Dominican Republic

Adverse Events (AE) are harmful events resulting from the use of medical products. Although social media may be crucial for early AE detection, the sheer scale of this data makes it logistically intractable to analyze using human agents, with NLP representing the only low-cost and scalable alternative.

In this paper, we frame AE Detection and Extraction as a sequence-to-sequence problem using the T5 model architecture and achieve strong performance improvements over the baselines on several English benchmarks (F1 = 0.71, 12.7% relative improvement for AE Detection; Strict F1 = 0.713, 12.4% relative improvement for AE Extraction). Motivated by the strong commonalities between AE tasks, the class imbalance in AE benchmarks, and the linguistic and structural variety typical of social media texts, we propose a new strategy for multi-task training that accounts, at the same time, for task and dataset characteristics. Our approach increases model robustness, leading to further performance gains. Finally, our framework shows some language transfer capabilities, obtaining higher performance than Multilingual BERT in zero-shot learning on French data.

EMNLP 2021

Exploring a Unified {S}equence-{T}o-{S}equence {T}ransformer for Medical Product Safety Monitoring in Social Media

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

technical paper

The relationships that exist between entities can be a reliable indicator for classifying sensitive information, such as commercially sensitive information. For example, the relation person-IsDirectorOf-company can indicate whether an individual’s salary should be considered as sensitive personal information. Representations of such relations are often learned using a knowledge graph to produce embeddings for relation types, generalised across different entity-pairs. However, a relation type may or may not correspond to a sensitivity depending on the entities that participate to the relation. Therefore, generalised relation embeddings are typically insufficient for classifying sensitive information. In this work, we propose a novel method for representing entities and relations within a single embedding to better capture the relationship between the entities. Moreover, we show that our proposed entity-relation-entity embedding approach can significantly improve (McNemar’s test, p <0.05) the effectiveness of sensitivity classification, compared to classification approaches that leverage relation embedding approaches from the literature. (0.426 F1 vs 0.413 F1)

RelDiff: Enriching Knowledge Graph Relation Representations for Sensitivity Classification

Empathy is the link between self and others. Detecting and understanding empathy is a key element for improving human-machine interaction. However, annotating data for detecting empathy at a large scale is a challenging task. This paper employs multi-task training with knowledge distillation to incorporate knowledge from available resources (emotion and sentiment) to detect empathy from the natural language in different domains. This approach yields better results on an existing news-related empathy dataset compared to strong baselines. In addition, we build a new dataset for empathy prediction with fine-grained empathy direction, seeking or providing empathy, from Twitter. We release our dataset for research purposes.

Distilling Knowledge for Empathy Detection

Domain-specific pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success over various downstream tasks in different domains. However, existing domain-specific PLMs mostly rely on self-supervised learning over large amounts of domain text, without explicitly integrating domain-specific knowledge, which can be essential in many domains. Moreover, in knowledge-sensitive areas such as the biomedical domain, knowledge is stored in multiple sources and formats, and existing biomedical PLMs either neglect them or utilize them in a limited manner. In this work, we introduce an architecture to integrate domain knowledge from diverse sources into PLMs in a parameter-efficient way. More specifically, we propose to encode domain knowledge via \textit{adapters}, which are small bottleneck feed-forward networks inserted between intermediate transformer layers in PLMs. These knowledge adapters are pre-trained for individual domain knowledge sources and integrated via an attention-based knowledge controller to enrich PLMs. Taking the biomedical domain as a case study, we explore three knowledge-specific adapters for PLMs based on the UMLS Metathesaurus graph, the Wikipedia articles for diseases, and the semantic grouping information for biomedical concepts. Extensive experiments on different biomedical NLP tasks and datasets demonstrate the benefits of the proposed architecture and the knowledge-specific adapters across multiple PLMs.

Parameter-Efficient Domain Knowledge Integration from Multiple Sources for Biomedical Pre-trained Language Models

Tables provide valuable knowledge that can be used to verify textual statements.
While a number of works have considered table-based fact verification, direct alignments of tabular data with tokens in textual statements are rarely available.
Moreover, training a generalized fact verification model requires abundant labeled training data.
In this paper, we propose a novel system to address these problems.
Inspired by counterfactual causality, our system identifies token-level salience in the statement with probing-based salience estimation.
Salience estimation allows enhanced learning of fact verification from two perspectives.
From one perspective, our system conducts masked salient token prediction to enhance the model for alignment and reasoning between the table and the statement.
From the other perspective, our system applies salience-aware data augmentation to generate a more diverse set of training instances by replacing non-salient terms. 
Experimental results on TabFact show the effective improvement by the proposed salience-aware learning techniques, leading to the new SOTA performance on the benchmark.

Table-based Fact Verification With Salience-aware Learning

News media structure their reporting of events or issues using certain perspectives. When describing an incident involving gun violence, for example, some journalists may focus on mental health or gun regulation, while others may emphasize the discussion of gun rights. Such perspectives are called “frames” in communication research.We study, for the first time, the value of combining lead images and their contextual information with text to identify the frame of a given news article. We observe that using multiple modes of information(article- and image-derived features) improves prediction of news frames over any single mode of information when the images are relevant to the frames of the headlines.We also observe that frame image relevance is related to the ease of conveying frames via images, which we call frame concreteness. Additionally, we release the first multimodal news framing dataset related to gun violence in the U.S., curated and annotated by communication researchers. The dataset will allow researchers to further examine the use of multiple information modalities for studying media framing.

Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Lead Images in U.S. Gun Violence Coverage

Training a robust and reliable deep learning model requires a large amount of data. In the crisis domain, building deep learning models to identify actionable information from the huge influx of data posted by eyewitnesses of crisis events on social media, in a time-critical manner, is central for fast response and relief operations. However, building a large, annotated dataset to train deep learning models is not always feasible in a crisis situation. In this paper, we investigate a multi-task learning approach to concurrently leverage available annotated data for several related tasks from the crisis domain to improve the performance on a main task with limited annotated data. Specifically, we focus on using multi-task learning to improve the performance on the task of identifying location mentions in crisis tweets.

Multi-task Learning to Enable Location Mention Identification in the Early Hours of a Crisis Event

Data annotation is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process for many NLP tasks. Although there exist various methods to produce pseudo data labels, they are often task-specific and require a decent amount of labeled data to start with. Recently, the immense language model GPT-3 with 170 billion parameters has achieved tremendous improvement across many few-shot learning tasks.
In this paper, we explore ways to leverage GPT-3 as a low-cost data labeler to train other models. We find that to make the downstream model achieve the same performance on a variety of NLU and NLG tasks, it costs 50% to 96% less to use labels from GPT-3 than using labels from humans.
Furthermore, we propose a novel framework of combining pseudo labels from GPT-3 with human labels, which leads to even better performance. These results present a cost-effective data labeling methodology that is generalizable to many practical applications.

Want To Reduce Labeling Cost? GPT-3 Can Help

This paper demonstrates that aggregating crowdsourced forecasts benefits from modeling the written justifications provided by forecasters. Our experiments show that the majority and weighted vote baselines are competitive, and that the written justifications are beneficial to call a question throughout its life except in the last quarter. We also conduct an error analysis shedding light into the characteristics that make a justification unreliable.

Written Justifications are Key to Aggregate Crowdsourced Forecasts

Substantial amounts of work are required to clean large collections of digitized books for NLP analysis, both because of the presence of errors in the scanned text and the presence of duplicate volumes in the corpora.
In this paper, we consider the issue of deduplication in the presence of optical character recognition (OCR) errors. We present methods to handle these errors, evaluated on a collection of 19,347 texts from the Project Gutenberg dataset and 96,635 texts from the HathiTrust Library. We demonstrate that improvements in language models now enable the detection and correction of OCR errors without consideration of the scanning image itself. The inconsistencies found by aligning pairs of scans of the same underlying work provides training data to build models for detecting and correcting errors. We identify the canonical version for each of 17,136 repeatedly-scanned books from 58,808 scans. Finally, we investigate methods to detect and correct errors in single-copy texts. We show that on average, our method corrects over six times as many errors as it introduces. We also provide interesting analysis on the relation between scanning quality and other factors such as location and publication year.

Cleaning Dirty Books: Post-OCR Processing for Previously Scanned Texts

Legal texts routinely use concepts that are difficult to understand. Lawyers elaborate on the meaning of such concepts by, among other things, carefully investigating how they have been used in the past. Finding text snippets that mention a particular concept in a useful way is tedious, time-consuming, and hence expensive. We assembled a data set of 26,959 sentences, coming from legal case decisions, and labeled them in terms of their usefulness for explaining selected legal concepts. Using the dataset we study the effectiveness of transformer models pre-trained on large language corpora to detect which of the sentences are useful. In light of models' predictions, we analyze various linguistic properties of the explanatory sentences as well as their relationship to the legal concept that needs to be explained. We show that the transformer-based models are capable of learning surprisingly sophisticated features and outperform the prior approaches to the task.

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