mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
It`s not Sexually Suggestive; It`s Educative | Separating Sex Education from Suggestive Content on TikTok videos
Authors: Mihai Surdeanu Enfa George
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce SexTok, a multi-modal dataset composed of TikTok videos labeled as sexually suggestive (from the annotator`s point of view), sex-educational content, or neither. Such a dataset is necessary to address the challenge of distinguishing between sexually suggestive content and virtual sex education videos on TikTok. Children`s exposure to sexually suggestive videos has been shown to have adversarial effects on their development (Collins et al. 2017). Meanwhile, virtual sex education, especially on subjects that are more relevant to the LGBTQIA+ community, is very valuable (Mitchell et al. 2014). The platform`s current system removes/punishes some of both types of videos, even though they serve different purposes. Our dataset contains video URLs, and it is also audio transcribed. To validate its importance, we explore two transformer-based models for classifying the videos. Our preliminary results suggest that the task of distinguishing between these types of videos is learnable but challenging. These experiments suggest that this dataset is meaningful and invites further study on the subject.
Dynamic Structured Neural Topic Model with Self-Attention Mechanism
Authors: Masaru Isonuma, Sho Takase, Junichiro Mori, Ichiro Sakata Nozomu Miyamoto
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: This study presents a dynamic structured neural topic model, which can handle the time-series development of topics while capturing their dependencies. Our model captures the topic branching and merging processes by modeling topic dependencies based on a self-attention mechanism. Additionally, we introduce citation regularization, which induces attention weights to represent citation relations by modeling text and citations jointly. Our model outperforms a prior dynamic embedded topic model regarding perplexity and coherence, while maintaining sufficient diversity across topics. Furthermore, we confirm that our model can potentially predict emerging topics from academic literature.
Hybrid-Regressive Paradigm for Accurate and Speed-Robust Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Xinhui Hu, Ming Chen Qiang Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: This work empirically confirms that non-autoregressive translation (NAT) is less robust in decoding batch size and hardware settings than autoregressive translation (AT). To address this issue, we demonstrate that prompting a small number of AT predictions can significantly reduce the performance gap between AT and NAT through synthetic experiments. Following this line, we propose hybrid-regressive translation (HRT), a two-stage translation prototype that combines the strengths of AT and NAT. Specifically, HRT first generates discontinuous sequences via autoregression (e.g., make a prediction for every $k$ tokens, $k>1$) and then fills in all previously skipped tokens at once in a non-autoregressive manner. Experiments on five translation tasks show that HRT achieves comparable translation quality with AT while having at least 1.5x faster inference regardless of batch size and device. Additionally, HRT successfully inherits the sound characteristics of AT in the deep-encoder-shallow-decoder architecture, allowing for further speedup without BLEU loss.
Commonsense Knowledge Transfer for Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Ronan Le Bras, Yejin Choi Wangchunshu Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite serving as the foundation models for a wide range of NLP benchmarks, pre-trained language models have shown limited capabilities of acquiring implicit commonsense knowledge from self-supervision alone, compared to learning linguistic and factual knowledge that appear more explicitly in the surface patterns in text. In this work, we introduce commonsense knowledge transfer, a framework to transfer the commonsense knowledge stored in a neural commonsense knowledge model to a general-purpose pre-trained language model. It first exploits general texts to form queries for extracting commonsense knowledge from the neural commonsense knowledge model and then refines the language model with two self-supervised objectives: commonsense mask infilling and commonsense relation prediction, which align human language with the underlying commonsense knowledge. Empirical results show that our approach consistently improves the model`s performance on downstream tasks that require commonsense reasoning. Moreover, we find that the improvement is more significant in the few-shot setting. This suggests that our approach helps language models better transfer to downstream tasks without extensive supervision by injecting commonsense knowledge into their parameters.
Shielded Representations: Protecting Sensitive Attributes Through Iterative Gradient-Based Projection
Authors: Kira Radinsky, Yonatan Belinkov Shadi Iskander
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Natural language processing models tend to learn and encode social biases present in the data. One popular approach for addressing such biases is to eliminate encoded information from the model`s representations. However, current methods are restricted to removing only linearly encoded information. In this work, we propose Iterative Gradient-Based Projection (IGBP), a novel method for removing non-linear encoded concepts from neural representations. Our method consists of iteratively training neural classifiers to predict a particular attribute we seek to eliminate, followed by a projection of the representation on a hypersurface, such that the classifiers become oblivious to the target attribute. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on the task of removing gender and race information as sensitive attributes. Our results demonstrate that IGBP is effective in mitigating bias through intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations, with minimal impact on downstream task accuracy.
Focal Training and Tagger Decouple for Grammatical Error Correction
Authors: Min Yang, Ruifeng Xu Minghuan Tan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate how to improve tagging-based Grammatical Error Correction models. We address two issues of current tagging-based approaches, label imbalance issue, and tagging entanglement issue. Then we propose to down-weight the loss of well-classified labels using Focal Loss and decouple the error detection layer from the label tagging layer through an extra self-attention-based matching module. Experiments over three latest Chinese Grammatical Error Correction datasets show that our proposed methods are effective. We further analyze choices of hyper-parameters for Focal Loss and inference tweaking.
LET: Leveraging Error Type Information for Grammatical Error Correction
Authors: Hongjia Li, Lei Li, Chengyin Xu, Shutao Xia, Chun Yuan Lingyu Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Grammatical error correction (GEC) aims to correct errors in given sentences and is significant to many downstream natural language understanding tasks. Recent work introduces the idea of grammatical error detection (GED) to improve the GEC task performance. In contrast, these explicit multi-stage works propagate and amplify the problem of misclassification of the GED module. To introduce more convincing error type information, we propose an end-to-end framework in this paper, which Leverages Error Type (LET) information in the generation process. First, the input text is fed into a classification module to obtain the error type corresponding to each token. Then, we introduce the category information into the decoder`s input and cross-attention module in two ways, respectively. Experiments on various datasets show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods by a clear margin.
On the Role of Parallel Data in Cross-lingual Transfer Learning
Authors: Mikel Artetxe Machel Reid
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: While prior work has established that the use of parallel data is conducive for cross-lingual learning, it is unclear if the improvements come from the data itself, or if it is the modeling of parallel interactions that matters. Exploring this, we examine the usage of unsupervised machine translation to generate synthetic parallel data, and compare it to supervised machine translation and gold parallel data. We find that even model generated parallel data can be useful for downstream tasks, in both a general setting (continued pretraining) as well as the task-specific setting (translate-train), although our best results are still obtained using real parallel data. Our findings suggest that existing multilingual models do not exploit the full potential of monolingual data, and prompt the community to reconsider the traditional categorization of cross-lingual learning approaches.
CoMave: Contrastive Pre-training with Multi-scale Masking for Attribute Value Extraction
Authors: Wentao Deng, Yongrui Chen, Yang Li, Mengdi Zhou, Guilin Qi, Tianxing Wu, Dong Yang, Liubin Wang, Yong Pan Xinnan Guo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) aims to automatically obtain attribute value pairs from product descriptions to aid e-commerce. Despite the progressive performance of existing approaches in e-commerce platforms, they still suffer from two challenges: 1) difficulty in identifying values at different scales simultaneously; 2) easy confusion by some highly similar fine-grained attributes. This paper proposes a pre-training technique for AVE to address these issues. In particular, we first improve the conventional token-level masking strategy, guiding the language model to understand multi-scale values by recovering spans at the phrase and sentence level. Second, we apply clustering to build a challenging negative set for each example and design a pre-training objective based on contrastive learning to force the model to discriminate similar attributes. Comprehensive experiments show that our solution provides a significant improvement over traditional pre-trained models in the AVE task, and achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks.
Phrase Retrieval for Open Domain Conversational Question Answering with Conversational Dependency Modeling via Contrastive Learning
Authors: Jinheon Baek, Sung Ju Hwang, Jong Park Soyeong Jeong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Open-Domain Conversational Question Answering (ODConvQA) aims at answering questions through a multi-turn conversation based on a retriever-reader pipeline, which retrieves passages and then predicts answers with them. However, such a pipeline approach not only makes the reader vulnerable to the errors propagated from the retriever, but also demands additional effort to develop both the retriever and the reader, which further makes it slower since they are not runnable in parallel. In this work, we propose a method to directly predict answers with a phrase retrieval scheme for a sequence of words, reducing the conventional two distinct subtasks into a single one. Also, for the first time, we study its capability for ODConvQA tasks. However, simply adopting it is largely problematic, due to the dependencies between previous and current turns in a conversation. To address this problem, we further introduce a novel contrastive learning strategy, making sure to reflect previous turns when retrieving the phrase for the current context, by maximizing representational similarities of consecutive turns in a conversation while minimizing irrelevant conversational contexts. We validate our model on two ODConvQA datasets, whose experimental results show that it substantially outperforms the relevant baselines with the retriever-reader. Code is available at: r̆lhttps://github.com/starsuzi/PRO-ConvQA.
Unlearning Bias in Language Models by Partitioning Gradients
Authors: Sullam Jeoung, Anish Kasi, Pengfei Yu, Heng Ji Charles Yu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent research has shown that large-scale pretrained language models, specifically transformers, tend to exhibit issues relating to racism, sexism, religion bias, and toxicity in general. Unfortunately, these pretrained language models are used almost universally in downstream tasks, and natural language processing is often applied to make real-world predictions. Thus, debiasing these language models as early in development as possible is increasingly crucial for preventing unintentional harms caused by natural language systems. To this end, we propose a new technique called partitioned contrastive gradient unlearning (PCGU), a gray-box method for debiasing pretrained masked language models. PCGU aims to optimize only the weights that contribute most to a specific domain of bias, doing so by computing a first-order approximation based on the gradients of contrastive sentence pairs. Our experiments show that PCGU is both low-cost and seems particularly effective at pinpointing the sources of implicit social bias in large pretrained transformers. Although we train using PCGU in the gender-profession domain only, we find that doing so can also partially mitigate bias across other domains. All code for our implementation and experiments can be found at r̆lhttps://github.com/CharlesYu2000/PCGU-UnlearningBias.
Meta-training with Demonstration Retrieval for Efficient Few-shot Learning
Authors: Kanika Narang, Lambert Mathias, Qifan Wang, Hamed Firooz Aaron Mueller
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models show impressive results on few-shot NLP tasks. However, these models are memory and computation-intensive. Meta-training allows one to leverage smaller models for few-shot generalization in a domain-general and task-agnostic manner; however, these methods alone results in models that may not have sufficient parameterization or knowledge to adapt quickly to a large variety of tasks. To overcome this issue, we propose meta-training with demonstration retrieval, where we use a dense passage retriever to retrieve semantically similar labeled demonstrations to each example for more varied supervision. By separating external knowledge from model parameters, we can use meta-training to train parameter-efficient models that generalize well on a larger variety of tasks. We construct a meta-training set from UnifiedQA and CrossFit, and propose a demonstration bank based on UnifiedQA tasks. To our knowledge, our work is the first to combine retrieval with meta-training, to use DPR models to retrieve demonstrations, and to leverage demonstrations from many tasks simultaneously, rather than randomly sampling demonstrations from the training set of the target task. Our approach outperforms a variety of targeted parameter-efficient and retrieval-augmented few-shot methods on QA, NLI, and text classification tasks (including SQuAD, QNLI, and TREC). Our approach can be meta-trained and fine-tuned quickly on a single GPU.
VCSUM: A Versatile Chinese Meeting Summarization Dataset
Authors: Mingjie Zhan, Haochen Tan, Zhaohui Hou, Ding Liang, Linqi Song Han Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Compared to news and chat summarization, the development of meeting summarization is hugely decelerated by the limited data. To this end, we introduce a versatile Chinese meeting summarization dataset, dubbed VCSum, consisting of 239 real-life meetings, with a total duration of over 230 hours. We claim our dataset is versatile because we provide the annotations of topic segmentation, headlines, segmentation summaries, overall meeting summaries, and salient sentences for each meeting transcript. As such, the dataset can adapt to various summarization tasks or methods, including segmentation-based summarization, multi-granularity summarization and retrieval-then-generate summarization. Our analysis confirms the effectiveness and robustness of VCSum. We also provide a set of benchmark models regarding different downstream summarization tasks on VCSum to facilitate further research.
LEDA: a Large-Organization Email-Based Decision-Dialogue-Act Analysis Dataset
Authors: Prashant Khare, Ravi Shekhar, Stephen McQuistin, Ignacio Castro, Gareth Tyson, Colin Perkins, Patrick Healey, Matthew Purver Vanja Mladen Karan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Collaboration increasingly happens online. This is especially true for large groups working on global tasks, with collaborators all around the globe. The size and distributed nature of such groups makes decision-making challenging. This paper proposes a set of dialog acts for the study of decision-making mechanisms in such groups, and provides a new annotated dataset based on real-world data from the public mail-archives of one such organisation -- the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We provide an initial data analysis showing that this dataset can be used to better understand decision-making in such organisations. Finally, we experiment with a preliminary transformer-based dialog act tagging model.
Negation Scope Refinement via Boundary Shift Loss
Authors: Aixin Sun Yin Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Negation in natural language may affect many NLP applications, e.g., information extraction and sentiment analysis. The key sub-task of negation detection is negation scope resolution which aims to extract the portion of a sentence that is being negated by a negation cue (e.g., keyword “not” and never”) in the sentence. Due to the long spans, existing methods tend to make wrong predictions around the scope boundaries. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective model named R-BSL which engages the Boundary Shift Loss to refine the predicted boundary. On multiple benchmark datasets, we show that the extremely simple R-BSL achieves best results.
Towards Diverse and Effective Question-Answer Pair Generation from Children Storybooks
Authors: Hyeonseok Moon, Jinsung Kim, Yuna Hur, Jeongwook Kim, SongEun Lee, Changwoo Chun, Sungsoo Park, Heuiseok Lim Sugyeong Eo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent advances in QA pair generation (QAG) have raised interest in applying this technique to the educational field. However, the diversity of QA types remains a challenge despite its contributions to comprehensive learning and assessment of children. In this paper, we propose a QAG framework that enhances QA type diversity by producing different interrogative sentences and implicit/explicit answers. Our framework comprises a QFS-based answer generator, an iterative QA generator, and a relevancy-aware ranker. The two generators aim to expand the number of candidates while covering various types. The ranker trained on the in-context negative samples clarifies the top-N outputs based on the ranking score. Extensive evaluations and detailed analyses demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art results by significant margins, achieving improved diversity and quality. Our task-oriented processes are consistent with real-world demand, which highlights our system`s high applicability.
Pulling Out All The Full Stops: Punctuation Sensitivity in Neural Machine Translation and Evaluation
Authors: Prathyusha Jwalapuram
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Much of the work testing machine translation systems for robustness and sensitivity has been adversarial or tended towards testing noisy input such as spelling errors, or non-standard input such as dialects. In this work, we take a step back to investigate a sensitivity problem that can seem trivial and is often overlooked: punctuation. We perform basic sentence-final insertion and deletion perturbation tests with full stops, exclamation and questions marks across source languages and demonstrate a concerning finding: commercial, production-level machine translation systems are vulnerable to mere single punctuation insertion or deletion, resulting in unreliable translations. Moreover, we demonstrate that both string-based and model-based evaluation metrics also suffer from this vulnerability, producing significantly different scores when translations only differ in a single punctuation, with model-based metrics penalizing each punctuation differently. Our work calls into question the reliability of machine translation systems and their evaluation metrics, particularly for real-world use cases, where inconsistent punctuation is often the most common and the least disruptive noise.
Reimagining Retrieval Augmented Language Models for Answering Queries
Authors: Yuliang Li, Pedro Rodriguez, Richard James, Xi Victoria Lin, Alon Halevy, Wen-tau Yih Wang-Chiew Tan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We present a reality check on large language models and inspect the promise of retrieval-augmented language models in comparison. Such language models are semi-parametric, where models integrate model parameters and knowledge from external data sources to make their predictions, as opposed to the parametric nature of vanilla large language models. We give initial experimental findings that semi-parametric architectures can be enhanced with views, a query analyzer/planner, and provenance to make a significantly more powerful system for question answering in terms of accuracy and efficiency, and potentially for other NLP tasks.
Numeric Magnitude Comparison Effects in Large Language Models
Authors: Vijay Marupudi, Reba Koenen, Khushi Bhardwaj, Sashank Varma Raj Shah
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) do not differentially represent numbers, which are pervasive in text. In contrast, neuroscience research has identified distinct neural representations for numbers and words. In this work, we investigate how well popular LLMs capture the magnitudes of numbers (e.g., that 4\ensuremath<5) from a behavioral lens. Prior research on the representational capabilities of LLMs evaluates whether they show human-level performance, for instance, high overall accuracy on standard benchmarks. Here, we ask a different question, one inspired by cognitive science: How closely do the number representations of LLMscorrespond to those of human language users, who typically demonstrate the distance, size, and ratio effects? We depend on a linking hypothesis to map the similarities among the model embeddings of number words and digits to human response times. The results reveal surprisingly human-like representations across language models of different architectures, despite the absence of the neural circuitry that directly supports these representations in the human brain. This research shows the utility of understanding LLMs using behavioral benchmarks and points the way to future work on the number of representations of LLMs and their cognitive plausibility.
Multi-Relational Probabilistic Event Representation Learning via Projected Gaussian Embedding
Authors: Congzhi Zhang, Deyu Zhou Linhai Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Event representation learning has been shown beneficial in various downstream tasks. Current event representation learning methods, which mainly focus on capturing the semantics of events via deterministic vector embeddings, have made notable progress. However, they ignore two important properties: the multiple relations between events and the uncertainty within events. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to learning multi-relational probabilistic event embeddings based on contrastive learning. Specifically, the proposed method consists of three major modules, a multi-relational event generation module to automatically generate multi-relational training data, a probabilistic event encoding module to model uncertainty of events by Gaussian density embeddings, and a relation-aware projection module to adapt unseen relations by projecting Gaussian embeddings into relation-aware subspaces. Moreover, a novel contrastive learning loss is elaborately designed for learning the multi-relational probabilistic embeddings. Since the existing benchmarks for event representation learning ignore relations and uncertainty of events, a novel dataset named MRPES is constructed to investigate whether multiple relations between events and uncertainty within events are learned. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines on both existing and newly constructed datasets.
PragmatiCQA: A Dataset for Pragmatic Question Answering in Conversations
Authors: Nina Du, Christopher Manning, Jing Huang Peng Qi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Pragmatic reasoning about another speaker`s unspoken intent and state of mind is crucial to efficient and effective human communication. It is virtually omnipresent in conversations between humans, e.g., when someone asks “do you have a minute?”, instead of interpreting it literally as a query about your schedule, you understand that the speaker might have requests that take time, and respond accordingly. In this paper, we present PragmatiCQA, the first large-scale open-domain question answering (QA) dataset featuring 6873 QA pairs that explores pragmatic reasoning in conversations over a diverse set of topics. We designed innovative crowdsourcing mechanisms for interest-based and task-driven data collection to address the common issue of incentive misalignment between crowdworkers and potential users. To compare computational models' capability at pragmatic reasoning, we also propose several quantitative metrics to evaluate question answering systems on PragmatiCQA. We find that state-of-the-art systems still struggle to perform human-like pragmatic reasoning, and highlight their limitations for future research.
Modular and On-demand Bias Mitigation with Attribute-Removal Subnetworks
Authors: Shahed Masoudian, Deepak Kumar, Markus Schedl, Navid Rekabsaz Lukas Hauzenberger
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Societal biases are reflected in large pre-trained language models and their fine-tuned versions on downstream tasks. Common in-processing bias mitigation approaches, such as adversarial training and mutual information removal, introduce additional optimization criteria, and update the model to reach a new debiased state. However, in practice, end-users and practitioners might prefer to switch back to the original model, or apply debiasing only on a specific subset of protected attributes. To enable this, we propose a novel modular bias mitigation approach, consisting of stand-alone highly sparse debiasing subnetworks, where each debiasing module can be integrated into the core model on-demand at inference time. Our approach draws from the concept of diff pruning, and proposes a novel training regime adaptable to various representation disentanglement optimizations. We conduct experiments on three classification tasks with gender, race, and age as protected attributes. The results show that our modular approach, while maintaining task performance, improves (or at least remains on-par with) the effectiveness of bias mitigation in comparison with baseline finetuning. Particularly on a two-attribute dataset, our approach with separately learned debiasing subnetworks shows effective utilization of either or both the subnetworks for selective bias mitigation.
Scientific Fact-Checking: A Survey of Resources and Approaches
Authors: Florian Matthes Juraj Vladika
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The task of fact-checking deals with assessing the veracity of factual claims based on credible evidence and background knowledge. In particular, scientific fact-checking is the variation of the task concerned with verifying claims rooted in scientific knowledge. This task has received significant attention due to the growing importance of scientific and health discussions on online platforms. Automated scientific fact-checking methods based on NLP can help combat the spread of misinformation, assist researchers in knowledge discovery, and help individuals understand new scientific breakthroughs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of existing research in this emerging field and its related tasks. We provide a task description, discuss the construction process of existing datasets, and analyze proposed models and approaches. Based on our findings, we identify intriguing challenges and outline potential future directions to advance the field.
Uni-Encoder: A Fast and Accurate Response Selection Paradigm for Generation-Based Dialogue Systems
Authors: Hongliang He, Haofei Yu, Pengfei Fang, Leyang Cui, Zhenzhong Lan Chiyu Song
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Sample-and-rank is a key decoding strategy for modern generation-based dialogue systems. It helps achieve diverse and high-quality responses by selecting an answer from a small pool of generated candidates. The current state-of-the-art ranking methods mainly use an encoding paradigm called Cross-Encoder, which separately encodes each context-candidate pair and ranks the candidates according to their fitness scores. However, Cross-Encoder repeatedly encodes the same lengthy context for each candidate, resulting in high computational costs. Poly-Encoder addresses the above problems by reducing the interaction between context and candidates, but with a price of performance drop. In this work, we develop a new paradigm called Uni-Encoder, that keeps the full attention over each pair as in Cross-Encoder while only encoding the context once, as in Poly-Encoder. Uni-Encoder encodes all the candidates with the context in one forward pass. We use the same positional embedding for all candidates to ensure they are treated equally and design a new attention mechanism to avoid confusion. Our Uni-Encoder can simulate other ranking paradigms using different attention and response concatenation methods. Extensive experiments show that our proposed paradigm achieves new state-of-the-art results on four benchmark datasets with high computational efficiency. For instance, it improves R10@1 by 2.9% with an approximately 4X faster inference speed on the Ubuntu V2 dataset.
DLAMA: A Framework for Curating Culturally Diverse Facts for Probing the Knowledge of Pretrained Language Models
Authors: Walid Magdy Amr Keleg
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: A few benchmarking datasets have been released to evaluate the factual knowledge of pretrained language models. These benchmarks (e.g., LAMA, and ParaRel) are mainly developed in English and later are translated to form new multilingual versions (e.g., mLAMA, and mParaRel). Results on these multilingual benchmarks suggest that using English prompts to recall the facts from multilingual models usually yields significantly better and more consistent performance than using non-English prompts. Our analysis shows that mLAMA is biased toward facts from Western countries, which might affect the fairness of probing models. We propose a new framework for curating factual triples from Wikidata that are culturally diverse. A new benchmark DLAMA-v1 is built of factual triples from three pairs of contrasting cultures having a total of 78,259 triples from 20 relation predicates. The three pairs comprise facts representing the (Arab and Western), (Asian and Western), and (South American and Western) countries respectively. Having a more balanced benchmark (DLAMA-v1) supports that mBERT performs better on Western facts than non-Western ones, while monolingual Arabic, English, and Korean models tend to perform better on their culturally proximate facts. Moreover, both monolingual and multilingual models tend to make a prediction that is culturally or geographically relevant to the correct label, even if the prediction is wrong.
Self-adaptive Context and Modal-interaction Modeling For Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Authors: Xianqiang Gao, Jianlong Wu, Tian Gan, Ning Ding, Feijun Jiang, Liqiang Nie Haozhe Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The multimodal emotion recognition in conversation task aims to predict the emotion label for a given utterance with its context and multiple modalities. Existing approaches achieve good results but also suffer from the following two limitations: 1) lacking modeling of diverse dependency ranges, i.e., long, short, and independent context-specific representations and without consideration of the different recognition difficulty for each utterance; 2) consistent treatment of the contribution for various modalities. To address the above challenges, we propose the Self-adaptive Context and Modal-interaction Modeling (SCMM) framework. We first design the context representation module, which consists of three submodules to model multiple contextual representations. Thereafter, we propose the modal-interaction module, including three interaction submodules to make full use of each modality. Finally, we come up with a self-adaptive path selection module to select an appropriate path in each module and integrate the features to obtain the final representation. Extensive experiments under four settings on three multimodal datasets, including IEMOCAP, MELD, and MOSEI, demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.
Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph for Conditional Question Answering on Long Documents
Authors: Yansong Feng, Chen Li, Yang Li, Yunshi Lan, Dongyan Zhao Haowei Du
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Conditional question answering on long documents aims to find probable answers and identify conditions that need to be satisfied to make the answers correct over long documents. Existing approaches solve this task by segmenting long documents into multiple sections, and attending information at global and local tokens to predict the answers and corresponding conditions. However, the natural structure of the document and discourse relations between sentences in each document section are ignored, which are crucial for condition retrieving across sections, as well as logical interaction over the question and conditions. To address this issue, this paper constructs a Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph (SDHG) and conducts bottom-up information propagation. Firstly we build the sentence-level discourse graphs for each section and encode the discourse relations by graph attention. Secondly, we construct a section-level structure graph based on natural structures, and conduct interactions over the question and contexts. Finally different levels of representations are integrated into jointly answer and condition decoding. The experiments on the benchmark ConditionalQA shows our approach gains over the prior state-of-the-art, by 3.0 EM score and 2.4 F1 score on answer measuring, as well as 2.2 EM score and 1.9 F1 score on jointly answer and condition measuring.
COBRA Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Effects and Harms of Offensive Statements
Authors: Hao Zhu, Akhila Yerukola, Thomas Davidson, Jena D. Hwang, Swabha Swayamdipta, Maarten Sap Xuhui Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Understanding the harms and offensiveness of statements requires reasoning about the social and situational context in which statements are made. For example, the utterance “your English is very good” may implicitly signal an insult when uttered by a white man to a non-white colleague, but uttered by an ESL teacher to their student would be interpreted as a genuine compliment. Such contextual factors have been largely ignored by previous approaches to toxic language detection. We introduce COBRA frames, the first context-aware formalism for explaining the intents, reactions, and harms of offensive or biased statements grounded in their social and situational context. We create COBRACORPUS, a dataset of 33k potentially offensive statements paired with machine-generated contexts and free-text explanations of offensiveness, implied biases, speaker intents, and listener reactions. To study the contextual dynamics of offensiveness, we train models to generate COBRA explanations, with and without access to the context. We find that explanations by context-agnostic models are significantly worse than by context-aware ones, especially in situations where the context inverts the statement`s offensiveness (29% accuracy drop). Our work highlights the importance and feasibility of contextualized NLP by modeling social factors.
Distilling Calibrated Knowledge for Stance Detection
Authors: Cornelia Caragea Yingjie Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Stance detection aims to determine the position of an author toward a target and provides insights into people`s views on controversial topics such as marijuana legalization. Despite recent progress in this task, most existing approaches use hard labels (one-hot vectors) during training, which ignores meaningful signals among categories offered by soft labels. In this work, we explore knowledge distillation for stance detection and present a comprehensive analysis. Our contributions are: 1) we propose to use knowledge distillation over multiple generations in which a student is taken as a new teacher to transfer knowledge to a new fresh student; 2) we propose a novel dynamic temperature scaling for knowledge distillation to calibrate teacher predictions in each generation step. Extensive results on three stance detection datasets show that knowledge distillation benefits stance detection and a teacher is able to transfer knowledge to a student more smoothly via calibrated guiding signals. We publicly release our code to facilitate future research.
PTCSpell: Pre-trained Corrector Based on Character Shape and Pinyin for Chinese Spelling Correction
Authors: Jianbao Huang, Hang Yu, Qian Liu Xiao Wei
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Chinese spelling correction (CSC) is a challenging task with the goal of correcting each wrong character in Chinese texts. Incorrect characters in a Chinese text are mainly due to the similar shape and similar pronunciation of Chinese characters. Recently, the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning has achieved remarkable success in natural language processing. However, the pre-training objectives in existing methods are not tailored for the CSC task since they neglect the visual and phonetic properties of characters, resulting in suboptimal spelling correction. In this work, we propose to pre-train a new corrector named PTCSpell for the CSC task under the detector-corrector architecture. The corrector we propose has the following two improvements. First, we design two novel pre-training objectives to capture pronunciation and shape information in Chinese characters. Second, we propose a new strategy to tackle the issue that the detector`s prediction results mislead the corrector by balancing the loss of wrong characters and correct characters. Experiments on three benchmarks (i.e., SIGHAN 2013, 2014, and 2015) show that our model achieves an average of 5.8% F1 improvements at the correction level over state-of-the-art methods, verifying its effectiveness.
Disentangling Text Representation With Counter-Template For Unsupervised Opinion Summarization
Authors: Deyu Zhou Yanyue Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Approaches for unsupervised opinion summarization are generally based on the reconstruction model and generate a summary by decoding the aggregated representation of inputs. Recent work has shown that aggregating via simple average leads to vector degeneration, generating the generic summary. To tackle the challenge, some approaches select the inputs before aggregating. However, we argue that the selection is too coarse as not all information in each input is equally essential for the summary. For example, the content information such as “great coffee maker, easy to set up” is more valuable than the pattern such as “this is a great product”. Therefore, we propose a novel framework for unsupervised opinion summarization based on text representation disentanglement with counter-template. In specific, a disentangling module is added to the encoder-decoder architecture which decouples the input text representation into two parts: content and pattern. To capture the pattern information, a counter-template is utilized as supervision, which is automatically generated based on contrastive learning. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on both quality and stability.
Evaluation of Question Generation Needs More References
Authors: Hyojun Go, Hyeongdon Moon, Yunsung Lee, Myeongho Jeong, Hyun Seung Lee, Seungtaek Choi Shinhyeok Oh
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Question generation (QG) is the task of generating a valid and fluent question based on a given context and the target answer. According to various purposes, even given the same context, instructors can ask questions about different concepts, and even the same concept can be written in different ways. However, the evaluation for QG usually depends on single reference-based similarity metrics, such as n-gram-based metric or learned metric, which is not sufficient to fully evaluate the potential of QG methods. To this end, we propose to paraphrase the reference question for a more robust QG evaluation. Using large language models such as GPT-3, we created semantically and syntactically diverse questions, then adopt the simple aggregation of the popular evaluation metrics as the final scores. Through our experiments, we found that using multiple (pseudo) references is more effective for QG evaluation while showing a higher correlation with human evaluations than evaluation with a single reference.
XtremeCLIP: Extremely Parameter-efficient Tuning for Low-resource Vision Language Understanding
Authors: Chengyu Wang, Jianing Wang, Chuanqi Tan, Songfang Huang, Cen Chen, Weining Qian Moming Tang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, Contrastive Visual-Language Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated remarkable capability in various Visual Language Understanding (VLU) tasks. Yet, most CLIP-based methods require tasks-specific designs and sufficient training data. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet efficient paradigm for low-resource VLU named XtremeCLIP, which involves very few trainable parameters to improve the generalization ability of the trained models. In our XtremeCLIP framework, we reformulate a series of VLU tasks as a unified open-book affinity-matching problem. Furthermore, to handle the insufficient supervised signals in small datasets, we adopt contrastive learning to utilize the implicit sorting information of ground-truth labels to provide more supervised cues. Extensive experiments over multiple datasets on visual entailment, visual question answering, and image classification show that XtremeCLIP consistently outperforms existing baselines in low-resource settings.
FACTUAL: A Benchmark for Faithful and Consistent Textual Scene Graph Parsing
Authors: Yuyang Chai, Terry Yue Zhuo, Lizhen Qu, Gholamreza Haffari, Fei Li, Donghong Ji, Quan Hung Tran Zhuang Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Textual scene graph parsing has become increasingly important in various vision-language applications, including image caption evaluation and image retrieval. However, existing scene graph parsers that convert image captions into scene graphs often suffer from two types of errors. First, the generated scene graphs fail to capture the true semantics of the captions or the corresponding images, resulting in a lack of faithfulness. Second, the generated scene graphs have high inconsistency, with the same semantics represented by different annotations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel dataset, which involves re-annotating the captions in Visual Genome (VG) using a new intermediate representation called FACTUAL-MR. FACTUAL-MR can be directly converted into faithful and consistent scene graph annotations. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate that the parser trained on our dataset outperforms existing approaches in terms of faithfulness and consistency. This improvement leads to a significant performance boost in both image caption evaluation and zero-shot image retrieval tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a novel metric for measuring scene graph similarity, which, when combined with the improved scene graph parser, achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on multiple benchmark datasets for the aforementioned tasks.
Target-Oriented Relation Alignment for Cross-Lingual Stance Detection
Authors: Nan Xu, Hanxuan Yang, Yuan Tian, Wenji Mao Ruike Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Stance detection is an important task in text mining and social media analytics, aiming to automatically identify the user`s attitude toward a specific target from text, and has wide applications in a variety of domains. Previous work on stance detection has mainly focused on monolingual setting. To address the problem of imbalanced language resources, cross-lingual stance detection is proposed to transfer the knowledge learned from a high-resource (source) language (typically English) to another low-resource (target) language. However, existing research on cross-lingual stance detection has ignored the inconsistency in the occurrences and distributions of targets between languages, which consequently degrades the performance of stance detection in low-resource languages. In this paper, we first identify the target inconsistency issue in cross-lingual stance detection, and propose a fine-grained Target-oriented Relation Alignment (TaRA) method for the task, which considers both target-level associations and language-level alignments. Specifically, we propose the Target Relation Graph to learn the in-language and cross-language target associations. We further devise the relation alignment strategy to enable knowledge transfer between semantically correlated targets across languages. Experimental results on the representative datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to competitive methods under variant settings.