Canada

This paper aims to benchmark recent progress in language understanding models that output contextualised representations at the character level. Many such modelling architectures and methods to train those architectures have been proposed, but it is currently unclear what the relative contributions of the architecture vs. the pretraining objective are to final model performance. We explore the design space of such models, comparing architectural innovations (Clark et al., 2022, Jaegle et al., 2022, Tay et al., 2021) and a variety of different pretraining objectives on a suite of evaluation tasks with a fixed training procedure in order to find the currently optimal way to build and train character-level BERT-like models. We find that our best performing character-level model exceeds the performance of a token-based model trained with the same settings on the same data, suggesting that character-level models are ready for more widespread adoption. Unfortunately, the best method to train character-level models still relies on a subword-level tokeniser during pretraining, and final model performance is highly dependent on tokeniser quality. We believe our results demonstrate the readiness of character-level models for multilingual language representation, and encourage NLP practitioners to try them as drop-in replacements for token-based models.

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ACL 2023

What is the best recipe for character-level encoder-only modelling?

character-level

tokenization

bert

### 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.

This paper aims to benchmark recent progress in language understanding models that output contextualised representations at the character level. Many such modelling architectures and methods to train those architectures have been proposed, but it is currently unclear what the relative contributions of the architecture vs. the pretraining objective are to final model performance. We explore the design space of such models, comparing architectural innovations (Clark et al., 2022, Jaegle et al., 2022, Tay et al., 2021) and a variety of different pretraining objectives on a suite of evaluation tasks with a fixed training procedure in order to find the currently optimal way to build and train character-level BERT-like models. We find that our best performing character-level model exceeds the performance of a token-based model trained with the same settings on the same data, suggesting that character-level models are ready for more widespread adoption. Unfortunately, the best method to train character-level models still relies on a subword-level tokeniser during pretraining, and final model performance is highly dependent on tokeniser quality. We believe our results demonstrate the readiness of character-level models for multilingual language representation, and encourage NLP practitioners to try them as drop-in replacements for token-based models.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/6qSnTPZvioRLfFJpZUjhCw/embed/polls/a2b224b0-148e-4b42-bca4-8c4ba0fb2bd9" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

technical paper

We investigate knowledge retrieval with multi-modal queries, i.e. queries containing information split across image and text inputs, a challenging task that differs from previous work on cross-modal retrieval. We curate a new dataset called ReMuQ for benchmarking progress on this task. ReMuQ requires a system to retrieve knowledge from a large corpus by integrating contents from both text and image queries. We introduce a retriever model "ReViz" that can directly process input text and images to retrieve relevant knowledge in an end-to-end fashion without being dependent on intermediate modules such as object detectors or caption generators. We introduce a new pretraining task that is effective for learning knowledge retrieval with multimodal queries and also improves performance on downstream tasks. We demonstrate superior performance in retrieval on two datasets (ReMuQ and OK-VQA) under zero-shot settings as well as further improvements when finetuned on these datasets.

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End-to-end Knowledge Retrieval with Multi-modal Queries

A curriculum is a planned sequence of learning materials and an effective one can make learning efficient and effective for both humans and machines. Recent studies developed effective data-driven curriculum learning approaches for training graph neural networks in language applications. However, existing curriculum learning approaches often employ a single criterion of difficulty in their training paradigms. In this paper, we propose a new perspective on curriculum learning by introducing a novel approach that builds on graph complexity formalisms (as difficulty criteria) and model competence during training. The model consists of a scheduling scheme which derives effective curricula by accounting for different views of sample difficulty and model competence during training. The proposed solution advances existing research in curriculum learning for graph neural networks with the ability to incorporate a fine-grained spectrum of graph difficulty criteria in their training paradigms. Experimental results on real-world link prediction and node classification tasks illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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Curriculum Learning for Graph Neural Networks: A Multiview Competence-based Approach

Voice dictation is an increasingly important text input modality. Existing systems that allow both dictation and editing-by-voice restrict their command language to flat templates invoked by trigger words. In this work, we study the feasibility of allowing users to interrupt their dictation with spoken editing commands in open-ended natural language. We introduce a new task and dataset, TERTiUS, to experiment with such systems. To support this flexibility in real-time, a system must incrementally segment and classify spans of speech as either dictation or command, and interpret the spans that are commands. We experiment with using large pre-trained language models to predict the edited text, or alternatively, to predict a small text-editing program. Experiments show a natural trade-off between model accuracy and latency: a smaller model achieves 30% end-state accuracy with 1.3 seconds of latency, while a larger model achieves 55% end-state accuracy with 7 seconds of latency.

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Toward Interactive Dictation

Recent works in Event Argument Extraction (EAE) have focused on improving model generalizability to cater to new events and domains. However, standard benchmarking datasets like ACE and ERE cover less than 40 event types and 25 entity-centric argument roles. Limited diversity and coverage hinder these datasets from adequately evaluating the generalizability of EAE models. In this paper, we first contribute by creating a large and diverse EAE ontology. This ontology is created by transforming FrameNet, a comprehensive semantic role labeling (SRL) dataset for EAE, by exploiting the similarity between these two tasks. Then, exhaustive human expert annotations are collected to build the ontology, concluding with 115 events and 220 argument roles, with a significant portion of roles not being entities. We utilize this ontology to further introduce GENEVA, a diverse generalizability benchmarking dataset comprising four test suites aimed at evaluating models' ability to handle limited data and unseen event type generalization. We benchmark six EAE models from various families. The results show that owing to non-entity argument roles, even the best-performing model can only achieve 39% F1 score, indicating how GENEVA provides new challenges for generalization in EAE. Overall, our large and diverse EAE ontology can aid in creating more comprehensive future resources, while GENEVA is a challenging benchmarking dataset encouraging further research for improving generalizability in EAE. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/PlusLabNLP/GENEVA.

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GENEVA: Benchmarking Generalizability for Event Argument Extraction with Hundreds of Event Types and Argument Roles

Despite exciting progress in causal language models, the expressiveness of their representations is largely limited due to poor discrimination ability. To remedy this issue, we present CONTRACLM, a novel contrastive learning framework at both the token-level and the sequence-level. We assess CONTRACLM on a variety of downstream tasks. We show that CONTRACLM enhances the discrimination of representations and bridges the gap with encoder-only models, which makes causal language models better suited for tasks beyond language generation. Specifically, we attain 44% relative improvement on the Semantic Textual Similarity tasks and 34% on Code-to-Code Search tasks. Furthermore, by improving the expressiveness of representations, CONTRACLM also boosts the source code generation capability with 9% relative improvement on execution accuracy on the HumanEval benchmark.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/a8c5a05d-5d9f-4e99-b48a-066ca952058f" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

ContraCLM: Contrastive Learning For Causal Language Model

We propose "Conceptual Coverage Across Languages" (CoCo-CroLa), a technique for benchmarking the degree to which any generative text-to-image system provides multilingual parity to its training language in terms of tangible nouns. For each model we can assess "conceptual coverage" of a given target language relative to a source language by comparing the population of images generated for a series of tangible nouns in the source language to the population of images generated for each noun under translation in the target language. This technique allows us to estimate how well-suited a model is to a target language as well as identify model-specific weaknesses, spurious correlations, and biases without a-priori assumptions. We demonstrate how it can be used to benchmark T2I models in terms of multilinguality, and how despite its simplicity it is a good proxy for impressive generalization.

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Multilingual Conceptual Coverage in Text-to-Image Models

Event argument extraction (EAE) identifies event arguments and their specific roles for a given event. Recent advancement in generation-based EAE models has shown great performance and generalizability over classification-based models. However, existing generation-based EAE models mostly focus on problem re-formulation and prompt design, without incorporating additional information that has been shown to be effective for classification-based models, such as the abstract meaning representation (AMR) of the input passages. Incorporating such information into generation-based models is challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of the natural language form prevalently used in generation-based models and the structured form of AMRs. In this work, we study strategies to incorporate AMR into generation-based EAE models. We propose AMPERE, which generates AMR-aware prefixes for every layer of the generation model. Thus, the prefix introduces AMR information to the generation-based EAE model and then improves the generation. We also introduce an adjusted copy mechanism to AMPERE to help overcome potential noises brought by the AMR graph. Comprehensive experiments and analyses on ACE2005 and ERE datasets show that AMPERE can get 4% - 10% absolute F1 score improvements with reduced training data and it is in general powerful across different training sizes.

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AMPERE: AMR-Aware Prefix for Generation-Based Event Argument Extraction Model

Large Language Models (LLMs) are so powerful that they sometimes learn correlations between labels and features that are irrelevant to the task, leading to poor generalization on out-of-distribution data. We propose explanation-based finetuning as a general approach to mitigate LLMs' reliance on spurious correlations. Unlike standard finetuning where the model only predicts the answer given the input, we finetune the model to additionally generate a free-text explanation supporting its answer. To evaluate our method, we finetune the model on artificially constructed training sets containing different types of spurious cues, and test it on a test set without these cues. Compared to standard finetuning, our method makes GPT-3 (davinci) remarkably more robust against spurious cues in terms of accuracy drop across four classification tasks: ComVE (+1.2), CREAK (+9.1), e-SNLI (+15.4), and SBIC (+6.5). The efficacy generalizes across multiple model families and scales, with greater gains for larger models. Finally, our method also works well with explanations generated by the model, implying its applicability to more datasets without human-written explanations.

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Explanation-based Finetuning Makes Models More Robust to Spurious Cues

Many machine learning-based low-code or no-code applications involve generating code that interacts with structured knowledge. For example, one of the most studied tasks in this area is generating SQL code from a natural language statement. Prior work shows that incorporating context information from the database schema, such as table and column names, is beneficial to model performance on this task. In this work we present a large pretraining dataset and strategy for learning representations of text, tables, and SQL code that leverages the entire context of the problem. Specifically, we build on existing encoder-decoder architecture by introducing a multitask pretraining framework that complements the unique attributes of our diverse pretraining data. Our work represents the first study on large-scale pretraining of encoder-decoder models for interacting with structured knowledge, and offers a new state-of-the-art foundation model in text-to-SQL generation. We validate our approach with experiments on two SQL tasks, showing improvement over existing methods, including a 1.7 and 2.2 percentage point improvement over prior state-of-the-arts on Spider and CoSQL.

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Multitask Pretraining with Structured Knowledge for Text-to-SQL Generation

Zero-shot event extraction (EE) methods infer richly structured event records from text, based only on a minimal user specification and no training examples, which enables flexibility in exploring and developing applications. Most event extraction research uses the Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) annotated dataset to evaluate supervised EE methods, but can it be used to evaluate zero-shot and other low-supervision EE? We describe ACE's event structures and identify significant ambiguities and issues in current evaluation practice, including (1) coreferent argument mentions, (2) conflicting argument head conventions, and (3) ignorance of modality and event class details. By sometimes mishandling these subtleties, current work may dramatically understate the actual performance of zero-shot and other low-supervision EE, considering up to 32% of correctly identified arguments and 25% of correctly ignored event mentions as false negatives. For each issue, we propose recommendations for future evaluations so the research community can better utilize ACE as an event evaluation resource.

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End-to-end Knowledge Retrieval with Multi-modal Queries

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