Canada

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at https://instructor-embedding.github.io.

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ACL 2023

One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings

text embedding

instruction

retrieval

Join us in exploring emergent themes in PER as a scholarly endeavor and as a research community!  Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?
Following the lead of AAPT for the summer meeting, PERC 20/20 was virtual. Enjoy browsing the content.

PERC SM 20

Since its inception, PER has served as a confluence of discipline, theory, research methodology, practice, and application.  How have these facets and the interplays among them been fruitful for physics education globally, regionally, locally, or otherwise?  And, how have our successes and interactions influenced the very nature of PER itself?

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at https://instructor-embedding.github.io.

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
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.<br>
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)**
<br><br><br><br>

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.

Controlling the text generated by language models and customizing the content has been a long-standing challenge. Existing prompting techniques proposed in pursuit of providing control are task-specific and lack generality; this provides overwhelming choices for non-expert users to find a suitable method for their task. The effort associated with those techniques, such as in writing examples, explanations, instructions, etc. further limits their adoption among non-expert users. In this paper, we propose a simple prompting strategy Help Me Think where we encourage largelanguage models (such as GPT3 and ChatGPT) to help non-expert users by asking a set of relevant questions and leveraging user answers to execute the task. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique Help Me Think on a variety of tasks. Specifically, we focus on tasks that are hard for average humans and require significant thinking to perform. We hope our work will encourage the development of unconventional ways to harness the power of large language models.

HELP ME THINK: A Simple Prompting Strategy for Non-experts to Create Customized Content with Models

Entity linking models have achieved significant success via utilizing pretrained language models to capture semantic features.However, the NIL prediction problem, which aims to identify mentions without a corresponding entity in the knowledge base, has received insufficient attention.We categorize mentions linking to NIL into Missing Entity and Non-Entity Phrase, and propose an entity linking dataset NEL that focuses on the NIL prediction problem.NEL takes ambiguous entities as seeds, collects relevant mention context in the Wikipedia corpus, and ensures the presence of mentions linking to NIL by human annotation and entity masking.We conduct a series of experiments with the widely used bi-encoder and cross-encoder entity linking models, results show that both types of NIL mentions in training data have a significant influence on the accuracy of NIL prediction.Our code and dataset can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/solitaryzero/NIL_EL}.

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Learn to Not Link: Exploring NIL Prediction in Entity Linking

Large language models have demonstrated robust performance on various language tasks using zero-shot or few-shot learning paradigms. While being actively researched, multimodal models that can additionally handle images as input have yet to catch up in size and generality with language-only models. In this work, we ask whether language-only models can be utilised for tasks that require visual input -- but also, as we argue, often require a strong reasoning component. Similar to some recent related work, we make visual information accessible to the language model using separate verbalisation models. Specifically, we investigate the performance of open-source, open-access language models against GPT-3 on five vision-language tasks when given textually-encoded visual information. Our results suggest that language models are effective for solving vision-language tasks even with limited samples. This approach also enhances the interpretability of a model's output by providing a means of tracing the output back through the verbalised image content.

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Images in Language Space: Exploring the Suitability of Large Language Models for Vision & Language Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great potential for in-context learning, where LLMs learn a new task simply by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (prompts). Despite their potential, our understanding of the factors influencing end-task performance and the robustness of in-context learning remains limited. This paper aims to bridge this knowledge gap by investigating the reliance of LLMs on shortcuts or spurious correlations within prompts. Through comprehensive experiments on classification and extraction tasks, we reveal that LLMs are "lazy learners" that tend to exploit such shortcuts. Additionally, we uncover a surprising finding that larger models are more likely to utilize shortcuts in prompts during inference. Our findings provide a new perspective on evaluating robustness in in-context learning and pose new challenges for detecting and mitigating the use of shortcuts in prompts.

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Large Language Models Can be Lazy Learners: Analyze Shortcuts in In-Context Learning

Text simplification (TS) aims to modify sentences to make their both content and structure easier to understand. Traditional n-gram matching-based TS evaluation metrics heavily rely on the exact token match and human-annotated simplified sentences. In this paper, we present a novel neural-network-based reference-free TS metric BETS that leverages pre-trained contextualized language representation models and large-scale paraphrasing datasets to evaluate simplicity and meaning preservation. We show that our metric, without collecting any costly human simplification reference, correlates better than existing metrics with human judgments for the quality of both overall simplification (+7.7%) and its key aspects, i.e., comparative simplicity (+11.2%) and meaning preservation (+9.2%).

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Towards Reference-free Text Simplification Evaluation with a BERT Siamese Network Architecture

As language models increase in size by the day, methods for efficient inference are critical to leveraging their capabilities for various applications. Prior work has investigated techniques like model pruning, knowledge distillation, and data multiplexing to increase model throughput without sacrificing accuracy. In this paper, we combine two such methods -- structured pruning and data multiplexing -- to compound the speedup gains obtained by either method. Our approach, PruMUX, obtains up to 7.5-29.5X throughput improvement over BERT-base model with accuracy threshold from 80% to 74%. We further study various combinations of parameters (such as sparsity and multiplexing factor) in the two techniques to provide a comprehensive analysis of the tradeoff between accuracy and throughput in the resulting models. We then propose Auto-PruMUX, a meta-level model that can predict the high-performance parameters for pruning and multiplexing given a desired accuracy loss budget, providing a practical method to leverage the combination effectively.

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PruMUX: Augmenting Data Multiplexing with Model Compression

Multimodal misinformation on online social platforms is becoming a critical concern due to increasing credibility and easier dissemination brought by multimedia content, compared to traditional text-only information. While existing multimodal detection approaches have achieved high performance, the lack of interpretability hinders these systems' reliability and practical deployment. Inspired by Neural-Symbolic AI which combines the learning ability of neural networks with the explainability of symbolic learning, we propose a novel logic-based neural model for multimodal misinformation detection which integrates interpretable logic clauses to express the reasoning process of the target task. To make learning effective, we parameterize the symbolic logical elements using neural representations, which facilitate the automatic generation and evaluation of meaningful logic clauses. Additionally, to make our framework generalizable across diverse misinformation sources, we introduce five meta-predicates that can be instantiated with different correlations. Results on three public datasets (Twitter, Weibo, and Sarcasm) demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of our model.

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Interpretable Multimodal Misinformation Detection with Logic Reasoning

Distantly-supervised named entity recognition (NER) aims at training networks with distantly-labeled data, which is automatically obtained by matching entity mentions in the raw text with entity types in a knowledge base. Distant supervision may induce incomplete and noisy labels, so recent state-of-the-art methods employ sample selection mechanism to separate clean data from noisy data based on the model's prediction scores. However, they ignore the noise distribution change caused by data selection, and they simply excludes noisy data during training, resulting in information loss. We propose to (1) use a dynamic loss function to better adapt to the changing noise during the training process, and (2) incorporate token level contrastive learning to fully utilize the noisy data as well as facilitate feature learning without relying on labels. Our method achieves superior performance on three benchmark datasets, outperforming existing distantly supervised NER models by significant margins.

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Noise-Robust Training with Dynamic Loss and Contrastive Learning for Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition

Adversarial training is widely acknowledged as the most effective defense against adversarial attacks. However, it is also well established that achieving both robustness and generalization in adversarially trained models involves a trade-off. The goal of this work is to provide an in depth comparison of different approaches for adversarial training in language models. Specifically, we study the effect of pre-training data augmentation as well as training time input perturbations vs. embedding space perturbations on the robustness and generalization of transformer-based language models. Our findings suggest that better robustness can be achieved by pre-training data augmentation or by training with input space perturbation. However, training with embedding space perturbation significantly improves generalization. A linguistic correlation analysis of neurons of the learned models reveal that the improved generalization is due to `more specialized' neurons. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to carry out a deep qualitative analysis of different methods of generating adversarial examples in adversarial training of language models.

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Impact of Adversarial Training on Robustness and Generalizability of Language Models

Despite the versatility of pre-trained language models (PLMs) across domains, their large memory footprints pose significant challenges in federated learning (FL), where the training model has to be distributed between a server and clients. One potential solution to bypass such constraints might be the use of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) in the context of FL. However, we have observed that typical PEFT tends to severely suffer from heterogeneity among clients in FL scenarios, resulting in unstable and slow convergence. In this paper, we propose Client-Customized Adaptation (C2A), a novel hypernetwork-based FL framework that generates client-specific adapters by conditioning the client information. With the effectiveness of the hypernetworks in generating customized weights through learning to adopt the different characteristics of inputs, C2A can maximize the utility of shared model parameters while minimizing the divergence caused by client heterogeneity. To verify the efficacy of C2A, we perform extensive evaluations on FL scenarios involving heterogeneity in label and language distributions. Comprehensive evaluation results clearly support the superiority of C2A in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness in FL scenarios.

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HELP ME THINK: A Simple Prompting Strategy for Non-experts to Create Customized Content with Models

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Next from ACL 2023

HELP ME THINK: A Simple Prompting Strategy for Non-experts to Create Customized Content with Models

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Qualitative Analysis of Students’ Epistemic Framing Surrounding Instructor’s Interaction (PERC)

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