Ireland

Program induction for answering complex questions over knowledge bases (KBs) aims to decompose a question into a multi-step program, whose execution against the KB produces the final answer. Learning to induce programs relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB. However, for most KBs, the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult. In this paper, we propose the approach of program transfer, which aims to leverage the valuable program annotations on the rich-resourced KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for the low-resourced KBs that lack program annotations. For program transfer, we design a novel two-stage parsing framework with an efficient ontology-guided pruning strategy. First, a sketch parser translates the question into a high-level program sketch, which is the composition of functions. Second, given the question and sketch, an argument parser searches the detailed arguments from the KB for functions. During the searching, we incorporate the KB ontology to prune the search space. The experiments on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP show that our method outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of program transfer and our framework. Our codes and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/ProgramTransfer.

ACL 2022

Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases

program induction; complex kbqa; program transfer

# 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

Prompt-based tuning for pre-trained language models (PLMs) has shown its effectiveness in few-shot learning. Typically, prompt-based tuning wraps the input text into a cloze question. To make predictions, the model maps the output words to labels via a verbalizer, which is either manually designed or automatically built. However, manual verbalizers heavily depend on domain-specific prior knowledge and human efforts, while finding appropriate label words automatically still remains challenging.In this work, we propose the prototypical verbalizer (ProtoVerb) which is built directly from training data. Specifically, ProtoVerb learns prototype vectors as verbalizers by contrastive learning. In this way, the prototypes summarize training instances and are able to enclose rich class-level semantics. We conduct experiments on both topic classification and entity typing tasks, and the results demonstrate that ProtoVerb significantly outperforms current automatic verbalizers, especially when training data is extremely scarce. More surprisingly, ProtoVerb consistently boosts prompt-based tuning even on untuned PLMs, indicating an elegant non-tuning way to utilize PLMs. Our codes are avaliable at https://github.com/thunlp/OpenPrompt.

Prototypical Verbalizer for Prompt-based Few-shot Tuning

Recent studies have determined that the learned token embeddings of large-scale neural lan- guage models are degenerated to be anisotropic with a narrow-cone shape. This phenomenon, called the representation degeneration problem, facilitates an increase in the overall similarity between token embeddings that negatively af- fect the performance of the models. Although the existing methods that address the degenera- tion problem based on observations of the phe- nomenon triggered by the problem improves the performance of the text generation, the train- ing dynamics of token embeddings behind the degeneration problem are still not explored. In this study, we analyze the training dynamics of the token embeddings focusing on rare to- ken embedding. We demonstrate that the spe- cific part of the gradient for rare token embed- dings is the key cause of the degeneration prob- lem for all tokens during training stage. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel method called, adaptive gradient gating (AGG). AGG addresses the degeneration problem by gating the specific part of the gradient for rare to- ken embeddings. Experimental results from lan- guage modeling, word similarity, and machine translation tasks quantitatively and qualitatively verify the effectiveness of AGG.

Rare Tokens Degenerate All Tokens: Improving Neural Text Generation via Adaptive Gradient Gating for Rare Token Embeddings

Non-autoregressive text to speech (NAR-TTS) models have attracted much attention from both academia and industry due to their fast generation speed. One limitation of NAR-TTS models is that they ignore the correlation in time and frequency domains while generating speech mel-spectrograms, and thus cause blurry and over-smoothed results. In this work, we revisit this over-smoothing problem from a novel perspective: the degree of over-smoothness is determined by the gap between the complexity of data distributions and the capability of modeling methods. Both simplifying data distributions and improving modeling methods can alleviate the problem. Accordingly, we first study methods reducing the complexity of data distributions. Then we conduct a comprehensive study on NAR-TTS models that use some advanced modeling methods. Based on these studies, we find that 1) methods that provide additional condition inputs reduce the complexity of data distributions to model, thus alleviating the over-smoothing problem and achieving better voice quality. 2) Among advanced modeling methods, Laplacian mixture loss performs well at modeling multimodal distributions and enjoys its simplicity, while GAN and Glow achieve the best voice quality while suffering from increased training or model complexity. 3) The two categories of methods can be combined to further alleviate the over-smoothness and improve the voice quality. 4) Our experiments on the multi-speaker dataset lead to similar conclusions as above and providing more variance information can reduce the difficulty of modeling the target data distribution and alleviate the requirements for model capacity.

Revisiting Over-Smoothness in Text to Speech

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown great potentials in natural language processing (NLP) including rhetorical structure theory (RST) discourse parsing.
Current PLMs are obtained by sentence-level pre-training, 
which is different from the basic processing unit, i.e. element discourse unit (EDU).
To this end, we propose a second-stage EDU-level pre-training approach in this work, 
which presents two novel tasks to learn effective EDU representations continually based on well pre-trained language models.
Concretely, the two tasks are (1) next EDU prediction (NEP) and (2) discourse marker prediction (DMP).

RST Discourse Parsing with Second-Stage EDU-Level Pre-training

Dialogue systems are usually categorized into two types, open-domain and task-oriented. The first one focuses on chatting with users and making them engage in the conversations, where selecting a proper topic to fit the dialogue context is essential for a successful dialogue. The other one focuses on a specific task instead of casual talks, e.g., finding a movie on Friday night, or playing a song. These two directions have been studied separately due to their different purposes. However, how smoothly transitioning from social chatting to task-oriented dialogues is important for triggering the business opportunities, and no public data is focused on such scenarios. Hence, this paper focuses on investigating the conversations starting from open-domain social chatting and then gradually transitioning to task-oriented purposes, and releases a large-scale dataset with detailed annotations for encouraging this research direction. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a framework to automatically generate many dialogues without human involvement, in which any powerful open-domain dialogue generation model can be easily leveraged. The human evaluation shows that our generated dialogue data has a natural flow at a reasonable quality, showing that our released data has a great potential of guiding future research directions and commercial activities. Furthermore, the released models allow researchers to automatically generate unlimited dialogues in the target scenarios, which can greatly benefit semi-supervised and unsupervised approaches.

SalesBot: Transitioning from Chit-Chat to Task-Oriented Dialogues

Event detection (ED) is a critical subtask of event extraction that seeks to identify event triggers of certain types in texts.
Despite significant advances in ED, existing methods typically follow a ``one model fits all types'' approach, which sees no differences between event types and often results in a quite skewed performance.
Finding the causes of skewed performance is crucial for the robustness of an ED model, but to date there has been little exploration of this problem.
This research examines the issue in depth and presents a new concept termed trigger salience attribution, which can explicitly quantify the underlying patterns of events. 
On this foundation, we develop a new training mechanism for ED, which can distinguish between trigger-dependent and context-dependent types and achieve promising performance on two benchmarks.
Finally, by highlighting many distinct characteristics of trigger-dependent and context-dependent types, our work may promote more research into this problem.

Saliency as Evidence: Event Detection with Trigger Saliency Attribution

This presentation is about our work on semi-supervised domain adaptation for dependency parsing with dynamic matching network. We for the first time apply a dynamic matching network on the shared-private model for semi-supervised cross-domain dependency parsing. Meanwhile, considering the scarcity of target-domain labeled data, we leverage unlabeled data from two aspects, i.e., designing a new training strategy to improve the capability of the dynamic matching network and fine-tuning BERT to obtain domain-related contextualized representations. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our proposed model consistently outperforms various baselines, leading to new state-of-the-art results on all domains.

Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for Dependency Parsing with Dynamic Matching Network

For Open Domain Passage Retrieval problems, towards the widely used contrastive learning framework proposed by DPR, we novelly study the defects of such framework, which we call Contrastive Conflicts. We propose a natural solution to solve this problem, which we call DCSR. Experiments have shown the effectiveness of our DCSR model, meaning that our DCSR is a better and more general replacement for DPR.

Sentence-aware Contrastive Learning for Open-Domain Passage Retrieval

Procedures are inherently hierarchical. To "make videos", one may need to "purchase a camera", which in turn may require one to "set a budget". While such hierarchical knowledge is critical for reasoning about complex procedures, most existing work has treated procedures as shallow structures without modeling the parent-child relation. In this work, we attempt to construct an open-domain hierarchical knowledge-base (KB) of procedures based on wikiHow, a website containing more than 110k instructional articles, each documenting the steps to carry out a complex procedure. To this end, we develop a simple and efficient method that links steps (e.g., "purchase a camera") in an article to other articles with similar goals (e.g., "how to choose a camera"), recursively constructing the KB. Our method significantly outperforms several strong baselines according to automatic evaluation, human judgment, and application to downstream tasks such as instructional video retrieval.

Show Me More Details: Discovering Hierarchies of Procedures from Semi-structured Web Data

In this paper, we propose SkipBERT to accelerate BERT inference by skipping the computation of shallow layers. To achieve this, our approach encodes small text chunks into independent representations, which are then materialized to approximate the shallow representation of BERT. Since the use of such approximation is inexpensive compared with transformer calculations, we leverage it to replace the shallow layers of BERT to skip their runtime overhead. With off-the-shelf early exit mechanisms, we also skip redundant computation from the highest few layers to further improve inference efficiency. Results on GLUE show that our approach can reduce latency by 65% without sacrificing performance. By using only two-layer transformer calculations, we can still maintain 95% accuracy of BERT.

Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases

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