United States

Common sense has always been of interest in AI, but has rarely taken center stage.  Despite its mention in one of John McCarthy&#39;s earliest papers and years of work by dedicated researchers, arguably no AI system with a serious amount of general common sense has ever emerged.  Why is that?  What&#39;s missing?  Examples of AI systems&#39; failures of common sense abound, and they point to AI&#39;s frequent focus on expertise as the cause.  Those attempting to break the brittleness barrier, even in the context of modern deep learning, have tended to invest their energy in large numbers of small bits of commonsense knowledge.  But all the commonsense knowledge fragments in the world don&#39;t add up to a system that actually demonstrates common sense in a human-like way.  We advocate examining common sense from a broader perspective than in the past.  Common sense is more complex than it has been taken to be and is worthy of its own scientific exploration.

AAAI 2022

Toward a New Science of Common Sense

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
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***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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EMNLP 2022

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Common sense has always been of interest in AI, but has rarely taken center stage.  Despite its mention in one of John McCarthy's earliest papers and years of work by dedicated researchers, arguably no AI system with a serious amount of general common sense has ever emerged.  Why is that?  What's missing?  Examples of AI systems' failures of common sense abound, and they point to AI's frequent focus on expertise as the cause.  Those attempting to break the brittleness barrier, even in the context of modern deep learning, have tended to invest their energy in large numbers of small bits of commonsense knowledge.  But all the commonsense knowledge fragments in the world don't add up to a system that actually demonstrates common sense in a human-like way.  We advocate examining common sense from a broader perspective than in the past.  Common sense is more complex than it has been taken to be and is worthy of its own scientific exploration.

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. 

AI is increasingly used to aid decision-making about the allocation of scarce societal resources, for example housing for homeless people, organs for transplantation, and food donations. Recently, there have been several proposals for how to design objectives for these systems that attempt to achieve some combination of fairness, efficiency, incentive compatibility, and satisfactory aggregation of stakeholder preferences. This paper lays out possible roles and opportunities for AI in this domain, arguing for a closer engagement with the political philosophy literature on local justice, which provides a framework for thinking about how societies have over time framed objectives for such allocation problems. It also discusses how we may be able to integrate into this framework the opportunities and risks opened up by the ubiquity of data and the availability of algorithms that can use them to make accurate predictions about the future.

Local Justice and the Algorithmic Allocation of Scarce Societal Resources

Many present and future problems associated with artificial intelligence are not due to its limitations, but to our poor assessment of its behaviour. Our evaluation procedures produce aggregated performance metrics that lack detail and quantified uncertainty about the following question: how will an AI system, with a particular profile \pi, behave for a new problem, characterised by a particular situation \mu? Instead of just aggregating test results, we can use machine learning methods to fully capitalise on this evaluation information. In this paper, we introduce the concept of an assessor model, \hat{R}(r|\pi,\mu), a conditional probability estimator trained on test data. We discuss how these assessors can be built by using information of the full system-problem space and illustrate a broad range of applications that derive from varied inferences and aggregations from \hat{R}. Building good assessor models will change the predictive and explanatory power of AI evaluation and will lead to new research directions for building and using them. We propose accompanying every deployed AI system with its own assessor.

Training on the Test Set: Mapping the System-Problem Space in AI

The ubiquity of recommender systems has increased the need for higher-bandwidth, natural and efficient communication with users. This need is increasingly filled by recommenders that support natural language interaction, often conversationally. Given the inherent semantic subjectivity present in natural language, we argue that modeling subjective attributes in recommenders is a critical, yet understudied, avenue of AI research. We propose a novel framework for understanding different forms of subjectivity, examine various recommender tasks that will benefit from a systematic treatment of subjective attributes, and outline a number of research challenges.

Subjective Attributes in Conversational Recommendation Systems: Challenges and Opportunities

In this paper, I pose a major challenge for AI researchers: to develop
systems that learn in a human-like manner. I briefly review the
history of machine learning, noting that early work made close contact
with results from cognitive psychology but that this is no longer the
case. I identify seven characteristics of human behavior that, if
reproduced, would offer better ways to acquire expertise than
statistical induction over massive training sets. I illustrate these
points with two domains - mathematics and driving - where people
are effective learners and review systems that address them. In
closing, I suggest ways to encourage more research on human-like
learning.

The Computational Gauntlet of Human-Like Learning

This paper focuses on a dynamic aspect of responsible autonomy, namely, to make intelligent agents be responsible at run time. That is, it considers settings where decision making by agents impinges upon the outcomes perceived by other agents. For an agent to act responsibly, it must accommodate the desires and other attitudes of its users and, through other agents, of their users.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides a conceptual analysis of consent, its benefits and misuses, and how understanding consent can help achieve responsible autonomy. Second, it outlines challenges for AI (in particular, for agents and multiagent systems) that merit investigation to form as a basis for modeling consent in multiagent systems and applying consent to achieve responsible autonomy.

Consent as a Foundation for Responsible Autonomy

The deployment of systems of artificial intelligence (AI) in high-risk settings warrants the need for trustworthy AI. This crucial requirement is highlighted by recent EU guidelines and regulations, but also by recommendations from OECD and UNESCO, among several other examples. One critical premise of trustworthy AI involves the necessity of finding explanations that offer reliable guarantees of soundness. This paper argues that the best known eXplainable AI (XAI) approaches fail to provide sound explanations, or that alternatively find explanations which can exhibit significant redundancy. The solution to these drawbacks are explanation approaches that offer formal guarantees of rigor. These formal explanations are not only sound but guarantee irredundancy. This paper summarizes the recent developments in the emerging discipline of formal XAI. The paper also outlines existing challenges for formal XAI.

Delivering Trustworthy AI through Formal XAI

Existing facial analysis systems have been shown to yield biased results against certain demographic subgroups. Due to its impact on society, it has become imperative to ensure that these systems do not discriminate based on gender, identity, or skin tone of individuals. This has led to research in the identification and mitigation of bias in AI systems. In this paper, we encapsulate bias detection/estimation and mitigation algorithms for facial analysis. Our main contributions include a systematic review of algorithms proposed for understanding bias, along with a taxonomy and extensive overview of existing bias mitigation algorithms. We also discuss open challenges in the field of biased facial analysis.

Anatomizing Bias in Facial Analysis

Conceptual representations of meaning have long been the general focus of Artificial Intelligence (AI) towards the fundamental goal of machine understanding, with innumerable efforts made in Knowledge Representation, Speech and Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, inter alia. Even today, at the core of Natural Language Understanding lies the task of Semantic Parsing, the objective of which is to convert natural sentences into machine-readable representations. Through this paper, we aim to revamp the historical dream of AI, by putting forward a novel, all-embracing, fully semantic meaning representation, that goes beyond the many existing formalisms. Indeed, we tackle their key limits by fully abstracting text into meaning and introducing language-independent concepts and semantic relations, in order to obtain an interlingual representation. Our proposal aims to overcome the language barrier, and connect not only texts across languages, but also images, videos, speech and sound, and logical formulas, across many fields of AI.

BMR: A Fully Semantic Meaning Representation to Overcome Language Barriers

While commonsense knowledge acquisition and reasoning has traditionally been a core research topic in the knowledge representation and reasoning community, recent years have seen a surge of interest in the natural language processing community in developing pre-trained models and testing their ability to address a variety of newly designed commonsense knowledge reasoning and generation tasks. This paper presents a survey of these tasks, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of state-of-the-art pre-trained models for commonsense reasoning and generation as revealed by these tasks, and reflects on future research directions.

Commonsense Knowledge Reasoning and Generation with Pre-trained Language Models: A Survey

We analyze the assignment of passengers in a shared ride, which considers the social relationship among the passengers. Namely, there is a fixed number of passengers in each vehicle, and the goal is to recommend an assignment of the passengers such that the number of friendship relations is maximized. We show that the  problem is computationally hard, and we provide an approximation algorithm.

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