United Arab Emirates

Evaluating automatically generated text is generally hard due to the inherently subjective nature of many aspects of the output quality. This difficulty is compounded in automatic consultation note generation by differing opinions between medical experts both about which patient statements should be included in generated notes and about their respective importance in arriving at a diagnosis. Previous real-world evaluations of note-generation systems saw substantial disagreement between expert evaluators. In this paper we propose a protocol that aims to increase objectivity by grounding evaluations in Consultation Checklists, which are created in a preliminary step and then used as a common point of reference during quality assessment. We observed good levels of inter-annotator agreement in a first evaluation study using the protocol; further, using Consultation Checklists produced in the study as reference for automatic metrics such as ROUGE or BERTScore improves their correlation with human judgements compared to using the original human note.

EMNLP 2022

Consultation Checklists: Standardising the Human Evaluation of Medical Note Generation

clinical-consultations

clinical-nlp

summarisation

evaluation

# 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. 

 
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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. 
* 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.

We introduce KiloGram, a resource for studying abstract visual reasoning in humans and machines. Drawing on the history of tangram puzzles as stimuli in cognitive science, we build a richly annotated dataset that, with >1k distinct stimuli, is orders of magnitude larger and more diverse than prior resources. It is both visually and linguistically richer, moving beyond whole shape descriptions to include segmentation maps and part labels. We use this resource to evaluate the abstract visual reasoning capacities of recent multi-modal models. We observe that pre-trained weights demonstrate limited abstract reasoning, which dramatically improves with fine-tuning. We also observe that explicitly describing parts aids abstract reasoning for both humans and models, especially when jointly encoding the linguistic and visual inputs.

Abstract Visual Reasoning with Tangram Shapes

Authorship attribution is a task that aims to identify the author of a given piece of writing. We aim to develop a generalized solution that can handle a large number of texts from authors and topics unavailable in training data. Previous studies have proposed strategies to address only either unseen authors or unseen topics. Authorship representation learning has been shown to work in open-set environments with a large number of unseen authors but has not been explicitly designed for cross-topic environments at the same time. To handle a large number of unseen authors and topics, we propose Authorship Representation Regularization (ARR), a distillation framework that creates authorship representation with reduced reliance on topic-specific information. To assess the performance of our framework, we also propose a cross-topic-open-set evaluation method. Our proposed method has improved performances in the cross-topic-open set setup over baselines in 4 out of 6 cases.

Topic-Regularized Authorship Representation Learning

While the NLP community is generally aware of resource disparities among languages, we lack research that quantifies the extent and types of such disparity. Prior surveys estimating the availability of resources based on the number of datasets can be misleading as dataset quality varies: many datasets are automatically induced or translated from English data. To provide a more comprehensive picture of language resources, we examine the characteristics of 156 publicly available NLP datasets. We manually annotate how they are created, including input text and label sources and tools used to build them, and what they study, tasks they address and motivations for their creation. After quantifying the qualitative NLP resource gap across languages, we discuss how to improve data collection in low-resource languages. We survey language-proficient NLP researchers and crowd workers per language, finding that their estimated availability correlates with dataset availability. Through crowdsourcing experiments, we identify strategies for collecting high-quality multilingual data on the Mechanical Turk platform. We conclude by making macro and micro-level suggestions to the NLP community and individual researchers for future multilingual data development.

Beyond Counting Datasets: A Survey of Multilingual Dataset Construction and Necessary Resources

Complex dialogue mappings (CDM), including one-to-many and many-to-one mappings, tend to make dialogue models generate incoherent or dull responses, and modeling these mappings remains a huge challenge for neural dialogue systems. To alleviate these problems, methods like introducing external information, reconstructing the optimization function, and manipulating data samples are proposed, while they primarily focus on avoiding training with CDM, inevitably weakening the model's ability of understanding CDM in human conversations and limiting further improvements in model performance. This paper proposes a Sentence Semantic Segmentation guided Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (SegCVAE) method which can model and take advantages of the CDM data. Specifically, to tackle the incoherent problem caused by one-to-many, SegCVAE uses response-related prominent semantics to constrained the latent variable. To mitigate the non-diverse problem brought by many-to-one, SegCVAE segments multiple prominent semantics to enrich the latent variables. Three novel components, Internal Separation, External Guidance, and Semantic Norms, are proposed to achieve SegCVAE. On dialogue generation tasks, both the automatic and human evaluation results show that SegCVAE achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

Modeling Complex Dialogue Mappings via Sentence Semantic Segmentation Guided Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder

Large language models can produce fluent dialogue but often hallucinate factual inaccuracies. While retrieval-augmented models help alleviate this issue, they still face a difficult challenge of both reasoning to provide correct knowledge and generating conversation simultaneously. In this work, we propose a modular model, Knowledge to Response (K2R), for incorporating knowledge into conversational agents, which breaks down this problem into two easier steps. K2R first generates a knowledge sequence, given a dialogue context, as an intermediate step. After this "reasoning step", the model then attends to its own generated knowledge sequence, as well as the dialogue context, to produce a final response. In detailed experiments, we find that such a model hallucinates less in knowledge-grounded dialogue tasks, and has advantages in terms of interpretability and modularity. In particular, it can be used to fuse QA and dialogue systems together to enable dialogue agents to give knowledgeable answers, or QA models to give conversational responses in a zero-shot setting.

Reason first, then respond: Modular Generation for Knowledge-infused Dialogue

This work aims to employ natural language generation (NLG) to rapidly generate items for English language learning applications: this requires both language models capable of generating fluent, high-quality English, and to control the output of the generation to match the requirements of the relevant items. We experiment with deep pretrained models for this task, developing novel methods for controlling items for factors relevant in language learning: diverse sentences for different proficiency levels and argument structure to test grammar. Human evaluation demonstrates high grammatically scores for all models (3.4 and above out of 4), and higher length (24%) and complexity (9%) over the baseline for the advanced proficiency model. Our results show that we can achieve strong performance while adding additional control to ensure diverse, tailored content for individual users.

Controlled Language Generation for Language Learning Items

Factual and logical errors made by Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems limit their applicability in many settings. We study this problem in a conversational search and recommendation setting, and observe that we can often make two simplifying assumptions in this domain: (i) there exists a body of structured knowledge we can use for verifying factuality of generated text; and (ii) the text to be factually assessed typically has a well-defined structure and style. Grounded in these assumptions, we propose a fast, unsupervised and explainable technique, DepChecker, that assesses factuality of input text based on rules derived from structured knowledge patterns and dependency relations with respect to the input text. We show that DepChecker outperforms state-of-the-art, general purpose fact-checking techniques in this special, but important case.

Fact Checking Machine Generated Text with Dependency Trees

Online advertisement text generation aims at generating attractive and persuasive text ads to appeal to users clicking ads or purchasing products. While pretraining-based models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality text ads, some challenges still remain, such as ad generation in low-resource scenarios and training efficiency for multiple ad tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel unified text ad generation framework with multi-task prompt learning, called PLATO-Ad, to
tackle these problems. Specifically, we design a three-phase transfer learning mechanism to tackle the low-resource ad generation problem. Furthermore, we present a novel multi-task prompt learning mechanism to efficiently utilize a single lightweight model to solve multiple ad generation tasks without loss of performance compared to training a separate model for each task. Finally, we conduct offline and online evaluations and experiment results show that PLATO-Ad significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on both offline and online metrics. 
PLATO-Ad has been deployed in a leading advertising platform with 3.5% CTR improvement on search ad descriptions and 10.4% CTR improvement on feed ad titles.

PLATO-Ad: A Unified Advertisement Text Generation Framework with Multi-Task Prompt Learning

In a live streaming chat on a video streaming service, it is crucial to filter out toxic comments with online processing to prevent users from reading comments in real-time.
However, recent toxic language detection methods rely on deep learning methods, which can not be scalable considering inference speed.
Also, these methods do not consider constraints of computational resources expected depending on a deployed system (e.g., no GPU resource).
This paper presents an efficient method for toxic language detection that is aware of real-world scenarios.
Our proposed architecture is based on partial stacking that feeds initial results with low confidence to meta-classifier.
Experimental results show that our method achieves a much faster inference speed than BERT-based models with comparable performance.

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Next from EMNLP 2022

Abstract Visual Reasoning with Tangram Shapes

Similar lecture

Human Evaluation and Correlation with Automatic Metrics in Consultation Note Generation