Canada

Although pretrained language models (PLMs) can be prompted to perform a wide range of language tasks, it remains an open question how much this ability comes from generalizable linguistic understanding versus surface-level lexical patterns. To test this, we present a structured prompting approach for linguistic structured prediction tasks, allowing us to perform zero- and few-shot sequence tagging with autoregressive PLMs. We evaluate this approach on part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and sentence chunking, demonstrating strong few-shot performance in all cases. We also find that while PLMs contain significant prior knowledge of task labels due to task leakage into the pretraining corpus, structured prompting can also retrieve linguistic structure with arbitrary labels. These findings indicate that the in-context learning ability and linguistic knowledge of PLMs generalizes beyond memorization of their training data.

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ACL 2023

Prompting Language Models for Linguistic Structure

linguistic structure

prompting

probing

model analysis

sequence tagging

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference!  
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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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
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Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
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The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
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 We wish you a wonderful conference!
<br><br>
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Although pretrained language models (PLMs) can be prompted to perform a wide range of language tasks, it remains an open question how much this ability comes from generalizable linguistic understanding versus surface-level lexical patterns. To test this, we present a structured prompting approach for linguistic structured prediction tasks, allowing us to perform zero- and few-shot sequence tagging with autoregressive PLMs. We evaluate this approach on part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and sentence chunking, demonstrating strong few-shot performance in all cases. We also find that while PLMs contain significant prior knowledge of task labels due to task leakage into the pretraining corpus, structured prompting can also retrieve linguistic structure with arbitrary labels. These findings indicate that the in-context learning ability and linguistic knowledge of PLMs generalizes beyond memorization of their training data.

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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)**
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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.

Researchers have traditionally recruited native speakers to provide annotations for the widely used benchmark datasets. But there are languages for which recruiting native speakers is difficult, and it would help to get learners of those languages to annotate the data. In this paper, we investigate whether language learners can contribute annotations to the benchmark datasets. In a carefully controlled annotation experiment, we recruit 36 language learners, provide two types of additional resources (dictionaries and machine-translated sentences), and perform mini-tests to measure their language proficiency. We target three languages, English, Korean, and Indonesian, and four NLP tasks, sentiment analysis, natural language inference, named entity recognition, and machine reading comprehension. We find that language learners, especially those with intermediate or advanced language proficiency, are able to provide fairly accurate labels with the help of additional resources. Moreover, we show that data annotation improves learners' language proficiency in terms of vocabulary and grammar. The implication of our findings is that broadening the annotation task to include language learners can open up the opportunity to build benchmark datasets for languages for which it is difficult to recruit native speakers.

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Rethinking Annotation: Can Language Learners Contribute?

To transition to a green economy, environmental claims made by companies must be reliable, comparable, and verifiable. To analyze such claims at scale, automated methods are needed to detect them in the first place. However, there exist no datasets or models for this. Thus, this paper introduces the task of environmental claim detection. To accompany the task, we release an expert-annotated dataset and models trained on this dataset. We preview one potential application of such models: We detect environmental claims made in quarterly earning calls and find that the number of environmental claims has steadily increased since the Paris Agreement in 2015.

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Environmental Claim Detection

Parameter-efficient tuning aims to mitigate the large memory requirements of adapting pretrained language models for downstream tasks. For example, one popular method, prefix-tuning, prepends trainable tokens to sequences while freezing the rest of the model's parameters. Although such models attain comparable performance with fine-tuning when applied to sequences with short to moderate lengths, we show their inferior performance when modelling long sequences. To bridge this gap, we propose prefix-propagation, a simple but effective approach that conditions prefixes on previous hidden states. We empirically demonstrate that prefix-propagation outperforms prefix-tuning across long-document tasks, while using 50% fewer parameters. To further investigate the proposed architecture, we also show its advantage in calibration, and perform additional study on its relationship with kernel attention. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to focus on parameter-efficient learning for long-sequence language tasks.

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Prefix Propagation: Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Long Sequences

Many NLP pipelines split text into sentences as one of the crucial preprocessing steps. Prior sentence segmentation tools either rely on punctuation or require a considerable amount of sentence-segmented training data: both central assumptions might fail when porting sentence segmenters to diverse languages on a massive scale. In this work, we thus introduce a multilingual punctuation-agnostic sentence segmentation method, currently covering 85 languages, trained in a self-supervised fashion on unsegmented text, by making use of newline characters which implicitly perform segmentation into paragraphs. We further propose an approach that adapts our method to the segmentation in a given corpus by using only a small number (64-256) of sentence-segmented examples. The main results indicate that our method outperforms all the prior best sentence-segmentation tools by an average of 6.1% F1 points. Furthermore, we demonstrate that proper sentence segmentation has a point: the use of a (powerful) sentence segmenter makes a considerable difference for a downstream application such as machine translation (MT). By using our method to match sentence segmentation to the segmentation used during training of MT models, we achieve an average improvement of 2.3 BLEU points over the best prior segmentation tool, as well as massive gains over a trivial segmenter that splits text into equally-sized blocks.

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Where's the Point? Self-Supervised Multilingual Punctuation-Agnostic Sentence Segmentation

Research on Korean grammatical error correction (GEC) is limited, compared to other major languages such as English. We attribute this problematic circumstance to the lack of a carefully designed evaluation benchmark for Korean GEC. In this work, we collect three datasets from different sources (Kor-Lang8, Kor-Native, and Kor-Learner) that covers a wide range of Korean grammatical errors. Considering the nature of Korean grammar, We then define 14 error types for Korean and provide KAGAS (Korean Automatic Grammatical error Annotation System), which can automatically annotate error types from parallel corpora. We use KAGAS on our datasets to make an evaluation benchmark for Korean, and present baseline models trained from our datasets. We show that the model trained with our datasets significantly outperforms the currently used statistical Korean GEC system (Hanspell) on a wider range of error types, demonstrating the diversity and usefulness of the datasets. The implementations and datasets are open-sourced.

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Towards standardizing Korean Grammatical Error Correction: Datasets and Annotation

End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems.In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score of the translation quality that can be used as a proxy to human evaluation. To evaluate our approach, we construct training and evaluation sets from more than 40k human annotations covering seven language directions.The best results of BLASER are achieved by training with supervision from human rating scores. We show that when evaluated at the sentence level, BLASER correlates significantly better with human judgment compared to ASR dependent metrics including ASR-SENTBLEU in all translation directions and ASR-COMET in five of them. Our analysis shows combining speech and text as inputs to BLASER does not increase the correlation with human scores, but best correlations are achieved when using speech, which motivates the goal of our research. Moreover, we show that using ASR for references is detrimental for text-based metrics.

BLASER: A Text-Free Speech-to-Speech Translation Evaluation Metric

Recent works have shown that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can elicit language models to solve complex reasoning tasks, step-by-step. However, prompt-based CoT methods are dependent on very large models such as GPT-3 175B which are prohibitive to deploy at scale. In this paper, we use these large models as reasoning teachers to enable complex reasoning in smaller models and reduce model size requirements by several orders of magnitude. We propose Fine-tune-CoT, a method that generates reasoning samples from very large teacher models to fine-tune smaller models. We evaluate our method on a wide range of public models and complex tasks. We find that Fine-tune-CoT enables substantial reasoning capability in small models, far outperforming prompt-based baselines and even the teacher model in many tasks. Additionally, we extend our method by leveraging the teacher model's ability to generate multiple distinct rationales for each original sample. Enriching the fine-tuning data with such diverse reasoning results in a substantial performance boost across datasets, even for very small models. We conduct ablations and sample studies to understand the emergence of reasoning capabilities of student models. Our code implementation and data are available at https://github.com/itsnamgyu/reasoning-teacher.

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Large Language Models Are Reasoning Teachers

Visual spatial description (VSD) aims to generate texts that describe the spatial relations of the given objects within images. Existing VSD work merely models the 2D geometrical vision features, thus inevitably falling prey to the problem of skewed spatial understanding of target objects. In this work, we investigate the incorporation of 3D scene features for VSD. With an external 3D scene extractor, we obtain the 3D objects and scene features for input images, based on which we construct a target object-centered 3D spatial scene graph (Go3D-S2G), such that we model the spatial semantics of target objects within the holistic 3D scenes. Besides, we propose a scene subgraph selecting mechanism, sampling topologically-diverse subgraphs from Go3D-S2G, where the diverse local structure features are navigated to yield spatially-diversified text generation. Experimental results on two VSD datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baselines significantly, especially improving on the cases with complex visual spatial relations. Meanwhile, our method can produce more spatially-diversified generation.

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Generating Visual Spatial Description via Holistic 3D Scene Understanding

Ensembling BERT models often significantly improves accuracy, but at the cost of significantly more computation and memory footprint. In this work, we propose Multi-CLS BERT, a novel ensembling method for CLS-based prediction tasks that is almost as efficient as a single BERT model. Multi-CLS BERT uses multiple CLS tokens with a parameterization and objective that encourages their diversity. Thus instead of fine-tuning each BERT model in an ensemble (and running them all at test time), we need only fine-tune our single Multi-CLS BERT model (and run the one model at test time, ensembling just the multiple final CLS embeddings). To test its effectiveness, we build Multi-CLS BERT on top of a state-of-the-art pretraining method for BERT (Aroca-Ouellette and Rudzicz, 2020). In experiments on GLUE and SuperGLUE we show that our Multi-CLS BERT reliably improves both overall accuracy and confidence estimation. When only 100 training samples are available in GLUE, the Multi-CLS BERT_Base model can even outperform the corresponding BERT_Large model. We analyze the behavior of our Multi-CLS BERT, showing that it has many of the same characteristics and behavior as a typical BERT 5-way ensemble, but with nearly 4-times less computation and memory.

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Multi-CLS BERT: An Efficient Alternative to Traditional Ensembling

Paraphrase generation is a long-standing task in natural language processing (NLP). Supervised paraphrase generation models, which rely on human-annotated paraphrase pairs, are cost-inefficient and hard to scale up. On the other hand, automatically annotated paraphrase pairs (e.g., by machine back-translation), usually suffer from the lack of syntactic diversity -- the generated paraphrase sentences are very similar to the source sentences in terms of syntax. In this work, we present ParaAMR, a large-scale syntactically diverse paraphrase dataset created by abstract meaning representation back-translation. Our quantitative analysis, qualitative examples, and human evaluation demonstrate that the paraphrases of ParaAMR are syntactically more diverse compared to existing large-scale paraphrase datasets while preserving good semantic similarity. In addition, we show that ParaAMR can be used to improve on three NLP tasks: learning sentence embeddings, syntactically controlled paraphrase generation, and data augmentation for few-shot learning. Our results thus showcase the potential of ParaAMR for improving various NLP applications.

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Rethinking Annotation: Can Language Learners Contribute?

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