United States

The increasing polarization of online political discourse calls for computational tools that automatically detect and monitor ideological divides in social media. We introduce a minimally supervised method that leverages the network structure of online discussion forums, specifically Reddit, to detect polarized concepts. We model polarization along the dimensions of salience and framing, drawing upon insights from moral psychology. Our architecture combines graph neural networks with structured sparsity learning and results in representations for concepts and subreddits that capture temporal ideological dynamics such as right-wing and left-wing radicalization.

NAACL 2022

Modeling Ideological Salience and Framing in Polarized Online Groups with Graph Neural Networks and Structured Sparsity

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

Existing studies in dialogue system research mostly treat task-oriented dialogue and chit-chat as separate domains. Towards building a human-like assistant that can converse naturally and seamlessly with users, it is important to build a dialogue system that conducts both types of conversations effectively. In this work, we investigate how task-oriented dialogue and knowledge-grounded chit-chat can be effectively integrated into a single model. To this end, we create a new dataset, KETOD (Knowledge-Enriched Task-Oriented Dialogue), where we naturally enrich task-oriented dialogues with chit-chat based on relevant entity knowledge. We also propose two new models, SimpleToDPlus and Combiner, for the proposed task. Experimental results on both automatic and human evaluations show that the proposed methods can significantly improve the performance in knowledge-enriched response generation while maintaining a competitive task-oriented dialog performance. We believe our new dataset will be a valuable resource for future studies. Our dataset and code are publicly available at \urlhttps://github.com/facebookresearch/ketod.

KETOD: Knowledge-Enriched Task-Oriented Dialogue

Goal-oriented dialogue systems face a trade-off between fluent language generation and task-specific control. While supervised learning with large language models is capable of producing realistic text, how to steer such responses towards completing a specific task without sacrificing language quality remains an open question. In this work, we formulate goal-oriented dialogue as a partially observed Markov decision process, interpreting the language model as a representation of both the dynamics and the policy. This view allows us to extend techniques from learning-based control, such as task relabeling, to derive a simple and effective method to finetune language models in a goal-aware way, leading to significantly improved task performance. We additionally introduce a number of training strategies that serve to better focus the model on the task at hand. We evaluate our method, Context-Aware Language Models (CALM), on a practical flight-booking task using AirDialogue. Empirically, CALM outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 7% in terms of task success, matching human-level task performance.

Context-Aware Language Modeling for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Open-domain conversational systems are assumed to generate equally good responses on multiple domains. Previous work achieved good performance on the single corpus, but training and evaluating on multiple corpora from different domains are less studied. This paper explores methods of generating relevant responses for each of multiple multi-domain corpora. We first examine interleaved learning which intermingles multiple corpora as the baseline. We then investigate two multi-domain learning methods, labeled learning and multi-task labeled learning, which encode each corpus through a unique corpus embedding. Furthermore, we propose Domain-specific Frequency (DF), a novel word-level importance weight that measures the relative importance of a word for a specific corpus compared to other corpora. Based on DF, we propose weighted learning, a method that integrates DF to the loss function. We also adopt DF as a new evaluation metric. Extensive experiments show that our methods gain significant improvements on both automatic and human evaluation. We share our code and data for reproducibility.

Balancing Multi-Domain Corpora Learning for Open-Domain Response Generation

Target-guided response generation enables dialogue systems to smoothly transition a conversation from a dialogue context toward a target sentence. Such control is useful for designing dialogue systems that direct a conversation toward specific goals, such as creating non-obtrusive recommendations or introducing new topics in the conversation. In this paper, we introduce a new technique for target-guided response generation, which first finds a bridging path of commonsense knowledge concepts between the source and the target, and then uses the identified bridging path to generate transition responses. Additionally, we propose techniques to re-purpose existing dialogue datasets for target-guided generation. Experiments reveal that the proposed techniques outperform various baselines on this task.
Finally, we observe that the existing automated metrics for this task correlate poorly with human judgement ratings. We propose a novel evaluation metric that we demonstrate is more reliable for target-guided response evaluation. Our work generally enables dialogue system designers to exercise more control over the conversations that their systems produce.

Target-Guided Dialogue Response Generation Using Commonsense and Data Augmentation

Persuasion is an intricate process involving empathetic connection between two individuals. Plain persuasive responses may make a conversation non-engaging. 
Even the most well-intended and reasoned persuasive conversations can fall through in the absence of empathetic connection between the speaker and listener. In this paper, we propose a novel task of incorporating empathy when generating persuasive responses. We develop an empathetic persuasive dialogue system by fine-tuning a maximum likelihood Estimation (MLE)-based language model in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. To design feedbacks for our RL-agent, we define an effective and efficient reward function considering consistency, repetitiveness, emotion and persuasion rewards to ensure consistency, non-repetitiveness, empathy and persuasiveness in the generated responses. Due to lack of emotion annotated persuasive data, we first annotate the existing Persuaion For Good dataset with emotions, then build transformer based classifiers to provide emotion based feedbacks to our RL agent. Experimental results confirm that our proposed model increases the rate of generating persuasive responses as compared to the available state-of-the-art dialogue models while making the dialogues empathetically more engaging and retaining the language quality in responses.

Empathetic Persuasion: Reinforcing Empathy and Persuasiveness in Dialogue Systems

Previous works show that discourse analysis benefits from modeling  intra- and inter-sentential levels separately, where proper representations for text units of different granularities are desired to capture both the information of the text units and their relation to the context. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of transformers to encode different contextualized representations of units of different levels to dynamically capture the information required for discourse dependency analysis on intra- and inter-sentential levels. Motivated by the observation of writing patterns shared across articles to improve discourse analysis, we propose to design sequence labeling methods to take advantage of such structural information from the context that substantially outperforms traditional direct classification methods. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on both English and Chinese datasets.

Improve Discourse Dependency Parsing with Contextualized Representations

Transformer-based pre-trained models with millions of parameters require large storage. Recent approaches tackle this shortcoming by training adapters, but these approaches still require a relatively large number of parameters. In this study, AdapterBias, a surprisingly simple yet effective adapter architecture, is proposed. AdapterBias adds a token-dependent shift to the hidden output of transformer layers to adapt to downstream tasks with only a vector and a linear layer. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of AdapterBias. The experiments show that our proposed method can dramatically reduce the trainable parameters compared to the previous works with a minimal decrease in task performances compared with fine-tuned pre-trained models. We further find that AdapterBias automatically learns to assign more significant representation shifts to the tokens related to the task in consideration. 


AdapterBias: Parameter-efficient Token-dependent Representation Shift for Adapters in NLP Tasks

The energy requirements of current natural language processing models continue to grow at a rapid, unsustainable pace. Recent works highlighting this problem conclude there is an urgent need for methods that reduce the energy needs of NLP and machine learning more broadly. In this article, we investigate techniques that can be used to reduce the energy consumption of common NLP applications. In particular, we focus on techniques to measure energy usage and different hardware and datacenter-oriented settings that can be tuned to reduce energy consumption for training and inference for language models. We characterize the impact of these settings on metrics such as computational performance and energy consumption through experiments conducted on a high performance computing system as well as popular cloud computing platforms. These techniques can lead to significant reduction in energy consumption when training language models or their use for inference. For example, power-capping, which limits the maximum power a GPU can consume, can enable a 15% decrease in energy usage with marginal increase in overall computation time when training a transformer-based language model.

Great Power, Great Responsibility: Recommendations for Reducing Energy for Training Language Models

The massive amount of trainable parameters in the pre-trained language models (PLMs) makes them hard to be deployed to multiple downstream tasks. To address this issue, parameter-efficient transfer learning methods have been proposed to tune only a few parameters during fine-tuning while freezing the rest. This paper looks at existing methods along this line through the \textitkernel lens. Motivated by the connection between self-attention in transformer-based PLMs and kernel learning, we propose \textitkernel-wise adapters, namely \textitKernel-mix, that utilize the kernel structure in self-attention to guide the assignment of the tunable parameters. These adapters use guidelines found in classical kernel learning and enable separate parameter tuning for each attention head. Our empirical results, over a diverse set of natural language generation and understanding tasks, show that our proposed adapters can attain or improve the strong performance of existing baselines.

Empowering parameter-efficient transfer learning by recognizing the kernel structure in self-attention

Large transformer-based pre-trained language models have achieved impressive performance on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks and can capture factual knowledge in their parameters. We argue that storing large amounts of knowledge in the model parameters is sub-optimal given the ever-growing amounts of knowledge and resource requirements. We posit that a more efficient alternative is to provide explicit access to contextually relevant structured knowledge to the model and train it to use that knowledge. We present LM-CORE -- a general framework to achieve this-- that allows \textitdecoupling of the language model training from the external knowledge source and allows the latter to be updated without affecting the already trained model. Experimental results show that LM-CORE, having access to external knowledge, achieves significant and robust outperformance over state-of-the-art knowledge-enhanced language models on knowledge probing tasks; can effectively handle knowledge updates; and performs well on two downstream tasks. We also present a thorough error analysis highlighting the successes and failures of LM-CORE. Our code and model checkpoints are publicly available.

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KETOD: Knowledge-Enriched Task-Oriented Dialogue

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