Croatia

To produce accurate predictions, language models (LMs) must balance between generalization and memorization. Yet, little is known about the mechanism by which transformer LMs employ their memorization capacity. When does a model decide to output a memorized phrase, and how is this phrase then retrieved from memory? In this work, we offer the first methodological framework for probing and characterizing recall of memorized sequences in transformer LMs. First, we lay out criteria for detecting model inputs that trigger memory recall, and propose idioms as inputs that typically fulfill these criteria. Next, we construct a dataset of English idioms and use it to compare model behavior on memorized vs. non-memorized inputs. Specifically, we analyze the internal prediction construction process by interpreting the model&#39;s hidden representations as a gradual refinement of the output probability distribution. We find that across different model sizes and architectures, memorized predictions are a two-step process: early layers promote the predicted token to the top of the output distribution, and upper layers increase model confidence. This suggests that memorized information is stored and retrieved in the early layers of the network. Last, we demonstrate the utility of our methodology beyond idioms in memorized factual statements. Overall, our work makes a first step towards understanding memory recall, and provides a methodological basis for future studies of transformer memorization.

EACL 2023

Understanding Transformer Memorization Recall Through Idioms

idioms

memorization

language models

# 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! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

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). 

To produce accurate predictions, language models (LMs) must balance between generalization and memorization. Yet, little is known about the mechanism by which transformer LMs employ their memorization capacity. When does a model decide to output a memorized phrase, and how is this phrase then retrieved from memory? In this work, we offer the first methodological framework for probing and characterizing recall of memorized sequences in transformer LMs. First, we lay out criteria for detecting model inputs that trigger memory recall, and propose idioms as inputs that typically fulfill these criteria. Next, we construct a dataset of English idioms and use it to compare model behavior on memorized vs. non-memorized inputs. Specifically, we analyze the internal prediction construction process by interpreting the model's hidden representations as a gradual refinement of the output probability distribution. We find that across different model sizes and architectures, memorized predictions are a two-step process: early layers promote the predicted token to the top of the output distribution, and upper layers increase model confidence. This suggests that memorized information is stored and retrieved in the early layers of the network. Last, we demonstrate the utility of our methodology beyond idioms in memorized factual statements. Overall, our work makes a first step towards understanding memory recall, and provides a methodological basis for future studies of transformer memorization.

poster

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Large language models (LLMs) are subject to sociocultural and other biases previously identified using intrinsic evaluations. However, when and how these intrinsic biases in pre-trained LM representations propagate to downstream, fine-tuned NLP tasks like summarization is not well understood. In this work, we investigate one type of bias—name-nationality bias—and trace it from the pre-training stage to a downstream summarization task across multiple summarization modeling choices. We show that these biases manifest themselves as hallucinations in summarization, leading to factually incorrect summaries. We also find that this propagation of biases is algorithm-dependent: more abstractive models allow biases to propagate more directly to downstream tasks as hallucinated facts. Building on these observations, we further analyze how changes to the adaptation method and fine-tuning data set affect name nationality biases and show that while they can reduce the overall rate of hallucinations, they do not change the types of biases that do appear.

When Do Pre-Training Biases Propagate to Downstream Tasks? A Case Study in Text Summarization

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a prominent neural model compression technique that heavily relies on teacher network predictions to guide the training of a student model. Considering the ever-growing size of pre-trained language models (PLMs), KD is often adopted in many NLP tasks involving PLMs. However, it is evident that in KD, deploying the teacher network during training adds to the memory and computational requirements of training. In the computer vision literature, the necessity of the teacher network is put under scrutiny by showing that KD is a label regularization technique that can be replaced with lighter teacher-free variants such as the label-smoothing technique. However, to the best of our knowledge, this issue is not investigated in NLP. 
Therefore, this work concerns studying different label regularization techniques and whether we actually need them to improve the fine-tuning of smaller PLM networks on downstream tasks. In this regard, we did a comprehensive set of experiments on different PLMs such as BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT with more than 600 distinct trials and ran each configuration five times. This investigation led to a surprising observation that KD and other label regularization techniques do not play any meaningful role over regular fine-tuning when the student model is pre-trained. 
We further explore this phenomenon in different settings of NLP and computer vision tasks and demonstrate that pre-training itself acts as a kind of regularization, and additional label regularization is unnecessary.

Do we need Label Regularization to Fine-tune Pre-trained Language Models?

Despite the success of Transformer models in vision and language tasks, they often learn knowledge from enormous data implicitly and cannot utilize structured input data directly. On the other hand, structured learning approaches such as graph neural networks (GNNs) that integrate prior information can barely compete with Transformer models.
In this work, we aim to benefit from both worlds and propose a novel Multimodal Graph Transformer for question answering tasks that requires performing reasoning across multiple modalities. We introduce a graph-involved plug-and-play quasi-attention mechanism to incorporate multimodal graph information, acquired from text and visual data, to the vanilla self-attention as effective prior. 
In particular, we construct the text graph, dense region graph, and semantic graph to generate adjacency matrices, and then compose them with input vision and language features to perform downstream reasoning. Such a way of regularizing self-attention with graph information significantly improves the inferring ability and helps align features from different modalities.
We validate the effectiveness of Multimodal Graph Transformer over its Transformer baselines on GQA, VQAv2, and MultiModalQA datasets.

Multimodal Graph Transformer for Multimodal Question Answering

Recently, prompt tuning has achieved promising results in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. 
The typical approach is to insert text pieces (i.e. templates) into the input and transform downstream tasks into the same form as pre-training. 
In essence, a high-quality template is the foundation of prompt tuning to support the performance of the converted cloze-style task. 
However, for sarcasm recognition, it is time-consuming and requires increasingly sophisticated domain knowledge to determine the appropriate templates and label words due to its highly figurative nature. 
In this work, we propose SarcPrompt, to incorporate the prior knowledge about contradictory intentions into prompt tuning for sarcasm recognition. 
SarcPrompt is inspired by that the speaker usually says the opposite of what they actually mean in the sarcastic text. 
Based on this idea, we explicitly mimic the actual intention by prompt construction and indicate whether the actual intention is contradictory to the literal content by verbalizer engineering. 
Experiments on three public datasets with standard and low-resource settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our SarcPrompt for sarcasm recognition.

Prompt Tuning with Contradictory Intentions for Sarcasm Recognition

Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) models aim at answering a question with its relevant paragraph and previous question-answer pairs that occurred during conversation multiple times. To apply such models to a real-world scenario, some existing work uses predicted answers, instead of unavailable ground-truth answers, as the conversation history for inference. However, since these models usually predict wrong answers, using all the predictions without filtering significantly hampers the model performance. To address this problem, we propose to filter out inaccurate answers in the conversation history based on their estimated confidences and uncertainties from the ConvQA model, without making any architectural changes. Moreover, to make the confidence and uncertainty values more reliable, we propose to further calibrate them, thereby smoothing the model predictions. We validate our models, Answer Selection-based realistic Conversation Question Answering, on two standard ConvQA datasets, and the results show that our models significantly outperform relevant baselines. Code is available at: https://github.com/starsuzi/AS-ConvQA.

Realistic Conversational Question Answering with Answer Selection based on Calibrated Confidence and Uncertainty Measurement

The degree of semantic relatedness of two units of language has long been considered fundamental to understanding meaning. Additionally, automatically determining relatedness has many applications such as question answering and summarization. However, prior NLP work has largely focused on semantic similarity, a subset of relatedness, because of a lack of relatedness datasets. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for Semantic Textual Relatedness, STR-2022, that has 5,500 English sentence pairs manually annotated using a comparative annotation framework, resulting in fine-grained scores. We show that human intuition regarding relatedness of sentence pairs is highly reliable, with a repeat annotation correlation of 0.84. We use the dataset to explore questions on what makes sentences semantically related. We also show the utility of STR-2022 for evaluating automatic methods of sentence representation and for various downstream NLP tasks.

Our dataset, data statement, and annotation questionnaire can be found at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7599667.

What Makes Sentences Semantically Related? A Textual Relatedness Dataset and Empirical Study

Recent studies have shown that transformer models like BERT rely on number information encoded in their representations of sentences' subjects and head verbs when performing subject-verb agreement. However, probing experiments suggest that subject number is also encoded in the representations of all words in such sentences. In this paper, we use causal interventions to show that BERT only uses the subject plurality information encoded in its representations of the subject and words that agree with it in number. We also demonstrate that current probing metrics are unable to determine which words' representations contain functionally relevant information. This both provides a revised view of subject-verb agreement in language models, and suggests potential pitfalls for current probe usage and evaluation.

The Functional Relevance of Probed Information: A Case Study

Taxonomies, which organize domain concepts into hierarchical structures, are crucial for building knowledge systems and downstream applications. As domain knowledge evolves, taxonomies need to be continuously updated to include new concepts.
Previous approaches have mainly focused on adding concepts to the leaf nodes of the existing hierarchical tree, which does not fully utilize the taxonomy's knowledge and is unable to update the original taxonomy structure (usually involving non-leaf nodes). In this paper, we propose a two-stage method called ATTEMPT for taxonomy completion. Our method inserts new concepts into the correct position by finding a parent node and labeling child nodes. Specifically, by combining local nodes with prompts to generate natural sentences, we take advantage of pre-trained language models for hypernym/hyponymy recognition. Experimental results on two public datasets (including six domains) show that ATTEMPT performs best on both taxonomy completion and extension tasks, surpassing existing methods.

Find Parent then Label Children: A Two-stage Taxonomy Completion Method with Pre-trained Language Model

Machine translation quality estimation (QE) predicts human judgements of a translation hypothesis without seeing the reference. State-of-the-art QE systems based on pretrained language models have been achieving remarkable correlations with human judgements yet they are computationally heavy and require human annotations, which are slow and expensive to create. To address these limitations, we define the problem of metric estimation (ME) where one predicts the automated metric scores also without the reference. We show that even without access to the reference, our model can estimate automated metrics (ρ = 60\% for BLEU, ρ = 51\% for other metrics) at the sentence-level. Because automated metrics correlate with human judgements, we can leverage the ME task for pre-training a QE model. For the QE task, we find that pre-training on TER is better (ρ = 23\%) than training for scratch (ρ = 20\%).

Poor Man’s Quality Estimation: Predicting Reference-Based MT Metrics Without the Reference

In this paper, we propose FrameBERT, a BERT-based model that can explicitly learn and incorporate FrameNet Embeddings for concept-level metaphor detection. FrameBERT not only achieves better or comparable performance to the state-of-the-art, but also is more explainable and interpretable compared to existing models, attributing to its ability of accounting for external knowledge of FrameNet.

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When Do Pre-Training Biases Propagate to Downstream Tasks? A Case Study in Text Summarization

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