The propensity of abstractive summarization models to make factual errors has been studied extensively, including design of metrics to detect factual errors and annotation of errors in current systems' outputs. However, the ever-evolving nature of summarization systems, metrics, and annotated benchmarks makes factuality evaluation a moving target, and drawing clear comparisons among metrics has become increasingly difficult. In this work, we aggregate factuality error annotations from nine existing datasets and stratify them according to the underlying summarization model. We compare performance of state-of-the-art factuality metrics, including recent ChatGPT-based metrics, on this stratified benchmark and show that their performance varies significantly across different types of summarization models. Critically, our analysis shows that much of the recent improvement in the factuality detection space has been on summaries from older (pre-Transformer) models instead of more relevant recent summarization models. We further perform a finer-grained analysis per error-type and find similar performance variance across error types for different factuality metrics. Our results show that no one metric is superior in all settings or for all error types, and we provide recommendations for best practices given these insights.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/qQ87ZDnDYN6cfmCQWHFaok/embed/polls/ff2340f5-0b87-4485-8fa0-121a6dee7b97" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Understanding Factual Errors in Summarization: Errors, Summarizers, Datasets, Error Detectors

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in following natural language instructions to solve unseen tasks. However, it remains unclear whether models truly understand task definitions and whether the human-written definitions are optimal. In this paper, we systematically study the role of task definitions in instruction learning. We first conduct an ablation analysis informed by human annotations to understand which parts of a task definition are most important, and find that model performance only drops substantially when removing contents describing the task output, in particular label information. Next, we propose an automatic algorithm to compress task definitions to a minimal supporting set of tokens, and find that 60\% of tokens can be removed while maintaining or even improving model performance. Based on these results, we propose two strategies to help models better leverage task instructions: (1) providing only key information for tasks in a common structured format, and (2) adding a meta-tuning stage to help the model better understand the definitions. With these two strategies, we achieve a 4.2 Rouge-L improvement over 119 unseen test tasks.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/982af804-3b12-4f08-95bf-e2c17bf8d011" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Did You Read the Instructions? Rethinking the Effectiveness of Task Definitions in Instruction Learning

Precisely assessing the progress in natural language generation (NLG) tasks is challenging, and human evaluation to establish a preference in a model's output over another is often necessary.
However, human evaluation is usually costly, difficult to reproduce, and non-reusable.
In this paper, we propose a new and simple automatic evaluation method for NLG called Near-Negative Distinction (NND) that repurposes prior human annotations into NND tests.
In an NND test, an NLG model must place a higher likelihood on a high-quality output candidate than on a near-negative candidate with a known error.
Model performance is established by the number of NND tests a model passes, as well as the distribution over task-specific errors the model fails on.
Through experiments on three NLG tasks (question generation, question answering, and summarization), we show that NND achieves a higher correlation with human judgments than standard NLG evaluation metrics. We then illustrate NND evaluation in four practical scenarios, for example performing fine-grain model analysis, or studying model training dynamics. Our findings suggest that NND can give a second life to human annotations and provide low-cost NLG evaluation.

Near-Negative Distinction: Giving a Second Life to Human Evaluation Datasets

There are many potential benefits to news readers accessing diverse sources. Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing the news, offering readers a plethora of source options, but choosing which source to read remains challenging. We propose a new framework to assist readers in identifying source differences and gaining an understanding of news coverage diversity. The framework is based on the generation of Discord Questions: questions with a diverse answer pool, explicitly illustrating source differences. To assemble a prototype of the framework, we focus on two components: (1) discord question generation, the task of generating questions answered differently by sources, for which we propose an automatic scoring method, and create a model that improves performance from current question generation (QG) methods by 5%, (2) answer consolidation, the task of grouping answers to a question that are semantically similar, for which we collect data and repurpose a method that achieves 81% balanced accuracy on our realistic test set. We illustrate the framework's feasibility through a prototype interface. Even though model performance at discord QG still lags human performance by more than 15%, generated questions are judged to be more interesting than factoid questions and can reveal differences in the level of detail, sentiment, and reasoning of sources in news coverage. Code is available at https://github.com/Salesforce/discord_questions.

Discord Questions: A Computational Approach To Diversity Analysis in News Coverage

Quiz Design Task: Helping Teachers Create Quizzes with Automated Question Generation

There are many potential benefits to news readers accessing diverse sources. Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing the news, offering readers a plethora of source options, but choosing which source to read remains challenging.
We propose a new framework to assist readers in identifying source differences and gaining an understanding of news coverage diversity.
The framework is based on the generation of Discord Questions: questions with a diverse answer pool, explicitly illustrating source differences.
To assemble a prototype of the framework, we focus on two components: (1) discord question generation, the task of generating questions answered differently by sources, for which we propose an automatic scoring method, and create a model that improves performance from current question generation (QG) methods by 5%, (2) answer consolidation, the task of grouping answers to a question that are semantically similar, for which we collect data and repurpose a method that achieves 81% balanced accuracy on our realistic test set.
We illustrate the framework's feasibility through a prototype interface. Even though model performance at discord QG still lags human performance by more than 15%, generated questions are judged to be more interesting than factoid questions and can reveal differences in the level of detail, sentiment, and reasoning of sources in news coverage. Code is available at https://github.com/Salesforce/discord_questions.

Poster Session 6

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.

Poster Session 1

O21 Resources and Evaluation 2

technical paper

## 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

workshop paper


**Tracks:** 
* Computational Social Science and Cultural Analytics
* Ethics, Bias, and Fairness
* Human-Centered NLP
* Semantics: Sentence-level Semantics and Textual Inference



Virtual PS3 - 7G: Group 10

## 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

Philippe Laban

6

6

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Understanding Factual Errors in Summarization: Errors, Summarizers, Datasets, Error Detectors

Did You Read the Instructions? Rethinking the Effectiveness of Task Definitions in Instruction Learning

Near-Negative Distinction: Giving a Second Life to Human Evaluation Datasets

Discord Questions: A Computational Approach To Diversity Analysis in News Coverage

Quiz Design Task: Helping Teachers Create Quizzes with Automated Question Generation

Discord Questions: A Computational Approach To Diversity Analysis in News Coverage

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES