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 | Virtual Conference Room
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 | Virtual Conference Room
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 | Virtual Conference Room
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!