Neural reasoning accuracy improves when generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, the source of this improvement is yet unclear.
Here, we investigate and factorize the benefit of generating intermediate steps for symbolic reasoning.
Specifically, we decompose the reasoning strategy w.r.t. step granularity and chaining strategy. 
With a purely symbolic numerical reasoning dataset (e.g., A=1, B=3, C=A+3, C?), we found that the choice of reasoning strategies significantly affects the performance, with the gap becoming even larger as the extrapolation length becomes longer.
Surprisingly, we also found that certain configurations lead to nearly perfect performance, even in the case of length extrapolation.
Our results indicate the importance of further exploring effective strategies for neural reasoning models.

Empirical Investigation of Neural Symbolic Reasoning Strategies

Language models (LMs) have been used in cognitive modeling as well as engineering studies---they compute information-theoretic complexity metrics that simulate humans' cognitive load during reading.
This study highlights a limitation of modern neural LMs as the model of choice for this purpose: there is a discrepancy between their context access capacities and that of humans.
Our results showed that constraining the LMs' context access improved their simulation of human reading behavior.
We also showed that LM-human gaps in context access were associated with specific syntactic constructions; incorporating syntactic biases into LMs' context access might enhance their cognitive plausibility.

Context Limitations Make Neural Language Models More Human-Like

Recent studies have reported that neural reasoning improves its accuracy when generating the intermediate reasoning steps. However, it is yet unclear what factors lead to such benefits.
We investigate and factorize the benefit of generating intermediate steps for symbolic reasoning.
Specifically, we decomposed the reasoning strategy regarding step granularity and chaining strategy. 
With a purely symbolic numerical reasoning dataset (e.g., A=1, B=3, C=A+3, C?), we found that the choice of reasoning strategies significantly affects the performance, with the gap becoming even larger as the extrapolation length becomes longer.
Surprisingly, we also found that certain configurations lead to nearly perfect performance, even in the case of length extrapolation.
Our results indicate the importance of further exploring effective strategies for neural reasoning models.

Humans use different wordings depending on the context to facilitate efficient communication.
For example, instead of completely new information, information related to the preceding context is typically placed at the sentence-initial position.
In this study, we analyze whether neural language models (LMs) can capture such discourse-level preferences in text generation.
Specifically, we focus on a particular aspect of discourse, namely the topic-comment structure.
To analyze the linguistic knowledge of LMs separately, we chose the Japanese language, a topic-prominent language, for designing probing tasks, and we created human topicalization judgment data by crowdsourcing.
Our experimental results suggest that LMs have different generalizations from humans; LMs exhibited less context-dependent behaviors toward topicalization judgment.
These results highlight the need for the additional inductive biases to guide LMs to achieve successful discourse-level generalization.

Topicalization in Language Models: A Case Study on Japanese

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing ﬁeld. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only composed of the multi-head attention; other components can also contribute to Transformers’ progressive performance. In this study, we extended the scope of the analysis of Transformers from solely the attention patterns to the whole attention block, i.e., multi-head attention, residual connection, and layer normalization. Our analysis of Transformer-based masked language models shows that the token-to-token interaction performed via attention has less impact on the intermediate representations than previously assumed. These results provide new intuitive explanations of existing reports; for example, discarding the learned attention patterns tends not to adversely affect the performance. The codes of our experiments are publicly available.

Incorporating Residual and Normalization Layers into Analysis of Masked Language Models

In computational psycholinguistics, various language models have been evaluated against human reading behavior (e.g., eye movement) to build human-like computational models. However, most previous efforts have focused almost exclusively on English, despite the recent trend towards linguistic universal within the general community. In order to fill the gap, this paper investigates whether the established results in computational psycholinguistics can be generalized across languages. Specifically, we re-examine an established generalization ---\textit{the lower perplexity a language model has, the more human-like the language model is}--- in Japanese with typologically different structures from English. Our experiments demonstrate that this established generalization exhibits a surprising lack of universality; namely, lower perplexity is not always human-like. Moreover, this discrepancy between English and Japanese is further explored from the perspective of (non-)uniform information density. Overall, our results suggest that a cross-lingual evaluation will be necessary to construct human-like computational models.

Lower Perplexity is Not Always Human-Like

Human-like syntactic generalization abilities of neural language models (LMs) have received wide attention, but discourse-level knowledge in these models has been less explored. In this study, we analyze the LMs with respect to a particular aspect of discourse, topic-comment structure, a crucial part of text production. To separately analyze the knowledge of LMs on topic-comment structure, we chose the Japanese language, a topic-prominent language, for designing probing tasks. Experimental results suggest that LMs have different generalizations from humans in terms of the topic-comment structure. These results imply that LMs do not perform human-like discourse processing in text generation.

Please feel free to view the Findings papers at your convenience. You are welcome to leave your comment or a question in the Chat box.

Findings

findings / work in progress

### 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.

**Topics:** Commonsense Reasoning 
Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics 
Dialogue and Interactive Systems 
Discourse and Pragmatics 
Efficient Methods for NLP 
Information Extraction 
Information Retrieval and Text Mining 
Interpretability, Interactivity and Analysis of Models for NLP 
Language Modeling and Analysis of Language Models 
Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics 
Machine Translation 
Multilinguality 
NLP Applications 
NLP Applications (CL) 
NLP Applications / Other (CL)

Poster Session 7

poster

## 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.

**Workshop Organizers:**
 Hanqi Yan, Zonghan Yang, Xiaojun Wan, and Sebastian Ruder

Student Research Workshop

workshop paper

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). 

This is an in-person poster sessions. If you are a virtual attendee you can browse the posters below and ask questions in the QA box next to the poster **Chair:** Jeska Buhmann

PS1 - Discourse and Pragmatics

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Virtual Poster Session I: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP

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.

<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/ceby/" seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>

Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

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.

**Session Chair: **Leila Arras 
**In Person Volunteer:** Daryna Dementieva 
** Remote Volunteer:** Ayush Kaushal

5F: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP 2

technical paper

Poster 3B: Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

**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).

Tatsuki Kuribayashi

8

40

SHORT BIO

OTHER AFFILIATIONS

Presentations

Empirical Investigation of Neural Symbolic Reasoning Strategies

Context Limitations Make Neural Language Models More Human-Like

Empirical Investigation of Neural Symbolic Reasoning Strategies

Topicalization in Language Models: A Case Study on Japanese

Incorporating Residual and Normalization Layers into Analysis of Masked Language Models

Incorporating Residual and Normalization Layers into Analysis of Masked Language Models

Lower Perplexity is Not Always Human-Like

Topicalization in Language Models: A Case Study on Japanese

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

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