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Pre-training sentence encoders is effective in many natural language processing tasks including machine translation (MT) quality estimation (QE), due partly to the scarcity of annotated QE data required for supervised learning. In this paper, we investigate the use of an intermediate self-supervised learning task for sentence encoder aiming at improving QE performances at the sentence and word levels. Our approach is motivated by a problem inherent to QE: mistakes in translation caused by wrongly inserted and deleted tokens. We modify the translation language model (TLM) training objective of the cross-lingual language model (XLM) to orientate the pre-trained model towards the target task. The proposed method does not rely on annotated data and is complementary to QE methods involving pre-trained sentence encoders and domain adaptation. Experiments on English-to-German and English-to-Russian translation directions show that intermediate learning improves over domain adaptated models. Additionally, our method reaches results in par with state-of-the-art QE models without requiring the combination of several approaches and outperforms similar methods based on pre-trained sentence encoders.

COLING 2020

Intermediate Self-supervised Learning for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

intermediate training

self-supervised learning

quality estimation

machine translation

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

poster

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

We analyze the use and interpretation of modal expressions in a corpus of situated human-robot dialogue and ask how to effectively represent these expressions for automatic learning and dynamic interpretation in context. We present a two-level annotation scheme for modality that captures both content and intent, integrating a logic-based, semantic representation and a task-oriented, pragmatic representation that maps to our robot's capabilities. Data from our annotation task reveals that the interpretation of modal expressions in human-robot dialogue is quite diverse, yet highly constrained by the physical environment and asymmetrical speaker/addressee relationship. We sketch a formal model of human-robot common ground in which modality can be grounded and dynamically interpreted relative to speaker role, temporal constraints, and physical environment.

A Two-Level Interpretation of Modality in Human-Robot Dialogue

Current methods of cross-lingual parser transfer focus on predicting the best parser for a low resource target language globally, that is, “at treebank level”. In this work, we propose and argue for a novel cross-lingual transfer paradigm: instance-level parser selection (ILPS), and present a proof-of-concept study focused on instance-level selection in the framework of delexicalized parser transfer. Our work is motivated by an empirical observation that different source parsers are the best choice for different Universal POS-sequences (i.e., UPOS sentences) in the target language. We then propose to predict the best parser at the instance level. To this end, we train a supervised regression model, based on the Transformer architecture, to predict parser accuracies for individual POS-sequences. We compare ILPS against two strong single-best parser selection baselines (SBPS): (1) a model that compares POS n-gram distributions between the source and target languages (KL) and (2) a model that selects the source based on the similarity between manually created language vectors encoding syntactic properties of languages (L2V). The results from our extensive evaluation, coupling 42 source parsers and 20 diverse low-resource test languages, show that ILPS outperforms KL and L2V on 13/20 and 14/20 test languages, respectively. Further, we show that by predicting the best parser “at treebank level” (SBPS), using the aggregation of predictions from our instance-level model, we outperform the same baselines on 17/20 and 16/20 test languages.

Towards Instance-Level Parser Selection for Cross-Lingual Transfer of Dependency Parsers

Table-based fact verification is expected to perform both linguistic reasoning and symbolic reasoning, such as count, argmax, and so on. Existing approaches for fact verification focus on the understanding of natural language, namely, linguistic reasoning, but fail to take advantage of the combination of linguistic information and symbolic information. We propose a heterogeneous graph-based neural network for table-based fact verification named HeterTFV, to learn to combine both types of information.

Learn to Combine Linguistic and Symbolic Information for Table-based Fact Verification

To address the two main challenges in distant supervision relation extraction, one of which is the wrong labeling problem and the other is long-tail relations, we propose a novel Collaborating Relation-augmented Attention framework.

Improving Long-Tail Relation Extraction with Collaborating Relation-Augmented Attention

Models with a large number of parameters are prone to overfitting and often fail to capture the underlying input distribution. We introduce Emix, a data augmentation method that uses interpolations of word embeddings and hidden layer representations to construct virtual examples. We show that Emix shows significant improvements over previously used interpolation-based regularizers and data augmentation techniques. We also demonstrate how our proposed method is more robust to sparsification. We highlight the merits of our proposed methodology by performing thorough quantitative and qualitative assessments.

Augmenting NLP models using Hidden State Interpolations

Math word problem solving is an emerging research topic in Natural Language Processing. Recently, to address the math word problem solving task, researchers have applied the encoder-decoder architecture, which is mainly used in machine translation tasks. The state-of-the-art neural models use hand-crafted features and are based on generation methods. In this paper, we propose the GEO (Generation of Equations by utilizing Operators) model that does not use hand-crafted features and addresses two issues that are present in existing neural models: 1. missing domain-specific knowledge features and 2. losing encoder-level knowledge. To address missing domain-specific feature issue, we designed two auxiliary tasks: operation group difference prediction and implicit pair prediction. To address losing encoder-level knowledge issue, we added an Operation Feature Feed Forward (OP3F) layer. Experimental results showed that the GEO model outperformed existing state-of-the-art models on two datasets, 85.1% in MAWPS, and 62.5% in DRAW-1K, and reached comparable performance of 82.1% in ALG514 dataset.

Generating Equation by Utilizing Operators : GEO Model

Neural models have achieved great success on the task of machine reading comprehension (MRC), which are typically trained on hard labels. We argue that hard labels limit the model capability on generalization due to the label sparseness problem. In this paper, we propose a robust training method for MRC models to address this problem. Our method consists of three strategies, 1) label smoothing, 2) word overlapping, 3) distribution prediction. All of them help to train models on soft labels. We validate our approach on the representative architecture ALBERT. Experimental results show that our method can greatly boost the baseline with 1% improvement in average, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on NewsQA and QUOREF.

Robust Machine Reading Comprehension by Learning Soft labels

In this paper, we address the task of news-image captioning, which generates a description of an image given the image and its article body as input. This task is more challenging than the conventional image captioning, because it requires a joint understanding of image and text. We present a Transformer model that integrates text and image modalities and attends to textual features from visual features in generating a caption. Experiments based on automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation show that an article text provides primary information to reproduce news-image captions written by journalists. The results also demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model. In addition, we also confirm that visual features contribute to improving the quality of news-image captions.

Image Caption Generation for News Articles

Work with neural word embeddings and lexical relations has largely focused on confirmatory experiments which use human-curated examples of semantic and syntactic relations to validate against. In this paper, we explore the degree to which lexical relations, such as those found in popular validation sets, can be derived and extended from a variety of neural embeddings using classical clustering methods. We show that the Word2Vec space of word-pairs (i.e., offset vectors) significantly outperforms other more contemporary methods, even in the presence of a large number of noisy offsets. Moreover, we show that via a simple nearest neighbor approach in the offset space, new examples of known relations can be discovered. Our results speak to the amenability of offset vectors from non-contextual neural embeddings to find semantically coherent clusters. This simple approach has implications for the exploration of emergent regularities and their examples, such as emerging trends on social media and their related posts.

Lexical Relation Mining in Neural Word Embeddings

To exploit the domain knowledge to guarantee the correctness of generated text has been a hot topic in recent years, especially for high professional domains such as medical. However, most of recent works only consider the information of unstructured text rather than structured information of the knowledge graph. In this paper, we focus on the medical topic-to-text generation task and adapt a knowledge-aware text generation model to the medical domain, named MedWriter, which not only introduces the specific knowledge from the external medical knowledge graph (MKG) but also is capable of learning graph-level representation. We conduct experiments on a medical literature dataset collected from medical journals, each of which has a set of topic words, an abstract of medical literature and a corresponding knowledge graph from CMeKG. Experimental results demonstrate incorporating knowledge graph into generation model can improve the quality of the generated text and has superiority over the competitor methods.


Intermediate Self-supervised Learning for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

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Intermediate Self-supervised Learning for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

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A Two-Level Interpretation of Modality in Human-Robot Dialogue

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