Malta

Sequence-to-sequence models often require an expensive autoregressive decoding process. However, for some downstream tasks such as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and resource allocation, the actual decoding output is not needed, just a scalar attribute of this sequence. In such scenarios, where knowing the quality of a system&#39;s output to predict poor performance prevails over knowing the output itself, is it possible to bypass the autoregressive decoding? We propose Non-Autoregressive Proxy (NAP) models that can efficiently predict scalar-valued sequence-level attributes. Importantly, NAPs predict these metrics directly from the encodings, avoiding the expensive decoding stage. We consider two sequence tasks: Machine Translation (MT) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). In OOD for MT, NAPs outperform ensembles while being significantly faster. NAPs are also proven capable of predicting metrics such as BERTScore (MT) or word error rate (ASR). For downstream tasks, such as data filtering and resource optimization, NAPs generate performance predictions that outperform predictive uncertainty while being highly inference efficient.

EACL 2024

Who Needs Decoders? Efficient Estimation of Sequence-Level Attributes with Proxies

preemptive predictions

non-autoregressive proxy

performance

uncertainty

# 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) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

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). 

Sequence-to-sequence models often require an expensive autoregressive decoding process. However, for some downstream tasks such as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and resource allocation, the actual decoding output is not needed, just a scalar attribute of this sequence. In such scenarios, where knowing the quality of a system's output to predict poor performance prevails over knowing the output itself, is it possible to bypass the autoregressive decoding? We propose Non-Autoregressive Proxy (NAP) models that can efficiently predict scalar-valued sequence-level attributes. Importantly, NAPs predict these metrics directly from the encodings, avoiding the expensive decoding stage. We consider two sequence tasks: Machine Translation (MT) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). In OOD for MT, NAPs outperform ensembles while being significantly faster. NAPs are also proven capable of predicting metrics such as BERTScore (MT) or word error rate (ASR). For downstream tasks, such as data filtering and resource optimization, NAPs generate performance predictions that outperform predictive uncertainty while being highly inference efficient.

poster

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

Please register!

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Inductive reasoning is fundamental to both human and artificial intelligence. 
The inductive reasoning abilities of current Large Language Models (LLMs) are evaluated in this research.
We argue that only considering induction of rules is too narrow and unrealistic, since inductive reasoning is usually mixed with other abilities, like rules application, results/rules validation, and updated information integration.
We probed the LLMs with a set of designed symbolic tasks and found that even state-of-the-art (SotA) LLMs fail significantly, showing the inability of LLMs to perform these intuitively simple tasks.
Furthermore, we found that perfect accuracy in a small-size problem does not guarantee the same accuracy in a larger-size version of the same problem, provoking the question of how we can assess the LLMs' actual problem-solving capabilities.
We also argue that Chain-of-Thought prompts help the LLMs by decomposing the problem-solving process, but the LLMs still learn limitedly.
Furthermore, we reveal that few-shot examples assist LLM generalization in out-of-domain (OOD) cases, albeit limited. The LLM starts to fail when the problem deviates from the provided few-shot examples.

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Inductive Reasoning Capabilities and Problem Solving in Large Language Models

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, wherein carefully crafted perturbations of the input can mislead the target model. In this paper, we introduce ACT, a novel adversarial attack framework against NMT systems guided by a classifier. In our attack, the adversary aims to craft meaning-preserving adversarial examples whose translations in the target language by the NMT model belong to a different class than the original translations. Unlike previous attacks, our new approach has a more substantial effect on the translation by altering the overall meaning, which then leads to a different class determined by an oracle classifier. To evaluate the robustness of NMT models to our attack, we propose enhancements to existing black-box word-replacement-based attacks by incorporating output translations of the target NMT model and the output logits of a classifier within the attack process. Extensive experiments, including a comparison with existing untargeted attacks, show that our attack is considerably more successful in altering the class of the output translation and has more effect on the translation. This new paradigm can reveal the vulnerabilities of NMT systems by focusing on the class of translation rather than the mere translation quality as studied traditionally.

A Classification-Guided Approach for Adversarial Attacks against Neural Machine Translation

Despite the rising popularity of saliency-based explanations, the research community remains at an impasse, facing doubts concerning their purpose, efficacy, and tendency to contradict each other. Seeking to unite the community's efforts around common goals, several recent works have proposed evaluation metrics. In this paper, we critically examine two sets of metrics: the ERASER metrics (comprehensiveness and sufficiency) and the EVAL-X metrics, focusing our inquiry on natural language processing. First, we show that we can inflate a model's comprehensiveness and sufficiency scores dramatically without altering its predictions or explanations on in-distribution test inputs. Our strategy exploits the tendency for extracted explanations and their complements to be "out-of-support" relative to each other and in-distribution inputs. Next, we demonstrate that the EVAL-X metrics can be inflated arbitrarily by a simple method that encodes the label, even though EVAL-X is precisely motivated to address such exploits. Our results raise doubts about the ability of current metrics to guide explainability research, underscoring the need for a broader reassessment of what precisely these metrics are intended to capture.

Goodhart’s Law Applies to NLP’s Explanation Benchmarks

Siamese encoders such as sentence transformers are among the least understood deep models.
Established attribution methods cannot tackle this model class since it compares two inputs rather than processing a single one. 
To address this gap, we have recently proposed an attribution method specifically for Siamese encoders (Möller et al., 2023). 
However, it requires models to be adjusted and fine-tuned and therefore cannot be directly applied to off-the-shelf models. 
In this work, we reassess these restrictions and propose (i) a model with exact attribution ability that retains the original model’s predictive performance and (ii) a way to compute approximate attributions for off-the-shelf models.
We extensively compare approximate and exact attributions and use them to analyze the models’ attendance to different linguistic aspects. We gain insights into which syntactic roles Siamese transformers attend to, confirm that they mostly ignore negation, explore how they judge semantically opposite adjectives, and find that they exhibit lexical bias.

Approximate Attributions for Off-the-Shelf Siamese Transformers

Large Language Models (LLMs) may hallucinate and generate fake information, despite pre-training on factual data. Inspired by the journalistic device of ``according to sources'', we propose according-to prompting: directing LLMs to ground responses against previously observed text. To quantify this grounding, we propose a novel evaluation metric (QUIP-Score) that measures the extent to which model-produced answers are directly found in underlying text corpora. We illustrate with experiments on three corpora (Wikipedia, PubMed, and the U.S. legal tax code) that these prompts improve grounding under our metrics, with the additional benefit of often improving end-task performance. Furthermore, prompts that ask the model to decrease grounding (or to ground to other corpora) indeed {decrease} QUIP-Score, indicating the ability of LLMs to increase or decrease grounded generations on request.

“According to . . . ”: Prompting Language Models Improves Quoting from Pre-Training Data

Understanding context is key to understanding human language, an ability which Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly seen to demonstrate to an impressive extent. However, though the evaluation of LLMs encompasses various domains within the realm of Natural Language Processing, limited attention has been paid to probing their linguistic capability of understanding contextual features. This paper introduces a context understanding benchmark by adapting existing datasets to suit the evaluation of generative models. This benchmark comprises of four distinct tasks and nine datasets, all featuring prompts designed to assess the models' ability to understand context. First, we evaluate the performance of LLMs under the in-context learning pretraining scenario. Experimental results indicate that pre-trained dense models struggle with understanding more nuanced contextual features when compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuned models. Second, as LLM compression holds growing significance in both research and real-world applications, we assess the context understanding of quantized models under in-context-learning settings. We find that 3-bit post-training quantization leads to varying degrees of performance reduction on our benchmark. We conduct an extensive analysis of these scenarios to substantiate our experimental results.

Can Large Language Models Understand Context?

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) perform well in In-Topic setups, where training and testing data come from the same topics. However, they face challenges in Cross-Topic scenarios where testing data is derived from distinct topics. This paper analyzes various PLMs with three probing-based experiments to better understand the reasons behind such generalization gaps. For the first time, we demonstrate that the extent of these generalization gaps and the sensitivity to token-level interventions vary significantly across PLMs. By evaluating large language models (LLMs), we show the usefulness of our analysis for these recent models. Overall, we observe diverse pre-training objectives and architectural regularization contribute to more robust PLMs and mitigate generalization gaps. Our research contributes to a deeper understanding and comparison of language models across different generalization scenarios.

Dive into the Chasm: Probing the Gap between In- and Cross-Topic Generalization

In the highly constrained context of low-resource language studies, we explore vector representations of speech from a pretrained model to determine their level of abstraction with regard to the audio signal. We propose a new unsupervised method using ABX tests on audio recordings with carefully curated metadata to shed light on the type of information present in the representations. ABX tests determine whether the representations computed by a multilingual speech model encode a given characteristic. Three experiments are devised: one on room acoustics aspects, one on linguistic genre, and one on phonetic aspects. The results confirm that the representations extracted from recordings with different linguistic/extra-linguistic characteristics differ along the same lines. Embedding more audio signal in one vector better discriminates extra-linguistic characteristics, whereas shorter snippets are better to distinguish segmental information. The method is fully unsupervised, potentially opening new research avenues for comparative work on under-documented languages.

Establishing degrees of closeness between audio recordings along different dimensions using large-scale cross-lingual models

Factual knowledge encoded in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) enriches their representations and justifies their use as knowledge bases. Previous work has focused on probing PLMs for factual knowledge by measuring how often they can correctly predict an _object_ entity given a subject and a relation, and improving fact retrieval by optimizing the prompts used for querying PLMs. In this work, we consider a complementary aspect, namely the coherency of factual knowledge in PLMs, i.e., how often can PLMs predict the _subject_ entity given its initial prediction of the object entity. This goes beyond evaluating how much PLMs know, and focuses on the internal state of knowledge inside them. Our results indicate that PLMs have low coherency using manually written, optimized and paraphrased prompts, but including an evidence paragraph leads to substantial improvement. This shows that PLMs fail to model inverse relations and need further enhancements to be able to handle retrieving facts from their parameters in a coherent manner, and to be considered as knowledge bases.

The Queen of England is not England’s Queen: On the Lack of Factual Coherency in PLMs

When facing an unsatisfactory prediction from a machine learning model, users can be interested in investigating the underlying reasons and exploring the potential for reversing the outcome. 
We ask: 
To flip the prediction on a test point $x_t$, how to identify the smallest training subset $\mathcal{S}_t$ that we need to relabel?
We propose an efficient algorithm to identify and relabel such a subset via an extended influence function for binary classification models with convex loss.
We find that relabeling fewer than 2\% of the training points can always flip a prediction.
This mechanism can serve multiple purposes: (1) providing an approach to challenge a model prediction by altering training points; (2) evaluating model robustness with the cardinality of the subset (i.e., $|\mathcal{S}_t|$); we show that $|\mathcal{S}_t|$ is highly related to the noise ratio in the training set and $|\mathcal{S}_t|$ is correlated with but complementary to predicted probabilities; and (3) revealing training points lead to group attribution bias. 
To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate identifying and relabeling the minimal training subset required to flip a given prediction.

Downloads

Next from EACL 2024

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Inductive Reasoning Capabilities and Problem Solving in Large Language Models

Similar lecture

Non-Autoregressive Sequence Generation - Methods