Indonesia

Open-domain table question answering aims to provide answers to a question by retrieving and extracting information from a large collection of tables. Existing studies of open-domain table QA either directly adopt text retrieval methods or consider the table structure only in the encoding layer for table retrieval, which may cause syntactical and structural information loss during table scoring. To address this issue, we propose a syntax- and structure-aware retrieval method for the open-domain table QA task. It provides syntactical representations for the question and uses the structural header and value representations for the tables to avoid the loss of fine-grained syntactical and structural information. Then, a syntactical-to-structural aggregator is used to obtain the matching score between the question and a candidate table by mimicking the human retrieval process. Experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art on the NQ-tables dataset and overwhelms strong baselines on a newly curated open-domain Text-to-SQL dataset.

IJCNLP-AACL 2023

Enhancing Open-Domain Table Question Answering via Syntax- and Structure-aware Dense Retrieval

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

poster

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2023!
I am honored and happy to welcome you to IJCNLP-AACL 2023! The conference hosts both the 13th
International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) and the 3rd Conference of
the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL). 
The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL have been organized by alternating leadership in the
Asia-Pacific region, in odd years by Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) and
in even years by AACL. The conference is organized by AFNLP this year. 

Considering the current situation that we are not yet fully over the coronavirus pandemic, the
conference is offered in a hybrid mode, off-line in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, and on-line with the help
of Underline, during November 1-4, 2023. For those attending off-line, I hope that you will find time to
explore the exciting local area, which remains quite warm and pleasant at this time of the year. For
those attending on-line, I hope that the attendance is not much hampered, sometimes even enhanced
and comfortable, though the on-line arrangements have been made without ample time. 

Message from Jong C. Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) 
IJCNLP-AACL 2023 General Chair 
###### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S2JSXa105xJxIkNBfhYmGH20Om6wARBx/view?usp=sharing)

In order to acces this event page, you need to register [here](http://www.ijcnlp-aacl2023.org/)

The 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Despite the success of pretrained masked language models (MLM), why MLM pretraining is useful is still a question not fully answered. In this work we theoretically and empirically that MLM pretraining makes models robust to lexicon-level spurious features, partly answering the question. Our explanation is that MLM pretraining may alleviate problems brought by simplicity bias (Shah et al., 2020), which refers to the phenomenon that a deep model tends to rely excessively on simple features. In NLP tasks, those simple features could be token-level features whose spurious association with the label can be learned easily. We show that MLM pretraining makes learning from the context easier. Thus, pretrained models are less likely to rely excessively on a single token. We also explore the theoretical explanations of MLM's efficacy in causal settings. Compared with Wei et al. (2021), we achieve similar results with milder assumption. Finally, we close the gap between our theories and real-world practices by conducting experiments on real-world tasks.

On a Benefit of Masked Language Model Pretraining: Robustness to Simplicity Bias

Influencer marketing involves a wide range of strategies in which brands collaborate with popular content creators (i.e., influencers) to leverage their reach, trust, and impact on their audience to promote and endorse products or services. Because followers of influencers are more likely to buy a product after receiving an authentic product endorsement rather than an explicit direct product promotion, the line between personal opinions and commercial content promotion is frequently blurred. This makes automatic detection of regulatory compliance breaches related to influencer advertising (e.g., misleading advertising or hidden sponsorships) particularly difficult. In this work, we (1) introduce a new Twitter (now X) dataset consisting of 15,998 influencer posts mapped into commercial and non-commercial categories for assisting in the automatic detection of commercial influencer content; (2) experiment with an extensive set of predictive models that combine text and visual information showing that our proposed cross-attention approach outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal models; and (3) conduct a thorough analysis of strengths and limitations of our models. We show that multimodal modeling is useful for identifying commercial posts, reducing the amount of false positives, and capturing relevant context that aids in the discovery of undisclosed commercial posts.

A Multimodal Analysis of Influencer Content on Twitter

Grounding dialogue response generation on external knowledge is proposed to produce informative and engaging responses. However, current knowledge-grounded dialogue (KGD) systems often fail to align the resulting responses with human-preferred qualities due to several issues like hallucination, unfaithfulness, and the lack of coherence. To address these challenges and driven by these observations, we propose Polished & Informed Candidate Scoring (PICK), a generation re-scoring framework that empowers models to generate faithful and relevant responses without requiring additional labeled data or model tuning. Through comprehensive automatic and human evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PICK in generating responses that are more faithful while keeping them relevant to the dialogue history. Further, we investigate the performance disparity between PICK and the theoretical upper bound re-ranking approach to provide insights for future research.

PICK: Polished & Informed Candidate Scoring for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Systems

Knowledge-intensive generation tasks like generative question answering require models to retrieve appropriate passages from external knowledge sources to support answer generation. The generation quality relies heavily on the retrieved passages, which serve as contextual information. State-of-the-art Retrieval Augmented Generation models with marginalized output dominate this area but focus too much on label-relevant passages, rather than question-relevant passages and answers. This work addresses this issue by incorporating rich answer encoding through Dense Knowledge Similarity (DKS) and Retriever as Answer Classifier (RAC). We demonstrate the advantages of our proposed approach in open domain question answering (MSMARCO) and conversation (Wizard of Wikipedia) datasets, reporting both generation and retrieval metrics. In the MSMARCO development set, our best model achieves 12.1% relative improvement1 on Recall@1 and 4.5% relative improvement on BLEU-4 compared to the baseline model. In the KILT-WoW leaderboard, our best model achieves 8.9% relative improvement on R-Precision and 13.3% relative improvement on KILT-RL compared to the baseline model. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/hwy9855/rag-ae.

Retrieval Augmented Generation with Rich Answer Encoding

This work presents KoBigBird-large, a large size of Korean BigBird that achieves state-of-the-art performance and allows long sequence processing for Korean language understanding. Without further pretraining, we only transform the architecture and extend the positional encoding with our proposed Tapered Absolute Positional Encoding Representations (TAPER). In experiments, KoBigBird-large shows state-of-the-art overall performance on Korean language understanding benchmarks and the best performance on document classification and question answering tasks for longer sequences against the competitive baseline models. We publicly release our model here.

KoBigBird-large: Transformation of Transformer for Korean Language Understanding

Text detoxification is the task of transferring the style of text from toxic to neutral. While there are approaches yielding promising results in monolingual setup, e.g., (Dale et al.,2021; Hallinan et al., 2022), cross-lingual transfer for this task remains a challenging open problem (Moskovskiy et al., 2022). In this work, we present a large-scale study of strategies for cross-lingual text detoxification -- given a parallel detoxification corpus for one language; the goal is to transfer detoxification ability to another language for which we do not have such a corpus.
Moreover, we are the first to explore a new task where text translation and detoxification are performed simultaneously, providing several strong baselines for this task. Finally, we introduce new automatic detoxification evaluation metrics with higher correlations with human judgments than previous benchmarks. We assess the most promising approaches also with manual markup, determining the answer for the best strategy to transfer the knowledge of text detoxification between languages.

Exploring Methods for Cross-lingual Text Style Transfer: The Case of Text Detoxification

We present PACT (Pretraining with Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Text Classification), a novel self-supervised framework for text classification. Instead of contrasting against in-batch negatives, a popular approach in the literature, PACT mines negatives closer to the anchor representation. PACT operates by endowing the standard pretraining mechanisms of BERT with adversarial contrastive learning objectives, allowing for effective joint optimization of token- and sentence-level pretraining of the BERT model. Our experiments on 13 diverse datasets including token-level, single-sentence, and sentence-pair text classification tasks show that PACT achieves consistent improvements over SOTA baselines. We further show that PACT regularizes both token-level and sentence-level embedding spaces into more uniform representations, thereby alleviating the undesirable anisotropic phenomenon of language models.

PACT: Pretraining with Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Text Classification

Investigating the behaviour of Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models under various types of test-time perturbations can shed light on the enhancement of their robustness and generalisation capability, despite the superhuman performance they have achieved on existing benchmark datasets. In this paper, we study the robustness of contemporary MRC systems to context paraphrasing, i.e., whether these models are still able to correctly answer the questions once the reading passages have been paraphrased. To this end, we systematically design a pipeline to semi-automatically generate perturbed MRC instances which ultimately lead to the creation of a paraphrased test set. We conduct experiments on this dataset with six state-of-the-art neural MRC models and we find that even the minimum performance drop of all these models exceeds 41%, whereas human performance remains high. Retraining models with augmented perturbed examples results in improved robustness, though the performance remains lower than on the original dataset. These results demonstrate that the existing high-performing MRC systems are still far away from real language understanding.

Are Machine Reading Comprehension Systems Robust to Context Paraphrasing?

To what extent do personal attributes affect the way we are spoken to? Answering this question requires the precise reproduction of a conversational context except for one personal attribute of interest, amounting to a classical, yet infeasible, causal inference problem. We present a method based on counterfactual analysis by manipulating speaker attributes in observational data. We present a case study of Advocate responses to Justices in debates in the Supreme Court of the United States. Specifically, we measure changes in politeness and coordination of Advocates when responding to (a) real Justices and (b) counterfactually-manipulated Justices, with responses generated with GPT2. We first validate our method, showing that GPT2-generated outputs capture coordination and politeness. Our results confirm a known impact of the attribute gender, and suggest a weaker effect of seniority on coordination.

It's not only What You Say, It's also Who It's Said to: Counterfactual Analysis of Interactive Behavior in the Courtroom

Bangla (or Bengali) is the ﬁfth most spoken language globally; yet, the state-of-the-art NLP in Bangla is lagging for even simple tasks such as lemmatization, POS tagging, etc. This is partly due to lack of a varied quality corpus. To alleviate this need, we build VACASPATI, a diverse corpus of Bangla literature. The literary works are collected from various websites; only those works that are publicly available without copyright violations or restrictions are collected. We believe that published literature captures the features of a language much better than newspapers, blogs or social media posts which tend to follow only a certain literary pattern and, therefore, miss out on language variety and vocabulary. Our corpus VACASPATI is varied from multiple aspects, including type of composition, topic, author, time, space, etc. It contains more than 11 million sentences
and 115 million words. We have also built a word embedding model, VAC-FT, using FastText from VACASPATI as well as trained an Electra model, VAC-BERT, using the corpus. VAC-BERT has far fewer parameters and requires only a fraction of resources compared to other state-of-the-art transformer models and yet performs either better or similar on various downstream tasks. Similarly, VAC-FT outperforms other FastText-based models on multiple downstream tasks. We also demonstrate the efﬁcacy of VACASPATI as a corpus by showing that similar models built from other corpora are not as effective. The models are available at https://bangla.iitk.ac.in/projects/vacaspati.html.

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Next from IJCNLP-AACL 2023

On a Benefit of Masked Language Model Pretraining: Robustness to Simplicity Bias

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Is Table Retrieval a Solved Problem? Exploring Join-Aware Multi-Table Retrieval

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