Ireland

Large-scale language models are rapidly improving, performing well on a variety of tasks with little to no customization. In this work we investigate how language models can support science writing, a challenging writing task that is both open-ended and highly constrained. We present a system for generating “sparks”, sentences related to a scientific concept intended to inspire writers. We run a user study with 13 STEM graduate students and find three main use cases of sparks---inspiration, translation, and perspective---each of which correlates with a unique interaction pattern. We also find that while participants were more likely to select higher quality sparks, the overall quality of sparks seen by a given participant did not correlate with their satisfaction with the tool.

ACL 2022

Sparks: Inspiration for Science Writing using Language Models

writing support tools

creativity support tools

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). 

workshop paper

Revision is an essential part of the human writing process. It tends to be strategic, adaptive, and, more importantly, iterative in nature. Despite the success of large language models on text revision tasks, they are limited to non-iterative, one-shot revisions. Examining and evaluating the capability of large language models for making continuous revisions and collaborating with human writers is a critical step towards building effective writing assistants. In this work, we present a human-in-the-loop iterative text revision system, Read, Revise, Repeat (R3), which aims at achieving high quality text revisions with minimal human efforts by reading model-generated revisions and user feedbacks, revising documents, and repeating human-machine interactions. In R3, a text revision model provides text editing suggestions for human writers, who can accept or reject the suggested edits. The accepted edits are then incorporated into the model for the next iteration of document revision. Writers can therefore revise documents iteratively by interacting with the system and simply accepting/rejecting its suggested edits until the text revision model stops making further revisions or reaches a predefined maximum number of revisions. Empirical experiments show that R3 can generate revisions with comparable acceptance rate to human writers at early revision depths, and the human-machine interaction can get higher quality revisions with fewer iterations and edits. The collected human-model interaction dataset and system code are available at \url{https://github.com/vipulraheja/IteraTeR}. Our system demonstration is available at \url{https://youtu.be/lK08tIpEoaE}.

Read, Revise, Repeat: A System Demonstration for Human-in-the-loop Iterative Text Revision

Recent work building open-domain chatbots has demonstrated that increasing model size improves performance. On the other hand, latency and connectivity considerations dictate the move of digital assistants on the device. Giving a digital assistant like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant the ability to discuss just about anything leads to the need for reducing the chatbot model size such that it fits on the user's device. We demonstrate that low parameter models can simultaneously retain their general knowledge conversational abilities while improving in a specific domain. Additionally, we propose a generic framework that accounts for variety in question types, tracks reference throughout multi-turn conversations, and removes inconsistent and potentially toxic responses. Our framework seamlessly transitions between chatting and performing transactional tasks, which will ultimately make interactions with digital assistants more human-like. We evaluate our framework on 1 internal and 4 public benchmark datasets using both automatic (Perplexity) and human (SSA - Sensibleness and Specificity Average) evaluation metrics and establish comparable performance while reducing model parameters by 90%.

Low-Resource Adaptation of Open-Domain Generative Chatbots

Question answering (QA) with disambiguation questions is essential for practical QA systems because user questions often do not contain information enough to find their answers. We call this task clarifying question answering, a task to find answers to ambiguous user questions by disambiguating their intents through interactions. There are two major problems in building a clarifying question answering system: data preparation of possible ambiguous questions and the generation of clarifying questions. In this paper, we tackle these problems by sentence generation methods using sentence structures. Ambiguous questions are generated by eliminating a part of a sentence considering the sentence structure. Clarifying the question generation method based on case frame dictionary and sentence structure is also proposed. Our experimental results verify that our pseudo ambiguous question generation successfully adds ambiguity to questions. Moreover, the proposed clarifying question generation recovers the performance drop by asking the user for missing information.

Pseudo Ambiguous and Clarifying Questions Based on Sentence Structures Toward Clarifying Question Answering System

A long-term ambition of information seeking QA systems is to reason over multi-modal contexts and generate natural answers to user queries. Today, memory intensive pre-trained language models are adapted to downstream tasks such as QA by fine-tuning the model on QA data in a specific modality like unstructured text or structured tables. To avoid training such memory-hungry models while utilizing a uniform architecture for each modality, parameter-efficient adapters add and train small task-specific bottle-neck layers between transformer layers. In this work, we study parameter-efficient abstractive QA in encoder-decoder models over structured tabular data and unstructured textual data using only 1.5% additional parameters for each modality. We also ablate over adapter layers in both encoder and decoder modules to study the efficiency-performance trade-off and demonstrate that reducing additional trainable parameters down to 0.7%-1.0% leads to comparable results. Our models out-perform current state-of-the-art models on tabular QA datasets such as Tablesum and FeTaQA, and achieve comparable performance on a textual QA dataset such as NarrativeQA using significantly less trainable parameters than fine-tuning.

Parameter-Efficient Abstractive Question Answering over Tables or Text

When multiple conversations occur simultaneously, a listener must decide which conversation each utterance is part of in order to interpret and respond to it appropriately. 
This task is referred as dialogue disentanglement.
A significant drawback of previous studies on disentanglement lies in that they only focus on pair-wise relationships between utterances while neglecting the conversation structure which is important for conversation structure modeling.
In this paper, we propose a hierarchical model, named Dialogue BERT (DialBERT), which integrates the local and global semantics in the context range by using BERT to encode each message-pair and using BiLSTM to aggregate the chronological context information into the output of BERT.
In order to integrate the conversation structure information into the model, two types of loss of conversation-structure loss and tree-structure loss are designed. 
In this way, our model can implicitly learn and leverage the conversation structures without being restricted to the lack of explicit access to such structures during the inference stage. 
Experimental results on two large datasets show that our method outperforms previous methods by substantial margins, achieving great performance on dialogue disentanglement.

Conversation- and Tree-Structure Losses for Dialogue Disentanglement

We deal with the scenario of conversational search, where user queries are under-specified or ambiguous. This calls for a mixed-initiative setup. User-asks (queries) and system-answers, as well as system-asks (clarification questions) and user response, in order to clarify her information needs. 
We focus on the task of selecting the next clarification question, given the conversation context. Our method leverages passage retrieval from a background content to fine-tune two deep-learning models for ranking candidate clarification questions. We evaluated our method on two different use-cases. The first is an open domain conversational search in a large web collection. The second is a task-oriented customer-support setup.
We show that our method performs well on both use-cases.

Conversational Search with Mixed-Initiative - Asking Good Clarification Questions backed-up by Passage Retrieval

Coreference resolution such as for anaphora has been an essential challenge that is commonly found in conversational machine reading comprehension (CMRC). This task aims to determine the referential entity to which a pronoun refers on the basis of contextual information. Existing approaches based on pre-trained language models (PLMs) mainly rely on an end-to-end method, which still has limitations in clarifying referential dependency. In this study, a novel graph-based approach is proposed to integrate the coreference of given text into graph structures (called coreference graphs), which can pinpoint a pronoun's referential entity. We propose two graph-combined methods, evidence-enhanced and the fusion model, for CMRC to integrate coreference graphs from different levels of the PLM architecture. Evidence-enhanced refers to textual level methods that include an evidence generator (for generating new text to elaborate a pronoun) and enhanced question (for rewriting a pronoun in a question) as PLM input. The fusion model is a structural level method that combines the PLM with a graph neural network. We evaluated these approaches on a CoQA pronoun-containing dataset and the whole CoQA dataset. The result showed that our methods can outperform baseline PLM methods with BERT and RoBERTa.

Graph-combined Coreference Resolution Methods on Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension with Pre-trained Language Model

We work on a recommendation dialogue system to help a user understand the appealing points of some target (e.g., a movie). In such dialogues, the recommendation system needs to utilize structured external knowledge to make informative and detailed recommendations. However, there is no dialogue dataset with structured external knowledge designed to make detailed recommendations for the target. Therefore, we construct a dialogue dataset, Japanese Movie Recommendation Dialogue (JMRD), in which the recommender recommends one movie in a long dialogue (23 turns on average). The external knowledge used in this dataset is hierarchically structured, including title, casts, reviews, and plots. Every recommender’s utterance is associated with the external knowledge related to the utterance. We then create a movie recommendation dialogue system that considers the structure of the external knowledge and the history of the knowledge used. Experimental results show that the proposed model is superior in knowledge selection to the baseline models.

Construction of Hierarchical Structured Knowledge-based Recommendation Dialogue Dataset and Dialogue System

To diversify and enrich generated dialogue responses, knowledge-grounded dialogue has been investigated in recent years. The existing methods tackle the knowledge grounding challenge by retrieving the relevant sentences over a large corpus and augmenting the dialogues with explicit extra information. Despite their success, however, the existing works have drawbacks in inference efficiency. This paper proposes KnowExpert, a framework to bypass the explicit retrieval process and inject knowledge into the pre-trained language models with lightweight adapters and adapt to the knowledge-grounded dialogue task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle this challenge without retrieval in this task under an open-domain chit-chat scenario. The experimental results show that Knowexpert performs comparably with some retrieval-based baselines while being time-efficient in inference, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Retrieval-Free Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Response Generation with Adapters

This work presents our contribution from the Text-to-Knowledge team of Ghent University (UGent-T2K) to the MultiDoc2Dial shared task on modeling dialogs grounded in multiple documents. We propose a pipeline system, comprising (1) document retrieval, (2) passage retrieval, and (3) response generation. We engineered these individual components mainly by, for (1)-(2), combining multiple ranking models and adding a final LambdaMART reranker, and, for (3), by adopting a Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) model. We thus significantly boost the baseline system’s performance (over +10 points for both F1 and SacreBLEU). Further, error analysis reveals two major failure cases, to be addressed in future work: (i) in case of topic shift within the dialog, retrieval often fails to select the correct grounding document(s), and (ii) generation sometimes fails to use the correctly retrieved grounding passage.

Sparks: Inspiration for Science Writing using Language Models

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