Ireland

We examine whether some countries are more richly represented in embedding space than others. We find that countries whose names occur with low frequency in training corpora are more likely to be tokenized into subwords, are less semantically distinct in embedding space, and are less likely to be correctly predicted: e.g., Ghana (the correct answer and invocabulary) is not predicted for, “The country producing the most cocoa is [MASK].”. Although these performance discrepancies and representational harms are due to frequency, we find that frequency is highly correlated with a country’s GDP; thus perpetuating historic power and wealth inequalities. We analyze the effectiveness of mitigation strategies; recommend that researchers report training word frequencies; and recommend future work for the community to define and design representational guarantees.

ACL 2022

Findings: Richer Countries and Richer Representations

representational guarantees

representational biases

country names

training data frequency

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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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

# 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). 

Multimodal sentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention and lots of models have been proposed. However, the performance of the state-of-the-art models decreases sharply when they are deployed in the real world. We find that the main reason is that real-world applications can only access the text outputs by the automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, which may be with errors because of the limitation of model capacity. Through further analysis of the ASR outputs, we find that in some cases the sentiment words, the key sentiment elements in the textual modality, are recognized as other words, which makes the sentiment of the text change and hurts the performance of multimodal sentiment analysis models directly. To address this problem, we propose the sentiment word aware multimodal refinement model (SWRM), which can dynamically refine the erroneous sentiment words by leveraging multimodal sentiment clues.

Sentiment Word Aware Multimodal Refinement for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with ASR Errors

Data Augmentation (DA) is known to improve the generalizability of deep neural networks. Most existing DA techniques naively add a certain number of augmented samples without considering the quality and the added computational cost of these samples. To tackle this problem, a common strategy, adopted by several state-of-the-art DA methods, is to adaptively generate or re-weight augmented samples with respect to the task objective during training. However, these adaptive DA methods: (1) are computationally expensive and not sample-efficient, and (2) are designed merely for a specific setting. In this work, we present a universal DA technique, called Glitter, to overcome both issues. Glitter can be plugged into any DA method, making training sample-efficient without sacrificing performance. From a pre-generated pool of augmented samples, Glitter adaptively selects a subset of worst-case samples with maximal loss, analogous to adversarial DA. Without altering the training strategy, the task objective can be optimized on the selected subset. Our thorough experiments on the GLUE benchmark, SQuAD, and HellaSwag in three widely used training setups including consistency training, self-distillation and knowledge distillation reveal that Glitter is substantially faster to train and achieves a competitive performance, compared to strong baselines.

When Chosen Wisely, More Data Is What You Need: A Universal Sample-Efficient Strategy For Data Augmentation

Dense retrieval (DR) methods conduct text retrieval by first encoding texts in the embedding space and then matching them by nearest neighbor search.
This requires strong locality properties from the representation space, e.g., close allocations of each small group of relevant texts, which are hard to generalize to domains without sufficient training data.
In this paper, we aim to improve the generalization ability of DR models from source training domains with rich supervision signals to target domains without any relevance label, in the zero-shot setting.
To achieve that, we propose Momentum adversarial Domain Invariant Representation learning (MoDIR), which introduces a momentum method to train a domain classifier that distinguishes source versus target domains, and then adversarially updates the DR encoder to learn domain invariant representations.
Our experiments show that MoDIR robustly outperforms its baselines on 10+ ranking datasets collected in the BEIR benchmark in the zero-shot setup, with more than 10% relative gains on datasets with enough sensitivity for DR models' evaluation.

Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval with Momentum Adversarial Domain Invariant Representations

Data sharing restrictions are common in NLP, especially in the clinical domain, but there is limited research on adapting models to new domains without access to the original training data, a setting known as source-free domain adaptation. We take algorithms that traditionally assume access to the source-domain training data—active learning, self-training, and data augmentation—and adapt them for source free domain adaptation. Then we systematically compare these different strategies across multiple tasks and domains. We find that active learning yields consistent gains across all SemEval 2021 Task 10 tasks and domains, but though the shared task saw successful self-trained and data augmented models, our systematic comparison finds these strategies to be unreliable for source-free domain adaptation.

A Comparison of Strategies for Source-Free Domain Adaptation

We point out that the data challenges of persona-based dialogue generation tasks lie in two aspects: first, it is expensive to scale up current persona-based dialogue datasets; second, each data sample in this task is more complex to learn with than conventional dialogue data. To alleviate the above data issues, we propose a data manipulation method, which is model-agnostic to be packed with any persona-based dialogue generation model to improve its performance. The original training samples will first be distilled and thus expected to be fitted more easily. Next, we show various effective ways that can diversify such easier distilled data. A given base model will then be trained via the constructed data curriculum, i.e. first on augmented distilled samples and then on original ones. Experiments illustrate the superiority of our method with two strong base dialogue models.

A Model-agnostic Data Manipulation Method for Persona-based Dialogue Generation

In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient EA Decoding Algorithm via Third-order Tensor Isomorphism (DATTI).
Specifically, we derive two sets of isomorphism equations: (1) Adjacency tensor isomorphism equations and (2) Gramian tensor isomorphism equations.
By combining these equations, DATTI could effectively utilize the adjacency and inner correlation isomorphisms of KGs to enhance the decoding process of EA.
Extensive experiments on public datasets indicate that our decoding algorithm can deliver significant performance improvements even on the most advanced EA methods, while the extra required time is less than 3 seconds.

An Effective and Efficient Entity Alignment Decoding Algorithm via Third-Order Tensor Isomorphism

Cross-lingual named entity recognition task is one of the critical problems for evaluating the potential transfer learning techniques on low resource languages. Knowledge distillation using pre-trained multilingual language models between source and target languages has shown their superiority. However, existing cross-lingual distillation models merely consider the potential transferability between two identical single tasks across both domains. Other possible auxiliary tasks to improve the learning performance have not been fully investigated. In this study, based on the knowledge distillation framework and multi-task learning, we introduce the similarity metric model as an auxiliary task to improve the cross-lingual NER performance on the target domain. Specifically, an entity recognizer and a similarity evaluator teachers are first trained in parallel from the source domain. Then, two tasks in the student model are supervised by the two teachers simultaneously. Empirical studies on the datasets across 7 different languages confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model.

An Unsupervised Multiple-Task and Multiple-Teacher Model for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition

Document-level information extraction (IE) tasks have recently begun to be revisited in earnest using the end-to-end neural network techniques that have been successful on their sentence-level IE counterparts. Evaluation of the approaches, however, has been limited in a number of dimensions. In particular, the precision/recall/F1 scores typically reported provide few insights on the range of errors the models make. We build on the work of Kummerfeld and Klein (2013) to propose a transformation-based framework for automating error analysis in document-level event and (N-ary) relation extraction. We employ our framework to compare two state-of-the-art document-level template-ﬁlling approaches on datasets from three domains; and then, to gauge progress in IE since its inception 30 years ago, vs. four systems from the MUC-4 (1992) evaluation.

Automatic Error Analysis for Document-level Information Extraction

Graph neural networks have triggered a resurgence of graph-based text classification methods, defining today's state of the art. We show that a wide multi-layer perceptron (MLP) using a Bag-of-Words (BoW) outperforms the recent graph-based models TextGCN and Hete-GCN in an inductive text classification setting and is comparable with HyperGAT. Moreover, we fine-tune a sequence-based BERT and a lightweight DistilBERT model, which both outperform all state-of-the-art models. These results question the importance of synthetic graphs used in modern text classifiers. In terms of efficiency, DistilBERT is still twice as large as our BoW-based wide MLP, while graph-based models like TextGCN require setting up an O(N^2) graph, where N is the vocabulary plus corpus size. Finally, since Transformers need to computeO(L^2) attention weights with sequence length L, the MLP models show higher training and inference speeds on datasets with long sequences.

Bag-of-Words vs. Graph vs. Sequence in Text Classification: Questioning the Necessity of Text-Graphs and the Surprising Strength of a Wide MLP

Machine Translation Quality Estimation (QE) aims to build predictive models to assess the quality of machine-generated translations in the absence of reference translations. While state-of-the-art QE models have been shown to achieve good results, they over-rely on features that do not have a causal impact on the quality of a translation. In particular, there appears to be a partial input bias, i.e., a tendency to assign high-quality scores to translations that are fluent and grammatically correct, even though they do not preserve the meaning of the source. We analyse the partial input bias in further detail and evaluate four approaches to use auxiliary tasks for bias mitigation. Two approaches use additional data to inform and support the main task, while the other two are adversarial, actively discouraging the model from learning the bias. We compare the methods with respect to their ability to reduce the partial input bias while maintaining the overall performance. We find that training a multitask architecture with an auxiliary binary classification task that utilises additional augmented data best achieves the desired effects and generalises well to different languages and quality metrics.

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Sentiment Word Aware Multimodal Refinement for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with ASR Errors

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Low Frequency Names Exhibit Bias and Overfitting in Contextualizing Language Models

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