United States

As task-oriented dialog systems are becoming increasingly popular in our lives, more realistic tasks have been proposed and explored. However, new practical challenges arise. For instance, current dialog systems cannot effectively handle multiple
search results when querying a database, due to the lack of such scenarios in 
existing public datasets. In this paper, we propose Database Search Result (DSR) Disambiguation, a novel task that focuses on disambiguating database search results, which enhances user experience by allowing them to choose from multiple options instead of just one. To study this task, we augment the popular task-oriented dialog datasets (MultiWOZ and SGD) with turns that resolve ambiguities by (a) synthetically generating turns through a pre-defined grammar, and (b) collecting human paraphrases for a subset. We find that training on our augmented dialog data improves the model&#39;s ability to deal with ambiguous scenarios, without sacrificing performance on unmodified turns. Furthermore, pre-fine tuning and multi-task learning help our model to improve performance on DSR-disambiguation even in the absence of in-domain data, suggesting that it can be learned as a universal dialog skill. 
Our data and code will be made publicly available.

NAACL 2022

Database Search Results Disambiguation for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

As task-oriented dialog systems are becoming increasingly popular in our lives, more realistic tasks have been proposed and explored. However, new practical challenges arise. For instance, current dialog systems cannot effectively handle multiple
search results when querying a database, due to the lack of such scenarios in 
existing public datasets. In this paper, we propose Database Search Result (DSR) Disambiguation, a novel task that focuses on disambiguating database search results, which enhances user experience by allowing them to choose from multiple options instead of just one. To study this task, we augment the popular task-oriented dialog datasets (MultiWOZ and SGD) with turns that resolve ambiguities by (a) synthetically generating turns through a pre-defined grammar, and (b) collecting human paraphrases for a subset. We find that training on our augmented dialog data improves the model's ability to deal with ambiguous scenarios, without sacrificing performance on unmodified turns. Furthermore, pre-fine tuning and multi-task learning help our model to improve performance on DSR-disambiguation even in the absence of in-domain data, suggesting that it can be learned as a universal dialog skill. 
Our data and code will be made publicly available.

poster

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Event schema depicts the typical structure of complex events, serving as a scaffolding to effectively analyze, predict, and possibly intervene in the ongoing events. To induce event schemas from historical events, previous work uses an event-by-event scheme, ignoring the global structure of the entire schema graph. We propose a new event schema induction framework using double graph autoencoders, which captures the global dependencies among nodes in event graphs. Specifically, we first extract the event skeleton from an event graph and design a variational directed acyclic graph (DAG) autoencoder to learn its global structure. Then we further fill in the event arguments for the skeleton, and use another Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based autoencoder to reconstruct entity-entity relations as well as to detect coreferential entities. By performing this two-stage induction decomposition, the model can avoid reconstructing the entire graph in one step, allowing it to focus on learning global structures between events. Experimental results on three event graph datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and induces high-quality event schemas with global consistency.

Event Schema Induction with Double Graph Autoencoders

Nowadays, pretrained language models (PLMs) have dominated the majority of NLP tasks. While, little research has been conducted on systematically evaluating the language abilities of PLMs. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study on general language ability evaluation of PLMs (ElitePLM). In our study, we design four evaluation dimensions, \ie memory, comprehension, reasoning, and composition, to measure ten widely-used PLMs within five categories. Our empirical results demonstrate that: (1) PLMs with varying training objectives and strategies are good at different ability tests; (2) fine-tuning PLMs in downstream tasks is usually sensitive to the data size and distribution; (3) PLMs have excellent transferability between similar tasks. Moreover, the prediction results of PLMs in our experiments are released as an open resource for more deep and detailed analysis on the language abilities of PLMs. This paper can guide the future work to select, apply, and design PLMs for specific tasks. We have made all the details of experiments publicly available.

ElitePLM: An Empirical Study on General Language Ability Evaluation of Pretrained Language Models

Paraphrase generation is an important language generation task attempting to interpret user intents and systematically generate new phrases of identical meanings to the given ones. However, the effectiveness of paraphrase generation is constrained by the access to the golden labeled data pairs where both the amount and the quality of the training data pairs are restricted. In this paper, we propose a new weakly supervised paraphrase generation approach that extends the success of a recent work that leverages reinforcement learning for effective model training with data selection. While data selection is privileged for the target task which has noisy data, developing a reinforced selective learning regime faces several unresolved challenges. In this paper, we carry on important discussions about the above problem and present a new model that could partially overcome the discussed issues with a model-based planning feature and a reward normalization feature. We perform extensive evaluation on four weakly supervised paraphrase generation tasks where the results show that our method could significantly improve the state-of-the-art performance on the evaluation datasets.

Learning to Selectively Learn for Weakly Supervised Paraphrase Generation with Model-based Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective way to generate pun sentences that does not require any training on existing puns. Our approach is inspired by humor theories that ambiguity comes from the context rather than the pun word itself. Given a pair of definitions of a pun word, our model first produces a list of related concepts through a reverse dictionary. We then utilize one-shot GPT3 to generate context words and then generate puns incorporating context words from both concepts. Human evaluation shows that our method successfully generates pun 52\% of the time, outperforming well-crafted baselines and the state-of-the-art models by a large margin.

AmbiPun: Generating Humorous Puns with Ambiguous Context

Natural language processing researchers have identified limitations of evaluation methodology for generation tasks, with new questions raised about the validity of automatic metrics and of crowdworker judgments. Meanwhile, efforts to improve generation models tend to depend on simple n-gram overlap metrics (e.g., BLEU, ROUGE). We argue that new advances on models and metrics should each more directly benefit and inform the other. We therefore propose a generalization of leaderboards, bidimensional leaderboards (Billboards), that simultaneously tracks progress in language generation models and metrics for their evaluation. Unlike conventional unidimensional leaderboards that sort submitted systems by predetermined metrics, a Billboard accepts both generators and evaluation metrics as competing entries. A Billboard automatically creates an ensemble metric that selects and linearly combines a few metrics based on a global analysis across generators. Further, metrics are ranked based on their correlation with human judgments. We release four Billboards for machine translation, summarization, and image captioning. We demonstrate that a linear ensemble of a few diverse metrics sometimes substantially outperforms existing metrics in isolation. Our mixed-effects model analysis shows that most automatic metrics, especially the reference-based ones, overrate machine over human generation, demonstrating the importance of updating metrics as generation models become stronger (and perhaps more similar to humans) in the future.

Bidimensional Leaderboards: Generate and Evaluate Language Hand in Hand

Recent work has found that multi-task training with a large number of diverse tasks can uniformly improve downstream performance on unseen target tasks.  In contrast, literature on task transferability has established that the choice of intermediate tasks can heavily affect downstream task performance. In this work, we aim to disentangle the effect of scale and relatedness of tasks in multi-task representation learning. We find that, on average, increasing the scale of multi-task learning, in terms of the number of tasks, indeed results in better learned representations than smaller multi-task setups. However, if the target tasks are known ahead of time, then training on a smaller set of related tasks is competitive to the large-scale multi-task training at a reduced computational cost.


Exploring the Role of Task Transferability in Large-Scale Multi-Task Learning

Despite the success of multilingual sequence-to-sequence pretraining, most existing approaches rely on monolingual corpora and do not make use of the strong cross-lingual signal contained in parallel data. In this paper, we present PARADISE (PARAllel &Denoising Integration in SEquence-to-sequence models), which extends the conventional denoising objective used to train these models by (i) replacing words in the noised sequence according to a multilingual dictionary, and (ii) predicting the reference translation according to a parallel corpus instead of recovering the original sequence. Our experiments on machine translation and cross-lingual natural language inference show an average improvement of 2.0 BLEU points and 6.7 accuracy points from integrating parallel data into pretraining, respectively, obtaining results that are competitive with several popular models at a fraction of their computational cost.

PARADISE: Exploiting Parallel Data for Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Pretraining

Human-translated text displays distinct features from naturally written text in the same language. This phenomena, known as translationese, has been argued to confound the machine translation (MT) evaluation. Yet, we find that existing work on translationese neglects some important factors and the conclusions are mostly correlational but not causal. In this work, we collect CausalMT, a dataset where the MT training data are also labeled with the human translation directions. We inspect two critical factors, the train-test direction match (whether the human translation directions in the training and test sets are aligned), and data-model direction match (whether the model learns in the same direction as the human translation direction in the dataset). We show that these two factors have a large causal effect on the MT performance, in addition to the test-model direction mismatch highlighted by existing work on the impact of translationese. In light of our findings, we provide a set of suggestions for MT training and evaluation. The slides are available at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hoRAtyEvv2mMPfvXLou6t9djiJS07Zb6Cvn8iUARPxw/

Original or Translated? A Causal Analysis of the Impact of Translationese on Machine Translation Performance

Suicide is an important public health concern and one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Suicidal behaviors, including suicide attempts (SA) and suicide ideations (SI), are leading risk factors for death by suicide. Information related to patients’ previous and current SA and SI are frequently documented in the electronic health record (EHR) notes. Accurate detection of such documentation may help improve surveillance and predictions of patients’ suicidal behaviors and alert medical professionals for suicide prevention efforts. In this study, we first built the Suicide Attempt and Ideation Events (ScAN) dataset, a subset of the publicly available MIMIC III dataset spanning over 12k+ EHR notes with 19k+ annotated SA and SI events information. The annotations also contain attributes such as the method of suicide attempt. We also provide a strong baseline model ScANER (Suicide Attempt and Ideation Events Retriever), a multi-task RoBERTa-based model with a retrieval module to extract all the relevant suicidal behavioral evidences from EHR notes of a hospital-stay and, and a prediction module to identify the type of suicidal behavior (SA and SI) concluded during the patient’s stay at the hospital. ScANER achieved a macro-weighted F1-score of 0.83 for identifying suicidal behavioral evidences and a macro F1-score of 0.78 and 0.60 for classification of SA and SI for the patient’s hospital-stay, respectively.

ScAN: Suicide Attempt and Ideation Events Dataset

Figurative and metaphorical language are commonplace in discourse, and figurative expressions play an important role in communication and cognition. However, figurative language has been a relatively under-studied area in NLP, and it remains an open question to what extent modern language models can interpret nonliteral phrases. To address this question, we introduce Fig-QA, a Winograd-style nonliteral language understanding task consisting of correctly interpreting paired figurative phrases with divergent meanings. We evaluate the performance of several state-of the-art language models on this task, and find that although language models achieve performance significantly over chance, they still fall short of human performance, particularly in zero- or few-shot settings. This suggests that further work is needed to improve the nonliteral reasoning capabilities of language models.

Database Search Results Disambiguation for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

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Event Schema Induction with Double Graph Autoencoders

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