United Arab Emirates

Although attention weights have been commonly used as a means to provide explanations for deep learning models, the approach has been widely criticized due to its lack of faithfulness. In this work, we present a simple approach to compute the newly proposed metric AtteFa, which can quantitatively represent the degree of faithfulness of the attention weights. Using this metric, we further validate the effect of the frequency of informative input elements and the use of contextual vs. non-contextual encoders on the faithfulness of the attention mechanism. Finally, we apply the approach on several real-life binary classification datasets to measure the faithfulness of attention weights in real-life settings.

EMNLP 2022

How (Un)Faithful is Attention?

explanation

faithfulness

attention mechanism

## 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.

workshop paper

## 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. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* 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.

Multilingual NLP models provide potential solutions to the digital language divide, i.e., cross-language performance disparities. Early analyses of such models have indicated good performance across training languages and good generalization to unseen, related languages. 
This work examines whether, between related languages, multilingual models are equally right for the right reasons, i.e., if interpretability methods reveal that the models put emphasis on the same words as humans. To this end, we provide a new trilingual, parallel corpus of rationale annotations for English, Danish, and Italian sentiment analysis models and use it to benchmark models and interpretability methods. We propose rank-biased overlap as a better metric for comparing input token attributions to human rationale annotations. Our results show: (i) models generally perform well on the languages they are trained on, and align best with human rationales in these languages; (ii) performance is higher on English, even when not a source language, but this performance is not accompanied by higher alignment with human rationales, which suggests that language models favor English, but do not facilitate successful transfer of rationales.

Are Multilingual Sentiment Models Equally Right for the Right Reasons?

We investigate the extent to which verb alternation classes, as described by Levin (1993), are encoded in the embeddings of Large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) such as BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, and DeBERTa using selectively constructed diagnostic classifiers for word and sentence-level prediction tasks. We follow and expand upon the experiments of Kann et al. (2019), which aim to probe whether static embeddings encode frame-selectional properties of verbs. At both the word and sentence level, we find that contextual embeddings from PLMs not only outperform non-contextual embeddings, but achieve astonishingly high accuracies on tasks across most alternation classes. Additionally, we find evidence that the middle-to-upper layers of PLMs achieve better performance on average than the lower layers across all probing tasks.

Probing for Understanding of English Verb Classes and Alternations in Large Pre-trained Language Models

Multiple studies have shown that
  existing NMT systems demonstrate some kind of “gender bias”. As a result, MT output appears to err more
  often for feminine forms and to amplify social gender
  misrepresentations, which is potentially harmful to users and practioners of these technologies.
    
  This paper continues this line of investigations and reports results
  obtained with a new test set in strictly controlled
  conditions. This setting allows us to better understand the multiple
  inner mechanisms that are causing these biases, which include the
  linguistic expressions of gender, the unbalanced distribution of
  masculine and feminine forms in the language, the modelling of
  morphological variation and the training process dynamics. To
  counterbalance these effects, we formulate several proposals and
  notably show that modifying the training loss can effectively
  mitigate such biases.

Analyzing Gender Translation Errors to Identify Information Flows between the Encoder and Decoder of a NMT System

Models able to generate free-text rationales that explain their output have been proposed as an important step towards interpretable NLP for “reasoning” tasks such as natural language inference and commonsense question answering. However, the relative merits of different architectures and types of rationales are not well understood and hard to measure. In this paper, we contribute two insights to this line of research: First, we find that models trained on gold explanations learn to rely on these but, in the case of the more challenging question answering data set we use, fail when given generated explanations at test time. However, additional fine-tuning on generated explanations teaches the model to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information in explanations. Second, we compare explanations by a generation-only model to those generated by a self-rationalizing model and find that, while the former score higher in terms of validity, factual correctness, and similarity to gold explanations, they are not more useful for downstream classification. We observe that the self-rationalizing model is prone to hallucination, which is punished by most metrics but may add useful context for the classification step.

Human Ratings Do Not Reflect Downstream Utility: A Study of Free-Text Explanations for Model Predictions

Acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) are fixed-dimensionality vector representations in a vector space such that different acoustic exemplars of the same word are projected nearby in the embedding space. In addition to their use in speech technology applications such as spoken term discovery and keyword spotting, AWE models have been adopted as models of spoken-word processing in several cognitively motivated studies and they have shown to exhibit a human-like performance in some auditory processing tasks. Nevertheless, the representation geometry of AWEs remains an under-explored topic that has not been studied in the literature. In this paper, we take a closer analytical look at AWEs and study how the choice of the learning objective and the architecture shapes their representational profile. Our main findings highlight the prominent role of the learning objective on the representational geometry over the architecture.

Analyzing the Representational Geometry of Acoustic Word Embeddings

We investigate how different domains are encoded in modern neural network architectures. We analyze the relationship between natural language domains, model size, and the amount of training data used. The primary analysis tool we develop is based on subpopulation analysis with Singular Vector Canonical Correlation Analysis (SVCCA), which we apply to Transformer-based language models (LMs). We compare the latent representations of such a language model at its different layers from a pair of models: a model trained on multiple domains (an experimental model) and a model trained on a single domain (a control model). Through our method, we find that increasing the model capacity impacts how domain information is stored in upper and lower layers differently. In addition, we show that larger experimental models simultaneously embed domain-specific information as if they were conjoined control models. These findings are confirmed qualitatively, demonstrating the validity of our method.

Understanding Domain Learning in Language Models Through Subpopulation Analysis

Interpretable entity representations (IERs) are sparse embeddings that are "human-readable'' in that dimensions correspond to fine-grained entity types and values are predicted probabilities that a given entity is of the corresponding type.  These methods perform well in zero-shot and low supervision settings.  Compared to standard dense neural embeddings, such interpretable representations may permit analysis and debugging.   However, while fine-tuning sparse, interpretable representations improves accuracy on downstream tasks, it destroys the semantics of the dimensions which were enforced in pre-training.  Can we maintain the interpretable semantics afforded by IERs while improving predictive performance on downstream tasks? Toward this end, we propose Intermediate enTity-based Sparse Interpretable Representation Learning (ItsIRL).   ItsIRL realizes improved performance over prior IERs on biomedical tasks, while maintaining "interpretability'' generally and their ability to support model debugging specifically.  The latter is enabled in part by the ability to perform "counterfactual'' fine-grained entity type manipulation, which we explore in this work.  Finally, we propose a method to construct entity type based class prototypes for revealing global semantic properties of classes learned by our model.  Code for pre-training and experiments will be made publicly available. 

Intermediate Entity-based Sparse Interpretable Representation Learning

Previous works on the fairness of toxic language classifiers compare the output of models with different identity terms as input features but do not consider the impact of other important concepts present in the context.  Here, besides identity terms, we take into account high-level latent features learned by the classifier and investigate the interaction between these features and identity terms. For a multi-class toxic language classifier, we leverage a concept-based explanation framework to calculate the sensitivity of the model to the concept of sentiment, which has been used before as a salient feature for toxic language detection. Our results show that although for some classes, the classifier has learned the sentiment information as expected, this information is outweighed by the influence of identity terms as input features. This work is a step towards evaluating procedural fairness, where unfair processes lead to unfair outcomes. The produced knowledge can guide debiasing techniques to ensure that important concepts besides identity terms are well-represented in training datasets.

Towards Procedural Fairness: Uncovering Biases in How a Toxic Language Classifier Uses Sentiment Information

Transformer based language models have been widely adopted by industrial and research organisations in developing machine learning applications in the presence of limited annotated data. While these models show remarkable results, their functioning in few-shot settings is still poorly understood. Hence, we perform an investigative study to understand the characteristics of such models fine-tuned in few-shot setups. Specifically, we compare the intermediate layer representations obtained from a few-shot model and a pre-trained language model. We observe that pre-trained and few-shot models show similar representations over initial layers, whereas the later layers show a stark deviation. Based on these observations, we propose to freeze the initial Transformer layers to fine-tune the model in a constrained text classification setup with $K$ annotated data points per class, where $K$ ranges from 8 to 64. In our experiments across six benchmark sentence classification tasks, we discover that freezing initial 50% Transformer layers not only reduces training time but also surprisingly improves Macro F1 (upto 8%) when compared to fully trainable layers in few-shot setup. We also observe that this idea of layer freezing can very well be generalized to state-of-the-art few-shot text classification techniques, like DNNC and LM-BFF, leading to significant reduction in training time while maintaining comparable performance.

Investigating the Characteristics of a Transformer in a Few-Shot Setup: Does Freezing Layers in RoBERTa Help?

We investigate to what extent a hundred publicly available, popular neural language models capture meaning systematically. Sentence embeddings obtained from pretrained or fine-tuned language models can be used to perform particular tasks, such as paraphrase detection, semantic textual similarity assessment or natural language inference. Common to all of these tasks is that paraphrastic sentences, that is, sentences that carry (nearly) the same meaning, should have (nearly) the same embeddings regardless of surface form. We demonstrate that performance varies greatly across different language models when a specific type of meaning-preserving transformation is applied: two sentences should be identified as paraphrastic if one of them contains a negated antonym in relation to the other one, such as "I am not guilty" versus "I am innocent". We introduce and release SemAntoNeg, a new test suite containing 3152 entries for probing paraphrasticity in sentences incorporating negation and antonyms. Among other things, we show that language models fine-tuned for natural language inference outperform other types of models, especially the ones fine-tuned to produce general-purpose sentence embeddings, on the test suite. Furthermore, we show that most models designed explicitly for paraphrasing are rather mediocre in our task.

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Are Multilingual Sentiment Models Equally Right for the Right Reasons?

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