United States

Nowadays, due to the breakthrough in natural language generation (NLG), including machine translation, document summarization, image captioning, etc NLG models have been encapsulated in cloud APIs to serve over half a billion people worldwide and process over one hundred billion word generations per day. Thus, NLG APIs have already become essential profitable services in many commercial companies. Due to the substantial financial and intellectual investments, service providers adopt a pay-as-you-use policy to promote sustainable market growth. However, recent works have shown that cloud platforms suffer from financial losses imposed by model extraction attacks, which aim to imitate the functionality and utility of the victim services, thus violating the intellectual property (IP) of cloud APIs. This work targets at protecting IP of NLG APIs by identifying the attackers who have utilized watermarked responses from the victim NLG APIs. However, most existing watermarking techniques are not directly amenable for IP protection of NLG APIs. To bridge this gap, we first present a novel watermarking method for text generation APIs by conducting lexical modification to the original outputs. Compared with the competitive baselines, our watermark approach achieves better identifiable performance in terms of p-value, with fewer semantic losses. In addition, our watermarks are more understandable and intuitive to humans than the baselines. Finally, the empirical studies show our approach is also applicable to queries from different domains, and is effective on the attacker trained on a mixture of the corpus which includes less than 10% watermarked samples.

AAAI 2022

Protecting Intellectual Property of Language Generation APIs with Lexical Watermark

### 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
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
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. 
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)**

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.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Lack of external knowledge makes empathetic dialogue systems difficult to perceive implicit emotions and learn emotional interactions from limited dialogue history. To address the above problems, we propose to leverage external knowledge, including commonsense knowledge and emotional lexical knowledge, to explicitly understand and express emotions in empathetic dialogue generation. We first enrich the dialogue history by jointly interacting with external knowledge and construct an emotional context graph. Then we learn emotional context representations from the knowledge-enriched emotional context graph and distill emotional signals, which are the prerequisites to predicate emotions expressed in responses. Finally, to generate the empathetic response, we propose an emotional cross-attention mechanism to learn the emotional dependencies from the emotional context graph. Extensive experiments conducted on a benchmark dataset verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, we find the performance of our method can be further improved by integrating with a pre-trained model that works orthogonally.

Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

We study fairness through the lens of cooperative multi-agent learning. Our work is motivated by empirical evidence that naive maximization of team reward yields unfair outcomes for individual team members. To address fairness in multi-agent contexts, we introduce team fairness, a group-based fairness measure for multi-agent learning. We then prove that it is possible to enforce team fairness during policy optimization by transforming the team's joint policy into an equivariant map. We refer to our multi-agent learning strategy as Fairness through Equivariance (Fair-E) and demonstrate its effectiveness empirically. We then introduce Fairness through Equivariance Regularization (Fair-ER) as a soft-constraint version of Fair-E and show that it reaches higher levels of utility than Fair-E and fairer outcomes than non-equivariant policies. Finally, we present novel findings regarding the fairness-utility trade-off in multi-agent settings; showing that the magnitude of the trade-off is dependent on agent skill.

Cooperative Multi-Agent Fairness and Equivariant Policies

Uplift modeling aims to model the incremental impact of a treatment on an individual outcome, which has attracted great interests of researchers and practitioners from different communities. Existing uplift modeling methods rely on either the data collected from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or the observational data which is more realistic. However, we notice that on the observational data, it is often the case that only a small number of subjects receive treatment, but finally infer the uplift on a much large group of subjects. Such highly imbalanced data is common in various fields such as marketing and medical treatment but it is rarely handled by existing works. In this paper, we theoretically and quantitatively prove that the existing representative methods, transformed outcome (TOM) and doubly robust (DR), suffer from large bias and deviation on highly imbalanced datasets with skewed propensity scores, mainly because they are proportional to the reciprocal of the propensity score. To reduce the bias and deviation of uplift modeling with an imbalanced dataset, we propose an imbalance-aware uplift modeling (IAUM) method via constructing a robust proxy outcome, which adaptively combines the doubly robust estimator and the imputed treatment effects based on the propensity score. We theoretically prove that IAUM can obtain a better bias-variance trade-off than existing methods on a highly imbalanced dataset. We conduct extensive experiments on a synthetic dataset and two real-world datasets, and the experimental results well demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art.

Imbalance-Aware Uplift Modeling for Observational Data

The predict+optimize problem combines machine learning and
 combinatorial optimization by predicting the problem coefficients first and then using these coefficients to solve the optimization problem. 
 While this problem can be solved in two separate stages, 
 recent research shows end to end models can achieve better results. 
 This requires differentiating through a discrete combinatorial function.
 Models that use differentiable surrogates are prone to approximation errors, while existing exact models are limited to dynamic programming, or they do not generalize well with scarce data. 
 In this work we propose a novel
 divide and conquer algorithm based on transition points to reason over exact optimization problems 
 and predict
 the coefficients using the optimization loss. Moreover, our model is not limited to dynamic programming problems.
 We also introduce a greedy version, which achieves similar
 results with less computation. 
 In comparison with other predict+optimize frameworks, we show our method outperforms existing exact frameworks and can reason over hard combinatorial problems better than surrogate methods.

A Divide and Conquer Algorithm for Predict+Optimize with Non-Convex Problems

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer missing information in incomplete knowledge graphs (KGs). Most previous works only consider the transductive scenario where entities are existing in KGs, which cannot work effectively for the inductive scenario containing emerging entities. Recently some graph neural network-based methods have been proposed for inductive KGC by aggregating neighborhood information to capture some uncertainty semantics from the neighboring auxiliary triples. But these methods ignore the more general relational semantics underlying all the known triples that can provide richer information to represent emerging entities so as to satisfy the inductive scenario. In this paper, we propose a novel model called CFAG, which utilizes two granularity levels of relational semantics in a coarse-grained aggregator (CG-AGG) and a fine-grained generative adversarial net (FG-GAN), for inductive KGC. The CG-AGG firstly generates entity representations with multiple semantics through a hypergraph neural network-based global aggregator and a graph neural network-based local aggregator, and the FG-GAN further enhances entity representations with specific semantics through conditional generative adversarial nets. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models for inductive KGC.

Exploring Relational Semantics for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion

Citing and describing related literature are crucial to scientific writing. Many existing approaches show encouraging performance in citation recommendation, but are unable to accomplish the more challenging and onerous task of citation text generation. In this paper, we propose a novel disentangled representation based model DisenCite to automatically generate the citation text through integrating paper text and citation graph. A key novelty of our method compared with existing approaches is to generate context-specific citation text, empowering the generation of different types of citations for the same paper. In particular, we first build and make available a graph enhanced contextual citation dataset (GCite) with 25K edges in different types characterized by citation contained sections over 4.8K research papers. Based on this dataset, we encode each paper according to both textual contexts and structure information in the heterogeneous citation graph. The resulted paper representations are then disentangled by the mutual information regularization between this paper and its neighbors in graph. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. We further conduct ablation and case studies to reassure that the improvement of our method comes from generating the context-specific citation through incorporating the citation graph.

DisenCite: Graph-Based Disentangled Representation Learning for Context-Specific Citation Generation

Metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon but also reflects the concept projection between source and target domains in human cognition. Previous sequence tagging-based metaphor identification methods could not model the concept projection, resulting in a limitation that the outputs of these models are unexplainable in the predictions of the metaphoricity labels. In this work, we propose the first explainable metaphor identification model, inspired by Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The model is based on statistic learning, a lexical resource, and a novel reward mechanism. Our model can identify the metaphoricity on the word-pair level, and explain the predicted metaphoricity labels via learned concept mappings. The use of the reward mechanism allows the model to learn the optimal concept mappings without knowing their true labels. Our method is also applicable for the concepts that are out of training domains by using the lexical resource. The automatically generated concept mappings demonstrate the implicit human thoughts in metaphoric expressions. Our experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed model in metaphor identification, and concept mapping tasks, respectively.

Explainable Metaphor Identification Inspired by Conceptual Metaphor Theory

We investigate approval-based committee voting with incomplete information about the approval preferences of voters. We consider several models of incompleteness where each voter partitions the set of candidates into approved, disapproved, and unknown candidates, possibly with ordinal preference constraints among candidates in the latter category. This captures scenarios where voters have not evaluated all candidates and/or it is unknown where voters draw the threshold between approved and disapproved candidates. We study the complexity of some fundamental computational problems for a number of classic approval-based committee voting rules including Proportional Approval Voting and Chamberlin-Courant. These problems include that of determining whether a given set of candidates is a possible or necessary winning committee and whether it forms a committee that possibly or necessarily satisfies representation axioms. We also consider the problem whether a given candidate is possibly or necessarily a member of the winning committee.

Approval-Based Committee Voting under Incomplete Information

Heuristics for lifted planning are not yet as informed as the best heuristics for ground planning. Recent work introduced the idea of using Datalog programs to compute the additive heuristic over lifted tasks. Based on this work, we show how to compute the more informed FF heuristic in a lifted manner. We extend the Datalog program with executable annotations that can also be used to define other delete-relaxation heuristics. In our experiments, we show that a planner using the lifted FF implementation produces state-of-the-art results for lifted planners. It also reduces the gap to state-of-the-art ground planners in domains where grounding is feasible.

The FF Heuristic for Lifted Classical Planning

Given a natural language statement, how to verify its veracity against a large-scale textual knowledge source like Wikipedia? Most existing neural models make predictions without giving clues about which part of a false claim goes wrong. In this paper, we propose LOREN, an approach for interpretable fact verification. We decompose the verification of the whole claim at phrase-level, where the veracity of the phrases serves as explanations and can be aggregated into the final verdict according to logical rules. The key insight of LOREN is to represent claim phrase veracity as three-valued latent variables, which are regularized by aggregation logical rules. The final claim verification is based on all latent variables. Thus, LOREN enjoys the additional benefit of interpretability --- it is easy to explain how it reaches certain results with claim phrase veracity. Experiments on a public fact verification benchmark show that LOREN is competitive against previous approaches while enjoying the merit of faithful and accurate interpretability. The resources of LOREN are available at: https://github.com/jiangjiechen/LOREN.

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