Canada

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) are successful in abstractive summarization of short dialogues, summarization of long dialogues remains challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a novel algorithm that processes complete dialogues comprising thousands of tokens into topic-segment-level Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs, which explicitly capture the dialogue structure, highlight salient semantics, and preserve high-level information. We also develop a new text-graph attention to leverage both graph semantics and a pretrained LLM that exploits the text. Finally, we propose an AMR node selection loss used jointly with conventional cross-entropy loss, to create additional training signals that facilitate graph feature encoding and content selection. Experiments show that our system outperforms the state-of-the-art models on multiple long dialogue summarization datasets, especially in low-resource settings, and generalizes well to out-of-domain data.

ACL 2023

Improving Long Dialogue Summarization with Semantic Graph Representation

semantic representation

summarization

dialogue

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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.

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to develop a learning system that can continually learn new classes from a data stream without forgetting previously learned classes. When learning classes incrementally, the classifier must be constantly updated to incorporate new classes, and the drift in decision boundary may lead to severe forgetting. This fundamental challenge, however, has not yet been studied extensively, especially in the setting where no samples from old classes are stored for rehearsal. In this paper, we take a closer look at how the drift in the classifier leads to forgetting, and accordingly, design four simple yet (super-) effective solutions to alleviate the classifier drift: an Individual Classifiers with Frozen Feature Extractor (ICE) framework where we individually train a classifier for each learning session, and its three variants ICE-PL, ICE-O, and ICE-PL&O which further take the logits of previously learned classes from old sessions or a constant logit of an Other class as constraint to the learning of new classifiers. Extensive experiments and analysis on 6 class-incremental information extraction tasks demonstrate that our solutions, especially ICE-O, consistently show significant improvement over the previous state-of-the-art approaches with up to 44.7% absolute F-score gain, providing a strong baseline and insights for future research on class-incremental learning.

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Teamwork Is Not Always Good: An Empirical Study of Classifier Drift in Class-incremental Information Extraction

Obtaining labeled data to train a model for a task of interest is often expensive. Prior work shows training models on multitask data augmented with task descriptions (prompts) effectively transfers knowledge to new tasks. Towards efficiently building task-specific models, we assume access to a small number (32-1000) of unlabeled target-task examples and use those to retrieve the most similar labeled examples from a large pool of multitask data augmented with prompts. Compared to the current practice of finetuning models on uniformly sampled prompted multitask data (e.g.: FLAN, T0), our approach of finetuning on cross-task nearest neighbors is significantly more data-efficient. Using only 2% of the data from the P3 pool without any labeled target-task data, our models outperform strong baselines trained on all available data by 3-30% on 12 out of 14 datasets representing held-out tasks including legal and scientific document QA. Similarly, models trained on cross-task nearest neighbors from SuperNaturalInstructions, representing about 5\% of the pool, obtain comparable performance to state-of-the-art models on 12 held-out tasks from that pool. Moreover, the models produced by our approach also provide a better initialization than single multitask finetuned models for few-shot finetuning on target-task data, as shown by a 2-23% relative improvement over few-shot finetuned T0-3B models on 8 datasets.

Data-Efficient Finetuning Using Cross-Task Nearest Neighbors

We study the problem of retrieval with instructions, where users provide explicit descriptions of their intent along with their queries to guide a retrieval system. Our solution is a general-purpose task-aware retrieval system, trained using multi-task instruction tuning and can follow human-written instructions to find relevant documents to a given query.We introduce the first large-scale collection of 37 retrieval datasets with instructions, BERRI, and present TART, a single multi-task retrieval system trained on BERRI with instructions that can adapt to a new task without any parameter updates. TART advances the state of the art on two zero-shot retrieval benchmarks, BEIR and LOTTE, outperforming models up to three times larger. We further introduce a new evaluation setup, X^2-Retrieval, to better reflect real-world scenarios in which diverse domains and tasks are pooled. TART significantly outperforms competitive baselines in this setup, further highlighting the effectiveness of guiding retrieval with instructions.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/3f8596bf-f7b5-4ecb-ae57-7d04c052141c" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions

Scientific progress in NLP rests on the reproducibility of researchers' claims.The *CL conferences created the NLP Reproducibility Checklist in 2020 to be completed by authors at submission to remind them of key information to include. We provide the first analysis of the Checklist by examining 10,405 anonymous responses to it. First, we find evidence of an increase in reporting of information on efficiency, validation performance, summary statistics, and hyperparameters after the Checklist's introduction. Further, we show acceptance rate grows for submissions with more Yes responses. We find that the 44% of submissions that gather new data are 5% less likely to be accepted than those that did not; the average reviewer-rated reproducibility of these submissions is also 2% lower relative to the rest. We find that only 46% of submissions claim to open-source their code, though submissions that do have 8% higher reproducibility score relative to those that do not, the most for any item. We discuss what can be inferred about the state of reproducibility in NLP, and provide a set of recommendations for future conferences, including: a) allowing submitting code and appendices one week after the deadline, and b) measuring dataset reproducibility by a checklist of data collection practices.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/3e49b35c-4690-46ed-950f-909d6f1e8010" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Reproducibility in NLP: What Have We Learned from the Checklist?

Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction (MRHP) aims to rank product reviews based on predicted helpfulness scores and has been widely applied in e-commerce via presenting customers with useful reviews. Previous studies commonly employ fully-connected neural networks (FCNNs) as the final score predictor and pairwise loss as the training objective. However, FCNNs have been shown to perform inefficient splitting for review features, making the model difficult to clearly differentiate helpful from unhelpful reviews. Furthermore, pairwise objective, which works on review pairs, may not completely capture the MRHP goal to produce the ranking for the entire review list, and possibly induces low generalization during testing. To address these issues, we propose a listwise attention network that clearly captures the MRHP ranking context and a listwise optimization objective that enhances model generalization. We further propose gradient-boosted decision tree as the score predictor to efficaciously partition product reviews' representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results and polished generalization performance on two large-scale MRHP benchmark datasets.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/77e20f32-aff0-4415-860e-337219c47b46" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Gradient-Boosted Decision Tree for Listwise Context Model in Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction

We present a novel end-to-end generative task and system for predicting event factuality holders, targets, and their associated factuality values. We perform the first experiments using all sources and targets of factuality statements from the FactBank corpus. We perform multi-task learning with other tasks and event-factuality corpora to improve on the FactBank source and target task. We argue that careful domain specific target text output format in generative systems is important and verify this with multiple experiments on target text output structure. We redo previous state-of-the-art author-only event factuality experiments and also offer insights towards a generative paradigm for the author-only event factuality prediction task.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/532fnPQGAZvefKDC1fZsuL/embed/polls/6451d1e8-58e5-46bb-9a32-9abc0df2c997" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Towards Generative Event Factuality Prediction

Biases cause discrepancies in healthcare services.Race, gender, and age of a patient affect interactions with physicians and the medical treatments one receives.These biases in clinical practices can be amplified following the release of pre-trained language models trained on biomedical corpora.To bring awareness to such repercussions, we examine social biases present in the biomedical masked language models.We curate prompts based on evidence-based practice and compare generated diagnoses based on biases.For a case study, we measure bias in diagnosing coronary artery disease and using cardiovascular procedures based on bias.Our study demonstrates that biomedical models are less biased than BERT in gender, while the opposite is true for race and age.

Race, Gender, and Age Biases in Biomedical Masked Language Models

Text style transfer is an exciting task within the field of natural language generation that is often plagued by the need for high-quality paired datasets. Furthermore, training a model for multi-attribute text style transfer requires datasets with sufficient support across all combinations of the considered stylistic attributes, adding to the challenges of training a style transfer model. This paper explores the impact of training data input diversity on the quality of the generated text from the multi-style transfer model. We construct a pseudo-parallel dataset by devising heuristics to adjust the style distribution in the training samples. We balance our training dataset using marginal and joint distributions to train our style transfer models. We observe that a balanced dataset produces more effective control effects over multiple styles than an imbalanced or skewed one. Through quantitative analysis, we explore the impact of multiple style distributions in training data on style-transferred output. These findings will better inform the design of style-transfer datasets.

Balancing the Effect of Training Dataset Distribution of Multiple Styles for Multi-Style Text Transfer

This paper studies the problem of open-domain question answering, with the aim of answering a diverse range of questions leveraging knowledge resources. Two types of sources, QA-pair and document corpora, have been actively leveraged with the following complementary strength. The former is highly precise when the paraphrase of given question q was seen and answered during training, often posed as a retrieval problem, while the latter generalizes better for unseen questions. A natural follow-up is thus leveraging both models, while a naive pipelining or integration approaches have failed to bring additional gains over either model alone. Our distinction is interpreting the problem as calibration, which estimates the confidence of predicted answers as an indicator to decide when to use a document or QA-pair corpus. The effectiveness of our method was validated on widely adopted benchmarks such as Natural Questions and TriviaQA.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/532fnPQGAZvefKDC1fZsuL/embed/polls/702d36ed-0f43-4abe-a603-edf405886455" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

When to Read Documents or QA History: On Unified and Selective Open-domain QA

We study feature interactions in the context of feature attribution methods for post-hoc interpretability. In interpretability research, getting to grips with feature interactions is increasingly recognised as an important challenge, because interacting features are key to the success of neural networks. Feature interactions allow a model to build up hierarchical representations for its input, and might provide an ideal starting point for the investigation into linguistic structure in language models.However, uncovering the exact role that these interactions play is also difficult, and a diverse range of interaction attribution methods has been proposed.In this paper, we focus on the question which of these methods most faithfully reflects the inner workings of the target models.We work out a grey box methodology, in which we train models to perfection on a formal language classification task, using PCFGs. We show that under specific configurations, some methods are indeed able to uncover the grammatical rules acquired by a model. Based on these findings we extend our evaluation to a case study on language models, providing novel insights into the linguistic structure that these models have acquired.

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