Dominican Republic

Commonsense is defined as the knowledge that is shared by everyone. However, certain types of commonsense knowledge are correlated with culture and geographic locations and they are only shared locally. For example, the scenarios of wedding ceremonies vary across regions due to different customs influenced by historical and religious factors. Such regional characteristics, however, are generally omitted in prior work. In this paper, we construct a Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning dataset (GD-VCR) to test vision-and-language models&#39; ability to understand cultural and geo-location-specific commonsense. In particular, we study two state-of-the-art Vision-and-Language models, VisualBERT and ViLBERT trained on VCR, a standard multimodal commonsense benchmark with images primarily from Western regions. We then evaluate how well the trained models can generalize to answering the questions in GD-VCR. We find that the performance of both models for non-Western regions including East Asia, South Asia, and Africa is significantly lower than that for Western region. We analyze the reasons behind the performance disparity and find that the performance gap is larger on QA pairs that: 1) are concerned with culture-related scenarios, e.g., weddings, religious activities, and festivals; 2) require high-level geo-diverse commonsense reasoning rather than low-order perception and recognition. Dataset and code are released at https://github.com/WadeYin9712/GD-VCR.

EMNLP 2021

Broaden the Vision: Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning

# 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. 

 
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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). 

Commonsense is defined as the knowledge that is shared by everyone. However, certain types of commonsense knowledge are correlated with culture and geographic locations and they are only shared locally. For example, the scenarios of wedding ceremonies vary across regions due to different customs influenced by historical and religious factors. Such regional characteristics, however, are generally omitted in prior work. In this paper, we construct a Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning dataset (GD-VCR) to test vision-and-language models' ability to understand cultural and geo-location-specific commonsense. In particular, we study two state-of-the-art Vision-and-Language models, VisualBERT and ViLBERT trained on VCR, a standard multimodal commonsense benchmark with images primarily from Western regions. We then evaluate how well the trained models can generalize to answering the questions in GD-VCR. We find that the performance of both models for non-Western regions including East Asia, South Asia, and Africa is significantly lower than that for Western region. We analyze the reasons behind the performance disparity and find that the performance gap is larger on QA pairs that: 1) are concerned with culture-related scenarios, e.g., weddings, religious activities, and festivals; 2) require high-level geo-diverse commonsense reasoning rather than low-order perception and recognition. Dataset and code are released at https://github.com/WadeYin9712/GD-VCR.

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.

Reading order detection is the cornerstone to understanding visually-rich documents (e.g., receipts and forms). Unfortunately, no existing work took advantage of advanced deep learning models because it is too laborious to annotate a large enough dataset. We observe that the reading order of WORD documents is embedded in their XML metadata; meanwhile, it is easy to convert WORD documents to PDFs or images. Therefore, in an automated manner, we construct ReadingBank, a benchmark dataset that contains reading order, text, and layout information for 500,000 document images covering a wide spectrum of document types. This first-ever large-scale dataset unleashes the power of deep neural networks for reading order detection. Specifically, our proposed LayoutReader captures the text and layout information for reading order prediction using the seq2seq model. It performs almost perfectly in reading order detection and significantly improves both open-source and commercial OCR engines in ordering text lines in their results in our experiments. The dataset and models are publicly available at https: //aka.ms/layoutreader.

LayoutReader: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Reading Order Detection

Temporal language grounding in videos aims to localize the temporal span relevant to the given query sentence. Previous methods treat it either as a boundary regression task or a span extraction task. This paper will formulate temporal language grounding into video reading comprehension and propose a Relation-aware Network (RaNet) to address it. This framework aims to select a video moment choice from the predefined answer set with the aid of coarse-and-fine choice-query interaction and choice-choice relation construction. A choice-query interactor is proposed to match the visual and textual information simultaneously in sentence-moment and token-moment levels, leading to a coarse-and-fine cross-modal interaction. Moreover, a novel multi-choice relation constructor is introduced by leveraging graph convolution to capture the dependencies among video moment choices for the best choice selection. Extensive experiments on ActivityNet-Captions, TACoS, and Charades-STA demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Huntersxsx/RaNet.

Relation-aware Video Reading Comprehension for Temporal Language Grounding

Interactive machine reading comprehension iMRC is machine comprehension tasks where knowledge sources are partially observable. An agent must interact with an environment sequentially to gather necessary knowledge in order to answer a question. We hypothesize that graph representations are good inductive biases, which can serve as an agent's memory mechanism in iMRC tasks. We explore four different categories of graphs that can capture text information at various levels. We describe methods that dynamically build and update these graphs during information gathering, as well as neural models to encode graph representations in RL agents. Extensive experiments on iSQuAD suggest that graph representations can result in significant performance improvements for RL agents.

Interactive Machine Comprehension with Dynamic Knowledge Graphs

Video grounding aims to localize the temporal segment corresponding to a sentence query from an untrimmed video. Almost all existing video grounding methods fall into two frameworks: 1) Top-down model: It predefines a set of segment candidates and then conducts segment classification and regression. 2) Bottomup model: It directly predicts frame-wise probabilities of the referential segment boundaries. However, all these methods are not end-to-end, i.e., they always rely on some time-consuming post-processing steps to refine predictions. To this end, we reformulate video grounding as a set prediction task and propose a novel end-toend multi-modal Transformer model, dubbed as GTR. Specifically, GTR has two encoders for video and language encoding, and a crossmodal decoder for grounding prediction. To facilitate the end-to-end training, we use a Cubic Embedding layer to transform the raw videos into a set of visual tokens. To better fuse these two modalities in the decoder, we design a new Multi-head Cross-Modal Attention. The whole GTR is optimized via a Many-to-One matching loss. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive studies to investigate different model design choices. Extensive results on three benchmarks have validated the superiority of GTR. All three typical GTR variants achieve recordbreaking performance on all datasets and metrics, with several times faster inference speed. Our project is available at GTR.

On Pursuit of Designing Multi-modal Transformer for Video Grounding

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are often optimized to work best for speakers with canonical speech patterns. Unfortunately, these systems perform poorly when tested on atypical speech and heavily accented speech. It has previously been shown that personalization through model fine-tuning substantially improves performance. However, maintaining such large models per speaker is costly and difficult to scale. We show that by adding a relatively small number of extra parameters to the encoder layers via so-called residual adapter, we can achieve similar adaptation gains compared to model fine-tuning, while only updating a tiny fraction (less than 0.5%) of the model parameters. We demonstrate this on two speech adaptation tasks (atypical and accented speech) and for two state-of-the-art ASR architectures.

Residual Adapters for Parameter-Efficient ASR Adaptation to Atypical and Accented Speech

This paper provides an overview of NVIDIA NeMo's neural machine translation systems for the constrained data track of the WMT21 News and Biomedical Shared Translation Tasks. Our news task submissions for English-German (En-De) and English-Russian (En-Ru) are built on top of a baseline transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model \cite{vaswani2017}. Specifically, we use a combination of 1) checkpoint averaging 2) model scaling 3) data augmentation with backtranslation and knowledge distillation from right-to-left factorized models 4) finetuning on test sets from previous years 5) model ensembling 6) shallow fusion decoding with transformer language models and 7) noisy channel re-ranking. Additionally, our biomedical task submission for English $\leftrightarrow$ Russian uses a biomedically biased vocabulary and is trained from scratch on news task data, medically relevant text curated from the news task dataset, and biomedical data provided by the shared task. Our news system achieves a sacreBLEU score of 39.5 on the WMT'20 En-De test set outperforming the best submission from last year's task of 38.8. Our biomedical task Ru-En and En-Ru systems reach BLEU scores of 43.8 and 40.3 respectively on the WMT'20 Biomedical Task Test set, outperforming the previous year's best submissions.

NVIDIA NeMo's Neural Machine Translation Systems for English-German and English-Russian News and Biomedical Tasks at WMT21

This paper describes the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) machine translation sys- tems and the improvements that were developed during the WMT21 evaluation campaign. This year, we explore various methods of adapting our baseline models from WMT20 and again measure improvements in performance on the Russian–English language pair.

Tune In: The AFRL WMT21 News-Translation Systems

This paper presents the JHU-Microsoft joint submission for WMT 2021 quality estimation shared task. We only participate in Task 2 (post-editing effort estimation) of the shared task, focusing on the target-side word-level quality estimation. The techniques we experimented with include Levenshtein Transformer training and data augmentation with a combination of forward, backward, round-trip translation, and pseudo post-editing of the MT output. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our system compared to the widely adopted OpenKiwi-XLM baseline. Our system is also the top-ranking system on the MT MCC metric for the English-German language pair.

The JHU-Microsoft Submission for WMT21 Quality Estimation Shared Task

This paper describes TenTrans' submission to WMT21 Multilingual Low-Resource Translation shared task for the Romance language pairs.
This task focuses on improving translation quality from Catalan to Occitan, Romanian and Italian, with the assistance of related high-resource languages.
We mainly utilize back-translation, pivot-based methods, multilingual models, pre-trained model fine-tuning, and in-domain knowledge transfer to improve the translation quality. On the test set, our best-submitted system achieves an average of 43.45 case-sensitive BLEU scores across all low-resource pairs. Our data, code, and pre-trained models used in this work are available in TenTrans evaluation examples.

TenTrans Multilingual Low-Resource Translation System for WMT21 Indo-European Languages Task

This paper describes the PROMT submissions for the WMT21 Terminology Translation Task. We participate in two directions: English to French and English to Russian. Our final submissions are MarianNMT-based neural systems. We present two technologies for terminology translation: a modification of the Dinu et al. (2019) soft-constrained approach and our own approach called PROMT Smart Neural Dictionary (SmartND). We achieve good results in both directions.

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