Canada

Recent work has demonstrated that using parameter efficient tuning techniques such as prefix tuning (or P-tuning) on pretrained language models can yield performance that is comparable or superior to fine-tuning while dramatically reducing trainable parameters. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of such methods under the context of data augmentation, a common strategy to improve learning under low data regimes, has not been fully explored. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of several popular task-agnostic data augmentation techniques, i.e., EDA, Back Translation, and Mixup, when using two general parameter efficient tuning methods, P-tuning v2 and LoRA, under data scarcity. We show that data augmentation can be used to boost the performance of P-tuning and LoRA models, but the effectiveness of each technique varies and certain methods can lead to a notable degradation in performance, particularly when using larger models and on harder tasks. We further analyze the sentence representations of P-tuning compared to fine-tuning to help understand the above behaviour, and reveal how P-tuning generally presents a more limited ability to separate the sentence embeddings from different classes of augmented data. In addition, it displays poorer performance on heavily altered data. However, we demonstrate that by adding a simple contrastive loss function it can help mitigate such issues for prefix tuning, resulting in sizable improvements to augmented data performance.

ACL 2023

Effectiveness of Data Augmentation for Parameter Efficient Tuning with Limited Data

prefix tuning

transformer-based models

contrastive loss

sentence representations

data augmentation

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
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. 
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)**

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.

While fully supervised relation classification (RC) models perform well on large-scale datasets, their performance drops drastically in low-resource settings. As generating annotated examples are expensive, recent zero-shot methods have been proposed that reformulate RC into other NLP tasks for which supervision exists such as textual entailment. However, these methods rely on templates that are manually created which is costly and requires domain expertise. In this paper, we present a novel strategy for template generation for relation classification, which is based on adapting Harris’ distributional similarity principle to templates encoded using contextualized representations. Further, we perform empirical evaluation of different strategies for combining the automatically acquired templates with manual templates. The experimental results on TACRED show that our approach not only performs better than the zero-shot RC methods that only use manual templates, but also that it achieves state-of-the-art performance for zero-shot TACRED at 64.3 F1 score.

Improving Zero-shot Relation Classification via Automatically-acquired Entailment Templates

Current multimodal models, aimed at solving Vision and Language (V+L) tasks, predominantly repurpose Vision Encoders (VE) as feature extractors. While many VEs -- of different architectures, trained on different data and objectives -- are publicly available, they are not designed for the downstream V+L tasks. Nonetheless, most current work assumes that a \textit{single} pre-trained VE can serve as a general-purpose encoder. In this work, we focus on analysis and aim to understand whether the information stored within different VEs is complementary, i.e. if providing the model with features from multiple VEs can improve the performance on a target task, and how they are combined. We exhaustively experiment with three popular VEs on six downstream V+L tasks and analyze the attention and VE-dropout patterns. Our analyses suggest that diverse VEs complement each other, resulting in improved downstream V+L task performance, where the improvements are not due to simple ensemble effects (i.e. the performance does not always improve when increasing the number of encoders). We demonstrate that future VEs, which are not \textit{repurposed}, but explicitly \textit{designed} for V+L tasks, have the potential of improving performance on the target V+L tasks.

One does not fit all! On the Complementarity of Vision Encoders for Vision and Language Tasks

The widespread adoption of large language models such as ChatGPT and Bard has led to unprecedented demand for these technologies. The burgeoning cost of inference for ever-increasing model sizes coupled with hardware shortages has limited affordable access and poses a pressing need for efficiency approaches geared towards high throughput and performance. Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) algorithms such as data multiplexing, offer a promising solution with a many-fold increase in throughput by performing inference for multiple inputs at the cost of a single input. Yet these approaches are not currently performant enough to be deployed in modern systems. We change that by developing MUX-PLMs, a class of high throughput pre-trained language models (PLMs) trained with data multiplexing, that can be fine-tuned for any downstream task to yield high-throughput high-performance. Our novel multiplexing and demultiplexing modules proficiently entangle and disentangle inputs, and enable high-performance high throughput \muxplms{} that are competitive with vanilla PLMs while achieving 2x/5x inference speedup with only a 1−4% drop on a broad suite of tasks.

MUX-PLMs: Pre-training Language Models with Data Multiplexing

Language models pretrained on general domain corpora usually exhibit considerable degradation when generalizing to downstream tasks of specialized domains. Existing approaches try to construct PLMs for each specific domains either from scratch or through further pretraining, which not only costs substantial resources, but also fails to cover all target domains at various granularity. In this work, we propose RADA, a novel Retrieval-Augmented framework for Domain Adaptation. We first construct a textual corpora that covers the downstream task at flexible domain granularity and resource availability. We employ it as a pluggable datastore to retrieve informative background knowledge, and integrate them into the standard language model framework to augment representations. We then propose a two-level selection scheme to integrate the most relevant information while alleviating irrelevant noises. Specifically, we introduce a differentiable sampling module as well as an attention mechanism to achieve both passage-level and word-level selection. Such a retrieval-augmented framework enables domain adaptation of language models with flexible domain coverage and fine-grained domain knowledge integration. We conduct comprehensive experiments across biomedical, science and legal domains to demonstrate the effectiveness of the overall framework, and its advantage over existing solutions.

Retrieval-Augmented Domain Adaptation of Language Models

Since the introduction of the SemEval 2020 Task 11, several approaches have been proposed in the literature for classifying propaganda
based on the rhetorical techniques used to influence readers.
These methods, however, classify one span at a time, ignoring dependencies from the labels of other spans within the same context.
In this paper, we approach propaganda technique classification as a
Multi-Instance Multi-Label (MIML) learning problem and propose a simple RoBERTa-based model for classifying all spans in an article simultaneously. Further, we note that, due to the annotation process where
annotators classified the spans by following a decision tree,
there is an inherent hierarchical relationship among the different
techniques, which existing approaches ignore. We incorporate these hierarchical label dependencies by adding an auxiliary classifier for each node in the decision tree to the training objective and ensembling the predictions from the original and auxiliary classifiers at test time. Overall, our model leads to an absolute improvement of 2.47% micro-F1 over the model from the shared task winning team in a cross-validation setup and is the best performing non-ensemble model on the shared task leaderboard.

Hierarchical Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning for Detecting Propaganda Techniques

We investigate the problem of negation in
Pretrained Language Models. We decompose the
problem of negation into detecting / encoding
negation and actually using it in prediction and
probe for LM performance on them.
We also provide a theory on why PLMs perform
badly on negation.

Probing Negation in Language Models

Machine comprehension of procedural texts is essential for reasoning about the steps and automating the procedures. However, this requires identifying entities within a text and resolving the relationships between the entities. Previous work focused on the cooking domain and proposed a framework to convert a recipe text into a flow graph (FG) representation. In this work, we propose a framework based on the recipe FG for flow graph prediction of open-domain procedural texts. To investigate flow graph prediction performance in non-cooking domains, we introduce the wikiHow-FG corpus from articles on wikiHow, a website of how-to instruction articles. In experiments, we consider using the existing recipe corpus and performing domain adaptation from the cooking to the target domain. Experimental results show that the domain adaptation models achieve higher performance than those trained only on the cooking or target domain data.

Towards Flow Graph Prediction of Open-Domain Procedural Texts

The widespread usage of latent language representations via pre-trained language models (LMs) suggests that they are a promising source of structured knowledge. However, existing methods focus only on a single object per subject-relation pair, even though often multiple objects are correct. To overcome this limitation, we analyze these representations for their potential to yield materialized multi-object relational knowledge. We formulate the problem as a rank-then-select task. For ranking candidate objects, we evaluate existing prompting techniques and propose new ones incorporating domain knowledge. Among the selection methods, we find that choosing objects with a likelihood above a learned relation-specific threshold gives a 49.5% F1 score. Our results highlight the difficulty of employing LMs for the multi-valued slot-filling task and pave the way for further research on extracting relational knowledge from latent language representations.

Extracting Multi-valued Relations from Language Models

Recent models have shown that incorporating syntactic knowledge into the semantic role labelling (SRL) task leads to a significant improvement. In this paper, we propose Syntax-aware Graph-to-Graph Transformer (SynG2G-Tr) model, which encodes the syntactic structure using a novel way to input graph relations as embeddings, directly into the self-attention mechanism of Transformer. This approach adds a soft bias towards attention patterns that follow the syntactic structure but also allows the model to use this information to learn alternative patterns. We evaluate our model on both span-based and dependency-based SRL datasets, and outperform previous alternative methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, on CoNLL 2005 and CoNLL 2009 datasets.

Syntax-Aware Graph-to-Graph Transformer for Semantic Role Labelling

Recent advances in prompt tuning have proven effective as a new language modeling paradigm for various natural language understanding tasks. However, it is challenging to adapt the soft prompt embeddings to different domains or generalize to low-data settings when learn- ing soft prompts itself is unstable, task-specific, and bias-prone. This paper proposes a prin- cipled learning framework—soft prompt con- struction (SPC)—to facilitate learning domain- adaptable soft prompts. Derived from the SPC framework is a simple loss that can plug into various models and tuning approaches to im- prove their cross-domain performance. We show SPC can improve upon SOTA for con- textual query rewriting, summarization, and paraphrase detection by up to 5%, 19%, and 16%, respectively.

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