United States

We propose a novel open-domain question-answering dataset based on the Common Crawl project. With a previously unseen number of around 130 million multilingual question-answer pairs (including about 60 million English data-points), we use our large-scale, natural, diverse and high-quality corpus to in-domain pre-train popular language models for the task of question-answering. In our experiments, we find that our Common Crawl Question Answering dataset (CCQA) achieves promising results in zero-shot, low resource and fine-tuned settings across multiple tasks, models and benchmarks.

NAACL 2022

CCQA: A New Web-Scale Question Answering Dataset for Model Pre-Training

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

Recent work on Open Domain Question Answering has shown that there is a large discrepancy in model performance between novel test questions and those that largely overlap with training questions. However, it is unclear which aspects of novel questions make them challenging. Drawing upon studies on systematic generalization, we introduce and annotate questions according to three categories that measure different levels and kinds of generalization: training set overlap, compositional generalization (comp-gen), and novel-entity generalization (novel-entity). When evaluating six popular parametric and non-parametric models, we find that for the established Natural Questions and TriviaQA datasets, even the strongest model performance for comp-gen/novel-entity is 13.1/5.4% and 9.6/1.5% lower compared to that for the full test set -- indicating the challenge posed by these types of questions. Furthermore, we show that whilst non-parametric models can handle questions containing novel entities relatively well, they struggle with those requiring compositional generalization. Lastly, we find that key question difficulty factors are: cascading errors from the retrieval component, frequency of question pattern, and frequency of the entity.

Challenges in Generalization in Open Domain Question Answering

Knowing the reasoning chains from knowledge to the predicted answers can help construct an explainable question answering (QA) system. Advances on QA explanation propose to explain the answers with entailment trees composed of multiple entailment steps. While current work proposes to generate entailment trees with end-to-end generative models, the steps in the generated trees are not constrained and could be unreliable. In this paper, we propose METGEN, a Module-based Entailment Tree GENeration framework that has multiple modules and a reasoning controller. Given a question and several supporting knowledge, METGEN can iteratively generate the entailment tree by conducting single-step entailment with separate modules and selecting the reasoning flow with the controller. As each module is guided to perform a specific type of entailment reasoning, the steps generated by METGEN are more reliable and valid. Experiment results on the standard benchmark show that METGEN can outperform previous state-of-the-art models with only 9% of the parameters.

METGEN: A Module-Based Entailment Tree Generation Framework for Answer Explanation

Numerical reasoning over text is a challenging subtask in question answering (QA) that requires both the understanding of texts and numbers. However, existing language models in these numerical reasoning QA models tend to overly rely on the pre-existing parametric knowledge at inference time, which commonly causes hallucination in interpreting numbers. Our work proposes a novel attention masked reasoning model, the NC-BERT, that learns to leverage the number-related contextual knowledge to alleviate the over-reliance on parametric knowledge and enhance the numerical reasoning capabilities of the QA model. The empirical results suggest that understanding of numbers in their context by reducing the parametric knowledge influence, and refining numerical information in the number embeddings lead to improved numerical reasoning accuracy and performance in DROP, a numerical QA dataset.

Exploiting Numerical-Contextual Knowledge to Improve Numerical Reasoning in Question Answering

We study open-domain question answering with structured, unstructured and semi-structured knowledge sources, including text, tables, lists and knowledge bases. Departing from prior work, we propose a unifying approach that homogenizes all sources by reducing them to text and applies the retriever-reader model which has so far been limited to text sources only. Our approach greatly improves the results on knowledge-base QA tasks by 11 points, compared to latest graph-based methods. More importantly, we demonstrate that our unified knowledge (UniK-QA) model is a simple and yet effective way to combine heterogeneous sources of knowledge, advancing the state-of-the-art results on two popular question answering benchmarks, NaturalQuestions and WebQuestions, by 3.5 and 2.6 points, respectively.

The code of UniK-QA is available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/UniK-QA.

UniK-QA: Unified Representations of Structured and Unstructured Knowledge for Open-Domain Question Answering

Math word problem (MWP) solving faces a dilemma in number representation learning. In order to avoid the number representation issue and reduce the search space of feasible solutions, existing works striving for MWP solving usually replace real numbers with symbolic placeholders to focus on logic reasoning. However, different from common symbolic reasoning tasks like program synthesis and knowledge graph reasoning, MWP solving has extra requirements in numerical reasoning. In other words, instead of the number value itself, it is the reusable numerical property that matters more in numerical reasoning. Therefore, we argue that injecting numerical properties into symbolic placeholders with contextualized representation learning schema can provide a way out of the dilemma in the number representation issue here. In this work, we introduce this idea to the popular pre-training language model (PLM) techniques and build MWP-BERT, an effective contextual number representation PLM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our MWP-BERT on MWP solving and several MWP-specific understanding tasks on both English and Chinese benchmarks.

MWP-BERT: Numeracy-Augmented Pre-training for Math Word Problem Solving

Previous studies on question answering over knowledge graphs have typically operated over a single knowledge graph (KG). This KG is assumed to be known a priori and is lever- aged similarly for all users’ queries during inference. However, such an assumption is not applicable to real-world settings, such as health- care, where one needs to handle queries of new users over unseen KGs during inference. Furthermore, privacy concerns and high computational costs render it infeasible to query the single KG that has information about all users while answering a specific user’s query. The above concerns motivate our question answer- ing setting over personalized knowledge graphs (PERKGQA) where each user has restricted access to their KG. We observe that current state-of-the-art KGQA methods that require learning prior node representations fare poorly. We propose two complementary approaches, PATHCBR and PATHRGCN for PERKGQA. The former is a simple non-parametric technique that employs case-based reasoning, while the latter is a parametric approach using graph neural networks. Our proposed methods circumvent learning prior representations, can generalize to unseen KGs, and outperform strong baselines on an academic and an internal dataset by 6.5% and 10.5%.

PerKGQA: Question Answering over Personalized Knowledge Graphs

Masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Understanding in the past few years. However, existing pre-trained MLMs often output an anisotropic distribution of token representations that occupies a narrow subset of the entire representation space. Such token representations are not ideal, especially for tasks that demand discriminative semantic meanings of distinct tokens. In this work, we propose TaCL (Token-aware Contrastive Learning), a novel continual pre-training approach that encourages BERT to learn an isotropic and discriminative distribution of token representations. TaCL is fully unsupervised and requires no additional data. We extensively test our approach on a wide range of English and Chinese benchmarks. The results show that TaCL brings consistent and notable improvements over the original BERT model. Furthermore, we conduct detailed analysis to reveal the merits and inner-workings of our approach.

TaCL: Improving BERT Pre-training with Token-aware Contrastive Learning

Text-to-SQL parsers are crucial in enabling non-experts to effortlessly query relational data. Training such parsers, by contrast, generally requires expertise in  annotating natural language (NL) utterances with corresponding SQL queries.
In this work, we propose a weak supervision approach for training text-to-SQL parsers. We take advantage of the recently proposed question meaning representation called QDMR, an intermediate between NL and formal query languages.
Given questions, their QDMR structures (annotated by non-experts or automatically predicted), and the answers, we are able to automatically synthesize SQL queries that are used to train text-to-SQL models. We test our approach by experimenting on five benchmark datasets. Our results show that the weakly supervised models perform competitively with those trained on annotated NL-SQL data.
Overall, we effectively train text-to-SQL parsers, while using zero SQL annotations.

Weakly Supervised Text-to-SQL Parsing through Question Decomposition

Recent years have seen the proliferation of disinformation and fake news online. Traditional approaches to mitigate these issues is to use manual or automatic fact-checking. Recently, another approach has emerged: checking whether the input claim has previously been fact-checked, which can be done automatically, and thus fast, while also offering credibility and explainability, thanks to the human fact-checking and explanations in the associated fact-checking article. Here, we focus on claims made in a political debate and we study the impact of modeling the context of the claim: both on the source side, i.e., in the debate, as well as on the target side, i.e., in the fact-checking explanation document. We do this by modeling the local context, the global context, as well as by means of co-reference resolution, and multi-hop reasoning over the sentences of the document describing the fact-checked claim. The experimental results show that each of these represents a valuable information source, but that modeling the source-side context is most important, and can yield 10+ points of absolute improvement over a state-of-the-art model.

The Role of Context in Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims

This paper explores a question-answer driven approach to reveal affirmative interpretations from verbal negations (i.e., when a negation cue grammatically modifies a verb). We create a new corpus consisting of  4,472 verbal negations  and discover that 67.1% of them convey that an event actually occurred. Annotators generate and answer 7,277 questions % converted for 4,000 for the 3,001 negations that convey an affirmative interpretation. We first cast the problem of revealing affirmative interpretations from negations as a natural language inference (NLI) classification task. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art transformers trained with existing NLI corpora are insufficient to reveal affirmative interpretations. We also observe, however, that fine-tuning brings substantial improvements. In addition to NLI classification, we also explore the more realistic task of generating affirmative interpretations directly from negations with the T5 transformer. We conclude that the generation task remains a challenge as T5 substantially underperforms humans.

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Challenges in Generalization in Open Domain Question Answering

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