Canada

Prompt tuning (PT) which only tunes the embeddings of an additional sequence of tokens per task, keeping the pre-trained language model (PLM) frozen, has shown remarkable performance in few-shot learning. Despite this, PT has been shown to rely heavily on good initialization of the prompt embeddings. In this work, we study meta prompt tuning (MPT) to systematically explore how meta-learning can help improve (if it can) cross-task generalization in PT through learning to initialize the prompt embeddings from other relevant tasks. We empirically analyze a representative set of meta learning algorithms in a wide range of adaptation settings with different source/target task configurations on a large set of few-shot tasks. With extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MPT. We find the improvement to be significant particularly on classification tasks. For other kinds of tasks such as question answering, we observe that while MPT can outperform PT in most cases, it does not always outperform multi-task learning. We further provide an in-depth analysis from the perspective of task similarity.

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ACL 2023

Learning to Initialize: Can Meta Learning Improve Cross-task Generalization in Prompt Tuning?

cross-task generalization

prompt tuning

meta learning

**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.

Prompt tuning (PT) which only tunes the embeddings of an additional sequence of tokens per task, keeping the pre-trained language model (PLM) frozen, has shown remarkable performance in few-shot learning. Despite this, PT has been shown to rely heavily on good initialization of the prompt embeddings. In this work, we study meta prompt tuning (MPT) to systematically explore how meta-learning can help improve (if it can) cross-task generalization in PT through learning to initialize the prompt embeddings from other relevant tasks. We empirically analyze a representative set of meta learning algorithms in a wide range of adaptation settings with different source/target task configurations on a large set of few-shot tasks. With extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MPT. We find the improvement to be significant particularly on classification tasks. For other kinds of tasks such as question answering, we observe that while MPT can outperform PT in most cases, it does not always outperform multi-task learning. We further provide an in-depth analysis from the perspective of task similarity.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/1kgCXjyZMgdV89PsksaJsj/embed/polls/3b776249-b064-431f-9ecf-681c62475094" 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.

Natural language processing (NLP) researchers develop models of grammar, meaning and communication based on written text. Due to task and data differences, what is considered text can vary substantially across studies. A conceptual framework for systematically capturing these differences is lacking. We argue that clarity on the notion of text is crucial for reproducible and generalizable NLP. Towards that goal, we propose common terminology to discuss the production and transformation of textual data, and introduce a two-tier taxonomy of linguistic and non-linguistic elements that are available in textual sources and can be used in NLP modeling. We apply this taxonomy to survey existing work that extends the notion of text beyond the conservative language-centered view. We outline key desiderata and challenges of the emerging inclusive approach to text in NLP, and suggest community-level reporting as a crucial next step to consolidate the discussion.

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An Inclusive Notion of Text

We propose HermEs, the first approach for spreadsheet formula prediction via HiEraRchical forMulet ExpanSion, where hierarchical expansion means generating formulas following the underlying parse tree structure, and Formulet refers to commonly-used multi-level patterns mined from real formula parse trees. HermEs improves the formula prediction accuracy by (1) guaranteeing correct grammar by hierarchical generation rather than left-to-right generation and (2) significantly streamlining the token-level decoding with high-level Formulet. Notably, instead of generating formulas in a pre-defined fixed order, we propose a novel sampling strategy to systematically exploit a variety of hierarchical and multi-level expansion orders and provided solid mathematical proof, with the aim of meeting diverse human needs of the formula writing order in real applications. We further develop an interactive formula completion interface based on \textsc{HermEs}, which shows a new user experience in https://github.com/formulet/HERMES.

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HermEs: Interactive Spreadsheet Formula Prediction via Hierarchical Formulet Expansion

We solve the challenging document-level event extraction problem by proposing a joint exaction methodology that can avoid inefficiency and error propagation issues in classic pipeline methods. Essentially, we address the three crucial limitations in existing studies. First, the autoregressive strategy of path expansion heavily relies on the orders of argument role. Second, the number of events in documents must be specified in advance. Last, unexpected errors usually exist when decoding events based on the entity-entity adjacency matrix. To address these issues, this paper designs a Token-Token Bidirectional Event Completed Graph (TT-BECG) in which the relation eType-Role1-Role2 serves as the edge type, precisely revealing which tokens play argument roles in an event of a specific event type. Exploiting the token-token adjacency matrix of the TT-BECG, we develop an edge-enhanced joint document-level event extraction model. Guided by the target token-token adjacency matrix, the predicted token-token adjacency matrix can be obtained during the model training. Then, extracted events and event records in a document are decoded based on the predicted matrix, including the graph structure and edge type decoding. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public datasets, and the results confirm the effectiveness of our method and its superiority over the state-of-the-art baselines.

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Joint Document-Level Event Extraction via Token-Token Bidirectional Event Completed Graph

Transformer achieves promising results on various tasks. However, self-attention suffers from quadratic memory requirements with respect to the sequence length. Existing work focuses on reducing time and space complexity from an algorithm perspective. In this work, we propose sequence parallelism, a memory-efficient parallelism to solve this issue from system perspective instead. Our approach is compatible with most existing parallelisms (\eg data, pipeline, and tensor parallelism), which means our sequence parallelism makes 4D parallelism possible. More importantly, we no longer require a single device to hold the whole sequence. Besides, using efficient attention with linear complexity, our sequence parallelism enables us to train transformer with infinite long sequence. Specifically, we split the input sequence into multiple chunks and feed each chunk into its corresponding device (\ie GPU). To compute the attention output, we integrated ring-style communication with self-attention calculation and proposed Ring Self-Attention (RSA). Experiments show that sequence parallelism performs well when scaling with batch size and sequence length. Compared with tensor parallelism, our approach achieved $13.7\times$ and $3.0\times$ maximum batch size and sequence length respectively when scaling up to 64 NVIDIA P100 GPUs. With efficient attention, sequence can handle sequence with over 114K tokens, which is over $27\times$ longer than existing efficient attention works holding the whole sequence on a single device.

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Sequence Parallelism: Long Sequence Training from System Perspective

The anonymity on the Darknet allows vendors to stay undetected by using multiple vendor aliases or frequently migrating between markets. Consequently, illegal markets and their connections are challenging to uncover on the Darknet. To identify relationships between illegal markets and their vendors, we propose VendorLink, an NLP-based approach that examines writing patterns to verify, identify, and link unique vendor accounts across text advertisements (ads) on seven public Darknet markets. In contrast to existing literature, VendorLink utilizes the strength of supervised pre-training to perform closed-set vendor verification, open-set vendor identification, and low-resource market adaption tasks. Through VendorLink, we uncover (i) 15 migrants and 71 potential aliases in the Alphabay-Dreams-Silk dataset, (ii) 17 migrants and 3 potential aliases in the Valhalla-Berlusconi dataset, and (iii) 75 migrants and 10 potential aliases in the Traderoute-Agora dataset. Altogether, our approach can help Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) make more informed decisions by verifying and identifying migrating vendors and their potential aliases on existing and Low-Resource (LR) emerging Darknet markets.

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VendorLink: An NLP approach for Identifying & Linking Vendor Migrants & Potential Aliases on Darknet Markets

Prior work on language models (LMs) shows that training on a large number of diverse tasks improves few-shot learning (FSL) performance on new tasks. We take this to the extreme, automatically extracting 413,299 tasks from internet tables - orders of magnitude more than the next-largest public datasets. Finetuning on the resulting dataset leads to improved FSL performance on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, but not proportionally to dataset scale. In fact, we find that narrow subsets of our dataset sometimes outperform more diverse datasets. For example, finetuning on software documentation from support.google.com raises FSL performance by a mean of +7.5% on 52 downstream tasks, which beats training on 40 human-curated NLP datasets (+6.7%). Finetuning on various narrow datasets leads to similar broad improvements across test tasks, suggesting that the gains are not from domain adaptation but adapting to FSL in general. We do not observe clear patterns between the datasets that lead to FSL gains, leaving open questions about why certain data helps with FSL.

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Few-shot Adaptation Works with UnpredicTable Data

Recently, question answering over temporal knowledge graphs (i.e., TKGQA) has been introduced and investigated, in quest of reasoning about dynamic factual knowledge. To foster research on TKGQA, a few datasets have been curated (e.g., CronQuestions and Complex-CronQuestions), and various models have been proposed based on these datasets. Nevertheless, existing efforts overlook the fact that real-life applications of TKGQA also tend to be complex in temporal granularity, i.e., the questions may concern mixed temporal granularities (e.g., both day and month). To overcome the limitation, in this paper, we motivate the notion of multi-granularity temporal question answering over knowledge graphs and present a large scale dataset for multi-granularity TKGQA, namely MultiTQ. To the best of our knowledge, MultiTQis among the first of its kind, and compared with existing datasets on TKGQA, MultiTQfeatures at least two desirable aspectsample relevant facts and multiple temporal granularities. It is expected to better reflect real-world challenges, and serve as a test bed for TKGQA models. In addition, we propose a competing baseline MultiQA over MultiTQ, which is experimentally demonstrated to be effective in dealing with TKGQA. The data and code are released at https://github.com/czy1999/MultiTQ.

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Multi-granularity Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

The longstanding goal of multi-lingual learning has been to develop a universal cross-lingual model that can withstand the changes in multi-lingual data distributions. There has been a large amount of work to adapt such multi-lingual models to unseen target languages. However, the majority of work in this direction focuses on the standard one-hop transfer learning pipeline from source to target languages, whereas in realistic scenarios, new languages can be incorporated at any time in a sequential manner. In this paper, we present a principled Cross-lingual Continual Learning (CCL) evaluation paradigm, where we analyze different categories of approaches used to continually adapt to emerging data from different languages. We provide insights into what makes multilingual sequential learning particularly challenging. To surmount such challenges, we benchmark a representative set of cross-lingual continual learning algorithms and analyze their knowledge preservation, accumulation, and generalization capabilities compared to baselines on carefully curated datastreams. The implications of this analysis include a recipe for how to measure and balance different cross-lingual continual learning desiderata, which go beyond conventional transfer learning.

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Cross-lingual Continual Learning

Moral norms vary across cultures. A recent line of work suggests that English large language models contain human-like moral biases, but these studies typically do not examine moral variation in a diverse cultural setting. We investigate the extent to which monolingual English language models contain knowledge about moral norms in different countries. We consider two levels of analysis: 1) whether language models capture fine-grained moral variation across countries over a variety of topics such as "homosexuality" and "divorce"; 2) whether language models capture cultural diversity and shared tendencies in which topics people around the globe tend to diverge or agree on in their moral judgment. We perform our analyses with two public datasets from the World Values Survey (across 55 countries) and PEW global surveys (across 40 countries) on morality. We find that pre-trained English language models predict empirical moral norms across countries worse than the English moral norms reported previously. However, fine-tuning language models on the survey data improves inference across countries at the expense of a less accurate estimate of the English moral norms. We discuss the relevance and challenges of incorporating cultural knowledge into the automated inference of moral norms.

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Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language models

Dataset distillation aims to create a small dataset of informative synthetic samples to rapidly train neural networks that retain the performance of the original dataset. In this paper, we focus on constructing distilled few-shot datasets for natural language processing (NLP) tasks to fine-tune pre-trained transformers. Specifically, we propose to introduce attention labels, which can efficiently distill the knowledge from the original dataset and transfer it to the transformer models via attention probabilities. We evaluated our dataset distillation methods in four various NLP tasks and demonstrated that it is possible to create distilled few-shot datasets with the attention labels, yielding impressive performances for fine-tuning BERT. Specifically, in AGNews, a four-class news classification task, our distilled few-shot dataset achieved up to 93.2% accuracy, which is 98.5% performance of the original dataset even with only one sample per class and only one gradient step.

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An Inclusive Notion of Text

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