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Despite achieving incredibly low perplexities on myriad natural language corpora, today&#39;s language models still often underperform when used to generate text. This dichotomy has puzzled the language generation community for the last few years. In this work, we posit that the abstraction of natural language as a communication channel (a la Shannon, 1948) can provide new insights into the behaviors of probabilistic language generators, e.g., why high-probability texts can be dull or repetitive. Humans use language as a means of communicating information, and do so in a simultaneously efficient and error-minimizing manner; they choose each word in a string with this (perhaps subconscious) goal in mind. We propose that generation from probabilistic models should mimic this behavior. Rather than always choosing words from the high-probability region of the distribution---which have a low Shannon information content---we sample from the set of words with information content close to the conditional entropy of our model, i.e., close to the expected information content. This decision criterion can be realized through a simple and efficient implementation, which we call typical sampling. Automatic and human evaluations show that, in comparison to nucleus and top-k sampling, typical sampling offers competitive performance in terms of quality while consistently reducing the number of degenerate repetitions.

EMNLP 2022

Typical Decoding for Natural Language Generation

# 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. 
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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). 

Despite achieving incredibly low perplexities on myriad natural language corpora, today's language models still often underperform when used to generate text. This dichotomy has puzzled the language generation community for the last few years. In this work, we posit that the abstraction of natural language as a communication channel (a la Shannon, 1948) can provide new insights into the behaviors of probabilistic language generators, e.g., why high-probability texts can be dull or repetitive. Humans use language as a means of communicating information, and do so in a simultaneously efficient and error-minimizing manner; they choose each word in a string with this (perhaps subconscious) goal in mind. We propose that generation from probabilistic models should mimic this behavior. Rather than always choosing words from the high-probability region of the distribution---which have a low Shannon information content---we sample from the set of words with information content close to the conditional entropy of our model, i.e., close to the expected information content. This decision criterion can be realized through a simple and efficient implementation, which we call typical sampling. Automatic and human evaluations show that, in comparison to nucleus and top-k sampling, typical sampling offers competitive performance in terms of quality while consistently reducing the number of degenerate repetitions.

technical paper

## 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.

Matching equivalent entities across Knowledge graphs is a pivotal step for knowledge fusion. Previous approaches usually study the problem in Euclidean space. However, recent works have shown that hyperbolic space has a higher capacity than Euclidean space and hyperbolic embedding can represent the hierarchical structure in a knowledge graph. In this paper, we propose a localized geometric method to find equivalent entities in hyperbolic space. Specifically, we use a hyperbolic neural network to encode the lingual information of entities and the structure of both knowledge graphs into a low-dimensional hyperbolic space. To address the asymmetry of structure on different KGs and the localized nature of relations, we learn an instance-specific geometric mapping function based on rotation to match entity pairs. A contrastive loss function is used to train the model. The experiment verifies the power of low-dimensional hyperbolic space for entity matching and shows that our method outperforms the state of the art by a large margin.

A Localized Geometric Method to Match Knowledge in Low-dimensional Hyperbolic Space

Even though the large-scale language models have achieved excellent performances, they suffer from various adversarial attacks.
A large body of defense methods has been proposed. 
However, they are still limited due to redundant attack search spaces and the inability to defend against various types of attacks.
In this work, we present a novel fine-tuning approach called \textbf{RO}bust \textbf{SE}letive fine-tuning (\textbf{ROSE}) to address this issue.
ROSE conducts selective updates when adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks, filtering out invaluable and unrobust updates of parameters.
Specifically, we propose two strategies: the first-order and second-order ROSE for selecting target robust parameters.
The experimental results show that ROSE achieves significant improvements in adversarial robustness on various downstream NLP tasks, and the ensemble method even surpasses both variants above.
Furthermore, ROSE can be easily incorporated into existing fine-tuning methods to improve their adversarial robustness further.
The empirical analysis confirms that ROSE eliminates unrobust spurious updates during fine-tuning, leading to solutions corresponding to flatter and wider optima than the conventional method.
Code is available at \url{https://github.com/jiangllan/ROSE}.

ROSE: Robust Selective Fine-tuning for Pre-trained Language Models

In this paper, we propose the CodeRetriever model, which learns the function-level code semantic representations through large-scale code-text contrastive pre-training. We adopt two contrastive learning schemes in CodeRetriever: unimodal contrastive learning and bimodal contrastive learning. For unimodal contrastive learning, we design an unsupervised learning approach to build semantic-related code pairs based on the documentation and function name. For bimodal contrastive learning, we leverage the documentation and in-line comments of code to build code-text pairs. Both contrastive objectives can fully leverage large-scale code corpus for pre-training. 
Extensive experimental results show that CodeRetriever achieves new state-of-the-art with significant improvement over existing code pre-trained models, on eleven domain/language-specific code search tasks with six programming languages in different code granularity (function-level, snippet-level and statement-level).
These results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of CodeRetriever.
The codes and resources are available at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/AR2/tree/main/CodeRetriever}.

CodeRetriever: A Large Scale Contrastive Pre-Training Method for Code Search

Current works about false information detection based on conversation graphs on social networks focus primarily on two research streams from the standpoint of topic distribution: in-topic and cross-topic techniques, which assume that the data topic distribution is identical or cross, respectively. This signifies that all test data topics are seen or unseen by the model.
However, these assumptions are too harsh for actual social networks that contain both seen and unseen topics simultaneously, hence restricting their practical application.
In light of this, this paper develops a novel open-topic scenario that is better suited to actual social networks. In this open-topic scenario, we empirically find that the existing models suffer from impairment in the detection performance for seen or unseen topic data, resulting in poor overall model performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Contrastive Adversarial Learning Network, CALN, that employs an unsupervised topic clustering method to capture topic-specific features to enhance the model's performance for seen topics and an unsupervised adversarial learning method to align data representation distributions to enhance the model's generalisation to unseen topics.
Experiments on two benchmark datasets and a variety of graph neural networks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Open-Topic False Information Detection on Social Networks with Contrastive Adversarial Learning

Event detection (ED) identifies and classifies event triggers from unstructured texts, serving as a fundamental task for information extraction. Despite the remarkable progress achieved in the past several years, most research efforts focus on detecting events from formal texts (e.g., news articles, Wikipedia documents, financial announcements). Moreover, the texts in each dataset are either from a single source or multiple yet relatively homogeneous sources. With massive amounts of user-generated text accumulating on the Web and inside enterprises, identifying meaningful events in these informal texts, usually from multiple heterogeneous sources, has become a problem of significant practical value. As a pioneering exploration that expands event detection to the scenarios involving informal and heterogeneous texts, we propose a new large-scale Chinese event detection dataset based on user reviews, text conversations, and phone conversations in a leading e-commerce platform for food service. We carefully investigate the proposed dataset's textual informality and multi-domain heterogeneity characteristics by inspecting data samples quantitatively and qualitatively. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art event detection methods verify the unique challenges posed by these characteristics, indicating that multi-domain informal event detection remains an open problem and requires further efforts. Our benchmark and code are released at https://github.com/myeclipse/MUSIED.

MUSIED: A Benchmark for Event Detection from Multi-Source Heterogeneous Informal Texts

Reproducibility is of utmost concern in machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). In the field of natural language generation (especially machine translation), the seminal paper of Post (2018) has pointed out problems of reproducibility of the dominant metric, BLEU, at the time of publication. Nowadays, BERT-based evaluation metrics considerably outperform BLEU. In this paper, we ask whether results and claims from four recent BERT-based metrics can be reproduced. We find that reproduction of claims and results often fails because of (i) heavy undocumented preprocessing involved in the metrics, (ii) missing code and (iii) reporting weaker results for the baseline metrics. (iv) In one case, the problem stems from correlating not to human scores but to a wrong column in the csv file, inflating scores by 5 points. Motivated by the impact of preprocessing, we then conduct a second study where we examine its effects more closely (for one of the metrics). We find that preprocessing can have large effects, especially for highly inflectional languages. In this case, the effect of preprocessing may be larger than the effect of the aggregation mechanism (e.g., greedy alignment vs. Word Mover Distance).

Reproducibility Issues for BERT-based Evaluation Metrics

In monolingual dense retrieval, lots of works focus on how to distill knowledge from cross-encoder re-ranker to dual-encoder retriever and these methods achieve better performance due to the effectiveness of cross-encoder re-ranker. However, we find that the performance of the cross-encoder re-ranker is heavily influenced by the number of training samples and the quality of negative samples, which is hard to obtain in the cross-lingual setting. In this paper, we propose to use a query generator as the teacher in the cross-lingual setting, which is less dependent on enough training samples and high-quality negative samples. In addition to traditional knowledge distillation, we further propose a novel enhancement method, which uses the query generator to help the dual-encoder align queries from different languages, but does not need any additional parallel sentences. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.

Empowering Dual-Encoder with Query Generator for Cross-Lingual Dense Retrieval

Document-level natural language inference (DOCNLI) is a new challenging task in natural language processing, aiming at judging the entailment relationship between a pair of hypothesis and premise documents. Current datasets and baselines largely follow sentence-level settings, but fail to address the issues raised by longer documents. In this paper, we establish a general solution, named Retrieval, Reading and Fusion (R2F) framework, and a new setting, by analyzing the main challenges of DOCNLI: interpretability, long-range dependency, and cross-sentence inference. The basic idea of the framework is to simplify document-level task into a set of sentence-level tasks, and improve both performance and interpretability with the power of evidence. For each hypothesis sentence, the framework retrieves evidence sentences from the premise, and reads to estimate its credibility. Then the sentence-level results are fused to judge the relationship between the documents. For the setting, we contribute complementary evidence and entailment label annotation on hypothesis sentences, for interpretability study. Our experimental results show that R2F framework can obtain state-of-the-art performance and is robust for diverse evidence retrieval methods. Moreover, it can give more interpretable prediction results. Our model and code are released at https://github.com/phoenixsecularbird/R2F.

R2F: A General Retrieval, Reading and Fusion Framework for Document-level Natural Language Inference

Extractive Question Answering (EQA) is one of the most essential tasks in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), which can be solved by fine-tuning the span selecting heads of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). However, most existing approaches for MRC may perform poorly in the few-shot learning scenario. To solve this issue, we propose a novel framework named Knowledge Enhanced Contrastive Prompt-tuning (KECP). Instead of adding pointer heads to PLMs, we introduce a seminal paradigm for EQA that transforms the task into a non-autoregressive Masked Language Modeling (MLM) generation problem. Simultaneously, rich semantics from the external knowledge base (KB) and the passage context support enhancing the query's representations. In addition, to boost the performance of PLMs, we jointly train the model by the MLM and contrastive learning objectives. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in few-shot settings by a large margin.

KECP: Knowledge Enhanced Contrastive Prompting for Few-shot Extractive Question Answering

In a world of racing to get the best systems on leaderboards, winning best shared tasks, building the largest LM, are we losing our soul as a scientific enterprise? Do we need to re-orient and re-pivot NLP? If so, what is needed to make this happen? Can we chart together a program where we ensure that science is the pivotal ingredient in CL/NLP? Could Responsible NLP be an avenue that could lead us back towards that goal? In this talk, in the spirit of EMpirical NLP, I will explore some “practical” ideas around framing a Responsible NLP vision hoping to achieve a higher scientific standard for our field, addressing issues from the “how” we conduct our research and venturing into the “what” we work on and produce using tenets from responsible mindset perspective. I will pose more questions than answers. This is a call to action, an invitation to start a real global community conversation, hopefully engaging all stakeholders: academia, industry, government and civic society.

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A Localized Geometric Method to Match Knowledge in Low-dimensional Hyperbolic Space

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Next from EMNLP 2022

A Localized Geometric Method to Match Knowledge in Low-dimensional Hyperbolic Space

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High probability or low information? The probability–quality paradox in language generation

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PRESENTATIONS

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