Canada

Addressee recognition aims to identify addressees in multi-party conversations. While state-of-the-art addressee recognition models have achieved promising performance, they still suffer from the issue of robustness when applied in real-world scenes. When exposed to a noisy environment, these models regard the noise as input and identify the addressee in a pre-given addressee closed set, while the addressees of the noise do not belong to this closed set, thus leading to the wrong identification of addressee. To this end, we propose a Robust Addressee Recognition (RAR) method, which discrete the addressees into a character codebook, making it able to represent open set addressees and robust in a noisy environment. Experimental results show that the introduction of the addressee character codebook helps to represent the open set addressees and highly improves the robustness of addressee recognition even if the input is noise.

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ACL 2023

Robust Learning for Multi-party Addressee Recognition with Discrete Addressee Codebook

robust learning ； multi-party addressee recognition； addressee codebook

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP)<br>
EMNLP 2023 General Chair<br><br><br><br>

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Addressee recognition aims to identify addressees in multi-party conversations. While state-of-the-art addressee recognition models have achieved promising performance, they still suffer from the issue of robustness when applied in real-world scenes. When exposed to a noisy environment, these models regard the noise as input and identify the addressee in a pre-given addressee closed set, while the addressees of the noise do not belong to this closed set, thus leading to the wrong identification of addressee. To this end, we propose a Robust Addressee Recognition (RAR) method, which discrete the addressees into a character codebook, making it able to represent open set addressees and robust in a noisy environment. Experimental results show that the introduction of the addressee character codebook helps to represent the open set addressees and highly improves the robustness of addressee recognition even if the input is noise.

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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
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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.

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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.

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) presents a unique challenge as it requires generating target tokens before the source sentence is fully consumed. This can lead to the hallucination problem, where target tokens are generated without support from the source sentence. The prefix-to-prefix training data used to train SiMT models are not always parallel, due to divergent word order between the source and target languages, and can contribute to the problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages traditional translation models as teachers and employs a two-stage beam search algorithm to generate monotonic yet accurate reference translations for sequence-level knowledge distillation. Experimental results demonstrate the significant improvements achieved by our approach over multiple strong SiMT baselines, leading to new state-of-the-art performance across various language pairs. Notably, when evaluated on a monotonic version of the WMT15 De-En test set, which includes references generated in a more monotonic style by professional translators, our approach achieves even more substantial improvement over the baselines. The source code and data are publicly available for further exploration.

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Better Simultaneous Translation with Monotonic Knowledge Distillation

Modeling political actors is at the core of quantitative political science. Existing works have incorporated contextual information to better learn the representation of political actors for specific tasks through graph models. However, they are limited to the structure and objective of training settings and can not be generalized to all politicians and other tasks. In this paper, we propose a Unified Pre-training Architecture for Political Actor Modeling based on language (UPPAM). In UPPAM, we aggregate statements to represent political actors and learn the mapping from languages to representation, instead of learning the representation of particular persons. We further design structure-aware contrastive learning and behavior-driven contrastive learning tasks, to inject multidimensional information in the political context into the mapping. In this framework, we can profile political actors from different aspects and solve various downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and capability of generalization of our method.

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UPPAM: A Unified Pre-training Architecture for Political Actor Modeling based on Language

Outside-knowledge visual question answering is a challenging task that requires both the acquisition and the use of open-ended real-world knowledge. Some existing solutions draw external knowledge into the cross-modality space which overlooks the much vaster textual knowledge in natural-language space, while others transform the image into a text which further fuses with the textual knowledge into the natural-language space and completely abandons the use of visual features. In this paper, we are inspired to constrain the cross-modality space into the same space of natural-language space which makes the visual features preserved directly, and the model still benefits from the vast knowledge in natural-language space. To this end, we propose a novel framework consisting of a multimodal encoder, a textual encoder and an answer decoder. Such structure allows us to introduce more types of knowledge including explicit and implicit multimodal and textual knowledge. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of the proposed method which outperforms the state-of-the-art by 6.17% accuracy. We also conduct comprehensive ablations of each component, and systematically study the roles of varying types of knowledge. Codes and knowledge data are to be released.

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Combo of Thinking and Observing for Outside-Knowledge VQA

The success of end-to-end speech-to-text translation (ST) is often achieved by utilizing source transcripts, e.g., by pre-training with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) tasks, or by introducing additional ASR and MT data. Unfortunately, transcripts are only sometimes available since numerous unwritten languages exist worldwide. In this paper, we aim to utilize large amounts of target-side monolingual data to enhance ST without transcripts. Motivated by the remarkable success of back translation in MT, we develop a back translation algorithm for ST (BT4ST) to synthesize pseudo ST data from monolingual target data. To ease the challenges posed by short-to-long generation and one-to-many mapping, we introduce self-supervised discrete units and achieve back translation by cascading a target-to-unit model and a unit-to-speech model. With our synthetic ST data, we achieve an average boost of 2.3 BLEU on MuST-C En-De, En-Fr, and En-Es datasets. More experiments show that our method is especially effective in low-resource scenarios.

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Back Translation for Speech-to-text Translation Without Transcripts

Two-step approaches, in which summary candidates are generated-then-reranked to return a single summary, can improve ROUGE scores over the standard single-step approach. Yet, standard decoding methods (i.e., beam search, nucleus sampling, and diverse beam search) produce candidates with redundant, and often low quality, content. In this paper, we design a novel method to generate candidates for re-ranking that addresses these issues. We ground each candidate abstract on its own unique content plan and generate distinct plan-guided abstracts using a model's top beam. More concretely, a standard language model (a BART LM) auto-regressively generates elemental discourse unit (EDU) content plans with an extractive copy mechanism. The top K beams from the content plan generator are then used to guide a separate LM, which produces a single abstractive candidate for each distinct plan. We apply an existing re-ranker (BRIO) to abstractive candidates generated from our method, as well as baseline decoding methods. We show large relevance improvements over previously published methods on widely used single document news article corpora, with ROUGE-2 F1 gains of 0.88, 2.01, and 0.38 on CNN / Dailymail, NYT, and Xsum, respectively. A human evaluation on CNN / DM validates these results. Similarly, on 1k samples from CNN / DM, we show that prompting GPT-3 to follow EDU plans outperforms sampling-based methods by by 1.05 ROUGE-2 F1 points. Code to generate and realize plans is available at https://github.com/griff4692/edu-sum.

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Generating EDU Extracts for Plan-Guided Summary Re-Ranking

Prior study has shown that pretrained language models (PLM) can boost the performance of text-based recommendation. In contrast to previous works that either use PLM to encode user history as a whole input text, or impose an additional aggregation network to fuse multi-turn history representations, we propose a unified local- and global-attention Transformer encoder to better model two-level contexts of user history. Moreover, conditioned on user history encoded by Transformer encoders, our framework leverages Transformer decoders to estimate the language perplexity of candidate text items, which can serve as a straightforward yet significant contrastive signal for user-item text matching. Based on this, our framework, UniTRec, unifies the contrastive objectives of discriminative matching scores and candidate text perplexity to jointly enhance text-based recommendation. Extensive evaluation shows that UniTRec delivers SOTA performance on three text-based recommendation tasks.

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UniTRec: A Unified Text-to-Text Transformer and Joint Contrastive Learning Framework for Text-based Recommendation

Biographical event detection is a relevant task that allows for the exploration and comparison of the ways in which people's lives are told and represented. This may support several real-life applications in digital humanities and in works aimed at exploring bias about minoritized groups. Despite that, there are no corpora and models specifically designed for this task. In this paper we fill this gap by presenting a new corpus annotated for biographical event detection. The corpus, which includes 20 Wikipedia biographies, was aligned with 5 existing corpora in order to train a model for the biographical event detection task. The model was able to detect all mentions of the target-entity in a biography with an F-score of 0.808 and the entity-related events with an F-score of 0.859. Finally, the model was used for performing an analysis of biases about women and non-Western people in Wikipedia biographies.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/e0a391af-737a-4b6d-abbe-25c6725c478b" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

WikiBio: a Semantic Resource for the Intersectional Analysis of Biographical Events

A robust summarization system should be able to capture the gist of the document, regardless of the specific word choices or noise in the input.In this work, we first explore the summarization models' robustness against perturbations including word-level synonym substitution and noise.To create semantic-consistent substitutes, we propose a SummAttacker, which is an efficient approach to generating adversarial samples based on pre-trained language models.Experimental results show that state-of-the-art summarization models have a significant decrease in performance on adversarial and noisy test sets.Next, we analyze the vulnerability of the summarization systems and explore improving the robustness by data augmentation.Specifically, the first vulnerability factor we found is the low diversity of the training inputs.Correspondingly, we expose the encoder to more diverse cases created by SummAttacker in the input space.The second factor is the vulnerability of the decoder, and we propose an augmentation in the latent space of the decoder to improve its robustness.Concretely, we create virtual cases by manifold softmixing two decoder hidden states of similar semantic meanings.Experimental results on Gigaword and CNN/DM datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements over strong baselines and exhibits higher robustness on noisy, attacked, and clean datasets

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Improving the Robustness of Summarization Systems with Dual Augmentation

Language models (LMs) now excel at many tasks such as question answering, reasoning, and dialog. However, they sometimes generate unsupported or misleading content. A user cannot easily determine whether their outputs are trustworthy or not, because most LMs do not have any built-in mechanism for attribution to external evidence. To enable attribution while still preserving all the powerful advantages of recent generation models, we propose RARR (Retrofit Attribution using Research and Revision), a system that 1) automatically finds attribution for the output of any text generation model, and 2) post-edits the output to fix unsupported content while preserving the original output as much as possible. When applied to the output of several state-of-the-art LMs on a diverse set of generation tasks, we find that RARR significantly improves attribution while otherwise preserving the original input to a much greater degree than previously explored edit models. Furthermore, the implementation of RARR requires only a handful of training examples, a large language model, and standard web search.

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RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models

The integration of multi-document pre-training objectives into language models has resulted in remarkable improvements in multi-document downstream tasks. In this work, we propose extending this idea by pre-training a generic multi-document model from a novel cross-document question answering pre-training objective.To that end, given a set (or cluster) of topically-related documents, we systematically generate semantically-oriented questions from a salient sentence in one document and challenge the model, during pre-training, to answer these questions while "peeking" into other topically-related documents.In a similar manner, the model is also challenged to recover the sentence from which the question was generated, again while leveraging cross-document information.This novel multi-document QA formulation directs the model to better recover cross-text informational relations, and introduces a natural augmentation that artificially increases the pre-training data. Further, unlike prior multi-document models that focus on either classification or summarization tasks, our pre-training objective formulation enables the model to perform tasks that involve both short text generation (e.g., QA) and long text generation (e.g., summarization).Following this scheme, we pre-train our model - termed QAmden - and evaluate its performance across several multi-document tasks, including multi-document QA, summarization, and query-focused summarization, yielding improvements of up to 7%, and significantly outperforms zero-shot GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

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Better Simultaneous Translation with Monotonic Knowledge Distillation

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