Canada

In this paper, we propose MPC (Modular Prompted Chatbot), a new approach for creating high-quality conversational agents without the need for fine-tuning. Our method utilizes pre-trained large language models (LLMs) as individual modules for long-term consistency and flexibility, by using techniques such as few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought (CoT), and external memory. Our human evaluation results show that MPC is on par with fine-tuned chatbot models in open-domain conversations, making it an effective solution for creating consistent and engaging chatbots.

ACL 2023

Prompted LLMs as Chatbot Modules for Long Open-domain Conversation

long-term memory

prompt

module

chatbot

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.

Domain generalization is hitherto an underexplored area applied in abstractive summarization. Moreover, most existing works on domain generalization have sophisticated training algorithms. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, weight averaging based, Domain Aligned Prefix Averaging approach to domain generalization for abstractive summarization. Given a number of source domains, our method first trains a prefix for each one of them. These source prefixes generate summaries for a small number of target domain documents. The similarity of the generated summaries to their corresponding source documents is used for calculating weights required to average source prefixes. In DAPA, prefix tuning allows for lightweight finetuning, and weight averaging allows for the computationally efficient addition of new source domains. When evaluated on four diverse summarization domains, DAPA shows comparable or better performance against the baselines demonstrating the effectiveness of its prefix averaging scheme.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/jQes3hFZo3TYjGXEHm6w95/embed/polls/dae4e3d1-5402-43d8-8bd7-08e22289caab" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Domain Aligned Prefix Averaging for Domain Generalization in Abstractive Summarization

Motivated by the question of the extent to which large language models "understand" social intelligence, we investigate the ability of such models to generate correct responses to questions involving descriptions of faux pas situations. The faux pas test is a test used in clinical psychology, which is known to be more challenging for children than individual tests of theory-of-mind or social intelligence. Our results demonstrate that, while the models seem to sometimes offer correct responses, they in fact struggle with this task, and that many of the seemingly correct responses can be attributed to over-interpretation by the human reader ("the ELIZA effect"). An additional phenomenon observed is the failure of most models to generate a correct response to presupposition questions. Finally, in an experiment in which the models are tasked with generating original faux pas stories, we find that while some models are capable of generating novel faux pas stories, the stories are all explicit, as the models are limited in their abilities to describe situations in an implicit manner.

How Well Do Large Language Models Perform on Faux Pas Tests?

Automatic text simplification systems help to reduce textual information barriers on the internet. However, for languages other than English, only few parallel data to train these systems exists. We propose a two-step approach to overcome this data scarcity issue. First, we fine-tuned language models on a corpus of German Easy Language, a specific style of German. Then, we used these models as decoders in a sequence-to-sequence simplification task. We show that the language models adapt to the style characteristics of Easy Language and output more accessible texts. Moreover, with the style-specific pre-training, we reduced the number of trainable parameters in text simplification models. Hence, less parallel data is sufficient for training. Our results indicate that pre-training on unaligned data can reduce the required parallel data while improving the performance on downstream tasks.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/jQes3hFZo3TYjGXEHm6w95/embed/polls/35a82013-98ac-40ac-891d-34402022f756" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Language Models for German Text Simplification: Overcoming Parallel Data Scarcity through Style-specific Pre-training

With the growing importance of detecting misinformation, many studies have focused on verifying factual claims by retrieving evidence. However, canonical fact verification tasks do not apply to catching subtle differences in factually consistent claims, which might still bias the readers, especially on contentious political or economic issues. Our underlying assumption is that among the trusted sources, one's argument is not necessarily more true than the other, requiring comparison rather than verification. In this study, we propose ClaimDIff, a novel dataset that primarily focuses on comparing the nuance between claim pairs. In ClaimDiff, we provide human-labeled 2,941 claim pairs from 268 news articles. We observe that while humans are capable of detecting the nuances between claims, strong baselines struggle to detect them, showing over a 19% absolute gap with the humans. We hope this initial study could help readers to gain an unbiased grasp of contentious issues through machine-aided comparison.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/jQes3hFZo3TYjGXEHm6w95/embed/polls/f8205401-bc7a-4945-974f-3aaa4787cc96" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

ClaimDiff: Comparing and Contrasting Claims on Contentious Issues

In recent years, pre-trained transformer-based language models (LM) have become a key resource for implementing most NLP tasks. However, pre-training such models demands large text collections not available in most languages. In this paper, we study the use of machine-translated corpora for pre-training LMs. We answer the following research questions: RQ1: Is MT-based data an alternative to real data for learning a LM?; RQ2: Can real data be complemented with translated data and improve the resulting LM? In order to validate these two questions, several BERT models for Basque have been trained, combining real data and synthetic data translated from Spanish.The evaluation carried out on 9 NLU tasks indicates that models trained exclusively on translated data offer competitive results. Furthermore, models trained with real data can be improved with synthetic data, although further research is needed on the matter.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/jQes3hFZo3TYjGXEHm6w95/embed/polls/4dbdca7a-427a-4fbb-8bf0-0f85045cfae4" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Not Enough Data to Pre-train Your Language Model? MT to the Rescue!

The current generation of intelligent assistants require explicit user requests to perform tasks or services, often leading to lengthy and complex conversations. In contrast, human assistants can infer multiple implicit intents from utterances via their commonsense knowledge, thereby simplifying interactions. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a framework for multi-domain dialogue systems. This framework automatically infers implicit intents from user utterances, and prompts a large pre-trained language model to suggest suitable task-oriented bots. By leveraging commonsense knowledge, our framework recommends associated bots in a zero-shot manner, enhancing interaction efficiency and effectiveness. This approach substantially reduces interaction complexity, seamlessly integrates various domains and tasks, and represents a significant step towards creating more human-like intelligent assistants that can reason about implicit intents, offering a superior user experience.

Zero-Shot Prompting for Implicit Intent Prediction and Recommendation with Commonsense Reasoning

Clinical practice frequently uses medical imaging for diagnosis and treatment. A significant challenge for automatic radiology report generation is that the radiology reports are long narratives consisting of multiple sentences for both abnormal and normal findings. Therefore, applying conventional image captioning approaches to generate the whole report proves to be insufficient, as these are designed to briefly describe images with short sentences. We propose a template-based approach to generate radiology reports from radiographs. Our approach involves the following: i) using a multilabel image classifier, produce the tags for the input radiograph; ii) using a transformer-based model, generate pathological descriptions (a description of abnormal findings seen on radiographs) from the tags generated in step (i); iii) using a BERT-based multi-label text classifier, find the spans in the normal report template to replace with the generated pathological descriptions; and iv) using a rule-based system, replace the identified span with the generated pathological description. We performed experiments with the two most popular radiology report datasets, IU Chest X-ray and MIMIC-CXR and demonstrated that the BLEU-1, ROUGE-L, METEOR, and CIDEr scores are better than the State-of-the-Art models by 25%, 36%, 44% and 48% respectively, on the IU X-RAY dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to generate chest X-ray radiology reports by first creating small sentences for abnormal findings and then replacing them in the normal report template.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/c3e91ba7-f7fc-4e92-ac37-01beca90aaf2" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Replace and Report: NLP Assisted Radiology Report Generation

Despite recent interest in open domain question answering (ODQA) over tables, many studies still rely on datasets that are not truly optimal for the task with respect to utilizing structural nature of table. These datasets assume answers reside as a single cell value and do not necessitate exploring over multiple cells such as aggregation, comparison, and sorting. Thus, we release Open-WikiTable, the first ODQA dataset that requires complex reasoning over tables. Open-WikiTable is built upon WikiSQL and WikiTableQuestions to be applicable in the open-domain setting. As each question is coupled with both textual answers and SQL queries, Open-WikiTable opens up a wide range of possibilities for future research, as both reader and parser methods can be applied. The dataset is publicly available.

Open-WikiTable : Dataset for Open Domain Question Answering with Complex Reasoning over Table

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a Semantic Parsing formalism that aims at providing a semantic graph abstraction representing a given text. Current approaches are based on autoregressive language models such as BART or T5, fine-tuned through Teacher Forcing to obtain a linearized version of the AMR graph from a sentence. In this paper, we present LeakDistill, a model and method that explores a modification to the Transformer architecture, using structural adapters to explicitly incorporate graph information into the learned representations and improve AMR parsing performance. Our experiments show how, by employing word-to-node alignment to embed graph structural information into the encoder at training time, we can obtain state-of-the-art AMR parsing through self-knowledge distillation, even without the use of additional data. We release the code at [http://www.github.com/sapienzanlp/LeakDistill](http://www.github.com/sapienzanlp/LeakDistill).

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/98b901e5-23bf-4c22-a167-35626c9180e0" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Incorporating Graph Information in Transformer-based AMR Parsing

Concurrent with the rapid progress in neural network-based models in NLP, the need for creating explanations for the predictions of these black-box models has risen steadily. Yet, especially for complex inputs like texts or images, existing interpretability methods still struggle with deriving easily interpretable explanations that also accurately represent the basis for the model's decision. To this end, we propose a new, model-agnostic method to generate extractive explanations for predictions made by neural networks, that is based on masking parts of the input which the model does not consider to be indicative of the respective class. The masking is done using gradient-based optimization combined with a new regularization scheme that enforces sufficiency, comprehensiveness, and compactness of the generated explanation.Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in a challenging paragraph-level rationale extraction task, showing that this task can be performed without training a specialized model.We further apply our method to image inputs and obtain high-quality explanations for image classifications, which indicates that the objectives for optimizing explanation masks in text generalize to inputs of other modalities.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/84157b22-1d76-4f89-994c-d3d408c2c580" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

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