Canada

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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ACL 2023

Event-Centric Query Expansion in Web Search

event reformulation

event-centric

query expansion

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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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.

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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Chemical Language Understanding Benchmark

Existing conversational question answering (CQA) datasets have been usually constructed from unstructured texts in English. In this paper, we propose Tab-CQA, a tabular CQA dataset created from Chinese financial reports that are extracted from listed companies in a wide range of different sectors in the past 30 years. From these reports, we select 2,463 tables, and manually generate 2,463 conversations with 35,494 QA pairs. Additionally,  we select 4,578 tables, from which 4,578 conversations with 73,595 QA pairs are automatically created via a template-based method. With the manually- and automatically-generated conversations, Tab-CQA contains answerable and unanswerable questions. For the answerable questions, we further diversify them to cover a wide range of skills, e.g., table retrieval, fact checking, numerical reasoning, so as to accommodate real-world scenarios. We further propose two different tabular CQA models, a text-based model and an operation-based model, and evaluate them on Tab-CQA. Experiment results show that Tab-CQA is a very challenging dataset, where a huge performance gap exists between human and neural models. We will publicly release Tab-CQA as a benchmark testbed to promote further research on Chinese tabular CQA.

Tab-CQA: A Tabular Conversational Question Answering Dataset on Financial Reports

Fake news detection has been a critical task for maintaining the health of the online news ecosystem. However, very few existing works consider the temporal shift issue caused by the rapidly-evolving nature of news data in practice, resulting in significant performance degradation when training on past data and testing on future data. In this paper, we observe that the appearances of news events on the same topic may display discernible patterns over time, and posit that such patterns can assist in selecting training instances that could make the model adapt better to future data. Specifically, we design an effective framework FTT (Forecasting Temporal Trends), which could forecast the temporal distribution patterns of news data and then guide the detector to fast adapt to future distribution. Experiments on the real-world temporally split dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework.

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Learn over Past, Evolve for Future: Forecasting Temporal Trends for Fake News Detection

Clinical prediction is an essential task in the healthcare industry. However, the recent success of transformers, on which large language models are built, has not been extended to this domain. In this research, we explore the use of transformers and language models in prognostic prediction for immunotherapy using real-world patients' clinical data and molecular profiles. This paper investigates the potential of transformers to improve clinical prediction compared to conventional machine learning approaches and addresses the challenge of few-shot learning in predicting rare disease areas. The study benchmarks the efficacy of baselines and language models on prognostic prediction across multiple cancer types and investigates the impact of different pretrained language models under few-shot regimes. The results demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and highlight the potential of NLP in clinical research to improve early detection and intervention for different diseases.

Boosting Transformers and Language Models for Clinical Prediction in Immunotherapy

"In conventional radiology practice, the radiologist dictates the diagnosis to the transcriptionist, who then prepares a preliminary formatted report referring to the notes, after which the radiologist reviews the report, corrects the errors, and signs off. This workflow is prone to delay and error. In this paper, we report our work on automatic radiology report generation from radiologists' dictation, which is in collaboration with a startup about to become Unicorn. A major contribution of our work is the set of knowledge graphs (KGs) of ten abdominal organs- Liver, Kidney, Gallbladder, Uterus, Urinary bladder, Ovary, Pancreas, Prostate, Biliary Tree, and Bowel. Our method for constructing these KGs relies on extracting entity1-relation-entity2 triplets from a large collection (about 10,000) of free-text radiology reports. The quality and coverage of the KGs are verified by two experienced radiologists (practicing for the last 30 years and 8 years, respectively). The dictation of the radiologist is automatically converted to what is called a pathological description which is the clinical description of the findings of the radiologist during ultrasonography (USG). 
Our knowledge-enhanced deep learning model improves the reported BLEU-3, ROUGE-L, METEOR, and CIDEr scores of the pathological description generation by 2%, 4%, 2% and 2% respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at representing the abdominal organs in the form of knowledge graphs and utilising these graphs for the automatic generation of USG reports. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) has been made available to the beta users, i.e., radiologists of reputed hospitals, for testing and evaluation. Our solution guarantees report generation within 30 seconds of running a scan."

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Event-Centric Query Expansion in Web Search

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