Thailand

We apply statistical techniques from natural language processing to a collection of Western and Hong Kong–based English-language newspaper articles spanning the years 1998–2020, studying the difference and evolution of its portrayal. We observe that both content and attitudes differ between Western and Hong Kong–based sources. 
ANOVA on keyword frequencies reveals that Hong Kong–based papers discuss protests and democracy less often.
Topic modeling detects salient aspects of protests and shows that Hong Kong–based papers made fewer references to police violence during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement.
Diachronic shifts in word embedding neighborhoods reveal a shift in the characterization of salient keywords once the Movement emerged.
Together, these raise questions about the existence of anodyne reporting from Hong Kong–based media.
Likewise, they illustrate the importance of sample selection for protest event analysis.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Characterizing News Portrayal of Civil Unrest in Hong Kong, 1998–2020

computational social science

bias

framing

**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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Registration is now open

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

workshop paper

The wanton spread of hate speech on the internet brings great harm to society and families. It is urgent to establish and improve automatic detection and active avoidance mechanisms for hate speech. While there exist methods for hate speech detection, they stereotype words and hence suffer from inherently biased training. In other words, getting more affective features from other affective resources will significantly affect the performance of hate speech detection. In this paper, we propose a hate speech detection framework based on sentiment knowledge sharing. While extracting the affective features of the target sentence itself, we make better use of the sentiment features from external resources, and finally fuse features from different feature extraction units to detect hate speech. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Hate Speech Detection Based on Sentiment Knowledge Sharing

We propose a transition-based bubble parser to perform coordination structure identiﬁcation and dependency-based syntactic analysis simultaneously. Bubble representations were proposed in the formal linguistics literature decades ago; they enhance dependency trees by encoding coordination boundaries and internal relationships within coordination structures explicitly. In this paper, we introduce a transition system and neural models for parsing these bubble-enhanced structures. Experimental results on the English Penn Treebank and the English GENIA corpus show that our parsers beat previous state-of-the-art approaches on the task of coordination structure prediction, especially for the subset of sentences with complex coordination structures.

Transition-based Bubble Parsing: Improvements on Coordination Structure Prediction

Recent years have seen the paradigm shift of Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems from sequence labeling to span prediction. Despite its preliminary effectiveness, the span prediction model's architectural bias has not been fully understood. In this paper, we first investigate the strengths and weaknesses when the span prediction model is used for named entity recognition compared with the sequence labeling framework and how to further improve it, which motivates us to make complementary advantages of systems based on different paradigms. We then reveal that span prediction, simultaneously, can serve as a system combiner to re-recognize named entities from different systems' outputs. We experimentally implement 154 systems on 11 datasets, covering three languages, comprehensive results show the effectiveness of span prediction models that both serve as base NER systems and system combiners. We make all codes and datasets available: \url{https://github.com/neulab/spanner}, as well as an online system demo: \url{http://spanner.sh}. Our model also has been deployed into the ExplainaBoard platform, which allows users to flexibly perform a system combination of top-scoring systems in an interactive way: \url{http://explainaboard.nlpedia.ai/leaderboard/task-ner/}.

SpanNER: Named Entity Re-/Recognition as Span Prediction

Strong Equivalence of TAG and CCG

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in Sanskrit is interesting, owing to the various linguistic peculiarities present in the language. The Sanskrit language is lexically productive, undergoes euphonic assimilation of phones at the word boundaries and exhibits variations in spelling conventions and in pronunciations. In this work, we propose the first large scale study of automatic speech recognition (ASR) in Sanskrit, with an emphasis on the impact of unit selection in Sanskrit ASR. In this work, we release a 78 hour ASR dataset for Sanskrit, which faithfully captures several of the linguistic characteristics expressed by the language. We investigate the role of different acoustic model and language model units in ASR systems for Sanskrit. We also propose a new modelling unit, inspired by the syllable level unit selection, that captures character sequences from one vowel in the word to the next vowel. We also highlight the importance of choosing graphemic representations for Sanskrit and show the impact of this choice on word error rates (WER). Finally, we extend these insights from Sanskrit ASR for building ASR systems in two other Indic languages, Gujarati and Telugu. For both these languages, our experimental results show that the use of phonetic based graphemic representations in ASR results in performance improvements as compared to ASR systems that use native scripts.

Automatic Speech Recognition in Sanskrit: A New Speech Corpus and Modelling Insights

End-to-End task-oriented dialogue systems generate responses based on dialog history and an accompanying knowledge base (KB). Inferring those KB entities that are most relevant for an utterance is crucial for response generation. Existing state of the art scales to large KBs by softly filtering over irrelevant KB information. In this paper, we propose a novel filtering technique that consists of (1) a pairwise similarity based filter that identifies relevant information by respecting the n-ary structure in a KB record. and, (2) an auxiliary loss that helps in separating contextually unrelated KB information. We also propose a new metric -- multiset entity F1 which fixes a correctness issue in the existing entity F1 metric. Experimental results on three publicly available task-oriented dialog datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art models.

Constraint based Knowledge Base Distillation in End-to-End Task Oriented Dialogs

Proposal of large-scale datasets has facilitated research on deep neural models for news summarization. 
Deep learning can also be potentially useful for spoken dialogue summarization, which can benefit a range of real-life scenarios including customer service management and medication tracking. 
To this end, we propose DialogSum, a large-scale labeled dialogue summarization dataset. 
We conduct empirical analysis on DialogSum using state-of-the-art neural summarizers. 
Experimental results show unique challenges in dialogue summarization, such as spoken terms, special discourse structures, coreferences and ellipsis, pragmatics and social common sense, which require specific representation learning technologies to better deal with.

Dialog{S}um: {A} Real-Life Scenario Dialogue Summarization Dataset

There have been several attempts to create an accurate and thorough emotion lexicon in English, which identifies the emotional content of words. Of the several commonly used resources, the NRC emotion lexicon has received the most attention due to its availability, size, and its choice of Plutchik's expressive 8-class emotion model. In this paper we identify a large number of troubling entries in the NRC lexicon, where words that should in most contexts be emotionally neutral, with no affect (e.g., lesbian, stone, mountain), are associated with emotional labels that are inaccurate, nonsensical, pejorative, or, at best, highly contingent and context-dependent (e.g., lesbian labeled as disgust and sadness, stone as anger, or mountain as anticipation). We describe a procedure for semi-automatically correcting these problems in the NRC, which includes disambiguating POS categories and aligning NRC entries with other emotion lexicons to infer the accuracy of labels. We demonstrate via an experimental benchmark that the quality of the resources is thus improved. We release the revised resource and our code to enable other researchers to reproduce and build upon results.

Hell Hath No Fury? Correcting Bias in the NRC Emotion Lexicon

Language provides speakers with a rich system of modality for expressing thoughts about events, without being committed to their actual occurrence. Modality is commonly used in the political news domain, where both actual and possible courses of events are discussed. NLP systems struggle with these semantic phenomena, often incorrectly extracting events which did not happen, which can lead to issues in downstream applications. We present an open-domain, lexicon-based event extraction system that captures various types of modality. This information is valuable for Question Answering, Knowledge Graph construction and Fact-checking tasks, and our evaluation shows that the system is sufficiently strong to be used in downstream applications.

Modality and Negation in Event Extraction

Incidents in industries have huge social and political impact and minimizing the consequent damage has been a high priority. However, automated analysis of repositories of incident reports has remained a challenge. In this paper, we focus on automatically extracting events from incident reports. Due to absence of event annotated datasets for industrial incidents we employ a transfer learning based approach which is shown to outperform several baselines. We further provide detailed analysis regarding effect of increase in pre-training data and provide explainability of why pre-training improves the performance.

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