Ireland

Aligning parallel sentences in multilingual corpora is essential to curating data for downstream applications such as Machine Translation. In this work, we present OneAligner, an alignment model specially designed for sentence retrieval tasks. This model is able to train on only one language pair and transfers, in a cross-lingual fashion, to low-resource language pairs with negligible degradation in performance. When trained with all language pairs of a large-scale parallel multilingual corpus (OPUS-100), this model achieves the state-of-the-art result on the Tateoba dataset, outperforming an equally-sized previous model by 8.0 points in accuracy while using less than 0.6% of their parallel data. When finetuned on a single rich-resource language pair, be it English-centered or not, our model is able to match the performance of the ones finetuned on all language pairs under the same data budget with less than 2.0 points decrease in accuracy. Furthermore, with the same setup, scaling up the number of rich-resource language pairs monotonically improves the performance, reaching a minimum of 0.4 points discrepancy in accuracy, making it less mandatory to collect any low-resource parallel data. Finally, we conclude through empirical results and analyses that the performance of the sentence alignment task depends mostly on the monolingual and parallel data size, up to a certain size threshold, rather than on what language pairs are used for training or evaluation.

ACL 2022

OneAligner: Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer with One Rich-Resource Language Pair for Low-Resource Sentence Retrieval

sentence alignment

cross-lingual transfer

multilingual

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

poster

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

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 (NLP). 

Modern NLP classifiers are known to return uncalibrated estimations of class posteriors. Existing methods for posterior calibration rescale the predicted probabilities but often have an adverse impact on final classification accuracy,
thus leading to poorer generalization. We propose an end-to-end trained calibrator, Platt-Binning, that directly optimizes the objective while minimizing the difference between the predicted and empirical posterior probabilities. Our method leverages the sample efficiency of Platt scaling and the verification guarantees of histogram binning, thus not only reducing the calibration error but also improving task performance. In contrast to existing calibrators, we perform this efficient calibration during training. Empirical evaluation of benchmark NLP classification tasks echoes the efficacy of our proposal.

Platt-Bin: Efficient Posterior Calibrated Training for NLP Classifiers

While fine-tuning pre-trained models for downstream classification is the conventional paradigm in NLP, often task-specific nuances may not get captured in the resultant models. Specifically, for tasks that take two inputs and require the output to be invariant of the order of the inputs, inconsistency is often observed in the predicted labels or confidence scores. We highlight this model shortcoming and apply a consistency loss function to alleviate inconsistency in symmetric classification. Our results show an improved consistency in predictions for three paraphrase detection datasets without a significant drop in the accuracy scores. We examine the classification performance of six datasets (both symmetric and non-symmetric) to showcase the strengths and limitations of our approach.

Striking a Balance: Alleviating Inconsistency in Pre-trained Models for Symmetric Classification Tasks

Machine translation typically adopts an encoder-to-decoder framework, in which the decoder generates the target sentence word-by-word in an auto-regressive manner. However, the auto-regressive decoder faces a deep-rooted one-pass issue whereby each generated word is considered as one element of the final output regardless of whether it is correct or not. These generated wrong words further constitute the target historical context to affect the generation of subsequent target words. This paper proposes a novel synchronous refinement method to revise potential errors in the generated words by considering part of the target future context. Particularly, the proposed approach allows the auto-regressive decoder to refine the previously generated target words and generate the next target word synchronously. The experimental results on three widely-used machine translation tasks demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Synchronous Refinement for Neural Machine Translation

Pretrained language models (PLMs) trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus are typically fine-tuned on task-specific downstream datasets, which have produced state-of-the-art results on various NLP tasks. However, the data discrepancy issue in domain and scale makes fine-tuning fail to efficiently capture task-specific patterns, especially in low data regime. To address this issue, we propose Task-guided Disentangled Tuning (TDT) for PLMs, which enhances the generalization of representations by disentangling task-relevant signals from the entangled representations. For a given task, we introduce a learnable confidence model to detect indicative guidance from context, and further propose a disentangled regularization to mitigate the over-reliance problem. Experimental results on GLUE and CLUE benchmarks show that TDT gives consistently better results than fine-tuning with different PLMs, and extensive analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

Task-guided Disentangled Tuning for Pretrained Language Models

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors, which are mainly caused by the phonological or visual similarity. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) promote the progress of CSC task. However, there exists a gap between the learned knowledge of PLMs and the goal of CSC task. PLMs focus on the semantics in text and tend to correct the erroneous characters to semantically proper or commonly used ones, but these aren’t the ground-truth corrections. To address this issue, we propose an Error-driven COntrastive Probability Optimization (ECOPO) framework for CSC task. ECOPO reﬁnes the knowledge representations of PLMs, and guides the model to avoid predicting these common characters through an error-driven way. Particularly, ECOPO is model-agnostic and it can be combined with existing CSC methods to achieve better performance. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on SIGHAN datasets demonstrate that ECOPO is simple yet effective.

The Past Mistake is the Future Wisdom: Error-driven Contrastive Probability Optimization for Chinese Spell Checking

Most of the existing defense methods improve the adversarial robustness by making the models adapt to the training set augmented with some adversarial examples. However, the augmented adversarial examples may not be natural, which might distort the training distribution, resulting in inferior performance both in clean accuracy and adversarial robustness. In this study, we explore the feasibility of introducing a reweighting mechanism to calibrate the training distribution to obtain robust models. We propose to train text classifiers by a sample reweighting method in which the example weights are learned to minimize the loss of a validation set mixed with the clean examples and their adversarial ones in an online learning manner.

Towards Adversarially Robust Text Classifiers by Learning to Reweight Clean Examples

Recent Quality Estimation (QE) models based on multilingual pre-trained representations have achieved very competitive results in predicting the overall quality of translated sentences. However, detecting specifically which translated words are incorrect is a more challenging task, especially when dealing with limited amounts of training data. We hypothesize that, not unlike humans, successful QE models rely on translation errors to predict overall sentence quality. By exploring a set of feature attribution methods that assign relevance scores to the inputs to explain model predictions, we study the behaviour of state-of-the-art sentence-level QE models and show that explanations (i.e. rationales) extracted from these models can indeed be used to detect translation errors. We therefore (i) introduce a novel semi-supervised method for word-level QE; and (ii) propose to use the QE task as a new benchmark for evaluating the plausibility of feature attribution, i.e. how interpretable model explanations are to humans.

Translation Error Detection as Rationale Extraction

Existing algorithms consider Word Segmentation as the sequence tagging task and the dominant tagging schemas are “BMES”, ”BIS”, “START-NONSTART”, and “SEP-APP”. For the existing tagging schemas, there are two issues:
1. The implicit information of position restricts the tag-to-tag transition. For the “BMES” tagging schema, tag “B” can not be transferred to tag “B” or “S”.
2. The first tag in the sentence must be “B”, “START” or “SEP”. 
Therefore, we propose the "Connection (C) – NoConnection (NC)" tagging schema to directly describe the connection state of every two adjacent characters. "C-NC" eliminates the implicit restriction of position for the existing tagging schemas.
Our Separation Inference framework is constructed on the "Connection (C) – NoConnection (NC)" tagging schema and its specially tailored bigram features. Our Separation Inference framework is evaluated on five public datasets, is demonstrated to work for machine learning and deep learning models, and outperforms state-of-the-art performance for CWS in all experiments. Performance boosts on Japanese Word Segmentation (JWS) and Korean Word Segmentation (KWS) further prove the framework is universal and effective for East Asian Languages.

Word Segmentation by Separation Inference for East Asian Languages

Interpretation methods to reveal the internal reasoning processes behind machine learning models have attracted increasing attention in recent years. To quantify the extent to which the identified interpretations truly reflect the intrinsic decision-making mechanisms, various faithfulness evaluation metrics have been proposed. However, we find that different faithfulness metrics show conflicting preferences when comparing different interpretations. Motivated by this observation, we aim to conduct a comprehensive and comparative study of the widely adopted faithfulness metrics. In particular, we introduce two assessment dimensions, namely diagnosticity and time complexity. Diagnosticity refers to the degree to which the faithfulness metric favours relatively faithful interpretations over randomly generated ones, and time complexity is measured by the average number of model forward passes. According to the experimental results, we find that sufficiency and comprehensiveness metrics have higher diagnosticity and lower time complexity than the other faithfulness metrics.

A Comparative Study of Faithfulness Metrics for Model Interpretability Methods

Program understanding is a fundamental task in program language processing. Despite the success, existing works fail to take human behaviors as reference in understanding programs. In this paper, we consider human behaviors and propose the PGNN-EK model that consists of two main components. On the one hand, inspired by the “divide-and-conquer” reading behaviors of humans, we present a partitioning-based graph neural network model PGNN on the upgraded AST of codes. On the other hand, to characterize human behaviors of resorting to other resources to help code comprehension, we transform raw codes with external knowledge and apply pre-training techniques for information extraction. Finally, we combine the two embeddings generated from the two components to output code embeddings. We conduct extensive experiments to show the superior performance of PGNN-EK on the code summarization and code clone detection tasks. In particular, to show the generalization ability of our model, we release a new dataset that is more challenging for code clone detection and could advance the development of the community. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RecklessRonan/PGNN-EK.

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Platt-Bin: Efficient Posterior Calibrated Training for NLP Classifiers

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