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Syntax-controlled paraphrase generation aims to produce paraphrase conform to given syntactic patterns. To address this task, recent works have started to use parse trees (or syntactic templates) to guide generation.
A constituency parse tree contains abundant structural information, such as parent-child relation, sibling relation, and the alignment relation between words and nodes.
Previous works have only utilized parent-child and alignment relations, which may affect the generation quality.
To address this limitation, we propose a Structural Information-augmented Syntax-Controlled Paraphrasing (SI-SCP) model. Particularly, we design a syntax encoder based on tree-transformer to capture parent-child and sibling relations. To model the alignment relation between words and nodes, we propose an attention regularization objective, which makes the decoder accurately select corresponding syntax nodes to guide the generation of words.
Experiments show that SI-SCP achieves state-of-the-art performances in terms of semantic and syntactic quality on two popular benchmark datasets.
Additionally, we propose a Syntactic Template Retriever (STR) to retrieve compatible syntactic structures. 
We validate that STR is capable of retrieving compatible syntactic structures. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of SI-SCP to generate diverse paraphrases with retrieved syntactic structures.

NAACL 2022

Learning Structural Information for Syntax-Controlled Paraphrase Generation

syntactic template

syntax-controlled paraphrase generation

structural information

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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

Pre-trained models (PTMs) have lead to great improvements in natural language generation (NLG). However, it is still unclear how much commonsense knowledge they possess. With the goal of evaluating commonsense knowledge of NLG models, recent work has proposed the problem of generative commonsense reasoning, e.g., to compose a logical sentence given a set of unordered concepts. Existing approaches to this problem hypothesize that PTMs lack sufficient parametric knowledge for this task, which can be overcome by introducing external knowledge or task-specific pre-training objectives. Different from this trend, we argue that PTM's inherent ability for generative commonsense reasoning is underestimated due to the order-agnostic property of its input. In particular, we hypothesize that the order of the input concepts can affect the PTM's ability to utilize its commonsense knowledge. To this end, we propose a pre-ordering approach to elaborately manipulate the order of the given concepts before generation. Experiments show that our approach can outperform the more sophisticated models that have access to a lot of external data and resources. 

Revisiting Generative Commonsense Reasoning: A Pre-Ordering Approach

Existing multilingual video corpus moment retrieval (mVCMR) methods are mainly based on a two-stream structure. The visual stream utilizes the visual content in the video to estimate the query-visual similarity, and the subtitle stream exploits the query-subtitle similarity. The final query-video similarity ensembles similarities from two streams. In our work, we pro- pose a simple and effective strategy termed as Cross-lingual Cross-modal Consolidation (C3 ) to improve mVCMR accuracy. We adopt the ensemble similarity as the teacher to guide the training of each stream, leading to a more powerful ensemble similarity. Meanwhile, we use the teacher for a specific language to guide the student for another language to exploit the complementary knowledge across languages. Ex- tensive experiments on mTVR dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our C3 method.

Cross-Lingual Cross-Modal Consolidation for Effective Multilingual Video Corpus Moment Retrieval

Self-supervised vision-and-language pretraining (VLP) aims to learn transferable multi-modal representations from large-scale image-text data and to achieve strong performances on a broad scope of vision-language tasks after finetuning. Previous mainstream VLP approaches typically adopt a two-step strategy relying on external object detectors to encode images in a multi-modal Transformer framework, which suffer from restrictive object concept space, limited image context and inefficient computation. In this paper,  we propose an object-aware end-to-end VLP framework, which directly feeds image grid features from CNNs into the Transformer and learns the multi-modal representations jointly. More importantly, we propose to perform object knowledge distillation to facilitate learning cross-modal alignment at different semantic levels. To achieve that, we design two novel pretext tasks by taking object features and their semantic labels from external detectors as supervision: 1.) Object-guided masked vision modeling task focuses on enforcing object-aware representation learning in the multi-modal Transformer; 2.) Phrase-region alignment task aims to improve cross-modal alignment by utilizing the similarities between noun phrases and object labels in the linguistic space. Extensive experiments on a wide range of vision-language tasks demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework, and we achieve competitive or superior performances over the existing pretraining strategies.

KD-VLP: Improving End-to-End Vision-and-Language Pretraining with Object Knowledge Distillation

Idioms are phrases which present a figurative meaning that cannot be (completely) derived by looking at the meaning of their individual components.
Identifying and understanding idioms in context is a crucial goal and a key challenge in a wide range of Natural Language Understanding tasks. Although efforts have been undertaken in this direction, the automatic identification and understanding of idioms is still a largely under-investigated area, especially when operating in a multilingual scenario.  
In this paper, we address such limitations and put forward several new contributions: we propose a novel multilingual Transformer-based system for the identification of idioms; we produce a high-quality automatically-created training dataset in 10 languages, along with a novel manually-curated evaluation benchmark; finally, we carry out a thorough performance analysis and release our evaluation suite at https://github.com/Babelscape/ID10M.

ID10M: Idiom Identification in 10 Languages

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying named entities in texts and classifying them through specific semantic categories, a process which is crucial for a wide range of NLP applications. Current datasets for NER focus mainly on coarse-grained entity types, tend to consider a single textual genre and to cover a narrow set of languages, thus limiting the general applicability of NER systems.
In this work, we design a new methodology for automatically producing NER annotations, and address the aforementioned limitations by introducing a novel dataset that covers 10 languages, 15 NER categories and 2 textual genres.
We also introduce a manually-annotated test set, and extensively evaluate the quality of our novel dataset on both this new test set and standard benchmarks for NER.
In addition, we include disambiguation information in our dataset in order to enable the development of multilingual entity linking systems.
We release our data and software at https://github.com/Babelscape/multinerd.

MultiNERD: A Multilingual, Multi-Genre and Fine-Grained Dataset for Named Entity Recognition (and Disambiguation)

Answering complex logical queries on incomplete knowledge graphs (KGs) with missing edges is a fundamental and important task for knowledge graph reasoning. The query embedding method is proposed to answer these queries by jointly encoding queries and entities to the same embedding space. Then the answer entities are selected according to the similarities between the entity embeddings and the query embedding. As the answers to a complex query are obtained from a combination of logical operations over sub-queries, the embeddings of the answer entities may not always follow a uni-modal distribution in the embedding space. Thus, it is challenging to simultaneously retrieve a set of diverse answers from the embedding space using a single and concentrated query representation such as a vector or a hyper-rectangle. To better cope with queries with diversified answers, we propose Query2Particles (Q2P), a complex KG query answering method. Q2P encodes each query into multiple vectors, named particle embeddings. By doing so, the candidate answers can be retrieved from different areas over the embedding space using the maximal similarities between the entity embeddings and any of the particle embeddings. Meanwhile, the corresponding neural logic operations are defined to support its reasoning over arbitrary first-order logic queries. The experiments show that Query2Particles achieves state-of-the-art performance on the complex query answering tasks on FB15k, FB15K-237, and NELL knowledge graphs. 

Query2Particles: Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Particle Embeddings

Sign language recognition and translation first uses a recognition module to generate glosses from sign language videos and then employs a translation module to translate glosses into spoken sentences. Most existing works focus on the recognition step, while paying less attention to sign language translation. In this work, we propose a task-aware instruction network, namely TIN-SLT, for sign language translation, by introducing the isntruction module and the learning-based feature fuse strategy into a Transformer network. In this way, the pre-trained model's language ability can be well explored and utilized to further boost the translation performance. Moreover, by exploring the representation space of sign language glosses and target spoken language, we propose a multi-level data augmentation scheme to adjust the data distribution of the training set. We conduct extensive experiments on two challenging benchmark datasets, PHOENIX-2014-T and ASLG-PC12, on which our method outperforms former best solutions by 1.65 and 1.42 in terms of BLEU-4. Our code and trained networks will be available upon the publication of this work.

Explore More Guidance: A Task-aware Instruction Network for Sign Language Translation Enhanced with Data Augmentation

Legal document classification is an essential task in law intelligence to automate the labor-intensive law case filing process. Unlike traditional document classification problems, legal documents should be classified by reasons and facts instead of topics. We propose a Document-to-Graph Classifier (D2GCLF), which extracts facts as relations between key participants in the law case and represents a legal document with four relation graphs. Each graph is responsible for capturing different relations between the litigation participants. We further develop a graph attention network on top of the four relation graphs to classify the legal documents. Experiments on a real-world legal document dataset show that D2GCLF outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy.

D2GCLF: Document-to-Graph Classifier for Legal Document Classification

Biomedical pathways have been extensively used to characterize the mechanism of complex diseases. One essential step in biomedical pathway analysis is to curate the description of a pathway based on its graph structure and node features. Neural text generation could be a plausible technique to circumvent the tedious manual curation. In this paper, we propose a new dataset Pathway2Text, which contains 2,367 pairs of biomedical pathways and textual descriptions. All pathway graphs are experimentally derived or manually curated. All textual descriptions are written by domain experts. We form this problem as a Graph2Text task and propose a novel graph-based text generation approach $k$NN-Graph2Text, which explicitly exploited descriptions of similar graphs to generate new descriptions. We observed substantial improvement of our method on both Graph2Text and the reverse task of Text2Graph. We further illustrated how our dataset can be used as a novel benchmark for biomedical named entity recognition. Collectively, we envision our method will become an important benchmark for evaluating Graph2Text methods and advance biomedical research for complex diseases.

Pathway2Text: Dataset and Method for Biomedical Pathway Description Generation

In this paper, we revisit the solving bias when evaluating models on current Math Word Problem (MWP) benchmarks. However, current solvers exist solving bias which consists of data bias and learning bias due to biased dataset and improper training strategy. Our experiments verify MWP solvers are easy to be biased by the biased training datasets which do not cover diverse questions for each problem narrative of all MWPs, thus a solver can only learn shallow heuristics rather than deep semantics for understanding problems. Besides, an MWP can be naturally solved by multiple equivalent equations while current datasets take only one of the equivalent equations as ground truth, forcing the model to match the labeled ground truth and ignoring other equivalent equations. Here, we first introduce a novel MWP dataset named UnbiasedMWP which is constructed by varying the grounded expressions in our collected data and annotating them with corresponding multiple new questions manually. Then, to further mitigate learning bias, we propose a Dynamic Target Selection (DTS) Strategy to dynamically select more suitable target expressions according to the longest prefix match between the current model output and candidate equivalent equations which are obtained by applying commutative law during training. The results show that our UnbiasedMWP has significantly fewer biases than its original data and other datasets, posing a promising benchmark for fairly evaluating the solvers' reasoning skills rather than matching nearest neighbors. And the solvers trained with our DTS achieve higher accuracies on multiple MWP benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/yangzhch6/UnbiasedMWP.


Learning Structural Information for Syntax-Controlled Paraphrase Generation

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Revisiting Generative Commonsense Reasoning: A Pre-Ordering Approach

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