United States

Students learn more from doing activities and practicing their skills on assessments, yet it can be challenging and time consuming to generate such practice opportunities. In this work, we present a pipeline for generating and evaluating questions from text-based learning materials in an introductory data science course. The pipeline includes applying a T5 question generation model and a concept hierarchy extraction model on the text content, then scoring the generated questions based on their relevance to the extracted key concepts. We further classified the generated questions as either useful to learning or not with two different approaches: automated labeling by a trained GPT-3 model and manual review by expert human judges. Our results showed that the generated questions were rated favorably by all three evaluation methods. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the generated questions and outline the next steps towards refining the pipeline and promoting NLP research in educational domains.

NAACL 2022

Towards Automated Generation and Evaluation of Questions in Educational Domains

question evaluation

concept extraction

question generation

# 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

Reliability concerns around Machine Translation (MT) system deployment have been well-documented, a dominant example being medical language which has shown potential for grave harm from translation errors. In this extended abstract, we sketch a research proposal for automatically estimating the quality of machine translation systems in medical settings to ensure they convey the message a clinician seeks to communicate to a patient. We briefly summarize findings from an interview study that is targeted towards understanding the strategies clinicians use to assess the quality of human and machine translations, and the challenges they incur in the process. We then discuss the limitations of existing quality estimation techniques from the NLP literature. Finally, we propose how these findings can inform future work on designing quality estimation systems that are more directly tailored towards clinician needs.

Evaluating the Quality of Machine Translation in Medical Settings

Exposure to ideas in domains outside a scientist's own may benefit her in reformulating existing research problems in novel ways and discovering new application domains for existing solution ideas. While improved performance in scholarly search engines can help scientists efficiently identify relevant advances in domains they may already be familiar with, it may fall short of helping them explore diverse ideas outside such domains. In this paper we explore the design of systems aimed at augmenting the end-user ability in cross-domain exploration with flexible query specification. To this end, we develop an exploratory search system in which end-users can select a portion of text core to their interest from a paper abstract and retrieve papers that have a high similarity to the user-selected core aspect but differ in terms of domains. Furthermore, end-users can `zoom in' to specific domain clusters to retrieve more papers from them and understand nuanced differences within the clusters. Our case studies with scientists uncover opportunities and design implications for systems aimed at facilitating cross-domain exploration and inspiration.

Augmenting Scientific Creativity with Retrieval across Knowledge Domains

Large Language Models (LMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many Natural Language Processing (NLP) benchmarks. With the growing number of new benchmarks, we build bigger and more complex LMs. However, building new LMs may not be an ideal option owing to the cost, time and environmental impact associated with it. We explore an alternative route: can we modify data by expressing it in terms of the model's strengths, so that a question becomes easier for models to answer? We investigate if humans can decompose a hard question into a set of simpler questions that are relatively easier for models to solve. We analyze a range of datasets involving various forms of reasoning and find that it is indeed possible to significantly improve model performance (24\% for GPT3 and 29\% for RoBERTa-SQuAD along with a symbolic calculator) via decomposition. Our approach provides a viable option to involve people in NLP research in a meaningful way. Our findings indicate that Human-in-the-loop Question Decomposition (HQD) can potentially provide an alternate path to building large LMs.

Is a Question Decomposition Unit All We Need?

While Indic NLP has made rapid advances recently in terms of the availability of corpora and pre-trained models, benchmark datasets on standard NLU tasks are limited. To this end, we introduce INDICXNLI, an NLI dataset for
11 Indic languages. It has been created by high-quality machine translation of the original English XNLI dataset and our analysis attests to the quality of INDICXNLI. By finetuning different pre-trained LMs on this INDICXNLI, we analyze various cross-lingual transfer techniques with respect to the impact of the choice of language models, languages, multi-linguality, mix-language input, etc. These experiments provide us with useful insights into the behaviour of pre-trained models for a diverse set of languages

INDICXNLI: Evaluating Multilingual Inference for Indian Languages

The modes of discourse aid in comprehending the convention and purpose of various forms of languages used during communication. In this study, we introduce a discourse mode annotated corpus for the low-resource Bengali (also referred to as Bangla) language. The corpus consists of sentence-level annotation of three discourse modes, narrative, descriptive, and informative of the text excerpted from a number of Bengali novels. We analyze the annotated corpus to expose various linguistic aspects of discourse modes, such as class distributions and average sentence lengths. To automatically determine the mode of discourse, we apply CML (classical machine learning) classifiers with n-gram based statistical features and a fine-tuned BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) based language model. We observe that fine-tuned BERT-based model yields better results than CML classifiers. Our created discourse mode annotated dataset, the first of its kind in Bengali, and the evaluation, provide baselines for the automatic discourse mode identification in Bengali and can assist various downstream natural language processing tasks.

An Annotated Dataset and Automatic Approaches for Discourse Mode Identification in Low-resource Bengali Language

Existing methods for open-retrieval question answering in lower resource languages (LRLs) lag significantly behind English. They not only suffer from the shortcomings of non-English document retrieval, but are reliant on language-specific supervision for either the task or translation. We formulate a task setup more realistic to available resources, that circumvents document retrieval to reliably transfer knowledge from English to lower resource languages. Assuming a strong English question answering model or database, we compare and analyze methods that pivot through English: to map foreign queries to English and then English answers back to target language answers. Within this task setup we propose Reranked Multilingual Maximal Inner Product Search (RM-MIPS), akin to semantic similarity retrieval over the English training set with reranking, which outperforms the strongest baselines by 2.7\% on XQuAD and 6.2\% on MKQA. Analysis demonstrates the particular efficacy of this strategy over state-of-the-art alternatives in challenging settings: low-resource languages, with extensive distractor data and query distribution misalignment. Circumventing retrieval, our analysis shows this approach offers rapid answer generation to many other languages off-the-shelf, without necessitating additional training data in the target language.

Pivot Through English: Reliably Answering Multilingual Questions without Document Retrieval

Our collective attention span is shortened by the flood of online information. We address the need for automated claim validation based on the incorporated evidence from dynamic, textually represented environments created by online news sources. We present FarFetched, an entity-centric claim validation and reasoning framework based on news, where latent connections between events, actions or statements are discovered via their identified entity mentions and are represented in a structured form with the help of a graph database. Using entity linking and semantic similarity, we enable the collection and combination of information from diverse sources in order to generate evidence relevant to the user's claim. We then leverage textual entailment recognition to quantitatively determine whether this assertion is credible, based on the created evidence. Our approach tries to fill the gap in automated claim validation for less-resourced languages and is showcased for the Greek language, complemented by the training of STS and NLI models.


Entity-centric Reasoning and Claim Validation for the Greek Language based on Textually Represented Environments

Text Simplification has been an extensively researched problem in English, but has not been investigated in Vietnamese. We focus on the Vietnamese-specific Complex Word Identification task, often the first step in Lexical Simplification (Shardlow, 2013). We examine three different Vietnamese datasets constructed for other Natural Language Processing tasks and show that, like in other languages, frequency is a strong signal in determining whether a word is complex, with a mean accuracy of 86.87%. Across the datasets, we find that the 10% most frequent words in many corpus can be labelled as simple, and the rest as complex, though this is more variable for smaller corpora. We also examine how human annotators perform at this task. Given the subjective nature, there is a fair amount of variability in which words are seen as difficult, though majority results are more consistent.

Complex Word Identification in Vietnamese: Towards Vietnamese Text Simplification

Current virtual assistant (VA) platforms are beholden to the limited number of languages they support. Every component, such as the tokenizer and intent classifier, is engineered for specific languages in these intricate platforms. Thus, supporting a new language in such platforms is a resource-intensive operation requiring expensive re-training and re-designing. In this paper, we propose a benchmark for evaluating language-agnostic intent classification, the most critical component of VA platforms. To ensure the benchmarking is challenging and comprehensive, we include 29 public and internal datasets across 10 low-resource languages and evaluate various training and testing settings with consideration of both accuracy and training time. The benchmarking result shows that Watson Assistant, among 7 commercial VA platforms and pre-trained multilingual language models (LMs), demonstrates close-to-best accuracy with the best accuracy-training time trade-off.

Benchmarking Language-agnostic Intent Classification for Virtual Assistant Platforms

Recent work in cross-lingual semantic parsing has successfully applied machine translation to localize parsers to new languages. However, these advances assume access to high-quality machine translation systems and word alignment tools. We remove these assumptions and study cross-lingual semantic parsing as a zero-shot problem, without parallel data (i.e., utterance-logical form pairs) for new languages. We propose a multi-task encoder-decoder model to transfer parsing knowledge to additional languages using only English-logical form paired data and in-domain natural language corpora in each new language. Our model encourages language-agnostic encodings by jointly optimizing for logical-form generation with auxiliary objectives designed for cross-lingual latent representation alignment. Our parser performs significantly above translation-based baselines and, in some cases, competes with the supervised upper-bound.

Towards Automated Generation and Evaluation of Questions in Educational Domains

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