United Arab Emirates

Overconfidence has been shown to impair generalization and calibration of a neural network. Previous studies remedy this issue by adding a regularization term to a loss function, preventing a model from making a peaked distribution. Label smoothing smoothes target labels with a pre-defined prior label distribution; as a result, a model is learned to maximize the likelihood of predicting the soft label. Nonetheless, the amount of smoothing is the same in all samples and remains fixed in training. In other words, label smoothing does not reflect the change in probability distribution mapped by a model over the course of training. To address this issue, we propose a regularization scheme that brings dynamic nature into the smoothing parameter by taking model probability distribution into account, thereby varying the parameter per instance. A model in training self-regulates the extent of smoothing on the fly during forward propagation. Furthermore, inspired by recent work in bridging label smoothing and knowledge distillation, our work utilizes self-knowledge as a prior label distribution in softening target labels, and presents theoretical support for the regularization effect by knowledge distillation and the dynamic smoothing parameter. Our regularizer is validated comprehensively, and the result illustrates marked improvements in model generalization and calibration, enhancing robustness and trustworthiness of a model.

EMNLP 2022

Adaptive Label Smoothing with Self-Knowledge in Natural Language Generation

self-knowledge

adaptive label smoothing

regularization

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

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.

Abstractive summarization models often generate inconsistent summaries containing factual errors or hallucinated content. Recent works focus on correcting factual errors in generated summaries via post-editing. Such correction models are trained using adversarial non-factual summaries constructed using heuristic rules for injecting errors. However, generating non-factual summaries using heuristics often does not generalize well to actual model errors. In this work, we propose to generate hard, representative synthetic examples of non-factual summaries through infilling language models. With this data, we train a more robust fact-correction model to post-edit the summaries to improve factual consistency. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments on two popular summarization datasets--- CNN/DM and XSum---we show that our approach vastly outperforms prior methods in correcting erroneous summaries. Our model---FactEdit---improves factuality scores by over ~11 points 
on CNN/DM and over ~31 points on XSum on average across multiple summarization models, producing more factual summaries while maintaining competitive summarization quality.

Correcting Diverse Factual Errors in Abstractive Summarization via Post-Editing and Language Model Infilling

We test the hypothesis that discourse predictability influences Hindi syntactic choice. While prior work has shown that a number of factors (e.g., information status, dependency length, and syntactic surprisal) influence Hindi word order preferences, the role of discourse predictability is underexplored in the literature. Inspired by prior work on syntactic priming, we investigate how the words and syntactic structures in a sentence influence the word order of the following sentences. Specifically, we extract sentences from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB), permute the preverbal constituents of those sentences, and build a classifier to predict which sentences actually occurred in the corpus against artificially generated distractors. The classifier uses a number of discourse-based features and cognitive features to make its predictions, including dependency length, surprisal, and information status. We find that information status and LSTM-based discourse predictability influence word order choices, especially for non-canonical object-fronted orders. We conclude by situating our results within the broader syntactic priming literature.

Discourse Context Predictability Effects in Hindi Word Order

Existing multimodal tasks mostly target at the complete input modality setting, i.e., each modality is either complete or completely missing in both training and test sets. However, the randomly missing situations have still been underexplored. In this paper, we present a novel approach named MM-Align to address the missing-modality inference problem. Concretely, we propose 1) an alignment dynamics learning module based on the theory of optimal transport (OT) for missing data imputation; 2) a denoising training algorithm to enhance the quality of imputation as well as the accuracy of model predictions. Compared with previous generative methods which devote to restoring the missing inputs, MM-Align learns to capture and imitate the alignment dynamics between modality sequences. Results of comprehensive experiments on two multimodal tasks empirically demonstrate that our method can perform more accurate and faster inference and alleviate the overfitting issue under different missing conditions.

MM-Align: Learning Optimal Transport-based Alignment Dynamics for Fast and Accurate Inference on Missing Modality Sequences

A large body of recent work highlights the fallacies of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer (ZS-XLT) with large multilingual language models. Namely, their performance varies substantially for different target languages and is the weakest where needed the most: for low-resource languages distant to the source language. One remedy is few-shot transfer (FS-XLT), where leveraging only a few task-annotated instances in the target language(s) may yield sizable performance gains. However, FS-XLT also succumbs to large variation, as models easily overfit to the small datasets. In this work, we present a systematic study focused on a spectrum of FS-XLT fine-tuning regimes, analyzing key properties such as effectiveness, (in)stability, and modularity. We conduct extensive experiments on both higher-level (NLI, paraphrasing) and lower-level tasks (NER, POS), presenting new FS-XLT strategies that yield both improved and more stable FS-XLT across the board. 
Our findings challenge established FS-XLT methods: e.g., we propose to replace sequential fine-tuning with joint fine-tuning on source and target language instances, offering consistent gains with different number of shots (including resource-rich scenarios). We also show that further gains can be achieved with multi-stage FS-XLT training in which joint multilingual fine-tuning precedes the bilingual source-target specialization.

Don't Stop Fine-Tuning: On Training Regimes for Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer with Multilingual Language Models

We study compositional generalization, which aims to generalize on unseen combinations of seen structural elements, for code search. Unlike existing approaches of partially pursuing this goal, we study how to extract structural elements, which we name a template that directly targets compositional generalization. Thus we propose CTBERT, or Code Template BERT, representing codes using automatically extracted templates as building blocks. We empirically validate CTBERT on two public code search benchmarks, AdvTest and CSN. Further, we show that templates are complementary to data flow graphs in GraphCodeBERT, by enhancing structural context around variables.

Towards Compositional Generalization in Code Search

The climate impact of AI, and NLP research in particular, has become a serious issue given the enormous amount of energy that is increasingly being used for training and running computational models. Consequently, increasing focus is placed on efficient NLP. However, this important initiative lacks simple guidelines that would allow for systematic climate reporting of NLP research. We argue that this deficiency is one of the reasons why very few publications in NLP report key figures that would allow a more thorough examination of environmental impact, and present a quantitative survey to demonstrate this. As a remedy, we propose a climate performance model card with the primary purpose of being practically usable with only limited information about experiments and the underlying computer hardware. We describe why this step is essential to increase awareness about the environmental impact of NLP research and, thereby, paving the way for more thorough discussions.

Towards Climate Awareness in NLP Research

The Architectural Bottleneck Principle

In this work, we investigate transfer learning from semantic role labeling (SRL) to event argument extraction (EAE), considering their similar argument structures. We view the extraction task as a role querying problem, unifying various methods into a single framework. There are key discrepancies on role labels and distant arguments between semantic role and event argument annotations. To mitigate these discrepancies, we specify natural language-like queries to tackle the label mismatch problem and devise argument augmentation to recover distant arguments. We show that SRL annotations can serve as a valuable resource for EAE, and a template-based slot querying strategy is especially effective for facilitating the transfer. In extensive evaluations on two English EAE benchmarks, our proposed model obtains impressive zero-shot results by leveraging SRL annotations, reaching nearly 80% of the fullysupervised scores. It further provides benefits in low-resource cases, where few EAE annotations are available. Moreover, we show that our approach generalizes to cross-domain and multilingual scenarios.

Transfer Learning from Semantic Role Labeling to Event Argument Extraction with Template-based Slot Querying

Large NLP models have recently shown impressive performance in language understanding tasks, typically evaluated by their fine-tuned performance. Alternatively, probing has received increasing attention as being a lightweight method for interpreting the intrinsic mechanisms of large NLP models. In probing, post-hoc classifiers are trained on "out-of-domain" datasets that diagnose specific abilities. While probing the language models has led to insightful findings, they appear disjointed from the development of models. This paper explores the utility of probing deep NLP models to extract a proxy signal widely used in model development -- the fine-tuning performance. We find that it is possible to use the accuracies of only three probing tests to predict the fine-tuning performance with errors 40% - 80% smaller than baselines. We further discuss possible avenues where probing can empower the development of deep NLP models.

Predicting Fine-Tuning Performance with Probing

There is a growing interest in dataset generation recently due to the superior generative capacity of large pre-trained language models (PLMs). In this paper, we study a flexible and efficient zero-short learning method, ZeroGen.
Given a zero-shot task, we first generate a dataset from scratch using PLMs in an unsupervised manner. Then, we train a tiny task model (e.g., LSTM) under the supervision of the synthesized dataset. This approach allows highly efficient inference as the final task model only has orders of magnitude fewer parameters comparing to PLMs (e.g., GPT2-XL).
Apart from being annotation-free and efficient, we argue that ZeroGen can also provide useful insights from the perspective of data-free model-agnostic knowledge distillation, and unreferenced text generation evaluation. 
Experiments and analysis on different NLP tasks, namely, text classification, question answering, and natural language inference, show the effectiveness of ZeroGen.

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