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This paper presents the first large-scale meta-evaluation of machine translation (MT). We annotated MT evaluations conducted in 769 research papers published from 2010 to 2020. Our study shows that practices for automatic MT evaluation have dramatically changed during the past decade and follow concerning trends. An increasing number of MT evaluations exclusively rely on differences between BLEU scores to draw conclusions, without performing any kind of statistical significance testing nor human evaluation, while at least 108 metrics claiming to be better than BLEU have been proposed. MT evaluations in recent papers tend to copy and compare automatic metric scores from previous work to claim the superiority of a method or an algorithm without confirming neither exactly the same training, validating, and testing data have been used nor the metric scores are comparable. Furthermore, tools for reporting standardized metric scores are still far from being widely adopted by the MT community. After showing how the accumulation of these pitfalls leads to dubious evaluation, we propose a guideline to encourage better automatic MT evaluation along with a simple meta-evaluation scoring method to assess its credibility.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Scientific Credibility of Machine Translation Research: A Meta-Evaluation of 769 Papers

evaluation guideline

meta-evaluation

machine translation evaluation

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

In this paper, we empirically investigate adversarial attack on NMT from two aspects: languages (the source vs. the target language) and positions (front vs. rear). For autoregressive NMT models that generate target words from left to right, we observe that adversarial attack on the source language is more effective than on the target language, and that attacking front positions of target sentences or positions of source sentences aligned to the front positions of corresponding target sentences is more effective than attacking other positions. We further exploit the attention distribution of the victim model to attack source sentences at positions that have a strong association with front target words. Experiment results demonstrate that our attention-based adversarial attack is more effective than adversarial attacks by sampling positions randomly or according to gradients.

An Empirical Study on Adversarial Attack on NMT: Languages and Positions Matter

Recently, considerable literature has grown up around the theme of few-shot named entity recognition (NER), but little published benchmark data specifically focused on the practical and challenging task. Current approaches collect existing supervised NER datasets and re-organize them to the few-shot setting for empirical study. These strategies conventionally aim to recognize coarse-grained entity types with few examples, while in practice, most unseen entity types are fine-grained. In this paper, we present Few-NERD, a large-scale human-annotated few-shot NER dataset with a hierarchy of 8 coarse-grained and 66 fine-grained entity types. Few-NERD consists of 188,238 sentences from Wikipedia, 4,601,160 words are included and each is annotated as context or a part of the two-level entity type. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER dataset. We construct benchmark tasks with different emphases to comprehensively assess the generalization capability of models. Extensive empirical results and analysis show that Few-NERD is challenging and the problem requires further research. The Few-NERD dataset and the baselines will be publicly available to facilitate the research on this problem.

Few-NERD: A Few-shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset

Metaphor involves not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also a cognitive phenomenon structuring human thought, which makes understanding it challenging. As a means of cognition, metaphor is rendered by more than texts alone, and multimodal information in
which vision/audio content is integrated with the text can play an important role in expressing and understanding metaphor. However, previous metaphor processing and understanding has focused on texts, partly due to the unavailability of large-scale datasets with ground truth labels of multimodal metaphor. In this paper, we introduce MultiMET, a novel multimodal metaphor dataset to facilitate understanding metaphorical information from multimodal text and image. It contains 10,437 text-image pairs from a range of sources with multimodal annotations of the occurrence of metaphors, domain relations, sentiments metaphors convey, and author intents. MultiMET opens the door to automatic metaphor understanding by investigating multimodal cues and their interplay. Moreover, we propose a range of strong baselines and show the importance of combining multimodal cues for metaphor understanding. MultiMET will be released publicly for research.

MultiMET: A Multimodal Dataset for Metaphor Understanding

Undermining the impact of hateful content with informed and non-aggressive responses, called counter narratives, has emerged as a possible solution for having healthier online communities. Thus, some NLP studies have started addressing the task of counter narrative generation. Although such studies have made an effort to build hate speech / counter narrative (HS/CN) datasets for neural generation, they fall short in reaching either high-quality and/or high-quantity. In this paper, we propose a novel human-in-the-loop data collection methodology in which a generative language model is refined iteratively by using its own data from the previous loops to generate new training samples that experts review and/or post-edit. Our experiments comprised several loops including diverse dynamic variations. Results show that the methodology is scalable and facilitates diverse, novel, and cost-effective data collection. To our knowledge, the resulting dataset is the only expert-based multi-target HS/CN dataset available to the community.

Human-in-the-Loop for Data Collection: a Multi-Target Counter Narrative Dataset to Fight Online Hate Speech

Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to judge the polarity of the given aspect word in reviews. Most recent methods adopt syntax-based Graph Neural Networks to extract the syntactic information from the dependency graph, thinking that would be beneficial for establishing relations between aspect and opinion words. However, these methods may ignore that some sentences have no remarkable syntactic structure, which causes the opposite judgement in sentiment analysis. In this paper, we figure out this problem by means of optimally fusing syntactic information, semantic information and their combinations simultaneously. Firstly, syntactic graphs and semantic graphs are generated by dependency tree and multi-head self-attention respectively. Then we propose a Dynamic and Multi-channel Graph Convolutional Network (DM-GCN) to learn the correlated information from the generated graphs effectively. Our extensive experiments on SemEval 2014 and Twitter datasets confirm that DM-GCN fuses syntactic, semantic and their combinations optimally and outperforms all state-of-the-art alternatives with a large margin.

Dynamic and Multi-Channel Graph Convolutional Networks for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

better social inclusion. Large multidisciplinary projects showed promising steps in that direction. Since 2010, the field started attracting more attention but at the cost of major shifts in system architecture, target audience, and evaluation strategies. Somewhere along the way, the focus has shifted from ATS for social good towards building complex end-to-end neural architectures that are not aimed at any particular target population. This study presents the trajectory of ATS for social good, the main issues in current ATS trends, and the ways forward that could bring the field back to its initial goals.

Automatic Text Simplification for Social Good: Progress and Challenges

In this paper, we propose a novel edge-editing approach to extract relation information from a document. We treat the relations in a document as a relation graph among entities in this approach. The relation graph is iteratively constructed by editing edges of an initial graph, which might be a graph extracted by another system or an empty graph. The way to edit edges is to classify them in a close-first manner using the document and temporally-constructed graph information; 
each edge is represented with a document context information by a pretrained transformer model and a graph context information by a graph convolutional neural network model. We evaluate our approach on the task to extract material synthesis procedures from materials science texts. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach in editing the graphs initialized by our in-house rule-based system and empty graphs.

A Neural Edge-Editing Approach for Document-Level Relation Graph Extraction

Pre-trained language models (PrLM) has been shown powerful in enhancing a broad range of downstream tasks including various dialogue related ones. However, PrLMs are usually trained on general plain text with common language model (LM) training objectives, which cannot sufficiently capture dialogue exclusive features due to the limitation of such training setting, so that there is an immediate need to fill the gap between a specific dialogue task and the LM task. As it is unlikely to collect huge dialogue data for dialogue-oriented pre-training, in this paper, we propose three strategies to simulate the conversation features on general plain text. Our proposed method differs from existing post-training methods that it may yield a general-purpose PrLM and does not individualize to any detailed task while keeping the capability of learning dialogue related features including speaker awareness, continuity and consistency. The resulted Dialog-PrLM is fine-tuned on three public multi-turn dialogue datasets and helps achieve significant and consistent improvement over the plain PrLMs.

Dialogue-oriented Pre-training

As part of scientific articles, grant information refers to funder names and their corresponding grant numbers. Extracting such funding information from articles is of significant importance to both academic and funding bodies. The studies on this topic face two major challenges: 1) no high-quality benchmark datasets; and 2) difficulties in extracting complex relationships between funders and grantIDs. In this paper, we present a novel pipeline framework called GrantRel, which consists of a funding sentence classifier, as well as a joint entity and relation extractor. For this purpose, we manually label two high-quality datasets called Grant-SP and Grant-RE, respectively. In addition, our relation extraction (RE) model uses both position embedding and context embedding in an adaptive-learning way. The experiment results have demonstrated that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art BERT-based RE baselines as higher as 6.5% of F1 scores against the PubMed Central (PMC) test set and 3.5% of that against the arXiv test set.

GrantRel: Grant Information Extraction via Joint Entity and Relation Extraction

This work empirically explores effective exploiting of intermediate output from pre-trained language models (PrLMs) for language generation tasks. For this purpose, we propose an improved method to integrate public checkpoints of PrLMs for the most convenience and perform extensive experiments on 6 different kinds of PrLMs, including BERT, ELECTRA, GPT2, Multi-lingual BERT, and XLM RoBERTa.
Evaluation with automatic metrics shows that our approach significantly improves the generation quality on the generation tasks, up to 1.8 BLEU points for neural machine translation (Korean-to-English, Korean-to-Chinese) and 1.8 ROUGE points improvements for text summarization.

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