Canada

Previous research has demonstrated that natural language explanations provide valuable inductive biases that guide models, thereby improving the generalization ability and data efficiency. In this paper, we undertake a systematic examination of the effectiveness of these explanations. Remarkably, we find that corrupted explanations with diminished inductive biases can achieve competitive or superior performance compared to the original explanations. Our findings furnish novel insights into the characteristics of natural language explanations in the following ways: (1) the impact of explanations varies across different training styles and datasets, with previously believed improvements primarily observed in frozen language models. (2) While previous research has attributed the effect of explanations solely to their inductive biases, our study shows that the effect persists even when the explanations are completely corrupted. We propose that the main effect is due to the provision of additional context space. (3) Utilizing the proposed automatic perturbed context, we were able to attain comparable results to annotated explanations, but with a significant increase in computational efficiency, 20-30 times faster.

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ACL 2023

Exploring Automatically Perturbed Natural Language Explanations in Relation Extraction

natural language explanation

knowledge integration

relation 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.
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
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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.

Previous research has demonstrated that natural language explanations provide valuable inductive biases that guide models, thereby improving the generalization ability and data efficiency. In this paper, we undertake a systematic examination of the effectiveness of these explanations. Remarkably, we find that corrupted explanations with diminished inductive biases can achieve competitive or superior performance compared to the original explanations. Our findings furnish novel insights into the characteristics of natural language explanations in the following ways: (1) the impact of explanations varies across different training styles and datasets, with previously believed improvements primarily observed in frozen language models. (2) While previous research has attributed the effect of explanations solely to their inductive biases, our study shows that the effect persists even when the explanations are completely corrupted. We propose that the main effect is due to the provision of additional context space. (3) Utilizing the proposed automatic perturbed context, we were able to attain comparable results to annotated explanations, but with a significant increase in computational efficiency, 20-30 times faster.

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poster

The multi-answer phenomenon, where a question may have multiple answers scattered in the document, can be well handled by humans but is challenging enough for machine reading comprehension (MRC) systems. Despite recent progress in multi-answer MRC, there lacks a systematic analysis of how this phenomenon arises and how to better address it. In this work, we design a taxonomy to categorize commonly-seen multi-answer MRC instances, with which we inspect three multi-answer datasets and analyze where the multi-answer challenge comes from. We further analyze how well different paradigms of current multi-answer MRC models deal with different types of multi-answer instances. We find that some paradigms capture well the key information in the questions while others better model the relation between questions and contexts. We thus explore strategies to make the best of the strengths of different paradigms. Experiments show that generation models can be a promising platform to incorporate different paradigms. Our annotations and code are released for further research.

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How Many Answers Should I Give? An Empirical Study of Multi-Answer Reading Comprehension

Word-level saliency explanations ("heat maps over words") are often used to communicate feature-attribution in text-based models. Recent studies found that superficial factors such as word length can distort human interpretation of the communicated saliency scores. We conduct a user study to investigate how the marking of a word's *neighboring words* affect the explainee's perception of the word's importance in the context of a saliency explanation.We find that neighboring words have significant effects on the word's importance rating.Concretely, we identify that the influence changes based on neighboring direction (left vs. right) and a-priori linguistic and computational measures of phrases and collocations (vs. unrelated neighboring words).Our results question whether text-based saliency explanations should be continued to be communicated at word level, and inform future research on alternative saliency explanation methods.

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Neighboring Words Affect Human Interpretation of Saliency Explanations

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at https://instructor-embedding.github.io.

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One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings

Controlling the text generated by language models and customizing the content has been a long-standing challenge. Existing prompting techniques proposed in pursuit of providing control are task-specific and lack generality; this provides overwhelming choices for non-expert users to find a suitable method for their task. The effort associated with those techniques, such as in writing examples, explanations, instructions, etc. further limits their adoption among non-expert users. In this paper, we propose a simple prompting strategy Help Me Think where we encourage largelanguage models (such as GPT3 and ChatGPT) to help non-expert users by asking a set of relevant questions and leveraging user answers to execute the task. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique Help Me Think on a variety of tasks. Specifically, we focus on tasks that are hard for average humans and require significant thinking to perform. We hope our work will encourage the development of unconventional ways to harness the power of large language models.

HELP ME THINK: A Simple Prompting Strategy for Non-experts to Create Customized Content with Models

Entity linking models have achieved significant success via utilizing pretrained language models to capture semantic features.However, the NIL prediction problem, which aims to identify mentions without a corresponding entity in the knowledge base, has received insufficient attention.We categorize mentions linking to NIL into Missing Entity and Non-Entity Phrase, and propose an entity linking dataset NEL that focuses on the NIL prediction problem.NEL takes ambiguous entities as seeds, collects relevant mention context in the Wikipedia corpus, and ensures the presence of mentions linking to NIL by human annotation and entity masking.We conduct a series of experiments with the widely used bi-encoder and cross-encoder entity linking models, results show that both types of NIL mentions in training data have a significant influence on the accuracy of NIL prediction.Our code and dataset can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/solitaryzero/NIL_EL}.

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Learn to Not Link: Exploring NIL Prediction in Entity Linking

Large language models have demonstrated robust performance on various language tasks using zero-shot or few-shot learning paradigms. While being actively researched, multimodal models that can additionally handle images as input have yet to catch up in size and generality with language-only models. In this work, we ask whether language-only models can be utilised for tasks that require visual input -- but also, as we argue, often require a strong reasoning component. Similar to some recent related work, we make visual information accessible to the language model using separate verbalisation models. Specifically, we investigate the performance of open-source, open-access language models against GPT-3 on five vision-language tasks when given textually-encoded visual information. Our results suggest that language models are effective for solving vision-language tasks even with limited samples. This approach also enhances the interpretability of a model's output by providing a means of tracing the output back through the verbalised image content.

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Images in Language Space: Exploring the Suitability of Large Language Models for Vision & Language Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great potential for in-context learning, where LLMs learn a new task simply by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (prompts). Despite their potential, our understanding of the factors influencing end-task performance and the robustness of in-context learning remains limited. This paper aims to bridge this knowledge gap by investigating the reliance of LLMs on shortcuts or spurious correlations within prompts. Through comprehensive experiments on classification and extraction tasks, we reveal that LLMs are "lazy learners" that tend to exploit such shortcuts. Additionally, we uncover a surprising finding that larger models are more likely to utilize shortcuts in prompts during inference. Our findings provide a new perspective on evaluating robustness in in-context learning and pose new challenges for detecting and mitigating the use of shortcuts in prompts.

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Large Language Models Can be Lazy Learners: Analyze Shortcuts in In-Context Learning

Text simplification (TS) aims to modify sentences to make their both content and structure easier to understand. Traditional n-gram matching-based TS evaluation metrics heavily rely on the exact token match and human-annotated simplified sentences. In this paper, we present a novel neural-network-based reference-free TS metric BETS that leverages pre-trained contextualized language representation models and large-scale paraphrasing datasets to evaluate simplicity and meaning preservation. We show that our metric, without collecting any costly human simplification reference, correlates better than existing metrics with human judgments for the quality of both overall simplification (+7.7%) and its key aspects, i.e., comparative simplicity (+11.2%) and meaning preservation (+9.2%).

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Towards Reference-free Text Simplification Evaluation with a BERT Siamese Network Architecture

As language models increase in size by the day, methods for efficient inference are critical to leveraging their capabilities for various applications. Prior work has investigated techniques like model pruning, knowledge distillation, and data multiplexing to increase model throughput without sacrificing accuracy. In this paper, we combine two such methods -- structured pruning and data multiplexing -- to compound the speedup gains obtained by either method. Our approach, PruMUX, obtains up to 7.5-29.5X throughput improvement over BERT-base model with accuracy threshold from 80% to 74%. We further study various combinations of parameters (such as sparsity and multiplexing factor) in the two techniques to provide a comprehensive analysis of the tradeoff between accuracy and throughput in the resulting models. We then propose Auto-PruMUX, a meta-level model that can predict the high-performance parameters for pruning and multiplexing given a desired accuracy loss budget, providing a practical method to leverage the combination effectively.

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PruMUX: Augmenting Data Multiplexing with Model Compression

Multimodal misinformation on online social platforms is becoming a critical concern due to increasing credibility and easier dissemination brought by multimedia content, compared to traditional text-only information. While existing multimodal detection approaches have achieved high performance, the lack of interpretability hinders these systems' reliability and practical deployment. Inspired by Neural-Symbolic AI which combines the learning ability of neural networks with the explainability of symbolic learning, we propose a novel logic-based neural model for multimodal misinformation detection which integrates interpretable logic clauses to express the reasoning process of the target task. To make learning effective, we parameterize the symbolic logical elements using neural representations, which facilitate the automatic generation and evaluation of meaningful logic clauses. Additionally, to make our framework generalizable across diverse misinformation sources, we introduce five meta-predicates that can be instantiated with different correlations. Results on three public datasets (Twitter, Weibo, and Sarcasm) demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of our model.

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