Ireland

Online escort advertisement websites are widely used for advertising victims of human trafficking. Domain experts agree that advertising multiple people in the same ad is a strong indicator of trafficking. Thus, extracting person names from the text of these ads can provide valuable clues for further analysis. In the presentation, we will pose our research questions and explains how our proposed method, NEAT, tackles these questions module by module. By analyzing the results, we reach the conclusion that our method outperforms the previous SOTA in this domain. Also, NEAT outperforms generic methods showing the continued need and benefit of domain-driven approaches.

ACL 2022

Extracting Person Names from User Generated Text: Named-Entity Recognition for Combating Human Trafficking

combating human trafficking

natural language processing

named entity recognition

The 9th Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (BRACIS), the 16h Encontro Nacional de Inteligência Artificial e Computacional (ENIAC), and the 12th Concurso de Teses e Dissertações em Inteligência Artificial e Computacional (CTDIAC) was held from 20 to 23 October, 2020.

BRACIS originated from the combination of the two most important scientific events in Brazil in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI): the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence - SBIA (22 editions), and the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks - SBRN (13 editions). ENIAC is a national forum for researchers, practitioners, educators and students to present and discuss innovations, trends, experiences, developments and work in progress in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence. CTDIAC is a satellite event whose goals are to disseminate and award the best dissertations and theses (MSc and PhDs concluded in Brazilian universities from June 2018 to May 2020) in Artificial and Computational Intelligence areas.

In this year, the Symposium on Knowledge Discovery, Mining and Learning (KDMiLe) will be held in conjunction with BRACIS 2020. This sysposium aims at integrating researchers, practitioners, developers, students and users to present their research results, to discuss ideas, and to exchange techniques, tools, and practical experiences – related to the Data Mining and Machine Learning areas.

BRACIS 2020

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). 

Though successfully applied in research and industry large pretrained language models of the BERT family are not yet fully understood. While much research in the field of BERTology has tested whether specific knowledge can be extracted from layer activations, we invert the popular probing design to analyze the prevailing differences and clusters in BERT's high dimensional space. By extracting coarse features from masked token representations and predicting them by probing models with access to only partial information we can apprehend the variation from 'BERT's point of view'. By applying our new methodology to different datasets we show how much the differences can be described by syntax but further how they are to a great extent shaped by the most simple positional information.

From BERT's Point of View: Revealing the Prevailing Contextual Differences

Controllable paraphrase generation (CPG) incorporates various external conditions to obtain desirable paraphrases. However, existing works only highlight a special condition under two indispensable aspects of CPG (i.e., lexically and syntactically CPG) individually, lacking a unified circumstance to explore and analyze their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a general controllable paraphrase generation framework (GCPG), which represents both lexical and syntactical conditions as text sequences and uniformly processes them in an encoder-decoder paradigm. Under GCPG, we reconstruct commonly adopted lexical condition (i.e., Keywords) and syntactical conditions (i.e., Part-Of-Speech sequence, Constituent Tree, Masked Template and Sentential Exemplar) and study the combination of the two types.
In particular, for Sentential Exemplar condition, we propose a novel exemplar construction method Syntax-Similarity based Exemplar (SSE). SSE retrieves a syntactically similar but lexically different sentence as the exemplar for each target sentence, avoiding exemplar-side words copying problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPG with SSE achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular benchmarks. In addition, the combination of lexical and syntactical conditions shows the significant controllable ability of paraphrase generation, and these empirical results could provide novel insight to user-oriented paraphrasing.

GCPG: A General Framework for Controllable Paraphrase Generation

the form of the newly defined STG task, the process of the method, and the experiments.

Going "Deeper": Structured Sememe Prediction via Transformer with Tree Attention

Distant supervision assumes that any sentence containing the same entity pairs reflects identical relationships. Previous works of distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) task generally focus on sentence-level or bag-level de-noising techniques independently, neglecting the explicit interaction with cross levels. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical contrastive learning Framework for Distantly Supervised relation extraction (HiCLRE) to reduce noisy sentences, which integrate the global structural information and local fine-grained interaction. Specifically, we propose a three-level hierarchical learning framework to interact with cross levels, generating the de-noising context-aware representations via adapting the existing multi-head self-attention, named Multi-Granularity Recontextualization. Meanwhile, pseudo positive samples are also provided in the specific level for contrastive learning via a dynamic gradient-based data augmentation strategy, named Dynamic Gradient Adversarial Perturbation. Experiments demonstrate that HiCLRE significantly outperforms strong baselines in various mainstream DSRE datasets.

HiCLRE: A Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

Pre-trained models have achieved excellent performance on the dialogue task. However, for the continual increase of online chit-chat scenarios, directly fine-tuning these models for each of the new tasks not only explodes the capacity of the dialogue system on the embedded devices but also causes knowledge forgetting on pre-trained models and knowledge interference among diverse dialogue tasks. In this work, we propose a hierarchical inductive transfer framework to learn and deploy the dialogue skills continually and efficiently. First, we introduce the adapter module into pre-trained models for learning new dialogue tasks. As the only trainable module, it is beneficial for the dialogue system on the embedded devices to acquire new dialogue skills with negligible additional parameters. Then, for alleviating knowledge interference between tasks yet benefiting the regularization between them, we further design hierarchical inductive transfer that enables new tasks to use general knowledge in the base adapter without being misled by diverse knowledge in task-specific adapters. Empirical evaluation and analysis indicate that our framework obtains comparable performance under deployment-friendly model capacity.

Hierarchical Inductive Transfer for Continual Dialogue Learning

Entity linking (EL) is the task of linking entity mentions in a document to referent entities in a knowledge base (KB). Many previous studies focus on Wikipedia-derived KBs. There is little work on EL over Wikidata, even though it is the most extensive crowdsourced KB. The scale of Wikidata can open up many new real-world applications, but its massive number of entities also makes EL challenging. To effectively narrow down the search space, we propose a novel candidate retrieval paradigm based on entity profiling. Wikidata entities and their textual fields are first indexed into a text search engine (e.g., Elasticsearch). During inference, given a mention and its context, we use a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model to generate the profile of the target entity, which consists of its title and description. We use the profile to query the indexed search engine to retrieve candidate entities. Our approach complements the traditional approach of using a Wikipedia anchor-text dictionary, enabling us to further design a highly effective hybrid method for candidate retrieval. Combined with a simple cross-attention reranker, our complete EL framework achieves state-of-the-art results on three Wikidata-based datasets and strong performance on TACKBP-2010.

Improving Candidate Retrieval with Entity Profile Generation for Wikidata Entity Linking

We propose a novel implementation of the information bottleneck method on BERT-base models to improve its adversarial robustness. Our method is proven to be successful in filtering out non-robust features and keeping task-specific robust features, thus improving the adversarial robustness of models. Experimental results have shown that our method outperforms four widely used defense methods across three datasets with both sentence-level and character-level attack algorithms. We also validate our method through a comprehensive analysis of experimental results as well as a quantitative interpretation of our model’s performance under adversarial attacks.

Improving the Adversarial Robustness of NLP Models by Information Bottleneck

In this work, we highlight the aspect-aware semantic learning in ABSA and propose a novel Dynamic Re-weighting BERT (DR-BERT) model with a new Dynamic Reweighting Adapter (DRA) to enhance aspect-aware semantic features.

Incorporating Dynamic Semantics into Pre-Trained Language Model for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Self-attention heads are characteristic of Transformer models and have been well studied for interpretability and pruning. In this work, we demonstrate an altogether different utility of attention heads, namely for adversarial detection. Specifically, we propose a method to construct input-specific attention subnetworks (IAS) from which we extract three features to discriminate between authentic and adversarial inputs. The resultant detector significantly improves (by over 7.5%) the state-of-the-art adversarial detection accuracy for the BERT encoder on 10 NLU datasets with 11 different adversarial attack types. We also demonstrate that our method (a) is more accurate for larger models which are likely to have more spurious correlations and thus vulnerable to adversarial attack, and (b) performs well even with modest
training sets of adversarial examples.

Input-specific Attention Subnetworks for Adversarial Detection

Prompting methods recently achieve impressive success in few-shot learning. These methods modify input samples with prompt sentence pieces, and decode label tokens to map samples to corresponding labels. However, such a paradigm is very inefficient for the task of slot tagging. Since slot tagging samples are multiple consecutive words in a sentence, the prompting methods have to enumerate all n-grams token spans to find all the possible slots, which greatly slows down the prediction. To tackle this, we introduce an inverse paradigm for prompting. Different from the classic prompts mapping tokens to labels, we reversely predict slot values given slot types. Such inverse prompting only requires a one-turn prediction for each slot type and greatly speeds up the prediction. Besides, we propose a novel Iterative Prediction Strategy, from which the model learns to refine predictions by considering the relations between different slot types. We find, somewhat surprisingly, the proposed method not only predicts faster but also significantly improves the effect (improve over 6.1 F1-scores on 10-shot setting) and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

Extracting Person Names from User Generated Text: Named-Entity Recognition for Combating Human Trafficking

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Next from ACL 2022

From BERT's Point of View: Revealing the Prevailing Contextual Differences

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