Canada

Reasoning about actions and change (RAC) is essential to understand and interact with the ever-changing environment. Previous AI research has shown the importance of fundamental and indispensable knowledge of actions, i.e., preconditions and effects. However, traditional methods rely on logical formalization which hinders practical applications. With recent transformer-based language models (LMs), reasoning over text is desirable and seemingly feasible, leading to the question of whether LMs can effectively and efficiently learn to solve RAC problems. We propose four essential RAC tasks as a comprehensive textual benchmark and generate problems in a way that minimizes the influence of other linguistic requirements (e.g., grounding) to focus on RAC. The resulting benchmark, TRAC, encompassing problems of various complexities, facilitates a more granular evaluation of LMs, precisely targeting the structural generalization ability much needed for RAC. Experiments with three high-performing transformers indicate that additional efforts are needed to tackle challenges raised by TRAC.

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ACL 2023

Exploring the Capacity of Pretrained Language Models for Reasoning about Actions and Change

reasoning about actions and change

language models

dataset

Reasoning about actions and change (RAC) is essential to understand and interact with the ever-changing environment. Previous AI research has shown the importance of fundamental and indispensable knowledge of actions, i.e., preconditions and effects. However, traditional methods rely on logical formalization which hinders practical applications. With recent transformer-based language models (LMs), reasoning over text is desirable and seemingly feasible, leading to the question of whether LMs can effectively and efficiently learn to solve RAC problems. We propose four essential RAC tasks as a comprehensive textual benchmark and generate problems in a way that minimizes the influence of other linguistic requirements (e.g., grounding) to focus on RAC. The resulting benchmark, TRAC, encompassing problems of various complexities, facilitates a more granular evaluation of LMs, precisely targeting the structural generalization ability much needed for RAC. Experiments with three high-performing transformers indicate that additional efforts are needed to tackle challenges raised by TRAC.

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poster

### 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
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
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)**
<br><br><br><br>

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.

Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to detect and classify entity spans in the text. When entity spans overlap between each other, the task is named as nested NER. Span-based methods have been widely used to tackle nested NER. Most of these methods get a score matrix, where each entry corresponds to a span. However, previous work ignores spatial relations in the score matrix. In this paper, we propose using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to model these spatial relations. Despite being simple, experiments in three commonly used nested NER datasets show that our model surpasses several recently proposed methods with the same pre-trained encoders. Further analysis shows that using CNN can help the model find more nested entities. Besides, we find that different papers use different sentence tokenizations for the three nested NER datasets, which will influence the comparison. Thus, we release a pre-processing script to facilitate future comparison.

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An Embarrassingly Easy but Strong Baseline for Nested Named Entity Recognition

The EAE task extracts a structured event record from an event text. Most existing approaches train the EAE model on each dataset independently and ignore the overlap knowledge across datasets. However, insufficient event records in a single dataset often prevent the existing model from achieving better performance. In this paper, we clearly define the overlap knowledge across datasets and split the knowledge of the EAE task into overlap knowledge across datasets and specific knowledge of the target dataset. We propose APE model to learn the two parts of knowledge in two serial learning phases without causing catastrophic forgetting. In addition, we formulate both learning phases as conditional generation tasks and design Stressing Entity Type Prompt to close the gap between the two phases. The experiments show APE achieves new state-of-the-art with a large margin in the EAE task. When only ten records are available in the target dataset, our model dramatically outperforms the baseline model with average 27.27% F1 gain.

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What Is Overlap Knowledge in Event Argument Extraction? APE: A Cross-datasets Transfer Learning Model for EAE

We investigate the effects of post-training quantization and quantization-aware training on the generalization of Transformer language models. We present a new method called self-distilled quantization (SDQ) that minimizes accumulative quantization errors and outperforms baselines. We apply SDQ to multilingual models XLM-R$_{\text{Base}}$ and InfoXLM$_{\text{Base}}$ and demonstrate that both models can be reduced from 32-bit floating point weights to 8-bit integer weights while maintaining a high level of performance on the XGLUE benchmark. Our results also highlight the challenges of quantizing multilingual models, which must generalize to languages they were not fine-tuned on.

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Self-Distilled Quantization: Achieving High Compression Rates in Transformer-Based Language Models

Pre-trained transformers are popular in state-of-the-art dialogue generation (DG) systems. Such language models are, however, vulnerable to various adversarial samples as studied in traditional tasks such as text classification, which inspires our curiosity about their robustness in DG systems. One main challenge of attacking DG models is that perturbations on the current sentence can hardly degrade the response accuracy because the unchanged chat histories are also considered for decision-making. Instead of merely pursuing pitfalls of performance metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, we observe that crafting adversarial samples to force longer generation outputs benefits attack effectiveness---the generated responses are typically irrelevant, lengthy, and repetitive. To this end, we propose a white-box multi-objective attack method called DGSlow. Specifically, DGSlow balances two objectives---generation accuracy and length, via a gradient-based multi-objective optimizer and applies an adaptive searching mechanism to iteratively craft adversarial samples with only a few modifications. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that DGSlow could significantly degrade state-of-the-art DG models with a higher success rate than traditional accuracy-based methods. Besides, our crafted sentences also exhibit strong transferability in attacking other models.

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White-Box Multi-Objective Adversarial Attack on Dialogue Generation

Prompt tuning is a parameter-efficient approach to adapting pre-trained language models to downstream tasks. Although prompt tuning has been shown to match the performance of full model tuning when training data is sufficient, it tends to struggle in few-shot learning settings. In this paper, we present Multi-task Pre-trained Modular Prompt (MP2) to boost prompt tuning for few-shot learning. MP2 is a set of combinable prompts pre-trained on 38 Chinese tasks. On downstream tasks, the pre-trained prompts are selectively activated and combined, leading to strong compositional generalization to unseen tasks. To bridge the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, we formulate upstream and downstream tasks into a unified machine reading comprehension task. Extensive experiments under two learning paradigms, i.e., gradient descent and black-box tuning, show that MP2 significantly outperforms prompt tuning, full model tuning, and prior prompt pre-training methods in few-shot settings. In addition, we demonstrate that MP2 can achieve surprisingly fast and strong adaptation to downstream tasks by merely learning 8 parameters to combine the pre-trained modular prompts.

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Multitask Pre-training of Modular Prompt for Chinese Few-Shot Learning

While the problem of hallucinations in neural machine translation has long been recognized, so far the progress on its alleviation is very little. Indeed, recently it turned out that without artificially encouraging models to hallucinate, previously existing methods fall short and even the standard sequence log-probability is more informative. It means that internal characteristics of the model can give much more information than we expect, and before using external models and measures, we first need to ask: how far can we go if we use nothing but the translation model itself ? We propose to use a method that evaluates the percentage of the source contribution to a generated translation. Intuitively, hallucinations are translations "detached from the source, hence they can be identified by low source contribution. This method improves detection accuracy for the most severe hallucinations by a factor of 2 and is able to alleviate hallucinations at test time on par with the previous best approach that relies on external models. Next, if we move away from internal model characteristics and allow external tools, we show that using sentence similarity from cross-lingual embeddings further improves these results. We release the code of our experiments.

Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations in Machine Translation: Model Internal Workings Alone Do Well, Sentence Similarity Even Better

Multimodal summarization usually suffers from the problem that the contribution of the visual modality is unclear. Existing multimodal summarization approaches focus on designing the fusion methods of different modalities, while ignoring the adaptive conditions under which visual modalities are useful. Therefore, we propose a novel Coarse-to-Fine contribution network for multimodal Summarization (CFSum) to consider different contributions of images for summarization. First, to eliminate the interference of useless images, we propose a pre-filter module to abandon useless images. Second, to make accurate use of useful images, we propose two levels of visual complement modules, word level and phrase level. Specifically, image contributions are calculated and are adopted to guide the attention of both textual and visual modalities. Experimental results have shown that CFSum significantly outperforms multiple strong baselines on the standard benchmark. Furthermore, the analysis verifies that useful images can even help generate non-visual words which are implicitly represented in the image.

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CFSum: Coarse-to-Fine Contribution Network for Multimodal Summarization

Implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) remains a challenging task in discourse analysis due to the absence of connectives. Most existing methods utilize one-hot labels as the sole optimization target, ignoring the internal association among connectives. Besides, these approaches spend lots of effort on template construction, negatively affecting the generalization capability. To address these problems,we propose a novel Connective Prediction via Knowledge Distillation (CP-KD) approach to instruct large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) mining the latent correlations between connectives and discourse relations, which is meaningful for IDRR. Experimental results on the PDTB 2.0/3.0 and CoNLL2016 datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models on coarse-grained and fine-grained discourse relations. Moreover, our approach can be transferred to explicit discourse relation recognition(EDRR) and achieve acceptable performance.

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Connective Prediction for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition via Knowledge Distillation

Responding with multi-modal content has been recognized as an essential capability for an intelligent conversational agent. In this paper, we introduce the MMDialog dataset to facilitate multi-modal conversation better. MMDialog is composed of a curated set of 1.08 million real-world dialogues with 1.53 million unique images across 4,184 topics. MMDialog has two main and unique advantages. First, it is the largest multi-modal conversation dataset by the number of dialogues by 88x. Second, it contains massive topics to generalize the open domain. To build an engaging dialogue system with this dataset, we propose and normalize two response prediction tasks based on retrieval and generative scenarios. In addition, we build two baselines for the above tasks with state-of-the-art techniques and report their experimental performance. We also propose a novel evaluation metric MM-Relevance to measure the multi-modal responses. Our dataset is available in https://github.com/victorsungo/MMDialog.

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MMDialog: A Large-scale Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-modal Open-domain Conversation

Language modeling, a central task in natural language processing, involves estimating a probability distribution over strings. In most cases, the estimated distribution sums to 1 over all finite strings. However, in some pathological cases, probability mass can ``leak'' onto the set of infinite sequences. In order to characterize the notion of leakage more precisely, this paper offers a measure-theoretic treatment of language modeling. We prove that many popular language model families are in fact tight, meaning that they will not leak in this sense. We also generalize characterizations of tightness proposed in previous works.

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An Embarrassingly Easy but Strong Baseline for Nested Named Entity Recognition

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