Canada

Through the use of first name substitution experiments, prior research has demonstrated the tendency of social commonsense reasoning models to systematically exhibit social biases along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, and gender (An et al., 2023). Demographic attributes of first names, however, are strongly correlated with corpus frequency and tokenization length, which may influence model behavior independent of or in addition to demographic factors. In this paper, we conduct a new series of first name substitution experiments that measures the influence of these factors while controlling for the others. We find that demographic attributes of a name (race, ethnicity, and gender) and name tokenization length are both factors that systematically affect the behavior of social commonsense reasoning models.

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ACL 2023

Nichelle and Nancy: The Influence of Demographic Attributes and Tokenization Length on First Name Biases

first name biases

social commonsense reasoning

bias and fairness

Through the use of first name substitution experiments, prior research has demonstrated the tendency of social commonsense reasoning models to systematically exhibit social biases along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, and gender (An et al., 2023). Demographic attributes of first names, however, are strongly correlated with corpus frequency and tokenization length, which may influence model behavior independent of or in addition to demographic factors. In this paper, we conduct a new series of first name substitution experiments that measures the influence of these factors while controlling for the others. We find that demographic attributes of a name (race, ethnicity, and gender) and name tokenization length are both factors that systematically affect the behavior of social commonsense reasoning models.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/6qSnTPZvioRLfFJpZUjhCw/embed/polls/c81b9011-fb85-4448-8eb2-8b4a7fab05a8" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

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)**
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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.

Radiology report summarization (RRS) is a growing area of research. Given the Findings section of a radiology report, the goal is to generate a summary (called an Impression section) that highlights the key observations and conclusions of the radiology study. However, RRS currently faces essential limitations.First, many prior studies conduct experiments on private datasets, preventing reproduction of results and fair comparisons across different systems and solutions. Second, most prior approaches are evaluated solely on chest X-rays. To address these limitations, we propose a dataset (MIMIC-RRS) involving three new modalities and seven new anatomies based on the MIMIC-III and MIMIC-CXR datasets. We then conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of models both within and across modality-anatomy pairs in MIMIC-RRS. In addition, we evaluate their clinical efficacy via RadGraph, a factual correctness metric.

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Toward Expanding the Scope of Radiology Report Summarization to Multiple Anatomies and Modalities

This work explores the feasibility of eliciting knowledge from language models (LMs) to decode symbolism, recognizing something (e.g.,roses) as a stand-in for another (e.g., love). We present our evaluative framework, Symbolism Analysis (SymbA), which compares LMs (e.g., RoBERTa, GPT-J) on different types of symbolism and analyze the outcomes along multiple metrics. Our findings suggest that conventional symbols are more reliably elicited from LMs while situated symbols are more challenging. Results also reveal the negative impact of the bias in pre-trained corpora. We further demonstrate that a simple re-ranking strategy can mitigate the bias and significantly improve model performances to be on par with human performances in some cases.

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Decoding Symbolism in Language Models

Semantic matching is a mainstream paradigm of zero-shot relation extraction, which matches a given input with a corresponding label description. The entities in the input should exactly match their hypernyms in the description, while the irrelevant contexts should be ignored when matching.However, general matching methods lack explicit modeling of the above matching pattern. In this work, we propose a fine-grained semantic matching method tailored for zero-shot relation extraction. Guided by the above matching pattern, we decompose the sentence-level similarity score into the entity matching score and context matching score. Considering that not all contextual words contribute equally to the relation semantics, we design a context distillation module to reduce the negative impact of irrelevant components on context matching. Experimental results show that our method achieves higher matching accuracy and more than 10 times faster inference speed, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

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RE-Matching: A Fine-Grained Semantic Matching Method for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction

We present Earley's (1970) context-free parsing algorithm as a deduction system, incorporating various known and new speed-ups. In particular, our presentation supports a known worst-case runtime improvement from Earley's (1970) O(N^3|G||R|), which is unworkable for the large grammars that arise in natural language processing, to O(N^3|G|), which matches the complexity of CKY on a binarized version of the grammar G. Here N is the length of the sentence, |R| is the number of productions in G, and |G| is the total length of those productions. We also provide a version that achieves runtime of O(N^3|M|) with |M| |G| when the grammar is represented compactly as a single finite-state automaton M (this is partly novel). We carefully treat the generalization to semiring-weighted deduction, preprocessing the grammar like Stolcke (1995) to eliminate the possibility of deduction cycles, and further generalize Stolcke's method to compute the weights of sentence prefixes. We also provide implementation details for efficient execution, ensuring that on a preprocessed grammar, the semiring-weighted versions of our methods have the same asymptotic runtime and space requirements as the unweighted methods, including sub-cubic runtime on some grammars.

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Efficient Semiring-Weighted Earley Parsing

Analogical reasoning is a fundamental capacity of human cognition that allows us to reason abstractly about novel situations by relating them to past experiences. While it is thought to be essential for robust reasoning in AI systems, conventional approaches require significant training and/or hard-coding of domain knowledge to be applied to benchmark tasks. Inspired by cognitive science research that has found connections between human language and analogy-making, we explore the use of intuitive language-based abstractions to support analogy in AI systems. Specifically, we apply large pre-trained language models (PLMs) to visual Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM), a common relational reasoning test. By simply encoding the perceptual features of the problem into language form, we find that PLMs exhibit a striking capacity for zero-shot relational reasoning, exceeding human performance and nearing supervised vision-based methods. We explore different encodings that vary the level of abstraction over task features, finding that higher-level abstractions further strengthen PLMs' analogical reasoning. Our detailed analysis reveals insights on the role of model complexity, in-context learning, and prior knowledge in solving RPM tasks.

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In-Context Analogical Reasoning with Pre-Trained Language Models

We consider the automated generation of sonnets, a poetic form constrained according to meter, rhyme scheme, and length. Sonnets generally also use rhetorical figures, expressive language, and a consistent theme or narrative. Our constrained decoding approach allows for the generation of sonnets within preset poetic constraints, while using a relatively modest neural backbone. Human evaluation confirms that our approach produces Shakespearean sonnets that resemble human-authored sonnets, and which adhere to the genre's defined constraints and contain lyrical language and literary devices.

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The Mechanical Bard: An Interpretable Machine Learning Approach to Shakespearean Sonnet Generation

As natural language processing (NLP) has recently seen an unprecedented level of excitement, and more people are eager to enter the field, it is unclear whether current research reproducibility efforts are sufficient for this group of beginners to apply the latest developments. To understand their needs, we conducted a study with 93 students in an introductory NLP course, where students reproduced the results of recent NLP papers. Surprisingly, we find that their programming skill and comprehension of research papers have a limited impact on their effort spent completing the exercise. Instead, we find accessibility efforts by research authors to be the key to success, including complete documentation, better coding practice, and easier access to data files. Going forward, we recommend that NLP researchers pay close attention to these simple aspects of open-sourcing their work, and use insights from beginners' feedback to provide actionable ideas on how to better support them.

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NLP Reproducibility For All: Understanding Experiences of Beginners

Target-dependent sentiment classification~(TSC) enables a fine-grained automatic analysis of sentiments expressed in texts. Sentiment expression varies depending on the domain, and it is necessary to create domain-specific datasets.While socially important, TSC in the news domain remains relatively understudied.We introduce MAD-TSC, a new dataset which differs substantially from existing resources.First, it includes aligned examples in eight languages to facilitate a comparison of performance for individual languages, and a direct comparison of human and machine translation. Second, the dataset is sampled from a diversified parallel news corpus, and is diversified in terms of news sources and geographic spread of entities.Finally, MAD-TSC is more challenging than existing datasets because its examples are more complex.We exemplify the use of MAD-TSC with comprehensive monolingual and multilingual experiments.The latter show that machine translations can successfully replace manual ones, and that performance for all included languages can match that of English by automatically translating test examples.

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MAD-TSC: A Multilingual Aligned News Dataset for Target-dependent Sentiment Classification

With the ubiquitous use of online meeting platforms and robust automatic speech recognition systems, meeting transcripts have emerged as a promising domain for natural language tasks. Most recent works on meeting transcripts primarily focus on summarization and extraction of action items. However, meeting discussions also have a useful question-answering (QA) component, crucial to understanding the discourse or meeting content, and can be used to build interactive interfaces on top of long transcripts. Hence, in this work, we leverage this inherent QA component of meeting discussions and introduce MeetingQA, an extractive QA dataset comprising of questions asked by meeting participants and corresponding responses. As a result, questions can be open-ended and actively seek discussions, while the answers can be multi-span and distributed across multiple speakers. Our comprehensive empirical study of several robust baselines including long-context language models and recent instruction-tuned models reveals that models perform poorly on this task (F1 = 57.3) and severely lag behind human performance (F1 = 84.6), thus presenting a challenging new task for the community to improve upon.

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MeetingQA: Extractive Question-Answering on Meeting Transcripts

It is critical to measure and mitigate fairness-related harms caused by AI text generation systems, including stereotyping and demeaning harms. To that end, we introduce FairPrism, a dataset of 5,000 examples of AI-generated English text with detailed human annotations covering a diverse set of harms relating to gender and sexuality. FairPrism aims to address several limitations of existing datasets for measuring and mitigating fairness-related harms, including improved transparency, clearer specification of dataset coverage, and accounting for annotator disagreement and harms that are context-dependent. FairPrism's annotations include the extent of stereotyping and demeaning harms, the demographic groups targeted, and appropriateness for different applications. The annotations also include specific harms that occur in interactive contexts and harms that raise normative concerns when the "speaker" is an AI system. Due to its precision and granularity, FairPrism can be used to diagnose (1) the types of fairness-related harms that AI text generation systems cause, and (2) the potential limitations of mitigation methods, both of which we illustrate through case studies. Finally, the process we followed to develop FairPrism offers a recipe for building improved datasets for measuring and mitigating harms caused by AI systems.

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Nichelle and Nancy: The Influence of Demographic Attributes and Tokenization Length on First Name Biases

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Toward Expanding the Scope of Radiology Report Summarization to Multiple Anatomies and Modalities

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