United States

Transformer-based models have shown promising performance in numerous NLP tasks. However, recent work has shown the limitation of such models in showing compositional generalization, which requires models to generalize to novel 
compositions of known concepts. In this work, we explore two strategies for compositional generalization on the task of kinship prediction from stories: (1) data augmentation and (2) predicting and using intermediate structured representation (in form of kinship graphs). Our experiments show that data augmentation boosts generalization performance by around 20% on average relative to a baseline model from prior work not using these strategies. However, predicting and using intermediate kinship graphs leads to a deterioration in the generalization of kinship prediction by around 50% on average relative to models that only leverage data augmentation.

NAACL 2022

Compositional Generalization for Kinship Prediction through Data Augmentation

intermediate structured data

compositional generalization

data augmentation

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

This paper presents our system used to participate in task 11 (MultiCONER) of the SemEval 2022 competition. Our system ranked fourth place in track 12 (Multilingual) and fifth place in track 13 (Code-Mixed). The goal of track 12 is to detect complex named entities in a multilingual setting, while track 13 is dedicated to detecting complex named entities in a code-mixed setting. Both systems were developed using transformer-based language models. We used an ensemble of XLM-RoBERTa-large and Microsoft/infoxlm-large with a Conditional Random Field (CRF) layer. In addition, we describe the algorithms employed to train our models and our hyper-parameter selection.

An Ensemble of Transformer Based Models for Complex Named Entity Recognition Task

Current natural language interaction for self-tracking tools largely depends on bespoke implementation optimized for a specific tracking theme and data format, which is neither generalizable nor scalable to a tremendous design space of self-tracking. However, training machine learning models in the context of self-tracking is challenging due to the wide variety of tracking topics and data formats. In this paper, we propose a novel NLP task for self-tracking that extracts close- and open-ended information from a retrospective activity log described as a plain text, and a domain-agnostic, GPT-3-based NLU framework that performs this task. The framework augments the prompt using synthetic samples to transform the task into 10-shot learning, to address a cold-start problem in bootstrapping a new tracking topic. Our preliminary evaluation suggests that our approach significantly outperforms the baseline QA models. Going further, we discuss future application domains toward which the NLP and HCI researchers can collaborate.

Leveraging Pre-Trained Language Models to Streamline Natural Language Interaction for Self-Tracking

This paper analyzes data from the 2021 Amazon Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4, in order to better understand the differences between human-computer interactions (HCI) in a socialbot setting and conventional human-to-human interactions. We find that because socialbots are a new genre of HCI, we are still negotiating norms to guide interactions in this setting. We present several notable patterns in user behavior toward socialbots, which have important implications for guiding future work in the development of conversational agents.

Let's Chat: Understanding User Expectations in Socialbot Interactions

In this short paper, we compare existing value systems and approaches in NLP and HCI for collecting narrative data. Building on these parallel discussions, we shed light on the challenges facing some popular NLP dataset types, which we discuss these in relation to widely-used narrative-based HCI research methods; and we highlight points where NLP methods can broaden qualitative narrative studies. In particular, we point towards contextuality, positionality, dataset size, and open research design as central points of difference and windows for collaboration when studying narratives. Through the use case of narratives, this work contributes to a larger conversation regarding the possibilities for bridging NLP and HCI through speculative mixed-methods.


Narrative Datasets through 
the Lenses of NLP and HCI


It can be challenging to build effective open question answering (open QA) systems for languages other than English, mainly due to a lack of labeled data for training. We present a data efficient method to bootstrap such a system for languages other than English. Our approach requires only limited QA resources in the given language, along with machine-translated data, and at least a bilingual language model. To evaluate our approach, we build such a system for the Icelandic language and evaluate performance over trivia style datasets. The corpora used for training are English in origin but machine translated into Icelandic. We train a bilingual Icelandic/English language model to embed English context and Icelandic questions following methodology introduced with DensePhrases (Lee et al., 2021). The resulting system is an open domain cross-lingual QA system between Icelandic and English. Finally, the system is adapted for Icelandic only open QA, demonstrating how it is possible to efficiently create an open QA system with limited access to curated datasets in the language of interest.

Cross-Lingual QA as a Steppingstone for Monolingual Open QA in Icelandic

This paper introduces our proposed system for the MIA Shared Task on Cross-lingual Open-retrieval Question Answering (COQA). In this challenging scenario, given an input question the system has to gather evidence documents from a multilingual pool and generate from it an answer in the language of the question. We devised several approaches combining different model variants for three main components: Data Augmentation, Passage Retrieval, and Answer Generation. For passage retrieval, we evaluated the monolingual BM25 ranker (coupled with machine translation) against the ensemble of re-rankers based on multilingual pretrained language models (PLMs) and also variants of the shared task baseline, re-training it from scratch using a recently introduced contrastive loss that maintains a strong gradient signal throughout training by means of mixed negative samples. For answer generation, we focused on language- and domain-specialization by means of continued LM pretraining of existing multilingual encoders. Additionally, for both passage retrieval and answer generation, we augmented the training data provided by the task organizers with automatically generated question answer pairs created from Wikipedia passages, in order to mitigate the issue of data scarcity, particularly for the lower-resource languages for which no training data were provided. Our results show that language- and domain-specialization as well as data augmentation help, especially for low-resource languages.

ZusammenQA: Data Augmentation with Specialized Models for Cross-lingual Open-retrieval Question Answering System

A prominent challenge for modern language understanding systems is the ability to answer implicit reasoning questions, where the required reasoning steps for answering the question are not mentioned in the text explicitly. In this work, we investigate why current models struggle with implicit reasoning question answering (QA) tasks, by decoupling inference of reasoning steps from their execution. We define a new task of implicit relation inference and construct a benchmark, IMPLICITRELATIONS, where given a question, a model should output a list of concept-relation pairs, where the relations describe the implicit reasoning steps required for answering the question. Using IMPLICITRELATIONS, we evaluate models from the GPT-3 family and find that, while these models struggle on the implicit reasoning QA task, they often succeed at inferring implicit relations. This suggests that the bottleneck for answering implicit reasoning questions is in the ability of language models to retrieve and reason over information rather than to plan an accurate reasoning strategy.

Inferring Implicit Relations in Complex Questions with Language Models

Existing pre-trained transformer analysis works usually focus only on one or two model families at a time, overlooking the variability of the architecture and pre-training objectives. In our work, we utilize the oLMpics bench- mark and psycholinguistic probing datasets for a diverse set of 29 models including T5, BART, and ALBERT. Additionally, we adapt the oLMpics zero-shot setup for autoregres- sive models and evaluate GPT networks of different sizes. Our findings show that none of these models can resolve compositional questions in a zero-shot fashion, suggesting that this skill is not learnable using existing pre-training objectives. Furthermore, we find that global model decisions such as architecture, directionality, size of the dataset, and pre-training objective are not predictive of a model’s linguistic capabilities.

Life after BERT: What do Other Muppets Understand about Language?

Gender is a construction in line with social perception and judgment. An important means of this construction is through languages. When natural language processing tools, such as word embeddings, associate gender with the relevant categories of social perception and judgment, it is likely to cause bias and harm to those groups that do not conform to the mainstream social perception and judgment. Using 12,251 Chinese word embeddings as intermedium, this paper studies the relationship between social perception and judgment categories and gender. The results reveal that these grammatical gender-neutral Chinese word embeddings show a certain gender bias, which is consistent with the mainstream society's perception and judgment of gender. Men are judged by their actions and perceived as bad, easily-disgusted, bad-tempered and rational roles while women are judged by their appearances and perceived as perfect, either happy or sad, and emotional roles.

Analysis of Gender Bias in Social Perception and Judgement Using Chinese Word Embeddings

People frequently interact with information retrieval (IR) systems, however, IR models exhibit biases and discrimination towards various demographics. The in-processing fair ranking methods provide a trade-offs between accuracy and fairness through adding a fairness-related regularization term in the loss function. However, there haven’t been intuitive objective functions that depend on the click probability and user engagement to directly optimize towards this. In this work, we propose the In-Batch Balancing Regularization (IBBR) to mitigate the ranking disparity among subgroups. In particular, we develop a differentiable normed Pairwise Ranking Fairness (nPRF) and leverage the T-statistics on top of nPRF over sub-groups as a regularization to improve fairness. Empirical results with the BERT-based neural rankers on the MS MARCO Passage Retrieval dataset with the human-annotated non-gendered queries benchmark (Rekabsaz and Schedl, 2020) show that our IBBR method with nPRF achieves significantly less bias with minimal degradation in ranking performance compared with the baseline

Compositional Generalization for Kinship Prediction through Data Augmentation

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Compositional Generalization for Kinship Prediction through Data Augmentation

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Improving Spoken Language Understanding by Wisdom of Crowds

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