United States

Avoiding to rely on dataset artifacts to predict hate speech is at the cornerstone of robust and fair hate speech detection. In this paper we critically analyze lexical biases in hate speech detection via a cross-platform study, disentangling various types of spurious and authentic artifacts and analyzing their impact on out-of-distribution fairness and robustness. We experiment with existing approaches and propose simple yet surprisingly effective data-centric baselines. Our results on English data across four platforms show that distinct spurious artifacts require different treatments to ultimately attain both robustness and fairness in hate speech detection. To encourage research in this direction, we release all baseline models and the code to compute artifacts, pointing it out as a complementary and necessary addition to the data statements practice.

NAACL 2022

Features or Spurious Artifacts? Data-centric Baselines for Fair and Robust Hate Speech Detection

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

ACL 2023

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.

technical paper

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Knowledge-grounded conversational models are known to suffer from producing factually invalid statements, a phenomenon commonly called hallucination.  In this work, we investigate the underlying causes of this phenomenon: is hallucination due to the training data, or to the models?  We conduct a comprehensive human study on both existing knowledge-grounded conversational benchmarks and several state-of-the-art models. Our study reveals that the standard benchmarks consist of > 60% hallucinated responses, leading to models that not only hallucinate but even amplify hallucinations. Our findings raise important questions on the quality of existing datasets and models trained using them. We make our annotations publicly available for future research.

On the Origin of Hallucinations in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models?

Masked Language Models (MLMs) pre-trained by predicting masked tokens on large corpora have been used successfully in natural language processing tasks for a variety of languages.
Unfortunately, it was reported that MLMs also learn discriminative biases regarding attributes such as gender and race.
Because most studies have focused on MLMs in English, the bias of MLMs in other languages has rarely been investigated.
Manual annotation of evaluation data for languages other than English has been challenging due to the cost and difficulty in recruiting annotators.
Moreover, the existing bias evaluation methods require the stereotypical sentence pairs consisting of the same context with attribute words (e.g. He/She is a nurse).
We propose Multilingual Bias Evaluation (MBE) score, to evaluate bias in various languages using only English attribute word lists and parallel corpora between the target language and English without requiring manually annotated data.
We evaluated MLMs in eight languages using the MBE and confirmed that gender-related biases are encoded in MLMs for all those languages.
We manually created datasets for gender bias in Japanese and Russian to evaluate the validity of the MBE.
The results show that the bias scores reported by the MBE significantly correlates with that computed from the above manually created datasets and the existing English datasets for gender bias.

Gender Bias in Masked Language Models for Multiple Languages

A hyperbolic relevance matching model for neural keyphrase extraction.

Hyperbolic Relevance Matching for Neural Keyphrase Extraction

Most previous studies aim at extracting events from a single sentence, while document-level event extraction still remains under-explored. In this paper, we focus on extracting event arguments from an entire document, which mainly faces two critical problems: a) the long- distance dependency between trigger and arguments over sentences; b) the distracting con- text towards an event in the document. To ad- dress these issues, we propose a Two-Stream Abstract meaning Representation enhanced extraction model (TSAR). TSAR encodes the document from different perspectives by a two-stream encoding module, to utilize local and global information and lower the impact of distracting context. Besides, TSAR introduces an AMR-guided interaction module to capture both intra-sentential and inter-sentential features, based on the locally and globally constructed AMR semantic graphs. An auxiliary boundary loss is introduced to enhance the boundary information for text spans explicitly. Extensive experiments illustrate that TSAR outperforms previous state-of-the-art by a large margin, with 2.54 F1 and 5.13 F1 performance gain on the public RAMS and WikiEvents datasets respectively, showing the superiority in the cross-sentence arguments extraction.

A Two-Stream AMR-enhanced Model for Document-level Event Argument Extraction

We present a novel approach incorporating transformer-based language models into infectious disease modelling. Text-derived features are quantified by tracking high-density clusters of sentence-level representations of Reddit posts within specific US states’ COVID19 subreddits. We benchmark these clustered embedding features against features extracted from other high-quality datasets. In a threshold classification task, we show that they outperform all other feature types at predicting upward trend signals, a significant result for infectious disease modelling in areas where epidemiological data is unreliable. Subsequently, in a time-series forecasting task we fully utilise the predictive power of the caseload and compare the relative strengths of using different supplementary datasets as covariate feature sets in a transformer-based time-series model.

Forecasting COVID-19 Caseloads Using Unsupervised Embedding Clusters of Social Media Posts

Motivated by the need for accelerating text entry in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for people with severe motor impairments, we propose a paradigm in which phrases are abbreviated aggressively as primarily word-initial letters. Our approach is to expand the abbreviations into full-phrase options by leveraging conversation context with the power of pretrained large language models (LLMs). Through zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning experiments on four public conversation datasets, we show that for replies to the initial turn of a dialog, an LLM with 64B parameters is able to exactly expand over 70% of phrases with abbreviation length up to 10, leading to an effective keystroke saving rate of up to about 77% on these exact expansions. Including a small amount of context in the form of a single conversation turn more than doubles abbreviation expansion accuracies compared to having no context, an effect that is more pronounced for longer phrases. Additionally, the robustness of models against typo noise can be enhanced through fine-tuning on noisy data.

Context-Aware Abbreviation Expansion Using Large Language Models

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to predict the sentiment polarity towards a particular aspect in a sentence. Recently, graph neural networks based on dependency tree convey rich structural information which is proven to be utility for ABSA. However, how to efectively harness the semantic and syntactic structure information from the dependency tree remains a challenging research question. In this paper, we propose a novel Syntactic and Semantic Enhanced Graph Convolutional Network (SSEGCN) model for ABSA task. Specifically,we propose an aspect-aware attention mechanism combined with self-attention to obtain attention score matrices of a sentence, which can not only learn the aspect-related semantic
correlations, but also learn the global semantics of the sentence. In order to obtain comprehensive syntactic structure information, we construct syntactic mask matrices of the sentence according to the different syntactic distances between words. Furthermore, to combine syntactic structure and semantic information, we
equip the attention score matrices by syntactic mask matrices. Finally, we enhance the node representations with graph convolutional network over attention score matrices for ABSA. Experimental results on benchmark datasets illustrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

SSEGCN: Syntactic and Semantic Enhanced Graph Convolutional Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Text style transfer (TST) is a well-known task whose goal is to convert the style of the text (e.g., from formal to informal) while preserving its content. Recently, it has been shown that both syntactic and semantic similarities between the source and the converted text are important for TST. However, the interaction between these two concepts has not been modeled. In this work, we propose a novel method based on Optimal Transport for TST to simultaneously incorporate syntactic and semantic information into similarity computation between the source and the converted text. We evaluate the proposed method in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Our analysis reveal the superiority of the proposed model in both settings.

Text Style Transfer via Optimal Transport

Automatic summarization methods are efficient but can suffer from low quality. In comparison, manual summarization is expensive but produces higher quality. Can humans and AI collaborate to improve summarization performance? In similar text generation tasks (e.g., machine translation), human-AI collaboration in the form of "post-editing" AI-generated text reduces human workload and improves the quality of AI output. Therefore, we explored whether post-editing offers advantages in text summarization. Specifically, we conducted an experiment with 72 participants, comparing post-editing provided summaries with manual summarization for summary quality, human efficiency, and user experience on formal (XSum news) and informal (Reddit posts) text. This study sheds valuable insights on when post-editing is useful for text summarization: it helped in some cases (e.g., when participants lacked domain knowledge) but not in others (e.g., when provided summaries include inaccurate information). Participants' different editing strategies and needs for assistance offer implications for future human-AI summarization systems. 

An Exploration of Post-Editing Effectiveness in Text Summarization

Natural language as a modality of interaction is becoming increasingly popular in the field of visualization. In addition to the popular query interfaces, other language-based interactions such as annotations, recommendations, explanations, or documentation experience growing interest. In this presentation, we provide an overview of natural language-based interaction in the research area of visualization. We discuss a renowned taxonomy of visualization tasks and classify 119 related works to illustrate the state-of-the-art of how current natural language interfaces support their performance. We examine applied NLP methods and discuss human-machine dialogue structures with a focus on initiative, duration, and communicative functions in recent visualization-oriented dialogue interfaces. Based on this overview, we point out interesting areas for the future application of NLP methods in the field of visualization.

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On the Origin of Hallucinations in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models?

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