Canada

Debiasing methods that seek to mitigate the tendency of Language Models (LMs) to occasionally output toxic or inappropriate text have recently gained traction. In this paper, we propose a standardized protocol which distinguishes methods that yield not only desirable results, but are also consistent with their mechanisms and specifications. For example, we ask, given a debiasing method that is developed to reduce toxicity in LMs, if the definition of toxicity used by the debiasing method is reversed, would the debiasing results also be reversed? We used such considerations to devise three criteria for our new protocol: Specification Polarity, Specification Importance, and Domain Transferability. As a case study, we apply ourprotocol to a popular debiasing method, Self-Debiasing, and compare it to one we propose, called Instructive Debiasing, and demonstrate that consistency is as important an aspect to debiasing viability as is simply a desirable result. We show that our protocol provides essential insights into the generalizability and interpretability of debiasing methods that may otherwise go overlooked.

ACL 2023

Debiasing should be Good and Bad

debiasing

consistency

bias

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
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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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. 
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)**

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.

workshop paper

The State of Profanity Obfuscation in Natural Language Processing Scientific Publications

COBRA Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Effects and Harms of Offensive Statements

Stereotypes and Smut: The (Mis)representation of Non-cisgender Identities by Text-to-Image Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of performing zero-shot closed-book question answering tasks, based on their internal knowledge stored in parameters during pre-training. However, such internalized knowledge might be insufficient and incorrect, which could lead LLMs to generate factually wrong answers. Furthermore, fine-tuning LLMs to update their knowledge is expensive. To this end, we propose to augment the knowledge directly in the input of LLMs. Specifically, we first retrieve the relevant facts to the input question from the knowledge graph based on semantic similarities between the question and its associated facts. After that, we prepend the retrieved facts to the input question in the form of the prompt, which is then forwarded to LLMs to generate the answer. Our framework, Knowledge-Augmented language model PromptING (KAPING), requires no model training, thus completely zero-shot. We validate the performance of our KAPING framework on the knowledge graph question answering task, that aims to answer the user's question based on facts over a knowledge graph, on which ours outperforms relevant zero-shot baselines by up to 48% in average, across multiple LLMs of various sizes.

Knowledge-Augmented Language Model Prompting with Knowledge Graphs for Zero-Shot Question Answering

Despite their impressive scale, knowledge
bases (KBs), such as Wikidata, still contain
significant gaps. Language models (LMs) have
been proposed as a source for filling these gaps.
However, prior works have focused on promi-
nent entities with rich coverage by LMs, ne-
glecting the crucial case of long-tail entities.
In this paper, we present a novel method for
LM-based-KB completion that is specifically
geared for facts about long-tail entities. The
method leverages two different LMs in two
stages: for candidate retrieval and for candidate
verification and disambiguation. To evaluate
our method and various baselines, we introduce
a novel dataset, called MALT, rooted in Wiki-
data. Our method outperforms all baselines in
F1, with major gains especially in recall.

Knowledge Base Completion for Long-Tail Entities

Entity standardization maps noisy mentions from free-form text to standard entities in a knowledge base. The unique challenge of this task relative to other entity-related tasks is the lack of surrounding context and numerous variations in the surface form of the mentions, especially when it comes to generalization across domains where labeled data is scarce. Previous research mostly focuses on developing models either heavily relying on context, or dedicated solely to a specific domain. In contrast, we pro- pose CoSiNES, a generic and adaptable framework with Contrastive Siamese Network for Entity Standardization that effectively adapts a pretrained language model to capture the syntax and semantics of the entities in a new domain.
We construct a new dataset in the technology domain, which contains 640 technical stack entities and 6,412 mentions collected from industrial content management systems. We demonstrate that CoSiNES yields higher accuracy and faster runtime than baselines derived from leading methods in this domain. CoSiNES also achieves competitive performance in four standard datasets from the chemistry, medicine, and biomedical domains, demonstrating its cross-domain applicability.


CoSiNES: Contrastive Siamese Network for Entity Standardization

In contrast to large text corpora, knowledge graphs (KG) provide dense and structured representations of factual information. This makes them attractive for systems that supplement or ground the knowledge found in pre-trained language models with an external knowledge source. This has especially been the case for classification tasks, where recent work has focused on creating pipeline models that retrieve information from KGs like ConceptNet as additional context. Many of these models consist of multiple components, and although they differ in the number and nature of these parts, they all have in common that for some given text query, they attempt to identify and retrieve a relevant subgraph from the KG. Due to the noise and idiosyncrasies often found in KGs, it is not known how current methods compare to a scenario where the aligned subgraph is completely relevant to the query. In this work, we try to bridge this knowledge gap by reviewing current approaches to text-to-KG alignment and evaluating them on two datasets where manually created graphs are available, providing insights into the effectiveness of current methods.

Text-To-KG Alignment: Comparing Current Methods on Classification Tasks

Humans often describe complex quantitative data using trend-based patterns. Trend-based patterns can be interpreted as higher order functions and relations over numerical data such as extreme values, rates of change, or cyclical repetition. One application where trends abound are descriptions of numerical tabular data. Therefore, the alignment of numerical tables and textual description of trends enables easier interpretations of tables. 
Most existing approaches can align quantities in text with tabular data but are unable to detect and align trend-based patterns about data. In this paper, we introduce the initial steps for aligning trend-based patterns about the data, i.e. the detection of textual description of trends and the alignment of trends with a relevant table. We introduce the problem of identifying quantifiably verifiable statements (QVS) in the text and aligning them with tables and datasets. We define the structure of these statements and implement a structured based detection. In our experiments, we demonstrate our method can detect and align these statements from several domains and compare favorably with traditional sequence labeling methods.

Identifying Quantifiably Verifiable Statements from Text

Event extraction is a complex task that involves extracting events from unstructured text. Prior classification-based methods require comprehensive entity annotations for joint training, while newer generation-based methods rely on heuristic templates containing oracle information such as event type, which is often unavailable in real-world scenarios. In this study, we consider a more realistic task setting, namely the Oracle-Free Event Extraction (OFEE) task, where only the input context is given, without any oracle information including event type, event ontology, or trigger word. To address this task, we propose a new framework, COFFEE. This framework extracts events solely based on the document context, without referring to any oracle information. In particular, COFFEE introduces a contrastive selection model to refine the generated triggers and handle multi-event instances. Our proposed COFFEE outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in the oracle-free setting of the event extraction task, as evaluated on two public variants of the ACE05 benchmark.

COFFEE: A Contrastive Oracle-Free Framework for Event Extraction

Relation extraction is a crucial language processing task for various downstream applications, including knowledge base completion, question answering, and summarization. Traditional relation-extraction techniques, however, rely on a predefined set of relations and model the extraction as a classification task. Consequently, such closed-world extraction methods are insufficient for inducing novel relations from a corpus. Unsupervised techniques like OpenIE, which extract <head, relation, tail> triples, generate relations that are too general for practical information extraction applications. In this work, we contribute the following: 1) We motivate and introduce a new task, corpus-based task-specific relation discovery. 2) We adapt existing data sources to create Wiki-Art, a novel dataset for task-specific relation discovery. 3) We develop a novel framework for relation discovery using zero-shot entity linking, prompting, and type-specific clustering. Our approach effectively connects unstructured text spans to their shared underlying relations, bridging the data-representation gap and significantly outperforming baselines on both quantitative and qualitative metrics.

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