Ireland

Various efforts in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community have been made to accommodate linguistic diversity and serve speakers of many different languages. However, it is important to acknowledge that speakers and the content they produce and require, vary not just by language, but also by culture. Although language and culture are tightly linked, there are important differences. Analogous to cross-lingual and multilingual NLP, cross-cultural and multicultural NLP considers these differences in order to better serve users of NLP systems. We propose a principled framework to frame these efforts, and survey existing and potential strategies.

ACL 2022

Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP

culture

diversity

survey

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AAPT SM 21

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# 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). 

As language technologies become more ubiquitous, there are increasing efforts toward expanding the language diversity and coverage of natural language processing (NLP) systems. Arguably, the most important factor influencing the quality of modern NLP systems is data availability. In this work, we study the geographical representativeness of NLP datasets, aiming to quantify if and by how much do NLP datasets match the expected needs of the language speakers. In doing so, we use entity recognition and linking systems, presenting an approach for good-enough entity linking without entity recognition first. Last, we explore some geographical and economic factors that may explain the observed dataset distributions.

Dataset Geography: Mapping Language Data to Language Users

Several natural language processing (NLP) tasks are defined as a classification problem in its most complex form: Multi-label Hierarchical Extreme classification, in which items may be associated with multiple classes from a set of thousands of possible classes organized in a hierarchy and with a highly unbalanced distribution both in terms of class frequency and the number of labels per item. We analyze the state of the art of evaluation metrics based on a set of formal properties and we define an information theoretic based metric inspired by the Information Contrast Model (ICM). Experiments on synthetic data and a case study on real data show the suitability of the ICM for such scenarios.

Evaluating Extreme Hierarchical Multi-label Classification

In this work, we propose a flow-adapter architecture for unsupervised NMT. It leverages normalizing flows to explicitly model the distributions of sentence-level latent representations, which are subsequently used in conjunction with the attention mechanism for the translation task. The primary novelties of our model are: (a) capturing language-specific sentence representations separately for each language using normalizing flows and (b) using a simple transformation of these latent representations for translating from one language to another. This architecture allows for unsupervised training of each language independently. While there is prior work on latent variables for supervised MT, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses latent variables and normalizing flows for unsupervised MT. We obtain competitive results on several unsupervised MT benchmarks.

Flow-Adapter Architecture for Unsupervised Machine Translation

Knowledge of questions' difficulty level helps a teacher in several ways, such as estimating students' potential quickly by asking carefully selected questions and improving quality of examination by modifying trivial and hard questions. Can we extract such benefits of instance difficulty in NLP? To this end, we conduct Instance-Level Difficulty Analysis of Evaluation data (ILDAE) in a large-scale setup of 23 datasets and demonstrate its five novel applications: 1) conducting efficient-yet-accurate evaluations with fewer instances saving computational cost and time, 2) improving quality of existing evaluation datasets by repairing erroneous and trivial instances, 3) selecting the best model based on application requirements, 4) analyzing dataset characteristics for guiding future data creation, 5) estimating Out-of-Domain performance reliably. Comprehensive experiments for these applications result in several interesting findings, such as evaluation using just 5% instances (selected via ILDAE) achieves as high as 0.93 Kendall correlation with evaluation using complete dataset and computing weighted accuracy using difficulty scores leads to 5.2% higher correlation with Out-of-Domain performance. We release the difficulty scores and hope our analyses and findings will bring more attention to this important yet understudied field of leveraging instance difficulty in evaluations.

ILDAE: Instance-Level Difficulty Analysis of Evaluation Data

Most low resource language technology development is premised on the need to collect data for training statistical models. When we follow the typical process of recording and transcribing text for small Indigenous languages, we hit up against the so-called ``transcription bottleneck.'' Therefore it is worth exploring new ways of engaging with speakers which generate data while avoiding the transcription bottleneck.
We have deployed a prototype app for speakers to use for confirming system guesses in an approach to transcription based on word spotting. However, in the process of testing the app we encountered many new problems for engagement with speakers.
This paper presents a close-up study of the process of deploying data capture technology on the ground in an Australian Aboriginal community.
We reflect on our interactions with participants and draw lessons that apply to anyone seeking to develop methods for language data collection in an Indigenous community.

Learning From Failure: Data Capture in an Australian Aboriginal Community

How can language technology address the diverse situations of the world's languages? In one view, languages exist on a resource continuum and the challenge is to scale existing solutions, bringing under-resourced languages into the high-resource world. In another view, presented here, the world's language ecology includes standardised languages, local languages, and contact languages. These are often subsumed under the label of `under-resourced languages' even though they have distinct functions and prospects. I explore this position and propose some ecologically-aware language technology agendas.

Local Languages, Third Spaces, and other High-Resource Scenarios

Massively Multilingual Transformer based Language Models
have been observed to be surprisingly effective on zero-shot
transfer across languages, though the performance varies
from language to language depending on the pivot
language(s) used for fine-tuning. In this work, we build upon
some of the existing techniques for predicting the zero-shot
performance on a task, by modeling it as a multi-task
learning problem. We jointly train predictive models for
different tasks which helps us build more accurate predictors
for tasks where we have test data in very few languages to
measure the actual performance of the model. Our approach
also lends us the ability to perform a much more robust
feature selection, and identify a common set of features that
influence zero-shot performance across a variety of tasks.

Multi Task Learning For Zero Shot Performance Prediction of Multilingual Models

With state-of-the-art systems having finally attained estimated human performance, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) has now joined the array of Natural Language Processing tasks that have seemingly been solved, thanks to the vast amounts of knowledge encoded into Transformer-based pre-trained language models. And yet, if we look below the surface of raw figures, it is easy to realize that current approaches still make trivial mistakes that a human would never make. In this work, we provide evidence showing why the F1 score metric should not simply be taken at face value and present an exhaustive analysis of the errors that seven of the most representative state-of-the-art systems for English all-words WSD make on traditional evaluation benchmarks.
In addition, we produce and release a collection of test sets featuring (a) an amended version of the standard evaluation benchmark that fixes its lexical and semantic inaccuracies, (b) 42D, a challenge set devised to assess the resilience of systems with respect to least frequent word senses and senses not seen at training time, and (c) hardEN, a challenge set made up solely of instances which none of the investigated state-of-the-art systems can solve. 
We make all of the test sets and model predictions available to the research community at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/wsd-hard-benchmark.

Nibbling at the Hard Core of Word Sense Disambiguation

We present a novel pipeline for the collection of parallel data for the detoxification task. We collect non-toxic paraphrases for over 10,000 English toxic sentences. We also show that this pipeline can be used to distill a large existing corpus of paraphrases to get toxic-neutral sentence pairs. We release two parallel corpora which can be used for the training of detoxification models. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first parallel datasets for this task.
We describe our pipeline in detail to make it fast to set up for a new language or domain, thus contributing to faster and easier development of new parallel resources.

We train several detoxification models on the collected data and compare them with several baselines and state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches. We conduct both automatic and manual evaluations. All models trained on parallel data outperform the state-of-the-art unsupervised models by a large margin. This suggests that our novel datasets can boost the performance of detoxification systems.

ParaDetox: Detoxification with Parallel Data

Sense embedding learning methods learn different embeddings for the different senses of an ambiguous word. One sense of an ambiguous word might be socially biased while its other senses remain unbiased. In comparison to the numerous prior work evaluating the social biases in pretrained word embeddings, the biases in sense embeddings have been relatively understudied. We create a benchmark dataset for evaluating the social biases in sense embeddings and propose novel sense-specific bias evaluation measures. We conduct an extensive evaluation of multiple static and contextualised sense embeddings for various types of social biases using the proposed measures. Our experimental results show that even in cases where no biases are found at word-level, there still exist worrying levels of social biases at sense-level, which are often ignored by the word-level bias evaluation measures.

Challenges and Strategies in Cross-Cultural NLP

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