United Arab Emirates

Natural language processing (NLP) models are known to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, which poses a newly arisen threat to NLP models. Prior online backdoor defense methods for NLP models only focus on the anomalies at either the input or output level, still suffering from fragility to adaptive attacks and high computational cost. In this work, we take the first step to investigate the unconcealment of textual poisoned samples at the intermediate-feature level and propose a feature-based efficient online defense method. Through extensive experiments on existing attacking methods, we find that the poisoned samples are far away from clean samples in the intermediate feature space of a poisoned NLP model. Motivated by this observation, we devise a distance-based anomaly score (DAN) to distinguish poisoned samples from clean samples at the feature level. Experiments on sentiment analysis and offense detection tasks demonstrate the superiority of DAN, as it substantially surpasses existing online defense methods in terms of defending performance and enjoys lower inference costs. Moreover, we show that DAN is also resistant to adaptive attacks based on feature-level regularization. Our code is available at https://github.com/lancopku/DAN.

EMNLP 2022

Expose Backdoors on the Way: A Feature-Based Efficient Defense against Textual Backdoor Attacks

intermediate feature

backdoor defense

backdoor attack

pre-trained language model

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

findings / work in progress

## 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.

<br>*Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA*<br>
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
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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.

Knowledge Graph(KG) grounded conversations often use large pre-trained models and usually suffer from fact hallucination. Frequently entities with no references in knowledge sources and conversation history are introduced into responses, thus hindering the flow of the conversation—existing work attempt to overcome this issue by tweaking the training procedure or using a multi-step refining method. However, minimal effort is put into constructing an entity-level hallucination detection system, which would provide fine-grained signals that control fallacious content while generating responses. As a first step to address this issue, we dive deep to identify various modes of hallucination in KG-grounded chatbots through human feedback analysis. Secondly, we propose a series of perturbation strategies to create a synthetic dataset named FADE (FActual Dialogue Hallucination DEtection Dataset). Finally, we conduct comprehensive data analyses and create multiple baseline models for hallucination detection to compare against human-verified data and already established benchmarks.

Diving Deep into Modes of Fact Hallucinations in Dialogue Systems

State-of-the-art keyphrase generation methods generally depend on large annotated datasets, limiting their performance in domains with limited annotated data. To overcome this challenge, we design a data-oriented approach that first identifies salient information using retrieval-based corpus-level statistics, and then learns a task-specific intermediate representation based on a pre-trained language model using large-scale unlabeled documents. We introduce salient span recovery and salient span prediction as denoising training objectives that condense the intra-article and inter-article knowledge essential for keyphrase generation. Through experiments on multiple keyphrase generation benchmarks, we show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for facilitating low-resource keyphrase generation and zero-shot domain adaptation. Our method especially benefits the generation of absent keyphrases, approaching the performance of models trained with large training sets.

Representation Learning for Resource-Constrained Keyphrase Generation

Levin et al. (2019) show experimentally that the interpretations of novel English noun compounds (e.g., stew skillet), while not fully compositional, are highly predictable based on whether the modifier and head refer to artifacts or natural kinds. Is the large language model GPT-3 governed by the same interpretive principles? To address this question, we first compare Levin et al.'s experimental data with GPT-3 generations, finding a high degree of similarity. However, this evidence is consistent with GPT-3 reasoning only about specific lexical items rather than the more abstract conceptual categories of Levin et al.'s theory. To probe more deeply, we construct prompts that require the relevant kind of conceptual reasoning. Here, we fail to find convincing evidence that GPT-3 is reasoning about more than just individual lexical items. These results highlight the importance of controlling for low-level distributional regularities when assessing whether a large language model latently encodes a deeper theory.

Systematicity in GPT-3's Interpretation of Novel English Noun Compounds

Pretrained language models can be effectively stimulated by textual prompts or demonstrations, especially in low-data scenarios. Recent works have focused on automatically searching discrete or continuous prompts or optimized verbalizers, yet studies for the demonstration are still limited. Concretely, the demonstration examples are crucial for an excellent final performance of prompt-tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach named contrastive demonstration tuning, which is free of demonstration sampling. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be: (i) Plugged into any previous prompt-tuning approaches; (ii) Extended to widespread classification tasks with a large number of categories. Experimental results on 16 datasets illustrate that our method integrated with previous approaches LM-BFF and P-tuning can yield better performance. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/research/Demo-Tuning.

Contrastive Demonstration Tuning for Pre-trained Language Models

Pretrained Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated ability to perform numerical reasoning by extrapolating from a few examples in few-shot settings. However, the extent to which this extrapolation relies on robust reasoning is unclear. In this paper, we investigate how well these models reason with terms that are less frequent in the pretraining data. In particular, we examine the correlations between the model performance on test instances and the frequency of terms from those instances in the pretraining data. We measure the strength of this correlation for a number of GPT-based language models (pretrained on the Pile dataset) on various numerical deduction tasks (e.g., arithmetic and unit conversion). Our results consistently demonstrate that models are more accurate on instances whose terms are more prevalent, in some cases above 70% (absolute) more accurate on the top 10\% frequent terms in comparison to the bottom 10%. Overall, although LMs appear successful at few-shot numerical reasoning, our results raise the question of how much models actually generalize beyond pretraining data, and we encourage researchers to take the pretraining data into account when interpreting evaluation results.

Impact of Pretraining Term Frequencies on Few-Shot Numerical Reasoning

Entity linking faces significant challenges such as prolific variations and prevalent ambiguities, especially in high-value domains with myriad entities. Standard classification approaches suffer from the annotation bottleneck and cannot effectively handle unseen entities. Zero-shot entity linking has emerged as a promising direction for generalizing to new entities, but it still requires example gold entity mentions during training and canonical descriptions for all entities, both of which are rarely available outside of Wikipedia. In this paper, we explore Knowledge-RIch Self-Supervision (KRISS) for biomedical entity linking, by leveraging readily available domain knowledge. In training, it generates self-supervised mention examples on unlabeled text using a domain ontology and trains a contextual encoder using contrastive learning. For inference, it samples self-supervised mentions as prototypes for each entity and conducts linking by mapping the test mention to the most similar prototype. Our approach can easily incorporate entity descriptions and gold mention labels if available. We conducted extensive experiments on seven standard datasets spanning biomedical literature and clinical notes. Without using any labeled information, our method produces KRISSBERT, a universal entity linker for four million UMLS entities that attains new state of the art, outperforming prior self-supervised methods by as much as 20 absolute points in accuracy. We released KRISSBERT at https://aka.ms/krissbert.

Knowledge-Rich Self-Supervision for Biomedical Entity Linking

We examine LMs' competence of directional predicate entailments by supervised fine-tuning with prompts. Our analysis shows that contrary to their apparent success on standard NLI, LMs show limited ability to learn such directional inference; moreover, existing datasets fail to test directionality, and/or are infested by artefacts that can be learnt as proxy for entailments, yielding over-optimistic results. In response, we present BoOQA (Boolean Open QA), a robust multi-lingual evaluation benchmark for directional predicate entailments, extrinsic to existing training sets. On BoOQA, we establish baselines and show evidence of existing LM-prompting models being incompetent directional entailment learners, in contrast to entailment graphs, however limited by sparsity.

Language Models Are Poor Learners of Directional Inference

Expressing empathy is important in everyday conversations, and exploring how empathy arises is crucial in automatic response generation. Most previous approaches consider only a single factor that affects empathy. However, in practice, empathy generation and expression is a very complex and dynamic psychological process. A listener needs to find out events which cause a speaker's emotions (emotion cause extraction), project the events into some experience (knowledge extension), and express empathy in the most appropriate way (communication mechanism).To this end, we propose a novel approach, which integrates the three components - emotion cause, knowledge graph, and communication mechanism for empathetic response generation.Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and show that incorporating the key components generates more informative and empathetic responses.

Wish I Can Feel What You Feel: A Neural Approach for Empathetic Response Generation

Visual question answering (VQA) is a hallmark of vision and language reasoning
and a challenging task under the zero-shot setting.
We propose Plug-and-Play VQA (PNP-VQA),
a modular framework for zero-shot VQA.
In contrast to most existing works, which require substantial adaptation of pretrained language models (PLMs) for the vision modality,
PNP-VQA requires no additional training of the PLMs.
Instead, we propose to use natural language and network interpretation as an intermediate representation that glues pretrained models together. We first generate question-guided informative image captions,
and pass the captions to a PLM as context for question answering.
Surpassing end-to-end trained baselines, PNP-VQA achieves state-of-the-art results on zero-shot VQAv2 and GQA. With 11B parameters, it outperforms the 80B-parameter Flamingo model by 8.5% on VQAv2. 
With 738M PLM parameters, PNP-VQA achieves an improvement of 9.1% on GQA over FewVLM with 740M PLM parameters.

Plug-and-Play VQA: Zero-shot VQA by Conjoining Large Pretrained Models with Zero Training

Subword-level models have been the dominant paradigm in NLP. However, character-level models have the benefit of seeing each character individually, providing the model with more detailed information that ultimately could lead to better models. Recent works have shown character-level models to be competitive with subword models, but costly in terms of time and computation. Character-level models with a downsampling component alleviate this, but at the cost of quality, particularly for machine translation. 
This work analyzes the problems of previous downsampling methods and introduces a novel downsampling method which is informed by subwords.
This new downsampling method not only outperforms existing downsampling methods, showing that downsampling characters can be done without sacrificing quality, but also leads to promising performance compared to subword models for translation.

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Diving Deep into Modes of Fact Hallucinations in Dialogue Systems

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