United Arab Emirates

Recent advances in distilling pretrained language models have discovered that, besides the expressiveness of knowledge, the student-friendliness should be taken into consideration to realize a truly knowledgeable teacher. Based on a pilot study, we find that over-parameterized teachers can produce expressive yet student-unfriendly knowledge and are thus limited in overall knowledgeableness. To remove the parameters that result in student-unfriendliness, we propose a sparse teacher trick under the guidance of an overall knowledgeable score for each teacher parameter. The knowledgeable score is essentially an interpolation of the expressiveness and student-friendliness scores. The aim is to ensure that the expressive parameters are retained while the student-unfriendly ones are removed. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark show that the proposed sparse teachers can be dense with knowledge and lead to students with compelling performance in comparison with a series of competitive baselines.

EMNLP 2022

Sparse Teachers Can Be Dense with Knowledge

model pruning

pretrained language model

knowledge distillation

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

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.

poster

## 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***
 
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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.

Most downstream adaptation methods tune all or part of the parameters of pre-trained models (PTMs) through gradient descent, where the tuning cost increases linearly with the growth of the model size.
By contrast, gradient-free methods only require the forward computation of the PTM to tune the prompt, retaining the benefits of efficient tuning and deployment.
Though, past work on gradient-free tuning often introduces gradient descent to seek a good initialization of prompt and lacks versatility across tasks and PTMs.
In this paper, we present BBTv2, an improved version of Black-Box Tuning, to drive PTMs for few-shot learning.
We prepend continuous prompts to every layer of the PTM and propose a divide-and-conquer gradient-free algorithm to optimize the prompts at different layers alternately.
Extensive experiments across various tasks and PTMs show that BBTv2 can achieve comparable performance to full model tuning and state-of-the-art parameter-efficient methods (e.g., Adapter, LoRA, BitFit, etc.) under few-shot settings while maintaining much fewer tunable parameters.

BBTv2: Towards a Gradient-Free Future with Large Language Models

Language differs dramatically from context to context. To some degree, large language models like GPT-3 account for such variation by conditioning on strings of initial input text, or prompts. However, prompting can be ineffective when contexts are sparse, out-of-sample, or extra-textual. In this paper, we introduce the mixed-effects transformer (MET), a novel approach for learning hierarchically-structured prefixes--- lightweight modules prepended to an input sequence--- to account for structured variation in language use. Specifically, we show how the popular class of mixed-effects regression models may be extended to transformer-based architectures using a regularized prefix-tuning procedure with dropout. We evaluate this approach on several domain-adaptation benchmarks, finding that it learns contextual variation from minimal data while generalizing well to unseen contexts.

Mixed-effects transformers for hierarchical adaptation

Document images are a ubiquitous source of data where the text is organized in a complex hierarchical structure ranging from fine granularity (e.g., words), medium granularity (e.g., regions such as paragraphs or figures), to coarse granularity (e.g., the whole page). The spatial hierarchical relationships between content at different levels of granularity are crucial for document image understanding tasks. Existing methods learn features from either word-level or region-level but fail to consider both simultaneously. Word-level models are restricted by the fact that they originate from pure-text language models, which only encode the word-level context. In contrast, region-level models attempt to encode regions corresponding to paragraphs or text blocks into a single embedding, but they perform worse with additional word-level features. To deal with these issues, we propose MGDoc, a new multi-modal multi-granular pre-training framework that encodes page-level, region-level, and word-level information at the same time. MGDoc uses a unified text-visual encoder to obtain multi-modal features across different granularities, which makes it possible to project the multi-granular features into the same hyperspace. To model the region-word correlation, we design a cross-granular attention mechanism and specific pre-training tasks for our model to reinforce the model of learning the hierarchy between regions and words. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed model can learn better features that perform well across granularities and lead to improvements in downstream tasks.

MGDoc: Pre-training with Multi-granular Hierarchy for Document Image Understanding

Dataset bias has attracted increasing attention recently for its detrimental effect on the generalization ability of fine-tuned models. The current mainstream solution is designing an additional shallow model to pre-identify biased instances. However, such two-stage methods scale up the computational complexity of training process and obstruct valid feature information while mitigating bias.
To address this issue, we utilize the representation normalization method which aims at disentangling the correlations between features of encoded sentences. We find it also promising in eliminating the bias problem by providing isotropic data distribution. We further propose Kernel-Whitening, a Nystrom kernel approximation method to achieve more thorough debiasing on nonlinear spurious correlations. Our framework is end-to-end with similar time consumption to fine-tuning. Experiments show that Kernel-Whitening significantly improves the performance of BERT on out-of-distribution datasets while maintaining in-distribution accuracy.

Kernel-Whitening: Overcome Dataset Bias with Isotropic Sentence Embedding

Previous work on pun generation commonly begins with a given pun word (a pair of homophones for heterographic pun generation and a polyseme for homographic pun generation) and seeks to generate an appropriate pun. While this may enable efficient pun generation, we believe that a pun is most entertaining if it fits appropriately within a given context, e.g., a given situation or dialogue. In this work, we propose a new task, context-situated pun generation, where a specific context represented by a set of keywords is provided, and the task is to first identify suitable pun words that are appropriate for the context, then generate puns based on the context keywords and the identified pun words. 
We collect a new dataset, CUP (Context-sitUated Pun), containing 4.5k tuples of context words and pun pairs. Based on the new data and setup, we propose a pipeline system for context-situated pun generation, including a pun word retrieval module that identifies suitable pun words for a given context, and a pun generation module that generates puns from context keywords and pun words. 
Human evaluation shows that 69% of our top retrieved pun words can be used to generate context-situated puns, and our generation module yields successful puns 31% of the time given a plausible tuple of context words and pun pair, almost tripling the yield of a state-of-the-art pun generation model. With an end-to-end evaluation, our pipeline system with the top-1 retrieved pun pair for a given context can generate successful puns 40% of the time, better than all other modeling variations but 32% lower than the human success rate. This highlights the difficulty of the task, and encourages more research in this direction.

Context-Situated Pun Generation

Pre-trained seq2seq models excel at graph semantic parsing with rich annotated data, but generalize worse to out-of-distribution (OOD) and long-tail examples. In comparison, symbolic parsers under-perform on population-level metrics, but exhibit unique strength in OOD and tail generalization. In this work, we study compositionality-aware approach to neural-symbolic inference informed by model confidence, performing fine-grained neural-symbolic reasoning at subgraph level (i.e., nodes and edges) and precisely targeting subgraph components with high uncertainty in the neural parser. As a result, the method combines the distinct strength of the neural and symbolic approaches in capturing different aspects of the graph prediction, leading to well-rounded generalization performance both across domains and in the tail. We empirically investigate the approach in the English Resource Grammar (ERG) parsing problem on a diverse suite of standard in-domain and seven OOD corpora. Our approach leads to 35.26% and 35.60% error reduction in aggregated SMATCH score over neural and symbolic approaches respectively, and 14% absolute accuracy gain in key tail linguistic categories over the neural model, outperforming prior state-of-art methods that do not account for compositionality or uncertainty.

Neural-Symbolic Inference for Robust Autoregressive Graph Parsing via Compositional Uncertainty Quantification

Legal judgment prediction (LJP) is a fundamental task in legal AI, which aims to assist the judge to hear the case and determine the judgment. The legal judgment usually consists of the law article, charge, and term of penalty. In the real trial scenario, the judge usually makes the decision step-by-step: first concludes the rationale according to the case's facts and then determines the judgment. Recently, many models have been proposed and made tremendous progress in LJP, but most of them adopt an end-to-end manner that cannot be manually intervened by the judge for practical use. Moreover, existing models lack interpretability due to the neglect of rationale in the prediction process. Following the judge's real trial logic, in this paper, we propose a novel Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction (RLJP) framework. In the RLJP framework, the LJP process is split into two steps. In the first phase, the model generates the rationales according to the fact description. Then it predicts the judgment based on the fact and the generated rationales. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show RLJP achieves the best results compared to the state-of-the-art models. Meanwhile, the proposed framework provides good interactivity and interpretability which enables practical use.

Towards Interactivity and Interpretability: A Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction Framework

Many language generation models are now available for a wide range of generation tasks, including machine translation and summarization. Combining such diverse models may lead to further progress, but ensembling generation models is challenging during inference: conventional ensembling methods (e.g., shallow fusion) require that the models share vocabulary/tokenization schemes. We introduce Twist decoding, a simple and general text generation algorithm that benefits from diverse models at inference time. Our method does not assume the vocabulary, tokenization or even generation order is shared. Our extensive evaluations on machine translation and scientific paper summarization demonstrate that Twist decoding substantially outperforms each model decoded in isolation over various scenarios, including cases where domain-specific and general-purpose models are both available. Twist decoding also consistently outperforms the popular reranking heuristic where output candidates from one model are rescored by another. We hope that our work will encourage researchers and practitioners to examine generation models collectively, not just independently, and to seek out models with complementary strengths to the currently available models.

Twist Decoding: Diverse Generators Guide Each Other

Neural machine translation (NMT) is often criticized for failures that happen
without awareness. 
The lack of competency awareness makes NMT untrustworthy. 
This is in sharp contrast to human translators who give feedback or conduct further investigations whenever they are in doubt about predictions. 
To fill this gap, we propose a novel competency-aware NMT by extending conventional NMT with a self-estimator, offering abilities to translate a source sentence and estimate its competency.
The self-estimator encodes the information of the decoding procedure and then examines whether it can reconstruct the original semantics of the source sentence. 
Experimental results on four translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed method not only carries out translation tasks intact but also delivers outstanding performance on quality estimation.
Without depending on any reference or annotated data typically required by state-of-the-art metric and quality estimation methods, our model yields an even higher correlation with human quality judgments than a variety of aforementioned methods, such as BLEURT, COMET, and BERTScore. 
Quantitative and qualitative analyses show better robustness of competency awareness in our model.\footnote{Code and test sets are available at: https://github.com/xiaoyi0814/CANMT.}

Competency-Aware Neural Machine Translation: Can Machine Translation Know its Own Translation Quality?

Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models have been successful across many NLP tasks,
including ones that require predicting linguistic structure. However, recent work on compositional generalization has shown that seq2seq models achieve very low accuracy in generalizing to linguistic structures that were not seen in training. We present new evidence that this is a general limitation of seq2seq models that is present not just in semantic parsing, but also in syntactic parsing and in text-to-text tasks, and that this limitation can often be overcome by neurosymbolic models that have linguistic knowledge built in. We further report on some experiments that give initial answers on the reasons for these limitations.

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