Inference, especially those derived from inductive processes, is a crucial component in our conversation to complement the information implicitly or explicitly conveyed by a speaker. 
While recent large language models show remarkable advances in inference tasks, their performance in inductive reasoning, where not all information is present in the context, is far behind deductive reasoning. 
In this paper, we analyze the behavior of the models based on the task difficulty defined by the semantic information gap -- which distinguishes inductive and deductive reasoning. 
Our analysis reveals that the information gap between dialogue contexts and desired inferences renders the inductive inference process more challenging. 
To mitigate this information gap, we investigate a contrastive learning approach by feeding negative samples.
Our experiments suggest negative samples help models understand what is wrong and improve their inference generations.

Contrastive Learning for Inference in Dialogue | VIDEO

To diversify and enrich generated dialogue responses, knowledge-grounded dialogue has been investigated in recent years. The existing methods tackle the knowledge grounding challenge by retrieving the relevant sentences over a large corpus and augmenting the dialogues with explicit extra information. Despite their success, however, the existing works have drawbacks in inference efficiency. This paper proposes KnowExpert, a framework to bypass the explicit retrieval process and inject knowledge into the pre-trained language models with lightweight adapters and adapt to the knowledge-grounded dialogue task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle this challenge without retrieval in this task under an open-domain chit-chat scenario. The experimental results show that Knowexpert performs comparably with some retrieval-based baselines while being time-efficient in inference, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Retrieval-Free Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Response Generation with Adapters

Question rewriting (QR) is a subtask of conversational question answering (CQA) aiming to ease the challenges of understanding dependencies among dialogue history by reformulating questions in a self-contained form. Despite seeming plausible, little evidence is available to justify QR as a mitigation method for CQA. To verify the effectiveness of QR in CQA, we investigate a reinforcement learning approach that integrates QR and CQA tasks and does not require corresponding QR datasets for targeted CQA. We find, however, that the RL method is on par with the end-to-end baseline. We provide an analysis of the failure and describe the difficulty of exploiting QR for CQA.

Can Question Rewriting Help Conversational Question Answering?

Resolving dependencies among dialogue history is one of the main obstacles in the research on conversational question answering (CQA). The conversational question rewrites (QR) task has been shown to be effective to solve this problem by reformulating questions in a self-contained form. However, QR datasets are limited and existing methods tend to depend on the assumption of the existence of corresponding QR datasets for every CQA dataset.
This paper proposes a reinforcement learning approach that integrates QR and CQA tasks without corresponding labeled QR datasets. We train a QR model based on the reward signal obtained from the CQA, and the experimental results show that our approach can bring improvement over the pipeline approaches.

 Integrating Question Rewrites in Conversational Question Answering: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

We introduce data augmentation methods to utilize pretrained language models for information-seeking dialogue system. We adopt Question Answering datasets for Knowledge Identification (KI) stage, and Knowledge Grounded Dialogue datasets for Response Generation (RG) stage. Our work highlights the effectiveness of data augmentation methods and potential for practical applications.

CAiRE in DialDoc21: Data Augmentation for Information-Seeking Dialogue System

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**Are you attending this poster session in person?** 
Hybrid posters are displayed in the East Foyer.

PS1 (In-person) Posters, Demo, Industry, Findings

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

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023

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

**Organizers:** Song Feng, Chengguang Tang, Svitlana Vakulenko, Hui Wan, Zeqiu (Ellen) Wu, Caixia Yuan **Description:** DialDoc Workshop focuses on document-grounded dialogue and conversational question answering. There is a vast
amount of document content created every day by human writers to communicate with human readers for sharing knowledge, ranging from encyclopedias to social benefits. Making the document content accessible to users via conversational
systems and scaling it to various domains could be a meaningful yet challenging task. There are significant individual research threads that show promise in handling heterogeous knowledge embedded in documents for building conversational
systems, including (1) unstructured content, such as text passages; (2) semi-structured content, such as tables or lists; (3)
multi-modal content, such as images and videos along with text descriptions, and so on. The purpose of this workshop is
to invite researchers and practitioners to bring their individual perspectives on the subject of document-grounded dialogue
and conversational question answering to advance the field in a joint effort. 
**Please visit our [website](https://doc2dial.github.io/workshop2022/)**

(DialDoc)        2nd DialDoc workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering

workshop paper

# 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). 

**Organizers:** Shabnam Tafresh, João Sedoc, Anna Rogers, Aleksandr Drozd, Anna Rumshisky
 **Description:** Publication of negative results is difficult in most fields, but in NLP the problem is exacerbated by the near-universal
focus on improvements in benchmarks. This situation implicitly discourages hypothesis-driven research, and it turns
creation and fine-tuning of NLP models into art rather than science. Furthermore, it increases the time, effort, and carbon
emissions spent on developing and tuning models, as the researchers have no opportunity to learn what has already been
tried and failed. This workshop invites both practical and theoretical unexpected or negative results that have important
implications for future research, highlight methodological issues with existing approaches, and/or point out pervasive
misunderstandings or bad practices. In particular, the most successful NLP models currently rely on different kinds of
pretrained meaning representations (from word embeddings to Transformer-based models like BERT). To complement all
the success stories, it would be insightful to see where and possibly why they fail. Any NLP tasks are welcome: sequence
labeling, question answering, inference, dialogue, machine translation - you name it.
 
**Please visit our [website](https://insights-workshop.github.io/index)**

(Negative Results) The Third Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP

Posters: Dialogue and Interactive Systems

Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational QA

**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).

Etsuko Ishii

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SHORT BIO

Presentations

Contrastive Learning for Inference in Dialogue | VIDEO

Retrieval-Free Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Response Generation with Adapters

Can Question Rewriting Help Conversational Question Answering?

Integrating Question Rewrites in Conversational Question Answering: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

CAiRE in DialDoc21: Data Augmentation for Information-Seeking Dialogue System

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