United Arab Emirates

It is unclear whether, how and where large pre-trained language models capture subtle linguistic traits like ambiguity, grammaticality and sentence complexity. We present results of automatic classification of these traits and compare their viability and patterns across representation types. We demonstrate that template-based datasets with surface-level artifacts should not be used for probing, careful comparisons with baselines should be done and that t-SNE plots should not be used to determine the presence of a feature among dense vectors representations. We also show how features might be highly localized in the layers for these models and get lost in the upper layers.

EMNLP 2022

Sentence Ambiguity, Grammaticality and Complexity Probes

grammaticality

language model probing

ambiguity

complexity

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

workshop paper

## 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.

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***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.

Hyperparameter tuning is important for achieving high accuracy in deep learning models, yet little interpretability work has focused on  hyperparameters. We propose to use the Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM), a glassbox method, as a post-hoc analysis tool for understanding how hyperparameters influence model accuracy. We present a case study on Transformer models in machine translation to illustrate the kinds of insights that may be gleaned, and perform extensive analysis to test the robustness of EBM under different data conditions. 

Post-Hoc Interpretation of Transformer Hyperparameters with Explainable Boosting Machines

Humans can systematically generalize to novel compositions of existing concepts. Recent studies argue that neural networks appear inherently ineffective in such cognitive capacity, leading to a pessimistic view and a lack of attention to optimistic results. We revisit this controversial topic from the perspective of meaningful learning, an exceptional capability of humans to learn novel concepts by connecting them with known ones. We reassess the compositional skills of sequence-to-sequence models conditioned on the semantic links between new and old concepts. Our observations suggest that models can successfully one-shot generalize to novel concepts and compositions through semantic linking, either inductively or deductively. We demonstrate that prior knowledge plays a key role as well. In addition to synthetic tests, we further conduct proof-of-concept experiments in machine translation and semantic parsing, showing the benefits of meaningful learning in applications. We hope our positive findings will encourage excavating modern neural networks' potential in systematic generalization through more advanced learning schemes.

Revisit Systematic Generalization via Meaningful Learning

Researchers often use games to analyze the abilities of Artificial Intelligence models. In this work, we use the game of Twenty Questions to study the world knowledge of language models. Despite its simplicity for humans, this game requires a broad knowledge of the world to answer yes/no questions. We evaluate several language models on this task and find that only the largest model has enough world knowledge to play it well, although it still has difficulties with the shape and size of objects. We also present a new method to improve the knowledge of smaller models by leveraging external information from the web. Finally, we release our dataset and Twentle, a website to interactively test the knowledge of language models by playing Twenty Questions.

Is It Smaller Than a Tennis Ball? Language Models Play the Game of Twenty Questions

Arabic is a Semitic language which is widely spoken with many dialects. Given the success of pre-trained language models, many transformer models trained on Arabic and its dialects have surfaced. While there have been an extrinsic evaluation of these models with respect to downstream NLP tasks, no work has been carried out to analyze and compare their internal representations. We probe how linguistic information is encoded in the transformer models, trained on different Arabic dialects. We perform a layer and neuron analysis on the models using morphological tagging tasks for different dialects of Arabic and a dialectal identification task. Our analysis enlightens interesting findings such as: i) word morphology is learned at the lower and middle layers, ii) while syntactic dependencies are predominantly captured at the higher layers, iii) despite a large overlap in their vocabulary, the MSA-based models fail to capture the nuances of Arabic dialects, iv) we found that neurons in embedding layers are polysemous in nature, while the neurons in middle layers are exclusive to specific properties.

Post-hoc analysis of Arabic transformer models

The automatic scoring of summaries is important as it guides the development of summarizers. Scoring is also complex, as it involves multiple aspects such as the fluency, grammar, and even textual entailment with the source text. However, summary scoring has not been considered as a machine learning task to study its accuracy and robustness. In this study, we place automatic scoring in the context of regression machine learning tasks and perform evasion attacks to explore its robustness. Attack systems predict a non-summary string from each input, and these non-summary strings achieve competitive scores with good summarizers on the most popular metrics: ROUGE, METEOR, and BERTScore. Attack systems also "outperform" state-of-the-art summarization methods on ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-L, and score the second-highest on METEOR. Furthermore, a BERTScore backdoor is observed: a simple trigger can score higher than any automatic summarization method. The evasion attacks in this work indicate the low robustness of current scoring systems at the system level. We hope that our highlighting of these proposed attack will facilitate the development of summary scores. 

Universal Evasion Attacks on Summarization Scoring

Although attention weights have been commonly used as a means to provide explanations for deep learning models, the approach has been widely criticized due to its lack of faithfulness. In this work, we present a simple approach to compute the newly proposed metric AtteFa, which can quantitatively represent the degree of faithfulness of the attention weights. Using this metric, we further validate the effect of the frequency of informative input elements and the use of contextual vs. non-contextual encoders on the faithfulness of the attention mechanism. Finally, we apply the approach on several real-life binary classification datasets to measure the faithfulness of attention weights in real-life settings.

How (Un)Faithful is Attention?

Multilingual NLP models provide potential solutions to the digital language divide, i.e., cross-language performance disparities. Early analyses of such models have indicated good performance across training languages and good generalization to unseen, related languages. 
This work examines whether, between related languages, multilingual models are equally right for the right reasons, i.e., if interpretability methods reveal that the models put emphasis on the same words as humans. To this end, we provide a new trilingual, parallel corpus of rationale annotations for English, Danish, and Italian sentiment analysis models and use it to benchmark models and interpretability methods. We propose rank-biased overlap as a better metric for comparing input token attributions to human rationale annotations. Our results show: (i) models generally perform well on the languages they are trained on, and align best with human rationales in these languages; (ii) performance is higher on English, even when not a source language, but this performance is not accompanied by higher alignment with human rationales, which suggests that language models favor English, but do not facilitate successful transfer of rationales.

Are Multilingual Sentiment Models Equally Right for the Right Reasons?

We investigate the extent to which verb alternation classes, as described by Levin (1993), are encoded in the embeddings of Large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) such as BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, and DeBERTa using selectively constructed diagnostic classifiers for word and sentence-level prediction tasks. We follow and expand upon the experiments of Kann et al. (2019), which aim to probe whether static embeddings encode frame-selectional properties of verbs. At both the word and sentence level, we find that contextual embeddings from PLMs not only outperform non-contextual embeddings, but achieve astonishingly high accuracies on tasks across most alternation classes. Additionally, we find evidence that the middle-to-upper layers of PLMs achieve better performance on average than the lower layers across all probing tasks.

Probing for Understanding of English Verb Classes and Alternations in Large Pre-trained Language Models

Multiple studies have shown that
  existing NMT systems demonstrate some kind of “gender bias”. As a result, MT output appears to err more
  often for feminine forms and to amplify social gender
  misrepresentations, which is potentially harmful to users and practioners of these technologies.
    
  This paper continues this line of investigations and reports results
  obtained with a new test set in strictly controlled
  conditions. This setting allows us to better understand the multiple
  inner mechanisms that are causing these biases, which include the
  linguistic expressions of gender, the unbalanced distribution of
  masculine and feminine forms in the language, the modelling of
  morphological variation and the training process dynamics. To
  counterbalance these effects, we formulate several proposals and
  notably show that modifying the training loss can effectively
  mitigate such biases.

Analyzing Gender Translation Errors to Identify Information Flows between the Encoder and Decoder of a NMT System

Models able to generate free-text rationales that explain their output have been proposed as an important step towards interpretable NLP for “reasoning” tasks such as natural language inference and commonsense question answering. However, the relative merits of different architectures and types of rationales are not well understood and hard to measure. In this paper, we contribute two insights to this line of research: First, we find that models trained on gold explanations learn to rely on these but, in the case of the more challenging question answering data set we use, fail when given generated explanations at test time. However, additional fine-tuning on generated explanations teaches the model to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information in explanations. Second, we compare explanations by a generation-only model to those generated by a self-rationalizing model and find that, while the former score higher in terms of validity, factual correctness, and similarity to gold explanations, they are not more useful for downstream classification. We observe that the self-rationalizing model is prone to hallucination, which is punished by most metrics but may add useful context for the classification step.

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