Korea, Republic of

Within textual emotion classification, the set of relevant labels depends on the domain and application scenario and might not be known at the time of model development. This conflicts with the classical paradigm of supervised learning in which the labels need to be predefined. A solution to obtain a model with a flexible set of labels is to use the paradigm of zero-shot learning as a natural language inference task, which in addition adds the advantage of not needing any labeled training data. This raises the question how to prompt a natural language inference model for zero-shot learning emotion classification. Options for prompt formulations include the emotion name anger alone or the statement “This text expresses anger”. With this paper, we analyze how sensitive a natural language inference-based zero-shot-learning classifier is to such changes to the prompt under consideration of the corpus: How carefully does the prompt need to be selected? We perform experiments on an established set of emotion datasets presenting different language registers according to different sources (tweets, events, blogs)
with three natural language inference models and show that indeed the choice of a particular prompt formulation needs to fit to the corpus. We show that this challenge can be tackled with combinations of multiple prompts. Such ensemble is more robust across corpora than individual prompts and shows nearly the same
performance as the individual best prompt for a particular corpus.

COLING 2022

Natural Language Inference Prompts for Zero-shot Emotion Classification in Text across Corpora

prompts

emotion analysis

zero-shot learning

# 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. 

 
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ACL 2022

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). 

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Data augmentation with mixup has shown to be effective on the NLP tasks. Although its great success, the mixup still has shortcomings. First, vanilla mixup randomly selects one sample to generate the mixup sample for a given sample. It remains unclear how to best choose the input samples for the mixup. Second, linear interpolation limits the space of synthetic data and its regularization effect. In this paper, we propose the dynamic nonlinear mixup with distance-based sample selection, which not only generates multiple sample pairs based on the distance between each sample but also enlarges the space of synthetic samples. Specifically, we compute the distance between each input data by cosine similarity and select multiple samples for a given sample. Then we use the dynamic nonlinear mixup to fuse sample pairs. It does not use a linear, scalar mixing strategy, but a nonlinear interpolation strategy, where the mixing strategy is adaptively updated for the input and label pairs. Experiments on the multiple public datasets demonstrate that dynamic nonlinear mixup outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Dynamic Nonlinear Mixup with Distance-based Sample Selection

Noise Learning for Text Classification: A Benchmark

In embodied cognition, physical experiences are believed to shape abstract cognition, such as natural language and reasoning. Image schemas were introduced as spatio-temporal cognitive building blocks that capture these recurring sensorimotor experiences. 
The few existing approaches for automatic detection of image schemas in natural language rely on specific assumptions about word classes as indicators of spatio-temporal events. Furthermore, the lack of sufficiently large, annotated datasets makes evaluation and supervised learning difficult. We propose to build on the recent success of large multilingual pretrained language models and a small dataset of examples from image schema literature to train a supervised classiﬁer that classifies natural language expressions of varying lengths into image schemas. Despite most of the training data being in English with few examples for German, the model performs best in German. Additionally, we analyse the model’s zero-shot performance in Russian, French, and Mandarin. To further investigate the model’s behaviour, we utilize local linear approximations for prediction probabilities that indicate which words in a sentence the model relies on for its ﬁnal classiﬁcation decision. Code and dataset are publicly available (https://tinyurl.com/24haedv5).

Systematic Analysis of Image Schemas in Natural Language through Explainable Multilingual Neural Language Processing

We focus on conversational discourse parsing. And we propose a Distance-Aware Multi-Task framework (DAMT) for conversational discourse parsing that allows one paradigm to explicitly facilitate the decoding process of the other from the encoding and decoding process, respectively. We present our work in four parts: intorduction, methodology, experimentation, and Conclusion.

A Distance-Aware Multi-Task Framework for Conversational Discourse Parsing

Multi-Document Scientific Summarization (MDSS) aims to produce coherent and concise summaries for clusters of topic-relevant scientific papers. This task requires precise understanding of paper content and accurate modeling of cross-paper relationships. Knowledge graphs convey compact and interpretable structured information for documents, which makes them ideal for content modeling and relationship modeling. In this paper, we present KGSum, an MDSS model centred on knowledge graphs during both the encoding and decoding process. Specifically, in the encoding process, two graph-based modules are proposed to incorporate knowledge graph information into paper encoding, while in the decoding process, we propose a two-stage decoder by first generating knowledge graph information of summary in the form of descriptive sentences, followed by generating the final summary. Empirical results show that the proposed architecture brings substantial improvements over baselines on the Multi-Xscience dataset.

Multi-Document Scientific Summarization from a Knowledge Graph-Centric View

Prompting, which casts downstream applications as language modeling tasks, has shown to be sample efficient compared to standard fine-tuning with pre-trained models. However, one pitfall of prompting is the need of manually-designed patterns, whose outcome can be unintuitive and requires large validation sets to tune. To tackle the challenge, we propose AutoSeq, a fully automatic prompting method: (1) We adopt natural language prompts on sequence-to-sequence models, enabling free-form generation and larger label search space; (2) We propose label sequences -- phrases with indefinite lengths to verbalize the labels -- which eliminate the need of manual templates and are more expressive than single label words; (3) We use beam search to automatically generate a large amount of label sequence candidates and propose contrastive re-ranking to get the best combinations. AutoSeq significantly outperforms other no-manual-design methods, such as soft prompt tuning, adapter tuning, and automatic search on single label words; the generated label sequences are even better than curated manual ones on a variety of tasks. Our method reveals the potential of sequence-to-sequence models in few-shot learning and sheds light on a path to generic and automatic prompting.

Automatic Label Sequence Generation for Prompting Sequence-to-sequence Models

Multi-hop question answering (QA) requires reasoning over multiple documents to answer a complex question and provide interpretable supporting evidence. However, providing supporting evidence is not enough to demonstrate that a model has performed the desired reasoning to reach the correct answer. Most existing multi-hop QA methods fail to answer a large fraction of sub-questions, even if their parent questions are answered correctly. In this paper, we propose the Prompt-based Conservation Learning (PCL) framework for multi-hop QA, which acquires new knowledge from multi-hop QA tasks while conserving old knowledge learned on single-hop QA tasks, mitigating forgetting. Specifically, we first train a model on existing single-hop QA tasks, and then freeze this model and expand it by allocating additional sub-networks for the multi-hop QA task. Moreover, to condition pre-trained language models to stimulate the kind of reasoning required for specific multi-hop questions, we learn soft prompts for the novel sub-networks to perform type-specific reasoning. Experimental results on the HotpotQA benchmark show that PCL is competitive for multi-hop QA and retains good performance on the corresponding single-hop sub-questions, demonstrating the efficacy of PCL in mitigating knowledge loss by forgetting.

Prompt-based Conservation Learning for Multi-hop Question Answering

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models, which eliminate the sequential dependencies within the target sentence, have achieved remarkable inference speed, but suffer from inferior translation quality. Towards exploring the underlying causes, we carry out a thorough preliminary study on the attention mechanism, which demonstrates the serious weakness in capturing localness compared with conventional autoregressive translation (AT). In response to this problem, we propose to improve the localness of NAT models by explicitly introducing the information about surrounding words. Specifically, temporal convolutions are incorporated into both encoder and decoder sides to obtain localness-aware representations. Extensive experiments on several typical translation datasets show that the proposed method can achieve consistent and significant improvements over strong NAT baselines. Further analyses on the WMT14 En-De translation task reveal that compared with baselines, our approach accelerates the convergence in training and can achieve equivalent performance with a reduction of 70% training steps.

Improving Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation via Modeling Localness

Dependency-aware Prototype Learning for Few-shot Relation Classification

Today the pre-trained language models achieve great success for question generation (QG) task and significantly outperform traditional sequence-to-sequence approaches. However, the pre-trained models treat the input passage as a flat sequence and are thus not aware of the text structure of input passage. For QG
task, we model text structure as answer position and syntactic dependency, and propose answer localness modeling and syntactic mask attention to address these limitations. Specially, we present localness modeling with a Gaussian bias to enable the model to focus on answer-surrounded context, and propose a mask attention mechanism to make the syntactic structure of input passage accessible in question generation process. Experiments on SQuAD dataset show that our proposed two modules improve performance over the strong pre-trained model ProphetNet, and combing them together achieves very competitive results with the state-of-the-art pre-trained model.

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Dynamic Nonlinear Mixup with Distance-based Sample Selection

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