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A quick guide to Amazon's 65-plus papers at this year's ACL

Familiar topics such as question answering and natural-language understanding remain well represented, but a new concentration on language modeling and multimodal models reflect the spread of generative AI.

By Staff writer
July 10, 2023
10 min read
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Between the main conference and the recently inaugurated ACL Proceedings, Amazon researchers have more than 65 papers at this year's meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

Automatic speech recognition

Masked audio text encoders are effective multi-modal rescorers*
Jason Cai, Monica Sunkara, Xilai Li, Anshu Bhatia, Xiao Pan, Sravan Bodapati

Code generation

A static evaluation of code completion by large language models
Hantian Ding, Varun Kumar, Yuchen Tian, Zijian Wang, Rob Kwiatkowski, Xiaopeng LI, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Baishakhi Ray, Parminder Bhatia, Sudipta Sengupta, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang

Multitask pretraining with structured knowledge for text-to-SQL generation
Robert Giaquinto, Dejiao Zhang, Benjamin Kleiner, Yang Li, Ming Tan, Parminder Bhatia, Ramesh Nallapati, Xiaofei Ma

Code switching

Code-switched text synthesis in unseen language pairs*
I-Hung Hsu, Avik Ray, Shubham Garg, Nanyun Peng, Jing Huang

Code-switched text synthesis.png
From "Code-switched text synthesis in unseen language pairs".

CoMix: Guide transformers to code-mix using POS structure and phonetics*
Gaurav Arora, Srujana Merugu, Vivek Sembium

Continual learning

Characterizing and measuring linguistic dataset drift
Tyler A. Chang, Kishaloy Halder, Neha Anna John, Yogarshi Vyas, Yassine Benajiba, Miguel Ballesteros, Dan Roth

Data-/table-to-text applications

An inner table retriever for robust table question answering
Weizhe Lin, Rexhina Blloshmi, Bill Byrne, Adrià de Gispert, Gonzalo Iglesias

Few-shot data-to-text generation via unified representation and multi-source learning
Alexander Hanbo Li, Mingyue Shang, Evangelia Spiliopoulou, JIE MA, Patrick Ng, Zhiguo Wang, Bonan Min, William Wang, Kathleen McKeown, Vittorio Castelli, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang

Improving cross-task generalization of unified table-to-text models with compositional task configurations*
Jifan Chen, Yuhao Zhang, Lan Liu, Rui Dong, Xinchi Chen, Patrick Ng, William Wang, Zhiheng Huang

LI-RAGE: Late interaction retrieval augmented generation with explicit signals for open-domain table question answering
Weizhe Lin, Rexhina Blloshmi, Bill Byrne, Adrià de Gispert, Gonzalo Iglesias

Dialogue

Diable: Efficient dialogue state tracking as operations on tables*
Pietro Lesci, Yoshinari Fujinuma, Momchil Hardalov, Chao Shang, Lluis Marquez

NatCS: Eliciting natural customer support dialogues
James Gung, Emily Moeng, Wesley Rose, Arshit Gupta, Yi Zhang, Saab Mansour

Schema-guided user satisfaction modeling for task-oriented dialogues
Yue Feng, Yunlong Jiao, Animesh Prasad, Nikolaos Aletras, Emine Yilmaz, Gabriella Kazai

Toward more accurate and generalizable evaluation metrics for task-oriented dialogs
Abi Komma, Nagesh Panyam, Timothy Leffel, Anuj Goyal, Angeliki Metallinou, Spyros Matsoukas, Aram Galstyan

Explainable AI

Efficient Shapley values estimation by amortization for text classification
Alan Yang, Fan Yin, He He, Kai-Wei Chang, Xiaofei Ma, Bing Xiang

Efficient Shapley values.png
From "Efficient Shapley values estimation by amortization for text classification".

Few shot rationale generation using self-training with dual teachers*
Aditya Srikanth Veerubhotla, Lahari Poddar, Jun Yin, Gyuri Szarvas, Sharanya Eswaran

Information extraction

An AMR-based link prediction approach for document-level event argument extraction
Yuqing Yang, Qipeng Guo, Xiangkun Hu, Yue Zhang, Qipeng Guo, Zheng Zhang

AVEN-GR: Attribute value extraction and normalization using product graphs
Donato Crisostomi, Thomas Ricatte

Large scale generative multimodal attribute extraction for e-commerce attributes
Anant Khandelwal, Happy Mittal, Shreyas Sunil Kulkarni, Deepak Gupta

ParaAMR: A large-scale syntactically diverse paraphrase dataset by AMR back-translation
Kuan-Hao Huang, Varun Iyer, I-Hung Hsu, Anoop Kumar, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan

ParaAMR.png
From "ParaAMR: A large-scale syntactically diverse paraphrase dataset by AMR back-translation".

Weakly supervised hierarchical multi-task classification of customer questions
Jitenkumar Rana, Promod Yenigalla, Chetan Aggarwal, Sandeep Mukku, Manan Soni, Rashmi Patange

WebIE: Faithful and robust information extraction on the web
Chenxi Whitehouse, Clara Vania, Alham Fikri Aji, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Andrea Pierleoni

Information retrieval

CUPID: Curriculum learning based real-time prediction using distillation
Arindam Bhattacharya, Ankith M S, Ankit Gandhi, Vijay Huddar, Atul Saroop, Rahul Bhagat

Direct fact retrieval from knowledge graphs without entity linking
Jinheon Baek, Alham Fikri Aji, Jens Lehmann, Sung Ju Hwang

Language modeling

Adaptation approaches for nearest neighbor language models*
Rishabh Bhardwaj, George Polovets, Monica Sunkara

CONTRACLM: Contrastive learning for causal language model
Nihal Jain, Dejiao Zhang, Wasi Ahmad, Zijian Wang, Feng Nan, Xiaopeng LI, Ming Tan, Baishakhi Ray, Parminder Bhatia, Xiaofei Ma, Ramesh Nallapati, Bing Xiang

Controlled text generation with hidden representation transformations*
Vaibhav Kumar, Hana Koorehdavoudi, Masud Moshtaghi, Amita Misra, Ankit Chadha, Emilio Ferrara

KILM: Knowledge injection into encoder-decoder language models
Yan XU, Mahdi Namazifar, Devamanyu Hazarika, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

KILM.png
From "KILM: Knowledge injection into encoder-decoder language models".

ReAugKD: Retrieval-augmented knowledge distillation for pre-trained language models
Jianyi Zhang, Aashiq Muhamed, Aditya Anantharaman, Guoyin Wang, Changyou Chen, Kai Zhong, Qingjun Cui, Yi Xu, Belinda Zeng, Trishul Chilimbi, Yiran Chen

Recipes for sequential pre-training of multilingual encoder and seq2seq models*
Saleh Soltan, Andy Rosenbaum, Tobias Falke, Qin Lu, Anna Rumshisky, Wael Hamza

Rethinking the role of scale for in-context learning: An interpretability-based case study at 66 billion scale
Hritik Bansal, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Saket Dingliwal, Sravan Bodapati, Katrin Kirchhoff, Dan Roth

Machine learning

Mitigating the burden of redundant datasets via batch-wise unique samples and frequency-aware losses
Donato Crisostomi, Andrea Caciolai, Alessandro Pedrani, Alessandro Manzotti, Enrico Palumbo, Kay Rottmann, Davide Bernardi

Machine translation

RAMP: Retrieval and attribute-marking enhanced prompting for attribute-controlled translation
Gabriele Sarti, Phu Mon Htut, Xing Niu, Benjamin Hsu, Anna Currey, Georgiana Dinu, Maria Nădejde

Multimodal models

Benchmarking diverse-modal entity linking with generative models*
Sijia Wang, Alexander Li, Henry Zhu, Sheng Zhang, Pramuditha Perera, Chung-Wei Hang, JIE MA, William Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Bing Xiang, Patrick Ng

Generate then select: Open-ended visual question answering guided by world knowledge*
Xingyu Fu, Sheng Zhang, Gukyeong Kwon, Pramuditha Perera, Henry Zhu, Yuhao Zhang, Alexander Hanbo Li, William Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Patrick Ng, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang

KG-FLIP: Knowledge-guided fashion-domain language-image pre-training for e-commerce
Qinjin Jia, Yang Liu, Shaoyuan Xu, Huidong Liu, Daoping Wu, Jinmiao Fu, Roland Vollgraf, Bryan Wang

Resolving ambiguities in text-to-image generative models
Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Apurv Verma, Jwala Dhamala, Varun Kumar, Qian Hu, Kai-Wei Chang, Richard Zemel, Aram Galstyan, Rahul Gupta

Translation-enhanced multilingual text-to-image generation
Yaoyiran Li, Ching-Yun (Frannie) Chang, Stephen Rawls, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen

Unsupervised melody-to-lyric generation
Yufei Tian, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Shereen Oraby, Alessandra Cervone, Chenyang Tao, Gunnar Sigurdsson, Wenbo Zhao, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang, Violet Peng

Unsupervised melody-to-lyric.png
From "Unsupervised melody-to-lyric generation".

Natural-language processing

Multi-VALUE: A framework for cross-dialectal English NLP
Caleb Ziems, William Held, Jingfeng Yang, Jwala Dhamala, Rahul Gupta, Diyi Yang

vONTSS: vMF based semi-supervised neural topic modeling with optimal transport*
Weijie Xu, Xiaoyu Jiang, Srinivasan Sengamedu, "SHS", Francis Iannacci, Jinjin Zhao

Natural-language understanding

ECG-QALM: Entity-controlled synthetic text generation using contextual Q&A for NER*
Karan Aggarwal, Henry Jin, Aitzaz Ahmad

Entity contrastive learning in a large-scale virtual assistant system
Jonathan Rubin, Jason Crowley, George Leung, Morteza Ziyadi, Maria Minakova

EPIC: Multi-perspective annotation of a corpus of irony
Simona Frenda, Alessandro Pedrani, Valerio Basile, Soda Marem Lo, Alessandra Teresa Cignarella, Raffaella Panizzon, Cristina Marco, Bianca Scarlini, Viviana Patti, Cristina Bosco, Davide Bernardi

Measuring and mitigating local instability in deep neural networks*
Arghya Datta, Subhrangshu Nandi, Jingcheng Xu, Greg Ver Steeg, He Xie, Anoop Kumar, Aram Galstyan

Reducing cohort bias in natural language understanding systems with targeted self-training scheme
Thu Le, Gabriela Cortes Hernandez, Bei Chen, Melanie Bradford

Privacy

Controlling the extraction of memorized data from large language models via prompt-tuning
Mustafa Ozdayi, Charith Peris, Jack G. M. FitzGerald, Christophe Dupuy, Jimit Majmudar, Haidar Khan, Rahil Parikh, Rahul Gupta

Query rewriting

Context-aware query rewriting for improving users’ search experience on e-commerce websites
Simiao Zuo, Qingyu Yin, Haoming Jiang, Shaohui Xi, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang, Tuo Zhao

Unified contextual query rewriting
Yingxue Zhou, Jie Hao, Mukund Rungta, Yang Liu, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Vishal Vasudevan, Kellen Gillespie, Zeynab Raeesy, Sawyer Shen, Edward Guo, Gokhan Tur

Question answering

Accurate training of web-based question answering systems with feedback from ranked users
Liang Wang, Ivano Lauriola, Alessandro Moschitti

Context-aware transformer pre-training for answer sentence selection
Luca Di Liello, Siddhant Garg, Alessandro Moschitti

Cross-Lingual Knowledge Distillation for answer sentence selection in low-resource languages*
Shivanshu Gupta, Yoshitomo Matsubara, Ankit Chadha, Alessandro Moschitti

Exploiting abstract meaning representation for open-domain question answering*
Cunxiang Wang, Zhikun Xu, Qipeng Guo, Xiangkun Hu, Xuefeng Bai, Zheng Zhang, Yue Zhang

Exploiting abstract meaning representation.png
From "Exploiting abstract meaning representation for open-domain question answering".

Hybrid hierarchical retrieval for open-domain question answering*
Manoj Ghuhan Arivazhagan, Lan Liu, Peng Qi, Xinchi Chen, William Wang, Zhiheng Huang

Learning answer generation using supervision from automatic question answering evaluators
Matteo Gabburo, Siddhant Garg, Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, Alessandro Moschitti

RobustQA: Benchmarking the robustness of domain adaptation for open-domain question answering*
Rujun Han, Peng Qi, Yuhao Zhang, Lan Liu, Juliette Burger, William Wang, Zhiheng Huang, Bing Xiang, Dan Roth

Reasoning

FolkScope: Intention knowledge graph construction for e-commerce commonsense discovery*
Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin

SCOTT: Self-consistent chain-of-thought distillation
Peifeng Wang, Zhengyang Wang, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Bing Yin, Xiang Ren

Self-learning

Constrained policy optimization for controlled self-learning in conversational AI systems
Mohammad Kachuee, Sungjin Lee

Scalable and safe remediation of defective actions in self-learning conversational systems
Sarthak Ahuja, Mohammad Kachuee, Fateme Sheikholeslami, Weiqing Liu, Jae Do

Semantic parsing

An empirical analysis of leveraging knowledge for low-resource task-oriented semantic parsing*
Mayank Kulkarni, Aoxiao Zhong, Nicolas Guenon Des Mesnards, Sahar Movaghati, Mukund Harakere, He Xie, Jianhua Lu

XSEMPLR: Cross-lingual semantic parsing in multiple natural languages and meaning representations
Yusen Zhang, Jun Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Rui Zhang

XSemPLR.png
From "XSEMPLR: Cross-lingual semantic parsing in multiple natural languages and meaning representations".

Spoken-language understanding

Regression-free model updates for spoken language understanding
Andrea Caciolai, Verena Weber, Tobias Falke, Alessandro Pedrani, Davide Bernardi

Sharing encoder representations across languages, domains and tasks in large-scale spoken language understanding
Jonathan Hueser, Judith Gaspers, Thomas Gueudre, Chandana Satya Prakash, Jin Cao, Daniil Sorokin, Quynh Do, Nicolas Anastassacos, Tobias Falke, Turan Gojayev, Mariusz Momotko, Denis Romasanta Rodriguez, Austin Doolittle, Kartik Balasubramaniam, Wael Hamza, Fabian Triefenbach, Patrick Lehnen

Toxic-language classification

QCon at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Data augmentation and model ensembling for detection of online sexism
Wes Feely, Prabhakar Gupta, Manas Mohanty, Tim Chon, Tuhin Kundu, Vijit Singh, Sandeep Atluri, Tanya Roosta, Viviane Ghaderi, Peter Schulam, Heba Elfardy

Towards building a robust toxicity predictor
Dmitriy Bespalov, Sourav Bhabesh, Yi Xiang, Yanjun (Jane) Qi

*Accepted to ACL Findings

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Applied Scientist, AWS Science of Security, AWS Provable Security
US, NY, New York
Application deadline: Nov 8, 2026 AWS Science of Security is dedicated to making AWS the best computing service in the world for customers who require advanced and rigorous solutions for security, privacy, and sovereignty. The team sits within Amazon Security and operates in a fast-growing, startup-like environment within AWS. You will participate in the design, development, evaluation, and deployment of automated reasoning solutions for verifying the correctness, security, and reliability of software systems. You’ll be applying techniques such as constraint solving, model checking, static analysis, theorem proving, and program analysis to unique applications in business and engineering. How you build and deploy automated reasoning tools and verification frameworks, plus research and implement novel approaches, will add distinct value to the business and our customers. This is work on open, hard problems: the kind where the tools you build get used to secure systems that millions of customers depend on. You will dive deep alongside our world-renowned automated reasoning scientist community, bring fresh ideas from your research experience, and see your work ship rather than sit on a shelf. This is an exceptional opportunity to join a fast moving segment of AWS and help shape the technology, product and business, with notable customer and business impact. Key job responsibilities - Solve significantly complex problems that require deep knowledge and understanding of your domain and scientific innovation - Own the design, implementation, and delivery of solutions that have a long-term quantifiable impact - Provide cross-organizational technical influence, driving effective outcomes by sharing your deep knowledge and experience - Develop fundamentally new solutions for uniquely challenging business problems A day in the life This is a unique opportunity to get in early on a fast-growing segment of AWS and help shape the technology, product and the business. You will have a chance to utilize your deep technical experience within a fast moving, start-up environment and make a meaningful business and customer impact. About the team Amazon Security values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage you to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from exploring what's next.
Principal Applied Scientist, Items and Relationships Platform
US, WA, Seattle
Interested in setting the scientific vision for how every product at Amazon is understood, identified, and connected, with the opportunity to impact every Amazon customer and every selling partner? The Items and Relationships Platform is the foundation that establishes what every product in Amazon’s catalog is and how products relate to one another. We are rebuilding the platform to establish identity and relationships from meaning and context, using multimodal large language models and generative AI. This is a foundational problem: understanding products deeply enough to identify them, relate them, and keep the catalog trustworthy as it scales to the full breadth of Amazon’s global contribution traffic. A Principal Applied Scientist on the Items and Relationships Platform owns the science direction for product identity and product relationships. It spans how contributions are resolved into a committed product identity, how products are connected into structural relationships (variations, multipacks, newer versions, lines of products, bundles), how confident those decisions are, and how their quality is measured. You will own the strategy for multimodal understanding, representation learning, relationship inference, calibration, and evaluation, so that science capability compounds across identity and relationships rather than being built one use case at a time. This role lives at the intersection of research and production. Product identity and relationships are fundamentally an entity resolution problem: deciding what is the same product, and how different products relate, across diverse sources, languages, and formats. You will make the hard modeling calls on where sameness ends and relatedness begins, how models express and calibrate confidence, and how the platform measures quality when there is no external ground truth. Successful candidates are passionate about translating ambiguous business goals into a coherent science roadmap that enables many businesses at once. You are comfortable being the final scientific arbiter on hard cross-team decisions, and working alongside top-notch applied scientists and software engineers to turn advanced research into production systems. Key job responsibilities As a Principal Applied Scientist on the Items and Relationships Platform, you will: - Own the science direction for product identity: define how products are semantically understood, resolved, and committed as coherent identities, navigating the precision/recall and friction/selection trade-offs inherent in every decision - Build representations that decide both sameness and typed relatedness, and drive relationship inference from semantic identity rather than one pipeline per relationship type - Own structural relationship science across variations, multipacks and base products, newer versions, lines of products, and bundles, and discover new relationship types from the gap between defined policy and what identity reveals - Own calibration and evaluation science: define how models emit calibrated confidence, and build the LLM judge methodology and Catalog Identity Quality metric that measure identity and relationship quality at catalog scale - Partner with Principal Engineers on cost-aware modeling (cascades, distillation, routing) and close the loop from production signals and corrections back into training - Set science direction partnering with ACCS Applied Science teams, mentoring senior and principal-track scientists, and driving the documentation and publication of scientific innovation A day in the life On a typical day, you move between setting science direction and going deep on hard problems: reviewing a multimodal identity model or a relationship inference experiment with scientists, deciding how a borderline case (a multipack, a newer version, a near-identical variant) should be modeled, and pressure-testing whether a quality gain is real by examining the judge and its calibration. You also spend time zoomed out, shaping the longer-term science roadmap, aligning with Principal Engineers and partner teams on the identity and relationship signals they consume, and mentoring scientists as they take on the ambiguous, high-impact problems that define the platform’s future. About the team The Items and Relationships Platform advances state-of-the-art GenAI to deeply understand, uniquely identify, and meaningfully connect every product at Amazon scale. We build the canonical product identity, matching, and relationship systems that power Amazon’s universal catalog: eliminating duplicates, preventing abuse, keeping product families coherent, and integrating the world’s product data to power agentic shopping and trusted discovery for customers worldwide. We solve foundational challenges including schema-agnostic multimodal understanding, relationship inference, evaluation without ground truth, and efficient inference at reduced cost.
Applied Scientist, Mobile Manipulation Robotics (I/O)
US, MA, North Reading
Amazon Robotics is transforming warehouse automation through edge AI and machine learning applied to real-world robotics challenges. We're seeking a Applied Scientist to advance our mobile manipulation capabilities by developing learning-based approaches that enable robots to navigate and manipulate objects in dynamic fulfillment environments. This role offers the opportunity to apply state-of-the-art research to production systems operating at Amazon's unprecedented scale. Key job responsibilities - Model Development and Training: Designing and implementing the model architectures, training and fine tuning the models using various datasets, and optimize the model performance through iterative experiments - Data Management: Process and prepare training data, including data governance, provenance tracking, data quality checks and creating reusable data pipelines. - Experimentation and Validation: Design and execute experiments to test model capabilities on the simulator and on the embodiment, validate performance across different scenarios, create a baseline and iteratively improve model performance. - Code Development: Write clean, maintainable, well commented and documented code, contribute to training infrastructure, create tools for model evaluation and testing, and implement necessary APIs - Research: Stay current with latest developments in foundation models and robotics, assist in literature reviews and research documentation, prepare technical reports and presentations, and contribute to research discussions and brainstorming sessions. - Collaboration: Work closely with senior scientists, engineers, and leaders across multiple teams, participate in knowledge sharing, support integration efforts with robotics hardware teams, and help document best practices and methodologies. A day in the life Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include: 1. Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage 2. Maternity and Parental Leave Options 3. Paid Time Off (PTO) 4. 401(k) Plan If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply! About the team Are you inspired by invention? Is problem solving through teamwork in your DNA? Do you like the idea of seeing how your work impacts the bigger picture? Answer yes to any of these and you’ll fit right in here at Amazon Robotics. We are a smart, collaborative team of enthusiastic doers that work passionately to apply innovative advances in robotics and software to solve real-world challenges that will transform our customers’ experiences in ways we can’t even image yet. We invent new improvements every day. We are Amazon Robotics and we will give you the tools and support you need to invent with us in ways that are rewarding, fulfilling and fun!
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