United States

Standard pretrained language models operate
on sequences of subword tokens without direct access to the characters that compose each
token’s string representation. We probe the
embedding layer of pretrained language models and show that models learn the internal
character composition of whole word and subword tokens to a surprising extent, without
ever seeing the characters coupled with the tokens. Our results show that the embedding layers of RoBERTa and GPT2 each hold enough
information to accurately spell up to a third
of the vocabulary and reach high character
ngram overlap across all token types. We further test whether enriching subword models
with character information can improve language modeling, and observe that this method
has a near-identical learning curve as training without spelling-based enrichment. Overall, our results suggest that language modeling objectives incentivize the model to implicitly learn some notion of spelling, and that explicitly teaching the model how to spell does
not appear to enhance its performance on such
tasks.

NAACL 2022

Models In a Spelling Bee: Language Models Implicitly Learn the Character Composition of Tokens

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

poster

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Deep learning based systems are susceptible to adversarial attacks, where a small, imperceptible change at the input alters the model prediction. However, to date the majority of the approaches to detect these attacks have been designed for image processing systems. Many popular image adversarial detection approaches are able to identify adversarial examples from embedding feature spaces, whilst in the NLP domain existing state of the art detection approaches solely focus on input text features, without consideration of model embedding spaces. This work examines what differences result when porting these image designed strategies to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks - these detectors are found to not port over well. This is expected as NLP systems have a very different form of input: discrete and sequential in nature, rather than the continuous and fixed size inputs for images. As an equivalent model-focused NLP detection approach, this work proposes a simple sentence-embedding "residue" based  detector to identify adversarial examples. On many tasks, it out-performs ported image domain detectors and recent state of the art NLP specific detectors.

Residue-Based Natural Language Adversarial Attack Detection

Gender-neutral pronouns have recently been introduced in many languages to a) include non-binary people and b) as a generic singular. Recent results from psycholinguistics suggest that gender-neutral pronouns (in Swedish) are not associated with human processing difficulties. This, we show, is in sharp contrast with automated processing. We show that gender-neutral pronouns in Danish, English, and Swedish are associated with higher perplexity, more dispersed attention patterns, and worse downstream performance. We argue that such conservativity in language models may limit widespread adoption of gender-neutral pronouns and must therefore be resolved. 

How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns

The success of multilingual pre-trained models is underpinned by their ability to learn representations shared by multiple languages even in absence of any explicit supervision. However, it remains unclear how these models learn to generalise across languages. In this work, we conjecture that multilingual pre-trained models can derive language-universal abstractions about grammar. In particular, we investigate whether morphosyntactic information is encoded in the same subset of neurons in different languages.
We conduct the first large-scale empirical study over 43 languages and 14 morphosyntactic categories with a state-of-the-art neuron-level probe. Our findings show that the cross-lingual overlap between neurons is significant, but its extent may vary across categories and depends on language proximity and pre-training data size.

Same Neurons, Different Languages: Probing Morphosyntax in Multilingual Pre-trained Models

Text style transfer (TST) without parallel data has achieved some practical success. 
However, most of the existing unsupervised text style transfer methods suffer from (i) requiring massive amounts of non-parallel data to guide transferring different text styles. (ii) colossal performance degradation when fine-tuning the model in new domains. In this work, we propose DAML-ATM (Domain Adaptive Meta-Learning with Adversarial Transfer Model), which consists of two parts: DAML and ATM. 
DAML is a domain adaptive meta-learning approach to learning general knowledge in multiple heterogeneous source domains, capable of adapting to new unseen domains with a small amount of data. Moreover, we propose a new unsupervised TST approach Adversarial Transfer Model (ATM), composed of a sequence-to-sequence pre-trained language model and uses adversarial style training for better content preservation and style transfer. Results on multi-domain datasets demonstrate that our approach generalizes well on unseen low-resource domains, achieving state-of-the-art results against ten strong baselines.

Low Resource Style Transfer via Domain Adaptive Meta Learning

In this presentation, I will introduce MuCGEC, the first multi-reference multi-source evaluation dataset for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC). We conduct experiments with two mainstream CGEC models, achieving competitive benchmark performance on previous and our datasets. We also discuss CGEC evaluation methodologies, including the effect of multiple references and using a char-based metric.

MuCGEC: a Multi-Reference Multi-Source Evaluation Dataset for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

Article prediction is a task that has long defied accurate linguistic description. As such, this task is ideally suited to evaluate models on their ability to emulate native-speaker intuition. To this end, we compare the performance of native English speakers and pre-trained models on the task of article prediction set up as a three way choice (a/an, the, zero). Our experiments with BERT show that BERT outperforms humans on this task across all articles. In particular, BERT is far superior to humans at detecting the zero article, possibly because we insert them using rules that the deep neural model can easily pick up. More interestingly, we find that BERT tends to agree more with annotators than with the corpus when inter-annotator agreement is high but switches to agreeing more with the corpus as inter-annotator agreement drops. We contend that this alignment with annotators, despite being trained on the corpus, suggests that BERT is not memorising article use, but captures a high level generalisation of article use akin to human intuition.


Abstraction not Memory: BERT and the English Article System

The task of natural language inference (NLI), to decide if a hypothesis entails or contradicts a premise, received considerable attention in recent years. All competitive systems build on top of contextualized representations and make use of transformer architectures for learning an NLI model. When somebody is faced with a particular NLI task, they need to select the best model that is available. This is a time-consuming and resource-intense endeavour. To solve this practical problem, we propose a simple method for predicting the performance without actually fine-tuning the model. We do this by testing how well the pre-trained models perform on the aNLI task when just comparing sentence embeddings with cosine similarity to what kind of performance is achieved when training a classifier on top of these embeddings. We show that the accuracy of the cosine similarity approach correlates strongly with the accuracy of the classification approach with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.65. Since the similarity is orders of magnitude faster to compute on a given dataset (less than a minute vs.\ hours), our method can lead to significant time savings in the process of model selection.

Embarrassingly Simple Performance Prediction for Abductive Natural Language Inference

Consistency training regularizes a model by enforcing predictions of original and perturbed inputs to be similar. Previous studies have proposed various augmentation methods for the perturbation but are limited in that they are agnostic to the training model. Thus, the perturbed samples may not aid in regularization due to their ease of classification from the model. In this context, we propose an augmentation method of adding a discrete noise that would incur the highest divergence between predictions. This virtual adversarial discrete noise obtained by replacing a small portion of tokens while keeping original semantics as much as possible efficiently pushes a training model's decision boundary. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms other consistency training baselines with text editing, paraphrasing, or a continuous noise on semi-supervised text classification tasks and a robustness benchmark.

Consistency Training with Virtual Adversarial Discrete Perturbation

The impressive performance of GPT-3 using natural language prompts and in-context learning has inspired work on better fine-tuning of moderately-sized models under this paradigm. Following this line of work, we present a contrastive learning framework that clusters inputs from the same class for better generality of models trained with only limited examples. Specifically, we propose a supervised contrastive framework that clusters inputs from the same class under different augmented "views" and repel the ones from different classes. We create different "views" of an example by appending it with different language prompts and contextual demonstrations. Combining a contrastive loss with the standard masked language modeling (MLM) loss in prompt-based few-shot learners, the experimental results show that our method can improve over the state-of-the-art methods in a diverse set of 15 language tasks. Our framework makes minimal assumptions on the task or the base model, and can be applied to many recent methods with little modification.

Contrastive Learning for Prompt-based Few-shot Language Learners

Few-shot language learners adapt knowledge from a pre-trained model to recognize novel classes from a few-labeled sentences. In such settings, fine-tuning a pre-trained language model can cause severe over-fitting. In this paper, we propose an Embedding Hallucination (EmbedHalluc) method, which generates auxiliary embedding-label pairs to expand the fine-tuning dataset. The hallucinator is trained by playing an adversarial game with the discriminator, such that the hallucinated embedding is indiscriminative to the real ones in the fine-tuning dataset. By training with the extended dataset, the language learner effectively learns from the diverse hallucinated embeddings to overcome the over-fitting issue. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is effective in a wide range of language tasks, outperforming current fine-tuning methods. Further, we show that EmbedHalluc outperforms other methods that address this over-fitting problem, such as common data augmentation, semi-supervised pseudo-labeling, and regularization.

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Residue-Based Natural Language Adversarial Attack Detection

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Spelling-out is not Straightforward: LLMs' Capability of Tokenization from Token to Characters