Taiwan

Data augmentation techniques have been proven useful in many applications in NLP
fields. Most augmentations are task-specific, and cannot be used as a general-purpose tool. In our work, we present AugCSE, a unified framework to utilize diverse sets of data augmentations to achieve a better, general purpose, sentence embedding model. Building upon the latest sentence embedding models, our approach uses a simple antagonistic discriminator that differentiates the augmentation types. With the finetuning objective borrowed from domain adaptation, we show that diverse augmentations, which often lead to conflicting
contrastive signals, can be tamed to produce a better and more robust sentence representation. Our methods1 achieve state-of-the-art results on downstream transfer tasks and perform competitively on semantic textual similarity tasks, using only unsupervised data.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.30/)

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

AugCSE: Contrastive Sentence Embedding with Diverse Augmentations

sentence textual similarity

sequence classification

low-resource nlp

sentence embedding

contrastive learning

data augmentation

sentence semantics

robustness

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

ACL 2023

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.

technical paper

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP).

A registration is required to access this event. Access to the event site will be granted to all registered attendees on **November 16th**. If you have not already done so, please register using the link below:
 
 https://conference.iis.sinica.edu.tw/servlet/Register?ConferenceID=411

Registration Is Required

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

Word embeddings learned using the distributional hypothesis (e.g., GloVe, Word2vec) do not capture the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, which are present inherently in words. We present a novel retrofitting method for updating embeddings of words for their affective meaning. It learns a non-linear transformation function that maps pre-trained embeddings to an affective vector space, in a representation learning setting. We investigate word embeddings for their capacity to cluster emotion-bearing words. The affective embeddings learned by our method achieve better inter-cluster and intra-cluster distance for words having the same emotions, as evaluated through different cluster quality metrics. For the downstream tasks on sentiment analysis and sarcasm detection, simple classification models, viz. SVM and Attention Net, learned using our affective embeddings perform better than their pre-trained counterparts (more than 1.5% improvement in F1-score) and other benchmarks. Furthermore, the difference in performance is more pronounced in limited data setting.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.42/)

Affective Retrofitted Word Embeddings

Models based on large-pretrained language models, such as S(entence)BERT, provide effective and efficient sentence embeddings that show high correlation to human similarity ratings, but lack interpretability. On the other hand, graph metrics for graph-based meaning representations (e.g., Abstract Meaning Representation, AMR) can make explicit the semantic aspects in which two sentences are similar. However, such metrics tend to be slow, rely on parsers, and do not reach state-of-the-art performance when rating sentence similarity.
In this work, we aim at the best of both worlds, by learning to induce Semantically Structured Sentence BERT embeddings (S3BERT). Our S3BERT embeddings are composed of explainable sub-embeddings that emphasize various semantic sentence features (e.g., semantic roles, negation, or quantification). We show how to i) learn a decomposition of the sentence embeddings into semantic features, through approximation of a suite of interpretable AMR graph metrics, and how to ii) preserve the overall power of the neural embeddings by controlling the decomposition learning process with a second objective that enforces consistency with the similarity ratings of an SBERT teacher model. In our experimental studies, we show that our approach offers interpretability -- while fully preserving the effectiveness and efficiency of the neural sentence embeddings.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.48/)

SBERT studies Meaning Representations: Decomposing Sentence Embeddings into Explainable AMR Meaning Features

Negation is poorly captured by current language models, although the extent of this problem is not widely understood. We introduce a natural language inference (NLI) test suite to enable probing the capabilities of NLP methods, with the aim of understanding sub-clausal negation. The test suite contains premise–hypothesis pairs where the premise contains sub-clausal negation and the hypothesis is constructed by making minimal modifications to the premise in order to reflect different possible interpretations. Aside from adopting standard NLI labels, our test suite is systematically constructed under a rigorous linguistic framework. It includes annotation of negation types and constructions grounded in linguistic theory, as well as the operations used to construct hypotheses. This facilitates fine-grained analysis of model performance. We conduct experiments using pre-trained language models to demonstrate that our test suite is more challenging than existing benchmarks focused on negation, and show how our annotation supports a deeper understanding of the current NLI capabilities in terms of negation and quantification.

Not another Negation Benchmark: The NaN-NLI Test Suite for Sub-clausal Negation

This paper introduces a new method, SummVD, for automatic unsupervised extractive summarization.
This method is based on singular value decomposition, a linear method in the number of words, in order to reduce the dimensionality of word embeddings and propose a representation of words on a small number of dimensions, each representing a hidden topic. It also uses word clustering to reduce the vocabulary size. This representation, specific to one document, reduces the noise brought by several dimensions of the embeddings that are useless in a restricted context. It is followed by a linear sentence extraction heuristic. This makes SummVD an efficient method for text summarization.
We evaluate SummVD using several corpora of different nature (news, scientific articles, social network). Our method outperforms in effectiveness recent extractive approaches. 
Moreover, SummVD requires low resources, in terms of data and computing power. So it can be run on long single documents such as scientific papers as much as large multi-document corpora and is fast enough to be used in live summarization systems.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.38/)

SummVD : An efficient approach for unsupervised topic-based summarization

An introduction of our work SAPGraph: Structure-aware Extractive Summarization for Scientific Papers with Heterogeneous Graph, including our background, motivation, methods, experiments, and future work.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.44/)

SAPGraph: Structure-aware Extractive Summarization for Scientific Papers with Heterogeneous Graph

Role-oriented dialogue summarization generates summaries for different roles in dialogue (e.g. doctor and patient). Existing methods consider roles separately where interactions among different roles are not fully explored. In this paper, we propose a novel Role-Aware Centrality (RAC) model to capture role interactions, which can be easily applied to any seq2seq models. The RAC assigns each role a specific sentence-level centrality score by involving role prompts to control what kind of summary to generate. The RAC measures both the importance of utterances and the relevance between roles and utterances. Then we use RAC to re-weight context representations, which are used by the decoder to generate role summaries. We verify RAC on two public benchmark datasets, CSDS and MC. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results on the two datasets. Extensive analyses have demonstrated that the role-aware centrality helps generate summaries more precisely.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.6/)

Towards Modeling Role-Aware Centrality for Dialogue Summarization

We provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis of self-repetition in the output of neural summarizers. We measure self-repetition as the number of $n$-grams of length four or longer that appear in multiple outputs of the same system. We analyze the behavior of three popular architectures (BART, T5, and Pegasus), fine-tuned on five datasets. In a regression analysis, we find that the three architectures have different propensities for repeating content across output summaries for inputs, with BART being particularly prone to self-repetition. Fine-tuning on more abstractive data, and on data featuring formulaic language, is associated with a higher rate of self-repetition. In qualitative analysis we find systems produce artefacts such as ads and disclaimers unrelated to the content being summarized, as well as formulaic phrases common in the fine-tuning domain. Our approach to corpus-level analysis of self-repetition may help practitioners clean up training data for summarizers and ultimately support methods for minimizing the amount of self-repetition.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.42/)

Self-Repetition in Abstractive Neural Summarizers

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.2/)

Double Trouble: How to not explain a text classifier's decisions using counterfactuals synthesized by masked language models?

Grammatical error correction (GEC) systems are a useful tool for assessing a learner's writing ability. These systems allow the grammatical proficiency of a candidate’s text to be assessed without requiring an examiner or teacher to read the text. A simple summary of a candidate's ability can be measured by the total number of edits between the input text and the GEC system output: the fewer the edits the better the candidate. With advances in deep learning, GEC systems have become increasingly powerful and accurate. However, deep learning systems are susceptible to adversarial attacks, in which a small change at the input can cause large, undesired changes at the output. In the context of GEC for automated assessment, the aim of an attack can be to deceive the system into not correcting (concealing) grammatical errors to create the perception of higher language ability. An interesting aspect of adversarial attacks in this scenario is that the attack needs to be simple as it must be applied by, for example, a learner of English. The form of realistic attack examined in this work is appending the same phrase to each input sentence: a concatenative universal attack. The candidate only needs to learn a single attack phrase. State-of-the-art GEC systems are found to be susceptible to this form of simple attack, which transfers to different test sets as well as system architectures.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.13/)

Grammatical Error Correction Systems for Automated Assessment: Are They Susceptible to Universal Adversarial Attacks?

Related works used indexes like CKA and variants of CCA to measure the similarity of cross-lingual representations in multilingual language models. In this paper, we argue that assumptions of CKA/CCA align poorly with one of the motivating goals of cross-lingual learning analysis, i.e., explaining zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. We highlight what valu- able aspects of cross-lingual similarity these indexes fail to capture and provide a motivating case study demonstrating the problem empir- ically. Then, we introduce Average Neuron- Wise Correlation (ANC) as a straightforward al- ternative that is exempt from the difficulties of CKA/CCA and is good specifically in a cross- lingual context. Finally, we use ANC to con- struct evidence that the previously introduced “first align, then predict” pattern takes place not only in masked language models (MLMs) but also in multilingual models with causal lan- guage modeling objectives (CLMs). Moreover, we show that the pattern extends to the scaled versions of the MLMs and CLMs (up to 85x original mBERT).

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.15/)

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