Ireland

Stance detection infers a text author&#39;s attitude towards a target. This is challenging when the model lacks background knowledge about the target. Here, we show how background knowledge from Wikipedia can help enhance the performance on stance detection. We introduce Wikipedia Stance Detection BERT (WS-BERT) that infuses the knowledge into stance encoding. Extensive results on three benchmark datasets covering social media discussions and online debates indicate that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on target-specific stance detection, cross-target stance detection, and zero/few-shot stance detection.

ACL 2022

Infusing Knowledge from Wikipedia to Enhance Stance Detection

commonsense knowledge

representation learning

stance detection

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Stance detection infers a text author's attitude towards a target. This is challenging when the model lacks background knowledge about the target. Here, we show how background knowledge from Wikipedia can help enhance the performance on stance detection. We introduce Wikipedia Stance Detection BERT (WS-BERT) that infuses the knowledge into stance encoding. Extensive results on three benchmark datasets covering social media discussions and online debates indicate that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on target-specific stance detection, cross-target stance detection, and zero/few-shot stance detection.

workshop 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). 

By sharing parameters and providing task-independent shared features, multi-task deep neural networks are considered one of the most interesting ways for parallel learning from different tasks and domains. However, fine-tuning on one task may compromise the performance of other tasks or restrict the generalization of the shared learned features. To address this issue, we propose to use task uncertainty to gauge the effect of the shared feature changes on other tasks and prevent the model from overfitting or over-generalizing. We conducted an experiment on 16 text classification tasks, and the findings showed that the proposed method consistently improves the performance of the baseline, facilitates the knowledge transfer of learned features to unseen data, and provides explicit control over the generalization of the shared model.

Uncertainty Regularized Multi-Task Learning

Recent works have demonstrated ability to assess aspects of mental health from personal discourse. At the same time, pre-trained contextual word embedding models have grown to dominate much of NLP but little is known empirically on how to best apply them for mental health assessment. Using degree of depression as a case study, we do an empirical analysis on which off-the-shelf language model, individual layers, and combinations of layers seem most promising when applied to human-level NLP tasks. Notably, we find RoBERTa most effective and, despite the standard in past work suggesting the second-to-last or concatenation of the last 4 layers, we find layer 19 (sixth-to last) is at least as good as layer 23 when using 1 layer. Further, when using multiple layers, distributing them across the second half (i.e. Layers 12+), rather than last 4, of the 24 layers yielded the most accurate results.

Understanding BERT's Mood: The Role of Contextual-Embeddings as User-Representations for Depression Assessment

Public opinion in social media is increasingly becoming a critical factor in pandemic control. Understanding the emotions of a population towards vaccinations and COVID-19 may be valuable in convincing members to become vaccinated. We investigated the emotions of Japanese Twitter users towards Tweets related to COVID-19 vaccination. Using the WRIME dataset, which provides emotion ratings for Japanese Tweets sourced from writers (Tweet posters) and readers, we fine-tuned a BERT model to predict levels of emotional intensity. This model achieved a training accuracy of MSE = 0.356. A separate dataset of 20,254 Japanese Tweets containing COVID-19 vaccine-related keywords was also collected, on which the fine-tuned BERT was used to perform emotion analysis. Afterwards, a correlation analysis between the extracted emotions and a set of vaccination measures in Japan was conducted. The results revealed that surprise and fear were the most intense emotions predicted by the model for writers and readers, respectively, on the vaccine-related Tweet dataset. The correlation analysis also showed that vaccinations were weakly positively correlated with predicted levels of writer joy, writer/reader anticipation, and writer/reader trust. Code will be made available at https: //github.com/PatrickJohnRamos/BERT-Japan-vaccination.

Emotion Analysis of Writers and Readers of Japanese Tweets on Vaccinations

Domain adaptation methods often exploit domain-transferable input features, a.k.a. pivots. The task of Aspect and Opinion Term Extraction presents a special challenge for domain transfer: while opinion terms largely transfer across domains, aspects change drastically from one domain to another (e.g. from restaurants to laptops). In this paper, we investigate and establish empirically a prior conjecture, which suggests that the linguistic relations connecting opinion terms to their aspects transfer well across domains and therefore can be leveraged for cross-domain aspect term extraction. We present several analyses supporting this conjecture, via experiments with four linguistic dependency formalisms to represent relation patterns. Subsequently, we present an aspect term extraction method that drives models to consider opinion–aspect relations via explicit multitask objectives. This method provides significant performance gains, even on top of a prior state-of-the-art linguistically-informed model, which are shown in analysis to stem from the relational pivoting signal.

Opinion-based Relational Pivoting for Cross-domain Aspect Term Extraction

Models are increasing in size and complexity in the hunt for SOTA. But what if those 2% increase in performance does not make a difference in a production use case? Maybe benefits from a smaller, faster model outweigh those slight performance gains. Also, equally good performance across languages in multilingual tasks is more important than SOTA results on a single one. We present the biggest, unified, multilingual collection of sentiment analysis datasets. We use these to assess 11 models and 80 high-quality sentiment datasets (out of 342 raw datasets collected) in 27 languages and included results on the internally annotated datasets. We deeply evaluate multiple setups, including fine-tuning transformer-based models for measuring performance. We compare results in numerous dimensions addressing the imbalance in both languages coverage and dataset sizes. Finally, we present some best practices for working with such a massive collection of datasets and models from a multilingual perspective.

Assessment of Massively Multilingual Sentiment Classifiers

Masked language models (MLMs) are pre-trained with a denoising objective that is in a mismatch with the objective of downstream fine-tuning. We propose pragmatic masking and surrogate fine-tuning as two complementing strategies that exploit social cues to drive pre-trained representations toward a broad set of concepts useful for a wide class of social meaning tasks. We test our models on 15 different Twitter datasets for social meaning detection. Our methods achieve 2.34% F1 over a competitive baseline, while outperforming domain-specific language models pre-trained on large datasets. Our methods also excel in few-shot learning: with only 5% of training data (severely few-shot), our methods enable an impressive 68.54% average F1. The methods are also language agnostic, as we show in a zero-shot setting involving six datasets from three different languages.

Improving Social Meaning Detection with Pragmatic Masking and Surrogate Fine-Tuning

Over the years, the review helpfulness prediction task has been the subject of several works, but remains being a challenging issue in Natural Language Processing, as results vary a lot depending on the domain, on the adopted features and on the chosen classification strategy. This paper attempts to evaluate the impact of
content features and classification methods for two different domains. In particular, we run our experiments for a low resource language – Portuguese –, trying to establish a benchmark for this language. We show that simple features and classical classification methods are powerful for the task of helpfulness prediction, but are largely outperformed by a convolutional neural network-based solution.


Evaluating Content Features and Classification Methods for Helpfulness Prediction of Online Reviews: Establishing a Benchmark for Portuguese

Our system, IUCL, participated in the WASSA 2022 Shared Task on Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification. Our main goal in building this system is to investigate how the use of demographic attributes influences performance. Our (official) results show that our text-only systems perform very competitively, ranking first in the empathy detection task, reaching an average Pearson correlation of 0.54, and second in the emotion classification task, reaching a Macro-F of 0.572. Our systems that use both text and demographic data are less competitive.

IUCL at WASSA 2022 Shared Task: A Text-only Approach to Empathy and Emotion Detection

This presentation describes the continual pre-training method for the masked language model (MLM) to enhance the DeBERTa pre-trained language model. Several training strategies are designed to further improve the final downstream performance including the data augmentation with the supervised transfer, child-tuning training, and the late fusion method. Extensive experiments on the emotional classification dataset show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating our method's effectiveness. Moreover, our submission ranked Top-1 with all metrics in the evaluation phase for the Emotion Classification task.

Continuing Pre-trained Model with Multiple Training Strategies for Emotional Classification

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Uncertainty Regularized Multi-Task Learning

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Stance Detection on Social Media with Background Knowledge | VIDEO