We introduce ART, a new corpus-level autoencoding approach for training dense retrieval models that does not require any labeled training data. Dense retrieval is a central challenge for open-domain tasks, such as Open QA, where state-of-the-art methods typically require large supervised datasets with custom hard-negative mining and denoising of positive examples. ART, in contrast, only requires access to unpaired inputs and outputs (e.g. questions and potential answer passages). It uses a new passage retrieval autoencoding scheme, where (1) an input question is used to retrieve a set of evidence passages, and (2) the passages are then used to compute the probability of reconstructing the original question. Training for retrieval based on question reconstruction enables effective unsupervised learning of both passage and question encoders, which can be later incorporated into complete Open QA systems without any further finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ART obtains state-of-the-art results on multiple QA retrieval benchmarks with only generic initialization from a pretrained language model, removing the need for labeled data and task-specific losses.

Questions Are All You Need to Train a Dense Passage Retriever

Federated Optimization in NLP

It is often challenging to solve a complex problem from scratch, but much easier if we can access other similar problems with their solutions --- a paradigm known as case-based reasoning (CBR). We propose a neuro-symbolic CBR approach (\alg) for question answering over large knowledge bases. CBR-KBQA consists of a nonparametric memory that stores cases (question and logical forms) and a parametric model that can generate a logical form for a new question by retrieving cases that are relevant to it. On several KBQA datasets that contain complex questions, CBR-KBQA achieves competitive performance. For example, on the CWQ dataset, CBR-KBQA outperforms the current state of the art by 11\% on accuracy. Furthermore, we show that CBR-KBQA is capable of using new cases \emph{without} any further training: by incorporating a few human-labeled examples in the case memory, CBR-KBQA is able to successfully generate logical forms containing unseen KB entities as well as relations.

Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases

State of the art end-to-end coreference resolution models use expensive span representations and antecedent prediction mechanisms. These approaches are expensive both in terms of their memory requirements as well as compute time, and are particularly ill-suited for long documents. In this paper, we propose an approximation to end-to-end models which scales gracefully to documents of any length. Replacing span representations with token representations, we reduce the time/memory complexity via token windows and nearest neighbor sparsification methods for more efficient antecedent prediction. We show our approach's resulting reduction of training and inference time compared to state-of-the-art methods with only a minimal loss in accuracy.

Scaling Within Document Coreference to Long Texts

Hierarchical clustering is a critical task in numerous domains. Many approaches are based on heuristics and the properties of the resulting clusterings are studied post hoc. However, in several applications, there is a natural cost function that can be used to characterize the quality of the clustering. In those cases, hierarchical clustering can be seen as a combinatorial optimization problem. To that end, we introduce a new approach based on A* search. We overcome the prohibitively large search space by combining A* with a novel trellis data structure. This results in an exact algorithm that scales beyond previous state of the art (from search space with 10^12 trees to 10^15 trees) and an approximate algorithm that improves over baselines, even in enormous search spaces (that contain more than 10^1000 trees). Empirically we demonstrate that our method achieves substantially higher quality results than baselines for a particle physics use case and other clustering benchmarks. We describe how our method provides significantly improved theoretical bounds on the time and space complexity of A* for clustering.

Exact and Approximate Hierarchical Clustering Using A*

Current commonsense reasoning research focuses on developing models that use commonsense knowledge to answer multiple-choice questions. However, systems designed to answer multiple-choice questions may not be useful in applications that do not provide a small list of candidate answers to choose from. As a step towards making commonsense reasoning research more realistic and useful, we propose to study open-ended commonsense reasoning (OpenCSR) — the task of answering a commonsense question without any pre-defined choices — using as a resource only a knowledge corpus of commonsense facts written in natural language. OpenCSR is challenging due to a large decision space, and because many questions require implicit multi-hop reasoning. As an approach to OpenCSR, we propose DRFACT, an efficient Differentiable model for multi-hop Reasoning over knowledge Facts. To evaluate OpenCSR methods, we adapt three popular multiple-choice datasets and collect multiple new answers to each test question via crowd-sourcing. Experiments show that DrFact outperforms strong baseline methods by a large margin.

Differentiable Open-Ended Commonsense Reasoning

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.

**Organizers:** Bill Yuchen Lin, Chaoyang He, Ninareh Mehrabi, Tian Li, Chulin Xie, Fatemehsadat
Mireshghallah, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Xiang Ren
 **Description:** Due to increasing concerns and regulations about data privacy (e.g., General Data Protection Regulation), coupled with the
growing computational power of edge devices, emerging data from realistic users have become much more fragmented, forming distributed private datasets across different clients (i.e., organizations or personal devices). Respecting users’
privacy and restricted by these regulations, we have to assume that users’ data in a client are not allowed to transfer to
a centralized server or other clients. For example, a hospital does not want to share its private data (e.g., conversations,
questions asked on its website/app) with other hospitals. This is despite the fact that models trained by a centralized
dataset (i.e., combining data from all clients) usually enjoy better performance on downstream tasks (e.g., dialogue,
question answering). Therefore, it is of vital importance to study NLP problems in such a scenario, where data are
distributed across different isolated organizations or remote devices and cannot be shared for privacy concerns **Please visit our [website](https://fl4nlp.github.io/)**

(FL4NLP 2022) Workshop on Federated Learning for Natural Language Processing (FL4NLP 2022)

keynote

# 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). 

Virtual Poster Session II: Question Answering

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: **Jonathan Berant 
**In Person Volunteer:** Dheeraj Mekala 
** Remote Volunteer:** Chenglei Si

8B: Question Answering 3

technical paper

Findings Papers - Discourse and Pragmatics

**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).

**Session Chair**: Ashish Sabharwal
 
 
**ID // Presenter // Live Discussant** 
405 // Feras Saad // Saquib Hashmi 
713 // Aaron Schein // Jaivardhan Kapoor 
770 Nicholas Monath // Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay 
841 Boyan Beronov // Samuel Hakansson

Dimensionality Reduction

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

The 37th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2021) is held fully online. We have an exciting program consisting of keynote talks by [Susan Murphy](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=A), [Eric Horvitz](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=B), [Lenka Zdeborová](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=C), [Judea Pearl](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=D) and [Ankur Moitra](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=E), a town hall meeting, peer-reviewed papers, and three workshops. The main conference is single-track and each paper is show-cased with a live component (either a live discussion and Q&A, or a live lightning talk). All papers are also featured in video presentations and in poster sessions in gather.town. The three parallel workshops on Friday allow for smaller meetings on current topics.

The walkthrough video below shows how you can navigate this site and use the different possibilities for interaction: UAIsland2021 on gather.town for posters and social interactions, the mementor platform for virtual mentoring sessions, and the chat and Q&A systems for discussions about talks and posters.

Have a great UAI 2021! 
 
 Cassio de Campos and Marloes Maathuis
 UAI 2021 Program Chairs
 uai2021programchairs@gmail.com

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 <iframe src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cri0lsViAGK?v=6&ff=1&title=0&controls=1" width=526 height=226 frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"> </iframe>
</figure>

A ticket is required to access this conference. Please use the provided link to register for the event.

https://auai.org/uai2021/registration

UAI 2021

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

**Session Chair: ** Marek Rei

13B-Oral: Question Answering

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

**Whova App** 
Stay in touch with your fellow conference attendees via the [Whova App](https://whova.com/portal/webapp/nacon_202106/)

**Conference Structure**
https://2021.naacl.org/blog/conference-structure/

**Walkthrough video of how to NAACL 2021** 

Please take a moment to view this video explaining how to navigate the platform, attend sessions network with other attendees. 


<figure class="video_container">
 <iframe src="https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/crhwbGVh3vx?v=6&ff=1&title=0&controls=1" width=640 height=350 frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"> </iframe>
</figure>

Manzil Zaheer

7

32

Presentations

Questions Are All You Need to Train a Dense Passage Retriever

Federated Optimization in NLP

Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases

Case-based Reasoning for Natural Language Queries over Knowledge Bases

Scaling Within Document Coreference to Long Texts

Exact and Approximate Hierarchical Clustering Using A*

Differentiable Open-Ended Commonsense Reasoning

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