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The softmax layer in neural machine translation is designed to model the distribution over mutually exclusive tokens. Machine translation, however, is intrinsically uncertain: the same source sentence can have multiple semantically equivalent translations. Therefore, we propose to replace the softmax activation with a multi-label classification layer that can model ambiguity more effectively. We call our loss function Single-label Contrastive Objective for Non-Exclusive Sequences (SCONES). We show that the multi-label output layer can still be trained on single reference training data using the SCONES loss function. SCONES yields consistent BLEU score gains across six translation directions, particularly for medium-resource language pairs and small beam sizes. By using smaller beam sizes we can speed up inference by a factor of 3.9x and still match or improve the BLEU score obtained using softmax. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SCONES can be used to train NMT models that assign the highest probability to adequate translations, thus mitigating the ``beam search curse&#39;&#39;. Additional experiments on synthetic language pairs with varying levels of uncertainty suggest that the improvements from SCONES can be attributed to better handling of ambiguity.

NAACL 2022

Jam or Cream First? Modeling Ambiguity in Neural Machine Translation with SCONES

# 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) 
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ACL 2022

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). 

The softmax layer in neural machine translation is designed to model the distribution over mutually exclusive tokens. Machine translation, however, is intrinsically uncertain: the same source sentence can have multiple semantically equivalent translations. Therefore, we propose to replace the softmax activation with a multi-label classification layer that can model ambiguity more effectively. We call our loss function Single-label Contrastive Objective for Non-Exclusive Sequences (SCONES). We show that the multi-label output layer can still be trained on single reference training data using the SCONES loss function. SCONES yields consistent BLEU score gains across six translation directions, particularly for medium-resource language pairs and small beam sizes. By using smaller beam sizes we can speed up inference by a factor of 3.9x and still match or improve the BLEU score obtained using softmax. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SCONES can be used to train NMT models that assign the highest probability to adequate translations, thus mitigating the ``beam search curse''. Additional experiments on synthetic language pairs with varying levels of uncertainty suggest that the improvements from SCONES can be attributed to better handling of ambiguity.

technical paper

## 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

Hate speech is plaguing the cyberspace along with user-generated content. Adding counter speech has become an effective way to combat hate speech online. Existing datasets and models target either (a) hate speech or (b) hate and counter speech but disregard the context. This paper investigates the role of context in the annotation and detection of online hate and counter speech, where context is defined as the preceding comment in a conversation thread. We created a context-aware dataset for a 3-way classification task on Reddit comments: hate speech, counter speech, or neutral. Our analyses indicate that context is critical to identify hate and counter speech: human judgments change for most comments depending on whether we show annotators the context. A linguistic analysis draws insights into the language people use to express hate and counter speech. Experimental results show that neural networks obtain significantly better results if context is taken into account. We also present qualitative error analyses shedding light into (a) when and why context is beneficial and (b) the remaining errors made by our best model when context is taken into account.

Hate Speech and Counter Speech Detection: Conversational Context Does Matter

Recent work in entity disambiguation (ED) has typically neglected structured knowledge base (KB) facts, and instead relied on a limited sub-set of KB information, such as entity descriptions or types. This limits the range of contexts in which entities can be disambiguated. To allow the use of all KB facts, as well as descriptions and types, we introduce an ED model which links entities by reasoning over a symbolic knowledge base in a fully differentiable fashion. Our model surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on six well-established ED datasets by 1.3 F1 on average. By allowing access to all KB information, our model is less reliant on popularity-based entity priors, and improves performance on the challenging ShadowLink dataset (which emphasises infrequent and ambiguous entities) by 12.7 F1.

Improving Entity Disambiguation by Reasoning over a Knowledge Base

Trojan attacks raise serious security concerns. In this paper, we investigate the underlying mechanism of Trojaned BERT models. We observe the attention focus drifting behavior of Trojaned models, i.e., when encountering an poisoned input, the trigger token hijacks the attention focus regardless of the context. We provide a thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis of this phenomenon, revealing insights into the Trojan mechanism. Based on the observation, we propose an attention-based Trojan detector to distinguish Trojaned models from clean ones. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to analyze the Trojan mechanism and to develop a Trojan detector based on the transformer's attention.

A Study of the Attention Abnormality in Trojaned BERTs

Textual knowledge bases such as Wikipedia require considerable effort to keep up to date and consistent. While automated writing assistants could potentially ease this burden, the problem of suggesting edits grounded in external knowledge has been under-explored. In this paper, we introduce the novel generation task of faithfully reflecting updated information in text (FRUIT) where the goal is to update an existing article given new evidence. We release the FRUIT-WIKI dataset, a collection of over 170K distantly supervised data produced from pairs of Wikipedia snapshots, along with our data generation pipeline and a gold evaluation set of 914 instances whose edits are guaranteed to be supported by the evidence. We provide benchmark results for popular generation systems as well as EDIT5 -- a T5-based approach tailored to editing we introduce that establishes the state of the art. Our analysis shows that developing models that can update articles faithfully requires new capabilities for neural generation models, and opens doors to many new applications.


FRUIT: Faithfully Reflecting Updated Information in Text

In Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection (DADC), human annotators are tasked with finding examples that models struggle to predict correctly. Models trained on DADC-collected training data have been shown to be more robust in adversarial and out-of-domain settings, and are considerably harder for humans to fool. However, DADC is more time-consuming than traditional data collection and thus more costly per annotated example. In this work, we examine whether we can maintain the advantages of DADC, without incurring the additional cost. To that end, we introduce Generative Annotation Assistants (GAAs), generator-in-the-loop models that provide real-time suggestions that annotators can either approve, modify, or reject entirely. We collect training datasets in twenty experimental settings and perform a detailed analysis of this approach for the task of extractive question answering (QA) for both standard and adversarial data collection. We demonstrate that GAAs provide significant efficiency benefits with over a 30% annotation speed-up, while leading to over a 5x improvement in model fooling rates. In addition, we find that using GAA-assisted training data leads to higher downstream model performance on a variety of question answering tasks over adversarial data collection.

Models in the Loop: Aiding Crowdworkers with Generative Annotation Assistants

Prompt tuning is a new, efficient NLP transfer learning paradigm that adds a task-specific prompt in each input instance during the model training stage. It freezes the pre-trained language model and only optimizes a few task-specific prompts. In this paper, we propose a conditional prompt generation method to generate prompts for each input instance, referred to as the Instance-Dependent Prompt Generation (IDPG). Unlike traditional prompt tuning methods that use a fixed prompt, IDPG introduces a lightweight and trainable component to generate prompts based on each input sentence. Extensive experiments on ten natural language understanding (NLU) tasks show that the proposed strategy consistently outperforms various prompt tuning baselines and is on par with other efficient transfer learning methods such as Compacter while tuning far fewer model parameters.

IDPG: An Instance-Dependent Prompt Generation Method

Generating adversarial examples for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) with single Round-Trip Translation (RTT) has achieved promising results by releasing the meaning-preserving restriction. However, a potential pitfall for this approach is that we cannot decide whether the generated examples are adversarial to the target NMT model or the auxiliary backward one, as the reconstruction error through the RTT can be related to either. To remedy this problem, we propose a new criterion for NMT adversarial examples based on the Doubly Round-Trip Translation (DRTT). Specifically, apart from the source-target-source RTT, we also consider the target-source-target one, which is utilized to pick out the authentic adversarial examples for the target NMT model. Additionally, to enhance the robustness of the NMT model, we introduce the masked language models to construct bilingual adversarial pairs based on DRTT, which are used to train the NMT model directly. Extensive experiments on both the clean and noisy test sets (including the artificial and natural noise) show that our approach substantially improves the robustness of NMT models.

Generating Authentic Adversarial Examples beyond Meaning-preserving with Doubly Round-trip Translation

Bash is a Unix command language used for interacting with the Operating System. Recent works on natural language to Bash translation have made significant advances, but none of the previous methods utilize the problem’s inherent structure. We identify this structure and propose a Segmented Invocation Transformer (SIT) that utilizes the information from the constituency parse tree of the natural language text. Our method is motivated by the alignment between segments in the natural language text and Bash command components. Incorporating the structure in the modelling improves the performance of the model. Since such systems must be universally accessible, we benchmark the inference times on a CPU rather than a GPU. We observe a 1.8x improvement in the inference time and a 5x reduction in model parameters. Attribution analysis using Integrated Gradients reveals that the proposed method can capture the problem structure.

Efficient Constituency Tree based Encoding for Natural Language to Bash Translation

Labelled data is the foundation of most natural language processing tasks. However, labelling data is difficult and there often are diverse valid beliefs about what the correct data labels should be. So far, dataset creators have acknowledged annotator subjectivity, but rarely actively managed it in the annotation process. This has led to partly-subjective datasets that fail to serve a clear downstream use. To address this issue, we propose two contrasting paradigms for data annotation. The descriptive paradigm encourages annotator subjectivity, whereas the prescriptive paradigm discourages it. Descriptive annotation allows for the surveying and modelling of different beliefs, whereas prescriptive annotation enables the training of models that consistently apply one belief. We discuss benefits and challenges in implementing both paradigms, and argue that dataset creators should explicitly aim for one or the other to facilitate the intended use of their dataset. Lastly, we conduct an annotation experiment using hate speech data that illustrates the contrast between the two paradigms.

Two Contrasting Data Annotation Paradigms for Subjective NLP Tasks

Ethics is one of the longest standing intellectual endeavors of humanity. In recent years, the fields of AI and NLP have attempted to address ethical issues of harmful outcomes in machine learning systems that are made to interface with humans. One recent approach in this vein is the construction of NLP morality models that can take in arbitrary text and output a moral judgment about the situation described. In this work, we offer a critique of such NLP methods for automating ethical decision-making. Through an audit of recent work on computational approaches for predicting morality, we examine the broader issues that arise from such efforts. We conclude with a discussion of how machine ethics could usefully proceed in NLP, by focusing on current and near-future uses of technology, in a way that centers around transparency, democratic values, and allows for straightforward accountability.

Jam or Cream First? Modeling Ambiguity in Neural Machine Translation with SCONES

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Hate Speech and Counter Speech Detection: Conversational Context Does Matter

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Jam or Cream First? Modeling Ambiguity in Neural Machine Translation with SCONES

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Hate Speech and Counter Speech Detection: Conversational Context Does Matter

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Translation Error Detection as Rationale Extraction

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