Ireland

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.

ACL 2022

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

machine-generated text

quality of experience

machine translation

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) 
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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). 

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.

A Study on Manual and Automatic Evaluation for Text Style Transfer: The Case of Detoxification

Although text style transfer has witnessed rapid development in recent years, there is as yet no established standard for evaluation, which is performed using several automatic metrics, lacking the possibility of always resorting to human judgement. We focus on the task of formality transfer, and on the three aspects that are usually evaluated: style strength, content preservation, and fluency. To cast light on how such aspects are assessed by common and new metrics, we run a human-based evaluation and perform a rich correlation analysis. We are then able to offer some recommendations on the use of such metrics in formality transfer, also with an eye to their generalisability (or not) to related tasks.

Human Judgement as a Compass to Navigate Automatic Metrics for Formality Transfer

Current evaluation practices for social dialog systems, dedicated to human-computer spontaneous conversation, exclusively focus on the quality of system-generated surface text, but not human-verifiable aspects of mutual understanding between the systems and their interlocutors. This work proposes Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) as an essential component of a valid and reliable human evaluation framework, whose long-term goal is to radically improve the usability of dialog systems in real-life human-computer collaboration. The practicality of this proposal is proved via experimentally investigating (1) the WordNet 3.0 sense inventory coverage of lexical meanings in spontaneous conversation between humans in American English, assumed as an upper bound of lexical diversity of human--computer communication, and (2) the effectiveness of state-of-the-art WSD models and pretrained transformer-based contextual embeddings on this type of data.

Towards Human Evaluation of Mutual Understanding in Human-Computer Spontaneous Conversation: An Empirical Study of Word Sense Disambiguation for Naturalistic Social Dialogs in American English

Knowledge graphs are often used to store common sense information that is useful for various tasks. However, the extraction of contextually-relevant knowledge is an unsolved problem, and current approaches are relatively simple. Here we introduce a triple selection method based on a ranking model and find that it improves question answering accuracy over existing methods. We additionally investigate methods to ensure that extracted triples form a connected graph. Graph connectivity is important for model interpretability, as paths are frequently used as explanations for the reasoning that connects question and answer.

Identifying relevant common sense information in knowledge graphs

Story comprehension that involves complex causal and temporal relations is a critical task in NLP, but previous studies have focused predominantly on English, leaving open the question of how the findings generalize to other languages, such as Indonesian. In this paper, we follow the Story Cloze Test framework of Mostafazadeh et al. (2016) in evaluating story understanding in Indonesian, by constructing a four-sentence story with one correct ending and one incorrect ending. To investigate commonsense knowledge acquisition in language models, we experimented with: (1) a classification task to predict the correct ending; and (2) a generation task to complete the story with a single sentence. We investigate these tasks in two settings: (i) monolingual training and ii) zero-shot cross-lingual transfer between Indonesian and English.

Cloze Evaluation for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories in Indonesian

Neural language models have attracted a lot of attention in the past few years. More and more researchers are getting intrigued by how language models encode commonsense, specifically what kind of commonsense they understand, and why they do. This paper analyzed neural language models' understanding of commonsense pragmatics (i.e., implied meanings) through human behavioral and neurophysiological data. These psycholinguistic tests are designed to draw conclusions based on predictive responses in context, making them very well suited to test word-prediction models such as BERT in natural settings. They can provide the appropriate prompts and tasks to answer questions about linguistic mechanisms underlying predictive responses. This paper adopted psycholinguistic datasets to probe language models' commonsense reasoning. Findings suggest that GPT-3's performance was mostly at chance in the psycholinguistic tasks. We also showed that DistillBERT had some understanding of the (implied) intent that's shared among most people. Such intent is implicitly reflected in the usage of conversational implicatures and presuppositions. Whether or not fine-tuning improved its performance to human-level depends on the type of commonsense reasoning.

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Human evaluation of web-crawled parallel corpora for machine translation

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