Ireland

Detecting biased language is useful for a variety of applications, such as identifying hyperpartisan news sources or flagging one-sided rhetoric. In this work we introduce WikiEvolve, a dataset for document-level promotional tone detection in English. Unlike previously proposed datasets, it contains seven versions of the same article from Wikipedia, from different points in its revision history; one with promotional tone, and six without it. We adapt the gradient reversal layer framework to encode two article versions simultaneously, and thus leverage the training signal present in the multiple versions. In our experiments, our proposed adaptation of gradient reversal improves the accuracy of four different architectures on both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation.

ACL 2022

Leveraging Wikipedia article evolution for promotional tone detection

gradient reversal

promotional tone

wikipedia

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.

findings / work in progress

# 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) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

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). 

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) is the task of extracting (subject, predicate, object) triples from natural language sentences. Current OpenIE systems extract all triple slots in independently. In contrast, we explore the hypothesis that it may be beneficial to extract triple slots iteratively: first extract easy slots, followed by the difficult ones by conditioning on the easy slots, and therefore achieve a better overall extraction. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a neural OpenIE system, MILIE, that operates in an iterative fashion. Due to the iterative nature, the system is also modular—it is possible to seamlessly integrate rule based extraction systems with a neural end-to-end system, thereby allowing rule based systems to supply extraction slots which MILIE can leverage for extracting the remaining slots. We confirm our hypothesis empirically: MILIE outperforms SOTA systems on multiple languages ranging from Chinese to Arabic. Additionally, we are the first to provide an OpenIE test dataset for Arabic and Galician.

MILIE: Modular & Iterative Multilingual Open Information Extraction

We present mGENRE, a sequence-to-sequence system for the Multilingual Entity Linking (MEL) problem -- the task of resolving language-specific mentions to a multilingual Knowledge Base (KB). For a mention in a given language, mGENRE predicts the name of the target entity left-to-right, token-by-token in an autoregressive fashion. The autoregressive formulation allows us to effectively cross-encode mention string and entity names to capture more interactions than the standard dot product between mention and entity vectors. It also enables fast search within a large KB even for mentions that do not appear in mention tables and with no need for large-scale vector indices. While prior MEL works use a single representation for each entity, we match against entity names of as many languages as possible, which allows exploiting language connections between source input and target name. Moreover, in a zero-shot setting on languages with no training data at all, mGENRE treats the target language as a latent variable that is marginalized at prediction time. This leads to over 50% improvements in average accuracy. We show the efficacy of our approach through extensive evaluation including experiments on three popular MEL benchmarks where mGENRE establishes new state-of-the-art results. Code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/facebookresearch/GENRE

Multilingual Autoregressive Entity Linking

Item Response Theory (IRT) has been extensively used to numerically characterize question difficulty and discrimination for human subjects in domains including cognitive psychology and education (Primi et al., 2014; Downing, 2003). More recently, IRT has been used to similarly characterize item difficulty and discrimination for natural language models across various datasets (Lalor et al., 2019; Vania et al., 2021; Rodriguez et al., 2021). In this work, we explore predictive models for directly estimating and explaining these traits for natural language questions in a question-answering context. We use HotpotQA for illustration. Our experiments show that it is possible to predict both difficulty and discrimination parameters for new questions, and these traits are correlated with features of questions, answers, and associated contexts. Our findings can have significant implications for the creation of new datasets and tests on the one hand and strategies such as active learning and curriculum learning on the other.

Predicting Difficulty and Discrimination of Natural Language Questions

Knowledge bases (KBs) contain plenty of structured world and commonsense knowledge. As such, they often complement distributional text-based information and facilitate various downstream tasks. Since their manual construction is resource- and time-intensive, recent efforts have tried leveraging large pretrained language models (PLMs) to generate additional monolingual knowledge facts for KBs. However, such methods have not been attempted for building and enriching multilingual KBs. Besides wider application, such multilingual KBs can provide richer combined knowledge than monolingual (e.g., English) KBs. Knowledge expressed in different languages may be complementary and unequally distributed: this implies that the knowledge available in high-resource languages can be transferred to low-resource ones. To achieve this, it is crucial to represent multilingual knowledge in a shared/unified space. To this end, we propose a unified representation model, Prix-LM, for multilingual KB construction and completion. We leverage two types of knowledge, monolingual triples and cross-lingual links, extracted from existing multilingual KBs, and tune a multilingual language encoder XLM-R via a causal language modeling objective. Prix-LM integrates useful multilingual and KB-based factual knowledge into a single model. Experiments on standard entity-related tasks, such as link prediction in multiple languages, cross-lingual entity linking and bilingual lexicon induction, demonstrate its effectiveness, with gains reported over strong task-specialised baselines.

Prix-LM: Pretraining for Multilingual Knowledge Base Construction

This paper introduces QAConv, a new question answering (QA) dataset that uses conversations as a knowledge source. We focus on informative conversations, including business emails, panel discussions, and work channels. Unlike open-domain and task-oriented dialogues, these conversations are usually long, complex, asynchronous, and involve strong domain knowledge. In total, we collect 34,608 QA pairs from 10,259 selected conversations with both human-written and machine-generated questions. We use a question generator and a dialogue summarizer as auxiliary tools to collect and recommend questions. The dataset has two testing scenarios: chunk mode and full mode, depending on whether the grounded partial conversation is provided or retrieved. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art pretrained QA systems have limited zero-shot performance and tend to predict our questions as unanswerable. Our dataset provides a new training and evaluation testbed to facilitate QA on conversations research.

QAConv: Question Answering on Informative Conversations

The video presents the paper "Reports of personal experiences and stories in argumentation: datasets and analysis." The impact of personal reports and stories in argumentation has been studied in the Social Sciences, but it is still largely underexplored in NLP. Our work is the first step towards filling this gap: our goal is to develop robust classifiers to identify documents containing personal experiences and reports. The main challenge is the scarcity of annotated data: our solution is to leverage existing annotations to be able to scale-up the analysis. 
We show that despite the differences among datasets and annotations, robust cross-domain classification is possible. Second, we employ linear regression for performance mining, identifying performance trends both for overall classification performance and individual classifier predictions.

Reports of personal experiences and stories in argumentation: datasets and analysis

Existing KBQA approaches, despite achieving strong performance on i.i.d. test data, often struggle in generalizing to questions involving unseen KB schema items. Prior ranking-based approaches have shown some success in generalization, but suffer from the coverage issue. We present RnG-KBQA, a Rank-and-Generate approach for KBQA, which remedies the coverage issue with a generation model while preserving a strong generalization capability. Our approach first uses a contrastive ranker to rank a set of candidate logical forms obtained by searching over the knowledge graph. It then introduces a tailored generation model conditioned on the question and the top-ranked candidates to compose the final logical form. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on GrailQA and WebQSP datasets. In particular, our method surpasses the prior state-of-the-art by a large margin on the GrailQA leaderboard. In addition, RnG-KBQA outperforms all prior approaches on the popular WebQSP benchmark, even including the ones that use the oracle entity linking. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the interplay between ranking and generation, which leads to the superior performance of our proposed approach across all settings with especially strong improvements in zero-shot generalization.

RNG-KBQA: Generation Augmented Iterative Ranking for Knowledge Base Question Answering

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models represent each entity and relation of a knowledge graph (KG) with low-dimensional embedding vectors. These methods have recently been applied to KG link prediction and question answering over incomplete KGs (KGQA). KGEs typically create an embedding for each entity in the graph, which results in large model sizes on real-world graphs with millions of entities. For downstream tasks these atomic entity representations often need to be integrated into a multi stage pipeline, limiting their utility. We show that an off-the-shelf encoder-decoder Transformer model can serve as a scalable and versatile KGE model obtaining state-of-the-art results for KG link prediction and incomplete KG question answering. We achieve this by posing KG link prediction as a sequence-to-sequence task and exchange the triple scoring approach taken by prior KGE methods with autoregressive decoding. Such a simple but powerful method reduces the model size up to 98% compared to conventional KGE models while keeping inference time tractable. After finetuning this model on the task of KGQA over incomplete KGs, our approach outperforms baselines on multiple large-scale datasets without extensive hyperparameter tuning.

Sequence-to-Sequence Knowledge Graph Completion and Question Answering

Previous sarcasm generation research has focused on how to generate text that people perceive as sarcastic to create more human-like interactions. In this paper, we argue that we should first turn our attention to the question of when sarcasm should be generated, finding that humans consider sarcastic responses inappropriate to many input utterances. Next, we use a theory-driven framework for generating sarcastic responses, which allows us to control the linguistic devices included during generation. For each device, we investigate how much humans associate it with sarcasm, finding that pragmatic insincerity and emotional markers are devices crucial for making sarcasm recognisable.

Should a Chatbot be Sarcastic? Understanding User Preferences Towards Sarcasm Generation

Many facts come with an expiration date, from the name of the President to the basketball team Lebron James plays for. But language models (LMs) are trained on snapshots of data collected at a specific moment in time, and this can limit their utility, especially in the closed-book setting where the pretraining corpus must contain the facts the model should memorize. We introduce a diagnostic dataset aimed at probing LMs for factual knowledge that changes over time and highlight problems with LMs at either end of the spectrum -- those trained on specific slices of temporal data, as well as those trained on a wide range of temporal data. To mitigate these problems, we propose a simple technique for jointly modeling text with its timestamp. This improves memorization of seen facts from the training time period, as well as calibration on predictions about unseen facts from future time periods. We also show that models trained with temporal context can be efficiently ``refreshed'' as new data arrives, without the need for retraining from scratch.

Leveraging Wikipedia article evolution for promotional tone detection

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