Stanford AI Lab Papers and Talks at EMNLP 2020

The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2020 is being hosted virtually from November 16th – November 20th. We’re excited to share all the work from SAIL that’s being presented, and you’ll find links to papers, videos and blogs below. Feel free to reach out to the contact authors directly to learn more about the work that’s happening at Stanford!

Main Conference


Pre-Training Transformers as Energy-Based Cloze Models


Authors: Kevin Clark, Minh-Thang Luong, Quoc V. Le, Christopher D. Manning

Contact: kevclark@cs.stanford.edu

Links: Paper

Keywords: representation learning, self-supervised learning, energy-based models


ALICE: Active Learning with Contrastive Natural Language Explanations


Authors: Weixin Liang, James Zou, Zhou Yu

Contact: wxliang@stanford.edu

Links: Paper

Keywords: natural language explanation, class-based active learning, contrastive explanation


CheXbert: Combining Automatic Labelers and Expert Annotations for Accurate Radiology Report Labeling Using BERT


Authors: Akshay Smit, Saahil Jain, Pranav Rajpurkar, Anuj Pareek, Andrew Y. Ng, Matthew P. Lungren

Contact: akshaysm@stanford.edu

Links: Paper

Keywords: bert, natural language processing, radiology, medical imaging, deep learning


AutoQA: From Databases To QA Semantic Parsers With Only Synthetic Training Data


Authors: Silei Xu, Sina J. Semnani, Giovanni Campagna, Monica S. Lam

Contact: silei@cs.stanford.edu

Links: Paper

Keywords: question answering, semantic parsing, language models, synthetic training data, data augmentation


Data and Representation for Turkish Natural Language Inference


Authors: Emrah Budur, Rıza Özçelik, Tunga Güngör, Christopher Potts

Contact: emrah.budur@boun.edu.tr

Links: Paper | Website

Keywords: sentence-level semantics, natural language inference, neural machine translation, morphologically rich language


Intrinsic Evaluation of Summarization Datasets


Authors: Rishi Bommasani, Claire Cardie

Contact: nlprishi@stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Video | Website | Virtual Conference Room

Keywords: summarization, datasets, evaluation


Learning Music Helps You Read: Using Transfer to Study Linguistic Structure in Language Models


Authors: Isabel Papadimitriou, Dan Jurafsky

Contact: isabelvp@stanford.edu

Links: Paper

Keywords: transfer learning, analysis, music, hierarchical structure


Localizing Open-Ontology QA Semantic Parsers in a Day Using Machine Translation


Authors: Mehrad Moradshahi, Giovanni Campagna, Sina J. Semnani, Silei Xu, Monica S. Lam

Contact: mehrad@cs.stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Website

Keywords: machine translation, semantic parsing, localization


SLM: Learning a Discourse Language Representation with Sentence Unshuffling


Authors: Haejun Lee, Drew A. Hudson, Kangwook Lee, Christopher D. Manning

Contact: dorarad@stanford.edu

Links: Paper

Keywords: transformer, bert, language, understanding, nlp, squad, glue, sentences, discourse


Utility is in the Eye of the User: A Critique of NLP Leaderboards


Authors: Kawin Ethayarajh, Dan Jurafsky

Contact: kawin@stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Website

Keywords: nlp, leaderboard, utility, benchmark, fairness, efficiency


With Little Power Comes Great Responsibility


Authors: Dallas Card, Peter Henderson, Urvashi Khandelwal, Robin Jia, Kyle Mahowald, Dan Jurafsky

Contact: dcard@stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Website

Keywords: statistical power, experimental methodology, leaderboards, machine translation, human evaluation


Findings of EMNLP


DeSMOG: Detecting Stance in Media On Global Warming


Authors: Yiwei Luo, Dallas Card, Dan Jurafsky

Contact: yiweil@stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Website

Keywords: computational social science; framing; argumentation; stance; bias; climate change


Investigating Transferability in Pretrained Language Models


Authors: Alex Tamkin, Trisha Singh, Davide Giovanardi, Noah Goodman

Contact: atamkin@stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Website | Virtual Conference Room

Keywords: finetuning, transfer learning, language models, bert, probing


Stay Hungry, Stay Focused: Generating Informative and Specific Questions in Information-Seeking Conversations


Authors: Peng Qi, Yuhao Zhang, Christopher D. Manning

Contact: pengqi@cs.stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Blog Post

Keywords: conversational agents, question generation, natural language generation


Do Language Embeddings Capture Scales?


Authors: Xikun Zhang*, Deepak Ramachandran*, Ian Tenney, Yanai Elazar, Dan Roth

Contact: xikunz2@cs.stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Virtual Conference Room

Keywords: probing, analysis, bertology, scales, common sense knowledge


On the Importance of Adaptive Data Collection for Extremely Imbalanced Pairwise Tasks


Authors: Stephen Mussmann, Robin Jia, Percy Liang

Contact: robinjia@cs.stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Website

Keywords: active learning, robustness, label imbalance


Pragmatic Issue-Sensitive Image Captioning


Authors: Allen Nie, Reuben Cohn-Gordon, Christopher Potts

Contact: anie@stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Video

Keywords: controllable caption generation, question under discussion, discourse, pragmatics


Workshops and Co-Located Conferences


BLEU Neighbors: A Reference-less Approach to Automatic Evaluation


Authors: Kawin Ethayarajh, Dorsa Sadigh

Contact: kawin@stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Website

Keywords: nlp, bleu, evaluation, nearest neighbors, dialogue


Determining Question-Answer Plausibility in Crowdsourced Datasets Using Multi-Task Learning


Authors: Rachel Gardner, Maya Varma, Clare Zhu, Ranjay Krishna

Contact: rachel0@cs.stanford.edu

Links: Paper

Keywords: noisy text, bert, plausibility, multi-task learning


Explaining the ‘Trump Gap’ in Social Distancing Using COVID Discourse


Authors: Austin van Loon, Sheridan Stewart, Brandon Waldon, Shrinidhi K. Lakshmikanth, Ishan Shah, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Garrick Sherman, James Zou, Johannes Eichstaedt

Contact: avanloon@stanford.edu

Links: Paper

Keywords: computational social science, social distancing, word2vec, vector semantics, twitter, bert


Learning Adaptive Language Interfaces through Decomposition


Authors: Siddharth Karamcheti, Dorsa Sadigh, Percy Liang

Contact: skaramcheti@cs.stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Virtual Conference Room

Keywords: semantic parsing, interaction, decomposition


Modeling Subjective Assessments of Guilt in Newspaper Crime Narratives


Authors: Elisa Kreiss*, Zijian Wang*, Christopher Potts

Contact: ekreiss@stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Website

Keywords: psycholinguistics, pragmatics, token-level supervision, model attribution, news, guilt, hedges, corpus, subjectivity


Neural Natural Language Inference Models Partially Embed Theories of Lexical Entailment and Negation


Authors: Atticus Geiger, Kyle Richardson, Chris Potts

Contact: atticusg@stanford.edu

Links: Paper | Website

Keywords: entailment intervention causality systematic generalization


Structured Self-Attention Weights Encode Semantics in Sentiment Analysis


Authors: Zhengxuan Wu, Thanh-Son Nguyen, Desmond C. Ong

Contact: wuzhengx@stanford.edu

Links: Paper

Keywords: attention, explainability, sentiment analysis


We look forward to seeing you at EMNLP 2020!

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