Croatia

The recent explosion of question-answering (QA) datasets and models has increased the interest in the generalization of models across multiple domains and formats by either training on multiple datasets or combining multiple models. Despite the promising results of multi-dataset models, some domains or QA formats may require specific architectures, and thus the adaptability of these models might be limited. In addition, current approaches for combining models disregard cues such as question-answer compatibility. In this work, we propose to combine expert agents with a novel, flexible, and training-efficient architecture that considers questions, answer predictions, and answer-prediction confidence scores to select the best answer among a list of answer predictions. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we show that our model i) creates a collaboration between agents that outperforms previous multi-agent and multi-dataset approaches, ii) is highly data-efficient to train, and iii) can be adapted to any QA format. We release our code and a dataset of answer predictions from expert agents for 16 QA datasets to foster future research of multi-agent systems.

EACL 2023

MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering

multi-agent

multi-domain

question answering

### 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.

poster

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Creating an abridged version of a text involves shortening it while maintaining its linguistic qualities. In this paper, we examine this task from an NLP perspective for the first time. We present a new resource, AbLit, which is derived from abridged versions of English literature books. The dataset captures passage-level alignments between the original and abridged texts. We characterize the linguistic relations of these alignments, and create automated models to predict these relations as well as to generate abridgements for new texts. Our findings establish abridgement as a challenging task, motivating future resources and research. The dataset is available at github.com/roemmele/AbLit.

AbLit: A Resource for Analyzing and Generating Abridged Versions of English Literature

Providing natural language instructions in prompts is a useful new paradigm for improving task performance of large language models in a zero-shot setting. Recent work has aimed to improve such prompts via manual rewriting or gradient-based tuning. However, manual rewriting is time-consuming and requires subjective interpretation, while gradient-based tuning can be extremely computationally demanding for large models and may not be feasible for API-based models. In this work, we introduce Gradient-free Instructional Prompt Search (GrIPS), a gradient-free, edit-based search approach for improving task instructions for large language models. GrIPS takes in instructions designed for humans and automatically returns an improved, edited prompt, while allowing for API-based tuning. With InstructGPT models, GrIPS improves the average task performance by up to 4.30 percentage points on eight classification tasks from the Natural Instructions dataset (with similar improvements for OPT, BLOOM, and FLAN-T5). We see improvements for both instruction-only prompts and instruction + k-shot examples prompts. Notably, GrIPS outperforms manual rewriting and purely example-based prompts while controlling for the available compute and data budget. Further, performance of GrIPS is comparable to select gradient-based tuning approaches. Qualitatively, we show our edits can simplify instructions and at times make them incoherent but nonetheless improve accuracy.

GrIPS: Gradient-free, Edit-based Instruction Search for Prompting Large Language Models

Existing models to extract temporal relations between events lack a principled method to incorporate external knowledge. In this study, we introduce Bayesian-Trans, a Bayesian learning-based method that models the temporal relation representations as latent variables and infers their values via Bayesian inference and translational functions. Compared to conventional neural approaches, instead of performing point estimation to find the best set parameters, the proposed model infers the parameters' posterior distribution directly, enhancing the model's capability to encode and express uncertainty about the predictions. Experimental results on the three widely used datasets show that Bayesian-Trans outperforms existing approaches for event temporal relation extraction. We additionally present detailed analyses on uncertainty quantification, comparison of priors, and ablation studies, illustrating the benefits of the proposed approach.

Event Temporal Relation Extraction with Bayesian Translational Model

Text generation from Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) has substantially benefited from the popularized Pretrained Language Models (PLMs). Myriad approaches have linearized the input graph as a sequence of tokens to fit the PLM tokenization requirements. Nevertheless, this transformation jeopardizes the structural integrity of the graph and is therefore detrimental to its resulting representation. To overcome this issue, Ribeiro et al. (2021b) have recently proposed StructAdapt, a structure-aware adapter which injects the input graph connectivity within PLMs using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). In this paper, we investigate the influence of Relative Position Embeddings (RPE) on AMR-to-Text, and, in parallel, we examine the robustness of StructAdapt. Through ablation studies, graph attack and link prediction, we reveal that RPE might be partially encoding input graphs. We suggest further research regarding the role of RPE will provide valuable insights for Graph-to-Text generation.

Investigating the Effect of Relative Positional Embeddings on AMR-to-Text Generation with Structural Adapters

While pretrained language models have exhibited impressive generalization capabilities, they still behave unpredictably under certain domain shifts. In particular, a model may learn a reasoning process on in-domain training data that does not hold for out-of-domain test data. We address the task of predicting out-of-domain (OOD) performance in a few-shot fashion: given a few target-domain examples and a set of models with similar training performance, can we understand how these models will perform on OOD test data? We benchmark the performance on this task when looking at model accuracy on the few-shot examples, then investigate how to incorporate analysis of the models' behavior using feature attributions to better tackle this problem. Specifically, we explore a set of "factors'' designed to reveal model agreement with certain pathological heuristics that may indicate worse generalization capabilities. On textual entailment, paraphrase recognition, and a synthetic classification task, we show that attribution-based factors can help rank relative model OOD performance. However, accuracy on a few-shot test set is a surprisingly strong baseline, particularly when the system designer does not have in-depth prior knowledge about the domain shift.

Assessing Out-of-Domain Language Model Performance from Few Examples

A characteristic feature of human semantic cognition is its ability to not only store and retrieve the properties of concepts observed through experience, but to also facilitate the inheritance of properties (can breathe) from superordinate concepts (animal) to their subordinates (dog)---i.e. demonstrate property inheritance. In this paper, we present COMPS, a collection of minimal pair sentences that jointly tests pre-trained language models (PLMs) on their ability to attribute properties to concepts and their ability to demonstrate property inheritance behavior. Analyses of 22 different PLMs on COMPS reveal that they can easily distinguish between concepts on the basis of a property when they are trivially different, but find it relatively difficult when concepts are related on the basis of nuanced knowledge representations. Furthermore, we find that PLMs can show behaviors suggesting successful property inheritance in simple contexts, but fail in the presence of distracting information, which decreases the performance of many models sometimes even below chance. This lack of robustness in demonstrating simple reasoning raises important questions about PLMs' capacity to make correct inferences even when they appear to possess the prerequisite knowledge.

COMPS: Conceptual Minimal Pair Sentences for testing Robust Property Knowledge and its Inheritance in Pre-trained Language Models

jTLEX is a programming library that provides a Java implementation of the TimeLine EXtraction algorithm~(TLEX - Finlayson et al., 2021), along with utilities for programmatic manipulation of TimeML graphs. Timelines are useful for a number of natural language understanding tasks, such as question answering, cross-document event coreference, and summarization \& visualization. jTLEX provides functionality for (1) parsing TimeML annotations into Java objects, (2) construction of TimeML graphs from scratch, (3) partitioning of TimeML graphs into temporally connected subgraphs, (4) transforming temporally connected subgraphs into point algebra (PA) graphs, (5) extracting exact timeline of TimeML graphs, (6) detecting inconsistent subgraphs, and (7) calculating indeterminate sections of the timeline. The library has been tested on the entire TimeBank corpus, and comes with a suite of unit tests. We release the software as open source with a free license for non-commercial use.

jTLEX: a Java Library for TimeLine EXtraction

We introduce small-text, an easy-to-use active learning library, which offers pool-based active learning for single- and multi-label text classification in Python. It features numerous pre-implemented state-of-the-art query strategies, including some that leverage the GPU. Standardized interfaces allow the combination of a variety of classifiers, query strategies, and stopping criteria, facilitating a quick mix and match, and enabling a rapid and convenient development of both active learning experiments and applications. With the objective of making various classifiers and query strategies accessible for active learning, small-text integrates several well-known machine learning libraries, namely scikit-learn, PyTorch, and Hugging Face transformers. The latter integrations are optionally installable extensions, so GPUs can be used but are not required. Using this new library, we investigate the performance of the recently published SetFit training paradigm, which we compare to vanilla transformer fine-tuning, finding that it matches the latter in classification accuracy while outperforming it in area under the curve. The library is available under the MIT License at https://github.com/webis-de/small-text, in version 1.3.0 at the time of writing.

Small-Text: Active Learning for Text Classification in Python

In this paper, we present kogito, an open-source tool for generating commonsense inferences about situations described in text. kogito provides an intuitive and extensible interface to interact with natural language generation models that can be used for hypothesizing commonsense knowledge inference from a textual input. In particular, kogito offers several features for targeted, multi-granularity knowledge generation. These include a standardized API for training and evaluating knowledge models, and generating and filtering inferences from them. We also include helper functions for converting natural language texts into a format ingestible by knowledge models — intermediate pipeline stages such as knowledge head extraction from text, heuristic and model-based knowledge head-relation matching, and an ability to define and use custom knowledge relations. We make the code for
kogito available at https://github.com/epflnlp/kogito along with thorough documentation at https://kogito.readthedocs.io.

kogito: A Commonsense Knowledge Inference Toolkit

We present ALAMBIC, an open-source dockerized web-based platform for annotating text data through active learning for classification tasks. Active learning is known to reduce the need of labelling, a time-consuming task, by selecting the most informative instances among the unlabelled instances, reaching an optimal accuracy faster than by just randomly labelling data. ALAMBIC integrates all the steps from data import to customization of the (active) learning process and annotation of the data, with indications of the progress of the trained model that can be downloaded and used in downstream tasks. Its architecture also allows the easy integration of other types of models, features and active learning strategies.

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Next from EACL 2023

AbLit: A Resource for Analyzing and Generating Abridged Versions of English Literature

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