United States

Prior works on the open-domain dialogue primarily focused on exploiting self personas. We propose a novel framework that automatically generates partner personas and enhances the succeeding response generation with the partner personas generated with the use of reinforcement learning.

NAACL 2022

Partner Personas Generation for Dialogue Response Generation

partner personas

personas

dialogue

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*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)

technical paper

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Neural module networks (NMN) have achieved success in image-grounded tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA) on synthetic images. However, very limited work on NMN has been studied in the video-grounded dialogue tasks. These tasks extend the complexity of traditional visual tasks with the additional visual temporal variance and language cross-turn dependencies. Motivated by recent NMN approaches on image-grounded tasks, we introduce Video-grounded Neural Module Network (VGNMN) to model the information retrieval process in video-grounded language tasks as a pipeline of neural modules. VGNMN first decomposes all language components in dialogues to explicitly resolve any entity references and detect corresponding action-based inputs from the question. The detected entities and actions are used as parameters to instantiate neural module networks and extract visual cues from the video. Our experiments show that VGNMN can achieve promising performance on a challenging video-grounded dialogue benchmark as well as a video QA benchmark.

VGNMN: Video-grounded Neural Module Networks for Video-Grounded Dialogue Systems

Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting.
Recent research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has advanced the development of various toxicity detection models with the intention of identifying and mitigating toxic language from existing systems. Despite the abundance of research in this area, less attention has been given to adversarial attacks that force the system to generate toxic language and the defense against them. Existing work to generate such attacks is either based on human-generated attacks which is costly
and not scalable or, in case of automatic attacks, the attack vector does not conform to human-like language, which can be detected using a language model loss. In this work, we propose attacks against conversational agents that are imperceptible, i.e., they fit the conversation in terms of coherency, relevancy, and fluency, while they are effective and scalable, i.e., they can automatically trigger the system into generating toxic language. We then propose a defense mechanism against such attacks which not only mitigates the attack but also attempts to maintain the conversational flow.
Through automatic and human evaluations, we show that our defense is effective at avoiding toxic language generation even against imperceptible toxicity triggers while the generated language fits the conversation in terms of coherency and relevancy. Lastly, we establish the generalizability of such a defense mechanism on language generation models beyond conversational agents.

Robust Conversational Agents against Imperceptible Toxicity Triggers

We propose DrBoost, a dense retrieval ensemble inspired by boosting. DrBoost is trained in stages: each component model is learned sequentially and specialized by focusing only on retrieval mistakes made by the current ensemble. The final representation is the concatenation of the output vectors of all the component models, making it a drop-in replacement for standard dense retrievers at test time. DrBoost enjoys several advantages compared to standard dense retrieval models. It produces representations which are 4x more compact, while delivering comparable retrieval results. It also performs surprisingly well under approximate search with coarse quantization, reducing latency and bandwidth needs by another 4x. In practice, this can make the difference between serving indices from disk versus from memory, paving the way for much cheaper deployments.

Boosted Dense Retriever

Dense retrieval approaches can overcome the lexical gap and lead to significantly improved search results. However, they require large amounts of training data which is not available for most domains. As shown in previous work (Thakur et al., 2021b), the performance of dense retrievers severely degrades under a domain shift. This limits the usage of dense retrieval approaches to only a few domains with large training datasets.
In this paper, we propose the novel unsupervised domain adaptation method Generative Pseudo Labeling (GPL), which combines a query generator with pseudo labeling from a cross-encoder. On six representative domain-specialized datasets, we find the proposed GPL can outperform an out-of-the-box state-of-the-art dense retrieval approach by up to 9.3 points nDCG@10. GPL requires less (unlabeled) data from the target domain and is more robust in its training than previous methods.
We further investigate the role of six recent pre-training methods in the scenario of domain adaptation for retrieval tasks, where only three could yield improved results. The best approach, TSDAE (Wang et al., 2021) can be combined with GPL, yielding another average improvement of 1.4 points nDCG@10 across the six tasks. The code and the models are available at https://github.com/UKPLab/gpl.

GPL: Generative Pseudo Labeling for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Dense Retrieval

We use paraphrases as a unique source of data to analyze contextualized embeddings, with a particular focus on BERT. Because paraphrases naturally encode consistent word and phrase semantics, they provide a unique lens for investigating properties of embeddings. Using the Paraphrase Database's alignments, we study words within paraphrases as well as phrase representations. We find that contextual embeddings effectively handle polysemous words, but give synonyms surprisingly different representations in many cases. We confirm previous findings that BERT is sensitive to word order, but find slightly different patterns than prior work in terms of the level of contextualization across BERT's layers.

Using Paraphrases to Study Properties of Contextual Embeddings

A growing line of work has investigated the development of neural NLP models that can produce rationales--subsets of input that can explain their model predictions. In this paper, we ask whether such rationale models can provide robustness to adversarial attacks in addition to their interpretable nature. Since these models need to first generate rationales (``rationalizer'') before making predictions (``predictor''), they have the potential to ignore noise or adversarially added text by simply masking it out of the generated rationale. To this end, we systematically generate various types of `AddText' attacks for both token and sentence-level rationalization tasks and perform an extensive empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art rationale models across five different tasks. Our experiments reveal that the rationale models promise to improve robustness over AddText attacks while they struggle in certain scenarios--when the rationalizer is sensitive to position bias or lexical choices of attack text. Further, leveraging human rationale as supervision does not always translate to better performance. Our study is a first step towards exploring the interplay between interpretability and robustness in the rationalize-then-predict framework.

Can Rationalization Improve Robustness?

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is a multimodal task where an agent follows natural language instructions and navigates in visual environments. Multiple setups have been proposed, and researchers apply new model architectures or training techniques to boost navigation performance. However, there still exist non-negligible gaps between machines' performance and human benchmarks. Moreover, the agents' inner mechanisms for navigation decisions remain unclear. To the best of our knowledge, how the agents perceive the multimodal input is under-studied and needs investigation. In this work, we conduct a series of diagnostic experiments to unveil agents' focus during navigation. 
Results show that indoor navigation agents refer to both object and direction tokens when making decisions. In contrast, outdoor navigation agents heavily rely on direction tokens and poorly understand the object tokens. Transformer-based agents acquire a better cross-modal understanding of objects and display strong numerical reasoning ability than non-Transformer-based agents. When it comes to vision-and-language alignments, many models claim that they can align object tokens with specific visual targets. We find unbalanced attention on the vision and text input and doubt the reliability of such cross-modal alignments.

Diagnosing Vision-and-Language Navigation: What Really Matters

Distributional models learn representations of words from text, but are criticized for their lack of grounding, or the linking of text to the non-linguistic world. Grounded language models have had success in learning to connect concrete categories like nouns and adjectives to the world via images and videos, but can struggle to isolate the meaning of verbs from the context in which they typically occur, e.g. a person walking across a tennis court is labeled “swinging a tennis racket". We are interested in building representations of trajectories (i.e. position and rotation of objects over time), and evaluating the extent to which they encode verb semantics. To achieve this, we build a procedurally generated agent-object-interaction dataset, and obtain human annotations for the verbs that occur. We find that trajectory data correlates as-is with verbs like fall, and can be abstracted through self-supervised pretraining to representations that capture nuanced differences in verb meaning, such as roll vs. slide, while falling short on other distinctions like fall vs. drop.

Do Trajectories Encode Verb Meaning?

Previous studies on the timeline summarization (TLS) task ignored the information interaction between sentences and dates, and adopted pre-defined unlearnable representations for them. They also considered date selection and event detection as two independent tasks, which makes it impossible to integrate their advantages and obtain a globally optimal summary. In this paper, we present a joint learning-based heterogeneous graph attention network for TLS (HeterTLS), in which date selection and event detection are combined into a unified framework to improve the extraction accuracy and remove redundant sentences simultaneously. Our heterogeneous graph involves multiple types of nodes, the representations of which are iteratively learned across the heterogeneous graph attention layer. We evaluated our model on four datasets, and found that it significantly outperformed the current state-of-the-art baselines with regard to ROUGE scores and date selection metrics.

Joint Learning-based Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network for Timeline Summarization

Interactive summarization is a task that facilitates user-guided exploration of information within a document set. While one would like to employ state of the art neural models to improve the quality of interactive summarization, many such technologies cannot ingest the full document set or cannot operate at sufficient speed for interactivity. To that end, we propose two novel deep reinforcement learning models for the task that address, respectively, the subtask of summarizing salient information that adheres to user queries, and the subtask of listing suggested queries to assist users throughout their exploration. In particular, our models allow encoding the interactive session state and history to refrain from redundancy. Together, these models compose a state of the art solution that addresses all of the task requirements. We compare our solution to a recent interactive summarization system, and show through an experimental study involving real users that our models are able to improve informativeness while preserving positive user experience.

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