This paper proposes an information-theoretic representation learning framework, named conditional information flow maximization, to extract noise-invariant sufficient representations for the input data and target task. It promotes the learned representations have good feature uniformity and sufficient predictive ability, which can enhance the generalization of pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the target task. Firstly, an information flow maximization principle is proposed to learn more sufficient representations for the input and target by simultaneously maximizing both input-representation and representation-label mutual information. Unlike the information bottleneck, we handle the input-representation information in an opposite way to avoid the over-compression issue of latent representations. Besides, to mitigate the negative effect of potential redundant features from the input, we design a conditional information minimization principle to eliminate negative redundant features while preserve noise-invariant features. Experiments on 13 language understanding benchmarks demonstrate that our method effectively improves the performance of PLMs for classification and regression. Extensive experiments show that the learned representations are more sufficient, robust and transferable.

Emotional support conversation (ESC) task aims to relieve the emotional distress of users who have high-intensity of negative emotions. However, due to the ignorance of emotion intensity modelling which is essential for ESC, previous methods fail to capture the transition of emotion intensity effectively. To this end, we propose a Multi-stream information Fusion Framework (MFF-ESC) to thoroughly fuse three streams (text semantics stream, emotion intensity stream, and feedback stream) for the modelling of emotion intensity, based on a designed multi-stream fusion unit. As the difficulty of modelling subtle transitions of emotion intensity and the strong emotion intensity-feedback correlations, we use the KL divergence between feedback distribution and emotion intensity distribution to further guide the learning of emotion intensities. Experimental results on automatic and human evaluations indicate the effectiveness of our method.

This paper describes our system designed for SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment analysis for African languages. The challenge faced by this task is the scarcity of labeled data and linguistic resources in low-resource settings. To alleviate these, we propose a generalized multilingual system SACL-XLMR for sentiment analysis on low-resource languages. Specifically, we design a lexicon-based multilingual BERT to facilitate language adaptation and sentiment-aware representation learning. Besides, we apply a supervised adversarial contrastive learning technique to learn sentiment-spread structured representations and enhance model generalization. Our system achieved competitive results, largely outperforming baselines on both multilingual and zero-shot sentiment classification subtasks. Notably, the system obtained the 1st rank on the zero-shot classification subtask in the official ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.

Extracting generalized and robust representations is a major challenge in emotion recognition in conversations (ERC). To address this, we propose a supervised adversarial contrastive learning (SACL) framework for learning class-spread structured representations in a supervised manner. SACL applies contrast-aware adversarial training to generate worst-case samples and uses joint class-spread contrastive learning to extract structured representations. It can effectively utilize label-level feature consistency and retain fine-grained intra-class features. To avoid the negative impact of adversarial perturbations on context-dependent data, we design a contextual adversarial training (CAT) strategy to learn more diverse features from context and enhance the model’s context robustness. Under the framework with CAT, we develop a sequence-based SACL-LSTM to learn label-consistent and context-robust features for ERC. Experiments on three datasets show that SACL-LSTM achieves state-of-the-art performance on ERC. Extended experiments prove the effectiveness of SACL and CAT.

Pre-trained language models have been widely applied to standard benchmarks. Due to the flexibility of natural language, the available resources in a certain domain can be restricted to support obtaining precise representation. To address this issue, we propose a novel Transformer-based language model named VarMAE for domain-adaptive language understanding. Under the masked autoencoding objective, we design a context uncertainty learning module to encode the token’s context into a smooth latent distribution. The module can produce diverse and well-formed contextual representations. Experiments on science- and finance-domain NLU tasks demonstrate that VarMAE can be efficiently adapted to new domains with limited resources.

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.

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 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.

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).

The widespread of fake news has detrimental societal effects. Recent works model information propagation as graph structure and aggregate structural features from user interactions for fake news detection. However, they usually neglect a broader propagation uncertainty issue, caused by some missing and unreliable interactions during actual spreading, and suffer from learning accurate and diverse structural properties. In this paper, we propose a novel dual graph-based model, Uncertainty-aware Propagation Structure Reconstruction (UPSR) for improving fake news detection. Specifically, after the original propagation modeling, we introduce propagation structure reconstruction to fully explore latent interactions in the actual propagation. We design a novel Gaussian Propagation Estimation to refine the original deterministic node representation by multiple Gaussian distributions and arise latent interactions with KL divergence between distributions in a multi-facet manner. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model.

Fake news’s quick propagation on social media brings severe social ramifications and economic damage. Previous fake news detection usually learn semantic and structural patterns within a single target propagation tree. However, they are usually limited in narrow signals since they do not consider latent information cross other propagation trees. Motivated by a common phenomenon that most fake news is published around a specific hot event/topic, this paper develops a new concept of propagation forest to naturally combine propagation trees in a semantic-aware clustering. We propose a novel Unified Propagation Forest-based framework (UniPF) to fully explore latent correlations between propagation trees to improve fake news detection. Besides, we design a root-induced training strategy, which encourages representations of propagation trees to be closer to their prototypical root nodes. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks consistently suggest the effectiveness and scalability of UniPF.

Detecting rumors on social media is a very critical task with significant implications to the economy, public health, etc. Previous works generally capture effective features from texts and the propagation structure. However, the uncertainty caused by unreliable relations in the propagation structure is common and inevitable due to wily rumor producers and the limited collection of spread data. Most approaches neglect it and may seriously limit the learning of features. Towards this issue, this paper makes the first attempt to explore propagation uncertainty for rumor detection. Specifically, we propose a novel Edge-enhanced Bayesian Graph Convolutional Network (EBGCN) to capture robust structural features. The model adaptively rethinks the reliability of latent relations by adopting a Bayesian approach. Besides, we design a new edge-wise consistency training framework to optimize the model by enforcing consistency on relations. Experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance than baseline methods on both rumor detection and early rumor detection tasks.

Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) has gained increasing attention for developing empathetic machines. Recently, many approaches have been devoted to perceiving conversational context by deep learning models. However, these approaches are insufficient in understanding the context due to lacking the ability to extract and integrate emotional clues. In this work, we propose novel Contextual Reasoning Networks (DialogueCRN) to fully understand the conversational context from a cognitive perspective. Inspired by the Cognitive Theory of Emotion, we design multi-turn reasoning modules to extract and integrate emotional clues. The reasoning module iteratively performs an intuitive retrieving process and a conscious reasoning process, which imitates human unique cognitive thinking. Extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model.