United Arab Emirates

Entities, as important carriers of real-world knowledge, play a key role in many NLP tasks.
We focus on incorporating entity knowledge into an encoder-decoder framework for informative text generation. Existing approaches tried to index, retrieve, and read external documents as evidence, but they suffered from a large computational overhead. In this work, we propose an encoder-decoder framework with an entity memory, namely EDMem. The entity knowledge is stored in the memory as latent representations, and the memory is pre-trained on Wikipedia along with encoder-decoder parameters. To precisely generate entity names, we design three decoding methods to constrain entity generation by linking entities in the memory. EDMem is a unified framework that can be used on various entity-intensive question answering and generation tasks. Extensive experimental results show that EDMem outperforms both memory-based auto-encoder models and non-memory encoder-decoder models.

EMNLP 2022

A Unified Encoder-Decoder Framework with Entity Memory

closed-book model

knowledge-enhanced nlp

entity memory

pre-trained language model

question answering

generation

technical paper

## 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***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
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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.

We present MolT5 - a self-supervised learning framework for pretraining models on a vast amount of unlabeled natural language text and molecule strings. MolT5 allows for new, useful, and challenging analogs of traditional vision-language tasks, such as molecule captioning and text-based de novo molecule generation (altogether: translation between molecules and language), which we explore for the first time. Since MolT5 pretrains models on single-modal data, it helps overcome the chemistry domain shortcoming of data scarcity. Furthermore, we consider several metrics, including a new cross-modal embedding-based metric, to evaluate the tasks of molecule captioning and text-based molecule generation. Our results show that MolT5-based models are able to generate outputs, both molecules and captions, which in many cases are high quality.

Translation between Molecules and Natural Language

Powerful generative models have led to recent progress in question generation (QG). However, it is difficult to measure advances in QG research since there are no standardized resources that allow a uniform comparison among approaches. In this paper, we introduce QG-Bench, a multilingual and multidomain benchmark for QG that unifies existing question answering datasets by converting them to a standard QG setting. It includes general-purpose datasets such as SQuAD for English, datasets from ten domains and two styles, as well as datasets in eight different languages. Using QG-Bench as a reference, we perform an extensive analysis of the capabilities of language models for the task. First, we propose robust QG baselines based on fine-tuning generative language models. Then, we complement automatic evaluation based on standard metrics with an extensive manual evaluation, which in turn sheds light on the difficulty of evaluating QG models. Finally, we analyse both the domain adaptability of these models as well as the effectiveness of multilingual models in languages other than English.
QG-Bench is released along with the fine-tuned models presented in the paper (https://github.com/asahi417/lm-question-generation), which are also available as a demo (https://autoqg.net/).

Generative Language Models for Paragraph-Level Question Generation

Recent work has introduced an important yet relatively under-explored NLP task called Semantic Overlap Summarization (SOS) that entails generating a summary from multiple alternative narratives which conveys the common information provided by those narratives. Previous work also published a benchmark dataset for this task by collecting 2,925 alternative narrative pairs from the web and manually annotating 411 different reference summaries by engaging human annotators. In this paper, we exclusively focus on the automated evaluation of the SOS task using the benchmark dataset. More specifically, we first use the popular ROUGE metric from text-summarization literature and conduct a systematic study to evaluate the SOS task. Our experiments discover that ROUGE is not suitable for this novel task and therefore, we propose a new sentence-level precision-recall style automated evaluation metric, called SEM-F1 (Semantic F1). It is inspired by the benefits of the sentence-wise annotation technique using overlap labels reported by the previous work. Our experiments show that the proposed SEM-F1 metric yields a higher correlation with human judgment and higher inter-rater agreement compared to the ROUGE metric.

SEM-F1: an Automatic Way for Semantic Evaluation of Multi-Narrative Overlap Summaries at Scale

We present DocInfer - a novel, end-to-end Document-level Natural Language Inference model that builds a hierarchical document graph enriched through inter-sentence relations (topical, entity-based, concept-based), performs paragraph pruning using the novel SubGraph Pooling layer, followed by optimal evidence selection based on REINFORCE algorithm to identify the most important context sentences for a given hypothesis. Our evidence selection mechanism allows it to transcend the input length limitation of modern BERT-like Transformer models while presenting the entire evidence together for inferential reasoning. We show this is an important property needed to reason on large documents where the evidence may be fragmented and located arbitrarily far from each other. Extensive experiments on popular corpora - DocNLI, ContractNLI, and ConTRoL datasets, and our new proposed dataset called CaseHoldNLI on the task of legal judicial reasoning, demonstrate significant performance gains of 8-12% over SOTA methods. Our ablation studies validate the impact of our model. Performance improvement of 3-6% on annotation-scarce downstream tasks of fact verification, multiple-choice QA, and contract clause retrieval demonstrates the usefulness of DocInfer beyond primary NLI tasks.

DocInfer: Document-level Natural Language Inference using Optimal Evidence Selection

The task of Cross-document Coreference Resolution has been traditionally formulated as requiring to identify all coreference links across a given set of documents. We propose an appealing, and often more applicable, complementary set up for the task -- Cross-document Coreference Search, focusing in this paper on event coreference. Concretely, given a mention in context of an event of interest, considered as a query, the task is to find all coreferring mentions for the query event in a large document collection. To support research on this task, we create a corresponding dataset, which is derived from Wikipedia while leveraging annotations in the available Wikipedia Event Coreferecene dataset (WEC-Eng). Observing that the coreference search setup is largely analogous to the setting of Open Domain Question Answering, we adapt the prominent Deep Passage Retrieval (DPR) model to our setting, as an appealing baseline. Finally, we present a novel model that integrates a powerful coreference scoring scheme into the DPR architecture, yielding improved performance.

Cross-document Event Coreference Search: Task, Dataset and Modeling

Multi-aspect controllable text generation is a more challenging and practical task than single-aspect control. Existing methods achieve complex multi-aspect control by fusing multiple controllers learned from single-aspect, but suffer from attribute degeneration caused by the mutual interference of these controllers. To address this, we provide observations on attribute fusion from a distributional perspective and propose to directly search for the intersection areas of multiple attribute distributions as their combination for generation. Our method first estimates the attribute space with an autoencoder structure. Afterward, we iteratively approach the intersections by jointly minimizing distances to points representing different attributes. Finally, we map them to attribute-relevant sentences with a prefix-tuning-based decoder. Experiments on the three-aspect control task, including sentiment, topic, and detoxification aspects, reveal that our method outperforms several strong baselines on attribute relevance and text quality and achieves the SOTA. Further analysis also supplies some explanatory support for the effectiveness of our approach.

A Distributional Lens for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation

We study the text generation task under the approach of pre-trained language models (PLMs). Typically, an auto-regressive (AR) method is adopted for generating texts in a token-by-token manner. 
Despite many advantages of AR generation, it usually suffers from inefficient inference. Therefore, non-autoregressive (NAR) models are proposed to generate all target tokens simultaneously. However, NAR models usually generate texts of lower quality due to the absence of token dependency in the output text. In this paper, we propose ELMER: an efficient and effective PLM for NAR text generation to explicitly model the token dependency during NAR generation. By leveraging the early exit technique, ELMER enables the token generations at different layers, according to their prediction confidence (a more confident token will exit at a lower layer). Besides, we propose a novel pre-training objective, Layer Permutation Language Modeling, to pre-train ELMER by permuting the exit layer for each token in sequences. Experiments on three text generation tasks show that ELMER significantly outperforms NAR models and further narrows the performance gap with AR PLMs (\eg ELMER (29.92) vs BART (30.61) ROUGE-L in XSUM) while achieving over 10 times inference speedup.

ELMER: A Non-Autoregressive Pre-trained Language Model for Efficient and Effective Text Generation

In this study, we propose a Bayesian model that can jointly estimate the number of senses of words and their changes through time.
The model combines a dynamic topic model on Gaussian Markov random fields with a logistic stick-breaking process that realizes Dirichlet process. 
In the experiments, we evaluated the proposed model in terms of interpretability, accuracy in estimating the number of senses, and tracking their changes using both artificial data and real data.
We quantitatively verified that the model behaves as expected through evaluation using artificial data.
Using the CCOHA corpus, we showed that our model outperforms the baseline model and investigated the semantic changes of several well-known target words.

Infinite SCAN: An Infinite Model of Diachronic Semantic Change

With evergrowing digital adoption in the society and increasing demand for businesses to deliver to customers doorstep, the last mile hop of transportation planning poses unique challenges in emerging geographies with unstructured addresses. One of the crucial inputs to facilitate effective planning is the task of geolocating customer addresses. Existing systems operate by aggregating historical delivery locations or by resolving/matching addresses to known buildings and campuses to vend a high-precision geolocation. However, by design they fail to cater to a significant fraction of addresses which are new in the system and have inaccurate or missing building level information. We propose a framework to resolve these addresses (referred to as hard-to-resolve henceforth) to a shallower granularity termed as neighbourhood. Specifically, we propose a weakly supervised deep metric learning model to encode the geospatial semantics in address embeddings. We present empirical evaluation on India (IN) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) hard-to-resolve addresses to show significant improvements in learning geolocations i.e., 22% (IN) & 55% (UAE) reduction in delivery defects (where learnt geocode is >Y meters away from actual location), and 43% (IN) & 90% (UAE) reduction in 50th percentile (p50) distance between learnt and actual delivery locations over the existing production system.

Learning Geolocations for Cold-Start and Hard-to-Resolve Addresses via Deep Metric Learning

Sampling proper negatives from a large document pool is vital to effectively train a dense retrieval model.
However, existing negative sampling strategies suffer from the uninformative or false negative problem.
In this work, we empirically show that according to the measured relevance scores, the negatives ranked around the positives are generally more informative and less likely to be false negatives.
Intuitively, these negatives are not too hard (\emph{may be false negatives}) or too easy (\emph{uninformative}). 
They are the ambiguous negatives and need more attention during training.
Thus, we propose a simple ambiguous negatives sampling method, SimANS, which incorporates a new sampling probability distribution to sample more ambiguous negatives.
Extensive experiments on four public and one industry datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.
We made the code and models publicly available in \url{https://github.com/microsoft/SimXNS}.

A Unified Encoder-Decoder Framework with Entity Memory

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Translation between Molecules and Natural Language

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A Unified Encoder-Decoder Framework with Entity Memory

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Next from EMNLP 2022

Translation between Molecules and Natural Language

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads