Indonesia

Understanding procedural natural language (e.g., step-by-step instructions) is a crucial step to execution and planning. However, while there are ample corpora and downstream tasks available in English, the field lacks such resources for most languages. To address this gap, we conduct a case study on Turkish procedural texts. We first expand the number of tutorials in Turkish wikiHow from 2,000 to 52,000 using automated translation tools, where the translation quality and loyalty to the original meaning are validated by a team of experts on a random set. Then, we generate several downstream tasks on the corpus, such as linking actions, goal inference, and summarization. To tackle these tasks, we implement strong baseline models via fine-tuning large language-specific models such as TR-BART and BERTurk, as well as multilingual models such as mBART, mT5, and XLM. We find that language-specific models consistently outperform their multilingual models by a significant margin across most procedural language understanding (PLU) tasks. We release our corpus, downstream tasks and the baseline models with https://github.com/GGLAB-KU/turkish-plu.

IJCNLP-AACL 2023

Benchmarking Procedural Language Understanding for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study on Turkish

### 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)**

ACL 2023

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.

poster

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2023!
I am honored and happy to welcome you to IJCNLP-AACL 2023! The conference hosts both the 13th
International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) and the 3rd Conference of
the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL). 
The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL have been organized by alternating leadership in the
Asia-Pacific region, in odd years by Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) and
in even years by AACL. The conference is organized by AFNLP this year. 

Considering the current situation that we are not yet fully over the coronavirus pandemic, the
conference is offered in a hybrid mode, off-line in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, and on-line with the help
of Underline, during November 1-4, 2023. For those attending off-line, I hope that you will find time to
explore the exciting local area, which remains quite warm and pleasant at this time of the year. For
those attending on-line, I hope that the attendance is not much hampered, sometimes even enhanced
and comfortable, though the on-line arrangements have been made without ample time. 

Message from Jong C. Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) 
IJCNLP-AACL 2023 General Chair 
###### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S2JSXa105xJxIkNBfhYmGH20Om6wARBx/view?usp=sharing)

In order to acces this event page, you need to register [here](http://www.ijcnlp-aacl2023.org/)

The 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

NLP models excel on tasks with clean inputs, but are less accurate with noisy inputs. In particular, character-level noise such as human-written typos and adversarially-engineered realistic-looking misspellings often appears in text and can easily trip up NLP models. Prior solutions to address character-level noise often alter the content of the inputs (low fidelity), thus inadvertently lowering model accuracy on clean inputs. We proposed FiRo, an approach to boost NLP model performance on noisy inputs without sacrificing performance on clean inputs. FiRo sanitizes the input text while preserving its fidelity by inferring the noise-free form for each token in the input. FiRo uses finite-context aggregation to obtain contextual embeddings which is then used to find the noise-free form within a restricted output space. The output space is restricted to a small cluster of probable candidates in order to predict the noise-free tokens more accurately. Although the clusters are small, FiRo's effective vocabulary (union of all clusters) can be scaled up to better preserve the input content. Experimental results show NLP models that use FiRo outperforming baselines on six classification tasks and one sequence labeling task at various degrees of noise.

FiRo: Finite-context Indexing of Restricted Output Space for NLP Models Facing Noisy Input

The Natural Language Inference (NLI) task often requires reasoning over multiple steps to reach the conclusion. While the necessity of generating such intermediate steps (instead of a summary explanation) has gained popular support, it is unclear how to generate such steps without complete end-to-end supervision and how such generated steps can be further utilized. In this work, we train and enhance a sequence-to-sequence next-step prediction model with external commonsense knowledge and search to generate intermediate steps with limited next-step supervision. We show the correctness of such generated steps through automated and human verification, on MNLI and MED datasets (and discuss the limitations through qualitative examples). We show that such generated steps can help improve end-to-end NLI task performance using simple data augmentation strategies. Using a CheckList dataset for NLI, we also explore the effect of augmentation on specific reasoning types.

Prover: Generating Intermediate Steps for NLI with Commonsense Knowledge Retrieval and Next-Step Prediction

Subsampling is effective in Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) for reducing overfitting caused by the sparsity in Knowledge Graph (KG) datasets. However, current subsampling approaches consider only frequencies of queries that consist of entities and their relations. Thus, the existing subsampling potentially underestimates the appearance probabilities of infrequent queries even if the frequencies of their entities or relations are high. 
To address this problem, we propose Model-based Subsampling (MBS) and Mixed Subsampling (MIX) to estimate their appearance probabilities through predictions of KGE models. Evaluation results on datasets FB15k-237, WN18RR, and YAGO3-10 showed that our proposed subsampling methods actually improved the KG completion performances for popular KGE models, RotatE, TransE, HAKE, ComplEx, and DistMult.

Model-based Subsampling for Knowledge Graph Completion

Open-domain table question answering aims to provide answers to a question by retrieving and extracting information from a large collection of tables. Existing studies of open-domain table QA either directly adopt text retrieval methods or consider the table structure only in the encoding layer for table retrieval, which may cause syntactical and structural information loss during table scoring. To address this issue, we propose a syntax- and structure-aware retrieval method for the open-domain table QA task. It provides syntactical representations for the question and uses the structural header and value representations for the tables to avoid the loss of fine-grained syntactical and structural information. Then, a syntactical-to-structural aggregator is used to obtain the matching score between the question and a candidate table by mimicking the human retrieval process. Experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art on the NQ-tables dataset and overwhelms strong baselines on a newly curated open-domain Text-to-SQL dataset.

Enhancing Open-Domain Table Question Answering via Syntax- and Structure-aware Dense Retrieval

Grounding dialogue response generation on external knowledge is proposed to produce informative and engaging responses. However, current knowledge-grounded dialogue (KGD) systems often fail to align the resulting responses with human-preferred qualities due to several issues like hallucination, unfaithfulness, and the lack of coherence. To address these challenges and driven by these observations, we propose Polished & Informed Candidate Scoring (PICK), a generation re-scoring framework that empowers models to generate faithful and relevant responses without requiring additional labeled data or model tuning. Through comprehensive automatic and human evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PICK in generating responses that are more faithful while keeping them relevant to the dialogue history. Further, we investigate the performance disparity between PICK and the theoretical upper bound re-ranking approach to provide insights for future research.

PICK: Polished & Informed Candidate Scoring for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Systems

Knowledge-intensive generation tasks like generative question answering require models to retrieve appropriate passages from external knowledge sources to support answer generation. The generation quality relies heavily on the retrieved passages, which serve as contextual information. State-of-the-art Retrieval Augmented Generation models with marginalized output dominate this area but focus too much on label-relevant passages, rather than question-relevant passages and answers. This work addresses this issue by incorporating rich answer encoding through Dense Knowledge Similarity (DKS) and Retriever as Answer Classifier (RAC). We demonstrate the advantages of our proposed approach in open domain question answering (MSMARCO) and conversation (Wizard of Wikipedia) datasets, reporting both generation and retrieval metrics. In the MSMARCO development set, our best model achieves 12.1% relative improvement1 on Recall@1 and 4.5% relative improvement on BLEU-4 compared to the baseline model. In the KILT-WoW leaderboard, our best model achieves 8.9% relative improvement on R-Precision and 13.3% relative improvement on KILT-RL compared to the baseline model. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/hwy9855/rag-ae.

Retrieval Augmented Generation with Rich Answer Encoding

This work presents KoBigBird-large, a large size of Korean BigBird that achieves state-of-the-art performance and allows long sequence processing for Korean language understanding. Without further pretraining, we only transform the architecture and extend the positional encoding with our proposed Tapered Absolute Positional Encoding Representations (TAPER). In experiments, KoBigBird-large shows state-of-the-art overall performance on Korean language understanding benchmarks and the best performance on document classification and question answering tasks for longer sequences against the competitive baseline models. We publicly release our model here.

KoBigBird-large: Transformation of Transformer for Korean Language Understanding

Text detoxification is the task of transferring the style of text from toxic to neutral. While there are approaches yielding promising results in monolingual setup, e.g., (Dale et al.,2021; Hallinan et al., 2022), cross-lingual transfer for this task remains a challenging open problem (Moskovskiy et al., 2022). In this work, we present a large-scale study of strategies for cross-lingual text detoxification -- given a parallel detoxification corpus for one language; the goal is to transfer detoxification ability to another language for which we do not have such a corpus.
Moreover, we are the first to explore a new task where text translation and detoxification are performed simultaneously, providing several strong baselines for this task. Finally, we introduce new automatic detoxification evaluation metrics with higher correlations with human judgments than previous benchmarks. We assess the most promising approaches also with manual markup, determining the answer for the best strategy to transfer the knowledge of text detoxification between languages.

Exploring Methods for Cross-lingual Text Style Transfer: The Case of Text Detoxification

We present PACT (Pretraining with Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Text Classification), a novel self-supervised framework for text classification. Instead of contrasting against in-batch negatives, a popular approach in the literature, PACT mines negatives closer to the anchor representation. PACT operates by endowing the standard pretraining mechanisms of BERT with adversarial contrastive learning objectives, allowing for effective joint optimization of token- and sentence-level pretraining of the BERT model. Our experiments on 13 diverse datasets including token-level, single-sentence, and sentence-pair text classification tasks show that PACT achieves consistent improvements over SOTA baselines. We further show that PACT regularizes both token-level and sentence-level embedding spaces into more uniform representations, thereby alleviating the undesirable anisotropic phenomenon of language models.

PACT: Pretraining with Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Text Classification

Investigating the behaviour of Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models under various types of test-time perturbations can shed light on the enhancement of their robustness and generalisation capability, despite the superhuman performance they have achieved on existing benchmark datasets. In this paper, we study the robustness of contemporary MRC systems to context paraphrasing, i.e., whether these models are still able to correctly answer the questions once the reading passages have been paraphrased. To this end, we systematically design a pipeline to semi-automatically generate perturbed MRC instances which ultimately lead to the creation of a paraphrased test set. We conduct experiments on this dataset with six state-of-the-art neural MRC models and we find that even the minimum performance drop of all these models exceeds 41%, whereas human performance remains high. Retraining models with augmented perturbed examples results in improved robustness, though the performance remains lower than on the original dataset. These results demonstrate that the existing high-performing MRC systems are still far away from real language understanding.

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