Canada

Automatic diagnosis (AD), a critical application of AI in healthcare, employs machine learning techniques to assist doctors in gathering patient symptom information for precise disease diagnosis. The Transformer-based method utilizes an input symptom sequence, predicts itself through auto-regression, and employs the hidden state of the final symptom to determine the disease. Despite its simplicity and superior performance demonstrated, a decline in disease diagnosis accuracy is observed caused by 1) a mismatch between symptoms observed during training and generation, and 2) the effect of different symptom orders on disease prediction. To address the above obstacles, we introduce the CoAD, a novel disease and symptom collaborative generation framework, which incorporates several key innovations to improve AD: 1) aligning sentence-level disease labels with multiple possible symptom inquiry steps to bridge the gap between training and generation; 2) expanding symptom labels for each sub-sequence of symptoms to enhance annotation and eliminate the effect of symptom order; 3) developing a repeated symptom input schema to effectively and efficiently learn the expanded disease and symptom labels. We evaluate the CoAD framework using four datasets, including three public and one private, and demonstrate that it achieves an average 2.3\% improvement over previous state-of-the-art results in automatic disease diagnosis. For reproducibility, we release the code and data at https://github.com/KwanWaiChung/coad.

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ACL 2023

CoAD: Automatic Diagnosis through Symptom and Disease Collaborative Generation

medical.

automatic diagnosis

transformer

Automatic diagnosis (AD), a critical application of AI in healthcare, employs machine learning techniques to assist doctors in gathering patient symptom information for precise disease diagnosis. The Transformer-based method utilizes an input symptom sequence, predicts itself through auto-regression, and employs the hidden state of the final symptom to determine the disease. Despite its simplicity and superior performance demonstrated, a decline in disease diagnosis accuracy is observed caused by 1) a mismatch between symptoms observed during training and generation, and 2) the effect of different symptom orders on disease prediction. To address the above obstacles, we introduce the CoAD, a novel disease and symptom collaborative generation framework, which incorporates several key innovations to improve AD: 1) aligning sentence-level disease labels with multiple possible symptom inquiry steps to bridge the gap between training and generation; 2) expanding symptom labels for each sub-sequence of symptoms to enhance annotation and eliminate the effect of symptom order; 3) developing a repeated symptom input schema to effectively and efficiently learn the expanded disease and symptom labels. We evaluate the CoAD framework using four datasets, including three public and one private, and demonstrate that it achieves an average 2.3\% improvement over previous state-of-the-art results in automatic disease diagnosis. For reproducibility, we release the code and data at https://github.com/KwanWaiChung/coad.

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technical paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
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you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
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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.

Toxic content is a global problem, but most resources for detecting toxic content are in English. When datasets are created in other languages, they often focus exclusively on one language or dialect. In many cultural and geographical settings, however, it is common to code-mix languages, combining and interchanging them throughout conversations. To shine a light on this practice, and enable more research into code-mixed toxic content, we introduce SOA, a new multilingual dataset of online attacks. Using the multilingual city-state of Singapore as a starting point, we collect a large corpus of Reddit comments in Indonesian, Malay, Singlish, and other languages, and provide fine-grained hierarchical labels for online attacks. We publish the corpus with rich metadata, as well as additional unlabelled data for domain adaptation. We share comprehensive baseline results, show how the metadata can be used for granular error analysis, and demonstrate the benefits of domain adaptation for detecting multilingual online attacks.

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Improving the Detection of Multilingual Online Attacks with Rich Social Media Data from Singapore

Large, multilingual language models exhibit surprisingly good zero- or few-shot machine translation capabilities, despite having never seen the intentionally-included translation examples provided to typical neural translation systems. We investigate the role of incidental bilingualism---the unintentional consumption of bilingual signals, including translation examples---in explaining the translation capabilities of large language models, taking the Pathways Language Model (PaLM) as a case study. We introduce a mixed-method approach to measure and understand incidental bilingualism at scale. We show that PaLM is exposed to over 30 million translation pairs across at least 44 languages. Furthermore, the amount of incidental bilingual content is highly correlated with the amount of monolingual in-language content for non-English languages. We relate incidental bilingual content to zero-shot prompts and show that it can be used to mine new prompts to improve PaLM's out-of-English zero-shot translation quality. Finally, in a series of small-scale ablations, we show that its presence has a substantial impact on translation capabilities, although this impact diminishes with model scale.

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Searching for Needles in a Haystack: On the Role of Incidental Bilingualism in PaLM's Translation Capability

In this work, we study -- multi-source test-time model adaptation from user feedback -- where K distinct models are established for adaptation. To allow efficient adaptation, we cast the problem as a stochastic decision-making process, aiming to determine the best-adapted model after adaptation. We discuss two frameworks: multi-armed bandit learning and multi-armed dueling bandits. Compared to multi-armed bandit learning, the dueling framework allows pairwise collaboration among K models, which is solved by a novel method named Co-UCB proposed in this work. Experiments on six datasets of extractive question answering (QA) show that the dueling framework using Co-UCB is more effective than other strong baselines for our studied problem.

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Multi-Source Test-Time Adaptation as Dueling Bandits for Extractive Question Answering

Multimodal sarcasm detection is an important research topic in natural language processing and multimedia computing, and benefits a wide range of applications in multiple domains. Most existing studies regard the incongruity between image and text as the indicative clue in identifying multimodal sarcasm. To capture cross-modal incongruity, previous methods rely on fixed architectures in network design, which restricts the model from dynamically adjusting to diverse image-text pairs. Inspired by routing-based dynamic network, we model the dynamic mechanism in multimodal sarcasm detection and propose the Dynamic Routing Transformer Network (DynRT-Net). Our method utilizes dynamic paths to activate different routing transformer modules with hierarchical co-attention adapting to cross-modal incongruity. Experimental results on a public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Our codes are available at https://github.com/TIAN-viola/DynRT.

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Dynamic Routing Transformer Network for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection

The generalization problem on KBQA has drawn considerable attention. Existing research suffers from the generalization issue brought by the entanglement in the coarse-grained modeling of the logical expression, or inexecutability issues due to the fine-grained modeling of disconnected classes and relations in real KBs. We propose a Fine-to-Coarse Composition framework for KBQA (FC-KBQA) to both ensure the generalization ability and executability of the logical expression. The main idea of FC-KBQA is to extract relevant fine-grained knowledge components from KB and reformulate them into middle-grained knowledge pairs for generating the final logical expressions. FC-KBQA derives new state-of-the-art performance on GrailQA and WebQSP, and runs 4 times faster than the baseline. Our code is now available at GitHub https://github. com/RUCKBReasoning/FC-KBQA.

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FC-KBQA: A Fine-to-Coarse Composition Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering

Self-supervised representation learning has proved to be a valuable component for out-of-distribution (OoD) detection with only the texts of in-distribution (ID) examples. These approaches either train a language model from scratch or fine-tune a pre-trained language model using ID examples, and then take the perplexity output by the language model as OoD scores. In this paper, we analyze the complementary characteristic of both methods and propose a multi-level knowledge distillation approach that integrates their strengths while mitigating their limitations. Specifically, we use a fine-tuned model as the teacher to teach a randomly initialized student model on the ID examples. Besides the prediction layer distillation, we present a similarity-based intermediate layer distillation method to thoroughly explore the representation space of the teacher model. In this way, the learned student can better represent the ID data manifold while gaining a stronger ability to map OoD examples outside the ID data manifold with the regularization inherited from pre-training. Besides, the student model sees only ID examples during parameter learning, further promoting more distinguishable features for OoD detection. We conduct extensive experiments over multiple benchmark datasets, i.e., CLINC150, SST, ROSTD, 20 NewsGroups, and AG News; showing that the proposed method yields new state-of-the-art performance. We also explore its application as an AIGC detector to distinguish answers generated by ChatGPT and human experts. It is observed that our model exceeds human evaluators in the pair-expert task on the Human ChatGPT Comparison Corpus.

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Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text

The task of generating code from a natural language description, or NL2Code, is considered a pressing and significant challenge in code intelligence. Thanks to the rapid development of pre-training techniques, surging large language models are being proposed for code, sparking the advances in NL2Code. To facilitate further research and applications in this field, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of 27 existing large language models for NL2Code, and also review benchmarks and metrics. We provide an intuitive comparison of all existing models on the HumanEval benchmark. Through in-depth observation and analysis, we provide some insights and conclude that the key factors contributing to the success of large language models for NL2Code are "Large Size, Premium Data, Expert Tuning". In addition, we discuss challenges and opportunities regarding the gap between models and humans. We also create a website https://nl2code.github.io to track the latest progress through crowd-sourcing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey of large language models for NL2Code, and we believe it will contribute to the ongoing development of the field.

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Large Language Models Meet NL2Code: A Survey

Although large language models demonstrate remarkable question-answering performances, revealing the intermediate reasoning steps that the models faithfully follow remains challenging. In this paper, we propose FAME (FAithful question answering with MontE-carlo planning) to answer questions based on faithful reasoning steps. The reasoning steps are organized as a structured entailment tree, which shows how premises are used to produce intermediate conclusions that can prove the correctness of the answer. We formulate the task as a discrete decision-making problem and solve it through the interaction of a reasoning environment and a controller. The environment is modular and contains several basic task-oriented modules, while the controller proposes actions to assemble the modules. Since the search space could be large, we introduce a Monte-Carlo planning algorithm to do a look-ahead search and select actions that will eventually lead to high-quality steps. FAME achieves advanced performance on the standard benchmark. It can produce valid and faithful reasoning steps compared with large language models with a much smaller model size.

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Faithful Question Answering with Monte-Carlo Planning

For most natural language processing tasks, the dominant practice is to finetune large pretrained transformer models (e.g., BERT) using smaller downstream datasets.Despite the success of this approach, it remains unclear to what extent these gainsare attributable to the massive background corpora employed for pretraining versus to the pretraining objectives themselves. This paper introduces a large-scale study of self-pretraining, where the same (downstream) training data is used for both pretraining and finetuning.In experiments addressing both ELECTRA and RoBERTa models and 10 distinct downstream classification datasets, we observe that self-pretraining rivals standard pretraining on the BookWiki corpus (despite using around 10x--500x less data), outperforming the latter on 7 and 5 datasets, respectively.Surprisingly, these task-specific pretrained models often perform well on other tasks,including the GLUE benchmark. Besides classification tasks, self-pretraining also provides benefits on structured output prediction tasks such as span based question answering and commonsense inference, often providing more than 50% of the performance boosts provided by pretraining on the BookWiki corpus. Our results hint that in many scenarios, performance gains attributable to pretraining are driven primarily by the pretraining objective itself and are not always attributable to the use of external pretraining data in massive amounts.These findings are especially relevant in light of concerns about intellectual property and offensive content in web-scale pretraining data.

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Downstream Datasets Make Surprisingly Good Pretraining Corpora

As a special task of natural language generation, conditional lyrics generation needs to consider the structure of generated lyrics and the relationship between lyrics and music. Due to various forms of conditions, a lyrics generation system is expected to generate lyrics conditioned on different signals, such as music scores, music audio, or partially-finished lyrics, etc. However, most of the previous works have ignored the musical attributes hidden behind the lyrics and the structure of the lyrics. Additionally, most works only handle limited lyrics generation conditions, such as lyrics generation based on music score or partial lyrics, they can not be easily extended to other generation conditions with the same framework.In this paper, we propose a unified structure-aware lyrics generation framework named UniLG. Specifically, we design compound templates that incorporate textual and musical information to improve structure modeling and unify the different lyrics generation conditions.Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Both objective and subjective evaluations show significant improvements in generating structural lyrics.

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Improving the Detection of Multilingual Online Attacks with Rich Social Media Data from Singapore

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