Ireland

Algorithmic oppression is an urgent and persistent problem in speech and language technologies. Considering power relations embedded in datasets before compiling or using them to train or test speech and language technologies is essential to designing less harmful, more just technologies. This paper presents a reflective exercise to recognise and challenge gaps and the power relations they reveal in speech and language datasets by applying principles of Data Feminism and Design Justice, and building on work on dataset documentation and sociolinguistics.

ACL 2022

Mind the data gap(s): Investigating power in speech and language datasets

dataset documentation

algorithmic bias

datasets

automatic speech recognition

# 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). 

workshop paper

Current language technology is ubiquitous and directly influences individuals' lives worldwide. Given the recent trend in AI on training and constantly releasing new and powerful large language models (LLMs), there is a need to assess their biases and potential concrete consequences. While some studies have highlighted the shortcomings of these models, there is only little on the negative impact of LLMs on LGBTQIA+ individuals. In this paper, we investigated a state-of-the-art template-based approach for measuring the harmfulness of English LLMs sentence completion when the subjects belong to the LGBTQIA+ community. Our findings show that, on average, the most likely LLM-generated completion is an identity attack 13% of the time. Our results raise serious concerns about the applicability of these models in production environments.

Measuring Harmful Sentence Completion in Language Models for LGBTQIA+ Individuals

Deaf and hard of hearing individuals regularly rely on captioning while watching live TV. Live TV captioning is evaluated by regulatory agencies using various caption evaluation metrics. However, caption evaluation metrics are often not informed by preferences of DHH users or how meaningful the captions are. There is a need to construct caption evaluation metrics that take the relative importance of words in a transcript into account. We conducted correlation analysis between two types of word embeddings and human-annotated labeled word-importance scores in existing corpus. We found that normalized contextualized word embeddings generated using BERT correlated better with manually annotated importance scores than word2vec-based word embeddings. We make available a pairing of word embeddings and their human-annotated importance scores. We also provide proof-of-concept utility by training word importance models, achieving an F1-score of 0.57 in the 6-class word importance classification task.

Using BERT Embeddings to Model Word Importance in Conversational Transcripts for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users

This paper presents a new method for automatic detection of gendered terms in large-scale language datasets. Currently, the evaluation of gender bias in natural language processing relies on the use of manually compiled lexicons of gendered expressions, such as pronouns and words that imply gender. However, manual compilation of lists with lexical gender can lead to static information if lists are not periodically updated and often involve value judgements by individual annotators and researchers. Moreover, terms not included in the lexicons fall out of the range of analysis. To address these issues, we devised a scalable dictionary-based method to automatically detect lexical gender that can provide a dynamic, up-to-date analysis with high coverage. Our approach reaches over 80% accuracy in determining the lexical gender of words retrieved randomly from a Wikipedia sample and when testing on a list of gendered words used in previous research.

Inferring Gender: A Scalable Methodology for Gender Detection with Online Lexical Databases

An explosion in the popularity of transformer-based language models (such as GPT-3, BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT) has opened the doors to new machine learning applications involving language modeling, text generation, and more. However, recent scrutiny reveals that these language models contain inherent biases towards certain demographics reflected in their training data. While research has tried mitigating this problem, existing approaches either fail to remove the bias completely, degrade performance ("catastrophic forgetting"), or are costly to execute. This work examines how to reduce gender bias in a GPT-2 language model by fine-tuning less than 1% of its parameters. Through quantitative benchmarks, we show that this is a viable way to reduce prejudice in pre-trained language models while remaining cost-effective at scale.

Debiasing Pre-Trained Language Models via Efficient Fine-Tuning


Many datasets contain personally identifiable information, or PII, which poses privacy risks to individuals. PII masking is commonly used to redact personal information such as names, addresses, and phone numbers from text data. Most modern PII masking pipelines involve machine learning algorithms. However, these systems may vary in performance, such that individuals from particular demographic groups bear a higher risk for having their personal information exposed. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three off-the-shelf PII masking systems on name detection and redaction. We generate data using names and templates from the customer service domain. We find that an open-source RoBERTa-based system shows fewer disparities than the commercial models we test. However, all systems demon- strate significant differences in error rate based on demographics. In particular, the highest error rates occurred for names associated with Black and Asian/Pacific Islander individuals.

Behind the Mask: Demographic bias in name detection for PII masking

As natural language processing systems become more widespread, it is necessary to address fairness issues in their implementation and deployment to ensure that their negative impacts on society are understood and minimized. However, there is limited work that studies fairness using a multilingual and intersectional framework or on downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce four multilingual Equity Evaluation Corpora, supplementary test sets designed to measure social biases, and a novel statistical framework for studying unisectional and intersectional social biases in natural language processing. We use these tools to measure gender, racial, ethnic, and intersectional social biases across five models trained on emotion regression tasks in English, Spanish, and Arabic. We find that many systems demonstrate statistically significant unisectional and intersectional social biases.

Mapping the Multilingual Margins: Intersectional Biases of Sentiment Analysis Systems in English, Spanish, and Arabic

Natural language processing is a powerful tool that can analyze a person's mental state from text they have written. Models have been developed that can predict whether a person is experiencing a mental health condition from social media posts with high accuracy. Yet, these models cannot explain why the person is experiencing a particular mental state. In this work, we present a new method for explaining a person's mental state from text using Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). Our MCTS algorithm employs trained classification models to guide the search for key phrases that explain the writer's mental state in a concise, interpretable manner. Furthermore, our algorithm can find both explanations that depend on the particular context of the text (e.g., a recent breakup) and those that are context-independent. Using a dataset of Reddit posts that exhibit stress, we demonstrate the ability of our MCTS algorithm to identify interpretable explanations for a person's feeling of stress in both a context-dependent and context-independent manner.


Monte Carlo Tree Search for Interpreting Stress in Natural Language

This paper presents a state-of-the-art solution to the LT-EDI-ACL 2022 Task 4: \textit{Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text}. The goal of this task is to detect the severity levels of depression of people from social media posts, where people often share their feelings on a daily basis. To detect the signs of depression, we propose a framework with pre-trained language models using rich information instead of training from scratch, gradient boosting and deep learning models for modeling various aspects, and supervised contrastive learning for the generalization ability. Moreover, ensemble techniques are also employed in consideration of the different advantages of each method. Experiments show that our framework achieves a 2nd prize ranking with a macro F1-score of 0.552, showing the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

Ensemble Models with VADER and Contrastive Learning for Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media

This working-notes are about the participation of the UMUTeam in a LT-EDI shared task concerning the identification of homophobic and transphobic comments in YouTube. These comments are written in English, which has high availability to machine-learning resources; Tamil, which has fewer resources; and a transliteration from Tamil to Roman script combined with English sentences. To carry out this shared task, we train a neural network that combines several feature sets applying a knowledge integration strategy. These features are linguistic features extracted from a tool developed by our research group and contextual and non-contextual sentence embeddings. We ranked 7th for English subtask (macro f1-score of 45%), 3rd for Tamil subtask (macro f1-score of 82%), and 2nd for Tamil-English subtask (macro f1-score of 58%).

Detecting homophobic and transphobic comments in Tamil

Depression is a mental condition related to sadness and the lack of interest in common daily tasks. In this working-notes, we describe the proposal of the UMUTeam in the LT-EDI shared task (ACL 2022) concerning the identification of signs of depression in social network posts. This task is somehow related to other relevant Natural Language Processing tasks such as Emotion Analysis. In this shared task, the organisers challenged the participants to distinguish between moderate and severe signs of depression (or no signs of depression at all) in a set of social posts written in English. Our proposal is based on the combination of linguistic features and several sentence embeddings using a knowledge integration strategy. Our proposal achieved the 6th position, with a macro f1-score of 53.82 in the official leader board.

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