Canada

Pragmatic reference enables efficient interpersonal communication. Prior work uses simple reference games to test models of pragmatic reasoning, often with unidentified speakers and listeners. In practice, however, speakers&#39; sociocultural background shapes their pragmatic assumptions. For example, readers of this paper assume NLP refers to Natural Language Processing, and not &quot;Neuro-linguistic Programming.&quot; This work introduces the Cultural Codes dataset, which operationalizes sociocultural pragmatic inference in a simple word reference game. Cultural Codes is based on the multi-turn collaborative two-player game, Codenames Duet. Our dataset consists of 794 games with 7,703 turns, distributed across 153 unique players. Alongside gameplay, we collect information about players&#39; personalities, values, and demographics. Utilizing theories of communication and pragmatics, we predict each player&#39;s actions via joint modeling of their sociocultural priors and the game context. Our experiments show that accounting for background characteristics significantly improves model performance for tasks related to both clue-giving and guessing, indicating that sociocultural priors play a vital role in gameplay decisions.

&lt;iframe src=&quot;https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/e8bc1ed4-9ec7-472b-9d2d-f2111d4375cf&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;

ACL 2023

Modeling Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Inference with Codenames Duet

codenames

pragmatics

### 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.

Pragmatic reference enables efficient interpersonal communication. Prior work uses simple reference games to test models of pragmatic reasoning, often with unidentified speakers and listeners. In practice, however, speakers' sociocultural background shapes their pragmatic assumptions. For example, readers of this paper assume NLP refers to Natural Language Processing, and not "Neuro-linguistic Programming." This work introduces the Cultural Codes dataset, which operationalizes sociocultural pragmatic inference in a simple word reference game. Cultural Codes is based on the multi-turn collaborative two-player game, Codenames Duet. Our dataset consists of 794 games with 7,703 turns, distributed across 153 unique players. Alongside gameplay, we collect information about players' personalities, values, and demographics. Utilizing theories of communication and pragmatics, we predict each player's actions via joint modeling of their sociocultural priors and the game context. Our experiments show that accounting for background characteristics significantly improves model performance for tasks related to both clue-giving and guessing, indicating that sociocultural priors play a vital role in gameplay decisions.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/e8bc1ed4-9ec7-472b-9d2d-f2111d4375cf" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

poster

We propose CHRT (Control HiddenRepresentation Transformation) a con-trolled language generation framework thatsteers large language models to generatetext pertaining to certain attributes (such astoxicity). CHRT gains attribute control bymodifying the hidden representation of thebase model through learned transformations.We employ a contrastive-learning frameworkto learn these transformations that can becombined to gain multi-attribute control. Theeffectiveness of CHRT is experimentallyshown by comparing it with seven baselinesover three attributes. CHRT outperforms all thebaselines in the task of detoxification, positivesentiment steering, and text simplificationwhile minimizing the loss in linguistic qualities.Further, our approach has the lowest inferencelatency of only 0.01 seconds more than thebase model, making it the most suitable forhigh-performance production environments.We open-source our code and release two noveldatasets to further propel controlled languagegeneration research

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/1b93dde3-fdf8-4a39-8258-122749c80833" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Controlled Text Generation with Hidden Representation Transformations

The development of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has brought a lot of attention recently. However, their evaluation in the benchmark academic datasets remains under-explored due to the difficulty of evaluating the generative outputs produced by this model against the ground truth. In this paper, we aim to present a thorough evaluation of ChatGPT's performance on diverse academic datasets, covering tasks like question-answering, text summarization, code generation, commonsense reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, machine translation, bias detection, and ethical considerations. Specifically, we evaluate ChatGPT across 140 tasks and analyze 255K responses it generates in these datasets. This makes our work the largest evaluation of ChatGPT in NLP benchmarks. In short, our study aims to validate the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT in various tasks and provide insights for future research using LLMs. We also report a new emergent ability to follow multi-query instructions that we mostly found in ChatGPT and other instruction-tuned models. Our extensive evaluation shows that even though ChatGPT is capable of performing a wide variety of tasks, and may obtain impressive performance in several benchmark datasets, it is still far from achieving the ability to reliably solve many challenging tasks. By providing a thorough assessment of ChatGPT's performance across diverse NLP tasks, this paper sets the stage for a targeted deployment of ChatGPT-like LLMs in real-world applications.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/0c729d2b-43bf-4b72-b221-954c44b1e9a2" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

A Systematic Study and Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Benchmark Datasets

Large language models are known to produce output which sounds fluent and convincing, but is also often wrong, e.g. ``unfaithful" with respect to a rationale as retrieved from a knowledge base. In this paper, we show that task-based systems which exhibit certain advanced linguistic dialog behaviors, such as lexical alignment (repeating what the user said), are in fact preferred and trusted more, whereas other phenomena, such as pronouns and ellipsis are dis-preferred. We use open-domain question answering systems as our test-bed for task based dialog generation and compare several open- and closed-book models. Our results highlight the danger of systems that appear to be trustworthy by parroting user input while providing an unfaithful response.

The Dangers of trusting Stochastic Parrots: Faithfulness and Trust in Open-domain Conversational Question Answering

Relation extraction (RE) aims to extract relations from sentences and documents. Existing relation extraction models typically rely on supervised machine learning. However, recent studies showed that many RE datasets are incompletely annotated. This is known as the false negative problem in which valid relations are falsely annotated as 'no_relation'. Models trained with such data inevitably make similar mistakes during the inference stage. Self-training has been proven effective in alleviating the false negative problem. However, traditional self-training is vulnerable to confirmation bias and exhibits poor performance in minority classes. To overcome this limitation, we proposed a novel class-adaptive re-sampling self-training framework. Specifically, we re-sampled the pseudo-labels for each class by precision and recall scores. Our re-sampling strategy favored the pseudo-labels of classes with high precision and low recall, which improved the overall recall without significantly compromising precision. We conducted experiments on document-level and biomedical relation extraction datasets, and the results showed that our proposed self-training framework consistently outperforms existing competitive methods on the Re-DocRED and ChemDisgene datasets when the training data are incompletely annotated.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/18542c4f-df08-4887-ac15-926d923c616c" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Class-Adaptive Self-Training for Relation Extraction with Incompletely Annotated Training Data

Automatic extraction of party (dis)similarities from texts such as party election manifestos or parliamentary speeches plays an increasing role in computational political science. However, existing approaches are fundamentally limited to targeting only global party (dis)-similarity: they condense the relationship between a pair of parties into a single figure, their similarity. In aggregating over all policy domains (e.g., health or foreign policy), they do not provide any qualitative insights into which domains parties agree or disagree on.This paper proposes a workflow for estimating policy domain aware party similarity that overcomes this limitation. The workflow covers (a) definition of suitable policy domains; (b) automatic labeling of domains, if no manual labels are available; (c) computation of domain-level similarities and aggregation at a global level; (d) extraction of interpretable party positions on major policy axes via multidimensional scaling. We evaluate our workflow on manifestos from the German federal elections. We find that our method (a) yields high correlation when predicting party similarity at a global level and (b) provides accurate party-specific positions, even with automatically labelled policy domains.

Additive manifesto decomposition: A policy domain aware method for understanding party positioning

With the evolution of Knowledge Graphs (KGs), new entities emerge which are not seen before. Representation learning of KGs in such an inductive setting aims to capture and transfer the structural patterns from existing entities to new entities. However, the performance of existing methods in inductive KGs are limited by sparsity and implicit transfer. In this paper, we propose VMCL, a Contrastive Learning (CL) framework with graph guided Variational autoencoder on Meta-KGs in the inductive setting. We first propose representation generation to capture the encoded and generated representations of entities, where the generated variations can densify representations with complementary features. Then, we design two CL objectives that work across entities and meta-KGs to simulate the transfer mode. With extensive experiments we demonstrate that our proposed VMCL can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art baselines.

Contrastive Learning with Generated Representations for Inductive Knowledge Graph Embedding

Retrieval accuracy is crucial to the performance of open-domain question answering (ODQA) systems. Recent work has demonstrated that dense hierarchical retrieval (DHR), which retrieves document candidates first and then relevant passages from the refined document set, can significantly outperform the single stage dense passage retriever (DPR). While effective, this approach requires document structure information to learn document representation and is hard to adopt to other domains without this information. Additionally, the dense retrievers tend to generalize poorly on out-of-domain data comparing with sparse retrievers such as BM25. In this paper, we propose Hybrid Hierarchical Retrieval (HHR) to address the existing limitations. Instead of relying solely on dense retrievers, we can apply sparse retriever, dense retriever, and a combination of them in both stages of document and passage retrieval. We perform extensive experiments on ODQA benchmarks and observe that our framework not only brings in-domain gains, but also generalizes better to zero-shot TriviaQA and Web Questions datasets with an average of 4.69% improvement on recall@100 over DHR. We also offer practical insights to trade off between retrieval accuracy, latency, and storage cost. The code is available on github.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/054d8fd0-12d3-4634-b8ba-ecc18070cc3f" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Hybrid Hierarchical Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering

Information Synchronization of semi-structured data across languages is challenging. For example, Wikipedia tables in one language need to be synchronized with others. To address this problem, we introduce a new dataset InfoSync and a two-step method for tabular synchronization. InfoSync contains 100K entity-centric tables (Wikipedia Infoboxes) across 14 languages, of which a subset (~3.5K pairs) are manually annotated. The proposed method includes 1) Information Alignment to map rows and 2) Information Update for updating missing/outdated information for aligned tables across multilingual tables. When evaluated on InfoSync, information alignment achieves an F1 score of 87.91 (en <-> non-en). To evaluate information updation, we perform human-assisted Wikipedia edits on Infoboxes for 532 table pairs. Our approach obtains an acceptance rate of 77.28% on Wikipedia, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/4d104bc1-1940-48ac-92f0-7987c9f43985" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

InfoSync: Information Synchronization across Multilingual Semi-structured Tables

There has been significant interest in zero and few-shot learning for dialogue state tracking (DST) due to thehigh cost of collecting and annotating task-oriented dialogues. Recent work has demonstrated that in-context learning requires very little data and zero parameter updates, and even outperforms trained methods in the few-shot setting. We propose RefPyDST, which advances the state of the art with three advancements to in-context learning for DST.First, we formulate DST as a Python programming task, explicitly modeling language coreference as variable reference in Python. Second, since in-context learning depends highly on the context examples, we propose a method to retrieve a diverse set of relevant examples to improve performance. Finally, we introduce a novel re-weighting method during decoding that takes into account probabilities of competing surface forms, and produces a more accurate dialogue state prediction.We evaluate our approach using MultiWOZ and achieve state-of-the-art multi-domain joint-goal accuracy in zero and few-shot settings.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/pk54NpNnxuhWHUa3vSMXH2/embed/polls/c4043972-7d1c-4ba6-b855-9f5a4daa86ee" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Diverse Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Dialogue State Tracking

Grammar induction, the task of learning a set of grammatical rules from raw or minimally labeled text data, can provide clues about what kinds of syntactic structures are learnable without prior knowledge. Recent work (e.g., Kim et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2020; Jin et al., 2021a) has achieved advances in unsupervised induction of probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs). However, categorial grammar induction has received less recent attention, despite allowing inducers to support a larger set of syntactic categoriesdue to restrictions on how categories can combineand providing a transparent interface with compositional semantics, opening up possibilities for models that jointly learn form and meaning. Motivated by this, we propose a new model for inducing a basic (Ajdukiewicz, 1935; Bar-Hillel, 1953) categorial grammar. In contrast to earlier categorial grammar induction systems (e.g., Bisk and Hockenmaier, 2012), our model learns from raw data without any part-of-speech information. Experiments on child-directed speech show that our model attains a recall-homogeneity of 0.33 on average, which dramatically increases to 0.59 when a bias toward forward function application is added to the model.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/532fnPQGAZvefKDC1fZsuL/embed/polls/8ae3cd0f-6f93-49d4-82e5-4c41261797c0" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Downloads

Next from ACL 2023

Controlled Text Generation with Hidden Representation Transformations

Similar lecture

Modeling Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Inference with Codenames Duet