Ireland

Dense retrieval aims at searching for the most relevant documents to the given query by encoding texts in the embedding space, requiring a large amount of query-document pairs to train. Since manually constructing such training data is challenging, recent work has proposed to generate synthetic queries from documents and use them to train a dense retriever. However, compared to the manually composed queries, synthetic queries do not generally ask for implicit information, therefore leading to a degraded retrieval performance. In this work, we propose Query Generation with External Knowledge (QGEK), a novel method for generating queries with external information related to the corresponding document. Specifically, we convert a query into a triplet-based template form to accommodate external information and transmit it to a pre-trained language model (PLM). We validate QGEK on both in-domain and out-domain dense retrieval settings. The dense retriever with the queries requiring implicit information is found to make good performance improvements. Also, such queries are similar to manually composed queries, confirmed by both human evaluation and unique &amp; non-unique word distribution.

ACL 2022

Query Generation with External Knowledge for Dense Retrieval

query generation

external knowledge

information retrieval

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Dense retrieval aims at searching for the most relevant documents to the given query by encoding texts in the embedding space, requiring a large amount of query-document pairs to train. Since manually constructing such training data is challenging, recent work has proposed to generate synthetic queries from documents and use them to train a dense retriever. However, compared to the manually composed queries, synthetic queries do not generally ask for implicit information, therefore leading to a degraded retrieval performance. In this work, we propose Query Generation with External Knowledge (QGEK), a novel method for generating queries with external information related to the corresponding document. Specifically, we convert a query into a triplet-based template form to accommodate external information and transmit it to a pre-trained language model (PLM). We validate QGEK on both in-domain and out-domain dense retrieval settings. The dense retriever with the queries requiring implicit information is found to make good performance improvements. Also, such queries are similar to manually composed queries, confirmed by both human evaluation and unique & non-unique word distribution.

workshop paper

# 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). 

Moral values as commonsense norms shape our everyday individual and community behavior. The possibility to extract moral attitude rapidly from natural language is an appealing perspective that would enable a deeper understanding of social interaction dynamics and the individual cognitive and behavioral dimensions. In this work, we focus on detecting moral content from natural language and we test our methods on a corpus of tweets previously labeled as containing moral values or violations, according to Moral Foundation Theory. We develop and compare two different approaches: (i) a frame-based symbolic value detector based on knowledge graphs and (ii) a zero-shot machine learning model fine-tuned on a task of Natural Language Inference (NLI) and a task of emotion detection. Our approaches achieve considerable performances without the need for prior training.

Uncovering Values: Detecting Latent Moral Content from Natural Language with Explainable and Non-Trained Methods

While entity retrieval models continue to advance their capabilities, our understanding of their wide-ranging applications is limited, especially in domain-specific settings. We highlighted this issue by using recent general-domain entity-linking models, LUKE and GENRE, to inject external knowledge into a question-answering (QA) model for a financial QA task with a hybrid tabular-textual dataset. We found that both models improved the baseline model by 1.57% overall and 8.86% on textual data. Nonetheless, the challenge remains as they still struggle to handle tabular inputs. We subsequently conducted a comprehensive attention-weight analysis, revealing how LUKE utilizes external knowledge supplied by GENRE. The analysis also elaborates how the injection of symbolic knowledge can be helpful and what needs further improvement, paving the way for future research on this challenging QA task and advancing our understanding of how a language model incorporates external knowledge.

KIQA:Knowledge-Infused Question Answering Model for Financial Table-Text Data

Natural language inference on tabular data is a challenging task. Existing approaches lack the world and common sense knowledge required to perform at a human level. While massive amounts of KG data exist, approaches to integrate them with deep learning models to enhance tabular reasoning are uncommon. In this paper, we investigate a new approach using BiLSTMs to incorporate knowledge effectively into language models. Through extensive analysis, we show that our proposed architecture, Trans-KBLSTM improves the benchmark performance on InfoTabS, a tabular NLI dataset.

Trans-KBLSTM: An External Knowledge Enhanced Transformer BiLSTM Model for Tabular Reasoning

We study few-shot debugging of transformer based natural language understanding models, using recently popularized test suites to not just diagnose but correct a problem. Given a few debugging examples of a certain phenomenon, and a held-out test set of the same phenomenon, we aim to maximize accuracy on the phenomenon at a minimal cost of accuracy on the original test set. We examine several methods that are faster than full epoch retraining. We introduce a new fast method, which samples a few in-danger examples from the original training set. Compared to fast methods using parameter distance constraints or Kullback-Leibler divergence, we achieve superior original accuracy for comparable debugging accuracy.

Fast Few-shot Debugging for NLU Test Suites

In the real world, many relational facts require context; for instance, a politician holds a given elected position only for a particular timespan. This context (the timespan) is typically ignored in knowledge graph link prediction tasks, or is leveraged by models designed specifically to make use of it (i.e. n-ary link prediction models). Here, we show that the task of n-ary link prediction is easily performed using language models, applied with a basic method for constructing cloze-style query sentences. We introduce a pre-training methodology based around an auxiliary entity-linked corpus that outperforms other popular pre-trained models like BERT, even with a smaller model. This methodology also enables n-ary link prediction without access to any n-ary training set, which can be invaluable in circumstances where expensive and time-consuming curation of n-ary knowledge graphs is not feasible. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on the primary n-ary link prediction dataset WD50K and on WikiPeople facts that include literals - typically ignored by knowledge graph embedding methods.

On Masked Language Models for Contextual Link Prediction

Previous studies on question answering over knowledge graphs have typically operated over a single knowledge graph (KG). This KG is assumed to be known a priori and is leveraged similarly for all users' queries during inference. However, such an assumption is not applicable to real-world settings, such as healthcare, where one needs to handle queries of new users over unseen KGs during inference. Furthermore, privacy concerns and high computational cost render it infeasible to query the single KG that has information of all users while answering a specific user's query. This motivates our setting of question answering over personalized knowledge graphs PerKGQA where each user has restricted access to their own KG. We observe that current state-of-the-art KGQA methods that require learning prior node representations fare poorly. We propose two complementary approaches, PathCBR and PathRGCN, to tackle PerKGQA The former is a simple non-parametric technique that employs case-based reasoning, while the latter is a parametric approach using graph neural networks. Our proposed methods circumvent learning prior representations, can generalize to unseen KGs, and outperform strong baselines on an academic and an internal dataset by 6.5% and 10.5%.

PERKGQA: Question Answering over Personalized Knowledge Graphs

Recently neural network based approaches to knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, such as question answering, started to rely heavily on the combination of neural retrievers and readers. Retrieval is typically performed over a large textual knowledge base (KB) which requires significant memory and compute resources, especially when scaled up.

Our results show that PCA is an easy solution that requires very little data and is only slightly worse than autoencoders, which are less stable. All methods are sensitive to pre- and post-processing and data should always be centered and normalized both before and after dimension reduction. Finally, we show that it is possible to combine PCA with using 1bit per dimension. Overall we achieve (1) 100× compression with 75%, and (2) 24× compression with 92% original retrieval performance.

Knowledge Base Index Compression via Dimensionality and Precision Reduction

Machine translation models struggle when translating out-of-domain text, which makes domain adaptation a topic of critical importance.
However, most domain adaptation methods focus on fine-tuning or training the entire or part of the model on every new domain, which can be costly. On the other hand, semi-parametric models have been shown to successfully perform domain adaptation by retrieving examples from an in-domain datastore (Khandelwal et al., 2021). A drawback of these retrieval-augmented models, however, is that they tend to be substantially slower. In this paper, we explore several approaches to speed up nearest neighbors machine translation. We adapt the methods recently proposed by He et al. (2021) for language modeling, and introduce a simple but effective caching strategy that avoids performing retrieval when similar contexts have been seen before. Translation quality and runtimes for several domains show the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

Efficient Machine Translation Domain Adaptation

We study extractive question answering task and systematically compare 9 models on MRQA benchmarks which have 12 QA datasets. In this presentation we highlight three interesting findings, the first one is that language models based on encoder-decoder architecture (e.g. BART and T5) can be used as extractive readers, while previous work used to use encoder-only architecture model (e.g. RoBERTa). The second finding is that in general extractive readers has better generalization capacity than generative readers. And the last one is that the generative reader is better than extractive readers if the context is long, and the extractive readers are better when the context is short.

Choose Your QA Model Wisely: A Systematic Study of Generative and Extractive Readers for Question Answering

Dense retrievers for open-domain question answering (ODQA) have been shown to achieve impressive performance by training on large datasets of question-passage pairs. Here we ask whether this dependence on labeled data can be reduced via unsupervised pretraining that is geared towards ODQA. We show this is in fact possible, via a novel pretraining scheme designed for retrieval: recurring span retrieval. We use recurring spans across passages in a document to create pseudo examples for contrastive learning. The resulting model -- Spider -- performs surprisingly well without any labeled training examples on a wide range of ODQA datasets. Specifically, it significantly outperforms all other pretrained baselines in a zero-shot setting, and is competitive with BM25, a strong sparse baseline. Moreover, when combined with BM25, it is often competitive with in-domain DPR models, which are trained on tens of thousands of examples.

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Uncovering Values: Detecting Latent Moral Content from Natural Language with Explainable and Non-Trained Methods

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PQR: Improving Dense Retrieval via Potential Query Modeling