United States

The widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in consequential domains, such as
healthcare and parole decision making systems, has drawn intense scrutiny on the
fairness of these methods. However, ensuring fairness is often insufficient as the
rationale for a contentious decision needs to be audited, understood, and defended.
We propose that the attention mechanism can be used to ensure fair outcomes while simultaneously providing feature attributions to account for how a decision was made. Toward this goal, we design an attention-based model that can be leveraged as an attribution framework. It can identify features responsible for both performance and fairness of the model through attention interventions and attention weight manipulation. Using this attribution framework, we then design a post-processing bias mitigation strategy and compare it with a suite of baselines. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by conducting experiments on two distinct data types, tabular and textual.

NAACL 2022

Attributing Fair Decisions with Attention Interventions

interpretability

fairness

bias

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.

workshop 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

In an effort to guarantee that machine learning model outputs conform with human moral values, recent work has begun exploring the possibility of explicitly training models to learn the difference between right and wrong. This is typically done in a bottom-up fashion, by exposing the model to different scenarios, annotated with human moral judgements. One question, however, is whether the trained models actually learn any consistent, higher-level ethical principles from these datasets – and if so, what? Here, we probe the Allen AI Delphi model with a set of standardized morality questionnaires, and find that, despite some inconsistencies, Delphi tends to mirror the moral principles associated with the demographic groups involved in the annotation process. We question whether this is desirable and discuss how we might move forward with this knowledge.

Does Moral Code Have a Moral Code? Probing Delphi’s Moral Philosophy

Large-scale surveys are a widely used instrument to collect data from a target audience. Beyond the single individual, an appropriate analysis of the answers can reveal trends and patterns and thus generate new insights and knowledge for researchers. Current analysis practices employ shallow machine learning methods or rely on (biased) human judgment. This work investigates the usage of state-of-the-art NLP models such as BERT to automatically extract information from both open- and closed-ended questions. We also leverage explainability methods at different levels of granularity to further derive knowledge from the analysis model. Experiments on EMS---a survey-based study researching influencing factors affecting a student's career goals---show that the proposed approach can identify such factors both at the input- and higher concept-level.

Explaining Neural NLP Models for the Joint Analysis of Open- and Closed-Ended Survey Answers

Neural rationale models are popular for interpretable predictions of NLP tasks. In these, a selector extracts segments of the input text, called rationales, and passes these segments to a classifier for prediction. Since the rationale is the only information accessible to the classifier, it is plausibly defined as the explanation. Is such a characterization unconditionally correct? In this paper, we argue to the contrary, with both philosophical perspectives and empirical evidence suggesting that rationale models are, perhaps, less rational and interpretable than expected. We call for more rigorous evaluations of these models to ensure desired properties of interpretability are indeed achieved. The code for our experiments is at https://github.com/yimingz89/Neural-Rationale-Analysis.

The Irrationality of Neural Rationale Models

In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on a bias measure, log-likelihood Masked Language Model (MLM) scoring, on a benchmark dataset. Previous work evaluates whether MLMs are biased or not for certain protected attributes (e.g., race) by comparing the log-likelihood scores of sentences that contain stereotypical characteristics with one category (e.g., black) versus another (e.g., white). We
hypothesized that this approach might be too sensitive to the choice of contextual words than the meaning of the sentence. Therefore, we computed the same measure after paraphrasing the sentences with different words but with same meaning. Our results demonstrate that the log-likelihood scoring can be more sensitive to utterance of specific words than to meaning behind a given sentence. Our paper reveals a shortcoming of the current log-likelihood-based bias measures for MLMs and calls for new ways to improve the robustness of it.

An Empirical Study on Pseudo-log-likelihood Bias Measures for Masked Language Models Using Paraphrased Sentences

Conversational recommender systems offer a way for users to engage in multi-turn conversations to find items they enjoy. For users to trust an agent and give effective feedback, the recommender system must be able to explain its suggestions and rationales. We develop a two-part framework for training multi-turn conversational recommenders that provide recommendation rationales that users can effectively interact with to receive better recommendations. First, we train a recommender system to jointly suggest items and explain its reasoning via subjective rationales.
We then fine-tune this model to incorporate iterative user feedback via self-supervised bot-play. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our system can be applied to different recommendation models across diverse domains to achieve state-of-the-art performance in multi-turn recommendation. Human studies show that systems trained with our framework provide more useful, helpful, and knowledgeable suggestions in warm- and cold-start settings. Our framework allows us to use only product reviews during training, avoiding the need for expensive dialog transcript datasets that limit the applicability of previous conversational recommender agents.

Self-Supervised Bot-Play for Transcript-Free Conversational Recommendation with Rationales

In this work, we propose a knowledge enhanced generative model to mitigate
these two issues. Our generative model is a unified framework to sequentially generate relational triplets under various relation extraction settings and explicitly utilizes relevant knowledge from Knowledge Graph (KG) to resolve ambiguities.

Enhanced Knowledge for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction

Structured Knowledge has recently emerged as an essential component to support finegrained Question Answering (QA). In general, QA systems query a Knowledge Base (KB) to detect and extract the raw answers as final prediction. However, as lacking of context, language generation can offer a much informative and complete response. In this paper, we propose to combine the power of transfer learning and the advantage of entity placeholders to produce high-quality verbalization of extracted answers from a structured KB. We claim that such approach is especially well-suited for answer generation. Our experiments show 44.25%, 3.26% and 29.10% relative gain in BLEU over the state-of-the- art on the VQuAnDA, ParaQA and VANiLLa datasets, respectively. We additionally provide minor hallucinations corrections in VANiLLa standing for 5% of each of the training and testing set. We witness a median absolute gain of 0.81 SacreBLEU. This strengthens the importance of data quality when using automated evaluation.

Transfer Learning and Masked Generation for Answer Verbalization

Traditional approaches for creating natural language inference datasets from semi-structured datasets either involve manually constructing datasets, which is a computationally expensive and time-consuming operation which limits generation to small-scale datasets, or use fully automated methods, which while capable of producing large-scale datasets frequently produce basic statements that may lack reasoning. In this paper, we produce a semiautomated framework for data generation from entity based tabular data. We use the INFOTABS (Gupta et al., 2020) dataset to generate a large-scale human-like synthetic data that includes counterfactual entity-based tables. Through thorough experiments we demonstrate
the performance of the generated dataset

Efficient Realistic Data Generation Framework for Semi-Structured
Tabular Inference

Presentation on the paper "Multi-sense Language Modelling": recap, observations and findings

Multi-sense Language Modelling

Automated scoring technology for short-answer questions has been attracting attention to improve the fairness of scoring and reduce the burden on the scorer. In general, a large amount of data is required to train an automated scoring model. The training data consists of the answer texts and the scoring data assigned to them. It may also include annotations indicating key word sequences. Many previous studies have created models with large amounts of training data specific to each question. This paper aims to achieve equivalent performance with less training data by utilizing a BERT model that has been pre-trained on a large amount of general text data not necessarily related to short answer questions. On the RIKEN dataset, the proposed method reduces the training data from the 800 data required in the past to about 400 data, and still achieves scoring accuracy comparable to that of humans. Annotating 400 data is still costly, but it is beneficial to reduce the number of data needed.

Attributing Fair Decisions with Attention Interventions

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Does Moral Code Have a Moral Code? Probing Delphi’s Moral Philosophy

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