United Arab Emirates

The multi-head self-attention mechanism of the transformer model has been thoroughly investigated recently. In one vein of study, researchers are interested in understanding why and how transformers work. In another vein, researchers propose new attention augmentation methods to make transformers more accurate, efficient and interpretable. In this paper, we combine these two lines of research in a human-in-the-loop pipeline to first discover important task-specific attention patterns. Then those patterns are injected, not only to smaller models, but also to the original model. The benefits of our pipeline and discovered patterns are demonstrated in two case studies with extractive summarization and topic segmentation. After discovering interpretable patterns in BERT-based models fine-tuned for the two downstream tasks, experiments indicate that when we inject the patterns into attention heads, the models show considerable improvements in accuracy and efficiency.

EMNLP 2022

Human Guided Exploitation of Interpretable Attention Patterns in Summarization and Topic Segmentation

human-in-the-loop

sparsity

interpretability

attention analysis

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

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.

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.

Autoregressive Transformers are strong language models but incur O(T) complexity during per-token generation due to the self-attention mechanism. Recent work proposes kernel-based methods to approximate causal self-attention by replacing it with recurrent formulations with various update rules and feature maps to achieve O(1) time and memory complexity. We explore these approaches and find that they are unnecessarily complex, and propose a simple alternative - decaying fast weights - that runs fast on GPU, outperforms prior methods, and retains 99% of attention's performance for GPT-2. We also show competitive performance on WikiText-103 against more complex attention substitutes.

Fine-Tuning Pre-trained Transformers into Decaying Fast Weights

The automatic generation of Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) has the potential to reduce the time educators spend on student assessment significantly. However, existing evaluation metrics for MCQ generation, such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR, focus on the n-gram based similarity of the generated MCQ to the gold sample in the dataset and disregard their educational value.
They fail to evaluate the MCQ's ability to assess the student's knowledge of the corresponding target fact. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel automatic evaluation metric, coined Knowledge Dependent Answerability (KDA), which measures the MCQ's answerability given knowledge of the target fact. Specifically, we first show how to measure KDA based on student responses from a human survey.
Then, we propose two automatic evaluation metrics, KDA_disc and KDA_cont, that approximate KDA by leveraging pre-trained language models to imitate students' problem-solving behavior.
Through our human studies, we show that KDA_disc and KDA_soft have strong correlations with both (1) KDA and (2) usability in an actual classroom setting, labeled by experts. Furthermore, when combined with n-gram based similarity metrics, KDA_disc and KDA_cont are shown to have a strong predictive power for various expert-labeled MCQ quality measures.

Evaluating the Knowledge Dependency of Questions

Implicit discourse relation recognition is a challenging task that involves identifying the sense or senses that hold between two adjacent spans of text, in the absense of an explicit connective between them. In both PDTB-2 (prasad et al., 2008) and PDTB-3 (Webber et al., 2019), discourse relational senses are organized into a three-level hierarchy ranging from four broad top-level senses, to more specific senses below them. Most previous work on implicitf discourse relation recognition have used the sense hierarchy simply to indicate what sense labels were available. Here we do more --- incorporating the sense hierarchy into the recognition process itself and using it to select the negative examples used in contrastive learning. With no additional effort, the approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the task. Our code is released in
https://github.com/wanqiulong 0923/Contrastive\_IDRR.

Facilitating Contrastive Learning of Discourse Relational Senses by Exploiting the Hierarchy of Sense Relations

There is significant interest in developing evaluation metrics which accurately estimate the quality of generated text without the aid of a human-written reference text, which can be time consuming and expensive to collect or entirely unavailable in online applications. However, in this work, we demonstrate that these reference-free metrics are inherently biased and limited in their ability to evaluate generated text, and we argue that they should not be used to measure progress on tasks like machine translation or summarization. We show how reference-free metrics are equivalent to using one generation model to evaluate another, which has several limitations: (1) the metrics can be optimized at test time to find the approximate best-possible output, (2) they are inherently biased toward models which are more similar to their own, and (3) they can be biased against higher-quality outputs, including those written by humans. Therefore, we recommend that reference-free metrics should be used as diagnostic tools for analyzing and understanding model behavior instead of measures of how well models perform a task, in which the goal is to achieve as high of a score as possible.

On the Limitations of Reference-Free Evaluations of Generated Text

Children acquiring English make systematic errors on subject control sentences even after they have reached near-adult competence (Chomsky, 1969), possibly due to heuristics based on semantic roles (Maratsos, 1974).
Given the advanced fluency of large generative language models, we ask whether model outputs are consistent with these heuristics, and to what degree different models are consistent with each other. We find that models can be categorized by behavior into three separate groups, with broad differences between the groups. The outputs of models in the largest group are consistent with positional heuristics that succeed on subject control but fail on object control. This result is surprising, given that object control is orders of magnitude more frequent in the text data used to train such models. We examine to what degree the models are sensitive to prompting with agent-patient information, finding that raising the salience of agent and patient relations results in significant changes in the outputs of most models. Based on this observation, we leverage an existing dataset of semantic proto-role annotations (White et al. 2020) to explore the connections between control and labeling event participants with properties typically associated with agents and patients.

The Curious Case of Control

Despite their promising results on standard benchmarks, NLU models are still prone to make predictions based on shortcuts caused by unintended bias in the dataset. For example, an NLI model may use lexical overlap as a shortcut to make entailment predictions due to repetitive data generation patterns from annotators, also called annotation artifacts. In this paper, we propose a causal analysis framework to help debias NLU models. We show that (1) by defining causal relationships, we can introspect how much annotation artifacts affect the outcomes. (2) We can utilize counterfactual inference to mitigate bias with this knowledge. We found that viewing a model as a treatment can mitigate bias more effectively than viewing annotation artifacts as treatment. (3) In addition to bias mitigation, we can interpret how much each debiasing strategy is affected by annotation artifacts. Our experimental results show that using counterfactual inference can improve out-of-distribution performance in all settings while maintaining high in-distribution performance.

Mitigating Spurious Correlation in Natural Language Understanding with Counterfactual Inference

Patent Landscaping, one of the central tasks of intellectual property management, includes selecting and grouping patents according to user-defined technical or application-oriented criteria. While recent transformer-based models have been shown to be effective for classifying patents into taxonomies such as CPC or IPC, there is yet little research on how to support real-world Patent Landscape Studies (PLSs) using natural language processing methods. With this paper, we release three labeled datasets for PLS-oriented classification tasks covering two diverse domains. We provide a qualitative analysis and report detailed corpus statistics.

Most research on neural models for patents has been restricted to leveraging titles and abstracts. We compare strong neural and non-neural baselines, proposing a novel model that takes into account textual information from the patents' full texts as well as embeddings created based on the patents' CPC labels. We find that for PLS-oriented classification tasks, going beyond title and abstract is crucial, CPC labels are an effective source of information, and combining all features yields the best results.

Three Real-World Datasets and Neural Computational Models for Classification Tasks in Patent Landscaping

Mixture of Experts layers (MoEs) enable efficient scaling of language models through conditional computation. This paper presents a detailed empirical study of how autoregressive MoE language models scale in comparison with dense models in a wide range of settings: in- and out-of-domain language modeling, zero- and few-shot priming, and full-shot fine-tuning. With the exception of fine-tuning, we find MoEs to be substantially more compute efficient. At more modest training budgets, MoEs can match the performance of dense models using ~4 times less compute. This gap narrows at scale, but our largest MoE model (1.1T parameters) consistently outperforms a compute-equivalent dense model (6.7B parameters). Overall, this performance gap varies greatly across tasks and domains, suggesting that MoE and dense models generalize differently in ways that are worthy of future study. We make our code and models publicly available for research use.

Efficient Large Scale Language Modeling with Mixtures of Experts

Pretrained, large, generative language models (LMs) have had great success in a wide range of sequence tagging and structured prediction tasks. Casting a sequence tagging task as a Seq2Seq one requires deciding the formats of the input and output sequences. However, we lack a principled understanding of the trade-offs associated with these formats (such as the effect on model accuracy, sequence length, multilingual generalization, hallucination). In this paper, we rigorously study different formats one could use for casting input text sentences and their output labels into the input and target (i.e., output) of a Seq2Seq model. Along the way, we introduce a new format, which we show to to be both simpler and more effective. Additionally the new format demonstrates significant gains in the multilingual settings -- both zero-shot transfer learning and joint training. Lastly, we find that the new format is more robust and almost completely devoid of hallucination -- an issue we find common in existing formats. With well over a 1000 experiments studying 14 different formats, over 7 diverse public benchmarks -- including 3 multilingual datasets spanning 7 languages -- we believe our findings provide a strong empirical basis in understanding how we should tackle sequence tagging tasks.

Transforming Sequence Tagging Into A Seq2Seq Task

We propose a method which uses neural embeddings to improve the performance of any given LDA-style topic model. Our method, called neural embedding allocation (NEA), deconstructs topic models (LDA or otherwise) into interpretable vector-space embeddings of words, topics, documents, authors, and so on, by learning neural embeddings to mimic the topic model. We demonstrate that NEA improves coherence scores of the original topic model by smoothing out the noisy topics when the number of topics is large. Furthermore, we show NEA’s effectiveness and generality in deconstructing and smoothing LDA, author-topic models, and the recent mixed membership skip-gram topic model and achieve better performance with the embeddings compared to several state-of-the-art models.

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