Korea, Republic of

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&#39;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.

COLING 2022

Effective data augmentation for sentence classification using one VAE per class

vaes

generative models

data augmentation

Promoted by the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC), the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and Web (WebMedia) is the main event of the theme in Brazil and an excellent opportunity for scientific and technical exchange among students, researchers and professionals in the areas of Multimedia, Hypermedia and Web. This year we will be celebrating to 26th edition of WebMedia, which will be held online from november 30th to December 4th .

Webmedia 2020’s programming includes:

– Technical sessions for the presentation of scientific papers
– National and international keynotes
– Panel with companies
– Workshops
– Short Courses
– Open community meetings

The topics of interest for submitting papers are:

– Web and Social Networks
– Multimedia
– Digital TV, Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing

Besides the main track, WebMedia 2020 will have in parallel the Tools and Applications Workshop, works Tools and Applications Workshop, the Workshop on Undergraduate Research Work and the Workshop The Future of Interactive.

The WebMedia 2020 organization is under the responsibility of the Programa de Pós-graduação Doutorado em Ciência da Computação – Associação UFMA/UFPI (DCCMAPI), do Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciência da Computação/ CCET (PPGCC), do Laboratory of Advanced Web Systems/UFMA (LAWS) e do Laboratório de Sistemas Multimídia/UFMA (TELEMÍDIA).).

#PartiuWebMedia2020 #WebMedia2020

WebMedia 2020

Promoted by the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC), the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and Web (WebMedia) is the main event of the theme in Brazil and an excellent opportunity for scientific and technical exchange among students, researchers and professionals in the areas of Multimedia, Hypermedia and Web.

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.

poster

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### 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!<br><br><br>

To gain access to this event page you are required to register.<br> 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.

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.

Continuous Decomposition of Granularity for Neural Paraphrase Generation

In natural language, referencing objects at different levels of specificity is a fundamental pragmatic mechanism for efficient communication in context. We develop a novel communication game, the hierarchical reference game, to study the emergence of such reference systems in artificial agents. We consider a simplified world, in which concepts are abstractions over a set of primitive attributes (e.g., color, style, shape). Depending on how many attributes are combined, concepts are more general ("circle") or more specific ("red dotted circle"). Based on the context, the agents have to communicate at different levels of this hierarchy. Our results show that the agents learn to play the game successfully and can even generalize to novel concepts. To achieve abstraction, they use implicit (omitting irrelevant information) and explicit (indicating that attributes are irrelevant) strategies. In addition, the compositional structure underlying the concept hierarchy is reflected in the emergent protocols, indicating that the need to develop hierarchical reference systems supports the emergence of compositionality.

Emergence of hierarchical reference systems in multi-agent communication

KiPT: Knowledge-injected Prompt Tuning for Event Detection

Knowledge-injected Prompt Tuning for Event Detection

With the rapid development of automatic fake news detection technology, fact extraction and verification (FEVER) has been attracting more attention. The task aims to extract the most related fact evidences from millions of open-domain Wikipedia documents and then verify the credibility of corresponding claims. Although several strong models have been proposed for the task and they have made great progress, we argue that they fail to utilize multi-view contextual information and thus cannot obtain better performance. In this pa per, we propose to integrate multi-view con textual information (IMCI) for fact extraction and verification. For each evidence sentence, we define two kinds of context, i.e.， intra-document context and inter-document con text. Intra-document context consists of the document title and all the other sentences from the same document. Inter-document context consists of all other evidences which may come from different documents. Then we integrate the multi-view contextual information to encode the evidence sentences to handle the task. Our experimental results on FEVER 1.0 shared task show that our IMCI framework makes great progress on both fact extraction and verification, and achieves state-of-the-art performance with a winning FEVER score of 73.96% and label accuracy of 77.25% on the online blind test set. We also conduct ablation study to detect the impact of multi-view contextual information.

IMCI: Integrate Multi-view Contextual Information for Fact Extraction and Verification

Though existing researches have achieved impressive results in controlled text generation, they focus mainly on single-attribute control. However, in applications like automatic comments, the topic and sentiment need to be controlled simultaneously. In this work, we propose a new framework for multi-attribute controlled text generation. To achieve this, we design a contrastive-generator that can effectively generate texts with more attributes. In order to increase the convergence of the text on the desired attributes, we adopt an external-discriminator to distinguish whether the generated text holds the desired attributes. Moreover, we propose top-n weighted decoding to further improve the relevance of texts to attributes. Automated evaluations and human evaluations show that our framework achieves remarkable controllability in multi-attribute generation while keeping the text fluent and diverse. It also yields promising performance on zero-shot generation.

Multi-Attribute Controlled Text Generation with Contrastive-Generator and External-Discriminator

Unsupervised summarization methods have achieved remarkable results by incorporating representations from pre-trained language models. However, existing methods fail to consider efficiency and effectiveness at the same time
when the input document is extremely long. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we proposed an efficient Coarse-to-Fine Facet-Aware Ranking (C2F-FAR) framework for unsupervised long document summarization, which is based on the semantic block. The semantic block refers to continuous sentences in the document that describe the same facet. Specifically, we address this problem by converting the one-step ranking method into the hierarchical multi-granularity two-stage ranking. In the coarse-level stage, we propose a new segment algorithm to split the document into facetaware semantic blocks and then filter insignificant blocks. In the fine-level stage, we select salient sentences in each block and then extract
the final summary from selected sentences. We evaluate our framework on four long document summarization datasets: Gov-Report, BillSum, arXiv, and PubMed. Our C2F-FAR can achieve new state-of-the-art unsupervised summarization results on Gov-Report and BillSum. In addition, our method speeds up 4-28 times more than previous methods

An Efficient Coarse-to-Fine Facet-Aware Unsupervised Summarization Framework based on Semantic Blocks

Prerecorded laughter accompanying dialog in comedy TV shows encourages the audience to laugh by clearly marking humorous moments in the show. We present an approach for automatically detecting humor in the \textit{Friends} TV show using multimodal data. Our model is capable of recognizing whether an utterance is humorous or not and assess the intensity of it. We use the prerecorded laughter in the show as annotation as it marks humor and the length of the audience's laughter tells us how funny a given joke is. We evaluate the model on episodes the model has not been exposed to during the training phase. Our results show that the model is capable of correctly detecting whether an utterance is humorous 78\% of the time and how long the audience's laughter reaction should last with a mean absolute error of 600 milliseconds.

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

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