United Arab Emirates

Transformer-based autoregressive and non-autoregressive models have played an essential role in sequence generation tasks. The autoregressive model can obtain excellent performance, while the non-autoregressive model brings fast decoding speed for inference. In this paper, we propose \textbf{JANUS}, a \textbf{J}oint \textbf{A}utoregressive and \textbf{N}on-autoregressive training method using a\textbf{U}xiliary los\textbf{S} to enhance the model performance in both AR and NAR manner simultaneously and effectively alleviate the problem of distribution discrepancy.
Further, we pre-train BART with JANUS on a large corpus with minimal cost (16 GPU days) and make the BART-JANUS capable of non-autoregressive generation, demonstrating that our approach can transfer the AR knowledge to NAR. Empirically, we show our approach and BART-JANUS can achieve significant improvement on multiple generation tasks, including machine translation and GLGE benchmarks. Our code is available at Github\footnote{\url{https://github.com/dropreg/JANUS}}.

EMNLP 2022

JANUS: Joint Autoregressive and Non-autoregressive Training with Auxiliary Loss for Sequence Generation

autoregressive and nonautoregressive generation

sequence generation

consistency training

# 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! 
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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). 

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
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* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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Welcome!
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.

As one of the challenging NLP tasks, designing math word problem (MWP) solvers has attracted increasing research attention for the past few years. In previous work, models designed by taking into account the properties of the binary tree structure of mathematical expressions at the output side have achieved better performance. However, the expressions corresponding to a MWP are often diverse (e.g., $n_1+n_2 \times n_3-n_4$, $n_3\times n_2-n_4+n_1$, etc.), and so are the corresponding binary trees, which creates difficulties in model learning due to the non-deterministic output space. In this paper, we propose the Structure-Unified M-Tree Coding Solver (SUMC-Solver), which applies a tree with any M branches (M-tree) to unify the output structures. To learn the M-tree, we use a mapping to convert the M-tree into the M-tree codes, where codes store the information of the paths from tree root to leaf nodes and the information of leaf nodes themselves, and then devise a Sequence-to-Code (seq2code) model to generate the codes. Experimental results on the widely used MAWPS and Math23K datasets have demonstrated that SUMC-Solver not only outperforms several state-of-the-art models under similar experimental settings but also performs much better under low-resource conditions.

Structure-Unified M-Tree Coding Solver for Math Word Problem

Story visualization advances the traditional text-to-image generation by enabling multiple image generation based on a complete story. This task requires machines to 1) understand long text inputs, and 2) produce a globally consistent image sequence that illustrates the contents of the story. A key challenge of consistent story visualization is to preserve characters that are essential in stories. To tackle the challenge, we propose to adapt a recent work that augments VQ-VAE with a text-to-visual-token (transformer) architecture. Specifically, we modify the text-to-visual-token module with a two-stage framework: 1) character token planning model that predicts the visual tokens for characters only; 2) visual token completion model that generates the remaining visual token sequence, which is sent to VQ-VAE for finalizing image generations. To encourage characters to appear in the images, we further train the two-stage framework with a character-token alignment objective. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method excels at preserving characters and can produce higher quality image sequences compared with the strong baselines.

Character-centric Story Visualization via Visual Planning and Token Alignment

Recently, more and more pre-trained language models are released as a cloud service. It allows users who lack computing resources to perform inference with a powerful model by uploading data to the cloud. The plain text may contain private information, as the result, users prefer to do partial computations locally and upload intermediate representations to the cloud for subsequent inference.
However, recent studies have shown that intermediate representations can also be recovered to plain text with reasonable accuracy, thus the risk of privacy leakage still exists. 
To address this issue, we propose TextFusion, a novel method for preserving inference privacy.
Specifically, we train a Fusion Predictor to dynamically fuse token representations, which hides multiple private token representations behind an unrecognizable one.
Furthermore, an adversarial training regime is employed to privatize these representations. In this way, the cloud only receives incomplete and perturbed representations, making it difficult to accurately recover the complete plain text.
The experimental results on diverse classification tasks show that our approach can effectively preserve inference privacy without significantly sacrificing performance in different scenarios.

TextFusion: Privacy-Preserving Pre-trained Model Inference via Token Fusion

Transfer learning is a simple and powerful method that can be used to boost model performance of low-resource neural machine translation (NMT). Existing transfer learning methods for NMT are static, which simply transfer knowledge from a parent model to a child model once via parameter initialization. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning method for NMT, namely ConsistTL, which can continuously transfer knowledge from the parent model during the training of the child model. Specifically, for each training instance of the child model, ConsistTL constructs the semantically-equivalent instance for the parent model and encourages prediction consistency between the parent and child for this instance, which is equivalent to the child model learning each instance under the guidance of the parent model. Experimental results on five low-resource NMT tasks demonstrate that ConsistTL results in significant improvements over strong transfer learning baselines, with a gain up to 1.7 BLEU over the existing back-translation model on the widely-used WMT17 Turkish-English benchmark. Further analysis reveals that ConsistTL can improve the inference calibration of the child model. Code and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/ConsistTL.

ConsistTL: Modeling Consistency in Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

One of the key challenges of knowledge base question answering (KBQA) is the multi-hop reasoning. Since in different hops, one attends to different parts of question, it is important to dynamically represent the question semantics for each hop. Existing methods, however, (i) infer the dynamic question representation only through coarse-grained attention mechanisms, which may bring information loss, (ii) and have not effectively modeled the sequential logic, which is crucial for the multi-hop reasoning process in KBQA.
To address these issues, we propose a sequential reasoning self-attention mechanism to capture the crucial reasoning information of each single hop in a more fine-grained way. Based on Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) which is good at modeling sequential process, we propose a simple but effective GRU-inspired Flow Control (GFC) framework to model sequential logic in the whole multi-hop process.
Extensive experiments on three popular benchmark datasets have demonstrated the superior effectiveness of our model. In particular, GFC achieves new state-of-the-art Hits@1 of 76.8% on WebQSP and is also effective when KB is incomplete. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Xie-Minghui/GFC.

A Sequential Flow Control Framework for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering

Existing work on Entity Linking mostly assumes that the reference knowledge base is complete, and therefore all mentions can be linked. In practice this is hardly ever the case, as knowledge bases are incomplete and because novel concepts arise constantly. We introduce the temporally segmented Unknown Entity Discovery and Indexing (EDIN)-benchmark where unknown entities, that is entities not part of the knowledge base and without descriptions and labeled mentions, have to be integrated into an existing entity linking system. By contrasting EDIN with zero-shot entity linking, we provide insight on the additional challenges it poses. Building on dense-retrieval based entity linking, we introduce the end-to-end EDIN-pipeline that detects, clusters, and indexes mentions of unknown entities in context. Experiments show that indexing a single embedding per entity unifying the information of multiple mentions works better than indexing mentions independently.

EDIN: An End-to-end Benchmark and Pipeline for Unknown Entity Discovery and Indexing

The Transformer architecture aggregates input information through the self-attention mechanism, but there is no clear understanding of how this information is mixed across the entire model. Additionally, recent works have demonstrated that attention weights alone are not enough to describe the flow of information. In this paper, we consider the whole attention block --multi-head attention, residual connection, and layer normalization-- and define a metric to measure token-to-token interactions within each layer. Then, we aggregate layer-wise interpretations to provide input attribution scores for model predictions. Experimentally, we show that our method, ALTI (Aggregation of Layer-wise Token-to-token Interactions), provides more faithful explanations and increased robustness than gradient-based methods.

Measuring the Mixing of Contextual Information in the Transformer

Unavailability of parallel corpora for training text style transfer (TST) models is a very challenging yet common scenario. Also, TST models implicitly need to preserve the content while transforming a source sentence into the target style. To tackle these problems, an intermediate representation is often constructed that is devoid of style while still preserving the meaning of the source sentence. In this work, we study the usefulness of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph as the intermediate style agnostic representation. We posit that semantic notations like AMR are a natural choice for an intermediate representation. Hence, we propose T-STAR: a model comprising of two components, text-to-AMR encoder and a AMR-to-text decoder. We propose several modeling improvements to enhance the style agnosticity of the generated AMR. To the best of our knowledge, T-STAR is the first work that uses AMR as an intermediate representation for TST. With thorough experimental evaluation we show T-STAR significantly outperforms state of the art techniques by achieving on an average 15.2% higher content preservation with negligible loss (~3%) in style accuracy. Through detailed human evaluation with 90,000 ratings, we also show that T-STAR has upto 50% lesser hallucinations compared to state of the art TST models.

T-STAR: Truthful Style Transfer using AMR Graph as Intermediate Representation

We propose PromptBERT, a novel contrastive learning method for learning better sentence representation. We firstly analysis the drawback of current sentence embedding from original BERT and find that it is mainly due to the static token embedding bias and ineffective BERT layers. Then we propose the first prompt-based sentence embeddings method and discuss two prompt representing methods and three prompt searching methods to make BERT achieve better sentence embeddings .Moreover, we propose a novel unsupervised training objective by the technology of template denoising, which substantially shortens the performance gap between the supervised and unsupervised settings. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method. Compared to SimCSE, PromptBERT achieves 2.29 and 2.58 points of improvement based on BERT and RoBERTa in the unsupervised setting.

PromptBERT: Improving BERT Sentence Embeddings with Prompts

Recently, Logic Explained Networks (LENs) have been proposed as explainable-by-design neural models providing logic explanations for their predictions.
However, these models have only been applied to vision and tabular data, and they mostly favour the generation of global explanations, while local ones tend to be noisy and verbose.
For these reasons, we propose LENp, improving local explanations by perturbing input words, and we test it on text classification. Our results show that (i) LENp provides better local explanations than LIME in terms of sensitivity and faithfulness, and (ii) its logic explanations are more useful and user-friendly than the feature scoring provided by LIME as attested by a human survey.

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