Ireland

The COVID-19 pandemic has created severe threats to global health control. In particular, misinformation circulated on social media and news outlets has undermined public trust in government and health agencies. This problem is further exacerbated in developing countries or low-resource regions where the
news may not be equipped with abundant English fact-checking information. This poses a question: “are existing computational solutions toward misinformation also effective in low-resource regions?&quot; In this paper, to answer this question, we make the first attempt to detect COVID-19 misinformation in English, Spanish,
and Haitian French populated in the Caribbean region, using the fact-checked claims in US-English. We started by collecting a dataset of real &amp; false claims in the Caribbean region. Then we trained several classification and language models on COVID-19 from high-resource language regions and transferred this knowledge to the Caribbean claim dataset. The experimental results show the limitations of
current false claim detection in low-resource regions and encourage further research toward the detection of multi-lingual false claims in long tail.

ACL 2022

Detecting False Claims in Low-Resource Regions: A Case Study of Caribbean Islands

false claims detection

low-resource language

machine learning

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

The COVID-19 pandemic has created severe threats to global health control. In particular, misinformation circulated on social media and news outlets has undermined public trust in government and health agencies. This problem is further exacerbated in developing countries or low-resource regions where the
news may not be equipped with abundant English fact-checking information. This poses a question: “are existing computational solutions toward misinformation also effective in low-resource regions?" In this paper, to answer this question, we make the first attempt to detect COVID-19 misinformation in English, Spanish,
and Haitian French populated in the Caribbean region, using the fact-checked claims in US-English. We started by collecting a dataset of real & false claims in the Caribbean region. Then we trained several classification and language models on COVID-19 from high-resource language regions and transferred this knowledge to the Caribbean claim dataset. The experimental results show the limitations of
current false claim detection in low-resource regions and encourage further research toward the detection of multi-lingual false claims in long tail.

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). 

Presents two proposed frameworks to role label the entities present in a meme in hero,villain,victim semantic classes using NLP techiques like NER and Sentiment Analysis. Here our aim is that given a meme from the context we sholud be able to tell whether an entity either hero or villain or victim or none.

Are you a hero or a villain? A semantic role labelling approach for detecting harmful memes.

This paper describes our system for the Constraint 2022 challenge at ACL 2022, whose goal is to detect which entities are glorified, vilified or victimized, within a meme. The task should be done considering the perspective of the meme’s author. In our work, the challenge is treated as a multi-class classification task. For a given pair of a meme and an entity, we need to classify whether the entity is being referenced as Hero, a Villain, a Victim or an Other. Our solution combines (ensembling) different models based on the Unimodal(Text only) model and the Multimodal model (Text+ Images). We conduct several experiments and benchmark different competitive pre-trained transformers and vision models in this work. Our solution, based on an ensembling method, is ranked first on the leaderboard and obtains a macro F1 score of 0.58 on the test set.

Logically at the Constraint 2022: Multimodal role labelling

This paper describes the system we developed for the shared task ``Hero, Villain and Victim: Dissecting harmful memes for Semantic role labeling of entities'' organized in the framework of the Second Workshop on Combating Online Hostile Posts in Regional Languages during Emergency Situation (Constraint 2022). 
We present an ensemble approach combining transformer-based models and linguistic information, such as the presence of irony and implicit sentiment associated to the target named entities. The ensemble system obtains promising classification scores, with a macro F-score of 0.55, resulting in a third place finish in the competition.

Combining Language Models and Linguistic Information to Label Entities in Memes

Harmful or abusive online content has been increasing over time and it has been raising concerns among social media platforms, government agencies, and policymakers. Such harmful or abusive content can have significant negative impact on society, e.g., cyberbullying can lead to suicides, rumors about COVID-19 can cause vaccine hesitance, promotion of fake cures for COVID-19 can cause health harms and deaths. The content that is posted and shared online can be textual, visual, or a combination of both, e.g., in a meme. Here, we describe our experiments in detecting the roles of the entities (hero, villain, victim) in harmful memes, which is part of the CONSTRAINT-2022 shared task, as well as our system for the task. We further provide a comparative analysis on different experimental settings (i.e., unimodal, multimodal, attention, and augmentation). For reproducibility, we make the experimental code publicly available (https://github.com/robi56/harmful_memes_block_fusion)

Detecting the Role of an Entity in Harmful Memes: Techniques and their Limitations

We propose our solution to the multimodal semantic role labeling task from the CONSTRAINT'22 workshop. The task aims at classifying entities in memes into classes such as ``hero'' and ``villain''. We use several pre-trained multi-modal models to jointly encode the text and image of the memes, and implement three systems to classify the role of the entities. We propose dynamic sampling strategies to tackle the issue of class imbalance. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis of the representations of the entities.


Fine-tuning and Sampling Strategies for Multimodal Role Labeling of Entities under Class Imbalance

We present the findings of the shared task at the CONSTRAINT 2022 Workshop: Hero, Villain, and Victim: Dissecting harmful memes for Semantic role labeling of entities. The task aims to delve deeper into the domain of meme comprehension by deciphering the connotations behind the entities present in a meme. In more nuanced terms, the shared task focuses on determining the victimizing, glorifying, and vilifying intentions embedded in meme entities to explicate their connotations. To this end, we curate HVVMemes, a novel meme dataset of about 7000 memes spanning the domains of COVID-19 and US Politics, each containing entities and their associated roles: hero, villain, victim, or none. The shared task attracted 105 participants, but eventually only 6 submissions were made. The successful submissions majorly relied on an ensemble of language and multimodal models. The best submission achieved an F1-score of 58.67.

Findings of the CONSTRAINT 2022 Shared Task on Detecting the Hero, the Villain, and the Victim in Memes

the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of misinformation on online social media has grown exponentially. Unverified bogus claims on these platforms regularly mislead people, leading them to believe in half-baked truths. The current vogue is to employ manual fact-checkers to verify claims to combat this avalanche of misinformation. However, establishing such claims' veracity is becoming increasingly challenging, partly due to the plethora of information available, which is difficult to process manually. Thus, it becomes imperative to verify claims automatically without human interventions. To cope up with this issue, we propose an automated claim verification solution encompassing two steps -- document retrieval and veracity prediction. For the retrieval module, we employ a hybrid search-based system with BM25 as a base retriever and experiment with recent state-of-the-art transformer-based models for re-ranking. Furthermore, we use a BART-based textual entailment architecture to authenticate the retrieved documents in the later step. We report experimental findings, demonstrating that our retrieval module outperforms the best baseline system by 10.32 NDCG@100 points. We escort a demonstration to assess the efficacy and impact of our suggested solution. As a byproduct of this study, we present an open-source, easily deployable, and user-friendly Python API that the community can adopt. 


Document Retrieval and Claim Verification to Mitigate COVID-19 Misinformation

Analogies play a central role in human commonsense reasoning. The ability to recognize analogies such as “eye is to seeing what ear is to hearing”, sometimes referred to as analogical proportions, shape how we structure knowledge and understand language. Surprisingly, however, the task of identifying such analogies has not yet received much attention in the language model era. In this paper, we analyze the capabilities of transformer-based language models on this unsupervised task, using benchmarks obtained from educational settings, as well as more commonly used datasets. We find that off-the-shelf language models can identify analogies to a certain extent, but struggle with abstract and complex relations, and results are highly sensitive to model architecture and hyperparameters. Overall the best results were obtained with GPT-2 and RoBERTa, while configurations using BERT were not able to outperform word embedding models. Our results raise important questions for future work about how, and to what extent, pre-trained language models capture knowledge about abstract semantic relations.

CIKQA: Learning Commonsense Inference with a Unified Knowledge-in-the-loop QA Paradigm

re-trained language models have been found to capture a surprisingly rich amount of lexical knowledge, ranging from commonsense properties of everyday concepts to detailed factual knowledge about named entities. Among others, this makes it possible to distill high-quality word vectors from pre-trained language models. However, it is currently unclear to what extent it is possible to distill relation embeddings, i.e. vectors that characterize the relationship between two words. Such relation embeddings are appealing because they can, in principle, encode relational knowledge in a more fine-grained way than is possible with knowledge graphs. To obtain relation embeddings from a pre-trained language model, we encode word pairs using a (manually or automatically generated) prompt, and we fine-tune the language model such that relationally similar word pairs yield similar output vectors. We find that the resulting relation embeddings are highly competitive on analogy (unsupervised) and relation classification (supervised) benchmarks, even without any task-specific fine-tuning. Source code to reproduce our experimental results and the model checkpoints are available in the following repository: https://github.com/asahi417/relbert

Distilling Relation Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models

Pre-trained models (PTMs) have lead to great improvements in natural language generation (NLG). However, it is still unclear how much commonsense knowledge they possess. With the goal of evaluating commonsense knowledge of NLG models, recent work has proposed the problem of generative commonsense reasoning, e.g., to compose a logical sentence given a set of unordered concepts. Existing approaches to this problem hypothesize that PTMs lack sufficient parametric knowledge for this task, which can be overcome by introducing external knowledge or task-specific pre-training objectives. Different from this trend, we argue that PTM's \textit{inherent} ability for generative commonsense reasoning is underestimated due to the order-agnostic property of its input. In particular, we hypothesize that the order of the input concepts can affect the PTM's ability to utilize its commonsense knowledge. To this end, we propose a pre-ordering approach to elaborately manipulate the order of the given concepts before generation. Experiments show that our approach can outperform the more sophisticated models that have access to a lot of external data and resources.

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Next from ACL 2022

Are you a hero or a villain? A semantic role labelling approach for detecting harmful memes.

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COVID-Fact: Fact Extraction and Verification of Real-World Claims on COVID-19 Pandemic