Canada

This work examines the presence of modularity in pre-trained Transformers, a feature commonly found in human brains and thought to be vital for general intelligence. In analogy to human brains, we consider two main characteristics of modularity: (1) functional specialization of neurons: we evaluate whether each neuron is mainly specialized in a certain function, and find that the answer is yes. (2) function-based neuron grouping: we explore to find a structure that groups neurons into modules by function, and each module works for its corresponding function. Given the enormous amount of possible structures, we focus on Mixture-of-Experts as a promising candidate, which partitions neurons into experts and usually activates different experts for different inputs. Experimental results show that there are functional experts, where clustered are the neurons specialized in a certain function. Moreover, perturbing the activations of functional experts significantly affects the corresponding function. Finally, we study how modularity emerges during pre-training, and find that the modular structure is stabilized at the early stage, which is faster than neuron stabilization. It suggests that Transformer first constructs the modular structure and then learns fine-grained neuron functions. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/THUNLP/modularity-analysis.

ACL 2023

Emergent Modularity in Pre-trained Transformers

model interpretation

pre-trained language model

modularity

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
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The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences.<br>
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I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best!<br>
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Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life.<br>
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference!<br>
Katrin Erk<br>
The University of Texas at Austin<br>
NAACL-2024 General Chair<br><br>
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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)**
<br><br><br><br>

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.

User and product information associated with a review is useful for sentiment polarity prediction. Typical approaches incorporating such information focus on modeling users and products as implicitly learned representation vectors. Most do not exploit the potential of historical reviews, or those that currently do require unnecessary modifications to model architectureor do not make full use of user/product associations. The contribution of this work is twofold: i) a method to explicitly employ historical reviews belonging to the same user/product in initializing representations, and ii) efficient incorporation of textual associations between users and products via a user-product cross-context module. Experiments on the IMDb, Yelp-2013 and Yelp-2014 English benchmarks with BERT, SpanBERT and Longformer pretrained language models show that our approach substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/c712fb55-e8a5-4de9-878d-ceb6462b05a0" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Exploiting Rich Textual User-Product Context for Improving Personalized Sentiment Analysis

We identify the robust overfitting issue for pre-trained language models by showing that the robust test loss increases as the epoch grows. Through comprehensive exploration of the robust loss on the training set, we attribute robust overfitting to the model's memorization of the adversarial training data. We attempt to mitigate robust overfitting by combining regularization methods with adversarial training. Following the philosophy that prevents the model from memorizing the adversarial data, we find that flooding, a regularization method with loss scaling, can mitigate robust overfitting for pre-trained language models. Eventually, we investigate the effect of flooding levels and evaluate the models' adversarial robustness under textual attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods can mitigate robust overfitting upon three top adversarial training methods and further promote adversarial robustness.

Exploring Robust Overfitting for Pre-trained Language Models

Pretrained multilingual Transformers have achieved great success in cross-lingual transfer learning. Current methods typically activate the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual Transformers by fine-tuning them on end-task data. However, the methods cannot perform cross-lingual transfer when end-task data are unavailable. In this work, we explore whether the cross-lingual transferability can be activated without end-task data. We propose a cross-lingual transfer method, named PlugIn-X. PlugIn-X disassembles monolingual and multilingual Transformers into sub-modules, and reassembles them to be the multilingual end-task model. After representation adaptation, PlugIn-X finally performs cross-lingual transfer in a plug-and-play style. Experimental results show that PlugIn-X successfully activates the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual Transformers without accessing end-task data. Moreover, we analyze how the cross-model representation alignment affects the cross-lingual transferability.

Can Cross-Lingual Transferability of Multilingual Transformers Be Activated Without End-Task Data?

The machine reading comprehension (MRC) of user manuals has huge potential in customer service. However, current methods have trouble answering complex questions. Therefore, we introduce the knowing-how & knowing-that task that requires the model to answer factoid-style, procedure-style, and inconsistent questions about user manuals. We resolve this task by jointly representing the sTeps and fActs in a gRAh (TARA), which supports a unified inference of various questions. Towards a systematical benchmarking study, we design a heuristic method to automatically parse user manuals into TARAs and build an annotated dataset to test the model's ability in answering real-world questions. Empirical results demonstrate that representing user manuals as TARAs is a desired solution for the MRC of user manuals. An in-depth investigation of TARA further sheds light on the issues and broader impacts of future representations of user manuals. We hope our work can move the MRC of user manuals to a more complex and realistic stage.

Knowing-how & Knowing-that: A New Task for Machine Comprehension of User Manuals

In the wake of responsible AI, interpretability methods, which attempt to provide an explanation for the predictions of neural models have seen rapid progress. In this work, we are concerned with explanations that are applicable to natural language processing (NLP) models and tasks, and we focus specifically on the analysis of counterfactual, contrastive explanations. We note that while there have been several explainers proposed to produce counterfactual explanations, their behaviour can vary significantly and the lack of a universal ground truth for the counterfactual edits imposes an insuperable barrier on their evaluation. We propose a new back translation-inspired evaluation methodology that utilises earlier outputs of the explainer as ground truth proxies to investigate the consistency of explainers. We show that by iteratively feeding the counterfactual to the explainer we can obtain valuable insights into the behaviour of both the predictor and the explainer models, and infer patterns that would be otherwise obscured. Using this methodology, we conduct a thorough analysis and propose a novel metric to evaluate the consistency of counterfactual generation approaches with different characteristics across available performance indicators.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/b07bf2b4-5686-4b6d-acc6-b42e85725a9d" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Counterfactuals of Counterfactuals: a back-translation-inspired approach to analyse counterfactual editors

Languages are dynamic entities, where the meanings associated with words constantly change with time.Detecting the semantic variation of words is an important task for various NLP applications that must make time-sensitive predictions.Existing work on semantic variation prediction have predominantly focused on comparing some form of an averaged contextualised representation of a target word computed from a given corpus.However, some of the previously associated meanings of a target word can become obsolete over time (e.g. meaning of gay as happy), while novel usages of existing words are observed (e.g. meaning of cell as a mobile phone).We argue that mean representations alone cannot accurately capture such semantic variations and propose a method that uses the entire cohort of the contextualised embeddings of the target word, which we refer to as the sibling distribution.Experimental results on SemEval-2020 Task 1 benchmark dataset for semantic variation prediction show that our method outperforms prior work that consider only the mean embeddings, and is comparable to the current state-of-the-art. Moreover, a qualitative analysis shows that our method detects important semantic changes in words that are not captured by the existing methods.

Unsupervised Semantic Variation Prediction using the Distribution of Sibling Embeddings

Learning quality document embeddings is a fundamental problem in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), recommendation systems, and search engines. Despite recent advances in the development of transformer-based models that produce sentence embeddings with self-contrastive learning, the encoding of long documents (Ks of words) is still challenging with respect to both efficiency and quality considerations. Therefore, we train Longfomer-based document encoders using a state-of-the-art unsupervised contrastive learning method (SimCSE). Further on, we complement the baseline method -siamese neural network- with additional convex neural networks based on functional Bregman divergence aiming to enhance the quality of the output document representations. We show that overall the combination of a self-contrastive siamese network and our proposed neural Bregman network outperforms the baselines in two linear classification settings on three long document topic classification tasks from the legal and biomedical domains.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/c73911d4-d74c-4786-bda2-6d5f6cad6ea8" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Efficient Document Embeddings via Self-Contrastive Bregman Divergence Learning

Sense embedding learning methods learn multiple vectors for a given ambiguous word, corresponding to its different word senses.For this purpose, different methods have been proposed in prior work on sense embedding learning that use different sense inventories, sense-tagged corpora and learning methods.However, not all existing sense embeddings cover all senses of ambiguous words equally well due to the discrepancies in their training resources.To address this problem, we propose the first-ever meta-sense embedding method -- Neighbour Preserving Meta-Sense Embeddings, which learns meta-sense embeddings by combining multiple independently trained source sense embeddings such that the sense neighbourhoods computed from the source embeddings are preserved in the meta-embedding space.Our proposed method can combine source sense embeddings that cover different sets of word senses.Experimental results on Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and Word-in-Context (WiC) tasks show that the proposed meta-sense embedding method consistently outperforms several competitive baselines.\footnote{An anonymised version of the source code implementation for our proposed method is submitted to reviewing system. Both source code and the learnt meta-sense embeddings will be publicly released upon paper acceptance.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/34b6f60f-0d79-4772-9f18-9d628121a8b3" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Together We Make Sense--Learning Meta-Sense Embeddings

Dynamic topic models (DTMs) analyze text streams to capture the evolution of topics. Despite their popularity, existing DTMs are either fully supervised, requiring expensive human annotations, or fully unsupervised, producing topic evolutions that often do not cater to a user's needs. Further, the topic evolutions produced by DTMs tend to contain generic terms that are not indicative of their designated time steps. To address these issues, we propose the task of discriminative dynamic topic discovery. This task aims to discover topic evolutions from temporal corpora that distinctly align with a set of user-provided category names and uniquely capture topics at each time step. We solve this task by developing DynaMiTE, a framework that ensembles semantic similarity, category indicative, and time indicative scores to produce informative topic evolutions. Through experiments on three diverse datasets, including the use of a newly-designed human evaluation experiment, we demonstrate that DynaMiTE is a practical and efficient framework for helping users discover high-quality topic evolutions suited to their interests.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/047d989f-aedd-4981-b55d-161bce85ba27" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

DynaMiTE: Discovering Explosive Topic Evolutions with User Guidance

Multilingual pre-trained language models can learn task-specific abilities or memorize facts across multiple languages but inevitably make undesired predictions with specific inputs. Under similar observation, model editing aims to post-hoc calibrate a model targeted to specific inputs with keeping the model's raw behavior. However, existing work only studies the monolingual scenario, which lacks the cross-lingual transferability to perform editing simultaneously across languages. In this work, we focus on cross-lingual model editing. Firstly, we define the cross-lingual model editing task and corresponding metrics, where an edit in one language propagates to the others. Next, we propose a framework to naturally adapt monolingual model editing approaches to the cross-lingual scenario using parallel corpus. Further, we propose language anisotropic editing to improve cross-lingual editing by amplifying different subsets of parameters for each language. On the newly defined cross-lingual model editing task, we empirically demonstrate the failure of monolingual baselines in propagating the edit to multiple languages and the effectiveness of the proposed language anisotropic model editing. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/franklear/LiME.

Next from ACL 2023

Exploiting Rich Textual User-Product Context for Improving Personalized Sentiment Analysis

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Unlocking Emergent Modularity in Large Language Models

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