Canada

Humans are storytellers, even in communication scenarios which are assumed to be more rationality-oriented, such as argumentation. Indeed, supporting arguments with narratives or personal experiences (henceforth, stories) is a very natural thing to do -- and yet, this phenomenon is largely unexplored in computational argumentation. Which role do stories play in an argument? Do they make the argument more effective? What are their narrative properties? To address these questions, we collected and annotated StoryARG, a dataset sampled from well-established corpora in computational argumentation (ChangeMyView and RegulationRoom), and the Social Sciences (Europolis), as well as comments to New York Times articles. StoryARG contains 2451 textual spans annotated at two levels. At the argumentative level, we annotate the function of the story (e.g., clarification, disclosure of harm, search for a solution, establishing speaker&#39;s authority), as well as its impact on the effectiveness of the argument and its emotional load. At the level of narrative properties, we annotate whether the story has a plot-like development, is factual or hypothetical, and who the protagonist is.What makes a story effective in an argument? Our analysis of the annotations in StoryARG uncover a positive impact on effectiveness for stories which illustrate a solution to a problem, and in general, annotator-specific preferences that we investigate with regression analysis.

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ACL 2023

StoryARG: a corpus of narratives and personal experiences in argumentative texts

storytelling

corpus

argumentation

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. <br><br>
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks.  Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. <br><br>

<br><br>
We wish you a wonderful conference! <br><br>
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
<br><br>
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing)<br>
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing)<br>
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ACL 2022

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 (NLP). 

Humans are storytellers, even in communication scenarios which are assumed to be more rationality-oriented, such as argumentation. Indeed, supporting arguments with narratives or personal experiences (henceforth, stories) is a very natural thing to do -- and yet, this phenomenon is largely unexplored in computational argumentation. Which role do stories play in an argument? Do they make the argument more effective? What are their narrative properties? To address these questions, we collected and annotated StoryARG, a dataset sampled from well-established corpora in computational argumentation (ChangeMyView and RegulationRoom), and the Social Sciences (Europolis), as well as comments to New York Times articles. StoryARG contains 2451 textual spans annotated at two levels. At the argumentative level, we annotate the function of the story (e.g., clarification, disclosure of harm, search for a solution, establishing speaker's authority), as well as its impact on the effectiveness of the argument and its emotional load. At the level of narrative properties, we annotate whether the story has a plot-like development, is factual or hypothetical, and who the protagonist is.What makes a story effective in an argument? Our analysis of the annotations in StoryARG uncover a positive impact on effectiveness for stories which illustrate a solution to a problem, and in general, annotator-specific preferences that we investigate with regression analysis.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/3ce47d23-c9a9-4cd2-94e3-8d262259e403" 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.

Morphological inflection is a popular task in sub-word NLP with both practical and cognitive applications. For years now, state-of-the-art systems have reported high, but also highly variable, performance across data sets and languages. We investigate the causes of this high performance and high variability; we find several aspects of data set creation and evaluation which systematically inflate performance and obfuscate differences between languages. To improve generalizability and reliability of results, we propose new data sampling and evaluation strategies that better reflect likely use-cases. Using these new strategies, we make new observations on the generalization abilities of current inflection systems.

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Morphological Inflection: A Reality Check

In this paper, we examine the current state-of-the-art in AMR parsing, which relies on ensemble strategies by merging multiple graph predictions. Our analysis reveals that the present models often violate AMR structural constraints. To address this issue, we develop a validation method, and show how ensemble models can exploit SMATCH metric weaknesses to obtain higher scores, but sometimes result in corrupted graphs. Additionally, we highlight the demanding need to compute the SMATCH score among all possible predictions. To overcome these challenges, we propose two novel ensemble strategies based on Transformer models, improving robustness to structural constraints, while also reducing the computational time. Our methods provide new insights for enhancing AMR parsers and metrics. Our code is available at [https://www.github.com/babelscape/AMRs-Assemble](https://www.github.com/babelscape/AMRs-Assemble).

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AMRs Assemble! Learning to Ensemble with Autoregressive Models for AMR Parsing

Recognizing flat, overlapped and discontinuous entities uniformly has been paid increasing attention.Among these works, Seq2Seq formulation prevails for its flexibility and effectiveness.It arranges the output entities into a specific target sequence.However, it introduces bias by assigning all the probability mass to the observed sequence.To alleviate the bias, previous works either augment the data with possible sequences or resort to other formulations.In this paper, we stick to the Seq2Seq formulation and propose a reranking-based approach.It redistributes the likelihood among candidate sequences depending on their performance via a contrastive loss.Extensive experiments show that our simple yet effective method consistently boosts the baseline, and yields competitive or better results compared with the state-of-the-art methods on 8 widely-used datasets for Named Entity Recognition.

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Debiasing Generative Named Entity Recognition by Calibrating Sequence Likelihood

Although proper handling of discourse significantly contributes to the quality of machine translation (MT), these improvements are not adequately measured in common translation quality metrics. Recent works in context-aware MT attempt to target a small set of discourse phenomena during evaluation, however not in a fully systematic way. In this paper, we develop the Multilingual Discourse-Aware (MuDA) benchmark, a series of taggers that identify and evaluate model performance on discourse phenomena in any given dataset. The choice of phenomena is inspired by a novel methodology to systematically identify translations that require context. This methodology confirms the difficulty of previously studied phenomena while uncovering others which were not previously addressed. We find that commonly studied context-aware MT models make only marginal improvements over context-agnostic models, which suggests these models do not handle these ambiguities effectively. We release code and data for 14 language pairs to encourage the MT community to focus on accurately capturing discourse phenomena. Code available at https://github.com/neulab/contextual-mt

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When Does Translation Require Context? A Data-driven, Multilingual Exploration

We present BIG-C (Bemba Image Grounded Conversations), a large multimodal dataset for Bemba. While Bemba is the most populous language of Zambia, it exhibits a dearth of resources which render the development of language technologies or language processing research almost impossible. The dataset is comprised of multi-turn dialogues between Bemba speakers based on images, transcribed and translated into English. There are more than 92,000 utterances/sentences, amounting to more than 180 hours of audio data with corresponding transcriptions and English translations. We also provide baselines on speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT) and speech translation (ST) tasks, and sketch out other potential future multimodal uses of our dataset. We hope that by making the dataset available to the research community, this work will foster research and encourage collaboration across the language, speech, and vision communities especially for languages outside the "traditionally" used high-resourced ones. All data and code are publicly available: [https://github.com/csikasote/bigc](https://github.com/csikasote/bigc).

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BIG-C: a Multimodal Multi-Purpose Dataset for Bemba

Endowing chatbots with a consistent persona is essential to an engaging conversation, yet it remains an unresolved challenge. In this work, we propose a new retrieval-enhanced approach for personalized response generation. Specifically, we design a hierarchical transformer retriever trained on dialogue domain data to perform personalized retrieval and a context-aware prefix encoder that fuses the retrieved information to the decoder more effectively. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model at generating more fluent and personalized responses. We quantitatively evaluate our model's performance under a suite of human and automatic metrics and find it to be superior compared to state-of-the-art baselines on English Reddit conversations.

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RECAP: Retrieval-Enhanced Context-Aware Prefix Encoder for Personalized Dialogue Response Generation

An emerging solution for explaining Transformer-based models is to use vector-based analysis on how the representations are formed. However, providing a faithful vector-based explanation for a multi-layer model could be challenging in three aspects: (1) Incorporating all components into the analysis, (2) Aggregating the layer dynamics to determine the information flow and mixture throughout the entire model, and (3) Identifying the connection between the vector-based analysis and the model's predictions. In this paper, we present DecompX to tackle these challenges. DecompX is based on the construction of decomposed token representations and their successive propagation throughout the model without mixing them in between layers. Additionally, our proposal provides multiple advantages over existing solutions for its inclusion of all encoder components (especially nonlinear feed-forward networks) and the classification head. The former allows acquiring precise vectors while the latter transforms the decomposition into meaningful prediction-based values, eliminating the need for norm- or summation-based vector aggregation. According to the standard faithfulness evaluations, DecompX consistently outperforms existing gradient-based and vector-based approaches on various datasets.Our code is available at https://github.com/mohsenfayyaz/DecompX.

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DecompX: Explaining Transformers Decisions by Propagating Token Decomposition

Transformer encoders contextualize token representations by attending to all other tokens at each layer, leading to quadratic increase in compute effort with the input length. In practice, however, the input text of many NLP tasks can be seen as a sequence of related segments (e.g., the sequence of sentences within a passage, or the hypothesis and premise in NLI). While attending across these segments is highly beneficial for many tasks, we hypothesize that this interaction can be delayed until later encoding stages.To this end, we introduce Layer-Adjustable Interactions in Transformers (LAIT). Within LAIT, segmented inputs are first encoded independently, and then jointly. This partial two-tower architecture bridges the gap between a Dual Encoder's ability to pre-compute representations for segments and a fully self-attentive Transformer's capacity to model cross-segment attention. The LAIT framework effectively leverages existing pretrained Transformers and converts them into the hybrid of the two aforementioned architectures, allowing for easy and intuitive control over the performance-efficiency tradeoff. Experimenting on a wide range of NLP tasks, we find LAIT able to reduce 30-50% of the attention FLOPs on many tasks, while preserving high accuracy; in some practical settings, LAIT could reduce actual latency by orders of magnitude.

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LAIT: Efficient Multi-Segment Encoding in Transformers with Layer-Adjustable Interaction

Large language models, particularly GPT-3, are able to produce high quality summaries ofgeneral domain news articles in few- and zero-shot settings. However, it is unclear if such models are similarly capable in more specialized domains such as biomedicine. In this paper we enlist domain experts (individuals with medical training) to evaluate summaries of biomedical articles generated by GPT-3, given no supervision. We consider bothsingle- and multi-document settings. In the former, GPT-3 is tasked with generating regular and plain-language summaries of articles describing randomized controlled trials; in thelatter, we assess the degree to which GPT-3 is able to synthesize evidence reported acrossa collection of articles. We design an annotation scheme for evaluating model outputs, withan emphasis on assessing the factual accuracy of generated summaries. We find that whileGPT-3 is able to summarize and simplify single biomedical articles faithfully, it strugglesto provide accurate aggregations of findings over multiple documents. We release all data,code, and annotations used in this work.

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Summarizing, Simplifying, and Synthesizing Medical Evidence using GPT-3 (with Varying Success)

Dialogue systems have received increasing attention while automatically evaluating their performance remains challenging. User satisfaction estimation (USE) has been proposed as an alternative. It assumes that the performance of a dialogue system can be measured by user satisfaction and uses an estimator to simulate users. The effectiveness of USE depends heavily on the estimator. Existing estimators independently predict user satisfaction at each turn and ignore satisfaction dynamics across turns within a dialogue. In order to fully simulate users, it is crucial to take satisfaction dynamics into account. To fill this gap, we propose a new estimator ASAP (sAtisfaction eStimation via HAwkes Process) that treats user satisfaction across turns as an event sequence and employs a Hawkes process to effectively model the dynamics in this sequence. Experimental results on four benchmark dialogue datasets demonstrate that ASAP can substantially outperform state-of-the-art baseline estimators.

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Next from ACL 2023

Morphological Inflection: A Reality Check

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Reports of personal experiences and stories in argumentation: datasets and analysis