Korea, Republic of

Complex Question Understanding (CQU)
parses complex questions to Question Decomposition
Meaning Representation (QDMR)
which is a sequence of atomic operators. Existing
works are based on end-to-end neural
models which do not explicitly model the intermediate
states and lack interpretability for the
parsing process. Besides, they predict QDMR
in a mismatched granularity and do not model
the step-wise information which is an essential
characteristic of QDMR. To alleviate the issues,
we treat QDMR as a computational graph and
propose a transition-based method where a decider
predicts a sequence of actions to build the
graph node-by-node. In this way, the partial
graph at each step enables better representation
of the intermediate states and better interpretability.
At each step, the decider encodes
the intermediate state with specially designed
encoders and predicts several candidates of the
next action and its confidence. For inference, a
searcher seeks the optimal graph based on the
predictions of the decider to alleviate the error
propagation. Experimental results demonstrate
the parsing accuracy of our method against several
strong baselines. Moreover, our method
has transparent and human-readable intermediate
results, showing improved interpretability.

COLING 2022

A Transition-based Method for Complex Question Understanding

question decomposition

semantic parsing

question answering

# 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) 
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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). 

poster

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### 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.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Large pretrained language models offer powerful generation capabilities, but cannot be reliably controlled at a sub-sentential level. We propose to make such fine-grained control possible in pretrained LMs by generating text directly from a semantic representation, Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), which is augmented at the node level with syntactic control tags. We experiment with English-language generation of three modes of syntax relevant to the framing of a sentence - verb voice, verb tense, and realization of human entities - and demonstrate that they can be reliably controlled, even in settings that diverge drastically from the training distribution. These syntactic aspects contribute to how information is framed in text, something that is important for applications such as summarization which aim to highlight salient information.

Using Structured Content Plans for Fine-grained Syntactic Control in Pretrained Language Model Generation

Pre-trained masked language models have demonstrated remarkable ability as few-shot learners. In this paper, as an alternative, we propose a novel approach to few-shot learning with pre-trained token-replaced detection models like ELECTRA. In this approach, we reformulate a classification or a regression task as a token-replaced detection problem. Specifically, we first define a template and label description words for each task and put them into the input to form a natural language prompt. Then, we employ the pre-trained token-replaced detection model to predict which label description word is the most original (i.e., least replaced) among all label description words in the prompt. A systematic evaluation on 16 datasets demonstrates that our approach outperforms few-shot learners with pre-trained masked language models in both one-sentence and two-sentence learning tasks.

Pre-trained Token-replaced Detection Model as Few-shot Learner

Does BERT store surface knowledge in its bottom layers, syntactic knowledge in its middle layers, and semantic knowledge in its upper layers? In re-examining Jawahar et al. (2019) and Tenney et al.'s (2019) probes into the structure of BERT, we have found that the pipeline-like separation that they were seeking lacks conclusive empirical support. BERT's structure is, however, linguistically grounded, although perhaps in a way that is more nuanced than can be explained by layers alone. We introduce a novel probe, called GridLoc, through which we can also take into account token positions, training rounds, and random seeds. Using GridLoc, we are able to detect other, stronger regularities that suggest that pseudo-cognitive appeals to layer depth may not be the preferred mode of explanation for BERT's inner workings.

Does BERT Rediscover a Classical NLP Pipeline?

The presentation first provides a brief background of the entity alignment between temporal knowledge graphs, then introduces some related work and illustrates the motivation, presents the proposed approach and experiment result, and finally gives a conclusion.

A Simple Temporal Information Matching Mechanism for Entity Alignment Between Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Figurative language generation is the task of reformulating a given text in the desired figure of speech while still being faithful to the original context. We take the first step towards multi-figurative language modelling by providing a benchmark for the automatic generation of five common figurative forms in English. We train mFLAG employing a scheme for multi-figurative language pre-training on top of BART, and a mechanism for injecting the target figurative information into the encoder; this enables the generation of text with the target figurative form from another figurative form without parallel figurative-figurative sentence pairs. Our approach outperforms all strong baselines. We also offer some qualitative analysis and reflections on the relationship between the different figures of speech.

Multi-Figurative Language Generation

In this work, we explore the fitness of various word/concept representations in analyzing an experimental verbal fluency dataset providing human responses to 10 different category numeration tasks. Based on human annotations of so-called clusters and switches between sub-categories in the verbal fluency sequences,
we analyze whether lexical semantic knowledge represented in word embedding spaces (GloVe, fastText, ConceptNet, BERT) is suitable for detecting these conceptual clusters and switches within and across different categories. Our results indicate that ConceptNet embeddings, a distributional semantics method enriched with taxonomical relations, outperforms other semantic representations by a large margin. Moreover, category-specific analysis suggests that individual thresholds per category are more suited for the analysis of clustering and switching in particular embedding sub-space instead of a one-fits-all cross-category solution. The results point to interesting directions for future work on probing word embedding models
on the verbal fluency task.

Exploring Semantic Spaces for Detecting Clustering and Switching in Verbal Fluency

The recently proposed capability-based NLP testing allows model developers to test the functional capabilities of NLP models, revealing functional failures that cannot be detected by the traditional heldout mechanism. However, existing work on capability-based testing requires extensive manual efforts and domain expertise in creating the test cases. In this paper, we investigate a low-cost approach for the test case generation by leveraging the GPT-3 engine. We further propose to use a classifier to remove the invalid outputs from GPT-3 and expand the outputs into templates to generate more test cases. Our experiments show that TestAug has three advantages over the existing work on behavioral testing: (1) TestAug can find more bugs than existing work; (2) The test cases in TestAug are more diverse; and (3) TestAug largely saves the manual efforts in creating the test suites. The code and data for TestAug can be found at https://github.com/guanqun-yang/testaug.

TestAug: A Framework for Augmenting Capability-based NLP Tests

Modern neural machine translation (NMT) models have been shown to suffer limitation in compositional generalization, failing to effectively learn the translation of atoms (e.g., words) and their semantic composition (e.g., modification) from seen compounds (e.g., phrases), and thus suffering from significantly weakened translation performance on unseen compounds during inference. We address this issue by introducing categorization to the source contextualized representations. The main idea is to enhance generalization by reducing sparsity and overfitting, which is achieved by finding prototypes of token representations over the training set and integrating their embeddings into the source encoding. Experiments on a dedicated MT dataset (i.e., CoGnition) show that our method reduces compositional generalization error rates by 24\% error reduction.

Categorizing Semantic Representations for Neural Machine Translation

Few-shot table understanding is a critical and challenging problem in real-world scenario as annotations over large amount of tables are usually costly. Pre-trained language models (PLMs), which have recently flourished on tabular data, have demonstrated their effectiveness for table understanding tasks. However, few-shot table understanding is rarely explored due to the deficiency of public table pre-training corpus and well-defined downstream benchmark tasks, especially in Chinese. In this paper, we establish a benchmark dataset, FewTUD, which consists of 5 different tasks with human annotations to systematically explore the few-shot table understanding in depth. Since there is no large number of public Chinese tables, we also collect a large-scale, multi-domain tabular corpus to facilitate future Chinese table pre-training, which includes one million tables and related natural language text with auxiliary supervised interaction signals. Finally, we present FewTPT, a novel table PLM with rich interactions over tabular data, and evaluate its performance comprehensively on the benchmark.

Few-Shot Table Understanding: A Benchmark Dataset and Pre-Training Baseline

Nominal metaphors are frequently used in human language and have been shown to be effective in persuading, expressing emotion, and stimulating interest. This paper tackles the problem of Chinese Nominal Metaphor (NM) generation. We introduce a novel neural framework, which jointly optimizes three tasks: NM identification, NM component identification, and NM generation. The metaphor identification module is able to perform a self-training procedure, which discovers novel metaphors from a large-scale unlabeled corpus for NM generation. The NM component identification module emphasizes components during training and conditions the generation on these NM components for more coherent results. To train the NM identification and component identification modules, we construct an annotated corpus consisting of 6.3k sentences that contain diverse metaphorical patterns. Automatic metrics show that our method can produce diverse metaphors with good readability, where 92\% of them are novel metaphorical comparisons. Human evaluation shows our model significantly outperforms baselines on consistency and creativity.

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Using Structured Content Plans for Fine-grained Syntactic Control in Pretrained Language Model Generation

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