Canada

Despite their successes in NLP, Transformer-based language models still require extensive computing resources and suffer in low-resource or low-compute settings. In this paper, we present AxomiyaBERTa, a novel BERT model for Assamese, a morphologically-rich low-resource language (LRL) of Eastern India. AxomiyaBERTa is trained only on the masked language modeling (MLM) task, without the typical additional next sentence prediction (NSP) objective, and our results show that in resource-scarce settings for very low-resource languages like Assamese, MLM alone can be successfully leveraged for a range of tasks. AxomiyaBERTa achieves SOTA on token-level tasks like Named Entity Recognition and also performs well on &quot;longer-context&quot; tasks like Cloze-style QA and Wiki Title Prediction, with the assistance of a novel embedding disperser and phonological signals respectively. Moreover, we show that AxomiyaBERTa can leverage phonological signals for even more challenging tasks, such as a novel cross-document coreference task on a translated version of the ECB+ corpus, where we present a new SOTA result for an LRL. Our source code and evaluation scripts may be found at https://github.com/csu-signal/axomiyaberta.

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ACL 2023

AxomiyaBERTa: A Phonologically-aware Transformer Model for Assamese

language-modeling

low-resource language

transformer

Despite their successes in NLP, Transformer-based language models still require extensive computing resources and suffer in low-resource or low-compute settings. In this paper, we present AxomiyaBERTa, a novel BERT model for Assamese, a morphologically-rich low-resource language (LRL) of Eastern India. AxomiyaBERTa is trained only on the masked language modeling (MLM) task, without the typical additional next sentence prediction (NSP) objective, and our results show that in resource-scarce settings for very low-resource languages like Assamese, MLM alone can be successfully leveraged for a range of tasks. AxomiyaBERTa achieves SOTA on token-level tasks like Named Entity Recognition and also performs well on "longer-context" tasks like Cloze-style QA and Wiki Title Prediction, with the assistance of a novel embedding disperser and phonological signals respectively. Moreover, we show that AxomiyaBERTa can leverage phonological signals for even more challenging tasks, such as a novel cross-document coreference task on a translated version of the ECB+ corpus, where we present a new SOTA result for an LRL. Our source code and evaluation scripts may be found at https://github.com/csu-signal/axomiyaberta.

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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
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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.

While large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3, appear to be robust and general, their reasoning ability is not at a level to compete with the best models trained for specific natural language reasoning problems. In this study, we observe that a large language model can serve as a highly effective few-shot semantic parser. It can convert natural language sentences into a logical form that serves as input for answer set programs, a logic-based declarative knowledge representation formalism. The combination results in a robust and general system that can handle multiple question-answering tasks without requiring retraining for each new task. It only needs a few examples to guide the LLM's adaptation to a specific task, along with reusable ASP knowledge modules that can be applied to multiple tasks. We demonstrate that this method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP benchmarks, including bAbI, StepGame, CLUTRR, and gSCAN. Additionally, it successfully tackles robot planning tasks that an LLM alone fails to solve.

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Coupling Large Language Models with Logic Programming for Robust and General Reasoning from Text

Relation Extraction (RE) has been extended to cross-document scenarios because many relations are not simply described in a single document.This inevitably brings the challenge of efficient open-space evidence retrieval to support the inference of cross-document relations,along with the challenge of multi-hop reasoning on top of entities and evidence scattered in an open set of documents.To combat these challenges, we propose Mr.Cod (Multi-hop evidence retrieval for Cross-document relation extraction), which is a multi-hop evidence retrieval method based on evidence path mining and ranking.We explore multiple variants of retrievers to show evidence retrieval is essential in cross-document RE.We also propose a contextual dense retriever for this setting.Experiments on CodRED show that evidence retrieval with Mr.Cod effectively acquires cross-document evidence and boosts end-to-end RE performance in both closed and open settings.

Multi-hop Evidence Retrieval for Cross-document Relation Extraction

Information extraction (IE) has been studied extensively. The existing methods always follow a fixed extraction order for complex IE tasks with multiple elements to be extracted in one instance such as event extraction. However, we conduct experiments on several complex IE datasets and observe that different extraction orders can significantly affect the extraction results for a great portion of instances, and the ratio of sentences that are sensitive to extraction orders increases dramatically with the complexity of the IE task. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel adaptive ordered IE paradigm to find the optimal element extraction order for different instances, so as to achieve the best extraction results. We also propose an reinforcement learning (RL) based framework to generate optimal extraction order for each instance dynamically. Additionally, we propose a co-training framework adapted to RL to mitigate the exposure bias during the extractor training phase. Extensive experiments conducted on several public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method can beat previous methods and effectively improve the performance of various IE tasks, especially for complex ones.

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Adaptive Ordered Information Extraction with Deep Reinforcement Learning

ELECTRA, the generator-discriminator pre-training framework, has achieved impressive semantic construction capability among various downstream tasks. Despite the convincing performance, ELECTRA still faces the challenges of monotonous training and deficient interaction. Generator with only masked language modeling (MLM) leads to biased learning and label imbalance for discriminator, decreasing learning efficiency; no explicit feedback loop from discriminator to generator results in the chasm between these two components, underutilizing the course learning. In this study, a multi-perspective course learning (MCL) method is proposed to fetch a many degrees and visual angles for sample-efficient pre-training, and to fully leverage the relationship between generator and discriminator. Concretely, three self-supervision courses are designed to alleviate inherent flaws of MLM and balance the label in a multi-perspective way. Besides, two self-correction courses are proposed to bridge the chasm between the two encoders by creating a "correction notebook" for secondary-supervision. Moreover, a course soups trial is conducted to solve the "tug-of-war" dynamics problem of MCL, evolving a stronger pre-trained model. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves ELECTRA's average performance by 2.8% and 3.2% absolute points respectively on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks, and overshadows recent advanced ELECTRA-style models under the same settings. The pre-trained MCL model is available at https://huggingface.co/McmanusChen/MCL-base.

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Pre-training Language Model as a Multi-perspective Course Learner

Translation difficulty arises when translators are required to resolve translation ambiguity from multiple possible translations. Translation difficulty can be measured by recording the diversity of responses provided by human translators and the time taken to provide these responses, but these behavioral measures are costly and do not scale. In this work, we use word alignments computed over large scale bilingual corpora to develop predictors of lexical translation difficulty. We evaluate our approach using behavioural data from translations provided both in and out of context, and report results that improve on a previous embedding-based approach (Thompson et al., 2020). Our work can therefore contribute to a deeper understanding of cross-lingual differences and of causes of translation difficulty.

Predicting Human Translation Difficulty Using Automatic Word Alignment

We introduce and study the problem of Continual Multilingual Learning (CML) where a previously trained multilingual model is periodically updated using new data arriving in stages. If the new data is present only in a subset of languages, we find that the resulting model shows improved performance only on the languages included in the latest update (and a few closely related languages) while its performance on all the remaining languages degrade significantly. We address this challenge by proposing LAFT-URIEL, a parameter-efficient finetuning strategy which aims to increase the number of languages on which the model improves after an update, while reducing the magnitude of loss in performance for the remaining languages. LAFT-URIEL uses linguistic knowledge to balance overfitting and knowledge sharing across languages, allowing for an additional 25% of task languages to see an improvement in performance after an update, while also reducing the average magnitude of losses on the remaining languages by 78% relative.

Parameter-Efficient Finetuning for Robust Continual Multilingual Learning

Large language models have made remarkable progress on a variety of NLP tasks. However, it has been found that they tend to rely on shortcut features that spuriously correlate with labels for prediction, which weakens their generalization on out-of-distribution samples. In this paper, we propose a human attention guided approach to identifying and mitigating shortcut learning, which encourages the LLM-based target model to learn relevant features. We define an attention-based measurement to capture both model and data bias and identify shortcut tokens by exploring both human and neural attention. In a self-distillation framework, we mitigate shortcut learning by dynamically adjusting the distillation temperature according to the detected shortcut tokens and estimated shortcut degree. Additionally, we utilize human attention as a supervisory signal to constrain large language models to pay more attention to relevant tokens. Experimental results on multiple NLP tasks show that our proposed method can effectively identify shortcut tokens, and significantly improve the robustness of large language models on OOD samples, while not undermining the performance on IID data.

HuaSLIM: Human Attention Motivated Shortcut Learning Identification and Mitigation for Large Language models

Zero-shot prompt-based learning has made much progress in sentiment analysis, and considerable effort has been dedicated to designing high-performing prompt templates. However, two problems exist; First, large language models are often biased to their pre-training data, leading to poor performance in prompt templates that models have rarely seen. Second, in order to adapt to different domains, re-designing prompt templates is usually required, which is time-consuming and inefficient. To remedy both shortcomings, we propose a simple yet strong data construction method to de-bias a given prompt template, yielding a large performance improvement in sentiment analysis tasks across different domains, pre-trained language models, and prompt templates. Also, we demonstrate the advantage of using domain-agnostic generic responses over the in-domain ground-truth data.

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A Simple Yet Strong Domain-Agnostic De-bias Method for Zero-Shot Sentiment Classification

Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is an emerging and challenging task with the goal of reducing the emotional distress of people. Previous attempts fail to maintain smooth transitions between utterances in ESC because they ignoring to grasp the fine-grained transition information at each dialogue turn. To solve this problem, we propose to take into account turn-level state Transitions of ESC (TransESC) from three perspectives, including semantics transition, strategy transition and emotion transition, to drive the conversation in a smooth and natural way. Specifically, we construct the state transition graph with a two-step way, named transit-then-interact, to grasp such three types of turn-level transition information. Finally, they are injected into the transition aware decoder to generate more engaging responses. Both automatic and human evaluations on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of TransESC to generate more smooth and effective supportive responses. \footnote{Our source code will be publicly available.

TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition

Existing multimodal task-oriented dialog data fails to demonstrate the diverse expressions of user subjective preferences and recommendation acts in the real-life shopping scenario. This paper introduces a new dataset SURE (Multimodal Recommendation Dialog with Subjective Preference), which contains 12K shopping dialogs in complex store scenes. The data is built in two phases with human annotations to ensure quality and diversity. SURE is well-annotated with subjective preferences and recommendation acts proposed by sales experts. A comprehensive analysis is given to reveal the distinguishing features of SURE. Three benchmark tasks are then proposed on the data to evaluate the capability of multimodal recommendation agents. Basing on the SURE, we propose a baseline model, powered by a state-of-the-art multimodal model, for these tasks.

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AxomiyaBERTa: A Phonologically-aware Transformer Model for Assamese

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