Korea, Republic of

Today the pre-trained language models achieve great success for question generation (QG) task and significantly outperform traditional sequence-to-sequence approaches. However, the pre-trained models treat the input passage as a flat sequence and are thus not aware of the text structure of input passage. For QG
task, we model text structure as answer position and syntactic dependency, and propose answer localness modeling and syntactic mask attention to address these limitations. Specially, we present localness modeling with a Gaussian bias to enable the model to focus on answer-surrounded context, and propose a mask attention mechanism to make the syntactic structure of input passage accessible in question generation process. Experiments on SQuAD dataset show that our proposed two modules improve performance over the strong pre-trained model ProphetNet, and combing them together achieves very competitive results with the state-of-the-art pre-trained model.

COLING 2022

Enhancing Pre-trained Models with Text Structure Knowledge for Question Generation

localness modeling

syntax knowledge

pretrained models

question generation

## 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/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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 including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Detecting Suicide Risk in Online Counseling Services: A Study in a Low-Resource Language

Document-level Event Factuality Identification (DEFI) predicts the factuality of a specific event based on a document from which the event can be derived, which is a fundamental and crucial task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, most previous studies only considered sentence-level task and did not adopt document-level knowledge. Moreover, they modelled DEFI as a typical text classification task depending on annotated information heavily, and limited to the task-specific corpus only, which resulted in data scarcity. To tackle these issues, we propose a new framework formulating DEFI as Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks considering both Span-Extraction (Ext) and Multiple-Choice (Mch). Our model does not employ any other explicit annotated information, and utilizes Transfer Learning (TL) to extract knowledge from universal large-scale MRC corpora for cross-domain data augmentation. The empirical results on DLEFM corpus demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-arts.

Document-level Event Factuality Identification via Machine Reading Comprehension Frameworks with Transfer Learning

Deep prompt tuning (DPT) has gained great success in most natural language processing~(NLP) tasks. However, it is not well-investigated in dense retrieval where fine-tuning~(FT) still dominates. When deploying multiple retrieval tasks using the same backbone model~(e.g., RoBERTa), FT-based methods are unfriendly in terms of deployment cost: each new retrieval model needs to repeatedly deploy the backbone model without reuse. To reduce the deployment cost in such a scenario, this work investigates applying DPT in dense retrieval. The challenge is that directly applying DPT in dense retrieval largely underperforms FT methods. To compensate for the performance drop, we propose two model-agnostic and task-agnostic strategies for DPT-based retrievers, namely retrieval-oriented intermediate pretraining and unified negative mining, as a general approach that could be compatible with any pre-trained language model and retrieval task. The experimental results show that the proposed method (called DPTDR) outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on both MS-MARCO and Natural Questions. We also conduct ablation studies to examine the effectiveness of each strategy in DPTDR. We believe this work facilitates the industry, as it saves enormous efforts and costs of deployment and increases the utility of computing resources. Our code is available at https://github.com/tangzhy/DPTDR.

DPTDR: Deep Prompt Tuning for Dense Passage Retrieval

The existing research efforts in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) have focused on developing the expressive ability of neural networks to fuse information from different modalities. However, these approaches lack a mechanism to understand the complex relations within and across different modalities, since some sentiments may be scattered in different modalities. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical graph contrastive learning (HGraph-CL) framework for MSA,
aiming to explore the intricate relations of intra- and inter-modal representations for sentiment extraction. Specifically, regarding the intra-modal level, we build a unimodal graph for each modality representation to account for the modality-specific sentiment implications. Based on it, a graph contrastive learning strategy is adopted to explore the potential relations based on unimodal graph augmentations. Furthermore, we construct a multimodal graph of each instance based on the unimodal graphs to grasp the sentiment relations between different modalities. Then, in light of the multimodal augmentation graphs, a graph contrastive learning strategy over the inter-modal level is proposed to ulteriorly seek the possible graph structures for precisely learning sentiment relations. This essentially allows the framework to understand the appropriate graph structures for learning intricate relations among different modalities. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in MSA.

Modeling Intra- and Inter-Modal Relations: Hierarchical Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

A personification is a figure of speech that endows inanimate entities with properties and actions typically seen as requiring animacy. In this paper, we explore the task of personification generation. To this end, we propose PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation. We curate a corpus of personifications called PersonifCorp, together with automatically generated de-personified literalizations of these personifications. We demonstrate the usefulness of this parallel corpus by training a seq2seq model to personify a given literal input. Both automatic and human evaluations show that fine-tuning with PersonifCorp leads to significant gains in personification-related qualities such as animacy and interestingness. A detailed qualitative analysis also highlights key strengths and imperfections of PINEAPPLE over baselines, demonstrating a strong ability to generate diverse and creative personifications that enhance the overall appeal of a sentence.

PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation

The human recognition system has presented the remarkable ability to effortlessly learn novel knowledge from only a few trigger events based on prior knowledge, which is called insight learning. Mimicking such behavior on Knowledge Graph Reasoning (KGR) is an interesting and challenging research problem with many practical applications. Simultaneously, existing works, such as knowledge embedding and few-shot learning models, have been limited to conducting KGR in either ``seen-to-seen'' or ``unseen-to-unseen'' scenarios. To this end, we propose a neural insight learning framework named Eureka to bridge the ``seen'' to ``unseen'' gap. Eureka is empowered to learn the seen relations with sufficient training triples while providing the flexibility of learning unseen relations given only one trigger without sacrificing its performance on seen relations. Eureka meets our expectation of the model to acquire seen and unseen relations at no extra cost, and eliminate the need to retrain when encountering emerging unseen relations. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework also outperforms various state-of-the-art baselines on datasets of both seen and unseen relations.

Eureka: Neural Insight Learning for Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) is to detect and classify relation sense between two text segments without an explicit connective. Vanilla pre-train and fine-tuning paradigm builds upon a Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) with a task-specific neural network. However, the task objective functions are often not in accordance with that of the PLM. Furthermore, this paradigm cannot well exploit some linguistic evidence embedded in the pre-training process. The recent pre-train, prompt, and predict paradigm selects appropriate prompts to reformulate downstream tasks, so as to utilizing the PLM itself for prediction. However, for its success applications, prompts, verbalizer as well as model training should still be carefully designed for different tasks. As the first trial of using this new paradigm for IDRR, this paper develops a Connective-cloze Prompt (ConnPrompt) to transform the relation prediction task as a connective-cloze task. Specifically, we design two styles of ConnPrompt template: Insert-cloze Prompt (ICP) and Prefix-cloze Prompt (PCP) and construct an answer space mapping to the relation senses based on the hierarchy sense tags and implicit connectives. Furthermore, we use a multi-prompt ensemble to fuse predictions from different prompting results. Experiments on the PDTB corpus show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms, even with fewer training data.

ConnPrompt: Connective-cloze Prompt Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

Recent studies show that the attention heads in Transformer are not equal. We relate this phenomenon to the imbalance training of multihead attention and the model dependence on specific heads. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple masking method: HeadMask, in two specific ways. Experiments show that translation improvements are achieved on multiple language pairs. Subsequent empirical analyses also support our assumption and confirm the effectiveness of the method.

Alleviating the Inequality of Attention Heads for Neural Machine Translation

This article revisits statistical relationships across Romance cognates between lexical semantic shift and six intra-linguistic variables, such as frequency and polysemy. Cognates are words that are derived from a common etymon, in this case, a Latin ancestor. Despite their shared etymology, some cognate pairs have experienced semantic shift. The degree of semantic shift is quantified using cosine distance between the cognates’ corresponding word embeddings. In the previous literature, frequency and polysemy have been reported to be correlated with semantic shift; however, the understanding of their effects needs revision because of various methodological defects. In the present study, we perform regression analysis under improved experimental conditions, and demonstrate a genuine negative effect of frequency and positive effect of polysemy on semantic shift. Furthermore, we reveal that morphologically complex etyma are more resistant to semantic shift and that the cognates that have been in use over a longer timespan are prone to greater shift in meaning. These findings add to our understanding of the historical process of semantic change.

Revisiting Statistical Laws of Semantic Shift in Romance Cognates

Recently, pretrained language models (PLMs) have had exceptional success in language generation. To leverage the rich knowledge encoded by PLMs, a simple yet powerful paradigm is to use prompts in the form of either discrete tokens or continuous embeddings. In existing studies, these prompting methods are typically independent of the inputs, lacking sufficient consideration of input semantics. To address this issue, we propose a novel continuous prompting approach, called context-tuning, to fine-tuning PLMs for natural language generation. Firstly, the prompts are derived based on the input text to elicit useful knowledge from PLMs for generation. We refer to such prompts as contextualized prompts. Secondly, we use continuous inverse prompting to improve the process of natural language generation by modeling an inverse generation process from output to input, making the generated text more relevant to the inputs. Furthermore, we utilize a lightweight context-tuning method that finetunes only 0.12% of the parameters while maintaining good performance.

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Enhancing Pre-trained Models with Text Structure Knowledge for Question Generation

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