United States

We propose a global entity disambiguation (ED) model based on BERT. To capture global contextual information for ED, our model treats not only words but also entities as input tokens, and solves the task by sequentially resolving mentions to their referent entities and using resolved entities as inputs at each step. We train the model using a large entity-annotated corpus obtained from Wikipedia. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on five standard ED datasets: AIDA-CoNLL, MSNBC, AQUAINT, ACE2004, and WNED-WIKI.  The source code and model checkpoint are available at https://github.com/studio-ousia/luke.

NAACL 2022

Global Entity Disambiguation with BERT

entity disambiguation

entity linking

wikipedia

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

## 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

In document-level event argument extraction, an argument is likely to appear multiple times in different expressions in the document. The redundancy of arguments underlying multiple sentences is beneficial but is often overlooked. In addition, in event argument extraction, most entities are regarded as class “others", i.e. Universum class, which is defined as a collection of samples that do not belong to any class of interest. Universum class is composed of heterogeneous entities without typical common features. Classifiers trained by cross entropy loss could easily misclassify the Universum class because of their open decision boundary. In this paper, to make use of redundant event information underlying a document, we build an entity coreference graph with the graph2token module to produce a comprehensive and coreference-aware representation for every entity and then build an entity summary graph to merge the multiple extraction results. To better classify Universum class, we propose a new loss function to build classifiers with closed boundaries. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models by 3.35% in F1-score.

Document-Level Event Argument Extraction by Leveraging Redundant Information and Closed Boundary Loss

The task of modal dependency parsing aims to parse a text into its modal dependency structure, which is a representation for the factuality of events in the text. We design a modal dependency parser that is based on priming pre-trained language models, and evaluate the parser on two data sets. Compared to baselines, we show an improvement of 2.6% in F-score for English and 4.6% for Chinese. To the best of our knowledge, this is also the first work on Chinese modal dependency parsing.

Modal Dependency Parsing via Language Model Priming

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental and important task in NLP, aiming at identifying named entities (NEs) from free text. Recently, since the multi-head attention mechanism applied in the Transformer model can effectively capture longer contextual information, Transformer-based models have become the mainstream methods and have achieved significant performance in this task. Unfortunately, although these models can capture effective global context information, they are still limited in the local feature and position information extraction, which is critical in NER. In this paper, to address this limitation, we propose a novel Hero-Gang Neural structure (HGN), including the Hero and Gang module, to leverage both global and local information to promote NER. Specifically, the Hero module is composed of a Transformer-based encoder to maintain the advantage of the self-attention mechanism, and the Gang module utilizes a multi-window recurrent module to extract local features and position information under the guidance of the Hero module. Afterward, the proposed multi-window attention effectively combines global information and multiple local features for predicting entity labels. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Hero-Gang Neural Model For Named Entity Recognition

Compared with traditional sentence-level relation extraction, document-level relation extraction is a more challenging task where an entity in a document may be mentioned multiple times and associated with multiple relations. However, most methods of document-level relation extraction do not distinguish between mention-level features and entity-level features, and just apply simple pooling operation for aggregating mention-level features into entity-level features. As a result, the distinct semantics between the different mentions of an entity are overlooked. To address this problem, we propose RSMAN in this paper which performs selective attentions over different entity mentions with respect to candidate relations. In this manner, the flexible and relation-specific representations of entities are obtained which indeed benefit relation classification. Our extensive experiments upon two benchmark datasets show that our RSMAN can bring significant improvements for some backbone models to achieve state-of-the-art performance, especially when an entity have multiple mentions in the document.

Relation-Specific Attentions over Entity Mentions for Enhanced Document-Level Relation Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-level performance on a vast spectrum of natural language tasks. However, it is largely unexplored whether they can better internalize knowledge from a structured data, such as a knowledge graph, or from text. In this work, we propose a method to infuse structured knowledge into LLMs, by directly training T5 models on factual triples of knowledge graphs (KGs). We show that models pre-trained on Wikidata KG with our method outperform the T5 baselines on FreebaseQA and WikiHop, as well as the Wikidata-answerable subset of TriviaQA and NaturalQuestions. The models pre-trained on factual triples compare competitively with the ones on natural language sentences that contain the same knowledge. Trained on a smaller size KG, WikiMovies, we saw 3x improvement of exact match score on MetaQA task. The proposed method has an advantage that no alignment between the knowledge graph and text corpus is required in curating training data. This makes our method particularly useful when working with industry-scale knowledge graphs.

SKILL: Structured Knowledge Infusion for Large Language Models

Standard pretrained language models operate
on sequences of subword tokens without direct access to the characters that compose each
token’s string representation. We probe the
embedding layer of pretrained language models and show that models learn the internal
character composition of whole word and subword tokens to a surprising extent, without
ever seeing the characters coupled with the tokens. Our results show that the embedding layers of RoBERTa and GPT2 each hold enough
information to accurately spell up to a third
of the vocabulary and reach high character
ngram overlap across all token types. We further test whether enriching subword models
with character information can improve language modeling, and observe that this method
has a near-identical learning curve as training without spelling-based enrichment. Overall, our results suggest that language modeling objectives incentivize the model to implicitly learn some notion of spelling, and that explicitly teaching the model how to spell does
not appear to enhance its performance on such
tasks.

Models In a Spelling Bee: Language Models Implicitly Learn the Character Composition of Tokens

Deep learning based systems are susceptible to adversarial attacks, where a small, imperceptible change at the input alters the model prediction. However, to date the majority of the approaches to detect these attacks have been designed for image processing systems. Many popular image adversarial detection approaches are able to identify adversarial examples from embedding feature spaces, whilst in the NLP domain existing state of the art detection approaches solely focus on input text features, without consideration of model embedding spaces. This work examines what differences result when porting these image designed strategies to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks - these detectors are found to not port over well. This is expected as NLP systems have a very different form of input: discrete and sequential in nature, rather than the continuous and fixed size inputs for images. As an equivalent model-focused NLP detection approach, this work proposes a simple sentence-embedding "residue" based  detector to identify adversarial examples. On many tasks, it out-performs ported image domain detectors and recent state of the art NLP specific detectors.

Residue-Based Natural Language Adversarial Attack Detection

Gender-neutral pronouns have recently been introduced in many languages to a) include non-binary people and b) as a generic singular. Recent results from psycholinguistics suggest that gender-neutral pronouns (in Swedish) are not associated with human processing difficulties. This, we show, is in sharp contrast with automated processing. We show that gender-neutral pronouns in Danish, English, and Swedish are associated with higher perplexity, more dispersed attention patterns, and worse downstream performance. We argue that such conservativity in language models may limit widespread adoption of gender-neutral pronouns and must therefore be resolved. 

How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns

The success of multilingual pre-trained models is underpinned by their ability to learn representations shared by multiple languages even in absence of any explicit supervision. However, it remains unclear how these models learn to generalise across languages. In this work, we conjecture that multilingual pre-trained models can derive language-universal abstractions about grammar. In particular, we investigate whether morphosyntactic information is encoded in the same subset of neurons in different languages.
We conduct the first large-scale empirical study over 43 languages and 14 morphosyntactic categories with a state-of-the-art neuron-level probe. Our findings show that the cross-lingual overlap between neurons is significant, but its extent may vary across categories and depends on language proximity and pre-training data size.

Same Neurons, Different Languages: Probing Morphosyntax in Multilingual Pre-trained Models

Text style transfer (TST) without parallel data has achieved some practical success. 
However, most of the existing unsupervised text style transfer methods suffer from (i) requiring massive amounts of non-parallel data to guide transferring different text styles. (ii) colossal performance degradation when fine-tuning the model in new domains. In this work, we propose DAML-ATM (Domain Adaptive Meta-Learning with Adversarial Transfer Model), which consists of two parts: DAML and ATM. 
DAML is a domain adaptive meta-learning approach to learning general knowledge in multiple heterogeneous source domains, capable of adapting to new unseen domains with a small amount of data. Moreover, we propose a new unsupervised TST approach Adversarial Transfer Model (ATM), composed of a sequence-to-sequence pre-trained language model and uses adversarial style training for better content preservation and style transfer. Results on multi-domain datasets demonstrate that our approach generalizes well on unseen low-resource domains, achieving state-of-the-art results against ten strong baselines.

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Document-Level Event Argument Extraction by Leveraging Redundant Information and Closed Boundary Loss

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