Bridging the Gap in Multilingual Semantic Role Labeling: A Language-Agnostic Approach

Recent research indicates that taking advantage of complex syntactic features leads to favorable results in Semantic Role Labeling. Nonetheless, an analysis of the latest state-of-the-art multilingual systems reveals the difficulty of bridging the wide gap in performance between high-resource (e.g., English) and low-resource (e.g., German) settings. To overcome this issue, we propose a fully language-agnostic model that does away with morphological and syntactic features to achieve robustness across languages. Our approach outperforms the state of the art in all the languages of the CoNLL-2009 benchmark dataset, especially whenever a scarce amount of training data is available. Our objective is not to reject approaches that rely on syntax, rather to set a strong and consistent language-independent baseline for future innovations in Semantic Role Labeling. We release our model code and checkpoints at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/multi-srl

Neural Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in NLP—A Survey

Deep neural networks excel at learning from labeled data and achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide array of Natural Language Processing tasks. In contrast, learning from unlabeled data, especially under domain shift, remains a challenge. Motivated by the latest advances, in this survey we review neural unsupervised domain adaptation techniques which do not require labeled target domain data. This is a more challenging yet a more widely applicable setup. We outline methods, from early approaches in traditional non-neural methods to pre-trained model transfer. We also revisit the notion of domain, and we uncover a bias in the type of Natural Language Processing tasks which received most attention. Lastly, we outline future directions, particularly the broader need for out-of-distribution generalization of future intelligent NLP

Persona-centric Metamorphic Relation guided Robustness Evaluation for Multi-turn Dialogue Modelling

Recently there has been significant progress in the field of dialogue system thanks to the introduction of training paradigms such as fine-tune and prompt learning. Persona can function as the prior knowledge for maintaining the personality consistency of dialogue systems, which makes it perform well on accuracy. Nonetheless, the conventional reference-based evaluation method falls short in capturing the genuine text comprehension prowess of the model, significantly relying on the quality of data annotation. In contrast, the application of metamorphic testing offers a more profound insight into the model's distinct capabilities without necessitating supplementary annotation labels. This approach furnishes a more comprehensive portrayal of the model's intricacies and exposes intricacies concealed within reference-based validation techniques. Consequently, we introduce a persona-centric metamorphic relation construction for metamorphic testing, aimed at evaluating both the persona consistency and robustness of personalized dialogue models. For that reason, this work evaluates several widely used training paradigms including learning from scratch, pretrain + fine-tune and prompt learning in personalized dialogue retrieval to know if they are more robust or if they have the same flaws as their predecessor. Under three kinds of designed metamorphic relations with consistent outputs, our experimental results reveal that prompt learning shows stronger robustness compared to training from scratch and fine-tune. Although tested retrieval models gain competitively high retrieval accuracy according to the traditional reference-based validation, they are still fragile and demonstrate various unexpected behaviors, thus there is still room for future improvement in personalized dialogue retrieval