Ireland

Handing in a paper or exercise and merely receiving &quot;bad&quot; or &quot;incorrect&quot; as feedback is not very helpful when the goal is to improve. Unfortunately, this is currently the kind of feedback given by many Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) systems. One of the reasons for this is a lack of content-focused elaborated feedback datasets. To encourage research on explainable and understandable feedback systems, we present the Short Answer Feedback dataset (SAF). Similar to other ASAG datasets, SAF contains learner responses and reference answers to German and English questions. However, instead of only assigning a label or score to the learners&#39; answers, SAF also contains elaborated feedback explaining the given score. Thus, SAF enables supervised training of models that grade answers and explain where and why mistakes were made. This paper discusses the need for enhanced feedback models in real-world pedagogical scenarios, describes the dataset annotation process, gives a comprehensive analysis of SAF, and provides T5-based baselines for future comparison.

ACL 2022

Introducing a Bilingual Short Answer Feedback Dataset

short answer grading

elaborated feedback

assessment

natural language generation

natural language processing

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Handing in a paper or exercise and merely receiving "bad" or "incorrect" as feedback is not very helpful when the goal is to improve. Unfortunately, this is currently the kind of feedback given by many Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) systems. One of the reasons for this is a lack of content-focused elaborated feedback datasets. To encourage research on explainable and understandable feedback systems, we present the Short Answer Feedback dataset (SAF). Similar to other ASAG datasets, SAF contains learner responses and reference answers to German and English questions. However, instead of only assigning a label or score to the learners' answers, SAF also contains elaborated feedback explaining the given score. Thus, SAF enables supervised training of models that grade answers and explain where and why mistakes were made. This paper discusses the need for enhanced feedback models in real-world pedagogical scenarios, describes the dataset annotation process, gives a comprehensive analysis of SAF, and provides T5-based baselines for future comparison.

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). 

The COVID-19 pandemic has received extensive media coverage, with a vast variety of claims made about different aspects of the virus. In order to track these claims, we present COVID-19 Claim Radar, a system that automatically extracts claims relating to COVID-19 in news articles. We provide a comprehensive structured view of such claims, with rich attributes (such as claimers and their affiliations) and associated knowledge elements (such as events, relations and entities). 
Further, we use this knowledge to identify inter-claim connections such as equivalent, supporting, or refuting relations, with shared structural evidence like claimers, similar centroid events and arguments. In order to consolidate claim structures at the corpus-level, we leverage Wikidata as the hub to merge coreferential knowledge elements, and apply machine translation to aggregate claims from news articles in multiple languages. The system provides users with a comprehensive exposure to COVID-19 related claims, their associated knowledge elements, and related connections to other claims. The system is publicly available on GitHub and DockerHub, with complete documentation.

COVID-19 Claim Radar: A Structured Claim Extraction and Tracking System

Despite data's crucial role in machine learning, most existing tools and research tend to focus on systems on top of existing data rather than how to interpret and manipulate data. In this paper, we propose DataLab, a unified data-oriented platform that not only allows users to interactively analyze the characteristics of data, but also provides a standardized interface for different data processing operations

DataLab: A Platform for Data Analysis and Intervention

We present PromptSource, a system for creating, using and sharing natural language prompts. Prompting language models is an emerging area in NLP, and Promptsource allows seamless application of prompts, with a flexible templating language and a web-based GUI. Promptsource is straightforward to install in standard environments and interfaces with HF datasets library.

PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts

Lyrics generation has been a very popular application of natural language generation. Previous works mainly focused on generating lyrics based on a couple of attributes or keywords, rendering very limited control over the content of the lyrics. In this paper, we demonstrate the QiuNiu, a Chinese lyrics generation system which is conditioned on passage-level text rather than a few attributes or keywords. By using the passage-level text as input, the content of generated lyrics is expected to reflect the nuances of users’ needs. The QiuNiu system supports various forms of passage-level input, such as short stories, essays, poetry. The training of it is conducted under the framework of unsupervised machine translation, due to the lack of aligned passage-level text-to-lyrics corpus. We initialize the parameters of QiuNiu with a custom pretrained Chinese GPT-2 model and adopt a two-step process to finetune the model for better alignment between passage-level text and lyrics. Additionally, a postprocess module is used to filter and rerank the generated lyrics to select the ones of highest quality. The demo video of the system is available at https://youtu.be/OCQNzahqWgM.

QiuNiu: A Chinese Lyrics Generation System with Passage-Level Input

Word-level adversarial attacks have shown success in NLP models, drastically decreasing the performance of transformer-based models in recent years. As a countermeasure, adversarial defense has been explored, but relatively few efforts have been made to detect adversarial examples. However, detecting adversarial examples may be crucial for automated tasks (e.g. review sentiment analysis) that wish to amass information about a certain population and additionally be a step towards a robust defense system. To this end, we release a dataset for four popular attack methods on four datasets and four models to encourage further research in this field. Along with it, we propose a competitive baseline based on density estimation that has the highest \textsc{auc} on 29 out of 30 dataset-attack-model combinations. The source code is released (https://github.com/bangawayoo/adversarial-examples-in-text-classification).

Detection of Adversarial Examples in Text Classification: Benchmark and Baseline via Robust Density Estimation

Although transformer-based Neural Language Models demonstrate impressive performance on a variety of tasks, their generalization abilities are not well understood. They have been shown to perform strongly on subject-verb number agreement in a wide array of settings, suggesting that they learned to track syntactic dependencies during their training even without explicit supervision. In this paper, we examine the extent to which BERT is able to perform lexically-independent subject-verb number agreement (NA) on targeted syntactic templates. To do so, we disrupt the lexical patterns found in naturally occurring stimuli for each targeted structure in a novel fine-grained analysis of BERT's behavior. Our results on nonce sentences suggest that the model generalizes well for simple templates, but fails to perform lexically-independent syntactic generalization when as little as one attractor is present.

Does BERT really agree ? Fine-grained Analysis of Lexical Dependence on a Syntactic Task

In this paper, we explore the capacity of a language model-based method for grammat- ical error detection in detail. We first show that 5 to 10% of training data are enough for a BERT-based error detection method to achieve performance equivalent to what a non- language model-based method can achieve with the full training data; recall improves much faster with respect to training data size in the BERT-based method than in the non-language model method. This suggests that (i) the BERT- based method should have a good knowledge of the grammar required to recognize certain types of error and that (ii) it can transform it into error detection rules by fine-tuning with few training samples, which explains its high generalization ability in grammatical error de- tection. We further show with pseudo error data that it actually exhibits such nice properties in learning rules for recognizing various types of error. Finally, based on these findings, we discuss a cost-effective method for detecting grammatical errors with feedback comments explaining relevant grammatical rules to learn- ers.

Exploring the Capacity of a Large-scale Masked Language Model to Recognize Grammatical Errors

Prior work on controllable text generation has focused on \emph{learning} how to control language models through trainable decoding, smart-prompt design, or fine-tuning based on a desired objective. We hypothesize that the information needed to steer the model to generate a target sentence is already encoded within the model. Accordingly, we explore a different approach altogether: extracting latent vectors directly from pretrained language model decoders without fine-tuning. Experiments show that there exist steering vectors, which, when added to the hidden states of the language model, generate a target sentence nearly perfectly (> 99 BLEU) for English sentences from a variety of domains. We show that vector arithmetic can be used for unsupervised sentiment transfer on the Yelp sentiment benchmark, with performance comparable to models tailored to this task. We find that distances between steering vectors reflect sentence similarity when evaluated on a textual similarity benchmark (STS-B), outperforming pooled hidden states of models. Finally, we present an analysis of the intrinsic properties of the steering vectors. Taken together, our results suggest that frozen LMs can be effectively controlled through their latent steering space.

Extracting Latent Steering Vectors from Pretrained Language Models

Pretrained language models can be queried for factual knowledge, with potential applications in knowledge base acquisition and tasks that require inference. However, for that, we need to know how reliable this knowledge is, and recent work has shown that monolingual English language models lack consistency when predicting factual knowledge, that is, they fill-in-the-blank differently for paraphrases describing the same fact. In this paper, we extend the analysis of consistency to a multilingual setting. We introduce a resource, mParaRel, and investigate (i) whether multilingual language models such as mBERT and XLM-R are more consistent than their monolingual counterparts;
and (ii) if such models are equally consistent across languages.

Factual Consistency of Multilingual Pretrained Language Models

The recent success of distributed word representations has led to an increased interest in analyzing the properties of their spatial distribution. Several studies have suggested that contextualized word embedding models do not isotropically project tokens into vector space. However, current methods designed to measure isotropy, such as average random cosine similarity and the partition score, have not been thoroughly analyzed and are not appropriate for measuring isotropy.
We propose IsoScore: a novel tool that quantifies the degree to which a point cloud uniformly utilizes the ambient vector space. Using rigorously designed tests, we demonstrate that IsoScore is the only tool available in the literature that accurately measures how uniformly distributed variance is across dimensions in vector space. Additionally, we use IsoScore to challenge a number of recent conclusions in the NLP literature that have been derived using brittle metrics of isotropy. 
We caution future studies from using existing tools to measure isotropy in contextualized embedding space as resulting conclusions will be misleading or altogether inaccurate.

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COVID-19 Claim Radar: A Structured Claim Extraction and Tracking System

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Graph RAG for Automated Short Answer Grading with Feedback: Bridging Pedagogical Needs and Technical Capabilities