United Arab Emirates

The representation space of neural models for textual data emerges in an unsupervised manner during training. Understanding how human-interpretable concepts, such as gender, are encoded in these representations would improve the ability of users to control the content of these representations and analyze the working of the models that rely on them. One prominent approach to the control problem is the identification and removal of linear concept subspaces -- subspaces in the representation space that correspond to a given concept. While those are tractable and interpretable, neural network do not necessarily represent concepts in linear subspaces. 

We propose a kernelization of the recently-proposed linear concept-removal objective, and show that it is effective in guarding against the ability of certain nonlinear adversaries to recover the concept. Interestingly, our findings suggest that the division between linear and nonlinear models is overly simplistic: when considering the concept of binary gender and its neutralization, we do not find a single kernel space that exclusively contains all the concept-related information. It is therefore challenging to protect against all nonlinear adversaries at once.

EMNLP 2022

Adversarial Concept Erasure in Kernel Space

interpretaion

kernels

concepts

bias

It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), held in San Diego, California, USA, July 2–7, 2026. ACL 2026 continues our fields tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.

It is exciting to see the many developments in the field reflected at our conference, such as the advancement of large language models (born out of our community) into many application directions. This is not without challenges, partly due to unsolved problems, and partly due to misuse of the technology. All this is reflected well at ACL 2026. The conference also reflects that the field is not only about advancing technology, but also the science of fundamentally understanding language and how it is use by many different speaker communities. 
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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

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## 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.

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***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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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.

Recently, prompt-tuning has attracted growing interests in event argument extraction (EAE). However, the existing prompt-tuning methods have not achieved satisfactory performance due to the lack of consideration of entity information. In this paper, we propose a bi-directional iterative prompt-tuning method for EAE, where the EAE task is treated as a cloze-style task to take full advantage of entity information and pre-trained language models (PLMs). Furthermore, our method explores event argument interactions by introducing the argument roles of contextual entities into prompt construction. Since template and verbalizer are two crucial components in a cloze-style prompt, we propose to utilize the role label semantic knowledge to construct a semantic verbalizer and design three kind of templates for the EAE task. Experiments on the ACE 2005 English dataset with standard and low-resource settings show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the peer state-of-the-art methods.

Bi-Directional Iterative Prompt-Tuning for Event Argument Extraction

Recent research has revealed that neural language models at scale suffer from poor temporal generalization capability, i.e., language model pre-trained on static data from past years performs worse over time on emerging data. Existing methods mainly perform continual training to mitigate such a misalignment. While effective to some extent but is far from being addressed on both the language modeling and downstream tasks. In this paper, we empirically observe that temporal generalization is closely affiliated with lexical semantic change, which is one of the essential phenomena of natural languages. Based on this observation, we propose a simple yet effective lexical-level masking strategy to post-train a converged language model. Experiments on two pre-trained language models, two different classification tasks, and four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method over existing temporal adaptation methods, i.e., continual training with new data. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhaochen0110/LMLM.

Improving Temporal Generalization of Pre-trained Language Models with Lexical Semantic Change

Causal chain reasoning (CCR) is an essential ability for many decision-making AI systems, which requires the model to build reliable causal chains by connecting causal pairs. However, CCR suffers from two main transitive problems: threshold effect and scene drift. In other words, the causal pairs to be spliced may have a conflicting threshold boundary or scenario.
To address these issues, we propose a novel Reliable Causal chain reasoning framework (ReCo), which introduces exogenous variables to represent the threshold and scene factors of each causal pair within the causal chain, and estimates the threshold and scene contradictions across exogenous variables via structural causal recurrent neural networks (SRNN). Experiments show that ReCo outperforms a series of strong baselines on both Chinese and English CCR datasets. Moreover, by injecting reliable causal chain knowledge distilled by ReCo, BERT can achieve better performances on four downstream causal-related tasks than BERT models enhanced by other kinds of knowledge.

ReCo: Reliable Causal Chain Reasoning via Structural Causal Recurrent Neural Networks

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract the aspect terms along with the corresponding opinion terms and the expressed sentiments in the review, which is an important task in sentiment analysis. Previous research efforts generally address the ASTE task in an end-to-end fashion through the table-filling formalization, in which the triplets are represented by a two-dimensional (2D) table of word-pair relations. Under this formalization, a term-level relation is decomposed into multiple independent word-level relations, which leads to relation inconsistency and boundary insensitivity in the face of multi-word aspect terms and opinion terms. To overcome these issues, we propose Boundary-Driven Table-Filling (BDTF), which represents each triplet as a relation region in the 2D table and transforms the ASTE task into detection and classification of relation regions. We also notice that the quality of the table representation greatly affects the performance of BDTF. Therefore, we develop an effective relation representation learning approach to learn the table representation, which can fully exploit both word-to-word interactions and relation-to-relation interactions. Experiments on several public benchmarks show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performances.

Boundary-Driven Table-Filling for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

It has been shown that named entity recognition (NER) could benefit from incorporating the long-distance structured information captured by dependency trees. However, dependency trees built by tools usually have a certain percentage of errors. Under such circumstances, how to better use relevant structured information while ignoring irrelevant or wrong structured information from the dependency trees to improve NER performance is still a challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose the Attention and Edge-Label guided Graph Convolution Network (AELGCN) model. Then, we integrate it into BiLSTM-CRF to form BiLSTM-AELGCN-CRF model. We design an edge-aware node joint update module and introduce a node-aware edge update module to explore hidden in structured information entirely and solve the wrong dependency label information to some extent. After two modules, we apply attention-guided GCN, which automatically learns how to attend to the relevant structured information selectively. We conduct extensive experiments on several standard datasets across four languages and achieve better results than previous approaches. Through experimental analysis, it is found that our proposed model can better exploit the structured information on the dependency tree to improve the recognition of long entities.

Attention and Edge-Label Guided Graph Convolutional Networks for Named Entity Recognition

Event extraction (EE) is crucial to downstream tasks such as new aggregation and event knowledge graph construction. Most existing EE datasets manually define fixed event types and design specific schema for each of them, failing to cover diverse events emerging from the online text. Moreover, news titles, an important source of event mentions, have not gained enough attention in current EE research. In this paper, we present Title2Event, a large-scale sentence-level dataset benchmarking Open Event Extraction without restricting event types. Title2Event contains more than 42,000 news titles in 34 topics collected from Chinese web pages. To the best of our knowledge, it is currently the largest manually annotated Chinese dataset for open event extraction. We further conduct experiments on Title2Event with different models and show that the characteristics of titles make it challenging for event extraction, addressing the significance of advanced study on this problem. The dataset and baseline codes are available at https://open-event-hub.github.io/title2event.

Title2Event: Benchmarking Open Event Extraction with a Large-scale Chinese Title Dataset

General pre-trained language models (PLMs), such as BERT, have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks. Recently, domain-specific PLMs have been proposed to boost the task performance of specific domains (e.g., biomedical and computer science) by continuing to pre-train general PLMs with domain-specific corpora. However, this domain-adaptive pre-training (DAPT \cite{DBLP:conf/acl/GururanganMSLBD20}) tends to forget the previous general knowledge acquired by general PLMs, which leads to a \emph{catastrophic forgetting} phenomenon and sub-optimal performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose a new framework of \textbf{M}emory-\textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{P}re-trained Language Model (\textbf{MAP}), which augments the domain-specific PLM by a memory built from the frozen general PLM without losing the general knowledge. Specifically, we propose a new memory-augmented layer, and based on it, different augmentation strategies are explored to build memory and fusion memory into domain-specific PLM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MAP on different domains (biomedical and computer science publications, news, and reviews) and different kinds (text classification, QA, NER) of tasks, and the extensive results show that the proposed MAP can achieve SOTA results on these tasks.

G-MAP: General Memory-Augmented Pre-trained Language Model for Domain Tasks

Despite the recent success of large pretrained language models in NLP, they are susceptible to adversarial examples. Concurrently, several studies on adversarial images have observed an intriguing property: the adversarial images tend to leave the low-dimensional natural data manifold. In this study, we find a similar phenomenon occurs in the contextualized embedding space of natural sentences induced by pretrained language models in which textual adversarial examples tend to have their embeddings diverge off the manifold of natural sentence embeddings. Based on this finding, we propose Textual Manifold-based Defense (TMD), a defense mechanism that learns the embedding space manifold of the underlying language model and projects novel inputs back to the approximated structure before classification. Through extensive experiments, we find that our method consistently and significantly outperforms previous defenses under various attack settings while remaining unaffected to the clean accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first kind of manifold-based defense adapted to the NLP domain.

Textual Manifold-based Defense Against Natural Language Adversarial Examples

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have been widely used by mobile phone intelligent assistants to accomplish tasks such as calendar scheduling or hotel reservation. Current TOD systems usually focus on multi-turn text/speech interaction, then they would call back-end APIs designed for TODs to perform the task. However, this API-based architecture greatly limits the information-searching capability of intelligent assistants and may even lead to task failure if TOD-specific APIs are not available or the task is too complicated to be executed by the provided APIs. In this paper, we propose a new TOD architecture: GUI-based task-oriented dialogue system (GUI-TOD). A GUI-TOD system can directly perform GUI operations on real APPs and execute tasks without invoking TOD-specific backend APIs. Furthermore, we release META-GUI, a dataset for training a Multi-modal convErsaTional Agent on mobile GUI. We also propose a multi-model action prediction and response model, which show promising results on META-GUI. The dataset, codes and leaderboard are publicly available.

META-GUI: Towards Multi-modal Conversational Agents on Mobile GUI

Recent years have witnessed the prevalent application of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in NLP. From the perspective of parameter space, PLMs provide generic initialization, starting from which high-performance minima could be found. Although plenty of works have studied how to effectively and efficiently adapt PLMs to high-performance minima, little is known about the connection of various minima reached under different adaptation configurations. In this paper, we investigate the geometric connections of different minima through the lens of mode connectivity, which measures whether two minima can be connected with a low-loss path. We conduct empirical analyses to investigate three questions: (1) how could hyperparameters, specific tuning methods, and training data affect PLM's mode connectivity? (2) How does mode connectivity change during pre-training? (3) How does the PLM's task knowledge change along the path connecting two minima? In general, exploring the mode connectivity of PLMs conduces to understanding the geometric connection of different minima, which may help us fathom the inner workings of PLM downstream adaptation. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/Mode-Connectivity-PLM.

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