Taiwan

We present a novel architecture for explainable modeling of task-oriented dialogues with discrete latent variables to represent dialogue actions. Our model is based on variational recurrent neural networks (VRNN) and requires no explicit annotation of semantic information. Unlike previous works, our approach models the system and user turns separately and performs database query modeling, which makes the model applicable to task-oriented dialogues while producing easily interpretable action latent variables. We show that our model outperforms previous approaches with less supervision in terms of perplexity and BLEU on three datasets, and we propose a way to measure dialogue success without the need for expert annotation. Finally, we propose a novel way to explain semantics of the latent variables with respect to system actions.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.24/)

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

Learning Interpretable Latent Dialogue Actions With Less Supervision

interpretability

dialogue systems

unsupervised learning

# 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). 

poster

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP).

A registration is required to access this event. Access to the event site will be granted to all registered attendees on **November 16th**. If you have not already done so, please register using the link below:
 
 https://conference.iis.sinica.edu.tw/servlet/Register?ConferenceID=411

Registration Is Required

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

Complex conversation settings such as persuasion involve communicating changes in attitude or behavior, so users' perspectives need to be addressed, even when not directly related to the topic. In this work, we contribute a novel modular dialogue system framework that seamlessly integrates factual information and social content into persuasive dialogue. Our framework is generalizable to any dialogue tasks that have mixed social and task contents. We conducted a study that compared user evaluations of our framework versus a baseline end-to-end generation model. We found our framework was evaluated more favorably in all dimensions including competence and friendliness, compared to the end-to-end model which does not explicitly handle social content or factual questions

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.31/)

Seamlessly Integrating Factual Information and Social Content with Persuasive Dialogue

Communicating efficiently in natural language requires that we often leave information implicit, especially in spontaneous speech. This frequently results in phenomena of incompleteness, such as omitted references, that pose challenges for language processing. In this poster session, we discuss the state of the art in research regarding the automatic processing of such implicit references in dialog scenarios, discuss weaknesses with respect to inconsistencies in task definitions and terminologies, and outline ideas for future work. Among others, these include unification of existing tasks and evaluation metrics, addressing data scarcity, and taking into account model and annotator uncertainties, but we are also excited to exchange new ideas about where this field should head.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.45/)

Towards Implicit References in Dialog

Speakers repeat constructions frequently in dialogue. Due to their peculiar information-theoretic properties, repetitions can be thought of as a strategy for cost-effective communication. In this study, we focus on the repetition of lexicalised constructions -- i.e., recurring multi-word units -- in English open-domain spoken dialogues. We hypothesise that speakers use construction repetition to mitigate information rate, leading to an overall decrease in utterance information content over the course of a dialogue. We conduct a quantitative analysis, measuring the information content of constructions and that of their containing utterances, estimating information content with an adaptive neural language model. We observe that construction usage lowers the information content of utterances. This facilitating effect (i) increases throughout dialogues, (ii) is boosted by repetition, (iii) grows as a function of repetition frequency and density, and (iv) is stronger for repetitions of referential constructions.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.51/)

Construction Repetition Reduces Information Rate in Dialogue

Recent language generative models are mostly trained on large-scale datasets, while in some real scenarios, the training datasets are often expensive to obtain and would be small-scale. In this paper we investigate the challenging task of less-data constrained generation, especially when the generated news headlines are short yet expected by readers to keep readable and informative simultaneously. We highlight the key information modeling task and propose a novel duality fine-tuning method by formally defining the probabilistic duality constraints between key information prediction and headline generation tasks. The proposed method can capture more information from limited data, build connections between separate tasks, and is suitable for less-data constrained generation tasks. Furthermore, the method can leverage various pre-trained generative regimes, e.g., autoregressive and encoder-decoder models. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our method is effective and efficient to achieve improved performance in terms of language modeling metric and informativeness correctness metric on two public datasets.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.5/)

Leveraging Key Information Modeling to Improve Less-Data Constrained News Headline Generation via Duality Fine-Tuning

This paper focuses on the generation of natural language questions based on SPARQL queries, with an emphasis on conversational use cases (follow-up question-answering). It studies what can be achieved so far based on current deep learning models (namely pretrained T5 and BART models). To do so, 4 knowledge-based QA corpora have been homogenized for the task and a new challenge set is introduced. A first series of experiments analyzes the impact of different training setups, while a second series seeks to understand what is still difficult for these models. The results from automatic metrics and human evaluation show that simple questions and frequent templates of SPARQL queries are usually well processed whereas complex questions and conversational dimensions (coreferences and ellipses) are still difficult to handle. The experimental material is publicly available on https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/sparql-to-text .

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.11/)

SPARQL-to-Text Question Generation for Knowledge-Based Conversational Applications

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) has been well-studied in general domains, but has not been examined for food computing. To fill this gap, we perform knowledge representation learning over a food knowledge graph (KG). We employ a pre-trained language model to encode entities and relations, thus emphasizing- ing contextual information in food KGs. The model is trained on two tasks – predicting a masked entity from a given triple from the KG and predicting the plausibility of a triple. Analysis of food substitutions helps in dietary choices for enabling healthier eating behaviors. Previous work in food substitutions mainly focuses on semantic similarity while ignoring the context. It is also hard to evaluate the substitutions due to the lack of an adequate validation set, and further, the evaluation is sub- jective based on perceived purpose. To tackle this problem, we propose a collection of adversarial sample generation strategies for different food substitutions over our learnt KGE. We pro- pose multiple strategies to generate high-quality context-aware recipe and ingredient substitutions and also provide generalized ingredient substitutions to meet different user needs. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed knowledge graph learning method and the following attack strategies are verified by extensive evaluations on a large-scale food KG.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.50/)

Food Knowledge Representation Learning with Adversarial Substitution

In recent years, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP). Despite the increasing amount of research work in this area, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews emerging research streams remains absent to this day. To provide an overview of the research landscape of KGs in NLP, we analyzed 507 papers in a multifaceted survey of tasks, research types, and contributions.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.46/)

A Decade of Knowledge Graphs in Natural Language Processing: A Survey

Keywords or keyphrases are often used to highlight a document's domains or main topics. Unsupervised keyphrase extraction (UKE) has always been highly anticipated because no labeled data is needed to train a model. This paper proposes an augmented graph-based unsupervised model to identify keyphrases from a document by integrating graph and deep learning methods. The proposed model utilizes mutual attention extracted from the pre-trained BERT model to build the candidate graph and augments the graph with global and local context nodes to improve the performance. The proposed model is evaluated on four publicly available datasets against thirteen UKE baselines. The results show that the proposed model is an effective and robust UKE model for long and short documents. Our source code is available on GitHub.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.19/)

AGRank: Augmented Graph-based Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction

Reasoning with preconditions such as “glass can be used for drinking water unless the glass is shattered” remains an open problem for language models. The main challenge lies in the scarcity of preconditions data and the model’s lack of support for such reasoning. We present PInKS, Preconditioned Commonsense Inference with WeaK Supervision, an improved model for reasoning with preconditions through minimum supervision. We show, both empirically and theoretically, that PInKS improves the results on benchmarks focused on reasoning with the preconditions of commonsense knowledge (up to 40% Macro-F1 scores). We further investigate PInKS through PAC-Bayesian informativeness analysis, precision measures, and ablation study.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.26/)

PInKS: Preconditioned Commonsense Inference with Minimal Supervision

In this research, we propose CNN based CoCNN+ model can beat transformer models in Bengali and Hindi language modeling - two of the most popular languages in the world. These languages have high inflection, flexible word order, and a lot of compound characters making them morphologically rich. Base CoCNN model has two components – 1D CNN based vocabulary learner works at word level, while terminal coordinator works at document level. We analyze CNN, LSTM and Transformer based models for Bengali language modeling using perplexity score. CNNs do a better job than LSTMs because of the flexible word order in Bengali. CoCNN has on par performance with pretrained BERT. We extend the base CoCNN to CoCNN+ by incorporating residual connection in the shallow layers of vocabulary learner and by introducing parallel branches of different convolution widths in the terminal coordinator. These modifications help CoCNN beat pretrained BERT for Bengali and Hindi next word prediction, text classification and sentiment analysis tasks.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.4/)

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