United Arab Emirates

Transformers are now widely used in code representation, and several recent works further develop tree Transformers to capture the syntactic structure in source code. 
Specifically, novel tree positional encodings have been proposed to incorporate inductive bias into Transformer.
In this work, we propose a novel tree Transformer encoding node positions based on our new description method for tree structures.
Technically, local and global soft bias shown in previous works is both introduced as positional encodings of our Transformer model.
Our model finally outperforms strong baselines on code summarization and completion tasks across two languages, demonstrating our model&#39;s effectiveness.
Besides, extensive experiments and ablation study shows that combining both local and global paradigms is still helpful in improving model performance. 
We release our code at \url{https://github.com/AwdHanPeng/TreeTransformer}.

EMNLP 2022

Rethinking Positional Encoding in Tree Transformer for Code Representation

code representation

tree transformer

Transformers are now widely used in code representation, and several recent works further develop tree Transformers to capture the syntactic structure in source code. 
Specifically, novel tree positional encodings have been proposed to incorporate inductive bias into Transformer.
In this work, we propose a novel tree Transformer encoding node positions based on our new description method for tree structures.
Technically, local and global soft bias shown in previous works is both introduced as positional encodings of our Transformer model.
Our model finally outperforms strong baselines on code summarization and completion tasks across two languages, demonstrating our model's effectiveness.
Besides, extensive experiments and ablation study shows that combining both local and global paradigms is still helpful in improving model performance. 
We release our code at \url{https://github.com/AwdHanPeng/TreeTransformer}.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Prompt-tuning has shown appealing performance in few-shot classification by virtue of its capability in effectively exploiting pre-trained knowledge. This motivates us to check the hypothesis that prompt-tuning is also a promising choice for long-tailed classification, since the tail classes are intuitively few-shot ones. To achieve this aim, we conduct empirical studies to examine the hypothesis. The results demonstrate that prompt-tuning makes pretrained language models at least good long-tailed learners. For intuitions on why prompt-tuning can achieve good performance in long-tailed classification, we carry out in-depth analyses by progressively bridging the gap between prompt-tuning and commonly used finetuning. The summary is that the classifier structure and parameterization form the key to making good long-tailed learners, in comparison with the less important input structure. Finally, we verify the applicability of our finding to few-shot classification.

Making Pretrained Language Models Good Long-tailed Learners

Retrieval-augmented Neural Machine Translation models have been successful in many translation scenarios. Different from previous works that make use of mutually similar but redundant translation memories~(TMs), we propose a new retrieval-augmented NMT to model contrastively retrieved translation memories that are holistically similar to the source sentence while individually contrastive to each other providing maximal information gain in three phases. First, in TM retrieval phase, we adopt contrastive retrieval algorithm to avoid redundancy and uninformativeness of similar translation pieces. Second, in memory encoding stage, given a set of TMs we propose a novel Hierarchical Group Attention module to gather both local context of each TM and global context of the whole TM set. Finally, in training phase, a Multi-TM contrastive learning objective is introduced to learn salient feature of each TM with respect to target sentence. Experimental results show that our framework obtains substantial improvements over strong baselines in the benchmark dataset.

Neural Machine Translation with Contrastive Translation Memories

Pretraining multimodal models on Electronic Health Records (EHRs) provides a means of learning representations that can transfer to downstream tasks with minimal supervision. Recent multimodal models induce soft local alignments between image regions and sentences. This is of particular interest in the medical domain, where alignments might highlight regions in an image relevant to specific phenomena described in free-text. While past work has suggested that attention "heatmaps” can be interpreted in this manner, there has been little evaluation of such alignments. We compare alignments from a state-of-the-art multimodal (image and text) model for EHR with human annotations that link image regions to sentences. Our main finding is that the text has an often weak or unintuitive influence on attention; alignments do not consistently reflect basic anatomical information. Moreover, synthetic modifications — such as substituting "left” for "right” — do not substantially influence highlights. Simple techniques such as allowing the model to opt out of attending to the image and few-shot finetuning show promise in terms of their ability to improve alignments with very little or no supervision. We make our code and checkpoints open-source.

That's the Wrong Lung! Evaluating and Improving the Interpretability of Unsupervised Multimodal Encoders for Medical Data

Machine translation systems are expected to cope with various types of constraints in many practical scenarios. While neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved strong performance in unconstrained cases, it is non-trivial to impose pre-specified constraints into the translation process of NMT models. Although many approaches have been proposed to address this issue, most existing methods can not satisfy the following three desiderata at the same time: (1) high translation quality, (2) high match accuracy, and (3) low latency. In this work, we propose a template-based method that can yield results with high translation quality and match accuracy and the inference speed of our method is comparable with unconstrained NMT models. Our basic idea is to rearrange the generation of constrained and unconstrained tokens through a template. Our method does not require any changes in the model architecture and the decoding algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed template-based approach can outperform several representative baselines in both lexically and structurally constrained translation tasks.

A Template-based Method for Constrained Neural Machine Translation

Word alignment which aims to extract lexicon translation equivalents between source and target sentences, serves as a fundamental tool for natural language processing. Recent studies in this area have yielded substantial improvements by generating alignments from contextualized embeddings of the pre-trained multilingual language models. However, we find that the existing approaches capture few interactions between the input sentence pairs, which degrades the word alignment quality severely, especially for the ambiguous words in the monolingual context. To remedy this problem, we propose Cross-Align to model deep interactions between the input sentence pairs, in which the source and target sentences are encoded separately with the shared self-attention modules in the shallow layers, while cross-lingual interactions are explicitly constructed by the cross-attention modules in the upper layers. Besides, to train our model effectively, we propose a two-stage training framework, where the model is trained with a simple Translation Language Modeling (TLM) objective in the first stage and then finetuned with a self-supervised alignment objective in the second stage. Experiments show that the proposed Cross-Align achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four out of five language pairs.

Cross-Align: Modeling Deep Cross-lingual Interactions for Word Alignment

Automatic evaluation metrics are crucial to the development of generative systems. In recent years, pre-trained language model (PLM) based metrics, such as BERTScore, have been commonly adopted in various generation tasks. However, it has been demonstrated that PLMs encode a range of stereotypical societal biases, leading to a concern about the fairness of PLMs as metrics. To that end, this work presents the first systematic study on the social bias in PLM-based metrics. We demonstrate that popular PLM-based metrics exhibit significantly higher social bias than traditional metrics on 6 sensitive attributes, namely race, gender, religion, physical appearance, age, and socioeconomic status. In-depth analysis suggests that choosing paradigms (matching, regression, or generation) of the metric has a greater impact on fairness than choosing PLMs. In addition, we develop debiasing adapters that are injected into PLM layers, mitigating bias in PLM-based metrics while retaining high performance for evaluating text generation.

BERTScore is Unfair: On Social Bias in Language Model-Based Metrics for Text Generation

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging subtask of multi-label classification due to its complex label hierarchy.
Recently, the pretrained language models (PLM)
have been widely adopted in HTC through a fine-tuning paradigm. However, in this paradigm, there exists a huge gap between the classification tasks with sophisticated label hierarchy and the masked language model (MLM) pretraining tasks of PLMs and thus the potential of PLMs cannot be fully tapped.
To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose HPT, a Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning method to handle HTC from a multi-label MLM perspective.
Specifically, we construct a dynamic virtual template and label words that take the form of soft prompts to fuse the label hierarchy knowledge and introduce a zero-bounded multi-label cross-entropy loss to harmonize the objectives of HTC and MLM.
Extensive experiments show HPT achieves state-of-the-art performances on 3 popular HTC datasets and is adept at handling the imbalance and low resource situations. Our code is available at https://github.com/wzh9969/HPT.

HPT: Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning for Hierarchical Text Classification

Understanding narrative flow and text coherence in long-form documents (novels) remains an open problem in NLP.
To gain insight, we explore the task of chapter ordering, reconstructing the original order of chapters in novel given a random permutation of the text. This can be seen as extending the well-known sentence ordering task to vastly larger documents: our task deals with over 9,000 novels with an average of twenty chapters each, versus standard sentence ordering datasets averaging only 5-8 sentences. We formulate the task of reconstructing order as a constraint solving problem, using minimum feedback arc set and traveling salesman problem optimization criteria, where the weights of the graph are generated based on models for character occurrences and chapter boundary detection, using relational chapter scores derived from RoBERTa. Our best methods yield a Spearman correlation of 0.59 on this novel and challenging task, substantially above baseline.

Chapter Ordering in Novels

In educational applications, knowledge tracing refers to the problem of estimating students' time-varying concept/skill mastery level from their past responses to questions and predicting their future performance.
One key limitation of most existing knowledge tracing methods is that they treat student responses to questions as binary-valued, i.e., whether they are correct or incorrect. 
Response correctness analysis/prediction is straightforward, but it ignores important information regarding mastery, especially for open-ended questions.
In contrast, exact student responses can provide much more information.
In this paper, we conduct the first exploration int open-ended knowledge tracing (OKT) by studying the new task of predicting students' exact open-ended responses to questions.
Our work is grounded in the domain of computer science education with programming questions. 
We develop an initial solution to the OKT problem, a student knowledge-guided code generation approach, that combines program synthesis methods using language models with student knowledge tracing methods. 
We also conduct a series of quantitative and qualitative experiments on a real-world student code dataset to validate and demonstrate the promise of OKT.

Open-ended Knowledge Tracing for Computer Science Education

Recently, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) algorithm has shown state-of-the-art generalization abilities in vision tasks. It demonstrates that flat minima tend to imply better generalization abilities. However, it has some difficulty implying SAM to some natural language tasks, especially to models with drastic gradient changes, such as RNNs. In this work, we analyze the relation between the flatness of the local minimum and its generalization ability from a novel and straightforward theoretical perspective. We propose that the shift of the training and test distributions can be equivalently seen as a virtual parameter corruption or perturbation, which can explain why flat minima that are robust against parameter corruptions or perturbations have better generalization performances. On its basis, we propose a Gradient-Strength based Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization (GA-SAM) algorithm to help to learn algorithms find flat minima that generalize better. Results in various language benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed GA-SAM algorithm on natural language tasks.

Rethinking Positional Encoding in Tree Transformer for Code Representation

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Making Pretrained Language Models Good Long-tailed Learners

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Rethinking Positional Encoding in Tree Transformer for Code Representation

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Making Pretrained Language Models Good Long-tailed Learners

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PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

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