United Arab Emirates

We recently introduced DRaiL, a declarative neuro-symbolic modeling framework designed to support a wide variety of NLP scenarios. In this demo, we enhance DRaiL with an easy to use Python interface equipped with methods to define, modify and augment models interactively, as well as with methods to debug and visualize the predictions made. We demonstrate this interface with two challenging NLP tasks: analyzing moral sentiment in political discourse, and analyzing opinions about the Covid-19 vaccine.

EMNLP 2022

Hands-On Interactive Neuro-Symbolic NLP with DRaiL

probabilistic logic

relational learning

interactive

neuro-symbolic

structured prediction

demo

## 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)
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/a3db7a768409f05192210d98601edb25.png)](https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/)

To access this site you need to register. Please register [here](https://2022.emnlp.org/registration/).

Register here

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.

We describe the AGREE system, which takes user-submitted passages as input and automatically generates grammar practice exercises that can be completed while reading. Multiple-choice practice items are generated for a variety of different grammar constructs: punctuation, articles, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, verbs, and nouns. We also conducted a large-scale human evaluation with around 4,500 multiple-choice practice items. We notice for 95% of items, a majority of raters out of five were able to identify the correct answer and for 85% of cases, raters agree that there is only one correct answer among the choices. Finally, the error analysis shows that raters made the most mistakes for punctuation and conjunctions.

AGReE: A system for generating Automated Grammar Reading Exercises

Automatic essay evaluation can help reduce teachers' workload and enable students to refine their works rapidly. Previous studies focus mainly on giving discrete scores for either the holistic quality or several distinct traits. However, real-world teachers usually provide detailed comments in natural language, which are more informative than single scores. In this paper, we present the comment generation task, which aims to generate comments for specified segments from given student narrative essays. To tackle this task, we propose a planning-based generation model, which first plans a sequence of keywords, and then expands these keywords into a complete comment. To improve the correctness and informativeness of generated comments, we adopt two following techniques: (1) training an error correction module to filter out incorrect keywords, and (2) recognizing fine-grained structured features from source essays to enrich the keywords. To support the evaluation of the task, we collect a human-written Chinese dataset, which contains 22,399 essay-comment pairs. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms strong baselines significantly. Moreover, we exert explicit control on our model to generate comments to describe the strengths or weaknesses of inputs with a 91\% success rate.

Automatic Comment Generation for Chinese Student Narrative Essays

We present POTATO, the Portable text annotation tool, a free, fully open-sourced annotation system that 1) supports labeling many types of text and multimodal data; 2) offers easy-to-configure features to maximize the productivity of both deployers and annotators (convenient templates for common ML/NLP tasks, active learning, keypress shortcuts, keyword highlights, tooltips); and 3) supports a high degree of customization (editable UI, inserting pre-screening questions, attention and qualification tests). Experiments over two annotation tasks suggest that POTATO improves labeling speed through its specially-designed productivity features, especially for long documents and complex tasks. POTATO is available at https://github.com/davidjurgens/ potato and will continue to be updated.

POTATO: The Portable Text Annotation Tool

We introduce VL-CheckList, a toolbox for evaluating Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models, along with a benchmark dataset for fine-grained VLP model analysis. Most existing VLP models evaluate their performance by comparing the fine-tuned downstream task performance. However, only average downstream task accuracy provides little information about the pros and cons of each VLP method. In this paper, we demonstrate how minor input changes in language and vision will affect the prediction outputs. We also provide a guideline for the research community to utilizes and contributes to this toolbox. Lastly, a case study based on VL-CheckList is conducted to analyze one of the representative VLP models. Data and code are available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/VL-CheckList

An Explainable Toolbox for Evaluating Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

We present a hybrid approach for product review summarization which consists of: (i) an unsupervised extractive step to extract the most important sentences out of all the reviews, and (ii) a supervised abstractive step to summarize the extracted sentences into a coherent short summary. This approach allows us to develop an efficient cross-lingual abstractive summarizer that can generate summaries in any language, given the extracted sentences out of thousands of reviews in a source language. In order to train and test the abstractive model, we create the Cross-lingual Amazon Reviews Summarization (CARS) dataset which provides English summaries for training, and English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Hindi summaries for testing based on selected English reviews. We show that the summaries generated by our model are as good as human written summaries in coherence, informativeness, non-redundancy, and fluency.

A Hybrid Approach to Cross-lingual Product Review Summarization

Online relevance matching is an essential task of e-commerce product search to boost the utility of search engines and ensure a smooth user experience. Previous work adopts either classical relevance matching models or Transformer-style models to address it. However, they ignore the inherent bipartite graph structures that are ubiquitous in e-commerce product search logs and are too inefficient to deploy online. In this paper, we design an efficient knowledge distillation framework for e-commerce relevance matching to integrate the respective advantages of Transformer-style models and classical relevance matching models. Especially for the core student model of the framework, we propose a novel method using k-order relevance modeling. The experimental results on large-scale real-world data (the size is 6~174 million) show that the proposed method significantly improves the prediction accuracy in terms of human relevance judgment. We deploy our method to JD.com online search platform. The A/B testing results show that our method significantly improves most business metrics under price sort mode and default sort mode.

Knowledge Distillation based Contextual Relevance Matching for E-commerce Product Search

Temporal aspect is one of the most challenging areas in Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDB). This paper addresses and examines how temporal questions being studied and supported by the research community at both levels: popular annotated dataset (e.g. Spider) and recent advanced models. We present a new dataset with accompanied databases supporting temporal questions in NLIDB. We experiment with two SOTA models (Picard and ValueNet) to investigate how our new dataset helps these models learn and improve performance in temporal aspect.

Tackling Temporal Questions in Natural Language Interface to Databases

In this work, we build a dense retrieval based semantic search engine on scientific articles from Elsevier. The major challenge is that there is no labeled data for training and testing. We apply a state-of-the-art unsupervised dense retrieval model called Generative Pseudo Labeling that generates high-quality pseudo training labels. Furthermore, since the articles are unbalanced across different domains, we select passages from multiple domains to form balanced training data. For the evaluation, we create two test sets: one manually annotated and one automatically created from the meta-information of our data. We compare the semantic search engine with the currently deployed lexical search engine on the two test sets. The results of the experiment show that the semantic search engine trained with pseudo training labels can significantly improve search performance.

Unsupervised Dense Retrieval for Scientific Articles

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a key problem and task in many industrial applications, which aims to predict labels organized in a hierarchy for given input text. For example, HTC can group the descriptions of online products into a taxonomy or organizing customer reviews into a hierarchy of categories. In real-life applications, while Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have dominated many NLP tasks, they face significant challenges too---the conventional fine-tuning process needs to modify and save models with a huge number of parameters. This is becoming more critical for HTC in both global and local modelling---the latter needs to learn multiple classifiers at different levels/nodes in a hierarchy. The concern will be even more serious since PLM sizes are continuing to increase in order to attain more competitive performances. Most recently, prefix tuning has become a very attractive technology by only tuning and saving a tiny set of parameters. Exploring prefix turning for HTC is hence highly desirable and has timely impact. In this paper, we investigate prefix tuning on HTC in two typical setups: local and global HTC. Our experiment shows that the prefix-tuning model only needs less than 1% of parameters and can achieve performance comparable to regular full fine-tuning. We demonstrate that using contrastive learning in learning prefix vectors can further improve HTC performance.

Developing Prefix-Tuning Models for Hierarchical Text Classification

Due to rapidly growing cyber-attacks and security vulnerabilities, many reports on cyber-threat intelligence (CTI) are being published daily.
While these reports can help security analysts to understand on-going cyber threats,
the overwhelming amount of information makes it difficult to digest the information in a timely manner.
This paper presents, SecIE, an industrial-strength full-stack information extraction (IE) system for the security domain.
SecIE can extract a large number of security entities, relations and the temporal information of the relations, which is critical for cyberthreat investigations.
Our evaluation with 133 labeled threat reports containing 108,021 tokens shows that
SecIE achieves over 92% F1-score for entity extraction and about 70% F1-score for relation extraction.
We also showcase how SecIE can be used for downstream security applications.

Hands-On Interactive Neuro-Symbolic NLP with DRaiL

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AGReE: A system for generating Automated Grammar Reading Exercises

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