United States

The present work constitutes an attempt to investigate the relational structures learnt by mBERT, a multilingual transformer-based network, with respect to different cross-linguistic regularities proposed in the fields of theoretical and quantitative linguistics. We pursued this objective by relying on a zero-shot transfer experiment, evaluating the model&#39;s ability to generalize its native task to artificial languages that could either respect or violate some proposed language universal, and comparing its performance to the output of BERT, a monolingual model with an identical configuration. We created four artificial corpora through a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar by manipulating the distribution of tokens and the structure of their dependency relations. We showed that while both models were favoured by a Zipfian distribution of the tokens and by the presence of head-dependency type structures, the multilingual transformer network exhibited a stronger reliance on hierarchical cues compared to its monolingual counterpart.

NAACL 2022

Multilingualism Encourages Recursion: a Transfer Study with mBERT

zipf's law

language universals

massively multilingual models

mbert

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP).

A registration is required to access this event. Access to the event site will be granted to all registered attendees on **November 16th**. If you have not already done so, please register using the link below:
 
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IJCNLP-AACL 2022

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

The present work constitutes an attempt to investigate the relational structures learnt by mBERT, a multilingual transformer-based network, with respect to different cross-linguistic regularities proposed in the fields of theoretical and quantitative linguistics. We pursued this objective by relying on a zero-shot transfer experiment, evaluating the model's ability to generalize its native task to artificial languages that could either respect or violate some proposed language universal, and comparing its performance to the output of BERT, a monolingual model with an identical configuration. We created four artificial corpora through a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar by manipulating the distribution of tokens and the structure of their dependency relations. We showed that while both models were favoured by a Zipfian distribution of the tokens and by the presence of head-dependency type structures, the multilingual transformer network exhibited a stronger reliance on hierarchical cues compared to its monolingual counterpart.

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

This study describes the structure and the results of the SIGTYP 2022 shared task on the prediction of cognate reflexes from multilingual wordlists. We asked participants to submit systems that would predict words in individual languages with the help of cognate words from related languages. Training and surprise data were based on standardized multilingual wordlists from several language families. Four teams submitted a total of eight systems, including both neural and non-neural systems, as well as systems adjusted to the task and systems using more general settings. While all systems showed a rather promising performance, reflecting the overwhelming regularity of sound change, the best performance throughout was achieved by a system based on convolutional networks originally designed for image restoration.

The SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task on the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes

This talk introduces a database for cross-linguistic modal semantics. the purpose of this database is to (1) enable ongoing consolidation of modal semantic typological knowledge into a repository according to uniform data standards and to (2) provide data for investigations in crosslinguistic modal semantic theory and experiments explaining such theories. We describe the kind of semantic variation that the database aims to record, the format of the data, and a current snapshot of the database, emphasizing access and contribution to the database in light of the goals above. Additionally, we dicuss some research potentials of this database.

A Database for Modal Semantic Typology

In Jäger (2019) a computational framework was defined to start from parallel word lists of related languages and infer the corresponding vocabulary of the shared proto-language. The SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task is closely related. The main difference is that what is to be reconstructed is not the proto-form but an unknown word from an extant language. The system described here is a re-implementation of the tools used in the mentioned paper, adapted to the current task.

Bayesian phylogenetic cognate prediction

This work describes an implementation of the “extended alignment” model for cognate reflex prediction submitted to the “SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task on the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes”. Similarly to List et al. (2022a), the technique involves an automatic extension of sequence alignments with multilayered vectors that encode informational tiers on both site-specific traits, such as sound classes and distinctive features, as well as contextual and suprasegmental ones, conveyed by cross-site referrals and replication. The method allows to generalize the problem of cognate reflex prediction as a classification problem, with models trained using a parallel corpus of cognate sets. A model using random forests is trained and evaluated on the shared task for reflex prediction, and the experimental results are presented and discussed along with some differences to other implementations.

Reflex Prediction Through Extended Alignments

Digital harms can manifest across any interface. Key problems in addressing these harms include the high individuality of harms and the fast-changing nature of digital systems. As a result, we still lack a systematic approach to study harms and produce interventions for end-users. We put forward GreaseVision, a new framework that enables end-users to collaboratively develop interventions against harms in software using a no-code approach and recent advances in few-shot machine learning. The contribution of the framework and tool allow individual end-users to study their usage history and create personalized interventions. Our contribution also enables researchers to study the distribution of harms and interventions at scale.

Rewriting the Rules of the Interface

This work describes the process of creating a corpus of Twitter conversations annotated for the presence of \textit{counterspeech} in response to toxic speech related to axes of discrimination linked to sexism, racism and homophobia. 
The main novelty is an annotated dataset comprising relevant tweets in their context of occurrence. 
The corpus is made up of tweets and responses captured by different profiles replying to discriminatory content or objectionably couched news. 
An annotation scheme was created to illustrate the relevant dimensions of toxic speech and counterspeech.
An analysis of the collected and annotated data and of the Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA) that emerged during the annotation process is included. Moreover, we report about preliminary experiments on automatic \textit{counterspeech} detection, based on supervised automatic learning models trained on the new dataset. 
The results highlight the fundamental role played by the context in this detection task, confirming our intuitions about the importance to collect tweets in their context of occurrence.

Counter-TWIT: An Italian Corpus for Online Counterspeech in Ecological Contexts

Analyzing ethnic or religious bias is important for improving fairness, accountability, and transparency of natural language processing models. However, many techniques rely on human-compiled lists of bias terms, which are expensive to create and are limited in coverage. In this study, we present a fully data-driven pipeline for generating a knowledge graph (KG) of cultural knowledge and stereotypes. Our resulting KG covers 5 religious groups and 5 nationalities and can easily be extended to include more entities. Our human evaluation shows that the majority (59.2%) of non-singleton entries are coherent and complete stereotypes. We further show that performing intermediate masked language model training on the verbalized KG leads to a higher level of cultural awareness in the model and has the potential to increase classification performance on knowledge-crucial samples on a related task, i.e., hate speech detection.

StereoKG: Data-Driven Knowledge Graph Construction for Cultural Knowledge and Stereotypes

Uses of pejorative expressions can be benign or actively empowering. When models for abuse detection misclassify these expressions as derogatory, they inadvertently censor productive conversations held by marginalized groups. One way to engage with non-dominant perspectives is to add context around conversations. Previous research has leveraged user- and thread-level features, but it often neglects the spaces within which productive conversations take place. Our paper highlights how community context can improve classification outcomes in abusive language detection. We make two main contributions to this end. First, we demonstrate that online communities cluster by the nature of their support towards victims of abuse. Second, we establish how community context improves accuracy and reduces the false positive rates of state-of-the-art abusive language classifiers. These findings suggest a promising direction for context-aware models in abusive language research.

Enriching Abusive Language Detection with Community Context

"Dogwhistles" are expressions intended by the speaker to have two messages: a socially unacceptable "in-group" message understood by a subset of listeners and a benign message intended for the out-group. We take the result of a word-replacement survey of the Swedish population intended to reveal how dogwhistles
are understood, and we show that the difficulty of annotating dogwhistles is reflected in the separability of the space of a sentence-transformer
Swedish BERT trained on general data.

Distributional properties of political dogwhistle representations in Swedish
BERT

Toxic speech is regarded as one of the crucial issues plaguing online social media today. Most recent work on toxic speech detection is constrained to the modality of text and written conversations with very limited work on toxicity detection from spoken utterances or using the modality of speech. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset DeToxy, the first publicly available toxicity annotated dataset for the English language. DeToxy is sourced from various openly available speech databases and consists of over 2 million utterances. We believe that our dataset would act as a benchmark for the relatively new and unexplored SLP task of detecting toxicity from spoken utterances and boost further research in this space. Finally, we also provide strong unimodal baselines for our dataset and compare traditional 2-step cascade and End-to-End (E2E) approaches. Our experiments show that in the case of spoken
utterances, text-based approaches are largely dependent on gold human-annotated transcripts for their performance and also suffer from the problem of keyword bias. However, the presence of speech files in DeToxy helps facilitates the development of E2E speech models which alleviate both the above-stated problems by better capturing speech clues.

Multilingualism Encourages Recursion: a Transfer Study with mBERT

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The SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task on the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes

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Multilingualism Encourages Recursion: a Transfer Study with mBERT

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Next from NAACL 2022

The SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task on the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes

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Detecting Urgency in Multilingual Medical SMS in Kenya

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