Canada

Large Language Model (LLM) trained on a mixture of text and code has demonstrated impressive capability in translating natural language (NL) into structured code.We observe that semantic structures can be conveniently translated into code and propose Code4Struct to leverage such text-to-structure translation capability to tackle structured prediction tasks.As a case study, we formulate Event Argument Extraction (EAE) as converting text into event-argument structures that can be represented as a class object using code.This alignment between structures and code enables us to take advantage of Programming Language (PL) features such as inheritance and type annotation to introduce external knowledge or add constraints.We show that, with sufficient in-context examples, formulating EAE as a code generation problem is advantageous over using variants of text-based prompts.Despite only using 20 training event instances for each event type, Code4Struct is comparable to supervised models trained on 4,202 instances and outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) trained on 20-shot data by 29.5% absolute F1. Code4Struct can use 10-shot training data from a sibling event type to predict arguments for zero-resource event types and outperforms the zero-shot baseline by 12% absolute F1.

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ACL 2023

Code4Struct: Code Generation for Few-Shot Event Structure Prediction

large language models

structured prediction

information extraction

### 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.
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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.

Large Language Model (LLM) trained on a mixture of text and code has demonstrated impressive capability in translating natural language (NL) into structured code.We observe that semantic structures can be conveniently translated into code and propose Code4Struct to leverage such text-to-structure translation capability to tackle structured prediction tasks.As a case study, we formulate Event Argument Extraction (EAE) as converting text into event-argument structures that can be represented as a class object using code.This alignment between structures and code enables us to take advantage of Programming Language (PL) features such as inheritance and type annotation to introduce external knowledge or add constraints.We show that, with sufficient in-context examples, formulating EAE as a code generation problem is advantageous over using variants of text-based prompts.Despite only using 20 training event instances for each event type, Code4Struct is comparable to supervised models trained on 4,202 instances and outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) trained on 20-shot data by 29.5% absolute F1. Code4Struct can use 10-shot training data from a sibling event type to predict arguments for zero-resource event types and outperforms the zero-shot baseline by 12% absolute F1.

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poster

Mental disorders affect millions of people worldwide and cause interference with their thinking and behavior. Through the past years, awareness created by health campaigns and other sources motivated the study of these disorders using information extracted from social media platforms. In this work, we aim to contribute to the study of these disorders and to the understanding of how mental problems reflect on social media. To achieve this goal, we propose a double-domain adaptation of a language model. First, we adapted the model to social media language, and then, we adapted it to the mental health domain. In both steps, we incorporated a lexical resource to guide the masking process of the language model and, therefore, to help it in paying more attention to words related to mental disorders. We have evaluated our model in the detection of signs of three major mental disorders: Anorexia, Self-harm, and Depression. Results are encouraging as they show that the proposed adaptation enhances the classification performance and yields competitive results against state-of-the-art methods.

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DisorBERT: A Double Domain Adaptation Model for Detecting Signs of Mental Disorders in Social Media

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis aims to predict the sentiment of video content. Recent research suggests that multimodal sentiment analysis critically depends on learning a good representation of multimodal information, which should contain both modality-invariant representations that are consistent across modalities as well as modality-specific representations. In this paper, we propose ConFEDE, a unified learning framework that jointly performs contrastive representation learning and contrastive feature decomposition to enhance the representation of multimodal information. It decomposes each of the three modalities of a video sample, including text, video frames, and audio, into a similarity feature and a dissimilarity feature, which are learned by a contrastive relation centered around the text. We conducted extensive experiments on CH-SIMS, MOSI and MOSEI to evaluate various state-of-the-art multimodal sentiment analysis methods. Experimental results show that ConFEDE outperforms all baselines on these datasets on a range of metrics.

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ConFEDE: Contrastive Feature Decomposition for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Vision and language models (VL) are known to exploit unrobust indicators in individual modalities (e.g., introduced by distributional biases) instead of focusing on relevant information in each modality. That a unimodal model achieves similar accuracy on a VL task to a multimodal one, indicates that so-called unimodal collapse occurred. However, accuracy-based tests fail to detect e.g., when the model prediction is wrong, while the model used relevant information from a modality.Instead, we propose MM-SHAP, a performance-agnostic multimodality score based on Shapley values that reliably quantifies in which proportions a multimodal model uses individual modalities. We apply MM-SHAP in two ways: (1) to compare models for their average degree of multimodality, and (2) to measure for individual models the contribution of individual modalities for different tasks and datasets.Experiments with six VL models LXMERT, CLIP and four ALBEF variants on four VL tasks highlight that unimodal collapse can occur to different degrees and in different directions, contradicting the wide-spread assumption that unimodal collapse is one-sided. Based on our results, we recommend MM-SHAP for analysing multimodal tasks, to diagnose and guide progress towards multimodal integration. Code available at \url{https://github.com/Heidelberg-NLP/MM-SHAP}.

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MM-SHAP: A Performance-agnostic Metric for Measuring Multimodal Contributions in Vision and Language Models & Tasks

We propose the Detailed Outline Control (DOC) framework for improving long-range plot coherence when automatically generating several-thousand-word-long stories. DOC consists of two complementary components: a detailed outliner and a detailed controller. The detailed outliner creates a more detailed, hierarchically structured outline, shifting creative burden from the main drafting procedure to the planning stage. The detailed controller ensures the more detailed outline is still respected during generation by controlling story passages to align with outline details. In human evaluations of automatically generated stories, DOC substantially outperforms a strong Re3 baseline (Yang et al., 2022) on plot coherence (22.5% absolute gain), outline relevance (28.2%), and interestingness (20.7%). Humans also judged DOC to be much more controllable in an interactive generation setting.

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DOC: Improving Long Story Coherence With Detailed Outline Control

Monetary policy pronouncements by Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) are a major driver of financial market returns. We construct the largest tokenized and annotated dataset of FOMC speeches, meeting minutes, and press conference transcripts in order to understand how monetary policy influences financial markets. In this study, we develop a novel task of hawkish-dovish classification and benchmark various pre-trained language models on the proposed dataset. Using the best-performing model (RoBERTa-large), we construct a measure of monetary policy stance for the FOMC document release days. To evaluate the constructed measure, we study its impact on the treasury market, stock market, and macroeconomic indicators. Our dataset, models, and code are publicly available on Huggingface and GitHub under CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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Trillion Dollar Words: A New Financial Dataset, Task & Market Analysis

Reasoning has been a central topic in artificial intelligence from the beginning. The recent progress made on distributed representation and neural networks continues to improve the state-of-the-art performance of natural language inference. However, it remains an open question whether the models perform real reasoning to reach their conclusions or rely on spurious correlations. Adversarial attacks have proven to be an important tool to help evaluate the Achilles' heel of the victim models. In this study, we explore the fundamental problem of developing attack models based on logic formalism. We propose NatLogAttack to perform systematic attacks centring around natural logic, a classical logic formalism that is traceable back to Aristotle's syllogism and has been closely developed for natural language inference. The proposed framework renders both label-preserving and label-flipping attacks.We show that compared to the existing attack models, NatLogAttack generates better adversarial examples with fewer visits to the victim models. The victim models are found to be more vulnerable under the label-flipping setting. NatLogAttack provides a tool to probe the existing and future NLI models' capacity from a key viewpoint and we hope more logic-based attacks will be further explored for understanding the desired property of reasoning.

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NatLogAttack: A Framework for Attacking Natural Language Inference Models with Natural Logic

Optimizing the phrasing of argumentative text is crucial in higher education and professional development. However, assessing whether and how the different claims in a text should be revised is a hard task, especially for novice writers. In this work, we explore the main challenges to identifying argumentative claims in need of specific revisions. By learning from collaborative editing behaviors in online debates, we seek to capture implicit revision patterns in order to develop approaches aimed at guiding writers in how to further improve their arguments. We systematically compare the ability of common word embedding models to capture the differences between different versions of the same text, and we analyze their impact on various types of writing issues. To deal with the noisy nature of revision-based corpora, we propose a new sampling strategy based on revision distance. Opposed to approaches from prior work, such sampling can be done without employing additional annotations and judgments. Moreover, we provide evidence that using contextual information and domain knowledge can further improve prediction results. How useful a certain type of context is, depends on the issue the claim is suffering from, though.

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To Revise or Not to Revise: Learning to Detect Improvable Claims for Argumentative Writing Support

Neural machine translation (NMT) has become the de-facto standard in real-world machine translation applications. However, NMT models can unpredictably produce severely pathological translations, known as hallucinations, that seriously undermine user trust. It becomes thus crucial to implement effective preventive strategies to guarantee their proper functioning. In this paper, we address the problem of hallucination detection in NMT by following a simple intuition: as hallucinations are detached from the source content, they exhibit encoder-decoder attention patterns that are statistically different from those of good quality translations. We frame this problem with an optimal transport formulation and propose a fully unsupervised, plug-in detector that can be used with any attention-based NMT model. Experimental results show that our detector not only outperforms all previous model-based detectors, but is also competitive with detectors that employ external models trained on millions of samples for related tasks such as quality estimation and cross-lingual sentence similarity.

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Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Hallucination Detection in Neural Machine Translation

We present bgGLUE (Bulgarian General Language Understanding Evaluation), a benchmark for evaluating language models on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks in Bulgarian. Our benchmark includes NLU tasks targeting a variety of NLP problems (e.g., natural language inference, fact-checking, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, question answering, etc.) and machine learning tasks (sequence labeling, document-level classification, and regression). We run the first systematic evaluation of pre-trained language models for Bulgarian, comparing and contrasting results across the nine tasks in the benchmark. The evaluation results show strong performance on sequence labeling tasks, but there is a lot of room for improvement for tasks that require more complex reasoning. We make bgGLUE publicly available together with the fine-tuning and the evaluation code, as well as a public leaderboard at https://bgglue.github.io, and we hope that it will enable further advancements in developing NLU models for Bulgarian.

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bgGLUE: A Bulgarian General Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can dramatically improve the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). CoT explicitly encourages the LLM to generate intermediate rationales for solving a problem, by providing a series of reasoning steps in the demonstrations. Despite its success, there is still little understanding of what makes CoT prompting effective and which aspects of the demonstrated reasoning steps contribute to its performance. In this paper, we show that CoT reasoning is possible even with invalid demonstrations - prompting with invalid reasoning steps can achieve over 80-90% of the performance obtained using CoT under various metrics, while still generating coherent lines of reasoning during inference. Further experiments show that other aspects of the rationales, such as being relevant to the query and correctly ordering the reasoning steps, are much more important for effective CoT reasoning. Overall, these findings both deepen our understanding of CoT prompting, and open up new questions regarding LLMs' capability to learn to reason in context.

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DisorBERT: A Double Domain Adaptation Model for Detecting Signs of Mental Disorders in Social Media

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