Ireland

We introduce and study the task of clickbait spoiling: generating a short text that satisfies the curiosity induced by a clickbait post. Clickbait links to a web page and advertises its contents by arousing curiosity instead of providing an informative summary. Our contributions are approaches to classify the type of spoiler needed (i.e., a phrase or a passage), and to generate appropriate spoilers. A large-scale evaluation and error analysis on a new corpus of 5,000 manually spoiled clickbait posts -- the Webis Clickbait Spoiling Corpus 2022 -- shows that our spoiler type classifier achieves an accuracy of 80%, while the question answering model DeBERTa-large outperforms all others in generating spoilers for both types.

ACL 2022

Clickbait Spoiling via Question Answering and Passage Retrieval

clickbait spoiling

clickbait

passage retrieval

question answering

### 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 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)

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). 

The IMPRESSIONS section of a radiology report about an imaging study is a summary of the radiologist's reasoning and conclusions, and it also aids the referring physician in confirming or excluding certain diagnoses. A cascade of tasks are required to automatically generate an abstractive summary of the typical information-rich radiology report. These tasks include acquisition of salient content from the report and generation of a concise, easily consumable IMPRESSIONS section. Prior research on radiology report summarization has focused on single-step end-to-end models -- which subsume the task of salient content acquisition. To fully explore the cascade structure and explainability of radiology report summarization, we introduce two innovations. First, we design a two-step approach: extractive summarization followed by abstractive summarization. Second, we additionally break down the extractive part into two independent tasks: extraction of salient (1) sentences and (2) keywords. Experiments on English radiology reports from two clinical sites show our novel approach leads to a more precise summary compared to single-step and to two-step-with-single-extractive-process baselines with an overall improvement in F1 score of 3-4%.

Differentiable Multi-Agent Actor-Critic for Multi-Step Radiology Report Summarization

In this paper, we investigate improvements to the GEC sequence tagging architecture with a focus on ensembling of recent cutting-edge Transformer-based encoders in Large configurations. We encourage ensembling models by majority votes on span-level edits because this approach is tolerant to the model architecture and vocabulary size. Our best ensemble achieves a new SOTA result with an score of 76.05 on BEA-2019 (test), even without pre-training on synthetic datasets. In addition, we perform knowledge distillation with a trained ensemble to generate new synthetic training datasets, "Troy-Blogs" and "Troy-1BW". Our best single sequence tagging model that is pretrained on the generated Troy- datasets in combination with the publicly available synthetic PIE dataset achieves a near-SOTA result with an score of 73.21 on BEA-2019 (test). The code, datasets, and trained models are publicly available.

Ensembling and Knowledge Distilling of Large Sequence Taggers for Grammatical Error Correction

While many methods purport to explain predictions by highlighting salient features, what aims these explanations serve and how they ought to be evaluated often go unstated. In this work, we introduce a framework to quantify the value of explanations via the accuracy gains that they confer on a student model trained to simulate a teacher model. Crucially, the explanations are available to the student during training, but are not available at test time. Compared to prior proposals, our approach is less easily gamed, enabling principled, automatic, model-agnostic evaluation of attributions. Using our framework, we compare numerous attribution methods for text classification and question answering, and observe quantitative differences that are consistent (to a moderate to high degree) across different student model architectures and learning strategies.


Evaluating Explanations: How Much do Explanations from the Teacher aid Students?

The enrichment of tabular datasets using external sources has gained significant attention in recent years. Existing solutions, however, either ignore external unstructured data completely or devise dataset-specific solutions. In this study, we proposed Few-Shot Transformer based Enrichment (FeSTE), a generic and robust framework for the enrichment of tabular datasets using unstructured data. By training over multiple datasets, our approach is able to develop generic models that can be applied to additional datasets with minimal training (i.e., few-shot). Our approach is based on an adaptation of BERT, for which we present a novel fine-tuning approach that reformulates the tuples of the datasets as sentences. Our evaluation, conducted on 17 datasets, shows that FeSTE is able to generate high quality features and significantly outperform existing fine-tuning solutions.

Few-Shot Tabular Data Enrichment Using Fine-Tuned Transformer Architectures

Simultaneous Machine Translation is the task of incrementally translating an input sentence before it is fully available. Currently, simultaneous translation is carried out by translating each sentence independently of the previously translated text. More generally, Streaming MT can be understood as an extension of Simultaneous MT to the incremental translation of a continuous input text stream. In this work, a state-of-the-art simultaneous sentence-level MT system is extended to the streaming setup by leveraging the streaming history. Extensive empirical results are reported on IWSLT Translation Tasks, showing that leveraging the streaming history leads to significant quality gains. In particular, the proposed system proves to compare favorably to the best performing systems.

From Simultaneous to Streaming Machine Translation by Leveraging Streaming History

We study the task of toxic spans detection, which concerns the detection of the spans that make a text toxic, when detecting such spans is possible. We introduce a dataset for this task, ToxicSpans, which we release publicly. By experimenting with several methods, we show that sequence labeling models perform best. Moreover, methods that add generic rationale extraction mechanisms on top of classifiers trained to predict if a post is toxic or not are also surprisingly promising. Finally, we use ToxicSpans and systems trained on it, to provide further analysis of state-of-the-art toxic to non-toxic transfer systems, as well as of human performance on that latter task. Our work highlights challenges in finer toxicity detection and mitigation.

From the Detection of Toxic Spans in Online Discussions to the Analysis of Toxic-to-Civil Transfer

Robustness of machine learning models on ever-changing real-world data is critical, especially for applications affecting human well-being, such as content moderation. New kinds of abusive language continually emerge in online discussions in response to current events (e.g., COVID-19), and the deployed abuse detection systems should be updated regularly to remain accurate. In this paper, we show that general abusive language classifiers tend to be fairly reliable in detecting out-of-domain explicitly abusive utterances but fail to detect new types of more subtle, implicit abuse. Next, we propose an interpretability technique, based on the Testing Concept Activation Vector (TCAV) method from computer vision, to quantify the sensitivity of a trained model to the human-defined concepts of explicit and implicit abusive
language, and use that to explain the generalizability of the model on new data, in this case, COVID-related anti-Asian hate speech. Extending this technique, we introduce a novel metric, Degree of Explicitness, for a single instance and show that the new metric is beneficial in suggesting out-of-domain unlabeled examples to effectively enrich the training data with informative, implicitly abusive texts.

Improving Generalizability in Implicitly Abusive Language Detection with Concept Activation Vectors

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) should focus not only on correction accuracy but also on the interpretability of the results for language learners. However, existing neural-based GEC models mostly focus on improving accuracy, while their interpretability has not been explored. Example-based methods are promising for improving interpretability, which use similar retrieved examples to generate corrections. Furthermore, examples are beneficial in language learning, helping learners to understand the basis for grammatically incorrect/correct texts and improve their confidence in writing. Therefore, we hypothesized that incorporating an example-based method into GEC could improve interpretability and support language learners. In this study, we introduce an Example-Based GEC (EB-GEC) that presents examples to language learners as a basis for correction result. The examples consist of pairs of correct and incorrect sentences similar to a given input and its predicted correction. Experiments demonstrate that the examples presented by EB-GEC help language learners decide whether to accept or refuse suggestions from the GEC output. Furthermore, the experiments show that retrieved examples also improve the accuracy of corrections.

Interpretability for Language Learners Using Example-Based Grammatical Error Correction

The performance of deep learning models in NLP and other fields of machine learning has led to a rise in their popularity, and so the need for explanations of these models becomes paramount. Attention has been seen as a solution to increase performance, while providing some explanations. However, a debate has started to cast doubt on the explanatory power of attention in neural networks. Although the debate has created a vast literature thanks to contributions from various areas, the lack of communication is becoming more and more tangible. In this paper, we provide a clear overview of the insights on the debate by critically confronting works from these different areas. This holistic vision can be of great interest for future works in all the communities concerned by this debate. We sum up the main challenges spotted in these areas, and we conclude by discussing the most promising future avenues on attention as an explanation.

Is Attention Explanation? An Introduction to the Debate

Word and sentence embeddings are useful feature representations in natural language processing. However, intrinsic evaluation for embeddings lags far behind, and there has been no significant update since the past decade. Word and sentence similarity tasks have become the de facto evaluation method. It leads models to overfit to such evaluations, negatively impacting embedding models' development. This paper first points out the problems using semantic similarity as the gold standard for word and sentence embedding evaluations. Further, we propose a new intrinsic evaluation method called EvalRank, which shows a much stronger correlation with downstream tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted based on 60+ models and popular datasets to certify our judgments. Finally, the practical evaluation toolkit is released for future benchmarking purposes.

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Next from ACL 2022

Differentiable Multi-Agent Actor-Critic for Multi-Step Radiology Report Summarization

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SemEval-2023 Task 5: Clickbait Spoiling

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