United Arab Emirates

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are found to exhibit discriminatory stereotypes across many social constructs, e.g. gender and race. In comparison to the progress made in reducing bias from static word embeddings, fairness in sentence-level text encoders received little consideration despite their wider applicability in contemporary NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose a debiasing method for pre-trained text encoders that both reduces social stereotypes, and inflicts next to no semantic damage. Unlike previous studies that directly manipulate the embeddings, we suggest to dive deeper into the operation of these encoders, and pay more attention to the way they pay attention to different social groups. We find that stereotypes are also encoded in the attention layer. Then, we work on model debiasing by redistributing the attention scores of a text encoder such that it forgets any preference to historically advantaged groups, and attends to all social classes with the same intensity. Our experiments confirm that reducing bias from attention effectively mitigates it from the model&#39;s text representations.

EMNLP 2022

Debiasing Pretrained Text Encoders by Paying Attention to Paying Attention

social bias mitigation

text encoders

social bias

attention

fairness

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are found to exhibit discriminatory stereotypes across many social constructs, e.g. gender and race. In comparison to the progress made in reducing bias from static word embeddings, fairness in sentence-level text encoders received little consideration despite their wider applicability in contemporary NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose a debiasing method for pre-trained text encoders that both reduces social stereotypes, and inflicts next to no semantic damage. Unlike previous studies that directly manipulate the embeddings, we suggest to dive deeper into the operation of these encoders, and pay more attention to the way they pay attention to different social groups. We find that stereotypes are also encoded in the attention layer. Then, we work on model debiasing by redistributing the attention scores of a text encoder such that it forgets any preference to historically advantaged groups, and attends to all social classes with the same intensity. Our experiments confirm that reducing bias from attention effectively mitigates it from the model's text representations.

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.

Can we teach models designed for language understanding tasks to track and improve their beliefs through intermediate points in text? Besides making their inner workings more transparent, this would also help make models more reliable and consistent. To this end, we propose a representation learning framework called breakpoint modeling that allows for efficient and robust learning of this type. Given any text encoder and data marked with intermediate states (breakpoints) along with corresponding textual queries viewed as true/false propositions (i.e., the candidate intermediate beliefs of a model), our approach trains models in an efficient and end-to-end fashion to build intermediate representations that facilitate direct querying and training of beliefs at arbitrary points in text, alongside solving other end-tasks. We evaluate breakpoint modeling on a diverse set of NLU tasks including relation reasoning on Cluttr and narrative understanding on bAbI. Using novel proposition prediction tasks alongside these end-tasks, we show the benefit of our T5-based breakpoint transformer over strong conventional representation learning approaches in terms of processing efficiency, belief accuracy, and belief consistency, all with minimal to no degradation on the end-task. To show the feasibility of incorporating our belief tracker into more complex reasoning pipelines, we also obtain state-of-the-art performance on the three-tiered reasoning challenge for the recent TRIP benchmark (23-32% absolute improvement on Tasks 2-3).

Breakpoint Transformers for Modeling and Tracking Intermediate Beliefs

Relation Extraction (RE) is a fundamental task of information extraction, which has attracted a large amount of research attention. Previous studies focus on extracting the relations within a sentence or document, while currently researchers begin to explore cross-document RE. However, current cross-document RE methods directly utilize text snippets surrounding target entities in multiple given documents, which brings considerable noisy and non-relevant sentences. Moreover, they utilize all the text paths in a document bag in a coarse-grained way, without considering the connections between these text paths.In this paper, we aim to address both of these shortages and push the state-of-the-art for cross-document RE. First, we focus on input construction for our RE model and propose an entity-based document-context filter to retain useful information in the given documents by using the bridge entities in the text paths. Second, we propose a cross-document RE model based on cross-path entity relation attention, which allow the entity relations across text paths to interact with each other. We compare our cross-document RE method with the state-of-the-art methods in the dataset CodRED. Our method outperforms them by at least 10% in F1, thus demonstrating its effectiveness.

Entity-centered Cross-document Relation Extraction

Despite the great success of spoken language understanding (SLU) in high-resource languages, it remains challenging in low-resource languages mainly due to the lack of labeled training data. The recent multilingual code-switching approach achieves better alignments of model representations across languages by constructing a mixed-language context in zero-shot cross-lingual SLU. However, current code-switching methods are limited to implicit alignment and disregard the inherent semantic structure in SLU, i.e., the hierarchical inclusion of utterances, slots and words. In this paper, we propose to model the utterance-slot-word structure by a multi-level contrastive learning framework at the utterance, slot and word levels to facilitate explicit alignment. Novel code-switching schemes are introduced to generate hard negative examples for our contrastive learning framework. Furthermore, we develop a label-aware joint model leveraging label semantics to enhance the implicit alignment and feed to contrastive learning. Our experimental results show that our proposed methods significantly improve the performance compared with the strong baselines on two zero-shot cross-lingual SLU benchmark datasets.

Label-aware Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Cross-lingual Spoken Language Understanding

Mental disease detection (MDD) from social media has suffered from poor generalizability and 
interpretability, due to lack of symptom modeling. This paper introduces PsySym, the first annotated symptom identification corpus of multiple psychiatric disorders, to facilitate further research progress. PsySym is annotated according to a knowledge graph of the 38 symptom classes related to 7 mental diseases complied from established clinical manuals and scales, and a novel annotation framework for diversity and quality. Experiments show that symptom-assisted MDD enabled by PsySym can outperform strong pure-text baselines. We also exhibit the convincing MDD explanations provided by symptom predictions with case studies, and point to their further potential applications.

Symptom Identification for Interpretable Detection of Multiple Mental Disorders on Social Media

With the availability of massive general-domain dialogue data, pre-trained dialogue generation appears to be super appealing to transfer knowledge from the general domain to downstream applications. In most existing work, such transferable ability is mainly obtained by fitting a large model with hundreds of millions of parameters on massive data in an exhaustive way, leading to inefficient running and poor interpretability. This paper proposes a novel dialogue generation model with a latent structure that is easily transferable from the general domain to downstream tasks in a lightweight and transparent way. Experiments on two benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Thanks to the transferable latent structure, our model is able to yield better dialogue responses than four strong baselines in terms of both automatic and human evaluations, and our model with about 22% parameters particularly delivers a 5x speedup in running time compared with the strongest baseline. Moreover, the proposed model is explainable by interpreting the discrete latent variables.

Towards Efficient Dialogue Pre-training with Transferable and Interpretable Latent Structure

Multilingual neural machine translation aims to translate multiple language pairs in a single model and has shown great success thanks to the knowledge transfer across languages with the shared parameters. Despite promising, this share-all paradigm suffers from insufficient ability to capture language-specific features. Currently, the common practice is to insert or search language-specific networks to balance the shared and specific features. However, those two types of features are not sufficient enough to model the complex commonality and divergence across languages, such as the locally shared features among similar languages, which leads to sub-optimal transfer, especially in massively multilingual translation. In this paper, we propose a novel token-level feature mixing method that enables the model to capture different features and dynamically determine the feature sharing across languages. Based on the observation that the tokens in the multilingual model are usually shared by different languages, we we insert a feature mixing layer into each Transformer sublayer and model each token representation as a mix of different features, with a proportion indicating its feature preference. In this way, we can perform fine-grained feature sharing and achieve better multilingual transfer. Experimental results on multilingual datasets show that our method outperforms various strong baselines and can be extended to zero-shot translation. Further analyses reveal that our method can capture different linguistic features and bridge the representation gap across languages.

Adaptive Token-level Cross-lingual Feature Mixing for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

How to achieve neural machine translation with limited parallel data? Existing techniques often rely on large-scale monolingual corpus, which is impractical for some low-resource languages. In this paper, we turn to connect several low-resource languages to a particular high-resource one by additional visual modality. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal contrastive learning method to learn a shared space for all languages, where both a coarse-grained sentence-level objective and a fine-grained token-level one are introduced. Experimental results and further analysis show that our method can effectively learn the cross-modal and cross-lingual alignment with a small amount of image-text pairs, and achieves significant improvements over the text-only baseline under both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios.

Low-resource Neural Machine Translation with Cross-modal Alignment

Recent work on applying large language models (LMs) achieves impressive performance in many NLP applications. Adapting or posttraining an LM using an unlabeled domain corpus can produce even better performance for end-tasks in the domain. This paper proposes the problem of continually extending an LM by incrementally post-train the LM with a sequence of unlabeled domain corpora to expand its knowledge without forgetting its previous skills. The goal is to improve the few-shot end-task learning in these domains. The resulting system is called CPT (Continual PostTraining), which to our knowledge, is the first continual post-training system. Experimental results verify its effectiveness.

Continual Training of Language Models for Few-Shot Learning

We present DiscoSense, a benchmark for commonsense reasoning via understanding a wide variety of discourse connectives. We generate compelling distractors in DiscoSense using Conditional Adversarial Filtering, an extension of Adversarial Filtering that employs conditional generation. We show that state-of-the-art pre-trained language models struggle to perform well on DiscoSense, which makes this dataset ideal for evaluating next-generation commonsense reasoning systems.

DiscoSense: Commonsense Reasoning with Discourse Connectives

Indian Sign Language, though used by a diverse community, still lacks well-annotated resources for developing systems that would enable sign language processing. In recent years researchers have actively worked for sign languages like American Sign Languages, however, Indian Sign language is still far from data-driven tasks like machine translation. To address this gap, in this paper, we introduce a new dataset CISLR (Corpus for Indian Sign Language Recognition) for word-level recognition in Indian Sign Language using videos. The corpus has a large vocabulary of around 4700 words covering different topics and domains. Further, we propose a baseline model for word recognition from sign language videos. To handle the low resource problem in the Indian Sign Language, the proposed model consists of a prototype-based one-shot learner that leverages resource rich American Sign Language to learn generalized features for improving predictions in Indian Sign Language. Our experiments show that gesture features learned in another sign language can help perform one-shot predictions in CISLR.

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