Ireland

Current QA systems can generate reasonable-sounding yet false answers without explanation or evidence for the generated answer, which is especially problematic when humans cannot readily check the model&#39;s answers. This presents a challenge for building trust in machine learning systems. We take inspiration from real-world situations where difficult questions are answered by considering opposing sides (see Irving et al., 2018). For multiple-choice QA examples, we build a dataset of single arguments for both a correct and incorrect answer option in a debate-style set-up as an initial step in training models to produce explanations for two candidate answers. We use long contexts---humans familiar with the context write convincing explanations for pre-selected correct and incorrect answers, and we test if those explanations allow humans who have not read the full context to more accurately determine the correct answer. We do not find that explanations in our set-up improve human accuracy, but a baseline condition shows that providing human-selected text snippets does improve accuracy. We use these findings to suggest ways of improving the debate set up for future data collection efforts.

ACL 2022

Single-Turn Debate Does Not Help Humans Answer Hard Reading-Comprehension Questions

debate

explanations

# 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)
 
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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). 

Current QA systems can generate reasonable-sounding yet false answers without explanation or evidence for the generated answer, which is especially problematic when humans cannot readily check the model's answers. This presents a challenge for building trust in machine learning systems. We take inspiration from real-world situations where difficult questions are answered by considering opposing sides (see Irving et al., 2018). For multiple-choice QA examples, we build a dataset of single arguments for both a correct and incorrect answer option in a debate-style set-up as an initial step in training models to produce explanations for two candidate answers. We use long contexts---humans familiar with the context write convincing explanations for pre-selected correct and incorrect answers, and we test if those explanations allow humans who have not read the full context to more accurately determine the correct answer. We do not find that explanations in our set-up improve human accuracy, but a baseline condition shows that providing human-selected text snippets does improve accuracy. We use these findings to suggest ways of improving the debate set up for future data collection efforts.

workshop paper

We advance the state-of-the-art in unsupervised abstractive dialogue summarization by utilizing multi-sentence compression graphs. Starting from well-founded assumptions about word graphs, we present simple but reliable path-reranking and topic segmentation schemes. Robustness of our method is demonstrated on datasets across multiple domains, including meetings, interviews, movie scripts, and day-to-day conversations. We also identify possible avenues to augment our heuristic-based system with deep learning. We open-source our code to provide a strong, reproducible baseline for future research into unsupervised dialogue summarization.

Unsupervised Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Word Graphs and POV Conversion

Distributional semantic models capture word-level meaning that is useful in many natural language processing tasks and have even been shown to capture cognitive aspects of word meaning. The majority of these models are purely text based, even though the human sensory experience is much richer. In this paper we create visually grounded word embeddings by combining English text and images and compare them to popular text-based methods, to see if visual information allows our model to better capture cognitive aspects of word meaning. Our analysis shows that visually grounded embedding similarities are more predictive of the human reaction times in a large priming experiment than the purely text-based embeddings. The visually grounded embeddings also correlate well with human word similarity ratings. Importantly, in both experiments we show that the grounded embeddings account for a unique portion of explained variance, even when we include text-based embeddings trained on huge corpora. This shows that visual grounding allows our model to capture information that cannot be extracted using text as the only source of information.

Seeing the advantage: visually grounding word embeddings to better capture human semantic knowledge

We propose a new neural model for word embeddings, which uses Unitary 
Matrices as the primary device for encoding lexical information. It uses
simple matrix multiplication to derive matrices for large units, yielding
a sentence processing model that is strictly compositional, does not
lose information over time steps, and is transparent, in the sense
that word embeddings can be analysed regardless of context.
This model does not employ activation functions, and so
the network is fully accessible to analysis by the methods of linear
algebra at each point in its operation on an input sequence. We test
it in two NLP agreement tasks and obtain rule like perfect accuracy,
with greater stability than current state-of-the-art systems. Our proposed
model goes some way towards offering a class of computationally powerful 
deep learning systems that can be fully understood and compared 
to human cognitive processes for natural language learning and
representation.


A Neural Model for Compositional Word Embeddings and Sentence Processing

In our study, we create Codenames spymaster agents using four types of relatedness measures that require only a raw text corpus to produce. These include newly introduced ones based on co-occurrences, which outperform FastText cosine similarity on gold standard relatedness data. To generate clues in Codenames, we combine relatedness measures with four different scoring functions, for two languages, English and Hungarian. For testing, we collect decisions of human guesser players in an online game, and our configurations outperform previous agents among methods using raw corpora only.

Codenames as a Game of Co-occurrence Counting

I investigate how to use pretrained static word embeddings to deliver improved estimates of bilexical co-occurrence probabilities: conditional probabilities of one word given a single other word in a specific relationship. Such probabilities play important roles in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and usage-based cognitive modeling of language more generally. I propose a log-bilinear model taking pretrained vector representations of the two words as input, enabling generalization based on the distributional information contained in both vectors. I show that this model outperforms baselines in estimating probabilities of adjectives given nouns that they attributively modify, and probabilities of nominal direct objects given their head verbs, given limited training data in Arabic, English, Korean, and Spanish.

Estimating word co-occurrence probabilities from pretrained static embeddings using a log-bilinear model

Attention describes cognitive processes that are important to many human phenomena including reading. The term is also used to describe the way in which transformer neural networks perform natural language processing. While attention appears to be very different under these two contexts, this paper presents an analysis of the correlations between transformer attention and overt human attention during reading tasks. An extensive analysis of human eye tracking datasets showed that the dwell times of human eye movements were strongly correlated with the attention patterns occurring in the early layers of pre-trained transformers such as BERT. Additionally, the strength of a correlation was not related to the number of parameters within a transformer. This suggests that something about the transformers’ architecture determined how closely the two measures were correlated.

Eye Gaze and Self-attention: How Humans and Transformers Attend Words in Sentences

Aspect is a linguistic concept that describes how an action, event, or state of a verb phrase is situated in time. In this paper, we explore whether different transformer models are capable of identifying aspectual features. We focus on two specific aspectual features: telicity and duration. Telicity marks whether the verb's action or state has an endpoint or not (telic/atelic), and duration denotes whether a verb expresses an action (dynamic) or a state (stative). These features are integral to the interpretation of natural language, but also hard to annotate and identify with NLP methods. We perform experiments in English and French, and our results show that transformer models adequately capture information on telicity and duration in their vectors, even in their non-finetuned forms, but are somewhat biased with regard to verb tense and word order.

About Time: Do Transformers Learn Temporal Verbal Aspect?

Eye tracking data during reading is a useful source of information to understand the cognitive processes that take place during language comprehension
processes. This shared task addresses the challenge of predicting eye-tracking features recorded during sentence processing of multiple languages. In our
solution, we compare our eye-tracking prediction results with some simple baselines using token-level features, which we improve upon with deep learning
methods which are based on transformer models. We provide the code for our experimentations here: (https://github.com/hvarS/CMCL-2022).

Poirot at CMCL 2022 Shared Task: Zero Shot Crosslingual Eye-Tracking Data Prediction using Multilingual Transformer Models

In this paper, we present a unified model that works for both multilingual and crosslingual prediction of reading times of words in various languages. The secret behind the success of this model is in the preprocessing step where all words are transformed to their universal language representation via the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to favorably exploit this phonological property of language for the two tasks. Various feature types were extracted covering basic frequencies, n-grams, information theoretic, and psycholinguistically-motivated predictors for model training. A finetuned Random Forest model obtained best performance for both tasks with 3.8031 and 3.9065 MAE scores for mean first fixation duration (FFDAvg) and mean total reading time (TRTAvg) respectively.

NU HLT at CMCL 2022 Shared Task: Multilingual and Crosslingual Prediction of Human Reading Behavior in Universal Language Space

Eye-Tracking data is a very useful source of information to study cognition and especially language comprehension in humans. In this paper, we describe our systems for the CMCL 2022 shared task on predicting eye-tracking information. We describe our experiments with pretrained models like BERT and XLM and the
different ways in which we used those representations to predict four eye-tracking features. Along with analysing the effect of using two different kinds of pretrained multilingual language models and different ways of pooling the token-level representations, we also explore how contextual information affects the performance of the systems. Finally, we also explore if factors like augmenting linguistic information affect the predictions. Our submissions achieved an average MAE of 5.72 and ranked 5th in the shared task. The average MAE showed further
reduction to 5.25 in post task evaluation.

Single-Turn Debate Does Not Help Humans Answer Hard Reading-Comprehension Questions

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Unsupervised Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Word Graphs and POV Conversion

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Single-Turn Debate Does Not Help Humans Answer Hard Reading-Comprehension Questions

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Next from ACL 2022

Unsupervised Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Word Graphs and POV Conversion

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Internet-augmented language models through few-shot prompting for open-domain question answering

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