United States

Recent studies show that pre-trained language models (LMs) are vulnerable to textual adversarial attacks. However, existing attack methods either suffer from low attack success rates or fail to search efficiently in the exponentially large perturbation space. We propose an efficient and effective framework SemAttack to generate natural adversarial text by constructing different semantic perturbation functions. In particular, SemAttack optimizes the generated perturbations constrained on generic semantic spaces, including typo space, knowledge space (e.g., WordNet), contextualized semantic space (e.g., the embedding space of BERT clusterings), or the combination of these spaces. Thus, the generated adversarial texts are more semantically close to the original inputs. Extensive experiments reveal that state-of-the-art (SOTA) large-scale LMs (e.g., DeBERTa-v2) and defense strategies (e.g., FreeLB) are still vulnerable to SemAttack. We further demonstrate that SemAttack is general and able to generate natural adversarial texts for different languages (e.g., English and Chinese) with high attack success rates. Human evaluations also confirm that our generated adversarial texts are natural and barely affect human performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AI-secure/SemAttack.

NAACL 2022

SemAttack: Natural Textual Attacks via Different Semantic Spaces

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

Single-task models have proven pivotal in solving specific tasks; however, they have limitations in real-world applications where multi-tasking is necessary and domain shifts are exhibited. Recently, instructional prompts have shown significant improvement towards multi-task generalization; however, the effect of instructional prompts and Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has not been systematically studied in the biomedical domain. Motivated by this, this paper explores the impact of instructional prompts for biomedical MTL. We introduce the BoX, a collection of 32 instruction tasks for Biomedical NLP across (X) various categories. Using this meta-dataset, we propose a unified model termed as In-BoXBART, that can jointly learn all tasks of the BoX without any task-specific modules. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose a unified model in the biomedical domain and use instructions to achieve generalization across several biomedical tasks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model: 1) outperforms single-task baseline by ~3% and multi-task (without instruction) baseline by ~18% on an average, and 2) shows ~23% improvement compared to single-task baseline in few-shot learning (i.e., 32 instances per task) on an average. Our analysis indicates that there is significant room for improvement across tasks in the BoX, implying the scope for future research direction.

In-BoXBART: Get Instructions into Biomedical Multi-Task Learning

Inspired by human fact checkers, who use different types of evidence (e.g. tables, images, audio) in addition to text, several datasets with tabular evidence data have been released in recent years. Whilst the datasets encourage research on table fact-checking, they rely on information from restricted data sources, such as Wikipedia for creating claims and extracting evidence data, making the fact-checking process different from the real-world process used by fact checkers. In this paper, we introduce PubHealthTab, a table fact-checking dataset based on real world public health claims and noisy evidence tables from sources similar to those used by real fact checkers. We outline our approach for collecting evidence data from various websites and present an in-depth analysis of our dataset. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art table representation and pre-trained models fine-tuned on our dataset, achieving an overall $F_1$ score of 0.73. 

PubHealthTab: A Public Health Table-based Dataset for Evidence-based Fact Checking

Mined bitexts can contain imperfect translations that yield unreliable training signals for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). While filtering such pairs out is known to improve final model quality, we argue that it is suboptimal in low-resource conditions where even mined data can be limited. In our work, we propose instead, to refine the mined bitexts via automatic editing: given a sentence in a language $x_f$, and a possibly imperfect translation of it $\mathbfx_e$, our model generates a revised version $x_f'$ or $x_e'$ that yields a more equivalent translation pair (i.e., <$x_f, x_e'$> or <$x_f', x_e$>). We use a simple editing strategy by (1) mining potentially imperfect translations for each sentence in a given bitext, (2) learning a model to reconstruct the original translations and translate, in a multi-task fashion. Experiments demonstrate that our approach successfully improves the quality of CCMatrix mined bitext for $5$ low-resource language-pairs and $10$ translation directions by up to ~$8$ BLEU points, in most cases improving upon a competitive translation-based baseline.

BitextEdit: Automatic Bitext Editing for Improved Low-Resource Machine Translation

The machine translation (MT) task is typically formulated as that of returning a single translation for an input segment. However, in many cases, multiple different translations are valid and the appropriate translation may depend on the intended target audience, characteristics of the speaker, or even the relationship between speakers. Specific problems arise when dealing with honorifics, particularly translating from English into languages with formality markers. For example, the sentence "Are you sure?" can be translated in German as "Sind Sie sich sicher?" (formal register) or "Bist du dir sicher?" (informal). Using wrong or inconsistent tone may be perceived as inappropriate or jarring for users of certain cultures and demographics. 

This work addresses the problem of learning to control target language attributes, in this case formality, from a small amount of labeled contrastive data. We introduce an annotated dataset (CoCoA-MT) and an associated evaluation metric for training and evaluating formality-controlled MT models for six diverse target languages. We show that we can train formality-controlled models by fine-tuning on labeled contrastive data, achieving high accuracy (82% in-domain and 73% out-of-domain) while maintaining overall quality.

CoCoA-MT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Contrastive Controlled MT with Application to Formality

News recommendation is different from movie or e-commercial recommendation as people usually do not grade the news. Therefore, user feedback for news is always implicit (click behavior, reading time, etc). Inevitably, there are noises in implicit feedback. On one hand, the user may exit immediately after clicking the news as he dislikes the news content, leaving the noise in his positive implicit feedback; on the other hand, the user may be recommended multiple interesting news at the same time and only click one of them, producing the noise in his negative implicit feedback. Opposite implicit feedback could construct more integrated user preferences and help each other to minimize the noise influence. Previous works on news recommendation only used positive implicit feedback and suffered from the noise impact. In this paper, we propose a denoising neural network for news recommendation with positive and negative implicit feedback, named DRPN. DRPN utilizes both feedback for recommendation with a module to denoise both positive and negative implicit feedback to further enhance the performance. Experiments on the real-world large-scale dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of DRPN.

Denoising Neural Network for News Recommendation with Positive and Negative Implicit Feedback

Works on learning job title representation are mainly based on \textitJob-Transition Graph, built from the working history of talents. However, since these records are usually messy, this graph is very sparse, which affects the quality of the learned representation and hinders further analysis. To address this specific issue, we propose to enrich the graph with additional nodes that improve the quality of job title representation. Specifically, we construct \textitJob-Transition-Tag Graph, a heterogeneous graph containing two types of nodes, i.e., job titles and tags (i.e., words related to job responsibilities or functionalities). Along this line, we reformulate job title representation learning as the task of learning node embedding on the \textitJob-Transition-Tag Graph. Experiments on two datasets show the interest of our approach.

Towards Job-Transition-Tag Graph for a Better Job Title Representation Learning

As the issues of privacy and trust are receiving increasing attention within the research community, various attempts have been made to anonymize textual data. A significant subset of these approaches incorporate differentially private mechanims to perturb word embeddings, thus replacing individual words in a sentence. While these methods represent very important contributions, have various advantages over other techniques and do show anonymization capabilities,
they have several shortcomings. In this paper, we investigate these weaknesses and demonstrate significant mathematical constraints diminishing the theoretical privacy guarantee
as well as major practical shortcomings with regard to the protection against deanonymization attacks, the preservation of content of the original sentences as well as the quality of the language output. Finally, we propose a new method for text anonymization based on transformer based language models fine-tuned for paraphrasing that circumvents most of the identified weaknesses and also offers a formal privacy guarantee. We evaluate the performance of our method via thourough experimentation and demonstrate superior performance over the discussed mechanisms.

The Limits of Word Level Differential Privacy

The Situated Interactive Multi-Modal Conversations (SIMMC) 2.0 aims to create virtual shopping assistants that can accept complex multi-modal inputs, i.e. visual appearances of objects and user utterances. It consists of four subtasks, multi-modal disambiguation (MM-Disamb), multi-modal coreference resolution (MM-Coref), multi-modal dialog state tracking (MM-DST), and response retrieval and generation. While many task-oriented dialog systems usually tackle each subtask separately, we propose a jointly learned multi-modal encoder-decoder that incorporates visual inputs and performs all four subtasks at once for efficiency. This approach won the MM-Coref and response retrieval subtasks and nominated runner-up for the remaining subtasks using a single unified model at the 10th Dialog Systems Technology Challenge (DSTC10), setting a high bar for the novel task of multi-modal task-oriented dialog systems.

Learning to Embed Multi-Modal Contexts for Situated Conversational Agents

Opponent modeling is the task of inferring another party's mental state within the context of social interactions. In a multi-issue negotiation, it involves inferring the relative importance that the opponent assigns to each issue under discussion, which is crucial for finding high-value deals. A practical model for this task needs to infer these priorities of the opponent on the fly based on partial dialogues as input, without needing additional annotations for training. In this work, we propose a ranker for identifying these priorities from negotiation dialogues. The model takes in a partial dialogue as input and predicts the priority order of the opponent. We further devise ways to adapt related data sources for this task to provide more explicit supervision for incorporating the opponent's preferences and offers, as a proxy to relying on granular utterance-level annotations. We show the utility of our proposed approach through extensive experiments based on two dialogue datasets. We find that the proposed data adaptations lead to strong performance in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Moreover, they allow the model to perform better than baselines while accessing fewer utterances from the opponent. We release our code to support future work in this direction.

Opponent Modeling in Negotiation Dialogues by Related Data Adaptation

Individuals, educational institutions, and businesses are prolific at generating instructional video content such as “how-to” and tutorial guides. While significant progress has been made in basic video understanding tasks, identifying procedural intent within these instructional videos is a challenging and important task that remains unexplored but essential to video summarization, search, and recommendations. This paper introduces the problem of instructional intent identification and extraction from software instructional livestreams. We construct and present a new multimodal dataset consisting of software instructional livestreams and containing manual annotations for both detailed and abstract procedural intent that enable training and evaluation of joint video and text understanding models. We then introduce a multimodal cascaded cross-attention model to efficiently combine the weaker and noisier video signal with the more discriminative text signal. Our experiments show that our proposed model brings significant gains compared to strong baselines, including large-scale pretrained multimodal models. Our analysis further identifies that the task benefits from spatial as well as motion features extracted from videos, and provides insight on how the video signal is preferentially used for intent discovery. We also show that current models struggle to comprehend the nature of abstract intents, revealing important gaps in multimodal understanding and paving the way for future work.

SemAttack: Natural Textual Attacks via Different Semantic Spaces

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In-BoXBART: Get Instructions into Biomedical Multi-Task Learning

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