Taiwan

A bottleneck to developing Semantic Parsing (SP) models is the need for a large volume of human-labeled training data. Given the complexity and cost of human annotation for SP, labeled data is often scarce, particularly in multilingual settings. Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at SP given only a few examples, however LLMs are unsuitable for runtime systems which require low latency. In this work, we propose CLASP, a simple method to improve low-resource SP for moderate-sized models: we generate synthetic data from AlexaTM 20B to augment the training set for a model 40x smaller (500M parameters). We evaluate on two datasets in low-resource settings: English PIZZA, containing either 348 or 16 real examples, and mTOP cross-lingual zero-shot, where training data is available only in English, and the model must generalize to four new languages. On both datasets, we show significant improvements over strong baseline methods.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.56/)

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

CLASP: Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Data Augmentation for Semantic Parsing

prompting large language models

synthetic data generation

semantic parsing

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### 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 2022

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

poster

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP).

A registration is required to access this event. Access to the event site will be granted to all registered attendees on **November 16th**. If you have not already done so, please register using the link below:
 
 https://conference.iis.sinica.edu.tw/servlet/Register?ConferenceID=411

Registration Is Required

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.55/)

An Empirical Study of Pipeline vs. Joint approaches to Entity and Relation Extraction

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.14/)

An Effective Post-training Embedding Binarization Approach for Fast Online Top-K Passage Matching

Graph-based text representation focuses on how text documents are represented as graphs for exploiting dependency information between tokens and documents within a corpus. Despite the increasing interest in graph representation learning, there is limited research in exploring new ways for graph-based text representation, which is important in downstream natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we first propose a new heterogeneous word-character text graph that combines word. and character n-gram nodes together with document nodes, allowing us to better learn dependencies among these entities. Additionally, we propose two new graph-based neural models, WCTextGCN and WCTextGAT, for modeling our proposed text graph. Extensive experiments in text classification and automatic
text summarization benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed models consistently outperform competitive baselines and state-of-the-art graph-based models.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.29/)

Improving Graph-Based Text Representations with Character and Word Level N-grams

Machine learning systems have shown impressive performance across a range of natural language tasks. However, it has been hypothesized that these systems are prone to learning spurious correlations that may be present in the training data. Though these correlations will not impact in-domain performance, they are unlikely to generalize well to out-of-domain data, limiting the applicability of systems. This work examines this phenomenon on text classification tasks. Rather than artificially injecting features into the data, we demonstrate that real spurious correlations can be exploited by current state-of-the-art deep-learning systems. Specifically, we show that even when only 'stop' words are available at the input stage, it is possible to predict the class significantly better than random. Though it is shown that these stop words are not required for good in-domain performance, they can degrade the ability of the system to generalize well to out-of-domain data.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.11/)

Analyzing Biases to Spurious Correlations in Text Classification Tasks

Language models (LMs) trained on raw texts have no direct access to the physical world. Gordon and Van Durme (2013) point out that LMs can thus suffer from reporting bias: texts rarely report on common facts, instead focusing on the unusual aspects of a situation. If LMs are only trained on text corpora and naively memorise local co-occurrence statistics, they thus naturally would learn a biased view of the physical world. While prior studies have repeatedly verified that LMs of smaller scales (e.g., RoBERTa, GPT-2) amplify reporting bias, it remains unknown whether such trends continue when models are scaled up. We investigate reporting bias from the perspective of colour in larger language models (LLMs) such as PaLM and GPT-3. Specifically, we query LLMs for the typical colour of objects, which is one simple type of perceptually grounded physical common sense. Surprisingly, we find that LLMs significantly outperform smaller LMs in determining an object's typical colour and more closely track human judgments, instead of overfitting to surface patterns stored in texts. This suggests that very large models of language alone are able to overcome certain types of reporting bias that are characterized by local co-occurrences.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.27/)


Do ever larger octopi still amplify reporting biases? Evidence from judgments of typical colour

We propose a benchmark to assess the capability of large language models to reason with conventional metaphors. Our benchmark combines the previously isolated topics of metaphor detection and commonsense reasoning into a single task that requires a model to make inferences by accurately selecting between the literal and metaphorical register. We examine the performance of state-of-the-art pre-trained models on binary-choice tasks and find a large discrepancy between the performance of small and very large models, going from chance to near-human level. We also analyse the largest model in a generative setting and find that although human performance is approached, careful multiple-shot prompting is required.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.46/)

MiQA: A Benchmark for Inference on Metaphorical Questions

We investigate in this paper how correlations between occupations and gendered-pronouns can be affected and changed by adding negation in bias probes, or changing the grammatical tense of the verbs in the probes. We use a set of simple bias probes in Norwegian and English, and perform 16 different probing analysis, using four Norwegian and four English pre-trained language models. We show that adding negation to probes does not have a considerable effect on the correlations between gendered-pronouns and occupations, supporting other works on negation in language models. We also show that altering the grammatical tense of verbs in bias probes do have some interesting effects on models' behaviours and correlations. We argue that we should take grammatical tense into account when choosing bias probes, and aggregating results across tenses might be a better representation of the existing correlations.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.53/)

Exploring the Effects of Negation and Grammatical Tense on Bias Probes

Being able to train Named Entity Recognition (NER) models for emerging topics is crucial for many real-world applications especially in the medical domain where new topics are continuously evolving out of the scope of existing models and datasets. For a realistic evaluation setup, we introduce a novel COVID-19 news NER dataset (COVIDNEWS-NER) and release 3000 entries of hand annotated strongly labelled sentences and 13000 auto-generated weakly labelled sentences. Besides the dataset, we propose CONTROSTER, a recipe to strategically combine weak and strong labels in improving NER in an emerging topic through transfer learning. We show the effectiveness of CONTROSTER on COVIDNEWS-NER while providing analysis on combining weak and strong labels for training. Our key findings are: (1) Using weak data to formulate an initial backbone before tuning on strong data outperforms methods trained on only strong or weak data. (2) A combination of out-of-domain and in-domain weak label training is crucial and can overcome saturation when being training on weak labels from a single source.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.60/)

How to tackle an emerging topic? Combining strong and weak labels for Covid news NER

Sentence acceptability judgment assesses to what degree a sentence is acceptable to native speakers of the language. Most unsupervised prediction approaches rely on a language model to obtain the likelihood of a sentence that reflects acceptability. However, two problems exist: first, low-frequency words would have a significant negative impact on the sentence likelihood derived from the language model; second, when it comes to multiple domains, the language model needs to be trained on domain-specific text for domain adaptation. To address both problems, we propose a simple method that substitutes Part-of-Speech (POS) tags for low-frequency words in sentences used for continual training of masked language models. Experimental results show that our word-tag-hybrid BERT model brings improvement on both a sentence acceptability benchmark and a cross-domain sentence acceptability evaluation corpus. Furthermore, our annotated cross-domain sentence acceptability evaluation corpus would benefit future research.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.25/)

A Simple Yet Effective Hybrid Pre-trained Language Model for Unsupervised Sentence Acceptability Prediction

Nepali is a low-resource language with more than 40 million speakers worldwide. It is written in Devnagari script and has rich semantics and complex grammatical structure. To this date, multilingual models such as Multilingual BERT, XLM, and XLM-RoBERTa haven’t been able to achieve promising results in Nepali NLP
tasks, and there does not exist any such a large-scale monolingual corpus. This study presents NepBERTa, a BERT-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model trained on the most extensive monolingual Nepali corpus ever. We collected a dataset of 0.8B words from 36 different popular news sites in Nepal and introduced the model. This data set is 3 folds times larger than the previous publicly available corpus. We evaluated the performance of NepBERTa in multiple Nepali-specific NLP tasks, including Named-Entity Recognition, Content Classification, POS Tagging, and Categorical Pair Similarity. We also introduce two different datasets for two new downstream tasks and benchmark four diverse NLU tasks altogether. We bring all these four tasks under the first-ever Nepali Language Understanding Evaluation (Nep-gLUE) benchmark. We will make Nep-gLUE along with the pre-trained model
and data sets publicly available for research.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.34/)

CLASP: Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Data Augmentation for Semantic Parsing

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