Canada

The BERT model and its variants have made great achievements in many downstream natural language processing tasks. The achievements of these models, however, demand highly expensive pre-training computation cost. To address this pre-training efficiency issue, the ELECTRA model is proposed to use a discriminator to perform replaced token detection (RTD) task, that is, to classify whether each input token is original or replaced by a generator. The RTD task performed by the ELECTRA accelerates pre-training so substantially, such that it is very challenging to further improve the pre-training efficiency established by the ELECTRA by using or adding other pre-training tasks, as the recent comprehensive study of Bajaj et al. (2022) summarizes. To further advance this pre-training efficiency frontier, in this paper we propose to extend the RTD task into a task of ranking input tokens according to K different quality levels. Essentially, we generalize the binary classifier in the ELECTRA into a K-level ranker to undertake a more precise task with negligible additional computation cost. Our extensive experiments show that our proposed method is able to outperform the state-of-the-art pre-training efficient models including ELECTRA in downstream GLUE tasks given the same computation cost.

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ACL 2023

PEER: Pre-training ELECTRA Extended by Ranking

token quality ranking

pre-training efficiency

replaced token detection

language models

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

Registration is now open

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

The BERT model and its variants have made great achievements in many downstream natural language processing tasks. The achievements of these models, however, demand highly expensive pre-training computation cost. To address this pre-training efficiency issue, the ELECTRA model is proposed to use a discriminator to perform replaced token detection (RTD) task, that is, to classify whether each input token is original or replaced by a generator. The RTD task performed by the ELECTRA accelerates pre-training so substantially, such that it is very challenging to further improve the pre-training efficiency established by the ELECTRA by using or adding other pre-training tasks, as the recent comprehensive study of Bajaj et al. (2022) summarizes. To further advance this pre-training efficiency frontier, in this paper we propose to extend the RTD task into a task of ranking input tokens according to K different quality levels. Essentially, we generalize the binary classifier in the ELECTRA into a K-level ranker to undertake a more precise task with negligible additional computation cost. Our extensive experiments show that our proposed method is able to outperform the state-of-the-art pre-training efficient models including ELECTRA in downstream GLUE tasks given the same computation cost.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/iHwnn5G9xYwcAmSbeKA4Au/embed/polls/245432f2-9445-429a-af91-928c21f7efed" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

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.

With the success of neural language models (LMs), their language acquisition has gained much attention. This work sheds light on the second language (L2) acquisition of LMs, while previous work has typically explored their first language (L1) acquisition. Specifically, we trained bilingual LMs with a scenario similar to human L2 acquisition and analyzed their cross-lingual transfer from linguistic perspectives. Our exploratory experiments demonstrated that the L1 pretraining accelerated their linguistic generalization in L2, and language transfer configurations (e.g., the L1 choice, and presence of parallel texts) substantially affected their generalizations. These clarify their (non-)human-like L2 acquisition in particular aspects.

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Second Language Acquisition of Neural Language Models

Code summarization, which aims to automatically generate natural language descriptions from source code, has become an essential task in software development for better program understanding.Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), which represents the syntax structure of the source code, is helpful when utilized together with the sequence of code tokens to improve the quality of code summaries.Recent works on code summarization attempted to capture the sequential and structural information of the source code, but they considered less the property that source code consists of multiple code blocks.In this paper, we propose BLOCSUM, BLOck scope-based source Code SUMmarization via shared block representation that utilizes block-scope information by representing various structures of the code block.We propose a shared block position embedding to effectively represent the structure of code blocks and merge both code and AST.Furthermore, we develop variant ASTs to learn rich information such as block and global dependencies of the source code.To prove our approach, we perform experiments on two real-world datasets, the Java dataset and the Python dataset.We demonstrate the effectiveness of BLOCSUM through various experiments, including ablation studies and a human evaluation.

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BLOCSUM: Block Scope-based Source Code Summarization via Shared Block Representation

We present a framework called G^3R for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL generation. G^3R aims to address two limitations of current approaches: (1) The structure of the abstract syntax tree (AST) is not fully explored during the decoding process which is crucial for complex SQL generation; (2) Domain knowledge is not incorporated to enhance their ability to generalise to unseen domains. G^3R consists of a graph-guided SQL generator and a knowledge-enhanced re-ranking mechanism. Firstly, during the decoding process, An AST-Grammar bipartite graph is constructed for both the AST and corresponding grammar rules of the generated partial SQL query. The graph-guided SQL generator captures its structural information and fuses heterogeneous information to predict the action sequence which can construct the AST for the corresponding SQL query uniquely. Then, in the inference stage, a knowledge-enhanced re-ranking mechanism is proposed to introduce domain knowledge to re-rank candidate SQL queries from the beam output and choose the final answer. The SQL ranker is based on pre-trained language models (PLM) and contrastive learning with hybrid prompt tuning is incorporated to stimulate the knowledge of PLMs and make it more discriminative. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the Spider and Spider-DK benchmarks, which are challenging complex and cross-domain benchmarks for Text-to-SQL semantic analysis.

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G^3R: A Graph-Guided Generate-and-Rerank Framework for Complex and Cross-domain Text-to-SQL Generation

Research on abusive content detection on social media has primarily focused on explicit forms of hate speech (HS), that are often identifiable by recognizing hateful words and expressions. Messages containing linguistically subtle and implicit forms of hate speech still constitute an open challenge for automatic hate speech detection. In this paper, we propose a new framework for generating adversarial implicit HS short-text messages using Auto-regressive Language Models. Moreover, we propose a strategy to group the generated implicit messages in complexity levels (EASY, MEDIUM, and HARD categories) characterizing how challenging these messages are for supervised classifiers. Finally, relying on (Dinan et al., 2019; Vidgen et al., 2021), we propose a ``build it, break it, fix it'', training scheme using HARD messages showing how iteratively retraining on HARD messages substantially leverages SOTA models' performances on implicit HS benchmarks.

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Playing the Part of the Sharp Bully: Generating Adversarial Examples for Implicit Hate Speech Detection

In order to solve the inefficient parameter update and storage issues of fine-tuning in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks, prompt-tuning methods have emerged as lightweight alternatives.Furthermore, efforts to reduce the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning have shown successful results in low-resource settings.As large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) for Program and Language Generation (PLG) tasks are constantly being developed, prompt tuning methods are necessary for the tasks.However, due to the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning different from PLMs for natural language, a prompt tuning method that reflects the traits of PLM for program language is needed.In this paper, we propose a Task-Agnostic prompt tuning method for the PLG tasks, CodePrompt, that combines Input-Dependent Prompt Template (to bridge the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning of PLMs for program and language) and Corpus-Specific Prefix Tuning (to update the parameters of PLMs for program and language efficiently).Also, we propose a method to provide richer prefix word information for limited prefix lengths. We prove that our method is effective in three PLG tasks, not only in the full-data setting but also in the low-resource setting and cross-domain setting.

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CodePrompt: Task-Agnostic Prefix Tuning for Program and Language Generation

The ability to pick up on language signals in an ongoing interaction is crucial for future machine learning models to collaborate and interact with humans naturally. In this paper, we present an initial study that evaluates intra-episodic feedback given in a collaborative setting. We use a referential language game as a controllable example of a task-oriented collaborative joint activity. A teacher utters a referring expression generated by a well-known symbolic algorithm (the "Incremental Algorithm") as an initial instruction and then monitors the follower's actions to possibly intervene with intra-episodic feedback (which does not explicitly have to be requested). We frame this task as a reinforcement learning problem with sparse rewards and learn a follower policy for a heuristic teacher. Our results show that intra-episodic feedback allows the follower to generalize on aspects of scene complexity and performs better than providing only the initial statement.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/0b072dca-6cc1-40cb-8ea6-2d689902e95e" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Yes, this Way! Learning to Ground Referring Expressions into Actions with Intra-episodic Feedback from Supportive Teachers

Quality Estimation (QE) is the task of evaluating machine translation output in the absence of reference translation.Conventional approaches to QE involve training separate models at different levels of granularity viz., word-level, sentence-level, and document-level, which sometimes lead to inconsistent predictions for the same input. To overcome this limitation, we focus on jointly training a single model for sentence-level and word-level QE tasks in a multi-task learning framework. Using two multi-task learning-based QE approaches, we show that multi-task learning improves the performance of both tasks. We evaluate these approaches by performing experiments in different settings, viz., single-pair, multi-pair, and zero-shot. We compare the multi-task learning-based approach with baseline QE models trained on single tasks and observe an improvement of up to 4.28% in Pearson's correlation (r) at sentence-level and 8.46% in F1-score at word-level, in the single-pair setting. In the multi-pair setting, we observe improvements of up to 3.04% at sentence-level and 13.74% at word-level; while in the zero-shot setting, we also observe improvements of up to 5.26% and 3.05%, respectively. We make the models proposed in this paper publically available.

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A Multi-task Learning Framework for Quality Estimation

Real-life multilingual systems should be able to efficiently incorporate new languages as data distributions fed to the system evolve and shift over time. To do this, systems need to handle the issue of catastrophic forgetting, where the model performance drops for languages or tasks seen further in its past. In this paper, we study catastrophic forgetting, as well as methods to minimize this, in a massively multilingual continual learning framework involving up to 51 languages and covering both classification and sequence labeling tasks. We present LR ADJUST, a learning rate scheduling method that is simple, yet effective in preserving new information without strongly overwriting past knowledge. Furthermore, we show that this method is effective across multiple continual learning approaches. Finally, we provide further insights into the dynamics of catastrophic forgetting in this massively multilingual setup.

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Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Massively Multilingual Continual Learning

Existing definitions of lexical substitutes are often vague or inconsistent with the gold annotations. We propose a new definition which is grounded in the relation of entailment; namely, that the sentence that results from the substitution should be in the relation of mutual entailment with the original sentence. We argue that the new definition is well-founded and supported by previous work on lexical entailment. We empirically validate our definition by verifying that it covers the majority of gold substitutes in existing datasets. Based on this definition, we create a new dataset from existing semantic resources. Finally, we propose a novel context augmentation method motivated by the definition, which relates the substitutes to the sense of the target word by incorporating glosses and synonyms directly into the context. Experimental results demonstrate that our augmentation approach improves the performance of lexical substitution systems on the existing benchmarks.

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Grounding the Lexical Substitution Task in Entailment

With the development of large language models (LLMs), zero-shot learning has attracted much attention for various NLP tasks. Different from prior works that generate training data with billion-scale natural language generation (NLG) models, we propose a retrieval-enhanced framework to create training data from a general-domain unlabeled corpus. To realize this, we first conduct contrastive pretraining to learn an unsupervised dense retriever for extracting the most relevant documents using class-descriptive verbalizers. We then further pro- pose two simple strategies, namely Verbalizer Augmentation with Demonstrations and Self- consistency Guided Filtering to improve the topic coverage of the dataset while removing noisy examples. Experiments on nine datasets demonstrate that ReGen achieves 4.3% gain over the strongest baselines and saves around 70% of the time when compared with baselines using large NLG models. Besides, REGEN can be naturally integrated with recently proposed large language models to boost performance.

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Second Language Acquisition of Neural Language Models

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Training ELECTRA Augmented with Multi-word Selection

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Next from ACL 2023

Second Language Acquisition of Neural Language Models

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Training ELECTRA Augmented with Multi-word Selection

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PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

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