United States

Action in video usually involves the interaction of human with objects. Action labels are typically composed of various combinations of verbs and nouns, but we may not have training data for all possible combinations. In this paper, we aim to improve the generalization ability of the compositional action recognition model to novel verbs or novel nouns that are unseen during training time, by leveraging the power of knowledge graphs. Previous work utilizes verb-noun compositional action nodes in the knowledge graph, making it inefficient to scale since the number of compositional action nodes grows quadratically with respect to the number of verbs and nouns. To address this issue, we propose our approach: Disentangled Action Recognition with Knowledge-bases (DARK), which leverages the inherent compositionality of actions. DARK trains a factorized model by first extracting disentangled feature representations for verbs and nouns, and then predicting classification weights using relations in external knowledge graphs. The type constraint between verb and noun is extracted from external knowledge bases and finally applied when composing actions. DARK has better scalability in the number of objects and verbs, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Charades dataset. We further propose a new benchmark split based on the Epic-kitchen dataset which is an order of magnitude bigger in the numbers of classes and samples, and benchmark various models on this benchmark.

NAACL 2022

Disentangled Action Recognition with Knowledge Bases

affordance

action recognition

zero-shot learning

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year! 

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CogSci 2021

The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

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

The rapid development of social networks, electronic commerce, mobile Internet, and other technologies, has influenced the growth of Web data.
Social media and Internet forums are valuable sources of citizens’ opinions, which can be analyzed for community development and user behavior analysis.
Unfortunately, the scarcity of resources (i.e., datasets or language models) become a barrier to the development of natural language processing applications in low-resource languages.
Thanks to the recent growth of online forums and news platforms of Swahili, we introduce two datasets of Swahili in this paper: a pre-training dataset of approximately 105MB with 16M words and annotated dataset of 13K instances for the emotion classification task.
The emotion classification dataset is manually annotated by two native Swahili speakers.
We pre-trained a new monolingual language model for Swahili, namely SwahBERT, using our collected pre-training data, and tested it with four downstream tasks including emotion classification.
We found that SwahBERT outperforms multilingual BERT, a well-known existing language model, in almost all downstream tasks.

SwahBERT: Language Model of Swahili

Fine-tuning continuous prompts for target tasks has recently emerged as a compact alternative to full model fine-tuning. Motivated by these promising results, we investigate the feasibility of extracting a discrete (textual) interpretation of continuous prompts that is faithful to the problem they solve. In practice, we observe a "wayward" behavior between the task solved by continuous prompts and their nearest neighbor discrete projections: We can find continuous prompts that solve a task while being projected to an arbitrary text (e.g., the definition of a different or even a contradictory task) while being within a very small (2%) margin of the best continuous prompt of the same size for the task. We provide intuitions behind this odd and surprising behavior, as well as extensive empirical analyses quantifying the effect of various parameters. For instance, for larger model sizes we observe higher waywardness, i.e, we can find prompts that more closely map to any arbitrary text with a smaller drop in accuracy. These findings have important implications relating to the difficulty of faithfully interpreting continuous prompts and their generalization across models and tasks, providing guidance for future progress in prompting language models.

On Discretized Interpretation of Continuous Prompts

The performance of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for natural language tasks including Machine Translation (MT) is crucially dependent on the reward formulation. This is due to the intrinsic difficulty of the task in the high-dimensional discrete action space as well as the sparseness of the standard reward functions defined for limited set of ground-truth sequences biased towards singular lexical choices. To address this issue, we formulate SURF, a maximally dense semantic-level unsupervised reward function which mimics human evaluation by considering both sentence fluency and semantic similarity. We demonstrate the strong potential of SURF to leverage a family of Actor-Critic Transformer-based Architectures with synchronous and asynchronous multi-agent variants. To tackle the problem of large action-state spaces, each agent is equipped with unique exploration strategies, promoting diversity during its exploration of the hypothesis space. When BLEU scores are compared, our dense unsupervised reward outperforms the standard sparse reward by 2% on average for in- and out-of-domain settings.

SURF: Semantic-level Unsupervised Reward Function for Machine Translation

Adapter modules enable modular and efficient zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, where current state-of-the-art adapter-based approaches learn specialized language adapters (LAs) for individual languages. In this work, we show that it is more effective to learn bilingual language pair adapters (BAs) when the goal is to optimize performance for a particular source-target transfer direction. Our novel BAD-X adapter framework trades off some modularity of dedicated LAs for improved transfer performance: we demonstrate consistent gains in three standard downstream tasks, and for the majority of evaluated low-resource languages.

BAD-X: Bilingual Adapters Improve Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

Since the advent of Federated Learning (FL), research has applied these methods to natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Despite a plethora of papers in FL for NLP, no previous works have studied how multilingual text impacts FL algorithms. Furthermore, multilingual text provides an interesting avenue to examine the impact of non-IID text (e.g. different languages) on FL in naturally occurring data. We explore three multilingual language tasks, language modeling, machine translation, and text classification using differing federated and non-federated learning algorithms. Our results show that using pretrained models reduces the negative effects of FL, helping them to perform near or better than centralized (no privacy) learning, even when using non-IID partitioning.

Pretrained Models for Multilingual Federated Learning

Mental Health Disorders continue plaguing humans worldwide. Aggravating this situation is the severe shortage of qualified and competent mental health professionals (MHPs), which underlines the need for developing Virtual Assistants (VAs) that can \it assist MHPs. The data+ML for automation can come from platforms that allow visiting and posting messages in peer-to-peer anonymous manner for sharing their experiences (frequently stigmatized) and seeking support. In this paper, we propose a VA that can act as the first point of contact and comfort for mental health patients. We curate a dataset, Motivational VA: MotiVAte comprising of 7k dyadic conversations collected from a peer-to-peer support platform. The system employs two mechanisms: (i) Mental Illness Classification: an attention based BERT classifier that outputs the mental disorder category out of the 4 categories, viz., Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), based on the input ongoing dialog between the support seeker and the VA; and (ii) Mental Illness Conditioned Motivational Dialogue Generation (MI-MDG): a sentiment driven Reinforcement Learning (RL) based motivational response generator. The empirical evaluation demonstrates the system capability by way of outperforming several baselines.

A Shoulder to Cry on: Towards A Motivational Virtual Assistant for Assuaging Mental Agony

Question Answering (QA) is a longstanding challenge in natural language processing. Existing QA works mostly focus on specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills. The specialty in QA research hinders systems from modeling commonalities between tasks and generalization for wider applications. To address this issue, we present ProQA, a unified QA paradigm that solves various tasks through a single model. ProQA takes a unified structural prompt as the bridge and improves the QA-centric ability by structural prompt-based pre-training. Through a structurally designed prompt-based input schema, ProQA concurrently models the knowledge generalization for all QA tasks while keeping the knowledge customization for every specific QA task. Furthermore, ProQA is pre-trained with structural prompt-formatted large-scale synthesized corpus, which empowers the model with the commonly-required QA ability. Experimental results on 11 QA benchmarks demonstrate that ProQA consistently boosts performance on both full data fine-tuning, few-shot learning, and zero-shot testing scenarios. Furthermore, ProQA exhibits strong ability in both continual learning and transfer learning by taking the advantages of the structural prompt.

ProQA: Structural Prompt-based Pre-training for Unified Question Answering

Knowledge based question answering (KBQA) is a complex task for natural language understanding. Many KBQA approaches have been proposed in recent years, and most of them are trained based on labeled reasoning path. This hinders the system's performance as many correct reasoning paths are not labeled as ground truth, and thus they cannot be learned. In this paper, we introduce a new concept of KBQA system which can leverage multiple reasoning paths' information and only requires labeled answer as supervision. We name it as \textbfMutliple \textbfReasoning \textbfPaths KB\textbfQA System (MRP-QA). We conduct experiments on several benchmark datasets containing both single-hop simple questions as well as muti-hop complex questions, including WebQuestionSP (WQSP), ComplexWebQuestion-1.1 (CWQ), and PathQuestion-Large (PQL), and demonstrate strong performance.

A New Concept of Knowledge based Question Answering (KBQA) System for Multi-hop Reasoning

Existing video question answering (video QA) models lack the capacity for deep video understanding and flexible multistep reasoning. We propose for video QA a novel model which performs dynamic multistep reasoning between questions and videos. It creates video semantic representation based on the video scene graph composed of semantic elements of the video and semantic relations among these elements. Then, it performs multistep reasoning for better answer decision between the representations of the question and the video, and dynamically integrate the reasoning results. Experiments show the significant advantage of the proposed model against previous methods in accuracy and interpretability. Against the existing state-of-the-art model, the proposed model dramatically improves more than $4\%/3.1\%/2\%$ on the three widely used video QA datasets, MSRVTT-QA, MSRVTT multi-choice, and TGIF-QA, and displays better interpretability by backtracing along with the attention mechanisms to the video scene graphs.

Dynamic Multistep Reasoning based on Video Scene Graph for Video Question Answering

Long-context question answering (QA) tasks require reasoning over a long document or multiple documents. Addressing these tasks often benefits from identifying a set of evidence spans (e.g., sentences), which provide supporting evidence for answering the question.
In this work, we propose a novel method for equipping long-context QA models with an additional sequence-level objective for better identification of the supporting evidence.
We achieve this via an additional contrastive supervision signal in finetuning, where the model is encouraged to explicitly discriminate supporting evidence sentences from negative ones by maximizing question-evidence similarity. 
The proposed additional loss exhibits consistent improvements on three different strong long-context transformer models, across two challenging question answering benchmarks -- HotpotQA and QAsper.

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SwahBERT: Language Model of Swahili

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