Dominican Republic

Large-scale language models such as ELMo and BERT have pushed the horizon of what is possible in semantic role labeling (SRL), solving the out-of-vocabulary problem and enabling end-to-end systems, but they have also introduced significant biases. We evaluate three SRL parsers on very simple transitive sentences with verbs usually associated with animate subjects and objects, such as 
&quot;Mary babysat Tom&quot;: a state-of-the-art parser based on BERT, an older parser based on GloVe, and an even older parser from before the days of word embeddings. When arguments are word forms predominantly used as person names, aligning with common sense expectations of animacy, the BERT-based parser is unsurprisingly superior; yet, with abstract or random nouns, the opposite picture emerges. We refer to this as &quot;common sense bias&quot; and present a challenge dataset for evaluating the extent to which parsers are sensitive to such a bias. Our code and challenge dataset are available

EMNLP 2021

Common Sense Bias in Semantic Role Labeling

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Large-scale language models such as ELMo and BERT have pushed the horizon of what is possible in semantic role labeling (SRL), solving the out-of-vocabulary problem and enabling end-to-end systems, but they have also introduced significant biases. We evaluate three SRL parsers on very simple transitive sentences with verbs usually associated with animate subjects and objects, such as 
"Mary babysat Tom": a state-of-the-art parser based on BERT, an older parser based on GloVe, and an even older parser from before the days of word embeddings. When arguments are word forms predominantly used as person names, aligning with common sense expectations of animacy, the BERT-based parser is unsurprisingly superior; yet, with abstract or random nouns, the opposite picture emerges. We refer to this as "common sense bias" and present a challenge dataset for evaluating the extent to which parsers are sensitive to such a bias. Our code and challenge dataset are available

workshop paper

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.

Scarcity of annotated causal texts leads to poor robustness when training state-of-the-art language models for causal sentence classification. In particular, we found that models misclassify on augmented sentences that have been negated or strengthened with respect to its causal meaning. This is worrying since minor linguistic differences in causal sentences can have disparate meanings. Therefore, we propose the generation of counterfactual causal sentences by creating contrast sets to be included during model training. We experimented on two model architectures and predicted on two out-of-domain corpora. While our strengthening schemes proved useful in improving model performance, for negation, regular edits were insufficient. Thus, we also introduce heuristics like shortening or multiplying root words of a sentence. By including a mixture of edits when training, we achieved performance improvements beyond the baseline across both models, and within and out of corpus' domain, suggesting that our proposed augmentation can also help models generalize.

Causal Augmentation for Causal Sentence Classification

Online conversations include more than just text. Increasingly, image-based responses such as memes and animated gifs serve as culturally recognized and often humorous responses in conversation. However, while NLP has broadened to multimodal models, conversational dialog systems have largely focused only on generating text replies. Here, we introduce a new dataset of 1.56M text-gif conversation turns and introduce a new multimodal conversational model Pepe the King Prawn for selecting gif-based replies. We demonstrate that our model produces relevant and high-quality gif responses and, in a large randomized control trial of multiple models replying to real users, we show that our model replies with gifs that are significantly better received by the community.

An animated picture says at least a thousand words: Selecting Gif-based Replies in Multimodal Dialog

Text Simplification for Comprehension-based Question-Answering

Finding informative COVID-19 posts in a stream of tweets is very useful to monitor health-related updates. Prior work focused on a balanced data setup and on English, but informative tweets are rare, and English is only one of the many languages spoken in the world. In this work, we introduce a new dataset of 5,000 tweets for finding informative COVID-19 tweets for Danish. In contrast to prior work, which balances the label distribution, we model the problem by keeping its natural distribution.
We examine how well a simple probabilistic model and a convolutional neural network (CNN) perform on this task. We find a weighted CNN to work well but it is sensitive to embedding and hyperparameter choices. We hope the contributed dataset is a starting point for further work in this direction.

Finding the needle in a haystack: Extraction of Informative COVID-19 Danish Tweets

Fine-grained temporal relation extraction (FineTempRel) aims to recognize the durations and timeline of event mentions in text. A missing part in the current deep learning models for FineTempRel is their failure to exploit the syntactic structures of the input sentences to enrich the representation vectors. In this work, we propose to fill this gap by introducing novel methods to integrate the syntactic structures into the deep learning models for FineTempRel. The proposed model focuses on two types of syntactic information from the dependency trees, i.e., the syntax-based importance scores for representation learning of the words and the syntactic connections to identify important context words for the event mentions. We also
present two novel techniques to facilitate the knowledge transfer between the subtasks of FineTempRel, leading to a novel model with the state-of-the-art performance for this task.

Fine-grained Temporal Relation Extraction with Ordered-Neuron LSTM and Graph Convolutional Networks

WARNING: This article contains contents that may offend the readers.

Strategies that insert intentional noise into text when posting it are commonly observed in the online space, and sometimes they aim to let only certain community users understand the genuine semantics. In this paper, we explore the purpose of such actions by categorizing them into tricks, memes, fillers, and codes, and organize the linguistic strategies that are used for each purpose. Through this, we identify that such strategies can be conducted by authors for multiple purposes, regarding the presence of stakeholders such as `Peers' and `Others'. We finally analyze how these strategies appear differently in each circumstance, along with the unified taxonomy accompanying examples.

Google-trickers, Yaminjeongeum, and Leetspeak: An Empirical Taxonomy for Intentionally Noisy User-Generated Text

ICD-9 coding is a relevant clinical billing task,
where unstructured texts with information
about a patient’s diagnosis and treatments are
annotated with multiple ICD-9 codes. Automated
ICD-9 coding is an active research field,
where CNN- and RNN-based model architectures
represent the state-of-the-art approaches.
In this work, we propose a description-based
label attention classifier to improve the model
explainability when dealing with noisy texts
like clinical notes. We evaluate our proposed
method with different transformer-based encoders
on the MIMIC-III-50 dataset. Our
method achieves strong results together with
augmented explainability.

Description-based Label Attention Classifier for Explainable ICD-9 Classification

Language models used in speech recognition are often either evaluated intrinsically using perplexity on test data, or extrinsically with an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. The former evaluation does not always correlate well with ASR performance, while the latter could be specific to particular ASR systems. Recent work proposed to evaluate language models by using them to classify ground truth sentences among alternative phonetically similar sentences generated by a fine state transducer. Underlying such an evaluation is the assumption that the generated sentences are linguistically incorrect. In this paper, we first put this assumption into question, and observe that alternatively generated sentences could often be linguistically correct when they differ from the ground truth by only one edit. Secondly, we showed that by using multi-lingual BERT, we can achieve better performance than previous work on two code-switching data sets.
Our implementation is publicly available on Github.

Intrinsic evaluation of language models for code-switching

Multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) requires to bridge the gap between language understanding and visual context. While many multimodal neural techniques have been proposed to incorporate images into the MNER task, the model's ability to leverage multimodal interactions remains poorly understood. In this work, we conduct in-depth analyses of existing multimodal fusion techniques from different perspectives and describe the scenarios where adding information from the image does not always boost performance. We also study the use of captions as a way to enrich the context for MNER. Experiments on three datasets from popular social platforms expose the bottleneck of existing multimodal models and the situations where using captions is beneficial.

Can images help recognize entities? A study of the role of images for Multimodal NER

State-of-the-art approaches to spelling error correction problem include Transformer-based Seq2Seq models, which require large training sets and suffer from slow inference time; and sequence labeling models based on Transformer encoders like BERT, which involve token-level label space and therefore a large pre-defined vocabulary dictionary. In this paper we present a Hierarchical Character Tagger model, or HCTagger, for short text spelling error correction. We use a pre-trained language model at the character level as a text encoder, and then predict character-level edits to transform the original text into its error-free form with a much smaller label space. For decoding, we propose a hierarchical multi-task approach to alleviate the issue of long-tail label distribution without introducing extra model parameters. Experiments on two public misspelling correction datasets demonstrate that HCTagger is an accurate and much faster approach than many existing models.

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Causal Augmentation for Causal Sentence Classification

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