United Arab Emirates

Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering (OK-VQA) is a challenging VQA task that requires retrieval of external knowledge to answer questions about images. Recent OK-VQA systems use Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) to retrieve documents from external knowledge bases, such as Wikipedia, but with DPR trained separately from answer generation, introducing a potential limit on the overall system performance.
Instead, we propose a joint training scheme which includes differentiable DPR integrated with answer generation so that the system can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. Our experiments show that our scheme outperforms recent OK-VQA systems with strong DPR for retrieval. We also introduce new diagnostic metrics to analyze how retrieval and generation interact. The strong retrieval ability of our model significantly reduces the number of retrieved documents needed in training, yielding significant benefits in answer quality and computation required for training.

EMNLP 2022

Retrieval Augmented Visual Question Answering with Outside Knowledge

knowledge-based visual question answering

retrieval augmented generation

dense passage retrieval

## 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.

poster

Discriminative pre-trained language models (PrLMs) can be generalized as denoising auto-encoders that work with two procedures, ennoising and denoising. First, an ennoising process corrupts texts with arbitrary noising functions to construct training instances. Then, a denoising language model is trained to restore the corrupted tokens. Existing studies have made progress by optimizing independent strategies of either ennoising or denosing. They treat training instances equally throughout the training process, with little attention on the individual contribution of those instances. To model explicit signals of instance contribution, this work proposes to estimate the complexity of restoring the original sentences from corrupted ones in language model pre-training. The estimations involve the corruption degree in the ennoising data construction process and the prediction confidence in the denoising counterpart. Experimental results on natural language understanding and reading comprehension benchmarks show that our approach improves pre-training efficiency, effectiveness, and robustness. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cooelf/InstanceReg.

Instance Regularization for Discriminative Language Model Pre-training

Prompt-based tuning has been proven effective for pretrained language models (PLMs). While most of the existing work focuses on the monolingual prompts, we study the multilingual prompts for multilingual PLMs, especially in the zero-shot cross-lingual setting. To alleviate the effort of designing different prompts for multiple languages, we propose a novel model that uses a unified prompt for all languages, called UniPrompt. Different from the discrete prompts and soft prompts, the unified prompt is model-based and language-agnostic. Specifically, the unified prompt is initialized by a multilingual PLM to produce language-independent representation, after which is fused with the text input. During inference, the prompts can be pre-computed so that no extra computation cost is needed. To collocate with the unified prompt, we propose a new initialization method for the target label word to further improve the model's transferability across languages. Extensive experiments show that our proposed methods can significantly outperform the strong baselines across different languages. We release data and code to facilitate future research.

Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer of Prompt-based Tuning with a Unified Multilingual Prompt

Recent unsupervised topic modelling ap-
proaches that use clustering techniques on
word, token or document embeddings can ex-
tract coherent topics. A common limitation
of such approaches is that they reveal noth-
ing about inter-topic relationships which are
essential in many real-world application do-
mains. We present an unsupervised topic mod-
elling method which harnesses Topological
Data Analysis (TDA) to extract a topological
skeleton of the manifold upon which contextu-
alised word embeddings lie. We demonstrate
that our approach, which performs on par with
a recent baseline, is able to construct a network
of coherent topics together with meaningful
relationships between them.

Topic Modeling With Topological Data Analysis

Users expect their queries to be answered by search systems, regardless of the query's surface form, which include keyword queries and natural questions. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components of Search and QA systems may fail to correctly interpret semantically equivalent inputs if this deviates from how the system was trained, leading to suboptimal understanding capabilities. We propose the keyword-question rewriting task to improve query understanding capabilities of NLU systems for all surface forms. To achieve this, we present CycleKQR, an unsupervised approach, enabling effective rewriting between keyword and question queries using non-parallel data.

Empirically we show the impact on QA performance of unfamiliar query forms for open domain and Knowledge Base QA systems (trained on either keywords or natural language questions). We demonstrate how CycleKQR significantly improves QA performance by rewriting queries into the appropriate form, while at the same time retaining the original semantic meaning of input queries, allowing CycleKQR to improve performance by up to 3% over supervised baselines. Finally, we release a dataset
of 66k keyword-question pairs.

CycleKQR: Unsupervised Bidirectional Keyword-Question Rewriting

The use of emojis affords a visual modality to, often private, textual communication.
The task of predicting emojis however provides a challenge for machine learning as emoji use tends to cluster into the frequently used and the rarely used emojis.
Much of the machine learning research on emoji use has focused on high resource languages and has conceptualised the task of predicting emojis around traditional server-side machine learning approaches.
However, traditional machine learning approaches for private communication can introduce privacy concerns, as these approaches require all data to be transmitted to a central storage.
In this paper, we seek to address the dual concerns of emphasising high resource languages for emoji prediction and risking the privacy of people's data.
We introduce a new dataset of 118k tweets (augmented from 25k unique tweets) for emoji prediction in Hindi, and propose a modification to the federated learning algorithm, CausalFedGSD, which aims to strike a balance between model performance and user privacy. We show that our approach obtains comparative scores with more complex centralised models while reducing the amount of data required to optimise the models and minimising risks to user privacy.

A Federated Approach to Predicting Emojis in Hindi Tweets

NLP benchmarks have largely focused on short texts, such as sentences and paragraphs, even though long texts comprise a considerable amount of natural language in the wild. We introduce SCROLLS, a suite of tasks that require reasoning over long texts. We examine existing long-text datasets, and handpick ones where the text is naturally long, while prioritizing tasks that involve synthesizing information across the input. SCROLLS contains summarization, question answering, and natural language inference tasks, covering multiple domains, including literature, science, business, and entertainment. Initial baselines, including Longformer Encoder-Decoder, indicate that there is ample room for improvement on SCROLLS. We make all datasets available in a unified text-to-text format and host a live leaderboard to facilitate research on model architecture and pretraining methods.

SCROLLS: Standardized CompaRison Over Long Language Sequences

Modeling the ideological perspectives of political actors is an essential task in computational political science with applications in many downstream tasks. Existing approaches are generally limited to textual data and voting records, while they neglect the rich social context and valuable expert knowledge for holistic ideological analysis. In this paper, we propose PAR, a Political Actor Representation learning framework that jointly leverages social context and expert knowledge. Specifically, we retrieve and extract factual statements about legislators to leverage social context information. We then construct a heterogeneous information network to incorporate social context and use relational graph neural networks to learn legislator representations. Finally, we train PAR with three objectives to align representation learning with expert knowledge, model ideological stance consistency, and simulate the echo chamber phenomenon. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAR is better at augmenting political text understanding and successfully advances the state-of-the-art in political perspective detection and roll call vote prediction. Further analysis proves that PAR learns representations that reflect the political reality and provide new insights into political behavior.

PAR: Political Actor Representation Learning with Social Context and Expert Knowledge

The popularity of multimodal dialogue has stimulated the need for a new generation of dialogue agents with multimodal interactivity.
When users communicate with customer service, they may express their requirements by means of text, images, or even videos. 
Visual information usually acts as discriminators for product models, or indicators of product failures, which play an important role in the E-commerce scenario.
On the other hand, detailed information provided by the images is limited, and typically, customer service systems cannot understand the intent of users without the input text.
Thus, bridging the gap between the image and text is crucial for communicating with customers.
In this paper, we construct JDDC 2.1, a large-scale multimodal multi-turn dialogue dataset collected from a mainstream Chinese E-commerce platform, containing about 246K dialogue sessions, 3M utterances, and 507K images, along with product knowledge bases and image category annotations. 
Over our dataset, we jointly define four tasks: 
the multimodal dialogue response generation task,
the multimodal query rewriting task, the multimodal dialogue discourse parsing task, and the multimodal dialogue summarization task.
JDDC 2.1 is the first corpus with annotations for all the above tasks over the same dialogue sessions, which facilitates the comprehensive research around the dialogue.
In addition, we present several text-only and multimodal baselines and show the importance of visual information for these tasks. Our dataset and implements will be publicly available.

JDDC 2.1: A Multimodal Chinese Dialogue Dataset with Joint Tasks of Query Rewriting, Response Generation, Discourse Parsing, and Summarization

Current end-to-end retrieval-based dialogue systems are mainly based on Recurrent Neural Networks or Transformers with attention 
mechanisms. Although promising results have been achieved, these models often suffer from slow inference or huge number of parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight fully convolutional architecture, called DialogConv, for response selection. DialogConv is exclusively built on top of convolution to extract matching features of context and response. Dialogues are modeled in 3D views, where DialogConv performs convolution operations on embedding view, word view and utterance view to capture richer semantic information from multiple contextual views. On the four benchmark datasets, compared with state-of-the-art baselines, DialogConv is on average about 8.5x smaller in size, and 79.39x and 10.64x faster on CPU and GPU devices, respectively. At the same time, DialogConv achieves the competitive effectiveness of response selection.

DialogConv: A Lightweight Fully Convolutional Network for Multi-view Response Selection

Dependency-based approaches to syntactic analysis assume that syntactic structure can be analyzed in terms of binary asymmetric dependency relations holding between elementary syntactic units. Computational models for dependency parsing almost universally assume that an elementary syntactic unit is a word, while the influential theory of Lucien Tesnière instead posits a more abstract notion of nucleus, which may be realized as one or more words. In this article, we investigate the effect of enriching computational parsing models with a concept of nucleus inspired by Tesnière. We begin by reviewing how the concept of nucleus can be defined in the framework of Universal Dependencies, which has become the de facto standard for training and evaluating supervised dependency parsers, and explaining how composition functions can be used to make neural transition-based dependency parsers aware of the nuclei thus defined. We then perform an extensive experimental study, using data from 20 languages to assess the impact of nucleus composition across languages with different typological characteristics, and employing a variety of analytical tools including ablation, linear mixed-effects models, diagnostic classifiers and dimensionality reduction. The analysis reveals that nucleus composition gives small but consistent improvements in parsing accuracy for most languages, and that the improvement mainly concerns the analysis of main predicates, nominal dependents, clausal dependents and coordination structures. Significant factors explaining the rate of improvement across languages include entropy in coordination structures and frequency of certain function words, in particular determiners. Analysis using dimensionality reduction and diagnostic classifiers suggests that nucleus composition increases the similarity of vectors representing nuclei of the same syntactic type.

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Instance Regularization for Discriminative Language Model Pre-training

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Entity-Focused Dense Passage Retrieval for Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering