Ireland

We study learning from user feedback for extractive question answering by simulating feedback using supervised data. We cast the problem as contextual bandit learning, and analyze the characteristics of several learning scenarios with focus on reducing data annotation. We show that systems initially trained on a small number of examples can dramatically improve given feedback from users on model-predicted answers, and that one can use existing datasets to deploy systems in new domains without any annotation, but instead improving the system on-the-fly via user feedback.

ACL 2022

Simulating Bandit Learning from User Feedback for Extractive Question Answering

user feedback

bandit learning

domain adaptation

# 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). 

findings / work in progress

Recent efforts to create challenge benchmarks that test the abilities of natural language understanding models have largely depended on human annotations. In this work, we introduce the "Break, Perturb, Build" (BPB) framework for automatic reasoning-oriented perturbation of question-answer pairs. BPB represents a question by decomposing it into the reasoning steps that are required to answer it, symbolically perturbs the decomposition, and then generates new question-answer pairs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BPB by creating evaluation sets for three reading comprehension (RC) benchmarks, generating thousands of high-quality examples without human intervention. We evaluate a range of RC models on our evaluation sets, which reveals large performance gaps on generated examples compared to the original data. Moreover, symbolic perturbations enable fine-grained analysis of the strengths and limitations of models. Last, augmenting the training data with examples generated by BPB helps close the performance gaps, without any drop on the original data distribution.

Break, Perturb, Build: Automatic Perturbation of Reasoning Paths Through Question Decomposition

In this paper, we study the named entity recognition (NER) problem under distant supervision. Due to the incompleteness of the external dictionaries and/or knowledge bases, such distantly annotated training data usually suffer from a high false negative rate. To this end, we formulate the Distantly Supervised NER (DS-NER) problem via Multi-class Positive and Unlabeled (MPU) learning and propose a theoretically and practically novel CONFidence-based MPU (Conf-MPU) approach. To handle the incomplete annotations, Conf-MPU consists of two steps. First, a confidence score is estimated for each token of being an entity token. Then, the proposed Conf-MPU risk estimation is applied to train a multi-class classifier for the NER task. Thorough experiments on two benchmark datasets labeled by various external knowledge demonstrate the superiority of the proposed Conf-MPU over existing DS-NER methods.

Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Confidence-Based Multi-Class Positive and Unlabeled Learning

In recent years, machine learning models have rapidly become better at generating clinical consultation notes; yet, there is little work on how to properly evaluate the generated consultation notes to understand the impact they may have on both the clinician using them and the patient's clinical safety.
To address this we present an extensive human evaluation study of consultation notes where 5 clinicians (i) listen to 57 mock consultations, (ii) write their own notes, (iii) post-edit a number of automatically generated notes, and (iv) extract all the errors, both quantitative and qualitative. We then carry out a correlation study with 18 automatic quality metrics and the human judgements. We find that a simple, character-based Levenshtein distance metric performs on par if not better than common model-based metrics like BertScore. All our findings and annotations are open-sourced.

Human Evaluation and Correlation with Automatic Metrics in Consultation Note Generation

The ability to integrate context, including perceptual and temporal cues, plays a pivotal role in grounding the meaning of a linguistic utterance. In order to measure to what extent current vision-and-language models master this ability, we devise a new multimodal challenge, Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions (ImageCoDe). In particular, models are tasked with retrieving the correct image from a set of 10 minimally contrastive candidates based on a contextual description. As such, each description contains only the details that help distinguish between images. Because of this, descriptions tend to be complex in terms of syntax and discourse and require drawing pragmatic inferences. Images are sourced from both static pictures and video frames. We benchmark several state-of-the-art models, including both cross-encoders such as ViLBERT and bi-encoders such as CLIP, on ImageCoDe. Our results reveal that these models dramatically lag behind human performance: the best variant achieves an accuracy of 20.9 on video frames and 59.4 on static pictures, compared with 90.8 in humans. Furthermore, we experiment with new model variants that are better equipped to incorporate visual and temporal context into their representations, which achieve modest gains. Our hope is that ImageCoDE will foster progress in grounded language understanding by encouraging models to focus on fine-grained visual differences.

Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions

Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on
compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In this paper, we study the interpretation of two noncompositional figurative languages (idioms
and similes). We collected datasets of fictional narratives containing a figurative expression along with crowd-sourced plausible and implausible continuations relying on the correct interpretation of the expression. We then trained models to choose or generate the plausible continuation. Our experiments show that models based solely on pretrained language models perform substantially worse than humans on these tasks. We additionally propose knowledge-enhanced
models, adopting human strategies for interpreting figurative language types : inferring meaning from the context and relying on the constituent words’ literal meanings. The knowledge-enhanced models improve the performance on both the discriminative and generative tasks, further bridging the gap from human performance.

Interpreting Figurative Language in Narratives

The retriever-reader framework is popular for open-domain question answering (ODQA) due to its ability to use explicit knowledge. Although prior work has sought to increase the knowledge coverage by incorporating structured knowledge beyond text, accessing heterogeneous knowledge sources through a unified interface remains an open question. While data-to-text generation has the potential to
serve as a universal interface for data and text, its feasibility for downstream tasks remains largely unknown. In this work, we bridge this gap and use the data-to-text method as a means for encoding structured knowledge for ODQA. Specifically, we propose a verbalizer-retriever-reader framework for ODQA over data and text where verbalized tables from Wikipedia and graphs from Wikidata are used as augmented knowledge sources. We show that our Unified Data and Text QA, UDT-QA, can effectively benefit from the expanded knowledge index, leading to large gains over text-only baselines. Notably, our approach sets the single-model state-of-the-art on Natural Questions. Furthermore, our analyses indicate that verbalized knowledge is preferred for answer reasoning for both adapted and hot-swap settings.

Open Domain Question Answering with A Unified Knowledge Interface

One of the biggest challenges hindering progress in low-resource and multilingual
machine translation is the lack of good evaluation benchmarks. Current evaluation benchmarks either lack good coverage of lowresource languages, consider only restricted domains, or are low quality because they are constructed using semi-automatic procedures. In this work, we introduce the FLORES-101 evaluation benchmark, consisting of 3001 sentences extracted from English Wikipedia and covering a variety of different topics and domains. These sentences have been translated in 101 languages by professional translators through a carefully controlled process. The resulting dataset enables better assessment of model quality on the long tail of low-resource languages, including the evaluation of many-to-many multilingual translation systems, as all translations are fully aligned. By publicly releasing such a high-quality and high-coverage dataset, we hope to foster progress in the machine translation community and beyond.

The FLORES-101 Evaluation Benchmark for Low-Resource and Multilingual Machine Translation

The increasing size of generative Pre-trained Language
Models (PLMs) have greatly increased the demand for model compression.
Despite various methods to compress BERT or its variants, 
there are few attempts to compress generative PLMs, and the underlying difficulty remains unclear. In this paper, we compress generative PLMs by quantization.
We find that previous quantization methods fail on generative tasks due to the homogeneous word embeddings caused by reduced capacity, and varied distribution of weights. Correspondingly, we propose a token-level contrastive distillation to learn distinguishable word embeddings, and a module-wise dynamic scaling to make quantizers adaptive to different modules. Empirical results on various tasks show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art compression
methods on generative PLMs by a clear margin. With comparable performance with the full-precision models, we achieve 14.4x and 13.4x compression rates on GPT-2 and BART, respectively.

Compression of Generative Pre-trained Language Models via Quantization

Discourse information is difficult to represent and annotate. Among the major frameworks for annotating discourse information, RST, PDTB and SDRT are widely discussed and used, each having its own theoretical foundation and focus. The motivation of unifying the frameworks, challenges of the task and my research questions will be discussed in the presentation.

 Towards Unification of Discourse Annotation Frameworks

There are limitations in learning language from text alone. Therefore, recent focus has been on developing multimodal models. However, few benchmarks exist that can measure what language models learn about language from multimodal training. We hypothesize that training on a visual modality should improve on the visual commonsense knowledge in language models. Therefore, we introduce two evaluation tasks for measuring visual commonsense knowledge in language models and use them to evaluate different multimodal models and unimodal baselines. Primarily, we find that the visual commonsense knowledge is not significantly different between the multimodal models and unimodal baseline models trained on visual text data.

Simulating Bandit Learning from User Feedback for Extractive Question Answering

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Break, Perturb, Build: Automatic Perturbation of Reasoning Paths Through Question Decomposition

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