Ireland

We present MozoLM, an open-source language model microservice package intended for use in AAC text-entry applications, with a particular focus on the design principles of the library. The intent of the library is to allow the ensembling of multiple diverse language models without requiring the clients (user interface designers, system users or speech-language pathologists) to attend to the formats of the models. Issues around privacy, security, dynamic versus static models, and methods of model combination are explored and specific design choices motivated. Some simulation experiments demonstrating the benefits of personalized language model ensembling via the library are presented.

ACL 2022

Design principles of an open-source language modeling microservice package for AAC text-entry applications

assistive technology language models microservices

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

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) 
[**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). 

Many people with severely limited muscle control can only communicate through augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems with a small number of buttons. In this paper, we present the design for ColorCode, which is an AAC system with two buttons that uses Bayesian inference to determine what the user wishes to communicate. Our information-theoretic analysis of ColorCode simulations shows that it is efficient in extracting information from the user, even in the presence of errors, achieving nearly optimal error correction. ColorCode is provided as open source software.

ColorCode: A Bayesian Approach to Augmentative and Alternative Communication with Two Buttons

Text simplification is an area of research focused on how to automatically adapt text to suit the needs of different audiences. When viewing text simplification via the lens of assistive applications, there are multiple ethical considerations which are currently not discussed. In this presentation, I outline some of the potential ethical concerns that arise when embedding text simplification algorithms into real world applications.

On the Ethical Considerations of Text Simplification

Conversational assistants are ubiquitous among the general population, however, these systems have not had an impact on people with disabilities, or speech and language disorders, for whom basic day-to-day communication and social interaction is a huge struggle. Language model technology can play a huge role in empowering these users and help them interact with others with less effort via interaction support. To enable this population, we build a system that can represent them in a social conversation and generate responses that can be controlled by the users using cues/keywords. For an ongoing conversation, this system can suggest responses that a user can choose. We also build models that can speed up this communication by suggesting relevant cues in the dialog response context. We introduce a keyword-loss to lexically constrain the model response output. We present automatic and human evaluation of our cue/keyword predictor and the controllable dialog system to show that our models perform significantly better than models without control. Our evaluation and user study shows that keyword-control on end-to-end response generation models is powerful and can enable and empower users with degenerative disorders to carry out their day-to-day communication.

CueBot: Cue-Controlled Response Generation for Assistive Interaction Usages

We propose a method for investigating the interpretability of metrics used for the coreference resolution task through comparisons with human judgments. We provide a corpus with annotations of different error types and human evaluations of their gravity. Our preliminary analysis shows that metrics considerably overlook several error types and errors in general compared to humans. This study is conducted on French texts, but the methodology is language-independent.

A Methodology for the Comparison of Human Judgments With Metrics for Coreference Resolution

The quality of machine-generated text is a complex construct consisting of various aspects and dimensions. We present a study that aims to uncover relevant perceptual quality dimensions for one type of machine-generated text, that is, Machine Translation. We conducted a crowdsourcing survey in the style of a Semantic Differential to collect attribute ratings for German MT outputs. An Exploratory Factor Analysis revealed the underlying perceptual dimensions. As a result, we extracted four factors that operate as relevant dimensions for the Quality of Experience of MT outputs: precision, complexity, grammaticality, and transparency.

Perceptual Quality Dimensions of Machine-Generated Text with a Focus on Machine Translation

Quality assessment has been an ongoing activity of the series of ParaCrawl efforts to crawl massive amounts of parallel data from multilingual websites for 29 languages. The goal of ParaCrawl is to get parallel data that is good for machine translation. To prove so, both, automatic (extrinsic) and human (intrinsic and extrinsic) evaluation tasks have been included as part of the quality assessment activity of the project. We sum up the various methods followed to address these evaluation tasks for the web-crawled corpora produced and their results. We review their advantages and disadvantages for the final goal of the ParaCrawl project and the related ongoing project MaCoCu.

Human evaluation of web-crawled parallel corpora for machine translation

Dieting is a behaviour change task that is difficult for many people to conduct successfully. This is due to many factors, including stress and cost. 
Mobile applications offer an alternative to traditional coaching. However, previous work on apps evaluation only focused on dietary outcomes, ignoring users' emotional state despite its influence on eating habits. 
In this work, we introduce a novel evaluation of the effects that tailored communication can have on the emotional load of dieting.
We implement this by augmenting a traditional diet-app with affective NLG, text-tailoring and persuasive communication techniques. We then run a short 2-weeks experiment and check dietary outcomes, user feedback of produced text and, most importantly, its impact on emotional state, through PANAS questionnaire. 
Results show that tailored communication significantly improved users' emotional state, compared to an app-only control group.

Beyond calories: evaluating how tailored communication reduces emotional load in diet-coaching

This paper presents the Human Evaluation Datasheet (HEDS), a template for recording the details of individual human evaluation experiments in Natural Language Processing (NLP), and reports on first experience of researchers using HEDS sheets in practice. Originally taking inspiration from seminal papers by Bender and Friedman (2018), Mitchell et al. (2019), and Gebru et al. (2020), HEDS facilitates the recording of properties of human evaluations in sufficient detail, and with sufficient standardisation, to support comparability, meta-evaluation, and reproducibility assessments for human evaluations. These are crucial for scientifically principled evaluation, but the overhead of completing a detailed datasheet is substantial, and we discuss possible ways of addressing this and other issues observed in practice.

The Human Evaluation Datasheet: A Template for Recording Details of Human Evaluation Experiments in NLP

Improvements in text generation technologies such as machine translation have necessitated more costly and time-consuming human evaluation procedures to ensure an accurate signal. We investigate a simple way to reduce cost by reducing the number of text segments that must be annotated in order to accurately predict a score for a complete test set. Using a sampling approach, we demonstrate that information from document membership and automatic metrics can help improve estimates compared to a pure random sampling baseline. We achieve gains of up to 20% in average absolute error by leveraging stratified sampling and control variates. Our techniques can improve estimates made from a fixed annotation budget, are easy to implement, and can be applied to any problem with structure similar to the one we study.

Toward More Effective Human Evaluation for Machine Translation

It is often difficult to reliably evaluate models which generate text. Among them, text style transfer is a particularly difficult to evaluate, because its success depends on a number of parameters.
We conduct an evaluation of a large number of models on a detoxification task. We explore the relations between the manual and automatic metrics and find that there is only weak correlation between them, which is dependent on the type of model which generated text. Automatic metrics tend to be less reliable for better-performing models. However, our findings suggest that, ChrF and BertScore metrics can be used as a proxy for human evaluation of text detoxification to some extent.

Design principles of an open-source language modeling microservice package for AAC text-entry applications

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ColorCode: A Bayesian Approach to Augmentative and Alternative Communication with Two Buttons

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Design principles of an open-source language modeling microservice package for AAC text-entry applications

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Next from ACL 2022

ColorCode: A Bayesian Approach to Augmentative and Alternative Communication with Two Buttons

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Language, Brains & Interpretability

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