Ireland

Graph neural networks have triggered a resurgence of graph-based text classification methods, defining today&#39;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.

ACL 2022

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

baseline

graph-based models

multi-layer perceptron

multilayer perceptron

text categorization

comparison

bag-of-words

word order

word embeddings

text classification

language models

# 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). 

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.

poster

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.

Bias Mitigation in Machine Translation Quality Estimation

Knowledge graphs store a large number of factual triples while they are still incomplete, inevitably. The previous knowledge graph completion (KGC) models predict missing links between entities merely relying on fact-view data, ignoring the valuable commonsense knowledge. The previous knowledge graph embedding (KGE) techniques suffer from invalid negative sampling and the uncertainty of fact-view link prediction, limiting KGC's performance. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel and scalable Commonsense-Aware Knowledge Embedding (CAKE) framework to automatically extract commonsense from factual triples with entity concepts. The generated commonsense augments effective self-supervision to facilitate both high-quality negative sampling (NS) and joint commonsense and fact-view link prediction. Experimental results on the KGC task demonstrate that assembling our framework could enhance the performance of the original KGE models, and the proposed commonsense-aware NS module is superior to other NS techniques. Besides, our proposed framework could be easily adaptive to various KGE models and explain the predicted results.

CAKE: A Scalable Commonsense-Aware Framework For Multi-View Knowledge Graph Completion

Model ensemble is a popular approach to produce a low-variance and well-generalized model. However, it induces large memory and inference costs, which are often not affordable for real-world deployment. Existing work has resorted to sharing weights among models. However, when increasing the proportion of the shared weights, the resulting models tend to be similar, and the benefits of using model ensemble diminish. To retain ensemble benefits while maintaining a low memory cost, we propose a consistency-regularized ensemble learning approach based on perturbed models, named CAMERO. Specifically, we share the weights of bottom layers across all models and apply different perturbations to the hidden representations for different models, which can effectively promote the model diversity. Meanwhile, we apply a prediction consistency regularizer across the perturbed models to control the variance due to the model diversity. Our experiments using large language models demonstrate that {\ours} significantly improves the generalization performance of the ensemble model. 
Specifically, {\ours} outperforms the standard ensemble of 8 BERT-base models on the GLUE benchmark by 0.7 with a significantly smaller model size (114.2M vs. 880.6M).

CAMERO: Consistency Regularized Ensemble of Perturbed Language Models with Weight Sharing

Artificial Intelligence (AI), along with the recent progress in biomedical language understanding, is gradually offering great promise for medical practice. With the development of biomedical language understanding benchmarks, AI applications are widely used in the medical field. However, most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it challenging to replicate many of the successes in English for other languages. To facilitate research in this direction, we collect real-world biomedical data and present the first Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation (CBLUE) benchmark: a collection of natural language understanding tasks including named entity recognition, information extraction, clinical diagnosis normalization, single-sentence/sentence-pair classification, and an associated online platform for model evaluation, comparison, and analysis. To establish evaluation on these tasks, we report empirical results with the current 11 pre-trained Chinese models, and experimental results show that state-of-the-art neural models perform by far worse than the human ceiling.

CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

Supervised learning has traditionally focused on inductive learning by observing labeled examples of a task. In contrast, a hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to learn new concepts purely from language. Here, we explore training zero-shot classifiers for structured data purely from language. For this, we introduce CLUES, a benchmark for Classifier Learning Using natural language ExplanationS, consisting of a range of classification tasks over structured data along with natural language supervision in the form of explanations. CLUES consists of 36 real-world and 144 synthetic classification tasks. It contains crowdsourced explanations describing real-world tasks from multiple teachers and programmatically generated explanations for the synthetic tasks. To model the influence of explanations in classifying an example, we develop ExEnt, an entailment-based model that learns classifiers using explanations. ExEnt generalizes up to 18% better (relative) on novel tasks than a baseline that does not use explanations. We delineate key challenges for automated learning from explanations, addressing which can lead to progress on CLUES in the future. Code and datasets are available at: https://clues-benchmark.github.io.

CLUES: A Benchmark for Learning Classifiers using Natural Language Explanations

South Asia is home to a plethora of languages, many of which severely lack access to new language technologies. This linguistic diversity also results in a research environment conducive to the study of comparative, contact, and historical linguistics--fields which necessitate the gathering of extensive data from many languages. We claim that data scatteredness (rather than scarcity) is the primary obstacle in the development of South Asian language technology, and suggest that the study of language history is uniquely aligned with surmounting this obstacle. We review recent developments in and at the intersection of South Asian NLP and historical-comparative linguistics, describing our and others' current efforts in this area. We also offer new strategies towards breaking the data barrier.

Computational Historical Linguistics and Language Diversity in South Asia

It has been shown that machine translation models usually generate poor translations for named entities that are infrequent in the training corpus. Earlier named entity translation methods mainly focus on phonetic transliteration, which ignores the sentence context for translation and is limited in domain and language coverage. To address this limitation, we propose DEEP, a DEnoising Entity Pretraining method that leverages large amounts of monolingual data and a knowledge base to improve named entity translation accuracy within sentences. Besides, we investigate a multi-task learning strategy that finetunes a pre-trained neural machine translation model on both entity-augmented monolingual data
and parallel data to further improve entity translation. Experimental results on three language pairs demonstrate that DEEP results in significant improvements over strong denoising auto-encoding baselines, with a gain of up to 1.3 BLEU and up to 9.2 entity accuracy points for English-Russian translation.

DEEP: DEnoising Entity Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation

Solving crossword puzzles requires diverse reasoning capabilities, access to a vast amount of knowledge about language and the world, and the ability to satisfy the constraints imposed by the structure of the puzzle. In this work, we introduce solving crossword puzzles as a new natural language understanding task. We release a corpus of crossword puzzles collected from the New York Times daily crossword spanning 25 years and comprised of a total of around nine thousand puzzles. These puzzles include a diverse set of clues: historic, factual, word meaning, synonyms/antonyms, fill-in-the-blank, abbreviations, prefixes/suffixes, wordplay, and cross-lingual, as well as clues that depend on the answers to other clues. We separately release the clue-answer pairs from these puzzles as an open-domain question answering dataset containing over half a million unique clue-answer pairs. For the question answering task, our baselines include several sequence-to-sequence and retrieval-based generative models. We also introduce a non-parametric constraint satisfaction baseline for solving the entire crossword puzzle. Finally, we propose an evaluation framework which consists of several complementary performance metrics.

Down and Across: Introducing Crossword-Solving as a New NLP Benchmark

k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation (kNN-MT) has been recently proposed as a non-parametric solution for domain adaptation in neural machine translation (NMT). It aims to alleviate the performance degradation of advanced MT systems in translating out-of-domain sentences by coordinating with an additional token-level feature-based retrieval module constructed from in-domain data. Previous studies have already demonstrated that non-parametric NMT is even superior to models fine-tuned on out-of-domain data. In spite of this success, kNN retrieval is at the expense of high latency, in particular for large datastores. To make it practical, in this paper, we explore a more efficient kNN-MT and propose to use clustering to improve the retrieval efficiency. Concretely, we first propose a cluster-based Compact Network for feature reduction in a contrastive learning manner to compress context features into 90+% lower dimensional vectors. We then suggest a cluster-based pruning solution to filter out 10%~40% redundant nodes in large datastores while retaining translation quality. Our proposed methods achieve better or comparable performance while reducing up to 57% inference latency against the advanced non-parametric MT model on several machine translation benchmarks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed methods maintain the most useful information of the original datastore and the Compact Network shows good generalization on unseen domains. Codes are available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/PCKMT.

Efficient Cluster-Based $k$-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation

Chinese pre-trained language models usually exploit contextual character information to learn representations, while ignoring the linguistics knowledge, e.g., word and sentence information. Hence, we propose a task-free enhancement module termed as Heterogeneous Linguistics Graph (HLG) to enhance Chinese pre-trained language models by integrating linguistics knowledge. Speciﬁcally, we construct a hierarchical heterogeneous graph to model the characteristics linguistics structure of Chinese language, and conduct a graphbased method to summarize and concretize information on different granularities of Chinese linguistics hierarchies.

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

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