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In order to equip NLP systems with selective prediction capability, several task-specific approaches have been proposed. However, which approaches work best across tasks or even if they consistently outperform the simplest baseline &#39;MaxProb&#39; remains to be explored. To this end, we systematically study &#39;selective prediction&#39; in a large-scale setup of 17 datasets across several NLP tasks. Through comprehensive experiments under in-domain (IID), out-of-domain (OOD), and adversarial (ADV) settings, we show that despite leveraging additional resources (held-out data/computation), none of the existing approaches consistently and considerably outperforms MaxProb in all three settings. Furthermore, their performance does not translate well across tasks. For instance, Monte-Carlo Dropout outperforms all other approaches on Duplicate Detection datasets but does not fare well on NLI datasets, especially in the OOD setting. Thus, we recommend that future selective prediction approaches should be evaluated across tasks and settings for reliable estimation of their capabilities.

ACL 2022

Investigating Selective Prediction Approaches Across Several Tasks in IID, OOD, and Adversarial Settings

selective prediction

robustness

reliability

# 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). 

In order to equip NLP systems with selective prediction capability, several task-specific approaches have been proposed. However, which approaches work best across tasks or even if they consistently outperform the simplest baseline 'MaxProb' remains to be explored. To this end, we systematically study 'selective prediction' in a large-scale setup of 17 datasets across several NLP tasks. Through comprehensive experiments under in-domain (IID), out-of-domain (OOD), and adversarial (ADV) settings, we show that despite leveraging additional resources (held-out data/computation), none of the existing approaches consistently and considerably outperforms MaxProb in all three settings. Furthermore, their performance does not translate well across tasks. For instance, Monte-Carlo Dropout outperforms all other approaches on Duplicate Detection datasets but does not fare well on NLI datasets, especially in the OOD setting. Thus, we recommend that future selective prediction approaches should be evaluated across tasks and settings for reliable estimation of their capabilities.

poster

We study the problem of few shot learning for named entity recognition. Specifically, we leverage the semantic information in the names of the labels as a way of giving the model addi- tional signal and enriched priors. We propose a neural architecture that consists of two BERT encoders, one to encode the document and its tokens and another one to encode each of the labels in natural language format. Our model learns to match the representations of named entities computed by the first encoder with la- bel representations computed by the second encoder. The label semantics signal is shown to support improved state-of-the-art results in multiple few shot NER benchmarks and on- par performance in standard benchmarks. Our model is especially effective in low resource settings.

Label Semantics for Few Shot Named Entity Recognition

Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems often demonstrate great performance on in-distribution data, but perform poorly on examples drawn from a shifted distribution. One way to evaluate the generalization ability of NER models is to use adversarial examples, on which the specific variations associated with named entities are rarely considered. To this end, we propose leveraging expert-guided heuristics to change the entity tokens and their surrounding contexts thereby altering their entity types as adversarial attacks. Using expert-guided heuristics, we augmented the CoNLL 2003 test set and manually annotated it to construct a high-quality challenging set. We found that state-of-the-art NER systems trained on CoNLL 2003 training data drop performance dramatically on our challenging set. By training on adversarial augmented training examples and using mixup for regularization, we were able to significantly improve the performance on the challenging set as well as improve out-of-domain generalization which we evaluated by using OntoNotes data. We have publicly released our dataset and code at https://github.com/GT-SALT/Guided-Adversarial-Augmentation.

Leveraging Expert Guided Adversarial Augmentation For Improving Generalization in Named Entity Recognition

We propose a new end-to-end framework that jointly models answer generation and machine reading, to enhance the faithfulness in the long form question answering system. The key idea is to augment the generation model with fine-grained, answer-related salient information which can be viewed as an emphasis on faithful facts. State-of-the-art results on two LFQA datasets, ELI5 and MS MARCO, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, in comparison with strong baselines on automatic and human evaluation metrics. A detailed analysis further proves the competency of our methods in generating fluent, relevant, and more faithful answers.

Read before Generate! Faithful Long Form Question Answering with Machine Reading

Despite the importance of relation extraction in building and representing knowledge, less research is focused on generalizing to unseen relations types. We introduce the task setting of Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction (ZeroRTE) to encourage further research in low-resource relation extraction methods. Given an input sentence, each extracted triplet consists of the head entity, relation label, and tail entity where the relation label is not seen at the training stage. To solve ZeroRTE, we propose to synthesize relation examples by prompting language models to generate structured texts. Concretely, we unify language model prompts and structured text approaches to design a structured prompt template for generating synthetic relation samples when conditioning on relation label prompts (RelationPrompt). To overcome the limitation for extracting multiple relation triplets in a sentence, we design a novel Triplet Search Decoding method. Experiments on FewRel and Wiki-ZSL datasets show the efficacy of RelationPrompt for the ZeroRTE task and zero-shot relation classification. Our code and data are available at github.com/declare-lab/RelationPrompt

RelationPrompt: Leveraging Prompts to Generate Synthetic Data for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction

We study the challenge of learning causal reasoning over procedural text to answer "What if..." questions when external commonsense knowledge is required. We propose a novel multi-hop graph reasoning model to 1) efficiently extract a commonsense subgraph with the most relevant information from a large knowledge graph; 2) predict the causal answer by reasoning over the representations obtained from the commonsense subgraph and the contextual interactions between the questions and context. We evaluate our model on WIQA benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to the recent models.

Relevant CommonSense Subgraphs for "What if..." Procedural Reasoning

Prior research has discussed and illustrated the need to consider linguistic norms at the community level when studying taboo (hateful/offensive/toxic etc.) language. However, a methodology for doing so, that is firmly founded on community language norms is still largely absent. This can lead both to biases in taboo text classification and limitations in our understanding of the causes of bias. We propose a method to study bias in taboo classification and annotation where a community perspective is front and center. This is accomplished by using special classifiers tuned for each community's language. In essence, these classifiers represent community level language norms. We use these to study bias and find, for example, biases are largest against African Americans (7/10 datasets and all 3 classifiers examined). In contrast to previous papers we also study other communities and find, for example, strong biases against South Asians. In a small scale user study we illustrate our key idea which is that common utterances, i.e., those with high alignment scores with a community (community classifier confidence scores) are unlikely to be regarded taboo. Annotators who are community members contradict taboo classification decisions and annotations in a majority of instances. This paper is a significant step toward reducing false positive taboo decisions that over time harm minority communities.

Suum Cuique: Studying Bias in Taboo Detection with a Community Perspective

Entity retrieval--retrieving information about entity mentions in a query--is a key step in open-domain tasks, such as question answering or fact checking. However, state-of-the-art entity retrievers struggle to retrieve rare entities for ambiguous mentions due to biases towards popular entities. Incorporating knowledge graph types during training could help overcome popularity biases, but there are several challenges: (1) existing type-based retrieval methods require mention boundaries as input, but open-domain tasks run on unstructured text, (2) type-based methods should not compromise overall performance, and (3) type-based methods should be robust to noisy and missing types. In this work, we introduce TABi, a method to jointly train bi-encoders on knowledge graph types and unstructured text for entity retrieval for open-domain tasks. TABi leverages a type-enforced contrastive loss to encourage entities and queries of similar types to be close in the embedding space. TABi improves retrieval of rare entities on the Ambiguous Entity Retrieval (AmbER) sets, while maintaining strong overall retrieval performance on open-domain tasks in the KILT benchmark compared to state-of-the-art retrievers. TABi is also robust to incomplete type systems, improving rare entity retrieval over baselines with only 5% type coverage of the training dataset.

TABi: Type-Aware Bi-Encoders for Open-Domain Entity Retrieval

The retriever-reader pipeline has shown promising performance in open-domain QA but suffers from a very slow inference speed. Recently proposed question retrieval models tackle this problem by indexing question-answer pairs and searching for similar questions. These models have shown a significant increase in inference speed, but at the cost of lower QA performance compared to the retriever-reader models. This paper proposes a two-step question retrieval model, SQuID (Sequential Question-Indexed Dense retrieval) and distant supervision for training. SQuID uses two bi-encoders for question retrieval. The first-step retriever selects top-k similar questions, and the second-step retriever finds the most similar question from the top-k questions. We evaluate the performance and the computational efficiency of SQuID. The results show that SQuID significantly increases the performance of existing question retrieval models with a negligible loss on inference speed.

Two-Step Question Retrieval for Open-Domain QA

The environmental costs of research are progressively important to the NLP community and their associated challenges are increasingly debated. In this work, we analyse the carbon cost (measured as CO2-equivalent) associated with journeys made by researchers attending in-person NLP conferences. We obtain the necessary data by text-mining all publications from the ACL anthology available at the time of the study (n=60,572) and extracting information about an author's affiliation, including their address. This allows us to estimate the corresponding carbon cost and compare it to previously known values for training large models. Further, we look at the benefits of in-person conferences by demonstrating that they can increase participation diversity by encouraging attendance from the region surrounding the host country. We show how the trade-off between carbon cost and diversity of an event depends on its location and type. Our aim is to foster further discussion on the best way to address the joint issue of emissions and diversity in the future.

Using NLP to quantify the environmental cost and diversity benefits of in-person NLP conferences

TL;DR: The evaluation of NLP systems focuses on accuracy measures. Through the analysis of more than a dozen pretrained language models of varying sizes on two toxic text classification tasks (English), we demonstrate that focusing on accuracy measures alone can lead to models with wide variation in fairness characteristics. We urge the NLP community to make fairness an integral part of system performance evaluation.

Investigating Selective Prediction Approaches Across Several Tasks in IID, OOD, and Adversarial Settings

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