Ireland

We present two simple modifications for word-level perturbation: Word Replacement considering Length (WR-L) and Compositional Word Replacement (CWR).
In conventional word replacement, a word in an input is replaced with a word sampled from the entire vocabulary, regardless of the length and context of the target word.
WR-L considers the length of a target word by sampling words from the Poisson distribution.
CWR considers the compositional candidates by restricting the source of sampling to related words that appear in subword regularization.
Experimental results showed that the combination of WR-L and CWR improved the performance of text classification and machine translation.

ACL 2022

Word-level Perturbation Considering Word Length and Compositional Subwords

word replacement

text classification

machine translation

# 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! 
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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). 

poster

Large pretrained generative models like GPT-3 often suffer from hallucinating
non-existent or incorrect content, which undermines their potential merits in
real applications. Existing work usually attempts to detect these
hallucinations based on a corresponding oracle reference at a sentence or
document level. However ground-truth references may not be readily available
for many free-form text generation applications, and sentence- or
document-level detection may fail to provide the fine-grained signals that
would prevent fallacious content in real time. As a first step to addressing
these issues, we propose a novel token-level, reference-free hallucination
detection task and an associated annotated dataset named HaDes (HAllucination
DEtection dataSet). To create this dataset, we first perturb a large number of
text segments extracted from English language Wikipedia, and then verify these
with crowd-sourced annotations. To mitigate label imbalance during annotation,
we utilize an iterative model-in-loop strategy. We conduct comprehensive data
analyses and create multiple baseline models.

A Token-level Reference-free Hallucination Detection Benchmark for Free-form Text Generation

Code search is to search reusable code snippets from source code corpus based on natural languages queries. Deep learning-based methods of code search have shown promising results. However, previous methods focus on retrieval accuracy, but lacked attention to the efficiency of the retrieval process. We propose a novel method CoSHC to accelerate code search with deep hashing and code classification, aiming to perform efficient code search without sacrificing too much accuracy. To evaluate the effectiveness of CoSHC, we apply our method to five code search models. Extensive experimental results indicate that compared with previous code search baselines, CoSHC can save more than 90% of retrieval time meanwhile preserving at least 99% of retrieval accuracy.

Accelerating Code Search with Deep Hashing and Code Classification

Progress with supervised Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) has been primarily limited to English due to the scarcity of training data in other languages. In this paper, we explore techniques to automatically convert English text for training OpenIE systems in other languages. We introduce the Alignment-Augmented Constrained Translation (AACTrans) model to translate English sentences and their corresponding extractions consistently with each other --- with no changes to vocabulary or semantic meaning which may result from independent translations. Using the data generated with AACTrans, we train a novel two-stage generative OpenIE model, which we call Gen2OIE, that outputs for each sentence: 1) relations in the first stage and 2) all extractions containing the relation in the second stage. Gen2OIE increases relation coverage using a training data transformation technique that is generalizable to multiple languages, in contrast to existing models that use an English-specific training loss. Evaluations on 5 languages --- Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hindi and Telugu --- show that the Gen2OIE with AACTrans data outperforms prior systems by a margin of 6-25% in F1.

Alignment-Augmented Consistent Translation for Multilingual Open Information Extraction

A recent study by Feldman (2020) proposed a long-tail theory to explain the memorization behavior of deep learning models. However, memorization has not been empirically verified in the context of NLP, a gap addressed by this work. In this paper, we use three different NLP tasks to check if the long-tail theory holds. Our experiments demonstrate that top-ranked memorized training instances are likely atypical, and removing the top-memorized training instances leads to a more serious drop in test accuracy compared with removing training instances randomly. Furthermore, we develop an attribution method to better understand why a training instance is memorized. We empirically show that our memorization attribution method is faithful, and share our interesting finding that the top-memorized parts of a training instance tend to be features negatively correlated with the class label.

An Empirical Study of Memorization in NLP

We study the interpretability issue of task-oriented dialogue systems in this paper. 
Previously, most neural-based task-oriented dialogue systems employ an
implicit reasoning strategy that makes the model predictions uninterpretable to 
humans. To obtain a transparent reasoning process, we introduce neuro-symbolic to perform explicit reasoning that justifies model decisions by reasoning chains. Since deriving reasoning chains requires multi-hop reasoning for task-oriented dialogues, existing neuro-symbolic approaches would induce error propagation due to the one-phase design. To overcome this, we propose a two-phase approach that consists of a hypothesis generator and a reasoner. We first obtain multiple hypotheses, i.e., potential operations to perform the desired task, through the hypothesis generator. Each hypothesis is then verified by the reasoner, and the valid one is selected to conduct the final prediction. The whole system is trained by exploiting raw textual dialogues without using any reasoning chain annotations. Experimental studies on two public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach not only achieves better results but also introduces an interpretable decision process.

An Interpretable Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Framework for Task-Oriented Dialogue Generation

Finetuning large pre-trained language models with a task-specific head has advanced the state-of-the-art on many natural language understanding benchmarks. However, models with a task-specific head require a lot of training data, making them susceptible to learning and exploiting dataset-specific superficial cues that do not generalize to other datasets.
Prompting has reduced the data requirement by reusing the language model head and formatting the task input to match the pre-training objective.
Therefore, it is expected that few-shot prompt-based models do not exploit superficial cues.
This paper presents an empirical examination of whether few-shot prompt-based models also exploit superficial cues.
Analyzing few-shot prompt-based models on MNLI, SNLI, HANS, and COPA has revealed that prompt-based models also exploit superficial cues.
While the models perform well on instances with superficial cues, they often underperform or only marginally outperform random accuracy on instances without superficial cues.

Are Prompt-based Models Clueless?

Recent progress of abstractive text summarization largely relies on large pre-trained sequence-to-sequence Transformer models, which are computationally expensive. This paper aims to distill these large models into smaller ones for faster inference and minimal performance loss. Pseudo-labeling based methods are popular in sequence-to-sequence model distillation. In this paper, we find simply manipulating attention temperatures in Transformers can make pseudo labels easier to learn for student models. Our experiments on three summarization datasets show our proposed method consistently improves over vanilla pseudo-labeling based methods. We also find that both the pseudo labels and summaries produced by our students are shorter and more abstractive.

Attention Temperature Matters in Abstractive Summarization Distillation

Human-like biases and undesired social stereotypes exist in large pretrained language models. Given the wide adoption of these models in real-world applications, mitigating such biases has become an emerging and important task. In this paper, we propose an automatic method to mitigate the biases in pretrained language models. Different from previous debiasing work that uses external corpora to fine-tune the pretrained models, we instead directly probe the biases encoded in pretrained models through prompts. Specifically, we propose a variant of the beam search method to automatically search for biased prompts such that the cloze-style completions are the most different with respect to different demographic groups. Given the identified biased prompts, we then propose a distribution alignment loss to mitigate the biases. Experiment results on standard datasets and metrics show that our proposed Auto-Debias approach can significantly reduce biases, including gender and racial bias, in pretrained language models such as BERT, RoBERTa and ALBERT. Moreover, the improvement in fairness does not decrease the language models' understanding abilities, as shown using the GLUE benchmark.

Auto-Debias: Debiasing Masked Language Models with Automated Biased Prompts

Neural named entity recognition (NER) models may easily encounter the over-confidence issue, which degrades the performance and calibration. Inspired by label smoothing and driven by the ambiguity of boundary annotation in NER engineering, we propose boundary smoothing as a regularization technique for span-based neural NER models. It re-assigns entity probabilities from annotated spans to the surrounding ones. Built on a simple but strong baseline, our model achieves results better than or competitive with previous state-of-the-art systems on eight well-known NER benchmarks. Further empirical analysis suggests that boundary smoothing effectively mitigates over-confidence, improves model calibration, and brings flatter neural minima and more smoothed loss landscapes.

Boundary Smoothing for Named Entity Recognition

Text-to-SQL parsers map natural language questions to programs that are executable over tables to generate answers, and are typically evaluated on large scale datasets like SPIDER (Yu et al., 2018). We argue that existing benchmarks fail to capture a certain out-of-domain generalization problem that is of significant practical importance: matching domain specific phrases to composite operations over columns. To study this problem, we propose a synthetic dataset and a re-purposed train/test split of the SQUALL dataset (Shi et al., 2020) as new benchmarks to quantify domain generalization over column operations. Our results indicate that existing state-of-the-art parsers struggle in these benchmarks. We propose to address this problem by incorporating prior domain knowledge by preprocessing table schemas, and design a method that consists of two components: schema expansion and schema pruning. This method can be easily applied to multiple existing base parsers, and we show that it significantly outperforms baseline parsers on this domain generalization problem, boosting the underlying parsers’ overall performance by up to 13.8% relative accuracy gain (5.1% absolute) on the new SQUALL data split.

Word-level Perturbation Considering Word Length and Compositional Subwords

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A Token-level Reference-free Hallucination Detection Benchmark for Free-form Text Generation

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