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Abductive reasoning aims to find plausible explanations for an event. This style of reasoning is critical for commonsense tasks where there are often multiple plausible explanations. Existing approaches for abductive reasoning in natural language processing (NLP) often rely on manually generated annotations for supervision; however, such annotations can be subjective and biased. Instead of using direct supervision, this work proposes an approach for abductive commonsense reasoning that exploits the fact that only a subset of explanations is correct for a given context. The method uses posterior regularization to enforce a mutual exclusion constraint, encouraging the model to learn the distinction between fluent explanations and plausible ones. We evaluate our approach on a diverse set of abductive reasoning datasets; experimental results show that our approach outperforms or is comparable to directly applying pretrained language models in a zero-shot manner and other knowledge-augmented zero-shot methods.

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ACL 2023

Abductive Commonsense Reasoning Exploiting Mutually Exclusive Explanations

latent-variable model

probabilistic model

abductive reasoning

explanations

posterior regularization

commonsense reasoning

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Abductive reasoning aims to find plausible explanations for an event. This style of reasoning is critical for commonsense tasks where there are often multiple plausible explanations. Existing approaches for abductive reasoning in natural language processing (NLP) often rely on manually generated annotations for supervision; however, such annotations can be subjective and biased. Instead of using direct supervision, this work proposes an approach for abductive commonsense reasoning that exploits the fact that only a subset of explanations is correct for a given context. The method uses posterior regularization to enforce a mutual exclusion constraint, encouraging the model to learn the distinction between fluent explanations and plausible ones. We evaluate our approach on a diverse set of abductive reasoning datasets; experimental results show that our approach outperforms or is comparable to directly applying pretrained language models in a zero-shot manner and other knowledge-augmented zero-shot methods.

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technical paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
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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)**
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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.

Despite remarkable progress made in natural language processing, even the state-of-the-art models often make incorrect predictions. Such predictions hamper the reliability of systems and limit their widespread adoption in real-world applications. 'Selective prediction' partly addresses the above concern by enabling models to abstain from answering when their predictions are likely to be incorrect. While selective prediction is advantageous, it leaves us with a pertinent question 'what to do after abstention'. To this end, we present an explorative study on 'Post-Abstention', a task that allows re-attempting the abstained instances with the aim of increasing **coverage** of the system without significantly sacrificing its **accuracy**. We first provide mathematical formulation of this task and then explore several methods to solve it. Comprehensive experiments on 11 QA datasets show that these methods lead to considerable risk improvements --performance metric of the Post-Abstention task-- both in the in-domain and the out-of-domain settings. We also conduct a thorough analysis of these results which further leads to several interesting findings. Finally, we believe that our work will encourage and facilitate further research in this important area of addressing the reliability of NLP systems.

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Post-Abstention: Towards Reliably Re-Attempting the Abstained Instances in QA

Recent task-oriented dialog systems have had great success in building English-based personal assistants, but extending these systems to a global audience is challenging due to the need for annotated data in the target language. An alternative approach is to leverage existing data in a high-resource language to enable cross-lingual transfer in low-resource language models. However, this type of transfer has not been widely explored in natural language response generation. In this research, we investigate the use of state-of-the-art multilingual models such as mBART and T5 to facilitate zero-shot and few-shot transfer of code-switched responses. We propose a new adapter-based framework that allows for efficient transfer by learning task-specific representations and encapsulating source and target language representations. Our framework is able to successfully transfer language knowledge even when the target language corpus is limited. We present both quantitative and qualitative analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach.

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Towards Zero-Shot Multilingual Transfer for Code-Switched Responses

This evidence-based position paper critiques current research practices within the language model pre-training literature. Despite rapid recent progress afforded by increasingly better pre-trained language models (PLMs), current PLM research practices often conflate different possible sources of model improvement, without conducting proper ablation studies and principled comparisons between different models under comparable conditions. These practices (i) leave us ill-equipped to understand which pre-training approaches should be used under what circumstances; (ii) impede reproducibility and credit assignment; and (iii) render it difficult to understand: "How exactly does each factor contribute to the progress that we have today?'' We provide a case in point by revisiting the success of BERT over its baselines, ELMo and GPT-1, and demonstrate how --- under comparable conditions where the baselines are tuned to a similar extent --- these baselines (and even-simpler variants thereof) can, in fact, achieve competitive or better performance than BERT. These findings demonstrate how disentangling different factors of model improvements can lead to valuable new insights. We conclude with recommendations for how to encourage and incentivize this line of work, and accelerate progress towards a better and more systematic understanding of what factors drive the progress of our foundation models today.

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On "Scientific Debt" in NLP: A Case for More Rigour in Language Model Pre-Training Research

Recent advances in open-domain question answering (ODQA) have demonstrated impressive accuracy on general-purpose domains like Wikipedia. While some work has been investigating how well ODQA models perform when tested for out-of-domain (OOD) generalization, these studies have been conducted only under conservative shifts in data distribution and typically focus on a single component (i.e., retriever or reader) rather than an end-to-end system. This work proposes a more realistic end-to-end domain shift evaluation setting covering five diverse domains. We not only find that end-to-end models fail to generalize but that high retrieval scores often still yield poor answer prediction accuracy. To address these failures, we investigate several interventions, in the form of data augmentations, for improving model adaption and use our evaluation set to elucidate the relationship between the efficacy of an intervention scheme and the particular type of dataset shifts we consider. We propose a generalizability test that estimates the type of shift in a target dataset without training a model in the target domain and that the type of shift is predictive of which data augmentation schemes will be effective for domain adaption. Overall, we find that these interventions increase end-to-end performance by up to ~24 points.

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To Adapt or to Annotate: Challenges and Interventions for Domain Adaptation in Open-Domain Question Answering

Compositional generalization allows efficient learning and human-like inductive biases. Since most research investigating compositional generalization in NLP is done on English, important questions remain underexplored. Do the necessary compositional generalization abilities differ across languages? Can models compositionally generalize cross-lingually? As a first step to answering these questions, recent work used neural machine translation to translate datasets for evaluating compositional generalization in semantic parsing. However, we show that this entails critical semantic distortion. To address this limitation, we craft a faithful rule-based translation of the MCWQ dataset from English to Chinese and Japanese. Even with the resulting robust benchmark, which we call MCWQ-R, we show that the distribution of compositions still suffers due to linguistic divergences, and that multilingual models still struggle with cross-lingual compositional generalization. Our dataset and methodology will serve as useful resources for the study of cross-lingual compositional generalization in other tasks.

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On Evaluating Multilingual Compositional Generalization with Translated Datasets

Large language models (LLMs) that have been trained on multilingual but not parallel text exhibit a remarkable ability to translate between languages. We probe this ability in an in-depth study of the pathways language model (PaLM), which has demonstrated the strongest machine translation (MT) performance among similarly-trained LLMs to date. We investigate various strategies for choosing translation examples for few-shot prompting, concluding that example quality is the most important factor. Using optimized prompts, we revisit previous assessments of PaLM's MT capabilities with more recent test sets, modern MT metrics, and human evaluation, and find that its performance, while impressive, still lags that of state-of-the-art supervised systems. We conclude by providing an analysis of PaLM's MT output which reveals some interesting properties and prospects for future work.

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Prompting PaLM for Translation: Assessing Strategies and Performance

Health-related speech datasets are often small and varied in focus. This makes it difficult to leverage them to effectively support healthcare goals. Robust transfer of linguistic features across different datasets orbiting the same goal carries potential to address this concern. To test this hypothesis, we experiment with domain adaptation (DA) techniques on heterogeneous spoken language data to evaluate generalizability across diverse datasets for a common task: dementia detection. We find that adapted models exhibit better performance across conversational and task-oriented datasets. The feature-augmented DA method achieves a 22% increase in accuracy adapting from a conversational to task-specific dataset compared to a jointly trained baseline. This suggests promising capacity of these techniques to allow for productive use of disparate data for a complex spoken language healthcare task.

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Towards Domain-Agnostic and Domain-Adaptive Dementia Detection from Spoken Language

Weakly supervised learning is a popular approach for training machine learning models in low-resource settings. Instead of requesting high-quality yet costly human annotations, it allows training models with noisy annotations obtained from various weak sources. Recently, many sophisticated approaches have been proposed for robust training under label noise, reporting impressive results. In this paper, we revisit the setup of these approaches and find that the benefits brought by these approaches are significantly overestimated. Specifically, we find that the success of existing weakly supervised learning approaches heavily relies on the availability of clean validation samples which, as we show, can be leveraged much more efficiently by simply training on them. After using these clean labels in training, the advantages of using these sophisticated approaches are mostly wiped out. This remains true even when reducing the size of the available clean data to just five samples per class, making these approaches impractical. To understand the true value of weakly supervised learning, we thoroughly analyse diverse NLP datasets and tasks to ascertain when and why weakly supervised approaches work, and provide recommendations for future research.

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Weaker Than You Think: A Critical Look at Weakly Supervised Learning

In-context learning (ICL) is an important paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs) to new tasks, but the generalization behavior of ICL remains poorly understood. We investigate the inductive biases of ICL from the perspective of feature bias: which feature ICL is more likely to use given a set of underspecified demonstrations in which two features are equally predictive of the labels. First, we characterize the feature biases of GPT-3 models by constructing underspecified demonstrations from a range of NLP datasets and feature combinations. We find that LLMs exhibit clear feature biasesfor example, demonstrating a strong bias to predict labels according to sentiment rather than shallow lexical features, like punctuation. Second, we evaluate the effect of different interventions that are designed to impose an inductive bias in favor of a particular feature, such as adding a natural language instruction or using semantically relevant label words. We find that, while many interventions can influence the learner to prefer a particular feature, it can be difficult to overcome strong prior biases. Overall, our results provide a broader picture of the types of features that ICL may be more likely to exploit and how to impose inductive biases that are better aligned with the intended task.

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Measuring Inductive Biases of In-Context Learning with Underspecified Demonstrations

Massively multilingual models such as mBERT and XLM-R are increasingly valued in Natural Language Processing research and applications, due to their ability to tackle the uneven distribution of resources available for different languages. The models’ ability to process multiple languages relying on a shared set of parameters raises the question of whether the grammatical knowledge they extracted during pre-training can be considered as a data-driven cross-lingual grammar. The present work studies the inner workings of mBERT and XLM-R in order to test the cross-lingual consistency of the individual neural units that respond to a precise syntactic phenomenon, that is, number agreement, in five languages (English, German, French, Hebrew, Russian). We found that there is a significant overlap in the latent dimensions that encode agreement across the languages we considered. This overlap is larger (a) for long- vis-à-vis short-distance agreement and (b) when considering XLM-R as compared to mBERT, and peaks in the intermediate layers of the network. We further show that a small set of syntax-sensitive neurons can capture agreement violations across languages; however, their contribution is not decisive in agreement processing.

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Post-Abstention: Towards Reliably Re-Attempting the Abstained Instances in QA

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