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Many NLP tasks require processing long contexts beyond the length limit of pretrained models. In order to scale these models to longer text sequences, many efficient long-range attention variants have been proposed. Despite the abundance of research along this direction, it is still difficult to gauge the relative effectiveness of these models in practical use cases, e.g., if we apply these models following the pretrain-and-finetune paradigm. In this work, we aim to conduct a thorough analysis of these emerging models with large-scale and controlled experiments. For each attention variant, we pretrain large-size models using the same long-doc corpus and then finetune these models for real-world long-context tasks. Our findings reveal pitfalls of an existing widely-used long-range benchmark and show none of the tested efficient attentions can beat a simple local window attention under standard pretraining paradigms. Further analysis on local attention variants suggests that even the commonly used attention-window overlap is not necessary to achieve good downstream results --- using disjoint local attentions, we are able to build a simpler and more efficient long-doc QA model that matches the performance of Longformer with half of its pretraining compute.

NAACL 2022

Simple Local Attentions Remain Competitive for Long-Context Tasks

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.

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

Controlled table-to-text generation seeks to generate natural language descriptions for highlighted subparts of a table. Previous SOTA systems still employ a sequence-to-sequence generation method, which merely captures the table as a linear structure and is brittle when table layouts change. We seek to go beyond this paradigm by (1) effectively expressing the relations of content pieces in the table, and (2) making our model robust to content-invariant structural transformations. Accordingly, we propose an equivariance learning framework, which encodes tables with a structure-aware self-attention mechanism. This prunes the full self-attention structure into an order-invariant graph attention that captures the connected graph structure of cells belonging to the same row or column, and it differentiates between relevant cells and irrelevant cells from the structural perspective. Our framework also modifies the positional encoding mechanism to preserve the relative position of tokens in the same cell but enforce position invariance among different cells. Our technology is free to be plugged into existing table-to-text generation models, and has improved T5-based models to offer better performance on ToTTo and HiTab. Moreover, on a harder version of ToTTo, we preserve promising performance, while previous SOTA systems, even with transformation-based data augmentation, have seen significant performance drops.

Robust (Controlled) Table-to-Text Generation with Structure-Aware Equivariance Learning

Recent video-text models can retrieve relevant videos based on text with a high accuracy, but to what extent do they comprehend the semantics of the text? Can they discriminate between similar entities and actions? To answer this, we propose an evaluation framework that probes video-text models with hard negatives. We automatically build contrast sets, where true textual descriptions are manipulated in ways that change their semantics while maintaining plausibility. Specifically, we leverage a pre-trained language model and a set of heuristics to create verb and person entity focused contrast sets. We apply these in the multiple choice video to-text classification setting. We test the robustness of recent methods on the proposed automatic contrast sets, and compare them to additionally collected human-generated counterparts, to assess their effectiveness. We see that model performance suffers across all methods, erasing the gap between recent CLIP-based methods vs. the earlier methods. 

Exposing the Limits of Video-Text Models through Contrast Sets

Despite recent improvements in abstractive summarization, most current approaches generate summaries that are not factually consistent with the source document, severely restricting their trust and usage in real-world applications. Recent works have shown promising improvements in factuality error identification using text or dependency arc entailments; however, they do not consider the entire semantic graph simultaneously. To this end, we propose FactGraph, a method that decomposes the document and the summary into structured meaning representations (MR), which are more suitable for factuality evaluation. MRs describe core semantic concepts and their relations, aggregating the main content in both document and summary in a canonical form, and reducing data sparsity. FactGraph encodes such graphs using a graph encoder augmented with structure-aware adapters to capture interactions among the concepts based on the graph connectivity, along with text representations using an adapter-based text encoder. Experiments on different benchmarks for evaluating factuality show that FactGraph outperforms previous approaches by up to 15%. Furthermore, FactGraph improves performance on identifying content verifiability errors and better captures subsentence-level factual inconsistencies.

FactGraph: Evaluating Factuality in Summarization with Semantic Graph Representations

Machine-in-the-loop writing aims to build models that assist humans to accomplish their writing tasks more effectively. Prior work has 
found that providing users a machine-written draft or sentence-level continuations has limited success since the generated text tends to deviate from users' intention.  To allow the user to retain control over the content, we train a rewriting model that, when prompted, modifies specified spans of text within the user's original draft to introduce descriptive and figurative elements in the text.
We evaluate the model on its ability to collaborate with humans on the task of creative image captioning. On a user study through Amazon Mechanical Turk, our model is rated to be more helpful by users than a baseline infilling language model. In addition, third-party evaluation shows that users write more descriptive and figurative captions when collaborating with our model compared to completing the task alone.
However, the improvement is not uniform across user groups: the model is more helpful to skilled users, which risks widening the gap between skilled and novice users, highlighting a need for careful, user-centric evaluation of interactive systems.

Machine-in-the-Loop Rewriting for Creative Image Captioning

While improving neural dialogue agents' factual accuracy is the object of much research, another important aspect of communication, less studied in the setting of neural dialogue, is transparency about ignorance.
In this work, we analyze to what extent state-of-the-art chit-chat models are linguistically calibrated in the sense that their verbalized expression of doubt (or confidence) matches the likelihood that the model's responses are factually incorrect (or correct). We find that these models are poorly calibrated, yet we show that likelihood of correctness can accurately be predicted.
By incorporating such metacognitive features into the training of a controllable generation model, we obtain a dialogue agent with greatly improved linguistic calibration.

Reducing conversational agents' overconfidence through linguistic calibration

Investigating Language Relationships in Multilingual Sentence Encoders through the Lens of Linguistic Typology

Debugging a machine learning model is hard since the bug usually involves the training data and the learning process. This becomes even harder for an opaque deep learning model if we have no clue about how the model actually works. In this survey, we review papers that exploit explanations to enable humans to give feedback and debug NLP models. We call this problem explanation-based human debugging (EBHD). In particular, we categorize and discuss existing work along three dimensions of EBHD (the bug context, the workflow, and the experimental setting), compile findings on how EBHD components affect the feedback providers, and highlight open problems that could be future research directions.

Explanation-Based Human Debugging of NLP Models: A Survey

Parody is a figurative device used for mimicking entities  for comedic or critical purposes. Parody is intentionally humorous and often involves sarcasm. This paper explores jointly modelling these figurative tropes with the goal of improving performance of political parody detection in tweets.  To this end, we present a multi-encoder model that combines three parallel encoders to enrich parody-specific representations with humor and sarcasm information. Experiments on a publicly available data set of political parody tweets demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

Combining Humor and Sarcasm for Improving Political Parody Detection

Automatic text summarization has enjoyed great progress over the years and is used in numerous applications, impacting the lives of many. Despite this development, there is little research that meaningfully investigates how the current research focus in automatic summarization aligns with users' needs. To bridge this gap, we propose a survey methodology that can be used to investigate the needs of users of automatically generated summaries. Importantly, these needs are dependent on the target group. Hence, we design our survey in such a way that it can be easily adjusted to investigate different user groups. In this work we focus on university students, who make extensive use of summaries during their studies. We find that the current research directions of the automatic summarization community do not fully align with students' needs. Motivated by our findings, we present ways to mitigate this mismatch in future research on automatic summarization: we propose research directions that impact the design, the development and the evaluation of automatically generated summaries.

What Makes a Good and Useful Summary? {I}ncorporating Users in Automatic Summarization Research

Deep learning for Information Retrieval (IR) requires a large amount of high-quality query-document relevance labels, but such labels are inherently sparse. Label smoothing redistributes some observed probability mass over unobserved instances, often uniformly, uninformed of the true distribution. In contrast, we propose knowledge distillation for informed labeling, without incurring high computation overheads at evaluation time. Our contribution is designing a simple but efficient teacher model which utilizes collective knowledge, to outperform state-of-the-arts distilled from a more complex teacher model. Specifically, we train up to $\times8$ faster than the state-of-the-art teacher, while distilling the rankings better. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/jihyukkim-nlp/CollectiveKD}.


Simple Local Attentions Remain Competitive for Long-Context Tasks

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Robust (Controlled) Table-to-Text Generation with Structure-Aware Equivariance Learning

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