United States

Target-guided response generation enables dialogue systems to smoothly transition a conversation from a dialogue context toward a target sentence. Such control is useful for designing dialogue systems that direct a conversation toward specific goals, such as creating non-obtrusive recommendations or introducing new topics in the conversation. In this paper, we introduce a new technique for target-guided response generation, which first finds a bridging path of commonsense knowledge concepts between the source and the target, and then uses the identified bridging path to generate transition responses. Additionally, we propose techniques to re-purpose existing dialogue datasets for target-guided generation. Experiments reveal that the proposed techniques outperform various baselines on this task.
Finally, we observe that the existing automated metrics for this task correlate poorly with human judgement ratings. We propose a novel evaluation metric that we demonstrate is more reliable for target-guided response evaluation. Our work generally enables dialogue system designers to exercise more control over the conversations that their systems produce.

NAACL 2022

Target-Guided Dialogue Response Generation Using Commonsense and Data Augmentation

**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) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
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.

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

Persuasion is an intricate process involving empathetic connection between two individuals. Plain persuasive responses may make a conversation non-engaging. 
Even the most well-intended and reasoned persuasive conversations can fall through in the absence of empathetic connection between the speaker and listener. In this paper, we propose a novel task of incorporating empathy when generating persuasive responses. We develop an empathetic persuasive dialogue system by fine-tuning a maximum likelihood Estimation (MLE)-based language model in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. To design feedbacks for our RL-agent, we define an effective and efficient reward function considering consistency, repetitiveness, emotion and persuasion rewards to ensure consistency, non-repetitiveness, empathy and persuasiveness in the generated responses. Due to lack of emotion annotated persuasive data, we first annotate the existing Persuaion For Good dataset with emotions, then build transformer based classifiers to provide emotion based feedbacks to our RL agent. Experimental results confirm that our proposed model increases the rate of generating persuasive responses as compared to the available state-of-the-art dialogue models while making the dialogues empathetically more engaging and retaining the language quality in responses.

Empathetic Persuasion: Reinforcing Empathy and Persuasiveness in Dialogue Systems

Previous works show that discourse analysis benefits from modeling  intra- and inter-sentential levels separately, where proper representations for text units of different granularities are desired to capture both the information of the text units and their relation to the context. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of transformers to encode different contextualized representations of units of different levels to dynamically capture the information required for discourse dependency analysis on intra- and inter-sentential levels. Motivated by the observation of writing patterns shared across articles to improve discourse analysis, we propose to design sequence labeling methods to take advantage of such structural information from the context that substantially outperforms traditional direct classification methods. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on both English and Chinese datasets.

Improve Discourse Dependency Parsing with Contextualized Representations

Transformer-based pre-trained models with millions of parameters require large storage. Recent approaches tackle this shortcoming by training adapters, but these approaches still require a relatively large number of parameters. In this study, AdapterBias, a surprisingly simple yet effective adapter architecture, is proposed. AdapterBias adds a token-dependent shift to the hidden output of transformer layers to adapt to downstream tasks with only a vector and a linear layer. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of AdapterBias. The experiments show that our proposed method can dramatically reduce the trainable parameters compared to the previous works with a minimal decrease in task performances compared with fine-tuned pre-trained models. We further find that AdapterBias automatically learns to assign more significant representation shifts to the tokens related to the task in consideration. 


AdapterBias: Parameter-efficient Token-dependent Representation Shift for Adapters in NLP Tasks

The energy requirements of current natural language processing models continue to grow at a rapid, unsustainable pace. Recent works highlighting this problem conclude there is an urgent need for methods that reduce the energy needs of NLP and machine learning more broadly. In this article, we investigate techniques that can be used to reduce the energy consumption of common NLP applications. In particular, we focus on techniques to measure energy usage and different hardware and datacenter-oriented settings that can be tuned to reduce energy consumption for training and inference for language models. We characterize the impact of these settings on metrics such as computational performance and energy consumption through experiments conducted on a high performance computing system as well as popular cloud computing platforms. These techniques can lead to significant reduction in energy consumption when training language models or their use for inference. For example, power-capping, which limits the maximum power a GPU can consume, can enable a 15% decrease in energy usage with marginal increase in overall computation time when training a transformer-based language model.

Great Power, Great Responsibility: Recommendations for Reducing Energy for Training Language Models

The massive amount of trainable parameters in the pre-trained language models (PLMs) makes them hard to be deployed to multiple downstream tasks. To address this issue, parameter-efficient transfer learning methods have been proposed to tune only a few parameters during fine-tuning while freezing the rest. This paper looks at existing methods along this line through the \textitkernel lens. Motivated by the connection between self-attention in transformer-based PLMs and kernel learning, we propose \textitkernel-wise adapters, namely \textitKernel-mix, that utilize the kernel structure in self-attention to guide the assignment of the tunable parameters. These adapters use guidelines found in classical kernel learning and enable separate parameter tuning for each attention head. Our empirical results, over a diverse set of natural language generation and understanding tasks, show that our proposed adapters can attain or improve the strong performance of existing baselines.

Empowering parameter-efficient transfer learning by recognizing the kernel structure in self-attention

Large transformer-based pre-trained language models have achieved impressive performance on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks and can capture factual knowledge in their parameters. We argue that storing large amounts of knowledge in the model parameters is sub-optimal given the ever-growing amounts of knowledge and resource requirements. We posit that a more efficient alternative is to provide explicit access to contextually relevant structured knowledge to the model and train it to use that knowledge. We present LM-CORE -- a general framework to achieve this-- that allows \textitdecoupling of the language model training from the external knowledge source and allows the latter to be updated without affecting the already trained model. Experimental results show that LM-CORE, having access to external knowledge, achieves significant and robust outperformance over state-of-the-art knowledge-enhanced language models on knowledge probing tasks; can effectively handle knowledge updates; and performs well on two downstream tasks. We also present a thorough error analysis highlighting the successes and failures of LM-CORE. Our code and model checkpoints are publicly available.

LM-CORE: Language Models with Contextually Relevant External Knowledge

Moral values influence how we interpret and act upon the information we receive. Identifying human moral values is essential for artificially  intelligent agents to co-exist with humans. Recent progress in natural language processing allows the identification of moral values in textual discourse. However, domain-specific moral rhetoric poses challenges for transferring knowledge from one domain to another.
We provide the first extensive investigation on the effects of cross-domain classification of moral values from text. We compare a state-of-the-art deep learning model (BERT) in seven domains and four cross-domain settings. We show that a value classifier can generalize and transfer knowledge to novel domains, but it can introduce catastrophic forgetting. We also highlight the typical classification errors in cross-domain value classification and compare the model predictions to the annotators agreement. Our results provide insights to computer and social scientists that seek to identify moral rhetoric specific to a domain of discourse.

Cross-Domain Classification of Moral Values

Large language models trained on a mixture of NLP tasks that are converted into a text-to-text format using prompts, can generalize into novel forms of language and handle novel tasks. A large body of work within prompt engineering attempts to understand the effects of input forms and prompts in achieving superior performance. We consider an alternative measure and inquire whether the way in which an input is encoded affects social biases promoted in outputs. In this paper, we study T0, a large-scale multi-task text-to-text language model trained using prompt-based learning. We consider two different forms of semantically equivalent inputs: question-answer format and premise-hypothesis format. We use an existing bias benchmark for the former BBQ and create the first bias benchmark in natural language inference BBNLI with hand-written hypotheses while also converting each benchmark into the other form. The results on two benchmarks suggest that given two different formulations of essentially the same input, T0 conspicuously acts more biased in question answering form, which is seen during training, compared to premise-hypothesis form which is unlike its training examples. Code and data are released under https://github.com/feyzaakyurek/bbnli.

On Measuring Social Biases in Prompt-Based Multi-Task Learning

Recent work has shown that deep learning models in NLP are highly sensitive to low-level correlations between simple features and specific output labels, leading to over-fitting and lack of generalization. To mitigate this problem, a common practice is to balance datasets by adding new instances or by filtering out “easy” instances (Sakaguchi et al., 2020), culminating in a recent proposal to eliminate single-word correlations altogether (Gardner et al., 2021). In this opinion paper, we identify that despite these efforts, increasingly-powerful models keep exploiting ever-smaller spurious correlations, and as a result even balancing all single-word features is insufficient for mitigating all of these correlations. In parallel, a truly balanced dataset may be bound to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and miss important signal encoding common sense and world knowledge. We highlight several alternatives to dataset balancing, focusing on enhancing datasets with richer contexts, allowing models to abstain and interact with users, and turning from large-scale fine-tuning to zero- or few-shot setups.

On the Limitations of Dataset Balancing: The Lost Battle Against Spurious Correlations

The logical negation property (LNP), which implies generating different predictions for semantically opposite inputs (p is true iff ¬p is false), is an important property that a trustworthy language model must satisfy. However, much recent evidence shows that large-size pre-trained language models (PLMs) do not satisfy this property. In this paper, we perform experiments using probing tasks to assess PLMs’ LNP understanding. Unlike previous studies that only examined negation expressions, we expand the boundary of the investigation to lexical semantics. Through experiments, we observe that PLMs violate the LNP frequently. To alleviate the issue, we propose a novel intermediate training task, named meaning-matching, designed to directly learn a meaning text correspondence, instead of relying on the distributional hypothesis. Through multiple experiments, we find that the task enables PLMs to learn lexical semantic information. Also, through fine-tuning experiments on 7 GLUE tasks, we confirm that it is a safe intermediate task that guarantees a similar or better performance of downstream tasks. Finally, we observe that our proposed approach outperforms our previous counterparts despite its time and resource efficiency.

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Empathetic Persuasion: Reinforcing Empathy and Persuasiveness in Dialogue Systems

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