Ireland

We provide the first exploration of sentence embeddings from text-to-text transformers (T5) including the effects of scaling up sentence encoders to 11B parameters. Sentence embeddings are broadly useful for language processing tasks. While T5 achieves impressive performance on language tasks, it is unclear how to produce sentence embeddings from encoder-decoder models. We investigate three methods to construct SentenceT5 (ST5) models: two utilize only the T5 encoder and one using the full T5 encoderdecoder. We establish a new sentence representation transfer benchmark, SentGLUE, which extends the SentEval toolkit to nine tasks from the GLUE benchmark (Wang et al., 2018). Our encoder-only models outperform the previous best models on both SentEval and SentGLUE transfer tasks, including semantic textual similarity (STS). Scaling up ST5 from millions to billions of parameters shown to consistently improve performance. Finally, our encoderdecoder method achieves a new state-of-theart on STS when using sentence embeddings.

ACL 2022

Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models

large encoders

semantic similarity

sentence embeddings

# 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). 

poster

Discourse analysis allows us to attain inferences of a text document that extend beyond the sentence-level. The current performance of discourse models is very low on texts outside of the training distribution's coverage, diminishing the practical utility of existing models. There is need for a measure that can inform us to what extent our model generalizes from the training to the test sample when these samples may be drawn from distinct distributions. While this can be estimated via distribution shift, we argue that this does not directly correlate with change in the observed error of a classifier (i.e. error-gap). Thus, we propose to use a statistic from the theoretical domain adaptation literature which can be directly tied to error-gap. We study the bias of this statistic as an estimator of error-gap both theoretically and through a large-scale empirical study of over 2400 experiments on 6 discourse datasets from domains including, but not limited to: news, biomedical texts, TED talks, Reddit posts, and fiction. Our results not only motivate our proposal and help us to understand its limitations, but also provide insight on the properties of discourse models and datasets which improve performance in domain adaptation. For instance, we find that non-news datasets are slightly easier to transfer to than news datasets when the training and test sets are very different. Our code and an associated Python package are available to allow practitioners to make more informed model and dataset choices.

The Change that Matters in Discourse Parsing: Estimating the Impact of Domain Shift on Parser Error

Transformer-based models achieve impressive performance on numerous Natural Language Inference (NLI) benchmarks when trained on respective training datasets. However, in certain cases, training samples may not be available, or collecting them could be time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this work, we address the above challenge and present an explorative study on unsupervised NLI, a paradigm in which no human-annotated training samples are available. We investigate it under three settings: PH, P, and NPH that differ in the extent of unlabeled data available for learning. As a solution, we propose a procedural data generation approach that leverages a set of sentence transformations to collect PHL (Premise, Hypothesis, Label) triplets for training NLI models, bypassing the need for human-annotated training data. Comprehensive experiments with several NLI datasets show that the proposed approach results in accuracies of up to 66.75%, 65.9%, and 65.39% in PH, P, and NPH settings respectively, outperforming all existing unsupervised baselines. Furthermore, fine-tuning our model with as little as ~0.1% of the human-annotated training dataset (500 instances) leads to 12.2% higher accuracy than the model trained from scratch on the same 500 instances. Supported by this superior performance, we conclude with a recommendation for collecting high-quality task-specific data.

Unsupervised Natural Language Inference Using PHL Triplet Generation

Procedural text contains rich anaphoric phenomena, yet has not received much attention in NLP. To fill this gap, we investigate the textual properties of two types of procedural text, recipes and chemical patents, and generalize an anaphora annotation framework developed for the chemical domain for modeling anaphoric phenomena in recipes. We apply this framework to annotate the RecipeRef corpus with both bridging and coreference relations. Through comparison to chemical patents, we show the complexity of anaphora resolution in recipes. We demonstrate empirically that transfer learning from the chemical domain improves resolution of anaphora in recipes, suggesting transferability of general procedural knowledge.

What does it take to bake a cake? The RecipeRef corpus and anaphora resolution in procedural text

Hedges play an important role in the management of conversational interaction. In peer-tutoring, they are notably used by tutors in dyads (pairs of interlocutors) experiencing low rapport to tone down the impact of instructions and negative feedback. Pursuing the objective of building a tutoring agent that manages rapport with students in order to improve learning, we used a multimodal peer-tutoring dataset to construct a computational framework for identifying hedges. We compared approaches relying on pre-trained resources with others that integrate insights from the social science literature. Our best performance involved a hybrid approach that outperforms the existing baseline while being easier to interpret. We employ a model explainability tool to explore the features that characterize hedges in peer-tutoring conversations, and we identify some novel features, and the benefits of such a hybrid model approach.

"You might think about slightly revising the title": Identifying Hedges in Peer-tutoring Interactions

This work explores techniques to predict Part-of-Speech (PoS) tags from neural signals measured at millisecond resolution with electroencephalography (EEG) during text reading. We first show that information about word length, frequency and word class is encoded by the brain at different post-stimulus latencies. We then demonstrate that pre-training on averaged EEG data and data augmentation techniques boost PoS decoding accuracy for single EEG trials. Finally, applying optimised temporally-resolved decoding techniques we show that Transformers substantially outperform linear-SVMs on PoS tagging of unigram and bigram data.

Decoding Part-of-Speech from Human EEG Signals

Transformers have been shown to be able to perform deductive reasoning on a logical rulebase containing rules and statements written in natural language. Recent works show that such models can also produce the reasoning steps (i.e., the proof graph) that emulate the model's logical reasoning process. Currently, these black-box models generate both the proof graph and intermediate inferences within the same model and thus may be unfaithful. In this work, we frame the deductive logical reasoning task by defining three modular components: rule selection, fact selection, and knowledge composition. The rule and fact selection steps select the candidate rule and facts to be used and then the knowledge composition combines them to generate new inferences. This ensures model faithfulness by assured causal relation from the proof step to the inference reasoning. To test our framework, we propose FaiRR (Faithful and Robust Reasoner) where the above three components are independently modeled by transformers. We observe that FaiRR is robust to novel language perturbations, and is faster at inference than previous works on existing reasoning datasets. Additionally, in contrast to black-box generative models, the errors made by FaiRR are more interpretable due to the modular approach.

FaiRR: Faithful and Robust Deductive Reasoning over Natural Language

We study the problem of building text classifiers with little or no training data, commonly known as zero and few-shot text classification. In recent years, an approach based on neural textual entailment models has been found to give strong results on a diverse range of tasks. In this work, we show that with proper pre-training, Siamese Networks that embed texts and labels offer a competitive alternative. These models allow for a large reduction in inference cost: constant in the number of labels rather than linear. Furthermore, we introduce label tuning, a simple and computationally efficient approach that allows to adapt the models in a few-shot setup by only changing the label embeddings. While giving lower performance than model fine-tuning, this approach has the architectural advantage that a single encoder can be shared by many different tasks.

Few-Shot Learning with Siamese Networks and Label Tuning

Semantic parsing is the task of producing structured meaning representations for natural language sentences. 
Recent research has pointed out that the commonly-used sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) semantic parsers struggle to generalize systematically, i.e. to handle examples that require recombining known knowledge in novel settings. In this work, we show that better systematic generalization can be achieved by producing the meaning representation directly as a graph and not as a sequence. To this end we propose LAGr (Label Aligned Graphs), a general framework to produce semantic parses by independently predicting node and edge labels for a complete multi-layer input-aligned graph. The strongly-supervised LAGr algorithm requires aligned graphs as inputs, whereas weakly-supervised LAGr infers alignments for originally unaligned target graphs using approximate maximum-a-posteriori inference. 
Experiments demonstrate that LAGr achieves significant improvements in systematic generalization upon the baseline seq2seq parsers in both strongly- and weakly-supervised settings.

LAGr: Label Aligned Graphs for Better Systematic Generalization in Semantic Parsing

Functional Distributional Semantics is a recently proposed framework for learning distributional semantics that provides linguistic interpretability. We train it on the Visual Genome dataset. our model outperforms previous work on learning semantics from Visual Genome.

Learning Functional Distributional Semantics with Visual Data

Round-trip Machine Translation (MT) is a popular choice for paraphrase generation, which leverages readily available parallel corpora for supervision. In this paper, we formalize the implicit similarity function induced by this approach, and show that it is susceptible to non-paraphrase pairs sharing a single ambiguous translation. Based on these insights, we design an alternative similarity metric that mitigates this issue by requiring the entire translation distribution to match, and implement a relaxation of it through the Information Bottleneck method. Our approach incorporates an adversarial term into MT training in order to learn representations that encode as much information about the reference translation as possible, while keeping as little information about the input as possible. Paraphrases can be generated by decoding back to the source from this representation, without having to generate pivot translations. In addition to being more principled and efficient than round-trip MT, our approach offers an adjustable parameter to control the fidelity-diversity trade-off, and obtains better results in our experiments.

Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models

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The Change that Matters in Discourse Parsing: Estimating the Impact of Domain Shift on Parser Error

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