United Arab Emirates

We present Referee, a novel framework for sentence summarization that can be trained reference-free (i.e., requiring no gold summaries for supervision), while allowing direct control for compression ratio. Our work is the first to demonstrate that reference-free, controlled sentence summarization is feasible via the conceptual framework of Symbolic Knowledge Distillation (West et al., 2022), where latent knowledge in pre-trained language models is distilled via explicit examples sampled from the teacher models, further purified with three types of filters: length, fidelity, and Information Bottleneck. Moreover, we uniquely propose iterative distillation of knowledge, where student models from the previous iteration of distillation serve as teacher models in the next iteration. Starting off from a relatively modest set of GPT3-generated summaries, we demonstrate how iterative knowledge distillation can lead to considerably smaller, but better summarizers with sharper controllability. A useful by-product of this iterative distillation process is a high-quality dataset of sentence-summary pairs with varying degrees of compression ratios. Empirical results demonstrate that the final student models vastly outperform the much larger GPT3-Instruct model in terms of the controllability of compression ratios, without compromising the quality of resulting summarization.

EMNLP 2022

Referee: Reference-Free Sentence Summarization with Sharper Controllability through Symbolic Knowledge Distillation

symbolic knowledge distillation

reference-free

large language models

summarization

## 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.

poster

Literary translation is a culturally significant task, but it is bottlenecked by the small number of qualified literary translators relative to the many untranslated works published around the world. Machine translation (MT) holds potential to complement the work of human translators by improving both training procedures and their overall efficiency. Literary translation is less constrained than more traditional MT settings since translators must balance meaning equivalence, readability, and critical interpretability in the target language. This property, along with the complex discourse-level context present in literary texts, also makes literary MT more challenging to computationally model and evaluate. To explore this task, we collect a dataset (Par3) of non-English language novels in the public domain, each aligned at the paragraph level to both human and automatic English translations. Using Par3, we discover that expert literary translators prefer reference human translations over machine-translated paragraphs at a rate of 84\%, while state-of-the-art automatic MT metrics do not correlate with those preferences. The experts note that MT outputs contain not only mistranslations, but also discourse-disrupting errors and stylistic inconsistencies. To address these problems, we train a post-editing model whose output is preferred over normal MT output at a rate of 69% by experts. We publicly release Par3 to spur future research into literary MT.

Exploring Document-Level Literary Machine Translation with Parallel Paragraphs from World Literature

Training a good deep learning model requires substantial data and computing resources, which makes the resulting neural model a valuable intellectual property. To prevent the neural network from being undesirably exploited, non-transferable learning has been proposed to reduce the model generalization ability in specific target domains. However, existing approaches require labeled data for the target domain which can be difficult to obtain. Furthermore, they do not have the mechanism to still recover the model's ability to access the target domain.
In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised non-transferable learning method for the text classification task that does not require annotated target domain data. We further introduce a secret key component in our approach for recovering the access to the target domain, where we design both an explicit and an implicit method for doing so. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Unsupervised Non-transferable Text Classification

We propose a simple refactoring of multi-choice question answering (MCQA) tasks as a series of binary classifications. The MCQA task is generally performed by scoring each (question, answer) pair normalized over all the pairs, and then selecting the answer from the pair that yield the highest score. For n answer choices, this is equivalent to an n-class classification setup where only one class (true answer) is correct. We instead show that classifying (question, true answer) as positive instances and (question, false answer) as negative instances is significantly more effective across various models and datasets. We show the efficacy of our proposed approach in different tasks -- abductive reasoning, commonsense question answering, science question answering, and sentence completion. Our DeBERTa binary classification model reaches the top or close to the top performance on public leaderboards for these tasks. The source code of the proposed approach is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/TEAM.

Two is Better than Many? Binary Classification as an Effective Approach to Multi-Choice Question Answering

Code-switched (CS) data is ubiquitous in today's globalized world, but the dearth of annotated datasets in code-switching poses a significant challenge for learning diverse tasks across different language pairs. Parameter-efficient prompt-tuning approaches conditioned on frozen language models have shown promise for transfer learning in limited-resource setups. In this paper, we propose a novel instance-based prompt composition technique, PRO-CS, for CS tasks that combine language and task knowledge. We compare our approach with prompt-tuning and fine-tuning for code-switched tasks on 10 datasets across 4 language pairs. Our model outperforms the prompt-tuning approach by significant margins across all datasets and outperforms or remains at par with fine-tuning by using just 0.18% of total parameters. We also achieve competitive results when compared with the fine-tuned model in the low-resource cross-lingual and cross-task setting, indicating the effectiveness of our approach to incorporate new code-switched tasks.

PRO-CS : An Instance-Based Prompt Composition Technique for Code-Switched Tasks

Language models (LMs) have been used in cognitive modeling as well as engineering studies---they compute information-theoretic complexity metrics that simulate humans' cognitive load during reading.
This study highlights a limitation of modern neural LMs as the model of choice for this purpose: there is a discrepancy between their context access capacities and that of humans.
Our results showed that constraining the LMs' context access improved their simulation of human reading behavior.
We also showed that LM-human gaps in context access were associated with specific syntactic constructions; incorporating syntactic biases into LMs' context access might enhance their cognitive plausibility.

Context Limitations Make Neural Language Models More Human-Like

Human communication relies on common ground (CG), the mutual knowledge and beliefs shared by participants, to produce coherent and interesting conversations. In this paper, we demonstrate that current response generation (RG) models produce generic and dull responses in dialogues because they act reflexively, failing to explicitly model CG, both due to the lack of CG in training data and the standard RG training procedure. We introduce Reflect, a dataset that annotates dialogues with explicit CG (materialized as inferences approximating shared knowledge and beliefs) and solicits 9k diverse human-generated responses each following one common ground. Using Reflect, we showcase the limitations of current dialogue data and RG models: less than half of the responses in current data is rated as high quality (sensible, specific, and interesting) and models trained using this data have even lower quality, while most Reflect responses are judged high quality. Next, we analyze whether CG can help models produce better quality responses by using Reflect CG to guide RG models. Surprisingly, we find that simply prompting GPT3 to "think" about CG generates 30% more quality responses, showing promising benefits to integrating CG into the RG process.

Reflect, Not Reflex: Inference-Based Common Ground Improves Dialogue Response Quality

Recent advances in large-scale pre-training provide large models with the potential to learn knowledge from the raw text. It is thus natural to ask whether it is possible to leverage these large models as knowledge bases for downstream tasks. In this work, we answer the aforementioned question in unsupervised knowledge-grounded conversation. We explore various methods that best elicit knowledge from large models. Our human study indicates that, though hallucinations exist, large models post the unique advantage of being able to output common sense and summarize facts that cannot be directly retrieved from the search engine. To better exploit such generated knowledge in dialogue generation, we treat the generated knowledge as a noisy knowledge source and propose the posterior-based reweighing as well as the noisy training strategy. Empirical results on two benchmarks show advantages over the state-of-the-art methods.

Eliciting Knowledge from Large Pre-Trained Models for Unsupervised Knowledge-Grounded Conversation

Lay summarisation aims to jointly summarise and simplify a given text, thus making its content more comprehensible to non-experts.
Automatic approaches for lay summarisation can provide significant value in broadening access to scientific literature, enabling a greater degree of both interdisciplinary knowledge sharing and public understanding when it comes to research findings. However, current corpora for this task are limited in their size and scope, hindering the development of broadly applicable data-driven approaches. 
Aiming to rectify these issues, we present two novel lay summarisation datasets, PLOS (large-scale) and eLife (medium-scale), each of which contains biomedical journal articles alongside expert-written lay summaries.
We provide a thorough characterisation of our lay summaries, 
highlighting differing levels of readability and abstractiveness
between datasets that can be leveraged to support the needs of different applications.
Finally, we benchmark our datasets using mainstream summarisation approaches and perform a manual evaluation with domain experts, demonstrating their utility and casting light on the key challenges of this task.

Making Science Simple: Corpora for the Lay Summarisation of Scientific Literature

It has been shown that NLI models are usually biased with respect to the word-overlap between the premise and the hypothesis, as they take this feature as a primary cue for predicting the entailment label. 
In this paper, we focus on an overlooked aspect of the overlap bias in the NLI models: the reverse word-overlap bias. 
Our experimental results demonstrate that current NLI systems are also highly biased towards the non-entailment label on instances with low overlap and that existing debiasing methods, which are reportedly successful on challenge datasets, are generally ineffective in addressing this category of bias.
Through a set of analyses, we investigate the reasons for the emergence of the overlap bias and the role of minority examples in mitigating this bias.
For the former, we find that the word overlap bias does not stem from pre-training, and in the latter, we observe that in contrast to the accepted assumption, eliminating minority examples does not affect the generalizability of debiasing methods with respect to the overlap bias.

Looking at the Overlooked: An Analysis on the Word-Overlap Bias in Natural Language Inference

Contrastive learning has been the dominant approach to training dense retrieval models. In this work, we investigate the impact of ranking context - an often overlooked aspect of learning dense retrieval models. In particular, we examine the effect of its constituent parts: jointly scoring a large number of negatives per query, using retrieved (query-specific) instead of random negatives, and a fully list-wise loss.

To incorporate these factors into training, we introduce Contextual Document Embedding Reranking (CODER), a highly efficient retrieval framework. When reranking, it incurs only a negligible computational overhead on top of a first-stage method at run time (approx. 5 ms delay per query), allowing it to be easily combined with any state-of-the-art dual encoder method. Models trained through CODER can also be used as stand-alone retrievers.

Evaluating CODER in a large set of experiments on the MS MARCO and TripClick collections, we show that the contextual reranking of precomputed document embeddings leads to a significant improvement in retrieval performance. This improvement becomes even more pronounced when more relevance information per query is available, shown in the TripClick collection, where we establish new state-of-the-art results by a large margin.

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Next from EMNLP 2022

Exploring Document-Level Literary Machine Translation with Parallel Paragraphs from World Literature

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