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Domain adaptation allows generative language models to address specific flaws caused by the domain shift of their application.However, the traditional adaptation by further training on in-domain data rapidly weakens the model&#39;s ability to generalize to other domains, making the open-ended deployments of the adapted models prone to errors.This work introduces novel training objectives built upon a semantic similarity of the predicted tokens to the reference.Our results show that (1) avoiding the common assumption of a single correct prediction by constructing the training target from tokens&#39; semantic similarity can largely mitigate catastrophic forgetting of adaptation, while (2) preserving the adaptation in-domain quality, (3) with negligible additions to compute costs.In the broader context, the objectives grounded in a continuous token similarity pioneer the exploration of the middle ground between the efficient but naive exact-match token-level objectives and expressive but computationally- and resource-intensive sequential objectives.

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ACL 2023

Soft Alignment Objectives for Robust Adaptation of Language Generation

adaptation

generation

robustness

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Domain adaptation allows generative language models to address specific flaws caused by the domain shift of their application.However, the traditional adaptation by further training on in-domain data rapidly weakens the model's ability to generalize to other domains, making the open-ended deployments of the adapted models prone to errors.This work introduces novel training objectives built upon a semantic similarity of the predicted tokens to the reference.Our results show that (1) avoiding the common assumption of a single correct prediction by constructing the training target from tokens' semantic similarity can largely mitigate catastrophic forgetting of adaptation, while (2) preserving the adaptation in-domain quality, (3) with negligible additions to compute costs.In the broader context, the objectives grounded in a continuous token similarity pioneer the exploration of the middle ground between the efficient but naive exact-match token-level objectives and expressive but computationally- and resource-intensive sequential objectives.

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
<br><br><br><br>

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.

Curriculum learning has shown promising improvements in multiple domains by training machine learning models from easy samples to hard ones. Previous works which either design rules or train models for scoring the difficulty highly rely on task-specific expertise, and cannot generalize. Inspired by the ``easy-to-hard'' intuition, we propose to do in-sample curriculum learning for natural language generation tasks. Our learning strategy starts training the model to generate the last few words, i.e., do sequence completion, and gradually extends to generate the whole output sequence. Comprehensive experiments show that it generalizes well to different tasks and achieves significant improvements over strong baselines.

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In-sample Curriculum Learning by Sequence Completion for Natural Language Generation

Extracting geolocation information from social media data enables effective disaster management, as it helps response authorities; for example, in locating incidents for planning rescue activities, and affected people for evacuation. Nevertheless, geolocation extraction is greatly understudied for the low resource languages such as Arabic. To fill this gap, we introduce IDRISI-RA, the first publicly-available Arabic Location Mention Recognition (LMR) dataset that provides human- and automatically-labeled versions in order of thousands and millions of tweets, respectively. It contains both location mentions and their types (e.g., district, city). Our extensive analysis shows the decent geographical, domain, location granularity, temporal, and dialectical coverage of IDRISI-RA. Furthermore, we establish baselines using the standard Arabic NER models and build two simple, yet effective, LMR models. Our rigorous experiments confirm the need for developing specific models for Arabic LMR in the disaster domain. Moreover, experiments show the promising domain and geographical generalizability of IDRISI-RA under zero-shot learning.

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IDRISI-RA: The First Arabic Location Mention Recognition Dataset of Disaster Tweets

The COVID-19 pandemic created a deluge of questionable and contradictory scientific claims about drug efficacy -- an "infodemic" with lasting consequences for science and society. In this work, we argue that NLP models can help domain experts distill and understand the literature in this complex, high-stakes area. Our task is to automatically identify contradictory claims about COVID-19 drug efficacy. We frame this as a natural language inference problem and offer a new NLI dataset created by domain experts. The NLI framing allows us to create curricula combining existing datasets and our own. The resulting models are useful investigative tools. We provide a case study of how these models help a domain expert summarize and assess evidence concerning remdisivir and hydroxychloroquine.

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Detecting Contradictory COVID-19 Drug Efficacy Claims from Biomedical Literature

Jointly extracting entity pairs and their relations is challenging when working on distantly-supervised data with ambiguous or noisy labels.To mitigate such impact, we propose uncertainty-aware bootstrap learning, which is motivated by the intuition that the higher uncertainty of an instance, the more likely the model confidence is inconsistent with the ground truths.Specifically, we first explore instance-level data uncertainty to create an initial high-confident examples. Such subset serves as filtering noisy instances and facilitating the model to converge fast at the early stage.During bootstrap learning, we propose self-ensembling as a regularizer to alleviate inter-model uncertainty produced by noisy labels. We further define probability variance of joint tagging probabilities to estimate inner-model parametric uncertainty, which is used to select and build up new reliable training instances for the next iteration.Experimental results on two large datasets reveal that our approach outperforms existing strong baselines and related methods.

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Uncertainty-Aware Bootstrap Learning for Joint Extraction on Distantly-Supervised Data

Researchers usually come up with new ideas only after thoroughly comprehending vast quantities of literature. The difficulty of this procedure is exacerbated by the fact that the number of academic publications is growing exponentially. In this study, we devise a framework based on concept co-occurrence for academic idea inspiration, which has been integrated into a research assistant system. From our perspective, the emergence of a new idea can be regarded as the fusion of two concepts that co-occur in an academic paper. We construct evolving concept graphs according to the co-occurrence relationship of concepts from 20 disciplines or topics. Then we design a temporal link prediction method based on masked language model to explore potential connections between different concepts. To verbalize the newly discovered connections, we also utilize the pretrained language model to generate a description of an idea based on a new data structure called co-occurrence citation quintuple. We evaluate our proposed system using both automatic metrics and human assessment. The results demonstrate that our system has broad prospects and can assist researchers in expediting the process of discovering new ideas.

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Exploring and Verbalizing Academic Ideas by Concept Co-occurrence

We introduce a method that self trains (or bootstraps) neural relation and explanation classifiers. Our work expands the supervised approach of \cite{10.1162/coli_a_00463}, which jointly trains a relation classifier with an explanation classifier that identifies context words important for the relation at hand, to semi-supervised scenarios. In particular, our approach iteratively converts the explainable models' outputs to rules and applies them to unlabeled text to produce new annotations.Our evaluation on the TACRED dataset shows that our method outperforms the rule-based model we started from by 15 F1 points, outperforms traditional self-training that relies just on the relation classifier by 5 F1 points, and performs comparatively with the prompt-based approach of \citet{sainz-etal-2021-label} (without requiring an additional natural language inference component).

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Bootstrapping Neural Relation and Explanation Classifiers

Multi-hop QA requires reasoning over multiple supporting facts to answer the question. However, the existing QA models always rely on shortcuts, e.g., providing the true answer by only one fact, rather than multi-hop reasoning, which is referred as disconnected reasoning problem. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel counterfactual multihop QA, a causal-effect approach that enables to reduce the disconnected reasoning. It builds upon explicitly modeling of causality: 1) the direct causal effects of disconnected reasoning and 2) the causal effect of true multi-hop reasoning from the total causal effect. With the causal graph, a counterfactual inference is proposed to disentangle the disconnected reasoning from the total causal effect, which provides us a new perspective and technology to learn a QA model that exploits the true multi-hop reasoning instead of shortcuts. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the benchmark HotpotQA dataset, which demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve notable improvement on reducing disconnected reasoning. For example, our method achieves 5.8% higher points of its Supps score on HotpotQA through true multihop reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/guowzh/CFMQA.

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Counterfactual Multihop QA: A Cause-Effect Approach for Reducing Disconnected Reasoning

Knowledge distillation has attracted a great deal of interest recently to compress large language models. However, existing knowledge distillation methods suffer from two limitations. First, the student model simply imitates the teacher's behavior while ignoring the reasoning behind it. Second, these methods usually focus on the transfer of sophisticated model-specific knowledge but overlook data-specific knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel attribution-driven knowledge distillation approach, which explores the token-level rationale behind the teacher model based on Integrated Gradients (IG) and transfers attribution knowledge to the student model. To enhance the knowledge transfer of model reasoning and generalization, we further explore multi-view attribution distillation on all potential decisions of the teacher. Comprehensive experiments are conducted with BERT on the GLUE benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach to several state-of-the-art methods.

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AD-KD: Attribution-Driven Knowledge Distillation for Language Model Compression

Given a language model (LM), maximum probability is a poor decoding objective for open-ended generation, because it produces short and repetitive text. On the other hand, sampling can often produce incoherent text that drifts from the original topics. We propose contrastive decoding (CD), a reliable decoding approach that optimizes a contrastive objective subject to a plausibility constraint. The contrastive objective returns the difference between the likelihood under a large LM (called the expert, e.g. OPT-13B) and a small LM (called the amateur, e.g. OPT-125M), and the constraint ensures that the outputs are plausible. CD is inspired by the fact that the failures of larger LMs (e.g., repetition, inco- herence) are even more prevalent in smaller LMs, and that this difference signals which texts should be preferred. CD requires zero additional training, and produces higher quality text than decoding from the larger LM alone. It also works across model scales (OPT-13B and GPT2-1.5B) and significantly outperforms four strong decoding algorithms (e.g., nucleus, top-k) in automatic and human evaluations across wikipedia, news and story domains.

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Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization

Large-scale vision language (VL) models use Transformers to perform cross-modal interactions between the input text and image. These cross-modal interactions are computationally expensive and memory-intensive due to the quadratic complexity of processing the input image and text. We present PuMer: a token reduction framework that uses text-informed Pruning and modality-aware Merging strategies to progressively reduce the tokens of input image and text, improving model inference speed and reducing memory footprint. PuMer learns to keep salient image tokens related to the input text and merges similar textual and visual tokens by adding lightweight token reducer modules at several cross-modal layers in the VL model. Training PuMer is mostly the same as finetuning the original VL model but faster. Our evaluation for two vision language models on four downstream VL tasks shows PuMer increases inference throughput by up to 2x and reduces memory footprint by over 50% while incurring less than a 1% accuracy drop.

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Next from ACL 2023

In-sample Curriculum Learning by Sequence Completion for Natural Language Generation

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