Korea, Republic of

As political attitudes have diverged ideologically in the United States, political speech has diverged linguistically. The ever-widening polarization between the US political parties is accelerated by an erosion of mutual understanding between them. We aim to make these communities more comprehensible to each other with a framework that probes community-specific responses to the same survey questions using community language models (COMMUNITYLM). In our framework we identify committed partisan members for each community on Twitter and fine-tune LMs on the tweets authored by them. We then assess the worldviews of the two groups using prompt-based probing of their corresponding LMs, with prompts that elicit opinions about public figures and groups surveyed by the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2020 Exploratory Testing Survey. We compare the responses generated by the LMs to the ANES survey results, and find a level of alignment that greatly exceeds several baseline methods. Our work aims to show that we can use community LMs to query the worldview of any group of people given a sufficiently large sample of their social media discussions or media diet.

COLING 2022

CommunityLM: Probing Partisan Worldviews from Language Models

community opinion mining

polarization

language model

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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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.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

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

Most NER methods rely on extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in the low-resource scenarios with limited training data. Existing dominant approaches usually suffer from the challenge that the target domain has different label sets compared with a resource-rich source domain, which can be concluded as class transfer and domain transfer. In this paper, we propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting (LightNER). Specifically, we construct the unified learnable verbalizer of entity categories to generate the entity span sequence and entity categories without any label-specific classifiers, thus addressing the class transfer issue. We further propose a pluggable guidance module by incorporating learnable parameters into the self-attention layer as guidance, which can re-modulate the attention and adapt pre-trained weights. Note that we only tune those inserted module with the whole parameter of the pre-trained language model fixed, thus, making our approach lightweight and flexible for low-resource scenarios and can better transfer knowledge across domains. Experimental results show that LightNER can obtain comparable performance in the standard supervised setting and outperform strong baselines in low-resource settings.

LightNER: A Lightweight Tuning Paradigm for Low-resource NER via Pluggable Prompting

We propose Neuro-Symbolic Visual Dialog (NSVD) -the first method to combine deep learning and symbolic program execution for multi-round visually-grounded reasoning. NSVD significantly outperforms existing purely-connectionist methods on two key challenges inherent to visual dialog: long-distance co-reference resolution as well as vanishing question-answering performance. We demonstrate the latter by proposing a more realistic and stricter evaluation scheme in which we use predicted answers for the full dialog history when calculating accuracy. We describe two variants of our model and show that using this new scheme, our best model achieves an accuracy of 99.72% on CLEVR-Dialog -a relative improvement of more than 10% over the state of the art while only requiring a fraction of training data. Moreover, we demonstrate that our neuro-symbolic models have a higher mean first failure round, are more robust against incomplete dialog histories, and generalize better not only to dialogs that are up to three times longer than those seen during training but also to unseen question types and scenes.

Neuro-Symbolic Visual Dialog

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC), which aims to predict text labels organized in hierarchical space, is a significant task lacking in investigation in natural language processing. Existing methods usually encode the entire hierarchical structure and fail to construct a robust label-dependent model, making it hard to make accurate predictions on sparse lower-level labels and achieving low Macro-F1. In this paper, we explore the level dependency and path dependency of the label hierarchy in a generative way for building the knowledge of upper-level labels of current path into lower-level ones, and thus propose a novel PAAM-HiA-T5 model for HTC: a hierarchy-aware T5 model with pathadaptive attention mechanism. Specifically, we generate a multi-level sequential label structure to exploit hierarchical dependency across different levels with Breadth-First Search (BFS) and T5 model. To further improve label dependency prediction within each path, we then propose an original path-adaptive attention mechanism (PAAM) to lead the model to adaptively focus on the path where the currently generated label is located, shielding the noise from other paths. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that PAAM-HiA-T5 greatly outperforms all state-of-the-art HTC approaches especially in Macro-F1.


Exploring Label Hierarchy in a Generative Way for Hierarchical Text Classification

CILDA: Contrastive Data Augmentation using Intermediate Layer Knowledge Distillation

Cross-domain named entity recognition aims to improve performance in a target domain with shared knowledge from a well-studied source domain.The previous sequence-labeling based method focuses on promoting model parameter sharing among domains. However, such a paradigm essentially ignores the domain-specific information and suffers from entity type conflicts. To address these issues, we propose a novel machine reading comprehension based framework, named DoSEA, which can identify domain-specific semantic differences and mitigate the subtype conflicts between domains. Concretely, we introduce an entity existence discrimination task and an entity-aware training setting, to recognize inconsistent entity annotations in the source domain and bring additional reference to better share information across domains. Experiments on six datasets prove the effectiveness of our DoSEA.

DoSEA: A Domain-specific Entity-aware Framework for Cross-Domain Named Entity Recogition

In recent years, data augmentation has become an important field of machine learning. While images can use simple techniques such as cropping or rotating, textual data augmentation needs more complex manipulations to ensure that the generated examples are useful. Variational auto-encoders (VAE) and its conditional variant the Conditional-VAE (CVAE) are often used to generate new textual data, both relying on a good enough training of the generator so that it doesn't create examples of the wrong class. In this paper, we explore a simpler way to use VAE for data augmentation: the training of one VAE per class. We show on several dataset sizes, as well as on four different binary classification tasks, that it outperforms other generative data augmentation techniques.

Effective data augmentation for sentence classification using one VAE per class

Over a decade, the research field of computational linguistics has witnessed the growth of corpora and models for natural language inference (NLI) for rich-resource languages such as English and Chinese. A large-scale and high-quality corpus is necessary for studies on NLI for Vietnamese, which can be considered a low-resource language. In this paper, we introduce ViNLI (Vietnamese Natural Language Inference), an open-domain and high-quality corpus for evaluating Vietnamese NLI models, which is created and evaluated with a strict process of quality control. ViNLI comprises over 30,000 human-annotated premise-hypothesis sentence pairs extracted from more than 800 online news articles on 13 distinct topics. In this paper, we introduce the guidelines for corpus creation which take the specific characteristics of the Vietnamese language in expressing entailment and contradiction into account. To evaluate the challenging level of our corpus, we conduct experiments with state-of-the-art deep neural networks and pre-trained models on our dataset. The best system performance is still far from human performance (a 14.20% gap in accuracy). The ViNLI corpus is a challenging corpus to accelerate progress in Vietnamese computational linguistics. Our corpus is available publicly for research purposes.

ViNLI: A Vietnamese Corpus for Studies on Open-Domain Natural Language Inference

While end-to-end neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved impressive progress, noisy input usually leads models to become fragile and unstable. Generating adversarial examples as the augmented data has been proved to be useful to alleviate this problem. Existing methods for adversarial example generation (AEG) are word-level or character-level, which ignore the ubiquitous phrase structure. In this paper, we propose a Phrase-level Adversarial Example Generation (PAEG) framework to enhance the robustness of the translation model. Our method further improves the gradientbased word-level AEG method by adopting a phrase-level substitution strategy. We verify our method on three benchmarks, including LDC Chinese-English, IWSLT14 GermanEnglish, and WMT14 English-German tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves translation performance and robustness to noise compared to previous strong baselines

PAEG: Phrase-level Adversarial Example Generation for Neural Machine Translation

Existing works on rumor resolution have shown great potential in recognizing word appearance and user participation. However, they ignore the intrinsic propagation mechanisms of rumors and present poor adaptive ability when unprecedented news emerges. To exploit the fine-grained rumor diffusion patterns and generalize rumor resolution methods, we formulate a predecessor task to identify triggering posts, and then exploit their characteristics to facilitate rumor verification. We design a tree-structured annotation interface and extend PHEME dataset with labels on the message level. Data analysis shows that triggers play a critical role in verifying rumors and present similar lingual patterns across irrelevant events. We propose a graph-based model considering the direction and interaction of information flow to implement role-aware rumor resolution. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model and progressive scheme.

A Progressive Framework for Role-Aware Rumor Resolution

While Transformers have had significant success in paragraph generation, they treat sentences as linear sequences of tokens and often neglect their hierarchical information. Prior work has shown that decomposing the levels of granularity~(e.g., word, phrase, or sentence) for input tokens has produced substantial improvements, suggesting the possibility of enhancing Transformers via more fine-grained modeling of granularity. In this work, we propose a continuous decomposition of granularity for neural paraphrase generation (C-DNPG). In order to efficiently incorporate granularity into sentence encoding, C-DNPG introduces a granularity-aware attention (GA-Attention) mechanism which extends the multi-head self-attention with: 1) a granularity head that automatically infers the hierarchical structure of a sentence by neurally estimating the granularity level of each input token; and 2) two novel attention masks, namely, granularity resonance and granularity scope, to efficiently encode granularity into attention. Experiments on two benchmarks, including Quora question pairs and Twitter URLs have shown that C-DNPG outperforms baseline models by a remarkable margin and achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of many metrics. Qualitative analysis reveals that C-DNPG indeed captures fine-grained levels of granularity with effectiveness.

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LightNER: A Lightweight Tuning Paradigm for Low-resource NER via Pluggable Prompting

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