United Arab Emirates

While fine-tuned language models perform well on many language tasks, they were also shown to rely on superficial surface features such as lexical overlap. Excessive utilization of such heuristics can lead to failure on challenging inputs. We analyze the use of lexical overlap heuristics in natural language inference, paraphrase detection, and reading comprehension (using a novel contrastive dataset),
and find that larger models are much less susceptible to adopting lexical overlap heuristics. We also find that longer training leads models to abandon lexical overlap heuristics. Finally, We provide evidence that the disparity between models size has its source in the pre-trained model.

EMNLP 2022

Lexical Generalization Improves with Larger Models and Longer Training

interpetability

langauage model

emergence

large language models

findings / work in progress

## 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.

Existing approaches to constructing training data for Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks, such as for semi-structured table reasoning, are either via crowdsourcing or fully automatic methods. However, the former is expensive and time consuming and thus limits scale, and the latter often produces naive examples that may lack complex reasoning. This paper develops a realistic semi-automated framework for data augmentation for tabular inference. Instead of manually generating a hypothesis for each table, our methodology generates hypothesis templates transferable to similar tables. In addition, our framework entails the creation of rational counterfactual tables based on human written logical constraints and premise paraphrasing. For our case study, we use the INFOTABS (Gupta et al., 2020), which is an entity centric tabular inference dataset. We observed that our framework could generate human-like tabular inference examples, which could benefit training data augmentation, especially in the scenario with limited supervision.

Realistic Data Augmentation Framework for Enhancing Tabular Reasoning

Transformer language models encode the notion of word order using positional information. Most commonly, this positional information is represented by absolute position embeddings (APEs), that are learned from the pretraining data. However, in natural language, it is not absolute position that matters, but relative position, and the extent to which APEs can capture this type of information has not been studied. In this work, we observe that models trained with APE over-rely on positional information to the point that they break-down when subjected to sentences with shifted position information. Specifically, when models are subjected to sentences starting from a non-zero position (excluding the effect of priming), they exhibit noticeably degraded performance on zero- to full-shot tasks, across a range of model families and model sizes. Our findings raise questions about the efficacy of APEs to model the relativity of position information, and invite further introspection on the sentence and word order processing strategies employed by these models.

The Curious Case of Absolute Position Embeddings

Vision-and-dialog navigation is a recent benchmark for evaluating the AI capabilities of perception, interaction, and decision making. While existing methods developed for this benchmark have demonstrated great successes, they mostly rely on large datasets, where data collection can be a challenge, and the learned policies are not adaptive to domain changes. In this paper, we focus on a new problem, referred to as goal-oriented vision-and-dialog navigation (GVDN), where an agent uses reinforcement learning techniques to compute dialog-navigation policies from trial and error. A robot conducts visual navigation to locate target objects, and can talk to a remote human operator as needed. Our remote human is able to provide guidance on navigation only if the robot correctly conveys its location through dialog. Experiments have been conducted using photo-realistic simulation environments. Results suggest that, our agent outperforms competitive baselines in success rate.

Goal-oriented Vision-and-Dialog Navigation via Reinforcement Learning

Creating challenging tabular inference data is essential for learning complex reasoning. Prior work has mostly relied on two data generation strategies. The first is human annotation, which yields linguistically diverse data but is difficult to scale. The second category for creation is synthetic generation, which is scalable and cost effective but lacks inventiveness. In this research, we present a framework for semi-automatically recasting existing tabular data to make use of the benefits of both approaches. We utilize our framework to build tabular NLI instances from five datasets that were initially intended for tasks like table2text creation, tabular Q/A, and semantic parsing. We demonstrate that recasted data could be used as evaluation benchmarks as well as augmentation data to enhance performance on tabular NLI tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of models trained on recasted data in the zero-shot scenario, and analyse trends in performance across different recasted datasets types.

Leveraging Data Recasting to Enhance Tabular Reasoning

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as GPT-3 have shown strong in-context learning capabilities, which are highly appealing for domains such as biomedicine that feature high and diverse demands of language technologies but also high data annotation costs. In this paper, we present the first systematic and comprehensive study to compare the few-shot performance of GPT-3 in-context learning with fine-tuning smaller (i.e., BERT-sized) PLMs on two representative biomedical information extraction (IE) tasks: named entity recognition and relation extraction. We follow the true few-shot setting to avoid overestimating models' few-shot performance by model selection over a large validation set. We also optimize GPT-3's performance with known techniques such as contextual calibration and dynamic in-context example retrieval. However, our results show that GPT-3 still significantly underperforms compared to simply fine-tuning a smaller PLM. In addition, GPT-3 in-context learning also yields smaller gains in accuracy when more training data becomes available. More in-depth analyses further reveal issues of in-context learning that may be detrimental to IE tasks in general. Given the high cost of experimenting with GPT-3, we hope our study provides helpful guidance for biomedical researchers and practitioners towards more practical solutions such as fine-tuning small PLMs before better in-context learning is available for biomedical IE.

Thinking about GPT-3 In-Context Learning for Biomedical IE? Think Again

In Transformer-based language models (LMs) the attention mechanism converts token embeddings into contextual embeddings that incorporate information from neighboring words. The resulting contextual hidden state embeddings have enabled highly accurate models of brain responses, suggesting that the attention mechanism constructs contextual embeddings that carry information reflected in language-related brain representations. However, it is unclear whether the attention weights that are used to integrate information across words are themselves related to language representations in the brain. To address this question we analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings of participants reading English language narratives. We provided the narrative text as input to two LMs (BERT and GPT-2) and extracted their corresponding attention weights. We then used encoding models to determine how well attention weights can predict recorded brain responses. We find that attention weights accurately predict brain responses in much of the frontal and temporal cortices. Our results suggest that the attention mechanism itself carries information that is reflected in brain representations. Moreover, these results indicate cortical areas in which context integration may occur.

Attention weights accurately predict language representations in the brain

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the task of identifying the intended sense of a word in context. While prior work on unsupervised WSD has leveraged lexical knowledge bases, such as WordNet and BabelNet, these resources have proven to be less effective for Chinese. Instead, the most widely used lexical knowledge base for Chinese is HowNet. Previous HowNet-based WSD methods have not exploited contextual translation information. In this paper, we present the first HowNet-based WSD system which combines monolingual contextual information from a pretrained neural language model with bilingual information obtained via machine translation and sense translation information from HowNet. The results of our evaluation experiment on a test set from prior work demonstrate that our new method achieves a new state of the art for unsupervised Chinese WSD.

Improving HowNet-Based Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation with Translations

Recent research on argumentative dialogues has focused on persuading people to take some action, changing their stance on the topic of discussion, or winning debates. In this work, we focus on argumentative dialogues that aim to open up (rather than change) people's minds to help them become more understanding to views that are unfamiliar or in opposition to their own convictions. To this end, we present a dataset of $183$ argumentative dialogues about $3$ controversial topics: veganism, Brexit and COVID-19 vaccination. The dialogues were collected using the Wizard of Oz approach, where wizards leverage a knowledge-base of arguments to converse with participants. Open-mindedness is measured before and after engaging in the dialogue using a questionnaire from the psychology literature, and success of the dialogue is measured as the change in the participant's stance towards those who hold opinions different to theirs. We evaluate two dialogue models: a Wikipedia-based and an argument-based model. We show that while both models perform closely in terms of opening up minds, the argument-based model is significantly better on other dialogue properties such as engagement and clarity.

Opening up Minds with Argumentative Dialogues

Many word-level adversarial attack approaches for textual data have been proposed in recent studies. However, due to the massive search space consisting of combinations of candidate words, the existing approaches face the problem of preserving the semantics of texts when crafting adversarial counterparts. In this paper, we develop a novel attack strategy to find adversarial texts with high similarity to the original texts while introducing minimal perturbation. The rationale is that we expect the adversarial texts with small perturbation can better preserve the semantic meaning of original texts. Experiments show that, compared with state-of-the-art attack approaches, our approach achieves higher success rates and lower perturbation rates in four benchmark datasets.

Generating Textual Adversaries with Minimal Perturbation

Adding interpretability to word embeddings represents an area of active research in text
representation. Recent work has explored the potential of embedding words via so-called polar
dimensions (e.g. good vs. bad, correct vs. wrong). Examples of such recent approaches
include SemAxis, POLAR, FrameAxis, and BiImp. Although these approaches provide interpretable
dimensions for words, they have not been designed to deal with polysemy, i.e. they can not easily distinguish between different senses of words. To address this limitation, we present SensePOLAR, an extension of the original POLAR framework that enables wordsense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings. The resulting interpretable word embeddings achieve a level of
performance that is comparable to original contextual word embeddings across a variety of
natural language processing tasks including the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks. Our work
removes a fundamental limitation of existing approaches by offering users sense aware interpretations
for contextual word embeddings.

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Lexical Generalization Improves with Larger Models and Longer Training

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