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Referring resolution is the task of identifying the referent of a natural language expression, for example &quot;the woman behind the other woman getting a massage&#39;&#39;. In this paper we investigate which are the kinds of referring expressions on which current transformer based models fail. Motivated by this analysis we identify the weakening of the spatial natural constraints as one of its causes and propose a model that aims to restore it. We evaluate our proposed model on different datasets for the task showing improved performance on the most challenging kinds of referring expressions. Finally we present a thorough analysis of the kinds errors that are improved by the new model and those that are not and remain future challenges for the task.

NAACL 2022

What kinds of errors do reference resolution models make and what can we learn from them?

referring expression comprehension

error analysis

grounding

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Referring resolution is the task of identifying the referent of a natural language expression, for example "the woman behind the other woman getting a massage''. In this paper we investigate which are the kinds of referring expressions on which current transformer based models fail. Motivated by this analysis we identify the weakening of the spatial natural constraints as one of its causes and propose a model that aims to restore it. We evaluate our proposed model on different datasets for the task showing improved performance on the most challenging kinds of referring expressions. Finally we present a thorough analysis of the kinds errors that are improved by the new model and those that are not and remain future challenges for the task.

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

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks require an agent to navigate through the environment based on language instructions. In this paper, we aim to solve two key challenges in this task: utilizing multilingual instructions for improved instruction-path grounding and navigating through new environments that are unseen during training. To address these challenges, first, our agent learns a shared and visually-aligned cross-lingual language representation for the three languages (English, Hindi and Telugu) in the Room-Across-Room dataset. Our language representation learning is guided by text pairs that are aligned by visual information. Second, our agent learns an environment-agnostic visual representation by maximizing the similarity between semantically-aligned image pairs (with constraints on object-matching) from different environments. Our environment agnostic visual representation can mitigate the environment bias induced by low-level visual information. Empirically, on the Room-Across-Room dataset, we show that our multi-lingual agent gets large improvements in all metrics over the strong baseline model when generalizing to unseen environments with the cross-lingual language representation and the environment-agnostic visual representation. Furthermore, we show that our learned language and visual representations can be successfully transferred to the Room-to-Room and Cooperative Vision-and-Dialogue Navigation task, and present detailed qualitative and quantitative generalization and grounding analysis.

CLEAR: Improving Vision-Language Navigation with Cross-Lingual, Environment-Agnostic Representations

Modern image captioning models are usually trained with text similarity objectives. However, since reference captions in public datasets often describe the most salient common objects, models trained with the text similarity objectives tend to ignore specific and detailed aspects of an image that distinguish it from others. Towards more descriptive and distinctive caption generation, we propose to use CLIP, a multimodal encoder trained on huge image-text pairs from the web, to calculate multi-modal similarity and use it as a reward function. We also propose a simple finetuning strategy of CLIP text encoder to improve grammar that does not require extra text annotation. This completely eliminates the need for reference captions during the reward computation. To comprehensively evaluate descriptive captions, we introduce FineCapEval, a new dataset for caption evaluation with fine-grained criteria: overall, background, object, relations. In our experiments on text-to-image retrieval and FineCapEval, the proposed CLIP-guided model generates more distinctive captions than the CIDEroptimized model. We also show that our unsupervised grammar finetuning of the CLIP text encoder alleviates the degeneration problem of the naive CLIP reward. Lastly, we show human analysis where the annotators strongly prefer CLIP reward to CIDEr and MLE objectives on diverse criteria.

Fine-grained Image Captioning with CLIP Reward

Automatic extraction of narrative elements from text, combining narrative theories with computational models, has been receiving increasing attention over the last few years. Previous works have utilized the oral narrative theory by Labov and Waletzky to identify various narrative elements in personal stories texts. Instead, we direct our focus to informational texts, specifically news stories. 

We introduce NEAT (Narrative Elements AnnoTation) -- a novel NLP task for detecting narrative elements in raw text. For this purpose, we designed a new multi-label narrative annotation scheme, better suited for informational text (e.g. news media), by adapting elements from the narrative theory of Labov and Waletzky (Complication and Resolution) and adding a new narrative element of our own (Success). We then used this scheme to annotate a new dataset of 2,209 sentences, compiled from 46 news articles from various category domains. We trained a number of supervised models in several different setups over the annotated dataset to identify the different narrative elements, achieving an average $F_1$ score of up to 0.77. The results demonstrate the holistic nature of our annotation scheme as well as its robustness to domain category.


Detecting Narrative Elements in Informational Text

Knowledge-based authentication is crucial for task-oriented spoken dialogue systems that offer personalised and privacy-focused services. Such systems should be able to enrol (E), verify (V), and identify (I) new and recurring users based on their personal information, e.g. postcode, name, and date of birth. In this work, we formalise the three authentication tasks and their evaluation protocols, and we present EVI, a challenging spoken multilingual dataset with 5,506 dialogues in English, Polish, and French. Our proposed models set the first competitive benchmarks, explore the challenges of multilingual natural language processing of spoken dialogue, and set directions for future research.

EVI: Multilingual Spoken Dialogue Tasks and Dataset for Knowledge-Based Enrolment, Verification, and Identification

In this work, we introduce BanglaBERT, a BERT-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model pretrained in Bangla, a widely spoken yet low-resource language in the NLP literature. To pretrain BanglaBERT, we collect 27.5 GB of Bangla pretraining data (dubbed 'Bangla2B+') by crawling 110 popular Bangla sites. We introduce two downstream task datasets on natural language inference and question answering and benchmark on four diverse NLU tasks covering text classification, sequence labeling, and span prediction. In the process, we bring them under the first-ever Bangla Language Understanding Benchmark (BLUB). BanglaBERT achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming multilingual and monolingual models. We are making the models, datasets, and a leaderboard publicly available at \urlhttps://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglabert to advance Bangla NLP.

BanglaBERT: Language Model Pretraining and Benchmarks for Low-Resource Language Understanding Evaluation in Bangla

Previous studies have proved that cross-lingual knowledge distillation can significantly improve the performance of pre-trained models for cross-lingual similarity matching tasks. However, the student model needs to be large in this operation. Otherwise, its performance will drop sharply, thus making it impractical to be deployed to memory-limited devices. To address this issue, we delve into cross-lingual knowledge distillation and propose a multi-stage distillation framework for constructing a small-size but high-performance cross-lingual model. In our framework, contrastive learning, bottleneck, and parameter recurrent strategies are delicately combined to prevent performance from being compromised during the compression process. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can compress the size of XLM-R and MiniLM by more than 50%, while the performance is only reduced by about 1%.

Multi-stage Distillation Framework for Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity Matching

Large-scale multilingual pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance in zero-shot cross-lingual tasks. A recent study has demonstrated the effectiveness of self-learning-based approach on cross-lingual transfer, where only unlabeled data of target languages are required, without any efforts to annotate gold labels for target languages. However, it suffers from noisy training due to the incorrectly pseudo-labeled samples. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-aware Cross-Lingual Transfer framework with Pseudo-Partial-Label (CLTP)1 to maximize the utilization of unlabeled data by reducing the noise introduced in the training phase. To estimate pseudo-partial-label for each unlabeled data, we propose a novel estimation method, considering both prediction confidence and the limitation to the number of similar labels. Extensive experiments are conducted on two cross-lingual tasks, including Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Natural Language Inference (NLI) across 40 languages, which shows our method can outperform the baselines on both high-resource and low-resource languages, such as 6.9 on Kazakh (kk) and 5.2 Marathi (mr) for NER.

Uncertainty-Aware Cross-Lingual Transfer with Pseudo Partial Labels

Machine translation models are embedded in larger user-facing systems. Although model evaluation has matured, evaluation at the systems level is still lacking. We review literature from both the translation studies and HCI communities about who uses machine translation and for what purposes. We emphasize an important difference in evaluating machine translation models versus the physical and cultural systems in which they are embedded. We then propose opportunities for improved measurement of user-facing translation systems. We pay particular attention to the need for design and evaluation to aid engendering trust and enhancing user agency in future machine translation systems.

FreeTransfer-X: Safe and Label-Free Cross-Lingual Transfer from Off-the-Shelf Models

Semantic parsing solves knowledge base (KB) question answering (KBQA) by composing a KB query, which generally involves node extraction (NE) and graph composition (GC) to detect and connect related nodes in a query. Despite the strong causal effects between NE and GC, previous works fail to directly model such causalities in their pipeline, hindering the learning of subtask correlations. Also, the sequence-generation process for GC in previous works induces ambiguity and exposure bias, which further harms accuracy. In this work, we formalize semantic parsing into two stages. In the first stage (graph structure generation), we propose a causal-enhanced table-filler to overcome the issues in sequence-modelling and to learn the internal causalities. In the second stage (relation extraction), an efficient beam-search algorithm is presented to scale complex queries on large-scale KBs. Experiments on LC-QuAD 1.0 indicate that our method surpasses previous state-of-the-arts by a large margin (17%) while remaining time and space efficiency.

Crake: Causal-Enhanced Table-Filler for Question Answering over Large Scale Knowledge Base

Although pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success and become a milestone in NLP, abstractive conversational summarization remains a challenging but less studied task. The difficulty lies in two aspects. One is the lack of large-scale conversational summary data. Another is that applying the existing pre-trained models to this task is tricky because of the structural dependence within the conversation and its informal expression, etc. In this work, we first build a large-scale (11M) pretraining dataset called RCSum, based on the multi-person discussions in the Reddit community. We then present TANet, a thread-aware Transformer-based network. Unlike the existing pre-trained models that treat a conversation as a sequence of sentences, we argue that the inherent contextual dependency among the utterances plays an essential role in understanding the entire conversation and thus propose two new techniques to incorporate the structural information into our model. The first is thread-aware attention which is computed by taking into account the contextual dependency within utterances. Second, we apply thread prediction loss to predict the relations between utterances. We evaluate our model on four datasets of real conversations, covering types of meeting transcripts, customer-service records, and forum threads. Experimental results demonstrate that TANet achieves a new state-of-the-art in terms of both automatic evaluation and human judgment.

What kinds of errors do reference resolution models make and what can we learn from them?

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CLEAR: Improving Vision-Language Navigation with Cross-Lingual, Environment-Agnostic Representations

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