United Arab Emirates

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.

EMNLP 2022

Context-Situated Pun Generation

context situated

pun generation

dataset

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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.

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.

Structural generalization is hard for sequence-to-sequence models

Despite low latency, non-autoregressive machine translation (NAT) suffers severe performance deterioration due to the naive independence assumption. This assumption is further strengthened by cross-entropy loss, which encourages a strict match between the hypothesis and the reference token by token. To alleviate this issue, we propose multi-granularity optimization for NAT, which collects model behaviours on translation segments of various granularities and integrates feedback for backpropagation. Experiments on four WMT benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the baseline models trained with cross-entropy loss, and achieves the best performance on WMT'16 En⇔Ro and highly competitive results on WMT'14 En⇔De for fully non-autoregressive translation.

Multi-Granularity Optimization for Non-Autoregressive Translation

Multi-hop Question Answering is an agent task for testing the reasoning ability. With the development of pre-trained models, the implicit reasoning ability has been surprisingly improved and can even surpass human performance. However, the nature of the black box hinders the construction of explainable intelligent systems. Several researchers have explored explainable neural-symbolic reasoning methods based on question decomposition techniques. The undifferentiable symbolic operations and the error propagation in the reasoning process lead to poor performance. To alleviate it, we propose a simple yet effective Global Differentiable Learning strategy to explore optimal reasoning paths from the latent probability space so that the model learns to solve intermediate reasoning processes without expert annotations. We further design a Dynamic Adaptive Reasoner to enhance the generalization of unseen questions. Our method achieves 17% improvements in F1-score against BreakRC and shows better interpretability. We take a step forward in building interpretable reasoning methods.

Explainable Question Answering based on Semantic Graph by Global Differentiable Learning and Dynamic Adaptive Reasoning

Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) aims to extract emotion clauses and corresponding cause clauses, which have recently received growing attention. Previous methods sequentially encode features with a specified order. They first encode the emotion and cause features for clause extraction and then combine them for pair extraction. This lead to an imbalance in inter-task feature interaction where features extracted later have no direct contact with the former. To address this issue, we propose a novel **P**air-**B**ased **J**oint **E**ncoding (**PBJE**) network, which generates pairs and clauses features simultaneously in a joint feature encoding manner to model the causal relationship in clauses. PBJE can balance the information flow among emotion clauses, cause clauses and pairs. From a multi-relational perspective, we construct a heterogeneous undirected graph and apply the Relational Graph Convolutional Network (RGCN) to capture the multiplex relationship between clauses and the relationship between pairs and clauses. Experimental results show that PBJE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Chinese benchmark corpus.

Pair-Based Joint Encoding with Relational Graph Convolutional Networks for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

In this paper, we show that the combination of Phrase Pair Injection and Corpus Filtering boosts the performance of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems. We extract parallel phrases and sentences from the pseudo-parallel corpus and augment it with the parallel corpus to train the NMT models. With the proposed approach, we observe an improvement in the Machine Translation (MT) system for 3 low-resource language pairs, Hindi-Marathi, English-Marathi, and English-Pashto, and 6 translation directions by up to 2.7 BLEU points, on the FLORES test data. These BLEU score improvements are over the models trained using the whole pseudo-parallel corpus augmented with the parallel corpus.

Improving Machine Translation with Phrase Pair Injection and Corpus Filtering

When recalling life experiences, people often forget or confuse life events, which necessitates information recall services. Previous work on information recall focuses on providing such assistance reactively, i.e., by retrieving the life event of a given query. Proactively detecting the need for information recall services is rarely discussed. In this paper, we use a human-annotated life experience retelling dataset to detect the right time to trigger the information recall service. We propose a pilot model—structured event enhancement network (SEEN) that detects life event inconsistency, additional information in life events, and forgotten events. A fusing mechanism is also proposed to incorporate event graphs of stories and enhance the textual representations. To explain the need detection results, SEEN simultaneously provides support evidence by selecting the related nodes from the event graph. Experimental results show that SEEN achieves promising performance in detecting information needs. In addition, the extracted evidence can be served as complementary information to remind users what events they may want to recall.

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