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Recently introduced language model prompting methods can achieve high accuracy in zero- and few-shot settings while requiring few to no learned task-specific parameters. Nevertheless, these methods still often trail behind full model finetuning. In this work, we investigate if a dedicated continued pretraining stage could improve &quot;promptability&quot;, i.e., zero-shot performance with natural language prompts or few-shot performance with prompt tuning. We reveal settings where existing continued pretraining methods lack promptability. We also identify current methodological gaps, which we fill with thorough large-scale experiments. We demonstrate that a simple recipe, continued pretraining that incorporates a trainable prompt during multi-task learning, leads to improved promptability in both zero- and few-shot settings compared to existing methods, up to 31% relative. On the other hand, we find that continued pretraining using MAML-style meta-learning, a method that directly optimizes few-shot promptability, yields subpar performance. We validate our findings with two prompt tuning methods, and, based on our results, we provide concrete recommendations to optimize promptability for different use cases.

EMNLP 2022

Continued Pretraining for Better Zero- and Few-Shot Promptability

prompting

few-shot

meta-learning

zero-shot

multi-task learning

# 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. 
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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). 

Recently introduced language model prompting methods can achieve high accuracy in zero- and few-shot settings while requiring few to no learned task-specific parameters. Nevertheless, these methods still often trail behind full model finetuning. In this work, we investigate if a dedicated continued pretraining stage could improve "promptability", i.e., zero-shot performance with natural language prompts or few-shot performance with prompt tuning. We reveal settings where existing continued pretraining methods lack promptability. We also identify current methodological gaps, which we fill with thorough large-scale experiments. We demonstrate that a simple recipe, continued pretraining that incorporates a trainable prompt during multi-task learning, leads to improved promptability in both zero- and few-shot settings compared to existing methods, up to 31% relative. On the other hand, we find that continued pretraining using MAML-style meta-learning, a method that directly optimizes few-shot promptability, yields subpar performance. We validate our findings with two prompt tuning methods, and, based on our results, we provide concrete recommendations to optimize promptability for different use cases.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Transformer-based language models trained on large natural language corpora have been very useful in downstream entity extraction tasks. However, they often result in poor performances when applied to domains that are different from those they are pretrained on. Continued pretraining using unlabeled data from target domains can help improve the performances of these language models on the downstream tasks. However, using all of the available unlabeled data for pretraining can be time-intensive; also, it can be detrimental to the performance of the downstream tasks, if the unlabeled data is not aligned with the data distribution for the target tasks. Previous works employed external supervision in the form of ontologies for selecting appropriate data samples for pretraining, but external supervision can be quite hard to obtain in low-resource domains. In this paper, we introduce effective ways to select data from unlabeled corpora of target domains for language model pretraining to improve the performances in target entity extraction tasks. Our data selection strategies do not require any external supervision. We conduct extensive experiments for the task of named entity recognition (NER) on seven different domains and show that language models pretrained on target domain unlabeled data obtained using our data selection strategies achieve better performances compared to those using data selection strategies in previous works that use external supervision. We also show that these pretrained language models using our data selection strategies outperform those pretrained on all of the available unlabeled target domain data.

Entity Extraction in Low Resource Domains with Selective Pre-training of Large Language Models

Sequential abstractive neural summarizers often do not use the underlying structure in the input article or dependencies between the input sentences. This structure is essential to integrate and consolidate information from different parts of the text. To address this shortcoming, we propose a hierarchy-aware graph neural network (HierGNN) which captures such dependencies through three main steps: 1) learning a hierarchical document structure through a latent structure tree learned by a sparse matrix-tree computation; 2) propagating sentence information over this structure using a novel message-passing node propagation mechanism to identify salient information; 3) using graph-level attention to concentrate the decoder on salient information. Experiments confirm HierGNN improves strong sequence models such as BART, with a 0.55 and 0.75 margin in average ROUGE-1/2/L for CNN/DM and XSum. Further human evaluation demonstrates that summaries produced by our model are more relevant and less redundant than the baselines, into which HierGNN is incorporated. We also find HierGNN synthesizes summaries by fusing multiple source sentences more, rather than compressing a single source sentence, and that it processes long inputs more effectively.

Abstractive Summarization Guided by Latent Hierarchical Document Structure

Logical table-to-text generation is a task that involves generating logically faithful sentences from tables, which requires models to derive logical-level facts from table records via logical inference. It raises a new challenge on the logical-level content planning of table-to-text models. However, directly learning the logical inference knowledge from table-text pairs is very difficult for neural models because of the ambiguity of natural language and the scarcity of parallel data. Hence even large-scale pre-trained language models present low logical fidelity on logical table-to-text. In this work, we propose a Pretrained Logical Form Generator (PLOG) framework to improve generation fidelity. Specifically, PLOG is first pretrained on a table-to-logical-form generation (table-to-logic) task, then finetuned on downstream table-to-text tasks. The logical forms are formally defined with unambiguous semantics. Hence we can collect a large amount of accurate logical forms from tables without human annotation. In addition, PLOG can learn logical inference from table-logic pairs much more reliably than from table-text pairs. To evaluate our model, we further collect a controlled logical table-to-text dataset CONTLOG based on an existing dataset. On two benchmarks, LOGICNLG and CONTLOG, PLOG outperforms strong baselines by a large margin on the logical fidelity, demonstrating the effectiveness of table-to-logic pretraining.

PLOG: Table-to-Logic Pretraining for Logical Table-to-Text Generation

Recent work has improved language models (LMs) remarkably by equipping them with a non-parametric memory component. However, most existing approaches only introduce mem-ories at testing time or represent them using a separately trained encoder, resulting in suboptimal training of the language model. In this work, we present TRIME, a novel yet simple training approach designed for training LMs with memory augmentation. Our approach uses a training objective that directly takes in-batch examples as accessible memory. We also present new methods for memory construction and data batching, which are used for adapting to different sets of memories—local, long-term, and external memory—at testing time. We evaluate TRIME on multiple language modeling and machine translation benchmarks and show that it is able to achieve significant improvements across all the settings. Concretely, TRIME reduces the perplexity from 18.70 to 15.37 on WIKITEXT-103, by effectively leveraging a large memory set from the training corpus. Compared to standard LM training, TRIME adds negligible computational overhead and is compatible with different neural architectures, making it a versatile solution for training memory-augmented LMs.

Training Language Models with Memory Augmentation

Misinformation emerges in times of uncertainty when credible information is limited. This is challenging for NLP-based fact-checking as it relies on counter-evidence, which may not yet be available. Despite increasing interest in automatic fact-checking, it is still unclear if automated approaches can realistically refute harmful real-world misinformation. Here, we contrast and compare NLP fact-checking with how professional fact-checkers combat misinformation in the absence of counter-evidence. In our analysis, we show that, by design, existing NLP task definitions for fact-checking cannot refute misinformation as professional fact-checkers do for the majority of claims. We then define two requirements that the evidence in datasets must fulfill for realistic fact-checking: It must be (1) sufficient to refute the claim and (2) not leaked from existing fact-checking articles. We survey existing fact-checking datasets and find that all of them fail to satisfy both criteria. Finally, we perform experiments to demonstrate that models trained on a large-scale fact-checking dataset rely on leaked evidence, which makes them unsuitable in real-world scenarios. Taken together, we show that current NLP fact-checking cannot realistically combat real-world misinformation because it depends on unrealistic assumptions about counter-evidence in the data.

Missing Counter-Evidence Renders NLP Fact-Checking Unrealistic for Misinformation

Existing dialogue datasets contain lots of noise in their state annotations. Such noise can hurt model training and ultimately lead to poor generalization performance. A general framework named ASSIST has recently been proposed to train robust dialogue state tracking (DST) models. It introduces an auxiliary model to generate pseudo labels for the noisy training set. These pseudo labels are combined with vanilla labels by a common fixed weighting parameter to train the primary DST model. Notwithstanding the improvements of ASSIST on DST, tuning the weighting parameter is challenging. Moreover, a single parameter shared by all slots and all instances may be suboptimal. To overcome these limitations, we propose a meta learning-based framework MetaASSIST to adaptively learn the weighting parameter. Specifically, we propose three schemes with varying degrees of flexibility, ranging from slot-wise to both slot-wise and instance-wise, to convert the weighting parameter into learnable functions. These functions are trained in a meta-learning manner by taking the validation set as meta data. Experimental results demonstrate that all three schemes can achieve competitive performance. Most impressively, we achieve a state-of-the-art joint goal accuracy of 80.10% on MultiWOZ 2.4.

MetaASSIST: Robust Dialogue State Tracking with Meta Learning

Language Models (LMs) become outdated as the world changes; they often fail to perform tasks requiring recent factual information which was absent or different during training, a phenomenon called temporal misalignment. This is especially a challenging problem because the research community still lacks a coherent dataset for assessing the adaptability of LMs to frequently-updated knowledge corpus such as Wikipedia. To this end, we introduce TemporalWiki, a lifelong benchmark for ever-evolving LMs that utilizes the difference between consecutive snapshots of English Wikipedia and English Wikidata for training and evaluation, respectively. The benchmark hence allows researchers to periodically track an LM's ability to retain previous knowledge and acquire updated/new knowledge at each point in time. We also find that training an LM on the diff data through continual learning methods achieves similar or better perplexity than on the entire snapshot in our benchmark with 12 times less computational cost, which verifies that factual knowledge in LMs can be safely updated with minimal training data via continual learning.

TemporalWiki: A Lifelong Benchmark for Training and Evaluating Ever-Evolving Language Models

This survey aims to sort out the recent advances in video question answering (VideoQA) and point towards future directions. We firstly categorize the datasets into 1) normal VideoQA, multi-modal VideoQA and knowledge-based VideoQA, according to the modalities invoked in the question-answer pairs, or 2) factoid VideoQA and inference VideoQA, according to the technical challenges in comprehending the questions and deriving the correct answers. We then summarize the VideoQA techniques, including those mainly designed for Factoid QA (e.g., the early spatio-temporal attention-based methods and the recently Transformer-based ones) and those targeted at explicit relation and logic inference (e.g., neural modular networks, neural symbolic methods, and graph-structured methods). Aside from the backbone techniques, we delve into the specific models and find out some common and useful insights either for video modeling, question answering, or for cross-modal correspondence learning. Finally, we point out the research trend of studying beyond factoid VideoQA to inference VideoQA, as well as towards the robustness and interpretability. Additionally, we maintain a repository, https://github.com/VRU-NExT/VideoQA, to keep trace of the latest VideoQA papers, datasets, and their open-source implementations if available. 
With these efforts, we strongly hope this survey could shed light on the follow-up VideoQA research.

Video Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms and Challenges

Adversarial Examples Detection (AED) is a crucial defense technique against adversarial attacks and has drawn increasing attention from the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. Despite the surge of new AED methods, our studies show that existing methods heavily rely on a shortcut to achieve good performance. In other words, current search-based adversarial attacks in NLP stop once model predictions change, and thus most adversarial examples generated by those attacks are located near model decision boundaries. To surpass this shortcut and fairly evaluate AED methods, we propose to test AED methods with \textbf{F}ar \textbf{B}oundary (\textbf{FB}) adversarial examples. Existing methods show worse than random guess performance under this scenario. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new technique, \textbf{ADDMU}, \textbf{a}dversary \textbf{d}etection with \textbf{d}ata and \textbf{m}odel \textbf{u}ncertainty, which combines two types of uncertainty estimation for both regular and FB adversarial example detection. Our new method outperforms previous methods by 3.6 and 6.0 \emph{AUC} points under each scenario. Finally, our analysis shows that the two types of uncertainty provided by \textbf{ADDMU} can be leveraged to characterize adversarial
examples and identify the ones that contribute most to model's robustness in adversarial training.

ADDMU: Detection of Far-Boundary Adversarial Examples with Data and Model Uncertainty Estimation

Recent work in training large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions has opened up exciting opportunities for natural language interface design. Building on the prior success of large language models in the realm of computer assisted creativity, in this work, we present \textit{CoPoet}, a collaborative poetry writing system, with the goal of to study if LLM's actually improve the quality of the generated content. In contrast to auto-completing a user's text, CoPoet is controlled by user instructions that specify the attributes of the desired text, such as \textit{Write a sentence about 'love'} or \textit{Write a sentence ending in 'fly'}. The core component of our system is a language model fine-tuned on a diverse collection of instructions for poetry writing. Our model is not only competitive to publicly available LLMs trained on instructions (InstructGPT), but also capable of satisfying unseen compositional instructions. A study with 15 qualified crowdworkers shows that users successfully write poems with CoPoet on diverse topics ranging from \textit{Monarchy} to \textit{Climate change}, which are preferred by third-party evaluators over poems written without the system.

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Entity Extraction in Low Resource Domains with Selective Pre-training of Large Language Models

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