Ireland

Human languages are full of metaphorical expressions. Metaphors help people understand the world by connecting new concepts and domains to more familiar ones. Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are therefore assumed to encode metaphorical knowledge useful for NLP systems. In this paper, we investigate this hypothesis for PLMs, by probing metaphoricity information in their encodings, and by measuring the cross-lingual and cross-dataset generalization of this information. We present studies in multiple metaphor detection datasets and in four languages (i.e., English, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi). Our extensive experiments suggest that contextual representations in PLMs do encode metaphorical knowledge, and mostly in their middle layers. The knowledge is transferable between languages and datasets, especially when the annotation is consistent across training and testing sets. Our findings give helpful insights for both cognitive and NLP scientists.

ACL 2022

Metaphors in Pre-Trained Language Models: Probing and Generalization Across Datasets and Languages

probing

metaphor

pre-trained language model

bert

transformers

# 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

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) outputs translation while reading source sentence and hence requires a policy to decide whether to wait for the next source word (READ) or generate a target word (WRITE), the actions of which form a read/write path. Although the read/write path is essential to SiMT performance, no direct supervision is given to the path in the existing methods. In this paper, we propose a method of dual-path SiMT which introduces duality constraints to direct the read/write path. According to duality constraints, the read/write path in source-totarget and target-to-source SiMT models can be mapped to each other. As a result, the two SiMT models can be optimized jointly by forcing their read/write paths to satisfy the mapping. Experiments on En-Vi and De-En tasks show that our method can outperform strong baselines under all latency.

Modeling Dual Read/Write Paths for Simultaneous Machine Translation

We introduce an argumentation annotation approach to model the structure of argumentative discourse in student-written business model pitches. Additionally, the annotation scheme captures a series of persuasiveness scores such as the specificity, strength, evidence, and relevance of the pitch and the individual components. Based on this scheme, we annotated a corpus of 200 business model pitches in German. Moreover, we trained predictive models to detect argumentative discourse structures and embedded them in an adaptive writing support system for students that provides them with individual argumentation feedback independent of an instructor, time, and location. We evaluated our tool in a real-world writing exercise and found promising results for the measured self-efficacy and perceived ease-of-use. Finally, we present our freely available corpus of persuasive business model pitches with 3,207 annotated sentences in German language and our annotation guidelines. 


Modeling Persuasive Discourse to Adaptively Support Students' Argumentative Writing

In order to better understand the rationale behind model behavior, recent works have exploited providing interpretation to support the inference prediction. However, existing methods tend to provide human-unfriendly interpretation, and are prone to sub-optimal performance due to one-side promotion, i.e. either inference promotion with interpretation or vice versa. In this paper, we propose a multi-level mutual promotion mechanism for self-evolved inference and sentence-level interpretation (MPII). Specifically, from the model level, we propose a Step-wise Integration Mechanism to jointly perform and deeply integrate inference and interpretation in an autoregressive manner. From the optimization level, we propose an Adversarial Fidelity Regularization to improve the fidelity between inference and interpretation with the Adversarial Mutual Information training strategy.
Extensive experiments on NLI and CQA tasks reveal that the proposed MPII approach can significantly outperform baseline models for both the inference performance and the interpretation quality.

MPII: Multi-Level Mutual Promotion for Inference and Interpretation

Prompting has recently been shown as a promising approach for applying pre-trained language models to perform downstream tasks. We present Multi-Stage Prompting, a simple and automatic approach for leveraging pre-trained language models to translation tasks. To better mitigate the discrepancy between pre-training and translation, MSP divides the translation process via pre-trained language models into three separate stages: the encoding stage, the re-encoding stage, and the decoding stage. During each stage, we independently apply different continuous prompts for allowing pre-trained language models better shift to translation tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on three translation tasks. Experiments show that our method can significantly improve the translation performance of pre-trained language models.

MSP: Multi-Stage Prompting for Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Translators

With the increasing popularity of posting multimodal messages online, many recent studies have been carried out utilizing both textual and visual information for multi-modal sarcasm detection. In this paper, we investigate multi-modal sarcasm detection from a novel perspective by constructing a cross-modal graph for each instance to explicitly draw the ironic re- lations between textual and visual modalities. Specifically, we first detect the objects paired with descriptions of the image modality, enabling the learning of important visual information. Then, the descriptions of the objects are served as a bridge to determine the importance of the association between the objects of image modality and the contextual words of text modality, so as to build a cross-modal graph for each multi-modal instance. Furthermore, we devise a cross-modal graph convolutional network to make sense of the incongruity relations between modalities for multi-modal sarcasm detection. Extensive experimental results and in-depth analysis show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal sarcasm detection

Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection via Cross-Modal Graph Convolutional Network

Nested named entity recognition (NER) has been receiving increasing attention. Recently, Fu et al. (2020) adapt a span-based constituency parser to tackle nested NER. They treat nested entities as partially-observed constituency trees and propose the masked inside algorithm for partial marginalization. However, their method cannot leverage entity heads, which have been shown useful in entity mention detection and entity typing. In this work, we resort to more expressive structures, lexicalized constituency trees in which constituents are annotated by headwords, to model nested entities. We leverage the Eisner-Satta algorithm to perform partial marginalization and inference efficiently.In addition, we propose to use (1) a two-stage strategy (2) a head regularization loss and (3) a head-aware labeling loss in order to enhance the performance. We make a thorough ablation study to investigate the functionality of each component. Experimentally, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on ACE2004, ACE2005 and NNE, and competitive performance on GENIA, and meanwhile has a fast inference speed.

Nested Named Entity Recognition as Latent Lexicalized Constituency Parsing

Multimodal machine translation (MMT) aims to improve neural machine translation (NMT) with additional visual information, but most existing MMT methods require paired input of source sentence and image, which makes them suffer from shortage of sentence-image pairs. In this paper, we propose a phrase-level retrieval-based method for MMT to get visual information for the source input from existing sentence-image data sets so that MMT can break the limitation of paired sentence-image input. Our method performs retrieval at the phrase level and hence learns visual information from pairs of source phrase and grounded region, which can mitigate data sparsity. Furthermore, our method employs the conditional variational auto-encoder to learn visual representations which can filter redundant visual information and only retain visual information related to the phrase. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines on multiple MMT datasets, especially when the textual context is limited.

Neural Machine Translation with Phrase-Level Universal Visual Representations

Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). This paper explores a deeper relationship between Transformer and numerical ODE methods. We first show that a residual block of layers in Transformer can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE. Inspired by this, we design a new architecture, {\it ODE Transformer}, which is analogous to the Runge-Kutta method that is well motivated in ODE. As a natural extension to Transformer, ODE Transformer is easy to implement and efficient to use. Experimental results on the large-scale machine translation, abstractive summarization, and grammar error correction tasks demonstrate the high genericity of ODE Transformer. It can gain large improvements in model performance over strong baselines (e.g., 30.77 and 44.11 BLEU scores on the WMT'14 English-German and English-French benchmarks) at a slight cost in inference efficiency.

ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation

In conversational question answering (CQA), the task of question rewriting (QR) in context aims to rewrite a context-dependent question into an equivalent self-contained question that gives the same answer. In this paper, we are interested in the robustness of a QR system to questions varying in rewriting hardness or difficulty. Since there is a lack of questions classified based on their rewriting hardness, we first propose a heuristic method to automatically classify questions into subsets of varying hardness, by measuring the discrepancy between a question and its rewrite. To find out what makes questions hard or easy for rewriting, we then conduct a human evaluation to annotate the rewriting hardness of questions. Finally, to enhance the robustness of QR systems to questions of varying hardness, we propose a novel learning framework for QR that first trains a QR model independently on each subset of questions of a certain level of hardness, then combines these QR models as one joint model for inference. Experimental results on two datasets show that our framework improves the overall performance compared to the baselines.

On the Robustness of Question Rewriting Systems to Questions of Varying Hardness

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a variety of post-hoc interpretations that aim to uncover how natural language processing (NLP) models make predictions. Despite the surge of new interpretation methods, it remains an open problem how to define and quantitatively measure the faithfulness of interpretations, i.e., to what extent interpretations reflect the reasoning process by a model. We propose two new criteria, sensitivity and stability, that provide complementary notions of faithfulness to the existed removal-based criteria. Our results show that the conclusion for how faithful interpretations are could vary substantially based on different notions. Motivated by the desiderata of sensitivity and stability, we introduce a new class of interpretation methods that adopt techniques from adversarial robustness. Empirical results show that our proposed methods are effective under the new criteria and overcome limitations of gradient-based methods on removal-based criteria. Besides text classification, we also apply interpretation methods and metrics to dependency parsing. Our results shed light on understanding the diverse set of interpretations.

Metaphors in Pre-Trained Language Models: Probing and Generalization Across Datasets and Languages

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Modeling Dual Read/Write Paths for Simultaneous Machine Translation

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