United States

Image Captioning (IC) models can highly benefit from human feedback in the training process, especially in cases where data is limited. We present work-in-progress on adapting an IC system to integrate human feedback, with the goal to make it easily adaptable to user-specific data. Our approach builds on a base IC model pre-trained on the MS COCO dataset, which generates captions for unseen images. The user will then be able to offer feedback on the image and the generated/predicted caption, which will be augmented to create additional training instances for the adaptation of the model. The additional instances are integrated into the model using step-wise updates, and a sparse memory replay component is used to avoid catastrophic forgetting. We hope that this approach, while leading to improved results, will also result in customizable IC models.

NAACL 2022

Putting Humans in the Image Captioning Loop

interactive machine learning

multimodal nlp

image captioning

data augmentation

### 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.

workshop 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

With the growth of Automatic Content Moderation (ACM) on widely used social media platforms, transparency into the design of moderation technology and policy is necessary for online communities to advocate for themselves when harms occur. In this work, we describe a suite of interactive modules to support the exploration of various aspects of this technology, and particularly of those components that rely on English models and datasets for hate speech detection, a subtask within ACM. We intend for this demo to support the various stakeholders of ACM in investigating the definitions and decisions that underpin current technologies such that those with technical knowledge and those with contextual knowledge may both better understand existing systems.

An Interactive Exploratory Tool for the Task of Hate Speech Detection

As digital social platforms and mobile technologies become more prevalent and robust, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in facilitating human communication will grow. This, in turn, will encourage development of intuitive, adaptive, and effective empathic AI interfaces that better address the needs of socially and culturally diverse communities. In this paper, we present several design considerations of an intelligent digital interface intended to guide the clinicians toward more empathetic communication. This approach allows various communities of practice to investigate how AI, on one side, and human communication and healthcare needs, on the other, can contribute to each other’s development.

Design Considerations for an NLP-Driven Empathy and Emotion Interface for Clinician Training via Telemedicine

This paper proposes an approach to the design of an ethical human-AI reasoning support system for decision makers in refugee law. In the context of refugee status determination, practitioners mostly rely on text data. We therefore investigate human-AI cooperation in legal natural language processing. Specifically, we want to determine which design methods can be transposed to legal text analytics. Although little work has been done so far on human-centered design methods applicable to the legal domain, we assume that introducing iterative cooperation and user engagement in the design process is (1) a method to reduce technical limitations of an NLP system and (2) that it will help design more ethical and effective applications by taking users’ preferences and feedback into account. The proposed methodology is based on three main design steps: cognitive process formalization in models understandable by both humans and computers, speculative design of prototypes, and semi-directed interviews with a sample of potential users.

Human-Centered Computing in Legal NLP: An Application to Refugee Status Determination

With Human-Centric Research (HCR) we can steer research activities so that the research outcome is beneficial for human stakeholders, such as end users. But what exactly makes research human-centric? We address this question by providing a working definition and define how a research pipeline can be split into different stages in which human-centric components can be added. Additionally, we discuss existing NLP with HCR components and define a series of guiding questions, which can serve as starting points for researchers interested in exploring human-centric research approaches. We hope that this work would inspire researchers to refine the proposed definition and to pose other questions that might be meaningful for achieving HCR.

Human-Centric Research for NLP: Towards a Definition and Guiding Questions

Motivated by practical problems, we outline a plan to sutdy the effectiveness of various families of methods in assisting users complete a downstream task of text matching. Insights from a systematic evaluation of these methods will suggest potential ways to improve user experiences in practical systems.

Understanding the Effectiveness of Model Explanations in Text Matching Tasks

Motivated by prior literature, we provide a proof of concept simulation study for an understudied interactive machine learning method, machine teaching (MT), for the text-based emotion prediction task. We compare this method experimentally against a more well-studied technique, active learning (AL). Results show the strengths of both approaches over more resource-intensive offline supervised learning. Additionally, applying AL and MT to fine-tune a pre-trained model offers further efficiency gain. We end by recommending research directions which aim to empower users in the learning process.

Teaching Interactively to Learn Emotions in Natural Language

Students learn more from doing activities and practicing their skills on assessments, yet it can be challenging and time consuming to generate such practice opportunities. In this work, we present a pipeline for generating and evaluating questions from text-based learning materials in an introductory data science course. The pipeline includes applying a T5 question generation model and a concept hierarchy extraction model on the text content, then scoring the generated questions based on their relevance to the extracted key concepts. We further classified the generated questions as either useful to learning or not with two different approaches: automated labeling by a trained GPT-3 model and manual review by expert human judges. Our results showed that the generated questions were rated favorably by all three evaluation methods. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the generated questions and outline the next steps towards refining the pipeline and promoting NLP research in educational domains.

Towards Automated Generation and Evaluation of Questions in Educational Domains

Reliability concerns around Machine Translation (MT) system deployment have been well-documented, a dominant example being medical language which has shown potential for grave harm from translation errors. In this extended abstract, we sketch a research proposal for automatically estimating the quality of machine translation systems in medical settings to ensure they convey the message a clinician seeks to communicate to a patient. We briefly summarize findings from an interview study that is targeted towards understanding the strategies clinicians use to assess the quality of human and machine translations, and the challenges they incur in the process. We then discuss the limitations of existing quality estimation techniques from the NLP literature. Finally, we propose how these findings can inform future work on designing quality estimation systems that are more directly tailored towards clinician needs.

Evaluating the Quality of Machine Translation in Medical Settings

Exposure to ideas in domains outside a scientist's own may benefit her in reformulating existing research problems in novel ways and discovering new application domains for existing solution ideas. While improved performance in scholarly search engines can help scientists efficiently identify relevant advances in domains they may already be familiar with, it may fall short of helping them explore diverse ideas outside such domains. In this paper we explore the design of systems aimed at augmenting the end-user ability in cross-domain exploration with flexible query specification. To this end, we develop an exploratory search system in which end-users can select a portion of text core to their interest from a paper abstract and retrieve papers that have a high similarity to the user-selected core aspect but differ in terms of domains. Furthermore, end-users can `zoom in' to specific domain clusters to retrieve more papers from them and understand nuanced differences within the clusters. Our case studies with scientists uncover opportunities and design implications for systems aimed at facilitating cross-domain exploration and inspiration.

Augmenting Scientific Creativity with Retrieval across Knowledge Domains

Large Language Models (LMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many Natural Language Processing (NLP) benchmarks. With the growing number of new benchmarks, we build bigger and more complex LMs. However, building new LMs may not be an ideal option owing to the cost, time and environmental impact associated with it. We explore an alternative route: can we modify data by expressing it in terms of the model's strengths, so that a question becomes easier for models to answer? We investigate if humans can decompose a hard question into a set of simpler questions that are relatively easier for models to solve. We analyze a range of datasets involving various forms of reasoning and find that it is indeed possible to significantly improve model performance (24\% for GPT3 and 29\% for RoBERTa-SQuAD along with a symbolic calculator) via decomposition. Our approach provides a viable option to involve people in NLP research in a meaningful way. Our findings indicate that Human-in-the-loop Question Decomposition (HQD) can potentially provide an alternate path to building large LMs.

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An Interactive Exploratory Tool for the Task of Hate Speech Detection

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Next from NAACL 2022

An Interactive Exploratory Tool for the Task of Hate Speech Detection

Similar lecture

Towards Adaptable and Interactive Image Captioning with Data Augmentation and Episodic Memory Aliki Anagnostopoulou, Mareike Hartmann and Daniel Sonntag (aliki.anagnostopoulou@dfki.de) Status: Accept

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