United Arab Emirates

Scaling multilingual representation learning beyond the hundred most frequent languages is challenging, in particular to cover the long tail of low-resource languages. We move away from the popular one-for-all multilingual models and focus on training multiple language (family) specific representations, but most prominently enable all languages to still be encoded in the same representational space. We focus on teacher-student training, allowing all encoders to be mutually compatible for bitext mining, and enabling fast learning of new languages. We also combine supervised and self-supervised training, allowing encoders to take advantage of monolingual training data.

Our approach significantly outperforms the original LASER encoder. We study very low-resource languages and handle 44 African languages, many of which are not covered by any other model. For these languages, we train sentence encoders and mine bitexts. Adding these mined bitexts yielded an improvement of 3.8 BLEU for NMT into English.

EMNLP 2022

Bitext Mining Using Distilled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Languages

multilingual sentence encoder

laser

bitext mining

low-resource mt

## 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.

findings / work in progress

We present EdiT5 - a novel semi-autoregressive text-editing approach designed to combine the strengths of non-autoregressive text-editing and autoregressive decoding. EdiT5 is faster at inference times than conventional sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, while being capable of modeling flexible input-output transformations.

This is achieved by decomposing the generation process into three sub-tasks: (1) tagging to decide on the subset of input tokens to be preserved in the output, (2) re-ordering to define their order in the output text, and (3) insertion to infill the missing tokens that are not present in the input. The tagging and re-ordering steps, which are responsible for generating the largest portion of the output, are non-autoregressive, while the insertion uses an autoregressive decoder.

Depending on the task, EdiT5 requires significantly fewer autoregressive steps demonstrating speedups of up to 25x when compared to classic seq2seq models. Quality-wise, EdiT5 is initialized with a pre-trained T5 checkpoint yielding comparable performance to T5 in high-resource settings and clearly outperforms it on low-resource settings when evaluated on three NLG tasks: Sentence Fusion, Grammatical Error Correction, and Decontextualization.

EdiT5: Semi-Autoregressive Text Editing with T5 Warm-Start

We review the state of research on empathy in natural language processing and identify the following issues: (1) empathy definitions are absent or abstract, which (2) leads to low construct validity and reproducibility. Moreover, (3) emotional empathy is overemphasized, skewing our focus to a narrow subset of simplified tasks. We believe these issues hinder research progress and argue that current directions will benefit from a clear conceptualization that includes operationalizing cognitive empathy components. Our main objectives are to provide insight and guidance on empathy conceptualization for NLP research objectives and to encourage researchers to pursue the overlooked opportunities in this area, highly relevant, e.g., for clinical and educational sectors.

A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing

Automatic Peer-review Aspect Score Prediction (PASP) of academic papers can be a helpful assistant tool for both reviewers and authors. Most existing works on PASP utilize supervised learning techniques. However, the limited number of peer-review data deteriorates the performance of PASP. This paper presents a novel semi-supervised learning (SSL) method that incorporates the Transformer fine-tuning into the Γ-model, a variant of the Ladder network, to leverage contextual features from unlabeled data. Backpropagation simultaneously minimizes the sum of supervised and unsupervised cost functions, avoiding the need for layer-wise pre-training. The experimental results show that our model outperforms the supervised and naive semi-supervised learning baselines. Our source codes are available online.

Exploiting Labeled and Unlabeled Data via Transformer Fine-tuning for Peer-Review Score Prediction

The successful completion of the hate speech detection task hinges upon the availability of rich and variable labeled data, which is hard to obtain. In this work, we present a new approach for data augmentation that uses as input real unlabelled data, which is carefully selected from online platforms where invited hate speech is abundant. We show that by harvesting and processing this data (in an automatic manner), one can augment existing manually-labeled datasets to improve the classification performance of hate speech classification models. We observed an improvement in F1-score ranging from 2.7\% and up to 9.5\%, depending on the task (in- or cross-domain) and the model used.

HARALD: Augmenting Hate Speech Data Sets with Real Data

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) outputs the translation while receiving the source inputs, and hence needs to balance the received source information and translated target information to make a reasonable decision between waiting for inputs or outputting translation. Previous methods always balance source and target information at the token level, either directly waiting for a fixed number of tokens or adjusting the waiting based on the current token. In this paper, we propose a Wait-info Policy to balance source and target at the information level. We first quantify the amount of information contained in each token, named info. Then during simultaneous translation, the decision of waiting or outputting is made based on the comparison results between the total info of previous target outputs and received source inputs. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong baselines under and achieves better balance via the proposed info.

Wait-info Policy: Balancing Source and Target at Information Level for Simultaneous Machine Translation

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) starts its translation before reading the whole source sentence and employs either fixed or adaptive policy to generate the target sentence. Compared to the fixed policy, the adaptive policy achieves better latency-quality tradeoffs by adopting a flexible translation policy. If the policy can evaluate rationality before taking action, the probability of incorrect actions will also decrease. However, previous methods lack evaluation of actions before taking them. In this paper, we propose a method of performing the adaptive policy via integrating post-evaluation into the fixed policy. Specifically, whenever a candidate token is generated, our model will evaluate the rationality of the next action by measuring the change in the source content. Our model will then take different actions based on the evaluation results. Experiments on three translation tasks show that our method can exceed strong baselines under all latency.

Turning Fixed to Adaptive: Integrating Post-Evaluation into Simultaneous Machine Translation

Sparsity of formal knowledge and roughness of non-ontological construction make sparsity problem particularly prominent in Open Knowledge Graphs (OpenKGs). Due to sparse links, learning effective representation for few-shot entities becomes difficult. We hypothesize that by introducing negative samples, a contrastive learning (CL) formulation could be beneficial in such scenarios. However, existing CL methods model KG triplets as binary objects of entities ignoring the relation-guided ternary propagation patterns and they are too generic, i.e., they ignore zero-shot, few-shot and synonymity problems that appear in OpenKGs. To address this, we propose TernaryCL, a CL framework based on ternary propagation patterns among head, relation and tail. TernaryCL designs Contrastive Entity and Contrastive Relation to mine ternary discriminative features with both negative entities and relations, introduces Contrastive Self to help zero- and few-shot entities learn discriminative features, Contrastive Synonym to model synonymous entities, and Contrastive Fusion to aggregate graph features from multiple paths. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of TernaryCL over state-of-the-art models.

Alleviating Sparsity of Open Knowledge Graphs with Ternary Contrastive Learning

Automatically fixing software bugs is a challenging task. While recent work showed that natural language context is useful in guiding bug-fixing models, the approach required prompting developers to provide this context, which was simulated through commit messages written after the bug-fixing code changes were made. We instead propose using bug report discussions, which are available before the task is performed and are also naturally occurring, avoiding the need for any additional information from developers. For this, we augment standard bug-fixing datasets with bug report discussions. Using these newly compiled datasets, we demonstrate that various forms of natural language context derived from such discussions can aid bug-fixing, even leading to improved performance over using commit messages corresponding to the oracle bug-fixing commits.

Using Developer Discussions to Guide Fixing Bugs in Software

Recent studies have shown the impressive efficacy of counterfactually augmented data (CAD) for reducing NLU models' reliance on spurious features and improving their generalizability. However, current methods still heavily rely on human efforts or task-specific designs to generate counterfactuals, thereby impeding CAD's applicability to a broad range of NLU tasks. In this paper, we present AutoCAD, a fully automatic and task-agnostic CAD generation framework. AutoCAD first leverages a classifier to unsupervisedly identify rationales as spans to be intervened, which disentangles spurious and causal features. Then, AutoCAD performs controllable generation enhanced by unlikelihood training to produce diverse counterfactuals. Extensive evaluations on multiple out-of-domain and challenge benchmarks demonstrate that AutoCAD consistently and significantly boosts the out-of-distribution performance of powerful pre-trained models across different NLU tasks, which is comparable or even better than previous state-of-the-art human-in-the-loop or task-specific CAD methods.

AutoCAD: Automatically Generate Counterfactuals for Mitigating Shortcut Learning

Classical Chinese poetry has a long history and is a precious cultural heritage of humankind. Displaying the classical Chinese poetry in a visual way, helps to cross cultural barriers in different countries, making it enjoyable for all the people. In this paper, we construct a multi-modal knowledge graph for classical Chinese poetry (PKG), in which the visual information of words in the poetry are incorporated. Then a multi-modal pre-training language model, PKG-Bert, is proposed to obtain the poetry representation with visual information, which bridges the semantic gap between different modalities. PKG-Bert achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the poetry-image retrieval task, showing the effectiveness of incorporating the multi-modal knowledge. The large-scale multi-modal knowledge graph of classical Chinese poetry will be released to promote the researches in classical Chinese culture area.

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EdiT5: Semi-Autoregressive Text Editing with T5 Warm-Start

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Bitext Mining Using Distilled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Languages

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