Korea, Republic of

Neural table-to-text generation approaches are data-hungry, limiting their adaptation for low-resource real-world applications. Previous works mostly resort to Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to generate fluent summaries of a table. However, they often contain hallucinated contents due to the uncontrolled nature of PLMs. Moreover, the topological differences between tables and sequences are rarely studied. Last but not least, fine-tuning on PLMs with a handful of instances may lead to over-fitting and catastrophic forgetting. To alleviate these problems, we propose a prompt-based approach, Prefix-Controlled Generator (i.e., PCG), for few-shot table-to-text generation. We prepend a task-specific prefix for a PLM to make the table structure better fit the pre-trained input. In addition, we generate an input-specific prefix to control the factual contents and word order of the generated text. Both automatic and human evaluations on different domains (humans, books and songs) of the Wikibio dataset show substantial improvements over baseline approaches.

COLING 2022

Few-shot Table-to-text Generation with Prefix-Controlled Generator

table-to-text generation

prompt

controlled generation

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

poster

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Hierarchical Attention Network for Explainable Depression Detection on Twitter Aided by Metaphor Concept Mappings

In this paper, we introduce a new QA dataset, CMQA, which is conditional and contains multiple answers of different quantities. Samples in CMQA have two characteristics: first, multi-span answers can be caused by users lacking related domain knowledge and asking ambiguous questions. In such cases, questions might need multiple conditions to specify the circumstance. Second, multiple answers in a sample might belong to different granularities, and there are often hierarchical relations among them.

Automatic Identification of 5C Vaccine Behaviour on Social Media

Causal Emotion Entailment (CEE) aims to discover the potential causes behind an emotion in a conversational utterance. Previous works formalize CEE as independent utterance pair classification problems, with emotion and speaker information neglected. From a new perspective, this paper considers CEE in a joint framework. We classify multiple utterances synchronously to capture the correlations between utterances in a global view and propose a Two-Stream Attention Model (TSAM) to effectively model the speaker's emotional influences in the conversational history. Specifically, the TSAM comprises three modules: Emotion Attention Network (EAN), Speaker Attention Network (SAN), and interaction module. The EAN and SAN incorporate emotion and speaker information in parallel, and the subsequent interaction module effectively interchanges relevant information between the EAN and SAN via a mutual BiAffine transformation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance and outperforms baselines remarkably.

TSAM: A Two-Stream Attention Model for Causal Emotion Entailment

The cross-entropy loss function is widely used and generally considered the default loss function for text classification. When it comes to ordinal text classification where there is an ordinal relationship between labels, the cross-entropy is not optimal as it does not incorporate the ordinal character into its feedback. In this paper, we propose a new simple loss function called ordinal log-loss (OLL). We show that this loss function outperforms state-of-the-art previously introduced losses on four benchmark text classification datasets.

A simple log-based loss function for ordinal text classification

Distantly supervised relation extraction is challenging due to the noise within data. Recent methods focus on exploiting bag representations based on deep neural networks with complex de-noising scheme to achieve remarkable performance. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective BERT-based Graph convolutional network Model (i.e., BGM). Our BGM comprises of an instance embedding module and a bag representation module. The instance embedding module uses a BERT-based pretrained language model to extract key information from each instance. The bag representaion module constructs the corresponding bag graph then apply a convolutional operation to obtain the bag representation. Our BGM model achieves a considerable improvement on two benchmark datasets, i.e., NYT10 and GDS.

A Simple Model for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) is crucial and fundamental for video understanding. Previous works typically model the target activity referred to the sentence query in a video by extracting the appearance information from each whole frame. However, these methods fail to distinguish visually similar background noise and capture subtle details of small objects. Although a few recent works additionally adopt a detection model to filter out the background contents and capture local appearances of foreground objects, they rely on the quality of the detection model and suffer from the time-consuming detection process. To this end, we propose a novel detection-free framework for TSG—Grounding with Learnable Foreground (GLF), which efficiently learns to locate the foreground regions related to the query in consecutive frames for better modelling the target activity. Specifically, we first split each video frame into multiple patch candidates of equal size, and reformulate the foreground detection problem as a patch localization task. Then, we develop a self-supervised coarse-to-fine paradigm to learn to locate the most query-relevant patch in each frame and aggregate them among the video for final grounding. Further, we employ a multi-scale patch reasoning strategy to capture more fine-grained foreground information. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets (Charades-STA, TACoS, ActivityNet) show that the proposed GLF outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Learning to Focus on the Foreground for Temporal Sentence Grounding

Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) has continued to attract research attention. However, most existing studies only explore the internal features of the Chinese language but neglect other lingual modal features. Actually, as another modal knowledge of the Chinese language, English contains rich prompts about entities that can potentially be applied to improve the performance of Chinese NER. Therefore, in this study, we explore the bilingual enhancement for Chinese NER and propose a unified bilingual interaction module called the Adapted Cross-Transformers with Global Sparse Attention (ACT-S) to capture the interaction of bilingual information. We utilize a model built upon several different ACT-Ss to integrate the rich English information into the Chinese representation. Moreover, our model can learn the interaction of information between bilinguals (inter-features) and the dependency information within Chinese (intra-features). Compared with existing Chinese NER methods, our proposed model can better handle entities with complex structures. The English text that enhances the model is automatically generated by machine translation, avoiding high labour costs. Experimental results on four well-known benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed model.

Two Languages Are Better Than One: Bilingual Enhancement For Chinese Named Entity Recognition

Most previous work on temporal relation extraction only focused on extracting the temporal relations among events or suffered from the issue of different expressions of events, timexes and Document Creation Time (DCT). Moreover, DCT can act as a hub to semantically connect the other events and timexes in a document. Unfortunately, previous work cannot benefit from such critical information. To address the above issues, we propose a unified DCT-centered Temporal Relation Extraction model DTRE to identify the relations among events, timexes and DCT. Specifically, sentence-style DCT representation is introduced to address the first issue and unify event expressions, timexes and DCT. Then, a DCT-aware graph is applied to obtain their contextual structural representations. Furthermore, a DCT-anchoring multi-task learning framework is proposed to jointly predict three types of temporal relations in a batch. Finally, we apply a DCT-guided global inference to further enhance the global consistency among different relations. Experimental results on three datasets show that our DTRE outperforms several SOTA baselines on E-E, E-T and E-D significantly.

DCT-Centered Temporal Relation Extraction

Debiasing word embeddings has been largely limited to individual and independent social categories. However, real-world corpora typically present multiple social categories that possibly correlate or intersect with each other. For instance, “hair weaves” is stereotypically associated with African American females, but neither African American nor females alone. Therefore, this work studies biases associated with multiple social categories: joint biases induced by the union of different categories and intersectional biases that do not overlap with the biases of the constituent categories. We first empirically observe that individual biases intersect non-trivially (i.e., over a one-dimensional subspace). Drawing from the intersectional
theory in social science and the linguistic theory, we then construct an intersectional
subspace to debias for multiple social categories using the nonlinear geometry of individual biases. Empirical evaluations corroborate the efficacy of our approach.

Debiasing Word Embeddings with Nonlinear Geometry

Quotation extraction aims to extract quotations from written text. There are three components in a quotation: source refers to the holder of the quotation, cue is the trigger word(s), and content is the main body. Existing solutions for quotation extraction mainly utilize rule-based approaches and sequence labeling models. While rule-based approaches often lead to low recalls, sequence labeling models cannot well handle quotations with complicated structures. In this paper, we propose the Context and Former-Label Enhanced Net (CofeNet) for quotation extraction. CofeNet is able to extract complicated quotations with components of variable lengths and complicated structures. On two public datasets (i.e., PolNeAR and Riqua) and one proprietary dataset (i.e., PoliticsZH), we show that our CofeNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on complicated quotation extraction.

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Hierarchical Attention Network for Explainable Depression Detection on Twitter Aided by Metaphor Concept Mappings

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