Selective rationales and counterfactual examples have emerged as two effective, complementary classes of interpretability methods for analyzing and training NLP models. However, prior work has not explored how these methods can be integrated to combine their complementary advantages. We overcome this limitation by introducing CREST (ContRastive Edits with Sparse raTionalization), a joint framework for selective rationalization and counterfactual text generation, and show that this framework leads to improvements in counterfactual quality, model robustness, and interpretability. First, CREST generates valid counterfactuals that are more natural than those produced by previous methods, and subsequently can be used for data augmentation at scale, reducing the need for human-generated examples. Second, we introduce a new loss function that leverages CREST counterfactuals to regularize selective rationales and show that this regularization improves both model robustness and rationale quality, compared to methods that do not leverage CREST counterfactuals. Our results demonstrate that CREST successfully bridges the gap between selective rationales and counterfactual examples, addressing the limitations of existing methods and providing a more comprehensive view of a model's predictions.

Existing multimodal task-oriented dialog data fails to demonstrate the diverse expressions of user subjective preferences and recommendation acts in the real-life shopping scenario. This paper introduces a new dataset SURE (Multimodal Recommendation Dialog with SUbjective PREference), which contains 12K shopping dialogs in complex store scenes. The data is built in two phases with human annotations to ensure quality and diversity. SURE is well-annotated with subjective preferences and recommendation acts proposed by sales experts. A comprehensive analysis is given to reveal the distinguishing features of SURE. Three benchmark tasks are then proposed on the data to evaluate the capability of multimodal recommendation agents. Based on the SURE, we propose a baseline model, powered by a state-of-the-art multimodal model, for these tasks.

While Transformer has become the de-facto standard for speech, modeling upon the fine-grained frame-level features remains an open challenge of capturing long-distance dependencies and distributing the attention weights. We propose \textit{Progressive Down-Sampling} (PDS) which gradually compresses the acoustic features into coarser-grained units containing more complete semantic information, like text-level representation. In addition, we develop a representation fusion method to alleviate information loss that occurs inevitably during high compression. In this way, we compress the acoustic features into 1/32 of the initial length while achieving better or comparable performances on the speech recognition task. And as a bonus, it yields inference speedups ranging from 1.20$\times$ to 1.47$\times$. By reducing the modeling burden, we also achieve competitive results when training on the more challenging speech translation task.

ElectrodeNet, a deep learning based sound coding strategy for the cochlear implant (CI), is proposed to emulate the advanced combination encoder (ACE) strategy by replacing the conventional envelope detection using various artificial neural networks. The extended ElectrodeNet-CS strategy further incorporates the channel selection (CS). Network models of deep neural network (DNN), convolutional neural network (CNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) were trained using the Fast Fourier Transformed bins and channel envelopes obtained from the processing of clean speech by the ACE strategy. Objective speech understanding using short-time objective intelligibility (STOI) and normalized covariance metric (NCM) was estimated for ElectrodeNet using CI simulations. Sentence recognition tests for vocoded Mandarin speech were conducted with normal-hearing listeners. DNN, CNN, and LSTM based ElectrodeNets exhibited strong correlations to ACE in objective and subjective scores using mean squared error (MSE), linear correlation coefficient (LCC) and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC). The ElectrodeNet-CS strategy was capable of producing N-of-M compatible electrode patterns using a modified DNN network to embed maxima selection, and to perform in similar or even slightly higher average in STOI and sentence recognition compared to ACE. The methods and findings demonstrated the feasibility and potential of using deep learning in CI coding strategy.

While a large body of literature suggests that large language models (LLMs) acquire rich linguistic representations, little is known about whether they adapt to linguistic biases in a human-like way. The present study probes this question by asking whether LLMs display human-like referential biases using stimuli and procedures from real psycholinguistic experiments. Recent psycholinguistic studies suggest that humans adapt their referential biases with recent exposure to referential patterns; closely replicating three relevant psycholinguistic experiments from Johnson & Arnold (2022) in an in-context learning (ICL) framework, we found that InstructGPT adapts its pronominal interpretations in response to the frequency of referential patterns in the local discourse, though in a limited fashion: adaptation was only observed relative to syntactic but not semantic biases. By contrast, FLAN-UL2 fails to generate meaningful patterns. Our results provide further evidence that contemporary LLMs discourse representations are sensitive to syntactic patterns in the local context but less so to semantic patterns. Our data and code are available at \url{https://github.com/zkx06111/llm_priming}.

Syntactically controlled paraphrase generation requires language models to generate paraphrases for sentences according to specific syntactic structures. Existing fine-tuning methods for this task are costly as all the parameters of the model need to be updated during the training process. Inspired by recent studies on parameter-efficient learning, we propose Parse-Instructed Prefix (PIP), a novel adaptation of prefix-tuning to tune large pre-trained language models on syntactically controlled paraphrase generation task in a low-data setting with significantly less training cost. We introduce two methods to instruct a model's encoder prefix to capture syntax-related knowledge: direct initiation (PIP-Direct) and indirect optimization (PIP-Indirect). In contrast to traditional fine-tuning methods for this task, PIP is a compute-efficient alternative with 10 times less learnable parameters. Compared to existing prefix-tuning methods, PIP excels at capturing syntax control information, achieving significantly higher performance at the same level of learnable parameter count.

In this paper, we propose a novel language model guided captioning approach, LAMOC, for knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA). Our approach employs the generated captions by a captioning model as the context of an answer prediction model, which is a Pre-trained Language model (PLM). As the major contribution, we leverage the guidance and feedback of the prediction model to improve the capability of the captioning model. In this way, the captioning model can become aware of the task goal and information need from the PLM. To develop our approach, we design two specific training stages, where the first stage adapts the captioning model to the prediction model (selecting more suitable caption propositions for training) and the second stage tunes the captioning model according to the task goal (learning from feedback of the PLM). Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the knowledge-based VQA task. Specifically, on the challenging A-OKVQA dataset, LAMOC outperforms several competitive zero-shot methods and even achieves comparable results to a fine-tuned VLP model. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LAMOC.

We present BIG-C (Bemba Image Grounded Conversations), a large multimodal dataset for Bemba. While Bemba is the most populous language of Zambia, it exhibits a dearth of resources which render the development of language technologies or language processing research almost impossible. The dataset is comprised of multi-turn dialogues between Bemba speakers based on images, transcribed and translated into English. There are more than 92,000 utterances/sentences, amounting to more than 180 hours of audio data with corresponding transcriptions and English translations. We also provide baselines on speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT) and speech translation (ST) tasks, and sketch out other potential future multimodal uses of our dataset. We hope that by making the dataset available to the research community, this work will foster research and encourage collaboration across the language, speech, and vision communities especially for languages outside the "traditionally" used high-resourced ones. All data and code are publicly available: https://github.com/csikasote/bigc.

NLP models often degrade in performance when real world data distributions differ markedly from training data. However, existing dataset drift metrics in NLP have generally not considered specific dimensions of linguistic drift that affect model performance, and they have not been validated in their ability to predict model performance at the individual example level, where such metrics are often used in practice. In this paper, we propose three dimensions of linguistic dataset drift: vocabulary, structural, and semantic drift. These dimensions correspond to content word frequency divergences, syntactic divergences, and meaning changes not captured by word frequencies (e.g. lexical semantic change). We propose interpretable metrics for all three drift dimensions, and we modify past performance prediction methods to predict model performance at both the example and dataset level for English sentiment classification and natural language inference. We find that our drift metrics are more effective than previous metrics at predicting out-of-domain model accuracies (mean 16.8% root mean square error decrease), particularly when compared to popular fine-tuned embedding distances (mean 47.7% error decrease). Fine-tuned embedding distances are much more effective at ranking individual examples by expected performance, but decomposing into vocabulary, structural, and semantic drift produces the best example rankings of all considered model-agnostic drift metrics (mean 6.7% ROC AUC increase).

Question generation (QG) is the task of generating a valid and fluent question based on a given context and the target answer. According to various purposes, even given the same context, instructors can ask questions about different concepts, and even the same concept can be written in different ways. However, the evaluation for QG usually depends on single reference-based similarity metrics, such as n-gram-based metric or learned metric, which is not sufficient to fully evaluate the potential of QG methods. To this end, we propose to paraphrase the reference question for a more robust QG evaluation. Using large language models such as GPT-3, we created semantically and syntactically diverse questions, then adopt the simple aggregation of the popular evaluation metrics as the final scores. Through our experiments, we found that using multiple (pseudo) references is more effective for QG evaluation while showing a higher correlation with human evaluations than evaluation with a single reference.