Canada

Very recently, few certified defense methods have been developed to provably guarantee the robustness of a text classifier to adversarial synonym substitutions. However, all the existing certified defense methods assume that the defenders have been informed of how the adversaries generate synonyms, which is not a realistic scenario. In this study, we propose a certifiably robust defense method by randomly masking a certain proportion of the words in an input text, in which the above unrealistic assumption is no longer necessary. The proposed method can defend against not only word substitution-based attacks, but also character-level perturbations. We can certify the classifications of over 50% of texts to be robust to any perturbation of five words on AGNEWS, and two words on SST2 dataset. The experimental results show that our randomized smoothing method significantly outperforms recently proposed defense methods across multiple datasets under different attack algorithms.

ACL 2023

ertified Robustness to Text Adversarial Attacks by Randomized [MASK]

adversarial example

text classification

certified robustness

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. 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>
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*<br><br><br><br>

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

Please register!

EACL 2024

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.

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.

Reasoning is one of the most important elements in achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), specifically when it comes to Abductive and counterfactual reasoning. In order to introduce these capabilities of reasoning in Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, there have been recent advances towards training NLP models to better perform on two main tasks - Abductive Natural Language Inference (alphaNLI) and Abductive Natural Language Generation Task (alphaNLG). This paper proposes CoGen, a model for both alphaNLI and alphaNLG tasks that employ a novel approach of combining the temporal commonsense reasoning for each observation (before and after a real hypothesis) from pre-trained models with contextual filtering for training. Additionally, we use state-of-the-art semantic entailment to filter out the contradictory hypothesis during the inference. Our experimental results show that CoGen outperforms current models and set a new state of the art in regards to alphaNLI and alphaNLG tasks. We make the source code of CoGen model publicly available for reproducibility and to facilitate relevant future research.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/8PaBoicsuHK7beXFunvrtr/embed/polls/1b672950-6e4c-4243-86e1-fd284f00c660" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

COGEN: Abductive Commonsense Language Generation

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to infer complex semantic relations among entities in a document. Distant supervision (DS) is able to generate massive auto-labeled data, which can improve DocRE performance. Recent works leverage pseudo labels generated by the pre-denoising model to reduce noise in DS data. However, unreliable pseudo labels bring new noise, e.g., adding false pseudo labels and losing correct DS labels. Therefore, how to select effective pseudo labels to denoise DS data is still a challenge in document-level distant relation extraction. To tackle this issue, we introduce uncertainty estimation technology to determine whether pseudo labels can be trusted. In this work, we propose a Document-level distant Relation Extraction framework with Uncertainty Guided label denoising, UGDRE. Specifically, we propose a novel instance-level uncertainty estimation method, which measures the reliability of the pseudo labels with overlapping relations. By further considering the long-tail problem, we design dynamic uncertainty thresholds for different types of relations to filter high-uncertainty pseudo labels. We conduct experiments on two public datasets. Our framework outperforms strong baselines by 1.91 F1 and 2.28 Ign F1 on the RE-DocRED dataset.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/8PaBoicsuHK7beXFunvrtr/embed/polls/d9bd58d6-2f27-45db-ba06-0eb56c7c2db4" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Uncertainty Guided Label Denoising for Document-level Distant Relation Extraction

Two-Tower Vision-Language (VL) models have shown promising improvements on various downstream VL tasks. Although the most advanced work improves performance by building bridges between encoders, it suffers from ineffective layer-by-layer utilization of uni-modal representations and cannot flexibly exploit different levels of uni-modal semantic knowledge. In this work, we propose ManagerTower, a novel VL model architecture that gathers and combines the insights of pre-trained uni-modal experts at different levels. The managers introduced in each cross-modal layer can adaptively aggregate uni-modal semantic knowledge to facilitate more comprehensive cross-modal alignment and fusion. ManagerTower outperforms previous strong baselines both with and without Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP). With only 4M VLP data, ManagerTower achieves superior performances on various downstream VL tasks, especially 79.15% accuracy on VQAv2 Test-Std, 86.56% IR@1 and 95.64% TR@1 on Flickr30K. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/LooperXX/ManagerTower.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/or9aypsi961h595NQtD7kk/embed/polls/ed45b212-9701-4db4-a772-fd5240c20a67" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

ManagerTower: Aggregating the Insights of Uni-Modal Experts for Vision-Language Representation Learning

In conversational search, the user's real search intent for the current conversation turn is dependent on the previous conversation history. It is challenging to determine a good search query from the whole conversation context. To avoid the expensive re-training of the query encoder, most existing methods try to learn a rewriting model to de-contextualize the current query by mimicking the manual query rewriting.However, manually rewritten queries are not always the best search queries.Thus, training a rewriting model on them would lead to sub-optimal queries. Another useful information to enhance the search query is the potential answer to the question. In this paper, we propose ConvGQR, a new framework to reformulate conversational queries based on generative pre-trained language models (PLMs), one for query rewriting and another for generating potential answers.By combining both, ConvGQR can produce better search queries.In addition, to relate query reformulation to the retrieval task, we propose a knowledge infusion mechanism to optimize both query reformulation and retrieval. Extensive experiments on four conversational search datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ConvGQR.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/or9aypsi961h595NQtD7kk/embed/polls/937e73bd-762e-4d78-a5ae-d462822d279c" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

ConvGQR: Generative Query Reformulation for Conversational Search

Continual relation extraction (RE) aims to learn constantly emerging relations while avoiding forgetting the learned relations. Existing works store a small number of typical samples to re-train the model for alleviating forgetting. However, repeatedly replaying these samples may cause the overfitting problem. We conduct an empirical study on existing works and observe that their performance is severely affected by analogous relations. To address this issue, we propose a novel continual extraction model for analogous relations. Specifically, we design memory-insensitive relation prototypes and memory augmentation to overcome the overfitting problem. We also introduce integrated training and focal knowledge distillation to enhance the performance on analogous relations. Experimental results show the superiority of our model and demonstrate its effectiveness in distinguishing analogous relations and overcoming overfitting.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/ded3ee5e-fe9e-446a-a60e-30e031c029ee" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Improving Continual Relation Extraction by Distinguishing Analogous Semantics

The pretrained language model (PLM) based metrics have been successfully used in evaluating language generation tasks. Recent studies of the human evaluation community show that considering both major errors (e.g. mistranslated tokens) and minor errors (e.g. imperfections in fluency) can produce high-quality judgments. This inspires us to approach the final goal of the automatic metrics (human-like evaluations) by fine-grained error analysis. In this paper, we argue that the ability to estimate sentence confidence is the tip of the iceberg for PLM-based metrics. And it can be used to refine the generated sentence toward higher confidence and more reference-grounded, where the costs of refining and approaching reference are used to determine the major and minor errors, respectively.To this end, we take BARTScore as the testbed and present an innovative solution to marry the unexploited sentence refining capacity of BARTScore and human-like error analysis, where the final score consists of both the evaluations of major and minor errors. Experiments show that our solution consistently and significantly improves BARTScore, and outperforms top-scoring metrics in 19/25 test settings. Analyses demonstrate our method robustly and efficiently approaches human-like evaluations, enjoying better interpretability. Our code and scripts will be publicly released in https://github.com/Coldmist-Lu/ErrorAnalysis_NLGEvaluation.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/jQes3hFZo3TYjGXEHm6w95/embed/polls/54449484-b16a-433a-9187-6789a4ceac5d" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Toward Human-Like Evaluation for Natural Language Generation with Error Analysis

The potential social harms that large language models pose, such as generating offensive content and reinforcing biases, are steeply rising. Existing works focus on coping with this concern while interacting with ill-intentioned users, such as those who explicitly make hate speech or elicit harmful responses. However, discussions on sensitive issues can become toxic even if the users are well-intentioned. For safer models in such scenarios, we present the Sensitive Questions and Acceptable Response (SQuARe) dataset, a large-scale Korean dataset of 49k sensitive questions with 42k acceptable and 46k non-acceptable responses. The dataset was constructed leveraging HyperCLOVA in a human-in-the-loop manner based on real news headlines. Experiments show that acceptable response generation significantly improves for HyperCLOVA and GPT-3, demonstrating the efficacy of this dataset.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/5b38715e-6b1e-4abe-bd47-c88fed7ed59f" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

SQuARe: A Large-Scale Dataset of Sensitive Questions and Acceptable Responses Created through Human-Machine Collaboration

Most recent coreference resolution systems use search algorithms over possible spans to identify mentions and resolve coreference. We instead present a coreference resolution system that uses a text-to-text (seq2seq) paradigm to predict mentions and links jointly. We implement the coreference system as a transition system and use multilingual T5 as an underlying language model. We obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the CoNLL-2012 datasets with 83.3 F1-score for English (a 2.3 higher F1-score than previous work) using only CoNLL data for training, 68.5 F1-score for Arabic (+4.1 higher than previous work) and 74.3 F1-score for Chinese (+5.3). In addition we use the SemEval-2010 data sets for experiments in the zero-shot setting, a few-shot setting, and supervised setting using all available training data. We get substantially higher zero-shot F1-scores for 3 out of 4 languages than previous approaches and significantly exceed previous supervised state-of-the-art results for all five tested languages.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/28237aa3-b78d-42b4-8d9c-71bfa0412e8f" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Coreference Resolution through a seq2seq Transition-Based System

Event-Level Video Question Answering (EVQA) requires complex reasoning across video events to obtain the visual information needed to provide optimal answers. However, despite significant progress in model performance, few studies have focused on using the explicit semantic connections between the question and visual information especially at the event level. There is need for using such semantic connections to facilitate complex reasoning across video frames. Therefore, we propose a semantic-aware dynamic retrospective-prospective reasoning approach for video-based question answering. Specifically, we explicitly use the Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) structure of the question in the dynamic reasoning process where we decide to move to the next frame based on which part of the SRL structure (agent, verb, patient, etc.) of the question is being focused on. We conduct experiments on a benchmark EVQA dataset - TrafficQA. Results show that our proposed approach achieves superior performance compared to previous state-of-the-art models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/lyuchenyang/Semantic-aware-VideoQA.

Semantic-Aware Dynamic Retrospective-Prospective Reasoning for Event-Level Video Question Answering

Content moderation on social media is governed by policies that are intricate and frequently updated with evolving world events. However, automated content moderation systems often restrict easy adaptation to policy changes and are expected to learn policy intricacies from limited amounts of labeled data, which make effective policy compliance challenging.  We propose to model content moderation as a binary question answering problem where the questions validate the loosely coupled themes constituting a policy. A decision logic is applied on top to aggregate the theme-specific validations. This way the questions pass theme information to a transformer network as explicit policy prompts, that in turn enables explainability. This setting further allows for faster adaptation to policy updates by leveraging zero-shot capabilities of pre-trained transformers. We showcase improved recall for our proposed method at 95\% precision on two proprietary datasets of social media posts and comments respectively annotated under curated Hate Speech and Commercial Spam policies.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/d3911f10-18c0-4799-b549-08c9a85a6165" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

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COGEN: Abductive Commonsense Language Generation

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Next from ACL 2023

COGEN: Abductive Commonsense Language Generation

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Random Smooth-based Certified Defense against Text Adversarial Attack

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