Korea, Republic of

Building dialogue generation systems in a zero-shot scenario remains a huge challenge, since the typical zero-shot approaches in dialogue generation rely heavily on large-scale pre-trained language generation models such as GPT-3 and T5. The research on zero-shot dialogue generation without cumbersome language models is limited due to lacking corresponding parallel dialogue corpora. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective Multilingual learning framework for Zero-shot Dialogue Generation (dubbed as MulZDG) that can effectively transfer knowledge from an English corpus with large-scale training samples to a non-English corpus with zero samples. Besides, MulZDG can be viewed as a multilingual data augmentation method to improve the performance of the resource-rich language. First, we construct multilingual code-switching dialogue datasets via translation utterances randomly selected from monolingual English datasets. Then we employ MulZDG to train a unified multilingual dialogue model based on the code-switching datasets. The MulZDG can conduct implicit semantic alignment between different languages. Experiments on DailyDialog and DSTC7 datasets demonstrate that MulZDG not only achieve competitive performance under zero-shot case compared to training with sufficient examples but also greatly improve the performance of the source language.


COLING 2022

MulZDG: Multilingual Code-Switching Framework for Zero-shot Dialogue Generation

dialogue generation systems zero-shot multilingual learning

# 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! 
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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). 

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

The keyphrase generation task is a challenging work that aims to generate a set of
keyphrases for a piece of text. Many previous studies based on the sequence-to-
sequence model were used to generate keyphrases, and they introduce a copy
mechanism to achieve good results. However, we observed that most of the
keyphrases are composed of some important words (seed words) in the source text,
and if these words can be identified accurately and copied to create more keyphrases, the performance of the model might be improved. To address this challenge, we propose a DualCopyNet model, which introduces an additional sequence labeling layer for identifying seed words, and further copies the words for generating new keyphrases by dual copy mechanisms. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms the baseline models and achieves an obvious performance improvement.

Automatic Keyphrase Generation by Incorporating Dual Copy Mechanisms in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

We present CoNTACT: a Dutch language model adapted to the domain of COVID-19 tweets. The model was developed by continuing the pre-training phase of RobBERT (Delobelle et al., 2020) by using 2.8M Dutch COVID-19 related tweets posted in 2021. In order to test the performance of the model and compare it to RobBERT, the two models were tested on two tasks: (1) binary vaccine hesitancy detection and (2) detection of arguments for vaccine hesitancy. For both tasks, not only Twitter but also Facebook data was used to show cross-genre performance. In our experiments, CoNTACT showed statistically significant gains over RobBERT in all experiments for task 1. For task 2, we observed substantial improvements in virtually all classes in all experiments. An error analysis indicated that the domain adaptation yielded better representations of domain-specific terminology, causing
CoNTACT to make more accurate classification decisions.

CoNTACT: A Dutch COVID-19 Adapted BERT for Vaccine Hesitancy and Argumentation Detection

Dialogue Act tagging with the ISO 24617-2 standard is a difficult task that involves multi- label text classification across a diverse set of labels covering semantic, syntactic and pragmatic aspects of dialogue. The lack of an adequately sized training set annotated with this taxonomy is a major problem when using the standard in practice. In this work, we propose a neural architecture to increase classification accuracy, especially on low-frequency fine-grained tags, on a subset of the ISO 24617-2 taxonomy. Our model takes advantage of the hierarchical structure of the ISO taxonomy and utilises syntactic information in the form of Part-Of-Speech and dependency tags, in addition to contextual information from previous turns. We train our architecture on an aggregated corpus of conversations from different domains, which provides a variety of dialogue interactions and linguistic registers. Our approach achieves state-of-the- art tagging results on the DialogBank bench- mark data set, providing empirical evidence that this architecture can successfully generalise to different domains.

A Multi-Dimensional, Cross-Domain and Hierarchy-Aware Neural Architecture for ISO-Standard Dialogue Act Tagging

Knowledge representation learning is a key step required for link prediction tasks with knowledge graphs (KGs).
During the learning process, the semantics of each entity is embedded by a vector or a point in a feature space.
The distance between these points is a measure of semantic similarity.
However, in a KG, while two entities may have similar semantics in some relations, they have different semantics in others.
It is ambiguous to assign a fixed distance to depict the variant semantic similarity of entities.
To alleviate the semantic ambiguity in KGs, 
we design a new embedding approach named OpticE, which is derived from the well-known physical phenomenon of optical interference.
It is a lightweight and relation-adaptive model based on coherence theory, in which each entity's semantics vary automatically regarding different relations.
In addition, a unique negative sampling method is proposed to combine the multimapping properties and self-adversarial learning during the training process.
The experimental results obtained on practical KG benchmarks show that the OpticE model, with elegant structures, can compete with existing link prediction methods.

OpticE: A Coherence Theory-Based Model for Link Prediction

In the real-world question answering scenarios, hybrid form combining both tabular and textual contents has attracted more and more attention, among which numerical reasoning problem is one of the most typical and challenging problems. Existing methods usually adopt encoder-decoder framework to represent hybrid contents and generate answers. However, it can not capture the rich relationship among numerical value, table schema, and text information on the encoder side. The decoder uses a simple predefined operator classifier which is not flexible enough to handle numerical reasoning processes with diverse expressions. To address these problems, this paper proposes a \textbf{Re}lational \textbf{G}raph enhanced \textbf{H}ybrid table-text \textbf{N}umerical reasoning model with \textbf{T}ree decoder (\textbf{RegHNT}). It models the numerical question answering over table-text hybrid contents as an expression tree generation task. Moreover, we propose a novel relational graph modeling method, which models alignment between questions, tables, and paragraphs. We validated our model on the publicly available table-text hybrid QA benchmark (TAT-QA). The proposed RegHNT significantly outperform the baseline model and achieve state-of-the-art results\footnote{We openly released the source code and data at~\url{https://github.com/lfy79001/RegHNT}}~(2022-05-05).

Answering Numerical Reasoning Questions in Table-Text Hybrid Contents with Graph-based Encoder and Tree-based Decoder

Automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogs remains an unsolved problem. Moreover, existing methods do not correlate strongly with human annotations.
This paper presents a new automated evaluation method using follow-ups: we measure the probability that a language model will continue the conversation with a fixed set of follow-ups (e.g. Not really relevant here, What are you trying to say?). 
When compared against twelve existing methods, our new evaluation achieves the highest correlation with human evaluations.

Open-Domain Dialog Evaluation using Follow-Ups Likelihood

Semantic parsing converts natural language utterances into structured logical expressions. We consider two such formal representations: Propositional Logic (PL) and First-order Logic (FOL). The paucity of labeled data is a major challenge in this field. In previous works, dual reinforcement learning has been proposed as an approach to reduce dependence on labeled data. However, this method has the following limitations: 1) The reward needs to be set manually and is not applicable to all kinds of logical expressions. 2) The training process easily collapses when models are trained with only the reward from dual reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a scoring model to automatically learn a model-based reward, and an effective training strategy based on curriculum learning is further proposed to stabilize the training process. In addition to the technical contribution, a Chinese-PL/FOL dataset is constructed to compensate for the paucity of labeled data in this field. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms ompetitors on several datasets. Furthermore, by introducing PL/FOL generated by our model, the performance of existing Natural Language Inference (NLI) models is further enhanced.

Parsing Natural Language into Propositional and First-Order Logic with Dual Reinforcement Learning

Domain-specific documents cover terminologies and specialized knowledge. This has been the main challenge of domain-specific document retrieval systems. Previous approaches propose domain-adaptation and transfer learning methods to alleviate this problem. However, these approaches still follow the same document representation method in previous approaches; a document is embedded into a single vector. In this study, we propose VKGDR. VKGDR represents a given corpus into a graph of entities and their relations (known as a virtual knowledge graph) and computes the relevance between queries and documents based on the graph representation. We conduct three experiments 1) domain-specific document retrieval, 2) comparison of our virtual knowledge graph construction method with previous approaches, and 3) ablation study on each component of our virtual knowledge graph. From the results, we see that unsupervised VKGDR outperforms baselines in a zero-shot setting and even outperforms fully-supervised bi-encoder. We also verify that our virtual knowledge graph construction method results in better retrieval performance than previous approaches.

Virtual Knowledge Graph Construction for Zero-Shot Domain-Specific Document Retrieval

The world of pronouns is changing -- from a closed word class with few members to an open set of terms to reflect identities. However, Natural Language Processing (NLP) barely reflects this linguistic shift, resulting in the possible exclusion of non-binary users, even though recent work outlined the harms of gender-exclusive language technology. The current modeling of 3rd person pronouns is particularly problematic. It largely ignores various phenomena like neopronouns, i.e., novel pronoun sets that are not (yet) widely established. This omission contributes to the discrimination of marginalized and underrepresented groups, e.g., non-binary individuals. It thus prevents gender equality, one of the UN's sustainable development goals (goal 5). Further, other identity-expressions beyond gender are ignored by current NLP technology. 
This paper provides an overview of 3rd person pronoun issues for NLP. Based on our observations and ethical considerations, we define a series of five desiderata for modeling pronouns in language technology, which we validate through a survey. We evaluate existing and novel modeling approaches w.r.t. these desiderata qualitatively and quantify the impact of a more discrimination-free approach on an established benchmark dataset.

Welcome to the Modern World of Pronouns: Identity-Inclusive Natural Language Processing beyond Gender

A math word problem (MWP) is a coherent narrative which reflects the underlying logic of math equations. Successful MWP generation can automate the writing of mathematics questions. Previous methods mainly generate MWP text based on inflexible pre-defined templates. In this paper, we propose a neural model for generating MWP text from math equations. Firstly, we incorporate a matching model conditioned on the domain knowledge to retrieve a MWP instance which is most consistent with the ground-truth, where the domain is a latent variable extracted with a domain summarizer. Secondly, by constructing a Quantity Cell Graph (QCG) from the retrieved MWP instance and reasoning over it, we improve the model's comprehension of real-world scenarios and derive a domain-constrained instance sketch to guide the generation. Besides, the QCG also interacts with the equation encoder to enhance the alignment between math tokens (e.g., quantities and variables) and MWP text. Experiments and empirical analysis on educational MWP set show that our model achieves impressive performance in both automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation metrics.

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