Canada

In recent years, pre-trained transformer-based language models (LM) have become a key resource for implementing most NLP tasks. However, pre-training such models demands large text collections not available in most languages. In this paper, we study the use of machine-translated corpora for pre-training LMs. We answer the following research questions: RQ1: Is MT-based data an alternative to real data for learning a LM?; RQ2: Can real data be complemented with translated data and improve the resulting LM? In order to validate these two questions, several BERT models for Basque have been trained, combining real data and synthetic data translated from Spanish.The evaluation carried out on 9 NLU tasks indicates that models trained exclusively on translated data offer competitive results. Furthermore, models trained with real data can be improved with synthetic data, although further research is needed on the matter.

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ACL 2023

Not Enough Data to Pre-train Your Language Model? MT to the Rescue!

low-resource languages

data augmentation

language models

machine translation

### 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.

In recent years, pre-trained transformer-based language models (LM) have become a key resource for implementing most NLP tasks. However, pre-training such models demands large text collections not available in most languages. In this paper, we study the use of machine-translated corpora for pre-training LMs. We answer the following research questions: RQ1: Is MT-based data an alternative to real data for learning a LM?; RQ2: Can real data be complemented with translated data and improve the resulting LM? In order to validate these two questions, several BERT models for Basque have been trained, combining real data and synthetic data translated from Spanish.The evaluation carried out on 9 NLU tasks indicates that models trained exclusively on translated data offer competitive results. Furthermore, models trained with real data can be improved with synthetic data, although further research is needed on the matter.

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poster

The current generation of intelligent assistants require explicit user requests to perform tasks or services, often leading to lengthy and complex conversations. In contrast, human assistants can infer multiple implicit intents from utterances via their commonsense knowledge, thereby simplifying interactions. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a framework for multi-domain dialogue systems. This framework automatically infers implicit intents from user utterances, and prompts a large pre-trained language model to suggest suitable task-oriented bots. By leveraging commonsense knowledge, our framework recommends associated bots in a zero-shot manner, enhancing interaction efficiency and effectiveness. This approach substantially reduces interaction complexity, seamlessly integrates various domains and tasks, and represents a significant step towards creating more human-like intelligent assistants that can reason about implicit intents, offering a superior user experience.

Zero-Shot Prompting for Implicit Intent Prediction and Recommendation with Commonsense Reasoning

Clinical practice frequently uses medical imaging for diagnosis and treatment. A significant challenge for automatic radiology report generation is that the radiology reports are long narratives consisting of multiple sentences for both abnormal and normal findings. Therefore, applying conventional image captioning approaches to generate the whole report proves to be insufficient, as these are designed to briefly describe images with short sentences. We propose a template-based approach to generate radiology reports from radiographs. Our approach involves the following: i) using a multilabel image classifier, produce the tags for the input radiograph; ii) using a transformer-based model, generate pathological descriptions (a description of abnormal findings seen on radiographs) from the tags generated in step (i); iii) using a BERT-based multi-label text classifier, find the spans in the normal report template to replace with the generated pathological descriptions; and iv) using a rule-based system, replace the identified span with the generated pathological description. We performed experiments with the two most popular radiology report datasets, IU Chest X-ray and MIMIC-CXR and demonstrated that the BLEU-1, ROUGE-L, METEOR, and CIDEr scores are better than the State-of-the-Art models by 25%, 36%, 44% and 48% respectively, on the IU X-RAY dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to generate chest X-ray radiology reports by first creating small sentences for abnormal findings and then replacing them in the normal report template.

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Replace and Report: NLP Assisted Radiology Report Generation

Despite recent interest in open domain question answering (ODQA) over tables, many studies still rely on datasets that are not truly optimal for the task with respect to utilizing structural nature of table. These datasets assume answers reside as a single cell value and do not necessitate exploring over multiple cells such as aggregation, comparison, and sorting. Thus, we release Open-WikiTable, the first ODQA dataset that requires complex reasoning over tables. Open-WikiTable is built upon WikiSQL and WikiTableQuestions to be applicable in the open-domain setting. As each question is coupled with both textual answers and SQL queries, Open-WikiTable opens up a wide range of possibilities for future research, as both reader and parser methods can be applied. The dataset is publicly available.

Open-WikiTable : Dataset for Open Domain Question Answering with Complex Reasoning over Table

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a Semantic Parsing formalism that aims at providing a semantic graph abstraction representing a given text. Current approaches are based on autoregressive language models such as BART or T5, fine-tuned through Teacher Forcing to obtain a linearized version of the AMR graph from a sentence. In this paper, we present LeakDistill, a model and method that explores a modification to the Transformer architecture, using structural adapters to explicitly incorporate graph information into the learned representations and improve AMR parsing performance. Our experiments show how, by employing word-to-node alignment to embed graph structural information into the encoder at training time, we can obtain state-of-the-art AMR parsing through self-knowledge distillation, even without the use of additional data. We release the code at [http://www.github.com/sapienzanlp/LeakDistill](http://www.github.com/sapienzanlp/LeakDistill).

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Incorporating Graph Information in Transformer-based AMR Parsing

Concurrent with the rapid progress in neural network-based models in NLP, the need for creating explanations for the predictions of these black-box models has risen steadily. Yet, especially for complex inputs like texts or images, existing interpretability methods still struggle with deriving easily interpretable explanations that also accurately represent the basis for the model's decision. To this end, we propose a new, model-agnostic method to generate extractive explanations for predictions made by neural networks, that is based on masking parts of the input which the model does not consider to be indicative of the respective class. The masking is done using gradient-based optimization combined with a new regularization scheme that enforces sufficiency, comprehensiveness, and compactness of the generated explanation.Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in a challenging paragraph-level rationale extraction task, showing that this task can be performed without training a specialized model.We further apply our method to image inputs and obtain high-quality explanations for image classifications, which indicates that the objectives for optimizing explanation masks in text generalize to inputs of other modalities.

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Model Interpretability and Rationale Extraction by Input Mask Optimization

Medical dialogue systems (MDS) aim to provide patients with medical services, such as diagnosis and prescription. Since most patients cannot precisely describe their symptoms, dialogue understanding is challenging for MDS. Previous studies mainly addressed this by extracting the mentioned medical entities as critical dialogue history information. In this work, we argue that it is also essential to capture the transitions of the medical entities and the doctor's dialogue acts in each turn, as they help the understanding of how the dialogue flows and enhance the prediction of the entities and dialogue acts to be adopted in the following turn. Correspondingly, we propose a Dual Flow enhanced Medical (DFMed) dialogue generation framework. It extracts the medical entities and dialogue acts used in the dialogue history and models their transitions with an entity-centric graph flow and a sequential act flow, respectively. We employ two sequential models to encode them and devise an interweaving component to enhance their interactions. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our method exceeds baselines in both automatic and manual evaluations.

Medical Dialogue Generation via Dual Flow Modeling

Pre-trained abstractive summarization models can generate fluent summaries and achieve high ROUGE scores. Previous research has found that these models often generate summaries that are inconsistent with their context document and contain nonfactual information. To evaluate factuality in document summarization, a document-level Natural Language Inference (NLI) classifier can be used. However, training such a classifier requires large-scale high-quality factual and nonfactual samples. To that end, we introduce NonFactS, a data generation model, to synthesize nonfactual summaries given a context document and a human-annotated (reference) factual summary. Compared to previous methods, our nonfactual samples are more abstractive and more similar to their corresponding factual samples, resulting in state-of-the-art performance on two factuality evaluation benchmarks, FALSESUM and SUMMAC. Our experiments demonstrate that even without human-annotated summaries, NonFactS can use random sentences to generate nonfactual summaries and a classifier trained on these samples generalizes to out-of-domain documents.

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NonFactS: NonFactual Summary Generation for Factuality Evaluation in Document Summarization

This paper introduces a novel aligner for Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs that can scale cross-lingually, and is thus capable of aligning units and spans in sentences of different languages. Our approach leverages modern Transformer-based parsers, which inherently encode alignment information in their cross-attention weights, allowing us to extract this information during parsing. This eliminates the need for English-specific rules or the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm that have been used in previous approaches. In addition, we propose a guided supervised method using alignment to further enhance the performance of our aligner. We achieve state-of-the-art results in the benchmarks for AMR alignment and demonstrate our aligner's ability to obtain them across multiple languages. Our code will be available at [https://www.github.com/babelscape/AMR-alignment](https://www.github.com/babelscape/AMR-alignment).

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Cross-lingual AMR Aligner: Paying Attention to Cross-Attention

Automatically scoring student answers is an important task that is usually solved using instance-based supervised learning. Recently, similarity-based scoring has been proposed as an alternative approach yielding similar perfor- mance. It has hypothetical advantages such as a lower need for annotated training data and better zero-shot performance, both of which are properties that would be highly beneficial when applying content scoring in a realistic classroom setting.In this paper we take a closer look at these alleged advantages by comparing different instance-based and similarity-based methods on multiple data sets in a number of learning curve experiments. We find that both the demand on data and cross-prompt performance is similar, thus not confirming the former two suggested advantages. The by default more straightforward possibility to give feedback based on a similarity-based approach may thus tip the scales in favor of it, although future work is needed to explore this advantage in practice.

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Similarity-Based Content Scoring - A more Classroom-Suitable Alternative to Instance-Based Scoring?

Dialogue participants may have varying levels of knowledge about the topic under discussion. In such cases, it is essential for speakers to adapt their utterances by taking their audience into account. Yet, it is an open question how such adaptation can be modelled in computational agents. In this paper, we model a visually grounded referential game between a knowledgeable speaker and a listener with more limited visual and linguistic experience. Inspired by psycholinguistic theories, we endow our speaker with the ability to adapt its referring expressions via a simulation module that monitors the effectiveness of planned utterances from the listener's perspective. We propose an adaptation mechanism building on plug-and-play approaches to controlled language generation, where utterance generation is steered on the fly by the simulator without finetuning the speaker's underlying language model. Our results and analyses show that our approach is effective: the speaker's utterances become closer to the listener's domain of expertise, which leads to higher communicative success.

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