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Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment classification task. Most recent efforts adopt pre-trained model to classify the sentences with aspects. However, the aspect sentiment bias from pre-trained model brings some noise to the ABSA task. Besides, traditional methods using cross-entropy loss are hard to find the potential associations between sentiment polarities. In this work, we analyze the ABSA task from a novel cognition perspective: humans can often judge the sentiment of an aspect even if they do not know what the aspect is. Moreover, it is easier to distinguish positive and negative sentiments than others for human beings because positive and negative are two opposite sentiments. To this end, we propose a no-aspect differential sentiment (NADS) framework for the ABSA task. We first design a no-aspect template by replacing the aspect with a special unbiased character to eliminate the sentiment bias and obtain a stronger representation. To better get the benefits from the template, we adopt contrastive learning between the no-aspect template and the original sentence. Then we propose a differential sentiment loss instead of the cross-entropy loss to better classify the sentiments by distinguishing the different distances between sentiments. Our proposed model is a general framework and can be combined with almost all traditional ABSA methods. Experiments on SemEval 2014 show that our framework is still able to predict the sentiment of the aspect even we don&#39;t konw what the aspect is. Moreover, our NADS framework boosts three typical ABSA methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

NAACL 2022

Aspect Is Not You Need: No-aspect Differential Sentiment Framework for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

sentiment bias

absa

contrastive learning

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COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment classification task. Most recent efforts adopt pre-trained model to classify the sentences with aspects. However, the aspect sentiment bias from pre-trained model brings some noise to the ABSA task. Besides, traditional methods using cross-entropy loss are hard to find the potential associations between sentiment polarities. In this work, we analyze the ABSA task from a novel cognition perspective: humans can often judge the sentiment of an aspect even if they do not know what the aspect is. Moreover, it is easier to distinguish positive and negative sentiments than others for human beings because positive and negative are two opposite sentiments. To this end, we propose a no-aspect differential sentiment (NADS) framework for the ABSA task. We first design a no-aspect template by replacing the aspect with a special unbiased character to eliminate the sentiment bias and obtain a stronger representation. To better get the benefits from the template, we adopt contrastive learning between the no-aspect template and the original sentence. Then we propose a differential sentiment loss instead of the cross-entropy loss to better classify the sentiments by distinguishing the different distances between sentiments. Our proposed model is a general framework and can be combined with almost all traditional ABSA methods. Experiments on SemEval 2014 show that our framework is still able to predict the sentiment of the aspect even we don't konw what the aspect is. Moreover, our NADS framework boosts three typical ABSA methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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

Deep acoustic models represent linguistic information based on massive amounts of data. Unfortunately, for regional languages and dialects such resources are mostly not available. However, deep acoustic models might have learned linguistic information that transfers to low-resource languages. In this study, we evaluate whether this is the case through the task of distinguishing low-resource (Dutch) regional varieties. By extracting embeddings from the hidden layers of various wav2vec 2.0 models (including new models which are pre-trained and/or fine-tuned on Dutch) and using dynamic time warping, we compute pairwise pronunciation differences averaged over 10 words for over 100 individual dialects from four (regional) languages. We then cluster the resulting difference matrix in four groups and compare these to a gold standard, and a partitioning on the basis of comparing phonetic transcriptions. Our results show that acoustic models outperform the (traditional) transcription-based approach without requiring phonetic transcriptions, with the best performance achieved by the multilingual XLSR-53 model fine-tuned on Dutch. On the basis of only six seconds of speech, the resulting clustering closely matches the gold standard.

Quantifying Language Variation Acoustically with Few Resources

Due to the dialogue characteristics of unstruc- tured contexts and multi-parties with first- person perspective, many successful text sum- marization works have failed when dealing with dialogue summarization. In dialogue sum- marization task, the input dialogue is usually spoken style with ellipsis and co-references but the output summaries are more formal and com- plete. Therefore, the dialogue summarization model should be able to complete the ellipsis content and co-reference information and then produce a suitable summary accordingly. How- ever, the current state-of-the-art models pay more attention on the topic or structure of sum- mary, rather than the consistency of dialogue summary with its input dialogue context, which may suffer from the personal and logical incon- sistency problem. In this paper, we propose a new model, named ReWriteSum, to tackle this problem. Firstly, an utterance rewriter is conducted to complete the ellipsis content of dialogue content and then obtain the rewriting utterances. Then, the co-reference data aug- mentation mechanism is utilized to replace the referential person name with its specific name to enhance the personal information. Finally, the rewriting utterances and the co-reference re- placement data are used in the standard BART model. Experimental results on both SAMSum and DialSum datasets show that our ReWrite- Sum significantly outperforms baseline models, in terms of both metric-based and human evalu- ations. Further analysis on multi-speakers also shows that ReWriteSum can obtain relatively higher improvement with more speakers, vali- dating the correctness and property of ReWrite- Sum.

From spoken dialogue to formal summary: An utterance rewriting for dialogue summarization

The last decade has witnessed a surge in the interaction of people through social networking platforms. While there are several positive aspects of these social platforms, their proliferation has led them to become the breeding ground for cyber-bullying and hate speech. Recent advances in NLP have often been used to mitigate the spread of such hateful content.
Since the task of hate speech detection is usually applicable in the context of social networks, we introduce CRUSH, a framework for hate speech detection using User Anchored self-supervision and contextual regularization.
Our proposed approach secures ~1-12% improvement in test set metrics over best performing previous approaches on two types of tasks and multiple popular English language social networking datasets.

CRUSH: Contextually Regularized and User anchored Self-supervised Hate speech Detection

Complaining is a speech act that expresses a negative inconsistency between reality and human’s expectations. While prior studies mostly focus on identifying the existence or the type of complaints, in this work, we present the ﬁrst study in computational linguistics of measuring the intensity of complaints from text. Analyzing complaints from such perspective is particularly useful, as complaints of certain degrees may cause severe consequences for companies or organizations. We ﬁrst collect 3,103 posts about complaints in education domain from Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform. These posts are then annotated with complaints intensity scores using Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) method. We show that complaints intensity can be accurately estimated by computational models with best mean square error achieving 0.11. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive linguistic analysis around complaints, including the connections between complaints and sentiment, and a cross-lingual comparison for complaints expressions used by Chinese and English speakers. We ﬁnally show that our complaints intensity scores can be incorporated for better estimating the popularity of posts on social media.

Analyzing the Intensity of Complaints on Social Media

Internet memes have emerged as an increasingly popular means of communication on the web. Although memes are typically intended to elicit humour, they have been increasingly used to spread hatred, trolling, and cyberbullying, as well as to target specific individuals, communities, or society on political, socio-cultural, and psychological grounds. While previous work has focused on detecting harmful, hateful, and offensive memes in general, identifying whom these memes attack (i.e., the `victims') remains a challenging and underexplored area. We attempt to address this problem in this paper. To this end, we create a dataset in which we annotate each meme with its victim(s) such as the name of the targeted person(s), organization(s), and community(ies). We then propose DISARM (Detecting vIctimS targeted by hARmful Memes), a framework that uses named-entity recognition and person identification to detect all entities a meme is referring to, and then, incorporates a novel contextualized multimodal deep neural network to classify whether the meme intends to harm these entities. We perform several systematic experiments on three different test sets, corresponding to entities that are (i) all seen while training, (ii) not seen as a harmful target while training, and (iii) not seen at all while training. The evaluation shows that DISARM significantly outperforms 10 unimodal and multimodal systems. Finally, we demonstrate that DISARM is interpretable and comparatively more generalizable and that it can reduce the relative error rate of harmful target identification by up to 9 % absolute over multimodal baseline systems.

DISARM: Detecting the Victims Targeted by Harmful Memes

Intermediate layer knowledge distillation (KD) can improve the standard KD technique (which only targets the output of teacher and student models) especially over large pre-trained language models. However, intermediate layer distillation suffers from excessive computational burdens and engineering efforts required for setting up a proper layer  mapping. To address these problems, we propose a RAndom Intermediate Layer Knowledge Distillation (RAIL-KD) approach in which, intermediate layers from the teacher model are selected randomly to be distilled into the intermediate layers of the student model. This randomized selection enforces that all teacher layers are taken into account in the training process, while reducing the computational cost of intermediate layer distillation. Also, we show that it acts as a regularizer for improving the generalizability of the student model. We perform extensive experiments on GLUE tasks as well as on out-of-domain test sets. We show that our proposed RAIL-KD approach outperforms other state-of-the-art intermediate layer KD methods considerably in both performance and training-time.

RAIL-KD: RAndom Intermediate Layer Mapping for Knowledge Distillation

The Transformer architecture continues to show remarkable performance gains in many Natural Language Processing tasks. However, obtaining such state-of-the-art performance in different tasks requires fine-tuning the same model separately for each task. Clearly, such an approach is demanding in terms of both memory requirements and computing power. In this paper, aiming to improve training efficiency across multiple tasks, we propose to collectively factorize the weighs of the multi-head attention module of a pre-trained Transformer. We test our proposed method on finetuning multiple natural language understanding tasks by employing BERT-Large as an instantiation of the Transformer and the GLUE as the evaluation benchmark.  Experimental results show that our method requires training and storing only 1\% of the initial model parameters for each task and matches or improves the original fine-tuned model's performance for each task while effectively decreasing the parameter requirements by two orders of magnitude. Furthermore, compared to well-known adapter-based alternatives on the GLUE benchmark, our method consistently reaches the same levels of performance while requiring approximately four times fewer total and trainable parameters per task.

Efficient Learning of Multiple NLP Tasks via Collective Weight Factorization on BERT

Bias research in NLP is a rapidly growing and developing field.  
Similar to CrowS-Pairs (Nangia et al., 2020), we assess gender bias in masked-language models (MLMs) by studying pairs of sentences with gender swapped person references.
Most bias research focuses on and often is specific to English.
Using a novel methodology for creating sentence pairs that is applicable across languages, we create, based on CrowS-Pairs, a multilingual dataset for English, Finnish, German, Indonesian and Thai.
Additionally, we propose $S_JSD$, a new bias measure based on Jensen–Shannon divergence, which we argue retains more information from the model output probabilities than other previously proposed bias measures for MLMs.
Using multilingual MLMs, we find that $S_JSD$ diagnoses the same systematic biased behavior for non-English that previous studies have found for monolingual English pre-trained MLMs. 
$S_JSD$ outperforms the CrowS-Pairs measure, which struggles to find such biases for smaller non-English datasets.

An Information-Theoretic Approach and Dataset for Probing Gender Stereotypes in Multilingual Masked Language Models

Text style transfer is an important task in controllable language generation. Supervised approaches have pushed performance improvement on style-oriented rewriting such as formality conversion. However, challenges remain due to the scarcity of large-scale parallel data in many domains. While unsupervised approaches do not rely on annotated sentence pairs for each style, they are often plagued with instability issues such as mode collapse or quality degradation.
To take advantage of both supervised and unsupervised paradigms and tackle the challenges, in this work, we propose a semi-supervised framework for text style transfer. First, the learning process is bootstrapped with supervision guided by automatically constructed pseudo-parallel pairs using lexical and semantic-based methods. Then the model learns from unlabeled data via reinforcement rewards. Specifically, we propose to improve the sequence-to-sequence policy gradient via stepwise reward optimization, providing fine-grained learning signals and stabilizing the reinforced learning process. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets, and produces effective generation with as minimal as 10\% of training data.

Learning from Bootstrapping and Stepwise Reinforcement Reward: A Semi-Supervised Framework for Text Style Transfer

Syntax-controlled paraphrase generation aims to produce paraphrase conform to given syntactic patterns. To address this task, recent works have started to use parse trees (or syntactic templates) to guide generation.
A constituency parse tree contains abundant structural information, such as parent-child relation, sibling relation, and the alignment relation between words and nodes.
Previous works have only utilized parent-child and alignment relations, which may affect the generation quality.
To address this limitation, we propose a Structural Information-augmented Syntax-Controlled Paraphrasing (SI-SCP) model. Particularly, we design a syntax encoder based on tree-transformer to capture parent-child and sibling relations. To model the alignment relation between words and nodes, we propose an attention regularization objective, which makes the decoder accurately select corresponding syntax nodes to guide the generation of words.
Experiments show that SI-SCP achieves state-of-the-art performances in terms of semantic and syntactic quality on two popular benchmark datasets.
Additionally, we propose a Syntactic Template Retriever (STR) to retrieve compatible syntactic structures. 
We validate that STR is capable of retrieving compatible syntactic structures. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of SI-SCP to generate diverse paraphrases with retrieved syntactic structures.

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Quantifying Language Variation Acoustically with Few Resources

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