United Arab Emirates

Few images on the Web receive alt-text descriptions that would make them accessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users. Image-based NLG systems have progressed to the point where they can begin to address this persistent societal problem, but these systems will not be fully successful unless we evaluate them on metrics that guide their development correctly. Here, we argue against current referenceless metrics -- those that don&#39;t rely on human-generated ground-truth descriptions -- on the grounds that they do not align with the needs of BLV users. The fundamental shortcoming of these metrics is that they do not take context into account, whereas contextual information is highly valued by BLV users. To substantiate these claims, we present a study with BLV participants who rated descriptions along a variety of dimensions. An in-depth analysis reveals that the lack of context-awareness makes current referenceless metrics inadequate for advancing image accessibility. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a contextual version of the referenceless metric CLIPScore which begins to address the disconnect to the BLV data.

EMNLP 2022

Context Matters for Image Descriptions for Accessibility: Challenges for Referenceless Evaluation Metrics

image accessibility

referenceless metrics

image captioning

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Few images on the Web receive alt-text descriptions that would make them accessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users. Image-based NLG systems have progressed to the point where they can begin to address this persistent societal problem, but these systems will not be fully successful unless we evaluate them on metrics that guide their development correctly. Here, we argue against current referenceless metrics -- those that don't rely on human-generated ground-truth descriptions -- on the grounds that they do not align with the needs of BLV users. The fundamental shortcoming of these metrics is that they do not take context into account, whereas contextual information is highly valued by BLV users. To substantiate these claims, we present a study with BLV participants who rated descriptions along a variety of dimensions. An in-depth analysis reveals that the lack of context-awareness makes current referenceless metrics inadequate for advancing image accessibility. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a contextual version of the referenceless metric CLIPScore which begins to address the disconnect to the BLV data.

poster

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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.

Weakly-supervised text classification aims to train a classifier using only class descriptions and unlabeled data. Recent research shows that keyword-driven methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various tasks. However, these methods not only rely on carefully-crafted class descriptions to obtain class-specific keywords but also require substantial amount of unlabeled data and takes a long time to train. This paper proposes FastClass, an efficient weakly-supervised classification approach. It uses dense text representation to retrieve class-relevant documents from external unlabeled corpus and selects an optimal subset to train a classifier. Compared to keyword-driven methods, our approach is less reliant on initial class descriptions as it no longer needs to expand each class description into a set of class-specific keywords.Experiments on a wide range of classification tasks show that the proposed approach frequently outperforms keyword-driven models in terms of classification accuracy and often enjoys orders-of-magnitude faster training speed.

FastClass: A Time-Efficient Approach to Weakly-Supervised Text Classification

Conventional visual relationship detection models only use the numeric ids of relation labels for training, but ignore the semantic correlation between the labels, which leads to severe training biases and harms the generalization ability of representations. In this paper, we introduce compact language information of relation labels for regularizing the representation learning of visual relations. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective visual Relationship prediction framework that transfers natural language knowledge learned from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models to enhance the relationship prediction, termed RelCLIP. Benefiting from the powerful visual-semantic alignment ability of CLIP at image level, we introduce a novel Relational Contrastive Learning (RCL) approach which explores relation-level visual-semantic alignment via learning to match cross-modal relational embeddings. By collaboratively learning the semantic coherence and discrepancy from relation triplets, the model can generate more discriminative and robust representations. Experimental results on the Visual Genome dataset show that RelCLIP achieves significant improvements over strong baselines under full (provide accurate labels) and distant supervision (provide noise labels), demonstrating its powerful generalization ability in learning relationship representations. Code will be available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/RelCLIP.

RelCLIP: Adapting Language-Image Pretraining for Visual Relationship Detection via Relational Contrastive Learning

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) model achieves a much faster inference speed than the autoregressive translation (AT) model because it can simultaneously predict all tokens during inference. However, its translation quality suffers from degradation compared to AT. And existing NAT methods only focus on improving the NAT model's performance but do not fully utilize it. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method called "Candidate Soups,” which can obtain high-quality translations while maintaining the inference speed of NAT models. Unlike previous approaches that pick the individual result and discard the remainders, Candidate Soups (CDS) can fully use the valuable information in the different candidate translations through model uncertainty. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks (WMT'14 EN–DE and WMT'16 EN–RO) demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our proposed method, which can significantly improve the translation quality of various base models. More notably, our best variant outperforms the AT model on three translation tasks with 7.6× speedup.

Candidate Soups: Fusing Candidate Results Improves Translation Quality for Non-Autoregressive Translation

Parameter efficient learning methods (PERMs)
have recently gained significant attention as
they provide an efficient way for pre-trained
language models (PLMs) to adapt to a downstream task. However, these conclusions are
mostly drawn from in-domain evaluations over
the full training set. In this paper, we present
comparisons between PERMs and finetuning
from three new perspectives: (1) the effect of
sample and model size to in-domain evaluations, (2) generalization to unseen domains and
new datasets, and (3) the faithfulness of generations. Our results show that for in-domain
settings (a) there is a cross point of sample
size for which PERMs will perform better than
finetuning when training with fewer samples,
and (b) larger PLMs have larger cross points.
For cross-domain and cross-dataset cases, we
show that (a) Adapter (Houlsby et al., 2019)
performs the best amongst all the PERMs studied here, and (b) it outperforms finetuning if
the task dataset is below a certain size. We
also compare the faithfulness of generations
and show that PERMs can achieve better faithfulness score than finetuning, especially for
small training set, by as much as 6%. Finally,
we apply Adapter to MT-NLG 530b (Smith
et al., 2022) and achieve new state-of-the-art
results on Xsum (Narayan et al., 2018) for all
ROUGE scores (ROUGE-1 49.17, ROUGE-2
27.20, ROUGE-L 40.98).

Evaluating Parameter Efficient Learning for Generation

Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) have advanced Graph-to-Text (G2T) generation by processing the linearised version of a graph. However, the linearisation is known to ignore the structural information. Additionally, PLMs are typically pre-trained on free text which introduces domain mismatch between pre-training and downstream G2T generation tasks. To address these shortcomings, we propose graph masking pre-training strategies that neither require supervision signals nor adjust the architecture of the underlying pre-trained encoder-decoder model. When used with a pre-trained T5, our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on WebNLG+2020 and EventNarrative G2T generation datasets. Our method also shows to be very effective in the low-resource setting.

Self-supervised Graph Masking Pre-training for Graph-to-Text Generation

Code search, which aims at retrieving the most relevant code fragment for a given natural language query, is a common activity in software development practice. Recently, contrastive learning is widely used in code search research, where many data augmentation approaches for source code (e.g., semantic-preserving program transformation) are proposed to learn better representations. However, these augmentations are at the raw-data level, which requires additional code analysis in the preprocessing stage and additional training cost in the training stage. In this paper, we explore augmentation methods that augment data (both code and query) at representation level which does not require additional data processing and training, and based on this we propose a general format of representation-level augmentation that unifies existing methods. Then, we propose three new augmentation methods (linear extrapolation, binary interpolation, and Gaussian scaling) based on the general format. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the advantages of the proposed augmentation methods over traditional contrastive learning methods on code search. We experimentally evaluate the proposed representation-level augmentation methods with state-of-the-art code search models on a large-scale public dataset consisting of six programming languages. The experimental results show that our approach can consistently boost the performance of the studied code search models.

Exploring Representation-level Augmentation for Code Search

Recently, discrete latent variable models have received a surge of interest in both Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), attributed to their comparable performance to the continuous counterparts in representation learning, while being more interpretable in their predictions. In this paper, we develop a topic-informed discrete latent variable model for semantic textual similarity, which learns a shared latent space for sentence-pair representation via vector quantization. Compared with previous models limited to local semantic contexts, our model can explore richer semantic information via topic modeling. We further boost the performance of semantic similarity by injecting the quantized representation into a transformer-based language model with a well-designed semantic-driven attention mechanism. We demonstrate, through extensive experiments across various English language datasets, that our model is able to surpass several strong neural baselines in semantic textual similarity tasks.

Learning Semantic Textual Similarity via Topic-informed Discrete Latent Variables

Sarcasm is a linguistic phenomenon indicating a discrepancy between literal meanings and implied intentions. Due to its sophisticated nature, it is usually difficult to be detected from the text itself. As a result, multi-modal sarcasm detection has received more and more attention in both academia and industries. However, most existing techniques only modeled the atomic-level inconsistencies between the text input and its accompanying image, ignoring more complex compositions for both modalities. Moreover, they neglected the rich information contained in external knowledge, e.g., image captions. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical framework for sarcasm detection by exploring both the atomic-level congruity based on multi-head cross attentions and the composition-level congruity based on graph neural networks, where a post with low congruity can be identified as sarcasm. In addition, we exploit the effect of various knowledge resources for sarcasm detection. Evaluation results on a public multi-modal sarcasm detection dataset based on Twitter demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model.

Towards Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection via Hierarchical Congruity Modeling with Knowledge Enhancement

Conceptual knowledge is fundamental to human cognition and knowledge bases. However, existing knowledge probing works only focus on evaluating factual knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and ignore conceptual knowledge. Since conceptual knowledge often appears as implicit commonsense behind texts, designing probes for conceptual knowledge is hard. Inspired by knowledge representation schemata, we comprehensively evaluate conceptual knowledge of PLMs by designing three tasks to probe whether PLMs organize entities by conceptual similarities, learn conceptual properties, and conceptualize entities in contexts, respectively. For the tasks, we collect and annotate 24k data instances covering 393 concepts, which is COPEN, a COnceptual knowledge Probing bENchmark. Extensive experiments on different sizes and types of PLMs show that existing PLMs systematically lack conceptual knowledge and suffer from various spurious correlations. We believe this is a critical bottleneck for realizing human-like cognition in PLMs. COPEN and our codes are publicly released at https://github.com/THU-KEG/COPEN.

COPEN: Probing Conceptual Knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models

Heterogeneous information network (HIN) is essential to study complicated networks containing multiple edge types and node types. Meta-path, a sequence of node types and edge types, is the core technique to embed HINs. Since manually curating meta-paths is time-consuming, there is a pressing need to develop automated meta-path generation approaches. Existing meta-path generation approaches cannot fully exploit the rich textual information in HINs, such as node names and edge type names. To address this problem, we propose MetaFill, a text-infilling-based approach for meta-path generation. The key idea of MetaFill is to formulate meta-path identification problem as a word sequence infilling problem, which can be advanced by pretrained language models (PLMs). We observed the superior performance of MetaFill against existing meta-path generation methods and graph embedding methods that do not leverage meta-paths in both link prediction and node classification on two real-world HIN datasets. We further demonstrated how MetaFill can accurately classify edges in the zero-shot setting, where existing approaches cannot generate any meta-paths. MetaFill exploits PLMs to generate meta-paths for graph embedding, opening up new avenues for language model applications in graph analysis.

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