Canada

Recent studies have pointed out that many well-developed Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems suffer from bias problem. Despite the remarkable performance gained on In-Distribution (ID) datasets, the VQA model might merely capture the superficial correlation from question to answer rather than showing real reasoning abilities. Therefore, when switching to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) dataset, whose test distribution is unknown or even reversed with the training set, significant drops might be demonstrated.Although efforts have been devoted to easing the negative bias effect brought by language prior and analysing its inherent cause, they are still limited by the following two aspects. First, most current debiasing methods achieve promising OOD generalization ability with a major sacrifice of the ID performance. Second, existing researches are restricted by exploiting comprehensive biases, since weakening the language bias is mainly focused, while only a few works consider vision bias. In this paper, we investigate a straightforward way to mitigate bias problem for VQA task. Specifically, we reduce bias effect by subtracting bias score from standard VQA base score. Based on such a direct strategy, we design two bias learning branches to detect more bias information, which are combined with a dynamical constraint loss to alleviate the problem of over-correction and insufficient debiasing effect. We evaluate our method on the challenging VQA v2.0 and VQA-CP V2,0 datasets and the proposed method achievessignificant improvement.

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ACL 2023

A Multi-modal Debiasing Model with Dynamical Constraint for Robust Visual Question Answering

multi-modal understanding

bias problem

visual question answering

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP)<br>
EMNLP 2023 General Chair<br><br><br><br>

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference.<br>
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details. 

EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Recent studies have pointed out that many well-developed Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems suffer from bias problem. Despite the remarkable performance gained on In-Distribution (ID) datasets, the VQA model might merely capture the superficial correlation from question to answer rather than showing real reasoning abilities. Therefore, when switching to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) dataset, whose test distribution is unknown or even reversed with the training set, significant drops might be demonstrated.Although efforts have been devoted to easing the negative bias effect brought by language prior and analysing its inherent cause, they are still limited by the following two aspects. First, most current debiasing methods achieve promising OOD generalization ability with a major sacrifice of the ID performance. Second, existing researches are restricted by exploiting comprehensive biases, since weakening the language bias is mainly focused, while only a few works consider vision bias. In this paper, we investigate a straightforward way to mitigate bias problem for VQA task. Specifically, we reduce bias effect by subtracting bias score from standard VQA base score. Based on such a direct strategy, we design two bias learning branches to detect more bias information, which are combined with a dynamical constraint loss to alleviate the problem of over-correction and insufficient debiasing effect. We evaluate our method on the challenging VQA v2.0 and VQA-CP V2,0 datasets and the proposed method achievessignificant improvement.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/jQes3hFZo3TYjGXEHm6w95/embed/polls/e0b88972-a27f-41d8-8962-78d7103921e2" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

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)**
<br><br><br><br>

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.

We introduce the task of correcting named entity recognition (NER) errors without re-training model.After an NER model is trained and deployed in production,it makes prediction errors, which usually need to be fixed quickly.To address this problem, we firstly construct a gazetteer containing named entities and corresponding possible entity types.And then, we propose type enhanced BERT (TyBERT),a method that integrates the named entity's type information into BERT by an adapter layer.When errors are identified, we can repair the model by updating the gazetteer.In other words, the gazetteer becomes a trigger to control NER model's output.The experiment results in multiple corpus show the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms strong baselines.x

Type Enhanced BERT for Correcting NER Errors

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in investigating what Transformer-based language models (TLMs) actually learn from the training data. This is especially relevant for complex tasks such as the understanding of non-literal meaning. In this work, we probe the performance of three black-box TLMs and two intrinsically transparent white-box models on figurative language classification of sarcasm, similes, idioms, and metaphors. We conduct two studies on the classification results to provide insights into the inner workings of such models. With our first analysis on feature importance, we identify crucial differences in model behavior. With our second analysis using an online experiment with human participants, we inspect different linguistic characteristics of the four figurative language types.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/f1493e2b-add7-4483-8bc0-3f6f971da76f" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Figurative Language Processing: A Linguistically Informed Feature Analysis of the Behavior of Language Models and Humans

The chain-of-though (CoT) prompting methods were successful in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks thanks to their ability to unveil the underlying complex reasoning processes.Such reasoning processes typically exhibit highly structured steps.Recent efforts also started investigating methods to encourage more structured reasoning procedures to be captured (cite least to most).In this work, we propose Tab-CoT, a novel tabular-format CoT prompting method, which allows the complex reasoning process to be explicitly modeled in a highly structured manner.Despite its simplicity, we show that our approach is capable of performing reasoning across multiple dimensions (i.e., both rows and columns).We demonstrate our approach's strong zero-shot and few-shot capabilities through extensive experiments on a range of reasoning tasks.

Tab-CoT: Zero-shot Tabular Chain of Thought

Most text-to-SQL models, even though based on the same grammar decoder, generate the SQL structure first and then fill in the SQL slots with the correct schema items. This second step depends on schema linking: aligning the entity references in the question with the schema columns or tables. This is generally approached via Exact Match based Schema Linking (EMSL) within a neural network-based schema linking module. EMSL has become standard in text-to-SQL: many state-of-the-art models employ EMSL, with performance dropping significantly when the EMSL component is removed. In this work, however, we show that EMSL reduces robustness, rendering models vulnerable to synonym substitution and typos. Instead of relying on EMSL to make up for deficiencies in question-schema encoding, we show that using a pre-trained language model as an encoder can improve performance without using EMSL, giving a more robust model. We also study the design choice of the schema linking module, finding that a suitable design benefits performance and interoperability. Finally, based on the above study of schema linking, we introduce the grammar linking to help model align grammar references in the question with the SQL keywords.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/320f9a53-8c59-46d3-ab0a-2125b3f8665a" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Re-appraising the Schema Linking for Text-to-SQL

Large language models (LLMs) have led to a series of breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), partly owing to the massive amounts of world knowledge they memorize during pretraining.While many downstream applications provide the model with an informational context to aid its underlying task, how the model's world knowledge interacts with the factual information presented in the context remains under explored. As a desirable behavior, an LLM should give precedence to the context whenever it contains task-relevant information that conflicts with the model's memorized knowledge. This enables model predictions to be grounded in the context, which then facilitates updating specific model predictions without frequently retraining the model. By contrast, when the context is irrelevant to the task, the model should ignore it and fall back on its internal knowledge. In this paper, we undertake a first joint study of the aforementioned two properties, namely controllability and robustness, in the context of LLMs. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art T5 and PaLM models (both pretrained and finetuned) could exhibit low controllability and robustness that does not improve with increasing the model size. As a solution, we propose a simple yet effective method knowledge aware finetuning (KAFT) to strengthen both controllability and robustness by injecting counterfactual and irrelevant contexts to standard supervised datasets. Our comprehensive evaluation showcases the utility of KAFT across model architectures and sizes.

Large Language Models with Controllable Working Memory

Multilingual image captioning has recently been tackled by training with large-scale machine translated data, which is an expensive, noisy, and time-consuming process. Without requiring any multilingual caption data, we propose LMCap, an image-blind few-shot multilingual captioning model that works by prompting a language model with retrieved captions. Specifically, instead of following the standard encoder-decoder paradigm, given an image, LMCap first retrieves the captions of similar images using a multilingual CLIP encoder. These captions are then combined into a prompt for an XGLM decoder, in order to generate captions in the desired language. In other words, the generation model does not directly process the image, instead it processes retrieved captions. Experiments on the XM3600 dataset of geographically diverse images show that our model is competitive with fully-supervised multilingual captioning models, without requiring any supervised training on any captioning data.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/deaf85c9-3f56-46cf-92cf-5123692b4d75" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

LMCap: Few-shot Multilingual Image Captioning by Retrieval Augmented Language Model Prompting

Intermediate training of pre-trained transformer-based language models on domain-specific data leads to substantial gains for downstream tasks. To increase efficiency and prevent catastrophic forgetting alleviated from full domain-adaptive pre-training, approaches such as adapters have been developed. However, these require additional parameters for each layer, and are criticized for their limited expressiveness. In this work, we introduce TADA, a novel task-agnostic domain adaptation method which is modular, parameter-efficient, and thus, data-efficient. Within TADA, we retrain the embeddings to learn domain-aware input representations and tokenizers for the transformer encoder, while freezing all other parameters of the model. Then, task-specific fine-tuning is performed. We further conduct experiments with meta-embeddings and newly introduced meta-tokenizers, resulting in one model per task in multi-domain use cases. Our broad evaluation in 4 downstream tasks for 14 domains across single- and multi-domain setups and high- and low-resource scenarios reveals that TADA is an effective and efficient alternative to full domain-adaptive pre-training and adapters for domain adaptation, while not introducing additional parameters or complex training steps.

TADA: Efficient Task-Agnostic Domain Adaptation for Transformers

Relation Extraction (RE) remains a challenging task, especially when considering realistic out-of-domain evaluations. One of the main reasons for this is the limited training size of current RE datasets: obtaining high-quality (manually annotated) data is extremely expensive and cannot realistically be repeated for each new domain. An intermediate training step on data from related tasks has shown to be beneficial across many NLP tasks.However, this setup still requires supplementary annotated data, which is often not available. In this paper, we investigate intermediate pre-training specifically for RE. We exploit the affinity between syntactic structure and semantic RE, and identify the syntactic relations which are closely related to RE by being on the shortest dependency path between two entities. We then take advantage of the high accuracy of current syntactic parsers in order to automatically obtain large amounts of low-cost pre-training data. By pre-training our RE model on the relevant syntactic relations, we are able to outperform the baseline in five out of six cross-domain setups, without any additional annotated data.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/c7478c27-714a-4a51-ba87-b339af8300e3" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Silver Syntax Pre-training for Cross-Domain Relation Extraction

Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to improve communication performance; however, its impact on imitation learning has yet to be investigated. Our work explores the link between compositionality and imitation in a Lewis game played by deep neural agents. Our contributions are twofold: first, we show that the learning algorithm used to imitate is crucial: supervised learning tends to produce more average languages, while reinforcement learning introduces a selection pressure toward more compositional languages. Second, our study reveals that compositional languages are easier to imitate, which may induce the pressure toward compositional languages in RL imitation settings.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/aL2QM8dUtT8fzBuK3envdP/embed/polls/34bd7c94-d4ff-4c3b-92d2-c40ba97a2cb0" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

On the Correspondence between Compositionality and Imitation in Emergent Neural Communication

This paper presents an investigation into the differences between processing monolingual input and code-switching (CSW) input in the context of machine translation (MT). Specifically, we compare the performance of three MT systems (Google, mBART-50 and M2M-100-big) in terms of their ability to translate monolingual Vietnamese, a low-resource language, and Vietnamese-English CSW respectively. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically analyse what might happen when multilingual MT systems are exposed to CSW data using both automatic and human metrics. We find that state-of-the-art neural translation systems not only achieve higher scores on automatic metrics when processing CSW input (compared to monolingual input), but also produce translations that are consistently rated as more semantically faithful by humans. We further suggest that automatic evaluation alone is insufficient for evaluating the translation of CSW input. Our findings establish a new benchmark that offers insights into the relationship between MT and CSW.

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Type Enhanced BERT for Correcting NER Errors

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