Korea, Republic of

Distance metric learning has become a popular solution for few-shot Named Entity Recognition~(NER). The typical setup aims to learn a similarity metric for measuring the semantic similarity between test samples and referents, where each referent represents an entity class. The effect of this setup may, however, be compromised for two reasons. First, there is typically a limited optimization exerted on the representations of entity tokens after initing by pre-trained language models. Second, the referents may be far from representing corresponding entity classes due to the label scarcity in the few-shot setting. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach named COntrastive learning with Prompt guiding for few-shot NER (COPNER). We introduce a novel prompt composed of class-specific words to COPNER to serve as 1) supervision signals for conducting contrastive learning to optimize token representations; 2) metric referents for distance-metric inference on test samples. Experimental results demonstrate that COPNER outperforms state-of-the-art models with a significant margin in most cases. Moreover, COPNER shows great potential in the zero-shot setting.

COLING 2022

COPNER: Contrastive Learning with Prompt Guiding for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

prompt guiding

contrastive learning

few-shot learning

named entity recognition

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 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 will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
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ACL 2022

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 (NLP). 

technical paper

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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.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa have dramatically improved the performance of various natural language processing tasks. Although these models are trained on large amounts of raw text, they have no explicit grounding in real-world entities. Knowledge graphs (KGs) are manually annotated with factual knowledge and store the relations between nodes corresponding to entities as labeled edges. This paper proposes a mechanism called KG-attention, which integrates the structure of a KG into recent PLM architectures. Unlike the existing PLM+KG integration methods, KG-attention generalizes the embeddings of neighboring entities using the relation embeddings; accordingly, it can handle relations between unconnected entities in the KG. Experimental results demonstrated that our method achieved significant improvements in a relation classification task, an entity typing task, and several language comprehension tasks.

Enhancing Contextual Word Representations Using Embedding of Neighboring Entities in Knowledge Graphs

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have been shown to exhibit sociodemographic biases, such as against gender and race, raising concerns about downstream biases in language technologies. However, PLMs' biases against people with disabilities (PWDs) have received little attention despite their potential to cause similar harm. Using perturbation sensitivity analysis, we test an assortment of popular word embedding-based and transformer-based PLMs and show significant biases against PWDs in all of them. The results demonstrate how models trained on large corpora widely favor ableist language.

A Study of Implicit Bias in Pretrained Language Models against People with Disabilities

Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to extract relations towards the continuous and iterative arrival of new data, of which the major challenge is the catastrophic forgetting of old tasks. In order to alleviate this critical problem for enhanced CRE performance, we propose a novel Continual Relation Extraction framework with Contrastive Learning, namely CRECL, which is built with a classification network and a prototypical contrastive network to achieve the incremental-class learning of CRE. Specifically, in the contrastive network a given instance is contrasted with the prototype of each candidate relations stored in the memory module. Such contrastive learning scheme ensures the data distributions of all tasks more distinguishable, so as to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting further. Our experiment results not only demonstrate our CRECL’s advantage over the state-of-the-art baselines on two public datasets, but also verify the effectiveness of CRECL’s contrastive learning on improving CRE performance.

Improving Continual Relation Extraction through Prototypical Contrastive Learning

Semantic parsing considers the task of mapping a natural language sentence into a target formal representation, where various sophisticated sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models have been applied with promising results.
Generally, these target representations follow a syntax formalism that limits permitted forms.
However, it is neither easy nor flexible to explicitly integrate this syntax formalism into a neural seq2seq model.
In this paper, we present a structure-aware self-attention language model to capture structural information of target representations and propose a knowledge distillation based approach to incorporating the target language model into a seq2seq model, where grammar rules or sketches are not required in the training process.
An ablation study shows that the proposed language model can notably improve the performance of the baseline model.
The experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance among neural approaches on four semantic parsing (ATIS, GEO) and Python code generation (Django, CoNaLa) tasks.

Transferring Knowledge from Structure-aware Self-attention Language Model to Sequence-to-Sequence Semantic Parsing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become increasingly utilized to provide adaptivity in educational applications. However, recent research has highlighted a variety of biases in pre-trained language models. While existing studies investigate bias in different domains, they are limited in addressing fine-grained analysis on educational and multilingual corpora.
In this work, we analyze bias across text and through multiple architectures on a corpus of 9,165 German peer-reviews collected from university students over five years. Notably, our corpus includes labels such as helpfulness, quality, and critical aspect ratings from the peer-review recipient as well as demographic attributes. We conduct a Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) analysis on (1) our collected corpus in connection with the clustered labels, (2) the most common pre-trained German language models (T5, BERT, and GPT-2) and GloVe embeddings, and (3) the language models after fine-tuning on our collected data-set. In contrast to our initial expectations, we found that our collected corpus does not reveal many biases in the co-occurrence analysis or in the GloVe embeddings. However, the pre-trained German language models find substantial conceptual, racial, and gender bias and have significant changes in bias across conceptual and racial axes during fine-tuning on the peer-review data. With our research, we aim to contribute to the fourth UN sustainability goal (quality education) with a novel dataset, an understanding of biases in natural language education data, and the potential harms of not counteracting biases in language models for educational tasks.

Bias at a Second Glance: A Deep Dive into Bias for German Educational Peer-Review Data Modeling

Stance detection aims to identify the attitude from an opinion towards a certain target. De- spite the significant progress on this task, it is extremely time-consuming and budget- unfriendly to collect sufficient high-quality la- beled data for every new target under fully- supervised learning, whereas unlabeled data can be collected easier. Therefore, this paper is devoted to few-shot stance detection and investigating how to achieve satisfactory re- sults in semi-supervised settings. As a target- oriented task, the core idea of semi-supervised few-shot stance detection is to make better use of target-relevant information from labeled and unlabeled data. Therefore, we develop a novel target-aware semi-supervised framework. Specifically, we propose a target-aware con- trastive learning objective to learn more distin- guishable representations for different targets. Such an objective can be easily applied with or without unlabeled data. Furthermore, to thor- oughly exploit the unlabeled data and facili- tate the model to learn target-relevant stance features in the opinion content, we explore a simple but effective target-aware consistency regularization combined with a self-training strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art per- formance on multiple benchmark datasets in the few-shot setting.

Target Really Matters: Target-aware Contrastive Learning and Consistency Regularization for Few-shot Stance Detection

Within textual emotion classification, the set of relevant labels depends on the domain and application scenario and might not be known at the time of model development. This conflicts with the classical paradigm of supervised learning in which the labels need to be predefined. A solution to obtain a model with a flexible set of labels is to use the paradigm of zero-shot learning as a natural language inference task, which in addition adds the advantage of not needing any labeled training data. This raises the question how to prompt a natural language inference model for zero-shot learning emotion classification. Options for prompt formulations include the emotion name anger alone or the statement “This text expresses anger”. With this paper, we analyze how sensitive a natural language inference-based zero-shot-learning classifier is to such changes to the prompt under consideration of the corpus: How carefully does the prompt need to be selected? We perform experiments on an established set of emotion datasets presenting different language registers according to different sources (tweets, events, blogs)
with three natural language inference models and show that indeed the choice of a particular prompt formulation needs to fit to the corpus. We show that this challenge can be tackled with combinations of multiple prompts. Such ensemble is more robust across corpora than individual prompts and shows nearly the same
performance as the individual best prompt for a particular corpus.

Natural Language Inference Prompts for Zero-shot Emotion Classification in Text across Corpora

Data augmentation with mixup has shown to be effective on the NLP tasks. Although its great success, the mixup still has shortcomings. First, vanilla mixup randomly selects one sample to generate the mixup sample for a given sample. It remains unclear how to best choose the input samples for the mixup. Second, linear interpolation limits the space of synthetic data and its regularization effect. In this paper, we propose the dynamic nonlinear mixup with distance-based sample selection, which not only generates multiple sample pairs based on the distance between each sample but also enlarges the space of synthetic samples. Specifically, we compute the distance between each input data by cosine similarity and select multiple samples for a given sample. Then we use the dynamic nonlinear mixup to fuse sample pairs. It does not use a linear, scalar mixing strategy, but a nonlinear interpolation strategy, where the mixing strategy is adaptively updated for the input and label pairs. Experiments on the multiple public datasets demonstrate that dynamic nonlinear mixup outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Dynamic Nonlinear Mixup with Distance-based Sample Selection

Noise Learning for Text Classification: A Benchmark

In embodied cognition, physical experiences are believed to shape abstract cognition, such as natural language and reasoning. Image schemas were introduced as spatio-temporal cognitive building blocks that capture these recurring sensorimotor experiences. 
The few existing approaches for automatic detection of image schemas in natural language rely on specific assumptions about word classes as indicators of spatio-temporal events. Furthermore, the lack of sufficiently large, annotated datasets makes evaluation and supervised learning difficult. We propose to build on the recent success of large multilingual pretrained language models and a small dataset of examples from image schema literature to train a supervised classiﬁer that classifies natural language expressions of varying lengths into image schemas. Despite most of the training data being in English with few examples for German, the model performs best in German. Additionally, we analyse the model’s zero-shot performance in Russian, French, and Mandarin. To further investigate the model’s behaviour, we utilize local linear approximations for prediction probabilities that indicate which words in a sentence the model relies on for its ﬁnal classiﬁcation decision. Code and dataset are publicly available (https://tinyurl.com/24haedv5).

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COPNER: Contrastive Learning with Prompt Guiding for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

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CONTaiNER: Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition via Contrastive Learning