Other Workshops and Events (2022)

Climate change is an existential threat to humanity, the proliferation of unsubstantiated claims relating to climate science is manipulating public perception, motivating the need for fact-checking in climate science. In this work, we draw on recent work that uses retrieval-augmented generation for veracity prediction and explanation generation, in framing explanation generation as a query-focused multi-document summarization task. We adapt PRIMERA to the climate science domain by adding additional global attention on claims. Through automatic evaluation and qualitative analysis, we demonstrate that our method is effective at generating explanations.

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Zhangzhou Implosives and Their Variations
Yishan Huang | Gwendolyn Hyslop

Zhangzhou Southern Min employs the airstream mechanism of glottalic ingressive as a contrastive feature in its onset system. However, their realisations are highly diverse with eleven phonetic variants that can be derived from three implosive phonemes (/ɓ, ɗ, ɠ/). The allophonic variations are regressively motivated by three driving factors comprising the nasal [Ṽ], labial-velar [u, w], and palatal [i, j] characteristics of subsequent segments. Several processes that include labialisation, nasalisation, lenition, laminalisation, dentalisation and palatalisation have been found to trigger alternation on the airstream mechanism, manner of articulation, and place of articulation of related sounds, resulting in diverse phonetic outputs of the three implosives phonemes that can be captured using phonological rules.

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Evaluating the Examiner: The Perils of Pearson Correlation for Validating Text Similarity Metrics
Gisela Vallejo | Timothy Baldwin | Lea Frermann

In recent years, researchers have developed question-answering based approaches to automatically evaluate system summaries, reporting improved validity compared to word overlap-based metrics like ROUGE, in terms of correlation with human ratings of criteria including fluency and hallucination. In this paper, we take a closer look at one particular metric, QuestEval, and ask whether: (1) it can serve as a more general metric for long document similarity assessment; and (2) a single correlation score between metric scores and human ratings, as the currently standard approach, is sufficient for metric validation. We find that correlation scores can be misleading, and that score distributions and outliers should be taken into account. With these caveats in mind, QuestEval can be a promising candidate for long document similarity assessment.

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Can Language Models Help in System Security? Investigating Log Anomaly Detection using BERT
Crispin Almodovar | Fariza Sabrina | Sarvnaz Karimi | Salahuddin Azad

The log files generated by networked computer systems contain valuable information that can be used to monitor system security and stability. Recently, techniques based on Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing have been proven effective in detecting anomalous activities from system logs. The current approaches, however, have limited practical application because they rely on log templates which cannot handle variability in log content, or they require supervised training to be effective. In this paper, a novel log anomaly detection approach named LogFiT is proposed. The LogFiT model inherits the linguistic “knowledge” encoded within a pretrained BERT-based language model and fine-tunes it towards learning the linguistic structure of system logs. The LogFiT model is trained in a self-supervised manner using normal log data only. Using masked token prediction and centroid distance minimisation as training objectives, the LogFiT model learns to recognise the linguistic patterns associated with the normal log data. During inference, a discriminator function uses the LogFiT model’s top-k token prediction accuracy and computed centroid distance to determine if the input is normal or anomaly. Experiments show that LogFiT’s F1 score and specificity exceeds that of baseline models on the HDFS dataset and comparable on the BGL dataset.

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A Semantics of Spatial Expressions for interacting with unmanned aerial vehicles
Lucas Domingos | Paulo Santos

This paper describes an investigation of establishing communication between a quadro- tor and a human by means of qualitative spatial relations using speech recognition. It is based on a system capable to receive, interpret, process, act, transmit and execute the commands given. This system is composed of a quadrotor equipped with a GPS, IMU sensors and radio communication, and a computer acting as a ground station, that is capable of understanding and interpreting the received commands and correctly provide answers according to an underlying qualitative reasoning formalism. Tests were performed, whose results show that the error rate was less than five percent for vertical and radial dimensions, otherwise, in horizontal dimension, we had an error rate of almost ten percent.

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Enhancing the DeBERTa Transformers Model for Classifying Sentences from Biomedical Abstracts
Abdul Aziz | Md. Akram Hossain | Abu Nowshed Chy

We introduce Textstar, a graph-based summarization and keyphrase extraction system that builds a document graph using only lemmatization and POS tagging. The document graph aggregates connections between lemma and sentence identifier nodes. Consecutive lemmas in each sentence, as well as consecutive sentences themselves, are connected in rings to form a ring of rings representing the document. We iteratively apply a centrality algorithm of our choice to the document graph and trim the lowest ranked nodes at each step. After the desired number of remaining sentences and lemmas is reached, we extract the sentences as the summary, and the remaining lemmas are aggregated into keyphrases using their context. Our algorithm is efficient enough to one-shot process large document graphs without any training, and empirical evaluation on several benchmarks indicates that our performance is higher than most other graph based algorithms.

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Contrastive Visual and Language Learning for Visual Relationship Detection
Thanh Tran | Maelic Neau | Paulo Santos | David Powers

Visual Relationship Detection aims to understand real-world objects’ interactions by grounding visual concepts to compositional visual relation triples, written in the form of (subject, predicate, object). Previous works have explored the use of contrastive learning to implicitly predict the predicates from the relevant image regions. However, these models often directly leverage in-distribution spatial and language co-occurrences biases during training, preventing the models from generalizing to out-of-distribution compositions. In this work, we examine whether contrastive vision and language models pre-trained on large-scale external image and text dataset can assist the detection of compositional visual relationships. To this end, we propose a semi-supervised contrastive fine-tuning approach for the visual relationship detection task. The results show that fine-tuned models that were pre-trained on larger datasets do not yield better performance when performing visual relationship detection, and larger models can yield lower performance when compared with their smaller counterparts.

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Overview of the 2022 ALTA Shared task: PIBOSO sentence classification, 10 years later
Diego Mollá

The 2022 ALTA shared task has been running annually since 2010. This year, the shared task is a re-visit of the 2012 ALTA shared task. The purpose of this task is to classify sentences of medical publications using the PIBOSO taxonomy. This is a multi-label classification task which can help medical researchers and practitioners conduct Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). In this paper we present the task, the evaluation criteria, and the results of the systems participating in the shared task.

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Estimating the Strength of Authorship Evidence with a Deep-Learning-Based Approach
Shunichi Ishihara | Satoru Tsuge | Mitsuyuki Inaba | Wataru Zaitsu

This study is the first likelihood ratio (LR)-based forensic text comparison study in which each text is mapped onto an embedding vector using RoBERTa as the pre-trained model. The scores obtained with Cosine distance and probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) were calibrated to LRs with logistic regression; the quality of the LRs was assessed by log LR cost (Cllr). Although the documents in the experiments were very short (maximum 100 words), the systems reached the Cllr values of 0.55595 and 0.71591 for the Cosine and PLDA systems, respectively. The effectiveness of deep-learning-based text representation is discussed by comparing the results of the current study to those of the previous studies of systems based on conventional feature engineering tested with longer documents.

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Automatic Classification of Evidence Based Medicine Using Transformers
Necva Bolucu | Pinar Uskaner Hepsag

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Context-Aware Sentence Classification in Evidence-Based Medicine
Biaoyan Fang | Fajri Koto

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining

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Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining
Gabriella Lapesa | Jodi Schneider | Yohan Jo | Sougata Saha

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ImageArg: A Multi-modal Tweet Dataset for Image Persuasiveness Mining
Zhexiong Liu | Meiqi Guo | Yue Dai | Diane Litman

The growing interest in developing corpora of persuasive texts has promoted applications in automated systems, e.g., debating and essay scoring systems; however, there is little prior work mining image persuasiveness from an argumentative perspective. To expand persuasiveness mining into a multi-modal realm, we present a multi-modal dataset, ImageArg, consisting of annotations of image persuasiveness in tweets. The annotations are based on a persuasion taxonomy we developed to explore image functionalities and the means of persuasion. We benchmark image persuasiveness tasks on ImageArg using widely-used multi-modal learning methods. The experimental results show that our dataset offers a useful resource for this rich and challenging topic, and there is ample room for modeling improvement.

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Data Augmentation for Improving the Prediction of Validity and Novelty of Argumentative Conclusions
Philipp Heinisch | Moritz Plenz | Juri Opitz | Anette Frank | Philipp Cimiano

We address the problem of automatically predicting the quality of a conclusion given a set of (textual) premises of an argument, focusing in particular on the task of predicting the validity and novelty of the argumentative conclusion. We propose a multi-task approach that jointly predicts the validity and novelty of the textual conclusion, relying on pre-trained language models fine-tuned on the task. As training data for this task is scarce and costly to obtain, we experimentally investigate the impact of data augmentation approaches for improving the accuracy of prediction compared to a baseline that relies on task-specific data only. We consider the generation of synthetic data as well as the integration of datasets from related argument tasks. We show that especially our synthetic data, combined with class-balancing and instance-specific learning rates, substantially improves classification results (+15.1 points in F₁-score). Using only training data retrieved from related datasets by automatically labeling them for validity and novelty, combined with synthetic data, outperforms the baseline by 11.5 points in F₁-score.

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Do Discourse Indicators Reflect the Main Arguments in Scientific Papers?
Yingqiang Gao | Nianlong Gu | Jessica Lam | Richard H.R. Hahnloser

In scientific papers, arguments are essential for explaining authors’ findings. As substrates of the reasoning process, arguments are often decorated with discourse indicators such as “which shows that” or “suggesting that”. However, it remains understudied whether discourse indicators by themselves can be used as an effective marker of the local argument components (LACs) in the body text that support the main claim in the abstract, i.e., the global argument. In this work, we investigate whether discourse indicators reflect the global premise and conclusion. We construct a set of regular expressions for over 100 word- and phrase-level discourse indicators and measure the alignment of LACs extracted by discourse indicators with the global arguments. We find a positive correlation between the alignment of local premises and local conclusions. However, compared to a simple textual intersection baseline, discourse indicators achieve lower ROUGE recall and have limited capability of extracting LACs relevant to the global argument; thus their role in scientific reasoning is less salient as expected.

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Analyzing Culture-Specific Argument Structures in Learner Essays
Wei-Fan Chen | Mei-Hua Chen | Garima Mudgal | Henning Wachsmuth

Language education has been shown to benefit from computational argumentation, for example, from methods that assess quality dimensions of language learners’ argumentative essays, such as their organization and argument strength. So far, however, little attention has been paid to cultural differences in learners’ argument structures originating from different origins and language capabilities. This paper extends prior studies of learner argumentation by analyzing differences in the argument structure of essays from culturally diverse learners. Based on the ICLE corpus containing essays written by English learners of 16 different mother tongues, we train natural language processing models to mine argumentative discourse units (ADUs) as well as to assess the essays’ quality in terms of organization and argument strength. The extracted ADUs and the predicted quality scores enable us to look into the similarities and differences of essay argumentation across different English learners. In particular, we analyze the ADUs from learners with different mother tongues, different levels of arguing proficiency, and different context cultures.

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Perturbations and Subpopulations for Testing Robustness in Token-Based Argument Unit Recognition
Jonathan Kamp | Lisa Beinborn | Antske Fokkens

Argument Unit Recognition and Classification aims at identifying argument units from text and classifying them as pro or against. One of the design choices that need to be made when developing systems for this task is what the unit of classification should be: segments of tokens or full sentences. Previous research suggests that fine-tuning language models on the token-level yields more robust results for classifying sentences compared to training on sentences directly. We reproduce the study that originally made this claim and further investigate what exactly token-based systems learned better compared to sentence-based ones. We develop systematic tests for analysing the behavioural differences between the token-based and the sentence-based system. Our results show that token-based models are generally more robust than sentence-based models both on manually perturbed examples and on specific subpopulations of the data.

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A Unified Representation and a Decoupled Deep Learning Architecture for Argumentation Mining of Students’ Persuasive Essays
Muhammad Tawsif Sazid | Robert E. Mercer

We develop a novel unified representation for the argumentation mining task facilitating the extracting from text and the labelling of the non-argumentative units and argumentation components—premises, claims, and major claims—and the argumentative relations—premise to claim or premise in a support or attack relation, and claim to major-claim in a for or against relation—in an end-to-end machine learning pipeline. This tightly integrated representation combines the component and relation identification sub-problems and enables a unitary solution for detecting argumentation structures. This new representation together with a new deep learning architecture composed of a mixed embedding method, a multi-head attention layer, two biLSTM layers, and a final linear layer obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the Persuasive Essays dataset. Also, we have introduced a decoupled solution to identify the entities and relations first, and on top of that, a second model is used to detect distance between the detected related components. An augmentation of the corpus (paragraph version) by including copies of major claims has further increased the performance.

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Overview of the 2022 Validity and Novelty Prediction Shared Task
Philipp Heinisch | Anette Frank | Juri Opitz | Moritz Plenz | Philipp Cimiano

This paper provides an overview of the Argument Validity and Novelty Prediction Shared Task that was organized as part of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining 2022). The task focused on the prediction of the validity and novelty of a conclusion given a textual premise. Validity is defined as the degree to which the conclusion is justified with respect to the given premise. Novelty defines the degree to which the conclusion contains content that is new in relation to the premise. Six groups participated in the task, submitting overall 13 system runs for the subtask of binary classification and 2 system runs for the subtask of relative classification. The results reveal that the task is challenging, with best results obtained for Validity prediction in the range of 75% F1 score, for Novelty prediction of 70% F1 score and for correctly predicting both Validity and Novelty of 45% F1 score. In this paper we summarize the task definition and dataset. We give an overview of the results obtained by the participating systems, as well as insights to be gained from the diverse contributions.

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Will It Blend? Mixing Training Paradigms & Prompting for Argument Quality Prediction
Michiel van der Meer | Myrthe Reuver | Urja Khurana | Lea Krause | Selene Baez Santamaria

This paper describes our contributions to the Shared Task of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining (2022). Our approach uses Large Language Models for the task of Argument Quality Prediction. We perform prompt engineering using GPT-3, and also investigate the training paradigms multi-task learning, contrastive learning, and intermediate-task training. We find that a mixed prediction setup outperforms single models. Prompting GPT-3 works best for predicting argument validity, and argument novelty is best estimated by a model trained using all three training paradigms.

The ArgMining 2022 Shared Task is concerned with predicting the validity and novelty of an inference for a given premise and conclusion pair. We propose two feed-forward network based models (KEViN1 and KEViN2), which combine features generated from several pretrained transformers and the WikiData knowledge graph. The transformers are used to predict entailment and semantic similarity, while WikiData is used to provide a semantic measure between concepts in the premise-conclusion pair. Our proposed models show significant improvement over RoBERTa, with KEViN1 outperforming KEViN2 and obtaining second rank on both subtasks (A and B) of the ArgMining 2022 Shared Task.

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Argument Novelty and Validity Assessment via Multitask and Transfer Learning
Milad Alshomary | Maja Stahl

An argument is a constellation of premises reasoning towards a certain conclusion. The automatic generation of conclusions is becoming a very prominent task, raising the need for automatic measures to assess the quality of these generated conclusions. The SharedTask at the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining proposes a new task to assess the novelty and validity of a conclusion given a set of premises. In this paper, we present a multitask learning approach that transfers the knowledge learned from the natural language inference task to the tasks at hand. Evaluation results indicate the importance of both knowledge transfer and joint learning, placing our approach in the fifth place with strong results compared to baselines.

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Is Your Perspective Also My Perspective? Enriching Prediction with Subjectivity
Julia Romberg

Although argumentation can be highly subjective, the common practice with supervised machine learning is to construct and learn from an aggregated ground truth formed from individual judgments by majority voting, averaging, or adjudication. This approach leads to a neglect of individual, but potentially important perspectives and in many cases cannot do justice to the subjective character of the tasks. One solution to this shortcoming are multi-perspective approaches, which have received very little attention in the field of argument mining so far. In this work we present PerspectifyMe, a method to incorporate perspectivism by enriching a task with subjectivity information from the data annotation process. We exemplify our approach with the use case of classifying argument concreteness, and provide first promising results for the recently published CIMT PartEval Argument Concreteness Corpus.

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Boundary Detection and Categorization of Argument Aspects via Supervised Learning
Mattes Ruckdeschel | Gregor Wiedemann

Aspect-based argument mining (ABAM) is the task of automatic _detection_ and _categorization_ of argument aspects, i.e. the parts of an argumentative text that contain the issue-specific key rationale for its conclusion. From empirical data, overlapping but not congruent sets of aspect categories can be derived for different topics. So far, two supervised approaches to detect aspect boundaries, and a smaller number of unsupervised clustering approaches to categorize groups of similar aspects have been proposed. With this paper, we introduce the Argument Aspect Corpus (AAC) that contains token-level annotations of aspects in 3,547 argumentative sentences from three highly debated topics. This dataset enables both the supervised learning of boundaries and categorization of argument aspects. During the design of our annotation process, we noticed that it is not clear from the outset at which contextual unit aspects should be coded. We, thus, experiment with classification at the token, chunk, and sentence level granularity. Our finding is that the chunk level provides the most useful information for applications. At the same time, it produces the best performing results in our tested supervised learning setups.

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Predicting the Presence of Reasoning Markers in Argumentative Text
Jonathan Clayton | Rob Gaizauskas

This paper proposes a novel task in Argument Mining, which we will refer to as Reasoning Marker Prediction. We reuse the popular Persuasive Essays Corpus (Stab and Gurevych, 2014). Instead of using this corpus for Argument Structure Parsing, we use a simple heuristic method to identify text spans which we can identify as reasoning markers. We propose baseline methods for predicting the presence of these reasoning markers automatically, and make a script to generate the data for the task publicly available.

The successful application of argument mining in the legal domain can dramatically impact many disciplines related to law. For this purpose, we present Demosthenes, a novel corpus for argument mining in legal documents, composed of 40 decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union on matters of fiscal state aid. The annotation specifies three hierarchical levels of information: the argumentative elements, their types, and their argument schemes. In our experimental evaluation, we address 4 different classification tasks, combining advanced language models and traditional classifiers.

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Multimodal Argument Mining: A Case Study in Political Debates
Eleonora Mancini | Federico Ruggeri | Andrea Galassi | Paolo Torroni

We propose a study on multimodal argument mining in the domain of political debates. We collate and extend existing corpora and provide an initial empirical study on multimodal architectures, with a special emphasis on input encoding methods. Our results provide interesting indications about future directions in this important domain.

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A Robustness Evaluation Framework for Argument Mining
Mehmet Sofi | Matteo Fortier | Oana Cocarascu

Standard practice for evaluating the performance of machine learning models for argument mining is to report different metrics such as accuracy or F1. However, little is usually known about the model’s stability and consistency when deployed in real-world settings. In this paper, we propose a robustness evaluation framework to guide the design of rigorous argument mining models. As part of the framework, we introduce several novel robustness tests tailored specifically to argument mining tasks. Additionally, we integrate existing robustness tests designed for other natural language processing tasks and re-purpose them for argument mining. Finally, we illustrate the utility of our framework on two widely used argument mining corpora, UKP topic-sentences and IBM Debater Evidence Sentence. We argue that our framework should be used in conjunction with standard performance evaluation techniques as a measure of model stability.

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On Selecting Training Corpora for Cross-Domain Claim Detection
Robin Schaefer | René Knaebel | Manfred Stede

Identifying claims in text is a crucial first step in argument mining. In this paper, we investigate factors for the composition of training corpora to improve cross-domain claim detection. To this end, we use four recent argumentation corpora annotated with claims and submit them to several experimental scenarios. Our results indicate that the “ideal” composition of training corpora is characterized by a large corpus size, homogeneous claim proportions, and less formal text domains.

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Entity-based Claim Representation Improves Fact-Checking of Medical Content in Tweets
Amelie Wührl | Roman Klinger

False medical information on social media poses harm to people’s health. While the need for biomedical fact-checking has been recognized in recent years, user-generated medical content has received comparably little attention. At the same time, models for other text genres might not be reusable, because the claims they have been trained with are substantially different. For instance, claims in the SciFact dataset are short and focused: “Side effects associated with antidepressants increases risk of stroke”. In contrast, social media holds naturally-occurring claims, often embedded in additional context: "‘If you take antidepressants like SSRIs, you could be at risk of a condition called serotonin syndrome’ Serotonin syndrome nearly killed me in 2010. Had symptoms of stroke and seizure.” This showcases the mismatch between real-world medical claims and the input that existing fact-checking systems expect. To make user-generated content checkable by existing models, we propose to reformulate the social-media input in such a way that the resulting claim mimics the claim characteristics in established datasets. To accomplish this, our method condenses the claim with the help of relational entity information and either compiles the claim out of an entity-relation-entity triple or extracts the shortest phrase that contains these elements. We show that the reformulated input improves the performance of various fact-checking models as opposed to checking the tweet text in its entirety.

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QualiAssistant: Extracting Qualia Structures from Texts
Manuel Biertz | Lorik Dumani | Markus Nilles | Björn Metzler | Ralf Schenkel

In this paper, we present QualiAssistant, a free and open-source system written in Java for identification and extraction of Qualia structures from any natural language texts having many application scenarios such as argument mining or creating dictionaries. It answers the call for a Qualia bootstrapping tool with a ready-to-use system that can be gradually filled by the community with patterns in multiple languages. Qualia structures express the meaning of lexical items. They describe, e.g., of what kind the item is (formal role), what it includes (constitutive role), how it is brought about (agentive role), and what it is used for (telic role). They are also valuable for various Information Retrieval and NLP tasks. Our application requires search patterns for Qualia structures consisting of POS tag sequences as well as the dataset the user wants to search for Qualias. Samples for both are provided alongside this paper. While samples are in German, QualiAssistant can process all languages for which constituency trees can be generated and patterns are available. Our provided patterns follow a high-precision low-recall design aiming to generate automatic annotations for text mining but can be exchanged easily for other purposes. Our evaluation shows that QualiAssistant is a valuable and reliable tool for finding Qualia structures in unstructured texts.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Automatic Simultaneous Translation

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Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Automatic Simultaneous Translation
Julia Ive | Ruiqing Zhang

This paper reports the results of the shared task we hosted on the Third Workshop of Automatic Simultaneous Translation (AutoSimTrans). The shared task aims to promote the development of text-to-text and speech-to-text simultaneous translation, and includes Chinese-English and English-Spanish tracks. The number of systems submitted this year has increased fourfold compared with last year. Additionally, the top 1 ranked system in the speech-to-text track is the first end-to-end submission we have received in the past three years, which has shown great potential. This paper reports the results and descriptions of the 14 participating teams, compares different evaluation metrics, and revisits the ranking method.

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Over-Generation Cannot Be Rewarded: Length-Adaptive Average Lagging for Simultaneous Speech Translation
Sara Papi | Marco Gaido | Matteo Negri | Marco Turchi

Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) systems aim at generating their output with the lowest possible latency, which is normally computed in terms of Average Lagging (AL). In this paper we highlight that, despite its widespread adoption, AL provides underestimated scores for systems that generate longer predictions compared to the corresponding references. We also show that this problem has practical relevance, as recent SimulST systems have indeed a tendency to over-generate. As a solution, we propose LAAL (Length-Adaptive Average Lagging), a modified version of the metric that takes into account the over-generation phenomenon and allows for unbiased evaluation of both under-/over-generating systems.

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System Description on Automatic Simultaneous Translation Workshop
Zecheng Li | Yue Sun | Haoze Li

This paper describes our system submitted on the third automatic simultaneous translation workshop at NAACL2022. We participate in the Chinese audio->English text direction of Chinese-to-English translation. Our speech-to-text system is a pipeline system, in which we resort to rhymological features for audio split, ASRT model for speech recoginition, STACL model for streaming text translation. To translate streaming text, we use wait-k policy trained to generate the target sentence concurrently with the source sentence, but always k words behind. We propose a competitive simultaneous translation system and rank 3rd in the audio input track. The code will release soon.

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System Description on Third Automatic Simultaneous Translation Workshop
Zhang Yiqiao

This paper shows my submission to the Third Automatic Simultaneous Translation Workshop at NAACL2022.The submission includes Chinese audio to English text task, Chinese text to English text tast, and English text to Spanish text task. For the two text-to-text tasks, I use the STACL model of PaddleNLP. As for the audio-to-text task, I first use DeepSpeech2 to translate the audio into text, then apply the STACL model to handle the text-to-text task. The submission results show that the used method can get low delay with a few training samples.

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End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Pretraining and Distillation: Huawei Noah’s System for AutoSimTranS 2022
Xingshan Zeng | Pengfei Li | Liangyou Li | Qun Liu

This paper describes the system submitted to AutoSimTrans 2022 from Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, which won the first place in the audio input track of the Chinese-English translation task. Our system is based on RealTranS, an end-to-end simultaneous speech translation model. We enhance the model with pretraining, by initializing the acoustic encoder with ASR encoder, and the semantic encoder and decoder with NMT encoder and decoder, respectively. To relieve the data scarcity, we further construct pseudo training corpus as a kind of knowledge distillation with ASR data and the pretrained NMT model. Meanwhile, we also apply several techniques to improve the robustness and domain generalizability, including punctuation removal, token-level knowledge distillation and multi-domain finetuning. Experiments show that our system significantly outperforms the baselines at all latency and also verify the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

This system paper describes the BIT-Xiaomi simultaneous translation system for Autosimtrans 2022 simultaneous translation challenge. We participated in three tracks: the Zh-En text-to-text track, the Zh-En audio-to-text track and the En-Es test-to-text track. In our system, wait-k is employed to train prefix-to-prefix translation models. We integrate streaming chunking to detect boundaries as the source streaming read in. We further improve our system with data selection, data-augmentation and R-drop training methods. Results show that our wait-k implementation outperforms organizer’s baseline by 8 BLEU score at most, and our proposed streaming chunking method further improves about 2 BLEU in low latency regime.

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USST’s System for AutoSimTrans 2022
Zhu Hui | Yu Jun

This paper describes our submitted text-to-text Simultaneous translation (ST) system, which won the second place in the Chinese→English streaming translation task of AutoSimTrans 2022. Our baseline system is a BPE-based Transformer model trained with the PaddlePaddle framework. In our experiments, we employ data synthesis and ensemble approaches to enhance the base model. In order to bridge the gap between general domain and spoken domain, we select in-domain data from general corpus and mixed then with spoken corpus for mixed fine tuning. Finally, we adopt fixed wait-k policy to transfer our full-sentence translation model to simultaneous translation model. Experiments on the development data show that our system outperforms than the baseline system.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2022)

Recent advances in natural language processing and transformer-based models have made it easier to implement accurate, automated English speech assessments. Yet, without careful examination, applications of these models may exacerbate social prejudices based on gender and race. This study addresses the need to examine potential biases of transformer-based models in the context of automated English speech assessment. For this purpose, we developed a BERT-based automated speech assessment system and investigated gender and racial bias of examinees’ automated scores. Gender and racial bias was measured by examining differential item functioning (DIF) using an item response theory framework. Preliminary results, which focused on a single verbal-response item, showed no statistically significant DIF based on gender or race for automated scores.

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Automatic scoring of short answers using justification cues estimated by BERT
Shunya Takano | Osamu Ichikawa

Automated scoring technology for short-answer questions has been attracting attention to improve the fairness of scoring and reduce the burden on the scorer. In general, a large amount of data is required to train an automated scoring model. The training data consists of the answer texts and the scoring data assigned to them. It may also include annotations indicating key word sequences. These data must be prepared manually, which is costly. Many previous studies have created models with large amounts of training data specific to each question. This paper aims to achieve equivalent performance with less training data by utilizing a BERT model that has been pre-trained on a large amount of general text data not necessarily related to short answer questions. On the RIKEN dataset, the proposed method reduces the training data from the 800 data required in the past to about 400 data, and still achieves scoring accuracy comparable to that of humans.

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Mitigating Learnerese Effects for CEFR Classification
Rricha Jalota | Peter Bourgonje | Jan Van Sas | Huiyan Huang

The role of an author’s L1 in SLA can be challenging for automated CEFR classification, in that texts from different L1 groups may be too heterogeneous to combine them as training data. We experiment with recent debiasing approaches by attempting to devoid textual representations of L1 features. This results in a more homogeneous group when aggregating CEFR-annotated texts from different L1 groups, leading to better classification performance. Using iterative null-space projection, we marginally improve classification performance for a linear classifier by 1 point. An MLP (e.g. non-linear) classifier remains unaffected by this procedure. We discuss possible directions of future work to attempt to increase this performance gain.

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Automatically Detecting Reduced-formed English Pronunciations by Using Deep Learning
Lei Chen | Chenglin Jiang | Yiwei Gu | Yang Liu | Jiahong Yuan

Reduced form pronunciations are widely used by native English speakers, especially in casual conversations. Second language (L2) learners have difficulty in processing reduced form pronunciations in listening comprehension and face challenges in production too. Meanwhile, training applications dedicated to reduced forms are still few. To solve this issue, we report on our first effort of using deep learning to evaluate L2 learners’ reduced form pronunciations. Compared with a baseline solution that uses an ASR to determine regular or reduced-formed pronunciations, a classifier that learns representative features via a convolution neural network (CNN) on low-level acoustic features, yields higher detection performance. F-1 metric has been increased from 0.690 to 0.757 on the reduction task. Furthermore, adding word entities to compute attention weights to better adjust the features learned by the CNN model helps increasing F-1 to 0.763.

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A Baseline Readability Model for Cebuano
Joseph Marvin Imperial | Lloyd Lois Antonie Reyes | Michael Antonio Ibanez | Ranz Sapinit | Mohammed Hussien

In this study, we developed the first baseline readability model for the Cebuano language. Cebuano is the second most-used native language in the Philippines with about 27.5 million speakers. As the baseline, we extracted traditional or surface-based features, syllable patterns based from Cebuano’s documented orthography, and neural embeddings from the multilingual BERT model. Results show that the use of the first two handcrafted linguistic features obtained the best performance trained on an optimized Random Forest model with approximately 87% across all metrics. The feature sets and algorithm used also is similar to previous results in readability assessment for the Filipino language—showing potential of crosslingual application. To encourage more work for readability assessment in Philippine languages such as Cebuano, we open-sourced both code and data.

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Generation of Synthetic Error Data of Verb Order Errors for Swedish
Judit Casademont Moner | Elena Volodina

We report on our work-in-progress to generate a synthetic error dataset for Swedish by replicating errors observed in the authentic error annotated dataset. We analyze a small subset of authentic errors, capture regular patterns based on parts of speech, and design a set of rules to corrupt new data. We explore the approach and identify its capabilities, advantages and limitations as a way to enrich the existing collection of error-annotated data. This work focuses on word order errors, specifically those involving the placement of finite verbs in a sentence.

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A Dependency Treebank of Spoken Second Language English
Kristopher Kyle | Masaki Eguchi | Aaron Miller | Theodore Sither

In this paper, we introduce a dependency treebank of spoken second language (L2) English that is annotated with part of speech (Penn POS) tags and syntactic dependencies (Universal Dependencies). We then evaluate the degree to which the use of this treebank as training data affects POS and UD annotation accuracy for L1 web texts, L2 written texts, and L2 spoken texts as compared to models trained on L1 texts only.

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Starting from “Zero”: An Incremental Zero-shot Learning Approach for Assessing Peer Feedback Comments
Qinjin Jia | Yupeng Cao | Edward Gehringer

Peer assessment is an effective and efficient pedagogical strategy for delivering feedback to learners. Asking students to provide quality feedback, which contains suggestions and mentions problems, can promote metacognition by reviewers and better assist reviewees in revising their work. Thus, various supervised machine learning algorithms have been proposed to detect quality feedback. However, all these powerful algorithms have the same Achilles’ heel: the reliance on sufficient historical data. In other words, collecting adequate peer feedback for training a supervised algorithm can take several semesters before the model can be deployed to a new class. In this paper, we present a new paradigm, called incremental zero-shot learning (IZSL), to tackle the problem of lacking sufficient historical data. Our results show that the method can achieve acceptable “cold-start” performance without needing any domain data, and it outperforms BERT when trained on the same data collected incrementally.

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On Assessing and Developing Spoken ’Grammatical Error Correction’ Systems
Yiting Lu | Stefano Bannò | Mark Gales

Spoken ‘grammatical error correction’ (SGEC) is an important process to provide feedback for second language learning. Due to a lack of end-to-end training data, SGEC is often implemented as a cascaded, modular system, consisting of speech recognition, disfluency removal, and grammatical error correction (GEC). This cascaded structure enables efficient use of training data for each module. It is, however, difficult to compare and evaluate the performance of individual modules as preceeding modules may introduce errors. For example the GEC module input depends on the output of non-native speech recognition and disfluency detection, both challenging tasks for learner data. This paper focuses on the assessment and development of SGEC systems. We first discuss metrics for evaluating SGEC, both individual modules and the overall system. The system-level metrics enable tuning for optimal system performance. A known issue in cascaded systems is error propagation between modules. To mitigate this problem semi-supervised approaches and self-distillation are investigated. Lastly, when SGEC system gets deployed it is important to give accurate feedback to users. Thus, we apply filtering to remove edits with low-confidence, aiming to improve overall feedback precision. The performance metrics are examined on a Linguaskill multi-level data set, which includes the original non-native speech, manual transcriptions and reference grammatical error corrections, to enable system analysis and development.

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Automatic True/False Question Generation for Educational Purpose
Bowei Zou | Pengfei Li | Liangming Pan | Ai Ti Aw

In field of teaching, true/false questioning is an important educational method for assessing students’ general understanding of learning materials. Manually creating such questions requires extensive human effort and expert knowledge. Question Generation (QG) technique offers the possibility to automatically generate a large number of questions. However, there is limited work on automatic true/false question generation due to the lack of training data and difficulty finding question-worthy content. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised True/False Question Generation approach (TF-QG) that automatically generates true/false questions from a given passage for reading comprehension test. TF-QG consists of a template-based framework that aims to test the specific knowledge in the passage by leveraging various NLP techniques, and a generative framework to generate more flexible and complicated questions by using a novel masking-and-infilling strategy. Human evaluation shows that our approach can generate high-quality and valuable true/false questions. In addition, simulated testing on the generated questions challenges the state-of-the-art inference models from NLI, QA, and fact verification tasks.

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Fine-tuning Transformers with Additional Context to Classify Discursive Moves in Mathematics Classrooms
Abhijit Suresh | Jennifer Jacobs | Margaret Perkoff | James H. Martin | Tamara Sumner

“Talk moves” are specific discursive strategies used by teachers and students to facilitate conversations in which students share their thinking, and actively consider the ideas of others, and engage in rich discussions. Experts in instructional practices often rely on cues to identify and document these strategies, for example by annotating classroom transcripts. Prior efforts to develop automated systems to classify teacher talk moves using transformers achieved a performance of 76.32% F1. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using enriched contextual cues to improve model performance. We applied state-of-the-art deep learning approaches for Natural Language Processing (NLP), including Robustly optimized bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (Roberta) with a special input representation that supports previous and subsequent utterances as context for talk moves classification. We worked with the publically available TalkMoves dataset, which contains utterances sourced from real-world classroom sessions (human- transcribed and annotated). Through a series of experimentations, we found that a combination of previous and subsequent utterances improved the transformers’ ability to differentiate talk moves (by 2.6% F1). These results constitute a new state of the art over previously published results and provide actionable insights to those in the broader NLP community who are working to develop similar transformer-based classification models.

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Cross-corpora experiments of automatic proficiency assessment and error detection for spoken English
Stefano Bannò | Marco Matassoni

The growing demand for learning English as a second language has led to an increasing interest in automatic approaches for assessing spoken language proficiency. One of the most significant challenges in this field is the lack of publicly available annotated spoken data. Another common issue is the lack of consistency and coherence in human assessment. To tackle both problems, in this paper we address the task of automatically predicting the scores of spoken test responses of English-as-a-second-language learners by training neural models on written data and using the presence of grammatical errors as a feature, as they can be considered consistent indicators of proficiency through their distribution and frequency. Specifically, we train a feature extractor on EFCAMDAT, a large written corpus containing error annotations and proficiency levels assigned by human experts, in order to extract information related to grammatical errors and, in turn, we use the resulting model for inference on the CLC-FCE corpus, on the ICNALE corpus, and on the spoken section of the TLT-school corpus, a collection of proficiency tests taken by Italian students. The work investigates the impact of the feature extractor on spoken proficiency assessment as well as the written-to-spoken approach. We find that our error-based approach can be beneficial for assessing spoken proficiency. The results obtained on the considered datasets are discussed and evaluated with appropriate metrics.

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Activity focused Speech Recognition of Preschool Children in Early Childhood Classrooms
Satwik Dutta | Dwight Irvin | Jay Buzhardt | John H.L. Hansen

A supportive environment is vital for overall cognitive development in children. Challenges with direct observation and limitations of access to data driven approaches often hinder teachers or practitioners in early childhood research to modify or enhance classroom structures. Deploying sensor based tools in naturalistic preschool classrooms will thereby help teachers/practitioners to make informed decisions and better support student learning needs. In this study, two elements of eco-behavioral assessment: conversational speech and real-time location are fused together. While various challenges remain in developing Automatic Speech Recognition systems for spontaneous preschool children speech, efforts are made to develop a hybrid ASR engine reporting an effective Word-Error-Rate of 40%. The ASR engine further supports recognition of spoken words, WH-words, and verbs in various activity learning zones in a naturalistic preschool classroom scenario. Activity areas represent various locations within the physical ecology of an early childhood setting, each of which is suited for knowledge and skill enhancement in young children. Capturing children’s communication engagement in such areas could help teachers/practitioners fine-tune their daily activities, without the need for direct observation. This investigation provides evidence of the use of speech technology in educational settings to better support such early childhood intervention.

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Structural information in mathematical formulas for exercise difficulty prediction: a comparison of NLP representations
Ekaterina Loginova | Dries Benoit

To tailor a learning system to the student’s level and needs, we must consider the characteristics of the learning content, such as its difficulty. While natural language processing allows us to represent text efficiently, the meaningful representation of mathematical formulas in an educational context is still understudied. This paper adopts structural embeddings as a possible way to bridge this gap. Our experiments validate the approach using publicly available datasets to show that incorporating syntactic information can improve performance in predicting the exercise difficulty.

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The Specificity and Helpfulness of Peer-to-Peer Feedback in Higher Education
Roman Rietsche | Andrew Caines | Cornelius Schramm | Dominik Pfütze | Paula Buttery

With the growth of online learning through MOOCs and other educational applications, it has become increasingly difficult for course providers to offer personalized feedback to students. Therefore asking students to provide feedback to each other has become one way to support learning. This peer-to-peer feedback has become increasingly important whether in MOOCs to provide feedback to thousands of students or in large-scale classes at universities. One of the challenges when allowing peer-to-peer feedback is that the feedback should be perceived as helpful, and an import factor determining helpfulness is how specific the feedback is. However, in classes including thousands of students, instructors do not have the resources to check the specificity of every piece of feedback between students. Therefore, we present an automatic classification model to measure sentence specificity in written feedback. The model was trained and tested on student feedback texts written in German where sentences have been labelled as general or specific. We find that we can automatically classify the sentences with an accuracy of 76.7% using a conventional feature-based approach, whereas transfer learning with BERT for German gives a classification accuracy of 81.1%. However, the feature-based approach comes with lower computational costs and preserves human interpretability of the coefficients. In addition we show that specificity of sentences in feedback texts has a weak positive correlation with perceptions of helpfulness. This indicates that specificity is one of the ingredients of good feedback, and invites further investigation.

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Similarity-Based Content Scoring - How to Make S-BERT Keep Up With BERT
Marie Bexte | Andrea Horbach | Torsten Zesch

The dominating paradigm for content scoring is to learn an instance-based model, i.e. to use lexical features derived from the learner answers themselves. An alternative approach that receives much less attention is however to learn a similarity-based model. We introduce an architecture that efficiently learns a similarity model and find that results on the standard ASAP dataset are on par with a BERT-based classification approach.

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Don’t Drop the Topic - The Role of the Prompt in Argument Identification in Student Writing
Yuning Ding | Marie Bexte | Andrea Horbach

In this paper, we explore the role of topic information in student essays from an argument mining perspective. We cluster a recently released corpus through topic modeling into prompts and train argument identification models on different data settings. Results show that, given the same amount of training data, prompt-specific training performs better than cross-prompt training. However, the advantage can be overcome by introducing large amounts of cross-prompt training data.

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ALEN App: Argumentative Writing Support To Foster English Language Learning
Thiemo Wambsganss | Andrew Caines | Paula Buttery

This paper introduces a novel tool to support and engage English language learners with feedback on the quality of their argument structures. We present an approach which automatically detects claim-premise structures and provides visual feedback to the learner to prompt them to repair any broken argumentation structures. To investigate, if our persuasive feedback on language learners’ essay writing tasks engages and supports them in learning better English language, we designed the ALEN app (Argumentation for Learning English). We leverage an argumentation mining model trained on texts written by students and embed it in a writing support tool which provides students with feedback in their essay writing process. We evaluated our tool in two field-studies with a total of 28 students from a German high school to investigate the effects of adaptive argumentation feedback on their learning of English. The quantitative results suggest that using the ALEN app leads to a high self-efficacy, ease-of-use, intention to use and perceived usefulness for students in their English language learning process. Moreover, the qualitative answers indicate the potential benefits of combining grammar feedback with discourse level argumentation mining.

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Assessing sentence readability for German language learners with broad linguistic modeling or readability formulas: When do linguistic insights make a difference?
Zarah Weiss | Detmar Meurers

We present a new state-of-the-art sentence-wise readability assessment model for German L2 readers. We build a linguistically broadly informed machine learning model and compare its performance against four commonly used readability formulas. To understand when the linguistic insights used to inform our model make a difference for readability assessment and when simple readability formulas suffice, we compare their performance based on two common automatic readability assessment tasks: predictive regression and sentence pair ranking. We find that leveraging linguistic insights yields top performances across tasks, but that for the identification of simplified sentences also readability formulas – which are easier to compute and more accessible – can be sufficiently precise. Linguistically informed modeling, however, is the only viable option for high quality outcomes in fine-grained prediction tasks. We then explore the sentence-wise readability profile of leveled texts written for language learners at a beginning, intermediate, and advanced level of German to showcase the valuable insights that sentence-wise readability assessment can have for the adaptation of learning materials and better understand how sentences’ individual readability contributes to larger texts’ overall readability.

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Parametrizable exercise generation from authentic texts: Effectively targeting the language means on the curriculum
Tanja Heck | Detmar Meurers

We present a parametrizable approach to exercise generation from authentic texts that addresses the need for digital materials designed to practice the language means on the curriculum in a real-life school setting. The tool builds on a language-aware searchengine that helps identify attractive texts rich in the language means to be practiced. Making use of state-of-the-art NLP, the relevant learning targets are identified and transformed intoexercise items embedded in the original context. While the language-aware search engine ensures that these contexts match the learner‘s interests based on the search term used, and the linguistic parametrization of the system then reranks the results to prioritize texts that richly represent the learning targets, for theexercise generation to proceed on this basis, an interactive configuration panel allows users to adjust exercise complexity through a range of parameters specifying both properties of thesource sentences and of the exercises. An evaluation of exercises generated from web documents for a representative sample of language means selected from the English curriculum of 7th grade in German secondary school showed that the ombination of language-aware search and exercise generationsuccessfully facilitates the process of generating exercises from authentic texts that support practice of the pedagogical targets.

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Selecting Context Clozes for Lightweight Reading Compliance
Greg Keim | Michael Littman

We explore a novel approach to reading compliance, leveraging large language models to select inline challenges that discourage skipping during reading. This lightweight ‘testing’ is accomplished through automatically identified context clozes where the reader must supply a missing word that would be hard to guess if earlier material was skipped. Clozes are selected by scoring each word by the contrast between its likelihood with and without prior sentences as context, preferring to leave gaps where this contrast is high. We report results of an initial human-participant test that indicates this method can find clozes that have this property.

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‘Meet me at the ribary’ – Acceptability of spelling variants in free-text answers to listening comprehension prompts
Ronja Laarmann-Quante | Leska Schwarz | Andrea Horbach | Torsten Zesch

When listening comprehension is tested as a free-text production task, a challenge for scoring the answers is the resulting wide range of spelling variants. When judging whether a variant is acceptable or not, human raters perform a complex holistic decision. In this paper, we present a corpus study in which we analyze human acceptability decisions in a high stakes test for German. We show that for human experts, spelling variants are harder to score consistently than other answer variants. Furthermore, we examine how the decision can be operationalized using features that could be applied by an automatic scoring system. We show that simple measures like edit distance and phonetic similarity between a given answer and the target answer can model the human acceptability decisions with the same inter-annotator agreement as humans, and discuss implications of the remaining inconsistencies.

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Educational Tools for Mapuzugun
Cristian Ahumada | Claudio Gutierrez | Antonios Anastasopoulos

Mapuzugun is the language of the Mapuche people. Due to political and historical reasons, its number of speakers has decreased and the language has been excluded from the educational system in Chile and Argentina. For this reason, it is very important to support the revitalization of the Mapuzugun in all spaces and media of society. In this work we present a tool towards supporting educational activities of Mapuzugun, tailored to the characteristics of the language. The tool consists of three parts: design and development of an orthography detector and converter; a morphological analyzer; and an informal translator. We also present a case study with Mapuzugun students showing promising results. Short abstract in Mapuzugun: Tüfachi küzaw pegelfi kiñe zugun küzawpeyüm kelluaetew pu mapuzugun chillkatufe kimal kizu tañi zugun.

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An Evaluation of Binary Comparative Lexical Complexity Models
Kai North | Marcos Zampieri | Matthew Shardlow

Identifying complex words in texts is an important first step in text simplification (TS) systems. In this paper, we investigate the performance of binary comparative Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP) models applied to a popular benchmark dataset — the CompLex 2.0 dataset used in SemEval-2021 Task 1. With the data from CompLex 2.0, we create a new dataset contain 1,940 sentences referred to as CompLex-BC. Using CompLex-BC, we train multiple models to differentiate which of two target words is more or less complex in the same sentence. A linear SVM model achieved the best performance in our experiments with an F1-score of 0.86.

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Toward Automatic Discourse Parsing of Student Writing Motivated by Neural Interpretation
James Fiacco | Shiyan Jiang | David Adamson | Carolyn Rosé

Providing effective automatic essay feedback is necessary for offering writing instruction at a massive scale. In particular, feedback for promoting coherent flow of ideas in essays is critical. In this paper we propose a state-of-the-art method for automated analysis of structure and flow of writing, referred to as Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsing. In so doing, we lay a foundation for a generalizable approach to automated writing feedback related to structure and flow. We address challenges in automated rhetorical analysis when applied to student writing and evaluate our novel RST parser model on both a recent student writing dataset and a standard benchmark RST parsing dataset.

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Educational Multi-Question Generation for Reading Comprehension
Manav Rathod | Tony Tu | Katherine Stasaski

Automated question generation has made great advances with the help of large NLP generation models. However, typically only one question is generated for each intended answer. We propose a new task, Multi-Question Generation, aimed at generating multiple semantically similar but lexically diverse questions assessing the same concept. We develop an evaluation framework based on desirable qualities of the resulting questions. Results comparing multiple question generation approaches in the two-question generation condition show a trade-off between question answerability and lexical diversity between the two questions. We also report preliminary results from sampling multiple questions from our model, to explore generating more than two questions. Our task can be used to further explore the educational impact of showing multiple distinct question wordings to students.

Responsive teaching is a highly effective strategy that promotes student learning. In math classrooms, teachers might funnel students towards a normative answer or focus students to reflect on their own thinking depending their understanding of math concepts. When teachers focus, they treat students’ contributions as resources for collective sensemaking, and thereby significantly improve students’ achievement and confidence in mathematics. We propose the task of computationally detecting funneling and focusing questions in classroom discourse. We do so by creating and releasing an annotated dataset of 2,348 teacher utterances labeled for funneling and focusing questions, or neither. We introduce supervised and unsupervised approaches to differentiating these questions. Our best model, a supervised RoBERTa model fine-tuned on our dataset, has a strong linear correlation of .76 with human expert labels and with positive educational outcomes, including math instruction quality and student achievement, showing the model’s potential for use in automated teacher feedback tools. Our unsupervised measures show significant but weaker correlations with human labels and outcomes, and they highlight interesting linguistic patterns of funneling and focusing questions. The high performance of the supervised measure indicates its promise for supporting teachers in their instruction.

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Towards an open-domain chatbot for language practice
Gladys Tyen | Mark Brenchley | Andrew Caines | Paula Buttery

State-of-the-art chatbots for English are now able to hold conversations on virtually any topic (e.g. Adiwardana et al., 2020; Roller et al., 2021). However, existing dialogue systems in the language learning domain still use hand-crafted rules and pattern matching, and are much more limited in scope. In this paper, we make an initial foray into adapting open-domain dialogue generation for second language learning. We propose and implement decoding strategies that can adjust the difficulty level of the chatbot according to the learner’s needs, without requiring further training of the chatbot. These strategies are then evaluated using judgements from human examiners trained in language education. Our results show that re-ranking candidate outputs is a particularly effective strategy, and performance can be further improved by adding sub-token penalties and filtering.

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have greatly helped educational applications, for both teachers and students. In higher education, there is great potential to use NLP tools for advancing pedagogical research. In this paper, we focus on how NLP can help understand student experiences in engineering, thus facilitating engineering educators to carry out large scale analysis that is helpful for re-designing the curriculum. Here, we introduce a new task we call response construct tagging (RCT), in which student responses to tailored survey questions are automatically tagged for six constructs measuring transformative experiences and engineering identity of students. We experiment with state-of-the-art classification models for this task and investigate the effects of different sources of additional information. Our best model achieves an F1 score of 48. We further investigate multi-task training on the related task of sentiment classification, which improves our model’s performance to 55 F1. Finally, we provide a detailed qualitative analysis of model performance.

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Towards Automatic Short Answer Assessment for Finnish as a Paraphrase Retrieval Task
Li-Hsin Chang | Jenna Kanerva | Filip Ginter

Automatic grouping of textual answers has the potential of allowing batch grading, but is challenging because the answers, especially longer essays, have many claims. To explore the feasibility of grouping together answers based on their semantic meaning, this paper investigates the grouping of short textual answers, proxies of single claims. This is approached as a paraphrase identification task, where neural and non-neural sentence embeddings and a paraphrase identification model are tested. These methods are evaluated on a dataset consisting of over 4000 short textual answers from various disciplines. The results map out the suitable question types for the paraphrase identification model and those for the neural and non-neural methods.

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Incremental Disfluency Detection for Spoken Learner English
Lucy Skidmore | Roger Moore

Incremental disfluency detection provides a framework for computing communicative meaning from hesitations, repetitions and false starts commonly found in speech. One application of this area of research is in dialogue-based computer-assisted language learning (CALL), where detecting learners’ production issues word-by-word can facilitate timely and pedagogically driven responses from an automated system. Existing research on disfluency detection in learner speech focuses on disfluency removal for subsequent downstream tasks, processing whole utterances non-incrementally. This paper instead explores the application of laughter as a feature for incremental disfluency detection and shows that when combined with silence, these features reduce the impact of learner errors on model precision as well as lead to an overall improvement of model performance. This work adds to the growing body of research incorporating laughter as a feature for dialogue processing tasks and provides further support for the application of multimodality in dialogue-based CALL systems.

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bib (full) Proceedings of BigScience Episode #5 -- Workshop on Challenges & Perspectives in Creating Large Language Models

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Proceedings of BigScience Episode #5 -- Workshop on Challenges & Perspectives in Creating Large Language Models
Angela Fan | Suzana Ilic | Thomas Wolf | Matthias Gallé

Pretrained language models (PTLMs) are typically learned over a large, static corpus and further fine-tuned for various downstream tasks. However, when deployed in the real world, a PTLM-based model must deal with data distributions that deviates from what the PTLM was initially trained on. In this paper, we study a lifelong language model pretraining challenge where a PTLM is continually updated so as to adapt to emerging data. Over a domain-incremental research paper stream and a chronologically-ordered tweet stream, we incrementally pretrain a PTLM with different continual learning algorithms, and keep track of the downstream task performance (after fine-tuning). We evaluate PTLM’s ability to adapt to new corpora while retaining learned knowledge in earlier corpora. Our experiments show distillation-based approaches to be most effective in retaining downstream performance in earlier domains. The algorithms also improve knowledge transfer, allowing models to achieve better downstream performance over latest data, and improve temporal generalization when distribution gaps exist between training and evaluation because of time. We believe our problem formulation, methods, and analysis will inspire future studies towards continual pretraining of language models.

This papers aims at improving spoken language modeling (LM) using very large amount of automatically transcribed speech. We leverage the INA (French National Audiovisual Institute) collection and obtain 19GB of text after applying ASR on 350,000 hours of diverse TV shows. From this, spoken language models are trained either by fine-tuning an existing LM (FlauBERT) or through training a LM from scratch. The new models (FlauBERT-Oral) will be shared with the community and are evaluated not only in terms of word prediction accuracy but also for two downstream tasks : classification of TV shows and syntactic parsing of speech. Experimental results show that FlauBERT-Oral is better than its initial FlauBERT version demonstrating that, despite its inherent noisy nature, ASR-Generated text can be useful to improve spoken language modeling.

Evaluating bias, fairness, and social impact in monolingual language models is a difficult task. This challenge is further compounded when language modeling occurs in a multilingual context. Considering the implication of evaluation biases for large multilingual language models, we situate the discussion of bias evaluation within a wider context of social scientific research with computational work. We highlight three dimensions of developing multilingual bias evaluation frameworks: (1) increasing transparency through documentation, (2) expanding targets of bias beyond gender, and (3) addressing cultural differences that exist between languages. We further discuss the power dynamics and consequences of training large language models and recommend that researchers remain cognizant of the ramifications of developing such technologies.

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Diverse Lottery Tickets Boost Ensemble from a Single Pretrained Model
Sosuke Kobayashi | Shun Kiyono | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui

Ensembling is a popular method used to improve performance as a last resort. However, ensembling multiple models finetuned from a single pretrained model has been not very effective; this could be due to the lack of diversity among ensemble members. This paper proposes Multi-Ticket Ensemble, which finetunes different subnetworks of a single pretrained model and ensembles them. We empirically demonstrated that winning-ticket subnetworks produced more diverse predictions than dense networks and their ensemble outperformed the standard ensemble in some tasks when accurate lottery tickets are found on the tasks.

An extractive rationale explains a language model’s (LM’s) prediction on a given task instance by highlighting the text inputs that most influenced the prediction. Ideally, rationale extraction should be faithful (reflective of LM’s actual behavior) and plausible (convincing to humans), without compromising the LM’s (i.e., task model’s) task performance. Although attribution algorithms and select-predict pipelines are commonly used in rationale extraction, they both rely on certain heuristics that hinder them from satisfying all three desiderata. In light of this, we propose UNIREX, a flexible learning framework which generalizes rationale extractor optimization as follows: (1) specify architecture for a learned rationale extractor; (2) select explainability objectives (i.e., faithfulness and plausibility criteria); and (3) jointly the train task model and rationale extractor on the task using selected objectives. UNIREX enables replacing prior works’ heuristic design choices with a generic learned rationale extractor in (1) and optimizing it for all three desiderata in (2)-(3). To facilitate comparison between methods w.r.t. multiple desiderata, we introduce the Normalized Relative Gain (NRG) metric. Across five English text classification datasets, our best UNIREX configuration outperforms the strongest baselines by an average of 32.9% NRG. Plus, we find that UNIREX-trained rationale extractors’ faithfulness can even generalize to unseen datasets and tasks.

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Pipelines for Social Bias Testing of Large Language Models
Debora Nozza | Federico Bianchi | Dirk Hovy

The maturity level of language models is now at a stage in which many companies rely on them to solve various tasks. However, while research has shown how biased and harmful these models are, systematic ways of integrating social bias tests into development pipelines are still lacking. This short paper suggests how to use these verification techniques in development pipelines. We take inspiration from software testing and suggest addressing social bias evaluation as software testing. We hope to open a discussion on the best methodologies to handle social bias testing in language models.

In this work, we explore whether the recently demonstrated zero-shot abilities of the T0 model extend to Named Entity Recognition for out-of-distribution languages and time periods. Using a historical newspaper corpus in 3 languages as test-bed, we use prompts to extract possible named entities. Our results show that a naive approach for prompt-based zero-shot multilingual Named Entity Recognition is error-prone, but highlights the potential of such an approach for historical languages lacking labeled datasets. Moreover, we also find that T0-like models can be probed to predict the publication date and language of a document, which could be very relevant for the study of historical texts.

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A Holistic Assessment of the Carbon Footprint of Noor, a Very Large Arabic Language Model
Imad Lakim | Ebtesam Almazrouei | Ibrahim Abualhaol | Merouane Debbah | Julien Launay

As ever larger language models grow more ubiquitous, it is crucial to consider their environmental impact. Characterised by extreme size and resource use, recent generations of models have been criticised for their voracious appetite for compute, and thus significant carbon footprint. Although reporting of carbon impact has grown more common in machine learning papers, this reporting is usually limited to compute resources used strictly for training. In this work, we propose a holistic assessment of the footprint of an extreme-scale language model, Noor. Noor is an ongoing project aiming to develop the largest multi-task Arabic language models–with up to 13B parameters–leveraging zero-shot generalisation to enable a wide range of downstream tasks via natural language instructions. We assess the total carbon bill of the entire project: starting with data collection and storage costs, including research and development budgets, pretraining costs, future serving estimates, and other exogenous costs necessary for this international cooperation. Notably, we find that inference costs and exogenous factors can have a significant impact on total budget. Finally, we discuss pathways to reduce the carbon footprint of extreme-scale models.

We introduce GPT-NeoX-20B, a 20 billion parameter autoregressive language model trained on the Pile, whose weights will be made freely and openly available to the public through a permissive license. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest dense autoregressive model that has publicly available weights at the time of submission. In this work, we describe GPT-NeoX-20B’s architecture and training, and evaluate its performance. We open-source the training and evaluation code, as well as the model weights, at https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neox.

Large-scale language modeling and natural language prompting have demonstrated exciting capabilities for few and zero shot learning in NLP. However, translating these successes to specialized domains such as biomedicine remains challenging, due in part to biomedical NLP’s significant dataset debt – the technical costs associated with data that are not consistently documented or easily incorporated into popular machine learning frameworks at scale. To assess this debt, we crowdsourced curation of datasheets for 167 biomedical datasets. We find that only 13% of datasets are available via programmatic access and 30% lack any documentation on licensing and permitted reuse. Our dataset catalog is available at: https://tinyurl.com/bigbio22.

Large language models have achieved success on a number of downstream tasks, particularly in a few and zero-shot manner. As a consequence, researchers have been investigating both the kind of information these networks learn and how such information can be encoded in the parameters of the model. We survey the literature on changes in the network during training, drawing from work outside of NLP when necessary, and on learned representations of linguistic features in large language models. We note in particular the lack of sufficient research on the emergence of functional units, subsections of the network where related functions are grouped or organised, within large language models and motivate future work that grounds the study of language models in an analysis of their changing internal structure during training time.

Foundation models pre-trained on large corpora demonstrate significant gains across many natural language processing tasks and domains e.g., law, healthcare, education, etc. However, only limited efforts have investigated the opportunities and limitations of applying these powerful models to science and security applications. In this work, we develop foundation models of scientific knowledge for chemistry to augment scientists with the advanced ability to perceive and reason at scale previously unimagined. Specifically, we build large-scale (1.47B parameter) general-purpose models for chemistry that can be effectively used to perform a wide range of in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. Evaluating these models in a zero-shot setting, we analyze the effect of model and data scaling, knowledge depth, and temporality on model performance in context of model training efficiency. Our novel findings demonstrate that (1) model size significantly contributes to the task performance when evaluated in a zero-shot setting; (2) data quality (aka diversity) affects model performance more than data quantity; (3) similarly, unlike previous work, temporal order of the documents in the corpus boosts model performance only for specific tasks, e.g., SciQ; and (4) models pre-trained from scratch perform better on in-domain tasks than those tuned from general-purpose models like Open AI’s GPT-2.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing

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Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing
Dina Demner-Fushman | Kevin Bretonnel Cohen | Sophia Ananiadou | Junichi Tsujii

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Explainable Assessment of Healthcare Articles with QA
Alodie Boissonnet | Marzieh Saeidi | Vassilis Plachouras | Andreas Vlachos

The healthcare domain suffers from the spread of poor quality articles on the Internet. While manual efforts exist to check the quality of online healthcare articles, they are not sufficient to assess all those in circulation. Such quality assessment can be automated as a text classification task, however, explanations for the labels are necessary for the users to trust the model predictions. While current explainable systems tackle explanation generation as summarization, we propose a new approach based on question answering (QA) that allows us to generate explanations for multiple criteria using a single model. We show that this QA-based approach is competitive with the current state-of-the-art, and complements summarization-based models for explainable quality assessment. We also introduce a human evaluation protocol more appropriate than automatic metrics for the evaluation of explanation generation models.

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A sequence-to-sequence approach for document-level relation extraction
John Giorgi | Gary Bader | Bo Wang

Motivated by the fact that many relations cross the sentence boundary, there has been increasing interest in document-level relation extraction (DocRE). DocRE requires integrating information within and across sentences, capturing complex interactions between mentions of entities. Most existing methods are pipeline-based, requiring entities as input. However, jointly learning to extract entities and relations can improve performance and be more efficient due to shared parameters and training steps. In this paper, we develop a sequence-to-sequence approach, seq2rel, that can learn the subtasks of DocRE (entity extraction, coreference resolution and relation extraction) end-to-end, replacing a pipeline of task-specific components. Using a simple strategy we call entity hinting, we compare our approach to existing pipeline-based methods on several popular biomedical datasets, in some cases exceeding their performance. We also report the first end-to-end results on these datasets for future comparison. Finally, we demonstrate that, under our model, an end-to-end approach outperforms a pipeline-based approach. Our code, data and trained models are available at https://github.com/johngiorgi/seq2rel. An online demo is available at https://share.streamlit.io/johngiorgi/seq2rel/main/demo.py.

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Position-based Prompting for Health Outcome Generation
Micheal Abaho | Danushka Bollegala | Paula Williamson | Susanna Dodd

Probing factual knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) using prompts has indirectly implied that language models (LMs) can be treated as knowledge bases. To this end, this phenomenon has been effective, especially when these LMs are fine-tuned towards not just data, but also to the style or linguistic pattern of the prompts themselves. We observe that satisfying a particular linguistic pattern in prompts is an unsustainable, time-consuming constraint in the probing task, especially because they are often manually designed and the range of possible prompt template patterns can vary depending on the prompting task. To alleviate this constraint, we propose using a position-attention mechanism to capture positional information of each word in a prompt relative to the mask to be filled, hence avoiding the need to re-construct prompts when the prompts’ linguistic pattern changes. Using our approach, we demonstrate the ability of eliciting answers (in a case study on health outcome generation) to not only common prompt templates like Cloze and Prefix but also rare ones too, such as Postfix and Mixed patterns whose masks are respectively at the start and in multiple random places of the prompt. More so, using various biomedical PLMs, our approach consistently outperforms a baseline in which the default PLMs representation is used to predict masked tokens.

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How You Say It Matters: Measuring the Impact of Verbal Disfluency Tags on Automated Dementia Detection
Shahla Farzana | Ashwin Deshpande | Natalie Parde

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems usually incorporate postprocessing mechanisms to remove disfluencies, facilitating the generation of clear, fluent transcripts that are conducive to many downstream NLP tasks. However, verbal disfluencies have proved to be predictive of dementia status, although little is known about how various types of verbal disfluencies, nor automatically detected disfluencies, affect predictive performance. We experiment with an off-the-shelf disfluency annotator to tag disfluencies in speech transcripts for a well-known cognitive health assessment task. We evaluate the performance of this model on detecting repetitions and corrections or retracing, and measure the influence of gold annotated versus automatically detected verbal disfluencies on dementia detection through a series of experiments. We find that removing both gold and automatically-detected disfluencies negatively impacts dementia detection performance, degrading classification accuracy by 5.6% and 3% respectively

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Zero-Shot Aspect-Based Scientific Document Summarization using Self-Supervised Pre-training
Amir Soleimani | Vassilina Nikoulina | Benoit Favre | Salah Ait Mokhtar

We study the zero-shot setting for the aspect-based scientific document summarization task. Summarizing scientific documents with respect to an aspect can remarkably improve document assistance systems and readers experience. However, existing large-scale datasets contain a limited variety of aspects, causing summarization models to over-fit to a small set of aspects and a specific domain. We establish baseline results in zero-shot performance (over unseen aspects and the presence of domain shift), paraphrasing, leave-one-out, and limited supervised samples experimental setups. We propose a self-supervised pre-training approach to enhance the zero-shot performance. We leverage the PubMed structured abstracts to create a biomedical aspect-based summarization dataset. Experimental results on the PubMed and FacetSum aspect-based datasets show promising performance when the model is pre-trained using unlabelled in-domain data.

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Data Augmentation for Biomedical Factoid Question Answering
Dimitris Pappas | Prodromos Malakasiotis | Ion Androutsopoulos

We study the effect of seven data augmentation (DA) methods in factoid question answering, focusing on the biomedical domain, where obtaining training instances is particularly difficult. We experiment with data from the BIOASQ challenge, which we augment with training instances obtained from an artificial biomedical machine reading comprehension dataset, or via back-translation, information retrieval, word substitution based on WORD2VEC embeddings, or masked language modeling, question generation, or extending the given passage with additional context. We show that DA can lead to very significant performance gains, even when using large pre-trained Transformers, contributing to a broader discussion of if/when DA benefits large pre-trained models. One of the simplest DA methods, WORD2VEC-based word substitution, performed best and is recommended. We release our artificial training instances and code.

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Slot Filling for Biomedical Information Extraction
Yannis Papanikolaou | Marlene Staib | Justin Joshua Grace | Francine Bennett

Information Extraction (IE) from text refers to the task of extracting structured knowledge from unstructured text. The task typically consists of a series of sub-tasks such as Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction. Sourcing entity and relation type specific training data is a major bottleneck in domains with limited resources such as biomedicine. In this work we present a slot filling approach to the task of biomedical IE, effectively replacing the need for entity and relation-specific training data, allowing us to deal with zero-shot settings. We follow the recently proposed paradigm of coupling a Tranformer-based bi-encoder, Dense Passage Retrieval, with a Transformer-based reading comprehension model to extract relations from biomedical text. We assemble a biomedical slot filling dataset for both retrieval and reading comprehension and conduct a series of experiments demonstrating that our approach outperforms a number of simpler baselines. We also evaluate our approach end-to-end for standard as well as zero-shot settings. Our work provides a fresh perspective on how to solve biomedical IE tasks, in the absence of relevant training data. Our code, models and datasets are available at https://github.com/tba.

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Automatic Biomedical Term Clustering by Learning Fine-grained Term Representations
Sihang Zeng | Zheng Yuan | Sheng Yu

Term clustering is important in biomedical knowledge graph construction. Using similarities between terms embedding is helpful for term clustering. State-of-the-art term embeddings leverage pretrained language models to encode terms, and use synonyms and relation knowledge from knowledge graphs to guide contrastive learning. These embeddings provide close embeddings for terms belonging to the same concept. However, from our probing experiments, these embeddings are not sensitive to minor textual differences which leads to failure for biomedical term clustering. To alleviate this problem, we adjust the sampling strategy in pretraining term embeddings by providing dynamic hard positive and negative samples during contrastive learning to learn fine-grained representations which result in better biomedical term clustering. We name our proposed method as CODER++, and it has been applied in clustering biomedical concepts in the newly released Biomedical Knowledge Graph named BIOS.

Pretrained language models have served as important backbones for natural language processing. Recently, in-domain pretraining has been shown to benefit various domain-specific downstream tasks. In the biomedical domain, natural language generation (NLG) tasks are of critical importance, while understudied. Approaching natural language understanding (NLU) tasks as NLG achieves satisfying performance in the general domain through constrained language generation or language prompting. We emphasize the lack of in-domain generative language models and the unsystematic generative downstream benchmarks in the biomedical domain, hindering the development of the research community. In this work, we introduce the generative language model BioBART that adapts BART to the biomedical domain. We collate various biomedical language generation tasks including dialogue, summarization, entity linking, and named entity recognition. BioBART pretrained on PubMed abstracts has enhanced performance compared to BART and set strong baselines on several tasks. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies on the pretraining tasks for BioBART and find that sentence permutation has negative effects on downstream tasks.

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Incorporating Medical Knowledge to Transformer-based Language Models for Medical Dialogue Generation
Usman Naseem | Ajay Bandi | Shaina Raza | Junaid Rashid | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi

Medical dialogue systems have the potential to assist doctors in expanding access to medical care, improving the quality of patient experiences, and lowering medical expenses. The computational methods are still in their early stages and are not ready for widespread application despite their great potential. Existing transformer-based language models have shown promising results but lack domain-specific knowledge. However, to diagnose like doctors, an automatic medical diagnosis necessitates more stringent requirements for the rationality of the dialogue in the context of relevant knowledge. In this study, we propose a new method that addresses the challenges of medical dialogue generation by incorporating medical knowledge into transformer-based language models. We present a method that leverages an external medical knowledge graph and injects triples as domain knowledge into the utterances. Automatic and human evaluation on a publicly available dataset demonstrates that incorporating medical knowledge outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline methods.

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Memory-aligned Knowledge Graph for Clinically Accurate Radiology Image Report Generation
Sixing Yan

Automatic generating the clinically accurate radiology report from X-ray images is important but challenging. The identification of multi-grained abnormal regions in image and corresponding abnormalities is difficult for data-driven neural models. In this work, we introduce a Memory-aligned Knowledge Graph (MaKG) of clinical abnormalities to better learn the visual patterns of abnormalities and their relationships by integrating it into a deep model architecture for the report generation. We carry out extensive experiments and show that the proposed MaKG deep model can improve the clinical accuracy of the generated reports.

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Simple Semantic-based Data Augmentation for Named Entity Recognition in Biomedical Texts
Uyen Phan | Nhung Nguyen

Data augmentation is important in addressing data sparsity and low resources in NLP. Unlike data augmentation for other tasks such as sentence-level and sentence-pair ones, data augmentation for named entity recognition (NER) requires preserving the semantic of entities. To that end, in this paper we propose a simple semantic-based data augmentation method for biomedical NER. Our method leverages semantic information from pre-trained language models for both entity-level and sentence-level. Experimental results on two datasets: i2b2-2010 (English) and VietBioNER (Vietnamese) showed that the proposed method could improve NER performance.

Named entity recognition (NER) is one of the elemental technologies, which has been used for knowledge extraction from biomedical text. As one of the NER improvement approaches, multi-task learning that learns a model from multiple training data has been used. Among multi-task learning, an auxiliary learning method, which uses an auxiliary task for improving its target task, has shown higher NER performance than conventional multi-task learning for improving all the tasks simultaneously by using only one auxiliary task in the auxiliary learning. We propose Multiple Utilization of NER Corpora Helpful for Auxiliary BLESsing (MUNCH ABLES). MUNCHABLES utilizes multiple training datasets as auxiliary training data by the following methods; the first one is to finetune the NER model of the target task by sequentially performing auxiliary learning for each auxiliary training dataset, and the other is to use all training datasets in one auxiliary learning. We evaluate MUNCHABLES on eight biomedical-related domain NER tasks, where seven training datasets are used as auxiliary training data. The experiment results show that MUNCHABLES achieves higher accuracy than conventional multi-task learning methods on average while showing state-of-the-art accuracy.

Self-supervised pre-training methods have brought remarkable breakthroughs in the understanding of text, image, and speech. Recent developments in genomics has also adopted these pre-training methods for genome understanding. However, they focus only on understanding haploid sequences, which hinders their applicability towards understanding genetic variations, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which is crucial for genome-wide association study. In this paper, we introduce SNP2Vec, a scalable self-supervised pre-training approach for understanding SNP. We apply SNP2Vec to perform long-sequence genomics modeling, and we evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on predicting Alzheimer’s disease risk in a Chinese cohort. Our approach significantly outperforms existing polygenic risk score methods and all other baselines, including the model that is trained entirely with haploid sequences.

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Biomedical NER using Novel Schema and Distant Supervision
Anshita Khandelwal | Alok Kar | Veera Raghavendra Chikka | Kamalakar Karlapalem

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (BMNER) is one of the most important tasks in the field of biomedical text mining. Most work so far on this task has not focused on identification of discontinuous and overlapping entities, even though they are present in significant fractions in real-life biomedical datasets. In this paper, we introduce a novel annotation schema to capture complex entities, and explore the effects of distant supervision on our deep-learning sequence labelling model. For BMNER task, our annotation schema outperforms other BIO-based annotation schemes on the same model. We also achieve higher F1-scores than state-of-the-art models on multiple corpora without fine-tuning embeddings, highlighting the efficacy of neural feature extraction using our model.

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Improving Supervised Drug-Protein Relation Extraction with Distantly Supervised Models
Naoki Iinuma | Makoto Miwa | Yutaka Sasaki

This paper proposes novel drug-protein relation extraction models that indirectly utilize distant supervision data. Concretely, instead of adding distant supervision data to the manually annotated training data, our models incorporate distantly supervised models that are relation extraction models trained with distant supervision data. Distantly supervised learning has been proposed to generate a large amount of pseudo-training data at low cost. However, there is still a problem of low prediction performance due to the inclusion of mislabeled data. Therefore, several methods have been proposed to suppress the effects of noisy cases by utilizing some manually annotated training data. However, their performance is lower than that of supervised learning on manually annotated data because mislabeled data that cannot be fully suppressed becomes noise when training the model. To overcome this issue, our methods indirectly utilize distant supervision data with manually annotated training data. The experimental results on the DrugProt corpus in the BioCreative VII Track 1 showed that our proposed model can consistently improve the supervised models in different settings.

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Named Entity Recognition for Cancer Immunology Research Using Distant Supervision
Hai-Long Trieu | Makoto Miwa | Sophia Ananiadou

Cancer immunology research involves several important cell and protein factors. Extracting the information of such cells and proteins and the interactions between them from text are crucial in text mining for cancer immunology research. However, there are few available datasets for these entities, and the amount of annotated documents is not sufficient compared with other major named entity types. In this work, we introduce our automatically annotated dataset of key named entities, i.e., T-cells, cytokines, and transcription factors, which engages the recent cancer immunotherapy. The entities are annotated based on the UniProtKB knowledge base using dictionary matching. We build a neural named entity recognition (NER) model to be trained on this dataset and evaluate it on a manually-annotated data. Experimental results show that we can achieve a promising NER performance even though our data is automatically annotated. Our dataset also enhances the NER performance when combined with existing data, especially gaining improvement in yet investigated named entities such as cytokines and transcription factors.

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Intra-Template Entity Compatibility based Slot-Filling for Clinical Trial Information Extraction
Christian Witte | Philipp Cimiano

We present a deep learning based information extraction system that can extract the design and results of a published abstract describing a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT). In contrast to other approaches, our system does not regard the PICO elements as flat objects or labels but as structured objects. We thus model the task as the one of filling a set of templates and slots; our two-step approach recognizes relevant slot candidates as a first step and assigns them to a corresponding template as second step, relying on a learned pairwise scoring function that models the compatibility of the different slot values. We evaluate the approach on a dataset of 211 manually annotated abstracts for type 2 Diabetes and Glaucoma, showing the positive impact of modelling intra-template entity compatibility. As main benefit, our approach yields a structured object for every RCT abstract that supports the aggregation and summarization of clinical trial results across published studies and can facilitate the task of creating a systematic review or meta-analysis.

This work presents the first large-scale biomedical Spanish language models trained from scratch, using large biomedical corpora consisting of a total of 1.1B tokens and an EHR corpus of 95M tokens. We compared them against general-domain and other domain-specific models for Spanish on three clinical NER tasks. As main results, our models are superior across the NER tasks, rendering them more convenient for clinical NLP applications. Furthermore, our findings indicate that when enough data is available, pre-training from scratch is better than continual pre-training when tested on clinical tasks, raising an exciting research question about which approach is optimal. Our models and fine-tuning scripts are publicly available at HuggingFace and GitHub.

Despite the advances in digital healthcare systems offering curated structured knowledge, much of the critical information still lies in large volumes of unlabeled and unstructured clinical texts. These texts, which often contain protected health information (PHI), are exposed to information extraction tools for downstream applications, risking patient identification. Existing works in de-identification rely on using large-scale annotated corpora in English, which often are not suitable in real-world multilingual settings. Pre-trained language models (LM) have shown great potential for cross-lingual transfer in low-resource settings. In this work, we empirically show the few-shot cross-lingual transfer property of LMs for named entity recognition (NER) and apply it to solve a low-resource and real-world challenge of code-mixed (Spanish-Catalan) clinical notes de-identification in the stroke domain. We annotate a gold evaluation dataset to assess few-shot setting performance where we only use a few hundred labeled examples for training. Our model improves the zero-shot F1-score from 73.7% to 91.2% on the gold evaluation set when adapting Multilingual BERT (mBERT) (CITATION) from the MEDDOCAN (CITATION) corpus with our few-shot cross-lingual target corpus. When generalized to an out-of-sample test set, the best model achieves a human-evaluation F1-score of 97.2%.

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VPAI_Lab at MedVidQA 2022: A Two-Stage Cross-modal Fusion Method for Medical Instructional Video Classification
Bin Li | Yixuan Weng | Fei Xia | Bin Sun | Shutao Li

This paper introduces the approach of VPAI_Lab team’s experiments on BioNLP 2022 shared task 1 Medical Video Classification (MedVidCL). Given an input video, the MedVidCL task aims to correctly classify it into one of three following categories: Medical Instructional, Medical Non-instructional, and Non-medical. Inspired by its dataset construction process, we divide the classification process into two stages. The first stage is to classify videos into medical videos and non-medical videos. In the second stage, for those samples classified as medical videos, we further classify them into instructional videos and non-instructional videos. In addition, we also propose the cross-modal fusion method to solve the video classification, such as fusing the text features (question and subtitles) from the pre-training language models and visual features from image frames. Specifically, we use textual information to concatenate and query the visual information for obtaining better feature representation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the official baseline method by 15.4% in the F1 score, which shows its effectiveness. Finally, the online results show that our method ranks the Top-1 on the online unseen test set. All the experimental codes are open-sourced at https://github.com/Lireanstar/MedVidCL.

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GenCompareSum: a hybrid unsupervised summarization method using salience
Jennifer Bishop | Qianqian Xie | Sophia Ananiadou

Text summarization (TS) is an important NLP task. Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have been used to improve the performance of TS. However, PLMs are limited by their need of labelled training data and by their attention mechanism, which often makes them unsuitable for use on long documents. To this end, we propose a hybrid, unsupervised, abstractive-extractive approach, in which we walk through a document, generating salient textual fragments representing its key points. We then select the most important sentences of the document by choosing the most similar sentences to the generated texts, calculated using BERTScore. We evaluate the efficacy of generating and using salient textual fragments to guide extractive summarization on documents from the biomedical and general scientific domains. We compare the performance between long and short documents using different generative text models, which are finetuned to generate relevant queries or document titles. We show that our hybrid approach out-performs existing unsupervised methods, as well as state-of-the-art supervised methods, despite not needing a vast amount of labelled training data.

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BioCite: A Deep Learning-based Citation Linkage Framework for Biomedical Research Articles
Sudipta Singha Roy | Robert E. Mercer

Research papers reflect scientific advances. Citations are widely used in research publications to support the new findings and show their benefits, while also regulating the information flow to make the contents clearer for the audience. A citation in a research article refers to the information’s source, but not the specific text span from that source article. In biomedical research articles, this task is challenging as the same chemical or biological component can be represented in multiple ways in different papers from various domains. This paper suggests a mechanism for linking citing sentences in a publication with cited sentences in referenced sources. The framework presented here pairs the citing sentence with all of the sentences in the reference text, and then tries to retrieve the semantically equivalent pairs. These semantically related sentences from the reference paper are chosen as the cited statements. This effort involves designing a citation linkage framework utilizing sequential and tree-structured siamese deep learning models. This paper also provides a method to create a synthetic corpus for such a task.

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Low Resource Causal Event Detection from Biomedical Literature
Zhengzhong Liang | Enrique Noriega-Atala | Clayton Morrison | Mihai Surdeanu

Recognizing causal precedence relations among the chemical interactions in biomedical literature is crucial to understanding the underlying biological mechanisms. However, detecting such causal relation can be hard because: (1) many times, such causal relations among events are not explicitly expressed by certain phrases but implicitly implied by very diverse expressions in the text, and (2) annotating such causal relation detection datasets requires considerable expert knowledge and effort. In this paper, we propose a strategy to address both challenges by training neural models with in-domain pre-training and knowledge distillation. We show that, by using very limited amount of labeled data, and sufficient amount of unlabeled data, the neural models outperform previous baselines on the causal precedence detection task, and are ten times faster at inference compared to the BERT base model.

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Overview of the MedVidQA 2022 Shared Task on Medical Video Question-Answering
Deepak Gupta | Dina Demner-Fushman

In this paper, we present an overview of the MedVidQA 2022 shared task, collocated with the 21st BioNLP workshop at ACL 2022. The shared task addressed two of the challenges faced by medical video question answering: (I) a video classification task that explores new approaches to medical video understanding (labeling), and (ii) a visual answer localization task. Visual answer localization refers to the identification of the relevant temporal segments (start and end timestamps) in the video where the answer to the medical question is being shown or illustrated. A total of thirteen teams participated in the shared task challenges, with eleven system descriptions submitted to the workshop. The descriptions present monomodal and multi-modal approaches developed for medical video classification and visual answer localization. This paper describes the tasks, the datasets, evaluation metrics, and baseline systems for both tasks. Finally, the paper summarizes the techniques and results of the evaluation of the various approaches explored by the participating teams.

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Inter-annotator agreement is not the ceiling of machine learning performance: Evidence from a comprehensive set of simulations
Russell Richie | Sachin Grover | Fuchiang (Rich) Tsui

It is commonly claimed that inter-annotator agreement (IAA) is the ceiling of machine learning (ML) performance, i.e., that the agreement between an ML system’s predictions and an annotator can not be higher than the agreement between two annotators. Although Boguslav & Cohen (2017) showed that this claim is falsified by many real-world ML systems, the claim has persisted. As a complement to this real-world evidence, we conducted a comprehensive set of simulations, and show that an ML model can beat IAA even if (and especially if) annotators are noisy and differ in their underlying classification functions, as long as the ML model is reasonably well-specified. Although the latter condition has long been elusive, leading ML models to underperform IAA, we anticipate that this condition will be increasingly met in the era of big data and deep learning. Our work has implications for (1) maximizing the value of machine learning, (2) adherence to ethical standards in computing, and (3) economical use of annotated resources, which is paramount in settings where annotation is especially expensive, like biomedical natural language processing.

Conversational bots have become non-traditional methods for therapy among individuals suffering from psychological illnesses. Leveraging deep neural generative language models, we propose a deep trainable neural conversational model for therapy-oriented response generation. We leverage transfer learning methods during training on therapy and counseling based data from Reddit and AlexanderStreet. This was done to adapt existing generative models – GPT2 and DialoGPT – to the task of automated dialog generation. Through quantitative evaluation of the linguistic quality, we observe that the dialog generation model - DialoGPT (345M) with transfer learning on video data attains scores similar to a human response baseline. However, human evaluation of responses by conversational bots show mostly signs of generic advice or information sharing instead of therapeutic interaction.

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BEEDS: Large-Scale Biomedical Event Extraction using Distant Supervision and Question Answering
Xing David Wang | Ulf Leser | Leon Weber

Automatic extraction of event structures from text is a promising way to extract important facts from the evergrowing amount of biomedical literature. We propose BEEDS, a new approach on how to mine event structures from PubMed based on a question-answering paradigm. Using a three-step pipeline comprising a document retriever, a document reader, and an entity normalizer, BEEDS is able to fully automatically extract event triples involving a query protein or gene and to store this information directly in a knowledge base. BEEDS applies a transformer-based architecture for event extraction and uses distant supervision to augment the scarce training data in event mining. In a knowledge base population setting, it outperforms a strong baseline in finding post-translational modification events consisting of enzyme-substrate-site triples while achieving competitive results in extracting binary relations consisting of protein-protein and protein-site interactions.

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Data Augmentation for Rare Symptoms in Vaccine Side-Effect Detection
Bosung Kim | Ndapa Nakashole

We study the problem of entity detection and normalization applied to patient self-reports of symptoms that arise as side-effects of vaccines. Our application domain presents unique challenges that render traditional classification methods ineffective: the number of entity types is large; and many symptoms are rare, resulting in a long-tail distribution of training examples per entity type. We tackle these challenges with an autoregressive model that generates standardized names of symptoms. We introduce a data augmentation technique to increase the number of training examples for rare symptoms. Experiments on real-life patient vaccine symptom self-reports show that our approach outperforms strong baselines, and that additional examples improve performance on the long-tail entities.

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Improving Romanian BioNER Using a Biologically Inspired System
Maria Mitrofan | Vasile Pais

Recognition of named entities present in text is an important step towards information extraction and natural language understanding. This work presents a named entity recognition system for the Romanian biomedical domain. The system makes use of a new and extended version of SiMoNERo corpus, that is open sourced. Also, the best system is available for direct usage in the RELATE platform.

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BanglaBioMed: A Biomedical Named-Entity Annotated Corpus for Bangla (Bengali)
Salim Sazzed

Recognizing biomedical entities in the text has significance in biomedical and health science research, as it benefits myriad downstream tasks, including entity linking, relation extraction, or entity resolution. While English and a few other widely used languages enjoy ample resources for automatic biomedical entity recognition, it is not the case for Bangla, a low-resource language. On that account, in this paper, we introduce BanglaBioMed, a Bangla biomedical named entity (NE) annotated dataset in standard IOB format, the first of its kind, consisting of over 12000 tokens annotated with the biomedical entities. The corpus is created by collecting Bangla text from a list of health articles and then annotated with four distinct types of entities: Anatomy (AN), Chemical and Drugs (CD), Disease and Symptom (DS), and Medical Procedure (MP). We provide the details of the entire data collection and annotation procedure and illustrate various statistics of the created corpus. Our developed corpus is a much-needed addition to the Bangla NLP resource that will facilitate biomedical NLP research in Bangla.

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ICDBigBird: A Contextual Embedding Model for ICD Code Classification
George Michalopoulos | Michal Malyska | Nicola Sahar | Alexander Wong | Helen Chen

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) system is the international standard for classifying diseases and procedures during a healthcare encounter and is widely used for healthcare reporting and management purposes. Assigning correct codes for clinical procedures is important for clinical, operational and financial decision-making in healthcare. Contextual word embedding models have achieved state-of-the-art results in multiple NLP tasks. However, these models have yet to achieve state-of-the-art results in the ICD classification task since one of their main disadvantages is that they can only process documents that contain a small number of tokens which is rarely the case with real patient notes. In this paper, we introduce ICDBigBird a BigBird-based model which can integrate a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), that takes advantage of the relations between ICD codes in order to create ‘enriched’ representations of their embeddings, with a BigBird contextual model that can process larger documents. Our experiments on a real-world clinical dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our BigBird-based model on the ICD classification task as it outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models.

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Doctor XAvIer: Explainable Diagnosis on Physician-Patient Dialogues and XAI Evaluation
Hillary Ngai | Frank Rudzicz

We introduce Doctor XAvIer — a BERT-based diagnostic system that extracts relevant clinical data from transcribed patient-doctor dialogues and explains predictions using feature attribution methods. We present a novel performance plot and evaluation metric for feature attribution methods — Feature Attribution Dropping (FAD) curve and its Normalized Area Under the Curve (N-AUC). FAD curve analysis shows that integrated gradients outperforms Shapley values in explaining diagnosis classification. Doctor XAvIer outperforms the baseline with 0.97 F1-score in named entity recognition and symptom pertinence classification and 0.91 F1-score in diagnosis classification.

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DISTANT-CTO: A Zero Cost, Distantly Supervised Approach to Improve Low-Resource Entity Extraction Using Clinical Trials Literature
Anjani Dhrangadhariya | Henning Müller

PICO recognition is an information extraction task for identifying participant, intervention, comparator, and outcome information from clinical literature. Manually identifying PICO information is the most time-consuming step for conducting systematic reviews (SR), which is already labor-intensive. A lack of diversified and large, annotated corpora restricts innovation and adoption of automated PICO recognition systems. The largest-available PICO entity/span corpus is manually annotated which is too expensive for a majority of the scientific community. To break through the bottleneck, we propose DISTANT-CTO, a novel distantly supervised PICO entity extraction approach using the clinical trials literature, to generate a massive weakly-labeled dataset with more than a million ‘Intervention’ and ‘Comparator’ entity annotations. We train distant NER (named-entity recognition) models using this weakly-labeled dataset and demonstrate that it outperforms even the sophisticated models trained on the manually annotated dataset with a 2% F1 improvement over the Intervention entity of the PICO benchmark and more than 5% improvement when combined with the manually annotated dataset. We investigate the generalizability of our approach and gain an impressive F1 score on another domain-specific PICO benchmark. The approach is not only zero-cost but is also scalable for a constant stream of PICO entity annotations.

Generating a summary from findings has been recently explored (Zhang et al., 2018, 2020) in note types such as radiology reports that typically have short length. In this work, we focus on echocardiogram notes that is longer and more complex compared to previous note types. We formally define the task of echocardiography conclusion generation (EchoGen) as generating a conclusion given the findings section, with emphasis on key cardiac findings. To promote the development of EchoGen methods, we present a new benchmark, which consists of two datasets collected from two hospitals. We further compare both standard and start-of-the-art methods on this new benchmark, with an emphasis on factual consistency. To accomplish this, we develop a tool to automatically extract concept-attribute tuples from the text. We then propose an evaluation metric, FactComp, to compare concept-attribute tuples between the human reference and generated conclusions. Both automatic and human evaluations show that there is still a significant gap between human-written and machine-generated conclusions on echo reports in terms of factuality and overall quality.

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Quantifying Clinical Outcome Measures in Patients with Epilepsy Using the Electronic Health Record
Kevin Xie | Brian Litt | Dan Roth | Colin A. Ellis

A wealth of important clinical information lies untouched in the Electronic Health Record, often in the form of unstructured textual documents. For patients with Epilepsy, such information includes outcome measures like Seizure Frequency and Dates of Last Seizure, key parameters that guide all therapy for these patients. Transformer models have been able to extract such outcome measures from unstructured clinical note text as sentences with human-like accuracy; however, these sentences are not yet usable in a quantitative analysis for large-scale studies. In this study, we developed a pipeline to quantify these outcome measures. We used text summarization models to convert unstructured sentences into specific formats, and then employed rules-based quantifiers to calculate seizure frequencies and dates of last seizure. We demonstrated that our pipeline of models does not excessively propagate errors and we analyzed its mistakes. We anticipate that our methods can be generalized outside of epilepsy to other disorders to drive large-scale clinical research.

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Comparing Encoder-Only and Encoder-Decoder Transformers for Relation Extraction from Biomedical Texts: An Empirical Study on Ten Benchmark Datasets
Mourad Sarrouti | Carson Tao | Yoann Mamy Randriamihaja

Biomedical relation extraction, aiming to automatically discover high-quality and semantic relations between the entities from free text, is becoming a vital step for automated knowledge discovery. Pretrained language models have achieved impressive performance on various natural language processing tasks, including relation extraction. In this paper, we perform extensive empirical comparisons of encoder-only transformers with the encoder-decoder transformer, specifically T5, on ten public biomedical relation extraction datasets. We study the relation extraction task from four major biomedical tasks, namely chemical-protein relation extraction, disease-protein relation extraction, drug-drug interaction, and protein-protein interaction. We also explore the use of multi-task fine-tuning to investigate the correlation among major biomedical relation extraction tasks. We report performance (micro F-score) using T5, BioBERT and PubMedBERT, demonstrating that T5 and multi-task learning can improve the performance of the biomedical relation extraction task.

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Utility Preservation of Clinical Text After De-Identification
Thomas Vakili | Hercules Dalianis

Electronic health records contain valuable information about symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and outcomes of the treatments of individual patients. However, the records may also contain information that can reveal the identity of the patients. Removing these identifiers - the Protected Health Information (PHI) - can protect the identity of the patient. Automatic de-identification is a process which employs machine learning techniques to detect and remove PHI. However, automatic techniques are imperfect in their precision and introduce noise into the data. This study examines the impact of this noise on the utility of Swedish de-identified clinical data by using human evaluators and by training and testing BERT models. Our results indicate that de-identification does not harm the utility for clinical NLP and that human evaluators are less sensitive to noise from de-identification than expected.

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Horses to Zebras: Ontology-Guided Data Augmentation and Synthesis for ICD-9 Coding
Matúš Falis | Hang Dong | Alexandra Birch | Beatrice Alex

Medical document coding is the process of assigning labels from a structured label space (ontology – e.g., ICD-9) to medical documents. This process is laborious, costly, and error-prone. In recent years, efforts have been made to automate this process with neural models. The label spaces are large (in the order of thousands of labels) and follow a big-head long-tail label distribution, giving rise to few-shot and zero-shot scenarios. Previous efforts tried to address these scenarios within the model, leading to improvements on rare labels, but worse results on frequent ones. We propose data augmentation and synthesis techniques in order to address these scenarios. We further introduce an analysis technique for this setting inspired by confusion matrices. This analysis technique points to the positive impact of data augmentation and synthesis, but also highlights more general issues of confusion within families of codes, and underprediction.

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Towards Automatic Curation of Antibiotic Resistance Genes via Statement Extraction from Scientific Papers: A Benchmark Dataset and Models
Sidhant Chandak | Liqing Zhang | Connor Brown | Lifu Huang

Antibiotic resistance has become a growing worldwide concern as new resistance mechanisms are emerging and spreading globally, and thus detecting and collecting the cause – Antibiotic Resistance Genes (ARGs), have been more critical than ever. In this work, we aim to automate the curation of ARGs by extracting ARG-related assertive statements from scientific papers. To support the research towards this direction, we build SciARG, a new benchmark dataset containing 2,000 manually annotated statements as the evaluation set and 12,516 silver-standard training statements that are automatically created from scientific papers by a set of rules. To set up the baseline performance on SciARG, we exploit three state-of-the-art neural architectures based on pre-trained language models and prompt tuning, and further ensemble them to attain the highest 77.0% F-score. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to leverage natural language processing techniques to curate all validated ARGs from scientific papers. Both the code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/VT-NLP/SciARG.

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Model Distillation for Faithful Explanations of Medical Code Predictions
Zach Wood-Doughty | Isabel Cachola | Mark Dredze

Machine learning models that offer excellent predictive performance often lack the interpretability necessary to support integrated human machine decision-making. In clinical medicine and other high-risk settings, domain experts may be unwilling to trust model predictions without explanations. Work in explainable AI must balance competing objectives along two different axes: 1) Models should ideally be both accurate and simple. 2) Explanations must balance faithfulness to the model’s decision-making with their plausibility to a domain expert. We propose to use knowledge distillation, or training a student model that mimics the behavior of a trained teacher model, as a technique to generate faithful and plausible explanations. We evaluate our approach on the task of assigning ICD codes to clinical notes to demonstrate that the student model is faithful to the teacher model’s behavior and produces quality natural language explanations.

Clinical risk scores enable clinicians to tabulate a set of patient data into simple scores to stratify patients into risk categories. Although risk scores are widely used to inform decision-making at the point-of-care, collecting the information necessary to calculate such scores requires considerable time and effort. Previous studies have focused on specific risk scores and involved manual curation of relevant terms or codes and heuristics for each data element of a risk score. To support more generalizable methods for risk score calculation, we annotate 100 patients in MIMIC-III with elements of CHA2DS2-VASc and PERC scores, and explore using question answering (QA) and off-the-shelf tools. We show that QA models can achieve comparable or better performance for certain risk score elements as compared to heuristic-based methods, and demonstrate the potential for more scalable risk score automation without the need for expert-curated heuristics. Our annotated dataset will be released to the community to encourage efforts in generalizable methods for automating risk scores.

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DoSSIER at MedVidQA 2022: Text-based Approaches to Medical Video Answer Localization Problem
Wojciech Kusa | Georgios Peikos | Óscar Espitia | Allan Hanbury | Gabriella Pasi

This paper describes our contribution to the Answer Localization track of the MedVidQA 2022 Shared Task. We propose two answer localization approaches that use only textual information extracted from the video. In particular, our approaches exploit the text extracted from the video’s transcripts along with the text displayed in the video’s frames to create a set of features. Having created a set of features that represents a video’s textual information, we employ four different models to measure the similarity between a video’s segment and a corresponding question. Then, we employ two different methods to obtain the start and end times of the identified answer. One of them is based on a random forest regressor, whereas the other one uses an unsupervised peak detection model to detect the answer’s start time. Our findings suggest that for this task, leveraging only text-related features (transmitted either verbally or visually) and using a small amount of training data, lead to significant improvements over the benchmark Video Span Localization model that is based on deep neural networks.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fifth BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

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A Minimal Model for Compositional Generalization on gSCAN
Alice Hein | Klaus Diepold

Whether neural networks are capable of compositional generalization has been a topic of much debate. Most previous studies on this subject investigate the generalization capabilities of state-of-the-art deep learning architectures. We here take a more bottom-up approach and design a minimal model that displays generalization on a compositional benchmark, namely, the gSCAN dataset. The model is a hybrid architecture that combines layers trained with gradient descent and a selective attention mechanism optimized with an evolutionary strategy. The architecture has around 60 times fewer trainable parameters than models previously tested on gSCAN, and achieves comparable accuracies on most test splits, even when trained only on a fraction of the dataset. On adverb to verb generalization accuracy, it outperforms previous approaches by 65 to 86%. Through ablation studies, neuron pruning, and error analyses, we show that weight decay and attention mechanisms facilitate compositional generalization by encouraging sparse representations divorced from irrelevant context. We find that the model’s sample efficiency can mainly be attributed to its selective attention mechanism.

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Sparse Interventions in Language Models with Differentiable Masking
Nicola De Cao | Leon Schmid | Dieuwke Hupkes | Ivan Titov

There has been a lot of interest in understanding what information is captured by hidden representations of language models (LMs). Typically, interpretation methods i) do not guarantee that the model actually uses the information found to be encoded, and ii) do not discover small subsets of neurons responsible for a considered phenomenon. Inspired by causal mediation analysis, we propose a method that discovers a small subset of neurons within a neural LM responsible for a particular linguistic phenomenon, i.e., subsets causing a change in the corresponding token emission probabilities. We use a differentiable relaxation to approximately search through the combinatorial space. An L₀ regularization term ensures that the search converges to discrete and sparse solutions. We apply our method to analyze subject-verb number agreement and gender bias detection in LSTMs. We observe that it is fast and finds better solutions than alternatives such as REINFORCE and Integrated Gradients. Our experiments confirm that each of these phenomena is mediated through a small subset of neurons that do not play any other discernible role.

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Where’s the Learning in Representation Learning for Compositional Semantics and the Case of Thematic Fit
Mughilan Muthupari | Samrat Halder | Asad Sayeed | Yuval Marton

Observing that for certain NLP tasks, such as semantic role prediction or thematic fit estimation, random embeddings perform as well as pre-trained embeddings, we explore what settings allow for this, and examine where most of the learning is encoded: the word embeddings, the semantic role embeddings, or “the network”. We find nuanced answers, depending on the task and its relation to the training objective. We examine these representation learning aspects in multi-task learning, where role prediction and role-filling are supervised tasks, while several thematic fit tasks are outside the models’ direct supervision. We observe a non-monotonous relation between some tasks’ quality scores and the training data size. In order to better understand this observation, we analyze these results using easier, per-verb versions of these tasks.

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Sentence Ambiguity, Grammaticality and Complexity Probes
Sunit Bhattacharya | Vilém Zouhar | Ondrej Bojar

It is unclear whether, how and where large pre-trained language models capture subtle linguistic traits like ambiguity, grammaticality and sentence complexity. We present results of automatic classification of these traits and compare their viability and patterns across representation types. We demonstrate that template-based datasets with surface-level artifacts should not be used for probing, careful comparisons with baselines should be done and that t-SNE plots should not be used to determine the presence of a feature among dense vectors representations. We also show how features might be highly localized in the layers for these models and get lost in the upper layers.

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Post-Hoc Interpretation of Transformer Hyperparameters with Explainable Boosting Machines
Kiron Deb | Xuan Zhang | Kevin Duh

Hyperparameter tuning is important for achieving high accuracy in deep learning models, yet little interpretability work has focused on hyperparameters. We propose to use the Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM), a glassbox method, as a post-hoc analysis tool for understanding how hyperparameters influence model accuracy. We present a case study on Transformer models in machine translation to illustrate the kinds of insights that may be gleaned, and perform extensive analysis to test the robustness of EBM under different data conditions.

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Revisit Systematic Generalization via Meaningful Learning
Ning Shi | Boxin Wang | Wei Wang | Xiangyu Liu | Zhouhan Lin

Humans can systematically generalize to novel compositions of existing concepts. Recent studies argue that neural networks appear inherently ineffective in such cognitive capacity, leading to a pessimistic view and a lack of attention to optimistic results. We revisit this controversial topic from the perspective of meaningful learning, an exceptional capability of humans to learn novel concepts by connecting them with known ones. We reassess the compositional skills of sequence-to-sequence models conditioned on the semantic links between new and old concepts. Our observations suggest that models can successfully one-shot generalize to novel concepts and compositions through semantic linking, either inductively or deductively. We demonstrate that prior knowledge plays a key role as well. In addition to synthetic tests, we further conduct proof-of-concept experiments in machine translation and semantic parsing, showing the benefits of meaningful learning in applications. We hope our positive findings will encourage excavating modern neural networks’ potential in systematic generalization through more advanced learning schemes.

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Is It Smaller Than a Tennis Ball? Language Models Play the Game of Twenty Questions
Maxime De Bruyn | Ehsan Lotfi | Jeska Buhmann | Walter Daelemans

Researchers often use games to analyze the abilities of Artificial Intelligence models. In this work, we use the game of Twenty Questions to study the world knowledge of language models. Despite its simplicity for humans, this game requires a broad knowledge of the world to answer yes/no questions. We evaluate several language models on this task and find that only the largest model has enough world knowledge to play it well, although it still has difficulties with the shape and size of objects. We also present a new method to improve the knowledge of smaller models by leveraging external information from the web. Finally, we release our dataset and Twentle, a website to interactively test the knowledge of language models by playing Twenty Questions.

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Post-hoc analysis of Arabic transformer models
Ahmed Abdelali | Nadir Durrani | Fahim Dalvi | Hassan Sajjad

Arabic is a Semitic language which is widely spoken with many dialects. Given the success of pre-trained language models, many transformer models trained on Arabic and its dialects have surfaced. While there have been an extrinsic evaluation of these models with respect to downstream NLP tasks, no work has been carried out to analyze and compare their internal representations. We probe how linguistic information is encoded in the transformer models, trained on different Arabic dialects. We perform a layer and neuron analysis on the models using morphological tagging tasks for different dialects of Arabic and a dialectal identification task. Our analysis enlightens interesting findings such as: i) word morphology is learned at the lower and middle layers, ii) while syntactic dependencies are predominantly captured at the higher layers, iii) despite a large overlap in their vocabulary, the MSA-based models fail to capture the nuances of Arabic dialects, iv) we found that neurons in embedding layers are polysemous in nature, while the neurons in middle layers are exclusive to specific properties.

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Universal Evasion Attacks on Summarization Scoring
Wenchuan Mu | Kwan Hui Lim

The automatic scoring of summaries is important as it guides the development of summarizers. Scoring is also complex, as it involves multiple aspects such as the fluency, grammar, and even textual entailment with the source text. However, summary scoring has not been considered as a machine learning task to study its accuracy and robustness. In this study, we place automatic scoring in the context of regression machine learning tasks and perform evasion attacks to explore its robustness. Attack systems predict a non-summary string from each input, and these non-summary strings achieve competitive scores with good summarizers on the most popular metrics: ROUGE, METEOR, and BERTScore. Attack systems also “outperform” state-of-the-art summarization methods on ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-L, and score the second-highest on METEOR. Furthermore, a BERTScore backdoor is observed: a simple trigger can score higher than any automatic summarization method. The evasion attacks in this work indicate the low robustness of current scoring systems at the system level. We hope that our highlighting of these proposed attack will facilitate the development of summary scores.

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How (Un)Faithful is Attention?
Hessam Amini | Leila Kosseim

Although attention weights have been commonly used as a means to provide explanations for deep learning models, the approach has been widely criticized due to its lack of faithfulness. In this work, we present a simple approach to compute the newly proposed metric AtteFa, which can quantitatively represent the degree of faithfulness of the attention weights. Using this metric, we further validate the effect of the frequency of informative input elements and the use of contextual vs. non-contextual encoders on the faithfulness of the attention mechanism. Finally, we apply the approach on several real-life binary classification datasets to measure the faithfulness of attention weights in real-life settings.

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Are Multilingual Sentiment Models Equally Right for the Right Reasons?
Rasmus Jørgensen | Fiammetta Caccavale | Christian Igel | Anders Søgaard

Multilingual NLP models provide potential solutions to the digital language divide, i.e., cross-language performance disparities. Early analyses of such models have indicated good performance across training languages and good generalization to unseen, related languages. This work examines whether, between related languages, multilingual models are equally right for the right reasons, i.e., if interpretability methods reveal that the models put emphasis on the same words as humans. To this end, we provide a new trilingual, parallel corpus of rationale annotations for English, Danish, and Italian sentiment analysis models and use it to benchmark models and interpretability methods. We propose rank-biased overlap as a better metric for comparing input token attributions to human rationale annotations. Our results show: (i) models generally perform well on the languages they are trained on, and align best with human rationales in these languages; (ii) performance is higher on English, even when not a source language, but this performance is not accompanied by higher alignment with human rationales, which suggests that language models favor English, but do not facilitate successful transfer of rationales.

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Probing for Understanding of English Verb Classes and Alternations in Large Pre-trained Language Models
David Yi | James Bruno | Jiayu Han | Peter Zukerman | Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

We investigate the extent to which verb alternation classes, as described by Levin (1993), are encoded in the embeddings of Large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) such as BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, and DeBERTa using selectively constructed diagnostic classifiers for word and sentence-level prediction tasks. We follow and expand upon the experiments of Kann et al. (2019), which aim to probe whether static embeddings encode frame-selectional properties of verbs. At both the word and sentence level, we find that contextual embeddings from PLMs not only outperform non-contextual embeddings, but achieve astonishingly high accuracies on tasks across most alternation classes. Additionally, we find evidence that the middle-to-upper layers of PLMs achieve better performance on average than the lower layers across all probing tasks.

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Analyzing Gender Translation Errors to Identify Information Flows between the Encoder and Decoder of a NMT System
Guillaume Wisniewski | Lichao Zhu | Nicolas Ballier | François Yvon

Multiple studies have shown that existing NMT systems demonstrate some kind of “gender bias”. As a result, MT output appears to err more often for feminine forms and to amplify social gender misrepresentations, which is potentially harmful to users and practioners of these technologies. This paper continues this line of investigations and reports results obtained with a new test set in strictly controlled conditions. This setting allows us to better understand the multiple inner mechanisms that are causing these biases, which include the linguistic expressions of gender, the unbalanced distribution of masculine and feminine forms in the language, the modelling of morphological variation and the training process dynamics. To counterbalance these effects, we formulate several proposals and notably show that modifying the training loss can effectively mitigate such biases.

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Human Ratings Do Not Reflect Downstream Utility: A Study of Free-Text Explanations for Model Predictions
Jenny Kunz | Martin Jirenius | Oskar Holmström | Marco Kuhlmann

Models able to generate free-text rationales that explain their output have been proposed as an important step towards interpretable NLP for “reasoning” tasks such as natural language inference and commonsense question answering. However, the relative merits of different architectures and types of rationales are not well understood and hard to measure. In this paper, we contribute two insights to this line of research: First, we find that models trained on gold explanations learn to rely on these but, in the case of the more challenging question answering data set we use, fail when given generated explanations at test time. However, additional fine-tuning on generated explanations teaches the model to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information in explanations. Second, we compare explanations by a generation-only model to those generated by a self-rationalizing model and find that, while the former score higher in terms of validity, factual correctness, and similarity to gold explanations, they are not more useful for downstream classification. We observe that the self-rationalizing model is prone to hallucination, which is punished by most metrics but may add useful context for the classification step.

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Analyzing the Representational Geometry of Acoustic Word Embeddings
Badr Abdullah | Dietrich Klakow

Acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) are fixed-dimensionality vector representations in a vector space such that different acoustic exemplars of the same word are projected nearby in the embedding space. In addition to their use in speech technology applications such as spoken term discovery and keyword spotting, AWE models have been adopted as models of spoken-word processing in several cognitively motivated studies and they have shown to exhibit a human-like performance in some auditory processing tasks. Nevertheless, the representation geometry of AWEs remains an under-explored topic that has not been studied in the literature. In this paper, we take a closer analytical look at AWEs and study how the choice of the learning objective and the architecture shapes their representational profile. Our main findings highlight the prominent role of the learning objective on the representational geometry over the architecture.

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Understanding Domain Learning in Language Models Through Subpopulation Analysis
Zheng Zhao | Yftah Ziser | Shay Cohen

We investigate how different domains are encoded in modern neural network architectures. We analyze the relationship between natural language domains, model size, and the amount of training data used. The primary analysis tool we develop is based on subpopulation analysis with Singular Vector Canonical Correlation Analysis (SVCCA), which we apply to Transformer-based language models (LMs). We compare the latent representations of such a language model at its different layers from a pair of models: a model trained on multiple domains (an experimental model) and a model trained on a single domain (a control model). Through our method, we find that increasing the model capacity impacts how domain information is stored in upper and lower layers differently. In addition, we show that larger experimental models simultaneously embed domain-specific information as if they were conjoined control models. These findings are confirmed qualitatively, demonstrating the validity of our method.

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Intermediate Entity-based Sparse Interpretable Representation Learning
Diego Garcia-Olano | Yasumasa Onoe | Joydeep Ghosh | Byron Wallace

Interpretable entity representations (IERs) are sparse embeddings that are “human-readable” in that dimensions correspond to fine-grained entity types and values are predicted probabilities that a given entity is of the corresponding type. These methods perform well in zero-shot and low supervision settings. Compared to standard dense neural embeddings, such interpretable representations may permit analysis and debugging. However, while fine-tuning sparse, interpretable representations improves accuracy on downstream tasks, it destroys the semantics of the dimensions which were enforced in pre-training. Can we maintain the interpretable semantics afforded by IERs while improving predictive performance on downstream tasks? Toward this end, we propose Intermediate enTity-based Sparse Interpretable Representation Learning (ItsIRL). ItsIRL realizes improved performance over prior IERs on biomedical tasks, while maintaining “interpretability” generally and their ability to support model debugging specifically. The latter is enabled in part by the ability to perform “counterfactual” fine-grained entity type manipulation, which we explore in this work. Finally, we propose a method to construct entity type based class prototypes for revealing global semantic properties of classes learned by our model. Code for pre-training and experiments will be made publicly available.

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Towards Procedural Fairness: Uncovering Biases in How a Toxic Language Classifier Uses Sentiment Information
Isar Nejadgholi | Esma Balkir | Kathleen Fraser | Svetlana Kiritchenko

Previous works on the fairness of toxic language classifiers compare the output of models with different identity terms as input features but do not consider the impact of other important concepts present in the context. Here, besides identity terms, we take into account high-level latent features learned by the classifier and investigate the interaction between these features and identity terms. For a multi-class toxic language classifier, we leverage a concept-based explanation framework to calculate the sensitivity of the model to the concept of sentiment, which has been used before as a salient feature for toxic language detection. Our results show that although for some classes, the classifier has learned the sentiment information as expected, this information is outweighed by the influence of identity terms as input features. This work is a step towards evaluating procedural fairness, where unfair processes lead to unfair outcomes. The produced knowledge can guide debiasing techniques to ensure that important concepts besides identity terms are well-represented in training datasets.

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Investigating the Characteristics of a Transformer in a Few-Shot Setup: Does Freezing Layers in RoBERTa Help?
Digvijay Ingle | Rishabh Tripathi | Ayush Kumar | Kevin Patel | Jithendra Vepa

Transformer based language models have been widely adopted by industrial and research organisations in developing machine learning applications in the presence of limited annotated data. While these models show remarkable results, their functioning in few-shot settings is still poorly understood. Hence, we perform an investigative study to understand the characteristics of such models fine-tuned in few-shot setups. Specifically, we compare the intermediate layer representations obtained from a few-shot model and a pre-trained language model. We observe that pre-trained and few-shot models show similar representations over initial layers, whereas the later layers show a stark deviation. Based on these observations, we propose to freeze the initial Transformer layers to fine-tune the model in a constrained text classification setup with K annotated data points per class, where K ranges from 8 to 64. In our experiments across six benchmark sentence classification tasks, we discover that freezing initial 50% Transformer layers not only reduces training time but also surprisingly improves Macro F1 (upto 8%) when compared to fully trainable layers in few-shot setup. We also observe that this idea of layer freezing can very well be generalized to state-of-the-art few-shot text classification techniques, like DNNC and LM-BFF, leading to significant reduction in training time while maintaining comparable performance.

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It Is Not Easy To Detect Paraphrases: Analysing Semantic Similarity With Antonyms and Negation Using the New SemAntoNeg Benchmark
Teemu Vahtola | Mathias Creutz | Jörg Tiedemann

We investigate to what extent a hundred publicly available, popular neural language models capture meaning systematically. Sentence embeddings obtained from pretrained or fine-tuned language models can be used to perform particular tasks, such as paraphrase detection, semantic textual similarity assessment or natural language inference. Common to all of these tasks is that paraphrastic sentences, that is, sentences that carry (nearly) the same meaning, should have (nearly) the same embeddings regardless of surface form. We demonstrate that performance varies greatly across different language models when a specific type of meaning-preserving transformation is applied: two sentences should be identified as paraphrastic if one of them contains a negated antonym in relation to the other one, such as “I am not guilty” versus “I am innocent”.We introduce and release SemAntoNeg, a new test suite containing 3152 entries for probing paraphrasticity in sentences incorporating negation and antonyms. Among other things, we show that language models fine-tuned for natural language inference outperform other types of models, especially the ones fine-tuned to produce general-purpose sentence embeddings, on the test suite. Furthermore, we show that most models designed explicitly for paraphrasing are rather mediocre in our task.

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Controlling for Stereotypes in Multimodal Language Model Evaluation
Manuj Malik | Richard Johansson

We propose a methodology and design two benchmark sets for measuring to what extent language-and-vision language models use the visual signal in the presence or absence of stereotypes. The first benchmark is designed to test for stereotypical colors of common objects, while the second benchmark considers gender stereotypes. The key idea is to compare predictions when the image conforms to the stereotype to predictions when it does not. Our results show that there is significant variation among multimodal models: the recent Transformer-based FLAVA seems to be more sensitive to the choice of image and less affected by stereotypes than older CNN-based models such as VisualBERT and LXMERT. This effect is more discernible in this type of controlled setting than in traditional evaluations where we do not know whether the model relied on the stereotype or the visual signal.

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On the Compositional Generalization Gap of In-Context Learning
Arian Hosseini | Ankit Vani | Dzmitry Bahdanau | Alessandro Sordoni | Aaron Courville

Pretrained large generative language models have shown great performance on many tasks, but exhibit low compositional generalization abilities. Scaling such models has been shown to improve their performance on various NLP tasks even just by conditioning them on a few examples to solve the task without any fine-tuning (also known as in-context learning). In this work, we look at the gap between the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance of such models in semantic parsing tasks with in-context learning. In the ID settings, the demonstrations are from the same split (test or train) that the model is being evaluated on, and in the OOD settings, they are from the other split. We look at how the relative generalization gap of in-context learning evolves as models are scaled up. We evaluate four model families, OPT, BLOOM, CodeGen and Codex on three semantic parsing datasets, CFQ, SCAN and GeoQuery with different number of exemplars, and observe a trend of decreasing relative generalization gap as models are scaled up.

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Explaining Translationese: why are Neural Classifiers Better and what do they Learn?
Kwabena Amponsah-Kaakyire | Daria Pylypenko | Josef Genabith | Cristina España-Bonet

Recent work has shown that neural feature- and representation-learning, e.g. BERT, achieves superior performance over traditional manual feature engineering based approaches, with e.g. SVMs, in translationese classification tasks. Previous research did not show (i) whether the difference is because of the features, the classifiers or both, and (ii) what the neural classifiers actually learn. To address (i), we carefully design experiments that swap features between BERT- and SVM-based classifiers. We show that an SVM fed with BERT representations performs at the level of the best BERT classifiers, while BERT learning and using handcrafted features performs at the level of an SVM using handcrafted features. This shows that the performance differences are due to the features. To address (ii) we use integrated gradients and find that (a) there is indication that information captured by hand-crafted features is only a subset of what BERT learns, and (b) part of BERT’s top performance results are due to BERT learning topic differences and spurious correlations with translationese.

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Probing GPT-3’s Linguistic Knowledge on Semantic Tasks
Lining Zhang | Mengchen Wang | Liben Chen | Wenxin Zhang

GPT-3 has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. However, it is still unclear what GPT-3 has understood or learned especially in linguistic knowledge. Some studies have shown linguistic phenomena including negation and tense are hard to be recognized by language models such as BERT. In this study, we conduct probing tasks focusing on semantic information. Specifically, we investigate GPT-3’s linguistic knowledge on semantic tasks to identify tense, the number of subjects, and the number of objects for a given sentence. We also experiment with different prompt designs and temperatures of the decoding method. Our experiment results suggest that GPT-3 has acquired linguistic knowledge to identify certain semantic information in most cases, but still fails when there are some types of disturbance happening in the sentence. We also perform error analysis to summarize some common types of mistakes that GPT-3 has made when dealing with certain semantic information.

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Garden Path Traversal in GPT-2
William Jurayj | William Rudman | Carsten Eickhoff

In recent years, large-scale transformer decoders such as the GPT-x family of models have become increasingly popular. Studies examining the behavior of these models tend to focus only on the output of the language modeling head and avoid analysis of the internal states of the transformer decoder. In this study, we present a collection of methods to analyze the hidden states of GPT-2 and use the model’s navigation of garden path sentences as a case study. To enable this, we compile the largest currently available dataset of garden path sentences. We show that Manhattan distances and cosine similarities provide more reliable insights compared to established surprisal methods that analyze next-token probabilities computed by a language modeling head. Using these methods, we find that negating tokens have minimal impacts on the model’s representations for unambiguous forms of sentences with ambiguity solely over what the object of a verb is, but have a more substantial impact of representations for unambiguous sentences whose ambiguity would stem from the voice of a verb. Further, we find that analyzing the decoder model’s hidden states reveals periods of ambiguity that might conclude in a garden path effect but happen not to, whereas surprisal analyses routinely miss this detail.

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Testing Pre-trained Language Models’ Understanding of Distributivity via Causal Mediation Analysis
Pangbo Ban | Yifan Jiang | Tianran Liu | Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

To what extent do pre-trained language models grasp semantic knowledge regarding the phenomenon of distributivity? In this paper, we introduce DistNLI, a new diagnostic dataset for natural language inference that targets the semantic difference arising from distributivity, and employ the causal mediation analysis framework to quantify the model behavior and explore the underlying mechanism in this semantically-related task. We find that the extent of models’ understanding is associated with model size and vocabulary size. We also provide insights into how models encode such high-level semantic knowledge.

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Using Roark-Hollingshead Distance to Probe BERT’s Syntactic Competence
Jingcheng Niu | Wenjie Lu | Eric Corlett | Gerald Penn

Probing BERT’s general ability to reason about syntax is no simple endeavour, primarily because of the uncertainty surrounding how large language models represent syntactic structure. Many prior accounts of BERT’s agility as a syntactic tool (Clark et al., 2013; Lau et al., 2014; Marvin and Linzen, 2018; Chowdhury and Zamparelli, 2018; Warstadt et al., 2019, 2020; Hu et al., 2020) have therefore confined themselves to studying very specific linguistic phenomena, and there has still been no definitive answer as to whether BERT “knows” syntax. The advent of perturbed masking (Wu et al., 2020) would then seem to be significant, because this is a parameter-free probing method that directly samples syntactic trees from BERT’s embeddings. These sampled trees outperform a right-branching baseline, thus providing preliminary evidence that BERT’s syntactic competence bests a simple baseline. This baseline is underwhelming, however, and our reappraisal below suggests that this result, too, is inconclusive. We propose RH Probe, an encoder-decoder probing architecture that operates on two probing tasks. We find strong empirical evidence confirming the existence of important syntactic information in BERT, but this information alone appears not to be enough to reproduce syntax in its entirety. Our probe makes crucial use of a conjecture made by Roark and Holling-shead (2008) that a particular lexical annotation that we shall call RH distance is a sufficient encoding of unlabelled binary syntactic trees, and we prove this conjecture.

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DALLE-2 is Seeing Double: Flaws in Word-to-Concept Mapping in Text2Image Models
Royi Rassin | Shauli Ravfogel | Yoav Goldberg

We study the way DALLE-2 maps symbols (words) in the prompt to their references (entities or properties of entities in the generated image). We show that in stark contrast to the way human process language, DALLE-2 does not follow the constraint that each word has a single role in the interpretation, and sometimes re-use the same symbol for different purposes. We collect a set of stimuli that reflect the phenomenon: we show that DALLE-2 depicts both senses of nouns with multiple senses at once; and that a given word can modify the properties of two distinct entities in the image, or can be depicted as one object and also modify the properties of another object, creating a semantic leakage of properties between entities. Taken together, our study highlights the differences between DALLE-2 and human language processing and opens an avenue for future study on the inductive biases of text-to-image models.

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Practical Benefits of Feature Feedback Under Distribution Shift
Anurag Katakkar | Clay H. Yoo | Weiqin Wang | Zachary Lipton | Divyansh Kaushik

In attempts to develop sample-efficient and interpretable algorithms, researcher have explored myriad mechanisms for collecting and exploiting feature feedback, auxiliary annotations provided for training (but not test) instances that highlight salient evidence. Examples include bounding boxes around objects and salient spans in text. Despite its intuitive appeal, feature feedback has not delivered significant gains in practical problems as assessed on iid holdout sets. However, recent works on counterfactually augmented data suggest an alternative benefit of supplemental annotations, beyond interpretability: lessening sensitivity to spurious patterns and consequently delivering gains in out-of-domain evaluations. We speculate that while existing methods for incorporating feature feedback have delivered negligible in-sample performance gains, they may nevertheless provide out-of-domain benefits. Our experiments addressing sentiment analysis, show that feature feedback methods perform significantly better on various natural out-of-domain datasets despite comparable in-domain evaluations. By contrast, performance on natural language inference remains comparable. Finally, we compare those tasks where feature feedback does (and does not) help.

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Identifying the Source of Vulnerability in Explanation Discrepancy: A Case Study in Neural Text Classification
Ruixuan Tang | Hanjie Chen | Yangfeng Ji

Some recent works observed the instability of post-hoc explanations when input side perturbations are applied to the model. This raises the interest and concern in the stability of post-hoc explanations. However, the remaining question is: is the instability caused by the neural network model or the post-hoc explanation method? This work explores the potential source that leads to unstable post-hoc explanations. To separate the influence from the model, we propose a simple output probability perturbation method. Compared to prior input side perturbation methods, the output probability perturbation method can circumvent the neural model’s potential effect on the explanations and allow the analysis on the explanation method. We evaluate the proposed method with three widely-used post-hoc explanation methods (LIME (Ribeiro et al., 2016), Kernel Shapley (Lundberg and Lee, 2017a), and Sample Shapley (Strumbelj and Kononenko, 2010)). The results demonstrate that the post-hoc methods are stable, barely producing discrepant explanations under output probability perturbations. The observation suggests that neural network models may be the primary source of fragile explanations.

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Probing Pretrained Models of Source Codes
Sergey Troshin | Nadezhda Chirkova

Deep learning models are widely used for solving challenging code processing tasks, such as code generation or code summarization. Traditionally, a specific model architecture was carefully built to solve a particular code processing task. However, recently general pretrained models such as CodeBERT or CodeT5 have been shown to outperform task-specific models in many applications. While pretrained models are known to learn complex patterns from data, they may fail to understand some properties of source code. To test diverse aspects of code understanding, we introduce a set of diagnostic probing tasks. We show that pretrained models of code indeed contain information about code syntactic structure, the notions of identifiers, and namespaces, but they may fail to recognize more complex code properties such as semantic equivalence. We also investigate how probing results are affected by using code-specific pretraining objectives, varying the model size, or finetuning.

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Probing the representations of named entities in Transformer-based Language Models
Stefan Schouten | Peter Bloem | Piek Vossen

In this work we analyze the named entity representations learned by Transformer-based language models. We investigate the role entities play in two tasks: a language modeling task, and a sequence classification task. For this purpose we collect a novel news topic classification dataset with 12 topics called RefNews-12. We perform two complementary methods of analysis. First, we use diagnostic models allowing us to quantify to what degree entity information is present in the hidden representations. Second, we perform entity mention substitution to measure how substitute-entities with different properties impact model performance. By controlling for model uncertainty we are able to show that entities are identified, and depending on the task, play a measurable role in the model’s predictions. Additionally, we show that the entities’ types alone are not enough to account for this. Finally, we find that the the frequency with which entities occur are important for the masked language modeling task, and that the entities’ distributions over topics are important for topic classification.

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Decomposing Natural Logic Inferences for Neural NLI
Julia Rozanova | Deborah Ferreira | Mokanarangan Thayaparan | Marco Valentino | Andre Freitas

In the interest of interpreting neural NLI models and their reasoning strategies, we carry out a systematic probing study which investigates whether these modelscapture the crucial semantic features central to natural logic: monotonicity and concept inclusion. Correctly identifying valid inferences in downward-monotone contexts is a known stumbling block for NLI performance,subsuming linguistic phenomena such as negation scope and generalized quantifiers. To understand this difficulty, we emphasize monotonicity as a property of a context and examine the extent to which models capture relevant monotonicity information in the vector representations which are intermediate to their decision making process. Drawing on the recent advancement of the probing paradigm,we compare the presence of monotonicity features across various models. We find that monotonicity information is notably weak in the representations of popularNLI models which achieve high scores on benchmarks, and observe that previous improvements to these models based on fine-tuning strategies have introduced stronger monotonicity features together with their improved performance on challenge sets.

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Probing with Noise: Unpicking the Warp and Weft of Embeddings
Filip Klubicka | John Kelleher

Improving our understanding of how information is encoded in vector space can yield valuable interpretability insights. Alongside vector dimensions, we argue that it is possible for the vector norm to also carry linguistic information. We develop a method to test this: an extension of the probing framework which allows for relative intrinsic interpretations of probing results. It relies on introducing noise that ablates information encoded in embeddings, grounded in random baselines and confidence intervals. We apply the method to well-established probing tasks and find evidence that confirms the existence of separate information containers in English GloVe and BERT embeddings. Our correlation analysis aligns with the experimental findings that different encoders use the norm to encode different kinds of information: GloVe stores syntactic and sentence length information in the vector norm, while BERT uses it to encode contextual incongruity.

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Look to the Right: Mitigating Relative Position Bias in Extractive Question Answering
Kazutoshi Shinoda | Saku Sugawara | Akiko Aizawa

Extractive question answering (QA) models tend to exploit spurious correlations to make predictions when a training set has unintended biases. This tendency results in models not being generalizable to examples where the correlations do not hold. Determining the spurious correlations QA models can exploit is crucial in building generalizable QA models in real-world applications; moreover, a method needs to be developed that prevents these models from learning the spurious correlations even when a training set is biased. In this study, we discovered that the relative position of an answer, which is defined as the relative distance from an answer span to the closest question-context overlap word, can be exploited by QA models as superficial cues for making predictions. Specifically, we find that when the relative positions in a training set are biased, the performance on examples with relative positions unseen during training is significantly degraded. To mitigate the performance degradation for unseen relative positions, we propose an ensemble-based debiasing method that does not require prior knowledge about the distribution of relative positions. We demonstrate that the proposed method mitigates the models’ reliance on relative positions using the biased and full SQuAD dataset. We hope that this study can help enhance the generalization ability of QA models in real-world applications.

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A Continuum of Generation Tasks for Investigating Length Bias and Degenerate Repetition
Darcey Riley | David Chiang

Language models suffer from various degenerate behaviors. These differ between tasks: machine translation (MT) exhibits length bias, while tasks like story generation exhibit excessive repetition. Recent work has attributed the difference to task constrainedness, but evidence for this claim has always involved many confounding variables. To study this question directly, we introduce a new experimental framework that allows us to smoothly vary task constrainedness, from MT at one end to fully open-ended generation at the other, while keeping all other aspects fixed. We find that: (1) repetition decreases smoothly with constrainedness, explaining the difference in repetition across tasks; (2) length bias surprisingly also decreases with constrainedness, suggesting some other cause for the difference in length bias; (3) across the board, these problems affect the mode, not the whole distribution; (4) the differences cannot be attributed to a change in the entropy of the distribution, since another method of changing the entropy, label smoothing, does not produce the same effect.

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Universal and Independent: Multilingual Probing Framework for Exhaustive Model Interpretation and Evaluation
Oleg Serikov | Vitaly Protasov | Ekaterina Voloshina | Viktoria Knyazkova | Tatiana Shavrina

Linguistic analysis of language models is one of the ways to explain and describe their reasoning, weaknesses, and limitations. In the probing part of the model interpretability research, studies concern individual languages as well as individual linguistic structures. The question arises: are the detected regularities linguistically coherent, or on the contrary, do they dissonate at the typological scale? Moreover, the majority of studies address the inherent set of languages and linguistic structures, leaving the actual typological diversity knowledge out of scope. In this paper, we present and apply the GUI-assisted framework allowing us to easily probe massive amounts of languages for all the morphosyntactic features present in the Universal Dependencies data. We show that reflecting the anglo-centric trend in NLP over the past years, most of the regularities revealed in the mBERT model are typical for the western-European languages. Our framework can be integrated with the existing probing toolboxes, model cards, and leaderboards, allowing practitioners to use and share their familiar probing methods to interpret multilingual models. Thus we propose a toolkit to systematize the multilingual flaws in multilingual models, providing a reproducible experimental setup for 104 languages and 80 morphosyntactic features.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Second Workshop on When Creative AI Meets Conversational AI

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Proceedings of the Second Workshop on When Creative AI Meets Conversational AI
Xianchao Wu | Peiying Ruan | Sheng Li | Yi Dong

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Prompting for a conversation: How to control a dialog model?
Josef Valvoda | Yimai Fang | David Vandyke

Dialog modelling faces a difficult trade-off. Models are trained on a large amount of text, yet their responses need to be limited to a desired scope and style of a dialog agent. Because the datasets used to achieve the former contain language that is not compatible with the latter, pre-trained dialog models are fine-tuned on smaller curated datasets. However, the fine-tuning process robs them of the ability to produce diverse responses, eventually reducing them to dull conversation partners. In this paper we investigate if prompting can help with mitigating the above trade-off. Specifically, we experiment with conditioning the prompt on the query, rather than training a single prompt for all queries. By following the intuition that freezing the pre-trained language model will conserve its expressivity, we find that compared to fine-tuning, prompting can achieve a higher BLEU score and substantially improve the diversity and novelty of the responses.

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Most Language Models can be Poets too: An AI Writing Assistant and Constrained Text Generation Studio
Allen Roush | Sanjay Basu | Akshay Moorthy | Dmitry Dubovoy

Despite rapid advancement in the field of Constrained Natural Language Generation, little time has been spent on exploring the potential of language models which have had their vocabularies lexically, semantically, and/or phonetically constrained. We find that most language models generate compelling text even under significant constraints. We present a simple and universally applicable technique for modifying the output of a language model by compositionally applying filter functions to the language models vocabulary before a unit of text is generated. This approach is plug-and-play and requires no modification to the model. To showcase the value of this technique, we present an easy to use AI writing assistant called “Constrained Text Generation Studio” (CTGS). CTGS allows users to generate or choose from text with any combination of a wide variety of constraints, such as banning a particular letter, forcing the generated words to have a certain number of syllables, and/or forcing the words to be partial anagrams of another word. We introduce a novel dataset of prose that omits the letter “e”. We show that our method results in strictly superior performance compared to fine-tuning alone on this dataset. We also present a Huggingface “space” web-app presenting this technique called Gadsby. The code is available to the public here: https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Generation-Studio

We propose a Korean multimodal dialogue system targeting emotion-based empathetic dialogues because most research in this field has been conducted in a few languages such as English and Japanese and in certain circumstances. Our dialogue system consists of an emotion detector, an empathetic response generator, a monitoring interface, a voice activity detector, a speech recognizer, a speech synthesizer, a gesture classification, and several controllers to provide both multimodality and empathy during a conversation between a human and a machine. For comparisons across visual influence on users, our dialogue system contains two versions of the user interface, a cat face-based user interface and an avatar-based user interface. We evaluated our dialogue system by investigating the dialogues in text and the average mean opinion scores under three different visual conditions, no visual, the cat face-based, and the avatar-based expressions. The experimental results stand for the importance of adequate visual expressions according to user utterances.

Task-Oriented Dialog (TOD) systems often suffer from dialog breakdowns - situations in which users cannot or do not want to proceed with the conversation. Ideally TOD systems should be able to detect dialog breakdowns to prevent users from quitting a conversation and to encourage them to interact with the system again. In this paper, we present BETOLD, a privacy-preserving dataset for breakdown detection. The dataset consists of user and system turns represented by intents and entity annotations, derived from NLU and NLG dialog manager components. We also propose an attention-based model that detects potential breakdowns using these annotations, instead of the utterances’ text. This approach achieves a comparable performance to the corresponding utterance-only model, while ensuring data privacy.

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Insurance Question Answering via Single-turn Dialogue Modeling
Seon-Ok Na | Young-Min Kim | Seung-Hwan Cho

With great success in single-turn question answering (QA), conversational QA is currently receiving considerable attention. Several studies have been conducted on this topic from different perspectives. However, building a real-world conversational system remains a challenge. This study introduces our ongoing project, which uses Korean QA data to develop a dialogue system in the insurance domain. The goal is to construct a system that provides informative responses to general insurance questions. We present the current results of single-turn QA. A unique aspect of our approach is that we borrow the concepts of intent detection and slot filling from task-oriented dialogue systems. We present details of the data construction process and the experimental results on both learning tasks.

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Can We Train a Language Model Inside an End-to-End ASR Model? - Investigating Effective Implicit Language Modeling
Zhuo Gong | Daisuke Saito | Sheng Li | Hisashi Kawai | Nobuaki Minematsu

Language models (LM) have played crucial roles in automatic speech recognition (ASR) to enhance end-to-end (E2E) ASR systems’ performance. There are two categories of approaches: finding better ways to integrate LMs into ASR systems and adapting on LMs to the task domain. This article will start with a reflection of interpolation-based integration methods of E2E ASR’s scores and LM’s scores. Then we will focus on LM augmentation approaches based on the noisy channel model, which is intrigued by insights obtained from the above reflection. The experiments show that we can enhance an ASR E2E model based on encoder-decoder architecture by pre-training the decoder with text data. This implies the decoder of an E2E model can be treated as an LM and reveals the possibility of enhancing the E2E model without an external LM. Based on those ideas, we proposed the implicit language model canceling method and then did more discussion about the decoder part of an E2E ASR model. The experimental results on the TED-LIUM2 dataset show that our approach achieves a 3.4% relative WER reduction compared with the baseline system, and more analytic experiments provide concrete experimental supports for our assumption.

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Semantic Content Prediction for Generating Interviewing Dialogues to Elicit Users’ Food Preferences
Jie Zeng | Tatsuya Sakato | Yukiko Nakano

Dialogue systems that aim to acquire user models through interactions with users need to have interviewing functionality. In this study, we propose a method to generate interview dialogues to build a dialogue system that acquires user preferences for food. First, we collected 118 text-based dialogues between the interviewer and customer and annotated the communicative function and semantic content of the utterances. Next, using the corpus as training data, we created a classification model for the communicative function of the interviewer’s next utterance and a generative model that predicts the semantic content of the utterance based on the dialogue history. By representing semantic content as a sequence of tokens, we evaluated the semantic content prediction model using BLEU. The results demonstrated that the semantic content produced by the proposed method was closer to the ground truth than the semantic content transformed from the output text generated by the retrieval model and GPT-2. Further, we present some examples of dialogue generation by applying model outputs to template-based sentence generation.

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Creative Painting with Latent Diffusion Models
Xianchao Wu

Artistic painting has achieved significant progress during recent years. Using a variational autoencoder to connect the original images with compressed latent spaces and a cross attention enhanced U-Net as the backbone of diffusion, latent diffusion models (LDMs) have achieved stable and high fertility image generation. In this paper, we focus on enhancing the creative painting ability of current LDMs in two directions, textual condition extension and model retraining with Wikiart dataset. Through textual condition extension, users’ input prompts are expanded with rich contextual knowledge for deeper understanding and explaining the prompts. Wikiart dataset contains 80K famous artworks drawn during recent 400 years by more than 1,000 famous artists in rich styles and genres. Through the retraining, we are able to ask these artists to draw artistic and creative paintings on modern topics. Direct comparisons with the original model show that the creativity and artistry are enriched.

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Learning to Evaluate Humor in Memes Based on the Incongruity Theory
Kohtaro Tanaka | Hiroaki Yamane | Yusuke Mori | Yusuke Mukuta | Tatsuya Harada

Memes are a widely used means of communication on social media platforms, and are known for their ability to “go viral”. In prior works, researchers have aimed to develop an AI system to understand humor in memes. However, existing methods are limited by the reliability and consistency of the annotations in the dataset used to train the underlying models. Moreover, they do not explicitly take advantage of the incongruity between images and their captions, which is known to be an important element of humor in memes. In this study, we first gathered real-valued humor annotations of 7,500 memes through a crowdwork platform. Based on this data, we propose a refinement process to extract memes that are not influenced by interpersonal differences in the perception of humor and a method designed to extract and utilize incongruities between images and captions. The results of an experimental comparison with models using vision and language pretraining models show that our proposed approach outperformed other models in a binary classification task of evaluating whether a given meme was humorous.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE)

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Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE)
Ali Hürriyetoğlu | Hristo Tanev | Vanni Zavarella | Erdem Yörük

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A Multi-Modal Dataset for Hate Speech Detection on Social Media: Case-study of Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Surendrabikram Thapa | Aditya Shah | Farhan Jafri | Usman Naseem | Imran Razzak

This paper presents a new multi-modal dataset for identifying hateful content on social media, consisting of 5,680 text-image pairs collected from Twitter, labeled across two labels. Experimental analysis of the presented dataset has shown that understanding both modalities is essential for detecting these techniques. It is confirmed in our experiments with several state-of-the-art multi-modal models. In future work, we plan to extend the dataset in size. We further plan to develop new multi-modal models tailored explicitly to hate-speech detection, aiming for a deeper understanding of the text and image relation. It would also be interesting to perform experiments in a direction that explores what social entities the given hate speech tweet targets.

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EventGraph: Event Extraction as Semantic Graph Parsing
Huiling You | David Samuel | Samia Touileb | Lilja Øvrelid

Event extraction involves the detection and extraction of both the event triggers and the corresponding arguments. Existing systems often decompose event extraction into multiple subtasks, without considering their possible interactions. In this paper, we propose EventGraph, a joint framework for event extraction, which encodes events as graphs. We represent event triggers and arguments as nodes in a semantic graph. Event extraction therefore becomes a graph parsing problem, which provides the following advantages: 1) performing event detection and argument extraction jointly; 2) detecting and extracting multiple events from a piece of text; 3) capturing the complicated interaction between event arguments and triggers. Experimental results on ACE2005 show that our model is competitive to state-of-the-art systems and has substantially improved the results on argument extraction. Additionally, we create two new datasets from ACE2005 where we keep the entire text spans for event arguments, instead of just the head word(s). Our code and models will be released as open-source.

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NLP4ITF @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Leveraging Linguistic Information for Event Causality Classification
Theresa Krumbiegel | Sophie Decher

We present our submission to Subtask 1 of theCASE-2022 Shared Task 3: Event CausalityIdentification with Causal News Corpus as partof the 5th Workshop on Challenges and Applicationsof Automated Extraction of SociopoliticalEvents from Text (CASE 2022) (Tanet al., 2022a). The task focuses on causal eventclassification on the sentence level and involvesdifferentiating between sentences that include acause-effect relation and sentences that do not. We approached this as a binary text classificationtask and experimented with multiple trainingsets augmented with additional linguisticinformation. Our best model was generated bytraining roberta-base on a combination ofdata from both Subtasks 1 and 2 with the additionof named entity annotations. During thedevelopment phase we achieved a macro F1 of0.8641 with this model on the development setprovided by the task organizers. When testingthe model on the final test data, we achieved amacro F1 of 0.8516.

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A Hybrid Knowledge and Transformer-Based Model for Event Detection with Automatic Self-Attention Threshold, Layer and Head Selection
Thierry Desot | Orphee De Clercq | Veronique Hoste

Event and argument role detection are frequently conceived as separate tasks. In this work we conceive both processes as one taskin a hybrid event detection approach. Its main component is based on automatic keyword extraction (AKE) using the self-attention mechanism of a BERT transformer model. As a bottleneck for AKE is defining the threshold of the attention values, we propose a novel method for automatic self-attention thresholdselection. It is fueled by core event information, or simply the verb and its arguments as the backbone of an event. These are outputted by a knowledge-based syntactic parser. In a secondstep the event core is enriched with other semantically salient words provided by the transformer model. Furthermore, we propose an automatic self-attention layer and head selectionmechanism, by analyzing which self-attention cells in the BERT transformer contribute most to the hybrid event detection and which linguistic tasks they represent. This approach was integrated in a pipeline event extraction approachand outperforms three state of the art multi-task event extraction methods.

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Improving Zero-Shot Event Extraction via Sentence Simplification
Sneha Mehta | Huzefa Rangwala | Naren Ramakrishnan

The success of sites such as ACLED and Our World in Data have demonstrated the massive utility of extracting events in structured formats from large volumes of textual data in the formof news, social media, blogs and discussion forums. Event extraction can provide a window into ongoing geopolitical crises and yield actionable intelligence. In this work, we cast socio-political event extraction as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) task. % With the proliferation of large pretrained language models Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has emerged as a new paradigm for event extraction in recent times. In this approach, extraction of social-political actors and targets from a sentence is framed as an extractive question-answering problem conditioned on an event type. There are several advantages of using MRC for this task including the ability to leverage large pretrained multilingual language models and their ability to perform zero-shot extraction. Moreover, we find that the problem of long-range dependencies, i.e., large lexical distance between trigger and argument words and the difficulty of processing syntactically complex sentences plague MRC-based approaches. To address this, we present a general approach to improve the performance of MRC-based event extraction by performing unsupervised sentence simplification guided by the MRC model itself. We evaluate our approach on the ICEWS geopolitical event extraction dataset, with specific attention to ‘Actor’ and ‘Target’ argument roles. We show how such context simplification can improve the performance of MRC-based event extraction by more than 5% for actor extraction and more than 10% for target extraction.

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SNU-Causality Lab @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Detecting Causality by Data Augmentation via Part-of-Speech tagging
Juhyeon Kim | Yesong Choe | Sanghack Lee

Finding causal relations in texts has been a challenge since it requires methods ranging from defining event ontologies to developing proper algorithmic approaches. In this paper, we developed a framework which classifies whether a given sentence contains a causal event. As our approach, we exploited an external corpus that has causal labels to overcome the small size of the original corpus (Causal News Corpus) provided by task organizers. Further, we employed a data augmentation technique utilizing Part-Of-Speech (POS) based on our observation that some parts of speech are more (or less) relevant to causality. Our approach especially improved the recall of detecting causal events in sentences.

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LTRC @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Extracting and Identifying Causal Elements using Adapters
Hiranmai Sri Adibhatla | Manish Shrivastava

Causality detection and identification is centered on identifying semantic and cognitive connections in a sentence. In this paper, we describe the effort of team LTRC for Causal News Corpus - Event Causality Shared Task 2022 at the 5th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2022). The shared task consisted of two subtasks: 1) identifying if a sentence contains a causality relation, and 2) identifying spans of text that correspond to cause, effect and signals. We fine-tuned transformer-based models with adapters for both subtasks. Our best-performing models obtained a binary F1 score of 0.853 on held-out data for subtask 1 and a macro F1 score of 0.032 on held-out data for subtask 2. Our approach is ranked third in subtask 1 and fourth in subtask 2. The paper describes our experiments, solutions, and analysis in detail.

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Cross-modal Transfer Between Vision and Language for Protest Detection
Ria Raj | Kajsa Andreasson | Tobias Norlund | Richard Johansson | Aron Lagerberg

Most of today’s systems for socio-political event detection are text-based, while an increasing amount of information published on the web is multi-modal. We seek to bridge this gap by proposing a method that utilizes existing annotated unimodal data to perform event detection in another data modality, zero-shot. Specifically, we focus on protest detection in text and images, and show that a pretrained vision-and-language alignment model (CLIP) can be leveraged towards this end. In particular, our results suggest that annotated protest text data can act supplementarily for detecting protests in images, but significant transfer is demonstrated in the opposite direction as well.

In this paper, we describe our participation in the subtask 1 of CASE-2022, Event Causality Identification with Casual News Corpus. We address the Causal Relation Identification (CRI) task by exploiting a set of simple yet complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models (LMs) on a few annotated examples (i.e., a few-shot configuration).We follow a prompt-based prediction approach for fine-tuning LMs in which the CRI task is treated as a masked language modeling problem (MLM). This approach allows LMs natively pre-trained on MLM tasks to directly generate textual responses to CRI-specific prompts. We compare the performance of this method against ensemble techniques trained on the entire dataset. Our best-performing submission was fine-tuned with only 256 instances per class, 15.7% of the all available data, and yet obtained the second-best precision (0.82), third-best accuracy (0.82), and an F1-score (0.85) very close to what was reported by the winner team (0.86).

In this paper, we describe our shared task submissions for Subtask 2 in CASE-2022, Event Causality Identification with Casual News Corpus. The challenge focused on the automatic detection of all cause-effect-signal spans present in the sentence from news-media. We detect cause-effect-signal spans in a sentence using T5 — a pre-trained autoregressive language model. We iteratively identify all cause-effect-signal span triplets, always conditioning the prediction of the next triplet on the previously predicted ones. To predict the triplet itself, we consider different causal relationships such as cause→effect→signal. Each triplet component is generated via a language model conditioned on the sentence, the previous parts of the current triplet, and previously predicted triplets. Despite training on an extremely small dataset of 160 samples, our approach achieved competitive performance, being placed second in the competition. Furthermore, we show that assuming either cause→effect or effect→cause order achieves similar results.

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NoisyAnnot@ Causal News Corpus 2022: Causality Detection using Multiple Annotation Decisions
Quynh Anh Nguyen | Arka Mitra

The paper describes the work that has been submitted to the 5th workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of socio-political events from text (CASE 2022). The work is associated with Subtask 1 of Shared Task 3 that aims to detect causality in protest news corpus. The authors used different large language models with customized cross-entropy loss functions that exploit annotation information. The experiments showed that bert-based-uncased with refined cross-entropy outperformed the others, achieving a F1 score of 0.8501 on the Causal News Corpus dataset.

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GGNN@Causal News Corpus 2022:Gated Graph Neural Networks for Causal Event Classification from Social-Political News Articles
Paul Trust | Rosane Minghim | Evangelos Milos | Kadusabe Provia

The discovery of causality mentions from text is a core cognitive concept and appears in many natural language processing (NLP) applications. In this paper, we study the task of Event Causality Identification (ECI) from social-political news. The aim of the task is to detect causal relationships between event mention pairs in text. Although deep learning models have recently achieved a state-of-the-art performance on many tasks and applications in NLP, most of them still fail to capture rich semantic and syntactic structures within sentences which is key for causality classification. We present a solution for causal event detection from social-political news that captures semantic and syntactic information based on gated graph neural networks (GGNN) and contextualized language embeddings. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the baseline model (BERT (Bidirectional Embeddings from Transformers) in terms of f1-score and accuracy.

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1Cademy @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Leveraging Self-Training in Causality Classification of Socio-Political Event Data
Adam Nik | Ge Zhang | Xingran Chen | Mingyu Li | Jie Fu

This paper details our participation in the Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE) workshop @ EMNLP 2022, where we take part in Subtask 1 of Shared Task 3 (CITATION). We approach the given task of event causality detection by proposing a self-training pipeline that follows a teacher-student classifier method. More specifically, we initially train a teacher model on the true, original task data, and use that teacher model to self-label data to be used in the training of a separate student model for the final task prediction. We test how restricting the number of positive or negative self-labeled examples in the self-training process affects classification performance. Our final results show that using self-training produces a comprehensive performance improvement across all models and self-labeled training sets tested within the task of event causality sequence classification. On top of that, we find that self-training performance did not diminish even when restricting either positive/negative examples used in training. Our code is be publicly available at https://github.com/Gzhang-umich/1CademyTeamOfCASE.

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1Cademy @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Enhance Causal Span Detection via Beam-Search-based Position Selector
Xingran Chen | Ge Zhang | Adam Nik | Mingyu Li | Jie Fu

In this paper, we present our approach and empirical observations for Cause-Effect Signal Span Detection—Subtask 2 of Shared task 3 at CASE 2022. The shared task aims to extract the cause, effect, and signal spans from a given causal sentence. We model the task as a reading comprehension (RC) problem and apply a token-level RC-based span prediction paradigm to the task as the baseline. We explore different training objectives to fine-tune the model, as well as data augmentation (DA) tricks based on the language model (LM) for performance improvement. Additionally, we propose an efficient beam-search post-processing strategy to due with the drawbacks of span detection to obtain a further performance gain. Our approach achieves an average F₁ score of 54.15 and ranks 1ˆst in the CASE competition. Our code is available at https://github.com/Gzhang-umich/1CademyTeamOfCASE.

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Hybrid Knowledge Engineering Leveraging a Robust ML Framework to Produce an Assassination Dataset
Abigail Sticha | Paul Brenner

Social and political researchers require robust event datasets to conduct data-driven analysis, an example being the need for trigger event datasets to analyze under what conditions and in what patterns certain trigger-type events increase the probability of mass killings. Fortunately, NLP and ML can be leveraged to create these robust datasets. In this paper we (i) outline a robust ML framework that prioritizes understandability through visualizations and generalizability through the ability to implement different ML algorithms, (ii) perform a comparative analysis of these ML tools within the framework for the coup trigger, (iii) leverage our ML framework along with a unique combination of NLP tools, such as NER and knowledge graphs, to produce a dataset for the the assassination trigger, and (iv) make this comprehensive, consolidated, and cohesive assassination dataset publicly available to provide temporal data for understanding political violence as well as training data for further socio-political research.

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Political Event Coding as Text-to-Text Sequence Generation
Yaoyao Dai | Benjamin Radford | Andrew Halterman

We report on the current status of an effort to produce political event data from unstructured text via a Transformer language model. Compelled by the current lack of publicly available and up-to-date event coding software, we seek to train a model that can produce structured political event records at the sentence level. Our approach differs from previous efforts in that we conceptualize this task as one of text-to-text sequence generation. We motivate this choice by outlining desirable properties of text generation models for the needs of event coding. To overcome the lack of sufficient training data, we also describe a method for generating synthetic text and event record pairs that we use to fit our model.

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Zero-Shot Ranking Socio-Political Texts with Transformer Language Models to Reduce Close Reading Time
Kiymet Akdemir | Ali Hürriyetoğlu

We approach the classification problem as an entailment problem and apply zero-shot ranking to socio-political texts. Documents that are ranked at the top can be considered positively classified documents and this reduces the close reading time for the information extraction process. We use Transformer Language Models to get the entailment probabilities and investigate different types of queries. We find that DeBERTa achieves higher mean average precision scores than RoBERTa and when declarative form of the class label is used as a query, it outperforms dictionary definition of the class label. We show that one can reduce the close reading time by taking some percentage of the ranked documents that the percentage depends on how much recall they want to achieve. However, our findings also show that percentage of the documents that should be read increases as the topic gets broader.

Understanding causal relationship is an importance part of natural language processing. We address the causal information extraction problem with different neural models built on top of pre-trained transformer-based language models for identifying Cause, Effect and Signal spans, from news data sets. We use the Causal News Corpus subtask 2 training data set to train span-based and sequence tagging models. Our span-based model based on pre-trained BERT base weights achieves an F1 score of 47.48 on the test set with an accuracy score of 36.87 and obtained 3rd place in the Causal News Corpus 2022 shared task.

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CSECU-DSG @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Fusion of RoBERTa Transformers Variants for Causal Event Classification
Abdul Aziz | Md. Akram Hossain | Abu Nowshed Chy

Identifying cause-effect relationships in sentences is one of the formidable tasks to tackle the challenges of inference and understanding of natural language. However, the diversity of word semantics and sentence structure makes it challenging to determine the causal relationship effectively. To address these challenges, CASE-2022 shared task 3 introduced a task focusing on event causality identification with causal news corpus. This paper presents our participation in this task, especially in subtask 1 which is the causal event classification task. To tackle the task challenge, we propose a unified neural model through exploiting two fine-tuned transformer models including RoBERTa and Twitter-RoBERTa. For the score fusion, we combine the prediction scores of each component model using weighted arithmetic mean to generate the probability score for class label identification. The experimental results showed that our proposed method achieved the top performance (ranked 1st) among the participants.

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ARGUABLY @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Contextually Augmented Language Models for Event Causality Identification
Guneet Kohli | Prabsimran Kaur | Jatin Bedi

Causal (a cause-effect relationship between two arguments) has become integral to various NLP domains such as question answering, summarization, and event prediction. To understand causality in detail, Event Causality Identification with Causal News Corpus (CASE-2022) has organized shared tasks. This paper defines our participation in Subtask 1, which focuses on classifying event causality. We used sentence-level augmentation based on contextualized word embeddings of distillBERT to construct new data. This data was then trained using two approaches. The first technique used the DeBERTa language model, and the second used the RoBERTa language model in combination with cross-attention. We obtained the second-best F1 score (0.8610) in the competition with the Contextually Augmented DeBERTa model.

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ClassBases at the CASE-2022 Multilingual Protest Event Detection Task: Multilingual Protest News Detection and Automatically Replicating Manually Created Event Datasets
Peratham Wiriyathammabhum

In this report, we describe our ClassBases submissions to a shared task on multilingual protest event detection. For the multilingual protest news detection, we participated in subtask-1, subtask-2 and subtask-4 which are document classification, sentence classification and token classification. In subtask-1, we compare XLM-RoBERTa-base, mLUKE-base and XLM-RoBERTa-large on finetuning in a sequential classification setting. We always use a combination of the training data from every language provided to train our multilingual models. We found that larger models seem to work better and entity knowledge helps but at a non-negligible cost. For subtask-2, we only submitted an mLUKE-base system for sentence classification. For subtask-4, we only submitted an XLM-RoBERTa-base for token classification system for sequence labeling. For automatically replicating manually created event datasets, we participated in COVID-related protest events from the New York Times news corpus. We created a system to process the crawled data into a dataset of protest events.

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EventGraph at CASE 2021 Task 1: A General Graph-based Approach to Protest Event Extraction
Huiling You | David Samuel | Samia Touileb | Lilja Øvrelid

This paper presents our submission to the 2022 edition of the CASE 2021 shared task 1, subtask 4. The EventGraph system adapts an end-to-end, graph-based semantic parser to the task of Protest Event Extraction and more specifically subtask 4 on event trigger and argument extraction. We experiment with various graphs, encoding the events as either “labeled-edge” or “node-centric” graphs. We show that the “node-centric” approach yields best results overall, performing well across the three languages of the task, namely English, Spanish, and Portuguese. EventGraph is ranked 3rd for English and Portuguese, and 4th for Spanish.

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NSUT-NLP at CASE 2022 Task 1: Multilingual Protest Event Detection using Transformer-based Models
Manan Suri | Krish Chopra | Adwita Arora

Event detection, specifically in the socio-political domain, has posed a long-standing challenge to researchers in the NLP domain. Therefore, the creation of automated techniques that perform classification of the large amounts of accessible data on the Internet becomes imperative. This paper is a summary of the efforts we made in participating in Task 1 of CASE 2022. We use state-of-art multilingual BERT (mBERT) with further fine-tuning to perform document classification in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Turkish and Mandarin. In the document classification subtask, we were able to achieve F1 scores of 0.8062, 0.6445, 0.7302, 0.5671, 0.6555, 0.7545 and 0.6702 in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Urdu, Mandarin and Turkish respectively achieving a rank of 5 in English and 7 on the remaining language tasks.

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CamPros at CASE 2022 Task 1: Transformer-based Multilingual Protest News Detection
Neha Kumari | Mrinal Anand | Tushar Mohan | Ponnurangam Kumaraguru | Arun Balaji Buduru

Socio-political protests often lead to grave consequences when they occur. The early detection of such protests is very important for taking early precautionary measures. However, the main shortcoming of protest event detection is the scarcity of sufficient training data for specific language categories, which makes it difficult to train data-hungry deep learning models effectively. Therefore, cross-lingual and zero-shot learning models are needed to detect events in various low-resource languages. This paper proposes a multi-lingual cross-document level event detection approach using pre-trained transformer models developed for Shared Task 1 at CASE 2022. The shared task constituted four subtasks for event detection at different granularity levels, i.e., document level to token level, spread over multiple languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Urdu, and Mandarin). Our system achieves an average F1 score of 0.73 for document-level event detection tasks. Our approach secured 2nd position for the Hindi language in subtask 1 with an F1 score of 0.80. While for Spanish, we secure 4th position with an F1 score of 0.69. Our code is available at https://github.com/nehapspathak/campros/.

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ARC-NLP at CASE 2022 Task 1: Ensemble Learning for Multilingual Protest Event Detection
Umitcan Sahin | Oguzhan Ozcelik | Izzet Emre Kucukkaya | Cagri Toraman

Automated socio-political protest event detection is a challenging task when multiple languages are considered. In CASE 2022 Task 1, we propose ensemble learning methods for multilingual protest event detection in four subtasks with different granularity levels from document-level to entity-level. We develop an ensemble of fine-tuned Transformer-based language models, along with a post-processing step to regularize the predictions of our ensembles. Our approach places the first place in 6 out of 16 leaderboards organized in seven languages including English, Mandarin, and Turkish.

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CEIA-NLP at CASE 2022 Task 1: Protest News Detection for Portuguese
Diogo Fernandes | Adalberto Junior | Gabriel Marques | Anderson Soares | Arlindo Galvao Filho

This paper summarizes our work on the document classification subtask of Multilingual protest news detection of the CASE @ ACL-IJCNLP 2022 workshok. In this context, we investigate the performance of monolingual and multilingual transformer-based models in low data resources, taking Portuguese as an example and evaluating language models on document classification. Our approach became the winning solution in Portuguese document classification achieving 0.8007 F1 Score on Test set. The experimental results demonstrate that multilingual models achieve best results in scenarios with few dataset samples of specific language, because we can train models using datasets from other languages of the same task and domain.

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SPARTA at CASE 2021 Task 1: Evaluating Different Techniques to Improve Event Extraction
Arthur Müller | Andreas Dafnos

We participated in the Shared Task 1 at CASE 2021, Subtask 4 on protest event extraction from news articles and examined different techniques aimed at improving the performance of the winning system from the last competition round. We evaluated in-domain pre-training, task-specific pre-fine-tuning, alternative loss function, translation of the English training dataset into other target languages (i.e., Portuguese, Spanish, and Hindi) for the token classification task, and a simple data augmentation technique by random sentence reordering. This paper summarizes the results, showing that random sentence reordering leads to a consistent improvement of the model performance.

The Event Causality Identification Shared Task of CASE 2022 involved two subtasks working on the Causal News Corpus. Subtask 1 required participants to predict if a sentence contains a causal relation or not. This is a supervised binary classification task. Subtask 2 required participants to identify the Cause, Effect and Signal spans per causal sentence. This could be seen as a supervised sequence labeling task. For both subtasks, participants uploaded their predictions for a held-out test set, and ranking was done based on binary F1 and macro F1 scores for Subtask 1 and 2, respectively. This paper summarizes the work of the 17 teams that submitted their results to our competition and 12 system description papers that were received. The best F1 scores achieved for Subtask 1 and 2 were 86.19% and 54.15%, respectively. All the top-performing approaches involved pre-trained language models fine-tuned to the targeted task. We further discuss these approaches and analyze errors across participants’ systems in this paper.

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Tracking COVID-19 protest events in the United States. Shared Task 2: Event Database Replication, CASE 2022
Vanni Zavarella | Hristo Tanev | Ali Hürriyetoğlu | Peratham Wiriyathammabhum | Bertrand De Longueville

The goal of Shared Task 2 is evaluating state-of-the-art event detection systems by comparing the spatio-temporal distribution of the events they detect with existing event databases. The task focuses on some usability requirements of event detection systems in real worldscenarios. Namely, it aims to measure the ability of such a system to: (i) detect socio-political event mentions in news and social media, (ii) properly find their geographical locations, (iii) de-duplicate reports extracted from multiple sources referring to the same actual event. Building an annotated corpus for training and evaluating jointly these sub-tasks is highly time consuming. One possible way to indirectly evaluate a system’s output without an annotated corpus available is to measure its correlation with human-curated event data sets. In the last three years, the COVID-19 pandemic became motivation for restrictions and anti-pandemic measures on a world scale. This has triggered a wave of reactions and citizen actions in many countries. Shared Task 2 challenges participants to identify COVID-19 related protest actions from large unstructureddata sources both from mainstream and social media. We assess each system’s ability to model the evolution of protest events both temporally and spatially by using a number of correlation metrics with respect to a comprehensive and validated data set of COVID-related protest events (Raleigh et al., 2010).

We provide a summary of the fifth edition of the CASE workshop that is held in the scope of EMNLP 2022. The workshop consists of regular papers, two keynotes, working papers of shared task participants, and task overview papers. This workshop has been bringing together all aspects of event information collection across technical and social science fields. In addition to the progress in depth, the submission and acceptance of multimodal approaches show the widening of this interdisciplinary research topic.

We report results of the CASE 2022 Shared Task 1 on Multilingual Protest Event Detection. This task is a continuation of CASE 2021 that consists of four subtasks that are i) document classification, ii) sentence classification, iii) event sentence coreference identification, and iv) event extraction. The CASE 2022 extension consists of expanding the test data with more data in previously available languages, namely, English, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish, and adding new test data in Mandarin, Turkish, and Urdu for Sub-task 1, document classification. The training data from CASE 2021 in English, Portuguese and Spanish were utilized. Therefore, predicting document labels in Hindi, Mandarin, Turkish, and Urdu occurs in a zero-shot setting. The CASE 2022 workshop accepts reports on systems developed for predicting test data of CASE 2021 as well. We observe that the best systems submitted by CASE 2022 participants achieve between 79.71 and 84.06 F1-macro for new languages in a zero-shot setting. The winning approaches are mainly ensembling models and merging data in multiple languages. The best two submissions on CASE 2021 data outperform submissions from last year for Subtask 1 and Subtask 2 in all languages. Only the following scenarios were not outperformed by new submissions on CASE 2021: Subtask 3 Portuguese & Subtask 4 English.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Customized Chat Grounding Persona and Knowledge

Rather than continuing the conversation based on personalized or implicit information, the existing conversation system generates dialogue by focusing only on the superficial content. To solve this problem, FoCus was recently released. FoCus is a persona-knowledge grounded dialogue generation dataset that leverages Wikipedia’s knowledge and personal persona, focusing on the landmarks provided by Google, enabling user-centered conversation. However, a closer empirical study is needed since research in the field is still in its early stages. Therefore, we fling two research questions about FoCus. “Is the FoCus whether for conversation or question answering?” to identify the structural problems of the dataset. “Does the FoCus model do real knowledge blending?” to closely demonstrate that the model acquires actual knowledge. As a result of the experiment, we present that the FoCus model could not correctly blend the knowledge according to the input dialogue and that the dataset design is unsuitable for the multi-turn conversation.

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Proto-Gen: An end-to-end neural generator for persona and knowledge grounded response generation
Sougata Saha | Souvik Das | Rohini Srihari

In this paper we detail the implementation of Proto-Gen, an end-to-end neural response generator capable of selecting appropriate persona and fact sentences from available options, and generating persona and fact grounded responses. Incorporating a novel interaction layer in an encoder-decoder architecture, Proto-Gen facilitates learning dependencies between facts, persona and the context, and outperforms existing baselines on the FoCus dataset for both the sub-tasks of persona and fact selection, and response generation. We further fine tune Proto-Gen’s hyperparameters, and share our results and findings.

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Evaluating Agent Interactions Through Episodic Knowledge Graphs
Selene Baez Santamaria | Piek Vossen | Thomas Baier

We present a new method based on episodic Knowledge Graphs (eKGs) for evaluating (multimodal) conversational agents in open domains. This graph is generated by interpreting raw signals during conversation and is able to capture the accumulation of knowledge over time. We apply structural and semantic analysis of the resulting graphs and translate the properties into qualitative measures. We compare these measures with existing automatic and manual evaluation metrics commonly used for conversational agents. Our results show that our Knowledge-Graph-based evaluation provides more qualitative insights into interaction and the agent’s behavior.

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PERSONACHATGEN: Generating Personalized Dialogues using GPT-3
Young-Jun Lee | Chae-Gyun Lim | Yunsu Choi | Ji-Hui Lm | Ho-Jin Choi

Recently, many prior works have made their own agents generate more personalized and engaging responses using personachat. However, since this dataset is frozen in 2018, the dialogue agents trained on this dataset would not know how to interact with a human who loves “Wandavision.” One way to alleviate this problem is to create a large-scale dataset. In this work, we introduce the pipeline of creating personachatgen, which is comprised of three main components: Creating (1) profilegen, (2) Persona Set, and (3) personachatgen. To encourage GPT-3’s generation ability, we also defined a taxonomy of hierarchical persona category derived from social profiling taxonomy. To create the speaker consistent persona set, we propose a simple contradiction-based iterative sentence replacement algorithm, named CoNL. Moreover, to prevent GPT-3 generating harmful content, we presented two filtering pipelines, one each for profilegen and personachatgen. Through analyzing of personachatgen, we showed that GPT-3 can generate personalized dialogue containing diverse persona. Furthermore, we revealed a state-of-the-art Blender 90M trained on our dataset that leads to higher performance.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 4th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop

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Proceedings of the 4th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop
Tristan Naumann | Steven Bethard | Kirk Roberts | Anna Rumshisky

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CLPT: A Universal Annotation Scheme and Toolkit for Clinical Language Processing
Saranya Krishnamoorthy | Yanyi Jiang | William Buchanan | Ayush Singh | John Ortega

With the abundance of natural language processing (NLP) frameworks and toolkits being used in the clinical arena, a new challenge has arisen - how do technologists collaborate across several projects in an easy way? Private sector companies are usually not willing to share their work due to intellectual property rights and profit-bearing decisions. Therefore, the annotation schemes and toolkits that they use are rarely shared with the wider community. We present the clinical language pipeline toolkit (CLPT) and its corresponding annotation scheme called the CLAO (Clinical Language Annotation Object) with the aim of creating a way to share research results and other efforts through a software solution. The CLAO is a unified annotation scheme for clinical technology processing (CTP) projects that forms part of the CLPT and is more reliable than previous standards such as UIMA, BioC, and cTakes for annotation searches, insertions, and deletions. Additionally, it offers a standardized object that can be exchanged through an API that the authors release publicly for CTP project inclusion.

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PLM-ICD: Automatic ICD Coding with Pretrained Language Models
Chao-Wei Huang | Shang-Chi Tsai | Yun-Nung Chen

Automatically classifying electronic health records (EHRs) into diagnostic codes has been challenging to the NLP community. State-of-the-art methods treated this problem as a multi-label classification problem and proposed various architectures to model this problem. However, these systems did not leverage the superb performance of pretrained language models, which achieved superb performance on natural language understanding tasks. Prior work has shown that pretrained language models underperformed on this task with the regular fine-tuning scheme. Therefore, this paper aims at analyzing the causes of the underperformance and developing a framework for automatic ICD coding with pretrained language models. We spotted three main issues through the experiments: 1) large label space, 2) long input sequences, and 3) domain mismatch between pretraining and fine-tuning. We propose PLM-ICD, a framework that tackles the challenges with various strategies. The experimental results show that our proposed framework can overcome the challenges and achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of multiple metrics on the benchmark MIMIC data. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MiuLab/PLM-ICD.

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m-Networks: Adapting the Triplet Networks for Acronym Disambiguation
Sandaru Seneviratne | Elena Daskalaki | Artem Lenskiy | Hanna Suominen

Acronym disambiguation (AD) is the process of identifying the correct expansion of the acronyms in text. AD is crucial in natural language understanding of scientific and medical documents due to the high prevalence of technical acronyms and the possible expansions. Given that natural language is often ambiguous with more than one meaning for words, identifying the correct expansion for acronyms requires learning of effective representations for words, phrases, acronyms, and abbreviations based on their context. In this paper, we proposed an approach to leverage the triplet networks and triplet loss which learns better representations of text through distance comparisons of embeddings. We tested both the triplet network-based method and the modified triplet network-based method with m networks on the AD dataset from the SDU@AAAI-21 AD task, CASI dataset, and MeDAL dataset. F scores of 87.31%, 70.67%, and 75.75% were achieved by the m network-based approach for SDU, CASI, and MeDAL datasets respectively indicating that triplet network-based methods have comparable performance but with only 12% of the number of parameters in the baseline method. This effective implementation is available at https://github.com/sandaruSen/m_networks under the MIT license.

Writing the conclusion section of radiology reports is essential for communicating the radiology findings and its assessment to physician in a condensed form. In this work, we employ a transformer-based Seq2Seq model for generating the conclusion section of German radiology reports. The model is initialized with the pretrained parameters of a German BERT model and fine-tuned in our downstream task on our domain data. We proposed two strategies to improve the factual correctness of the model. In the first method, next to the abstractive learning objective, we introduce an extraction learning objective to train the decoder in the model to both generate one summary sequence and extract the key findings from the source input. The second approach is to integrate the pointer mechanism into the transformer-based Seq2Seq model. The pointer network helps the Seq2Seq model to choose between generating tokens from the vocabulary or copying parts from the source input during generation. The results of the automatic and human evaluations show that the enhanced Seq2Seq model is capable of generating human-like radiology conclusions and that the improved models effectively reduce the factual errors in the generations despite the small amount of training data.

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RRED : A Radiology Report Error Detector based on Deep Learning Framework
Dabin Min | Kaeun Kim | Jong Hyuk Lee | Yisak Kim | Chang Min Park

Radiology report is an official record of radiologists’ interpretation of patients’ radiographs and it’s a crucial component in the overall medical diagnostic process. However, it can contain various types of errors that can lead to inadequate treatment or delay in diagnosis. To address this problem, we propose a deep learning framework to detect errors in radiology reports. Specifically, our method detects errors between findings and conclusion of chest X-ray reports based on a supervised learning framework. To compensate for the lack of data availability of radiology reports with errors, we develop an error generator to systematically create artificial errors in existing reports. In addition, we introduce a Medical Knowledge-enhancing Pre-training to further utilize the knowledge of abbreviations and key phrases frequently used in the medical domain. We believe that this is the first work to propose a deep learning framework for detecting errors in radiology reports based on a rich contextual and medical understanding. Validation on our radiologist-synthesized dataset, based on MIMIC-CXR, shows 0.80 and 0.95 of the area under precision-recall curve (AUPRC) and the area under the ROC curve (AUROC) respectively, indicating that our framework can effectively detect errors in the real-world radiology reports.

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Cross-Language Transfer of High-Quality Annotations: Combining Neural Machine Translation with Cross-Linguistic Span Alignment to Apply NER to Clinical Texts in a Low-Resource Language
Henning Schäfer | Ahmad Idrissi-Yaghir | Peter Horn | Christoph Friedrich

In this work, cross-linguistic span prediction based on contextualized word embedding models is used together with neural machine translation (NMT) to transfer and apply the state-of-the-art models in natural language processing (NLP) to a low-resource language clinical corpus. Two directions are evaluated: (a) English models can be applied to translated texts to subsequently transfer the predicted annotations to the source language and (b) existing high-quality annotations can be transferred beyond translation and then used to train NLP models in the target language. Effectiveness and loss of transmission is evaluated using the German Berlin-Tübingen-Oncology Corpus (BRONCO) dataset with transferred external data from NCBI disease, SemEval-2013 drug-drug interaction (DDI) and i2b2/VA 2010 data. The use of English models for translated clinical texts has always involved attempts to take full advantage of the benefits associated with them (large pre-trained biomedical word embeddings). To improve advances in this area, we provide a general-purpose pipeline to transfer any annotated BRAT or CoNLL format to various target languages. For the entity class medication, good results were obtained with 0.806 F1-score after re-alignment. Limited success occurred in the diagnosis and treatment class with results just below 0.5 F1-score due to differences in annotation guidelines.

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What Do You See in this Patient? Behavioral Testing of Clinical NLP Models
Betty Van Aken | Sebastian Herrmann | Alexander Löser

Decision support systems based on clinical notes have the potential to improve patient care by pointing doctors towards overseen risks. Predicting a patient’s outcome is an essential part of such systems, for which the use of deep neural networks has shown promising results. However, the patterns learned by these networks are mostly opaque and previous work revealed both reproduction of systemic biases and unexpected behavior for out-of-distribution patients. For application in clinical practice it is crucial to be aware of such behavior. We thus introduce a testing framework that evaluates clinical models regarding certain changes in the input. The framework helps to understand learned patterns and their influence on model decisions. In this work, we apply it to analyse the change in behavior with regard to the patient characteristics gender, age and ethnicity. Our evaluation of three current clinical NLP models demonstrates the concrete effects of these characteristics on the models’ decisions. They show that model behavior varies drastically even when fine-tuned on the same data with similar AUROC score. These results exemplify the need for a broader communication of model behavior in the clinical domain.

Existing question answering (QA) datasets derived from electronic health records (EHR) are artificially generated and consequently fail to capture realistic physician information needs. We present Discharge Summary Clinical Questions (DiSCQ), a newly curated question dataset composed of 2,000+ questions paired with the snippets of text (triggers) that prompted each question. The questions are generated by medical experts from 100+ MIMIC-III discharge summaries. We analyze this dataset to characterize the types of information sought by medical experts. We also train baseline models for trigger detection and question generation (QG), paired with unsupervised answer retrieval over EHRs. Our baseline model is able to generate high quality questions in over 62% of cases when prompted with human selected triggers. We release this dataset (and all code to reproduce baseline model results) to facilitate further research into realistic clinical QA and QG: https://github.com/elehman16/discq.

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Clinical Flair: A Pre-Trained Language Model for Spanish Clinical Natural Language Processing
Matías Rojas | Jocelyn Dunstan | Fabián Villena

Word embeddings have been widely used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Although these representations can capture the semantic information of words, they cannot learn the sequence-level semantics. This problem can be handled using contextual word embeddings derived from pre-trained language models, which have contributed to significant improvements in several NLP tasks. Further improvements are achieved when pre-training these models on domain-specific corpora. In this paper, we introduce Clinical Flair, a domain-specific language model trained on Spanish clinical narratives. To validate the quality of the contextual representations retrieved from our model, we tested them on four named entity recognition datasets belonging to the clinical and biomedical domains. Our experiments confirm that incorporating domain-specific embeddings into classical sequence labeling architectures improves model performance dramatically compared to general-domain embeddings, demonstrating the importance of having these resources available.

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An exploratory data analysis: the performance differences of a medical code prediction system on different demographic groups
Heereen Shim | Dietwig Lowet | Stijn Luca | Bart Vanrumste

Recent studies show that neural natural processing models for medical code prediction suffer from a label imbalance issue. This study aims to investigate further imbalance in a medical code prediction dataset in terms of demographic variables and analyse performance differences in demographic groups. We use sample-based metrics to correctly evaluate the performance in terms of the data subject. Also, a simple label distance metric is proposed to quantify the difference in the label distribution between a group and the entire data. Our analysis results reveal that the model performs differently towards different demographic groups: significant differences between age groups and between insurance types are observed. Interestingly, we found a weak positive correlation between the number of training data of the group and the performance of the group. However, a strong negative correlation between the label distance of the group and the performance of the group is observed. This result suggests that the model tends to perform poorly in the group whose label distribution is different from the global label distribution of the training data set. Further analysis of the model performance is required to identify the cause of these differences and to improve the model building.

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Ensemble-based Fine-Tuning Strategy for Temporal Relation Extraction from the Clinical Narrative
Lijing Wang | Timothy Miller | Steven Bethard | Guergana Savova

In this paper, we investigate ensemble methods for fine-tuning transformer-based pretrained models for clinical natural language processing tasks, specifically temporal relation extraction from the clinical narrative. Our experimental results on the THYME data show that ensembling as a fine-tuning strategy can further boost model performance over single learners optimized for hyperparameters. Dynamic snapshot ensembling is particularly beneficial as it fine-tunes a wide array of parameters and results in a 2.8% absolute improvement in F1 over the base single learner.

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Exploring Text Representations for Generative Temporal Relation Extraction
Dmitriy Dligach | Steven Bethard | Timothy Miller | Guergana Savova

Sequence-to-sequence models are appealing because they allow both encoder and decoder to be shared across many tasks by formulating those tasks as text-to-text problems. Despite recently reported successes of such models, we find that engineering input/output representations for such text-to-text models is challenging. On the Clinical TempEval 2016 relation extraction task, the most natural choice of output representations, where relations are spelled out in simple predicate logic statements, did not lead to good performance. We explore a variety of input/output representations, with the most successful prompting one event at a time, and achieving results competitive with standard pairwise temporal relation extraction systems.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology

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DEPAC: a Corpus for Depression and Anxiety Detection from Speech
Mashrura Tasnim | Malikeh Ehghaghi | Brian Diep | Jekaterina Novikova

Mental distress like depression and anxiety contribute to the largest proportion of the global burden of diseases. Automated diagnosis system of such disorders, empowered by recent innovations in Artificial Intelligence, can pave the way to reduce the sufferings of the affected individuals. Development of such systems requires information-rich and balanced corpora. In this work, we introduce a novel mental distress analysis audio dataset DEPAC, labelled based on established thresholds on depression and anxiety standard screening tools. This large dataset comprises multiple speech tasks per individual, as well as relevant demographic information. Alongside, we present a feature set consisting of hand-curated acoustic and linguistic features, which were found effective in identifying signs of mental illnesses in human speech. Finally, we justify the quality and effectiveness of our proposed audio corpus and feature set in predicting depression severity by comparing the performance of baseline machine learning models built on this dataset with baseline models trained on other well-known depression corpora.

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The ethical role of computational linguistics in digital psychological formulation and suicide prevention.
Martin Orr | Kirsten Van Kessel | Dave Parry

Formulation is central to clinical practice. Formulation has a factor weighing, pattern recognition and explanatory hypothesis modelling focus. Formulation attempts to make sense of why a person presents in a certain state at a certain time and context, and how that state may be best managed to enhance mental health, safety and optimal change. Inherent to the clinical need for formulation is an appreciation of the complexities, uncertainty and limits of applying theoretical concepts and symptom, diagnostic and risk categories to human experience; or attaching meaning or weight to any particular factor in an individual?s history or mental state without considering the broader biopsychosocial and cultural context. With specific reference to suicide prevention, this paper considers the need and potential for the computer linguistic community to be both cognisant of and ethically contribute to the clinical formulation process.

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Explaining Models of Mental Health via Clinically Grounded Auxiliary Tasks
Ayah Zirikly | Mark Dredze

Models of mental health based on natural language processing can uncover latent signals of mental health from language. Models that indicate whether an individual is depressed, or has other mental health conditions, can aid in diagnosis and treatment. A critical aspect of integration of these models into the clinical setting relies on explaining their behavior to domain experts. In the case of mental health diagnosis, clinicians already rely on an assessment framework to make these decisions; that framework can help a model generate meaningful explanations. In this work we propose to use PHQ-9 categories as an auxiliary task to explaining a social media based model of depression. We develop a multi-task learning framework that predicts both depression and PHQ-9 categories as auxiliary tasks. We compare the quality of explanations generated based on the depression task only, versus those that use the predicted PHQ-9 categories. We find that by relying on clinically meaningful auxiliary tasks, we produce more meaningful explanations.

This study examined differences in linguistic features produced by autistic and neurotypical (NT) children during brief picture descriptions, and assessed feature stability over time. Weekly speech samples from well-characterized participants were collected using a telephony system designed to improve access for geographically isolated and historically marginalized communities. Results showed stable group differences in certain acoustic features, some of which may potentially serve as key outcome measures in future treatment studies. These results highlight the importance of eliciting semi-structured speech samples in a variety of contexts over time, and adds to a growing body of research showing that fine-grained naturalistic communication features hold promise for intervention research.

There are many different forms of psychotherapy. Itemized inventories of psychotherapeutic interventions provide a mechanism for evaluating the quality of care received by clients and for conducting research on how psychotherapy helps. However, evaluations such as these are slow, expensive, and are rarely used outside of well-funded research studies. Natural language processing research has progressed to allow automating such tasks. Yet, NLP work in this area has been restricted to evaluating a single approach to treatment, when prior research indicates therapists used a wide variety of interventions with their clients, often in the same session. In this paper, we frame this scenario as a multi-label classification task, and develop a group of models aimed at predicting a wide variety of therapist talk-turn level orientations. Our models achieve F1 macro scores of 0.5, with the class F1 ranging from 0.36 to 0.67. We present analyses which offer insights into the capability of such models to capture psychotherapy approaches, and which may complement human judgment.

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Then and Now: Quantifying the Longitudinal Validity of Self-Disclosed Depression Diagnoses
Keith Harrigian | Mark Dredze

Self-disclosed mental health diagnoses, which serve as ground truth annotations of mental health status in the absence of clinical measures, underpin the conclusions behind most computational studies of mental health language from the last decade. However, psychiatric conditions are dynamic; a prior depression diagnosis may no longer be indicative of an individual’s mental health, either due to treatment or other mitigating factors. We ask: to what extent are self-disclosures of mental health diagnoses actually relevant over time? We analyze recent activity from individuals who disclosed a depression diagnosis on social media over five years ago and, in turn, acquire a new understanding of how presentations of mental health status on social media manifest longitudinally. We also provide expanded evidence for the presence of personality-related biases in datasets curated using self-disclosed diagnoses. Our findings motivate three practical recommendations for improving mental health datasets curated using self-disclosed diagnoses:1) Annotate diagnosis dates and psychiatric comorbidities2) Sample control groups using propensity score matching3) Identify and remove spurious correlations introduced by selection bias

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Tracking Mental Health Risks and Coping Strategies in Healthcare Workers’ Online Conversations Across the COVID-19 Pandemic
Molly Ireland | Kaitlin Adams | Sean Farrell

The mental health risks of the COVID-19 pandemic are magnified for medical professionals, such as doctors and nurses. To track conversational markers of psychological distress and coping strategies, we analyzed 67.25 million words written by self-identified healthcare workers (N = 5,409; 60.5% nurses, 40.5% physicians) on Reddit beginning in June 2019. Dictionary-based measures revealed increasing emotionality (including more positive and negative emotion and more swearing), social withdrawal (less affiliation and empathy, more “they” pronouns), and self-distancing (fewer “I” pronouns) over time. Several effects were strongest for conversations that were least health-focused and self-relevant, suggesting that long-term changes in social and emotional behavior are general and not limited to personal or work-related experiences. Understanding protective and risky coping strategies used by healthcare workers during the pandemic is fundamental for maintaining mental health among front-line workers during periods of chronic stress, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Are You Really Okay? A Transfer Learning-based Approach for Identification of Underlying Mental Illnesses
Ankit Aich | Natalie Parde

Evidence has demonstrated the presence of similarities in language use across people with various mental health conditions. In this work, we investigate these correlations both in terms of literature and as a data analysis problem. We also introduce a novel state-of-the-art transfer learning-based approach that learns from linguistic feature spaces of previous conditions and predicts unknown ones. Our model achieves strong performance, with F1 scores of 0.75, 0.80, and 0.76 at detecting depression, stress, and suicidal ideation in a first-of-its-kind transfer task and offering promising evidence that language models can harness learned patterns from known mental health conditions to aid in their prediction of others that may lie latent.

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Comparing emotion feature extraction approaches for predicting depression and anxiety
Hannah Burkhardt | Michael Pullmann | Thomas Hull | Patricia Areán | Trevor Cohen

The increasing adoption of message-based behavioral therapy enables new approaches to assessing mental health using linguistic analysis of patient-generated text. Word counting approaches have demonstrated utility for linguistic feature extraction, but deep learning methods hold additional promise given recent advances in this area. We evaluated the utility of emotion features extracted using a BERT-based model in comparison to emotions extracted using word counts as predictors of symptom severity in a large set of messages from text-based therapy sessions involving over 6,500 unique patients, accompanied by data from repeatedly administered symptom scale measurements. BERT-based emotion features explained more variance in regression models of symptom severity, and improved predictive modeling of scale-derived diagnostic categories. However, LIWC categories that are not directly related to emotions provided valuable and complementary information for modeling of symptom severity, indicating a role for both approaches in inferring the mental states underlying patient-generated language.

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Detecting Suicidality with a Contextual Graph Neural Network
Daeun Lee | Migyeong Kang | Minji Kim | Jinyoung Han

Discovering individuals’ suicidality on social media has become increasingly important. Many researchers have studied to detect suicidality by using a suicide dictionary. However, while prior work focused on matching a word in a post with a suicide dictionary without considering contexts, little attention has been paid to how the word can be associated with the suicide-related context. To address this problem, we propose a suicidality detection model based on a graph neural network to grasp the dynamic semantic information of the suicide vocabulary by learning the relations between a given post and words. The extensive evaluation demonstrates that the proposed model achieves higher performance than the state-of-the-art methods. We believe the proposed model has great utility in identifying the suicidality of individuals and hence preventing individuals from potential suicide risks at an early stage.

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Identifying Distorted Thinking in Patient-Therapist Text Message Exchanges by Leveraging Dynamic Multi-Turn Context
Kevin Lybarger | Justin Tauscher | Xiruo Ding | Dror Ben-zeev | Trevor Cohen

There is growing evidence that mobile text message exchanges between patients and therapists can augment traditional cognitive behavioral therapy. The automatic characterization of patient thinking patterns in this asynchronous text communication may guide treatment and assist in therapist training. In this work, we automatically identify distorted thinking in text-based patient-therapist exchanges, investigating the role of conversation history (context) in distortion prediction. We identify six unique types of cognitive distortions and utilize BERT-based architectures to represent text messages within the context of the conversation. We propose two approaches for leveraging dynamic conversation context in model training. By representing the text messages within the context of the broader patient-therapist conversation, the models better emulate the therapist’s task of recognizing distorted thoughts. This multi-turn classification approach also leverages the clustering of distorted thinking in the conversation timeline. We demonstrate that including conversation context, including the proposed dynamic context methods, improves distortion prediction performance. The proposed architectures and conversation encoding approaches achieve performance comparable to inter-rater agreement. The presence of any distorted thinking is identified with relatively high performance at 0.73 F1, significantly outperforming the best context-agnostic models (0.68 F1).

Conversational Agents (CAs) powered with deep language models (DLMs) have shown tremendous promise in the domain of mental health. Prominently, the CAs have been used to provide informational or therapeutic services (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy) to patients. However, the utility of CAs to assist in mental health triaging has not been explored in the existing work as it requires a controlled generation of follow-up questions (FQs), which are often initiated and guided by the mental health professionals (MHPs) in clinical settings. In the context of ‘depression’, our experiments show that DLMs coupled with process knowledge in a mental health questionnaire generate 12.54% and 9.37% better FQs based on similarity and longest common subsequence matches to questions in the PHQ-9 dataset respectively, when compared with DLMs without process knowledge support. Despite coupling with process knowledge, we find that DLMs are still prone to hallucination, i.e., generating redundant, irrelevant, and unsafe FQs. We demonstrate the challenge of using existing datasets to train a DLM for generating FQs that adhere to clinical process knowledge. To address this limitation, we prepared an extended PHQ-9 based dataset, PRIMATE, in collaboration with MHPs. PRIMATE contains annotations regarding whether a particular question in the PHQ-9 dataset has already been answered in the user’s initial description of the mental health condition. We used PRIMATE to train a DLM in a supervised setting to identify which of the PHQ-9 questions can be answered directly from the user’s post and which ones would require more information from the user. Using performance analysis based on MCC scores, we show that PRIMATE is appropriate for identifying questions in PHQ-9 that could guide generative DLMs towards controlled FQ generation (with minimal hallucination) suitable for aiding triaging. The dataset created as a part of this research can be obtained from https://github.com/primate-mh/Primate2022

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Masking Morphosyntactic Categories to Evaluate Salience for Schizophrenia Diagnosis
Yaara Shriki | Ido Ziv | Nachum Dershowitz | Eiran Harel | Kfir Bar

Natural language processing tools have been shown to be effective for detecting symptoms of schizophrenia in transcribed speech. We analyze and assess the contribution of the various syntactic and morphological categories towards successful machine classification of texts produced by subjects with schizophrenia and by others. Specifically, we fine-tune a language model for the classification task, and mask all words that are attributed with each category of interest. The speech samples were generated in a controlled way by interviewing inpatients who were officially diagnosed with schizophrenia, and a corresponding group of healthy controls. All participants are native Hebrew speakers. Our results show that nouns are the most significant category for classification performance.

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Measuring Linguistic Synchrony in Psychotherapy
Natalie Shapira | Dana Atzil-Slonim | Rivka Tuval Mashiach | Ori Shapira

We study the phenomenon of linguistic synchrony between clients and therapists in a psychotherapy process. Linguistic Synchrony (LS) can be viewed as any observed interdependence or association between more than one person?s linguistic behavior. Accordingly, we establish LS as a methodological task. We suggest a LS function that applies a linguistic similarity measure based on the Jensen-Shannon distance across the observed part-of-speech tag distributions (JSDuPos) of the speakers in different time frames. We perform a study over a unique corpus of 872 transcribed sessions, covering 68 clients and 59 therapists. After establishing the presence of client-therapist LS, we verify its association with therapeutic alliance and treatment outcome (measured using WAI and ORS), and additionally analyse the behavior of JSDuPos throughout treatment. Results indicate that (1) higher linguistic similarity at the session level associates with higher therapeutic alliance as reported by the client and therapist at the end of the session, (2) higher linguistic similarity at the session level associates with higher level of treatment outcome as reported by the client at the beginnings of the next sessions, (3) there is a significant linear increase in linguistic similarity throughout treatment, (4) surprisingly, higher LS associates with lower treatment outcome. Finally, we demonstrate how the LS function can be used to interpret and explore the mechanism for synchrony.

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Nonsuicidal Self-Injury and Substance Use Disorders: A Shared Language of Addiction
Salvatore Giorgi | Mckenzie Himelein-wachowiak | Daniel Habib | Lyle Ungar | Brenda Curtis

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), or the deliberate injuring of one?s body without intending to die, has been shown to exhibit many similarities to substance use disorders (SUDs), including population-level characteristics, impulsivity traits, and comorbidity with other mental disorders. Research has further shown that people who self-injure adopt language common in SUD recovery communities (e.g., “clean”, “relapse”, “addiction,” and celebratory language about sobriety milestones). In this study, we investigate the shared language of NSSI and SUD by comparing discussions on public Reddit forums related to self-injury and drug addiction. To this end, we build a set of LDA topics across both NSSI and SUD Reddit users and show that shared language across the two domains includes SUD recovery language in addition to other themes common to support forums (e.g., requests for help and gratitude). Next, we examine Reddit-wide posting activity and note that users posting in r/selfharm also post in many mental health-related subreddits, while users of drug addiction related subreddits do not, despite high comorbidity between NSSI and SUDs. These results show that while people who self-injure may contextualize their disorder as an addiction, their posting habits demonstrate comorbidities with other mental disorders more so than their counterparts in recovery from SUDs. These observations have clinical implications for people who self-injure and seek support by sharing their experiences online.

We provide an overview of the CLPsych 2022 Shared Task, which focusses on the automatic identification of ‘Moments of Change’ in lon- gitudinal posts by individuals on social media and its connection with information regarding mental health . This year’s task introduced the notion of longitudinal modelling of the text generated by an individual online over time, along with appropriate temporally sen- sitive evaluation metrics. The Shared Task con- sisted of two subtasks: (a) the main task of cap- turing changes in an individual’s mood (dras- tic changes-‘Switches’- and gradual changes -‘Escalations’- on the basis of textual content shared online; and subsequently (b) the sub- task of identifying the suicide risk level of an individual – a continuation of the CLPsych 2019 Shared Task– where participants were encouraged to explore how the identification of changes in mood in task (a) can help with assessing suicidality risk in task (b).

This paper describes the participation of our group on the CLPsych 2022 shared task. For task A, which tries to capture changes in mood over time, we have applied an Approximate Nearest Neighbour (ANN) extraction technique with the aim of relabelling the user messages according to their proximity, based on the representation of these messages in a vector space. Regarding the subtask B, we have used the output of the subtask A to train a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to predict the risk of suicide at the user level. The results obtained are very competitive considering that our team was one of the few that made use of the organisers’ proposed virtual environment and also made use of the Task A output to predict the Task B results.

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Capturing Changes in Mood Over Time in Longitudinal Data Using Ensemble Methodologies
Ana-Maria Bucur | Hyewon Jang | Farhana Ferdousi Liza

This paper presents the system description of team BLUE for Task A of the CLPsych 2022 Shared Task on identifying changes in mood and behaviour in longitudinal textual data. These moments of change are signals that can be used to screen and prevent suicide attempts. To detect these changes, we experimented with several text representation methods, such as TF-IDF, sentence embeddings, emotion-informed embeddings and several classical machine learning classifiers. We chose to submit three runs of ensemble systems based on maximum voting on the predictions from the best performing models. Of the nine participating teams in Task A, our team ranked second in the Precision-oriented Coverage-based Evaluation, with a score of 0.499. Our best system was an ensemble of Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, and Adaptive Boosting classifiers using emotion-informed embeddings as input representation that can model both the linguistic and emotional information found in users? posts.

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Detecting Moments of Change and Suicidal Risks in Longitudinal User Texts Using Multi-task Learning
Tayyaba Azim | Loitongbam Gyanendro Singh | Stuart E. Middleton

This work describes the classification system proposed for the Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych) Shared Task 2022. We propose the use of multitask learning approach with bidirectional long-short term memory (Bi-LSTM) model for predicting changes in user’s mood and their suicidal risk level. The two classification tasks have been solved independently or in an augmented way previously, where the output of one task is leveraged for learning another task, however this work proposes an ‘all-in-one’ framework that jointly learns the related mental health tasks. The experimental results suggest that the proposed multi-task framework outperforms the remaining single-task frameworks submitted to the challenge and evaluated via timeline based and coverage based performance metrics shared by the organisers. We also assess the potential of using various types of feature embedding schemes that could prove useful in initialising the Bi-LSTM model for better multitask learning in the mental health domain.

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Emotionally-Informed Models for Detecting Moments of Change and Suicide Risk Levels in Longitudinal Social Media Data
Ulya Bayram | Lamia Benhiba

In this shared task, we focus on detecting mental health signals in Reddit users’ posts through two main challenges: A) capturing mood changes (anomalies) from the longitudinal set of posts (called timelines), and B) assessing the users’ suicide risk-levels. Our approaches leverage emotion recognition on linguistic content by computing emotion/sentiment scores using pre-trained BERTs on users’ posts and feeding them to machine learning models, including XGBoost, Bi-LSTM, and logistic regression. For Task-A, we detect longitudinal anomalies using a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) autoencoder and capture regions of mood deviations. For Task-B, our two models utilize the BERT emotion/sentiment scores. The first computes emotion bandwidths and merges them with n-gram features, and employs logistic regression to detect users’ suicide risk levels. The second model predicts suicide risk on the timeline level using a Bi-LSTM on Task-A results and sentiment scores. Our results outperformed most participating teams and ranked in the top three in Task-A. In Task-B, our methods surpass all others and return the best macro and micro F1 scores.

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Exploring transformers and time lag features for predicting changes in mood over time
John Culnan | Damian Romero Diaz | Steven Bethard

This paper presents transformer-based models created for the CLPsych 2022 shared task. Using posts from Reddit users over a period of time, we aim to predict changes in mood from post to post. We test models that preserve timeline information through explicit ordering of posts as well as those that do not order posts but preserve features on the length of time between a user’s posts. We find that a model with temporal information may provide slight benefits over the same model without such information, although a RoBERTa transformer model provides enough information to make similar predictions without custom-encoded time information.

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Multi-Task Learning to Capture Changes in Mood Over Time
Prasadith Kirinde Gamaarachchige | Ahmed Husseini Orabi | Mahmoud Husseini Orabi | Diana Inkpen

This paper investigates the impact of using Multi-Task Learning (MTL) to predict mood changes over time for each individual (social media user). The presented models were developed as a part of the Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych) 2022 shared task. Given the limited number of Reddit social media users, as well as their posts, we decided to experiment with different multi-task learning architectures to identify to what extent knowledge can be shared among similar tasks. Due to class imbalance at both post and user levels and to accommodate task alignment, we randomly sampled an equal number of instances from the respective classes and performed ensemble learning to reduce prediction variance. Faced with several constraints, we managed to produce competitive results that could provide insights into the use of multi-task learning to identify mood changes over time and suicide ideation risk.

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Predicting Moments of Mood Changes Overtime from Imbalanced Social Media Data
Falwah Alhamed | Julia Ive | Lucia Specia

Social media data have been used in research for many years to understand users’ mental health. In this paper, using user-generated content we aim to achieve two goals: the first is detecting moments of mood change over time using timelines of users from Reddit. The second is predicting the degree of suicide risk as a user-level classification task. We used different approaches to address longitudinal modelling as well as the problem of the severely imbalanced dataset. Using BERT with undersampling techniques performed the best among other LSTM and basic random forests models for the first task. For the second task, extracting some features related to suicide from posts’ text contributed to the overall performance improvement. Specifically, a number of suicide-related words in a post as a feature improved the accuracy by 17%.

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Towards Capturing Changes in Mood and Identifying Suicidality Risk
Sravani Boinepelli | Shivansh Subramanian | Abhijeeth Singam | Tathagata Raha | Vasudeva Varma

This paper describes our systems for CLPsych?s 2022 Shared Task. Subtask A involves capturing moments of change in an individual?s mood over time, while Subtask B asked us to identify the suicidality risk of a user. We explore multiple machine learning and deep learning methods for the same, taking real-life applicability into account while considering the design of the architecture. Our team achieved top results in different categories for both subtasks. Task A was evaluated on a post-level (using macro averaged F1) and on a window-based timeline level (using macro-averaged precision and recall). We scored a post-level F1 of 0.520 and ranked second with a timeline-level recall of 0.646. Task B was a user-level task where we also came in second with a micro F1 of 0.520 and scored third place on the leaderboard with a macro F1 of 0.380.

Psychological states unfold dynamically; to understand and measure mental health at scale we need to detect and measure these changes from sequences of online posts. We evaluate two approaches to capturing psychological changes in text: the first relies on computing the difference between the embedding of a message with the one that precedes it, the second relies on a “human-aware” multi-level recurrent transformer (HaRT). The mood changes of timeline posts of users were annotated into three classes, ‘ordinary,’ ‘switching’ (positive to negative or vice versa) and ‘escalations’ (increasing in intensity). For classifying these mood changes, the difference-between-embeddings technique – applied to RoBERTa embeddings – showed the highest overall F1 score (0.61) across the three different classes on the test set. The technique particularly outperformed the HaRT transformer (and other baselines) in the detection of switches (F1 = .33) and escalations (F1 = .61).Consistent with the literature, the language use patterns associated with mental-health related constructs in prior work (including depression, stress, anger and anxiety) predicted both mood switches and escalations.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics

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Seeing the advantage: visually grounding word embeddings to better capture human semantic knowledge
Danny Merkx | Stefan Frank | Mirjam Ernestus

Distributional semantic models capture word-level meaning that is useful in many natural language processing tasks and have even been shown to capture cognitive aspects of word meaning. The majority of these models are purely text based, even though the human sensory experience is much richer. In this paper we create visually grounded word embeddings by combining English text and images and compare them to popular text-based methods, to see if visual information allows our model to better capture cognitive aspects of word meaning. Our analysis shows that visually grounded embedding similarities are more predictive of the human reaction times in a large priming experiment than the purely text-based embeddings. The visually grounded embeddings also correlate well with human word similarity ratings. Importantly, in both experiments we show that the grounded embeddings account for a unique portion of explained variance, even when we include text-based embeddings trained on huge corpora. This shows that visual grounding allows our model to capture information that cannot be extracted using text as the only source of information.

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A Neural Model for Compositional Word Embeddings and Sentence Processing
Shalom Lappin | Jean-Philippe Bernardy

We propose a new neural model for word embeddings, which uses Unitary Matrices as the primary device for encoding lexical information. It uses simple matrix multiplication to derive matrices for large units, yielding a sentence processing model that is strictly compositional, does not lose information over time steps, and is transparent, in the sense that word embeddings can be analysed regardless of context. This model does not employ activation functions, and so the network is fully accessible to analysis by the methods of linear algebra at each point in its operation on an input sequence. We test it in two NLP agreement tasks and obtain rule like perfect accuracy, with greater stability than current state-of-the-art systems. Our proposed model goes some way towards offering a class of computationally powerful deep learning systems that can be fully understood and compared to human cognitive processes for natural language learning and representation.

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Visually Grounded Interpretation of Noun-Noun Compounds in English
Inga Lang | Lonneke Plas | Malvina Nissim | Albert Gatt

Noun-noun compounds (NNCs) occur frequently in the English language. Accurate NNC interpretation, i.e. determining the implicit relationship between the constituents of a NNC, is crucial for the advancement of many natural language processing tasks. Until now, computational NNC interpretation has been limited to approaches involving linguistic representations only. However, much research suggests that grounding linguistic representations in vision or other modalities can increase performance on this and other tasks. Our work is a novel comparison of linguistic and visuo-linguistic representations for the task of NNC interpretation. We frame NNC interpretation as a relation classification task, evaluating on a large, relationally-annotated NNC dataset. We combine distributional word vectors with image vectors to investigate how visual information can help improve NNC interpretation systems. We find that adding visual vectors increases classification performance on our dataset in many cases.

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Less Descriptive yet Discriminative: Quantifying the Properties of Multimodal Referring Utterances via CLIP
Ece Takmaz | Sandro Pezzelle | Raquel Fernández

In this work, we use a transformer-based pre-trained multimodal model, CLIP, to shed light on the mechanisms employed by human speakers when referring to visual entities. In particular, we use CLIP to quantify the degree of descriptiveness (how well an utterance describes an image in isolation) and discriminativeness (to what extent an utterance is effective in picking out a single image among similar images) of human referring utterances within multimodal dialogues. Overall, our results show that utterances become less descriptive over time while their discriminativeness remains unchanged. Through analysis, we propose that this trend could be due to participants relying on the previous mentions in the dialogue history, as well as being able to distill the most discriminative information from the visual context. In general, our study opens up the possibility of using this and similar models to quantify patterns in human data and shed light on the underlying cognitive mechanisms.

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Codenames as a Game of Co-occurrence Counting
Réka Cserháti | Istvan Kollath | András Kicsi | Gábor Berend

Codenames is a popular board game, in which knowledge and cooperation between players play an important role. The task of a player playing as a spymaster is to find words (clues) that a teammate finds related to as many of some given words as possible, but not to other specified words. This is a hard challenge even with today’s advanced language technology methods. In our study, we create spymaster agents using four types of relatedness measures that require only a raw text corpus to produce. These include newly introduced ones based on co-occurrences, which outperform FastText cosine similarity on gold standard relatedness data. To generate clues in Codenames, we combine relatedness measures with four different scoring functions, for two languages, English and Hungarian. For testing, we collect decisions of human guesser players in an online game, and our configurations outperform previous agents among methods using raw corpora only.

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Estimating word co-occurrence probabilities from pretrained static embeddings using a log-bilinear model
Richard Futrell

We investigate how to use pretrained static word embeddings to deliver improved estimates of bilexical co-occurrence probabilities: conditional probabilities of one word given a single other word in a specific relationship. Such probabilities play important roles in psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and usage-based cognitive modeling of language more generally. We propose a log-bilinear model taking pretrained vector representations of the two words as input, enabling generalization based on the distributional information contained in both vectors. We show that this model outperforms baselines in estimating probabilities of adjectives given nouns that they attributively modify, and probabilities of nominal direct objects given their head verbs, given limited training data in Arabic, English, Korean, and Spanish.

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Modeling the Relationship between Input Distributions and Learning Trajectories with the Tolerance Principle
Jordan Kodner

Child language learners develop with remarkable uniformity, both in their learning trajectories and ultimate outcomes, despite major differences in their learning environments. In this paper, we explore the role that the frequencies and distributions of irregular lexical items in the input plays in driving learning trajectories. We conclude that while the Tolerance Principle, a type-based model of productivity learning, accounts for inter-learner uniformity, it also interacts with input distributions to drive cross-linguistic variation in learning trajectories.

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Predicting scalar diversity with context-driven uncertainty over alternatives
Jennifer Hu | Roger Levy | Sebastian Schuster

Scalar implicature (SI) arises when a speaker uses an expression (e.g., “some”) that is semantically compatible with a logically stronger alternative on the same scale (e.g., “all”), leading the listener to infer that they did not intend to convey the stronger meaning. Prior work has demonstrated that SI rates are highly variable across scales, raising the question of what factors determine the SI strength for a particular scale. Here, we test the hypothesis that SI rates depend on the listener’s confidence in the underlying scale, which we operationalize as uncertainty over the distribution of possible alternatives conditioned on the context. We use a T5 model fine-tuned on a text infilling task to estimate this distribution. We find that scale uncertainty predicts human SI rates, measured as entropy over the sampled alternatives and over latent classes among alternatives in sentence embedding space. Furthermore, we do not find a significant effect of the surprisal of the strong scalemate. Our results suggest that pragmatic inferences depend on listeners’ context-driven uncertainty over alternatives.

Attention describes cognitive processes that are important to many human phenomena including reading. The term is also used to describe the way in which transformer neural networks perform natural language processing. While attention appears to be very different under these two contexts, this paper presents an analysis of the correlations between transformer attention and overt human attention during reading tasks. An extensive analysis of human eye tracking datasets showed that the dwell times of human eye movements were strongly correlated with the attention patterns occurring in the early layers of pre-trained transformers such as BERT. Additionally, the strength of a correlation was not related to the number of parameters within a transformer. This suggests that something about the transformers’ architecture determined how closely the two measures were correlated.

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About Time: Do Transformers Learn Temporal Verbal Aspect?
Eleni Metheniti | Tim Van De Cruys | Nabil Hathout

Aspect is a linguistic concept that describes how an action, event, or state of a verb phrase is situated in time. In this paper, we explore whether different transformer models are capable of identifying aspectual features. We focus on two specific aspectual features: telicity and duration. Telicity marks whether the verb’s action or state has an endpoint or not (telic/atelic), and duration denotes whether a verb expresses an action (dynamic) or a state (stative). These features are integral to the interpretation of natural language, but also hard to annotate and identify with NLP methods. We perform experiments in English and French, and our results show that transformer models adequately capture information on telicity and duration in their vectors, even in their non-finetuned forms, but are somewhat biased with regard to verb tense and word order.

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Poirot at CMCL 2022 Shared Task: Zero Shot Crosslingual Eye-Tracking Data Prediction using Multilingual Transformer Models
Harshvardhan Srivastava

Eye tracking data during reading is a useful source of information to understand the cognitive processes that take place during language comprehension processes. Different languages account for different cognitive triggers, however there seems to be some uniform indicatorsacross languages. In this paper, we describe our submission to the CMCL 2022 shared task on predicting human reading patterns for multi-lingual dataset. Our model uses text representations from transformers and some hand engineered features with a regression layer on top to predict statistical measures of mean and standard deviation for 2 main eye-tracking features. We train an end-to-end model to extract meaningful information from different languages and test our model on two separate datasets. We compare different transformer models andshow ablation studies affecting model performance. Our final submission ranked 4th place for SubTask-1 and 1st place for SubTask-2 forthe shared task.

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NU HLT at CMCL 2022 Shared Task: Multilingual and Crosslingual Prediction of Human Reading Behavior in Universal Language Space
Joseph Marvin Imperial

In this paper, we present a unified model that works for both multilingual and crosslingual prediction of reading times of words in various languages. The secret behind the success of this model is in the preprocessing step where all words are transformed to their universal language representation via the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to favorably exploit this phonological property of language for the two tasks. Various feature types were extracted covering basic frequencies, n-grams, information theoretic, and psycholinguistically-motivated predictors for model training. A finetuned Random Forest model obtained best performance for both tasks with 3.8031 and 3.9065 MAE scores for mean first fixation duration (FFDAvg) and mean total reading time (TRTAvg) respectively.

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HkAmsters at CMCL 2022 Shared Task: Predicting Eye-Tracking Data from a Gradient Boosting Framework with Linguistic Features
Lavinia Salicchi | Rong Xiang | Yu-Yin Hsu

Eye movement data are used in psycholinguistic studies to infer information regarding cognitive processes during reading. In this paper, we describe our proposed method for the Shared Task of Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) 2022 - Subtask 1, which involves data from multiple datasets on 6 languages. We compared different regression models using features of the target word and its previous word, and target word surprisal as regression features. Our final system, using a gradient boosting regressor, achieved the lowest mean absolute error (MAE), resulting in the best system of the competition.

We present the second shared task on eye-tracking data prediction of the Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics Workshop (CMCL). Differently from the previous edition, participating teams are asked to predict eye-tracking features from multiple languages, including a surprise language for which there were no available training data. Moreover, the task also included the prediction of standard deviations of feature values in order to account for individual differences between readers.A total of six teams registered to the task. For the first subtask on multilingual prediction, the winning team proposed a regression model based on lexical features, while for the second subtask on cross-lingual prediction, the winning team used a hybrid model based on a multilingual transformer embeddings as well as statistical features.

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Team ÚFAL at CMCL 2022 Shared Task: Figuring out the correct recipe for predicting Eye-Tracking features using Pretrained Language Models
Sunit Bhattacharya | Rishu Kumar | Ondrej Bojar

Eye-Tracking data is a very useful source of information to study cognition and especially language comprehension in humans. In this paper, we describe our systems for the CMCL 2022 shared task on predicting eye-tracking information. We describe our experiments withpretrained models like BERT and XLM and the different ways in which we used those representations to predict four eye-tracking features. Along with analysing the effect of using two different kinds of pretrained multilingual language models and different ways of pooling the token-level representations, we also explore how contextual information affects the performance of the systems. Finally, we also explore if factors like augmenting linguistic information affect the predictions. Our submissions achieved an average MAE of 5.72 and ranked 5th in the shared task. The average MAE showed further reduction to 5.25 in post task evaluation.

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Team DMG at CMCL 2022 Shared Task: Transformer Adapters for the Multi- and Cross-Lingual Prediction of Human Reading Behavior
Ece Takmaz

In this paper, we present the details of our approaches that attained the second place in the shared task of the ACL 2022 Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics Workshop. The shared task is focused on multi- and cross-lingual prediction of eye movement features in human reading behavior, which could provide valuable information regarding language processing. To this end, we train ‘adapters’ inserted into the layers of frozen transformer-based pretrained language models. We find that multilingual models equipped with adapters perform well in predicting eye-tracking features. Our results suggest that utilizing language- and task-specific adapters is beneficial and translating test sets into similar languages that exist in the training set could help with zero-shot transferability in the prediction of human reading behavior.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse

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KOJAK: A New Corpus for Studying German Discourse Particle ja
Adil Soubki | Owen Rambow | Chong Kang

In German, ja can be used as a discourse particle to indicate that a proposition, according to the speaker, is believed by both the speaker and audience. We use this observation to create KoJaK, a distantly-labeled English dataset derived from Europarl for studying when a speaker believes a statement to be common ground. This corpus is then analyzed to identify lexical choices in English that correspond with German ja. Finally, we perform experiments on the dataset to predict if an English clause corresponds to a German clause containing ja and achieve an F-measure of 75.3% on a balanced test corpus.

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Improving Topic Segmentation by Injecting Discourse Dependencies
Linzi Xing | Patrick Huber | Giuseppe Carenini

Recent neural supervised topic segmentation models achieve distinguished superior effectiveness over unsupervised methods, with the availability of large-scale training corpora sampled from Wikipedia. These models may, however, suffer from limited robustness and transferability caused by exploiting simple linguistic cues for prediction, but overlooking more important inter-sentential topical consistency. To address this issue, we present a discourse-aware neural topic segmentation model with the injection of above-sentence discourse dependency structures to encourage the model make topic boundary prediction based more on the topical consistency between sentences. Our empirical study on English evaluation datasets shows that injecting above-sentence discourse structures to a neural topic segmenter with our proposed strategy can substantially improve its performances on intra-domain and out-of-domain data, with little increase of model’s complexity.

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Evaluating How Users Game and Display Conversation with Human-Like Agents
Won Ik Cho | Soomin Kim | Eujeong Choi | Younghoon Jeong

Recently, with the advent of high-performance generative language models, artificial agents that communicate directly with the users have become more human-like. This development allows users to perform a diverse range of trials with the agents, and the responses are sometimes displayed online by users who share or show-off their experiences. In this study, we explore dialogues with a social chatbot uploaded to an online community, with the aim of understanding how users game human-like agents and display their conversations. Having done this, we assert that user postings can be investigated from two aspects, namely conversation topic and purpose of testing, and suggest a categorization scheme for the analysis. We analyze 639 dialogues to develop an annotation protocol for the evaluation, and measure the agreement to demonstrate the validity. We find that the dialogue content does not necessarily reflect the purpose of testing, and also that users come up with creative strategies to game the agent without being penalized.

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Evaluating Discourse Cohesion in Pre-trained Language Models
Jie He | Wanqiu Long | Deyi Xiong

Large pre-trained neural models have achieved remarkable success in natural language process (NLP), inspiring a growing body of research analyzing their ability from different aspects. In this paper, we propose a test suite to evaluate the cohesive ability of pre-trained language models. The test suite contains multiple cohesion phenomena between adjacent and non-adjacent sentences. We try to compare different pre-trained language models on these phenomena and analyze the experimental results,hoping more attention can be given to discourse cohesion in the future. The built discourse cohesion test suite will be publicly available at https://github.com/probe2/discourse_cohesion.

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Easy-First Bottom-Up Discourse Parsing via Sequence Labelling
Andrew Shen | Fajri Koto | Jey Han Lau | Timothy Baldwin

We propose a novel unconstrained bottom-up approach for rhetorical discourse parsing based on sequence labelling of adjacent pairs of discourse units (DUs), based on the framework of Koto et al. (2021). We describe the unique training requirements of an unconstrained parser, and explore two different training procedures: (1) fixed left-to-right; and (2) random order in tree construction. Additionally, we introduce a novel dynamic oracle for unconstrained bottom-up parsing. Our proposed parser achieves competitive results for bottom-up rhetorical discourse parsing.

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Using Translation Process Data to Explore Explicitation and Implicitation through Discourse Connectives
Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski | Michael Carl

We look into English-German translation process data to analyse explicitation and implicitation phenomena of discourse connectives. For this, we use the database CRITT TPR-DB which contains translation process data with various features that elicit online translation behaviour. We explore the English-German part of the data for discourse connectives that are either omitted or inserted in the target, as well as cases when changing a weak signal to strong one, or the other way around. We determine several features that have an impact on cognitive effort during translation for explicitation and implicitation. Our results show that cognitive load caused by implicitation and explicitation may depend on the discourse connectives used, as well as on the strength and the type of the relations the connectives convey.

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Label distributions help implicit discourse relation classification
Frances Yung | Kaveri Anuranjana | Merel Scholman | Vera Demberg

Implicit discourse relations can convey more than one relation sense, but much of the research on discourse relations has focused on single relation senses. Recently, DiscoGeM, a novel multi-domain corpus, which contains 10 crowd-sourced labels per relational instance, has become available. In this paper, we analyse the co-occurrences of relations in DiscoGem and show that they are systematic and characteristic of text genre. We then test whether information on multi-label distributions in the data can help implicit relation classifiers. Our results show that incorporating multiple labels in parser training can improve its performance, and yield label distributions which are more similar to human label distributions, compared to a parser that is trained on just a single most frequent label per instance.

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The Keystone Role Played by Questions in Debate
Zlata Kikteva | Kamila Gorska | Wassiliki Siskou | Annette Hautli-Janisz | Chris Reed

Building on the recent results of a study into the roles that are played by questions in argumentative dialogue (Hautli-Janisz et al.,2022a), we expand the analysis to investigate a newly released corpus that constitutes the largest extant corpus of closely annotated debate. Questions play a critical role in driving dialogical discourse forward; in combative or critical discursive environments, they not only provide a range of discourse management techniques, they also scaffold the semantic structure of the positions that interlocutors develop. The boundaries, however, between providing substantive answers to questions, merely responding to questions, and evading questions entirely, are fuzzy and the way in which answers, responses and evasions affect the subsequent development of dialogue and argumentation structure are poorly understood. In this paper, we explore how questions have ramifications on the large-scale structure of a debate using as our substrate the BBC television programme Question Time, the foremost topical debate show in the UK. Analysis of the data demonstrates not only that questioning plays a particularly prominent role in such debate, but also that its repercussions can reverberate through a discourse.

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Shallow Discourse Parsing for Open Information Extraction and Text Simplification
Christina Niklaus | André Freitas | Siegfried Handschuh

We present a discourse-aware text simplification (TS) approach that recursively splits and rephrases complex English sentences into a semantic hierarchy of simplified sentences. Using a set of linguistically principled transformation patterns, sentences are converted into a hierarchical representation in the form of core sentences and accompanying contexts that are linked via rhetorical relations. As opposed to previously proposed sentence splitting approaches, which commonly do not take into account discourse-level aspects, our TS approach preserves the semantic relationship of the decomposed constituents in the output. A comparative analysis with the annotations contained in RST-DT shows that we capture the contextual hierarchy between the split sentences with a precision of 89% and reach an average precision of 69% for the classification of the rhetorical relations that hold between them. Moreover, an integration into state-of-the-art Open Information Extraction (IE) systems reveals that when applying our TS approach as a pre-processing step, the generated relational tuples are enriched with additional meta information, resulting in a novel lightweight semantic representation for the task of Open IE.

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Predicting Political Orientation in News with Latent Discourse Structure to Improve Bias Understanding
Nicolas Devatine | Philippe Muller | Chloé Braud

With the growing number of information sources, the problem of media bias becomes worrying for a democratic society. This paper explores the task of predicting the political orientation of news articles, with a goal of analyzing how bias is expressed. We demonstrate that integrating rhetorical dimensions via latent structures over sub-sentential discourse units allows for large improvements, with a +7.4 points difference between the base LSTM model and its discourse-based version, and +3 points improvement over the previous BERT-based state-of-the-art model. We also argue that this gives a new relevant handle for analyzing political bias in news articles.

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Attention Modulation for Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking
Mathilde Veron | Olivier Galibert | Guillaume Bernard | Sophie Rosset

Dialog state tracking (DST) is a core step for task-oriented dialogue systems aiming to track the user’s current goal during a dialogue. Recently a special focus has been put on applying existing DST models to new domains, in other words performing zero-shot cross-domain transfer. While recent state-of-the-art models leverage large pre-trained language models, no work has been made on understanding and improving the results of first developed zero-shot models like SUMBT. In this paper, we thus propose to improve SUMBT zero-shot results on MultiWOZ by using attention modulation during inference. This method improves SUMBT zero-shot results significantly on two domains and does not worsen the initial performance with the great advantage of needing no additional training.

Although topic transition has been studied in dialogue for decades, only a handful of corpora based quantitative studies have been conducted to investigate the nature of topic transitions. Towards this end, this study annotates 215 conversations from the switchboard corpus, perform quantitative analysis and finds that 1) longer conversations consists of more topic transitions, 2) topic transition are usually lead by one participant and 3) we found no pattern in time series progression of topic transition. We also model topic transition with a precision of 91%.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the CODI-CRAC 2022 Shared Task on Anaphora, Bridging, and Discourse Deixis in Dialogue

The CODI-CRAC 2022 Shared Task on Anaphora Resolution in Dialogues is the second edition of an initiative focused on detecting different types of anaphoric relations in conversations of different kinds. Using five conversational datasets, four of which have been newly annotated with a wide range of anaphoric relations: identity, bridging references and discourse deixis, we defined multiple tasks focusing individually on these key relations. The second edition of the shared task maintained the focus on these relations and used the same datasets as in 2021, but new test data were annotated, the 2021 data were checked, and new subtasks were added. In this paper, we discuss the annotation schemes, the datasets, the evaluation scripts used to assess the system performance on these tasks, and provide a brief summary of the participating systems and the results obtained across 230 runs from three teams, with most submissions achieving significantly better results than our baseline methods.

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Anaphora Resolution in Dialogue: System Description (CODI-CRAC 2022 Shared Task)
Tatiana Anikina | Natalia Skachkova | Joseph Renner | Priyansh Trivedi

We describe three models submitted for the CODI-CRAC 2022 shared task. To perform identity anaphora resolution, we test several combinations of the incremental clustering approach based on the Workspace Coreference System (WCS) with other coreference models. The best result is achieved by adding the “cluster merging” version of the coref-hoi model, which brings up to 10.33% improvement1 over vanilla WCS clustering. Discourse deixis resolution is implemented as multi-task learning: we combine the learning objective of coref-hoi with anaphor type classification. We adapt the higher-order resolution model introduced in Joshi et al. (2019) for bridging resolution given gold mentions and anaphors.

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Pipeline Coreference Resolution Model for Anaphoric Identity in Dialogues
Damrin Kim | Seongsik Park | Mirae Han | Harksoo Kim

CODI-CRAC 2022 Shared Task in Dialogues consists of three sub-tasks: Sub-task 1 is the resolution of anaphoric identity, sub-task 2 is the resolution of bridging references, and sub-task 3 is the resolution of discourse deixis/abstract anaphora. Anaphora resolution is the task of detecting mentions from input documents and clustering the mentions of the same entity. The end-to-end model proceeds with the pruning of the candidate mention, and the pruning has the possibility of removing the correct mention. Also, the end-to-end anaphora resolution model has high model complexity, which takes a long time to train. Therefore, we proceed with the anaphora resolution as a two-stage pipeline model. In the first mention detection step, the score of the candidate word span is calculated, and the mention is predicted without pruning. In the second anaphora resolution step, the pair of mentions of the anaphora resolution relationship is predicted using the mentions predicted in the mention detection step. We propose a two-stage anaphora resolution pipeline model that reduces model complexity and training time, and maintains similar performance to end-to-end models. As a result of the experiment, the anaphora resolution showed a performance of 68.27% in Light, 48.87% in AMI, 69.06% in Persuasion, and 60.99% on Switchboard. Our final system ranked 3rd on the leaderboard of sub-task 1.

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Neural Anaphora Resolution in Dialogue Revisited
Shengjie Li | Hideo Kobayashi | Vincent Ng

We present the systems that we developed for all three tracks of the CODI-CRAC 2022 shared task, namely the anaphora resolution track, the bridging resolution track, and the discourse deixis resolution track. Combining an effective encoding of the input using the SpanBERT_Large encoder with an extensive hyperparameter search process, our systems achieved the highest scores in all phases of all three tracks.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

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Development of the Siberian Ingrian Finnish Speech Corpus
Ivan Ubaleht | Taisto-Kalevi Raudalainen

In this paper we present the speech corpus for the Siberian Ingrian Finnish language. The speech corpus includes audio data, annotations, software tools for data-processing, two databases and a web application. We have published part of the audio data and annotations. The software tool for parsing annotation files and feeding a relational database is developed and published under a free license. A web application is developed and available. At this moment, about 300 words and 200 phrases can be displayed using this web application.

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New syntactic insights for automated Wolof Universal Dependency parsing
Bill Dyer

Focus on language-specific properties with insights from formal minimalist syntax can improve universal dependency (UD) parsing. Such improvements are especially sensitive for low-resource African languages, like Wolof, which have fewer UD treebanks in number and amount of annotations, and fewer contributing annotators. For two different UD parser pipelines, one parser model was trained on the original Wolof treebank, and one was trained on an edited treebank. For each parser pipeline, the accuracy of the edited treebank was higher than the original for both the dependency relations and dependency labels. Accuracy for universal dependency relations improved as much as 2.90%, while accuracy for universal dependency labels increased as much as 3.38%. An annotation scheme that better fits a language’s distinct syntax results in better parsing accuracy.

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Corpus Development of Kiswahili Speech Recognition Test and Evaluation sets, Preemptively Mitigating Demographic Bias Through Collaboration with Linguists
Kathleen Siminyu | Kibibi Mohamed Amran | Abdulrahman Ndegwa Karatu | Mnata Resani | Mwimbi Makobo Junior | Rebecca Ryakitimbo | Britone Mwasaru

Language technologies, particularly speech technologies, are becoming more pervasive for access to digital platforms and resources. This brings to the forefront concerns of their inclusivity, first in terms of language diversity. Additionally, research shows speech recognition to be more accurate for men than for women and more accurate for individuals younger than 30 years of age than those older. In the Global South where languages are low resource, these same issues should be taken into consideration in data collection efforts to not replicate these mistakes. It is also important to note that in varying contexts within the Global South, this work presents additional nuance and potential for bias based on accents, related dialects and variants of a language. This paper documents i) the designing and execution of a Linguists Engagement for purposes of building an inclusive Kiswahili Speech Recognition dataset, representative of the diversity among speakers of the language ii) the unexpected yet key learning in terms of socio-linguistcs which demonstrate the importance of multi-disciplinarity in teams developing datasets and NLP technologies iii) the creation of a test dataset intended to be used for evaluating the performance of Speech Recognition models on demographic groups that are likely to be underrepresented.

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CLD² Language Documentation Meets Natural Language Processing for Revitalising Endangered Languages
Roberto Zariquiey | Arturo Oncevay | Javier Vera

Language revitalisation should not be understood as a direct outcome of language documentation, which is mainly focused on the creation of language repositories. Natural language processing (NLP) offers the potential to complement and exploit these repositories through the development of language technologies that may contribute to improving the vitality status of endangered languages. In this paper, we discuss the current state of the interaction between language documentation and computational linguistics, present a diagnosis of how the outputs of recent documentation projects for endangered languages are underutilised for the NLP community, and discuss how the situation could change from both the documentary linguistics and NLP perspectives. All this is introduced as a bridging paradigm dubbed as Computational Language Documentation and Development (CLD²). CLD² calls for (1) the inclusion of NLP-friendly annotated data as a deliverable of future language documentation projects; and (2) the exploitation of language documentation databases by the NLP community to promote the computerization of endangered languages, as one way to contribute to their revitalization.

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One Wug, Two Wug+s Transformer Inflection Models Hallucinate Affixes
Farhan Samir | Miikka Silfverberg

Data augmentation strategies are increasingly important in NLP pipelines for low-resourced and endangered languages, and in neural morphological inflection, augmentation by so called data hallucination is a popular technique. This paper presents a detailed analysis of inflection models trained with and without data hallucination for the low-resourced Canadian Indigenous language Gitksan. Our analysis reveals evidence for a concatenative inductive bias in augmented models—in contrast to models trained without hallucination, they strongly prefer affixing inflection patterns over suppletive ones. We find that preference for affixation in general improves inflection performance in “wug test” like settings, where the model is asked to inflect lexemes missing from the training set. However, data hallucination dramatically reduces prediction accuracy for reduplicative forms due to a misanalysis of reduplication as affixation. While the overall impact of data hallucination for unseen lexemes remains positive, our findings call for greater qualitative analysis and more varied evaluation conditions in testing automatic inflection systems. Our results indicate that further innovations in data augmentation for computational morphology are desirable.

Many archival recordings of speech from endangered languages remain unannotated and inaccessible to community members and language learning programs. One bottleneck is the time-intensive nature of annotation. An even narrower bottleneck occurs for recordings with access constraints, such as language that must be vetted or filtered by authorised community members before annotation can begin. We propose a privacy-preserving workflow to widen both bottlenecks for recordings where speech in the endangered language is intermixed with a more widely-used language such as English for meta-linguistic commentary and questions (e.g.What is the word for ‘tree’?). We integrate voice activity detection (VAD), spoken language identification (SLI), and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe the metalinguistic content, which an authorised person can quickly scan to triage recordings that can be annotated by people with lower levels of access. We report work-in-progress processing 136 hours archival audio containing a mix of English and Muruwari. Our collaborative work with the Muruwari custodian of the archival materials show that this workflow reduces metalanguage transcription time by 20% even given only minimal amounts of annotated training data, 10 utterances per language for SLI and for ASR at most 39 minutes, and possibly as little as 39 seconds.

This paper describes the motivation and implementation details for a rule-based, index-preserving grapheme-to-phoneme engine ‘G_i2P_i' implemented in pure Python and released under the open source MIT license. The engine and interface have been designed to prioritize the developer experience of potential contributors without requiring a high level of programming knowledge. ‘G_i2P_i' already provides mappings for 30 (mostly Indigenous) languages, and the package is accompanied by a web-based interactive development environment, a RESTful API, and extensive documentation to encourage the addition of more mappings in the future. We also present three downstream applications of ‘G_i2P_i' and show results of a preliminary evaluation.

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Shallow Parsing for Nepal Bhasa Complement Clauses
Borui Zhang | Abe Kazemzadeh | Brian Reese

Accelerating the process of data collection, annotation, and analysis is an urgent need for linguistic fieldwork and documentation of endangered languages (Bird, 2009). Our experiments describe how we maximize the quality for the Nepal Bhasa syntactic complement structure chunking model. Native speaker language consultants were trained to annotate a minimally selected raw data set (Suárez et al.,2019). The embedded clauses, matrix verbs, and embedded verbs are annotated. We apply both statistical training algorithms and transfer learning in our training, including Naive Bayes, MaxEnt, and fine-tuning the pre-trained mBERT model (Devlin et al., 2018). We show that with limited annotated data, the model is already sufficient for the task. The modeling resources we used are largely available for many other endangered languages. The practice is easy to duplicate for training a shallow parser for other endangered languages in general.

We describe recent extensions to the open source Learning And Reading Assistant (LARA) supporting image-based and phonetically annotated texts. We motivate the utility of these extensions both in general and specifically in relation to endangered and archaic languages, and illustrate with examples from the revived Australian language Barngarla, Icelandic Sign Language, Irish Gaelic, Old Norse manuscripts and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

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Recovering Text from Endangered Languages Corrupted PDF documents
Nicolas Stefanovitch

In this paper we present an approach to efficiently recover texts from corrupted documents of endangered languages. Textual resources for such languages are scarce, and sometimes the few available resources are corrupted PDF documents. Endangered languages are not supported by standard tools and present even the additional difficulties of not possessing any corpus over which to train language models to assist with the recovery. The approach presented is able to fully recover born digital PDF documents with minimal effort, thereby helping the preservation effort of endangered languages, by extending the range of documents usable for corpus building.

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Learning Through Transcription
Mat Bettinson | Steven Bird

Transcribing speech for primarily oral, local languages is often a joint effort involving speakers and outsiders. It is commonly motivated by externally-defined scientific goals, alongside local motivations such as language acquisition and access to heritage materials. We explore the task of ‘learning through transcription’ through the design of a system for collaborative speech annotation. We have developed a prototype to support local and remote learner-speaker interactions in remote Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. We show that situated systems design for inclusive non-expert practice is a promising new direction for working with speakers of local languages.

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Developing a Part-Of-Speech tagger for te reo Māori
Aoife Finn | Peter-Lucas Jones | Keoni Mahelona | Suzanne Duncan | Gianna Leoni

This paper discusses the development of a Part-of-Speech tagger for te reo Māori which is the Indigenous language of Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand, see Morrison. Henceforth, Part-of-Speech will be referred to as POS throughout this paper and te reo Māori will be referred to as Māori, while Universal Dependencies will be referred to as UD. Prior to the development of this tagger, there was no POS tagger for Māori from Aotearoa. POS taggers tag words according to their syntactic or grammatical category. However, many traditional syntactic categories, and by consequence POS labels, do not “work for” Māori. By this we mean that, for some of the traditional categories, The definition of, or guidelines for, an existing category is not suitable for Māori. They do not have an existing category for certain word classes of Māori. They do not reflect a Māori worldview of the Māori language. We wanted a tagset that is usable with industry-wide tools, but we also needed a tagset that would meet the needs of Māori. Therefore, we based our tagset and guidelines on the UD tagset and tagging conventions, however the categorization of words has been significantly altered to be appropriate for Māori. This is because at the time of development of our POS tagger, the UD conventions had still not been used to tag a Polyneisan language such as Māori, nor did it provide any guidelines about how to tag them. To that end, we worked with highly-proficient, specially-selected Māori speakers and linguists who are specialists in Māori. This has ensured that our POS labels and guidelines conventions faithfully reflect a Māori speaker’s conceptualization of their language.

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Challenges and Perspectives for Innu-Aimun within Indigenous Language Technologies
Antoine Cadotte | Tan Le Ngoc | Mathieu Boivin | Fatiha Sadat

Innu-Aimun is an Algonquian language spoken in Eastern Canada. It is the language of the Innu, an Indigenous people that now lives for the most part in a dozen communities across Quebec and Labrador. Although it is alive, Innu-Aimun sees important preservation and revitalization challenges and issues. The state of its technology is still nascent, with very few existing applications. This paper proposes a first survey of the available linguistic resources and existing technology for Innu-Aimun. Considering the existing linguistic and textual resources, we argue that developing language technology is feasible and propose first steps towards NLP applications like machine translation. The goal of developing such technologies is first and foremost to help efforts in improving language transmission and cultural safety and preservation for Innu-Aimun speakers, as those are considered urgent and vital issues. Finally, we discuss the importance of close collaboration and consultation with the Innu community in order to ensure that language technologies are developed respectfully and in accordance with that goal.

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Using Speech and NLP Resources to build an iCALL platform for a minority language, the story of An Scéalaí, the Irish experience to date
Neasa Ní Chiaráin | Oisín Nolan | Madeleine Comtois | Neimhin Robinson Gunning | Harald Berthelsen | Ailbhe Ni Chasaide

This paper describes how emerging linguistic resources and technologies can be used to build a language learning platform for Irish, an endangered language. This platform, An Scéalaí, harvests learner corpora - a vital resource both to study the stages of learners’ language acquisition and to guide future platform development. A technical description of the platform is provided, including details of how different speech technologies and linguistic resources are fused to provide a holistic learner experience. The active continuous participation of the community, and platform evaluations by learners and teachers, are discussed.

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Closing the NLP Gap: Documentary Linguistics and NLP Need a Shared Software Infrastructure
Luke Gessler

For decades, researchers in natural language processing and computational linguistics have been developing models and algorithms that aim to serve the needs of language documentation projects. However, these models have seen little use in language documentation despite their great potential for making documentary linguistic artefacts better and easier to produce. In this work, we argue that a major reason for this NLP gap is the lack of a strong foundation of application software which can on the one hand serve the complex needs of language documentation and on the other hand provide effortless integration with NLP models. We further present and describe a work-in-progress system we have developed to serve this need, Glam.

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Can We Use Word Embeddings for Enhancing Guarani-Spanish Machine Translation?
Santiago Góngora | Nicolás Giossa | Luis Chiruzzo

Machine translation for low-resource languages, such as Guarani, is a challenging task due to the lack of data. One way of tackling it is using pretrained word embeddings for model initialization. In this work we try to check if currently available data is enough to train rich embeddings for enhancing MT for Guarani and Spanish, by building a set of word embedding collections and training MT systems using them. We found that the trained vectors are strong enough to slightly improve the performance of some of the translation models and also to speed up the training convergence.

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Faoi Gheasa an adaptive game for Irish language learning
Liang Xu | Elaine Uí Dhonnchadha | Monica Ward

In this paper, we present a game with a purpose (GWAP) (Von Ahn 2006). The aim of the game is to promote language learning and ‘noticing’ (Skehan, 2013). The game has been designed for Irish, but the framework could be used for other languages. Irish is a minority language which means that L2 learners have limited opportunities for exposure to the language, and additionally, there are also limited (digital) learning resources available. This research incorporates game development, language pedagogy and ICALL language materials development. This paper will focus on the language materials development as this is a bottleneck in the teaching and learning of minority and endangered languages.

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Using Graph-Based Methods to Augment Online Dictionaries of Endangered Languages
Khalid Alnajjar | Mika Hämäläinen | Niko Tapio Partanen | Jack Rueter

Many endangered Uralic languages have multilingual machine readable dictionaries saved in an XML format. However, the dictionaries cover translations very inconsistently between language pairs, for instance, the Livonian dictionary has some translations to Finnish, Latvian and Estonian, and the Komi-Zyrian dictionary has some translations to Finnish, English and Russian. We utilize graph-based approaches to augment such dictionaries by predicting new translations to existing and new languages based on different dictionaries for endangered languages and Wiktionaries. Our study focuses on the lexical resources for Komi-Zyrian (kpv), Erzya (myv) and Livonian (liv). We evaluate our approach by human judges fluent in the three endangered languages in question. Based on the evaluation, the method predicted good or acceptable translations 77% of the time. Furthermore, we train a neural prediction model to predict the quality of the automatically predicted translations with an 81% accuracy. The resulting extensions to the dictionaries are made available on the online dictionary platform used by the speakers of these languages.

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Reusing a Multi-lingual Setup to Bootstrap a Grammar Checker for a Very Low Resource Language without Data
Inga Lill Sigga Mikkelsen | Linda Wiechetek | Flammie A Pirinen

Grammar checkers (GEC) are needed for digital language survival. Very low resource languages like Lule Sámi with less than 3,000 speakers need to hurry to build these tools, but do not have the big corpus data that are required for the construction of machine learning tools. We present a rule-based tool and a workflow where the work done for a related language can speed up the process. We use an existing grammar to infer rules for the new language, and we do not need a large gold corpus of annotated grammar errors, but a smaller corpus of regression tests is built while developing the tool. We present a test case for Lule Sámi reusing resources from North Sámi, show how we achieve a categorisation of the most frequent errors, and present a preliminary evaluation of the system. We hope this serves as an inspiration for small languages that need advanced tools in a limited amount of time, but do not have big data.

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A Word-and-Paradigm Workflow for Fieldwork Annotation
Maria Copot | Sara Court | Noah Diewald | Stephanie Antetomaso | Micha Elsner

There are many challenges in morphological fieldwork annotation, it heavily relies on segmentation and feature labeling (which have both practical and theoretical drawbacks), it’s time-intensive, and the annotator needs to be linguistically trained and may still annotate things inconsistently. We propose a workflow that relies on unsupervised and active learning grounded in Word-and-Paradigm morphology (WP). Machine learning has the potential to greatly accelerate the annotation process and allow a human annotator to focus on problematic cases, while the WP approach makes for an annotation system that is word-based and relational, removing the need to make decisions about feature labeling and segmentation early in the process and allowing speakers of the language of interest to participate more actively, since linguistic training is not necessary. We present a proof-of-concept for the first step of the workflow, in a realistic fieldwork setting, annotators can process hundreds of forms per hour.

This is a report on results obtained in the development of speech recognition tools intended to support linguistic documentation efforts. The test case is an extensive fieldwork corpus of Japhug, an endangered language of the Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) family. The goal is to reduce the transcription workload of field linguists. The method used is a deep learning approach based on the language-specific tuning of a generic pre-trained representation model, XLS-R, using a Transformer architecture. We note difficulties in implementation, in terms of learning stability. But this approach brings significant improvements nonetheless. The quality of phonemic transcription is improved over earlier experiments; and most significantly, the new approach allows for reaching the stage of automatic word recognition. Subjective evaluation of the tool by the author of the training data confirms the usefulness of this approach.

The project XXXX is developing a platform to enable researchers of living languages to easily create and make available state-of-the-art spoken and textual annotated resources. As a case study we use Greek and Pomak, the latter being an endangered oral Slavic language of the Balkans (including Thrace/Greece). The linguistic documentation of Pomak is an ongoing work by an interdisciplinary team in close cooperation with the Pomak community of Greece. We describe our experience in the development of a Latin-based orthography and morphologically annotated text corpora of Pomak with state-of-the-art NLP technology. These resources will be made openly available on the XXXX site and the gold annotated corpora of Pomak will be made available on the Universal Dependencies treebank repository.

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Enhancing Documentation of Hupa with Automatic Speech Recognition
Zoey Liu | Justin Spence | Emily Prud’hommeaux

This study investigates applications of automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques to Hupa, a critically endangered Native American language from the Dene (Athabaskan) language family. Using around 9h12m of spoken data produced by one elder who is a first-language Hupa speaker, we experimented with different evaluation schemes and training settings. On average a fully connected deep neural network reached a word error rate of 35.26%. Our overall results illustrate the utility of ASR for making Hupa language documentation more accessible and usable. In addition, we found that when training acoustic models, using recordings with transcripts that were not carefully verified did not necessarily have a negative effect on model performance. This shows promise for speech corpora of indigenous languages that commonly include transcriptions produced by second-language speakers or linguists who have advanced knowledge in the language of interest.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)

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Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)
Antske Fokkens | Vivek Srikumar

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A Multilingual Bag-of-Entities Model for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Text Classification
Sosuke Nishikawa | Ikuya Yamada | Yoshimasa Tsuruoka | Isao Echizen

We present a multilingual bag-of-entities model that effectively boosts the performance of zero-shot cross-lingual text classification by extending a multilingual pre-trained language model (e.g., M-BERT). It leverages the multilingual nature of Wikidata: entities in multiple languages representing the same concept are defined with a unique identifier. This enables entities described in multiple languages to be represented using shared embeddings. A model trained on entity features in a resource-rich language can thus be directly applied to other languages. Our experimental results on cross-lingual topic classification (using the MLDoc and TED-CLDC datasets) and entity typing (using the SHINRA2020-ML dataset) show that the proposed model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models.

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Collateral facilitation in humans and language models
James Michaelov | Benjamin Bergen

Are the predictions of humans and language models affected by similar things? Research suggests that while comprehending language, humans make predictions about upcoming words, with more predictable words being processed more easily. However, evidence also shows that humans display a similar processing advantage for highly anomalous words when these words are semantically related to the preceding context or to the most probable continuation. Using stimuli from 3 psycholinguistic experiments, we find that this is also almost always also the case for 8 contemporary transformer language models (BERT, ALBERT, RoBERTa, XLM-R, GPT-2, GPT-Neo, GPT-J, and XGLM). We then discuss the implications of this phenomenon for our understanding of both human language comprehension and the predictions made by language models.

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How Hate Speech Varies by Target Identity: A Computational Analysis
Michael Yoder | Lynnette Ng | David West Brown | Kathleen Carley

This paper investigates how hate speech varies in systematic ways according to the identities it targets. Across multiple hate speech datasets annotated for targeted identities, we find that classifiers trained on hate speech targeting specific identity groups struggle to generalize to other targeted identities. This provides empirical evidence for differences in hate speech by target identity; we then investigate which patterns structure this variation. We find that the targeted demographic category (e.g. gender/sexuality or race/ethnicity) appears to have a greater effect on the language of hate speech than does the relative social power of the targeted identity group. We also find that words associated with hate speech targeting specific identities often relate to stereotypes, histories of oppression, current social movements, and other social contexts specific to identities. These experiments suggest the importance of considering targeted identity, as well as the social contexts associated with these identities, in automated hate speech classification

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Continual Learning for Natural Language Generations with Transformer Calibration
Peng Yang | Dingcheng Li | Ping Li

Conventional natural language process (NLP) generation models are trained offline with a given dataset for a particular task, which is referred to as isolated learning. Research on sequence-to-sequence language generation aims to study continual learning model to constantly learning from sequentially encountered tasks. However, continual learning studies often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, a persistent challenge for lifelong learning. In this paper, we present a novel NLP transformer model that attempts to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in online continual learning from a new perspective, i.e., attention calibration. We model the attention in the transformer as a calibrated unit in a general formulation, where the attention calibration could give benefits to balance the stability and plasticity of continual learning algorithms through influencing both their forward inference path and backward optimization path. Our empirical experiments, paraphrase generation and dialog response generation, demonstrate that this work outperforms state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin and effectively mitigate the forgetting.

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That’s so cute!: The CARE Dataset for Affective Response Detection
Jane Yu | Alon Halevy

Social media plays an increasing role in our communication with friends and family, and in our consumption of entertainment and information. Hence, to design effective ranking functions for posts on social media, it would be useful to predict the affective responses of a post (e.g., whether it is likely to elicit feelings of entertainment, inspiration, or anger). Similar to work on emotion detection (which focuses on the affect of the publisher of the post), the traditional approach to recognizing affective response would involve an expensive investment in human annotation of training data. We create and publicly release CARE DB, a dataset of 230k social media post annotations according to seven affective responses using the Common Affective Response Expression (CARE) method. The CARE method is a means of leveraging the signal that is present in comments that are posted in response to a post, providing high-precision evidence about the affective response to the post without human annotation. Unlike human annotation, the annotation process we describe here can be iterated upon to expand the coverage of the method, particularly for new affective responses. We present experiments that demonstrate that the CARE annotations compare favorably with crowdsourced annotations. Finally, we use CARE DB to train competitive BERT-based models for predicting affective response as well as emotion detection, demonstrating the utility of the dataset for related tasks.

While there is increasing concern about the interpretability of neural models, the evaluation of interpretability remains an open problem, due to the lack of proper evaluation datasets and metrics. In this paper, we present a novel benchmark to evaluate the interpretability of both neural models and saliency methods. This benchmark covers three representative NLP tasks: sentiment analysis, textual similarity and reading comprehension, each provided with both English and Chinese annotated data. In order to precisely evaluate the interpretability, we provide token-level rationales that are carefully annotated to be sufficient, compact and comprehensive. We also design a new metric, i.e., the consistency between the rationales before and after perturbations, to uniformly evaluate the interpretability on different types of tasks. Based on this benchmark, we conduct experiments on three typical models with three saliency methods, and unveil their strengths and weakness in terms of interpretability. We will release this benchmark (https://www.luge.ai/#/luge/task/taskDetail?taskId=15) and hope it can facilitate the research in building trustworthy systems.

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Towards More Natural Artificial Languages
Mark Hopkins

A number of papers have recently argued in favor of using artificially generated languages to investigate the inductive biases of linguistic models, or to develop models for low-resource languages with underrepresented typologies. But the promise of artificial languages comes with a caveat: if these artificial languages are not sufficiently reflective of natural language, then using them as a proxy may lead to inaccurate conclusions. In this paper, we take a step towards increasing the realism of artificial language by introducing a variant of indexed grammars that draw their weights from hierarchical Pitman-Yor processes. We show that this framework generates languages that emulate the statistics of natural language corpora better than the current approach of directly formulating weighted context-free grammars.

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Causal Analysis of Syntactic Agreement Neurons in Multilingual Language Models
Aaron Mueller | Yu Xia | Tal Linzen

Structural probing work has found evidence for latent syntactic information in pre-trained language models. However, much of this analysis has focused on monolingual models, and analyses of multilingual models have employed correlational methods that are confounded by the choice of probing tasks. In this study, we causally probe multilingual language models (XGLM and multilingual BERT) as well as monolingual BERT-based models across various languages; we do this by performing counterfactual perturbations on neuron activations and observing the effect on models’ subject-verb agreement probabilities. We observe where in the model and to what extent syntactic agreement is encoded in each language. We find significant neuron overlap across languages in autoregressive multilingual language models, but not masked language models. We also find two distinct layer-wise effect patterns and two distinct sets of neurons used for syntactic agreement, depending on whether the subject and verb are separated by other tokens. Finally, we find that behavioral analyses of language models are likely underestimating how sensitive masked language models are to syntactic information.

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Combining Noisy Semantic Signals with Orthographic Cues: Cognate Induction for the Indic Dialect Continuum
Niyati Bafna | Josef van Genabith | Cristina España-Bonet | Zdeněk Žabokrtský

We present a novel method for unsupervised cognate/borrowing identification from monolingual corpora designed for low and extremely low resource scenarios, based on combining noisy semantic signals from joint bilingual spaces with orthographic cues modelling sound change. We apply our method to the North Indian dialect continuum, containing several dozens of dialects and languages spoken by more than 100 million people. Many of these languages are zero-resource and therefore natural language processing for them is non-existent. We first collect monolingual data for 26 Indic languages, 16 of which were previously zero-resource, and perform exploratory character, lexical and subword cross-lingual alignment experiments for the first time at this scale on this dialect continuum. We create bilingual evaluation lexicons against Hindi for 20 of the languages. We then apply our cognate identification method on the data, and show that our method outperforms both traditional orthography baselines as well as EM-style learnt edit distance matrices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to combine traditional orthographic cues with noisy bilingual embeddings to tackle unsupervised cognate detection in a (truly) low-resource setup, showing that even noisy bilingual embeddings can act as good guides for this task. We release our multilingual dialect corpus, called HinDialect, as well as our scripts for evaluation data collection and cognate induction.

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Detecting Unintended Social Bias in Toxic Language Datasets
Nihar Sahoo | Himanshu Gupta | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

With the rise of online hate speech, automatic detection of Hate Speech, Offensive texts as a natural language processing task is getting popular. However, very little research has been done to detect unintended social bias from these toxic language datasets. This paper introduces a new dataset ToxicBias curated from the existing dataset of Kaggle competition named “Jigsaw Unintended Bias in Toxicity Classification”. We aim to detect social biases, their categories, and targeted groups. The dataset contains instances annotated for five different bias categories, viz., gender, race/ethnicity, religion, political, and LGBTQ. We train transformer-based models using our curated datasets and report baseline performance for bias identification, target generation, and bias implications. Model biases and their mitigation are also discussed in detail. Our study motivates a systematic extraction of social bias data from toxic language datasets.

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Incremental Processing of Principle B: Mismatches Between Neural Models and Humans
Forrest Davis

Despite neural language models qualitatively capturing many human linguistic behaviors, recent work has demonstrated that they underestimate the true processing costs of ungrammatical structures. We extend these more fine-grained comparisons between humans and models by investigating the interaction between Principle B and coreference processing. While humans use Principle B to block certain structural positions from affecting their incremental processing, we find that GPT-based language models are influenced by ungrammatical positions. We conclude by relating the mismatch between neural models and humans to properties of training data and suggest that certain aspects of human processing behavior do not directly follow from linguistic data.

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Parsing as Deduction Revisited: Using an Automatic Theorem Prover to Solve an SMT Model of a Minimalist Parser
Sagar Indurkhya

We introduce a constraint-based parser for Minimalist Grammars (MG), implemented as a working computer program, that falls within the long established “Parsing as Deduction” framework. The parser takes as input an MG lexicon and a (partially specified) pairing of sound with meaning - i.e. a word sequence paired with a semantic representation - and, using an axiomatized logic, declaratively deduces syntactic derivations (i.e. parse trees) that comport with the specified interface conditions. The parser is built on the first axiomatization of MGs to use Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT), encoding in a constraint-based way the principles of minimalist syntax. The parser operates via a novel solution method: it assembles an SMT model of an MG derivation, translates the inputs into SMT formulae that constrain the model, and then solves the model using the Z3 SMT-solver, a high-performance automatic theorem prover; as the SMT-model has finite size (being bounded by the inputs), it is decidable and thus solvable in finite time. The output derivation is then recovered from the model solution. To demonstrate this, we run the parser on several representative inputs and examine how the output derivations differ when the inputs are partially vs. fully specified. We conclude by discussing the parser’s extensibility and how a linguist can use it to automatically identify: (i) dependencies between input interface conditions and principles of syntax, and (ii) contradictions or redundancies between the model axioms encoding principles of syntax.

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Entailment Semantics Can Be Extracted from an Ideal Language Model
William Merrill | Alex Warstadt | Tal Linzen

Language models are often trained on text alone, without additional grounding. There is debate as to how much of natural language semantics can be inferred from such a procedure. We prove that entailment judgments between sentences can be extracted from an ideal language model that has perfectly learned its target distribution, assuming the training sentences are generated by Gricean agents, i.e., agents who follow fundamental principles of communication from the linguistic theory of pragmatics. We also show entailment judgments can be decoded from the predictions of a language model trained on such Gricean data. Our results reveal a pathway for understanding the semantic information encoded in unlabeled linguistic data and a potential framework for extracting semantics from language models.

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On Neurons Invariant to Sentence Structural Changes in Neural Machine Translation
Gal Patel | Leshem Choshen | Omri Abend

We present a methodology that explores how sentence structure is reflected in neural representations of machine translation systems. We demonstrate our model-agnostic approach with the Transformer English-German translation model. We analyze neuron-level correlation of activations between paraphrases while discussing the methodology challenges and the need for confound analysis to isolate the effects of shallow cues. We find that similarity between activation patterns can be mostly accounted for by similarity in word choice and sentence length. Following that, we manipulate neuron activations to control the syntactic form of the output. We show this intervention to be somewhat successful, indicating that deep models capture sentence-structure distinctions, despite finding no such indication at the neuron level. To conduct our experiments, we develop a semi-automatic method to generate meaning-preserving minimal pair paraphrases (active-passive voice and adverbial clause-noun phrase) and compile a corpus of such pairs.

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Shared knowledge in natural conversations: can entropy metrics shed light on information transfers?
Eliot Maës | Philippe Blache | Leonor Becerra

The mechanisms underlying human communication have been under investigation for decades, but the answer to how understanding between locutors emerges remains incomplete. Interaction theories suggest the development of a structural alignment between the speakers, allowing for the construction of a shared knowledge base (common ground). In this paper, we propose to apply metrics derived from information theory to quantify the amount of information exchanged between participants, the dynamics of information exchanges, to provide an objective way to measure the common ground instantiation. We focus on a corpus of free conversations augmented with prosodic segmentation and an expert annotation of thematic episodes. We show that during free conversations, the amount of information remains globally constant at the scale of the conversation, but varies depending on the thematic structuring, underlining the role of the speaker introducing the theme. We propose an original methodology applied to uncontrolled material.

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Leveraging a New Spanish Corpus for Multilingual and Cross-lingual Metaphor Detection
Elisa Sanchez-Bayona | Rodrigo Agerri

The lack of wide coverage datasets annotated with everyday metaphorical expressions for languages other than English is striking. This means that most research on supervised metaphor detection has been published only for that language. In order to address this issue, this work presents the first corpus annotated with naturally occurring metaphors in Spanish large enough to develop systems to perform metaphor detection. The presented dataset, CoMeta, includes texts from various domains, namely, news, political discourse, Wikipedia and reviews. In order to label CoMeta, we apply the MIPVU method, the guidelines most commonly used to systematically annotate metaphor on real data. We use our newly created dataset to provide competitive baselines by fine-tuning several multilingual and monolingual state-of-the-art large language models. Furthermore, by leveraging the existing VUAM English data in addition to CoMeta, we present the, to the best of our knowledge, first cross-lingual experiments on supervised metaphor detection. Finally, we perform a detailed error analysis that explores the seemingly high transfer of everyday metaphor across these two languages and datasets.

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Cognitive Simplification Operations Improve Text Simplification
Eytan Chamovitz | Omri Abend

Text Simplification (TS) is the task of converting a text into a form that is easier to read while maintaining the meaning of the original text. A sub-task of TS is Cognitive Simplification (CS), converting text to a form that is readily understood by people with cognitive disabilities without rendering it childish or simplistic. This sub-task has yet to be explored with neural methods in NLP, and resources for it are scarcely available. In this paper, we present a method for incorporating knowledge from the cognitive accessibility domain into a TS model, by introducing an inductive bias regarding what simplification operations to use. We show that by adding this inductive bias to a TS-trained model, it is able to adapt better to CS without ever seeing CS data, and outperform a baseline model on a traditional TS benchmark. In addition, we provide a novel test dataset for CS, and analyze the differences between CS corpora and existing TS corpora, in terms of how simplification operations are applied.

Cross-lingual transfer of parsing models has been shown to work well for several closely-related languages, but predicting the success in other cases remains hard. Our study is a comprehensive analysis of the impact of linguistic distance on the transfer of UD parsers. As an alternative to syntactic typological distances extracted from URIEL, we propose three text-based feature spaces and show that they can be more precise predictors, especially on a more local scale, when only shorter distances are taken into account. Our analyses also reveal that the good coverage in typological databases is not among the factors that explain good transfer.

The success of scene graphs for visual scene understanding has brought attention to the benefits of abstracting a visual input (e.g., image) into a structured representation, where entities (people and objects) are nodes connected by edges specifying their relations. Building these representations, however, requires expensive manual annotation in the form of images paired with their scene graphs or frames. These formalisms remain limited in the nature of entities and relations they can capture. In this paper, we propose to leverage a widely-used meaning representation in the field of natural language processing, the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), to address these shortcomings. Compared to scene graphs, which largely emphasize spatial relationships, our visual AMR graphs are more linguistically informed, with a focus on higher-level semantic concepts extrapolated from visual input. Moreover, they allow us to generate meta-AMR graphs to unify information contained in multiple image descriptions under one representation. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, we demonstrate that we can re-purpose an existing text-to-AMR parser to parse images into AMRs. Our findings point to important future research directions for improved scene understanding.

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Syntactic Surprisal From Neural Models Predicts, But Underestimates, Human Processing Difficulty From Syntactic Ambiguities
Suhas Arehalli | Brian Dillon | Tal Linzen

Humans exhibit garden path effects: When reading sentences that are temporarily structurally ambiguous, they slow down when the structure is disambiguated in favor of the less preferred alternative. Surprisal theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), a prominent explanation of this finding, proposes that these slowdowns are due to the unpredictability of each of the words that occur in these sentences. Challenging this hypothesis, van Schijndel and Linzen (2021) find that estimates of the cost of word predictability derived from language models severely underestimate the magnitude of human garden path effects. In this work, we consider whether this underestimation is due to the fact that humans weight syntactic factors in their predictions more highly than language models do. We propose a method for estimating syntactic predictability from a language model, allowing us to weigh the cost of lexical and syntactic predictability independently. We find that treating syntactic predictability independently from lexical predictability indeed results in larger estimates of garden path. At the same time, even when syntactic predictability is independently weighted, surprisal still greatly underestimate the magnitude of human garden path effects. Our results support the hypothesis that predictability is not the only factor responsible for the processing cost associated with garden path sentences.

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OpenStance: Real-world Zero-shot Stance Detection
Hanzi Xu | Slobodan Vucetic | Wenpeng Yin

Prior studies of zero-shot stance detection identify the attitude of texts towards unseen topics occurring in the same document corpus. Such task formulation has three limitations: (i) Single domain/dataset. A system is optimized on a particular dataset from a single domain; therefore, the resulting system cannot work well on other datasets; (ii) the model is evaluated on a limited number of unseen topics; (iii) it is assumed that part of the topics has rich annotations, which might be impossible in real-world applications. These drawbacks will lead to an impractical stance detection system that fails to generalize to open domains and open-form topics. This work defines OpenStance: open-domain zero-shot stance detection, aiming to handle stance detection in an open world with neither domain constraints nor topic-specific annotations. The key challenge of OpenStance lies in open-domain generalization: learning a system with fully unspecific supervision but capable of generalizing to any dataset. To solve OpenStance, we propose to combine indirect supervision, from textual entailment datasets, and weak supervision, from data generated automatically by pre-trained Language Models. Our single system, without any topic-specific supervision, outperforms the supervised method on three popular datasets. To our knowledge, this is the first work that studies stance detection under the open-domain zero-shot setting. All data and code will be publicly released.

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Optimizing text representations to capture (dis)similarity between political parties
Tanise Ceron | Nico Blokker | Sebastian Padó

Even though fine-tuned neural language models have been pivotal in enabling “deep” automatic text analysis, optimizing text representations for specific applications remains a crucial bottleneck. In this study, we look at this problem in the context of a task from computational social science, namely modeling pairwise similarities between political parties. Our research question is what level of structural information is necessary to create robust text representation, contrasting a strongly informed approach (which uses both claim span and claim category annotations) with approaches that forgo one or both types of annotation with document structure-based heuristics. Evaluating our models on the manifestos of German parties for the 2021 federal election. We find that heuristics that maximize within-party over between-party similarity along with a normalization step lead to reliable party similarity prediction, without the need for manual annotation.

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Computational cognitive modeling of predictive sentence processing in a second language
Umesh Patil | Sol Lago

We propose an ACT-R cue-based retrieval model of the real-time gender predictions displayed by second language (L2) learners. The model extends a previous model of native (L1) speakers according to two central accounts in L2 sentence processing: (i) the Interference Hypothesis, which proposes that retrieval interference is higher in L2 than L1 speakers; (ii) the Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis, which proposes that problems with gender agreement are due to weak gender representations. We tested the predictions of these accounts using data from two visual world experiments, which found that the gender predictions elicited by German possessive pronouns were delayed and smaller in size in L2 than L1 speakers. The experiments also found a “match effect”, such that when the antecedent and possessee of the pronoun had the same gender, predictions were earlier than when the two genders differed. This match effect was smaller in L2 than L1 speakers. The model implementing the Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis captured the effects of smaller predictions, smaller match effect and delayed predictions in one of the two conditions. By contrast, the model implementing the Interference Hypothesis captured the smaller prediction effect but it showed an earlier prediction effect and an increased match effect in L2 than L1 speakers. These results provide evidence for the Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis, and they demonstrate a method for extending computational models of L1 to L2 processing.

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PIE-QG: Paraphrased Information Extraction for Unsupervised Question Generation from Small Corpora
Dinesh Nagumothu | Bahadorreza Ofoghi | Guangyan Huang | Peter Eklund

Supervised Question Answering systems (QA systems) rely on domain-specific human-labeled data for training. Unsupervised QA systems generate their own question-answer training pairs, typically using secondary knowledge sources to achieve this outcome. Our approach (called PIE-QG) uses Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) to generate synthetic training questions from paraphrased passages and uses the question-answer pairs as training data for a language model for a state-of-the-art QA system based on BERT. Triples in the form of <subject, predicate, object> are extracted from each passage, and questions are formed with subjects (or objects) and predicates while objects (or subjects) are considered as answers. Experimenting on five extractive QA datasets demonstrates that our technique achieves on-par performance with existing state-of-the-art QA systems with the benefit of being trained on an order of magnitude fewer documents and without any recourse to external reference data sources.

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Probing for targeted syntactic knowledge through grammatical error detection
Christopher Davis | Christopher Bryant | Andrew Caines | Marek Rei | Paula Buttery

Targeted studies testing knowledge of subject-verb agreement (SVA) indicate that pre-trained language models encode syntactic information. We assert that if models robustly encode subject-verb agreement, they should be able to identify when agreement is correct and when it is incorrect. To that end, we propose grammatical error detection as a diagnostic probe to evaluate token-level contextual representations for their knowledge of SVA. We evaluate contextual representations at each layer from five pre-trained English language models: BERT, XLNet, GPT-2, RoBERTa and ELECTRA. We leverage public annotated training data from both English second language learners and Wikipedia edits, and report results on manually crafted stimuli for subject-verb agreement. We find that masked language models linearly encode information relevant to the detection of SVA errors, while the autoregressive models perform on par with our baseline. However, we also observe a divergence in performance when probes are trained on different training sets, and when they are evaluated on different syntactic constructions, suggesting the information pertaining to SVA error detection is not robustly encoded.

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An Alignment-based Approach to Text Segmentation Similarity Scoring
Gerardo Ocampo Diaz | Jessica Ouyang

Text segmentation is a natural language processing task with popular applications, such as topic segmentation, element discourse extraction, and sentence tokenization. Much work has been done to develop accurate segmentation similarity metrics, but even the most advanced metrics used today, B, and WindowDiff, exhibit incorrect behavior due to their evaluation of boundaries in isolation. In this paper, we present a new segment-alignment based approach to segmentation similarity scoring and a new similarity metric A. We show that A does not exhibit the erratic behavior of $ and WindowDiff, quantify the likelihood of B and WindowDiff misbehaving through simulation, and discuss the versatility of alignment-based approaches for segmentation similarity scoring. We make our implementation of A publicly available and encourage the community to explore more sophisticated approaches to text segmentation similarity scoring.

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Enhancing the Transformer Decoder with Transition-based Syntax
Leshem Choshen | Omri Abend

Notwithstanding recent advances, syntactic generalization remains a challenge for text decoders. While some studies showed gains from incorporating source-side symbolic syntactic and semantic structure into text generation Transformers, very little work addressed the decoding of such structure. We propose a general approach for tree decoding using a transition-based approach. Examining the challenging test case of incorporating Universal Dependencies syntax into machine translation, we present substantial improvements on test sets that focus on syntactic generalization, while presenting improved or comparable performance on standard MT benchmarks. Further qualitative analysis addresses cases where syntactic generalization in the vanilla Transformer decoder is inadequate and demonstrates the advantages afforded by integrating syntactic information.

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Characterizing Verbatim Short-Term Memory in Neural Language Models
Kristijan Armeni | Christopher Honey | Tal Linzen

When a language model is trained to predict natural language sequences, its prediction at each moment depends on a representation of prior context. What kind of information about the prior context can language models retrieve? We tested whether language models could retrieve the exact words that occurred previously in a text. In our paradigm, language models (transformers and an LSTM) processed English text in which a list of nouns occurred twice. We operationalized retrieval as the reduction in surprisal from the first to the second list. We found that the transformers retrieved both the identity and ordering of nouns from the first list. Further, the transformers’ retrieval was markedly enhanced when they were trained on a larger corpus and with greater model depth. Lastly, their ability to index prior tokens was dependent on learned attention patterns. In contrast, the LSTM exhibited less precise retrieval, which was limited to list-initial tokens and to short intervening texts. The LSTM’s retrieval was not sensitive to the order of nouns and it improved when the list was semantically coherent. We conclude that transformers implemented something akin to a working memory system that could flexibly retrieve individual token representations across arbitrary delays; conversely, the LSTM maintained a coarser and more rapidly-decaying semantic gist of prior tokens, weighted toward the earliest items.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situations

We present the findings of the shared task at the CONSTRAINT 2022 Workshop: Hero, Villain, and Victim: Dissecting harmful memes for Semantic role labeling of entities. The task aims to delve deeper into the domain of meme comprehension by deciphering the connotations behind the entities present in a meme. In more nuanced terms, the shared task focuses on determining the victimizing, glorifying, and vilifying intentions embedded in meme entities to explicate their connotations. To this end, we curate HVVMemes, a novel meme dataset of about 7000 memes spanning the domains of COVID-19 and US Politics, each containing entities and their associated roles: hero, villain, victim, or none. The shared task attracted 105 participants, but eventually only 6 submissions were made. Most of the successful submissions relied on fine-tuning pre-trained language and multimodal models along with ensembles. The best submission achieved an F1-score of 58.67.

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DD-TIG at Constraint@ACL2022: Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning for Role Labeling of Entities in Hateful Memes
Ziming Zhou | Han Zhao | Jingjing Dong | Jun Gao | Xiaolong Liu

The memes serve as an important tool in online communication, whereas some hateful memes endanger cyberspace by attacking certain people or subjects. Recent studies address hateful memes detection while further understanding of relationships of entities in memes remains unexplored. This paper presents our work at the Constraint@ACL2022 Shared Task: Hero, Villain and Victim: Dissecting harmful memes for semantic role labelling of entities. In particular, we propose our approach utilizing transformer-based multimodal models through a VCR method with data augmentation, continual pretraining, loss re-weighting, and ensemble learning. We describe the models used, the ways of preprocessing and experiments implementation. As a result, our best model achieves the Macro F1-score of 54.707 on the test set of this shared task.

Identifying good and evil through representations of victimhood, heroism, and villainy (i.e., role labeling of entities) has recently caught the research community’s interest. Because of the growing popularity of memes, the amount of offensive information published on the internet is expanding at an alarming rate. It generated a larger need to address this issue and analyze the memes for content moderation. Framing is used to show the entities engaged as heroes, villains, victims, or others so that readers may better anticipate and understand their attitudes and behaviors as characters. Positive phrases are used to characterize heroes, whereas negative terms depict victims and villains, and terms that tend to be neutral are mapped to others. In this paper, we propose two approaches to role label the entities of the meme as hero, villain, victim, or other through Named-Entity Recognition(NER), Sentiment Analysis, etc. With an F1-score of 23.855, our team secured eighth position in the Shared Task @ Constraint 2022.

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Logically at the Constraint 2022: Multimodal role labelling
Ludovic Kun | Jayesh Bankoti | David Kiskovski

This paper describes our system for the Constraint 2022 challenge at ACL 2022, whose goal is to detect which entities are glorified, vilified or victimised, within a meme . The task should be done considering the perspective of the meme’s author. In our work, the challenge is treated as a multi-class classification task. For a given pair of a meme and an entity, we need to classify whether the entity is being referenced as Hero, a Villain, a Victim or Other. Our solution combines (ensembling) different models based on Unimodal (Text only) model and Multimodal model (Text + Images). We conduct several experiments and benchmarks different competitive pre-trained transformers and vision models in this work. Our solution, based on an ensembling method, is ranked first on the leaderboard and obtains a macro F1-score of 0.58 on test set. The code for the experiments and results are available at https://bitbucket.org/logicallydevs/constraint_2022/src/master/

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Combining Language Models and Linguistic Information to Label Entities in Memes
Pranaydeep Singh | Aaron Maladry | Els Lefever

This paper describes the system we developed for the shared task ‘Hero, Villain and Victim: Dissecting harmful memes for Semantic role labelling of entities’ organised in the framework of the Second Workshop on Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situation (Constraint 2022). We present an ensemble approach combining transformer-based models and linguistic information, such as the presence of irony and implicit sentiment associated to the target named entities. The ensemble system obtains promising classification scores, resulting in a third place finish in the competition.

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Detecting the Role of an Entity in Harmful Memes: Techniques and their Limitations
Rabindra Nath Nandi | Firoj Alam | Preslav Nakov

Harmful or abusive online content has been increasing over time and it has been raising concerns among social media platforms, government agencies, and policymakers. Such harmful or abusive content has a significant negative impact on society such as cyberbullying led to suicides, COVID-19 related rumors led to hundreds of deaths. The content that is posted and shared online can be textual, visual, a combination of both, or a meme. In this paper, we provide our study on detecting the roles of entities in harmful memes, which is part of the CONSTRAINT-2022 shared task. We report the results on the participated system. We further provide a comparative analysis on different experimental settings (i.e., unimodal, multimodal, attention, and augmentation).

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Fine-tuning and Sampling Strategies for Multimodal Role Labeling of Entities under Class Imbalance
Syrielle Montariol | Étienne Simon | Arij Riabi | Djamé Seddah

We propose our solution to the multimodal semantic role labeling task from the CONSTRAINT’22 workshop. The task aims at classifying entities in memes into classes such as “hero” and “villain”. We use several pre-trained multi-modal models to jointly encode the text and image of the memes, and implement three systems to classify the role of the entities. We propose dynamic sampling strategies to tackle the issue of class imbalance. Finally, we perform qualitative analysis on the representations of the entities.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of misinformation on online social media has grown exponentially. Unverified bogus claims on these platforms regularly mislead people, leading them to believe in half-baked truths. The current vogue is to employ manual fact-checkers to verify claims to combat this avalanche of misinformation. However, establishing such claims’ veracity is becoming increasingly challenging, partly due to the plethora of information available, which is difficult to process manually. Thus, it becomes imperative to verify claims automatically without human interventions. To cope up with this issue, we propose an automated claim verification solution encompassing two steps – document retrieval and veracity prediction. For the retrieval module, we employ a hybrid search-based system with BM25 as a base retriever and experiment with recent state-of-the-art transformer-based models for re-ranking. Furthermore, we use a BART-based textual entailment architecture to authenticate the retrieved documents in the later step. We report experimental findings, demonstrating that our retrieval module outperforms the best baseline system by 10.32 NDCG@100 points. We escort a demonstration to assess the efficacy and impact of our suggested solution. As a byproduct of this study, we present an open-source, easily deployable, and user-friendly Python API that the community can adopt.

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M-BAD: A Multilabel Dataset for Detecting Aggressive Texts and Their Targets
Omar Sharif | Eftekhar Hossain | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

Recently, detection and categorization of undesired (e. g., aggressive, abusive, offensive, hate) content from online platforms has grabbed the attention of researchers because of its detrimental impact on society. Several attempts have been made to mitigate the usage and propagation of such content. However, most past studies were conducted primarily for English, where low-resource languages like Bengali remained out of the focus. Therefore, to facilitate research in this arena, this paper introduces a novel multilabel Bengali dataset (named M-BAD) containing 15650 texts to detect aggressive texts and their targets. Each text of M-BAD went through rigorous two-level annotations. At the primary level, each text is labelled as either aggressive or non-aggressive. In the secondary level, the aggressive texts have been further annotated into five fine-grained target classes: religion, politics, verbal, gender and race. Baseline experiments are carried out with different machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and transformer models, where Bangla-BERT acquired the highest weighted f₁-score in both detection (0.92) and target identification (0.83) tasks. Error analysis of the models exhibits the difficulty to identify context-dependent aggression, and this work argues that further research is required to address these issues.

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How does fake news use a thumbnail? CLIP-based Multimodal Detection on the Unrepresentative News Image
Hyewon Choi | Yejun Yoon | Seunghyun Yoon | Kunwoo Park

This study investigates how fake news use the thumbnail image for a news article. We aim at capturing the degree of semantic incongruity between news text and image by using the pretrained CLIP representation. Motivated by the stylistic distinctiveness in fake news text, we examine whether fake news tends to use an irrelevant image to the news content. Results show that fake news tends to have a high degree of semantic incongruity than general news. We further attempt to detect such image-text incongruity by training classification models on a newly generated dataset. A manual evaluation suggests our method can find news articles of which the thumbnail image is semantically irrelevant to news text with an accuracy of 0.8. We also release a new dataset of image and news text pairs with the incongruity label, facilitating future studies on the direction.

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Detecting False Claims in Low-Resource Regions: A Case Study of Caribbean Islands
Jason Lucas | Limeng Cui | Thai Le | Dongwon Lee

The COVID-19 pandemic has created threats to global health control. Misinformation circulated on social media and news outlets has undermined public trust towards Government and health agencies. This problem is further exacerbated in developing countries or low-resource regions, where the news is not equipped with abundant English fact-checking information. In this paper, we make the first attempt to detect COVID-19 misinformation (in English, Spanish, and Haitian French) populated in the Caribbean regions, using the fact-checked claims in the US (in English). We started by collecting a dataset of Caribbean real & fake claims. Then we trained several classification and language models on COVID-19 in the high-resource language regions and transferred the knowledge to the Caribbean claim dataset. The experimental results of this paper reveal the limitations of current fake claim detection in low-resource regions and encourage further research on multi-lingual detection.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference

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Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference
Maciej Ogrodniczuk | Sameer Pradhan | Anna Nedoluzhko | Vincent Ng | Massimo Poesio

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Quantifying Discourse Support for Omitted Pronouns
Shulin Zhang | Jixing Li | John Hale

Pro-drop is commonly seen in many languages, but its discourse motivations have not been well characterized. Inspired by the topic chain theory in Chinese, this study shows how character-verb usage continuity distinguishes dropped pronouns from overt references to story characters. We model the choice to drop vs. not drop as a function of character-verb continuity. The results show that omitted subjects have higher character history-current verb continuity salience than non-omitted subjects. This is consistent with the idea that discourse coherence with a particular topic, such as a story character, indeed facilitates the omission of pronouns in languages and contexts where they are optional.

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Online Neural Coreference Resolution with Rollback
Patrick Xia | Benjamin Van Durme

Humans process natural language online, whether reading a document or participating in multiparty dialogue. Recent advances in neural coreference resolution have focused on offline approaches that assume the full communication history as input. This is neither realistic nor sufficient if we wish to support dialogue understanding in real-time. We benchmark two existing, offline, models and highlight their shortcomings in the online setting. We then modify these models to perform online inference and introduce rollback: a short-term mechanism to correct mistakes. We demonstrate across five English datasets the effectiveness of this approach against an offline and a naive online model in terms of latency, final document-level coreference F1, and average running F1.

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Analyzing Coreference and Bridging in Product Reviews
Hideo Kobayashi | Christopher Malon

Product reviews may have complex discourse including coreference and bridging relations to a main product, competing products, and interacting products. Current approaches to aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) and opinion summarization largely ignore this complexity. On the other hand, existing systems for coreference and bridging were trained in a different domain. We collect mention type annotations relevant to coreference and bridging for 498 product reviews. Using these annotations, we show that a state-of-the-art factuality score fails to catch coreference errors in product reviews, and that a state-of-the-art coreference system trained on OntoNotes does not perform nearly as well on product mentions. As our dataset grows, we expect it to help ABSA and opinion summarization systems to avoid entity reference errors.

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Anaphoric Phenomena in Situated dialog: A First Round of Annotations
Sharid Loáiciga | Simon Dobnik | David Schlangen

We present a first release of 500 documents from the multimodal corpus Tell-me-more (Ilinykh et al., 2019) annotated with coreference information according to the ARRAU guidelines (Poesio et al., 2021). The corpus consists of images and short texts of five sentences. We describe the annotation process and present the adaptations to the original guidelines in order to account for the challenges of grounding the annotations to the image. 50 documents from the 500 available are annotated by two people and used to estimate inter-annotator agreement (IAA) relying on Krippendorff’s alpha.

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Building a Manually Annotated Hungarian Coreference Corpus: Workflow and Tools
Noémi Vadász

This paper presents the complete workflow of building a manually annotated Hungarian corpus, KorKor, with particular reference to anaphora and coreference annotation. All linguistic annotation layers were corrected manually. The corpus is freely available in two formats. The paper gives insight into the process of setting up the workflow and the challenges that have arisen.

We present the Norwegian Anaphora Resolution Corpus (NARC), the first publicly available corpus annotated with anaphoric relations between noun phrases for Norwegian. The paper describes the annotated data for 326 documents in Norwegian Bokmål, together with inter-annotator agreement and discussions of relevant statistics. We also present preliminary modelling results which are comparable to existing corpora for other languages, and discuss relevant problems in relation to both modelling and the annotations themselves.

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Evaluating Coreference Resolvers on Community-based Question Answering: From Rule-based to State of the Art
Haixia Chai | Nafise Sadat Moosavi | Iryna Gurevych | Michael Strube

Coreference resolution is a key step in natural language understanding. Developments in coreference resolution are mainly focused on improving the performance on standard datasets annotated for coreference resolution. However, coreference resolution is an intermediate step for text understanding and it is not clear how these improvements translate into downstream task performance. In this paper, we perform a thorough investigation on the impact of coreference resolvers in multiple settings of community-based question answering task, i.e., answer selection with long answers. Our settings cover multiple text domains and encompass several answer selection methods. We first inspect extrinsic evaluation of coreference resolvers on answer selection by using coreference relations to decontextualize individual sentences of candidate answers, and then annotate a subset of answers with coreference information for intrinsic evaluation. The results of our extrinsic evaluation show that while there is a significant difference between the performance of the rule-based system vs. state-of-the-art neural model on coreference resolution datasets, we do not observe a considerable difference on their impact on downstream models. Our intrinsic evaluation shows that (i) resolving coreference relations on less-formal text genres is more difficult even for trained annotators, and (ii) the values of linguistic-agnostic coreference evaluation metrics do not correlate with the impact on downstream data.

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Improving Bridging Reference Resolution using Continuous Essentiality from Crowdsourcing
Nobuhiro Ueda | Sadao Kurohashi

Bridging reference resolution is the task of finding nouns that complement essential information of another noun. The essentiality varies depending on noun combination and context and has a continuous distribution. Despite the continuous nature of essentiality, existing datasets of bridging reference have only a few coarse labels to represent the essentiality. In this work, we propose a crowdsourcing-based annotation method that considers continuous essentiality. In the crowdsourcing task, we asked workers to select both all nouns with a bridging reference relation and a noun with the highest essentiality among them. Combining these annotations, we can obtain continuous essentiality. Experimental results demonstrated that the constructed dataset improves bridging reference resolution performance. The code is available at https://github.com/nobu-g/bridging-resolution.

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Investigating Cross-Document Event Coreference for Dutch
Loic De Langhe | Orphee De Clercq | Veronique Hoste

In this paper we present baseline results for Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) in Dutch using gold-standard (i.e non-predicted) event mentions. A newly developed benchmark dataset allows us to properly investigate the possibility of creating ECR systems for both within and cross-document coreference. We give an overview of the state of the art for ECR in other languages, as well as a detailed overview of existing ECR resources. Afterwards, we provide a comparative report on our own dataset. We apply a significant number of approaches that have been shown to attain good results for English ECR including feature-based models, monolingual transformer language models and multilingual language models. The best results were obtained using the monolingual BERTje model. Finally, results for all models are thoroughly analysed and visualised, as to provide insight into the inner workings of ECR and long-distance semantic NLP tasks in general.

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The Role of Common Ground for Referential Expressions in Social Dialogues
Jaap Kruijt | Piek Vossen

In this paper, we frame the problem of co-reference resolution in dialogue as a dynamic social process in which mentions to people previously known and newly introduced are mixed when people know each other well. We restructured an existing data set for the Friends sitcom as a coreference task that evolves over time, where close friends make reference to other people either part of their common ground (inner circle) or not (outer circle). We expect that awareness of common ground is key in social dialogue in order to resolve references to the inner social circle, whereas local contextual information plays a more important role for outer circle mentions. Our analysis of these references confirms that there are differences in naming and introducing these people. We also experimented with the SpanBERT coreference system with and without fine-tuning to measure whether preceding discourse contexts matter for resolving inner and outer circle mentions. Our results show that more inner circle mentions lead to a decrease in model performance, and that fine-tuning on preceding contexts reduces false negatives for both inner and outer circle mentions but increases the false positives as well, showing that the models overfit on these contexts.

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bib (full) Proceedings of The Workshop on Automatic Summarization for Creative Writing

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Proceedings of The Workshop on Automatic Summarization for Creative Writing
Kathleen Mckeown

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IDN-Sum: A New Dataset for Interactive Digital Narrative Extractive Text Summarisation
Ashwathy T. Revi | Stuart E. Middleton | David E. Millard

Summarizing Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) presents some unique challenges to existing text summarization models especially around capturing interactive elements in addition to important plot points. In this paper, we describe the first IDN dataset (IDN-Sum) designed specifically for training and testing IDN text summarization algorithms. Our dataset is generated using random playthroughs of 8 IDN episodes, taken from 2 different IDN games, and consists of 10,000 documents. Playthrough documents are annotated through automatic alignment with fan-sourced summaries using a commonly used alignment algorithm. We also report and discuss results from experiments applying common baseline extractive text summarization algorithms to this dataset. Qualitative analysis of the results reveals shortcomings in common annotation approaches and evaluation methods when applied to narrative and interactive narrative datasets. The dataset is released as open source for future researchers to train and test their own approaches for IDN text.

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Summarization of Long Input Texts Using Multi-Layer Neural Network
Niladri Chatterjee | Aadyant Khatri | Raksha Agarwal

This paper describes the architecture of a novel Multi-Layer Long Text Summarizer (MLLTS) system proposed for the task of creative writing summarization. Typically, such writings are very long, often spanning over 100 pages. Summarizers available online are either not equipped enough to handle long texts, or even if they are able to generate the summary, the quality is poor. The proposed MLLTS system handles the difficulty by splitting the text into several parts. Each part is then subjected to different existing summarizers. A multilayer network is constructed by establishing linkages between the different parts. During training phases, several hyperparameters are fine-tuned. The system achieved very good ROUGE scores on the test data supplied for the contest.

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COLING 2022 Shared Task: LED Finteuning and Recursive Summary Generation for Automatic Summarization of Chapters from Novels
Prerna Kashyap

We present the results of the Workshop on Automatic Summarization for Creative Writing 2022 Shared Task on summarization of chapters from novels. In this task, we finetune a pretrained transformer model for long documents called LongformerEncoderDecoder which supports seq2seq tasks for long inputs which can be up to 16k tokens in length. We use the Booksum dataset for longform narrative summarization for training and validation, which maps chapters from novels, plays and stories to highly abstractive human written summaries. We use a summary of summaries approach to generate the final summaries for the blind test set, in which we recursively divide the text into paragraphs, summarize them, concatenate all resultant summaries and repeat this process until either a specified summary length is reached or there is no significant change in summary length in consecutive iterations. Our best model achieves a ROUGE-1 F-1 score of 29.75, a ROUGE-2 F-1 score of 7.89 and a BERT F-1 score of 54.10 on the shared task blind test dataset.

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TEAM UFAL @ CreativeSumm 2022: BART and SamSum based few-shot approach for creative Summarization
Rishu Kumar | Rudolf Rosa

This system description paper details TEAM UFAL’s approach for the SummScreen, TVMegasite subtask of the CreativeSumm shared task. The subtask deals with creating summaries for dialogues from TV Soap operas. We utilized BART based pre-trained model fine-tuned on SamSum dialouge summarization dataset. Few examples from AutoMin dataset and the dataset provided by the organizers were also inserted into the data as a few-shot learning objective. The additional data was manually broken into chunks based on different boundaries in summary and the dialogue file. For inference we choose a similar strategy as the top-performing team at AutoMin 2021, where the data is split into chunks, either on [SCENE_CHANGE] or exceeding a pre-defined token length, to accommodate the maximum token possible in the pre-trained model for one example. The final training strategy was chosen based on how natural the responses looked instead of how well the model performed on an automated evaluation metrics such as ROGUE.

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Long Input Dialogue Summarization with Sketch Supervision for Summarization of Primetime Television Transcripts
Nataliia Kees | Thien Nguyen | Tobias Eder | Georg Groh

This paper presents our entry to the CreativeSumm 2022 shared task. Specifically tackling the problem of prime-time television screenplay summarization based on the SummScreen Forever Dreaming dataset. Our approach utilizes extended Longformers combined with sketch supervision including categories specifically for scene descriptions. Our system was able to produce the shortest summaries out of all submissions. While some problems with factual consistency still remain, the system was scoring highest among competitors in the ROUGE and BERTScore evaluation categories.

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AMRTVSumm: AMR-augmented Hierarchical Network for TV Transcript Summarization
Yilun Hua | Zhaoyuan Deng | Zhijie Xu

This paper describes our AMRTVSumm system for the SummScreen datasets in the Automatic Summarization for Creative Writing shared task (Creative-Summ 2022). In order to capture the complicated entity interactions and dialogue structures in transcripts of TV series, we introduce a new Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) (Banarescu et al., 2013), particularly designed to represent individual scenes in an episode. We also propose a new cross-level cross-attention mechanism to incorporate these scene AMRs into a hierarchical encoder-decoder baseline. On both the ForeverDreaming and TVMegaSite datasets of SummScreen, our system consistently outperforms the hierarchical transformer baseline. Compared with the state-of-the-art DialogLM (Zhong et al., 2021), our system still has a lower performance primarily because it is pretrained only on out-of-domain news data, unlike DialogLM, which uses extensive in-domain pretraining on dialogue and TV show data. Overall, our work suggests a promising direction to capture complicated long dialogue structures through graph representations and the need to combine graph representations with powerful pretrained language models.

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Automatic Summarization for Creative Writing: BART based Pipeline Method for Generating Summary of Movie Scripts
Aditya Upadhyay | Nidhir Bhavsar | Aakash Bhatnagar | Muskaan Singh | Petr Motlicek

This paper documents our approach for the Creative-Summ 2022 shared task for Automatic Summarization of Creative Writing. For this purpose, we develop an automatic summarization pipeline where we leverage a denoising autoencoder for pretraining sequence-to-sequence models and fine-tune it on a large-scale abstractive screenplay summarization dataset to summarize TV transcripts from primetime shows. Our pipeline divides the input transcript into smaller conversational blocks, removes redundant text, summarises the conversational blocks, obtains the block-wise summaries, cleans, structures, and then integrates the summaries to create the meeting minutes. Our proposed system achieves some of the best scores across multiple metrics(lexical, semantical) in the Creative-Summ shared task.

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The CreativeSumm 2022 Shared Task: A Two-Stage Summarization Model using Scene Attributes
Eunchong Kim | Taewoo Yoo | Gunhee Cho | Suyoung Bae | Yun-Gyung Cheong

In this paper, we describe our work for the CreativeSumm 2022 Shared Task, Automatic Summarization for Creative Writing. The task is to summarize movie scripts, which is challenging due to their long length and complex format. To tackle this problem, we present a two-stage summarization approach using both the abstractive and an extractive summarization methods. In addition, we preprocess the script to enhance summarization performance. The results of our experiment demonstrate that the presented approach outperforms baseline models in terms of standard summarization evaluation metrics.

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Two-Stage Movie Script Summarization: An Efficient Method For Low-Resource Long Document Summarization
Dongqi Pu | Xudong Hong | Pin-Jie Lin | Ernie Chang | Vera Demberg

The Creative Summarization Shared Task at COLING 2022 aspires to generate summaries given long-form texts from creative writing. This paper presents the system architecture and the results of our participation in the Scriptbase track that focuses on generating movie plots given movie scripts. The core innovation in our model employs a two-stage hierarchical architecture for movie script summarization. In the first stage, a heuristic extraction method is applied to extract actions and essential dialogues, which reduces the average length of input movie scripts by 66% from about 24K to 8K tokens. In the second stage, a state-of-the-art encoder-decoder model, Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED), is trained with effective fine-tuning methods, BitFit and NoisyTune. Evaluations on the unseen test set indicate that our system outperforms both zero-shot LED baselines as well as other participants on various automatic metrics and ranks 1st in the Scriptbase track.

This paper introduces the shared task of summrizing documents in several creative domains, namely literary texts, movie scripts, and television scripts. Summarizing these creative documents requires making complex literary interpretations, as well as understanding non-trivial temporal dependencies in texts containing varied styles of plot development and narrative structure. This poses unique challenges and is yet underexplored for text summarization systems. In this shared task, we introduce four sub-tasks and their corresponding datasets, focusing on summarizing books, movie scripts, primetime television scripts, and daytime soap opera scripts. We detail the process of curating these datasets for the task, as well as the metrics used for the evaluation of the submissions. As part of the CREATIVESUMM workshop at COLING 2022, the shared task attracted 18 submissions in total. We discuss the submissions and the baselines for each sub-task in this paper, along with directions for facilitating future work.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Commonsense Representation and Reasoning (CSRR 2022)

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Identifying relevant common sense information in knowledge graphs
Guy Aglionby | Simone Teufel

Knowledge graphs are often used to store common sense information that is useful for various tasks. However, the extraction of contextually-relevant knowledge is an unsolved problem, and current approaches are relatively simple. Here we introduce a triple selection method based on a ranking model and find that it improves question answering accuracy over existing methods. We additionally investigate methods to ensure that extracted triples form a connected graph. Graph connectivity is important for model interpretability, as paths are frequently used as explanations for the reasoning that connects question and answer.

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Cloze Evaluation for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories in Indonesian
Fajri Koto | Timothy Baldwin | Jey Han Lau

Story comprehension that involves complex causal and temporal relations is a critical task in NLP, but previous studies have focused predominantly on English, leaving open the question of how the findings generalize to other languages, such as Indonesian. In this paper, we follow the Story Cloze Test framework of Mostafazadeh et al. (2016) in evaluating story understanding in Indonesian, by constructing a four-sentence story with one correct ending and one incorrect ending. To investigate commonsense knowledge acquisition in language models, we experimented with: (1) a classification task to predict the correct ending; and (2) a generation task to complete the story with a single sentence. We investigate these tasks in two settings: (i) monolingual training and ii) zero-shot cross-lingual transfer between Indonesian and English.

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Psycholinguistic Diagnosis of Language Models’ Commonsense Reasoning
Yan Cong

Neural language models have attracted a lot of attention in the past few years. More and more researchers are getting intrigued by how language models encode commonsense, specifically what kind of commonsense they understand, and why they do. This paper analyzed neural language models’ understanding of commonsense pragmatics (i.e., implied meanings) through human behavioral and neurophysiological data. These psycholinguistic tests are designed to draw conclusions based on predictive responses in context, making them very well suited to test word-prediction models such as BERT in natural settings. They can provide the appropriate prompts and tasks to answer questions about linguistic mechanisms underlying predictive responses. This paper adopted psycholinguistic datasets to probe language models’ commonsense reasoning. Findings suggest that GPT-3’s performance was mostly at chance in the psycholinguistic tasks. We also showed that DistillBERT had some understanding of the (implied) intent that’s shared among most people. Such intent is implicitly reflected in the usage of conversational implicatures and presuppositions. Whether or not fine-tuning improved its performance to human-level depends on the type of commonsense reasoning.

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Bridging the Gap between Recognition-level Pre-training and Commonsensical Vision-language Tasks
Yue Wan | Yueen Ma | Haoxuan You | Zhecan Wang | Shih-Fu Chang

Large-scale visual-linguistic pre-training aims to capture the generic representations from multimodal features, which are essential for downstream vision-language tasks. Existing methods mostly focus on learning the semantic connections between visual objects and linguistic content, which tend to be recognitionlevel information and may not be sufficient for commonsensical reasoning tasks like VCR. In this paper, we propose a novel commonsensical vision-language pre-training framework to bridge the gap. We first augment the conventional image-caption pre-training datasets with commonsense inferences from a visuallinguistic GPT-2. To pre-train models on image, caption and commonsense inferences together, we propose two new tasks: masked commonsense modeling (MCM) and commonsense type prediction (CTP). To reduce the shortcut effect between captions and commonsense inferences, we further introduce the domain-wise adaptive masking that dynamically adjusts the masking ratio. Experimental results on downstream tasks, VCR and VQA, show the improvement of our pre-training strategy over previous methods. Human evaluation also validates the relevance, informativeness, and diversity of the generated commonsense inferences. Overall, we demonstrate the potential of incorporating commonsense knowledge into the conventional recognition-level visual-linguistic pre-training.

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Materialized Knowledge Bases from Commonsense Transformers
Tuan-Phong Nguyen | Simon Razniewski

Starting from the COMET methodology by Bosselut et al. (2019), generating commonsense knowledge directly from pre-trained language models has recently received significant attention. Surprisingly, up to now no materialized resource of commonsense knowledge generated this way is publicly available. This paper fills this gap, and uses the materialized resources to perform a detailed analysis of the potential of this approach in terms of precision and recall. Furthermore, we identify common problem cases, and outline use cases enabled by materialized resources. We posit that the availability of these resources is important for the advancement of the field, as it enables an off-the-shelf-use of the resulting knowledge, as well as further analyses on its strengths and weaknesses.

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Knowledge-Augmented Language Models for Cause-Effect Relation Classification
Pedram Hosseini | David A. Broniatowski | Mona Diab

Previous studies have shown the efficacy of knowledge augmentation methods in pretrained language models. However, these methods behave differently across domains and downstream tasks. In this work, we investigate the augmentation of pretrained language models with knowledge graph data in the cause-effect relation classification and commonsense causal reasoning tasks. After automatically verbalizing triples in ATOMIC2020, a wide coverage commonsense reasoning knowledge graph, we continually pretrain BERT and evaluate the resulting model on cause-effect pair classification and answering commonsense causal reasoning questions. Our results show that a continually pretrained language model augmented with commonsense reasoning knowledge outperforms our baselines on two commonsense causal reasoning benchmarks, COPA and BCOPA-CE, and a Temporal and Causal Reasoning (TCR) dataset, without additional improvement in model architecture or using quality-enhanced data for fine-tuning.

Predicting the effects of unexpected situations is an important reasoning task, e.g., would cloudy skies help or hinder plant growth? Given a context, the goal of such situational reasoning is to elicit the consequences of a new situation (st) that arises in that context. We propose CURIE, a method to iteratively build a graph of relevant consequences explicitly in a structured situational graph (st graph) using natural language queries over a finetuned language model. Across multiple domains, CURIE generates st graphs that humans find relevant and meaningful in eliciting the consequences of a new situation (75% of the graphs were judged correct by humans). We present a case study of a situation reasoning end task (WIQA-QA), where simply augmenting their input with st graphs improves accuracy by 3 points. We show that these improvements mainly come from a hard subset of the data, that requires background knowledge and multi-hop reasoning.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection

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Resilience of Named Entity Recognition Models under Adversarial Attack
Sudeshna Das | Jiaul Paik

Named entity recognition (NER) is a popular language processing task with wide applications. Progress in NER has been noteworthy, as evidenced by the F1 scores obtained on standard datasets. In practice, however, the end-user uses an NER model on their dataset out-of-the-box, on text that may not be pristine. In this paper we present four model-agnostic adversarial attacks to gauge the resilience of NER models in such scenarios. Our experiments on four state-of-the-art NER methods with five English datasets suggest that the NER models are over-reliant on case information and do not utilise contextual information well. As such, they are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks based on these features.

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GreaseVision: Rewriting the Rules of the Interface
Siddhartha Datta | Konrad Kollnig | Nigel Shadbolt

Digital harms can manifest across any interface. Key problems in addressing these harms include the high individuality of harms and the fast-changing nature of digital systems. We put forth GreaseVision, a collaborative human-in-the-loop learning framework that enables end-users to analyze their screenomes to annotate harms as well as render overlay interventions. We evaluate HITL intervention development with a set of completed tasks in a cognitive walkthrough, and test scalability with one-shot element removal and fine-tuning hate speech classification models. The contribution of the framework and tool allow individual end-users to study their usage history and create personalized interventions. Our contribution also enables researchers to study the distribution of multi-modal harms and interventions at scale.

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Posthoc Verification and the Fallibility of the Ground Truth
Yifan Ding | Nicholas Botzer | Tim Weninger

Classifiers commonly make use of pre-annotated datasets, wherein a model is evaluated by pre-defined metrics on a held-out test set typically made of human-annotated labels. Metrics used in these evaluations are tied to the availability of well-defined ground truth labels, and these metrics typically do not allow for inexact matches. These noisy ground truth labels and strict evaluation metrics may compromise the validity and realism of evaluation results. In the present work, we conduct a systematic label verification experiment on the entity linking (EL) task. Specifically, we ask annotators to verify the correctness of annotations after the fact (, posthoc). Compared to pre-annotation evaluation, state-of-the-art EL models performed extremely well according to the posthoc evaluation methodology. Surprisingly, we find predictions from EL models had a similar or higher verification rate than the ground truth. We conclude with a discussion on these findings and recommendations for future evaluations. The source code, raw results, and evaluation scripts are publicly available via the MIT license at https://github.com/yifding/e2e_EL_evaluate

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Overconfidence in the Face of Ambiguity with Adversarial Data
Margaret Li | Julian Michael

Adversarial data collection has shown promise as a method for building models which are more robust to the spurious correlations that generally appear in naturalistic data. However, adversarially-collected data may itself be subject to biases, particularly with regard to ambiguous or arguable labeling judgments. Searching for examples where an annotator disagrees with a model might over-sample ambiguous inputs, and filtering the results for high inter-annotator agreement may under-sample them. In either case, training a model on such data may produce predictable and unwanted biases. In this work, we investigate whether models trained on adversarially-collected data are miscalibrated with respect to the ambiguity of their inputs. Using Natural Language Inference models as a testbed, we find no clear difference in accuracy between naturalistically and adversarially trained models, but our model trained only on adversarially-sourced data is considerably more overconfident of its predictions and demonstrates worse calibration, especially on ambiguous inputs. This effect is mitigated, however, when naturalistic and adversarial training data are combined.

Developing methods to adversarially challenge NLP systems is a promising avenue for improving both model performance and interpretability. Here, we describe the approach of the team “longhorns” on Task 1 of the The First Workshop on Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection (DADC), which asked teams to manually fool a model on an Extractive Question Answering task. Our team finished first (pending validation), with a model error rate of 62%. We advocate for a systematic, linguistically informed approach to formulating adversarial questions, and we describe the results of our pilot experiments, as well as our official submission.

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Collecting high-quality adversarial data for machine reading comprehension tasks with humans and models in the loop
Damian Y. Romero Diaz | Magdalena Anioł | John Culnan

We present our experience as annotators in the creation of high-quality, adversarial machine-reading-comprehension data for extractive QA for Task 1 of the First Workshop on Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection (DADC). DADC is an emergent data collection paradigm with both models and humans in the loop. We set up a quasi-experimental annotation design and perform quantitative analyses across groups with different numbers of annotators focusing on successful adversarial attacks, cost analysis, and annotator confidence correlation. We further perform a qualitative analysis of our perceived difficulty of the task given the different topics of the passages in our dataset and conclude with recommendations and suggestions that might be of value to people working on future DADC tasks and related annotation interfaces.

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Generalized Quantifiers as a Source of Error in Multilingual NLU Benchmarks
Ruixiang Cui | Daniel Hershcovich | Anders Søgaard

Logical approaches to representing language have developed and evaluated computational models of quantifier words since the 19th century, but today’s NLU models still struggle to capture their semantics. We rely on Generalized Quantifier Theory for language-independent representations of the semantics of quantifier words, to quantify their contribution to the errors of NLU models. We find that quantifiers are pervasive in NLU benchmarks, and their occurrence at test time is associated with performance drops. Multilingual models also exhibit unsatisfying quantifier reasoning abilities, but not necessarily worse for non-English languages. To facilitate directly-targeted probing, we present an adversarial generalized quantifier NLI task (GQNLI) and show that pre-trained language models have a clear lack of robustness in generalized quantifier reasoning.

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Adversarially Constructed Evaluation Sets Are More Challenging, but May Not Be Fair
Jason Phang | Angelica Chen | William Huang | Samuel R. Bowman

Large language models increasingly saturate existing task benchmarks, in some cases outperforming humans, leaving little headroom with which to measure further progress. Adversarial dataset creation, which builds datasets using examples that a target system outputs incorrect predictions for, has been proposed as a strategy to construct more challenging datasets, avoiding the more serious challenge of building more precise benchmarks by conventional means. In this work, we study the impact of applying three common approaches for adversarial dataset creation: (1) filtering out easy examples (AFLite), (2) perturbing examples (TextFooler), and (3) model-in-the-loop data collection (ANLI and AdversarialQA), across 18 different adversary models. We find that all three methods can produce more challenging datasets, with stronger adversary models lowering the performance of evaluated models more. However, the resulting ranking of the evaluated models can also be unstable and highly sensitive to the choice of adversary model. Moreover, we find that AFLite oversamples examples with low annotator agreement, meaning that model comparisons hinge on the examples that are most contentious for humans. We recommend that researchers tread carefully when using adversarial methods for building evaluation datasets.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Data Science with Human-in-the-Loop (Language Advances)

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Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Data Science with Human-in-the-Loop (Language Advances)
Eduard Dragut | Yunyao Li | Lucian Popa | Slobodan Vucetic | Shashank Srivastava

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MEGAnno: Exploratory Labeling for NLP in Computational Notebooks
Dan Zhang | Hannah Kim | Rafael Li Chen | Eser Kandogan | Estevam Hruschka

We present MEGAnno, a novel exploratory annotation framework designed for NLP researchers and practitioners. Unlike existing labeling tools that focus on data labeling only, our framework aims to support a broader, iterative ML workflow including data exploration and model development. With MEGAnno’s API, users can programmatically explore the data through sophisticated search and automated suggestion functions and incrementally update task schema as their project evolve. Combined with our widget, the users can interactively sort, filter, and assign labels to multiple items simultaneously in the same notebook where the rest of the NLP project resides. We demonstrate MEGAnno’s flexible, exploratory, efficient, and seamless labeling experience through a sentiment analysis use case.

Entity linking (EL) on short text is crucial for a variety of industrial applications. Compared with general long-text EL, short-text EL poses particular challenges as the limited context restricts the clues one can leverage to disambiguate textual mentions. On the other hand, existing studies mostly focus on black-box neural methods and thus lack interpretability, which is critical to industrial applications in certain areas. In this study, we extend upon LNN-EL, a monolingual short-text EL method based on interpretable first-order logic, by incorporating three sets of multilingual features to enable disambiguating mentions written in languages other than English. More specifically, we use multilingual autoencoding language models (i.e., mBERT) to capture the similarities between the mention with its context and the candidate entity; we use multilingual sequence-to-sequence language models (i.e., mBART and mT5) to represent the likelihood of the text given the candidate entity. We also propose a word-level context feature to capture the semantic evidence of the co-occurring mentions. We evaluate the proposed xLNN-EL approach on the QALD-9-multilingual dataset and demonstrate the cross-linguality of the model and the effectiveness of the features.

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Crowdsourcing Preposition Sense Disambiguation with High Precision via a Priming Task
Shira Wein | Nathan Schneider

The careful design of a crowdsourcing protocol is critical to eliciting highly accurate annotations from untrained workers. In this work, we explore the development of crowdsourcing protocols for a challenging word sense disambiguation task. We find that (a) selecting a similar example usage can serve as a proxy for selecting an explicit definition of the sense, and (b) priming workers with an additional, related task within the HIT improves performance on the main proxy task. Ultimately, we demonstrate the usefulness of our crowdsourcing elicitation technique as an effective alternative to previously investigated training strategies, which can be used if agreement on a challenging task is low.

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DoSA : A System to Accelerate Annotations on Business Documents with Human-in-the-Loop
Neelesh Shukla | Msp Raja | Raghu Katikeri | Amit Vaid

Business documents come in a variety of structures, formats and information needs which makes information extraction a challenging task. Due to these variations, having a document generic model which can work well across all types of documents for all the use cases seems far-fetched. For document-specific models, we would need customized document-specific labels. We introduce DoSA (Document Specific Automated Annotations), which helps annotators in generating initial annotations automatically using our novel bootstrap approach by leveraging document generic datasets and models. These initial annotations can further be reviewed by a human for correctness. An initial document-specific model can be trained and its inference can be used as feedback for generating more automated annotations. These automated annotations can be reviewed by humanin-the-loop for the correctness and a new improved model can be trained using the current model as pre-trained model before going for the next iteration. In this paper, our scope is limited to Form like documents due to limited availability of generic annotated datasets, but this idea can be extended to a variety of other documents as more datasets are built. An opensource ready-to-use implementation is made available on GitHub.

Code generation models can benefit data scientists’ productivity by automatically generating code from context and text descriptions. An important measure of the modeling progress is whether a model can generate code that can correctly execute to solve the task. However, due to the lack of an evaluation dataset that directly supports execution-based model evaluation, existing work relies on code surface form similarity metrics (e.g., BLEU, CodeBLEU) for model selection, which can be inaccurate. To remedy this, we introduce ExeDS, an evaluation dataset for execution evaluation for data science code generation tasks. ExeDS contains a set of 534 problems from Jupyter Notebooks, each consisting of code context, task description, reference program, and the desired execution output. With ExeDS, we evaluate the execution performance of five state-of-the-art code generation models that have achieved high surface-form evaluation scores. Our experiments show that models with high surface-form scores do not necessarily perform well on execution metrics, and execution-based metrics can better capture model code generation errors. All the code and data will be released upon acceptance.

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A Gamified Approach to Frame Semantic Role Labeling
Emily Amspoker | Miriam R L Petruck

Much research has investigated the possibility of creating games with a purpose (GWAPs), i.e., online games whose purpose is gathering information to address the insufficient amount of data for training and testing of large language models (Von Ahn and Dabbish, 2008). Based on such work, this paper reports on the development of a game for frame semantic role labeling, where players have fun while using semantic frames as prompts for short story writing. This game will generate more annotations for FrameNet and original content for annotation, supporting FrameNet’s goal of characterizing the English language in terms of Frame Semantics.

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A Comparative Analysis between Human-in-the-loop Systems and Large Language Models for Pattern Extraction Tasks
Maeda Hanafi | Yannis Katsis | Ishan Jindal | Lucian Popa

Building a natural language processing (NLP) model can be challenging for end-users such as analysts, journalists, investigators, etc., especially given that they will likely apply existing tools out of the box. In this article, we take a closer look at how two complementary approaches, a state-of-the-art human-in-the-loop (HITL) tool and a generative language model (GPT-3) perform out of the box, that is, without fine-tuning. Concretely, we compare these approaches when end-users with little technical background are given pattern extraction tasks from text. We discover that the HITL tool performs with higher precision, while GPT-3 requires some level of engineering in its input prompts as well as post-processing on its output before it can achieve comparable results. Future work in this space should look further into the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches, HITL and generative language model, as well as into ways to optimally combine them.

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Guiding Generative Language Models for Data Augmentation in Few-Shot Text Classification
Aleksandra Edwards | Asahi Ushio | Jose Camacho-collados | Helene Ribaupierre | Alun Preece

Data augmentation techniques are widely used for enhancing the performance of machine learning models by tackling class imbalance issues and data sparsity. State-of-the-art generative language models have been shown to provide significant gains across different NLP tasks. However, their applicability to data augmentation for text classification tasks in few-shot settings have not been fully explored, especially for specialised domains. In this paper, we leverage GPT-2 (Radford et al, 2019) for generating artificial training instances in order to improve classification performance. Our aim is to analyse the impact the selection process of seed training examples has over the quality of GPT-generated samples and consequently the classifier performance. We propose a human-in-the-loop approach for selecting seed samples. Further, we compare the approach to other seed selection strategies that exploit the characteristics of specialised domains such as human-created class hierarchical structure and the presence of noun phrases. Our results show that fine-tuning GPT-2 in a handful of label instances leads to consistent classification improvements and outperform competitive baselines. The seed selection strategies developed in this work lead to significant improvements over random seed selection for specialised domains. We show that guiding text generation through domain expert selection can lead to further improvements, which opens up interesting research avenues for combining generative models and active learning.

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Partially Humanizing Weak Supervision: Towards a Better Low Resource Pipeline for Spoken Language Understanding
Ayush Kumar | Rishabh Tripathi | Jithendra Vepa

Weak Supervised Learning (WSL) is a popular technique to develop machine learning models in absence of labeled training data. WSL involves training over noisy labels which are traditionally obtained from hand-engineered semantic rules and task-specific pre-trained models. Such rules offer limited coverage and generalization over tasks. On the other hand, pre-trained models are available only for limited tasks. Thus, obtaining weak labels is a bottleneck in weak supervised learning. In this work, we propose to utilize the prompting paradigm to generate weak labels for the underlying tasks. We show that task-agnostic prompts are generalizable and can be used to obtain noisy labels for different Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) tasks such as sentiment classification, disfluency detection and emotion classification. These prompts can additionally be updated with human-in-the-loop to add task-specific contexts, thus providing flexibility to design task-specific prompts. Our proposed WSL pipeline outperforms other competitive low-resource benchmarks on zero and few-shot learning by more than 4% on Macro-F1 and a conventional rule-based WSL baseline by more than 5% across all the benchmark datasets. We demonstrate that prompt-based methods save nearly 75% of time in a weak-supervised framework and generate more reliable labels for the above SLU tasks and thus can be used as a universal strategy to obtain weak labels.

Identifying and integrating missing facts is a crucial task for knowledge graph completion to ensure robustness towards downstream applications such as question answering. Adding new facts for a knowledge graph in real world system often involves human verification effort, where candidate facts are verified for accuracy by human annotators. This process is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and inefficient since only a small number of missing facts can be identified. This paper proposes a simple but effective human-in-the-loop framework for fact collection that searches for a diverse set of highly relevant candidate facts for human annotation. Empirical results presented in this work demonstrate that the proposed solution leads to both improvements in i) the quality of the candidate facts as well as ii) the ability of discovering more facts to grow the knowledge graph without requiring additional human effort.

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AVA-TMP: A Human-in-the-Loop Multi-layer Dynamic Topic Modeling Pipeline
Viseth Sean | Padideh Danaee | Yang Yang | Hakan Kardes

A phone call is still one of the primary preferred channels for seniors to express their needs, ask questions, and inform potential problems to their health insurance plans. Alignment Healthis a next-generation, consumer-centric organization that is providing a variety of Medicare Advantage Products for seniors. We combine our proprietary technology platform, AVA, and our high-touch clinical model to provide seniors with care as it should be: high quality, low cost, and accompanied by a vastly improved consumer experience. Our members have the ability to connect with our member services and concierge teams 24/7 for a wide variety of ever-changing reasons through different channels, such as phone, email, and messages. We strive to provide an excellent member experience and ensure our members are getting the help and information they need at every touch —ideally, even before they reach us. This requires ongoing monitoring of reasons for contacting us, ensuring agents are equipped with the right tools and information to serve members, and coming up with proactive strategies to eliminate the need for the call when possible. We developed an NLP-based dynamic call reason tagging and reporting pipeline with an optimized human-in-the-loop approach to enable accurate call reason reporting and monitoring with the ability to see high-level trends as well as drill down into more granular sub-reasons. Our system produces 96.4% precision and 30%-50% better recall in tagging calls with proper reasons. We have also consistently achieved a 60+ Net Promoter Score (NPS) score, which illustrates high consumer satisfaction.

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Improving Named Entity Recognition in Telephone Conversations via Effective Active Learning with Human in the Loop
Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar | Cheng Chen | Xue-yong Fu | Shashi Bhushan Tn

Telephone transcription data can be very noisy due to speech recognition errors, disfluencies, etc. Not only that annotating such data is very challenging for the annotators, but also such data may have lots of annotation errors even after the annotation job is completed, resulting in a very poor model performance. In this paper, we present an active learning framework that leverages human in the loop learning to identify data samples from the annotated dataset for re-annotation that are more likely to contain annotation errors. In this way, we largely reduce the need for data re-annotation for the whole dataset. We conduct extensive experiments with our proposed approach for Named Entity Recognition and observe that by re-annotating only about 6% training instances out of the whole dataset, the F1 score for a certain entity type can be significantly improved by about 25%.

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Interactively Uncovering Latent Arguments in Social Media Platforms: A Case Study on the Covid-19 Vaccine Debate
Maria Leonor Pacheco | Tunazzina Islam | Lyle Ungar | Ming Yin | Dan Goldwasser

Automated methods for analyzing public opinion have grown in popularity with the proliferation of social media. While supervised methods can be very good at classifying text, the dynamic nature of social media discourse results in a moving target for supervised learning. Meanwhile, traditional unsupervised techniques for extracting themes from textual repositories, such as topic models, can result in incorrect outputs that are unusable to domain experts. For this reason, a non-trivial amount of research on social media discourse still relies on manual coding techniques. In this paper, we present an interactive, humans-in-the-loop framework that strikes a balance between unsupervised techniques and manual coding for extracting latent arguments from social media discussions. We use the COVID-19 vaccination debate as a case study, and show that our methodology can be used to obtain a more accurate, interpretable set of arguments when compared to traditional topic models. We do this at a relatively low manual cost, as 3 experts take approximately 2 hours to code close to 100k tweets.

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User or Labor: An Interaction Framework for Human-Machine Relationships in NLP
Ruyuan Wan | Naome Etori | Karla Badillo-urquiola | Dongyeop Kang

The bridging research between Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing is developing quickly these years. However, there is still a lack of formative guidelines to understand the human-machine interaction in the NLP loop. When researchers crossing the two fields talk about humans, they may imply a user or labor. Regarding a human as a user, the human is in control, and the machine is used as a tool to achieve the human’s goals. Considering a human as a laborer, the machine is in control, and the human is used as a resource to achieve the machine’s goals. Through a systematic literature review and thematic analysis, we present an interaction framework for understanding human-machine relationships in NLP. In the framework, we propose four types of human-machine interactions: Human-Teacher and Machine-Learner, Machine-Leading, Human-Leading, and Human-Machine Collaborators. Our analysis shows that the type of interaction is not fixed but can change across tasks as the relationship between the human and the machine develops. We also discuss the implications of this framework for the future of NLP and human-machine relationships.

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bib (full) Proceedings of Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO 2022): The 3rd Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures

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Proceedings of Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO 2022): The 3rd Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures
Eneko Agirre | Marianna Apidianaki | Ivan Vulić

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Cross-lingual Semantic Role Labelling with the ValPaL Database Knowledge
Chinmay Choudhary | Colm O’Riordan

Cross-lingual Transfer Learning typically involves training a model on a high-resource sourcelanguage and applying it to a low-resource tar-get language. In this work we introduce a lexi-cal database calledValency Patterns Leipzig(ValPal)which provides the argument patterninformation about various verb-forms in mul-tiple languages including low-resource langua-ges. We also provide a framework to integratethe ValPal database knowledge into the state-of-the-art LSTM based model for cross-lingualsemantic role labelling. Experimental resultsshow that integrating such knowledge resultedin am improvement in performance of the mo-del on all the target languages on which it isevaluated.

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How Do Transformer-Architecture Models Address Polysemy of Korean Adverbial Postpositions?
Seongmin Mun | Guillaume Desagulier

Postpositions, which are characterized as multiple form-function associations and thus polysemous, pose a challenge to automatic identification of their usage. Several studies have used contextualized word-embedding models to reveal the functions of Korean postpositions. Despite the superior classification performance of previous studies, the particular reason how these models resolve the polysemy of Korean postpositions is not enough clear. To add more interpretation, for this reason, we devised a classification model by employing two transformer-architecture models—BERT and GPT-2—and introduces a computational simulation that interactively demonstrates how these transformer-architecture models simulate human interpretation of word-level polysemy involving Korean adverbial postpositions -ey, -eyse, and -(u)lo. Results reveal that (i) the BERT model performs better than the GPT-2 model to classify the intended function of postpositions, (ii) there is an inverse relationship between the classification accuracy and the number of functions that each postposition manifests, (iii) model performance is affected by the corpus size of each function, (iv) the models’ performance gradually improves as the epoch proceeds, and (vi) the models are affected by the scarcity of input and/or semantic closeness between the items.

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Query Generation with External Knowledge for Dense Retrieval
Sukmin Cho | Soyeong Jeong | Wonsuk Yang | Jong Park

Dense retrieval aims at searching for the most relevant documents to the given query by encoding texts in the embedding space, requiring a large amount of query-document pairs to train. Since manually constructing such training data is challenging, recent work has proposed to generate synthetic queries from documents and use them to train a dense retriever. However, compared to the manually composed queries, synthetic queries do not generally ask for implicit information, therefore leading to a degraded retrieval performance. In this work, we propose Query Generation with External Knowledge (QGEK), a novel method for generating queries with external information related to the corresponding document. Specifically, we convert a query into a triplet-based template form to accommodate external information and transmit it to a pre-trained language model (PLM). We validate QGEK on both in-domain and out-domain dense retrieval settings. The dense retriever with the queries requiring implicit information is found to make good performance improvement. Also, such queries are similar to manually composed queries, confirmed by both human evaluation and unique & non-unique words distribution.

Moral values as commonsense norms shape our everyday individual and community behavior. The possibility to extract moral attitude rapidly from natural language is an appealing perspective that would enable a deeper understanding of social interaction dynamics and the individual cognitive and behavioral dimension. In this work we focus on detecting moral content from natural language and we test our methods on a corpus of tweets previously labeled as containing moral values or violations, according to Moral Foundation Theory. We develop and compare two different approaches: (i) a frame-based symbolic value detector based on knowledge graphs and (ii) a zero-shot machine learning model fine-tuned on a task of Natural Language Inference (NLI) and a task of emotion detection. The final outcome from our work consists in two approaches meant to perform without the need for prior training process on a moral value detection task.

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Jointly Identifying and Fixing Inconsistent Readings from Information Extraction Systems
Ankur Padia | Francis Ferraro | Tim Finin

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KIQA: Knowledge-Infused Question Answering Model for Financial Table-Text Data
Rungsiman Nararatwong | Natthawut Kertkeidkachorn | Ryutaro Ichise

While entity retrieval models continue to advance their capabilities, our understanding of their wide-ranging applications is limited, especially in domain-specific settings. We highlighted this issue by using recent general-domain entity-linking models, LUKE and GENRE, to inject external knowledge into a question-answering (QA) model for a financial QA task with a hybrid tabular-textual dataset. We found that both models improved the baseline model by 1.57% overall and 8.86% on textual data. Nonetheless, the challenge remains as they still struggle to handle tabular inputs. We subsequently conducted a comprehensive attention-weight analysis, revealing how LUKE utilizes external knowledge supplied by GENRE. The analysis also elaborates how the injection of symbolic knowledge can be helpful and what needs further improvement, paving the way for future research on this challenging QA task and advancing our understanding of how a language model incorporates external knowledge.

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Trans-KBLSTM: An External Knowledge Enhanced Transformer BiLSTM Model for Tabular Reasoning
Yerram Varun | Aayush Sharma | Vivek Gupta

Natural language inference on tabular data is a challenging task. Existing approaches lack the world and common sense knowledge required to perform at a human level. While massive amounts of KG data exist, approaches to integrate them with deep learning models to enhance tabular reasoning are uncommon. In this paper, we investigate a new approach using BiLSTMs to incorporate knowledge effectively into language models. Through extensive analysis, we show that our proposed architecture, Trans-KBLSTM improves the benchmark performance on InfoTabS, a tabular NLI dataset.

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Fast Few-shot Debugging for NLU Test Suites
Christopher Malon | Kai Li | Erik Kruus

We study few-shot debugging of transformer based natural language understanding models, using recently popularized test suites to not just diagnose but correct a problem. Given a few debugging examples of a certain phenomenon, and a held-out test set of the same phenomenon, we aim to maximize accuracy on the phenomenon at a minimal cost of accuracy on the original test set. We examine several methods that are faster than full epoch retraining. We introduce a new fast method, which samples a few in-danger examples from the original training set. Compared to fast methods using parameter distance constraints or Kullback-Leibler divergence, we achieve superior original accuracy for comparable debugging accuracy.

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On Masked Language Models for Contextual Link Prediction
Angus Brayne | Maciej Wiatrak | Dane Corneil

In the real world, many relational facts require context; for instance, a politician holds a given elected position only for a particular timespan. This context (the timespan) is typically ignored in knowledge graph link prediction tasks, or is leveraged by models designed specifically to make use of it (i.e. n-ary link prediction models). Here, we show that the task of n-ary link prediction is easily performed using language models, applied with a basic method for constructing cloze-style query sentences. We introduce a pre-training methodology based around an auxiliary entity-linked corpus that outperforms other popular pre-trained models like BERT, even with a smaller model. This methodology also enables n-ary link prediction without access to any n-ary training set, which can be invaluable in circumstances where expensive and time-consuming curation of n-ary knowledge graphs is not feasible. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on the primary n-ary link prediction dataset WD50K and on WikiPeople facts that include literals - typically ignored by knowledge graph embedding methods.

GPT-3 has attracted lots of attention due to its superior performance across a wide range of NLP tasks, especially with its in-context learning abilities. Despite its success, we found that the empirical results of GPT-3 depend heavily on the choice of in-context examples. In this work, we investigate whether there are more effective strategies for judiciously selecting in-context examples (relative to random sampling) that better leverage GPT-3’s in-context learning capabilities. Inspired by the recent success of leveraging a retrieval module to augment neural networks, we propose to retrieve examples that are semantically-similar to a test query sample to formulate its corresponding prompt. Intuitively, the examples selected with such a strategy may serve as more informative inputs to unleash GPT-3’s power of text generation. We evaluate the proposed approach on several natural language understanding and generation benchmarks, where the retrieval-based prompt selection approach consistently outperforms the random selection baseline. Moreover, it is observed that the sentence encoders fine-tuned on task-related datasets yield even more helpful retrieval results. Notably, significant gains are observed on tasks such as table-to-text generation (44.3% on the ToTTo dataset) and open-domain question answering (45.5% on the NQ dataset).

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Deep Learning for Low-Resource Natural Language Processing

The lack of resources for languages in the Americas has proven to be a problem for the creation of digital systems such as machine translation, search engines, chat bots, and more. The scarceness of digital resources for a language causes a higher impact on populations where the language is spoken by millions of people. We introduce the first official large combined corpus for deep learning of an indigenous South American low-resource language spoken by millions called Quechua. Specifically, our curated corpus is created from text gathered from the southern region of Peru where a dialect of Quechua is spoken that has not traditionally been used for digital systems as a target dialect in the past. In order to make our work repeatable by others, we also offer a public, pre-trained, BERT model called QuBERT which is the largest linguistic model ever trained for any Quechua type, not just the southern region dialect. We furthermore test our corpus and its corresponding BERT model on two major tasks: (1) named-entity recognition (NER) and (2) part-of-speech (POS) tagging by using state-of-the-art techniques where we achieve results comparable to other work on higher-resource languages. In this article, we describe the methodology, challenges, and results from the creation of QuBERT which is on par with other state-of-the-art multilingual models for natural language processing achieving between 71 and 74% F1 score on NER and 84–87% on POS tasks.

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Improving Distantly Supervised Document-Level Relation Extraction Through Natural Language Inference
Clara Vania | Grace Lee | Andrea Pierleoni

The distant supervision (DS) paradigm has been widely used for relation extraction (RE) to alleviate the need for expensive annotations. However, it suffers from noisy labels, which leads to worse performance than models trained on human-annotated data, even when trained using hundreds of times more data. We present a systematic study on the use of natural language inference (NLI) to improve distantly supervised document-level RE. We apply NLI in three scenarios: (i) as a filter for denoising DS labels, (ii) as a filter for model prediction, and (iii) as a standalone RE model. Our results show that NLI filtering consistently improves performance, reducing the performance gap with a model trained on human-annotated data by 2.3 F1.

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IDANI: Inference-time Domain Adaptation via Neuron-level Interventions
Omer Antverg | Eyal Ben-David | Yonatan Belinkov

Large pre-trained models are usually fine-tuned on downstream task data, and tested on unseen data. When the train and test data come from different domains, the model is likely to struggle, as it is not adapted to the test domain. We propose a new approach for domain adaptation (DA), using neuron-level interventions: We modify the representation of each test example in specific neurons, resulting in a counterfactual example from the source domain, which the model is more familiar with. The modified example is then fed back into the model. While most other DA methods are applied during training time, ours is applied during inference only, making it more efficient and applicable. Our experiments show that our method improves performance on unseen domains.

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Generating unlabelled data for a tri-training approach in a low resourced NER task
Hugo Boulanger | Thomas Lavergne | Sophie Rosset

Training a tagger for Named Entity Recognition (NER) requires a substantial amount of labeled data in the task domain. Manual labeling is a tedious and complicated task. Semisupervised learning methods can reduce the quantity of labeled data necessary to train a model. However, these methods require large quantities of unlabeled data, which remains an issue in many cases.We address this problem by generating unlabeled data. Large language models have proven to be powerful tools for text generation. We use their generative capacity to produce new sentences and variations of the sentences of our available data. This generation method, combined with a semi-supervised method, is evaluated on CoNLL and I2B2. We prepare both of these corpora to simulate a low resource setting. We obtain significant improvements for semisupervised learning with synthetic data against supervised learning on natural data.

Text segmentation and extraction from unstructured documents can provide business researchers with a wealth of new information on firms and their behaviors. However, the most valuable text is often difficult to extract consistently due to substantial variations in how content can appear from document to document. Thus, the most successful way to extract this content has been through costly crowdsourcing and training of manual workers. We propose the Assisted Neural Text Segmentation (ANTS) framework to identify pertinent text in unstructured documents from a small set of labeled examples. ANTS leverages deep learning and transfer learning architectures to empower researchers to identify relevant text with minimal manual coding. Using a real world sample of accounting documents, we identify targeted sections 96% of the time using only 5 training examples.

Deep learning methods have enabled taskoriented semantic parsing of increasingly complex utterances. However, a single model is still typically trained and deployed for each task separately, requiring labeled training data for each, which makes it challenging to support new tasks, even within a single business vertical (e.g., food-ordering or travel booking). In this paper we describe Cross-TOP (Cross-Schema Task-Oriented Parsing), a zero-shot method for complex semantic parsing in a given vertical. By leveraging the fact that user requests from the same vertical share lexical and semantic similarities, a single cross-schema parser is trained to service an arbitrary number of tasks, seen or unseen, within a vertical. We show that Cross-TOP can achieve high accuracy on a previously unseen task without requiring any additional training data, thereby providing a scalable way to bootstrap semantic parsers for new tasks. As part of this work we release the FoodOrdering dataset, a task-oriented parsing dataset in the food-ordering vertical, with utterances and annotations derived from five schemas, each from a different restaurant menu.

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Help from the Neighbors: Estonian Dialect Normalization Using a Finnish Dialect Generator
Mika Hämäläinen | Khalid Alnajjar | Tuuli Tuisk

While standard Estonian is not a low-resourced language, the different dialects of the language are under-resourced from the point of view of NLP, given that there are no vast hand normalized resources available for training a machine learning model to normalize dialectal Estonian to standard Estonian. In this paper, we crawl a small corpus of parallel dialectal Estonian - standard Estonian sentences. In addition, we take a savvy approach of generating more synthetic training data for the normalization task by using an existing dialect generator model built for Finnish to “dialectalize” standard Estonian sentences from the Universal Dependencies tree banks. Our BERT based normalization model achieves a word error rate that is 26.49 points lower when using both the synthetic data and Estonian data in comparison to training the model with only the available Estonian data. Our results suggest that synthetic data generated by a model trained on a more resourced related language can indeed boost the results for a less resourced language.

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Exploring diversity in back translation for low-resource machine translation
Laurie Burchell | Alexandra Birch | Kenneth Heafield

Back translation is one of the most widely used methods for improving the performance of neural machine translation systems. Recent research has sought to enhance the effectiveness of this method by increasing the ‘diversity’ of the generated translations. We argue that the definitions and metrics used to quantify ‘diversity’ in previous work have been insufficient. This work puts forward a more nuanced framework for understanding diversity in training data, splitting it into lexical diversity and syntactic diversity. We present novel metrics for measuring these different aspects of diversity and carry out empirical analysis into the effect of these types of diversity on final neural machine translation model performance for low-resource English↔Turkish and mid-resource English↔Icelandic. Our findings show that generating back translation using nucleus sampling results in higher final model performance, and that this method of generation has high levels of both lexical and syntactic diversity. We also find evidence that lexical diversity is more important than syntactic for back translation performance.

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Punctuation Restoration in Spanish Customer Support Transcripts using Transfer Learning
Xiliang Zhu | Shayna Gardiner | David Rossouw | Tere Roldán | Simon Corston-Oliver

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems typically produce unpunctuated transcripts that have poor readability. In addition, building a punctuation restoration system is challenging for low-resource languages, especially for domain-specific applications. In this paper, we propose a Spanish punctuation restoration system designed for a real-time customer support transcription service. To address the data sparsity of Spanish transcripts in the customer support domain, we introduce two transferlearning-based strategies: 1) domain adaptation using out-of-domain Spanish text data; 2) crosslingual transfer learning leveraging in-domain English transcript data. Our experiment results show that these strategies improve the accuracy of the Spanish punctuation restoration system.

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Pre-training Data Quality and Quantity for a Low-Resource Language: New Corpus and BERT Models for Maltese
Kurt Micallef | Albert Gatt | Marc Tanti | Lonneke van der Plas | Claudia Borg

Multilingual language models such as mBERT have seen impressive cross-lingual transfer to a variety of languages, but many languages remain excluded from these models. In this paper, we analyse the effect of pre-training with monolingual data for a low-resource language that is not included in mBERT – Maltese – with a range of pre-training set ups. We conduct evaluations with the newly pre-trained models on three morphosyntactic tasks – dependency parsing, part-of-speech tagging, and named-entity recognition – and one semantic classification task – sentiment analysis. We also present a newly created corpus for Maltese, and determine the effect that the pre-training data size and domain have on the downstream performance. Our results show that using a mixture of pre-training domains is often superior to using Wikipedia text only. We also find that a fraction of this corpus is enough to make significant leaps in performance over Wikipedia-trained models. We pre-train and compare two models on the new corpus: a monolingual BERT model trained from scratch (BERTu), and a further pretrained multilingual BERT (mBERTu). The models achieve state-of-the-art performance on these tasks, despite the new corpus being considerably smaller than typically used corpora for high-resourced languages. On average, BERTu outperforms or performs competitively with mBERTu, and the largest gains are observed for higher-level tasks.

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Building an Event Extractor with Only a Few Examples
Pengfei Yu | Zixuan Zhang | Clare Voss | Jonathan May | Heng Ji

Supervised event extraction models require a substantial amount of training data to perform well. However, event annotation requires a lot of human effort and costs much time, which limits the application of existing supervised approaches to new event types. In order to reduce manual labor and shorten the time to build an event extraction system for an arbitrary event ontology, we present a new framework to train such systems much more efficiently without large annotations. Our event trigger labeling model uses a weak supervision approach, which only requires a set of keywords, a small number of examples and an unlabeled corpus, on which our approach automatically collects weakly supervised annotations. Our argument role labeling component performs zero-shot learning, which only requires the names of the argument roles of new event types. The source codes of our event trigger detection1 and event argument extraction2 models are publicly available for research purposes. We also release a dockerized system connecting the two models into an unified event extraction pipeline.

Pretrained language models have shown success in various areas of natural language processing, including reading comprehension tasks. However, when applying machine learning methods to new domains, labeled data may not always be available. To address this, we use supervised pretraining on source-domain data to reduce sample complexity on domainspecific downstream tasks. We evaluate zeroshot performance on domain-specific reading comprehension tasks by combining task transfer with domain adaptation to fine-tune a pretrained model with no labelled data from the target task. Our approach outperforms DomainAdaptive Pretraining on downstream domainspecific reading comprehension tasks in 3 out of 4 domains.

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Let the Model Decide its Curriculum for Multitask Learning
Neeraj Varshney | Swaroop Mishra | Chitta Baral

Curriculum learning strategies in prior multitask learning approaches arrange datasets in a difficulty hierarchy either based on human perception or by exhaustively searching the optimal arrangement. However, human perception of difficulty may not always correlate well with machine interpretation leading to poor performance and exhaustive search is computationally expensive. Addressing these concerns, we propose two classes of techniques to arrange training instances into a learning curriculum based on difficulty scores computed via model-based approaches. The two classes i.e Dataset-level and Instance-level differ in granularity of arrangement. Through comprehensive experiments with 12 datasets, we show that instance-level and dataset-level techniques result in strong representations as they lead to an average performance improvement of 4.17% and 3.15% over their respective baselines. Furthermore, we find that most of this improvement comes from correctly answering the difficult instances, implying a greater efficacy of our techniques on difficult tasks

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AfriTeVA: Extending ?Small Data? Pretraining Approaches to Sequence-to-Sequence Models
Odunayo Jude Ogundepo | Akintunde Oladipo | Mofetoluwa Adeyemi | Kelechi Ogueji | Jimmy Lin

Pretrained language models represent the state of the art in NLP, but the successful construction of such models often requires large amounts of data and computational resources. Thus, the paucity of data for low-resource languages impedes the development of robust NLP capabilities for these languages. There has been some recent success in pretraining encoderonly models solely on a combination of lowresource African languages, exemplified by AfriBERTa. In this work, we extend the approach of “small data” pretraining to encoder– decoder models. We introduce AfriTeVa, a family of sequence-to-sequence models derived from T5 that are pretrained on 10 African languages from scratch. With a pretraining corpus of only around 1GB, we show that it is possible to achieve competitive downstream effectiveness for machine translation and text classification, compared to larger models trained on much more data. All the code and model checkpoints described in this work are publicly available at https://github.com/castorini/afriteva.

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Few-shot Learning for Sumerian Named Entity Recognition
Guanghai Wang | Yudong Liu | James Hearne

This paper presents our study in exploring the task of named entity recognition (NER) in a low resource setting, focusing on few-shot learning on the Sumerian NER task. The Sumerian language is deemed as an extremely low-resource language due to that (1) it is a long dead language, (2) highly skilled language experts are extremely scarce. NER on Sumerian text is important in that it helps identify the actors and entities active in a given period of time from the collections of tens of thousands of texts in building socio-economic networks of the archives of interest. As a text classification task, NER tends to become challenging when the amount of annotated data is limited or the model is required to handle new classes. The Sumerian NER is no exception. In this work, we propose to use two few-shot learning systems, ProtoBERT and NNShot, to the Sumerian NER task. Our experiments show that the ProtoBERT NER generally outperforms both the NNShot NER and the fully supervised BERT NER in low resource settings on the predictions of rare classes. In particular, F1-score of ProtoBERT on unseen entity types on our test set has achieved 89.6% that is significantly better than the F1-score of 84.3% of the BERT NER.

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Deep Learning-Based Morphological Segmentation for Indigenous Languages: A Study Case on Innu-Aimun
Ngoc Tan Le | Antoine Cadotte | Mathieu Boivin | Fatiha Sadat | Jimena Terraza

Recent advances in the field of deep learning have led to a growing interest in the development of NLP approaches for low-resource and endangered languages. Nevertheless, relatively little research, related to NLP, has been conducted on indigenous languages. These languages are considered to be filled with complexities and challenges that make their study incredibly difficult in the NLP and AI fields. This paper focuses on the morphological segmentation of indigenous languages, an extremely challenging task because of polysynthesis, dialectal variations with rich morpho-phonemics, misspellings and resource-limited scenario issues. The proposed approach, towards a morphological segmentation of Innu-Aimun, an extremely low-resource indigenous language of Canada, is based on deep learning. Experiments and evaluations have shown promising results, compared to state-of-the-art rule-based and unsupervised approaches.

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Clean or Annotate: How to Spend a Limited Data Collection Budget
Derek Chen | Zhou Yu | Samuel R. Bowman

Crowdsourcing platforms are often used to collect datasets for training machine learning models, despite higher levels of inaccurate labeling compared to expert labeling. There are two common strategies to manage the impact of such noise: The first involves aggregating redundant annotations, but comes at the expense of labeling substantially fewer examples. Secondly, prior works have also considered using the entire annotation budget to label as many examples as possible and subsequently apply denoising algorithms to implicitly clean the dataset. We find a middle ground and propose an approach which reserves a fraction of annotations to explicitly clean up highly probable error samples to optimize the annotation process. In particular, we allocate a large portion of the labeling budget to form an initial dataset used to train a model. This model is then used to identify specific examples that appear most likely to be incorrect, which we spend the remaining budget to relabel. Experiments across three model variations and four natural language processing tasks show our approach outperforms or matches both label aggregation and advanced denoising methods designed to handle noisy labels when allocated the same finite annotation budget.

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Unsupervised Knowledge Graph Generation Using Semantic Similarity Matching
Lixian Liu | Amin Omidvar | Zongyang Ma | Ameeta Agrawal | Aijun An

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are directed labeled graphs representing entities and the relationships between them. Most prior work focuses on supervised or semi-supervised approaches which require large amounts of annotated data. While unsupervised approaches do not need labeled training data, most existing methods either generate too many redundant relations or require manual mapping of the extracted relations to a known schema. To address these limitations, we propose an unsupervised method for KG generation that requires neither labeled data nor manual mapping to the predefined relation schema. Instead, our method leverages sentence-level semantic similarity for automatically generating relations between pairs of entities. Our proposed method outperforms two baseline systems when evaluated over four datasets.

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FarFetched: Entity-centric Reasoning and Claim Validation for the Greek Language based on Textually Represented Environments
Dimitris Papadopoulos | Katerina Metropoulou | Nikolaos Papadakis | Nikolaos Matsatsinis

Our collective attention span is shortened by the flood of online information. With FarFetched, we address the need for automated claim validation based on the aggregated evidence derived from multiple online news sources. We introduce an entity-centric reasoning framework in which latent connections between events, actions, or statements are revealed via entity mentions and represented in a graph database. Using entity linking and semantic similarity, we offer a way for collecting and combining information from diverse sources in order to generate evidence relevant to the user’s claim. Then, we leverage textual entailment recognition to quantitatively determine whether this assertion is credible, based on the created evidence. Our approach tries to fill the gap in automated claim validation for less-resourced languages and is showcased on the Greek language, complemented by the training of relevant semantic textual similarity (STS) and natural language inference (NLI) models that are evaluated on translated versions of common benchmarks.

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Alternative non-BERT model choices for the textual classification in low-resource languages and environments
Syed Mustavi Maheen | Moshiur Rahman Faisal | Md. Rafakat Rahman | Md. Shahriar Karim

Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in non-dominant and low-resource languages have not experienced significant progress. Although pre-trained BERT models are available, GPU-dependency, large memory requirement, and data scarcity often limit their applicability. As a solution, this paper proposes a fusion chain architecture comprised of one or more layers of CNN, LSTM, and BiLSTM and identifies precise configuration and chain length. The study shows that a simpler, CPU-trainable non-BERT fusion CNN + BiLSTM + CNN is sufficient to surpass the textual classification performance of the BERT-related models in resource-limited languages and environments. The fusion architecture competitively approaches the state-of-the-art accuracy in several Bengali NLP tasks and a six-class emotion detection task for a newly developed Bengali dataset. Interestingly, the performance of the identified fusion model, for instance, CNN + BiLSTM + CNN, also holds for other lowresource languages and environments. Efficacy study shows that the CNN + BiLSTM + CNN model outperforms BERT implementation for Vietnamese languages and performs almost equally in English NLP tasks experiencing artificial data scarcity. For the GLUE benchmark and other datasets such as Emotion, IMDB, and Intent classification, the CNN + BiLSTM + CNN model often surpasses or competes with BERT-base, TinyBERT, DistilBERT, and mBERT. Besides, a position-sensitive selfattention layer role further improves the fusion models’ performance in the Bengali emotion classification. The models are also compressible to as low as ≈ 5× smaller through pruning and retraining, making them more viable for resource-constrained environments. Together, this study may help NLP practitioners and serve as a blueprint for NLP model choices in textual classification for low-resource languages and environments.

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Generating Complement Data for Aspect Term Extraction with GPT-2
Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh | Franck Dernoncourt | Bonan Min | Thien Huu Nguyen

Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) is the task of identifying the word(s) in a review text toward which the author express an opinion. A major challenges for ATE involve data scarcity that hinder the training of deep sequence taggers to identify rare targets. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel method to better exploit the available labeled data for ATE by computing effective complement sentences to augment the input data and facilitate the aspect term prediction. In particular, we introduce a multistep training procedure that first obtains optimal complement representations and sentences for training data with respect to a deep ATE model. Afterward, we fine-tune the generative language model GPT-2 to allow complement sentence generation at test data. The REINFORCE algorithm is employed to incorporate different expected properties into the reward function to perform the fine-tuning. We perform extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method that achieve the state-of-the-art performance on different datasets.

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How to Translate Your Samples and Choose Your Shots? Analyzing Translate-train & Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer
Iman Jundi | Gabriella Lapesa

The lack of resources for languages in the Americas has proven to be a problem for the creation of digital systems such as machine translation, search engines, chat bots, and more. The scarceness of digital resources for a language causes a higher impact on populations where the language is spoken by millions of people. We introduce the first official large combined corpus for deep learning of an indigenous South American low-resource language spoken by millions called Quechua. Specifically, our curated corpus is created from text gathered from the southern region of Peru where a dialect of Quechua is spoken that has not traditionally been used for digital systems as a target dialect in the past. In order to make our work repeatable by others, we also offer a public, pre-trained, BERT model called QuBERT which is the largest linguistic model ever trained for any Quechua type, not just the southern region dialect. We furthermore test our corpus and its corresponding BERT model on two major tasks: (1) named-entity recognition (NER) and (2) part-of-speech (POS) tagging by using state-of-the-art techniques where we achieve results comparable to other work on higher-resource languages. In this article, we describe the methodology, challenges, and results from the creation of QuBERT which is on on par with other state-of-the-art multilingual models for natural language processing achieving between 71 and 74% F1 score on NER and 84–87% on POS tasks.

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Unified NMT models for the Indian subcontinent, transcending script-barriers
Gokul N.c.

Highly accurate machine translation systems are very important in societies and countries where multilinguality is very common, and where English often does not suffice. The Indian subcontinent (or South Asia) is such a region, with all the Indic languages currently being under-represented in the NLP ecosystem. It is essential to thoroughly explore various techniques to improve the performance of such lowresource languages at least using the data available in open-source, which itself is something not very explored in the Indic ecosystem. In our work, we perform a study with a focus on improving the performance of very-low-resource South Asian languages, especially of countries in addition to India. Specifically, we propose how unified models can be built that can exploit the data from comparatively resource-rich languages of the same region. We propose strategies to unify different types of unexplored scripts, especially Perso–Arabic scripts and Indic scripts to build multilingual models for all the South Asian languages despite the script barrier. We also study how augmentation techniques like back-translation can be made useof to build unified models just using openly available raw data, to understand what levels of improvements can be expected for these Indic languages.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering

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Proceedings of the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering
Song Feng | Hui Wan | Caixia Yuan | Han Yu

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MSAMSum: Towards Benchmarking Multi-lingual Dialogue Summarization
Xiachong Feng | Xiaocheng Feng | Bing Qin

Dialogue summarization helps users capture salient information from various types of dialogues has received much attention recently. However, current works mainly focus on English dialogue summarization, leaving other languages less well explored. Therefore, we present a multi-lingual dialogue summarization dataset, namely MSAMSum, which covers dialogue-summary pairs in six languages. Specifically, we derive MSAMSum from the standard SAMSum using sophisticated translation techniques and further employ two methods to ensure the integral translation quality and summary factual consistency. Given the proposed MSAMum, we systematically set up five multi-lingual settings for this task, including a novel mix-lingual dialogue summarization setting. To illustrate the utility of our dataset, we benchmark various experiments with pre-trained models under different settings and report results in both supervised and zero-shot manners. We also discuss some future works towards this task to motivate future researches.

With the advances in deep learning, tremendous progress has been made with chit-chat dialogue systems and task-oriented dialogue systems. However, these two systems are often tackled separately in current methods. To achieve more natural interaction with humans, dialogue systems need to be capable of both chatting and accomplishing tasks. To this end, we propose a unified dialogue system (UniDS) with the two aforementioned skills. In particular, we design a unified dialogue data schema, compatible for both chit-chat and task-oriented dialogues. Besides, we propose a two-stage training method to train UniDS based on the unified dialogue data schema. UniDS does not need to adding extra parameters to existing chit-chat dialogue systems. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed UniDS works comparably well as the state-of-the-art chit-chat dialogue systems and task-oriented dialogue systems. More importantly, UniDS achieves better robustness than pure dialogue systems and satisfactory switch ability between two types of dialogues.

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Low-Resource Adaptation of Open-Domain Generative Chatbots
Greyson Gerhard-Young | Raviteja Anantha | Srinivas Chappidi | Bjorn Hoffmeister

Recent work building open-domain chatbots has demonstrated that increasing model size improves performance (Adiwardana et al., 2020; Roller et al., 2020). On the other hand, latency and connectivity considerations dictate the move of digital assistants on the device (Verge, 2021). Giving a digital assistant like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant the ability to discuss just about anything leads to the need for reducing the chatbot model size such that it fits on the user’s device. We demonstrate that low parameter models can simultaneously retain their general knowledge conversational abilities while improving in a specific domain. Additionally, we propose a generic framework that accounts for variety in question types, tracks reference throughout multi-turn conversations, and removes inconsistent and potentially toxic responses. Our framework seamlessly transitions between chatting and performing transactional tasks, which will ultimately make interactions with digital assistants more human-like. We evaluate our framework on 1 internal and 4 public benchmark datasets using both automatic (Perplexity) and human (SSA – Sensibleness and Specificity Average) evaluation metrics and establish comparable performance while reducing model parameters by 90%.

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Pseudo Ambiguous and Clarifying Questions Based on Sentence Structures Toward Clarifying Question Answering System
Yuya Nakano | Seiya Kawano | Koichiro Yoshino | Katsuhito Sudoh | Satoshi Nakamura

Question answering (QA) with disambiguation questions is essential for practical QA systems because user questions often do not contain information enough to find their answers. We call this task clarifying question answering, a task to find answers to ambiguous user questions by disambiguating their intents through interactions. There are two major problems in building a clarifying question answering system: data preparation of possible ambiguous questions and the generation of clarifying questions. In this paper, we tackle these problems by sentence generation methods using sentence structures. Ambiguous questions are generated by eliminating a part of a sentence considering the sentence structure. Clarifying the question generation method based on case frame dictionary and sentence structure is also proposed. Our experimental results verify that our pseudo ambiguous question generation successfully adds ambiguity to questions. Moreover, the proposed clarifying question generation recovers the performance drop by asking the user for missing information.

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Parameter-Efficient Abstractive Question Answering over Tables or Text
Vaishali Pal | Evangelos Kanoulas | Maarten de Rijke

A long-term ambition of information seeking QA systems is to reason over multi-modal contexts and generate natural answers to user queries. Today, memory intensive pre-trained language models are adapted to downstream tasks such as QA by fine-tuning the model on QA data in a specific modality like unstructured text or structured tables. To avoid training such memory-hungry models while utilizing a uniform architecture for each modality, parameter-efficient adapters add and train small task-specific bottle-neck layers between transformer layers. In this work, we study parameter-efficient abstractive QA in encoder-decoder models over structured tabular data and unstructured textual data using only 1.5% additional parameters for each modality. We also ablate over adapter layers in both encoder and decoder modules to study the efficiency-performance trade-off and demonstrate that reducing additional trainable parameters down to 0.7%-1.0% leads to comparable results. Our models out-perform current state-of-the-art models on tabular QA datasets such as Tablesum and FeTaQA, and achieve comparable performance on a textual QA dataset such as NarrativeQA using significantly less trainable parameters than fine-tuning.

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Conversation- and Tree-Structure Losses for Dialogue Disentanglement
Tianda Li | Jia-Chen Gu | Zhen-Hua Ling | Quan Liu

When multiple conversations occur simultaneously, a listener must decide which conversation each utterance is part of in order to interpret and respond to it appropriately. This task is referred as dialogue disentanglement. A significant drawback of previous studies on disentanglement lies in that they only focus on pair-wise relationships between utterances while neglecting the conversation structure which is important for conversation structure modeling. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical model, named Dialogue BERT (DIALBERT), which integrates the local and global semantics in the context range by using BERT to encode each message-pair and using BiLSTM to aggregate the chronological context information into the output of BERT. In order to integrate the conversation structure information into the model, two types of loss of conversation-structure loss and tree-structure loss are designed. In this way, our model can implicitly learn and leverage the conversation structures without being restricted to the lack of explicit access to such structures during the inference stage. Experimental results on two large datasets show that our method outperforms previous methods by substantial margins, achieving great performance on dialogue disentanglement.

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Conversational Search with Mixed-Initiative - Asking Good Clarification Questions backed-up by Passage Retrieval
Yosi Mass | Doron Cohen | Asaf Yehudai | David Konopnicki

We deal with the scenario of conversational search, where user queries are under-specified or ambiguous. This calls for a mixed-initiative setup. User-asks (queries) and system-answers, as well as system-asks (clarification questions) and user response, in order to clarify her information needs. We focus on the task of selecting the next clarification question, given conversation context. Our method leverages passage retrieval from background content to fine-tune two deep-learning models for ranking candidate clarification questions. We evaluated our method on two different use-cases. The first is an open domain conversational search in a large web collection. The second is a task-oriented customer-support setup. We show that our method performs well on both use-cases.

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Graph-combined Coreference Resolution Methods on Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension with Pre-trained Language Model
Zhaodong Wang | Kazunori Komatani

Coreference resolution such as for anaphora has been an essential challenge that is commonly found in conversational machine reading comprehension (CMRC). This task aims to determine the referential entity to which a pronoun refers on the basis of contextual information. Existing approaches based on pre-trained language models (PLMs) mainly rely on an end-to-end method, which still has limitations in clarifying referential dependency. In this study, a novel graph-based approach is proposed to integrate the coreference of given text into graph structures (called coreference graphs), which can pinpoint a pronoun’s referential entity. We propose two graph-combined methods, evidence-enhanced and the fusion model, for CMRC to integrate coreference graphs from different levels of the PLM architecture. Evidence-enhanced refers to textual level methods that include an evidence generator (for generating new text to elaborate a pronoun) and enhanced question (for rewriting a pronoun in a question) as PLM input. The fusion model is a structural level method that combines the PLM with a graph neural network. We evaluated these approaches on a CoQA pronoun-containing dataset and the whole CoQA dataset. The result showed that our methods can outperform baseline PLM methods with BERT and RoBERTa.

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Construction of Hierarchical Structured Knowledge-based Recommendation Dialogue Dataset and Dialogue System
Takashi Kodama | Ribeka Tanaka | Sadao Kurohashi

We work on a recommendation dialogue system to help a user understand the appealing points of some target (e.g., a movie). In such dialogues, the recommendation system needs to utilize structured external knowledge to make informative and detailed recommendations. However, there is no dialogue dataset with structured external knowledge designed to make detailed recommendations for the target. Therefore, we construct a dialogue dataset, Japanese Movie Recommendation Dialogue (JMRD), in which the recommender recommends one movie in a long dialogue (23 turns on average). The external knowledge used in this dataset is hierarchically structured, including title, casts, reviews, and plots. Every recommender’s utterance is associated with the external knowledge related to the utterance. We then create a movie recommendation dialogue system that considers the structure of the external knowledge and the history of the knowledge used. Experimental results show that the proposed model is superior in knowledge selection to the baseline models.

To diversify and enrich generated dialogue responses, knowledge-grounded dialogue has been investigated in recent years. The existing methods tackle the knowledge grounding challenge by retrieving the relevant sentences over a large corpus and augmenting the dialogues with explicit extra information. Despite their success, however, the existing works have drawbacks on the inference efficiency. This paper proposes KnowExpert, an end-to-end framework to bypass the explicit retrieval process and inject knowledge into the pre-trained language models with lightweight adapters and adapt to the knowledge-grounded dialogue task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle this challenge without retrieval in this task under an open-domain chit-chat scenario. The experimental results show that KnowExpert performs comparably with some retrieval-based baselines while being time-efficient in inference, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method.

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G4: Grounding-guided Goal-oriented Dialogues Generation with Multiple Documents
Shiwei Zhang | Yiyang Du | Guanzhong Liu | Zhao Yan | Yunbo Cao

Goal-oriented dialogues generation grounded in multiple documents(MultiDoc2Dial) is a challenging and realistic task. Unlike previous works which treat document-grounded dialogue modeling as a machine reading comprehension task from single document, MultiDoc2Dial task faces challenges of both seeking information from multiple documents and generating conversation response simultaneously. This paper summarizes our entries to agent response generation subtask in MultiDoc2Dial dataset. We propose a three-stage solution, Grounding-guided goal-oriented dialogues generation(G4), which predicts groundings from retrieved passages to guide the generation of the final response. Our experiments show that G4 achieves SacreBLEU score of 31.24 and F1 score of 44.6 which is 60.7% higher than the baseline model.

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UGent-T2K at the 2nd DialDoc Shared Task: A Retrieval-Focused Dialog System Grounded in Multiple Documents
Yiwei Jiang | Amir Hadifar | Johannes Deleu | Thomas Demeester | Chris Develder

This work presents the contribution from the Text-to-Knowledge team of Ghent University (UGent-T2K) to the MultiDoc2Dial shared task on modeling dialogs grounded in multiple documents. We propose a pipeline system, comprising (1) document retrieval, (2) passage retrieval, and (3) response generation. We engineered these individual components mainly by, for (1)-(2), combining multiple ranking models and adding a final LambdaMART reranker, and, for (3), by adopting a Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) model. We thus significantly boost the baseline system’s performance (over +10 points for both F1 and SacreBLEU). Further, error analysis reveals two major failure cases, to be addressed in future work: (i) in case of topic shift within the dialog, retrieval often fails to select the correct grounding document(s), and (ii) generation sometimes fails to use the correctly retrieved grounding passage. Our code is released at this link.

MultiDoc2Dial presents an important challenge on modeling dialogues grounded with multiple documents. This paper proposes a pipeline system of “retrieve, re-rank, and generate”, where each component is individually optimized. This enables the passage re-ranker and response generator to fully exploit training with ground-truth data. Furthermore, we use a deep cross-encoder trained with localized hard negative passages from the retriever. For the response generator, we use grounding span prediction as an auxiliary task to be jointly trained with the main task of response generation. We also adopt a passage dropout and regularization technique to improve response generation performance. Experimental results indicate that the system clearly surpasses the competitive baseline and our team CPII-NLP ranked 1st among the public submissions on ALL four leaderboards based on the sum of F1, SacreBLEU, METEOR and RougeL scores.

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A Knowledge storage and semantic space alignment Method for Multi-documents dialogue generation
Minjun Zhu | Bin Li | Yixuan Weng | Fei Xia

Question Answering (QA) is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task that can measure language and semantics understanding ability, it requires a system not only to retrieve relevant documents from a large number of articles but also to answer corresponding questions according to documents. However, various language styles and sources of human questions and evidence documents form the different embedding semantic spaces, which may bring some errors to the downstream QA task. To alleviate these problems, we propose a framework for enhancing downstream evidence retrieval by generating evidence, aiming at improving the performance of response generation. Specifically, we take the pre-training language model as a knowledge base, storing documents’ information and knowledge into model parameters. With the Child-Tuning approach being designed, the knowledge storage and evidence generation avoid catastrophic forgetting for response generation. Extensive experiments carried out on the multi-documents dataset show that the proposed method can improve the final performance, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

In this paper, we mainly discuss about our submission to MultiDoc2Dial task, which aims to model the goal-oriented dialogues grounded in multiple documents. The proposed task is split into grounding span prediction and agent response generation. The baseline for the task is the retrieval augmented generation model, which consists of a dense passage retrieval model for the retrieval part and the BART model for the generation part. The main challenge of this task is that the system requires a great amount of pre-trained knowledge to generate answers grounded in multiple documents. To overcome this challenge, we adopt model pretraining, fine-tuning, and multi-task learning to enhance our model’s coverage of pretrained knowledge. We experimented with various settings of our method to show the effectiveness of our approaches.

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Docalog: Multi-document Dialogue System using Transformer-based Span Retrieval
Sayed Hesam Alavian | Ali Satvaty | Sadra Sabouri | Ehsaneddin Asgari | Hossein Sameti

Information-seeking dialogue systems, including knowledge identification and response generation, aim to respond to users with fluent, coherent, and informative answers based on users’ needs. This paper discusses our proposed approach, Docalog, for the DialDoc-22 (MultiDoc2Dial) shared task. Docalog identifies the most relevant knowledge in the associated document, in a multi-document setting. Docalog, is a three-stage pipeline consisting of (1) a document retriever model (DR. TEIT), (2) an answer span prediction model, and (3) an ultimate span picker deciding on the most likely answer span, out of all predicted spans. In the test phase of MultiDoc2Dial 2022, Docalog achieved f1-scores of 36.07% and 28.44% and SacreBLEU scores of 23.70% and 20.52%, respectively on the MDD-SEEN and MDD-UNSEEN folds.

In this paper, we present our submission to the DialDoc shared task based on the MultiDoc2Dial dataset. MultiDoc2Dial is a conversational question answering dataset that grounds dialogues in multiple documents. The task involves grounding a user’s query in a document followed by generating an appropriate response. We propose several improvements over the baseline’s retriever-reader architecture to aid in modeling goal-oriented dialogues grounded in multiple documents. Our proposed approach employs sparse representations for passage retrieval, a passage re-ranker, the fusion-in-decoder architecture for generation, and a curriculum learning training paradigm. Our approach shows a 12 point improvement in BLEU score compared to the baseline RAG model.

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DialDoc 2022 Shared Task: Open-Book Document-grounded Dialogue Modeling
Song Feng | Siva Patel | Hui Wan

The paper presents the results of the Shared Task hosted by the Second DialDoc Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering co-located at ACL 2022. The primary goal of this Shared Task is to build goal-oriented information-seeking conversation systems that are grounded in the domain documents, where each dialogue could correspond to multiple subtasks that are based on different documents. The task is to generate agent responses in natural language given the dialogue and document contexts. There are two task settings and leaderboards based on (1) the same sets of domains (SEEN) and (2) one unseen domain (UNSEEN). There are over 20 teams participating in Dev Phase and 8 teams participating in both Dev and Test Phases. Multiple submissions significantly outperform the baseline. The best-performing system achieves 52.06 F1 and the total of 191.30 on the SEEN task; and 34.65 F1 and the total of 130.79 on the UNSEEN task.

Grounded text generation systems often generate text that contains factual inconsistencies, hindering their real-world applicability. Automatic factual consistency evaluation may help alleviate this limitation by accelerating evaluation cycles, filtering inconsistent outputs and augmenting training data. While attracting increasing attention, such evaluation metrics are usually developed and evaluated in silo for a single task or dataset, slowing their adoption. Moreover, previous meta-evaluation protocols focused on system-level correlations with human annotations, which leave the example-level accuracy of such metrics unclear. In this work, we introduce TRUE: a comprehensive study of factual consistency metrics on a standardized collection of existing texts from diverse tasks, manually annotated for factual consistency. Our standardization enables an example-level meta-evaluation protocol that is more actionable and interpretable than previously reported correlations, yielding clearer quality measures. Across diverse state-of-the-art metrics and 11 datasets we find that large-scale NLI and question generation-and-answering-based approaches achieve strong and complementary results. We recommend those methods as a starting point for model and metric developers, and hope TRUE will foster progress towards even better methods.

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Handling Comments in Documents through Interactions
Elnaz Nouri | Carlos Toxtli

Comments are widely used by users in collaborative documents every day. The documents’ comments enable collaborative editing and review dynamics, transforming each document into a context-sensitive communication channel. Understanding the role of comments in communication dynamics within documents is the first step towards automating their management. In this paper we propose the first ever taxonomy for different types of in-document comments based on analysis of a large scale dataset of public documents from the web. We envision that the next generation of intelligent collaborative document experiences allow interactive creation and consumption of content, there We also introduce the components necessary for developing novel tools that automate the handling of comments through natural language interaction with the documents. We identify the commands that users would use to respond to various types of comments. We train machine learning algorithms to recognize the different types of comments and assess their feasibility. We conclude by discussing some of the implications for the design of automatic document management tools.

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Task2Dial: A Novel Task and Dataset for Commonsense-enhanced Task-based Dialogue Grounded in Documents
Carl Strathearn | Dimitra Gkatzia

This paper proposes a novel task on commonsense-enhanced task-based dialogue grounded in documents and describes the Task2Dial dataset, a novel dataset of document-grounded task-based dialogues, where an Information Giver (IG) provides instructions (by consulting a document) to an Information Follower (IF), so that the latter can successfully complete the task. In this unique setting, the IF can ask clarification questions which may not be grounded in the underlying document and require commonsense knowledge to be answered. The Task2Dial dataset poses new challenges: (1) its human reference texts show more lexical richness and variation than other document-grounded dialogue datasets; (2) generating from this set requires paraphrasing as instructional responses might have been modified from the underlying document; (3) requires commonsense knowledge, since questions might not necessarily be grounded in the document; (4) generating requires planning based on context, as task steps need to be provided in order. The Task2Dial dataset contains dialogues with an average 18.15 number of turns and 19.79 tokens per turn, as compared to 12.94 and 12 respectively in existing datasets. As such, learning from this dataset promises more natural, varied and less template-like system utterances.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Dimensions of Meaning: Distributional and Curated Semantics (DistCurate 2022)

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Dimensions of Meaning: Distributional and Curated Semantics (DistCurate 2022)
Collin F. Baker

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A Descriptive Study of Metaphors and Frames in the Multilingual Shared Annotation Task
Maucha Gamonal

This work assumes that languages are structured by semantic frames, which are schematic representations of concepts. Metaphors, on the other hand, are cognitive projections between domains, which are the result of our interaction in the world, through experiences, expectations and human biology itself. In this work, we use both semantic frames and metaphors in multilingual contrast (Brazilian Portuguese, English and German). The aim is to present a descriptive study of metaphors and frames in the multilingual shared annotation task of Multilingual FrameNet, a task which consisted of using frames from Berkeley FrameNet to annotate a parallel corpora. The result shows parameters for cross-linguistic annotation considering frames and metaphors.

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Multi-sense Language Modelling
Andrea Lekkas | Peter Schneider-Kamp | Isabelle Augenstein

The effectiveness of a language model is influenced by its token representations, which must encode contextual information and handle the same word form having a plurality of meanings (polysemy). Currently, none of the common language modelling architectures explicitly model polysemy. We propose a language model which not only predicts the next word, but also its sense in context. We argue that this higher prediction granularity may be useful for end tasks such as assistive writing, and allow for more a precise linking of language models with knowledge bases. We find that multi-sense language modelling requires architectures that go beyond standard language models, and here propose a localized prediction framework that decomposes the task into a word followed by a sense prediction task. To aid sense prediction, we utilise a Graph Attention Network, which encodes definitions and example uses of word senses. Overall, we find that multi-sense language modelling is a highly challenging task, and suggest that future work focus on the creation of more annotated training datasets.

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Logical Story Representations via FrameNet + Semantic Parsing
Lane Lawley | Lenhart Schubert

We propose a means of augmenting FrameNet parsers with a formal logic parser to obtain rich semantic representations of events. These schematic representations of the frame events, which we call Episodic Logic (EL) schemas, abstract constants to variables, preserving their types and relationships to other individuals in the same text. Due to the temporal semantics of the chosen logical formalism, all identified schemas in a text are also assigned temporally bound “episodes” and related to one another in time. The semantic role information from the FrameNet frames is also incorporated into the schema’s type constraints. We describe an implementation of this method using a neural FrameNet parser, and discuss the approach’s possible applications to question answering and open-domain event schema learning.

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Comparing Distributional and Curated Approaches for Cross-lingual Frame Alignment
Collin F. Baker | Michael Ellsworth | Miriam R. L. Petruck | Arthur Lorenzi

Despite advances in statistical approaches to the modeling of meaning, many ques- tions about the ideal way of exploiting both knowledge-based (e.g., FrameNet, WordNet) and data-based methods (e.g., BERT) remain unresolved. This workshop focuses on these questions with three session papers that run the gamut from highly distributional methods (Lekkas et al., 2022), to highly curated methods (Gamonal, 2022), and techniques with statistical methods producing structured semantics (Lawley and Schubert, 2022). In addition, we begin the workshop with a small comparison of cross-lingual techniques for frame semantic alignment for one language pair (Spanish and English). None of the distributional techniques consistently aligns the 1-best frame match from English to Spanish, all failing in at least one case. Predicting which techniques will align which frames cross-linguistically is not possible from any known characteristic of the alignment technique or the frames. Although distributional techniques are a rich source of semantic information for many tasks, at present curated, knowledge-based semantics remains the only technique that can consistently align frames across languages.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Deep Learning on Graphs for Natural Language Processing (DLG4NLP 2022)

Generative commonsense reasoning (GCR) in natural language is to reason about the commonsense while generating coherent text. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in improving the generation quality of commonsense reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, these approaches have seldom investigated diversity in the GCR tasks, which aims to generate alternative explanations for a real-world situation or predict all possible outcomes. Diversifying GCR is challenging as it expects to generate multiple outputs that are not only semantically different but also grounded in commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose MoKGE, a novel method that diversifies the generative reasoning by a mixture of expert (MoE) strategy on commonsense knowledge graphs (KG). A set of knowledge experts seek diverse reasoning on KG to encourage various generation outputs. Empirical experiments demonstrated that MoKGE can significantly improve the diversity while achieving on par performance on accuracy on two GCR benchmarks, based on both automatic and human evaluations.

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Improving Neural Machine Translation with the Abstract Meaning Representation by Combining Graph and Sequence Transformers
Changmao Li | Jeffrey Flanigan

Previous studies have shown that the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) can improve Neural Machine Translation (NMT). However, there has been little work investigating incorporating AMR graphs into Transformer models. In this work, we propose a novel encoder-decoder architecture which augments the Transformer model with a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer (Yao et al., 2020) which encodes source sentence AMR graphs. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed model outperforms the Transformer model and previous non-Transformer based models on two different language pairs in both the high resource setting and low resource setting. Our source code, training corpus and released models are available at https://github.com/jlab-nlp/amr-nmt.

There has been an increasing interest in modeling continuous-time dynamics of temporal graph data. Previous methods encode time-evolving relational information into a low-dimensional representation by specifying discrete layers of neural networks, while real-world dynamic graphs often vary continuously over time. Hence, we propose Continuous Temporal Graph Networks (CTGNs) to capture continuous dynamics of temporal graph data. We use both the link starting timestamps and link duration as evolving information to model continuous dynamics of nodes. The key idea is to use neural ordinary differential equations (ODE) to characterize the continuous dynamics of node representations over dynamic graphs. We parameterize ordinary differential equations using a novel graph neural network. The existing dynamic graph networks can be considered as a specific discretization of CTGNs. Experiment results on both transductive and inductive tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach over competitive baselines.

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Scene Graph Parsing via Abstract Meaning Representation in Pre-trained Language Models
Woo Suk Choi | Yu-Jung Heo | Dharani Punithan | Byoung-Tak Zhang

In this work, we propose the application of abstract meaning representation (AMR) based semantic parsing models to parse textual descriptions of a visual scene into scene graphs, which is the first work to the best of our knowledge. Previous works examined scene graph parsing from textual descriptions using dependency parsing and left the AMR parsing approach as future work since sophisticated methods are required to apply AMR. Hence, we use pre-trained AMR parsing models to parse the region descriptions of visual scenes (i.e. images) into AMR graphs and pre-trained language models (PLM), BART and T5, to parse AMR graphs into scene graphs. The experimental results show that our approach explicitly captures high-level semantics from textual descriptions of visual scenes, such as objects, attributes of objects, and relationships between objects. Our textual scene graph parsing approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art results by 9.3% in the SPICE metric score.

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Graph Neural Networks for Adapting Off-the-shelf General Domain Language Models to Low-Resource Specialised Domains
Merieme Bouhandi | Emmanuel Morin | Thierry Hamon

Language models encode linguistic proprieties and are used as input for more specific models. Using their word representations as-is for specialised and low-resource domains might be less efficient. Methods of adapting them exist, but these models often overlook global information about how words, terms, and concepts relate to each other in a corpus due to their strong reliance on attention. We consider that global information can influence the results of the downstream tasks, and combination with contextual information is performed using graph convolution networks or GCN built on vocabulary graphs. By outperforming baselines, we show that this architecture is profitable for domain-specific tasks.

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GraDA: Graph Generative Data Augmentation for Commonsense Reasoning
Adyasha Maharana | Mohit Bansal

Recent advances in commonsense reasoning have been fueled by the availability of large-scale human annotated datasets. Manual annotation of such datasets, many of which are based on existing knowledge bases, is expensive and not scalable. Moreover, it is challenging to build augmentation data for commonsense reasoning because the synthetic questions need to adhere to real-world scenarios. Hence, we present GraDA, a graph-generative data augmentation framework to synthesize factual data samples from knowledge graphs for commonsense reasoning datasets. First, we train a graph-to-text model for conditional generation of questions from graph entities and relations. Then, we train a generator with GAN loss to generate distractors for synthetic questions. Our approach improves performance for SocialIQA, CODAH, HellaSwag and CommonsenseQA, and works well for generative tasks like ProtoQA. We show improvement in robustness to semantic adversaries after training with GraDA and provide human evaluation of the quality of synthetic datasets in terms of factuality and answerability. Our work provides evidence and encourages future research into graph-based generative data augmentation.

Multi-label text classification (MLTC) is an attractive and challenging task in natural language processing (NLP). Compared with single-label text classification, MLTC has a wider range of applications in practice. In this paper, we propose a label-interpretable graph convolutional network model to solve the MLTC problem by modeling tokens and labels as nodes in a heterogeneous graph. In this way, we are able to take into account multiple relationships including token-level relationships. Besides, the model allows better interpretability for predicted labels as the token-label edges are exposed. We evaluate our method on four real-world datasets and it achieves competitive scores against selected baseline methods. Specifically, this model achieves a gain of 0.14 on the F1 score in the small label set MLTC, and 0.07 in the large label set scenario.

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Explicit Graph Reasoning Fusing Knowledge and Contextual Information for Multi-hop Question Answering
Zhenyun Deng | Yonghua Zhu | Qianqian Qi | Michael Witbrock | Patricia Riddle

Current graph-neural-network-based (GNN-based) approaches to multi-hop questions integrate clues from scattered paragraphs in an entity graph, achieving implicit reasoning by synchronous update of graph node representations using information from neighbours; this is poorly suited for explaining how clues are passed through the graph in hops. In this paper, we describe a structured Knowledge and contextual Information Fusion GNN (KIFGraph) whose explicit multi-hop graph reasoning mimics human step by step reasoning. Specifically, we first integrate clues at multiple levels of granularity (question, paragraph, sentence, entity) as nodes in the graph, connected by edges derived using structured semantic knowledge, then use a contextual encoder to obtain the initial node representations, followed by step-by-step two-stage graph reasoning that asynchronously updates node representations. Each node can be related to its neighbour nodes through fused structured knowledge and contextual information, reliably integrating their answer clues. Moreover, a masked attention mechanism (MAM) filters out noisy or redundant nodes and edges, to avoid ineffective clue propagation in graph reasoning. Experimental results show performance competitive with published models on the HotpotQA dataset.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

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BERT-Based Sequence Labelling Approach for Dependency Parsing in Tamil
C S Ayush Kumar | Advaith Maharana | Srinath Murali | Premjith B | Soman Kp

Dependency parsing is a method for doing surface-level syntactic analysis on natural language texts. The scarcity of any viable tools for doing these tasks in Dravidian Languages has introduced a new line of research into these topics. This paper focuses on a novel approach that uses word-to-word dependency tagging using BERT models to improve the malt parser performance. We used Tamil, a morphologically rich and free word language. The individual words are tokenized using BERT models and the dependency relations are recognized using Machine Learning Algorithms. Oversampling algorithms such as SMOTE (Chawla et al., 2002) and ADASYN (He et al., 2008) are used to tackle data imbalance and consequently improve parsing results. The results obtained are used in the malt parser and this can be accustomed to further highlight that feature-based approaches can be used for such tasks.

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A Dataset for Detecting Humor in Telugu Social Media Text
Sriphani Bellamkonda | Maithili Lohakare | Shaswat Patel

Increased use of online social media sites has given rise to tremendous amounts of user generated data. Social media sites have become a platform where users express and voice their opinions in a real-time environment. Social media sites such as Twitter limit the number of characters used to express a thought in a tweet, leading to increased use of creative, humorous and confusing language in order to convey the message. Due to this, automatic humor detection has become a difficult task, especially for low-resource languages such as the Dravidian languages. Humor detection has been a well studied area for resource rich languages due to the availability of rich and accurate data. In this paper, we have attempted to solve this issue by working on low-resource languages, such as, Telugu, a Dravidian language, by collecting and annotating Telugu tweets and performing automatic humor detection on the collected data. We experimented on the corpus using various transformer models such as Multilingual BERT, Multilingual DistillBERT and XLM-RoBERTa to establish a baseline classification system. We concluded that XLM-RoBERTa was the best-performing model and it achieved an F1-score of 0.82 with 81.5% accuracy.

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MuCoT: Multilingual Contrastive Training for Question-Answering in Low-resource Languages
Gokul Karthik Kumar | Abhishek Gehlot | Sahal Shaji Mullappilly | Karthik Nandakumar

Accuracy of English-language Question Answering (QA) systems has improved significantly in recent years with the advent of Transformer-based models (e.g., BERT). These models are pre-trained in a self-supervised fashion with a large English text corpus and further fine-tuned with a massive English QA dataset (e.g., SQuAD). However, QA datasets on such a scale are not available for most of the other languages. Multi-lingual BERT-based models (mBERT) are often used to transfer knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. Since these models are pre-trained with huge text corpora containing multiple languages, they typically learn language-agnostic embeddings for tokens from different languages. However, directly training an mBERT-based QA system for low-resource languages is challenging due to the paucity of training data. In this work, we augment the QA samples of the target language using translation and transliteration into other languages and use the augmented data to fine-tune an mBERT-based QA model, which is already pre-trained in English. Experiments on the Google ChAII dataset show that fine-tuning the mBERT model with translations from the same language family boosts the question-answering performance, whereas the performance degrades in the case of cross-language families. We further show that introducing a contrastive loss between the translated question-context feature pairs during the fine-tuning process, prevents such degradation with cross-lingual family translations and leads to marginal improvement. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/gokulkarthik/mucot.

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TamilATIS: Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialog in Tamil
Ramaneswaran S | Sanchit Vijay | Kathiravan Srinivasan

Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems allow users to accomplish tasks by giving directions to the system using natural language utterances. With the widespread adoption of conversational agents and chat platforms, TOD has become mainstream in NLP research today. However, developing TOD systems require massive amounts of data, and there has been limited work done for TOD in low-resource languages like Tamil. Towards this objective, we introduce TamilATIS - a TOD dataset for Tamil which contains 4874 utterances. We present a detailed account of the entire data collection and data annotation process. We train state-of-the-art NLU models and report their performances. The joint BERT model with XLM-Roberta as utterance encoder achieved the highest score with an intent accuracy of 96.26% and slot F1 of 94.01%.

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DE-ABUSE@TamilNLP-ACL 2022: Transliteration as Data Augmentation for Abuse Detection in Tamil
Vasanth Palanikumar | Sean Benhur | Adeep Hande | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi

With the rise of social media and internet, thereis a necessity to provide an inclusive space andprevent the abusive topics against any gender,race or community. This paper describes thesystem submitted to the ACL-2022 shared taskon fine-grained abuse detection in Tamil. In ourapproach we transliterated code-mixed datasetas an augmentation technique to increase thesize of the data. Using this method we wereable to rank 3rd on the task with a 0.290 macroaverage F1 score and a 0.590 weighted F1score

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UMUTeam@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Emotional Analysis in Tamil
José García-Díaz | Miguel Ángel Rodríguez García | Rafael Valencia-García

This working notes summarises the participation of the UMUTeam on the TamilNLP (ACL 2022) shared task concerning emotion analysis in Tamil. We participated in the two multi-classification challenges proposed with a neural network that combines linguistic features with different feature sets based on contextual and non-contextual sentence embeddings. Our proposal achieved the 1st result for the second subtask, with an f1-score of 15.1% discerning among 30 different emotions. However, our results for the first subtask were not recorded in the official leader board. Accordingly, we report our results for this subtask with the validation split, reaching a macro f1-score of 32.360%.

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UMUTeam@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Abusive Detection in Tamil using Linguistic Features and Transformers
José García-Díaz | Manuel Valencia-Garcia | Rafael Valencia-García

Social media has become a dangerous place as bullies take advantage of the anonymity the Internet provides to target and intimidate vulnerable individuals and groups. In the past few years, the research community has focused on developing automatic classification tools for detecting hate-speech, its variants, and other types of abusive behaviour. However, these methods are still at an early stage in low-resource languages. With the aim of reducing this barrier, the TamilNLP shared task has proposed a multi-classification challenge for Tamil written in Tamil script and code-mixed to detect abusive comments and hope-speech. Our participation consists of a knowledge integration strategy that combines sentence embeddings from BERT, RoBERTa, FastText and a subset of language-independent linguistic features. We achieved our best result in code-mixed, reaching 3rd position with a macro-average f1-score of 35%.

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hate-alert@DravidianLangTech-ACL2022: Ensembling Multi-Modalities for Tamil TrollMeme Classification
Mithun Das | Somnath Banerjee | Animesh Mukherjee

Social media platforms often act as breeding grounds for various forms of trolling or malicious content targeting users or communities. One way of trolling users is by creating memes, which in most cases unites an image with a short piece of text embedded on top of it. The situation is more complex for multilingual(e.g., Tamil) memes due to the lack of benchmark datasets and models. We explore several models to detect Troll memes in Tamil based on the shared task, “Troll Meme Classification in DravidianLangTech2022” at ACL-2022. We observe while the text-based model MURIL performs better for Non-troll meme classification, the image-based model VGG16 performs better for Troll-meme classification. Further fusing these two modalities help us achieve stable outcomes in both classes. Our fusion model achieved a 0.561 weighted average F1 score and ranked second in this task.

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JudithJeyafreedaAndrew@TamilNLP-ACL2022:CNN for Emotion Analysis in Tamil
Judith Jeyafreeda Andrew

Using technology for analysis of human emotion is a relatively nascent research area. There are several types of data where emotion recognition can be employed, such as - text, images, audio and video. In this paper, the focus is on emotion recognition in text data. Emotion recognition in text can be performed from both written comments and from conversations. In this paper, the dataset used for emotion recognition is a list of comments. While extensive research is being performed in this area, the language of the text plays a very important role. In this work, the focus is on the Dravidian language of Tamil. The language and its script demands an extensive pre-processing. The paper contributes to this by adapting various pre-processing methods to the Dravidian Language of Tamil. A CNN method has been adopted for the task at hand. The proposed method has achieved a comparable result.

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MUCIC@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil Language using 1D Conv-LSTM
Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi | Anusha Gowda | Hosahalli Shashirekha | Grigori Sidorov

Abusive language content such as hate speech, profanity, and cyberbullying etc., which is common in online platforms is creating lot of problems to the users as well as policy makers. Hence, detection of such abusive language in user-generated online content has become increasingly important over the past few years. Online platforms strive hard to moderate the abusive content to reduce societal harm, comply with laws, and create a more inclusive environment for their users. In spite of various methods to automatically detect abusive languages in online platforms, the problem still persists. To address the automatic detection of abusive languages in online platforms, this paper describes the models submitted by our team - MUCIC to the shared task on “Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil-ACL 2022”. This shared task addresses the abusive comment detection in native Tamil script texts and code-mixed Tamil texts. To address this challenge, two models: i) n-gram-Multilayer Perceptron (n-gram-MLP) model utilizing MLP classifier fed with char-n gram features and ii) 1D Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (1D Conv-LSTM) model, were submitted. The n-gram-MLP model fared well among these two models with weighted F1-scores of 0.560 and 0.430 for code-mixed Tamil and native Tamil script texts, respectively. This work may be reproduced using the code available in https://github.com/anushamdgowda/abusive-detection.

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CEN-Tamil@DravidianLangTech-ACL2022: Abusive Comment detection in Tamil using TF-IDF and Random Kitchen Sink Algorithm
Prasanth S N | R Aswin Raj | Adhithan P | Premjith B | Soman Kp

This paper describes the approach of team CEN-Tamil used for abusive comment detection in Tamil. This task aims to identify whether a given comment contains abusive comments. We used TF-IDF with char-wb analyzers with Random Kitchen Sink (RKS) algorithm to create feature vectors and the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier with polynomial kernel for classification. We used this method for both Tamil and Tamil-English datasets and secured first place with an f1-score of 0.32 and seventh place with an f1-score of 0.25, respectively. The code for our approach is shared in the GitHub repository.

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NITK-IT_NLP@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Transformer based model for Toxic Span Identification in Tamil
Hariharan LekshmiAmmal | Manikandan Ravikiran | Anand Kumar Madasamy

Toxic span identification in Tamil is a shared task that focuses on identifying harmful content, contributing to offensiveness. In this work, we have built a model that can efficiently identify the span of text contributing to offensive content. We have used various transformer-based models to develop the system, out of which the fine-tuned MuRIL model was able to achieve the best overall character F1-score of 0.4489.

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TeamX@DravidianLangTech-ACL2022: A Comparative Analysis for Troll-Based Meme Classification
Rabindra Nath Nandi | Firoj Alam | Preslav Nakov

The spread of fake news, propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and harmful content online raised concerns among social mediaplatforms, government agencies, policymakers, and society as a whole. This is because such harmful or abusive content leads to several consequences to people such as physical, emotional, relational, and financial. Among different harmful content trolling-based online content is one of them, where the idea is to post a message that is provocative, offensive, or menacing with an intent to mislead the audience. The content can be textual, visual, a combination of both, or a meme. In this study, we provide a comparative analysis of troll-based memes classification using the textual, visual, and multimodal content. We report several interesting findings in terms of code-mixed text, multimodal setting, and combining an additional dataset, which shows improvements over the majority baseline.

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GJG@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Emotion Analysis and Classification in Tamil using Transformers
Janvi Prasad | Gaurang Prasad | Gunavathi C

This paper describes the systems built by our team for the “Emotion Analysis in Tamil” shared task at the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages at ACL 2022. There were two multi-class classification sub-tasks as a part of this shared task. The dataset for sub-task A contained 11 types of emotions while sub-task B was more fine-grained with 31 emotions. We fine-tuned an XLM-RoBERTa and DeBERTA base model for each sub-task. For sub-task A, the XLM-RoBERTa model achieved an accuracy of 0.46 and the DeBERTa model achieved an accuracy of 0.45. We had the best classification performance out of 11 teams for sub-task A. For sub-task B, the XLM-RoBERTa model’s accuracy was 0.33 and the DeBERTa model had an accuracy of 0.26. We ranked 2nd out of 7 teams for sub-task B.

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GJG@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Using Transformers for Abusive Comment Classification in Tamil
Gaurang Prasad | Janvi Prasad | Gunavathi C

This paper presents transformer-based models for the “Abusive Comment Detection” shared task at the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages at ACL 2022. Our team participated in both the multi-class classification sub-tasks as a part of this shared task. The dataset for sub-task A was in Tamil text; while B was code-mixed Tamil-English text. Both the datasets contained 8 classes of abusive comments. We trained an XLM-RoBERTa and DeBERTA base model on the training splits for each sub-task. For sub-task A, the XLM-RoBERTa model achieved an accuracy of 0.66 and the DeBERTa model achieved an accuracy of 0.62. For sub-task B, both the models achieved a classification accuracy of 0.72; however, the DeBERTa model performed better in other classification metrics. Our team ranked 2nd in the code-mixed classification sub-task and 8th in Tamil-text sub-task.

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IIITDWD@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Transformer-based approach to classify abusive content in Dravidian Code-mixed text
Shankar Biradar | Sunil Saumya

Identifying abusive content or hate speech in social media text has raised the research community’s interest in recent times. The major driving force behind this is the widespread use of social media websites. Further, it also leads to identifying abusive content in low-resource regional languages, which is an important research problem in computational linguistics. As part of ACL-2022, organizers of DravidianLangTech@ACL 2022 have released a shared task on abusive category identification in Tamil and Tamil-English code-mixed text to encourage further research on offensive content identification in low-resource Indic languages. This paper presents the working notes for the model submitted by IIITDWD at DravidianLangTech@ACL 2022. Our team competed in Sub-Task B and finished in 9th place among the participating teams. In our proposed approach, we used a pre-trained transformer model such as Indic-bert for feature extraction, and on top of that, SVM classifier is used for stance detection. Further, our model achieved 62 % accuracy on code-mixed Tamil-English text.

As the world around us continues to become increasingly digital, it has been acknowledged that there is a growing need for emotion analysis of social media content. The task of identifying the emotion in a given text has many practical applications ranging from screening public health to business and management. In this paper, we propose a language-agnostic model that focuses on emotion analysis in Tamil text. Our experiments yielded an F1-score of 0.010.

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PANDAS@Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil Code-Mixed Data Using Custom Embeddings with LaBSE
Gayathri G L | Krithika Swaminathan | Divyasri K | Thenmozhi Durairaj | Bharathi B

Abusive language has lately been prevalent in comments on various social media platforms. The increasing hostility observed on the internet calls for the creation of a system that can identify and flag such acerbic content, to prevent conflict and mental distress. This task becomes more challenging when low-resource languages like Tamil, as well as the often-observed Tamil-English code-mixed text, are involved. The approach used in this paper for the classification model includes different methods of feature extraction and the use of traditional classifiers. We propose a novel method of combining language-agnostic sentence embeddings with the TF-IDF vector representation that uses a curated corpus of words as vocabulary, to create a custom embedding, which is then passed to an SVM classifier. Our experimentation yielded an accuracy of 52% and an F1-score of 0.54.

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Translation Techies @DravidianLangTech-ACL2022-Machine Translation in Dravidian Languages
Piyushi Goyal | Musica Supriya | Dinesh U | Ashalatha Nayak

This paper discusses the details of submission made by team Translation Techies to the Shared Task on Machine Translation in Dravidian languages- ACL 2022. In connection to the task, five language pairs were provided to test the accuracy of submitted model. A baseline transformer model with Neural Machine Translation(NMT) technique is used which has been taken directly from the OpenNMT framework. On this baseline model, tokenization is applied using the IndicNLP library. Finally, the evaluation is performed using the BLEU scoring mechanism.

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SSNCSE_NLP@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Transformer based approach for Emotion analysis in Tamil language
Bharathi B | Josephine Varsha

Emotion analysis is the process of identifying and analyzing the underlying emotions expressed in textual data. Identifying emotions from a textual conversation is a challenging task due to the absence of gestures, vocal intonation, and facial expressions. Once the chatbots and messengers detect and report the emotions of the user, a comfortable conversation can be carried out with no misunderstandings. Our task is to categorize text into a predefined notion of emotion. In this thesis, it is required to classify text into several emotional labels depending on the task. We have adopted the transformer model approach to identify the emotions present in the text sequence. Our task is to identify whether a given comment contains emotion, and the emotion it stands for. The datasets were provided to us by the LT-EDI organizers (CITATION) for two tasks, in the Tamil language. We have evaluated the datasets using the pretrained transformer models and we have obtained the micro-averaged F1 scores as 0.19 and 0.12 for Task1 and Task 2 respectively.

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SSN_MLRG1@DravidianLangTech-ACL2022: Troll Meme Classification in Tamil using Transformer Models
Shruthi Hariprasad | Sarika Esackimuthu | Saritha Madhavan | Rajalakshmi Sivanaiah | Angel S

The ACL shared task of DravidianLangTech-2022 for Troll Meme classification is a binary classification task that involves identifying Tamil memes as troll or not-troll. Classification of memes is a challenging task since memes express humour and sarcasm in an implicit way. Team SSN_MLRG1 tested and compared results obtained by using three models namely BERT, ALBERT and XLNET. The XLNet model outperformed the other two models in terms of various performance metrics. The proposed XLNet model obtained the 3rd rank in the shared task with a weighted F1-score of 0.558.

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BpHigh@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Effects of Data Augmentation on Indic-Transformer based classifier for Abusive Comments Detection in Tamil
Bhavish Pahwa

Social Media platforms have grown their reach worldwide. As an effect of this growth, many vernacular social media platforms have also emerged, focusing more on the diverse languages in the specific regions. Tamil has also emerged as a popular language for use on social media platforms due to the increasing penetration of vernacular media like Sharechat and Moj, which focus more on local Indian languages than English and encourage their users to converse in Indic languages. Abusive language remains a significant challenge in the social media framework and more so when we consider languages like Tamil, which are low-resource languages and have poor performance on multilingual models and lack language-specific models. Based on this shared task, “Abusive Comment detection in Tamil@DravidianLangTech-ACL 2022”, we present an exploration of different techniques used to tackle and increase the accuracy of our models using data augmentation in NLP. We also show the results of these techniques.

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MUCS@DravidianLangTech@ACL2022: Ensemble of Logistic Regression Penalties to Identify Emotions in Tamil Text
Asha Hegde | Sharal Coelho | Hosahalli Shashirekha

Emotion Analysis (EA) is the process of automatically analyzing and categorizing the input text into one of the predefined sets of emotions. In recent years, people have turned to social media to express their emotions, opinions or feelings about news, movies, products, services, and so on. These users’ emotions may help the public, governments, business organizations, film producers, and others in devising strategies, making decisions, and so on. The increasing number of social media users and the increasing amount of user generated text containing emotions on social media demands automated tools for the analysis of such data as handling this data manually is labor intensive and error prone. Further, the characteristics of social media data makes the EA challenging. Most of the EA research works have focused on English language leaving several Indian languages including Tamil unexplored for this task. To address the challenges of EA in Tamil texts, in this paper, we - team MUCS, describe the model submitted to the shared task on Emotion Analysis in Tamil at DravidianLangTech@ACL 2022. Out of the two subtasks in this shared task, our team submitted the model only for Task a. The proposed model comprises of an Ensemble of Logistic Regression (LR) classifiers with three penalties, namely: L1, L2, and Elasticnet. This Ensemble model trained with Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) of character bigrams and trigrams secured 4th rank in Task a with a macro averaged F1-score of 0.04. The code to reproduce the proposed models is available in github1.

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BPHC@DravidianLangTech-ACL2022-A comparative analysis of classical and pre-trained models for troll meme classification in Tamil
Achyuta V | Mithun Kumar S R | Aruna Malapati | Lov Kumar

Trolling refers to any user behaviour on the internet to intentionally provoke or instigate conflict predominantly in social media. This paper aims to classify troll meme captions in Tamil-English code-mixed form. Embeddings are obtained for raw code-mixed text and the translated and transliterated version of the text and their relative performances are compared. Furthermore, this paper compares the performances of 11 different classification algorithms using Accuracy and F1- Score. We conclude that we were able to achieve a weighted F1 score of 0.74 through MuRIL pretrained model.

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SSNCSE NLP@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Transformer based approach for detection of abusive comment for Tamil language
Bharathi B | Josephine Varsha

Social media platforms along with many other public forums on the Internet have shown a significant rise in the cases of abusive behavior such as Misogynism, Misandry, Homophobia, and Cyberbullying. To tackle these concerns, technologies are being developed and applied, as it is a tedious and time-consuming task to identify, report and block these offenders. Our task was to automate the process of identifying abusive comments and classify them into appropriate categories. The datasets provided by the DravidianLangTech@ACL2022 organizers were a code-mixed form of Tamil text. We trained the datasets using pre-trained transformer models such as BERT,m-BERT, and XLNET and achieved a weighted average of F1 scores of 0.96 for Tamil-English code mixed text and 0.59 for Tamil text.

In this paper, we present our system for the task of Emotion analysis in Tamil. Over 3.96 million people use these platforms to send messages formed using texts, images, videos, audio or combinations of these to express their thoughts and feelings. Text communication on social media platforms is quite overwhelming due to its enormous quantity and simplicity. The data must be processed to understand the general feeling felt by the author. We present a lexicon-based approach for the extraction emotion in Tamil texts. We use dictionaries of words labelled with their respective emotions. The process of assigning an emotional label to each text, and then capture the main emotion expressed in it. Finally, the F1-score in the official test set is 0.0300 and our method ranks 5th.

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CUET-NLP@DravidianLangTech-ACL2022: Investigating Deep Learning Techniques to Detect Multimodal Troll Memes
Md Hasan | Nusratul Jannat | Eftekhar Hossain | Omar Sharif | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

With the substantial rise of internet usage, social media has become a powerful communication medium to convey information, opinions, and feelings on various issues. Recently, memes have become a popular way of sharing information on social media. Usually, memes are visuals with text incorporated into them and quickly disseminate hatred and offensive content. Detecting or classifying memes is challenging due to their region-specific interpretation and multimodal nature. This work presents a meme classification technique in Tamil developed by the CUET NLP team under the shared task (DravidianLangTech-ACL2022). Several computational models have been investigated to perform the classification task. This work also explored visual and textual features using VGG16, ResNet50, VGG19, CNN and CNN+LSTM models. Multimodal features are extracted by combining image (VGG16) and text (CNN, LSTM+CNN) characteristics. Results demonstrate that the textual strategy with CNN+LSTM achieved the highest weighted f₁-score (0.52) and recall (0.57). Moreover, the CNN-Text+VGG16 outperformed the other models concerning the multimodal memes detection by achieving the highest f₁-score of 0.49, but the LSTM+CNN model allowed the team to achieve 4^th place in the shared task.

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PICT@DravidianLangTech-ACL2022: Neural Machine Translation On Dravidian Languages
Aditya Vyawahare | Rahul Tangsali | Aditya Mandke | Onkar Litake | Dipali Kadam

This paper presents a summary of the findings that we obtained based on the shared task on machine translation of Dravidian languages. As a part of this shared task, we carried out neural machine translations for the following five language pairs: Kannada to Tamil, Kannada to Telugu, Kannada to Malayalam, Kannada to Sanskrit, and Kannada to Tulu. The datasets for each of the five language pairs were used to train various translation models, including Seq2Seq models such as LSTM, bidirectional LSTM, Conv Seq2Seq, and training state-of-the-art as transformers from scratch, and fine-tuning already pre-trained models. For some models involving monolingual corpora, we implemented backtranslation as well. These models’ accuracy was later tested with a part of the same dataset using BLEU score as an evaluation metric.

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Sentiment Analysis on Code-Switched Dravidian Languages with Kernel Based Extreme Learning Machines
Mithun Kumar S R | Lov Kumar | Aruna Malapati

Code-switching refers to the textual or spoken data containing multiple languages. Application of natural language processing (NLP) tasks like sentiment analysis is a harder problem on code-switched languages due to the irregularities in the sentence structuring and ordering. This paper shows the experiment results of building a Kernel based Extreme Learning Machines(ELM) for sentiment analysis for code-switched Dravidian languages with English. Our results show that ELM performs better than traditional machine learning classifiers on various metrics as well as trains faster than deep learning models. We also show that Polynomial kernels perform better than others in the ELM architecture. We were able to achieve a median AUC of 0.79 with a polynomial kernel.

With the proliferation of internet usage, a massive growth of consumer-generated content on social media has been witnessed in recent years that provide people’s opinions on diverse issues. Through social media, users can convey their emotions and thoughts in distinctive forms such as text, image, audio, video, and emoji, which leads to the advancement of the multimodality of the content users on social networking sites. This paper presents a technique for classifying multimodal sentiment using the text modality into five categories: highly positive, positive, neutral, negative, and highly negative categories. A shared task was organized to develop models that can identify the sentiments expressed by the videos of movie reviewers in both Malayalam and Tamil languages. This work applied several machine learning techniques (LR, DT, MNB, SVM) and deep learning (BiLSTM, CNN+BiLSTM) to accomplish the task. Results demonstrate that the proposed model with the decision tree (DT) outperformed the other methods and won the competition by acquiring the highest macro f₁-score of 0.24.

Recently, emotion analysis has gained increased attention by NLP researchers due to its various applications in opinion mining, e-commerce, comprehensive search, healthcare, personalized recommendations and online education. Developing an intelligent emotion analysis model is challenging in resource-constrained languages like Tamil. Therefore a shared task is organized to identify the underlying emotion of a given comment expressed in the Tamil language. The paper presents our approach to classifying the textual emotion in Tamil into 11 classes: ambiguous, anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, love, neutral, sadness, surprise and trust. We investigated various machine learning (LR, DT, MNB, SVM), deep learning (CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM) and transformer-based models (Multilingual-BERT, XLM-R). Results reveal that the XLM-R model outdoes all other models by acquiring the highest macro f₁-score (0.33).

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DLRG@DravidianLangTech-ACL2022: Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil using Multilingual Transformer Models
Ratnavel Rajalakshmi | Ankita Duraphe | Antonette Shibani

Online Social Network has let people to connect and interact with each other. It does, however, also provide a platform for online abusers to propagate abusive content. The vast majority of abusive remarks are written in a multilingual style, which allows them to easily slip past internet inspection. This paper presents a system developed for the Shared Task on Abusive Comment Detection (Misogyny, Misandry, Homophobia, Transphobic, Xenophobia, CounterSpeech, Hope Speech) in Tamil DravidianLangTech@ACL 2022 to detect the abusive category of each comment. We approach the task with three methodologies - Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Transformer-based modeling, for two sets of data - Tamil and Tamil+English language dataset. The dataset used in our system can be accessed from the competition on CodaLab. For Machine Learning, eight algorithms were implemented, among which Random Forest gave the best result with Tamil+English dataset, with a weighted average F1-score of 0.78. For Deep Learning, Bi-Directional LSTM gave best result with pre-trained word embeddings. In Transformer-based modeling, we used IndicBERT and mBERT with fine-tuning, among which mBERT gave the best result for Tamil dataset with a weighted average F1-score of 0.7.

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Aanisha@TamilNLP-ACL2022:Abusive Detection in Tamil
Aanisha Bhattacharyya

In social media, there are instances where people present their opinions in strong language, resorting to abusive/toxic comments. There are instances of communal hatred, hate-speech, toxicity and bullying. And, in this age of social media, it’s very important to find means to keep check on these toxic comments, as to preserve the mental peace of people in social media. While there are tools, models to detect andpotentially filter these kind of content, developing these kinds of models for the low resource language space is an issue of research. In this paper, the task of abusive comment identification in Tamil language, is seen upon as a multi-class classification problem. There are different pre-processing as well as modelling approaches discussed in this paper. The different approaches are compared on the basis of weighted average accuracy.

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COMBATANT@TamilNLP-ACL2022: Fine-grained Categorization of Abusive Comments using Logistic Regression
Alamgir Hossain | Mahathir Bishal | Eftekhar Hossain | Omar Sharif | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

With the widespread usage of social media and effortless internet access, millions of posts and comments are generated every minute. Unfortunately, with this substantial rise, the usage of abusive language has increased significantly in these mediums. This proliferation leads to many hazards such as cyber-bullying, vulgarity, online harassment and abuse. Therefore, it becomes a crucial issue to detect and mitigate the usage of abusive language. This work presents our system developed as part of the shared task to detect the abusive language in Tamil. We employed three machine learning (LR, DT, SVM), two deep learning (CNN+BiLSTM, CNN+BiLSTM with FastText) and a transformer-based model (Indic-BERT). The experimental results show that Logistic regression (LR) and CNN+BiLSTM models outperformed the others. Both Logistic Regression (LR) and CNN+BiLSTM with FastText achieved the weighted F₁-score of 0.39. However, LR obtained a higher recall value (0.44) than CNN+BiLSTM (0.36). This leads us to stand the 2^nd rank in the shared task competition.

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Optimize_Prime@DravidianLangTech-ACL2022: Emotion Analysis in Tamil
Omkar Gokhale | Shantanu Patankar | Onkar Litake | Aditya Mandke | Dipali Kadam

This paper aims to perform an emotion analysis of social media comments in Tamil. Emotion analysis is the process of identifying the emotional context of the text. In this paper, we present the findings obtained by Team Optimize_Prime in the ACL 2022 shared task “Emotion Analysis in Tamil.” The task aimed to classify social media comments into categories of emotion like Joy, Anger, Trust, Disgust, etc. The task was further divided into two subtasks, one with 11 broad categories of emotions and the other with 31 specific categories of emotion. We implemented three different approaches to tackle this problem: transformer-based models, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Ensemble models. XLM-RoBERTa performed the best on the first task with a macro-averaged f1 score of 0.27, while MuRIL provided the best results on the second task with a macro-averaged f1 score of 0.13.

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Optimize_Prime@DravidianLangTech-ACL2022: Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil
Shantanu Patankar | Omkar Gokhale | Onkar Litake | Aditya Mandke | Dipali Kadam

This paper tries to address the problem of abusive comment detection in low-resource indic languages. Abusive comments are statements that are offensive to a person or a group of people. These comments are targeted toward individuals belonging to specific ethnicities, genders, caste, race, sexuality, etc. Abusive Comment Detection is a significant problem, especially with the recent rise in social media users. This paper presents the approach used by our team — Optimize_Prime, in the ACL 2022 shared task “Abusive Comment Detection in Tamil.” This task detects and classifies YouTube comments in Tamil and Tamil-English Codemixed format into multiple categories. We have used three methods to optimize our results: Ensemble models, Recurrent Neural Networks, and Transformers. In the Tamil data, MuRIL and XLM-RoBERTA were our best performing models with a macro-averaged f1 score of 0.43. Furthermore, for the Code-mixed data, MuRIL and M-BERT provided sublime results, with a macro-averaged f1 score of 0.45.

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Zero-shot Code-Mixed Offensive Span Identification through Rationale Extraction
Manikandan Ravikiran | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi

This paper investigates the effectiveness of sentence-level transformers for zero-shot offensive span identification on a code-mixed Tamil dataset. More specifically, we evaluate rationale extraction methods of Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Explanations (LIME) (CITATION) and Integrated Gradients (IG) (CITATION) for adapting transformer based offensive language classification models for zero-shot offensive span identification. To this end, we find that LIME and IG show baseline F₁ of 26.35% and 44.83%, respectively. Besides, we study the effect of data set size and training process on the overall accuracy of span identification. As a result, we find both LIME and IG to show significant improvement with Masked Data Augmentation and Multilabel Training, with F₁ of 50.23% and 47.38% respectively. Disclaimer : This paper contains examples that may be considered profane, vulgar, or offensive. The examples do not represent the views of the authors or their employers/graduate schools towards any person(s), group(s), practice(s), or entity/entities. Instead they are used to emphasize only the linguistic research challenges.

Identifying offensive speech is an exciting andessential area of research, with ample tractionin recent times. This paper presents our sys-tem submission to the subtask 1, focusing onusing supervised approaches for extracting Of-fensive spans from code-mixed Tamil-Englishcomments. To identify offensive spans, wedeveloped the Bidirectional Long Short-TermMemory (BiLSTM) model with Glove Em-bedding. To this end, the developed systemachieved an overall F1 of 0.1728. Addition-ally, for comments with less than 30 characters,the developed system shows an F1 of 0.3890,competitive with other submissions.

This paper presents the findings of the shared task on Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Troll meme classification in Dravidian languages held at ACL 2022. Multimodal sentiment analysis deals with the identification of sentiment from video. In addition to video data, the task requires the analysis of corresponding text and audio features for the classification of movie reviews into five classes. We created a dataset for this task in Malayalam and Tamil. The Troll meme classification task aims to classify multimodal Troll memes into two categories. This task assumes the analysis of both text and image features for making better predictions. The performance of the participating teams was analysed using the F1-score. Only one team submitted their results in the Multimodal Sentiment Analysis task, whereas we received six submissions in the Troll meme classification task. The only team that participated in the Multimodal Sentiment Analysis shared task obtained an F1-score of 0.24. In the Troll meme classification task, the winning team achieved an F1-score of 0.596.

Offensive content moderation is vital in social media platforms to support healthy online discussions. However, their prevalence in code-mixed Dravidian languages is limited to classifying whole comments without identifying part of it contributing to offensiveness. Such limitation is primarily due to the lack of annotated data for offensive spans. Accordingly, in this shared task, we provide Tamil-English code-mixed social comments with offensive spans. This paper outlines the dataset so released, methods, and results of the submitted systems.

This paper presents an outline of the shared task on translation of under-resourced Dravidian languages at DravidianLangTech-2022 workshop to be held jointly with ACL 2022. A description of the datasets used, approach taken for analysis of submissions and the results have been illustrated in this paper. Five sub-tasks organized as a part of the shared task include the following translation pairs: Kannada to Tamil, Kannada to Telugu, Kannada to Sanskrit, Kannada to Malayalam and Kannada to Tulu. Training, development and test datasets were provided to all participants and results were evaluated on the gold standard datasets. A total of 16 research groups participated in the shared task and a total of 12 submission runs were made for evaluation. Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) score was used for evaluation of the translations.

This paper presents the overview of the shared task on emotional analysis in Tamil. The result of the shared task is presented at the workshop. This paper presents the dataset used in the shared task, task description, and the methodology used by the participants and the evaluation results of the submission. This task is organized as two Tasks. Task A is carried with 11 emotions annotated data for social media comments in Tamil and Task B is organized with 31 fine-grained emotion annotated data for social media comments in Tamil. For conducting experiments, training and development datasets were provided to the participants and results are evaluated for the unseen data. Totally we have received around 24 submissions from 13 teams. For evaluating the models, Precision, Recall, micro average metrics are used.

We present our findings from the first shared task on Multi-task Learning in Dravidian Languages at the second Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages. In this task, a sentence in any of three Dravidian Languages is required to be classified into two closely related tasks namely Sentiment Analyis (SA) and Offensive Language Identification (OLI). The task spans over three Dravidian Languages, namely, Kannada, Malayalam, and Tamil. It is one of the first shared tasks that focuses on Multi-task Learning for closely related tasks, especially for a very low-resourced language family such as the Dravidian language family. In total, 55 people signed up to participate in the task, and due to the intricate nature of the task, especially in its first iteration, 3 submissions have been received.

The social media is one of the significantdigital platforms that create a huge im-pact in peoples of all levels. The commentsposted on social media is powerful enoughto even change the political and businessscenarios in very few hours. They alsotend to attack a particular individual ora group of individuals. This shared taskaims at detecting the abusive comments in-volving, Homophobia, Misandry, Counter-speech, Misogyny, Xenophobia, Transpho-bic. The hope speech is also identified. Adataset collected from social media taggedwith the above said categories in Tamiland Tamil-English code-mixed languagesare given to the participants. The par-ticipants used different machine learningand deep learning algorithms. This paperpresents the overview of this task compris-ing the dataset details and results of theparticipants.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (ECNLP 5)

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DEFTri: A Few-Shot Label Fused Contextual Representation Learning For Product Defect Triage in e-Commerce
Ipsita Mohanty

Defect Triage is a time-sensitive and critical process in a large-scale agile software development lifecycle for e-commerce. Inefficiencies arising from human and process dependencies in this domain have motivated research in automated approaches using machine learning to accurately assign defects to qualified teams. This work proposes a novel framework for automated defect triage (DEFTri) using fine-tuned state-of-the-art pre-trained BERT on labels fused text embeddings to improve contextual representations from human-generated product defects. For our multi-label text classification defect triage task, we also introduce a Walmart proprietary dataset of product defects using weak supervision and adversarial learning, in a few-shot setting.

As the multi-modal e-commerce is thriving, high-quality advertising product copywriting has gain more attentions, which plays a crucial role in the e-commerce recommender, advertising and even search platforms. The advertising product copywriting is able to enhance the user experience by highlighting the product’s characteristics with textual descriptions and thus to improve the likelihood of user click and purchase. Automatically generating product copywriting has attracted noticeable interests from both academic and industrial communities, where existing solutions merely make use of a product’s title and attribute information to generate its corresponding description. However, in addition to the product title and attributes, we observe that there are various auxiliary descriptions created by the shoppers or marketers in the e-commerce platforms (namely human knowledge), which contains valuable information for product copywriting generation, yet always accompanying lots of noises. In this work, we propose a novel solution to automatically generating product copywriting that involves all the title, attributes and denoised auxiliary knowledge. To be specific, we design an end-to-end generation framework equipped with two variational autoencoders that works interactively to select informative human knowledge and generate diverse copywriting.

In a leading e-commerce business, we receive hundreds of millions of customer feedback from different text communication channels such as product reviews. The feedback can contain rich information regarding customers’ dissatisfaction in the quality of goods and services. To harness such information to better serve customers, in this paper, we created a machine learning approach to automatically identify product issues and uncover root causes from the customer feedback text. We identify issues at two levels: coarse grained (L-Coarse) and fine grained (L-Granular). We formulate this multi-level product issue identification problem as a seq2seq language generation problem. Specifically, we utilize transformer-based seq2seq models due to their versatility and strong transfer-learning capability. We demonstrate that our approach is label efficient and outperforms the traditional approach such as multi-class multi-label classification formulation. Based on human evaluation, our fine-tuned model achieves 82.1% and 95.4% human-level performance for L-Coarse and L-Granular issue identification, respectively. Furthermore, our experiments illustrate that the model can generalize to identify unseen L-Granular issues.

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Data Quality Estimation Framework for Faster Tax Code Classification
Ravi Kondadadi | Allen Williams | Nicolas Nicolov

This paper describes a novel framework to estimate the data quality of a collection of product descriptions to identify required relevant information for accurate product listing classification for tax-code assignment. Our Data Quality Estimation (DQE) framework consists of a Question Answering (QA) based attribute value extraction model to identify missing attributes and a classification model to identify bad quality records. We show that our framework can accurately predict the quality of product descriptions. In addition to identifying low-quality product listings, our framework can also generate a detailed report at a category level showing missing product information resulting in a better customer experience.

Deep neural network models are especially susceptible to noise in annotated labels. In the real world, annotated data typically contains noise caused by a variety of factors such as task difficulty, annotator experience, and annotator bias. Label quality is critical for label validation tasks; however, correcting for noise by collecting more data is often costly. In this paper, we propose a contrastive meta-learning framework (CML) to address the challenges introduced by noisy annotated data, specifically in the context of natural language processing. CML combines contrastive and meta learning to improve the quality of text feature representations. Meta-learning is also used to generate confidence scores to assess label quality. We demonstrate that a model built on CML-filtered data outperforms a model built on clean data. Furthermore, we perform experiments on deidentified commercial voice assistant datasets and demonstrate that our model outperforms several SOTA approaches.

Ensuring relevance quality in product search is a critical task as it impacts the customer’s ability to find intended products in the short-term as well as the general perception and trust of the e-commerce system in the long term. In this work we leverage a high-precision cross-encoder BERT model for semantic similarity between customer query and products and survey its effectiveness for three ranking applications where offline-generated scores could be used: (1) as an offline metric for estimating relevance quality impact, (2) as a re-ranking feature covering head/torso queries, and (3) as a training objective for optimization. We present results on effectiveness of this strategy for the large e-commerce setting, which has general applicability for choice of other high-precision models and tasks in ranking.

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Comparative Snippet Generation
Saurabh Jain | Yisong Miao | Min-Yen Kan

We model products’ reviews to generate comparative responses consisting of positive and negative experiences regarding the product. Specifically, we generate a single-sentence, comparative response from a given positive and a negative opinion. We contribute the first dataset for this task of Comparative Snippet Generation from contrasting opinions regarding a product, and an analysis of performance of a pre-trained BERT model to generate such snippets.

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Textual Content Moderation in C2C Marketplace
Yusuke Shido | Hsien-Chi Liu | Keisuke Umezawa

Automatic monitoring systems for inappropriate user-generated messages have been found to be effective in reducing human operation costs in Consumer to Consumer (C2C) marketplace services, in which customers send messages directly to other customers. We propose a lightweight neural network that takes a conversation as input, which we deployed to a production service. Our results show that the system reduced the human operation costs to less than one-sixth compared to the conventional rule-based monitoring at Mercari.

In E-commerce search, spelling correction plays an important role to find desired products for customers in processing user-typed search queries. However, resolving phonetic errors is a critical but much overlooked area. The query with phonetic spelling errors tends to appear correct based on pronunciation but is nonetheless inaccurate in spelling (e.g., “bluetooth sound system” vs. “blutut sant sistam”) with numerous noisy forms and sparse occurrences. In this work, we propose a generalized spelling correction system integrating phonetics to address phonetic errors in E-commerce search without additional latency cost. Using India (IN) E-commerce market for illustration, the experiment shows that our proposed phonetic solution significantly improves the F1 score by 9%+ and recall of phonetic errors by 8%+. This phonetic spelling correction system has been deployed to production, currently serving hundreds of millions of customers.

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Logical Reasoning for Task Oriented Dialogue Systems
Sajjad Beygi | Maryam Fazel-Zarandi | Alessandra Cervone | Prakash Krishnan | Siddhartha Jonnalagadda

In recent years, large pretrained models have been used in dialogue systems to improve successful task completion rates. However, lack of reasoning capabilities of dialogue platforms make it difficult to provide relevant and fluent responses, unless the designers of a conversational experience spend a considerable amount of time implementing these capabilities in external rule based modules. In this work, we propose a novel method to fine-tune pretrained transformer models such as Roberta and T5, to reason over a set of facts in a given dialogue context. Our method includes a synthetic data generation mechanism which helps the model learn logical relations, such as comparison between list of numerical values, inverse relations (and negation), inclusion and exclusion for categorical attributes, and application of a combination of attributes over both numerical and categorical values, and spoken form for numerical values, without need for additional training data. We show that the transformer based model can perform logical reasoning to answer questions when the dialogue context contains all the required information, otherwise it is able to extract appropriate constraints to pass to downstream components (e.g. a knowledge base) when partial information is available. We observe that transformer based models such as UnifiedQA-T5 can be fine-tuned to perform logical reasoning (such as numerical and categorical attributes’ comparison) over attributes seen at training time (e.g., accuracy of 90%+ for comparison of smaller than kmax=5 values over heldout test dataset).

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CoVA: Context-aware Visual Attention for Webpage Information Extraction
Anurendra Kumar | Keval Morabia | William Wang | Kevin Chang | Alex Schwing

Webpage information extraction (WIE) is an important step to create knowledge bases. For this, classical WIE methods leverage the Document Object Model (DOM) tree of a website. However, use of the DOM tree poses significant challenges as context and appearance are encoded in an abstract manner. To address this challenge we propose to reformulate WIE as a context-aware Webpage Object Detection task. Specifically, we develop a Context-aware Visual Attention-based (CoVA) detection pipeline which combines appearance features with syntactical structure from the DOM tree. To study the approach we collect a new large-scale datase of e-commerce websites for which we manually annotate every web element with four labels: product price, product title, product image and others. On this dataset we show that the proposed CoVA approach is a new challenging baseline which improves upon prior state-of-the-art methods.

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Product Titles-to-Attributes As a Text-to-Text Task
Gilad Fuchs | Yoni Acriche

Online marketplaces use attribute-value pairs, such as brand, size, size type, color, etc. to help define important and relevant facts about a listing. These help buyers to curate their search results using attribute filtering and overall create a richer experience. Although their critical importance for listings’ discoverability, getting sellers to input tens of different attribute-value pairs per listing is costly and often results in missing information. This can later translate to the unnecessary removal of relevant listings from the search results when buyers are filtering by attribute values. In this paper we demonstrate using a Text-to-Text hierarchical multi-label ranking model framework to predict the most relevant attributes per listing, along with their expected values, using historic user behavioral data. This solution helps sellers by allowing them to focus on verifying information on attributes that are likely to be used by buyers, and thus, increase the expected recall for their listings. Specifically for eBay’s case we show that using this model can improve the relevancy of the attribute extraction process by 33.2% compared to the current highly-optimized production system. Apart from the empirical contribution, the highly generalized nature of the framework presented in this paper makes it relevant for many high-volume search-driven websites.

It is of great value to answer product questions based on heterogeneous information sources available on web product pages, e.g., semi-structured attributes, text descriptions, user-provided contents, etc. However, these sources have different structures and writing styles, which poses challenges for (1) evidence ranking, (2) source selection, and (3) answer generation. In this paper, we build a benchmark with annotations for both evidence selection and answer generation covering 6 information sources. Based on this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive study and present a set of best practices. We show that all sources are important and contribute to answering questions. Handling all sources within one single model can produce comparable confidence scores across sources and combining multiple sources for training always helps, even for sources with totally different structures. We further propose a novel data augmentation method to iteratively create training samples for answer generation, which achieves close-to-human performance with only a few thousandannotations. Finally, we perform an in-depth error analysis of model predictions and highlight the challenges for future research.

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semiPQA: A Study on Product Question Answering over Semi-structured Data
Xiaoyu Shen | Gianni Barlacchi | Marco Del Tredici | Weiwei Cheng | Adrià Gispert

Product question answering (PQA) aims to automatically address customer questions to improve their online shopping experience. Current research mainly focuses on finding answers from either unstructured text, like product descriptions and user reviews, or structured knowledge bases with pre-defined schemas. Apart from the above two sources, a lot of product information is represented in a semi-structured way, e.g., key-value pairs, lists, tables, json and xml files, etc. These semi-structured data can be a valuable answer source since they are better organized than free text, while being easier to construct than structured knowledge bases. However, little attention has been paid to them. To fill in this blank, here we study how to effectively incorporate semi-structured answer sources for PQA and focus on presenting answers in a natural, fluent sentence. To this end, we present semiPQA: a dataset to benchmark PQA over semi-structured data. It contains 11,243 written questions about json-formatted data covering 320 unique attribute types. Each data point is paired with manually-annotated text that describes its contents, so that we can train a neural answer presenter to present the data in a natural way. We provide baseline results and a deep analysis on the successes and challenges of leveraging semi-structured data for PQA. In general, state-of-the-art neural models can perform remarkably well when dealing with seen attribute types. For unseen attribute types, however, a noticeable drop is observed for both answer presentation and attribute ranking.

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Improving Specificity in Review Response Generation with Data-Driven Data Filtering
Tannon Kew | Martin Volk

Responding to online customer reviews has become an essential part of successfully managing and growing a business both in e-commerce and the hospitality and tourism sectors. Recently, neural text generation methods intended to assist authors in composing responses have been shown to deliver highly fluent and natural looking texts. However, they also tend to learn a strong, undesirable bias towards generating overly generic, one-size-fits-all outputs to a wide range of inputs. While this often results in ‘safe’, high-probability responses, there are many practical settings in which greater specificity is preferable. In this work we examine the task of generating more specific responses for online reviews in the hospitality domain by identifying generic responses in the training data, filtering them and fine-tuning the generation model. We experiment with a range of data-driven filtering methods and show through automatic and human evaluation that, despite a 60% reduction in the amount of training data, filtering helps to derive models that are capable of generating more specific, useful responses.

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Extreme Multi-Label Classification with Label Masking for Product Attribute Value Extraction
Wei-Te Chen | Yandi Xia | Keiji Shinzato

Although most studies have treated attribute value extraction (AVE) as named entity recognition, these approaches are not practical in real-world e-commerce platforms because they perform poorly, and require canonicalization of extracted values. Furthermore, since values needed for actual services is static in many attributes, extraction of new values is not always necessary. Given the above, we formalize AVE as extreme multi-label classification (XMC). A major problem in solving AVE as XMC is that the distribution between positive and negative labels for products is heavily imbalanced. To mitigate the negative impact derived from such biased distribution, we propose label masking, a simple and effective method to reduce the number of negative labels in training. We exploit attribute taxonomy designed for e-commerce platforms to determine which labels are negative for products. Experimental results using a dataset collected from a Japanese e-commerce platform demonstrate that the label masking improves micro and macro F₁ scores by 3.38 and 23.20 points, respectively.

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Enhanced Representation with Contrastive Loss for Long-Tail Query Classification in e-commerce
Lvxing Zhu | Hao Chen | Chao Wei | Weiru Zhang

Query classification is a fundamental task in an e-commerce search engine, which assigns one or multiple predefined product categories in response to each search query. Taking click-through logs as training data in deep learning methods is a common and effective approach for query classification. However, the frequency distribution of queries typically has long-tail property, which means that there are few logs for most of the queries. The lack of reliable user feedback information results in worse performance of long-tail queries compared with frequent queries. To solve the above problem, we propose a novel method that leverages an auxiliary module to enhance the representations of long-tail queries by taking advantage of reliable supervised information of variant frequent queries. The long-tail queries are guided by the contrastive loss to obtain category-aligned representations in the auxiliary module, where the variant frequent queries serve as anchors in the representation space. We train our model with real-world click data from AliExpress and conduct evaluation on both offline labeled data and online AB test. The results and further analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

We demonstrate that knowledge distillation can be used not only to reduce model size, but to simultaneously adapt a contextual language model to a specific domain. We use Multilingual BERT (mBERT; Devlin et al., 2019) as a starting point and follow the knowledge distillation approach of (Sahn et al., 2019) to train a smaller multilingual BERT model that is adapted to the domain at hand. We show that for in-domain tasks, the domain-specific model shows on average 2.3% improvement in F1 score, relative to a model distilled on domain-general data. Whereas much previous work with BERT has fine-tuned the encoder weights during task training, we show that the model improvements from distillation on in-domain data persist even when the encoder weights are frozen during task training, allowing a single encoder to support classifiers for multiple tasks and languages.

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OpenBrand: Open Brand Value Extraction from Product Descriptions
Kassem Sabeh | Mouna Kacimi | Johann Gamper

Extracting attribute-value information from unstructured product descriptions continue to be of a vital importance in e-commerce applications. One of the most important product attributes is the brand which highly influences costumers’ purchasing behaviour. Thus, it is crucial to accurately extract brand information dealing with the main challenge of discovering new brand names. Under the open world assumption, several approaches have adopted deep learning models to extract attribute-values using sequence tagging paradigm. However, they did not employ finer grained data representations such as character level embeddings which improve generalizability. In this paper, we introduce OpenBrand, a novel approach for discovering brand names. OpenBrand is a BiLSTM-CRF-Attention model with embeddings at different granularities. Such embeddings are learned using CNN and LSTM architectures to provide more accurate representations. We further propose a new dataset for brand value extraction, with a very challenging task on zero-shot extraction. We have tested our approach, through extensive experiments, and shown that it outperforms state-of-the-art models in brand name discovery.

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Robust Product Classification with Instance-Dependent Noise
Huy Nguyen | Devashish Khatwani

Noisy labels in large E-commerce product data (i.e., product items are placed into incorrect categories) is a critical issue for product categorization task because they are unavoidable, non-trivial to remove and degrade prediction performance significantly. Training a product title classification model which is robust to noisy labels in the data is very important to make product classification applications more practical. In this paper, we study the impact of instance-dependent noise to performance of product title classification by comparing our data denoising algorithm and different noise-resistance training algorithms which were designed to prevent a classifier model from over-fitting to noise. We develop a simple yet effective Deep Neural Network for product title classification to use as a base classifier. Along with recent methods of stimulating instance-dependent noise, we propose a novel noise stimulation algorithm based on product title similarity. Our experiments cover multiple datasets, various noise methods and different training solutions. Results uncover the limit of classification task when noise rate is not negligible and data distribution is highly skewed.

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Structured Extraction of Terms and Conditions from German and English Online Shops
Tobias Schamel | Daniel Braun | Florian Matthes

The automated analysis of Terms and Conditions has gained attention in recent years, mainly due to its relevance to consumer protection. Well-structured data sets are the base for every analysis. While content extraction, in general, is a well-researched field and many open source libraries are available, our evaluation shows, that existing solutions cannot extract Terms and Conditions in sufficient quality, mainly because of their special structure. In this paper, we present an approach to extract the content and hierarchy of Terms and Conditions from German and English online shops. Our evaluation shows, that the approach outperforms the current state of the art. A python implementation of the approach is made available under an open license.

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“Does it come in black?” CLIP-like models are zero-shot recommenders
Patrick John Chia | Jacopo Tagliabue | Federico Bianchi | Ciro Greco | Diogo Goncalves

Product discovery is a crucial component for online shopping. However, item-to-item recommendations today do not allow users to explore changes along selected dimensions: given a query item, can a model suggest something similar but in a different color? We consider item recommendations of the comparative nature (e.g. “something darker”) and show how CLIP-based models can support this use case in a zero-shot manner. Leveraging a large model built for fashion, we introduce GradREC and its industry potential, and offer a first rounded assessment of its strength and weaknesses.

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Clause Topic Classification in German and English Standard Form Contracts
Daniel Braun | Florian Matthes

So-called standard form contracts, i.e. contracts that are drafted unilaterally by one party, like terms and conditions of online shops or terms of services of social networks, are cornerstones of our modern economy. Their processing is, therefore, of significant practical value. Often, the sheer size of these contracts allows the drafting party to hide unfavourable terms from the other party. In this paper, we compare different approaches for automatically classifying the topics of clauses in standard form contracts, based on a data-set of more than 6,000 clauses from more than 170 contracts, which we collected from German and English online shops and annotated based on a taxonomy of clause topics, that we developed together with legal experts. We will show that, in our comparison of seven approaches, from simple keyword matching to transformer language models, BERT performed best with an F1-score of up to 0.91, however much simpler and computationally cheaper models like logistic regression also achieved similarly good results of up to 0.87.

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Investigating the Generative Approach for Question Answering in E-Commerce
Kalyani Roy | Vineeth Balapanuru | Tapas Nayak | Pawan Goyal

Many e-commerce websites provide Product-related Question Answering (PQA) platform where potential customers can ask questions related to a product, and other consumers can post an answer to that question based on their experience. Recently, there has been a growing interest in providing automated responses to product questions. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of the generative approach for PQA. We use state-of-the-art generative models proposed by Deng et al.(2020) and Lu et al.(2020) for this purpose. On closer examination, we find several drawbacks in this approach: (1) input reviews are not always utilized significantly for answer generation, (2) the performance of the models is abysmal while answering the numerical questions, (3) many of the generated answers contain phrases like “I do not know” which are taken from the reference answer in training data, and these answers do not convey any information to the customer. Although these approaches achieve a high ROUGE score, it does not reflect upon these shortcomings of the generated answers. We hope that our analysis will lead to more rigorous PQA approaches, and future research will focus on addressing these shortcomings in PQA.

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Utilizing Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning to Improve Item Categorization BERT Model
Lei Chen | Hou Wei Chou

Item categorization (IC) is a core natural language processing (NLP) task in e-commerce. As a special text classification task, fine-tuning pre-trained models, e.g., BERT, has become a mainstream solution. To improve IC performance further, other product metadata, e.g., product images, have been used. Although multimodal IC (MIC) systems show higher performance, expanding from processing text to more resource-demanding images brings large engineering impacts and hinders the deployment of such dual-input MIC systems. In this paper, we proposed a new way of using product images to improve text-only IC model: leveraging cross-modal signals between products’ titles and associated images to adapt BERT models in a self-supervised learning (SSL) way. Our experiments on the three genres in the public Amazon product dataset show that the proposed method generates improved prediction accuracy and macro-F1 values than simply using the original BERT. Moreover, the proposed method is able to keep using existing text-only IC inference implementation and shows a resource advantage than the deployment of a dual-input MIC system.

Recently, semantic search has been successfully applied to E-commerce product search and the learned semantic space for query and product encoding are expected to generalize well to unseen queries or products. Yet, whether generalization can conveniently emerge has not been thoroughly studied in the domain thus far. In this paper, we examine several general-domain and domain-specific pre-trained Roberta variants and discover that general-domain fine-tuning does not really help generalization which aligns with the discovery of prior art, yet proper domain-specific fine-tuning with clickstream data can lead to better model generalization, based on a bucketed analysis of a manually annotated query-product relevance data.

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Can Pretrained Language Models Generate Persuasive, Faithful, and Informative Ad Text for Product Descriptions?
Fajri Koto | Jey Han Lau | Timothy Baldwin

For any e-commerce service, persuasive, faithful, and informative product descriptions can attract shoppers and improve sales. While not all sellers are capable of providing such interesting descriptions, a language generation system can be a source of such descriptions at scale, and potentially assist sellers to improve their product descriptions. Most previous work has addressed this task based on statistical approaches (Wang et al., 2017), limited attributes such as titles (Chen et al., 2019; Chan et al., 2020), and focused on only one product type (Wang et al., 2017; Munigala et al., 2018; Hong et al., 2021). In this paper, we jointly train image features and 10 text attributes across 23 diverse product types, with two different target text types with different writing styles: bullet points and paragraph descriptions. Our findings suggest that multimodal training with modern pretrained language models can generate fluent and persuasive advertisements, but are less faithful and informative, especially out of domain.

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A Simple Baseline for Domain Adaptation in End to End ASR Systems Using Synthetic Data
Raviraj Joshi | Anupam Singh

Automatic Speech Recognition(ASR) has been dominated by deep learning-based end-to-end speech recognition models. These approaches require large amounts of labeled data in the form of audio-text pairs. Moreover, these models are more susceptible to domain shift as compared to traditional models. It is common practice to train generic ASR models and then adapt them to target domains using comparatively smaller data sets. We consider a more extreme case of domain adaptation where text-only corpus is available. In this work, we propose a simple baseline technique for domain adaptation in end-to-end speech recognition models. We convert the text-only corpus to audio data using single speaker Text to Speech (TTS) engine. The parallel data in the target domain is then used to fine-tune the final dense layer of generic ASR models. We show that single speaker synthetic TTS data coupled with final dense layer only fine-tuning provides reasonable improvements in word error rates. We use text data from address and e-commerce search domains to show the effectiveness of our low-cost baseline approach on CTC and attention-based models.

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Lot or Not: Identifying Multi-Quantity Offerings in E-Commerce
Gal Lavee | Ido Guy

The term lot in is defined to mean an offering that contains a collection of multiple identical items for sale. In a large online marketplace, lot offerings play an important role, allowing buyers and sellers to set price levels to optimally balance supply and demand needs. In spite of their central role, platforms often struggle to identify lot offerings, since explicit lot status identification is frequently not provided by sellers. The ability to identify lot offerings plays a key role in many fundamental tasks, from matching offerings to catalog products, through ranking search results, to providing effective pricing guidance. In this work, we seek to determine the lot status (and lot size) of each offering, in order to facilitate an improved buyer experience, while reducing the friction for sellers posting new offerings. We demonstrate experimentally the ability to accurately classify offerings as lots and predict their lot size using only the offer title, by adapting state-of-the-art natural language techniques to the lot identification problem.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media

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Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media
Sanjaya Wijeratne | Jennifer Lee | Horacio Saggion | Amit Sheth

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Interpreting Emoji with Emoji
Jens Reelfs | Timon Mohaupt | Sandipan Sikdar | Markus Strohmaier | Oliver Hohlfeld

We study the extent to which emoji can be used to add interpretability to embeddings of text and emoji. To do so, we extend the POLAR-framework that transforms word embeddings to interpretable counterparts and apply it to word-emoji embeddings trained on four years of messaging data from the Jodel social network. We devise a crowdsourced human judgement experiment to study six usecases, evaluating against words only, what role emoji can play in adding interpretability to word embeddings. That is, we use a revised POLAR approach interpreting words and emoji with words, emoji or both according to human judgement. We find statistically significant trends demonstrating that emoji can be used to interpret other emoji very well.

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Beyond emojis: an insight into the IKON language
Laura Meloni | Phimolporn Hitmeangsong | Bernhard Appelhaus | Edgar Walthert | Cesco Reale

This paper presents a new iconic language, the IKON language, and its philosophical, linguistic, and graphical principles. We examine some case studies to highlight the semantic complexity of the visual representation of meanings. We also introduce the Iconometer test to validate our icons and their application to the medical domain, through the creation of iconic sentences.

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Emoji semantics/pragmatics: investigating commitment and lying
Benjamin Weissman

This paper presents the results of two experiments investigating the directness of emoji in constituting speaker meaning. This relationship is examined in two ways, with Experiment 1 testing whether speakers are committed to meanings they communicate via a single emoji and Experiment 2 testing whether that speaker is taken to have lied if that meaning is false and intended to deceive. Results indicate that emoji with high meaning agreement in general (i.e., pictorial representations of concrete objects or foods) reliably commit the speaker to that meaning and can constitute lying. Expressive emoji representing facial expressions and emotional states demonstrate a range of commitment and lie ratings: those with high meaning agreement constitute more commitment and more of a lie than those with less meaning agreement in the first place. Emoji can constitute speaker commitment and they can be lies, but this result does not apply uniformly to all emoji and is instead tied to agreement, conventionality, and lexicalization.

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Understanding the Sarcastic Nature of Emojis with SarcOji
Vandita Grover | Hema Banati

Identifying sarcasm is a challenging research problem owing to its highly contextual nature. Several researchers have attempted numerous mechanisms to incorporate context, linguistic aspects, and supervised and semi-supervised techniques to determine sarcasm. It has also been noted that emojis in a text may also hold key indicators of sarcasm. However, the availability of sarcasm datasets with emojis is scarce. This makes it challenging to effectively study the sarcastic nature of emojis. In this work, we present SarcOji which has been compiled from five publicly available sarcasm datasets. SarcOji contains labeled English texts which all have emojis. We also analyze SarcOji to determine if there is an incongruence in the polarity of text and emojis used therein. Further, emojis’ usage, occurrences, and positions in the context of sarcasm are also studied in this compiled dataset. With SarcOji we have been able to demonstrate that frequency of occurrence of an emoji and its position are strong indicators of sarcasm. SarcOji dataset is now publicly available with several derived features like sentiment scores of text and emojis, most frequent emoji, and its position in the text. Compilation of the SarcOji dataset is an initial step to enable the study of the role of emojis in communicating sarcasm. SarcOji dataset can also serve as a go-to dataset for various emoji-based sarcasm detection techniques.

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Conducting Cross-Cultural Research on COVID-19 Memes
Jing Ge-Stadnyk | Lusha Sa

A cross-linguistic study of COVID-19 memes should allow scholars and professionals to gain insight into how people engage in socially and politically important issues and how culture has influenced societal responses to the global pandemic. This preliminary study employs framing analysis to examine and compare issues, actors and stances conveyed by both English and Chinese memes. The overall findings point to divergence in the way individuals communicate pandemic-related issues in English-speaking countries versus China, although a few similarities were also identified. ‘Regulation’ is the most common issue addressed by both English and Chinese memes, though the latter does so at a comparatively higher rate. The ‘ordinary people’ image within these memes accounts for the largest percentage in both data sets. Although both Chinese and English memes primarily express negative emotions, the former often occurs on an interpersonal level, whereas the latter aims at criticizing society and certain group of people in general. Lastly, this study proposes explanations for these findings in terms of culture and political environment.

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Investigating the Influence of Users Personality on the Ambiguous Emoji Perception
Olga Iarygina

Emojis are an integral part of Internet communication nowadays. Even though, they are supposed to make the text clearer and less dubious, some emojis are ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. One of the factors that determine the perception of emojis is the user’s personality. In this work, I conducted an experimental study and investigated how personality traits, measured with a Big Five Inventory (BFI) questionnaire, affect reaction time when interpreting emoji. For a set of emoji, for which there are several possible interpretations, participants had to determine whether the emoji fits the presented context or not. Using regression analysis, I found that conscientiousness and neuroticism significantly predict the reaction time the person needs to decide about the emoji. More conscientious people take longer to resolve ambiguity, while more neurotic people make decisions about ambiguous emoji faster. The knowledge of the relationship between personality and emoji interpretation can lead to effective use of knowledge of people’s characters in personalizing interactive computer systems.

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Semantic Congruency Facilitates Memory for Emojis
Andriana L. Christofalos | Laurie Beth Feldman | Heather Sheridan

Emojis can assume different relations with the sentence context in which they occur. While affective elaboration and emoji-word redundancy are frequently investigated in laboratory experiments, the role of emojis in inferential processes has received much less attention. Here, we used an online ratings task and a recognition memory task to investigate whether differences in emoji function within a sentence affect judgments of emoji-text coherence and subsequent recognition accuracy. Emojis that function as synonyms of a target word from the passages were rated as better fitting with the passage (more coherent) than emojis consistent with an inference from the passage, and both types of emojis were rated as more coherent than incongruent (unrelated) emojis. In a recognition test, emojis consistent with the semantic content of passages (synonym and inference emojis) were better recognized than incongruent emojis. Findings of the present study provide corroborating evidence that readers extract semantic information from emojis and then integrate it with surrounding passage content.

This paper proposes EmojiCloud, an open-source Python-based emoji cloud visualization tool, to generate a quick and straightforward understanding of emojis from the perspective of frequency and importance. EmojiCloud is flexible enough to support diverse drawing shapes, such as rectangles, ellipses, and image masked canvases. We also follow inclusive and personalized design principles to cover the unique emoji designs from seven emoji vendors (e.g., Twitter, Apple, and Windows) and allow users to customize plotted emojis and background colors. We hope EmojiCloud can benefit the whole emoji community due to its flexibility, inclusiveness, and customizability.

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Graphicon Evolution on the Chinese Social Media Platform BiliBili
Yiqiong Zhang | Susan Herring | Suifu Gan

This study examines the evolutionary trajectory of graphicons in a 13-year corpus of comments from BiliBili, a popular Chinese video-sharing platform. Findings show that emoticons (kaomoji) rose and fell in frequency, while emojis and stickers are both presently on the rise. Graphicon distributions differ in comments and replies to comments. There is also a strong correlation between the types of graphicons used in comments and their corresponding replies, suggesting a priming effect. Finally, qualitative analysis of the 10 most-frequent kaomojis, emojis, and stickers reveals a trend for each successive graphicon type to become less about emotion expression and more integrated with platform-specific culture and the Chinese language. These findings lend partial support to claims in the literature about graphicon evolution.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Ever Evolving NLP (EvoNLP)

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MLLabs-LIG at TempoWiC 2022: A Generative Approach for Examining Temporal Meaning Shift
Chenyang Lyu | Yongxin Zhou | Tianbo Ji

In this paper, we present our system for the EvoNLP 2022 shared task Temporal Meaning Shift (TempoWiC). Different from the typically used discriminative model, we propose a generative approach based on pre-trained generation models. The basic architecture of our system is a seq2seq model where the input sequence consists of two documents followed by a question asking whether the meaning of target word changed or not, the target output sequence is a declarative sentence describing the meaning of target word changed or not. The experimental results on TempoWiC test set show that our best system (with time information) obtained an accuracy and Marco F-1 score of 68.09% and 62.59% respectively, which ranked 12th among all submitted systems. The results have shown the plausibility of using generation model for WiC tasks, meanwhile also indicate there’s still room for further improvement.

This paper mainly describes the dma submission to the TempoWiC task, which achieves a macro-F1 score of 77.05% and attains the first place in this task. We first explore the impact of different pre-trained language models. Then we adopt data cleaning, data augmentation, and adversarial training strategies to enhance the model generalization and robustness. For further improvement, we integrate POS information and word semantic representation using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach. The experimental results show that MoE can overcome the feature overuse issue and combine the context, POS, and word semantic features well. Additionally, we use a model ensemble method for the final prediction, which has been proven effective by many research works.

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Using Two Losses and Two Datasets Simultaneously to Improve TempoWiC Accuracy
Mohammad Javad Pirhadi | Motahhare Mirzaei | Sauleh Eetemadi

WSD (Word Sense Disambiguation) is the task of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of text. Researchers have worked on this task (e.g. Pustejovsky, 2002) for years but it’s still a challenging one even for SOTA (state-of-the-art) LMs (language models). The new dataset, TempoWiC introduced by Loureiro et al. (2022b) focuses on the fact that words change over time. Their best baseline achieves 70.33% macro-F1. In this work, we use two different losses simultaneously. We also improve our model by using another similar dataset to generalize better. Our best configuration beats their best baseline by 4.23%.

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Class Incremental Learning for Intent Classification with Limited or No Old Data
Debjit Paul | Daniil Sorokin | Judith Gaspers

In this paper, we explore class-incremental learning for intent classification (IC) in a setting with limited old data available. IC is the task of mapping user utterances to their corresponding intents. Even though class-incremental learning without storing the old data yields high potential of reducing human and computational resources in industry NLP model releases, to the best of our knowledge, it hasn’t been studied for NLP classification tasks in the literature before. In this work, we compare several contemporary class-incremental learning methods, i.e., BERT warm start, L2, Elastic Weight Consolidation, RecAdam and Knowledge Distillation within two realistic class-incremental learning scenarios: one where only the previous model is assumed to be available, but no data corresponding to old classes, and one in which limited unlabeled data for old classes is assumed to be available. Our results indicate that among the investigated continual learning methods, Knowledge Distillation worked best for our class-incremental learning tasks, and adding limited unlabeled data helps the model in both adaptability and stability.

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CC-Top: Constrained Clustering for Dynamic Topic Discovery
Jann Goschenhofer | Pranav Ragupathy | Christian Heumann | Bernd Bischl | Matthias Aßenmacher

Research on multi-class text classification of short texts mainly focuses on supervised (transfer) learning approaches, requiring a finite set of pre-defined classes which is constant over time. This work explores deep constrained clustering (CC) as an alternative to supervised learning approaches in a setting with a dynamically changing number of classes, a task we introduce as dynamic topic discovery (DTD).We do so by using pairwise similarity constraints instead of instance-level class labels which allow for a flexible number of classes while exhibiting a competitive performance compared to supervised approaches. First, we substantiate this through a series of experiments and show that CC algorithms exhibit a predictive performance similar to state-of-the-art supervised learning algorithms while requiring less annotation effort. Second, we demonstrate the overclustering capabilities of deep CC for detecting topics in short text data sets in the absence of the ground truth class cardinality during model training. Third, we showcase that these capabilities can be leveraged for the DTD setting as a step towards dynamic learning over time and finally, we release our codebase to nurture further research in this area.

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HSE at TempoWiC: Detecting Meaning Shift in Social Media with Diachronic Language Models
Elizaveta Tukhtina | Kseniia Kashleva | Svetlana Vydrina

This paper describes our methods for temporal meaning shift detection, implemented during the TempoWiC shared task. We present two systems: with and without time span data usage. Our approaches are based on the language models fine-tuned for Twitter domain. Both systems outperformed all the competition’s baselines except TimeLMs-SIM. Our best submission achieved the macro-F1 score of 70.09% and took the 7th place. This result was achieved by using diachronic language models from the TimeLMs project.

We present a study on the integration of time-sensitive information in lexicon-based offensive language detection systems. Our focus is on Offenseval sub-task A, aimed at detecting offensive tweets. We apply a semantic change detection algorithm over a short time span of two years to detect words whose semantics has changed and we focus particularly on those words that acquired or lost an offensive meaning between 2019 and 2020. Using the output of this semantic change detection approach, we train an SVM classifier on the Offenseval 2019 training set. We build on the already competitive SINAI system submitted to Offenseval 2019 by adding new lexical features, including those that capture the change in usage of words and their association with emerging offensive usages. We discuss the challenges, opportunities and limitations of integrating semantic change detection in offensive language detection models. Our work draws attention to an often neglected aspect of offensive language, namely that the meanings of words are constantly evolving and that NLP systems that account for this change can achieve good performance even when not trained on the most recent training data.

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Temporal Word Meaning Disambiguation using TimeLMs
Mihir Godbole | Parth Dandavate | Aditya Kane

Meaning of words constantly change given the events in modern civilization. Large Language Models use word embeddings, which are often static and thus cannot cope with this semantic change. Thus, it is important to resolve ambiguity in word meanings. This paper is an effort in this direction, where we explore methods for word sense disambiguation for the EvoNLP shared task. We conduct rigorous ablations for two solutions to this problem. We see that an approach using time-aware language models helps this task. Furthermore, we explore possible future directions to this problem.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fifth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)

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Retrieval Data Augmentation Informed by Downstream Question Answering Performance
James Ferguson | Hannaneh Hajishirzi | Pradeep Dasigi | Tushar Khot

Training retrieval models to fetch contexts for Question Answering (QA) over large corpora requires labeling relevant passages in those corpora. Since obtaining exhaustive manual annotations of all relevant passages is not feasible, prior work uses text overlap heuristics to find passages that are likely to contain the answer, but this is not feasible when the task requires deeper reasoning and answers are not extractable spans (e.g.: multi-hop, discrete reasoning). We address this issue by identifying relevant passages based on whether they are useful for a trained QA model to arrive at the correct answers, and develop a search process guided by the QA model’s loss. Our experiments show that this approach enables identifying relevant context for unseen data greater than 90% of the time on the IIRC dataset and generalizes better to the end QA task than those trained on just the gold retrieval data on IIRC and QASC datasets.

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Heterogeneous-Graph Reasoning and Fine-Grained Aggregation for Fact Checking
Hongbin Lin | Xianghua Fu

Fact checking is a challenging task that requires corresponding evidences to verify the property of a claim based on reasoning. Previous studies generally i) construct the graph by treating each evidence-claim pair as node which is a simple way that ignores to exploit their implicit interaction, or building a fully-connected graph among claim and evidences where the entailment relationship between claim and evidence would be considered equal to the semantic relationship among evidences; ii) aggregate evidences equally without considering their different stances towards the verification of fact. Towards the above issues, we propose a novel heterogeneous-graph reasoning and fine-grained aggregation model, with two following modules: 1) a heterogeneous graph attention network module to distinguish different types of relationships within the constructed graph; 2) fine-grained aggregation module which learns the implicit stance of evidences towards the prediction result in details. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our proposed model achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art methods.

Many people read online reviews to learn about real-world entities of their interest. However, majority of reviews only describes general experiences and opinions of the customers, and may not reveal facts that are specific to the entity being reviewed. In this work, we focus on a novel task of mining from a review corpus sentences that are unique for each entity. We refer to this task as Salient Fact Extraction. Salient facts are extremely scarce due to their very nature. Consequently, collecting labeled examples for training supervised models is tedious and cost-prohibitive. To alleviate this scarcity problem, we develop an unsupervised method, ZL-Distiller, which leverages contextual language representations of the reviews and their distributional patterns to identify salient sentences about entities. Our experiments on multiple domains (hotels, products, and restaurants) show that ZL-Distiller achieves state-of-the-art performance and further boosts the performance of other supervised/unsupervised algorithms for the task. Furthermore, we show that salient sentences mined by ZL-Distiller provide unique and detailed information about entities, which benefit downstream NLP applications including question answering and summarization.

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Automatic Fake News Detection: Are current models “fact-checking” or“gut-checking”?
Ian Kelk | Benjamin Basseri | Wee Lee | Richard Qiu | Chris Tanner

Automatic fake news detection models are ostensibly based on logic, where the truth of a claim made in a headline can be determined by supporting or refuting evidence found in a resulting web query. These models are believed to be reasoning in some way; however, it has been shown that these same results, or better, can be achieved without considering the claim at all – only the evidence. This implies that other signals are contained within the examined evidence, and could be based on manipulable factors such as emotion, sentiment, or part-of-speech (POS) frequencies, which are vulnerable to adversarial inputs. We neutralize some of these signals through multiple forms of both neural and non-neural pre-processing and style transfer, and find that this flattening of extraneous indicators can induce the models to actually require both claims and evidence to perform well. We conclude with the construction of a model using emotion vectors built off a lexicon and passed through an “emotional attention” mechanism to appropriately weight certain emotions. We provide quantifiable results that prove our hypothesis that manipulable features are being used for fact-checking.

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A Semantics-Aware Approach to Automated Claim Verification
Blanca Calvo Figueras | Montse Cuadros | Rodrigo Agerri

The influence of fake news in the perception of reality has become a mainstream topic in the last years due to the fast propagation of misleading information. In order to help in the fight against misinformation, automated solutions to fact-checking are being actively developed within the research community. In this context, the task of Automated Claim Verification is defined as assessing the truthfulness of a claim by finding evidence about its veracity. In this work we empirically demonstrate that enriching a BERT model with explicit semantic information such as Semantic Role Labelling helps to improve results in claim verification as proposed by the FEVER benchmark. Furthermore, we perform a number of explainability tests that suggest that the semantically-enriched model is better at handling complex cases, such as those including passive forms or multiple propositions.

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PHEMEPlus: Enriching Social Media Rumour Verification with External Evidence
John Dougrez-Lewis | Elena Kochkina | Miguel Arana-Catania | Maria Liakata | Yulan He

Work on social media rumour verification utilises signals from posts, their propagation and users involved. Other lines of work target identifying and fact-checking claims based on information from Wikipedia, or trustworthy news articles without considering social media context. However works combining the information from social media with external evidence from the wider web are lacking. To facilitate research in this direction, we release a novel dataset, PHEMEPlus, an extension of the PHEME benchmark, which contains social media conversations as well as relevant external evidence for each rumour. We demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such evidence in improving rumour verification models. Additionally, as part of the evidence collection, we evaluate various ways of query formulation to identify the most effective method.

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XInfoTabS: Evaluating Multilingual Tabular Natural Language Inference
Bhavnick Minhas | Anant Shankhdhar | Vivek Gupta | Divyanshu Aggarwal | Shuo Zhang

The ability to reason about tabular or semi-structured knowledge is a fundamental problem for today’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. While significant progress has been achieved in the direction of tabular reasoning, these advances are limited to English due to the absence of multilingual benchmark datasets for semi-structured data. In this paper, we use machine translation methods to construct a multilingual tabular NLI dataset, namely XINFOTABS, which expands the English tabular NLI dataset of INFOTABS to ten diverse languages. We also present several baselines for multilingual tabular reasoning, e.g., machine translation-based methods and cross-lingual. We discover that the XINFOTABS evaluation suite is both practical and challenging. As a result, this dataset will contribute to increased linguistic inclusion in tabular reasoning research and applications.

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Neural Machine Translation for Fact-checking Temporal Claims
Marco Mori | Paolo Papotti | Luigi Bellomarini | Oliver Giudice

Computational fact-checking aims at supporting the verification process of textual claims by exploiting trustworthy sources. However, there are large classes of complex claims that cannot be automatically verified, for instance those related to temporal reasoning. To this aim, in this work, we focus on the verification of economic claims against time series sources. Starting from given textual claims in natural language, we propose a neural machine translation approach to produce respective queries expressed in a recently proposed temporal fragment of the Datalog language. The adopted deep neural approach shows promising preliminary results for the translation of 10 categories of claims extracted from real use cases.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the first workshop on NLP applications to field linguistics

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A Finite State Aproach to Interactive Transcription
William Lane | Steven Bird

We describe a novel approach to transcribing morphologically complex, local, oral languages. The approach connects with local motivations for participating in language work which center on language learning, accessing the content of audio collections, and applying this knowledge in language revitalization and maintenance. We develop a constraint-based approach to interactive word completion, expressed using Optimality Theoretic constraints, implemented in a finite state transducer, and applied to an Indigenous language. We show that this approach suggests correct full word predictions on 57.9% of the test utterances, and correct partial word predictions on 67.5% of the test utterances. In total, 87% of the test utterances receive full or partial word suggestions which serve to guide the interactive transcription process.

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Corpus-Guided Contrast Sets for Morphosyntactic Feature Detection in Low-Resource English Varieties
Tessa Masis | Anissa Neal | Lisa Green | Brendan O’Connor

The study of language variation examines how language varies between and within different groups of speakers, shedding light on how we use language to construct identities and how social contexts affect language use. A common method is to identify instances of a certain linguistic feature - say, the zero copula construction - in a corpus, and analyze the feature’s distribution across speakers, topics, and other variables, to either gain a qualitative understanding of the feature’s function or systematically measure variation. In this paper, we explore the challenging task of automatic morphosyntactic feature detection in low-resource English varieties. We present a human-in-the-loop approach to generate and filter effective contrast sets via corpus-guided edits. We show that our approach improves feature detection for both Indian English and African American English, demonstrate how it can assist linguistic research, and release our fine-tuned models for use by other researchers.

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Machine Translation Between High-resource Languages in a Language Documentation Setting
Katharina Kann | Abteen Ebrahimi | Kristine Stenzel | Alexis Palmer

Language documentation encompasses translation, typically into the dominant high-resource language in the region where the target language is spoken. To make data accessible to a broader audience, additional translation into other high-resource languages might be needed. Working within a project documenting Kotiria, we explore the extent to which state-of-the-art machine translation (MT) systems can support this second translation – in our case from Portuguese to English. This translation task is challenging for multiple reasons: (1) the data is out-of-domain with respect to the MT system’s training data, (2) much of the data is conversational, (3) existing translations include non-standard and uncommon expressions, often reflecting properties of the documented language, and (4) the data includes borrowings from other regional languages. Despite these challenges, existing MT systems perform at a usable level, though there is still room for improvement. We then conduct a qualitative analysis and suggest ways to improve MT between high-resource languages in a language documentation setting.

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Automatic Detection of Borrowings in Low-Resource Languages of the Caucasus: Andic branch
Konstantin Zaitsev | Anzhelika Minchenko

Linguistic borrowings occur in all languages. Andic languages of the Caucasus have borrowings from different donor-languages like Russian, Arabic, Persian. To automatically detect these borrowings, we propose a logistic regression model. The model was trained on the dataset which contains words in IPA from dictionaries of Andic languages. To improve model’s quality, we compared TfIdf and Count vectorizers and chose the second one. Besides, we added new features to the model. They were extracted using analysis of vectorizer features and using a language model. The model was evaluated by classification quality metrics (precision, recall and F1-score). The best average F1-score of all languages for words in IPA was about 0.78. Experiments showed that our model reaches good results not only with words in IPA but also with words in Cyrillic.

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The interaction between cognitive ease and informativeness shapes the lexicons of natural languages
Thomas Brochhagen | Gemma Boleda

It is common for languages to express multiple meanings with the same word, a phenomenon known as colexification. For instance, the meanings FINGER and TOE colexify in the word “dedo” in Spanish, while they do not colexify in English. Colexification has been suggested to follow universal constraints. In particular, previous work has shown that related meanings are more prone to colexify. This tendency has been explained in terms of the cognitive pressure for ease, since expressing related meanings with the same word makes lexicons easier to learn and use. The present study examines the interplay between this pressure and a competing universal constraint, the functional pressure for languages to maximize informativeness. We hypothesize that meanings are more likely to colexify if they are related (fostering ease), but not so related as to become confusable and cause misunderstandings (fostering informativeness). We find support for this principle in data from over 1200 languages and 1400 meanings. Our results thus suggest that universal principles shape the lexicons of natural languages. More broadly, they contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that languages evolve to strike a balance between competing functional and cognitive pressures.

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The first neural machine translation system for the Erzya language
David Dale

We present the first neural machine translation system for translation between the endangered Erzya language and Russian and the dataset collected by us to train and evaluate it. The BLEU scores are 17 and 19 for translation to Erzya and Russian respectively, and more than half of the translations are rated as acceptable by native speakers. We also adapt our model to translate between Erzya and 10 other languages, but without additional parallel data, the quality on these directions remains low. We release the translation models along with the collected text corpus, a new language identification model, and a multilingual sentence encoder adapted for the Erzya language. These resources will be available at https://github.com/slone-nlp/myv-nmt.

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Abui Wordnet: Using a Toolbox Dictionary to develop a wordnet for a low-resource language
Frantisek Kratochvil | Luís Morgado da Costa

This paper describes a procedure to link a Toolbox dictionary of a low-resource language to correct synsets, generating a new wordnet. We introduce a bootstrapping technique utilising the information in the gloss fields (English, national, and regional) to generate sense candidates using a naive algorithm based on multilingual sense intersection. We show that this technique is quite effective when glosses are available in more than one language. Our technique complements the previous work by Rosman et al. (2014) which linked the SIL Semantic Domains to wordnet senses. Through this work we have created a small, fully hand-checked wordnet for Abui, containing over 1,400 concepts and 3,600 senses.

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How to encode arbitrarily complex morphology in word embeddings, no corpus needed
Lane Schwartz | Coleman Haley | Francis Tyers

In this paper, we present a straightforward technique for constructing interpretable word embeddings from morphologically analyzed examples (such as interlinear glosses) for all of the world’s languages. Currently, fewer than 300-400 languages out of approximately 7000 have have more than a trivial amount of digitized texts; of those, between 100-200 languages (most in the Indo-European language family) have enough text data for BERT embeddings of reasonable quality to be trained. The word embeddings in this paper are explicitly designed to be both linguistically interpretable and fully capable of handling the broad variety found in the world’s diverse set of 7000 languages, regardless of corpus size or morphological characteristics. We demonstrate the applicability of our representation through examples drawn from a typologically diverse set of languages whose morphology includes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, templatic morphemes, derivational morphemes, inflectional morphemes, and reduplication.

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Predictive Text for Agglutinative and Polysynthetic Languages
Sergey Kosyak | Francis Tyers

This paper presents a set of experiments in the area of morphological modelling and prediction. We test whether morphological segmentation can compete against statistical segmentation in the tasks of language modelling and predictive text entry for two under-resourced and indigenous languages, K’iche’ and Chukchi. We use different segmentation methods — both statistical and morphological — to make datasets that are used to train models of different types: single-way segmented, which are trained using data from one segmenter; two-way segmented, which are trained using concatenated data from two segmenters; and finetuned, which are trained on two datasets from different segmenters. We compute word and character level perplexities and find that single-way segmented models trained on morphologically segmented data show the highest performance. Finally, we evaluate the language models on the task of predictive text entry using gold standard data and measure the average number of clicks per character and keystroke savings rate. We find that the models trained on morphologically segmented data show better scores, although with substantial room for improvement. At last, we propose the usage of morphological segmentation in order to improve the end-user experience while using predictive text and we plan on testing this assumption by doing end-user evaluation.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP)

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TEDB System Description to a Shared Task on Euphemism Detection 2022
Peratham Wiriyathammabhum

In this report, we describe our Transformers for euphemism detection baseline (TEDB) submissions to a shared task on euphemism detection 2022. We cast the task of predicting euphemism as text classification. We considered Transformer-based models which are the current state-of-the-art methods for text classification. We explored different training schemes, pretrained models, and model architectures. Our best result of 0.816 F1-score (0.818 precision and 0.814 recall) consists of a euphemism-detection-finetuned TweetEval/TimeLMs-pretrained RoBERTa model as a feature extractor frontend with a KimCNN classifier backend trained end-to-end using a cosine annealing scheduler. We observed pretrained models on sentiment analysis and offensiveness detection to correlate with more F1-score while pretraining on other tasks, such as sarcasm detection, produces less F1-scores. Also, putting more word vector channels does not improve the performance in our experiments.

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A Prompt Based Approach for Euphemism Detection
Abulimiti Maimaitituoheti | Yang Yong | Fan Xiaochao

Euphemism is an indirect way to express sensitive topics. People can comfortably communicate with each other about sensitive topics or taboos by using euphemisms. The Euphemism Detection Shared Task in the Third Workshop on Figurative Language Processing co-located with EMNLP 2022 provided a euphemism detection dataset that was divided into the train set and the test set. We made euphemism detection experiments by prompt tuning pre-trained language models on the dataset. We used RoBERTa as the pre-trained language model and created suitable templates and verbalizers for the euphemism detection task. Our approach achieved the third-best score in the euphemism detection shared task. This paper describes our model participating in the task.

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Transfer Learning Parallel Metaphor using Bilingual Embeddings
Maria Berger

Automated metaphor detection in languages other than English is highly restricted as training corpora are comparably rare. One way to overcome this problem is transfer learning. This paper gives an overview on transfer learning techniques applied to NLP. We first introduce types of transfer learning, then we present work focusing on: i) transfer learning with cross-lingual embeddings; ii) transfer learning in machine translation; and iii) transfer learning using pre-trained transformer models. The paper is complemented by first experiments that make use of bilingual embeddings generated from different sources of parallel data: We i) present the preparation of a parallel Gold corpus; ii) examine the embeddings spaces to search for metaphoric words cross-lingually; iii) run first experiments in transfer learning German metaphor from English labeled data only. Results show that finding data sources for bilingual embeddings training and the vocabulary covered by these embeddings is critical for learning metaphor cross-lingually.

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Ring That Bell: A Corpus and Method for Multimodal Metaphor Detection in Videos
Khalid Alnajjar | Mika Hämäläinen | Shuo Zhang

We present the first openly available multimodal metaphor annotated corpus. The corpus consists of videos including audio and subtitles that have been annotated by experts. Furthermore, we present a method for detecting metaphors in the new dataset based on the textual content of the videos. The method achieves a high F1-score (62%) for metaphorical labels. We also experiment with other modalities and multimodal methods; however, these methods did not out-perform the text-based model. In our error analysis, we do identify that there are cases where video could help in disambiguating metaphors, however, the visual cues are too subtle for our model to capture. The data is available on Zenodo.

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Picard understanding Darmok: A Dataset and Model for Metaphor-Rich Translation in a Constructed Language
Peter A. Jansen | Jordan Boyd-Graber

Tamarian, a fictional language introduced in the Star Trek episode Darmok, communicates meaning through utterances of metaphorical references, such as “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” instead of “We should work together.” This work assembles a Tamarian-English dictionary of utterances from the original episode and several follow-on novels, and uses this to construct a parallel corpus of 456 English-Tamarian utterances. A machine translation system based on a large language model (T5) is trained using this parallel corpus, and is shown to produce an accuracy of 76% when translating from English to Tamarian on known utterances.

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The Secret of Metaphor on Expressing Stronger Emotion
Yucheng Li | Frank Guerin | Chenghua Lin

Metaphors are proven to have stronger emotional impact than literal expressions. Although this conclusion is shown to be promising in benefiting various NLP applications, the reasons behind this phenomenon are not well studied. This paper conducts the first study in exploring how metaphors convey stronger emotion than their literal counterparts. We find that metaphors are generally more specific than literal expressions. The more specific property of metaphor can be one of the reasons for metaphors’ superiority in emotion expression. When we compare metaphors with literal expressions with the same specificity level, the gap of emotion expressing ability between both reduces significantly. In addition, we observe specificity is crucial in literal language as well, as literal language can express stronger emotion by making it more specific.

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Drum Up SUPPORT: Systematic Analysis of Image-Schematic Conceptual Metaphors
Lennart Wachowiak | Dagmar Gromann | Chao Xu

Conceptual metaphors represent a cognitive mechanism to transfer knowledge structures from one onto another domain. Image-schematic conceptual metaphors (ISCMs) specialize on transferring sensorimotor experiences to abstract domains. Natural language is believed to provide evidence of such metaphors. However, approaches to verify this hypothesis largely rely on top-down methods, gathering examples by way of introspection, or on manual corpus analyses. In order to contribute towards a method that is systematic and can be replicated, we propose to bring together existing processing steps in a pipeline to detect ISCMs, exemplified for the image schema SUPPORT in the COVID-19 domain. This pipeline consist of neural metaphor detection, dependency parsing to uncover construction patterns, clustering, and BERT-based frame annotation of dependent constructions to analyse ISCMs.

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Effective Cross-Task Transfer Learning for Explainable Natural Language Inference with T5
Irina Bigoulaeva | Rachneet Singh Sachdeva | Harish Tayyar Madabushi | Aline Villavicencio | Iryna Gurevych

We compare sequential fine-tuning with a model for multi-task learning in the context where we are interested in boosting performance on two of the tasks, one of which depends on the other. We test these models on the FigLang2022 shared task which requires participants to predict language inference labels on figurative language along with corresponding textual explanations of the inference predictions. Our results show that while sequential multi-task learning can be tuned to be good at the first of two target tasks, it performs less well on the second and additionally struggles with overfitting. Our findings show that simple sequential fine-tuning of text-to-text models is an extraordinarily powerful method of achieving cross-task knowledge transfer while simultaneously predicting multiple interdependent targets. So much so, that our best model achieved the (tied) highest score on the task.

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Detecting Euphemisms with Literal Descriptions and Visual Imagery
Ilker Kesen | Aykut Erdem | Erkut Erdem | Iacer Calixto

This paper describes our two-stage system for the Euphemism Detection shared task hosted by the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing in conjunction with EMNLP 2022. Euphemisms tone down expressions about sensitive or unpleasant issues like addiction and death. The ambiguous nature of euphemistic words or expressions makes it challenging to detect their actual meaning within a context. In the first stage, we seek to mitigate this ambiguity by incorporating literal descriptions into input text prompts to our baseline model. It turns out that this kind of direct supervision yields remarkable performance improvement. In the second stage, we integrate visual supervision into our system using visual imageries, two sets of images generated by a text-to-image model by taking terms and descriptions as input. Our experiments demonstrate that visual supervision also gives a statistically significant performance boost. Our system achieved the second place with an F1 score of 87.2%, only about 0.9% worse than the best submission.

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Distribution-Based Measures of Surprise for Creative Language: Experiments with Humor and Metaphor
Razvan C. Bunescu | Oseremen O. Uduehi

Novelty or surprise is a fundamental attribute of creative output. As such, we postulate that a writer’s creative use of language leads to word choices and, more importantly, corresponding semantic structures that are unexpected for the reader. In this paper we investigate measures of surprise that rely solely on word distributions computed by language models and show empirically that creative language such as humor and metaphor is strongly correlated with surprise. Surprisingly at first, information content is observed to be at least as good a predictor of creative language as any of the surprise measures investigated. However, the best prediction performance is obtained when information and surprise measures are combined, showing that surprise measures capture an aspect of creative language that goes beyond information content.

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Euphemism Detection by Transformers and Relational Graph Attention Network
Yuting Wang | Yiyi Liu | Ruqing Zhang | Yixing Fan | Jiafeng Guo

Euphemism is a type of figurative language broadly adopted in social media and daily conversations. People use euphemism for politeness or to conceal what they are discussing. Euphemism detection is a challenging task because of its obscure and figurative nature. Even humans may not agree on if a word expresses euphemism. In this paper, we propose to employ bidirectional encoder representations transformers (BERT), and relational graph attention network in order to model the semantic and syntactic relations between the target words and the input sentence. The best performing method of ours reaches a Macro-F1 score of 84.0 on the euphemism detection dataset of the third workshop on figurative language processing shared task 2022.

Figurative language (e.g., “he flew like the wind”) is challenging to understand, as it is hard to tell what implicit information is being conveyed from the surface form alone. We hypothesize that to perform this task well, the reader needs to mentally elaborate the scene being described to identify a sensible meaning of the language. We present DREAM-FLUTE, a figurative language understanding system that does this, first forming a “mental model” of situations described in a premise and hypothesis before making an entailment/contradiction decision and generating an explanation. DREAM-FLUTE uses an existing scene elaboration model, DREAM, for constructing its “mental model.” In the FigLang2022 Shared Task evaluation, DREAM-FLUTE achieved (joint) first place (Acc@60=63.3%), and can perform even better with ensemble techniques, demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach. More generally, this work suggests that adding a reflective component to pretrained language models can improve their performance beyond standard fine-tuning (3.3% improvement in Acc@60).

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Bayes at FigLang 2022 Euphemism Detection shared task: Cost-Sensitive Bayesian Fine-tuning and Venn-Abers Predictors for Robust Training under Class Skewed Distributions
Paul Trust | Kadusabe Provia | Kizito Omala

Transformers have achieved a state of the art performance across most natural language processing tasks. However the performance of these models degrade when being trained on skewed class distributions (class imbalance) because training tends to be biased towards head classes with most of the data points . Classical methods that have been proposed to handle this problem (re-sampling and re-weighting) often suffer from unstable performance, poor applicability and poor calibration. In this paper, we propose to use Bayesian methods and Venn-Abers predictors for well calibrated and robust training against class imbalance. Our proposed approach improves f1-score of the baseline RoBERTa (A Robustly Optimized Bidirectional Embedding from Transformers Pretraining Approach) model by about 6 points (79.0% against 72.6%) when training with class imbalanced data.

Idiomatic expressions (or idioms) are phrases where the meaning of the phrase cannot be determined from the meaning of the individual words in the expression. Translating idioms between languages is therefore a challenging task. Transformer models based on contextual embeddings have advanced the state-of-the-art across many domains in the field of natural language processing. While research using transformers has advanced both idiom detection as well as idiom disambiguation, idiom translation has not seen a similar advancement. In this work, we investigate two approaches to fine-tuning a pretrained Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) model to perform idiom translation from English to German. The first approach directly translates English idiom-containing sentences to German, while the second is underpinned by idiom paraphrasing, firstly paraphrasing English idiomatic expressions to their simplified English versions before translating them to German. Results of our evaluation show that each of the approaches is able to generate adequate translations.

We introduce EUREKA, an ensemble-based approach for performing automatic euphemism detection. We (1) identify and correct potentially mislabelled rows in the dataset, (2) curate an expanded corpus called EuphAug, (3) leverage model representations of Potentially Euphemistic Terms (PETs), and (4) explore using representations of semantically close sentences to aid in classification. Using our augmented dataset and kNN-based methods, EUREKA was able to achieve state-of-the-art results on the public leaderboard of the Euphemism Detection Shared Task, ranking first with a macro F1 score of 0.881.

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An insulin pump? Identifying figurative links in the construction of the drug lexicon
Antonio Reyes | Rafael Saldivar

One of the remarkable characteristics of the drug lexicon is its elusive nature. In order to communicate information related to drugs or drug trafficking, the community uses several terms that are mostly unknown to regular people, or even to the authorities. For instance, the terms jolly green, joystick, or jive are used to refer to marijuana. The selection of such terms is not necessarily a random or senseless process, but a communicative strategy in which figurative language plays a relevant role. In this study, we describe an ongoing research to identify drug-related terms by applying machine learning techniques. To this end, a data set regarding drug trafficking in Spanish was built. This data set was used to train a word embedding model to identify terms used by the community to creatively refer to drugs and related matters. The initial findings show an interesting repository of terms created to consciously veil drug-related contents by using figurative language devices, such as metaphor or metonymy. These findings can provide preliminary evidence to be applied by law agencies in order to address actions against crime, drug transactions on the internet, illicit activities, or human trafficking.

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Can Yes-No Question-Answering Models be Useful for Few-Shot Metaphor Detection?
Lena Dankin | Kfir Bar | Nachum Dershowitz

Metaphor detection has been a challenging task in the NLP domain both before and after the emergence of transformer-based language models. The difficulty lies in subtle semantic nuances that are required to detect metaphor and in the scarcity of labeled data. We explore few-shot setups for metaphor detection, and also introduce new question answering data that can enhance classifiers that are trained on a small amount of data. We formulate the classification task as a question-answering one, and train a question-answering model. We perform extensive experiments for few shot on several architectures and report the results of several strong baselines. Thus, the answer to the question posed in the title is a definite “Yes!”

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An Exploration of Linguistically-Driven and Transfer Learning Methods for Euphemism Detection
Devika Tiwari | Natalie Parde

Euphemisms are often used to drive rhetoric, but their automated recognition and interpretation are under-explored. We investigate four methods for detecting euphemisms in sentences containing potentially euphemistic terms. The first three linguistically-motivated methods rest on an understanding of (1) euphemism’s role to attenuate the harsh connotations of a taboo topic and (2) euphemism’s metaphorical underpinnings. In contrast, the fourth method follows recent innovations in other tasks and employs transfer learning from a general-domain pre-trained language model. While the latter method ultimately (and perhaps surprisingly) performed best (F1 = 0.74), we comprehensively evaluate all four methods to derive additional useful insights from the negative results.

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Back to the Roots: Predicting the Source Domain of Metaphors using Contrastive Learning
Meghdut Sengupta | Milad Alshomary | Henning Wachsmuth

Metaphors frame a given target domain using concepts from another, usually more concrete, source domain. Previous research in NLP has focused on the identification of metaphors and the interpretation of their meaning. In contrast, this paper studies to what extent the source domain can be predicted computationally from a metaphorical text. Given a dataset with metaphorical texts from a finite set of source domains, we propose a contrastive learning approach that ranks source domains by their likelihood of being referred to in a metaphorical text. In experiments, it achieves reasonable performance even for rare source domains, clearly outperforming a classification baseline.

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SBU Figures It Out: Models Explain Figurative Language
Yash Kumar Lal | Mohaddeseh Bastan

Figurative language is ubiquitous in human communication. However, current NLP models are unable to demonstrate a significant understanding of instances of this phenomena. The EMNLP 2022 shared task on figurative language understanding posed the problem of predicting and explaining the relation between a premise and a hypothesis containing an instance of the use of figurative language. We experiment with different variations of using T5-large for this task and build a model that significantly outperforms the task baseline. Treating it as a new task for T5 and simply finetuning on the data achieves the best score on the defined evaluation. Furthermore, we find that hypothesis-only models are able to achieve most of the performance.

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NLP@UIT at FigLang-EMNLP 2022: A Divide-and-Conquer System For Shared Task On Understanding Figurative Language
Khoa Thi-Kim Phan | Duc-Vu Nguyen | Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen

This paper describes our submissions to the EMNLP 2022 shared task on Understanding Figurative Language as part of the Figurative Language Workshop (FigLang 2022). Our systems based on pre-trained language model T5 are divide-and-conquer models which can address both two requirements of the task: 1) classification, and 2) generation. In this paper, we introduce different approaches in which each approach we employ a processing strategy on input model. We also emphasize the influence of the types of figurative language on our systems.

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Adversarial Perturbations Augmented Language Models for Euphemism Identification
Guneet Kohli | Prabsimran Kaur | Jatin Bedi

Euphemisms are mild words or expressions used instead of harsh or direct words while talking to someone to avoid discussing something unpleasant, embarrassing, or offensive. However, they are often ambiguous, thus making it a challenging task. The Third Workshop on Figurative Language Processing, colocated with EMNLP 2022 organized a shared task on Euphemism Detection to better understand euphemisms. We have used the adversarial augmentation technique to construct new data. This augmented data was then trained using two language models: BERT and longformer. To further enhance the overall performance, various combinations of the results obtained using longformer and BERT were passed through a voting ensembler. We achieved an F1 score of 71.5 using the combination of two adversarial longformers, two adversarial BERT, and one non-adversarial BERT.

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FigurativeQA: A Test Benchmark for Figurativeness Comprehension for Question Answering
Geetanjali Rakshit | Jeffrey Flanigan

Figurative language is widespread in human language (Lakoff and Johnson, 2008) posing potential challenges in NLP applications. In this paper, we investigate the effect of figurative language on the task of question answering (QA). We construct FigQA, a test set of 400 yes-no questions with figurative and non-figurative contexts, extracted from product reviews and restaurant reviews. We demonstrate that a state-of-the-art RoBERTa QA model has considerably lower performance in question answering when the contexts are figurative rather than literal, indicating a gap in current models. We propose a general method for improving the performance of QA models by converting the figurative contexts into non-figurative by prompting GPT-3, and demonstrate its effectiveness. Our results indicate a need for building QA models infused with figurative language understanding capabilities.

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Exploring Euphemism Detection in Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Settings
Sedrick Scott Keh

This work builds upon the Euphemism Detection Shared Task proposed in the EMNLP 2022 FigLang Workshop, and extends it to few-shot and zero-shot settings. We demonstrate a few-shot and zero-shot formulation using the dataset from the shared task, and we conduct experiments in these settings using RoBERTa and GPT-3. Our results show that language models are able to classify euphemistic terms relatively well even on new terms unseen during training, indicating that it is able to capture higher-level concepts related to euphemisms.

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On the Cusp of Comprehensibility: Can Language Models Distinguish Between Metaphors and Nonsense?
Bernadeta Griciūtė | Marc Tanti | Lucia Donatelli

Utterly creative texts can sometimes be difficult to understand, balancing on the edge of comprehensibility. However, good language skills and common sense allow advanced language users both to interpret creative texts and to reject some linguistic input as nonsense. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the current language models are also able to make the distinction between a creative language use and nonsense. To test this, we have computed mean rank and pseudo-log-likelihood score (PLL) of metaphorical and nonsensical sentences, and fine-tuned several pretrained models (BERT, RoBERTa) for binary classification between the two categories. There was a significant difference in the mean ranks and PPL scores of the categories, and the classifier reached around 85.5% accuracy. The results raise further questions on what could have let to such satisfactory performance.

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A Report on the FigLang 2022 Shared Task on Understanding Figurative Language
Arkadiy Saakyan | Tuhin Chakrabarty | Debanjan Ghosh | Smaranda Muresan

We present the results of the Shared Task on Understanding Figurative Language that we conducted as a part of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang 2022) at EMNLP 2022. The shared task is based on the FLUTE dataset (Chakrabarty et al., 2022), which consists of NLI pairs containing figurative language along with free text explanations for each NLI instance. The task challenged participants to build models that are able to not only predict the right label for a figurative NLI instance, but also generate a convincing free-text explanation. The participants were able to significantly improve upon provided baselines in both automatic and human evaluation settings. We further summarize the submitted systems and discuss the evaluation results.

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A Report on the Euphemisms Detection Shared Task
Patrick Lee | Anna Feldman | Jing Peng

This paper presents The Shared Task on Euphemism Detection for the Third Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang 2022) held in conjunction with EMNLP 2022. Participants were invited to investigate the euphemism detection task: given input text, identify whether it contains a euphemism. The input data is a corpus of sentences containing potentially euphemistic terms (PETs) collected from the GloWbE corpus, and are human-annotated as containing either a euphemistic or literal usage of a PET. In this paper, we present the results and analyze the common themes, methods and findings of the participating teams.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP)

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Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing (FinNLP)
Chung-Chi Chen | Hen-Hsen Huang | Hiroya Takamura | Hsin-Hsi Chen

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Contextualizing Emerging Trends in Financial News Articles
Nhu Khoa Nguyen | Thierry Delahaut | Emanuela Boros | Antoine Doucet | Gaël Lejeune

Identifying and exploring emerging trends in news is becoming more essential than ever with many changes occurring around the world due to the global health crises. However, most of the recent research has focused mainly on detecting trends in social media, thus, benefiting from social features (e.g. likes and retweets on Twitter) which helped the task as they can be used to measure the engagement and diffusion rate of content. Yet, formal text data, unlike short social media posts, comes with a longer, less restricted writing format, and thus, more challenging. In this paper, we focus our study on emerging trends detection in financial news articles about Microsoft, collected before and during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (July 2019 to July 2020). We make the dataset freely available and we also propose a strong baseline (Contextual Leap2Trend) for exploring the dynamics of similarities between pairs of keywords based on topic modeling and term frequency. Finally, we evaluate against a gold standard (Google Trends) and present noteworthy real-world scenarios regarding the influence of the pandemic on Microsoft.

Using the pre-trained language models to understand source codes has attracted increasing attention from financial institutions owing to the great potential to uncover financial risks. However, there are several challenges in applying these language models to solve programming language related problems directly. For instance, the shift of domain knowledge between natural language (NL) and programming language (PL) requires understanding the semantic and syntactic information from the data from different perspectives. To this end, we propose the AstBERT model, a pre-trained PL model aiming to better understand the financial codes using the abstract syntax tree (AST). Specifically, we collect a sheer number of source codes (both Java and Python) from the Alipay code repository and incorporate both syntactic and semantic code knowledge into our model through the help of code parsers, in which AST information of the source codes can be interpreted and integrated. We evaluate the performance of the proposed model on three tasks, including code question answering, code clone detection and code refinement. Experiment results show that our AstBERT achieves promising performance on three different downstream tasks.

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Disentangled Variational Topic Inference for Topic-Accurate Financial Report Generation
Sixing Yan

Automatic generating financial report from a set of news is important but challenging. The financial reports is composed of key points of the news and corresponding inferring and reasoning from specialists in financial domain with professional knowledge. The challenges lie in the effective learning of the extra knowledge that is not well presented in the news, and the misalignment between topic of input news and output knowledge in target reports. In this work, we introduce a disentangled variational topic inference approach to learn two latent variables for news and report, respectively. We use a publicly available dataset to evaluate the proposed approach. The results demonstrate its effectiveness of enhancing the language informativeness and the topic accuracy of the generated financial reports.

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Toward Privacy-preserving Text Embedding Similarity with Homomorphic Encryption
Donggyu Kim | Garam Lee | Sungwoo Oh

Text embedding is an essential component to build efficient natural language applications based on text similarities such as search engines and chatbots. Certain industries like finance and healthcare demand strict privacy-preserving conditions that user’s data should not be exposed to any potential malicious users even including service providers. From a privacy standpoint, text embeddings seem impossible to be interpreted but there is still a privacy risk that they can be recovered to original texts through inversion attacks. To satisfy such privacy requirements, in this paper, we study a Homomorphic Encryption (HE) based text similarity inference. To validate our method, we perform extensive experiments on two vital text similarity tasks. Through text embedding inversion tests, we prove that the benchmark datasets are vulnerable to inversion attacks and another privacy preserving approach, dχ-privacy, a relaxed version of Local Differential Privacy method fails to prevent them. We show that our approach preserves the performance of models compared to that the baseline has degradation up to 10% of scores for the minimum security.

Stock sentiment has strong correlations with the stock market but traditional sentiment analysis task classifies sentiment according to having feelings and emotions of good or bad. This definition of sentiment is not an accurate indicator of public opinion about specific stocks. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new task of stock sentiment analysis and present a new dataset for this task named TweetFinSent. In TweetFinSent, tweets are annotated based on if one gained or expected to gain positive or negative return from a stock. Experiments on TweetFinSent with several sentiment analysis models from lexicon-based to transformer-based have been conducted. Experimental results show that TweetFinSent dataset constitutes a challenging problem and there is ample room for improvement on the stock sentiment analysis task. TweetFinSent is available at https://github.com/jpmcair/tweetfinsent.

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Stock Price Volatility Prediction: A Case Study with AutoML
Hilal Pataci | Yunyao Li | Yannis Katsis | Yada Zhu | Lucian Popa

Accurate prediction of the stock price volatility, the rate at which the price of a stock increases or decreases over a particular period, is an important problem in finance. Inaccurate prediction of stock price volatility might lead to investment risk and financial loss, while accurate prediction might generate significant returns for investors. Several studies investigated stock price volatility prediction in a regression task by using the transcripts of earning calls (quarterly conference calls held by public companies) with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Existing studies use the entire transcript and this degrades the performance due to noise caused by irrelevant information that might not have a significant impact on stock price volatility. In order to overcome these limitations, by considering stock price volatility prediction as a classification task, we explore several denoising approaches, ranging from general-purpose approaches to techniques specific to finance to remove the noise, and leverage AutoML systems that enable auto-exploration of a wide variety of models. Our preliminary findings indicate that domain-specific denoising approaches provide better results than general-purpose approaches, moreover AutoML systems provide promising results.

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DigiCall: A Benchmark for Measuring the Maturity of Digital Strategy through Company Earning Calls
Hilal Pataci | Kexuan Sun | T. Ravichandran

Digital transformation reinvents companies, their vision and strategy, organizational structure, processes, capabilities, and culture, and enables the development of new or enhanced products and services delivered to customers more efficiently. Organizations, by formalizing their digital strategy attempt to plan for their digital transformations and accelerate their company growth. Understanding how successful a company is in its digital transformation starts with accurate measurement of its digital maturity levels. However, existing approaches to measuring organizations’ digital strategy have low accuracy levels and this leads to inconsistent results, and also does not provide resources (data) for future research to improve. In order to measure the digital strategy maturity of companies, we leverage the state-of-the-art NLP models on unstructured data (earning call transcripts), and reach the state-of-the-art levels (94%) for this task. We release 3.691 earning call transcripts and also annotated data set, labeled particularly for the digital strategy maturity by linguists. Our work provides an empirical baseline for research in industry and management science.

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Learning Better Intent Representations for Financial Open Intent Classification
Xianzhi Li | Will Aitken | Xiaodan Zhu | Stephen W. Thomas

With the recent surge of NLP technologies in the financial domain, banks and other financial entities have adopted virtual agents (VA) to assist customers. A challenging problem for VAs in this domain is determining a user’s reason or intent for contacting the VA, especially when the intent was unseen or open during the VA’s training. One method for handling open intents is adaptive decision boundary (ADB) post-processing, which learns tight decision boundaries from intent representations to separate known and open intents. We propose incorporating two methods for supervised pre-training of intent representations: prefix tuning and fine-tuning just the last layer of a large language model (LLM). With this proposal, our accuracy is 1.63% - 2.07% higher than the prior state-of-the-art ADB method for open intent classification on the banking77 benchmark amongst others. Notably, we only supplement the original ADB model with 0.1% additional trainable parameters. Ablation studies also determine that our method yields better results than full fine-tuning the entire model. We hypothesize that our findings could stimulate a new optimal method of downstream tuning that combines parameter efficient tuning modules with fine-tuning a subset of the base model’s layers.

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Exploring Robustness of Prefix Tuning in Noisy Data: A Case Study in Financial Sentiment Analysis
Sudhandar Balakrishnan | Yihao Fang | Xiaodan Zhu

The invention of transformer-based models such as BERT, GPT, and RoBERTa has enabled researchers and financial companies to finetune these powerful models and use them in different downstream tasks to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Recently, a lightweight alternative (approximately 0.1% - 3% of the original model parameters) to fine-tuning, known as prefix tuning has been introduced. This method freezes the model parameters and only updates the prefix to achieve performance comparable to full fine-tuning. Prefix tuning enables researchers and financial practitioners to achieve similar results with much fewer parameters. In this paper, we explore the robustness of prefix tuning when facing noisy data. Our experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning is more robust to noise than prefix tuning—the latter method faces a significant decrease in performance on most corrupted data sets with increasing noise levels. Furthermore, prefix tuning has high variances on the F1 scores compared to fine-tuning in many corruption methods. We strongly advocate that caution should be carefully taken when applying the state-of-the-art prefix tuning method to noisy data.

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A Taxonomical NLP Blueprint to Support Financial Decision Making through Information-Centred Interactions
Siavash Kazemian | Cosmin Munteanu | Gerald Penn

Investment management professionals (IMPs) often make decisions after manual analysis of text transcripts of central banks’ conferences or companies’ earning calls. Their current software tools, while interactive, largely leave users unassisted in using these transcripts. A key component to designing speech and NLP techniques for this community is to qualitatively characterize their perceptions of AI as well as their legitimate needs so as to (1) better apply existing NLP methods, (2) direct future research and (3) correct IMPs’ perceptions of what AI is capable of. This paper presents such a study, through a contextual inquiry with eleven IMPs, uncovering their information practices when using such transcripts. We then propose a taxonomy of user requirements and usability criteria to support IMP decision making, and validate the taxonomy through participatory design workshops with four IMPs. Our investigation suggests that: (1) IMPs view visualization methods and natural language processing algorithms primarily as time-saving tools that are incapable of enhancing either discovery or interpretation and (2) their existing software falls well short of the state of the art in both visualization and NLP.

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Overview of the FinNLP-2022 ERAI Task: Evaluating the Rationales of Amateur Investors
Chung-Chi Chen | Hen-Hsen Huang | Hiroya Takamura | Hsin-Hsi Chen

This paper provides an overview of the shared task, Evaluating the Rationales of Amateur Investors (ERAI), in FinNLP-2022 at EMNLP-2022. This shared task aims to sort out investment opinions that would lead to higher profit from social platforms. We obtained 19 registered teams; 9 teams submitted their results for final evaluation, and 8 teams submitted papers to share their methods. The discussed directions are various: prompting, fine-tuning, translation system comparison, and tailor-made neural network architectures. We provide details of the task settings, data statistics, participants’ results, and fine-grained analysis.

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PromptShots at the FinNLP-2022 ERAI Task: Pairwise Comparison and Unsupervised Ranking
Peratham Wiriyathammabhum

This report describes our PromptShots submissions to a shared task on Evaluating the Rationales of Amateur Investors (ERAI). We participated in both pairwise comparison and unsupervised ranking tasks. For pairwise comparison, we employed instruction-based models based on T5-small and OpenAI InstructGPT language models. Surprisingly, we observed OpenAI InstructGPT language model few-shot trained on Chinese data works best in our submissions, ranking 3rd on the maximal loss (ML) pairwise accuracy. This model works better than training on the Google translated English data by a large margin, where the English few-shot trained InstructGPT model even performs worse than an instruction-based T5-small model finetuned on the English data. However, all instruction-based submissions do not perform well on the maximal potential profit (MPP) pairwise accuracy where there are more data and learning signals. The Chinese few-shot trained InstructGPT model still performs best in our setting. For unsupervised ranking, we utilized many language models, including many financial-specific ones, and Bayesian lexicons unsupervised-learned on both Chinese and English words using a method-of-moments estimator. All our submissions rank best in the MPP ranking, from 1st to 3rd. However, they all do not perform well for ML scoring. Therefore, both MPP and ML scores need different treatments since we treated MPP and ML using the same formula. Our only difference is the treatment of market sentiment lexicons.

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LIPI at the FinNLP-2022 ERAI Task: Ensembling Sentence Transformers for Assessing Maximum Possible Profit and Loss from Online Financial Posts
Sohom Ghosh | Sudip Kumar Naskar

Using insights from social media for making investment decisions has become mainstream. However, in the current era of information ex- plosion, it is essential to mine high-quality so- cial media posts. The FinNLP-2022 ERAI task deals with assessing Maximum Possible Profit (MPP) and Maximum Loss (ML) from social me- dia posts relating to finance. In this paper, we present our team LIPI’s approach. We ensem- bled a range of Sentence Transformers to quan- tify these posts. Unlike other teams with vary- ing performances across different metrics, our system performs consistently well. Our code is available here https://github.com/sohomghosh/LIPI_ERAI_ FinNLP_EMNLP- 2022/

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DCU-ML at the FinNLP-2022 ERAI Task: Investigating the Transferability of Sentiment Analysis Data for Evaluating Rationales of Investors
Chenyang Lyu | Tianbo Ji | Liting Zhou

In this paper, we describe our system for the FinNLP-2022 shared task: Evaluating the Rationales of Amateur Investors (ERAI). The ERAI shared tasks focuses on mining profitable information from financial texts by predicting the possible Maximal Potential Profit (MPP) and Maximal Loss (ML) based on the posts from amateur investors. There are two sub-tasks in ERAI: Pairwise Comparison and Unsupervised Rank, both target on the prediction of MPP and ML. To tackle the two tasks, we frame this task as a text-pair classification task where the input consists of two documents and the output is the label of whether the first document will lead to higher MPP or lower ML. Specifically, we propose to take advantage of the transferability of Sentiment Analysis data with an assumption that a more positive text will lead to higher MPP or higher ML to facilitate the prediction of MPP and ML. In experiment on the ERAI blind test set, our systems trained on Sentiment Analysis data and ERAI training data ranked 1st and 8th in ML and MPP pairwise comparison respectively. Code available in this link.

Evaluating the Rationales of Amateur Investors (ERAI) is a task about mining expert-like viewpoints from social media. This paper summarizes our solutions to the ERAI shared task, which is co-located with the FinNLP workshop at EMNLP 2022. There are 2 sub-tasks in ERAI. Sub-task 1 is a pair-wised comparison task, where we propose a BERT-based pre-trained model projecting opinion pairs in a common space for classification. Sub-task 2 is an unsupervised learning task ranking the opinions’ maximal potential profit (MPP) and maximal loss (ML), where our model leverages the regression method and multi-layer perceptron to rank the MPP and ML values. The proposed approaches achieve competitive accuracy of 54.02% on ML Accuracy and 51.72% on MPP Accuracy for pairwise tasks, also 12.35% and -9.39% regression unsupervised ranking task for MPP and ML.

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aiML at the FinNLP-2022 ERAI Task: Combining Classification and Regression Tasks for Financial Opinion Mining
Zhaoxuan Qin | Jinan Zou | Qiaoyang Luo | Haiyao Cao | Yang Jiao

Identifying posts of high financial quality from opinions is of extraordinary significance for investors. Hence, this paper focuses on evaluating the rationales of amateur investors (ERAI) in a shared task, and we present our solutions. The pairwise comparison task aims at extracting the post that will trigger higher MPP and ML values from pairs of posts. The goal of the unsupervised ranking task is to find the top 10% of posts with higher MPP and ML values. We initially model the shared task as text classification and regression problems. We then propose a multi-learning approach applied by financial domain pre-trained models and multiple linear classifiers for factor combinations to integrate better relationships and information between training data. The official results have proved that our method achieves 48.28% and 52.87% for MPP and ML accuracy on pairwise tasks, 14.02% and -4.17% regarding unsupervised ranking tasks for MPP and ML. Our source code is available.

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Yet at the FinNLP-2022 ERAI Task: Modified models for evaluating the Rationales of Amateur Investors
Yan Zhuang | Fuji Ren

The financial reports usually reveal the recent development of the company and often cause the volatility in the company’s share price. The opinions causing higher maximal potential profit and lower maximal loss can help the amateur investors choose rational strategies. FinNLP-2022 ERAI task aims to quantify the opinions’ potentials of leading higher maximal potential profit and lower maximal loss. In this paper, different strategies were applied to solve the ERAI tasks. Valinna ‘RoBERTa-wwm’ showed excellent performance and helped us rank second in ‘MPP’ label prediction task. After integrating some tricks, the modified ‘RoBERTa-wwm’ outperformed all other models in ‘ML’ ranking task.

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LDPP at the FinNLP-2022 ERAI Task: Determinantal Point Processes and Variational Auto-encoders for Identifying High-Quality Opinions from a pool of Social Media Posts
Paul Trust | Rosane Minghim

Social media and online forums have made it easier for people to share their views and opinions on various topics in society. In this paper, we focus on posts discussing investment related topics. When it comes to investment , people can now easily share their opinions about online traded items and also provide rationales to support their arguments on social media. However, there are millions of posts to read with potential of having some posts from amateur investors or completely unrelated posts. Identifying the most important posts that could lead to higher maximal potential profit (MPP) and lower maximal loss for investment is not a trivial task. In this paper, propose to use determinantal point processes and variational autoencoders to identify high quality posts from the given rationales. Experimental results suggest that our method mines quality posts compared to random selection and also latent variable modeling improves improves the quality of selected posts.

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Jetsons at the FinNLP-2022 ERAI Task: BERT-Chinese for mining high MPP posts
Alolika Gon | Sihan Zha | Sai Krishna Rallabandi | Parag Pravin Dakle | Preethi Raghavan

In this paper, we discuss the various approaches by the Jetsons team for the “Pairwise Comparison” sub-task of the ERAI shared task to compare financial opinions for profitability and loss. Our BERT-Chinese model considers a pair of opinions and predicts the one with a higher maximum potential profit (MPP) with 62.07% accuracy. We analyze the performance of our approaches on both the MPP and maximal loss (ML) problems and deeply dive into why BERT-Chinese outperforms other models.

Previous work has demonstrated the viability of applying deep learning techniques in the financial area. Recently, the task of stock embedding learning has been drawing attention from the research community, which aims to represent the characteristics of stocks with distributed vectors that can be used in various financial analysis scenarios. Existing approaches for learning stock embeddings either require expert knowledge, or mainly focus on the textual part of information corresponding to individual temporal movements. In this paper, we propose to model stock properties as the combination of internal attributes and relational attributes, which takes into consideration both the time-invariant properties of individual stocks and their movement patterns in relation to the market. To learn the two types of attributes from financial news and transaction data, we design several training objectives based on contrastive learning to extract and separate the long-term and temporary information in the data that are able to counter the inherent randomness of the stock market. Experiments and further analyses on portfolio optimization reveal the effectiveness of our method in extracting comprehensive stock information from various data sources.

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Prospectus Language and IPO Performance
Jared Sharpe | Keith Decker

Pricing a firm’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) has historically been very difficult, with high average returns on the first-day of trading. Furthermore, IPO withdrawal, the event in which companies who file to go public ultimately rescind the application before the offering, is an equally challenging prediction problem. This research utilizes word embedding techniques to evaluate existing theories concerning firm sentiment on first-day trading performance and the probability of withdrawal, which has not yet been explored empirically. The results suggest that firms attempting to go public experience a decreased probability of withdrawal with the increased presence of positive, litigious, and uncertain language in their initial prospectus, while the increased presence of strong modular language leads to an increased probability of withdrawal. The results also suggest that frequent or large adjustments in the strong modular language of subsequent filings leads to smaller first-day returns.

With the goal of reasoning on the financial textual data, we present in this paper, a novel approach for annotating arguments, their components and relations in the transcripts of earnings conference calls (ECCs). The proposed scheme is driven from the argumentation theory at the micro-structure level of discourse. We further conduct a manual annotation study with four annotators on 136 documents. We obtained inter-annotator agreement of lpha_U = 0.70 for argument components and lpha = 0.81 for argument relations. The final created corpus, with the size of 804 documents, as well as the annotation guidelines are publicly available for researchers in the domains of computational argumentation, finance and FinNLP.

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How Can a Teacher Make Learning From Sparse Data Softer? Application to Business Relation Extraction
Hadjer Khaldi | Farah Benamara | Camille Pradel | Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles

Business Relation Extraction between market entities is a challenging information extraction task that suffers from data imbalance due to the over-representation of negative relations (also known as No-relation or Others) compared to positive relations that corresponds to the taxonomy of relations of interest. This paper proposes a novel solution to tackle this problem, relying on binary soft labels supervision generated by an approach based on knowledge distillation. When evaluated on a business relation extraction dataset, the results suggest that the proposed approach improves the overall performance, beating state-of-the art solutions for data imbalance. In particular, it improves the extraction of under-represented relations as well as the detection of false negatives.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) demonstrates a great potential to support financial decision-making by analyzing the text from social media or news outlets. In this work, we build a platform to study the NLP-aided stock auto-trading algorithms systematically. In contrast to the previous work, our platform is characterized by three features: (1) We provide financial news for each specific stock. (2) We provide various stock factors for each stock. (3) We evaluate performance from more financial-relevant metrics. Such a design allows us to develop and evaluate NLP-aided stock auto-trading algorithms in a more realistic setting. In addition to designing an evaluation platform and dataset collection, we also made a technical contribution by proposing a system to automatically learn a good feature representation from various input information. The key to our algorithm is a method called semantic role labeling Pooling (SRLP), which leverages Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) to create a compact representation of each news paragraph. Based on SRLP, we further incorporate other stock factors to make the final prediction. In addition, we propose a self-supervised learning strategy based on SRLP to enhance the out-of-distribution generalization performance of our system. Through our experimental study, we show that the proposed method achieves better performance and outperforms all the baselines’ annualized rate of return as well as the maximum drawdown of the CSI300 index and XIN9 index on real trading. Our Astock dataset and code are available at https://github.com/JinanZou/Astock.

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Next-Year Bankruptcy Prediction from Textual Data: Benchmark and Baselines
Henri Arno | Klaas Mulier | Joke Baeck | Thomas Demeester

Models for bankruptcy prediction are useful in several real-world scenarios, and multiple research contributions have been devoted to the task, based on structured (numerical) as well as unstructured (textual) data. However, the lack of a common benchmark dataset and evaluation strategy impedes the objective comparison between models. This paper introduces such a benchmark for the unstructured data scenario, based on novel and established datasets, in order to stimulate further research into the task. We describe and evaluate several classical and neural baseline models, and discuss benefits and flaws of different strategies. In particular, we find that a lightweight bag-of-words model based on static in-domain word representations obtains surprisingly good results, especially when taking textual data from several years into account. These results are critically assessed, and discussed in light of particular aspects of the data and the task. All code to replicate the data and experimental results will be released.

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AdaK-NER: An Adaptive Top-K Approach for Named Entity Recognition with Incomplete Annotations
Hongtao Ruan | Liying Zheng | Peixian Hu

State-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) models rely heavily on large amounts of fully annotated training data. However, accessible data are often incompletely annotated since the annotators usually lack comprehensive knowledge in the target domain. Normally the unannotated tokens are regarded as non-entities by default, while we underline that these tokens could either be non-entities or part of any entity. Here, we study NER modeling with incomplete annotated data where only a fraction of the named entities are labeled, and the unlabeled tokens are equivalently multi-labeled by every possible label. Taking multi-labeled tokens into account, the numerous possible paths can distract the training model from the gold path (ground truth label sequence), and thus hinders the learning ability. In this paper, we propose AdaK-NER, named the adaptive top-K approach, to help the model focus on a smaller feasible region where the gold path is more likely to be located. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach through extensive experiments on both English and Chinese datasets, averagely improving 2% in F-score on the CoNLL-2003 and over 10% on two Chinese datasets compared with the prior state-of-the-art works.

Cryptocurrencies have gained enormous momentum in finance and are nowadays commonly adopted as a medium of exchange for online payments. After recent events during which GameStop’s stocks were believed to be influenced by WallStreetBets subReddit, Reddit has become a very hot topic on the cryptocurrency market. The influence of public opinions on cryptocurrency price trends has inspired researchers on exploring solutions that integrate such information in crypto price change forecasting. A popular integration technique regards representing social media opinions via sentiment features. However, this research direction is still in its infancy, where a limited number of publicly available datasets with sentiment annotations exists. We propose a novel Bitcoin Reddit Sentiment Dataset, a ready-to-use dataset annotated with state-of-the-art sentiment and emotion recognition. The dataset contains pre-processed Reddit posts and comments about Bitcoin from several domain-related subReddits along with Bitcoin’s financial data. We evaluate several widely adopted neural architectures for crypto price change forecasting. Our results show controversial benefits of sentiment and emotion features advocating for more sophisticated social media integration techniques. We make our dataset publicly available for research.

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FinSim4-ESG Shared Task: Learning Semantic Similarities for the Financial Domain. Extended edition to ESG insights
Juyeon Kang | Ismail El Maarouf

This paper describes FinSim4-ESG 1 shared task organized in the 4th FinNLP workshopwhich is held in conjunction with the IJCAI-ECAI-2022 confer- enceThis year, the FinSim4 is extended to the Environment, Social and Government (ESG) insights and proposes two subtasks, one for ESG Taxonomy Enrichment and the other for Sustainable Sentence Prediction. Among the 28 teams registered to the shared task, a total of 8 teams submitted their systems results and 6 teams also submitted a paper to describe their method. The winner of each subtask shows good performance results of 0.85% and 0.95% in terms of accuracy, respectively.

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Using Contextual Sentence Analysis Models to Recognize ESG Concepts
Elvys Linhares Pontes | Mohamed Ben Jannet | Jose G. Moreno | Antoine Doucet

This paper summarizes the joint participation of the Trading Central Labs and the L3i laboratory of the University of La Rochelle on both sub-tasks of the Shared Task FinSim-4 evaluation campaign. The first sub-task aims to enrich the ‘Fortia ESG taxonomy’ with new lexicon entries while the second one aims to classify sentences to either ‘sustainable’ or ‘unsustainable’ with respect to ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) related factors. For the first sub-task, we proposed a model based on pre-trained Sentence-BERT models to project sentences and concepts in a common space in order to better represent ESG concepts. The official task results show that our system yields a significant performance improvement compared to the baseline and outperforms all other submissions on the first sub-task. For the second sub-task, we combine the RoBERTa model with a feed-forward multi-layer perceptron in order to extract the context of sentences and classify them. Our model achieved high accuracy scores (over 92%) and was ranked among the top 5 systems.

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Automatic Term and Sentence Classification Via Augmented Term and Pre-trained language model in ESG Taxonomy texts
Ke Tian | Zepeng Zhang | Hua Chen

In this paper, we present our solutions to the FinSim4 Shared Task which is co-located with the FinNLP workshop at IJCAI-2022. This new edition of FinSim4-ESG is extended to the “Environment, Social and Governance (ESG)” related issues in the financial domain. There are two sub-tasks in the FinSim4 shared task. The goal of sub-task1 is to develop a model to predict correctly a list of given terms from ESG taxonomy domain into the most relevant concepts. The aim of subtask2 is to design a system that can automatically classify the ESG Taxonomy text sentence into sustainable or unsustainable class. We have developed different classifiers to automatically classify the terms and sentences with augmented term and pre-trained language models: tf-idf vector, word2vec, Bert, Distill-Bert, Albert, Roberta. The result dashboard shows that our proposed methods yield a significant performance improvement compared to the baseline which ranked 1st in the subtask2 and 2rd of mean rank in the subtask1.

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Knowledge informed sustainability detection from short financial texts
Boshko Koloski | Syrielle Montariol | Matthew Purver | Senja Pollak

There is a global trend for responsible investing and the need for developing automated methods for analyzing and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) related elements in financial texts is raising. In this work we propose a solution to the FinSim4-ESG task, consisting of binary classification of sentences into sustainable or unsustainable. We propose a novel knowledge-based latent heterogeneous representation that is based on knowledge from taxonomies and knowledge graphs and multiple contemporary document representations. We hypothesize that an approach based on a combination of knowledge and document representations can introduce significant improvement over conventional document representation approaches. We consider ensembles on classifier as well on representation level late-fusion and early fusion. The proposed approaches achieve competitive accuracy of 89 and are 5.85 behind the best achieved score.

Advanced neural network architectures have provided several opportunities to develop systems to automatically capture information from domain-specific unstructured text sources. The FinSim4-ESG shared task, collocated with the FinNLP workshop, proposed two sub-tasks. In sub-task1, the challenge was to design systems that could utilize contextual word embeddings along with sustainability resources to elaborate an ESG taxonomy. In the second sub-task, participants were asked to design a system that could classify sentences into sustainable or unsustainable sentences. In this paper, we utilize semantic similarity features along with BERT embeddings to segregate domain terms into a fixed number of class labels. The proposed model not only considers the contextual BERT embeddings but also incorporates Word2Vec, cosine, and Jaccard similarity which gives word-level importance to the model. For sentence classification, several linguistic elements along with BERT embeddings were used as classification features. We have shown a detailed ablation study for the proposed models.

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Ranking Environment, Social And Governance Related Concepts And Assessing Sustainability Aspect of Financial Texts
Sohom Ghosh | Sudip Kumar Naskar

Understanding Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors related to financial products has become extremely important for investors. However, manually screening through the corporate policies and reports to understand their sustainability aspect is extremely tedious. In this paper, we propose solutions to two such problems which were released as shared tasks of the FinNLP workshop of the IJCAI-2022 conference. Firstly, we train a Sentence Transformers based model which automatically ranks ESG related concepts for a given unknown term. Secondly, we fine-tune a RoBERTa model to classify financial texts as sustainable or not. Out of 26 registered teams, our team ranked 4th in sub-task 1 and 3rd in sub-task 2. The source code can be accessed from https://github.com/sohomghosh/Finsim4_ESG

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Using Transformer-based Models for Taxonomy Enrichment and Sentence Classification
Parag Pravin Dakle | Shrikumar Patil | Sai Krishna Rallabandi | Chaitra Hegde | Preethi Raghavan

In this paper, we present a system that addresses the taxonomy enrichment problem for Environment, Social and Governance issues in the financial domain, as well as classifying sentences as sustainable or unsustainable, for FinSim4-ESG, a shared task for the FinNLP workshop at IJCAI-2022. We first created a derived dataset for taxonomy enrichment by using a sentence-BERT-based paraphrase detector (Reimers and Gurevych, 2019) (on the train set) to create positive and negative term-concept pairs. We then model the problem by fine-tuning the sentence-BERT-based paraphrase detector on this derived dataset, and use it as the encoder, and use a Logistic Regression classifier as the decoder, resulting in test Accuracy: 0.6 and Avg. Rank: 1.97. In case of the sentence classification task, the best-performing classifier (Accuracy: 0.92) consists of a pre-trained RoBERTa model (Liu et al., 2019a) as the encoder and a Feed Forward Neural Network classifier as the decoder.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Federated Learning for Natural Language Processing (FL4NLP 2022)

In the context of personalized federated learning (FL), the critical challenge is to balance local model improvement and global model tuning when the personal and global objectives may not be exactly aligned. Inspired by Bayesian hierarchical models, we develop ActPerFL, a self-aware personalized FL method where each client can automatically balance the training of its local personal model and the global model that implicitly contributes to other clients’ training. Such a balance is derived from the inter-client and intra-client uncertainty quantification. Consequently, ActPerFL can adapt to the underlying clients’ heterogeneity with uncertainty-driven local training and model aggregation. With experimental studies on Sent140 and Amazon Alexa audio data, we show that ActPerFL can achieve superior personalization performance compared with the existing counterparts.

Most studies in cross-device federated learning focus on small models, due to the server-client communication and on-device computation bottlenecks. In this work, we leverage various techniques for mitigating these bottlenecks to train larger language models in cross-device federated learning. With systematic applications of partial model training, quantization, efficient transfer learning, and communication-efficient optimizers, we are able to train a 21M parameter Transformer that achieves the same perplexity as that of a similarly sized LSTM with ∼10× smaller client-to-server communication cost and 11% lower perplexity than smaller LSTMs commonly studied in literature.

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Adaptive Differential Privacy for Language Model Training
Xinwei Wu | Li Gong | Deyi Xiong

Although differential privacy (DP) can protect language models from leaking privacy, its indiscriminative protection on all data points reduces its practical utility. Previous works improve DP training by discriminating privacy and non-privacy data. But these works rely on datasets with prior privacy information, which is not available in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Differential Privacy (ADP) framework for language modeling without resorting to prior privacy information. We estimate the probability that a linguistic item contains privacy based on a language model. We further propose a new Adam algorithm that adjusts the degree of differential privacy noise injected to the language model according to the estimated privacy probabilities. Experiments demonstrate that our ADP improves differentially private language modeling to achieve good protection from canary attackers.

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Intrinsic Gradient Compression for Scalable and Efficient Federated Learning
Luke Melas-Kyriazi | Franklyn Wang

Federated learning is a rapidly growing area of research, holding the promise of privacy-preserving distributed training on edge devices. The largest barrier to wider adoption of federated learning is the communication cost of model updates, which is accentuated by the fact that many edge devices are bandwidth-constrained. At the same time, within the machine learning theory community, a separate line of research has emerged around optimizing networks within a subspace of the full space of all parameters. The dimension of the smallest subspace for which these methods still yield strong results is called the intrinsic dimension. In this work, we prove a general correspondence between the notions of intrinsic dimension and gradient compressibility, and we show that a family of low-bandwidth federated learning algorithms, which we call intrinsic gradient compression algorithms, naturally emerges from this correspondence. Finally, we conduct large-scale NLP experiments using transformer models with over 100M parameters (GPT-2 and BERT), and show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in gradient compression.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)

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Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)
Christian Hardmeier | Christine Basta | Marta R. Costa-jussà | Gabriel Stanovsky | Hila Gonen

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Analyzing Hate Speech Data along Racial, Gender and Intersectional Axes
Antonis Maronikolakis | Philip Baader | Hinrich Schütze

To tackle the rising phenomenon of hate speech, efforts have been made towards data curation and analysis. When it comes to analysis of bias, previous work has focused predominantly on race. In our work, we further investigate bias in hate speech datasets along racial, gender and intersectional axes. We identify strong bias against African American English (AAE), masculine and AAE+Masculine tweets, which are annotated as disproportionately more hateful and offensive than from other demographics. We provide evidence that BERT-based models propagate this bias and show that balancing the training data for these protected attributes can lead to fairer models with regards to gender, but not race.

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Analysis of Gender Bias in Social Perception and Judgement Using Chinese Word Embeddings
Jiali Li | Shucheng Zhu | Ying Liu | Pengyuan Liu

Gender is a construction in line with social perception and judgment. An important means of this construction is through languages. When natural language processing tools, such as word embeddings, associate gender with the relevant categories of social perception and judgment, it is likely to cause bias and harm to those groups that do not conform to the mainstream social perception and judgment. Using 12,251 Chinese word embeddings as intermedium, this paper studies the relationship between social perception and judgment categories and gender. The results reveal that these grammatical gender-neutral Chinese word embeddings show a certain gender bias, which is consistent with the mainstream society’s perception and judgment of gender. Men are judged by their actions and perceived as bad, easily-disgusted, bad-tempered and rational roles while women are judged by their appearances and perceived as perfect, either happy or sad, and emotional roles.

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Don’t Forget About Pronouns: Removing Gender Bias in Language Models Without Losing Factual Gender Information
Tomasz Limisiewicz | David Mareček

The representations in large language models contain multiple types of gender information. We focus on two types of such signals in English texts: factual gender information, which is a grammatical or semantic property, and gender bias, which is the correlation between a word and specific gender. We can disentangle the model’s embeddings and identify components encoding both types of information with probing. We aim to diminish the stereotypical bias in the representations while preserving the factual gender signal. Our filtering method shows that it is possible to decrease the bias of gender-neutral profession names without significant deterioration of language modeling capabilities. The findings can be applied to language generation to mitigate reliance on stereotypes while preserving gender agreement in coreferences.

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Uncertainty and Inclusivity in Gender Bias Annotation: An Annotation Taxonomy and Annotated Datasets of British English Text
Lucy Havens | Melissa Terras | Benjamin Bach | Beatrice Alex

Mitigating harms from gender biased language in Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems remains a challenge, and the situated nature of language means bias is inescapable in NLP data. Though efforts to mitigate gender bias in NLP are numerous, they often vaguely define gender and bias, only consider two genders, and do not incorporate uncertainty into models. To address these limitations, in this paper we present a taxonomy of gender biased language and apply it to create annotated datasets. We created the taxonomy and annotated data with the aim of making gender bias in language transparent. If biases are communicated clearly, varieties of biased language can be better identified and measured. Our taxonomy contains eleven types of gender biases inclusive of people whose gender expressions do not fit into the binary conceptions of woman and man, and whose gender differs from that they were assigned at birth, while also allowing annotators to document unknown gender information. The taxonomy and annotated data will, in future work, underpin analysis and more equitable language model development.

People frequently interact with information retrieval (IR) systems, however, IR models exhibit biases and discrimination towards various demographics. The in-processing fair ranking methods provides a trade-offs between accuracy and fairness through adding a fairness-related regularization term in the loss function. However, there haven’t been intuitive objective functions that depend on the click probability and user engagement to directly optimize towards this. In this work, we propose the In-Batch Balancing Regularization (IBBR) to mitigate the ranking disparity among subgroups. In particular, we develop a differentiable normed Pairwise Ranking Fairness (nPRF) and leverage the T-statistics on top of nPRF over subgroups as a regularization to improve fairness. Empirical results with the BERT-based neural rankers on the MS MARCO Passage Retrieval dataset with the human-annotated non-gendered queries benchmark (CITATION) show that our IBBR method with nPRF achieves significantly less bias with minimal degradation in ranking performance compared with the baseline.

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Gender Biases and Where to Find Them: Exploring Gender Bias in Pre-Trained Transformer-based Language Models Using Movement Pruning
Przemyslaw Joniak | Akiko Aizawa

Language model debiasing has emerged as an important field of study in the NLP community. Numerous debiasing techniques were proposed, but bias ablation remains an unaddressed issue. We demonstrate a novel framework for inspecting bias in pre-trained transformer-based language models via movement pruning. Given a model and a debiasing objective, our framework finds a subset of the model containing less bias than the original model. We implement our framework by pruning the model while fine-tuning it on the debasing objective. Optimized are only the pruning scores – parameters coupled with the model’s weights that act as gates. We experiment with pruning attention heads, an important building block of transformers: we prune square blocks, as well as establish a new way of pruning the entire heads. Lastly, we demonstrate the usage of our framework using gender bias, and based on our findings, we propose an improvement to an existing debiasing method. Additionally, we re-discover a bias-performance trade-off: the better the model performs, the more bias it contains.

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Gendered Language in Resumes and its Implications for Algorithmic Bias in Hiring
Prasanna Parasurama | João Sedoc

Despite growing concerns around gender bias in NLP models used in algorithmic hiring, there is little empirical work studying the extent and nature of gendered language in resumes. Using a corpus of 709k resumes from IT firms, we train a series of models to classify the gender of the applicant, thereby measuring the extent of gendered information encoded in resumes. We also investigate whether it is possible to obfuscate gender from resumes by removing gender identifiers, hobbies, gender sub-space in embedding models, etc. We find that there is a significant amount of gendered information in resumes even after obfuscation.A simple Tf-Idf model can learn to classify gender with AUROC=0.75, and more sophisticated transformer-based models achieve AUROC=0.8.We further find that gender predictive values have low correlation with gender direction of embeddings – meaning that, what is predictive of gender is much more than what is “gendered” in the masculine/feminine sense. We discuss the algorithmic bias and fairness implications of these findings in the hiring context.

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The Birth of Bias: A case study on the evolution of gender bias in an English language model
Oskar Van Der Wal | Jaap Jumelet | Katrin Schulz | Willem Zuidema

Detecting and mitigating harmful biases in modern language models are widely recognized as crucial, open problems. In this paper, we take a step back and investigate how language models come to be biased in the first place. We use a relatively small language model, using the LSTM architecture trained on an English Wikipedia corpus. With full access to the data and to the model parameters as they change during every step while training, we can map in detail how the representation of gender develops, what patterns in the dataset drive this, and how the model’s internal state relates to the bias in a downstream task (semantic textual similarity).We find that the representation of gender is dynamic and identify different phases during training. Furthermore, we show that gender information is represented increasingly locally in the input embeddings of the model and that, as a consequence, debiasing these can be effective in reducing the downstream bias. Monitoring the training dynamics, allows us to detect an asymmetry in how the female and male gender are represented in the input embeddings. This is important, as it may cause naive mitigation strategies to introduce new undesirable biases. We discuss the relevance of the findings for mitigation strategies more generally and the prospects of generalizing our methods to larger language models, the Transformer architecture, other languages and other undesirable biases.

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Challenges in Measuring Bias via Open-Ended Language Generation
Afra Feyza Akyürek | Muhammed Yusuf Kocyigit | Sejin Paik | Derry Tanti Wijaya

Researchers have devised numerous ways to quantify social biases vested in pretrained language models. As some language models are capable of generating coherent completions given a set of textual prompts, several prompting datasets have been proposed to measure biases between social groups—posing language generation as a way of identifying biases. In this opinion paper, we analyze how specific choices of prompt sets, metrics, automatic tools and sampling strategies affect bias results. We find out that the practice of measuring biases through text completion is prone to yielding contradicting results under different experiment settings. We additionally provide recommendations for reporting biases in open-ended language generation for a more complete outlook of biases exhibited by a given language model. Code to reproduce the results is released under https://github.com/feyzaakyurek/bias-textgen.

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Worst of Both Worlds: Biases Compound in Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Models
Tejas Srinivasan | Yonatan Bisk

Numerous works have analyzed biases in vision and pre-trained language models individually - however, less attention has been paid to how these biases interact in multimodal settings. This work extends text-based bias analysis methods to investigate multimodal language models, and analyzes intra- and inter-modality associations and biases learned by these models. Specifically, we demonstrate that VL-BERT (Su et al., 2020) exhibits gender biases, often preferring to reinforce a stereotype over faithfully describing the visual scene. We demonstrate these findings on a controlled case-study and extend them for a larger set of stereotypically gendered entities.

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Assessing Group-level Gender Bias in Professional Evaluations: The Case of Medical Student End-of-Shift Feedback
Emmy Liu | Michael Henry Tessler | Nicole Dubosh | Katherine Hiller | Roger Levy

Though approximately 50% of medical school graduates today are women, female physicians tend to be underrepresented in senior positions, make less money than their male counterparts and receive fewer promotions. There is a growing body of literature demonstrating gender bias in various forms of evaluation in medicine, but this work was mainly conducted by looking for specific words using fixed dictionaries such as LIWC and focused on global assessments of performance such as recommendation letters. We use a dataset of written and quantitative assessments of medical student performance on individual shifts of work, collected across multiple institutions, to investigate the extent to which gender bias exists in a day-to-day context for medical students. We investigate differences in the narrative comments given to male and female students by both male or female faculty assessors, using a fine-tuned BERT model. This allows us to examine whether groups are written about in systematically different ways, without relying on hand-crafted wordlists or topic models. We compare these results to results from the traditional LIWC method and find that, although we find no evidence of group-level gender bias in this dataset, terms related to family and children are used more in feedback given to women.

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On the Dynamics of Gender Learning in Speech Translation
Beatrice Savoldi | Marco Gaido | Luisa Bentivogli | Matteo Negri | Marco Turchi

Due to the complexity of bias and the opaque nature of current neural approaches, there is a rising interest in auditing language technologies. In this work, we contribute to such a line of inquiry by exploring the emergence of gender bias in Speech Translation (ST). As a new perspective, rather than focusing on the final systems only, we examine their evolution over the course of training. In this way, we are able to account for different variables related to the learning dynamics of gender translation, and investigate when and how gender divides emerge in ST. Accordingly, for three language pairs (en ? es, fr, it) we compare how ST systems behave for masculine and feminine translation at several levels of granularity. We find that masculine and feminine curves are dissimilar, with the feminine one being characterized by more erratic behaviour and late improvements over the course of training. Also, depending on the considered phenomena, their learning trends can be either antiphase or parallel. Overall, we show how such a progressive analysis can inform on the reliability and time-wise acquisition of gender, which is concealed by static evaluations and standard metrics.

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Fewer Errors, but More Stereotypes? The Effect of Model Size on Gender Bias
Yarden Tal | Inbal Magar | Roy Schwartz

The size of pretrained models is increasing, and so is their performance on a variety of NLP tasks. However, as their memorization capacity grows, they might pick up more social biases. In this work, we examine the connection between model size and its gender bias (specifically, occupational gender bias). We measure bias in three masked language model families (RoBERTa, DeBERTa, and T5) in two setups: directly using prompt based method, and using a downstream task (Winogender). We find on the one hand that larger models receive higher bias scores on the former task, but when evaluated on the latter, they make fewer gender errors. To examine these potentially conflicting results, we carefully investigate the behavior of the different models on Winogender. We find that while larger models outperform smaller ones, the probability that their mistakes are caused by gender bias is higher. Moreover, we find that the proportion of stereotypical errors compared to anti-stereotypical ones grows with the model size. Our findings highlight the potential risks that can arise from increasing model size.

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Unsupervised Mitigating Gender Bias by Character Components: A Case Study of Chinese Word Embedding
Xiuying Chen | Mingzhe Li | Rui Yan | Xin Gao | Xiangliang Zhang

Word embeddings learned from massive text collections have demonstrated significant levels of discriminative biases. However, debias on the Chinese language, one of the most spoken languages, has been less explored. Meanwhile, existing literature relies on manually created supplementary data, which is time- and energy-consuming. In this work, we propose the first Chinese Gender-neutral word Embedding model (CGE) based on Word2vec, which learns gender-neutral word embeddings without any labeled data. Concretely, CGE utilizes and emphasizes the rich feminine and masculine information contained in radicals, i.e., a kind of component in Chinese characters, during the training procedure. This consequently alleviates discriminative gender biases. Experimental results on public benchmark datasets show that our unsupervised method outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised debiased word embedding models without sacrificing the functionality of the embedding model.

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An Empirical Study on the Fairness of Pre-trained Word Embeddings
Emeralda Sesari | Max Hort | Federica Sarro

Pre-trained word embedding models are easily distributed and applied, as they alleviate users from the effort to train models themselves. With widely distributed models, it is important to ensure that they do not exhibit undesired behaviour, such as biases against population groups. For this purpose, we carry out an empirical study on evaluating the bias of 15 publicly available, pre-trained word embeddings model based on three training algorithms (GloVe, word2vec, and fastText) with regard to four bias metrics (WEAT, SEMBIAS,DIRECT BIAS, and ECT). The choice of word embedding models and bias metrics is motivated by a literature survey over 37 publications which quantified bias on pre-trained word embeddings. Our results indicate that fastText is the least biased model (in 8 out of 12 cases) and small vector lengths lead to a higher bias.

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Mitigating Gender Stereotypes in Hindi and Marathi
Neeraja Kirtane | Tanvi Anand

As the use of natural language processing increases in our day-to-day life, the need to address gender bias inherent in these systems also amplifies. This is because the inherent bias interferes with the semantic structure of the output of these systems while performing tasks in natural language processing. While research is being done in English to quantify and mitigate bias, debiasing methods in Indic Languages are either relatively nascent or absent for some Indic languages altogether. Most Indic languages are gendered, i.e., each noun is assigned a gender according to each language’s rules of grammar. As a consequence, evaluation differs from what is done in English. This paper evaluates the gender stereotypes in Hindi and Marathi languages. The methodologies will differ from the ones in the English language because there are masculine and feminine counterparts in the case of some words. We create a dataset of neutral and gendered occupation words, emotion words and measure bias with the help of Embedding Coherence Test (ECT) and Relative Norm Distance (RND). We also attempt to mitigate this bias from the embeddings. Experiments show that our proposed debiasing techniques reduce gender bias in these languages.

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Choose Your Lenses: Flaws in Gender Bias Evaluation
Hadas Orgad | Yonatan Belinkov

Considerable efforts to measure and mitigate gender bias in recent years have led to the introduction of an abundance of tasks, datasets, and metrics used in this vein. In this position paper, we assess the current paradigm of gender bias evaluation and identify several flaws in it. First, we highlight the importance of extrinsic bias metrics that measure how a model’s performance on some task is affected by gender, as opposed to intrinsic evaluations of model representations, which are less strongly connected to specific harms to people interacting with systems. We find that only a few extrinsic metrics are measured in most studies, although more can be measured. Second, we find that datasets and metrics are often coupled, and discuss how their coupling hinders the ability to obtain reliable conclusions, and how one may decouple them. We then investigate how the choice of the dataset and its composition, as well as the choice of the metric, affect bias measurement, finding significant variations across each of them. Finally, we propose several guidelines for more reliable gender bias evaluation.

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A Taxonomy of Bias-Causing Ambiguities in Machine Translation
Michal Měchura

This paper introduces a taxonomy of phenomena which cause bias in machine translation, covering gender bias (people being male and/or female), number bias (singular you versus plural you) and formality bias (informal you versus formal you). Our taxonomy is a formalism for describing situations in machine translation when the source text leaves some of these properties unspecified (eg. does not say whether doctor is male or female) but the target language requires the property to be specified (eg. because it does not have a gender-neutral word for doctor). The formalism described here is used internally by a web-based tool we have built for detecting and correcting bias in the output of any machine translator.

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On Gender Biases in Offensive Language Classification Models
Sanjana Marcé | Adam Poliak

We explore whether neural Natural Language Processing models trained to identify offensive language in tweets contain gender biases. We add historically gendered and gender ambiguous American names to an existing offensive language evaluation set to determine whether models? predictions are sensitive or robust to gendered names. While we see some evidence that these models might be prone to biased stereotypes that men use more offensive language than women, our results indicate that these models? binary predictions might not greatly change based upon gendered names.

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Gender Bias in BERT - Measuring and Analysing Biases through Sentiment Rating in a Realistic Downstream Classification Task
Sophie Jentzsch | Cigdem Turan

Pretrained language models are publicly available and constantly finetuned for various real-life applications. As they become capable of grasping complex contextual information, harmful biases are likely increasingly intertwined with those models. This paper analyses gender bias in BERT models with two main contributions: First, a novel bias measure is introduced, defining biases as the difference in sentiment valuation of female and male sample versions. Second, we comprehensively analyse BERT?s biases on the example of a realistic IMDB movie classifier. By systematically varying elements of the training pipeline, we can conclude regarding their impact on the final model bias. Seven different public BERT models in nine training conditions, i.e. 63 models in total, are compared. Almost all conditions yield significant gender biases. Results indicate that reflected biases stem from public BERT models rather than task-specific data, emphasising the weight of responsible usage.

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Occupational Biases in Norwegian and Multilingual Language Models
Samia Touileb | Lilja Øvrelid | Erik Velldal

In this paper we explore how a demographic distribution of occupations, along gender dimensions, is reflected in pre-trained language models. We give a descriptive assessment of the distribution of occupations, and investigate to what extent these are reflected in four Norwegian and two multilingual models. To this end, we introduce a set of simple bias probes, and perform five different tasks combining gendered pronouns, first names, and a set of occupations from the Norwegian statistics bureau. We show that language specific models obtain more accurate results, and are much closer to the real-world distribution of clearly gendered occupations. However, we see that none of the models have correct representations of the occupations that are demographically balanced between genders. We also discuss the importance of the training data on which the models were trained on, and argue that template-based bias probes can sometimes be fragile, and a simple alteration in a template can change a model’s behavior.

The growing capability and availability of generative language models has enabled a wide range of new downstream tasks. Academic research has identified, quantified and mitigated biases present in language models but is rarely tailored to downstream tasks where wider impact on individuals and society can be felt. In this work, we leverage one popular generative language model, GPT-3, with the goal of writing unbiased and realistic job advertisements. We first assess the bias and realism of zero-shot generated advertisements and compare them to real-world advertisements. We then evaluate prompt-engineering and fine-tuning as debiasing methods. We find that prompt-engineering with diversity-encouraging prompts gives no significant improvement to bias, nor realism. Conversely, fine-tuning, especially on unbiased real advertisements, can improve realism and reduce bias.

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HeteroCorpus: A Corpus for Heteronormative Language Detection
Juan Vásquez | Gemma Bel-Enguix | Scott Thomas Andersen | Sergio-Luis Ojeda-Trueba

In recent years, plenty of work has been done by the NLP community regarding gender bias detection and mitigation in language systems. Yet, to our knowledge, no one has focused on the difficult task of heteronormative language detection and mitigation. We consider this an urgent issue, since language technologies are growing increasingly present in the world and, as it has been proven by various studies, NLP systems with biases can create real-life adverse consequences for women, gender minorities and racial minorities and queer people. For these reasons, we propose and evaluate HeteroCorpus; a corpus created specifically for studying heterononormative language in English. Additionally, we propose a baseline set of classification experiments on our corpus, in order to show the performance of our corpus in classification tasks.

Films are a rich source of data for natural language processing. OpenSubtitles (Lison and Tiedemann, 2016) is a popular movie script dataset, used for training models for tasks such as machine translation and dialogue generation. However, movies often contain biases that reflect society at the time, and these biases may be introduced during pre-training and influence downstream models. We perform sentiment analysis on template infilling (Kurita et al., 2019) and the Sentence Embedding Association Test (May et al., 2019) to measure how BERT-based language models change after continued pre-training on OpenSubtitles. We consider gender bias as a primary motivating case for this analysis, while also measuring other social biases such as disability. We show that sentiment analysis on template infilling is not an effective measure of bias due to the rarity of disability and gender identifying tokens in the movie dialogue. We extend our analysis to a longitudinal study of bias in film dialogue over the last 110 years and find that continued pre-training on OpenSubtitles encodes additional bias into BERT. We show that BERT learns associations that reflect the biases and representation of each film era, suggesting that additional care must be taken when using historical data.

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Indigenous Language Revitalization and the Dilemma of Gender Bias
Oussama Hansal | Ngoc Tan Le | Fatiha Sadat

Natural Language Processing (NLP), through its several applications, has been considered as one of the most valuable field in interdisciplinary researches, as well as in computer science. However, it is not without its flaws. One of the most common flaws is bias. This paper examines the main linguistic challenges of Inuktitut, an indigenous language of Canada, and focuses on gender bias identification and mitigation. We explore the unique characteristics of this language to help us understand the right techniques that can be used to identify and mitigate implicit biases. We use some methods to quantify the gender bias existing in Inuktitut word embeddings; then we proceed to mitigate the bias and evaluate the performance of the debiased embeddings. Next, we explain how approaches for detecting and reducing bias in English embeddings may be transferred to Inuktitut embeddings by properly taking into account the language’s particular characteristics. Next, we compare the effect of the debiasing techniques on Inuktitut and English. Finally, we highlight some future research directions which will further help to push the boundaries.

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What changed? Investigating Debiasing Methods using Causal Mediation Analysis
Sullam Jeoung | Jana Diesner

Previous work has examined how debiasing language models affect downstream tasks, specifically, how debiasing techniques influence task performance and whether debiased models also make impartial predictions in downstream tasks or not. However, what we don’t understand well yet is why debiasing methods have varying impacts on downstream tasks and how debiasing techniques affect internal components of language models, i.e., neurons, layers, and attentions. In this paper, we decompose the internal mechanisms of debiasing language models with respect to gender by applying causal mediation analysis to understand the influence of debiasing methods on toxicity detection as a downstream task. Our findings suggest a need to test the effectiveness of debiasing methods with different bias metrics, and to focus on changes in the behavior of certain components of the models, e.g.,first two layers of language models, and attention heads.

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Why Knowledge Distillation Amplifies Gender Bias and How to Mitigate from the Perspective of DistilBERT
Jaimeen Ahn | Hwaran Lee | Jinhwa Kim | Alice Oh

Knowledge distillation is widely used to transfer the language understanding of a large model to a smaller model. However, after knowledge distillation, it was found that the smaller model is more biased by gender compared to the source large model. This paper studies what causes gender bias to increase after the knowledge distillation process. Moreover, we suggest applying a variant of the mixup on knowledge distillation, which is used to increase generalizability during the distillation process, not for augmentation. By doing so, we can significantly reduce the gender bias amplification after knowledge distillation. We also conduct an experiment on the GLUE benchmark to demonstrate that even if the mixup is applied, it does not have a significant adverse effect on the model’s performance.

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Incorporating Subjectivity into Gendered Ambiguous Pronoun (GAP) Resolution using Style Transfer
Kartikey Pant | Tanvi Dadu

The GAP dataset is a Wikipedia-based evaluation dataset for gender bias detection in coreference resolution, containing mostly objective sentences. Since subjectivity is ubiquitous in our daily texts, it becomes necessary to evaluate models for both subjective and objective instances. In this work, we present a new evaluation dataset for gender bias in coreference resolution, GAP-Subjective, which increases the coverage of the original GAP dataset by including subjective sentences. We outline the methodology used to create this dataset. Firstly, we detect objective sentences and transfer them into their subjective variants using a sequence-to-sequence model. Secondly, we outline the thresholding techniques based on fluency and content preservation to maintain the quality of the sentences. Thirdly, we perform automated and human-based analysis of the style transfer and infer that the transferred sentences are of high quality. Finally, we benchmark both GAP and GAP-Subjective datasets using a BERT-based model and analyze its predictive performance and gender bias.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)

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Improving abstractive summarization with energy-based re-ranking
Diogo Pernes | Afonso Mendes | André F. T. Martins

Current abstractive summarization systems present important weaknesses which prevent their deployment in real-world applications, such as the omission of relevant information and the generation of factual inconsistencies (also known as hallucinations). At the same time, automatic evaluation metrics such as CTC scores (Deng et al., 2021) have been recently proposed that exhibit a higher correlation with human judgments than traditional lexical-overlap metrics such as ROUGE. In this work, we intend to close the loop by leveraging the recent advances in summarization metrics to create quality-aware abstractive summarizers. Namely, we propose an energy-based model that learns to re-rank summaries according to one or a combination of these metrics. We experiment using several metrics to train our energy-based re-ranker and show that it consistently improves the scores achieved by the predicted summaries. Nonetheless, human evaluation results show that the re-ranking approach should be used with care for highly abstractive summaries, as the available metrics are not yet sufficiently reliable for this purpose.

In the area of data augmentation research, the main focus to date has been on the improvement of the generation models, while the examination and improvements to synthetic data evaluation methods remains less explored. In our work, we explore a number of sentence similarity measures in the context of data generation filtering, and evaluate their impact on the performance of the targeted Natural Language Understanding problem on the example of the intent classification and named entity recognition tasks. Our experiments on ATIS dataset show that the right choice of filtering technique can bring up to 33% in sentence accuracy improvement for targeted underrepresented intents.

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Generating Coherent Narratives with Subtopic Planning to Answer How-to Questions
Pengshan Cai | Mo Yu | Fei Liu | Hong Yu

Answering how-to questions remains a major challenge in question answering research. A vast number of narrow, long-tail questions cannot be readily answered using a search engine. Moreover, there is little to no annotated data available to develop such systems. This paper makes a first attempt at generating coherent, long-form answers for how-to questions. We propose new architectures, consisting of passage retrieval, subtopic planning and narrative generation, to consolidate multiple relevant passages into a coherent, explanatory answer. Our subtopic planning module aims to produce a set of relevant, diverse subtopics that serve as the backbone for answer generation to improve topic coherence. We present extensive experiments on a WikiHow dataset repurposed for long-form question answering. Empirical results demonstrate that generating narratives to answer how-to questions is a challenging task. Nevertheless, our architecture incorporated with subtopic planning can produce high-quality, diverse narratives evaluated using automatic metrics and human assessment.

We explore the task of automated generation of technical interview questions from a given textbook. Such questions are different from those for reading comprehension studied in question generation literature. We curate a context based interview questions data set for Machine Learning and Deep Learning from two popular textbooks. We first explore the possibility of using a large generative language model (GPT-3) for this task in a zero shot setting. We then evaluate the performance of smaller generative models such as BART fine-tuned on weakly supervised data obtained using GPT-3 and hand-crafted templates. We deploy an automatic question importance assignment technique to figure out suitability of a question in a technical interview. It improves the evaluation results in many dimensions. We dissect the performance of these models for this task and also scrutinize the suitability of questions generated by them for use in technical interviews.

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Analyzing Multi-Task Learning for Abstractive Text Summarization
Frederic Thomas Kirstein | Jan Philip Wahle | Terry Ruas | Bela Gipp

Despite the recent success of multi-task learning and pre-finetuning for natural language understanding, few works have studied the effects of task families on abstractive text summarization. Task families are a form of task grouping during the pre-finetuning stage to learn common skills, such as reading comprehension. To close this gap, we analyze the influence of multi-task learning strategies using task families for the English abstractive text summarization task. We group tasks into one of three strategies, i.e., sequential, simultaneous, and continual multi-task learning, and evaluate trained models through two downstream tasks. We find that certain combinations of task families (e.g., advanced reading comprehension and natural language inference) positively impact downstream performance. Further, we find that choice and combinations of task families influence downstream performance more than the training scheme, supporting the use of task families for abstractive text

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CLSE: Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities
Aleksandr Chuklin | Justin Zhao | Mihir Kale

One of the biggest challenges of natural language generation (NLG) is the proper handling of named entities. Named entities are a common source of grammar mistakes such as wrong prepositions, wrong article handling, or incorrect entity inflection. Without factoring linguistic representation, such errors are often underrepresented when evaluating on a small set of arbitrarily picked argument values, or when translating a dataset from a linguistically simpler language, like English, to a linguistically complex language, like Russian. However, for some applications, broadly precise grammatical correctness is critical – native speakers may find entity-related grammar errors silly, jarring, or even offensive. To enable the creation of more linguistically diverse NLG datasets, we release a Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities (CLSE) annotated by linguist experts. The corpus includes 34 languages and covers 74 different semantic types to support various applications from airline ticketing to video games. To demonstrate one possible use of CLSE, we produce an augmented version of the Schema-Guided Dialog Dataset, SGD-CLSE. Using the CLSE’s entities and a small number of human translations, we create a linguistically representative NLG evaluation benchmark in three languages: French (high-resource), Marathi (low-resource), and Russian (highly inflected language). We establish quality baselines for neural, template-based, and hybrid NLG systems and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

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Revisiting text decomposition methods for NLI-based factuality scoring of summaries
John Glover | Federico Fancellu | Vasudevan Jagannathan | Matthew R. Gormley | Thomas Schaaf

Scoring the factuality of a generated summary involves measuring the degree to which a target text contains factual information using the input document as support. Given the similarities in the problem formulation, previous work has shown that Natural Language Inference models can be effectively repurposed to perform this task. As these models are trained to score entailment at a sentence level, several recent studies have shown that decomposing either the input document or the summary into sentences helps with factuality scoring. But is fine-grained decomposition always a winning strategy? In this paper we systematically compare different granularities of decomposition - from document to sub-sentence level, and we show that the answer is no. Our results show that incorporating additional context can yield improvement, but that this does not necessarily apply to all datasets. We also show that small changes to previously proposed entailment-based scoring methods can result in better performance, highlighting the need for caution in model and methodology selection for downstream tasks.

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Semantic Similarity as a Window into Vector- and Graph-Based Metrics
Wai Ching Leung | Shira Wein | Nathan Schneider

In this work, we use sentence similarity as a lens through which to investigate the representation of meaning in graphs vs. vectors. On semantic textual similarity data, we examine how similarity metrics based on vectors alone (SENTENCE-BERT and BERTSCORE) fare compared to metrics based on AMR graphs (SMATCH and S2MATCH). Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the AMR-based metrics can better capture meanings dependent on sentence structures, but can also be distracted by structural differences—whereas the BERT-based metrics represent finer-grained meanings of individual words, but often fail to capture the ordering effect of words within sentences and suffer from interpretability problems. These findings contribute to our understanding of each approach to semantic representation and motivate distinct use cases for graph and vector-based representations.

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Towards In-Context Non-Expert Evaluation of Reflection Generation for Counselling Conversations
Zixiu Wu | Simone Balloccu | Rim Helaoui | Diego Reforgiato Recupero | Daniele Riboni

Reflection is an essential counselling strategy, where the therapist listens actively and responds with their own interpretation of the client’s words. Recent work leveraged pre-trained language models (PLMs) to approach reflection generation as a promising tool to aid counsellor training. However, those studies used limited dialogue context for modelling and simplistic error analysis for human evaluation. In this work, we take the first step towards addressing those limitations. First, we fine-tune PLMs on longer dialogue contexts for reflection generation. Then, we collect free-text error descriptions from non-experts about generated reflections, identify common patterns among them, and accordingly establish discrete error categories using thematic analysis. Based on this scheme, we plan for future work a mass non-expert error annotation phase for generated reflections followed by an expert-based validation phase, namely “whether a coherent and consistent response is a good reflection”.

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WikiOmnia: filtration and evaluation of the generated QA corpus on the whole Russian Wikipedia
Dina Pisarevskaya | Tatiana Shavrina

The General QA field has been developing the methodology referencing the Stanford Question answering dataset (SQuAD) as the significant benchmark. Compiling factual questions datasets requires manual annotations, limiting the training data’s potential size. We present the WikiOmnia dataset, a new publicly available set of QA pairs and corresponding Russian Wikipedia article summary sections, composed with a fully automated generation and filtration pipeline. To ensure high quality of generated QA pairs, diverse manual and automated evaluation techniques were applied. The WikiOmnia pipeline is available open-source and is also tested for creating SQuAD-formatted QA on other domains, like news texts, fiction, and social media. The resulting dataset includes two parts: raw data on the whole Russian Wikipedia (7,930,873 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruGPT-3 XL and 7,991,040 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruT5-large) and cleaned data with strict automatic verification (over 160,000 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruGPT-3 XL and over 3,400,000 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruT5-large).

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Evaluation of Response Generation Models: Shouldn’t It Be Shareable and Replicable?
Seyed Mahed Mousavi | Gabriel Roccabruna | Michela Lorandi | Simone Caldarella | Giuseppe Riccardi

Human Evaluation (HE) of automatically generated responses is necessary for the advancement of human-machine dialogue research. Current automatic evaluation measures are poor surrogates, at best. There are no agreed-upon HE protocols and it is difficult to develop them. As a result, researchers either perform non-replicable, non-transparent and inconsistent procedures or, worse, limit themselves to automated metrics. We propose to standardize the human evaluation of response generation models by publicly sharing a detailed protocol. The proposal includes the task design, annotators recruitment, task execution, and annotation reporting. Such protocol and process can be used as-is, as-a-whole, in-part, or modified and extended by the research community. We validate the protocol by evaluating two conversationally fine-tuned state-of-the-art models (GPT-2 and T5) for the complex task of personalized response generation. We invite the community to use this protocol - or its future community amended versions - as a transparent, replicable, and comparable approach to HE of generated responses.

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Enhancing and Evaluating the Grammatical Framework Approach to Logic-to-Text Generation
Eduardo Calò | Elze van der Werf | Albert Gatt | Kees van Deemter

Logic-to-text generation is an important yet underrepresented area of natural language generation (NLG). In particular, most previous works on this topic lack sound evaluation. We address this limitation by building and evaluating a system that generates high-quality English text given a first-order logic (FOL) formula as input. We start by analyzing the performance of Ranta (2011)’s system. Based on this analysis, we develop an extended version of the system, which we name LoLa, that performs formula simplification based on logical equivalences and syntactic transformations. We carry out an extensive evaluation of LoLa using standard automatic metrics and human evaluation. We compare the results against a baseline and Ranta (2011)’s system. The results show that LoLa outperforms the other two systems in most aspects.

To be trusted and perceived as natural and coherent, conversational systems must adapt to the language of their users. While personalized dialogue is a promising direction, controlling generation for fine-grained language features remains a challenge in this approach. A recent line of research showed the effectiveness of leveraging pre-trained language models toward adapting to a text’s topic or sentiment. In this study, we build on these approaches and focus on a higher-level dimension of language variation: speakers’ age. We frame the task as a dialogue response generation, and test methods based on bag-of-words (BoW) and neural discriminators (Disc) to condition the output of GPT-2 and DialoGPT without altering the parameters of the language models. We show that Disc models achieve a higher degree of detectable control than BoW models based on automatic evaluation. In contrast, humans can partially detect age differences in BoW but not Disc responses. Since BoW responses are deemed better than Disc ones by humans, simple controllable methods thus appear to be a better tradeoff between adaptation and language quality. Our work confirms the challenges of adapting to higher-level dimensions of language variation. Moreover, it highlights the need to evaluate natural language generation thoroughly.

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Template-based Contact Email Generation for Job Recommendation
Qiuchi Li | Christina Lioma

Text generation has long been a popular research topic in NLP. However, the task of generating contact emails from recruiters to candidates in the job recommendation scenario has received little attention by the research community. This work aims at defining the topic of automatic email generation for job recommendation, identifying the challenges, and providing a baseline template-based solution for Danish jobs. Evaluation by human experts shows that our method is effective. We wrap up by discussing the future research directions for better solving this task.

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Are Abstractive Summarization Models truly ‘Abstractive’? An Empirical Study to Compare the two Forms of Summarization
Vinayshekhar Bannihatti Kumar | Rashmi Gangadharaiah

Automatic Text Summarization has seen a large paradigm shift from extractive methods to abstractive (or generation-based) methods in the last few years. This can be attributed to the availability of large autoregressive language models that have been shown to outperform extractive methods. In this work, we revisit extractive methods and study their performance against state of the art(SOTA) abstractive models. Through extensive studies, we notice that abstractive methods are not yet completely abstractive in their generated summaries. In addition to this finding, we propose an evaluation metric that could benefit the summarization research community to measure the degree of abstractiveness of a summary in comparison to their extractive counterparts. To confirm the generalizability of our findings, we conduct experiments on two summarization datasets using five powerful techniques in extractive and abstractive summarization and study their levels of abstraction.

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Transfer learning for multilingual vacancy text generation
Anna Lorincz | David Graus | Dor Lavi | Joao Lebre Magalhaes Pereira

Writing job vacancies is a repetitive and expensive task for humans. This research focuses on automatically generating the benefit sections of vacancies at redacted from job attributes using mT5, the multilingual version of the state-of-the-art T5 transformer trained on general domains to generate texts in multiple languages. While transformers are accurate at generating coherent text, they are sometimes incorrect at including the structured data (the input) in the generated text. Including the input correctly is crucial for vacancy text generation; otherwise, the candidates may get misled. To evaluate how the model includes the input we developed our own domain-specific metrics (input generation accuracy). This was necessary, because Relation Generation, the pre-existing evaluation metric for data-to-text generation uses only string matching, which was not suitable for our dataset (due to the binary field). With the help of the new evaluation method we were able to measure how well the input is included in the generated text separately for different types of inputs (binary, categorical, numeric), offering another contribution to the field. Additionally, we also evaluated how accurate the mT5 model generates the text in the requested language. The results show that mT5 is very accurate at generating the text in the correct language, at including seen categorical inputs and binary values correctly in the generated text. However, mT5 performed worse when generating text from unseen city names or working with numeric inputs. Furthermore, we found that generating additional synthetic training data for the samples with numeric input can increase the input generation accuracy, however this only works when the numbers are integers and only cover a small range.

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Plug-and-Play Recipe Generation with Content Planning
Yinhong Liu | Yixuan Su | Ehsan Shareghi | Nigel Collier

Recent pre-trained language models have shown promising capability to generate fluent and realistic natural text. However, generating multi-sentence text with global content planning has been a long-existing research question. The current controlled text generation models cannot directly address this issue, as they usually condition on single known control attribute. We propose a low-cost yet effective framework that explicitly models content plans and optimizes the joint distribution of the natural sequence and the content plans in a plug-and-play post-processing manner. We evaluate our model with extensive automatic metrics and human evaluations and show that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the recipe generation task on Recipe1M+ dataset.

Controllable Text Generation (CTG) has obtained great success due to its fine-grained generation ability obtained by focusing on multiple attributes. However, most existing CTG researches overlook how to utilize the attribute entanglement to enhance the diversity of the controlled generated texts. Facing this dilemma, we focus on a novel CTG scenario, i.e., blessing generation which is challenging because high-quality blessing texts require CTG models to comprehensively consider the entanglement between multiple attributes (e.g., objects and occasions). To promote the research on blessing generation, we present EBleT, a large-scale Entangled Blessing Text dataset containing 293K English sentences annotated with multiple attributes. Furthermore, we propose novel evaluation metrics to measure the quality of the blessing texts generated by the baseline models we designed. Our study opens a new research direction for controllable text generation and enables the development of attribute-entangled CTG models.

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Unsupervised Token-level Hallucination Detection from Summary Generation By-products
Andreas Marfurt | James Henderson

Hallucinations in abstractive summarization are model generations that are unfaithful to the source document. Current methods for detecting hallucinations operate mostly on noun phrases and named entities, and restrict themselves to the XSum dataset, which is known to have hallucinations in 3 out of 4 training examples (Maynez et al., 2020). We instead consider the CNN/DailyMail dataset where the summarization model has not seen abnormally many hallucinations during training. We automatically detect candidate hallucinations at the token level, irrespective of its part of speech. Our detection comes essentially for free, as we only use information the model already produces during generation of the summary. This enables practitioners to jointly generate a summary and identify possible hallucinations, with minimal overhead. We repurpose an existing factuality dataset and create our own token-level annotations. The evaluation on these two datasets shows that our model achieves better precision-recall tradeoffs than its competitors, which additionally require a model forward pass.

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A Corpus and Evaluation for Predicting Semi-Structured Human Annotations
Andreas Marfurt | Ashley Thornton | David Sylvan | Lonneke van der Plas | James Henderson

A wide variety of tasks have been framed as text-to-text tasks to allow processing by sequence-to-sequence models. We propose a new task of generating a semi-structured interpretation of a source document. The interpretation is semi-structured in that it contains mandatory and optional fields with free-text information. This structure is surfaced by human annotations, which we standardize and convert to text format. We then propose an evaluation technique that is generally applicable to any such semi-structured annotation, called equivalence classes evaluation. The evaluation technique is efficient and scalable; it creates a large number of evaluation instances from a comparably cheap clustering of the free-text information by domain experts. For our task, we release a dataset about the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. On this corpus, our evaluation shows larger differences between pretrained models than standard text generation metrics.

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T5QL: Taming language models for SQL generation
Samuel David Arcadinho | David Aparicio | Hugo Veiga | Antonio Alegria

Automatic SQL generation has been an active research area, aiming at streamlining the access to databases by writing natural language with the given intent instead of writing SQL. Current SOTA methods for semantic parsing depend on LLMs to achieve high predictive accuracy on benchmark datasets. This reduces their applicability, since LLMs requires expensive GPUs. Furthermore, SOTA methods are ungrounded and thus not guaranteed to always generate valid SQL. Here we propose T5QL, a new SQL generation method that improves the performance in benchmark datasets when using smaller LMs, namely T5-Base, by 13pp when compared against SOTA methods. Additionally, T5QL is guaranteed to always output valid SQL using a context-free grammar to constrain SQL generation. Finally, we show that dividing semantic parsing in two tasks, candidate SQLs generation and candidate re-ranking, is a promising research avenue that can reduce the need for large LMs.

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Human perceiving behavior modeling in evaluation of code generation models
Sergey V. Kovalchuk | Vadim Lomshakov | Artem Aliev

Within this study, we evaluated a series of code generation models based on CodeGen and GPTNeo to compare the metric-based performance and human evaluation. For a deeper analysis of human perceiving within the evaluation procedure we’ve implemented a 5-level Likert scale assessment of the model output using a perceiving model based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Through such analysis, we showed an extension of model assessment as well as a deeper understanding of the quality and applicability of generated code for practical question answering. The approach was evaluated with several model settings in order to assess diversity in quality and style of answer. With the TPB-based model, we showed a different level of perceiving the model result, namely personal understanding, agreement level, and readiness to use the particular code. With such analysis, we investigate a series of issues in code generation as natural language generation (NLG) problems observed in a practical context of programming question-answering with code.

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Nearest Neighbor Language Models for Stylistic Controllable Generation
Severino Trotta | Lucie Flek | Charles Welch

Recent language modeling performance has been greatly improved by the use of external memory. This memory encodes the context so that similar contexts can be recalled during decoding. This similarity depends on how the model learns to encode context, which can be altered to include other attributes, such as style. We construct and evaluate an architecture for this purpose, using corpora annotated for politeness, formality, and toxicity. Through extensive experiments and human evaluation we demonstrate the potential of our method to generate text while controlling style. We find that style-specific datastores improve generation performance, though results vary greatly across styles, and the effect of pretraining data and specific styles should be explored in future work.

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On reporting scores and agreement for error annotation tasks
Maja Popović | Anya Belz

This work examines different ways of aggregating scores for error annotation in MT outputs: raw error counts, error counts normalised over total number of words (word percentage’), and error counts normalised over total number of errors (error percentage’). We use each of these three scores to calculate inter-annotator agreement in the form of Krippendorff’s alpha and Pearson’s r and compare the obtained numbers, overall and separately for different types of errors. While each score has its advantages depending on the goal of the evaluation, we argue that the best way of estimating inter-annotator agreement using such numbers are raw counts. If the annotation process ensures that the total number of words cannot differ among the annotators (for example, due to adding omission symbols), normalising over number of words will lead to the same conclusions. In contrast, total number of errors is very subjective because different annotators often perceive different amount of errors in the same text, therefore normalising over this number can indicate lower agreements.

Most commercial conversational AI products in domains spanning e-commerce, health care, finance, and education involve a hierarchy of NLP models that perform a variety of tasks such as classification, entity recognition, question-answering, sentiment detection, semantic text similarity, and so on. Despite our understanding of each of the constituent models, we do not have a clear view as to how these models affect the overall platform metrics. To bridge this gap, we define a metric known as answerability, which penalizes not only irrelevant or incorrect chatbot responses but also unhelpful responses that do not serve the chatbot’s purpose despite being correct or relevant. Additionally, we describe a formula-based mathematical framework to relate individual model metrics to the answerability metric. We also describe a modeling approach for predicting a chatbot’s answerability to a user question and its corresponding chatbot response.

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Improved Evaluation of Automatic Source Code Summarisation
Jesse Phillips | David Bowes | Mahmoud El-Haj | Tracy Hall

Source code summaries are a vital tool for the understanding and maintenance of source code as they can be used to explain code in simple terms. However, source code with missing, incorrect, or outdated summaries is a common occurrence in production code. Automatic source code summarisation seeks to solve these issues by generating up-to-date summaries of source code methods. Recent work in automatically generating source code summaries uses neural networks for generating summaries; commonly Sequence-to-Sequence or Transformer models, pretrained on method-summary pairs. The most common method of evaluating the quality of these summaries is comparing the machine-generated summaries against human-written summaries. Summaries can be evaluated using n-gram-based translation metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, or ROUGE-L. However, these metrics alone can be unreliable and new Natural Language Generation metrics based on large pretrained language models provide an alternative. In this paper, we propose a method of improving the evaluation of a model by improving the preprocessing of the data used to train it, as well as proposing evaluating the model with a metric based off a language model, pretrained on a Natural Language (English) alongside traditional metrics. Our evaluation suggests our model has been improved by cleaning and preprocessing the data used in model training. The addition of a pretrained language model metric alongside traditional metrics shows that both produce results which can be used to evaluate neural source code summarisation.

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Most NLG is Low-Resource: here’s what we can do about it
David M. Howcroft | Dimitra Gkatzia

Many domains and tasks in natural language generation (NLG) are inherently ‘low-resource’, where training data, tools and linguistic analyses are scarce. This poses a particular challenge to researchers and system developers in the era of machine-learning-driven NLG. In this position paper, we initially present the challenges researchers & developers often encounter when dealing with low-resource settings in NLG. We then argue that it is unsustainable to collect large aligned datasets or build large language models from scratch for every possible domain due to cost, labour, and time constraints, so researching and developing methods and resources for low-resource settings is vital. We then discuss current approaches to low-resource NLG, followed by proposed solutions and promising avenues for future work in NLG for low-resource settings.

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GiCCS: A German in-Context Conversational Similarity Benchmark
Shima Asaadi | Zahra Kolagar | Alina Liebel | Alessandra Zarcone

The Semantic textual similarity (STS) task is commonly used to evaluate the semantic representations that language models (LMs) learn from texts, under the assumption that good-quality representations will yield accurate similarity estimates. When it comes to estimating the similarity of two utterances in a dialogue, however, the conversational context plays a particularly important role. We argue for the need of benchmarks specifically created using conversational data in order to evaluate conversational LMs in the STS task. We introduce GiCCS, a first conversational STS evaluation benchmark for German. We collected the similarity annotations for GiCCS using best-worst scaling and presenting the target items in context, in order to obtain highly-reliable context-dependent similarity scores. We present benchmarking experiments for evaluating LMs on capturing the similarity of utterances. Results suggest that pretraining LMs on conversational data and providing conversational context can be useful for capturing similarity of utterances in dialogues. GiCCS will be publicly available to encourage benchmarking of conversational LMs.

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Control Prefixes for Parameter-Efficient Text Generation
Jordan Clive | Kris Cao | Marek Rei

Prefix-tuning is a parameter-efficient and powerful technique for adapting a pre-trained language model to a downstream application. However, it uses the same dataset-level tuned set of parameters for all examples in the dataset. We extend the framework with a dynamic method, Control Prefixes, which allows for the effective inclusion of input-dependent information, thereby demonstrating how prefix-tuning can be used for controlled text generation tasks. The method incorporates attribute-level learnable representations into different layers of a pre-trained Transformer, enabling the generated text to be guided in a particular direction. We provide a systematic evaluation of the technique and apply it to five datasets from the GEM benchmark for natural language generation (NLG). Using only 0.1–2% additional trainable parameters, we show Control Prefixes can even outperform full fine-tuning methods, and present state-of-the-art results on several data-to-text datasets, including WebNLG. We also examine the common case where input-dependent information is unavailable at test time and show Control Prefixes can excel in this setting also.

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A Survey of Recent Error Annotation Schemes for Automatically Generated Text
Rudali Huidrom | Anya Belz

While automatically computing numerical scores remains the dominant paradigm in NLP system evaluation, error analysis is receiving increasing attention, with numerous error annotation schemes being proposed for automatically generated text. However, there is little agreement about what error annotation schemes should look like, how many different types of errors should be distinguished and at what level of granularity. In this paper, our aim is to map out recent work on annotating errors in automatically generated text, with a particular focus on error taxonomies. We describe our systematic paper selection process, and survey the error annotation schemes reported in the papers, drawing out similarities and differences between them. Finally, we characterise the issues that would make it difficult to move from the current situation to a standardised error taxonomy for annotating errors in automatically generated text.

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What’s in a (dataset’s) name? The case of BigPatent
Silvia Casola | Alberto Lavelli | Horacio Saggion

Sharing datasets and benchmarks has been crucial for rapidly improving Natural Language Processing models and systems. Documenting datasets’ characteristics (and any modification introduced over time) is equally important to avoid confusion and make comparisons reliable. Here, we describe the case of BigPatent, a dataset for patent summarization that exists in at least two rather different versions under the same name. While previous literature has not clearly distinguished among versions, their differences do not only lay on a surface level but also modify the dataset’s core nature and, thus, the complexity of the summarization task. While this paper describes a specific case, we aim to shed light on new challenges that might emerge in resource sharing and advocate for comprehensive documentation of datasets and models.

Similarity metrics for text corpora are becoming critical due to the tremendous growth in the number of generative models. These similarity metrics measure the semantic gap between human and machine-generated text on the corpus level. However, standard methods for evaluating the characteristics of these metrics have yet to be established. We propose a set of automatic measures for evaluating the characteristics of semantic similarity metrics for text corpora. Our measures allow us to sensibly compare and identify the strengths and weaknesses of these metrics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our evaluation measures in capturing fundamental characteristics by comparing it to a collection of classical and state-of-the-art metrics. Our measures revealed that recent metrics are becoming better in identifying semantic distributional mismatch while classical metrics are more sensitive to perturbations in the surface text levels.

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Multilingual Social Media Text Generation and Evaluation with Few-Shot Prompting
Mack Blackburn

This work adapts large language models to generate multilingual social media text that meets several objectives simultaneously: topic relevance, author style consistency, and reply validity. Leveraging existing online information behavior simulators, which currently only forecast activities but not content, our approach comprised of generalizable prompt formation and efficient evaluation to produce a believable, personalized, and responsive synthetic social network. According to some preliminary experiments, our multi-objective prompt formation and automatic evaluation/selection methods are able to yield a significant number of high-quality synthetic texts according to both standardized and trained metrics.

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Assessing Inter-metric Correlation for Multi-document Summarization Evaluation
Michael Ridenour | Ameeta Agrawal | Olubusayo Olabisi

Recent advances in automatic text summarization have contemporaneously been accompanied by a great deal of new metrics of automatic evaluation. This in turn has inspired recent research to re-assess these evaluation metrics to see how well they correlate with each other as well as with human evaluation, mostly focusing on single-document summarization (SDS) tasks. Although many of these metrics are typically also used for evaluating multi-document summarization (MDS) tasks, so far, little attention has been paid to studying them under such a distinct scenario. To address this gap, we present a systematic analysis of the inter-metric correlations for MDS tasks, while comparing and contrasting the results with SDS models. Using datasets from a wide range of domains (news, peer reviews, tweets, dialogues), we thus study a unified set of metrics under both the task setups. Our empirical analysis suggests that while most reference-based metrics show fairly similar trends across both multi- and single-document summarization, there is a notable lack of correlation between reference-free metrics in multi-document summarization tasks.

Despite the recent advancements in abstractive summarization systems leveraged from large-scale datasets and pre-trained language models, the factual correctness of the summary is still insufficient. One line of trials to mitigate this problem is to include a post-editing process that can detect and correct factual errors in the summary. In building such a system, it is strongly required that 1) the process has a high success rate and interpretability and 2) it has a fast running time. Previous approaches focus on the regeneration of the summary, resulting in low interpretability and high computing resources. In this paper, we propose an efficient factual error correction system RFEC based on entity retrieval. RFEC first retrieves the evidence sentences from the original document by comparing the sentences with the target summary to reduce the length of the text to analyze. Next, RFEC detects entity-level errors in the summaries using the evidence sentences and substitutes the wrong entities with the accurate entities from the evidence sentences. Experimental results show that our proposed error correction system shows more competitive performance than baseline methods in correcting factual errors with a much faster speed.

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Coherent Long Text Generation by Contrastive Soft Prompt
Guandan Chen | Jiashu Pu | Yadong Xi | Rongsheng Zhang

Improving the coherence of long text generation is an important but challenging task. Existing models still struggle to generate a logical and coherent sentence sequence. It is difficult for a model to plan long text generation and avoid generating incoherent texts from a high-level semantic perspective. We speculate that this is due to two factors: (1) current training methods mainly rely on maximum likelihood estimation computed from token-level probability prediction; (2) the role of incoherent texts has been largely under-explored, thus the noised generated texts with errors are out-of-distribution for the model. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a Contrastive Soft Prompt (CSP) model for improving the coherence of long text generation. It learns text representations in the hidden space for better planning long text generation. To this end, it jointly learns to generate a text representation close to representations of coherent texts and away from incoherent ones, and then generate long text taking this representation as the soft prompt. We conduct experiments on two public story generation datasets, and experiment results show that our method can generate more coherent stories than the state-of-the-art model.

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Error Analysis of ToTTo Table-to-Text Neural NLG Models
Barkavi Sundararajan | Somayajulu Sripada | Ehud Reiter

We report error analysis of outputs from seven Table-to-Text generation models fine-tuned on ToTTo, an open-domain English language dataset. A manual error annotation of a subset of outputs (a total of 5,278 sentences) belonging to the topic of Politics generated by these seven models has been carried out. Our error annotation focused on eight categories of errors. The error analysis shows that more than 45% of sentences from each of the seven models have been error-free. It uncovered some of the specific classes of errors such as WORD errors that are the dominant errors in all the seven models, NAME and NUMBER errors are more committed by two of the GeM benchmark models, whereas DATE-DIMENSION and OTHER category of errors are more common in our Table-to-Text models.

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Improving Dialogue Act Recognition with Augmented Data
Khyati Mahajan | Soham Parikh | Quaizar Vohra | Mitul Tiwari | Samira Shaikh

We present our work on augmenting dialog act recognition capabilities utilizing synthetically generated data. Our work is motivated by the limitations of current dialog act datasets, and the need to adapt for new domains as well as ambiguity in utterances written by humans. We list our observations and findings towards how synthetically generated data can contribute meaningfully towards more robust dialogue act recognition models extending to new domains. Our major finding shows that synthetic data, which is linguistically varied, can be very useful towards this goal and increase the performance from (0.39, 0.16) to (0.85, 0.88) for AFFIRM and NEGATE dialog acts respectively.

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Do Decoding Algorithms Capture Discourse Structure in Multi-Modal Tasks? A Case Study of Image Paragraph Generation
Nikolai Ilinykh | Simon Dobnik

This paper describes insights into how different inference algorithms structure discourse in image paragraphs. We train a multi-modal transformer and compare 11 variations of decoding algorithms. We propose to evaluate image paragraphs not only with standard automatic metrics, but also with a more extensive, “under the hood” analysis of the discourse formed by sentences. Our results show that while decoding algorithms can be unfaithful to the reference texts, they still generate grounded descriptions, but they also lack understanding of the discourse structure and differ from humans in terms of attentional structure over images.

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20Q: Overlap-Free World Knowledge Benchmark for Language Models
Maxime De Bruyn | Ehsan Lotfi | Jeska Buhmann | Walter Daelemans

What do language models know about our world? This question is hard to answer but important to get right. To this end, we introduce 20Q, a novel benchmark using the Twenty Questions game to evaluate world knowledge and common sense of language models. Thanks to our overlap-free benchmark, language models learn the game of Twenty Questions without learning relevant knowledge for the test set. We uncover two intuitive factors influencing the world knowledge of language models: the size of the model and the topic frequency in the pre-training data. Moreover, we show that in-context learning is inefficient for evaluating language models’ world knowledge — fine-tuning is necessary to show their true capabilities. Lastly, our results show room for improvement to enhance the world knowledge and common sense of large language models. A potential solution would be to up-sample unfrequent topics in the pre-training of language models.

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What Was Your Name Again? Interrogating Generative Conversational Models For Factual Consistency Evaluation
Ehsan Lotfi | Maxime De Bruyn | Jeska Buhmann | Walter Daelemans

Generative conversational agents are known to suffer from problems like inconsistency and hallucination, and a big challenge in studying these issues remains evaluation: they are not properly reflected in common text generation metrics like perplexity or BLEU, and alternative implicit methods like semantic similarity or NLI labels can be misguided when few specific tokens are decisive. In this work we propose ConsisTest; a factual consistency benchmark including both WH and Y/N questions based on PersonaChat, along with a hybrid evaluation pipeline which aims to get the best of symbolic and sub-symbolic methods. Using these and focusing on pretrained generative models like BART, we provide detailed statistics and analysis on how the model’s consistency is affected by variations in question and context.

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Narrative Why-Question Answering: A Review of Challenges and Datasets
Emil Kalbaliyev | Kairit Sirts

Narrative Why-Question Answering is an important task to assess the causal reasoning ability of systems in narrative settings. Further progress in this domain needs clear identification of challenges related to understanding the causal structure of narration. In this paper, we give an overview of the challenges related to both narrative understanding and why-question answering, because Narrative Why-Question Answering combines the characteristics of these domains. We also identify narrative QA datasets containing why-questions and analyze their characteristics through the lens of these challenges.

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Exploring a POS-based Two-stage Approach for Improving Low-Resource AMR-to-Text Generation
Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo | Thiago Pardo

This work presents a two-stage approach for tackling low-resource AMR-to-text generation for Brazilian Portuguese. Our approach consists of (1) generating a masked surface realization in which some tokens are masked according to its Part-of-Speech class and (2) infilling the masked tokens according to the AMR graph and the previous masked surface realization. Results show a slight improvement over the baseline, mainly in BLEU (1.63) and METEOR (0.02) scores. Moreover, we evaluate the pipeline components separately, showing that the bottleneck of the pipeline is the masked surface realization. Finally, the human evaluation suggests that models still suffer from hallucinations, and some strategies to deal with the problems found are proposed.

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What Makes Data-to-Text Generation Hard for Pretrained Language Models?
Moniba Keymanesh | Adrian Benton | Mark Dredze

Expressing natural language descriptions of structured facts or relations – data-to-text generation (D2T) – increases the accessibility of structured knowledge repositories. Previous work shows that pre-trained language models (PLMs) perform remarkably well on this task after fine-tuning on a significant amount of task-specific training data. On the other hand, while auto-regressive PLMs can generalize from a few task examples, their efficacy at D2T is largely unexplored. Furthermore, we have an incomplete understanding of the limits of PLMs on D2T. In this work, we conduct an empirical study of both fine-tuned and auto-regressive PLMs on the DART multi-domain D2T dataset. We consider their performance as a function of the amount of task-specific data and how the data is incorporated into the models: zero and few-shot learning, and fine-tuning of model weights. In addition, we probe the limits of PLMs by measuring performance on subsets of the evaluation data: novel predicates and abstractive test examples. To improve the performance on these subsets, we investigate two techniques: providing predicate descriptions in the context and re-ranking generated candidates by information reflected in the source. Finally, we conduct a human evaluation of model errors and show that D2T generation tasks would benefit from datasets with more careful manual curation.

Abstractive summarization systems today produce fluent and relevant output, but often “hallucinate” statements not supported by the source text. We analyze the connection between hallucinations and training data, and find evidence that models hallucinate because they train on target summaries that are unsupported by the source. Based on our findings, we present PINOCCHIO, a new decoding method that improves the consistency of a transformer-based abstractive summarizer by constraining beam search to avoid hallucinations. Given the model states and outputs at a given step, PINOCCHIO detects likely model hallucinations based on various measures of attribution to the source text. PINOCCHIO backtracks to find more consistent output, and can opt to produce no summary at all when no consistent generation can be found. In experiments, we find that PINOCCHIO improves the consistency of generation by an average of 67% on two abstractive summarization datasets, without hurting recall.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bridging Human--Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing

An existing domain taxonomy for normalizing content is often assumed when discussing approaches to information extraction, yet often in real-world scenarios there is none. When one does exist, as the information needs shift, it must be continually extended. This is a slow and tedious task, and one which does not scale well. Here we propose an interactive tool that allows a taxonomy to be built or extended rapidly and with a human in the loop to control precision. We apply insights from text summarization and information extraction to reduce the search space dramatically, then leverage modern pretrained language models to perform contextualized clustering of the remaining concepts to yield candidate nodes for the user to review. We show this allows a user to consider as many as 200 taxonomy concept candidates an hour, to quickly build or extend a taxonomy to better fit information needs.

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An Interactive Exploratory Tool for the Task of Hate Speech Detection
Angelina McMillan-Major | Amandalynne Paullada | Yacine Jernite

With the growth of Automatic Content Moderation (ACM) on widely used social media platforms, transparency into the design of moderation technology and policy is necessary for online communities to advocate for themselves when harms occur. In this work, we describe a suite of interactive modules to support the exploration of various aspects of this technology, and particularly of those components that rely on English models and datasets for hate speech detection, a subtask within ACM. We intend for this demo to support the various stakeholders of ACM in investigating the definitions and decisions that underpin current technologies such that those with technical knowledge and those with contextual knowledge may both better understand existing systems.

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Design Considerations for an NLP-Driven Empathy and Emotion Interface for Clinician Training via Telemedicine
Roxana Girju | Marina Girju

As digital social platforms and mobile technologies become more prevalent and robust, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in facilitating human communication will grow. This, in turn, will encourage development of intuitive, adaptive, and effective empathic AI interfaces that better address the needs of socially and culturally diverse communities. In this paper, we present several design considerations of an intelligent digital interface intended to guide the clinicians toward more empathetic communication. This approach allows various communities of practice to investigate how AI, on one side, and human communication and healthcare needs, on the other, can contribute to each other’s development.

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Human-centered computing in legal NLP - An application to refugee status determination
Claire Barale

This paper proposes an approach to the design of an ethical human-AI reasoning support system for decision makers in refugee law. In the context of refugee status determination, practitioners mostly rely on text data. We therefore investigate human-AI cooperation in legal natural language processing. Specifically, we want to determine which design methods can be transposed to legal text analytics. Although little work has been done so far on human-centered design methods applicable to the legal domain, we assume that introducing iterative cooperation and user engagement in the design process is (1) a method to reduce technical limitations of an NLP system and (2) that it will help design more ethical and effective applications by taking users’ preferences and feedback into account. The proposed methodology is based on three main design steps: cognitive process formalization in models understandable by both humans and computers, speculative design of prototypes, and semi-directed interviews with a sample of potential users.

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Let’s Chat: Understanding User Expectations in Socialbot Interactions
Elizabeth Soper | Erin Pacquetet | Sougata Saha | Souvik Das | Rohini Srihari

This paper analyzes data from the 2021 Amazon Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4, in order to better understand the differences between human-computer interactions (HCI) in a socialbot setting and conventional human-to-human interactions. We find that because socialbots are a new genre of HCI, we are still negotiating norms to guide interactions in this setting. We present several notable patterns in user behavior toward socialbots, which have important implications for guiding future work in the development of conversational agents.

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Teaching Interactively to Learn Emotions in Natural Language
Rajesh Titung | Cecilia Alm

Motivated by prior literature, we provide a proof of concept simulation study for an understudied interactive machine learning method, machine teaching (MT), for the text-based emotion prediction task. We compare this method experimentally against a more well-studied technique, active learning (AL). Results show the strengths of both approaches over more resource-intensive offline supervised learning. Additionally, applying AL and MT to fine-tune a pre-trained model offers further efficiency gain. We end by recommending research directions which aim to empower users in the learning process.

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Narrative Datasets through the Lenses of NLP and HCI
Sharifa Sultana | Renwen Zhang | Hajin Lim | Maria Antoniak

In this short paper, we compare existing value systems and approaches in NLP and HCI for collecting narrative data. Building on these parallel discussions, we shed light on the challenges facing some popular NLP dataset types, which we discuss these in relation to widely-used narrative-based HCI research methods; and we highlight points where NLP methods can broaden qualitative narrative studies. In particular, we point towards contextuality, positionality, dataset size, and open research design as central points of difference and windows for collaboration when studying narratives. Through the use case of narratives, this work contributes to a larger conversation regarding the possibilities for bridging NLP and HCI through speculative mixed-methods.

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Towards a Deep Multi-layered Dialectal Language Analysis: A Case Study of African-American English
Jamell Dacon

Currently, natural language processing (NLP) models proliferate language discrimination leading to potentially harmful societal impacts as a result of biased outcomes. For example, part-of-speech taggers trained on Mainstream American English (MAE) produce non-interpretable results when applied to African American English (AAE) as a result of language features not seen during training. In this work, we incorporate a human-in-the-loop paradigm to gain a better understanding of AAE speakers’ behavior and their language use, and highlight the need for dialectal language inclusivity so that native AAE speakers can extensively interact with NLP systems while reducing feelings of disenfranchisement.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems (HumEval)

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Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Human Evaluation of NLP Systems (HumEval)
Anya Belz | Maja Popović | Ehud Reiter | Anastasia Shimorina

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Vacillating Human Correlation of SacreBLEU in Unprotected Languages
Ahrii Kim | Jinhyeon Kim

SacreBLEU, by incorporating a text normalizing step in the pipeline, has become a rising automatic evaluation metric in recent MT studies. With agglutinative languages such as Korean, however, the lexical-level metric cannot provide a conceivable result without a customized pre-tokenization. This paper endeavors to ex- amine the influence of diversified tokenization schemes –word, morpheme, subword, character, and consonants & vowels (CV)– on the metric after its protective layer is peeled off. By performing meta-evaluation with manually- constructed into-Korean resources, our empirical study demonstrates that the human correlation of the surface-based metric and other homogeneous ones (as an extension) vacillates greatly by the token type. Moreover, the human correlation of the metric often deteriorates due to some tokenization, with CV one of its culprits. Guiding through the proper usage of tokenizers for the given metric, we discover i) the feasibility of the character tokens and ii) the deficit of CV in the Korean MT evaluation.

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A Methodology for the Comparison of Human Judgments With Metrics for Coreference Resolution
Mariya Borovikova | Loïc Grobol | Anaïs Halftermeyer | Sylvie Billot

We propose a method for investigating the interpretability of metrics used for the coreference resolution task through comparisons with human judgments. We provide a corpus with annotations of different error types and human evaluations of their gravity. Our preliminary analysis shows that metrics considerably overlook several error types and overlook errors in general in comparison to humans. This study is conducted on French texts, but the methodology is language-independent.

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Perceptual Quality Dimensions of Machine-Generated Text with a Focus on Machine Translation
Vivien Macketanz | Babak Naderi | Steven Schmidt | Sebastian Möller

The quality of machine-generated text is a complex construct consisting of various aspects and dimensions. We present a study that aims to uncover relevant perceptual quality dimensions for one type of machine-generated text, that is, Machine Translation. We conducted a crowdsourcing survey in the style of a Semantic Differential to collect attribute ratings for German MT outputs. An Exploratory Factor Analysis revealed the underlying perceptual dimensions. As a result, we extracted four factors that operate as relevant dimensions for the Quality of Experience of MT outputs: precision, complexity, grammaticality, and transparency.

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Human evaluation of web-crawled parallel corpora for machine translation
Gema Ramírez-Sánchez | Marta Bañón | Jaume Zaragoza-Bernabeu | Sergio Ortiz Rojas

Quality assessment has been an ongoing activity of the series of ParaCrawl efforts to crawl massive amounts of parallel data from multilingual websites for 29 languages. The goal of ParaCrawl is to get parallel data that is good for machine translation. To prove so, both, automatic (extrinsic) and human (intrinsic and extrinsic) evaluation tasks have been included as part of the quality assessment activity of the project. We sum up the various methods followed to address these evaluation tasks for the web-crawled corpora produced and their results. We review their advantages and disadvantages for the final goal of the ParaCrawl project and the related ongoing project MaCoCu.

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Beyond calories: evaluating how tailored communication reduces emotional load in diet-coaching
Simone Balloccu | Ehud Reiter

Dieting is a behaviour change task that is difficult for many people to conduct successfully. This is due to many factors, including stress and cost. Mobile applications offer an alternative to traditional coaching. However, previous work on apps evaluation only focused on dietary outcomes, ignoring users’ emotional state despite its influence on eating habits. In this work, we introduce a novel evaluation of the effects that tailored communication can have on the emotional load of dieting. We implement this by augmenting a traditional diet-app with affective NLG, text-tailoring and persuasive communication techniques. We then run a short 2-weeks experiment and check dietary outcomes, user feedback of produced text and, most importantly, its impact on emotional state, through PANAS questionnaire. Results show that tailored communication significantly improved users’ emotional state, compared to an app-only control group.

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The Human Evaluation Datasheet: A Template for Recording Details of Human Evaluation Experiments in NLP
Anastasia Shimorina | Anya Belz

This paper presents the Human Evaluation Datasheet (HEDS), a template for recording the details of individual human evaluation experiments in Natural Language Processing (NLP), and reports on first experience of researchers using HEDS sheets in practice. Originally taking inspiration from seminal papers by Bender and Friedman (2018), Mitchell et al. (2019), and Gebru et al. (2020), HEDS facilitates the recording of properties of human evaluations in sufficient detail, and with sufficient standardisation, to support comparability, meta-evaluation,and reproducibility assessments for human evaluations. These are crucial for scientifically principled evaluation, but the overhead of completing a detailed datasheet is substantial, and we discuss possible ways of addressing this and other issues observed in practice.

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Toward More Effective Human Evaluation for Machine Translation
Belén Saldías Fuentes | George Foster | Markus Freitag | Qijun Tan

Improvements in text generation technologies such as machine translation have necessitated more costly and time-consuming human evaluation procedures to ensure an accurate signal. We investigate a simple way to reduce cost by reducing the number of text segments that must be annotated in order to accurately predict a score for a complete test set. Using a sampling approach, we demonstrate that information from document membership and automatic metrics can help improve estimates compared to a pure random sampling baseline. We achieve gains of up to 20% in average absolute error by leveraging stratified sampling and control variates. Our techniques can improve estimates made from a fixed annotation budget, are easy to implement, and can be applied to any problem with structure similar to the one we study.

It is often difficult to reliably evaluate models which generate text. Among them, text style transfer is a particularly difficult to evaluate, because its success depends on a number of parameters. We conduct an evaluation of a large number of models on a detoxification task. We explore the relations between the manual and automatic metrics and find that there is only weak correlation between them, which is dependent on the type of model which generated text. Automatic metrics tend to be less reliable for better-performing models. However, our findings suggest that, ChrF and BertScore metrics can be used as a proxy for human evaluation of text detoxification to some extent.

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Human Judgement as a Compass to Navigate Automatic Metrics for Formality Transfer
Huiyuan Lai | Jiali Mao | Antonio Toral | Malvina Nissim

Although text style transfer has witnessed rapid development in recent years, there is as yet no established standard for evaluation, which is performed using several automatic metrics, lacking the possibility of always resorting to human judgement. We focus on the task of formality transfer, and on the three aspects that are usually evaluated: style strength, content preservation, and fluency. To cast light on how such aspects are assessed by common and new metrics, we run a human-based evaluation and perform a rich correlation analysis. We are then able to offer some recommendations on the use of such metrics in formality transfer, also with an eye to their generalisability (or not) to related tasks.

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Towards Human Evaluation of Mutual Understanding in Human-Computer Spontaneous Conversation: An Empirical Study of Word Sense Disambiguation for Naturalistic Social Dialogs in American English
Alex Lưu

Current evaluation practices for social dialog systems, dedicated to human-computer spontaneous conversation, exclusively focus on the quality of system-generated surface text, but not human-verifiable aspects of mutual understanding between the systems and their interlocutors. This work proposes Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) as an essential component of a valid and reliable human evaluation framework, whose long-term goal is to radically improve the usability of dialog systems in real-life human-computer collaboration. The practicality of this proposal is proved via experimentally investigating (1) the WordNet 3.0 sense inventory coverage of lexical meanings in spontaneous conversation between humans in American English, assumed as an upper bound of lexical diversity of human-computer communication, and (2) the effectiveness of state-of-the-art WSD models and pretrained transformer-based contextual embeddings on this type of data.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing 2022)

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Data-to-text systems as writing environment
Adela Schneider | Andreas Madsack | Johanna Heininger | Ching-Yi Chen | Robert Weißgraeber

Today, data-to-text systems are used as commercial solutions for automated text productionof large quantities of text. Therefore, they already represent a new technology of writing. This new technology requires the author, asan act of writing, both to configure a systemthat then takes over the transformation into areal text, but also to maintain strategies of traditional writing. What should an environmentlook like, where a human guides a machineto write texts? Based on a comparison of theNLG pipeline architecture with the results ofthe research on the human writing process, thispaper attempts to take an overview of whichtasks need to be solved and which strategiesare necessary to produce good texts in this environment. From this synopsis, principles for thedesign of data-to-text systems as a functioningwriting environment are then derived.

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A Design Space for Writing Support Tools Using a Cognitive Process Model of Writing
Katy Gero | Alex Calderwood | Charlotte Li | Lydia Chilton

Improvements in language technology have led to an increasing interest in writing support tools. In this paper we propose a design space for such tools based on a cognitive process model of writing. We conduct a systematic review of recent computer science papers that present and/or study such tools, analyzing 30 papers from the last five years using the design space. Tools are plotted according to three distinct cognitive processes–planning, translating, and reviewing–and the level of constraint each process entails. Analyzing recent work with the design space shows that highly constrained planning and reviewing are under-studied areas that recent technology improvements may now be able to serve. Finally, we propose shared evaluation methodologies and tasks that may help the field mature.

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A Selective Summary of Where to Hide a Stolen Elephant: Leaps in Creative Writing with Multimodal Machine Intelligence
Nikhil Singh | Guillermo Bernal | Daria Savchenko | Elena Glassman

While developing a story, novices and published writers alike have had to look outside themselves for inspiration. Language models have recently been able to generate text fluently, producing new stochastic narratives upon request. However, effectively integrating such capabilities with human cognitive faculties and creative processes remains challenging. We propose to investigate this integration with a multimodal writing support interface that offers writing suggestions textually, visually, and aurally. We conduct an extensive study that combines elicitation of prior expectations before writing, observation and semi-structured interviews during writing, and outcome evaluations after writing. Our results illustrate individual and situational variation in machine-in-the-loop writing approaches, suggestion acceptance, and ways the system is helpful. Centrally, we report how participants perform integrative leaps, by which they do cognitive work to integrate suggestions of varying semantic relevance into their developing stories. We interpret these findings, offering modeling and design recommendations for future creative writing support technologies.

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A text-writing system for Easy-to-Read German evaluated with low-literate users with cognitive impairment
Ina Steinmetz | Karin Harbusch

Low-literate users with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD) and/or complex communication needs (CCN) require specific writing support. We present a system that interactively supports fast and correct writing of a variant of Leichte Sprache (LS; German term for easy-to-read German), slightly extended within and beyond the inner-sentential syntactic level. The system provides simple and intuitive dialogues for selecting options from a natural-language paraphrase generator. Moreover, it reminds the user to add text elements enhancing understandability, audience design, and text coherence. In earlier development phases, the system was evaluated with different groups of substitute users. Here, we report a case study with seven low-literate users with IDD.

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Language Models as Context-sensitive Word Search Engines
Matti Wiegmann | Michael Völske | Benno Stein | Martin Potthast

Context-sensitive word search engines are writing assistants that support word choice, phrasing, and idiomatic language use by indexing large-scale n-gram collections and implementing a wildcard search. However, search results become unreliable with increasing context size (e.g., n>=5), when observations become sparse. This paper proposes two strategies for word search with larger n, based on masked and conditional language modeling. We build such search engines using BERT and BART and compare their capabilities in answering English context queries with those of the n-gram-based word search engine Netspeak. Our proposed strategies score within 5 percentage points MRR of n-gram collections while answering up to 5 times as many queries.

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Plug-and-Play Controller for Story Completion: A Pilot Study toward Emotion-aware Story Writing Assistance
Yusuke Mori | Hiroaki Yamane | Ryohei Shimizu | Tatsuya Harada

Emotions are essential for storytelling and narrative generation, and as such, the relationship between stories and emotions has been extensively studied. The authors of this paper, including a professional novelist, have examined the use of natural language processing to address the problems of novelists from the perspective of practical creative writing. In particular, the story completion task, which requires understanding the existing unfinished context, was studied from the perspective of creative support for human writers, to generate appropriate content to complete the unfinished parts. It was found that unsupervised pre-trained large neural models of the sequence-to-sequence type are useful for this task. Furthermore, based on the plug-and-play module for controllable text generation using GPT-2, an additional module was implemented to consider emotions. Although this is a preliminary study, and the results leave room for improvement before incorporating the model into a practical system, this effort is an important step in complementing the emotional trajectory of the story.

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Text Revision by On-the-Fly Representation Optimization
Jingjing Li | Zichao Li | Tao Ge | Irwin King | Michael Lyu

Text revision refers to a family of natural language generation tasks, where the source and target sequences share moderate resemblance in surface form but differentiate in attributes, such as text formality and simplicity. Current state-of-the-art methods formulate these tasks as sequence-to-sequence learning problems, which rely on large-scale parallel training corpus. In this paper, we present an iterative inplace editing approach for text revision, which requires no parallel data. In this approach, we simply fine-tune a pre-trained Transformer with masked language modeling and attribute classification. During inference, the editing at each iteration is realized by two-step span replacement. At the first step, the distributed representation of the text optimizes on the fly towards an attribute function. At the second step, a text span is masked and another new one is proposed conditioned on the optimized representation. The empirical experiments on two typical and important text revision tasks, text formalization and text simplification, show the effectiveness of our approach. It achieves competitive and even better performance than state-of-the-art supervised methods on text simplification, and gains better performance than strong unsupervised methods on text formalization.

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The Pure Poet: How Good is the Subjective Credibility and Stylistic Quality of Literary Short Texts Written with an Artificial Intelligence Tool as Compared to Texts Written by Human Authors?
Vivian Emily Gunser | Steffen Gottschling | Birgit Brucker | Sandra Richter | Dîlan Canan Çakir | Peter Gerjets

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) for text generation in creative domains raises questions regarding the credibility of AI-generated content. In two studies, we explored if readers can differentiate between AI-based and human-written texts (generated based on the first line of texts and poems of classic authors) and how the stylistic qualities of these texts are rated. Participants read 9 AI-based continuations and either 9 human-written continuations (Study 1, N=120) or 9 original continuations (Study 2, N=302). Participants’ task was to decide whether a continuation was written with an AI-tool or not, to indicate their confidence in each decision, and to assess the stylistic text quality. Results showed that participants generally had low accuracy for differentiating between text types but were overconfident in their decisions. Regarding the assessment of stylistic quality, AI-continuations were perceived as less well-written, inspiring, fascinating, interesting, and aesthetic than both human-written and original continuations.

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Interactive Children’s Story Rewriting Through Parent-Children Interaction
Yoonjoo Lee | Tae Soo Kim | Minsuk Chang | Juho Kim

Storytelling in early childhood provides significant benefits in language and literacy development, relationship building, and entertainment. To maximize these benefits, it is important to empower children with more agency. Interactive story rewriting through parent-children interaction can boost children’s agency and help build the relationship between parent and child as they collaboratively create changes to an original story. However, for children with limited proficiency in reading and writing, parents must carry out multiple tasks to guide the rewriting process, which can incur a high cognitive load. In this work, we introduce an interface design that aims to support children and parents to rewrite stories together with the help of AI techniques. We describe three design goals determined by a review of prior literature in interactive storytelling and existing educational activities. We also propose a preliminary prompt-based pipeline that uses GPT-3 to realize the design goals and enable the interface.

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News Article Retrieval in Context for Event-centric Narrative Creation
Nikos Voskarides | Edgar Meij | Sabrina Sauer | Maarten de Rijke

Writers such as journalists often use automatic tools to find relevant content to include in their narratives. In this paper, we focus on supporting writers in the news domain to develop event-centric narratives. Given an incomplete narrative that specifies a main event and a context, we aim to retrieve news articles that discuss relevant events that would enable the continuation of the narrative. We formally define this task and propose a retrieval dataset construction procedure that relies on existing news articles to simulate incomplete narratives and relevant articles. Experiments on two datasets derived from this procedure show that state-of-the-art lexical and semantic rankers are not sufficient for this task. We show that combining those with a ranker that ranks articles by reverse chronological order outperforms those rankers alone. We also perform an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results that sheds light on the characteristics of this task.

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Unmet Creativity Support Needs in Computationally Supported Creative Writing
Max Kreminski | Chris Martens

Large language models (LLMs) enabled by the datasets and computing power of the last decade have recently gained popularity for their capacity to generate plausible natural language text from human-provided prompts. This ability makes them appealing to fiction writers as prospective co-creative agents, addressing the common challenge of writer’s block, or getting unstuck. However, creative writers face additional challenges, including maintaining narrative consistency, developing plot structure, architecting reader experience, and refining their expressive intent, which are not well-addressed by current LLM-backed tools. In this paper, we define these needs by grounding them in cognitive and theoretical literature, then survey previous computational narrative research that holds promise for supporting each of them in a co-creative setting.

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Sparks: Inspiration for Science Writing using Language Models
Katy Gero | Vivian Liu | Lydia Chilton

Large-scale language models are rapidly improving, performing well on a variety of tasks with little to no customization. In this work we investigate how language models can support science writing, a challenging writing task that is both open-ended and highly constrained. We present a system for generating “sparks”, sentences related to a scientific concept intended to inspire writers. We run a user study with 13 STEM graduate students and find three main use cases of sparks—inspiration, translation, and perspective—each of which correlates with a unique interaction pattern. We also find that while participants were more likely to select higher quality sparks, the overall quality of sparks seen by a given participant did not correlate with their satisfaction with the tool.

In this work, we take a further step towards satisfying practical demands in Chinese lyric generation from musical short-video creators, in respect of the challenges on songs’ format constraints, creating specific lyrics from open-ended inspiration inputs, and language rhyme grace. One representative detail in these demands is to control lyric format at word level, that is, for Chinese songs, creators even expect fix-length words on certain positions in a lyric to match a special melody, while previous methods lack such ability. Although recent lyric generation community has made gratifying progress, most methods are not comprehensive enough to simultaneously meet these demands. As a result, we propose ChipSong, which is an assisted lyric generation system built based on a Transformer-based autoregressive language model architecture, and generates controlled lyric paragraphs fit for musical short-video display purpose, by designing 1) a novel Begin-Internal-End (BIE) word-granularity embedding sequence with its guided attention mechanism for word-level length format control, and an explicit symbol set for sentence-level length format control; 2) an open-ended trigger word mechanism to guide specific lyric contents generation; 3) a paradigm of reverse order training and shielding decoding for rhyme control. Extensive experiments show that our ChipSong generates fluent lyrics, with assuring the high consistency to pre-determined control conditions.

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Read, Revise, Repeat: A System Demonstration for Human-in-the-loop Iterative Text Revision
Wanyu Du | Zae Myung Kim | Vipul Raheja | Dhruv Kumar | Dongyeop Kang

Revision is an essential part of the human writing process. It tends to be strategic, adaptive, and, more importantly, iterative in nature. Despite the success of large language models on text revision tasks, they are limited to non-iterative, one-shot revisions. Examining and evaluating the capability of large language models for making continuous revisions and collaborating with human writers is a critical step towards building effective writing assistants. In this work, we present a human-in-the-loop iterative text revision system, Read, Revise, Repeat (R3), which aims at achieving high quality text revisions with minimal human efforts by reading model-generated revisions and user feedbacks, revising documents, and repeating human-machine interactions. In R3, a text revision model provides text editing suggestions for human writers, who can accept or reject the suggested edits. The accepted edits are then incorporated into the model for the next iteration of document revision. Writers can therefore revise documents iteratively by interacting with the system and simply accepting/rejecting its suggested edits until the text revision model stops making further revisions or reaches a predefined maximum number of revisions. Empirical experiments show that R3 can generate revisions with comparable acceptance rate to human writers at early revision depths, and the human-machine interaction can get higher quality revisions with fewer iterations and edits. The collected human-model interaction dataset and system code are available at https://github.com/vipulraheja/IteraTeR. Our system demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/lK08tIpEoaE.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP

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On Isotropy Calibration of Transformer Models
Yue Ding | Karolis Martinkus | Damian Pascual | Simon Clematide | Roger Wattenhofer

Different studies of the embedding space of transformer models suggest that the distribution of contextual representations is highly anisotropic - the embeddings are distributed in a narrow cone. Meanwhile, static word representations (e.g., Word2Vec or GloVe) have been shown to benefit from isotropic spaces. Therefore, previous work has developed methods to calibrate the embedding space of transformers in order to ensure isotropy. However, a recent study (Cai et al. 2021) shows that the embedding space of transformers is locally isotropic, which suggests that these models are already capable of exploiting the expressive capacity of their embedding space. In this work, we conduct an empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods for isotropy calibration on transformers and find that they do not provide consistent improvements across models and tasks. These results support the thesis that, given the local isotropy, transformers do not benefit from additional isotropy calibration.

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Do Dependency Relations Help in the Task of Stance Detection?
Alessandra Teresa Cignarella | Cristina Bosco | Paolo Rosso

In this paper we present a set of multilingual experiments tackling the task of Stance Detection in five different languages: English, Spanish, Catalan, French and Italian. Furthermore, we study the phenomenon of stance with respect to six different targets – one per language, and two different for Italian – employing a variety of machine learning algorithms that primarily exploit morphological and syntactic knowledge as features, represented throughout the format of Universal Dependencies. Results seem to suggest that the methodology employed is not beneficial per se, but might be useful to exploit the same features with a different methodology.

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Evaluating the Practical Utility of Confidence-score based Techniques for Unsupervised Open-world Classification
Sopan Khosla | Rashmi Gangadharaiah

Open-world classification in dialog systems require models to detect open intents, while ensuring the quality of in-domain (ID) intent classification. In this work, we revisit methods that leverage distance-based statistics for unsupervised out-of-domain (OOD) detection. We show that despite their superior performance on threshold-independent metrics like AUROC on test-set, threshold values chosen based on the performance on a validation-set do not generalize well to the test-set, thus resulting in substantially lower performance on ID or OOD detection accuracy and F1-scores. Our analysis shows that this lack of generalizability can be successfully mitigated by setting aside a hold-out set from validation data for threshold selection (sometimes achieving relative gains as high as 100%). Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets show that this fix puts the performance of these methods at par with, or sometimes even better than, the current state-of-the-art OOD detection techniques.

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Extending the Scope of Out-of-Domain: Examining QA models in multiple subdomains
Chenyang Lyu | Jennifer Foster | Yvette Graham

Past work that investigates out-of-domain performance of QA systems has mainly focused on general domains (e.g. news domain, wikipedia domain), underestimating the importance of subdomains defined by the internal characteristics of QA datasets. In this paper, we extend the scope of “out-of-domain” by splitting QA examples into different subdomains according to their internal characteristics including question type, text length, answer position. We then examine the performance of QA systems trained on the data from different subdomains. Experimental results show that the performance of QA systems can be significantly reduced when the train data and test data come from different subdomains. These results question the generalizability of current QA systems in multiple subdomains, suggesting the need to combat the bias introduced by the internal characteristics of QA datasets.

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What Do You Get When You Cross Beam Search with Nucleus Sampling?
Uri Shaham | Omer Levy

We combine beam search with the probabilistic pruning technique of nucleus sampling to create two deterministic nucleus search algorithms for natural language generation. The first algorithm, p-exact search, locally prunes the next-token distribution and performs an exact search over the remaining space. The second algorithm, dynamic beam search, shrinks and expands the beam size according to the entropy of the candidate’s probability distribution. Despite the probabilistic intuition behind nucleus search, experiments on machine translation and summarization benchmarks show that both algorithms reach the same performance levels as standard beam search.

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How Much Do Modifications to Transformer Language Models Affect Their Ability to Learn Linguistic Knowledge?
Simeng Sun | Brian Dillon | Mohit Iyyer

Recent progress in large pretrained language models (LMs) has led to a growth of analyses examining what kinds of linguistic knowledge are encoded by these models. Due to computational constraints, existing analyses are mostly conducted on publicly-released LM checkpoints, which makes it difficult to study how various factors during training affect the models’ acquisition of linguistic knowledge. In this paper, we train a suite of small-scale Transformer LMs that differ from each other with respect to architectural decisions (e.g., self-attention configuration) or training objectives (e.g., multi-tasking, focal loss). We evaluate these LMs on BLiMP, a targeted evaluation benchmark of multiple English linguistic phenomena. Our experiments show that while none of these modifications yields significant improvements on aggregate, changes to the loss function result in promising improvements on several subcategories (e.g., detecting adjunct islands, correctly scoping negative polarity items). We hope our work offers useful insights for future research into designing Transformer LMs that more effectively learn linguistic knowledge.

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Cross-lingual Inflection as a Data Augmentation Method for Parsing
Alberto Muñoz-Ortiz | Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez | David Vilares

We propose a morphology-based method for low-resource (LR) dependency parsing. We train a morphological inflector for target LR languages, and apply it to related rich-resource (RR) treebanks to create cross-lingual (x-inflected) treebanks that resemble the target LR language. We use such inflected treebanks to train parsers in zero- (training on x-inflected treebanks) and few-shot (training on x-inflected and target language treebanks) setups. The results show that the method sometimes improves the baselines, but not consistently.

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Is BERT Robust to Label Noise? A Study on Learning with Noisy Labels in Text Classification
Dawei Zhu | Michael A. Hedderich | Fangzhou Zhai | David Adelani | Dietrich Klakow

Incorrect labels in training data occur when human annotators make mistakes or when the data is generated via weak or distant supervision. It has been shown that complex noise-handling techniques - by modeling, cleaning or filtering the noisy instances - are required to prevent models from fitting this label noise. However, we show in this work that, for text classification tasks with modern NLP models like BERT, over a variety of noise types, existing noise-handling methods do not always improve its performance, and may even deteriorate it, suggesting the need for further investigation. We also back our observations with a comprehensive analysis.

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Ancestor-to-Creole Transfer is Not a Walk in the Park
Heather Lent | Emanuele Bugliarello | Anders Søgaard

We aim to learn language models for Creole languages for which large volumes of data are not readily available, and therefore explore the potential transfer from ancestor languages (the ‘Ancestry Transfer Hypothesis’). We find that standard transfer methods do not facilitate ancestry transfer. Surprisingly, different from other non-Creole languages, a very distinct two-phase pattern emerges for Creoles: As our training losses plateau, and language models begin to overfit on their source languages, perplexity on the Creoles drop. We explore if this compression phase can lead to practically useful language models (the ‘Ancestry Bottleneck Hypothesis’), but also falsify this. Moreover, we show that Creoles even exhibit this two-phase pattern even when training on random, unrelated languages. Thus Creoles seem to be typological outliers and we speculate whether there is a link between the two observations.

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What GPT Knows About Who is Who
Xiaohan Yang | Eduardo Peynetti | Vasco Meerman | Chris Tanner

Coreference resolution – which is a crucial task for understanding discourse and language at large – has yet to witness widespread benefits from large language models (LLMs). Moreover, coreference resolution systems largely rely on supervised labels, which are highly expensive and difficult to annotate, thus making it ripe for prompt engineering. In this paper, we introduce a QA-based prompt-engineering method and discern generative, pre-trained LLMs’ abilities and limitations toward the task of coreference resolution. Our experiments show that GPT-2 and GPT-Neo can return valid answers, but that their capabilities to identify coreferent mentions are limited and prompt-sensitive, leading to inconsistent results.

Recent work uses a Siamese Network, initialized with BioWordVec embeddings (distributed word embeddings), for predicting synonymy among biomedical terms to automate a part of the UMLS (Unified Medical Language System) Metathesaurus construction process. We evaluate the use of contextualized word embeddings extracted from nine different biomedical BERT-based models for synonym prediction in the UMLS by replacing BioWordVec embeddings with embeddings extracted from each biomedical BERT model using different feature extraction methods. Finally, we conduct a thorough grid search, which prior work lacks, to find the best set of hyperparameters. Surprisingly, we find that Siamese Networks initialized with BioWordVec embeddings still out perform the Siamese Networks initialized with embedding extracted from biomedical BERT model.

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On the Impact of Data Augmentation on Downstream Performance in Natural Language Processing
Itsuki Okimura | Machel Reid | Makoto Kawano | Yutaka Matsuo

With in the broader scope of machine learning, data augmentation is a common strategy to improve generalization and robustness of machine learning models. While data augmentation has been widely used within computer vision, its use in the NLP has been been comparably rather limited. The reason for this is that within NLP, the impact of proposed data augmentation methods on performance has not been evaluated in a unified manner, and effective data augmentation methods are unclear. In this paper, we look to tackle this by evaluating the impact of 12 data augmentation methods on multiple datasets when finetuning pre-trained language models. We find minimal improvements when data sizes are constrained to a few thousand, with performance degradation when data size is increased. We also use various methods to quantify the strength of data augmentations, and find that these values, though weakly correlated with downstream performance, correlate negatively or positively depending on the task. Furthermore, we find a glaring lack of consistently performant data augmentations. This all alludes to the difficulty of data augmentations for NLP tasks and we are inclined to believe that static data augmentations are not broadly applicable given these properties.

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Can Question Rewriting Help Conversational Question Answering?
Etsuko Ishii | Yan Xu | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Bryan Wilie

Question rewriting (QR) is a subtask of conversational question answering (CQA) aiming to ease the challenges of understanding dependencies among dialogue history by reformulating questions in a self-contained form. Despite seeming plausible, little evidence is available to justify QR as a mitigation method for CQA. To verify the effectiveness of QR in CQA, we investigate a reinforcement learning approach that integrates QR and CQA tasks and does not require corresponding QR datasets for targeted CQA.We find, however, that the RL method is on par with the end-to-end baseline. We provide an analysis of the failure and describe the difficulty of exploiting QR for CQA.

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Clustering Examples in Multi-Dataset Benchmarks with Item Response Theory
Pedro Rodriguez | Phu Mon Htut | John Lalor | João Sedoc

In natural language processing, multi-dataset benchmarks for common tasks (e.g., SuperGLUE for natural language inference and MRQA for question answering) have risen in importance. Invariably, tasks and individual examples vary in difficulty. Recent analysis methods infer properties of examples such as difficulty. In particular, Item Response Theory (IRT) jointly infers example and model properties from the output of benchmark tasks (i.e., scores for each model-example pair). Therefore, it seems sensible that methods like IRT should be able to detect differences between datasets in a task. This work shows that current IRT models are not as good at identifying differences as we would expect, explain why this is difficult, and outline future directions that incorporate more (textual) signal from examples.

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On the Limits of Evaluating Embodied Agent Model Generalization Using Validation Sets
Hyounghun Kim | Aishwarya Padmakumar | Di Jin | Mohit Bansal | Dilek Hakkani-Tur

Natural language guided embodied task completion is a challenging problem since it requires understanding natural language instructions, aligning them with egocentric visual observations, and choosing appropriate actions to execute in the environment to produce desired changes. We experiment with augmenting a transformer model for this task with modules that effectively utilize a wider field of view and learn to choose whether the next step requires a navigation or manipulation action. We observed that the proposed modules resulted in improved, and in fact state-of-the-art performance on an unseen validation set of a popular benchmark dataset, ALFRED. However, our best model selected using the unseen validation set underperforms on the unseen test split of ALFRED, indicating that performance on the unseen validation set may not in itself be a sufficient indicator of whether model improvements generalize to unseen test sets. We highlight this result as we believe it may be a wider phenomenon in machine learning tasks but primarily noticeable only in benchmarks that limit evaluations on test splits, and highlights the need to modify benchmark design to better account for variance in model performance.

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Do Data-based Curricula Work?
Maxim Surkov | Vladislav Mosin | Ivan P. Yamshchikov

Current state-of-the-art NLP systems use large neural networks that require extensive computational resources for training. Inspired by human knowledge acquisition, researchers have proposed curriculum learning - sequencing tasks (task-based curricula) or ordering and sampling the datasets (data-based curricula) that facilitate training. This work investigates the benefits of data-based curriculum learning for large language models such as BERT and T5. We experiment with various curricula based on complexity measures and different sampling strategies. Extensive experiments on several NLP tasks show that curricula based on various complexity measures rarely have any benefits, while random sampling performs either as well or better than curricula.

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The Document Vectors Using Cosine Similarity Revisited
Zhang Bingyu | Nikolay Arefyev

The current state-of-the-art test accuracy (97.42%) on the IMDB movie reviews dataset was reported by Thongtan and Phienthrakul (2019) and achieved by the logistic regression classifier trained on the Document Vectors using Cosine Similarity (DV-ngrams-cosine) proposed in their paper and the Bag-of-N-grams (BON) vectors scaled by Naïve Bayesian weights. While large pre-trained Transformer-based models have shown SOTA results across many datasets and tasks, the aforementioned model has not been surpassed by them, despite being much simpler and pre-trained on the IMDB dataset only. In this paper, we describe an error in the evaluation procedure of this model, which was found when we were trying to analyze its excellent performance on the IMDB dataset. We further show that the previously reported test accuracy of 97.42% is invalid and should be corrected to 93.68%. We also analyze the model performance with different amounts of training data (subsets of the IMDB dataset) and compare it to the Transformer-based RoBERTa model. The results show that while RoBERTa has a clear advantage for larger training sets, the DV-ngrams-cosine performs better than RoBERTa when the labeled training set is very small (10 or 20 documents). Finally, we introduce a sub-sampling scheme based on Naïve Bayesian weights for the training process of the DV-ngrams-cosine, which leads to faster training and better quality.

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Challenges in including extra-linguistic context in pre-trained language models
Ionut Sorodoc | Laura Aina | Gemma Boleda

To successfully account for language, computational models need to take into account both the linguistic context (the content of the utterances) and the extra-linguistic context (for instance, the participants in a dialogue). We focus on a referential task that asks models to link entity mentions in a TV show to the corresponding characters, and design an architecture that attempts to account for both kinds of context. In particular, our architecture combines a previously proposed specialized module (an “entity library”) for character representation with transfer learning from a pre-trained language model. We find that, although the model does improve linguistic contextualization, it fails to successfully integrate extra-linguistic information about the participants in the dialogue. Our work shows that it is very challenging to incorporate extra-linguistic information into pre-trained language models.

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Label Errors in BANKING77
Cecilia Ying | Stephen Thomas

We investigate potential label errors present in the popular BANKING77 dataset and the associated negative impacts on intent classification methods. Motivated by our own negative results when constructing an intent classifier, we applied two automated approaches to identify potential label errors in the dataset. We found that over 1,400 (14%) of the 10,003 training utterances may have been incorrectly labelled. In a simple experiment, we found that by removing the utterances with potential errors, our intent classifier saw an increase of 4.5% and 8% for the F1-Score and Adjusted Rand Index, respectively, in supervised and unsupervised classification. This paper serves as a warning of the potential of noisy labels in popular NLP datasets. Further study is needed to fully identify the breadth and depth of label errors in BANKING77 and other datasets.

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Pathologies of Pre-trained Language Models in Few-shot Fine-tuning
Hanjie Chen | Guoqing Zheng | Ahmed Awadallah | Yangfeng Ji

Although adapting pre-trained language models with few examples has shown promising performance on text classification, there is a lack of understanding of where the performance gain comes from. In this work, we propose to answer this question by interpreting the adaptation behavior using post-hoc explanations from model predictions. By modeling feature statistics of explanations, we discover that (1) without fine-tuning, pre-trained models (e.g. BERT and RoBERTa) show strong prediction bias across labels; (2) although few-shot fine-tuning can mitigate the prediction bias and demonstrate promising prediction performance, our analysis shows models gain performance improvement by capturing non-task-related features (e.g. stop words) or shallow data patterns (e.g. lexical overlaps). These observations alert that pursuing model performance with fewer examples may incur pathological prediction behavior, which requires further sanity check on model predictions and careful design in model evaluations in few-shot fine-tuning.

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An Empirical study to understand the Compositional Prowess of Neural Dialog Models
Vinayshekhar Kumar | Vaibhav Kumar | Mukul Bhutani | Alexander Rudnicky

In this work, we examine the problems associated with neural dialog models under the common theme of compositionality. Specifically, we investigate three manifestations of compositionality: (1) Productivity, (2) Substitutivity, and (3) Systematicity. These manifestations shed light on the generalization, syntactic robustness, and semantic capabilities of neural dialog models. We design probing experiments by perturbing the training data to study the above phenomenon. We make informative observations based on automated metrics and hope that this work increases research interest in understanding the capacity of these models.

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Combining Extraction and Generation for Constructing Belief-Consequence Causal Links
Maria Alexeeva | Allegra A. Beal Cohen | Mihai Surdeanu

In this paper, we introduce and justify a new task—causal link extraction based on beliefs—and do a qualitative analysis of the ability of a large language model—InstructGPT-3—to generate implicit consequences of beliefs. With the language model-generated consequences being promising, but not consistent, we propose directions of future work, including data collection, explicit consequence extraction using rule-based and language modeling-based approaches, and using explicitly stated consequences of beliefs to fine-tune or prompt the language model to produce outputs suitable for the task.

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Replicability under Near-Perfect Conditions – A Case-Study from Automatic Summarization
Margot Mieskes

Replication of research results has become more and more important in Natural Language Processing. Nevertheless, we still rely on results reported in the literature for comparison. Additionally, elements of an experimental setup are not always completely reported. This includes, but is not limited to reporting specific parameters used or omitting an implementational detail. In our experiment based on two frequently used data sets from the domain of automatic summarization and the seemingly full disclosure of research artefacts, we examine how well results reported are replicable and what elements influence the success or failure of replication. Our results indicate that publishing research artifacts is far from sufficient, that that publishing all relevant parameters in all possible detail is cruicial.

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BPE beyond Word Boundary: How NOT to use Multi Word Expressions in Neural Machine Translation
Dipesh Kumar | Avijit Thawani

BPE tokenization merges characters into longer tokens by finding frequently occurring contiguous patterns within the word boundary. An intuitive relaxation would be to extend a BPE vocabulary with multi-word expressions (MWEs): bigrams (in_a), trigrams (out_of_the), and skip-grams (he . his). In the context of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), we replace the least frequent subword/whole-word tokens with the most frequent MWEs. We find that these modifications to BPE end up hurting the model, resulting in a net drop of BLEU and chrF scores across two language pairs. We observe that naively extending BPE beyond word boundaries results in incoherent tokens which are themselves better represented as individual words. Moreover, we find that Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) instead of frequency finds better MWEs (e.g., New_York, Statue_of_Liberty, neither . nor) which consistently improves translation performance.We release all code at https://github.com/pegasus-lynx/mwe-bpe.

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Pre-trained language models evaluating themselves - A comparative study
Philipp Koch | Matthias Aßenmacher | Christian Heumann

Evaluating generated text received new attention with the introduction of model-based metrics in recent years. These new metrics have a higher correlation with human judgments and seemingly overcome many issues of previous n-gram based metrics from the symbolic age. In this work, we examine the recently introduced metrics BERTScore, BLEURT, NUBIA, MoverScore, and Mark-Evaluate (Petersen). We investigate their sensitivity to different types of semantic deterioration (part of speech drop and negation), word order perturbations, word drop, and the common problem of repetition. No metric showed appropriate behaviour for negation, and further none of them was overall sensitive to the other issues mentioned above.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2022)

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Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2022)
Elizabeth Salesky | Marcello Federico | Marta Costa-jussà

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SubER - A Metric for Automatic Evaluation of Subtitle Quality
Patrick Wilken | Panayota Georgakopoulou | Evgeny Matusov

This paper addresses the problem of evaluating the quality of automatically generated subtitles, which includes not only the quality of the machine-transcribed or translated speech, but also the quality of line segmentation and subtitle timing. We propose SubER - a single novel metric based on edit distance with shifts that takes all of these subtitle properties into account. We compare it to existing metrics for evaluating transcription, translation, and subtitle quality. A careful human evaluation in a post-editing scenario shows that the new metric has a high correlation with the post-editing effort and direct human assessment scores, outperforming baseline metrics considering only the subtitle text, such as WER and BLEU, and existing methods to integrate segmentation and timing features.

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Improving Arabic Diacritization by Learning to Diacritize and Translate
Brian Thompson | Ali Alshehri

We propose a novel multitask learning method for diacritization which trains a model to both diacritize and translate. Our method addresses data sparsity by exploiting large, readily available bitext corpora. Furthermore, translation requires implicit linguistic and semantic knowledge, which is helpful for resolving ambiguities in diacritization. We apply our method to the Penn Arabic Treebank and report a new state-of-the-art word error rate of 4.79%. We also conduct manual and automatic analysis to better understand our method and highlight some of the remaining challenges in diacritization. Our method has applications in text-to-speech, speech-to-speech translation, and other NLP tasks.

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Simultaneous Neural Machine Translation with Prefix Alignment
Yasumasa Kano | Katsuhito Sudoh | Satoshi Nakamura

Simultaneous translation is a task that requires starting translation before the speaker has finished speaking, so we face a trade-off between latency and accuracy. In this work, we focus on prefix-to-prefix translation and propose a method to extract alignment between bilingual prefix pairs. We use the alignment to segment a streaming input and fine-tune a translation model. The proposed method demonstrated higher BLEU than those of baselines in low latency ranges in our experiments on the IWSLT simultaneous translation benchmark.

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Locality-Sensitive Hashing for Long Context Neural Machine Translation
Frithjof Petrick | Jan Rosendahl | Christian Herold | Hermann Ney

After its introduction the Transformer architecture quickly became the gold standard for the task of neural machine translation. A major advantage of the Transformer compared to previous architectures is the faster training speed achieved by complete parallelization across timesteps due to the use of attention over recurrent layers. However, this also leads to one of the biggest problems of the Transformer, namely the quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to the input length. In this work we adapt the locality-sensitive hashing approach of Kitaev et al. (2020) to self-attention in the Transformer, we extended it to cross-attention and apply this memory efficient framework to sentence- and document-level machine translation. Our experiments show that the LSH attention scheme for sentence-level comes at the cost of slightly reduced translation quality. For document-level NMT we are able to include much bigger context sizes than what is possible with the baseline Transformer. However, more context does neither improve translation quality nor improve scores on targeted test suites.

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Anticipation-Free Training for Simultaneous Machine Translation
Chih-Chiang Chang | Shun-Po Chuang | Hung-yi Lee

Simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) speeds up the translation process by starting to translate before the source sentence is completely available. It is difficult due to limited context and word order difference between languages. Existing methods increase latency or introduce adaptive read-write policies for SimulMT models to handle local reordering and improve translation quality. However, the long-distance reordering would make the SimulMT models learn translation mistakenly. Specifically, the model may be forced to predict target tokens when the corresponding source tokens have not been read. This leads to aggressive anticipation during inference, resulting in the hallucination phenomenon. To mitigate this problem, we propose a new framework that decompose the translation process into the monotonic translation step and the reordering step, and we model the latter by the auxiliary sorting network (ASN). The ASN rearranges the hidden states to match the order in the target language, so that the SimulMT model could learn to translate more reasonably. The entire model is optimized end-to-end and does not rely on external aligners or data. During inference, ASN is removed to achieve streaming. Experiments show the proposed framework could outperform previous methods with less latency.

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Who Are We Talking About? Handling Person Names in Speech Translation
Marco Gaido | Matteo Negri | Marco Turchi

Recent work has shown that systems for speech translation (ST) – similarly to automatic speech recognition (ASR) – poorly handle person names. This shortcoming does not only lead to errors that can seriously distort the meaning of the input, but also hinders the adoption of such systems in application scenarios (like computer-assisted interpreting) where the translation of named entities, like person names, is crucial. In this paper, we first analyse the outputs of ASR/ST systems to identify the reasons of failures in person name transcription/translation. Besides the frequency in the training data, we pinpoint the nationality of the referred person as a key factor. We then mitigate the problem by creating multilingual models, and further improve our ST systems by forcing them to jointly generate transcripts and translations, prioritising the former over the latter. Overall, our solutions result in a relative improvement in token-level person name accuracy by 47.8% on average for three language pairs (en->es,fr,it).

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Joint Generation of Captions and Subtitles with Dual Decoding
Jitao Xu | François Buet | Josep Crego | Elise Bertin-Lemée | François Yvon

As the amount of audio-visual content increases, the need to develop automatic captioning and subtitling solutions to match the expectations of a growing international audience appears as the only viable way to boost throughput and lower the related post-production costs. Automatic captioning and subtitling often need to be tightly intertwined to achieve an appropriate level of consistency and synchronization with each other and with the video signal. In this work, we assess a dual decoding scheme to achieve a strong coupling between these two tasks and show how adequacy and consistency are increased, with virtually no additional cost in terms of model size and training complexity.

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MirrorAlign: A Super Lightweight Unsupervised Word Alignment Model via Cross-Lingual Contrastive Learning
Di Wu | Liang Ding | Shuo Yang | Mingyang Li

Word alignment is essential for the downstream cross-lingual language understanding and generation tasks. Recently, the performance of the neural word alignment models has exceeded that of statistical models. However, they heavily rely on sophisticated translation models. In this study, we propose a super lightweight unsupervised word alignment model named MirrorAlign, in which bidirectional symmetric attention trained with a contrastive learning objective is introduced, and an agreement loss is employed to bind the attention maps, such that the alignments follow mirror-like symmetry hypothesis. Experimental results on several public benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves competitive, if not better, performance compared to the state of the art in word alignment while significantly reducing the training and decoding time on average. Further ablation analysis and case studies show the superiority of our proposed MirrorAlign. Notably, we recognize our model as a pioneer attempt to unify bilingual word embedding and word alignments. Encouragingly, our approach achieves 16.4X speedup against GIZA++, and 50X parameter compression compared with the Transformer-based alignment methods. We release our code to facilitate the community: https://github.com/moore3930/MirrorAlign.

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On the Impact of Noises in Crowd-Sourced Data for Speech Translation
Siqi Ouyang | Rong Ye | Lei Li

Training speech translation (ST) models requires large and high-quality datasets. MuST-C is one of the most widely used ST benchmark datasets. It contains around 400 hours of speech-transcript-translation data for each of the eight translation directions. This dataset passes several quality-control filters during creation. However, we find that MuST-C still suffers from three major quality issues: audiotext misalignment, inaccurate translation, and unnecessary speaker’s name. What are the impacts of these data quality issues for model development and evaluation? In this paper, we propose an automatic method to fix or filter the above quality issues, using English-German (En-De) translation as an example. Our experiments show that ST models perform better on clean test sets, and the rank of proposed models remains consistent across different test sets. Besides, simply removing misaligned data points from the training set does not lead to a better ST model.

The evaluation campaign of the 19th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation featured eight shared tasks: (i) Simultaneous speech translation, (ii) Offline speech translation, (iii) Speech to speech translation, (iv) Low-resource speech translation, (v) Multilingual speech translation, (vi) Dialect speech translation, (vii) Formality control for speech translation, (viii) Isometric speech translation. A total of 27 teams participated in at least one of the shared tasks. This paper details, for each shared task, the purpose of the task, the data that were released, the evaluation metrics that were applied, the submissions that were received and the results that were achieved.

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The YiTrans Speech Translation System for IWSLT 2022 Offline Shared Task
Ziqiang Zhang | Junyi Ao

This paper describes the submission of our end-to-end YiTrans speech translation system for the IWSLT 2022 offline task, which translates from English audio to German, Chinese, and Japanese. The YiTrans system is built on large-scale pre-trained encoder-decoder models. More specifically, we first design a multi-stage pre-training strategy to build a multi-modality model with a large amount of labeled and unlabeled data. We then fine-tune the corresponding components of the model for the downstream speech translation tasks. Moreover, we make various efforts to improve performance, such as data filtering, data augmentation, speech segmentation, model ensemble, and so on. Experimental results show that our YiTrans system obtains a significant improvement than the strong baseline on three translation directions, and it achieves +5.2 BLEU improvements over last year’s optimal end-to-end system on tst2021 English-German.

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Amazon Alexa AI’s System for IWSLT 2022 Offline Speech Translation Shared Task
Akshaya Shanbhogue | Ran Xue | Ching-Yun Chang | Sarah Campbell

This paper describes Amazon Alexa AI’s submission to the IWSLT 2022 Offline Speech Translation Task. Our system is an end-to-end speech translation model that leverages pretrained models and cross modality transfer learning. We detail two improvements to the knowledge transfer schema. First, we implemented a new loss function that reduces knowledge gap between audio and text modalities in translation task effectively. Second, we investigate multiple finetuning strategies including sampling loss, language grouping and domain adaption. These strategies aims to bridge the gaps between speech and text translation tasks. We also implement a multi-stage segmentation and merging strategy that yields improvements on the unsegmented development datasets. Results show that the proposed loss function consistently improves BLEU scores on the development datasets for both English-German and multilingual models. Additionally, certain language pairs see BLEU score improvements with specific finetuning strategies.

The primary goal of this FBK’s systems submission to the IWSLT 2022 offline and simultaneous speech translation tasks is to reduce model training costs without sacrificing translation quality. As such, we first question the need of ASR pre-training, showing that it is not essential to achieve competitive results. Second, we focus on data filtering, showing that a simple method that looks at the ratio between source and target characters yields a quality improvement of 1 BLEU. Third, we compare different methods to reduce the detrimental effect of the audio segmentation mismatch between training data manually segmented at sentence level and inference data that is automatically segmented. Towards the same goal of training cost reduction, we participate in the simultaneous task with the same model trained for offline ST. The effectiveness of our lightweight training strategy is shown by the high score obtained on the MuST-C en-de corpus (26.7 BLEU) and is confirmed in high-resource data conditions by a 1.6 BLEU improvement on the IWSLT2020 test set over last year’s winning system.

Pretrained models in acoustic and textual modalities can potentially improve speech translation for both Cascade and End-to-end approaches. In this evaluation, we aim at empirically looking for the answer by using the wav2vec, mBART50 and DeltaLM models to improve text and speech translation models. The experiments showed that the presence of these models together with an advanced audio segmentation method results in an improvement over the previous end-to-end system by up to 7 BLEU points. More importantly, the experiments showed that given enough data and modeling capacity to overcome the training difficulty, we can outperform even very competitive Cascade systems. In our experiments, this gap can be as large as 2.0 BLEU points, the same gap that the Cascade often led over the years.

This paper describes USTC-NELSLIP’s submissions to the IWSLT 2022 Offline Speech Translation task, including speech translation of talks from English to German, English to Chinese and English to Japanese. We describe both cascaded architectures and end-to-end models which can directly translate source speech into target text. In the cascaded condition, we investigate the effectiveness of different model architectures with robust training and achieve 2.72 BLEU improvements over last year’s optimal system on MuST-C English-German test set. In the end-to-end condition, we build models based on Transformer and Conformer architectures, achieving 2.26 BLEU improvements over last year’s optimal end-to-end system. The end-to-end system has obtained promising results, but it is still lagging behind our cascaded models.

This paper describes AISP-SJTU’s submissions for the IWSLT 2022 Simultaneous Translation task. We participate in the text-to-text and speech-to-text simultaneous translation from English to Mandarin Chinese. The training of the CAAT is improved by training across multiple values of right context window size, which achieves good online performance without setting a prior right context window size for training. For speech-to-text task, the best model we submitted achieves 25.87, 26.21, 26.45 BLEU in low, medium and high regimes on tst-COMMON, corresponding to 27.94, 28.31, 28.43 BLEU in text-to-text task.

This system paper describes the Xiaomi Translation System for the IWSLT 2022 Simultaneous Speech Translation (noted as SST) shared task. We participate in the English-to-Mandarin Chinese Text-to-Text (noted as T2T) track. Our system is built based on the Transformer model with novel techniques borrowed from our recent research work. For the data filtering, language-model-based and rule-based methods are conducted to filter the data to obtain high-quality bilingual parallel corpora. We also strengthen our system with some dominating techniques related to data augmentation, such as knowledge distillation, tagged back-translation, and iterative back-translation. We also incorporate novel training techniques such as R-drop, deep model, and large batch training which have been shown to be beneficial to the naive Transformer model. In the SST scenario, several variations of extttwait-k strategies are explored. Furthermore, in terms of robustness, both data-based and model-based ways are used to reduce the sensitivity of our system to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs. We finally design some inference algorithms and use the adaptive-ensemble method based on multiple model variants to further improve the performance of the system. Compared with strong baselines, fusing all techniques can improve our system by 2 extasciitilde3 BLEU scores under different latency regimes.

This paper provides an overview of NVIDIA NeMo’s speech translation systems for the IWSLT 2022 Offline Speech Translation Task. Our cascade system consists of 1) Conformer RNN-T automatic speech recognition model, 2) punctuation-capitalization model based on pre-trained T5 encoder, 3) ensemble of Transformer neural machine translation models fine-tuned on TED talks. Our end-to-end model has less parameters and consists of Conformer encoder and Transformer decoder. It relies on the cascade system by re-using its pre-trained ASR encoder and training on synthetic translations generated with the ensemble of NMT models. Our En->De cascade and end-to-end systems achieve 29.7 and 26.2 BLEU on the 2020 test set correspondingly, both outperforming the previous year’s best of 26 BLEU.

This paper describes NiuTrans’s submission to the IWSLT22 English-to-Chinese (En-Zh) offline speech translation task. The end-to-end and bilingual system is built by constrained English and Chinese data and translates the English speech to Chinese text without intermediate transcription. Our speech translation models are composed of different pre-trained acoustic models and machine translation models by two kinds of adapters. We compared the effect of the standard speech feature (e.g. log Mel-filterbank) and the pre-training speech feature and try to make them interact. The final submission is an ensemble of three potential speech translation models. Our single best and ensemble model achieves 18.66 BLEU and 19.35 BLEU separately on MuST-C En-Zh tst-COMMON set.

This paper describes the HW-TSC’s designation of the Offline Speech Translation System submitted for IWSLT 2022 Evaluation. We explored both cascade and end-to-end system on three language tracks (en-de, en-zh and en-ja), and we chose the cascade one as our primary submission. For the automatic speech recognition (ASR) model of cascade system, there are three ASR models including Conformer, S2T-Transformer and U2 trained on the mixture of five datasets. During inference, transcripts are generated with the help of domain controlled generation strategy. Context-aware reranking and ensemble based anti-interference strategy are proposed to produce better ASR outputs. For machine translation part, we pretrained three translation models on WMT21 dataset and fine-tuned them on in-domain corpora. Our cascade system shows competitive performance than the known offline systems in the industry and academia.

This paper presents our work in the participation of IWSLT 2022 simultaneous speech translation evaluation. For the track of text-to-text (T2T), we participate in three language pairs and build wait-k based simultaneous MT (SimulMT) model for the task. The model was pretrained on WMT21 news corpora, and was further improved with in-domain fine-tuning and self-training. For the speech-to-text (S2T) track, we designed both cascade and end-to-end form in three language pairs. The cascade system is composed of a chunking-based streaming ASR model and the SimulMT model used in the T2T track. The end-to-end system is a simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) model based on wait-k strategy, which is directly trained on a synthetic corpus produced by translating all texts of ASR corpora into specific target language with an offline MT model. It also contains a heuristic sentence breaking strategy, preventing it from finishing the translation before the the end of the speech. We evaluate our systems on the MUST-C tst-COMMON dataset and show that the end-to-end system is competitive to the cascade one. Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that the SimulMT model can be efficiently optimized by these approaches, resulting in the improvements of 1-2 BLEU points.

This work describes the participation of the MLLP-VRAIN research group in the two shared tasks of the IWSLT 2022 conference: Simultaneous Speech Translation and Speech-to-Speech Translation. We present our streaming-ready ASR, MT and TTS systems for Speech Translation and Synthesis from English into German. Our submission combines these systems by means of a cascade approach paying special attention to data preparation and decoding for streaming inference.

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Pretrained Speech Encoders and Efficient Fine-tuning Methods for Speech Translation: UPC at IWSLT 2022
Ioannis Tsiamas | Gerard I. Gállego | Carlos Escolano | José Fonollosa | Marta R. Costa-jussà

This paper describes the submissions of the UPC Machine Translation group to the IWSLT 2022 Offline Speech Translation and Speech-to-Speech Translation tracks. The offline task involves translating English speech to German, Japanese and Chinese text. Our Speech Translation systems are trained end-to-end and are based on large pretrained speech and text models. We use an efficient fine-tuning technique that trains only specific layers of our system, and explore the use of adapter modules for the non-trainable layers. We further investigate the suitability of different speech encoders (wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT) for our models and the impact of knowledge distillation from the Machine Translation model that we use for the decoder (mBART). For segmenting the IWSLT test sets we fine-tune a pretrained audio segmentation model and achieve improvements of 5 BLEU compared to the given segmentation. Our best single model uses HuBERT and parallel adapters and achieves 29.42 BLEU at English-German MuST-C tst-COMMON and 26.77 at IWSLT 2020 test. By ensembling many models, we further increase translation quality to 30.83 BLEU and 27.78 accordingly. Furthermore, our submission for English-Japanese achieves 15.85 and English-Chinese obtains 25.63 BLEU on the MuST-C tst-COMMON sets. Finally, we extend our system to perform English-German Speech-to-Speech Translation with a pretrained Text-to-Speech model.

In this paper, we describe our submission to the Simultaneous Speech Translation at IWSLT 2022. We explore strategies to utilize an offline model in a simultaneous setting without the need to modify the original model. In our experiments, we show that our onlinization algorithm is almost on par with the offline setting while being 3x faster than offline in terms of latency on the test set. We also show that the onlinized offline model outperforms the best IWSLT2021 simultaneous system in medium and high latency regimes and is almost on par in the low latency regime. We make our system publicly available.

This paper describes NAIST’s simultaneous speech translation systems developed for IWSLT 2022 Evaluation Campaign. We participated the speech-to-speech track for English-to-German and English-to-Japanese. Our primary submissions were end-to-end systems using adaptive segmentation policies based on Prefix Alignment.

The paper presents the HW-TSC’s pipeline and results of Offline Speech to Speech Translation for IWSLT 2022. We design a cascade system consisted of an ASR model, machine translation model and TTS model to convert the speech from one language into another language(en-de). For the ASR part, we find that better performance can be obtained by ensembling multiple heterogeneous ASR models and performing reranking on beam candidates. And we find that the combination of context-aware reranking strategy and MT model fine-tuned on the in-domain dataset is helpful to improve the performance. Because it can mitigate the problem that the inconsistency in transcripts caused by the lack of context. Finally, we use VITS model provided officially to reproduce audio files from the translation hypothesis.

This paper describes CMU’s submissions to the IWSLT 2022 dialect speech translation (ST) shared task for translating Tunisian-Arabic speech to English text. We use additional paired Modern Standard Arabic data (MSA) to directly improve the speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) components of our cascaded systems. We also augment the paired ASR data with pseudo translations via sequence-level knowledge distillation from an MT model and use these artificial triplet ST data to improve our end-to-end (E2E) systems. Our E2E models are based on the Multi-Decoder architecture with searchable hidden intermediates. We extend the Multi-Decoder by orienting the speech encoder towards the target language by applying ST supervision as hierarchical connectionist temporal classification (CTC) multi-task. During inference, we apply joint decoding of the ST CTC and ST autoregressive decoder branches of our modified Multi-Decoder. Finally, we apply ROVER voting, posterior combination, and minimum bayes-risk decoding with combined N-best lists to ensemble our various cascaded and E2E systems. Our best systems reached 20.8 and 19.5 BLEU on test2 (blind) and test1 respectively. Without any additional MSA data, we reached 20.4 and 19.2 on the same test sets.

This paper describes the ON-TRAC Consortium translation systems developed for two challenge tracks featured in the Evaluation Campaign of IWSLT 2022: low-resource and dialect speech translation. For the Tunisian Arabic-English dataset (low-resource and dialect tracks), we build an end-to-end model as our joint primary submission, and compare it against cascaded models that leverage a large fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0 model for ASR. Our results show that in our settings pipeline approaches are still very competitive, and that with the use of transfer learning, they can outperform end-to-end models for speech translation (ST). For the Tamasheq-French dataset (low-resource track) our primary submission leverages intermediate representations from a wav2vec 2.0 model trained on 234 hours of Tamasheq audio, while our contrastive model uses a French phonetic transcription of the Tamasheq audio as input in a Conformer speech translation architecture jointly trained on automatic speech recognition, ST and machine translation losses. Our results highlight that self-supervised models trained on smaller sets of target data are more effective to low-resource end-to-end ST fine-tuning, compared to large off-the-shelf models. Results also illustrate that even approximate phonetic transcriptions can improve ST scores.

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JHU IWSLT 2022 Dialect Speech Translation System Description
Jinyi Yang | Amir Hussein | Matthew Wiesner | Sanjeev Khudanpur

This paper details the Johns Hopkins speech translation (ST) system used in the IWLST2022 dialect speech translation task. Our system uses a cascade of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT). We use a Conformer model for ASR systems and a Transformer model for machine translation. Surprisingly, we found that while using additional ASR training data resulted in only a negligible change in performance as measured by BLEU or word error rate (WER), aggressive text normalization improved BLEU more significantly. We also describe an approach, similar to back-translation, for improving performance using synthetic dialectal source text produced from source sentences in mismatched dialects.

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Controlling Translation Formality Using Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models
Elijah Rippeth | Sweta Agrawal | Marine Carpuat

This paper describes the University of Maryland’s submission to the Special Task on Formality Control for Spoken Language Translation at IWSLT, which evaluates translation from English into 6 languages with diverse grammatical formality markers. We investigate to what extent this problem can be addressed with a single multilingual model, simultaneously controlling its output for target language and formality. Results show that this strategy can approach the translation quality and formality control achieved by dedicated translation models. However, the nature of the underlying pre-trained language model and of the finetuning samples greatly impact results.

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Controlling Formality in Low-Resource NMT with Domain Adaptation and Re-Ranking: SLT-CDT-UoS at IWSLT2022
Sebastian Vincent | Loïc Barrault | Carolina Scarton

This paper describes the SLT-CDT-UoS group’s submission to the first Special Task on Formality Control for Spoken Language Translation, part of the IWSLT 2022 Evaluation Campaign. Our efforts were split between two fronts: data engineering and altering the objective function for best hypothesis selection. We used language-independent methods to extract formal and informal sentence pairs from the provided corpora; using English as a pivot language, we propagated formality annotations to languages treated as zero-shot in the task; we also further improved formality controlling with a hypothesis re-ranking approach. On the test sets for English-to-German and English-to-Spanish, we achieved an average accuracy of .935 within the constrained setting and .995 within unconstrained setting. In a zero-shot setting for English-to-Russian and English-to-Italian, we scored average accuracy of .590 for constrained setting and .659 for unconstrained.

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Improving Machine Translation Formality Control with Weakly-Labelled Data Augmentation and Post Editing Strategies
Daniel Zhang | Jiang Yu | Pragati Verma | Ashwinkumar Ganesan | Sarah Campbell

This paper describes Amazon Alexa AI’s implementation for the IWSLT 2022 shared task on formality control. We focus on the unconstrained and supervised task for en→hi (Hindi) and en→ja (Japanese) pairs where very limited formality annotated data is available. We propose three simple yet effective post editing strategies namely, T-V conversion, utilizing a verb conjugator and seq2seq models in order to rewrite the translated phrases into formal or informal language. Considering nuances for formality and informality in different languages, our analysis shows that a language-specific post editing strategy achieves the best performance. To address the unique challenge of limited formality annotations, we further develop a formality classifier to perform weakly labelled data augmentation which automatically generates synthetic formality labels from large parallel corpus. Empirical results on the IWSLT formality testset have shown that proposed system achieved significant improvements in terms of formality accuracy while retaining BLEU score on-par with baseline.

This paper presents our submissions to the IWSLT 2022 Isometric Spoken Language Translation task. We participate in all three language pairs (English-German, English-French, English-Spanish) under the constrained setting, and submit an English-German result under the unconstrained setting. We use the standard Transformer model as the baseline and obtain the best performance via one of its variants that shares the decoder input and output embedding. We perform detailed pre-processing and filtering on the provided bilingual data. Several strategies are used to train our models, such as Multilingual Translation, Back Translation, Forward Translation, R-Drop, Average Checkpoint, and Ensemble. We investigate three methods for biasing the output length: i) conditioning the output to a given target-source length-ratio class; ii) enriching the transformer positional embedding with length information and iii) length control decoding for non-autoregressive translation etc. Our submissions achieve 30.7, 41.6 and 36.7 BLEU respectively on the tst-COMMON test sets for English-German, English-French, English-Spanish tasks and 100% comply with the length requirements.

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AppTek’s Submission to the IWSLT 2022 Isometric Spoken Language Translation Task
Patrick Wilken | Evgeny Matusov

To participate in the Isometric Spoken Language Translation Task of the IWSLT 2022 evaluation, constrained condition, AppTek developed neural Transformer-based systems for English-to-German with various mechanisms of length control, ranging from source-side and target-side pseudo-tokens to encoding of remaining length in characters that replaces positional encoding. We further increased translation length compliance by sentence-level selection of length-compliant hypotheses from different system variants, as well as rescoring of N-best candidates from a single system. Length-compliant back-translated and forward-translated synthetic data, as well as other parallel data variants derived from the original MuST-C training corpus were important for a good quality/desired length trade-off. Our experimental results show that length compliance levels above 90% can be reached while minimizing losses in MT quality as measured in BERT and BLEU scores.

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Hierarchical Multi-task learning framework for Isometric-Speech Language Translation
Aakash Bhatnagar | Nidhir Bhavsar | Muskaan Singh | Petr Motlicek

This paper presents our submission for the shared task on isometric neural machine translation in International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT). There are numerous state-of-art models for translation problems. However, these models lack any length constraint to produce short or long outputs from the source text. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical approach to generate isometric translation on MUST-C dataset, we achieve a BERTscore of 0.85, a length ratio of 1.087, a BLEU score of 42.3, and a length range of 51.03%. On the blind dataset provided by the task organizers, we obtain a BERTscore of 0.80, a length ratio of 1.10 and a length range of 47.5%. We have made our code public here https://github.com/aakash0017/Machine-Translation-ISWLT

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 6th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

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Proceedings of the 6th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Stefania Degaetano | Anna Kazantseva | Nils Reiter | Stan Szpakowicz

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Evaluation of Word Embeddings for the Social Sciences
Ricardo Schiffers | Dagmar Kern | Daniel Hienert

Word embeddings are an essential instrument in many NLP tasks. Most available resources are trained on general language from Web corpora or Wikipedia dumps. However, word embeddings for domain-specific language are rare, in particular for the social science domain. Therefore, in this work, we describe the creation and evaluation of word embedding models based on 37,604 open-access social science research papers. In the evaluation, we compare domain-specific and general language models for (i) language coverage, (ii) diversity, and (iii) semantic relationships. We found that the created domain-specific model, even with a relatively small vocabulary size, covers a large part of social science concepts, their neighborhoods are diverse in comparison to more general models Across all relation types, we found a more extensive coverage of semantic relationships.

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Developing a tool for fair and reproducible use of paid crowdsourcing in the digital humanities
Tuomo Hiippala | Helmiina Hotti | Rosa Suviranta

This system demonstration paper describes ongoing work on a tool for fair and reproducible use of paid crowdsourcing in the digital humanities. Paid crowdsourcing is widely used in natural language processing and computer vision, but has been rarely applied in the digital humanities due to ethical concerns. We discuss concerns associated with paid crowdsourcing and describe how we seek to mitigate them in designing the tool and crowdsourcing pipelines. We demonstrate how the tool may be used to create annotations for diagrams, a complex mode of expression whose description requires human input.

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Archive TimeLine Summarization (ATLS): Conceptual Framework for Timeline Generation over Historical Document Collections
Nicolas Gutehrlé | Antoine Doucet | Adam Jatowt

Archive collections are nowadays mostly available through search engines interfaces, which allow a user to retrieve documents by issuing queries. The study of these collections may be, however, impaired by some aspects of search engines, such as the overwhelming number of documents returned or the lack of contextual knowledge provided. New methods that could work independently or in combination with search engines are then required to access these collections. In this position paper, we propose to extend TimeLine Summarization (TLS) methods on archive collections to assist in their studies. We provide an overview of existing TLS methods and we describe a conceptual framework for an Archive TimeLine Summarization (ATLS) system, which aims to generate informative, readable and interpretable timelines.

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Prabhupadavani: A Code-mixed Speech Translation Data for 25 Languages
Jivnesh Sandhan | Ayush Daksh | Om Adideva Paranjay | Laxmidhar Behera | Pawan Goyal

Nowadays, the interest in code-mixing has become ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing (NLP); however, not much attention has been given to address this phenomenon for Speech Translation (ST) task. This can be solely attributed to the lack of code-mixed ST task labelled data. Thus, we introduce Prabhupadavani, which is a multilingual code-mixed ST dataset for 25 languages. It is multi-domain, covers ten language families, containing 94 hours of speech by 130+ speakers, manually aligned with corresponding text in the target language. The Prabhupadavani is about Vedic culture and heritage from Indic literature, where code-switching in the case of quotation from literature is important in the context of humanities teaching. To the best of our knowledge, Prabhupadvani is the first multi-lingual code-mixed ST dataset available in the ST literature. This data also can be used for a code-mixed machine translation task. All the dataset can be accessed at: https://github.com/frozentoad9/CMST.

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Using Language Models to Improve Rule-based Linguistic Annotation of Modern Historical Japanese Corpora
Jerry Bonnell | Mitsunori Ogihara

Annotation of unlabeled textual corpora with linguistic metadata is a fundamental technology in many scholarly workflows in the digital humanities (DH). Pretrained natural language processing pipelines offer tokenization, tagging, and dependency parsing of raw text simultaneously using an annotation scheme like Universal Dependencies (UD). However, the accuracy of these UD tools remains unknown for historical texts and current methods lack mechanisms that enable helpful evaluations by domain experts. To address both points for the case of Modern Historical Japanese text, this paper proposes the use of unsupervised domain adaptation methods to develop a domain-adapted language model (LM) that can flag instances of inaccurate UD output from a pretrained LM and the use of these instances to form rules that, when applied, improves pretrained annotation accuracy. To test the efficacy of the proposed approach, the paper evaluates the domain-adapted LM against three baselines that are not adapted to the historical domain. The experiments conducted demonstrate that the domain-adapted LM improves UD annotation in the Modern Historical Japanese domain and that rules produced using this LM are best indicative of characteristics of the domain in terms of out-of-vocabulary rate and candidate normalized form discovery for “difficult” bigram terms.

Generating a short story out of an image is arduous. Unlike image captioning, story generation from an image poses multiple challenges: preserving the story coherence, appropriately assessing the quality of the story, steering the generated story into a certain style, and addressing the scarcity of image-story pair reference datasets limiting supervision during training. In this work, we introduce Plug-and-Play Story Teller (PPST) and improve image-to-story generation by: 1) alleviating the data scarcity problem by incorporating large pre-trained models, namely CLIP and GPT-2, to facilitate a fluent image-to-text generation with minimal supervision, and 2) enabling a more style-relevant generation by incorporating stylistic adapters to control the story generation. We conduct image-to-story generation experiments with non-styled, romance-styled, and action-styled PPST approaches and compare our generated stories with those of previous work over three aspects, i.e., story coherence, image-story relevance, and style fitness, using both automatic and human evaluation. The results show that PPST improves story coherence and has better image-story relevance, but has yet to be adequately stylistic.

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To the Most Gracious Highness, from Your Humble Servant: Analysing Swedish 18th Century Petitions Using Text Classification
Ellinor Lindqvist | Eva Pettersson | Joakim Nivre

Petitions are a rich historical source, yet they have been relatively little used in historical research. In this paper, we aim to analyse Swedish texts from around the 18th century, and petitions in particular, using automatic means of text classification. We also test how text pre-processing and different feature representations affect the result, and we examine feature importance for our main class of interest - petitions. Our experiments show that the statistical algorithms NB, RF, SVM, and kNN are indeed very able to classify different genres of historical text. Further, we find that normalisation has a positive impact on classification, and that content words are particularly informative for the traditional models. A fine-tuned BERT model, fed with normalised data, outperforms all other classification experiments with a macro average F1 score at 98.8. However, using less computationally expensive methods, including feature representation with word2vec, fastText embeddings or even TF-IDF values, with a SVM classifier also show good results for both unnormalise and normalised data. In the feature importance analysis, where we obtain the features most decisive for the classification models, we find highly relevant characteristics of the petitions, namely words expressing signs of someone inferior addressing someone superior.

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Automatized Detection and Annotation for Calls to Action in Latin-American Social Media Postings
Wassiliki Siskou | Clara Giralt Mirón | Sarah Molina-Raith | Miriam Butt

Voter mobilization via social media has shown to be an effective tool. While previous research has primarily looked at how calls-to-action (CTAs) were used in Twitter messages from non-profit organizations and protest mobilization, we are interested in identifying the linguistic cues used in CTAs found on Facebook and Twitter for an automatic identification of CTAs. The work is part of an on-going collaboration with researchers from political science, who are investigating CTAs in the period leading up to recent elections in three different Latin American countries. We developed a new NLP pipeline for Spanish to facilitate their work. Our pipeline annotates social media posts with a range of linguistic information and then conducts targeted searches for linguistic cues that allow for an automatic annotation and identification of relevant CTAs. By using carefully crafted and linguistically informed heuristics, our system so far achieves an F1-score of 0.72.

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The Distribution of Deontic Modals in Jane Austen’s Mature Novels
Lauren Levine

Deontic modals are auxiliary verbs which express some kind of necessity, obligation, or moral recommendation. This paper investigates the collocation and distribution within Jane Austen’s six mature novels of the following deontic modals: must, should, ought, and need. We also examine the co-occurrences of these modals with name mentions of the heroines in the six novels, categorizing each occurrence with a category of obligation if applicable. The paper offers a brief explanation of the categories of obligation chosen for this investigation. In order to examine the types of obligations associated with each heroine, we then investigate the distribution of these categories in relation to mentions of each heroine. The patterns observed show a general concurrence with the thematic characterizations of Austen’s heroines which are found in literary analysis.

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Man vs. Machine: Extracting Character Networks from Human and Machine Translations
Aleksandra Konovalova | Antonio Toral

Most of the work on Character Networks to date is limited to monolingual texts. Conversely, in this paper we apply and analyze Character Networks on both source texts (English novels) and their Finnish translations (both human- and machine-translated). We assume that this analysis could provide some insights on changes in translations that could modify the character networks, as well as the narrative. The results show that the character networks of translations differ from originals in case of long novels, and the differences may also vary depending on the novel and translator’s strategy.

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The COVID That Wasn’t: Counterfactual Journalism Using GPT
Sil Hamilton | Andrew Piper

In this paper, we explore the use of large language models to assess human interpretations of real world events. To do so, we use a language model trained prior to 2020 to artificially generate news articles concerning COVID-19 given the headlines of actual articles written during the pandemic. We then compare stylistic qualities of our artificially generated corpus with a news corpus, in this case 5,082 articles produced by CBC News between January 23 and May 5, 2020. We find our artificially generated articles exhibits a considerably more negative attitude towards COVID and a significantly lower reliance on geopolitical framing. Our methods and results hold importance for researchers seeking to simulate large scale cultural processes via recent breakthroughs in text generation.

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War and Pieces: Comparing Perspectives About World War I and II Across Wikipedia Language Communities
Ana Smith | Lillian Lee

Wikipedia is widely used to train models for various tasks including semantic association, text generation, and translation. These tasks typically involve aligning and using text from multiple language editions, with the assumption that all versions of the article present the same content. But this assumption may not hold. We introduce a methodology for approximating the extent to which narratives of conflict may diverge in this scenario, focusing on articles about World War I and II battles written by Wikipedia’s communities of editors across four language editions. For simplicity, our unit of analysis representing each language communities’ perspectives is based on national entities and their subject-object-relation context, identified using named entity recognition and open-domain information extraction. Using a vector representation of these tuples, we evaluate how similarly different language editions portray how and how often these entities are mentioned in articles. Our results indicate that (1) language editions tend to reference associated countries more and (2) how much one language edition’s depiction overlaps with all others varies.

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Computational Detection of Narrativity: A Comparison Using Textual Features and Reader Response
Max Steg | Karlo Slot | Federico Pianzola

The task of computational textual narrative detection focuses on detecting the presence of narrative parts, or the degree of narrativity in texts. In this work, we focus on detecting the local degree of narrativity in texts, using short text passages. We performed a human annotation experiment on 325 English texts ranging across 20 genres to capture readers’ perception by means of three cognitive aspects: suspense, curiosity, and surprise. We then employed a linear regression model to predict narrativity scores for 17,372 texts. When comparing our average annotation scores to similar annotation experiments with different cognitive aspects, we found that Pearson’s r ranges from .63 to .75. When looking at the calculated narrative probabilities, Pearson’s r is .91. We found that it is possible to use suspense, curiosity and surprise to detect narrativity. However, there are still differences between methods. This does not imply that there are inherently correct methods, but rather suggests that the underlying definition of narrativity is a determining factor for the results of the computational models employed.

In this article, we discuss the conditions surrounding the building of historical and literary corpora. We describe the assumptions and method of making the original corpus of the Polish novel (1864-1939). Then, we present the research procedure aimed at demonstrating the variability of the emotional value of the concept of “the city” and “the country” in the texts included in our corpus. The proposed method considers the complex socio-political nature of Central and Eastern Europe, especially the fact that there was no unified Polish state during this period. The method can be easily replicated in studies of the literature of countries with similar specificities.

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Measuring Presence of Women and Men as Information Sources in News
Muitze Zulaika | Xabier Saralegi | Iñaki San Vicente

In the news, statements from information sources are often quoted, made by individuals who interact in the news. Detecting those quotes and the gender of their sources is a key task when it comes to media analysis from a gender perspective. It is a challenging task: the structure of the quotes is variable, gender marks are not present in many languages, and quote authors are often omitted due to frequent use of coreferences. This paper proposes a strategy to measure the presence of women and men as information sources in news. We approach the problem of detecting sentences including quotes and the gender of the speaker as a joint task, by means of a supervised multiclass classifier of sentences. We have created the first datasets for Spanish and Basque by manually annotating quotes and the gender of the associated sources in news items. The results obtained show that BERT based approaches are significantly better than bag-of-words based classical ones, achieving accuracies close to 90%. We also analyse a bilingual learning strategy and generating additional training examples synthetically; both provide improvements up to 3.4% and 5.6%, respectively.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

We present a benchmark in six European languages containing manually annotated information about olfactory situations and events following a FrameNet-like approach. The documents selection covers ten domains of interest to cultural historians in the olfactory domain and includes texts published between 1620 to 1920, allowing a diachronic analysis of smell descriptions. With this work, we aim to foster the development of olfactory information extraction approaches as well as the analysis of changes in smell descriptions over time.

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Language Acquisition, Neutral Change, and Diachronic Trends in Noun Classifiers
Aniket Kali | Jordan Kodner

Languages around the world employ classifier systems as a method of semantic organization and categorization. These systems are rife with variability, violability, and ambiguity, and are prone to constant change over time. We explicitly model change in classifier systems as the population-level outcome of child language acquisition over time in order to shed light on the factors that drive change to classifier systems. Our research consists of two parts: a contrastive corpus study of Cantonese and Mandarin child-directed speech to determine the role that ambiguity and homophony avoidance may play in classifier learning and change followed by a series of population-level learning simulations of an abstract classifier system. We find that acquisition without reference to ambiguity avoidance is sufficient to drive broad trends in classifier change and suggest an additional role for adults and discourse factors in classifier death.

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Deconstructing destruction: A Cognitive Linguistics perspective on a computational analysis of diachronic change
Karlien Franco | Mariana Montes | Kris Heylen

In this paper, we aim to introduce a Cognitive Linguistics perspective into a computational analysis of near-synonyms. We focus on a single set of Dutch near-synonyms, vernielen and vernietigen, roughly translated as ‘to destroy’, replicating the analysis from Geeraerts (1997) with distributional models. Our analysis, which tracks the meaning of both words in a corpus of 16th-20th century prose data, shows that both lexical items have undergone semantic change, led by differences in their prototypical semantic core.

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What is Done is Done: an Incremental Approach to Semantic Shift Detection
Francesco Periti | Alfio Ferrara | Stefano Montanelli | Martin Ruskov

Contextual word embedding techniques for semantic shift detection are receiving more and more attention. In this paper, we present What is Done is Done (WiDiD), an incremental approach to semantic shift detection based on incremental clustering techniques and contextual embedding methods to capture the changes over the meanings of a target word along a diachronic corpus. In WiDiD, the word contexts observed in the past are consolidated as a set of clusters that constitute the “memory” of the word meanings observed so far. Such a memory is exploited as a basis for subsequent word observations, so that the meanings observed in the present are stratified over the past ones.

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From qualifiers to quantifiers: semantic shift at the paradigm level
Quentin Feltgen

Language change has often been conceived as a competition between linguistic variants. However, language units may be complex organizations in themselves, e.g. in the case of schematic constructions, featuring a free slot. Such a slot is filled by words forming a set or ‘paradigm’ and engaging in inter-related dynamics within this constructional environment. To tackle this complexity, a simple computational method is offered to automatically characterize their interactions, and visualize them through networks of cooperation and competition. Applying this method to the French paradigm of quantifiers, I show that this method efficiently captures phenomena regarding the evolving organization of constructional paradigms, in particular the constitution of competing clusters of fillers that promote different semantic strategies overall.

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Do Not Fire the Linguist: Grammatical Profiles Help Language Models Detect Semantic Change
Mario Giulianelli | Andrey Kutuzov | Lidia Pivovarova

Morphological and syntactic changes in word usage — as captured, e.g., by grammatical profiles — have been shown to be good predictors of a word’s meaning change. In this work, we explore whether large pre-trained contextualised language models, a common tool for lexical semantic change detection, are sensitive to such morphosyntactic changes. To this end, we first compare the performance of grammatical profiles against that of a multilingual neural language model (XLM-R) on 10 datasets, covering 7 languages, and then combine the two approaches in ensembles to assess their complementarity. Our results show that ensembling grammatical profiles with XLM-R improves semantic change detection performance for most datasets and languages. This indicates that language models do not fully cover the fine-grained morphological and syntactic signals that are explicitly represented in grammatical profiles. An interesting exception are the test sets where the time spans under analysis are much longer than the time gap between them (for example, century-long spans with a one-year gap between them). Morphosyntactic change is slow so grammatical profiles do not detect in such cases. In contrast, language models, thanks to their access to lexical information, are able to detect fast topical changes.

In this paper, we describe a BERT model trained on the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) dataset of digitized documents. The ECCO dataset poses unique modelling challenges due to the presence of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) artifacts. We establish the performance of the BERT model on a publication year prediction task against linear baseline models and human judgement, finding the BERT model to be superior to both and able to date the works, on average, with less than 7 years absolute error. We also explore how language change over time affects the model by analyzing the features the model uses for publication year predictions as given by the Integrated Gradients model explanation method.

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Using Cross-Lingual Part of Speech Tagging for Partially Reconstructing the Classic Language Family Tree Model
Anat Samohi | Daniel Weisberg Mitelman | Kfir Bar

The tree model is well known for expressing the historic evolution of languages. This model has been considered as a method of describing genetic relationships between languages. Nevertheless, some researchers question the model’s ability to predict the proximity between two languages, since it represents genetic relatedness rather than linguistic resemblance. Defining other language proximity models has been an active research area for many years. In this paper we explore a part-of-speech model for defining proximity between languages using a multilingual language model that was fine-tuned on the task of cross-lingual part-of-speech tagging. We train the model on one language and evaluate it on another; the measured performance is then used to define the proximity between the two languages. By further developing the model, we show that it can reconstruct some parts of the tree model.

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A New Framework for Fast Automated Phonological Reconstruction Using Trimmed Alignments and Sound Correspondence Patterns
Johann-Mattis List | Robert Forkel | Nathan Hill

Computational approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly applied during the past decade and many new methods that implement parts of the traditional comparative method have been proposed. Despite these increased efforts, there are not many easy-to-use and fast approaches for the task of phonological reconstruction. Here we present a new framework that combines state-of-the-art techniques for automated sequence comparison with novel techniques for phonetic alignment analysis and sound correspondence pattern detection to allow for the supervised reconstruction of word forms in ancestral languages. We test the method on a new dataset covering six groups from three different language families. The results show that our method yields promising results while at the same time being not only fast but also easy to apply and expand.

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Caveats of Measuring Semantic Change of Cognates and Borrowings using Multilingual Word Embeddings
Clémentine Fourrier | Syrielle Montariol

Cognates and borrowings carry different aspects of etymological evolution. In this work, we study semantic change of such items using multilingual word embeddings, both static and contextualised. We underline caveats identified while building and evaluating these embeddings. We release both said embeddings and a newly-built historical words lexicon, containing typed relations between words of varied Romance languages.

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Lexicon of Changes: Towards the Evaluation of Diachronic Semantic Shift in Chinese
Jing Chen | Emmanuele Chersoni | Chu-ren Huang

Recent research has brought a wind of using computational approaches to the classic topic of semantic change, aiming to tackle one of the most challenging issues in the evolution of human language. While several methods for detecting semantic change have been proposed, such studies are limited to a few languages, where evaluation datasets are available. This paper presents the first dataset for evaluating Chinese semantic change in contexts preceding and following the Reform and Opening-up, covering a 50-year period in Modern Chinese. Following the DURel framework, we collected 6,000 human judgments for the dataset. We also reported the performance of alignment-based word embedding models on this evaluation dataset, achieving high and significant correlation scores.

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Low Saxon dialect distances at the orthographic and syntactic level
Janine Siewert | Yves Scherrer | Martijn Wieling

We compare five Low Saxon dialects from the 19th and 21st century from Germany and the Netherlands with each other as well as with modern Standard Dutch and Standard German. Our comparison is based on character n-grams on the one hand and PoS n-grams on the other and we show that these two lead to different distances. Particularly in the PoS-based distances, one can observe all of the 21st century Low Saxon dialects shifting towards the modern majority languages.

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“Vaderland”, “Volk” and “Natie”: Semantic Change Related to Nationalism in Dutch Literature Between 1700 and 1880 Captured with Dynamic Bernoulli Word Embeddings
Marije Timmermans | Eva Vanmassenhove | Dimitar Shterionov

Languages can respond to external events in various ways - the creation of new words or named entities, additional senses might develop for already existing words or the valence of words can change. In this work, we explore the semantic shift of the Dutch words “natie” (“nation”), “volk” (“people”) and “vaderland” (“fatherland”) over a period that is known for the rise of nationalism in Europe: 1700-1880. The semantic change is measured by means of Dynamic Bernoulli Word Embeddings which allow for comparison between word embeddings over different time slices. The word embeddings were generated based on Dutch fiction literature divided over different decades. From the analysis of the absolute drifts, it appears that the word “natie” underwent a relatively small drift. However, the drifts of “vaderland’” and “volk”’ show multiple peaks, culminating around the turn of the nineteenth century. To verify whether this semantic change can indeed be attributed to nationalistic movements, a detailed analysis of the nearest neighbours of the target words is provided. From the analysis, it appears that “natie”, “volk” and “vaderlan”’ became more nationalistically-loaded over time.

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Using neural topic models to track context shifts of words: a case study of COVID-related terms before and after the lockdown in April 2020
Olga Kellert | Md Mahmud Uz Zaman

This paper explores lexical meaning changes in a new dataset, which includes tweets from before and after the COVID-related lockdown in April 2020. We use this dataset to evaluate traditional and more recent unsupervised approaches to lexical semantic change that make use of contextualized word representations based on the BERT neural language model to obtain representations of word usages. We argue that previous models that encode local representations of words cannot capture global context shifts such as the context shift of face masks since the pandemic outbreak. We experiment with neural topic models to track context shifts of words. We show that this approach can reveal textual associations of words that go beyond their lexical meaning representation. We discuss future work and how to proceed capturing the pragmatic aspect of meaning change as opposed to lexical semantic change.

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Roadblocks in Gender Bias Measurement for Diachronic Corpora
Saied Alshahrani | Esma Wali | Abdullah R Alshamsan | Yan Chen | Jeanna Matthews

The use of word embeddings is an important NLP technique for extracting meaningful conclusions from corpora of human text. One important question that has been raised about word embeddings is the degree of gender bias learned from corpora. Bolukbasi et al. (2016) proposed an important technique for quantifying gender bias in word embeddings that, at its heart, is lexically based and relies on sets of highly gendered word pairs (e.g., mother/father and madam/sir) and a list of professions words (e.g., doctor and nurse). In this paper, we document problems that arise with this method to quantify gender bias in diachronic corpora. Focusing on Arabic and Chinese corpora, in particular, we document clear changes in profession words used over time and, somewhat surprisingly, even changes in the simpler gendered defining set word pairs. We further document complications in languages such as Arabic, where many words are highly polysemous/homonymous, especially female professions words.

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LSCDiscovery: A shared task on semantic change discovery and detection in Spanish
Frank D. Zamora-Reina | Felipe Bravo-Marquez | Dominik Schlechtweg

We present the first shared task on semantic change discovery and detection in Spanish. We create the first dataset of Spanish words manually annotated by semantic change using the DURel framewok (Schlechtweg et al., 2018). The task is divided in two phases: 1) graded change discovery, and 2) binary change detection. In addition to introducing a new language for this task, the main novelty with respect to the previous tasks consists in predicting and evaluating changes for all vocabulary words in the corpus. Six teams participated in phase 1 and seven teams in phase 2 of the shared task, and the best system obtained a Spearman rank correlation of 0.735 for phase 1 and an F1 score of 0.735 for phase 2. We describe the systems developed by the competing teams, highlighting the techniques that were particularly useful.

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BOS at LSCDiscovery: Lexical Substitution for Interpretable Lexical Semantic Change Detection
Artem Kudisov | Nikolay Arefyev

We propose a solution for the LSCDiscovery shared task on Lexical Semantic Change Detection in Spanish. Our approach is based on generating lexical substitutes that describe old and new senses of a given word. This approach achieves the second best result in sense loss and sense gain detection subtasks. By observing those substitutes that are specific for only one time period, one can understand which senses were obtained or lost. This allows providing more detailed information about semantic change to the user and makes our method interpretable.

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DeepMistake at LSCDiscovery: Can a Multilingual Word-in-Context Model Replace Human Annotators?
Daniil Homskiy | Nikolay Arefyev

In this paper we describe our solution of the LSCDiscovery shared task on Lexical Semantic Change Discovery (LSCD) in Spanish. Our solution employs a Word-in-Context (WiC) model, which is trained to determine if a particular word has the same meaning in two given contexts. We basically try to replicate the annotation of the dataset for the shared task, but replacing human annotators with a neural network. In the graded change discovery subtask, our solution has achieved the 2nd best result according to all metrics. In the main binary change detection subtask, our F1-score is 0.655 compared to 0.716 of the best submission, corresponding to the 5th place. However, in the optional sense gain detection subtask we have outperformed all other participants. During the post-evaluation experiments we compared different ways to prepare WiC data in Spanish for fine-tuning. We have found that it helps leaving only examples annotated as 1 (unrelated senses) and 4 (identical senses) rather than using 2x more examples including intermediate annotations.

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UAlberta at LSCDiscovery: Lexical Semantic Change Detection via Word Sense Disambiguation
Daniela Teodorescu | Spencer von der Ohe | Grzegorz Kondrak

We describe our two systems for the shared task on Lexical Semantic Change Discovery in Spanish. For binary change detection, we frame the task as a word sense disambiguation (WSD) problem. We derive sense frequency distributions for target words in both old and modern corpora. We assume that the word semantics have changed if a sense is observed in only one of the two corpora, or the relative change for any sense exceeds a tuned threshold. For graded change discovery, we follow the design of CIRCE (Pömsl and Lyapin, 2020) by combining both static and contextual embeddings. For contextual embeddings, we use XLM-RoBERTa instead of BERT, and train the model to predict a masked token instead of the time period. Our language-independent methods achieve results that are close to the best-performing systems in the shared task.

This paper presents the contributions of the CoToHiLi team for the LSCDiscovery shared task on semantic change in the Spanish language. We participated in both tasks (graded discovery and binary change, including sense gain and sense loss) and proposed models based on word embedding distances combined with hand-crafted linguistic features, including polysemy, number of neological synonyms, and relation to cognates in English. We find that models that include linguistically informed features combined using weights assigned manually by experts lead to promising results.

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HSE at LSCDiscovery in Spanish: Clustering and Profiling for Lexical Semantic Change Discovery
Kseniia Kashleva | Alexander Shein | Elizaveta Tukhtina | Svetlana Vydrina

This paper describes the methods used for lexical semantic change discovery in Spanish. We tried the method based on BERT embeddings with clustering, the method based on grammatical profiles and the grammatical profiles method enhanced with permutation tests. BERT embeddings with clustering turned out to show the best results for both graded and binary semantic change detection outperforming the baseline. Our best submission for graded discovery was the 3rd best result, while for binary detection it was the 2nd place (precision) and the 7th place (both F1-score and recall). Our highest precision for binary detection was 0.75 and it was achieved due to improving grammatical profiling with permutation tests.

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GlossReader at LSCDiscovery: Train to Select a Proper Gloss in English – Discover Lexical Semantic Change in Spanish
Maxim Rachinskiy | Nikolay Arefyev

The contextualized embeddings obtained from neural networks pre-trained as Language Models (LM) or Masked Language Models (MLM) are not well suitable for solving the Lexical Semantic Change Detection (LSCD) task because they are more sensitive to changes in word forms rather than word meaning, a property previously known as the word form bias or orthographic bias. Unlike many other NLP tasks, it is also not obvious how to fine-tune such models for LSCD. In order to conclude if there are any differences between senses of a particular word in two corpora, a human annotator or a system shall analyze many examples containing this word from both corpora. This makes annotation of LSCD datasets very labour-consuming. The existing LSCD datasets contain up to 100 words that are labeled according to their semantic change, which is hardly enough for fine-tuning. To solve these problems we fine-tune the XLM-R MLM as part of a gloss-based WSD system on a large WSD dataset in English. Then we employ zero-shot cross-lingual transferability of XLM-R to build the contextualized embeddings for examples in Spanish. In order to obtain the graded change score for each word, we calculate the average distance between our improved contextualized embeddings of its old and new occurrences. For the binary change detection subtask, we apply thresholding to the same scores. Our solution has shown the best results among all other participants in all subtasks except for the optional sense gain detection subtask.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Learning with Natural Language Supervision

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Learning with Natural Language Supervision
Jacob Andreas | Karthik Narasimhan | Aida Nematzadeh

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Finding Sub-task Structure with Natural Language Instruction
Ryokan Ri | Yufang Hou | Radu Marinescu | Akihiro Kishimoto

When mapping a natural language instruction to a sequence of actions, it is often useful toidentify sub-tasks in the instruction. Such sub-task segmentation, however, is not necessarily provided in the training data. We present the A2LCTC (Action-to-Language Connectionist Temporal Classification) algorithm to automatically discover a sub-task segmentation of an action sequence.A2LCTC does not require annotations of correct sub-task segments and learns to find them from pairs of instruction and action sequence in a weakly-supervised manner. We experiment with the ALFRED dataset and show that A2LCTC accurately finds the sub-task structures. With the discovered sub-tasks segments, we also train agents that work on the downstream task and empirically show that our algorithm improves the performance.

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GrammarSHAP: An Efficient Model-Agnostic and Structure-Aware NLP Explainer
Edoardo Mosca | Defne Demirtürk | Luca Mülln | Fabio Raffagnato | Georg Groh

Interpreting NLP models is fundamental for their development as it can shed light on hidden properties and unexpected behaviors. However, while transformer architectures exploit contextual information to enhance their predictive capabilities, most of the available methods to explain such predictions only provide importance scores at the word level. This work addresses the lack of feature attribution approaches that also take into account the sentence structure. We extend the SHAP framework by proposing GrammarSHAP—a model-agnostic explainer leveraging the sentence’s constituency parsing to generate hierarchical importance scores.

Current QA systems can generate reasonable-sounding yet false answers without explanation or evidence for the generated answer, which is especially problematic when humans cannot readily check the model’s answers. This presents a challenge for building trust in machine learning systems. We take inspiration from real-world situations where difficult questions are answered by considering opposing sides (see Irving et al., 2018). For multiple-choice QA examples, we build a dataset of single arguments for both a correct and incorrect answer option in a debate-style set-up as an initial step in training models to produce explanations for two candidate answers. We use long contexts—humans familiar with the context write convincing explanations for pre-selected correct and incorrect answers, and we test if those explanations allow humans who have not read the full context to more accurately determine the correct answer. We do not find that explanations in our set-up improve human accuracy, but a baseline condition shows that providing human-selected text snippets does improve accuracy. We use these findings to suggest ways of improving the debate set up for future data collection efforts.

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When Can Models Learn From Explanations? A Formal Framework for Understanding the Roles of Explanation Data
Peter Hase | Mohit Bansal

Many methods now exist for conditioning models on task instructions and user-provided explanations for individual data points. These methods show great promise for improving task performance of language models beyond what can be achieved by learning from individual (x,y) pairs. In this paper, we (1) provide a formal framework for characterizing approaches to learning from explanation data, and (2) we propose a synthetic task for studying how models learn from explanation data. In the first direction, we give graphical models for the available modeling approaches, in which explanation data can be used as model inputs, as targets, or as a prior. In the second direction, we introduce a carefully designed synthetic task with several properties making it useful for studying a model’s ability to learn from explanation data. Each data point in this binary classification task is accompanied by a string that is essentially an answer to the why question: “why does data point x have label y?” We aim to encourage research into this area by identifying key considerations for the modeling problem and providing an empirical testbed for theories of how models can best learn from explanation data.

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A survey on improving NLP models with human explanations
Mareike Hartmann | Daniel Sonntag

Training a model with access to human explanations can improve data efficiency and model performance on in- and out-of-domain data. Adding to these empirical findings, similarity with the process of human learning makes learning from explanations a promising way to establish a fruitful human-machine interaction. Several methods have been proposed for improving natural language processing (NLP) models with human explanations, that rely on different explanation types and mechanism for integrating these explanations into the learning process. These methods are rarely compared with each other, making it hard for practitioners to choose the best combination of explanation type and integration mechanism for a specific use-case. In this paper, we give an overview of different methods for learning from human explanations, and discuss different factors that can inform the decision of which method to choose for a specific use-case.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2022)

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Very Low Resource Sentence Alignment: Luhya and Swahili
Everlyn Chimoto | Bruce Bassett

Language-agnostic sentence embeddings generated by pre-trained models such as LASER and LaBSE are attractive options for mining large datasets to produce parallel corpora for low-resource machine translation. We test LASER and LaBSE in extracting bitext for two related low-resource African languages: Luhya and Swahili. For this work, we created a new parallel set of nearly 8000 Luhya-English sentences which allows a new zero-shot test of LASER and LaBSE. We find that LaBSE significantly outperforms LASER on both languages. Both LASER and LaBSE however perform poorly at zero-shot alignment on Luhya, achieving just 1.5% and 22.0% successful alignments respectively (P@1 score). We fine-tune the embeddings on a small set of parallel Luhya sentences and show significant gains, improving the LaBSE alignment accuracy to 53.3%. Further, restricting the dataset to sentence embedding pairs with cosine similarity above 0.7 yielded alignments with over 85% accuracy.

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Multiple Pivot Languages and Strategic Decoder Initialization Helps Neural Machine Translation
Shivam Mhaskar | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

In machine translation, a pivot language can be used to assist the source to target translation model. In pivot-based transfer learning, the source to pivot and the pivot to target models are used to improve the performance of the source to target model. This technique works best when both source-pivot and pivot-target are high resource language pairs and the source-target is a low resource language pair. But in some cases, such as Indic languages, the pivot to target language pair is not a high resource one. To overcome this limitation, we use multiple related languages as pivot languages to assist the source to target model. We show that using multiple pivot languages gives 2.03 BLEU and 3.05 chrF score improvement over the baseline model. We show that strategic decoder initialization while performing pivot-based transfer learning with multiple pivot languages gives a 3.67 BLEU and 5.94 chrF score improvement over the baseline model.

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Known Words Will Do: Unknown Concept Translation via Lexical Relations
Winston Wu | David Yarowsky

Translating into low-resource languages is challenging due to the scarcity of training data. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic lexical translation method that bridges through lexical relations including synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, and co-hyponyms. This method, which only requires a dictionary like Wiktionary and a lexical database like WordNet, enables the translation of unknown vocabulary into low-resource languages for which we may only know the translation of a related concept. Experiments on translating a core vocabulary set into 472 languages, most of them low-resource, show the effectiveness of our approach.

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The Only Chance to Understand: Machine Translation of the Severely Endangered Low-resource Languages of Eurasia
Anna Mosolova | Kamel Smaili

Numerous machine translation systems have been proposed since the appearance of this task. Nowadays, new large language model-based algorithms show results that sometimes overcome human ones on the rich-resource languages. Nevertheless, it is still not the case for the low-resource languages, for which all these algorithms did not show equally impressive results. In this work, we want to compare 3 generations of machine translation models on 7 low-resource languages and make a step further by proposing a new way of automatic parallel data augmentation using the state-of-the-art generative model.

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Data-adaptive Transfer Learning for Translation: A Case Study in Haitian and Jamaican
Nathaniel Robinson | Cameron Hogan | Nancy Fulda | David R. Mortensen

Multilingual transfer techniques often improve low-resource machine translation (MT). Many of these techniques are applied without considering data characteristics. We show in the context of Haitian-to-English translation that transfer effectiveness is correlated with amount of training data and relationships between knowledge-sharing languages. Our experiments suggest that for some languages beyond a threshold of authentic data, back-translation augmentation methods are counterproductive, while cross-lingual transfer from a sufficiently related language is preferred. We complement this finding by contributing a rule-based French-Haitian orthographic and syntactic engine and a novel method for phonological embedding. When used with multilingual techniques, orthographic transformation makes statistically significant improvements over conventional methods. And in very low-resource Jamaican MT, code-switching with a transfer language for orthographic resemblance yields a 6.63 BLEU point advantage.

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Augmented Bio-SBERT: Improving Performance for Pairwise Sentence Tasks in Bio-medical Domain
Sonam Pankaj | Amit Gautam

One of the modern challenges in AI is the access to high-quality and annotated data, especially in NLP; that is why augmentation is gaining importance. In computer vision, where image data augmentation is standard, text data augmentation in NLP is complex due to the high complexity of language. Moreover, we have seen the advantages of augmentation where there are fewer data available, which can significantly improve the model’s accuracy and performance. We have implemented Augmentation in Pairwise sentence scoring in the biomedical domain. By experimenting with our approach to downstream tasks on biomedical data, we have looked into the solution to improve Bi-encoders’ sentence transformer performance using an augmented dataset generated by cross-encoders fine-tuned on Biosses and MedNLI on the pre-trained Bio-BERT model. It has significantly improved the results with respect to the model only trained on Gold data for the respective tasks.

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Machine Translation for a Very Low-Resource Language - Layer Freezing Approach on Transfer Learning
Amartya Chowdhury | Deepak K. T. | Samudra Vijaya K | S. R. Mahadeva Prasanna

This paper presents the implementation of Machine Translation (MT) between Lambani, a low-resource Indian tribal language, and English, a high-resource universal language. Lambani is spoken by nomadic tribes of the Indian state of Karnataka and there are similarities between Lambani and various other Indian languages. To implement the English-Lambani MT system, we followed the transfer learning approach with English-Kannada as the parent MT model. The implementation and performance of the English-Lambani MT system are discussed in this paper. Since Lambani has been influenced by various other languages, we explored the possibility of getting better MT performance by using parent models associated with related Indian languages. Specifically, we experimented with English-Gujarati and English-Marathi as additional parent models. We compare the performance of three different English-Lambani MT systems derived from three parent language models, and the observations are presented in the paper. Additionally, we will also explore the effect of freezing the encoder layer and decoder layer and the change in performance from both of them.

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HFT: High Frequency Tokens for Low-Resource NMT
Edoardo Signoroni | Pavel Rychlý

Tokenization has been shown to impact the quality of downstream tasks, such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT), which is susceptible to out-of-vocabulary words and low frequency training data. Current state-of-the-art algorithms have been helpful in addressing the issues of out-of-vocabulary words, bigger vocabulary sizes and token frequency by implementing subword segmentation. We argue, however, that there is still room for improvement, in particular regarding low-frequency tokens in the training data. In this paper, we present “High Frequency Tokenizer”, or HFT, a new language-independent subword segmentation algorithm that addresses this issue. We also propose a new metric to measure the frequency coverage of a tokenizer’s vocabulary, based on a frequency rank weighted average of the frequency values of its items. We experiment with a diverse set of language corpora, vocabulary sizes, and writing systems and report improvements on both frequency statistics and on the average length of the output. We also observe a positive impact on downstream NMT.

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Romanian Language Translation in the RELATE Platform
Vasile Pais | Maria Mitrofan | Andrei-Marius Avram

This paper presents the usage of the RELATE platform for translation tasks involving the Romanian language. Using this platform, it is possible to perform text and speech data translations, either for single documents or for entire corpora. Furthermore, the platform was successfully used in international projects to create new resources useful for Romanian language translation.

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Translating Spanish into Spanish Sign Language: Combining Rules and Data-driven Approaches
Luis Chiruzzo | Euan McGill | Santiago Egea-Gómez | Horacio Saggion

This paper presents a series of experiments on translating between spoken Spanish and Spanish Sign Language glosses (LSE), including enriching Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems with linguistic features, and creating synthetic data to pretrain and later on finetune a neural translation model. We found evidence that pretraining over a large corpus of LSE synthetic data aligned to Spanish sentences could markedly improve the performance of the translation models.

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Benefiting from Language Similarity in the Multilingual MT Training: Case Study of Indonesian and Malaysian
Alberto Poncelas | Johanes Effendi

The development of machine translation (MT) has been successful in breaking the language barrier of the world’s top 10-20 languages. However, for the rest of it, delivering an acceptable translation quality is still a challenge due to the limited resource. To tackle this problem, most studies focus on augmenting data while overlooking the fact that we can borrow high-quality natural data from the closely-related language. In this work, we propose an MT model training strategy by increasing the language directions as a means of augmentation in a multilingual setting. Our experiment result using Indonesian and Malaysian on the state-of-the-art MT model showcases the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

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A Preordered RNN Layer Boosts Neural Machine Translation in Low Resource Settings
Mohaddeseh Bastan | Shahram Khadivi

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are strong enough to convey semantic and syntactic information from the source language to the target language. However, these models are suffering from the need for a large amount of data to learn the parameters. As a result, for languages with scarce data, these models are at risk of underperforming. We propose to augment attention based neural network with reordering information to alleviate the lack of data. This augmentation improves the translation quality for both English to Persian and Persian to English by up to 6% BLEU absolute over the baseline models.

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Exploring Word Alignment towards an Efficient Sentence Aligner for Filipino and Cebuano Languages
Jenn Leana Fernandez | Kristine Mae M. Adlaon

Building a robust machine translation (MT) system requires a large amount of parallel corpus which is an expensive resource for low-resourced languages. The two major languages being spoken in the Philippines which are Filipino and Cebuano have an abundance in monolingual data that this study took advantage of attempting to find the best way to automatically generate parallel corpus out from monolingual corpora through the use of bitext alignment. Byte-pair encoding was applied in an attempt to optimize the alignment of the source and target texts. Results have shown that alignment was best achieved without segmenting the tokens. Itermax alignment score is best for short-length sentences and match or argmax alignment score are best for long-length sentences.

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Aligning Word Vectors on Low-Resource Languages with Wiktionary
Mike Izbicki

Aligned word embeddings have become a popular technique for low-resource natural language processing. Most existing evaluation datasets are generated automatically from machine translations systems, so they have many errors and exist only for high-resource languages. We introduce the Wiktionary bilingual lexicon collection, which provides high-quality human annotated translations for words in 298 languages to English. We use these lexicons to train and evaluate the largest published collection of aligned word embeddings on 157 different languages. All of our code and data is publicly available at https://github.com/mikeizbicki/wiktionary_bli.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI)

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Exploring the Influence of Dialog Input Format for Unsupervised Clinical Questionnaire Filling
Farnaz Ghassemi Toudeshki | Anna Liednikova | Philippe Jolivet | Claire Gardent

In the medical field, we have seen the emergence of health-bots that interact with patients to gather data and track their state. One of the downstream application is automatic questionnaire filling, where the content of the dialog is used to automatically fill a pre-defined medical questionnaire. Previous work has shown that answering questions from the dialog context can successfully be cast as a Natural Language Inference (NLI) task and therefore benefit from current pre-trained NLI models. However, NLI models have mostly been trained on text rather than dialogs, which may have an influence on their performance. In this paper, we study the influence of content transformation and content selection on the questionnaire filling task. Our results demonstrate that dialog pre-processing can significantly improve the performance of zero-shot questionnaire filling models which take health-bots dialogs as input.

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Assessing the Limits of Straightforward Models for Nested Named Entity Recognition in Spanish Clinical Narratives
Matias Rojas | Casimiro Pio Carrino | Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre | Jocelyn Dunstan | Marta Villegas

Nested Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an information extraction task that aims to identify entities that may be nested within other entity mentions. Despite the availability of several corpora with nested entities in the Spanish clinical domain, most previous work has overlooked them due to the lack of models and a clear annotation scheme for dealing with the task. To fill this gap, this paper provides an empirical study of straightforward methods for tackling the nested NER task on two Spanish clinical datasets, Clinical Trials, and the Chilean Waiting List. We assess the advantages and limitations of two sequence labeling approaches; one based on Multiple LSTM-CRF architectures and another on Joint labeling models. To better understand the differences between these models, we compute task-specific metrics that adequately measure the ability of models to detect nested entities and perform a fine-grained comparison across models. Our experimental results show that employing domain-specific language models trained from scratch significantly improves the performance obtained with strong domain-specific and general-domain baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results in both datasets. Specifically, we obtained F1 scores of 89.21 and 83.16 in Clinical Trials and the Chilean Waiting List, respectively. Interestingly enough, we observe that the task-specific metrics and analysis properly reflect the limitations of the models when recognizing nested entities. Finally, we perform a case study on an aggregated NER dataset created from several clinical corpora in Spanish. We highlight how entity length and the simultaneous recognition of inner and outer entities are the most critical variables for the nested NER task.

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Can Current Explainability Help Provide References in Clinical Notes to Support Humans Annotate Medical Codes?
Byung-Hak Kim | Zhongfen Deng | Philip Yu | Varun Ganapathi

The medical codes prediction problem from clinical notes has received substantial interest in the NLP community, and several recent studies have shown the state-of-the-art (SOTA) code prediction results of full-fledged deep learning-based methods. However, most previous SOTA works based on deep learning are still in early stages in terms of providing textual references and explanations of the predicted codes, despite the fact that this level of explainability of the prediction outcomes is critical to gaining trust from professional medical coders. This raises the important question of how well current explainability methods apply to advanced neural network models such as transformers to predict correct codes and present references in clinical notes that support code prediction. First, we present an explainable Read, Attend, and Code (xRAC) framework and assess two approaches, attention score-based xRAC-ATTN and model-agnostic knowledge-distillation-based xRAC-KD, through simplified but thorough human-grounded evaluations with SOTA transformer-based model, RAC. We find that the supporting evidence text highlighted by xRAC-ATTN is of higher quality than xRAC-KD whereas xRAC-KD has potential advantages in production deployment scenarios. More importantly, we show for the first time that, given the current state of explainability methodologies, using the SOTA medical codes prediction system still requires the expertise and competencies of professional coders, even though its prediction accuracy is superior to that of human coders. This, we believe, is a very meaningful step toward developing explainable and accurate machine learning systems for fully autonomous medical code prediction from clinical notes.

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Distinguishing between focus and background entities in biomedical corpora using discourse structure and transformers
Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Karin Verspoor

Scientific documents typically contain numerous entity mentions, while only a subset are directly relevant to the key contributions of the paper. Distinguishing these focus entities from background ones effectively could improve the recovery of relevant documents and the extraction of information from documents. To study the identification of focus entities, we developed two large datasets of disease-causing biological pathogens using MEDLINE, the largest collection of biomedical citations, and PubMed Central, a collection of full text articles. The focus entities were identified using human-curated indexing on these collections. Experiments with machine learning methods to identify focus entities show that transformer methods achieve high precision and recall and that document discourse information is relevant. The work lays the foundation for more targeted retrieval/summarisation of entity-relevant documents.

This paper introduces FrenchMedMCQA, the first publicly available Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) dataset in French for medical domain. It is composed of 3,105 questions taken from real exams of the French medical specialization diploma in pharmacy, mixing single and multiple answers. Each instance of the dataset contains an identifier, a question, five possible answers and their manual correction(s). We also propose first baseline models to automatically process this MCQA task in order to report on the current performances and to highlight the difficulty of the task. A detailed analysis of the results showed that it is necessary to have representations adapted to the medical domain or to the MCQA task: in our case, English specialized models yielded better results than generic French ones, even though FrenchMedMCQA is in French. Corpus, models and tools are available online.

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A Large-Scale Dataset for Biomedical Keyphrase Generation
Maël Houbre | Florian Boudin | Beatrice Daille

Keyphrase generation is the task consisting in generating a set of words or phrases that highlight the main topics of a document. There are few datasets for keyphrase generation in the biomedical domain and they do not meet the expectations in terms of size for training generative models. In this paper, we introduce kp-biomed, the first large-scale biomedical keyphrase generation dataset collected from PubMed abstracts. We train and release several generative models and conduct a series of experiments showing that using large scale datasets improves significantly the performances for present and absent keyphrase generation. The dataset and models are available online.

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Section Classification in Clinical Notes with Multi-task Transformers
Fan Zhang | Itay Laish | Ayelet Benjamini | Amir Feder

Clinical notes are the backbone of electronic health records, often containing vital information not observed in other structured data. Unfortunately, the unstructured nature of clinical notes can lead to critical patient-related information being lost. Algorithms that organize clinical notes into distinct sections are often proposed in order to allow medical professionals to better access information in a given note. These algorithms, however, often assume a given partition over the note, and classify section types given this information. In this paper, we propose a multi-task solution for note sectioning, where a single model identifies context changes and labels each section with its medically-relevant title. Results on in-distribution (MIMIC-III) and out-of-distribution (private held-out) datasets reveal that our approach successfully identifies note sections across different hospital systems.

Clinical notes often contain useful information not documented in structured data, but their unstructured nature can lead to critical patient-related information being missed. To increase the likelihood that this valuable information is utilized for patient care, algorithms that summarize notes into a problem list have been proposed. Focused on identifying medically-relevant entities in the free-form text, these solutions are often detached from a canonical ontology and do not allow downstream use of the detected text-spans. Mitigating these issues, we present here a system for generating a canonical problem list from medical notes, consisting of two major stages. At the first stage, annotation, we use a transformer model to detect all clinical conditions which are mentioned in a single note. These clinical conditions are then grounded to a predefined ontology, and are linked to spans in the text. At the second stage, summarization, we develop a novel algorithm that aggregates over the set of clinical conditions detected on all of the patient’s notes, and produce a concise patient summary that organizes their most important conditions.

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Specializing Static and Contextual Embeddings in the Medical Domain Using Knowledge Graphs: Let’s Keep It Simple
Hicham El Boukkouri | Olivier Ferret | Thomas Lavergne | Pierre Zweigenbaum

Domain adaptation of word embeddings has mainly been explored in the context of retraining general models on large specialized corpora. While this usually yields good results, we argue that knowledge graphs, which are used less frequently, could also be utilized to enhance existing representations with specialized knowledge. In this work, we aim to shed some light on whether such knowledge injection could be achieved using a basic set of tools: graph-level embeddings and concatenation. To that end, we adopt an incremental approach where we first demonstrate that static embeddings can indeed be improved through concatenation with in-domain node2vec representations. Then, we validate this approach on contextual models and generalize it further by proposing a variant of BERT that incorporates knowledge embeddings within its hidden states through the same process of concatenation. We show that this variant outperforms plain retraining on several specialized tasks, then discuss how this simple approach could be improved further. Both our code and pre-trained models are open-sourced for future research. In this work, we conduct experiments that target the medical domain and the English language.

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BioSimCSE: BioMedical Sentence Embeddings using Contrastive learning
Kamal raj Kanakarajan | Bhuvana Kundumani | Abhijith Abraham | Malaikannan Sankarasubbu

Sentence embeddings in the form of fixed-size vectors that capture the information in the sentence as well as the context are critical components of Natural Language Processing systems. With transformer model based sentence encoders outperforming the other sentence embedding methods in the general domain, we explore the transformer based architectures to generate dense sentence embeddings in the biomedical domain. In this work, we present BioSimCSE, where we train sentence embeddings with domain specific transformer based models with biomedical texts. We assess our model’s performance with zero-shot and fine-tuned settings on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) and Recognizing Question Entailment (RQE) tasks. Our BioSimCSE model using BioLinkBERT achieves state of the art (SOTA) performance on both tasks.

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Proxy-based Zero-Shot Entity Linking by Effective Candidate Retrieval
Maciej Wiatrak | Eirini Arvaniti | Angus Brayne | Jonas Vetterle | Aaron Sim

A recent advancement in the domain of biomedical Entity Linking is the development of powerful two-stage algorithms – an initial candidate retrieval stage that generates a shortlist of entities for each mention, followed by a candidate ranking stage. However, the effectiveness of both stages are inextricably dependent on computationally expensive components. Specifically, in candidate retrieval via dense representation retrieval it is important to have hard negative samples, which require repeated forward passes and nearest neighbour searches across the entire entity label set throughout training. In this work, we show that pairing a proxy-based metric learning loss with an adversarial regularizer provides an efficient alternative to hard negative sampling in the candidate retrieval stage. In particular, we show competitive performance on the recall@1 metric, thereby providing the option to leave out the expensive candidate ranking step. Finally, we demonstrate how the model can be used in a zero-shot setting to discover out of knowledge base biomedical entities.

Transformer models have achieved great success across many NLP problems. However, previous studies in automated ICD coding concluded that these models fail to outperform some of the earlier solutions such as CNN-based models. In this paper we challenge this conclusion. We present a simple and scalable method to process long text with the existing transformer models such as BERT. We show that this method significantly improves the previous results reported for transformer models in ICD coding, and is able to outperform one of the prominent CNN-based methods.

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Parameter Efficient Transfer Learning for Suicide Attempt and Ideation Detection
Bhanu Pratap Singh Rawat | Hong Yu

Pre-trained language models (LMs) have been deployed as the state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) approaches for multiple clinical applications. Model generalisability is important in clinical domain due to the low available resources. In this study, we evaluated transfer learning techniques for an important clinical application: detecting suicide attempt (SA) and suicide ideation (SI) in electronic health records (EHRs). Using the annotation guideline provided by the authors of ScAN, we annotated two EHR datasets from different hospitals. We then fine-tuned ScANER, a publicly available SA and SI detection model, to evaluate five different parameter efficient transfer learning techniques, such as adapter-based learning and soft-prompt tuning, on the two datasets. Without any fine-tuning, ScANER achieve macro F1-scores of 0.85 and 0.87 for SA and SI evidence detection across the two datasets. We observed that by fine-tuning less than ~2% of ScANER’s parameters, we were able to further improve the macro F1-score for SA-SI evidence detection by 3% and 5% for the two EHR datasets. Our results show that parameter-efficient transfer learning methods can help improve the performance of publicly available clinical models on new hospital datasets with few annotations.

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Automatic Patient Note Assessment without Strong Supervision
Jianing Zhou | Vyom Nayan Thakkar | Rachel Yudkowsky | Suma Bhat | William F. Bond

Training of physicians requires significant practice writing patient notes that document the patient’s medical and health information and physician diagnostic reasoning. Assessment and feedback of the patient note requires experienced faculty, consumes significant amounts of time and delays feedback to learners. Grading patient notes is thus a tedious and expensive process for humans that could be improved with the addition of natural language processing. However, the large manual effort required to create labeled datasets increases the challenge, particularly when test cases change. Therefore, traditional supervised NLP methods relying on labelled datasets are impractical in such a low-resource scenario. In our work, we proposed an unsupervised framework as a simple baseline and a weakly supervised method utilizing transfer learning for automatic assessment of patient notes under a low-resource scenario. Experiments on our self-collected datasets show that our weakly-supervised methods could provide reliable assessment for patient notes with accuracy of 0.92.

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DDI-MuG: Multi-aspect Graphs for Drug-Drug Interaction Extraction
Jie Yang | Yihao Ding | Siqu Long | Josiah Poon | Soyeon Caren Han

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) may leads to adverse reactions in patients, thus it is important to extract such knowledge from biomedical texts. However, previously proposed approaches typically focus on capturing sentence-aspect information while ignoring valuable knowledge concerning the whole corpus. In this paper, we propose a Multi-aspect Graph-based DDI extraction model, named DDI-MuG. We first employ a bio-specific pre-trained language model to obtain the token contextualized representations. Then we use two graphs to get syntactic information from input instance and word co-occurrence information within the entire corpus, respectively. Finally, we combine the representations of drug entities and verb tokens for the final classification. It is encouraging to see that the proposed model outperforms all baseline models on two benchmark datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model that explores multi-aspect graphs to the DDI extraction task, and we hope it can establish a foundation for more robust multi-aspect works in the future.

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Divide and Conquer: An Extreme Multi-Label Classification Approach for Coding Diseases and Procedures in Spanish
Jose Barros | Matias Rojas | Jocelyn Dunstan | Andres Abeliuk

Clinical coding is the task of transforming medical documents into structured codes following a standard ontology. Since these terminologies are composed of hundreds of codes, this problem can be considered an Extreme Multi-label Classification task. This paper proposes a novel neural network-based architecture for clinical coding. First, we take full advantage of the hierarchical nature of ontologies to create clusters based on semantic relations. Then, we use a Matcher module to assign the probability of documents belonging to each cluster. Finally, the Ranker calculates the probability of each code considering only the documents in the cluster. This division allows a fine-grained differentiation within the cluster, which cannot be addressed using a single classifier. In addition, since most of the previous work has focused on solving this task in English, we conducted our experiments on three clinical coding corpora in Spanish. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, achieving state-of-the-art results on two of the three datasets. Specifically, we outperformed previous models on two subtasks of the CodiEsp shared task: CodiEsp-D (diseases) and CodiEsp-P (procedures). Automatic coding can profoundly impact healthcare by structuring critical information written in free text in electronic health records.

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Curriculum-guided Abstractive Summarization for Mental Health Online Posts
Sajad Sotudeh | Nazli Goharian | Hanieh Deilamsalehy | Franck Dernoncourt

Automatically generating short summaries from users’ online mental health posts could save counselors’ reading time and reduce their fatigue so that they can provide timely responses to those seeking help for improving their mental state. Recent Transformers-based summarization models have presented a promising approach to abstractive summarization. They go beyond sentence selection and extractive strategies to deal with more complicated tasks such as novel word generation and sentence paraphrasing. Nonetheless, these models have a prominent shortcoming; their training strategy is not quite efficient, which restricts the model’s performance. In this paper, we include a curriculum learning approach to reweigh the training samples, bringing about an efficient learning procedure. We apply our model on extreme summarization dataset of MentSum posts —-a dataset of mental health related posts from Reddit social media. Compared to the state-of-the-art model, our proposed method makes substantial gains in terms of Rouge and Bertscore evaluation metrics, yielding 3.5% Rouge-1, 10.4% Rouge-2, and 4.7% Rouge-L, 1.5% Bertscore relative improvements.

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Improving information fusion on multimodal clinical data in classification settings
Sneha Jha | Erik Mayer | Mauricio Barahona

Clinical data often exists in different forms across the lifetime of a patient’s interaction with the healthcare system - structured, unstructured or semi-structured data in the form of laboratory readings, clinical notes, diagnostic codes, imaging and audio data of various kinds, and other observational data. Formulating a representation model that aggregates information from these heterogeneous sources may allow us to jointly model on data with more predictive signal than noise and help inform our model with useful constraints learned from better data. Multimodal fusion approaches help produce representations combined from heterogeneous modalities, which can be used for clinical prediction tasks. Representations produced through different fusion techniques require different training strategies. We investigate the advantage of adding narrative clinical text to structured modalities to classification tasks in the clinical domain. We show that while there is a competitive advantage in combined representations of clinical data, the approach can be helped by training guidance customized to each modality. We show empirical results across binary/multiclass settings, single/multitask settings and unified/multimodal learning rate settings for early and late information fusion of clinical data.

Large pre-trained language models (LMs) have been widely adopted in biomedical and clinical domains, introducing many powerful LMs such as bio-lm and BioELECTRA. However, the applicability of these methods to real clinical use cases is hindered, due to the limitation of pre-trained LMs in processing long textual data with thousands of words, which is a common length for a clinical note. In this work, we explore long-range adaptation from such LMs with Longformer, allowing the LMs to capture longer clinical notes context. We conduct experiments on three n2c2 challenges datasets and a longitudinal clinical dataset from Hong Kong Hospital Authority electronic health record (EHR) system to show the effectiveness and generalizability of this concept, achieving ~10% F1-score improvement. Based on our experiments, we conclude that capturing a longer clinical note interval is beneficial to the model performance, but there are different cut-off intervals to achieve the optimal performance for different target variables.

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A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Schizophrenia Language
Amal Alqahtani | Efsun Sarioglu Kayi | Sardar Hamidian | Michael Compton | Mona Diab

Schizophrenia is one of the most disabling mental health conditions to live with. Approximately one percent of the population has schizophrenia which makes it fairly common, and it affects many people and their families. Patients with schizophrenia suffer different symptoms: formal thought disorder (FTD), delusions, and emotional flatness. In this paper, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the language of patients with schizophrenia measuring various linguistic features in two modalities: speech and written text. We examine the following features: coherence and cohesion of thoughts, emotions, specificity, level of commit- ted belief (LCB), and personality traits. Our results show that patients with schizophrenia score high in fear and neuroticism compared to healthy controls. In addition, they are more committed to their beliefs, and their writing lacks details. They score lower in most of the linguistic features of cohesion with significant p-values.

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Exploring Hybrid and Ensemble Models for Multiclass Prediction of Mental Health Status on Social Media
Sourabh Zanwar | Daniel Wiechmann | Yu Qiao | Elma Kerz

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in research on automatic mental health detection (MHD) from social media data leveraging advances in natural language processing and machine learning techniques. While significant progress has been achieved in this interdisciplinary research area, the vast majority of work has treated MHD as a binary classification task. The multiclass classification setup is, however, essential if we are to uncover the subtle differences among the statistical patterns of language use associated with particular mental health conditions. Here, we report on experiments aimed at predicting six conditions (anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and psychological stress) from Reddit social media posts. We explore and compare the performance of hybrid and ensemble models leveraging transformer-based architectures (BERT and RoBERTa) and BiLSTM neural networks trained on within-text distributions of a diverse set of linguistic features. This set encompasses measures of syntactic complexity, lexical sophistication and diversity, readability, and register-specific ngram frequencies, as well as sentiment and emotion lexicons. In addition, we conduct feature ablation experiments to investigate which types of features are most indicative of particular mental health conditions.

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A Knowledge-Graph-Based Intrinsic Test for Benchmarking Medical Concept Embeddings and Pretrained Language Models
Claudio Aracena | Fabián Villena | Matias Rojas | Jocelyn Dunstan

Using language models created from large data sources has improved the performance of several deep learning-based architectures, obtaining state-of-the-art results in several NLP extrinsic tasks. However, little research is related to creating intrinsic tests that allow us to compare the quality of different language models when obtaining contextualized embeddings. This gap increases even more when working on specific domains in languages other than English. This paper proposes a novel graph-based intrinsic test that allows us to measure the quality of different language models in clinical and biomedical domains in Spanish. Our results show that our intrinsic test performs better for clinical and biomedical language models than a general one. Also, it correlates with better outcomes for a NER task using a probing model over contextualized embeddings. We hope our work will help the clinical NLP research community to evaluate and compare new language models in other languages and find the most suitable models for solving downstream tasks.

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Enriching Deep Learning with Frame Semantics for Empathy Classification in Medical Narrative Essays
Priyanka Dey | Roxana Girju

Empathy is a vital component of health care and plays a key role in the training of future doctors. Paying attention to medical students’ self-reflective stories of their interactions with patients can encourage empathy and the formation of professional identities that embody desirable values such as integrity and respect. We present a computational approach and linguistic analysis of empathic language in a large corpus of 440 essays written by pre-med students as narrated simulated patient – doctor interactions. We analyze the discourse of three kinds of empathy: cognitive, affective, and prosocial as highlighted by expert annotators. We also present various experiments with state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks and transformer models for classifying these forms of empathy. To further improve over these results, we develop a novel system architecture that makes use of frame semantics to enrich our state-of-the-art models. We show that this novel framework leads to significant improvement on the empathy classification task for this dataset.

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Condition-Treatment Relation Extraction on Disease-related Social Media Data
Sichang Tu | Stephen Doogan | Jinho D. Choi

Social media has become a popular platform where people share information about personal healthcare conditions, diagnostic histories, and medical plans. Analyzing posts on social media depicting such realistic information can help improve quality and clinical decision-making; however, the lack of structured resources in this genre limits us to build robust NLP models for meaningful analysis. This paper presents a new corpus annotating relations among many types of conditions, treatments, and their attributes illustrated in social media posts by patients and caregivers. For experiments, a transformer encoder is pretrained on 1M raw posts and used to train several document-level relation extraction models using our corpus. Our best-performing model achieves the F1 scores of 70.9 and 51.7 for Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction, respectively. These results are encouraging as it is the first neural model extracting complex relations of this kind on social media data.

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Integration of Heterogeneous Knowledge Sources for Biomedical Text Processing
Parsa Bagherzadeh | Sabine Bergler

Recently, research into bringing outside knowledge sources into current neural NLP models has been increasing. Most approaches that leverage external knowledge sources require laborious and non-trivial designs, as well as tailoring the system through intensive ablation of different knowledge sources, an effort that discourages users to use quality ontological resources. In this paper, we show that multiple large heterogeneous KSs can be easily integrated using a decoupled approach, allowing for an automatic ablation of irrelevant KSs, while keeping the overall parameter space tractable. We experiment with BERT and pre-trained graph embeddings, and show that they interoperate well without performance degradation, even when some do not contribute to the task.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

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Mind the data gap(s): Investigating power in speech and language datasets
Nina Markl

Algorithmic oppression is an urgent and persistent problem in speech and language technologies. Considering power relations embedded in datasets before compiling or using them to train or test speech and language technologies is essential to designing less harmful, more just technologies. This paper presents a reflective exercise to recognise and challenge gaps and the power relations they reveal in speech and language datasets by applying principles of Data Feminism and Design Justice, and building on work on dataset documentation and sociolinguistics.

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Regex in a Time of Deep Learning: The Role of an Old Technology in Age Discrimination Detection in Job Advertisements
Anna Pillar | Kyrill Poelmans | Martha Larson

Deep learning holds great promise for detecting discriminatory language in the public sphere. However, for the detection of illegal age discrimination in job advertisements, regex approaches are still strong performers. In this paper, we investigate job advertisements in the Netherlands. We present a qualitative analysis of the benefits of the ‘old’ approach based on regexes and investigate how neural embeddings could address its limitations.

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Doing not Being: Concrete Language as a Bridge from Language Technology to Ethnically Inclusive Job Ads
Jetske Adams | Kyrill Poelmans | Iris Hendrickx | Martha Larson

This paper makes the case for studying concreteness in language as a bridge that will allow language technology to support the understanding and improvement of ethnic inclusivity in job advertisements. We propose an annotation scheme that guides the assignment of sentences in job ads to classes that reflect concrete actions, i.e., what the employer needs people to do, and abstract dispositions, i.e., who the employer expects people to be. Using an annotated dataset of Dutch-language job ads, we demonstrate that machine learning technology is effectively able to distinguish these classes.

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Measuring Harmful Sentence Completion in Language Models for LGBTQIA+ Individuals
Debora Nozza | Federico Bianchi | Anne Lauscher | Dirk Hovy

Current language technology is ubiquitous and directly influences individuals’ lives worldwide. Given the recent trend in AI on training and constantly releasing new and powerful large language models (LLMs), there is a need to assess their biases and potential concrete consequences. While some studies have highlighted the shortcomings of these models, there is only little on the negative impact of LLMs on LGBTQIA+ individuals. In this paper, we investigated a state-of-the-art template-based approach for measuring the harmfulness of English LLMs sentence completion when the subjects belong to the LGBTQIA+ community. Our findings show that, on average, the most likely LLM-generated completion is an identity attack 13% of the time. Our results raise serious concerns about the applicability of these models in production environments.

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Using BERT Embeddings to Model Word Importance in Conversational Transcripts for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users
Akhter Al Amin | Saad Hassan | Cecilia Alm | Matt Huenerfauth

Deaf and hard of hearing individuals regularly rely on captioning while watching live TV. Live TV captioning is evaluated by regulatory agencies using various caption evaluation metrics. However, caption evaluation metrics are often not informed by preferences of DHH users or how meaningful the captions are. There is a need to construct caption evaluation metrics that take the relative importance of words in transcript into account. We conducted correlation analysis between two types of word embeddings and human-annotated labelled word-importance scores in existing corpus. We found that normalized contextualized word embeddings generated using BERT correlated better with manually annotated importance scores than word2vec-based word embeddings. We make available a pairing of word embeddings and their human-annotated importance scores. We also provide proof-of-concept utility by training word importance models, achieving an F1-score of 0.57 in the 6-class word importance classification task.

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Detoxifying Language Models with a Toxic Corpus
Yoona Park | Frank Rudzicz

Existing studies have investigated the tendency of autoregressive language models to generate contexts that exhibit undesired biases and toxicity. Various debiasing approaches have been proposed, which are primarily categorized into data-based and decoding-based. In our study, we investigate the ensemble of the two debiasing paradigms, proposing to use toxic corpus as an additional resource to reduce the toxicity. Our result shows that toxic corpus can indeed help to reduce the toxicity of the language generation process substantially, complementing the existing debiasing methods.

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Inferring Gender: A Scalable Methodology for Gender Detection with Online Lexical Databases
Marion Bartl | Susan Leavy

This paper presents a new method for automatic detection of gendered terms in large-scale language datasets. Currently, the evaluation of gender bias in natural language processing relies on the use of manually compiled lexicons of gendered expressions, such as pronouns and words that imply gender. However, manual compilation of lists with lexical gender can lead to static information if lists are not periodically updated and often involve value judgements by individual annotators and researchers. Moreover, terms not included in the lexicons fall out of the range of analysis. To address these issues, we devised a scalable dictionary-based method to automatically detect lexical gender that can provide a dynamic, up-to-date analysis with high coverage. Our approach reaches over 80% accuracy in determining the lexical gender of words retrieved randomly from a Wikipedia sample and when testing on a list of gendered words used in previous research.

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Debiasing Pre-Trained Language Models via Efficient Fine-Tuning
Michael Gira | Ruisu Zhang | Kangwook Lee

An explosion in the popularity of transformer-based language models (such as GPT-3, BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT) has opened the doors to new machine learning applications involving language modeling, text generation, and more. However, recent scrutiny reveals that these language models contain inherent biases towards certain demographics reflected in their training data. While research has tried mitigating this problem, existing approaches either fail to remove the bias completely, degrade performance (“catastrophic forgetting”), or are costly to execute. This work examines how to reduce gender bias in a GPT-2 language model by fine-tuning less than 1% of its parameters. Through quantitative benchmarks, we show that this is a viable way to reduce prejudice in pre-trained language models while remaining cost-effective at scale.

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Disambiguation of morpho-syntactic features of African American English – the case of habitual be
Harrison Santiago | Joshua Martin | Sarah Moeller | Kevin Tang

Recent research has highlighted that natural language processing (NLP) systems exhibit a bias againstAfrican American speakers. These errors are often caused by poor representation of linguistic features unique to African American English (AAE), which is due to the relatively low probability of occurrence for many such features. We present a workflow to overcome this issue in the case of habitual “be”. Habitual “be” is isomorphic, and therefore ambiguous, with other forms of uninflected “be” found in both AAE and General American English (GAE). This creates a clear challenge for bias in NLP technologies. To overcome the scarcity, we employ a combination of rule-based filters and data augmentation that generate a corpus balanced between habitual and non-habitual instances. This balanced corpus trains unbiased machine learning classifiers, as demonstrated on a corpus of AAE transcribed texts, achieving .65 F₁ score at classifying habitual “be”.

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Behind the Mask: Demographic bias in name detection for PII masking
Courtney Mansfield | Amandalynne Paullada | Kristen Howell

Many datasets contain personally identifiable information, or PII, which poses privacy risks to individuals. PII masking is commonly used to redact personal information such as names, addresses, and phone numbers from text data. Most modern PII masking pipelines involve machine learning algorithms. However, these systems may vary in performance, such that individuals from particular demographic groups bear a higher risk for having their personal information exposed. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three off-the-shelf PII masking systems on name detection and redaction. We generate data using names and templates from the customer service domain. We find that an open-source RoBERTa-based system shows fewer disparities than the commercial models we test. However, all systems demonstrate significant differences in error rate based on demographics. In particular, the highest error rates occurred for names associated with Black and Asian/Pacific Islander individuals.

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Mapping the Multilingual Margins: Intersectional Biases of Sentiment Analysis Systems in English, Spanish, and Arabic
António Câmara | Nina Taneja | Tamjeed Azad | Emily Allaway | Richard Zemel

As natural language processing systems become more widespread, it is necessary to address fairness issues in their implementation and deployment to ensure that their negative impacts on society are understood and minimized. However, there is limited work that studies fairness using a multilingual and intersectional framework or on downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce four multilingual Equity Evaluation Corpora, supplementary test sets designed to measure social biases, and a novel statistical framework for studying unisectional and intersectional social biases in natural language processing. We use these tools to measure gender, racial, ethnic, and intersectional social biases across five models trained on emotion regression tasks in English, Spanish, and Arabic. We find that many systems demonstrate statistically significant unisectional and intersectional social biases. We make our code and datasets available for download.

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Monte Carlo Tree Search for Interpreting Stress in Natural Language
Kyle Swanson | Joy Hsu | Mirac Suzgun

Natural language processing can facilitate the analysis of a person’s mental state from text they have written. Previous studies have developed models that can predict whether a person is experiencing a mental health condition from social media posts with high accuracy. Yet, these models cannot explain why the person is experiencing a particular mental state. In this work, we present a new method for explaining a person’s mental state from text using Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). Our MCTS algorithm employs trained classification models to guide the search for key phrases that explain the writer’s mental state in a concise, interpretable manner. Furthermore, our algorithm can find both explanations that depend on the particular context of the text (e.g., a recent breakup) and those that are context-independent. Using a dataset of Reddit posts that exhibit stress, we demonstrate the ability of our MCTS algorithm to identify interpretable explanations for a person’s feeling of stress in both a context-dependent and context-independent manner.

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IIITSurat@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Hope Speech Detection using Machine Learning
Pradeep Roy | Snehaan Bhawal | Abhinav Kumar | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi

This paper addresses the issue of Hope Speech detection using machine learning techniques. Designing a robust model that helps in predicting the target class with higher accuracy is a challenging task in machine learning, especially when the distribution of the class labels is highly imbalanced. This study uses and compares the experimental outcomes of the different oversampling techniques. Many models are implemented to classify the comments into Hope and Non-Hope speech, and it found that machine learning algorithms perform better than deep learning models. The English language dataset used in this research was developed by collecting YouTube comments and is part of the task “ACL-2022:Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion”. The proposed model achieved a weighted F1-score of 0.55 on the test dataset and secured the first rank among the participated teams.

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The Best of both Worlds: Dual Channel Language modeling for Hope Speech Detection in low-resourced Kannada
Adeep Hande | Siddhanth U Hegde | Sangeetha S | Ruba Priyadharshini | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi

In recent years, various methods have been developed to control the spread of negativity by removing profane, aggressive, and offensive comments from social media platforms. There is, however, a scarcity of research focusing on embracing positivity and reinforcing supportive and reassuring content in online forums. As a result, we concentrate our research on developing systems to detect hope speech in code-mixed Kannada. As a result, we present DC-LM, a dual-channel language model that sees hope speech by using the English translations of the code-mixed dataset for additional training. The approach is jointly modelled on both English and code-mixed Kannada to enable effective cross-lingual transfer between the languages. With a weighted F1-score of 0.756, the method outperforms other models. We aim to initiate research in Kannada while encouraging researchers to take a pragmatic approach to inspire positive and supportive online content.

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NYCU_TWD@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Ensemble Models with VADER and Contrastive Learning for Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media
Wei-Yao Wang | Yu-Chien Tang | Wei-Wei Du | Wen-Chih Peng

This paper presents a state-of-the-art solution to the LT-EDI-ACL 2022 Task 4: Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text. The goal of this task is to detect the severity levels of depression of people from social media posts, where people often share their feelings on a daily basis. To detect the signs of depression, we propose a framework with pre-trained language models using rich information instead of training from scratch, gradient boosting and deep learning models for modeling various aspects, and supervised contrastive learning for the generalization ability. Moreover, ensemble techniques are also employed in consideration of the different advantages of each method. Experiments show that our framework achieves a 2nd prize ranking with a macro F1-score of 0.552, showing the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

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UMUTeam@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Detecting homophobic and transphobic comments in Tamil
José García-Díaz | Camilo Caparros-Laiz | Rafael Valencia-García

This working-notes are about the participation of the UMUTeam in a LT-EDI shared task concerning the identification of homophobic and transphobic comments in YouTube. These comments are written in English, which has high availability to machine-learning resources; Tamil, which has fewer resources; and a transliteration from Tamil to Roman script combined with English sentences. To carry out this shared task, we train a neural network that combines several feature sets applying a knowledge integration strategy. These features are linguistic features extracted from a tool developed by our research group and contextual and non-contextual sentence embeddings. We ranked 7th for English subtask (macro f1-score of 45%), 3rd for Tamil subtask (macro f1-score of 82%), and 2nd for Tamil-English subtask (macro f1-score of 58%).

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UMUTeam@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Detecting Signs of Depression from text
José García-Díaz | Rafael Valencia-García

Depression is a mental condition related to sadness and the lack of interest in common daily tasks. In this working-notes, we describe the proposal of the UMUTeam in the LT-EDI shared task (ACL 2022) concerning the identification of signs of depression in social network posts. This task is somehow related to other relevant Natural Language Processing tasks such as Emotion Analysis. In this shared task, the organisers challenged the participants to distinguish between moderate and severe signs of depression (or no signs of depression at all) in a set of social posts written in English. Our proposal is based on the combination of linguistic features and several sentence embeddings using a knowledge integration strategy. Our proposal achieved the 6th position, with a macro f1-score of 53.82 in the official leader board.

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bitsa_nlp@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Leveraging Pretrained Language Models for Detecting Homophobia and Transphobia in Social Media Comments
Vitthal Bhandari | Poonam Goyal

Online social networks are ubiquitous and user-friendly. Nevertheless, it is vital to detect and moderate offensive content to maintain decency and empathy. However, mining social media texts is a complex task since users don’t adhere to any fixed patterns. Comments can be written in any combination of languages and many of them may be low-resource. In this paper, we present our system for the LT-EDI shared task on detecting homophobia and transphobia in social media comments. We experiment with a number of monolingual and multilingual transformer based models such as mBERT along with a data augmentation technique for tackling class imbalance. Such pretrained large models have recently shown tremendous success on a variety of benchmark tasks in natural language processing. We observe their performance on a carefully annotated, real life dataset of YouTube comments in English as well as Tamil. Our submission achieved ranks 9, 6 and 3 with a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.42, 0.64 and 0.58 in the English, Tamil and Tamil-English subtasks respectively. The code for the system has been open sourced.

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ABLIMET @LT-EDI-ACL2022: A Roberta based Approach for Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media
Abulimiti Maimaitituoheti

This paper describes our system that participated in LT-EDI-ACL2022- Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media. Sexual minorities face a lot of unfair treatment and discrimination in our world. This creates enormous stress and many psychological problems for sexual minorities. There is a lot of hate speech on the internet, and Homophobia/Transphobia is the one against sexual minorities. Identifying and processing Homophobia/ Transphobia through natural language processing technology can improve the efficiency of processing Homophobia/ Transphobia, and can quickly screen out Homophobia/Transphobia on the Internet. The organizer of LT-EDI-ACL2022- Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media constructs a Homophobia/ Transphobia detection dataset based on YouTube comments for English and Tamil. We use a Roberta -based approach to conduct Homophobia/ Transphobia detection experiments on the dataset of the competition, and get better results.

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MUCIC@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Hope Speech Detection using Data Re-Sampling and 1D Conv-LSTM
Anusha Gowda | Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi | Hosahalli Shashirekha | Grigori Sidorov

Spreading positive vibes or hope content on social media may help many people to get motivated in their life. To address Hope Speech detection in YouTube comments, this paper presents the description of the models submitted by our team - MUCIC, to the Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (HopeEDI) shared task at Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2022. This shared task consists of texts in five languages, namely: English, Spanish (in Latin scripts), and Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada (in code-mixed native and Roman scripts) with the aim of classifying the YouTube comment into “Hope”, “Not-Hope” or “Not-Intended” categories. The proposed methodology uses the re-sampling technique to deal with imbalanced data in the corpus and obtained 1st rank for English language with a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.550 and weighted-averaged F1-score of 0.860. The code to reproduce this work is available in GitHub.

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DeepBlues@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Depression level detection modelling through domain specific BERT and short text Depression classifiers
Nawshad Farruque | Osmar Zaiane | Randy Goebel | Sudhakar Sivapalan

We discuss a variety of approaches to build a robust Depression level detection model from longer social media posts (i.e., Reddit Depression forum posts) using a mental health text pre-trained BERT model. Further, we report our experimental results based on a strategy to select excerpts from long text and then fine-tune the BERT model to combat the issue of memory constraints while processing such texts. We show that, with domain specific BERT, we can achieve reasonable accuracy with fixed text size (in this case 200 tokens) for this task. In addition we can use short text classifiers to extract relevant text from the long text and achieve slightly better accuracy, albeit, trading off with the processing time for extracting such excerpts.

In recent years social media has become one of the major forums for expressing human views and emotions. With the help of smartphones and high-speed internet, anyone can express their views on Social media. However, this can also lead to the spread of hatred and violence in society. Therefore it is necessary to build a method to find and support helpful social media content. In this paper, we studied Natural Language Processing approach for detecting Hope speech in a given sentence. The task was to classify the sentences into ‘Hope speech’ and ‘Non-hope speech’. The dataset was provided by LT-EDI organizers with text from Youtube comments. Based on the task description, we developed a system using the pre-trained language model BERT to complete this task. Our model achieved 1st rank in the Kannada language with a weighted average F1 score of 0.750, 2nd rank in the Malayalam language with a weighted average F1 score of 0.740, 3rd rank in the Tamil language with a weighted average F1 score of 0.390 and 6th rank in the English language with a weighted average F1 score of 0.880.

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SUH_ASR@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Transformer based Approach for Speech Recognition for Vulnerable Individuals in Tamil
Suhasini S | Bharathi B

An Automatic Speech Recognition System is developed for addressing the Tamil conversational speech data of the elderly people andtransgender. The speech corpus used in this system is collected from the people who adhere their communication in Tamil at some primary places like bank, hospital, vegetable markets. Our ASR system is designed with pre-trained model which is used to recognize the speechdata. WER(Word Error Rate) calculation is used to analyse the performance of the ASR system. This evaluation could help to make acomparison of utterances between the elderly people and others. Similarly, the comparison between the transgender and other people isalso done. Our proposed ASR system achieves the word error rate as 39.65%.

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LPS@LT-EDI-ACL2022:An Ensemble Approach about Hope Speech Detection
Yue Zhu

The task shared by sponsor about Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion at LT-EDI-ACL-2022.The goal of this task is to identify whether a given comment contains hope speech or not,and hope is considered significant for the well-being, recuperation and restoration of human life. Our work aims to change the prevalent way of thinking by moving away from a preoccupation with discrimination, loneliness or the worst things in life to building the confidence, support and good qualities based on comments by individuals. In response to the need to detect equality, diversity and inclusion of hope speech in a multilingual environment, we built an integration model and achieved well performance on multiple datasets presented by the sponsor and the specific results can be referred to the experimental results section.

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CURAJ_IIITDWD@LT-EDI-ACL 2022: Hope Speech Detection in English YouTube Comments using Deep Learning Techniques
Vanshita Jha | Ankit Mishra | Sunil Saumya

Hope Speech are positive terms that help to promote or criticise a point of view without hurting the user’s or community’s feelings. Non-Hope Speech, on the other side, includes expressions that are harsh, ridiculing, or demotivating. The goal of this article is to find the hope speech comments in a YouTube dataset. The datasets were created as part of the “LT-EDI-ACL 2022: Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion” shared task. The shared task dataset was proposed in Malayalam, Tamil, English, Spanish, and Kannada languages. In this paper, we worked at English-language YouTube comments. We employed several deep learning based models such as DNN (dense or fully connected neural network), CNN (Convolutional Neural Network), Bi-LSTM (Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory Network), and GRU(Gated Recurrent Unit) to identify the hopeful comments. We also used Stacked LSTM-CNN and Stacked LSTM-LSTM network to train the model. The best macro average F1-score 0.67 for development dataset was obtained using the DNN model. The macro average F1-score of 0.67 was achieved for the classification done on the test data as well.

Depression is a common mental illness that involves sadness and lack of interest in all day-to-day activities. The task is to classify the social media text as signs of depression into three labels namely “not depressed”, “moderately depressed”, and “severely depressed”. We have build a system using Deep Learning Model “Transformers”. Transformers provides thousands of pretrained models to perform tasks on different modalities such as text, vision, and audio. The multi-class classification model used in our system is based on the ALBERT model. In the shared task ACL 2022, Our team SSN_MLRG3 obtained a Macro F1 score of 0.473.

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BERT 4EVER@LT-EDI-ACL2022-Detecting signs of Depression from Social Media:Detecting Depression in Social Media using Prompt-Learning and Word-Emotion Cluster
Xiaotian Lin | Yingwen Fu | Ziyu Yang | Nankai Lin | Shengyi Jiang

In this paper, we report the solution of the team BERT 4EVER for the LT-EDI-2022 shared task2: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in social media comments in ACL 2022, which aims to classify Youtube comments into one of the following categories: no,moderate, or severe depression. We model the problem as a text classification task and a text generation task and respectively propose two different models for the tasks. To combine the knowledge learned from these two different models, we softly fuse the predicted probabilities of the models above and then select the label with the highest probability as the final output. In addition, multiple augmentation strategies are leveraged to improve the model generalization capability, such as back translation and adversarial training. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models and two augmented strategies.

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CIC@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Are transformers the only hope? Hope speech detection for Spanish and English comments
Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi | Sabur Butt | Grigori Sidorov | Alexander Gelbukh

Hope is an inherent part of human life and essential for improving the quality of life. Hope increases happiness and reduces stress and feelings of helplessness. Hope speech is the desired outcome for better and can be studied using text from various online sources where people express their desires and outcomes. In this paper, we address a deep-learning approach with a combination of linguistic and psycho-linguistic features for hope-speech detection. We report our best results submitted to LT-EDI-2022 which ranked 2nd and 3rd in English and Spanish respectively.

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scubeMSEC@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Detection of Depression using Transformer Models
Sivamanikandan S | Santhosh V | Sanjaykumar N | Jerin Mahibha C | Thenmozhi Durairaj

Social media platforms play a major role in our day-to-day life and are considered as a virtual friend by many users, who use the social media to share their feelings all day. Many a time, the content which is shared by users on social media replicate their internal life. Nowadays people love to share their daily life incidents like happy or unhappy moments and their feelings in social media and it makes them feel complete and it has become a habit for many users. Social media provides a new chance to identify the feelings of a person through their posts. The aim of the shared task is to develop a model in which the system is capable of analyzing the grammatical markers related to onset and permanent symptoms of depression. We as a team participated in the shared task Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text at LT-EDI 2022- ACL 2022 and we have proposed a model which predicts depression from English social media posts using the data set shared for the task. The prediction is done based on the labels Moderate, Severe and Not Depressed. We have implemented this using different transformer models like DistilBERT, RoBERTa and ALBERT by which we were able to achieve a Macro F1 score of 0.337, 0.457 and 0.387 respectively. Our code is publicly available in the github

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SSNCSE_NLP@LT-EDI-ACL2022:Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion using sentence transformers
Bharathi B | Dhanya Srinivasan | Josephine Varsha | Thenmozhi Durairaj | Senthil Kumar B

In recent times, applications have been developed to regulate and control the spread of negativity and toxicity on online platforms. The world is filled with serious problems like political & religious conflicts, wars, pandemics, and offensive hate speech is the last thing we desire. Our task was to classify a text into ‘Hope Speech’ and ‘Non-Hope Speech’. We searched for datasets acquired from YouTube comments that offer support, reassurance, inspiration, and insight, and the ones that don’t. The datasets were provided to us by the LTEDI organizers in English, Tamil, Spanish, Kannada, and Malayalam. To successfully identify and classify them, we employed several machine learning transformer models such as m-BERT, MLNet, BERT, XLMRoberta, and XLM_MLM. The observed results indicate that the BERT and m-BERT have obtained the best results among all the other techniques, gaining a weighted F1- score of 0.92, 0.71, 0.76, 0.87, and 0.83 for English, Tamil, Spanish, Kannada, and Malayalam respectively. This paper depicts our work for the Shared Task on Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion at LTEDI 2021.

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SOA_NLP@LT-EDI-ACL2022: An Ensemble Model for Hope Speech Detection from YouTube Comments
Abhinav Kumar | Sunil Saumya | Pradeep Roy

Language should be accommodating of equality and diversity as a fundamental aspect of communication. The language of internet users has a big impact on peer users all over the world. On virtual platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, people express their opinions in different languages. People respect others’ accomplishments, pray for their well-being, and cheer them on when they fail. Such motivational remarks are hope speech remarks. Simultaneously, a group of users encourages discrimination against women, people of color, people with disabilities, and other minorities based on gender, race, sexual orientation, and other factors. To recognize hope speech from YouTube comments, the current study offers an ensemble approach that combines a support vector machine, logistic regression, and random forest classifiers. Extensive testing was carried out to discover the best features for the aforementioned classifiers. In the support vector machine and logistic regression classifiers, char-level TF-IDF features were used, whereas in the random forest classifier, word-level features were used. The proposed ensemble model performed significantly well among English, Spanish, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada YouTube comments.

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IIT Dhanbad @LT-EDI-ACL2022- Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion
Vishesh Gupta | Ritesh Kumar | Rajendra Pamula

Hope is considered significant for the wellbeing,recuperation and restoration of humanlife by health professionals. Hope speech reflectsthe belief that one can discover pathwaysto their desired objectives and become rousedto utilise those pathways. Hope speech offerssupport, reassurance, suggestions, inspirationand insight. Hate speech is a prevalent practicethat society has to struggle with everyday. The freedom of speech and ease of anonymitygranted by social media has also resulted inincitement to hatred. In this paper, we workto identify and promote positive and supportivecontent on these platforms. We work withseveral machine learning models to classify socialmedia comments as hope speech or nonhopespeech in English. This paper portraysour work for the Shared Task on Hope SpeechDetection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusionat LT-EDI-ACL 2022.

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IISERB@LT-EDI-ACL2022: A Bag of Words and Document Embeddings Based Framework to Identify Severity of Depression Over Social Media
Tanmay Basu

The DepSign-LT-EDI-ACL2022 shared task focuses on early prediction of severity of depression over social media posts. The BioNLP group at Department of Data Science and Engineering in Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal (IISERB) has participated in this challenge and submitted three runs based on three different text mining models. The severity of depression were categorized into three classes, viz., no depression, moderate, and severe and the data to build models were released as part of this shared task. The objective of this work is to identify relevant features from the given social media texts for effective text classification. As part of our investigation, we explored features derived from text data using document embeddings technique and simple bag of words model following different weighting schemes. Subsequently, adaptive boosting, logistic regression, random forest and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers were used to identify the scale of depression from the given texts. The experimental analysis on the given validation data show that the SVM classifier using the bag of words model following term frequency and inverse document frequency weighting scheme outperforms the other models for identifying depression. However, this framework could not achieve a place among the top ten runs of the shared task. This paper describes the potential of the proposed framework as well as the possible reasons behind mediocre performance on the given data.

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SSNCSE_NLP@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Multiple Languages using SVM Classifiers and BERT-based Transformers
Krithika Swaminathan | Bharathi B | Gayathri G L | Hrishik Sampath

Over the years, there has been a slow but steady change in the attitude of society towards different kinds of sexuality. However, on social media platforms, where people have the license to be anonymous, toxic comments targeted at homosexuals, transgenders and the LGBTQ+ community are not uncommon. Detection of homophobic comments on social media can be useful in making the internet a safer place for everyone. For this task, we used a combination of word embeddings and SVM Classifiers as well as some BERT-based transformers. We achieved a weighted F1-score of 0.93 on the English dataset, 0.75 on the Tamil dataset and 0.87 on the Tamil-English Code-Mixed dataset.

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KUCST@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text
Manex Agirrezabal | Janek Amann

In this paper we present our approach for detecting signs of depression from social media text. Our model relies on word unigrams, part-of-speech tags, readabilitiy measures and the use of first, second or third person and the number of words. Our best model obtained a macro F1-score of 0.439 and ranked 25th, out of 31 teams. We further take advantage of the interpretability of the Logistic Regression model and we make an attempt to interpret the model coefficients with the hope that these will be useful for further research on the topic.

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E8-IJS@LT-EDI-ACL2022 - BERT, AutoML and Knowledge-graph backed Detection of Depression
Ilija Tavchioski | Boshko Koloski | Blaž Škrlj | Senja Pollak

Depression is a mental illness that negatively affects a person’s well-being and can, if left untreated, lead to serious consequences such as suicide. Therefore, it is important to recognize the signs of depression early. In the last decade, social media has become one of the most common places to express one’s feelings. Hence, there is a possibility of text processing and applying machine learning techniques to detect possible signs of depression. In this paper, we present our approaches to solving the shared task titled Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text. We explore three different approaches to solve the challenge: fine-tuning BERT model, leveraging AutoML for the construction of features and classifier selection and finally, we explore latent spaces derived from the combination of textual and knowledge-based representations. We ranked 9th out of 31 teams in the competition. Our best solution, based on knowledge graph and textual representations, was 4.9% behind the best model in terms of Macro F1, and only 1.9% behind in terms of Recall.

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Nozza@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Ensemble Modeling for Homophobia and Transphobia Detection
Debora Nozza

In this paper, we describe our approach for the task of homophobia and transphobia detection in English social media comments. The dataset consists of YouTube comments, and it has been released for the shared task on Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in social media comments. Given the high class imbalance, we propose a solution based on data augmentation and ensemble modeling. We fine-tuned different large language models (BERT, RoBERTa, and HateBERT) and used the weighted majority vote on their predictions. Our proposed model obtained 0.48 and 0.94 for macro and weighted F1-score, respectively, ranking at the third position.

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KADO@LT-EDI-ACL2022: BERT-based Ensembles for Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text
Morteza Janatdoust | Fatemeh Ehsani-Besheli | Hossein Zeinali

Depression is a common and serious mental illness that early detection can improve the patient’s symptoms and make depression easier to treat. This paper mainly introduces the relevant content of the task “Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text at DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022”. The goal of DepSign is to classify the signs of depression into three labels namely “not depressed”, “moderately depressed”, and “severely depressed” based on social media’s posts. In this paper, we propose a predictive ensemble model that utilizes the fine-tuned contextualized word embedding, ALBERT, DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and BERT base model. We show that our model outperforms the baseline models in all considered metrics and achieves an F1 score of 54% and accuracy of 61%, ranking 5th on the leader-board for the DepSign task.

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Sammaan@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Ensembled Transformers Against Homophobia and Transphobia
Ishan Sanjeev Upadhyay | Kv Aditya Srivatsa | Radhika Mamidi

Hateful and offensive content on social media platforms can have negative effects on users and can make online communities more hostile towards certain people and hamper equality, diversity and inclusion. In this paper, we describe our approach to classify homophobia and transphobia in social media comments. We used an ensemble of transformer-based models to build our classifier. Our model ranked 2nd for English, 8th for Tamil and 10th for Tamil-English.

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OPI@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text using RoBERTa Pre-trained Language Models
Rafał Poświata | Michał Perełkiewicz

This paper presents our winning solution for the Shared Task on Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text at LT-EDI-ACL2022. The task was to create a system that, given social media posts in English, should detect the level of depression as ‘not depressed’, ‘moderately depressed’ or ‘severely depressed’. We based our solution on transformer-based language models. We fine-tuned selected models: BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, of which the best results were obtained for RoBERTa. Then, using the prepared corpus, we trained our own language model called DepRoBERTa (RoBERTa for Depression Detection). Fine-tuning of this model improved the results. The third solution was to use the ensemble averaging, which turned out to be the best solution. It achieved a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.583. The source code of prepared solution is available at https://github.com/rafalposwiata/depression-detection-lt-edi-2022.

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FilipN@LT-EDI-ACL2022-Detecting signs of Depression from Social Media: Examining the use of summarization methods as data augmentation for text classification
Filip Nilsson | György Kovács

Depression is a common mental disorder that severely affects the quality of life, and can lead to suicide. When diagnosed in time, mild, moderate, and even severe depression can be treated. This is why it is vital to detect signs of depression in time. One possibility for this is the use of text classification models on social media posts. Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of similar text classification tasks. One drawback, however, is that when the dataset is imbalanced, the performance of these models may be negatively affected. Because of this, in this paper, we examine the effect of balancing a depression detection dataset using data augmentation. In particular, we use abstractive summarization techniques for data augmentation. We examine the effect of this method on the LT-EDI-ACL2022 task. Our results show that when increasing the multiplicity of the minority classes to the right degree, this data augmentation method can in fact improve classification scores on the task.

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NAYEL @LT-EDI-ACL2022: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion using SVM
Nsrin Ashraf | Mohamed Taha | Ahmed Abd Elfattah | Hamada Nayel

Analysing the contents of social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter gained interest due to the vast number of users. One of the important tasks is homophobia/transphobia detection. This paper illustrates the system submitted by our team for the homophobia/transphobia detection in social media comments shared task. A machine learning-based model has been designed and various classification algorithms have been implemented for automatic detection of homophobia in YouTube comments. TF/IDF has been used with a range of bigram model for vectorization of comments. Support Vector Machines has been used to develop the proposed model and our submission reported 0.91, 0.92, 0.88 weighted f1-score for English, Tamil and Tamil-English datasets respectively.

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giniUs @LT-EDI-ACL2022: Aasha: Transformers based Hope-EDI
Basavraj Chinagundi | Harshul Surana

This paper describes team giniUs’ submission to the Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Shared Task organised by LT-EDI ACL 2022. We have fine-tuned the Roberta-large pre-trained model and extracted the last four decoder layers to build a classifier. Our best result on the leaderboard achieve a weighted F1 score of 0.86 and a Macro F1 score of 0.51 for English. We have secured a rank of 4 for the English task. We have open-sourced our code implementations on GitHub to facilitate easy reproducibility by the scientific community.

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SSN_MLRG1@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Multi-Class Classification using BERT models for Detecting Depression Signs from Social Media Text
Karun Anantharaman | Angel S | Rajalakshmi Sivanaiah | Saritha Madhavan | Sakaya Milton Rajendram

DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022 aims to ascer-tain the signs of depression of a person fromtheir messages and posts on social mediawherein people share their feelings and emo-tions. Given social media postings in English,the system should classify the signs of depres-sion into three labels namely “not depressed”,“moderately depressed”, and “severely de-pressed”. To achieve this objective, we haveadopted a fine-tuned BERT model. This solu-tion from team SSN_MLRG1 achieves 58.5%accuracy on the DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022test set.

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DepressionOne@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Using Machine Learning with SMOTE and Random UnderSampling to Detect Signs of Depression on Social Media Text.
Suman Dowlagar | Radhika Mamidi

Depression is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think, and how you act. Detecting depression is essential as it must be treated early to avoid painful consequences. Nowadays, people are broadcasting how they feel via posts and comments. Using social media, we can extract many comments related to depression and use NLP techniques to train and detect depression. This work presents the submission of the DepressionOne team at LT-EDI-2022 for the shared task, detecting signs of depression from social media text. The depression data is small and unbalanced. Thus, we have used oversampling and undersampling methods such as SMOTE and RandomUnderSampler to represent the data. Later, we used machine learning methods to train and detect the signs of depression.

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LeaningTower@LT-EDI-ACL2022: When Hope and Hate Collide
Arianna Muti | Marta Marchiori Manerba | Katerina Korre | Alberto Barrón-Cedeño

The 2022 edition of LT-EDI proposed two tasks in various languages. Task Hope Speech Detection required models for the automatic identification of hopeful comments for equality, diversity, and inclusion. Task Homophobia/Transphobia Detection focused on the identification of homophobic and transphobic comments. We targeted both tasks in English by using reinforced BERT-based approaches. Our core strategy aimed at exploiting the data available for each given task to augment the amount of supervised instances in the other. On the basis of an active learning process, we trained a model on the dataset for Task i and applied it to the dataset for Task j to iteratively integrate new silver data for Task i. Our official submissions to the shared task obtained a macro-averaged F₁ score of 0.53 for Hope Speech and 0.46 for Homo/Transphobia, placing our team in the third and fourth positions out of 11 and 12 participating teams respectively.

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MUCS@Text-LT-EDI@ACL 2022: Detecting Sign of Depression from Social Media Text using Supervised Learning Approach
Asha Hegde | Sharal Coelho | Ahmad Elyas Dashti | Hosahalli Shashirekha

Social media has seen enormous growth in its users recently and knowingly or unknowingly the behavior of a person will be reflected in the comments she/he posts on social media. Users having the sign of depression may post negative or disturbing content seeking the attention of other users. Hence, social media data can be analysed to check whether the users’ have the sign of depression and help them to get through the situation if required. However, as analyzing the increasing amount of social media data manually in laborious and error-prone, automated tools have to be developed for the same. To address the issue of detecting the sign of depression content on social media, in this paper, we - team MUCS, describe an Ensemble of Machine Learning (ML) models and a Transfer Learning (TL) model submitted to “Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text-LT-EDI@ACL 2022” (DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022) shared task at Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2022. Both frequency and text based features are used to train an Ensemble model and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) fine-tuned with raw text is used to train the TL model. Among the two models, the TL model performed better with a macro averaged F-score of 0.479 and placed 18th rank in the shared task. The code to reproduce the proposed models is available in github page1.

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SSNCSE_NLP@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Speech Recognition for Vulnerable Individuals in Tamil using pre-trained XLSR models
Dhanya Srinivasan | Bharathi B | Thenmozhi Durairaj | Senthil Kumar B

Automatic speech recognition is a tool used to transform human speech into a written form. It is used in a variety of avenues, such as in voice commands, customer, service and more. It has emerged as an essential tool in the digitisation of daily life. It has been known to be of vital importance in making the lives of elderly and disabled people much easier. In this paper we describe an automatic speech recognition model, determined by using three pre-trained models, fine-tuned from the Facebook XLSR Wav2Vec2 model, which was trained using the Common Voice Dataset. The best model for speech recognition in Tamil is determined by finding the word error rate of the data. This work explains the submission made by SSNCSE_NLP in the shared task organized by LT-EDI at ACL 2022. A word error rate of 39.4512 is achieved.

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IDIAP_TIET@LT-EDI-ACL2022 : Hope Speech Detection in Social Media using Contextualized BERT with Attention Mechanism
Deepanshu Khanna | Muskaan Singh | Petr Motlicek

With the increase of users on social media platforms, manipulating or provoking masses of people has become a piece of cake. This spread of hatred among people, which has become a loophole for freedom of speech, must be minimized. Hence, it is essential to have a system that automatically classifies the hatred content, especially on social media, to take it down. This paper presents a simple modular pipeline classifier with BERT embeddings and attention mechanism to classify hope speech content in the Hope Speech Detection shared task for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion-ACL 2022. Our system submission ranks fourth with an F1-score of 0.84. We release our code-base here https://github.com/Deepanshu-beep/hope-speech-attention .

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SSN@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Transfer Learning using BERT for Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Texts
Adarsh S | Betina Antony

Depression is one of the most common mentalissues faced by people. Detecting signs ofdepression early on can help in the treatmentand prevention of extreme outcomes like suicide. Since the advent of the internet, peoplehave felt more comfortable discussing topicslike depression online due to the anonymityit provides. This shared task has used datascraped from various social media sites andaims to develop models that detect signs andthe severity of depression effectively. In thispaper, we employ transfer learning by applyingenhanced BERT model trained for Wikipediadataset to the social media text and performtext classification. The model gives a F1-scoreof 63.8% which was reasonably better than theother competing models.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media
Kayalvizhi S | Thenmozhi Durairaj | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Jerin Mahibha C

Social media is considered as a platform whereusers express themselves. The rise of social me-dia as one of humanity’s most important publiccommunication platforms presents a potentialprospect for early identification and manage-ment of mental illness. Depression is one suchillness that can lead to a variety of emotionaland physical problems. It is necessary to mea-sure the level of depression from the socialmedia text to treat them and to avoid the nega-tive consequences. Detecting levels of depres-sion is a challenging task since it involves themindset of the people which can change period-ically. The aim of the DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022 shared task is to classify the social me-dia text into three levels of depression namely“Not Depressed”, “Moderately Depressed”, and“Severely Depressed”. This overview presentsa description on the task, the data set, method-ologies used and an analysis on the results ofthe submissions. The models that were submit-ted as a part of the shared task had used a va-riety of technologies from traditional machinelearning algorithms to deep learning models. It could be observed from the result that thetransformer based models have outperformedthe other models. Among the 31 teams whohad submitted their results for the shared task,the best macro F1-score of 0.583 was obtainedusing transformer based model.

This paper illustrates the overview of the sharedtask on automatic speech recognition in the Tamillanguage. In the shared task, spontaneousTamil speech data gathered from elderly andtransgender people was given for recognitionand evaluation. These utterances were collected from people when they communicatedin the public locations such as hospitals, markets, vegetable shop, etc. The speech corpusincludes utterances of male, female, and transgender and was split into training and testingdata. The given task was evaluated using WER(Word Error Rate). The participants used thetransformer-based model for automatic speechrecognition. Different results using differentpre-trained transformer models are discussedin this overview paper.

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DLRG@LT-EDI-ACL2022:Detecting signs of Depression from Social Media using XGBoost Method
Herbert Sharen | Ratnavel Rajalakshmi

Depression is linked to the development of dementia. Cognitive functions such as thinkingand remembering generally deteriorate in dementiapatients. Social media usage has beenincreased among the people in recent days. Thetechnology advancements help the communityto express their views publicly. Analysing thesigns of depression from texts has become animportant area of research now, as it helps toidentify this kind of mental disorders among thepeople from their social media posts. As part ofthe shared task on detecting signs of depressionfrom social media text, a dataset has been providedby the organizers (Sampath et al.). Weapplied different machine learning techniquessuch as Support Vector Machine, Random Forestand XGBoost classifier to classify the signsof depression. Experimental results revealedthat, the XGBoost model outperformed othermodels with the highest classification accuracyof 0.61% and an Macro F1 score of 0.54.

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IDIAP Submission@LT-EDI-ACL2022 : Hope Speech Detection for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Muskaan Singh | Petr Motlicek

Social media platforms have been provoking masses of people. The individual comments affect a prevalent way of thinking by moving away from preoccupation with discrimination, loneliness, or influence in building confidence, support, and good qualities. This paper aims to identify hope in these social media posts. Hope significantly impacts the well-being of people, as suggested by health professionals. It reflects the belief to achieve an objective, discovers a new path, or become motivated to formulate pathways. In this paper we classify given a social media post, hope speech or not hope speech, using ensembled voting of BERT, ERNIE 2.0 and RoBERTa for English language with 0.54 macro F1-score (2^st rank). For non-English languages Malayalam, Spanish and Tamil we utilized XLM RoBERTA with 0.50, 0.81, 0.3 macro F1 score (1^st, 1^st,3^rd rank) respectively. For Kannada, we use Multilingual BERT with 0.32 F1 score(5^th)position. We release our code-base here: https://github.com/Muskaan-Singh/Hate-Speech-detection.git.

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IDIAP Submission@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in social media comments
Muskaan Singh | Petr Motlicek

The increased expansion of abusive content on social media platforms negatively affects online users. Transphobic/homophobic content indicates hatred comments for lesbian, gay, transgender, or bisexual people. It leads to offensive speech and causes severe social problems that can make online platforms toxic and unpleasant to LGBT+people, endeavoring to eliminate equality, diversity, and inclusion. In this paper, we present our classification system; given comments, it predicts whether or not it contains any form of homophobia/transphobia with a Zero-Shot learning framework. Our system submission achieved 0.40, 0.85, 0.89 F1-score for Tamil and Tamil-English, English with (1^st, 1^st,8^th) ranks respectively. We release our codebase here: https://github.com/Muskaan-Singh/Homophobia-and-Transphobia-ACL-Submission.git.

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IDIAP Submission@LT-EDI-ACL2022: Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text
Muskaan Singh | Petr Motlicek

Depression is a common illness involving sadness and lack of interest in all day-to-day activities. It is important to detect depression at an early stage as it is treated at an early stage to avoid consequences. In this paper, we present our system submission of ARGUABLY for DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022. We aim to detect the signs of depression of a person from their social media postings wherein people share their feelings and emotions. The proposed system is an ensembled voting model with fine-tuned BERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet. Given social media postings in English, the submitted system classify the signs of depression into three labels, namely “not depressed,” “moderately depressed,” and “severely depressed.” Our best model is ranked 3^rd position with 0.54% accuracy . We make our codebase accessible here.

Homophobia and Transphobia Detection is the task of identifying homophobia, transphobia, and non-anti-LGBT+ content from the given corpus. Homophobia and transphobia are both toxic languages directed at LGBTQ+ individuals that are described as hate speech. This paper summarizes our findings on the “Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in social media comments” shared task held at LT-EDI 2022 - ACL 2022 1. This shared taskfocused on three sub-tasks for Tamil, English, and Tamil-English (code-mixed) languages. It received 10 systems for Tamil, 13 systems for English, and 11 systems for Tamil-English. The best systems for Tamil, English, and Tamil-English scored 0.570, 0.870, and 0.610, respectively, on average macro F1-score.

Hope Speech detection is the task of classifying a sentence as hope speech or non-hope speech given a corpus of sentences. Hope speech is any message or content that is positive, encouraging, reassuring, inclusive and supportive that inspires and engenders optimism in the minds of people. In contrast to identifying and censoring negative speech patterns, hope speech detection is focussed on recognising and promoting positive speech patterns online. In this paper, we report an overview of the findings and results from the shared task on hope speech detection for Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, English and Spanish languages conducted in the second workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (LT-EDI-2022) organised as a part of ACL 2022. The participants were provided with annotated training & development datasets and unlabelled test datasets in all the five languages. The goal of the shared task is to classify the given sentences into one of the two hope speech classes. The performances of the systems submitted by the participants were evaluated in terms of micro-F1 score and weighted-F1 score. The datasets for this challenge are openly available

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Mathematical Natural Language Processing (MathNLP)

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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Mathematical Natural Language Processing (MathNLP)
Deborah Ferreira | Marco Valentino | Andre Freitas | Sean Welleck | Moritz Schubotz

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Tracing and Manipulating intermediate values in Neural Math Problem Solvers
Yuta Matsumoto | Benjamin Heinzerling | Masashi Yoshikawa | Kentaro Inui

How language models process complex input that requires multiple steps of inference is not well understood. Previous research has shown that information about intermediate values of these inputs can be extracted from the activations of the models, but it is unclear where that information is encoded and whether that information is indeed used during inference. We introduce a method for analyzing how a Transformer model processes these inputs by focusing on simple arithmetic problems and their intermediate values. To trace where information about intermediate values is encoded, we measure the correlation between intermediate values and the activations of the model using principal component analysis (PCA). Then, we perform a causal intervention by manipulating model weights. This intervention shows that the weights identified via tracing are not merely correlated with intermediate values, but causally related to model predictions. Our findings show that the model has a locality to certain intermediate values, and this is useful for enhancing the interpretability of the models.

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Investigating Math Word Problems using Pretrained Multilingual Language Models
Minghuan Tan | Lei Wang | Lingxiao Jiang | Jing Jiang

In this paper, we revisit math word problems (MWPs) from the cross-lingual and multilingual perspective. We construct our MWP solvers over pretrained multilingual language models using the sequence-to-sequence model with copy mechanism. We compare how the MWP solvers perform in cross-lingual and multilingual scenarios. To facilitate the comparison of cross-lingual performance, we first adapt the large-scale English dataset MathQA as a counterpart of the Chinese dataset Math23K. Then we extend several English datasets to bilingual datasets through machine translation plus human annotation. Our experiments show that the MWP solvers may not be transferred to a different language even if the target expressions share the same numerical constants and operator set. However, it can be better generalized if problem types exist on both source language and target language.

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Induced Natural Language Rationales and Interleaved Markup Tokens Enable Extrapolation in Large Language Models
Mirelle Candida Bueno | Carlos Gemmell | Jeff Dalton | Roberto Lotufo | Rodrigo Nogueira

The ability to extrapolate, i.e., to make predictions on sequences that are longer than those presented as training examples, is a challenging problem for current deep learning models. Recent work shows that this limitation persists in state-of-the-art Transformer-based models. Most solutions to this problem use specific architectures or training methods that do not generalize to other tasks. We demonstrate that large language models can succeed in extrapolation without modifying their architecture or training procedure. Our experimental results show that generating step-by-step rationales and introducing marker tokens are both required for effective extrapolation. First, we induce a language model to produce step-by-step rationales before outputting the answer to effectively communicate the task to the model. However, as sequences become longer, we find that current models struggle to keep track of token positions. To address this issue, we interleave output tokens with markup tokens that act as explicit positional and counting symbols. Our findings show how these two complementary approaches enable remarkable sequence extrapolation and highlight a limitation of current architectures to effectively generalize without explicit surface form guidance. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/induced-rationales-markup-tokens-0650/README.md

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Towards Autoformalization of Mathematics and Code Correctness: Experiments with Elementary Proofs
Garett Cunningham | Razvan Bunescu | David Juedes

The ever-growing complexity of mathematical proofs makes their manual verification by mathematicians very cognitively demanding. Autoformalization seeks to address this by translating proofs written in natural language into a formal representation that is computer-verifiable via interactive theorem provers. In this paper, we introduce a semantic parsing approach, based on the Universal Transformer architecture, that translates elementary mathematical proofs into an equivalent formalization in the language of the Coq interactive theorem prover. The same architecture is also trained to translate simple imperative code decorated with Hoare triples into formally verifiable proofs of correctness in Coq. Experiments on a limited domain of artificial and human-written proofs show that the models generalize well to intermediate lengths not seen during training and variations in natural language.

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Numerical Correlation in Text
Daniel Spokoyny | Chien-Sheng Wu | Caiming Xiong

Evaluation of quantitative reasoning of large language models is an important step towards understanding their current capabilities and limitations. We propose a new task, Numerical Correlation in Text, which requires models to identify the correlation between two numbers in a sentence. To this end, we introduce a new dataset, which contains over 2,000 Wikipedia sentences with two numbers and their correlation labels. Using this dataset we are able to show that recent numerically aware pretraining methods for language models do not help generalization on this task posing a challenge for future work in this area.

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Extracting Operator Trees from Model Embeddings
Anja Reusch | Wolfgang Lehner

Transformer-based language models are able to capture several linguistic properties such as hierarchical structures like dependency or constituency trees. Whether similar structures for mathematics are extractable from language models has not yet been explored. This work aims to probe current state-of-the-art models for the extractability of Operator Trees from their contextualized embeddings using the structure probe designed by Hewitt and Manning. We release the code and our data set for future analysis.

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End-to-End Evaluation of a Spoken Dialogue System for Learning Basic Mathematics
Eda Okur | Saurav Sahay | Roddy Fuentes Alba | Lama Nachman

The advances in language-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies applied to build educational applications can present AI for social-good opportunities with a broader positive impact. Across many disciplines, enhancing the quality of mathematics education is crucial in building critical thinking and problem-solving skills at younger ages. Conversational AI systems have started maturing to a point where they could play a significant role in helping students learn fundamental math concepts. This work presents a task-oriented Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) built to support play-based learning of basic math concepts for early childhood education. The system has been evaluated via real-world deployments at school while the students are practicing early math concepts with multimodal interactions. We discuss our efforts to improve the SDS pipeline built for math learning, for which we explore utilizing MathBERT representations for potential enhancement to the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module. We perform an end-to-end evaluation using real-world deployment outputs from the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Intent Recognition, and Dialogue Manager (DM) components to understand how error propagation affects the overall performance in real-world scenarios.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA)

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Geographical Distance Is The New Hyperparameter: A Case Study Of Finding The Optimal Pre-trained Language For English-isiZulu Machine Translation.
Muhammad Umair Nasir | Innocent Mchechesi

Stemming from the limited availability of datasets and textual resources for low-resource languages such as isiZulu, there is a significant need to be able to harness knowledge from pre-trained models to improve low resource machine translation. Moreover, a lack of techniques to handle the complexities of morphologically rich languages has compounded the unequal development of translation models, with many widely spoken African languages being left behind. This study explores the potential benefits of transfer learning in an English-isiZulu translation framework. The results indicate the value of transfer learning from closely related languages to enhance the performance of low-resource translation models, thus providing a key strategy for low-resource translation going forward. We gathered results from 8 different language corpora, including one multi-lingual corpus, and saw that isiXhosa-isiZulu outperformed all languages, with a BLEU score of 8.56 on the test set which was better from the multi-lingual corpora pre-trained model by 2.73. We also derived a new coefficient, Nasir’s Geographical Distance Coefficient (NGDC) which provides an easy selection of languages for the pre-trained models. NGDC also indicated that isiXhosa should be selected as the language for the pre-trained model.

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An Annotated Dataset and Automatic Approaches for Discourse Mode Identification in Low-resource Bengali Language
Salim Sazzed

The modes of discourse aid in comprehending the convention and purpose of various forms of languages used during communication. In this study, we introduce a discourse mode annotated corpus for the low-resource Bangla (also referred to as Bengali) language. The corpus consists of sentence-level annotation of three different discourse modes, narrative, descriptive, and informative of the text excerpted from a number of Bangla novels. We analyze the annotated corpus to expose various linguistic aspects of discourse modes, such as class distributions and average sentence lengths. To automatically determine the mode of discourse, we apply CML (classical machine learning) classifiers with n-gram based statistical features and a fine-tuned BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) based language model. We observe that fine-tuned BERT-based approach yields more promising results than n-gram based CML classifiers. Our created discourse mode annotated dataset, the first of its kind in Bangla, and the evaluation, provide baselines for the automatic discourse mode identification in Bangla and can assist various downstream natural language processing tasks.

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Pivot Through English: Reliably Answering Multilingual Questions without Document Retrieval
Ivan Montero | Shayne Longpre | Ni Lao | Andrew Frank | Christopher DuBois

Existing methods for open-retrieval question answering in lower resource languages (LRLs) lag significantly behind English. They not only suffer from the shortcomings of non-English document retrieval, but are reliant on language-specific supervision for either the task or translation. We formulate a task setup more realistic to available resources, that circumvents document retrieval to reliably transfer knowledge from English to lower resource languages. Assuming a strong English question answering model or database, we compare and analyze methods that pivot through English: to map foreign queries to English and then English answers back to target language answers. Within this task setup we propose Reranked Multilingual Maximal Inner Product Search (RM-MIPS), akin to semantic similarity retrieval over the English training set with reranking, which outperforms the strongest baselines by 2.7% on XQuAD and 6.2% on MKQA. Analysis demonstrates the particular efficacy of this strategy over state-of-the-art alternatives in challenging settings: low-resource languages, with extensive distractor data and query distribution misalignment. Circumventing retrieval, our analysis shows this approach offers rapid answer generation to many other languages off-the-shelf, without necessitating additional training data in the target language.

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Cross-Lingual QA as a Stepping Stone for Monolingual Open QA in Icelandic
Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson | Hafsteinn Einarsson

It can be challenging to build effective open question answering (open QA) systems for languages other than English, mainly due to a lack of labeled data for training. We present a data efficient method to bootstrap such a system for languages other than English. Our approach requires only limited QA resources in the given language, along with machine-translated data, and at least a bilingual language model. To evaluate our approach, we build such a system for the Icelandic language and evaluate performance over trivia style datasets. The corpora used for training are English in origin but machine translated into Icelandic. We train a bilingual Icelandic/English language model to embed English context and Icelandic questions following methodology introduced with DensePhrases (Lee et al., 2021). The resulting system is an open domain cross-lingual QA system between Icelandic and English. Finally, the system is adapted for Icelandic only open QA, demonstrating how it is possible to efficiently create an open QA system with limited access to curated datasets in the language of interest.

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Multilingual Event Linking to Wikidata
Adithya Pratapa | Rishubh Gupta | Teruko Mitamura

We present a task of multilingual linking of events to a knowledge base. We automatically compile a large-scale dataset for this task, comprising of 1.8M mentions across 44 languages referring to over 10.9K events from Wikidata. We propose two variants of the event linking task: 1) multilingual, where event descriptions are from the same language as the mention, and 2) crosslingual, where all event descriptions are in English. On the two proposed tasks, we compare multiple event linking systems including BM25+ (Lv and Zhai, 2011) and multilingual adaptations of the biencoder and crossencoder architectures from BLINK (Wu et al., 2020). In our experiments on the two task variants, we find both biencoder and crossencoder models significantly outperform the BM25+ baseline. Our results also indicate that the crosslingual task is in general more challenging than the multilingual task. To test the out-of-domain generalization of the proposed linking systems, we additionally create a Wikinews-based evaluation set. We present qualitative analysis highlighting various aspects captured by the proposed dataset, including the need for temporal reasoning over context and tackling diverse event descriptions across languages.

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Complex Word Identification in Vietnamese: Towards Vietnamese Text Simplification
Phuong Nguyen | David Kauchak

Text Simplification has been an extensively researched problem in English, but has not been investigated in Vietnamese. We focus on the Vietnamese-specific Complex Word Identification task, often the first step in Lexical Simplification (Shardlow, 2013). We examine three different Vietnamese datasets constructed for other Natural Language Processing tasks and show that, like in other languages, frequency is a strong signal in determining whether a word is complex, with a mean accuracy of 86.87%. Across the datasets, we find that the 10% most frequent words in many corpus can be labelled as simple, and the rest as complex, though this is more variable for smaller corpora. We also examine how human annotators perform at this task. Given the subjective nature, there is a fair amount of variability in which words are seen as difficult, though majority results are more consistent.

Current virtual assistant (VA) platforms are beholden to the limited number of languages they support. Every component, such as the tokenizer and intent classifier, is engineered for specific languages in these intricate platforms. Thus, supporting a new language in such platforms is a resource-intensive operation requiring expensive re-training and re-designing. In this paper, we propose a benchmark for evaluating language-agnostic intent classification, the most critical component of VA platforms. To ensure the benchmarking is challenging and comprehensive, we include 29 public and internal datasets across 10 low-resource languages and evaluate various training and testing settings with consideration of both accuracy and training time. The benchmarking result shows that Watson Assistant, among 7 commercial VA platforms and pre-trained multilingual language models (LMs), demonstrates close-to-best accuracy with the best accuracy-training time trade-off.

This paper introduces our proposed system for the MIA Shared Task on Cross-lingual Openretrieval Question Answering (COQA). In this challenging scenario, given an input question the system has to gather evidence documents from a multilingual pool and generate from them an answer in the language of the question. We devised several approaches combining different model variants for three main components: Data Augmentation, Passage Retrieval, and Answer Generation. For passage retrieval, we evaluated the monolingual BM25 ranker against the ensemble of re-rankers based on multilingual pretrained language models (PLMs) and also variants of the shared task baseline, re-training it from scratch using a recently introduced contrastive loss that maintains a strong gradient signal throughout training by means of mixed negative samples. For answer generation, we focused on languageand domain-specialization by means of continued language model (LM) pretraining of existing multilingual encoders. Additionally, for both passage retrieval and answer generation, we augmented the training data provided by the task organizers with automatically generated question-answer pairs created from Wikipedia passages to mitigate the issue of data scarcity, particularly for the low-resource languages for which no training data were provided. Our results show that language- and domain-specialization as well as data augmentation help, especially for low-resource languages.

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Zero-shot cross-lingual open domain question answering
Sumit Agarwal | Suraj Tripathi | Teruko Mitamura | Carolyn Penstein Rose

People speaking different kinds of languages search for information in a cross-lingual manner. They tend to ask questions in their language and expect the answer to be in the same language, despite the evidence lying in another language. In this paper, we present our approach for this task of cross-lingual open-domain question-answering. Our proposed method employs a passage reranker, the fusion-in-decoder technique for generation, and a wiki data entity-based post-processing system to tackle the inability to generate entities across all languages. Our end-2-end pipeline shows an improvement of 3 and 4.6 points on F1 and EM metrics respectively, when compared with the baseline CORA model on the XOR-TyDi dataset. We also evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed techniques in the zero-shot setting using the MKQA dataset and show an improvement of 5 points in F1 for high-resource and 3 points improvement for low-resource zero-shot languages. Our team, CMUmQA’s submission in the MIA-Shared task ranked 1st in the constrained setup for the dev and 2nd in the test setting.

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MIA 2022 Shared Task Submission: Leveraging Entity Representations, Dense-Sparse Hybrids, and Fusion-in-Decoder for Cross-Lingual Question Answering
Zhucheng Tu | Sarguna Janani Padmanabhan

We describe our two-stage system for the Multilingual Information Access (MIA) 2022 Shared Task on Cross-Lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering. The first stage consists of multilingual passage retrieval with a hybrid dense and sparse retrieval strategy. The second stage consists of a reader which outputs the answer from the top passages returned by the first stage. We show the efficacy of using entity representations, sparse retrieval signals to help dense retrieval, and Fusion-in-Decoder. On the development set, we obtain 43.46 F1 on XOR-TyDi QA and 21.99 F1 on MKQA, for an average F1 score of 32.73. On the test set, we obtain 40.93 F1 on XOR-TyDi QA and 22.29 F1 on MKQA, for an average F1 score of 31.61. We improve over the official baseline by over 4 F1 points on both the development and test sets.

We present the results of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA) 2022 Shared Task, evaluating cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (QA) systems in 16 typologically diverse languages. In this task, we adapted two large-scale cross-lingual open-retrieval QA datasets in 14 typologically diverse languages, and newly annotated open-retrieval QA data in 2 underrepresented languages: Tagalog and Tamil. Four teams submitted their systems. The best constrained system uses entity-aware contextualized representations for document retrieval, thereby achieving an average F1 score of 31.6, which is 4.1 F1 absolute higher than the challenging baseline. The best system obtains particularly significant improvements in Tamil (20.8 F1), whereas most of the other systems yield nearly zero scores. The best unconstrained system achieves 32.2 F1, outperforming our baseline by 4.5 points.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Multimodal Learning

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Language-agnostic Semantic Consistent Text-to-Image Generation
SeongJun Jung | Woo Suk Choi | Seongho Choi | Byoung-Tak Zhang

Recent GAN-based text-to-image generation models have advanced that they can generate photo-realistic images matching semantically with descriptions. However, research on multi-lingual text-to-image generation has not been carried out yet much. There are two problems when constructing a multilingual text-to-image generation model: 1) language imbalance issue in text-to-image paired datasets and 2) generating images that have the same meaning but are semantically inconsistent with each other in texts expressed in different languages. To this end, we propose a Language-agnostic Semantic Consistent Generative Adversarial Network (LaSC-GAN) for text-to-image generation, which can generate semantically consistent images via language-agnostic text encoder and Siamese mechanism. Experiments on relatively low-resource language text-image datasets show that the model has comparable generation quality as images generated by high-resource language text, and generates semantically consistent images for texts with the same meaning even in different languages.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multimodal Machine Learning in Low-resource Languages

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Multimodal Code-Mixed Tamil Troll Meme Classification using Feature Fusion
Ramesh Kannan | Ratnavel Rajalakshmi

Memes became an important way of expressing relevant idea through social media platforms and forums. At the same time, these memes are trolled by a person who tries to get identified from the other internet users like social media users, chat rooms and blogs. The memes contain both textual and visual information. Based on the content of memes, they are trolled in online community. There is no restriction for language usage in online media. The present work focuses on whether memes are trolled or not trolled. The proposed multi modal approach achieved considerably better weighted average F1 score of 0.5437 compared to Unimodal approaches. The other performance metrics like precision, recall, accuracy and macro average have also been studied to observe the proposed system.

of expressing relevant idea through social media platforms and forums. At the same time, these memes are trolled by a person who tries to get identified from the other internet users like social media users, chat rooms and blogs. The memes contain both textual and visual information. Based on the content of memes, they are trolled in online community. There is no restriction for language usage in online media. The present work focuses on whether memes are trolled or not trolled. The proposed multi modal approach achieved considerably better weighted average F1 score of 0.5437 compared to Unimodal approaches. The other performance metrics like precision, recall, accuracy and macro average have also been studied to observe the proposed system.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Performance and Interpretability Evaluations of Multimodal, Multipurpose, Massive-Scale Models

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Performance and Interpretability Evaluations of Multimodal, Multipurpose, Massive-Scale Models

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On the Effects of Video Grounding on Language Models
Ehsan Doostmohammadi | Marco Kuhlmann

Transformer-based models trained on text and vision modalities try to improve the performance on multimodal downstream tasks or tackle the problem Transformer-based models trained on text and vision modalities try to improve the performance on multimodal downstream tasks or tackle the problem of lack of grounding, e.g., addressing issues like models’ insufficient commonsense knowledge. While it is more straightforward to evaluate the effects of such models on multimodal tasks, such as visual question answering or image captioning, it is not as well-understood how these tasks affect the model itself, and its internal linguistic representations. In this work, we experiment with language models grounded in videos and measure the models’ performance on predicting masked words chosen based on their imageability. The results show that the smaller model benefits from video grounding in predicting highly imageable words, while the results for the larger model seem harder to interpret.of lack of grounding, e.g., addressing issues like models’ insufficient commonsense knowledge. While it is more straightforward to evaluate the effects of such models on multimodal tasks, such as visual question answering or image captioning, it is not as well-understood how these tasks affect the model itself, and its internal linguistic representations. In this work, we experiment with language models grounded in videos and measure the models’ performance on predicting masked words chosen based on their imageability. The results show that the smaller model benefits from video grounding in predicting highly imageable words, while the results for the larger model seem harder to interpret.

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Rethinking Task Sampling for Few-shot Vision-Language Transfer Learning
Zhenhailong Wang | Hang Yu | Manling Li | Han Zhao | Heng Ji

Despite achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, existing vision-language models still fall short of few-shot transfer ability on domain-specific problems. Classical fine-tuning often fails to prevent highly expressive models from exploiting spurious correlations. Although model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) presents as a natural alternative for few-shot transfer learning, the expensive computation due to implicit second-order optimization limits its use on large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP. While much literature has been devoted to exploring alternative optimization strategies, we identify another essential aspect towards effective few-shot transfer learning, task sampling, which is previously only be viewed as part of data pre-processing in MAML. To show the impact of task sampling, we propose a simple algorithm, Model-Agnostic Multitask Fine-tuning (MAMF), which differentiates classical fine-tuning only on uniformly sampling multiple tasks. Despite its simplicity, we show that MAMF consistently outperforms classical fine-tuning on five few-shot image classification tasks. We further show that the effectiveness of the bi-level optimization in MAML is highly sensitive to the zero-shot performance of a task in the context of few-shot vision-language classification. The goal of this paper is to provide new insights on what makes few-shot learning work, and encourage more research into investigating better task sampling strategies.

Knowledge transfer between neural language models is a widely used technique that has proven to improve performance in a multitude of natural language tasks, in particular with the recent rise of large pre-trained language models like BERT. Similarly, high cross-lingual transfer has been shown to occur in multilingual language models. Hence, it is of great importance to better understand this phenomenon as well as its limits. While most studies about cross-lingual transfer focus on training on independent and identically distributed (i.e. i.i.d.) samples, in this paper we study cross-lingual transfer in a continual learning setting on two sequence labeling tasks: slot-filling and named entity recognition. We investigate this by training multilingual BERT on sequences of 9 languages, one language at a time, on the MultiATIS++ and MultiCoNER corpora. Our first findings are that forward transfer between languages is retained although forgetting is present. Additional experiments show that lost performance can be recovered with as little as a single training epoch even if forgetting was high, which can be explained by a progressive shift of model parameters towards a better multilingual initialization. We also find that commonly used metrics might be insufficient to assess continual learning performance.

Pixel-level autoregression with Transformer models (Image GPT or iGPT) is one of the recent approaches to image generation that has not received massive attention and elaboration due to quadratic complexity of attention as it imposes huge memory requirements and thus restricts the resolution of the generated images. In this paper, we propose to tackle this problem by adopting Byte-Pair-Encoding (BPE) originally proposed for text processing to the image domain to drastically reduce the length of the modeled sequence. The obtained results demonstrate that it is possible to decrease the amount of computation required to generate images pixel-by-pixel while preserving their quality and the expressiveness of the features extracted from the model. Our results show that there is room for improvement for iGPT-like models with more thorough research on the way to the optimal sequence encoding techniques for images.

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Cost-Effective Language Driven Image Editing with LX-DRIM
Rodrigo Santos | António Branco | João Ricardo Silva

Cross-modal language and image processing is envisaged as a way to improve language understanding by resorting to visual grounding, but only recently, with the emergence of neural architectures specifically tailored to cope with both modalities, has it attracted increased attention and obtained promising results. In this paper we address a cross-modal task of language-driven image design, in particular the task of altering a given image on the basis of language instructions. We also avoid the need for a specifically tailored architecture and resort instead to a general purpose model in the Transformer family. Experiments with the resulting tool, LX-DRIM, show very encouraging results, confirming the viability of the approach for language-driven image design while keeping it affordable in terms of compute and data.

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Shapes of Emotions: Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations via Emotion Shifts
Keshav Bansal | Harsh Agarwal | Abhinav Joshi | Ashutosh Modi

Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is an important and active research area. Recent work has shown the benefits of using multiple modalities (e.g., text, audio, and video) for the ERC task. In a conversation, participants tend to maintain a particular emotional state unless some stimuli evokes a change. There is a continuous ebb and flow of emotions in a conversation. Inspired by this observation, we propose a multimodal ERC model and augment it with an emotion-shift component that improves performance. The proposed emotion-shift component is modular and can be added to any existing multimodal ERC model (with a few modifications). We experiment with different variants of the model, and results show that the inclusion of emotion shift signal helps the model to outperform existing models for ERC on MOSEI and IEMOCAP datasets.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Massively Multilingual Natural Language Understanding Workshop (MMNLU-22)

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Robust Domain Adaptation for Pre-trained Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models
Mathieu Grosso | Alexis Mathey | Pirashanth Ratnamogan | William Vanhuffel | Michael Fotso

Recent literature has demonstrated the potential of multilingual Neural Machine Translation (mNMT) models. However, the most efficient models are not well suited to specialized industries. In these cases, internal data is scarce and expensive to find in all language pairs. Therefore, fine-tuning a mNMT model on a specialized domain is hard. In this context, we decided to focus on a new task: Domain Adaptation of a pre-trained mNMT model on a single pair of language while trying to maintain model quality on generic domain data for all language pairs. The risk of loss on generic domain and on other pairs is high. This task is key for mNMT model adoption in the industry and is at the border of many others. We propose a fine-tuning procedure for the generic mNMT that combines embeddings freezing and adversarial loss. Our experiments demonstrated that the procedure improves performances on specialized data with a minimal loss in initial performances on generic domain for all languages pairs, compared to a naive standard approach (+10.0 BLEU score on specialized data, -0.01 to -0.5 BLEU on WMT and Tatoeba datasets on the other pairs with M2M100).

Encoding both language-specific and language-agnostic information into a single high-dimensional space is a common practice of pre-trained Multi-lingual Language Models (pMLM). Such encoding has been shown to perform effectively on natural language tasks requiring semantics of the whole sentence (e.g., translation). However, its effectiveness appears to be limited on tasks requiring partial information of the utterance (e.g., multi-lingual entity retrieval, template retrieval, and semantic alignment). In this work, a novel Fine-grained Multilingual Disentangled Autoencoder (FMDA) is proposed to disentangle fine-grained semantic information from language-specific information in a multi-lingual setting. FMDA is capable of successfully extracting the disentangled template semantic and residual semantic representations. Experiments conducted on the MASSIVE dataset demonstrate that the disentangled encoding can boost each other during the training, thus consistently outperforming the original pMLM and the strong language disentanglement baseline on monolingual template retrieval and cross-lingual semantic retrieval tasks across multiple languages.

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Byte-Level Massively Multilingual Semantic Parsing
Massimo Nicosia | Francesco Piccinno

Token free approaches have been successfully applied to a series of word and span level tasks. In this work, we evaluate a byte-level sequence to sequence model (ByT5) on the 51 languages in the MASSIVE multilingual semantic parsing dataset. We examine multiple experimental settings: (i) zero-shot, (ii) full gold data and (iii) zero-shot with synthetic data. By leveraging a state-of-the-art label projection method for machine translated examples, we are able to reduce the gap in exact match to only 5 points with respect to a model trained on gold data from all the languages. We additionally provide insights on the cross-lingual transfer of ByT5 and show how the model compares with respect to mT5 across all parameter sizes.

Multilingual spoken language understanding (SLU) consists of two sub-tasks, namely intent detection and slot filling. To improve the performance of these two sub-tasks, we propose to use consistency regularization based on a hybrid data augmentation strategy. The consistency regularization enforces the predicted distributions for an example and its semantically equivalent augmentation to be consistent. We conduct experiments on the MASSIVE dataset under both full-dataset and zero-shot settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method improves the performance on both intent detection and slot filling tasks. Our system ranked 1st in the MMNLU-22 competition under the full-dataset setting.

Cross-lingual phenomena are quite common in informal contexts like social media, where users are likely to mix their native language with English or other languages. However, few studies have focused so far on analyzing cross-lingual interactions in voice-assistant data, which present peculiar features in terms of sentence length, named entities, and use of spoken language. Also, little attention has been posed to European countries, where English is frequently used as a second language. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical analysis of cross-lingual phenomena (code-mixing, linguistic borrowing, foreign named entities) in the interactions with a large-scale voice assistant in European countries. To do this, we first introduce a general, highly-scalable technique to generate synthetic mixed training data annotated with token-level language labels and we train two neural network models to predict them. We evaluate the models both on the synthetic dataset and on a real dataset of code-switched utterances, showing that the best performance is obtained by a character convolution based model. The results of the analysis highlight different behaviors between countries, having Italy with the highest ratio of cross-lingual utterances and Spain with a marked preference in keeping Spanish words. Our research, paired to the increase of the cross-lingual phenomena in time, motivates further research in developing multilingual Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models, which can naturally deal with cross-lingual interactions.

The joint intent classification and slot filling task seeks to detect the intent of an utterance and extract its semantic concepts. In the zero-shot cross-lingual setting, a model is trained on a source language and then transferred to other target languages through multi-lingual representations without additional training data. While prior studies show that pre-trained multilingual sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models can facilitate zero-shot transfer, there is little understanding on how to design the output template for the joint prediction tasks. In this paper, we examine three aspects of the output template – (1) label mapping, (2) task dependency, and (3) word order. Experiments on the MASSIVE dataset consisting of 51 languages show that our output template significantly improves the performance of pre-trained cross-lingual language models.

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C5L7: A Zero-Shot Algorithm for Intent and Slot Detection in Multilingual Task Oriented Languages
Jiun-hao Jhan | Qingxiaoyang Zhu | Nehal Bengre | Tapas Kanungo

Voice assistants are becoming central to our lives. The convenience of using voice assistants to do simple tasks has created an industry for voice-enabled devices like TVs, thermostats, air conditioners, etc. It has also improved the quality of life of elders by making the world more accessible. Voice assistants engage in task-oriented dialogues using machine-learned language understanding models. However, training deep-learned models take a lot of training data, which is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, it is even more problematic if we want the voice assistant to understand hundreds of languages. In this paper, we present a zero-shot deep learning algorithm that uses only the English part of the Massive dataset and achieves a high level of accuracy across 51 languages. The algorithm uses a delexicalized translation model to generate multilingual data for data augmentation. The training data is further weighted to improve the accuracy of the worst-performing languages. We report on our experiments with code-switching, word order, multilingual ensemble methods, and other techniques and their impact on overall accuracy.

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Machine Translation for Multilingual Intent Detection and Slots Filling
Maxime De bruyn | Ehsan Lotfi | Jeska Buhmann | Walter Daelemans

We expect to interact with home assistants irrespective of our language. However, scaling the Natural Language Understanding pipeline to multiple languages while keeping the same level of accuracy remains a challenge. In this work, we leverage the inherent multilingual aspect of translation models for the task of multilingual intent classification and slot filling. Our experiments reveal that they work equally well with general-purpose multilingual text-to-text models. Furthermore, their accuracy can be further improved by artificially increasing the size of the training set. Unfortunately, increasing the training set also increases the overlap with the test set, leading to overestimating their true capabilities. As a result, we propose two new evaluation methods capable of accounting for an overlap between the training and test set.

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Massively Multilingual Natural Language Understanding 2022 (MMNLU-22) Workshop and Competition
Jack FitzGerald | Christopher Hench | Charith Peris | Kay Rottmann

To be writen (workshop summary paper)

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning (MRL)

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Entity Retrieval from Multilingual Knowledge Graphs
Saher Esmeir | Arthur Câmara | Edgar Meij

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are structured databases that capture real-world entities and their relationships. The task of entity retrieval from a KG aims at retrieving a ranked list of entities relevant to a given user query. While English-only entity retrieval has attracted considerable attention, user queries, as well as the information contained in the KG, may be represented in multiple—and possibly distinct—languages. Furthermore, KG content may vary between languages due to different information sources and points of view. Recent advances in language representation have enabled natural ways of bridging gaps between languages. In this paper, we therefore propose to utilise language models (LMs) and diverse entity representations to enable truly multilingual entity retrieval. We propose two approaches: (i) an array of monolingual retrievers and (ii) a single multilingual retriever, trained using queries and documents in multiple languages. We show that while our approach is on par with the significantly more complex state-of-the-art method for the English task, it can be successfully applied to virtually any language with a LM. Furthermore, it allows languages to benefit from one another, yielding significantly better performance, both for low- and high-resource languages.

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Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Learning for Event Detection
Luis Guzman Nateras | Viet Lai | Franck Dernoncourt | Thien Nguyen

Cross-Lingual Event Detection (CLED) models are capable of performing the Event Detection (ED) task in multiple languages. Such models are trained using data from a source language and then evaluated on data from a distinct target language. Training is usually performed in the standard supervised setting with labeled data available in the source language. The Few-Shot Learning (FSL) paradigm is yet to be explored for CLED despite its inherent advantage of allowing models to better generalize to unseen event types. As such, in this work, we study the CLED task under an FSL setting. Our contribution is threefold: first, we introduce a novel FSL classification method based on Optimal Transport (OT); second, we present a novel regularization term to incorporate the global distance between the support and query sets; and third, we adapt our approach to the cross-lingual setting by exploiting the alignment between source and target data. Our experiments on three, syntactically-different, target languages show the applicability of our approach and its effectiveness at improving the cross-lingual performance of few-shot models for event detection.

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Zero-shot Cross-Lingual Counterfactual Detection via Automatic Extraction and Prediction of Clue Phrases
Asahi Ushio | Danushka Bollegala

Counterfactual statements describe events that did not or cannot take place unless some conditions are satisfied. Existing counterfactual detection (CFD) methods assume the availability of manually labelled statements for each language they consider, limiting the broad applicability of CFD. In this paper, we consider the problem of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning for CFD. Specifically, we propose a novel loss function based on the clue phrase prediction for generalising a CFD model trained on a source language to multiple target languages, without requiring any human-labelled data. We obtain clue phrases that express various language-specific lexical indicators of counterfactuality in the target language in an unsupervised manner using a neural alignment model. We evaluate our method on the Amazon Multilingual Counterfactual Dataset (AMCD) for English, German, and Japanese languages in the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer setup where no manual annotations are used for the target language during training. The best CFD model fine-tuned on XLM-R improves the macro F1 score by 25% for German and 20% for Japanese target languages compared to a model that is trained only using English source language data.

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Zero-shot Cross-Language Transfer of Monolingual Entity Linking Models
Elliot Schumacher | James Mayfield | Mark Dredze

Most entity linking systems, whether mono or multilingual, link mentions to a single English knowledge base. Few have considered linking non-English text to a non-English KB, and therefore, transferring an English entity linking model to both a new document and KB language. We consider the task of zero-shot cross-language transfer of entity linking systems to a new language and KB. We find that a system trained with multilingual representations does reasonably well, and propose improvements to system training that lead to improved recall in most datasets, often matching the in-language performance. We further conduct a detailed evaluation to elucidate the challenges of this setting.

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Rule-Based Clause-Level Morphology for Multiple Languages
Tillmann Dönicke

This paper describes an approach for the morphosyntactic analysis of clauses, including the analysis of composite verb forms and both overt and covert pronouns. The approach uses grammatical rules for verb inflection and clause-internal word agreement to compute a clause’s morphosyntactic features from the morphological features of the individual words. The approach is tested for eight languages in the 1st Shared Task on Multilingual Clause-Level Morphology, where it achieves F1 scores between 79% and 99% (94% in average).

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Comparative Analysis of Cross-lingual Contextualized Word Embeddings
Hossain Shaikh Saadi | Viktor Hangya | Tobias Eder | Alexander Fraser

Contextualized word embeddings have emerged as the most important tool for performing NLP tasks in a large variety of languages. In order to improve the cross- lingual representation and transfer learning quality, contextualized embedding alignment techniques, such as mapping and model fine-tuning, are employed. Existing techniques however are time-, data- and computational resource-intensive. In this paper we analyze these techniques by utilizing three tasks: bilingual lexicon induction (BLI), word retrieval and cross-lingual natural language inference (XNLI) for a high resource (German-English) and a low resource (Bengali-English) language pair. In contrast to previous works which focus only on a few popular models, we compare five multilingual and seven monolingual language models and investigate the effect of various aspects on their performance, such as vocabulary size, number of languages used for training and number of parameters. Additionally, we propose a parameter-, data- and runtime-efficient technique which can be trained with 10% of the data, less than 10% of the time and have less than 5% of the trainable parameters compared to model fine-tuning. We show that our proposed method is competitive with resource heavy models, even outperforming them in some cases, even though it relies on less resource

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How Language-Dependent is Emotion Detection? Evidence from Multilingual BERT
Luna De Bruyne | Pranaydeep Singh | Orphee De Clercq | Els Lefever | Veronique Hoste

As emotion analysis in text has gained a lot of attention in the field of natural language processing, differences in emotion expression across languages could have consequences for how emotion detection models work. We evaluate the language-dependence of an mBERT-based emotion detection model by comparing language identification performance before and after fine-tuning on emotion detection, and performing (adjusted) zero-shot experiments to assess whether emotion detection models rely on language-specific information. When dealing with typologically dissimilar languages, we found evidence for the language-dependence of emotion detection.

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MicroBERT: Effective Training of Low-resource Monolingual BERTs through Parameter Reduction and Multitask Learning
Luke Gessler | Amir Zeldes

BERT-style contextualized word embedding models are critical for good performance in most NLP tasks, but they are data-hungry and therefore difficult to train for low-resource languages. In this work, we investigate whether a combination of greatly reduced model size and two linguistically rich auxiliary pretraining tasks (part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing) can help produce better BERTs in a low-resource setting. Results from 7 diverse languages indicate that our model, MicroBERT, is able to produce marked improvements in downstream task evaluations, including gains up to 18% for parser LAS and 11% for NER F1 compared to an mBERT baseline, and we achieve these results with less than 1% of the parameter count of a multilingual BERT base–sized model. We conclude that training very small BERTs and leveraging any available labeled data for multitask learning during pretraining can produce models which outperform both their multilingual counterparts and traditional fixed embeddings for low-resource languages.

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Transformers on Multilingual Clause-Level Morphology
Emre Can Acikgoz | Tilek Chubakov | Muge Kural | Gözde Şahin | Deniz Yuret

This paper describes the KUIS-AI NLP team’s submission for the 1st Shared Task on Multilingual Clause-level Morphology (MRL2022). We present our work on all three parts of the shared task: inflection, reinflection, and analysis. We mainly explore two approaches: Trans- former models in combination with data augmentation, and exploiting the state-of-the-art language modeling techniques for morphological analysis. Data augmentation leads to a remarkable performance improvement for most of the languages in the inflection task. Prefix-tuning on pretrained mGPT model helps us to adapt reinflection and analysis tasks in a low-data setting. Additionally, we used pipeline architectures using publicly available open-source lemmatization tools and monolingual BERT- based morphological feature classifiers for rein- flection and analysis tasks, respectively. While Transformer architectures with data augmentation and pipeline architectures achieved the best results for inflection and reinflection tasks, pipelines and prefix-tuning on mGPT received the highest results for the analysis task. Our methods achieved first place in each of the three tasks and outperforms mT5-baseline with 89% for inflection, 80% for reflection, and 12% for analysis. Our code 1 is publicly available.

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Impact of Sequence Length and Copying on Clause-Level Inflection
Badr Jaidi | Utkarsh Saboo | Xihan Wu | Garrett Nicolai | Miikka Silfverberg

We present the University of British Columbia’s submission to the MRL shared task on multilingual clause-level morphology. Our submission extends word-level inflectional models to the clause-level in two ways: first, by evaluating the role that BPE has on the learning of inflectional morphology, and second, by evaluating the importance of a copy bias obtained through data hallucination. Experiments demonstrate a strong preference for language-tuned BPE and a copy bias over a vanilla transformer. The methods are complementary for inflection and analysis tasks – combined models see error reductions of 38% for inflection and 15.6% for analysis; However, this synergy does not hold for reinflection, which performs best under a BPE-only setting. A deeper analysis of the errors generated by our models illustrates that the copy bias may be too strong - the combined model produces predictions more similar to the copy-influenced system, despite the success of the BPE-model.

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Towards Improved Distantly Supervised Multilingual Named-Entity Recognition for Tweets
Ramy Eskander | Shubhanshu Mishra | Sneha Mehta | Sofia Samaniego | Aria Haghighi

Recent low-resource named-entity recognition (NER) work has shown impressive gains by leveraging a single multilingual model trained using distantly supervised data derived from cross-lingual knowledge bases. In this work, we investigate such approaches by leveraging Wikidata to build large-scale NER datasets of Tweets and propose two orthogonal improvements for low-resource NER in the Twitter social media domain: (1) leveraging domain-specific pre-training on Tweets; and (2) building a model for each language family rather than an all-in-one single multilingual model. For (1), we show that mBERT with Tweet pre-training outperforms the state-of-the-art multilingual transformer-based language model, LaBSE, by a relative increase of 34.6% in F1 when evaluated on Twitter data in a language-agnostic multilingual setting. For (2), we show that learning NER models for language families outperforms a single multilingual model by relative increases of 14.1%, 15.8% and 45.3% in F1 when utilizing mBERT, mBERT with Tweet pre-training and LaBSE, respectively. We conduct analyses and present examples for these observed improvements.

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Average Is Not Enough: Caveats of Multilingual Evaluation
Matúš Pikuliak | Marian Simko

This position paper discusses the problem of multilingual evaluation. Using simple statistics, such as average language performance, might inject linguistic biases in favor of dominant language families into evaluation methodology. We argue that a qualitative analysis informed by comparative linguistics is needed for multilingual results to detect this kind of bias. We show in our case study that results in published works can indeed be linguistically biased and we demonstrate that visualization based on URIEL typological database can detect it.

The 2022 Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL) Shared Task was dedicated to clause-level morphology. As the first ever benchmark that defines and evaluates morphology outside its traditional lexical boundaries, the shared task on multilingual clause-level morphology sets the scene for competition across different approaches to morphological modeling, with 3 clause-level sub-tasks: morphological inflection, reinflection and analysis, where systems are required to generate, manipulate or analyze simple sentences centered around a single content lexeme and a set of morphological features characterizing its syntactic clause. This year’s tasks covered eight typologically distinct languages: English, French, German, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Swahili and Turkish. The tasks has received submissions of four systems from three teams which were compared to two baselines implementing prominent multilingual learning methods. The results show that modern NLP models are effective in solving morphological tasks even at the clause level. However, there is still room for improvement, especially in the task of morphological analysis.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP in Agriculture and Livestock Management

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP in Agriculture and Livestock Management
Manjira Sinha | Tirthankar Dasgupta | Sanjay Chatterjee

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Rice Cultivation in India – Challenges and Environmental Effects
Ushasi Bhattacharya

Rice is one of the most cultivated grain crops in India as well as in Asian countries. It is a staple food in India. India is the second largest producer of Rice next to China. This crop is grown mainly in tropical and rain fed areas. In this paper, major types of Rice crops cultivated in India, the major challenges of cultivating Rice in India and its adverse effect in the environment are discussed. We have also discussed how the Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Mobile Applications and other technologies and research works can help to overcome these issues.

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A custom CNN model for detection of rice disease under complex environment
Chiranjit Pal | Sanjoy Pratihar | Imon Mukherjee

The work in this paper designs an image-based rice disease detection framework that takes rice plant image as input and identifies the presence of BrownSpot disease in the image fed into the system. A CNN-based disease detection scheme performs the binary classification task on our custom dataset containing 2223 images of healthy and unhealthy classes under complex environments. Experimental results show that our system is able to achieve consistently satisfactory results in performing disease detection tasks. Furthermore, the CNN disease detection model compares with state-of-the-art works and procures an accuracy of 96.8%.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Novel Ideas in Learning-to-Learn through Interaction (NILLI 2022)

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Novel Ideas in Learning-to-Learn through Interaction (NILLI 2022)
Prasanna Parthasarathi | Marc-Alexandre Côté

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022

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Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022
Nikolaos Aletras | Ilias Chalkidis | Leslie Barrett | Cătălina Goanță | Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro

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On Breadth Alone: Improving the Precision of Terminology Extraction Systems on Patent Corpora
Sean Nordquist | Adam Meyers

Automatic Terminology Extraction (ATE) methods are a class of linguistic, statistical, machine learning or hybrid techniques for identifying terminology in a set of documents. Most modern ATE methods use a statistical measure of how important or characteristic a potential term is to a foreground corpus by using a second background corpus as a baseline. While many variables with ATE methods have been carefully evaluated and tuned in the literature, the effects of choosing a particular background corpus over another are not obvious. In this paper, we propose a methodology that allows us to adjust the relative breadth of the foreground and background corpora in patent documents by taking advantage of the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) scheme. Our results show that for every foreground corpus, the broadest background corpus gave the worst performance, in the worst case that difference is 17%. Similarly, the least broad background corpus gave suboptimal performance in all three experiments. We also demonstrate qualitative differences between background corpora – narrower background corpora tend towards more technical output. We expect our results to generalize to terminology extraction for other legal and technical documents and, generally, to the foreground/background approach to ATE.

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On What it Means to Pay Your Fair Share: Towards Automatically Mapping Different Conceptions of Tax Justice in Legal Research Literature
Reto Gubelmann | Peter Hongler | Elina Margadant | Siegfried Handschuh

In this article, we explore the potential and challenges of applying transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) and statistical methods to a particularly challenging, yet highly important and largely uncharted domain: normative discussions in tax law research. On our conviction, the role of NLP in this essentially contested territory is to make explicit implicit normative assumptions, and to foster debates across ideological divides. To this goal, we propose the first steps towards a method that automatically labels normative statements in tax law research, and that suggests the normative background of these statements. Our results are encouraging, but it is clear that there is still room for improvement.

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ClassActionPrediction: A Challenging Benchmark for Legal Judgment Prediction of Class Action Cases in the US
Gil Semo | Dor Bernsohn | Ben Hagag | Gila Hayat | Joel Niklaus

The research field of Legal Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been very active recently, with Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) becoming one of the most extensively studied tasks. To date, most publicly released LJP datasets originate from countries with civil law. In this work, we release, for the first time, a challenging LJP dataset focused on class action cases in the US. It is the first dataset in the common law system that focuses on the harder and more realistic task involving the complaints as input instead of the often used facts summary written by the court. Additionally, we study the difficulty of the task by collecting expert human predictions, showing that even human experts can only reach 53% accuracy on this dataset. Our Longformer model clearly outperforms the human baseline (63%), despite only considering the first 2,048 tokens. Furthermore, we perform a detailed error analysis and find that the Longformer model is significantly better calibrated than the human experts. Finally, we publicly release the dataset and the code used for the experiments.

Creating balanced labeled textual corpora for complex tasks, like legal analysis, is a challenging and expensive process that often requires the collaboration of domain experts. To address this problem, we propose a data augmentation method based on the combination of GloVe word embeddings and the WordNet ontology. We present an example of application in the legal domain, specifically on decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union.Our evaluation with human experts confirms that our method is more robust than the alternatives.

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A Legal Approach to Hate Speech – Operationalizing the EU’s Legal Framework against the Expression of Hatred as an NLP Task
Frederike Zufall | Marius Hamacher | Katharina Kloppenborg | Torsten Zesch

We propose a ‘legal approach’ to hate speech detection by operationalization of the decision as to whether a post is subject to criminal law into an NLP task. Comparing existing regulatory regimes for hate speech, we base our investigation on the European Union’s framework as it provides a widely applicable legal minimum standard. Accurately deciding whether a post is punishable or not usually requires legal education. We show that, by breaking the legal assessment down into a series of simpler sub-decisions, even laypersons can annotate consistently. Based on a newly annotated dataset, our experiments show that directly learning an automated model of punishable content is challenging. However, learning the two sub-tasks of ‘target group’ and ‘targeting conduct’ instead of a holistic, end-to-end approach to the legal assessment yields better results. Overall, our method also provides decisions that are more transparent than those of end-to-end models, which is a crucial point in legal decision-making.

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Privacy Pitfalls of Online Service Terms and Conditions: a Hybrid Approach for Classification and Summarization
Emilia Lukose | Suparna De | Jon Johnson

Verbose and complicated legal terminology in online service terms and conditions (T&C) means that users typically don’t read these documents before accepting the terms of such unilateral service contracts. With such services becoming part of mainstream digital life, highlighting Terms of Service (ToS) clauses that impact on the collection and use of user data and privacy are important concerns. Advances in text summarization can help to create informative and concise summaries of the terms, but existing approaches geared towards news and microblogging corpora are not directly applicable to the ToS domain, which is hindered by a lack of T&C-relevant resources for training and evaluation. This paper presents a ToS model, developing a hybrid extractive-classifier-abstractive pipeline that highlights the privacy and data collection/use-related sections in a ToS document and paraphrases these into concise and informative sentences. Relying on significantly less training data (4313 training pairs) than previous representative works (287,226 pairs), our model outperforms extractive baselines by at least 50% in ROUGE-1 score and 54% in METEOR score. The paper also contributes to existing community efforts by curating a dataset of online service T&C, through a developed web scraping tool.

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Abstractive Summarization of Dutch Court Verdicts Using Sequence-to-sequence Models
Marijn Schraagen | Floris Bex | Nick Van De Luijtgaarden | Daniël Prijs

With the legal sector embracing digitization, the increasing availability of information has led to a need for systems that can automatically summarize legal documents. Most existing research on legal text summarization has so far focused on extractive models, which can result in awkward summaries, as sentences in legal documents can be very long and detailed. In this study, we apply two abstractive summarization models on a Dutch legal domain dataset. The results show that existing models transfer quite well across domains and languages: the ROUGE scores of our experiments are comparable to state-of-the-art studies on English news article texts. Examining one of the models showed the capability of rewriting long legal sentences to much shorter ones, using mostly vocabulary from the source document. Human evaluation shows that for both models hand-made summaries are still perceived as more relevant and readable, and automatic summaries do not always capture elements such as background, considerations and judgement. Still, generated summaries are valuable if only a keyword summary or no summary at all is present.

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Legal-Tech Open Diaries: Lesson learned on how to develop and deploy light-weight models in the era of humongous Language Models
Stelios Maroudas | Sotiris Legkas | Prodromos Malakasiotis | Ilias Chalkidis

In the era of billion-parameter-sized Language Models (LMs), start-ups have to follow trends and adapt their technology accordingly. Nonetheless, there are open challenges since the development and deployment of large models comes with a need for high computational resources and has economical consequences. In this work, we follow the steps of the R&D group of a modern legal-tech start-up and present important insights on model development and deployment. We start from ground zero by pre-training multiple domain-specific multi-lingual LMs which are a better fit to contractual and regulatory text compared to the available alternatives (XLM-R). We present benchmark results of such models in a half-public half-private legal benchmark comprising 5 downstream tasks showing the impact of larger model size. Lastly, we examine the impact of a full-scale pipeline for model compression which includes: a) Parameter Pruning, b) Knowledge Distillation, and c) Quantization: The resulting models are much more efficient without sacrificing performance at large.

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Towards Cross-Domain Transferability of Text Generation Models for Legal Text
Vinayshekhar Bannihatti Kumar | Kasturi Bhattacharjee | Rashmi Gangadharaiah

Legalese can often be filled with verbose domain-specific jargon which can make it challenging to understand and use for non-experts. Creating succinct summaries of legal documents often makes it easier for user comprehension. However, obtaining labeled data for every domain of legal text is challenging, which makes cross-domain transferability of text generation models for legal text, an important area of research. In this paper, we explore the ability of existing state-of-the-art T5 & BART-based summarization models to transfer across legal domains. We leverage publicly available datasets across four domains for this task, one of which is a new resource for summarizing privacy policies, that we curate and release for academic research. Our experiments demonstrate the low cross-domain transferability of these models, while also highlighting the benefits of combining different domains. Further, we compare the effectiveness of standard metrics for this task and illustrate the vast differences in their performance.

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Parameter-Efficient Legal Domain Adaptation
Jonathan Li | Rohan Bhambhoria | Xiaodan Zhu

Seeking legal advice is often expensive. Recent advancements in machine learning for solving complex problems can be leveraged to help make legal services more accessible to the public. However, real-life applications encounter significant challenges. State-of-the-art language models are growing increasingly large, making parameter-efficient learning increasingly important. Unfortunately, parameter-efficient methods perform poorly with small amounts of data, which are common in the legal domain (where data labelling costs are high). To address these challenges, we propose parameter-efficient legal domain adaptation, which uses vast unsupervised legal data from public legal forums to perform legal pre-training. This method exceeds or matches the fewshot performance of existing models such as LEGAL-BERT on various legal tasks while tuning only approximately 0.1% of model parameters. Additionally, we show that our method can achieve calibration comparable to existing methods across several tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first to explore parameter-efficient methods of tuning language models in the legal domain.

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Processing Long Legal Documents with Pre-trained Transformers: Modding LegalBERT and Longformer
Dimitris Mamakas | Petros Tsotsi | Ion Androutsopoulos | Ilias Chalkidis

Pre-trained Transformers currently dominate most NLP tasks. They impose, however, limits on the maximum input length (512 sub-words in BERT), which are too restrictive in the legal domain. Even sparse-attention models, such as Longformer and BigBird, which increase the maximum input length to 4,096 sub-words, severely truncate texts in three of the six datasets of LexGLUE. Simpler linear classifiers with TF-IDF features can handle texts of any length, require far less resources to train and deploy, but are usually outperformed by pre-trained Transformers. We explore two directions to cope with long legal texts: (i) modifying a Longformer warm-started from LegalBERT to handle even longer texts (up to 8,192 sub-words), and (ii) modifying LegalBERT to use TF-IDF representations. The first approach is the best in terms of performance, surpassing a hierarchical version of LegalBERT, which was the previous state of the art in LexGLUE. The second approach leads to computationally more efficient models at the expense of lower performance, but the resulting models still outperform overall a linear SVM with TF-IDF features in long legal document classification.

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Data-efficient end-to-end Information Extraction for Statistical Legal Analysis
Wonseok Hwang | Saehee Eom | Hanuhl Lee | Hai Jin Park | Minjoon Seo

Legal practitioners often face a vast amount of documents. Lawyers, for instance, search for appropriate precedents favorable to their clients, while the number of legal precedents is ever-growing. Although legal search engines can assist finding individual target documents and narrowing down the number of candidates, retrieved information is often presented as unstructured text and users have to examine each document thoroughly which could lead to information overloading. This also makes their statistical analysis challenging. Here, we present an end-to-end information extraction (IE) system for legal documents. By formulating IE as a generation task, our system can be easily applied to various tasks without domain-specific engineering effort. The experimental results of four IE tasks on Korean precedents shows that our IE system can achieve competent scores (-2.3 on average) compared to the rule-based baseline with as few as 50 training examples per task and higher score (+5.4 on average) with 200 examples. Finally, our statistical analysis on two case categories — drunk driving and fraud — with 35k precedents reveals the resulting structured information from our IE system faithfully reflects the macroscopic features of Korean legal system.

Legal documents are unstructured, use legal jargon, and have considerable length, making them difficult to process automatically via conventional text processing techniques. A legal document processing system would benefit substantially if the documents could be segmented into coherent information units. This paper proposes a new corpus of legal documents annotated (with the help of legal experts) with a set of 13 semantically coherent units labels (referred to as Rhetorical Roles), e.g., facts, arguments, statute, issue, precedent, ruling, and ratio. We perform a thorough analysis of the corpus and the annotations. For automatically segmenting the legal documents, we experiment with the task of rhetorical role prediction: given a document, predict the text segments corresponding to various roles. Using the created corpus, we experiment extensively with various deep learning-based baseline models for the task. Further, we develop a multitask learning (MTL) based deep model with document rhetorical role label shift as an auxiliary task for segmenting a legal document. The proposed model shows superior performance over the existing models. We also experiment with model performance in the case of domain transfer and model distillation techniques to see the model performance in limited data conditions.

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Privacy-Preserving Models for Legal Natural Language Processing
Ying Yin | Ivan Habernal

Pre-training large transformer models with in-domain data improves domain adaptation and helps gain performance on the domain-specific downstream tasks. However, sharing models pre-trained on potentially sensitive data is prone to adversarial privacy attacks. In this paper, we asked to which extent we can guarantee privacy of pre-training data and, at the same time, achieve better downstream performance on legal tasks without the need of additional labeled data. We extensively experiment with scalable self-supervised learning of transformer models under the formal paradigm of differential privacy and show that under specific training configurations we can improve downstream performance without sacrifying privacy protection for the in-domain data. Our main contribution is utilizing differential privacy for large-scale pre-training of transformer language models in the legal NLP domain, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been addressed before.

Identification of named entities from legal texts is an essential building block for developing other legal Artificial Intelligence applications. Named Entities in legal texts are slightly different and more fine-grained than commonly used named entities like Person, Organization, Location etc. In this paper, we introduce a new corpus of 46545 annotated legal named entities mapped to 14 legal entity types. The Baseline model for extracting legal named entities from judgment text is also developed.

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The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure
Leonard Bongard | Lena Held | Ivan Habernal

We present a new NLP task and dataset from the domain of the U.S. civil procedure. Each instance of the dataset consists of a general introduction to the case, a particular question, and a possible solution argument, accompanied by a detailed analysis of why the argument applies in that case. Since the dataset is based on a book aimed at law students, we believe that it represents a truly complex task for benchmarking modern legal language models. Our baseline evaluation shows that fine-tuning a legal transformer provides some advantage over random baseline models, but our analysis reveals that the actual ability to infer legal arguments remains a challenging open research question.

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Efficient Deep Learning-based Sentence Boundary Detection in Legal Text
Reshma Sheik | Gokul T | S Nirmala

A key component of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline is Sentence Boundary Detection (SBD). Erroneous SBD could affect other processing steps and reduce performance. A few criteria based on punctuation and capitalization are necessary to identify sentence borders in well-defined corpora. However, due to several grammatical ambiguities, the complex structure of legal data poses difficulties for SBD. In this paper, we have trained a neural network framework for identifying the end of the sentence in legal text. We used several state-of-the-art deep learning models, analyzed their performance, and identified that Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) outperformed other deep learning frameworks. We compared the results with rule-based, statistical, and transformer-based frameworks. The best neural network model outscored the popular rule-based framework with an improvement of 8% in the F1 score. Although domain-specific statistical models have slightly improved performance, the trained CNN is 80 times faster in run-time and doesn’t require much feature engineering. Furthermore, after extensive pretraining, the transformer models fall short in overall performance compared to the best deep learning model.

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Tracking Semantic Shifts in German Court Decisions with Diachronic Word Embeddings
Daniel Braun

Language and its usage change over time. While legal language is arguably more stable than everyday language, it is still subject to change. Sometimes it changes gradually and slowly, sometimes almost instantaneously, for example through legislative changes. This paper presents an application of diachronic word embeddings to track changes in the usage of language by German courts triggered by changing legislation, based on a corpus of more than 200,000 documents. The results show the swift and lasting effect that changes in legislation can have on the usage of language by courts and suggest that using time-restricted word embedding models could be beneficial for downstream NLP tasks.

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Should I disclose my dataset? Caveats between reproducibility and individual data rights
Raysa M. Benatti | Camila M. L. Villarroel | Sandra Avila | Esther L. Colombini | Fabiana Severi

Natural language processing techniques have helped domain experts solve legal problems. Digital availability of court documents increases possibilities for researchers, who can access them as a source for building datasets — whose disclosure is aligned with good reproducibility practices in computational research. Large and digitized court systems, such as the Brazilian one, are prone to be explored in that sense. However, personal data protection laws impose restrictions on data exposure and state principles about which researchers should be mindful. Special caution must be taken in cases with human rights violations, such as gender discrimination, over which we elaborate as an example of interest. We present legal and ethical considerations on the issue, as well as guidelines for researchers dealing with this kind of data and deciding whether to disclose it.

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Attack on Unfair ToS Clause Detection: A Case Study using Universal Adversarial Triggers
Shanshan Xu | Irina Broda | Rashid Haddad | Marco Negrini | Matthias Grabmair

Recent work has demonstrated that natural language processing techniques can support consumer protection by automatically detecting unfair clauses in the Terms of Service (ToS) Agreement. This work demonstrates that transformer-based ToS analysis systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We conduct experiments attacking an unfair-clause detector with universal adversarial triggers. Experiments show that a minor perturbation of the text can considerably reduce the detection performance. Moreover, to measure the detectability of the triggers, we conduct a detailed human evaluation study by collecting both answer accuracy and response time from the participants. The results show that the naturalness of the triggers remains key to tricking readers.

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E-NER — An Annotated Named Entity Recognition Corpus of Legal Text
Ting Wai Terence Au | Vasileios Lampos | Ingemar Cox

Identifying named entities such as a person, location or organization, in documents can highlight key information to readers. Training Named Entity Recognition (NER) models requires an annotated data set, which can be a time-consuming labour-intensive task. Nevertheless, there are publicly available NER data sets for general English. Recently there has been interest in developing NER for legal text. However, prior work and experimental results reported here indicate that there is a significant degradation in performance when NER methods trained on a general English data set are applied to legal text. We describe a publicly available legal NER data set, called E-NER, based on legal company filings available from the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR data set. Training a number of different NER algorithms on the general English CoNLL-2003 corpus but testing on our test collection confirmed significant degradations in accuracy, as measured by the F1-score, of between 29.4% and 60.4%, compared to training and testing on the E-NER collection.

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Detecting Relevant Differences Between Similar Legal Texts
Xiang Li | Jiaxun Gao | Diana Inkpen | Wolfgang Alschner

Given two similar legal texts, is it useful to be able to focus only on the parts that contain relevant differences. However, because of variation in linguistic structure and terminology, it is not easy to identify true semantic differences. An accurate difference detection model between similar legal texts is therefore in demand, in order to increase the efficiency of legal research and document analysis. In this paper, we automatically label a training dataset of sentence pairs using an existing legal resource of international investment treaties that were already manually annotated with metadata. Then we propose models based on state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for the novel task of detecting relevant differences. In addition to providing solutions for this task, we include models for automatically producing metadata for the treaties that do not have it.

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Legal and Political Stance Detection of SCOTUS Language
Noah Bergam | Emily Allaway | Kathleen Mckeown

We analyze publicly available US Supreme Court documents using automated stance detection. In the first phase of our work, we investigate the extent to which the Court’s public-facing language is political. We propose and calculate two distinct ideology metrics of SCOTUS justices using oral argument transcripts. We then compare these language-based metrics to existing social scientific measures of the ideology of the Supreme Court and the public. Through this cross-disciplinary analysis, we find that justices who are more responsive to public opinion tend to express their ideology during oral arguments. This observation provides a new kind of evidence in favor of the attitudinal change hypothesis of Supreme Court justice behavior. As a natural extension of this political stance detection, we propose the more specialized task of legal stance detection with our new dataset SC-stance, which matches written opinions to legal questions. We find competitive performance on this dataset using language adapters trained on legal documents.

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Graph-based Keyword Planning for Legal Clause Generation from Topics
Sagar Joshi | Sumanth Balaji | Aparna Garimella | Vasudeva Varma

Generating domain-specific content such as legal clauses based on minimal user-provided information can be of significant benefit in automating legal contract generation. In this paper, we propose a controllable graph-based mechanism that can generate legal clauses using only the topic or type of the legal clauses. Our pipeline consists of two stages involving a graph-based planner followed by a clause generator. The planner outlines the content of a legal clause as a sequence of keywords in the order of generic to more specific clause information based on the input topic using a controllable graph-based mechanism. The generation stage takes in a given plan and generates a clause. The pipeline consists of a graph-based planner followed by text generation. We illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed two-stage approach on a broad set of clause topics in contracts.

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Automatic Classification of Legal Violations in Cookie Banner Texts
Marieke Van Hofslot | Almila Akdag Salah | Albert Gatt | Cristiana Santos

Cookie banners are designed to request consent from website visitors for their personal data. Recent research suggest that a high percentage of cookie banners violate legal regulations as defined by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive. In this paper, we focus on language used in these cookie banners, and whether these violations can be automatically detected, or not. We make use of a small cookie banner dataset that is annotated by five experts for legal violations and test it with state of the art classification models, namely BERT, LEGAL-BERT, BART in a zero-shot setting and BERT with LIWC embeddings. Our results show that none of the models outperform the others in all classes, but in general, BERT and LEGAL-BERT provide the highest accuracy results (70%-97%). However, they are influenced by the small size and the unbalanced distributions in the dataset.

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Text Simplification for Legal Domain: {I}nsights and Challenges
Aparna Garimella | Abhilasha Sancheti | Vinay Aggarwal | Ananya Ganesh | Niyati Chhaya | Nandakishore Kambhatla

Legal documents such as contracts contain complex and domain-specific jargons, long and nested sentences, and often present with several details that may be difficult to understand for laypeople without domain expertise. In this paper, we explore the problem of text simplification (TS) in legal domain. The main challenge to this is the lack of availability of complex-simple parallel datasets for the legal domain. We investigate some of the existing datasets, methods, and metrics in the TS literature for simplifying legal texts, and perform human evaluation to analyze the gaps. We present some of the challenges involved, and outline a few open questions that need to be addressed for future research in this direction.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a well-explored area from Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing with an extensive research community. Despite that, few languages, such as English and German, are well-resourced, whereas many other languages, such as Romanian, have scarce resources, especially in domain-specific applications. In this work, we address the NER problem in the legal domain from both Romanian and German languages and evaluate the performance of our proposed method based on domain adaptation. We employ multi-task learning to jointly train a neural network on two legal and general domains and perform adaptation among them. The results show that domain adaptation increase performances by a small amount, under 1%, while considerable improvements are in the recall metric.

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Computing and Exploiting Document Structure to Improve Unsupervised Extractive Summarization of Legal Case Decisions
Yang Zhong | Diane Litman

Though many algorithms can be used to automatically summarize legal case decisions, most fail to incorporate domain knowledge about how important sentences in a legal decision relate to a representation of its document structure. For example, analysis of a legal case sum- marization dataset demonstrates that sentences serving different types of argumentative roles in the decision appear in different sections of the document. In this work, we propose an unsupervised graph-based ranking model that uses a reweighting algorithm to exploit properties of the document structure of legal case decisions. We also explore the impact of using different methods to compute the document structure. Results on the Canadian Legal Case Law dataset show that our proposed method outperforms several strong baselines.

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AraLegal-BERT: A pretrained language model for Arabic Legal text
Muhammad Al-qurishi | Sarah Alqaseemi | Riad Souissi

The effectiveness of the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model for multiple linguistic tasks is well documented. However, its potential for a narrow and specific domain, such as legal, has not been fully explored. In this study, we examine the use of BERT in the Arabic legal domain and customize this language model for several downstream tasks using different domain-relevant training and test datasets to train BERT from scratch. We introduce AraLegal-BERT, a bidirectional encoder transformer-based model that has been thoroughly tested and carefully optimized with the goal of amplifying the impact of natural language processing-driven solutions on jurisprudence, legal documents, and legal practice. We fine-tuned AraLegal-BERT and evaluated it against three BERT variants for the Arabic language in three natural language understanding tasks. The results showed that the base version of AraLegal-BERT achieved better accuracy than the typical and original BERT model concerning legal texts.

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An Efficient Active Learning Pipeline for Legal Text Classification
Sepideh Mamooler | Rémi Lebret | Stephane Massonnet | Karl Aberer

Active Learning (AL) is a powerful tool for learning with less labeled data, in particular, for specialized domains, like legal documents, where unlabeled data is abundant, but the annotation requires domain expertise and is thus expensive. Recent works have shown the effectiveness of AL strategies for pre-trained language models. However, most AL strategies require a set of labeled samples to start with, which is expensive to acquire. In addition, pre-trained language models have been shown unstable during fine-tuning with small datasets, and their embeddings are not semantically meaningful. In this work, we propose a pipeline for effectively using active learning with pre-trained language models in the legal domain. To this end, we leverage the available unlabeled data in three phases. First, we continue pre-training the model to adapt it to the downstream task. Second, we use knowledge distillation to guide the model’s embeddings to a semantically meaningful space. Finally, we propose a simple, yet effective, strategy to find the initial set of labeled samples with fewer actions compared to existing methods. Our experiments on Contract-NLI, adapted to the classification task, and LEDGAR benchmarks show that our approach outperforms standard AL strategies, and is more efficient. Furthermore, our pipeline reaches comparable results to the fully-supervised approach with a small performance gap, and dramatically reduced annotation cost. Code and the adapted data will be made available.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning

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Comparing Native and Learner Englishes Using a Large Pre-trained Language Model
Tatsuya Aoyama

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The instructional effectiveness of automatically generated exercises for learning French grammatical gender: preliminary results
Stephen Bodnar

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Swedish MuClaGED: A new dataset for Grammatical Error Detection in Swedish
Judith Casademont Moner | Elena Volodina

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Interactive word sense disambiguation in foreign language learning
Jasper Degraeuwe | Patrick Goethals

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Language learning analytics: designing and testing new functional complexity measures in L2 writings
Thomas Gaillat

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Generating and authoring high-variability exercises from authentic texts
Tanja Heck | Detmar Meurers

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Exploring Linguistic Acceptability in Swedish Learners’ Language
Julia Klezl | Yousuf Ali Mohammed | Elena Volodina

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Evaluating Automatic Spelling Correction Tools on German Primary School Children’s Misspellings
Ronja Laarmann-Quante | Lisa Prepens | Torsten Zesch

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Metadata Formats for Learner Corpora: Case Study and Discussion
Herbert Lange

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A Transformer for SAG: What Does it Grade?
Nico Willms | Ulrike Pado

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Towards a Verb Profile: distribution of verbal tenses in FFL textbooks and in learner productions
Nami Yamaguchi | David Alfter | Kaori Sugiyama | Thomas François

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI

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A Randomized Link Transformer for Diverse Open-Domain Dialogue Generation
Jing Yang Lee | Kong Aik Lee | Woon Seng Gan

A major issue in open-domain dialogue generation is the agent’s tendency to generate repetitive and generic responses. The lack in response diversity has been addressed in recent years via the use of latent variable models, such as the Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE), which typically involve learning a latent Gaussian distribution over potential response intents. However, due to latent variable collapse, training latent variable dialogue models are notoriously complex, requiring substantial modification to the standard training process and loss function. Other approaches proposed to improve response diversity also largely entail a significant increase in training complexity. Hence, this paper proposes a Randomized Link (RL) Transformer as an alternative to the latent variable models. The RL Transformer does not require any additional enhancements to the training process or loss function. Empirical results show that, when it comes to response diversity, the RL Transformer achieved comparable performance compared to latent variable models.

Pre-trained Transformer-based models were reported to be robust in intent classification. In this work, we first point out the importance of in-domain out-of-scope detection in few-shot intent recognition tasks and then illustrate the vulnerability of pre-trained Transformer-based models against samples that are in-domain but out-of-scope (ID-OOS). We construct two new datasets, and empirically show that pre-trained models do not perform well on both ID-OOS examples and general out-of-scope examples, especially on fine-grained few-shot intent detection tasks.

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Conversational AI for Positive-sum Retailing under Falsehood Control
Yin-Hsiang Liao | Ruo-Ping Dong | Huan-Cheng Chang | Wilson Ma

Retailing combines complicated communication skills and strategies to reach an agreement between buyer and seller with identical or different goals. In each transaction a good seller finds an optimal solution by considering his/her own profits while simultaneously considering whether the buyer’s needs have been met. In this paper, we manage the retailing problem by mixing cooperation and competition. We present a rich dataset of buyer-seller bargaining in a simulated marketplace in which each agent values goods and utility separately. Various attributes (preference, quality, and profit) are initially hidden from one agent with respect to its role; during the conversation, both sides may reveal, fake, or retain the information uncovered to come to a final decision through natural language. Using this dataset, we leverage transfer learning techniques on a pretrained, end-to-end model and enhance its decision-making ability toward the best choice in terms of utility by means of multi-agent reinforcement learning. An automatic evaluation shows that our approach results in more optimal transactions than human does. We also show that our framework controls the falsehoods generated by seller agents.

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D-REX: Dialogue Relation Extraction with Explanations
Alon Albalak | Varun Embar | Yi-Lin Tuan | Lise Getoor | William Yang Wang

Existing research studies on cross-sentence relation extraction in long-form multi-party conversations aim to improve relation extraction without considering the explainability of such methods. This work addresses that gap by focusing on extracting explanations that indicate that a relation exists while using only partially labeled explanations. We propose our model-agnostic framework, D-REX, a policy-guided semi-supervised algorithm that optimizes for explanation quality and relation extraction simultaneously. We frame relation extraction as a re-ranking task and include relation- and entity-specific explanations as an intermediate step of the inference process. We find that human annotators are 4.2 times more likely to prefer D-REX’s explanations over a joint relation extraction and explanation model. Finally, our evaluations show that D-REX is simple yet effective and improves relation extraction performance of strong baseline models by 1.2-4.7%.

Data augmentation is a widely employed technique to alleviate the problem of data scarcity. In this work, we propose a prompting-based approach to generate labelled training data for intent classification with off-the-shelf language models (LMs) such as GPT-3. An advantage of this method is that no task-specific LM-fine-tuning for data generation is required; hence the method requires no hyper parameter tuning and is applicable even when the available training data is very scarce. We evaluate the proposed method in a few-shot setting on four diverse intent classification tasks. We find that GPT-generated data significantly boosts the performance of intent classifiers when intents in consideration are sufficiently distinct from each other. In tasks with semantically close intents, we observe that the generated data is less helpful. Our analysis shows that this is because GPT often generates utterances that belong to a closely-related intent instead of the desired one. We present preliminary evidence that a prompting-based GPT classifier could be helpful in filtering the generated data to enhance its quality.

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Extracting and Inferring Personal Attributes from Dialogue
Zhilin Wang | Xuhui Zhou | Rik Koncel-Kedziorski | Alex Marin | Fei Xia

Personal attributes represent structured information about a person, such as their hobbies, pets, family, likes and dislikes. We introduce the tasks of extracting and inferring personal attributes from human-human dialogue, and analyze the linguistic demands of these tasks. To meet these challenges, we introduce a simple and extensible model that combines an autoregressive language model utilizing constrained attribute generation with a discriminative reranker. Our model outperforms strong baselines on extracting personal attributes as well as inferring personal attributes that are not contained verbatim in utterances and instead requires commonsense reasoning and lexical inferences, which occur frequently in everyday conversation. Finally, we demonstrate the benefit of incorporating personal attributes in social chit-chat and task-oriented dialogue settings.

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From Rewriting to Remembering: Common Ground for Conversational QA Models
Marco Del Tredici | Xiaoyu Shen | Gianni Barlacchi | Bill Byrne | Adrià de Gispert

In conversational QA, models have to leverage information in previous turns to answer upcoming questions. Current approaches, such as Question Rewriting, struggle to extract relevant information as the conversation unwinds. We introduce the Common Ground (CG), an approach to accumulate conversational information as it emerges and select the relevant information at every turn. We show that CG offers a more efficient and human-like way to exploit conversational information compared to existing approaches, leading to improvements on Open Domain Conversational QA.

At the heart of improving conversational AI is the open problem of how to evaluate conversations. Issues with automatic metrics are well known (Liu et al., 2016), with human evaluations still considered the gold standard. Unfortunately, how to perform human evaluations is also an open problem: differing data collection methods have varying levels of human agreement and statistical sensitivity, resulting in differing amounts of human annotation hours and labor costs. In this work we compare five different crowdworker-based human evaluation methods and find that different methods are best depending on the types of models compared, with no clear winner across the board. While this highlights the open problems in the area, our analysis leads to advice of when to use which one, and possible future directions.

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KG-CRuSE: Recurrent Walks over Knowledge Graph for Explainable Conversation Reasoning using Semantic Embeddings
Rajdeep Sarkar | Mihael Arcan | John McCrae

Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems utilise external knowledge such as knowledge graphs to generate informative and appropriate responses. A crucial challenge of such systems is to select facts from a knowledge graph pertinent to the dialogue context for response generation. This fact selection can be formulated as path traversal over a knowledge graph conditioned on the dialogue context. Such paths can originate from facts mentioned in the dialogue history and terminate at the facts to be mentioned in the response. These walks, in turn, provide an explanation of the flow of the conversation. This work proposes KG-CRuSE, a simple, yet effective LSTM based decoder that utilises the semantic information in the dialogue history and the knowledge graph elements to generate such paths for effective conversation explanation. Extensive evaluations showed that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on the OpenDialKG dataset on multiple metrics.

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Knowledge Distillation Meets Few-Shot Learning: An Approach for Few-Shot Intent Classification Within and Across Domains
Anna Sauer | Shima Asaadi | Fabian Küch

Large Transformer-based natural language understanding models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in dialogue systems. However, scarce labeled data for training, the large model size, and low inference speed hinder their deployment in low-resource scenarios. Few-shot learning and knowledge distillation techniques have been introduced to reduce the need for labeled data and computational resources, respectively. However, these techniques are incompatible because few-shot learning trains models using few data, whereas, knowledge distillation requires sufficient data to train smaller, yet competitive models that run on limited computational resources. In this paper, we address the problem of distilling generalizable small models under the few-shot setting for the intent classification task. Considering in-domain and cross-domain few-shot learning scenarios, we introduce an approach for distilling small models that generalize to new intent classes and domains using only a handful of labeled examples. We conduct experiments on public intent classification benchmarks, and observe a slight performance gap between small models and large Transformer-based models. Overall, our results in both few-shot scenarios confirm the generalization ability of the small distilled models while having lower computational costs.

Language understanding in speech-based systems has attracted extensive interest from both academic and industrial communities in recent years with the growing demand for voice-based applications. Prior works focus on independent research by the automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) communities, or on jointly modeling the speech and NLP problems focusing on a single dataset or single NLP task. To facilitate the development of spoken language research, we introduce MTL-SLT, a multi-task learning framework for spoken language tasks. MTL-SLT takes speech as input, and outputs transcription, intent, named entities, summaries, and answers to text queries, supporting the tasks of spoken language understanding, spoken summarization and spoken question answering respectively. The proposed framework benefits from three key aspects: 1) pre-trained sub-networks of ASR model and language model; 2) multi-task learning objective to exploit shared knowledge from different tasks; 3) end-to-end training of ASR and downstream NLP task based on sequence loss. We obtain state-of-the-art results on spoken language understanding tasks such as SLURP and ATIS. Spoken summarization results are reported on a new dataset: Spoken-Gigaword.

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Multimodal Conversational AI: A Survey of Datasets and Approaches
Anirudh Sundar | Larry Heck

As humans, we experience the world with all our senses or modalities (sound, sight, touch, smell, and taste). We use these modalities, particularly sight and touch, to convey and interpret specific meanings. Multimodal expressions are central to conversations; a rich set of modalities amplify and often compensate for each other. A multimodal conversational AI system answers questions, fulfills tasks, and emulates human conversations by understanding and expressing itself via multiple modalities. This paper motivates, defines, and mathematically formulates the multimodal conversational research objective. We provide a taxonomy of research required to solve the objective: multimodal representation, fusion, alignment, translation, and co-learning. We survey state-of-the-art datasets and approaches for each research area and highlight their limiting assumptions. Finally, we identify multimodal co-learning as a promising direction for multimodal conversational AI research.

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Open-domain Dialogue Generation: What We Can Do, Cannot Do, And Should Do Next
Katharina Kann | Abteen Ebrahimi | Joewie Koh | Shiran Dudy | Alessandro Roncone

Human–computer conversation has long been an interest of artificial intelligence and natural language processing research. Recent years have seen a dramatic improvement in quality for both task-oriented and open-domain dialogue systems, and an increasing amount of research in the area. The goal of this work is threefold: (1) to provide an overview of recent advances in the field of open-domain dialogue, (2) to summarize issues related to ethics, bias, and fairness that the field has identified as well as typical errors of dialogue systems, and (3) to outline important future challenges. We hope that this work will be of interest to both new and experienced researchers in the area.

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Relevance in Dialogue: Is Less More? An Empirical Comparison of Existing Metrics, and a Novel Simple Metric
Ian Berlot-Attwell | Frank Rudzicz

In this work, we evaluate various existing dialogue relevance metrics, find strong dependency on the dataset, often with poor correlation with human scores of relevance, and propose modifications to reduce data requirements and domain sensitivity while improving correlation. Our proposed metric achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HUMOD dataset while reducing measured sensitivity to dataset by 37%-66%. We achieve this without fine-tuning a pretrained language model, and using only 3,750 unannotated human dialogues and a single negative example. Despite these limitations, we demonstrate competitive performance on four datasets from different domains. Our code, including our metric and experiments, is open sourced.

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RetroNLU: Retrieval Augmented Task-Oriented Semantic Parsing
Vivek Gupta | Akshat Shrivastava | Adithya Sagar | Armen Aghajanyan | Denis Savenkov

While large pre-trained language models accumulate a lot of knowledge in their parameters, it has been demonstrated that augmenting it with non-parametric retrieval-based memory has a number of benefits ranging from improved accuracy to data efficiency for knowledge-focused tasks such as question answering. In this work, we apply retrieval-based modeling ideas to the challenging complex task of multi-domain task-oriented semantic parsing for conversational assistants. Our technique, RetroNLU, extends a sequence-to-sequence model architecture with a retrieval component, which is used to retrieve existing similar samples and present them as an additional context to the model. In particular, we analyze two settings, where we augment an input with (a) retrieved nearest neighbor utterances (utterance-nn), and (b) ground-truth semantic parses of nearest neighbor utterances (semparse-nn). Our technique outperforms the baseline method by 1.5% absolute macro-F1, especially at the low resource setting, matching the baseline model accuracy with only 40% of the complete data. Furthermore, we analyse the quality, model sensitivity, and performance of the nearest neighbor retrieval component’s for semantic parses of varied utterance complexity.

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Stylistic Response Generation by Controlling Personality Traits and Intent
Sougata Saha | Souvik Das | Rohini Srihari

Personality traits influence human actions and thoughts, which is manifested in day to day conversations. Although glimpses of personality traits are observable in existing open domain conversation corpora, leveraging generic language modelling for response generation overlooks the interlocutor idiosyncrasies, resulting in non-customizable personality agnostic responses. With the motivation of enabling stylistically configurable response generators, in this paper we experiment with end-to-end mechanisms to ground neural response generators based on both (i) interlocutor Big-5 personality traits, and (ii) discourse intent as stylistic control codes. Since most of the existing large scale open domain chat corpora do not include Big-5 personality traits and discourse intent, we employ automatic annotation schemes to enrich the corpora with noisy estimates of personality and intent annotations, and further assess the impact of using such features as control codes for response generation using automatic evaluation metrics, ablation studies and human judgement. Our experiments illustrate the effectiveness of this strategy resulting in improvements to existing benchmarks. Additionally, we yield two silver standard annotated corpora with intents and personality traits annotated, which can be of use to the research community.

Conversational Recommendation Systems recommend items through language based interactions with users. In order to generate naturalistic conversations and effectively utilize knowledge graphs (KGs) containing background information, we propose a novel Bag-of-Entities loss, which encourages the generated utterances to mention concepts related to the item being recommended, such as the genre or director of a movie. We also propose an alignment loss to further integrate KG entities into the response generation network. Experiments on the large-scale REDIAL dataset demonstrate that the proposed system consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

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Understanding and Improving the Exemplar-based Generation for Open-domain Conversation
Seungju Han | Beomsu Kim | Seokjun Seo | Enkhbayar Erdenee | Buru Chang

Exemplar-based generative models for open-domain conversation produce responses based on the exemplars provided by the retriever, taking advantage of generative models and retrieval models. However, due to the one-to-many problem of the open-domain conversation, they often ignore the retrieved exemplars while generating responses or produce responses over-fitted to the retrieved exemplars. To address these advantages, we introduce a training method selecting exemplars that are semantically relevant to the gold response but lexically distanced from the gold response. In the training phase, our training method first uses the gold response instead of dialogue context as a query to select exemplars that are semantically relevant to the gold response. And then, it eliminates the exemplars that lexically resemble the gold responses to alleviate the dependency of the generative models on that exemplars. The remaining exemplars could be irrelevant to the given context since they are searched depending on the gold response. Thus, our training method further utilizes the relevance scores between the given context and the exemplars to penalize the irrelevant exemplars. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed training method alleviates the drawbacks of the existing exemplar-based generative models and significantly improves the performance in terms of appropriateness and informativeness.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact (NLP4PI)

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A unified framework for cross-domain and cross-task learning of mental health conditions
Huikai Chua | Andrew Caines | Helen Yannakoudakis

The detection of mental health conditions based on an individual’s use of language has received considerable attention in the NLP community. However, most work has focused on single-task and single-domain models, limiting the semantic space that they are able to cover and risking significant cross-domain loss. In this paper, we present two approaches towards a unified framework for cross-domain and cross-task learning for the detection of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide risk across different platforms that further utilizes inductive biases across tasks. Firstly, we develop a lightweight model using a general set of features that sets a new state of the art on several tasks while matching the performance of more complex task- and domain-specific systems on others. We also propose a multi-task approach and further extend our framework to explicitly capture the affective characteristics of someone’s language, further consolidating transfer of inductive biases and of shared linguistic characteristics. Finally, we present a novel dynamically adaptive loss weighting approach that allows for more stable learning across imbalanced datasets and better neural generalization performance. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our unified framework for mental ill-health detection across a number of diverse English datasets.

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Critical Perspectives: A Benchmark Revealing Pitfalls in PerspectiveAPI
Lucas Rosenblatt | Lorena Piedras | Julia Wilkins

Detecting “toxic” language in internet content is a pressing social and technical challenge. In this work, we focus on Perspective API from Jigsaw, a state-of-the-art tool that promises to score the “toxicity” of text, with a recent model update that claims impressive results (Lees et al., 2022). We seek to challenge certain normative claims about toxic language by proposing a new benchmark, Selected Adversarial SemanticS, or SASS. We evaluate Perspective on SASS, and compare to low-effort alternatives, like zero-shot and few-shot GPT-3 prompt models, in binary classification settings. We find that Perspective exhibits troubling shortcomings across a number of our toxicity categories. SASS provides a new tool for evaluating performance on previously undetected toxic language that avoids common normative pitfalls. Our work leads us to emphasize the importance of questioning assumptions made by tools already in deployment for toxicity detection in order to anticipate and prevent disparate harms.

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Securely Capturing People’s Interactions with Voice Assistants at Home: A Bespoke Tool for Ethical Data Collection
Angus Addlesee

Speech production is nuanced and unique to every individual, but today’s Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDSs) are trained to use general speech patterns to successfully improve performance on various evaluation metrics. However, these patterns do not apply to certain user groups - often the very people that can benefit the most from SDSs. For example, people with dementia produce more disfluent speech than the general population. In order to evaluate systems with specific user groups in mind, and to guide the design of such systems to deliver maximum benefit to these users, data must be collected securely. In this short paper we present CVR-SI, a bespoke tool for ethical data collection. Designed for the healthcare domain, we argue that it should also be used in more general settings. We detail how off-the-shelf solutions fail to ensure that sensitive data remains secure and private. We then describe the ethical design and security features of our device, with a full guide on how to build both the hardware and software components of CVR-SI. Our design ensures inclusivity to all researchers in this field, particularly those who are not hardware experts. This guarantees everyone can collect appropriate data for human evaluation ethically, securely, and in a timely manner.

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Leveraging World Knowledge in Implicit Hate Speech Detection
Jessica Lin

While much attention has been paid to identifying explicit hate speech, implicit hateful expressions that are disguised in coded or indirect language are pervasive and remain a major challenge for existing hate speech detection systems. This paper presents the first attempt to apply Entity Linking (EL) techniques to both explicit and implicit hate speech detection, where we show that such real world knowledge about entity mentions in a text does help models better detect hate speech, and the benefit of adding it into the model is more pronounced when explicit entity triggers (e.g., rally, KKK) are present. We also discuss cases where real world knowledge does not add value to hate speech detection, which provides more insights into understanding and modeling the subtleties of hate speech.

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A Dataset of Sustainable Diet Arguments on Twitter
Marcus Hansen | Daniel Hershcovich

Sustainable development requires a significant change in our dietary habits. Argument mining can help achieve this goal by both affecting and helping understand people’s behavior. We design an annotation scheme for argument mining from online discourse around sustainable diets, including novel evidence types specific to this domain. Using Twitter as a source, we crowdsource a dataset of 597 tweets annotated in relation to 5 topics. We benchmark a variety of NLP models on this dataset, demonstrating strong performance in some sub-tasks, while highlighting remaining challenges.

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Impacts of Low Socio-economic Status on Educational Outcomes: A Narrative Based Analysis
Motti Kelbessa | Ilyas Jamil | Labiba Jahan

Socioeconomic status (SES) is a metric used to compare a person’s social standing based on their income, level of education, and occupation. Students from low SES backgrounds are those whose parents have low income and have limited access to the resources and opportunities they need to aid their success. Researchers have studied many issues and solutions for students with low SES, and there is a lot of research going on in many fields, especially in the social sciences. Computer science, however, has not yet as a field turned its considerable potential to addressing these inequalities. Utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods and technology, our work aims to address these disparities and ways to bridge the gap. We built a simple string matching algorithm including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model and Open Information Extraction (open IE) to generate relational triples that are connected to the context of the students’ challenges, and the strategies they follow to overcome them. We manually collected 16 narratives about the experiences of low SES students in higher education from a publicly accessible internet forum (Reddit) and tested our model on them. We demonstrate that our strategy is effective (from 37.50% to 80%) in gathering contextual data about low SES students, in particular, about their difficulties while in a higher educational institution and how they improve their situation. A detailed error analysis suggests that increase of data, improvement of the LDA model, and quality of triples can help get better results from our model. For the advantage of other researchers, we make our code available.

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Enhancing Crisis-Related Tweet Classification with Entity-Masked Language Modeling and Multi-Task Learning
Philipp Seeberger | Korbinian Riedhammer

Social media has become an important information source for crisis management and provides quick access to ongoing developments and critical information. However, classification models suffer from event-related biases and highly imbalanced label distributions which still poses a challenging task. To address these challenges, we propose a combination of entity-masked language modeling and hierarchical multi-label classification as a multi-task learning problem. We evaluate our method on tweets from the TREC-IS dataset and show an absolute performance gain w.r.t. F1-score of up to 10% for actionable information types. Moreover, we found that entity-masking reduces the effect of overfitting to in-domain events and enables improvements in cross-event generalization.

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Misinformation Detection in the Wild: News Source Classification as a Proxy for Non-article Texts
Matyas Bohacek

Creating classifiers of disinformation is time-consuming, expensive, and requires vast effort from experts spanning different fields. Even when these efforts succeed, their roll-out to publicly available applications stagnates. While these models struggle to find their consumer-accessible use, disinformation behavior online evolves at a pressing speed. The hoaxes get shared in various abbreviations on social networks, often in user-restricted areas, making external monitoring and intervention virtually impossible. To re-purpose existing NLP methods for the new paradigm of sharing misinformation, we propose leveraging information about given texts’ originating news sources to proxy the respective text’s trustworthiness. We first present a methodology for determining the sources’ overall credibility. We demonstrate our pipeline construction in a specific language and introduce CNSC: a novel dataset for Czech articles’ news source and source credibility classification. We constitute initial benchmarks on multiple architectures. Lastly, we create in-the-wild wrapper applications of the trained models: a chatbot, a browser extension, and a standalone web application.

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Modelling Persuasion through Misuse of Rhetorical Appeals
Amalie Pauli | Leon Derczynski | Ira Assent

It is important to understand how people use words to persuade each other. This helps understand debate, and detect persuasive narratives in regard to e.g. misinformation. While computational modelling of some aspects of persuasion has received some attention, a way to unify and describe the overall phenomenon of when persuasion becomes undesired and problematic, is missing. In this paper, we attempt to address this by proposing a taxonomy of computational persuasion. Drawing upon existing research and resources, this paper shows how to re-frame and re-organise current work into a coherent framework targeting the misuse of rhetorical appeals. As a study to validate these re-framings, we then train and evaluate models of persuasion adapted to our taxonomy. Our results show an application of our taxonomy, and we are able to detecting misuse of rhetorical appeals, finding that these are more often used in misinformative contexts than in true ones.

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Breaking through Inequality of Information Acquisition among Social Classes: A Modest Effort on Measuring “Fun”
Chenghao Xiao | Baicheng Sun | Jindi Wang | Mingyue Liu | Jiayi Feng

With the identification of the inequality encoded in information acquisition among social classes, we propose to leverage a powerful concept that has never been studied as a linguistic construct, “fun”, to deconstruct the inequality. Inspired by theories in sociology, we draw connection between social class and information cocoon, through the lens of fun, and hypothesize the measurement of “how fun one’s dominating social cocoon is” to be an indicator of the social class of an individual. Following this, we propose an NLP framework to combat the issue by measuring how fun one’s information cocoon is, and empower individuals to emancipate from their trapped cocoons. We position our work to be a domain-agnostic framework that can be deployed in a lot of downstream cases, and is one that aims to deconstruct, as opposed to reinforcing, the traditional social structure of beneficiaries.

We present a web application for creating games and exercises for teaching English as a foreign language with the help of NLP tools. The application contains different kinds of games such as crosswords, word searches, a memory game, and a multiplayer game based on the classic battleship pen and paper game. This application was built with the aim of supporting teachers in rural schools that are teaching English lessons, so they can easily create interactive and engaging activities for their students. We present the context and history of the project, the current state of the web application, and some ideas on how we will expand it in the future.

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“Am I Answering My Job Interview Questions Right?”: A NLP Approach to Predict Degree of Explanation in Job Interview Responses
Raghu Verrap | Ehsanul Nirjhar | Ani Nenkova | Theodora Chaspari

Providing the right amount of explanation in an employment interview can help the interviewee effectively communicate their skills and experience to the interviewer and convince the she/he is the right candidate for the job. This paper examines natural language processing (NLP) approaches, including word-based tokenization, lexicon-based representations, and pre-trained embeddings with deep learning models, for detecting the degree of explanation in a job interview response. These are exemplified in a study of 24 military veterans who are the focal group of this study, since they can experience unique challenges in job interviews due to the unique verbal communication style that is prevalent in the military. Military veterans conducted mock interviews with industry recruiters and data from these interviews were transcribed and analyzed. Results indicate that the feasibility of automated NLP methods for detecting the degree of explanation in an interview response. Features based on tokenizer analysis are the most effective in detecting under-explained responses (i.e., 0.29 F1-score), while lexicon-based methods depict the higher performance in detecting over-explanation (i.e., 0.51 F1-score). Findings from this work lay the foundation for the design of intelligent assistive technologies that can provide personalized learning pathways to job candidates, especially those belonging to sensitive or under-represented populations, and helping them succeed in employment job interviews, ultimately contributing to an inclusive workforce.

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Identifying Condescending Language: A Tale of Two Distinct Phenomena?
Carla Perez Almendros | Steven Schockaert

Patronizing and condescending language is characterized, among others, by its subtle nature. It thus seems reasonable to assume that detecting condescending language in text would be harder than detecting more explicitly harmful language, such as hate speech. However, the results of a SemEval-2022 Task devoted to this topic paint a different picture, with the top-performing systems achieving remarkably strong results. In this paper, we analyse the surprising effectiveness of standard text classification methods in more detail. In particular, we highlight the presence of two rather different types of condescending language in the dataset from the SemEval task. Some inputs are condescending because of the way they talk about a particular subject, i.e. condescending language in this case is a linguistic phenomenon, which can, in principle, be learned from training examples. However, other inputs are condescending because of the nature of what is said, rather than the way in which it is expressed, e.g. by emphasizing stereotypes about a given community. In such cases, our ability to detect condescending language, with current methods, largely depends on the presence of similar examples in the training data.

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BELA: Bot for English Language Acquisition
Muskan Mahajan

In this paper, we introduce a conversational agent (chatbot) for Hindi-speaking youth called BELA—Bot for English Language Acquisition. Developed for young underprivileged students at an Indian non-profit, the agent supports both Hindi and Hinglish (code-switched Hindi and English, written primarily with English orthography) utterances. BELA has two interaction modes: a question-answering mode for classic English language learning tasks like word meanings, translations, reading passage comprehensions, etc., and an open-domain dialogue system mode to allow users to practice their language skills. We present a high-level overview of the design of BELA, including the implementation details and the preliminary results of our early prototype. We also report the challenges in creating an English-language learning chatbot for a largely Hindi-speaking population.

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Applicability of Pretrained Language Models: Automatic Screening for Children’s Language Development Level
Byoung-doo Oh | Yoon-koung Lee | Yu-seop Kim

The various potential of children can be limited by language delay or language impairments. However, there are many instances where parents are unaware of the child’s condition and do not obtain appropriate treatment as a result. Additionally, experts collecting children’s utterance to establish norms of language tests and evaluating children’s language development level takes a significant amount of time and work. To address these issues, dependable automated screening tools are required. In this paper, we used pretrained LM to assist experts in quickly and objectively screening the language development level of children. Here, evaluating the language development level is to ensure that the child has the appropriate language abilities for his or her age, which is the same as the child’s age. To do this, we analyzed the utterances of children according to age. Based on these findings, we use the standard deviations of the pretrained LM’s probability as a score for children to screen their language development level. The experiment results showed very strong correlations between our proposed method and the Korean language test REVT (REVT-R, REVT-E), with Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.9888 and 0.9892, respectively.

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Transformers-Based Approach for a Sustainability Term-Based Sentiment Analysis (STBSA)
Blaise Sandwidi | Suneer Pallitharammal Mukkolakal

Traditional sentiment analysis is a sentence level or document-level task. However, a sentence or paragraph may contain multiple target terms with different sentiments, making sentiment prediction more challenging. Although pre-trained language models like BERT have been successful, incorporating dynamic semantic changes into aspect-based sentiment models remains difficult, especially for domain-specific sentiment analysis. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Term-Based Sentiment Analysis (TBSA), a novel method designed to learn Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) contexts based on a sustainability taxonomy for ESG aspect-oriented sentiment analysis. Notably, we introduce a technique enhancing the ESG term’s attention, inspired by the success of attention-based neural networks in machine translation (Bahdanau et al., 2015) and Computer Vision (Bello et al., 2019). It enables the proposed model to focus on a small region of the sentences at each step and to reweigh the crucial terms for a better understanding of the ESG aspect-aware sentiment. Beyond the novelty in the model design, we propose a new dataset of 125,000+ ESG analyst annotated data points for sustainability term based sentiment classification, which derives from historical sustainability corpus data and expertise acquired by development finance institutions. Our extensive experiments combining the new method and the new dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the Sustainability TBSA model with an accuracy of 91.30% (90% F1-score). Both internal and external business applications of our model show an evident potential for a significant positive impact toward furthering sustainable development goals (SDGs).

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Hate-CLIPper: Multimodal Hateful Meme Classification based on Cross-modal Interaction of CLIP Features
Gokul Karthik Kumar | Karthik Nandakumar

Hateful memes are a growing menace on social media. While the image and its corresponding text in a meme are related, they do not necessarily convey the same meaning when viewed individually. Hence, detecting hateful memes requires careful consideration of both visual and textual information. Multimodal pre-training can be beneficial for this task because it effectively captures the relationship between the image and the text by representing them in a similar feature space. Furthermore, it is essential to model the interactions between the image and text features through intermediate fusion. Most existing methods either employ multimodal pre-training or intermediate fusion, but not both. In this work, we propose the Hate-CLIPper architecture, which explicitly models the cross-modal interactions between the image and text representations obtained using Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) encoders via a feature interaction matrix (FIM). A simple classifier based on the FIM representation is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Hateful Memes Challenge (HMC) dataset with an AUROC of 85.8, which even surpasses the human performance of 82.65. Experiments on other meme datasets such as Propaganda Memes and TamilMemes also demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed approach. Finally, we analyze the interpretability of the FIM representation and show that cross-modal interactions can indeed facilitate the learning of meaningful concepts. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/gokulkarthik/hateclipper

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS)

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Improving the Generalizability of Text-Based Emotion Detection by Leveraging Transformers with Psycholinguistic Features
Sourabh Zanwar | Daniel Wiechmann | Yu Qiao | Elma Kerz

recent years, there has been increased interest in building predictive models that harness natural language processing and machine learning techniques to detect emotions from various text sources, including social media posts, micro-blogs or news articles. Yet, deployment of such models in real-world sentiment and emotion applications faces challenges, in particular poor out-of-domain generalizability. This is likely due to domain-specific differences (e.g., topics, communicative goals, and annotation schemes) that make transfer between different models of emotion recognition difficult. In this work we propose approaches for text-based emotion detection that leverage transformer models (BERT and RoBERTa) in combination with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks trained on a comprehensive set of psycholinguistic features. First, we evaluate the performance of our models within-domain on two benchmark datasets GoEmotion (Demszky et al., 2020) and ISEAR (Scherer and Wallbott, 1994). Second, we conduct transfer learning experiments on six datasets from the Unified Emotion Dataset (Bostan and Klinger, 2018) to evaluate their out-of-domain robustness. We find that the proposed hybrid models improve the ability to generalize to out-of-distribution data compared to a standard transformer-based approach. Moreover, we observe that these models perform competitively on in-domain data.’

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Fine-Grained Extraction and Classification of Skill Requirements in German-Speaking Job Ads
Ann-sophie Gnehm | Eva Bühlmann | Helen Buchs | Simon Clematide

Monitoring the development of labor market skill requirements is an information need that is more and more approached by applying text mining methods to job advertisement data. We present an approach for fine-grained extraction and classification of skill requirements from German-speaking job advertisements. We adapt pre-trained transformer-based language models to the domain and task of computing meaningful representations of sentences or spans. By using context from job advertisements and the large ESCO domain ontology we improve our similarity-based unsupervised multi-label classification results. Our best model achieves a mean average precision of 0.969 on the skill class level.

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Experiencer-Specific Emotion and Appraisal Prediction
Maximilian Wegge | Enrica Troiano | Laura Ana Maria Oberlaender | Roman Klinger

Emotion classification in NLP assigns emotions to texts, such as sentences or paragraphs. With texts like “I felt guilty when he cried”, focusing on the sentence level disregards the standpoint of each participant in the situation: the writer (“I”) and the other entity (“he”) could in fact have different affective states. The emotions of different entities have been considered only partially in emotion semantic role labeling, a task that relates semantic roles to emotion cue words. Proposing a related task, we narrow the focus on the experiencers of events, and assign an emotion (if any holds) to each of them. To this end, we represent each emotion both categorically and with appraisal variables, as a psychological access to explaining why a person develops a particular emotion. On an event description corpus, our experiencer-aware models of emotions and appraisals outperform the experiencer-agnostic baselines, showing that disregarding event participants is an oversimplification for the emotion detection task.

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Understanding Narratives from Demographic Survey Data: a Comparative Study with Multiple Neural Topic Models
Xiao Xu | Gert Stulp | Antal Van Den Bosch | Anne Gauthier

Fertility intentions as verbalized in surveys are a poor predictor of actual fertility outcomes, the number of children people have. This can partly be explained by the uncertainty people have in their intentions. Such uncertainties are hard to capture through traditional survey questions, although open-ended questions can be used to get insight into people’s subjective narratives of the future that determine their intentions. Analyzing such answers to open-ended questions can be done through Natural Language Processing techniques. Traditional topic models (e.g., LSA and LDA), however, often fail to do since they rely on co-occurrences, which are often rare in short survey responses. The aim of this study was to apply and evaluate topic models on demographic survey data. In this study, we applied neural topic models (e.g. BERTopic, CombinedTM) based on language models to responses from Dutch women on their fertility plans, and compared the topics and their coherence scores from each model to expert judgments. Our results show that neural models produce topics more in line with human interpretation compared to LDA. However, the coherence score could only partly reflect on this, depending on the corpus used for calculation. This research is important because, first, it helps us develop more informed strategies on model selection and evaluation for topic modeling on survey data; and second, it shows that the field of demography has much to gain from adopting NLP methods.

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To Prefer or to Choose? Generating Agency and Power Counterfactuals Jointly for Gender Bias Mitigation
Maja Stahl | Maximilian Spliethöver | Henning Wachsmuth

Gender bias may emerge from an unequal representation of agency and power, for example, by portraying women frequently as passive and powerless (“She accepted her future”) and men as proactive and powerful (“He chose his future”). When language models learn from respective texts, they may reproduce or even amplify the bias. An effective way to mitigate bias is to generate counterfactual sentences with opposite agency and power to the training. Recent work targeted agency-specific verbs from a lexicon to this end. We argue that this is insufficient, due to the interaction of agency and power and their dependence on context. In this paper, we thus develop a new rewriting model that identifies verbs with the desired agency and power in the context of the given sentence. The verbs’ probability is then boosted to encourage the model to rewrite both connotations jointly. According to automatic metrics, our model effectively controls for power while being competitive in agency to the state of the art. In our main evaluation, human annotators favored its counterfactuals in terms of both connotations, also deeming its meaning preservation better.

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Conspiracy Narratives in the Protest Movement Against COVID-19 Restrictions in Germany. A Long-term Content Analysis of Telegram Chat Groups.
Manuel Weigand | Maximilian Weber | Johannes Gruber

From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, different groups have been protesting measures implemented by different government bodies in Germany to control the pandemic. It was widely claimed that many of the offline and online protests were driven by conspiracy narratives disseminated through groups and channels on the messenger app Telegram. We investigate this claim by measuring the frequency of conspiracy narratives in messages from open Telegram chat groups of the Querdenken movement, set up to organize protests against COVID-19 restrictions in Germany. We furthermore explore the content of these messages using topic modelling. To this end, we collected 822k text messages sent between April 2020 and May 2022 in 34 chat groups. By fine-tuning a Distilbert model, using self-annotated data, we find that 8.24% of the sent messages contain signs of conspiracy narratives. This number is not static, however, as the share of conspiracy messages grew while the overall number of messages shows a downward trend since its peak at the end of 2020. We further find a mix of known conspiracy narratives make up the topics in our topic model. Our findings suggest that the Querdenken movement is getting smaller over time, but its remaining members focus even more on conspiracy narratives.

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Conditional Language Models for Community-Level Linguistic Variation
Bill Noble | Jean-philippe Bernardy

Community-level linguistic variation is a core concept in sociolinguistics. In this paper, we use conditioned neural language models to learn vector representations for 510 online communities. We use these representations to measure linguistic variation between commu-nities and investigate the degree to which linguistic variation corresponds with social connections between communities. We find that our sociolinguistic embeddings are highly correlated with a social network-based representation that does not use any linguistic input.

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Understanding Interpersonal Conflict Types and their Impact on Perception Classification
Charles Welch | Joan Plepi | Béla Neuendorf | Lucie Flek

Studies on interpersonal conflict have a long history and contain many suggestions for conflict typology. We use this as the basis of a novel annotation scheme and release a new dataset of situations and conflict aspect annotations. We then build a classifier to predict whether someone will perceive the actions of one individual as right or wrong in a given situation. Our analyses include conflict aspects, but also generated clusters, which are human validated, and show differences in conflict content based on the relationship of participants to the author. Our findings have important implications for understanding conflict and social norms.

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Examining Political Rhetoric with Epistemic Stance Detection
Ankita Gupta | Su Lin Blodgett | Justin Gross | Brendan O’connor

Participants in political discourse employ rhetorical strategies—such as hedging, attributions, or denials—to display varying degrees of belief commitments to claims proposed by themselves or others. Traditionally, political scientists have studied these epistemic phenomena through labor-intensive manual content analysis. We propose to help automate such work through epistemic stance prediction, drawn from research in computational semantics, to distinguish at the clausal level what is asserted, denied, or only ambivalently suggested by the author or other mentioned entities (belief holders). We first develop a simple RoBERTa-based model for multi-source stance predictions that outperforms more complex state-of-the-art modeling. Then we demonstrate its novel application to political science by conducting a large-scale analysis of the Mass Market Manifestos corpus of U.S. political opinion books, where we characterize trends in cited belief holders—respected allies and opposed bogeymen—across U.S. political ideologies.

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Linguistic Elements of Engaging Customer Service Discourse on Social Media
Sonam Singh | Anthony Rios

Customers are rapidly turning to social media for customer support. While brand agents on these platforms are motivated and well-intentioned to help and engage with customers, their efforts are often ignored if their initial response to the customer does not match a specific tone, style, or topic the customer is aiming to receive. The length of a conversation can reflect the effort and quality of the initial response made by a brand toward collaborating and helping consumers, even when the overall sentiment of the conversation might not be very positive. Thus, through this study, we aim to bridge this critical gap in the existing literature by analyzing language’s content and stylistic aspects such as expressed empathy, psycho-linguistic features, dialogue tags, and metrics for quantifying personalization of the utterances that can influence the engagement of an interaction. This paper demonstrates that we can predict engagement using initial customer and brand posts.

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Measuring Harmful Representations in Scandinavian Language Models
Samia Touileb | Debora Nozza

Scandinavian countries are perceived as role-models when it comes to gender equality. With the advent of pre-trained language models and their widespread usage, we investigate to what extent gender-based harmful and toxic content exists in selected Scandinavian language models. We examine nine models, covering Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, by manually creating template-based sentences and probing the models for completion. We evaluate the completions using two methods for measuring harmful and toxic completions and provide a thorough analysis of the results. We show that Scandinavian pre-trained language models contain harmful and gender-based stereotypes with similar values across all languages. This finding goes against the general expectations related to gender equality in Scandinavian countries and shows the possible problematic outcomes of using such models in real-world settings. Warning: Some of the examples provided in this paper can be upsetting and offensive.

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Can Contextualizing User Embeddings Improve Sarcasm and Hate Speech Detection?
Kim Breitwieser

While implicit embeddings so far have been mostly concerned with creating an overall representation of the user, we evaluate a different approach. By only considering content directed at a specific topic, we create sub-user embeddings, and measure their usefulness on the tasks of sarcasm and hate speech detection. In doing so, we show that task-related topics can have a noticeable effect on model performance, especially when dealing with intended expressions like sarcasm, but less so for hate speech, which is usually labelled as such on the receiving end.

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Professional Presentation and Projected Power: A Case Study of Implicit Gender Information in English CVs
Jinrui Yang | Sheilla Njoto | Marc Cheong | Leah Ruppanner | Lea Frermann

Gender discrimination in hiring is a pertinent and persistent bias in society, and a common motivating example for exploring bias in NLP. However, the manifestation of gendered language in application materials has received limited attention. This paper investigates the framing of skills and background in CVs of self-identified men and women. We introduce a data set of 1.8K authentic, English-language, CVs from the US, covering 16 occupations, allowing us to partially control for the confound occupation-specific gender base rates. We find that (1) women use more verbs evoking impressions of low power; and (2) classifiers capture gender signal even after data balancing and removal of pronouns and named entities, and this holds for both transformer-based and linear classifiers.

We address dissonant stance detection, classifying conflicting stance between two input statements. Computational models for traditional stance detection have typically been trained to indicate pro/con for a given target topic (e.g. gun control) and thus do not generalize well to new topics. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the generalizability of dissonant stance detection to situations where examples of the topic have not been seen at all or have only been seen a few times. We show that dissonant stance detection models trained on only 8 topics, none of which are the target topic, can perform as well as those trained only on a target topic. Further, adding non-target topics boosts performance further up to approximately 32 topics where accuracies start to plateau. Taken together, our experiments suggest dissonant stance detection models can generalize to new unanticipated topics, an important attribute for the social scientific study of social media where new topics emerge daily.

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An Analysis of Acknowledgments in NLP Conference Proceedings
Winston Wu

While acknowledgments are often overlooked and sometimes entirely missing from publications, this short section of a paper can provide insights on the state of a field. We characterize and perform a textual analysis of acknowledgments in NLP conference proceedings across the last 17 years, revealing broader trends in funding and research directions in NLP as well as interesting phenomena including career incentives and the influence of defaults.

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Extracting Associations of Intersectional Identities with Discourse about Institution from Nigeria
Pavan Kantharaju | Sonja Schmer-galunder

Word embedding models have been used in prior work to extract associations of intersectional identities within discourse concerning institutions of power, but restricted its focus on narratives of the nineteenth-century U.S. south. This paper leverages this prior work and introduces an initial study on the association of intersected identities with discourse concerning social institutions within social media from Nigeria. Specifically, we use word embedding models trained on tweets from Nigeria and extract associations of intersected social identities with institutions (e.g., domestic, culture, etc.) to provide insight into the alignment of identities with institutions. Our initial experiments indicate that identities at the intersection of gender and economic status groups have significant associations with discourse about the economic, political, and domestic institutions.

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OLALA: Object-Level Active Learning for Efficient Document Layout Annotation
Zejiang Shen | Weining Li | Jian Zhao | Yaoliang Yu | Melissa Dell

Layout detection is an essential step for accurately extracting structured contents from historical documents. The intricate and varied layouts present in these document images make it expensive to label the numerous layout regions that can be densely arranged on each page. Current active learning methods typically rank and label samples at the image level, where the annotation budget is not optimally spent due to the overexposure of common objects per image. Inspired by recent progress in semi-supervised learning and self-training, we propose OLALA, an Object-Level Active Learning framework for efficient document layout Annotation. OLALA aims to optimize the annotation process by selectively annotating only the most ambiguous regions within an image, while using automatically generated labels for the rest. Central to OLALA is a perturbation-based scoring function that determines which objects require manual annotation. Extensive experiments show that OLALA can significantly boost model performance and improve annotation efficiency, facilitating the extraction of masses of structured text for downstream NLP applications.

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Towards Few-Shot Identification of Morality Frames using In-Context Learning
Shamik Roy | Nishanth Sridhar Nakshatri | Dan Goldwasser

Data scarcity is a common problem in NLP, especially when the annotation pertains to nuanced socio-linguistic concepts that require specialized knowledge. As a result, few-shot identification of these concepts is desirable. Few-shot in-context learning using pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) has been recently applied successfully in many NLP tasks. In this paper, we study few-shot identification of a psycho-linguistic concept, Morality Frames (Roy et al., 2021), using LLMs. Morality frames are a representation framework that provides a holistic view of the moral sentiment expressed in text, identifying the relevant moral foundation (Haidt and Graham, 2007) and at a finer level of granularity, the moral sentiment expressed towards the entities mentioned in the text. Previous studies relied on human annotation to identify morality frames in text which is expensive. In this paper, we propose prompting based approaches using pretrained Large Language Models for identification of morality frames, relying only on few-shot exemplars. We compare our models’ performance with few-shot RoBERTa and found promising results.

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Utilizing Weak Supervision to Create S3D: A Sarcasm Annotated Dataset
Jordan Painter | Helen Treharne | Diptesh Kanojia

Sarcasm is prevalent in all corners of social media, posing many challenges within Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for sentiment analysis. Sarcasm detection remains a largely unsolved problem in many NLP tasks due to its contradictory and typically derogatory nature as a figurative language construct. With recent strides in NLP, many pre-trained language models exist that have been trained on data from specific social media platforms, i.e., Twitter. In this paper, we evaluate the efficacy of multiple sarcasm detection datasets using machine and deep learning models. We create two new datasets - a manually annotated gold standard Sarcasm Annotated Dataset (SAD) and a Silver-Standard Sarcasm-annotated Dataset (S3D). Using a combination of existing sarcasm datasets with SAD, we train a sarcasm detection model over a social-media domain pre-trained language model, BERTweet, which yields an F1-score of 78.29%. Using an Ensemble model with an underlying majority technique, we further label S3D to produce a weakly supervised dataset containing over 100,000 tweets. We publicly release all the code, our manually annotated and weakly supervised datasets, and fine-tuned models for further research.

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A Robust Bias Mitigation Procedure Based on the Stereotype Content Model
Eddie Ungless | Amy Rafferty | Hrichika Nag | Björn Ross

The Stereotype Content model (SCM) states that we tend to perceive minority groups as cold, incompetent or both. In this paper we adapt existing work to demonstrate that the Stereotype Content model holds for contextualised word embeddings, then use these results to evaluate a fine-tuning process designed to drive a language model away from stereotyped portrayals of minority groups. We find the SCM terms are better able to capture bias than demographic agnostic terms related to pleasantness. Further, we were able to reduce the presence of stereotypes in the model through a simple fine-tuning procedure that required minimal human and computer resources, without harming downstream performance. We present this work as a prototype of a debiasing procedure that aims to remove the need for a priori knowledge of the specifics of bias in the model.

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Who is GPT-3? An exploration of personality, values and demographics
Marilù Miotto | Nicola Rossberg | Bennett Kleinberg

Language models such as GPT-3 have caused a furore in the research community. Some studies found that GPT-3 has some creative abilities and makes mistakes that are on par with human behaviour. This paper answers a related question: Who is GPT-3? We administered two validated measurement tools to GPT-3 to assess its personality, the values it holds and its self-reported demographics. Our results show that GPT-3 scores similarly to human samples in terms of personality and - when provided with a model response memory - in terms of the values it holds. We provide the first evidence of psychological assessment of the GPT-3 model and thereby add to our understanding of this language model. We close with suggestions for future research that moves social science closer to language models and vice versa.

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bib (full) Proceedings of NLP Power! The First Workshop on Efficient Benchmarking in NLP

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Raison d’être of the benchmark dataset: A Survey of Current Practices of Benchmark Dataset Sharing Platforms
Jaihyun Park | Sullam Jeoung

This paper critically examines the current practices of benchmark dataset sharing in NLP and suggests a better way to inform reusers of the benchmark dataset. As the dataset sharing platform plays a key role not only in distributing the dataset but also in informing the potential reusers about the dataset, we believe data-sharing platforms should provide a comprehensive context of the datasets. We survey four benchmark dataset sharing platforms: HuggingFace, PaperswithCode, Tensorflow, and Pytorch to diagnose the current practices of how the dataset is shared which metadata is shared and omitted. To be specific, drawing on the concept of data curation which considers the future reuse when the data is made public, we advance the direction that benchmark dataset sharing platforms should take into consideration. We identify that four benchmark platforms have different practices of using metadata and there is a lack of consensus on what social impact metadata is. We believe the problem of missing a discussion around social impact in the dataset sharing platforms has to do with the failed agreement on who should be in charge. We propose that the benchmark dataset should develop social impact metadata and data curator should take a role in managing the social impact metadata.

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Towards Stronger Adversarial Baselines Through Human-AI Collaboration
Wencong You | Daniel Lowd

Natural language processing (NLP) systems are often used for adversarial tasks such as detecting spam, abuse, hate speech, and fake news. Properly evaluating such systems requires dynamic evaluation that searches for weaknesses in the model, rather than a static test set. Prior work has evaluated such models on both manually and automatically generated examples, but both approaches have limitations: manually constructed examples are time-consuming to create and are limited by the imagination and intuition of the creators, while automatically constructed examples are often ungrammatical or labeled inconsistently. We propose to combine human and AI expertise in generating adversarial examples, benefiting from humans’ expertise in language and automated attacks’ ability to probe the target system more quickly and thoroughly. We present a system that facilitates attack construction, combining human judgment with automated attacks to create better attacks more efficiently. Preliminary results from our own experimentation suggest that human-AI hybrid attacks are more effective than either human-only or AI-only attacks. A complete user study to validate these hypotheses is still pending.

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Benchmarking for Public Health Surveillance tasks on Social Media with a Domain-Specific Pretrained Language Model
Usman Naseem | Byoung Chan Lee | Matloob Khushi | Jinman Kim | Adam Dunn

A user-generated text on social media enables health workers to keep track of information, identify possible outbreaks, forecast disease trends, monitor emergency cases, and ascertain disease awareness and response to official health correspondence. This exchange of health information on social media has been regarded as an attempt to enhance public health surveillance (PHS). Despite its potential, the technology is still in its early stages and is not ready for widespread application. Advancements in pretrained language models (PLMs) have facilitated the development of several domain-specific PLMs and a variety of downstream applications. However, there are no PLMs for social media tasks involving PHS. We present and release PHS-BERT, a transformer-based PLM, to identify tasks related to public health surveillance on social media. We compared and benchmarked the performance of PHS-BERT on 25 datasets from different social medial platforms related to 7 different PHS tasks. Compared with existing PLMs that are mainly evaluated on limited tasks, PHS-BERT achieved state-of-the-art performance on all 25 tested datasets, showing that our PLM is robust and generalizable in the common PHS tasks. By making PHS-BERT available, we aim to facilitate the community to reduce the computational cost and introduce new baselines for future works across various PHS-related tasks.

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Why only Micro-F1? Class Weighting of Measures for Relation Classification
David Harbecke | Yuxuan Chen | Leonhard Hennig | Christoph Alt

Relation classification models are conventionally evaluated using only a single measure, e.g., micro-F1, macro-F1 or AUC. In this work, we analyze weighting schemes, such as micro and macro, for imbalanced datasets. We introduce a framework for weighting schemes, where existing schemes are extremes, and two new intermediate schemes. We show that reporting results of different weighting schemes better highlights strengths and weaknesses of a model.

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Automatically Discarding Straplines to Improve Data Quality for Abstractive News Summarization
Amr Keleg | Matthias Lindemann | Danyang Liu | Wanqiu Long | Bonnie L. Webber

Recent improvements in automatic news summarization fundamentally rely on large corpora of news articles and their summaries. These corpora are often constructed by scraping news websites, which results in including not only summaries but also other kinds of texts. Apart from more generic noise, we identify straplines as a form of text scraped from news websites that commonly turn out not to be summaries. The presence of these non-summaries threatens the validity of scraped corpora as benchmarks for news summarization. We have annotated extracts from two news sources that form part of the Newsroom corpus (Grusky et al., 2018), labeling those which were straplines, those which were summaries, and those which were both. We present a rule-based strapline detection method that achieves good performance on a manually annotated test set. Automatic evaluation indicates that removing straplines and noise from the training data of a news summarizer results in higher quality summaries, with improvements as high as 7 points ROUGE score.

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A global analysis of metrics used for measuring performance in natural language processing
Kathrin Blagec | Georg Dorffner | Milad Moradi | Simon Ott | Matthias Samwald

Measuring the performance of natural language processing models is challenging. Traditionally used metrics, such as BLEU and ROUGE, originally devised for machine translation and summarization, have been shown to suffer from low correlation with human judgment and a lack of transferability to other tasks and languages. In the past 15 years, a wide range of alternative metrics have been proposed. However, it is unclear to what extent this has had an impact on NLP benchmarking efforts. Here we provide the first large-scale cross-sectional analysis of metrics used for measuring performance in natural language processing. We curated, mapped and systematized more than 3500 machine learning model performance results from the open repository ‘Papers with Code’ to enable a global and comprehensive analysis. Our results suggest that the large majority of natural language processing metrics currently used have properties that may result in an inadequate reflection of a models’ performance. Furthermore, we found that ambiguities and inconsistencies in the reporting of metrics may lead to difficulties in interpreting and comparing model performances, impairing transparency and reproducibility in NLP research.

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Beyond Static models and test sets: Benchmarking the potential of pre-trained models across tasks and languages
Kabir Ahuja | Sandipan Dandapat | Sunayana Sitaram | Monojit Choudhury

Although recent Massively Multilingual Language Models (MMLMs) like mBERT and XLMR support around 100 languages, most existing multilingual NLP benchmarks provide evaluation data in only a handful of these languages with little linguistic diversity. We argue that this makes the existing practices in multilingual evaluation unreliable and does not provide a full picture of the performance of MMLMs across the linguistic landscape. We propose that the recent work done in Performance Prediction for NLP tasks can serve as a potential solution in fixing benchmarking in Multilingual NLP by utilizing features related to data and language typology to estimate the performance of an MMLM on different languages. We compare performance prediction with translating test data with a case study on four different multilingual datasets, and observe that these methods can provide reliable estimates of the performance that are often on-par with the translation based approaches, without the need for any additional translation as well as evaluation costs.

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Checking HateCheck: a cross-functional analysis of behaviour-aware learning for hate speech detection
Pedro Henrique Luz de Araujo | Benjamin Roth

Behavioural testing—verifying system capabilities by validating human-designed input-output pairs—is an alternative evaluation method of natural language processing systems proposed to address the shortcomings of the standard approach: computing metrics on held-out data. While behavioural tests capture human prior knowledge and insights, there has been little exploration on how to leverage them for model training and development. With this in mind, we explore behaviour-aware learning by examining several fine-tuning schemes using HateCheck, a suite of functional tests for hate speech detection systems. To address potential pitfalls of training on data originally intended for evaluation, we train and evaluate models on different configurations of HateCheck by holding out categories of test cases, which enables us to estimate performance on potentially overlooked system properties. The fine-tuning procedure led to improvements in the classification accuracy of held-out functionalities and identity groups, suggesting that models can potentially generalise to overlooked functionalities. However, performance on held-out functionality classes and i.i.d. hate speech detection data decreased, which indicates that generalisation occurs mostly across functionalities from the same class and that the procedure led to overfitting to the HateCheck data distribution.

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Language Invariant Properties in Natural Language Processing
Federico Bianchi | Debora Nozza | Dirk Hovy

Meaning is context-dependent, but many properties of language (should) remain the same even if we transform the context. For example, sentiment or speaker properties should be the same in a translation and original of a text. We introduce language invariant properties: i.e., properties that should not change when we transform text, and how they can be used to quantitatively evaluate the robustness of transformation algorithms. Language invariant properties can be used to define novel benchmarks to evaluate text transformation methods. In our work we use translation and paraphrasing as examples, but our findings apply more broadly to any transformation. Our results indicate that many NLP transformations change properties. We additionally release a tool as a proof of concept to evaluate the invariance of transformation applications.

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DACT-BERT: Differentiable Adaptive Computation Time for an Efficient BERT Inference
Cristobal Eyzaguirre | Felipe del Rio | Vladimir Araujo | Alvaro Soto

Large-scale pre-trained language models have shown remarkable results in diverse NLP applications. However, these performance gains have been accompanied by a significant increase in computation time and model size, stressing the need to develop new or complementary strategies to increase the efficiency of these models. This paper proposes DACT-BERT, a differentiable adaptive computation time strategy for BERT-like models. DACT-BERT adds an adaptive computational mechanism to BERT’s regular processing pipeline, which controls the number of Transformer blocks that need to be executed at inference time. By doing this, the model learns to combine the most appropriate intermediate representations for the task at hand. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach, when compared to the baselines, excels on a reduced computational regime and is competitive in other less restrictive ones. Code available at https://github.com/ceyzaguirre4/dact_bert.

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Benchmarking Post-Hoc Interpretability Approaches for Transformer-based Misogyny Detection
Giuseppe Attanasio | Debora Nozza | Eliana Pastor | Dirk Hovy

Transformer-based Natural Language Processing models have become the standard for hate speech detection. However, the unconscious use of these techniques for such a critical task comes with negative consequences. Various works have demonstrated that hate speech classifiers are biased. These findings have prompted efforts to explain classifiers, mainly using attribution methods. In this paper, we provide the first benchmark study of interpretability approaches for hate speech detection. We cover four post-hoc token attribution approaches to explain the predictions of Transformer-based misogyny classifiers in English and Italian. Further, we compare generated attributions to attention analysis. We find that only two algorithms provide faithful explanations aligned with human expectations. Gradient-based methods and attention, however, show inconsistent outputs, making their value for explanations questionable for hate speech detection tasks.

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Characterizing the Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off for Long-Context NLP Models
Phyllis Ang | Bhuwan Dhingra | Lisa Wu Wills

With many real-world applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP) comprising of long texts, there has been a rise in NLP benchmarks that measure the accuracy of models that can handle longer input sequences. However, these benchmarks do not consider the trade-offs between accuracy, speed, and power consumption as input sizes or model sizes are varied. In this work, we perform a systematic study of this accuracy vs. efficiency trade-off on two widely used long-sequence models - Longformer-Encoder-Decoder (LED) and Big Bird - during fine-tuning and inference on four datasets from the SCROLLS benchmark. To study how this trade-off differs across hyperparameter settings, we compare the models across four sequence lengths (1024, 2048, 3072, 4096) and two model sizes (base and large) under a fixed resource budget. We find that LED consistently achieves better accuracy at lower energy costs than Big Bird. For summarization, we find that increasing model size is more energy efficient than increasing sequence length for higher accuracy. However, this comes at the cost of a large drop in inference speed. For question answering, we find that smaller models are both more efficient and more accurate due to the larger training batch sizes possible under a fixed resource budget.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on NLP Solutions for Under Resourced Languages (NSURL 2022) co-located with ICNLSP 2022

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Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on NLP Solutions for Under Resourced Languages (NSURL 2022) co-located with ICNLSP 2022
Abed Alhakim Freihat | Mourad Abbas

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Syllable Subword Tokens for Open Vocabulary Speech Recognition in Malayalam
Kavya Manohar | A. R. Jayan | Rajeev Rajan

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Semi-Supervised and Unsupervised detection of Humour in Code-Mixed Hindi-English Tweets
Chakita Muttaraju | Aakansha Singh | Anusha Kabber | Mamatha H. R

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Toward a Test Set of Dislocations in Persian for Neural Machine Translation
Behnoosh Namdarzadeh | Nicolas Ballier | Lichao Zhu | Guillaume Wisniewski | Jean-Baptiste Yunès

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Eco EvE : Economic Event Extraction
Meriem Mkhinini | Mohamed Ali Ben El Haj Aissa | Aboubacar Sidiki Sidibe | Paul Pike | Aymen Khelifi

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An empirical Comparison of Arabic Named Entity Recognition Methods: Application to the ALP Corpus
Mohamed Lichouri

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ALRT: Cutting Edge Tool for Automatic Generation of Arabic Lexical Recognition Tests
Osama Hamed | Saeed Salah | Abed Alhakim Freihat

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Pattern-based Approaches to NLP in the Age of Deep Learning

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PatternRank: Jointly Ranking Patterns and Extractions for Relation Extraction Using Graph-Based Algorithms
Robert Vacareanu | Dane Bell | Mihai Surdeanu

In this paper we revisit the direction of using lexico-syntactic patterns for relation extraction instead of today’s ubiquitous neural classifiers. We propose a semi-supervised graph-based algorithm for pattern acquisition that scores patterns and the relations they extract jointly, using a variant of PageRank. We insert light supervision in the form of seed patterns or relations, and model it with several custom teleportation probabilities that bias random-walk scores of patterns/relations based on their proximity to correct information. We evaluate our approach on Few-Shot TACRED, and show that our method outperforms (or performs competitively with) more expensive and opaque deep neural networks. Lastly, we thoroughly compare our proposed approach with the seminal RlogF pattern acquisition algorithm of, showing that it outperforms it for all the hyper parameters tested, in all settings.

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Key Information Extraction in Purchase Documents using Deep Learning and Rule-based Corrections
Roberto Arroyo | Javier Yebes | Elena Martínez | Héctor Corrales | Javier Lorenzo

Deep Learning (DL) is dominating the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) in the recent times. However, DL commonly relies on the availability of large data annotations, so other alternative or complementary pattern-based techniques can help to improve results. In this paper, we build upon Key Information Extraction (KIE) in purchase documents using both DL and rule-based corrections. Our system initially trusts on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and text understanding based on entity tagging to identify purchase facts of interest (e.g., product codes, descriptions, quantities, or prices). These facts are then linked to a same product group, which is recognized by means of line detection and some grouping heuristics. Once these DL approaches are processed, we contribute several mechanisms consisting of rule-based corrections for improving the baseline DL predictions. We prove the enhancements provided by these rule-based corrections over the baseline DL results in the presented experiments for purchase documents from public and NielsenIQ datasets.

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Unsupervised Generation of Long-form Technical Questions from Textbook Metadata using Structured Templates
Indrajit Bhattacharya | Subhasish Ghosh | Arpita Kundu | Pratik Saini | Tapas Nayak

We explore the task of generating long-form technical questions from textbooks. Semi-structured metadata of a textbook — the table of contents and the index — provide rich cues for technical question generation. Existing literature for long-form question generation focuses mostly on reading comprehension assessment, and does not use semi-structured metadata for question generation. We design unsupervised template based algorithms for generating questions based on structural and contextual patterns in the index and ToC. We evaluate our approach on textbooks on diverse subjects and show that our approach generates high quality questions of diverse types. We show that, in comparison, zero-shot question generation using pre-trained LLMs on the same meta-data has much poorer quality.

Natural language understanding (NLU) is integral to task-oriented dialog systems, but demands a considerable amount of annotated training data to increase the coverage of diverse utterances. In this study, we report the construction of a linguistic resource named FIAD (Financial Annotated Dataset) and its use to generate a Korean annotated training data for NLU in the banking customer service (CS) domain. By an empirical examination of a corpus of banking app reviews, we identified three linguistic patterns occurring in Korean request utterances: TOPIC (ENTITY, FEATURE), EVENT, and DISCOURSE MARKER. We represented them in LGGs (Local Grammar Graphs) to generate annotated data covering diverse intents and entities. To assess the practicality of the resource, we evaluate the performances of DIET-only (Intent: 0.91 /Topic [entity+feature]: 0.83), DIET+ HANBERT (I:0.94/T:0.85), DIET+ KoBERT (I:0.94/T:0.86), and DIET+ KorBERT (I:0.95/T:0.84) models trained on FIAD-generated data to extract various types of semantic items.

We report the construction of a Korean evaluation-annotated corpus, hereafter called ‘Evaluation Annotated Dataset (EVAD)’, and its use in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) extended in order to cover e-commerce reviews containing sentiment and non-sentiment linguistic patterns. The annotation process uses Semi-Automatic Symbolic Propagation (SSP). We built extensive linguistic resources formalized as a Finite-State Transducer (FST) to annotate corpora with detailed ABSA components in the fashion e-commerce domain. The ABSA approach is extended, in order to analyze user opinions more accurately and extract more detailed features of targets, by including aspect values in addition to topics and aspects, and by classifying aspect-value pairs depending whether values are unary, binary, or multiple. For evaluation, the KoBERT and KcBERT models are trained on the annotated dataset, showing robust performances of F1 0.88 and F1 0.90, respectively, on recognition of aspect-value pairs.

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Accelerating Human Authorship of Information Extraction Rules
Dayne Freitag | John Cadigan | John Niekrasz | Robert Sasseen

We consider whether machine models can facilitate the human development of rule sets for information extraction. Arguing that rule-based methods possess a speed advantage in the early development of new extraction capabilities, we ask whether this advantage can be increased further through the machine facilitation of common recurring manual operations in the creation of an extraction rule set from scratch. Using a historical rule set, we reconstruct and describe the putative manual operations required to create it. In experiments targeting one key operation—the enumeration of words occurring in particular contexts—we simulate the process or corpus review and word list creation, showing that several simple interventions greatly improve recall as a function of simulated labor.

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Syntax-driven Data Augmentation for Named Entity Recognition
Arie Sutiono | Gus Hahn-Powell

In low resource settings, data augmentation strategies are commonly leveraged to improve performance. Numerous approaches have attempted document-level augmentation (e.g., text classification), but few studies have explored token-level augmentation. Performed naively, data augmentation can produce semantically incongruent and ungrammatical examples. In this work, we compare simple masked language model replacement and an augmentation method using constituency tree mutations to improve the performance of named entity recognition in low-resource settings with the aim of preserving linguistic cohesion of the augmented sentences.

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Query Processing and Optimization for a Custom Retrieval Language
Yakov Kuzin | Anna Smirnova | Evgeniy Slobodkin | George Chernishev

Data annotation has been a pressing issue ever since the rise of machine learning and associated areas. It is well-known that obtaining high-quality annotated data incurs high costs, be they financial or time-related. In our previous work, we have proposed a custom, SQL-like retrieval language used to query collections of short documents, such as chat transcripts or tweets. Its main purpose is enabling a human annotator to select “situations” from such collections, i.e. subsets of documents that are related both thematically and temporally. This language, named Matcher, was prototyped in our custom annotation tool. Entering the next stage of development of the tool, we have tested the prototype implementation. Given the language’s rich semantics, many possible execution options with various costs arise. We have found out we could provide tangible improvement in terms of speed and memory consumption by carefully selecting the execution strategy in each particular case. In this work, we present the improved algorithms and proposed optimization methods, as well as a benchmark suite whose results show the significance of the presented techniques. While this is an initial work and not a full-fledged optimization framework, it nevertheless yields good results, providing up to tenfold improvement.

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Rule Based Event Extraction for Artificial Social Intelligence
Remo Nitschke | Yuwei Wang | Chen Chen | Adarsh Pyarelal | Rebecca Sharp

Natural language (as opposed to structured communication modes such as Morse code) is by far the most common mode of communication between humans, and can thus provide significant insight into both individual mental states and interpersonal dynamics. As part of DARPA’s Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams (ASIST) program, we are developing an AI agent team member that constructs and maintains models of their human teammates and provides appropriate task-relevant advice to improve team processes and mission performance. One of the key components of this agent is a module that uses a rule-based approach to extract task-relevant events from natural language utterances in real time, and publish them for consumption by downstream components. In this case study, we evaluate the performance of our rule-based event extraction system on a recently conducted ASIST experiment consisting of a simulated urban search and rescue mission in Minecraft. We compare the performance of our approach with that of a zero-shot neural classifier, and find that our approach outperforms the classifier for all event types, even when the classifier is used in an oracle setting where it knows how many events should be extracted from each utterance.

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Neural-Guided Program Synthesis of Information Extraction Rules Using Self-Supervision
Enrique Noriega-Atala | Robert Vacareanu | Gus Hahn-Powell | Marco A. Valenzuela-Escárcega

We propose a neural-based approach for rule synthesis designed to help bridge the gap between the interpretability, precision and maintainability exhibited by rule-based information extraction systems with the scalability and convenience of statistical information extraction systems. This is achieved by avoiding placing the burden of learning another specialized language on domain experts and instead asking them to provide a small set of examples in the form of highlighted spans of text. We introduce a transformer-based architecture that drives a rule synthesis system that leverages a self-supervised approach for pre-training a large-scale language model complemented by an analysis of different loss functions and aggregation mechanisms for variable length sequences of user-annotated spans of text. The results are encouraging and point to different desirable properties, such as speed and quality, depending on the choice of loss and aggregation method.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Privacy in Natural Language Processing

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Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Privacy in Natural Language Processing
Oluwaseyi Feyisetan | Sepideh Ghanavati | Patricia Thaine | Ivan Habernal | Fatemehsadat Mireshghallah

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Differential Privacy in Natural Language Processing The Story So Far
Oleksandra Klymenko | Stephen Meisenbacher | Florian Matthes

As the tide of Big Data continues to influence the landscape of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the utilization of modern NLP methods has grounded itself in this data, in order to tackle a variety of text-based tasks. These methods without a doubt can include private or otherwise personally identifiable information. As such, the question of privacy in NLP has gained fervor in recent years, coinciding with the development of new Privacy- Enhancing Technologies (PETs). Among these PETs, Differential Privacy boasts several desirable qualities in the conversation surrounding data privacy. Naturally, the question becomes whether Differential Privacy is applicable in the largely unstructured realm of NLP. This topic has sparked novel research, which is unified in one basic goal how can one adapt Differential Privacy to NLP methods? This paper aims to summarize the vulnerabilities addressed by Differential Privacy, the current thinking, and above all, the crucial next steps that must be considered.

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The Impact of Differential Privacy on Group Disparity Mitigation
Victor Petren Bach Hansen | Atula Tejaswi Neerkaje | Ramit Sawhney | Lucie Flek | Anders Sogaard

The performance cost of differential privacy has, for some applications, been shown to be higher for minority groups fairness, conversely, has been shown to disproportionally compromise the privacy of members of such groups. Most work in this area has been restricted to computer vision and risk assessment. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of differential privacy on fairness across four tasks, focusing on how attempts to mitigate privacy violations and between-group performance differences interact Does privacy inhibit attempts to ensure fairness? To this end, we train epsilon, delta-differentially private models with empirical risk minimization and group distributionally robust training objectives. Consistent with previous findings, we find that differential privacy increases between-group performance differences in the baseline setting but more interestingly, differential privacy reduces between-group performance differences in the robust setting. We explain this by reinterpreting differential privacy as regularization.

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Privacy Leakage in Text Classification A Data Extraction Approach
Adel Elmahdy | Huseyin A. Inan | Robert Sim

Recent work has demonstrated the successful extraction of training data from generative language models. However, it is not evident whether such extraction is feasible in text classification models since the training objective is to predict the class label as opposed to next-word prediction. This poses an interesting challenge and raises an important question regarding the privacy of training data in text classification settings. Therefore, we study the potential privacy leakage in the text classification domain by investigating the problem of unintended memorization of training data that is not pertinent to the learning task. We propose an algorithm to extract missing tokens of a partial text by exploiting the likelihood of the class label provided by the model. We test the effectiveness of our algorithm by inserting canaries into the training set and attempting to extract tokens in these canaries post-training. In our experiments, we demonstrate that successful extraction is possible to some extent. This can also be used as an auditing strategy to assess any potential unauthorized use of personal data without consent.

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Training Text-to-Text Transformers with Privacy Guarantees
Natalia Ponomareva | Jasmijn Bastings | Sergei Vassilvitskii

Recent advances in NLP often stem from large transformer-based pre-trained models, which rapidly grow in size and use more and more training data. Such models are often released to the public so that end users can fine-tune them on a task dataset. While it is common to treat pre-training data as public, it may still contain personally identifiable information (PII), such as names, phone numbers, and copyrighted material. Recent findings show that the capacity of these models allows them to memorize parts of the training data, and suggest differentially private (DP) training as a potential mitigation. While there is recent work on DP fine-tuning of NLP models, the effects of DP pre-training are less well understood it is not clear how downstream performance is affected by DP pre-training, and whether DP pre-training mitigates some of the memorization concerns. We focus on T5 and show that by using recent advances in JAX and XLA we can train models with DP that do not suffer a large drop in pre-training utility, nor in training speed, and can still be fine-tuned to high accuracy on downstream tasks (e.g. GLUE). Moreover, we show that T5s span corruption is a good defense against data memorization.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

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Distributionally Robust Recurrent Decoders with Random Network Distillation
Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone | Alexandra Birch | Rico Sennrich

Neural machine learning models can successfully model language that is similar to their training distribution, but they are highly susceptible to degradation under distribution shift, which occurs in many practical applications when processing out-of-domain (OOD) text. This has been attributed to “shortcut learning””:" relying on weak correlations over arbitrary large contexts. We propose a method based on OOD detection with Random Network Distillation to allow an autoregressive language model to automatically disregard OOD context during inference, smoothly transitioning towards a less expressive but more robust model as the data becomes more OOD, while retaining its full context capability when operating in-distribution. We apply our method to a GRU architecture, demonstrating improvements on multiple language modeling (LM) datasets.

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Q-Learning Scheduler for Multi Task Learning Through the use of Histogram of Task Uncertainty
Kourosh Meshgi | Maryam Sadat Mirzaei | Satoshi Sekine

Simultaneous training of a multi-task learning network on different domains or tasks is not always straightforward. It could lead to inferior performance or generalization compared to the corresponding single-task networks. An effective training scheduling method is deemed necessary to maximize the benefits of multi-task learning. Traditional schedulers follow a heuristic or prefixed strategy, ignoring the relation of the tasks, their sample complexities, and the state of the emergent shared features. We proposed a deep Q-Learning Scheduler (QLS) that monitors the state of the tasks and the shared features using a novel histogram of task uncertainty, and through trial-and-error, learns an optimal policy for task scheduling. Extensive experiments on multi-domain and multi-task settings with various task difficulty profiles have been conducted, the proposed method is benchmarked against other schedulers, its superior performance has been demonstrated, and results are discussed.

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When does CLIP generalize better than unimodal models? When judging human-centric concepts
Romain Bielawski | Benjamin Devillers | Tim Van De Cruys | Rufin Vanrullen

CLIP, a vision-language network trained with a multimodal contrastive learning objective on a large dataset of images and captions, has demonstrated impressive zero-shot ability in various tasks. However, recent work showed that in comparison to unimodal (visual) networks, CLIP’s multimodal training does not benefit generalization (e.g. few-shot or transfer learning) for standard visual classification tasks such as object, street numbers or animal recognition. Here, we hypothesize that CLIP’s improved unimodal generalization abilities may be most prominent in domains that involve human-centric concepts (cultural, social, aesthetic, affective...); this is because CLIP’s training dataset is mainly composed of image annotations made by humans for other humans. To evaluate this, we use 3 tasks that require judging human-centric concepts”:” sentiment analysis on tweets, genre classification on books or movies. We introduce and publicly release a new multimodal dataset for movie genre classification. We compare CLIP’s visual stream against two visually trained networks and CLIP’s textual stream against two linguistically trained networks, as well as multimodal combinations of these networks. We show that CLIP generally outperforms other networks, whether using one or two modalities. We conclude that CLIP’s multimodal training is beneficial for both unimodal and multimodal tasks that require classification of human-centric concepts.

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From Hyperbolic Geometry Back to Word Embeddings
Zhenisbek Assylbekov | Sultan Nurmukhamedov | Arsen Sheverdin | Thomas Mach

We choose random points in the hyperbolic disc and claim that these points are already word representations. However, it is yet to be uncovered which point corresponds to which word of the human language of interest. This correspondence can be approximately established using a pointwise mutual information between words and recent alignment techniques.

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A Comparative Study of Pre-trained Encoders for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition
Yuxuan Chen | Jonas Mikkelsen | Arne Binder | Christoph Alt | Leonhard Hennig

Pre-trained language models (PLM) are effective components of few-shot named entity recognition (NER) approaches when augmented with continued pre-training on task-specific out-of-domain data or fine-tuning on in-domain data. However, their performance in low-resource scenarios, where such data is not available, remains an open question. We introduce an encoder evaluation framework, and use it to systematically compare the performance of state-of-the-art pre-trained representations on the task of low-resource NER. We analyze a wide range of encoders pre-trained with different strategies, model architectures, intermediate-task fine-tuning, and contrastive learning. Our experimental results across ten benchmark NER datasets in English and German show that encoder performance varies significantly, suggesting that the choice of encoder for a specific low-resource scenario needs to be carefully evaluated.

Task-adaptive pre-training (TAPT) alleviates the lack of labelled data and provides performance lift by adapting unlabelled data to downstream task. Unfortunately, existing adaptations mainly involve deterministic rules that cannot generalize well. Here, we propose Clozer, a sequence-tagging based cloze answer extraction method used in TAPT that is extendable for adaptation on any cloze-style machine reading comprehension (MRC) downstream tasks. We experiment on multiple-choice cloze-style MRC tasks, and show that Clozer performs significantly better compared to the oracle and state-of-the-art in escalating TAPT effectiveness in lifting model performance, and prove that Clozer is able to recognize the gold answers independently of any heuristics.

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Analyzing Gender Representation in Multilingual Models
Hila Gonen | Shauli Ravfogel | Yoav Goldberg

Multilingual language models were shown to allow for nontrivial transfer across scripts and languages. In this work, we study the structure of the internal representations that enable this transfer. We focus on the representations of gender distinctions as a practical case study, and examine the extent to which the gender concept is encoded in shared subspaces across different languages. Our analysis shows that gender representations consist of several prominent components that are shared across languages, alongside language-specific components. The existence of language-independent and language-specific components provides an explanation for an intriguing empirical observation we make”:” while gender classification transfers well across languages, interventions for gender removal trained on a single language do not transfer easily to others.

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Detecting Textual Adversarial Examples Based on Distributional Characteristics of Data Representations
Na Liu | Mark Dras | Wei Emma Zhang

Although deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various machine learning tasks, adversarial examples, constructed by adding small non-random perturbations to correctly classified inputs, successfully fool highly expressive deep classifiers into incorrect predictions. Approaches to adversarial attacks in natural language tasks have boomed in the last five years using character-level, word-level, phrase-level, or sentence-level textual perturbations. While there is some work in NLP on defending against such attacks through proactive methods, like adversarial training, there is to our knowledge no effective general reactive approaches to defence via detection of textual adversarial examples such as is found in the image processing literature. In this paper, we propose two new reactive methods for NLP to fill this gap, which unlike the few limited application baselines from NLP are based entirely on distribution characteristics of learned representations”:” we adapt one from the image processing literature (Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (LID)), and propose a novel one (MultiDistance Representation Ensemble Method (MDRE)). Adapted LID and MDRE obtain state-of-the-art results on character-level, word-level, and phrase-level attacks on the IMDB dataset as well as on the later two with respect to the MultiNLI dataset. For future research, we publish our code .

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models’ ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in low-resource languages, leading models to produce suboptimal representations. Additionally, the dependency on a fixed vocabulary limits the subword models’ adaptability across languages and domains. In this work, we propose a vocabulary-free neural tokenizer by distilling segmentation information from heuristic-based subword tokenization. We pre-train our character-based tokenizer by processing unique words from multilingual corpus, thereby extensively increasing word diversity across languages. Unlike the predefined and fixed vocabularies in subword methods, our tokenizer allows end-to-end task learning, resulting in optimal task-specific tokenization. The experimental results show that replacing the subword tokenizer with our neural tokenizer consistently improves performance on multilingual (NLI) and code-switching (sentiment analysis) tasks, with larger gains in low-resource languages. Additionally, our neural tokenizer exhibits a robust performance on downstream tasks when adversarial noise is present (typos and misspelling), further increasing the initial improvements over statistical subword tokenizers.

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Identifying the Limits of Cross-Domain Knowledge Transfer for Pretrained Models
Zhengxuan Wu | Nelson F. Liu | Christopher Potts

There is growing evidence that pretrained language models improve task-specific fine-tuning even where the task examples are radically different from those seen in training. We study an extreme case of transfer learning by providing a systematic exploration of how much transfer occurs when models are denied any information about word identity via random scrambling. In four classification tasks and two sequence labeling tasks, we evaluate LSTMs using GloVe embeddings, BERT, and baseline models. Among these models, we find that only BERT shows high rates of transfer into our scrambled domains, and for classification but not sequence labeling tasks. Our analyses seek to explain why transfer succeeds for some tasks but not others, to isolate the separate contributions of pretraining versus fine-tuning, to show that the fine-tuning process is not merely learning to unscramble the scrambled inputs, and to quantify the role of word frequency. Furthermore, our results suggest that current benchmarks may overestimate the degree to which current models actually understand language.

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Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Low-rank and Model-agnostic Representations
Ioannis Dikeoulias | Saadullah Amin | Günter Neumann

Temporal knowledge graph completion (TKGC) has become a popular approach for reasoning over the event and temporal knowledge graphs, targeting the completion of knowledge with accurate but missing information. In this context, tensor decomposition has successfully modeled interactions between entities and relations. Their effectiveness in static knowledge graph completion motivates us to introduce Time-LowFER, a family of parameter-efficient and time-aware extensions of the low-rank tensor factorization model LowFER. Noting several limitations in current approaches to represent time, we propose a cycle-aware time-encoding scheme for time features, which is model-agnostic and offers a more generalized representation of time. We implement our methods in a unified temporal knowledge graph embedding framework, focusing on time-sensitive data processing. The experiments show that our proposed methods perform on par or better than the state-of-the-art semantic matching models on two benchmarks.

Pre-trained language models have brought significant improvements in performance in a variety of natural language processing tasks. Most existing models performing state-of-the-art results have shown their approaches in the separate perspectives of data processing, pre-training tasks, neural network modeling, or fine-tuning. In this paper, we demonstrate how the approaches affect performance individually, and that the language model performs the best results on a specific question answering task when those approaches are jointly considered in pre-training models. In particular, we propose an extended pre-training task, and a new neighbor-aware mechanism that attends neighboring tokens more to capture the richness of context for pre-training language modeling. Our best model achieves new state-of-the-art results of 95.7% F1 and 90.6% EM on SQuAD 1.1 and also outperforms existing pre-trained language models such as RoBERTa, ALBERT, ELECTRA, and XLNet on the SQuAD 2.0 benchmark.

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Video Language Co-Attention with Multimodal Fast-Learning Feature Fusion for VideoQA
Adnen Abdessaied | Ekta Sood | Andreas Bulling

We propose the Video Language Co-Attention Network (VLCN) – a novel memory-enhanced model for Video Question Answering (VideoQA). Our model combines two original contributions”:” A multi-modal fast-learning feature fusion (FLF) block and a mechanism that uses self-attended language features to separately guide neural attention on both static and dynamic visual features extracted from individual video frames and short video clips. When trained from scratch, VLCN achieves competitive results with the state of the art on both MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA with 38.06% and 36.01% test accuracies, respectively. Through an ablation study, we further show that FLF improves generalization across different VideoQA datasets and performance for question types that are notoriously challenging in current datasets, such as long questions that require deeper reasoning as well as questions with rare answers.

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Detecting Word-Level Adversarial Text Attacks via SHapley Additive exPlanations
Lukas Huber | Marc Alexander Kühn | Edoardo Mosca | Georg Groh

State-of-the-art machine learning models are prone to adversarial attacks”:” Maliciously crafted inputs to fool the model into making a wrong prediction, often with high confidence. While defense strategies have been extensively explored in the computer vision domain, research in natural language processing still lacks techniques to make models resilient to adversarial text inputs. We adapt a technique from computer vision to detect word-level attacks targeting text classifiers. This method relies on training an adversarial detector leveraging Shapley additive explanations and outperforms the current state-of-the-art on two benchmarks. Furthermore, we prove the detector requires only a low amount of training samples and, in some cases, generalizes to different datasets without needing to retrain.

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Binary Encoded Word Mover’s Distance
Christian Johnson

Word Mover’s Distance is a textual distance metric which calculates the minimum transport cost between two sets of word embeddings. This metric achieves impressive results on semantic similarity tasks, but is slow and difficult to scale due to the large number of floating point calculations. This paper demonstrates that by combining pre-existing lower bounds with binary encoded word vectors, the metric can be rendered highly efficient in terms of computation time and memory while still maintaining accuracy on several textual similarity tasks.

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Unsupervised Geometric and Topological Approaches for Cross-Lingual Sentence Representation and Comparison
Shaked Haim Meirom | Omer Bobrowski

We propose novel structural-based approaches for the generation and comparison of cross lingual sentence representations. We do so by applying geometric and topological methods to analyze the structure of sentences, as captured by their word embeddings. The key properties of our methods are”:” (a) They are designed to be isometric invariant, in order to provide language-agnostic representations. (b) They are fully unsupervised, and use no cross-lingual signal. The quality of our representations, and their preservation across languages, are evaluated in similarity comparison tasks, achieving competitive results. Furthermore, we show that our structural-based representations can be combined with existing methods for improved results.

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A Study on Entity Linking Across Domains: Which Data is Best for Fine-Tuning?
Hassan Soliman | Heike Adel | Mohamed H. Gad-Elrab | Dragan Milchevski | Jannik Strötgen

Entity linking disambiguates mentions by mapping them to entities in a knowledge graph (KG). One important question in today’s research is how to extend neural entity linking systems to new domains. In this paper, we aim at a system that enables linking mentions to entities from a general-domain KG and a domain-specific KG at the same time. In particular, we represent the entities of different KGs in a joint vector space and address the questions of which data is best suited for creating and fine-tuning that space, and whether fine-tuning harms performance on the general domain. We find that a combination of data from both the general and the special domain is most helpful. The first is especially necessary for avoiding performance loss on the general domain. While additional supervision on entities that appear in both KGs performs best in an intrinsic evaluation of the vector space, it has less impact on the downstream task of entity linking.

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TRAttack: Text Rewriting Attack Against Text Retrieval
Junshuai Song | Jiangshan Zhang | Jifeng Zhu | Mengyun Tang | Yong Yang

Text retrieval has been widely-used in many online applications to help users find relevant information from a text collection. In this paper, we study a new attack scenario against text retrieval to evaluate its robustness to adversarial attacks under the black-box setting, in which attackers want their own texts to always get high relevance scores with different users’ input queries and thus be retrieved frequently and can receive large amounts of impressions for profits. Considering that most current attack methods only simply follow certain fixed optimization rules, we propose a novel text rewriting attack (TRAttack) method with learning ability from the multi-armed bandit mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted on simulated victim environments demonstrate that TRAttack can yield texts that have higher relevance scores with different given users’ queries than those generated by current state-of-the-art attack methods. We also evaluate TRAttack on Tencent Cloud’s and Baidu Cloud’s commercially-available text retrieval APIs, and the rewritten adversarial texts successfully get high relevance scores with different user queries, which shows the practical potential of our method and the risk of text retrieval systems.

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On the Geometry of Concreteness
Christian Wartena

In this paper we investigate how concreteness and abstractness are represented in word embedding spaces. We use data for English and German, and show that concreteness and abstractness can be determined independently and turn out to be completely opposite directions in the embedding space. Various methods can be used to determine the direction of concreteness, always resulting in roughly the same vector. Though concreteness is a central aspect of the meaning of words and can be detected clearly in embedding spaces, it seems not as easy to subtract or add concreteness to words to obtain other words or word senses like e.g. can be done with a semantic property like gender.

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Towards Improving Selective Prediction Ability of NLP Systems
Neeraj Varshney | Swaroop Mishra | Chitta Baral

It’s better to say “I can’t answer” than to answer incorrectly. This selective prediction ability is crucial for NLP systems to be reliably deployed in real-world applications. Prior work has shown that existing selective prediction techniques fail to perform well, especially in the out-of-domain setting. In this work, we propose a method that improves probability estimates of models by calibrating them using prediction confidence and difficulty score of instances. Using these two signals, we first annotate held-out instances and then train a calibrator to predict the likelihood of correctness of the model’s prediction. We instantiate our method with Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Duplicate Detection (DD) tasks and evaluate it in both In-Domain (IID) and Out-of-Domain (OOD) settings. In (IID, OOD) settings, we show that the representations learned by our calibrator result in an improvement of (15.81%, 5.64%) and (6.19%, 13.9%) over ‘MaxProb’ -a selective prediction baseline- on NLI and DD tasks respectively.

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On Target Representation in Continuous-output Neural Machine Translation
Evgeniia Tokarchuk | Vlad Niculae

Continuous generative models proved their usefulness in high-dimensional data, such as image and audio generation. However, continuous models for text generation have received limited attention from the community. In this work, we study continuous text generation using Transformers for neural machine translation (NMT). We argue that the choice of embeddings is crucial for such models, so we aim to focus on one particular aspect”:” target representation via embeddings. We explore pretrained embeddings and also introduce knowledge transfer from the discrete Transformer model using embeddings in Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces. Our results on the WMT Romanian-English and English-Turkish benchmarks show such transfer leads to the best-performing continuous model.

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Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer is Under-specified Optimization
Shijie Wu | Benjamin Van Durme | Mark Dredze

Pretrained multilingual encoders enable zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, but often produce unreliable models that exhibit high performance variance on the target language. We postulate that this high variance results from zero-shot cross-lingual transfer solving an under-specified optimization problem. We show that any linear-interpolated model between the source language monolingual model and source + target bilingual model has equally low source language generalization error, yet the target language generalization error reduces smoothly and linearly as we move from the monolingual to bilingual model, suggesting that the model struggles to identify good solutions for both source and target languages using the source language alone. Additionally, we show that zero-shot solution lies in non-flat region of target language error generalization surface, causing the high variance.

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Same Author or Just Same Topic? Towards Content-Independent Style Representations
Anna Wegmann | Marijn Schraagen | Dong Nguyen

Linguistic style is an integral component of language. Recent advances in the development of style representations have increasingly used training objectives from authorship verification (AV)”:” Do two texts have the same author? The assumption underlying the AV training task (same author approximates same writing style) enables self-supervised and, thus, extensive training. However, a good performance on the AV task does not ensure good “general-purpose” style representations. For example, as the same author might typically write about certain topics, representations trained on AV might also encode content information instead of style alone. We introduce a variation of the AV training task that controls for content using conversation or domain labels. We evaluate whether known style dimensions are represented and preferred over content information through an original variation to the recently proposed STEL framework. We find that representations trained by controlling for conversation are better than representations trained with domain or no content control at representing style independent from content.

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WeaNF”:" Weak Supervision with Normalizing Flows
Andreas Stephan | Benjamin Roth

A popular approach to decrease the need for costly manual annotation of large data sets is weak supervision, which introduces problems of noisy labels, coverage and bias. Methods for overcoming these problems have either relied on discriminative models, trained with cost functions specific to weak supervision, and more recently, generative models, trying to model the output of the automatic annotation process. In this work, we explore a novel direction of generative modeling for weak supervision”:” Instead of modeling the output of the annotation process (the labeling function matches), we generatively model the input-side data distributions (the feature space) covered by labeling functions. Specifically, we estimate a density for each weak labeling source, or labeling function, by using normalizing flows. An integral part of our method is the flow-based modeling of multiple simultaneously matching labeling functions, and therefore phenomena such as labeling function overlap and correlations are captured. We analyze the effectiveness and modeling capabilities on various commonly used weak supervision data sets, and show that weakly supervised normalizing flows compare favorably to standard weak supervision baselines.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing

With the ever-increasing pace of research and high volume of scholarly communication, scholars face a daunting task. Not only must they keep up with the growing literature in their own and related fields, scholars increasingly also need to rebut pseudo-science and disinformation. These needs have motivated an increasing focus on computational methods for enhancing search, summarization, and analysis of scholarly documents. However, the various strands of research on scholarly document processing remain fragmented. To reach out to the broader NLP and AI/ML community, pool distributed efforts in this area, and enable shared access to published research, we held the 3rd Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) at COLING as a hybrid event (https://sdproc.org/2022/). The SDP workshop consisted of a research track, three invited talks and five Shared Tasks: 1) MSLR22: Multi-Document Summarization for Literature Reviews, 2) DAGPap22: Detecting automatically generated scientific papers, 3) SV-Ident 2022: Survey Variable Identification in Social Science Publications, 4) SKGG: Scholarly Knowledge Graph Generation, 5) MuP 2022: Multi Perspective Scientific Document Summarization. The program was geared towards NLP, information retrieval, and data mining for scholarly documents, with an emphasis on identifying and providing solutions to open challenges.

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Finding Scientific Topics in Continuously Growing Text Corpora
André Bittermann | Jonas Rieger

The ever growing amount of research publications demands computational assistance for everyone trying to keep track with scientific processes. Topic modeling has become a popular approach for finding scientific topics in static collections of research papers. However, the reality of continuously growing corpora of scholarly documents poses a major challenge for traditional approaches. We introduce RollingLDA for an ongoing monitoring of research topics, which offers the possibility of sequential modeling of dynamically growing corpora with time consistency of time series resulting from the modeled texts. We evaluate its capability to detect research topics and present a Shiny App as an easy-to-use interface. In addition, we illustrate usage scenarios for different user groups such as researchers, students, journalists, or policy-makers.

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Large-scale Evaluation of Transformer-based Article Encoders on the Task of Citation Recommendation
Zoran Medić | Jan Snajder

Recently introduced transformer-based article encoders (TAEs) designed to produce similar vector representations for mutually related scientific articles have demonstrated strong performance on benchmark datasets for scientific article recommendation. However, the existing benchmark datasets are predominantly focused on single domains and, in some cases, contain easy negatives in small candidate pools. Evaluating representations on such benchmarks might obscure the realistic performance of TAEs in setups with thousands of articles in candidate pools. In this work, we evaluate TAEs on large benchmarks with more challenging candidate pools. We compare the performance of TAEs with a lexical retrieval baseline model BM25 on the task of citation recommendation, where the model produces a list of recommendations for citing in a given input article. We find out that BM25 is still very competitive with the state-of-the-art neural retrievers, a finding which is surprising given the strong performance of TAEs on small benchmarks. As a remedy for the limitations of the existing benchmarks, we propose a new benchmark dataset for evaluating scientific article representations: Multi-Domain Citation Recommendation dataset (MDCR), which covers different scientific fields and contains challenging candidate pools.

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Investigating the detection of Tortured Phrases in Scientific Literature
Puthineath Lay | Martin Lentschat | Cyril Labbe

With the help of online tools, unscrupulous authors can today generate a pseudo-scientific article and attempt to publish it. Some of these tools work by replacing or paraphrasing existing texts to produce new content, but they have a tendency to generate nonsensical expressions. A recent study introduced the concept of “tortured phrase”, an unexpected odd phrase that appears instead of the fixed expression. E.g. counterfeit consciousness instead of artificial intelligence. The present study aims at investigating how tortured phrases, that are not yet listed, can be detected automatically. We conducted several experiments, including non-neural binary classification, neural binary classification and cosine similarity comparison of the phrase tokens, yielding noticeable results.

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Lightweight Contextual Logical Structure Recovery
Po-Wei Huang | Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap | Yanxia Qin | Yajing Yang | Min-Yen Kan

Logical structure recovery in scientific articles associates text with a semantic section of the article. Although previous work has disregarded the surrounding context of a line, we model this important information by employing line-level attention on top of a transformer-based scientific document processing pipeline. With the addition of loss function engineering and data augmentation techniques with semi-supervised learning, our method improves classification performance by 10% compared to a recent state-of-the-art model. Our parsimonious, text-only method achieves a performance comparable to that of other works that use rich document features such as font and spatial position, using less data without sacrificing performance, resulting in a lightweight training pipeline.

Recently, there have been numerous research in Natural Language Processing on citation analysis in scientific literature. Studies of citation behavior aim at finding how researchers cited a paper in their work. In this paper, we are interested in identifying cited papers that are criticized. Recent research introduces the concept of Critical citations which provides a useful theoretical framework, making criticism an important part of scientific progress. Indeed, identifying critics could be a way to spot errors and thus encourage self-correction of science. In this work, we investigate how to automatically classify the critical citation contexts using Natural Language Processing (NLP). Our classification task consists of predicting critical or non-critical labels for citation contexts. For this, we experiment and compare different methods, including rule-based and machine learning methods, to classify critical vs. non-critical citation contexts. Our experiments show that fine-tuning pretrained transformer model RoBERTa achieved the highest performance among all systems.

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Incorporating the Rhetoric of Scientific Language into Sentence Embeddings using Phrase-guided Distant Supervision and Metric Learning
Kaito Sugimoto | Akiko Aizawa

Communicative functions are an important rhetorical feature of scientific writing. Sentence embeddings that contain such features are highly valuable for the argumentative analysis of scientific documents, with applications in document alignment, recommendation, and academic writing assistance. Moreover, embeddings can provide a possible solution to the open-set problem, where models need to generalize to new communicative functions unseen at training time. However, existing sentence representation models are not suited for detecting functional similarity since they only consider lexical or semantic similarities. To remedy this, we propose a combined approach of distant supervision and metric learning to make a representation model more aware of the functional part of a sentence. We first leverage an existing academic phrase database to label sentences automatically with their functions. Then, we train an embedding model to capture similarities and dissimilarities from a rhetorical perspective. The experimental results demonstrate that the embeddings obtained from our model are more advantageous than existing models when retrieving functionally similar sentences. We also provide an extensive analysis of the performance differences between five metric learning objectives, revealing that traditional methods (e.g., softmax cross-entropy loss and triplet loss) outperform state-of-the-art techniques.

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Identifying Medical Paraphrases in Scientific versus Popularization Texts in French for Laypeople Understanding
Ioana Buhnila

Scientific medical terms are difficult to understand for laypeople due to their technical formulas and etymology. Understanding medical concepts is important for laypeople as personal and public health is a lifelong concern. In this study, we present our methodology for building a French lexical resource annotated with paraphrases for the simplification of monolexical and multiword medical terms. In order to find medical paraphrases, we automatically searched for medical terms and specific lexical markers that help to paraphrase them. We annotated the medical terms, the paraphrase markers, and the paraphrase. We analysed the lexical relations and semantico-pragmatic functions that exists between the term and its paraphrase. We computed statistics for the medical paraphrase corpus, and we evaluated the readability of the medical paraphrases for a non-specialist coder. Our results show that medical paraphrases from popularization texts are easier to understand (62.66%) than paraphrases extracted from scientific texts (50%).

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Multi-objective Representation Learning for Scientific Document Retrieval
Mathias Parisot | Jakub Zavrel

Existing dense retrieval models for scientific documents have been optimized for either retrieval by short queries, or for document similarity, but usually not for both. In this paper, we explore the space of combining multiple objectives to achieve a single representation model that presents a good balance between both modes of dense retrieval, combining the relevance judgements from MS MARCO with the citation similarity of SPECTER, and the self-supervised objective of independent cropping. We also consider the addition of training data from document co-citation in a sentence context and domain-specific synthetic data. We show that combining multiple objectives yields models that generalize well across different benchmark tasks, improving up to 73% over models trained on a single objective.

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Visualisation Methods for Diachronic Semantic Shift
Raef Kazi | Alessandra Amato | Shenghui Wang | Doina Bucur

The meaning and usage of a concept or a word changes over time. These diachronic semantic shifts reflect the change of societal and cultural consensus as well as the evolution of science. The availability of large-scale corpora and recent success in language models have enabled researchers to analyse semantic shifts in great detail. However, current research lacks intuitive ways of presenting diachronic semantic shifts and making them comprehensive. In this paper, we study the PubMed dataset and compute semantic shifts across six decades. We develop three visualisation methods that can show, given a root word: the temporal change in its linguistic context, word re-occurrence, degree of similarity, time continuity, and separate trends per publisher location. We also propose a taxonomy that classifies visualisation methods for diachronic semantic shifts with respect to different purposes.

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Unsupervised Partial Sentence Matching for Cited Text Identification
Kathryn Ricci | Haw-Shiuan Chang | Purujit Goyal | Andrew McCallum

Given a citation in the body of a research paper, cited text identification aims to find the sentences in the cited paper that are most relevant to the citing sentence. The task is fundamentally one of sentence matching, where affinity is often assessed by a cosine similarity between sentence embeddings. However, (a) sentences may not be well-represented by a single embedding because they contain multiple distinct semantic aspects, and (b) good matches may not require a strong match in all aspects. To overcome these limitations, we propose a simple and efficient unsupervised method for cited text identification that adapts an asymmetric similarity measure to allow partial matches of multiple aspects in both sentences. On the CL-SciSumm dataset we find that our method outperforms a baseline symmetric approach, and, surprisingly, also outperforms all supervised and unsupervised systems submitted to past editions of CL-SciSumm Shared Task 1a.

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Multi-label Classification of Scientific Research Documents Across Domains and Languages
Autumn Toney | James Dunham

Automatically organizing scholarly literature is a necessary and challenging task. By assigning scientific research publications key concepts, researchers, policymakers, and the general public are able to search for and discover relevant research literature. The organization of scientific research evolves with new discoveries and publications, requiring an up-to-date and scalable text classification model. Additionally, scientific research publications benefit from multi-label classification, particularly with more fine-grained sub-domains. Prior work has focused on classifying scientific publications from one research area (e.g., computer science), referencing static concept descriptions, and implementing an English-only classification model. We propose a multi-label classification model that can be implemented in non-English languages, across all of scientific literature, with updatable concept descriptions.

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Investigating Metric Diversity for Evaluating Long Document Summarisation
Cai Yang | Stephen Wan

Long document summarisation, a challenging summarisation scenario, is the focus of the recently proposed LongSumm shared task. One of the limitations of this shared task has been its use of a single family of metrics for evaluation (the ROUGE metrics). In contrast, other fields, like text generation, employ multiple metrics. We replicated the LongSumm evaluation using multiple test set samples (vs. the single test set of the official shared task) and investigated how different metrics might complement each other in this evaluation framework. We show that under this more rigorous evaluation, (1) some of the key learnings from Longsumm 2020 and 2021 still hold, but the relative ranking of systems changes, and (2) the use of additional metrics reveals additional high-quality summaries missed by ROUGE, and (3) we show that SPICE is a candidate metric for summarisation evaluation for LongSumm.

Relation extraction models typically cast the problem of determining whether there is a relation between a pair of entities as a single decision. However, these models can struggle with long or complex language constructions in which two entities are not directly linked, as is often the case in scientific publications. We propose a novel approach that decomposes a binary relation into two unary relations that capture each argument’s role in the relation separately. We create a stacked learning model that incorporates information from unary and binary relation extractors to determine whether a relation holds between two entities. We present experimental results showing that this approach outperforms several competitive relation extractors on a new corpus of planetary science publications as well as a benchmark dataset in the biology domain.

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Mitigating Data Shift of Biomedical Research Articles for Information Retrieval and Semantic Indexing
Nima Ebadi | Anthony Rios | Peyman Najafirad

Researchers have explored novel methods for both semantic indexing and information retrieval of biomedical research articles. Moreover, most solutions treat each task independently. However, both tasks are related. For instance, semantic indexes are generally used to filter results from an information retrieval system. Hence, one task can potentially improve the performance of models trained for the other task. Thus, this study proposes a unified retriever-ranker-based model to tackle the tasks of information retrieval (IR) and semantic indexing (SI). Particularly, our proposed model can adapt to rapid shifts in scientific research. Our results show that the model effectively leverages task similarity to improve the robustness to dataset shift. For SI, the Micro f1 score increases by 8% and the LCA-F score improves by 5%. For IR, the MAP increases by 5% on average.

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A Japanese Masked Language Model for Academic Domain
Hiroki Yamauchi | Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Marie Katsurai | Ikki Ohmukai | Takashi Ninomiya

We release a pretrained Japanese masked language model for an academic domain. Pretrained masked language models have recently improved the performance of various natural language processing applications. In domains such as medical and academic, which include a lot of technical terms, domain-specific pretraining is effective. While domain-specific masked language models for medical and SNS domains are widely used in Japanese, along with domain-independent ones, pretrained models specific to the academic domain are not publicly available. In this study, we pretrained a RoBERTa-based Japanese masked language model on paper abstracts from the academic database CiNii Articles. Experimental results on Japanese text classification in the academic domain revealed the effectiveness of the proposed model over existing pretrained models.

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Named Entity Inclusion in Abstractive Text Summarization
Sergey Berezin | Tatiana Batura

We address the named entity omission - the drawback of many current abstractive text summarizers. We suggest a custom pretraining objective to enhance the model’s attention on the named entities in a text. At first, the named entity recognition model RoBERTa is trained to determine named entities in the text. After that this model is used to mask named entities in the text and the BART model is trained to reconstruct them. Next, BART model is fine-tuned on the summarization task. Our experiments showed that this pretraining approach drastically improves named entity inclusion precision and recall metrics.

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Named Entity Recognition Based Automatic Generation of Research Highlights
Tohida Rehman | Debarshi Kumar Sanyal | Prasenjit Majumder | Samiran Chattopadhyay

A scientific paper is traditionally prefaced by an abstract that summarizes the paper. Recently, research highlights that focus on the main findings of the paper have emerged as a complementary summary in addition to an abstract. However, highlights are not yet as common as abstracts, and are absent in many papers. In this paper, we aim to automatically generate research highlights using different sections of a research paper as input. We investigate whether the use of named entity recognition on the input improves the quality of the generated highlights. In particular, we have used two deep learning-based models: the first is a pointer-generator network, and the second augments the first model with coverage mechanism. We then augment each of the above models with named entity recognition features. The proposed method can be used to produce highlights for papers with missing highlights. Our experiments show that adding named entity information improves the performance of the deep learning-based summarizers in terms of ROUGE, METEOR and BERTScore measures.

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Citation Sentence Generation Leveraging the Content of Cited Papers
Akito Arita | Hiroaki Sugiyama | Kohji Dohsaka | Rikuto Tanaka | Hirotoshi Taira

We address automatic citation sentence generation, which reduces the burden on writing scientific papers. For highly accurate citation senetence generation, appropriate language must be learned using information such as the relationship between the cited source and the cited paper as well as the context in which the paper cited. Although the abstracts of papers have been used for the generation in the past, they often contain extra information in the citation sentence, which might negatively impact the generation of citation sentences. Therefore, this study attempts to learn a highly accurate citation sentence generation model using sentences from cited articles that resemble the previous sentence to the cited location, thereby utilizing information that is more useful for citation sentence generation.

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Overview of MSLR2022: A Shared Task on Multi-document Summarization for Literature Reviews
Lucy Lu Wang | Jay DeYoung | Byron Wallace

We provide an overview of the MSLR2022 shared task on multi-document summarization for literature reviews. The shared task was hosted at the Third Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) Workshop at COLING 2022. For this task, we provided data consisting of gold summaries extracted from review papers along with the groups of input abstracts that were synthesized into these summaries, split into two subtasks. In total, six teams participated, making 10 public submissions, 6 to the Cochrane subtask and 4 to the MSˆ2 subtask. The top scoring systems reported over 2 points ROUGE-L improvement on the Cochrane subtask, though performance improvements are not consistently reported across all automated evaluation metrics; qualitative examination of the results also suggests the inadequacy of current evaluation metrics for capturing factuality and consistency on this task. Significant work is needed to improve system performance, and more importantly, to develop better methods for automatically evaluating performance on this task.

In this paper we report the experiments performed for the submission to the Multidocument summarisation for Literature Review (MSLR) Shared Task. In particular, we adopt Primera model to the biomedical domain by placing global attention on important biomedical entities in several ways. We analyse the outputs of 23 resulting models and report some patterns related to the presence of additional global attention, number of training steps and the inputs configuration.

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Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Models on Multi-Document Summarization for Literature Reviews
Benjamin Yu

Systematic literature reviews in the biomedical space are often expensive to conduct. Automation through machine learning and large language models could improve the accuracy and research outcomes from such reviews. In this study, we evaluate a pre-trained LongT5 model on the MSLR22: Multi-Document Summarization for Literature Reviews Shared Task datasets. We weren’t able to make any improvements on the dataset benchmark, but we do establish some evidence that current summarization metrics are insufficient in measuring summarization accuracy. A multi-document summarization web tool was also built to demonstrate the viability of summarization models for future investigators: https://ben-yu.github.io/summarizer

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Exploring the limits of a base BART for multi-document summarization in the medical domain
Ishmael Obonyo | Silvia Casola | Horacio Saggion

This paper is a description of our participation in the Multi-document Summarization for Literature Review (MSLR) Shared Task, in which we explore summarization models to create an automatic review of scientific results. Rather than maximizing the metrics using expensive computational models, we placed ourselves in a situation of scarce computational resources and explore the limits of a base sequence to sequence models (thus with a limited input length) to the task. Although we explore methods to feed the abstractive model with salient sentences only (using a first extractive step), we find the results still need some improvements.

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Abstractive Approaches To Multidocument Summarization Of Medical Literature Reviews
Rahul Tangsali | Aditya Jagdish Vyawahare | Aditya Vyankatesh Mandke | Onkar Rupesh Litake | Dipali Dattatray Kadam

Text summarization has been a trending domain of research in NLP in the past few decades. The medical domain is no exception to the same. Medical documents often contain a lot of jargon pertaining to certain domains, and performing an abstractive summarization on the same remains a challenge. This paper presents a summary of the findings that we obtained based on the shared task of Multidocument Summarization for Literature Review (MSLR). We stood fourth in the leaderboards for evaluation on the MSˆ2 and Cochrane datasets. We finetuned pre-trained models such as BART-large, DistilBART and T5-base on both these datasets. These models’ accuracy was later tested with a part of the same dataset using ROUGE scores as the evaluation metrics.

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An Extractive-Abstractive Approach for Multi-document Summarization of Scientific Articles for Literature Review
Kartik Shinde | Trinita Roy | Tirthankar Ghosal

Research in the biomedical domain is con- stantly challenged by its large amount of ever- evolving textual information. Biomedical re- searchers are usually required to conduct a lit- erature review before any medical interven- tion to assess the effectiveness of the con- cerned research. However, the process is time- consuming, and therefore, automation to some extent would help reduce the accompanying information overload. Multi-document sum- marization of scientific articles for literature reviews is one approximation of such automa- tion. Here in this paper, we describe our pipelined approach for the aforementioned task. We design a BERT-based extractive method followed by a BigBird PEGASUS-based ab- stractive pipeline for generating literature re- view summaries from the abstracts of biomedi- cal trial reports as part of the Multi-document Summarization for Literature Review (MSLR) shared task1 in the Scholarly Document Pro- cessing (SDP) workshop 20222. Our proposed model achieves the best performance on the MSLR-Cochrane leaderboard3 on majority of the evaluation metrics. Human scrutiny of our automatically generated summaries indicates that our approach is promising to yield readable multi-article summaries for conducting such lit- erature reviews.

This paper provides an overview of the DAGPap22 shared task on the detection of automatically generated scientific papers at the Scholarly Document Process workshop colocated with COLING. We frame the detection problem as a binary classification task: given an excerpt of text, label it as either human-written or machine-generated. We shared a dataset containing excerpts from human-written papers as well as artificially generated content and suspicious documents collected by Elsevier publishing and editorial teams. As a test set, the participants are provided with a 5x larger corpus of openly accessible human-written as well as generated papers from the same scientific domains of documents. The shared task saw 180 submissions across 14 participating teams and resulted in two published technical reports. We discuss our findings from the shared task in this overview paper.

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SynSciPass: detecting appropriate uses of scientific text generation
Domenic Rosati

Approaches to machine generated text detection tend to focus on binary classification of human versus machine written text. In the scientific domain where publishers might use these models to examine manuscripts under submission, misclassification has the potential to cause harm to authors. Additionally, authors may appropriately use text generation models such as with the use of assistive technologies like translation tools. In this setting, a binary classification scheme might be used to flag appropriate uses of assistive text generation technology as simply machine generated which is a cause of concern. In our work, we simulate this scenario by presenting a state-of-the-art detector trained on the DAGPap22 with machine translated passages from Scielo and find that the model performs at random. Given this finding, we develop a framework for dataset development that provides a nuanced approach to detecting machine generated text by having labels for the type of technology used such as for translation or paraphrase resulting in the construction of SynSciPass. By training the same model that performed well on DAGPap22 on SynSciPass, we show that not only is the model more robust to domain shifts but also is able to uncover the type of technology used for machine generated text. Despite this, we conclude that current datasets are neither comprehensive nor realistic enough to understand how these models would perform in the wild where manuscript submissions can come from many unknown or novel distributions, how they would perform on scientific full-texts rather than small passages, and what might happen when there is a mix of appropriate and inappropriate uses of natural language generation.

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Detecting generated scientific papers using an ensemble of transformer models
Anna Glazkova | Maksim Glazkov

The paper describes neural models developed for the DAGPap22 shared task hosted at the Third Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing. This shared task targets the automatic detection of generated scientific papers. Our work focuses on comparing different transformer-based models as well as using additional datasets and techniques to deal with imbalanced classes. As a final submission, we utilized an ensemble of SciBERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTa fine-tuned using random oversampling technique. Our model achieved 99.24% in terms of F1-score. The official evaluation results have put our system at the third place.

In this paper, we provide an overview of the SV-Ident shared task as part of the 3rd Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) at COLING 2022. In the shared task, participants were provided with a sentence and a vocabulary of variables, and asked to identify which variables, if any, are mentioned in individual sentences from scholarly documents in full text. Two teams made a total of 9 submissions to the shared task leaderboard. While none of the teams improve on the baseline systems, we still draw insights from their submissions. Furthermore, we provide a detailed evaluation. Data and baselines for our shared task are freely available at https://github.com/vadis-project/sv-ident.

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Varanalysis@SV-Ident 2022: Variable Detection and Disambiguation Based on Semantic Similarity
Alica Hövelmeyer | Yavuz Selim Kartal

This paper describes an approach to the SV-Ident Shared Task which requires the detection and disambiguation of survey variables in sentences taken from social science publications. It deals with both subtasks as problems of semantic textual similarity (STS) and relies on the use of sentence transformers. Sentences and variables are examined for semantic similarity for both detecting sentences containing variables and disambiguating the respective variables. The focus is placed on analyzing the effects of including different parts of the variables and observing the differences between English and German instances. Additionally, for the variable detection task a bag of words model is used to filter out sentences which are likely to contain a variable mention as a preselection of sentences to perform the semantic similarity comparison on.

We present a new gold-standard dataset and a benchmark for the Research Theme Identification task, a sub-task of the Scholarly Knowledge Graph Generation shared task, at the 3rd Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing. The objective of the shared task was to label given research papers with research themes from a total of 36 themes. The benchmark was compiled using data drawn from the largest overall assessment of university research output ever undertaken globally (the Research Excellence Framework - 2014). We provide a performance comparison of a transformer-based ensemble, which obtains multiple predictions for a research paper, given its multiple textual fields (e.g. title, abstract, reference), with traditional machine learning models. The ensemble involves enriching the initial data with additional information from open-access digital libraries and Argumentative Zoning techniques (CITATION). It uses a weighted sum aggregation for the multiple predictions to obtain a final single prediction for the given research paper. Both data and the ensemble are publicly available on https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/sdp2022-scholarly-knowledge-graph-generation/data?select=task1_test_no_label.csv and https://github.com/ProjectDoSSIER/sdp2022, respectively.

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Overview of the First Shared Task on Multi Perspective Scientific Document Summarization (MuP)
Arman Cohan | Guy Feigenblat | Tirthankar Ghosal | Michal Shmueli-Scheuer

We present the main findings of MuP 2022 shared task, the first shared task on multi-perspective scientific document summarization. The task provides a testbed representing challenges for summarization of scientific documents, and facilitates development of better models to leverage summaries generated from multiple perspectives. We received 139 total submissions from 9 teams. We evaluated submissions both by automated metrics (i.e., Rouge) and human judgments on faithfulness, coverage, and readability which provided a more nuanced view of the differences between the systems. While we observe encouraging results from the participating teams, we conclude that there is still significant room left for improving summarization leveraging multiple references. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/allenai/mup.

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Multi Perspective Scientific Document Summarization With Graph Attention Networks (GATS)
Abbas Akkasi

It is well recognized that creating summaries of scientific texts can be difficult. For each given document, the majority of summarizing research believes there is only one best gold summary. Having just one gold summary limits our capacity to assess the effectiveness of summarizing algorithms because creating summaries is an art. Likewise, because it takes subject-matter experts a lot of time to read and comprehend lengthy scientific publications, annotating several gold summaries for scientific documents can be very expensive. The shared task known as the Multi perspective Scientific Document Summarization (Mup) is an exploration of various methods to produce multi perspective scientific summaries. Utilizing Graph Attention Networks (GATs), we take an extractive text summarization approach to the issue as a kind of sentence ranking task. Although the results produced by the suggested model are not particularly impressive, comparing them to the state-of-the-arts demonstrates the model’s potential for improvement.

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GUIR @ MuP 2022: Towards Generating Topic-aware Multi-perspective Summaries for Scientific Documents
Sajad Sotudeh | Nazli Goharian

This paper presents our approach for the MuP 2022 shared task —-Multi-Perspective Scientific Document Summarization, where the objective is to enable summarization models to explore methods for generating multi-perspective summaries for scientific papers. We explore two orthogonal ways to cope with this task. The first approach involves incorporating a neural topic model (i.e., NTM) into the state-of-the-art abstractive summarizer (LED); the second approach involves adding a two-step summarizer that extracts the salient sentences from the document and then writes abstractive summaries from those sentences. Our latter model outperformed our other submissions on the official test set. Specifically, among 10 participants (including organizers’ baseline) who made their results public with 163 total runs. Our best system ranks first in Rouge-1 (F), and second in Rouge-1 (R), Rouge-2 (F) and Average Rouge (F) scores.

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LTRC @MuP 2022: Multi-Perspective Scientific Document Summarization Using Pre-trained Generation Models
Ashok Urlana | Nirmal Surange | Manish Shrivastava

The MuP-2022 shared task focuses on multiperspective scientific document summarization. Given a scientific document, with multiple reference summaries, our goal was to develop a model that can produce a generic summary covering as many aspects of the document as covered by all of its reference summaries. This paper describes our best official model, a finetuned BART-large, along with a discussion on the challenges of this task and some of our unofficial models including SOTA generation models. Our submitted model out performedthe given, MuP 2022 shared task, baselines on ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L and average ROUGE F1-scores. Code of our submission can be ac- cessed here.

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Team AINLPML @ MuP in SDP 2021: Scientific Document Summarization by End-to-End Extractive and Abstractive Approach
Sandeep Kumar | Guneet Singh Kohli | Kartik Shinde | Asif Ekbal

This paper introduces the proposed summarization system of the AINLPML team for the First Shared Task on Multi-Perspective Scientific Document Summarization at SDP 2022. We present a method to produce abstractive summaries of scientific documents. First, we perform an extractive summarization step to identify the essential part of the paper. The extraction step includes utilizing a contributing sentence identification model to determine the contributing sentences in selected sections and portions of the text. In the next step, the extracted relevant information is used to condition the transformer language model to generate an abstractive summary. In particular, we fine-tuned the pre-trained BART model on the extracted summary from the previous step. Our proposed model successfully outperformed the baseline provided by the organizers by a significant margin. Our approach achieves the best average Rouge F1 Score, Rouge-2 F1 Score, and Rouge-L F1 Score among all submissions.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

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Semeval-2022 Task 1: CODWOE – Comparing Dictionaries and Word Embeddings
Timothee Mickus | Kees Van Deemter | Mathieu Constant | Denis Paperno

Word embeddings have advanced the state of the art in NLP across numerous tasks. Understanding the contents of dense neural representations is of utmost interest to the computational semantics community. We propose to focus on relating these opaque word vectors with human-readable definitions, as found in dictionaries This problem naturally divides into two subtasks: converting definitions into embeddings, and converting embeddings into definitions. This task was conducted in a multilingual setting, using comparable sets of embeddings trained homogeneously.

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1Cademy at Semeval-2022 Task 1: Investigating the Effectiveness of Multilingual, Multitask, and Language-Agnostic Tricks for the Reverse Dictionary Task
Zhiyong Wang | Ge Zhang | Nineli Lashkarashvili

This paper describes our system for the Se- mEval2022 task of matching dictionary glosses to word embeddings. We focus on the Reverse Dictionary Track of the competition, which maps multilingual glosses to reconstructed vector representations. More specifically, models convert the input of sentences to three types of embeddings: SGNS, Char, and Electra. We pro- pose several experiments for applying neural network cells, general multilingual and multi-task structures, and language-agnostic tricks to the task. We also provide comparisons over different types of word embeddings and ablation studies to suggest helpful strategies. Our initial transformer-based model achieves relatively low performance. However, trials on different retokenization methodologies indicate improved performance. Our proposed Elmo- based monolingual model achieves the highest outcome, and its multitask, and multilingual varieties show competitive results as well.

This paper describes the BLCU-ICALL system used in the SemEval-2022 Task 1 Comparing Dictionaries and Word Embeddings, the Definition Modeling subtrack, achieving 1st on Italian, 2nd on Spanish and Russian, and 3rd on English and French. We propose a transformer-based multitasking framework to explore the task. The framework integrates multiple embedding architectures through the cross-attention mechanism, and captures the structure of glosses through a masking language model objective. Additionally, we also investigate a simple but effective model ensembling strategy to further improve the robustness. The evaluation results show the effectiveness of our solution. We release our code at: https://github.com/blcuicall/SemEval2022-Task1-DM.

This paper introduces the approach of Team LingJing’s experiments on SemEval-2022 Task 1 Comparing Dictionaries and Word Embeddings (CODWOE). This task aims at comparing two types of semantic descriptions and including two sub-tasks: the definition modeling and reverse dictionary track. Our team focuses on the reverse dictionary track and adopts the multi-task self-supervised pre-training for multilingual reverse dictionaries. Specifically, the randomly initialized mDeBERTa-base model is used to perform multi-task pre-training on the multilingual training datasets. The pre-training step is divided into two stages, namely the MLM pre-training stage and the contrastive pre-training stage. The experimental results show that the proposed method has achieved good performance in the reverse dictionary track, where we rank the 1-st in the Sgns targets of the EN and RU languages. All the experimental codes are open-sourced at https://github.com/WENGSYX/Semeval.

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IRB-NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 1: Exploring the Relationship Between Words and Their Semantic Representations
Damir Korenčić | Ivan Grubisic

What is the relation between a word and its description, or a word and its embedding? Both descriptions and embeddings are semantic representations of words. But, what information from the original word remains in these representations? Or more importantly, which information about a word do these two representations share? Definition Modeling and Reverse Dictionary are two opposite learning tasks that address these questions. The goal of the Definition Modeling task is to investigate the power of information laying inside a word embedding to express the meaning of the word in a humanly understandable way – as a dictionary definition. Conversely, the Reverse Dictionary task explores the ability to predict word embeddings directly from its definition. In this paper, by tackling these two tasks, we are exploring the relationship between words and their semantic representations. We present our findings based on the descriptive, exploratory, and predictive data analysis conducted on the CODWOE dataset. We give a detailed overview of the systems that we designed for Definition Modeling and Reverse Dictionary tasks, and that achieved top scores on SemEval-2022 CODWOE challenge in several subtasks. We hope that our experimental results concerning the predictive models and the data analyses we provide will prove useful in future explorations of word representations and their relationships.

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TLDR at SemEval-2022 Task 1: Using Transformers to Learn Dictionaries and Representations
Aditya Srivastava | Harsha Vardhan Vemulapati

We propose a pair of deep learning models, which employ unsupervised pretraining, attention mechanisms and contrastive learning for representation learning from dictionary definitions, and definition modeling from such representations. Our systems, the Transformers for Learning Dictionaries and Representations (TLDR), were submitted to the SemEval 2022 Task 1: Comparing Dictionaries and Word Embeddings (CODWOE), where they officially ranked first on the definition modeling subtask, and achieved competitive performance on the reverse dictionary subtask. In this paper we describe our methodology and analyse our system design hypotheses.

This paper presents a novel and linguistic-driven system for the Spanish Reverse Dictionary task of SemEval-2022 Task 1. The aim of this task is the automatic generation of a word using its gloss. The conclusion is that this task results could improve if the quality of the dataset did as well by incorporating high-quality lexicographic data. Therefore, in this paper we analyze the main gaps in the proposed dataset and describe how these limitations could be tackled.

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Edinburgh at SemEval-2022 Task 1: Jointly Fishing for Word Embeddings and Definitions
Pinzhen Chen | Zheng Zhao

This paper presents a winning submission to the SemEval 2022 Task 1 on two sub-tasks: reverse dictionary and definition modelling. We leverage a recently proposed unified model with multi-task training. It utilizes data symmetrically and learns to tackle both tracks concurrently. Analysis shows that our system performs consistently on diverse languages, and works the best with sgns embeddings. Yet, char and electra carry intriguing properties. The two tracks’ best results are always in differing subsets grouped by linguistic annotations. In this task, the quality of definition generation lags behind, and BLEU scores might be misleading.

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RIGA at SemEval-2022 Task 1: Scaling Recurrent Neural Networks for CODWOE Dictionary Modeling
Eduards Mukans | Gus Strazds | Guntis Barzdins

Described are our two entries “emukans” and “guntis” for the definition modeling track of CODWOE SemEval-2022 Task 1. Our approach is based on careful scaling of a GRU recurrent neural network, which exhibits double descent of errors, corresponding to significant improvements also per human judgement. Our results are in the middle of the ranking table per official automatic metrics.

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Uppsala University at SemEval-2022 Task 1: Can Foreign Entries Enhance an English Reverse Dictionary?
Rafal Cerniavski | Sara Stymne

We present the Uppsala University system for SemEval-2022 Task 1: Comparing Dictionaries and Word Embeddings (CODWOE). We explore the performance of multilingual reverse dictionaries as well as the possibility of utilizing annotated data in other languages to improve the quality of a reverse dictionary in the target language. We mainly focus on character-based embeddings.In our main experiment, we train multilingual models by combining the training data from multiple languages. In an additional experiment, using resources beyond the shared task, we use the training data in Russian and French to improve the English reverse dictionary using unsupervised embeddings alignment and machine translation. The results show that multilingual models occasionally but not consistently can outperform the monolingual baselines. In addition, we demonstrate an improvement of an English reverse dictionary using translated entries from the Russian training data set.

This paper describes our two deep learning systems that competed at SemEval-2022 Task 1 “CODWOE: Comparing Dictionaries and WOrd Embeddings”. We participated in the subtask for the reverse dictionary which consists in generating vectors from glosses. We use sequential models that integrate several neural networks, starting from Embeddings networks until the use of Dense networks, Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks and LSTM networks. All glosses have been preprocessed in order to consider the best representation form of the meanings for all words that appears. We achieved very competitive results in reverse dictionary with a second position in English and French languages when using contextualized embeddings, and the same position for English, French and Spanish languages when using char embeddings.

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JSI at SemEval-2022 Task 1: CODWOE - Reverse Dictionary: Monolingual and cross-lingual approaches
Thi Hong Hanh Tran | Matej Martinc | Matthew Purver | Senja Pollak

The reverse dictionary task is a sequence-to-vector task in which a gloss is provided as input, and the output must be a semantically matching word vector. The reverse dictionary is useful in practical applications such as solving the tip-of-the-tongue problem, helping new language learners, etc. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of a Transformer-based model with cross-lingual zero-shot learning to improve the reverse dictionary performance. Our experiments are conducted in five languages in the CODWOE dataset, including English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. Even if we did not achieve a good ranking in the CODWOE competition, we show that our work partially improves the current baseline from the organizers with a hypothesis on the impact of LSTM in monolingual, multilingual, and zero-shot learning. All the codes are available at https://github.com/honghanhh/codwoe2021.

This paper presents the shared task on Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding, which consists of two subtasks: (a) a binary classification task aimed at identifying whether a sentence contains an idiomatic expression, and (b) a task based on semantic text similarity which requires the model to adequately represent potentially idiomatic expressions in context. Each subtask includes different settings regarding the amount of training data. Besides the task description, this paper introduces the datasets in English, Portuguese, and Galician and their annotation procedure, the evaluation metrics, and a summary of the participant systems and their results. The task had close to 100 registered participants organised into twenty five teams making over 650 and 150 submissions in the practice and evaluation phases respectively.

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Helsinki-NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 2: A Feature-Based Approach to Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection
Sami Itkonen | Jörg Tiedemann | Mathias Creutz

This paper describes the University of Helsinki submission to the SemEval 2022 task on multilingual idiomaticity detection. Our system utilizes several models made available by HuggingFace, along with the baseline BERT model for the task. We focus on feature engineering based on properties that typically characterize idiomatic expressions. The additional features lead to improvements over the baseline and the final submission achieves 15th place out of 20 submissions. The paper provides error analysis of our model including visualisations of the contributions of individual features.

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Hitachi at SemEval-2022 Task 2: On the Effectiveness of Span-based Classification Approaches for Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection
Atsuki Yamaguchi | Gaku Morio | Hiroaki Ozaki | Yasuhiro Sogawa

In this paper, we describe our system for SemEval-2022 Task 2: Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding. The task aims at detecting idiomaticity in an input sequence (Subtask A) and modeling representation of sentences that contain potential idiomatic multiword expressions (MWEs) (Subtask B) in three languages. We focus on the zero-shot setting of Subtask A and propose two span-based idiomaticity classification methods: MWE span-based classification and idiomatic MWE span prediction-based classification. We use several cross-lingual pre-trained language models (InfoXLM, XLM-R, and others) as our backbone network. Our best-performing system, fine-tuned with the span-based idiomaticity classification, ranked fifth in the zero-shot setting of Subtask A and exhibited a macro F1 score of 0.7466.

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UAlberta at SemEval 2022 Task 2: Leveraging Glosses and Translations for Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection
Bradley Hauer | Seeratpal Jaura | Talgat Omarov | Grzegorz Kondrak

We describe the University of Alberta systems for the SemEval-2022 Task 2 on multilingual idiomaticity detection. Working under the assumption that idiomatic expressions are noncompositional, our first method integrates information on the meanings of the individual words of an expression into a binary classifier. Further hypothesizing that literal and idiomatic expressions translate differently, our second method translates an expression in context, and uses a lexical knowledge base to determine if the translation is literal. Our approaches are grounded in linguistic phenomena, and leverage existing sources of lexical knowledge. Our results offer support for both approaches, particularly the former.

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HYU at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Effective Idiomaticity Detection with Consideration at Different Levels of Contextualization
Youngju Joung | Taeuk Kim

We propose a unified framework that enables us to consider various aspects of contextualization at different levels to better identify the idiomaticity of multi-word expressions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach based on the inter- and inner-sentence context of a target MWE is effective in improving the performance of related models. We also share our experience in detail on the task of SemEval-2022 Tasks 2 such that future work on the same task can be benefited from this.

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drsphelps at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Learning idiom representations using BERTRAM
Dylan Phelps

This paper describes our system for SemEval-2022 Task 2 Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding sub-task B. We modify a standard BERT sentence transformer by adding embeddings for each idiom, which are created using BERTRAM and a small number of contexts. We show that this technique increases the quality of idiom representations and leads to better performance on the task. We also perform analysis on our final results and show that the quality of the produced idiom embeddings is highly sensitive to the quality of the input contexts.

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JARVix at SemEval-2022 Task 2: It Takes One to Know One? Idiomaticity Detection using Zero and One-Shot Learning
Yash Jakhotiya | Vaibhav Kumar | Ashwin Pathak | Raj Shah

Large Language Models have been successful in a wide variety of Natural Language Processing tasks by capturing the compositionality of the text representations. In spite of their great success, these vector representations fail to capture meaning of idiomatic multi-word expressions (MWEs). In this paper, we focus on the detection of idiomatic expressions by using binary classification. We use a dataset consisting of the literal and idiomatic usage of MWEs in English and Portuguese. Thereafter, we perform the classification in two different settings: zero shot and one shot, to determine if a given sentence contains an idiom or not. N shot classification for this task is defined by N number of common idioms between the training and testing sets. In this paper, we train multiple Large Language Models in both the settings and achieve an F1 score (macro) of 0.73 for the zero shot setting and an F1 score (macro) of 0.85 for the one shot setting. An implementation of our work can be found at https://github.com/ashwinpathak20/Idiomaticity_Detection_Using_Few_Shot_Learning.

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CardiffNLP-Metaphor at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Targeted Fine-tuning of Transformer-based Language Models for Idiomaticity Detection
Joanne Boisson | Jose Camacho-Collados | Luis Espinosa-Anke

This paper describes the experiments ran for SemEval-2022 Task 2, subtask A, zero-shot and one-shot settings for idiomaticity detection. Our main approach is based on fine-tuning transformer-based language models as a baseline to perform binary classification. Our system, CardiffNLP-Metaphor, ranked 8th and 7th (respectively on zero- and one-shot settings on this task. Our main contribution lies in the extensive evaluation of transformer-based language models and various configurations, showing, among others, the potential of large multilingual models over base monolingual models. Moreover, we analyse the impact of various input parameters, which offer interesting insights on how language models work in practice.

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kpfriends at SemEval-2022 Task 2: NEAMER - Named Entity Augmented Multi-word Expression Recognizer
Minsik Oh

We present NEAMER - Named Entity Augmented Multi-word Expression Recognizer. This system is inspired by non-compositionality characteristics shared between Named Entity and Idiomatic Expressions. We utilize transfer learning and locality features to enhance idiom classification task. This system is our submission for SemEval Task 2: Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding Subtask A OneShot shared task. We achieve SOTA with F1 0.9395 during post-evaluation phase. We also observe improvement in training stability. Lastly, we experiment with non-compositionality knowledge transfer, cross-lingual fine-tuning and locality features, which we also introduce in this paper.

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daminglu123 at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Using BERT and LSTM to Do Text Classification
Daming Lu

Multiword expressions (MWEs) or idiomaticity are common phenomenon in natural languages. Current pre-trained language models cannot effectively capture the meaning of these MWEs. The reason is that two normal words, after combining together, could have an abruptly different meaning than the compositionality of the meanings of each word, whereas pre-trained language models reply on words compositionality. We proposed an improved method of adding an LSTM layer to the BERT model in order to get better results on a text classification task (Subtask A). Our result is slightly better than the baseline. We also tried adding TextCNN to BERT and adding both LSTM and TextCNN to BERT. We find that adding only LSTM gives the best performance.

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HiJoNLP at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Detecting Idiomaticity of Multiword Expressions using Multilingual Pretrained Language Models
Minghuan Tan

This paper describes an approach to detect idiomaticity only from the contextualized representation of a MWE over multilingual pretrained language models. Our experiments find that larger models are usually more effective in idiomaticity detection. However, using a higher layer of the model may not guarantee a better performance. In multilingual scenarios, the convergence of different languages are not consistent and rich-resource languages have big advantages over other languages.

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ZhichunRoad at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Adversarial Training and Contrastive Learning for Multiword Representations
Xuange Cui | Wei Xiong | Songlin Wang

This paper presents our contribution to the SemEval-2022 Task 2: Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding.We explore the impact of three different pre-trained multilingual language models in the SubTaskA.By enhancing the model generalization and robustness, we use the exponential moving average (EMA) method and the adversarial attack strategy. In SubTaskB, we add an effective cross-attention module for modeling the relationships of two sentences. We jointly train the model with a contrastive learning objective and employ a momentum contrast to enlarge the number of negative pairs. Additionally, we use the alignment and uniformity properties to measure the quality of sentence embeddings.Our approach obtained competitive results in both subtasks.

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NER4ID at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Named Entity Recognition for Idiomaticity Detection
Simone Tedeschi | Roberto Navigli

Idioms are lexically-complex phrases whose meaning cannot be derived by compositionally interpreting their components. Although the automatic identification and understanding of idioms is essential for a wide range of Natural Language Understanding tasks, they are still largely under-investigated. This motivated the organization of the SemEval-2022 Task 2, which is divided into two multilingual subtasks: one about idiomaticity detection, and the other about sentence embeddings. In this work, we focus on the first subtask and propose a Transformer-based dual-encoder architecture to compute the semantic similarity between a potentially-idiomatic expression and its context and, based on this, predict idiomaticity. Then, we show how and to what extent Named Entity Recognition can be exploited to reduce the degree of confusion of idiom identification systems and, therefore, improve performance. Our model achieves 92.1 F1 in the one-shot setting and shows strong robustness towards unseen idioms achieving 77.4 F1 in the zero-shot setting. We release our code at https://github.com/Babelscape/ner4id.

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YNU-HPCC at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Representing Multilingual Idiomaticity based on Contrastive Learning
Kuanghong Liu | Jin Wang | Xuejie Zhang

This paper will present the methods we use as the YNU-HPCC team in the SemEval-2022 Task 2, Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding. We are involved in two subtasks, including four settings. In subtask B of sentence representation, we used novel approaches with ideas of contrastive learning to optimize model, where method of CoSENT was used in the pre-train setting, and triplet loss and multiple negatives ranking loss functions in fine-tune setting. We had achieved very competitive results on the final released test datasets. However, for subtask A of idiomaticity detection, we simply did a few explorations and experiments based on the xlm-RoBERTa model. Sentence concatenated with additional MWE as inputs did well in a one-shot setting. Sentences containing context had a poor performance on final released test data in zero-shot setting even if we attempted to extract effective information from CLS tokens of hidden layers.

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OCHADAI at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Adversarial Training for Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection
Lis Pereira | Ichiro Kobayashi

We propose a multilingual adversarial training model for determining whether a sentence contains an idiomatic expression. Given that a key challenge with this task is the limited size of annotated data, our model relies on pre-trained contextual representations from different multi-lingual state-of-the-art transformer-based language models (i.e., multilingual BERT and XLM-RoBERTa), and on adversarial training, a training method for further enhancing model generalization and robustness. Without relying on any human-crafted features, knowledgebase, or additional datasets other than the target datasets, our model achieved competitive results and ranked 6thplace in SubTask A (zero-shot) setting and 15thplace in SubTask A (one-shot) setting

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HIT at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Pre-trained Language Model for Idioms Detection
Zheng Chu | Ziqing Yang | Yiming Cui | Zhigang Chen | Ming Liu

The same multi-word expressions may have different meanings in different sentences. They can be mainly divided into two categories, which are literal meaning and idiomatic meaning. Non-contextual-based methods perform poorly on this problem, and we need contextual embedding to understand the idiomatic meaning of multi-word expressions correctly. We use a pre-trained language model, which can provide a context-aware sentence embedding, to detect whether multi-word expression in the sentence is idiomatic usage.

We report the results of the SemEval 2022 Task 3, PreTENS, on evaluation the acceptability of simple sentences containing constructions whose two arguments are presupposed to be or not to be in an ordered taxonomic relation. The task featured two sub-tasks articulated as: (i) binary prediction task and (ii) regression task, predicting the acceptability in a continuous scale. The sentences were artificially generated in three languages (English, Italian and French). 21 systems, with 8 system papers were submitted for the task, all based on various types of fine-tuned transformer systems, often with ensemble methods and various data augmentation techniques. The best systems reached an F1-macro score of 94.49 (sub-task1) and a Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.80 (sub-task2), with interesting variations in specific constructions and/or languages.

This paper presents the results and main findings of our system on SemEval-2022 Task 3 Presupposed Taxonomies: Evaluating Neural Network Semantics (PreTENS). This task aims at semantic competence with specific attention on the evaluation of language models, which is a task with respect to the recognition of appropriate taxonomic relations between two nominal arguments. Two sub-tasks including binary classification and regression are designed for the evaluation. For the classification sub-task, we adopt the DeBERTa-v3 pre-trained model for fine-tuning datasets of different languages. Due to the small size of the training datasets of the regression sub-task, we transfer the knowledge of classification model (i.e., model parameters) to the regression task. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the best results on both sub-tasks. Meanwhile, we also report negative results of multiple training strategies for further discussion. All the experimental codes are open-sourced at https://github.com/WENGSYX/Semeval.

This paper describes our system created for the SemEval 2022 Task 3: Presupposed Taxonomies - Evaluating Neural-network Semantics. This task is focused on correctly recognizing taxonomic word relations in English, French and Italian. We developed various datageneration techniques that expand the originally provided train set and show that all methods increase the performance of modelstrained on these expanded datasets. Our final system outperformed the baseline system from the task organizers by achieving an average macro F1 score of 79.6 on all languages, compared to the baseline’s 67.4.

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CSECU-DSG at SemEval-2022 Task 3: Investigating the Taxonomic Relationship Between Two Arguments using Fusion of Multilingual Transformer Models
Abdul Aziz | Md. Akram Hossain | Abu Nowshed Chy

Recognizing lexical relationships between words is one of the formidable tasks in computational linguistics. It plays a vital role in the improvement of various NLP tasks. However, the diversity of word semantics, sentence structure as well as word order information make it challenging to distill the relationship effectively. To address these challenges, SemEval-2022 Task 3 introduced a shared task PreTENS focusing on semantic competence to determine the taxonomic relations between two nominal arguments. This paper presents our participation in this task where we proposed an approach through exploiting an ensemble of multilingual transformer methods. We employed two fine-tuned multilingual transformer models including XLM-RoBERTa and mBERT to train our model. To enhance the performance of individual models, we fuse the predicted probability score of these two models using weighted arithmetic mean to generate a unified probability score. The experimental results showed that our proposed method achieved competitive performance among the participants’ methods.

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UoR-NCL at SemEval-2022 Task 3: Fine-Tuning the BERT-Based Models for Validating Taxonomic Relations
Thanet Markchom | Huizhi Liang | Jiaoyan Chen

In human languages, there are many presuppositional constructions that impose a constrain on the taxonomic relations between two nouns depending on their order. These constructions create a challenge in validating taxonomic relations in real-world contexts. In SemEval2022-Task3 Presupposed Taxonomies: Evaluating Neural Network Semantics (PreTENS), the organizers introduced a task regarding validating the taxonomic relations within a variety of presuppositional constructions. This task is divided into two subtasks: classification and regression. Each subtask contains three datasets in multiple languages, i.e., English, Italian and French. To tackle this task, this work proposes to fine-tune different BERT-based models pre-trained on different languages. According to the experimental results, the fine-tuned BERT-based models are effective compared to the baselines in classification. For regression, the fine-tuned models show promising performance with the possibility of improvement.

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SPDB Innovation Lab at SemEval-2022 Task 3: Recognize Appropriate Taxonomic Relations Between Two Nominal Arguments with ERNIE-M Model
Yue Zhou | Bowei Wei | Jianyu Liu | Yang Yang

Synonym and antonym practice are the most common practices in our early childhood. It correlated our known words to a better place deep in our intuition. At the beginning of life for a machine, we would like to treat the machine as a baby and built a similar training for it as well to present a qualified performance. In this paper, we present an ensemble model for sentence logistics classification, which outperforms the state-of-art methods. Our approach essentially builds on two models including ERNIE-M and DeBERTaV3. With cross validation and random seeds tuning, we select the top performance models for the last soft ensemble and make them vote for the final answer, achieving the top 6 performance.

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UU-Tax at SemEval-2022 Task 3: Improving the generalizability of language models for taxonomy classification through data augmentation
Injy Sarhan | Pablo Mosteiro | Marco Spruit

This paper presents our strategy to address the SemEval-2022 Task 3 PreTENS: Presupposed Taxonomies Evaluating Neural Network Semantics. The goal of the task is to identify if a sentence is deemed acceptable or not, depending on the taxonomic relationship that holds between a noun pair contained in the sentence. For sub-task 1—binary classification—we propose an effective way to enhance the robustness and the generalizability of language models for better classification on this downstream task. We design a two-stage fine-tuning procedure on the ELECTRA language model using data augmentation techniques. Rigorous experiments are carried out using multi-task learning and data-enriched fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model, UU-Tax, is indeed able to generalize well for our downstream task. For sub-task 2 —regression—we propose a simple classifier that trains on features obtained from Universal Sentence Encoder (USE). In addition to describing the submitted systems, we discuss other experiments that employ pre-trained language models and data augmentation techniques. For both sub-tasks, we perform error analysis to further understand the behaviour of the proposed models. We achieved a global F1Binary score of 91.25% in sub-task 1 and a rho score of 0.221 in sub-task 2.

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KaMiKla at SemEval-2022 Task 3: AlBERTo, BERT, and CamemBERT—Be(r)tween Taxonomy Detection and Prediction
Karl Vetter | Miriam Segiet | Klara Lennermann

This paper describes our system submitted for SemEval Task 3: Presupposed Taxonomies: Evaluating Neural Network Semantics (Zamparelli et al., 2022). We participated in both the binary classification and the regression subtask. Target sentences are classified according to their taxonomical relation in subtask 1 and according to their acceptability judgment in subtask 2. Our approach in both subtasks is based on a neural network BERT model. We used separate models for the three languages covered by the task, English, French, and Italian. For the second subtask, we used median averaging to construct an ensemble model. We ranked 15th out of 21 groups for subtask 1 (F1-score: 77.38%) and 11th out of 17 groups for subtask 2 (RHO: 0.078).

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HW-TSC at SemEval-2022 Task 3: A Unified Approach Fine-tuned on Multilingual Pretrained Model for PreTENS
Yinglu Li | Min Zhang | Xiaosong Qiao | Minghan Wang

In the paper, we describe a unified system for task 3 of SemEval-2022. The task aims to recognize the semantic structures of sentences by providing two nominal arguments and to evaluate the degree of taxonomic relations. We utilise the strategy that adding language prefix tag in the training set, which is effective for the model. We split the training set to avoid the translation information to be learnt by the model. For the task, we propose a unified model fine-tuned on the multilingual pretrained model, XLM-RoBERTa. The model performs well in subtask 1 (the binary classification subtask). In order to verify whether our model could also perform better in subtask 2 (the regression subtask), the ranking score is transformed into classification labels by an up-sampling strategy. With the ensemble strategy, the performance of our model can be also improved. As a result, the model obtained the second place for subtask 1 and subtask 2 in the competition evaluation.

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SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection
Carla Perez-Almendros | Luis Espinosa-Anke | Steven Schockaert

This paper presents an overview of Task 4 at SemEval-2022, which was focused on detecting Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) towards vulnerable communities. Two sub-tasks were considered: a binary classification task, where participants needed to classify a given paragraph as containing PCL or not, and a multi-label classification task, where participants needed to identify which types of PCL are present (if any). The task attracted more than 300 participants, 77 teams and 229 valid submissions. We provide an overview of how the task was organized, discuss the techniques that were employed by the different participants, and summarize the main resulting insights about PCL detection and categorization.

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JUST-DEEP at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Using Deep Learning Techniques to Reveal Patronizing and Condescending Language
Mohammad Makahleh | Naba Bani Yaseen | Malak Abdullah

Classification of language that favors or condones vulnerable communities (e.g., refugees, homeless, widows) has been considered a challenging task and a critical step in NLP applications. Moreover, the spread of this language among people and on social media harms society and harms the people concerned. Therefore, the classification of this language is considered a significant challenge for researchers in the world. In this paper, we propose JUST-DEEP architecture to classify a text and determine if it contains any form of patronizing and condescending language (Task 4- Subtask 1). The architecture uses state-of-art pre-trained models and empowers ensembling techniques that outperform the baseline (RoBERTa) in the SemEval-2022 task4 with a 0.502 F1 score.

This paper describes the second-placed system for subtask 2 and the ninth-placed system for subtask 1 in SemEval 2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. We propose an ensemble of prompt training and label attention mechanism for multi-label classification tasks. Transfer learning is introduced to transfer the knowledge from binary classification to multi-label classification. The experimental results proved the effectiveness of our proposed method. The ablation study is also conducted to show the validity of each technique.

PCL detection task is aimed at identifying and categorizing language that is patronizing or condescending towards vulnerable communities in the general media. Compared to other NLP tasks of paragraph classification, the negative language presented in the PCL detection task is usually more implicit and subtle to be recognized, making the performance of common text classification approaches disappointed. Targeting the PCL detection problem in SemEval-2022 Task 4, in this paper, we give an introduction to our team’s solution, which exploits the power of prompt-based learning on paragraph classification. We reformulate the task as an appropriate cloze prompt and use pre2trained Masked Language Models to fill the cloze slot. For the two subtasks, binary classification and multi-label classification, DeBERTa model is adopted and fine-tuned to predict masked label words of task-specific prompts. On the evaluation dataset, for binary classification, our approach achieves an F1-score of 0.6406; for multi-label classification, our approach achieves an macro-F1-score of 0.4689 and ranks first in the leaderboard.

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DH-FBK at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Leveraging Annotators’ Disagreement and Multiple Data Views for Patronizing Language Detection
Alan Ramponi | Elisa Leonardelli

The subtle and typically unconscious use of patronizing and condescending language (PCL) in large-audience media outlets undesirably feeds stereotypes and strengthens power-knowledge relationships, perpetuating discrimination towards vulnerable communities. Due to its subjective and subtle nature, PCL detection is an open and challenging problem, both for computational methods and human annotators. In this paper we describe the systems submitted by the DH-FBK team to SemEval-2022 Task 4, aiming at detecting PCL towards vulnerable communities in English media texts. Motivated by the subjectivity of human interpretation, we propose to leverage annotators’ uncertainty and disagreement to better capture the shades of PCL in a multi-task, multi-view learning framework. Our approach achieves competitive results, largely outperforming baselines and ranking on the top-left side of the leaderboard on both PCL identification and classification. Noticeably, our approach does not rely on any external data or model ensemble, making it a viable and attractive solution for real-world use.

Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) has a large harmful impact and is difficult to detect, both for human judges and existing NLP systems. At SemEval-2022 Task 4, we propose a novel Transformer-based model and its ensembles to accurately understand such language context for PCL detection. To facilitate comprehension of the subtle and subjective nature of PCL, two fine-tuning strategies are applied to capture discriminative features from diverse linguistic behaviour and categorical distribution. The system achieves remarkable results on the official ranking, including 1st in Subtask 1 and 5th in Subtask 2. Extensive experiments on the task demonstrate the effectiveness of our system and its strategies.

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ASRtrans at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Ensemble of Tuned Transformer-based Models for PCL Detection
Ailneni Rakshitha Rao

Patronizing behavior is a subtle form of bullying and when directed towards vulnerable communities, it can arise inequalities. This paper describes our system for Task 4 of SemEval-2022: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection (PCL). We participated in both the sub-tasks and conducted extensive experiments to analyze the effects of data augmentation and loss functions used, to tackle the problem of class imbalance. We explore whether large transformer-based models can capture the intricacies associated with PCL detection. Our solution consists of an ensemble of the RoBERTa model which is further trained on external data and other language models such as XLNeT, Ernie-2.0, and BERT. We also present the results of several problem transformation techniques such as Classifier Chains, Label Powerset, and Binary relevance for multi-label classification.

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LastResort at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Towards Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection using Pre-trained Transformer Based Models Ensembles
Samyak Agrawal | Radhika Mamidi

This paper presents our solutions systems for Task4 at SemEval2022: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. This shared task contains two sub-tasks. The first sub-task is a binary classification task whose goal is to predict whether a given paragraph contains any form of patronising or condescending language(PCL). For the second sub-task, given a paragraph, we have to find which PCL categories express the condescension. Here we have a total of 7 overlapping sub-categories for PCL. Our proposed solution uses BERT based ensembled models with hard voting and techniques applied to take care of class imbalances. Our paper describes the system architecture of the submitted solution and other experiments that we conducted.

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Felix&Julia at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection
Felix Herrmann | Julia Krebs

This paper describes the authors’ submission to the SemEval-2022 task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) Detection. The aim of the task is the detection and classification of PCL in an annotated dataset. Subtask 1 includes a binary classification task (PCL or not PCL). Subtask 2 is a multi label classification task where the system identifies different categories of PCL. The authors of this paper submitted two different models: one RoBERTa model and one DistilBERT model. Both systems performed better than the random and RoBERTA baseline given by the task organizers. The RoBERTA model finetuned by the authors performed better in both subtasks than the DistilBERT model.

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MS@IW at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronising and Condescending Language Detection with Synthetically Generated Data
Selina Meyer | Maximilian Schmidhuber | Udo Kruschwitz

In this description paper we outline the system architecture submitted to Task 4, Subtask 1 at SemEval-2022. We leverage the generative power of state of the art generative pretrained transformer models to increase training set size and remedy class imbalance issues. Our best submitted system is trained on a synthetically enhanced dataset with 10.3 times as many positive samples as the original dataset and reaches an F1 score of 50.62%, which is 10 percentage points higher than our initial system trained on an undersampled version of the original dataset. We explore possible reasons for the comparably low score in the overall task ranking and report on experiments conducted during the post-evaluation phase.

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Team LEGO at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Machine Learning Methods for PCL Detection
Abhishek Singh

In this paper, we present our submission to the SemEval 2022 - Task 4 on Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) detection. Weapproach this problem as a traditional text classification problem with machine learning (ML)methods. We experiment and investigate theuse of various ML algorithms for detecting PCL in news articles. Our best methodology achieves an F1- Score of 0.39 for subtask1 witha rank of 63 out of 80, and F1-score of 0.082for subtask2 with a rank of 41 out of 48 on the blind dataset provided in the shared task.

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RNRE-NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection
Rylan Yang | Ethan Chi | Nathan Chi

An understanding of patronizing and condescending language detection is an important part of identifying and addressing discrimination and prejudice in various forms of communication. In this paper, we investigate several methods for detecting patronizing and condescending language in short statements as part of SemEval-2022 Task 4. For Task 1a, we investigate applying both lightweight (tree-based and linear) machine learning classification models and fine-tuned pre-trained large language models. Our final system achieves an F1-score of 0.4321, recall-score of 0.5016, and a precision-score of 0.3795 (ranked 53 / 78) on Task 1a.

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UTSA NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 4: An Exploration of Simple Ensembles of Transformers, Convolutional, and Recurrent Neural Networks
Xingmeng Zhao | Anthony Rios

The act of appearing kind or helpful via the use of but having a feeling of superiority condescending and patronizing language can have have serious mental health implications to those that experience it. Thus, detecting this condescending and patronizing language online can be useful for online moderation systems. Thus, in this manuscript, we describe the system developed by Team UTSA SemEval-2022 Task 4, Detecting Patronizing and Condescending Language. Our approach explores the use of several deep learning architectures including RoBERTa, convolutions neural networks, and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks. Furthermore, we explore simple and effective methods to create ensembles of neural network models. Overall, we experimented with several ensemble models and found that the a simple combination of five RoBERTa models achieved an F-score of .6441 on the development dataset and .5745 on the final test dataset. Finally, we also performed a comprehensive error analysis to better understand the limitations of the model and provide ideas for further research.

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AliEdalat at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection using Fine-tuned Language Models, BERT+BiGRU, and Ensemble Models
Ali Edalat | Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh | Behnam Bahrak

This paper presents the AliEdalat team’s methodology and results in SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) Detection. This task aims to detect the presence of PCL and PCL categories in text in order to prevent further discrimination against vulnerable communities. We use an ensemble of three basic models to detect the presence of PCL: fine-tuned bigbird, fine-tuned mpnet, and BERT+BiGRU. The ensemble model performs worse than the baseline due to overfitting and achieves an F1-score of 0.3031. We offer another solution to resolve the submitted model’s problem. We consider the different categories of PCL separately. To detect each category of PCL, we act like a PCL detector. Instead of BERT+BiGRU, we use fine-tuned roberta in the models. In PCL category detection, our model outperforms the baseline model and achieves an F1-score of 0.2531. We also present new models for detecting two categories of PCL that outperform the submitted models.

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Tesla at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection using Transformer-based Models with Data Augmentation
Sahil Bhatt | Manish Shrivastava

This paper describes our system for Task 4 of SemEval 2022: Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) Detection. For sub-task 1, where the objective is to classify a text as PCL or non-PCL, we use a T5 Model fine-tuned on the dataset. For sub-task 2, which is a multi-label classification problem, we use a RoBERTa model fine-tuned on the dataset. Given that the key challenge in this task is classification on an imbalanced dataset, our models rely on an augmented dataset that we generate using paraphrasing. We found that these two models yield the best results out of all the other approaches we tried.

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SSN_NLP_MLRG at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Ensemble Learning strategies to detect Patronizing and Condescending Language
Kalaivani Adaikkan | Thenmozhi Durairaj

In this paper, we describe our efforts at SemEval 2022 Shared Task 4 on Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) Detection. This is the first shared task to detect PCL which is to identify and categorize PCL language towards vulnerable communities. The shared task consists of two subtasks: Patronizing and Condescending language detection (Subtask A) which is the binary task classification and identifying the PCL categories that express the condescension (Subtask B) which is the multi-label text classification. For PCL language detection, We proposed the ensemble strategies of a system combination of BERT, Roberta, Distilbert, Roberta large, Albert achieved the official results for Subtask A with a macro f1 score of 0.5172 on the test set which is improved by baseline score. For PCL Category identification, We proposed a multi-label classification model to ensemble the various Bert-based models and the official results for Subtask B with a macro f1 score of 0.2117 on the test set which is improved by baseline score.

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Sapphire at SemEval-2022 Task 4: A Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection Model Based on Capsule Networks
Sihui Li | Xiaobing Zhou

This paper introduces the related work and the results of Team Sapphire’s system for SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. We only participated in subtask 1. The task goal is to judge whether a news text contains PCL. This task can be considered as a task of binary classification of news texts. In this binary classification task, the BERT-base model is adopted as the pre-trained model used to represent textual information in vector form and encode it. Capsule networks is adopted to extract features from the encoded vectors. The official evaluation metric for subtask 1 is the F1 score over the positive class. Finally, our system’s submitted prediction results on test set achieved the score of 0.5187.

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McRock at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection using Multi-Channel CNN, Hybrid LSTM, DistilBERT and XLNet
Marco Siino | Marco Cascia | Ilenia Tinnirello

In this paper we propose four deep learning models for the task of detecting and classifying Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) using a corpus of over 13,000 annotated paragraphs in English. The task, hosted at SemEval-2022, consists of two different subtasks. The Subtask 1 is a binary classification problem. Namely, given a paragraph, a system must predict whether or not it contains any form of PCL. The Subtask 2 is a multi-label classification task. Given a paragraph, a system must identify which PCL categories express the condescension. A paragraph might contain one or more categories of PCL. To face with the first subtask we propose a multi-channel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and an Hybrid LSTM. Using the multi-channel CNN we explore the impact of parallel word emebeddings and convolutional layers involving different kernel sizes. With Hybrid LSTM we focus on extracting features in advance, thanks to a convolutional layer followed by two bidirectional LSTM layers. For the second subtask a Transformer BERT-based model (i.e. DistilBERT) and an XLNet-based model are proposed. The multi-channel CNN model is able to reach an F1 score of 0.2928, the Hybrid LSTM modelis able to reach an F1 score of 0.2815, the DistilBERT-based one an average F1 of 0.2165 and the XLNet an average F1 of 0.2296. In this paper, in addition to system descriptions, we also provide further analysis of the results, highlighting strengths and limitations. We make all the code publicly available and reusable on GitHub.

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Team Stanford ACMLab at SemEval 2022 Task 4: Textual Analysis of PCL Using Contextual Word Embeddings
Upamanyu Dass-Vattam | Spencer Wallace | Rohan Sikand | Zach Witzel | Jillian Tang

We propose the use of a contextual embedding based-neural model on strictly textual inputs to detect the presence of patronizing or condescending language (PCL). We finetuned a pre-trained BERT model to detect whether or not a paragraph contained PCL (Subtask 1), and furthermore finetuned another pre-trained BERT model to identify the linguistic techniques used to convey the PCL (Subtask 2). Results show that this approach is viable for binary classification of PCL, but breaks when attempting to identify the PCL techniques. Our system placed 32/79 for subtask 1, and 40/49 for subtask 2.

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Team LRL_NC at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Binary and Multi-label Classification of PCL using Fine-tuned Transformer-based Models
Kushagri Tandon | Niladri Chatterjee

Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) can find its way into many mediums of public discourse. Presence of PCL in text can produce negative effects in the society. The challenge presented by the task emerges from the subtleties of PCL and various data dependent constraints. Hence, developing techniques to detect PCL in text, before it is propagated is vital. The aim of this paper is twofold, a) to present systems that can be used to classify a text as containing PCL or not, and b) to present systems that assign the different categories of PCL present in text. The proposed systems are primarily rooted in transformer-based pre-trained language models. Among the models submitted for Subtask 1, the best F1-Score of 0.5436 was achieved by a deep learning based ensemble model. This system secured the rank 29 in the official task ranking. For Subtask 2, the best macro-average F1-Score of 0.339 was achieved by an ensemble model combining transformer-based neural architecture with gradient boosting label-balanced classifiers. This system secured the rank 21 in the official task ranking. Among subsequently carried out experiments a variation in architecture of a system for Subtask 2 achieved a macro-average F1-Score of 0.3527.

Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) towards vulnerable communities in general media has been shown to have potentially harmful effects. Due to its subtlety and the good intentions behind its use, the audience is not aware of the language’s toxicity. In this paper, we present our method for the SemEval-2022 Task4 titled “Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection”. In Subtask A, a binary classification task, we introduce adversarial training based on Fast Gradient Method (FGM) and employ pre-trained model in a unified architecture. For Subtask B, framed as a multi-label classification problem, we utilize various improved multi-label cross-entropy loss functions and analyze the performance of our method. In the final evaluation, our system achieved official rankings of 17/79 and 16/49 on Subtask A and Subtask B, respectively. In addition, we explore the relationship between PCL and emotional polarity and intensity it contains.

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HITMI&T at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Investigating Task-Adaptive Pretraining And Attention Mechanism On PCL Detection
Zihang Liu | Yancheng He | Feiqing Zhuang | Bing Xu

This paper describes the system for the Semeval-2022 Task4 ”Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection”.An entity engages in Patronizing and Condescending Language(PCL) when its language use shows a superior attitude towards others or depicts them in a compassionate way. The task contains two parts. The first one is to identify whether the sentence is PCL, and the second one is to categorize PCL. Through experimental verification, the Roberta-based model will be used in our system. Respectively, for subtask 1, that is, to judge whether a sentence is PCL, the method of retraining the model with specific task data is adopted, and the method of splicing [CLS] and the keyword representation of the last three layers as the representation of the sentence; for subtask 2, that is, to judge the PCL type of the sentence, in addition to using the same method as task1, the method of selecting a special loss for Multi-label text classification is applied. We give a clear ablation experiment and give the effect of each method on the final result. Our project ranked 11th out of 79 teams participating in subtask 1 and 6th out of 49 teams participating in subtask 2.

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UMass PCL at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Pre-trained Language Model Ensembles for Detecting Patronizing and Condescending Language
David Koleczek | Alexander Scarlatos | Preshma Linet Pereira | Siddha Makarand Karkare

Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) is everywhere, but rarely is the focus on its use by media towards vulnerable communities. Accurately detecting PCL of this form is a difficult task due to limited labeled data and how subtle it can be. In this paper, we describe our system for detecting such language which was submitted to SemEval 2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. Our approach uses an ensemble of pre-trained language models, data augmentation, and optimizing the threshold for detection. Experimental results on the evaluation dataset released by the competition hosts show that our work is reliably able to detect PCL, achieving an F1 score of 55.47% on the binary classification task and a macro F1 score of 36.25% on the fine-grained, multi-label detection task.

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YNU-HPCC at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Finetuning Pretrained Language Models for Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection
Wenqiang Bai | Jin Wang | Xuejie Zhang

This paper describes a system built in the SemEval-2022 competition. As participants in Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection, we implemented the text sentiment classification system for two subtasks in English. Both subtasks involve determining emotions; subtask 1 requires us to determine whether the text belongs to the PCL category (single-label classification), and subtask 2 requires us to determine to which PCL category the text belongs (multi-label classification). Our system is based on the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model. For the single-label classification, our system applies a BertForSequenceClassification model to classify the input text. For the multi-label classification, we use the fine-tuned BERT model to extract the sentiment score of the text and a fully connected layer to classify the text into the PCL categories. Our system achieved relatively good results on the competition’s official leaderboard.

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I2C at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection using Deep Learning Techniques
Laura Vázquez Ramos | Adrián Moreno Monterde | Victoria Pachón | Jacinto Mata

Patronizing and Condescending Language is an ever-present problem in our day-to-day lives. There has been a rise in patronizing language on social media platforms manifesting itself in various forms. This paper presents two performing deep learning algorithms and results for the “Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection.” of SemEval 2022. The task incorporates an English dataset containing sentences from social media from around the world. The paper focuses on data augmentation to boost results on various deep learning methods as BERT and LSTM Neural Network.

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PiCkLe at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Boosting Pre-trained Language Models with Task Specific Metadata and Cost Sensitive Learning
Manan Suri

This paper describes our system for Task 4 of SemEval 2022: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) refers to language used with respect to vulnerable communities that portrays them in a pitiful way and is reflective of a sense of superiority. Task 4 involved binary classification (Subtask 1) and multi-label classification (Subtask 2) of Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL). For our system, we experimented with fine-tuning different transformer-based pre-trained models including BERT, DistilBERT, RoBERTa and ALBERT. Further, we have used token separated metadata in order to improve our model by helping it contextualize different communities with respect to PCL. We faced the challenge of class imbalance, which we solved by experimenting with different class weighting schemes. Our models were effective in both subtasks, with the best performance coming out of models with Effective Number of Samples (ENS) class weighting and token separated metadata in both subtasks. For subtask 1 and subtask 2, our best models were finetuned BERT and RoBERTa models respectively.

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ML_LTU at SemEval-2022 Task 4: T5 Towards Identifying Patronizing and Condescending Language
Tosin Adewumi | Lama Alkhaled | Hamam Mokayed | Foteini Liwicki | Marcus Liwicki

This paper describes the system used by the Machine Learning Group of LTU in subtask 1 of the SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) Detection. Our system consists of finetuning a pretrained text-to-text transfer transformer (T5) and innovatively reducing its out-of-class predictions. The main contributions of this paper are 1) the description of the implementation details of the T5 model we used, 2) analysis of the successes & struggles of the model in this task, and 3) ablation studies beyond the official submission to ascertain the relative importance of data split. Our model achieves an F1 score of 0.5452 on the official test set.

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Xu at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Pre-BERT Neural Network Methods vs Post-BERT RoBERTa Approach for Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection
Jinghua Xu

This paper describes my participation in the SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. I participate in both subtasks: Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) Identification and Patronizing and Condescending Language Categorization, with the main focus put on subtask 1. The experiments compare pre-BERT neural network (NN) based systems against post-BERT pretrained language model RoBERTa. This research finds NN-based systems in the experiments perform worse on the task compared to the pretrained language models. The top-performing RoBERTa system is ranked 26 out of 78 teams (F1-score: 54.64) in subtask 1, and 23 out of 49 teams (F1-score: 30.03) in subtask 2.

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Amsqr at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Towards AutoNLP via Meta-Learning and Adversarial Data Augmentation for PCL Detection
Alejandro Mosquera

This paper describes the use of AutoNLP techniques applied to the detection of patronizing and condescending language (PCL) in a binary classification scenario. The proposed approach combines meta-learning, in order to identify the best performing combination of deep learning architectures, with the synthesis of adversarial training examples; thus boosting robustness and model generalization. A submission from this system was evaluated as part of the first sub-task of SemEval 2022 - Task 4 and achieved an F1 score of 0.57%, which is 16 percentage points higher than the RoBERTa baseline provided by the organizers.

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SATLab at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Trying to Detect Patronizing and Condescending Language with only Character and Word N-grams
Yves Bestgen

A logistic regression model only fed with character and word n-grams is proposed for the SemEval-2022 Task 4 on Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection (PCL). It obtained an average level of performance, well above the performance of a system that tries to guess without using any knowledge about the task, but much lower than the best teams. To facilitate the interpretation of the performance scores, the F1 measure, the best level of performance of a system that tries to guess without using any knowledge is calculated and used to correct the F1 scores in the manner of a Kappa. As the proposed model is very similar to the one that performed well on a task requiring to automatically identify hate speech and offensive content, this paper confirms the difficulty of PCL detection.

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Taygete at SemEval-2022 Task 4: RoBERTa based models for detecting Patronising and Condescending Language
Jayant Chhillar

This work describes the development of different models to detect patronising and condescending language within extracts of news articles as part of the SemEval 2022 competition (Task-4). This work explores different models based on the pre-trained RoBERTa language model coupled with LSTM and CNN layers. The best models achieved 15^th rank with an F1-score of 0.5924 for subtask-A and 12^th in subtask-B with a macro-F1 score of 0.3763.

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CS/NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Effective Data Augmentation Methods for Patronizing Language Detection and Multi-label Classification with RoBERTa and GPT3
Daniel Saeedi | Sirwe Saeedi | Aliakbar Panahi | Alvis C.M. Fong

This paper presents a combination of data augmentation methods to boost the performance of state-of-the-art transformer-based language models for Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) detection and multi-label PCL classification tasks. These tasks are inherently different from sentiment analysis because positive/negative hidden attitudes in the context will not necessarily be considered positive/negative for PCL tasks. The oblation study observes that the imbalance degree of PCL dataset is in the extreme range. This paper presents a modified version of the sentence paraphrasing deep learning model (PEGASUS) to tackle the limitation of maximum sequence length. The proposed algorithm has no specific maximum input length to paraphrase sequences. Our augmented underrepresented class of annotated data achieved competitive results among top-16 SemEval-2022 participants. This paper’s approaches rely on fine-tuning pretrained RoBERTa and GPT3 models such as Davinci and Curie engines with an extra-enriched PCL dataset. Furthermore, we discuss Few-Shot learning technique to overcome the limitation of low-resource NLP problems.

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University of Bucharest Team at Semeval-2022 Task4: Detection and Classification of Patronizing and Condescending Language
Tudor Dumitrascu | Raluca-Andreea Gînga | Bogdan Dobre | Bogdan Radu Silviu Sielecki

This paper details our implementations for finding Patronizing and Condescending Language in texts, as part of the SemEval Workshop Task 4. We have used a variety of methods from simple machine learning algorithms applied on bag of words, all the way to BERT models, in order to solve the binary classification and the multi-label multi-class classification.

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Amrita_CEN at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Oversampling-based Machine Learning Approach for Detecting Patronizing and Condescending Language
Bichu George | Adarsh S | Nishitkumar Prajapati | Premjith B | Soman Kp

This paper narrates the work of the team Amrita_CEN for the shared task on Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection at SemEval 2022. We implemented machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machine (SVV), Logistic regression, Naive Bayes, XG Boost and Random Forest for modelling the tasks. At the same time, we also applied a feature engineering method to solve the class imbalance problem with respect to training data. Among all the models, the logistic regression model outperformed all other models and we have submitted results based upon the same.

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JCT at SemEval-2022 Task 4-A: Patronism Detection in Posts Written in English using Preprocessing Methods and various Machine Leaerning Methods
Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner | Ilan Meyrowitsch | Matan Fchima

In this paper, we describe our submissions to SemEval-2022 subtask 4-A - “Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection: Binary Classification”. We developed different models for this subtask. We applied 11 supervised machine learning methods and 9 preprocessing methods. Our best submission was a model we built with BertForSequenceClassification. Our experiments indicate that pre-processing stage is a must for a successful model. The dataset for Subtask 1 is highly imbalanced dataset. The f1-scores on the oversampled imbalanced training dataset were higher the results on the original training dataset.

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ULFRI at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Leveraging uncertainty and additional knowledge for patronizing and condescending language detection
Matej Klemen | Marko Robnik-Šikonja

We describe the ULFRI system used in the Subtask 1 of SemEval-2022 Task 4 Patronizing and condescending language detection. Our models are based on the RoBERTa model, modified in two ways: (1) by injecting additional knowledge (coreferences, named entities, dependency relations, and sentiment) and (2) by leveraging the task uncertainty by using soft labels, Monte Carlo dropout, and threshold optimization. We find that the injection of additional knowledge is not helpful but the uncertainty management mechanisms lead to small but consistent improvements. Our final system based on these findings achieves F1 = 0.575 in the online evaluation, ranking 19th out of 78 systems.

The paper describes the SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI),which explores the detection of misogynous memes on the web by taking advantage of available texts and images. The task has been organised in two related sub-tasks: the first one is focused on recognising whether a meme is misogynous or not (Sub-task A), while the second one is devoted to recognising types of misogyny (Sub-task B). MAMI has been one of the most popular tasks at SemEval-2022 with more than 400 participants, 65 teams involved in Sub-task A and 41 in Sub-task B from 13 countries. The MAMI challenge received 4214 submitted runs (of which 166 uploaded on the leader-board), denoting an enthusiastic participation for the proposed problem. The collection and annotation is described for the task dataset. The paper provides an overview of the systems proposed for the challenge, reports the results achieved in both sub-tasks and outlines a description of the main errors for a comprehension of the systems capabilities and for detailing future research perspectives.

Social media is an idea created to make theworld smaller and more connected. Recently,it has become a hub of fake news and sexistmemes that target women. Social Media shouldensure proper women’s safety and equality. Filteringsuch information from social media is ofparamount importance to achieving this goal. In this paper, we describe the system developedby our team for SemEval-2022 Task 5: MultimediaAutomatic Misogyny Identification. Wepropose a multimodal training methodologythat achieves good performance on both thesubtasks, ranking 4th for Subtask A (0.718macro F1-score) and 9th for Subtask B (0.695macro F1-score) while exceeding the baselineresults by good margins.

This paper describes our system used in the SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI). Multimedia automatic misogyny recognition consists of the identification of misogynous memes, taking advantage of both text and images as sources of information. The task will be organized around two main subtasks: Task A is a binary classification task, which should be identified either as misogynous or not misogynous. Task B is a multi-label classification task, in which the types of misogyny should be identified in potential overlapping categories, such as stereotype, shaming, objectification, and violence. In this paper, we proposed a system based on multi-task learning for multi-modal misogynous detection in memes. Our system combined image features with text features to train a multi-label classification. The prediction results were obtained by the simple weighted average method of the results with different fusion models, and the results of Task A were corrected by Task B. Our system achieves a test accuracy of 0.755 on Task A (ranking 3rd on the final leaderboard) and the accuracy of 0.731 on Task B (ranking 1st on the final leaderboard).

This paper describes our submission for task 5 Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI) at SemEval-2022. The task is designed to detect and classify misogynous memes. To utilize both textual and visual information presented in a meme, we investigate several of the most recent visual language transformer-based multimodal models and choose ERNIE-ViL-Large as our base model. For subtask A, with observations of models’ overfitting on unimodal patterns, strategies are proposed to mitigate problems of biased words and template memes. For subtask B, we transform this multi-label problem into a multi-class one and experiment with oversampling and complementary techniques. Our approach places 2nd for subtask A and 5th for subtask B in this competition.

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TechSSN at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification using Deep Learning Models
Rajalakshmi Sivanaiah | Angel S | Sakaya Milton Rajendram | Mirnalinee T T

Research is progressing in a fast manner in the field of offensive, hate speech, abusive and sarcastic data. Tackling hate speech against women is urgent and really needed to give respect to the lady of our life. This paper describes the system used for identifying misogynous content using images and text. The system developed by the team TECHSSN uses transformer models to detect the misogynous content from text and Convolutional Neural Network model for image data. Various models like BERT, ALBERT, XLNET and CNN are explored and the combination of ALBERT and CNN as an ensemble model provides better results than the rest. This system was developed for the task 5 of the competition, SemEval 2022.

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LastResort at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Towards Misogyny Identification using Visual Linguistic Model Ensembles And Task-Specific Pretraining
Samyak Agrawal | Radhika Mamidi

In current times, memes have become one of the most popular mediums to share jokes and information with the masses over the internet. Memes can also be used as tools to spread hatred and target women through degrading content disguised as humour. The task, Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI), is to detect misogyny in these memes. This task is further divided into two sub-tasks: (A) Misogynous meme identification, where a meme should be categorized either as misogynous or not misogynous and (B) Categorizing these misogynous memes into potential overlapping subcategories. In this paper, we propose models leveraging task-specific pretraining with transfer learning on Visual Linguistic models. Our best performing models scored 0.686 and 0.691 on sub-tasks A and B respectively.

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HateU at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification
Ayme Arango | Jesus Perez-Martin | Arniel Labrada

Hate speech expressions in social media are not limited to textual messages; they can appear in videos, images, or multimodal formats like memes. Existing work towards detecting such expressions has been conducted almost exclusively over textual content, and the analysis of pictures and videos has been very scarce. This paper describes our team proposal in the Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI) task at SemEval 2022. The challenge consisted of identifying misogynous memes from a dataset where images and text transcriptions were provided. We reported a 71% of F-score using a multimodal system based on the CLIP model.

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SRCB at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Pretraining Based Image to Text Late Sequential Fusion System for Multimodal Misogynous Meme Identification
Jing Zhang | Yujin Wang

Online misogyny meme detection is an image/text multimodal classification task, the complicated relation of image and text challenges the intelligent system’s modality fusion learning capability. In this paper, we investigate the single-stream UNITER and dual-stream CLIP multimodal pretrained models on their capability to handle strong and weakly correlated image/text pairs. The XGBoost classifier with image features extracted by the CLIP model has the highest performance and being robust on domain shift. Based on this, we propose the PBR system, an ensemble system of Pretraining models, Boosting method and Rule-based adjustment, text information is fused into the system using our late sequential fusion scheme. Our system ranks 1st place on both sub-task A and sub-task B of the SemEval-2022 Task 5 Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification, with 0.834/0.731 macro F1 scores for sub-task A/B correspondingly.

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ASRtrans at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Transformer-based Models for Meme Classification
Ailneni Rakshitha Rao | Arjun Rao

Women are frequently targeted online with hate speech and misogyny using tweets, memes, and other forms of communication. This paper describes our system for Task 5 of SemEval-2022: Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI). We participated in both the sub-tasks, where we used transformer-based architecture to combine features of images and text. We explore models with multi-modal pre-training (VisualBERT) and text-based pre-training (MMBT) while drawing comparative results. We also show how additional training with task-related external data can improve the model performance. We achieved sizable improvements over baseline models and the official evaluation ranked our system 3^rd out of 83 teams on the binary classification task (Sub-task A) with an F1 score of 0.761, and 7^th out of 48 teams on the multi-label classification task (Sub-task B) with an F1 score of 0.705.

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UAEM-ITAM at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Vision-Language Approach to Recognize Misogynous Content in Memes
Edgar Roman-Rangel | Jorge Fuentes-Pacheco | Jorge Hermosillo Valadez

In the context of the Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI) competition 2022, we developed a framework for extracting lexical-semantic features from text and combine them with semantic descriptions of images, together with image content representation. We enriched the text modality description by incorporating word representations for each object present within the images. Images and text are then described at two levels of detail, globally and locally, using standard dimensionality reduction techniques for images in order to obtain 4 embeddings for each meme. These embeddings are finally concatenated and passed to a classifier. Our results overcome the baseline by 4%, falling behind the best performance by 12% for Sub-task B.

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JRLV at SemEval-2022 Task 5: The Importance of Visual Elements for Misogyny Identification in Memes
Jason Ravagli | Lorenzo Vaiani

Gender discrimination is a serious and widespread problem on social media and online in general. Besides offensive messages, memes are one of the main means of dissemination for such content. With these premises, the MAMI task was proposed at the SemEval-2022, which consists of identifying memes with misogynous characteristics. In this work, we propose a solution to this problem based on Mask R-CNN and VisualBERT that leverages the multimodal nature of the task. Our study focuses on observing how the two sources of data in memes (text and image) and their possible combinations impact performances. Our best result slightly exceeds the higher baseline, but the experiments allowed us to draw important considerations regarding the importance of correctly exploiting the visual information and the relevance of the elements present in the memes images.

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UPB at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Enhancing UNITER with Image Sentiment and Graph Convolutional Networks for Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification
Andrei Paraschiv | Mihai Dascalu | Dumitru-Clementin Cercel

In recent times, the detection of hate-speech, offensive, or abusive language in online media has become an important topic in NLP research due to the exponential growth of social media and the propagation of such messages, as well as their impact. Misogyny detection, even though it plays an important part in hate-speech detection, has not received the same attention. In this paper, we describe our classification systems submitted to the SemEval-2022 Task 5: MAMI - Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification. The shared task aimed to identify misogynous content in a multi-modal setting by analysing meme images together with their textual captions. To this end, we propose two models based on the pre-trained UNITER model, one enhanced with an image sentiment classifier, whereas the second leverages a Vocabulary Graph Convolutional Network (VGCN). Additionally, we explore an ensemble using the aforementioned models. Our best model reaches an F1-score of 71.4% in Sub-task A and 67.3% for Sub-task B positioning our team in the upper third of the leaderboard. We release the code and experiments for our models on GitHub.

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RubCSG at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Ensemble learning for identifying misogynous MEMEs
Wentao Yu | Benedikt Boenninghoff | Jonas Röhrig | Dorothea Kolossa

This work presents an ensemble system based on various uni-modal and bi-modal model architectures developed for the SemEval 2022 Task 5: MAMI-Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification. The challenge organizers provide an English meme dataset to develop and train systems for identifying and classifying misogynous memes. More precisely, the competition is separated into two sub-tasks: sub-task A asks for a binary decision as to whether a meme expresses misogyny, while sub-task B is to classify misogynous memes into the potentially overlapping sub-categories of stereotype, shaming, objectification, and violence. For our submission, we implement a new model fusion network and employ an ensemble learning approach for better performance. With this structure, we achieve a 0.755 macro-average F1-score (11th) in sub-task A and a 0.709 weighted-average F1-score (10th) in sub-task B.

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RIT Boston at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multimedia Misogyny Detection By Using Coherent Visual and Language Features from CLIP Model and Data-centric AI Principle
Lei Chen | Hou Wei Chou

Detecting MEME images to be misogynous or not is an application useful on curbing online hateful information against women. In the SemEval-2022 Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI) challenge, we designed a system using two simple but effective principles. First, we leverage on recently emerging Transformer models pre-trained (mostly in a self-supervised learning way) on massive data sets to obtain very effective visual (V) and language (L) features. In particular, we used the CLIP model provided by OpenAI to obtain coherent V and L features and then simply used a logistic regression model to make binary predictions. Second, we emphasized more on data rather than tweaking models by following the data-centric AI principle. These principles were proven to be useful and our final macro-F1 is 0.778 for the MAMI task A and ranked the third place among participant teams.

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TeamOtter at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Detecting Misogynistic Content in Multimodal Memes
Paridhi Maheshwari | Sharmila Reddy Nangi

We describe our system for the SemEval 2022 task on detecting misogynous content in memes. This is a pressing problem and we explore various methods ranging from traditional machine learning to deep learning models such as multimodal transformers. We propose a multimodal BERT architecture that uses information from both image and text. We further incorporate common world knowledge from pretrained CLIP and Urban dictionary. We also provide qualitative analysis to support out model. Our best performing model achieves an F1 score of 0.679 on Task A (Rank 5) and 0.680 on Task B (Rank 13) of the hidden test set. Our code is available at https://github.com/paridhimaheshwari2708/MAMI.

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taochen at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multimodal Multitask Learning and Ensemble Learning
Chen Tao | Jung-jae Kim

We present a multi-modal deep learning system for the Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI) challenge, a SemEval task of identifying and classifying misogynistic messages in online memes. We adapt multi-task learning for the multimodal subtasks of the MAMI challenge to transfer knowledge among the correlated subtasks. We also leverage on ensemble learning for synergistic integration of models individually trained for the subtasks. We finally discuss about errors of the system to provide useful insights for future work.

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MilaNLP at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Using Perceiver IO for Detecting Misogynous Memes with Text and Image Modalities
Giuseppe Attanasio | Debora Nozza | Federico Bianchi

In this paper, we describe the system proposed by the MilaNLP team for the Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI) challenge. We use Perceiver IO as a multimodal late fusion over unimodal streams to address both sub-tasks A and B. We build unimodal embeddings using Vision Transformer (image) and RoBERTa (text transcript). We enrich the input representation using face and demographic recognition, image captioning, and detection of adult content and web entities. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to use Perceiver IO combining text and image modalities. The proposed approach outperforms unimodal and multimodal baselines.

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UniBO at SemEval-2022 Task 5: A Multimodal bi-Transformer Approach to the Binary and Fine-grained Identification of Misogyny in Memes
Arianna Muti | Katerina Korre | Alberto Barrón-Cedeño

We present our submission to SemEval 2022 Task 5 on Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification. We address the two tasks: Task A consists of identifying whether a meme is misogynous. If so, Task B attempts to identify its kind among shaming, stereotyping, objectification, and violence. Our approach combines a BERT Transformer with CLIP for the textual and visual representations. Both textual and visual encoders are fused in an early-fusion fashion through a Multimodal Bidirectional Transformer with unimodally pretrained components. Our official submissions obtain macro-averaged F₁=0.727 in Task A (4th position out of 69 participants)and weighted F₁=0.710 in Task B (4th position out of 42 participants).

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IIITH at SemEval-2022 Task 5: A comparative study of deep learning models for identifying misogynous memes
Tathagata Raha | Sagar Joshi | Vasudeva Varma

This paper provides a comparison of different deep learning methods for identifying misogynous memes for SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification. In this task, we experiment with architectures in the identification of misogynous content in memes by making use of text and image-based information. The different deep learning methods compared in this paper are: (i) unimodal image or text models (ii) fusion of unimodal models (iii) multimodal transformers models and (iv) transformers further pretrained on a multimodal task. From our experiments, we found pretrained multimodal transformer architectures to strongly outperform the models involving the fusion of representation from both the modalities.

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Codec at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multi-Modal Multi-Transformer Misogynous Meme Classification Framework
Ahmed Mahran | Carlo Alessandro Borella | Konstantinos Perifanos

In this paper we describe our work towards building a generic framework for both multi-modal embedding and multi-label binary classification tasks, while participating in task 5 (Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification) of SemEval 2022 competition. Since pretraining deep models from scratch is a resource and data hungry task, our approach is based on three main strategies. We combine different state-of-the-art architectures to capture a wide spectrum of semantic signals from the multi-modal input. We employ a multi-task learning scheme to be able to use multiple datasets from the same knowledge domain to help increase the model’s performance. We also use multiple objectives to regularize and fine tune different system components.

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I2C at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Identification of misogyny in internet memes
Pablo Cordon | Pablo Gonzalez Diaz | Jacinto Mata | Victoria Pachón

In this paper we present our approach and system description on Task 5 A in MAMI: Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification. In our experiments we compared several architectures based on deep learning algorithms with various other approaches to binary classification using Transformers, combined with a nudity image detection algorithm to provide better results. With this approach, we achieved an F1-score of 0.665 in the evaluation process

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INF-UFRGS at SemEval-2022 Task 5: analyzing the performance of multimodal models
Gustavo Lorentz | Viviane Moreira

This paper describes INF-UFRGS submission for SemEval-2022 Task 5 Multimodal Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI). Unprecedented levels of harassment came with the ever-growing internet usage as a mean of worldwide communication. The goal of the task is to improve the quality of existing methods for misogyny identification, many of which require dedicated personnel, hence the need for automation. We experimented with five existing models, including ViLBERT and Visual BERT - both uni and multimodally pretrained - and MMBT. The datasets consist of memes with captions in English. The results show that all models achieved Macro-F1 scores above 0.64. ViLBERT was the best performer with a score of 0.698.

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MMVAE at SemEval-2022 Task 5: A Multi-modal Multi-task VAE on Misogynous Meme Detection
Yimeng Gu | Ignacio Castro | Gareth Tyson

Nowadays, memes have become quite common in day-to-day communications on social media platforms. They appear to be amusing, evoking and attractive to audiences. However, some memes containing malicious contents can be harmful to the targeted group and arouse public anger in the long run. In this paper, we study misogynous meme detection, a shared task in SemEval 2022 - Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI). The challenge of misogynous meme detection is to co-represent multi-modal features. To tackle with this challenge, we propose a Multi-modal Multi-task Variational AutoEncoder (MMVAE) to learn an effective co-representation of visual and textual features in the latent space, and determine if the meme contains misogynous information and identify its fine-grained categories. Our model achieves 0.723 on sub-task A and 0.634 on sub-task B in terms of F₁ scores. We carry out comprehensive experiments on our model’s architecture and show that our approach significantly outperforms several strong uni-modal and multi-modal approaches. Our code is released on github.

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AMS_ADRN at SemEval-2022 Task 5: A Suitable Image-text Multimodal Joint Modeling Method for Multi-task Misogyny Identification
Da Li | Ming Yi | Yukai He

Women are influential online, especially in image-based social media such as Twitter and Instagram. However, many in the network environment contain gender discrimination and aggressive information, which magnify gender stereotypes and gender inequality. Therefore, the filtering of illegal content such as gender discrimination is essential to maintain a healthy social network environment. In this paper, we describe the system developed by our team for SemEval-2022Task 5: Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification. More specifically, we introduce two novel system to analyze these posts: a multimodal multi-task learning architecture that combines Bertweet for text encoding with ResNet-18 for image representation, and a single-flow transformer structure which combines text embeddings from BERT-Embeddings and image embeddings from several different modules such as EfficientNet and ResNet. In this manner, we show that the information behind them can be properly revealed. Our approach achieves good performance on each of the two subtasks of the current competition, ranking 15th for Subtask A (0.746 macro F1-score), 11th for Subtask B (0.706 macro F1-score) while exceeding the official baseline results by high margins.

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University of Hildesheim at SemEval-2022 task 5: Combining Deep Text and Image Models for Multimedia Misogyny Detection
Milan Kalkenings | Thomas Mandl

This paper describes the participation of the University of Hildesheim at the SemEval task 5. The task deals with Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI). Hateful memes need to be detected within a data collection. For this task, we implemented six models for text and image analysis and tested the effectiveness of their combinations. A fusion system implements a multi-modal transformer to integrate the embeddings of these models. The best performing models included BERT for the text of the meme, manually derived associations for words in the memes and a Faster R-CNN network for the image. We evaluated the performance of our approach also with the data of the Facebook Hateful Memes challenge in order to analyze the generalisation capabilities of the approach.

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Mitra Behzadi at SemEval-2022 Task 5 : Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification method based on CLIP
Mitra Behzadi | Ali Derakhshan | Ian Harris

Everyday more users are using memes on social media platforms to convey a message with text and image combined. Although there are many fun and harmless memes being created and posted, there are also ones that are hateful and offensive to particular groups of people. In this article present a novel approach based on the CLIP network to detect misogynous memes and find out the types of misogyny in that meme. We participated in Task A and Task B of the Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MaMi) challenge and our best scores are 0.694 and 0.681 respectively.

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IITR CodeBusters at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Misogyny Identification using Transformers
Gagan Sharma | Gajanan Sunil Gitte | Shlok Goyal | Raksha Sharma

This paper presents our submission to task 5 ( Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification) of the SemEval 2022 competition. The purpose of the task is to identify given memes as misogynistic or not and further label the type of misogyny involved. In this paper, we present our approach based on language processing tools. We embed meme texts using GloVe embedding and classify misogyny using BERT model. Our model obtains an F1-score of 66.24% and 63.5% in misogyny classification and misogyny labels, respectively.

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IIT DHANBAD CODECHAMPS at SemEval-2022 Task 5: MAMI - Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification
Shubham Barnwal | Ritesh Kumar | Rajendra Pamula

With the growth of the internet, the use of social media based on images has drastically increased like Twitter, Instagram, etc. In these social media, women have a very high contribution as of 75% women use social media multiple times compared to men which is only 65% of men uses social media multiple times a day. However, with this much contribution, it also increases systematic inequality and discrimination offline is replicated in online spaces in the form of MEMEs. A meme is essentially an image characterized by pictorial content with an overlaying text a posteriori introduced by humans, with the main goal of being funny and/or ironic. Although most of them are created with the intent of making funny jokes, in a short time people started to use them as a form of hate and prejudice against women, landing to sexist and aggressive messages in online environments that subsequently amplify the sexual stereotyping and gender inequality of the offline world. This leads to the need for automatic detection of Misogyny MEMEs. Specifically, I described the model submitted for the shared task on Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI) and my team name is IIT DHANBAD CODECHAMPS.

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QiNiAn at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multi-Modal Misogyny Detection and Classification
Qin Gu | Nino Meisinger | Anna-Katharina Dick

In this paper, we describe our submission to the misogyny classification challenge at SemEval-2022. We propose two models for the two subtasks of the challenge: The first uses joint image and text classification to classify memes as either misogynistic or not. This model uses a majority voting ensemble structure built on traditional classifiers and additional image information such as age, gender and nudity estimations. The second model uses a RoBERTa classifier on the text transcriptions to additionally identify the type of problematic ideas the memes perpetuate. Our submissions perform above all organizer submitted baselines. For binary misogyny classification, our system achieved the fifth place on the leaderboard, with a macro F1-score of 0.665. For multi-label classification identifying the type of misogyny, our model achieved place 19 on the leaderboard, with a weighted F1-score of 0.637.

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UMUTeam at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Combining image and textual embeddings for multi-modal automatic misogyny identification
José García-Díaz | Camilo Caparros-Laiz | Rafael Valencia-García

In this manuscript we describe the participation of the UMUTeam on the MAMI shared task proposed at SemEval 2022. This task is concerning the identification of misogynous content from a multi-modal perspective. Our participation is grounded on the combination of different feature sets within the same neural network. Specifically, we combine linguistic features with contextual transformers based on text (BERT) and images (BEiT). Besides, we also evaluate other ensemble learning strategies and the usage of non-contextual pretrained embeddings. Although our results are limited, we outperform all the baselines proposed, achieving position 36 in the binary classification task with a macro F1-score of 0.687, and position 28 in the multi-label task of misogynous categorisation, with an macro F1-score of 0.663.

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YNU-HPCC at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Multi-Modal and Multi-label Emotion Classification Based on LXMERT
Chao Han | Jin Wang | Xuejie Zhang

This paper describes our system used in the SemEval-2022 Task5 Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI). This task is to use the provided text-image pairs to classify emotions. In this paper, We propose a multi-label emotion classification model based on pre-trained LXMERT. We use Faster-RCNN to extract visual representation and utilize LXMERT’s cross-attention for multi-modal alignment. Then we use the Bilinear-interaction layer to fuse these features. Our experimental results surpass the F₁ score of baseline. For Sub-task A, our F₁ score is 0.662 and Sub-task B’s F₁ score is 0.633. The code of this study is available on GitHub.

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TIB-VA at SemEval-2022 Task 5: A Multimodal Architecture for the Detection and Classification of Misogynous Memes
Sherzod Hakimov | Gullal Singh Cheema | Ralph Ewerth

The detection of offensive, hateful content on social media is a challenging problem that affects many online users on a daily basis. Hateful content is often used to target a group of people based on ethnicity, gender, religion and other factors. The hate or contempt toward women has been increasing on social platforms. Misogynous content detection is especially challenging when textual and visual modalities are combined to form a single context, e.g., an overlay text embedded on top of an image, also known as meme. In this paper, we present a multimodal architecture that combines textual and visual features to detect misogynous memes. The proposed architecture is evaluated in the SemEval-2022 Task 5: MAMI - Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification challenge under the team name TIB-VA. We obtained the best result in the Task-B where the challenge is to classify whether a given document is misogynous and further identify the following sub-classes: shaming, stereotype, objectification, and violence.

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R2D2 at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Attention is only as good as its Values! A multimodal system for identifying misogynist memes
Mayukh Sharma | Ilanthenral Kandasamy | Vasantha W B

This paper describes the multimodal deep learning system proposed for SemEval 2022 Task 5: MAMI - Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification. We participated in both Subtasks, i.e. Subtask A: Misogynous meme identification, and Subtask B: Identifying type of misogyny among potential overlapping categories (stereotype, shaming, objectification, violence). The proposed architecture uses pre-trained models as feature extractors for text and images. We use these features to learn multimodal representation using methods like concatenation and scaled dot product attention. Classification layers are used on fused features as per the subtask definition. We also performed experiments using unimodal models for setting up comparative baselines. Our best performing system achieved an F1 score of 0.757 and was ranked 3^rd in Subtask A. On Subtask B, our system performed well with an F1 score of 0.690 and was ranked 10^th on the leaderboard. We further show extensive experiments using combinations of different pre-trained models which will be helpful as baselines for future work.

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AIDA-UPM at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Exploring Multimodal Late Information Fusion for Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification
Álvaro Huertas-García | Helena Liz | Guillermo Villar-Rodríguez | Alejandro Martín | Javier Huertas-Tato | David Camacho

This paper describes the multimodal late fusion model proposed in the SemEval-2022 Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification (MAMI) task. The main contribution of this paper is the exploration of different late fusion methods to boost the performance of the combination based on the Transformer-based model and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for text and image, respectively. Additionally, our findings contribute to a better understanding of the effects of different image preprocessing methods for meme classification. We achieve 0.636 F1-macro average score for the binary subtask A, and 0.632 F1-macro average score for the multi-label subtask B. The present findings might help solve the inequality and discrimination women suffer on social media platforms.

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YMAI at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Detecting Misogyny in Memes using VisualBERT and MMBT MultiModal Pre-trained Models
Mohammad Habash | Yahya Daqour | Malak Abdullah | Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub

This paper presents a deep learning system that contends at SemEval-2022 Task 5. The goal is to detect the existence of misogynous memes in sub-task A. At the same time, the advanced multi-label sub-task B categorizes the misogyny of misogynous memes into one of four types: stereotype, shaming, objectification, and violence. The Ensemble technique has been used for three multi-modal deep learning models: two MMBT models and VisualBERT. Our proposed system ranked 17 place out of 83 participant teams with an F1-score of 0.722 in sub-task A, which shows a significant performance improvement over the baseline model’s F1-score of 0.65.

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Exploring Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Detection of Misogynistic Memes
Charic Farinango Cuervo | Natalie Parde

Misogynistic memes are rampant on social media, and often convey their messages using multimodal signals (e.g., images paired with derogatory text or captions). However, to date very few multimodal systems have been leveraged for the detection of misogynistic memes. Recently, researchers have turned to contrastive learning, and most notably OpenAI’s CLIP model, is an innovative solution to a variety of multimodal tasks. In this work, we experiment with contrastive learning to address the detection of misogynistic memes within the context of SemEval 2022 Task 5. Although our model does not achieve top results, these experiments provide important exploratory findings for this task. We conduct a detailed error analysis, revealing promising clues and offering a foundation for follow-up work.

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Poirot at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Leveraging Graph Network for Misogynistic Meme Detection
Harshvardhan Srivastava

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in a new form of entertainment medium called memes. These memes although seemingly innocuous have transcended the boundary of online harassment against women and created an unwanted bias against them. To help alleviate this problem, we propose an early fusion model for the prediction and identification of misogynistic memes and their type in this paper for which we participated in SemEval-2022 Task 5. The model receives as input meme image with its text transcription with a target vector. Given that a key challenge with this task is the combination of different modalities to predict misogyny, our model relies on pre-trained contextual representations from different state-of-the-art transformer-based language models and pre-trained image models to get an effective image representation. Our model achieved competitive results on both SubTask-A and SubTask-B with the other competingteams and significantly outperforms the baselines.

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SemEval-2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval, Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic
Ibrahim Abu Farha | Silviu Vlad Oprea | Steven Wilson | Walid Magdy

iSarcasmEval is the first shared task to target intended sarcasm detection: the data for this task was provided and labelled by the authors of the texts themselves. Such an approach minimises the downfalls of other methods to collect sarcasm data, which rely on distant supervision or third-party annotations. The shared task contains two languages, English and Arabic, and three subtasks: sarcasm detection, sarcasm category classification, and pairwise sarcasm identification given a sarcastic sentence and its non-sarcastic rephrase. The task received submissions from 60 different teams, with the sarcasm detection task being the most popular. Most of the participating teams utilised pre-trained language models. In this paper, we provide an overview of the task, data, and participating teams.

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PALI-NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval- Fine-tuning the Pre-trained Model for Detecting Intended Sarcasm
Xiyang Du | Dou Hu | Jin Zhi | Lianxin Jiang | Xiaofeng Shi

This paper describes the method we utilized in the SemEval-2022 Task 6 iSarcasmEval: Intended Sarcasm Detection In English and Arabic. Our system has achieved 1st in SubtaskB, which is to identify the categories of intended sarcasm. The proposed system integrates multiple BERT-based, RoBERTa-based and BERTweet-based models with finetuning. In this task, we contributed the following: 1) we reveal several large pre-trained models’ performance on tasks coping with the tweet-like text. 2) Our methods prove that we can still achieve excellent results in this particular task without a complex classifier adopting some proper training method. 3) we found there is a hierarchical relationship of sarcasm types in this task.

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stce at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Sarcasm Detection in English Tweets
Mengfei Yuan | Zhou Mengyuan | Lianxin Jiang | Yang Mo | Xiaofeng Shi

This paper describes the systematic approach applied in “SemEval-2022 Task 6 (iSarcasmEval) : Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic”. In particular, we illustrate the proposed system in detail for SubTask-A about determining a given text as sarcastic or non-sarcastic in English. We start with the training data from the officially released data and then experiment with different combinations of public datasets to improve the model generalization. Additional experiments conducted on the task demonstrate our strategies are effective in completing the task. Different transformer-based language models, as well as some popular plug-and-play proirs, are mixed into our system to enhance the model’s robustness. Furthermore, statistical and lexical-based text features are mined to improve the accuracy of the sarcasm detection. Our final submission achieves an F1-score for the sarcastic class of 0.6052 on the official test set (the top 1 of the 43 teams in “SubTask-A-English” on the leaderboard).

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GetSmartMSEC at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Sarcasm Detection using Contextual Word Embedding with Gaussian model for Irony Type Identification
Diksha Krishnan | Jerin Mahibha C | Thenmozhi Durairaj

Sarcasm refers to the use of words that have different literal and intended meanings. It represents the usage of words that are opposite of what is literally said, especially in order to insult, mock, criticise or irritate someone. These types of statements may be funny or amusing to others but may hurt or annoy the person towards whom it is intended. Identification of sarcastic phrases from social media posts finds its application in different domains like sentiment analysis, opinion mining, author profiling, and harassment detection. We have proposed a model for the shared task iSarcasmEval - Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic (CITATION) by SemEval-2022 considering the language English based on ELmo embeddings for Subtasks A and C and TF-IDF vectors and Gaussian Naive bayes classifier for Subtask B. The proposed model resulted in a F1 score 0.2012 for sarcastic texts in Subtask A, macro-F1 score of 0.0387 and 0.2794 for Subtasks B and C respectively.

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Amrita_CEN at SemEval-2022 Task 6: A Machine Learning Approach for Detecting Intended Sarcasm using Oversampling
Aparna K Ajayan | Krishna Mohanan | Anugraha S | Premjith B | Soman Kp

This paper describes the submission of the team Amrita_CEN to the shared task on iSarcasm Eval: Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic at SemEval 2022. We employed machine learning algorithms towards sarcasm detection. Here, we used K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, and Decision Tree along with the Random Forest ensemble method. Additionally, feature engineering techniques were applied to deal with the problems of class imbalance during training. Among the models considered, our study shows that the SVM, logistic regression and ensemble model Random Forest exhibited the best performance, which was submitted to the shared task.

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High Tech team at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Intended Sarcasm Detection for Arabic texts
Hamza Alami | Abdessamad Benlahbib | Ahmed Alami

This paper presents our proposed methods for the iSarcasmEval shared task. The shared task consists of three different subtasks. We participate in both subtask A and subtask C. The purpose of subtask A was to predict if a text is sarcastic while the aim of subtask C is to determine which text is sarcastic given a sarcastic text and its non-sarcastic rephrase. Both of the developed solutions used BERT pre-trained models. The proposed models are optimized on simple objectives and are easy to grasp. However, despite their simplicity, our methods ranked 4 and 2 in iSarcasmEval subtask A and subtask C for Arabic texts.

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CS-UM6P at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Transformer-based Models for Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic
Abdelkader El Mahdaouy | Abdellah El Mekki | Kabil Essefar | Abderrahman Skiredj | Ismail Berrada

Sarcasm is a form of figurative language where the intended meaning of a sentence differs from its literal meaning. This poses a serious challenge to several Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, and Author Profiling. In this paper, we present our participating system to the intended sarcasm detection task in English and Arabic languages. Our system consists of three deep learning-based models leveraging two existing pre-trained language models for Arabic and English. We have participated in all sub-tasks. Our official submissions achieve the best performance on sub-task A for Arabic language and rank second in sub-task B. For sub-task C, our system is ranked 7th and 11th on Arabic and English datasets, respectively.

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TechSSN at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Intended Sarcasm Detection using Transformer Models
Ramdhanush V | Rajalakshmi Sivanaiah | Angel S | Sakaya Milton Rajendram | Mirnalinee T T

Irony detection in the social media is an upcoming research which places a main role in sentiment analysis and offensive language identification. Sarcasm is one form of irony that is used to provide intended comments against realism. This paper describes a method to detect intended sarcasm in text (SemEval-2022 Task 6). The TECHSSN team used Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models and its variants to classify the text as sarcastic or non-sarcastic in English and Arabic languages. The data is preprocessed and fed to the model for training. The transformer models learn the weights during the training phase from the given dataset and predicts the output class labels for the unseen test data.

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I2C at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Intended Sarcasm in English using Deep Learning Techniques
Adrián Moreno Monterde | Laura Vázquez Ramos | Jacinto Mata | Victoria Pachón Álvarez

Sarcasm is often expressed through several verbal and non-verbal cues, e.g., a change of tone, overemphasis in a word, a drawn-out syllable, or a straight looking face. Most of the recent work in sarcasm detection has been carried out on textual data. This paper describes how the problem proposed in Task 6: Intended Sarcasm Detection in English (Abu Arfa et al. 2022) has been solved. Specifically, we participated in Subtask B: a binary multi-label classification task, where it is necessary to determine whether a tweet belongs to an ironic speech category, if any. Several approaches (classic machine learning and deep learning algorithms) were developed. The final submission consisted of a BERT based model and a macro-F1 score of 0.0699 was obtained.

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NULL at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Intended Sarcasm Detection Using Stylistically Fused Contextualized Representation and Deep Learning
Mostafa Rahgouy | Hamed Babaei Giglou | Taher Rahgooy | Cheryl Seals

The intended sarcasm cannot be understood until the listener observes that the text’s literal meaning violates truthfulness. Consequently, words and meanings play an essential role in specifying sarcasm. Enriched feature extraction techniques were proposed to capture both words and meanings in the contexts. Due to the overlapping features in sarcastic and non-sarcastic texts, a CNN model extracts local features from the combined class-dependent statistical embedding of sarcastic texts with contextualized embedding. Another component BiLSTM extracts long dependencies from combined non-sarcastic statistical and contextualized embeddings. This work combines a classifier that uses the combined high-level features of CNN and BiLSTM for sarcasm detection to produce the final predictions. The experimental analysis presented in this paper shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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UoR-NCL at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Using ensemble loss with BERT for intended sarcasm detection
Emmanuel Osei-Brefo | Huizhi Liang

Sarcasm has gained notoriety for being difficult to detect by machine learning systems due to its figurative nature. In this paper, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model has been used with ensemble loss made of cross-entropy loss and negative log-likelihood loss to classify whether a given sentence is in English and Arabic tweets are sarcastic or not. From the results obtained in the experiments, our proposed BERT with ensemble loss achieved superior performance when applied to English and Arabic test datasets. For the validation dataset, our model performed better on the Arabic dataset but failed to outperform the baseline method (made of BERT with only a single loss function) when applied on the English validation set.

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I2C at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Intended Sarcasm Detection on Social Networks with Deep Learning
Pablo Gonzalez Diaz | Pablo Cordon | Jacinto Mata | Victoria Pachón

In this paper we present our approach and system description on iSarcasmEval: a SemEval task for intended sarcasm detection on social networks. This derives from our participation in SubTask A: Given a text, determine whether it is sarcastic or non-sarcastic. In our approach to complete the task, a comparison of several machine learning and deep learning algorithms using two datasets was conducted. The model which obtained the highest values of F1-score was a BERT-base-cased model. With this one, an F1-score of 0.2451 for the sarcastic class in the evaluation process was achieved. Finally, our team reached the 30th position.

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BFCAI at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Multi-Layer Perceptron for Sarcasm Detection in Arabic Texts
Nsrin Ashraf | Fathy Elkazzaz | Mohamed Taha | Hamada Nayel | Tarek Elshishtawy

This paper describes the systems submitted to iSarcasm shared task. The aim of iSarcasm is to identify the sarcastic contents in Arabic and English text. Our team participated in iSarcasm for the Arabic language. A multi-Layer machine learning based model has been submitted for Arabic sarcasm detection. In this model, a vector space TF-IDF has been used as for feature representation. The submitted system is simple and does not need any external resources. The test results show encouraging results.

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akaBERT at SemEval-2022 Task 6: An Ensemble Transformer-based Model for Arabic Sarcasm Detection
Abdulrahman Mohamed Kamr | Ensaf Mohamed

Due to the widespread usage of social media sites and the enormous number of users who utilize irony implicit words in most of their tweets and posts, it has become necessary to detect sarcasm, which strongly influences understanding and analyzing the crowd’s opinions. Detecting sarcasm is difficult due to the nature of sarcastic tweets, which vary based on the topic, region, the user’s attitude, culture, terminologies, and other criteria. In addition to these difficulties, detecting sarcasm in Arabic has its challenges due to its complexities, such as being morphologically rich, having many different dialects, and having low resources. In this research, we present our submission of (iSarcasmEval) sub-task A of the shared task on SemEval 2022. In Sub-task A; we determine whether the tweets are sarcastic or non-sarcastic. We implemented different approaches based on Transformers. First, we fine-tuned the AraBERT, MARABERT, and AraELECTRA. One of the challenges that faced us was that the data was not balanced. Non-sarcastic data is much more than sarcastic. We used data augmentation techniques to balance the two classes, significantly affecting the performance. The performance F1 score of the three models was 87%, 90%, and 91%, respectively. Then we boosted the three models by developing an ensemble model based on hard voting. The final performance F1 Score was 93%.

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AlexU-AL at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Detecting Sarcasm in Arabic Text Using Deep Learning Techniques
Aya Lotfy | Marwan Torki | Nagwa El-Makky

Sarcasm detection is an important task in Natural Language Understanding. Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony that occurs when there is a discrepancy between the literal and intended meanings of an expression. In this paper, we use the tweets of the Arabic dataset provided by SemEval-2022 task 6 to train deep learning classifiers to solve the sub-tasks A and C associated with the dataset. Sub-task A is to determine if the tweet is sarcastic or not. For sub-task C, given a sarcastic text and its non-sarcastic rephrase, i.e. two texts that convey the same meaning, determine which is the sarcastic one. In our solution, we utilize fine-tuned MARBERT (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021) model with an added single linear layer on top for classification. The proposed solution achieved 0.5076 F1-sarcastic in Arabic sub-task A, accuracy of 0.7450 and F-score of 0.7442 in Arabic sub-task C. We achieved the 2^nd and the 9^th places for Arabic sub-tasks A and C respectively.

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reamtchka at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Investigating the effect of different loss functions for Sarcasm detection for unbalanced datasets
Reem Abdel-Salam

This paper describes the system used in SemEval-2022 Task 6: Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic. Achieving 20th,3rd places with 34& 47 F1-Sarcastic score for task A, 16th place for task B with 0.0560 F1-macro score, and 10, 6th places for task C with72% and 80% accuracy on the leaderboard. A voting classifier between either multiple different BERT-based models or machine learningmodels is proposed, as our final model. Multiple key points has been extensively examined to overcome the problem of the unbalance ofthe dataset as: type of models, suitable architecture, augmentation, loss function, etc. In addition to that, we present an analysis of ourresults in this work, highlighting its strengths and shortcomings.

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niksss at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Are Traditionally Pre-Trained Contextual Embeddings Enough for Detecting Intended Sarcasm ?
Nikhil Singh

This paper presents the 10th and 11th place system for Subtask A -English and Subtask A Arabic respectively of the SemEval 2022 -Task 6. The purpose of the Subtask A was to classify a given text sequence into sarcastic and nonsarcastic. We also breifly cover our method for Subtask B which performed subpar when compared with most of the submissions on the official leaderboard . All of the developed solutions used a transformers based language model for encoding the text sequences with necessary changes of the pretrained weights and classifier according to the language and subtask at hand .

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Dartmouth at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Detection of Sarcasm
Rishik Lad | Weicheng Ma | Soroush Vosoughi

This paper introduces the result of Team Dartmouth’s experiments on each of the five subtasks for the detection of sarcasm in English and Arabic tweets. This detection was framed as a classification problem, and our contributions are threefold: we developed an English binary classifier system with RoBERTa, an Arabic binary classifier with XLM-RoBERTa, and an English multilabel classifier with BERT. Preprocessing steps are taken with labeled input data prior to tokenization, such as extracting and appending verbs/adjectives or representative/significant keywords to the end of an input tweet to help the models better understand and generalize sarcasm detection. We also discuss the results of simple data augmentation techniques to improve the quality of the given training dataset as well as an alternative approach to the question of multilabel sequence classification. Ultimately, our systems place us in the top 14 participants for each of the five subtasks.

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ISD at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Sarcasm Detection Using Lightweight Models
Samantha Huang | Ethan Chi | Nathan Chi

A robust comprehension of sarcasm detection iscritical for creating artificial systems that can ef-fectively perform sentiment analysis in writtentext. In this work, we investigate AI approachesto identifying whether a text is sarcastic or notas part of SemEval-2022 Task 6. We focus oncreating systems for Task A, where we experi-ment with lightweight statistical classificationapproaches trained on both GloVe features andmanually-selected features. Additionally, weinvestigate fine-tuning the transformer modelBERT. Our final system for Task A is an Ex-treme Gradient Boosting Classifier trained onmanually-engineered features. Our final sys-tem achieved an F1-score of 0.2403 on SubtaskA and was ranked 32 of 43.

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Plumeria at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Sarcasm Detection for English and Arabic Using Transformers and Data Augmentation
Mosab Shaheen | Shubham Kumar Nigam

The paper describes our submission to SemEval-2022 Task 6 on sarcasm detection and its five subtasks for English and Arabic. Sarcasm conveys a meaning which contradicts the literal meaning, and it is mainly found on social networks. It has a significant role in understanding the intention of the user. For detecting sarcasm, we used deep learning techniques based on transformers due to its success in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) without the need for feature engineering. The datasets were taken from tweets. We created new datasets by augmenting with external data or by using word embeddings and repetition of instances. Experiments were done on the datasets with different types of preprocessing because it is crucial in this task. The rank of our team was consistent across four subtasks (fourth rank in three subtasks and sixth rank in one subtask); whereas other teams might be in the top ranks for some subtasks but rank drastically less in other subtasks. This implies the robustness and stability of the models and the techniques we used.

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IISERB Brains at SemEval-2022 Task 6: A Deep-learning Framework to Identify Intended Sarcasm in English
Tanuj Shekhawat | Manoj Kumar | Udaybhan Rathore | Aditya Joshi | Jasabanta Patro

This paper describes the system architectures and the models submitted by our team “IISERB Brains” to SemEval 2022 Task 6 competition. We contested for all three sub-tasks floated for the English dataset. On the leader-board, we got 19th rank out of 43 teams for sub-task A, 8th rank out of 22 teams for sub-task B, and 13th rank out of 16 teams for sub-task C. Apart from the submitted results and models, we also report the other models and results that we obtained through our experiments after organizers published the gold labels of their evaluation data. All of our code and links to additional resources are present in GitHub for reproducibility.

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connotation_clashers at SemEval-2022 Task 6: The effect of sentiment analysis on sarcasm detection
Patrick Hantsch | Nadav Chkroun

We investigated the influence of contradictory connotations of words or phrases occurring in sarcastic statements, causing those statements to convey the opposite of their literal meaning. Our approach was to perform a sentiment analysis in order to capture potential opposite sentiments within one sentence and use its results as additional information for a further classifier extracting general text features, testing this for a Convolutional Neural Network, as well as for a Support Vector Machine classifier, respectively. We found that a more complex and sophisticated implementation of the sentiment analysis than just classifying the sentences as positive or negative is necessary, since our implementation showed a worse performance in both approaches than the respective classifier without using any sentiment analysis.

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TUG-CIC at SemEval-2021 Task 6: Two-stage Fine-tuning for Intended Sarcasm Detection
Jason Angel | Segun Aroyehun | Alexander Gelbukh

We present our systems and findings for the iSarcasmEval: Intended Sarcasm Detection In English and Arabic at SEMEVAL 2022. Specifically we take part in Subtask A for the English language. The task aims to determine whether a text from social media (a tweet) is sarcastic or not. We model the problem using knowledge sources, a pre-trained language model on sentiment/emotion data and a dataset focused on intended sarcasm. Our submission ranked third place among 43 teams. In addition, we show a brief error analysis of our best model to investigate challenging examples for detecting sarcasm.

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YNU-HPCC at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Transformer-based Model for Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic
Guangmin Zheng | Jin Wang | Xuejie Zhang

In this paper, we (a YNU-HPCC team) describe the system we built in the SemEval-2022 competition. As participants in Task 6 (titled “iSarcasmEval: Intended Sarcasm Detection In English and Arabic”), we implement the sentiment system for all three subtasks in English and Arabic. All subtasks involve the detection of sarcasm (binary and multilabel classification) and the determination of the sarcastic text location (sentence pair classification). Our system primarily applies the sequence classification model of a bidirectional encoder representation from a transformer (BERT). The BERT is used to extract sentence information from both directions for downstream classification tasks. A single basic model is used for single-sentence and sentence-pair binary classification tasks. For the multilabel task, the Label-Powerset method and binary cross-entropy loss function with weights are used. Our system exhibits competitive performance, obtaining 12/43 (21/32), 11/22, and 3/16 (8/13) rankings in the three official rankings for English (Arabic).

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UTNLP at SemEval-2022 Task 6: A Comparative Analysis of Sarcasm Detection Using Generative-based and Mutation-based Data Augmentation
Amirhossein Abaskohi | Arash Rasouli | Tanin Zeraati | Behnam Bahrak

Sarcasm is a term that refers to the use of words to mock, irritate, or amuse someone. It is commonly used on social media. The metaphorical and creative nature of sarcasm presents a significant difficulty for sentiment analysis systems based on affective computing. The methodology and results of our team, UTNLP, in the SemEval-2022 shared task 6 on sarcasm detection are presented in this paper. We put different models, and data augmentation approaches to the test and report on which one works best. The tests begin with traditional machine learning models and progress to transformer-based and attention-based models. We employed data augmentation based on data mutation and data generation. Using RoBERTa and mutation-based data augmentation, our best approach achieved an F1-score of 0.38 in the competition’s evaluation phase. After the competition, we fixed our model’s flaws and achieved anF1-score of 0.414.

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FII UAIC at SemEval-2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval - Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic
Tudor Manoleasa | Daniela Gifu | Iustin Sandu

The “iSarcasmEval - Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic” task at the SemEval 2022 competition focuses on detectingand rating the distinction between intendedand perceived sarcasm in the context of textual sarcasm detection, as well as the level ofirony contained in these texts. In the contextof SemEval, we present a binary classificationmethod which classifies the text as sarcasticor non-sarcastic (task A, for English) based onfive classical machine learning approaches bytrying to train the models based on this datasetsolely (i.e., no other datasets have been used).This process indicates low performance compared to previously studied datasets, which in2dicates that the previous ones might be biased.

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MarSan at SemEval-2022 Task 6: iSarcasm Detection via T5 and Sequence Learners
Maryam Najafi | Ehsan Tavan

The paper describes SemEval-2022’s shared task “Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic.” This task includes English and Arabic tweets with sarcasm and non-sarcasm samples and irony speech labels. The first two subtasks predict whether a text is sarcastic and the ironic category the sarcasm sample belongs to. The third one is to find the sarcastic sample from its non-sarcastic paraphrase. Deep neural networks have recently achieved highly competitive performance in many tasks. Combining deep learning with language models has also resulted in acceptable accuracy. Inspired by this, we propose a novel deep learning model on top of language models. On top of T5, this architecture uses an encoder module of the transformer, followed by LSTM and attention to utilizing past and future information, concentrating on informative tokens. Due to the success of the proposed model, we used the same architecture with a few modifications to the output layer in all three subtasks.

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LT3 at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Fuzzy-Rough Nearest Neighbor Classification for Sarcasm Detection
Olha Kaminska | Chris Cornelis | Veronique Hoste

This paper describes the approach developed by the LT3 team in the Intended Sarcasm Detection task at SemEval-2022 Task 6. We considered the binary classification subtask A for English data. The presented system is based on the fuzzy-rough nearest neighbor classification method using various text embedding techniques. Our solution reached 9th place in the official leader-board for English subtask A.

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LISACTeam at SemEval-2022 Task 6: A Transformer based Approach for Intended Sarcasm Detection in English Tweets
Abdessamad Benlahbib | Hamza Alami | Ahmed Alami

In this paper, we present our system and findings for SemEval-2022 Task 6 - iSarcasmEval: Intended Sarcasm Detection in English. The main objective of this task was to identify sarcastic tweets. This task was challenging mainly due to (1) the small training dataset that contains only 3468 tweets and (2) the imbalanced class distribution (25% sarcastic and 75% non-sarcastic). Our submitted model (ranked eighth on Sub-Task A and fifth on Sub-Task C) consists of a Transformer-based approach (BERTweet model).

Detecting sarcasm and verbal irony from people’s subjective statements is crucial to understanding their intended meanings and real sentiments and positions in social scenarios. This paper describes the X-PuDu system that participated in SemEval-2022 Task 6, iSarcasmEval - Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic, which aims at detecting intended sarcasm in various settings of natural language understanding. Our solution finetunes pre-trained language models, such as ERNIE-M and DeBERTa, under the multilingual settings to recognize the irony from Arabic and English texts. Our system ranked second out of 43, and ninth out of 32 in Task A: one-sentence detection in English and Arabic; fifth out of 22 in Task B: binary multi-label classification in English; first out of 16, and fifth out of 13 in Task C: sentence-pair detection in English and Arabic.

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DUCS at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Exploring Emojis and Sentiments for Sarcasm Detection
Vandita Grover | Prof Hema Banati

This paper describes the participation of team DUCS at SemEval 2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval - Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic. Team DUCS participated in SubTask A of iSarcasmEval which was to determine if the given English text was sarcastic or not. In this work, emojis were utilized to capture how they contributed to the sarcastic nature of a text. It is observed that emojis can augment or reverse the polarity of a given statement. Thus sentiment polarities and intensities of emojis, as well as those of text, were computed to determine sarcasm. Use of capitalization, word repetition, and use of punctuation marks like '!' were factored in as sentiment intensifiers. An NLP augmenter was used to tackle the imbalanced nature of the sarcasm dataset. Several architectures comprising of various ML and DL classifiers, and transformer models like BERT and Multimodal BERT were experimented with. It was observed that Multimodal BERT outperformed other architectures tested and achieved an F1-score of 30.71%. The key takeaway of this study was that sarcastic texts are usually positive sentences. In general emojis with positive polarity are used more than those with negative polarities in sarcastic texts.

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UMUTeam at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Evaluating Transformers for detecting Sarcasm in English and Arabic
José García-Díaz | Camilo Caparros-Laiz | Rafael Valencia-García

In this manuscript we detail the participation of the UMUTeam in the iSarcasm shared task (SemEval-2022). This shared task is related to the identification of sarcasm in English and Arabic documents. Our team achieve in the first challenge, a binary classification task, a F1 score of the sarcastic class of 17.97 for English and 31.75 for Arabic. For the second challenge, a multi-label classification, our results are not recorded due to an unknown problem. Therefore, we report the results of each sarcastic mechanism with the validation split. For our proposal, several neural networks that combine language-independent linguistic features with pre-trained embeddings are trained. The embeddings are based on different schemes, such as word and sentence embeddings, and contextual and non-contextual embeddings. Besides, we evaluate different techniques for the integration of the feature sets, such as ensemble learning and knowledge integration. In general, our best results are achieved using the knowledge integration strategy.

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R2D2 at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Are language models sarcastic enough? Finetuning pre-trained language models to identify sarcasm
Mayukh Sharma | Ilanthenral Kandasamy | Vasantha W B

This paper describes our system used for SemEval 2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval: Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic. We participated in all subtasks based on only English datasets. Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have become a de-facto approach for most natural language processing tasks. In our work, we evaluate the performance of these models for identifying sarcasm. For Subtask A and Subtask B, we used simple finetuning on PLMs. For Subtask C, we propose a Siamese network architecture trained using a combination of cross-entropy and distance-maximisation loss. Our model was ranked 7^th in Subtask B, 8^th in Subtask C (English), and performed well in Subtask A (English). In our work, we also present the comparative performance of different PLMs for each Subtask.

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SarcasmDet at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Detecting Sarcasm using Pre-trained Transformers in English and Arabic Languages
Malak Abdullah | Dalya Alnore | Safa Swedat | Jumana Khrais | Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub

This paper presents solution systems for task 6 at SemEval2022, iSarcasmEval: Intended Sarcasm Detection In English and Arabic. The shared task 6 consists of three sub-task. We participated in subtask A for both languages, Arabic and English. The goal of subtask A is to predict if a tweet would be considered sarcastic or not. The proposed solution SarcasmDet has been developed using the state-of-the-art Arabic and English pre-trained models AraBERT, MARBERT, BERT, and RoBERTa with ensemble techniques. The paper describes the SarcasmDet architecture with the fine-tuning of the best hyperparameter that led to this superior system. Our model ranked seventh out of 32 teams in subtask A- Arabic with an f1-sarcastic of 0.4305 and Seventeen out of 42 teams with f1-sarcastic 0.3561. However, we built another model to score f-1 sarcastic with 0.43 in English after the deadline. Both Models (Arabic and English scored 0.43 as f-1 sarcastic with ranking seventh).

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JCT at SemEval-2022 Task 6-A: Sarcasm Detection in Tweets Written in English and Arabic using Preprocessing Methods and Word N-grams
Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner | Matan Fchima | Ilan Meyrowitsch

In this paper, we describe our submissions to SemEval-2022 contest. We tackled subtask 6-A - “iSarcasmEval: Intended Sarcasm Detection In English and Arabic – Binary Classification”. We developed different models for two languages: English and Arabic. We applied 4 supervised machine learning methods, 6 preprocessing methods for English and 3 for Arabic, and 3 oversampling methods. Our best submitted model for the English test dataset was a SVC model that balanced the dataset using SMOTE and removed stop words. For the Arabic test dataset our best submitted model was a SVC model that preprocessed removed longation.

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SemEval-2022 Task 7: Identifying Plausible Clarifications of Implicit and Underspecified Phrases in Instructional Texts
Michael Roth | Talita Anthonio | Anna Sauer

We describe SemEval-2022 Task 7, a shared task on rating the plausibility of clarifications in instructional texts. The dataset for this task consists of manually clarified how-to guides for which we generated alternative clarifications and collected human plausibility judgements. The task of participating systems was to automatically determine the plausibility of a clarification in the respective context. In total, 21 participants took part in this task, with the best system achieving an accuracy of 68.9%. This report summarizes the results and findings from 8 teams and their system descriptions. Finally, we show in an additional evaluation that predictions by the top participating team make it possible to identify contexts with multiple plausible clarifications with an accuracy of 75.2%.

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JBNU-CCLab at SemEval-2022 Task 7: DeBERTa for Identifying Plausible Clarifications in Instructional Texts
Daewook Kang | Sung-Min Lee | Eunhwan Park | Seung-Hoon Na

In this study, we examine the ability of contextualized representations of pretrained language model to distinguish whether sequences from instructional articles are plausible or implausible. Towards this end, we compare the BERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTa models using simple classifiers based on the sentence representations of the [CLS] tokens and perform a detailed analysis by visualizing the representations of the [CLS] tokens of the models. In the experimental results of Subtask A: Multi-Class Classification, DeBERTa exhibits the best performance and produces a more distinguishable representation across different labels. Submitting an ensemble of 10 DeBERTa-based models, our final system achieves an accuracy of 61.4% and is ranked fifth out of models submitted by eight teams. Further in-depth results suggest that the abilities of pretrained language models for the plausibility detection task are more strongly affected by their model structures or attention designs than by their model sizes.

This paper describes the system for the identifying Plausible Clarifications of Implicit and Underspecified Phrases. This task was set up as an English cloze task, in which clarifications are presented as possible fillers and systems have to score how well each filler plausibly fits in a given context. For this shared task, we propose our own solutions, including supervised proaches, unsupervised approaches with pretrained models, and then we use these models to build an ensemble model. Finally we get the 2nd best result in the subtask1 which is a classification task, and the 3rd best result in the subtask2 which is a regression task.

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DuluthNLP at SemEval-2022 Task 7: Classifying Plausible Alternatives with Pre–trained ELECTRA
Samuel Akrah | Ted Pedersen

This paper describes the DuluthNLP system that participated in Task 7 of SemEval-2022 on Identifying Plausible Clarifications of Implicit and Underspecified Phrases in Instructional Texts. Given an instructional text with an omitted token, the task requires models to classify or rank the plausibility of potential fillers. To solve the task, we fine–tuned the models BERT, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA on training data where potential fillers are rated for plausibility. This is a challenging problem, as shown by BERT-based models achieving accuracy less than 45%. However, our ELECTRA model with tuned class weights on CrossEntropyLoss achieves an accuracy of 53.3% on the official evaluation test data, which ranks 6 out of the 8 total submissions for Subtask A.

In this paper, we detail the methods we used to determine the idiomaticity and plausibility of candidate words or phrases into an instructional text as part of the SemEval Task 7: Identifying Plausible Clarifications of Implicit and Underspecified Phrases in Instructional Texts. Given a set of steps in an instructional text, there are certain phrases that most plausibly fill that spot. We explored various possible architectures, including tree-based methods over GloVe embeddings, ensembled BERT and ELECTRA models, and GPT 2-based infilling methods.

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Nowruz at SemEval-2022 Task 7: Tackling Cloze Tests with Transformers and Ordinal Regression
Mohammadmahdi Nouriborji | Omid Rohanian | David Clifton

This paper outlines the system using which team Nowruz participated in SemEval 2022 Task 7 “Identifying Plausible Clarifications of Implicit and Underspecified Phrases” for both subtasks A and B. Using a pre-trained transformer as a backbone, the model targeted the task of multi-task classification and ranking in the context of finding the best fillers for a cloze task related to instructional texts on the website Wikihow. The system employed a combination of two ordinal regression components to tackle this task in a multi-task learning scenario. According to the official leaderboard of the shared task, this system was ranked 5th in the ranking and 7th in the classification subtasks out of 21 participating teams. With additional experiments, the models have since been further optimised. The code used in the experiments is going to be publicly available.

This paper describes our winning system on SemEval 2022 Task 7: Identifying Plausible Clarifications ofImplicit and Underspecified Phrases in Instructional Texts. A replaced token detection pre-trained model is utilized with minorly different task-specific heads for SubTask-A: Multi-class Classification and SubTask-B: Ranking. Incorporating a pattern-aware ensemble method, our system achieves a 68.90% accuracy score and 0.8070 spearman’s rank correlation score surpassing the 2nd place with a large margin by 2.7 and 2.2 percent points for SubTask-A and SubTask-B, respectively. Our approach is simple and easy to implement, and we conducted ablation studies and qualitative and quantitative analyses for the working strategies used in our system.

This paper describes our system used in the SemEval-2022 Task 7(Roth et al.): Identifying Plausible Clarifications of Implicit and Under-specified Phrases. Semeval Task7 is an more complex cloze task, different than normal cloze task, only requiring NLP system could find the best fillers for sentence. In Semeval Task7, NLP system not only need to choose the best fillers for each input instance, but also evaluate the quality of all possible fillers and give them a relative score according to context semantic information. We propose an ensemble of different state-of-the-art transformer-based language models(i.e., RoBERTa and Deberta) with some plug-and-play tricks, such as Grouped Layerwise Learning Rate Decay (GLLRD) strategy, contrastive learning loss, different pooling head and an external input data preprecess block before the information came into pretrained language models, which improve performance significantly. The main contributions of our sys-tem are 1) revealing the performance discrepancy of different transformer-based pretraining models on the downstream task; 2) presenting an efficient learning-rate and parameter attenuation strategy when fintuning pretrained language models; 3) adding different constrative learning loss to improve model performance; 4) showing the useful of the different pooling head structure. Our system achieves a test accuracy of 0.654 on subtask1(ranking 4th on the leaderboard) and a test Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient of 0.785 on subtask2(ranking 2nd on the leaderboard).

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niksss at SemEval-2022 Task7:Transformers for Grading the Clarifications on Instructional Texts
Nikhil Singh

This paper describes the 9th place system description for SemEval-2022 Task 7. The goal of this shared task was to develop computational models to predict how plausible a clarification made on an instructional text is. This shared task was divided into two Subtasks A and B. We attempted to solve these using various transformers-based architecture under different regime. We initially treated this as a text2text generation problem but comparing it with our recent approach we dropped it and treated this as a text-sequence classification and regression depending on the Subtask.

Thousands of new news articles appear daily in outlets in different languages. Understanding which articles refer to the same story can not only improve applications like news aggregation but enable cross-linguistic analysis of media consumption and attention. However, assessing the similarity of stories in news articles is challenging due to the different dimensions in which a story might vary, e.g., two articles may have substantial textual overlap but describe similar events that happened years apart. To address this challenge, we introduce a new dataset of nearly 10,000 news article pairs spanning 18 language combinations annotated for seven dimensions of similarity as SemEval 2022 Task 8. Here, we present an overview of the task, the best performing submissions, and the frontiers and challenges for measuring multilingual news article similarity. While the participants of this SemEval task contributed very strong models, achieving up to 0.818 correlation with gold standard labels across languages, human annotators are capable of reaching higher correlations, suggesting space for further progress.

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EMBEDDIA at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Investigating Sentence, Image, and Knowledge Graph Representations for Multilingual News Article Similarity
Elaine Zosa | Emanuela Boros | Boshko Koloski | Lidia Pivovarova

In this paper, we present the participation of the EMBEDDIA team in the SemEval-2022 Task 8 (Multilingual News Article Similarity). We cover several techniques and propose different methods for finding the multilingual news article similarity by exploring the dataset in its entirety. We take advantage of the textual content of the articles, the provided metadata (e.g., titles, keywords, topics), the translated articles, the images (those that were available), and knowledge graph-based representations for entities and relations present in the articles. We, then, compute the semantic similarity between the different features and predict through regression the similarity scores. Our findings show that, while our proposed methods obtained promising results, exploiting the semantic textual similarity with sentence representations is unbeatable. Finally, in the official SemEval-2022 Task 8, we ranked fifth in the overall team ranking cross-lingual results, and second in the English-only results.

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HFL at SemEval-2022 Task 8: A Linguistics-inspired Regression Model with Data Augmentation for Multilingual News Similarity
Zihang Xu | Ziqing Yang | Yiming Cui | Zhigang Chen

This paper describes our system designed for SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. We proposed a linguistics-inspired model trained with a few task-specific strategies. The main techniques of our system are: 1) data augmentation, 2) multi-label loss, 3) adapted R-Drop, 4) samples reconstruction with the head-tail combination. We also present a brief analysis of some negative methods like two-tower architecture. Our system ranked 1st on the leaderboard while achieving a Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient of 0.818 on the official evaluation set.

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GateNLP-UShef at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Entity-Enriched Siamese Transformer for Multilingual News Article Similarity
Iknoor Singh | Yue Li | Melissa Thong | Carolina Scarton

This paper describes the second-placed system on the leaderboard of SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. We propose an entity-enriched Siamese Transformer which computes news article similarity based on different sub-dimensions, such as the shared narrative, entities, location and time of the event discussed in the news article. Our system exploits a Siamese network architecture using a Transformer encoder to learn document-level representations for the purpose of capturing the narrative together with the auxiliary entity-based features extracted from the news articles. The intuition behind using all these features together is to capture the similarity between news articles at different granularity levels and to assess the extent to which different news outlets write about “the same events”. Our experimental results and detailed ablation study demonstrate the effectiveness and the validity of our proposed method.

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Wolfies at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Feature extraction pipeline with transformers for Multi-lingual news article similarity
Nikhil Goel | Ranjith Reddy Bommidi

This work is about finding the similarity between a pair of news articles. There are seven different objective similarity metrics provided in the dataset for each pair and the news articles are in multiple different languages. On top of the pre-trained embedding model, we calculated cosine similarity for baseline results and feed-forward neural network was then trained on top of it to improve the results. We also built separate pipelines for each similarity metric for feature extraction. We could see significant improvement from baseline results using feature extraction and feed-forward neural network.

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SkoltechNLP at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity via Exploration of News Texts to Vector Representations
Mikhail Kuimov | Daryna Dementieva | Alexander Panchenko

This paper describes our contribution to SemEval 2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. The aim was to test completely different approaches and distinguish the best performing. That is why we’ve considered systems based on Transformer-based encoders, NER-based, and NLI-based methods (and their combination with SVO dependency triplets representation). The results prove that Transformer models produce the best scores. However, there is space for research and approaches that give not yet comparable but more interpretable results.

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IIIT-MLNS at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Siamese Architecture for Modeling Multilingual News Similarity
Sagar Joshi | Dhaval Taunk | Vasudeva Varma

The task of multilingual news article similarity entails determining the degree of similarity of a given pair of news articles in a language-agnostic setting. This task aims to determine the extent to which the articles deal with the entities and events in question without much consideration of the subjective aspects of the discourse. Considering the superior representations being given by these models as validated on other tasks in NLP across an array of high and low-resource languages and this task not having any restricted set of languages to focus on, we adopted using the encoder representations from these models as our choice throughout our experiments. For modeling the similarity task by using the representations given by these models, a Siamese architecture was used as the underlying architecture. In experimentation, we investigated on several fronts including features passed to the encoder model, data augmentation and ensembling among our major experiments. We found data augmentation to be the most effective working strategy among our experiments.

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HuaAMS at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Combining Translation and Domain Pre-training for Cross-lingual News Article Similarity
Sai Sandeep Sharma Chittilla | Talaat Khalil

This paper describes our submission to SemEval-2022 Multilingual News Article Similarity task. We experiment with different approaches that utilize a pre-trained language model fitted with a regression head to predict similarity scores for a given pair of news articles. Our best performing systems include 2 key steps: 1) pre-training with in-domain data 2) training data enrichment through machine translation. Our final submission is an ensemble of predictions from our top systems. While we show the significance of pre-training and augmentation, we believe the issue of language coverage calls for more attention.

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DartmouthCS at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Predicting Multilingual News Article Similarity with Meta-Information and Translation
Joseph Hajjar | Weicheng Ma | Soroush Vosoughi

This paper presents our approach for tackling SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. Our experiments show that even by using multi-lingual pre-trained language models (LMs), translating the text into the same language yields the best evaluation performance. We also find that stylometric features of the text and meta-information of the news articles can be predicted based on the text with low error rates, and these predictions could be used to improve the predictions of the overall similarity scores. These findings suggest substantial correlations between authorship information and topical similarity estimation, which sheds light on future stylometric and topic modeling research.

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Team Innovators at SemEval-2022 for Task 8: Multi-Task Training with Hyperpartisan and Semantic Relation for Multi-Lingual News Article Similarity
Nidhir Bhavsar | Rishikesh Devanathan | Aakash Bhatnagar | Muskaan Singh | Petr Motlicek | Tirthankar Ghosal

This work represents the system proposed by team Innovators for SemEval 2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. Similar multilingual news articles should match irrespective of the style of writing, the language of conveyance, and subjective decisions and biases induced by medium/outlet. The proposed architecture includes a machine translation system that translates multilingual news articles into English and presents a multitask learning model trained simultaneously on three distinct datasets. The system leverages the PageRank algorithm for Long-form text alignment. Multitask learning approach allows simultaneous training of multiple tasks while sharing the same encoder during training, facilitating knowledge transfer between tasks. Our best model is ranked 16 with a Pearson score of 0.733.

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OversampledML at SemEval-2022 Task 8: When multilingual news similarity met Zero-shot approaches
Mayank Jobanputra | Lorena Martín Rodríguez

We investigate the capabilities of pre-trained models, without any fine-tuning, for a document-level multilingual news similarity task of SemEval-2022. We utilize title and news content with appropriate pre-processing techniques. Our system derives 14 different similarity features using a combination of state-of-the-art methods (MPNet) with well-known statistical methods (i.e. TF-IDF, Word Mover’s distance). We formulate multilingual news similarity task as a regression task and approximate the overall similarity between two news articles using these features. Our best-performing system achieved a correlation score of 70.1% and was ranked 20th among the 34 participating teams. In this paper, in addition to a system description, we also provide further analysis of our results and an ablation study highlighting the strengths and limitations of our features. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/cicl-iscl/multinewssimilarity

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Team TMA at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Lightweight and Language-Agnostic News Similarity Classifier
Nicolas Stefanovitch

We present our contribution to the SemEval 22 Share Task 8: Multilingual news article similarity. The approach is lightweight and language-agnostic, it is based on the computation of several lexicographic and embedding-based features, and the use of a simple ML approach: random forests. In a notable departure from the task formulation, which is a ranking task, we tackled this task as a classification one. We present a detailed analysis of the behaviour of our system under different settings.

This article introduces a system to solve the SemEval 2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. The task focuses on the consistency of events reported in two news articles. The system consists of a pre-trained model(e.g., INFOXLM and XLM-RoBERTa) to extract multilingual news features, following fully-connected networks to measure the similarity. In addition, data augmentation and Ten Fold Voting are used to enhance the model. Our final submitted model is an ensemble of three base models, with a Pearson value of 0.784 on the test dataset.

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LSX_team5 at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity Assessment based on Word- and Sentence Mover’s Distance
Stefan Heil | Karina Kopp | Albin Zehe | Konstantin Kobs | Andreas Hotho

This paper introduces our submission for the SemEval 2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. The task of the competition consisted of the development of a model, capable of determining the similarity between pairs of multilingual news articles. To address this challenge, we evaluated the Word Mover’s Distance in conjunction with word embeddings from ConceptNet Numberbatch and term frequencies of WorldLex, as well the Sentence Mover’s Distance based on sentence embeddings generated by pretrained transformer models of Sentence-BERT. To facilitate the comparison of multilingual articles with Sentence-BERT models, we deployed a Neural Machine Translation system. All our models achieve stable results in multilingual similarity estimation without learning parameters.

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Team dina at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Pre-trained Language Models as Baselines for Semantic Similarity
Dina Pisarevskaya | Arkaitz Zubiaga

This paper describes the participation of the team “dina” in the Multilingual News Similarity task at SemEval 2022. To build our system for the task, we experimented with several multilingual language models which were originally pre-trained for semantic similarity but were not further fine-tuned. We use these models in combination with state-of-the-art packages for machine translation and named entity recognition with the expectation of providing valuable input to the model. Our work assesses the applicability of such “pure” models to solve the multilingual semantic similarity task in the case of news articles. Our best model achieved a score of 0.511, but shows that there is room for improvement.

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TCU at SemEval-2022 Task 8: A Stacking Ensemble Transformer Model for Multilingual News Article Similarity
Xiang Luo | Yanqing Niu | Boer Zhu

Previous studies focus on measuring the degree of similarity of textsby using traditional machine learning methods, such as Support Vector Regression (SVR). Based on Transformers, this paper describes our contribution to SemEval-2022 Task 8 Multilingual News Article Similarity. The similarity of multilingual news articles requires a regression prediction on the similarity of multilingual articles, rather than a classification for judging text similarity. This paper mainly describes the architecture of the model and how to adjust the parameters in the experiment and strengthen the generalization ability. In this paper, we implement and construct different models through transformer-based models. We applied different transformer-based models, as well as ensemble them together by using ensemble learning. To avoid the overfit, we focus on the adjustment of parameters and the increase of generalization ability in our experiments. In the last submitted contest, we achieve a score of 0.715 and rank the 21st place.

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Nikkei at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Exploring BERT-based Bi-Encoder Approach for Pairwise Multilingual News Article Similarity
Shotaro Ishihara | Hono Shirai

This paper describes our system in SemEval-2022 Task 8, where participants were required to predict the similarity of two multilingual news articles. In the task of pairwise sentence and document scoring, there are two main approaches: Cross-Encoder, which inputs pairs of texts into a single encoder, and Bi-Encoder, which encodes each input independently. The former method often achieves higher performance, but the latter gave us a better result in SemEval-2022 Task 8. This paper presents our exploration of BERT-based Bi-Encoder approach for this task, and there are several findings such as pretrained models, pooling methods, translation, data separation, and the number of tokens. The weighted average ensemble of the four models achieved the competitive result and ranked in the top 12.

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YNU-HPCC at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Transformer-based Ensemble Model for Multilingual News Article Similarity
Zihan Nai | Jin Wang | Xuejie Zhang

This paper describes the system submitted by our team (YNU-HPCC) to SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual news article similarity. This task requires participants to develop a system which could evaluate the similarity between multilingual news article pairs. We propose an approach that relies on Transformers to compute the similarity between pairs of news. We tried different models namely BERT, ALBERT, ELECTRA, RoBERTa, M-BERT and Compared their results. At last, we chose M-BERT as our System, which has achieved the best Pearson Correlation Coefficient score of 0.738.

This paper presents our system for document-level semantic textual similarity (STS) evaluation at SemEval-2022 Task 8: “Multilingual News Article Similarity”. The semantic information used is obtained by using different semantic models ranging from the extraction of key terms and named entities to the document classification and obtaining similarity from automatic summarization of documents. All these semantic information’s are then used as features to feed a supervised system in order to evaluate the degree of similarity of a pair of documents. We obtained a Pearson correlation score of 0.706 compared to the best score of 0.818 from teams that participated in this task.

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DataScience-Polimi at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Stacking Language Models to Predict News Article Similarity
Marco Di Giovanni | Thomas Tasca | Marco Brambilla

In this paper, we describe the approach we designed to solve SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. We collect and use exclusively textual features (title, description and body) of articles. Our best model is a stacking of 14 Transformer-based Language models fine-tuned on single or multiple fields, using data in the original language or translated to English. It placed fourth on the original leaderboard, sixth on the complete official one and fourth on the English-subset official one. We observe the data collection as our principal source of error due to a relevant fraction of missing or wrong fields.

We present a system that creates pair-wise cosine and arccosine sentence similarity matrices using multilingual sentence embeddings obtained from pre-trained SBERT and Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) models respectively. For each news article sentence, it searches the most similar sentence from the other article and computes an average score. Further, a convolutional neural network calculates a total similarity score for the article pairs on these matrices. Finally, a random forest regressor merges the previous results to a final score that can optionally be extended with a publishing date score.

In this task, we identify a challenge that is reflective of linguistic and cognitive competencies that humans have when speaking and reasoning. Particularly, given the intuition that textual and visual information mutually inform each other for semantic reasoning, we formulate a Competence-based Question Answering challenge, designed to involve rich semantic annotation and aligned text-video objects. The task is to answer questions from a collection of cooking recipes and videos, where each question belongs to a “question family” reflecting a specific reasoning competence. The data and task result is publicly available.

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HIT&QMUL at SemEval-2022 Task 9: Label-Enclosed Generative Question Answering (LEG-QA)
Weihe Zhai | Mingqiang Feng | Arkaitz Zubiaga | Bingquan Liu

This paper presents the second place system for the R2VQ: competence-based multimodal question answering shared task. The purpose of this task is to involve semantic&cooking roles and text-images objects when querying how well a system understands the procedure of a recipe. This task is approached with text-to-text generative model based on transformer architecture. As a result, the model can well generalise to soft constrained and other competence-based question answering problem. We propose label enclosed input method which help the model achieve significant improvement from 65.34 (baseline) to 91.3. In addition to describing the submitted system, the impact of model architecture and label selection are investigated along with remarks regarding error analysis. Finally, future works are presented.

In this work we present an overview of our winning system for the R2VQ - Competence-based Multimodal Question Answering task, with the final exact match score of 92.53%.The task is structured as question-answer pairs, querying how well a system is capable of competence-based comprehension of recipes. We propose a hybrid of a rule-based system, Question Answering Transformer, and a neural classifier for N/A answers recognition. The rule-based system focuses on intent identification, data extraction and response generation.

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PINGAN_AI at SemEval-2022 Task 9: Recipe knowledge enhanced model applied in Competence-based Multimodal Question Answering
Zhihao Ruan | Xiaolong Hou | Lianxin Jiang

This paper describes our system used in the SemEval-2022 Task 09: R2VQ - Competence-based Multimodal Question Answering. We propose a knowledge-enhanced model for predicting answer in QA task, this model use BERT as the backbone. We adopted two knowledge-enhanced methods in this model: the knowledge auxiliary text method and the knowledge embedding method. We also design an answer extraction task pipeline, which contains an extraction-based model, an automatic keyword labeling module, and an answer generation module. Our system ranked 3rd in task 9 and achieved an exact match score of 78.21 and a word-level F1 score of 82.62.

In this paper, we introduce the first SemEval shared task on Structured Sentiment Analysis, for which participants are required to predict all sentiment graphs in a text, where a single sentiment graph is composed of a sentiment holder, target, expression and polarity. This new shared task includes two subtracks (monolingual and cross-lingual) with seven datasets available in five languages, namely Norwegian, Catalan, Basque, Spanish and English. Participants submitted their predictions on a held-out test set and were evaluated on Sentiment Graph F1 . Overall, the task received over 200 submissions from 32 participating teams. We present the results of the 15 teams that provided system descriptions and our own expanded analysis of the test predictions.

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AMEX AI Labs at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Contextualized fine-tuning of BERT for Structured Sentiment Analysis
Pratyush Sarangi | Shamika Ganesan | Piyush Arora | Salil Joshi

We describe the work carried out by AMEX AI Labs on the structured sentiment analysis task at SemEval-2022. This task focuses on extracting fine grained information w.r.t. to source, target and polar expressions in a given text. We propose a BERT based encoder, which utilizes a novel concatenation mechanism for combining syntactic and pretrained embeddings with BERT embeddings. Our system achieved an average rank of 14/32 systems, based on the average scores across seven datasets for five languages provided for the monolingual task. The proposed BERT based approaches outperformed BiLSTM based approaches used for structured sentiment extraction problem. We provide an in-depth analysis based on our post submission analysis.

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ISCAS at SemEval-2022 Task 10: An Extraction-Validation Pipeline for Structured Sentiment Analysis
Xinyu Lu | Mengjie Ren | Yaojie Lu | Hongyu Lin

ISCAS participated in both sub-tasks in SemEval-2022 Task 10: Structured Sentiment competition. We design an extraction-validation pipeline architecture to tackle both monolingual and cross-lingual sub-tasks. Experimental results show the multilingual effectiveness and cross-lingual robustness of our system. Our system is openly released on: https://github.com/luxinyu1/SemEval2022-Task10/.

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SenPoi at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Point me to your Opinion, SenPoi
Jan Pfister | Sebastian Wankerl | Andreas Hotho

Structured Sentiment Analysis is the task of extracting sentiment tuples in a graph structure commonly from review texts. We adapt the Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis pointer network BARTABSA to model this tuple extraction as a sequence prediction task and extend their output grammar to account for the increased complexity of Structured Sentiment Analysis. To predict structured sentiment tuples in languages other than English we swap BART for a multilingual mT5 and introduce a novel Output Length Regularization to mitigate overfitting to common target sequence lengths, thereby improving the performance of the model by up to 70%. We evaluate our approach on seven datasets in five languages including a zero shot crosslingual setting.

Task 10 in SemEval 2022 is a composite task which entails analysis of opinion tuples, and recognition and demarcation of their nature. In this paper, we will elaborate on how such a methodology is implemented, how it is undertaken for a Structured Sentiment Analysis, and the results obtained thereof. To achieve this objective, we have adopted a bi-layered BiLSTM approach. In our research, a variation on the norm has been effected towards enhancement of accuracy, by basing the categorization meted out to an individual member as a by-product of its adjacent members, using specialized algorithms to ensure the veracity of the output, which has been modelled to be the holistically most accurate label for the entire sequence. Such a strategy is superior in terms of its parsing accuracy and requires less time. This manner of action has yielded an SF1 of 0.33 in the highest-performing configuration.

Sentiment analysis is a fundamental task, and structure sentiment analysis (SSA) is an important component of sentiment analysis. However, traditional SSA is suffering from some important issues: (1) lack of interactive knowledge of different languages; (2) small amount of annotation data or even no annotation data. To address the above problems, we incorporate data augment and auxiliary tasks within a cross-lingual pretrained language model into SSA. Specifically, we employ XLM-Roberta to enhance mutually interactive information when parallel data is available in the pretraining stage. Furthermore, we leverage two data augment strategies and auxiliary tasks to improve the performance on few-label data and zero-shot cross-lingual settings. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our models. Our models rank first on the cross-lingual sub-task and rank second on the monolingual sub-task of SemEval-2022 task 10.

Sentiment analysis is increasingly viewed as a vital task both from an academic and a commercial standpoint. In this paper, we focus on the structured sentiment analysis task that is released on SemEval-2022 Task 10. The task aims to extract the structured sentiment information (e.g., holder, target, expression and sentiment polarity) in a text. We propose a simple and unified model for both the monolingual and crosslingual structured sentiment analysis tasks. We translate this task into an event extraction task by regrading the expression as the trigger word and the other elements as the arguments of the event. Particularly, we first extract the expression by judging its start and end indices. Then, to consider the expression, we design a conditional layer normalization algorithm to extract the holder and target based on the extracted expression. Finally, we infer the sentiment polarity based on the extracted structured information. Pre-trained language models are utilized to obtain the text representation. We conduct the experiments on seven datasets in five languages. It attracted 233 submissions in monolingual subtask and crosslingual subtask from 32 teams. Finally, we obtain the top 5 place on crosslingual tasks.

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ZHIXIAOBAO at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Apporoaching Structured Sentiment with Graph Parsing
Yangkun Lin | Chen Liang | Jing Xu | Chong Yang | Yongliang Wang

This paper presents our submission to task 10, Structured Sentiment Analysis of the SemEval 2022 competition. The task aims to extract all elements of the fine-grained sentiment in a text. We cast structured sentiment analysis to the prediction of the sentiment graphs following (Barnes et al., 2021), where nodes are spans of sentiment holders, targets and expressions, and directed edges denote the relation types between them. Our approach closely follows that of semantic dependency parsing (Dozat and Manning, 2018). The difference is that we use pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT and RoBERTa) as text encoder to solve the problem of limited annotated data. Additionally, we make improvements on the computation of cross attention and present the suffix masking technique to make further performance improvement. Substantially, our model achieved the Top-1 average Sentiment Graph F1 score on seven datasets in five different languages in the monolingual subtask.

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Hitachi at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Comparing Graph- and Seq2Seq-based Models Highlights Difficulty in Structured Sentiment Analysis
Gaku Morio | Hiroaki Ozaki | Atsuki Yamaguchi | Yasuhiro Sogawa

This paper describes our participation in SemEval-2022 Task 10, a structured sentiment analysis. In this task, we have to parse opinions considering both structure- and context-dependent subjective aspects, which is different from typical dependency parsing. Some of the major parser types have recently been used for semantic and syntactic parsing, while it is still unknown which type can capture structured sentiments well due to their subjective aspects. To this end, we compared two different types of state-of-the-art parser, namely graph-based and seq2seq-based. Our in-depth analyses suggest that, even though graph-based parser generally outperforms the seq2seq-based one, with strong pre-trained language models both parsers can essentially output acceptable and reasonable predictions. The analyses highlight that the difficulty derived from subjective aspects in structured sentiment analysis remains an essential challenge.

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UFRGSent at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Structured Sentiment Analysis using a Question Answering Model
Lucas Pessutto | Viviane Moreira

This paper describes the system submitted by our team (UFRGSent) to SemEval-2022 Task 10: Structured Sentiment Analysis. We propose a multilingual approach that relies on a Question Answering model to find tuples consisting of aspect, opinion, and holder. The approach starts from general questions and uses the extracted tuple elements to find the remaining components. Finally, we employ an aspect sentiment classification model to classify the polarity of the entire tuple. Despite our method being in a mid-rank position on SemEval competition, we show that the question-answering approach can achieve good coverage retrieving sentiment tuples, allowing room for improvements in the technique.

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OPI at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Transformer-based Sequence Tagging with Relation Classification for Structured Sentiment Analysis
Rafał Poświata

This paper presents our solution for SemEval-2022 Task 10: Structured Sentiment Analysis. The solution consisted of two modules: the first for sequence tagging and the second for relation classification. In both modules we used transformer-based language models. In addition to utilizing language models specific to each of the five competition languages, we also adopted multilingual models. This approach allowed us to apply the solution to both monolingual and cross-lingual sub-tasks, where we obtained average Sentiment Graph F1 of 54.5% and 53.1%, respectively. The source code of the prepared solution is available at https://github.com/rafalposwiata/structured-sentiment-analysis.

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ETMS@IITKGP at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Structured Sentiment Analysis Using A Generative Approach
Raghav R | Adarsh Vemali | Rajdeep Mukherjee

Structured Sentiment Analysis (SSA) deals with extracting opinion tuples in a text, where each tuple (h, e, t, p) consists of h, the holder, who expresses a sentiment polarity p towards a target t through a sentiment expression e. While prior works explore graph-based or sequence labeling-based approaches for the task, we in this paper present a novel unified generative method to solve SSA, a SemEval2022 shared task. We leverage a BART-based encoder-decoder architecture and suitably modify it to generate, given a sentence, a sequence of opinion tuples. Each generated tuple consists of seven integers respectively representing the indices corresponding to the start and end positions of the holder, target, and expression spans, followed by the sentiment polarity class associated between the target and the sentiment expression. We perform rigorous experiments for both Monolingual and Cross-lingual subtasks, and achieve competitive Sentiment F1 scores on the leaderboard in both settings.

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SLPL-Sentiment at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Making Use of Pre-Trained Model’s Attention Values in Structured Sentiment Analysis
Sadrodin Barikbin

Sentiment analysis is a useful problem which could serve a variety of fields from business intelligence to social studies and even health studies. Using SemEval 2022 Task 10 formulation of this problem and taking sequence labeling as our approach, we propose a model which learns the task by finetuning a pretrained transformer, introducing as few parameters (~150k) as possible and making use of precomputed attention values in the transformer. Our model improves shared task baselines on all task datasets.

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LyS_ACoruña at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Repurposing Off-the-Shelf Tools for Sentiment Analysis as Semantic Dependency Parsing
Iago Alonso-Alonso | David Vilares | Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez

This paper addressed the problem of structured sentiment analysis using a bi-affine semantic dependency parser, large pre-trained language models, and publicly available translation models. For the monolingual setup, we considered: (i) training on a single treebank, and (ii) relaxing the setup by training on treebanks coming from different languages that can be adequately processed by cross-lingual language models. For the zero-shot setup and a given target treebank, we relied on: (i) a word-level translation of available treebanks in other languages to get noisy, unlikely-grammatical, but annotated data (we release as much of it as licenses allow), and (ii) merging those translated treebanks to obtain training data. In the post-evaluation phase, we also trained cross-lingual models that simply merged all the English treebanks and did not use word-level translations, and yet obtained better results. According to the official results, we ranked 8th and 9th in the monolingual and cross-lingual setups.

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SPDB Innovation Lab at SemEval-2022 Task 10: A Novel End-to-End Structured Sentiment Analysis Model based on the ERNIE-M
Yalong Jia | Zhenghui Ou | Yang Yang

Sentiment analysis is a classical problem of natural language processing. SemEval 2022 sets a problem on the structured sentiment analysis in task 10, which is also a study-worthy topic in research area. In this paper, we propose a method which can predict structured sentiment information on multiple languages with limited data. The ERNIE-M pretrained language model is employed as a lingual feature extractor which works well on multiple language processing, followed by a graph parser as a opinion extractor. The method can predict structured sentiment information with high interpretability. We apply data augmentation as the given datasets are so small. Furthermore, we use K-fold cross-validation and DeBERTaV3 pretrained model as extra English embedding generator to train multiple models as our ensemble strategies. Experimental results show that the proposed model has considerable performance on both monolingual and cross-lingual tasks.

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HITSZ-HLT at SemEval-2022 Task 10: A Span-Relation Extraction Framework for Structured Sentiment Analysis
Yihui Li | Yifan Yang | Yice Zhang | Ruifeng Xu

This paper describes our system that participated in the SemEval-2022 Task 10: Structured Sentiment Analysis, which aims to extract opinion tuples from texts.A full opinion tuple generally contains an opinion holder, an opinion target, the sentiment expression, and the corresponding polarity. The complex structure of the opinion tuple makes the task challenging. To address this task, we formalize it as a span-relation extraction problem and propose a two-stage extraction framework accordingly. In the first stage, we employ the span module to enumerate spans and then recognize the type of every span. In the second stage, we employ the relation module to determine the relation between spans. Our system achieves competitive results and ranks among the top-10 systems in almost subtasks.

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SemEval-2022 Task 11: Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER)
Shervin Malmasi | Anjie Fang | Besnik Fetahu | Sudipta Kar | Oleg Rokhlenko

We present the findings of SemEval-2022 Task 11 on Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition MULTICONER. Divided into 13 tracks, the task focused on methods to identify complex named entities (like names of movies, products and groups) in 11 languages in both monolingual and multi-lingual scenarios. Eleven tracks required building monolingual NER models for individual languages, one track focused on multilingual models able to work on all languages, and the last track featured code-mixed texts within any of these languages. The task is based on the MULTICONER dataset comprising of 2.3 millions instances in Bangla, Chinese, Dutch, English, Farsi, German, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Results showed that methods fusing external knowledge into transformer models achieved the best results. However, identifying entities like creative works is still challenging even with external knowledge. MULTICONER was one of the most popular tasks in SemEval-2022 and it attracted 377 participants during the practice phase. 236 participants signed up for the final test phase and 55 teams submitted their systems.

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LMN at SemEval-2022 Task 11: A Transformer-based System for English Named Entity Recognition
Ngoc Lai

Processing complex and ambiguous named entities is a challenging research problem, but it has not received sufficient attention from the natural language processing community. In this short paper, we present our participation in the English track of SemEval-2022 Task 11: Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition. Inspired by the recent advances in pretrained Transformer language models, we propose a simple yet effective Transformer-based baseline for the task. Despite its simplicity, our proposed approach shows competitive results in the leaderboard as we ranked 12 over 30 teams. Our system achieved a macro F1 score of 72.50% on the held-out test set. We have also explored a data augmentation approach using entity linking. While the approach does not improve the final performance, we also discuss it in this paper.

From pretrained contextual embedding to document-level embedding, the selection and construction of embedding have drawn more and more attention in the NER domain in recent research. This paper aims to discuss the performance of ensemble embeddings on complex NER tasks. Enlightened by Wang’s methodology, we try to replicate the dominating power of ensemble models with reinforcement learning optimizor on plain NER tasks to complex ones. Based on the composition of semeval dataset, the performance of the applied model is tested on lower-context, QA, and search query scenarios together with its zero-shot learning ability. Results show that with abundant training data, the model can achieve similar performance on lower-context cases compared to plain NER cases, but can barely transfer the performance to other scenarios in the test phase.

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UC3M-PUCPR at SemEval-2022 Task 11: An Ensemble Method of Transformer-based Models for Complex Named Entity Recognition
Elisa Schneider | Renzo M. Rivera-Zavala | Paloma Martinez | Claudia Moro | Emerson Paraiso

This study introduces the system submitted to the SemEval 2022 Task 11: MultiCoNER (Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition) by the UC3M-PUCPR team. We proposed an ensemble of transformer-based models for entity recognition in cross-domain texts. Our deep learning method benefits from the transformer architecture, which adopts the attention mechanism to handle the long-range dependencies of the input text. Also, the ensemble approach for named entity recognition (NER) improved the results over baselines based on individual models on two of the three tracks we participated in. The ensemble model for the code-mixed task achieves an overall performance of 76.36% F1-score, a 2.85 percentage point increase upon our individually best model for this task, XLM-RoBERTa-large (73.51%), outperforming the baseline provided for the shared task by 18.26 points. Our preliminary results suggest that contextualized language models ensembles can, even if modestly, improve the results in extracting information from unstructured data.

The MultiCoNER shared task aims at detecting semantically ambiguous and complex named entities in short and low-context settings for multiple languages. The lack of contexts makes the recognition of ambiguous named entities challenging. To alleviate this issue, our team DAMO-NLP proposes a knowledge-based system, where we build a multilingual knowledge base based on Wikipedia to provide related context information to the named entity recognition (NER) model. Given an input sentence, our system effectively retrieves related contexts from the knowledge base. The original input sentences are then augmented with such context information, allowing significantly better contextualized token representations to be captured. Our system wins 10 out of 13 tracks in the MultiCoNER shared task.

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Multilinguals at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Complex NER in Semantically Ambiguous Settings for Low Resource Languages
Amit Pandey | Swayatta Daw | Narendra Unnam | Vikram Pudi

We leverage pre-trained language models to solve the task of complex NER for two low-resource languages: Chinese and Spanish. We use the technique of Whole Word Masking (WWM) to boost the performance of masked language modeling objective on large and unsupervised corpora. We experiment with multiple neural network architectures, incorporating CRF, BiLSTMs, and Linear Classifiers on top of a fine-tuned BERT layer. All our models outperform the baseline by a significant margin and our best performing model obtains a competitive position on the evaluation leaderboard for the blind test set.

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AaltoNLP at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Ensembling Task-adaptive Pretrained Transformers for Multilingual Complex NER
Aapo Pietiläinen | Shaoxiong Ji

This paper presents the system description of team AaltoNLP for SemEval-2022 shared task 11: MultiCoNER. Transformer-based models have produced high scores on standard Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. However, accuracy on complex named entities is still low. Complex and ambiguous named entities have been identified as a major error source in NER tasks. The shared task is about multilingual complex named entity recognition. In this paper, we describe an ensemble approach, which increases accuracy across all tested languages. The system ensembles output from multiple same architecture task-adaptive pretrained transformers trained with different random seeds. We notice a large discrepancy between performance on development and test data. Model selection based on limited development data may not yield optimal results on large test data sets.

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DANGNT-SGU at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Using Pre-trained Language Model for Complex Named Entity Recognition
Dang Nguyen | Huy Khac Nguyen Huynh

In this paper, we describe a system that we built to participate in the SemEval 2022 Task 11: MultiCoNER Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition, specifically the track Mono-lingual in English. To construct this system, we used Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Especially, the Pre-trained Model base on BERT is applied for the task of recognizing named entities by fine-tuning method. We performed the evaluation on two test datasets of the shared task: the Practice Phase and the Evaluation Phase of the competition.

This article describes the OPDAI submission to SemEval-2022 Task 11 on Chinese complex NER. First, we explore the performance of model-based approaches and their ensemble, finding that fine-tuning the pre-trained Chinese RoBERTa-wwm model with word semantic representation and contextual gazetteer representation performs best among single models. However, the model-based approach performs poorly on test data because of low-context and unseen-entity cases. Then, we extend our system into two stages: (1) generating entity candidates by using neural model, soft-templates and Wikipedia lexicon. (2) predicting the final entity results within a feature-based rank model. For the evaluation, our best submission achieves an F₁ score of 0.7954 and attains the third-best score in the Chinese sub-track.

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Sliced at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Bigger, Better? Massively Multilingual LMs for Multilingual Complex NER on an Academic GPU Budget
Barbara Plank

Massively multilingual language models (MMLMs) have become a widely-used representation method, and multiple large MMLMs were proposed in recent years. A trend is to train MMLMs on larger text corpora or with more layers. In this paper we set out to test recent popular MMLMs on detecting semantically ambiguous and complex named entities with an academic GPU budget. Our submission of a single model for 11 languages on the SemEval Task 11 MultiCoNER shows that a vanilla transformer-CRF with XLM-R_large outperforms the more recent RemBERT, ranking 9th from 26 submissions in the multilingual track. Compared to RemBERT, the XLM-R model has the additional advantage to fit on a slice of a multi-instance GPU. As contrary to expectations and recent findings, we found RemBERT to not be the best MMLM, we further set out to investigate this discrepancy with additional experiments on multilingual Wikipedia NER data. While we expected RemBERT to have an edge on that dataset as it is closer to its pre-training data, surprisingly, our results show that this is not the case, suggesting that text domain match does not explain the discrepancy.

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Infrrd.ai at SemEval-2022 Task 11: A system for named entity recognition using data augmentation, transformer-based sequence labeling model, and EnsembleCRF
Jianglong He | Akshay Uppal | Mamatha N | Shiv Vignesh | Deepak Kumar | Aditya Kumar Sarda

In low-resource languages, the amount of training data is limited. Hence, the model has to perform well in unseen sentences and syntax on which the model has not trained. We propose a method that addresses the problem through an encoder and an ensemble of language models. A language-specific language model performed poorly when compared to a multilingual language model. So, the multilingual language model checkpoint is fine-tuned to a specific language. A novel approach of one hot encoder is introduced between the model outputs and the CRF to combine the results in an ensemble format. Our team, Infrrd.ai, competed in the MultiCoNER competition. The results are encouraging where the team is positioned within the top 10 positions. There is less than a 4% percent difference from the third position in most of the tracks that we participated in. The proposed method shows that the ensemble of models with a multilingual language model as the base with the help of an encoder performs better than a single language-specific model.

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UM6P-CS at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Enhancing Multilingual and Code-Mixed Complex Named Entity Recognition via Pseudo Labels using Multilingual Transformer
Abdellah El Mekki | Abdelkader El Mahdaouy | Mohammed Akallouch | Ismail Berrada | Ahmed Khoumsi

Building real-world complex Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems is a challenging task. This is due to the complexity and ambiguity of named entities that appear in various contexts such as short input sentences, emerging entities, and complex entities. Besides, real-world queries are mostly malformed, as they can be code-mixed or multilingual, among other scenarios. In this paper, we introduce our submitted system to the Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER) shared task. We approach the complex NER for multilingual and code-mixed queries, by relying on the contextualized representation provided by the multilingual Transformer XLM-RoBERTa. In addition to the CRF-based token classification layer, we incorporate a span classification loss to recognize named entities spans. Furthermore, we use a self-training mechanism to generate weakly-annotated data from a large unlabeled dataset. Our proposed system is ranked 6th and 8th in the multilingual and code-mixed MultiCoNER’s tracks respectively.

This paper describes our approach to develop a complex named entity recognition system in SemEval 2022 Task 11: MultiCoNER Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition,Track 9 - Chinese. In this task, we need to identify the entity boundaries and categorylabels for the six identified categories of CW,LOC, PER, GRP, CORP, and PORD.The task focuses on detecting semantically ambiguous and complex entities in short and low-context settings. We constructed a hybrid system based on Roberta-large model with three training mechanisms and a series of data gugmentation.Three training mechanisms include adversarial training, Child-Tuning training, and continued pre-training. The core idea of the hybrid system is to improve the performance of the model in complex environments by introducing more domain knowledge through data augmentation and continuing pre-training domain adaptation of the model. Our proposed method in this paper achieves a macro-F1 of 0.797 on the final test set, ranking second.

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TEAM-Atreides at SemEval-2022 Task 11: On leveraging data augmentation and ensemble to recognize complex Named Entities in Bangla
Nazia Tasnim | Md. Istiak Shihab | Asif Shahriyar Sushmit | Steven Bethard | Farig Sadeque

Many areas, such as the biological and healthcare domain, artistic works, and organization names, have nested, overlapping, discontinuous entity mentions that may even be syntactically or semantically ambiguous in practice. Traditional sequence tagging algorithms are unable to recognize these complex mentions because they may violate the assumptions upon which sequence tagging schemes are founded. In this paper, we describe our contribution to SemEval 2022 Task 11 on identifying such complex Named Entities. We have leveraged the ensemble of multiple ELECTRA-based models that were exclusively pretrained on the Bangla language with the performance of ELECTRA-based models pretrained on English to achieve competitive performance on the Track-11. Besides providing a system description, we will also present the outcomes of our experiments on architectural decisions, dataset augmentations, and post-competition findings.

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KDDIE at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Using DeBERTa for Named Entity Recognition
Caleb Martin | Huichen Yang | William Hsu

In this work, we introduce our system to the SemEval 2022 Task 11: Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER) competition. Our team (KDDIE) attempted the sub-task of Named Entity Recognition (NER) for the language of English in the challenge and reported our results. For this task, we use transfer learning method: fine-tuning the pre-trained language models (PLMs) on the competition dataset. Our two approaches are the BERT-based PLMs and PLMs with additional layer such as Condition Random Field. We report our finding and results in this report.

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silpa_nlp at SemEval-2022 Tasks 11: Transformer based NER models for Hindi and Bangla languages
Sumit Singh | Pawankumar Jawale | Uma Tiwary

We present Transformer based pretrained models, which are fine-tuned for Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. Our team participated in SemEval-2022 Task 11 MultiCoNER: Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition task for Hindi and Bangla. Result comparison of six models (mBERT, IndicBERT, MuRIL (Base), MuRIL (Large), XLM-RoBERTa (Base) and XLM-RoBERTa (Large) ) has been performed. It is found that among these models MuRIL (Large) model performs better for both the Hindi and Bangla languages. Its F1-Scores for Hindi and Bangla are 0.69 and 0.59 respectively.

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DS4DH at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Using an Ensemble of Transformer-based Language Models
Hossein Rouhizadeh | Douglas Teodoro

In this paper, we describe our proposed method for the SemEval 2022 Task 11: Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER). The goal of this task is to locate and classify named entities in unstructured short complex texts in 11 different languages. After training a variety of contextual language models on the NER dataset, we used an ensemble strategy based on a majority vote to finalize our model. We evaluated our proposed approach on the multilingual NER dataset at SemEval-2022. The ensemble model provided consistent improvements against the individual models on the multilingual track, achieving a macro F1 performance of 65.2%. However, our results were significantly outperformed by the top ranking systems, achieving thus a baseline performance.

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CSECU-DSG at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Identifying the Multilingual Complex Named Entity in Text Using Stacked Embeddings and Transformer based Approach
Abdul Aziz | Md. Akram Hossain | Abu Nowshed Chy

Recognizing complex and ambiguous named entities (NEs) is one of the formidable tasks in the NLP domain. However, the diversity of linguistic constituents, syntactic structure, semantic ambiguity as well as differences from traditional NEs make it challenging to identify the complex NEs. To address these challenges, SemEval-2022 Task 11 introduced a shared task MultiCoNER focusing on complex named entity recognition in multilingual settings. This paper presents our participation in this task where we propose two different approaches including a BiLSTM-CRF model with stacked-embedding strategy and a transformer-based approach. Our proposed method achieved competitive performance among the participants’ methods in a few languages.

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CMNEROne at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Code-Mixed Named Entity Recognition by leveraging multilingual data
Suman Dowlagar | Radhika Mamidi

Identifying named entities is, in general, a practical and challenging task in the field of Natural Language Processing. Named Entity Recognition on the code-mixed text is further challenging due to the linguistic complexity resulting from the nature of the mixing. This paper addresses the submission of team CMNEROne to the SEMEVAL 2022 shared task 11 MultiCoNER. The Code-mixed NER task aimed to identify named entities on the code-mixed dataset. Our work consists of Named Entity Recognition (NER) on the code-mixed dataset by leveraging the multilingual data. We achieved a weighted average F1 score of 0.7044, i.e., 6% greater than the NER baseline.

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RACAI at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Complex named entity recognition using a lateral inhibition mechanism
Vasile Pais

This paper presents RACAI’s system used for the shared task of “Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER)”, organized as part of the “The 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2022)”. The system employs a novel layer inspired by the biological mechanism of lateral inhibition. This allowed the system to achieve good results without any additional resources apart from the provided training data. In addition to the system’s architecture, results are provided as well as observations regarding the provided dataset.

This paper presents the two submissions of NamedEntityRangers Team to the MultiCoNER Shared Task, hosted at SemEval-2022. We evaluate two state-of-the-art approaches, of which both utilize pre-trained multi-lingual language models differently. The first approach follows the token classification schema, in which each token is assigned with a tag. The second approach follows a recent template-free paradigm, in which an encoder-decoder model translates the input sequence of words to a special output, encoding named entities with predefined labels. We utilize RemBERT and mT5 as backbone models for these two approaches, respectively. Our results show that the oldie but goodie token classification outperforms the template-free method by a wide margin. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Abiks/MultiCoNER.

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Raccoons at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Leveraging Concatenated Word Embeddings for Named Entity Recognition
Atharvan Dogra | Prabsimran Kaur | Guneet Kohli | Jatin Bedi

Named Entity Recognition (NER), an essential subtask in NLP that identifies text belonging to predefined semantics such as a person, location, organization, drug, time, clinical procedure, biological protein, etc. NER plays a vital role in various fields such as informationextraction, question answering, and machine translation. This paper describes our participating system run to the Named entity recognitionand classification shared task SemEval-2022. The task is motivated towards detecting semantically ambiguous and complex entities in shortand low-context settings. Our team focused on improving entity recognition by improving the word embeddings. We concatenated the word representations from State-of-the-art language models and passed them to find the best representation through a reinforcement trainer. Our results highlight the improvements achieved by various embedding concatenations.

This paper presents our system used to participate in task 11 (MultiCONER) of the SemEval 2022 competition. Our system ranked fourth place in track 12 (Multilingual) and fifth place in track 13 (Code-Mixed). The goal of track 12 is to detect complex named entities in a multilingual setting, while track 13 is dedicated to detecting complex named entities in a code-mixed setting. Both systems were developed using transformer-based language models. We used an ensemble of XLM-RoBERTa-large and Microsoft/infoxlm-large with a Conditional Random Field (CRF) layer. In addition, we describe the algorithms employed to train our models and our hyper-parameter selection. We furthermore study the impact of different methods to aggregate the outputs of the individual models that compose our ensemble. Finally, we present an extensive analysis of the results and errors.

Large scale pre-training models have been widely used in named entity recognition (NER) tasks. However, model ensemble through parameter averaging or voting can not give full play to the differentiation advantages of different models, especially in the open domain. This paper describes our NER system in the SemEval 2022 task11: MultiCoNER. We proposed an effective system to adaptively ensemble pre-trained language models by a Transformer layer. By assigning different weights to each model for different inputs, we adopted the Transformer layer to integrate the advantages of diverse models effectively. Experimental results show that our method achieves superior performances in Farsi and Dutch.

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NCUEE-NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Chinese Named Entity Recognition Using the BERT-BiLSTM-CRF Model
Lung-Hao Lee | Chien-Huan Lu | Tzu-Mi Lin

This study describes the model design of the NCUEE-NLP system for the Chinese track of the SemEval-2022 MultiCoNER task. We use the BERT embedding for character representation and train the BiLSTM-CRF model to recognize complex named entities. A total of 21 teams participated in this track, with each team allowed a maximum of six submissions. Our best submission, with a macro-averaging F1-score of 0.7418, ranked the seventh position out of 21 teams.

This paper presents a solution for the SemEval-2022 Task 11 Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition. What is challenging in this task is detecting semantically ambiguous and complex entities in short and low-context settings. Our team (CMB AI Lab) propose a two-stage method to recognize the named entities: first, a model based on biaffine layer is built to predict span boundaries, and then a span classification model based on pooling layer is built to predict semantic tags of the spans. The basic pre-trained models we choose are XLM-RoBERTa and mT5. The evaluation result of our approach achieves an F1 score of 84.62 on sub-task 13, which ranks the third on the learder board.

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UA-KO at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Data Augmentation and Ensembles for Korean Named Entity Recognition
Hyunju Song | Steven Bethard

This paper presents the approaches and systems of the UA-KO team for the Korean portion of SemEval-2022 Task 11 on Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition.We fine-tuned Korean and multilingual BERT and RoBERTA models, conducted experiments on data augmentation, ensembles, and task-adaptive pretraining. Our final system ranked 8th out of 17 teams with an F1 score of 0.6749 F1.

This paper describes the system developed by the USTC-NELSLIP team for SemEval-2022 Task 11 Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER). We propose a gazetteer-adapted integration network (GAIN) to improve the performance of language models for recognizing complex named entities. The method first adapts the representations of gazetteer networks to those of language models by minimizing the KL divergence between them. After adaptation, these two networks are then integrated for backend supervised named entity recognition (NER) training. The proposed method is applied to several state-of-the-art Transformer-based NER models with a gazetteer built from Wikidata, and shows great generalization ability across them. The final predictions are derived from an ensemble of these trained models. Experimental results and detailed analysis verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The official results show that our system ranked 1st on three tracks (Chinese, Code-mixed and Bangla) and 2nd on the other ten tracks in this task.

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Multilinguals at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Transformer Based Architecture for Complex NER
Amit Pandey | Swayatta Daw | Vikram Pudi

We investigate the task of complex NER for the English language. The task is non-trivial due to the semantic ambiguity of the textual structure and the rarity of occurrence of such entities in the prevalent literature. Using pre-trained language models such as BERT, we obtain a competitive performance on this task. We qualitatively analyze the performance of multiple architectures for this task. All our models are able to outperform the baseline by a significant margin. Our best performing model beats the baseline F1-score by over 9%.

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L3i at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Straightforward Additional Context for Multilingual Named Entity Recognition
Emanuela Boros | Carlos-Emiliano González-Gallardo | Jose Moreno | Antoine Doucet

This paper summarizes the participation of the L3i laboratory of the University of La Rochelle in the SemEval-2022 Task 11, Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER). The task focuses on detecting semantically ambiguous and complex entities in short and low-context monolingual and multilingual settings. We argue that using a language-specific and a multilingual language model could improve the performance of multilingual and mixed NER. Also, we consider that using additional contexts from the training set could improve the performance of a NER on short texts. Thus, we propose a straightforward technique for generating additional contexts with and without the presence of entities. Our findings suggest that, in our internal experimental setup, this approach is promising. However, we ranked above average for the high-resource languages and lower than average for low-resource and multilingual models.

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MarSan at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Multilingual complex named entity recognition using T5 and transformer encoder
Ehsan Tavan | Maryam Najafi

The multilingual complex named entity recognition task of SemEval2020 required participants to detect semantically ambiguous and complex entities in 11 languages. In order to participate in this competition, a deep learning model is being used with the T5 text-to-text language model and its multilingual version, MT5, along with the transformer’s encoder module. The subtoken check has also been introduced, resulting in a 4% increase in the model F1-score in English. We also examined the use of the BPEmb model for converting input tokens to representation vectors in this research. A performance evaluation of the proposed entity detection model is presented at the end of this paper. Six different scenarios were defined, and the proposed model was evaluated in each scenario within the English development set. Our model is also evaluated in other languages.

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SU-NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Complex Named Entity Recognition with Entity Linking
Buse Çarık | Fatih Beyhan | Reyyan Yeniterzi

This paper describes the system proposed by Sabancı University Natural Language Processing Group in the SemEval-2022 MultiCoNER task. We developed an unsupervised entity linking pipeline that detects potential entity mentions with the help of Wikipedia and also uses the corresponding Wikipedia context to help the classifier in finding the named entity type of that mention. The proposed pipeline significantly improved the performance, especially for complex entities in low-context settings.

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Qtrade AI at SemEval-2022 Task 11: An Unified Framework for Multilingual NER Task
Weichao Gan | Yuanping Lin | Guangbo Yu | Guimin Chen | Qian Ye

This paper describes our system, which placed third in the Multilingual Track (subtask 11), fourth in the Code-Mixed Track (subtask 12), and seventh in the Chinese Track (subtask 9) in the SemEval 2022 Task 11: MultiCoNER Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition. Our system’s key contributions are as follows: 1) For multilingual NER tasks, we offered a unified framework with which one can easily execute single-language or multilingual NER tasks, 2) for low-resource mixed-code NER task, one can easily enhanced his or her dataset through implementing several simple data augmentation methods and 3) for Chinese tasks, we proposed a model that can capture Chinese lexical semantic, lexical border, and lexical graph structural information. Finally, in the test phase, our system received macro-f1 scores of 77.66, 84.35, and 74 on task 12, task 13, and task 9.

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PAI at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Name Entity Recognition with Contextualized Entity Representations and Robust Loss Functions
Long Ma | Xiaorong Jian | Xuan Li

This paper describes our system used in the SemEval-2022 Task 11 Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition, achieving 3rd for track 1 on the leaderboard. We propose Dictionary-fused BERT, a flexible approach for entity dictionaries integration. The main ideas of our systems are:1) integrating external knowledge (an entity dictionary) into pre-trained models to obtain contextualized word and entity representations 2) designing a robust loss function leveraging a logit matrix 3) adding an auxiliary task, which is an on-top binary classification to decide whether the token is a mention word or not, makes the main task easier to learn. It is worth noting that our system achieves an F1 of 0.914 in the post-evaluation stage by updating the entity dictionary to the one of (CITATION), which is higher than the score of 1st on the leaderboard of the evaluation stage.

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SemEval 2022 Task 12: Symlink - Linking Mathematical Symbols to their Descriptions
Viet Lai | Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh | Franck Dernoncourt | Thien Nguyen

We describe Symlink, a SemEval shared task of extracting mathematical symbols and their descriptions from LaTeX source of scientific documents. This is a new task in SemEval 2022, which attracted 180 individual registrations and 59 final submissions from 7 participant teams. We expect the data developed for this task and the findings reported to be valuable for the scientific knowledge extraction and automated knowledge base construction communities. The data used in this task is publicly accessible at https://github.com/nlp-oregon/symlink.

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JBNU-CCLab at SemEval-2022 Task 12: Machine Reading Comprehension and Span Pair Classification for Linking Mathematical Symbols to Their Descriptions
Sung-Min Lee | Seung-Hoon Na

This paper describes our system in the SemEval-2022 Task 12: ‘linking mathematical symbols to their descriptions’, achieving first on the leaderboard for all the subtasks comprising named entity extraction (NER) and relation extraction (RE). Our system is a two-stage pipeline model based on SciBERT that detects symbols, descriptions, and their relationships in scientific documents. The system consists of 1) machine reading comprehension(MRC)-based NER model, where each entity type is represented as a question and its entity mention span is extracted as an answer using an MRC model, and 2) span pair classification for RE, where two entity mentions and their type markers are encoded into span representations that are then fed to a Softmax classifier. In addition, we deploy a rule-based symbol tokenizer to improve the detection of the exact boundary of symbol entities. Regularization and ensemble methods are further explored to improve the RE model.

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AIFB-WebScience at SemEval-2022 Task 12: Relation Extraction First - Using Relation Extraction to Identify Entities
Nicholas Popovic | Walter Laurito | Michael Färber

In this paper, we present an end-to-end joint entity and relation extraction approach based on transformer-based language models. We apply the model to the task of linking mathematical symbols to their descriptions in LaTeX documents. In contrast to existing approaches, which perform entity and relation extraction in sequence, our system incorporates information from relation extraction into entity extraction. This means that the system can be trained even on data sets where only a subset of all valid entity spans is annotated. We provide an extensive evaluation of the proposed system and its strengths and weaknesses. Our approach, which can be scaled dynamically in computational complexity at inference time, produces predictions with high precision and reaches 3rd place in the leaderboard of SemEval-2022 Task 12. For inputs in the domain of physics and math, it achieves high relation extraction macro F1 scores of 95.43% and 79.17%, respectively. The code used for training and evaluating our models is available at: https://github.com/nicpopovic/RE1st

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MaChAmp at SemEval-2022 Tasks 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, and 12: Multi-task Multi-lingual Learning for a Pre-selected Set of Semantic Datasets
Rob van der Goot

Previous work on multi-task learning in Natural Language Processing (NLP) oftenincorporated carefully selected tasks as well as carefully tuning ofarchitectures to share information across tasks. Recently, it has shown thatfor autoregressive language models, a multi-task second pre-training step on awide variety of NLP tasks leads to a set of parameters that more easily adaptfor other NLP tasks. In this paper, we examine whether a similar setup can beused in autoencoder language models using a restricted set of semanticallyoriented NLP tasks, namely all SemEval 2022 tasks that are annotated at theword, sentence or paragraph level. We first evaluate a multi-task model trainedon all SemEval 2022 tasks that contain annotation on the word, sentence orparagraph level (7 tasks, 11 sub-tasks), and then evaluate whetherre-finetuning the resulting model for each task specificially leads to furtherimprovements. Our results show that our mono-task baseline, our multi-taskmodel and our re-finetuned multi-task model each outperform the other modelsfor a subset of the tasks. Overall, huge gains can be observed by doingmulti-task learning: for three tasks we observe an error reduction of more than40%.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Towards Semi-Supervised and Reinforced Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (SereTOD)

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Proceedings of the Towards Semi-Supervised and Reinforced Task-Oriented Dialog Systems (SereTOD)
Zhijian Ou | Junlan Feng | Juanzi Li

The primary purpose of dialogue state tracking(DST), a critical component of an end-toend conversational system, is to build a model that responds well to real-world situations. Although we often change our minds from time to time during ordinary conversations, current benchmark datasets do not adequately reflect such occurrences and instead consist of over-simplified conversations, in which no one changes their mind during a conversation. As the main question inspiring the present study, “Are current benchmark datasets sufficiently diverse to handle casual conversations in which one changes their mind after a certain topic is over?” We found that the answer is “No” because DST models cannot refer to previous user preferences when template-based turnback utterances are injected into the dataset. Even in the the simplest mind-changing (turnback) scenario, the performance of DST models significantly degenerated. However, we found that this performance degeneration can be recovered when the turnback scenarios are explicitly designed in the training set, implying that the problem is not with the DST models but rather with the construction of the benchmark dataset.

With the widespread popularisation of intelligent technology, task-based dialogue systems (TOD) are increasingly being applied to a wide variety of practical scenarios. As the key tasks in dialogue systems, named entity recognition and slot filling play a crucial role in the completeness and accuracy of information extraction. This paper is an evaluation paper for Sere-TOD 2022 Workshop challenge (Track 1 Information extraction from dialog transcripts). We proposed a multi-model fusion approach based on GlobalPointer, combined with some optimisation tricks, finally achieved an entity F1 of 60.73, an entity-slot-value triple F1 of 56, and an average F1 of 58.37, and got the highest score in SereTOD 2022 Workshop challenge

This paper describes our solution for Sere- TOD Challenge Track 1: Information extraction from dialog transcripts. We propose a token-pair framework to simultaneously identify entity and value mentions and link them into corresponding triples. As entity mentions are usually coreferent, we adopt a baseline model for coreference resolution. We exploit both annotated transcripts and unsupervised dialogs for training. With model ensemble and post-processing strategies, our system significantly outperforms the baseline solution and ranks first in triple f1 and third in entity f1.

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Prompt Learning for Domain Adaptation in Task-Oriented Dialogue
Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar | Christopher Parisien

Conversation designers continue to face significant obstacles when creating productionquality task-oriented dialogue systems. The complexity and cost involved in schema development and data collection is often a major barrier for such designers, limiting their ability to create natural, user-friendly experiences. We frame the classification of user intent as the generation of a canonical form, a lightweight semantic representation using natural language. We show that canonical forms offer a promising alternative to traditional methods for intent classification. By tuning soft prompts for a frozen large language model, we show that canonical forms generalize very well to new, unseen domains in a zero- or few-shot setting. The method is also sample-efficient, reducing the complexity and effort of developing new task-oriented dialogue domains.

Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a taskoriented dialog system. Traditional softmaxbased confidence scores are susceptible to the overconfidence issue. In this paper, we propose a simple but strong energy-based score function to detect OOD where the energy scores of OOD samples are higher than IND samples. Further, given a small set of labeled OOD samples, we introduce an energy-based margin objective for supervised OOD detection to explicitly distinguish OOD samples from INDs. Comprehensive experiments and analysis prove our method helps disentangle confidence score distributions of IND and OOD data.

Recent advances in neural approaches greatly improve task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems which assist users to accomplish their goals. However, such systems rely on costly manually labeled dialogs which are not available in practical scenarios. In this paper, we present our models for Track 2 of the SereTOD 2022 challenge, which is the first challenge of building semisupervised and reinforced TOD systems on a large-scale real-world Chinese TOD dataset MobileCS. We build a knowledge-grounded dialog model to formulate dialog history and local KB as input and predict the system response. And we perform semi-supervised pretraining both on the labeled and unlabeled data. Our system achieves the first place both in the automatic evaluation and human interaction, especially with higher BLEU (+7.64) and Success (+13.6%) than the second place.

Dialogue modeling problems severely limit the real-world deployment of neural conversational models and building a human-like dialogue agent is an extremely challenging task. Recently, data-driven models become more and more prevalent which need a huge amount of conversation data. In this paper, we release around 100,000 dialogue, which come from real-world dialogue transcripts between real users and customer-service staffs. We call this dataset as CMCC (China Mobile Customer Care) dataset, which differs from existing dialogue datasets in both size and nature significantly. The dataset reflects several characteristics of human-human conversations, e.g., task-driven, care-oriented, and long-term dependency among the context. It also covers various dialogue types including task-oriented, chitchat and conversational recommendation in real-world scenarios. To our knowledge, CMCC is the largest real human-human spoken dialogue dataset and has dozens of times the data scale of others, which shall significantly promote the training and evaluation of dialogue modeling methods. The results of extensive experiments indicate that CMCC is challenging and needs further effort. We hope that this resource will allow for more effective models across various dialogue sub-problems to be built in the future.

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State-Aware Adversarial Training for Utterance-Level Dialogue Generation
Yi Huang | Xiaoting Wu | Wei Hu | Junlan Feng | Chao Deng

Dialogue generation is a challenging problem because it not only requires us to model the context in a conversation but also to exploit it to generate a coherent and fluent utterance. This paper, aiming for a specific topic of this field, proposes an adversarial training based framework for utterance-level dialogue generation. Technically, we train an encoder-decoder generator simultaneously with a discriminative classifier that make the utterance approximate to the state-aware inputs. Experiments on MultiWoZ 2.0 and MultiWoZ 2.1 datasets show that our method achieves advanced improvements on both automatic and human evaluations, and on the effectiveness of our framework facing low-resource. We further explore the effect of fine-grained augmentations for downstream dialogue state tracking (DST) tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the high-quality data generated by our proposed framework improves the performance over state-of-the-art models.

Recently, there have merged a class of taskoriented dialogue (TOD) datasets collected through Wizard-of-Oz simulated games. However, the Wizard-of-Oz data are in fact simulated data and thus are fundamentally different from real-life conversations, which are more noisy and casual. Recently, the SereTOD challenge is organized and releases the MobileCS dataset, which consists of real-world dialog transcripts between real users and customerservice staffs from China Mobile. Based on the MobileCS dataset, the SereTOD challenge has two tasks, not only evaluating the construction of the dialogue system itself, but also examining information extraction from dialog transcripts, which is crucial for building the knowledge base for TOD. This paper mainly presents a baseline study of the two tasks with the MobileCS dataset. We introduce how the two baselines are constructed, the problems encountered, and the results. We anticipate that the baselines can facilitate exciting future research to build human-robot dialogue systems for real-life tasks.

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A Generative User Simulator with GPT-based Architecture and Goal State Tracking for Reinforced Multi-Domain Dialog Systems
Hong Liu | Yucheng Cai | Zhijian Ou | Yi Huang | Junlan Feng

Building user simulators (USs) for reinforcement learning (RL) of task-oriented dialog systems (DSs) has gained more and more attention, which, however, still faces several fundamental challenges. First, it is unclear whether we can leverage pretrained language models to design, for example, GPT-2 based USs, to catch up and interact with the recently advanced GPT- 2 based DSs. Second, an important ingredient in a US is that the user goal can be effectively incorporated and tracked; but how to flexibly integrate goal state tracking and develop an end-to-end trainable US for multi-domains has remained to be a challenge. In this work, we propose a generative user simulator (GUS) with GPT-2 based architecture and goal state tracking towards addressing the above two challenges. Extensive experiments are conducted on MultiWOZ2.1. Different DSs are trained via RL with GUS, the classic agenda-based user simulator (ABUS) and other ablation simulators respectively, and are compared for crossmodel evaluation, corpus-based evaluation and human evaluation. The GUS achieves superior results in all three evaluation tasks.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach to fine-tune offline pretrained GPT-2 model in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. In order to obtain human-like online interactions while extending the usage of RL, building pretrained user simulators (US) along with dialogue systems (DS) and facilitating jointly fine-tuning via RL becomes prevalent. However, joint training brings distributional shift problem caused by compounding exposure bias. Existing methods usually iterative update US and DS to ameliorate the ensued non-stationarity problem, which could lead to sub-optimal policy and less sample efficiency. To take a step further for tackling the problem, we introduce an Offline-to-oNline Co-Evolutional (ONCE) framework, which enables bias-aware concurrent joint update for RL-based fine-tuning whilst takes advantages from GPT-2 based end-to-end modeling on US and DS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ONCE builds high-quality loops of policy learning and dialogues data collection, and achieves state-of-the-art online and offline evaluation results on MultiWOZ2.1 dataset. Opensourced code will be implemented with Mindspore (MS, 2022) and released on our homepage.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 19th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

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Proceedings of the 19th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
Garrett Nicolai | Eleanor Chodroff

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On Building Spoken Language Understanding Systems for Low Resourced Languages
Akshat Gupta

Spoken dialog systems are slowly becoming an integral part of the human experience due to their various advantages over textual interfaces. Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are fundamental building blocks of spoken dialog systems. But creating SLU systems for low resourced languages is still a challenge. In a large number of low resourced language, we don’t have access to enough data to build automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies, which are fundamental to any SLU system. Also, ASR based SLU systems do not generalize to unwritten languages. In this paper, we present a series of experiments to explore extremely low-resourced settings where we perform intent classification with systems trained on as low as one data-point per intent and with only one speaker in the dataset. We also work in a low-resourced setting where we do not use language specific ASR systems to transcribe input speech, which compounds the challenge of building SLU systems to simulate a true low-resourced setting. We test our system on Belgian Dutch (Flemish) and English and find that using phonetic transcriptions to make intent classification systems in such low-resourced setting performs significantly better than using speech features. Specifically, when using a phonetic transcription based system over a feature based system, we see average improvements of 12.37% and 13.08% for binary and four-class classification problems respectively, when averaged over 49 different experimental settings.

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Unsupervised morphological segmentation in a language with reduplication
Simon Todd | Annie Huang | Jeremy Needle | Jennifer Hay | Jeanette King

We present an extension of the Morfessor Baseline model of unsupervised morphological segmentation (Creutz and Lagus, 2007) that incorporates abstract templates for reduplication, a typologically common but computationally underaddressed process. Through a detailed investigation that applies the model to Maori, the ̄ Indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand, we show that incorporating templates improves Morfessor’s ability to identify instances of reduplication, and does so most when there are multiple minimally-overlapping templates. We present an error analysis that reveals important factors to consider when applying the extended model and suggests useful future directions.

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Investigating phonological theories with crowd-sourced data: The Inventory Size Hypothesis in the light of Lingua Libre
Mathilde Hutin | Marc Allassonnière-Tang

Data-driven research in phonetics and phonology relies massively on oral resources, and access thereto. We propose to explore a question in comparative linguistics using an open-source crowd-sourced corpus, Lingua Libre, Wikimedia’s participatory linguistic library, to show that such corpora may offer a solution to typologists wishing to explore numerous languages at once. For the present proof of concept, we compare the realizations of Italian and Spanish vowels (sample size = 5000) to investigate whether vowel production is influenced by the size of the phonemic inventory (the Inventory Size Hypothesis), by the exact shape of the inventory (the Vowel Quality Hypothesis) or by none of the above. Results show that the size of the inventory does not seem to influence vowel production, thus supporting previous research, but also that the shape of the inventory may well be a factor determining the extent of variation in vowel production. Most of all, these results show that Lingua Libre has the potential to provide valuable data for linguistic inquiry.

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Logical Transductions for the Typology of Ditransitive Prosody
Mai Ha Vu | Aniello De Santo | Hossep Dolatian

Given the empirical landscape of possible prosodic parses, this paper examines the computations required to formalize the mapping from syntactic structure to prosodic structure. In particular, we use logical tree transductions to define the prosodic mapping of ditransitive verb phrases in SVO languages, building off of the typology described in Kalivoda (2018). Explicit formalization of syntax-prosody mapping revealed a number of unanswered questions relating to the fine details of theoretical assumptions behind prosodic mapping.

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A Masked Segmental Language Model for Unsupervised Natural Language Segmentation
C.m. Downey | Fei Xia | Gina-Anne Levow | Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

We introduce a Masked Segmental Language Model (MSLM) for joint language modeling and unsupervised segmentation. While near-perfect supervised methods have been developed for segmenting human-like linguistic units in resource-rich languages such as Chinese, many of the world’s languages are both morphologically complex, and have no large dataset of “gold” segmentations for supervised training. Segmental Language Models offer a unique approach by conducting unsupervised segmentation as the byproduct of a neural language modeling objective. However, current SLMs are limited in their scalability due to their recurrent architecture. We propose a new type of SLM for use in both unsupervised and lightly supervised segmentation tasks. The MSLM is built on a span-masking transformer architecture, harnessing a masked bidirectional modeling context and attention, as well as adding the potential for model scalability. In a series of experiments, our model outperforms the segmentation quality of recurrent SLMs on Chinese, and performs similarly to the recurrent model on English.

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Trees probe deeper than strings: an argument from allomorphy
Hossep Dolatian | Shiori Ikawa | Thomas Graf

Linguists disagree on whether morphological representations should be strings or trees. We argue that tree-based views of morphology can provide new insights into morphological complexity even in cases where the posited tree structure closely matches the surface string. Our argument is based on a subregular case study of morphologically conditioned allomorphy, where the phonological form of some morpheme (the target) is conditioned by the presence of some other morpheme (the trigger) somewhere within the morphosyntactic context. The trigger and target can either be linearly adjacent or non-adjacent, and either the trigger precedes the target (inwardly sensitive) or the target precedes the trigger (outwardly sensitive). When formalized as string transductions, the only complexity difference is between local and non-local allomorphy. Over trees, on the other hand, we also see a complexity difference between inwardly sensitive and outwardly sensitive allomorphy. Just as unboundedness assumptions can sometimes tease apart patterns that are equally complex in the finitely bounded case, tree-based representations can reveal differences that disappear over strings.

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Subword-based Cross-lingual Transfer of Embeddings from Hindi to Marathi and Nepali
Niyati Bafna | Zdeněk Žabokrtský

Word embeddings are growing to be a crucial resource in the field of NLP for any language. This work introduces a novel technique for static subword embeddings transfer for Indic languages from a relatively higher resource language to a genealogically related low resource language. We primarily work with HindiMarathi, simulating a low-resource scenario for Marathi, and confirm observed trends on Nepali. We demonstrate the consistent benefits of unsupervised morphemic segmentation on both source and target sides over the treatment performed by fastText. Our best-performing approach uses an EM-style approach to learning bilingual subword embeddings; we also show, for the first time, that a trivial “copyand-paste” embeddings transfer based on even perfect bilingual lexicons is inadequate in capturing language-specific relationships. We find that our approach substantially outperforms the fastText baselines for both Marathi and Nepali on the Word Similarity task as well as WordNetBased Synonymy Tests; on the former task, its performance for Marathi is close to that of pretrained fastText embeddings that use three orders of magnitude more Marathi data.

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Multidimensional acoustic variation in vowels across English dialects
James Tanner | Morgan Sonderegger | Jane Stuart-Smith

Vowels are typically characterized in terms of their static position in formant space, though vowels have also been long-known to undergo dynamic formant change over their timecourse. Recent studies have demonstrated that this change is highly informative for distinguishing vowels within a system, as well as providing additional resolution in characterizing differences between dialects. It remains unclear, however, how both static and dynamic representations capture the main dimensions of vowel variation across a large number of dialects. This study examines the role of static, dynamic, and duration information for 5 vowels across 21 British and North American English dialects, and observes that vowels exhibit highly structured variation across dialects, with dialects displaying similar patterns within a given vowel, broadly corresponding to a spectrum between traditional ‘monophthong’ and ‘diphthong’ characterizations. These findings highlight the importance of dynamic and duration information in capturing how vowels can systematically vary across a large number of dialects, and provide the first large-scale description of formant dynamics across many dialects of a single language.

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Domain-Informed Probing of wav2vec 2.0 Embeddings for Phonetic Features
Patrick Cormac English | John D. Kelleher | Julie Carson-Berndsen

In recent years large transformer model architectures have become available which provide a novel means of generating high-quality vector representations of speech audio. These transformers make use of an attention mechanism to generate representations enhanced with contextual and positional information from the input sequence. Previous works have explored the capabilities of these models with regard to performance in tasks such as speech recognition and speaker verification, but there has not been a significant inquiry as to the manner in which the contextual information provided by the transformer architecture impacts the representation of phonetic information within these models. In this paper, we report the results of a number of probing experiments on the representations generated by the wav2vec 2.0 model’s transformer component, with regard to the encoding of phonetic categorization information within the generated embeddings. We find that the contextual information generated by the transformer’s operation results in enhanced capture of phonetic detail by the model, and allows for distinctions to emerge in acoustic data that are otherwise difficult to separate.

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Morphotactic Modeling in an Open-source Multi-dialectal Arabic Morphological Analyzer and Generator
Nizar Habash | Reham Marzouk | Christian Khairallah | Salam Khalifa

Arabic is a morphologically rich and complex language, with numerous dialectal variants. Previous efforts on Arabic morphology modeling focused on specific variants and specific domains using a range of techniques with different degrees of linguistic modeling transparency. In this paper we propose a new approach to modeling Arabic morphology with an eye towards multi-dialectness, resource openness, and easy extensibility and use. We demonstrate our approach by modeling verbs from Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, within a common framework, and with high coverage.

The SIGMORPHON 2022 shared task on morpheme segmentation challenged systems to decompose a word into a sequence of morphemes and covered most types of morphology: compounds, derivations, and inflections. Subtask 1, word-level morpheme segmentation, covered 5 million words in 9 languages (Czech, English, Spanish, Hungarian, French, Italian, Russian, Latin, Mongolian) and received 13 system submissions from 7 teams and the best system averaged 97.29% F1 score across all languages, ranging English (93.84%) to Latin (99.38%). Subtask 2, sentence-level morpheme segmentation, covered 18,735 sentences in 3 languages (Czech, English, Mongolian), received 10 system submissions from 3 teams, and the best systems outperformed all three state-of-the-art subword tokenization methods (BPE, ULM, Morfessor2) by 30.71% absolute. To facilitate error analysis and support any type of future studies, we released all system predictions, the evaluation script, and all gold standard datasets.

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Sharing Data by Language Family: Data Augmentation for Romance Language Morpheme Segmentation
Lauren Levine

This paper presents a basic character level sequence-to-sequence approach to morpheme segmentation for the following Romance languages: French, Italian, and Spanish. We experiment with adding a small set of additional linguistic features, as well as with sharing training data between sister languages for morphological categories with low performance in single language base models. We find that while the additional linguistic features were generally not helpful in this instance, data augmentation between sister languages did help to raise the scores of some individual morphological categories, but did not consistently result in an overall improvement when considering the aggregate of the categories.

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SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task on Morpheme Segmentation Submission Description: Sequence Labelling for Word-Level Morpheme Segmentation
Leander Girrbach

We propose a sequence labelling approach to word-level morpheme segmentation. Segmentation labels are edit operations derived from a modified minimum edit distance alignment. We show that sequence labelling performs well for “shallow segmentation” and “canonical segmentation”, achieving 96.06 f1 score (macroaveraged over all languages in the shared task) and ranking 3rd among all participating teams. Therefore, we conclude that sequence labelling is a promising approach to morpheme segmentation.

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Beyond Characters: Subword-level Morpheme Segmentation
Ben Peters | Andre F. T. Martins

This paper presents DeepSPIN’s submissions to the SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task on Morpheme Segmentation. We make three submissions, all to the word-level subtask. First, we show that entmax-based sparse sequence-tosequence models deliver large improvements over conventional softmax-based models, echoing results from other tasks. Then, we challenge the assumption that models for morphological tasks should be trained at the character level by building a transformer that generates morphemes as sequences of unigram language model-induced subwords. This subword transformer outperforms all of our character-level models and wins the word-level subtask. Although we do not submit an official submission to the sentence-level subtask, we show that this subword-based approach is highly effective there as well.

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Word-level Morpheme segmentation using Transformer neural network
Tsolmon Zundi | Chinbat Avaajargal

This paper presents the submission of team NUM DI to the SIGMORPHON 2022 Task on Morpheme Segmentation Part 1, word-level morpheme segmentation. We explore the transformer neural network approach to the shared task. We develop monolingual models for world-level morpheme segmentation and focus on improving the model by using various training strategies to improve accuracy and generalization across languages.

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Morfessor-enriched features and multilingual training for canonical morphological segmentation
Aku Rouhe | Stig-Arne Grönroos | Sami Virpioja | Mathias Creutz | Mikko Kurimo

In our submission to the SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task on Morpheme Segmentation, we study whether an unsupervised morphological segmentation method, Morfessor, can help in a supervised setting. Previous research has shown the effectiveness of the approach in semisupervised settings with small amounts of labeled data. The current tasks vary in data size: the amount of word-level annotated training data is much larger, but the amount of sentencelevel annotated training data remains small. Our approach is to pre-segment the input data for a neural sequence-to-sequence model with the unsupervised method. As the unsupervised method can be trained with raw text data, we use Wikipedia to increase the amount of training data. In addition, we train multilingual models for the sentence-level task. The results for the Morfessor-enriched features are mixed, showing benefit for all three sentencelevel tasks but only some of the word-level tasks. The multilingual training yields considerable improvements over the monolingual sentence-level models, but it negates the effect of the enriched features.

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JB132 submission to the SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task 3 on Morphological Segmentation
Jan Bodnár

This paper describes the JB132 submission to the SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task 3 on Morpheme Segmentation. In this paper we describe probabilistic model trained with the Expectation-Maximization algorithm, we provide the results and analyze sources of errors and general limitations of our approach. The model was implemented within our own modular probabilistic framework.

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SIGMORPHON–UniMorph 2022 Shared Task 0: Modeling Inflection in Language Acquisition
Jordan Kodner | Salam Khalifa

This year’s iteration of the SIGMORPHONUniMorph shared task on “human-like” morphological inflection generation focuses on generalization and errors in language acquisition. Systems are trained on data sets extracted from corpora of child-directed speech in order to simulate a natural learning setting, and their predictions are evaluated against what is known about children’s developmental trajectories for three well-studied patterns: English past tense, German noun plurals, and Arabic noun plurals. Three submitted neural systems were evaluated together with two baselines. Performance was generally good, and all systems were prone to human-like over-regularization. However, all systems were also prone to non-human-like over-irregularization and nonsense productions to varying degrees. We situate this behavior in a discussion of the Past Tense Debate.

The 2022 SIGMORPHON–UniMorph shared task on large scale morphological inflection generation included a wide range of typologically diverse languages: 33 languages from 11 top-level language families: Arabic (Modern Standard), Assamese, Braj, Chukchi, Eastern Armenian, Evenki, Georgian, Gothic, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hungarian, Itelmen, Karelian, Kazakh, Ket, Khalkha Mongolian, Kholosi, Korean, Lamahalot, Low German, Ludic, Magahi, Middle Low German, Old English, Old High German, Old Norse, Polish, Pomak, Slovak, Turkish, Upper Sorbian, Veps, and Xibe. We emphasize generalization along different dimensions this year by evaluating test items with unseen lemmas and unseen features separately under small and large training conditions. Across the five submitted systems and two baselines, the prediction of inflections with unseen features proved challenging, with average performance decreased substantially from last year. This was true even for languages for which the forms were in principle predictable, which suggests that further work is needed in designing systems that capture the various types of generalization required for the world’s languages.

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SIGMORPHON 2022 Task 0 Submission Description: Modelling Morphological Inflection with Data-Driven and Rule-Based Approaches
Tatiana Merzhevich | Nkonye Gbadegoye | Leander Girrbach | Jingwen Li | Ryan Soh-Eun Shim

This paper describes our participation in the 2022 SIGMORPHON-UniMorph Shared Task on Typologically Diverse and AcquisitionInspired Morphological Inflection Generation. We present two approaches: one being a modification of the neural baseline encoderdecoder model, the other being hand-coded morphological analyzers using finite-state tools (FST) and outside linguistic knowledge. While our proposed modification of the baseline encoder-decoder model underperforms the baseline for almost all languages, the FST methods outperform other systems in the respective languages by a large margin. This confirms that purely data-driven approaches have not yet reached the maturity to replace trained linguists for documentation and analysis especially considering low-resource and endangered languages.

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CLUZH at SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Tasks on Morpheme Segmentation and Inflection Generation
Silvan Wehrli | Simon Clematide | Peter Makarov

This paper describes the submissions of the team of the Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich, to the SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Tasks on Morpheme Segmentation and Inflection Generation. Our submissions use a character-level neural transducer that operates over traditional edit actions. While this model has been found particularly wellsuited for low-resource settings, using it with large data quantities has been difficult. Existing implementations could not fully profit from GPU acceleration and did not efficiently implement mini-batch training, which could be tricky for a transition-based system. For this year’s submission, we have ported the neural transducer to PyTorch and implemented true mini-batch training. This has allowed us to successfully scale the approach to large data quantities and conduct extensive experimentation. We report competitive results for morpheme segmentation (including sharing first place in part 2 of the challenge). We also demonstrate that reducing sentence-level morpheme segmentation to a word-level problem is a simple yet effective strategy. Additionally, we report strong results in inflection generation (the overall best result for large training sets in part 1, the best results in low-resource learning trajectories in part 2). Our code is publicly available.

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OSU at SigMorphon 2022: Analogical Inflection With Rule Features
Micha Elsner | Sara Court

OSU’s inflection system is a transformer whose input is augmented with an analogical exemplar showing how to inflect a different word into the target cell. In addition, alignment-based heuristic features indicate how well the exemplar is likely to match the output. OSU’s scores substantially improve over the baseline transformer for instances where an exemplar is available, though not quite matching the challenge winner. In Part 2, the system shows a tendency to over-apply the majority pattern in English, but not Arabic.

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Generalizing Morphological Inflection Systems to Unseen Lemmas
Changbing Yang | Ruixin (Ray) Yang | Garrett Nicolai | Miikka Silfverberg

This paper presents experiments on morphological inflection using data from the SIGMORPHON-UniMorph 2022 Shared Task 0: Generalization and Typologically Diverse Morphological Inflection. We present a transformer inflection system, which enriches the standard transformer architecture with reverse positional encoding and type embeddings. We further apply data hallucination and lemma copying to augment training data. We train models using a two-stage procedure: (1) We first train on the augmented training data using standard backpropagation and teacher forcing. (2) We then continue training with a variant of the scheduled sampling algorithm dubbed student forcing. Our system delivers competitive performance under the small and large data conditions on the shared task datasets.

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HeiMorph at SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task on Morphological Acquisition Trajectories
Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao | Yulia Zinova | Kevin Tang | Ruben van de Vijver

This paper presents the submission by the HeiMorph team to the SIGMORPHON 2022 task 2 of Morphological Acquisition Trajectories. Across all experimental conditions, we have found no evidence for the so-called Ushaped development trajectory. Our submitted systems achieve an average test accuracies of 55.5% on Arabic, 67% on German and 73.38% on English. We found that, bigram hallucination provides better inferences only for English and Arabic and only when the number of hallucinations remains low.

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Morphology is not just a naive Bayes – UniMelb Submission to SIGMORPHON 2022 ST on Morphological Inflection
Andreas Sherbakov | Ekaterina Vylomova

The paper describes the Flexica team’s submission to the SIGMORPHON 2022 Shared Task 1 Part 1: Typologically Diverse Morphological Inflection. Our team submitted a nonneural system that extracted transformation patterns from alignments between a lemma and inflected forms. For each inflection category, we chose a pattern based on its abstractness score. The system outperformed the non-neural baseline, the extracted patterns covered a substantial part of possible inflections. However, we discovered that such score that does not account for all possible combinations of string segments as well as morphosyntactic features is not sufficient for a certain proportion of inflection cases.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

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Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP
Ekaterina Vylomova | Edoardo Ponti | Ryan Cotterell

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Multilingualism Encourages Recursion: a Transfer Study with mBERT
Andrea De Varda | Roberto Zamparelli

The present work constitutes an attempt to investigate the relational structures learnt by mBERT, a multilingual transformer-based network, with respect to different cross-linguistic regularities proposed in the fields of theoretical and quantitative linguistics. We pursued this objective by relying on a zero-shot transfer experiment, evaluating the model’s ability to generalize its native task to artificial languages that could either respect or violate some proposed language universal, and comparing its performance to the output of BERT, a monolingual model with an identical configuration. We created four artificial corpora through a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar by manipulating the distribution of tokens and the structure of their dependency relations. We showed that while both models were favoured by a Zipfian distribution of the tokens and by the presence of head-dependency type structures, the multilingual transformer network exhibited a stronger reliance on hierarchical cues compared to its monolingual counterpart.

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Word-order Typology in Multilingual BERT: A Case Study in Subordinate-Clause Detection
Dmitry Nikolaev | Sebastian Pado

The capabilities and limitations of BERT and similar models are still unclear when it comes to learning syntactic abstractions, in particular across languages. In this paper, we use the task of subordinate-clause detection within and across languages to probe these properties. We show that this task is deceptively simple, with easy gains offset by a long tail of harder cases, and that BERT’s zero-shot performance is dominated by word-order effects, mirroring the SVO/VSO/SOV typology.

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Typological Word Order Correlations with Logistic Brownian Motion
Kai Hartung | Gerhard Jäger | Sören Gröttrup | Munir Georges

In this study we address the question to what extent syntactic word-order traits of different languages have evolved under correlation and whether such dependencies can be found universally across all languages or restricted to specific language families. To do so, we use logistic Brownian Motion under a Bayesian framework to model the trait evolution for 768 languages from 34 language families. We test for trait correlations both in single families and universally over all families. Separate models reveal no universal correlation patterns and Bayes Factor analysis of models over all covered families also strongly indicate lineage specific correlation patters instead of universal dependencies.

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Cross-linguistic Comparison of Linguistic Feature Encoding in BERT Models for Typologically Different Languages
Yulia Otmakhova | Karin Verspoor | Jey Han Lau

Though recently there have been an increased interest in how pre-trained language models encode different linguistic features, there is still a lack of systematic comparison between languages with different morphology and syntax. In this paper, using BERT as an example of a pre-trained model, we compare how three typologically different languages (English, Korean, and Russian) encode morphology and syntax features across different layers. In particular, we contrast languages which differ in a particular aspect, such as flexibility of word order, head directionality, morphological type, presence of grammatical gender, and morphological richness, across four different tasks.

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Tweaking UD Annotations to Investigate the Placement of Determiners, Quantifiers and Numerals in the Noun Phrase
Luigi Talamo

We describe a methodology to extract with finer accuracy word order patterns from texts automatically annotated with Universal Dependency (UD) trained parsers. We use the methodology to quantify the word order entropy of determiners, quantifiers and numerals in ten Indo-European languages, using UD-parsed texts from a parallel corpus of prosaic texts. Our results suggest that the combinations of different UD annotation layers, such as UD Relations, Universal Parts of Speech and lemma, and the introduction of language-specific lists of closed-category lemmata has the two-fold effect of improving the quality of analysis and unveiling hidden areas of variability in word order patterns.

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A Database for Modal Semantic Typology
Qingxia Guo | Nathaniel Imel | Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

This paper introduces a database for crosslinguistic modal semantics. The purpose of this database is to (1) enable ongoing consolidation of modal semantic typological knowledge into a repository according to uniform data standards and to (2) provide data for investigations in crosslinguistic modal semantic theory and experiments explaining such theories. We describe the kind of semantic variation that the database aims to record, the format of the data, and a current snapshot of the database, emphasizing access and contribution to the database in light of the goals above. We release the database at https://clmbr.shane.st/modal-typology.

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The SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task on the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes
Johann-Mattis List | Ekaterina Vylomova | Robert Forkel | Nathan Hill | Ryan Cotterell

This study describes the structure and the results of the SIGTYP 2022 shared task on the prediction of cognate reflexes from multilingual wordlists. We asked participants to submit systems that would predict words in individual languages with the help of cognate words from related languages. Training and surprise data were based on standardized multilingual wordlists from several language families. Four teams submitted a total of eight systems, including both neural and non-neural systems, as well as systems adjusted to the task and systems using more general settings. While all systems showed a rather promising performance, reflecting the overwhelming regularity of sound change, the best performance throughout was achieved by a system based on convolutional networks originally designed for image restoration.

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Bayesian Phylogenetic Cognate Prediction
Gerhard Jäger

In Jäger (2019) a computational framework was defined to start from parallel word lists of related languages and infer the corresponding vocabulary of the shared proto-language. The SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task is closely related. The main difference is that what is to be reconstructed is not the proto-form but an unknown word from an extant language. The system described here is a re-implementation of the tools used in the mentioned paper, adapted to the current task.

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Mockingbird at the SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task: Two Types of Models for the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes
Christo Kirov | Richard Sproat | Alexander Gutkin

The SIGTYP 2022 shared task concerns the problem of word reflex generation in a target language, given cognate words from a subset of related languages. We present two systems to tackle this problem, covering two very different modeling approaches. The first model extends transformer-based encoder-decoder sequence-to-sequence modeling, by encoding all available input cognates in parallel, and having the decoder attend to the resulting joint representation during inference. The second approach takes inspiration from the field of image restoration, where models are tasked with recovering pixels in an image that have been masked out. For reflex generation, the missing reflexes are treated as “masked pixels” in an “image” which is a representation of an entire cognate set across a language family. As in the image restoration case, cognate restoration is performed with a convolutional network.

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A Transformer Architecture for the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes
Giuseppe G. A. Celano

This paper presents the transformer model built to participate in the SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task on the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes. It consists of an encoder-decoder architecture with multi-head attention mechanism. Its output is concatenated with the one hot encoding of the language label of an input character sequence to predict a target character sequence. The results show that the transformer outperforms the baseline rule-based system only partially.

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Approaching Reflex Predictions as a Classification Problem Using Extended Phonological Alignments
Tiago Tresoldi

This work describes an implementation of the “extended alignment” model for cognate reflex prediction submitted to the “SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task on the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes”. Similarly to List et al. (2022a), the technique involves an automatic extension of sequence alignments with multilayered vectors that encode informational tiers on both site-specific traits, such as sound classes and distinctive features, as well as contextual and suprasegmental ones, conveyed by cross-site referrals and replication. The method allows to generalize the problem of cognate reflex prediction as a classification problem, with models trained using a parallel corpus of cognate sets. A model using random forests is trained and evaluated on the shared task for reflex prediction, and the experimental results are presented and discussed along with some differences to other implementations.

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Investigating Information-Theoretic Properties of the Typology of Spatial Demonstratives
Sihan Chen | Richard Futrell | Kyle Mahowald

Using data from Nintemann et al. (2020), we explore the variability in complexity and informativity across spatial demonstrative systems using spatial deictic lexicons from 223 languages. We argue from an information-theoretic perspective (Shannon, 1948) that spatial deictic lexicons are efficient in communication, balancing informativity and complexity. Specifically, we find that under an appropriate choice of cost function and need probability over meanings, among all the 21146 theoretically possible spatial deictic lexicons, those adopted by real languages lie near an efficient frontier. Moreover, we find that the conditions that the need probability and the cost function need to satisfy are consistent with the cognitive science literature regarding the source-goal asymmetry. We also show that the data are better explained by introducing a notion of systematicity, which is not currently accounted for in Information Bottleneck approaches to linguistic efficiency.

Metonymy is regarded by most linguists as a universal cognitive phenomenon, especially since the emergence of the theory of conceptual mappings. However, the field data backing up claims of universality has not been large enough so far to provide conclusive evidence. We introduce a large-scale analysis of metonymy based on a lexical corpus of over 20 thousand metonymy instances from 189 languages and 69 genera. No prior study, to our knowledge, is based on linguistic coverage as broad as ours. Drawing on corpus analysis, evidence of universality is found at three levels: systematic metonymy in general, particular metonymy patterns, and specific metonymy concepts.

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PaVeDa - Pavia Verbs Database: Challenges and Perspectives
Chiara Zanchi | Silvia Luraghi | Claudia Roberta Combei

This paper describes an ongoing endeavor to construct Pavia Verbs Database (PaVeDa) – an open-access typological resource that builds upon previous work on verb argument structure, in particular the Valency Patterns Leipzig (ValPaL) project (Hartmann et al., 2013). The PaVeDa database features four major innovations as compared to the ValPaL database: (i) it includes data from ancient languages enabling diachronic research; (ii) it expands the language sample to language families that are not represented in the ValPaL; (iii) it is linked to external corpora that are used as sources of usage-based examples of stored patterns; (iv) it introduces a new cross-linguistic layer of annotation for valency patterns which allows for contrastive data visualization.

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ParaNames: A Massively Multilingual Entity Name Corpus
Jonne Sälevä | Constantine Lignos

We present ParaNames, a Wikidata-derived multilingual parallel name resource consisting of names for approximately 14 million entities spanning over 400 languages. ParaNames is useful for multilingual language processing, both in defining tasks for name translation tasks and as supplementary data for other tasks. We demonstrate an application of ParaNames by training a multilingual model for canonical name translation to and from English.

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bib (full) Ninth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT-2022)

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Ninth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT-2022)
Sarah Ebling | Emily Prud’hommeaux | Preethi Vaidyanathan

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Design principles of an open-source language modeling microservice package for AAC text-entry applications
Brian Roark | Alexander Gutkin

We present MozoLM, an open-source language model microservice package intended for use in AAC text-entry applications, with a particular focus on the design principles of the library. The intent of the library is to allow the ensembling of multiple diverse language models without requiring the clients (user interface designers, system users or speech-language pathologists) to attend to the formats of the models. Issues around privacy, security, dynamic versus static models, and methods of model combination are explored and specific design choices motivated. Some simulation experiments demonstrating the benefits of personalized language model ensembling via the library are presented.

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ColorCode: A Bayesian Approach to Augmentative and Alternative Communication with Two Buttons
Matthew Daly

Many people with severely limited muscle control can only communicate through augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems with a small number of buttons. In this paper, we present the design for ColorCode, which is an AAC system with two buttons that uses Bayesian inference to determine what the user wishes to communicate. Our information-theoretic analysis of ColorCode simulations shows that it is efficient in extracting information from the user, even in the presence of errors, achieving nearly optimal error correction. ColorCode is provided as open source software.

Robitaille (2010) wrote ‘if all technology companies have accessibility in their mind then people with disabilities won’t be left behind.’ Current technology has come a long way from where it stood decades ago; however, researchers and manufacturers often do not include people with disabilities in the design process and tend to accommodate them after the fact. In this paper we share feedback from four assistive technology users who rely on one or more assistive technology devices in their everyday lives. We believe end users should be part of the design process and that by bringing together experts and users, we can bridge the research/practice gap.

Conversations between a clinician and a patient, in natural conditions, are valuable sources of information for medical follow-up. The automatic analysis of these dialogues could help extract new language markers and speed up the clinicians’ reports. Yet, it is not clear which model is the most efficient to detect and identify the speaker turns, especially for individuals with speech disorders. Here, we proposed a split of the data that allows conducting a comparative evaluation of different diarization methods. We designed and trained end-to-end neural network architectures to directly tackle this task from the raw signal and evaluate each approach under the same metric. We also studied the effect of fine-tuning models to find the best performance. Experimental results are reported on naturalistic clinical conversations between Psychologists and Interviewees, at different stages of Huntington’s disease, displaying a large panel of speech disorders. We found out that our best end-to-end model achieved 19.5 % IER on the test set, compared to 23.6% achieved by the finetuning of the X-vector architecture. Finally, we observed that we could extract clinical markers directly from the automatic systems, highlighting the clinical relevance of our methods.

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Producing Standard German Subtitles for Swiss German TV Content
Johanna Gerlach | Jonathan Mutal | Bouillon Pierrette

In this study we compare two approaches (neural machine translation and edit-based) and the use of synthetic data for the task of translating normalised Swiss German ASR output into correct written Standard German for subtitles, with a special focus on syntactic differences. Results suggest that NMT is better suited to this task and that relatively simple rule-based generation of training data could be a valuable approach for cases where little training data is available and transformations are simple.

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Investigating the Medical Coverage of a Translation System into Pictographs for Patients with an Intellectual Disability
Magali Norré | Vincent Vandeghinste | Thomas François | Bouillon Pierrette

Communication between physician and patients can lead to misunderstandings, especially for disabled people. An automatic system that translates natural language into a pictographic language is one of the solutions that could help to overcome this issue. In this preliminary study, we present the French version of a translation system using the Arasaac pictographs and we investigate the strategies used by speech therapists to translate into pictographs. We also evaluate the medical coverage of this tool for translating physician questions and patient instructions.

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On the Ethical Considerations of Text Simplification
Sian Gooding

This paper outlines the ethical implications of text simplification within the framework of assistive systems. We argue that a distinction should be made between the technologies that perform text simplification and the realisation of these in assistive technologies. When using the latter as a motivation for research, it is important that the subsequent ethical implications be carefully considered. We provide guidelines for the framing of text simplification independently of assistive systems, as well as suggesting directions for future research and discussion based on the concerns raised.

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Applying the Stereotype Content Model to assess disability bias in popular pre-trained NLP models underlying AI-based assistive technologies
Brienna Herold | James Waller | Raja Kushalnagar

Stereotypes are a positive or negative, generalized, and often widely shared belief about the attributes of certain groups of people, such as people with sensory disabilities. If stereotypes manifest in assistive technologies used by deaf or blind people, they can harm the user in a number of ways, especially considering the vulnerable nature of the target population. AI models underlying assistive technologies have been shown to contain biased stereotypes, including racial, gender, and disability biases. We build on this work to present a psychology-based stereotype assessment of the representation of disability, deafness, and blindness in BERT using the Stereotype Content Model. We show that BERT contains disability bias, and that this bias differs along established stereotype dimensions.

Conversational assistants are ubiquitous among the general population, however, these systems have not had an impact on people with disabilities, or speech and language disorders, for whom basic day-to-day communication and social interaction is a huge struggle. Language model technology can play a huge role in empowering these users and help them interact with others with less effort via interaction support. To enable this population, we build a system that can represent them in a social conversation and generate responses that can be controlled by the users using cues/keywords. We build models that can speed up this communication by suggesting relevant cues in the dialog response context. We also introduce a keyword-loss to lexically constrain the model response output. We present automatic and human evaluation of our cue/keyword predictor and the controllable dialog system to show that our models perform significantly better than models without control. Our evaluation and user study shows that keyword-control on end-to-end response generation models is powerful and can enable and empower users with degenerative disorders to carry out their day-to-day communication.

This paper describes three areas of assistive technology development which deploy the resources and speech technology for Irish (Gaelic), newly emerging from the ABAIR initiative. These include (i) a screenreading facility for visually impaired people, (ii) an application to help develop phonological awareness and early literacy for dyslexic people (iii) a speech-enabled AAC system for non-speaking people. Each of these is at a different stage of development and poses unique challenges: these are dis-cussed along with the approaches adopted to address them. Three guiding principles underlie development. Firstly, the sociolinguistic context and the needs of the community are essential considerations in setting priorities. Secondly, development needs to be language sensitive. The need for skilled researchers with a deep knowledge of Irish structure is illustrated in the case of (ii) and (iii), where aspects of Irish linguistic structure (phonological, morphological and grammatical) and the striking differences from English pose challenges for systems aimed at bilingual Irish-English users. Thirdly, and most importantly, the users and their support networks are central – not as passive recipients of ready-made technologies, but as active partners at every stage of development, from design to implementation, evaluation and dissemination.

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bib (full) Proceedings of The Seventh Workshop on Social Media Mining for Health Applications, Workshop & Shared Task

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Proceedings of The Seventh Workshop on Social Media Mining for Health Applications, Workshop & Shared Task
Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez | Davy Weissenbacher

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RACAI@SMM4H’22: Tweets Disease Mention Detection Using a Neural Lateral Inhibitory Mechanism
Andrei-Marius Avram | Vasile Pais | Maria Mitrofan

This paper presents our system employed for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 competition Task 10 - SocialDisNER. The goal of the task was to improve the detection of diseases in tweets. Because the tweets were in Spanish, we approached this problem using a system that relies on a pre-trained multilingual model and is fine-tuned using the recently introduced lateral inhibition layer. We further experimented on this task by employing a conditional random field on top of the system and using a voting-based ensemble that contains various architectures. The evaluation results outlined that our best performing model obtained 83.7% F1-strict on the validation set and 82.1% F1-strict on the test set.

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PingAnTech at SMM4H task1: Multiple pre-trained model approaches for Adverse Drug Reactions
Xi Liu | Han Zhou | Chang Su

This paper describes the solution for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 Shared Task. We participated in Task1a., Task1b. and Task1c. To solve the problem of the presence of Twitter data, we used a pre-trained language model. We used training strategies that involved: adversarial training, head layer weighted fusion, etc., to improve the performance of the model. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our designed system. For task 1a, the system achieved an F1 score of 0.68; for task 1b Overlapping F1 score of 0.65 and a Strict F1 score of 0.49. Task 1c yields Overlapping F1 and Strict F1 scores of 0.36 and 0.30, respectively.

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dezzai@SMM4H’22: Tasks 5 & 10 - Hybrid models everywhere
Miguel Ortega-Martín | Alfonso Ardoiz | Oscar Garcia | Jorge Álvarez | Adrián Alonso

This paper presents our approaches to SMM4H’22 task 5 - Classification of tweets of self-reported COVID-19 symptoms in Spanish, and task 10 - Detection of disease mentions in tweets – SocialDisNER (in Spanish). We have presented hybrid systems that combine Deep Learning techniques with linguistic rules and medical ontologies, which have allowed us to achieve outstanding results in both tasks.

This paper describes our proposed framework for the 10 text classification tasks of Task 1a, 2a, 2b, 3a, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, in the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022. According to the pre-trained BERT-based models, various techniques, including regularized dropout, focal loss, exponential moving average, 5-fold cross-validation, ensemble prediction, and pseudo-labeling, are applied for further formulating and improving the generalization performance of our framework. In the evaluation, the proposed framework achieves the 1st place in Task 3a with a 7% higher F1-score than the median, and obtains a 4% higher averaged F1-score than the median in all participating tasks except Task 1a.

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MANTIS at SMM4H’2022: Pre-Trained Language Models Meet a Suite of Psycholinguistic Features for the Detection of Self-Reported Chronic Stress
Sourabh Zanwar | Daniel Wiechmann | Yu Qiao | Elma Kerz

This paper describes our submission to Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 Shared Task 8, aimed at detecting self-reported chronic stress on Twitter. Our approach leverages a pre-trained transformer model (RoBERTa) in combination with a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network trained on a diverse set of psycholinguistic features. We handle the class imbalance issue in the training dataset by augmenting it by another dataset used for stress classification in social media.

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NLP-CIC-WFU at SocialDisNER: Disease Mention Extraction in Spanish Tweets Using Transfer Learning and Search by Propagation
Antonio Tamayo | Alexander Gelbukh | Diego Burgos

Named entity recognition (e.g., disease mention extraction) is one of the most relevant tasks for data mining in the medical field. Although it is a well-known challenge, the bulk of the efforts to tackle this task have been made using clinical texts commonly written in English. In this work, we present our contribution to the SocialDisNER competition, which consists of a transfer learning approach to extracting disease mentions in a corpus from Twitter written in Spanish. We fine-tuned a model based on mBERT and applied post-processing using regular expressions to propagate the entities identified by the model and enhance disease mention extraction. Our system achieved a competitive strict F1 of 0.851 on the testing data set.

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yiriyou@SMM4H’22: Stance and Premise Classification in Domain Specific Tweets with Dual-View Attention Neural Networks
Huabin Yang | Zhongjian Zhang | Yanru Zhang

The paper introduces the methodology proposed for the shared Task 2 of the Social Media Mining for Health Application (SMM4H) in 2022. Task 2 consists of two subtasks: Stance Detection and Premise Classification, named Subtask 2a and Subtask 2b, respectively. Our proposed system is based on dual-view attention neural networks and achieves an F1 score of 0.618 for Subtask 2a (0.068 more than the median) and an F1 score of 0.630 for Subtask 2b (0.017 less than the median). Further experiments show that the domain-specific pre-trained model, cross-validation, and pseudo-label techniques contribute to the improvement of system performance.

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SINAI@SMM4H’22: Transformers for biomedical social media text mining in Spanish
Mariia Chizhikova | Pilar López-Úbeda | Manuel C. Díaz-Galiano | L. Alfonso Ureña-López | M. Teresa Martín-Valdivia

This paper covers participation of the SINAI team in Tasks 5 and 10 of the Social Media Mining for Health (#SSM4H) workshop at COLING-2022. These tasks focus on leveraging Twitter posts written in Spanish for healthcare research. The objective of Task 5 was to classify tweets reporting COVID-19 symptoms, while Task 10 required identifying disease mentions in Twitter posts. The presented systems explore large RoBERTa language models pre-trained on Twitter data in the case of tweet classification task and general-domain data for the disease recognition task. We also present a text pre-processing methodology implemented in both systems and describe an initial weakly-supervised fine-tuning phase alongside with a submission post-processing procedure designed for Task 10. The systems obtained 0.84 F1-score on the Task 5 and 0.77 F1-score on Task 10.

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BOUN-TABI@SMM4H’22: Text-to-Text Adverse Drug Event Extraction with Data Balancing and Prompting
Gökçe Uludoğan | Zeynep Yirmibeşoğlu

This paper describes models developed for the Social Media Mining for Health 2022 Shared Task. We participated in two subtasks: classification of English tweets reporting adverse drug events (ADE) (Task 1a) and extraction of ADE spans in such tweets (Task 1b). We developed two separate systems based on the T5 model, viewing these tasks as sequence-to-sequence problems. To address the class imbalance, we made use of data balancing via over- and undersampling on both tasks. For the ADE extraction task, we explored prompting to further benefit from the T5 model and its formulation. Additionally, we built an ensemble model, utilizing both balanced and prompted models. The proposed models outperformed the current state-of-the-art, with an F1 score of 0.655 on ADE classification and a Partial F1 score of 0.527 on ADE extraction.

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uestcc@SMM4H’22: RoBERTa based Adverse Drug Events Classification on Tweets
Chunchen Wei | Ran Bi | Yanru Zhang

This is a description of our participation in the ADE Mining in English Tweets shared task, organized by the Social Media Mining for Health SMM4H 2022 workshop. We participate in the subtask a of shared Task 1, and the paper introduces the system we developed for solving the task. The task requires classifying the given tweets by whether they mention the Adverse Drug Effects. We utilize RoBERTa model and apply several methods during training and finetuning period. We also try to improve the performance of our system by preprocessing the dataset but improve the precision only. The results of our system on test set are 0.601 in F1- score, 0.705 in precision, and 0.524 in recall.

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Zhegu@SMM4H-2022: The Pre-training Tweet & Claim Matching Makes Your Prediction Better
Pan He | Chen YuZe | Yanru Zhang

SMM4H-2022 (CITATION) Task 2 is to detect whether containing premise in the tweets of users about COVID-19 on the social medias or their stances for the claims. In this paper, we propose Tweet Claim Matching (TCM), which is a new pre-training task constructed by the tweets and claims similarly to Next Sentence Prediction (NSP). We first continue to pre-train the standard pre-trained language models on the labelled dataset and then fine-tune them for obtaining better performance. Compared with the solid baseline (CITATION), we achieve the absolute improvement of 7.9% in Task 2a and obtain the SOTA results.

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MaNLP@SMM4H’22: BERT for Classification of Twitter Posts
Keshav Kapur | Rajitha Harikrishnan | Sanjay Singh

The reported work is our straightforward approach for the shared task “Classification of tweets self-reporting age” organized by the “Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H)” workshop. This literature describes the approach that was used to build a binary classification system, that classifies the tweets related to birthday posts into two classes namely, exact age(positive class) and non-exact age(negative class). We made two submissions with variations in the preprocessing of text which yielded F1 scores of 0.80 and 0.81 when evaluated by the organizers.

Social media has become a major source of information for healthcare professionals but due to the growing volume of data in unstructured format, analyzing these resources accurately has become a challenge. In this study, we trained health related NER and classification models on different datasets published within the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H 2022) workshop. Transformer based Bert for Token Classification and Bert for Sequence Classification algorithms as well as vanilla NER and text classification algorithms from Spark NLP library were utilized during this study without changing the underlying DL architecture. The trained models are available within a production-grade code base as part of the Spark NLP library; can scale up for training and inference in any Spark cluster; has GPU support and libraries for popular programming languages such as Python, R, Scala and Java.

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READ-BioMed@SocialDisNER: Adaptation of an Annotation System to Spanish Tweets
Antonio Jimeno Yepes | Karin Verspoor

We describe the work of the READ-BioMed team for the preparation of a submission to the SocialDisNER Disease Named Entity Recognition (NER) Task (Task 10) in 2022. We had developed a system for named entity recognition for identifying biomedical concepts in English MEDLINE citations and Spanish clinical text for the LivingNER 2022 challenge. Minimal adaptation of our system was required to perform named entity recognition in the Spanish tweets in the SocialDisNER task, given the availability of Spanish pre-trained language models and the SocialDisNER training data. Minor additions included treatment of emojis and entities in hashtags and Twitter account names.

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PLN CMM at SocialDisNER: Improving Detection of Disease Mentions in Tweets by Using Document-Level Features
Matias Rojas | Jose Barros | Kinan Martin | Mauricio Araneda-Hernandez | Jocelyn Dunstan

This paper describes our approaches used to solve the SocialDisNER task, which belongs to the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task. This task aims to identify disease mentions in tweets written in Spanish. The proposed model is an architecture based on the FLERT approach. It consists of fine-tuning a language model that creates an input representation of a sentence based on its neighboring sentences, thus obtaining the document-level context. The best result was obtained using an ensemble of six language models using the FLERT approach. The system achieved an F1 score of 0.862, significantly surpassing the average performance among competitor models of 0.680 on the test partition.

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CLaCLab at SocialDisNER: Using Medical Gazetteers for Named-Entity Recognition of Disease Mentions in Spanish Tweets
Harsh Verma | Parsa Bagherzadeh | Sabine Bergler

This paper summarizes the CLaC submission for SMM4H 2022 Task 10 which concerns the recognition of diseases mentioned in Spanish tweets. Before classifying each token, we encode each token with a transformer encoder using features from Multilingual RoBERTa Large, UMLS gazetteer, and DISTEMIST gazetteer, among others. We obtain a strict F1 score of 0.869, with competition mean of 0.675, standard deviation of 0.245, and median of 0.761.

This paper describes our submissions for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 shared tasks. We participated in 2 tasks: a) Task 4: Classification of Tweets self-reporting exact age and b) Task 9: Classification of Reddit posts self-reporting exact age. We evaluated the two( BERT and RoBERTa) transformer based models for both tasks. For Task 4 RoBERTa-Large achieved an F1 score of 0.846 on the test set and BERT-Large achieved an F1 score of 0.865 on the test set for Task 9.

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NCUEE-NLP@SMM4H’22: Classification of Self-reported Chronic Stress on Twitter Using Ensemble Pre-trained Transformer Models
Tzu-Mi Lin | Chao-Yi Chen | Yu-Wen Tzeng | Lung-Hao Lee

This study describes our proposed system design for the SMM4H 2022 Task 8. We fine-tune the BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, XLNet and ELECTRA transformers and their connecting classifiers. Each transformer model is regarded as a standalone method to detect tweets that self-reported chronic stress. The final output classification result is then combined using the majority voting ensemble mechanism. Experimental results indicate that our approach achieved a best F1-score of 0.73 over the positive class.

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BioInfo@UAVR@SMM4H’22: Classification and Extraction of Adverse Event mentions in Tweets using Transformer Models
Edgar Morais | José Luis Oliveira | Alina Trifan | Olga Fajarda

This paper describes BioInfo@UAVR team’s approach for adressing subtasks 1a and 1b of the Social Media Mining for Health Applications 2022 shared task. These sub-tasks deal with the classification of tweets that contain an Adverse Drug Event mentions and the detection of spans that correspond to those mentions. Our approach relies on transformer-based models, data augmentation, and an external dataset.

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FRE at SocialDisNER: Joint Learning of Language Models for Named Entity Recognition
Kendrick Cetina | Nuria García-Santa

This paper describes our followed methodology for the automatic extraction of disease mentions from tweets in Spanish as part of the SocialDisNER challenge within the 2022 Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) Shared Task. We followed a Joint Learning ensemble architecture for the fine-tuning of top performing pre-trained language models in biomedical domain for Named Entity Recognition tasks. We used text generation techniques to augment training data. During practice phase of the challenge our approach showed results of 0.87 F1-Score.

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ITAINNOVA at SocialDisNER: A Transformers cocktail for disease identification in social media in Spanish
Rosa Montañés-Salas | Irene López-Bosque | Luis García-Garcés | Rafael del-Hoyo-Alonso

ITAINNOVA participates in SocialDisNER with a hybrid system which combines Transformer-based Language Models (LMs) with a custom-built gazetteer for Approximate String Matching (ASM) and dedicated text processing techniques for the social media domain. Additionally, zero-shot classification capabilities have been explored in order to support different parts of the system. An extensive analysis on the interactions of these components has been accomplished, making the system stand out above the mean performance of all the participating teams.

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mattica@SMM4H’22: Leveraging sentiment for stance & premise joint learning
Oscar Lithgow-Serrano | Joseph Cornelius | Fabio Rinaldi | Ljiljana Dolamic

This paper describes our submissions to the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task 2022. Our team (mattica) participated in detecting stances and premises in tweets about health mandates related to COVID-19 (Task 2). Our approach was based on using an in-domain Pretrained Language Model, which we fine-tuned by combining different strategies such as leveraging an additional stance detection dataset through two-stage fine-tuning, joint-learning Stance and Premise detection objectives; and ensembling the sentiment-polarity given by an off-the-shelf fine-tuned model.

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KU_ED at SocialDisNER: Extracting Disease Mentions in Tweets Written in Spanish
Antoine Lain | Wonjin Yoon | Hyunjae Kim | Jaewoo Kang | Ian Simpson

This paper describes our system developed for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 SocialDisNER task. We used several types of pre-trained language models, which are trained on Spanish biomedical literature or Spanish Tweets. We showed the difference in performance depending on the quality of the tokenization as well as introducing silver standard annotations when training the model. Our model obtained a strict F1 of 80.3% on the test set, which is an improvement of +12.8% F1 (24.6 std) over the average results across all submissions to the SocialDisNER challenge.

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CHAAI@SMM4H’22: RoBERTa, GPT-2 and Sampling - An interesting concoction
Christopher Palmer | Sedigheh Khademi Habibabadi | Muhammad Javed | Gerardo Luis Dimaguila | Jim Buttery

This paper describes the approaches to the SMM4H 2022 Shared Tasks that were taken by our team for tasks 1 and 6. Task 6 was the “Classification of tweets which indicate self-reported COVID-19 vaccination status (in English)”. The best test F1 score was 0.82 using a CT-BERT model, which exceeded the median test F1 score of 0.77, and was close to the 0.83 F1 score of the SMM4H baseline model. Task 1 was described as the “Classification, detection and normalization of Adverse Events (AE) mentions in tweets (in English)”. We undertook task 1a, and with a RoBERTa-base model achieved an F1 Score of 0.61 on test data, which exceeded the mean test F1 for the task of 0.56.

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IAI @ SocialDisNER : Catch me if you can! Capturing complex disease mentions in tweets
Aman Sinha | Cristina Garcia Holgado | Marianne Clausel | Matthieu Constant

Biomedical NER is an active research area today. Despite the availability of state-of-the-art models for standard NER tasks, their performance degrades on biomedical data due to OOV entities and the challenges encountered in specialized domains. We use Flair-NER framework to investigate the effectiveness of various contextual and static embeddings for NER on Spanish tweets, in particular, to capture complex disease mentions.

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UCCNLP@SMM4H’22:Label distribution aware long-tailed learning with post-hoc posterior calibration applied to text classification
Paul Trust | Provia Kadusabe | Ahmed Zahran | Rosane Minghim | Kizito Omala

The paper describes our submissions for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) workshop 2022 shared tasks. We participated in 2 tasks: (1) classification of adverse drug events (ADE) mentions in english tweets (Task-1a) and (2) classification of self-reported intimate partner violence (IPV) on twitter (Task 7). We proposed an approach that uses RoBERTa (A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach) fine-tuned with a label distribution-aware margin loss function and post-hoc posterior calibration for robust inference against class imbalance. We achieved a 4% and 1 % increase in performance on IPV and ADE respectively when compared with the traditional fine-tuning strategy with unweighted cross-entropy loss.

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HaleLab_NITK@SMM4H’22: Adaptive Learning Model for Effective Detection, Extraction and Normalization of Adverse Drug Events from Social Media Data
Reshma Unnikrishnan | Sowmya Kamath S | Ananthanarayana V. S.

This paper describes the techniques designed for detecting, extracting and normalizing adverse events from social data as part of the submission for the Shared task, Task 1-SMM4H’22. We present an adaptive learner mechanism for the foundation model to identify Adverse Drug Event (ADE) tweets. For the detected ADE tweets, a pipeline consisting of a pre-trained question-answering model followed by a fuzzy matching algorithm was leveraged for the span extraction and normalization tasks. The proposed method performed well at detecting ADE tweets, scoring an above-average F1 of 0.567 and 0.172 overlapping F1 for ADE normalization. The model’s performance for the ADE extraction task was lower, with an overlapping F1 of 0.435.

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Yet@SMM4H’22: Improved BERT-based classification models with Rdrop and PolyLoss
Yan Zhuang | Yanru Zhang

This paper describes our approach for 11 classification tasks (Task1a, Task2a, Task2b, Task3a, Task3b, Task4, Task5, Task6, Task7, Task8 and Task9) from Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 Shared Tasks. We developed a classification model that incorporated Rdrop to augment data and avoid overfitting, Poly Loss and Focal Loss to alleviate sample imbalance, and pseudo labels to improve model performance. The results of our submissions are over or equal to the median scores in almost all tasks. In addition, our model achieved the highest score in Task4, with a higher 7.8% and 5.3% F1-score than the median scores in Task2b and Task3a respectively.

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Fraunhofer FKIE @ SMM4H 2022: System Description for Shared Tasks 2, 4 and 9
Daniel Claeser | Samantha Kent

We present our results for the shared tasks 2, 4 and 9 at the SMM4H Workshop at COLING 2022 achieved by succesfully fine-tuning pre-trained language models to the downstream tasks. We identify the occurence of code-switching in the test data for task 2 as a possible source of considerable performance degradation on the test set scores. We successfully exploit structural linguistic similarities in the datasets of tasks 4 and 9 for training on joined datasets, scoring first in task 9 and on par with SOTA in task 4.

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Transformer-based classification of premise in tweets related to COVID-19
Vadim Porvatov | Natalia Semenova

Automation of social network data assessment is one of the classic challenges of natural language processing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mining people’s stances from their public messages become crucial regarding the understanding of attitude towards health orders. In this paper, authors propose the transformer-based predictive model allowing to effectively classify presence of stance and premise in the Twitter texts.

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Fraunhofer SIT@SMM4H’22: Learning to Predict Stances and Premises in Tweets related to COVID-19 Health Orders Using Generative Models
Raphael Frick | Martin Steinebach

This paper describes the system used to predict stances towards health orders and to detect premises in Tweets as part of the Social Media Mining for Health 2022 (SMM4H) shared task. It takes advantage of GPT-2 to generate new labeled data samples which are used together with pre-labeled and unlabeled data to fine-tune an ensemble of GAN-BERT models. First experiments on the validation set yielded good results, although it also revealed that the proposed architecture is more suited for sentiment analysis. The system achieved a score of 0.4258 for the stance and 0.3581 for the premise detection on the test set.

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UB Health Miners@SMM4H’22: Exploring Pre-processing Techniques To Classify Tweets Using Transformer Based Pipelines.
Roshan Khatri | Sougata Saha | Souvik Das | Rohini Srihari

Here we discuss our implementation of two tasks in the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) 2022 shared tasks – classification, detection, and normalization of Adverse Events (AE) mentioned in English tweets (Task 1) and classification of English tweets self-reporting exact age (Task 4). We have explored different methods and models for binary classification, multi-class classification and named entity recognition (NER) for these tasks. We have also processed the provided dataset for noise, imbalance, and creative language expression from data. Using diverse NLP methods we classified tweets for mentions of adverse drug effects (ADEs) and self-reporting the exact age in the tweets. Further, extracted reactions from the tweets and normalized these adverse effects to a standard concept ID in the MedDRA vocabulary.

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CSECU-DSG@SMM4H’22: Transformer based Unified Approach for Classification of Changes in Medication Treatments in Tweets and WebMD Reviews
Afrin Sultana | Nihad Karim Chowdhury | Abu Nowshed Chy

Medications play a vital role in medical treatment as medication non-adherence reduces clinical benefit, results in morbidity, and medication wastage. Self-declared changes in drug treatment and their reasons are automatically extracted from tweets and user reviews, helping to determine the effectiveness of drugs and improve treatment care. SMM4H 2022 Task 3 introduced a shared task focusing on the identification of non-persistent patients from tweets and WebMD reviews. In this paper, we present our participation in this task. We propose a neural approach that integrates the strengths of the transformer model, the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model, and the fully connected layer into a unified architecture. Experimental results demonstrate the competitive performance of our system on test data with 61% F1-score on task 3a and 86% F1-score on task 3b. Our proposed neural approach ranked first in task 3b.

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Innovators @ SMM4H’22: An Ensembles Approach for self-reporting of COVID-19 Vaccination Status Tweets
Mohammad Zohair | Nidhir Bhavsar | Aakash Bhatnagar | Muskaan Singh

With the Surge in COVID-19, the number of social media postings related to the vaccine has grown, specifically tracing the confirmed reports by the users regarding the COVID-19 vaccine dose termed “Vaccine Surveillance.” To mitigate this research problem, we present our novel ensembled approach for self-reporting COVID-19 vaccination status tweets into two labels, namely “Vaccine Chatter” and “Self Report.” We utilize state-of-the-art models, namely BERT, RoBERTa, and XLNet. Our model provides promising results with 0.77, 0.93, and 0.66 as precision, recall, and F1-score (respectively), comparable to the corresponding median scores of 0.77, 0.9, and 0.68 (respec- tively). The model gave an overall accuracy of 93.43. We also present an empirical analysis of the results to present how well the tweet was able to classify and report. We release our code base here https://github.com/Zohair0209/SMM4H-2022-Task6.git

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Innovators@SMM4H’22: An Ensembles Approach for Stance and Premise Classification of COVID-19 Health Mandates Tweets
Vatsal Savaliya | Aakash Bhatnagar | Nidhir Bhavsar | Muskaan Singh

This paper presents our submission for the Shared Task-2 of classification of stance and premise in tweets about health mandates related to COVID-19 at the Social Media Mining for Health 2022. There have been a plethora of tweets about people expressing their opinions on the COVID-19 epidemic since it first emerged. The shared task emphasizes finding the level of cooperation within the mandates for their stance towards the health orders of the pandemic. Overall the shared subjects the participants to propose system’s that can efficiently perform 1) Stance Detection, which focuses on determining the author’s point of view in the text. 2) Premise Classification, which indicates whether or not the text has arguments. Through this paper we propose an orchestration of multiple transformer based encoders to derive the output for stance and premise classification. Our best model achieves a F1 score of 0.771 for Premise Classification and an aggregate macro-F1 score of 0.661 for Stance Detection. We have made our code public here

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AILAB-Udine@SMM4H’22: Limits of Transformers and BERT Ensembles
Beatrice Portelli | Simone Scaboro | Emmanuele Chersoni | Enrico Santus | Giuseppe Serra

This paper describes the models developed by the AILAB-Udine team for the SMM4H’22 Shared Task. We explored the limits of Transformer based models on text classification, entity extraction and entity normalization, tackling Tasks 1, 2, 5, 6 and 10. The main takeaways we got from participating in different tasks are: the overwhelming positive effects of combining different architectures when using ensemble learning, and the great potential of generative models for term normalization.

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AIR-JPMC@SMM4H’22: Classifying Self-Reported Intimate Partner Violence in Tweets with Multiple BERT-based Models
Alec Louis Candidato | Akshat Gupta | Xiaomo Liu | Sameena Shah

This paper presents our submission for the SMM4H 2022-Shared Task on the classification of self-reported intimate partner violence on Twitter (in English). The goal of this task was to accurately determine if the contents of a given tweet demonstrated someone reporting their own experience with intimate partner violence. The submitted system is an ensemble of five RoBERTa models each weighted by their respective F1-scores on the validation data-set. This system performed 13% better than the baseline and was the best performing system overall for this shared task.

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ARGUABLY@SMM4H’22: Classification of Health Related Tweets using Ensemble, Zero-Shot and Fine-Tuned Language Model
Prabsimran Kaur | Guneet Kohli | Jatin Bedi

With the increase in the use of social media, people have become more outspoken and are using platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter to express their views and share the medical challenges they are facing. This data is a valuable source of medical insight and is often used for healthcare research. This paper describes our participation in Task 1a, 2a, 2b, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9 organized by SMM4H 2022. We have proposed two transformer-based approaches to handle the classification tasks. The first approach is fine-tuning single language models. The second approach is ensembling the results of BERT, RoBERTa, and ERNIE 2.0.

This paper presents a description of our system in SMM4H-2022, where we participated in task 1a,task 4, and task 6 to task 10. There are three main challenges in SMM4H-2022, namely the domain shift problem, the prediction bias due to category imbalance, and the noise in informal text. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for the classification and named entity recognition tasks to solve the challenges, and it can be applied to both English and Spanish scenarios. The results of our system are higher than the median F1-scores for 7 tasks and significantly exceed the F1-scores for 6 tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.

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Edinburgh_UCL_Health@SMM4H’22: From Glove to Flair for handling imbalanced healthcare corpora related to Adverse Drug Events, Change in medication and self-reporting vaccination
Imane Guellil | Jinge Wu | Honghan Wu | Tony Sun | Beatrice Alex

This paper reports on the performance of Edinburgh_UCL_Health’s models in the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 shared tasks. Our team participated in the tasks related to the Identification of Adverse Drug Events (ADEs), the classification of change in medication (change-med) and the classification of self-report of vaccination (self-vaccine). Our best performing models are based on DeepADEMiner (with respective F1= 0.64, 0.62 and 0.39 for ADE identification), on a GloVe model trained on Twitter (with F1=0.11 for the change-med) and finally on a stack embedding including a layer of Glove embedding and two layers of Flair embedding (with F1= 0.77 for self-report).

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KUL@SMM4H’22: Template Augmented Adaptive Pre-training for Tweet Classification
Sumam Francis | Marie-Francine Moens

This paper describes models developed for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) 2022 shared tasks. Our team participated in the first subtask that classifies tweets with Adverse Drug Effect (ADE) mentions. Our best-performing model comprises of a template augmented task adaptive pre-training and further fine-tuning on target task data. Augmentation with random prompt templates increases the amount of task-specific data to generalize the LM to the target task domain. We explore 2 pre-training strategies: Masked language modeling (MLM) and Simple contrastive pre-training (SimSCE) and the impact of adding template augmentations with these pre-training strategies. Our system achieves an F1 score of 0.433 on the test set without using supplementary resources and medical dictionaries.

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Enolp musk@SMM4H’22 : Leveraging Pre-trained Language Models for Stance And Premise Classification
Millon Das | Archit Mangrulkar | Ishan Manchanda | Manav Kapadnis | Sohan Patnaik

This paper covers our approaches for the Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) Shared Tasks 2a and 2b. Apart from the baseline architectures, we experiment with Parts of Speech (PoS), dependency parsing, and Tf-Idf features. Additionally, we perform contrastive pretraining on our best models using a supervised contrastive loss function. In both the tasks, we outperformed the mean and median scores and ranked first on the validation set. For stance classification, we achieved an F1-score of 0.636 using the CovidTwitterBERT model, while for premise classification, we achieved an F1-score of 0.664 using BART-base model on test dataset.

We present our response to Task 5 of the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) 2022 competition. We share our approach into classifying whether a tweet in Spanish about COVID-19 symptoms pertain to themselves, others, or not at all. Using a combination of BERT based models, we were able to achieve results that were higher than the median result of the competition.

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AIR-JPMC@SMM4H’22: BERT + Ensembling = Too Cool: Using Multiple BERT Models Together for Various COVID-19 Tweet Identification Tasks
Leung Wai Liu | Akshat Gupta | Saheed Obitayo | Xiaomo Liu | Sameena Shah

This paper presents my submission for Tasks 1 and 2 for the Social Media Mining of Health (SMM4H) 2022 Shared Tasks competition. I first describe the background behind each of these tasks, followed by the descriptions of the various subtasks of Tasks 1 and 2, then present the methodology. Through model ensembling, this methodology was able to achieve higher results than the mean and median of the competition for the classification tasks.

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CAISA@SMM4H’22: Robust Cross-Lingual Detection of Disease Mentions on Social Media with Adversarial Methods
Akbar Karimi | Lucie Flek

We propose adversarial methods for increasing the robustness of disease mention detection on social media. Our method applies adversarial data augmentation on the input and the embedding spaces to the English BioBERT model. We evaluate our method in the SocialDisNER challenge at SMM4H’22 on an annotated dataset of disease mentions in Spanish tweets. We find that both methods outperform a heuristic vocabulary-based baseline by a large margin. Additionally, utilizing the English BioBERT model shows a strong performance and outperforms the data augmentation methods even when applied to the Spanish dataset, which has a large amount of data, while augmentation methods show a significant advantage in a low-data setting.

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OFU@SMM4H’22: Mining Advent Drug Events Using Pretrained Language Models
Omar Adjali | Fréjus A. A. Laleye | Umang Aggarwal

We describe in this paper our proposed systems for the Social Media Mining for Health 2022 shared task 1. In particular, we participated in the three sub-tasks, tasks that aim at extracting and processing Adverse Drug Events. We investigate different transformer-based pretrained models we fine-tuned on each task and proposed some improvement on the task of entity normalization.

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CompLx@SMM4H’22: In-domain pretrained language models for detection of adverse drug reaction mentions in English tweets
Orest Xherija | Hojoon Choi

The paper describes the system that team CompLx developed for sub-task 1a of the Social Media Mining for Health 2022 (#SMM4H) Shared Task. We finetune a RoBERTa model, a pretrained, transformer-based language model, on a provided dataset to classify English tweets for mentions of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs), i.e. negative side effects related to medication intake. With only a simple finetuning, our approach achieves competitive results, significantly outperforming the average score across submitted systems. We make the model checkpoints and code publicly available. We also create a web application to provide a user-friendly, readily accessible interface for anyone interested in exploring the model’s capabilities.

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The SocialDisNER shared task on detection of disease mentions in health-relevant content from social media: methods, evaluation, guidelines and corpora
Luis Gasco Sánchez | Darryl Estrada Zavala | Eulàlia Farré-Maduell | Salvador Lima-López | Antonio Miranda-Escalada | Martin Krallinger

There is a pressing need to exploit health-related content from social media, a global source of data where key health information is posted directly by citizens, patients and other healthcare stakeholders. Use cases of disease related social media mining include disease outbreak/surveillance, mental health and pharmacovigilance. Current efforts address the exploitation of social media beyond English. The SocialDisNER task, organized as part of the SMM4H 2022 initiative, has applied the LINKAGE methodology to select and annotate a Gold Standard corpus of 9,500 tweets in Spanish enriched with disease mentions generated by patients and medical professionals. As a complementary resource for teams participating in the SocialDisNER track, we have also created a large-scale corpus of 85,000 tweets, where in addition to disease mentions, other medical entities of relevance (e.g., medications, symptoms and procedures, among others) have been automatically labelled. Using these large-scale datasets, co-mention networks or knowledge graphs were released for each entity pair type. Out of the 47 teams registered for the task, 17 teams uploaded a total of 32 runs. The top-performing team achieved a very competitive 0.891 f-score, with a system trained following a continue pre-training strategy. We anticipate that the corpus and systems resulting from the SocialDisNER track might further foster health related text mining of social media content in Spanish and inspire disease detection strategies in other languages.

This paper introduces a manually annotated dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in micro-blogging text for Romanian language. It contains gold annotations for 9 entity classes and expressions: persons, locations, organizations, time expressions, legal references, disorders, chemicals, medical devices and anatomical parts. Furthermore, word embeddings models computed on a larger micro-blogging corpus are made available. Finally, several NER models are trained and their performance is evaluated against the newly introduced corpus.

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The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Engineered Features with Transformers for Improved Mental Health Prediction from Reddit Posts
Sourabh Zanwar | Daniel Wiechmann | Yu Qiao | Elma Kerz

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the application of natural language processing and machine learning techniques to the detection of mental health conditions (MHC) based on social media data. In this paper, we aim to improve the state-of-the-art (SoTA) detection of six MHC in Reddit posts in two ways: First, we built models leveraging Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) networks trained on in-text distributions of a comprehensive set of psycholinguistic features for more explainable MHC detection as compared to black-box solutions. Second, we combine these BLSTM models with Transformers to improve the prediction accuracy over SoTA models. In addition, we uncover nuanced patterns of linguistic markers characteristic of specific MHC.

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Leveraging Social Media as a Source for Clinical Guidelines: A Demarcation of Experiential Knowledge
Jia-Zhen Michelle Chan | Florian Kunneman | Roser Morante | Lea Lösch | Teun Zuiderent-Jerak

In this paper we present a procedure to extract posts that contain experiential knowledge from Facebook discussions in Dutch, using automated filtering, manual annotations and machine learning. We define guidelines to annotate experiential knowledge and test them on a subset of the data. After several rounds of (re-)annotations, we come to an inter-annotator agreement of K=0.69, which reflects the difficulty of the task. We subsequently discuss inclusion and exclusion criteria to cope with the diversity of manifestations of experiential knowledge relevant to guideline development.

Billions of people across the globe have been using social media platforms in their local languages to voice their opinions about the various topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Several organizations, including the World Health Organization, have developed automated social media analysis tools that classify COVID-19-related tweets to various topics. However, these tools that help combat the pandemic are limited to very few languages, making several countries unable to take their benefit. While multi-lingual or low-resource language-specific tools are being developed, there is still a need to expand their coverage, such as for the Nepali language. In this paper, we identify the eight most common COVID-19 discussion topics among the Twitter community using the Nepali language, set up an online platform to automatically gather Nepali tweets containing the COVID-19-related keywords, classify the tweets into the eight topics, and visualize the results across the period in a web-based dashboard. We compare the performance of two state-of-the-art multi-lingual language models for Nepali tweet classification, one generic (mBERT) and the other Nepali language family-specific model (MuRIL). Our results show that the models’ relative performance depends on the data size, with MuRIL doing better for a larger dataset. The annotated data, models, and the web-based dashboard are open-sourced at https://github.com/naamiinepal/covid-tweet-classification.

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SMM4H 2022 Task 2: Dataset for stance and premise detection in tweets about health mandates related to COVID-19
Vera Davydova | Elena Tutubalina

This paper is an organizers’ report of the competition on argument mining systems dealing with English tweets about COVID-19 health mandates. This competition was held within the framework of the SMM4H 2022 shared tasks. During the competition, the participants were offered two subtasks: stance detection and premise classification. We present a manually annotated corpus containing 6,156 short posts from Twitter on three topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic: school closures, stay-at-home orders, and wearing masks. We hope the prepared dataset will support further research on argument mining in the health field.

For the past seven years, the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H) shared tasks have promoted the community-driven development and evaluation of advanced natural language processing systems to detect, extract, and normalize health-related information in public, user-generated content. This seventh iteration consists of ten tasks that include English and Spanish posts on Twitter, Reddit, and WebMD. Interest in the #SMM4H shared tasks continues to grow, with 117 teams that registered and 54 teams that participated in at least one task—a 17.5% and 35% increase in registration and participation, respectively, over the last iteration. This paper provides an overview of the tasks and participants’ systems. The data sets remain available upon request, and new systems can be evaluated through the post-evaluation phase on CodaLab.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media

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Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media
Lun-Wei Ku | Cheng-Te Li | Yu-Che Tsai | Wei-Yao Wang

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Mask and Regenerate: A Classifier-based Approach for Unpaired Sentiment Transformation of Reviews for Electronic Commerce Websites.
Shuo Yang

Style transfer is the task of transferring a sentence into the target style while keeping its content. The major challenge is that parallel corpora are not available for various domains. In this paper, we propose a Mask-And-Regenerate approach (MAR). It learns from unpaired sentences by modifying the word-level style attributes. We cautiously integrate the deletion, insertion and substitution operations into our model. This enables our model to automatically apply different edit operations for different sentences. Specifically, we train a multilayer perceptron (MLP) as a style classifier to find out and mask style-characteristic words in the source inputs. Then we learn a language model on non-parallel data sets to score sentences and remove unnecessary masks. Finally, the masked source sentences are input to a Transformer to perform style transfer. The final results show that our proposed model exceeds baselines by about 2 per cent of accuracy for both sentiment and style transfer tasks with comparable or better content retention.

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Exploiting Social Media Content for Self-Supervised Style Transfer
Dana Ruiter | Thomas Kleinbauer | Cristina España-Bonet | Josef van Genabith | Dietrich Klakow

Recent research on style transfer takes inspiration from unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT), learning from large amounts of non-parallel data by exploiting cycle consistency loss, back-translation, and denoising autoencoders. By contrast, the use of selfsupervised NMT (SSNMT), which leverages (near) parallel instances hidden in non-parallel data more efficiently than UNMT, has not yet been explored for style transfer. In this paper we present a novel Self-Supervised Style Transfer (3ST) model, which augments SSNMT with UNMT methods in order to identify and efficiently exploit supervisory signals in non-parallel social media posts. We compare 3ST with state-of-the-art (SOTA) style transfer models across civil rephrasing, formality and polarity tasks. We show that 3ST is able to balance the three major objectives (fluency, content preservation, attribute transfer accuracy) the best, outperforming SOTA models on averaged performance across their tested tasks in automatic and human evaluation.

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Detecting Rumor Veracity with Only Textual Information by Double-Channel Structure
Alex Gunwoo Kim | Sangwon Yoon

Kyle (1985) proposes two types of rumors: informed rumors which are based on some private information and uninformed rumors which are not based on any information (i.e. bluffing). Also, prior studies find that when people have credible source of information, they are likely to use a more confident textual tone in their spreading of rumors. Motivated by these theoretical findings, we propose a double-channel structure to determine the ex-ante veracity of rumors on social media. Our ultimate goal is to classify each rumor into true, false, or unverifiable category. We first assign each text into either certain (informed rumor) or uncertain (uninformed rumor) category. Then, we apply lie detection algorithm to informed rumors and thread-reply agreement detection algorithm to uninformed rumors. Using the dataset of SemEval 2019 Task 7, which requires ex-ante threefold classification (true, false, or unverifiable) of social media rumors, our model yields a macro-F1 score of 0.4027, outperforming all the baseline models and the second-place winner (Gorrell et al., 2019). Furthermore, we empirically validate that the double-channel structure outperforms single-channel structures which use either lie detection or agreement detection algorithm to all posts.

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Leveraging Dependency Grammar for Fine-Grained Offensive Language Detection using Graph Convolutional Networks
Divyam Goel | Raksha Sharma

The last few years have witnessed an exponential rise in the propagation of offensive text on social media. Identification of this text with high precision is crucial for the well-being of society. Most of the existing approaches tend to give high toxicity scores to innocuous statements (e.g., “I am a gay man”). These false positives result from over-generalization on the training data where specific terms in the statement may have been used in a pejorative sense (e.g., “gay”). Emphasis on such words alone can lead to discrimination against the classes these systems are designed to protect. In this paper, we address the problem of offensive language detection on Twitter, while also detecting the type and the target of the offense. We propose a novel approach called SyLSTM, which integrates syntactic features in the form of the dependency parse tree of a sentence and semantic features in the form of word embeddings into a deep learning architecture using a Graph Convolutional Network. Results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art BERT model with orders of magnitude fewer number of parameters.

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A Comparative Study on Word Embeddings and Social NLP Tasks
Fatma Elsafoury | Steven R. Wilson | Naeem Ramzan

In recent years, gray social media platforms, those with a loose moderation policy on cyberbullying, have been attracting more users. Recently, data collected from these types of platforms have been used to pre-train word embeddings (social-media-based), yet these word embeddings have not been investigated for social NLP related tasks. In this paper, we carried out a comparative study between social-media-based and non-social-media-based word embeddings on two social NLP tasks: Detecting cyberbullying and Measuring social bias. Our results show that using social-media-based word embeddings as input features, rather than non-social-media-based embeddings, leads to better cyberbullying detection performance. We also show that some word embeddings are more useful than others for categorizing offensive words. However, we do not find strong evidence that certain word embeddings will necessarily work best when identifying certain categories of cyberbullying within our datasets. Finally, We show even though most of the state-of-the-art bias metrics ranked social-media-based word embeddings as the most socially biased, these results remain inconclusive and further research is required.

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Identifying Human Needs through Social Media: A study on Indian cities during COVID-19
Sunny Rai | Rohan Joseph | Prakruti Singh Thakur | Mohammed Abdul Khaliq

In this paper, we present a minimally-supervised approach to identify human needs expressed in tweets. Taking inspiration from Frustration-Aggression theory, we trained RoBERTa model to classify tweets expressing frustration which serves as an indicator of unmet needs. Although the notion of frustration is highly subjective and complex, the findings support the use of pretrained language model in identifying tweets with unmet needs. Our study reveals the major causes behind feeling frustrated during the lockdown and the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Our proposed approach can be useful in timely identification and prioritization of emerging human needs in the event of a crisis.

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Towards Toxic Positivity Detection
Ishan Sanjeev Upadhyay | KV Aditya Srivatsa | Radhika Mamidi

Over the past few years, there has been a growing concern around toxic positivity on social media which is a phenomenon where positivity is used to minimize one’s emotional experience. In this paper, we create a dataset for toxic positivity classification from Twitter and an inspirational quote website. We then perform benchmarking experiments using various text classification models and show the suitability of these models for the task. We achieved a macro F1 score of 0.71 and a weighted F1 score of 0.85 by using an ensemble model. To the best of our knowledge, our dataset is the first such dataset created.

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OK Boomer: Probing the socio-demographic Divide in Echo Chambers
Henri-Jacques Geiss | Flora Sakketou | Lucie Flek

Social media platforms such as Twitter or Reddit have become an integral part in political opinion formation and discussions, accompanied by potential echo chamber forming. In this paper, we examine the relationships between the interaction patterns, the opinion polarity, and the socio-demographic characteristics in discussion communities on Reddit. On a dataset of over 2 million posts coming from over 20k users, we combine network community detection algorithms, reliable stance polarity annotations, and NLP-based socio-demographic estimations, to identify echo chambers and understand their properties at scale. We show that the separability of the interaction communities is more strongly correlated to the relative socio-demographic divide, rather than the stance polarity gap size. We further demonstrate that the socio-demographic classifiers have a strong topical bias and should be used with caution, merely for the relative community difference comparisons within a topic, rather than for any absolute labeling.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Semiparametric Methods in NLP: Decoupling Logic from Knowledge

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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Semiparametric Methods in NLP: Decoupling Logic from Knowledge
Rajarshi Das | Patrick Lewis | Sewon Min | June Thai | Manzil Zaheer

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Improving Discriminative Learning for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction
Van-Hien Tran | Hiroki Ouchi | Taro Watanabe | Yuji Matsumoto

Zero-shot relation extraction (ZSRE) aims to predict target relations that cannot be observed during training. While most previous studies have focused on fully supervised relation extraction and achieved considerably high performance, less effort has been made towards ZSRE. This study proposes a new model incorporating discriminative embedding learning for both sentences and semantic relations. In addition, a self-adaptive comparator network is used to judge whether the relationship between a sentence and a relation is consistent. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets showed that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

While both extractive and generative readers have been successfully applied to the Question Answering (QA) task, little attention has been paid toward the systematic comparison of them. Characterizing the strengths and weaknesses of the two readers is crucial not only for making a more informed reader selection in practice but also for developing a deeper understanding to foster further research on improving readers in a principled manner. Motivated by this goal, we make the first attempt to systematically study the comparison of extractive and generative readers for question answering. To be aligned with the state-of-the-art, we explore nine transformer-based large pre-trained language models (PrLMs) as backbone architectures. Furthermore, we organize our findings under two main categories: (1) keeping the architecture invariant, and (2) varying the underlying PrLMs. Among several interesting findings, it is important to highlight that (1) the generative readers perform better in long context QA, (2) the extractive readers perform better in short context while also showing better out-of-domain generalization, and (3) the encoder of encoder-decoder PrLMs (e.g., T5) turns out to be a strong extractive reader and outperforms the standard choice of encoder-only PrLMs (e.g., RoBERTa). We also study the effect of multi-task learning on the two types of readers varying the underlying PrLMs and perform qualitative and quantitative diagnosis to provide further insights into future directions in modeling better readers.

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Efficient Machine Translation Domain Adaptation
Pedro Martins | Zita Marinho | Andre Martins

Machine translation models struggle when translating out-of-domain text, which makes domain adaptation a topic of critical importance. However, most domain adaptation methods focus on fine-tuning or training the entire or part of the model on every new domain, which can be costly. On the other hand, semi-parametric models have been shown to successfully perform domain adaptation by retrieving examples from an in-domain datastore (Khandelwal et al., 2021). A drawback of these retrieval-augmented models, however, is that they tend to be substantially slower. In this paper, we explore several approaches to speed up nearest neighbors machine translation. We adapt the methods recently proposed by He et al. (2021) for language modeling, and introduce a simple but effective caching strategy that avoids performing retrieval when similar contexts have been seen before. Translation quality and runtimes for several domains show the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

We propose a novel framework to conduct field extraction from forms with unlabeled data. To bootstrap the training process, we develop a rule-based method for mining noisy pseudo-labels from unlabeled forms. Using the supervisory signal from the pseudo-labels, we extract a discriminative token representation from a transformer-based model by modeling the interaction between text in the form. To prevent the model from overfitting to label noise, we introduce a refinement module based on a progressive pseudo-label ensemble. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

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Knowledge Base Index Compression via Dimensionality and Precision Reduction
Vilém Zouhar | Marius Mosbach | Miaoran Zhang | Dietrich Klakow

Recently neural network based approaches to knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, such as question answering, started to rely heavily on the combination of neural retrievers and readers. Retrieval is typically performed over a large textual knowledge base (KB) which requires significant memory and compute resources, especially when scaled up. On HotpotQA we systematically investigate reducing the size of the KB index by means of dimensionality (sparse random projections, PCA, autoencoders) and numerical precision reduction. Our results show that PCA is an easy solution that requires very little data and is only slightly worse than autoencoders, which are less stable. All methods are sensitive to pre- and post-processing and data should always be centered and normalized both before and after dimension reduction. Finally, we show that it is possible to combine PCA with using 1bit per dimension. Overall we achieve (1) 100× compression with 75%, and (2) 24× compression with 92% original retrieval performance.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP

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Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP
Andreas Vlachos | Priyanka Agrawal | André Martins | Gerasimos Lampouras | Chunchuan Lyu

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Multilingual Syntax-aware Language Modeling through Dependency Tree Conversion
Shunsuke Kando | Hiroshi Noji | Yusuke Miyao

Incorporating stronger syntactic biases into neural language models (LMs) is a long-standing goal, but research in this area often focuses on modeling English text, where constituent treebanks are readily available. Extending constituent tree-based LMs to the multilingual setting, where dependency treebanks are more common, is possible via dependency-to-constituency conversion methods. However, this raises the question of which tree formats are best for learning the model, and for which languages. We investigate this question by training recurrent neural network grammars (RNNGs) using various conversion methods, and evaluating them empirically in a multilingual setting. We examine the effect on LM performance across nine conversion methods and five languages through seven types of syntactic tests. On average, the performance of our best model represents a 19 % increase in accuracy over the worst choice across all languages. Our best model shows the advantage over sequential/overparameterized LMs, suggesting the positive effect of syntax injection in a multilingual setting. Our experiments highlight the importance of choosing the right tree formalism, and provide insights into making an informed decision.

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Joint Entity and Relation Extraction Based on Table Labeling Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Youmi Ma | Tatsuya Hiraoka | Naoaki Okazaki

This study introduces a novel approach to the joint extraction of entities and relations by stacking convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on pretrained language models. We adopt table representations to model the entities and relations, casting the entity and relation extraction as a table-labeling problem. Regarding each table as an image and each cell in a table as an image pixel, we apply two-dimensional CNNs to the tables to capture local dependencies and predict the cell labels. The experimental results showed that the performance of the proposed method is comparable to those of current state-of-art systems on the CoNLL04, ACE05, and ADE datasets. Even when freezing pretrained language model parameters, the proposed method showed a stable performance, whereas the compared methods suffered from significant decreases in performance. This observation indicates that the parameters of the pretrained encoder may incorporate dependencies among the entity and relation labels during fine-tuning.

Temporal knowledge graphs store the dynamics of entities and relations during a time period. However, typical temporal knowledge graphs often suffer from incomplete dynamics with missing facts in real-world scenarios. Hence, modeling temporal knowledge graphs to complete the missing facts is important. In this paper, we tackle the temporal knowledge graph completion task by proposing TempCaps, which is a Capsule network-based embedding model for Temporal knowledge graph completion. TempCaps models temporal knowledge graphs by introducing a novel dynamic routing aggregator inspired by Capsule Networks. Specifically, TempCaps builds entity embeddings by dynamically routing retrieved temporal relation and neighbor information. Experimental results demonstrate that TempCaps reaches state-of-the-art performance for temporal knowledge graph completion. Additional analysis also shows that TempCaps is efficient.

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SlotGAN: Detecting Mentions in Text via Adversarial Distant Learning
Daniel Daza | Michael Cochez | Paul Groth

We present SlotGAN, a framework for training a mention detection model that only requires unlabeled text and a gazetteer. It consists of a generator trained to extract spans from an input sentence, and a discriminator trained to determine whether a span comes from the generator, or from the gazetteer. We evaluate the method on English newswire data and compare it against supervised, weakly-supervised, and unsupervised methods. We find that the performance of the method is lower than these baselines, because it tends to generate more and longer spans, and in some cases it relies only on capitalization. In other cases, it generates spans that are valid but differ from the benchmark. When evaluated with metrics based on overlap, we find that SlotGAN performs within 95% of the precision of a supervised method, and 84% of its recall. Our results suggest that the model can generate spans that overlap well, but an additional filtering mechanism is required.

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A Joint Learning Approach for Semi-supervised Neural Topic Modeling
Jeffrey Chiu | Rajat Mittal | Neehal Tumma | Abhishek Sharma | Finale Doshi-Velez

Topic models are some of the most popular ways to represent textual data in an interpret-able manner. Recently, advances in deep generative models, specifically auto-encoding variational Bayes (AEVB), have led to the introduction of unsupervised neural topic models, which leverage deep generative models as opposed to traditional statistics-based topic models. We extend upon these neural topic models by introducing the Label-Indexed Neural Topic Model (LI-NTM), which is, to the extent of our knowledge, the first effective upstream semi-supervised neural topic model. We find that LI-NTM outperforms existing neural topic models in document reconstruction benchmarks, with the most notable results in low labeled data regimes and for data-sets with informative labels; furthermore, our jointly learned classifier outperforms baseline classifiers in ablation studies.

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Neural String Edit Distance
Jindřich Libovický | Alexander Fraser

We propose the neural string edit distance model for string-pair matching and string transduction based on learnable string edit distance. We modify the original expectation-maximization learned edit distance algorithm into a differentiable loss function, allowing us to integrate it into a neural network providing a contextual representation of the input. We evaluate on cognate detection, transliteration, and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and show that we can trade off between performance and interpretability in a single framework. Using contextual representations, which are difficult to interpret, we match the performance of state-of-the-art string-pair matching models. Using static embeddings and a slightly different loss function, we force interpretability, at the expense of an accuracy drop.

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Predicting Attention Sparsity in Transformers
Marcos Treviso | António Góis | Patrick Fernandes | Erick Fonseca | Andre Martins

Transformers’ quadratic complexity with respect to the input sequence length has motivated a body of work on efficient sparse approximations to softmax. An alternative path, used by entmax transformers, consists of having built-in exact sparse attention; however this approach still requires quadratic computation. In this paper, we propose Sparsefinder, a simple model trained to identify the sparsity pattern of entmax attention before computing it. We experiment with three variants of our method, based on distances, quantization, and clustering, on two tasks: machine translation (attention in the decoder) and masked language modeling (encoder-only). Our work provides a new angle to study model efficiency by doing extensive analysis of the tradeoff between the sparsity and recall of the predicted attention graph. This allows for detailed comparison between different models along their Pareto curves, important to guide future benchmarks for sparse attention models.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

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Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics
Vivi Nastase | Ellie Pavlick | Mohammad Taher Pilehvar | Jose Camacho-Collados | Alessandro Raganato

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What do Large Language Models Learn about Scripts?
Abhilasha Sancheti | Rachel Rudinger

Script Knowledge (Schank and Abelson, 1975) has long been recognized as crucial for language understanding as it can help in filling in unstated information in a narrative. However, such knowledge is expensive to produce manually and difficult to induce from text due to reporting bias (Gordon and Van Durme, 2013). In this work, we are interested in the scientific question of whether explicit script knowledge is present and accessible through pre-trained generative language models (LMs). To this end, we introduce the task of generating full event sequence descriptions (ESDs) given a scenario as a natural language prompt. Through zero-shot probing, we find that generative LMs produce poor ESDs with mostly omitted, irrelevant, repeated or misordered events. To address this, we propose a pipeline-based script induction framework (SIF) which can generate good quality ESDs for unseen scenarios (e.g., bake a cake). SIF is a two-staged framework that fine-tunes LM on a small set of ESD examples in the first stage. In the second stage, ESD generated for an unseen scenario is post-processed using RoBERTa-based models to filter irrelevant events, remove repetitions, and reorder the temporally misordered events. Through automatic and manual evaluations, we demonstrate that SIF yields substantial improvements (1-3 BLEU points) over a fine-tuned LM. However, manual analysis shows that there is great room for improvement, offering a new research direction for inducing script knowledge.

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DeepA2: A Modular Framework for Deep Argument Analysis with Pretrained Neural Text2Text Language Models
Gregor Betz | Kyle Richardson

In this paper, we present and implement a multi-dimensional, modular framework for performing deep argument analysis (DeepA2) using current pre-trained language models (PTLMs). ArgumentAnalyst – a T5 model [Raffel et al. 2020] set up and trained within DeepA2 – reconstructs argumentative texts, which advance an informal argumentation, as valid arguments: It inserts, e.g., missing premises and conclusions, formalizes inferences, and coherently links the logical reconstruction to the source text. We create a synthetic corpus for deep argument analysis, and evaluate ArgumentAnalyst on this new dataset as well as on existing data, specifically EntailmentBank [Dalvi et al. 2021]. Our empirical findings vindicate the overall framework and highlight the advantages of a modular design, in particular its ability to emulate established heuristics (such as hermeneutic cycles), to explore the model’s uncertainty, to cope with the plurality of correct solutions (underdetermination), and to exploit higher-order evidence.

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Semantics-aware Attention Improves Neural Machine Translation
Aviv Slobodkin | Leshem Choshen | Omri Abend

The integration of syntactic structures into Transformer machine translation has shown positive results, but to our knowledge, no work has attempted to do so with semantic structures. In this work we propose two novel parameter-free methods for injecting semantic information into Transformers, both rely on semantics-aware masking of (some of) the attention heads. One such method operates on the encoder, through a Scene-Aware Self-Attention (SASA) head. Another on the decoder, through a Scene-Aware Cross-Attention (SACrA) head. We show a consistent improvement over the vanilla Transformer and syntax-aware models for four language pairs. We further show an additional gain when using both semantic and syntactic structures in some language pairs.

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Compositional generalization with a broad-coverage semantic parser
Pia Weißenhorn | Lucia Donatelli | Alexander Koller

We show how the AM parser, a compositional semantic parser (Groschwitz et al., 2018) can solve compositional generalization on the COGS dataset. It is the first semantic parser that achieves high accuracy on both naturally occurring language and the synthetic COGS dataset. We discuss implications for corpus and model design for learning human-like generalization. Our results suggest that compositional generalization can be best achieved by building compositionality into semantic parsers.

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AnaLog: Testing Analytical and Deductive Logic Learnability in Language Models
Samuel Ryb | Mario Giulianelli | Arabella Sinclair | Raquel Fernández

We investigate the extent to which pre-trained language models acquire analytical and deductive logical reasoning capabilities as a side effect of learning word prediction. We present AnaLog, a natural language inference task designed to probe models for these capabilities, controlling for different invalid heuristics the models may adopt instead of learning the desired generalisations. We test four languagemodels on AnaLog, finding that they have all learned, to a different extent, to encode information that is predictive of entailment beyond shallow heuristics such as lexical overlap and grammaticality. We closely analyse the best performing language model and show that while it performs more consistently than other language models across logical connectives and reasoning domains, it still is sensitive to lexical and syntactic variations in the realisation of logical statements.

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Pairwise Representation Learning for Event Coreference
Xiaodong Yu | Wenpeng Yin | Dan Roth

Natural Language Processing tasks such as resolving the coreference of events require understanding the relations between two text snippets. These tasks are typically formulated as (binary) classification problems over independently induced representations of the text snippets. In this work, we develop a Pairwise Representation Learning (PairwiseRL) scheme for the event mention pairs, in which we jointly encode a pair of text snippets so that the representation of each mention in the pair is induced in the context of the other one. Furthermore, our representation supports a finer, structured representation of the text snippet to facilitate encoding events and their arguments. We show that PairwiseRL, despite its simplicity, outperforms the prior state-of-the-art event coreference systems on both cross-document and within-document event coreference benchmarks. We also conduct in-depth analysis in terms of the improvement and the limitation of pairwise representation so as to provide insights for future work.

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A Simple Unsupervised Approach for Coreference Resolution using Rule-based Weak Supervision
Alessandro Stolfo | Chris Tanner | Vikram Gupta | Mrinmaya Sachan

Labeled data for the task of Coreference Resolution is a scarce resource, requiring significant human effort. While state-of-the-art coreference models rely on such data, we propose an approach that leverages an end-to-end neural model in settings where labeled data is unavailable. Specifically, using weak supervision, we transfer the linguistic knowledge encoded by Stanford?s rule-based coreference system to the end-to-end model, which jointly learns rich, contextualized span representations and coreference chains. Our experiments on the English OntoNotes corpus demonstrate that our approach effectively benefits from the noisy coreference supervision, producing an improvement over Stanford?s rule-based system (+3.7 F1) and outperforming the previous best unsupervised model (+0.9 F1). Additionally, we validate the efficacy of our method on two other datasets: PreCo and Litbank (+2.5 and +5 F1 on Stanford’s system, respectively).

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Multilingual Extraction and Categorization of Lexical Collocations with Graph-aware Transformers
Luis Espinosa Anke | Alexander Shvets | Alireza Mohammadshahi | James Henderson | Leo Wanner

Recognizing and categorizing lexical collocations in context is useful for language learning, dictionary compilation and downstream NLP. However, it is a challenging task due to the varying degrees of frozenness lexical collocations exhibit. In this paper, we put forward a sequence tagging BERT-based model enhanced with a graph-aware transformer architecture, which we evaluate on the task of collocation recognition in context. Our results suggest that explicitly encoding syntactic dependencies in the model architecture is helpful, and provide insights on differences in collocation typification in English, Spanish and French.

While neural language models often perform surprisingly well on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, their strengths and limitations remain poorly understood. Controlled synthetic tasks are thus an increasingly important resource for diagnosing model behavior. In this work we focus on story understanding, a core competency for NLU systems. However, the main synthetic resource for story understanding, the bAbI benchmark, lacks such a systematic mechanism for controllable task generation. We develop Dyna-bAbI, a dynamic framework providing fine-grained control over task generation in bAbI. We demonstrate our ideas by constructing three new tasks requiring compositional generalization, an important evaluation setting absent from the original benchmark. We tested both special-purpose models developed for bAbI as well as state-of-the-art pre-trained methods, and found that while both approaches solve the original tasks (99% accuracy), neither approach succeeded in the compositional generalization setting, indicating the limitations of the original training data. We explored ways to augment the original data, and found that though diversifying training data was far more useful than simply increasing dataset size, it was still insufficient for driving robust compositional generalization (with 70% accuracy for complex compositions). Our results underscore the importance of highly controllable task generators for creating robust NLU systems through a virtuous cycle of model and data development.

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When Polysemy Matters: Modeling Semantic Categorization with Word Embeddings
Elizabeth Soper | Jean-pierre Koenig

Recent work using word embeddings to model semantic categorization have indicated that static models outperform the more recent contextual class of models (Majewska et al, 2021). In this paper, we consider polysemy as a possible confounding factor, comparing sense-level embeddings with previously studied static embeddings on both coarse- and fine-grained categorization tasks. We find that the effect of polysemy depends on how one defines semantic categorization; while sense-level embeddings dramatically outperform static embeddings in predicting coarse-grained categories derived from a word sorting task, they perform approximately equally in predicting fine-grained categories derived from context-free similarity judgments. Our findings highlight the different processes underlying human behavior on different types of semantic tasks.

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Word-Label Alignment for Event Detection: A New Perspective via Optimal Transport
Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh | Thien Nguyen

Event Detection (ED) aims to identify mentions/triggers of real world events in text. In the literature, this task is modeled as a sequence-labeling or word-prediction problem. In this work, we present a novel formulation in which ED is modeled as a word-label alignment task. In particular, given the words in a sentence and possible event types, the objective is to infer an alignment matrix in which event trigger words are aligned with the most likely event types. Moreover, we show that this new perspective facilitates the incorporation of word-label alignment biases to improve alignment matrix for ED. Novel alignment biases and Optimal Transport are introduced to solve our alignment problem for ED. We conduct experiments on a benchmark dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for ED.

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Comparison and Combination of Sentence Embeddings Derived from Different Supervision Signals
Hayato Tsukagoshi | Ryohei Sasano | Koichi Takeda

There have been many successful applications of sentence embedding methods. However, it has not been well understood what properties are captured in the resulting sentence embeddings depending on the supervision signals. In this paper, we focus on two types of sentence embedding methods with similar architectures and tasks: one fine-tunes pre-trained language models on the natural language inference task, and the other fine-tunes pre-trained language models on word prediction task from its definition sentence, and investigate their properties. Specifically, we compare their performances on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks using STS datasets partitioned from two perspectives: 1) sentence source and 2) superficial similarity of the sentence pairs, and compare their performances on the downstream and probing tasks. Furthermore, we attempt to combine the two methods and demonstrate that combining the two methods yields substantially better performance than the respective methods on unsupervised STS tasks and downstream tasks.

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Distilling Hypernymy Relations from Language Models: On the Effectiveness of Zero-Shot Taxonomy Induction
Devansh Jain | Luis Espinosa Anke

In this paper, we analyze zero-shot taxonomy learning methods which are based on distilling knowledge from language models via prompting and sentence scoring. We show that, despite their simplicity, these methods outperform some supervised strategies and are competitive with the current state-of-the-art under adequate conditions. We also show that statistical and linguistic properties of prompts dictate downstream performance.

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A Dynamic, Interpreted CheckList for Meaning-oriented NLG Metric Evaluation – through the Lens of Semantic Similarity Rating
Laura Zeidler | Juri Opitz | Anette Frank

Evaluating the quality of generated text is difficult, since traditional NLG evaluation metrics, focusing more on surface form than meaning, often fail to assign appropriate scores. This is especially problematic for AMR-to-text evaluation, given the abstract nature of AMR.Our work aims to support the development and improvement of NLG evaluation metrics that focus on meaning by developing a dynamic CheckList for NLG metrics that is interpreted by being organized around meaning-relevant linguistic phenomena. Each test instance consists of a pair of sentences with their AMR graphs and a human-produced textual semantic similarity or relatedness score. Our CheckList facilitates comparative evaluation of metrics and reveals strengths and weaknesses of novel and traditional metrics. We demonstrate the usefulness of CheckList by designing a new metric GraCo that computes lexical cohesion graphs over AMR concepts. Our analysis suggests that GraCo presents an interesting NLG metric worth future investigation and that meaning-oriented NLG metrics can profit from graph-based metric components using AMR.

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Assessing the Limits of the Distributional Hypothesis in Semantic Spaces: Trait-based Relational Knowledge and the Impact of Co-occurrences
Mark Anderson | Jose Camacho-collados

The increase in performance in NLP due to the prevalence of distributional models and deep learning has brought with it a reciprocal decrease in interpretability. This has spurred a focus on what neural networks learn about natural language with less of a focus on how. Some work has focused on the data used to develop data-driven models, but typically this line of work aims to highlight issues with the data, e.g. highlighting and offsetting harmful biases. This work contributes to the relatively untrodden path of what is required in data for models to capture meaningful representations of natural language. This is entails evaluating how well English and Spanish semantic spaces capture a particular type of relational knowledge, namely the traits associated with concepts (e.g. bananas-yellow), and exploring the role of co-occurrences in this context.

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A Generative Approach for Mitigating Structural Biases in Natural Language Inference
Dimion Asael | Zachary Ziegler | Yonatan Belinkov

Many natural language inference (NLI) datasets contain biases that allow models to perform well by only using a biased subset of the input, without considering the remainder features. For instance, models are able to classify samples by only using the hypothesis, without learning the true relationship between it and the premise. These structural biases lead discriminative models to learn unintended superficial features and generalize poorly out of the training distribution. In this work, we reformulate the NLI task as a generative task, where a model is conditioned on the biased subset of the input and the label and generates the remaining subset of the input. We show that by imposing a uniform prior, we obtain a provably unbiased model. Through synthetic experiments, we find that this approach is highly robust to large amounts of bias. We then demonstrate empirically on two types of natural bias that this approach leads to fully unbiased models in practice. However, we find that generative models are difficult to train and generally perform worse than discriminative baselines. We highlight the difficulty of the generative modeling task in the context of NLI as a cause for this worse performance. Finally, by fine-tuning the generative model with a discriminative objective, we reduce the performance gap between the generative model and the discriminative baseline, while allowing for a small amount of bias.

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Measuring Alignment Bias in Neural Seq2seq Semantic Parsers
Davide Locatelli | Ariadna Quattoni

Prior to deep learning the semantic parsing community has been interested in understanding and modeling the range of possible word alignments between natural language sentences and their corresponding meaning representations. Sequence-to-sequence models changed the research landscape suggesting that we no longer need to worry about alignments since they can be learned automatically by means of an attention mechanism. More recently, researchers have started to question such premise. In this work we investigate whether seq2seq models can handle both simple and complex alignments. To answer this question we augment the popular Geo semantic parsing dataset with alignment annotations and create Geo-Aligned. We then study the performance of standard seq2seq models on the examples that can be aligned monotonically versus examples that require more complex alignments. Our empirical study shows that performance is significantly better over monotonic alignments.

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Improved Induction of Narrative Chains via Cross-Document Relations
Andrew Blair-stanek | Benjamin Van Durme

The standard approach for inducing narrative chains considers statistics gathered per individual document. We consider whether statistics gathered using cross-document relations can lead to improved chain induction. Our study is motivated by legal narratives, where cases typically cite thematically similar cases. We consider four novel variations on pointwise mutual information (PMI), each accounting for cross-document relations in a different way. One proposed PMI variation performs 58% better relative to standard PMI on recall@50 and induces qualitatively better narrative chains.

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DRS Parsing as Sequence Labeling
Minxing Shen | Kilian Evang

We present the first fully trainable semantic parser for English, German, Italian, and Dutch discourse representation structures (DRSs) that is competitive in accuracy with recent sequence-to-sequence models and at the same time compositional in the sense that the output maps each token to one of a finite set of meaning fragments, and the meaning of the utterance is a function of the meanings of its parts. We argue that this property makes the system more transparent and more useful for human-in-the-loop annotation. We achieve this simply by casting DRS parsing as a sequence labeling task, where tokens are labeled with both fragments (lists of abstracted clauses with relative referent indices indicating unification) and symbols like word senses or names. We give a comprehensive error analysis that highlights areas for future work.

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How Does Data Corruption Affect Natural Language Understanding Models? A Study on GLUE datasets
Aarne Talman | Marianna Apidianaki | Stergios Chatzikyriakidis | Jörg Tiedemann

A central question in natural language understanding (NLU) research is whether high performance demonstrates the models’ strong reasoning capabilities. We present an extensive series of controlled experiments where pre-trained language models are exposed to data that have undergone specific corruption transformations. These involve removing instances of specific word classes and often lead to non-sensical sentences. Our results show that performance remains high on most GLUE tasks when the models are fine-tuned or tested on corrupted data, suggesting that they leverage other cues for prediction even in non-sensical contexts. Our proposed data transformations can be used to assess the extent to which a specific dataset constitutes a proper testbed for evaluating models’ language understanding capabilities.

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Leveraging Three Types of Embeddings from Masked Language Models in Idiom Token Classification
Ryosuke Takahashi | Ryohei Sasano | Koichi Takeda

Many linguistic expressions have idiomatic and literal interpretations, and the automatic distinction of these two interpretations has been studied for decades. Recent research has shown that contextualized word embeddings derived from masked language models (MLMs) can give promising results for idiom token classification. This indicates that contextualized word embedding alone contains information about whether the word is being used in a literal sense or not. However, we believe that more types of information can be derived from MLMs and that leveraging such information can improve idiom token classification. In this paper, we leverage three types of embeddings from MLMs; uncontextualized token embeddings and masked token embeddings in addition to the standard contextualized word embeddings and show that the newly added embeddings significantly improve idiom token classification for both English and Japanese datasets.

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“What makes a question inquisitive?” A Study on Type-Controlled Inquisitive Question Generation
Lingyu Gao | Debanjan Ghosh | Kevin Gimpel

We propose a type-controlled framework for inquisitive question generation. We annotate an inquisitive question dataset with question types, train question type classifiers, and finetune models for type-controlled question generation. Empirical results demonstrate that we can generate a variety of questions that adhere to specific types while drawing from the source texts. We also investigate strategies for selecting a single question from a generated set, considering both an informative vs. inquisitive question classifier and a pairwise ranker trained from a small set of expert annotations. Question selection using the pairwise ranker yields strong results in automatic and manual evaluation. Our human evaluation assesses multiple aspects of the generated questions, finding that the ranker chooses questions with the best syntax (4.59), semantics (4.37), and inquisitiveness (3.92) on a scale of 1-5, even rivaling the performance of human-written questions.

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Pretraining on Interactions for Learning Grounded Affordance Representations
Jack Merullo | Dylan Ebert | Carsten Eickhoff | Ellie Pavlick

Lexical semantics and cognitive science point to affordances (i.e. the actions that objects support) as critical for understanding and representing nouns and verbs. However, study of these semantic features has not yet been integrated with the ?foundation? models that currently dominate language representation research. We hypothesize that predictive modeling of object state over time will result in representations that encode object affordance information ?for free?. We train a neural network to predict objects? trajectories in a simulated interaction and show that our network?s latent representations differentiate between both observed and unobserved affordances. We find that models trained using 3D simulations outperform conventional 2D computer vision models trained on a similar task, and, on initial inspection, that differences between concepts correspond to expected features (e.g., roll entails rotation) . Our results suggest a way in which modern deep learning approaches to grounded language learning can be integrated with traditional formal semantic notions of lexical representations.

This paper describes the evolution of the PropBank approach to semantic role labeling over the last two decades. During this time the PropBank frame files have been expanded to include non-verbal predicates such as adjectives, prepositions and multi-word expressions. The number of domains, genres and languages that have been PropBanked has also expanded greatly, creating an opportunity for much more challenging and robust testing of the generalization capabilities of PropBank semantic role labeling systems. We also describe the substantial effort that has gone into ensuring the consistency and reliability of the various annotated datasets and resources, to better support the training and evaluation of such systems

Recognizing speech acts (SA) is crucial for capturing meaning beyond what is said, making communicative intentions particularly relevant to identify urgent messages. This paper attempts to measure for the first time the impact of SA on urgency detection during crises,006in tweets. We propose a new dataset annotated for both urgency and SA, and develop several deep learning architectures to inject SA into urgency detection while ensuring models generalisability. Our results show that taking speech acts into account in tweet analysis improves information type detection in an out-of-type configuration where models are evaluated in unseen event types during training. These results are encouraging and constitute a first step towards SA-aware disaster management in social media.

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What Drives the Use of Metaphorical Language? Negative Insights from Abstractness, Affect, Discourse Coherence and Contextualized Word Representations
Prisca Piccirilli | Sabine Schulte Im Walde

Given a specific discourse, which discourse properties trigger the use of metaphorical language, rather than using literal alternatives? For example, what drives people to say grasp the meaning rather than understand the meaning within a specific context? Many NLP approaches to metaphorical language rely on cognitive and (psycho-)linguistic insights and have successfully defined models of discourse coherence, abstractness and affect. In this work, we build five simple models relying on established cognitive and linguistic properties ? frequency, abstractness, affect, discourse coherence and contextualized word representations ? to predict the use of a metaphorical vs. synonymous literal expression in context. By comparing the models? outputs to human judgments, our study indicates that our selected properties are not sufficient to systematically explain metaphorical vs. literal language choices.

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Unsupervised Reinforcement Adaptation for Class-Imbalanced Text Classification
Yuexin Wu | Xiaolei Huang

Class imbalance naturally exists when label distributions are not aligned across source and target domains. However, existing state-of-the-art UDA models learn domain-invariant representations across domains and evaluate primarily on class-balanced data. In this work, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation approach via reinforcement learning that jointly leverages feature variants and imbalanced labels across domains. We experiment with the text classification task for its easily accessible datasets and compare the proposed method with five baselines. Experiments on three datasets prove that our proposed method can effectively learn robust domain-invariant representations and successfully adapt text classifiers on imbalanced classes over domains.

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Event Causality Identification via Generation of Important Context Words
Hieu Man | Minh Nguyen | Thien Nguyen

An important problem of Information Extraction involves Event Causality Identification (ECI) that seeks to identify causal relation between pairs of event mentions. Prior models for ECI have mainly solved the problem using the classification framework that does not explore prediction/generation of important context words from input sentences for causal recognition. In this work, we consider the words along the dependency path between the two event mentions in the dependency tree as the important context words for ECI. We introduce dependency path generation as a complementary task for ECI, which can be solved jointly with causal label prediction to improve the performance. To facilitate the multi-task learning, we cast ECI into a generation problem that aims to generate both causal relation and dependency path words from input sentence. In addition, we propose to use the REINFORCE algorithm to train our generative model where novel reward functions are designed to capture both causal prediction accuracy and generation quality. The experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of the proposed model for ECI.

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Capturing the Content of a Document through Complex Event Identification
Zheng Qi | Elior Sulem | Haoyu Wang | Xiaodong Yu | Dan Roth

Granular events, instantiated in a document by predicates, can usually be grouped into more general events, called complex events. Together, they capture the major content of the document. Recent work grouped granular events by defining event regions, filtering out sentences that are irrelevant to the main content. However, this approach assumes that a given complex event is always described in consecutive sentences, which does not always hold in practice. In this paper, we introduce the task of complex event identification. We address this task as a pipeline, first predicting whether two granular events mentioned in the text belong to the same complex event, independently of their position in the text, and then using this to cluster them into complex events. Due to the difficulty of predicting whether two granular events belong to the same complex event in isolation, we propose a context-augmented representation learning approach CONTEXTRL that adds additional context to better model the pairwise relation between granular events. We show that our approach outperforms strong baselines on the complex event identification task and further present a promising case study exploring the effectiveness of using complex events as input for document-level argument extraction.

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Online Coreference Resolution for Dialogue Processing: Improving Mention-Linking on Real-Time Conversations
Liyan Xu | Jinho D. Choi

This paper suggests a direction of coreference resolution for online decoding on actively generated input such as dialogue, where the model accepts an utterance and its past context, then finds mentions in the current utterance as well as their referents, upon each dialogue turn. A baseline and four incremental updated models adapted from the mention linking paradigm are proposed for this new setting, which address different aspects including the singletons, speaker-grounded encoding and cross-turn mention contextualization. Our approach is assessed on three datasets: Friends, OntoNotes, and BOLT. Results show that each aspect brings out steady improvement, and our best models outperform the baseline by over 10%, presenting an effective system for this setting. Further analysis highlights the task characteristics, such as the significance of addressing the mention recall.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured and Unstructured Knowledge Integration (SUKI)

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FabKG: A Knowledge graph of Manufacturing Science domain utilizing structured and unconventional unstructured knowledge source
Aman Kumar | Akshay Bharadwaj | Binil Starly | Collin Lynch

As the demands for large-scale information processing have grown, knowledge graph-based approaches have gained prominence for representing general and domain knowledge. The development of such general representations is essential, particularly in domains such as manufacturing which intelligent processes and adaptive education can enhance. Despite the continuous accumulation of text in these domains, the lack of structured data has created information extraction and knowledge transfer barriers. In this paper, we report on work towards developing robust knowledge graphs based upon entity and relation data for both commercial and educational uses. To create the FabKG (Manufacturing knowledge graph), we have utilized textbook index words, research paper keywords, FabNER (manufacturing NER), to extract a sub knowledge base contained within Wikidata. Moreover, we propose a novel crowdsourcing method for KG creation by leveraging student notes, which contain invaluable information but are not captured as meaningful information, excluding their use in personal preparation for learning and written exams. We have created a knowledge graph containing 65000+ triples using all data sources. We have also shown the use case of domain-specific question answering and expression/formula-based question answering for educational purposes.

Because of the compositionality of natural language, syntactic structure which contains the information about the relationship between words is a key factor for semantic understanding. However, the widely adopted Transformer is hard to learn the syntactic structure effectively in dialogue generation tasks. To explicitly model the compositionaity of language in Transformer Block, we restrict the information flow between words by constructing directed dependency graph and propose Dependency Relation Attention (DRA). Experimental results demonstrate that DRA can further improve the performance of state-of-the-art models for dialogue generation.

Intent classification (IC) and slot filling (SF) are two fundamental tasks in modern Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems. Collecting and annotating large amounts of data to train deep learning models for such systems are not scalable. This problem can be addressed by learning from few examples using fast supervised meta-learning techniques such as prototypical networks. In this work, we systematically investigate how contrastive learning and data augmentation methods can benefit these existing meta-learning pipelines for jointly modelled IC/SF tasks. Through extensive experiments across standard IC/SF benchmarks (SNIPS and ATIS), we show that our proposed approaches outperform standard meta-learning methods: contrastive losses as a regularizer in conjunction with prototypical networks consistently outperform the existing state-of-the-art for both IC and SF tasks, while data augmentation strategies primarily improve few-shot IC by a significant margin

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Learning Open Domain Multi-hop Search Using Reinforcement Learning
Enrique Noriega-Atala | Mihai Surdeanu | Clayton Morrison

We propose a method to teach an automated agent to learn how to search for multi-hop paths of relations between entities in an open domain. The method learns a policy for directing existing information retrieval and machine reading resources to focus on relevant regions of a corpus. The approach formulates the learning problem as a Markov decision process with a state representation that encodes the dynamics of the search process and a reward structure that minimizes the number of documents that must be processed while still finding multi-hop paths. We implement the method in an actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm and evaluate it on a dataset of search problems derived from a subset of English Wikipedia. The algorithm finds a family of policies that succeeds in extracting the desired information while processing fewer documents compared to several baseline heuristic algorithms.

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Table Retrieval May Not Necessitate Table-specific Model Design
Zhiruo Wang | Zhengbao Jiang | Eric Nyberg | Graham Neubig

Tables are an important form of structured data for both human and machine readers alike, providing answers to questions that cannot, or cannot easily, be found in texts. Recent work has designed special models and training paradigms for table-related tasks such as table-based question answering and table retrieval. Though effective, they add complexity in both modeling and data acquisition compared to generic text solutions and obscure which elements are truly beneficial. In this work, we focus on the task of table retrieval, and ask: “is table-specific model design necessary for table retrieval, or can a simpler text-based model be effectively used to achieve a similar result?’’ First, we perform an analysis on a table-based portion of the Natural Questions dataset (NQ-table), and find that structure plays a negligible role in more than 70% of the cases. Based on this, we experiment with a general Dense Passage Retriever (DPR) based on text and a specialized Dense Table Retriever (DTR) that uses table-specific model designs. We find that DPR performs well without any table-specific design and training, and even achieves superior results compared to DTR when fine-tuned on properly linearized tables. We then experiment with three modules to explicitly encode table structures, namely auxiliary row/column embeddings, hard attention masks, and soft relation-based attention biases. However, none of these yielded significant improvements, suggesting that table-specific model design may not be necessary for table retrieval.

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Transfer Learning and Masked Generation for Answer Verbalization
Sebastien Montella | Lina Rojas-Barahona | Frederic Bechet | Johannes Heinecke | Alexis Nasr

Structured Knowledge has recently emerged as an essential component to support fine-grained Question Answering (QA). In general, QA systems query a Knowledge Base (KB) to detect and extract the raw answers as final prediction. However, as lacking of context, language generation can offer a much informative and complete response. In this paper, we propose to combine the power of transfer learning and the advantage of entity placeholders to produce high-quality verbalization of extracted answers from a KB. We claim that such approach is especially well-suited for answer generation. Our experiments show 44.25%, 3.26% and 29.10% relative gain in BLEU over the state-of-the-art on the VQuAnDA, ParaQA and VANiLLa datasets, respectively. We additionally provide minor hallucinations corrections in VANiLLa standing for 5% of each of the training and testing set. We witness a median absolute gain of 0.81 SacreBLEU. This strengthens the importance of data quality when using automated evaluation.

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Knowledge Transfer between Structured and Unstructured Sources for Complex Question Answering
Lingbo Mo | Zhen Wang | Jie Zhao | Huan Sun

Multi-hop question answering (QA) combines multiple pieces of evidence to search for the correct answer. Reasoning over a text corpus (TextQA) and/or a knowledge base (KBQA) has been extensively studied and led to distinct system architectures. However, knowledge transfer between such two QA systems has been under-explored. Research questions like what knowledge is transferred or whether the transferred knowledge can help answer over one source using another one, are yet to be answered. In this paper, therefore, we study the knowledge transfer of multi-hop reasoning between structured and unstructured sources. We first propose a unified QA framework named SimultQA to enable knowledge transfer and bridge the distinct supervisions from KB and text sources. Then, we conduct extensive analyses to explore how knowledge is transferred by leveraging the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. We focus on the low-resource fine-tuning to show that pre-training SimultQA on one source can substantially improve its performance on the other source. More fine-grained analyses on transfer behaviors reveal the types of transferred knowledge and transfer patterns. We conclude with insights into how to construct better QA datasets and systems to exploit knowledge transfer for future work.

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Hierarchical Control of Situated Agents through Natural Language
Shuyan Zhou | Pengcheng Yin | Graham Neubig

When humans perform a particular task, they do so hierarchically: splitting higher-level tasks into smaller sub-tasks. However, most works on natural language (NL) command of situated agents have treated the procedures to be executed as flat sequences of simple actions, or any hierarchies of procedures have been shallow at best. In this paper, we propose a formalism of procedures as programs, a method for representing hierarchical procedural knowledge for agent command and control aimed at enabling easy application to various scenarios. We further propose a modeling paradigm of hierarchical modular networks, which consist of a planner and reactors that convert NL intents to predictions of executable programs and probe the environment for information necessary to complete the program execution. We instantiate this framework on the IQA and ALFRED datasets for NL instruction following. Our model outperforms reactive baselines by a large margin on both datasets. We also demonstrate that our framework is more data-efficient, and that it allows for fast iterative development.

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bib (full) Proceedings of The Third Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing (SustaiNLP)

The success of large BERT models has raised the demand for model compression methods to reduce model size and computational cost. Quantization can reduce the model size and inference latency, making inference more efficient, without changing its stucture, but it comes at the cost of performance degradation. Due to the complex loss landscape of ternarized/binarized BERT, we present an efficient two-stage progressive quantization method in which we fine tune the model with quantized weights and progressively lower its bits, and then we fine tune the model with quantized weights and activations. At the same time, we strategically choose which bitwidth to fine-tune on and to initialize from, and which bitwidth to fine-tune under augmented data to outperform the existing BERT binarization methods without adding an extra module, compressing the binary model 18% more than previous binarization methods or compressing BERT by 31x w.r.t. to the full-precision model. Our method without data augmentation can outperform existing BERT ternarization methods.

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KGRefiner: Knowledge Graph Refinement for Improving Accuracy of Translational Link Prediction Methods
Mohammad Javad Saeedizade | Najmeh Torabian | Behrouz Minaei-Bidgoli

Link Prediction is the task of predicting missing relations between knowledge graph entities (KG). Recent work in link prediction mainly attempted to adapt a model to increase link prediction accuracy by using more layers in neural network architecture, which heavily rely on computational resources. This paper proposes the refinement of knowledge graphs to perform link prediction operations more accurately using relatively fast translational models. Translational link prediction models have significantly less complexity than deep learning approaches; this motivated us to improve their accuracy. Our method uses the ontologies of knowledge graphs to add information as auxiliary nodes to the graph. Then, these auxiliary nodes are connected to ordinary nodes of the KG that contain auxiliary information in their hierarchy. Our experiments show that our method can significantly increase the performance of translational link prediction methods in Hit@10, Mean Rank, and Mean Reciprocal Rank.

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Algorithmic Diversity and Tiny Models: Comparing Binary Networks and the Fruit Fly Algorithm on Document Representation Tasks
Tanise Ceron | Nhut Truong | Aurelie Herbelot

Neural language models have seen a dramatic increase in size in the last years. While many still advocate that ‘bigger is better’, work in model distillation has shown that the number of parameters used by very large networks is actually more than what is required for state-of-the-art performance. This prompts an obvious question: can we build smaller models from scratch, rather than going through the inefficient process of training at scale and subsequently reducing model size. In this paper, we investigate the behaviour of a biologically inspired algorithm, based on the fruit fly’s olfactory system. This algorithm has shown good performance in the past on the task of learning word embeddings. We now put it to the test on the task of semantic hashing. Specifically, we compare the fruit fly to a standard binary network on the task of generating locality-sensitive hashes for text documents, measuring both task performance and energy consumption. Our results indicate that the two algorithms have complementary strengths while showing similar electricity usage.

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Look Ma, Only 400 Samples! Revisiting the Effectiveness of Automatic N-Gram Rule Generation for Spelling Normalization in Filipino
Lorenzo Jaime Flores | Dragomir Radev

With 84.75 million Filipinos online, the ability for models to process online text is crucial for developing Filipino NLP applications. To this end, spelling correction is a crucial preprocessing step for downstream processing. However, the lack of data prevents the use of language models for this task. In this paper, we propose an N-Gram + Damerau-Levenshtein distance model with automatic rule extraction. We train the model on 300 samples, and show that despite limited training data, it achieves good performance and outperforms other deep learning approaches in terms of accuracy and edit distance. Moreover, the model (1) requires little compute power, (2) trains in little time, thus allowing for retraining, and (3) is easily interpretable, allowing for direct troubleshooting, highlighting the success of traditional approaches over more complex deep learning models in settings where data is unavailable.

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Who Says Elephants Can’t Run: Bringing Large Scale MoE Models into Cloud Scale Production
Young Jin Kim | Rawn Henry | Raffy Fahim | Hany Hassan

Mixture of Experts (MoE) models with conditional execution of sparsely activated layers has enabled training models with a much larger number of parameters. As a result, these models have achieved significantly better quality on various natural language processing tasks including machine translation. However, it remains challenging to deploy such models in real-life scenarios due to the large memory requirements and inefficient inference. In this work, we introduce a highly efficient inference framework with several optimization approaches to accelerate the computation of sparse models and cut down the memory consumption significantly. While we achieve up to 26x speed-up in terms of throughput, we also reduce the model size almost to one eighth of the original 32-bit float model by quantizing expert weights into 4-bit integers. As a result, we are able to deploy 136x larger models with 27% less cost and significantly better quality with large scale MoE model deployment compared to the existing solutions. This enables a paradigm shift in deploying large scale multilingual MoE transformers models instead of distilling into dozens of smaller models per language or task.

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Data-Efficient Auto-Regressive Document Retrieval for Fact Verification
James Thorne

Document retrieval is a core component of many knowledge-intensive natural language processing task formulations such as fact verification. Sources of textual knowledge such as Wikipedia articles condition the generation of answers from the models. Recent advances in retrieval use sequence-to-sequence models to incrementally predict the title of the appropriate Wikipedia page given an input instance. However, this method requires supervision in the form of human annotation to label which Wikipedia pages contain appropriate context. This paper introduces a distant-supervision method that does not require any annotation train auto-regressive retrievers that attain competitive R-Precision and Recall in a zero-shot setting. Furthermore we show that with task-specific supervised fine-tuning, auto-regressive retrieval performance for two Wikipedia-based fact verification tasks can approach or even exceed full supervision using less than 1/4 of the annotated data. We release all code and models

In recent years, multilingual pre-trained language models have gained prominence due to their remarkable performance on numerous downstream Natural Language Processing tasks (NLP). However, pre-training these large multilingual language models requires a lot of training data, which is not available for African Languages. Active learning is a semi-supervised learning algorithm, in which a model consistently and dynamically learns to identify the most beneficial samples to train itself on, in order to achieve better optimization and performance on downstream tasks. Furthermore, active learning effectively and practically addresses real-world data scarcity. Despite all its benefits, active learning, in the context of NLP and especially multilingual language models pretraining, has received little consideration. In this paper, we present AfroLM, a multilingual language model pretrained from scratch on 23 African languages (the largest effort to date) using our novel self-active learning framework. Pretrained on a dataset significantly (14x) smaller than existing baselines, AfroLM outperforms many multilingual pretrained language models (AfriBERTa, XLMR-base, mBERT) on various NLP downstream tasks (NER, text classification, and sentiment analysis). Additional out-of-domain sentiment analysis experiments show that AfroLM is able to generalize well across various domains. We release the code source, and our datasets used in our framework at https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/MLM_AL.

With the growing prevalence of large-scale language models, their energy footprint and potential to learn and amplify historical biases are two pressing challenges. Dataset distillation (DD) — a method for reducing the dataset size by learning a small number of synthetic samples which encode the information in the original dataset — is a method for reducing the cost of model training, however its impact on fairness has not been studied. We investigate how DD impacts on group bias, with experiments over two language classification tasks, concluding that vanilla DD preserves the bias of the dataset. We then show how existing debiasing methods can be combined with DD to produce models that are fair and accurate, at reduced training cost.

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bib (full) Proceedings of TextGraphs-16: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing

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Multilevel Hypernode Graphs for Effective and Efficient Entity Linking
David Montero | Javier Martínez | Javier Yebes

Information extraction on documents still remains a challenge, especially when dealing with unstructured documents with complex and variable layouts. Graph Neural Networks seem to be a promising approach to overcome these difficulties due to their flexible and sparse nature, but they have not been exploited yet. In this work, we present a multi-level graph-based model that performs entity building and linking on unstructured documents, purely based on GNNs, and extremely light (0.3 million parameters). We also propose a novel strategy for an optimal propagation of the information between the graph levels based on hypernodes. The conducted experiments on public and private datasets demonstrate that our model is suitable for solving the tasks, and that the proposed propagation strategy is optimal and outperforms other approaches.

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Cross-Modal Contextualized Hidden State Projection Method for Expanding of Taxonomic Graphs
Irina Nikishina | Alsu Vakhitova | Elena Tutubalina | Alexander Panchenko

Taxonomy is a graph of terms organized hierarchically using is-a (hypernymy) relations. We suggest novel candidate-free task formulation for the taxonomy enrichment task. To solve the task, we leverage lexical knowledge from the pre-trained models to predict new words missing in the taxonomic resource. We propose a method that combines graph-, and text-based contextualized representations from transformer networks to predict new entries to the taxonomy. We have evaluated the method suggested for this task against text-only baselines based on BERT and fastText representations. The results demonstrate that incorporation of graph embedding is beneficial in the task of hyponym prediction using contextualized models. We hope the new challenging task will foster further research in automatic text graph construction methods.

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Sharing Parameter by Conjugation for Knowledge Graph Embeddings in Complex Space
Xincan Feng | Zhi Qu | Yuchang Cheng | Taro Watanabe | Nobuhiro Yugami

A Knowledge Graph (KG) is the directed graphical representation of entities and relations in the real world. KG can be applied in diverse Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks where knowledge is required. The need to scale up and complete KG automatically yields Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE), a shallow machine learning model that is suffering from memory and training time consumption issues. To mitigate the computational load, we propose a parameter-sharing method, i.e., using conjugate parameters for complex numbers employed in KGE models. Our method improves memory efficiency by 2x in relation embedding while achieving comparable performance to the state-of-the-art non-conjugate models, with faster, or at least comparable, training time. We demonstrated the generalizability of our method on two best-performing KGE models 5^★E (CITATION) and ComplEx (CITATION) on five benchmark datasets.

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A Clique-based Graphical Approach to Detect Interpretable Adjectival Senses in Hungarian
Enikő Héja | Noémi Ligeti-Nagy

The present paper introduces an ongoing research which aims to detect interpretable adjectival senses from monolingual corpora applying an unsupervised WSI approach. According to our expectations the findings of our investigation are going to contribute to the work of lexicographers, linguists and also facilitate the creation of benchmarks with semantic information for the NLP community. For doing so, we set up four criteria to distinguish between senses. We experiment with a graphical approach to model our criteria and then perform a detailed, linguistically motivated manual evaluation of the results.

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GUSUM: Graph-based Unsupervised Summarization Using Sentence Features Scoring and Sentence-BERT
Tuba Gokhan | Phillip Smith | Mark Lee

Unsupervised extractive document summarization aims to extract salient sentences from a document without requiring a labelled corpus. In existing graph-based methods, vertex and edge weights are usually created by calculating sentence similarities. In this paper, we develop a Graph-Based Unsupervised Summarization(GUSUM) method for extractive text summarization based on the principle of including the most important sentences while excluding sentences with similar meanings in the summary. We modify traditional graph ranking algorithms with recent sentence embedding models and sentence features and modify how sentence centrality is computed. We first define the sentence feature scores represented at the vertices, indicating the importance of each sentence in the document. After this stage, we use Sentence-BERT for obtaining sentence embeddings to better capture the sentence meaning. In this way, we define the edges of a graph where semantic similarities are represented. Next we create an undirected graph that includes sentence significance and similarities between sentences. In the last stage, we determine the most important sentences in the document with the ranking method we suggested on the graph created. Experiments on CNN/Daily Mail, New York Times, arXiv, and PubMed datasets show our approach achieves high performance on unsupervised graph-based summarization when evaluated both automatically and by humans.

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The Effectiveness of Masked Language Modeling and Adapters for Factual Knowledge Injection
Sondre Wold

This paper studies the problem of injecting factual knowledge into large pre-trained language models. We train adapter modules on parts of the ConceptNet knowledge graph using the masked language modeling objective and evaluate the success of the method by a series of probing experiments on the LAMA probe. Mean P@K curves for different configurations indicate that the technique is effective, increasing the performance on sub-sets of the LAMA probe for large values of k by adding as little as 2.1% additional parameters to the original models.

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Text-Aware Graph Embeddings for Donation Behavior Prediction
MeiXing Dong | Xueming Xu | Rada Mihalcea

Predicting user behavior is essential for a large number of applications including recommender and dialog systems, and more broadly in domains such as healthcare, education, and economics. In this paper, we show that we can effectively predict donation behavior by using text-aware graph models, building upon graphs that connect user behaviors and their interests. Using a university donation dataset, we show that the graph representation significantly improves over learning from textual representations. Moreover, we show how incorporating implicit information inferred from text associated with the graph entities brings additional improvements. Our results demonstrate the role played by text-aware graph representations in predicting donation behavior.

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Word Sense Disambiguation of French Lexicographical Examples Using Lexical Networks
Aman Sinha | Sandrine Ollinger | Mathieu Constant

This paper focuses on the task of word sense disambiguation (WSD) on lexicographic examples relying on the French Lexical Network (fr-LN). For this purpose, we exploit the lexical and relational properties of the network, that we integrated in a feedforward neural WSD model on top of pretrained French BERT embeddings. We provide a comparative study with various models and further show the impact of our approach regarding polysemic units.

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RuDSI: Graph-based Word Sense Induction Dataset for Russian
Anna Aksenova | Ekaterina Gavrishina | Elisei Rykov | Andrey Kutuzov

We present RuDSI, a new benchmark for word sense induction (WSI) in Russian. The dataset was created using manual annotation and semi-automatic clustering of Word Usage Graphs (WUGs). RuDSI is completely data-driven (based on texts from Russian National Corpus), with no external word senses imposed on annotators. We present and analyze RuDSI, describe our annotation workflow, show how graph clustering parameters affect the dataset, report the performance that several baseline WSI methods obtain on RuDSI and discuss possibilities for improving these scores.

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Temporal Graph Analysis of Misinformation Spreaders in Social Media
Joan Plepi | Flora Sakketou | Henri-Jacques Geiss | Lucie Flek

Proactively identifying misinformation spreaders is an important step towards mitigating the impact of fake news on our society. Although the news domain is subject to rapid changes over time, the temporal dynamics of the spreaders’ language and network have not been explored yet. In this paper, we analyze the users’ time-evolving semantic similarities and social interactions and show that such patterns can, on their own, indicate misinformation spreading. Building on these observations, we propose a dynamic graph-based framework that leverages the dynamic nature of the users’ network for detecting fake news spreaders. We validate our design choice through qualitative analysis and demonstrate the contributions of our model’s components through a series of exploratory and ablative experiments on two datasets.

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TextGraphs 2022 Shared Task on Natural Language Premise Selection
Marco Valentino | Deborah Ferreira | Mokanarangan Thayaparan | André Freitas | Dmitry Ustalov

The Shared Task on Natural Language Premise Selection (NLPS) asks participants to retrieve the set of premises that are most likely to be useful for proving a given mathematical statement from a supporting knowledge base. While previous editions of the TextGraphs shared tasks series targeted multi-hop inference for explanation regeneration in the context of science questions (Thayaparan et al., 2021; Jansen and Ustalov, 2020, 2019), NLPS aims to assess the ability of state-of-the-art approaches to operate on a mixture of natural and mathematical language and model complex multi-hop reasoning dependencies between statements. To this end, this edition of the shared task makes use of a large set of approximately 21k mathematical statements extracted from the PS-ProofWiki dataset (Ferreira and Freitas, 2020a). In this summary paper, we present the results of the 1st edition of the NLPS task, providing a description of the evaluation data, and the participating systems. Additionally, we perform a detailed analysis of the results, evaluating various aspects involved in mathematical language processing and multi-hop inference. The best-performing system achieved a MAP of 15.39, improving the performance of a TF-IDF baseline by approximately 3.0 MAP.

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IJS at TextGraphs-16 Natural Language Premise Selection Task: Will Contextual Information Improve Natural Language Premise Selection?
Thi Hong Hanh Tran | Matej Martinc | Antoine Doucet | Senja Pollak

Natural Language Premise Selection (NLPS) is a mathematical Natural Language Processing (NLP) task that retrieves a set of applicable relevant premises to support the end-user finding the proof for a particular statement. In this research, we evaluate the impact of Transformer-based contextual information and different fundamental similarity scores toward NLPS. The results demonstrate that the contextual representation is better at capturing meaningful information despite not being pretrained in the mathematical background compared to the statistical approach (e.g., the TF-IDF) with a boost of around 3.00% MAP@500.

This paper describes our system for the submission to the TextGraphs 2022 shared task at COLING 2022: Natural Language Premise Selection (NLPS) from mathematical texts. The task of NLPS is about selecting mathematical statements called premises in a knowledge base written in natural language and mathematical formulae that are most likely to be used to prove a particular mathematical proof. We formulated this task as an unsupervised semantic similarity task by first obtaining contextualized embeddings of both the premises and mathematical proofs using sentence transformers. We then obtained the cosine similarity between the embeddings of premises and proofs and then selected premises with the highest cosine scores as the most probable. Our system improves over the baseline system that uses bag of words models based on term frequency inverse document frequency in terms of mean average precision (MAP) by about 23.5% (0.1516 versus 0.1228).

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Keyword-based Natural Language Premise Selection for an Automatic Mathematical Statement Proving
Doratossadat Dastgheib | Ehsaneddin Asgari

Extraction of supportive premises for a mathematical problem can contribute to profound success in improving automatic reasoning systems. One bottleneck in automated theorem proving is the lack of a proper semantic information retrieval system for mathematical texts. In this paper, we show the effect of keyword extraction in the natural language premise selection (NLPS) shared task proposed in TextGraph-16 that seeks to select the most relevant sentences supporting a given mathematical statement.

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TextGraphs-16 Natural Language Premise Selection Task: Zero-Shot Premise Selection with Prompting Generative Language Models
Liubov Kovriguina | Roman Teucher | Robert Wardenga

Automated theorem proving can benefit a lot from methods employed in natural language processing, knowledge graphs and information retrieval: this non-trivial task combines formal languages understanding, reasoning, similarity search. We tackle this task by enhancing semantic similarity ranking with prompt engineering, which has become a new paradigm in natural language understanding. None of our approaches requires additional training. Despite encouraging results reported by prompt engineering approaches for a range of NLP tasks, for the premise selection task vanilla re-ranking by prompting GPT-3 doesn’t outperform semantic similarity ranking with SBERT, but merging of the both rankings shows better results.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Threat, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC 2022)

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Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Threat, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC 2022)
Ritesh Kumar | Atul Kr. Ojha | Marcos Zampieri | Shervin Malmasi | Daniel Kadar

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L3Cube-MahaHate: A Tweet-based Marathi Hate Speech Detection Dataset and BERT Models
Hrushikesh Patil | Abhishek Velankar | Raviraj Joshi

Social media platforms are used by a large number of people prominently to express their thoughts and opinions. However, these platforms have contributed to a sub stantial amount of hateful and abusive content as well. Therefore, it is impor tant to curb the spread of hate speech on these platforms. In India, Marathi is one of the most popular languages used by a wide audience. In this work, we present L3Cube-MahaHate, the first ma jor Hate Speech Dataset in Marathi. The dataset is curated from Twitter, anno tated manually. Our dataset consists of over 00 distinct tweets labeled into four major classes i.e hate, offensive, pro fane, and not. We present the approaches used for collecting and annotating the data and the challenges faced during the pro cess. Finally, we present baseline classi fication results using deep learning mod els based on CNN, LSTM, and Transform ers. We explore mono-lingual and multi lingual variants of BERT like MahaBERT, IndicBERT, mBERT, and xlm-RoBERTa and show that mono-lingual models per form better than their multi-lingual coun terparts. The MahaBERT model provides the best results on L3Cube-MahaHate Corpus.

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Which One Is More Toxic? Findings from Jigsaw Rate Severity of Toxic Comments
Millon Das | Punyajoy Saha | Mithun Das

The proliferation of online hate speech has necessitated the creation of algorithms which can detect toxicity. Most of the past research focuses on this detection as a classification task, but assigning an absolute toxicity label is often tricky. Hence, few of the past works transform the same task into a regression. This paper shows the comparative evaluation of different transformers and traditional machine learning models on a recently released toxicity severity measurement dataset by Jigsaw. We further demonstrate the issues with the model predictions using explainability analysis.

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Can Attention-based Transformers Explain or Interpret Cyberbullying Detection?
Kanishk Verma | Tijana Milosevic | Brian Davis

Automated textual cyberbullying detection is known to be a challenging task. It is sometimes expected that messages associated with bullying will either be a) abusive, b) targeted at a specific individual or group, or c) have a negative sentiment. Transfer learning by fine-tuning pre-trained attention-based transformer language models (LMs) has achieved near state-of-the-art (SOA) precision in identifying textual fragments as being bullying-related or not. This study looks closely at two SOA LMs, BERT and HateBERT, fine-tuned on real-life cyberbullying datasets from multiple social networking platforms. We intend to determine whether these finely calibrated pre-trained LMs learn textual cyberbullying attributes or syntactical features in the text. The results of our comprehensive experiments show that despite the fact that attention weights are drawn more strongly to syntactical features of the text at every layer, attention weights cannot completely account for the decision-making of such attention-based transformers.

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Bias, Threat and Aggression Identification Using Machine Learning Techniques on Multilingual Comments
Kirti Kumari | Shaury Srivastav | Rajiv Ranjan Suman

In this paper, we presented our team "IIITRanchi” for the Trolling, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC-3) 2022 shared tasks. Aggression and its different forms on social media and other platforms had tremendous growth on the Internet. In this work we have tried upon different aspects of aggression, aggression intensity, bias of different forms and their usage online and its identification using different Machine Learning techniques. We have classified each sample at seven different tasks namely aggression level, aggression intensity, discursive role, gender bias, religious bias, caste/class bias and ethnicity/racial bias as specified in the shared tasks. Both of our teams tried machine learning classifiers and achieved the good results. Overall, our team "IIITRanchi” ranked first position in this shared tasks competition.

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The Role of Context in Detecting the Target of Hate Speech
Ilia Markov | Walter Daelemans

Online hate speech detection is an inherently challenging task that has recently received much attention from the natural language processing community. Despite a substantial increase in performance, considerable challenges remain and include encoding contextual information into automated hate speech detection systems. In this paper, we focus on detecting the target of hate speech in Dutch social media: whether a hateful Facebook comment is directed against migrants or not (i.e., against someone else). We manually annotate the relevant conversational context and investigate the effect of different aspects of context on performance when adding it to a Dutch transformer-based pre-trained language model, BERTje. We show that performance of the model can be significantly improved by integrating relevant contextual information.

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Annotating Targets of Toxic Language at the Span Level
Baran Barbarestani | Isa Maks | Piek Vossen

In this paper, we discuss an interpretable framework to integrate toxic language annotations. Most data sets address only one aspect of the complex relationship in toxic communication and are inconsistent with each other. Enriching annotations with more details and information is however of great importance in order to develop high-performing and comprehensive explainable language models. Such systems should recognize and interpret both expressions that are toxic as well as expressions that make reference to specific targets to combat toxic language. We therefore created a crowd-annotation task to mark the spans of words that refer to target communities as an extension of the HateXplain data set. We present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the annotations. We also fine-tuned RoBERTa-base on our data and experimented with different data thresholds to measure their effect on the classification. The F1-score of our best model on the test set is 79%. The annotations are freely available and can be combined with the existing HateXplain annotation to build richer and more complete models.

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Is More Data Better? Re-thinking the Importance of Efficiency in Abusive Language Detection with Transformers-Based Active Learning
Hannah Kirk | Bertie Vidgen | Scott Hale

Annotating abusive language is expensive, logistically complex and creates a risk of psychological harm. However, most machine learning research has prioritized maximizing effectiveness (i.e., F1 or accuracy score) rather than data efficiency (i.e., minimizing the amount of data that is annotated). In this paper, we use simulated experiments over two datasets at varying percentages of abuse to demonstrate that transformers-based active learning is a promising approach to substantially raise efficiency whilst still maintaining high effectiveness, especially when abusive content is a smaller percentage of the dataset. This approach requires a fraction of labeled data to reach performance equivalent to training over the full dataset.

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A Lightweight Yet Robust Approach to Textual Anomaly Detection
Leslie Barrett | Robert Kingan | Alexandra Ortan | Madhavan Seshadri

Highly imbalanced textual datasets continue to pose a challenge for supervised learning models. However, viewing such imbalanced text data as an anomaly detection (AD) problem has advantages for certain tasks such as detecting hate speech, or inappropriate and/or offensive language in large social media feeds. There the unwanted content tends to be both rare and non-uniform with respect to its thematic character, and better fits the definition of an anomaly than a class. Several recent approaches to textual AD use transformer models, achieving good results but with trade-offs in pre-training and inflexibility with respect to new domains. In this paper we compare two linear models within the NMF family, which also have a recent history in textual AD. We introduce a new approach based on an alternative regularization of the NMF objective. Our results surpass other linear AD models and are on par with deep models, performing comparably well even in very small outlier concentrations.

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Detection of Negative Campaign in Israeli Municipal Elections
Marina Litvak | Natalia Vanetik | Sagiv Talker | Or Machlouf

Political competitions are complex settings where candidates use campaigns to promote their chances to be elected. One choice focuses on conducting a positive campaign that highlights the candidate’s achievements, leadership skills, and future programs. The alternative is to focus on a negative campaign that emphasizes the negative aspects of the competing person and is aimed at offending opponents or the opponent’s supporters. In this proposal, we concentrate on negative campaigns in Israeli elections. This work introduces an empirical case study on automatic detection of negative campaigns, using machine learning and natural language processing approaches, applied to the Hebrew-language data from Israeli municipal elections. Our contribution is multi-fold: (1) We provide TONIC—daTaset fOr Negative polItical Campaign in Hebrew—which consists of annotated posts from Facebook related to Israeli municipal elections; (2) We introduce results of a case study, that explored several research questions. RQ1: Which classifier and representation perform best for this task? We employed several traditional classifiers which are known for their good performance in IR tasks and two pre-trained models based on BERT architecture; several standard representations were employed with traditional ML models. RQ2: Does a negative campaign always contain offensive language? Can a model, trained to detect offensive language, also detect negative campaigns? We are trying to answer this question by reporting results for the transfer learning from a dataset annotated with offensive language to our dataset.

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Hypothesis Engineering for Zero-Shot Hate Speech Detection
Janis Goldzycher | Gerold Schneider

Standard approaches to hate speech detection rely on sufficient available hate speech annotations. Extending previous work that repurposes natural language inference (NLI) models for zero-shot text classification, we propose a simple approach that combines multiple hypotheses to improve English NLI-based zero-shot hate speech detection. We first conduct an error analysis for vanilla NLI-based zero-shot hate speech detection and then develop four strategies based on this analysis. The strategies use multiple hypotheses to predict various aspects of an input text and combine these predictions into a final verdict. We find that the zero-shot baseline used for the initial error analysis already outperforms commercial systems and fine-tuned BERT-based hate speech detection models on HateCheck. The combination of the proposed strategies further increases the zero-shot accuracy of 79.4% on HateCheck by 7.9 percentage points (pp), and the accuracy of 69.6% on ETHOS by 10.0pp.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing (TrustNLP 2022)

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An Encoder Attribution Analysis for Dense Passage Retriever in Open-Domain Question Answering
Minghan Li | Xueguang Ma | Jimmy Lin

The bi-encoder design of dense passage retriever (DPR) is a key factor to its success in open-domain question answering (QA), yet it is unclear how DPR’s question encoder and passage encoder individually contributes to overall performance, which we refer to as the encoder attribution problem. The problem is important as it helps us identify the factors that affect individual encoders to further improve overall performance. In this paper, we formulate our analysis under a probabilistic framework called encoder marginalization, where we quantify the contribution of a single encoder by marginalizing other variables. First, we find that the passage encoder contributes more than the question encoder to in-domain retrieval accuracy. Second, we demonstrate how to find the affecting factors for each encoder, where we train DPR with different amounts of data and use encoder marginalization to analyze the results. We find that positive passage overlap and corpus coverage of training data have big impacts on the passage encoder, while the question encoder is mainly affected by training sample complexity under this setting. Based on this framework, we can devise data-efficient training regimes: for example, we manage to train a passage encoder on SQuAD using 60% less training data without loss of accuracy.

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Attributing Fair Decisions with Attention Interventions
Ninareh Mehrabi | Umang Gupta | Fred Morstatter | Greg Ver Steeg | Aram Galstyan

The widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in consequential domains, such as health-care and parole decision-making systems, has drawn intense scrutiny on the fairness of these methods. However, ensuring fairness is often insufficient as the rationale for a contentious decision needs to be audited, understood, and defended. We propose that the attention mechanism can be used to ensure fair outcomes while simultaneously providing feature attributions to account for how a decision was made. Toward this goal, we design an attention-based model that can be leveraged as an attribution framework. It can identify features responsible for both performance and fairness of the model through attention interventions and attention weight manipulation. Using this attribution framework, we then design a post-processing bias mitigation strategy and compare it with a suite of baselines. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by conducting experiments on two distinct data types, tabular and textual.

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Does Moral Code have a Moral Code? Probing Delphi’s Moral Philosophy
Kathleen C. Fraser | Svetlana Kiritchenko | Esma Balkir

In an effort to guarantee that machine learning model outputs conform with human moral values, recent work has begun exploring the possibility of explicitly training models to learn the difference between right and wrong. This is typically done in a bottom-up fashion, by exposing the model to different scenarios, annotated with human moral judgements. One question, however, is whether the trained models actually learn any consistent, higher-level ethical principles from these datasets – and if so, what? Here, we probe the Allen AI Delphi model with a set of standardized morality questionnaires, and find that, despite some inconsistencies, Delphi tends to mirror the moral principles associated with the demographic groups involved in the annotation process. We question whether this is desirable and discuss how we might move forward with this knowledge.

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The Cycle of Trust and Responsibility in Outsourced AI
Maximilian Castelli | Linda C. Moreau

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are rapidly becoming must-have capabilities. According to a 2019 Forbes Insights Report, “seventy-nine percent [of executives] agree that AI is already having a transformational impact on workflows and tools for knowledge workers, but only 5% of executives consider their companies to be industry-leading in terms of taking advantage of AI-powered processes.” (Forbes 2019) A major reason for this may be a shortage of on-staff expertise in AI/ML. This paper explores the intertwined issues of trust, adoption, training, and ethics of outsourcing AI development to a third party. We describe our experiences as a provider of outsourced natural language processing (NLP). We discuss how trust and accountability co-evolve as solutions mature from proof-of-concept to production-ready.

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Explaining Neural NLP Models for the Joint Analysis of Open-and-Closed-Ended Survey Answers
Edoardo Mosca | Katharina Harmann | Tobias Eder | Georg Groh

Large-scale surveys are a widely used instrument to collect data from a target audience. Beyond the single individual, an appropriate analysis of the answers can reveal trends and patterns and thus generate new insights and knowledge for researchers. Current analysis practices employ shallow machine learning methods or rely on (biased) human judgment. This work investigates the usage of state-of-the-art NLP models such as BERT to automatically extract information from both open- and closed-ended questions. We also leverage explainability methods at different levels of granularity to further derive knowledge from the analysis model. Experiments on EMS—a survey-based study researching influencing factors affecting a student’s career goals—show that the proposed approach can identify such factors both at the input- and higher concept-level.

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The Irrationality of Neural Rationale Models
Yiming Zheng | Serena Booth | Julie Shah | Yilun Zhou

Neural rationale models are popular for interpretable predictions of NLP tasks. In these, a selector extracts segments of the input text, called rationales, and passes these segments to a classifier for prediction. Since the rationale is the only information accessible to the classifier, it is plausibly defined as the explanation. Is such a characterization unconditionally correct? In this paper, we argue to the contrary, with both philosophical perspectives and empirical evidence suggesting that rationale models are, perhaps, less rational and interpretable than expected. We call for more rigorous evaluations of these models to ensure desired properties of interpretability are indeed achieved. The code for our experiments is at https://github.com/yimingz89/Neural-Rationale-Analysis.

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An Empirical Study on Pseudo-log-likelihood Bias Measures for Masked Language Models Using Paraphrased Sentences
Bum Chul Kwon | Nandana Mihindukulasooriya

In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on a bias measure, log-likelihood Masked Language Model (MLM) scoring, on a benchmark dataset. Previous work evaluates whether MLMs are biased or not for certain protected attributes (e.g., race) by comparing the log-likelihood scores of sentences that contain stereotypical characteristics with one category (e.g., black) versus another (e.g., white). We hypothesized that this approach might be too sensitive to the choice of contextual words than the meaning of the sentence. Therefore, we computed the same measure after paraphrasing the sentences with different words but with same meaning. Our results demonstrate that the log-likelihood scoring can be more sensitive to utterance of specific words than to meaning behind a given sentence. Our paper reveals a shortcoming of the current log-likelihood-based bias measures for MLMs and calls for new ways to improve the robustness of it

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Challenges in Applying Explainability Methods to Improve the Fairness of NLP Models
Esma Balkir | Svetlana Kiritchenko | Isar Nejadgholi | Kathleen Fraser

Motivations for methods in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) often include detecting, quantifying and mitigating bias, and contributing to making machine learning models fairer. However, exactly how an XAI method can help in combating biases is often left unspecified. In this paper, we briefly review trends in explainability and fairness in NLP research, identify the current practices in which explainability methods are applied to detect and mitigate bias, and investigate the barriers preventing XAI methods from being used more widely in tackling fairness issues.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022)

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The Fewer Splits are Better: Deconstructing Readability in Sentence Splitting
Tadashi Nomoto

In this work, we focus on sentence splitting, a subfield of text simplification, primarily motivated by an unproven idea that if you divide a sentence into pieces, it should become easier to understand. Our primary goal in this paper is to determine whether this is true. In particular, we ask, does it matter whether we break a sentence into two or three? We report on our findings based on Amazon Mechanical Turk. More specifically, we introduce a Bayesian modeling framework to further investigate to what degree a particular way of splitting the complex sentence affects readability, along with a number of other parameters adopted from diverse perspectives, including clinical linguistics, and cognitive linguistics. The Bayesian modeling experiment provides clear evidence that bisecting the sentence leads to enhanced readability to a degree greater than when we create simplification by trisection.

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Parallel Corpus Filtering for Japanese Text Simplification
Koki Hatagaki | Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Takashi Ninomiya

We propose a method of parallel corpus filtering for Japanese text simplification. The parallel corpus for this task contains some redundant wording. In this study, we first identify the type and size of noisy sentence pairs in the Japanese text simplification corpus. We then propose a method of parallel corpus filtering to remove each type of noisy sentence pair. Experimental results show that filtering the training parallel corpus with the proposed method improves simplification performance.

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Patient-friendly Clinical Notes: Towards a new Text Simplification Dataset
Jan Trienes | Jörg Schlötterer | Hans-Ulrich Schildhaus | Christin Seifert

Automatic text simplification can help patients to better understand their own clinical notes. A major hurdle for the development of clinical text simplification methods is the lack of high quality resources. We report ongoing efforts in creating a parallel dataset of professionally simplified clinical notes. Currently, this corpus consists of 851 document-level simplifications of German pathology reports. We highlight characteristics of this dataset and establish first baselines for paragraph-level simplification.

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Target-Level Sentence Simplification as Controlled Paraphrasing
Tannon Kew | Sarah Ebling

Automatic text simplification aims to reduce the linguistic complexity of a text in order to make it easier to understand and more accessible. However, simplified texts are consumed by a diverse array of target audiences and what might be appropriately simplified for one group of readers may differ considerably for another. In this work we investigate a novel formulation of sentence simplification as paraphrasing with controlled decoding. This approach aims to alleviate the major burden of relying on large amounts of in-domain parallel training data, while at the same time allowing for modular and adaptive simplification. According to automatic metrics, our approach performs competitively against baselines that prove more difficult to adapt to the needs of different target audiences or require significant amounts of complex-simple parallel aligned data.

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Conciseness: An Overlooked Language Task
Felix Stahlberg | Aashish Kumar | Chris Alberti | Shankar Kumar

We report on novel investigations into training models that make sentences concise. We define the task and show that it is different from related tasks such as summarization and simplification. For evaluation, we release two test sets, consisting of 2000 sentences each, that were annotated by two and five human annotators, respectively. We demonstrate that conciseness is a difficult task for which zero-shot setups with large neural language models often do not perform well. Given the limitations of these approaches, we propose a synthetic data generation method based on round-trip translations. Using this data to either train Transformers from scratch or fine-tune T5 models yields our strongest baselines that can be further improved by fine-tuning on an artificial conciseness dataset that we derived from multi-annotator machine translation test sets.

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Revision for Concision: A Constrained Paraphrase Generation Task
Wenchuan Mu | Kwan Hui Lim

Academic writing should be concise as concise sentences better keep the readers’ attention and convey meaning clearly. Writing concisely is challenging, for writers often struggle to revise their drafts. We introduce and formulate revising for concision as a natural language processing task at the sentence level. Revising for concision requires algorithms to use only necessary words to rewrite a sentence while preserving its meaning. The revised sentence should be evaluated according to its word choice, sentence structure, and organization. The revised sentence also needs to fulfil semantic retention and syntactic soundness. To aide these efforts, we curate and make available a benchmark parallel dataset that can depict revising for concision. The dataset contains 536 pairs of sentences before and after revising, and all pairs are collected from college writing centres. We also present and evaluate the approaches to this problem, which may assist researchers in this area.

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Controlling Japanese Machine Translation Output by Using JLPT Vocabulary Levels
Alberto Poncelas | Ohnmar Htun

In Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems, there is generally little control over the lexicon of the output. Consequently, the translated output may be too difficult for certain audiences. For example, for people with limited knowledge of the language, vocabulary is a major impediment to understanding a text. In this work, we build a complexity-controllable NMT for English-to-Japanese translations. More particularly, we aim to modulate the difficulty of the translation in terms of not only the vocabulary but also the use of kanji. For achieving this, we follow a sentence-tagging approach to influence the output. Controlling Japanese Machine Translation Output by Using JLPT Vocabulary Levels.

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IrekiaLFes: a New Open Benchmark and Baseline Systems for Spanish Automatic Text Simplification
Itziar Gonzalez-Dios | Iker Gutiérrez-Fandiño | Oscar m. Cumbicus-Pineda | Aitor Soroa

Automatic Text simplification (ATS) seeks to reduce the complexity of a text for a general public or a target audience. In the last years, deep learning methods have become the most used systems in ATS research, but these systems need large and good quality datasets to be evaluated. Moreover, these data are available on a large scale only for English and in some cases with restrictive licenses. In this paper, we present IrekiaLF_es, an open-license benchmark for Spanish text simplification. It consists of a document-level corpus and a sentence-level test set that has been manually aligned. We also conduct a neurolinguistically-based evaluation of the corpus in order to reveal its suitability for text simplification. This evaluation follows the Lexicon-Unification-Linearity (LeULi) model of neurolinguistic complexity assessment. Finally, we present a set of experiments and baselines of ATS systems in a zero-shot scenario.

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Lexical Simplification in Foreign Language Learning: Creating Pedagogically Suitable Simplified Example Sentences
Jasper Degraeuwe | Horacio Saggion

This study presents a lexical simplification (LS) methodology for foreign language (FL) learning purposes, a barely explored area of automatic text simplification (TS). The method, targeted at Spanish as a foreign language (SFL), includes a customised complex word identification (CWI) classifier and generates substitutions based on masked language modelling. Performance is calculated on a custom dataset by means of a new, pedagogically-oriented evaluation. With 43% of the top simplifications being found suitable, the method shows potential for simplifying sentences to be used in FL learning activities. The evaluation also suggests that, though still crucial, meaning preservation is not always a prerequisite for successful LS. To arrive at grammatically correct and more idiomatic simplifications, future research could study the integration of association measures based on co-occurrence data.

Eye movements are known to reflect cognitive processes in reading, and psychological reading research has shown that eye gaze patterns differ between readers with and without dyslexia. In recent years, researchers have attempted to classify readers with dyslexia based on their eye movements using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). However, these approaches (i) are based on highly aggregated features averaged over all words read by a participant, thus disregarding the sequential nature of the eye movements, and (ii) do not consider the linguistic stimulus and its interaction with the reader’s eye movements. In the present work, we propose two simple sequence models that process eye movements on the entire stimulus without the need of aggregating features across the sentence. Additionally, we incorporate the linguistic stimulus into the model in two ways—contextualized word embeddings and manually extracted linguistic features. The models are evaluated on a Mandarin Chinese dataset containing eye movements from children with and without dyslexia. Our results show that (i) even for a logographic script such as Chinese, sequence models are able to classify dyslexia on eye gaze sequences, reaching state-of-the-art performance, and (ii) incorporating the linguistic stimulus does not help to improve classification performance.

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A Dataset of Word-Complexity Judgements from Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Adults for Text Simplification
Oliver Alonzo | Sooyeon Lee | Mounica Maddela | Wei Xu | Matt Huenerfauth

Research has explored the use of automatic text simplification (ATS), which consists of techniques to make text simpler to read, to provide reading assistance to Deaf and Hard-of-hearing (DHH) adults with various literacy levels. Prior work in this area has identified interest in and benefits from ATS-based reading assistance tools. However, no prior work on ATS has gathered judgements from DHH adults as to what constitutes complex text. Thus, following approaches in prior NLP work, this paper contributes new word-complexity judgements from 11 DHH adults on a dataset of 15,000 English words that had been previously annotated by L2 speakers, which we also augmented to include automatic annotations of linguistic characteristics of the words. Additionally, we conduct a supplementary analysis of the interaction effect between the linguistic characteristics of the words and the groups of annotators. This analysis highlights the importance of collecting judgements from DHH adults for training ATS systems, as it revealed statistically significant interaction effects for nearly all of the linguistic characteristics of the words.

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(Psycho-)Linguistic Features Meet Transformer Models for Improved Explainable and Controllable Text Simplification
Yu Qiao | Xiaofei Li | Daniel Wiechmann | Elma Kerz

State-of-the-art text simplification (TS) systems adopt end-to-end neural network models to directly generate the simplified version of the input text, and usually function as a blackbox. Moreover, TS is usually treated as an all-purpose generic task under the assumption of homogeneity, where the same simplification is suitable for all. In recent years, however, there has been increasing recognition of the need to adapt the simplification techniques to the specific needs of different target groups. In this work, we aim to advance current research on explainable and controllable TS in two ways: First, building on recently proposed work to increase the transparency of TS systems (Garbacea et al., 2020), we use a large set of (psycho-)linguistic features in combination with pre-trained language models to improve explainable complexity prediction. Second, based on the results of this preliminary task, we extend a state-of-the-art Seq2Seq TS model, ACCESS (Martin et al., 2020), to enable explicit control of ten attributes. The results of experiments show (1) that our approach improves the performance of state-of-the-art models for predicting explainable complexity and (2) that explicitly conditioning the Seq2Seq model on ten attributes leads to a significant improvement in performance in both within-domain and out-of-domain settings.

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Lexically Constrained Decoding with Edit Operation Prediction for Controllable Text Simplification
Tatsuya Zetsu | Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Yuki Arase

Controllable text simplification assists language learners by automatically rewriting complex sentences into simpler forms of a target level. However, existing methods tend to perform conservative edits that keep complex words intact. To address this problem, we employ lexically constrained decoding to encourage rewriting. Specifically, the proposed method predicts edit operations conditioned to a target level and creates positive/negative constraints for words that should/should not appear in an output sentence. The experimental results confirm that our method significantly outperforms previous methods and demonstrates a new state-of-the-art performance.

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An Investigation into the Effect of Control Tokens on Text Simplification
Zihao Li | Matthew Shardlow | Saeed Hassan

Recent work on text simplification has focused on the use of control tokens to further the state of the art. However, it is not easy to further improve without an in-depth comprehension of the mechanisms underlying control tokens. One unexplored factor is the tokenisation strategy, which we also explore. In this paper, we (1) reimplemented ACCESS, (2) explored the effects of varying control tokens, (3) tested the influences of different tokenisation strategies, and (4) demonstrated how separate control tokens affect performance. We show variations of performance in the four control tokens separately. We also uncover how the design of control tokens could influence the performance and propose some suggestions for designing control tokens, which also reaches into other controllable text generation tasks.

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Divide-and-Conquer Text Simplification by Scalable Data Enhancement
Sanqiang Zhao | Rui Meng | Hui Su | Daqing He

Text simplification is a task to reduce the complexity of a text while retain its original meaning. It can facilitate people with low-literacy skills or language impairments, such as children and individuals with dyslexia and aphasia, to read and understand complicated materials. Normally, substitution, deletion, reordering, and splitting are considered as four core operations for performing text simplification. Thus an ideal model should be capable of executing these operations appropriately to simplify a text. However, by examining the degree that each operation is exerted in different datasets, we observe that there is a salient discrepancy between the human annotation and existing training data that is widely used for training simplification models. To alleviate this discrepancy, we propose an unsupervised data construction method that distills each simplifying operation into data via different automatic data enhancement measures. The empirical results demonstrate that the resulting dataset SimSim can support models to achieve better performance by performing all operations properly.

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Improving Text Simplification with Factuality Error Detection
Yuan Ma | Sandaru Seneviratne | Elena Daskalaki

In the past few years, the field of text simplification has been dominated by supervised learning approaches thanks to the appearance of large parallel datasets such as Wikilarge and Newsela. However, these datasets suffer from sentence pairs with factuality errors which compromise the models’ performance. So, we proposed a model-independent factuality error detection mechanism, considering bad simplification and bad alignment, to refine the Wikilarge dataset through reducing the weight of these samples during training. We demonstrated that this approach improved the performance of the state-of-the-art text simplification model TST5 by an FKGL reduction of 0.33 and 0.29 on the TurkCorpus and ASSET testing datasets respectively. Our study illustrates the impact of erroneous samples in TS datasets and highlights the need for automatic methods to improve their quality.

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JADES: New Text Simplification Dataset in Japanese Targeted at Non-Native Speakers
Akio Hayakawa | Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Hiroki Ouchi | Taro Watanabe

The user-dependency of Text Simplification makes its evaluation obscure. A targeted evaluation dataset clarifies the purpose of simplification, though its specification is hard to define. We built JADES (JApanese Dataset for the Evaluation of Simplification), a text simplification dataset targeted at non-native Japanese speakers, according to public vocabulary and grammar profiles. JADES comprises 3,907 complex-simple sentence pairs annotated by an expert. Analysis of JADES shows that wide and multiple rewriting operations were applied through simplification. Furthermore, we analyzed outputs on JADES from several benchmark systems and automatic and manual scores of them. Results of these analyses highlight differences between English and Japanese in operations and evaluations.

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A Benchmark for Neural Readability Assessment of Texts in Spanish
Laura Vásquez-Rodríguez | Pedro-Manuel Cuenca-Jiménez | Sergio Morales-Esquivel | Fernando Alva-Manchego

We release a new benchmark for Automated Readability Assessment (ARA) of texts in Spanish. We combined existing corpora with suitable texts collected from the Web, thus creating the largest available dataset for ARA of Spanish texts. All data was pre-processed and categorised to allow experimenting with ARA models that make predictions at two (simple and complex) or three (basic, intermediate, and advanced) readability levels, and at two text granularities (paragraphs and sentences). An analysis based on readability indices shows that our proposed datasets groupings are suitable for their designated readability level. We use our benchmark to train neural ARA models based on BERT in zero-shot, few-shot, and cross-lingual settings. Results show that either a monolingual or multilingual pre-trained model can achieve good results when fine-tuned in language-specific data. In addition, all mod- els decrease their performance when predicting three classes instead of two, showing opportunities for the development of better ARA models for Spanish with existing resources.

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Controllable Lexical Simplification for English
Kim Cheng Sheang | Daniel Ferrés | Horacio Saggion

Fine-tuning Transformer-based approaches have recently shown exciting results on sentence simplification task. However, so far, no research has applied similar approaches to the Lexical Simplification (LS) task. In this paper, we present ConLS, a Controllable Lexical Simplification system fine-tuned with T5 (a Transformer-based model pre-trained with a BERT-style approach and several other tasks). The evaluation results on three datasets (LexMTurk, BenchLS, and NNSeval) have shown that our model performs comparable to LSBert (the current state-of-the-art) and even outperforms it in some cases. We also conducted a detailed comparison on the effectiveness of control tokens to give a clear view of how each token contributes to the model.

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CILS at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Investigating the Applicability of Lexical Substitution Methods for Lexical Simplification
Sandaru Seneviratne | Elena Daskalaki | Hanna Suominen

Lexical simplification — which aims to simplify complex text through the replacement of difficult words using simpler alternatives while maintaining the meaning of the given text — is popular as a way of improving text accessibility for both people and computers. First, lexical simplification through substitution can improve the understandability of complex text for, for example, non-native speakers, second language learners, and people with low literacy. Second, its usefulness has been demonstrated in many natural language processing problems like data augmentation, paraphrase generation, or word sense induction. In this paper, we investigated the applicability of existing unsupervised lexical substitution methods based on pre-trained contextual embedding models and WordNet, which incorporate Context Information, for Lexical Simplification (CILS). Although the performance of this CILS approach has been outstanding in lexical substitution tasks, its usefulness was limited at the TSAR-2022 shared task on lexical simplification. Consequently, a minimally supervised approach with careful tuning to a given simplification task may work better than unsupervised methods. Our investigation also encouraged further work on evaluating the simplicity of potential candidates and incorporating them into the lexical simplification methods.

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PresiUniv at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Generation and Ranking of Simplification Substitutes of Complex Words in Multiple Languages
Peniel Whistely | Sandeep Mathias | Galiveeti Poornima

In this paper, we describe our approach to generate and rank candidate simplifications using pre-trained language models (Eg. BERT), publicly available word embeddings (Eg. FastText), and a part-of-speech tagger, to generate and rank candidate contextual simplifications for a given complex word. In this task, our system, PresiUniv, was placed first in the Spanish track, 5th in the Brazilian-Portuguese track, and 10th in the English track. We upload our codes and data for this project to aid in replication of our results. We also analyze some of the errors and describe design decisions which we took while writing the paper.

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UoM&MMU at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Prompt Learning for Lexical Simplification
Laura Vásquez-Rodríguez | Nhung Nguyen | Matthew Shardlow | Sophia Ananiadou

We present PromptLS, a method for fine-tuning large pre-trained Language Models (LM) to perform the task of Lexical Simplification. We use a predefined template to attain appropriate replacements for a term, and fine-tune a LM using this template on language specific datasets. We filter candidate lists in post-processing to improve accuracy. We demonstrate that our model can work in a) a zero shot setting (where we only require a pre-trained LM), b) a fine-tuned setting (where language-specific data is required), and c) a multilingual setting (where the model is pre-trained across multiple languages and fine-tuned in an specific language). Experimental results show that, although the zero-shot setting is competitive, its performance is still far from the fine-tuned setting. Also, the multilingual is unsurprisingly worse than the fine-tuned model. Among all TSAR-2022 Shared Task participants, our team was ranked second in Spanish and third in English.

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PolyU-CBS at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: A Simple, Rank-Based Method for Complex Word Substitution in Two Steps
Emmanuele Chersoni | Yu-Yin Hsu

In this paper, we describe the system we presented at the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022) regarding the shared task on Lexical Simplification for English, Portuguese, and Spanish. We proposed an unsupervised approach in two steps: First, we used a masked language model with word masking for each language to extract possible candidates for the replacement of a difficult word; second, we ranked the candidates according to three different Transformer-based metrics. Finally, we determined our list of candidates based on the lowest average rank across different metrics.

Lexical simplification is the task of substituting a difficult word with a simpler equivalent for a target audience. This is currently commonly done by modeling lexical complexity on a continuous scale to identify simpler alternatives to difficult words. In the TSAR shared task, the organizers call for systems capable of generating substitutions in a zero-shot-task context, for English, Spanish and Portuguese. In this paper, we present the solution we (the cental team) proposed for the task. We explore the ability of BERT-like models to generate substitution words by masking the difficult word. To do so, we investigate various context enhancement strategies, that we combined into an ensemble method. We also explore different substitution ranking methods. We report on a post-submission analysis of the results and present our insights for potential improvements. The code for all our experiments is available at https://gitlab.com/Cental-FR/cental-tsar2022.

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teamPN at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Lexical Simplification using Multi-Level and Modular Approach
Nikita Nikita | Pawan Rajpoot

Lexical Simplification is the process of reducing the lexical complexity of a text by replacing difficult words with easier-to-read (or understand) expressions while preserving the original information and meaning. This paper explains the work done by our team “teamPN” for the English track of TSAR 2022 Shared Task of Lexical Simplification. We created a modular pipeline which combines transformers based models with traditional NLP methods like paraphrasing and verb sense disambiguation. We created a multi-level and modular pipeline where the target text is treated according to its semantics (Part of Speech Tag). The pipeline is multi-level as we utilize multiple source models to find potential candidates for replacement. It is modular as we can switch the source models and their weighting in the final re-ranking.

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MANTIS at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Improved Unsupervised Lexical Simplification with Pretrained Encoders
Xiaofei Li | Daniel Wiechmann | Yu Qiao | Elma Kerz

In this paper we present our contribution to the TSAR-2022 Shared Task on Lexical Simplification of the EMNLP 2022 Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability. Our approach builds on and extends the unsupervised lexical simplification system with pretrained encoders (LSBert) system introduced in Qiang et al. (2020) in the following ways: For the subtask of simplification candidate selection, it utilizes a RoBERTa transformer language model and expands the size of the generated candidate list. For subsequent substitution ranking, it introduces a new feature weighting scheme and adopts a candidate filtering method based on textual entailment to maximize semantic similarity between the target word and its simplification. Our best-performing system improves LSBert by 5.9% accuracy and achieves second place out of 33 ranked solutions.

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UniHD at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Is Compute All We Need for Lexical Simplification?
Dennis Aumiller | Michael Gertz

Previous state-of-the-art models for lexical simplification consist of complex pipelines with several components, each of which requires deep technical knowledge and fine-tuned interaction to achieve its full potential. As an alternative, we describe a frustratingly simple pipeline based on prompted GPT-3 responses, beating competing approaches by a wide margin in settings with few training instances. Our best-performing submission to the English language track of the TSAR-2022 shared task consists of an “ensemble” of six different prompt templates with varying context levels. As a late-breaking result, we further detail a language transfer technique that allows simplification in languages other than English. Applied to the Spanish and Portuguese subset, we achieve state-of-the-art results with only minor modification to the original prompts. Aside from detailing the implementation and setup, we spend the remainder of this work discussing the particularities of prompting and implications for future work. Code for the experiments is available online at https://github.com/dennlinger/TSAR-2022-Shared-Task.

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RCML at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Lexical Simplification With Modular Substitution Candidate Ranking
Desislava Aleksandrova | Olivier Brochu Dufour

This paper describes the lexical simplification system RCML submitted to the English language track of the TSAR-2022 Shared Task. The system leverages a pre-trained language model to generate contextually plausible substitution candidates which are then ranked according to their simplicity as well as their grammatical and semantic similarity to the target complex word. Our submissions secure 6th and 7th places out of 33, improving over the SOTA baseline for 27 out of the 51 metrics.

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GMU-WLV at TSAR-2022 Shared Task: Evaluating Lexical Simplification Models
Kai North | Alphaeus Dmonte | Tharindu Ranasinghe | Marcos Zampieri

This paper describes team GMU-WLV submission to the TSAR shared-task on multilingual lexical simplification. The goal of the task is to automatically provide a set of candidate substitutions for complex words in context. The organizers provided participants with ALEXSIS a manually annotated dataset with instances split between a small trial set with a dozen instances in each of the three languages of the competition (English, Portuguese, Spanish) and a test set with over 300 instances in the three aforementioned languages. To cope with the lack of training data, participants had to either use alternative data sources or pre-trained language models. We experimented with monolingual models: BERTimbau, ELECTRA, and RoBERTA-largeBNE. Our best system achieved 1st place out of sixteen systems for Portuguese, 8th out of thirty-three systems for English, and 6th out of twelve systems for Spanish.

We report findings of the TSAR-2022 shared task on multilingual lexical simplification, organized as part of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability TSAR-2022 held in conjunction with EMNLP 2022. The task called the Natural Language Processing research community to contribute with methods to advance the state of the art in multilingual lexical simplification for English, Portuguese, and Spanish. A total of 14 teams submitted the results of their lexical simplification systems for the provided test data. Results of the shared task indicate new benchmarks in Lexical Simplification with English lexical simplification quantitative results noticeably higher than those obtained for Spanish and (Brazilian) Portuguese.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop On Transcript Understanding

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Leveraging Non-dialogue Summaries for Dialogue Summarization
Seongmin Park | Dongchan Shin | Jihwa Lee

To mitigate the lack of diverse dialogue summarization datasets in academia, we present methods to utilize non-dialogue summarization data for enhancing dialogue summarization systems. We apply transformations to document summarization data pairs to create training data that better befit dialogue summarization. The suggested transformations also retain desirable properties of non-dialogue datasets, such as improved faithfulness to the source text. We conduct extensive experiments across both English and Korean to verify our approach. Although absolute gains in ROUGE naturally plateau as more dialogue summarization samples are introduced, utilizing non-dialogue data for training significantly improves summarization performance in zero- and few-shot settings and enhances faithfulness across all training regimes.

Visual Dialogue (VD) task has recently received increasing attention in AI research. Visual Dialog aims to generate multi-round, interactive responses based on the dialog history and image content. Existing textual dialogue models cannot fully understand visual information, resulting in a lack of scene features when communicating with humans continuously. Therefore, how to efficiently fuse multimodal data features remains to be a challenge. In this work, we propose a knowledge transfer method with visual prompt (VPTG) fusing multi-modal data, which is a flexible module that can utilize the text-only seq2seq model to handle visual dialogue tasks. The VPTG conducts text-image co-learning and multi-modal information fusion with visual prompts and visual knowledge distillation. Specifically, we construct visual prompts from visual representations and then induce sequence-to-sequence(seq2seq) models to fuse visual information and textual contexts by visual-text patterns. And we also realize visual knowledge transfer through distillation between two different models’ text representations, so that the seq2seq model can actively learn visual semantic representations. Extensive experiments on the multi-modal dialogue understanding and generation (MDUG) datasets show the proposed VPTG outperforms other single-modal methods, which demonstrate the effectiveness of visual prompt and visual knowledge transfer.

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Model Transfer for Event tracking as Transcript Understanding for Videos of Small Group Interaction
Sumit Agarwal | Rosanna Vitiello | Carolyn Rosé

Videos of group interactions contain a wealth of information beyond the information directly communicated in a transcript of the discussion. Tracking who has participated throughout an extended interaction and what each of their trajectories has been in relation to one another is the foundation for joint activity understanding, though it comes with some unique challenges in videos of tightly coupled group work. Motivated by insights into the properties of such scenarios, including group composition and the properties of task-oriented, goal directed tasks, we present a successful proof-of-concept. In particular, we present a transfer experiment to a dyadic robot construction task, an ablation study, and a qualitative analysis.

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BehanceMT: A Machine Translation Corpus for Livestreaming Video Transcripts
Minh Van Nguyen | Franck Dernoncourt | Thien Nguyen

Machine translation (MT) is an important task in natural language processing, which aims to translate a sentence in a source language to another sentence with the same/similar semantics in a target language. Despite the huge effort on building MT systems for different language pairs, most previous work focuses on formal-language settings, where text to be translated come from written sources such as books and news articles. As a result, such MT systems could fail to translate livestreaming video transcripts, where text is often shorter and might be grammatically incorrect. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel MT corpus - BehanceMT for livestreaming video transcript translation. Our corpus contains parallel transcripts for 3 language pairs, where English is the source language and Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic are the target languages. Experimental results show that finetuning a pretrained MT model on BehanceMT significantly improves the performance of the model in translating video transcripts across 3 language pairs. In addition, the finetuned MT model outperforms GoogleTranslate in 2 out of 3 language pairs, further demonstrating the usefulness of our proposed dataset for video transcript translation. BehanceMT will be publicly released upon the acceptance of the paper.

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Investigating the Impact of ASR Errors on Spoken Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition
Linh The Nguyen | Dat Quoc Nguyen

We present an empirical study investigating the influence of automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors on the spoken implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) task. We construct a spoken dataset for this task based on the Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0. On this dataset, we conduct “Cascaded” experiments employing state-of-the-art ASR and text-based IDRR models and find that the ASR errors significantly decrease the IDRR performance. In addition, the “Cascaded” approach does remarkably better than an “End-to-End” one that directly predicts a relation label for each input argument speech pair.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Unimodal and Multimodal Induction of Linguistic Structures (UM-IoS)

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Named Entity Recognition as Structured Span Prediction
Urchade Zaratiana | Nadi Tomeh | Pierre Holat | Thierry Charnois

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important task in Natural Language Processing with applications in many domains. While the dominant paradigm of NER is sequence labelling, span-based approaches have become very popular in recent times but are less well understood. In this work, we study different aspects of span-based NER, namely the span representation, learning strategy, and decoding algorithms to avoid span overlap. We also propose an exact algorithm that efficiently finds the set of non-overlapping spans that maximizes a global score, given a list of candidate spans. We performed our study on three benchmark NER datasets from different domains. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/urchade/span-structured-prediction.

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Global Span Selection for Named Entity Recognition
Urchade Zaratiana | Niama El khbir | Pierre Holat | Nadi Tomeh | Thierry Charnois

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important task in Natural Language Processing with applications in many domains. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to named entity recognition, in which we output a set of spans (i.e., segmentations) by maximizing a global score. During training, we optimize our model by maximizing the probability of the gold segmentation. During inference, we use dynamic programming to select the best segmentation under a linear time complexity. We prove that our approach outperforms CRF and semi-CRF models for Named Entity Recognition. We will make our code publicly available.

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Visual Grounding of Inter-lingual Word-Embeddings
Wafaa Mohammed | Hassan Shahmohammadi | Hendrik P. A. Lensch | R. Harald Baayen

Visual grounding of Language aims at enriching textual representations of language with multiple sources of visual knowledge such as images and videos. Although visual grounding is an area of intense research, inter-lingual aspects of visual grounding have not received much attention. The present study investigates the inter-lingual visual grounding of word embeddings. We propose an implicit alignment technique between the two spaces of vision and language in which inter-lingual textual information interacts in order to enrich pre-trained textual word embeddings. We focus on three languages in our experiments, namely, English, Arabic, and German. We obtained visually grounded vector representations for these languages and studied whether visual grounding on one or multiple languages improved the performance of embeddings on word similarity and categorization benchmarks. Our experiments suggest that inter-lingual knowledge improves the performance of grounded embeddings in similar languages such as German and English. However, inter-lingual grounding of German or English with Arabic led to a slight degradation in performance on word similarity benchmarks. On the other hand, we observed an opposite trend on categorization benchmarks where Arabic had the most improvement on English. In the discussion section, several reasons for those findings are laid out. We hope that our experiments provide a baseline for further research on inter lingual visual grounding.

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A Subspace-Based Analysis of Structured and Unstructured Representations in Image-Text Retrieval
Erica K. Shimomoto | Edison Marrese-Taylor | Hiroya Takamura | Ichiro Kobayashi | Yusuke Miyao

In this paper, we specifically look at the image-text retrieval problem. Recent multimodal frameworks have shown that structured inputs and fine-tuning lead to consistent performance improvement. However, this paradigm has been challenged recently with newer Transformer-based models that can reach zero-shot state-of-the-art results despite not explicitly using structured data during pre-training. Since such strategies lead to increased computational resources, we seek to better understand their role in image-text retrieval by analyzing visual and text representations extracted with three multimodal frameworks – SGM, UNITER, and CLIP. To perform such analysis, we represent a single image or text as low-dimensional linear subspaces and perform retrieval based on subspace similarity. We chose this representation as subspaces give us the flexibility to model an entity based on feature sets, allowing us to observe how integrating or reducing information changes the representation of each entity. We analyze the performance of the selected models’ features on two standard benchmark datasets. Our results indicate that heavily pre-training models can already lead to features with critical information representing each entity, with zero-shot UNITER features performing consistently better than fine-tuned features. Furthermore, while models can benefit from structured inputs, learning representations for objects and relationships separately, such as in SGM, likely causes a loss of crucial contextual information needed to obtain a compact cluster that can effectively represent a single entity.

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Discourse Relation Embeddings: Representing the Relations between Discourse Segments in Social Media
Youngseo Son | Vasudha Varadarajan | H. Andrew Schwartz

Discourse relations are typically modeled as a discrete class that characterizes the relation between segments of text (e.g. causal explanations, expansions). However, such predefined discrete classes limit the universe of potential relationships and their nuanced differences. Adding higher-level semantic structure to contextual word embeddings, we propose representing discourse relations as points in high dimensional continuous space. However, unlike words, discourse relations often have no surface form (relations are in between two segments, often with no word or phrase in that gap) which presents a challenge for existing embedding techniques. We present a novel method for automatically creating discourse relation embeddings (DiscRE), addressing the embedding challenge through a weakly supervised, multitask approach to learn diverse and nuanced relations in social media. Results show DiscRE representations obtain the best performance on Twitter discourse relation classification (macro F1=0.76), social media causality prediction (from F1=0.79 to 0.81), and perform beyond modern sentence and word transformers at traditional discourse relation classification, capturing novel nuanced relations (e.g. relations at the intersection of causal explanations and counterfactuals).

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Understanding Cross-modal Interactions in V&L Models that Generate Scene Descriptions
Michele Cafagna | Kees van Deemter | Albert Gatt

Image captioning models tend to describe images in an object-centric way, emphasising visible objects. But image descriptions can also abstract away from objects and describe the type of scene depicted. In this paper, we explore the potential of a state of the art Vision and Language model, VinVL, to caption images at the scene level using (1) a novel dataset which pairs images with both object-centric and scene descriptions. Through (2) an in-depth analysis of the effect of the fine-tuning, we show (3) that a small amount of curated data suffices to generate scene descriptions without losing the capability to identify object-level concepts in the scene; the model acquires a more holistic view of the image compared to when object-centric descriptions are generated. We discuss the parallels between these results and insights from computational and cognitive science research on scene perception.

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DeepParliament: A Legal domain Benchmark & Dataset for Parliament Bills Prediction
Ankit Pal

This paper introduces DeepParliament, a legal domain Benchmark Dataset that gathers bill documents and metadata and performs various bill status classification tasks. The proposed dataset text covers a broad range of bills from 1986 to the present and contains richer information on parliament bill content. Data collection, detailed statistics and analyses are provided in the paper. Moreover, we experimented with different types of models ranging from RNN to pretrained and reported the results. We are proposing two new benchmarks: Binary and Multi-Class Bill Status classification. Models developed for bill documents and relevant supportive tasks may assist Members of Parliament (MPs), presidents, and other legal practitioners. It will help review or prioritise bills, thus speeding up the billing process, improving the quality of decisions and reducing the time consumption in both houses. Considering that the foundation of the country”s democracy is Parliament and state legislatures, we anticipate that our research will be an essential addition to the Legal NLP community. This work will be the first to present a Parliament bill prediction task. In order to improve the accessibility of legal AI resources and promote reproducibility, we have made our code and dataset publicly accessible at github.com/monk1337/DeepParliament.

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Punctuation and case restoration in code mixed Indian languages
Subhashree Tripathy | Ashis Samal

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are taking over in different industries starting from producing video subtitles to interactive digital assistants. ASR output can be used in automatic indexing, categorizing, searching along with normal human readability. Raw transcripts from ASR systems are difficult to interpret since it usually produces text without punctuation and case information (all lower, all upper, camel case etc.), thus limiting the performance of downstream NLP tasks. We proposed an approach to restore the punctuation and case for both English and Hinglish (i.e Hindi vocabulary in Latin script) languages. We have performed a classification task using encoder-based transformers which is a mini BERT consisting of 4 encoder layers for punctuation and case restoration instead of the traditional Seq2Seq model considering the latency constraint in real world use cases. It consists of a total number of 15 distinct classes for the model which includes 5 punctuations i.e Period(.), Comma(,), Single Quote(‘), Double Quote(”) & Question Mark(?) with different combinations of casing. The model is benchmarked on an internal dataset which was based on user conversation with the voice assistant and it achieves a F1(macro) score of 91.52% on the test set.

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Probing Script Knowledge from Pre-Trained Models
Zijia Jin | Xingyu Zhang | Mo Yu | Lifu Huang

Adversarial attack of structured prediction models faces various challenges such as the difficulty of perturbing discrete words, the sentence quality issue, and the sensitivity of outputs to small perturbations. In this work, we introduce SHARP, a new attack method that formulates the black-box adversarial attack as a search-based optimization problem with a specially designed objective function considering sentence fluency, meaning preservation and attacking effectiveness. Additionally, three different searching strategies are analyzed and compared, , Beam Search, Metropolis-Hastings Sampling, and Hybrid Search. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attacking strategies on two challenging structured prediction tasks: part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing. Through automatic and human evaluations, we show that our method performs a more potent attack compared with pioneer arts. Moreover, the generated adversarial examples can be used to successfully boost the robustness and performance of the victim model via adversarial training.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language

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Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language
Valentina Pyatkin | Daniel Fried | Talita Anthonio

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Pre-trained Language Models’ Interpretation of Evaluativity Implicature: Evidence from Gradable Adjectives Usage in Context
Yan Cong

By saying Maria is tall, a human speaker typically implies that Maria is evaluatively tall from the speaker’s perspective. However, by using a different construction Maria is taller than Sophie, we cannot infer from Maria and Sophie’s relative heights that Maria is evaluatively tall because it is possible for Maria to be taller than Sophie in a context in which they both count as short. Can pre-trained language models (LMs) “understand” evaulativity (EVAL) inference? To what extent can they discern the EVAL salience of different constructions in a conversation? Will it help LMs’ implicitness performance if we give LMs a persona such as chill, social, and pragmatically skilled? Our study provides an approach to probing LMs’ interpretation of EVAL inference by incorporating insights from experimental pragmatics and sociolinguistics. We find that with the appropriate prompt, LMs can succeed in some pragmatic level language understanding tasks. Our study suggests that socio-pragmatics methodology can shed light on the challenging questions in NLP.

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Pragmatic and Logical Inferences in NLI Systems: The Case of Conjunction Buttressing
Paolo Pedinotti | Emmanuele Chersoni | Enrico Santus | Alessandro Lenci

An intelligent system is expected to perform reasonable inferences, accounting for both the literal meaning of a word and the meanings a word can acquire in different contexts. A specific kind of inference concerns the connective and, which in some cases gives rise to a temporal succession or causal interpretation in contrast with the logic, commutative one (Levinson, 2000). In this work, we investigate the phenomenon by creating a new dataset for evaluating the interpretation of and by NLI systems, which we use to test three Transformer-based models. Our results show that all systems generalize patterns that are consistent with both the logical and the pragmatic interpretation, perform inferences that are inconsistent with each other, and show clear divergences with both theoretical accounts and humans’ behavior.

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“Devils Are in the Details”: Annotating Specificity of Clinical Advice from Medical Literature
Yingya Li | Bei Yu

Prior studies have raised concerns over specificity issues in clinical advice. Lacking specificity — explicitly discussed detailed information — may affect the quality and implementation of clinical advice in medical practice. In this study, we developed and validated a fine-grained annotation schema to describe different aspects of specificity in clinical advice extracted from medical research literature. We also presented our initial annotation effort and discussed future directions towards an NLP-based specificity analysis tool for summarizing and verifying the details in clinical advice.

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Searching for PETs: Using Distributional and Sentiment-Based Methods to Find Potentially Euphemistic Terms
Patrick Lee | Martha Gavidia | Anna Feldman | Jing Peng

This paper presents a linguistically driven proof of concept for finding potentially euphemistic terms, or PETs. Acknowledging that PETs tend to be commonly used expressions for a certain range of sensitive topics, we make use of distri- butional similarities to select and filter phrase candidates from a sentence and rank them using a set of simple sentiment-based metrics. We present the results of our approach tested on a corpus of sentences containing euphemisms, demonstrating its efficacy for detecting single and multi-word PETs from a broad range of topics. We also discuss future potential for sentiment-based methods on this task.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects

This report presents the results of the shared tasks organized as part of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2022. The campaign is part of the ninth workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial), co-located with COLING 2022. Three separate shared tasks were included this year: Identification of Languages and Dialects of Italy (ITDI), French Cross-Domain Dialect Identification (FDI), and Dialectal Extractive Question Answering (DialQA). All three tasks were organized for the first time this year.

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Social Context and User Profiles of Linguistic Variation on a Micro Scale
Olga Kellert | Nicholas Hill Matlis

This paper presents a new tweet-based approach in geolinguistic analysis which combines geolocation, user IDs and textual features in order to identify patterns of linguistic variation on a sub-city scale. Sub-city variations can be connected to social drivers and thus open new opportunities for understanding the mechanisms of language variation and change. However, measuring linguistic variation on these scales is challenging due to the lack of highly-spatially-resolved data as well as to the daily movement or users’ “mobility” inside cities which can obscure the relation between the social context and linguistic variation. Here we demonstrate how combining geolocation with user IDs and textual analysis of tweets can yield information about the linguistic profiles of the users, the social context associated with specific locations and their connection to linguistic variation. We apply our methodology to analyze dialects in Buenos Aires and find evidence of socially-driven variation. Our methods will contribute to the identification of sociolinguistic patterns inside cities, which are valuable in social sciences and social services.

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dialectR: Doing Dialectometry in R
Ryan Soh-Eun Shim | John Nerbonne

We present dialectR, an open-source R package for performing quantitative analyses of dialects based on categorical measures of difference and on variants of edit distance. dialectR stands as one of the first programmable toolkits that may freely be combined and extended by users with further statistical procedures. We describe implementational details of the package, and provide two examples of its use: one performing analyses based on multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering on a dataset of Dutch dialects, and another showing how an approximation of the acoustic vowel space may be achieved by performing an MFCC (Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients)-based acoustic distance on audio recordings of vowels.

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Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation: A Case Study of Cantonese
Evelyn Kai-Yan Liu

The development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications for Cantonese, a language with over 85 million speakers, is lagging compared to other languages with a similar number of speakers. In this paper, we present, to our best knowledge, the first benchmark of multiple neural machine translation (NMT) systems from Mandarin Chinese to Cantonese. Additionally, we performed parallel sentence mining (PSM) as data augmentation for the extremely low resource language pair and increased the number of sentence pairs from 1,002 to 35,877. Results show that with PSM, the best performing model (BPE-level bidirectional LSTM) scored 11.98 BLEU better than the vanilla baseline and 9.93 BLEU higher than our strong baseline. Our unsupervised NMT (UNMT) results also refuted previous assumption n (Rubino et al., 2020) that the poor performance was related to the lack of linguistic similarities between the target and source languages, particularly in the case of Cantonese and Mandarin. In the process of building the NMT system, we also created the first large-scale parallel training and evaluation datasets of the language pair. Codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/evelynkyl/yue_nmt.

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Phonetic, Semantic, and Articulatory Features in Assamese-Bengali Cognate Detection
Abhijnan Nath | Rahul Ghosh | Nikhil Krishnaswamy

In this paper, we propose a method to detect if words in two similar languages, Assamese and Bengali, are cognates. We mix phonetic, semantic, and articulatory features and use the cognate detection task to analyze the relative informational contribution of each type of feature to distinguish words in the two similar languages. In addition, since support for low-resourced languages like Assamese can be weak or nonexistent in some multilingual language models, we create a monolingual Assamese Transformer model and explore augmenting multilingual models with monolingual models using affine transformation techniques between vector spaces.

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Mapping Phonology to Semantics: A Computational Model of Cross-Lingual Spoken-Word Recognition
Iuliia Zaitova | Badr Abdullah | Dietrich Klakow

Closely related languages are often mutually intelligible to various degrees. Therefore, speakers of closely related languages are usually capable of (partially) comprehending each other’s speech without explicitly learning the target, second language. The cross-linguistic intelligibility among closely related languages is mainly driven by linguistic factors such as lexical similarities. This paper presents a computational model of spoken-word recognition and investigates its ability to recognize word forms from different languages than its native, training language. Our model is based on a recurrent neural network that learns to map a word’s phonological sequence onto a semantic representation of the word. Furthermore, we present a case study on the related Slavic languages and demonstrate that the cross-lingual performance of our model not only predicts mutual intelligibility to a large extent but also reflects the genetic classification of the languages in our study.

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Annotating Norwegian language varieties on Twitter for Part-of-speech
Petter Mæhlum | Andre Kåsen | Samia Touileb | Jeremy Barnes

Norwegian Twitter data poses an interesting challenge for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. These texts are difficult for models trained on standardized text in one of the two Norwegian written forms (Bokmål and Nynorsk), as they contain both the typical variation of social media text, as well as a large amount of dialectal variety. In this paper we present a novel Norwegian Twitter dataset annotated with POS-tags. We show that models trained on Universal Dependency (UD) data perform worse when evaluated against this dataset, and that models trained on Bokmål generally perform better than those trained on Nynorsk. We also see that performance on dialectal tweets is comparable to the written standards for some models. Finally we perform a detailed analysis of the errors that models commonly make on this data.

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OcWikiDisc: a Corpus of Wikipedia Talk Pages in Occitan
Aleksandra Miletic | Yves Scherrer

This paper presents OcWikiDisc, a new freely available corpus in Occitan, as well as language identification experiments on Occitan done as part of the corpus building process. Occitan is a regional language spoken mainly in the south of France and in parts of Spain and Italy. It exhibits rich diatopic variation, it is not standardized, and it is still low-resourced, especially when it comes to large downloadable corpora. We introduce OcWikiDisc, a corpus extracted from the talk pages associated with the Occitan Wikipedia. The version of the corpus with the most restrictive language filtering contains 8K user messages for a total of 618K tokens. The language filtering is performed based on language identification experiments with five off-the-shelf tools, including the new fasttext’s language identification model from Meta AI’s No Language Left Behind initiative, released in July 2022.

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Is Encoder-Decoder Transformer the Shiny Hammer?
Nat Gillin

We present an approach to multi-class classification using an encoder-decoder transformer model. We trained a network to identify French varieties using the same scripts we use to train an encoder-decoder machine translation model. With some slight modification to the data preparation and inference parameters, we showed that the same tools used for machine translation can be easily re-used to achieve competitive performance for classification. On the French Dialectal Identification (FDI) task, we scored 32.4 on weighted F1, but this is far from a simple naive bayes classifier that outperforms a neural encoder-decoder model at 41.27 weighted F1.

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The Curious Case of Logistic Regression for Italian Languages and Dialects Identification
Giacomo Camposampiero | Quynh Anh Nguyen | Francesco Di Stefano

Automatic Language Identification represents an important task for improving many real-world applications such as opinion mining and machine translation. In the case of closely-related languages such as regional dialects, this task is often challenging. In this paper, we propose an extensive evaluation of different approaches for the identification of Italian dialects and languages, spanning from classical machine learning models to more complex neural architectures and state-of-the-art pre-trained language models. Surprisingly, shallow machine learning models managed to outperform huge pre-trained language models in this specific task. This work was developed in the context of the Identification of Languages and Dialects of Italy (ITDI) task organised at VarDial 2022 Evaluation Campaign. Our best submission managed to achieve a weighted F1-score of 0.6880, ranking 5th out of 9 final submissions.

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Neural Networks for Cross-domain Language Identification. Phlyers @Vardial 2022
Andrea Ceolin

We present our contribution to the Identification of Languages and Dialects of Italy shared task (ITDI) proposed in the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2022, which asked participants to automatically identify the language of a text associated to one of the language varieties of Italy. The method that yielded the best results in our experiments was a Deep Feedforward Neural Network (DNN) trained on character ngram counts, which provided a better performance compared to Naive Bayes methods and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The system was among the best methods proposed for the ITDI shared task. The analysis of the results suggests that simple DNNs could be more efficient than CNNs to perform language identification of close varieties.

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Transfer Learning Improves French Cross-Domain Dialect Identification: NRC @ VarDial 2022
Gabriel Bernier-Colborne | Serge Leger | Cyril Goutte

We describe the systems developed by the National Research Council Canada for the French Cross-Domain Dialect Identification shared task at the 2022 VarDial evaluation campaign. We evaluated two different approaches to this task: SVM and probabilistic classifiers exploiting n-grams as features, and trained from scratch on the data provided; and a pre-trained French language model, CamemBERT, that we fine-tuned on the dialect identification task. The latter method turned out to improve the macro-F1 score on the test set from 0.344 to 0.430 (25% increase), which indicates that transfer learning can be helpful for dialect identification.

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Italian Language and Dialect Identification and Regional French Variety Detection using Adaptive Naive Bayes
Tommi Jauhiainen | Heidi Jauhiainen | Krister Lindén

This article describes the language identification approach used by the SUKI team in the Identification of Languages and Dialects of Italy and the French Cross-Domain Dialect Identification shared tasks organized as part of the VarDial workshop 2022. We describe some experiments and the preprocessing techniques we used for the training data in preparation for the shared task submissions, which are also discussed. Our Naive Bayes-based adaptive system reached the first position in Italian language identification and came second in the French variety identification task.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP)

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CAraNER: The COVID-19 Arabic Named Entity Corpus
Abdulmohsen Al-Thubaity | Sakhar Alkhereyf | Wejdan Alzahrani | Alia Bahanshal

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a well-known problem for the natural language processing (NLP) community. It is a key component of different NLP applications, including information extraction, question answering, and information retrieval. In the literature, there are several Arabic NER datasets with different named entity tags; however, due to data and concept drift, we are always in need of new data for NER and other NLP applications. In this paper, first, we introduce Wassem, a web-based annotation platform for Arabic NLP applications. Wassem can be used to manually annotate textual data for a variety of NLP tasks: text classification, sequence classification, and word segmentation. Second, we introduce the COVID-19 Arabic Named Entities Recognition (CAraNER) dataset. CAraNER has 55,389 tokens distributed over 1,278 sentences randomly extracted from Saudi Arabian newspaper articles published during 2019, 2020, and 2021. The dataset is labeled by five annotators with five named-entity tags, namely: Person, Title, Location, Organization, and Miscellaneous. The CAraNER corpus is available for download for free. We evaluate the corpus by finetuning four BERT-based Arabic language models on the CAraNER corpus. The best model was AraBERTv0.2-large with 0.86 for the F1 macro measure.

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Joint Coreference Resolution for Zeros and non-Zeros in Arabic
Abdulrahman Aloraini | Sameer Pradhan | Massimo Poesio

Most existing proposals about anaphoric zero pronoun (AZP) resolution regard full mention coreference and AZP resolution as two independent tasks, even though the two tasks are clearly related. The main issues that need tackling to develop a joint model for zero and non-zero mentions are the difference between the two types of arguments (zero pronouns, being null, provide no nominal information) and the lack of annotated datasets of a suitable size in which both types of arguments are annotated for languages other than Chinese and Japanese. In this paper, we introduce two architectures for jointly resolving AZPs and non-AZPs, and evaluate them on Arabic, a language for which, as far as we know, there has been no prior work on joint resolution. Doing this also required creating a new version of the Arabic subset of the standard coreference resolution dataset used for the CoNLL-2012 shared task (Pradhan et al.,2012) in which both zeros and non-zeros are included in a single dataset.

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SAIDS: A Novel Approach for Sentiment Analysis Informed of Dialect and Sarcasm
Abdelrahman Kaseb | Mona Farouk

Sentiment analysis becomes an essential part of every social network, as it enables decision-makers to know more about users’ opinions in almost all life aspects. Despite its importance, there are multiple issues it encounters like the sentiment of the sarcastic text which is one of the main challenges of sentiment analysis. This paper tackles this challenge by introducing a novel system (SAIDS) that predicts the sentiment, sarcasm and dialect of Arabic tweets. SAIDS uses its prediction of sarcasm and dialect as known information to predict the sentiment. It uses MARBERT as a language model to generate sentence embedding, then passes it to the sarcasm and dialect models, and then the outputs of the three models are concatenated and passed to the sentiment analysis model. Multiple system design setups were experimented with and reported. SAIDS was applied to the ArSarcasm-v2 dataset where it outperforms the state-of-the-art model for the sentiment analysis task. By training all tasks together, SAIDS achieves results of 75.98 FPN, 59.09 F1-score and 71.13 F1-score for sentiment analysis, sarcasm detection, and dialect identification respectively. The system design can be used to enhance the performance of any task which is dependent on other tasks.

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AraBART: a Pretrained Arabic Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Abstractive Summarization
Moussa Kamal Eddine | Nadi Tomeh | Nizar Habash | Joseph Le Roux | Michalis Vazirgiannis

Like most natural language understanding and generation tasks, state-of-the-art models for summarization are transformer-based sequence-to-sequence architectures that are pretrained on large corpora. While most existing models focus on English, Arabic remains understudied. In this paper we propose AraBART, the first Arabic model in which the encoder and the decoder are pretrained end-to-end, based on BART. We show that AraBART achieves the best performance on multiple abstractive summarization datasets, outperforming strong baselines including a pretrained Arabic BERT-based model, multilingual BART, Arabic T5, and a multilingual T5 model. AraBART is publicly available.

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Towards Arabic Sentence Simplification via Classification and Generative Approaches
Nouran Khallaf | Serge Sharoff | Rasha Soliman

This paper presents an attempt to build a Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) sentence-level simplification system. We experimented with sentence simplification using two approaches: (i) a classification approach leading to lexical simplification pipelines which use Arabic-BERT, a pre-trained contextualised model, as well as a model of fastText word embeddings; and (ii) a generative approach, a Seq2Seq technique by applying a multilingual Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer mT5. We developed our training corpus by aligning the original and simplified sentences from the internationally acclaimed Arabic novel Saaq al-Bambuu. We evaluate effectiveness of these methods by comparing the generated simple sentences to the target simple sentences using the BERTScore evaluation metric. The simple sentences produced by the mT5 model achieve P 0.72, R 0.68 and F-1 0.70 via BERTScore, while, combining Arabic-BERT and fastText achieves P 0.97, R 0.97 and F-1 0.97. In addition, we report a manual error analysis for these experiments.

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Generating Classical Arabic Poetry using Pre-trained Models
Nehal Elkaref | Mervat Abu-Elkheir | Maryam ElOraby | Mohamed Abdelgaber

Poetry generation tends to be a complicated task given meter and rhyme constraints. Previous work resorted to exhaustive methods in-order to employ poetic elements. In this paper we leave pre-trained models, GPT-J and BERTShared to recognize patterns of meters and rhyme to generate classical Arabic poetry and present our findings and results on how well both models could pick up on these classical Arabic poetic elements.

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A Benchmark Study of Contrastive Learning for Arabic Social Meaning
Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker | El Moatez Billah Nagoudi | AbdelRahim Elmadany | Muhammad Abdul-Mageed | Laks Lakshmanan, V.S.

Contrastive learning (CL) has brought significant progress to various NLP tasks. Despite such a progress, CL has not been applied to Arabic NLP. Nor is it clear how much benefits it could bring to particular classes of tasks such as social meaning (e.g., sentiment analysis, dialect identification, hate speech detection). In this work, we present a comprehensive benchmark study of state-of-the-art supervised CL methods on a wide array of Arabic social meaning tasks. Through an extensive empirical analysis, we show that CL methods outperform vanilla finetuning on most of the tasks. We also show that CL can be data efficient and quantify this efficiency, demonstrating the promise of these methods in low-resource settings vis-a-vis the particular downstream tasks (especially label granularity).

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Adversarial Text-to-Speech for low-resource languages
Ashraf Elneima | Mikołaj Bińkowski

In this paper we propose a new method for training adversarial text-to-speech (TTS) models for low-resource languages using auxiliary data. Specifically, we modify the MelGAN (Kumar et al., 2019) architecture to achieve better performance in Arabic speech generation, exploring multiple additional datasets and architectural choices, which involved extra discriminators designed to exploit high-frequency similarities between languages. In our evaluation, we used subjective human evaluation, MOS-Mean Opinion Score, and a novel quantitative metric, the Fréchet Wav2Vec Distance, which we found to be well correlated with MOS. Both subjectively and quantitatively, our method outperformed the standard MelGAN model.

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NADI 2022: The Third Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed | Chiyu Zhang | AbdelRahim Elmadany | Houda Bouamor | Nizar Habash

We describe the findings of the third Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2022). NADI aims at advancing state-of-the-art Arabic NLP, including Arabic dialects. It does so by affording diverse datasets and modeling opportunities in a standardized context where meaningful comparisons between models and approaches are possible. NADI 2022 targeted both dialect identification (Subtask 1) and dialectal sentiment analysis (Subtask 2) at the country level. A total of 41 unique teams registered for the shared task, of whom 21 teams have participated (with 105 valid submissions). Among these, 19 teams participated in Subtask 1, and 10 participated in Subtask 2. The winning team achieved F1=27.06 on Subtask 1 and F1=75.16 on Subtask 2, reflecting that both subtasks remain challenging and motivating future work in this area. We describe the methods employed by the participating teams and offer an outlook for NADI.

In this paper, we present the results and findings of the Shared Task on Gender Rewriting, which was organized as part of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop. The task of gender rewriting refers to generating alternatives of a given sentence to match different target user gender contexts (e.g., a female speaker with a male listener, a male speaker with a male listener, etc.). This requires changing the grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) of certain words referring to the users. In this task, we focus on Arabic, a gender-marking morphologically rich language. A total of five teams from four countries participated in the shared task.

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Overview of the WANLP 2022 Shared Task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic
Firoj Alam | Hamdy Mubarak | Wajdi Zaghouani | Giovanni Da San Martino | Preslav Nakov

Propaganda is defined as an expression of opinion or action by individuals or groups deliberately designed to influence opinions or actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends and this is achieved by means of well-defined rhetorical and psychological devices. Currently, propaganda (or persuasion) techniques have been commonly used on social media to manipulate or mislead social media users. Automatic detection of propaganda techniques from textual, visual, or multimodal content has been studied recently, however, major of such efforts are focused on English language content. In this paper, we propose a shared task on detecting propaganda techniques for Arabic textual content. We have done a pilot annotation of 200 Arabic tweets, which we plan to extend to 2,000 tweets, covering diverse topics. We hope that the shared task will help in building a community for Arabic propaganda detection. The dataset will be made publicly available, which can help in future studies.

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ArzEn-ST: A Three-way Speech Translation Corpus for Code-Switched Egyptian Arabic-English
Injy Hamed | Nizar Habash | Slim Abdennadher | Ngoc Thang Vu

We present our work on collecting ArzEn-ST, a code-switched Egyptian Arabic-English Speech Translation Corpus. This corpus is an extension of the ArzEn speech corpus, which was collected through informal interviews with bilingual speakers. In this work, we collect translations in both directions, monolingual Egyptian Arabic and monolingual English, forming a three-way speech translation corpus. We make the translation guidelines and corpus publicly available. We also report results for baseline systems for machine translation and speech translation tasks. We believe this is a valuable resource that can motivate and facilitate further research studying the code-switching phenomenon from a linguistic perspective and can be used to train and evaluate NLP systems.

We present Maknuune, a large open lexicon for the Palestinian Arabic dialect. Maknuune has over 36K entries from 17K lemmas, and 3.7K roots. All entries include diacritized Arabic orthography, phonological transcription and English glosses. Some entries are enriched with additional information such as broken plurals and templatic feminine forms, associated phrases and collocations, Standard Arabic glosses, and examples or notes on grammar, usage, or location of collected entry

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Developing a Tag-Set and Extracting the Morphological Lexicons to Build a Morphological Analyzer for Egyptian Arabic
Amany Fashwan | Sameh Alansary

This paper sheds light on an in-progress work for building a morphological analyzer for Egyptian Arabic (EGY). To build such a tool, a tag-set schema is developed depending on a corpus of 527,000 EGY words covering different sources and genres. This tag-set schema is used in annotating about 318,940 words, morphologically, according to their contexts. Each annotated word is associated with its suitable prefix(s), original stem, tag, suffix(s), glossary, number, gender, definiteness, and conventional lemma and stem. These morphologically annotated words, in turns, are used in developing the proposed morphological analyzer where the morphological lexicons and the compatibility tables are extracted and tested. The system is compared with one of best EGY morphological analyzers; CALIMA.

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A Weak Supervised Transfer Learning Approach for Sentiment Analysis to the Kuwaiti Dialect
Fatemah Husain | Hana Al-Ostad | Halima Omar

Developing a system for sentiment analysis is very challenging for the Arabic language due to the limitations in the available Arabic datasets. Many Arabic dialects are still not studied by researchers in Arabic sentiment analysis due to the complexity of annotators’ recruitment process during dataset creation. This paper covers the research gap in sentiment analysis for the Kuwaiti dialect by proposing a weak supervised approach to develop a large labeled dataset. Our dataset consists of over 16.6k tweets with 7,905 negatives, 7,902 positives, and 860 neutrals that spans several themes and time frames to remove any bias that might affect its content. The annotation agreement between our proposed system’s labels and human-annotated labels reports 93% for the pairwise percent agreement and 0.87 for Cohen’s kappa coefficient. Furthermore, we evaluate our dataset using multiple traditional machine learning classifiers and advanced deep learning language models to test its performance. The results report 89% accuracy when applied to the testing dataset using the ARBERT model.

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Mawqif: A Multi-label Arabic Dataset for Target-specific Stance Detection
Nora Saleh Alturayeif | Hamzah Abdullah Luqman | Moataz Aly Kamaleldin Ahmed

Social media platforms are becoming inherent parts of people’s daily life to express opinions and stances toward topics of varying polarities. Stance detection determines the viewpoint expressed in a text toward a target. While communication on social media (e.g., Twitter) takes place in more than 40 languages, the majority of stance detection research has been focused on English. Although some efforts have recently been made to develop stance detection datasets in other languages, no similar efforts seem to have considered the Arabic language. In this paper, we present Mawqif, the first Arabic dataset for target-specific stance detection, composed of 4,121 tweets annotated with stance, sentiment, and sarcasm polarities. Mawqif, as a multi-label dataset, can provide more opportunities for studying the interaction between different opinion dimensions and evaluating a multi-task model. We provide a detailed description of the dataset, present an analysis of the produced annotation, and evaluate four BERT-based models on it. Our best model achieves a macro-F1 of 78.89%, which shows that there is ample room for improvement on this challenging task. We publicly release our dataset, the annotation guidelines, and the code of the experiments.

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Assessing the Linguistic Knowledge in Arabic Pre-trained Language Models Using Minimal Pairs
Wafa Abdullah Alrajhi | Hend Al-Khalifa | Abdulmalik AlSalman

Despite the noticeable progress that we recently witnessed in Arabic pre-trained language models (PLMs), the linguistic knowledge captured by these models remains unclear. In this paper, we conducted a study to evaluate available Arabic PLMs in terms of their linguistic knowledge. BERT-based language models (LMs) are evaluated using Minimum Pairs (MP), where each pair represents a grammatical sentence and its contradictory counterpart. MPs isolate specific linguistic knowledge to test the model’s sensitivity in understanding a specific linguistic phenomenon. We cover nine major Arabic phenomena: Verbal sentences, Nominal sentences, Adjective Modification, and Idafa construction. The experiments compared the results of fifteen Arabic BERT-based PLMs. Overall, among all tested models, CAMeL-CA outperformed the other PLMs by achieving the highest overall accuracy.

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Identifying Code-switching in Arabizi
Safaa Shehadi | Shuly Wintner

We describe a corpus of social media posts that include utterances in Arabizi, a Roman-script rendering of Arabic, mixed with other languages, notably English, French, and Arabic written in the Arabic script. We manually annotated a subset of the texts with word-level language IDs; this is a non-trivial task due to the nature of mixed-language writing, especially on social media. We developed classifiers that can accurately predict the language ID tags. Then, we extended the word-level predictions to identify sentences that include Arabizi (and code-switching), and applied the classifiers to the raw corpus, thereby harvesting a large number of additional instances. The result is a large-scale dataset of Arabizi, with precise indications of code-switching between Arabizi and English, French, and Arabic.

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Authorship Verification for Arabic Short Texts Using Arabic Knowledge-Base Model (AraKB)
Fatimah Alqahtani | Helen Yannakoudakis

Arabic is a Semitic language, considered to be one of the most complex languages in the world due to its unique composition and complex linguistic features. It consequently causes challenges for verifying the authorship of Arabic texts, requiring extensive research and development. This paper presents a new knowledge-based model to enhance Natural Language Understanding and thereby improve authorship verification performance. The proposed model provided promising results that would benefit the Arabic research for different Natural Language Processing tasks.

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A Semi-supervised Approach for a Better Translation of Sentiment in Dialectical Arabic UGT
Hadeel Saadany | Constantin Orăsan | Emad Mohamed | Ashraf Tantawy

In the online world, Machine Translation (MT) systems are extensively used to translate User-Generated Text (UGT) such as reviews, tweets, and social media posts, where the main message is often the author’s positive or negative attitude towards the topic of the text. However, MT systems still lack accuracy in some low-resource languages and sometimes make critical translation errors that completely flip the sentiment polarity of the target word or phrase and hence delivers a wrong affect message. This is particularly noticeable in texts that do not follow common lexico-grammatical standards such as the dialectical Arabic (DA) used on online platforms. In this research, we aim to improve the translation of sentiment in UGT written in the dialectical versions of the Arabic language to English. Given the scarcity of gold-standard parallel data for DA-EN in the UGT domain, we introduce a semi-supervised approach that exploits both monolingual and parallel data for training an NMT system initialised by a cross-lingual language model trained with supervised and unsupervised modeling objectives. We assess the accuracy of sentiment translation by our proposed system through a numerical ‘sentiment-closeness’ measure as well as human evaluation. We will show that our semi-supervised MT system can significantly help with correcting sentiment errors detected in the online translation of dialectical Arabic UGT.

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Cross-lingual transfer for low-resource Arabic language understanding
Khadige Abboud | Olga Golovneva | Christopher DiPersio

This paper explores cross-lingual transfer learning in natural language understanding (NLU), with the focus on bootstrapping Arabic from high-resource English and French languages for domain classification, intent classification, and named entity recognition tasks. We adopt a BERT-based architecture and pretrain three models using open-source Wikipedia data and large-scale commercial datasets: monolingual:Arabic, bilingual:Arabic-English, and trilingual:Arabic-English-French models. Additionally, we use off-the-shelf machine translator to translate internal data from source English language to the target Arabic language, in an effort to enhance transfer learning through translation. We conduct experiments that finetune the three models for NLU tasks and evaluate them on a large internal dataset. Despite the morphological, orthographical, and grammatical differences between Arabic and the source languages, transfer learning performance gains from source languages and through machine translation are achieved on a real-world Arabic test dataset in both a zero-shot setting and in a setting when the models are further finetuned on labeled data from the target language.

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Improving POS Tagging for Arabic Dialects on Out-of-Domain Texts
Noor Abo Mokh | Daniel Dakota | Sandra Kübler

We investigate part of speech tagging for four Arabic dialects (Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, and Maghrebi), in an out-of-domain setting. More specifically, we look at the effectiveness of 1) upsampling the target dialect in the training data of a joint model, 2) increasing the consistency of the annotations, and 3) using word embeddings pre-trained on a large corpus of dialectal Arabic. We increase the accuracy on average by about 20 percentage points.

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Domain Adaptation for Arabic Crisis Response
Reem Alrashdi | Simon O’Keefe

Deep learning algorithms can identify related tweets to reduce the information overload that prevents humanitarian organisations from using valuable Twitter posts. However, they rely heavily on human-labelled data, which are unavailable for emerging crises. Because each crisis has its own features, such as location, time and social media response, current models are known to suffer from generalising to unseen disaster events when pre-trained on past ones. Tweet classifiers for low-resource languages like Arabic has the additional issue of limited labelled data duplicates caused by the absence of good language resources. Thus, we propose a novel domain adaptation approach that employs distant supervision to automatically label tweets from emerging Arabic crisis events to be used to train a model along with available human-labelled data. We evaluate our work on data from seven 2018–2020 Arabic events from different crisis types (flood, explosion, virus and storm). Results show that our method outperforms self-training in identifying crisis-related tweets in real-time scenarios and can be seen as a robust Arabic tweet classifier.

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Weakly and Semi-Supervised Learning for Arabic Text Classification using Monodialectal Language Models
Reem AlYami | Rabah Al-Zaidy

The lack of resources such as annotated datasets and tools for low-resource languages is a significant obstacle to the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications targeting users who speak these languages. Although learning techniques such as semi-supervised and weakly supervised learning are effective in text classification cases where annotated data is limited, they are still not widely investigated in many languages due to the sparsity of data altogether, both labeled and unlabeled. In this study, we deploy both weakly, and semi-supervised learning approaches for text classification in low-resource languages and address the underlying limitations that can hinder the effectiveness of these techniques. To that end, we propose a suite of language-agnostic techniques for large-scale data collection, automatic data annotation, and language model training in scenarios where resources are scarce. Specifically, we propose a novel data collection pipeline for under-represented languages, or dialects, that is language and task agnostic and of sufficient size for training a language model capable of achieving competitive results on common NLP tasks, as our experiments show. The models will be shared with the research community.

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Event-Based Knowledge MLM for Arabic Event Detection
Asma Z Yamani | Amjad K Alsulami | Rabeah A Al-Zaidy

With the fast pace of reporting around the globe from various sources, event extraction has increasingly become an important task in NLP. The use of pre-trained language models (PTMs) has become popular to provide contextual representation for downstream tasks. This work aims to pre-train language models that enhance event extraction accuracy. To this end, we propose an Event-Based Knowledge (EBK) masking approach to mask the most significant terms in the event detection task. These significant terms are based on an external knowledge source that is curated for the purpose of event detection for the Arabic language. The proposed approach improves the classification accuracy of all the 9 event types. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed masking approach and encourage further exploration.

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Establishing a Baseline for Arabic Patents Classification: A Comparison of Twelve Approaches
Taif Omar Al-Omar | Hend Al-Khalifa | Rawan Al-Matham

Nowadays, the number of patent applications is constantly growing and there is an economical interest on developing accurate and fast models to automate their classification task. In this paper, we introduce the first public Arabic patent dataset called ArPatent and experiment with twelve classification approaches to develop a baseline for Arabic patents classification. To achieve the goal of finding the best baseline for classifying Arabic patents, different machine learning, pre-trained language models as well as ensemble approaches were conducted. From the obtained results, we can observe that the best performing model for classifying Arabic patents was ARBERT with F1 of 66.53%, while the ensemble approach of the best three performing language models, namely: ARBERT, CAMeL-MSA, and QARiB, achieved the second best F1 score, i.e., 64.52%.

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Towards Learning Arabic Morphophonology
Salam Khalifa | Jordan Kodner | Owen Rambow

One core challenge facing morphological inflection systems is capturing language-specific morphophonological changes. This is particularly true of languages like Arabic which are morphologically complex. In this paper, we learn explicit morphophonological rules from morphologically annotated Egyptian Arabic and corresponding surface forms. These rules are human-interpretable, capture known morphophonological phenomena in the language, and are generalizable to unseen forms.

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AraDepSu: Detecting Depression and Suicidal Ideation in Arabic Tweets Using Transformers
Mariam Hassib | Nancy Hossam | Jolie Sameh | Marwan Torki

Among mental health diseases, depression is one of the most severe, as it often leads to suicide which is the fourth leading cause of death in the Middle East. In the Middle East, Egypt has the highest percentage of suicidal deaths; due to this, it is important to identify depression and suicidal ideation. In Arabic culture, there is a lack of awareness regarding the importance of diagnosing and living with mental health diseases. However, as noted for the last couple years people all over the world, including Arab citizens, tend to express their feelings openly on social media. Twitter is the most popular platform designed to enable the expression of emotions through short texts, pictures, or videos. This paper aims to predict depression and depression with suicidal ideation. Due to the tendency of people to treat social media as their personal diaries and share their deepest thoughts on social media platforms. Social data contain valuable information that can be used to identify user’s psychological states. We create AraDepSu dataset by scrapping tweets from twitter and manually labelling them. We expand the diversity of user tweets, by adding a neutral label (“neutral”) so the dataset include three classes (“depressed”, “suicidal”, “neutral”). Then we train our AraDepSu dataset on 30+ different transformer models. We find that the best-performing model is MARBERT with accuracy, precision, recall and F1-Score values of 91.20%, 88.74%, 88.50% and 88.75%.

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End-to-End Speech Translation of Arabic to English Broadcast News
Fethi Bougares | Salim Jouili

Speech translation (ST) is the task of directly translating acoustic speech signals in a source language into text in a foreign language. ST task has been addressed, for a long time, using a pipeline approach with two modules : first an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in the source language followed by a text-to-text Machine translation (MT). In the past few years, we have seen a paradigm shift towards the end-to-end approaches using sequence-to-sequence deep neural network models. This paper presents our efforts towards the development of the first Broadcast News end-to-end Arabic to English speech translation system. Starting from independent ASR and MT LDC releases, we were able to identify about 92 hours of Arabic audio recordings for which the manual transcription was also translated into English at the segment level. These data was used to train and compare pipeline and end-to-end speech translation systems under multiple scenarios including transfer learning and data augmentation techniques.

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Arabic Keyphrase Extraction: Enhancing Deep Learning Models with Pre-trained Contextual Embedding and External Features
Randah Alharbi | Husni Al-Muhtasab

Keyphrase extraction is essential to many Information retrieval (IR) and Natural language Processing (NLP) tasks such as summarization and indexing. This study investigates deep learning approaches to Arabic keyphrase extraction. We address the problem as sequence classification and create a Bi-LSTM model to classify each sequence token as either part of the keyphrase or outside of it. We have extracted word embeddings from two pre-trained models, Word2Vec and BERT. Moreover, we have investigated the effect of incorporating linguistic, positional, and statistical features with word embeddings on performance. Our best-performing model has achieved 0.45 F1-score on ArabicKPE dataset when combining linguistic and positional features with BERT embedding.

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ArabIE: Joint Entity, Relation and Event Extraction for Arabic
Niama El Khbir | Nadi Tomeh | Thierry Charnois

Previous work on Arabic information extraction has mainly focused on named entity recognition and very little work has been done on Arabic relation extraction and event recognition. Moreover, modeling Arabic data for such tasks is not straightforward because of the morphological richness and idiosyncrasies of the Arabic language. We propose in this article the first neural joint information extraction system for the Arabic language.

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Emoji Sentiment Roles for Sentiment Analysis: A Case Study in Arabic Texts
Shatha Ali A. Hakami | Robert Hendley | Phillip Smith

Emoji (digital pictograms) are crucial features for textual sentiment analysis. However, analysing the sentiment roles of emoji is very complex. This is due to its dependency on different factors, such as textual context, cultural perspective, interlocutor’s personal traits, interlocutors’ relationships or a platforms’ functional features. This work introduces an approach to analysing the sentiment effects of emoji as textual features. Using an Arabic dataset as a benchmark, our results confirm the borrowed argument that each emoji has three different norms of sentiment role (negative, neutral or positive). Therefore, an emoji can play different sentiment roles depending upon the context. It can behave as an emphasizer, an indicator, a mitigator, a reverser or a trigger of either negative or positive sentiment within a text. In addition, an emoji may have a neutral effect (i.e., no effect) on the sentiment of the text.

Arabic diacritic recovery is important for a variety of downstream tasks such as text-to-speech. In this paper, we introduce a new Gulf Arabic diacritization dataset composed of 19,850 words based on a subset of the Gumar corpus. We provide comprehensive set of guidelines for diacritization to enable the diacritization of more data. We also report on diacritization results based on the new corpus using a Hidden Markov Model and character-based sequence to sequence models.

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Learning From Arabic Corpora But Not Always From Arabic Speakers: A Case Study of the Arabic Wikipedia Editions
Saied Alshahrani | Esma Wali | Jeanna Matthews

Wikipedia is a common source of training data for Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, especially as a source for corpora in languages other than English. However, for many downstream NLP tasks, it is important to understand the degree to which these corpora reflect representative contributions of native speakers. In particular, many entries in a given language may be translated from other languages or produced through other automated mechanisms. Language models built using corpora like Wikipedia can embed history, culture, bias, stereotypes, politics, and more, but it is important to understand whose views are actually being represented. In this paper, we present a case study focusing specifically on differences among the Arabic Wikipedia editions (Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian, and Moroccan). In particular, we document issues in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia with automatic creation/generation and translation of content pages from English without human supervision. These issues could substantially affect the performance and accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) trained from these corpora, producing models that lack the cultural richness and meaningful representation of native speakers. Fortunately, the metadata maintained by Wikipedia provides visibility into these issues, but unfortunately, this is not the case for all corpora used to train LLMs.

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A Pilot Study on the Collection and Computational Analysis of Linguistic Differences Amongst Men and Women in a Kuwaiti Arabic WhatsApp Dataset
Hesah Aldihan | Robert Gaizauskas | Susan Fitzmaurice

This study focuses on the collection and computational analysis of Kuwaiti Arabic (KA), which is considered a low resource dialect, to test different sociolinguistic hypotheses related to gendered language use. In this paper, we describe the collection and analysis of a corpus of WhatsApp Group chats with mixed gender Kuwaiti participants. This corpus, which we are making publicly available, is the first corpus of KA conversational data. We analyse different interactional and linguistic features to get insights about features that may be indicative of gender to inform the development of a gender classification system for KA in an upcoming study. Statistical analysis of our data shows that there is insufficient evidence to claim that there are significant differences amongst men and women with respect to number of turns, length of turns and number of emojis. However, qualitative analysis shows that men and women differ substantially in the types of emojis they use and in their use of lengthened words.

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Beyond Arabic: Software for Perso-Arabic Script Manipulation
Alexander Gutkin | Cibu Johny | Raiomond Doctor | Brian Roark | Richard Sproat

This paper presents an open-source software library that provides a set of finite-state transducer (FST) components and corresponding utilities for manipulating the writing systems of languages that use the Perso-Arabic script. The operations include various levels of script normalization, including visual invariance-preserving operations that subsume and go beyond the standard Unicode normalization forms, as well as transformations that modify the visual appearance of characters in accordance with the regional orthographies for eleven contemporary languages from diverse language families. The library also provides simple FST-based romanization and transliteration. We additionally attempt to formalize the typology of Perso-Arabic characters by providing one-to-many mappings from Unicode code points to the languages that use them. While our work focuses on the Arabic script diaspora rather than Arabic itself, this approach could be adopted for any language that uses the Arabic script, thus providing a unified framework for treating a script family used by close to a billion people.

Coreference resolution is a key aspect of text comprehension, but the size of the available coreference corpora for Arabic is limited in comparison to the size of the corpora for other languages. In this paper we present a Game-With-A-Purpose called Stroll with a Scroll created to collect from players coreference annotations for Arabic. The key contribution of this work is the embedding of the annotation task in a virtual world setting, as opposed to the puzzle-type games used in previously proposed Games-With-A-Purpose for coreference.

NatiQ is end-to-end text-to-speech system for Arabic. Our speech synthesizer uses an encoder-decoder architecture with attention. We used both tacotron-based models (tacotron- 1 and tacotron-2) and the faster transformer model for generating mel-spectrograms from characters. We concatenated Tacotron1 with the WaveRNN vocoder, Tacotron2 with the WaveGlow vocoder and ESPnet transformer with the parallel wavegan vocoder to synthesize waveforms from the spectrograms. We used in-house speech data for two voices: 1) neu- tral male “Hamza”- narrating general content and news, and 2) expressive female “Amina”- narrating children story books to train our models. Our best systems achieve an aver- age Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.21 and 4.40 for Amina and Hamza respectively. The objective evaluation of the systems using word and character error rate (WER and CER) as well as the response time measured by real- time factor favored the end-to-end architecture ESPnet. NatiQ demo is available online at https://tts.qcri.org.

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The Effect of Arabic Dialect Familiarity on Data Annotation
Ibrahim Abu Farha | Walid Magdy

Data annotation is the foundation of most natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, data annotation is complex and there is often no specific correct label, especially in subjective tasks. Data annotation is affected by the annotators’ ability to understand the provided data. In the case of Arabic, this is important due to the large dialectal variety. In this paper, we analyse how Arabic speakers understand other dialects in written text. Also, we analyse the effect of dialect familiarity on the quality of data annotation, focusing on Arabic sarcasm detection. This is done by collecting third-party labels and comparing them to high-quality first-party labels. Our analysis shows that annotators tend to better identify their own dialect and they are prone to confuse dialects they are unfamiliar with. For task labels, annotators tend to perform better on their dialect or dialects they are familiar with. Finally, females tend to perform better than males on the sarcasm detection task. We suggest that to guarantee high-quality labels, researchers should recruit native dialect speakers for annotation.

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Optimizing Naive Bayes for Arabic Dialect Identification
Tommi Jauhiainen | Heidi Jauhiainen | Krister Lindén

This article describes the language identification system used by the SUKI team in the 2022 Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task. In addition to the system description, we give some details of the dialect identification experiments we conducted while preparing our submissions. In the end, we submitted only one official run. We used a Naive Bayes-based language identifier with character n-grams from one to four, of which we implemented a new version, which automatically optimizes its parameters. We also experimented with clustering the training data according to different topics. With the macro F1 score of 0.1963 on test set A and 0.1058 on test set B, we achieved the 18th position out of the 19 competing teams.

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iCompass Working Notes for the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared task
Abir Messaoudi | Chayma Fourati | Hatem Haddad | Moez BenHajhmida

We describe our submitted system to the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task. We tackled only the first subtask (Subtask 1). We used state-of-the-art Deep Learning models and pre-trained contextualized text representation models that we finetuned according to the downstream task in hand. As a first approach, we used BERT Arabic variants: MARBERT with its two versions MARBERT v1 and MARBERT v2, we combined MARBERT embeddings with a CNN classifier, and finally, we tested the Quasi-Recurrent Neural Networks (QRNN) model. The results found show that version 2 of MARBERT outperforms all of the previously mentioned models on Subtask 1.

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TF-IDF or Transformers for Arabic Dialect Identification? ITFLOWS participation in the NADI 2022 Shared Task
Fouad Shammary | Yiyi Chen | Zsolt T Kardkovacs | Mehwish Alam | Haithem Afli

This study targets the shared task of Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) organized with the Workshop on Arabic Natural Language Processing (WANLP). It further focuses on Subtask 1 on the identification of the Arabic dialects at the country level. More specifically, it studies the impact of a traditional approach such as TF-IDF and then moves on to study the impact of advanced deep learning based methods. These methods include fully fine-tuning MARBERT as well as adapter based fine-tuning of MARBERT with and without performing data augmentation. The evaluation shows that the traditional approach based on TF-IDF scores the best in terms of accuracy on TEST-A dataset, while, the fine-tuned MARBERT with adapter on augmented data scores the second on Macro F1-score on the TEST-B dataset. This led to the proposed system being ranked second on the shared task on average.

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Domain-Adapted BERT-based Models for Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification and Tweet Sentiment Analysis
Giyaseddin Bayrak | Abdul Majeed Issifu

This paper summarizes the solution of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) 2022 shared task. It consists of two subtasks: a country-level Arabic Dialect Identification (ADID) and an Arabic Sentiment Analysis (ASA). Our work shows the importance of using domain-adapted models and language-specific pre-processing in NLP task solutions. We implement a simple but strong baseline technique to increase the stability of fine-tuning settings to obtain a good generalization of models. Our best model for the Dialect Identification subtask achieves a Macro F-1 score of 25.54% as an average of both Test-A (33.89%) and Test-B (19.19%) F-1 scores. We also obtained a Macro F-1 score of 74.29% of positive and negative sentiments only, in the Sentiment Analysis task.

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Benchmarking transfer learning approaches for sentiment analysis of Arabic dialect
Emna Fsih | Sameh Kchaou | Rahma Boujelbane | Lamia Hadrich-Belguith

Arabic has a widely varying collection of dialects. With the explosion of the use of social networks, the volume of written texts has remarkably increased. Most users express themselves using their own dialect. Unfortunately, many of these dialects remain under-studied due to the scarcity of resources. Researchers and industry practitioners are increasingly interested in analyzing users’ sentiments. In this context, several approaches have been proposed, namely: traditional machine learning, deep learning transfer learning and more recently few-shot learning approaches. In this work, we compare their efficiency as part of the NADI competition to develop a country-level sentiment analysis model. Three models were beneficial for this sub-task: The first based on Sentence Transformer (ST) and achieve 43.23% on DEV set and 42.33% on TEST set, the second based on CAMeLBERT and achieve 47.85% on DEV set and 41.72% on TEST set and the third based on multi-dialect BERT model and achieve 66.72% on DEV set and 39.69% on TEST set.

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SQU-CS @ NADI 2022: Dialectal Arabic Identification using One-vs-One Classification with TF-IDF Weights Computed on Character n-grams
Abdulrahman Khalifa AAlAbdulsalam

In this paper, I present an approach using one-vs-one classification scheme with TF-IDF term weighting on character n-grams for identifying Arabic dialects used in social media. The scheme was evaluated in the context of the third Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI 2022) shared task for identifying Arabic dialects used in Twitter messages. The approach was implemented with logistic regression loss and trained using stochastic gradient decent (SGD) algorithm. This simple method achieved a macro F1 score of 22.89% and 10.83% on TEST A and TEST B, respectively, in comparison to an approach based on AraBERT pretrained transformer model which achieved a macro F1 score of 30.01% and 14.84%, respectively. My submission based on AraBERT scored a macro F1 average of 22.42% and was ranked 10 out of the 19 teams who participated in the task.

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Ahmed and Khalil at NADI 2022: Transfer Learning and Addressing Class Imbalance for Arabic Dialect Identification and Sentiment Analysis
Ahmed Oumar | Khalil Mrini

In this paper, we present our findings in the two subtasks of the 2022 NADI shared task. First, in the Arabic dialect identification subtask, we find that there is heavy class imbalance, and propose to address this issue using focal loss. Our experiments with the focusing hyperparameter confirm that focal loss improves performance. Second, in the Arabic tweet sentiment analysis subtask, we deal with a smaller dataset, where text includes both Arabic dialects and Modern Standard Arabic. We propose to use transfer learning from both pre-trained MSA language models and our own model from the first subtask. Our system ranks in the 5th and 7th best spots of the leaderboards of first and second subtasks respectively.

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Arabic Sentiment Analysis by Pretrained Ensemble
Abdelrahim Qaddoumi

This paper presents the 259 team’s BERT ensemble designed for the NADI 2022 Subtask 2 (sentiment analysis) (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2022). Twitter Sentiment analysis is one of the language processing (NLP) tasks that provides a method to understand the perception and emotions of the public around specific topics. The most common research approach focuses on obtaining the tweet’s sentiment by analyzing its lexical and syntactic features. We used multiple pretrained Arabic-Bert models with a simple average ensembling and then chose the best-performing ensemble on the training dataset and ran it on the development dataset. This system ranked 3rd in Subtask 2 with a Macro-PN-F1-score of 72.49%.

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Dialect & Sentiment Identification in Nuanced Arabic Tweets Using an Ensemble of Prompt-based, Fine-tuned, and Multitask BERT-Based Models
Reem Abdel-Salam

Dialect Identification is important to improve the performance of various application as translation, speech recognition, etc. In this paper, we present our findings and results in the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification Shared Task (NADI 2022) for country-level dialect identification and sentiment identification for dialectical Arabic. The proposed model is an ensemble between fine-tuned BERT-based models and various approaches of prompt-tuning. Our model secured first place on the leaderboard for subtask 1 with an 27.06 F1-macro score, and subtask 2 secured first place with 75.15 F1-PN score. Our findings show that prompt-tuning-based models achieved better performance when compared to fine-tuning and Multi-task based methods. Moreover, using an ensemble of different loss functions might improve model performance.

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On The Arabic Dialects’ Identification: Overcoming Challenges of Geographical Similarities Between Arabic dialects and Imbalanced Datasets
Salma Jamal | Aly M .Kassem | Omar Mohamed | Ali Ashraf

Arabic is one of the world’s richest languages, with a diverse range of dialects based on geographical origin. In this paper, we present a solution to tackle subtask 1 (Country-level dialect identification) of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task 2022 achieving third place with an average macro F1 score between the two test sets of 26.44%. In the preprocessing stage, we removed the most common frequent terms from all sentences across all dialects, and in the modeling step, we employed a hybrid loss function approach that includes Weighted cross entropy loss and Vector Scaling(VS) Loss. On test sets A and B, our model achieved 35.68% and 17.192% Macro F1 scores, respectively.

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Arabic dialect identification using machine learning and transformer-based models: Submission to the NADI 2022 Shared Task
Nouf AlShenaifi | Aqil Azmi

Arabic has a wide range of dialects. Dialect is the language variation of a specific community. In this paper, we show the models we created to participate in the third Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task (Subtask 1) that involves developing a system to classify a tweet into a country-level dialect. We utilized a number of machine learning techniques as well as deep learning transformer-based models. For the machine learning approach, we build an ensemble classifier of various machine learning models. In our deep learning approach, we consider bidirectional LSTM model and AraBERT pretrained model. The results demonstrate that the deep learning approach performs noticeably better than the other machine learning approaches with 68.7% accuracy on the development set.

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NLP DI at NADI Shared Task Subtask-1: Sub-word Level Convolutional Neural Models and Pre-trained Binary Classifiers for Dialect Identification
Vani Kanjirangat | Tanja Samardzic | Ljiljana Dolamic | Fabio Rinaldi

In this paper, we describe our systems submitted to the NADI Subtask 1: country-wise dialect classifications. We designed two types of solutions. The first type is convolutional neural network CNN) classifiers trained on subword segments of optimized lengths. The second type is fine-tuned classifiers with BERT-based language specific pre-trained models. To deal with the missing dialects in one of the test sets, we experimented with binary classifiers, analyzing the predicted probability distribution patterns and comparing them with the development set patterns. The better performing approach on the development set was fine-tuning language specific pre-trained model (best F-score 26.59%). On the test set, on the other hand, we obtained the best performance with the CNN model trained on subword tokens obtained with a Unigram model (the best F-score 26.12%). Re-training models on samples of training data simulating missing dialects gave the maximum performance on the test set version with a number of dialects lesser than the training set (F-score 16.44%)

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Word Representation Models for Arabic Dialect Identification
Mahmoud Sobhy | Ahmed H. Abu El-Atta | Ahmed A. El-Sawy | Hamada Nayel

This paper describes the systems submitted by BFCAI team to Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task 2022. Dialect identification task aims at detecting the source variant of a given text or speech segment automatically. There are two subtasks in NADI 2022, the first subtask for country-level identification and the second subtask for sentiment analysis. Our team participated in the first subtask. The proposed systems use Term Frequency Inverse/Document Frequency and word embeddings as vectorization models. Different machine learning algorithms have been used as classifiers. The proposed systems have been tested on two test sets: Test-A and Test-B. The proposed models achieved Macro-f1 score of 21.25% and 9.71% for Test-A and Test-B set respectively. On other hand, the best-performed submitted system achieved Macro-f1 score of 36.48% and 18.95% for Test-A and Test-B set respectively.

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Building an Ensemble of Transformer Models for Arabic Dialect Classification and Sentiment Analysis
Abdullah Salem Khered | Ingy Yasser Hassan Abdou Abdelhalim | Riza Batista-Navarro

In this paper, we describe the approaches we developed for the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) 2022 shared task, which consists of two subtasks: the identification of country-level Arabic dialects and sentiment analysis. Our team, UniManc, developed approaches to the two subtasks which are underpinned by the same model: a pre-trained MARBERT language model. For Subtask 1, we applied undersampling to create versions of the training data with a balanced distribution across classes. For Subtask 2, we further trained the original MARBERT model for the masked language modelling objective using a NADI-provided dataset of unlabelled Arabic tweets. For each of the subtasks, a MARBERT model was fine-tuned for sequence classification, using different values for hyperparameters such as seed and learning rate. This resulted in multiple model variants, which formed the basis of an ensemble model for each subtask. Based on the official NADI evaluation, our ensemble model obtained a macro-F1-score of 26.863, ranking second overall in the first subtask. In the second subtask, our ensemble model also ranked second, obtaining a macro-F1-PN score (macro-averaged F1-score over the Positive and Negative classes) of 73.544.

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Arabic Dialect Identification and Sentiment Classification using Transformer-based Models
Joseph Attieh | Fadi Hassan

In this paper, we present two deep learning approaches that are based on AraBERT, submitted to the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task of the Seventh Workshop for Arabic Natural Language Processing (WANLP 2022). NADI consists of two main sub-tasks, mainly country-level dialect and sentiment identification for dialectical Arabic. We present one system per sub-task. The first system is a multi-task learning model that consists of a shared AraBERT encoder with three task-specific classification layers. This model is trained to jointly learn the country-level dialect of the tweet as well as the region-level and area-level dialects. The second system is a distilled model of an ensemble of models trained using K-fold cross-validation. Each model in the ensemble consists of an AraBERT model and a classifier, fine-tuned on (K-1) folds of the training set. Our team Pythoneers achieved rank 6 on the first test set of the first sub-task, rank 9 on the second test set of the first sub-task, and rank 4 on the test set of the second sub-task.

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Generative Approach for Gender-Rewriting Task with ArabicT5
Sultan Alrowili | Vijay Shanker

Addressing the correct gender in generative tasks (e.g., Machine Translation) has been an overlooked issue in the Arabic NLP. However, the recent introduction of the Arabic Parallel Gender Corpus (APGC) dataset has established new baselines for the Arabic Gender Rewriting task. To address the Gender Rewriting task, we first pre-train our new Seq2Seq ArabicT5 model on a 17GB of Arabic Corpora. Then, we continue pre-training our ArabicT5 model on the APGC dataset using a newly proposed method. Our evaluation shows that our ArabicT5 model, when trained on the APGC dataset, achieved competitive results against existing state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our ArabicT5 model shows better results on the APGC dataset compared to other Arabic and multilingual T5 models.

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AraProp at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Leveraging Pre-Trained Language Models for Arabic Propaganda Detection
Gaurav Singh

This paper presents the approach taken for the shared task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic at the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP 2022). We participated in Sub-task 1 where the text of a tweet is provided, and the goal is to identify the different propaganda techniques used in it. This problem belongs to multi-label classification. For our solution, we approached leveraging different transformer based pre-trained language models with fine-tuning to solve this problem. We found that MARBERTv2 outperforms in terms of performance where F1-macro is 0.08175 and F1-micro is 0.61116 compared to other language models that we considered. Our method achieved rank 4 in the testing phase of the challenge.

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TUB at WANLP22 Shared Task: Using Semantic Similarity for Propaganda Detection in Arabic
Salar Mohtaj | Sebastian Möller

Propaganda and the spreading of fake news through social media have become a serious problem in recent years. In this paper we present our approach for the shared task on propaganda detection in Arabic in which the goal is to identify propaganda techniques in the Arabic social media text. We propose a semantic similarity detection model to compare text in the test set with the sentences in the train set to find the most similar instances. The label of the target text is obtained from the most similar texts in the train set. The proposed model obtained the micro F1 score of 0.494 on the text data set.

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SI2M & AIOX Labs at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Propaganda Detection in Arabic, A Data Augmentation and Name Entity Recognition Approach
Kamel Gaanoun | Imade Benelallam

This paper presents SI2M & AIOX Labs work among the propaganda detection in Arabic text shared task. The objective of this challenge is to identify the propaganda techniques used in specific propaganda fragments. We use a combination of data augmentation, Name Entity Recognition, rule-based repetition detection, and ARBERT prediction to develop our system. The model we provide scored 0.585 micro F1-Score and ranked 6th out of 12 teams.

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iCompass at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: ARBERT and MARBERT for Multilabel Propaganda Classification of Arabic Tweets
Bilel - Taboubi | Bechir Brahem | Hatem Haddad

Arabic propaganda detection in Arabic was carried out using transformers pre-trained models ARBERT, MARBERT. They were fine-tuned for the down-stream task in hand ‘subtask 1’, multilabel classification of Arabic tweets. Submitted model was MARBERT the got 0.597 micro F1 score and got the fifth rank.

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ChavanKane at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Large Language Models for Multi-label Propaganda Detection
Tanmay Chavan | Aditya Manish Kane

The spread of propaganda through the internet has increased drastically over the past years. Lately, propaganda detection has started gaining importance because of the negative impact it has on society. In this work, we describe our approach for the WANLP 2022 shared task which handles the task of propaganda detection in a multi-label setting. The task demands the model to label the given text as having one or more types of propaganda techniques. There are a total of 21 propaganda techniques to be detected. We show that an ensemble of five models performs the best on the task, scoring a micro-F1 score of 59.73%. We also conduct comprehensive ablations and propose various future directions for this work.

Nowadays, the rapid dissemination of data on digital platforms has resulted in the emergence of information pollution and data contamination, specifically mis-information, mal-information, dis-information, fake news, and various types of propaganda. These topics are now posing a serious threat to the online digital realm, posing numerous challenges to social media platforms and governments around the world. In this article, we propose a propaganda detection model based on the transformer-based model AraBERT, with the objective of using this framework to detect propagandistic content in the Arabic social media text scene, well with purpose of making online Arabic news and media consumption healthier and safer. Given the dataset, our results are relatively encouraging, indicating a huge potential for this line of approaches in Arabic online news text NLP.

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AraBEM at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Propaganda Detection in Arabic Tweets
Eshrag Ali Refaee | Basem Ahmed | Motaz Saad

Propaganda is information or ideas that an organized group or government spreads to influence peopleś opinions, especially by not giving all the facts or secretly emphasizing only one way of looking at the points. The ability to automatically detect propaganda-related linguistic signs is a challenging task that researchers in the NLP community have recently started to address. This paper presents the participation of our team AraBEM in the propaganda detection shared task on Arabic tweets. Our system utilized a pre-trained BERT model to perform multi-class binary classification. It attained the best score at 0.602 micro-f1, ranking third on subtask-1, which identifies the propaganda techniques as a multilabel classification problem with a baseline of 0.079.

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IITD at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Multilingual Multi-Granularity Network for Propaganda Detection
Shubham Mittal | Preslav Nakov

We present our system for the two subtasks of the shared task on propaganda detection in Arabic, part of WANLP’2022. Subtask 1 is a multi-label classification problem to find the propaganda techniques used in a given tweet. Our system for this task uses XLM-R to predict probabilities for the target tweet to use each of the techniques. In addition to finding the techniques, subtask 2 further asks to identify the textual span for each instance of each technique that is present in the tweet; the task can be modelled as a sequence tagging problem. We use a multi-granularity network with mBERT encoder for subtask 2. Overall, our system ranks second for both subtasks (out of 14 and 3 participants, respectively). Our experimental results and analysis show that it does not help to use a much larger English corpus annotated with propaganda techniques, regardless of whether used in English or after translation to Arabic.

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Pythoneers at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Monolingual AraBERT for Arabic Propaganda Detection and Span Extraction
Joseph Attieh | Fadi Hassan

In this paper, we present two deep learning approaches that are based on AraBERT, submitted to the Propaganda Detection shared task of the Seventh Workshop for Arabic Natural Language Processing (WANLP 2022). Propaganda detection consists of two main sub-tasks, mainly propaganda identification and span extraction. We present one system per sub-task. The first system is a Multi-Task Learning model that consists of a shared AraBERT encoder with task-specific binary classification layers. This model is trained to jointly learn one binary classification task per propaganda method. The second system is an AraBERT model with a Conditional Random Field (CRF) layer. We achieved rank 3 on the first sub-task and rank 1 on the second sub-task.

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CNLP-NITS-PP at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Propaganda Detection in Arabic using Data Augmentation and AraBERT Pre-trained Model
Sahinur Rahman Laskar | Rahul Singh | Abdullah Faiz Ur Rahman Khilji | Riyanka Manna | Partha Pakray | Sivaji Bandyopadhyay

In today’s time, online users are regularly exposed to media posts that are propagandistic. Several strategies have been developed to promote safer media consumption in Arabic to combat this. However, there is a limited available multilabel annotated social media dataset. In this work, we have used a pre-trained AraBERT twitter-base model on an expanded train data via data augmentation. Our team CNLP-NITS-PP, has achieved the third rank in subtask 1 at WANLP-2022, for propaganda detection in Arabic (shared task) in terms of micro-F1 score of 0.602.

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NGU CNLP atWANLP 2022 Shared Task: Propaganda Detection in Arabic
Ahmed Samir Hussein | Abu Bakr Soliman Mohammad | Mohamed Ibrahim | Laila Hesham Afify | Samhaa R. El-Beltagy

This paper presents the system developed by the NGU_CNLP team for addressing the shared task on Propaganda Detection in Arabic at WANLP 2022. The team participated in the shared tasks’ two sub-tasks which are: 1) Propaganda technique identification in text and 2) Propaganda technique span identification. In the first sub-task, the goal is to detect all employed propaganda techniques in some given piece of text out of a possible 17 different techniques or to detect that no propaganda technique is being used in that piece of text. As such, this first sub-task is a multi-label classification problem with a pool of 18 possible labels. Subtask 2 extends sub-task 1, by requiring the identification of the exact text span in which a propaganda technique was employed, making it a sequence labeling problem. For task 1, a combination of a data augmentation strategy coupled with an enabled transformer-based model comprised our classification model. This classification model ranked first amongst the 14 systems participating in this subtask. For sub-task two, a transfer learning model was adopted. The system ranked third among the 3 different models that participated in this subtask.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis

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On the Complementarity of Images and Text for the Expression of Emotions in Social Media
Anna Khlyzova | Carina Silberer | Roman Klinger

Authors of posts in social media communicate their emotions and what causes them with text and images. While there is work on emotion and stimulus detection for each modality separately, it is yet unknown if the modalities contain complementary emotion information in social media. We aim at filling this research gap and contribute a novel, annotated corpus of English multimodal Reddit posts. On this resource, we develop models to automatically detect the relation between image and text, an emotion stimulus category and the emotion class. We evaluate if these tasks require both modalities and find for the image–text relations, that text alone is sufficient for most categories (complementary, illustrative, opposing): the information in the text allows to predict if an image is required for emotion understanding. The emotions of anger and sadness are best predicted with a multimodal model, while text alone is sufficient for disgust, joy, and surprise. Stimuli depicted by objects, animals, food, or a person are best predicted by image-only models, while multimodal mod- els are most effective on art, events, memes, places, or screenshots.

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Multiplex Anti-Asian Sentiment before and during the Pandemic: Introducing New Datasets from Twitter Mining
Hao Lin | Pradeep Nalluri | Lantian Li | Yifan Sun | Yongjun Zhang

COVID-19 has disproportionately threatened minority communities in the U.S, not only in health but also in societal impact. However, social scientists and policymakers lack critical data to capture the dynamics of the anti-Asian hate trend and to evaluate its scale and scope. We introduce new datasets from Twitter related to anti-Asian hate sentiment before and during the pandemic. Relying on Twitter’s academic API, we retrieve hateful and counter-hate tweets from the Twitter Historical Database. To build contextual understanding and collect related racial cues, we also collect instances of heated arguments, often political, but not necessarily hateful, discussing Chinese issues. We then use the state-of-the-art hate speech classifiers to discern whether these tweets express hatred. These datasets can be used to study hate speech, general anti-Asian or Chinese sentiment, and hate linguistics by social scientists as well as to evaluate and build hate speech or sentiment analysis classifiers by computational scholars.

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Domain-Aware Contrastive Knowledge Transfer for Multi-domain Imbalanced Data
Zixuan Ke | Mohammad Kachuee | Sungjin Lee

In many real-world machine learning applications, samples belong to a set of domains e.g., for product reviews each review belongs to a product category. In this paper, we study multi-domain imbalanced learning (MIL), the scenario that there is imbalance not only in classes but also in domains. In the MIL setting, different domains exhibit different patterns and there is a varying degree of similarity and divergence among domains posing opportunities and challenges for transfer learning especially when faced with limited or insufficient training data. We propose a novel domain-aware contrastive knowledge transfer method called DCMI to (1) identify the shared domain knowledge to encourage positive transfer among similar domains (in particular from head domains to tail domains); (2) isolate the domain-specific knowledge to minimize the negative transfer from dissimilar domains. We evaluated the performance of DCMI on three different datasets showing significant improvements in different MIL scenarios.

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“splink” is happy and “phrouth” is scary: Emotion Intensity Analysis for Nonsense Words
Valentino Sabbatino | Enrica Troiano | Antje Schweitzer | Roman Klinger

People associate affective meanings to words - “death” is scary and sad while “party” is connotated with surprise and joy. This raises the question if the association is purely a product of the learned affective imports inherent to semantic meanings, or is also an effect of other features of words, e.g., morphological and phonological patterns. We approach this question with an annotation-based analysis leveraging nonsense words. Specifically, we conduct a best-worst scaling crowdsourcing study in which participants assign intensity scores for joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise to 272 non-sense words and, for comparison of the results to previous work, to 68 real words. Based on this resource, we develop character-level and phonology-based intensity regressors. We evaluate them on both nonsense words and real words (making use of the NRC emotion intensity lexicon of 7493 words), across six emotion categories. The analysis of our data reveals that some phonetic patterns show clear differences between emotion intensities. For instance, s as a first phoneme contributes to joy, sh to surprise, p as last phoneme more to disgust than to anger and fear. In the modelling experiments, a regressor trained on real words from the NRC emotion intensity lexicon shows a higher performance (r = 0.17) than regressors that aim at learning the emotion connotation purely from nonsense words. We conclude that humans do associate affective meaning to words based on surface patterns, but also based on similarities to existing words (“juy” to “joy”, or “flike” to “like”).

In this paper, we present the SentEMO platform, a tool that provides aspect-based sentiment analysis and emotion detection of unstructured text data such as reviews, emails and customer care conversations. Currently, models have been trained for five domains and one general domain and are implemented in a pipeline approach, where the output of one model serves as the input for the next. The results are presented in three dashboards, allowing companies to gain more insights into what stakeholders think of their products and services. The SentEMO platform is available at https://sentemo.ugent.be

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Can Emotion Carriers Explain Automatic Sentiment Prediction? A Study on Personal Narratives
Seyed Mahed Mousavi | Gabriel Roccabruna | Aniruddha Tammewar | Steve Azzolin | Giuseppe Riccardi

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models have achieved acceptable performance in sentiment prediction of written text. However, the output of these machine learning (ML) models cannot be natively interpreted. In this paper, we study how the sentiment polarity predictions by DNNs can be explained and compare them to humans’ explanations. We crowdsource a corpus of Personal Narratives and ask human judges to annotate them with polarity and select the corresponding token chunks - the Emotion Carriers (EC) - that convey narrators’ emotions in the text. The interpretations of ML neural models are carried out through Integrated Gradients method and we compare them with human annotators’ interpretations. The results of our comparative analysis indicate that while the ML model mostly focuses on the explicit appearance of emotions-laden words (e.g. happy, frustrated), the human annotator predominantly focuses the attention on the manifestation of emotions through ECs that denote events, persons, and objects which activate narrator’s emotional state.

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Infusing Knowledge from Wikipedia to Enhance Stance Detection
Zihao He | Negar Mokhberian | Kristina Lerman

Stance detection infers a text author’s attitude towards a target. This is challenging when the model lacks background knowledge about the target. Here, we show how background knowledge from Wikipedia can help enhance the performance on stance detection. We introduce Wikipedia Stance Detection BERT (WS-BERT) that infuses the knowledge into stance encoding. Extensive results on three benchmark datasets covering social media discussions and online debates indicate that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on target-specific stance detection, cross-target stance detection, and zero/few-shot stance detection.

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Uncertainty Regularized Multi-Task Learning
Kourosh Meshgi | Maryam Sadat Mirzaei | Satoshi Sekine

By sharing parameters and providing task-independent shared features, multi-task deep neural networks are considered one of the most interesting ways for parallel learning from different tasks and domains. However, fine-tuning on one task may compromise the performance of other tasks or restrict the generalization of the shared learned features. To address this issue, we propose to use task uncertainty to gauge the effect of the shared feature changes on other tasks and prevent the model from overfitting or over-generalizing. We conducted an experiment on 16 text classification tasks, and findings showed that the proposed method consistently improves the performance of the baseline, facilitates the knowledge transfer of learned features to unseen data, and provides explicit control over the generalization of the shared model.

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Evaluating Contextual Embeddings and their Extraction Layers for Depression Assessment
Matthew Matero | Albert Hung | H. Andrew Schwartz

Many recent works in natural language processing have demonstrated ability to assess aspects of mental health from personal discourse. At the same time, pre-trained contextual word embedding models have grown to dominate much of NLP but little is known empirically on how to best apply them for mental health assessment. Using degree of depression as a case study, we do an empirical analysis on which off-the-shelf language model, individual layers, and combinations of layers seem most promising when applied to human-level NLP tasks. Notably, we find RoBERTa most effective and, despite the standard in past work suggesting the second-to-last or concatenation of the last 4 layers, we find layer 19 (sixth-to last) is at least as good as layer 23 when using 1 layer. Further, when using multiple layers, distributing them across the second half (i.e. Layers 12+), rather than last 4, of the 24 layers yielded the most accurate results.

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Emotion Analysis of Writers and Readers of Japanese Tweets on Vaccinations
Patrick John Ramos | Kiki Ferawati | Kongmeng Liew | Eiji Aramaki | Shoko Wakamiya

Public opinion in social media is increasingly becoming a critical factor in pandemic control. Understanding the emotions of a population towards vaccinations and COVID-19 may be valuable in convincing members to become vaccinated. We investigated the emotions of Japanese Twitter users towards Tweets related to COVID-19 vaccination. Using the WRIME dataset, which provides emotion ratings for Japanese Tweets sourced from writers (Tweet posters) and readers, we fine-tuned a BERT model to predict levels of emotional intensity. This model achieved a training accuracy of MSE = 0.356. A separate dataset of 20,254 Japanese Tweets containing COVID-19 vaccine-related keywords was also collected, on which the fine-tuned BERT was used to perform emotion analysis. Afterwards, a correlation analysis between the extracted emotions and a set of vaccination measures in Japan was conducted.The results revealed that surprise and fear were the most intense emotions predicted by the model for writers and readers, respectively, on the vaccine-related Tweet dataset. The correlation analysis also showed that vaccinations were weakly positively correlated with predicted levels of writer joy, writer/reader anticipation, and writer/reader trust.

Domain adaptation methods often exploit domain-transferable input features, a.k.a. pivots. The task of Aspect and Opinion Term Extraction presents a special challenge for domain transfer: while opinion terms largely transfer across domains, aspects change drastically from one domain to another (e.g. from restaurants to laptops). In this paper, we investigate and establish empirically a prior conjecture, which suggests that the linguistic relations connecting opinion terms to their aspects transfer well across domains and therefore can be leveraged for cross-domain aspect term extraction. We present several analyses supporting this conjecture, via experiments with four linguistic dependency formalisms to represent relation patterns. Subsequently, we present an aspect term extraction method that drives models to consider opinion–aspect relations via explicit multitask objectives. This method provides significant performance gains, even on top of a prior state-of-the-art linguistically-informed model, which are shown in analysis to stem from the relational pivoting signal.

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English-Malay Word Embeddings Alignment for Cross-lingual Emotion Classification with Hierarchical Attention Network
Ying Hao Lim | Jasy Suet Yan Liew

The main challenge in English-Malay cross-lingual emotion classification is that there are no Malay training emotion corpora. Given that machine translation could fall short in contextually complex tweets, we only limited machine translation to the word level. In this paper, we bridge the language gap between English and Malay through cross-lingual word embeddings constructed using singular value decomposition. We pre-trained our hierarchical attention model using English tweets and fine-tuned it using a set of gold standard Malay tweets. Our model uses significantly less computational resources compared to the language models. Experimental results show that the performance of our model is better than mBERT in zero-shot learning by 2.4% and Malay BERT by 0.8% when a limited number of Malay tweets is available. In exchange for 6 – 7 times less in computational time, our model only lags behind mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa by a margin of 0.9 – 4.3 % in few-shot learning. Also, the word-level attention could be transferred to the Malay tweets accurately using the cross-lingual word embeddings.

Models are increasing in size and complexity in the hunt for SOTA. But what if those 2%increase in performance does not make a difference in a production use case? Maybe benefits from a smaller, faster model outweigh those slight performance gains. Also, equally good performance across languages in multilingual tasks is more important than SOTA results on a single one. We present the biggest, unified, multilingual collection of sentiment analysis datasets. We use these to assess 11 models and 80 high-quality sentiment datasets (out of 342 raw datasets collected) in 27 languages and included results on the internally annotated datasets. We deeply evaluate multiple setups, including fine-tuning transformer-based models for measuring performance. We compare results in numerous dimensions addressing the imbalance in both languages coverage and dataset sizes. Finally, we present some best practices for working with such a massive collection of datasets and models for a multi-lingual perspective.

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Improving Social Meaning Detection with Pragmatic Masking and Surrogate Fine-Tuning
Chiyu Zhang | Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

Masked language models (MLMs) are pre-trained with a denoising objective that is in a mismatch with the objective of downstream fine-tuning. We propose pragmatic masking and surrogate fine-tuning as two complementing strategies that exploit social cues to drive pre-trained representations toward a broad set of concepts useful for a wide class of social meaning tasks. We test our models on 15 different Twitter datasets for social meaning detection. Our methods achieve 2.34% F₁ over a competitive baseline, while outperforming domain-specific language models pre-trained on large datasets. Our methods also excel in few-shot learning: with only 5% of training data (severely few-shot), our methods enable an impressive 68.54% average F₁. The methods are also language agnostic, as we show in a zero-shot setting involving six datasets from three different languages.

Inferring group membership of social media users is of high interest in many domains. Group membership is typically inferred via network interactions with other members, or by the usage of in-group language. However, network information is incomplete when users or groups move between platforms, and in-group keywords lose significance as public discussion about a group increases. Similarly, using keywords to filter content and users can fail to distinguish between the various groups that discuss a topic—perhaps confounding research on public opinion and narrative trends. We present a classifier intended to distinguish members of groups from users discussing a group based on contextual usage of keywords. We demonstrate the classifier on a sample of community pairs from Reddit and focus on results related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Irony Detection for Dutch: a Venture into the Implicit
Aaron Maladry | Els Lefever | Cynthia Van Hee | Veronique Hoste

This paper presents the results of a replication experiment for automatic irony detection in Dutch social media text, investigating both a feature-based SVM classifier, as was done by Van Hee et al. (2017) and and a transformer-based approach. In addition to building a baseline model, an important goal of this research is to explore the implementation of common-sense knowledge in the form of implicit sentiment, as we strongly believe that common-sense and connotative knowledge are essential to the identification of irony and implicit meaning in tweets. We show promising results and the presented approach can provide a solid baseline and serve as a staging ground to build on in future experiments for irony detection in Dutch.

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Pushing on Personality Detection from Verbal Behavior: A Transformer Meets Text Contours of Psycholinguistic Features
Elma Kerz | Yu Qiao | Sourabh Zanwar | Daniel Wiechmann

Research at the intersection of personality psychology, computer science, and linguistics has recently focused increasingly on modeling and predicting personality from language use. We report two major improvements in predicting personality traits from text data: (1) to our knowledge, the most comprehensive set of theory-based psycholinguistic features and (2) hybrid models that integrate a pre-trained Transformer Language Model BERT and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) networks trained on within-text distributions (‘text contours’) of psycholinguistic features. We experiment with BLSTM models (with and without Attention) and with two techniques for applying pre-trained language representations from the transformer model - ‘feature-based’ and ‘fine-tuning’. We evaluate the performance of the models we built on two benchmark datasets that target the two dominant theoretical models of personality: the Big Five Essay dataset (Pennebaker and King, 1999) and the MBTI Kaggle dataset (Li et al., 2018). Our results are encouraging as our models outperform existing work on the same datasets. More specifically, our models achieve improvement in classification accuracy by 2.9% on the Essay dataset and 8.28% on the Kaggle MBTI dataset. In addition, we perform ablation experiments to quantify the impact of different categories of psycholinguistic features in the respective personality prediction models.

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XLM-EMO: Multilingual Emotion Prediction in Social Media Text
Federico Bianchi | Debora Nozza | Dirk Hovy

Detecting emotion in text allows social and computational scientists to study how people behave and react to online events. However, developing these tools for different languages requires data that is not always available. This paper collects the available emotion detection datasets across 19 languages. We train a multilingual emotion prediction model for social media data, XLM-EMO. The model shows competitive performance in a zero-shot setting, suggesting it is helpful in the context of low-resource languages. We release our model to the community so that interested researchers can directly use it.

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Evaluating Content Features and Classification Methods for Helpfulness Prediction of Online Reviews: Establishing a Benchmark for Portuguese
Rogério Sousa | Thiago Pardo

Over the years, the review helpfulness prediction task has been the subject of several works, but remains being a challenging issue in Natural Language Processing, as results vary a lot depending on the domain, on the adopted features and on the chosen classification strategy. This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of content features and classification methods for two different domains. In particular, we run our experiments for a low resource language – Portuguese –, trying to establish a benchmark for this language. We show that simple features and classical classification methods are powerful for the task of helpfulness prediction, but are largely outperformed by a convolutional neural network-based solution.

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WASSA 2022 Shared Task: Predicting Empathy, Emotion and Personality in Reaction to News Stories
Valentin Barriere | Shabnam Tafreshi | João Sedoc | Sawsan Alqahtani

This paper presents the results that were obtained from WASSA 2022 shared task on predicting empathy, emotion, and personality in reaction to news stories. Participants were given access to a dataset comprising empathic reactions to news stories where harm is done to a person, group, or other. These reactions consist of essays and Batson’s empathic concern and personal distress scores. The dataset was further extended in WASSA 2021 shared task to include news articles, person-level demographic information (e.g. age, gender), personality information, and Ekman’s six basic emotions at essay level Participation was encouraged in four tracks: predicting empathy and distress scores, predicting emotion categories, predicting personality and predicting interpersonal reactivity. In total, 14 teams participated in the shared task. We summarize the methods and resources used by the participating teams.

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IUCL at WASSA 2022 Shared Task: A Text-only Approach to Empathy and Emotion Detection
Yue Chen | Yingnan Ju | Sandra Kübler

Our system, IUCL, participated in the WASSA 2022 Shared Task on Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification. Our main goal in building this system is to investigate how the use of demographic attributes influences performance. Our (official) results show that our text-only systems perform very competitively, ranking first in the empathy detection task, reaching an average Pearson correlation of 0.54, and second in the emotion classification task, reaching a Macro-F of 0.572. Our systems that use both text and demographic data are less competitive.

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Continuing Pre-trained Model with Multiple Training Strategies for Emotional Classification
Bin Li | Yixuan Weng | Qiya Song | Bin Sun | Shutao Li

Emotion is the essential attribute of human beings. Perceiving and understanding emotions in a human-like manner is the most central part of developing emotional intelligence. This paper describes the contribution of the LingJing team’s method to the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis (WASSA) 2022 shared task on Emotion Classification. The participants are required to predict seven emotions from empathic responses to news or stories that caused harm to individuals, groups, or others. This paper describes the continual pre-training method for the masked language model (MLM) to enhance the DeBERTa pre-trained language model. Several training strategies are designed to further improve the final downstream performance including the data augmentation with the supervised transfer, child-tuning training, and the late fusion method. Extensive experiments on the emotional classification dataset show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating our method’s effectiveness. Moreover, our submission ranked Top-1 with all metrics in the evaluation phase for the Emotion Classification task.

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Empathy and Distress Prediction using Transformer Multi-output Regression and Emotion Analysis with an Ensemble of Supervised and Zero-Shot Learning Models
Flor Miriam Del Arco | Jaime Collado-Montañez | L. Alfonso Ureña | María-Teresa Martín-Valdivia

This paper describes the participation of the SINAI research group at WASSA 2022 (Empathy and Personality Detection and Emotion Classification). Specifically, we participate in Track 1 (Empathy and Distress predictions) and Track 2 (Emotion classification). We conducted extensive experiments developing different machine learning solutions in line with the state of the art in Natural Language Processing. For Track 1, a Transformer multi-output regression model is proposed. For Track 2, we aim to explore recent techniques based on Zero-Shot Learning models including a Natural Language Inference model and GPT-3, using them in an ensemble manner with a fine-tune RoBERTa model. Our team ranked 2nd in the first track and 3rd in the second track.

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Leveraging Emotion-Specific features to improve Transformer performance for Emotion Classification
Shaily Desai | Atharva Kshirsagar | Aditi Sidnerlikar | Nikhil Khodake | Manisha Marathe

This paper describes team PVG’s AI Club’s approach to the Emotion Classification shared task held at WASSA 2022. This Track 2 sub-task focuses on building models which can predict a multi-class emotion label based on essays from news articles where a person, group or another entity is affected. Baseline transformer models have been demonstrating good results on sequence classification tasks, and we aim to improve this performance with the help of ensembling techniques, and by leveraging two variations of emotion-specific representations. We observe better results than our baseline models and achieve an accuracy of 0.619 and a macro F1 score of 0.520 on the emotion classification task.

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Transformer based ensemble for emotion detection
Aditya Kane | Shantanu Patankar | Sahil Khose | Neeraja Kirtane

Detecting emotions in languages is important to accomplish a complete interaction between humans and machines. This paper describes our contribution to the WASSA 2022 shared task which handles this crucial task of emotion detection. We have to identify the following emotions: sadness, surprise, neutral, anger, fear, disgust, joy based on a given essay text. We are using an ensemble of ELECTRA and BERT models to tackle this problem achieving an F1 score of 62.76%. Our codebase (https://bit.ly/WASSA_shared_task) and our WandB project (https://wandb.ai/acl_wassa_pictxmanipal/acl_wassa) is publicly available.

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Team IITP-AINLPML at WASSA 2022: Empathy Detection, Emotion Classification and Personality Detection
Soumitra Ghosh | Dhirendra Maurya | Asif Ekbal | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Computational comprehension and identifying emotional components in language have been critical in enhancing human-computer connection in recent years. The WASSA 2022 Shared Task introduced four tracks and released a dataset of news stories: Track-1 for Empathy and Distress Prediction, Track-2 for Emotion classification, Track-3 for Personality prediction, and Track-4 for Interpersonal Reactivity Index prediction at the essay level. This paper describes our participation in the WASSA 2022 shared task on the tasks mentioned above. We developed multi-task deep learning methods to address Tracks 1 and 2 and machine learning models for Track 3 and 4. Our developed systems achieved average Pearson scores of 0.483, 0.05, and 0.08 for Track 1, 3, and 4, respectively, and a macro F1 score of 0.524 for Track 2 on the test set. We ranked 8th, 11th, 2nd and 2nd for tracks 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively.

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Transformer-based Architecture for Empathy Prediction and Emotion Classification
Himil Vasava | Pramegh Uikey | Gaurav Wasnik | Raksha Sharma

This paper describes the contribution of team PHG to the WASSA 2022 shared task on Empathy Prediction and Emotion Classification. The broad goal of this task was to model an empathy score, a distress score and the type of emotion associated with the person who had reacted to the essay written in response to a newspaper article. We have used the RoBERTa model for training and top of which few layers are added to finetune the transformer. We also use few machine learning techniques to augment as well as upsample the data. Our system achieves a Pearson Correlation Coefficient of 0.488 on Task 1 (Empathy - 0.470 and Distress - 0.506) and Macro F1-score of 0.531 on Task 2.

This paper describes the LingJing team’s method to the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis (WASSA) 2022 shared task on Personality Prediction (PER) and Reactivity Index Prediction (IRI). In this paper, we adopt the prompt-based method with the pre-trained language model to accomplish these tasks. Specifically, the prompt is designed to provide knowledge of the extra personalized information for enhancing the pre-trained model. Data augmentation and model ensemble are adopted for obtaining better results. Extensive experiments are performed, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed method. On the final submission, our system achieves a Pearson Correlation Coefficient of 0.2301 and 0.2546 on Track 3 and Track 4 respectively. We ranked 1-st on both sub-tasks.

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SURREY-CTS-NLP at WASSA2022: An Experiment of Discourse and Sentiment Analysis for the Prediction of Empathy, Distress and Emotion
Shenbin Qian | Constantin Orasan | Diptesh Kanojia | Hadeel Saadany | Félix Do Carmo

This paper summarises the submissions our team, SURREY-CTS-NLP has made for the WASSA 2022 Shared Task for the prediction of empathy, distress and emotion. In this work, we tested different learning strategies, like ensemble learning and multi-task learning, as well as several large language models, but our primary focus was on analysing and extracting emotion-intensive features from both the essays in the training data and the news articles, to better predict empathy and distress scores from the perspective of discourse and sentiment analysis. We propose several text feature extraction schemes to compensate the small size of training examples for fine-tuning pretrained language models, including methods based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsing, cosine similarity and sentiment score. Our best submissions achieve an average Pearson correlation score of 0.518 for the empathy prediction task and an F1 score of 0.571 for the emotion prediction task, indicating that using these schemes to extract emotion-intensive information can help improve model performance.

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An Ensemble Approach to Detect Emotions at an Essay Level
Himanshu Maheshwari | Vasudeva Varma

This paper describes our system (IREL, reffered as himanshu.1007 on Codalab) for Shared Task on Empathy Detection, Emotion Classification, and Personality Detection at 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis at ACL 2022. We participated in track 2 for predicting emotion at the essay level. We propose an ensemble approach that leverages the linguistic knowledge of the RoBERTa, BART-large, and RoBERTa model finetuned on the GoEmotions dataset. Each brings in its unique advantage, as we discuss in the paper. Our proposed system achieved a Macro F1 score of 0.585 and ranked one out of thirteen teams

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CAISA at WASSA 2022: Adapter-Tuning for Empathy Prediction
Allison Lahnala | Charles Welch | Lucie Flek

We build a system that leverages adapters, a light weight and efficient method for leveraging large language models to perform the task Em- pathy and Distress prediction tasks for WASSA 2022. In our experiments, we find that stacking our empathy and distress adapters on a pre-trained emotion lassification adapter performs best compared to full fine-tuning approaches and emotion feature concatenation. We make our experimental code publicly available

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NLPOP: a Dataset for Popularity Prediction of Promoted NLP Research on Twitter
Leo Obadić | Martin Tutek | Jan Šnajder

Twitter has slowly but surely established itself as a forum for disseminating, analysing and promoting NLP research. The trend of researchers promoting work not yet peer-reviewed (preprints) by posting concise summaries presented itself as an opportunity to collect and combine multiple modalities of data. In scope of this paper, we (1) construct a dataset of Twitter threads in which researchers promote NLP preprints and (2) evaluate whether it is possible to predict the popularity of a thread based on the content of the Twitter thread, paper content and user metadata. We experimentally show that it is possible to predict popularity of threads promoting research based on their content, and that predictive performance depends on modelling textual input, indicating that the dataset could present value for related areas of NLP research such as citation recommendation and abstractive summarization.

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Tagging Without Rewriting: A Probabilistic Model for Unpaired Sentiment and Style Transfer
Yang Shuo

Style transfer is the task of paraphrasing text into a target-style domain while retaining the content. Unsupervised approaches mainly focus on training a generator to rewrite input sentences. In this work, we assume that text styles are determined by only a small proportion of words; therefore, rewriting sentences via generative models may be unnecessary. As an alternative, we consider style transfer as a sequence tagging task. Specifically, we use edit operations (i.e., deletion, insertion and substitution) to tag words in an input sentence. We train a classifier and a language model to score tagged sequences and build a conditional random field. Finally, the optimal path in the conditional random field is used as the output. The results of experiments comparing models indicate that our proposed model exceeds end-to-end baselines in terms of accuracy on both sentiment and style transfer tasks with comparable or better content preservation.

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Polite Task-oriented Dialog Agents: To Generate or to Rewrite?
Diogo Silva | David Semedo | João Magalhães

For task-oriented dialog agents, the tone of voice mediates user-agent interactions, playing a central role in the flow of a conversation. Distinct from domain-agnostic politeness constructs, in specific domains such as online stores, booking platforms, and others, agents need to be capable of adopting highly specific vocabulary, with significant impact on lexical and grammatical aspects of utterances. Then, the challenge is on improving utterances’ politeness while preserving the actual content, an utterly central requirement to achieve the task goal. In this paper, we conduct a novel assessment of politeness strategies for task-oriented dialog agents under a transfer learning scenario. We extend existing generative and rewriting politeness approaches, towards overcoming domain-shifting issues, and enabling the transfer of politeness patterns to a novel domain. Both automatic and human evaluation is conducted on customer-store interactions, over the fashion domain, from which contribute with insightful and experimentally supported lessons regarding the improvement of politeness in task-specific dialog agents.

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Items from Psychometric Tests as Training Data for Personality Profiling Models of Twitter Users
Anne Kreuter | Kai Sassenberg | Roman Klinger

Machine-learned models for author profiling in social media often rely on data acquired via self-reporting-based psychometric tests (questionnaires) filled out by social media users. This is an expensive but accurate data collection strategy. Another, less costly alternative, which leads to potentially more noisy and biased data, is to rely on labels inferred from publicly available information in the profiles of the users, for instance self-reported diagnoses or test results. In this paper, we explore a third strategy, namely to directly use a corpus of items from validated psychometric tests as training data. Items from psychometric tests often consist of sentences from an I-perspective (e.g., ‘I make friends easily.’). Such corpora of test items constitute ‘small data’, but their availability for many concepts is a rich resource. We investigate this approach for personality profiling, and evaluate BERT classifiers fine-tuned on such psychometric test items for the big five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) and analyze various augmentation strategies regarding their potential to address the challenges coming with such a small corpus. Our evaluation on a publicly available Twitter corpus shows a comparable performance to in-domain training for 4/5 personality traits with T5-based data augmentation.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Asian Translation

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Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Asian Translation

This paper presents the results of the shared tasks from the 9th workshop on Asian translation (WAT2022). For the WAT2022, 8 teams submitted their translation results for the human evaluation. We also accepted 4 research papers. About 300 translation results were submitted to the automatic evaluation server, and selected submissions were manually evaluated.

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Comparing BERT-based Reward Functions for Deep Reinforcement Learning in Machine Translation
Yuki Nakatani | Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Takashi Ninomiya

In text generation tasks such as machine translation, models are generally trained using cross-entropy loss. However, mismatches between the loss function and the evaluation metric are often problematic. It is known that this problem can be addressed by direct optimization to the evaluation metric with reinforcement learning. In machine translation, previous studies have used BLEU to calculate rewards for reinforcement learning, but BLEU is not well correlated with human evaluation. In this study, we investigate the impact on machine translation quality through reinforcement learning based on evaluation metrics that are more highly correlated with human evaluation. Experimental results show that reinforcement learning with BERT-based rewards can improve various evaluation metrics.

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Improving Jejueo-Korean Translation With Cross-Lingual Pretraining Using Japanese and Korean
Francis Zheng | Edison Marrese-Taylor | Yutaka Matsuo

Jejueo is a critically endangered language spoken on Jeju Island and is closely related to but mutually unintelligible with Korean. Parallel data between Jejueo and Korean is scarce, and translation between the two languages requires more attention, as current neural machine translation systems typically rely on large amounts of parallel training data. While low-resource machine translation has been shown to benefit from using additional monolingual data during the pretraining process, not as much research has been done on how to select languages other than the source and target languages for use during pretraining. We show that using large amounts of Korean and Japanese data during the pretraining process improves translation by 2.16 BLEU points for translation in the Jejueo → Korean direction and 1.34 BLEU points for translation in the Korean → Jejueo direction compared to the baseline.

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TMU NMT System with Automatic Post-Editing by Multi-Source Levenshtein Transformer for the Restricted Translation Task of WAT 2022
Seiichiro Kondo | Mamoru Komachi

In this paper, we describe our TMU English–Japanese systems submitted to the restricted translation task at WAT 2022 (Nakazawa et al., 2022). In this task, we translate an input sentence with the constraint that certain words or phrases (called restricted target vocabularies (RTVs)) should be contained in the output sentence. To satisfy this constraint, we address this task using a combination of two techniques. One is lexical-constraint-aware neural machine translation (LeCA) (Chen et al., 2020), which is a method of adding RTVs at the end of input sentences. The other is multi-source Levenshtein transformer (MSLevT) (Wan et al., 2020), which is a non-autoregressive method for automatic post-editing. Our system generates translations in two steps. First, we generate the translation using LeCA. Subsequently, we filter the sentences that do not satisfy the constraints and post-edit them with MSLevT. Our experimental results reveal that 100% of the RTVs can be included in the generated sentences while maintaining the translation quality of the LeCA model on both English to Japanese (En→Ja) and Japanese to English (Ja→En) tasks. Furthermore, the method used in previous studies requires an increase in the beam size to satisfy the constraints, which is computationally expensive. In contrast, the proposed method does not require a similar increase and can generate translations faster.

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HwTscSU’s Submissions on WAT 2022 Shared Task
Yilun Liu | Zhen Zhang | Shimin Tao | Junhui Li | Hao Yang

In this paper we describe our submission to the shared tasks of the 9th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2022) on NICT–SAP under the team name ”HwTscSU”. The tasks involve translation from 5 languages into English and vice-versa in two domains: IT domain and Wikinews domain. The purpose is to determine the feasibility of multilingualism, domain adaptation or document-level knowledge given very little to none clean parallel corpora for training. Our approach for all translation tasks mainly focused on pre-training NMT models on general datasets and fine-tuning them on domain-specific datasets. Due to the small amount of parallel corpora, we collected and cleaned the OPUS dataset including three IT domain corpora, i.e., GNOME, KDE4, and Ubuntu. We then trained Transformer models on the collected dataset and fine-tuned on corresponding dev set. The BLEU scores greatly improved in comparison with other systems. Our submission ranked 1st in all IT-domain tasks and in one out of eight ALT domain tasks.

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NICT’s Submission to the WAT 2022 Structured Document Translation Task
Raj Dabre

We present our submission to the structured document translation task organized by WAT 2022. In structured document translation, the key challenge is the handling of inline tags, which annotate text. Specifically, the text that is annotated by tags, should be translated in such a way that in the translation should contain the tags annotating the translation. This challenge is further compounded by the lack of training data containing sentence pairs with inline XML tag annotated content. However, to our surprise, we find that existing multilingual NMT systems are able to handle the translation of text annotated with XML tags without any explicit training on data containing said tags. Specifically, massively multilingual translation models like M2M-100 perform well despite not being explicitly trained to handle structured content. This direct translation approach is often either as good as if not better than the traditional approach of “remove tag, translate and re-inject tag” also known as the “detag-and-project” approach.

This paper introduces our neural machine translation system’s participation in the WAT 2022 shared translation task (team ID: sakura). We participated in the Parallel Data Filtering Task. Our approach based on Feature Decay Algorithms achieved +1.4 and +2.4 BLEU points for English to Japanese and Japanese to English respectively compared to the model trained on the full dataset, showing the effectiveness of FDA on in-domain data selection.

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NIT Rourkela Machine Translation(MT) System Submission to WAT 2022 for MultiIndicMT: An Indic Language Multilingual Shared Task
Sudhansu Bala Das | Atharv Biradar | Tapas Kumar Mishra | Bidyut Kumar Patra

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) exhibits incredible performance with the development of a single translation model for many languages. Previous studies on multilingual translation reveal that multilingual training is effective for languages with limited corpus. This paper presents our submission (Team Id: NITR) in the WAT 2022 for “MultiIndicMT shared task” where the objective of the task is the translation between 5 Indic languages from OPUS Corpus (which are newly added in WAT 2022 corpus) into English and vice versa using the corpus provided by the organizer of WAT. Our system is based on a transformer-based NMT using fairseq modelling toolkit with ensemble techniques. Heuristic pre-processing approaches are carried out before keeping the model under training. Our multilingual NMT systems are trained with shared encoder and decoder parameters followed by assigning language embeddings to each token in both encoder and decoder. Our final multilingual system was examined by using BLEU and RIBES metrics scores. In future, we look forward to extend our research that will help in fine-tuning of both encoder and decoder during the monolingual unsupervised training in order to improve the quality of the synthetic data generated during the process.

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Investigation of Multilingual Neural Machine Translation for Indian Languages
Sahinur Rahman Laskar | Riyanka Manna | Partha Pakray | Sivaji Bandyopadhyay

In the domain of natural language processing, machine translation is a well-defined task where one natural language is automatically translated to another natural language. The deep learning-based approach of machine translation, known as neural machine translation attains remarkable translational performance. However, it requires a sufficient amount of training data which is a critical issue for low-resource pair translation. To handle the data scarcity problem, the multilingual concept has been investigated in neural machine translation in different settings like many-to-one and one-to-many translation. WAT2022 (Workshop on Asian Translation 2022) organizes (hosted by the COLING 2022) Indic tasks: English-to-Indic and Indic-to-English translation tasks where we have participated as a team named CNLP-NITS-PP. Herein, we have investigated a transliteration-based approach, where Indic languages are transliterated into English script and shared sub-word level vocabulary during the training phase. We have attained BLEU scores of 2.0 (English-to-Bengali), 1.10 (English-to-Assamese), 4.50 (Bengali-to-English), and 3.50 (Assamese-to-English) translation, respectively.

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Does partial pretranslation can improve low ressourced-languages pairs?
Raoul Blin

We study the effects of a local and punctual pretranslation of the source corpus on the performance of a Transformer translation model. The pretranslations are performed at the morphological (morpheme translation), lexical (word translation) and morphosyntactic (numeral groups and dates) levels. We focus on small and medium-sized training corpora (50K 2.5M bisegments) and on a linguistically distant language pair (Japanese and French). We find that this type of pretranslation does not lead to significant progress. We describe the motivations of the approach, the specific difficulties of Japanese-French translation. We discuss the possible reasons for the observed underperformance.

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Multimodal Neural Machine Translation with Search Engine Based Image Retrieval
ZhenHao Tang | XiaoBing Zhang | Zi Long | XiangHua Fu

Recently, numbers of works shows that the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) can be improved to a certain extent with using visual information. However, most of these conclusions are drawn from the analysis of experimental results based on a limited set of bilingual sentence-image pairs, such as Multi30K.In these kinds of datasets, the content of one bilingual parallel sentence pair must be well represented by a manually annotated image,which is different with the actual translation situation. we propose an open-vocabulary image retrieval methods to collect descriptive images for bilingual parallel corpus using image search engine, and we propose text-aware attentive visual encoder to filter incorrectly collected noise images. Experiment results on Multi30K and other two translation datasets show that our proposed method achieves significant improvements over strong baselines.

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Silo NLP’s Participation at WAT2022
Shantipriya Parida | Subhadarshi Panda | Stig-Arne Grönroos | Mark Granroth-Wilding | Mika Koistinen

This paper provides the system description of “Silo NLP’s” submission to the Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT2022). We have participated in the Indic Multimodal tasks (English->Hindi, English->Malayalam, and English->Bengali, Multimodal Translation). For text-only translation, we used the Transformer and fine-tuned the mBART. For multimodal translation, we used the same architecture and extracted object tags from the images to use as visual features concatenated with the text sequence for input. Our submission tops many tasks including English->Hindi multimodal translation (evaluation test), English->Malayalam text-only and multimodal translation (evaluation test), English->Bengali multimodal translation (challenge test), and English->Bengali text-only translation (evaluation test).

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PICT@WAT 2022: Neural Machine Translation Systems for Indic Languages
Anupam Patil | Isha Joshi | Dipali Kadam

Translation entails more than simply translating words from one language to another. It is vitally essential for effective cross-cultural communication, thus making good translation systems an important requirement. We describe our systems in this paper, which were submitted to the WAT 2022 translation shared tasks. As part of the Multi-modal translation tasks’ text-only translation sub-tasks, we submitted three Neural Machine Translation systems based on Transformer models for English to Malayalam, English to Bengali, and English to Hindi text translation. We found significant results on the leaderboard for English-Indic (en-xx) systems utilizing BLEU and RIBES scores as comparative metrics in our studies. For the respective translations of English to Malayalam, Bengali, and Hindi, we obtained BLEU scores of 19.50, 32.90, and 41.80 for the challenge subset and 30.60, 39.80, and 42.90 on the benchmark evaluation subset data.

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English to Bengali Multimodal Neural Machine Translation using Transliteration-based Phrase Pairs Augmentation
Sahinur Rahman Laskar | Pankaj Dadure | Riyanka Manna | Partha Pakray | Sivaji Bandyopadhyay

Automatic translation of one natural language to another is a popular task of natural language processing. Although the deep learning-based technique known as neural machine translation (NMT) is a widely accepted machine translation approach, it needs an adequate amount of training data, which is a challenging issue for low-resource pair translation. Moreover, the multimodal concept utilizes text and visual features to improve low-resource pair translation. WAT2022 (Workshop on Asian Translation 2022) organizes (hosted by the COLING 2022) English to Bengali multimodal translation task where we have participated as a team named CNLP-NITS-PP in two tracks: 1) text-only and 2) multimodal translation. Herein, we have proposed a transliteration-based phrase pairs augmentation approach which shows improvement in the multimodal translation task and achieved benchmark results on Bengali Visual Genome 1.0 dataset. We have attained the best results on the challenge and evaluation test set for English to Bengali multimodal translation with BLEU scores of 28.70, 43.90 and RIBES scores of 0.688931, 0.780669, respectively.

Machine translation translates one natural language to another, a well-defined natural language processing task. Neural machine translation (NMT) is a widely accepted machine translation approach, but it requires a sufficient amount of training data, which is a challenging issue for low-resource pair translation. Moreover, the multimodal concept utilizes text and visual features to improve low-resource pair translation. WAT2022 (Workshop on Asian Translation 2022) organizes (hosted by the COLING 2022) English to Hindi multimodal translation task where we have participated as a team named CNLP-NITS-PP in two tracks: 1) text-only and 2) multimodal translation. Herein, we have proposed a transliteration-based phrase pairs augmentation approach, which shows improvement in the multimodal translation task. We have attained the second best results on the challenge test set for English to Hindi multimodal translation with BLEU score of 39.30, and a RIBES score of 0.791468.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Sixth Widening NLP Workshop (WiNLP)

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Deriving Insights from User-Generated Text

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Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Deriving Insights from User-Generated Text
Estevam Hruschka | Tom Mitchell | Dunja Mladenic | Marko Grobelnik | Nikita Bhutani

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Unsupervised Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Word Graphs and POV Conversion
Seongmin Park | Jihwa Lee

We advance the state-of-the-art in unsupervised abstractive dialogue summarization by utilizing multi-sentence compression graphs. Starting from well-founded assumptions about word graphs, we present simple but reliable path-reranking and topic segmentation schemes. Robustness of our method is demonstrated on datasets across multiple domains, including meetings, interviews, movie scripts, and day-to-day conversations. We also identify possible avenues to augment our heuristic-based system with deep learning. We open-source our code, to provide a strong, reproducible baseline for future research into unsupervised dialogue summarization.

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An Interactive Analysis of User-reported Long COVID Symptoms using Twitter Data
Lin Miao | Mark Last | Marina Litvak

With millions of documented recoveries from COVID-19 worldwide, various long-term sequelae have been observed in a large group of survivors. This paper is aimed at systematically analyzing user-generated conversations on Twitter that are related to long-term COVID symptoms for a better understanding of the Long COVID health consequences. Using an interactive information extraction tool built especially for this purpose, we extracted key information from the relevant tweets and analyzed the user-reported Long COVID symptoms with respect to their demographic and geographical characteristics. The results of our analysis are expected to improve the public awareness on long-term COVID-19 sequelae and provide important insights to public health authorities.

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Bi-Directional Recurrent Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for Social Media Text Classification
Maunika Tamire | Srinivas Anumasa | P. K. Srijith

Classification of posts in social media such as Twitter is difficult due to the noisy and short nature of texts. Sequence classification models based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) are popular for classifying posts that are sequential in nature. RNNs assume the hidden representation dynamics to evolve in a discrete manner and do not consider the exact time of the posting. In this work, we propose to use recurrent neural ordinary differential equations (RNODE) for social media post classification which consider the time of posting and allow the computation of hidden representation to evolve in a time-sensitive continuous manner. In addition, we propose a novel model, Bi-directional RNODE (Bi-RNODE), which can consider the information flow in both the forward and backward directions of posting times to predict the post label. Our experiments demonstrate that RNODE and Bi-RNODE are effective for the problem of stance classification of rumours in social media.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Seventh Conference on Machine Translation (WMT)

This paper presents the results of the General Machine Translation Task organised as part of the Conference on Machine Translation (WMT) 2022. In the general MT task, participants were asked to build machine translation systems for any of 11 language pairs, to be evaluated on test sets consisting of four different domains. We evaluate system outputs with human annotators using two different techniques: reference-based direct assessment and (DA) and a combination of DA and scalar quality metric (DA+SQM).

This paper presents the results of the WMT22 Metrics Shared Task. Participants submitting automatic MT evaluation metrics were asked to score the outputs of the translation systems competing in the WMT22 News Translation Task on four different domains: news, social, ecommerce, and chat. All metrics were evaluated on how well they correlate with human ratings at the system and segment level. Similar to last year, we acquired our own human ratings based on expert-based human evaluation via Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM). This setup had several advantages, among other things: (i) expert-based evaluation is more reliable, (ii) we extended the pool of translations by 5 additional translations based on MBR decoding or rescoring which are challenging for current metrics. In addition, we initiated a challenge set subtask, where participants had to create contrastive test suites for evaluating metrics’ ability to capture and penalise specific types of translation errors. Finally, we present an extensive analysis on how well metrics perform on three language pairs: English to German, English to Russian and Chinese to English. The results demonstrate the superiority of neural-based learned metrics and demonstrate again that overlap metrics like Bleu, spBleu or chrf correlate poorly with human ratings. The results also reveal that neural-based metrics are remarkably robust across different domains and challenges.

We report the results of the WMT 2022 shared task on Quality Estimation, in which the challenge is to predict the quality of the output of neural machine translation systems at the word and sentence levels, without access to reference translations. This edition introduces a few novel aspects and extensions that aim to enable more fine-grained, and explainable quality estimation approaches. We introduce an updated quality annotation scheme using Multidimensional Quality Metrics to obtain sentence- and word-level quality scores for three language pairs. We also extend the Direct Assessments and post-edit data (MLQE-PE) to new language pairs: we present a novel and large dataset on English-Marathi, as well as a zero-shot test set on English-Yoruba. Further, we include an explainability sub-task for all language pairs and present a new format of a critical error detection task for two new language pairs. Participants from 11 different teams submitted altogether 991 systems to different task variants and language pairs.

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Findings of the WMT 2022 Shared Task on Efficient Translation
Kenneth Heafield | Biao Zhang | Graeme Nail | Jelmer Van Der Linde | Nikolay Bogoychev

The machine translation efficiency task challenges participants to make their systems faster and smaller with minimal impact on translation quality. How much quality to sacrifice for efficiency depends upon the application, so participants were encouraged to make multiple submissions covering the space of trade-offs. In total, there were 76 submissions from 5 teams. The task covers GPU, single-core CPU, and multi-core CPU hardware tracks as well as batched throughput or single-sentence latency conditions. Submissions showed hundreds of millions of words can be translated for a dollar, average latency is 3.5–25 ms, and models fit in 7.5–900 MB.

We present the results from the 8th round of the WMT shared task on MT Automatic PostEditing, which consists in automatically correcting the output of a “black-box” machine translation system by learning from human corrections. This year, the task focused on a new language pair (English→Marathi) and on data coming from multiple domains (healthcare, tourism, and general/news). Although according to several indicators this round was of medium-high difficulty compared to the past,the best submission from the three participating teams managed to significantly improve (with an error reduction of 3.49 TER points) the original translations produced by a generic neural MT system.

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Embarrassingly Easy Document-Level MT Metrics: How to Convert Any Pretrained Metric into a Document-Level Metric
Giorgos Vernikos | Brian Thompson | Prashant Mathur | Marcello Federico

We present a very simple method for extending pretrained machine translation metrics to incorporate document-level context. We apply our method to four popular metrics: BERTScore, Prism, COMET, and the reference-free metric COMET-QE. We evaluate our document-level metrics on the MQM annotations from the WMT 2021 metrics shared task and find that the document-level metrics outperform their sentence-level counterparts in about 85% of the tested conditions, when excluding results on low-quality human references. Additionally, we show that our document-level extension of COMET-QE dramatically improves accuracy on discourse phenomena tasks, supporting our hypothesis that our document-level metrics are resolving ambiguities in the reference sentence by using additional context.

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Searching for a Higher Power in the Human Evaluation of MT
Johnny Wei | Tom Kocmi | Christian Federmann

In MT evaluation, pairwise comparisons are conducted to identify the better system. In conducting the comparison, the experimenter must allocate a budget to collect Direct Assessment (DA) judgments. We provide a cost effective way to spend the budget, but show that typical budget sizes often do not allow for solid comparison. Taking the perspective that the basis of solid comparison is in achieving statistical significance, we study the power (rate of achieving significance) on a large collection of pairwise DA comparisons. Due to the nature of statistical estimation, power is low for differentiating less than 1-2 DA points, and to achieve a notable increase in power requires at least 2-3x more samples. Applying variance reduction alone will not yield these gains, so we must face the reality of undetectable differences and spending increases. In this context, we propose interim testing, an “early stopping” collection procedure that yields more power per judgment collected, which adaptively focuses the budget on pairs that are borderline significant. Interim testing can achieve up to a 27% efficiency gain when spending 3x the current budget, or 18% savings at the current evaluation power.

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Test Set Sampling Affects System Rankings: Expanded Human Evaluation of WMT20 English-Inuktitut Systems
Rebecca Knowles | Chi-kiu Lo

We present a collection of expanded human annotations of the WMT20 English-Inuktitut machine translation shared task, covering the Nunavut Hansard portion of the dataset. Additionally, we recompute News rankings to take into account the completed set of human annotations and certain irregularities in the annotation task construction. We show the effect of these changes on the downstream task of the evaluation of automatic metrics. Finally, we demonstrate that character-level metrics correlate well with human judgments for the task of automatically evaluating translation into this polysynthetic language.

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Continuous Rating as Reliable Human Evaluation of Simultaneous Speech Translation
Dávid Javorský | Dominik Macháček | Ondřej Bojar

Simultaneous speech translation (SST) can be evaluated on simulated online events where human evaluators watch subtitled videos and continuously express their satisfaction by pressing buttons (so called Continuous Rating). Continuous Rating is easy to collect, but little is known about its reliability, or relation to comprehension of foreign language document by SST users. In this paper, we contrast Continuous Rating with factual questionnaires on judges with different levels of source language knowledge. Our results show that Continuous Rating is easy and reliable SST quality assessment if the judges have at least limited knowledge of the source language. Our study indicates users’ preferences on subtitle layout and presentation style and, most importantly, provides a significant evidence that users with advanced source language knowledge prefer low latency over fewer re-translations.

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Gender Bias Mitigation for NMT Involving Genderless Languages
Ander Corral | Xabier Saralegi

It has been found that NMT systems have a strong preference towards social defaults and biases when translating certain occupations, which due to their widespread use, can unintentionally contribute to amplifying and perpetuating these patterns. In that sense, this work focuses on sentence-level gender agreement between gendered entities and occupations when translating from genderless languages to languages with grammatical gender. Specifically, we address the Basque to Spanish translation direction for which bias mitigation has not been addressed. Gender information in Basque is explicit in neither the grammar nor the morphology. It is only present in a limited number of gender specific common nouns and person proper names. We propose a template-based fine-tuning strategy with explicit gender tags to provide a stronger gender signal for the proper inflection of occupations. This strategy is compared against systems fine-tuned on real data extracted from Wikipedia biographies. We provide a detailed gender bias assessment analysis and perform a template ablation study to determine the optimal set of templates. We report a substantial gender bias mitigation (up to 50% on gender bias scores) while keeping the original translation quality.

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Exploring the Benefits and Limitations of Multilinguality for Non-autoregressive Machine Translation
Sweta Agrawal | Julia Kreutzer | Colin Cherry

Non-autoregressive (NAR) machine translation has recently received significant developments and now achieves comparable quality with autoregressive (AR) models on some benchmarks while providing an efficient alternative to AR inference. However, while AR translation is often used to implement multilingual models that benefit from transfer between languages and from improved serving efficiency, multilingual NAR models remain relatively unexplored. Taking Connectionist Temporal Classification as an example NAR model and IMPUTER as a semi-NAR model, we present a comprehensive empirical study of multilingual NAR. We test its capabilities with respect to positive transfer between related languages and negative transfer under capacity constraints. As NAR models require distilled training sets, we carefully study the impact of bilingual versus multilingual teachers. Finally, we fit a scaling law for multilingual NAR to determine capacity bottlenecks, which quantifies its performance relative to the AR model as the model scale increases.

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Learning an Artificial Language for Knowledge-Sharing in Multilingual Translation
Danni Liu | Jan Niehues

The cornerstone of multilingual neural translation is shared representations across languages. Given the theoretically infinite representation power of neural networks, semantically identical sentences are likely represented differently. While representing sentences in the continuous latent space ensures expressiveness, it introduces the risk of capturing of irrelevant features which hinders the learning of a common representation. In this work, we discretize the encoder output latent space of multilingual models by assigning encoder states to entries in a codebook,which in effect represents source sentences in a new artificial language. This discretization process not only offers a new way to interpret the otherwise black-box model representations,but, more importantly, gives potential for increasing robustness in unseen testing conditions. We validate our approach on large-scale experiments with realistic data volumes and domains. When tested in zero-shot conditions, our approach is competitive with two strong alternatives from the literature. We also use the learned artificial language to analyze model behavior, and discover that using a similar bridge language increases knowledge-sharing among the remaining languages.

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Don’t Discard Fixed-Window Audio Segmentation in Speech-to-Text Translation
Chantal Amrhein | Barry Haddow

For real-life applications, it is crucial that end-to-end spoken language translation models perform well on continuous audio, without relying on human-supplied segmentation. For online spoken language translation, where models need to start translating before the full utterance is spoken,most previous work has ignored the segmentation problem. In this paper, we compare various methods for improving models’ robustness towards segmentation errors and different segmentation strategies in both offline and online settings and report results on translation quality, flicker and delay. Our findings on five different language pairs show that a simple fixed-window audio segmentation can perform surprisingly well given the right conditions.

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Additive Interventions Yield Robust Multi-Domain Machine Translation Models
Elijah Rippeth | Matt Post

Additive interventions are a recently-proposed mechanism for controlling target-side attributes in neural machine translation by modulating the encoder’s representation of a source sequence as opposed to manipulating the raw source sequence as seen in most previous tag-based approaches. In this work we examine the role of additive interventions in a large-scale multi-domain machine translation setting and compare its performance in various inference scenarios. We find that while the performance difference is small between intervention-based systems and tag-based systems when the domain label matches the test domain, intervention-based systems are robust to label error, making them an attractive choice under label uncertainty. Further, we find that the superiority of single-domain fine-tuning comes under question when training data is scaled, contradicting previous findings.

This paper describes the Inria ALMAnaCH team submission to the WMT 2022 general translation shared task. Participating in the language directions cs,ru,uk→en and cs↔uk, we experiment with the use of a dedicated Latin-script transcription convention aimed at representing all Slavic languages involved in a way that maximises character- and word-level correspondences between them as well as with the English language. Our hypothesis was that bringing the source and target language closer could have a positive impact on machine translation results. We provide multiple comparisons, including bilingual and multilingual baselines, with and without transcription. Initial results indicate that the transcription strategy was not successful, resulting in lower results than baselines. We nevertheless submitted our multilingual, transcribed models as our primary systems, and in this paper provide some indications as to why we got these negative results.

In this paper, we describe our NAIST-NICT-TIT submission to the WMT22 general machine translation task. We participated in this task for the English ↔ Japanese language pair. Our system is characterized as an ensemble of Transformer big models, k-nearest-neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) (Khandelwal et al., 2021), and reranking.In our translation system, we construct the datastore for kNN-MT from back-translated monolingual data and integrate kNN-MT into the ensemble model. We designed a reranking system to select a translation from the n-best translation candidates generated by the translation system. We also use a context-aware model to improve the document-level consistency of the translation.

This paper presents the system description of Samsung R&D Institute Poland participation in WMT 2022 for General MT solution for medium and low resource languages: Russian and Croatian. Our approach combines iterative noised/tagged back-translation and iterative distillation. We investigated different monolingual resources and compared their influence on final translations. We used available BERT-likemodels for text classification and for extracting domains of texts. Then we prepared an ensemble of NMT models adapted to multiple domains. Finally we attempted to predict ensemble weight vectors from the BERT-based domain classifications for individual sentences. Our final trained models reached quality comparable to best online translators using only limited constrained resources during training.

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Tencent AI Lab - Shanghai Jiao Tong University Low-Resource Translation System for the WMT22 Translation Task
Zhiwei He | Xing Wang | Zhaopeng Tu | Shuming Shi | Rui Wang

This paper describes Tencent AI Lab - Shanghai Jiao Tong University (TAL-SJTU) Low-Resource Translation systems for the WMT22 shared task. We participate in the general translation task on English-Livonian.Our system is based on M2M100 with novel techniques that adapt it to the target language pair.(1) Cross-model word embedding alignment: inspired by cross-lingual word embedding alignment, we successfully transfer a pre-trained word embedding to M2M100, enabling it to support Livonian.(2) Gradual adaptation strategy: we exploit Estonian and Latvian as auxiliary languages for many-to-many translation training and then adapt to English-Livonian.(3) Data augmentation: to enlarge the parallel data for English-Livonian, we construct pseudo-parallel data with Estonian and Latvian as pivot languages.(4) Fine-tuning: to make the most of all available data, we fine-tune the model with the validation set and online back-translation, further boosting the performance. In model evaluation: (1) We find that previous work underestimated the translation performance of Livonian due to inconsistent Unicode normalization, which may cause a discrepancy of up to 14.9 BLEU score.(2) In addition to the standard validation set, we also employ round-trip BLEU to evaluate the models, which we find more appropriate for this task. Finally, our unconstrained system achieves BLEU scores of 17.0 and 30.4 for English to/from Livonian.

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Lan-Bridge MT’s Participation in the WMT 2022 General Translation Shared Task
Bing Han | Yangjian Wu | Gang Hu | Qiulin Chen

This paper describes Lan-Bridge Translation systems for the WMT 2022 General Translation shared task. We participate in 18 language directions: English to and from Czech, German, Ukrainian, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, English to Croatian, French to German, Yakut to and from Russian and Ukrainian to and from Czech.To develop systems covering all these direc_x0002_tions, we mainly focus on multilingual mod_x0002_els. In general, we apply data corpus filtering, scaling model size, sparse expert model (in par_x0002_ticular, Transformer with adapters), large scale backtranslation and language model rerankingtechniques. Our system ranks first in 6 directions based on automatic evaluation.

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Manifold’s English-Chinese System at WMT22 General MT Task
Chang Jin | Tingxun Shi | Zhengshan Xue | Xiaodong Lin

Manifold’s English-Chinese System at WMT22 is an ensemble of 4 models trained by different configurations with scheduled sampling-based fine-tuning. The four configurations are DeepBig (XenC), DeepLarger (XenC), DeepBig-TalkingHeads (XenC) and DeepBig (LaBSE). Concretely, DeepBig extends Transformer-Big to 24 encoder layers. DeepLarger has 20 encoder layers and its feed-forward network (FFN) dimension is 8192. TalkingHeads applies the talking-heads trick. For XenC configs, we selected monolingual and parallel data that is similar to the past newstest datasets using XenC, and for LaBSE, we cleaned the officially provided parallel data using LaBSE pretrained model. According to the officially released autonomic metrics leaderboard, our final constrained system ranked 1st among all others when evaluated by bleu-all, chrf-all and COMET-B, 2nd by COMET-A.

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CUNI-Bergamot Submission at WMT22 General Translation Task
Josef Jon | Martin Popel | Ondřej Bojar

We present the CUNI-Bergamot submission for the WMT22 General translation task. We compete in English-Czech direction. Our submission further explores block backtranslation techniques. Compared to the previous work, we measure performance in terms of COMET score and named entities translation accuracy. We evaluate performance of MBR decoding compared to traditional mixed backtranslation training and we show a possible synergy when using both of the techniques simultaneously. The results show that both approaches are effective means of improving translation quality and they yield even better results when combined.

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KYB General Machine Translation Systems for WMT22
Shivam Kalkar | Yoko Matsuzaki | Ben Li

We here describe our neural machine translation system for general machine translation shared task in WMT 2022. Our systems are based on the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) with base settings. We explore the high-efficiency model training strategies, aimed to train a model with high-accuracy by using small model and a reasonable amount of data. We performed fine-tuning and ensembling with N-best ranking in English to/from Japanese directions. We found that fine-tuning by filtered JParaCrawl data set leads to better translations for both of direction in English to/from Japanese models. In English to Japanese direction model, ensembling and N-best ranking of 10 different checkpoints improved translations. By comparing with other online translation service, we found that our model achieved a great translation quality.

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Analyzing the Use of Influence Functions for Instance-Specific Data Filtering in Neural Machine Translation
Tsz Kin Lam | Eva Hasler | Felix Hieber

Customer feedback can be an important signal for improving commercial machine translation systems. One solution for fixing specific translation errors is to remove the related erroneous training instances followed by re-training of the machine translation system, which we refer to as instance-specific data filtering. Influence functions (IF) have been shown to be effective in finding such relevant training examples for classification tasks such as image classification, toxic speech detection and entailment task. Given a probing instance, IF find influential training examples by measuring the similarity of the probing instance with a set of training examples in gradient space. In this work, we examine the use of influence functions for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). We propose two effective extensions to a state of the art influence function and demonstrate on the sub-problem of copied training examples that IF can be applied more generally than hand-crafted regular expressions.

This paper describes AISP-SJTU’s participation in WMT 2022 shared general MT task. In this shared task, we participated in four translation directions: English-Chinese, Chinese-English, English-Japanese and Japanese-English. Our systems are based on the Transformer architecture with several novel and effective variants, including network depth and internal structure. In our experiments, we employ data filtering, large-scale back-translation, knowledge distillation, forward-translation, iterative in-domain knowledge finetune and model ensemble. The constrained systems achieve 48.8, 29.7, 39.3 and 22.0 case-sensitive BLEU scores on EN-ZH, ZH-EN, EN-JA and JA-EN, respectively.

This paper describes the NTT-Tohoku-TokyoTech-RIKEN (NT5) team’s submission system for the WMT’22 general translation task. This year, we focused on the English-to-Japanese and Japanese-to-English translation tracks. Our submission system consists of an ensemble of Transformer models with several extensions. We also applied data augmentation and selection techniques to obtain potentially effective training data for training individual Transformer models in the pre-training and fine-tuning scheme. Additionally, we report our trial of incorporating a reranking module and the reevaluated results of several techniques that have been recently developed and published.

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Adam Mickiewicz University at WMT 2022: NER-Assisted and Quality-Aware Neural Machine Translation
Artur Nowakowski | Gabriela Pałka | Kamil Guttmann | Mikołaj Pokrywka

This paper presents Adam Mickiewicz University’s (AMU) submissions to the constrained track of the WMT 2022 General MT Task. We participated in the Ukrainian ↔ Czech translation directions. The systems are a weighted ensemble of four models based on the Transformer (big) architecture. The models use source factors to utilize the information about named entities present in the input. Each of the models in the ensemble was trained using only the data provided by the shared task organizers. A noisy back-translation technique was used to augment the training corpora. One of the models in the ensemble is a document-level model, trained on parallel and synthetic longer sequences. During the sentence-level decoding process, the ensemble generated the n-best list. The n-best list was merged with the n-best list generated by a single document-level model which translated multiple sentences at a time. Finally, existing quality estimation models and minimum Bayes risk decoding were used to rerank the n-best list so that the best hypothesis was chosen according to the COMET evaluation metric. According to the automatic evaluation results, our systems rank first in both translation directions.

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Evaluating Corpus Cleanup Methods in the WMT’22 News Translation Task
Marilena Malli | George Tambouratzis

This submission to the WMT22: General MT Task, consists of translations produced from a series of NMT models of the following two language pairs: german-to-english and german-to-french. All the models are trained using only the parallel training data specified by WMT22, and no monolingual training data was used. The models follow the transformer architecture employing 8 attention heads and 6 layers in both the encoder and decoder. It is also worth mentioning that, in order to limit the computational resources that we would use during the training process, we decided to train the majority of models by limiting the training to 21 epochs. Moreover, the translations submitted at WMT22 have been produced using the test data released by the WMT22.The aim of our experiments has been to evaluate methods for cleaning-up a parallel corpus to determine if this will lead to a translation model producing more accurate translations. For each language pair, the base NMT models has been trained from raw parallel training corpora, while the additional NMT models have been trained with corpora subjected to a special cleaning process with the following tools: Bifixer and Bicleaner. It should be mentioned that the Bicleaner repository doesn’t provide pre-trained classifiers for the above language pairs, consequently we trained probabilistic dictionaries in order to produce new models. The fundamental differences between these NMT models produced are mainly related to the quality and the quantity of the training data, while there are very few differences in the training parameters. To complete this work, we used the following three software packages: (i) MARIAN NMT (Version: v1.11.5), which was used for the training of the neural machine translation models and (ii) Bifixer and (iii) Bicleaner, which were used in order to correct and clean the parallel training data. Concerning the Bifixer and Bicleaner tools, we followed all the steps as described meticulously in the following article: “Ramírez-Sánchez, G., Zaragoza-Bernabeu, J., Bañón, M., & Rojas, S.O. (2020). Bifixer and Bicleaner: two open-source tools to clean your parallel data. EAMT. ” and also in the official github pages: https://github.com/bitextor/bifixer, https://github.com/bitextor/bicleaner.

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PROMT Systems for WMT22 General Translation Task
Alexander Molchanov | Vladislav Kovalenko | Natalia Makhamalkina

The PROMT systems are trained with the MarianNMT toolkit. All systems use the transformer-big configuration. We use BPE for text encoding, the vocabulary sizes vary from 24k to 32k for different language pairs. All systems are unconstrained. We use all data provided by the WMT organizers, all publicly available data and some private data. We participate in four directions: English-Russian, English-German and German-English, Ukrainian-English.

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eTranslation’s Submissions to the WMT22 General Machine Translation Task
Csaba Oravecz | Katina Bontcheva | David Kolovratnìk | Bogomil Kovachev | Christopher Scott

The paper describes the NMT models for French-German, English-Ukranian and English-Russian, submitted by the eTranslation team to the WMT22 general machine translation shared task. In the WMT news task last year, multilingual systems with deep and complex architectures utilizing immense amount of data and resources were dominant. This year with the task extended to cover less domain specific text we expected even more dominance of such systems. In the hope to produce competitive (constrained) systems despite our limited resources, this time we selected only medium resource language pairs, which are serviced in the European Commission’s eTranslation system. We took the approach of exploring less resource intensive strategies focusing on data selection and filtering to improve the performance of baseline systems. With our submitted systems our approach scored competitively according to the automatic rankings, except for the the English–Russian model where our submission was only a baseline reference model developed as a by-product of the multilingual setup we built focusing primarily on the English-Ukranian language pair.

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CUNI Systems for the WMT 22 Czech-Ukrainian Translation Task
Martin Popel | Jindřich Libovický | Jindřich Helcl

We present Charles University submissions to the WMT 22 GeneralTranslation Shared Task on Czech-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Czech machine translation. We present two constrained submissions based on block back-translation and tagged back-translation and experiment with rule-basedromanization of Ukrainian. Our results show that the romanization onlyhas a minor effect on the translation quality. Further, we describe Charles Translator,a system that was developed in March 2022 as a response to the migrationfrom Ukraine to the Czech Republic. Compared to our constrained systems,it did not use the romanization and used some proprietary data sources.

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The ARC-NKUA Submission for the English-Ukrainian General Machine Translation Shared Task at WMT22
Dimitrios Roussis | Vassilis Papavassiliou

The ARC-NKUA (“Athena” Research Center - National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) submission to the WMT22 General Machine Translation shared task concerns the unconstrained tracks of the English-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-English translation directions. The two Neural Machine Translation systems are based on Transformer models and our primary submissions were determined through experimentation with (a) ensemble decoding, (b) selected fine-tuning with a subset of the training data, (c) data augmentation with back-translated monolingual data, and (d) post-processing of the translation outputs. Furthermore, we discuss filtering techniques and the acquisition of additional data used for training the systems.

This paper describes the NiuTrans neural machine translation systems of the WMT22 General MT constrained task. We participate in four directions, including Chinese→English, English→Croatian, and Livonian↔English. Our models are based on several advanced Transformer variants, e.g., Transformer-ODE, Universal Multiscale Transformer (UMST). The main workflow consists of data filtering, large-scale data augmentation (i.e., iterative back-translation, iterative knowledge distillation), and specific-domain fine-tuning. Moreover, we try several multi-domain methods, such as a multi-domain model structure and a multi-domain data clustering method, to rise to this year’s newly proposed multi-domain test set challenge. For low-resource scenarios, we build a multi-language translation model to enhance the performance, and try to use the pre-trained language model (mBERT) to initialize the translation model.

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Teaching Unseen Low-resource Languages to Large Translation Models
Maali Tars | Taido Purason | Andre Tättar

In recent years, large multilingual pre-trained neural machine translation model research has grown and it is common for these models to be publicly available for usage and fine-tuning. Low-resource languages benefit from the pre-trained models, because of knowledge transfer from high- to medium-resource languages. The recently available M2M-100 model is our starting point for cross-lingual transfer learning to Finno-Ugric languages, like Livonian. We participate in the WMT22 General Machine Translation task, where we focus on the English-Livonian language pair. We leverage data from other Finno-Ugric languages and through that, we achieve high scores for English-Livonian translation directions. Overall, instead of training a model from scratch, we use transfer learning and back-translation as the main methods and fine-tune a publicly available pre-trained model. This in turn reduces the cost and duration of training high-quality multilingual neural machine translation models.

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Can Domains Be Transferred across Languages in Multi-Domain Multilingual Neural Machine Translation?
Thuy-trang Vu | Shahram Khadivi | Xuanli He | Dinh Phung | Gholamreza Haffari

Previous works mostly focus on either multilingual or multi-domain aspects of neural machine translation (NMT). This paper investigates whether the domain information can be transferred across languages on the composition of multi-domain and multilingual NMT, particularly for the incomplete data condition where in-domain bitext is missing for some language pairs. Our results in the curated leave-one-domain-out experiments show that multi-domain multilingual (MDML) NMT can boost zero-shot translation performance up to +10 gains on BLEU, as well as aid the generalisation of multi-domain NMT to the missing domain. We also explore strategies for effective integration of multilingual and multi-domain NMT, including language and domain tag combination and auxiliary task training. We find that learning domain-aware representations and adding target-language tags to the encoder leads to effective MDML-NMT.

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DUTNLP Machine Translation System for WMT22 General MT Task
Ting Wang | Huan Liu | Junpeng Liu | Degen Huang

This paper describes DUTNLP Lab’s submission to the WMT22 General MT Task on four translation directions: English to/from Chinese and English to/from Japanese under the constrained condition. Our primary system are built on several Transformer variants which employ wider FFN layer or deeper encoder layer. The bilingual data are filtered by detailed data pre-processing strategies and four data augmentation methods are combined to enlarge the training data with the provided monolingual data. Several common methods are also employed to further improve the model performance, such as fine-tuning, model ensemble and post-editing. As a result, our constrained systems achieve 29.01, 63.87, 41.84, and 24.82 BLEU scores on Chinese-to-English, English-to-Chinese, English-to-Japanese, and Japanese-to-English, respectively.

This paper presents the submissions of Huawei Translate Services Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT 2022 General Machine Translation Shared Task. We participate in 6 language pairs, including Zh↔En, Ru↔En, Uk↔En, Hr↔En, Uk↔Cs and Liv↔En. We use Transformer architecture and obtain the best performance via multiple variants with larger parameter sizes. We perform fine-grained pre-processing and filtering on the provided large-scale bilingual and monolingual datasets. For medium and highresource languages, we mainly use data augmentation strategies, including Back Translation, Self Training, Ensemble Knowledge Distillation, Multilingual, etc. For low-resource languages such as Liv, we use pre-trained machine translation models, and then continue training with Regularization Dropout (R-Drop). The previous mentioned data augmentation methods are also used. Our submissions obtain competitive results in the final evaluation.

We describe the JD Explore Academy’s submission of the WMT 2022 shared general translation task. We participated in all high-resource tracks and one medium-resource track, including Chinese-English, German-English, Czech-English, Russian-English, and Japanese-English. We push the limit of our previous work – bidirectional training for translation by scaling up two main factors, i.e. language pairs and model sizes, namely the Vega-MT system. As for language pairs, we scale the “bidirectional” up to the “multidirectional” settings, covering all participating languages, to exploit the common knowledge across languages, and transfer them to the downstream bilingual tasks. As for model sizes, we scale the Transformer-Big up to the extremely large model that owns nearly 4.7 Billion parameters, to fully enhance the model capacity for our Vega-MT. Also, we adopt the data augmentation strategies, e.g. cycle translation for monolingual data, and bidirectional self-training for bilingual and monolingual data, to comprehensively exploit the bilingual and monolingual data. To adapt our Vega-MT to the general domain test set, generalization tuning is designed. Based on the official automatic scores of constrained systems, in terms of the sacreBLEU shown in Figure-1, we got the 1st place on Zh-En (33.5), En-Zh (49.7), De-En (33.7), En-De (37.8), Cs-En (54.9), En-Cs (41.4) and En-Ru (32.7), 2nd place on Ru-En (45.1) and Ja-En (25.6), and 3rd place on En-Ja(41.5), respectively; W.R.T the COMET, we got the 1st place on Zh-En (45.1), En-Zh (61.7), De-En (58.0), En-De (63.2), Cs-En (74.7), Ru-En (64.9), En-Ru (69.6) and En-Ja (65.1), 2nd place on En-Cs (95.3) and Ja-En (40.6), respectively. Models will be released to facilitate the MT community through GitHub and OmniForce Platform.

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No Domain Left behind
Hui Zeng

We participated in the WMT General MT task and focus on four high resource language pairs: English to Chinese, Chinese to English, English to Japanese and Japanese to English). The submitted systems (LanguageX) focus on data cleaning, data selection, data mixing and TM-augmented NMT. Rules and multilingual language model are used for data filtering and data selection. In the automatic evaluation, our best submitted English to Chinese system achieved 54.3 BLEU score and 63.8 COMET score, which is the highest among all the submissions.

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GTCOM Neural Machine Translation Systems for WMT22
Hao Zong | Chao Bei

GTCOM participates in five directions: English to/from Ukrainian, Ukrainian to/from Czech, English to Chinese and English to Croatian. Our submitted systems are unconstrained and focus on backtranslation, multilingual translation model and finetuning. Multilingual translation model focus on X to one and one to X. We also apply rules and language model to filter monolingual, parallel sentences and synthetic sentences.

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Linguistically Motivated Evaluation of the 2022 State-of-the-art Machine Translation Systems for Three Language Directions
Vivien Macketanz | Shushen Manakhimova | Eleftherios Avramidis | Ekaterina Lapshinova-koltunski | Sergei Bagdasarov | Sebastian Möller

This document describes a fine-grained linguistically motivated analysis of 29 machine translation systems submitted at the Shared Task of the 7th Conference of Machine Translation (WMT22). This submission expands the test suite work of previous years by adding the language direction of English–Russian. As a result, evaluation takes place for the language directions of German–English, English–German, and English–Russian. We find that the German–English systems suffer in translating idioms, some tenses of modal verbs, and resultative predicates, the English–German ones in idioms, transitive-past progressive, and middle voice, whereas the English–Russian ones in pseudogapping and idioms.

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Automated Evaluation Metric for Terminology Consistency in MT
Kirill Semenov | Ondřej Bojar

The most widely used metrics for machine translation tackle sentence-level evaluation. However, at least for professional domains such as legal texts, it is crucial to measure the consistency of the translation of the terms throughout the whole text. This paper introduces an automated metric for the term consistency evaluation in machine translation (MT). To demonstrate the metric’s performance, we used the Czech-to-English translated texts from the ELITR 2021 agreement corpus and the outputs of the MT systems that took part in WMT21 News Task. We show different modes of our evaluation algorithm and try to interpret the differences in the ranking of the translation systems based on sentence-level metrics and our approach. We also demonstrate that the proposed metric scores significantly differ from the widespread automated metric scores, and correlate with the human assessment.

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Test Suite Evaluation: Morphological Challenges and Pronoun Translation
Marion Weller-Di Marco | Alexander Fraser

This paper summarizes the results of our test suite evaluation with a main focus on morphology for the language pairs English to/from German. We look at the translation of morphologically complex words (DE–EN), and evaluatewhether English noun phrases are translated as compounds vs. phrases into German. Furthermore, we investigate the preservation of morphological features (gender in EN–DE pronoun translation and number in morpho-syntacticallycomplex structures for DE–EN). Our results indicate that systems are able to interpret linguistic structures to obtain relevant information, but also that translation becomes more challenging with increasing complexity, as seen, for example, when translating words with negation or non-concatenative properties, and for the morecomplex cases of the pronoun translation task.

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Robust MT Evaluation with Sentence-level Multilingual Augmentation
Duarte Alves | Ricardo Rei | Ana C Farinha | José G. C. de Souza | André F. T. Martins

Automatic translations with critical errors may lead to misinterpretations and pose several risks for the user. As such, it is important that Machine Translation (MT) Evaluation systems are robust to these errors in order to increase the reliability and safety of Machine Translation systems. Here we introduce SMAUG a novel Sentence-level Multilingual AUGmentation approach for generating translations with critical errors and apply this approach to create a test set to evaluate the robustness of MT metrics to these errors. We show that current State-of-the-Art metrics are improving their capability to distinguish translations with and without critical errors and to penalize the first accordingly. We also show that metrics tend to struggle with errors related to named entities and numbers and that there is a high variance in the robustness of current methods to translations with critical errors.

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ACES: Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics
Chantal Amrhein | Nikita Moghe | Liane Guillou

As machine translation (MT) metrics improve their correlation with human judgement every year, it is crucial to understand the limitations of these metrics at the segment level. Specifically, it is important to investigate metric behaviour when facing accuracy errors in MT because these can have dangerous consequences in certain contexts (e.g., legal, medical). We curate ACES, a translation accuracy challenge set, consisting of 68 phenomena ranging from simple perturbations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We use ACES to evaluate a wide range of MT metrics including the submissions to the WMT 2022 metrics shared task and perform several analyses leading to general recommendations for metric developers. We recommend: a) combining metrics with different strengths, b) developing metrics that give more weight to the source and less to surface-level overlap with the reference and c) explicitly modelling additional language-specific information beyond what is available via multilingual embeddings.

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Linguistically Motivated Evaluation of Machine Translation Metrics Based on a Challenge Set
Eleftherios Avramidis | Vivien Macketanz

We employ a linguistically motivated challenge set in order to evaluate the state-of-the-art machine translation metrics submitted to the Metrics Shared Task of the 7th Conference for Machine Translation. The challenge set includes about 20,000 items extracted from 145 MT systems for two language directions (German-English, English-German), covering more than 100 linguistically-motivated phenomena organized in 14 categories. The best performing metrics are YiSi-1, BERTScore and COMET-22 for German-English, and UniTE, UniTE-ref, XL-DA and xxl-DA19 for English-German.Metrics in both directions are performing worst when it comes to named-entities & terminology and particularly measuring units. Particularly in German-English they are weak at detecting issues at punctuation, polar questions, relative clauses, dates and idioms. In English-German, they perform worst at present progressive of transitive verbs, future II progressive of intransitive verbs, simple present perfect of ditransitive verbs and focus particles.

Contextual word embeddings extracted from pre-trained models have become the basis for many downstream NLP tasks, including machine translation automatic evaluations. Metrics that leverage embeddings claim better capture of synonyms and changes in word orders, and thus better correlation with human ratings than surface-form matching metrics (e.g. BLEU). However, few studies have been done to examine robustness of these metrics. This report uses a challenge set to uncover the brittleness of reference-based and reference-free metrics. Our challenge set1 aims at examining metrics’ capability to correlate synonyms in different areas and to discern catastrophic errors at both word- and sentence-levels. The results show that although embedding-based metrics perform relatively well on discerning sentence-level negation/affirmation errors, their performances on relating synonyms are poor. In addition, we find that some metrics are susceptible to text styles so their generalizability compromised.

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MS-COMET: More and Better Human Judgements Improve Metric Performance
Tom Kocmi | Hitokazu Matsushita | Christian Federmann

We develop two new metrics that build on top of the COMET architecture. The main contribution is collecting a ten-times larger corpus of human judgements than COMET and investigating how to filter out problematic human judgements. We propose filtering human judgements where human reference is statistically worse than machine translation. Furthermore, we average scores of all equal segments evaluated multiple times. The results comparing automatic metrics on source-based DA and MQM-style human judgement show state-of-the-art performance on a system-level pair-wise system ranking. We release both of our metrics for public use.

In this paper, we present the contribution of HW-TSC to WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task. We propose one reference-based metric, HWTSC-EE-BERTScore*, and four referencefree metrics including HWTSC-Teacher-Sim, HWTSC-TLM, KG-BERTScore and CROSSQE. Among these metrics, HWTSC-Teacher-Sim and CROSS-QE are supervised, whereas HWTSC-EE-BERTScore*, HWTSC-TLM and KG-BERTScore are unsupervised. We use these metrics in the segment-level and systemlevel tracks. Overall, our systems achieve strong results for all language pairs on previous test sets and a new state-of-the-art in many sys-level case sets.

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Unsupervised Embedding-based Metric for MT Evaluation with Improved Human Correlation
Ananya Mukherjee | Manish Shrivastava

In this paper, we describe our submission to the WMT22 metrics shared task. Our metric focuses on computing contextual and syntactic equivalences along with lexical, morphological, and semantic similarity. The intent is to capture the fluency and context of the MT outputs along with their adequacy. Fluency is captured using syntactic similarity and context is captured using sentence similarity leveraging sentence embeddings. The final sentence translation score is the weighted combination of three similarity scores: a) Syntactic Similarity b) Lexical, Morphological and Semantic Similarity, and c) Contextual Similarity. This paper outlines two improved versions of MEE i.e., MEE2 and MEE4. Additionally, we report our experiments on language pairs of en-de, en-ru and zh-en from WMT17-19 testset and further depict the correlation with human assessments.

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REUSE: REference-free UnSupervised Quality Estimation Metric
Ananya Mukherjee | Manish Shrivastava

This paper describes our submission to the WMT2022 shared metrics task. Our unsupervised metric estimates the translation quality at chunk-level and sentence-level. Source and target sentence chunks are retrieved by using a multi-lingual chunker. The chunk-level similarity is computed by leveraging BERT contextual word embeddings and sentence similarity scores are calculated by leveraging sentence embeddings of Language-Agnostic BERT models. The final quality estimation score is obtained by mean pooling the chunk-level and sentence-level similarity scores. This paper outlines our experiments and also reports the correlation with human judgements for en-de, en-ru and zh-en language pairs of WMT17, WMT18 and WMT19 test sets.

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MaTESe: Machine Translation Evaluation as a Sequence Tagging Problem
Stefano Perrella | Lorenzo Proietti | Alessandro Scirè | Niccolò Campolungo | Roberto Navigli

Starting from last year, WMT human evaluation has been performed within the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework, where human annotators are asked to identify error spans in translations, alongside an error category and a severity. In this paper, we describe our submission to the WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task, where we propose using the same paradigm for automatic evaluation: we present the MaTESe metrics, which reframe machine translation evaluation as a sequence tagging problem. Our submission also includes a reference-free metric, denominated MaTESe-QE. Despite the paucity of the openly available MQM data, our metrics obtain promising results, showing high levels of correlation with human judgements, while also enabling an evaluation that is interpretable. Moreover, MaTESe-QE can also be employed in settings where it is infeasible to curate reference translations manually.

In this paper, we present the joint contribution of Unbabel and IST to the WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task. Our primary submission – dubbed COMET-22 – is an ensemble between a COMET estimator model trained with Direct Assessments and a newly proposed multitask model trained to predict sentence-level scores along with OK/BAD word-level tags derived from Multidimensional Quality Metrics error annotations. These models are ensembled together using a hyper-parameter search that weights different features extracted from both evaluation models and combines them into a single score. For the reference-free evaluation, we present CometKiwi. Similarly to our primary submission, CometKiwi is an ensemble between two models. A traditional predictor-estimator model inspired by OpenKiwi and our new multitask model trained on Multidimensional Quality Metrics which can also be used without references. Both our submissions show improved correlations compared to state-of-the-art metrics from last year as well as increased robustness to critical errors.

In this report, we present our submission to the WMT 2022 Metrics Shared Task. We build our system based on the core idea of UNITE (Unified Translation Evaluation), which unifies source-only, reference-only, and source- reference-combined evaluation scenarios into one single model. Specifically, during the model pre-training phase, we first apply the pseudo-labeled data examples to continuously pre-train UNITE. Notably, to reduce the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, we use data cropping and a ranking-based score normalization strategy. During the fine-tuning phase, we use both Direct Assessment (DA) and Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) data from past years’ WMT competitions. Specially, we collect the results from models with different pre-trained language model backbones, and use different ensembling strategies for involved translation directions.

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Quality Estimation via Backtranslation at the WMT 2022 Quality Estimation Task
Sweta Agrawal | Nikita Mehandru | Niloufar Salehi | Marine Carpuat

This paper describes submission to the WMT 2022 Quality Estimation shared task (Task 1: sentence-level quality prediction). We follow a simple and intuitive approach, which consists of estimating MT quality by automatically back-translating hypotheses into the source language using a multilingual MT system. We then compare the resulting backtranslation with the original source using standard MT evaluation metrics. We find that even the best-performing backtranslation-based scores perform substantially worse than supervised QE systems, including the organizers’ baseline. However, combining backtranslation-based metrics with off-the-shelf QE scorers improves correlation with human judgments, suggesting that they can indeed complement a supervised QE system.

In this paper, we present our submission to the sentence-level MQM benchmark at Quality Estimation Shared Task, named UniTE (Unified Translation Evaluation). Specifically, our systems employ the framework of UniTE, which combined three types of input formats during training with a pre-trained language model. First, we apply the pseudo-labeled data examples for the continuously pre-training phase. Notably, to reduce the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, we use data cropping and a ranking-based score normalization strategy. For the fine-tuning phase, we use both Direct Assessment (DA) and Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) data from past years’ WMT competitions. Finally, we collect the source-only evaluation results, and ensemble the predictions generated by two UniTE models, whose backbones are XLM-R and infoXLM, respectively. Results show that our models reach 1st overall ranking in the Multilingual and English-Russian settings, and 2nd overall ranking in English-German and Chinese-English settings, showing relatively strong performances in this year’s quality estimation competition.

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KU X Upstage’s Submission for the WMT22 Quality Estimation: Critical Error Detection Shared Task
Sugyeong Eo | Chanjun Park | Hyeonseok Moon | Jaehyung Seo | Heuiseok Lim

This paper presents KU X Upstage’s submission to the quality estimation (QE): critical error detection (CED) shared task in WMT22. We leverage the XLM-RoBERTa large model without utilizing any additional parallel data. To the best of our knowledge, we apply prompt-based fine-tuning to the QE task for the first time. To maximize the model’s language understanding capability, we reformulate the CED task to be similar to the masked language model objective, which is a pre-training strategy of the language model. We design intuitive templates and label words, and include auxiliary descriptions such as demonstration or Google Translate results in the input sequence. We further improve the performance through the template ensemble, and as a result of the shared task, our approach achieve the best performance for both English-German and Portuguese-English language pairs in an unconstrained setting.

This paper presents submissions of the NJUNLP team in WMT 2022Quality Estimation shared task 1, where the goal is to predict the sentence-level and word-level quality for target machine translations. Our system explores pseudo data and multi-task learning. We propose several novel methods to generate pseudo data for different annotations using the conditional masked language model and the neural machine translation model. The proposed methods control the decoding process to generate more real pseudo translations. We pre-train the XLMR-large model with pseudo data and then fine-tune this model with real data both in the way of multi-task learning. We jointly learn sentence-level scores (with regression and rank tasks) and word-level tags (with a sequence tagging task). Our system obtains competitive results on different language pairs and ranks first place on both sentence- and word-level sub-tasks of the English-German language pair.

This paper presents the BJTU-Toshiba joint submission for WMT 2022 quality estimation shared task. We only participate in Task 1 (quality prediction) of the shared task, focusing on the sentence-level MQM prediction. The techniques we experimented with include the integration of monolingual language models and the pre-finetuning of pre-trained representations. We tried two styles of pre-finetuning, namely Translation Language Modeling and Replaced Token Detection. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our system compared to the widely adopted XLM-RoBERTa baseline. Our system is also the top-ranking system on the Sentence-level MQM Prediction for the English-German language pairs.

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Papago’s Submission to the WMT22 Quality Estimation Shared Task
Seunghyun Lim | Jeonghyeok Park

This paper describes anonymous submission to the WMT 2022 Quality Estimation shared task. We participate in Task 1: Quality Prediction for both sentence and word-level quality prediction tasks. Our system is a multilingual and multi-task model, whereby a single system can infer both sentence and word-level quality on multiple language pairs. Our system’s architecture consists of Pretrained Language Model (PLM) and task layers, and is jointly optimized for both sentence and word-level quality prediction tasks using multilingual dataset. We propose novel auxiliary tasks for training and explore diverse sources of additional data to demonstrate further improvements on performance. Through ablation study, we examine the effectiveness of proposed components and find optimal configurations to train our submission systems under each language pair and task settings. Finally, submission systems are trained and inferenced using K-folds ensemble. Our systems greatly outperform task organizer’s baseline and achieve comparable performance against other participants’ submissions in both sentence and word-level quality prediction tasks.

We present the joint contribution of IST and Unbabel to the WMT 2022 Shared Task on Quality Estimation (QE). Our team participated in all three subtasks: (i) Sentence and Word-level Quality Prediction; (ii) Explainable QE; and (iii) Critical Error Detection. For all tasks we build on top of the COMET framework, connecting it with the predictor-estimator architecture of OpenKiwi, and equipping it with a word-level sequence tagger and an explanation extractor. Our results suggest that incorporating references during pretraining improves performance across several language pairs on downstream tasks, and that jointly training with sentence and word-level objectives yields a further boost. Furthermore, combining attention and gradient information proved to be the top strategy for extracting good explanations of sentence-level QE models. Overall, our submissions achieved the best results for all three tasks for almost all language pairs by a considerable margin.

Quality estimation (QE) is a crucial method to investigate automatic methods for estimating the quality of machine translation results without reference translations. This paper presents Huawei Translation Services Center’s (HW-TSC’s) work called CrossQE in WMT 2022 QE shared tasks 1 and 2, namely sentence- and word- level quality prediction and explainable QE.CrossQE employes the framework of predictor-estimator for task 1, concretely with a pre-trained cross-lingual XLM-RoBERTa large as predictor and task-specific classifier or regressor as estimator. An extensive set of experimental results show that after adding bottleneck adapter layer, mean teacher loss, masked language modeling task loss and MC dropout methods in CrossQE, the performance has improved to a certain extent. For task 2, CrossQE calculated the cosine similarity between each word feature in the target and each word feature in the source by task 1 sentence-level QE system’s predictor, and used the inverse value of maximum similarity between each word in the target and the source as the word translation error risk value. Moreover, CrossQE has outstanding performance on QE test sets of WMT 2022.

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Welocalize-ARC/NKUA’s Submission to the WMT 2022 Quality Estimation Shared Task
Eirini Zafeiridou | Sokratis Sofianopoulos

This paper presents our submission to the WMT 2022 quality estimation shared task and more specifically to the quality prediction sentence-level direct assessment (DA) subtask. We build a multilingual system based on the predictor–estimator architecture by using the XLM-RoBERTa transformer for feature extraction and a regression head on top of the final model to estimate the z-standardized DA labels. Furthermore, we use pretrained models to extract useful knowledge that reflect various criteria of quality assessment and demonstrate good correlation with human judgements. We optimize the performance of our model by incorporating this information as additional external features in the input data and by applying Monte Carlo dropout during both training and inference.

We participated in all tracks of the WMT 2022 efficient machine translation task: single-core CPU, multi-core CPU, and GPU hardware with throughput and latency conditions. Our submissions explores a number of several efficiency strategies: knowledge distillation, a simpler simple recurrent unit (SSRU) decoder with one or two layers, shortlisting, deep encoder, shallow decoder, pruning and bidirectional decoder. For the CPU track, we used quantized 8-bit models. For the GPU track, we used FP16 quantisation. We explored various pruning strategies and combination of one or more of the above methods.

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CUNI Non-Autoregressive System for the WMT 22 Efficient Translation Shared Task
Jindřich Helcl

We present a non-autoregressive system submission to the WMT 22 Efficient Translation Shared Task. Our system was used by Helcl et al. (2022) in an attempt to provide fair comparison between non-autoregressive and autoregressive models. This submission is an effort to establish solid baselines along with sound evaluation methodology, particularly in terms of measuring the decoding speed. The model itself is a 12-layer Transformer model trained with connectionist temporal classification on knowledge-distilled dataset by a strong autoregressive teacher model.

This paper describes the submission of the RoyalFlush neural machine translation system for the WMT 2022 translation efficiency task. Unlike the commonly used autoregressive translation system, we adopted a two-stage translation paradigm called Hybrid Regression Translation (HRT) to combine the advantages of autoregressive and non-autoregressive translation. Specifically, HRT first autoregressively generates a discontinuous sequence (e.g., make a prediction every k tokens, k1) and then fills in all previously skipped tokens at once in a non-autoregressive manner. Thus, we can easily trade off the translation quality and speed by adjusting k. In addition, by integrating other modeling techniques (e.g., sequence-level knowledge distillation and deep-encoder-shallow-decoder layer allocation strategy) and a mass of engineering efforts, HRT improves 80% inference speed and achieves equivalent translation performance with the same-capacity AT counterpart. Our fastest system reaches 6k+ words/second on the GPU latency setting, estimated to be about 3.1x faster than the last year’s winner.

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translation Services Center (HW-TSC) to WMT 2022 Efficiency Shared Task. For this year’s task, we still apply sentence-level distillation strategy to train small models with different configurations. Then, we integrate the average attention mechanism into the lightweight RNN model to pursue more efficient decoding. We tried adding a retrain step to our 8-bit and 4-bit models to achieve a balance between model size and quality. We still use Huawei Noah’s Bolt for INT8 inference and 4-bit storage. Coupled with Bolt’s support for batch inference and multi-core parallel computing, we finally submit models with different configurations to the CPU latency and throughput tracks to explore the Pareto frontiers.

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IIT Bombay’s WMT22 Automatic Post-Editing Shared Task Submission
Sourabh Deoghare | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

This paper describes IIT Bombay’s submission to the WMT22 Automatic Post-Editing (APE) shared task for the English-Marathi (En-Mr) language pair. We follow the curriculum training strategy to train our APE system. First, we train an encoder-decoder model to perform translation from English to Marathi. Next, we add another encoder to the model and train the resulting dual-encoder single-decoder model for the APE task. This involves training the model using the synthetic APE data in multiple training stages and then fine-tuning it using the real APE data. We use the LaBSE technique to ensure the quality of the synthetic APE data. For data augmentation, along with using candidates obtained from an external machine translation (MT) system, we also use the phrase-level APE triplets generated using phrase table injection. As APE systems are prone to the problem of ‘over-correction’, we use a sentence-level quality estimation (QE) system to select the final output between an original translation and the corresponding output generated by the APE model. Our approach improves the TER and BLEU scores on the development set by -3.92 and +4.36 points, respectively. Also, the final results on the test set show that our APE system outperforms the baseline system by -3.49 TER points and +5.37 BLEU points.

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LUL’s WMT22 Automatic Post-Editing Shared Task Submission
Xiaoying Huang | Xingrui Lou | Fan Zhang | Tu Mei

By learning the human post-edits, the automatic post-editing (APE) models are often used to modify the output of the machine translation (MT) system to make it as close as possible to human translation. We introduce the system used in our submission of WMT’22 Automatic Post-Editing (APE) English-Marathi (En-Mr) shared task. In this task, we first train the MT system of En-Mr to generate additional machine-translation sentences. Then we use the additional triple to bulid our APE model and use APE dataset to further fine-tuning. Inspired by the mixture of experts (MoE), we use GMM algorithm to roughly divide the text of APE dataset into three categories. After that, the experts are added to the APE model and different domain data are sent to different experts. Finally, we ensemble the models to get better performance. Our APE system significantly improves the translations of provided MT results by -2.848 and +3.74 on the development dataset in terms of TER and BLEU, respectively. Finally, the TER and BLEU scores are improved by -1.22 and +2.41 respectively on the blind test set.

In the seventh edition of the WMT Biomedical Task, we addressed a total of seven languagepairs, namely English/German, English/French, English/Spanish, English/Portuguese, English/Chinese, English/Russian, English/Italian. This year’s test sets covered three types of biomedical text genre. In addition to scientific abstracts and terminology items used in previous editions, we released test sets of clinical cases. The evaluation of clinical cases translations were given special attention by involving clinicians in the preparation of reference translations and manual evaluation. For the main MEDLINE test sets, we received a total of 609 submissions from 37 teams. For the ClinSpEn sub-task, we had the participation of five teams.

This paper reports the findings of the second edition of the Chat Translation Shared Task. Similarly to the previous WMT 2020 edition, the task consisted of translating bilingual customer support conversational text. However, unlike the previous edition, in which the bilingual data was created from a synthetic monolingual English corpus, this year we used a portion of the newly released Unbabel’s MAIA corpus, which contains genuine bilingual conversations between agents and customers. We also expanded the language pairs to English↔German (en↔de), English↔French (en↔fr), and English↔Brazilian Portuguese (en↔pt-br).Given that the main goal of the shared task is to translate bilingual conversations, participants were encouraged to train and test their models specifically for this environment. In total, we received 18 submissions from 4 different teams. All teams participated in both directions of en↔de. One of the teams also participated in en↔fr and en↔pt-br. We evaluated the submissions with automatic metrics as well as human judgments via Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) on both directions. The official ranking of the systems is based on the overall MQM scores of the participating systems on both directions, i.e. agent and customer.

This paper presents the results of the First WMT Shared Task on Sign Language Translation (WMT-SLT22).This shared task is concerned with automatic translation between signed and spoken languages. The task is novel in the sense that it requires processing visual information (such as video frames or human pose estimation) beyond the well-known paradigm of text-to-text machine translation (MT).The task featured two tracks, translating from Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) to German and vice versa. Seven teams participated in this first edition of the task, all submitting to the DSGS-to-German track. Besides a system ranking and system papers describing state-of-the-art techniques, this shared task makes the following scientific contributions: novel corpora, reproducible baseline systems and new protocols and software for human evaluation. Finally, the task also resulted in the first publicly available set of system outputs and human evaluation scores for sign language translation.

We present the results of the WMT’22 SharedTask on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. The shared taskincluded both a data and a systems track, alongwith additional innovations, such as a focus onAfrican languages and extensive human evaluation of submitted systems. We received 14system submissions from 8 teams, as well as6 data track contributions. We report a largeprogress in the quality of translation for Africanlanguages since the last iteration of this sharedtask: there is an increase of about 7.5 BLEUpoints across 72 language pairs, and the average BLEU scores went from 15.09 to 22.60.

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Findings of the WMT 2022 Shared Tasks in Unsupervised MT and Very Low Resource Supervised MT
Marion Weller-Di Marco | Alexander Fraser

We present the findings of the WMT2022Shared Tasks in Unsupervised MT and VeryLow Resource Supervised MT with experiments on the language pairs German to/fromUpper Sorbian, German to/from Lower Sorbian and Lower Sorbian to/from Upper Sorbian. Upper and Lower Sorbian are minoritylanguages spoken in the Eastern parts of Germany. There are active language communitiesworking on the preservation of the languageswho also made the data used in this Shared Taskavailable.In total, four teams participated on this SharedTask, with submissions from three teams for theunsupervised sub task, and submissions fromall four teams for the supervised sub task. Inthis overview paper, we present and discuss theresults.

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Overview and Results of MixMT Shared-Task at WMT 2022
Vivek Srivastava | Mayank Singh

In this paper, we present an overview of the WMT 2022 shared task on code-mixed machine translation (MixMT). In this shared task, we hosted two code-mixed machine translation subtasks in the following settings: (i) monolingual to code-mixed translation and (ii) code-mixed to monolingual translation. In both the subtasks, we received registration and participation from teams across the globe showing an interest and need to immediately address the challenges with machine translation involving code-mixed and low-resource languages.

Recent years have witnessed rapid advancements in machine translation, but the state-of-the-art machine translation system still can not satisfy the high requirements in some rigorous translation scenarios. Computer-aided translation (CAT) provides a promising solution to yield a high-quality translation with a guarantee. Unfortunately, due to the lack of popular benchmarks, the research on CAT is not well developed compared with machine translation. In this year, we hold a new shared task called Word-level AutoCompletion (WLAC) for CAT in WMT. Specifically, we introduce some resources to train a WLAC model, and particularly we collect data from CAT systems as a part of test data for this shared task. In addition, we employ both automatic and human evaluations to measure the performance of the submitted systems, and our final evaluation results reveal some findings for the WLAC task.

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Findings of the WMT 2022 Shared Task on Translation Suggestion
Zhen Yang | Fandong Meng | Yingxue Zhang | Ernan Li | Jie Zhou

We report the result of the first edition of the WMT shared task on Translation Suggestion (TS). The task aims to provide alternatives for specific words or phrases given the entire documents generated by machine translation (MT). It consists two sub-tasks, namely, the naive translation suggestion and translation suggestion with hints. The main difference is that some hints are provided in sub-task two, therefore, it is easier for the model to generate more accurate suggestions. For sub-task one, we provide the corpus for the language pairs English-German and English-Chinese. And only English-Chinese corpus is provided for the sub-task two. We received 92 submissions from 5 participating teams in sub-task one and 6 submissions for the sub-task 2, most of them covering all of the translation directions. We used the automatic metric BLEU for evaluating the performance of each submission.

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Focused Concatenation for Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation
Lorenzo Lupo | Marco Dinarelli | Laurent Besacier

A straightforward approach to context-aware neural machine translation consists in feeding the standard encoder-decoder architecture with a window of consecutive sentences, formed by the current sentence and a number of sentences from its context concatenated to it. In this work, we propose an improved concatenation approach that encourages the model to focus on the translation of the current sentence, discounting the loss generated by target context. We also propose an additional improvement that strengthen the notion of sentence boundaries and of relative sentence distance, facilitating model compliance to the context-discounted objective. We evaluate our approach with both average-translation quality metrics and contrastive test sets for the translation of inter-sentential discourse phenomena, proving its superiority to the vanilla concatenation approach and other sophisticated context-aware systems.

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Does Sentence Segmentation Matter for Machine Translation?
Rachel Wicks | Matt Post

For the most part, NLP applications operate at the sentence level. Since sentences occur most naturally in documents, they must be extracted and segmented via the use of a segmenter, of which there are a handful of options. There has been some work evaluating the performance of segmenters on intrinsic metrics, that look at their ability to recover human-segmented sentence boundaries, but there has been no work looking at the effect of segmenters on downstream tasks. We ask the question, “does segmentation matter?” and attempt to answer it on the task of machine translation. We consider two settings: the application of segmenters to a black-box system whose training segmentation is mostly unknown, as well as the variation in performance when segmenters are applied to the training process, too. We find that the choice of segmenter largely does not matter, so long as its behavior is not one of extreme under- or over-segmentation. For such settings, we provide some qualitative analysis examining their harms, and point the way towards document-level processing.

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Revisiting Locality Sensitive Hashing for Vocabulary Selection in Fast Neural Machine Translation
Hieu Hoang | Marcin Junczys-dowmunt | Roman Grundkiewicz | Huda Khayrallah

Neural machine translation models often contain large target vocabularies. The calculation of logits, softmax and beam search is computationally costly over so many classes. We investigate the use of locality sensitive hashing (LSH) to reduce the number of vocabulary items that must be evaluated and explore the relationship between the hashing algorithm, translation speed and quality. Compared to prior work, our LSH-based solution does not require additional augmentation via word-frequency lists or alignments. We propose a training procedure that produces models, which, when combined with our LSH inference algorithm increase translation speed by up to 87% over the baseline, while maintaining translation quality as measured by BLEU. Apart from just using BLEU, we focus on minimizing search errors compared to the full softmax, a much harsher quality criterion.

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Too Brittle to Touch: Comparing the Stability of Quantization and Distillation towards Developing Low-Resource MT Models
Harshita Diddee | Sandipan Dandapat | Monojit Choudhury | Tanuja Ganu | Kalika Bali

Leveraging shared learning through Massively Multilingual Models, state-of-the-art Machine translation (MT) models are often able to adapt to the paucity of data for low-resource languages. However, this performance comes at the cost of significantly bloated models which aren’t practically deployable. Knowledge Distillation is one popular technique to develop competitive lightweight models: In this work, we first evaluate its use in compressing MT models, focusing specifically on languages with extremely limited training data. Through our analysis across 8 languages, we find that the variance in the performance of the distilled models due to their dependence on priors including the amount of synthetic data used for distillation, the student architecture, training hyper-parameters and confidence of the teacher models, makes distillation a brittle compression mechanism. To mitigate this, we further explore the use of post-training quantization for the compression of these models. Here, we find that while Distillation provides gains across some low-resource languages, Quantization provides more consistent performance trends for the entire range of languages, especially the lowest-resource languages in our target set.

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Data Augmentation for Inline Tag-Aware Neural Machine Translation
Yonghyun Ryu | Yoonjung Choi | Sangha Kim

Despite the wide use of inline formatting, not much has been studied on translating sentences with inline formatted tags. The detag-and-project approach using word alignments is one solution to translating a tagged sentence. However, the method has a limitation: tag reinsertion is not considered in the translation process. Another solution is to use an end-to-end model which takes text with inline tags as inputs and translates them into a tagged sentence. This approach can alleviate the problems of the aforementioned method, but there is no sufficient parallel corpus dedicated to such a task. To solve this problem, an automatic data augmentation method by tag injection is suggested, but it is computationally expensive and augmentation is limited since the model is based on isolated translation for all fragments. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective tag augmentation method based on word alignment. Our experiments show that our approach outperforms the detag-and-project methods. We also introduce a metric to evaluate the placement of tags and show that the suggested metric is reasonable for our task. We further analyze the effectiveness of each implementation detail.

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The SPECTRANS System Description for the WMT22 Biomedical Task
Nicolas Ballier | Jean-baptiste Yunès | Guillaume Wisniewski | Lichao Zhu | Maria Zimina

This paper describes the SPECTRANS submission for the WMT 2022 biomedical shared task. We present the results of our experiments using the training corpora and the JoeyNMT (Kreutzer et al., 2019) and SYSTRAN Pure Neural Server/ Advanced Model Studio toolkits for the language directions English to French and French to English. We compare the pre- dictions of the different toolkits. We also use JoeyNMT to fine-tune the model with a selection of texts from WMT, Khresmoi and UFAL data sets. We report our results and assess the respective merits of the different translated texts.

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SRT’s Neural Machine Translation System for WMT22 Biomedical Translation Task
Yoonjung Choi | Jiho Shin | Yonghyun Ryu | Sangha Kim

This paper describes the Samsung Research’s Translation system (SRT) submitted to the WMT22 biomedical translation task in two language directions: English to Spanish and Spanish to English. To improve the overall quality, we adopt the deep transformer architecture and employ the back-translation strategy for monolingual corpus. One of the issues in the domain translation is to translate domain-specific terminologies well. To address this issue, we apply the soft-constrained terminology translation based on biomedical terminology dictionaries. In this paper, we provide the performance of our system with WMT20 and WMT21 biomedical testsets. Compared to the best model in WMT20 and WMT21, our system shows equal or better performance. According to the official evaluation results in terms of BLEU scores, our systems get the highest scores in both directions.

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Examining Large Pre-Trained Language Models for Machine Translation: What You Don’t Know about It
Lifeng Han | Gleb Erofeev | Irina Sorokina | Serge Gladkoff | Goran Nenadic

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) often take advantage of the monolingual and multilingual dataset that is freely available online to acquire general or mixed domain knowledge before deployment into specific tasks. Extra-large PLMs (xLPLMs) are proposed very recently to claim supreme performances over smaller-sized PLMs such as in machine translation (MT) tasks. These xLPLMs include Meta-AI’s wmt21-dense-24-wide-en-X (2021) and NLLB (2022). In this work, we examine if xLPLMs are absolutely superior to smaller-sized PLMs in fine-tuning toward domain-specific MTs. We use two different in-domain data of different sizes: commercial automotive in-house data and clinical shared task data from the ClinSpEn2022 challenge at WMT2022. We choose the popular Marian Helsinki as smaller sized PLM and two massive-sized Mega-Transformers from Meta-AI as xLPLMs.Our experimental investigation shows that 1) on smaller-sized in-domain commercial automotive data, xLPLM wmt21-dense-24-wide-en-X indeed shows much better evaluation scores using SacreBLEU and hLEPOR metrics than smaller-sized Marian, even though its score increase rate is lower than Marian after fine-tuning; 2) on relatively larger-size well prepared clinical data fine-tuning, the xLPLM NLLB tends to lose its advantage over smaller-sized Marian on two sub-tasks (clinical terms and ontology concepts) using ClinSpEn offered metrics METEOR, COMET, and ROUGE-L, and totally lost to Marian on Task-1 (clinical cases) on all official metrics including SacreBLEU and BLEU; 3) metrics do not always agree with each other on the same tasks using the same model outputs; 4) clinic-Marian ranked No.2 on Task- 1 (via SacreBLEU/BLEU) and Task-3 (via METEOR and ROUGE) among all submissions.

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Summer: WeChat Neural Machine Translation Systems for the WMT22 Biomedical Translation Task
Ernan Li | Fandong Meng | Jie Zhou

This paper introduces WeChat’s participation in WMT 2022 shared biomedical translationtask on Chinese→English. Our systems are based on the Transformer(Vaswani et al., 2017),and use several different Transformer structures to improve the quality of translation. In our experiments, we employ data filtering, data generation, several variants of Transformer,fine-tuning and model ensemble. Our Chinese→English system, named Summer, achieves the highest BLEU score among all submissions.

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Optum’s Submission to WMT22 Biomedical Translation Tasks
Sahil Manchanda | Saurabh Bhagwat

This paper describes Optum’s submission to the Biomedical Translation task of the seventh conference on Machine Translation (WMT22). The task aims at promoting the development and evaluation of machine translation systems in their ability to handle challenging domain-specific biomedical data. We made submissions to two sub-tracks of ClinSpEn 2022, namely, ClinSpEn-CC (clinical cases) and ClinSpEn-OC (ontology concepts). These sub-tasks aim to test translation from English to Spanish. Our approach involves fine-tuning a pre-trained transformer model using in-house clinical domain data and the biomedical data provided by WMT. The fine-tuned model results in a test BLEU score of 38.12 in the ClinSpEn-CC (clinical cases) subtask, which is a gain of 1.23 BLEU compared to the pre-trained model.

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Huawei BabelTar NMT at WMT22 Biomedical Translation Task: How We Further Improve Domain-specific NMT
Weixuan Wang | Xupeng Meng | Suqing Yan | Ye Tian | Wei Peng

This paper describes Huawei Artificial Intelligence Application Research Center’s neural machine translation system (“BabelTar”). Our submission to the WMT22 biomedical translation shared task covers language directions between English and the other seven languages (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Chinese). During the past four years, our participation in this domain-specific track has witnessed a paradigm shift of methodology from a purely data-driven focus to embracing diversified techniques, including pre-trained multilingual NMT models, homograph disambiguation, ensemble learning, and preprocessing methods. We illustrate practical insights and measured performance improvements relating to how we further improve our domain-specific NMT system.

This paper describes the translation systems trained by Huawei translation services center (HW-TSC) for the WMT22 biomedical translation task in five language pairs: English↔German (en↔de), English↔French (en↔fr), English↔Chinese (en↔zh), English↔Russian (en↔ru) and Spanish→English (es→en). Our primary systems are built on deep Transformer with a large filter size. We also utilize R-Drop, data diversification, forward translation, back translation, data selection, finetuning and ensemble to improve the system performance. According to the official evaluation results in OCELoT or CodaLab, our unconstrained systems in en→de, de→en, en→fr, fr→en, en→zh and es→en (clinical terminology sub-track) get the highest BLEU scores among all submissions for the WMT22 biomedical translation task.

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Unbabel-IST at the WMT Chat Translation Shared Task
João Alves | Pedro Henrique Martins | José G. C. de Souza | M. Amin Farajian | André F. T. Martins

We present the joint contribution of IST and Unbabel to the WMT 2022 Chat Translation Shared Task. We participated in all six language directions (English ↔ German, English ↔ French, English ↔ Brazilian Portuguese). Due to the lack of domain-specific data, we use mBART50, a large pretrained language model trained on millions of sentence-pairs, as our base model. We fine-tune it using a two step fine-tuning process. In the first step, we fine-tune the model on publicly available data. In the second step, we use the validation set. After having a domain specific model, we explore the use of kNN-MT as a way of incorporating domain-specific data at decoding time.

Multilingual chatbots are the need of the hour for modern business. There is increasing demand for such systems all over the world. A multilingual chatbot can help to connect distant parts of the world together, without sharing a common language. We participated in WMT22 Chat Translation Shared Task. In this paper, we report descriptions of methodologies used for participation. We submit outputs from multi-encoder based transformer model, where one encoder is for context and another for source utterance. We consider one previous utterance as context. We obtain COMET scores of 0.768 and 0.907 on English-to-German and German-to-English directions, respectively. We submitted outputs without using context at all, which generated worse results in English-to-German direction. While for German-to-English, the model achieved a lower COMET score but slightly higher chrF and BLEU scores. Further, to understand the effectiveness of the context encoder, we submitted a run after removing the context encoder during testing and we obtain similar results.

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BJTU-WeChat’s Systems for the WMT22 Chat Translation Task
Yunlong Liang | Fandong Meng | Jinan Xu | Yufeng Chen | Jie Zhou

This paper introduces the joint submission of the Beijing Jiaotong University and WeChat AI to the WMT’22 chat translation task for English-German. Based on the Transformer, we apply several effective variants. In our experiments, we apply the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm. In the first pre-training stage, we employ data filtering and synthetic data generation (i.e., back-translation, forward-translation, and knowledge distillation). In the second fine-tuning stage, we investigate speaker-aware in-domain data generation, speaker adaptation, prompt-based context modeling, target denoising fine-tuning, and boosted self-COMET-based model ensemble. Our systems achieve 81.0 and 94.6 COMET scores on English-German and German-English, respectively. The COMET scores of English-German and German-English are the highest among all submissions.

This paper describes the submissions of Huawei Translation Services Center (HW-TSC) to WMT22 chat translation shared task on English-Germany (en-de) bidirection with results of zore-shot and few-shot tracks. We use the deep transformer architecture with a lager parameter size. Our submissions to the WMT21 News Translation task are used as the baselines. We adopt strategies such as back translation, forward translation, domain transfer, data selection, and noisy forward translation in task, and achieve competitive results on the development set. We also test the effectiveness of document translation on chat tasks. Due to the lack of chat data, the results on the development set show that it is not as effective as sentence-level translation models.

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Clean Text and Full-Body Transformer: Microsoft’s Submission to the WMT22 Shared Task on Sign Language Translation
Subhadeep Dey | Abhilash Pal | Cyrine Chaabani | Oscar Koller

This paper describes Microsoft’s submission to the first shared task on sign language translation at WMT 2022, a public competition tackling sign language to spoken language translation for Swiss German sign language. The task is very challenging due to data scarcity and an unprecedented vocabulary size of more than 20k words on the target side. Moreover, the data is taken from real broadcast news, includes native signing and covers scenarios of long videos. Motivated by recent advances in action recognition, we incorporate full body information by extracting features from a pre-trained I3D model and applying a standard transformer network. The accuracy of the system is furtherimproved by applying careful data cleaning on the target text. We obtain BLEU scores of 0.6 and 0.78 on the test and dev set respectively, which is the best score among the participants of the shared task. Also in the human evaluation the submission reaches the first place. The BLEU score is further improved to 1.08 on the dev set by applying features extracted from a lip reading model.

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Spatio-temporal Sign Language Representation and Translation
Yasser Hamidullah | Josef Van Genabith | Cristina España-bonet

This paper describes the DFKI-MLT submission to the WMT-SLT 2022 sign language translation (SLT) task from Swiss German Sign Language (video) into German (text). State-of-the-art techniques for SLT use a generic seq2seq architecture with customized input embeddings. Instead of word embeddings as used in textual machine translation, SLT systems use features extracted from video frames. Standard approaches often do not benefit from temporal features. In our participation, we present a system that learns spatio-temporal feature representations and translation in a single model, resulting in a real end-to-end architecture expected to better generalize to new data sets. Our best system achieved 5 ± 1 BLEU points on the development set, but the performance on the test dropped to 0.11 ± 0.06 BLEU points.

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Experimental Machine Translation of the Swiss German Sign Language via 3D Augmentation of Body Keypoints
Lorenz Hufe | Eleftherios Avramidis

This paper describes the participation of DFKI-SLT at the Sign Language Translation Task of the Seventh Conference of Machine Translation (WMT22). The system focuses on the translation direction from the Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) to written German. The original videos of the sign language were analyzed with computer vision models to provide 3D body keypoints. A deep-learning sequence-to-sequence model is trained on a parallel corpus of these body keypoints aligned to written German sentences. Geometric data augmentation occurs during the training process. The body keypoints are augmented by artificial rotation in the three dimensional space. The 3D-transformation is calculated with different angles on every batch of the training process.

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TTIC’s WMT-SLT 22 Sign Language Translation System
Bowen Shi | Diane Brentari | Gregory Shakhnarovich | Karen Livescu

We describe TTIC’s model submission to WMT-SLT 2022 task on sign language translation (Swiss-German Sign Language (DSGS) - German). Our model consists of an I3D backbone for image encoding and a Transformerbased encoder-decoder model for sequence modeling. The I3D is pre-trained with isolated sign recognition using the WLASL dataset. The model is based on RGB images alone and does not rely on the pre-extracted human pose. We explore a few different strategies for model training in this paper. Our system achieves 0.3 BLEU score and 0.195 Chrf score on the official test set.

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Tackling Low-Resourced Sign Language Translation: UPC at WMT-SLT 22
Laia Tarres | Gerard I. Gállego | Xavier Giro-i-nieto | Jordi Torres

This paper describes the system developed at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya for the Workshop on Machine Translation 2022 Sign Language Translation Task, in particular, for the sign-to-text direction. We use a Transformer model implemented with the Fairseq modeling toolkit. We have experimented with the vocabulary size, data augmentation techniques and pretraining the model with the PHOENIX-14T dataset. Our system obtains 0.50 BLEU score for the test set, improving the organizers’ baseline by 0.38 BLEU. We remark the poor results for both the baseline and our system, and thus, the unreliability of our findings.

We participated in the WMT 2022 Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for the African Languages Shared Task. This work describes our approach, which is based on filtering the given noisy data using a sentence-pair classifier that was built by fine-tuning a pre-trained language model. To train the classifier, we obtain positive samples (i.e. high-quality parallel sentences) from a gold-standard curated dataset and extract negative samples (i.e. low-quality parallel sentences) from automatically aligned parallel data by choosing sentences with low alignment scores. Our final machine translation model was then trained on filtered data, instead of the entire noisy dataset. We empirically validate our approach by evaluating on two common datasets and show that data filtering generally improves overall translation quality, in some cases even significantly.

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Language Adapters for Large-Scale MT: The GMU System for the WMT 2022 Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages Shared Task
Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam | Antonios Anastasopoulos

This report describes GMU’s machine translation systems for the WMT22 shared task on large-scale machine translation evaluation for African languages. We participated in the constrained translation track where only the data listed on the shared task page were allowed, including submissions accepted to the Data track. Our approach uses models initialized with DeltaLM, a generic pre-trained multilingual encoder-decoder model, and fine-tuned correspondingly with the allowed data sources. Our best submission incorporates language family and language-specific adapter units; ranking ranked second under the constrained setting.

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Samsung Research Philippines - Datasaur AI’s Submission for the WMT22 Large Scale Multilingual Translation Task
Jan Christian Blaise Cruz | Lintang Sutawika

This paper describes the submission of the joint Samsung Research Philippines - Datasaur AI team for the WMT22 Large Scale Multilingual African Translation shared task. We approach the contest as a way to explore task composition as a solution for low-resource multilingual translation, using adapter fusion to combine multiple task adapters that learn subsets of the total translation pairs. Our final model shows performance improvements in 32 out of the 44 translation directions that we participate in when compared to a single model system trained on multiple directions at once.

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University of Cape Town’s WMT22 System: Multilingual Machine Translation for Southern African Languages
Khalid Elmadani | Francois Meyer | Jan Buys

The paper describes the University of Cape Town’s submission to the constrained track of the WMT22 Shared Task: Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. Our system is a single multilingual translation model that translates between English and 8 South / South East African Languages, as well as between specific pairs of the African languages. We used several techniques suited for low-resource machine translation (MT), including overlap BPE, back-translation, synthetic training data generation, and adding more translation directions during training. Our results show the value of these techniques, especially for directions where very little or no bilingual training data is available.

This paper describes Tencent’s multilingual machine translation systems for the WMT22 shared task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. We participated in the constrained translation track in which only the data and pretrained models provided by the organizer are allowed. The task is challenging due to three problems, including the absence of training data for some to-be-evaluated language pairs, the uneven optimization of language pairs caused by data imbalance, and the curse of multilinguality. To address these problems, we adopt data augmentation, distributionally robust optimization, and language family grouping, respectively, to develop our multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) models. Our submissions won the 1st place on the blind test sets in terms of the automatic evaluation metrics. Codes, models, and detailed competition results are available at https://github.com/wxjiao/WMT2022-Large-Scale-African.

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DENTRA: Denoising and Translation Pre-training for Multilingual Machine Translation
Samta Kamboj | Sunil Kumar Sahu | Neha Sengupta

In this paper, we describe our submission to the WMT-2022: Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages under the Constrained Translation track. We introduce DENTRA, a novel pre-training strategy for a multilingual sequence-to-sequence transformer model. DENTRA pre-training combines denoising and translation objectives to incorporate both monolingual and bitext corpora in 24 African, English, and French languages. To evaluate the quality of DENTRA, we fine-tuned it with two multilingual machine translation configurations, one-to-many and many-to-one. In both pre-training and fine-tuning, we employ only the datasets provided by the organizers. We compare DENTRA against a strong baseline, M2M-100, in different African multilingual machine translation scenarios and show gains in 3 out of 4 subtasks.

This report describes our VolcTrans system for the WMT22 shared task on large-scale multilingual machine translation. We participated in the unconstrained track which allows the use of external resources. Our system is a transformer-based multilingual model trained on data from multiple sources including the public training set from the data track, NLLB data provided by Meta AI, self-collected parallel corpora, and pseudo bitext from back-translation. Both bilingual and monolingual texts are cleaned by a series of heuristic rules. On the official test set, our system achieves 17.3 BLEU, 21.9 spBLEU, and 41.9 chrF2++ on average over all language pairs. Averaged inference speed is 11.5 sentences per second using a single Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU.

WebCrawl African is a mixed domain multilingual parallel corpora for a pool of African languages compiled by ANVITA machine translation team of Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Lab, primarily for accelerating research on low-resource and extremely low-resource machine translation and is part of the submission to WMT 2022 shared task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages under the data track. The corpora is compiled through web data mining and comprises 695K parallel sentences spanning 74 different language pairs from English and 15 African languages, many of which fall under low and extremely low resource categories. As a measure of corpora usefulness, a MNMT model for 24 African languages to English is trained by combining WebCrawl African corpora with existing corpus and evaluation on FLORES200 shows that inclusion of WebCrawl African corpora could improve BLEU score by 0.01-1.66 for 12 out of 15 African to English translation directions and even by 0.18-0.68 for the 4 out of 9 African to English translation directions which are not part of WebCrawl African corpora. WebCrawl African corpora includes more parallel sentences for many language pairs in comparison to OPUS public repository. This data description paper captures creation of corpora and results obtained along with datasheets. The WebCrawl African corpora is hosted on github repository.

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ANVITA-African: A Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System for African Languages
Pavanpankaj Vegi | Sivabhavani J | Biswajit Paul | Prasanna K R | Chitra Viswanathan

This paper describes ANVITA African NMT system submitted by team ANVITA for WMT 2022 shared task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages under the constrained translation track. The team participated in 24 African languages to English MT directions. For better handling of relatively low resource language pairs and effective transfer learning, models are trained in multilingual setting. Heuristic based corpus filtering is applied and it improved performance by 0.04-2.06 BLEU across 22 out of 24 African to English directions and also improved training time by 5x. Use of deep transformer with 24 layers of encoder and 6 layers of decoder significantly improved performance by 1.1-7.7 BLEU across all the 24 African to English directions compared to base transformer. For effective selection of source vocabulary in multilingual setting, joint and language wise vocabulary selection strategies are explored at the source side. Use of language wise vocabulary selection however did not consistently improve performance of low resource languages in comparison to joint vocabulary selection. Empirical results indicate that training using deep transformer with filtered corpora seems to be a better choice than using base transformer on the whole corpora both in terms of accuracy and training time.

This paper describes the submissions of Huawei translation services center (HW-TSC) to the WMT22 Very Low Resource Supervised MT task. We participate in all 6 supervised tracks including all combinations between Upper/Lower Sorbian (Hsb/Dsb) and German (De). Our systems are build on deep Transformer with a large filter size. We use multilingual transfer with German-Czech (De-Cs) and German-Polish (De-Pl) parallel data. We also utilize regularized dropout (R-Drop), back translation, fine-tuning and ensemble to improve the system performance. According to the official evaluation results on OCELoT, our supervised systems of all 6 language directions get the highest BLEU scores among all submissions. Our pre-trained multilingual model for unsupervised De2Dsb and Dsb2De translation also gain highest BLEU.

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Unsupervised and Very-Low Resource Supervised Translation on German and Sorbian Variant Languages
Rahul Tangsali | Aditya Vyawahare | Aditya Mandke | Onkar Litake | Dipali Kadam

This paper presents the work of team PICT-NLP for the shared task on unsupervised and very low-resource supervised machine translation, organized by the Workshop on Machine Translation, a workshop in collocation with the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022). The paper delineates the approaches we implemented for supervised and unsupervised translation between the following 6 language pairs: German-Lower Sorbian (de-dsb), Lower Sorbian-German (dsb-de), Lower Sorbian-Upper Sorbian (dsb-hsb), Upper Sorbian-Lower Sorbian (hsb-dsb), German-Upper Sorbian (de-hsb), and Upper Sorbian-German (hsb-de). For supervised learning, we implemented the transformer architecture from scratch using the Fairseq library. Whereas for unsupervised learning, we implemented Facebook’s XLM masked language modeling approach. We discuss the training details for the models we used, and the results obtained from our approaches. We used the BLEU and chrF metrics for evaluating the accuracies of the generated translations on our systems.

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MUNI-NLP Systems for Lower Sorbian-German and Lower Sorbian-Upper Sorbian Machine Translation @ WMT22
Edoardo Signoroni | Pavel Rychlý

We describe our neural machine translation systems for the WMT22 shared task on unsupervised MT and very low resource supervised MT. We submit supervised NMT systems for Lower Sorbian-German and Lower Sorbian-Upper Sorbian translation in both directions. By using a novel tokenization algorithm, data augmentation techniques, such as Data Diversification (DD), and parameter optimization we improve on our baselines by 10.5-10.77 BLEU for Lower Sorbian-German and by 1.52-1.88 BLEU for Lower Sorbian-Upper Sorbian.

This paper presents our submissions to WMT 22 shared task in the Unsupervised and Very Low Resource Supervised Machine Translation tasks. The task revolves around translating between German ↔ Upper Sorbian (de ↔ hsb), German ↔ Lower Sorbian (de ↔ dsb) and Upper Sorbian ↔ Lower Sorbian (hsb ↔ dsb) in both unsupervised and supervised manner. For the unsupervised system, we trained an unsupervised phrase-based statistical machine translation (UPBSMT) system on each pair independently. We pretrained a De-Salvic mBART model on the following languages Polish (pl), Czech (cs), German (de), Upper Sorbian (hsb), Lower Sorbian (dsb). We then fine-tuned our mBART on the synthetic parallel data generated by the (UPBSMT) model along with authentic parallel data (de ↔ pl, de ↔ cs). We further fine-tuned our unsupervised system on authentic parallel data (hsb ↔ dsb, de ↔ dsb, de ↔ hsb) to submit our supervised low-resource system.

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NICT at MixMT 2022: Synthetic Code-Mixed Pre-training and Multi-way Fine-tuning for Hinglish–English Translation
Raj Dabre

In this paper, we describe our submission to the Code-mixed Machine Translation (MixMT) shared task. In MixMT, the objective is to translate Hinglish to English and vice versa. For our submissions, we focused on code-mixed pre-training and multi-way fine-tuning. Our submissions achieved rank 4 in terms of automatic evaluation score. For Hinglish to English translation, our submission achieved rank 4 as well.

Code-mixed machine translation has become an important task in multilingual communities and extending the task of machine translation to code mixed data has become a common task for these languages. In the shared tasks of EMNLP 2022, we try to tackle the same for both English + Hindi to Hinglish and Hinglish to English. The first task dealt with both Roman and Devanagari script as we had monolingual data in both English and Hindi whereas the second task only had data in Roman script. To our knowledge, we achieved one of the top ROUGE-L and WER scores for the first task of Monolingual to Code-Mixed machine translation. In this paper, we discuss the use of mBART with some special pre-processing and post-processing (transliteration from Devanagari to Roman) for the first task in detail and the experiments that we performed for the second task of translating code-mixed Hinglish to monolingual English.

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MUCS@MixMT: IndicTrans-based Machine Translation for Hinglish Text
Asha Hegde | Shashirekha Lakshmaiah

Code-mixing is the phenomena of mixing various linguistic units such as paragraphs, sentences, phrases, words, etc., of one language with that of the other language in any text. This code-mixing is predominantly used by social media users who know more than one language. Processing code-mixed text is challenging because of its characteristics and lack of tools that supports such data. Further, pretrained models can be used for the formal text and not for the informal text such as code-mixed. Developing efficient Machine Translation (MT) systems for code-mixed text is challenging due to lack of code-mixed training data. Further, existing MT systems developed to translate monolingual data are not portable to translate code-mixed text mainly due to its informal nature. To address the MT challenges of code-mixed text, this paper describes the proposed MT models submitted by our team MUCS, to the Code-mixed Machine Translation (MixMT) shared task in the Workshop on Machine Translation (WMT) organized in connection with Empirical models in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2022. This shared has two subtasks: i) subtask 1 - to translate English sentences and their corresponding Hindi translations into Hinglish text and ii) subtask 2 - to translate Hinglish text into English text. The proposed models that translate the code-mixed English text to Hinglish (English-Hindli code-mixed text) and vice-versa, comprises of i) transliterating Hinglish text from Latin to Devanagari script and vice-versa, ii) pseudo translation generation using existing models, and iii) efficient target generation by combining the pseudo translations along with the training data provided by the shared task organizers. The proposed models obtained 5^th and 3^rd rank with Recall-Oriented Under-study for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) scores of 0.35806 and 0.55453 for subtask 1 and subtask 2 respectively.

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SIT at MixMT 2022: Fluent Translation Built on Giant Pre-trained Models
Abdul Khan | Hrishikesh Kanade | Girish Budhrani | Preet Jhanglani | Jia Xu

This paper describes the Stevens Institute of Technology’s submission for the WMT 2022 Shared Task: Code-mixed Machine Translation (MixMT). The task consisted of two subtasks, subtask 1 Hindi/English to Hinglish and subtask 2 Hinglish to English translation. Our findings lie in the improvements made through the use of large pre-trained multilingual NMT models and in-domain datasets, as well as back-translation and ensemble techniques. The translation output is automatically evaluated against the reference translations using ROUGE-L and WER. Our system achieves the 1st position on subtask 2 according to ROUGE-L, WER, and human evaluation, 1st position on subtask 1 according to WER and human evaluation, and 3rd position on subtask 1 with respect to ROUGE-L metric.

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The University of Edinburgh’s Submission to the WMT22 Code-Mixing Shared Task (MixMT)
Faheem Kirefu | Vivek Iyer | Pinzhen Chen | Laurie Burchell

The University of Edinburgh participated in the WMT22 shared task on code-mixed translation. This consists of two subtasks: i) generating code-mixed Hindi/English (Hinglish) text generation from parallel Hindi and English sentences and ii) machine translation from Hinglish to English. As both subtasks are considered low-resource, we focused our efforts on careful data generation and curation, especially the use of backtranslation from monolingual resources. For subtask 1 we explored the effects of constrained decoding on English and transliterated subwords in order to produce Hinglish. For subtask 2, we investigated different pretraining techniques, namely comparing simple initialisation from existing machine translation models and aligned augmentation. For both subtasks, we found that our baseline systems worked best. Our systems for both subtasks were one of the overall top-performing submissions.

The mixing of two or more languages in speech or text is known as code-mixing. In this form of communication, users mix words and phrases from multiple languages. Code-mixing is very common in the context of Indian languages due to the presence of multilingual societies. The probability of the existence of code-mixed sentences in almost all Indian languages since in India English is the dominant language for social media textual communication platforms. We have participated in the WMT22 shared task of code-mixed machine translation with the team name: CNLP-NITS-PP. In this task, we have prepared a synthetic Hinglish–English parallel corpus using transliteration of original Hindi sentences to tackle the limitation of the parallel corpus, where, we mainly considered sentences that have named-entity (proper noun) from the available English-Hindi parallel corpus. With the addition of synthetic bi-text data to the original parallel corpus (train set), our transformer-based neural machine translation models have attained recall-oriented understudy for gisting evaluation (ROUGE-L) scores of 0.23815, 0.33729, and word error rate (WER) scores of 0.95458, 0.88451 at Sub-Task-1 (English-to-Hinglish) and Sub-Task-2 (Hinglish-to-English) for test set results respectively.

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Domain Curricula for Code-Switched MT at MixMT 2022
Lekan Raheem | Maab Elrashid | Melvin Johnson | Julia Kreutzer

In multilingual colloquial settings, it is a habitual occurrence to compose expressions of text or speech containing tokens or phrases of different languages, a phenomenon popularly known as code-switching or code-mixing (CMX). We present our approach and results for the Code-mixed Machine Translation (MixMT) shared task at WMT 2022: the task consists of two subtasks, monolingual to code-mixed machine translation (Subtask-1) and code-mixed to monolingual machine translation (Subtask-2). Most non-synthetic code-mixed data are from social media but gathering a significant amount of this kind of data would be laborious and this form of data has more writing variation than other domains, so for both subtasks, we experimented with data schedules for out-of-domain data. We jointly learn multiple domains of text by pretraining and fine-tuning, combined with a sentence alignment objective. We found that switching between domains caused improved performance in the domains seen earliest during training, but depleted the performance on the remaining domains. A continuous training run with strategically dispensed data of different domains showed a significantly improved performance over fine-tuning.

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Lingua Custodia’s Participation at the WMT 2022 Word-Level Auto-completion Shared Task
Melissa Ailem | Jingshu Liu | Jean-gabriel Barthelemy | Raheel Qader

This paper presents Lingua Custodia’s submission to the WMT22 shared task on Word Level Auto-completion (WLAC). We consider two directions, namely German-English and English-German.The WLAC task in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) consists in predicting a target word given few human typed characters, the source sentence to translate, as well as some translation context. Inspired by recent work in terminology control, we propose to treat the human typed sequence as a constraint to predict the right word starting by the latter. To do so, the source side of the training data is augmented with both the constraints and the translation context. In addition, following new advances in WLAC, we use a joint optimization strategy taking into account several types of translation context. The automatic as well as human accuracy obtained with the submitted systems show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Translation Word-Level Auto-Completion: What Can We Achieve Out of the Box?
Yasmin Moslem | Rejwanul Haque | Andy Way

Research on Machine Translation (MT) has achieved important breakthroughs in several areas. While there is much more to be done in order to build on this success, we believe that the language industry needs better ways to take full advantage of current achievements. Due to a combination of factors, including time, resources, and skills, businesses tend to apply pragmatism into their AI workflows. Hence, they concentrate more on outcomes, e.g. delivery, shipping, releases, and features, and adopt high-level working production solutions, where possible. Among the features thought to be helpful for translators are sentence-level and word-level translation auto-suggestion and auto-completion. Suggesting alternatives can inspire translators and limit their need to refer to external resources, which hopefully boosts their productivity. This work describes our submissions to WMT’s shared task on word-level auto-completion, for the Chinese-to-English, English-to-Chinese, German-to-English, and English-to-German language directions. We investigate the possibility of using pre-trained models and out-of-the-box features from available libraries. We employ random sampling to generate diverse alternatives, which reveals good results. Furthermore, we introduce our open-source API, based on CTranslate2, to serve translations, auto-suggestions, and auto-completions.

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PRHLT’s Submission to WLAC 2022
Angel Navarro | Miguel Domingo | Francisco Casacuberta

This paper describes our submission to the Word-Level AutoCompletion shared task of WMT22. We participated in the English–German and German–English categories. We proposed a segment-based interactive machine translation approach whose central core is a machine translation (MT) model which generates a complete translation from the context provided by the task. From there, we obtain the word which corresponds to the autocompletion. With this approach, we aim to show that it is possible to use the MT models in the autocompletion task by simply performing minor changes at the decoding step, obtaining satisfactory results.

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IIGROUP Submissions for WMT22 Word-Level AutoCompletion Task
Cheng Yang | Siheng Li | Chufan Shi | Yujiu Yang

This paper presents IIGroup’s submission to the WMT22 Word-Level AutoCompletion(WLAC) Shared Task in four language directions. We propose to use a Generate-then-Rerank framework to solve this task. More specifically, the generator is used to generate candidate words and recall as many positive candidates as possible. To facilitate the training process of the generator, we propose a span-level mask prediction task. Once we get the candidate words, we take the top-K candidates and feed them into the reranker. The reranker is used to select the most confident candidate. The experimental results in four language directions demonstrate the effectiveness of our systems. Our systems achieve competitive performance ranking 1st in English to Chinese subtask and 2nd in Chinese to English subtask.

This paper presents the submissions of Huawei Translation Services Center (HW-TSC) to WMT 2022 Word-Level AutoCompletion Task. We propose an end-to-end autoregressive model with bi-context based on Transformer to solve current task. The model uses a mixture of subword and character encoding units to realize the joint encoding of human input, the context of the target side and the decoded sequence, which ensures full utilization of information. We uses one model to solve four types of data structures in the task. During training, we try using a machine translation model as the pre-trained model and fine-tune it for the task. We also add BERT-style MLM data at the fine-tuning stage to improve model performance. We participate in zh→en, en→de, and de→en directions and win the first place in all the three tracks. Particularly, we outperform the second place by more than 5% in terms of accuracy on the zh→en and en→de tracks. The result is buttressed by human evaluations as well, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model.

This paper describes the joint submission of Alibaba and Soochow University to the WMT 2022 Shared Task on Translation Suggestion (TS). We participate in the English to/from German and English to/from Chinese tasks. Basically, we utilize the model paradigm fine-tuning on the downstream tasks based on large-scale pre-trained models, which has recently achieved great success. We choose FAIR’s WMT19 English to/from German news translation system and MBART50 for English to/from Chinese as our pre-trained models. Considering the task’s condition of limited use of training data, we follow the data augmentation strategies provided by Yang to boost our TS model performance. And we further involve the dual conditional cross-entropy model and GPT-2 language model to filter augmented data. The leader board finally shows that our submissions are ranked first in three of four language directions in the Naive TS task of the WMT22 Translation Suggestion task.

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Transn’s Submissions to the WMT22 Translation Suggestion Task
Mao Hongbao | Zhang Wenbo | Cai Jie | Cheng Jianwei

This paper describes the Transn’s submissions to the WMT2022 shared task on TranslationSuggestion. Our team participated on two tasks: Naive Translation Suggestion and TranslationSuggestion with Hints, focusing on two language directions Zh→En and En→Zh. Apart from the golden training data provided by the shared task, we utilized synthetic corpus to fine-tune on DeltaLM (∆LM), which is a pre-trained encoder-decoder language model. We applied two-stage training strategy on ∆LM and several effective methods to generate synthetic corpus, which contribute a lot to the results. According to the official evaluation results in terms of BLEU scores, our submissions in Naive Translation Suggestion En→Zh and Translation Suggestion with Hints (both Zh→En and En→Zh) ranked 1st, and Naive Translation Suggestion Zh→En also achieved comparable result to the best score.

Translation suggestion (TS) models are used to automatically provide alternative suggestions for incorrect spans in sentences generated by machine translation. This paper introduces the system used in our submission to the WMT’22 Translation Suggestion shared task. Our system is based on the ensemble of different translation architectures, including Transformer, SA-Transformer, and DynamicConv. We use three strategies to construct synthetic data from parallel corpora to compensate for the lack of supervised data. In addition, we introduce a multi-phase pre-training strategy, adding an additional pre-training phase with in-domain data. We rank second and third on the English-German and English-Chinese bidirectional tasks, respectively.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 4th Workshop of Narrative Understanding (WNU2022)

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Proceedings of the 4th Workshop of Narrative Understanding (WNU2022)
Elizabeth Clark | Faeze Brahman | Mohit Iyyer

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Uncovering Surprising Event Boundaries in Narratives
Zhilin Wang | Anna Jafarpour | Maarten Sap

When reading stories, people can naturally identify sentences in which a new event starts, i.e., event boundaries, using their knowledge of how events typically unfold, but a computational model to detect event boundaries is not yet available. We characterize and detect sentences with expected or surprising event boundaries in an annotated corpus of short diary-like stories, using a model that combines commonsense knowledge and narrative flow features with a RoBERTa classifier. Our results show that, while commonsense and narrative features can help improve performance overall, detecting event boundaries that are more subjective remains challenging for our model. We also find that sentences marking surprising event boundaries are less likely to be causally related to the preceding sentence, but are more likely to express emotional reactions of story characters, compared to sentences with no event boundary.

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Compositional Generalization for Kinship Prediction through Data Augmentation
Kangda Wei | Sayan Ghosh | Shashank Srivastava

Transformer-based models have shown promising performance in numerous NLP tasks. However, recent work has shown the limitation of such models in showing compositional generalization, which requires models to generalize to novel compositions of known concepts. In this work, we explore two strategies for compositional generalization on the task of kinship prediction from stories, (1) data augmentation and (2) predicting and using intermediate structured representation (in form of kinship graphs). Our experiments show that data augmentation boosts generalization performance by around 20% on average relative to a baseline model from prior work not using these strategies. However, predicting and using intermediate kinship graphs leads to a deterioration in the generalization of kinship prediction by around 50% on average relative to models that only leverage data augmentation.

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How to be Helpful on Online Support Forums?
Zhilin Wang | Pablo E. Torres

Internet forums such as Reddit offer people a platform to ask for advice when they encounter various issues at work, school or in relationships. Telling helpful comments apart from unhelpful comments to these advice-seeking posts can help people and dialogue agents to become more helpful in offering advice. We propose a dataset that contains both helpful and unhelpful comments in response to such requests. We then relate helpfulness to the closely related construct of empathy. Finally, we analyze the language features that are associated with helpful and unhelpful comments.

We experiment with adapting generative language models for the generation of long coherent narratives in the form of theatre plays. Since fully automatic generation of whole plays is not currently feasible, we created an interactive tool that allows a human user to steer the generation somewhat while minimizing intervention. We pursue two approaches to long-text generation: a flat generation with summarization of context, and a hierarchical text-to-text two-stage approach, where a synopsis is generated first and then used to condition generation of the final script. Our preliminary results and discussions with theatre professionals show improvements over vanilla language model generation, but also identify important limitations of our approach.

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GisPy: A Tool for Measuring Gist Inference Score in Text
Pedram Hosseini | Christopher Wolfe | Mona Diab | David Broniatowski

Decision making theories such as Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT) suggest that individuals tend to rely on gist, or bottom-line meaning, in the text when making decisions. In this work, we delineate the process of developing GisPy, an opensource tool in Python for measuring the Gist Inference Score (GIS) in text. Evaluation of GisPy on documents in three benchmarks from the news and scientific text domains demonstrates that scores generated by our tool significantly distinguish low vs. high gist documents. Our tool is publicly available to use at: https: //github.com/phosseini/GisPy.

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Heroes, Villains, and Victims, and GPT-3: Automated Extraction of Character Roles Without Training Data
Dominik Stammbach | Maria Antoniak | Elliott Ash

This paper shows how to use large-scale pretrained language models to extract character roles from narrative texts without domain-specific training data. Queried with a zero-shot question-answering prompt, GPT-3 can identify the hero, villain, and victim in diverse domains: newspaper articles, movie plot summaries, and political speeches.

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Narrative Detection and Feature Analysis in Online Health Communities
Achyutarama Ganti | Steven Wilson | Zexin Ma | Xinyan Zhao | Rong Ma

Narratives have been shown to be an effective way to communicate health risks and promote health behavior change, and given the growing amount of health information being shared on social media, it is crucial to study health-related narratives in social media. However, expert identification of a large number of narrative texts is a time consuming process, and larger scale studies on the use of narratives may be enabled through automatic text classification approaches. Prior work has demonstrated that automatic narrative detection is possible, but modern deep learning approaches have not been used for this task in the domain of online health communities. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the use of deep learning methods to automatically classify the presence of narratives in social media posts, finding that they outperform previously proposed approaches. We also find that in many cases, these models generalize well across posts from different health organizations. Finally, in order to better understand the increase in performance achieved by deep learning models, we use feature analysis techniques to explore the features that most contribute to narrative detection for posts in online health communities.

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Looking from the Inside: How Children Render Character’s Perspectives in Freely Told Fantasy Stories
Max van Duijn | Bram van Dijk | Marco Spruit

Story characters not only perform actions, they typically also perceive, feel, think, and communicate. Here we are interested in how children render characters’ perspectives when freely telling a fantasy story. Drawing on a sample of 150 narratives elicited from Dutch children aged 4-12, we provide an inventory of 750 instances of character-perspective representation (CPR), distinguishing fourteen different types. Firstly, we observe that character perspectives are ubiquitous in freely told children’s stories and take more varied forms than traditional frameworks can accommodate. Secondly, we discuss variation in the use of different types of CPR across age groups, finding that character perspectives are being fleshed out in more advanced and diverse ways as children grow older. Thirdly, we explore whether such variation can be meaningfully linked to automatically extracted linguistic features, thereby probing the potential for using automated tools from NLP to extract and classify character perspectives in children’s stories.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2022)

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Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2022)

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Changes in Tweet Geolocation over Time: A Study with Carmen 2.0
Jingyu Zhang | Alexandra DeLucia | Mark Dredze

Researchers across disciplines use Twitter geolocation tools to filter data for desired locations. These tools have largely been trained and tested on English tweets, often originating in the United States from almost a decade ago. Despite the importance of these tools for data curation, the impact of tweet language, country of origin, and creation date on tool performance remains largely unknown. We explore these issues with Carmen, a popular tool for Twitter geolocation. To support this study we introduce Carmen 2.0, a major update which includes the incorporation of GeoNames, a gazetteer that provides much broader coverage of locations. We evaluate using two new Twitter datasets, one for multilingual, multiyear geolocation evaluation, and another for usage trends over time. We found that language, country origin, and time does impact geolocation tool performance.

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Extracting Mathematical Concepts from Text
Jacob Collard | Valeria de Paiva | Brendan Fong | Eswaran Subrahmanian

We investigate different systems for extracting mathematical entities from English texts in the mathematical field of category theory as a first step for constructing a mathematical knowledge graph. We consider four different term extractors and compare their results. This small experiment showcases some of the issues with the construction and evaluation of terms extracted from noisy domain text. We also make available two open corpora in research mathematics, in particular in category theory: a small corpus of 755 abstracts from the journal TAC (3188 sentences), and a larger corpus from the nLab community wiki (15,000 sentences)

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Data-driven Approach to Differentiating between Depression and Dementia from Noisy Speech and Language Data
Malikeh Ehghaghi | Frank Rudzicz | Jekaterina Novikova

A significant number of studies apply acoustic and linguistic characteristics of human speech as prominent markers of dementia and depression. However, studies on discriminating depression from dementia are rare. Co-morbid depression is frequent in dementia and these clinical conditions share many overlapping symptoms, but the ability to distinguish between depression and dementia is essential as depression is often curable. In this work, we investigate the ability of clustering approaches in distinguishing between depression and dementia from human speech. We introduce a novel aggregated dataset, which combines narrative speech data from multiple conditions, i.e., Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, healthy control, and depression. We compare linear and non-linear clustering approaches and show that non-linear clustering techniques distinguish better between distinct disease clusters. Our interpretability analysis shows that the main differentiating symptoms between dementia and depression are acoustic abnormality, repetitiveness (or circularity) of speech, word finding difficulty, coherence impairment, and differences in lexical complexity and richness.

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Cross-Dialect Social Media Dependency Parsing for Social Scientific Entity Attribute Analysis
Chloe Eggleston | Brendan O’Connor

In this paper, we utilize recent advancements in social media natural language processing to obtain state-of-the-art syntactic dependency parsing results for social media English. We observe performance gains of 3.4 UAS and 4.0 LAS against the previous state-of-the-art as well as less disparity between African-American and Mainstream American English dialects. We demonstrate the computational social scientific utility of this parser for the task of socially embedded entity attribute analysis: for a specified entity, derive its semantic relationships from parses’ rich syntax, and accumulate and compare them across social variables. We conduct a case study on politicized views of U.S. official Anthony Fauci during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Impact of Environmental Noise on Alzheimer’s Disease Detection from Speech: Should You Let a Baby Cry?
Jekaterina Novikova

Research related to automatically detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is important, given the high prevalence of AD and the high cost of traditional methods. Since AD significantly affects the acoustics of spontaneous speech, speech processing and machine learning (ML) provide promising techniques for reliably detecting AD. However, speech audio may be affected by different types of background noise and it is important to understand how the noise influences the accuracy of ML models detecting AD from speech. In this paper, we study the effect of fifteen types of environmental noise from five different categories on the performance of four ML models trained with three types of acoustic representations. We perform a thorough analysis showing how ML models and acoustic features are affected by different types of acoustic noise. We show that acoustic noise is not necessarily harmful - certain types of noise are beneficial for AD detection models and help increasing accuracy by up to 4.8%. We provide recommendations on how to utilize acoustic noise in order to achieve the best performance results with the ML models deployed in real world.

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Exploring Multimodal Features and Fusion Strategies for Analyzing Disaster Tweets
Raj Pranesh

Social media platforms, such as Twitter, often provide firsthand news during the outbreak of a crisis. It is extremely essential to process these facts quickly to plan the response efforts for minimal loss. Therefore, in this paper, we present an analysis of various multimodal feature fusion techniques to analyze and classify disaster tweets into multiple crisis events via transfer learning. In our study, we utilized three image models pre-trained on ImageNet dataset and three fine-tuned language models to learn the visual and textual features of the data and combine them to make predictions. We have presented a systematic analysis of multiple intra-modal and cross-modal fusion strategies and their effect on the performance of the multimodal disaster classification system. In our experiment, we used 8,242 disaster tweets, each comprising image, and text data with five disaster event classes. The results show that the multimodal with transformer-attention mechanism and factorized bilinear pooling (FBP) for intra-modal and cross-modal feature fusion respectively achieved the best performance.

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NTULM: Enriching Social Media Text Representations with Non-Textual Units
Jinning Li | Shubhanshu Mishra | Ahmed El-Kishky | Sneha Mehta | Vivek Kulkarni

On social media, additional context is often present in the form of annotations and meta-data such as the post’s author, mentions, Hashtags, and hyperlinks. We refer to these annotations as Non-Textual Units (NTUs). We posit that NTUs provide social context beyond their textual semantics and leveraging these units can enrich social media text representations. In this work we construct an NTU-centric social heterogeneous network to co-embed NTUs. We then principally integrate these NTU embeddings into a large pretrained language model by fine-tuning with these additional units. This adds context to noisy short-text social media. Experiments show that utilizing NTU-augmented text representations significantly outperforms existing text-only baselines by 2-5% relative points on many downstream tasks highlighting the importance of context to social media NLP. We also highlight that including NTU context into the initial layers of language model alongside text is better than using it after the text embedding is generated. Our work leads to the generation of holistic general purpose social media content embedding.

Entity Linking (EL) is the gateway into Knowledge Bases. Recent advances in EL utilize dense retrieval approaches for Candidate Generation, which addresses some of the shortcomings of the Lookup based approach of matching NER mentions against pre-computed dictionaries. In this work, we show that in the domain of Tweets, such methods suffer as users often include informal spelling, limited context, and lack of specificity, among other issues. We investigate these challenges on a large and recent Tweets benchmark for EL, empirically evaluate lookup and dense retrieval approaches, and demonstrate a hybrid solution using long contextual representation from Wikipedia is necessary to achieve considerable gains over previous work, achieving 0.93 recall.

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TransPOS: Transformers for Consolidating Different POS Tagset Datasets
Alex Li | Ilyas Bankole-Hameed | Ranadeep Singh | Gabriel Ng | Akshat Gupta

In hope of expanding training data, researchers often want to merge two or more datasets that are created using different labeling schemes. This paper considers two datasets that label part-of-speech (POS) tags under different tagging schemes and leverage the supervised labels of one dataset to help generate labels for the other dataset. This paper further discusses the theoretical difficulties of this approach and proposes a novel supervised architecture employing Transformers to tackle the problem of consolidating two completely disjoint datasets. The results diverge from initial expectations and discourage exploration into the use of disjoint labels to consolidate datasets with different labels.

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An Effective, Performant Named Entity Recognition System for Noisy Business Telephone Conversation Transcripts
Xue-Yong Fu | Cheng Chen | Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar | Shashi Bhushan Tn | Simon Corston-Oliver

We present a simple yet effective method to train a named entity recognition (NER) model that operates on business telephone conversation transcripts that contain noise due to the nature of spoken conversation and artifacts of automatic speech recognition. We first fine-tune LUKE, a state-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) model, on a limited amount of transcripts, then use it as the teacher model to teach a smaller DistilBERT-based student model using a large amount of weakly labeled data and a small amount of human-annotated data. The model achieves high accuracy while also satisfying the practical constraints for inclusion in a commercial telephony product: realtime performance when deployed on cost-effective CPUs rather than GPUs. In this paper, we introduce the fine-tune-then-distill method for entity recognition on real world noisy data to deploy our NER model in a limited budget production environment. By generating pseudo-labels using a large teacher model pre-trained on typed text while fine-tuned on noisy speech text to train a smaller student model, we make the student model 75x times faster while reserving 99.09% of its accuracy. These findings demonstrate that our proposed approach is very effective in limited budget scenarios to alleviate the need of human labeling of a large amount of noisy data.

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Leveraging Semantic and Sentiment Knowledge for User-Generated Text Sentiment Classification
Jawad Khan | Niaz Ahmad | Aftab Alam | Youngmoon Lee

Sentiment analysis is essential to process and understand unstructured user-generated content for better data analytics and decision-making. State-of-the-art techniques suffer from a high dimensional feature space because of noisy and irrelevant features from the noisy user-generated text. Our goal is to mitigate such problems using DNN-based text classification and popular word embeddings (Glove, fastText, and BERT) in conjunction with statistical filter feature selection (mRMR and PCA) to select relevant sentiment features and pick out unessential/irrelevant ones. We propose an effective way of integrating the traditional feature construction methods with the DNN-based methods to improve the performance of sentiment classification. We evaluate our model on three real-world benchmark datasets demonstrating that our proposed method improves the classification performance of several existing methods.

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An Emotional Journey: Detecting Emotion Trajectories in Dutch Customer Service Dialogues
Sofie Labat | Amir Hadifar | Thomas Demeester | Veronique Hoste

The ability to track fine-grained emotions in customer service dialogues has many real-world applications, but has not been studied extensively. This paper measures the potential of prediction models on that task, based on a real-world dataset of Dutch Twitter conversations in the domain of customer service. We find that modeling emotion trajectories has a small, but measurable benefit compared to predictions based on isolated turns. The models used in our study are shown to generalize well to different companies and economic sectors.

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Supervised and Unsupervised Evaluation of Synthetic Code-Switching
Evgeny Orlov | Ekaterina Artemova

Code-switching (CS) is a phenomenon of mixing words and phrases from multiple languages within a single sentence or conversation. The ever-growing amount of CS communication among multilingual speakers in social media has highlighted the need to adapt existing NLP products for CS speakers and lead to a rising interest in solving CS NLP tasks. A large number of contemporary approaches use synthetic CS data for training. As previous work has shown the positive effect of pretraining on high-quality CS data, the task of evaluating synthetic CS becomes crucial. In this paper, we address the task of evaluating synthetic CS in two settings. In supervised setting, we apply Hinglish finetuned models to solve the quality rating prediction task of HinglishEval competition and establish a new SOTA. In unsupervised setting, we employ the method of acceptability measures with the same models. We find that in both settings, models finetuned on CS data consistently outperform their original counterparts.

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ArabGend: Gender Analysis and Inference on Arabic Twitter
Hamdy Mubarak | Shammur Absar Chowdhury | Firoj Alam

Gender analysis of Twitter can reveal important socio-cultural differences between male and female users. There has been a significant effort to analyze and automatically infer gender in the past for most widely spoken languages’ content, however, to our knowledge very limited work has been done for Arabic. In this paper, we perform an extensive analysis of differences between male and female users on the Arabic Twitter-sphere. We study differences in user engagement, topics of interest, and the gender gap in professions. Along with gender analysis, we also propose a method to infer gender by utilizing usernames, profile pictures, tweets, and networks of friends. In order to do so, we manually annotated gender and locations for ~166K Twitter accounts associated with ~92K user location, which we plan to make publicly available. Our proposed gender inference method achieve an F1 score of 82.1% (47.3% higher than majority baseline). We also developed a demo and made it publicly available.

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Automatic Identification of 5C Vaccine Behaviour on Social Media
Ajay Hemanth Sampath Kumar | Aminath Shausan | Gianluca Demartini | Afshin Rahimi

Monitoring vaccine behaviour through social media can guide health policy. We present a new dataset of 9471 tweets posted in Australia from 2020 to 2022, annotated with sentiment toward vaccines and also 5C, the five types of behaviour toward vaccines, a scheme commonly used in health psychology literature. We benchmark our dataset using BERT and Gradient Boosting Machine and show that jointly training both sentiment and 5C tasks (F1=48) outperforms individual training (F1=39) in this highly imbalanced data. Our sentiment analysis indicates close correlation between the sentiments and prominent events during the pandemic. We hope that our dataset and benchmark models will inform further work in online monitoring of vaccine behaviour. The dataset and benchmark methods are accessible online.

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Automatic Extraction of Structured Mineral Drillhole Results from Unstructured Mining Company Reports
Adam Dimeski | Afshin Rahimi

Aggregate mining exploration results can help companies and governments to optimise and police mining permits and operations, a necessity for transition to a renewable energy future, however, these results are buried in unstructured text. We present a novel dataset from 23 Australian mining company reports, framing the extraction of structured drillhole information as a sequence labelling task. Our two benchmark models based on Bi-LSTM-CRF and BERT, show their effectiveness in this task with a F1 score of 77% and 87%, respectively. Our dataset and benchmarks are accessible online.

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“Kanglish alli names!” Named Entity Recognition for Kannada-English Code-Mixed Social Media Data
Sumukh S | Manish Shrivastava

Code-mixing (CM) is a frequently observed phenomenon on social media platforms in multilingual societies such as India. While the increase in code-mixed content on these platforms provides good amount of data for studying various aspects of code-mixing, the lack of automated text analysis tools makes such studies difficult. To overcome the same, tools such as language identifiers and parts of-speech (POS) taggers for analysing code-mixed data have been developed. One such tool is Named Entity Recognition (NER), an important Natural Language Processing (NLP) task, which is not only a subtask of Information Extraction, but is also needed for downstream NLP tasks such as semantic role labeling. While entity extraction from social media data is generally difficult due to its informal nature, code-mixed data further complicates the problem due to its informal, unstructured and incomplete information. In this work, we present the first ever corpus for Kannada-English code-mixed social media data with the corresponding named entity tags for NER. We provide strong baselines with machine learning classification models such as CRF, Bi-LSTM, and Bi-LSTM-CRF on our corpus with word, character, and lexical features.

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Span Extraction Aided Improved Code-mixed Sentiment Classification
Ramaneswaran S | Sean Benhur | Sreyan Ghosh

Sentiment classification is a fundamental NLP task of detecting the sentiment polarity of a given text. In this paper we show how solving sentiment span extraction as an auxiliary task can help improve final sentiment classification performance in a low-resource code-mixed setup. To be precise, we don’t solve a simple multi-task learning objective, but rather design a unified transformer framework that exploits the bidirectional connection between the two tasks simultaneously. To facilitate research in this direction we release gold-standard human-annotated sentiment span extraction dataset for Tamil-english code-switched texts. Extensive experiments and strong baselines show that our proposed approach outperforms sentiment and span prediction by 1.27% and 2.78% respectively when compared to the best performing MTL baseline. We also establish the generalizability of our approach on the Twitter Sentiment Extraction dataset. We make our code and data publicly available on GitHub

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AdBERT: An Effective Few Shot Learning Framework for Aligning Tweets to Superbowl Advertisements
Debarati Das | Roopana Chenchu | Maral Abdollahi | Jisu Huh | Jaideep Srivastava

The tremendous increase in social media usage for sharing Television (TV) experiences has provided a unique opportunity in the Public Health and Marketing sectors to understand viewer engagement and attitudes through viewer-generated content on social media. However, this opportunity also comes with associated technical challenges. Specifically, given a televised event and related tweets about this event, we need methods to effectively align these tweets and the corresponding event. In this paper, we consider the specific ecosystem of the Superbowl 2020 and map viewer tweets to advertisements they are referring to. Our proposed model, AdBERT, is an effective few-shot learning framework that is able to handle the technical challenges of establishing ad-relatedness, class imbalance as well as the scarcity of labeled data. As part of this study, we have curated and developed two datasets that can prove to be useful for Social TV research: 1) dataset of ad-related tweets and 2) dataset of ad descriptions of Superbowl advertisements. Explaining connections to SentenceBERT, we describe the advantages of AdBERT that allow us to make the most out of a challenging and interesting dataset which we will open-source along with the models developed in this paper.

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Increasing Robustness for Cross-domain Dialogue Act Classification on Social Media Data
Marcus Vielsted | Nikolaj Wallenius | Rob van der Goot

Automatically detecting the intent of an utterance is important for various downstream natural language processing tasks. This task is also called Dialogue Act Classification (DAC) and was primarily researched on spoken one-to-one conversations. The rise of social media has made this an interesting data source to explore within DAC, although it comes with some difficulties: non-standard form, variety of language types (across and within platforms), and quickly evolving norms. We therefore investigate the robustness of DAC on social media data in this paper. More concretely, we provide a benchmark that includes cross-domain data splits, as well as a variety of improvements on our transformer-based baseline. Our experiments show that lexical normalization is not beneficial in this setup, balancing the labels through resampling is beneficial in some cases, and incorporating context is crucial for this task and leads to the highest performance improvements 7 F1 percentage points in-domain and 20 cross-domain).

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Disfluency Detection for Vietnamese
Mai Hoang Dao | Thinh Hung Truong | Dat Quoc Nguyen

In this paper, we present the first empirical study for Vietnamese disfluency detection. To conduct this study, we first create a disfluency detection dataset for Vietnamese, with manual annotations over two disfluency types. We then empirically perform experiments using strong baseline models, and find that: automatic Vietnamese word segmentation improves the disfluency detection performances of the baselines, and the highest performance results are obtained by fine-tuning pre-trained language models in which the monolingual model PhoBERT for Vietnamese does better than the multilingual model XLM-R.

The automatic categorization of support tickets is a fundamental tool for modern businesses. Such requests are most commonly composed of concise textual descriptions that are noisy and filled with technical jargon. In this paper, we test the effectiveness of pre-trained LMs for the classification of issues related to software bugs. First, we test several strategies to produce single, ticket-wise representations starting from their BERT-generated word embeddings. Then, we showcase a simple yet effective way to build a multi-level classifier for the categorization of documents with two hierarchically dependent labels. We experiment on a public bugs dataset and compare our results with standard BERT-based and traditional SVM classifiers. Our findings suggest that both embedding strategies and hierarchical label dependencies considerably impact classification accuracy.

Web-crawled datasets are known to be noisy, as they feature a wide range of language use covering both user-generated and professionally edited content as well as noise originating from the crawling process. This article presents one solution to reduce this noise by using automatic register (genre) identification -whether the texts are, e.g., forum discussions, lyrical or how-to pages. We apply the multilingual register identification model by Rönnqvist et al. (2021) and label the widely used Oscar dataset. Additionally, we evaluate the model against eight new languages, showing that the performance is comparable to previous findings on a restricted set of languages. Finally, we present and apply a machine learning method for further cleaning text files originating from Web crawls from remains of boilerplate and other elements not belonging to the main text of the Web page. The register labeled and cleaned dataset covers 351 million documents in 14 languages and is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/TurkuNLP/register_oscar.

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True or False? Detecting False Information on Social Media Using Graph Neural Networks
Samyo Rode-Hasinger | Anna Kruspe | Xiao Xiang Zhu

In recent years, false information such as fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories on many relevant issues in society have proliferated. This phenomenon has been significantly amplified by the fast and inexorable spread of misinformation on social media and instant messaging platforms. With this work, we contribute to containing the negative impact on society caused by fake news. We propose a graph neural network approach for detecting false information on Twitter. We leverage the inherent structure of graph-based social media data aggregating information from short text messages (tweets), user profiles and social interactions. We use knowledge from pre-trained language models efficiently, and show that user-defined descriptions of profiles provide useful information for improved prediction performance. The empirical results indicate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms text- and user-based methods on misinformation datasets from two different domains, even in a difficult multilingual setting.

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Analyzing the Real Vulnerability of Hate Speech Detection Systems against Targeted Intentional Noise
Piush Aggarwal | Torsten Zesch

Hate speech detection systems have been shown to be vulnerable against obfuscation attacks, where a potential hater tries to circumvent detection by deliberately introducing noise in their posts. In previous work, noise is often introduced for all words (which is likely overestimating the impact) or single untargeted words (likely underestimating the vulnerability). We perform a user study asking people to select words they would obfuscate in a post. Using this realistic setting, we find that the real vulnerability of hate speech detection systems against deliberately introduced noise is almost as high as when using a whitebox attack and much more severe than when using a non-targeted dictionary. Our results are based on 4 different datasets, 12 different obfuscation strategies, and hate speech detection systems using different paradigms.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)

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Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Kanika Narang | Aida Mostafazadeh Davani | Lambert Mathias | Bertie Vidgen | Zeerak Talat

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Separating Hate Speech and Offensive Language Classes via Adversarial Debiasing
Shuzhou Yuan | Antonis Maronikolakis | Hinrich Schütze

Research to tackle hate speech plaguing online media has made strides in providing solutions, analyzing bias and curating data. A challenging problem is ambiguity between hate speech and offensive language, causing low performance both overall and specifically for the hate speech class. It can be argued that misclassifying actual hate speech content as merely offensive can lead to further harm against targeted groups. In our work, we mitigate this potentially harmful phenomenon by proposing an adversarial debiasing method to separate the two classes. We show that our method works for English, Arabic German and Hindi, plus in a multilingual setting, improving performance over baselines.

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Towards Automatic Generation of Messages Countering Online Hate Speech and Microaggressions
Mana Ashida | Mamoru Komachi

With the widespread use of social media, online hate is increasing, and microaggressions are receiving attention. We explore the potential for using pretrained language models to automatically generate messages that combat the associated offensive texts. Specifically, we focus on using prompting to steer model generation as it requires less data and computation than fine-tuning. We also propose a human evaluation perspective; offensiveness, stance, and informativeness. After obtaining 306 counterspeech and 42 microintervention messages generated by GPT-2, 3, Neo, we conducted a human evaluation using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results indicate the potential of using prompting in the proposed generation task. All the generated texts along with the annotation are published to encourage future research on countering hate and microaggressions online.

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GreaseVision: Rewriting the Rules of the Interface
Siddhartha Datta | Konrad Kollnig | Nigel Shadbolt

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Improving Generalization of Hate Speech Detection Systems to Novel Target Groups via Domain Adaptation
Florian Ludwig | Klara Dolos | Torsten Zesch | Eleanor Hobley

Despite recent advances in machine learning based hate speech detection, classifiers still struggle with generalizing knowledge to out-of-domain data samples. In this paper, we investigate the generalization capabilities of deep learning models to different target groups of hate speech under clean experimental settings. Furthermore, we assess the efficacy of three different strategies of unsupervised domain adaptation to improve these capabilities. Given the diversity of hate and its rapid dynamics in the online world (e.g. the evolution of new target groups like virologists during the COVID-19 pandemic), robustly detecting hate aimed at newly identified target groups is a highly relevant research question. We show that naively trained models suffer from a target group specific bias, which can be reduced via domain adaptation. We were able to achieve a relative improvement of the F1-score between 5.8% and 10.7% for out-of-domain target groups of hate speech compared to baseline approaches by utilizing domain adaptation.

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“Zo Grof !”: A Comprehensive Corpus for Offensive and Abusive Language in Dutch
Ward Ruitenbeek | Victor Zwart | Robin Van Der Noord | Zhenja Gnezdilov | Tommaso Caselli

This paper presents a comprehensive corpus for the study of socially unacceptable language in Dutch. The corpus extends and revise an existing resource with more data and introduces a new annotation dimension for offensive language, making it a unique resource in the Dutch language panorama. Each language phenomenon (abusive and offensive language) in the corpus has been annotated with a multi-layer annotation scheme modelling the explicitness and the target(s) of the message. We have conducted a new set of experiments with different classification algorithms on all annotation dimensions. Monolingual Pre-Trained Language Models prove as the best systems, obtaining a macro-average F1 of 0.828 for binary classification of offensive language, and 0.579 for the targets of offensive messages. Furthermore, the best system obtains a macro-average F1 of 0.667 for distinguishing between abusive and offensive messages.

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Counter-TWIT: An Italian Corpus for Online Counterspeech in Ecological Contexts
Pierpaolo Goffredo | Valerio Basile | Bianca Cepollaro | Viviana Patti

This work describes the process of creating a corpus of Twitter conversations annotated for the presence of counterspeech in response to toxic speech related to axes of discrimination linked to sexism, racism and homophobia. The main novelty is an annotated dataset comprising relevant tweets in their context of occurrence. The corpus is made up of tweets and responses captured by different profiles replying to discriminatory content or objectionably couched news. An annotation scheme was created to make explicit the knowledge on the dimensions of toxic speech and counterspeech.An analysis of the collected and annotated data and of the IAA that emerged during the annotation process is included. Moreover, we report about preliminary experiments on automatic counterspeech detection, based on supervised automatic learning models trained on the new dataset. The results highlight the fundamental role played by the context in this detection task, confirming our intuitions about the importance to collect tweets in their context of occurrence.

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StereoKG: Data-Driven Knowledge Graph Construction For Cultural Knowledge and Stereotypes
Awantee Deshpande | Dana Ruiter | Marius Mosbach | Dietrich Klakow

Analyzing ethnic or religious bias is important for improving fairness, accountability, and transparency of natural language processing models. However, many techniques rely on human-compiled lists of bias terms, which are expensive to create and are limited in coverage. In this study, we present a fully data-driven pipeline for generating a knowledge graph (KG) of cultural knowledge and stereotypes. Our resulting KG covers 5 religious groups and 5 nationalities and can easily be extended to more entities. Our human evaluation shows that the majority (59.2%) of non-singleton entries are coherent and complete stereotypes. We further show that performing intermediate masked language model training on the verbalized KG leads to a higher level of cultural awareness in the model and has the potential to increase classification performance on knowledge-crucial samples on a related task, i.e., hate speech detection.

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The subtle language of exclusion: Identifying the Toxic Speech of Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminists
Christina Lu | David Jurgens

Toxic language can take many forms, from explicit hate speech to more subtle microaggressions. Within this space, models identifying transphobic language have largely focused on overt forms. However, a more pernicious and subtle source of transphobic comments comes in the form of statements made by Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs); these statements often appear seemingly-positive and promote women’s causes and issues, while simultaneously denying the inclusion of transgender women as women. Here, we introduce two models to mitigate this antisocial behavior. The first model identifies TERF users in social media, recognizing that these users are a main source of transphobic material that enters mainstream discussion and whom other users may not desire to engage with in good faith. The second model tackles the harder task of recognizing the masked rhetoric of TERF messages and introduces a new dataset to support this task. Finally, we discuss the ethics of deploying these models to mitigate the harm of this language, arguing for a balanced approach that allows for restorative interactions.

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Lost in Distillation: A Case Study in Toxicity Modeling
Alyssa Chvasta | Alyssa Lees | Jeffrey Sorensen | Lucy Vasserman | Nitesh Goyal

In an era of increasingly large pre-trained language models, knowledge distillation is a powerful tool for transferring information from a large model to a smaller one. In particular, distillation is of tremendous benefit when it comes to real-world constraints such as serving latency or serving at scale. However, a loss of robustness in language understanding may be hidden in the process and not immediately revealed when looking at high-level evaluation metrics. In this work, we investigate the hidden costs: what is “lost in distillation”, especially in regards to identity-based model bias using the case study of toxicity modeling. With reproducible models using open source training sets, we investigate models distilled from a BERT teacher baseline. Using both open source and proprietary big data models, we investigate these hidden performance costs.

We present a cleansed version of the multilingual lexicon HURTLEX-(EL) comprising 737 offensive words of Modern Greek. We worked bottom-up in two annotation rounds and developed detailed guidelines by cross-classifying words on three dimensions: context, reference, and thematic domain. Our classification reveals a wider spectrum of thematic domains concerning the study of offensive language than previously thought Efthymiou et al. (2014) and reveals social and cultural aspects that are not included in the HURTLEX categories.

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Free speech or Free Hate Speech? Analyzing the Proliferation of Hate Speech in Parler
Abraham Israeli | Oren Tsur

Social platforms such as Gab and Parler, branded as ‘free-speech’ networks, have seen a significant growth of their user base in recent years. This popularity is mainly attributed to the stricter moderation enforced by mainstream platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit.In this work we provide the first large scale analysis of hate-speech on Parler. We experiment with an array of algorithms for hate-speech detection, demonstrating limitations of transfer learning in that domain, given the illusive and ever changing nature of the ways hate-speech is delivered. In order to improve classification accuracy we annotated 10K Parler posts, which we use to fine-tune a BERT classifier. Classification of individual posts is then leveraged for the classification of millions of users via label propagation over the social network. Classifying users by their propensity to disseminate hate, we find that hate mongers make 16.1% of Parler active users, and that they have distinct characteristics comparing to other user groups. We further complement our analysis by comparing the trends observed in Parler to those found in Gab. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first works to analyze hate speech in Parler in a quantitative manner and on the user level.

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Resources for Multilingual Hate Speech Detection
Ayme Arango Monnar | Jorge Perez | Barbara Poblete | Magdalena Saldaña | Valentina Proust

Most of the published approaches and resources for hate speech detection are tailored for the English language. In consequence, cross-lingual and cross-cultural perspectives lack some essential resources. The lack of diversity of the datasets in Spanish is notable. Variations throughout Spanish-speaking countries make existing datasets not enough to encompass the task in the different Spanish variants. We annotated 9834 tweets from Chile to enrich the existing Spanish resources with different words and new targets of hate that have not been considered in previous studies. We conducted several cross-dataset evaluation experiments of the models published in the literature using our Chilean dataset and two others in English and Spanish. We propose a comparative framework for quickly conducting comparative experiments using different previously published models. In addition, we set up a Codalab competition for further comparison of new models in a standard scenario, that is, data partitions and evaluation metrics. All resources can be accessed trough a centralized repository for researchers to get a complete picture of the progress on the multilingual hate speech and offensive language detection task.

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Enriching Abusive Language Detection with Community Context
Haji Mohammad Saleem | Jana Kurrek | Derek Ruths

Uses of pejorative expressions can be benign or actively empowering. When models for abuse detection misclassify these expressions as derogatory, they inadvertently censor productive conversations held by marginalized groups. One way to engage with non-dominant perspectives is to add context around conversations. Previous research has leveraged user- and thread-level features, but it often neglects the spaces within which productive conversations take place. Our paper highlights how community context can improve classification outcomes in abusive language detection. We make two main contributions to this end. First, we demonstrate that online communities cluster by the nature of their support towards victims of abuse. Second, we establish how community context improves accuracy and reduces the false positive rates of state-of-the-art abusive language classifiers. These findings suggest a promising direction for context-aware models in abusive language research.

In this work, we present a new publicly available offensive language dataset of 10.278 German social media comments collected in the first half of 2021 that were annotated by in total six annotators. With twelve different annotation categories, it is far more comprehensive than other datasets, and goes beyond just hate speech detection. The labels aim in particular also at toxicity, criminal relevance and discrimination types of comments. Furthermore, about half of the comments are from coherent parts of conversations, which opens the possibility to consider the comments’ contexts and do conversation analyses in order to research the contagion of offensive language in conversations.

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Multilingual HateCheck: Functional Tests for Multilingual Hate Speech Detection Models
Paul Röttger | Haitham Seelawi | Debora Nozza | Zeerak Talat | Bertie Vidgen

Hate speech detection models are typically evaluated on held-out test sets. However, this risks painting an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of model performance because of increasingly well-documented systematic gaps and biases in hate speech datasets. To enable more targeted diagnostic insights, recent research has thus introduced functional tests for hate speech detection models. However, these tests currently only exist for English-language content, which means that they cannot support the development of more effective models in other languages spoken by billions across the world. To help address this issue, we introduce Multilingual HateCheck (MHC), a suite of functional tests for multilingual hate speech detection models. MHC covers 34 functionalities across ten languages, which is more languages than any other hate speech dataset. To illustrate MHC’s utility, we train and test a high-performing multilingual hate speech detection model, and reveal critical model weaknesses for monolingual and cross-lingual applications.

“Dogwhistles” are expressions intended by the speaker have two messages: a socially-unacceptable “in-group” message understood by a subset of listeners, and a benign message intended for the out-group. We take the result of a word-replacement survey of the Swedish population intended to reveal how dogwhistles are understood, and we show that the difficulty of annotating dogwhistles is reflected in the separability in the space of a sentence-transformer Swedish BERT trained on general data.

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Hate Speech Criteria: A Modular Approach to Task-Specific Hate Speech Definitions
Urja Khurana | Ivar Vermeulen | Eric Nalisnick | Marloes Van Noorloos | Antske Fokkens

The subjectivity of automatic hate speech detection makes it a complex task, reflected in different and incomplete definitions in NLP. We present hate speech criteria, developed with insights from a law and social science expert, that help researchers create more explicit definitions and annotation guidelines on five aspects: (1) target groups and (2) dominance, (3) perpetrator characteristics, (4) explicit presence of negative interactions, and the (5) type of consequences/effects. Definitions can be structured so that they cover a more broad or more narrow phenomenon and conscious choices can be made on specifying criteria or leaving them open. We argue that the goal and exact task developers have in mind should determine how the scope of hate speech is defined. We provide an overview of the properties of datasets from hatespeechdata.com that may help select the most suitable dataset for a specific scenario.

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Accounting for Offensive Speech as a Practice of Resistance
Mark Diaz | Razvan Amironesei | Laura Weidinger | Iason Gabriel

Tasks such as toxicity detection, hate speech detection, and online harassment detection have been developed for identifying interactions involving offensive speech. In this work we articulate the need for a relational understanding of offensiveness to help distinguish denotative offensive speech from offensive speech serving as a mechanism through which marginalized communities resist oppressive social norms. Using examples from the queer community, we argue that evaluations of offensive speech must focus on the impacts of language use. We call this the cynic perspective– or a characteristic of language with roots in Cynic philosophy that pertains to employing offensive speech as a practice of resistance. We also explore the degree to which NLP systems may encounter limits to modeling relational context.

Online messaging is dynamic, influential, and highly contextual, and a single post may contain contrasting sentiments towards multiple entities, such as dehumanizing one actor while empathizing with another in the same message. These complexities are important to capture for understanding the systematic abuse voiced within an online community, or for determining whether individuals are advocating for abuse, opposing abuse, or simply reporting abuse. In this work, we describe a formulation of directed social regard (DSR) as a problem of multi-entity aspect-based sentiment analysis (ME-ABSA), which models the degree of intensity of multiple sentiments that are associated with entities described by a text document. Our DSR schema is informed by Bandura’s psychosocial theory of moral disengagement and by recent work in ABSA. We present a dataset of over 2,900 posts and sentences, comprising over 24,000 entities annotated for DSR over nine psychosocial dimensions by three annotators. We present a novel transformer-based ME-ABSA model for DSR, achieving favorable preliminary results on this dataset.

A common approach for testing fairness issues in text-based classifiers is through the use of counterfactuals: does the classifier output change if a sensitive attribute in the input is changed? Existing counterfactual generation methods typically rely on wordlists or templates, producing simple counterfactuals that fail to take into account grammar, context, or subtle sensitive attribute references, and could miss issues that the wordlist creators had not considered. In this paper, we introduce a task for generating counterfactuals that overcomes these shortcomings, and demonstrate how large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged to accomplish this task. We show that this LLM-based method can produce complex counterfactuals that existing methods cannot, comparing the performance of various counterfactual generation methods on the Civil Comments dataset and showing their value in evaluating a toxicity classifier.

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Users Hate Blondes: Detecting Sexism in User Comments on Online Romanian News
Andreea Moldovan | Karla Csürös | Ana-maria Bucur | Loredana Bercuci

Romania ranks almost last in Europe when it comes to gender equality in political representation, with about 10% fewer women in politics than the E.U. average. We proceed from the assumption that this underrepresentation is also influenced by the sexism and verbal abuse female politicians face in the public sphere, especially in online media. We collect a novel dataset with sexist comments in Romanian language from newspaper articles about Romanian female politicians and propose baseline models using classical machine learning models and fine-tuned pretrained transformer models for the classification of sexist language in the online medium.

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Targeted Identity Group Prediction in Hate Speech Corpora
Pratik Sachdeva | Renata Barreto | Claudia Von Vacano | Chris Kennedy

The past decade has seen an abundance of work seeking to detect, characterize, and measure online hate speech. A related, but less studied problem, is the detection of identity groups targeted by that hate speech. Predictive accuracy on this task can supplement additional analyses beyond hate speech detection, motivating its study. Using the Measuring Hate Speech corpus, which provided annotations for targeted identity groups, we created neural network models to perform multi-label binary prediction of identity groups targeted by a comment. Specifically, we studied 8 broad identity groups and 12 identity sub-groups within race and gender identity. We found that these networks exhibited good predictive performance, achieving ROC AUCs of greater than 0.9 and PR AUCs of greater than 0.7 on several identity groups. We validated their performance on HateCheck and Gab Hate Corpora, finding that predictive performance generalized in most settings. We additionally examined the performance of the model on comments targeting multiple identity groups. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of simultaneously identifying targeted groups in social media comments.

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Revisiting Queer Minorities in Lexicons
Krithika Ramesh | Sumeet Kumar | Ashiqur Khudabukhsh

Lexicons play an important role in content moderation often being the first line of defense. However, little or no literature exists in analyzing the representation of queer-related words in them. In this paper, we consider twelve well-known lexicons containing inappropriate words and analyze how gender and sexual minorities are represented in these lexicons. Our analyses reveal that several of these lexicons barely make any distinction between pejorative and non-pejorative queer-related words. We express concern that such unfettered usage of non-pejorative queer-related words may impact queer presence in mainstream discourse. Our analyses further reveal that the lexicons have poor overlap in queer-related words. We finally present a quantifiable measure of consistency and show that several of these lexicons are not consistent in how they include (or omit) queer-related words.

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HATE-ITA: Hate Speech Detection in Italian Social Media Text
Debora Nozza | Federico Bianchi | Giuseppe Attanasio

Online hate speech is a dangerous phenomenon that can (and should) be promptly counteracted properly. While Natural Language Processing supplies appropriate algorithms for trying to reach this objective, all research efforts are directed toward the English language. This strongly limits the classification power on non-English languages. In this paper, we test several learning frameworks for identifying hate speech in Italian text. We release HATE-ITA, a multi-language model trained on a large set of English data and available Italian datasets. HATE-ITA performs better than mono-lingual models and seems to adapt well also on language-specific slurs. We hope our findings will encourage the research in other mid-to-low resource communities and provide a valuable benchmarking tool for the Italian community.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 3rd Wordplay: When Language Meets Games Workshop (Wordplay 2022)

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Proceedings of the 3rd Wordplay: When Language Meets Games Workshop (Wordplay 2022)
Marc-Alexandre Côté | Xingdi Yuan | Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

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A Systematic Survey of Text Worlds as Embodied Natural Language Environments
Peter Jansen

Text Worlds are virtual environments for embodied agents that, unlike 2D or 3D environments, are rendered exclusively using textual descriptions. These environments offer an alternative to higher-fidelity 3D environments due to their low barrier to entry, providing the ability to study semantics, compositional inference, and other high-level tasks with rich action spaces while controlling for perceptual input. This systematic survey outlines recent developments in tooling, environments, and agent modeling for Text Worlds, while examining recent trends in knowledge graphs, common sense reasoning, transfer learning of Text World performance to higher-fidelity environments, as well as near-term development targets that, once achieved, make Text Worlds an attractive general research paradigm for natural language processing.

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A Minimal Computational Improviser Based on Oral Thought
Nick Montfort | Sebastian Bartlett Fernandez

A prototype system for playing a minimal improvisational game with one or more human or computer players is discussed. The game, Chain Reaction, has players collectively build a chain of word pairs or solid compounds. With a basis in oral culture, it emphasizes memory and rapid improvisation. Chains are only locally coherent, so absurdity and humor increases during play. While it is trivial to develop a computer player using textual corpora and literature-culture concepts, our approach is unique in that we have grounded our work in the principles of oral culture according to Walter Ong, an early scholar of orature. We show how a simple computer model can be designed to embody many aspects of oral poetics as theorized by Ong, suggesting design directions for other work in oral improvisation and poetics. The opportunities for own our system’s further development include creating culturally specific automated players and situating play in different temporal, physical, and social contexts.

Non-Player Characters (NPCs) significantly enhance the player experience in many games. Historically, players’ interactions with NPCs have tended to be highly scripted, to be limited to natural language responses to be selected by the player, and to not involve dynamic change in game state. In this work, we demonstrate that use of a few example conversational prompts can power a conversational agent to generate both natural language and novel code. This approach can permit development of NPCs with which players can have grounded conversations that are free-form and less repetitive. We demonstrate our approach using OpenAI Codex (GPT-3 finetuned on GitHub), with Minecraft game development as our test bed. We show that with a few example prompts, a Codex-based agent can generate novel code, hold multi-turn conversations and answer questions about structured data. We evaluate this application using experienced gamers in a Minecraft realm and provide analysis of failure cases and suggest possible directions for solutions.

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A Sequence Modelling Approach to Question Answering in Text-Based Games
Gregory Furman | Edan Toledo | Jonathan Shock | Jan Buys

Interactive Question Answering (IQA) requires an intelligent agent to interact with a dynamic environment in order to gather information necessary to answer a question. IQA tasks have been proposed as means of training systems to develop language or visual comprehension abilities. To this end, the Question Answering with Interactive Text (QAit) task was created to produce and benchmark interactive agents capable of seeking information and answering questions in unseen environments. While prior work has exclusively focused on IQA as a reinforcement learning problem, such methods suffer from low sample efficiency and poor accuracy in zero-shot evaluation. In this paper, we propose the use of the recently proposed Decision Transformer architecture to provide improvements upon prior baselines. By utilising a causally masked GPT-2 Transformer for command generation and a BERT model for question answer prediction, we show that the Decision Transformer achieves performance greater than or equal to current state-of-the-art RL baselines on the QAit task in a sample efficient manner. In addition, these results are achievable by training on sub-optimal random trajectories, therefore not requiring the use of online agents to gather data.

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Automatic Exploration of Textual Environments with Language-Conditioned Autotelic Agents
Laetitia Teodorescu | Xingdi Yuan | Marc-Alexandre Côté | Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

The purpose of this extended abstract is to discuss the possible fruitful interactions between intrinsically-motivated language-conditioned agents and textual environments. We define autotelic agents as agents able to set their own goals. We identify desirable properties of textual nenvironments that makes them a good testbed for autotelic agents. We them list drivers of exploration for such agents that would allow them to achieve large repertoires of skills in these environments, enabling such agents to be repurposed for solving the benchmarks implemented in textual environments. We then discuss challenges and further perspectives brought about by this interaction.