Canada

Current neural semantic parsers take a supervised approach requiring a considerable amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain. Thus, minimizing the supervision effort is one of the key challenges in semantic parsing. In this paper, we propose the Retrieval as Ambiguous Supervision framework, in which we construct a retrieval system based on pretrained language models to collect high-coverage candidates. Assuming candidates always contain the correct ones, we convert zero-shot task into ambiguously supervised task. To improve the precision and coverage of such ambiguous supervision, we propose a confidence-driven self-training algorithm, in which a semantic parser is learned and exploited to disambiguate the candidates iteratively. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot semantic parsing methods.

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ACL 2023

Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing

semantic parsing

low resource

zero-shot

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP)<br>
EMNLP 2023 General Chair<br><br><br><br>

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference.<br>
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details. 

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Current neural semantic parsers take a supervised approach requiring a considerable amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain. Thus, minimizing the supervision effort is one of the key challenges in semantic parsing. In this paper, we propose the Retrieval as Ambiguous Supervision framework, in which we construct a retrieval system based on pretrained language models to collect high-coverage candidates. Assuming candidates always contain the correct ones, we convert zero-shot task into ambiguously supervised task. To improve the precision and coverage of such ambiguous supervision, we propose a confidence-driven self-training algorithm, in which a semantic parser is learned and exploited to disambiguate the candidates iteratively. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot semantic parsing methods.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/iHwnn5G9xYwcAmSbeKA4Au/embed/polls/2614633d-497e-4887-bd5e-c91f78755e91" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

poster

### 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.
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.<br>
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)**
<br><br><br><br>

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.

Relation Extraction (RE) is a task that identifies relationships between entities in a text, enabling the acquisition of relational facts and bridging the gap between natural language and structured knowledge. However, current RE models often rely on small datasets with low coverage of relation types, particularly when working with languages other than English.In this paper, we address the above issue and provide two new resources that enable the training and evaluation of multilingual RE systems.First, we present SRED<sup>FM</sup>, an automatically annotated dataset covering 18 languages, 400 relation types, 13 entity types, totaling more than 40 million triplet instances. Second, we propose RED<sup>FM</sup>, a smaller, human-revised dataset for seven languages that allows for the evaluation of multilingual RE systems. To demonstrate the utility of these novel datasets, we experiment with the first end-to-end multilingual RE model, mREBEL, that extracts triplets, including entity types, in multiple languages. We release our resources and model checkpoints at [https://www.github.com/babelscape/rebel](https://www.github.com/babelscape/rebel).

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RED<sup>FM</sup>: a Filtered and Multilingual Relation Extraction Dataset

Pre-trained transformer-based models have recently shown great performance when applied to Named Entity Recognition (NER). As the complexity of their self-attention mechanism prevents them from processing long documents at once, these models are usually applied in a sequential fashion. Such an approach unfortunately only incorporates local context and prevents leveraging global document context in long documents such as novels, which might hinder performance. In this article, we explore the impact of global document context, and its relationships with local context. We find that correctly retrieving global document context has a greater impact on performance than only leveraging local context, prompting for further research on how to better retrieve that context.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/jQes3hFZo3TYjGXEHm6w95/embed/polls/2ab10a0d-d613-48da-ade5-4cdead11dbf1" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

The Role of Global and Local Context in Named Entity Recognition

Recent open-domain TableQA models are typically implemented as retriever-reader pipelines. The retriever component is usually a variant of the Dense Passage Retriever, which computes the similarities between questions and tables based on a single representation of each.These fixed vectors can be insufficient to capture fine-grained features of potentially very big tables with heterogeneous row/column information. We address this limitation by 1) applying late interaction models which enforce a finer-grained interaction between question and table embeddings at retrieval time. In addition, we 2) incorporate a joint training scheme of the retriever and reader with explicit table-level signals, and 3) embed a binary relevance token as a prefix to the answer generated by the reader, so we can determine at inference time whether the table used to answer the question is reliable and filter accordingly. The combined strategies set a new state-to-the-art performance on two public open-domain TableQA datasets.

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LI-RAGE: Late Interaction Retrieval Augmented Generation with Explicit Signals for Open-Domain Table Question Answering

Social science and psycholinguistic research have shown that power and status affect how people use language in a range of domains. Here, we investigate a similar question in a large, distributed, consensus-driven community with little traditional power hierarchy -- the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a collaborative organisation that designs internet standards. Our analysis based on lexical categories (LIWC) and BERT, shows that participants' levels of influence can be predicted from their email text, and identify key linguistic differences (e.g., certain LIWC categories, such as "WE"} are positively correlated with high-influence). We also identify the differences in language use for the same person before and after becoming influential.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/37410325-95b0-4c83-a05f-cbf569866665" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Tracing Linguistic Markers of Influence in a Large Online Organisation

Link Prediction on Hyper-relational Knowledge Graphs (HKG) is a worthwhile endeavor. HKG consists of hyper-relational facts (H-Facts), composed of a main triple and several auxiliary attribute-value qualifiers, which can effectively represent factually comprehensive information. The internal structure of HKG can be represented as a hypergraph-based representation globally and a semantic sequence-based representation locally. However, existing research seldom simultaneously models the graphical and sequential structure of HKGs, limiting HKGs' representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Hierarchical Attention model for HKG Embedding (HAHE), including global-level and local-level attention. The global-level attention can model the graphical structure of HKG using hypergraph dual-attention layers, while the local-level attention can learn the sequential structure inside H-Facts via heterogeneous self-attention layers. Experiment results indicate that HAHE achieves state-of-the-art performance in link prediction tasks on HKG standard datasets. In addition, HAHE addresses the issue of HKG multi-position prediction for the first time, increasing the applicability of the HKG link prediction task. Our code is publicly available.

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HAHE: Hierarchical Attention for Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs in Global and Local Level

Keeping track of how states of entities change as a text or dialog unfolds is a key prerequisite to discourse understanding. Yet, there have been few systematic investigations into the ability of large language models (LLMs) to track discourse entities. In this work, we present a task probing to what extent a language model can infer the final state of an entity given an English description of the initial state and a series of state-changing operations. We use this task to first investigate whether Flan-T5, GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 can track the state of entities, and find that only GPT-3.5 models, which have been pretrained on large amounts of code, exhibit this ability. We then investigate whether smaller models pretrained primarily on text can learn to track entities, through finetuning T5 on several training/evaluation splits. While performance degrades for more complex splits, we find that even when evaluated on a different set of entities from training or longer operation sequences, a finetuned model can perform non-trivial entity tracking. Taken together, these results suggest that language models can learn to track entities but pretraining on text corpora alone does not make this capacity surface.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/6qSnTPZvioRLfFJpZUjhCw/embed/polls/66956f35-385a-41bb-8a73-a0f7dab4e272" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Entity Tracking in Language Models

Recent abstractive conversation summarization systems generally rely on large-scale datasets with annotated summaries. However, collecting and annotating these conversations can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. To address this issue, in this work, we present a sub-structure level compositional data augmentation method, \textsc{Compo}, for generating diverse and high-quality pairs of conversations and summaries. Specifically, \textsc{Compo} first extracts conversation structures like topic splits and action triples as basic units. Then we organize these semantically meaningful conversation snippets compositionally to create new training instances.Additionally, we explore noise-tolerant settings in both self-training and joint-training paradigms to make the most of these augmented samples. Our experiments on benchmark datasets, SAMSum and DialogSum, show that \textsc{Compo} substantially outperforms prior baseline methods by achieving a nearly 10\% increase of ROUGE scores with limited data. Code is available at \texttt{https://github.com/ozyyshr/Compo}.

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Compositional Data Augmentation for Abstractive Conversation Summarization

In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieve the best performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. While the first models were trained on general domain data, specialized ones have emerged to more effectively treat specific domains. In this paper, we propose an original study of PLMs in the medical domain on French language. We compare, for the first time, the performance of PLMs trained on both public data from the web and private data from healthcare establishments. We also evaluate different learning strategies on a set of biomedical tasks. In particular, we show that we can take advantage of already existing biomedical PLMs in a foreign language by further pre-train it on our targeted data. Finally, we release the first specialized PLMs for the biomedical field in French, called DrBERT, as well as the largest corpus of medical data under free license on which these models are trained.

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DrBERT: A Robust Pre-trained Model in French for Biomedical and Clinical domains

Sampling-based decoding strategies are widely employed for generating text from probabilistic models. Yet, systems making use of this class of strategies often exhibit problems: for example, the chance of sampling an extremely low-probability item at least once in the generation of a long string is actually relatively high, and a single such token can render the rest of the text incoherent. To alleviate some of these issues, various modifications to a model's sampling distribution have been proposed, e.g., top-p or top-k sampling; we refer to these methods as sampling adapters. Such adapters lead to qualitatively better text, which raises the question: from a formal perspective, how are they changing language generation models' token-level distributions? And why do these local changes lead to a shift of probability mass onto higher-quality text? In this paper, we argue that the shift they enforce can be viewed as a precision--recall trade-off: while the model loses its ability to produce certain strings, its precision rate on desirable text increases. While this trade-off is not reflected in standard metrics of distribution quality (such as perplexity), we find that several precision-emphasizing metrics indeed indicate that sampling adapters can lead to probability distributions more aligned with the true distribution. Further, these metrics correlate with higher sequence-level quality scores, specifically, Mauve. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results, and suggesting future directions for sampling adapter research.

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On the Efficacy of Sampling Adapters

Recent work on Event Extraction has reframed the task as Question Answering (QA), with promising results. The advantage of this approach is that it addresses the error propagation issue found in traditional token-based classification approaches by directly predicting event arguments without extracting candidates first. However, the questions are typically based on fixed templates and they rarely leverage contextual information such as relevant arguments. In addition, prior QA-based approaches have difficulty handling cases where there are multiple arguments for the same role. In this paper, we propose QGA-EE, which enables a Question Generation (QG) model to generate questions that incorporate rich contextual information instead of using fixed templates. We also propose dynamic templates to assist the training of QG model. Experiments show that QGA-EE outperforms all prior single-task-based models on the ACE05 English dataset.

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Next from ACL 2023

RED<sup>FM</sup>: a Filtered and Multilingual Relation Extraction Dataset

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ZEROTOP: Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing using Large Language Models