Dominican Republic

Natural language relies on a finite lexicon to express an unbounded set of emerging ideas. One result of this tension is the formation of new compositions, such that existing linguistic units can be combined with emerging items into novel expressions. We develop a framework that exploits the cognitive mechanisms of chaining and multimodal knowledge to predict emergent compositional expressions through time. We present the syntactic frame extension model (SFEM) that draws on the theory of chaining and knowledge from “percept”, “concept”, and “language” to infer how verbs extend their frames to form new compositions with existing and novel nouns. We evaluate SFEM rigorously on the 1) modalities of knowledge and 2) categorization models of chaining, in a syntactically parsed English corpus over the past 150 years. We show that multimodal SFEM predicts newly emerged verb syntax and arguments substantially better than competing models using purely linguistic or unimodal knowledge. We find support for an exemplar view of chaining as opposed to a prototype view and reveal how the joint approach of multimodal chaining may be fundamental to the creation of literal and figurative language uses including metaphor and metonymy.

EMNLP 2021

Predicting emergent linguistic compositions through time: Syntactic frame extension via multimodal chaining

# 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

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

A possible explanation for the impressive performance of masked language model (MLM) pre-training is that such models have learned to represent the syntactic structures prevalent in classical NLP pipelines. In this paper, we propose a different explanation: MLMs succeed on downstream tasks almost entirely due to their ability to model higher-order word co-occurrence statistics. To demonstrate this, we pre-train MLMs on sentences with randomly shuffled word order, and show that these models still achieve high accuracy after fine-tuning on many downstream tasks -- including on tasks specifically designed to be challenging for models that ignore word order. Our models perform surprisingly well according to some parametric syntactic probes, indicating possible deficiencies in how we test representations for syntactic information. Overall, our results show that purely distributional information largely explains the success of pre-training, and underscore the importance of curating challenging evaluation datasets that require deeper linguistic knowledge.

Masked Language Modeling and the Distributional Hypothesis: Order Word Matters Pre-training for Little

We demonstrate that one-layer randomly weighted neural networks contain subnetworks that can achieve impressive performance without ever modifying the weight values on machine translation tasks. To find subnetworks for one-layer randomly weighted neural networks, we apply different binary masks to the same weight matrix to generate different layers. Hidden in a one-layer randomly weighted Transformerwide/wider, we find subnetworks can achieve 29.45/17.29 BLEU on IWSLT14/WMT14. Using a fixed pre-trained embedding layer, the previously found subnetworks are smaller than, but can match 98%/92% (34.14/25.24 BLEU) the performance of a trained Transformersmall/base on IWSLT14/WMT14. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of larger & deeper transformers, as well as the impact of different initialization methods.

What’s Hidden in a One-layer Randomly Weighted Transformer?

Lifelong Learning (LL) black-box models are dynamic in that they keep learning from new tasks and constantly update their parameters. Owing to the need to utilize information from previously seen tasks, and capture commonalities in potentially diverse data, it is hard for automatic explanation methods to explain the outcomes of these models. In addition, existing explanation methods, e.g., LIME, which are computationally expensive when explaining a static black-box model, are even more inefficient in the LL setting. In this paper, we propose a novel Lifelong Explanation (LLE) approach that continuously trains a student explainer under the supervision of a teacher -- an arbitrary explanation algorithm -- on different tasks undertaken in LL. We also leverage the Experience Replay (ER) mechanism to prevent catastrophic forgetting in the student explainer. Our experiments comparing LLE to three baselines on text classification tasks show that LLE can enhance the stability of the explanations for all seen tasks and maintain the same level of faithfulness to the black-box model as the teacher, while being up to 10^2 times faster at test time. Our ablation study shows that the ER mechanism in our LLE approach enhances the learning capabilities of the student explainer. Our code is available at https://github.com/situsnow/LLE.

Lifelong Explainer for Lifelong Learners

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where a small perturbation to an input alters the model prediction. In many cases, malicious inputs intentionally crafted for one model can fool another model. In this paper, we present the first study to systematically investigate the transferability of adversarial examples for text classification networks, and how various factors, including network architecture, tokenization scheme, word embedding, and model capacity, affect the transferability of adversarial examples with extensive experiments. Based on these studies, we pro- pose a genetic algorithm to find an ensemble of models that can be used to induce adversarial examples to fool almost all existing models. Such adversarial examples reflect the defects of the learning process and the bias in training sets. Finally, we generalize these adversarial examples into a set of word replacement rules that can be used for model diagnostics.

On the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks against Neural Text Classifier

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing ﬁeld. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only composed of the multi-head attention; other components can also contribute to Transformers’ progressive performance. In this study, we extended the scope of the analysis of Transformers from solely the attention patterns to the whole attention block, i.e., multi-head attention, residual connection, and layer normalization. Our analysis of Transformer-based masked language models shows that the token-to-token interaction performed via attention has less impact on the intermediate representations than previously assumed. These results provide new intuitive explanations of existing reports; for example, discarding the learned attention patterns tends not to adversely affect the performance. The codes of our experiments are publicly available.

Incorporating Residual and Normalization Layers into Analysis of Masked Language Models

We introduce SelfExplain, a novel self-explaining model that explains a text classifier's predictions using phrase-based concepts. SelfExplain augments existing neural classifiers by adding (1) a globally interpretable layer that identifies the most influential concepts in the training set for a given sample and (2) a locally interpretable layer that quantifies the contribution of each local input concept by computing a relevance score relative to the predicted label. Experiments across five text-classification datasets show that SelfExplain facilitates interpretability without sacrificing performance. Most importantly, explanations from SelfExplain show sufficiency for model predictions and are perceived as adequate, trustworthy and understandable by human judges compared to existing widely-used baselines.

SelfExplain: A Self-Explaining Architecture for Neural Text Classifiers

Entity Linking (EL) systems have achieved impressive results on standard benchmarks, mainly thanks to the contextualized representations provided by recent pretrained language models.
However, such systems still require massive amounts of data -- millions of labeled examples -- to perform at their best, with training times that often exceed several days, especially when limited computational resources are available.
In this paper, we look at how Named Entity Recognition (NER) can be exploited to narrow the gap between EL systems trained on high and low amounts of labeled data.
More specifically, we show how and to what extent an EL system can benefit from NER to enhance its entity representations, improve candidate selection, select more effective negative samples and enforce hard and soft constraints on its output entities.

Named Entity Recognition for Entity Linking: What Works and What's Next

Writing mammography reports can be errorprone and time-consuming for radiologists. In this paper we propose a method to generate mammography reports given four images, corresponding to the four views used in screening mammography. To the best of our knowledge our work represents the ﬁrst attempt to generate the mammography report using deep-learning. We propose an encoder-decoder model that includes an EfﬁcientNet-based encoder and a Transformer-based decoder. We demonstrate that the Transformer-based attention mechanism can combine visual and semantic information to localize salient regions on the input mammograms and generate a visually interpretable report. The conducted experiments, including an evaluation by a certiﬁed radiologist, show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Generating Mammography Reports from Multi-view Mammograms with BERT

Online tenant reviews of multifamily residential properties present a unique source of information for commercial real estate investing and research. Real estate professionals frequently read tenant reviews to uncover property-related issues that are otherwise difficult to detect, a process that is both biased and time-consuming. Using this as motivation, we asked whether a text classification-based approach can automate the detection of four carefully defined, major quality-of-life issues: severe crime, noise nuisance, pest burden, and parking difficulties. We aggregate 5.5 million tenant reviews from five sources and use two-stage crowdsourced labeling on 0.1% of the data to produce high-quality labels for subsequent text classification. Following fine-tuning of pretrained language models on millions of reviews, we train a multi-label reviews classifier that achieves a mean AUROC of 0.965 on these labels. We next use the model to reveal temporal and spatial patterns among tens of thousands of multifamily properties. Collectively, these results highlight the feasibility of automated analysis of housing trends and investment opportunities using tenant-perspective data.

Classification and Geotemporal Analysis of Quality-of-Life Issues in Tenant Reviews

While large-scale pretrained language models have been shown to learn effective linguistic representations for many NLP tasks, there remain many real-world contextual aspects of language that current approaches do not capture. For instance, consider a cloze-test “I enjoyed the _______ game this weekend”: the correct answer depends heavily on where the speaker is from, when the utterance occurred, and the speaker’s broader social milieu and preferences. Although language depends heavily on the geographical, temporal, and other social contexts of the speaker, these elements have not been incorporated into modern transformer-based language models. We propose a simple but effective approach to incorporate speaker social context into the learned representations of large-scale language models. Our method first learns dense representations of social contexts using graph representation learning algorithms and then primes language model pretraining with these social context representations. We evaluate our approach on geographically sensitive language modeling tasks and show a substantial improvement (more than 100% relative lift on MRR) compared to baselines

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