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Semantic parsing maps natural language questions into logical forms, which can be executed against a knowledge base for answers. In real-world applications, the performance of parser is often limited by the lack of training data. To facilitate zero-shot learning, data synthesis have been widely studied to automatically generate paired questions and logical forms. However, the data synthesis methods can hardly cover the diverse structures in natural languages, leading to a large gap in sentence structure between synthetic and natural questions. In this paper, we propose a decomposition-based method to unify the sentence structures of questions, which benefits the generalization to the natural questions. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves the semantic parser trained on synthetic data (+7.9% on KQA and +8.9% on ComplexWebQuestions in terms of exact match accuracy). Extensive analysis demonstrates that our method can better generalize to the natural questions with novel text expressions compared with baselines. Besides semantic parsing, our idea potentially benefits other semantic understanding tasks by mitigating the distracting structure features. To illustrate this, we extend our method to the task of sentence embedding learning, and observe substantial improvements on sentence retrieval (+13.1% for Hit@1).

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ACL 2023

Bridging the Gap between Synthetic and Natural Questions via Sentence Decomposition for Semantic Parsing

sentence decomposition

synthetic data

semantic parsing

low resource

Semantic parsing maps natural language questions into logical forms, which can be executed against a knowledge base for answers. In real-world applications, the performance of parser is often limited by the lack of training data. To facilitate zero-shot learning, data synthesis have been widely studied to automatically generate paired questions and logical forms. However, the data synthesis methods can hardly cover the diverse structures in natural languages, leading to a large gap in sentence structure between synthetic and natural questions. In this paper, we propose a decomposition-based method to unify the sentence structures of questions, which benefits the generalization to the natural questions. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves the semantic parser trained on synthetic data (+7.9% on KQA and +8.9% on ComplexWebQuestions in terms of exact match accuracy). Extensive analysis demonstrates that our method can better generalize to the natural questions with novel text expressions compared with baselines. Besides semantic parsing, our idea potentially benefits other semantic understanding tasks by mitigating the distracting structure features. To illustrate this, we extend our method to the task of sentence embedding learning, and observe substantial improvements on sentence retrieval (+13.1% for Hit@1).

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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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.

In this paper, we conduct the first study on spurious correlations for open-domain response generation models based on a corpus CGDIALOG curated in our work. The current models indeed suffer from spurious correlations and have a tendency of generating irrelevant and generic responses. Inspired by causal discovery algorithms, we propose a novel model-agnostic method for training and inference of response generation model using a conditional independence classifier. The classifier is trained by a constrained self-training method, coined CONSTRAIN, to overcome data scarcity. The experimental results based on both human and automatic evaluation show that our method significantly outperforms the competitive baselines in terms of relevance, informativeness, and fluency.

Less is More: Mitigate Spurious Correlations for Open-Domain Dialogue Response Generation Models by Causal Discovery

Abusive language and hate speech in tweets and comments on various social media platforms have become ubiquitous. This paper focuses on classifying an input text in English, Hindi and Hinglish (Hindi written in English) along with emojis and emoticons into three categories - Abusive, Hate Speech or Neither based on the confidence scores of each class. Abusive language on social media is textual content that contains disparaging words. Hate speech can be threatening and can hurt the sentiments of a person or a community. To gain better insights, results are captured with and without lemmatization and stemming. Accuracy is used as the metric to evaluate the classification models. Deep learning models BERT and RoBERTa are trained separately on plain English data (PE), Hinglish data along with emojis (HEmo) and the combined full dataset (CF). The same process is repeated for five non-deep learning models - Decision trees, k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest and Naïve Bayes. The deep learning model RoBERTa results in the highest accuracy of 0.9938 on the PE dataset, 0.9896 on the EHEmo dataset and 0.9899 on the CF dataset. SVM model performed best among traditional classifiers with an accuracy of 0.7996 on the PE dataset, 0.7899 on the EHEmo dataset and 0.7913 on the CF dataset.

Detection and Comparison of Abusive and Hate Speech in English and Hinglish with Emojis Using Deep Learning and Non-Deep Learning Techniques

In this paper we describe the task of adapting NLP models to dialogue processing in the emergency response domain. Our goal is to provide a recipe for building a system that performs dialogue act classification and domain-specific slot tagging while being efficient, flexible and robust. We show that adapter models Pfeiffer et al. (2020) perform well in the emergency response domain and benefit from additional dialogue context and speaker information. Comparing adapters to standard fine-tuned Transformer models we show that they achieve competitive results and can easily accommodate new tasks without significant memory increase since the base model can be shared between the adapters specializing on different tasks. We also address the problem of scarce annotations in the emergency response domain and evaluate different data augmentation techniques in a low-resource setting.

Towards Efficient Dialogue Processing in the Emergency Response Domain

In search engines, query expansion (QE) is a crucial technique to improve search experience. Previous studies often rely on long-term search log mining, which leads to slow updates and is sub-optimal for time-sensitive news searches. In this work, we present Event-Centric Query Expansion (EQE), the QE system used in a famous Chinese search engine. EQE utilizes a novel event retrieval framework that consists of four stages, i.e., event collection, event reformulation, semantic retrieval and online ranking, which can select the best expansion from a significant amount of potential events rapidly and accurately. Specifically, we first collect and filter news headlines from websites. Then we propose a generation model that incorporates contrastive learning and prompt-tuning techniques to reformulate these headlines to concise candidates. Additionally, we fine-tune a dual-tower semantic model to serve as an encoder for event retrieval and explore a two-stage contrastive training approach to enhance the accuracy of event retrieval. Finally, we rank the retrieved events and select the optimal one as QE, which is then used to improve the retrieval of event-related documents. Through offline analysis and online A/B testing, we observed that the EQE system has significantly improved many indicators compared to the baseline. The system has been deployed in a real production environment and serves hundreds of millions of users.

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Event-Centric Query Expansion in Web Search

As e-commerce platforms develop different business lines, a special but challenging product categorization scenario emerges, where there are multiple domain-specific category taxonomies and each of them evolves dynamically over time. 
In order to unify the categorization process and ensure efficiency, we propose a two-stage taxonomy-agnostic framework that relies solely on calculating the semantic relatedness between product titles and category names in the vector space. 
To further enhance domain transferability and better exploit cross-domain data, we design two plug-in modules: a heuristic mapping scorer and a pretrained contrastive ranking module with the help of meta concepts, which represent keyword knowledge shared across domains. Comprehensive offline experiments show that our method outperforms strong baselines on three dynamic multi-domain product categorization (DMPC) tasks, and online experiments reconfirm its efficacy with a 5% increase on seasonal purchase revenue. Related datasets will be released."

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Transferable and Efficient: Unifying Dynamic Multi-Domain Product Categorization

"The categorization of massive e-Commerce data is a crucial, well-studied task, which is prevalent in industrial settings. In this work, we aim to improve an existing product categorization model that is already in use by a major web company, serving multiple applications.
At its core, the product categorization model is a text classification model that takes a product title as an input and outputs the most suitable category out of thousands of available candidates. Upon a closer inspection, we found inconsistencies in the labeling of similar items. For example, minor modifications of the product title pertaining to colors or measurements majorly impacted the model's output. This phenomenon can negatively affect downstream recommendation or search applications, leading to a sub-optimal user experience.

To address this issue, we propose a new framework for consistent text categorization. Our goal is to improve the model's consistency while maintaining its production-level performance. We use a semi-supervised approach for data augmentation and presents two different methods for utilizing unlabeled samples. One method relies directly on existing catalogs, while the other uses a generative model. We compare the pros and cons of each approach and present our experimental results."

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Consistent Text Categorization using Data Augmentation in e-Commerce

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is essential for any voice-based application. The streaming capability of ASR becomes necessary to provide immediate feedback to the user in applications like Voice Search. LSTM/RNN and CTC based ASR systems are very simple to train and deploy for low latency streaming applications but have lower accuracy when compared to the state-of-the-art models. In this work, we build accurate LSTM, attention and CTC based streaming ASR models for large-scale Hinglish (blend of Hindi and English) Voice Search. We evaluate how various modifications in vanilla LSTM training improve the system's accuracy while preserving the streaming capabilities. We also discuss a simple integration of end-of-speech (EOS) detection with CTC models, which helps reduce the overall search latency. Our model achieves a word error rate (WER) of 3.69% without EOS and 4.78% with EOS, with ~1300 ms (~46.64%) reduction in latency.

Building Accurate Low Latency ASR for Streaming Voice Search in E-commerce

Patent applicants write patent specifications that describe embodiments of inventions.
Some embodiments are claimed for a patent,
while others may be unclaimed
due to strategic considerations.
Unclaimed embodiments may be extracted by
applicants later and claimed in
continuing applications to
gain advantages over competitors.
Despite being essential for corporate intellectual property (IP) strategies,
unclaimed embodiment extraction is conducted manually,
and little research has been conducted on its automation.
This paper presents a novel task of
unclaimed embodiment extraction (UEE)
and a novel dataset for the task.
Our experiments with Transformer-based models
demonstrated
that the task was challenging as it required
conducting natural language inference on
patent specifications, which consisted of
technical, long, syntactically and semantically
involved sentences.
We release the dataset and code 
to foster this new area of research."

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Hunt for Buried Treasures: Extracting Unclaimed Embodiments from Patent Specifications

In a task-oriented dialogue system, joint intent detection and slot filling for multi-intent utterances become meaningful since users tend to query more. The current state-of-the-art studies choose to process multi-intent utterances through a single joint model of sequence labelling and multi-label classification, which cannot generalize to utterances with more intents than training samples. Meanwhile, it lacks the ability to assign slots to each corresponding intent. To overcome these problems, we propose a Split-Parsing Method (SPM) for joint multiple intent detection and slot filling, which is a two-stage method. It first splits an input sentence into multiple sub-sentences which contain a single-intent, and then a joint single intent detection and slot filling model is applied to parse each sub-sentence recurrently. Finally, we integrate the parsed results. The sub-sentence split task is also treated as a sequence labelling problem with only one entity-label, which can effectively generalize to a sentence with more intents unseen in the training set. Experimental results on three multi-intent datasets show that our method obtains substantial improvements over different baselines.

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SPM: A Split-Parsing Method for Joint Multi-Intent Detection and Slot Filling

In this paper, we introduce the benchmark datasets named CLUB (Chemical Language Understanding Benchmark) to facilitate NLP research in the chemical industry. We have 4 datasets consisted of text and token classification tasks. As far as we have recognized, it is one of the first examples of chemical language understanding benchmark datasets consisted of tasks for both patent and literature articles provided by industrial organization. All the datasets are internally made by chemists from scratch. Finally, we evaluate the datasets on the various language models based on BERT and RoBERTa, and demonstrate the model performs better when the domain of the pretrained models are closer to chemistry domain. We provide baselines for our benchmark as 0.8054 in average, and we hope this benchmark is used by many researchers in both industry and academia.

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Bridging the Gap between Synthetic and Natural Questions via Sentence Decomposition for Semantic Parsing

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Less is More: Mitigate Spurious Correlations for Open-Domain Dialogue Response Generation Models by Causal Discovery

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