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Multilingual pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer abilities, however, their performance is hindered when the target language has distant typologyfrom the source language or when pre-training data is limited in size.In this paper, we propose XLM-P, a method that contextually retrieves prompts as flexible guidance for encoding instances conditionally. Our space-efficient and model-agnostic XLM-P approach enables (1) lightweight modeling of language-invariant and language-specific knowledge across languages, and (2) easy integration with other multilingual pre-training methods. On the tasks of XTREME, which include text classification, sequence labeling, question answering, and sentence retrieval, both base- and large-size language models pre-trained with our proposed method exhibit consistent performance improvement. Furthermore, it provides substantial advantages for low-resource languages in unsupervised sentence retrieval and for target languages that differ greatly from the source language in cross-lingual transfer.

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ACL 2023

Soft Language Clustering for Multilingual Model Pre-training

multilingual model pre-training

prompt

fine-tuning

### 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.

Multilingual pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer abilities, however, their performance is hindered when the target language has distant typologyfrom the source language or when pre-training data is limited in size.In this paper, we propose XLM-P, a method that contextually retrieves prompts as flexible guidance for encoding instances conditionally. Our space-efficient and model-agnostic XLM-P approach enables (1) lightweight modeling of language-invariant and language-specific knowledge across languages, and (2) easy integration with other multilingual pre-training methods. On the tasks of XTREME, which include text classification, sequence labeling, question answering, and sentence retrieval, both base- and large-size language models pre-trained with our proposed method exhibit consistent performance improvement. Furthermore, it provides substantial advantages for low-resource languages in unsupervised sentence retrieval and for target languages that differ greatly from the source language in cross-lingual transfer.

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poster

A trigger warning is used to warn people about potentially disturbing content. We introduce trigger warning assignment as a multi-label classification task, create the Webis Trigger Warning Corpus 2022, and with it the first dataset of 1 million fanfiction works from Archive of our Own with up to 36 different warnings per document. To provide a reliable catalog of trigger warnings, we organized 41 million of free-form tags assigned by fanfiction authors into the first comprehensive taxonomy of trigger warnings by mapping them to the 36 institutionally recommended warnings. To determine the best operationalization of trigger warnings, we explore state-of-the-art multi-label models, examining the trade-off between assigning coarse- and fine-grained warnings, open- and closed-set classification, document length, and label confidence. Our models achieve micro-F1 scores of about 0.5, which reveals the difficulty of the task. Tailored representations, long input sequences, and a higher recall on rare warnings would help.

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Trigger Warning Assignment as a Multi-Label Document Classification Problem

Cross-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to perform various fine-grained sentiment analysis tasks on a target domain by transferring knowledge from a source domain. Since labeled data only exists in the source domain, a model is expected to bridge the domain gap for tackling cross-domain ABSA. Though domain adaptation methods have proven to be effective, most of them are based on a discriminative model, which needs to be specifically designed for different ABSA tasks. To offer a more general solution, we propose a unified bidirectional generative framework to tackle various cross-domain ABSA tasks. Specifically, our framework trains a generative model in both text-to-label and label-to-text directions. The former transforms each task into a unified format to learn domain-agnostic features, and the latter generates natural sentences from noisy labels for data augmentation, with which a more accurate model can be trained. To investigate the effectiveness and generality of our framework, we conduct extensive experiments on four cross-domain ABSA tasks and present new state-of-the-art results on all tasks. Our data and code are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/BGCA}.

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Bidirectional Generative Framework for Cross-domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Recent advances in tabular question answering (QA) with large language models are constrained in their coverage and only answer questions over a single table. However, real-world queries are complex in nature, often over multiple tables in a relational database or web page. Single table questions do not involve common table operations such as set operations, Cartesian products (joins), or nested queries. Furthermore, multi-table operations often result in a tabular output, which necessitates table generation capabilities of tabular QA models. To fill this gap, we propose a new task of answering questions over multiple tables. Our model, MultiTabQA, not only answers questions over multiple tables, but also generalizes to generate tabular answers. To enable effective training, we build a pre-training dataset comprising of 132,645 SQL queries and tabular answers. Further, we evaluate the generated tables by introducing table-specific metrics of varying strictness assessing various levels of granularity of the table structure. MultiTabQA outperforms state-of-the-art single table QA models adapted to a multi-table QA setting by finetuning on three datasets: Spider, Atis and GeoQuery.

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MultiTabQA: Generating Tabular Answers for Multi-Table Question Answering

We create publicly available language identification (LID) datasets and models in all 22 Indian languages listed in the Indian constitution in both native-script and romanized text. First, we create Bhasha-Abhijnaanam, a language identification test set for native-script as well as romanized text which spans all 22 Indic languages. We also train IndicLID, a language identifier for all the above-mentioned languages in both native and romanized script. For native-script text, it has better language coverage than existing LIDs and is competitive or better than other LIDs. IndicLID is the first LID for romanized text in Indian languages. Two major challenges for romanized text LID are the lack of training data and low-LID performance when languages are similar. We provide simple and effective solutions to these problems. In general, there has been limited work on romanized text in any language, and our findings are relevant to other languages that need romanized language identification. Our models are publicly available at https://github.com/AI4Bharat/IndicLID under open-source licenses. Our training and test sets are also publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ai4bharat/Bhasha-Abhijnaanam under open-source licenses.

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Bhasa-Abhijnaanam: Native-script and romanized Language Identification for 22 Indic languages

Financial forecasting has been an important and active area of machine learning research, as even the most modest advantages in predictive accuracy can be parlayed into significant financial gains. Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) bring the opportunity to leverage textual data, such as earnings reports of publicly traded companies, to predict the return rate for an asset. However, when dealing with such a sensitive task, the consistency of models -- their invariance under meaning-preserving alternations in input -- is a crucial property for building user trust. Despite this, current methods for financial forecasting do not take consistency into consideration. To address this issue, we propose FinTrust, an evaluation tool that assesses logical consistency in financial text. Using FinTrust, we show that the consistency of state-of-the-art NLP models for financial forecasting is poor. Our analysis of the performance degradation caused by meaning-preserving alternations suggests that current text-based methods are not suitable for robustly predicting market information.

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Measuring Consistency in Text-based Financial Forecasting Models

In recent years, Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) on social media has attracted considerable attention. However, existing MNER studies only extract entity-type pairs in text, which is useless for multimodal knowledge graph construction and insufficient for entity disambiguation. To solve these issues, in this work, we introduce a Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) task. Given a text-image social post, GMNER aims to identify the named entities in text, their entity types, and their bounding box groundings in image (i.e. visual regions). To tackle the GMNER task, we construct a Twitter dataset based on two existing MNER datasets. Moreover, we extend four well-known MNER methods to establish a number of baseline systems and further propose a Hierarchical Index generation framework named H-Index, which generates the entity-type-region triples in a hierarchical manner with a sequence-to-sequence model. Experiment results on our annotated dataset demonstrate the superiority of our H-Index framework over baseline systems on the GMNER task.

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Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition on Social Media

The attention mechanism is a powerful and effective method utilized in natural language processing. However, it has been observed that this method is insensitive to positional information. Although several studies have attempted to improve positional encoding and investigate the influence of word order perturbation, it remains unclear how positional encoding impacts NLP models from the perspective of word order. In this paper, we aim to shed light on this problem by analyzing the working mechanism of the attention module and investigating the root cause of its inability to encode positional information. Our hypothesis is that the insensitivity can be attributed to the weight sum operation utilized in the attention module. To verify this hypothesis, we propose a novel weight concatenation operation and evaluate its efficacy in neural machine translation tasks. Our enhanced experimental results not only reveal that the proposed operation can effectively encode positional information but also confirm our hypothesis.

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Interpreting Positional Information in Perspective of Word Order

In work on AMR (Abstract Meaning Representation), similarity metrics are crucial as they are used to evaluate AMR systems such as AMR parsers. Current AMR metrics are all based on nodes or triples matching without considering the entire structures of AMR graphs. To address this problem, and inspired by learned similarity evaluation on plain text, we propose AMRSim, an automatic AMR graph similarity evaluation metric. To overcome the high cost of collecting human-annotated data, AMRSim automatically generates silver AMR graphs and utilizes self-supervised learning methods. We evaluated AMRSim on various datasets and found that AMRSim significantly improves the correlations with human semantic scores and remains robust under diverse challenges. We also discuss how AMRSim can be extended to multilingual cases.

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Evaluate AMR Graph Similarity via Self-supervised Learning

Traditional machine translation evaluation relies on reference written by humans. While reference-free evaluation gets rid of the constraints of labor-intensive annotations, which can pivot easily to new domains and is more scalable. In this paper, we propose a reference-free evaluation approach that characterizes evaluation as two aspects: (1) fluency: how well the translated text conforms to normal human language usage; (2) faithfulness: how well the translated text reflects the source data. We further split the faithfulness into word-level and sentence-level. Extensive experiments spanning WMT18/19/21 Metrics segment-level daRR and MQM datasets demonstrate that our proposed reference-free approach, ReFreeEval, outperforms SOTA reference-fee metrics like YiSi-2.

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A Holistic Approach to Reference-Free Evaluation of Machine Translation

We present EPIC (English Perspectivist Irony Corpus), the first annotated corpus for irony analysis based on the principles of data perspectivism. The corpus contains short conversations from social media in five regional varieties of English, and it is annotated by contributors from five countries corresponding to those varieties. We analyse the resource along the perspectives induced by the diversity of the annotators, in terms of origin, age, and gender, and the relationship between these dimensions, irony, and the topics of conversation. We validate EPIC by creating perspective-aware models that encode the perspectives of annotators grouped according to their demographic characteristics. Firstly, the performance of perspectivist models confirms that different annotators induce very different models. Secondly, in the classification of ironic and non-ironic texts, perspectivist models prove to be generally more confident than the non-perspectivist ones. Furthermore, comparing the performance on a perspective-based test set with those achieved on a gold standard test set, we can observe how perspectivist models tend to detect more precisely the positive class, showing their ability to capture the different perceptions of irony. Thanks to these models, we are moreover able to show interesting insights about the variation in the perception of irony by the different groups of annotators, such as among different generations and nationalities.

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Trigger Warning Assignment as a Multi-Label Document Classification Problem

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