In the wake of responsible AI, interpretability methods, which attempt to provide an explanation for the predictions of neural models have seen rapid progress. In this work, we are concerned with explanations that are applicable to natural language processing (NLP) models and tasks, and we focus specifically on the analysis of counterfactual, contrastive explanations. We note that while there have been several explainers proposed to produce counterfactual explanations, their behaviour can vary significantly and the lack of a universal ground truth for the counterfactual edits imposes an insuperable barrier on their evaluation. We propose a new back translation-inspired evaluation methodology that utilises earlier outputs of the explainer as ground truth proxies to investigate the consistency of explainers. We show that by iteratively feeding the counterfactual to the explainer we can obtain valuable insights into the behaviour of both the predictor and the explainer models, and infer patterns that would be otherwise obscured. Using this methodology, we conduct a thorough analysis and propose a novel metric to evaluate the consistency of counterfactual generation approaches with different characteristics across available performance indicators.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/b07bf2b4-5686-4b6d-acc6-b42e85725a9d" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Counterfactuals of Counterfactuals: a back-translation-inspired approach to analyse counterfactual editors

Trainable evaluation metrics for machine translation (MT) exhibit strong correlation with human judgements, but they are often hard to interpret and might produce unreliable scores 
under noisy or out-of-domain data. 
Recent work has attempted to mitigate this with simple uncertainty quantification techniques (Monte Carlo dropout and deep ensembles), however these techniques (as we show) are limited in several ways – for example, they are unable to distinguish between different kinds of uncertainty, and they are time and memory consuming. 
In this paper, we propose more powerful and efficient uncertainty predictors for MT evaluation, and we assess their ability to target different sources of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. 
To this end, we develop and compare training objectives for the COMET metric to enhance it with an uncertainty prediction output, including heteroscedastic regression, divergence minimization, and direct uncertainty prediction.
Our experiments show improved results on uncertainty prediction for the WMT metrics task datasets, with a substantial reduction in computational costs. Moreover, they demonstrate the ability of these predictors to address specific uncertainty causes in MT evaluation, such as low quality references and 
out-of-domain data.

Disentangling Uncertainty in Machine Translation Evaluation

Negation and uncertainty modeling are longstanding tasks in natural language processing. Linguistic theory postulates that expressions of negation and uncertainty are semantically independent from each other and the content they modify. However, previous works on representation learning do not explicitly model this independence. We therefore attempt to disentangle the representations of negation, uncertainty, and content using a Variational Autoencoder.
We find that simply supervising the latent representations results in good disentanglement, but auxiliary objectives based on adversarial learning and mutual information minimization can provide additional disentanglement gains.

Learning Disentangled Representations of Negation and Uncertainty

Several neural-based metrics have been recently proposed to evaluate machine translation quality. However, all of them resort to point estimates, which provide limited information at segment level. This is made worse as they are trained on noisy, biased and scarce human judgements, often resulting in unreliable quality predictions.
In this paper, we introduce uncertainty-aware MT evaluation and analyze the trustworthiness of the predicted quality.
We combine the COMET framework with two uncertainty estimation methods, Monte Carlo dropout and deep ensembles, to obtain quality scores along with confidence intervals. 
We compare the performance of our uncertainty-aware MT evaluation methods across multiple language pairs from the QT21 dataset and the WMT20 metrics task, augmented with MQM annotations. We experiment with varying numbers of references and further discuss the usefulness of uncertainty-aware quality estimation (without references) to flag possibly critical translation mistakes.

Uncertainty-Aware Machine Translation Evaluation

In this paper, we present the joint contribution of Unbabel and IST to the WMT 2021 Metrics Shared Task. With this year's focus on Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) as the ground-truth human assessment, our aim was to steer COMET towards higher correlations with MQM. We do so by first pre-training on Direct Assessments and then fine-tuning on z-normalized MQM scores. In our experiments we also show that reference-free COMET models are becoming competitive with reference-based models, even outperforming the best COMET model from 2020 on this year's development data. Additionally, we present COMETinho, a lightweight COMET model that is 19x faster on CPU than the original model, while also achieving state-of-the-art correlations with MQM. Finally, in the "QE as a metric'' track, we also participated with a QE model trained using the OpenKiwi framework leveraging MQM scores and word-level annotations.

Are References Really Needed? Unbabel-IST 2021 Submission for the Metrics Shared Task

We present the joint contribution of IST and Unbabel to the WMT 2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation. Our team participated on two tasks: Direct Assessment and Post-Editing Effort, encompassing a total of 35 submissions. For all submissions, our efforts focused on training multilingual models on top of OpenKiwi predictor-estimator architecture, using pre-trained multilingual encoders combined with adapters. We further experiment with and uncertainty-related objectives and features as well as training on out-of-domain direct assessment data.

IST-Unbabel 2021 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task

We report the results of the WMT 2021 shared task on Quality Estimation, where the challenge is to predict the quality of the output of neural machine translation systems at the word and sentence levels. This edition focused on two main novel additions: (i) prediction for unseen languages, i.e. zero-shot settings, and (ii) prediction of sentences with catastrophic errors. In addition, new data was released for a number of languages, especially post-edited data. Participating teams from 19 institutions submitted altogether 1263 systems to different task variants and language pairs.

Findings of the WMT 2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation

Several neural-based metrics have been recently proposed to evaluate machine translation quality. However, all of them resort to point estimates, which provide limited information at segment level. This is made worse as they are trained on noisy, biased and scarce human judgements, often resulting in unreliable quality predictions.
In this paper, we introduce uncertainty-aware MT evaluation and analyze the trustworthiness of the predicted quality.
We combine the COMET framework with two uncertainty estimation methods, Monte Carlo dropout and deep ensembles, to obtain quality scores along with confidence intervals. 
We compare the performance of our uncertainty-aware MT evaluation methods across multiple language pairs from the QT21 dataset and the WMT20 metrics task, augmented with MQM annotations. We experiment with varying numbers of references and further discuss the usefulness of uncertainty-aware quality estimation (without references) to flag possibly critical translation mistakes.

Virtual Poster Session 3

poster

### 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.

**Topics:** Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics 
Dialogue and Interactive Systems 
Efficient Methods for NLP 
Resources and Evaluation 
Ethics 
Information Extraction 
Information Retrieval and Text Mining 
Interpretability, Interactivity and Analysis of Models for NLP 
Language Modeling and Analysis of Language Models 
Machine Learning for NLP 
Machine Translation

Poster Session 13

## 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.

Posters: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP

# 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). 



[![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pf-upload-01/u-59356/0/2021-09-18/me23j72/button_workshop-website.png)](http://www.statmt.org/wmt21/) 

W11: Sixth Conference on Machine Translation Day 1

workshop paper

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.

Chrysoula Zerva

9

12

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Counterfactuals of Counterfactuals: a back-translation-inspired approach to analyse counterfactual editors

Disentangling Uncertainty in Machine Translation Evaluation

Learning Disentangled Representations of Negation and Uncertainty

Uncertainty-Aware Machine Translation Evaluation

Are References Really Needed? Unbabel-IST 2021 Submission for the Metrics Shared Task

IST-Unbabel 2021 Submission for the Quality Estimation Shared Task

Findings of the WMT 2021 Shared Task on Quality Estimation

Uncertainty-Aware Machine Translation Evaluation

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES