Korea, Republic of

Treebank selection for parsing evaluation and the spurious effects that might arise from a biased choice have not been explored in detail. This paper studies how evaluating on a single subset of treebanks can lead to weak conclusions. First, we take a few contrasting parsers, and run them on subsets of treebanks proposed in previous work, whose use was justified (or not) on criteria such as typology or data scarcity. Second, we run a large-scale version of this experiment, create vast amounts of random subsets of treebanks, and compare on them many parsers whose scores are available. The results show substantial variability across subsets and that although establishing guidelines for good treebank selection is hard, it is possible to detect potentially harmful strategies.

COLING 2022

The Fragility of Multi-Treebank Parsing Evaluation

multilinguality

dependency parsing

evaluation

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 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 will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

technical paper

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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 including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Recently, many task-oriented dialogue systems
need to serve users in different languages. However,
it is time-consuming to collect enough
data of each language for training. Thus, zeroshot
adaptation of cross-lingual task-oriented
dialog systems has been studied. Most of existing
methods consider the word-level alignments
to conduct two main tasks for taskoriented
dialogue system, i.e., intent detection
and slot filling, and they rarely explore the dependency
relations among these two tasks. In
this paper, we propose a hierarchical framework
to classify the pre-defined intents in the
high-level and fulfill slot filling under the guidance
of intent in the low-level. Particularly, we
incorporate sentence-level alignment among
different languages to enhance the performance
of intent detection. The extensive experiments
report that our proposed method achieves the
SOTA performance on the public task-oriented
dialog dataset.

HCLD: A Hierarchical Framework for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Dialogue System

Cross-lingual Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsers are currently evaluated in comparison to gold English AMRs, despite parsing a language other than English, due to the lack of multilingual AMR evaluation metrics. This evaluation practice is problematic because of the established effect of source language on AMR structure. In this work, we present three multilingual adaptations of monolingual AMR evaluation metrics and compare the performance of these metrics to sentence-level human judgments. We then use our most highly correlated metric to evaluate the output of state-of-the-art cross-lingual AMR parsers, finding that Smatch may still be a useful metric in comparison to gold English AMRs, while our multilingual adaptation of S2match (XS2match) is best for comparison with gold in-language AMRs.

Accounting for Language Effect in the Evaluation of Cross-lingual AMR Parsers

Word ordering is a constrained language generation task taking unordered words as input. Existing work uses linear models and neural networks for the task, yet pre-trained language models have not been studied in word ordering, let alone why they help. We use BART as an instance and show its effectiveness in the task. To explain why BART helps word ordering, we extend analysis with probing and empirically identify that syntactic dependency knowledge in BART is a reliable explanation. We also report performance gains with BART in the related partial tree linearization task, which readily extends our analysis.

On the Role of Pre-trained Language Models in Word Ordering: A Case Study with BART

Predicting word embeddings for out of vocabulary words remains an important challenge for NLP tools. Word embedding models only include terms that occur a sufficient number of times in their training corpora. Word embedding vector models attempt to approximate information about a word not in their vocabularies. We propose a fast method for predicting vectors for out of vocabulary terms that makes use of the surrounding terms of the unknown term and the hidden context layer of the word2vec model. We propose this method as a strong baseline in the sense that 1) while it does not surpass all state-of-the-art methods, it surpasses several techniques for vector prediction on benchmark tasks, 2) even when it underperforms, the margin is small retaining competitive performance in downstream tasks, and 3) it is inexpensive to compute, requiring no additional training stage. We also show that our technique can be incorporated into existing methods to achieve a new state-of-the-art on the word vector prediction problem.

COIN – An Inexpensive and Strong Baseline for Predicting Out of Vocabulary Word Embeddings

As we know, people are able to use thousands of languages to describe images, but languages only share one visual world. Multi-modal Machine Translation aims to optimize the conventional text-only machine translation systems by using multi-modal information, which has received growing research attentions in the fields of CV and NLP, recently.

Noise-robust Cross-modal Interactive Learning with Text2image Mask for Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation

Sentiment analysis in social media is challenging since posts are short of context. As
a popular way to express emotion on social media, stickers related to these posts can supplement missing sentiments and help identify sentiments precisely. However, research about stickers has not been investigated further. To this end, we present a Chinese sticker-based multimodal dataset for the sentiment analysis
task (CSMSA). Compared with previous realworld photo-based multimodal datasets, the CSMSA dataset focuses on stickers, conveying more vivid and moving emotions. The sticker-based multimodal sentiment analysis task is challenging in three aspects: inherent multimodality of stickers, significant interseries variations between stickers, and complex multimodal sentiment fusion. We propose SAMSAM to address the above three challenges. Our model introduces a flexible masked self-attention mechanism to allow the dynamic interaction between post texts and stickers. The experimental results indicate that our model performs best compared with other models. More researches need to be devoted to this field.

Towards Exploiting Sticker for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis in Social Media: A New Dataset and Baseline

Zero-shot learning for Dialogue State Tracking (DST) focuses on generalizing to an unseen domain without the expense of collecting indomain data. However, previous zero-shot DST methods ignore the slot dependencies in a multidomain dialogue, resulting in sub-optimal performances when adapting to unseen domains.
In this paper, we utilize slot prompts combination, slot values demonstration, and slot constraint object to model the slot-slot dependency, slot-value dependency and slot-context dependency respectively. Specifically, each slot prompt consists of a slot-specific prompt and a slot-shared prompt to capture the shared knowledge across different domains. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed method over existing state-of-art generation methods under zero-shot/few-shot settings.

Slot Dependency Modeling for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking

Generalized text representations are the foun- dation of many natural language understanding tasks. To fully utilize the different corpus, it is inevitable that models need to understand the relevance among them. However, many methods ignore the relevance and adopt a single-channel model (a coarse paradigm) directly for all tasks, which lacks enough rationality and interpretation. In addition, some existing works learn downstream tasks by stitches skill block (a fine paradigm), which might cause irrational results due to its redundancy and noise. In this work, we first analyze the task correlation through three different perspectives, i.e., data property, manual design, and model-based relevance, based on which the similar tasks are grouped together. Then, we propose a hierarchical framework with a coarse-to-fine paradigm, with the bottom level shared to all the tasks, the mid-level divided to different groups, and the top-level assigned to each of the tasks. This allows our model to learn basic language properties from all tasks, boost performance on rele- vant tasks, and reduce the negative impact from irrelevant tasks. Our experiments on 13 benchmark datasets across four natural language understanding tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Coarse-to-Fine: Hierarchical Multi-task Learning for Natural Language Understanding

Traditional intent classification models are based on a pre-defined intent set and only recognize limited in-domain (IND) intent classes. But users may input out-of-domain (OOD) queries in a practical dialogue system. Such OOD queries can provide directions for future improvement. In this paper, we define a new task, Generalized Intent Discovery (GID), which aims to extend an IND intent classifier to an open-world intent set including IND and OOD intents. We hope to simultaneously classify a set of labeled IND intent classes while discovering and recognizing new unlabeled OOD types incrementally. We construct three public datasets for different application scenarios and propose two kinds of frameworks, pipeline-based and end-to-end for future work. Further, We conduct exhaustive experiments and qualitative analysis to comprehend key challenges and provide new guidance for future GID research.

Generalized Intent Discovery: Learning from Open World Dialogue System

Knowledge graph (KG) inference aims to address the natural incompleteness of KGs, including rule learning-based and KG embedding (KGE) models. However, the rule learning-based models suffer from low efficiency and generalization while KGE models lack interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel and effective closed-loop neural-symbolic learning framework EngineKG via incorporating our developed KGE and rule learning modules. KGE module exploits symbolic rules and paths to enhance the semantic association between entities and relations for improving KG embeddings and interpretability. A novel rule pruning mechanism is proposed in the rule learning module by leveraging paths as initial candidate rules and employing KG embeddings together with concepts for extracting more high-quality rules. Experimental results on four real-world datasets show that our model outperforms the relevant baselines on link prediction tasks, demonstrating the superiority of our KG inference model in a neural-symbolic learning fashion.

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HCLD: A Hierarchical Framework for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Dialogue System

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