United States

It can be challenging to build effective open question answering (open QA) systems for languages other than English, mainly due to a lack of labeled data for training. We present a data efficient method to bootstrap such a system for languages other than English. Our approach requires only limited QA resources in the given language, along with machine-translated data, and at least a bilingual language model. To evaluate our approach, we build such a system for the Icelandic language and evaluate performance over trivia style datasets. The corpora used for training are English in origin but machine translated into Icelandic. We train a bilingual Icelandic/English language model to embed English context and Icelandic questions following methodology introduced with DensePhrases (Lee et al., 2021). The resulting system is an open domain cross-lingual QA system between Icelandic and English. Finally, the system is adapted for Icelandic only open QA, demonstrating how it is possible to efficiently create an open QA system with limited access to curated datasets in the language of interest.

NAACL 2022

Cross-Lingual QA as a Steppingstone for Monolingual Open QA in Icelandic

open qa

low resource

question answering

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.

workshop 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

This paper introduces our proposed system for the MIA Shared Task on Cross-lingual Open-retrieval Question Answering (COQA). In this challenging scenario, given an input question the system has to gather evidence documents from a multilingual pool and generate from it an answer in the language of the question. We devised several approaches combining different model variants for three main components: Data Augmentation, Passage Retrieval, and Answer Generation. For passage retrieval, we evaluated the monolingual BM25 ranker (coupled with machine translation) against the ensemble of re-rankers based on multilingual pretrained language models (PLMs) and also variants of the shared task baseline, re-training it from scratch using a recently introduced contrastive loss that maintains a strong gradient signal throughout training by means of mixed negative samples. For answer generation, we focused on language- and domain-specialization by means of continued LM pretraining of existing multilingual encoders. Additionally, for both passage retrieval and answer generation, we augmented the training data provided by the task organizers with automatically generated question answer pairs created from Wikipedia passages, in order to mitigate the issue of data scarcity, particularly for the lower-resource languages for which no training data were provided. Our results show that language- and domain-specialization as well as data augmentation help, especially for low-resource languages.

ZusammenQA: Data Augmentation with Specialized Models for Cross-lingual Open-retrieval Question Answering System

A prominent challenge for modern language understanding systems is the ability to answer implicit reasoning questions, where the required reasoning steps for answering the question are not mentioned in the text explicitly. In this work, we investigate why current models struggle with implicit reasoning question answering (QA) tasks, by decoupling inference of reasoning steps from their execution. We define a new task of implicit relation inference and construct a benchmark, IMPLICITRELATIONS, where given a question, a model should output a list of concept-relation pairs, where the relations describe the implicit reasoning steps required for answering the question. Using IMPLICITRELATIONS, we evaluate models from the GPT-3 family and find that, while these models struggle on the implicit reasoning QA task, they often succeed at inferring implicit relations. This suggests that the bottleneck for answering implicit reasoning questions is in the ability of language models to retrieve and reason over information rather than to plan an accurate reasoning strategy.

Inferring Implicit Relations in Complex Questions with Language Models

Existing pre-trained transformer analysis works usually focus only on one or two model families at a time, overlooking the variability of the architecture and pre-training objectives. In our work, we utilize the oLMpics bench- mark and psycholinguistic probing datasets for a diverse set of 29 models including T5, BART, and ALBERT. Additionally, we adapt the oLMpics zero-shot setup for autoregres- sive models and evaluate GPT networks of different sizes. Our findings show that none of these models can resolve compositional questions in a zero-shot fashion, suggesting that this skill is not learnable using existing pre-training objectives. Furthermore, we find that global model decisions such as architecture, directionality, size of the dataset, and pre-training objective are not predictive of a model’s linguistic capabilities.

Life after BERT: What do Other Muppets Understand about Language?

Gender is a construction in line with social perception and judgment. An important means of this construction is through languages. When natural language processing tools, such as word embeddings, associate gender with the relevant categories of social perception and judgment, it is likely to cause bias and harm to those groups that do not conform to the mainstream social perception and judgment. Using 12,251 Chinese word embeddings as intermedium, this paper studies the relationship between social perception and judgment categories and gender. The results reveal that these grammatical gender-neutral Chinese word embeddings show a certain gender bias, which is consistent with the mainstream society's perception and judgment of gender. Men are judged by their actions and perceived as bad, easily-disgusted, bad-tempered and rational roles while women are judged by their appearances and perceived as perfect, either happy or sad, and emotional roles.

Analysis of Gender Bias in Social Perception and Judgement Using Chinese Word Embeddings

People frequently interact with information retrieval (IR) systems, however, IR models exhibit biases and discrimination towards various demographics. The in-processing fair ranking methods provide a trade-offs between accuracy and fairness through adding a fairness-related regularization term in the loss function. However, there haven’t been intuitive objective functions that depend on the click probability and user engagement to directly optimize towards this. In this work, we propose the In-Batch Balancing Regularization (IBBR) to mitigate the ranking disparity among subgroups. In particular, we develop a differentiable normed Pairwise Ranking Fairness (nPRF) and leverage the T-statistics on top of nPRF over sub-groups as a regularization to improve fairness. Empirical results with the BERT-based neural rankers on the MS MARCO Passage Retrieval dataset with the human-annotated non-gendered queries benchmark (Rekabsaz and Schedl, 2020) show that our IBBR method with nPRF achieves significantly less bias with minimal degradation in ranking performance compared with the baseline

Debiasing Neural Retrieval via In-batch Balancing Regularization

Have you ever wondered where one can find gender biases? They hide within language models (LM) and we will show how to find them! Our new framework can identify regions of a LM that contain bias – it exploits movement pruning to do so. We also show the utility of our framework by conducting gender bias study in BERT. Based on our observations, show an improvement to an existing debiasing method.

Gender Biases and Where to Find Them

Word embeddings learned from massive text collections have demonstrated significant levels of discriminative biases.
However, debiasing on the Chinese language, one of the most spoken languages, has been less explored.
Meanwhile, existing literature relies on manually created supplementary data, which is time- and energy-consuming.
In this work, we propose the first Chinese Gender-neutral word Embedding model (CGE) based on Word2vec, which learns gender-neutral word embeddings without any labeled data.
Concretely, CGE utilizes and emphasizes the rich feminine and masculine information contained in radicals, \ie a kind of component in Chinese characters, during the training procedure.
This consequently alleviates discriminative gender biases.
Experimental results show that our unsupervised method outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised debiased word embedding models without sacrificing the functionality of the embedding model.

Unsupervised Mitigation of Gender Bias by Character Components: A Case Study of Chinese Word Embedding

Pre-trained word embedding models are easily distributed and applied, as they alleviatevusers from the effort to train models themselves. With widely distributed models, it is important to ensure that they do not exhibit undesired behaviour, such as biases against population groups. For this purpose, we carry outvan empirical study on evaluating the bias of 15 publicly available, pre-trained word embeddings model based on three training algorithms (GloVe, word2vec, and fastText) with
regard to four bias metrics (WEAT, SEMBIAS, DIRECT BIAS, and ECT). The choice of word embedding models and bias metrics is motivated by a literature survey over 37 publications which quantified bias on pre-trained word embeddings. Our results indicate that fastText is the least biased model (in 8 out of 12 cases) and small vector lengths lead to a higher bias.

An Empirical Study on the Fairness of Pre-trained Word Embeddings

Considerable efforts to measure and mitigate gender bias in recent years have led to the introduction of an abundance of tasks, datasets, and metrics used in this vein. 
In this position paper, we assess the current paradigm of gender bias evaluation and identify several flaws in it. First, we highlight the importance of extrinsic bias metrics that measure how a model's performance on some task is affected by gender, as opposed to intrinsic evaluations of model representations, which are less strongly connected to specific harms to people interacting with systems. We find that only a few extrinsic metrics are measured in most studies, although more can be measured. Second, we find that datasets and metrics are often coupled, and discuss how their coupling hinders the ability to obtain reliable conclusions, and how one may decouple them. We then investigate how the choice of the dataset and its composition, as well as the choice of the metric, affect bias measurement, finding significant variations across each of them. Finally, we propose several guidelines for more reliable gender bias evaluation.

Choose Your Lenses: Flaws in Gender Bias Evaluation

The growing capability and availability of generative
language models has enabled a wide
range of new downstream tasks. Academic research
has identified, quantified and mitigated
biases present in language models but is rarely
tailored to downstream tasks where wider impact
on individuals and society can be felt. In
this work, we leverage one popular generative
language model, GPT-3, with the goal of writing
unbiased and realistic job advertisements.
We first assess the bias and realism of zero-shot
generated advertisements and compare them to
real-world advertisements. We then evaluate
prompt-engineering and fine-tuning as debiasing
methods. We find that prompt-engineering
with diversity-encouraging prompts gives no
significant improvement to bias, nor realism.
Conversely, fine-tuning, especially on unbiased
real advertisements, can improve realism and
reduce bias.

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Next from NAACL 2022

ZusammenQA: Data Augmentation with Specialized Models for Cross-lingual Open-retrieval Question Answering System

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