech Acts framework. Experimental results on the HVD dataset and QuRe illustrate that PRESQUE, employing pragmatic reasoning, performs 20% better than a literal reasoning baseline when predicting quantifier percentage scopes, with no additional training required.

SPE: Symmetrical Prompt Enhancement for Fact Probing

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have been shown to accumulate factual knowledge during pretrainingng (Petroni et al., 2019). Recent works probe PLMs for the extent of this knowledge through prompts either in discrete or continuous forms. However, these methods do not consider symmetry of the task: object prediction and subject prediction. In this work, we propose Symmetrical Prompt Enhancement (SPE), a continuous prompt-based method for factual probing in PLMs that leverages the symmetry of the task by constructing symmetrical prompts for subject and object prediction. Our results on a popular factual probing dataset, LAMA, show significant improvement of SPE over previous probing methods.

Adversarial Scrubbing of Demographic Information for Text Classification

Contextual representations learned by language models can often encode undesirable attributes, like demographic associations of the users, while being trained for an unrelated target task. We aim to scrub such undesirable attributes and learn fair representations while maintaining performance on the target task. In this paper, we present an adversarial learning framework "Adversarial Scrubber" (ADS), to debias contextual representations. We perform theoretical analysis to show that our framework converges without leaking demographic information under certain conditions. We extend previous evaluation techniques by evaluating debiasing performance using Minimum Description Length (MDL) probing. Experimental evaluations on 8 datasets show that ADS generates representations with minimal information about demographic attributes while being maximally informative about the target task.

Comparison of Interactive Knowledge Base Spelling Correction Models for Low-Resource Languages

Spelling normalization for low resource languages is a challenging task because the patterns are hard to predict and large corpora are usually required to collect enough examples. This work shows a comparison of a neural model and character language models with varying amounts on target language data. Our usage scenario is interactive correction with nearly zero amounts of training examples, improving models as more data is collected, for example within a chat app. Such models are designed to be incrementally improved as feedback is given from users. In this work, we design a knowledge-base and prediction model embedded system for spelling correction in low-resource languages. Experimental results on multiple languages show that the model could become effective with a small amount of data. We perform experiments on both natural and synthetic data, as well as on data from two endangered languages (Ainu and Griko). Last, we built a prototype system that was used for a small case study on Hinglish, which further demonstrated the suitability of our approach in real world scenarios.

A Summary of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Language Documentation and Revitalization

Despite recent advances in natural language processing and other language technology, the application of such technology to language documentation and conservation has been limited. In August 2019, a workshop was held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to attempt to bring together language community members, documentary linguists, and technologists to discuss how to bridge this gap and create prototypes of novel and practical language revitalization technologies. This paper reports the results of this workshop, including issues discussed, and various conceived and implemented technologies for nine languages: Arapaho, Cayuga, Inuktitut, Irish Gaelic, Kidaw'ida, Kwak'wala, Ojibwe, San Juan Quiahije Chatino, and Seneca.

Towards Minimal Supervision BERT-based Grammar Error Correction

Current grammatical error correction (GEC) models typically consider the task as sequence generation, which requires large amounts of annotated data and limit the applications in data-limited settings. We try to incorporate contextual information from pre-trained language model to leverage annotation and benefit multilingual scenarios. Results show strong potential of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) in grammatical error correction task.