Canada

Biases cause discrepancies in healthcare services.Race, gender, and age of a patient affect interactions with physicians and the medical treatments one receives.These biases in clinical practices can be amplified following the release of pre-trained language models trained on biomedical corpora.To bring awareness to such repercussions, we examine social biases present in the biomedical masked language models.We curate prompts based on evidence-based practice and compare generated diagnoses based on biases.For a case study, we measure bias in diagnosing coronary artery disease and using cardiovascular procedures based on bias.Our study demonstrates that biomedical models are less biased than BERT in gender, while the opposite is true for race and age.

ACL 2023

Race, Gender, and Age Biases in Biomedical Masked Language Models

biomedical models

fairness in ai

bias detection

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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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.

Text style transfer is an exciting task within the field of natural language generation that is often plagued by the need for high-quality paired datasets. Furthermore, training a model for multi-attribute text style transfer requires datasets with sufficient support across all combinations of the considered stylistic attributes, adding to the challenges of training a style transfer model. This paper explores the impact of training data input diversity on the quality of the generated text from the multi-style transfer model. We construct a pseudo-parallel dataset by devising heuristics to adjust the style distribution in the training samples. We balance our training dataset using marginal and joint distributions to train our style transfer models. We observe that a balanced dataset produces more effective control effects over multiple styles than an imbalanced or skewed one. Through quantitative analysis, we explore the impact of multiple style distributions in training data on style-transferred output. These findings will better inform the design of style-transfer datasets.

Balancing the Effect of Training Dataset Distribution of Multiple Styles for Multi-Style Text Transfer

This paper studies the problem of open-domain question answering, with the aim of answering a diverse range of questions leveraging knowledge resources. Two types of sources, QA-pair and document corpora, have been actively leveraged with the following complementary strength. The former is highly precise when the paraphrase of given question q was seen and answered during training, often posed as a retrieval problem, while the latter generalizes better for unseen questions. A natural follow-up is thus leveraging both models, while a naive pipelining or integration approaches have failed to bring additional gains over either model alone. Our distinction is interpreting the problem as calibration, which estimates the confidence of predicted answers as an indicator to decide when to use a document or QA-pair corpus. The effectiveness of our method was validated on widely adopted benchmarks such as Natural Questions and TriviaQA.

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When to Read Documents or QA History: On Unified and Selective Open-domain QA

We study feature interactions in the context of feature attribution methods for post-hoc interpretability. In interpretability research, getting to grips with feature interactions is increasingly recognised as an important challenge, because interacting features are key to the success of neural networks. Feature interactions allow a model to build up hierarchical representations for its input, and might provide an ideal starting point for the investigation into linguistic structure in language models.However, uncovering the exact role that these interactions play is also difficult, and a diverse range of interaction attribution methods has been proposed.In this paper, we focus on the question which of these methods most faithfully reflects the inner workings of the target models.We work out a grey box methodology, in which we train models to perfection on a formal language classification task, using PCFGs. We show that under specific configurations, some methods are indeed able to uncover the grammatical rules acquired by a model. Based on these findings we extend our evaluation to a case study on language models, providing novel insights into the linguistic structure that these models have acquired.

Feature Interactions Reveal Linguistic Structure in Language Models

Investigating whether pre-trained language models (LMs) can function as knowledge bases (KBs) has raised wide research interests recently. However, existing works focus on simple, triple-based, relational KBs, but omit more sophisticated, logic-based, conceptualised KBs such as OWL ontologies. To investigate an LM's knowledge of ontologies, we propose OntoLAMA, a set of inference-based probing tasks and datasets from ontology subsumption axioms involving both atomic and complex concepts. We conduct extensive experiments on ontologies of different domains and scales, and our results demonstrate that LMs encode relatively less background knowledge of Subsumption Inference (SI) than traditional Natural Language Inference (NLI) but can improve on SI significantly when a small number of samples are given. We will open-source our code and datasets.

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Language Model Analysis for Ontology Subsumption Inference

Textual backdoor attack, as a novel attack model, has been shown to be effective in adding a backdoor to the model during training. Defending against such backdoor attacks has become urgent and important. In this paper, we propose AttDef, an efficient attribution-based pipeline to defend against two insertion-based poisoning attacks, BadNL and InSent. Specifically, we regard the tokens with larger attribution scores as potential triggers since larger attribution words contribute more to the false prediction results and therefore are more likely to be poison triggers. Additionally, we further utilize an external pre-trained language model to distinguish whether input is poisoned or not. We show that our proposed method can generalize sufficiently well in two common attack scenarios (poisoning training data and testing data), which consistently improves previous methods. For instance, AttDef can successfully mitigate both attacks with an average accuracy of 79.97% (56.59% up) and 48.34% (3.99% up) under pre-training and post-training attack defense respectively, achieving the new state-of-the-art performance on prediction recovery over four benchmark datasets.

Defending against Insertion-based Textual Backdoor Attacks via Attribution

Procedure planning, or the ability to predict a series of steps that can achieve a given goal conditioned on the current observation, is critical for building intelligent embodied agents that can assist users in everyday tasks. Encouraged by the recent success of language models (LMs) for zero-shot and few-shot planning, we hypothesize that LMs may be equipped with stronger priors for planning compared to their visual counterparts. To this end, we propose a language-first procedure planning framework with a modularized design: we first align the current and goal observations with corresponding steps and then use a pre-trained LM to predict the intermediate steps. Under this framework, we find that using an image captioning model for alignment can already match state-of-the-art performance and by designing a double retrieval model conditioned over current and goal observations jointly, we can achieve large improvements (19.2%-98.9% relatively higher success rate than state-of-the-art) on both COIN and CrossTask benchmarks. Our work verifies the planning ability of LMs and demonstrates how LMs can serve as a powerful ``reasoning engine'' even when the input is provided in another modality.

A Language-First Approach for Procedure Planning

Lexically-constrained NMT (LNMT) aims to incorporate user-provided terminology into translations. Despite its practical advantages, existing work has not evaluated LNMT models under challenging real-world conditions. In this paper, we focus on two important but understudied issues that lie in the current evaluation process of LNMT studies. The model needs to cope with challenging lexical constraints that are "homographs" or "unseen" during training. To this end, we first design a homograph disambiguation module to differentiate the meanings of homographs. Moreover, we propose PLUMCOT which integrates contextually rich information about unseen lexical constraints from pre-trained language models and strengthens a copy mechanism of the pointer network via direct supervision of a copying score. We also release HOLLY, an evaluation benchmark for assessing the ability of model to cope with "homographic" and "unseen" lexical constraints. Experiments on HOLLY and the previous test setup show the effectiveness of our method. The effects of PLUMCOT are shown to be remarkable in "unseen" constraints.Our dataset is available at https://github.com/papago-lab/HOLLY-benchmark.

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Towards Accurate Translation via Semantically Appropriate Application of Lexical Constraints

Pre-trained seq2seq models have achieved state-of-the-art results in the grammatical error correction task. However, these models still suffer from a prediction bias due to their unidirectional decoding. Thus, we propose a bidirectional Transformer reranker (BTR), that re-estimates the probability of each candidate sentence generated by the pre-trained seq2seq model. The BTR preserves the seq2seq-style Transformer architecture but utilizes a BERT-style self-attention mechanism in the decoder to compute the probability of each target token by using masked language modeling to capture bidirectional representations from the target context. For guiding the reranking, the BTR adopts negative sampling in the objective function to minimize the unlikelihood. During inference, the BTR gives final results after comparing the reranked top-1 results with the original ones by an acceptance threshold. Experimental results show that, in reranking candidates from a pre-trained seq2seq model, T5-base, the BTR on top of T5-base could yield 65.47 and 71.27 F0.5 scores on the CoNLL-14 and BEA test sets, respectively, and yield 59.52 GLEU score on the JFLEG corpus, with improvements of 0.36, 0.76 and 0.48 points compared with the original T5-base. Furthermore, when reranking candidates from T5-large, the BTR on top of T5-base improved the original T5-large by 0.26 points on the BEA test set.

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Bidirectional Transformer Reranker for Grammatical Error Correction

Data augmentation is an effective way to improve model performance of grammatical error correction (GEC). This paper identifies a critical side-effect of GEC data augmentation, which is due to the style discrepancy between the data used in GEC tasks (i.e., texts produced by non-native speakers) and data augmentation (i.e., native texts). To alleviate this issue, we propose to use an alternative data source, translationese (i.e., human-translated texts), as input for GEC data augmentation, which 1) is easier to obtain and usually has better quality than non-native texts, and 2) has a more similar style to non-native texts. Experimental results on the CoNLL14 and BEA19 English, NLPCC18 Chinese, Falko-MERLIN German, and RULEC-GEC Russian GEC benchmarks show that our approach consistently improves correction accuracy over strong baselines. Further analyses reveal that our approach is helpful for overcoming mainstream correction difficulties such as the corrections of frequent words, missing words, and substitution errors. Data, code, models and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/TransGEC.

TransGEC: Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Translationese

Task-oriented dialog (TOD) agents often ground their responses on external knowledge bases (KBs). These KBs can be dynamic and may be updated frequently. Existing approaches for learning TOD agents assume the KB snapshot contemporary to each individual dialog is available during training. However, in real-world scenarios, only the latest KB snapshot is available during training and as a result, the train dialogs may contain facts conflicting with the latest KB. These dialog-KB inconsistencies in the training data may potentially confuse the TOD agent learning algorithm.In this work, we define the novel problem of learning a TOD agent with dialog-KB inconsistencies in the training data. We propose a Dialog-KB Arbitration Framework (DKAF) which reduces the dialog-KB inconsistencies by predicting the contemporary KB snapshot for each train dialog. These predicted KB snapshots are then used for training downstream TOD agents. As there are no existing datasets with dialog-KB inconsistencies, we systematically introduce inconsistencies in two publicly available dialog datasets. We show that TOD agents trained with DKAF perform better than existing baselines on both these datasets.

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Race, Gender, and Age Biases in Biomedical Masked Language Models

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Balancing the Effect of Training Dataset Distribution of Multiple Styles for Multi-Style Text Transfer

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