United Arab Emirates

Recent works that revealed the vulnerability of dialogue state tracking (DST) models to distributional shifts have made holistic comparisons on robustness and qualitative analyses increasingly important for understanding their relative performance. 
We present our findings from standardized and comprehensive DST diagnoses, which have previously been sparse and uncoordinated, using our toolkit, CheckDST, a collection of robustness tests and failure mode analytics. 
We discover that different classes of DST models have clear strengths and weaknesses, where generation models are more promising for handling language variety while span-based classification models are more robust to unseen entities. 
Prompted by this discovery, we also compare checkpoints from the same model and find that the standard practice of selecting checkpoints using validation loss/accuracy is prone to overfitting and each model class has distinct patterns of failure. 
Lastly, we demonstrate how our diagnoses motivate a pre-finetuning procedure with non-dialogue data that offers comprehensive improvements to generation models by alleviating the impact of distributional shifts through transfer learning.

EMNLP 2022

Know Thy Strengths: Comprehensive Dialogue State Tracking Diagnostics

prefinetuning

task-oriented dialogue

dialogue state tracking

robustness

dialogue

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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.

Humor is an inherently social phenomenon, with humorous utterances shaped by what is socially and culturally accepted. Understanding humor is an important NLP challenge, with many applications to human-computer interactions. In this work we explore humor in the context of Cards Against Humanity -- a party game where players complete fill-in-the-blank statements using cards that can be offensive or politically incorrect.

We introduce a novel dataset of 300,000 online games of Cards Against Humanity, including 785K unique jokes, analyze it and provide insights. We trained machine learning models to predict the winning joke per game, achieving performance twice as good (20%) as random, even without any user information.
On the more difficult task of judging novel cards, we see the models' ability to generalize is moderate. 
Interestingly, we find that our models are primarily focused on punchline card, with the context having little impact.
Analyzing feature importance, we observe that short, crude, juvenile punchlines tend to win.

Cards Against AI: Predicting Humor in a Fill-in-the-blank Party Game

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are gaining popularity over cascaded approaches due to their simplicity and ability to avoid error propagation. However, these systems model sequence labeling as a sequence prediction task causing a divergence from its well-established token-level tagging formulation. We build compositional end-to-end SLU systems that explicitly separate the added complexity of recognizing spoken mentions in SLU from the NLU task of sequence labeling. By relying on intermediate decoders trained for ASR, our end-to-end systems transform the input modality from speech to token-level representations that can be used in the traditional sequence labeling framework. This composition of ASR and NLU formulations in our end-to-end SLU system offers direct compatibility with pre-trained ASR and NLU systems, allows performance monitoring of individual components and enables the use of globally normalized losses like CRF, making them attractive in practical scenarios. Our models outperform both cascaded and direct end-to-end models on a labeling task of named entity recognition across SLU benchmarks.

Token-level Sequence Labeling for Spoken Language Understanding using Compositional End-to-End Models

One of the key challenges of automatic story generation is how to generate a long narrative that can maintain fluency, relevance, and coherence. Despite recent progress, current story generation systems still face the challenge of how to effectively capture contextual and event features, which has a profound impact on a model's generation performance. To address these challenges, we present EtriCA, a novel neural generation model, which improves the relevance and coherence of the generated stories through residually mapping context features to event sequences with a cross-attention mechanism. Such a feature capturing mechanism allows our model to better exploit the logical relatedness between events when generating stories. Extensive experiments based on both automatic and human evaluations show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model in leveraging context and event features.

EtriCA: Event-Triggered Context-Aware Story Generation Augmented by Cross Attention

In this paper, we study trade-offs between efficiency, cost and accuracy when pre-training Transformer encoders with different pre-training objectives. For this purpose, we analyze features of common objectives and combine them to create new effective pre-training approaches. Specifically, we designed light token generators based on a straightforward statistical approach, which can replace ELECTRA computationally heavy generators, thus highly reducing cost. Our experiments also show that (i) there are more efficient alternatives to BERT's MLM, and (ii) it is possible to efficiently pre-train Transformer-based models using lighter generators without a significant drop in performance.

Effective Pretraining Objectives for Transformer-based Autoencoders

While collecting or generating more parallel data is necessary to improve machine translation (MT) in low-resource settings, we lack an understanding of how the limited amounts of existing data are actually used to help guide the collection of further resources. In this paper, we apply data cartography techniques (Swayamdipta et al., 2020) to characterize the contribution of training samples in two low-resource MT tasks (Swahili-English and Turkish-English) throughout the training of standard neural MT models. Our empirical study shows that, unlike in prior work for classification tasks, most samples contribute to model training in low-resource MT, albeit not uniformly throughout the training process. 
Furthermore, uni-dimensional characterizations of samples -- e.g., based on dual cross-entropy or word frequency -- do not suffice to characterize to what degree they are hard or easy to learn. Taken together, our results suggest that data augmentation strategies for low-resource MT would benefit from model-in-the-loop strategies to maximize improvements.

Data Cartography for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

While a substantial body of prior work has explored adversarial example generation for natural language understanding tasks, these examples are often unrealistic and diverge from the real-world data distributions. In this work, we introduce a two-stage adversarial example generation framework (NaturalAdversaries), for designing adversaries that are effective at fooling a given classifier and demonstrate natural-looking failure cases that could plausibly occur during in-the-wild deployment of the models. At the first stage a token attribution method is used to summarize a given classifier's behavior as a function of the key tokens in the input. In the second stage a generative model is conditioned on the key tokens from the first stage. NaturalAdversaries is adaptable to both black-box and white-box adversarial attacks based on the level of access to the model parameters. Our results indicate these adversaries generalize across domains, and offer insights for future research on improving robustness of neural text classification models.

NaturalAdversaries: Can Naturalistic Adversaries Be as Effective as Artificial Adversaries?

A standard measure of the influence of a research paper is the number of times it is cited. However, papers may be cited for many reasons, and citation count is not informative about the extent to which a paper affected the content of subsequent publications. We therefore propose a novel method to quantify linguistic influence in timestamped document collections. There are two main steps: first, identify lexical and semantic changes using contextual embeddings and word frequencies; second, aggregate information about these changes into per-document influence parameters by estimating a high-dimensional Hawkes process with a low-rank parameter matrix. The resulting measures of linguistic influence are predictive of \emph{future} citations. Specifically, the estimate of linguistic influence from the two years after a paper's publication is correlated with and predictive of its citation count in the following three years. This is demonstrated using an online evaluation with incremental temporal training/test splits, in comparison with a strong baseline that includes predictors for initial citation counts, topics, and lexical features.

Predicting Long-Term Citations from Short-Term Linguistic Influence

We study politeness phenomena in nine typologically diverse languages. Politeness is an important facet of communication and is sometimes argued to be cultural-specific, yet existing computational linguistic study is limited to English. We create TyDiP, a dataset containing three-way politeness annotations for 500 examples in each language, totaling 4.5K examples. We evaluate how well multilingual models can identify politeness levels -- they show a fairly robust zero-shot transfer ability, yet fall short of estimated human accuracy significantly. We further study mapping the English politeness strategy lexicon into nine languages via automatic translation and lexicon induction, analyzing whether each strategy's impact stays consistent across languages. Lastly, we empirically study the complicated relationship between formality and politeness through transfer experiments. We hope our dataset will support various research questions and applications, from evaluating multilingual models to constructing polite multilingual agents.

TyDiP: A Dataset for Politeness Classification in Nine Typologically Diverse Languages

Keyphrase generation aims at generating important phrases (keyphrases) that best describe a given document. In scholarly domains, current approaches have largely used only the title and abstract of the articles to generate keyphrases. In this paper, we comprehensively explore whether the integration of additional information from the full text of a given article or from semantically similar articles can be helpful for a neural keyphrase generation model or not. We discover that adding sentences from the full text, particularly in the form of the extractive summary of the article can significantly improve the generation of both types of keyphrases that are either present or absent from the text. Experimental results with three widely used models for keyphrase generation along with one of the latest transformer models suitable for longer documents, Longformer Encoder-Decoder (LED) validate the observation. We also present a new large-scale scholarly dataset FullTextKP for keyphrase generation. Unlike prior large-scale datasets, FullTextKP includes the full text of the articles along with the title and abstract. We release the source code at https://github.com/kgarg8/FullTextKP.

Keyphrase Generation Beyond the Boundaries of Title and Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture called Composition Attention Grammars (CAGs) that recursively compose subtrees into a single vector representation with a composition function, and selectively attend to previous structural information with a self-attention mechanism. We investigate whether these components---the composition function and the self-attention mechanism---can both induce human-like syntactic generalization. Specifically, we train language models (LMs) with and without these two components with the model sizes carefully controlled, and evaluate their syntactic generalization performance against six test circuits on the SyntaxGym benchmark. The results demonstrated that the composition function and the self-attention mechanism both play an important role to make LMs more human-like, and closer inspection of grammatical phenomena implied that the composition function allowed syntactic features, but not semantic features, to percolate into subtree representations.

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Cards Against AI: Predicting Humor in a Fill-in-the-blank Party Game

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Next from EMNLP 2022

Cards Against AI: Predicting Humor in a Fill-in-the-blank Party Game

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Enhancing Dialogue State Tracking Models through LLM-backed User-Agents Simulation

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