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Language is by its very nature incremental in how it is produced and processed. This property can be exploited by NLP systems to produce fast responses, which has been shown to be beneficial for real-time interactive applications. Recent neural network-based approaches for incremental processing mainly use RNNs or Transformers. RNNs are fast but monotonic (cannot correct earlier output, which can be necessary in incremental processing). Transformers, on the other hand, consume whole sequences, and hence are by nature non-incremental. A restart-incremental interface that repeatedly passes longer input prefixes can be used to obtain partial outputs, while providing the ability to revise. However, this method becomes costly as the sentence grows longer. In this work, we propose the Two-pass model for AdaPtIve Revision (TAPIR) and introduce a method to obtain an incremental supervision signal for learning an adaptive revision policy. Experimental results on sequence labelling show that our model has better incremental performance and faster inference speed compared to restart-incremental Transformers, while showing little degradation on full sequences.

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ACL 2023

TAPIR: Learning Adaptive Revision for Incremental Natural Language Understanding with a Two-Pass Model

incremental processing

deep learning

Language is by its very nature incremental in how it is produced and processed. This property can be exploited by NLP systems to produce fast responses, which has been shown to be beneficial for real-time interactive applications. Recent neural network-based approaches for incremental processing mainly use RNNs or Transformers. RNNs are fast but monotonic (cannot correct earlier output, which can be necessary in incremental processing). Transformers, on the other hand, consume whole sequences, and hence are by nature non-incremental. A restart-incremental interface that repeatedly passes longer input prefixes can be used to obtain partial outputs, while providing the ability to revise. However, this method becomes costly as the sentence grows longer. In this work, we propose the Two-pass model for AdaPtIve Revision (TAPIR) and introduce a method to obtain an incremental supervision signal for learning an adaptive revision policy. Experimental results on sequence labelling show that our model has better incremental performance and faster inference speed compared to restart-incremental Transformers, while showing little degradation on full sequences.

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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.
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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.

Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis (ACSA) is one of the main subtasks of sentiment analysis, which aims at predicting polarity over a given aspect category. Recently, generative methods emerge as an efficient way to utilize a pre-trained language model for solving ACSA. However, those methods fail to model relations of target words and opinion words in a sentence including multiple aspects. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a method to incorporate Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), which describes semantic representation of a sentence as a directed graph, into a text generation model. Furthermore, two regularizers are designed to guide cross attention weights allocation over AMR graphs. One is the identical regularizer that constrains attention weights of aligned nodes, the other is the entropy regularizer that helps the decoder generate tokens by heavily considering only a few related nodes in the AMR graph. Experimental results on three datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, proving the effectiveness of our model.

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Text Generation Model Enhanced with Semantic Information in Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis

In natural language processing (NLP), deep neural networks (DNNs) could model complex interactions between context and have achieved impressive results on a range of NLP tasks. Prior works on feature interaction attribution mainly focus on studying symmetric interaction that only explains the additional influence of a set of words in combination, which fails to capture asymmetric influence that contributes to model prediction. In this work, we propose an asymmetric feature interaction attribution explanation model that aims to explore asymmetric higher-order feature interactions in the inference of deep neural NLP models. By representing our explanation with an directed interaction graph, we experimentally demonstrate interpretability of the graph to discover asymmetric feature interactions. Experimental results on two sentiment classification datasets show the superiority of our model against the state-of-the-art feature interaction attribution methods in identifying influential features for model predictions.

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Asymmetric feature interaction for interpreting model predictions

Previous research has demonstrated that natural language explanations provide valuable inductive biases that guide models, thereby improving the generalization ability and data efficiency. In this paper, we undertake a systematic examination of the effectiveness of these explanations. Remarkably, we find that corrupted explanations with diminished inductive biases can achieve competitive or superior performance compared to the original explanations. Our findings furnish novel insights into the characteristics of natural language explanations in the following ways: (1) the impact of explanations varies across different training styles and datasets, with previously believed improvements primarily observed in frozen language models. (2) While previous research has attributed the effect of explanations solely to their inductive biases, our study shows that the effect persists even when the explanations are completely corrupted. We propose that the main effect is due to the provision of additional context space. (3) Utilizing the proposed automatic perturbed context, we were able to attain comparable results to annotated explanations, but with a significant increase in computational efficiency, 20-30 times faster.

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Exploring Automatically Perturbed Natural Language Explanations in Relation Extraction

The multi-answer phenomenon, where a question may have multiple answers scattered in the document, can be well handled by humans but is challenging enough for machine reading comprehension (MRC) systems. Despite recent progress in multi-answer MRC, there lacks a systematic analysis of how this phenomenon arises and how to better address it. In this work, we design a taxonomy to categorize commonly-seen multi-answer MRC instances, with which we inspect three multi-answer datasets and analyze where the multi-answer challenge comes from. We further analyze how well different paradigms of current multi-answer MRC models deal with different types of multi-answer instances. We find that some paradigms capture well the key information in the questions while others better model the relation between questions and contexts. We thus explore strategies to make the best of the strengths of different paradigms. Experiments show that generation models can be a promising platform to incorporate different paradigms. Our annotations and code are released for further research.

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How Many Answers Should I Give? An Empirical Study of Multi-Answer Reading Comprehension

Word-level saliency explanations ("heat maps over words") are often used to communicate feature-attribution in text-based models. Recent studies found that superficial factors such as word length can distort human interpretation of the communicated saliency scores. We conduct a user study to investigate how the marking of a word's *neighboring words* affect the explainee's perception of the word's importance in the context of a saliency explanation.We find that neighboring words have significant effects on the word's importance rating.Concretely, we identify that the influence changes based on neighboring direction (left vs. right) and a-priori linguistic and computational measures of phrases and collocations (vs. unrelated neighboring words).Our results question whether text-based saliency explanations should be continued to be communicated at word level, and inform future research on alternative saliency explanation methods.

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Neighboring Words Affect Human Interpretation of Saliency Explanations

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at https://instructor-embedding.github.io.

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One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings

Controlling the text generated by language models and customizing the content has been a long-standing challenge. Existing prompting techniques proposed in pursuit of providing control are task-specific and lack generality; this provides overwhelming choices for non-expert users to find a suitable method for their task. The effort associated with those techniques, such as in writing examples, explanations, instructions, etc. further limits their adoption among non-expert users. In this paper, we propose a simple prompting strategy Help Me Think where we encourage largelanguage models (such as GPT3 and ChatGPT) to help non-expert users by asking a set of relevant questions and leveraging user answers to execute the task. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique Help Me Think on a variety of tasks. Specifically, we focus on tasks that are hard for average humans and require significant thinking to perform. We hope our work will encourage the development of unconventional ways to harness the power of large language models.

HELP ME THINK: A Simple Prompting Strategy for Non-experts to Create Customized Content with Models

Entity linking models have achieved significant success via utilizing pretrained language models to capture semantic features.However, the NIL prediction problem, which aims to identify mentions without a corresponding entity in the knowledge base, has received insufficient attention.We categorize mentions linking to NIL into Missing Entity and Non-Entity Phrase, and propose an entity linking dataset NEL that focuses on the NIL prediction problem.NEL takes ambiguous entities as seeds, collects relevant mention context in the Wikipedia corpus, and ensures the presence of mentions linking to NIL by human annotation and entity masking.We conduct a series of experiments with the widely used bi-encoder and cross-encoder entity linking models, results show that both types of NIL mentions in training data have a significant influence on the accuracy of NIL prediction.Our code and dataset can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/solitaryzero/NIL_EL}.

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Learn to Not Link: Exploring NIL Prediction in Entity Linking

Large language models have demonstrated robust performance on various language tasks using zero-shot or few-shot learning paradigms. While being actively researched, multimodal models that can additionally handle images as input have yet to catch up in size and generality with language-only models. In this work, we ask whether language-only models can be utilised for tasks that require visual input -- but also, as we argue, often require a strong reasoning component. Similar to some recent related work, we make visual information accessible to the language model using separate verbalisation models. Specifically, we investigate the performance of open-source, open-access language models against GPT-3 on five vision-language tasks when given textually-encoded visual information. Our results suggest that language models are effective for solving vision-language tasks even with limited samples. This approach also enhances the interpretability of a model's output by providing a means of tracing the output back through the verbalised image content.

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Images in Language Space: Exploring the Suitability of Large Language Models for Vision & Language Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great potential for in-context learning, where LLMs learn a new task simply by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (prompts). Despite their potential, our understanding of the factors influencing end-task performance and the robustness of in-context learning remains limited. This paper aims to bridge this knowledge gap by investigating the reliance of LLMs on shortcuts or spurious correlations within prompts. Through comprehensive experiments on classification and extraction tasks, we reveal that LLMs are "lazy learners" that tend to exploit such shortcuts. Additionally, we uncover a surprising finding that larger models are more likely to utilize shortcuts in prompts during inference. Our findings provide a new perspective on evaluating robustness in in-context learning and pose new challenges for detecting and mitigating the use of shortcuts in prompts.

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TAPIR: Learning Adaptive Revision for Incremental Natural Language Understanding with a Two-Pass Model

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Text Generation Model Enhanced with Semantic Information in Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis

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