Ireland

The capability of holding social talk (or casual conversation) and making sense of conversational content requires context-sensitive natural language understanding and reasoning, which cannot be handled efficiently by the current popular open-domain dialog systems and chatbots. Heavily relying on corpus-based machine learning techniques to encode and decode context-sensitive meanings, these systems focus on fitting a particular training dataset, but not tracking what is actually happening in a conversation, and therefore easily derail in a new context. This work sketches out a more linguistically-informed architecture to handle social talk in English, in which corpus-based methods form the backbone of the relatively context-insensitive components (e.g. part-of-speech tagging, approximation of lexical meaning and constituent chunking), while symbolic modeling is used for reasoning out the context-sensitive components, which do not have any consistent mapping to linguistic forms. All components are fitted into a Bayesian game-theoretic model to address the interactive and rational aspects of conversation.

ACL 2022

 Sketching a Linguistically-Driven Reasoning Dialog Model for Social Talk

conversational context

conversational coherence

casual conversation

dialog model

social talk

english

# 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. 

 
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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

Data-hungry deep neural networks have established themselves as the defacto standard for many NLP tasks including the traditional sequence tagging ones. Despite their state-of-the-art performance on high-resource languages, they still fall behind of their statistical counter-parts in low-resource scenarios. One methodology to counter attack this problem is text augmentation, i.e., generating new synthetic training data points from existing data. Although NLP has recently
witnessed a load of textual augmentation techniques, the field still lacks a systematic performance analysis on a diverse set of languages and sequence tagging tasks. To fill this gap, we investigate three categories of text augmentation methodologies which perform changes on the syntax (e.g., cropping sub-sentences), token (e.g., random word insertion) and character (e.g., character swapping) levels. We systematically compare the methods on part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and semantic role labeling for a diverse set of language families using various models
including the architectures that rely on pretrained multilingual contextualized language models such as mBERT. Augmentation most significantly improves dependency parsing, followed by part-of-speech tagging and semantic role labeling. We find the experimented techniques to be effective on morphologically rich languages in general rather than analytic languages such as Vietnamese. Our results suggest that the augmentation techniques can further improve over strong baselines based on mBERT, especially for dependency parsing. We identify the character-level methods as the most consistent performers, while synonym replacement and syntactic augmenters provide inconsistent improvements. Finally, we discuss that the results most heavily depend on the task, language pair (e.g., syntactic-level techniques mostly benefit higher-level tasks and morphologically richer languages), and the model type (e.g., token-level augmentation provide significant improvements for BPE, while character-level ones give generally higher scores for char and mBERT based models).

To Augment or Not to Augment? A Comparative Study on Text Augmentation Techniques for Low-Resource NLP

Few-Shot Relation Extraction aims at predicting the relation for a pair of entities in a sentence by training with a few labelled examples in each relation. Some recent works have introduced relation information (i.e., relation labels or descriptions) to assist model learning based on Prototype Network. However, most of them constrain the prototypes of each relation class implicitly with relation information, generally through designing complex network structures, like generating hybrid features, combining with contrastive learning or attention networks. We argue that relation information can be introduced more explicitly and effectively into the model. Thus, this paper proposes a direct addition approach to introduce relation information. Specifically, for each relation class, the relation representation is first generated by concatenating two views of relations (i.e., [CLS] token embedding and the mean value of embeddings of all tokens) and then directly added to the original prototype for both train and prediction. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset FewRel 1.0 show significant improvements and achieve comparable results to the state-of-the-art, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Besides, further analyses verify that the direct addition is a much more effective way to integrate the relation representations and the original prototypes.

A Simple yet Effective Relation Information Guided Approach for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

In this work, we explore the novel idea of employing dependency parsing information in the
context of few-shot learning, the task of learning the meaning of a rare word based on a limited amount of context sentences. Firstly, we
use dependency-based word embedding models as background spaces for few-shot learning.
Secondly, we introduce two few-shot learning
methods which enhance the additive baseline
model by using dependencies.

 Using dependency parsing for few-shot learning in distributional semantics

We present an event structure classification empirically derived from inferential properties annotated on sentence- and document-level Universal Decompositional Semantics (UDS) graphs. We induce this classification jointly with semantic role, entity, and event-event relation classifications using a document-level generative model structured by these graphs. To support this induction, we augment existing annotations found in the UDS1.0 dataset, which covers the entirety of the English Web Treebank, with an array of inferential properties capturing fine-grained aspects of the temporal and aspectual structure of events. The resulting dataset (available at decomp.io) is the largest annotation of event structure and (partial) event coreference to date.

Decomposing and Recomposing Event Structure

Existing table question answering datasets contain abundant factual questions that primarily evaluate a QA system’s comprehension of query and tabular data. However, restricted by their short-form answers, these datasets fail to include question–answer interactions that represent more advanced and naturally occurring information needs: questions that ask for reasoning and integration of information pieces retrieved from a structured knowledge source. To complement the existing datasets and to reveal the challenging nature of the table-based question answering task, we introduce FeTaQA, a new dataset with 10K Wikipedia-based {table, question, free-form answer, supporting table cells} pairs. FeTaQA is collected from noteworthy descriptions of Wikipedia tables that contain information people tend to seek; generation of these descriptions requires advanced processing that humans perform on a daily basis: Understand the question and table, retrieve, integrate, infer, and conduct text planning and surface realization to generate an answer. We provide two benchmark methods for the proposed task: a pipeline method based on semantic parsing-based QA systems and an end-to-end method based on large pretrained text generation models, and show that FeTaQA poses a challenge for both methods.

FeTaQA: Free-form Table Question Answering

We introduce a neuro-symbolic natural logic framework based on reinforcement learning with introspective revision. The model samples and rewards specific reasoning paths through policy gradient, in which the introspective revision algorithm modifies intermediate symbolic reasoning steps to discover reward-earning operations as well as leverages external knowledge to alleviate spurious reasoning and training inefficiency. The framework is supported by properly designed local relation models to avoid input entangling, which helps ensure the interpretability of the proof paths. The proposed model has built-in interpretability and shows superior capability in monotonicity inference, systematic generalization, and interpretability, compared to previous models on the existing datasets.

Neuro-symbolic Natural Logic with Introspective Revision for Natural Language Inference

Off-the-shelf models are widely used by computational social science researchers to measure properties of text, such as sentiment. However, without access to source data it is difficult to account for domain shift, which presents a threat to validity. Here, we treat domain adaptation as a modular process that involves separate model producers and model consumers, and show how they can independently cooperate to facilitate more accurate measurements of text. We introduce two lightweight techniques for this scenario, and demonstrate that they reliably increase out-of-domain accuracy on four multi-domain text classification datasets when used with linear and contextual embedding models. We conclude with recommendations for model producers and consumers, and release models and replication code to accompany this paper.

Modular Domain Adaptation

Training the deep neural networks that dominate NLP requires large datasets. These are often collected automatically or via crowdsourcing, and may exhibit systematic biases or annotation artifacts. By the latter we mean spurious correlations between inputs and outputs that do not represent a generally held causal relationship between features and classes; models that exploit such correlations may appear to perform a given task well, but fail on out of sample data. In this paper, we evaluate use of different attribution methods for aiding identification of training data artifacts. We propose new hybrid approaches that combine saliency maps (which highlight important input features) with instance attribution methods (which retrieve training samples influential to a given prediction). We show that this proposed training-feature attribution can be used to efficiently uncover artifacts in training data when a challenging validation set is available. We also carry out a small user study to evaluate whether these methods are useful to NLP researchers in practice, with promising results. We make code for all methods and experiments in this paper available.

Combining Feature and Instance Attribution to Detect Artifacts

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models can be trained on sensitive information such as phone numbers, zip-codes etc. Recent literature has focused on Model Inversion Attacks (ModIvA) that can extract training data from model parameters. In this work, we present a version of such an attack by extracting canaries inserted in NLU training data. In the attack, an adversary with open-box access to the model reconstructs the canaries contained in the model's training set. We evaluate our approach by performing text completion on canaries and demonstrate that by using the prefix (non-sensitive) tokens of the canary, we can generate the full canary. As an example, our attack is able to reconstruct a four digit code in the training dataset of the NLU model with a probability of 0.5 in its best configuration. As countermeasures, we identify several defense mechanisms that, when combined, effectively eliminate the risk of ModIvA in our experiments.

Canary Extraction in Natural Language Understanding Models

Humor is a common experience that has great societal value. However, humor generation is a challenging problem for the language technologies community as it involves a significant understanding of context. To address this, previous works on humor generation have employed linguistic expertise to produce jokes with a set structure. However this approach is not scalable, since there is a wide range of possible joke structures across various types of jokes (e.g. question-answer formats, one-liners, etc.). In addition, studies on topic-controlled joke generation has been limited, which can hinder the usability of such models in real life. Topic control is important since jokes are often used in a specific context or setting, and choosing the right topic for the setting is crucial for a good use of a joke. This work introduces EDDIE, a keyword-based humor generation model that allows the user to have a fine-grained topic control on the jokes produced. Our system primarily focuses on producing Question and Answer (Q&A) style jokes with occasional one-liners. We have developed a humor generation pipeline that incorporates humor classifier, humor generator, and toxicity filter in order to produce responsible and humorous content. We evaluate EDDIE in a quantitative and qualitative manner. For the former evaluation, we assess the ability of various language models to learn and utilize mechanisms of humor given no linguistic knowledge. For the latter, we have designed three evaluation criteria : funniness, understandability, and complexity. The study has been conducted with both expert comedians and general volunteers from the general public in order to gain insights into machine humor generation and its application in real life.

Sketching a Linguistically-Driven Reasoning Dialog Model for Social Talk

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To Augment or Not to Augment? A Comparative Study on Text Augmentation Techniques for Low-Resource NLP

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