Ireland

When generating natural language from neural probabilistic models, high probability does not always coincide with high quality: It has often been observed that mode-seeking decoding methods, i.e., those that produce high-probability text under the model, lead to unnatural language. On the other hand, the lower-probability text generated by stochastic methods is perceived as more human-like. In this note, we offer an explanation for this phenomenon by analyzing language generation through an information-theoretic lens. Specifically, we posit that human-like language should contain an amount of information (quantified as negative log-probability) that is close to the entropy of the distribution over natural strings. Further, we posit that language with substantially more (or less) information is undesirable. We provide preliminary empirical evidence in favor of this hypothesis; quality ratings of both human and machine-generated text---covering multiple tasks and common decoding strategies---suggest high-quality text has an information content significantly closer to the entropy than we would expect by chance.

ACL 2022

High probability or low information? The probability–quality paradox in language generation

decoding

information theory

language generation

# 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

Annotation studies often require annotators to familiarize themselves with the task, its annotation scheme, and the data domain. This can be overwhelming in the beginning, mentally taxing, and induce errors into the resulting annotations; especially in citizen science or crowdsourcing scenarios where domain expertise is not required. To alleviate these issues, we propose annotation curricula, a novel approach to implicitly train annotators. The goal is to gradually introduce annotators into the task by ordering instances to be annotated according to a learning curriculum. To do so, we formalize annotation curricula for sentence- and paragraph-level annotation tasks, define an ordering strategy, and identifies well-performing heuristics and interactively trained models on three existing English datasets. Finally, we provide a proof of concept for annotation curricula in a carefully designed user study with 40 participants who are asked to identify the most fitting misconception for English tweets about the Covid-19 pandemic. The results indicate that using a simple heuristic to order instances can already significantly reduce the total annotation time while preserving a high annotation quality.

Annotation Curricula to Implicitly Train Non-Expert Annotators

Short texts (STs) present in a variety of scenarios, including query, dialog, and entity names. Most of the exciting studies in neural machine translation (NMT) are wild about tackling open problems concerning long sentences rather than short ones. The intuition behind is that, with respect to human learning and processing, short sequences are generally regarded as easy examples. In this paper, we first dispel this speculation via conducting preliminary experiments, showing that the conventional state-of-the-art NMT approach, i.e. TRANSFORMER, still severely suffers from over-translation and mistranslation errors over STs. After empirically investigating the rationale behind, we summarized two challenges in NMT for STs associated with translation error types above, respectively: 1) the imbalanced length distribution in training set intensifies model inference calibration over STs, leading to more over-translation cases on STs; 2) the lack of contextual information makes NMT have higher data uncertainty on short sentences, and NMT model is troubled by considerable mistranslation errors. Some existing approaches, like balancing data distribution for training (e.g. data upsampling) and complementing contextual information (e.g. introducing translation memory) can pertinently alleviate the translation issues in NMT for STs. We are delighted to embrace researchers investigate other challenges in NMT for STs, thus reducing ST translation errors and enhancing translation quality.

Challenges of Neural Machine Translation for Short Texts

Majority voting and averaging are common approaches employed to resolve annotator disagreements and derive single ground truth labels from multiple annotations. However, annotators may systematically disagree with one another, often reflecting their individual biases and values, especially in the case of subjective tasks such as detecting affect, aggression, and hate speech. Annotator disagreements may capture important nuances in such tasks that are often ignored while aggregating annotations to a single ground truth. In order to address this, we investigate the efficacy of multi-annotator models. In particular, our multi-task based approach treats predicting each annotators' judgements as separate subtasks, while sharing a common learned representation of the task. We show that this approach yields same or better performance than aggregating labels in the data prior to training across seven different binary classification tasks. Our approach also provides a way to estimate uncertainty in predictions, which we demonstrate better correlate with annotation disagreements than traditional methods. Being able to model uncertainty is especially useful in deployment scenarios where knowing when not to make a prediction is important.

Dealing with Disagreements: Looking Beyond the Majority Vote in Subjective Annotations

Pretrained multilingual models enable zero-shot learning even for unseen languages, and that performance can be further improved via adaptation prior to finetuning.
However, it is unclear how the number of pretraining languages influences a model's zero-shot learning for languages unseen during pretraining.
To fill this gap, we ask the following research questions: 
(1) How does the number of pretraining languages influence zero-shot performance on unseen target languages? (2) Does the answer to that question change with model adaptation? (3) Do the findings for our first question change if the languages used for pretraining are all related? 
Our experiments on pretraining with \emph{related} languages
indicate that choosing a diverse set of languages is crucial.
Without model adaptation, surprisingly, increasing the number of pretraining languages yields better results up to adding related languages, after which performance plateaus.
In contrast, with model adaptation via continued pretraining, pretraining on a larger number of languages often gives further improvement, suggesting that model adaptation is crucial to exploit additional pretraining languages.

Match the Script, Adapt if Multilingual: Analyzing the Effect of Multilingual Pretraining on Cross-lingual Transferability

We present a study on leveraging multilingual pre-trained generative language models for zero-shot cross-lingual event argument extraction (EAE). By formulating EAE as a language generation task, our method effectively encodes event structures and captures the dependencies between arguments. We design language-agnostic templates to represent the event argument structures, which are compatible with any language, hence facilitating the cross-lingual transfer. Our proposed model finetunes multilingual pre-trained generative language models to generate sentences that fill in the language-agnostic template with arguments extracted from the input passage. The model is trained on source languages and is then directly applied to target languages for event argument extraction. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on zero-shot cross-lingual EAE. Comprehensive studies and error analyses are presented to better understand the advantages and the current limitations of using generative language models for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer EAE.

Multilingual Generative Language Models for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Event Argument Extraction

Natural language processing for sign language video - including tasks like recognition, translation, and search - is crucial for making artificial intelligence technologies accessible to deaf individuals, and is gaining research interest in recent years. In this paper, we address the problem of searching for fingerspelled key-words or key phrases in raw sign language videos. This is an important task since significant content in sign language is often conveyed via fingerspelling, and to our knowledge the task has not been studied before. We propose an end-to-end model for this task, FSS-Net, that jointly detects fingerspelling and matches it to a text sequence. Our experiments, done on a large public dataset of ASL fingerspelling in the wild, show the importance of fingerspelling detection as a component of a search and retrieval model. Our model significantly outperforms baseline methods adapted from prior work on related tasks.

Searching for fingerspelled content in American Sign Language

We propose a computationally cheap methods for uncertainty estimation of Transformer predictions on NLP tasks

Uncertainty Estimation of Transformer Predictions for Misclassification Detection

Dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to extract essential information from multi-turn dialogue situations and take appropriate actions. A belief state, one of the core pieces of information, refers to the subject and its specific content, and appears in the form of domain-slot-value. The trained model predicts "accumulated" belief states in every turn, and joint goal accuracy and slot accuracy are mainly used to evaluate the prediction; however, we specify that the current evaluation metrics have a critical limitation when evaluating belief states accumulated as the dialogue proceeds, especially in the most used MultiWOZ dataset. Additionally, we propose relative slot accuracy to complement existing metrics. Relative slot accuracy does not depend on the number of predefined slots, and allows intuitive evaluation by assigning relative scores according to the turn of each dialogue. This study also encourages not solely the reporting of joint goal accuracy, but also various complementary metrics in DST tasks for the sake of a realistic evaluation.

Mismatch between Multi-turn Dialogue and its Evaluation Metric in Dialogue State Tracking

We exploit the pre-trained seq2seq model mBART for multilingual text style transfer. Using machine translated data as well as gold aligned English sentences yields state-of-the-art results in the three target languages we consider. Besides, in view of the general scarcity of parallel data, we propose a modular approach for multilingual formality transfer, which consists of two training strategies that target adaptation to both language and task. Our approach achieves competitive performance without monolingual task-specific parallel data and can be applied to other style transfer tasks as well as to other languages.

Multilingual Pre-training with Language and Task Adaptation for Multilingual Text Style Transfer

This paper introduces an adversarial method to stress-test trained metrics to evaluate conversational dialogue systems. The method leverages Reinforcement Learning to find response strategies that elicit optimal scores from the trained metrics. We apply our method to test recently proposed trained metrics. We find that they all are susceptible to giving high scores to responses generated by relatively simple and obviously flawed strategies that our method converges on. For instance, simply copying parts of the conversation context to form a response yields competitive scores or even outperforms responses written by humans.

High probability or low information? The probability–quality paradox in language generation

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Annotation Curricula to Implicitly Train Non-Expert Annotators

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