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While impressive performance has been achieved on the task of Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) for English, the same does not hold for languages that lack large labeled datasets. In this work, we propose Cross-Lingual Knowledge Distillation (CLKD) from a strong English AS2 teacher as a method to train AS2 models for low-resource languages in the tasks without the need of labeled data for the target language. To evaluate our method, we introduce 1) Xtr-WikiQA, a translation-based WikiQA dataset for 9 additional languages, and 2) TyDi-AS2, a multilingual AS2 dataset with over 70K questions spanning 8 typologically diverse languages. We conduct extensive experiments on Xtr-WikiQA and TyDi-AS2 with multiple teachers, diverse monolingual and multilingual pretrained language models (PLMs) as students, and both monolingual and multilingual training. The results demonstrate that CLKD either outperforms or rivals even supervised fine-tuning with the same amount of labeled data and a combination of machine translation and the teacher model. Our method can potentially enable stronger AS2 models for low-resource languages, while TyDi-AS2 can serve as the largest multilingual AS2 dataset for further studies in the research community.

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ACL 2023

Cross-Lingual Knowledge Distillation for Answer Sentence Selection in Low-Resource Languages

low-resource languages

answer sentence selection

knowledge distillation

While impressive performance has been achieved on the task of Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) for English, the same does not hold for languages that lack large labeled datasets. In this work, we propose Cross-Lingual Knowledge Distillation (CLKD) from a strong English AS2 teacher as a method to train AS2 models for low-resource languages in the tasks without the need of labeled data for the target language. To evaluate our method, we introduce 1) Xtr-WikiQA, a translation-based WikiQA dataset for 9 additional languages, and 2) TyDi-AS2, a multilingual AS2 dataset with over 70K questions spanning 8 typologically diverse languages. We conduct extensive experiments on Xtr-WikiQA and TyDi-AS2 with multiple teachers, diverse monolingual and multilingual pretrained language models (PLMs) as students, and both monolingual and multilingual training. The results demonstrate that CLKD either outperforms or rivals even supervised fine-tuning with the same amount of labeled data and a combination of machine translation and the teacher model. Our method can potentially enable stronger AS2 models for low-resource languages, while TyDi-AS2 can serve as the largest multilingual AS2 dataset for further studies in the research community.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/4cb867bf-259b-4b46-82ce-2c0e0a06611a" 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)**
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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.

How-to Guides for Specific Audiences: A Corpus and Initial Findings

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How-to Guides for Specific Audiences: A Corpus and Initial Findings

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, i.e., step-by-step reasoning instruction, enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks. Nevertheless, whether this gain suggests that LLMs have robust reasoning abilities remains unclear. In this study, we inspect the LLMs' step-by-step reasoning ability under controlled settings, with a particular focus on negation. Our results indicate that all tested LLMs were not robust against lexical negation (e.g., plausible -> implausible) when performing the CoT reasoning. Furthermore, our experiments with varying levels revealed that different LLMs exhibit different difficulties and output biases against lexical negation.

Assessing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning against Lexical Negation: A Case Study on Syllogism

Recently, dynamic early exiting has attracted much attention since it can accelerate the inference speed of pre-trained models (PTMs). However, previous work on early exiting has neglected the intermediate exits' architectural designs. In this work, we propose a novel framework, \underline{L}earned \underline{E}xits and \underline{CO}mparison-based early exiting (LECO) to improve PTMs' early exiting performances. First, to fully uncover the potentials of multi-exit BERT, we design a novel search space for intermediate exits and employ the idea of differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) to design proper exit architectures for different intermediate layers automatically. Second, we propose a simple-yet-effective comparison-based early exiting mechanism (COBEE), which can help PTMs achieve better performance and speedup tradeoffs. Extensive experiments show that our LECO achieves the SOTA performances for multi-exit BERT training and dynamic early exiting.

LECO: Improving Early Exiting via Learned Exits and Comparison-based Exiting Mechanism

Currently, most knowledge-grounded dialogue response generation models focus on reflecting given external knowledge. However, even when conveying external knowledge, humans integrate their own knowledge, experiences, and opinions with external knowledge to make their utterances engaging. In this study, we analyze such human behavior by annotating the utterances in an existing knowledge-grounded dialogue corpus. Each entity in the corpus is annotated with its information source, either derived from external knowledge (database-derived) or the speaker's own knowledge, experiences, and opinions (speaker-derived). Our analysis shows that the presence of speaker-derived information in the utterance improves dialogue engagingness. We also confirm that responses generated by an existing model, which is trained to reflect the given knowledge, cannot include speaker-derived information in responses as often as humans do.

Is a Knowledge-based Response Engaging?: An Analysis on Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue with Information Source Annotation

We introduce our work submitted to SemEval-2023 Task 12: "Sentiment Analysis for Low-resource African Languages using Twitter dataset". In our system, we leverage adaptive pretraining on African texts and study transfer learning with source language selection. Our system wins 2 of 3 subtasks and performs best in 7 out of 14 languages in the shared task.

NLNDE at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Adaptive Pretraining and Source Language Selection for Low-Resource Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

This paper presents the best-performing approach alias "Adam Smith" for the SemEval-2023 Task 4: "Identification of Human Values behind Arguments". The goal of the task was to create systems that automatically identify the values within textual arguments. We train transformer-based models until they reach their loss minimum or f1-score maximum. Ensembling the models by selecting one global decision threshold that maximizes the f1-score leads to the best-performing system in the competition. Ensembling based on stacking with logistic regressions shows the best performance on an additional dataset provided to evaluate the robustness ("Nahj al-Balagha"). Apart from outlining the submitted system, we demonstrate that the use of the large ensemble model is not necessary and that the system size can be significantly reduced.

Adam-Smith at SemEval-2023 Task 4: Discovering Human Values in Arguments with Ensembles of Transformer-based Models

Modeling the most likely label when an annotation task is perspective-dependent discards relevant sources of variation that come from the annotators themselves. 
We present three approaches to modeling the controversiality of a particular text. First, we explicitly represented annotators using annotator embeddings to predict the training signals of each annotator's selections in addition to a majority class label. This method leads to reduction in error relative to models without these features, allowing the overall result to influence the weights of each annotator on the final prediction. In a second set of experiments, annotators were not modeled individually but instead annotator judgments were combined in a pairwise fashion that allowed us to implicitly combine annotators. Overall, we found that aggregating and explicitly comparing annotators' responses to a static document representation produced high-quality predictions in all datasets, though some systems struggle to account for large or variable numbers of annotators.

University at Buffalo at SemEval-2023 Task 11: MASDA--Modelling Annotator Sensibilities through DisAggregation

The goal of the NLI4CT task is to build a Natural Language Inference system for Clinical Trial Reports that will be used for evidence interpretation and retrieval. Large Language models have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in various natural language processing tasks across multiple domains. We suggest using an instruction-finetuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to take on this particular task in light of these developments. We have evaluated the publicly available LLMs under zeroshot setting, and finetuned the best performing Flan-T5 model for this task. On the leaderboard, our system ranked second, with an F1 Score of 0.834 on the official test set.

Saama AI Research at SemEval-2023 Task 7: Exploring the Capabilities of Flan-T5 for Multi-evidence Natural Language Inference in Clinical Trial Data

This presentation describes our system submitted to SemEval-2023 Task 5: Clickbait Spoiling. We work on spoiler generation of the subtask 2 and develop a system which comprises two parts: 1) simple seq2seq spoiler generation and 2) post-hoc model ensembling. Using this simple method, we address the challenge of generating multipart spoiler. In the test set, our submitted system1 outperformed the baseline by a large margin (approximately 10 points above on the BLEU score) for mixed types of spoilers. We also found that our system successfully handled the challenge of the multipart spoiler, confirm- ing the effectiveness of our approach.

TohokuNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 5: Clickbait Spoiling via Simple Seq2Seq Generation and Ensembling

Online sexism is a widespread and harmful phenomenon. Automated tools can assist the detection of sexism at scale. Binary detection, however, disregards the diversity of sexist content, and fails to provide clear explanations for why something is sexist. To address this issue, we introduce SemEval Task 10 on the Explainable Detection of Online Sexism (EDOS). We make three main contributions: i) a novel hierarchical taxonomy of sexist content, which includes granular vectors of sexism to aid explainability; ii) a new dataset of 20,000 social media comments with fine-grained labels, along with larger unlabelled datasets for model adaptation; and iii) baseline models as well as an analysis of the methods, results and errors for participant submissions to our task.

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Cross-Lingual Knowledge Distillation for Answer Sentence Selection in Low-Resource Languages

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