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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research areas

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The Central Learning Solutions (CLS) - Science team builds state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions for enhancing leadership and associate development within the organization. We develop technology and mechanisms for building personalized learning courses based on the profiles of different learners and asses the post-training performance curves for different learner profiles. As a Data Scientist on the team, you will be driving the data science/ML roadmap for the CLS t Science team. You will leverage your knowledge in statistics and econometrics, estimate the causal impact of training interventions, recommend the right interventions for a given learner profile, and measure the post-launch success of these interventions through A/B weblabs. These insights will help in dynamically changing the training content of Learning & Development courses and unlock opportunities to improve both training effectiveness and learner experience. You will collaborate effectively with internal stakeholders and cross-functional teams for solving business problems, create operational efficiencies, and deliver successfully against high organizational standards. Key job responsibilities - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and implementation. - Use advanced causal inference methodologies to estimate the learning curves for different learner profiles and the effectiveness of training content. - Perform statistical analysis and statistical tests including hypothesis testing and A/B testing. - Implement new statistical, machine learning, or other mathematical methodologies to solve specific business problems. - Present deep dives and analysis to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, ensure clarity, and influence the strategy of business partners. About the team We serve North America L&D orgs as the strategic thought leader, looking beyond where other teams are focused to drive transformative solutions that leverage technology and processes to improve learning outcomes and drive down the cost to serve.
US, WA, Bellevue
The Principal Applied Scientist will own the science mission for building next-generation proactive and autonomous agentic experiences across Alexa AI's Personalization, Autonomy and Proactive Intelligence organization. You will technically lead a team of applied scientists to harness state-of-the-art technologies in machine learning, natural language processing, LLM training and application, and agentic AI systems to advance the scientific frontiers of autonomous intelligence and proactive user assistance. The right candidate will be an inventor at heart, provide deep scientific leadership, establish compelling technical direction and vision, and drive ambitious research initiatives that push the boundaries of what's possible with AI agents. You will need to be adept at identifying promising research directions in agentic AI, developing novel autonomous agent solutions, and translating advanced AI research into production-ready agentic systems. You will need to be adept at influencing and collaborating with partner teams, launching AI-powered autonomous agents into production, and building team mechanisms that will foster innovation and execution in the rapidly evolving field of agentic AI. This role represents a unique opportunity to tackle fundamental challenges in how Alexa proactively understands user needs, autonomously takes actions on behalf of users, and delivers intelligent assistance through state-of-the-art agentic AI technologies. As a science leader in Alexa AI, you will shape the technical strategy for making Alexa a truly proactive and autonomous agent that anticipates user needs, takes intelligent actions, and provides seamless assistance without explicit prompting. Your team will be at the forefront of solving complex problems in agentic reasoning, multi-step task planning, autonomous decision-making, proactive intelligence, and context-aware action execution that will fundamentally transform how users interact with Alexa as an intelligent agent. The successful candidate will bring deep technical expertise in machine learning, natural language processing, and agentic AI systems, along with the leadership ability to guide talented scientists in pursuing ambitious research that advances the state of the art in autonomous agents, proactive intelligence, and AI-driven personalization. Experience with multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, goal-oriented dialogue systems, and production-scale agentic architectures is highly valued. You will lead the development of breakthrough capabilities that enable Alexa to: 1) proactively anticipate user needs through advanced predictive modeling and contextual understanding; 2) autonomously execute complex multi-step tasks with minimal user intervention; 3) reason and plan intelligently across diverse user goals and environmental contexts; 4) learn and adapt continuously from user interactions to improve agentic behaviors; 5) coordinate actions seamlessly across multiple domains and services as a unified intelligent agent. This is a unique opportunity to define the future of conversational AI agents and build technology that will impact hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Key job responsibilities Technical Leadership - Lead complex research and development projects - Partner closely with the T&C Product and Engineering leaders on the technical strategy and roadmap - Evaluate emerging technologies and methodologies - Make high-level architectural decisions Technical leadership and mentoring: - Mentor and develop technical talent - Set team project goals and metrics - Help with resource allocation and project prioritization from technical side Research & Development - Drive innovation in applied science areas - Translate research into practical business solutions - Author technical papers and patents - Collaborate with academic and industry partners About the team PAPI (Personalization Autonomy and Proactive Intelligence) aims to accelerate personalized and intuitive experiences across Amazon's customer touchpoints through automated, scalable, self-serve AI systems. We leverage customer, device, and ambient signals to deliver conversational, visual, and proactive experiences that delight customers, increase engagement, reduce defects, and enable natural interactions across Amazon touch points including Alexa, FireTV, and Mobile etc. Our systems offer personalized suggestions, comprehend customer inputs, learn from interactions, and propose appropriate actions to serve millions of customers globally.