Croatia

Table-to-text generation aims at automatically generating text to help people conveniently obtain salient information in tables. 
Recent works explicitly decompose the generation process into content planning and surface generation stages, employing two autoregressive networks for them respectively.
However, they are computationally expensive due to the non-parallelizable nature of autoregressive decoding and the redundant parameters of two networks.
In this paper, we propose the first totally non-autoregressive table-to-text model (Plan-then-Seam, PTS) that produces its outputs in parallel with one single network.
PTS firstly writes and calibrates one plan of the content to be generated with a novel rethinking pointer predictor, and then takes the plan as the context for seaming to decode the description.
These two steps share parameters and perform iteratively to capture token inter-dependency while keeping parallel decoding.
Experiments on two public benchmarks show that PTS achieves 3.0~5.6 times speedup for inference time, reducing 50% parameters, while maintaining as least comparable performance against strong two-stage table-to-text competitors.

EACL 2023

Plan-then-Seam: Towards Efficient Table-to-Text Generation

data-to-text generation

table-to-text generation

text generation

findings / work in progress

### 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.

The paper presents our work on corpus annotation
for metaphor in German. Metaphors denote
entities that are similar to their literal referent,
e.g., when *Licht* ‘light' is used in the sense
of ‘hope'. We are interested in the relation between
metaphor and register, hence, the corpus
includes material from different registers.
We focussed on metaphors that can serve as
register markers and can also be reliably indentified
for annotation. Our results show huge
differences between registers in metaphor usage,
which we interpret in terms of specific
properties of the registers.

A corpus of metaphors as register markers

Prior work in semantic parsing has shown that conventional seq2seq models fail at compositional generalization tasks. This limitation led to a resurgence of methods that model alignments between sentences and their corresponding meaning representations, either implicitly through latent variables or explicitly by taking advantage of alignment annotations. We take the second direction and propose TPol, a two-step approach that first translates input sentences monotonically and then reorders them to obtain the correct output. This is achieved with a modular framework comprising a Translator and a Reorderer component. We test our approach on two popular semantic parsing datasets. Our experiments show that by means of the monotonic translations, TPol can learn reliable lexico-logical patterns from aligned data, significantly improving compositional generalization both over conventional seq2seq models, as well as over other approaches that exploit gold alignments.

Translate First Reorder Later: Leveraging Monotonicity in Semantic Parsing

Incorporating personal preference is crucial in advanced machine translation tasks. Despite the recent advancement of machine translation, it remains a demanding task to properly reflect personal style. In this paper, we introduce a personalized automatic post-editing framework to address this challenge, which effectively generates sentences considering distinct personal behaviors. To build this framework, we first collect post-editing data that connotes the user preference from a live machine translation system. Specifically, real-world users enter source sentences for translation and edit the machine-translated outputs according to the user's preferred style. We then propose a model that combines a discriminator module and user-specific parameters on the APE framework. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other baseline models on four different metrics (i.e., BLEU, TER, YiSi-1, and human evaluation).

PePe: Personalized Post-editing Model utilizing User-generated Post-edits

In multi-turn dialog understanding, semantic frames are constructed by detecting intents and slots within each user utterance.
However, recent works lack the capability of modeling multi-turn dynamics within a dialog in natural language understanding (NLU), instead leaving them for updating dialog states only.
Moreover, humans usually associate relevant background knowledge with the current dialog contexts to better illustrate slot semantics revealed from word connotations, where previous works have explored such possibility mostly in knowledge-grounded response generation.
In this paper, we propose to amend the research gap by equipping a BERT-based NLU framework with knowledge and context awareness.
We first encode dialog contexts with a unidirectional context-aware transformer encoder and select relevant inter-word knowledge with the current word and previous history based on a knowledge attention mechanism. 
Experimental results in two complicated multi-turn dialog datasets have demonstrated significant improvements of our proposed framework. Attention visualization also demonstrates how our modules leverage knowledge across the utterance.

Infusing Context and Knowledge Awareness in Multi-turn Dialog Understanding

While there has been a recent burgeoning of applications at the intersection of natural and programming languages, such as code generation and code summarization, these applications are usually English-centric. This creates a barrier for program developers who are not proficient in English. 
To mitigate this gap in technology development across languages, we propose a multilingual dataset, MCoNaLa, to benchmark code generation from natural language commands extending beyond English. Modeled off of the methodology from the English Code/Natural Language Challenge (CoNaLa) dataset, we annotated a total of 896 NL-Code pairs in three languages: Spanish, Japanese, and Russian. We present a systematic evaluation on MCoNaLa by testing state-of-the-art code generation systems. Although the difficulties vary across three languages, all systems lag significantly behind their English counterparts, revealing the challenges in adapting code generation to new languages.

MCoNaLa: A Benchmark for Code Generation from Multiple Natural Languages

The integration of multimodality in natural language processing (NLP) tasks seeks to exploit the complementary information contained in two or more modalities, such as text, audio and video. This paper investigates the integration of often under-researched audio features with text, using the task of argumentation mining (AM) as a case study. We take a previously reported dataset and present an audio-enhanced version (the Multimodal USElecDeb60To16 dataset). We report the performance of two text models based on BERT and GloVe embeddings, one audio model (based on CNN and Bi-LSTM) and multimodal combinations, on a dataset of 28,850 utterances. The results show that multimodal models do not outperform text-based models when using the full dataset. However, we show that audio features add value in fully supervised scenarios with limited data. We find that when data is scarce (e.g. with 10% of the original dataset) multimodal models yield improved performance, whereas text models based on BERT considerably decrease performance. Finally, we conduct a study with artificially generated voices and an ablation study to investigate the importance of different audio features in the audio models.

Augmenting pre-trained language models with audio feature embedding for argumentation mining in political debates

We explore zero-shot adaptation, where a general-domain model has access to customer or domain specific parallel data at inference time, but not during training. We build on the idea of Retrieval Augmented Translation (RAT) where top-k in-domain fuzzy matches are found for the source sentence, and target-language translations of those fuzzy-matched sentences are provided to the translation model at inference time. We propose a novel architecture to control interactions between a source sentence and the top-k fuzzy target-language matches, and compare it to architectures from prior work. We conduct experiments in two language pairs (En-De and En-Fr) by training models on WMT data and testing them with five and seven multi-domain datasets, respectively. Our approach consistently outperforms the alternative architectures, improving BLEU across language pair, domain, and number k of fuzzy matches.

Improving Retrieval Augmented Neural Machine Translation by Controlling Source and Fuzzy-Match Interactions

Causal reasoning is a critical component of human cognition and is required across a range of question-answering (QA) tasks (such as abductive reasoning, commonsense QA, and procedural reasoning). Research on causal QA has been underdefined, task-specific, and limited in complexity. Recent advances in foundation language models (such as BERT, ERNIE, and T5) have shown the efficacy of pre-trained models across diverse QA tasks. However, there is limited research exploring the causal reasoning capabilities of those language models and no standard evaluation benchmark. To unify causal QA research, we propose CALM-Bench, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating causality-aware language models (CALM). We present a standardized definition of causal QA tasks and show empirically that causal reasoning can be generalized and transferred across different QA tasks. Additionally, we share a strong multi-task baseline model which outperforms single-task fine-tuned models on the CALM-Bench tasks.

CALM-Bench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Causality-Aware Language Models

Large-scale, high-quality corpora are critical for advancing research in coreference resolution. However, existing datasets vary in their definition of coreferences and have been collected via complex and lengthy guidelines that are curated for linguistic experts. These concerns have sparked a growing interest among researchers to curate a unified set of guidelines suitable for annotators with various backgrounds. In this work, we develop a crowdsourcing-friendly coreference annotation methodology, ezCoref, consisting of an annotation tool and an interactive tutorial. We use ezCoref to re-annotate 240 passages from seven existing English coreference datasets (spanning fiction, news, and multiple other domains) while teaching annotators only cases that are treated similarly across these datasets. Surprisingly, we find that reasonable quality annotations were already achievable (>90% agreement between the crowd and expert annotations) even without extensive training. On carefully analyzing the remaining disagreements, we identify the presence of linguistic cases that our annotators unanimously agree upon but lack unified treatments (e.g., generic pronouns, appositives) in existing datasets. We propose the research community should revisit these phenomena when curating future unified annotation guidelines.

ezCoref: Towards Unifying Annotation Guidelines for Coreference Resolution

The recent increase in the volume of online meetings necessitates automated tools for organizing the material, especially when an attendee has missed the discussion and needs assistance in quickly exploring it. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for generating interactive questionnaires for preference-based meeting exploration. As a result, users are supplied with a list of suggested questions reflecting their preferences. 
Since the task is new, we introduce an automatic evaluation strategy by measuring how much the generated questions via questionnaire are answerable to ensure factual correctness and covers the source meeting for the depth of possible exploration.

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A corpus of metaphors as register markers

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A corpus of metaphors as register markers

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