Dominican Republic

For many NLP applications of online reviews, comparing two opinion-bearing sentences is the key. We argue that, while general purpose text similarity metrics have been applied for this purpose, there has been limited exploration of their applicability to opinion texts. We address this gap by studying: (1) how humans
judge the similarity of pairs of opinion-bearing sentences; and, (2) the degree to which existing text similarity metrics, particularly embedding-based ones, correspond to human judgments. We crowdsourced annotations for opinion sentence pairs and our main findings are: (1) annotators tend to agree on whether
or not opinion sentences are similar or different; and (2) embedding-based metrics capture human judgments of “opinion similarity” but not “opinion difference&quot;. Based on our analysis, we identify areas where the current metrics should be improved. We further propose to learn a similarity metric for opinion similarity via fine-tuning the Sentence-BERT sentence embedding network based on review text and weak supervision by review ratings. Experiments show that our learned metric outperforms existing text similarity metrics and especially show significantly higher correlations with human annotations for differing opinions.

EMNLP 2021

Measuring Similarity of Opinion-bearing Sentences

### 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.

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ACL 2023

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.

For many NLP applications of online reviews, comparing two opinion-bearing sentences is the key. We argue that, while general purpose text similarity metrics have been applied for this purpose, there has been limited exploration of their applicability to opinion texts. We address this gap by studying: (1) how humans
judge the similarity of pairs of opinion-bearing sentences; and, (2) the degree to which existing text similarity metrics, particularly embedding-based ones, correspond to human judgments. We crowdsourced annotations for opinion sentence pairs and our main findings are: (1) annotators tend to agree on whether
or not opinion sentences are similar or different; and (2) embedding-based metrics capture human judgments of “opinion similarity” but not “opinion difference". Based on our analysis, we identify areas where the current metrics should be improved. We further propose to learn a similarity metric for opinion similarity via fine-tuning the Sentence-BERT sentence embedding network based on review text and weak supervision by review ratings. Experiments show that our learned metric outperforms existing text similarity metrics and especially show significantly higher correlations with human annotations for differing opinions.

workshop paper

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

This paper presents a novel training method, Conditional Masked Language Modeling (CMLM), to effectively learn sentence representations on large scale unlabeled corpora. CMLM integrates sentence representation learning into MLM training by conditioning on the encoded vectors of adjacent sentences. Our English CMLM model achieves state-of-the-art performance on SentEval, even outperforming models learned using supervised signals. As a fully unsupervised learning method, CMLM can be conveniently extended to a broad range of languages and domains. We find that a multilingual CMLM model co-trained with bitext retrieval (BR) and natural language inference (NLI) tasks outperforms the previous state-of-the-art multilingual models by a large margin, e.g. 10% improvement upon baseline models on cross-lingual semantic search. We explore the same language bias of the learned representations, and propose a simple, post-training and model agnostic approach to remove the language identifying information from the representation while still retaining sentence semantics.

Universal Sentence Representation Learning with Conditional Masked Language Model

The task of organizing a shuffled set of sentences into a coherent text has been used to evaluate a machine's understanding of causal and temporal relations. We formulate the sentence ordering task as a conditional text-to-marker generation problem. We present Reorder-BART (Re-BART) that leverages a pre-trained Transformer-based model to identify a coherent order for a given set of shuffled sentences. The model takes a set of shuffled sentences with sentence-specific markers as input and generates a sequence of position markers of the sentences in the ordered text. Re-BART achieves the state-of-the-art performance across 7 datasets in Perfect Match Ratio (PMR) and Kendall's tau (τ). We perform evaluations in a zero-shot setting, showcasing that our model is able to generalize well across other datasets. We additionally perform several experiments to understand the functioning and limitations of our framework.

Is Everything in Order? A Simple Way to Order Sentences

Although recent developments in neural architectures and pre-trained representations have greatly increased state-of-the-art model performance on fully-supervised semantic role labeling (SRL), the task remains challenging for languages where supervised SRL training data are not abundant. Cross-lingual learning can improve performance in this setting by transferring knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource ones. Moreover, we hypothesize that annotations of syntactic dependencies can be leveraged to further facilitate cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we perform an empirical exploration of the helpfulness of syntactic supervision for crosslingual SRL within a simple multitask learning scheme. With comprehensive evaluations across ten languages (in addition to English) and three SRL benchmark datasets, including both dependency- and span-based SRL, we show the effectiveness of syntactic supervision in low-resource scenarios.

On the Benefit of Syntactic Supervision for Cross-lingual Transfer in Semantic Role Labeling

Most existing simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) systems are trained and evaluated on offline translation corpora. We argue that SiMT systems should be trained and tested on real interpretation data. To illustrate this argument, we propose an interpretation test set and conduct a realistic evaluation of SiMT trained on offline translations. Our results, on our test set along with 3 existing smaller scale language pairs, highlight the difference of up-to 13.83 BLEU score when SiMT models are evaluated on translation vs interpretation data. In the absence of interpretation training data, we propose a translation-to-interpretation (T2I) style transfer method which allows converting existing offline translations into interpretation-style data, leading to up-to 2.8 BLEU improvement. However, the evaluation gap remains notable, calling for constructing large-scale interpretation corpora better suited for evaluating and developing SiMT systems.

It Is Not As Good As You Think! Evaluating Simultaneous Machine Translation on Interpretation Data

We propose a novel scheme to use the Levenshtein Transformer to perform the task of word-level quality estimation. A Levenshtein Transformer is a natural fit for this task: trained to perform decoding in an iterative manner, a Levenshtein Transformer can learn to post-edit without explicit supervision. To further minimize the mismatch between the translation task and the word-level QE task, we propose a two-stage transfer learning procedure on both augmented data and human post-editing data. We also propose heuristics to construct reference labels that are compatible with subword-level finetuning and inference. Results on WMT 2020 QE shared task dataset show that our proposed method has superior data efficiency under the data-constrained setting and competitive performance under the unconstrained setting.

Levenshtein Training for Word-level Quality Estimation

In this paper, we study the knowledge-based abstractive sentence summarization.
There are two essential information features that can influence the quality of news summarization, which are topic keywords and the knowledge structure of the news text.
Besides, the existing knowledge-augmented methods have poor performance on sentence summarization since the sparse knowledge structure problem.
Considering these, we propose KAS, a novel Knowledge and Keywords Augmented Abstractive Sentence Summarization framework.
Tri-encoders are utilized to integrate contexts of original text, knowledge structure and keywords topic simultaneously, with a special linearized knowledge structure.
Automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that KAS achieves the best performances.

Knowledge and Keywords Augmented Abstractive Sentence Summarization

In this paper, we focus on improving the quality of the summary generated by neural abstractive dialogue summarization systems.
Even though pre-trained language models generate well-constructed and promising results, it is still challenging to summarize the conversation of multiple participants since the summary should include a description of the overall situation and the actions of each speaker. 
This paper proposes self-supervised strategies for speaker-focused post-correction in abstractive dialogue summarization. Specifically, our model first discriminates which type of speaker correction is required in a draft summary and then generates a revised summary according to the required type. 
Experimental results show that our proposed method adequately corrects the draft summaries, and the revised summaries are significantly improved in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Capturing Speaker Incorrectness: Speaker-Focused Post-Correction for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

Cross-lingual summarization is a challenging task for which currently there are no cross-lingual scientific resources are available. To overcome the lack of a high-quality resource, we present a novel dataset for mono- and cross-lingual summarization considering the English-German pair. We collect a high-quality, real-world cross-lingual data from Spektrum der Wissenschaft, which publishes human-written German scientific summaries of English science articles on various subjects. The generated Spektrum dataset is small; therefore, we harvest a similar nature dataset from Wikipedia Science Portal to complement it. The Wikipedia dataset consists of English and German articles, which can be used for monolingual and cross-lingual summarization. Further, we present a quantitative analysis of the dataset and results of empirical experiments with several existing extractive and abstractive summarization techniques. The results suggest the viability and usefulness of the proposed dataset for mono- and cross-lingual summarization.

A Novel Wikipedia based Dataset for Monolingual and Cross-Lingual Summarization

In this paper, we propose Sequence Span Rewriting (SSR), a self-supervised task for sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) pre-training. SSR learns to refine the machine-generated imperfect text spans into ground truth text. SSR provides more fine-grained and informa- tive supervision in addition to the original text- infilling objective. Compared to the preva- lent text infilling objectives for Seq2Seq pre- training, SSR is naturally more consistent with many downstream generation tasks that re- quire sentence rewriting (e.g., text summariza- tion, question generation, grammatical error correction, and paraphrase generation). We conduct extensive experiments by using SSR to improve the typical Seq2Seq pre-trained model T5 in a continual pre-training setting and show substantial improvements over T5 on various natural language generation tasks.

Improving Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training via Sequence Span Rewriting

We study continual learning for natural language instruction generation, by observing human users' instruction execution. We focus on a collaborative scenario, where the system both acts and delegates tasks to human users using natural language. We compare user execution of generated instructions to the original system intent as an indication to the system's success communicating its intent. We show how to use this signal to improve the system's ability to generate instructions via contextual bandit learning. In interaction with real users, our system demonstrates dramatic improvements in its ability to generate language over time.

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Universal Sentence Representation Learning with Conditional Masked Language Model

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Examining Bias in Opinion Summarisation through the Perspective of Opinion Diversity

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