United States

Recently, NLP models have achieved remarkable progress across a variety of tasks; however, they have also been criticized for being not robust. Many robustness problems can be attributed to models exploiting &quot;spurious correlations&quot;, or &quot;shortcuts&quot; between the training data and the task labels. Most existing work identifies a limited set of task-specific shortcuts via human priors or error analyses, which requires extensive expertise and efforts. In this paper, we aim to automatically identify such spurious correlations in NLP models at scale. We first leverage existing interpretability methods to extract tokens that significantly affect model&#39;s decision process from the input text. We then distinguish &quot;genuine&quot; tokens and &quot;spurious&quot; tokens by analyzing model predictions across multiple corpora and further verify them through knowledge-aware perturbations. We show that our proposed method can effectively and efficiently identify a scalable set of ``shortcuts&#39;&#39;,  and mitigating these leads to more robust models in multiple applications.

NAACL 2022

Identifying and Mitigating Spurious Correlations for Improving Robustness in NLP 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)

ACL 2022

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). 

Recently, NLP models have achieved remarkable progress across a variety of tasks; however, they have also been criticized for being not robust. Many robustness problems can be attributed to models exploiting "spurious correlations", or "shortcuts" between the training data and the task labels. Most existing work identifies a limited set of task-specific shortcuts via human priors or error analyses, which requires extensive expertise and efforts. In this paper, we aim to automatically identify such spurious correlations in NLP models at scale. We first leverage existing interpretability methods to extract tokens that significantly affect model's decision process from the input text. We then distinguish "genuine" tokens and "spurious" tokens by analyzing model predictions across multiple corpora and further verify them through knowledge-aware perturbations. We show that our proposed method can effectively and efficiently identify a scalable set of ``shortcuts'',  and mitigating these leads to more robust models in multiple applications.

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

Large language models have achieved high performance on various question answering (QA) benchmarks, but the explainability of their output remains elusive. Structured explanations, called entailment trees, were recently suggested as a way to explain the reasoning behind a QA system's answer. In order to better generate such entailment trees, we propose an architecture called Iterative Retrieval-Generation Reasoner (IRGR). Our model is able to explain a given hypothesis by systematically generating a step-by-step explanation from textual premises. The IRGR model iteratively searches for suitable premises, constructing a single entailment step at a time. Contrary to previous approaches, our method combines generation steps and retrieval of premises, allowing the model to leverage intermediate conclusions, and mitigating the input size limit of baseline encoder-decoder models. We conduct experiments using the EntailmentBank dataset, where we outperform existing benchmarks on premise retrieval and entailment tree generation, with around 300% gain in overall correctness.

Entailment Tree Explanations via Iterative Retrieval-Generation Reasoner

Self-rationalization models that predict task labels and generate free-text elaborations for their predictions could enable more intuitive interaction with NLP systems. These models are, however, currently trained with a large amount of human-written free-text explanations for each task which hinders their broader usage. We propose to study a more realistic setting of self-rationalization using few training examples. We present FEB---a standardized collection of four existing English-language datasets and associated metrics. We identify the right prompting approach by extensively exploring natural language prompts on FEB. Then, by using this prompt and scaling the model size, we demonstrate that making progress on few-shot self-rationalization is possible. We show there is still ample room for improvement in this task: the average plausibility of generated explanations assessed by human annotators is at most 51% (with GPT-3), while plausibility of human explanations is 76%. We hope that FEB and our proposed approach will spur the community to take on the few-shot self-rationalization challenge. 

Few-Shot Self-Rationalization with Natural Language Prompts

Few-shot transfer often shows substantial gain over zero-shot transfer~\citelauscher2020zero, which is a practically useful trade-off between fully supervised and unsupervised learning approaches for multilingual pretained model-based systems. This paper explores various strategies for selecting data for annotation that can result in a better few-shot transfer. The proposed approaches rely on multiple measures such as data entropy using $n$-gram language model, predictive entropy, and gradient embedding. We propose a loss embedding method for sequence labeling tasks, which induces diversity and uncertainty sampling similar to gradient embedding. The proposed data selection strategies are evaluated and compared for POS tagging, NER, and NLI tasks for up to 20 languages. Our experiments show that the gradient and loss embedding-based strategies consistently outperform random data selection baselines, with gains varying with the initial performance of the zero-shot transfer. Furthermore, the proposed method shows similar trends in improvement even when the model is fine-tuned using a lower proportion of the original task-specific labeled training data for zero-shot transfer.

'Diversity and Uncertainty in Moderation'' are the Key to Data Selection for Multilingual Few-shot Transfer

Transformer models yield impressive results on many NLP and sequence modeling tasks. Remarkably, Transformers can handle long sequences, which allows them to produce long coherent outputs: entire paragraphs produced by GPT-3 or well-structured images produced by DALL-E. These large language models are impressive but also very inefficient and costly, which limits their applications and accessibility. We postulate that having an explicit hierarchical architecture is the key to Transformers that efficiently handle long sequences. To verify this claim, we first study different ways to downsample and upsample activations in Transformers so as to make them hierarchical. We use the best performing upsampling and downsampling layers to create Hourglass - a hierarchical Transformer language model. Hourglass improves upon the Transformer baseline given the same amount of computation and can yield the same results as Transformers more efficiently. In particular, Hourglass sets new state-of-the-art for Transformer models on the ImageNet32 generation task and improves language modeling efficiency on the widely studied enwik8 benchmark.

Hierarchical Transformers Are More Efficient Language Models

Pretrained language models based on the transformer architecture have shown great success in NLP.
Textual training data often comes from the web and is thus tagged with time-specific information, but most language models ignore this information.
They are trained on the textual data alone, limiting their ability to generalize temporally.
In this work, we extend the key component of the transformer architecture, i.e., the self-attention mechanism, and propose temporal attention - a time-aware self-attention mechanism.
Temporal attention can be applied to any transformer model and requires the input texts to be accompanied with their relevant time points. 
This mechanism allows the transformer to capture this temporal information and create time-specific contextualized word representations.
We leverage these representations for the task of semantic change detection; we apply our proposed mechanism to BERT and experiment on three datasets in different languages (English, German, and Latin) that also vary in time, size, and genre.
Our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on all the datasets.

Temporal Attention for Language Models

In this work, we explore how to train task-specific language models aimed towards learning rich representation of keyphrases from text documents. We experiment with different masking strategies for pre-training transformer language models (LMs) in discriminative as well as generative settings. In the discriminative setting, we introduce a new pre-training objective - Keyphrase Boundary Infilling with Replacement (KBIR), showing large gains in performance (upto 9.26 points in F1) over SOTA, when the LM pre-trained using KBIR is fine-tuned for the task of keyphrase extraction. In the generative setting, we introduce a new pre-training setup for BART - KeyBART, that reproduces the keyphrases related to the input text in the CatSeq format, instead of the denoised original input. This also led to gains in performance (upto 4.33 points in F1@M) over SOTA for keyphrase generation. Additionally, we also fine-tune the pre-trained language models on named entity recognition (NER), question answering (QA), relation extraction (RE), abstractive summarization and achieve comparable performance with that of the SOTA, showing that learning rich representation of keyphrases is indeed beneficial for many other fundamental NLP tasks.

Learning Rich Representation of Keyphrases from Text

Recent work has shown that either (1) increasing the input length or (2) increasing model size can improve the performance of Transformer-based neural models. In this paper, we present LongT5, a new model that explores the effects of scaling both the input length and model size at the same time. 
Specifically, we integrate attention ideas from long-input transformers (ETC), and adopt pre-training strategies from summarization pre-training (PEGASUS) into the scalable T5 architecture. The result is a new attention mechanism we call Transient Global (TGlobal), which mimics ETC's local/global attention mechanism, but without requiring additional side-inputs. We are able to achieve state-of-the-art results on several summarization and question answering tasks, as well as outperform the original T5 models on these tasks. We have open  sourced our architecture and training code, as well as our pre-trained model checkpoints.

LongT5: Efficient Text-To-Text Transformer for Long Sequences

Language models (LMs) are typically trained once on a large-scale corpus and used for years without being updated. However, in a dynamic world, new entities constantly arise. We propose a framework to analyze what LMs can infer about new entities that did not exist when the LMs were pretrained. We derive a dataset of entities indexed by their origination date and paired with their English Wikipedia articles, from which we can find sentences about each entity. We evaluate LMs' perplexity on masked spans within these sentences. We show that models more informed about the entities, such as those with access to a textual definition of them, achieve lower perplexity on this benchmark. Our experimental results demonstrate that making inferences about new entities remains difficult for LMs. Given its wide coverage on entity knowledge and temporal indexing, our dataset can be used to evaluate LMs and techniques designed to modify or extend their knowledge. Our automatic data collection pipeline can be easily used to continually update our benchmark.

Entity Cloze By Date: What LMs Know About Unseen Entities

We present a self-supervised pre-training approach for learning rich visual language representations for both handwritten and printed historical document transcription. After supervised fine-tuning of our pre-trained encoder representations for low-resource document transcription on two languages, (1) a heterogeneous set of handwritten Islamicate manuscript images and (2) early modern English printed documents, we show a meaningful improvement in recognition accuracy over the same supervised model trained from scratch with as few as 30 line image transcriptions for training. Our masked language model-style pre-training strategy, where the model is trained to be able to identify the true masked visual representation from distractors sampled from within the same line, encourages learning robust contextualized language representations invariant to scribal writing style and printing noise present across documents.

Lacuna Reconstruction: Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Low-Resource Historical Document Transcription

We introduce MTG, a new benchmark suite for training and evaluating multilingual text generation. It is the first-proposed multilingual multiway text generation dataset with the largest human-annotated data (400k). It includes four generation tasks (story generation, question generation, title generation and text summarization) across five languages (English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese). The multiway setup enables testing knowledge transfer capabilities for a model across languages and tasks. Using MTG, we train and analyze several popular multilingual generation models from different aspects. Our benchmark suite fosters model performance enhancement with more human-annotated parallel data. It provides comprehensive evaluations with diverse generation scenarios. Code and data are available at \urlhttps://github.com/zide05/MTG.

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Entailment Tree Explanations via Iterative Retrieval-Generation Reasoner

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Spurious Correlations