Ireland

Users interacting with voice assistants today need to phrase their requests in a very specific manner to elicit an appropriate response. This limits the user experience, and is partly due to the lack of reasoning capabilities of dialogue platforms and the hand-crafted rules that require extensive labor. One possible way to improve user experience and relieve the manual efforts of designers is to build an end-to-end dialogue system that can do reasoning itself while perceiving user&#39;s utterances. In this work, we propose a novel method to incorporate the knowledge reasoning capability into dialogue systems in a more scalable and generalizable manner. Our proposed method allows a single transformer model to directly walk on a large-scale knowledge graph to generate responses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to have transformer models generate responses by reasoning over differentiable knowledge graphs. We investigate the reasoning abilities of the proposed method on both task-oriented and domain-specific chit-chat dialogues. Empirical results show that this method can effectively and efficiently incorporate a knowledge graph into a dialogue system with fully-interpretable reasoning paths.

ACL 2022

Towards Large-Scale Interpretable Knowledge Graph Reasoning for Dialogue Systems

interpretability

dialogue system

knowledge graph

reasoning

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Users interacting with voice assistants today need to phrase their requests in a very specific manner to elicit an appropriate response. This limits the user experience, and is partly due to the lack of reasoning capabilities of dialogue platforms and the hand-crafted rules that require extensive labor. One possible way to improve user experience and relieve the manual efforts of designers is to build an end-to-end dialogue system that can do reasoning itself while perceiving user's utterances. In this work, we propose a novel method to incorporate the knowledge reasoning capability into dialogue systems in a more scalable and generalizable manner. Our proposed method allows a single transformer model to directly walk on a large-scale knowledge graph to generate responses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to have transformer models generate responses by reasoning over differentiable knowledge graphs. We investigate the reasoning abilities of the proposed method on both task-oriented and domain-specific chit-chat dialogues. Empirical results show that this method can effectively and efficiently incorporate a knowledge graph into a dialogue system with fully-interpretable reasoning paths.

poster

# 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). 

Existing studies on semantic parsing focus on mapping a natural-language utterance to a logical form (LF) in one turn. However, because natural language may contain ambiguity and variability, this is a difficult challenge. In this work, we investigate an interactive semantic parsing framework that explains the predicted LF step by step in natural language and enables the user to make corrections through natural-language feedback for individual steps. We focus on question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) as an instantiation of our framework, aiming to increase the transparency of the parsing process and help the user trust the final answer. We construct INSPIRED, a crowdsourced dialogue dataset derived from the ComplexWebQuestions dataset. Our experiments show that this framework has the potential to greatly improve overall parse accuracy. Furthermore, we develop a pipeline for dialogue simulation to evaluate our framework w.r.t. a variety of state-of-the-art KBQA models without further crowdsourcing effort. The results demonstrate that our framework promises to be effective across such models.

Towards Transparent Interactive Semantic Parsing via Step-by-Step Correction

Pre-trained language models (e.g. BART) have shown impressive results when fine-tuned on large summarization datasets. However, little is understood about this fine-tuning process, including what knowledge is retained from pre-training time or how content selection and generation strategies are learnt across iterations. In this work, we analyze the training dynamics for generation models, focusing on summarization. Across different datasets (CNNDM, XSUM, MEDIASUM) and summary properties, such as abstractiveness and hallucination, we study what the model learns at different stages of its fine-tuning process. We find that a propensity to copy the input is learned early in the training process consistently across all datasets studied. On the other hand, factual errors, such as hallucination of unsupported facts, are learnt in the later stages, though this behavior is more varied across domains. Based on these observations, we explore complementary approaches for modifying training: first, disregarding high-loss tokens that are challenging to learn and second,
disregarding low-loss tokens that are learnt very quickly in the latter stages of the training process. We show that these simple training modifications allow us to configure our model to achieve different goals, such as improving factuality or improving abstractiveness.

Training Dynamics for Text Summarization Models

We propose uFACT, a training corpus construction method for data-to-text (d2t) generation models. We show that d2t models trained on uFACT datasets generate utterances which represent the semantic content of the data sources more accurately compared to models trained on the target corpus alone. Our approach is to augment the training set of a given target corpus with alien corpora which have different semantic representations. We show that while it is important to have faithful data from the target corpus, the faithfulness of additional corpora only plays a minor role. Consequently, uFACT datasets can be constructed with large quantities of unfaithful data, minimising the need for faithful data. We show how uFACT can be leveraged to obtain state-of-the-art results on the WebNLG benchmark using METEOR as our performance metric. Furthermore, we investigate the sensitivity of the generation faithfulness to the training corpus structure using the PARENT metric, and provide a baseline for this metric on the WebNLG benchmark to facilitate comparisons with future work.

uFACT: Unfaithful Alien-Corpora Training for Semantically Consistent Data-to-Text Generation

Interactive robots navigating photo-realistic environments need to be trained to effectively leverage and handle the dynamic nature of dialogue in addition to the challenges underlying vision-and-language navigation (VLN). In this paper, we present VISITRON, a multi-modal Transformer-based navigator better suited to the interactive regime inherent to Cooperative Vision-and-Dialog Navigation (CVDN). VISITRON is trained to: i) identify and associate object-level concepts and semantics between the environment and dialogue history, ii) identify when to interact vs. navigate via imitation learning of a binary classiﬁcation head. We perform extensive pre-training and ﬁne-tuning ablations with VISITRON to gain empirical insights and improve performance on CVDN. V ISITRON’s ability to identify when to interact leads to a natural generalization of the gameplay mode introduced by Roman et al. (2020) for enabling the use of such models in different environments. VISITRON is competitive with models on the static CVDN leaderboard and attains state-of-the-art performance on the Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) metric.

VISITRON: Visual Semantics-Aligned Interactively Trained Object-Navigator

Humans (e.g., crowdworkers) have a remarkable ability in solving different tasks, by simply reading textual instructions that define them and looking at a few examples. Despite the success of the conventional supervised learning on individual datasets, such models often struggle with generalization across tasks (e.g., a question-answering system cannot solve classification tasks). A long-standing challenge in AI is to build a model that learns a new task by understanding the human-readable instructions that define it. To study this, we introduce NATURAL INSTRUCTIONS, a dataset of 61 distinct tasks, their human-authored instructions, and 193k task instances (input-output pairs). The instructions are obtained from crowdsourcing instructions used to create existing NLP datasets and mapped to a unified schema. Using this meta-dataset, we measure cross-task generalization by training models on seen tasks and measuring generalization to the remaining unseen ones. We adopt generative pre-trained language models to encode task-specific instructions along with input and generate task output. Our results indicate that models benefit from instructions when evaluated in terms of generalization to unseen tasks (19% better for models utilizing instructions). These models, however, are far behind an estimated performance upperbound indicating significant room for more progress in this direction.

Cross-Task Generalization via Natural Language Crowdsourcing Instructions

Automated scientific fact checking is difficult due to the complexity of scientific language and a lack of significant amounts of training data, as annotation requires domain expertise. To address this challenge, we propose scientific claim generation, the task of generating one or more atomic and verifiable claims from scientific sentences, and demonstrate its usefulness in zero-shot fact checking for biomedical claims. We propose CLAIMGEN-BART, a new supervised method for generating claims supported by the literature, as well as KBIN, a novel method for generating claim negations. Additionally, we adapt an existing unsupervised entity-centric method of claim generation to biomedical claims, which we call CLAIMGEN-ENTITY. Experiments on zero-shot fact checking demonstrate that both CLAIMGEN-ENTITY and CLAIMGEN-BART, coupled with KBIN, achieve up to 90% performance of fully supervised models trained on manually annotated claims and evidence. A rigorous evaluation study demonstrates significant improvement in generated claim and negation quality over existing baselines

Generating Scientific Claims for Zero-Shot Scientific Fact Checking

Pre-trained language models have been recently shown to benefit task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. Despite their success, existing methods often formulate this task as a cascaded generation problem which can lead to error accumulation across different sub-tasks and greater data annotation overhead. In this study, we present PPTOD, a unified model that seamlessly supports both task-oriented dialogue understanding and response generation in a plug-and-play fashion. In addition, we introduce a new dialogue multi-task pre-training strategy that allows the model to learn the primary TOD task completion skills from heterogeneous dialog corpora. We extensively test our model on three benchmark TOD tasks, including end-to-end dialogue modelling, dialogue state tracking, and intent classification. Results show that PPTOD creates new state-of-the-art on all evaluated tasks in both full training and low-resource scenarios. Furthermore, comparisons against previous SOTA methods show that the responses generated by PPTOD are more factually correct and semantically coherent as judged by human annotators.

Multi-Task Pre-Training for Plug-and-Play Task-Oriented Dialogue System

In data-to-text (D2T) generation, training on in-domain data leads to overfitting to the data representation and repeating training data noise. We examine how to avoid finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) on D2T generation datasets while still taking advantage of surface realization capabilities of PLMs. Inspired by pipeline approaches, we propose to generate text by transforming single-item descriptions with a sequence of modules trained on general-domain text-based operations: ordering, aggregation, and paragraph compression. We train PLMs for performing these operations on a synthetic corpus WikiFluent which we build from English Wikipedia. Our experiments on two major triple-to-text datasets—WebNLG and E2E—show that our approach enables D2T generation from RDF triples in zero-shot settings.

Neural Pipeline for Zero-Shot Data-to-Text Generation

In recent years, neural models have often outperformed rule-based and classic Machine Learning approaches in NLG. These classic approaches are now often disregarded, for example when new neural models are evaluated. We argue that they should not be overlooked, since, for some tasks, well-designed non-neural approaches achieve better performance than neural ones. In this paper, the task of generating referring expressions in linguistic context is used as an example. We examined two very different English datasets (WebNLG and WSJ) and evaluated each algorithm using both automatic and human evaluations. Overall, the results of these evaluations suggest that rule-based systems with simple rule sets achieve on-par or better performance on both datasets compared to state-of-the-art neural
REG systems. In the case of the more realistic dataset, WSJ, a machine learning-based system with well-designed linguistic features performed best. We hope that our work can encourage researchers to consider non-neural models in the future.

Non-neural Models Matter: a Re-evaluation of Neural Referring Expression Generation Systems

Sequence-to-sequence neural networks have recently achieved great success in abstractive summarization, especially through fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on the downstream dataset. These models are typically decoded with beam search to generate a unique summary. However, the search space is very large, and with the exposure bias, such decoding is not optimal. In this paper, we show that it is possible to directly train a second-stage model performing re-ranking on a set of summary candidates. Our mixture-of-experts SummaReranker learns to select a better candidate and consistently improves the performance of the base model. With a base PEGASUS, we push ROUGE scores by 5.44% on CNN-DailyMail (47.16 ROUGE-1), 1.31% on XSum (48.12 ROUGE-1) and 9.34% on Reddit TIFU (29.83 ROUGE-1), reaching a new state-of-the-art.

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Towards Transparent Interactive Semantic Parsing via Step-by-Step Correction

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