We present BYOKG, a universal question-answering (QA) system that can operate on any knowledge graph (KG), requires no human-annotated training data, and can be ready to use within a day---attributes that are out-of-scope for current KGQA systems. BYOKG draws inspiration from the remarkable ability of humans to comprehend information present in an unseen KG through exploration---starting at random nodes, inspecting the labels of adjacent nodes and edges, and combining them with their prior world knowledge. Exploration in BYOKG leverages an LLM-backed symbolic agent that generates a diverse set of query-program exemplars, which are then used to ground a retrieval-augmented reasoning procedure to synthesize programs for arbitrary questions. BYOKG is effective over both small- and large-scale graphs, showing dramatic gains in zero-shot QA accuracy of 27.89 and 59.88 F1 on GrailQA and MetaQA, respectively. We further find that performance of BYOKG reliably improves with continued exploration as well as improvements in the base LLM, notably outperforming a state-of-the-art fine-tuned model by 7.08 F1 on a sub-sampled zero-shot split of GrailQA. Lastly, we verify our universality claim by evaluating BYOKG on a domain-specific materials science KG and show that it improves zero-shot performance by 46.33 F1.

Bring Your Own KG: Self-Supervised Program Synthesis for Zero-Shot KGQA

Most benchmarks designed for question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) operate with the i.i.d. assumption where one encounters the same schema items during inference as those observed during training. Recently, the GrailQA dataset was established to evaluate zero-shot generalization capabilities of KBQA models as a departure from the i.i.d. assumption. Reasonable performance of current KBQA systems on the zero-shot GrailQA split hints that the field might be moving towards more generalizable systems. In this work, we observe a bias in the GrailQA dataset towards simpler one or two-hop questions, which results in an inaccurate assessment of the aforementioned prowess. We propose GrailQA++, a challenging zero-shot KBQA test set that contains more questions relying on complex reasoning. We leverage the concept of graph isomorphisms to control the complexity of the questions and to ensure that our proposed test set has a fair distribution of simple and complex questions. Existing KBQA models suffer a substantial drop in performance on our constructed new test set as compared to the GrailQA zero-shot split. Our analysis reveals how isomorphisms can be used to understand the complementary strengths of different KBQA models and provide a deeper insight into model mispredictions. Overall, our paper highlights the \textit{non-generalizability} of existing models and the necessity for designing more challenging benchmarks. Our dataset is available at \url{https://github.com/sopankhosla/GrailQA-PlusPlus}

GrailQA++: A Challenging Zero-Shot Benchmark for Knowledge Base Question Answering

Recent research has demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities of several Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) models on the GrailQA dataset. We inspect whether these models can generalize to other datasets in a zero-shot setting. We notice a significant drop in performance and investigate the causes for the same. We observe that the models are dependent not only on the structural complexity of the questions, but also on the linguistic styles of framing a question. Specifically, the linguistic dimensions corresponding to explicitness, readability, coherence, and grammaticality have a significant impact on the performance of state-of-the-art KBQA models. Overall our results showcase the brittleness of such models and the need for creating generalizable systems.

Exploring the Reasons for Non-generalizability of KBQA systems

Response generation is one of the critical components in task-oriented dialog systems. Existing studies have shown that large pre-trained language models can be adapted to this task. The typical paradigm of adapting such extremely large language models would be by fine-tuning on the downstream tasks which is not only time-consuming but also involves significant resources and access to fine-tuning data. Prompting (Schick and Schütze, 2020) has been an alternative to fine-tuning in many NLP tasks. In our work, we explore the idea of using prompting for response generation in task-oriented dialog systems. Specifically, we propose an approach that performs contextual dynamic prompting where the prompts are learnt from dialog contexts. We aim to distill useful prompting signals from the dialog context. On experiments with MultiWOZ 2.2 dataset (Zang et al., 2020), we show that contextual dynamic prompts improve response generation in terms of combined score (Mehri et al., 2019) by 3 absolute points, and an additional 17 points when dialog states are incorporated. Furthermore, we carried out human annotation on these conversations and found that agents which incorporate context are preferred over agents with vanilla prefix-tuning.

Contextual Dynamic Prompting for Response Generation in Task-oriented Dialog Systems

Legalese can often be filled with verbose domain-specific jargon which can make it challenging to understand and use for non-experts. Creating succinct summaries of legal documents often makes it easier for user comprehension. However, obtaining labeled data for every domain of legal text is challenging, which makes cross-domain transferability of text generation models for legal text, an important area of research. In this paper, we explore the ability of existing state-of-the-art T5 \& BART-based summarization models to transfer across legal domains. We leverage publicly available datasets across four domains for this task, one of which is a new resource for summarizing privacy policies, that we curate and release for academic research. Our experiments demonstrate the low cross-domain transferability of these models, while also highlighting the benefits of combining different domains. Further, we compare the effectiveness of standard metrics for this task and illustrate the vast differences in their performance.

Towards Cross-Domain Transferability of Text Generation Models for Legal Text

Automatic Text Summarization has seen a large paradigm shift from extractive methods to abstractive (or generation-based) methods in the last few years. This can be attributed to the availability of large autoregressive language models that have been shown to outperform extractive methods. In this work, we revisit extractive methods and study their performance against state of the art(SOTA) abstractive models. Through extensive studies, we notice that abstractive methods are not yet completely abstractive in their generated summaries. In addition to this finding, we propose an evaluation metric that could benefit the summarization research community to measure the degree of abstractiveness of a summary in comparison to their extractive counterparts. To confirm the generalizability of our findings, we conduct experiments on two summarization datasets using five powerful techniques in extractive and abstractive summarization and study their levels of abstraction.

Are Abstractive Summarization Models truly `Abstractive'? An Empirical Study to Compare the two Forms of Summarization

Task-oriented dialog systems deployed in real-world applications are often challenged by out-of-distribution queries. These systems should not only reliably detect utterances with unsupported intents (semantic shift), but also generalize to covariate shift (supported intents from unseen distributions). However, none of the existing benchmarks for open-world intent classification focus on the second aspect, thus only performing a partial evaluation of intent detection techniques. In this work, we propose two new datasets (CLINC14-COV and HWU12- COV) that include utterances useful for evaluating the robustness of open-world models to covariate shift. Along with the i.i.d. test set, both datasets contain a new cov-test set that, along with out-of-scope utterances, contains in-scope utterances sampled from different distributions not seen during training. This setting better mimics the challenges faced in real-world applications. Evaluating several open-world classifiers on the new datasets reveals that models that perform well on the test set struggle to generalize to the cov-test. Our datasets fill an important gap in the field, offering a more realistic evaluation scenario for intent classification in task-oriented dialog systems.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.3/)

Benchmarking the Covariate Shift Robustness of Open-world Intent Classification Approaches

Previous studies on question answering over knowledge graphs have typically operated over a single knowledge graph (KG). This KG is assumed to be known a priori and is lever- aged similarly for all users’ queries during inference. However, such an assumption is not applicable to real-world settings, such as health- care, where one needs to handle queries of new users over unseen KGs during inference. Furthermore, privacy concerns and high computational costs render it infeasible to query the single KG that has information about all users while answering a specific user’s query. The above concerns motivate our question answer- ing setting over personalized knowledge graphs (PERKGQA) where each user has restricted access to their KG. We observe that current state-of-the-art KGQA methods that require learning prior node representations fare poorly. We propose two complementary approaches, PATHCBR and PATHRGCN for PERKGQA. The former is a simple non-parametric technique that employs case-based reasoning, while the latter is a parametric approach using graph neural networks. Our proposed methods circumvent learning prior representations, can generalize to unseen KGs, and outperform strong baselines on an academic and an internal dataset by 6.5% and 10.5%.

PerKGQA: Question Answering over Personalized Knowledge Graphs

Users often leave feedback on a myriad of aspects of a product which, if leveraged successfully, can help yield useful insights that can lead to further improvements down the line. Detecting actionable insights can be challenging owing to large amounts of data as well as the absence of labels in real-world scenarios. In this work, we present an aggregation and graph-based ranking strategy for unsupervised detection of these insights from real-world, noisy, user-generated feedback. Our proposed approach significantly outperforms strong baselines on two real-world user feedback datasets and one academic dataset.

What Do Users Care About? Detecting Actionable Insights from User Feedback

Previous studies on question answering over knowledge graphs have typically operated over a single knowledge graph (KG). This KG is assumed to be known a priori and is leveraged similarly for all users' queries during inference. However, such an assumption is not applicable to real-world settings, such as healthcare, where one needs to handle queries of new users over unseen KGs during inference. Furthermore, privacy concerns and high computational cost render it infeasible to query the single KG that has information of all users while answering a specific user's query. This motivates our setting of question answering over personalized knowledge graphs PerKGQA where each user has restricted access to their own KG. We observe that current state-of-the-art KGQA methods that require learning prior node representations fare poorly. We propose two complementary approaches, PathCBR and PathRGCN, to tackle PerKGQA The former is a simple non-parametric technique that employs case-based reasoning, while the latter is a parametric approach using graph neural networks. Our proposed methods circumvent learning prior representations, can generalize to unseen KGs, and outperform strong baselines on an academic and an internal dataset by 6.5% and 10.5%.

PERKGQA: Question Answering over Personalized Knowledge Graphs

This poster session includes Findings posters and Demos from the following areas: 
Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics • Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP • Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics • Machine Learning for NLP • Machine Translation • Multilinguality and Language Diversity • Multimodality and Language Grounding to Vision, Robotics and Beyond • Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation • Question Answering • Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining • Summarization

In-Person Poster Session 7

poster

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

To access the event page you need to register [**here.**](http://acl.swoogo.com/naacl2024) 
Your access to the event page is limited based on your registration type. If you registered for workshops only, you will gain access to full workshops content on the day of the workshops program.

Please register!

NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Session 1B: Question Answering

technical paper

### 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/)

IJCNLP-AACL 2023

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

**Organizers:** Shabnam Tafreshi, University of Maryland: ARLIS; Arjun Reddy Akula, Google; João Sedoc, New York University; Anna Rogers, University of Copenhagen; Aleksandr Drozd, RIKEN; Anna Rumshisky, University of Massachusetts Lowell / Amazon Alexa For more details, please visit our [workshop website](https://insights-workshop.github.io/))

Fourth Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP

workshop paper

### Welcome to the 17th 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 had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. 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.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

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 Session 5

**Chairs:** Ilias Chalkidis, Nikolaos Aletras, Leslie Barrett, Catalina Goanta, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, Catalina Goanta and Leslie Barrett **Organizers:** Nikolaos Aletras, Ilias Chalkidis, Leslie Barrett, Cătălina Goanță and Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro Please visit our [**website**](https://nllpw.org/) for more information and detailed schedule.

**RocketChat channel for this workshop:** https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/channel/workshop-21-nllp

W21 (NLLP) The Fourth Workshop on Natural Legal Language Processing

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/a3db7a768409f05192210d98601edb25.png)](https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/)

To access this site you need to register. Please register [here](https://2022.emnlp.org/registration/).

Register here

EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/26c36e70b5f083b72ae632cbdcc2b5b1.png)](https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/play/jnnjarGDmiQJRrCaHkOGb1I42O5csAJ1LpkxhdEx0yyKShWdDbydaLcEXGgp1hDxfAEULNnaSc3WXGUX.pdpXB3VxNP0wugam?autoplay=true&startTime=1670428143000) 

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/7e41b6370eefd82b0bf5eb67e35a574b.png)](https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/play/4hetiYPKWio8m-ge5MbRPazwzlU-yH34oWv66G4udQ26iuVuMfqHa-eVqxaWF5plloGJwODhFNHYtY5a.HQSebYGq6Va0PqaI?autoplay=true&startTime=1670360978000) 

**Chair:** Jekaterina Novikova **Organizers:** Antoine Bosselut, Khyathi Chandu, Kaustubh Dhole, Varun Gangal, Sebastian Gehrmann, Yacine Jernite, Jekaterina Novikova and Laura Perez-Beltrachini Please visit our [**website**](https://gem-benchmark.com/workshop) for more information and detailed schedule.

**RocketChat channel for this workshop:** https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/channel/workshop-5-gem

W5 (GEM) Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics

**Session Chair:**
 Mamoru Komachi

Session 1E: Resources and Evaluation

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP).

A registration is required to access this event. Access to the event site will be granted to all registered attendees on **November 16th**. If you have not already done so, please register using the link below:
 
 https://conference.iis.sinica.edu.tw/servlet/Register?ConferenceID=411

Registration Is Required

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

9F: Findings In-person Poster Session 1

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

6G: Industry/Demo Poster Session

**Organizers:** Dung Thai, Manzil Zaheer, Patrick Lewis, Rajarshi Das, Sewon Min
 **Description:** Large parametric language models have achieved dramatic empirical success across many applications. However, these
models lack several desirable properties such as explainability (providing provenance), privacy (ability to remove knowledge from the model), robust controllability, and debuggability. On the other hand, nonparametric models provide many
of these features by design such as provenance, ability to incorporate/remove information. However, these models often
suffer from weaker empirical performance as compared to deep parametric models. Recently, many works have independently proposed a middle ground that combines a parametric model (that encodes logic) with a nonparametric model
(that retrieves knowledge) in various areas from question answering over natural languages to complex reasoning over
knowledge bases to even protein structure predictions. Given the increasingly promising results on various tasks of such
semiparametric model, we believe this area is ripe for targeted investigation on understanding efficiency, generalization,
limitations, widening its applicability, etc. As a result, we want to host a workshop on this topic. 
 **Please visit our [website](http://www.semiparametric.ml/)**

(SPA-NLP) Semiparametric Methods in NLP: Decoupling Logic from Knowledge

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

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 (NLP). 

Rashmi Gangadharaiah

10

8

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Bring Your Own KG: Self-Supervised Program Synthesis for Zero-Shot KGQA

GrailQA++: A Challenging Zero-Shot Benchmark for Knowledge Base Question Answering

Exploring the Reasons for Non-generalizability of KBQA systems

Contextual Dynamic Prompting for Response Generation in Task-oriented Dialog Systems

Towards Cross-Domain Transferability of Text Generation Models for Legal Text

Are Abstractive Summarization Models truly `Abstractive'? An Empirical Study to Compare the two Forms of Summarization

Benchmarking the Covariate Shift Robustness of Open-world Intent Classification Approaches

PerKGQA: Question Answering over Personalized Knowledge Graphs

What Do Users Care About? Detecting Actionable Insights from User Feedback

PERKGQA: Question Answering over Personalized Knowledge Graphs

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES