Taiwan

A lack of large-scale human-annotated data has hampered the hierarchical discourse parsing of Chinese. In this paper, we present GCDT, the largest hierarchical discourse treebank for Mandarin Chinese in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). GCDT covers over 60K tokens across five genres of freely available text, using the same relation inventory as contemporary RST treebanks for English. We also report on this dataset’s parsing experiments, including state-of-the-art (SOTA) scores for Chinese RST parsing and RST parsing on the English GUM dataset, using cross-lingual training in Chinese and English with multilingual embeddings.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.47/)

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

GCDT: A Chinese RST Treebank for Multigenre and Multilingual Discourse Parsing

genre

rhetorical structure theory

corpus

discourse

chinese

# 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). 

technical paper

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:
 
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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). 

Word order choices during sentence production can be primed by preceding sentences. In this work, we test the DUAL MECHANISM hypothesis that priming is driven by multiple different sources. Using a Hindi corpus of text productions, we model lexical priming with an n-gram cache model, and we capture more abstract syntactic priming with an adaptive neural language model. We permute the preverbal constituents of corpus sentences and then use a logistic regression model to predict which sentences actually occurred in the corpus against artificially generated meaning-equivalent variants. Our results indicate that lexical priming and lexically-independent syntactic priming affect complementary sets of verb classes. By showing that different priming influences are separable from one another, our results support the hypothesis that multiple different cognitive mechanisms underlie priming.

Dual Mechanism Priming Effects in Hindi Word Order

We present a novel method for higher-order dependency parsing which takes advantage of the general form of score functions written as arc-polynomials, a general framework which encompasses common higher-order score functions, and includes new ones. This method is based on non-linear optimization techniques, namely coordinate ascent and genetic search where we iteratively update a candidate parse. Updates are formulated as gradient-based op- erations, and are efficiently computed by auto- differentiation libraries. Experiments show that this method obtains results matching the recent state-of-the-art second order parsers on three standard datasets.

Higher-Order Dependency Parsing for Arc-Polynomial Score Functions via Gradient-Based Methods and Genetic Algorithm

PoS tags, once taken for granted as a useful resource for syntactic parsing, have become more situational with the popularization of deep learning. Recent work on the impact of PoS tags on graph- and transition-based parsers suggests that they are only useful when tagging accuracy is prohibitively high, or in low-resource scenarios. However, such an analysis is lacking for the emerging sequence labeling parsing paradigm, where it is especially relevant as some models explicitly use PoS tags for encoding and decoding. We undertake a study and uncover some trends. Among them, PoS tags are generally more useful for sequence labeling parsers than for other paradigms, but the impact of their accuracy is highly encoding-dependent, with the PoS-based head-selection encoding being best only when both tagging accuracy and resource availability are high.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.16/)

Parsing linearizations appreciate PoS tags - but some are fussy about errors

Neural metrics have achieved impressive correlation with human judgements in the evaluation of machine translation systems, but before we can safely optimise towards such metrics, we should be aware of (and ideally eliminate) biases toward bad translations that receive high scores. Our experiments show that sample-based Minimum Bayes Risk decoding can be used to explore and quantify such weaknesses. When applying this strategy to COMET for en-de and de-en, we find that COMET models are not sensitive enough to discrepancies in numbers and named entities. We further show that these biases are hard to fully remove by simply training on additional synthetic data and release our code and data for facilitating further experiments.

Identifying Weaknesses in Machine Translation Metrics Through Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding: A Case Study for COMET

Large pretrained multilingual models, trained on dozens of languages, have delivered promising results due to cross-lingual learning capabilities on a variety of language tasks. Further adapting these models to specific languages, especially ones unseen during pre-training, is an important goal toward expanding the coverage of language technologies. In this study, we show how we can use language phylogenetic information to improve cross-lingual transfer leveraging closely related languages \textit{in a structured, linguistically-informed manner}. We perform adapter-based training on languages from diverse language families (Germanic, Uralic, Tupian, Uto-Aztecan) and evaluate on both syntactic and semantic tasks, obtaining more than 20\% relative performance improvements over strong commonly used baselines, especially on languages unseen during pre-training.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.34/)

Phylogeny-Inspired Adaptation of Multilingual Models to New Languages

Neural machine translation (NMT) models are known to be fragile to noisy inputs from automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Existing methods are usually tailored for robustness against only homophone errors which account for a small portion of realistic ASR errors. In this paper, we propose an adversarial example generation method based on confusion sets that contain words easily confusable with a target word by ASR to conduct adversarial training for NMT models. Specifically, an adversarial example is generated from the perspective of acoustic relations instead of the traditional uniform or unigram sampling from the confusion sets. Experiments on different test sets with hand-crafted and real-world noise demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over previous methods. Moreover, our approach can achieve improvements in the clean test set.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.28/)

Adversarially Improving NMT Robustness to ASR Errors with Confusion Sets

This paper presents Domain-Specific Sub-network (DoSS). It uses a set of masks obtained through pruning to define a sub-network for each domain and finetunes the sub-network parameters on domain data. This performs very closely and drastically reduces the number of parameters compared to finetuning the whole
network on each domain. Also a method to make masks unique per domain is proposed and shown to greatly improve the generalization to unseen domains. In our experiments on German to English machine translation, the proposed method outperforms the strong baseline of continue training on multi-domain (medical,
tech and religion) data by 1.47 BLEU points. Also continue training DoSS on new domain (legal) outperforms the multi-domain (medical, tech, religion, legal) baseline by 1.52 BLEU points.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.43/)

Domain Specific Sub-network for Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation

Open-Domain Generative Question Answering has achieved impressive performance in English by combining document-level retrieval with answer generation. These approaches, which we refer to as GENQA, can generate complete sentences, effectively answering both factoid and non-factoid questions. In this paper, we extend GENQA to the multilingual and cross-lingual settings. For this purpose, we first introduce GEN-TYDIQA, an extension of the TyDiQA dataset with well-formed and complete answers for Arabic, Bengali, English, Japanese, and Russian. Based on GEN-TYDIQA, we design a cross-lingual generative model that produces full-sentence answers by exploiting passages written in multiple languages, including languages different from the question. Our cross-lingual generative system outperforms answer sentence selection baselines for all 5 languages and monolingual generative pipelines for three out of five languages studied.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.27/)

Cross-Lingual Open-Domain Question Answering with Answer Sentence Generation

We propose a method for controlling the difficulty of a sentence based on deep reinforcement learning. Although existing models are trained based on the word-level difficulty, the sentence-level difficulty has not been taken into account in the loss function. Our proposed method generates sentences of appropriate difficulty for the target audience through reinforcement learning using a reward calculated based on the difference between the difficulty of the output sentence and the target difficulty. Experimental results of English text simplification show that the proposed method achieves a higher performance than existing approaches. Compared to previous studies, the proposed method can generate sentences whose grade-levels are closer to those of human references estimated using a fine-tuned pre-trained model.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.49/)

Controllable Text Simplification with Deep Reinforcement Learning

To solve Math Word Problems, human students leverage diverse reasoning logic that reaches different possible equation solutions. However, the mainstream sequence-to-sequence approach of automatic solvers aims to decode a fixed solution equation supervised by human annotation.
In this paper, we propose a controlled equation generation solver by leveraging a set of control codes to guide the model to consider certain reasoning logic and decode the corresponding equations expressions transformed from the human reference.
The empirical results suggest that our method universally improves the performance on single-unknown (Math23K) and multiple-unknown (DRAW1K, HMWP) benchmarks, with substantial improvements up to 13.2% accuracy on the challenging multiple-unknown datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/yiyunya/CTRL-MWP.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.32/)

GCDT: A Chinese RST Treebank for Multigenre and Multilingual Discourse Parsing

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Dual Mechanism Priming Effects in Hindi Word Order

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GCDT: A Chinese RST Treebank for Multigenre and Multilingual Discourse Parsing

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Dual Mechanism Priming Effects in Hindi Word Order

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CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

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