United Arab Emirates

As polarization continues to rise among both the public and the news media, increasing attention has been devoted to detecting media bias. Most recent work in the NLP community, however, identify bias at the level of individual articles. However, each article itself comprises multiple sentences, which vary in their ideological bias. In this paper, we aim to identify sentences within an article that can illuminate and explain the overall bias of the entire article. We show that understanding the discourse role of a sentence in telling a news story, as well as its relation with nearby sentences, can reveal the ideological leanings of an author even when the sentence itself appears merely neutral. In particular, we consider using a functional news discourse structure and PDTB discourse relations to inform bias sentence identification, and distill the auxiliary knowledge from the two types of discourse structure into our bias sentence identification system. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that incorporating both the global functional discourse structure and local rhetorical discourse relations can effectively increase the recall of bias sentence identification by 8.27% - 8.62%, as well as increase the precision by 2.82% - 3.48%.

EMNLP 2022

Sentence-level Media Bias Analysis Informed by Discourse Structures

media bias

discourse structures

knowledge distillation

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
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The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.

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***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.

Though linguistic knowledge emerges during large-scale language model pretraining, recent work attempt to explicitly incorporate human-defined linguistic priors into task-specific fine-tuning. Infusing language models with syntactic or semantic knowledge from parsers has shown improvements on many language understanding tasks. To further investigate the effectiveness of structural linguistic priors, we conduct empirical study of replacing parsed graphs or trees with trivial ones (rarely carrying linguistic knowledge e.g., balanced tree) for tasks in the GLUE benchmark. Encoding with trivial graphs achieves competitive or even better performance in fully-supervised and few-shot settings. It reveals that the gains might not be significantly attributed to explicit linguistic priors but rather to more feature interactions brought by fusion layers. Hence we call for attention to using trivial graphs as necessary baselines to design advanced knowledge fusion methods in the future.

An Empirical Revisiting of Linguistic Knowledge Fusion in Language Understanding Tasks

Prompt-based learning (a.k.a. prompting) achieves high performance by bridging the gap between the objectives of language modeling and downstream tasks. Domain generalization ability can be improved by prompting since classification across different domains can be unified into the prediction of the same set of label words. The remaining challenge for domain generalization by prompting comes from discrepancies between the data distribution of different domains. To improve domain generalization with prompting, we learn distributional invariance across source domains via two alignment regularization loss functions. The first is vocabulary distribution alignment, which uses a Kullback-Leibler divergence regularization on source-domain vocabulary distributions. The second is feature distribution alignment, which uses a novel adversarial training strategy to learn domain invariant representation across source domains. Experiments on sentiment analysis and natural language inference show the effectiveness of our method and achieve state-of-the-art results on six datasets.

Prompt-based Distribution Alignment for Domain Generalization in Text Classification

Domain-adaptive pre-training (or DA-training for short), also known as post-training, aims
to train a pre-trained general-purpose language model (LM) using an unlabeled corpus of a
particular domain to adapt the LM so that end-tasks in the domain can give improved performances. However, existing DA-training methods are in some sense blind as they do not explicitly identify what knowledge in the LM should be preserved and what should be changed by the domain corpus. This paper shows that the existing methods are suboptimal and proposes a novel method to perform a more informed adaptation of the knowledge in the LM by (1) soft-masking the attention heads based on their importance to best preserve the general knowledge in the LM and (2) contrasting the representations of the general and the full (both general and domain knowledge) to learn an integrated representation with both general and domain-specific knowledge. Experimental results will demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Adapting a Language Model While Preserving its General Knowledge

A graph is a suitable data structure to represent the structural information of text. Recently, multi-hop question answering (MHQA) tasks, which require inter-paragraph/sentence linkages, have come to exploit such properties of a graph. Previous approaches to MHQA relied on leveraging the graph information along with the pre-trained language model (PLM) encoders. However, this trend exhibits the following drawbacks: (i) sample inefficiency while training in a low-resource setting; (ii) lack of reusability due to changes in the model structure or input. Our work proposes the Graph-Induced Transformer (GIT) that applies graph-derived attention patterns directly into a PLM, without the need to employ external graph modules. GIT can leverage the useful inductive bias of graphs while retaining the unperturbed Transformer structure and parameters. Our experiments on HotpotQA successfully demonstrate both the sample efficient characteristic of GIT and its capacity to replace the graph modules while preserving model performance.

Graph-Induced Transformers for Efficient Multi-Hop Question Answering

Teaching neural models to generate narrative coherent texts is a critical problem. Recent pre-trained language models have achieved promising results, but there is still a gap between human written texts and machine-generated outputs. In this work, we propose a novel multi-task training strategy for long text generation grounded on the cognitive theory of writing, which empowers the model to learn essential subskills needed for writing including planning and reviewing besides end-to-end generation. 
We extensively evaluate our model on three open-ended generation tasks including story generation, news article writing and argument generation. Experiments show that our model achieves better results on both few-shot and fully-supervised settings than strong baselines, and human evaluations confirm that our model can generate more coherent outputs.

MOCHA: A Multi-Task Training Approach for Coherent Text Generation from Cognitive Perspective

Argument mining (AM) is a challenging task as it requires recognizing the complex argumentation structures involving multiple subtasks.
To handle all subtasks of AM in an end-to-end fashion, previous works generally transform AM into a dependency parsing task.
However, such methods largely require complex pre- and post-processing to realize the task transformation.
In this paper, we investigate the end-to-end AM task from a novel perspective by proposing a generative framework, in which the expected outputs of AM are framed as a simple target sequence. 
Then, we employ a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language model with a constrained pointer mechanism (CPM) to model the clues for all the subtasks of AM in the light of the target sequence. Furthermore, we devise a reconstructed positional encoding (RPE) to alleviate the order biases induced by the autoregressive generation paradigm.
Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two AM benchmarks.

A Generative Model for End-to-End Argument Mining with Reconstructed Positional Encoding and Constrained Pointer Mechanism

In a practical real-world scenario, the longstanding goal is that a universal multilingual translation model can be incrementally updated when new language pairs arrive. Specifically, the initial vocabulary only covers some of the words in new languages, which hurts the translation quality for incremental learning. Although existing approaches attempt to address this issue by replacing the original vocabulary with a rebuilt vocabulary or constructing independent language-specific vocabularies, these methods can not meet the following three demands simultaneously: (1) High translation quality for original and incremental languages, (2) low cost for model training, (3) low time overhead for preprocessing. In this work, we propose an entropy-based vocabulary substitution (EVS) method that just needs to walk through new language pairs for incremental learning in a large-scale multilingual data updating while remaining the size of the vocabulary. Our method has access to learn new knowledge from updated training samples incrementally while keeping high translation quality for original language pairs, alleviating the issue of catastrophic forgetting. Results of experiments show that EVS can achieve better performance and save excess overhead for incremental learning in the multilingual machine translation task.

Entropy-Based Vocabulary Substitution for Incremental Learning in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Negative samples have not been efficiently explored in multilingual dense passage retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel multilingual dense passage retrieval framework, mHFN, to recover and utilize hard and false negative samples. mHFN consists of three key components: 1) a multilingual hard negative sample augmentation module that allows knowledge of indistinguishable passages to be shared across multiple languages and synthesizes new hard negative samples by interpolating representations of queries and existing hard negative samples, 2) a multilingual negative sample cache queue that stores negative samples from previous batches in each language to increase the number of multilingual negative samples used in training beyond the batch size limit, and 3) a lightweight adaptive false negative sample filter that uses generated pseudo labels to separate unlabeled false negative samples and converts them into positive passages in training. We evaluate mHFN on Mr. TyDi, a high-quality multilingual dense passage retrieval dataset covering eleven typologically diverse languages, and experimental results show that mHFN outperforms strong sparse, dense and hybrid baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on all languages. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Magnetic2014/mHFN.

Recovering Gold from Black Sand: Multilingual Dense Passage Retrieval with Hard and False Negative Samples

Human variation in labeling is often considered noise. Annotation projects for machine learning (ML) aim at minimizing human label variation, with the assumption to maximize data quality and in turn optimize and maximize machine learning metrics. However, this
conventional practice assumes that there exists a *ground truth*, and neglects that there exists genuine human variation in labeling due to disagreement, subjectivity in annotation or multiple plausible answers.
In this position paper, we argue that this big open problem of \textit{human label variation} persists and critically needs more attention to move our field forward. This is because human label variation impacts all stages of the ML pipeline: *data, modeling and evaluation*. However, few works consider all of these dimensions jointly; and existing research is fragmented. We reconcile different previously proposed notions of human label variation, provide a repository of publicly-available datasets with un-aggregated labels, depict approaches proposed so far, identify gaps and suggest ways forward. As datasets are becoming increasingly available, we hope that this synthesized view on the ``problem'' will lead to an open discussion on possible strategies to devise fundamentally new directions.

The "Problem” of Human Label Variation: On Ground Truth in Data, Modeling and Evaluation

Flowchart grounded dialog systems converse with users by following a given flowchart and a corpus of FAQs. The existing state-of-the-art approach (Raghu et al, 2021) for learning such a dialog system, named FLONET, has two main limitations. (1) It uses a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework which represents a flowchart as a bag of nodes. By doing so, it loses the connectivity structure between nodes that can aid in better response generation. (2) Typically dialogs progress with the agent asking polar (Y/N) questions, but users often respond indirectly without the explicit use of polar words. In such cases, it fails to understand the correct polarity of the answer. To overcome these issues, we propose Structure-Aware FLONET (SA-FLONET) which infuses structural constraints derived from the connectivity structure of flowcharts into the RAG framework. It uses natural language inference to better predict the polarity of indirect Y/N answers. We find that SA-FLONET outperforms FLONET, with a success rate improvement of 68% and 123% in flowchart grounded response generation and zero-shot flowchart grounded response generation tasks respectively.

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