Ireland

Transfer learning with a unified Transformer frame- work (T5) that converts all language problems into a text-to-text format was recently proposed as a simple and effective transfer learning approach. Although a multilingual version of the T5 model (mT5) was also introduced, it is not clear how well it can fare on non-English tasks involving diverse data. To investigate this question, we apply mT5 on a language with a wide variety of dialects–Arabic. For evaluation, we introduce a novel benchmark for ARabic language GENeration (ARGEN), covering seven important tasks. For model comparison, we pre-train three powerful Arabic T5-style models and evaluate them on ARGEN. Although pre-trained with ∼ 49% less data, our new models perform significantly better than mT5 on all ARGEN tasks (in 52 out of 59 test sets) and set several new SOTAs. Our models also establish new SOTA on the recently-proposed, large Arabic language understanding evaluation benchmark ARLUE (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021). Our new models are publicly available. We also link to ARGEN datasets through our repository.

ACL 2022

AraT5: Text-to-Text Transformers for Arabic Language Generation

arabic language generation

arat5

arabic nlp

language generation

transformers

language models

# 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). 

poster

Class-based language models (LMs) have been long devised to address context sparsity in n-gram LMs. In this study, we revisit this approach in the context of neural LMs. We hypothesize that class-based prediction leads to an implicit context aggregation for similar words and thus can improve generalization for rare words. We map words that have a common WordNet hypernym to the same class and train large neural LMs by gradually annealing from predicting the class to token prediction during training. Empirically, this curriculum learning strategy consistently improves perplexity over various large, highly-performant state-of-the-art Transformer-based models on two datasets, WikiText-103 and Arxiv. Our analysis shows that the performance improvement is achieved without sacrificing performance on rare words. Finally, we document other attempts that failed to yield empirical gains, and discuss future directions for the adoption of class-based LMs on a larger scale.

Better Language Model with Hypernym Class Prediction

Despite recent improvements in open-domain dialogue models, state of the art models are trained and evaluated on short conversations with little context. In contrast, the long-term conversation setting has hardly been studied. In this work we collect and release a human-human dataset consisting of multiple chat sessions whereby the speaking partners learn about each other's interests and discuss the things they have learnt from past sessions. We show how existing models trained on existing datasets perform poorly in this long-term conversation setting in both automatic and human evaluations, and we study long-context models that can perform much better. In particular, we find retrieval-augmented methods and methods with an ability to summarize and recall previous conversations outperform the standard encoder-decoder architectures currently considered state of the art.

Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation

Interactive neural machine translation (INMT) is able to guarantee high-quality translations by taking human interactions into account. Existing IMT systems relying on lexical constrained decoding (LCD) enable humans to translate in a flexible translation manner beyond left-to-right. However, they typically suffer from limitations in translation efficiency and quality due to the reliance on LCD. In this work, we propose a novel BiTIIMT system, Bilingual Text-Infilling for Interactive Neural Machine Translation. The key idea to BiTIIMT is the Bilingual Text-infilling (BiTI) task which aims to fill missing segments in a manually revised translation for a given source sentence. We propose a simple yet effective solution by casting this task as a sequence-to-sequence task. 
The benefits of our solution are that it performs efficient decoding with the same complexity as the standard decoding in NMT and makes full use of revised words for better translation prediction. Experiment results show that BiTiIMT performs significantly better and faster than state-of-the-art LCD-based IMT on three translation tasks.

BiTIIMT: A Bilingual Text-infilling Method for Interactive Machine Translation

Charts are commonly used for exploring data
and communicating insights. Generating natural language summaries from charts can be very helpful for people in inferring key insights that would otherwise require a lot of cognitive and perceptual efforts. We present Chart-to-text, a large-scale benchmark with two datasets and a total of 44,096 charts covering a wide range of topics and chart types. We explain the dataset construction process and
analyze the datasets. We also introduce a number of state-of-the-art neural models as baselines that utilize image captioning and data-to-text generation techniques to tackle two problem variations: one assumes the underlying data table of the chart is available while the other needs to extract data from chart images. Our analysis with automatic and human evaluation shows that while our best models usually generate fluent summaries and yield reasonable BLEU scores, they also suffer from
hallucinations and factual errors as well as difficulties in correctly explaining complex patterns and trends in charts.

Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization

Transformer based re-ranking models can achieve high search relevance through context- aware soft matching of query tokens with document tokens. To alleviate runtime complexity of such inference, previous work has adopted a late interaction architecture with pre-computed contextual token representations at the cost of a large online storage. This paper proposes contextual quantization of token embeddings by decoupling document-specific and document-independent ranking contributions during codebook-based compression. This allows effective online decompression and embedding composition for better search relevance. This paper presents an evaluation of the above compact token representation model in terms of relevance and space efficiency.

Compact Token Representations with Contextual Quantization for Efficient Document Re-ranking

Multi-hop reading comprehension requires an ability to reason across multiple documents. On the one hand, deep learning approaches only implicitly encode query-related information into distributed embeddings which fail to uncover the discrete relational reasoning process to infer the correct answer. On the other hand, logic-based approaches provide interpretable rules to infer the target answer, but mostly work on structured data where entities and relations are well-defined. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning based inductive logic reasoning method that firstly extracts query-related (candidate-related) information, and then conducts logic reasoning among the filtered information by inducing feasible rules that entail the target relation. The reasoning process is accomplished via attentive memories with novel differentiable logic operators. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we evaluate it on two reading comprehension datasets, namely WikiHop and MedHop.

Deep Inductive Logic Reasoning for Multi-Hop Reading Comprehension

While large language models have shown exciting progress on several NLP benchmarks, evaluating their ability for complex analogical reasoning remains under-explored. Here, we introduce a high-quality crowdsourced dataset of narratives for employing proverbs in context as a benchmark for abstract language understanding. The dataset provides fine-grained annotation of aligned spans between proverbs and narratives, and contains minimal lexical overlaps between narratives and proverbs, ensuring that models need to go beyond surface-level reasoning to succeed. We explore three tasks: (1) proverb recommendation and alignment prediction, (2) narrative generation for a given proverb and topic, and (3) identifying narratives with similar motifs. Our experiments show that neural language models struggle on these tasks compared to humans, and these tasks pose multiple learning challenges.

ePiC: Employing Proverbs in Context as a Benchmark for Abstract Language Understanding

Question answering (QA) is a fundamental means to facilitate assessment and training of narrative comprehension skills for both machines and young children, yet there is scarcity of high-quality QA datasets carefully designed to serve this purpose. In particular, existing datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. Drawing on the reading education research, we introduce FairytaleQA, a dataset focusing on narrative comprehension of kindergarten to eighth-grade students. Generated by educational experts based on an evidence-based theoretical framework, FairytaleQA consists of 10,580 explicit and implicit questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. Our dataset is valuable in two folds: First, we ran existing QA models on our dataset and confirmed that this annotation helps assess models' fine-grained learning skills. Second, the dataset supports question generation (QG) task in the education domain. Through benchmarking with QG models, we show that the QG model trained on FairytaleQA is capable of asking high-quality and more diverse questions.

Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA -- An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension

Unfamiliar terminology and complex language can present barriers to understanding science. Natural language processing stands to help address these issues by automatically defining unfamiliar terms. We introduce a new task and dataset for defining scientific terms and controlling the complexity of generated definitions as a way of adapting to a specific reader’s background knowledge. We test four definition generation methods for this new task, finding that a sequence-to-sequence approach is most successful. We then explore the version of the task in which definitions are generated at a target complexity level. We introduce a novel reranking approach and find in human evaluations that it offers superior fluency while also controlling complexity, compared to several controllable generation base- lines.

Generating Scientific Definitions with Controllable Complexity

Deep learning (DL) techniques involving finetuning large numbers of model parameters have delivered impressive performance on the task of discriminating between language produced by cognitively healthy individuals, and those with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, questions remain about their ability to generalize beyond the small reference sets that are publicly available for research. As an alternative to fitting model parameters directly, we propose a novel method by which a Transformer DL model (GPT-2) pre-trained on general English text is paired with an artificially degraded version of itself (GPT-D), to compute the ratio between these two models’ perplexities on language from cognitively healthy and impaired individuals. This technique approaches state-of-the-art performance on text data from a widely used "Cookie Theft" picture description task, and unlike established alternatives also generalizes well to spontaneous conversations. Furthermore, GPT-D generates text with characteristics known to be associated with AD, demonstrating the induction of dementia-related linguistic anomalies. Our study is a step toward better understanding of the relationships between the inner workings of generative neural language models, the language that they produce, and the deleterious effects of dementia on human speech and language characteristics.

AraT5: Text-to-Text Transformers for Arabic Language Generation

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