Canada

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 &quot;correction notebook&quot; for secondary-supervision. Moreover, a course soups trial is conducted to solve the &quot;tug-of-war&quot; dynamics problem of MCL, evolving a stronger pre-trained model. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves ELECTRA&#39;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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ACL 2023

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

course learning

electra

pre-training

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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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.

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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Multimodal Recommendation Dialog with Subjective Preference: A New Challenge and Benchmark

The nodes in the commonsense knowledge graph (CSKG) are normally represented by free-form short text (e.g., word or phrase). Different nodes may represent the same concept. This leads to the problems of edge sparsity and node redundancy, which challenges CSKG representation and completion. On the one hand, edge sparsity limits the performance of graph representation learning; On the other hand, node redundancy makes different nodes corresponding to the same concept have inconsistent relations with other nodes. To address the two problems, we propose a new CSKG completion framework based on Contrastive Pretraining and Node Clustering (CPNC). Contrastive Pretraining constructs positive and negative head-tail node pairs on CSKG and utilizes contrastive learning to obtain better semantic node representation. Node Clustering aggregates nodes with the same concept into a latent concept, assisting the task of CSKG completion. We evaluate our CPNC approach on two CSKG completion benchmarks (CN-100K and ATOMIC), where CPNC outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both Contrastive Pretraining and Node Clustering can significantly improve the performance of CSKG completion. The source code of CPNC is publicly available on \url{https://github.com/NUSTM/CPNC}.

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Commonsense Knowledge Graph Completion Via Contrastive Pretraining and Node Clustering

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is widely used in various applications. However, existing ASTE datasets are limited in their ability to represent real-world scenarios, hindering the advancement of research in this area. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, named DMASTE, which is manually annotated to better fit real-world scenarios by providing more diverse and realistic reviews for the task. The dataset includes various lengths, diverse expressions, more aspect types, and more domains than existing datasets. We conduct extensive experiments on DMASTE in multiple settings to evaluate previous ASTE approaches. Empirical results demonstrate that DMASTE is a more challenging ASTE dataset. Further analyses of in-domain and cross-domain settings provide some promising directions for future research.

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Measuring Your ASTE Models in The Wild: A Diversified Multi-domain Dataset For Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels or distilling using LLM-generated labels. However, finetuning and distillation require large amounts of training data to achieve comparable performance to LLMs. We introduce Distilling step-by-step, a new mechanism that (a) trains smaller models that outperform LLMs, and (b) achieves so by leveraging less training data needed by finetuning or distillation. Our method extracts LLM rationales as additional supervision for training small models within a multi-task framework. We present three findings across 4 NLP benchmarks: First, compared to both finetuning and distillation, our mechanism achieves better performance with much fewer labeled/unlabeled training examples. Second, compared to few-shot prompted LLMs, we achieve better performance using substantially smaller model sizes. Third, we reduce both the model size and the amount of data required to outperform LLMs; our finetuned 770M T5 model outperforms the few-shot prompted 540B PaLM model using only 80% of available data on a benchmark, whereas standard finetuning the same T5 model struggles to match even by using 100% of the dataset.

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Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes

The impression is crucial for the referring physicians to grasp key information since it is concluded from the findings and reasoning of radiologists. To alleviate the workload of radiologists and reduce repetitive human labor in impression writing, many researchers have focused on automatic impression generation. However, recent works on this task mainly summarize the corresponding findings and pay less attention to the radiology images. In clinical, radiographs can provide more detailed valuable observations to enhance radiologists' impression writing, especially for complicated cases. Besides, each sentence in findings usually focuses on single anatomy, such that they only need to be matched to corresponding anatomical regions instead of the whole image, which is beneficial for textual and visual features alignment. Therefore, we propose a novel anatomy-enhanced multimodal model to promote impression generation. In detail, we first construct a set of rules to extract anatomies and put these prompts into each sentence to highlight anatomy characteristics. Then, two separate encoders are applied to extract features from the radiograph and findings. Afterward, we utilize a contrastive learning module to align these two representations at the overall level and use a co-attention to fuse them at the sentence level with the help of anatomy-enhanced sentence representation. The experimental results on two benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art results.

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

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