Ireland

Pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language models have led to widespread success in many natural language generation tasks. However, there has been relatively less work on analyzing their ability to generate structured outputs such as graphs. Unlike natural language, graphs have distinct structural and semantic properties in the context of a downstream NLP task, e.g., generating a graph that is connected and acyclic can be attributed to its structural constraints, while the semantics of a graph can refer to how meaningfully an edge represents the relation between two node concepts. In this work, we study pre-trained language models that generate explanation graphs in an end-to-end manner and analyze their ability to learn the structural constraints and semantics of such graphs. We first show that with limited supervision, pre-trained language models often generate graphs that either violate these constraints or are semantically incoherent. Since curating large amount of human-annotated graphs is expensive and tedious, we propose simple yet effective ways of graph perturbations via node and edge edit operations that lead to structurally and semantically positive and negative graphs. Next, we leverage these graphs in different contrastive learning models with Max-Margin and InfoNCE losses. Our methods lead to significant improvements in both structural and semantic accuracy of explanation graphs and also generalize to other similar graph generation tasks. Lastly, we show that human errors are the best negatives for contrastive learning and also that automatically generating more such human-like negative graphs can lead to further improvements.

ACL 2022

Explanation Graph Generation via Pre-trained Language Models: An Empirical Study with Contrastive Learning

explanation graphs

contrastive learning

interpretability

# 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

Despite recent progress in abstractive summarization, systems still suffer from faithfulness errors. While prior work has proposed models that improve faithfulness, it is unclear whether the improvement comes from an increased level of extractiveness of the model outputs as one naive way to improve faithfulness is to make summarization models more extractive. In this work, we present a framework for evaluating the effective faithfulness of summarization systems, by generating a faithfulnessabstractiveness trade-off curve that serves as a control at different operating points on the abstractiveness spectrum. We then show that the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) baseline as well as a recently proposed method for improving faithfulness, are both worse than the control at the same level of abstractiveness. Finally, we learn a selector to identify the most faithful and abstractive summary for a given document, and show that this system can attain higher faithfulness scores in human evaluations while being more abstractive than the baseline system on two datasets. Moreover, we show that our system is able to achieve a better faithfulness-abstractiveness trade-off than the control at the same level of abstractiveness.

Faithful or Extractive? On Mitigating the Faithfulness-Abstractiveness Trade-off in Abstractive Summarization

Publicly traded companies are required to submit periodic reports with eXtensive Business Reporting Language (XBRL) word-level tags. Manually tagging the reports is tedious and costly. We, therefore, introduce XBRL tagging as a new entity extraction task for the financial domain and release FiNER-139, a dataset of 1.1M sentences with gold XBRL tags. Unlike typical entity extraction datasets, FiNER-139 uses a much larger label set of 139 entity types. Most annotated tokens are numeric, with the correct tag per token depending mostly on context, rather than the token itself. We show that subword fragmentation of numeric expressions harms BERT's performance, allowing word-level BILSTMs to perform better. To improve BERT's performance, we propose two simple and effective solutions that replace numeric expressions with pseudo-tokens reflecting original token shapes and numeric magnitudes. We also experiment with FIN-BERT, an existing BERT model for the financial domain, and release our own BERT (SEC-BERT), pre-trained on financial filings, which performs best. Through data and error analysis, we finally identify possible limitations to inspire future work on XBRL tagging.

FiNER: Financial Numeric Entity Recognition for XBRL Tagging

We introduce ParaBLEU, a paraphrase representation learning model and evaluation metric for text generation. Unlike previous approaches, ParaBLEU learns to understand paraphrasis using generative conditioning as a pretraining objective.
ParaBLEU correlates more strongly with human judgements than existing metrics,
obtaining new state-of-the-art results on the 2017 WMT Metrics Shared Task. We
show that our model is robust to data scarcity, exceeding previous state-of-the-art
performance using only 50% of the available training data and surpassing BLEU,
ROUGE and METEOR with only 40 labelled examples. Finally, we demonstrate
that ParaBLEU can be used to conditionally generate novel paraphrases from a
single demonstration, which we use to confirm our hypothesis that it learns abstract,
generalized paraphrase representations.

Generative Pretraining for Paraphrase Evaluation

State-of-the-art abstractive summarization systems often generate hallucinations; i.e., content that is not directly inferable from the source text. Despite being assumed incorrect, we find that much hallucinated content is factual, namely consistent with world knowledge. These factual hallucinations can be beneficial in a summary by providing useful background information. 
In this work, we propose a novel detection approach that separates factual from non-factual hallucinations of entities. 
Our method utilizes an entity's prior and posterior probabilities according to pre-trained and finetuned masked language models, respectively. Empirical results suggest that our approach outperforms five baselines and strongly correlates with human judgments.
Furthermore, we show that our detector, when used as a reward signal in an off-line reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, significantly improves the factuality of summaries while maintaining the level of abstractiveness.

Hallucinated but Factual! Inspecting the Factuality of Hallucinations in Abstractive Summarization

Document structure is critical for efficient in-formation consumption. However, it is challenging to encode it efficiently into the modern Transformer architecture. In this work, we present HIBRIDS, which injects Hierarchical Biases foR Incorporating Document Structure into the calculation of attention scores. We further present a new task, hierarchical question-summary generation, for summarizing salient content in the source document into a hierarchy of questions and summaries, where each follow-up question inquires about the content of its parent question-summary pair. We also annotate a new dataset with 6,153 question- summary hierarchies labeled on long government reports. Experiment results show that our model produces better question-summary hierarchies than comparisons on both hierarchy quality and content coverage, a finding also echoed by human judges. Additionally, our model improves the generation of long-form summaries from lengthy government reports and Wikipedia articles, as measured by ROUGE scores.

HIBRIDS: Attention with Hierarchical Biases for Structure-aware Long Document Summarization

In this presentation, we share our work "Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering".

Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering

Natural language inference (NLI) has been widely used as a task to train and evaluate models for language understanding. However, the ability of NLI models to perform inferences requiring understanding of figurative language such as idioms and metaphors remains understudied. We introduce the IMPLI (Idiomatic and Metaphoric Paired Language Inference) dataset, an English dataset consisting of paired sentences spanning idioms and metaphors. We develop novel methods to generate 24k semi-automatic pairs as well as manually creating 1.8k gold pairs. We use IMPLI to evaluate NLI models based on RoBERTa fine-tuned on the widely used MNLI dataset. We then show that while they can reliably detect entailment relationship between figurative phrases with their literal counterparts, they perform poorly on similarly structured examples where pairs are designed to be non-entailing. This suggests the limits of current NLI models with regard to understanding figurative language and this dataset serves as a benchmark for future improvements in this direction.

IMPLI: Investigating NLI Models' Performance on Figurative Language

Modern neural language models can produce remarkably fluent and grammatical text. So much, in fact, that recent work by Clark et al. (2021) has reported that conventional crowdsourcing can no longer reliably distinguish between machine-authored (GPT-3) and human-authored writing. As errors in machine generations become ever subtler and harder to spot, it poses a new challenge to the research community for robust machine text evaluation. We propose a new framework called Scarecrow for scrutinizing machine text via crowd annotation. To support the broad range of real machine errors that can be identified by laypeople, the ten error categories of Scarecrow -- such as redundancy, commonsense errors, and incoherence -- are identified through several rounds of crowd annotation experiments without a predefined ontology. We then use Scarecrow to collect over 41k error spans in human-written and machine-generated paragraphs of English language news text. We isolate factors for detailed analysis, including parameter count, training data, and various decoding-time configurations. Our approach successfully quantifies measurable gaps between human authored text and generations from models of several sizes, including fourteen configurations of GPT-3. In addition, our analysis unveils new insights, with detailed rationales provided by laypeople, e.g., that the commonsense capabilities have been improving with larger models while math capabilities have not, and that the choices of simple decoding hyperparameters can make remarkable differences on the perceived quality of machine text. We release our training material, annotation toolkit and dataset at https://yao-dou.github.io/scarecrow/

Is GPT-3 Text Indistinguishable from Human Text? Scarecrow: A Framework for Scrutinizing Machine Text 

In this paper, we study the effect of commonsense and domain knowledge while generating responses in counseling conversations using retrieval and generative methods for knowledge integration. We propose a pipeline that collects domain knowledge through web mining, and show that retrieval from both domainspeciﬁc and commonsense knowledge bases improves the quality of generated responses. We also present a model that incorporates knowledge generated by COMET using soft positional encoding and masked self-attention. We show that both retrieved and COMETgenerated knowledge improve the system’s performance as measured by automatic metrics and by human evaluation. Lastly, we present a comparative study on the types of knowledge encoded by our system, showing that causal and intentional relationships beneﬁt the generation task more than other types of commonsense relations.

Knowledge Enhanced Reflection Generation for Counseling Dialogues

In this paper, we firstly empirically find that existing models struggle to handle hard mentions due to their insufficient contexts, which consequently limits their overall typing performance. To this end, we propose to exploit sibling mentions for enhancing the mention representations. Specifically, we present two different metrics for sibling selection and employ an attentive graph neural network to aggregate information from sibling mentions. The proposed graph model is scalable in that unseen test mentions are allowed to be added as new nodes for inference. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our sibling learning strategy, where our model outperforms ten strong baselines. Moreover, our experiments indeed prove the superiority of sibling mentions in helping clarify the types for hard mentions.

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Faithful or Extractive? On Mitigating the Faithfulness-Abstractiveness Trade-off in Abstractive Summarization

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