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Explaining the black-box predictions of NLP models naturally and accurately is an important open problem in natural language generation. These free-text explanations are expected to contain sufficient and carefully-selected evidence to form supportive arguments for predictions. Thanks to the superior generative capacity of large pretrained language models (PLM), recent work built on prompt engineering enables explanations generated without specific training. However, explanations generated through single-pass prompting often lack sufficiency and conciseness, due to the prompt complexity and hallucination issues. To discard the dross and take the essence of current PLM&#39;s results, we propose to produce sufficient and concise explanations via the information bottleneck (EIB) theory. EIB regenerates explanations by polishing the single-pass output of PLM but retaining the information that supports the contents being explained by balancing two information bottleneck objectives. Experiments on two different tasks verify the effectiveness of EIB through automatic evaluation and thoroughly-conducted human evaluation.

&lt;iframe src=&quot;https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/1088eec3-5722-4fe9-bc03-0661e8ed035c&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;

ACL 2023

Explanation Regeneration via Information Bottleneck

free-text explanation

information bottleneck

pre-trained language models

Explaining the black-box predictions of NLP models naturally and accurately is an important open problem in natural language generation. These free-text explanations are expected to contain sufficient and carefully-selected evidence to form supportive arguments for predictions. Thanks to the superior generative capacity of large pretrained language models (PLM), recent work built on prompt engineering enables explanations generated without specific training. However, explanations generated through single-pass prompting often lack sufficiency and conciseness, due to the prompt complexity and hallucination issues. To discard the dross and take the essence of current PLM's results, we propose to produce sufficient and concise explanations via the information bottleneck (EIB) theory. EIB regenerates explanations by polishing the single-pass output of PLM but retaining the information that supports the contents being explained by balancing two information bottleneck objectives. Experiments on two different tasks verify the effectiveness of EIB through automatic evaluation and thoroughly-conducted human evaluation.

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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.

Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) is a challenging yet significant subtask in aspectbased sentiment analysis as it provides a complete aspect-level sentiment structure. However, existing ASQP datasets are usually small and low-density, hindering technical advancement. To expand the capacity, in this paper, we release two new datasets for ASQP, which contain the following characteristics: larger size, more words per sample, and higher density. With such datasets, we unveil the shortcomings of existing strong ASQP baselines and therefore propose a unified one-step solution for ASQP, namely One-ASQP, to detect the aspect categories and to identify the aspectopinion-sentiment (AOS) triplets simultaneously. Our One-ASQP holds several unique advantages: (1) by separating ASQP into two subtasks and solving them independently and simultaneously, we can avoid error propagation in pipeline-based methods and overcome slow training and inference in generation-based methods; (2) by introducing sentiment-specific horns tagging schema in a token-pair-based two-dimensional matrix, we can exploit deeper interactions between sentiment elements and efficiently decode the AOS triplets; (3) we design "[NULL] token can help us effectively identify the implicit aspects or opinions. Experiments on two benchmark datasets and our released two datasets demonstrate the advantages of our One-ASQP. The two new datasets are publicly released at https://www.github.com/Datastory-CN/ASQP-Datasets.

A Unified One-Step Solution for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction

We have witnessed the rapid proliferation of multimodal data on numerous social media platforms. Conventional studies typically require massive labeled data to train models for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA). However, collecting and annotating fine-grained multimodal data for MABSA is tough. To alleviate the above issue, we perform three MABSA-related tasks with quite a small number of labeled multimodal samples. We first build diverse and comprehensive multimodal few-shot datasets according to the data distribution. To capture the specific prompt for each aspect term in a few-shot scenario, we propose a novel Generative Multimodal Prompt (GMP) model for MABSA, which includes the Multimodal Encoder module and the N-Stream Decoders module. We further introduce a subtask to predict the number of aspect terms in each instance to construct the multimodal prompt.Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong baselines on two MABSA-related tasks in the few-shot setting.

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Few-shot Joint Multimodal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis Based on Generative Multimodal Prompt

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been proven to be sensitive towards perturbations on input samples, and previous works highlight that adversarial samples are even more vulnerable than normal ones. In this work, this phenomenon is illustrated frWe first show that adversarial samples locate in steep and narrow local minima of the loss landscape (high sharpness) while normal samples, which differs distinctly from adversarial ones, reside in the loss surface that is more flatter (low sharpness).om the perspective of sharpness via visualizing the input loss landscape of models. Based on this, we propose a simple and effective sharpness-based detector to distinct adversarial samples by maximizing the loss increment within the region where the inference sample is located. Considering that the notion of sharpness of a loss landscape is relative, we further propose an adaptive optimization strategy in an attempt to fairly compare the relative sharpness among different samples. Experimental results show that our approach can outperform previous detection methods by large margins (average +6.6 F1 score) for four advanced attack strategies considered in this paper across three text classification tasks.

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Detecting Adversarial Samples through Sharpness of Loss Landscape

Diverse headline generation is an NLP task where given a news article, the goal is to generate multiple headlines that are true to the content of the article but are different among themselves. This task aims to exhibit and exploit semantically similar one-to-many relationships between a source news article and multiple target headlines. Toward this, we propose a novel model called DIVHSK. It has two components:KEYSELECT for selecting the important keywords, and SEQGEN, for finally generating the multiple diverse headlines. In KEYSELECT, we cluster the self-attention heads of the last layer of the pre-trained encoder and select the most-attentive theme and general keywords from the source article. Then, cluster-specific keyword sets guide the SEQGEN, a pre-trained encoder-decoder model, to generate diverse yet semantically similar headlines. The proposed model consistently outperformed existing literature and our strong baselines and emerged as a state-of-the-art model. We have also created a high-quality multi-reference headline dataset from news articles.

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DivHSK: Diverse Headline Generation using Self-Attention based Keyword Selection

Developing monolingual large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) is shown to be very successful in handling different tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this work, we present AraMUS, the largest Arabic PLM with 11B parameters trained on 529GB of high-quality Arabic textual data. AraMUS achieves state-of-the-art performances on a diverse set of Arabic classification and generative tasks. Moreover, AraMUS shows impressive few-shot learning abilities compared with the best existing Arabic PLMs.

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AraMUS: Pushing the Limits of Data and Model Scale for Arabic Natural Language Processing

Open-Domain Conversational Question Answering (ODConvQA) aims at answering questions through a multi-turn conversation based on a retriever-reader pipeline, which retrieves passages and then predicts answers with them. However, such a pipeline approach not only makes the reader vulnerable to the errors propagated from the retriever, but also demands additional effort to develop both the retriever and the reader, which further makes it slower since they are not runnable in parallel. In this work, we propose a method to directly predict answers with a phrase retrieval scheme for a sequence of words, reducing the conventional two distinct subtasks into a single one. Also, for the first time, we study its capability for ODConvQA tasks. However, simply adopting it is largely problematic, due to the dependencies between previous and current turns in a conversation. To address this problem, we further introduce a novel contrastive learning strategy, making sure to reflect previous turns when retrieving the phrase for the current context, by maximizing representational similarities of consecutive turns in a conversation while minimizing irrelevant conversational contexts. We validate our model on two ODConvQA datasets, whose experimental results show that it substantially outperforms the relevant baselines with the retriever-reader. Code is available at: https://github.com/starsuzi/PRO-ConvQA.

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Phrase Retrieval for Open Domain Conversational Question Answering with Conversational Dependency Modeling via Contrastive Learning

Well pre-trained contextualized representations from pre-trained language model (PLM) have been shown helpful for enhancing various natural language processing tasks, surely including neural machine translation (NMT). However, existing methods either consider encoder-only enhancement or rely on specific multilingual PLMs, which leads to a much larger model or give up potentially helpful knowledge from target PLMs. In this paper, we propose a new monolingual PLM-sponsored NMT model to let both encoder and decoder enjoy PLM enhancement to alleviate such obvious inconvenience. Especially, incorporating a newly proposed frequency-weighted embedding transformation algorithm, PLM embeddings can be effectively exploited in terms of the representations of the NMT decoder. We evaluate our model on IWSLT14 En-De, De-En, WMT14 En-De, and En-Fr tasks, and the results show that our proposed PLM enhancement gives significant improvement and even helps achieve new state-of-the-art.

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Encoder and Decoder, Not One Less for Pre-trained Language Model Sponsored NMT

kNN-MT presents a new paradigm for domain adaptation by building an external datastore, which usually saves all target language token occurrences in the parallel corpus. As a result, the constructed datastore is usually large and possibly redundant. In this paper, we investigate the interpretability issue of this approach: what knowledge does the NMT model need? We propose the notion of local correctness (LAC) as a new angle, which describes the potential translation correctness for a single entry and for a given neighborhood. Empirical study shows that our investigation successfully finds the conditions where the NMT model could easily fail and need related knowledge. Experiments on six diverse target domains and two language-pairs show that pruning according to local correctness brings a light and more explainable memory for kNN-MT domain adaptation.

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What Knowledge Is Needed? Towards Explainable Memory for kNN-MT Domain Adaptation

Task embeddings are task-specific vectors designed to construct a semantic space of tasks, which can be used to predict the most transferable source task for a given target task via the similarity between task embeddings. However, existing methods use optimized parameters and representations as task embeddings, resulting in substantial computational complexity and storage requirements. In this work, we draw inspiration from the operating mechanism of deep neural networks (DNNs) and biological brains, where neuronal activations are sparse and task-specific, and we use the connectivity patterns of neurons as a unique identifier associated with the task. The proposed method learns to assign importance masks for sub-structures of DNNs, and accordingly indicate the task-specific connectivity patterns. In addition to the storage advantages brought by the binary masking mechanism and structured sparsity, the early-bird nature of the sparse optimization process can deliver an efficient computation advantage. Experiments show that our method consistently outperforms other baselines in predicting inter-task transferability across data regimes and transfer settings, while keeping high efficiency in computation and storage.

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Connectivity Patterns are Task Embeddings

We present SkillQG: a question generation framework with controllable comprehension types for assessing and improving machine reading comprehension models. Existing question generation systems widely differentiate questions by literal information such as question words and answer types to generate semantically relevant questions for a given context.However, they rarely consider the comprehension nature of questions, \ie the different comprehension capabilities embodied by different questions.In comparison, our SkillQG is able to tailor a fine-grained assessment and improvement to the capabilities of questions answering models built on it.Specifically, we first frame the comprehension type of questions based on a hierarchical skill-based schema.We then formulate SkillQG as a skill-conditioned question generator.Furthermore, to improve the controllability of generation, we augment the input text with skill-specific question focus and knowledge, which are constructed by iteratively prompting the pre-trained language models.Empirical results demonstrate that SkillQG outperforms baselines in terms of quality, relevance, and skill-controllability while showing a promising performance boost in downstream question answering task.

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Explanation Regeneration via Information Bottleneck

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A Unified One-Step Solution for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction

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