Ireland

Current state-of-the-art approaches to cross-modal retrieval process text and visual input jointly, relying on Transformer-based architectures with cross-attention mechanisms that attend over all words and objects in an image. While offering unmatched retrieval performance, such models: 1) are typically pretrained from scratch and thus less scalable, 2) suffer from huge retrieval latency and inefficiency issues, which makes them impractical in realistic applications. To address these crucial gaps towards both improved and efficient cross-modal retrieval, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework that turns any pretrained text-image multi-modal model into an efficient retrieval model. The framework is based on a cooperative retrieve-and-rerank approach which combines: 1)}twin networks (i.e., a bi-encoder) to separately encode all items of a corpus, enabling efficient initial retrieval, and 2) a cross-encoder component for a more nuanced (i.e., smarter) ranking of the retrieved small set of items. We also propose to jointly fine-tune the two components with shared weights, yielding a more parameter-efficient model. Our experiments on a series of standard cross-modal retrieval benchmarks in monolingual, multilingual, and zero-shot setups, demonstrate improved accuracy and huge efficiency benefits over the state-of-the-art cross-encoders.

ACL 2022

Retrieve Fast, Rerank Smart: Cooperative and Joint Approaches for Improved Cross-Modal Retrieval

multimodal transformer

image-text retrieval

cross-modal retrieval

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

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IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

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). 

In the domain of Morphology, Inflection is a fundamental and important task that gained a lot of traction in recent years, mostly via SIGMORPHON's shared-tasks. With average accuracy above 0.9 over the scores of all languages, the task is considered mostly solved using relatively generic neural seq2seq models, even with little data provided. In this work, we propose to re-evaluate morphological inflection models by employing harder train-test splits that will challenge the generalization capacity of the models. In particular, as opposed to the na{ï}ve split-by-form, we propose a split-by-lemma method to challenge the performance on existing benchmarks. Our experiments with the three top-ranked systems on the SIGMORPHON's 2020 shared-task show that the lemma-split presents an average drop of 30 percentage points in macro-average for the 90 languages included. The effect is most significant for low-resourced languages with a drop as high as 95 points, but even high-resourced languages lose about 10 points on average. Our results clearly show that generalizing inflection to unseen lemmas is far from being solved, presenting a simple yet effective means to promote more sophisticated models.

(Un)solving Morphological Inflection: Lemma Overlap Artificially Inflates Models’ Performance

Evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems is highly challenging and development of better techniques is highlighted time and again as desperately needed. Despite substantial efforts to carry out reliable live evaluation of systems in recent competitions, annotations have been abandoned and reported as too unreliable to yield sensible results. This is a serious problem since automatic metrics are not known to provide a good indication of what may or may not be a high-quality conversation. Answering the distress call of competitions that have emphasized the urgent need for better evaluation techniques in dialogue, we present the successful development of human evaluation that is highly reliable while still remaining feasible and low cost. Self-replication experiments reveal almost perfectly repeatable results with a correlation of $r=0.969$. Furthermore, due to the lack of appropriate methods of statistical significance testing, the likelihood of potential improvements to systems occurring due to chance is rarely taken into account in dialogue evaluation, and the evaluation we propose facilitates application of standard tests. Since we have developed a highly reliable evaluation method, new insights into system performance can be revealed. We therefore include a comparison of state-of-the-art models (i) with and without personas, to measure the contribution of personas to conversation quality, as well as (ii) prescribed versus freely chosen topics. Interestingly with respect to personas, results indicate that personas do not positively contribute to conversation quality as expected.

Achieving Reliable Human Assessment of Open-Domain Dialogue Systems

In this paper, we propose an entity-based neural local coherence model which is linguistically more sound than previously proposed neural coherence models. Recent neural coherence models encode the input document using large-scale pretrained language models. Hence their basis for computing local coherence are words and even sub-words. An analysis of their output shows that these models frequently compute coherence on the basis of connections between (sub-)words which, from a linguistic perspective, should not play a role. Still, these models achieve state-of-the-art performance in several end applications. In contrast to these models, we compute coherence on the basis of entities by constraining the input to noun phrases and proper names. This provides us with an explicit representation of the most important items in sentences leading to the notion of focus. This brings our model linguistically in line with pre-neural models of computing coherence. It also gives us better insight into the behaviour of the model thus leading to better explainability. Our approach is also in accord with a recent study (O'Connor and Andreas, 2021), which shows that most usable information is captured by nouns and verbs in transformer-based language models. We evaluate our model on three downstream tasks showing that it is not only linguistically more sound than previous models but also that it outperforms them in end applications.

Entity-based Neural Local Coherence Modeling

Several high-profile events, such as the mass testing of emotion recognition systems on vulnerable sub-populations and using question answering systems to make moral judgments, have highlighted how technology will often lead to more adverse outcomes for those that are already marginalized. At issue here are not just individual systems and datasets, but also the AI tasks themselves. In this position paper, I make a case for thinking about ethical considerations not just at the level of individual models and datasets, but also at the level of AI tasks. I will present a new form of such an effort, Ethics Sheets for AI Tasks, dedicated to fleshing out the assumptions and ethical considerations hidden in how a task is commonly framed and in the choices we make regarding the data, method, and evaluation. I will also present a template for ethics sheets with 50 ethical considerations, using the task of emotion recognition as a running example. Ethics sheets are a mechanism to engage with and document ethical considerations before building datasets and systems. Similar to survey articles, a small number of ethics sheets can serve numerous researchers and developers.

Ethics Sheets for AI Tasks

This paper studies the (often implicit) human values behind natural language arguments, such as to have freedom of thought or to be broadminded. Values are commonly accepted answers to why some option is desirable in the ethical sense and are thus essential both in real-world argumentation and theoretical argumentation frameworks. However, their large variety has been a major obstacle to modeling them in argument mining. To overcome this obstacle, we contribute an operationalization of human values, namely a multi-level taxonomy with 54 values that is in line with psychological research. Moreover, we provide a dataset of 5270 arguments from four geographical cultures, manually annotated for human values. First experiments with the automatic classification of human values are promising, with F 1 -scores up to 0.81 and 0.25 on average.

Identifying the Human Values behind Arguments

In recent years, a flurry of morphological datasets had emerged, most notably UniMorph, a multi-lingual repository of inflection tables. However, the flat structure of the current morphological annotation schema makes the treatment of some languages quirky, if not impossible, specifically in cases of polypersonal agreement,
where verbs agree with multiple arguments using true affixes. In this paper we propose to address this phenomenon, by expanding the UniMorph annotation schema to a hierarchical feature structure that naturally accommodates
complex argument marking. We apply this extended schema to one such language, Georgian, and provide a human-verified, accurate and balanced morphological dataset for Georgian verbs. The dataset has 4 times more tables and 6 times more verb forms compared to the existing UniMorph dataset, covering all possible variants of argument marking, demonstrating the adequacy of our proposed scheme. Experiments with a standard reinflection model show that generalization is easy when the data is split at the form level, but extremely hard when splitting along lemma lines. Expanding the other languages in UniMorph to this schema
is expected to improve both the coverage, consistency and interpretability of this benchmark.

Reinflection with Multiple Arguments: An Extended Annotation schema and a Georgian Case Study

Multi-modal techniques offer significant untapped potential to unlock improved NLP technology for local languages. However, many advances in language model pre-training are focused on text, a fact that only increases systematic inequalities in the performance of NLP tasks across the world's languages. In this work, we propose a multi-modal approach to train language models using whatever text and/or audio data might be available in a language. Initial experiments using Swahili and Kinyarwanda data suggest the viability of the approach for downstream Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks, with models pre-trained on phone data showing an improvement of up to 6\% F1-score above models that are trained from scratch. Preprocessing and training code will be uploaded to https://github.com/sil-ai/phone-it-in.

Phone-ing it in: Towards Flexible Multi-Modal Language Model Training by Phonetic Representations of Data

Recent research demonstrates the effectiveness of using fine-tuned language models~(LM) for dense retrieval. However, dense retrievers are hard to train, typically requiring heavily engineered fine-tuning pipelines to realize their full potential. In this paper, we identify and address two underlying problems of dense retrievers: i)~fragility to training data noise and ii)~requiring large batches to robustly learn the embedding space. We use the recently proposed Condenser pre-training architecture, which learns to condense information into the dense vector through LM pre-training. On top of it, we propose coCondenser, which adds an unsupervised corpus-level contrastive loss to warm up the passage embedding space. Experiments on MS-MARCO, Natural Question, and Trivia QA datasets show that coCondenser removes the need for heavy data engineering such as augmentation, synthesis, or filtering, and the need for large batch training. It shows comparable performance to RocketQA, a state-of-the-art, heavily engineered system, using simple small batch fine-tuning.

Unsupervised Corpus Aware Language Model Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval

Tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) with task-specific prompts has been a promising approach for text classification. Particularly, previous studies suggest that prompt-tuning has remarkable superiority in the low-data scenario over the generic fine-tuning methods with extra classifiers. The core idea of prompt-tuning is to insert text pieces, i.e., template, to the input and transform a classification problem into a masked language modeling problem, where a crucial step is to construct a projection, i.e., verbalizer, between a label space and a label word space. A verbalizer is usually handcrafted or searched by gradient descent, which may lack coverage and bring considerable bias and high variances to the results. In this work, we focus on incorporating external knowledge into the verbalizer, forming a knowledgeable prompt-tuning (KPT), to improve and stabilize prompt-tuning. Specifically, we expand the label word space of the verbalizer using external knowledge bases (KBs) and refine the expanded label word space with the PLM itself before predicting with the expanded label word space. Extensive experiments on zero and few-shot text classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of knowledgeable prompt-tuning.

Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification

Transformer-based models are widely used in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, and multimodal transformers have been effective in visual-language tasks. This study explores distilling visual information from pretrained multimodal transformers to pretrained language encoders. Our framework is inspired by cross-modal encoders' success in visual-language tasks while we alter the learning objective to cater to the language-heavy characteristics of NLU. After training with a small number of extra adapting steps and finetuned, the proposed XDBERT (cross-modal distilled BERT) outperforms pretrained-BERT in general language understanding evaluation (GLUE), situations with adversarial generations (SWAG) benchmarks, and readability benchmarks. We analyze the performance of XDBERT on GLUE to show that the improvement is likely visually grounded.

Retrieve Fast, Rerank Smart: Cooperative and Joint Approaches for Improved Cross-Modal Retrieval

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(Un)solving Morphological Inflection: Lemma Overlap Artificially Inflates Models’ Performance

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