Ireland

AI technologies for Natural Languages have made tremendous progress recently. However, commensurate progress has not been made on Sign Languages, in particular, in recognizing signs as individual words or as complete sentences. We introduce 👐OpenHands, a library where we take four key ideas from the NLP community for low-resource languages and apply them to sign languages for word-level recognition…

ACL 2022

OpenHands: Making Sign Language Recognition Accessible with Pose-based Pretrained Models across Languages

low resource nlp

sign language

self-supervised learning

# 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

Recent entity and relation extraction works focus on investigating how to obtain a better span representation from the pre-trained encoder. However, a major limitation of existing works is that they ignore the interrelation between spans (pairs). In this work, we propose a novel span representation approach, named Packed Levitated Markers (PL-Marker), to consider the interrelation between the spans (pairs) by strategically packing the markers in the encoder. In particular, we propose a neighborhood-oriented packing strategy, which considers the neighbor spans integrally to better model the entity boundary information. Furthermore, for those more complicated span pair classification tasks, we design a subject-oriented packing strategy, which packs each subject and all its objects to model the interrelation between the same-subject span pairs. The experimental results show that, with the enhanced marker feature, our model advances baselines on six NER benchmarks, and obtains a 4.1%-4.3% strict relation F1 improvement with higher speed over previous state-of-the-art models on ACE04 and ACE05.

Packed Levitated Marker for Entity and Relation Extraction

Text-based games provide an interactive way to study natural language processing. While deep reinforcement learning has shown effectiveness in developing the game playing agent, the low sample efficiency and the large action space remain to be the two major challenges that hinder the DRL from being applied in the real world. In this paper, we address the challenges by introducing world-perceiving modules, which automatically decompose tasks and prune actions by answering questions about the environment. We then propose a two-phase training framework to decouple language learning from reinforcement learning, which further improves the sample efficiency. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the performance and sample efficiency. Besides, it shows robustness against compound error and limited pre-training data.

Perceiving the World: Question-guided Reinforcement Learning for Text-based Games

We show some interesting findings of applying Structured Pruning on Multilingual Pre-trained Models, and also present a simple method for more efficient pruning.

Probing Structured Pruning on Multilingual Pre-trained Models: Settings, Algorithms, and Efficiency

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a crucial problem in the natural language processing (NLP) community. Current methods achieve decent performance by utilizing supervised learning and large pre-trained language models. However, the imbalanced training dataset leads to poor performance on rare senses and zero-shot senses. There are more training instances and senses for words with top frequency ranks than those with low frequency ranks in the training dataset. We investigate the statistical relation between word frequency rank and word sense number distribution. Based on the relation, we propose a Z-reweighting method on the word level to adjust the training on the imbalanced dataset. The experiments show that the Z-reweighting strategy achieves performance gain on the standard English all words WSD benchmark. Moreover, the strategy can help models generalize better on rare and zero-shot senses.

Rare and Zero-shot Word Sense Disambiguation using Z-Reweighting

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) starts translating while receiving the streaming source inputs, and hence the source sentence is always incomplete during translating. Different from the full-sentence MT using the conventional seq-to-seq architecture, SiMT often applies prefix-to-prefix architecture, which forces each target word to only align with a partial source prefix to adapt to the incomplete source in streaming inputs. However, the source words in the front positions are always illusoryly considered more important since they appear in more prefixes, resulting in position bias, which makes the model pay more attention on the front source positions in testing. In this paper, we first analyze the phenomenon of position bias in SiMT, and develop a Length-Aware Framework to reduce the position bias by bridging the structural gap between SiMT and fullsentence MT. Specifically, given the streaming inputs, we first predict the full-sentence length and then fill the future source position with positional encoding, thereby turning the streaming inputs into a pseudo full-sentence. The proposed framework can be integrated into most existing SiMT methods to further improve performance. Experiments on two representative SiMT methods, including the state-of-the-art adaptive policy, show that our method successfully reduces the position bias and thereby achieves better SiMT performance.

Reducing Position Bias in Simultaneous Machine Translation with Length-Aware Framework

Natural language processing models learn word representations based on the distributional hypothesis, which asserts that word context (e.g., co-occurrence) correlates with meaning. We propose that n-grams composed of random character sequences, or garble, provide a novel context for studying word meaning both within and beyond extant language. In particular, randomly generated character n-grams lack meaning but contain primitive information based on the distribution of characters they contain. By studying the embeddings of a large corpus of garble, extant language, and pseudowords using CharacterBERT, we identify an axis in the model's high-dimensional embedding space that separates these classes of n-grams. Furthermore, we show that this axis relates to structure within extant language, including word part-of-speech, morphology, and concept concreteness. Thus, in contrast to studies that are mainly limited to extant language, our work reveals that meaning and primitive information are intrinsically linked.

Signal in Noise: Exploring Meaning Encoded in Random Character Sequences with Character-Aware Language Models

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to reason over known facts and infer the missing links. Text-based methods such as KG-BERT (Yao et al., 2019) learn entity representations from natural language descriptions, and have the potential for inductive KGC. However, the performance of text-based methods still largely lag behind graph embedding-based methods like TransE (Bordes et al., 2013) and RotatE (Sun et al., 2019b). In this paper, we identify that the key issue is efficient contrastive learning. To improve the learning efficiency, we introduce three types of negatives: in-batch negatives, pre-batch negatives, and self-negatives which act as a simple form of hard negatives. Combined with InfoNCE loss, our proposed model SimKGC can substantially outperform embedding-based methods on several benchmark datasets. In terms of mean reciprocal rank (MRR), we advance the state-of-the-art by +19% on WN18RR, +6.8% on the Wikidata5M transductive setting, and +22% on the Wikidata5M inductive setting. Thorough analyses are conducted to gain insights into each component. Our code is available at https://github.com/intfloat/SimKGC

SimKGC: Simple Contrastive Knowledge Graph Completion with Pre-trained Language Models

Tangled multi-party dialogue contexts lead to challenges for dialogue reading comprehension, where multiple dialogue threads flow simultaneously within a common dialogue record, increasing difficulties in understanding the dialogue history for both human and machine. Previous studies mainly focus on utterance encoding methods with carefully designed features but pay inadequate attention to characteristic features of the structure of dialogues. We specially take structure factors into account and design a novel model for dialogue disentangling. Based on the fact that dialogues are constructed on successive participation and interactions between speakers, we model structural information of dialogues in two aspects: 1)speaker property that indicates whom a message is from, and 2) reference dependency that shows whom a message may refer to. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art on the Ubuntu IRC benchmark dataset and contributes to dialogue-related comprehension.

Structural Characterization for Dialogue Disentanglement

Recent works on knowledge base question answering (KBQA) retrieve subgraphs for easier reasoning. The desired subgraph is crucial as a small one may exclude the answer but a large one might introduce more noises. However, the existing retrieval is either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs, which increases the reasoning bias when the intermediate supervision
is missing. This paper proposes a trainable subgraph retriever (SR) decoupled from
the subsequent reasoning process, which enables a plug-and-play framework to enhance any subgraph-oriented KBQA model. Extensive experiments demonstrate SR achieves significantly better retrieval and QA performance than existing retrieval methods. Via weakly supervised pre-training as well as the end-to-end fine-tuning, SR achieves new state-of-the-art performance when combined with NSM (He
et al., 2021), a subgraph-oriented reasoner, for embedding-based KBQA methods. Codes and datasets are available online.

Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model  for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering

Summarizing biomedical discovery from genomics data using natural languages is an essential step in biomedical research but is mostly done manually. Here, we introduce Textomics, a novel dataset of genomics data description, which contains 22,273 pairs of genomics data matrices and their summaries. Each summary is written by the researchers who generated the data and associated with a scientific paper. Based on this dataset, we study two novel tasks: generating textual summary from a genomics data matrix and vice versa. Inspired by the successful applications of k nearest neighbors in modeling genomics data, we propose a kNN-Vec2Text model to address these tasks and observe substantial improvement on our dataset. We further illustrate how Textomics can be used to advance other applications, including evaluating scientific paper embeddings and generating masked templates for scientific paper understanding. Textomics serves as the first benchmark for generating textual summaries for genomics data and we envision it will be broadly applied to other biomedical and natural language processing applications.

OpenHands: Making Sign Language Recognition Accessible with Pose-based Pretrained Models across Languages

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