United States

Recent advances in self-supervised modeling of text and images open new opportunities for computational models of child language acquisition, which is believed to rely heavily on cross-modal signals. However, prior studies has been limited by their reliance on vision models trained on large image datasets annotated with a pre-defined set of depicted object categories. This is (a) not faithful to the information children receive and (b) prohibits the evaluation of such models with respect to category learning tasks, due to the pre-imposed category structure. We address this gap, and present a cognitively-inspired, multimodal acquisition model, trained from image-caption pairs on naturalistic data using cross-modal self-supervision. We show that the model learns word categories and object recognition abilities, and presents trends reminiscent of ones reported in the developmental literature.

NAACL 2022

A Computational Acquisition Model for Multimodal Word Categorization

# 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)

ACL 2022

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). 

poster

## 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

Prior works on the open-domain dialogue primarily focused on exploiting self personas. We propose a novel framework that automatically generates partner personas and enhances the succeeding response generation with the partner personas generated with the use of reinforcement learning.

Partner Personas Generation for Dialogue Response Generation

Building robust multimodal models are crucial for achieving reliable deployment in the wild. Despite its importance, less attention has been paid to identifying and improving the robustness of Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) models. In this work, we hope to address that by (i) Proposing simple diagnostic checks for modality robustness in a trained multimodal model. Using these checks, we find MSA models to be highly sensitive to a single modality, which creates issues in their robustness; (ii) We analyze well-known robust training strategies to alleviate the issues. Critically, we observe that robustness can be achieved without compromising on the original performance. We hope our extensive study--performed across five models and two benchmark datasets--and proposed procedures would make robustness an integral component in MSA research. Our diagnostic checks and robust training solutions are simple to implement and available at https://github.com/declare-lab/MSA-Robustness

Analyzing Modality Robustness in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Media news framing bias can increase political polarization and undermine civil society. The need for automatic mitigation methods is therefore growing. We propose a new task, a neutral summary generation from multiple news articles of the varying political leanings to facilitate balanced and unbiased news reading. In this paper, we first collect a new dataset, illustrate insights about framing bias through a case study, and propose a new effective metric and model (NEUS-TITLE) for the task. Based on our discovery that title provides a good signal for framing bias, we present NEUSTITLE that learns to neutralize news content in hierarchical order from title to article. Our hierarchical multi-task learning is achieved by formatting our hierarchical data pair (title, article) sequentially with identifier-tokens (“TITLE=>”, “ARTICLE=>”) and fine-tuning the auto-regressive decoder with the standard negative log-likelihood objective. We then analyze and point out the remaining challenges and future directions. One of the most interesting observations is that neural NLG models can hallucinate not only factually inaccurate or unverifiable content but also politically biased content.

NeuS: Neutral Multi-News Summarization for Mitigating Framing Bias

Recent advancements in open-domain question answering (ODQA), that is, finding answers from large open-domain corpus like Wikipedia, have led to human-level performance on many datasets. However, progress in QA over book stories (Book QA) lags despite its similar task formulation to ODQA. This work provides a comprehensive and quantitative analysis about the difficulty of Book QA: (1) We benchmark the research on the NarrativeQA dataset with extensive experiments with cutting-edge ODQA techniques. This quantifies the challenges Book QA poses, as well as advances the published state-of-the-art with a ∼7% absolute improvement on ROUGE-L. (2) We further analyze the detailed challenges in Book QA through human studies.1 Our findings indicate that the event-centric questions dominate this task, which exemplifies the inability of existing QA models to handle event-oriented scenarios.

Narrative Question Answering with Cutting-Edge Open-Domain QA Techniques: A Comprehensive Study

Czech Grammar Error Correction with a Large and Diverse Corpus

We establish THumB, a rubric-based human evaluation protocol for image captioning models. Our scoring rubrics and their definitions are carefully developed based on machine- and human-generated captions on the MSCOCO dataset. Each caption is evaluated along two main dimensions in a tradeoff (precision and recall) as well as other aspects that measure the text quality (fluency, conciseness, and inclusive language). Our evaluations demonstrate several critical problems of the current evaluation practice. Human-generated captions show substantially higher quality than machine-generated ones, especially in coverage of salient information (i.e., recall), while most automatic metrics say the opposite. Our rubric-based results reveal that CLIPScore, a recent metric that uses image features, better correlates with human judgments than conventional text-only metrics because it is more sensitive to recall. We hope that this work will promote a more transparent evaluation protocol for image captioning and its automatic metrics.

Transparent Human Evaluation for Image Captioning

The Yes/No QA task (Clark et al., 2019) consists of "Yes" or "No" questions about a given context. However, in realistic scenarios, the information provided in the context is not always sufficient in order to answer the question. For example,  given the context "She married a lawyer from New-York.", we don't know whether the answer to the question "Did she marry in New York?" is "Yes" or "No". In this paper, we extend the Yes/No QA task, adding questions with an IDK answer, and show its considerable difficulty compared to the original 2-label task. For this purpose, we (i) enrich the BoolQ dataset (Clark et al., 2019) to include unanswerable questions and (ii) create out-of-domain test sets for the Yes/No/IDK QA task. We study the contribution of training on other Natural Language Understanding tasks. We focus in particular on Extractive QA (Rajpurkar et al., 2018) and Recognizing Textual Entailments (RTE; Dagan et al., 2013), analyzing the differences between 2 and 3 labels using the new data.

Yes, No or IDK: The Challenge of Unanswerable Yes/No Questions

Pre-trained Language Models (PTLMs) have been shown to perform well on natural language tasks. Many prior works have leveraged structured commonsense present in the form of entities linked through labeled relations in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to assist PTLMs. Retrieval approaches use KG as a separate static module which limits coverage since KGs contain finite knowledge. Generative methods train PTLMs on KG triples to improve the scale at which knowledge can be obtained. However, training on symbolic KG entities limits their applicability in tasks involving natural language text where they ignore overall context. To mitigate this, we propose a CommonSense Contextualizer (CoSe-Co) conditioned on sentences as input to make it generically usable in tasks for generating knowledge relevant to the overall context of input text. To train CoSe-Co, we propose a novel dataset comprising of sentence and commonsense knowledge pairs. The knowledge inferred by CoSe-Co is diverse and contain novel entities not present in the underlying KG. We augment generated knowledge in Multi-Choice QA and Open-ended CommonSense Reasoning tasks leading to improvements over current best methods on CSQA, ARC, QASC and OBQA datasets. We also demonstrate its applicability in improving performance of a baseline model for paraphrase generation task.

CoSe-Co: Text Conditioned Generative CommonSense Contextualizer

Global models are typically trained to be as generalizable as possible. Invariance to the specific user is considered desirable since models are shared across multitudes of users. However, these models are often unable to produce personalized responses for individual users, based on their data.  Contrary to widely-used personalization techniques based on few-shot and meta-learning, we propose UserIdentifier, a novel scheme for training a single shared model for all users. Our approach produces personalized responses by prepending a fixed, user-specific non-trainable string (called ``user identifier'') to each user's input text. Unlike prior work, this method doesn't need any additional model parameters, any extra rounds of personal few-shot learning or any change made to the vocabulary. We empirically study different types of user identifiers (numeric, alphanumeric, and also randomly generated) and demonstrate that, surprisingly, randomly generated user identifiers outperform the prefix-tuning based state-of-the-art approach by up to 13, on a suite of sentiment analysis datasets. 

UserIdentifier: Implicit User Representations for Simple and Effective Personalized Sentiment Analysis

Recognizing offensive text is an important requirement for every content management system, especially for social networks. While the majority of the prior work formulate this problem as text classification, i.e., if a text excerpt is offensive or not, in this work we propose a novel model for offensive span detection (OSD), whose goal is to identify the spans responsible for the offensive tone of the text. One of the challenges to train a model for this novel setting is the lack of enough training data. To address this limitation, in this work we propose a novel method in which the large-scale pre-trained language model GPT-2 is employed to generate synthetic training data for OSD. In particular, we propose to train the GPT-2 model in a dual-training setting using the REINFORCE algorithm to generate in-domain, natural and diverse training samples. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset for OSD reveal the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Partner Personas Generation for Dialogue Response Generation

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