Ireland

Representation of linguistic phenomena in computational language models is typically assessed against the predictions of existing linguistic theories of these phenomena. Using the notion of polarity as a case study, we show that this is not always the most adequate set-up. We probe polarity via so-called &#39;negative polarity items&#39; (in particular, English &#39;any&#39;) in two pre-trained Transformer-based models (BERT and GPT-2). We show that - at least for polarity - metrics derived from language models are more consistent with data from psycholinguistic experiments than linguistic theory predictions. Establishing this allows us to more adequately evaluate the performance of language models and also to use language models to discover new insights into natural language grammar beyond existing linguistic theories. This work contributes to establishing closer ties between psycholinguistic experiments and experiments with language models.

ACL 2022

Transformers in the loop: Polarity in neural models of language

polarity

pre-trained language models

psycholinguistics

evaluation

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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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).

Representation of linguistic phenomena in computational language models is typically assessed against the predictions of existing linguistic theories of these phenomena. Using the notion of polarity as a case study, we show that this is not always the most adequate set-up. We probe polarity via so-called 'negative polarity items' (in particular, English 'any') in two pre-trained Transformer-based models (BERT and GPT-2). We show that - at least for polarity - metrics derived from language models are more consistent with data from psycholinguistic experiments than linguistic theory predictions. Establishing this allows us to more adequately evaluate the performance of language models and also to use language models to discover new insights into natural language grammar beyond existing linguistic theories. This work contributes to establishing closer ties between psycholinguistic experiments and experiments with language models.

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) 
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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). 

We propose a benchmark to measure whether a language model is truthful in generating an- swers to questions. The benchmark comprises 817 questions that span 38 categories, includ- ing health, law, finance and politics. We crafted questions that some humans would answer falsely due to a false belief or misconception. To perform well, models must avoid generating false answers learned from imitating human texts. We tested GPT-3, GPT-Neo/J, GPT-2 and a T5-based model. The best model was truthful on 58% of questions, while human per- formance was 94%. Models generated many false answers that mimic popular misconcep- tions and have the potential to deceive humans. The largest models were generally the least truthful. This contrasts with other NLP tasks, where performance improves with model size. However, this result is expected if false answers are learned from the training distribution. We suggest that scaling up models alone is less promising for improving truthfulness than fine- tuning using training objectives other than imi- tation of text from the web.

TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods

We describe a method to jointly pre-train 
speech and text in an encoder-decoder modeling framework for speech translation and recognition. 
The proposed method incorporates 
four self-supervised and supervised subtasks for cross modality learning. 
A self-supervised speech subtask leverages unlabelled speech data, and a (self-)supervised text to text subtask makes use of 
abundant text training data. 
Two auxiliary supervised speech tasks are included to unify speech and text modeling space. 
Our contribution lies in integrating linguistic information from the text corpus into the speech pre-training.
Detailed analysis reveals learning interference among subtasks. 
Two pre-training configurations for speech translation and recognition, respectively, are presented to alleviate subtask interference.
Our experiments show the proposed method can effectively fuse speech and text information into one model. 
It achieves between 1.7 and 2.3 BLEU improvement above the state of the art on the MuST-C speech translation dataset and 
comparable WERs to wav2vec 2.0 on the Librispeech speech recognition task.

Unified Speech-Text Pre-training for Speech Translation and Recognition

Recent parameter-efficient language model tuning (PELT) methods manage to match the performance of fine-tuning with much fewer trainable parameters and perform especially well when training data is limited. However, different PELT methods may perform rather differently on the same task, making it nontrivial to select the most appropriate method for a specific task, especially considering the fast-growing number of new PELT methods and tasks. In light of model diversity and the difficulty of model selection, we propose a unified framework, UniPELT, which incorporates different PELT methods as submodules and learns to activate the ones that best suit the current data or task setup via gating mechanism. On the GLUE benchmark, UniPELT consistently achieves 1~4% gains compared to the best individual PELT method that it incorporates and even outperforms fine-tuning under different setups. Moreover, UniPELT generally surpasses the upper bound that takes the best performance of all its submodules used individually on each task, indicating that a mixture of multiple PELT methods may be inherently more effective than single methods.

UniPELT: A Unified Framework for Parameter-Efficient Language Model Tuning

Coreference resolution over semantic graphs like AMRs aims to group the graph nodes that represent the same entity. This is a crucial step for making document-level formal semantic representations. With annotated data on AMR coreference resolution, deep learning approaches have recently shown great potential for this task, yet they are usually data hungry and annotating data is costly. We propose a general pretraining method using variational graph autoencoder (VGAE) for AMR coreference resolution, which can leverage any general AMR corpus and even automatically parsed AMR data. Experiments on benchmarks show that the pretraining approach achieves performance gains of up to 6% absolute F1 points. Moreover, our model significantly improves on the previous state-of-the-art model by up to 11% F1 points.

Variational Graph Autoencoding as Cheap Supervision for AMR Coreference Resolution

A long-term goal of AI research is to build intelligent agents that can communicate with humans in natural language, perceive the environment, and perform real-world tasks. Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a fundamental and interdisciplinary research topic towards this goal, and receives increasing attention from natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, and machine learning communities. 
In this paper, we review contemporary studies in the emerging field of VLN, covering tasks, evaluation metrics, methods, etc. Through structured analysis of current progress and challenges, we highlight the limitations of current VLN and opportunities for future work. This paper serves as a thorough reference for the VLN research community.

Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions

This paper analyzes negation in eight popular corpora spanning six natural language understanding tasks. We show that these corpora have few negations compared to general-purpose English, and that the few negations in them are often unimportant. Indeed, one can often ignore negations and still make the right predictions. Additionally, experimental results show that state-of-the-art transformers trained with these corpora obtain substantially worse results with instances that contain negation, especially if the negations are important. We conclude that new corpora accounting for negation are needed to solve natural language understanding tasks when negation is present.

An Analysis of Negation in Natural Language Understanding Corpora

Deep learning sequence models have been successful with morphological inflection generation. The SIGMORPHON shared task results in the past several years indicate that such models can perform well, but only if the training data covers a good amount of different lemmata, or if the lemmata to be inflected at test time have also been seen in training, as has indeed been largely the case in these tasks. Surprisingly, we find that standard models such as the Transformer almost completely fail at generalizing inflection patterns when trained on a limited number of lemmata and asked to inflect previously unseen lemmata---i.e. under ``wug test''-like circumstances. This is true even though the actual number of training examples is very large. While established data augmentation techniques can be employed to alleviate this shortcoming by introducing a copying bias through hallucinating synthetic new word forms using the alphabet in the language at hand, our experiment results show that, to be more effective, the hallucination process needs to pay attention to substrings of syllable-like length rather than individual characters.

Can a Transformer Pass the Wug Test? Tuning Copying Bias in Neural Morphological Inflection Models

We consider the problem of pretraining a two-stage open-domain question answering (QA) system (retriever + reader) with strong transfer capabilities. The key challenge is how to construct a large amount of high-quality question-answer-context triplets without task-specific annotations. Specifically, the triplets should align well with downstream tasks by: (i) covering a wide range of domains (for open-domain applications), (ii) linking a question to its semantically relevant context with supporting evidence (for training the retriever), and (iii) identifying the correct answer in the context (for training the reader). Previous pretraining approaches generally fall short of one or more of these requirements. In this work, we automatically construct a large-scale corpus that meets all three criteria by consulting millions of references cited within Wikipedia. The well-aligned pretraining signals benefit both the retriever and the reader significantly. Our pretrained retriever leads to 2%-10% absolute gains in top-20 accuracy. And with our pretrained reader, the entire system improves by up to 4% in exact match.

C-MORE: Pretraining to Answer Open-Domain Questions by Consulting Millions of References

Annotation errors that stem from various sources are usually unavoidable when performing large-scale annotation of linguistic data. In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of using the Transformer model to detect various types of annotator errors in type-based morphological datasets that contain inflected word forms. We evaluate our error detection model on four languages by injecting three different types of artificial errors into the data: (1) typographic errors, where single characters in the data are inserted, replaced, or deleted; (2) linguistic confusion errors where two inflected forms are systematically swapped; and (3) self-adversarial errors where the Transformer model itself is used to generate plausible-looking, but erroneous forms by retrieving high-scoring predictions from a Transformer search beam. Results show that the model can with perfect, or near-perfect recall detect errors in all three scenarios, even when significant amounts of the annotated data (5%-30%) are corrupted on all languages tested. Precision varies across the languages and types of errors, but is high enough that the model can reliably be used to flag suspicious entries in large datasets for further scrutiny by human annotators.

Detecting Annotation Errors in Morphological Data with the Transformer

Reasoning using negation is known to be difficult for transformer-based language models. While previous studies have used the tools of psycholinguistics to probe a transformer's ability to reason over negation, none have focused on the types of negation studied in developmental psychology. We explore how well transformers can process such categories of negation, by framing the problem as a natural language inference (NLI) task. We curate a set of diagnostic questions for our target categories from popular NLI datasets and evaluate how well a suite of models reason over them. We find that models perform consistently better only on certain categories, suggesting clear distinctions in how they are processed.

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TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods

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