Ireland

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) has drawn a lot of attention as an approach for assessing the ability of systems to understand natural language. Usually systems focus on selecting the correct answer to a question given a contextual paragraph. However, for many applications of multiple-choice MRC systems there are two additional considerations. For multiple-choice exams there is often a negative marking scheme; there is a penalty for an incorrect answer. This means that the system is required to have an idea of the uncertainty in the predicted answer. The second consideration is that many multiple-choice questions have the option of none of the above (NOA) indicating that none of the answers is applicable, rather than there always being the correct answer in the list of choices. This paper investigates both of these issues by making use of predictive uncertainty. It is shown that uncertainty does allow questions that the system is not confident about to be detected. Additionally we show that uncertainty outperforms a system explicitly built with an NOA option for the ReClor corpus.

ACL 2022

Answer Uncertainty and Unanswerability in Multiple-Choice Machine Reading Comprehension

unanswerability

uncertainty

machine reading comprehension

### 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.
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you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
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enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

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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.

findings / work in progress

# 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)
 
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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). 

It is well documented that NLP models learn social biases, but little work has been done on how these biases manifest in model outputs for applied tasks like question answering (QA). We introduce the Bias Benchmark for QA (BBQ), a dataset of question-sets constructed by the authors that highlight attested social biases against people belonging to protected classes along nine social dimensions relevant for U.S. English-speaking contexts. Our task evaluate model responses at two levels: (i) given an under-informative context, we test how strongly responses reflect social biases, and (ii) given an adequately informative context, we test whether the model’s biases override a correct answer choice. We find that models often rely on stereotypes when the context is under-informative, meaning the model’s outputs consistently reproduce harmful biases in this setting. Though models are more accurate when the context provides an informative answer, they still rely on stereotypes and average up to 3.4 percentage points higher accuracy when the correct answer aligns with a social bias than when it conflicts, with this difference widening to over 5 points on examples targeting gender for most models tested.

BBQ: A hand-built bias benchmark for question answering

In typical machine learning systems, an estimate of the probability of the prediction is used to assess the system's confidence in the prediction.
This confidence measure is usually uncalibrated; i.e.\ the system's confidence in the prediction does not match the true probability of the predicted output.
In this paper, we present an investigation into calibrating open setting machine reading systems
such as open-domain question answering and claim verification systems.
We show that calibrating such complex systems which contain discrete retrieval and deep reading components is challenging and current calibration techniques fail to scale to these settings. 
We propose simple extensions to existing calibration approaches that allow us to adapt these calibrators to these settings.

Our experimental results reveal that the joint calibration of the retriever and the reader outperforms the reader calibrator by a significant margin. We also show that the calibrator can be useful for selective prediction, e.g., when question answering systems are posed with unanswerable or out-of-the-training distribution questions.

Calibration of Machine Reading Systems at Scale

Reddit is home to a broad spectrum of political activity, and users signal their political affiliations in multiple ways—from self-declarations to community participation. Frequently, computational studies have treated political users as a single bloc, both in developing models to infer political leaning and in studying political behavior. Here, we test this assumption of political users and show that commonly-used political-inference models do not generalize, indicating heterogeneous types of political users. The models remain imprecise at best for most users, regardless of which sources of data or methods are used. Across a 14-year longitudinal analysis, we demonstrate that the choice in definition of a political user has significant implications for behavioral analysis. Controlling for multiple factors, political users are more toxic on the platform and inter-party interactions are even more toxic---but not all political users behave this way. Last, we identify a subset of political users who repeatedly flip affiliations, showing that these users are the most controversial of all, acting as provocateurs by more frequently bringing up politics, and are more likely to be banned, suspended, or deleted.

Classification without (Proper) Representation: Political Heterogeneity in Social Media and Its Implications for Classification and Behavioral Analysis

We propose an autoregressive entity linking model, that is trained with two auxiliary tasks, and learns to re-rank generated samples at inference time. Our proposed novelties address two weaknesses in the literature. First, a recent method proposes to learn mention detection and then entity candidate selection, but relies on predefined sets of candidates. We use encoder-decoder autoregressive entity linking in order to bypass this need, and propose to train mention detection as an auxiliary task instead. Second, previous work suggests that re-ranking could help correct prediction errors. We add a new, auxiliary task, match prediction, to learn re-ranking. Without the use of a knowledge base or candidate sets, our model sets a new state of the art in two benchmark datasets of entity linking: COMETA in the biomedical domain, and AIDA-CoNLL in the news domain. We show through ablation studies that each of the two auxiliary tasks increases performance, and that re-ranking is an important factor to the increase. Finally, our low-resource experimental results suggest that performance on the main task benefits from the knowledge learned by the auxiliary tasks, and not just from the additional training data.

Detection, Disambiguation, Re-ranking: Autoregressive Entity Linking as a Multi-Task Problem

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models risk overfitting to specific terms in the training data, thereby reducing their performance, fairness, and generalizability. E.g., neural hate speech detection models are strongly influenced by identity terms like gay, or women, resulting in false positives, severe unintended bias, and lower performance. Most mitigation techniques use lists of identity terms or samples from the target domain during training. However, this approach requires a-priori knowledge and introduces further bias if important terms are neglected. Instead, we propose a knowledge-free Entropy-based Attention Regularization (EAR) to discourage overfitting to training-specific terms. An additional objective function penalizes tokens with low self-attention entropy. We fine-tune BERT via EAR: the resulting model matches or exceeds state-of-the-art performance for hate speech classification and bias metrics on three benchmark corpora in English and Italian. EAR also reveals overfitting terms, i.e., terms most likely to induce bias, to help identify their effect on the model, task, and predictions.

Entropy-based Attention Regularization Frees Unintended Bias Mitigation from Lists

Current Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) task mainly focuses on performing answer reasoning upon KGs with binary facts. However, it neglects the n-ary facts, which contain more than two entities. In this work, we highlight a more challenging but under-explored task: n-ary KGQA, i.e., answering n-ary facts questions upon n-ary KGs. Nevertheless, the multi-hop reasoning framework popular in binary KGQA task is not directly applicable on n-ary KGQA. We propose two feasible improvements: 1) upgrade the basic reasoning unit from entity or relation to fact, and 2) upgrade the reasoning structure from chain to tree. Therefore, we propose a novel fact-tree reasoning framework, FacTree, which integrates the above two upgrades. FacTree transforms the question into a fact tree and performs iterative fact reasoning on the fact tree to infer the correct answer. Experimental results on the n-ary KGQA dataset we constructed and two binary KGQA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of FacTree compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Fact-Tree Reasoning for N-ary Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

We propose the task of culture-specific time expression grounding, i.e. mapping from expressions such as "morning" in English or "Manhã" in Portuguese to specific hours in the day. We propose 3 language-agnostic methods, one of which achieves promising results on gold standard annotations that we collected for a small number of languages. We then apply this method to 27 languages and analyze the similarities across languages in the grounding of time expressions.

Good Night at 4 pm?! Time Expressions in Different Cultures

Training giant models from scratch for each complex task is resource- and data-inefficient. To help develop models that can leverage existing systems, we propose a new challenge: Learning to solve complex tasks by communicating with existing agents (or models) in natural language. We design a synthetic benchmark, COMMAQA, with three complex reasoning tasks (explicit, implicit, numeric) designed to be solved by communicating with existing QA agents. For instance, using text and table QA agents to answer questions such as "Who had the longest javelin throw from USA?". We show that black-box models struggle to learn this task from scratch (accuracy under 50%) even with access to each agent’s knowledge and gold facts supervision. In contrast, models that learn to communicate with agents out-perform black-box models, reaching scores of 100% when given gold decomposition supervision. However, we show that the challenge of learning to solve complex tasks by communicating with existing agents without relying on any auxiliary supervision or data still remains highly elusive. We release COMMAQA, along with a compositional generalization test split, to advance research in this direction

Hey AI, Can You Solve Complex Tasks by Talking to Agents?

Natural language is generated by people, yet
traditional language modeling views words
or documents as if generated independently.
Here, we propose human language modeling
(HuLM), a hierarchical extension to the language modeling problem whereby a humanlevel exists to connect sequences of documents
(e.g. social media messages) and capture the
notion that human language is moderated by
changing human states. We introduce, HaRT,
a large-scale transformer model for the HULM
task, pre-trained on approximately 100,000 social media users, and demonstrate it’s effectiveness in terms of both language modeling
(perplexity) for social media and fine-tuning
for 4 downstream tasks spanning documentand user-levels: stance detection, sentiment
classification, age estimation, and personality
assessment.
Results on all tasks meet or surpass the current state-of-the-art.

Human Language Modeling

In order to equip NLP systems with selective prediction capability, several task-specific approaches have been proposed. However, which approaches work best across tasks or even if they consistently outperform the simplest baseline 'MaxProb' remains to be explored. To this end, we systematically study 'selective prediction' in a large-scale setup of 17 datasets across several NLP tasks. Through comprehensive experiments under in-domain (IID), out-of-domain (OOD), and adversarial (ADV) settings, we show that despite leveraging additional resources (held-out data/computation), none of the existing approaches consistently and considerably outperforms MaxProb in all three settings. Furthermore, their performance does not translate well across tasks. For instance, Monte-Carlo Dropout outperforms all other approaches on Duplicate Detection datasets but does not fare well on NLI datasets, especially in the OOD setting. Thus, we recommend that future selective prediction approaches should be evaluated across tasks and settings for reliable estimation of their capabilities.

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Next from ACL 2022

BBQ: A hand-built bias benchmark for question answering

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