United States

Machine Reading Comprehension with Unanswerable Questions is a difficult NLP task, challenged by the questions which can not be answered from passages.
It is observed that subtle literal changes often make an answerable question unanswerable, however, most MRC models fail to recognize such changes.
To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a span-based method of Contrastive Learning (spanCL) which explicitly contrast answerable questions with their answerable and unanswerable counterparts at the answer span level.
With spanCL, MRC models are forced to perceive crucial semantic changes from slight literal differences.
Experiments on SQuAD 2.0 dataset show that spanCL can improve baselines significantly, yielding 0.86\textasciitilde 2.14 absolute EM improvements. 
Additional experiments also show that spanCL is an effective  way to utilize generated questions.  

NAACL 2022

To Answer or Not To Answer? Improving Machine Reading Comprehension Model with  Span-based Contrastive Learning

squad

contrastive learning

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

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

Given a context knowledge base (KB) and a corresponding question, the Knowledge Base Question Answering task aims to retrieve correct answer entities from this KB. Despite sophisticated retrieval algorithms, the impact of the low-resource (incomplete) KB is not fully exploited, where contributing components (\ie. key entities and/or relations) may be absent for question answering. To effectively address this problem, we propose a contrastive regularization based method, which is motivated by the \textttlearn-\textttby-\textttanalogy capability from human readers.
Specifically, the proposed work includes two major modules: the knowledge extension and sMoCo module. The former aims at exploiting the latent knowledge from the context KB and generating auxiliary information in the form of question-answer pairs. The later module utilizes those additional pairs and applies the contrastive regularization to learn informative representations, that making \texttthard positive pairs attracted and \texttthard negative pairs separated. Empirically, we achieved the state-of-the-art performance on the WebQuestionsSP dataset and the effectiveness of proposed modules is also evaluated.

Seeing the wood for the trees: a contrastive regularization method for the low-resource Knowledge Base Question Answering

Compared with unimodal data, multimodal data can provide more features to help the model analyze the sentiment of data. Previous research works rarely consider token-level feature fusion, and few works explore learning the common features related to sentiment in multimodal data to help the model fuse multimodal features. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Learning and Multi-Layer Fusion (CLMLF) method for multimodal sentiment detection. Specifically, we first encode text and image to obtain hidden representations, and then use a multi-layer fusion module to align and fuse the token-level features of text and image. In addition to the sentiment analysis task, we also designed two contrastive learning tasks, label based contrastive learning and data based contrastive learning tasks, which will help the model learn common features related to sentiment in multimodal data. Extensive experiments conducted on three publicly available multimodal datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for multimodal sentiment detection compared with existing methods. The codes are available for use at https: //github.com/Link-Li/CLMLF

CLMLF:A Contrastive Learning and Multi-Layer Fusion Method for Multimodal Sentiment Detection

Sarcasm employs ambivalence, where one says something positive but actually means negative, and vice versa. The essence of sarcasm, which is also a sufficient and necessary condition, is the conflict between literal and implied sentiments expressed in one sentence. However, it is difficult to recognize such sentiment conflict because the sentiments are mixed or even implicit. As a result, the recognition of sophisticated and obscure sentiment brings in a great challenge to sarcasm detection. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Channel Framework by modeling both literal and implied sentiments separately. Based on this dual-channel framework, we design the Dual-Channel Network~(DC-Net) to recognize sentiment conflict. Experiments on political debates (i.e. IAC-V1 and IAC-V2) and Twitter datasets show that our proposed DC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on sarcasm recognition. Our code is released to support research.

A Dual-Channel Framework for Sarcasm Recognition by Detecting Sentiment Conflict

Linguistic bias in Deep Neural Network (DNN) based Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems is a critical problem that needs attention. The problem further intensifies in the case of security systems, such as speaker verification, where fairness is essential. Speaker verification systems are intelligent systems that determine if two speech recordings belong to the same speaker. Such human-oriented security systems should be usable by diverse people speaking varied languages. Thus, a speaker verification system trained on speech in one language should generalize when tested for other languages. However, DNN-based models are often language-dependent. Previous works explore domain adaptation to fine-tune the pre-trained model for out-of-domain languages. Fine-tuning the model individually for each existing language is expensive. Hence, it limits the usability of the system. This paper proposes the cost-effective idea of integrating a lightweight embedding with existing speaker verification systems to mitigate linguistic bias without adaptation. This work is motivated by the theoretical hypothesis that attentive-frames could help generate language-agnostic embeddings. For scientific validation of this hypothesis, we propose two frame-attentive networks and investigate the effect of their integration with baselines for twelve languages. Empirical results suggest that frame-attentive embedding can cost-effectively reduce linguistic bias and enhance the usability of baselines.  

FAtNet: Cost-Effective Approach Towards Mitigating the Linguistic Bias in Speaker Verification Systems

Adversarial attack of structured prediction models faces various challenges such as the difficulty of perturbing discrete words, the sentence quality issue, and the sensitivity of outputs to small perturbations. In this work, we introduce SHARP, a new attack method that formulates the black-box adversarial attack as a search-based optimization problem with a specially designed objective function considering sentence fluency, meaning preservation and attacking effectiveness. Additionally, three different searching strategies are analyzed and compared, i.e., Beam Search, Metropolis-Hastings Sampling, and Hybrid Search. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attacking strategies on two challenging structured prediction tasks: Pos-tagging and dependency parsing. Through automatic and human evaluations, we show that our method performs a more potent attack compared with pioneer arts. Moreover, the generated adversarial examples can be used to successfully boost the robustness and performance of the victim model via adversarial training.

SHARP: Search-Based Adversarial Attack for Structured Prediction

The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME), a 1.7-million-word treebank that is an important resource for research in syntactic change, has several properties that present potential challenges for NLP technologies. We describe these  key features of PPCEME that make it challenging for parsing, including a larger and more varied set of function tags than in the Penn Treebank, and present results for this corpus using a modified version of the Berkeley Neural Parser and the approach to function tag recovery of Gabbard et al. (2006).  While this approach to function tag recovery gives reasonable results, it is in some ways inappropriate for span-based parsers.   We also present further evidence of the importance of in-domain pretraining for contextualized word representations.  The resulting parser will be used to parse Early English Books Online, a 1.5 billion word corpus whose utility for the study of syntactic change will be greatly increased with the addition of accurate parse trees.
 

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Seeing the wood for the trees: a contrastive regularization method for the low-resource Knowledge Base Question Answering

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