Canada

Despite recent progress towards scaling up multimodal vision-language models, these models are still known to struggle on compositional generalization benchmarks such as Winoground. We find that a critical component lacking from current vision-language models is relation-level alignment: the ability to match directional semantic relations in text (e.g., `mug in grass&#39;) with spatial relationships in the image (e.g., the position of the mug relative to the grass). To tackle this problem, we show that relation alignment can be enforced by encouraging the language attention from `mug&#39; to `grass&#39; (capturing the semantic relation `in&#39;) to match the visual attention from the mug to the grass (capturing the corresponding physical relation). Tokens and their corresponding objects are softly identified using a weighted mean of cross-modal attention. We prove that this notion of soft cross-modal equivalence is equivalent to enforcing congruence between vision and language attention matrices under a `change of basis&#39; provided by the cross-modal attention matrix. Intuitively, our approach projects visual attention into the language attention space to calculate its divergence from the actual language attention, and vice versa. We apply our Cross-modal Attention Congruence Regularization (CACR) loss to fine-tune UNITER and improve its Winoground Group score by 5.75 points.

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ACL 2023

Cross-modal Attention Congruence Regularization for Vision-Language Relation Alignment

vision-language

multimodal

compositionality

grounding

semantics

syntax

## 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.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well:  we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

<br>*Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA*<br>
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
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.

Despite recent progress towards scaling up multimodal vision-language models, these models are still known to struggle on compositional generalization benchmarks such as Winoground. We find that a critical component lacking from current vision-language models is relation-level alignment: the ability to match directional semantic relations in text (e.g., `mug in grass') with spatial relationships in the image (e.g., the position of the mug relative to the grass). To tackle this problem, we show that relation alignment can be enforced by encouraging the language attention from `mug' to `grass' (capturing the semantic relation `in') to match the visual attention from the mug to the grass (capturing the corresponding physical relation). Tokens and their corresponding objects are softly identified using a weighted mean of cross-modal attention. We prove that this notion of soft cross-modal equivalence is equivalent to enforcing congruence between vision and language attention matrices under a `change of basis' provided by the cross-modal attention matrix. Intuitively, our approach projects visual attention into the language attention space to calculate its divergence from the actual language attention, and vice versa. We apply our Cross-modal Attention Congruence Regularization (CACR) loss to fine-tune UNITER and improve its Winoground Group score by 5.75 points.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/jQes3hFZo3TYjGXEHm6w95/embed/polls/aae203a3-9fe6-4f90-a8e3-3b68f47a12b7" 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)**
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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.

Previous work in phonetically-grounded language generation has mainly focused on domains such as lyrics and poetry. In this paper, we present work on the generation of tongue twisters - a form of language that is required to be phonetically conditioned to maximise sound overlap, whilst maintaining semantic consistency with an input topic, and still being grammatically correct. We present TwistList, a large annotated dataset of tongue twisters, consisting of 2.1K+ human-authored examples. We additionally present several benchmark systems (referred to as TwisterMisters) for the proposed task of tongue twister generation, including models that both do and do not require training on in-domain data. We present the results of automatic and human evaluation to demonstrate the performance ofexisting mainstream pre-trained models in this task with limited (or no) task specific training and data, and no explicit phonetic knowledge. We find that the task of tongue twister generation is challenging for models under these conditions, yet some models are still capable of generating acceptable examples of this language type.

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TwistList: Resources and Baselines for Tongue Twister Generation

In this work, we conduct a detailed analysis on the performance of legal-oriented pre-trained language models (PLMs). We examine the interplay between their original objective, acquired knowledge, and legal language understanding capacities which we define as the upstream, probing, and downstream performance, respectively. We consider not only the models' size but also the pre-training corpora used as important dimensions in our study. To this end, we release a multinational English legal corpus (LeXFiles) and a legal knowledge probing benchmark (LegalLAMA) to facilitate training and detailed analysis of legal-oriented PLMs. We release two new legal PLMs trained on LeXFiles and evaluate them alongside others on LegalLAMA and LexGLUE. We find that probing performance strongly correlates with upstream performance in related legal topics. On the other hand, downstream performance is mainly driven by the model's size and prior legal knowledge which can be estimated by upstream and probing performance. Based on these findings, we can conclude that both dimensions are important for those seeking the development of domain-specific PLMs.

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LeXFiles and LegalLAMA: Facilitating English Multinational Legal Language Model Development

A triple speech translation data comprises speech, transcription, and translation.In the end-to-end paradigm, text machine translation (MT) usually plays the role of a teacher model for the speech translation (ST) via knowledge distillation. Parameter sharing with the teacher is often adopted to construct the ST model architecture, however, the two modalities are independently fed and trained via different losses. This situation does not match ST's properties across two modalities and also limits the upper bound of the performance. Inspired by the works of video Transformer, we propose a simple unified cross-modal ST method, which concatenates speech and text as the input, and builds a teacher that can utilize both cross-modal information simultaneously. Experimental results show that in our unified ST framework, models can effectively utilize the auxiliary information from speech and text, and achieve compelling results on MuST-C datasets.

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A Simple Concatenation can Effectively Improve Speech Translation

Neural machine translation has achieved promising results on many translation tasks. However, previous studies have shown that neural models induce a non-smooth representation space, which harms its generalization results. Recently, kNN-MT has provided an effective paradigm to smooth the prediction based on neighbor representations during inference. Despite promising results, kNN-MT usually requires large inference overhead. We propose an effective training framework INK to directly smooth the representation space via adjusting representations of kNN neighbors with a small number of new parameters. The new parameters are then used to refresh the whole representation datastore to get new kNN knowledge asynchronously. This loop keeps running until convergence. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that INK achieves average gains of 1.99 COMET and 1.0 BLEU, outperforming the state-of-the-art kNN-MT system with 0.02x memory space and 1.9x inference speedup.

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INK: Injecting kNN Knowledge in Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

Extractive and abstractive summarization designs have historically been fragmented, limiting the benefits that often arise from compatible model architectures. In this paper, we explore the potential synergies of modeling extractive summarization with an abstractive summarization system and propose three novel inference algorithms using the sequence-to-sequence architecture. We evaluate them on the CNN \& Dailymail dataset and show that recent advancements in abstractive system designs enable abstractive systems to not only compete, but even surpass the performance of extractive systems with custom architectures. To our surprise, abstractive systems achieve this without being exposed to extractive oracle summaries and, therefore, for the first time allow a single model to produce both abstractive and extractive summaries. This evidence questions our fundamental understanding of extractive system design, and the necessity for extractive labels while pathing the way for promising research directions in hybrid models.

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Abstractive Summarizers are Excellent Extractive Summarizers

Building a system for morphological processing is a challenging task in morphologically complex languages like Arabic. Although there are some deep learning based models that achieve successful results, these models rely on a large amount of annotated data. Building such datasets, specially for some of the lower-resource Arabic dialects, is very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. In addition, some parts of the annotated data do not contain useful information for training machine learning models. Active learning strategies allow the learner algorithm to select the most informative samples for annotation. There has been little research that focuses on applying active learning for morphological inflection and morphophonological processing. In this paper, we have proposed a deep active learning method for this task. Our experiments on Egyptian Arabic show that with only about 30% of annotated data, we achieve the same results as does the state-of-the-art model on the whole dataset.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/jQes3hFZo3TYjGXEHm6w95/embed/polls/8354523c-4eec-42b7-8974-2b441ef99871" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Deep Active Learning for Morphophonological Processing

Asking and answering questions are inseparable parts of human social life. The primary purposes of asking questions are to gain knowledge or request help which has been the subject of question-answering studies. However, questions can also reflect negative intentions and include implicit offenses, such as highlighting one's lack of knowledge or bolstering an alleged superior knowledge, which can lead to conflict in conversations; yet has been scarcely researched. This paper is the first study to introduce a dataset (Question Intention Dataset) that includes questions with positive/neutral and negative intentions and the underlying intention categories within each group. We further conduct a meta-analysis to highlight tacit and apparent intents. We also propose a classification method using Transformers augmented by TF-IDF-based features and report the results of several models for classifying the main intention categories. We aim to highlight the importance of taking intentions into account, especially implicit and negative ones, to gain insight into conflict-evoking questions and better understand human-human communication on the web for NLP applications.

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What is the Real Intention behind this Question? Dataset Collection and Intention Classification

Interactive semantic parsing based on natural language (NL) feedback, where users provide feedback to correct the parser mistakes, has emerged as a more practical scenario than the traditional one-shot semantic parsing. However, prior work has heavily relied on human-annotated feedback data to train the interactive semantic parser, which is prohibitively expensive and not scalable. In this work, we propose a new task of simulating NL feedback for interactive semantic parsing. We accompany the task with a novel feedback evaluator. The evaluator is specifically designed to assess the quality of the simulated feedback, based on which we decide the best feedback simulator from our proposed variants. On a text-to-SQL dataset, we show that our feedback simulator can generate high-quality NL feedback to boost the error correction ability of a specific parser. In low-data settings, our feedback simulator can help achieve comparable error correction performance as trained using the costly, full set of human annotations.

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Learning to Simulate Natural Language Feedback for Interactive Semantic Parsing

To prevent the costly and inefficient use of resources on low-quality annotations, we want a method for creating a pool of dependable annotators who can effectively complete difficult tasks, such as evaluating automatic summarization. Thus, we investigate the recruitment of high-quality Amazon Mechanical Turk workers via a two-step pipeline. We show that we can successfully filter out subpar workers before they carry out the evaluations and obtain high-agreement annotations with similar constraints on resources. Although our workers demonstrate a strong consensus among themselves and CloudResearch workers, their alignment with expert judgments on a subset of the data is not as expected and needs further training in correctness. This paper still serves as a best practice for the recruitment of qualified annotators in other challenging annotation tasks.

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A Needle in a Haystack: An Analysis of High-Agreement Workers on MTurk for Summarization

Naturally occurring information-seeking questions often contain questionable assumptions---assumptions that are false or unverifiable. Questions containing questionable assumptions are challenging because they require a distinct answer strategy that deviates from typical answers for information-seeking questions. For instance, the question "When did Marie Curie discover Uranium?" cannot be answered as a typical "when" question without addressing the false assumption "Marie Curie discovered Uranium". In this work, we propose (QA)^2 (Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions), an open-domain evaluation dataset consisting of naturally occurring search engine queries that may or may not contain questionable assumptions. To be successful on (QA)^2, systems must be able to detect questionable assumptions and also be able to produce adequate responses for both typical information-seeking questions and ones with questionable assumptions. Through human rater acceptability on end-to-end QA with (QA)^2, we find that current models do struggle with handling questionable assumptions, leaving substantial headroom for progress.

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Next from ACL 2023

TwistList: Resources and Baselines for Tongue Twister Generation

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