Ireland

We introduce the Probabilistic Worldbuilding Model (PWM), a new fully-symbolic Bayesian model of semantic parsing and reasoning, as a first step in a research program toward more domain- and task-general NLU and AI. Humans create internal mental models of their observations which greatly aid in their ability to understand and reason about a large variety of problems. In PWM, the meanings of sentences, acquired facts about the world, and intermediate steps in reasoning are all expressed in a human-readable formal language, with the design goal of interpretability. PWM is Bayesian, designed specifically to be able to generalize to new domains and new tasks. We derive and implement an inference algorithm that reads sentences by parsing and abducing updates to its latent world model that capture the semantics of those sentences, and evaluate it on two out-of-domain question-answering datasets: (1) ProofWriter and (2) a new dataset we call FictionalGeoQA, designed to be more representative of real language but still simple enough to focus on evaluating reasoning ability, while being robust against heuristics. Our method outperforms baselines on both, thereby demonstrating its value as a proof-of-concept.

ACL 2022

Towards General Natural Language Understanding with Probabilistic Worldbuilding

probabilistic modeling

reasoning

question answering

natural language understanding

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

findings / work in progress

# 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 ability to sequence unordered events is an essential skill to comprehend and reason about real world task procedures, which often requires thorough understanding of temporal common sense and multimodal information, as these procedures are often communicated through a combination of texts and images. Such capability is essential for applications such as sequential task planning and multi-source instruction summarization. While humans are capable of reasoning about and sequencing unordered multimodal procedural instructions, whether current machine learning models have such essential capability is still an open question. In this work, we benchmark models' capability of reasoning over and sequencing unordered multimodal instructions by curating datasets from popular online instructional manuals and collecting comprehensive human annotations. We find models not only perform significantly worse than humans but also seem incapable of efficiently utilizing the multimodal information. To improve machines' performance on multimodal event sequencing, we propose sequentiality-aware pretraining techniques that exploit the sequential alignment properties of both texts and images, resulting in > 5% significant improvements.

Understanding Multimodal Procedural Knowledge by Sequencing Multimodal Instructional Manuals

We propose VALSE (Vision And Language Structured Evaluation), a novel benchmark designed for testing general-purpose pretrained vision and language (V&L) models for their visio-linguistic grounding capabilities on specific linguistic phenomena. VALSE offers a suite of six tests covering various linguistic constructs. Solving these requires models to ground linguistic phenomena in the visual modality, allowing more fine-grained evaluations than hitherto possible. We build VALSE using methods that support the construction of valid foils, and report results from evaluating five widely-used V&L models. Our experiments suggest that current models have considerable difficulty addressing most phenomena. Hence, we expect VALSE to serve as an important benchmark to measure future progress of pretrained V&L models from a linguistic perspective, complementing the canonical task-centred V&L evaluations.

VALSE: A Task-Independent Benchmark for Vision and Language Models Centered on Linguistic Phenomena

Natural language applied to natural 2D images describes a fundamentally 3D world. 
We present the Voxel-informed Language Grounder (VLG), a language grounding model that leverages 3D geometric information in the form of voxel maps derived from the visual input using a volumetric reconstruction model. 
We show that VLG significantly improves grounding accuracy on SNARE, an object reference game task.
At the time of writing, VLG holds the top place on the SNARE leaderboard, achieving SOTA results with a 2.0% absolute improvement.

Voxel-informed Language Grounding

Transfer learning (TL) in natural language processing (NLP) has seen a surge of interest in recent years, as pre-trained models have shown an impressive ability to transfer to novel tasks. Three main strategies have emerged for making use of multiple supervised datasets during fine-tuning: training on an intermediate task before training on the target task (STILTs), using multi-task learning (MTL) to train jointly on a supplementary task and the target task (pairwise MTL), or simply using MTL to train jointly on all available datasets (MTL-ALL). In this work, we compare all three TL methods in a comprehensive analysis on the GLUE dataset suite. We find that there is a simple heuristic for when to use one of these techniques over the other: pairwise MTL is better than STILTs when the target task has fewer instances than the supporting task and vice versa. We show that this holds true in more than 92% of applicable cases on the GLUE dataset and validate this hypothesis with experiments varying dataset size. The simplicity and effectiveness of this heuristic is surprising and warrants additional exploration by the TL community. Furthermore, we find that MTL-ALL is worse than the pairwise methods in almost every case. We hope this study will aid others as they choose between TL methods for NLP tasks.

When to Use Multi-Task Learning vs Intermediate Fine-Tuning for Pre-Trained Encoder Transfer Learning

This study carries out a systematic intrinsic evaluation of the semantic representations learned by state-of-the-art pre-trained multimodal Transformers. These representations are claimed to be task-agnostic and shown to help on many downstream language-and-vision tasks. However, the extent to which they align with human semantic intuitions remains unclear. We experiment with various models and obtain static word representations from the contextualized ones they learn. We then evaluate them against the semantic judgments provided by human speakers. In line with previous evidence, we observe a generalized advantage of multimodal representations over language- only ones on concrete word pairs, but not on abstract ones. On the one hand, this confirms the effectiveness of these models to align language and vision, which results in better semantic representations for concepts that are grounded in images. On the other hand, models are shown to follow different representation learning patterns, which sheds some light on how and when they perform multimodal integration.

Word Representation Learning in Multimodal Pre-Trained Transformers: An Intrinsic Evaluation

Learning representations of words in a continuous space is perhaps the most fundamental task in NLP, however words interact in ways much richer than vector dot product similarity can provide. Many relationships between words can be expressed set-theoretically, for example, adjective-noun compounds (eg. "red cars"⊆"cars") and homographs (eg. "tongue"∩"body" should be similar to "mouth", while "tongue"∩"language" should be similar to "dialect") have natural set-theoretic interpretations. Box embeddings are a novel region-based representation which provide the capability to perform these set-theoretic operations. In this work, we provide a fuzzy-set interpretation of box embeddings, and learn box representations of words using a set-theoretic training objective. We demonstrate improved performance on various word similarity tasks, particularly on less common words, and perform a quantitative and qualitative analysis exploring the additional unique expressivity provided by Word2Box.

Word2Box: Capturing Set-Theoretic Semantics of Words using Box Embeddings

This work introduces the Adaptor library that transposes the traditional model-centric training to objective-centric approach, composing the training process from applications of selected objectives in a given schedule.
We overview how can multiple research directions benefit from enhanced objective-centric experimentation and we find the most potential applications in multi-task training, custom objectives development, dynamic training curricula, or domain adaptation.
Our paper also demonstrates the practical applicability of Adaptor in selected unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios.

Adaptor: Objective-Centric Adaptation Framework for Language Models

There is a growing need to model interactions between data modalities (e.g., vision, language) — both to improve AI predictions on existing tasks and to enable new applications. In the recent field of multimodal medical AI, integrating multiple modalities has gained widespread popularity as multimodal models have proven to improve performance, robustness, require less training samples and add complementary information. ​​

To improve technical reproducibility and transparency for multimodal medical tasks as well as speed up progress across medical AI, we present ViLMedic, a Vision-and- Language medical library. ​

Ultimately, we hope our reproducible pipelines can enable clinical translation and create real impact.​

ViLMedic: a framework for research at the intersection of vision and language in medical AI

Data modification, either via additional training datasets, data augmentation, debiasing, and dataset filtering, has been proposed as an effective solution for generalizing to out-of-domain (OOD) inputs, in both natural language processing and computer vision literature. However, the effect of data modification on adversarial robustness remains unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study of common data modification strategies and evaluate not only their in-domain and OOD performance, but also their adversarial robustness (AR). We also present results on a two-dimensional synthetic dataset to visualize the effect of each method on the training distribution. This work serves as an empirical study towards understanding the relationship between generalizing to unseen domains and defending against adversarial perturbations. Our findings suggest that more data (either via additional datasets or data augmentation) benefits both OOD accuracy and AR. However, data filtering (previously shown to improve OOD accuracy on natural language inference) hurts OOD accuracy on other tasks such as question answering and image classification. We provide insights from our experiments to inform future work in this direction.

Generalized but not Robust? Comparing the Effects of Data Modification Methods on Out-of-Domain Generalization and Adversarial Robustness

This presentation concisely describes our proposed weight regularizer that mitigates alignment distortion during iteratively pruning and fine-tuning Transformer models. This leads to improved zero-shot performance across languages which are not used during training over multiple tasks within the XGLUE benchmark.

Towards General Natural Language Understanding with Probabilistic Worldbuilding

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