Ireland

Identifying argument components from unstructured texts and predicting the relationships expressed among them are two primary steps of argument mining. The intrinsic complexity of these tasks demands powerful learning models. While pretrained Transformer-based Language Models (LM) have been shown to provide state-of-the-art results over different NLP tasks, the scarcity of manually annotated data and the highly domain-dependent nature of argumentation restrict the capabilities of such models. In this work, we propose a novel transfer learning strategy to overcome these challenges. We utilize argumentation-rich social discussions from the {\em ChangeMyView} subreddit as a source of unsupervised, argumentative discourse-aware knowledge by finetuning pretrained LMs on a selectively masked language modeling task. Furthermore, we introduce a novel prompt-based strategy for inter-component relation prediction that compliments our proposed finetuning method while leveraging on the discourse context. Exhaustive experiments show the generalization capability of our method on these two tasks over within-domain as well as out-of-domain datasets, outperforming several existing and employed strong baselines.

ACL 2022

Can Unsupervised Knowledge Transfer from Social Discussions Help Argument Mining?

relation prediction

argument component detection

prompt-based methods

argument mining

transfer learning

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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 including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

technical paper

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

Dense retrieval models, which aim at retrieving the most relevant document for an input query on a dense representation space, have gained considerable attention for their remarkable success. Yet, dense models require a vast amount of labeled training data for notable performance, whereas it is often challenging to acquire query-document pairs annotated by humans. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple but effective Document Augmentation for dense Retrieval (DAR) framework, which augments the representations of documents with their interpolation and perturbation. We validate the performance of DAR on retrieval tasks with two benchmark datasets, showing that the proposed DAR significantly outperforms relevant baselines on the dense retrieval of both the labeled and unlabeled documents.

Augmenting Document Representations for Dense Retrieval with Interpolation and Perturbation

Although much work in NLP has focused on measuring and mitigating stereotypical bias in semantic spaces, research addressing bias in computational argumentation is still in its infancy. In this paper, we address this re- search gap and conduct a thorough investiga- tion of bias in argumentative language mod- els. To this end, we introduce ABBA, a novel resource for bias measurement specifi- cally tailored to argumentation. We employ our resource to assess the effect of argumen- tative fine-tuning and debiasing on the intrin- sic bias found in transformer-based language models using a lightweight adapter-based ap- proach that is more sustainable and parameter- efficient than full fine-tuning. Finally, we ana- lyze the potential impact of language model de- biasing on the performance in argument qual- ity prediction, a downstream task of compu- tational argumentation. Our results show that we are able to successfully and sustainably re- move bias in general and argumentative lan- guage models while preserving (and some- times improving) model performance in down- stream tasks. We make all experimental code and data available at https://github.com/ umanlp/FairArgumentativeLM.

Fair and Argumentative Language Modeling for Computational Argumentation

Much work on biases in natural language processing has addressed biases linked to the social and cultural experience of English speaking individuals in the United States. We seek to widen the scope of bias studies by creating material to measure social bias in language models (LMs) against specific demographic groups in France. We build on the US-centered CrowS-pairs dataset to create a multilingual stereotypes dataset that allows for comparability across languages while also characterizing biases that are specific to each country and language. We introduce 1,677 sentence pairs in French that cover stereotypes in ten types of bias like gender and age. 1,467 sentence pairs are translated from CrowS-pairs and 210 are newly crowdsourced and translated back into English. The sentence pairs contrast stereotypes concerning underadvantaged groups with the same sentence concerning advantaged groups. We find that four widely used language models (three French, one multilingual) favor sentences that express stereotypes in most bias categories. We report on the translation process, which led to a characterization of stereotypes in CrowS-pairs including the identification of US-centric cultural traits. We offer guidelines to further extend the dataset to other languages and cultural environments.

French CrowS-Pairs: Extending a challenge dataset for measuring social bias in masked language models to a language other than English

Informal social interaction is the primordial home of human language. Linguistically diverse conversational corpora are an important and largely untapped resource for computational linguistics and language technology. Through the efforts of a worldwide language documentation movement, such corpora are increasingly becoming available. We show how interactional data from 63 languages (26 families) harbours insights about turn-taking, timing, sequential structure and social action, with implications for language technology, natural language understanding, and the design of conversational interfaces. Harnessing linguistically diverse conversational corpora will provide the empirical foundations for flexible, localizable, humane language technologies of the future.

From text to talk: Harnessing conversational corpora for humane and diversity-aware language technology

More than 43% of the languages spoken in the world are endangered, and language loss currently occurs at an accelerated rate because of globalization and neocolonialism. Saving and revitalizing endangered languages has become very important for maintaining the cultural diversity on our planet. In this work, we focus on discussing how NLP can help revitalize endangered languages. We first suggest three principles that may help NLP practitioners to foster mutual understanding and collaboration with language communities, and we discuss three ways in which NLP can potentially assist in language education. We then take Cherokee, a severely-endangered Native American language, as a case study. After reviewing the language’s history, linguistic features, and existing resources, we (in collaboration with Cherokee community members) arrive at a few meaningful ways NLP practitioners can collaborate with community partners. We suggest two approaches to enrich the Cherokee language’s resources with machine-in-the-loop processing, and discuss several NLP tools that people from the Cherokee community have shown interest in. We hope that our work serves not only to inform the NLP community about Cherokee, but also to provide inspiration for future work on endangered languages in general.

How can NLP Help Revitalize Endangered Languages? A Case Study and Roadmap for the Cherokee Language

The largest store of continually updating knowledge on our planet can be accessed via internet search. In this work we study giving access to this information to conversational agents. Large language models, even though they store an impressive amount of knowledge within their weights, are known to hallucinate facts when generating dialogue (Shuster et al., 2021); moreover, those facts are frozen in time at the point of model training. In contrast, we propose an approach that learns to generate an internet search query based on the context, and then conditions on the search results to finally generate a response, a method that can employ up-to-the-minute relevant information. We train and evaluate such models on a newly collected dataset of human-human conversations whereby one of the speakers is given access to internet search during knowledgedriven discussions in order to ground their responses. We find that search-query based access of the internet in conversation provides superior performance compared to existing approaches that either use no augmentation or FAISS-based retrieval (Lewis et al., 2020b).

Internet-Augmented Dialogue Generation

Discourse parsing has been studied for decades. However, it still remains challenging to utilize discourse parsing for real-world applications because the parsing accuracy degrades significantly on out-of-domain text. In this paper, we report and discuss the effectiveness and limitations of bootstrapping methods for adapting modern BERT-based discourse dependency parsers to out-of-domain text without relying on additional human supervision. Specifically, we investigate self-training, co-training, tri-training, and asymmetric tri-training of graph-based and transition-based discourse dependency parsing models, as well as confidence measures and sample selection criteria in two adaptation scenarios: monologue adaptation between scientific disciplines and dialogue genre adaptation. We also release COVID-19 Discourse Dependency Treebank (COVID19-DTB), a new manually annotated resource for discourse dependency parsing of biomedical paper abstracts. The experimental results show that bootstrapping is significantly and consistently effective for unsupervised domain adaptation of discourse dependency parsing, but the low coverage of accurately predicted pseudo labels is a bottleneck for further improvement. We show that active learning can mitigate this limitation.

Out-of-Domain Discourse Dependency Parsing via Bootstrapping: An Empirical Analysis on Its Effectiveness and Limitation

Given the claims of improved text generation quality across various pre-trained neural models, we consider the coherence evaluation of machine generated text to be one of the principal applications of coherence models that needs to be investigated. Prior work in neural coherence modeling has primarily focused on devising new architectures for solving the permuted document task. We instead use a basic model architecture and show significant improvements over state of the art within the same training regime. We then design a harder self-supervision objective by increasing the ratio of negative samples within a contrastive learning setup, and enhance the model further through automatic hard negative mining coupled with a large global negative queue encoded by a momentum encoder. We show empirically that increasing the density of negative samples improves the basic model, and using a global negative queue further improves and stabilizes the model while training with hard negative samples. We evaluate the coherence model on task-independent test sets that resemble real-world applications and show significant improvements in coherence evaluations of downstream tasks.

Rethinking Self-Supervision Objectives for Generalizable Coherence Modeling

Researchers in NLP often frame and discuss research results in ways that serve to deemphasize the field's successes, often in response to the field's widespread hype. Though well-meaning, this has yielded many misleading or false claims about the limits of our best technology. This is a problem, and it may be more serious than it looks: It harms our credibility in ways that can make it harder to mitigate present-day harms, like those involving biased systems for content moderation or resume screening. It also limits our ability to prepare for the potentially enormous impacts of more distant future advances. This paper urges researchers to be careful about these claims and suggests some research directions and communication strategies that will make it easier to avoid or rebut them.

The Dangers of Underclaiming: Reasons for Caution When Reporting How NLP Systems Fail

Signed Language Processing (SLP) concerns the automated processing of signed languages, the main means of communication of Deaf and hearing impaired individuals. SLP features many different tasks, ranging from sign recognition to translation and production of signed speech, but it has been overlooked by the NLP
community thus far. In this paper, we bring attention to the task of modelling the phonology of sign languages. We leverage existing resources to construct a large-scale dataset of American Sign Language signs annotated with six different phonological properties. We then conduct an extensive empirical study to investigate whether data-driven end-to-end and feature-based approaches can be optimised to automatically recognise these properties. We find that, despite the inherent challenges of the task, graph-based neural networks that operate over skeleton features extracted from raw videos are able to succeed at the task to a varying degree. Most importantly, we show that this performance pertains even on signs unobserved during training.

Can Unsupervised Knowledge Transfer from Social Discussions Help Argument Mining?

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