Intent classification (IC) plays an important role in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, IC models often generalize poorly when training without sufficient annotated examples for each user intent. We propose a novel pre-training method for text encoders that uses contrastive learning with intent psuedo-labels to produce embeddings that are well-suited for IC tasks, reducing the need for manual annotations. By applying this pre-training strategy, we also introduce Pre-trained Intent-aware Encoder (PIE), which is designed to align encodings of utterances with their intent names. Specifically, we first train a tagger to identify key phrases within utterances that are crucial for interpreting intents. We then use these extracted phrases to create examples for pre-training a text encoder in a contrastive manner. As a result, our PIE model achieves up to 5.4% and 4.0% higher accuracy than the previous state-of-the-art pre-trained text encoder for the N-way zero- and one-shot settings on four IC datasets.

Pre-training Intent-Aware Encoders for Zero- and Few-Shot Intent Classification | VIDEO

Recent developments of dense retrieval rely on quality representations of queries and contexts from pre-trained query and context encoders. In this paper, we introduce TOUR (Test-Time Optimization of Query Representations), which further optimizes instance-level query representations guided by signals from test-time retrieval results. We leverage a cross-encoder re-ranker to provide fine-grained pseudo labels over retrieval results and iteratively optimize query representations with gradient descent. Our theoretical analysis reveals that TOUR can be viewed as a generalization of the classical Rocchio algorithm for pseudo relevance feedback, and we present two variants that leverage pseudo-labels as hard binary or soft continuous labels. We first apply TOUR on phrase retrieval with our proposed phrase re-ranker, and also evaluate its effectiveness on passage retrieval with an off-the-shelf re-ranker. TOUR greatly improves end-to-end open-domain question answering accuracy, as well as passage retrieval performance. TOUR also consistently improves direct re-ranking by up to 2.0% while running 1.3-2.4x faster with an efficient implementation.

Optimizing Test-Time Query Representations for Dense Retrieval

We consider the task of automatically extracting various overlapping frames, i.e, structured entities composed of multiple labels and mentions, from long clinical breast radiology documents. 
While many methods exist for related topics such as event extraction, slot filling, or discontinuous entity recognition, a challenge in our study resides in the fact that clinical reports typically contain overlapping frames that span multiple sentences or paragraphs.
We propose a new method that addresses these difficulties and evaluate it on a new annotated corpus.
Despite the small number of documents, we show that the hybridization between knowledge injection and a learning-based system allows us to quickly obtain proper results.
We will also introduce the concept of scope relations and show that it both improves the performance of our system, and provides a visual explanation of the predictions.


An end-to-end neural model based on cliques and scopes for frame extraction in long breast radiology reports

Recent developments of dense retrieval rely on quality representations of queries and contexts from pre-trained query and context encoders. In this paper, we introduce TOUR (Test-Time Optimization of Query Representations), which further optimizes instance-level query representations guided by signals from test-time retrieval results. We leverage a cross-encoder re-ranker to provide fine-grained pseudo labels over retrieval results and iteratively optimize query representations with gradient descent. Our theoretical analysis reveals that TOUR can be viewed as a generalization of the classical Rocchio algorithm for pseudo relevance feedback, and we present two variants that leverage pseudo-labels as hard binary or soft continuous labels. We first apply TOUR on phrase retrieval with our proposed phrase re-ranker, and also evaluate its effectiveness on passage retrieval with an off-the-shelf re-ranker. TOUR greatly improves end-to-end open-domain question answering accuracy, as well as passage retrieval performance. TOUR also consistently improves direct re-ranking by up to 2.0% while running 1.32.4x faster with an efficient implementation.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/kgQkh7cPzt9VEM52HG3MJu/embed/polls/71b8c562-528d-407b-818b-0be2b14e52d9" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Pre-trained language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in solving various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. There has been increasing interest in what knowledge these LMs contain and how we can extract that knowledge, treating LMs as knowledge bases (KBs). While there has been much work on probing LMs in the general domain, there has been little attention to whether these powerful LMs can be used as domain-specific KBs. To this end, we create the BioLAMA benchmark, which is comprised of 49K biomedical factual knowledge triples for probing biomedical LMs. We find that biomedical LMs with recently proposed probing methods can achieve up to 18.51% Acc@5 on retrieving biomedical knowledge. Although this seems promising given the task difficulty, our detailed analyses reveal that most predictions are highly correlated with prompt templates without any subjects, hence producing similar results on each relation and hindering their capabilities to be used as domain-specific KBs. We hope that BioLAMA can serve as a challenging benchmark for biomedical factual probing.

Can Language Models be Biomedical Knowledge Bases?

Open-domain question answering can be reformulated as a phrase retrieval problem, without the need for processing documents on-demand during inference (Seo et al., 2019).
However, current phrase retrieval models heavily depend on sparse representations and still underperform retriever-reader approaches.
In this work, we show for the first time that we can learn dense representations of phrases alone that achieve much stronger performance in open-domain QA.
We present an effective method to learn phrase representations from the supervision of reading comprehension tasks, coupled with novel negative sampling methods.
We also propose a query-side fine-tuning strategy, which can support transfer learning and reduce the discrepancy between training and inference.
On five popular open-domain QA datasets, our model DensePhrases improves over previous phrase retrieval models by 15%-25% absolute accuracy and matches the performance of state-of-the-art retriever-reader models.
Our model is easy to parallelize due to pure dense representations and processes more than 10 questions per second on CPUs.
Finally, we directly use our pre-indexed dense phrase representations for two slot filling tasks, showing the promise of utilizing DensePhrases as a dense knowledge base for downstream tasks.

Learning Dense Representations of Phrases at Scale

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PS1 (Hybrid) Posters, Demo, Industry

poster

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

The 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP 2023) will be hosted by ACL 2023 and held on 13 July 2023. The workshop is being organised by Burcu Can, Maximilian Mozes, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Naomi Saphra, Nora Kassner, Shauli Ravfogel, Abhilasha Ravichander, and Chen Zhao; and advised by Isabelle Augenstein, Anna Rogers, Kyunghyun Cho, and Edward Grefenstette. The workshop is organised by the ACL Special Interest Group on Representation Learning (SIGREP).

The 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP aims to continue the success of the Repl4NLP workshop series, with the 1st Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP having received about 50 submissions and over 250 attendees - the second most attended collocated event at ACL'16 after WMT. The workshop was introduced as a synthesis of several years of independent CL workshops focusing on vector space models of meaning, compositionality, and the application of deep neural networks and spectral methods to NLP. It provides a forum for discussing recent advances on these topics, as well as future research directions in linguistically motivated vector-based models in NLP. The workshop will take place in a hybrid setting, and, as in previous years, feature interdisciplinary keynotes, paper presentations, posters, as well as a panel discussion. 
For more details visit our workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/repl4nlp2023
#### [Visit GatherTown](https://app.gather.town/app/5OscLswEEuYf2Psb/ACL2023)

W5: The 8th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP)

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
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. 
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)**

ACL 2023

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.

### [Program](https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/BioNLP_Workshop#BioNLP_2023:_Program)
The BioNLP workshop associated with the ACL SIGBIOMED special interest group has established itself as the primary venue for presenting foundational research in language processing for the biological and medical domains. The workshop is running every year since 2002 and continues getting stronger. BioNLP welcomes and encourages work on languages other than English, and inclusion and diversity. BioNLP truly encompasses the breadth of the domain and brings together researchers in bio- and clinical NLP from all over the world. The workshop will continue presenting work on a broad and interesting range of topics in NLP. The interest to biomedical language has broadened significantly due to the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to grow: as access to information becomes easier and more people generate and access health-related text, it becomes clearer that only language technologies can enable and support adequate use of the biomedical text.

BioNLP 2023 will be particularly interested in language processing that supports DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility). The work on detection and mitigation of bias and misinformation continues to be of interest. Research in languages other than English, particularly, under-represented languages, and health disparities are always of interest to BioNLP. For more details visit our workshop website: https://aclweb.org/aclwiki/BioNLP_Workshop
#### [Visit GatherTown](https://app.gather.town/app/5OscLswEEuYf2Psb/ACL2023)

W13: The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and Shared Tasks (BioNLP-ST)

Virtual Poster Session 2

Virtual Poster Session I: NLP Applications

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

5G - In Person Poster Session

**Session Chair: ** Sara Rosenthal 
**Session Volunteer: ** Oyeniran Oluwashina Akinloye

14E: Question Answering #4

technical paper

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

**Reminder2:** Underline site will open closer to the event. If you already registered you will receive access detail

Registration is now open

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Mujeen Sung

7

9

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Pre-training Intent-Aware Encoders for Zero- and Few-Shot Intent Classification | VIDEO

Optimizing Test-Time Query Representations for Dense Retrieval

An end-to-end neural model based on cliques and scopes for frame extraction in long breast radiology reports

Optimizing Test-Time Query Representations for Dense Retrieval

Can Language Models be Biomedical Knowledge Bases?

Can Language Models be Biomedical Knowledge Bases?

Learning Dense Representations of Phrases at Scale

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