Ireland

We propose a probabilistic approach to select a subset of a \textit{target domain representative keywords} from a candidate set, contrasting with a context domain. Such a task is crucial for many downstream tasks in natural language processing. To contrast the target domain and the context domain, we adapt the \textit{two-component mixture model} concept to generate a distribution of candidate keywords. It provides more importance to the \textit{distinctive} keywords of the target domain than common keywords contrasting with the context domain. To support the \textit{representativeness} of the selected keywords towards the target domain, we introduce an \textit{optimization algorithm} for selecting the subset from the generated candidate distribution. We have shown that the optimization algorithm can be efficiently implemented with a near-optimal approximation guarantee. Finally, extensive experiments on multiple domains demonstrate the superiority of our approach over other baselines for the tasks of keyword summary generation and trending keywords selection.

ACL 2022

Domain Representative Keywords Selection: A Probabilistic Approach

probabilistic approach

keyword selection

domain representation

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/ceby/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>

Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

findings / work in progress

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. To this end, models generally utilize an encoder-only (like BERT) paradigm or an encoder-decoder (like T5) approach. These paradigms, however, are not without flaws, i.e., running the model on all query-document pairs at inference-time incurs a significant computational cost. This paper proposes a new training and inference paradigm for re-ranking. We propose to finetune a pretrained encoder-decoder model using in the form of document to query generation. Subsequently, we show that this encoder-decoder architecture can be decomposed into a decoder-only language model during inference. This results in significant inference time speedups since the decoder-only architecture only needs to learn to interpret static encoder embeddings during inference. Our experiments show that this new paradigm achieves results that are comparable to the more expensive cross-attention ranking approaches while being up to 6.8X faster. We believe this work paves the way for more efficient neural rankers that leverage large pretrained models.

ED2LM: Encoder-Decoder to Language Model for Faster Document Re-ranking Inference

The ability to recognize analogies is fundamental to human cognition. Existing benchmarks to test word analogy do not reveal the underneath process of analogical reasoning of neural models. Holding the belief that models capable of reasoning should be right for the right reasons, we propose a first-of-its-kind Explainable Knowledge-intensive Analogical Reasoning benchmark (E-KAR). Our benchmark consists of 1,655 (in Chinese) and 1,251 (in English) problems sourced from the Civil Service Exams, which require intensive background knowledge to solve. More importantly, we design a free-text explanation scheme to explain whether an analogy should be drawn, and manually annotate them for each and every question and candidate answer. Empirical results suggest that this benchmark is very challenging for some state-of-the-art models for both explanation generation and analogical question answering tasks, which invites further research in this area. Project page of E-KAR can be found at https://ekar-leaderboard.github.io.

E-KAR: A Benchmark for Rationalizing Natural Language Analogical Reasoning

While cultural backgrounds have been shown to affect linguistic expressions, existing natural language processing (NLP) research on culture modeling is overly coarse-grained and does not examine cultural differences among speakers of the same language. To address this problem and augment NLP models with cultural background features, we collect, annotate, manually validate, and benchmark EnCBP, a finer-grained news-based cultural background prediction dataset in English. Through language modeling (LM) evaluations and manual analyses, we confirm that there are noticeable differences in linguistic expressions among five English-speaking countries and across four states in the US. Additionally, our evaluations on nine syntactic (CoNLL-2003), semantic (PAWS-Wiki, QNLI, STS-B, and RTE), and psycholinguistic tasks (SST-5, SST-2, Emotion, and Go-Emotions) show that, while introducing cultural background information does not benefit the Go-Emotions task due to text domain conflicts, it noticeably improves deep learning (DL) model performance on other tasks. Our findings strongly support the importance of cultural background modeling to a wide variety of NLP tasks and demonstrate the applicability of EnCBP in culture-related research.

EnCBP: A New Benchmark Dataset for Finer-Grained Cultural Background Prediction in English

We present a generalized paradigm for adaptation of propositional analysis (predicate-argument pairs) to new tasks and domains. We leverage an analogy between stances (belief-driven sentiment) and concerns (topical issues with moral dimensions/endorsements) to produce an explanatory representation. A key contribution is the combination of semi-automatic resource building for extraction of domain-dependent concern types (with 2-4 hours of human labor per domain) and an entirely automatic procedure for extraction of domain-independent moral dimensions and endorsement values. Prudent (automatic) selection of terms from propositional structures for lexical expansion (via semantic similarity) produces new moral dimension lexicons at three levels of granularity beyond a strong baseline lexicon. We develop a ground truth (GT) based on expert annotators and compare our concern detection output to GT, to yield 231% improvement in recall over baseline, with only a 10% loss in precision. F1 yields 66% improvement over baseline and 97.8% of human performance. Our lexically based approach yields large savings over approaches that employ costly human labor and model building. We provide to the community a newly expanded moral dimension/value lexicon, annotation guidelines, and GT.

From Stance to Concern: Adaptation of Propositional Analysis to New Tasks and Domains

We firstly introduce the motivations of our paper and then describe the LeMon task and the corresponding dataset DuLeMon. Our proposed PLATO-LTM framework is given in detail and the results of the models on our dataset.

Long Time No See! Open-Domain Conversation with Long-Term Persona Memory

Event extraction is typically modeled as a multi-class classification problem where event types and argument roles are treated as atomic symbols. These approaches are usually limited to a set of pre-defined types. We propose a novel event extraction framework that uses event types and argument roles as natural language queries to extract candidate triggers and arguments from the input text. With the rich semantics in the queries, our framework benefits from the attention mechanisms to better capture the semantic correlation between the event types or argument roles and the input text. Furthermore, the query-and-extract formulation allows our approach to leverage all available event annotations from various ontologies as a unified model. Experiments on ACE and ERE demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on each dataset and significantly outperforms existing methods on zero-shot event extraction.

Query and Extract: Refining Event Extraction as Type-oriented Binary Decoding

We propose a pre-training objective based on question answering (QA) for learning general-purpose contextual representations, motivated by the intuition that the representation of a phrase in a passage should encode all questions that the phrase can answer in context. To this end, we train a bi-encoder QA model, which independently encodes passages and questions, to match the predictions of a more accurate cross-encoder model on 80 million synthesized QA pairs. By encoding QA-relevant information, the bi-encoder's token-level representations are useful for non-QA downstream tasks without extensive (or in some cases, any) fine-tuning. We show large improvements over both RoBERTa-large and previous state-of-the-art results on zero-shot and few-shot paraphrase detection on four datasets, few-shot named entity recognition on two datasets, and zero-shot sentiment analysis on three datasets.

Question Answering Infused Pre-training of General-Purpose Contextualized Representations

Previous studies on document-level neural machine translation (DNMT) should be reviewed with the doubt of overfitting. We propose to solve DNMT in a document-to-document way with the original Transformer. It turns out that translating the whole document (even more than 2000 words) is not only feasible but also better.

Rethinking Document-level Neural Machine Translation

Multimodal sentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention and lots of models have been proposed. However, the performance of the state-of-the-art models decreases sharply when they are deployed in the real world. We find that the main reason is that real-world applications can only access the text outputs by the automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, which may be with errors because of the limitation of model capacity. Through further analysis of the ASR outputs, we find that in some cases the sentiment words, the key sentiment elements in the textual modality, are recognized as other words, which makes the sentiment of the text change and hurts the performance of multimodal sentiment analysis models directly. To address this problem, we propose the sentiment word aware multimodal refinement model (SWRM), which can dynamically refine the erroneous sentiment words by leveraging multimodal sentiment clues.

Sentiment Word Aware Multimodal Refinement for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with ASR Errors

Data Augmentation (DA) is known to improve the generalizability of deep neural networks. Most existing DA techniques naively add a certain number of augmented samples without considering the quality and the added computational cost of these samples. To tackle this problem, a common strategy, adopted by several state-of-the-art DA methods, is to adaptively generate or re-weight augmented samples with respect to the task objective during training. However, these adaptive DA methods: (1) are computationally expensive and not sample-efficient, and (2) are designed merely for a specific setting. In this work, we present a universal DA technique, called Glitter, to overcome both issues. Glitter can be plugged into any DA method, making training sample-efficient without sacrificing performance. From a pre-generated pool of augmented samples, Glitter adaptively selects a subset of worst-case samples with maximal loss, analogous to adversarial DA. Without altering the training strategy, the task objective can be optimized on the selected subset. Our thorough experiments on the GLUE benchmark, SQuAD, and HellaSwag in three widely used training setups including consistency training, self-distillation and knowledge distillation reveal that Glitter is substantially faster to train and achieves a competitive performance, compared to strong baselines.

Domain Representative Keywords Selection: A Probabilistic Approach

Downloads

Next from ACL 2022

ED2LM: Encoder-Decoder to Language Model for Faster Document Re-ranking Inference

Similar lecture

SUBSUME: A Dataset for Subjective Summary Extraction from Wikipedia Documents