Canada

Large language models are known to produce output which sounds fluent and convincing, but is also often wrong, e.g. ``unfaithful&quot; with respect to a rationale as retrieved from a knowledge base. In this paper, we show that task-based systems which exhibit certain advanced linguistic dialog behaviors, such as lexical alignment (repeating what the user said), are in fact preferred and trusted more, whereas other phenomena, such as pronouns and ellipsis are dis-preferred. We use open-domain question answering systems as our test-bed for task based dialog generation and compare several open- and closed-book models. Our results highlight the danger of systems that appear to be trustworthy by parroting user input while providing an unfaithful response.

ACL 2023

The Dangers of trusting Stochastic Parrots: Faithfulness and Trust in Open-domain Conversational Question Answering

faithfulness

conversational question answering

large language models

evaluation

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) <br><br>
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.<br><br><br><br>

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Large language models are known to produce output which sounds fluent and convincing, but is also often wrong, e.g. ``unfaithful" with respect to a rationale as retrieved from a knowledge base. In this paper, we show that task-based systems which exhibit certain advanced linguistic dialog behaviors, such as lexical alignment (repeating what the user said), are in fact preferred and trusted more, whereas other phenomena, such as pronouns and ellipsis are dis-preferred. We use open-domain question answering systems as our test-bed for task based dialog generation and compare several open- and closed-book models. Our results highlight the danger of systems that appear to be trustworthy by parroting user input while providing an unfaithful response.

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.

Relation extraction (RE) aims to extract relations from sentences and documents. Existing relation extraction models typically rely on supervised machine learning. However, recent studies showed that many RE datasets are incompletely annotated. This is known as the false negative problem in which valid relations are falsely annotated as 'no_relation'. Models trained with such data inevitably make similar mistakes during the inference stage. Self-training has been proven effective in alleviating the false negative problem. However, traditional self-training is vulnerable to confirmation bias and exhibits poor performance in minority classes. To overcome this limitation, we proposed a novel class-adaptive re-sampling self-training framework. Specifically, we re-sampled the pseudo-labels for each class by precision and recall scores. Our re-sampling strategy favored the pseudo-labels of classes with high precision and low recall, which improved the overall recall without significantly compromising precision. We conducted experiments on document-level and biomedical relation extraction datasets, and the results showed that our proposed self-training framework consistently outperforms existing competitive methods on the Re-DocRED and ChemDisgene datasets when the training data are incompletely annotated.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/18542c4f-df08-4887-ac15-926d923c616c" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Class-Adaptive Self-Training for Relation Extraction with Incompletely Annotated Training Data

Automatic extraction of party (dis)similarities from texts such as party election manifestos or parliamentary speeches plays an increasing role in computational political science. However, existing approaches are fundamentally limited to targeting only global party (dis)-similarity: they condense the relationship between a pair of parties into a single figure, their similarity. In aggregating over all policy domains (e.g., health or foreign policy), they do not provide any qualitative insights into which domains parties agree or disagree on.This paper proposes a workflow for estimating policy domain aware party similarity that overcomes this limitation. The workflow covers (a) definition of suitable policy domains; (b) automatic labeling of domains, if no manual labels are available; (c) computation of domain-level similarities and aggregation at a global level; (d) extraction of interpretable party positions on major policy axes via multidimensional scaling. We evaluate our workflow on manifestos from the German federal elections. We find that our method (a) yields high correlation when predicting party similarity at a global level and (b) provides accurate party-specific positions, even with automatically labelled policy domains.

Additive manifesto decomposition: A policy domain aware method for understanding party positioning

With the evolution of Knowledge Graphs (KGs), new entities emerge which are not seen before. Representation learning of KGs in such an inductive setting aims to capture and transfer the structural patterns from existing entities to new entities. However, the performance of existing methods in inductive KGs are limited by sparsity and implicit transfer. In this paper, we propose VMCL, a Contrastive Learning (CL) framework with graph guided Variational autoencoder on Meta-KGs in the inductive setting. We first propose representation generation to capture the encoded and generated representations of entities, where the generated variations can densify representations with complementary features. Then, we design two CL objectives that work across entities and meta-KGs to simulate the transfer mode. With extensive experiments we demonstrate that our proposed VMCL can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art baselines.

Contrastive Learning with Generated Representations for Inductive Knowledge Graph Embedding

Retrieval accuracy is crucial to the performance of open-domain question answering (ODQA) systems. Recent work has demonstrated that dense hierarchical retrieval (DHR), which retrieves document candidates first and then relevant passages from the refined document set, can significantly outperform the single stage dense passage retriever (DPR). While effective, this approach requires document structure information to learn document representation and is hard to adopt to other domains without this information. Additionally, the dense retrievers tend to generalize poorly on out-of-domain data comparing with sparse retrievers such as BM25. In this paper, we propose Hybrid Hierarchical Retrieval (HHR) to address the existing limitations. Instead of relying solely on dense retrievers, we can apply sparse retriever, dense retriever, and a combination of them in both stages of document and passage retrieval. We perform extensive experiments on ODQA benchmarks and observe that our framework not only brings in-domain gains, but also generalizes better to zero-shot TriviaQA and Web Questions datasets with an average of 4.69% improvement on recall@100 over DHR. We also offer practical insights to trade off between retrieval accuracy, latency, and storage cost. The code is available on github.

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Hybrid Hierarchical Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering

Information Synchronization of semi-structured data across languages is challenging. For example, Wikipedia tables in one language need to be synchronized with others. To address this problem, we introduce a new dataset InfoSync and a two-step method for tabular synchronization. InfoSync contains 100K entity-centric tables (Wikipedia Infoboxes) across 14 languages, of which a subset (~3.5K pairs) are manually annotated. The proposed method includes 1) Information Alignment to map rows and 2) Information Update for updating missing/outdated information for aligned tables across multilingual tables. When evaluated on InfoSync, information alignment achieves an F1 score of 87.91 (en <-> non-en). To evaluate information updation, we perform human-assisted Wikipedia edits on Infoboxes for 532 table pairs. Our approach obtains an acceptance rate of 77.28% on Wikipedia, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/4d104bc1-1940-48ac-92f0-7987c9f43985" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

InfoSync: Information Synchronization across Multilingual Semi-structured Tables

There has been significant interest in zero and few-shot learning for dialogue state tracking (DST) due to thehigh cost of collecting and annotating task-oriented dialogues. Recent work has demonstrated that in-context learning requires very little data and zero parameter updates, and even outperforms trained methods in the few-shot setting. We propose RefPyDST, which advances the state of the art with three advancements to in-context learning for DST.First, we formulate DST as a Python programming task, explicitly modeling language coreference as variable reference in Python. Second, since in-context learning depends highly on the context examples, we propose a method to retrieve a diverse set of relevant examples to improve performance. Finally, we introduce a novel re-weighting method during decoding that takes into account probabilities of competing surface forms, and produces a more accurate dialogue state prediction.We evaluate our approach using MultiWOZ and achieve state-of-the-art multi-domain joint-goal accuracy in zero and few-shot settings.

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Diverse Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Dialogue State Tracking

Grammar induction, the task of learning a set of grammatical rules from raw or minimally labeled text data, can provide clues about what kinds of syntactic structures are learnable without prior knowledge. Recent work (e.g., Kim et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2020; Jin et al., 2021a) has achieved advances in unsupervised induction of probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs). However, categorial grammar induction has received less recent attention, despite allowing inducers to support a larger set of syntactic categoriesdue to restrictions on how categories can combineand providing a transparent interface with compositional semantics, opening up possibilities for models that jointly learn form and meaning. Motivated by this, we propose a new model for inducing a basic (Ajdukiewicz, 1935; Bar-Hillel, 1953) categorial grammar. In contrast to earlier categorial grammar induction systems (e.g., Bisk and Hockenmaier, 2012), our model learns from raw data without any part-of-speech information. Experiments on child-directed speech show that our model attains a recall-homogeneity of 0.33 on average, which dramatically increases to 0.59 when a bias toward forward function application is added to the model.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/532fnPQGAZvefKDC1fZsuL/embed/polls/8ae3cd0f-6f93-49d4-82e5-4c41261797c0" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Categorial grammar induction from raw data

Researchers are witnessing knowledge-inspired natural language processing shifts the focus from entity-level to event-level, whereas event coreference resolution is one of the core challenges. This paper proposes a novel model for within-document event coreference resolution. On the basis of event but not entity as before, our model learns and integrates multiple representations from both event alone and event pair. For the former, we introduce multiple linguistics-motivated event alone features for more discriminative event representations. For the latter, we consider multiple similarity measures to capture the distinction of event pair. Our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art on the ACE 2005 benchmark, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

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Learning Event-aware Measures for Event Coreference Resolution

Natural language understanding (NLU) models often suffer from unintended dataset biases. Among bias mitigation methods, ensemble-based debiasing methods, especially product-of-experts (PoE), have stood out for their impressive empirical success. However, previous ensemble-based debiasing methods typically apply debiasing on top-level logits without directly addressing biased attention patterns. Attention serves as the main media of feature interaction and aggregation in PLMs and plays a crucial role in providing robust prediction. In this paper, we propose REsidual Attention Debiasing (READ), an end-to-end debiasing method that mitigates unintended biases from attention. Experiments on three NLU benchmarks show that READ significantly improves the OOD performance of BERT-based models, including +12.9% accuracy on HANS, +11.0% accuracy on FEVER-Symmetric, and +2.7% F1 on PAWS. Detailed analyses demonstrate the crucial role of unbiased attention in robust NLU models and that READ effectively mitigates biases in attention.

Robust Natural Language Understanding with Residual Attention Debiasing

Conventional approaches to text classification typically assume the existence of a fixed set of predefined labels to which a given text can be classified. However, in real-world applications, there exists an infinite label space for describing a given text. In addition, depending on the aspect (sentiment, topic, etc.) and domain of the text (finance, legal, etc.), the interpretation of the label can vary greatly. This makes the task of text classification, particularly in the zero-shot scenario, extremely challenging. In this paper, we investigate the task of zero-shot text classification with the aim of improving the ability of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to generalize to both seen and unseen data across varying aspects and domains. To solve this we introduce two new simple yet effective pre-training strategies, Implicit and Explicit pre-training. These methods inject aspect-level understanding into the model at train time with the goal of conditioning the model to build task-level understanding. To evaluate this, we construct and release UTCD, a new benchmark dataset for evaluating text classification in zero-shot settings. Experimental results on UTCD show that our approach achieves improved zero-shot generalization on a suite of challenging datasets across an array of zero-shot formalizations.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/532fnPQGAZvefKDC1fZsuL/embed/polls/be8540aa-c37f-4757-9923-75d631c38253" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

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Class-Adaptive Self-Training for Relation Extraction with Incompletely Annotated Training Data

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Next from ACL 2023

Class-Adaptive Self-Training for Relation Extraction with Incompletely Annotated Training Data

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Conversational Tree Search: A New Hybrid Dialog Task

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