United Arab Emirates

Training a model to provide natural language explanations (NLEs) for its predictions usually requires the acquisition of task-specific NLEs, which is time- and resource-consuming. A potential solution is the few-shot out-of-domain transfer of NLEs from a parent task with many NLEs to a child task.
In this work, we examine the setup in which the child task has few NLEs but abundant labels. We establish four few-shot transfer learning methods that cover the possible fine-tuning combinations of the labels and NLEs for the parent and child tasks. We transfer explainability from a large natural language inference dataset (e-SNLI) separately to two child tasks: (1) hard cases of pronoun resolution, where we introduce the small-e-WinoGrande dataset of NLEs on top of the WinoGrande dataset, and (2)~commonsense validation (ComVE). Our results demonstrate that the parent task helps with NLE generation and we establish the best methods for this setup.

EMNLP 2022

Few-Shot Out-of-Domain Transfer Learning of Natural Language Explanations in a Label-Abundant Setup

explanation

language

transfer

## 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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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

Prompt tuning, or the conditioning of a frozen pretrained language model (PLM) with soft prompts learned from data, has demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. However, prompt tuning requires a large training dataset to be effective and is outperformed by finetuning the entire PLM in data-scarce regimes. Previous work (Gu et al., 2022, Vu et al., 2022) proposed to transfer soft prompts pretrained on the source domain to the target domain. In this paper, we explore domain adaptation for prompt tuning, a problem setting where unlabeled data from the target domain are available during pretraining. We propose bOosting Prompt TunIng with doMain Adaptation (OPTIMA), which regularizes the decision boundary to be smooth around regions where source and target data distributions are similar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OPTIMA significantly enhances the transferability and sample-efficiency of prompt tuning compared to strong baselines. Moreover, in few-shot settings, OPTIMA exceeds full-model tuning by a large margin.

Improving the Sample Efficiency of Prompt Tuning with Domain Adaptation

Phrase similarity is a key component of many NLP applications. Current phrase similarity methods focus on embedding the phrase itself and use the phrase context only during training of the pretrained model. To better leverage the information in the context, we propose McPhraSy (Multi-context Phrase Similarity), a novel algorithm for estimating the similarity of phrases based on multiple contexts. At inference time, McPhraSy represents each phrase by considering multiple contexts in which it appears and computes the similarity of two phrases by aggregating the pairwise similarities between the contexts of the phrases. Incorporating context during inference enables McPhraSy to outperform current state-of-the-art models on two phrase similarity datasets by up to 13.3%. Finally, we also present a new downstream task that relies on phrase similarity – keyphrase clustering – and create a new benchmark for it in the product reviews domain. We show that McPhraSy surpasses all other baselines for this task.

McPhraSy: Multi-Context Phrase Similarity and Clustering

Relation Extraction (RE) has attracted increasing attention, but current RE evaluation is limited to in-domain evaluation setups. Little is known on how well a RE system fares in challenging, but realistic out-of-distribution evaluation setups. To address this gap, we propose CrossRE, a new, freely-available cross-domain benchmark for RE, which comprises six distinct text domains and includes multi-label annotations. An additional innovation is that we release meta-data collected during annotation, to include explanations and flags of difficult instances. We provide an empirical evaluation with a state-of-the-art model for relation classification. As the meta-data enables us to shed new light on the state-of-the-art model, we provide a comprehensive analysis on the impact of difficult cases and find correlations between model and human annotations. Overall, our empirical investigation highlights the difficulty of cross-domain RE. We release our dataset, to spur more research in this direction.

CrossRE: A Cross-Domain Dataset for Relation Extraction

The logical reasoning capabilities of pre-trained language models have recently received much attention. As one of the vital reasoning paradigms, non-monotonic reasoning refers to the fact that conclusions may be invalidated with new information. Existing work has constructed a non-monotonic inference dataset $\delta$-NLI and explored the performance of language models on it. However, the $\delta$-NLI dataset is entangled with commonsense reasoning. In this paper, we explore the pure non-monotonic reasoning ability of pre-trained language models. 
We build a non-monotonic reasoning benchmark, named LogicNMR, with explicit default rules and iterative updates. In the experimental part, the performance of popular language models on LogicNMR is explored from the perspectives of accuracy, generalization, proof-based traceability and robustness. The experimental results show that even though the fine-tuned language models achieve an accuracy of more than 94.4\% on LogicNMR, they perform unsatisfactorily, with a significant drop, in generalization and proof-based traceability.

LogicNMR: Probing the Non-monotonic Reasoning Ability of Pre-trained Language Models

For humans and computers, the first step in answering an open-domain question is retrieving a set of relevant documents from a large corpus. However, the strategies that computers use fundamentally differ from those of humans. To better understand these differences, we design a gamified interface for data collection---Cheater's Bowl---where a human answers complex questions with access to both traditional and modern search tools. We collect a dataset of human search sessions, analyze human search strategies, and compare them to state-of-the-art multi-hop QA models. Humans query logically, apply dynamic search chains, and use world knowledge to boost searching. We demonstrate how human queries can improve the accuracy of existing systems and propose improving the future design of QA models.

Cheater's Bowl: Human vs. Computer Search Strategies for Open-Domain QA

Despite being able to generate fluent and grammatical text, current Seq2Seq summarization models still suffering from the unfaithful generation problem.
In this paper, we study the faithfulness of existing systems from a new perspective of factual robustness which is the ability to correctly generate factual information over adversarial unfaithful information.
We first measure a model's
factual robustness by its success rate to defend against adversarial attacks when generating factual information.
The factual robustness analysis on a wide range of current systems shows its good consistency with human judgments on faithfulness.
Inspired by these findings, we propose to improve the faithfulness of a model by enhancing its factual robustness.
Specifically, we propose a novel training strategy, namely FRSUM, which teaches the model to defend against both explicit adversarial samples and implicit factual adversarial perturbations.
Extensive automatic and human evaluation results show that FRSUM consistently improves the faithfulness of various Seq2Seq models, such as T5, BART.

FRSUM: Towards Faithful Abstractive Summarization via Enhancing Factual Robustness

Building dense retrievers requires a series of standard procedures, including training and validating neural models and creating indexes for efficient search. However, these procedures are often misaligned in that training objectives do not exactly reflect the retrieval scenario at inference time. In this paper, we explore how the gap between training and inference in dense retrieval can be reduced, focusing on dense phrase retrieval (Lee et al., 2021) where billions of representations are indexed at inference. Since validating every dense retriever with a large-scale index is practically infeasible, we propose an efficient way of validating dense retrievers using a small subset of the entire corpus. This allows us to validate various training strategies including unifying contrastive loss terms and using hard negatives for phrase retrieval, which largely reduces the training-inference discrepancy. As a result, we improve top-1 phrase retrieval accuracy by 2~3 points and top-20 passage retrieval accuracy by 2~4 points for open-domain question answering. Our work urges modeling dense retrievers with careful consideration of training and inference via efficient validation while advancing phrase retrieval as a general solution for dense retrieval.

Bridging the Training-Inference Gap for Dense Phrase Retrieval

Remembering important information from the past and continuing to talk about it in the present are crucial in long-term conversations. However, previous literature does not deal with cases where the memorized information is outdated, which may cause confusion in later conversations. To address this issue, we present a novel task and a corresponding dataset of memory management in long-term conversations, in which bots keep track of and bring up the latest information about users while conversing through multiple sessions. In order to support more precise and interpretable memory, we represent memory as unstructured text descriptions of key information and propose a new mechanism of memory management that selectively eliminates invalidated or redundant information. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the baselines that leave the stored memory unchanged in terms of engagingness and humanness, with larger performance gap especially in the later sessions.

Keep Me Updated! Memory Management in Long-term Conversations

The shift of public debate to the digital sphere has been accompanied by a rise in online hate speech. While many promising approaches for hate speech classification have been proposed, studies often focus only on a single language, usually English, and do not address three key concerns: post-deployment performance, classifier maintenance and infrastructural limitations. In this paper, we introduce a new human-in-the-loop BERT-based hate speech classification pipeline and trace its development from initial data collection and annotation all the way to post-deployment. Our classifier, trained using data from our original corpus of over 422k examples, is specifically developed for the inherently multilingual setting of Switzerland and outperforms with its F1 score of 80.5 the currently best-performing BERT-based multilingual classifier by 5.8 F1 points in German and 3.6 F1 points in French. Our systematic evaluations over a 12-month period further highlight the vital importance of continuous, human-in-the-loop classifier maintenance to ensure robust hate speech classification post-deployment.

Human-in-the-Loop Hate Speech Classification in a Multilingual Context

We seek to semantically describe a set of images, capturing both the attributes of single images and the variations within the set. Our procedure is analogous to Principle Component Analysis, in which the role of projection vectors is replaced with generated phrases. First, a centroid phrase that has the largest average semantic similarity to the images in the set is generated, where both the computation of the similarity and the generation are based on pretrained vision-language models. Then, the phrase that generates the highest variation among the similarity scores is generated, using the same models. The next phrase maximizes the variance subject to being orthogonal, in the latent space, to the highest-variance phrase, and the process continues. Our experiments show that our method is able to convincingly capture the essence of image sets and describe the individual elements in a semantically meaningful way within the context of the entire set. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/OdedH/textual-pca}.

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Improving the Sample Efficiency of Prompt Tuning with Domain Adaptation

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Few-Shot Out-of-Domain Transfer Learning of Natural Language Explanations in a Label-Abundant Setup

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