Canada

Pretrained multilingual Transformers have achieved great success in cross-lingual transfer learning. Current methods typically activate the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual Transformers by fine-tuning them on end-task data. However, the methods cannot perform cross-lingual transfer when end-task data are unavailable. In this work, we explore whether the cross-lingual transferability can be activated without end-task data. We propose a cross-lingual transfer method, named PlugIn-X. PlugIn-X disassembles monolingual and multilingual Transformers into sub-modules, and reassembles them to be the multilingual end-task model. After representation adaptation, PlugIn-X finally performs cross-lingual transfer in a plug-and-play style. Experimental results show that PlugIn-X successfully activates the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual Transformers without accessing end-task data. Moreover, we analyze how the cross-model representation alignment affects the cross-lingual transferability.

ACL 2023

Can Cross-Lingual Transferability of Multilingual Transformers Be Activated Without End-Task Data?

multilingual transformer

modular deep learning

cross-lingual transfer

### Welcome to IJCNLP-AACL 2023!
I am honored and happy to welcome you to IJCNLP-AACL 2023! The conference hosts both the 13th
International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP) and the 3rd Conference of
the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL).<br>
The joint conferences of IJCNLP and AACL have been organized by alternating leadership in the
Asia-Pacific region, in odd years by Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP) and
in even years by AACL. The conference is organized by AFNLP this year.<br>

Considering the current situation that we are not yet fully over the coronavirus pandemic, the
conference is offered in a hybrid mode, off-line in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, and on-line with the help
of Underline, during November 1-4, 2023. For those attending off-line, I hope that you will find time to
explore the exciting local area, which remains quite warm and pleasant at this time of the year. For
those attending on-line, I hope that the attendance is not much hampered, sometimes even enhanced
and comfortable, though the on-line arrangements have been made without ample time. 

Message from Jong C. Park, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)<br>
IJCNLP-AACL 2023 General Chair<br><br>
###### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S2JSXa105xJxIkNBfhYmGH20Om6wARBx/view?usp=sharing)
<br><br><br><br>

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IJCNLP-AACL 2023

The 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
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.<br>
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)**
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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.

The machine reading comprehension (MRC) of user manuals has huge potential in customer service. However, current methods have trouble answering complex questions. Therefore, we introduce the knowing-how & knowing-that task that requires the model to answer factoid-style, procedure-style, and inconsistent questions about user manuals. We resolve this task by jointly representing the sTeps and fActs in a gRAh (TARA), which supports a unified inference of various questions. Towards a systematical benchmarking study, we design a heuristic method to automatically parse user manuals into TARAs and build an annotated dataset to test the model's ability in answering real-world questions. Empirical results demonstrate that representing user manuals as TARAs is a desired solution for the MRC of user manuals. An in-depth investigation of TARA further sheds light on the issues and broader impacts of future representations of user manuals. We hope our work can move the MRC of user manuals to a more complex and realistic stage.

Knowing-how & Knowing-that: A New Task for Machine Comprehension of User Manuals

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

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

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

Languages are dynamic entities, where the meanings associated with words constantly change with time.Detecting the semantic variation of words is an important task for various NLP applications that must make time-sensitive predictions.Existing work on semantic variation prediction have predominantly focused on comparing some form of an averaged contextualised representation of a target word computed from a given corpus.However, some of the previously associated meanings of a target word can become obsolete over time (e.g. meaning of gay as happy), while novel usages of existing words are observed (e.g. meaning of cell as a mobile phone).We argue that mean representations alone cannot accurately capture such semantic variations and propose a method that uses the entire cohort of the contextualised embeddings of the target word, which we refer to as the sibling distribution.Experimental results on SemEval-2020 Task 1 benchmark dataset for semantic variation prediction show that our method outperforms prior work that consider only the mean embeddings, and is comparable to the current state-of-the-art. Moreover, a qualitative analysis shows that our method detects important semantic changes in words that are not captured by the existing methods.

Unsupervised Semantic Variation Prediction using the Distribution of Sibling Embeddings

Learning quality document embeddings is a fundamental problem in natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), recommendation systems, and search engines. Despite recent advances in the development of transformer-based models that produce sentence embeddings with self-contrastive learning, the encoding of long documents (Ks of words) is still challenging with respect to both efficiency and quality considerations. Therefore, we train Longfomer-based document encoders using a state-of-the-art unsupervised contrastive learning method (SimCSE). Further on, we complement the baseline method -siamese neural network- with additional convex neural networks based on functional Bregman divergence aiming to enhance the quality of the output document representations. We show that overall the combination of a self-contrastive siamese network and our proposed neural Bregman network outperforms the baselines in two linear classification settings on three long document topic classification tasks from the legal and biomedical domains.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/c73911d4-d74c-4786-bda2-6d5f6cad6ea8" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Efficient Document Embeddings via Self-Contrastive Bregman Divergence Learning

Sense embedding learning methods learn multiple vectors for a given ambiguous word, corresponding to its different word senses.For this purpose, different methods have been proposed in prior work on sense embedding learning that use different sense inventories, sense-tagged corpora and learning methods.However, not all existing sense embeddings cover all senses of ambiguous words equally well due to the discrepancies in their training resources.To address this problem, we propose the first-ever meta-sense embedding method -- Neighbour Preserving Meta-Sense Embeddings, which learns meta-sense embeddings by combining multiple independently trained source sense embeddings such that the sense neighbourhoods computed from the source embeddings are preserved in the meta-embedding space.Our proposed method can combine source sense embeddings that cover different sets of word senses.Experimental results on Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and Word-in-Context (WiC) tasks show that the proposed meta-sense embedding method consistently outperforms several competitive baselines.\footnote{An anonymised version of the source code implementation for our proposed method is submitted to reviewing system. Both source code and the learnt meta-sense embeddings will be publicly released upon paper acceptance.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/34b6f60f-0d79-4772-9f18-9d628121a8b3" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Together We Make Sense--Learning Meta-Sense Embeddings

Dynamic topic models (DTMs) analyze text streams to capture the evolution of topics. Despite their popularity, existing DTMs are either fully supervised, requiring expensive human annotations, or fully unsupervised, producing topic evolutions that often do not cater to a user's needs. Further, the topic evolutions produced by DTMs tend to contain generic terms that are not indicative of their designated time steps. To address these issues, we propose the task of discriminative dynamic topic discovery. This task aims to discover topic evolutions from temporal corpora that distinctly align with a set of user-provided category names and uniquely capture topics at each time step. We solve this task by developing DynaMiTE, a framework that ensembles semantic similarity, category indicative, and time indicative scores to produce informative topic evolutions. Through experiments on three diverse datasets, including the use of a newly-designed human evaluation experiment, we demonstrate that DynaMiTE is a practical and efficient framework for helping users discover high-quality topic evolutions suited to their interests.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/eX4PwSmcCc1EvCqjxcYdKB/embed/polls/047d989f-aedd-4981-b55d-161bce85ba27" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

DynaMiTE: Discovering Explosive Topic Evolutions with User Guidance

Multilingual pre-trained language models can learn task-specific abilities or memorize facts across multiple languages but inevitably make undesired predictions with specific inputs. Under similar observation, model editing aims to post-hoc calibrate a model targeted to specific inputs with keeping the model's raw behavior. However, existing work only studies the monolingual scenario, which lacks the cross-lingual transferability to perform editing simultaneously across languages. In this work, we focus on cross-lingual model editing. Firstly, we define the cross-lingual model editing task and corresponding metrics, where an edit in one language propagates to the others. Next, we propose a framework to naturally adapt monolingual model editing approaches to the cross-lingual scenario using parallel corpus. Further, we propose language anisotropic editing to improve cross-lingual editing by amplifying different subsets of parameters for each language. On the newly defined cross-lingual model editing task, we empirically demonstrate the failure of monolingual baselines in propagating the edit to multiple languages and the effectiveness of the proposed language anisotropic model editing. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/franklear/LiME.

Language Anisotropic Cross-Lingual Model Editing

Automated essay scoring (AES) aims to score essays written for a given prompt, which defines the writing topic. Most existing AES systems assume to grade essays of the same prompt as used in training and assign only a holistic score. However, such settings conflict with real-education situations; pre-graded essays for a particular prompt are lacking, and detailed trait scores of sub-rubrics are required. Thus, predicting various trait scores of unseen-prompt essays (called cross-prompt essay trait scoring) is a remaining challenge of AES. In this paper, we propose a robust model: prompt- and trait relation-aware cross-prompt essay trait scorer. We encode prompt-aware essay representation by essay-prompt attention and utilizing the topic-coherence feature extracted by the topic-modeling mechanism without access to labeled data; therefore, our model considers the prompt adherence of an essay, even in a cross-prompt setting. To facilitate multi-trait scoring, we design trait-similarity loss that encapsulates the correlations of traits. Experiments prove the efficacy of our model, showing state-of-the-art results for all prompts and traits. Significant improvements in low-resource-prompt and inferior traits further indicate our model's strength.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/t38CPUax2NoHBQcXN6okdA/embed/polls/ed3249e6-e6db-4163-aae0-cc757bb94318" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Prompt- and Trait Relation-aware Cross-prompt Essay Trait Scoring

Debiasing methods that seek to mitigate the tendency of Language Models (LMs) to occasionally output toxic or inappropriate text have recently gained traction. In this paper, we propose a standardized protocol which distinguishes methods that yield not only desirable results, but are also consistent with their mechanisms and specifications. For example, we ask, given a debiasing method that is developed to reduce toxicity in LMs, if the definition of toxicity used by the debiasing method is reversed, would the debiasing results also be reversed? We used such considerations to devise three criteria for our new protocol: Specification Polarity, Specification Importance, and Domain Transferability. As a case study, we apply our protocol to a popular debiasing method, Self-Debiasing, and compare it to one we propose, called Instructive Debiasing, and demonstrate that consistency is as important an aspect to debiasing viability as is simply a desirable result. We show that our protocol provides essential insights into the generalizability and interpretability of debiasing methods that may otherwise go overlooked.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/t38CPUax2NoHBQcXN6okdA/embed/polls/c3f8aa1e-e397-4c2d-9519-c2f80302cc2f" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Debiasing should be Good and Bad: Measuring the Consistency of Debiasing Techniques in Language Models

In task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems designed to aid users accomplish specific goals in one or more domains, the agent retrieves entities that satisfy user constraints from the database. However, when multiple database search results exist, an ambiguity occurs regarding which results to select and present to the user. Existing TOD systems handle this ambiguity by randomly selecting one or few results and presenting their names to the user. However, in a real scenario, users do not always accept a randomly recommended entity, and users should have access to more comprehensive information about the search results. To address this limitation, we propose a novel task called Comparison-Based database search Ambiguity handling (CBA), which handles ambiguity in database search results by comparing the properties of multiple entities to enable users to choose according to their preferences. Accordingly, we introduce a new framework for automatically collecting high-quality dialogue data along with the Disambiguating Schema-guided Dialogue (DSD) dataset, an augmented version of the SGD dataset. Experimental studies on the DSD dataset demonstrate that training baseline models with the dataset effectively address the CBA task. Our dataset and code will be publicized.

Next from ACL 2023

Knowing-how & Knowing-that: A New Task for Machine Comprehension of User Manuals

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