Croatia

Van Miltenburg et al. (2021) suggest NLP research should adopt preregistration to prevent fishing expeditions and to promote publication of negative results. At face value, this is a very reasonable suggestion, seemingly solving many methodological problems with NLP research. We discuss pros and cons - some old, some new: a) Preregistration is challenged by the practice of retrieving hypotheses after the results are known; b) preregistration may bias NLP toward confirmatory research; c) preregistration must allow for reclassification of research as exploratory; d) preregistration may increase publication bias; e) preregistration may increase flag-planting; f) preregistration may increase p-hacking; and finally, g) preregistration may make us less risk tolerant. We cast our discussion as a dialogue, presenting both sides of the debate.

EACL 2023

A Two-Sided Discussion of Preregistration of NLP Research

reviewing

reproducibility

preregistration

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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NAACL 2021

technical paper

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) <br><br>
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.<br><br><br><br>

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Recent work has focused on compressing pre-trained language models (PLMs) like BERT where the major focus has been to improve the in-distribution performance for downstream tasks. However, very few of these studies have analyzed the impact of compression on the generalizability and robustness of compressed models for out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Towards this end, we study two popular model compression techniques including knowledge distillation and pruning and show that the compressed models are significantly less robust than their PLM counterparts on OOD test sets although they obtain similar performance on in-distribution development sets for a task. Further analysis indicates that the compressed models overfit on the shortcut samples and generalize poorly on the hard ones. We further leverage this observation to develop a regularization strategy for robust model compression based on sample uncertainty.

Robustness Challenges in Model Distillation and Pruning for Natural Language Understanding

Argument mining seeks to extract arguments and their structure from unstructured texts. Identifying relations between arguments (such as attack, support, and neutral) is a challenging task because two arguments may be related to each other via implicit inferences. 
This task often requires external commonsense knowledge to discover how one argument relates to another. State-of-the-art methods, however, rely on pre-defined knowledge graphs, and thus might not cover target argument pairs well. We introduce a new generative neuro-symbolic approach to finding inference chains that connect the argument pairs by making use of the Commonsense Transformer (COMET). We evaluate our approach on three datasets for both the two-label (attack/support) and three-label (attack/support/neutral) tasks. Our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art, by 2-5\% in F1 score, on all three datasets.

Uncovering Implicit Inferences for Improved Relational Argument Mining

Recent breakthroughs in self-supervised training have led to a new class of pretrained vision–language models. While there have been investigations of bias in multimodal models, they have mostly focused on gender and racial bias, giving much less attention to other relevant groups, such as minorities with regard to religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or disabilities. This is mainly due to lack of suitable benchmarks for such groups. We seek to address this gap by providing a visual and textual bias benchmark called MMBias, consisting of around 3,800 images and phrases covering 14 population subgroups. We utilize this dataset to assess bias in several prominent self-supervised multimodal models, including CLIP, ALBEF, and ViLT. Our results show that these models demonstrate meaningful bias favoring certain groups. Finally, we introduce a debiasing method designed specifically for such large pretrained models that can be applied as a post-processing step to mitigate bias, while preserving the remaining accuracy of the model.

Multi-Modal Bias: Introducing a Framework for Stereotypical Bias Assessment beyond Gender and Race in Vision–Language Models

Many measures of societal bias in language models have been proposed in recent years. A popular approach is to use a set of word filling prompts to evaluate the behavior of the language models. In this work, we analyze the validity of two such measures -- StereoSet and CrowS-Pairs. We show that these measures produce unexpected and illogical results when appropriate control group samples are constructed. Based on this, we believe that they are problematic and using them in the future should be reconsidered. We propose a way forward with an improved testing protocol. Finally, we also introduce a new gender bias dataset for Slovak.

In-Depth Look at Word Filling Societal Bias Measures

While human evaluation remains best practice for accurately judging the faithfulness of automatically-generated summaries, few solutions exist to address the increased difficulty and workload when evaluating long-form summaries. Through a survey of 162 papers on long-form summarization, we first shed light on current human evaluation practices surrounding long-form summaries. We find that 73\% of these papers do not perform any human evaluation on model-generated summaries, while other works face new difficulties that manifest when dealing with long documents (e.g., low inter-annotator agreement). Motivated by our survey, we present LongEval, a set of guidelines for human evaluation of faithfulness in long-form summaries that addresses the following challenges: (1) How can we achieve high inter-annotator agreement on faithfulness scores? (2) How can we minimize annotator workload while maintaining accurate faithfulness scores? and (3) Do humans benefit from automated alignment between summary and source snippets? We deploy LongEval in annotation studies on two long-form summarization datasets in different domains (SQuALITY and PubMed), and we find that switching to a finer granularity of judgment (e.g., clause-level) reduces inter-annotator variance in faithfulness scores (e.g., std-dev from 18.5 to 6.8). We also show that scores from a partial annotation of fine-grained units highly correlates with scores from a full annotation workload (0.89 Kendall's tau using 50\% judgements). We release our human judgments, annotation templates, and software as a Python library for future research.

LongEval: Guidelines for Human Evaluation of Faithfulness in Long-form Summarization

Timely generation of radiology reports and diagnoses is a challenge worldwide due to the enormous number of cases and shortage of radiology specialists. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Graph Augmented Vision Language BART (KGVL-BART) model that takes as input two chest X-ray images- one frontal and the other lateral- along with tags which are diagnostic keywords, and outputs a report with the patient-specific findings. Our system development effort is divided into 3 stages: i) construction of the Chest X-ray KG (referred to as chestX-KG), ii) image feature extraction, and iii) training a KGVL-BART model using the visual, text, and KG data. The dataset we use is the well-known Indiana University Chest X-ray reports with the train, validation, and test split of 3025 instances, 300 instances, and 500 instances respectively. We construct a Chest X-Ray knowledge graph from these reports by extracting entity1-relation-entity2 triples; the triples get extracted by a rule-based tool of our own. Constructed KG is verified by two experienced radiologists (with experience of 30 years and 8 years, respectively). We demonstrate that our model- KGVL-BART- outperforms State-of-the-Art transformer-based models on standard NLG scoring metrics. We also include a qualitative evaluation of our system by experienced radiologist (with experience of 30 years) on the test data, which showed that 73\% of the reports generated were fully correct, only 5.5\% are completely wrong and 21.5\% have important missing details though overall correct. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first system to make use of multi-modality and domain knowledge to generate X-ray reports automatically.

KGVL-BART: Knowledge Graph Augmented Visual Language BART for Radiology Report Generation

The proliferation of deep neural networks in various domains has seen an increased need for the interpretability of these models, especially in scenarios where fairness and trust are as important as model performance. A lot of independent work is being carried out to: i) analyze what linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge is learned within these models, and ii) highlight the salient parts of the input. We present NxPlain, a web application that provides an explanation of a model's prediction using latent concepts. NxPlain discovers latent concepts learned in a deep NLP model, provides an interpretation of the knowledge learned in the model, and explains its predictions based on the used concepts. The application allows users to browse through the latent concepts in an intuitive order, letting them efficiently scan through the most salient concepts with a global corpus-level view and a local sentence-level view. Our tool is useful for debugging, unraveling model bias, and for highlighting spurious correlations in a model. A hosted demo is available here: https://nxplain.qcri.org

NxPlain: A Web-based Tool for Discovery of Latent Concepts

While conditional generation models can now generate natural language well enough to create fluent text, it is still difficult to control the generation process, leading to irrelevant, repetitive, and hallucinated content. Recent work shows that planning can be a useful intermediate step to render conditional generation less opaque and more grounded. We present a web browser-based demonstration for query-focused summarization that uses a sequence of question-answer pairs, as a blueprint plan for guiding text generation (i.e., what to say and in what order). We illustrate how users may interact with the generated text and associated plan visualizations, e.g., by editing and modifying the blueprint in order to improve or control the generated output.

A short video demonstrating our system is available at https://goo.gle/text-blueprint-demo

Text-Blueprint: An Interactive Platform for Plan-based Conditional Generation

Graphs are a natural representation of complex data as their structure allows users to discover (often implicit) relations among the nodes intuitively. Applications build graphs in an ad-hoc fashion, usually tailored to specific use cases, limiting their reusability. To account for this, we present the Corpus Annotation Graph (CAG) architectural framework based on a create-and-annotate pattern that enables users to build uniformly structured graphs from diverse data sources and extend them with automatically extracted annotations (e.g., named entities, topics). The resulting graphs can be used for further analyses across multiple downstream tasks (e.g., node classification). CAG is installable via PyPi: pip install cag.

Corpus Annotation Graph Builder (CAG): An Architectural Framework to Create and Annotate a Multi-source Graph

This paper presents the development of the AI-based language-learning platform, Revita. It is an intelligent online tutor, developed to support learners of multiple languages, from lower-intermediate toward advanced levels. It has been in pilot use with hundreds of students at several universities, whose feedback and needs shape the development. One of the main emerging features of Revita is the system of linguistic constructs to represent the domain knowledge. The system of constructs is developed in collaboration with experts in language pedagogy. Constructs define the types of exercises, the content of the feedback, and enable detailed modeling and evaluation of learner progress.


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Robustness Challenges in Model Distillation and Pruning for Natural Language Understanding

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