Canada

Despite the excellent performance of Pre-trained Language Models on many text generation tasks, they suffer from inefficient inference on computation and memory due to their large-scale parameters and the universal autoregressive decoding paradigm. In this work, we propose a novel fine-tuning method \textbf{DEER}, which can make a single pre-trained model support \textbf{D}ynamic and \textbf{E}fficient inf\textbf{ER}ence and achieve an adaptive trade-off between model performance and latency. In particular, our critical insight is to jointly utilize the non-autoregressive (NAR) generation and dynamic parameter pruning techniques, which can flexibly control the decoding iteration steps and model sizes according to memory and latency limitations. Besides, we also explore the effectiveness of the pre-trained MLMs (i.e., the BERT family) for text generation tasks since their bidirectional attention nature is more suitable for the NAR training objective. Extensive experiments on both monolingual and multilingual pre-trained MLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DEER method by consistently achieving (1) higher BLEU scores than the strong autoregressive Transformer model on three neural machine translation tasks with 3 $\to$ 12 times speedup, (2) competitive performance (but with much faster inference speed) compared with the BART model on four GLGE benchmark tasks. Our code will be publicly available at GitHub\footnote{\url{https://github.com/dropreg/DEER}}.

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ACL 2023

Dynamic and Efficient Inference for Text Generation via BERT Family

bert family

model pruning

non-autoregressive

Despite the excellent performance of Pre-trained Language Models on many text generation tasks, they suffer from inefficient inference on computation and memory due to their large-scale parameters and the universal autoregressive decoding paradigm. In this work, we propose a novel fine-tuning method \textbf{DEER}, which can make a single pre-trained model support \textbf{D}ynamic and \textbf{E}fficient inf\textbf{ER}ence and achieve an adaptive trade-off between model performance and latency. In particular, our critical insight is to jointly utilize the non-autoregressive (NAR) generation and dynamic parameter pruning techniques, which can flexibly control the decoding iteration steps and model sizes according to memory and latency limitations. Besides, we also explore the effectiveness of the pre-trained MLMs (i.e., the BERT family) for text generation tasks since their bidirectional attention nature is more suitable for the NAR training objective. Extensive experiments on both monolingual and multilingual pre-trained MLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DEER method by consistently achieving (1) higher BLEU scores than the strong autoregressive Transformer model on three neural machine translation tasks with 3 $\to$ 12 times speedup, (2) competitive performance (but with much faster inference speed) compared with the BART model on four GLGE benchmark tasks. Our code will be publicly available at GitHub\footnote{\url{https://github.com/dropreg/DEER}}.

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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.

Recent work has identified noisy and misannotated data as a core cause of hallucinations and unfaithful outputs in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. Consequently, identifying and removing these examples is a key open challenge in creating reliable NLG systems. In this work, we introduce a framework to identify and remove low-quality training instances that lead to undesirable outputs, such as faithfulness errors in text summarization. We show that existing approaches for error tracing, such as gradient-based influence measures, do not perform reliably for detecting faithfulness errors in NLG datasets. We overcome the drawbacks of existing error tracing methods through a new, contrast-based estimate that compares undesired generations to human-corrected outputs. Our proposed method can achieve a mean average precision of 0.93 at detecting known data errors across synthetic tasks with known ground truth, substantially outperforming existing approaches. Using this approach and re-training models on cleaned data leads to a 70% reduction in entity hallucinations on the NYT dataset and a 55% reduction in semantic errors on the E2E dataset.

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Contrastive Error Attribution for Finetuned Language Models

Document-level event argument extraction aims to identify event arguments beyond sentence level, where a significant challenge is to model long-range dependencies.Focusing on this challenge, we present a new chain reasoning paradigm for the task, which can generate decomposable first-order logic rules for reasoning.This paradigm naturally captures long-range interdependence due to the chains' compositional nature, which also improves interpretability by explicitly modeling the reasoning process.We introduce T-norm fuzzy logic for optimization, which permits end-to-end learning and shows promise for integrating the expressiveness of logical reasoning with the generalization of neural networks.In experiments, we show that our approach outperforms previous methods by a significant margin on two standard benchmarks (over 6 points in F1).Moreover, it is data-efficient in low-resource scenarios and robust enough to defend against adversarial attacks.

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Document-Level Event Argument Extraction With a Chain Reasoning Paradigm

Generative pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has demonstrates its great success in natural language processing and related techniques have been adapted into molecular modeling. Considering that text is the most important record for scientific discovery, in this paper, we propose MolXPT, a unified language model of text and molecules pre-trained on SMILES (a sequence representation of molecules) wrapped by text. Briefly, we detect the molecule names in each sequence and replace them to the corresponding SMILES. In this way, the SMILES could leverage the information from surrounding text, and vice versa. The above wrapped sequences, text sequences from PubMed and SMILES sequences from PubChem are all fed into a language model for pre-training. Experimental results demonstrate that MolXPT outperforms strong baselines of molecular property prediction on MoleculeNet, performs comparably to the best model in text-molecule translation while using less than half of its parameters, and enables zero-shot molecular generation without finetuning.

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MolXPT: Wrapping Molecules with Text for Generative Pre-training

Maintaining faithfulness between responses and knowledge is an important research topic for building reliable knowledge-grounded dialogue systems. Existing models heavily rely on elaborate data engineering or increasing the model's parameters ignoring to track the tokens that significantly influence losses, which is decisive for the optimization direction of the model in each iteration. To address this issue, we propose Focus Learning (FocusL), a novel learning approach that adjusts the contribution of each token to the optimization direction by directly scaling the corresponding objective loss. Specifically, we first introduce a positioning method by utilizing similarity distributions between knowledge and each response token to locate knowledge-aware tokens. Then, we further design a similarity-to-weight transformation to provide dynamic token-level weights for the cross-entropy loss. Finally, we use the weighted loss to encourage the model to pay special attention to the knowledge utilization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art results and generates more reliable responses while maintaining training stability.

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Towards Faithful Dialogues via Focus Learning

Discourse analysis is an important task because it models intrinsic semantic structures between sentences in a document. Discourse markers are natural representations of discourse in our daily language. One challenge is that the markers as well as pre-defined and human-labeled discourse relations can be ambiguous when describing the semantics between sentences. We believe that a better approach is to use a contextual-dependent distribution over the markers to express discourse information. In this work, we propose to learn a Distributed Marker Representation (DMR) by utilizing the (potentially) unlimited discourse marker data with a latent discourse sense, thereby bridging markers with sentence pairs. Such representations can be learned automatically from data without supervision, and in turn provide insights into the data itself. Experiments show the SOTA performance of our DMR on the implicit discourse relation recognition task and strong interpretability. Our method also offers a valuable tool to understand complex ambiguity and entanglement among discourse markers and manually defined discourse relations.

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Distributed Marker Representation for Ambiguous Discourse Markers and Entangled Relations

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) has advanced the performance of many vision-language tasks, such as image-text retrieval, visual entailment, and visual reasoning.The pre-training mostly utilizes lexical databases and image queries in English. Previous work has demonstrated that the pre-training in English does not transfer well to other languages in a zero-shot setting. However, multilingual pre-trained language models (MPLM) have excelled at a variety of single-modal language tasks. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient approach to adapt VLP to unseen languages using MPLM.We utilize a cross-lingual contextualised token embeddings alignment approach to train text encoders for non-English languages. Our approach does not require image input and primarily uses machine translation, eliminating the need for target language data. Our evaluation across three distinct tasks (image-text retrieval, visual entailment, and natural language visual reasoning) demonstrates that this approach outperforms the state-of-the-art multilingual vision-language models without requiring large parallel corpora. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yasminekaroui/CliCoTea.

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Stop Pre-Training: Adapt Visual-Language Models to Unseen Languages

Reasoning about time is of fundamental importance. Many facts are time-dependent. For example, athletes change teams from time to time, and different government officials are elected periodically. Previous time-dependent question answering (QA) datasets tend to be biased in either their coverage of time spans or question types. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive probing dataset TempReason to evaluate the temporal reasoning capability of large language models. Our dataset includes questions of three temporal reasoning levels. In addition, we also propose a novel learning framework to improve the temporal reasoning capability of large language models, based on temporal span extraction and time-sensitive reinforcement learning. We conducted experiments in closed book QA, open book QA, and reasoning QA settings and demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.

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Towards Benchmarking and Improving the Temporal Reasoning Capability of Large Language Models

Traditional text classification typically categorizes into pre-defined coarse-grained classes, from which the produced models cannot handle the real-world scenario where finer categories emerge periodically for accurate services. In this work, we investigate the setting where fine-grained classification is done given only using the annotation of coarse-grained categories and the coarse-to-fine mapping. We propose a lightweight contrastive clustering-based bootstrapping method to iteratively refine the labels of passages. During clustering, it pulls away negative passage-prototype pairs under the guidance of the mapping from both global and local perspectives. Experiments on NYT and 20News show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

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Contrastive Bootstrapping for Label Refinement

To address the problem of NLP classifiers learning spurious correlations between training features and target labels, a common approach is to make the model's predictions invariant to these features. However, this can be counter-productive when the features have a non-zero causal effect on the target label and thus are important for prediction. Therefore, using methods from the causal inference literature, we propose an algorithm to regularize the learnt effect of the features on the model's prediction to the estimated effect of feature on label. This results in an automated augmentation method that leverages the estimated effect of a feature to appropriately change the labels for new augmented inputs. On toxicity and IMDB review datasets, the proposed algorithm minimises spurious correlations and improves the minority group (i.e., samples breaking spurious correlations) accuracy, while also improving the total accuracy compared to standard training.

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Controlling Learned Effects to Reduce Spurious Correlations in Text Classifiers

Pre-training and fine-tuning is a paradigm for alleviating the data scarcity problem in end-to-end speech translation (E2E ST). The commonplace ''modality gap'' between speech and text data often leads to inconsistent inputs between pre-training and fine-tuning. However, we observe that this gap occurs in the early stages of fine-tuning, but does not have a major impact on the final performance. On the other hand, we find that there has another gap, which we call the ''capacity gap'': high resource tasks (such as ASR and MT) always require a large model to fit, when the model is reused for a low resource task (E2E ST), it will get a sub-optimal performance due to the over-fitting. In a case study, we find that the regularization plays a more important role than the well-designed modality adaption method, which achieves 29.0 for en-de and 40.3 for en-fr on the MuST-C dataset.

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