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Models trained with counterfactually augmented data learn representations of the causal structure of tasks, enabling robust generalization. However, high-quality counterfactual data is scarce for most tasks and not easily generated at scale. When crowdsourced, such data is typically limited in scale and diversity; when generated using supervised methods, it is computationally expensive to extend to new counterfactual dimensions. In this work, we introduce DISCO (DIStilled COunterfactual Data), a new method for automatically generating high-quality counterfactual data at scale. DISCO engineers prompts to generate phrasal perturbations with a large general language model. Then, a task-specific teacher model filters these generations to distill high-quality counterfactual data. While task-agnostic, we apply our pipeline to the task of natural language inference (NLI) and find that on challenging evaluations such as the NLI stress test, comparatively smaller student models trained with DISCO generated counterfactuals are more robust (6% absolute) and generalize better across distributions (2%) compared to models trained without data augmentation. Furthermore, DISCO augmented models are 10% more consistent between counterfactual pairs on three evaluation sets, demonstrating that DISCO augmentation enables models to more reliably learn causal representations. Our repository are available at: https://github.com/eric11eca/disco

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ACL 2023

DISCO: Distilling Counterfactuals with Large Language Models

mitigating spurious correlations

automatic dataset generation

counterfactual data augmentation

large language model

natural language inference

Models trained with counterfactually augmented data learn representations of the causal structure of tasks, enabling robust generalization. However, high-quality counterfactual data is scarce for most tasks and not easily generated at scale. When crowdsourced, such data is typically limited in scale and diversity; when generated using supervised methods, it is computationally expensive to extend to new counterfactual dimensions. In this work, we introduce DISCO (DIStilled COunterfactual Data), a new method for automatically generating high-quality counterfactual data at scale. DISCO engineers prompts to generate phrasal perturbations with a large general language model. Then, a task-specific teacher model filters these generations to distill high-quality counterfactual data. While task-agnostic, we apply our pipeline to the task of natural language inference (NLI) and find that on challenging evaluations such as the NLI stress test, comparatively smaller student models trained with DISCO generated counterfactuals are more robust (6% absolute) and generalize better across distributions (2%) compared to models trained without data augmentation. Furthermore, DISCO augmented models are 10% more consistent between counterfactual pairs on three evaluation sets, demonstrating that DISCO augmentation enables models to more reliably learn causal representations. Our repository are available at: https://github.com/eric11eca/disco

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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)**
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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.

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) has been used in the pipelines of various NLP tasks. Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus on which models to use in which tasks. Muddying things further is the lack of comparisons that take differing training sets into account. In this paper, we present an application-focused empirical survey of neural OpenIE models, training sets, and benchmarks in an effort to help users choose the most suitable OpenIE systems for their applications. We find that the different assumptions made by different models and datasets have a statistically significant effect on performance, making it important to choose the most appropriate model for one's applications. We demonstrate the applicability of our recommendations on a downstream Complex QA application.

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When to Use What: An In-Depth Comparative Empirical Analysis of OpenIE Systems for Downstream Applications

We present, \textit{Naamapadam}, the largest publicly available Named Entity Recognition (NER) dataset for the 11 major Indian languages from two language families. The dataset contains more than 400k sentences annotated with a total of at least 100k entities from three standard entity categories (Person, Location, and, Organization) for 9 out of the 11 languages. The training dataset has been automatically created from the Samanantar parallel corpus by projecting automatically tagged entities from an English sentence to the corresponding Indian language translation. We also create manually annotated testsets for 9 languages. We demonstrate the utility of the obtained dataset on the {Naamapadam}-test dataset. We also release \textit{IndicNER}, a multilingual IndicBERT model fine-tuned on {Naamapadam} training set. {IndicNER} achieves an F1 score of more than $80$ for $7$ out of $9$ test languages. The dataset and models are available under open-source licences at \url{https://ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in/naamapadam}.

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Naamapadam: A Large-Scale Named Entity Annotated Data for Indic Languages

A crucial issue of current text generation models is that they often uncontrollably generate text that is factually inconsistent with inputs.Due to lack of annotated data, existing factual consistency metrics usually train evaluation models on synthetic texts or directly transfer from other related tasks, such as question answering (QA) and natural language inference (NLI).Bias in synthetic text or upstream tasks makes them perform poorly on text actually generated by language models, especially for general evaluation for various tasks.To alleviate this problem, we propose a weakly supervised framework named \textbf{WeCheck} that is directly trained on actual generated samples from language models with weakly annotated labels.WeCheck first utilizes a generative model to infer the factual labels of generated samples by aggregating weak labels from multiple resources.Next, we train a simple noise-aware classification model as the target metric using the inferred weakly supervised information.Comprehensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate the strong performance of WeCheck, achieving an average absolute improvement of 3.3% on the TRUE benchmark over 11B state-of-the-art methods using only 435M parameters.Furthermore, it is up to 30 times faster than previous evaluation methods, greatly improving the accuracy and efficiency of factual consistency evaluation.

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WeCheck: Strong Factual Consistency Checker via Weakly Supervised Learning

In open-domain question answering, due to the ambiguity of questions, multiple plausible answers may exist.To provide feasible answers to an ambiguous question,one approach is to directly predict all valid answers, but this can struggle with balancing relevance and diversity.An alternative is to gather candidate answers and aggregate them, but this method can be computationally costly and may neglect dependencies among answers.In this paper, we present AmbigPrompt to address the imperfections of existing approaches to answering ambiguous questions.Specifically, we integrate an answering model with a prompting model in an iterative manner.The prompting model adaptively tracks the reading process and progressively triggers the answering model to compose distinct and relevant answers. Additionally, we develop a task-specific post-pretraining approach for both the answering model and the prompting model, which greatly improves the performance of our framework. Empirical studies on two commonly-used open benchmarks show that AmbigPrompt achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results while using less memory and having a lower inference latency than competing approaches. Additionally, AmbigPrompt also performs well in low-resource settings.

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Answering Ambiguous Questions via Iterative Prompting

Visual Word Sense Disambiguation (VWSD) is a task to find the image that most accurately depicts the correct sense of the target word for the given context. Previously, image-text matching models often suffered from recognizing polysemous words. This paper introduces an unsupervised VWSD approach that uses gloss information of an external lexical knowledge-base, especially the sense definitions. Specifically, we suggest employing Bayesian inference to incorporate the sense definitions when sense information of the answer is not provided. In addition, to ameliorate the out-of-dictionary (OOD) issue, we propose a context-aware definition generation with GPT-3. Experimental results show that the VWSD performance significantly increased with our Bayesian inference-based approach. In addition, our context-aware definition generation achieved prominent performance improvement in OOD examples exhibiting better performance than the existing definition generation method.

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Vision Meets Definitions: Unsupervised Visual Word Sense Disambiguation Incorporating Gloss Information

Scaling up language models has led to unprecedented performance gains, but little is understood about how the training dynamics change as models get larger. How do language models of different sizes learn during pre-training? Why do larger language models demonstrate more desirable behaviors? In this paper, we analyze the intermediate training checkpoints of differently sized OPT models (Zhang et al., 2022)from 125M to 175B parameterson next-token prediction, sequence-level generation and downstream tasks. We find that 1) at a given perplexity and independent of model sizes, a similar subset of training tokens see the most significant reduction in loss, with the rest stagnating or showing double-descent behavior (Nakkiran et al., 2020); 2) early in training, all models learn to reduce the perplexity of grammatical sequences that contain hallucinations, with small models halting at this suboptimal distribution and larger ones eventually learning to assign these sequences lower probabilities; and 3) perplexity is a strong predictor of in-context learning performance on 74 multiple-choice tasks from BIG-Bench, and this holds independent of the model size. Together, these results show that perplexity is more predictive of model behaviors than model size or training computation.

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Training Trajectories of Language Models Across Scales

We introduce a dataset for evidence/rationale extraction on an extreme multi-label classification task over long medical documents. One such task is Computer-Assisted Coding (CAC) which has improved significantly in recent years, thanks to advances in machine learning technologies. Yet simply predicting a set of final codes for a patient encounter is insufficient as CAC systems are required to provide supporting textual evidence to justify the billing codes. A model able to produce accurate and reliable supporting evidence for each code would be a tremendous benefit. However, a human annotated code evidence corpus is extremely difficult to create because it requires specialized knowledge. In this paper, we introduce MDACE, the first publicly available code evidence dataset, which is built on a subset of the MIMIC-III clinical records. The dataset -- annotated by professional medical coders -- consists of 302 Inpatient charts with 3,934 evidence spans and 52 Profee charts with 5,563 evidence spans. We implemented several evidence extraction methods based on the EffectiveCAN model (Liu et al., 2021) to establish baseline performance on this dataset. MDACE can be used to evaluate code evidence extraction methods for CAC systems, as well as the accuracy and interpretability of deep learning models for multi-label classification. We believe that the release of MDACE will greatly improve the understanding and application of deep learning technologies for medical coding and document classification.

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MDACE: MIMIC Documents Annotated with Code Evidence

Question answering models commonly have access to two sources of "knowledge" during inference time: (1) parametric knowledge - the factual knowledge encoded in the model weights, and (2) contextual knowledge - external knowledge (e.g., a Wikipedia passage) given to the model to generate a grounded answer. Having these two sources of knowledge entangled together is a core issue for generative QA models as it is unclear whether the answer stems from the given non-parametric knowledge or not. This unclarity has implications on issues of trust, interpretability and factuality. In this work, we propose a new paradigm in which QA models are trained to disentangle the two sources of knowledge. Using counterfactual data augmentation, we introduce a model that predicts two answers for a given question: one based on given contextual knowledge and one based on parametric knowledge. Our experiments on the Natural Questions dataset show that this approach improves the performance of QA models by making them more robust to knowledge conflicts between the two knowledge sources, while generating useful disentangled answers.

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DisentQA: Disentangling Parametric and Contextual Knowledge with Counterfactual Question Answering

We present a state-of-the-art neural approach to the unsupervised reconstruction of ancient word forms. Previous work in this domain used expectation-maximization to predict simple phonological changes between ancient word forms and their cognates in modern languages. We extend this work with neural models that can capture more complicated phonological and morphological changes. At the same time, we preserve the inductive biases from classical methods by building monotonic alignment constraints into the model and deliberately underfitting during the maximization step. We evaluate our performance on the task of reconstructing Latin from a dataset of cognates across five Romance languages, achieving a notable reduction in edit distance from the target word forms compared to previous methods.

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Neural Unsupervised Reconstruction of Protolanguage Word Forms

Dialogue summarization aims to condense the lengthy dialogue into a concise summary, and has recently achieved significant progress. However, the result of existing methods is still far from satisfactory. Previous works indicated that omission is a major factor in affecting the quality of summarization, but few of them have further explored the omission problem, such as how omission affects summarization results and how to detect omission, which is critical for reducing omission and improving summarization quality. Moreover, analyzing and detecting omission relies on summarization datasets with omission labels (i.e., which dialogue utterances are omitted in the summarization), which are not available in the current literature. In this paper, we propose the OLDS dataset, which provides high-quality omission labels for dialogue summarization. By analyzing this dataset, we find that a large improvement in summarization quality can be achieved by providing ground-truth omission labels for the summarization model to recover omission information, which demonstrates the importance of omission detection for omission mitigation in dialogue summarization. Therefore, we formulate an omission detection task and demonstrate our proposed dataset can support the training and evaluation of this task well. We also call for research action on omission detection based on our proposed datasets. Our dataset and codes are publicly available.

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When to Use What: An In-Depth Comparative Empirical Analysis of OpenIE Systems for Downstream Applications

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