Taiwan

Neural metrics have achieved impressive correlation with human judgements in the evaluation of machine translation systems, but before we can safely optimise towards such metrics, we should be aware of (and ideally eliminate) biases toward bad translations that receive high scores. Our experiments show that sample-based Minimum Bayes Risk decoding can be used to explore and quantify such weaknesses. When applying this strategy to COMET for en-de and de-en, we find that COMET models are not sensitive enough to discrepancies in numbers and named entities. We further show that these biases are hard to fully remove by simply training on additional synthetic data and release our code and data for facilitating further experiments.

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

Identifying Weaknesses in Machine Translation Metrics Through Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding: A Case Study for COMET

metric weaknesses

machine translation evaluation

comet

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/a3db7a768409f05192210d98601edb25.png)](https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/)

To access this site you need to register. Please register [here](https://2022.emnlp.org/registration/).

Register here

EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

technical paper

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). 

Open-Domain Generative Question Answering has achieved impressive performance in English by combining document-level retrieval with answer generation. These approaches, which we refer to as GENQA, can generate complete sentences, effectively answering both factoid and non-factoid questions. In this paper, we extend GENQA to the multilingual and cross-lingual settings. For this purpose, we first introduce GEN-TYDIQA, an extension of the TyDiQA dataset with well-formed and complete answers for Arabic, Bengali, English, Japanese, and Russian. Based on GEN-TYDIQA, we design a cross-lingual generative model that produces full-sentence answers by exploiting passages written in multiple languages, including languages different from the question. Our cross-lingual generative system outperforms answer sentence selection baselines for all 5 languages and monolingual generative pipelines for three out of five languages studied.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.27/)

Cross-Lingual Open-Domain Question Answering with Answer Sentence Generation

Definition generation is a task that aims to generate a definition of a target word or phrase given a context. Recently, pre-trained transformer-based models have achieved great success in the task of definition generation (DG). However, previous encoder-decoder models lack effective representation learning to contain full semantic components of the given word, which leads to generating under-specific definitions. To address this problem, we propose a novel contrastive learning method, encouraging the model to capture more detailed semantic representations from the definition sequence encoding. According to both automatic and manual evaluation, the experimental results on three mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method could generate more specific and high-quality definitions compared with several state-of-the-art models.

Fine-grained Contrastive Learning for Definition Generation

We propose a method for controlling the difficulty of a sentence based on deep reinforcement learning. Although existing models are trained based on the word-level difficulty, the sentence-level difficulty has not been taken into account in the loss function. Our proposed method generates sentences of appropriate difficulty for the target audience through reinforcement learning using a reward calculated based on the difference between the difficulty of the output sentence and the target difficulty. Experimental results of English text simplification show that the proposed method achieves a higher performance than existing approaches. Compared to previous studies, the proposed method can generate sentences whose grade-levels are closer to those of human references estimated using a fine-tuned pre-trained model.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.49/)

Controllable Text Simplification with Deep Reinforcement Learning

To solve Math Word Problems, human students leverage diverse reasoning logic that reaches different possible equation solutions. However, the mainstream sequence-to-sequence approach of automatic solvers aims to decode a fixed solution equation supervised by human annotation.
In this paper, we propose a controlled equation generation solver by leveraging a set of control codes to guide the model to consider certain reasoning logic and decode the corresponding equations expressions transformed from the human reference.
The empirical results suggest that our method universally improves the performance on single-unknown (Math23K) and multiple-unknown (DRAW1K, HMWP) benchmarks, with substantial improvements up to 13.2% accuracy on the challenging multiple-unknown datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/yiyunya/CTRL-MWP.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.32/)

Seeking Diverse Reasoning Logic: Controlled Equation Expression Generation for Solving Math Word Problems

The Fractality of Sentiment Arcs for Literary Quality Assessment - the Case of Nobel Laureates

Natural language understanding (NLU) tasks are typically defined by creating an annotated dataset in which each utterance is encountered once. Such data does not resemble real-world natural language interactions in which certain utterances are encountered frequently, others rarely.  For deployed NLU systems, this is a vital problem, since the underlying machine learning (ML) models are often fine-tuned on typical NLU data, in which utterance frequency is never factored in, and then applied to real-world data with a very different distribution.  Such systems need to maintain interpretation consistency for the high-frequency (head) utterances, while also doing well on low-frequency (tail) utterances. We propose an alternative strategy that explicitly uses utterance frequency in training data to learn models that are more robust to unknown distributions. We present a methodology to simulate utterance usage in two public corpora and create two new corpora with head, body and tail segments. We evaluate several methods for joint intent classification and named entity recognition (referred to as IC-NER), and propose to use two domain generalization (DG) approaches that we adapt to sequence labeling task. The DG approaches demonstrate up to 7.02% relative improvement in semantic accuracy over baselines on the tail data.  We provide insights as to why the proposed approaches work and show that the reasons for the observed improvements do not align with those reported in previous work.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.1/)

Chasing the Tail with Domain Generalization: A Case Study on Frequency-Enriched Datasets

In this paper, we describe KreolMorisienMT, a dataset for benchmarking machine translation quality of Mauritian Creole. Mauritian Creole (Kreol Morisien) is a French-based creole and a lingua franca of the Republic of Mauritius. KreolMorisienMT consists of a parallel corpus between English and Kreol Morisien, French and Kreol Morisien and a monolingual corpus for Kreol Morisien. We first give an overview of Kreol Morisien and then describe the steps taken to create the corpora. Thereafter, we benchmark Kreol Morisien<-->English and Kreol Morisien<-->French models leveraging pre-trained models and multilingual transfer learning. Human evaluation reveals our systems' high translation quality.

KreolMorisienMT: A Dataset for Mauritian Creole  Machine Translation

Block diagrams are very popular for representing a workflow or process of a model. Understanding block diagrams by generating summaries can be extremely useful in document summarization. It can also assist people in inferring key insights from block diagrams without requiring a lot of perceptual and cognitive effort. In this paper, we propose a novel task of converting block diagram images into text by presenting a framework called “BloSum”. This framework extracts the contextual meaning from the images in the form of triplets that help the language model in summary generation. We also introduce a new dataset for complex computerized block diagrams, explain the dataset preparation process, and later analyze it. Additionally, to showcase the generalization of the model, we test our method with publicly available handwritten block diagram datasets. Our evaluation with different metrics demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach that outperforms other methods and techniques.

Block Diagram-to-Text: Understanding Block Diagram Images by Generating Natural Language Descriptors

Machine translation (MT) metrics often fail to achieve very high correlations with human assessments. In terms of MT system evaluation, most metrics pay equal attentions to every sample in an evaluation set, while in human evaluation, difficult sentences often make candidate systems distinguishable via notable fluctuations in human scores, especially when systems are competitive. We find that samples with high entropy values, which though usually count for less than 5%, tend to play a key role in MT evaluation: when the evaluation set is shrunk to only the high-entropy portion, correlations with human assessments are actually improved. Thus, in this paper, we propose a fast and unsupervised approach to enhance MT metrics using entropy, expanding the dimension of evaluation by introducing sentence-level difficulty. A translation hypothesis with a significantly high entropy value is considered difficult and receives a large weight in aggregation of system-level scores. Experimental results on five sub-tracks in the WMT19 Metrics shared tasks show that our proposed method significantly enhanced the performance of commonly-used MT metrics in terms of system-level correlations with human assessments, even outperforming existing SOTA metrics. In particular, all enhanced metrics exhibit overall stability in correlations with human assessments in circumstances where only competitive MT systems are included, while the corresponding standard metrics fail to correlate with human assessments.

Downloads

Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2022

Cross-Lingual Open-Domain Question Answering with Answer Sentence Generation

Similar lecture

MS-COMET: More and Better Human Judgements Improve Metric Performance

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2022

Cross-Lingual Open-Domain Question Answering with Answer Sentence Generation

Similar lecture

MS-COMET: More and Better Human Judgements Improve Metric Performance

Downloads