Singapore

An end-to-end speech-to-text (S2T) translation model is usually initialized from a pre-trained speech recognition encoder and a pre-trained text-to-text (T2T) translation decoder.
Although this straightforward setting has been shown empirically successful, there do not exist clear answers to the research questions: 1) how are speech and text modalities fused in S2T model and 2) how to better fuse the two modalities?
In this paper, we take the first step toward understanding the fusion of speech and text features in S2T model.
We first design and release a 10GB linguistic probing benchmark, namely Speech-Senteval, to investigate the acoustic and linguistic behaviors of S2T models.
Preliminary analysis reveals that the uppermost encoder layers of the S2T model can not learn linguistic knowledge efficiently, which is crucial for accurate translation.
Based on the finding, we further propose a simple plug-in prompt-learning strategy on the uppermost encoder layers to broaden the abstract representation power of the encoder of S2T models.
We call such a prompt-enhanced S2T model PromptST.
Experimental results on four widely-used S2T datasets show that PromptST can deliver significant improvements over a strong baseline by capturing richer linguistic knowledge.
Benchmarks, code, and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/ytf-philp/PromptST.

EMNLP 2023

PromptST: Abstract Prompt Learning for End-to-End Speech Translation

linguistic probing benchmark

prompt learning

speech-to-text translation

# 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. 
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. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
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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). 

poster

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

A major concern in using deep learning based generative models for document-grounded dialogs is the potential generation of responses that are not faithful to the underlying document. Existing automated metrics used for evaluating the faithfulness of response with respect to the grounding document measure the degree of similarity between the generated response and the document's content. However, these automated metrics are far from being well aligned with human judgments. Therefore, to improve the measurement of faithfulness, we propose a new metric that utilizes (Conditional) Point-wise Mutual Information (PMI) between the generated response and the source document, conditioned on the dialogue. PMI quantifies the extent to which the document influences the generated response -- with a higher PMI indicating a more faithful response. We build upon this idea to create a new decoding technique that incorporates PMI into the response generation process to predict more faithful responses. Our experiments on the BEGIN benchmark demonstrate an improved correlation of our metric with human evaluation. We also show that our decoding technique is effective in generating more faithful responses when compared to standard decoding techniques on a set of publicly available document-grounded dialog datasets.

Pointwise Mutual Information Based Metric and Decoding Strategy for Faithful Generation in Document Grounded Dialogs

The use of persona-grounded retrieval-based chatbots is crucial for personalized conversations, but there are several challenges that need to be addressed. 1) In general, collecting persona-grounded corpus is very expensive. 2) The chatbot system does not always respond in consideration of persona at real applications. To address these challenges, we propose a plug-and-play persona prompting method. Our system can function as a standard open-domain chatbot if persona information is not available. We demonstrate that this approach performs well in the zero-shot setting, which reduces the dependence on persona-ground training data. This makes it easier to expand the system to other languages without the need to build a persona-grounded corpus. Additionally, our model can be fine-tuned for even better performance. In our experiments, the zero-shot model improved the standard model by 7.71 and 1.04 points in the original persona and revised persona, respectively. The fine-tuned model improved the previous state-of-the-art system by 1.95 and 3.39 points in the original persona and revised persona, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to solve the problem of personalized response selection using prompt sequences. Our code is available on github~\footnote{https://github.com/rungjoo/plug-and-play-prompt-persona}.

P5: Plug-and-Play Persona Prompting for Personalized Response Selection

We propose AnyTOD, an end-to-end, zero-shot task-oriented dialog (TOD) system capable of zero-shot adaptation onto unseen tasks or domains. We view TOD as a program executed by a language model (LM), where program logic and ontology is provided by a designer as a schema. To enable generalization to unseen schemas and programs without prior training, AnyTOD adopts a neuro-symbolic approach. A neural LM keeps track of events that occur during a conversation, and a symbolic program implementing dialog policy is executed to recommend actions AnyTOD should take. This approach drastically reduces data annotation and model training requirements, addressing the enduring challenge of rapidly adapting a TOD system to unseen tasks and domains. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on STAR, ABCD and SGD benchmarks. We also demonstrate strong zero-shot transfer ability in low-resource settings, such as zero-shot transfer onto MultiWOZ. In addition, we release STARv2, an updated version of the STAR dataset with richer annotations, for benchmarking zero-shot task transfer for end-to-end TOD models.

AnyTOD: A Programmable Task-Oriented Dialog System

Continuous learning from free-text human feedback, such as error corrections, new knowledge, or alternative responses, is essential for today's chatbots and virtual assistants to stay up-to-date, engaging, and socially acceptable. However, for research on methods for learning from such data, annotated data is scarce. To address this, we examine the error and user response types of six popular dialogue datasets from various types, including MultiWoZ, PersonaChat, Wizards-of-Wikipedia, and others, to assess their extendibility with the needed annotations. For this corpus study, we manually annotate a subset of each dataset with error and user response types using an improved version of the Integrated Error Taxonomy and a newly proposed user response type taxonomy. We provide the resulting dataset (EURTAD) to the community. Our findings provide new insights into dataset composition, including error types, user response types, and the relations between them.

Learning From Free-Text Human Feedback – Collect New Datasets Or Extend Existing Ones?

We investigate the effect of sub-word tokenization on representations of German noun compounds: single orthographic words which are composed of two or more constituents but often tokenized into units that are not morphologically motivated or meaningful. Using variants of BERT models and tokenization strategies on domain-specific restricted diachronic data, we introduce a suite of evaluations relying on the masked language modelling task and compositionality prediction. We obtain the most consistent improvements by pre-splitting compounds into constituents.

To Split or Not to Split: Composing Compounds in Contextual Vector Spaces | VIDEO

While analogies are a common way to evaluate word embeddings in NLP, it is also of interest to investigate whether or not analogical reasoning is a task in itself that can be learned. In this paper, we test several ways to learn basic analogical reasoning, specifically focusing on analogies that are more typical of what is used to evaluate analogical reasoning in humans than those in commonly used NLP benchmarks. Our experiments find that models are able to learn analogical reasoning, even with a small amount of data. We additionally compare our models to a dataset with a human baseline, and find that after training models approach human performance.

Can language models learn analogical reasoning? Investigating training objectives and comparisons to human performance

Relational databases play an important role in business, science, and more. However, many users cannot fully unleash the analytical power of relational databases, because they are not familiar with database languages such as SQL. Many techniques have been proposed to automatically generate SQL from natural language, but they suffer from two issues: (1) they still make many mistakes, particularly for complex queries, and (2) they do not provide a flexible way for non-expert users to validate and refine incorrect queries. To address these issues, we introduce a new interaction mechanism that allows users to directly edit a step-by-step explanation of a query to fix errors. Our experiments on multiple datasets, as well as a user study with 24 participants, demonstrate that our approach can achieve better performance than multiple SOTA approaches. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/magic-YuanTian/STEPS.

Interactive Text-to-SQL Generation via Editable Step-by-Step Explanations | VIDEO

The popularity of conversational digital assistants has resulted in the availability of large amounts of conversational data which can be utilized for improved user experience and personalized response generation. Building these assistants using popular large language models like ChatGPT also require additional emphasis on prompt engineering and evaluation methods. Textual similarity metrics are a key ingredient for such analysis and evaluations. While many similarity metrics have been proposed in the literature, they have not proven effective for task-oriented conversations as they do not take advantage of unique conversational features. To address this gap, we present TaskDiff, a novel conversational similarity metric that utilizes different dialogue components (utterances, intents, and slots) and their distributions to compute similarity. Extensive experimental evaluation of TaskDiff on a benchmark dataset demonstrates its superior performance and improved robustness over other related approaches.

TaskDiff: A Similarity Metric for Task-Oriented Conversations | VIDEO

In this paper, we conducted a comprehensive study with the latest Sentence Encoders and Large Language Models (LLMs) on the challenging task of "definition-wild zero-shot topic inference", where users define or provide the topics of interest in real-time. Through extensive experimentation on seven diverse data sets, we observed that LLMs, such as ChatGPT-3.5 and PaLM, demonstrated superior generality compared to other LLMs, e.g., BLOOM and GPT-NeoX. Furthermore, Sentence-BERT, a BERT-based classical sentence encoder, outperformed PaLM and achieved performance comparable to ChatGPT-3.5.

Zero-Shot Multi-Label Topic Inference with Sentence Encoders and LLMs

We propose a novel graph-based approach for semantic parsing that resolves two problems observed in the literature:(1) seq2seq models fail on compositional generalization tasks;(2) previous work using phrase structure parsers cannot cover all the semantic parses observed in treebanks.We prove that both MAP inference and latent tag anchoring (required for weakly-supervised learning) are NP-hard problems.We propose two optimization algorithms based on constraint smoothing and conditional gradient to approximately solve these inference problems.Experimentally, our approach delivers state-of-the-art results on GeoQuery, Scan and Clevr, both for i.i.d. splits and for splits that test for compositional generalization.

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Pointwise Mutual Information Based Metric and Decoding Strategy for Faithful Generation in Document Grounded Dialogs

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