Ireland

Large-scale pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models like BART and T5 achieve state-of-the-art performance on many generative NLP tasks. However, such models pose a great challenge in resource-constrained scenarios owing to their large memory requirements and high latency. To alleviate this issue, we propose to jointly distill and quantize the model, where knowledge is transferred from the full-precision teacher model to the quantized and distilled low-precision student model. Empirical analyses show that, despite the challenging nature of generative tasks, we were able to achieve a 16.5x model footprint compression ratio with little performance drop relative to the full-precision counterparts on multiple summarization and QA datasets. We further pushed the limit of compression ratio to 27.7x and presented the performance-efficiency trade-off for generative tasks using pre-trained models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work aiming to effectively distill and quantize sequence-to-sequence pre-trained models for language generation tasks.

ACL 2022

DQ-BART: Efficient Sequence-to-Sequence Model via Joint Distillation and Quantization

generation task

sequence-to-sequence model

quantization

distillation

bart

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

poster

# 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). 

Text style transfer and paraphrasing of texts are actively growing areas of NLP, dozens of methods for solving these tasks have been recently introduced. In both tasks, the system is supposed to generate a text which should be semantically similar to the input text. Therefore, these tasks are dependent on methods of measuring textual semantic similarity. 
However, it is still unclear which measures are the best to automatically evaluate content preservation between original and generated text. According to our observations, many researchers still use BLEU-like measures, while there exist more advanced measures including neural-based that significantly outperform classic approaches. The current problem is the lack of a thorough evaluation of the available measures. We close this gap by conducting a large-scale computational study by comparing 57 measures based on different principles on 19 annotated datasets. We show that measures based on cross-encoder models outperform alternative approaches in almost all cases.
We also introduce the Mutual Implication Score (MIS), a measure that uses the idea of paraphrasing as a bidirectional entailment and outperforms all other measures on the paraphrase detection task and performs on par with the best measures in the text style transfer task.

 A large-scale computational study of content preservation measures for text style transfer and paraphrase generation

In this paper, we investigate the problem of vision and language navigation. To solve this problem, grounding the landmarks and spatial relations in the textual instructions into visual modality is important. We propose a neural agent named Explicit Object Relation Alignment Agent (EXOR), to explicitly align the spatial information in both instruction and the visual environment, including landmarks and spatial relationships between the agent and landmarks. Empirically, our proposed method surpasses the baseline by a large margin on the R2R dataset. We provide a comprehensive analysis to show our model’s spatial reasoning ability and explainability.

 Explicit Object Relation Alignment for Vision and Language Navigation

With the increase of deception and misinformation especially in social media, it has become crucial to be able to develop machine learning methods to automatically identify deceptive language. In this proposal, we identify key challenges underlying deception detection in cross-domain, cross-lingual and multi-modal settings. To improve cross-domain deception classification, we propose to use inter-domain distance to identify a suitable source domain for a given target domain. We propose to study the efficacy of multilingual classification models vs translation for cross-lingual deception classification. Finally, we propose to better understand multi-modal deception detection and explore methods to weight and combine information from multiple modalities to improve multi-modal deception classification.

 Improving Cross-domain, Cross-lingual and Multi-modal Deception Detection

We propose a morphology-based method for low-resource (LR) dependency parsing. We train a morphological inflector for target LR languages, and apply it to related rich-resource (RR) treebanks to create cross-lingual (x-inflected) treebanks that resemble the target LR language. We use such inflected treebanks to train parsers in zero- (training on x-inflected treebanks) and few-shot (training on x-inflected and target language treebanks) setups. The results show that the method sometimes improves the baselines, but not consistently.

Cross-lingual Inflection as a Data Augmentation Method for Parsing

Coreference resolution – which is a crucial task for understanding discourse and language at large – has yet to witness widespread benefits from large language models (LLMs). Moreover, coreference resolution systems largely rely on supervised labels, which are highly ex- pensive and difficult to annotate, thus making it ripe for prompt engineering. In this paper, we introduce a QA-based prompt-engineering method and discern generative, pre-trained LLMs’ abilities and limitations toward the task of coreference resolution. Our experiments show that GPT-2 and GPT-Neo can return valid answers, but that their capabilities to identify coreferent mentions are limited and prompt-sensitive, leading to inconsistent results.

What GPT Knows About Who is Who

Different studies of the embedding space of transformer models suggest that the distribution of contextual representations is highly anisotropic - the embeddings are distributed in a narrow cone. Meanwhile, static word representations (e.g., Word2Vec or GloVe) have been shown to benefit from isotropic spaces. Therefore, previous work has developed methods to calibrate the embedding space of transformers in order to ensure isotropy. However, a recent study (Cai et al. 2021) shows that the embedding space of transformers is locally isotropic, which suggests that these models are already capable of exploiting the expressive capacity of their embedding space. In this work, we conduct an empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods for isotropy calibration on transformers and find that they do not provide consistent improvements across models and tasks. These results support the thesis that, given the local isotropy, transformers do not benefit from additional isotropy calibration.

On Isotropy Calibration of Transformer Models

We evaluated 12 existing data augmentation methods for natural language processing in a unified experimental setting. In addition, we evaluated the strength of data augmentation in terms of how large a perturbation it causes to a sentence, and we examined the correlation between this value and changes in performance. The results showed that when there were several thousand data points, data augmentation rarely improved performance, and the strength of data augmentation also did not correlate clearly with changes in performance.

On the Impact of Data Augmentation on Downstream Performance in Natural Language Processing

Question rewriting (QR) is a subtask of conversational question answering (CQA) aiming to ease the challenges of understanding dependencies among dialogue history by reformulating questions in a self-contained form. Despite seeming plausible, little evidence is available to justify QR as a mitigation method for CQA. To verify the effectiveness of QR in CQA, we investigate a reinforcement learning approach that integrates QR and CQA tasks and does not require corresponding QR datasets for targeted CQA. We find, however, that the RL method is on par with the end-to-end baseline. We provide an analysis of the failure and describe the difficulty of exploiting QR for CQA.

Can Question Rewriting Help Conversational Question Answering?

In this paper we present a set of multilingual experiments tackling the task of Stance Detection in five different languages: English, Spanish, Catalan, French and Italian. Furthermore, we study the phenomenon of stance with respect to six different targets – one per language, and two different for Italian – employing a variety of machine learning algorithms that primarily exploit morphological and syntactic knowledge as features, represented throughout the format of Universal Dependencies. Results seem to suggest that the methodology employed is not beneficial per se, but might be useful to exploit the same features with a different methodology and/or classification technique.

Do Dependency Relations Help in the Task of Stance Detection?

We investigate potential label errors present in the popular BANKING77 dataset and the associated negative impacts on intent classification methods. Motivated by our own negative results when constructing an intent classifier, we applied two automated approaches to identify potential label errors in the dataset. We found that over 1,400 (14%) of the 10,003 training utterances may have been incorrectly labelled. In a simple experiment, we found that by removing the utterances with potential errors, our intent classifier saw an increase of 4.5% and 8% for the F1-Score and Adjusted Rand Index, respectively, in supervised and unsupervised classification. This paper serves as a warning of the potential of noisy labels in popular NLP datasets. Further study is needed to fully identify the breadth and depth of label errors in BANKING77 and other datasets.

DQ-BART: Efficient Sequence-to-Sequence Model via Joint Distillation and Quantization

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A large-scale computational study of content preservation measures for text style transfer and paraphrase generation

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