United Arab Emirates

Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success on various NLP tasks and have shown a trend of exponential growth in model size. To alleviate the unaffordable computational costs brought by the size growth, model compression has been widely explored. Existing efforts have achieved promising results in compressing medium-sized models for specific tasks, while task-agnostic compression for big models with over billions of parameters is rarely studied. Task-agnostic compression can provide an efficient and versatile big model for both prompting and delta tuning, leading to a more general impact than task-specific compression. Hence, we introduce a task-agnostic compression toolkit BMCook for big models. In BMCook, we implement four representative compression methods, including quantization, pruning, distillation, and MoEfication. Developers can easily combine these methods towards better efficiency. To evaluate BMCook, we apply it to compress T5-3B (a PLM with 3 billion parameters). We achieve nearly 12x efficiency improvement while maintaining over 97% of the original T5-3B performance on three typical NLP benchmarks. Moreover, the final compressed model also significantly outperforms T5-base (a PLM with 220 million parameters), which has a similar computational cost. BMCook is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/BMCook.

EMNLP 2022

BMCook: A Task-agnostic Compression Toolkit for Big Models

efficient nlp

pre-trained language models

model compression

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***
 
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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.

TextBox 2.0 is a comprehensive and unified library, focusing on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to facilitate research on text generation.
To be comprehensive, our library covers 13 common text generation tasks and their corresponding 83 datasets and further incorporates 45 PLMs. We also implement 4 efficient training strategies and provide 4 generation objectives for pre-training new PLMs from scratch.
To be unified, we design the interfaces to support the entire research pipeline (from data loading to training and evaluation), ensuring that each step can be fulfilled in a unified way. Despite the rich functionality, it is easy to use our library, either through the friendly Python API or command line.
We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our library, and the results show that it can accurately reproduce existing models. Besides, we exemplify four types of research scenarios. The project is released at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TextBox.

TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models

Diagnostic coding, or ICD coding, is the task of assigning diagnosis codes defined by the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) standard to patient visits based on clinical notes. The current process of manual ICD coding is time-consuming and often error-prone, which suggests the need for automatic ICD coding. However, despite the long history of automatic ICD coding, there have been no standardized frameworks for benchmarking ICD coding models.
We open-source an easy-to-use tool named AnEMIC, which provides a streamlined pipeline for preprocessing, training, and evaluating for automatic ICD coding. We correct errors in preprocessing by existing works, and provide key models and weights trained on the correctly preprocessed datasets. We also provide an interactive demo performing real-time inference from custom inputs, and visualizations drawn from explainable AI to analyze the models. We hope the framework helps move the research of ICD coding forward and helps professionals explore the potential of ICD coding. The framework and the associated code are available here.

AnEMIC: A Framework for Benchmarking ICD Coding Models

The medical conversational system can relieve doctors’ burden and improve healthcare efficiency, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the existing medical dialogue systems have the problems of weak scalability, insufficient knowledge, and poor controllability. Thus, we propose a medical conversational question-answering (CQA) system based on the knowledge graph, namely MedConQA, which is designed as a pipeline framework to maintain high flexibility. Our system utilizes automated medical procedures, including medical triage, consultation, image-text drug recommendation, and record. Each module has been open-sourced as a tool, which can be used alone or in combination, with robust scalability. Besides, to conduct knowledge-grounded dialogues with users, we first construct a Chinese Medical Knowledge Graph (CMKG) and collect a large-scale Chinese Medical CQA (CMCQA) dataset, and we design a series of methods for reasoning more intellectually. Finally, we use state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques to keep the final generated response more controllable, which is further assured by hospital and professional evaluations. We have open-sourced related code, datasets, web pages, and tools, hoping to advance future research.

MedConQA: Medical Conversational Question Answering System based on Knowledge Graphs

Recent research has shown that large language models pretrained using unsupervised approaches can achieve significant performance improvement on many downstream tasks. Typically when adapting these language models to downstream tasks, like a classification or regression task, we employ a fine-tuning paradigm in which the sentence representation from the language model is input to a task-specific head; the model is then fine-tuned end-to-end. However, with the emergence of models like GPT-3, prompt-based fine-tuning has been proven to be a successful approach for few-shot tasks. Inspired by this work, we study discrete prompt technologies in practice. There are two issues that arise with the standard prompt approach. First, it can overfit on the prompt template. Second, it requires manual effort to formulate the downstream task as a language model problem. In this paper, we propose an improvement to prompt-based fine-tuning that addresses these two issues. We refer to our approach as DynaMaR -- Dynamic Prompt with Mask Token Representation. Results show that DynaMaR can achieve an average improvement of 10% in few-shot settings and improvement of 3.7% in data-rich settings over the standard fine-tuning approach on four e-commerce applications.

DynaMaR: Dynamic Prompt with Mask Token Representation

Conversational understanding is an integral part of modern intelligent devices. In a large fraction of the global traffic from customers using smart digital assistants, frictions in dialogues may be attributed to incorrect understanding of the entities in a customer's query due to factors including ambiguous mentions, mispronunciation, background noise and faulty on-device signal processing. Such errors are compounded by two common deficiencies from intelligent devices namely, (1) the device not being tailored to individual customers, and (2) the device responses being unaware of the context in the conversation session. Viewing this problem via the lens of retrieval-based search engines, we build and evaluate a scalable entity correction system, PENTATRON. The system leverages a parametric transformer-based language model to learn patterns from in-session customer-device interactions coupled with a non-parametric personalized entity index to compute the correct query, which aids downstream components in reasoning about the best response. In addition to establishing baselines and demonstrating the value of personalized and context-aware systems, we use multitasking to learn the domain of the correct entity. We also investigate the utility of language model prompts. Through extensive experiments, we show a significant upward movement of the key metric (Exact Match) by up to 500.97% (relative to the baseline).

PENTATRON: PErsonalized coNText-Aware Transformer for Retrieval-based cOnversational uNderstanding

We present SLATE, a sequence labeling approach for extracting tasks from free-form content such as digitally handwritten (or "inked") notes on a virtual whiteboard. Our approach allows us to create a single, low-latency model to simultaneously perform sentence segmentation and classification of these sentences into task/non-task sentences. SLATE greatly outperforms a baseline two-model (sentence segmentation followed by classification model) approach, achieving a task F1 score of 84.4%, a sentence segmentation (boundary similarity) score of 88.4% and three times lower latency compared to the baseline. Furthermore, we provide insights into tackling challenges of performing NLP on the inking domain. We release both our code and dataset for this novel task.

SLATE: A Sequence Labeling Approach for Task Extraction from Free-form Inked Content

Large pretrained Transformer-based language models like BERT and GPT have changed the landscape of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, fine tuning such models still requires a large number of training examples for each target task, thus annotating multiple datasets and training these models on various downstream tasks becomes time consuming and expensive. In this work, we propose a simple extension of the Prototypical Networks for few-shot text classification. Our main idea is to replace the class prototypes by Gaussians and introduce a regularization term that encourages the examples to be clustered near the appropriate class centroids. Experimental results show that our method outperforms various strong baselines on 13 public and 4 internal datasets. Furthermore, we use the class distributions as a tool for detecting potential out-of-distribution (OOD) data points during deployment.

Meta-learning Pathologies from Radiology Reports using Variance Aware Prototypical Networks

Building Agent Assistants that can help improve customer service support requires inputs from industry users and their customers, as well as knowledge about state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology. We combine expertise from academia and industry to bridge the gap and build task/domain-specific Neural Agent Assistants (NAA) with three high-level components for: (1) Intent Identification, (2) Context Retrieval, and (3) Response Generation. In this paper, we outline the pipeline of the NAA's core system and also present three case studies in which three industry partners successfully adapt the framework to find solutions to their unique challenges. Our findings suggest that a collaborative process is instrumental in spurring the development of emerging NLP models for Conversational AI tasks in industry. The full reference implementation code and results are available at https://github.com/VectorInstitute/NAA.

Bringing the State-of-the-Art to Customers: A Neural Agent Assistant Framework for Customer Service Support

Large pretrained language models like GPT-3 and PaLM have generated enormous enthusiasm, and are capable of producing remarkably fluent language. But they have also been criticized on many grounds, and described as “stochastic parrots.” Are they adequate as a basis for artificial general intelligence AGI , and if not, what would a better foundation for general intelligence look like?

BMCook: A Task-agnostic Compression Toolkit for Big Models

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TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models

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