United Arab Emirates

Figurative language understanding has been recently framed as a recognizing textual entailment (RTE) task (a.k.a. natural language inference (NLI)). However, similar to classical RTE/NLI datasets they suffer from spurious correlations and annotation artifacts. To tackle this problem, work on NLI has built explanation-based datasets such as eSNLI, allowing us to probe whether language models are right for the right reasons. Yet no such data exists for figurative language, making it harder to assess genuine understanding of such expressions. To address this issue, we release FLUTE, a dataset of 9,000 figurative NLI instances with explanations, spanning four categories: Sarcasm, Simile, Metaphor, and Idioms. We collect the data through a Human-AI collaboration framework based on GPT-3, crowd workers, and expert annotators. We show how utilizing GPT-3 in conjunction with human annotators (novices and experts) can aid in scaling up the creation of datasets even for such complex linguistic phenomena as figurative language. The baseline performance of the T5 model fine-tuned on FLUTE shows that our dataset can bring us a step closer to developing models that understand figurative language through textual explanations.

EMNLP 2022

FLUTE: Figurative Language Understanding through Textual Explanations

human-ai collaboration

figurative language

explanations

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.

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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.

Composing Ci (also widely known as Song Ci), a special type of classical Chinese poetry, requires to follow particular format once their tune patterns are given. To automatically generate a well-formed Ci, text generation systems should strictly take into account pre-defined rigid formats (e.g., length and rhyme). Yet, most existing approaches regard Ci generation as a conventional sequence-to-sequence task and use autoregressive models, while it is challenging for such models to properly handle the constraints (according to tune patterns) of Ci during the generation process. Moreover, consider that with the format prepared, Ci generation can be operated by an efficient synchronous process, where autoregressive models are limited in doing so since they follow the character-by-character generation protocol. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to compose Ci through a non-autoregressive approach, which not only ensure that the generation process accommodates tune patterns by controlling the rhythm and essential meaning of each sentence, but also allow the model to perform synchronous generation. In addition, we further improve our approach by applying reinforcement learning to the generation process with the rigid constraints of Ci as well as the diversity in content serving as rewards, so as to further maintain the format and content requirement. Experiments on a collected Ci dataset confirm that our proposed approach outperforms strong baselines and previous studies in terms of both automatic evaluation metrics and human judgements.

Composing Ci with Reinforced Non-autoregressive Text Generation

Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) extrapolation reasoning predicts future events based on historical information, which has great research significance and broad application value. Existing methods can be divided into embedding-based methods and logical rule-based methods. Embedding-based methods rely on learned entity and relation embeddings to make predictions and thus lack interpretability. Logical rule-based methods bring scalability problems due to being limited by the learned logical rules. We combine the two methods to capture deep causal logic by learning rule embeddings, and propose an interpretable model for temporal knowledge graph reasoning called adaptive logical rule embedding model for inductive reasoning (ALRE-IR). ALRE-IR can adaptively extract and assess reasons contained in historical events, and make predictions based on causal logic. Furthermore, we propose a one-class augmented matching loss for optimization. When evaluated on the ICEWS14, ICEWS0515 and ICEWS18 datasets, the performance of ALRE-IR outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines. The results also demonstrate that ALRE-IR still shows outstanding performance when transferred to related dataset with common relation vocabulary, indicating our proposed model has good zero-shot reasoning ability.

An Adaptive Logical Rule Embedding Model for Inductive Reasoning over Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Recently, hybrid systems of clustering and neural diarization models have been successfully applied in multi-party meeting analysis. However, current models always treat overlapped speaker diarization as a multi-label classification problem, where speaker dependency and overlaps are not well considered. To overcome the disadvantages, we reformulate overlapped speaker diarization task as a single-label prediction problem via the proposed power set encoding (PSE). Through this formulation, speaker dependency and overlaps can be explicitly modeled. To fully leverage this formulation, we further propose the speaker overlap-aware neural diarization (SOND) model, which consists of a context-independent (CI) scorer to model global speaker discriminability, a context-dependent scorer (CD) to model local discriminability, and a speaker combining network (SCN) to combine and reassign speaker activities. Experimental results show that using the proposed formulation can outperform the state-of-the-art methods based on target speaker voice activity detection, and the performance can be further improved with SOND, resulting in a 6.30% relative diarization error reduction.

Speaker Overlap-aware Neural Diarization for Multi-party Meeting Analysis

Conventional phrase grounding aims to localize noun phrases mentioned in a given caption to their corresponding image regions, which has achieved great success recently. Apparently, sole noun phrase grounding is not enough for cross-modal visual language understanding. Here we extend the task by considering pronouns as well. First, we construct a dataset of phrase grounding with both noun phrases and pronouns to image regions. Based on the dataset, we test the performance of phrase grounding by using a state-of-the-art literature model of this line. Then, we enhance the baseline grounding model with coreference information which should help our task potentially, modeling the coreference structures with graph convolutional networks. Experiments on our dataset, interestingly, show that pronouns are easier to ground than noun phrases, where the possible reason might be that these pronouns are much less ambiguous. Additionally, our final model with coreference information can significantly boost the grounding performance of both noun phrases and pronouns.

Extending Phrase Grounding with Pronouns in Visual Dialogues

Joint entity and relation extraction has been a core task in the field of information extraction. Recent approaches usually consider the extraction of relational triples from a stereoscopic perspective, either learning a relation-specific tagger or separate classifiers for each relation type. However, they still suffer from error propagation, relation redundancy and lack of high-level connections between triples. To address these issues, we propose a novel query-based approach to construct instance-level representations for relational triples. By metric-based comparison between query embeddings and token embeddings, we can extract all types of triples in one step, thus eliminating the error propagation problem. In addition, we learn the instance-level representation of relational triples via contrastive learning. In this way, relational triples can not only enclose rich class-level semantics but also access to high-order global connections. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the state of the art on five widely used benchmarks.

Query-based Instance Discrimination Network for Relational Triple Extraction

Few-shot knowledge graph completion (FKGC) aims to infer unknown fact triples of a relation using its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent FKGC studies focus on learning semantic representations of entity pairs by separately encoding the neighborhoods of head and tail entities. Such practice, however, ignores the inter-entity interaction, resulting in low-discrimination representations for entity pairs, especially when these entity pairs are associated with 1-to-N, N-to-1, and N-to-N relations. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel FKGC model, named Cross-Interaction Attention Network (CIAN) to investigate the inter-entity interaction between head and tail entities. Specifically, we first explore the interactions within entities by computing the attention between the task relation and each entity neighbor, and then model the interactions between head and tail entities by letting an entity to attend to the neighborhood of its paired entity. In this way, CIAN can figure out the relevant semantics between head and tail entities, thereby generating more discriminative representations for entity pairs. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that CIAN outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/cjlyl/FKGC-CIAN}.

Learning Inter-Entity-Interaction for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion

We present ClidSum, a benchmark dataset towards building cross-lingual summarization systems on dialogue documents. It consists of 67k+ dialogue documents and 112k+ annotated summaries in different target languages. Based on the proposed ClidSum, we introduce two benchmark settings for supervised and semi-supervised scenarios, respectively. We then build various baseline systems in different paradigms (pipeline and end-to-end) and conduct extensive experiments on ClidSum to provide deeper analyses. Furthermore, we propose mDialBART which extends mBART via further pre-training, where the multiple objectives help the pre-trained model capture the structural characteristics as well as key content in dialogues and the transformation from source to the target language. Experimental results show the superiority of mDialBART, as an end-to-end model, outperforms strong pipeline models on ClidSum. Finally, we discuss specific challenges that current approaches faced with this task and give multiple promising directions for future research. We have released the dataset and code at https://github.com/krystalan/ClidSum.

ClidSum: A Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Dialogue Summarization

Evidence from psycholinguistic studies suggests that the human brain builds a hierarchical syntactic structure during language comprehension. However, it is still unknown whether the neural basis of such structures is universal across languages. In this paper, we first analyze the differences in language structure between two diverse languages: Chinese and English. 
By computing the working memory requirements when applying parsing strategies to different language structures, we find that top-down parsing generates less memory load for the right-branching English and bottom-up parsing is less memory-demanding for Chinese.
Then we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether the brain has different syntactic adaptation strategies in processing Chinese and English. Specifically, for both Chinese and English, we extract predictors from the implementations of different parsing strategies, i.e., bottom-up and top-down. Then, these predictors are separately associated with fMRI signals. 
Results show that for Chinese and English, the brain utilizes bottom-up and top-down parsing strategies separately. These results reveal that the brain adopts parsing strategies with less memory processing load according to different language structures.

Is the Brain Mechanism for Hierarchical Structure Building Universal Across Languages? An fMRI Study of Chinese and English

Recently, aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) has become a popular task in the field of aspect-level sentiment analysis. Previous work utilizes a predefined template to paraphrase the original sentence into a structure target sequence, which can be easily decoded as quadruplets of the form (aspect category, aspect term, opinion term, sentiment polarity). The template involves the four elements in a fixed order. However, we observe that this solution contradicts with the order-free property of the ASQP task, since there is no need to fix the template order as long as the quadruplet is extracted correctly. Inspired by the observation, we study the effects of template orders and find that some orders help the generative model achieve better performance. It is hypothesized that different orders provide various views of the quadruplet. Therefore, we propose a simple but effective method to identify the most proper orders, and further combine multiple proper templates as data augmentation to improve the ASQP task. Specifically, we use the pre-trained language model to select the orders with minimal entropy. By fine-tuning the pre-trained language model with these template orders, our approach improves the performance of quad prediction, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly in low-resource settings.

Improving Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction via Template-Order Data Augmentation

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown their effectiveness in multiple scenarios. However, KBQA remains challenging, especially regarding coverage and generalization settings. This is due to two main factors: i) understanding the semantics of both questions and relevant knowledge from the KB; ii) generating executable logical forms with both semantic and syntactic correctness. In this paper, we present a new KBQA model, TIARA, which addresses those issues by applying multi-grained retrieval to help the PLM focus on the most relevant KB context, viz., entities, exemplary logical forms, and schema items. Moreover, constrained decoding is used to control the output space and reduce generation errors. Experiments over important benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. TIARA outperforms previous SOTA, including those using PLMs or oracle entity annotations, by at least 4.1 and 1.1 F1 points on GrailQA and WebQuestionsSP, respectively. Specifically on GrailQA, TIARA outperforms previous models in all categories, with an improvement of 4.7 F1 points in zero-shot generalization.

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FLUTE: Figurative Language Understanding through Textual Explanations

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Composing Ci with Reinforced Non-autoregressive Text Generation

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