United States

Recent methods based on pre-trained language models have exhibited superior performance over tabular tasks (e.g. tabular NLI), despite showing inherent problems with reasoning over the tabular data (Gupta et al., 2021). In this work, we utilize Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET) to strengthen pre-existing knowledge
and reasoning abilities of these tabular reasoning models’. Compared to current baselines, our upgraded model exhibits a superior understanding of knowledge facts and tabular reasoning. Additionally, we demonstrate that such models are more effective for underlying downstream tasks of tabular inference on InfoTabS. Furthermore, we also show our model’s robustness against adversarial sets generated through various character and word level perturbations on InfoTabS

NAACL 2022

Enhancing Tabular Reasoning with Pattern Exploiting Training

pattern exploited pretraining

lm prompting

infotabs

semi-structured inference

tabular reasoning

language pretraining

tabular inference

# 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). 

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

Structured and grounded representation of text is typically formalized by closed information extraction, the problem of extracting an exhaustive set of (subject, relation, object) triplets that are consistent with a predefined set of entities and relations from a knowledge base schema. Most existing works are pipelines prone to error accumulation, and all approaches are only applicable to unrealistically small numbers of entities and relations. We introduce GenIE (generative information extraction), the first end-to-end autoregressive formulation of closed information extraction. GenIE naturally exploits the language knowledge from the pre-trained transformer by autoregressively generating relations and entities in textual form. Thanks to a new bi-level constrained generation strategy, only triplets consistent with the predefined knowledge base schema are produced. Our experiments show that GenIE is state-of-the-art on closed information extraction, generalizes from fewer training data points than baselines, and scales to a previously unmanageable number of entities and relations. With this work, closed information extraction becomes practical in realistic scenarios, providing new opportunities for downstream tasks. Finally, this work paves the way towards a unified end-to-end approach to the core tasks of information extraction.

GenIE: Generative Information Extraction

Content-based collaborative filtering (CCF) predicts user-item interactions based on both users' interaction history and items' content information. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLM) have been used to extract high-quality item encodings for CCF. However, it is resource-intensive to train a PLM-based CCF model in an end-to-end (E2E) manner, since optimization involves back-propagating through every content encoding within a given user interaction sequence. To tackle this issue, we propose GRAM (GRadient Accumulation for Multi-modality in CCF), which exploits the fact that a given item often appears multiple times within a batch of interaction histories. Specifically, Single-step GRAM aggregates each item encoding's gradients for back-propagation, with theoretic equivalence to the standard E2E training. As an extension of Single-step GRAM, we propose Multi-step GRAM, which increases the gradient update latency, achieving a further speedup with drastically less GPU memory. GRAM significantly improves training efficiency (up to 146x) on five datasets from two task domains of Knowledge Tracing and News Recommendation. Our code is available at https://github.com/yoonseok312/GRAM.

GRAM: Fast Fine-tuning of Pre-trained Language Models for Content-based Collaborative Filtering

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

Hierarchical Relation-Guided Type-Sentence Alignment for Long-Tail Relation Extraction with Distant Supervision

To tailor a learning system to the student's level and needs, we must consider the characteristics of the learning content, such as its difficulty. While natural language processing allows us to represent text efficiently, the meaningful representation of mathematical formulas in an educational context is still understudied. This paper adopts structural embeddings as a possible way to bridge this gap. Our experiments validate the approach using publicly available datasets to show that incorporating syntactic information can improve performance in predicting the exercise difficulty.

SEQZERO: Few-shot Compositional Semantic Parsing with Sequential Prompts and Zero-shot Models

Data-driven Model Generalizability in Crosslinguistic Low-resource Morphological Segmentation

Prior work on constructing challenging tabular inference data centered primarily on human annotation or automatic synthetic generation. Both techniques have their own set of issues. Human annotation, despite its diversity and superior reasoning, struggles from scaling concerns. Synthetic data, on the other hand, despite its scalability, suffers from lack of linguistic and reasoning diversity. In this paper, we address both of these concerns by presenting a recasting approach that semi-automatically generates tabular NLI instances. We transform the table2text dataset ToTTo (Parikh et al., 2020) into a tabular NLI dataset using our proposed
framework. We demonstrate the use of our recasted data as an evaluation benchmark as well as augmentation data to improve performance on TabFact (Chen et al., 2020b). Furthermore, we test the effectiveness of models trained on
our data on the TabFact benchmark in the zeroshot scenario.

Framework for Recasting Table-to-Text Generation Datafor Tabular Inference

When humans conceive how to perform a particular task, they do so hierarchically: splitting higher-level tasks into smaller sub-tasks. How- ever, in the literature on natural language (NL) command of situated agents, most works have treated the procedures to be executed as flat sequences of simple actions, or any hierarchies of procedures have been shallow at best. In this paper, we propose a formalism of procedures as programs, a powerful yet intuitive method of representing hierarchical procedural knowledge for agent command and control. We further propose a modeling paradigm of hierarchical modular networks, which consist of a planner and reactors that convert NL intents to predictions of executable programs and probe the environment for information necessary to complete the program execution. We instantiate this framework on the IQA and ALFRED datasets for NL instruction following. Our model outperforms reactive baselines by a large margin on both datasets. We also demonstrate that our framework is more data-efficient, and that it allows for fast iterative development.

Hierarchical Control of Situated Agents through Natural Language

Because of the compositionality of natural language, syntactic structure which contains the information about the relationship between words is a key factor for semantic understanding. However, the widely adopted Transformer is hard to learn the syntactic structure effectively in dialogue generation tasks. To explicitly model the compositionaity of language in Transformer Block, we restrict the information flow between words by constructing directed dependency graph and propose Dependency Relation Attention (DRA). Experimental results demonstrate that DRA can further improve the performance of state-of-the-art models for dialogue generation.

Modeling Compositionality with Dependency Graph for Dialogue Generation

Intent classification (IC) and slot filling (SF) are two fundamental tasks in modern Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems. Collecting and annotating large amounts of data to train deep learning models for such systems are not scalable. This problem can be addressed by learning from few examples using fast supervised meta-learning techniques such as prototypical networks. In this work, we systematically investigate how contrastive learning and data augmentation methods can benefit these existing meta-learning pipelines for jointly modelled IC/SF tasks. Through extensive experiments across standard IC/SF benchmarks (SNIPS and ATIS), we show that our proposed approaches outperform standard meta-learning methods: contrastive losses as a regularizer in conjunction with prototypical networks consistently outperform the existing state-of-the-art for both IC and SF tasks, while data augmentation strategies primarily improve few-shot IC by a significant margin

Strategies to Improve Few-shot Learning for Intent Classification and Slot Filling

Reasoning over natural language is a long-standing goal for the research community. However, studies have shown that existing language models are inadequate in reasoning. To address the issue, we present POET, a new pre-training paradigm. Through pre-training language models with programs and their execution results, POET empowers language models to harvest the reasoning knowledge possessed in program executors via a data-driven approach. POET is conceptually simple and can be instantiated by different kinds of programs. In this paper, we show three empirically powerful instances, i.e., POET-Math, POET-Logic, and POET-SQL. Experimental results on six benchmarks demonstrate that POET can significantly boost model performance on natural language reasoning, such as numerical reasoning, logical reasoning, and multi-hop reasoning. Taking the DROP benchmark as a representative example, POET improves the F1 metric of BART from 69.2% to 80.6%. Furthermore, POET shines in giant language models, pushing the F1 metric of T5-11B to 87.6% and achieving a new state-of-the-art performance on DROP. POET opens a new gate on reasoning-enhancement pre-training and we hope our analysis would shed light on the future research of reasoning like program executors.

Downloads

Next from NAACL 2022

GenIE: Generative Information Extraction

Similar lecture

Systematic Probes for Examining Evidence-Based Tabular Reasoning