United Arab Emirates

Since the meaning representations are detailed and accurate annotations which express fine-grained sequence-level semtantics, it is usually hard to train discriminative semantic parsers via Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) in an autoregressive fashion. In this paper, we propose a semantic-aware contrastive learning algorithm, which can learn to distinguish fine-grained meaning representations and take the overall sequence-level semantic into consideration. Specifically, a multi-level online sampling algorithm is proposed to sample confusing and diverse instances. Three semantic-aware similarity functions are designed to accurately measure the distance between meaning representations as a whole. And a ranked contrastive loss is proposed to pull the representations of the semantic-identical instances together and push negative instances away. Experiments on two standard datasets show that our approach achieves significant improvements over MLE baselines and gets state-of-the-art performances by simply applying semantic-aware contrastive learning on a vanilla Seq2Seq model.

EMNLP 2022

Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning for More Accurate Semantic Parsing

seq2seq model

contrastive learning

semantic parsing

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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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.

Relational triple extraction is a critical task for natural language processing. Existing methods mainly focused on capturing semantic information, but suffered from ignoring the syntactic structure of the sentence, which is proved in the relation classification task to contain rich relational information. This is due to the absence of entity locations, which is the prerequisite for pruning noisy edges from the dependency tree, when extracting relational triples. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to tackle this challenge and incorporate syntactic information for relational triple extraction. First, we propose to automatically contract the dependency tree into a core relational topology and eliminate redundant information with graph pooling operations. Then, we propose a symmetrical expanding path with graph unpooling operations to fuse the contracted core syntactic interactions with the original sentence context. We also propose a bipartite graph matching objective function to capture the reflections between the core topology and golden relational facts. Since our model shares similar contracting and expanding paths with encoder-decoder models like U-Net, we name our model as Relation U-Net (RelU-Net). We conduct experiments on several datasets and the results prove the effectiveness of our method.

RelU-Net: Syntax-aware Graph U-Net for Relational Triple Extraction

Relation prediction in knowledge graphs (KGs) aims at predicting missing relations in incomplete triples, whereas the dominant embedding paradigm has a restriction on handling unseen entities during testing. In the real-world scenario, the inductive setting is more common because entities in the training process are finite. Previous methods capture an inductive ability by implicit logic in KGs. However, it would be challenging to preciously acquire entity-independent relational semantics of compositional logic rules and to deal with the deficient supervision of logic caused by the scarcity of relational semantics. To this end, we propose a novel graph convolutional network (GCN)-based model LogCo with logical reasoning by contrastive representations. LogCo firstly extracts enclosing subgraphs and relational paths between two entities to supply the entity-independence. Then a contrastive strategy for relational path instances and the subgraph is proposed for the issue of deficient supervision. The contrastive representations are learned for a joint training regime. Finally, prediction results and logic rules for reasoning are attained. Comprehensive experiments on twelve inductive datasets show that LogCo achieves outstanding performance comparing with state-of-the-art inductive relation prediction baselines.

Inductive Relation Prediction with Logical Reasoning Using Contrastive Representations

As generic machine translation (MT) quality has improved, the need for targeted benchmarks that explore fine-grained aspects of quality has increased. In particular, gender accuracy in translation can have implications in terms of output fluency, translation accuracy, and ethics. In this paper, we introduce MT-GenEval, a benchmark for evaluating gender accuracy in translation from English into eight widely-spoken languages. MT-GenEval complements existing benchmarks by providing realistic, gender-balanced, counterfactual data in eight language pairs where the gender of individuals is unambiguous in the input segment, including multi-sentence segments requiring inter-sentential gender agreement. Our data and code is publicly available under a CC BY SA 3.0 license.

MT-GenEval: A Counterfactual and Contextual Dataset for Evaluating Gender Accuracy in Machine Translation

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a new fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to extract triplets of aspect terms, sentiments, and opinion terms from review sentences. Recently, span-level models achieve gratifying results on ASTE task by taking advantage of the predictions of all possible spans. Since all possible spans significantly increases the number of potential aspect and opinion candidates, it is crucial and challenging to efficiently extract the triplet elements among them. In this paper, we present a span-level bidirectional network which utilizes all possible spans as input and extracts triplets from spans bidirectionally. Specifically, we devise both the aspect decoder and opinion decoder to decode the span representations and extract triples from aspect-to-opinion and opinion-to-aspect directions. With these two decoders complementing with each other, the whole network can extract triplets from spans more comprehensively. Moreover, considering that mutual exclusion cannot be guaranteed between the spans, we design a similar span separation loss to facilitate the downstream task of distinguishing the correct span by expanding the KL divergence of similar spans during the training process; in the inference process, we adopt an inference strategy to remove conflicting triplets from the results base on their confidence scores. Experimental results show that our framework not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, but achieves better performance in predicting triplets with multi-token entities and extracting triplets in sentences contain multi-triplets.

A Span-level Bidirectional Network for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

The tasks of humor understanding and generation are challenging and subjective even for humans, requiring commonsense and real-world knowledge to master. Puns, in particular, add the challenge of fusing that knowledge with the ability to interpret lexical-semantic ambiguity. In this paper, we present the ExPUNations (ExPUN) dataset, in which we augment an existing dataset of puns with detailed crowdsourced annotations of keywords denoting the most distinctive words that make the text funny, pun explanations describing why the text is funny, and fine-grained funniness ratings. This is the first humor dataset with such extensive and fine-grained annotations specifically for puns. Based on these annotations, we propose two tasks: explanation generation to aid with pun classification and keyword-conditioned pun generation, to challenge the current state-of-the-art natural language understanding and generation models' ability to understand and generate humor. We showcase that the annotated keywords we collect are helpful for generating better novel humorous texts in human evaluation, and that our natural language explanations can be leveraged to improve both the accuracy and robustness of humor classifiers.

ExPUNations: Augmenting Puns with Keywords and Explanations

Current deep learning models often achieve excellent results on benchmark image-to-text datasets but fail to generate texts that are useful in practice. We argue that to close this gap, it is vital to distinguish descriptions from captions based on their distinct communicative roles. Descriptions focus on visual features and are meant to replace an image (often to increase accessibility), whereas captions appear alongside an image to supply additional information. To motivate this distinction and help people put it into practice, we introduce the publicly available Wikipedia-based dataset Concadia consisting of 96,918 images with corresponding English-language descriptions, captions, and surrounding context. Using insights from Concadia, models trained on it, and a preregistered human-subjects experiment with human- and model-generated texts, we characterize the commonalities and differences between descriptions and captions. In addition, we show that, for generating both descriptions and captions, it is useful to augment image-to-text models with representations of the textual context in which the image appeared.

Concadia: Towards Image-Based Text Generation with a Purpose

Few images on the Web receive alt-text descriptions that would make them accessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users. Image-based NLG systems have progressed to the point where they can begin to address this persistent societal problem, but these systems will not be fully successful unless we evaluate them on metrics that guide their development correctly. Here, we argue against current referenceless metrics -- those that don't rely on human-generated ground-truth descriptions -- on the grounds that they do not align with the needs of BLV users. The fundamental shortcoming of these metrics is that they do not take context into account, whereas contextual information is highly valued by BLV users. To substantiate these claims, we present a study with BLV participants who rated descriptions along a variety of dimensions. An in-depth analysis reveals that the lack of context-awareness makes current referenceless metrics inadequate for advancing image accessibility. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a contextual version of the referenceless metric CLIPScore which begins to address the disconnect to the BLV data.

Context Matters for Image Descriptions for Accessibility: Challenges for Referenceless Evaluation Metrics

Weakly-supervised text classification aims to train a classifier using only class descriptions and unlabeled data. Recent research shows that keyword-driven methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various tasks. However, these methods not only rely on carefully-crafted class descriptions to obtain class-specific keywords but also require substantial amount of unlabeled data and takes a long time to train. This paper proposes FastClass, an efficient weakly-supervised classification approach. It uses dense text representation to retrieve class-relevant documents from external unlabeled corpus and selects an optimal subset to train a classifier. Compared to keyword-driven methods, our approach is less reliant on initial class descriptions as it no longer needs to expand each class description into a set of class-specific keywords.Experiments on a wide range of classification tasks show that the proposed approach frequently outperforms keyword-driven models in terms of classification accuracy and often enjoys orders-of-magnitude faster training speed.

FastClass: A Time-Efficient Approach to Weakly-Supervised Text Classification

Conventional visual relationship detection models only use the numeric ids of relation labels for training, but ignore the semantic correlation between the labels, which leads to severe training biases and harms the generalization ability of representations. In this paper, we introduce compact language information of relation labels for regularizing the representation learning of visual relations. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective visual Relationship prediction framework that transfers natural language knowledge learned from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models to enhance the relationship prediction, termed RelCLIP. Benefiting from the powerful visual-semantic alignment ability of CLIP at image level, we introduce a novel Relational Contrastive Learning (RCL) approach which explores relation-level visual-semantic alignment via learning to match cross-modal relational embeddings. By collaboratively learning the semantic coherence and discrepancy from relation triplets, the model can generate more discriminative and robust representations. Experimental results on the Visual Genome dataset show that RelCLIP achieves significant improvements over strong baselines under full (provide accurate labels) and distant supervision (provide noise labels), demonstrating its powerful generalization ability in learning relationship representations. Code will be available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/RelCLIP.

RelCLIP: Adapting Language-Image Pretraining for Visual Relationship Detection via Relational Contrastive Learning

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) model achieves a much faster inference speed than the autoregressive translation (AT) model because it can simultaneously predict all tokens during inference. However, its translation quality suffers from degradation compared to AT. And existing NAT methods only focus on improving the NAT model's performance but do not fully utilize it. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method called "Candidate Soups,” which can obtain high-quality translations while maintaining the inference speed of NAT models. Unlike previous approaches that pick the individual result and discard the remainders, Candidate Soups (CDS) can fully use the valuable information in the different candidate translations through model uncertainty. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks (WMT'14 EN–DE and WMT'16 EN–RO) demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our proposed method, which can significantly improve the translation quality of various base models. More notably, our best variant outperforms the AT model on three translation tasks with 7.6× speedup.

Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning for More Accurate Semantic Parsing

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RelU-Net: Syntax-aware Graph U-Net for Relational Triple Extraction

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Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning for More Accurate Semantic Parsing

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Next from EMNLP 2022

RelU-Net: Syntax-aware Graph U-Net for Relational Triple Extraction

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads