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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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Manager, Applied Science, International Seller Services
US, WA, Seattle
Are you interested in leading growth initiatives for one of Amazon’s most significant and fastest growing businesses? Selling Partners offer hundreds of millions of unique products and are a critical to delivering on our vision of offering the Earth’s largest selection and lowest prices. The Amazon Marketplace enables over 2 million third-party selling partners in eleven marketplaces to list their products for sale to Amazon customers across the world. Within our WW Marketplace business, International Seller Services (ISS) oversees the recruiting and development of Selling Partners for all of our international marketplaces (e.g. UK, Germany, Japan, Middle East etc.). ISS also enables global selling, helping Sellers in one country expand and sell internationally. Are you fascinated by the power of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLM) to transform the way we interact with technology? Are you passionate about applying advanced machine learning techniques to solve complex challenges in the e-commerce space? If so, the Central Science Team of Amazon's International Seller Services has an exciting opportunity for you as an Applied Science Manager. We are seeking an experienced science leader who is adept at a variety of skills; especially in generative AI, computer vision, and large language models that will help international sellers succeed as they sell on Amazon. The right candidate will provide science leadership, establish the right direction and vision, build team mechanisms, foster the spirit of collaboration and innovation within the org, and execute against a roadmap. This leader will provide both technical direction as well as manage a sizable team of scientists. They will need to be adept at recruiting, launching AI models into production, writing vision/direction documents, and building team mechanisms that will foster innovation and execution. Additionally, while the position is based in Seattle, this leader will interact with global leaders and teams in Europe, Japan, China, Australia, and other regions. Key job responsibilities Key job responsibilities Responsibilities include: * Drive end-to-end applied science projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, complexity. * Provide technical / science leadership related to NLP, computer vision and large language models. * Research new and innovative machine learning approaches. * Recruit high performing Applied Scientists to the team and provide mentorship. * Establish team mechanisms, including team building, planning, and document reviews. * Communicate complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, providing clear explanations and guidance on proposed solutions and their potential impact.
Senior Economist
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon.com strives to be Earth's most customer-centric company where customers can shop in our stores to find and discover anything they want to buy. We hire the world's brightest minds, offering them a fast paced, technologically sophisticated and friendly work environment. Economists in the Forecasting, Macroeconomics & Finance field document, interpret and forecast Amazon business dynamics. This track is well suited for economists adept at combining times-series statistical methods with strong economic analysis and intuition. This track could be a good fit for candidates with research experience in: macroeconometrics and/or empirical macroeconomics; international macroeconomics; time-series econometrics; forecasting; financial econometrics and/or empirical finance; and the use of micro and panel data to improve and validate traditional aggregate models. Economists at Amazon are expected to work directly with our senior management and scientists from other fields on key business problems faced across Amazon, including retail, cloud computing, third party merchants, search, Kindle, streaming video, and operations. The Forecasting, Macroeconomics & Finance field utilizes methods at the frontier of economics to develop formal models to understand the past and the present, predict the future, and identify relevant risks and opportunities. For example, we analyze the internal and external drivers of growth and profitability and how these drivers interact with the customer experience in the short, medium and long-term. We build econometric models of dynamic systems, using our world class data tools, formalizing problems using rigorous science to solve business issues and further delight customers.
Senior Economist
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon.com strives to be Earth's most customer-centric company where customers can shop in our stores to find and discover anything they want to buy. We hire the world's brightest minds, offering them a fast paced, technologically sophisticated and friendly work environment. Economists at Amazon partner closely with senior management, business stakeholders, scientist and engineers, and economist leadership to solve key business problems ranging from Amazon Web Services, Kindle, Prime, inventory planning, international retail, third party merchants, search, pricing, labor and employment planning, effective benefits (health, retirement, etc.) and beyond. Amazon Economists build econometric models using our world class data systems and apply approaches from a variety of skillsets – applied macro/time series, applied micro, econometric theory, empirical IO, empirical health, labor, public economics and related fields are all highly valued skillsets at Amazon. You will work in a fast moving environment to solve business problems as a member of either a cross-functional team embedded within a business unit or a central science and economics organization. You will be expected to develop techniques that apply econometrics to large data sets, address quantitative problems, and contribute to the design of automated systems around the company.
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