Ireland

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.

ACL 2022

Fast Few-shot Debugging for NLU Test Suites

model correction

debugging

few-shot

text classification

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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. 

 
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). 

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.

Learning to Retrieve Passages without Supervision

Introduction to our recent work "Hyperlink-induced Pre-training
for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering", a pre-training method to learn question-passage relevance induced by hyperlink-based structures within Web documents for OpenQA passage retrieval.

Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering

Large Language Models (LMs) are known to encode world knowledge in their parameters as they pretrain on a vast amount of web corpus, which is often utilized for performing knowledge-dependent downstream tasks such as question answering, fact-checking, and open dialogue. In real-world scenarios, the world knowledge stored in the LMs can quickly become outdated as the world changes, but it is non-trivial to avoid catastrophic forgetting and reliably acquire new knowledge while preserving invariant knowledge. To push the community towards better maintenance of ever-changing LMs, we formulate a new continual learning (CL) problem called Continual Knowledge Learning (CKL). We construct a new benchmark and metric to quantify the retention of time-invariant world knowledge, the update of outdated knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge. We adopt applicable recent methods from literature to create several strong baselines. Through extensive experiments, we find that CKL exhibits unique challenges that are not addressed in previous CL setups, where parameter expansion is necessary to reliably retain and learn knowledge simultaneously. By highlighting the critical causes of knowledge forgetting, we show that CKL is a challenging and important problem that helps us better understand and train ever-changing LMs.

Towards Continual Knowledge Learning of Language Models

We present a new cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) system trained using multi-stage knowledge distillation (KD). The teacher relies on a highly effective but expensive two-stage process consisting of query translation and monolingual IR, while the student executes a single CLIR step. We teach the student powerful multilingual encoding as well as CLIR by optimizing two corresponding KD objectives. Learning useful non-English representations from an English-only retriever is accomplished through a cross-lingual token alignment algorithm that relies on the representation capabilities of the underlying multilingual language model. In both in-domain and zero-shot evaluation, the proposed method demonstrates far superior accuracy over direct fine-tuning with labeled CLIR data. One of our systems is also the current best single-model system on the XOR-TyDi leaderboard.

Learning Cross-Lingual IR from an English Retriever

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.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2022

On Masked Language Models for Contextual Link Prediction

Similar lecture

NL-Debugging: Exploiting Natural Language as an Intermediate Representation for Code Debugging