Canada

Despite their widespread adoption, neural conversation models have yet to exhibit natural chat capabilities with humans. In this research, we examine user utterances as causes and generated responses as effects, recognizing that changes in a cause should produce a different effect. To further explore this concept, we have compiled and expanded upon a new dataset called CausalDialogue through crowd-sourcing. This dataset includes multiple cause-effect pairs within a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. Our analysis reveals that traditional loss functions struggle to effectively incorporate the DAG structure, leading us to propose a causality-enhanced method called Exponential Maximum Average Treatment Effect (ExMATE) to enhance the impact of causality at the utterance level in training neural conversation models. To evaluate the needs of considering causality in dialogue generation, we built a comprehensive benchmark on CausalDialogue dataset using different models, inference, and training methods. Through experiments, we find that a causality-inspired loss like ExMATE can improve the diversity and agility of conventional loss function and there is still room for improvement to reach human-level quality on this new dataset.

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ACL 2023

CausalDialogue: Modeling Utterance-level Causality in Conversations

training loss

causal-effect

conditional text generation

dialogue generation

language model

game

response generation

causal inference

dataset

### 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.

Despite their widespread adoption, neural conversation models have yet to exhibit natural chat capabilities with humans. In this research, we examine user utterances as causes and generated responses as effects, recognizing that changes in a cause should produce a different effect. To further explore this concept, we have compiled and expanded upon a new dataset called CausalDialogue through crowd-sourcing. This dataset includes multiple cause-effect pairs within a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. Our analysis reveals that traditional loss functions struggle to effectively incorporate the DAG structure, leading us to propose a causality-enhanced method called Exponential Maximum Average Treatment Effect (ExMATE) to enhance the impact of causality at the utterance level in training neural conversation models. To evaluate the needs of considering causality in dialogue generation, we built a comprehensive benchmark on CausalDialogue dataset using different models, inference, and training methods. Through experiments, we find that a causality-inspired loss like ExMATE can improve the diversity and agility of conventional loss function and there is still room for improvement to reach human-level quality on this new dataset.

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poster

Recent work studies the cognitive capabilities of language models through psychological tests designed for humans. While these studies are helpful for understanding the general capabilities of these models, there is no guarantee that a model possessing sufficient capabilities to pass those tests would actually use those capabilities in performing real-life tasks. In this work, we formulate task-oriented cognitive capabilities, which are human-like cognitive capabilities that language models leverage to perform tasks. These capabilities are (i) the ability to quickly generate good candidate utterances (the search capability) (ii) the ability to predict how a listener interprets those utterances and choose the most appropriate one (the pragmatic capability). We design an evaluation scheme for comparing these capabilities of a language model with those of a human. Applying this scheme to examine various models in a navigation instruction generation problem, we find that their pragmatic capability is severely lacking. This insight leads us to augment them with better models of the listener and obtain a significant boost of 11% in success rate in guiding real humans. Our work advocates for having a principled procedure for aligning language models with humans that involves (i) formulating task-oriented capabilities, (ii) devising a method to quantify their deficiency, and (iii) iteratively improving them.

Define, Evaluate, and Improve Task-Oriented Cognitive Capabilities for Instruction Generation Models

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) has made great progress that benefits from extraordinary fusion scheme. However, there is a lack of labeled data, resulting in severe overfitting and poor generalization for supervised models applied in this field. In this paper, we propose Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Self-supervised Learning (SKESL) to capture common sentimental patterns in unlabeled videos, which facilitates further learning on limited labeled data. Specifically, with the help of sentiment knowledge and non-verbal behavior, SKESL conducts sentiment word masking and predicts fine-grained word sentiment intensity, so as to embed sentiment information at the word level into pre-trained multimodal representation. In addition, a non-verbal injection method is also proposed to integrate non-verbal information into the word semantics. Experiments on two standard benchmarks of MSA clearly show that SKESL significantly outperforms the baseline, and achieves new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) results.

Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Self-supervised Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

As the foundation of current natural language processing methods, pre-trained language model has achieved excellent performance. However, the black-box structure of the deep neural network in pre-trained language models seriously limits the interpretability of the language modeling process. After revisiting the coupled requirement of deep neural representation and semantics logic of language modeling, a Word-Context-Coupled Space (W2CSpace) is proposed by introducing the alignment processing between uninterpretable neural representation and interpretable statistical logic. Moreover, a clustering process is also designed to connect the word- and context-level semantics. Specifically, an associative knowledge network (AKN), considered interpretable statistical logic, is introduced in the alignment process for word-level semantics. Furthermore, the context-relative distance is employed as the semantic feature for the downstream classifier, which is greatly different from the current uninterpretable semantic representations of pre-trained models. Our experiments for performance evaluation and interpretable analysis are executed on several types of datasets, including SIGHAN, Weibo, and ChnSenti. Wherein a novel evaluation strategy for the interpretability of machine learning models is first proposed. According to the experimental results, our language model can achieve better performance and highly credible interpretable ability compared to related state-of-the-art methods.

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Constructing Word-Context-Coupled Space Aligned with Associative Knowledge Relations for Interpretable Language Modeling

Existing factual consistency evaluation approaches for text summarization provide binary predictions and limited insights into the weakness of summarization systems. Therefore, we propose the task of fine-grained inconsistency detection, the goal of which is to predict the fine-grained types of factual errors in a summary. Motivated by how humans inspect factual inconsistency in summaries, we propose an interpretable fine-grained inconsistency detection model, FineGrainFact, which explicitly represents the facts in the documents and summaries with semantic frames extracted by semantic role labeling, and highlights the related semantic frames to predict inconsistency. The highlighted semantic frames help verify predicted error types and correct inconsistent summaries. Experiment results demonstrate that our model outperforms strong baselines and provides evidence to support or refute the summary.

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Interpretable Automatic Fine-grained Inconsistency Detection in Text Summarization

Word embedding methods like word2vec and GloVe have been shown to learn strong representations of words. However, these methods only learn representations for words in the training corpus and therefore struggle to handle unknown and new words, known as out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. As a result, there have been multiple attempts to learn OOV word representations in a similar fashion to how humans learn new words, using word roots/subwords and/or surrounding words. However, while most of these approaches use advanced architectures like attention on the context of the OOV word, they tend to use simple structures like ngram addition or character based convolutional neural networks (CNN) to handle processing subword information. In response to this, we propose SubAtt, a transformer based OOV estimation model that uses attention mechanisms on both the context and the subwords. In addition to attention, we also show that pretraining subword representations also leads to improvement in OOV estimation. We show SubAtt outperforms current state-of-the-art OOV estimation models.

Enhancing Out-of-Vocabulary Estimation with Subword Attention

Building cross-model intelligence that can understand charts and communicate the salient information hidden behind them is an appealing challenge in the vision and language (V+L) community. The capability to uncover the underlined table data of chart figures is a critical key to automatic chart understanding. We introduce ChartT5, a V+L model that learns how to interpret table information from chart images via cross-modal pre-training on plot table pairs. Specifically, we propose two novel pre-training objectives: Masked Header Prediction (MHP) and Masked Value Prediction (MVP) to facilitate the model with different skills to interpret the table information. We have conducted extensive experiments on chart question answering and chart summarization to verify the effectiveness of the proposed pre-training strategies. In particular, on the ChartQA benchmark, our ChartT5 outperforms the state-of-the-art non-pretraining methods by over $8\%$ performance gains.

Enhanced Chart Understanding via Visual Language Pre-training on Plot Table Pairs

Code-switching, or switching between languages, occurs for many reasons and has important linguistic, sociological, and cultural implications. Multilingual speakers code-switch for a variety of communicative functions, such as expressing emotions, borrowing terms, making jokes, introducing a new topic, etc. The function of code-switching may be quite useful for the analysis of linguists, cognitive scientists, speech therapists, and others, but is not readily apparent. To remedy this situation, we annotate and release a new dataset of functions of code-switching in Spanish-English. We build the first system (to our knowledge) to automatically identify a wide range of functions for which speakers code-switch in everyday speech, achieving an accuracy of 75% across all functions.

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Automatic Identification of Code-Switching Functions in Speech Transcripts

Until now, few studies have been explored on Automated Creative Essay Scoring (ACES), in which a pre-trained model automatically labels an essay as a creative or a non-creative. Since the creativity evaluation of essays is very subjective, each evaluator often has his or her own criteria for creativity. For this reason, quantifying creativity in essays is very challenging. In this work, as one of preliminary studies in developing a novel model for ACES, we deeply investigate the correlation between creative essays and expressiveness. Specifically, we explore how rare tokens affect the evaluation of creativity for essays. For such a journey, we present five distinct methods to extract rare tokens, and conduct a comparative study on the correlation between rare tokens and creative essay evaluation results using BERT. Our experimental results showed clear correlation between rare tokens and creative essays. In all test sets, accuracies of our rare token masking-based BERT (ramBERT) model were improved over the existing BERT model up to 14%.

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A Comparative Analysis of the Effectiveness of Rare Tokens on Creative Expression using ramBERT

Despite the recent advances in open-domain dialogue systems, building a reliable evaluation metric is still a challenging problem. Recent studies proposed learnable metrics based on classification models trained to distinguish the correct response. However, neural classifiers are known to make overly confident predictions for examples from unseen distributions. We propose DENSITY, which evaluates a response by utilizing density estimation on the feature space derived from a neural classifier. Our metric measures how likely a response would appear in the distribution of human conversations. Moreover, to improve the performance of DENSITY, we utilize contrastive learning to further compress the feature space. Experiments on multiple response evaluation datasets show that DENSITY correlates better with human evaluations than the existing metrics.

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DEnsity: Open-domain Dialogue Evaluation Metric using Density Estimation

Event skeleton generation, aiming to induce an event schema skeleton graph with abstracted event nodes and their temporal relations from a set of event instance graphs, is a critical step in the temporal complex event schema induction task. Existing methods effectively address this task from a graph generation perspective but suffer from noise-sensitive and error accumulation, e.g., the inability to correct errors while generating schema. We, therefore, propose a novel Diffusion Event Graph Model~(DEGM) to address these issues. Our DEGM is the first workable diffusion model for event skeleton generation, where the embedding and rounding techniques with a custom edge-based loss are introduced to transform a discrete event graph into learnable latent representations. Furthermore, we propose a denoising training process to maintain the model's robustness. Consequently, DEGM derives the final schema, where error correction is guaranteed by iteratively refining the latent representations during the schema generation process. Experimental results on three IED bombing datasets demonstrate that our DEGM achieves better results than other state-of-the-art baselines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zhufq00/EventSkeletonGeneration.

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Define, Evaluate, and Improve Task-Oriented Cognitive Capabilities for Instruction Generation Models

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CausalDialogue: Modeling Utterance-level Causality in Conversations