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We study feature interactions in the context of feature attribution methods for post-hoc interpretability. In interpretability research, getting to grips with feature interactions is increasingly recognised as an important challenge, because interacting features are key to the success of neural networks. Feature interactions allow a model to build up hierarchical representations for its input, and might provide an ideal starting point for the investigation into linguistic structure in language models.However, uncovering the exact role that these interactions play is also difficult, and a diverse range of interaction attribution methods has been proposed.In this paper, we focus on the question which of these methods most faithfully reflects the inner workings of the target models.We work out a grey box methodology, in which we train models to perfection on a formal language classification task, using PCFGs. We show that under specific configurations, some methods are indeed able to uncover the grammatical rules acquired by a model. Based on these findings we extend our evaluation to a case study on language models, providing novel insights into the linguistic structure that these models have acquired.

ACL 2023

Feature Interactions Reveal Linguistic Structure in Language Models

feature interactions

hierarchical structure

faithfulness

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022!  I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent.  Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm.  We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community.  Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

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
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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.

Investigating whether pre-trained language models (LMs) can function as knowledge bases (KBs) has raised wide research interests recently. However, existing works focus on simple, triple-based, relational KBs, but omit more sophisticated, logic-based, conceptualised KBs such as OWL ontologies. To investigate an LM's knowledge of ontologies, we propose OntoLAMA, a set of inference-based probing tasks and datasets from ontology subsumption axioms involving both atomic and complex concepts. We conduct extensive experiments on ontologies of different domains and scales, and our results demonstrate that LMs encode relatively less background knowledge of Subsumption Inference (SI) than traditional Natural Language Inference (NLI) but can improve on SI significantly when a small number of samples are given. We will open-source our code and datasets.

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Language Model Analysis for Ontology Subsumption Inference

Textual backdoor attack, as a novel attack model, has been shown to be effective in adding a backdoor to the model during training. Defending against such backdoor attacks has become urgent and important. In this paper, we propose AttDef, an efficient attribution-based pipeline to defend against two insertion-based poisoning attacks, BadNL and InSent. Specifically, we regard the tokens with larger attribution scores as potential triggers since larger attribution words contribute more to the false prediction results and therefore are more likely to be poison triggers. Additionally, we further utilize an external pre-trained language model to distinguish whether input is poisoned or not. We show that our proposed method can generalize sufficiently well in two common attack scenarios (poisoning training data and testing data), which consistently improves previous methods. For instance, AttDef can successfully mitigate both attacks with an average accuracy of 79.97% (56.59% up) and 48.34% (3.99% up) under pre-training and post-training attack defense respectively, achieving the new state-of-the-art performance on prediction recovery over four benchmark datasets.

Defending against Insertion-based Textual Backdoor Attacks via Attribution

Procedure planning, or the ability to predict a series of steps that can achieve a given goal conditioned on the current observation, is critical for building intelligent embodied agents that can assist users in everyday tasks. Encouraged by the recent success of language models (LMs) for zero-shot and few-shot planning, we hypothesize that LMs may be equipped with stronger priors for planning compared to their visual counterparts. To this end, we propose a language-first procedure planning framework with a modularized design: we first align the current and goal observations with corresponding steps and then use a pre-trained LM to predict the intermediate steps. Under this framework, we find that using an image captioning model for alignment can already match state-of-the-art performance and by designing a double retrieval model conditioned over current and goal observations jointly, we can achieve large improvements (19.2%-98.9% relatively higher success rate than state-of-the-art) on both COIN and CrossTask benchmarks. Our work verifies the planning ability of LMs and demonstrates how LMs can serve as a powerful ``reasoning engine'' even when the input is provided in another modality.

A Language-First Approach for Procedure Planning

Lexically-constrained NMT (LNMT) aims to incorporate user-provided terminology into translations. Despite its practical advantages, existing work has not evaluated LNMT models under challenging real-world conditions. In this paper, we focus on two important but understudied issues that lie in the current evaluation process of LNMT studies. The model needs to cope with challenging lexical constraints that are "homographs" or "unseen" during training. To this end, we first design a homograph disambiguation module to differentiate the meanings of homographs. Moreover, we propose PLUMCOT which integrates contextually rich information about unseen lexical constraints from pre-trained language models and strengthens a copy mechanism of the pointer network via direct supervision of a copying score. We also release HOLLY, an evaluation benchmark for assessing the ability of model to cope with "homographic" and "unseen" lexical constraints. Experiments on HOLLY and the previous test setup show the effectiveness of our method. The effects of PLUMCOT are shown to be remarkable in "unseen" constraints.Our dataset is available at https://github.com/papago-lab/HOLLY-benchmark.

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Towards Accurate Translation via Semantically Appropriate Application of Lexical Constraints

Pre-trained seq2seq models have achieved state-of-the-art results in the grammatical error correction task. However, these models still suffer from a prediction bias due to their unidirectional decoding. Thus, we propose a bidirectional Transformer reranker (BTR), that re-estimates the probability of each candidate sentence generated by the pre-trained seq2seq model. The BTR preserves the seq2seq-style Transformer architecture but utilizes a BERT-style self-attention mechanism in the decoder to compute the probability of each target token by using masked language modeling to capture bidirectional representations from the target context. For guiding the reranking, the BTR adopts negative sampling in the objective function to minimize the unlikelihood. During inference, the BTR gives final results after comparing the reranked top-1 results with the original ones by an acceptance threshold. Experimental results show that, in reranking candidates from a pre-trained seq2seq model, T5-base, the BTR on top of T5-base could yield 65.47 and 71.27 F0.5 scores on the CoNLL-14 and BEA test sets, respectively, and yield 59.52 GLEU score on the JFLEG corpus, with improvements of 0.36, 0.76 and 0.48 points compared with the original T5-base. Furthermore, when reranking candidates from T5-large, the BTR on top of T5-base improved the original T5-large by 0.26 points on the BEA test set.

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Bidirectional Transformer Reranker for Grammatical Error Correction

Data augmentation is an effective way to improve model performance of grammatical error correction (GEC). This paper identifies a critical side-effect of GEC data augmentation, which is due to the style discrepancy between the data used in GEC tasks (i.e., texts produced by non-native speakers) and data augmentation (i.e., native texts). To alleviate this issue, we propose to use an alternative data source, translationese (i.e., human-translated texts), as input for GEC data augmentation, which 1) is easier to obtain and usually has better quality than non-native texts, and 2) has a more similar style to non-native texts. Experimental results on the CoNLL14 and BEA19 English, NLPCC18 Chinese, Falko-MERLIN German, and RULEC-GEC Russian GEC benchmarks show that our approach consistently improves correction accuracy over strong baselines. Further analyses reveal that our approach is helpful for overcoming mainstream correction difficulties such as the corrections of frequent words, missing words, and substitution errors. Data, code, models and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/TransGEC.

TransGEC: Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Translationese

Task-oriented dialog (TOD) agents often ground their responses on external knowledge bases (KBs). These KBs can be dynamic and may be updated frequently. Existing approaches for learning TOD agents assume the KB snapshot contemporary to each individual dialog is available during training. However, in real-world scenarios, only the latest KB snapshot is available during training and as a result, the train dialogs may contain facts conflicting with the latest KB. These dialog-KB inconsistencies in the training data may potentially confuse the TOD agent learning algorithm.In this work, we define the novel problem of learning a TOD agent with dialog-KB inconsistencies in the training data. We propose a Dialog-KB Arbitration Framework (DKAF) which reduces the dialog-KB inconsistencies by predicting the contemporary KB snapshot for each train dialog. These predicted KB snapshots are then used for training downstream TOD agents. As there are no existing datasets with dialog-KB inconsistencies, we systematically introduce inconsistencies in two publicly available dialog datasets. We show that TOD agents trained with DKAF perform better than existing baselines on both these datasets.

DKAF: KB Arbitration for Learning Task-Oriented Dialog Systems with Dialog-KB Inconsistencies

Many NLP algorithms have been described in terms of deduction systems.  Unweighted deduction allows a generic forward-chaining execution strategy.  For weighted deduction, however, efficient execution should propagate the weight of each item only after it has converged.  This means visiting the items in topologically sorted order (as in dynamic programming).  Toposorting is fast on a materialized graph; unfortunately, materializing the graph would take extra space.  Is there a generic weighted deduction strategy which, for every acyclic deduction system and every input, uses only a constant factor more time and space than generic unweighted deduction?  After reviewing past strategies, we answer this question in the affirmative by combining ideas of Goodman (1999) and Kahn (1962).  We also give an extension to cyclic deduction systems, based on Tarjan (1972).

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Time-and-Space-Efficient Weighted Deduction

The goal of information-seeking dialogue is to respond to seeker queries with natural language utterances that are grounded on knowledge sources.However, dialogue systems often produce unsupported utterances, a phenomenon known as hallucination. To mitigate this behavior, we adopt a data-centric solution and create FaithDial, a new benchmark for hallucination-free dialogues, by editing hallucinated responses in the Wizard of Wikipedia (WoW) benchmark. We observe that FaithDial is more faithful than WoW while also maintaining engaging conversations.We show that FaithDial can serve as training signal for: i) a hallucination critic, which discriminates whether an utterance is faithful or not, and boosts the performance by 12.8 F1 score on the BEGIN benchmark compared to existing datasets for dialogue coherence; ii) high-quality dialogue generation. We benchmark a series of state-of-the-art models and propose an auxiliary contrastive objective that achieves the highest level of faithfulness and abstractiveness based on several automated metrics. Further, we find that the benefits of FaithDial generalize to zero-shot transfer on other datasets, such as CMU-Dog and TopicalChat. Finally, human evaluation reveals that responses generated by models trained on FaithDial are perceived as more interpretable, cooperative, and engaging.

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FaithDial: A Faithful Benchmark for Information-Seeking Dialogue

Keeping the performance of language technologies optimal as time passes is of great practical interest. We study temporal effects on model performance on downstream language tasks, establishing a nuanced terminology for such discussion and identifying factors essential to conduct a robust study. We present experiments for several tasks in English where the label correctness is not dependent on time and demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between temporal model deterioration and temporal domain adaptation for systems using pre-trained representations. We find that depending on the task, temporal model deterioration is not necessarily a concern. Temporal domain adaptation however is beneficial in all cases, with better performance for a given time period possible when the system is trained on temporally more recent data. Therefore, we also examine the efficacy of two approaches for temporal domain adaptation without human annotations on new data. Self-labeling shows consistent improvement and notably, for named entity recognition, leads to better temporal adaptation than even human annotations.

Next from ACL 2023

Language Model Analysis for Ontology Subsumption Inference

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