Canada

Information extraction systems often produce
hundreds to thousands of strings on a specific
topic. We present a method that facilitates
better consumption of these strings, in an ex-
ploratory setting in which a user wants to both
get a broad overview of what&#39;s available, and a
chance to dive deeper on some aspects. The sys-
tem works by grouping similar items together,
and arranging the remaining items into a hierar-
chical navigable DAG structure. We apply the
method to medical information extraction.

&lt;iframe src=&quot;https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/2a9aa61f-2a2b-4873-a116-05577dc17666&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;

ACL 2023

Hierarchy Builder: Organizing Textual Spans into a Hierarchy to Facilitate Navigation

exploratory search graph

taxonomical builder

organizing textual spans

hierarchy builder

Information extraction systems often produce
hundreds to thousands of strings on a specific
topic. We present a method that facilitates
better consumption of these strings, in an ex-
ploratory setting in which a user wants to both
get a broad overview of what's available, and a
chance to dive deeper on some aspects. The sys-
tem works by grouping similar items together,
and arranging the remaining items into a hierar-
chical navigable DAG structure. We apply the
method to medical information extraction.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/2a9aa61f-2a2b-4873-a116-05577dc17666" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

demo

### 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.

ROOTS is a 1.6TB multilingual text corpus developed for the training of BLOOM, currently the largest language model explicitly accompanied by commensurate data governance efforts. In continuation of these efforts, we present the ROOTS Search Tool: a search engine over the entire ROOTS corpus offering both fuzzy and exact search capabilities. ROOTS is the largest corpus to date that can be investigated this way. The ROOTS Search Tool is open-sourced and available on Hugging Face Spaces: https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigscience-data/roots-search. We describe our implementation and the possible use cases of our tool.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/956d3185-9248-4565-a56a-ef2688324097" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

The ROOTS Search Tool: Data Transparency for LLMs

This paper introduces the Unified Interactive Natural Understanding of the Italian Language (UINAUIL), a benchmark of six tasks for Italian Natural Language Understanding. We present a description of the tasks and software library that collects the data from the European Language Grid, harmonizes the data format, and exposes functionalities to facilitates data manipulation and the evaluation of custom models. We also present the results of tests conducted with available Italian and multilingual language models on UINAUIL, providing an updated picture of the current state of the art in Italian NLU.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/aa40a70c-b326-43e8-83c7-e75576bb58cf" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

UINAUIL: A Unified Benchmark for Italian Natural Language Understanding

Past work in natural language processing interpretability focused mainly on popular classification tasks while largely overlooking generation settings, partly due to a lack of dedicated tools. In this work, we introduce Inseq, a Python library to democratize access to interpretability analyses of sequence generation models. Inseq enables intuitive and optimized extraction of models' internal information and feature importance scores for popular decoder-only and encoder-decoder Transformers architectures. We showcase its potential by adopting it to highlight gender biases in machine translation models and locate factual knowledge inside GPT-2. Thanks to its extensible interface supporting cutting-edge techniques such as contrastive feature attribution, Inseq can drive future advances in explainable natural language generation, centralizing good practices and enabling fair and reproducible model evaluations.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/6a7118ea-f306-4b97-879f-79d66291b731" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Inseq: An Interpretability Toolkit for Sequence Generation Models

We present a human-in-the-loop dashboard tailored to diagnosing potential spurious features that NLI models rely on for predictions. 
The dashboard enables users to generate diverse and challenging examples by drawing inspiration from GPT-3 suggestions. 
Additionally, users can receive feedback from a trained NLI model on how challenging the newly created example is and make refinements based on the feedback.
Through our investigation, we discover several categories of spurious correlations that impact the reasoning of NLI models, which we group into three categories: Semantic Relevance, Logical Fallacies, and Bias. Based on our findings, we identify and describe various research opportunities, including diversifying training data and assessing NLI models' robustness by creating adversarial test suites.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/89f7e36b-b72b-40fe-abf5-247ce3e1a791" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Which Spurious Correlations Impact Reasoning in NLI Models? A Visual Interactive Diagnosis through Data-Constrained Counterfactuals

Despite their omnipresence in modern NLP, characterizing the computational power of transformer neural nets remains an interesting open question. We prove that transformers whose arithmetic precision is logarithmic in the number of input tokens (and whose feedforward nets are computable using space linear in their input) can be simulated by constant-depth logspace-uniform threshold circuits. This provides insight on the power of transformers using known results in complexity theory. For example, if $\mathsf L \neq \mathsf P$ (i.e., not all poly-time problems can be solved using logarithmic space), then transformers cannot even accurately solve linear equalities or check membership in an arbitrary context-free grammar with empty productions. Our result intuitively emerges from the transformer architecture's high parallelizability. We thus speculatively introduce the idea of a fundamental parallelism tradeoff: any model architecture as parallelizable as the transformer will obey limitations similar to it. Since parallelism is key to training models at massive scale, this suggests a potential inherent weakness of the scaling paradigm.

The Parallelism Tradeoff: Limitations of Log-Precision Transformers

This work presents results using multiple large pretrained language models showing that models with more parameters and lower perplexity nonetheless yield surprisal estimates that are less predictive of human reading times, replicating and expanding upon earlier results limited to just GPT-2 (Oh et al., 2022). First, regression analyses show a strictly monotonic, positive log-linear relationship between perplexity and fit to reading times for the more recently released five GPT-Neo variants and eight OPT variants on two separate datasets, providing strong empirical support for this trend. Subsequently, analysis of residual errors reveals a systematic deviation of the larger variants, such as underpredicting reading times of named entities and making compensatory overpredictions for reading times of function words such as modals and conjunctions. These results suggest that the propensity of larger Transformer-based models to 'memorize' sequences during training makes their surprisal estimates diverge from humanlike expectations, which warrants caution in using pretrained language models to study human language processing.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/a40e47ea-2788-434b-a797-7746bee16cb9" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Why Does Surprisal From Larger Transformer-Based Language Models Provide a Poorer Fit to Human Reading Times?

This study discusses the effect of semi-supervised learning in combination with pretrained language models for data-to-text generation. It is not known whether semi-supervised learning is still helpful when a large-scale language model is also supplemented. This study aims to answer this question by comparing a data-to-text system only supplemented with a language model, to two data-to-text systems that are additionally enriched by a data augmentation or a pseudo-labeling semi-supervised learning approach. Results show that semi-supervised learning results in higher scores on diversity metrics. In terms of output quality, extending the training set of a data-to-text system with a language model using the pseudo-labeling approach did increase text quality scores, but the data augmentation approach yielded similar scores to the system without training set extension. These results indicate that semi-supervised learning approaches can bolster output quality and diversity, even when a language model is also present.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/c2bbd779-6378-4ed1-a6b1-84822c9dbe30" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Neural Data-to-Text Generation Based on Small Datasets: Comparing the Added Value of Two Semi-Supervised Learning Approaches on Top of a Large Language Model

Large Language Models (LLMs) have limited performance when solving arithmetic reasoning tasks and often provide incorrect answers. Unlike natural language understanding, math problems typically have a single correct answer, making the task of generating accurate solutions more challenging for LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, we are not aware of any LLMs that indicate their level of confidence in their responses which fuels a trust deficit in these models impeding their adoption. To address this deficiency, we propose 'MathPrompter', a technique that improves performance of LLMs on arithmetic problems along with increased reliance in the predictions. MathPrompter uses the Zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting technique to generate multiple algebraic expressions or python functions to solve the same math problem in different ways and thereby raise the confidence level in the output results. This is in contrast to other prompt based CoT methods, where there is no check on the validity of the intermediate steps followed. Our technique improves over state-of-the-art on the 'MultiArith' dataset (78.7% -> 92.5%) evaluated using 175B parameter GPT-based LLM.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/08a4a6f7-8143-4237-8930-b597a284727b" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

MathPrompter: Mathematical Reasoning using Large Language Models

"Large language models trained on code have shown great potential to increase productivity of software developers. Several execution-based benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate functional correctness of model-generated code on simple programming problems. Nevertheless, it is expensive to perform the same evaluation on complex real-world projects considering the execution cost. On the other hand, static analysis tools such as linters, which can detect errors without running the program, haven't been well explored for evaluating code generation models. In this work, we propose a static evaluation framework to quantify static errors in Python code completions, by leveraging Abstract Syntax Trees. Compared with execution-based evaluation, our method is not only more efficient, but also applicable to code in the wild. For experiments, we collect code context from open source repos to generate one million function bodies using public models. Our static analysis reveals that Undefined Name and Unused Variable are the most common errors among others made by language models.
Through extensive studies, we also show the impact of sampling temperature, model size, and context on static errors in code completions."

A Static Evaluation of Code Completion by Large Language Models

We present an efficient and reliable approach to Natural Language Querying (NLQ) on databases (DB) which is not based on text-to-SQL type semantic parsing. Our approach simplifies the NLQ on structured data problem to the following "bread and butter" NLP tasks: (a) Domain classification, for choosing which DB table to query, whether the question is out-of-scope (b) Multi-head slot/entity extraction (SE) to extract the field criteria and other attributes such as its role (filter, sort etc) from the raw text and (c) Slot value disambiguation (SVD) to resolve/normalize raw spans from SE to format suitable to query a DB. This is a general purpose, DB language agnostic approach and the output can be used to query any DB and return results to the user. Also each of these tasks is extremely well studied, mature, easier to collect data for and enables better error analysis by tracing problems to specific components when something goes wrong.

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Hierarchy Builder: Organizing Textual Spans into a Hierarchy to Facilitate Navigation

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The ROOTS Search Tool: Data Transparency for LLMs

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