Canada

Language models have been shown to exhibit positive scaling, where performance improves as models are scaled up in terms of size, compute, or data. In this work, we introduce NeQA, a dataset consisting of questions with negation in which language models do not exhibit straightforward positive scaling. We show that this task can exhibit inverse scaling, U-shaped scaling, or positive scaling, and the three scaling trends shift in this order as we use more powerful prompting methods or model families. We hypothesize that solving NeQA depends on two subtasks: question answering (task 1) and negation understanding (task 2). We find that task 1 has linear scaling, while task 2 has sigmoid-shaped scaling with an emergent transition point, and composing these two scaling trends yields the final scaling trend of NeQA. Our work reveals and provides a way to analyze the complex scaling trends of language models.

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ACL 2023

Beyond Positive Scaling: How Negation Impacts Scaling Trends of Language Models

task decomposition

scaling

language model

negation

# 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>
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)


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). 

Language models have been shown to exhibit positive scaling, where performance improves as models are scaled up in terms of size, compute, or data. In this work, we introduce NeQA, a dataset consisting of questions with negation in which language models do not exhibit straightforward positive scaling. We show that this task can exhibit inverse scaling, U-shaped scaling, or positive scaling, and the three scaling trends shift in this order as we use more powerful prompting methods or model families. We hypothesize that solving NeQA depends on two subtasks: question answering (task 1) and negation understanding (task 2). We find that task 1 has linear scaling, while task 2 has sigmoid-shaped scaling with an emergent transition point, and composing these two scaling trends yields the final scaling trend of NeQA. Our work reveals and provides a way to analyze the complex scaling trends of language models.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/or9aypsi961h595NQtD7kk/embed/polls/49d43ce3-650f-4ee3-9c2e-7cc09eb6ef05" 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.

Text-based personality computing (TPC) has gained many research interests in NLP. In this paper, we describe 15 challenges that we consider deserving the attention of the NLP research community. These challenges are organized by the following topics: personality taxonomies, measurement quality, datasets, performance evaluation, modelling choices, as well as ethics and fairness. When addressing each challenge, not only do we combine perspectives from both NLP and social sciences, but also offer concrete suggestions. We hope to inspire more valid and reliable TPC research.

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On Text-based Personality Computing: Challenges and Future Directions

In recent years, the main focus of research on automatic readability assessment (ARA) has shifted towards using expensive deep learning-based methods with the primary goal of increasing models' accuracy. This, however, is rarely applicable for low-resource languages where traditional handcrafted features are still widely used due to the lack of existing NLP tools to extract deeper linguistic representations. In this work, we take a step back from the technical component and focus on how linguistic aspects such as mutual intelligibility or degree of language relatedness can improve ARA in a low-resource setting. We collect short stories written in three languages in the PhilippinesTagalog, Bikol, and Cebuanoto train readability assessment models and explore the interaction of data and features in various cross-lingual setups. Our results show that the inclusion of CrossNGO, a novel specialized feature exploiting n-gram overlap applied to languages with high mutual intelligibility, significantly improves the performance of ARA models compared to the use of off-the-shelf large multilingual language models alone. Consequently, when both linguistic representations are combined, we achieve state-of-the-art results for Tagalog and Cebuano, and baseline scores for ARA in Bikol.

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Automatic Readability Assessment for Closely Related Languages

Knowing exactly how many data points need to be labeled to achieve a certain model performance is a hugely beneficial step towards reducing the overall budgets for annotation. It pertains to both active learning and traditional data annotation, and is particularly beneficial for low resource scenarios. Nevertheless, it remains a largely under-explored area of research in NLP. We therefore explored various techniques for estimating the training sample size necessary to achieve a targeted performance value. We derived a simple yet effective approach to predict the maximum achievable model performance based on small amount of training samples -- which serves as an early indicator during data annotation for data quality and sample size determination. We performed ablation studies on four language understanding tasks, and showed that the proposed approach allows us to forecast model performance within a small margin of mean absolute error (~0.9%) with only 10% data.

Revisiting Sample Size Determination in Natural Language Understanding

The rapid development of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) within recent decades shows great potential for real-world society. The current ABSA works, however, are mostly limited to the scenario of a single text piece, leaving the study in dialogue contexts unexplored. To bridge the gap between fine-grained sentiment analysis and conversational opinion mining, in this work, we introduce a novel task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis, namely DiaASQ, aiming to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. We manually construct a large-scale high-quality DiaASQ dataset in both Chinese and English languages. We deliberately develop a neural model to benchmark the task, which advances in effectively performing end-to-end quadruple prediction, and manages to incorporate rich dialogue-specific and discourse feature representations for better cross-utterance quadruple extraction. We hope the new benchmark will spur more advancements in the sentiment analysis community.

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DiaASQ: A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis

The transformer model is known to be computationally demanding, and prohibitively costly for long sequences, as the self-attention module uses a quadratic time and space complexity with respect to sequence length. Many researchers have focused on designing new forms of self-attention or introducing new parameters to overcome this limitation, however a large portion of them prohibits the model to inherit weights from large pretrained models.In this work, the transformer's inefficiency has been taken care of from another perspective. We propose Fourier Transformer, a simple yet effective approach by progressively removing redundancies in hidden sequence using the ready-made Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operator to perform Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT). Fourier Transformer is able to significantly reduce computational costs while retain the ability to inherit from various large pretrained models.Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performances among all transformer-based models on the long-range modeling benchmark LRA with significant improvement in both speed and space. For generative seq-to-seq tasks including CNN/DailyMail and ELI5, by inheriting the BART weights our model outperforms the standard BART and other efficient models. \footnote{Our code will be publicly available at \url{https://github.com/LUMIA-Group/FourierTransformer}}

Fourier Transformer: Fast Long Range Modeling by Removing Sequence Redundancy with FFT Operator

Since conventional knowledge embedding models cannot take full advantage of the abundant textual information, there have been extensive research efforts in enhancing knowledge embedding using texts. However, existing enhancement approaches cannot apply to \textit{temporal knowledge graphs} (tKGs), which contain time-dependent event knowledge with complex temporal dynamics. Specifically, existing enhancement approaches often assume knowledge embedding is time-independent. In contrast, the entity embedding in tKG models usually evolves, which poses the challenge of aligning \textit{temporally relevant} texts with entities. To this end, we propose to study enhancing temporal knowledge embedding with textual data in this paper. As an approach to this task, we propose Enhanced Temporal Knowledge Embeddings with Contextualized Language Representations (ECOLA), which takes the temporal aspect into account and injects textual information into temporal knowledge embedding. To evaluate ECOLA, we introduce three new datasets for training and evaluating ECOLA. Extensive experiments show that ECOLA significantly enhances temporal KG embedding models with up to 287% relative improvements regarding Hits@1 on the link prediction task. The code and models are publicly available on https://github.com/mayhugotong/ECOLA.

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ECOLA: Enhancing Temporal Knowledge Embeddings with Contextualized Language Representations

The prevalence of short video platforms has spawned a lot of fake news videos, which have stronger propagation ability than textual fake news. Thus, automatically detecting fake news videos has been an important countermeasure in practice. Previous works commonly verify each news video individually with multimodal information. Nevertheless, news videos from different perspectives regarding the same event are commonly posted together, which contain complementary or contradictory information and thus can be used to evaluate each other mutually. To this end, we introduce a new and practical paradigm, i.e., cross-sample fake news video detection, and propose a novel framework, Neighbor-Enhanced fakE news video Detection (NEED), which integrates the neighborhood relationship of new videos belonging to the same event. NEED can be readily combined with existing single-sample detectors and further enhance their performances with the proposed graph aggregation (GA) and debunking rectification (DR) modules. Specifically, given the feature representations obtained from single-sample detectors, GA aggregates the neighborhood information with the dynamic graph to enrich the features of independent samples. After that, DR explicitly leverages the relationship between debunking videos and fake news videos to refute the candidate videos via textual and visual consistency. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark demonstrate that NEED greatly improves the performance of both single-modal (up to 8.34% in accuracy) and multimodal (up to 4.97% in accuracy) base detectors.

Two Heads Are Better Than One: Improving Fake News Video Detection by Correlating with Neighbors

Annotating long-document question answering (long-document QA) pairs is time-consuming and expensive. To alleviate the problem, it might be possible to generate long-document QA pairs via unsupervised question answering (UQA) methods. However, existing UQA tasks are based on short documents, and can hardly incorporate long-range information. To tackle the problem, we propose a new task, named unsupervised long-document question answering (ULQA), aiming to generate high-quality long-document QA instances in an unsupervised manner. Besides, we propose AttenWalker, a novel unsupervised method to aggregate and generate answers with long-range dependency so as to construct long-document QA pairs. Specifically, AttenWalker is composed of three modules, i.e. span collector, span linker and answer aggregator. Firstly, the span collector takes advantage of constituent parsing and reconstruction loss to select informative candidate spans for constructing answers. Secondly, with the help of the attention graph of a pre-trained long-document model, potentially interrelated text spans (that might be far apart) could be linked together via an attention-walking algorithm. Thirdly, in the answer aggregator, linked spans are aggregated into the final answer via the mask-filling ability of a pre-trained model. Extensive experiments show that AttenWalker outperforms previous methods on NarrativeQA and Qasper. In addition, AttenWalker also shows strong performance in the few-shot learning setting.

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AttenWalker: Unsupervised Long-Document Question Answering via Attention-based Graph Walking

Layer Normalization (LayerNorm) is an inherent component in all Transformer-based models.In this paper, we show that LayerNorm is crucial to the expressivity of the multi-head attention layer that follows it. This is in contrast to the common belief that LayerNorm's only role is to normalize the activations during the forward pass, and their gradients during the backward pass.We consider a geometric interpretation of LayerNorm and show that it consists of two components: (a) projection of the input vectors to a d-1 space that is orthogonal to the [1,1,...,1] vector, and(b) scaling of all vectors to the same norm of \sqrt{d}. We show that each of these components is important for the attention layer that follows it in Transformers:(a) projection allows the attention mechanism to create an attention query that attends to all keys equally, offloading the need to learn this operation in the attention; and(b) scaling allows each key to potentially receive the highest attention, and prevents keys from being "un-select-able''.We show empirically that Transformers do indeed benefit from these properties of LayeNorm in general language modeling and even in computing simple functions such as "majority''. Our code is available at https://github.com/tech-srl/layer_norm_expressivity_role .

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On the Expressivity Role of LayerNorm in Transformers' Attention

Few-shot cross-lingual transfer, fine-tuning Multilingual Masked Language Model (MMLM) with source language labeled data and a small amount of target language labeled data, provides excellent performance in the target language.However, if no labeled data in the target language are available, they need to be created through human annotations.In this study, we devise a metric to select annotation candidates from an unlabeled data pool that efficiently enhance accuracy for few-shot cross-lingual transfer.It is known that training a model with hard examples is important to improve the model's performance.Therefore, we first identify examples that MMLM cannot solve in a zero-shot cross-lingual transfer setting and demonstrate that it is hard to predict peculiar examples in the target language, i.e., the examples distant from the source language examples in cross-lingual semantic space of the MMLM.We then choose high peculiarity examples as annotation candidates and perform few-shot cross-lingual transfer.In comprehensive experiments with 20 languages and 6 tasks, we demonstrate that the high peculiarity examples improve the target language accuracy compared to other candidate selection methods proposed in previous studies.

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On Text-based Personality Computing: Challenges and Future Directions

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