Korea, Republic of

Document-level Event Factuality Identification (DEFI) predicts the factuality of a specific event based on a document from which the event can be derived, which is a fundamental and crucial task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, most previous studies only considered sentence-level task and did not adopt document-level knowledge. Moreover, they modelled DEFI as a typical text classification task depending on annotated information heavily, and limited to the task-specific corpus only, which resulted in data scarcity. To tackle these issues, we propose a new framework formulating DEFI as Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks considering both Span-Extraction (Ext) and Multiple-Choice (Mch). Our model does not employ any other explicit annotated information, and utilizes Transfer Learning (TL) to extract knowledge from universal large-scale MRC corpora for cross-domain data augmentation. The empirical results on DLEFM corpus demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-arts.

COLING 2022

Document-level Event Factuality Identification via Machine Reading Comprehension Frameworks with Transfer Learning

machine reading comprehension framework

document-level event factuality identification

bert

transfer learning

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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 and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

[![](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.

Deep prompt tuning (DPT) has gained great success in most natural language processing~(NLP) tasks. However, it is not well-investigated in dense retrieval where fine-tuning~(FT) still dominates. When deploying multiple retrieval tasks using the same backbone model~(e.g., RoBERTa), FT-based methods are unfriendly in terms of deployment cost: each new retrieval model needs to repeatedly deploy the backbone model without reuse. To reduce the deployment cost in such a scenario, this work investigates applying DPT in dense retrieval. The challenge is that directly applying DPT in dense retrieval largely underperforms FT methods. To compensate for the performance drop, we propose two model-agnostic and task-agnostic strategies for DPT-based retrievers, namely retrieval-oriented intermediate pretraining and unified negative mining, as a general approach that could be compatible with any pre-trained language model and retrieval task. The experimental results show that the proposed method (called DPTDR) outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on both MS-MARCO and Natural Questions. We also conduct ablation studies to examine the effectiveness of each strategy in DPTDR. We believe this work facilitates the industry, as it saves enormous efforts and costs of deployment and increases the utility of computing resources. Our code is available at https://github.com/tangzhy/DPTDR.

DPTDR: Deep Prompt Tuning for Dense Passage Retrieval

The existing research efforts in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) have focused on developing the expressive ability of neural networks to fuse information from different modalities. However, these approaches lack a mechanism to understand the complex relations within and across different modalities, since some sentiments may be scattered in different modalities. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical graph contrastive learning (HGraph-CL) framework for MSA,
aiming to explore the intricate relations of intra- and inter-modal representations for sentiment extraction. Specifically, regarding the intra-modal level, we build a unimodal graph for each modality representation to account for the modality-specific sentiment implications. Based on it, a graph contrastive learning strategy is adopted to explore the potential relations based on unimodal graph augmentations. Furthermore, we construct a multimodal graph of each instance based on the unimodal graphs to grasp the sentiment relations between different modalities. Then, in light of the multimodal augmentation graphs, a graph contrastive learning strategy over the inter-modal level is proposed to ulteriorly seek the possible graph structures for precisely learning sentiment relations. This essentially allows the framework to understand the appropriate graph structures for learning intricate relations among different modalities. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in MSA.

Modeling Intra- and Inter-Modal Relations: Hierarchical Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

A personification is a figure of speech that endows inanimate entities with properties and actions typically seen as requiring animacy. In this paper, we explore the task of personification generation. To this end, we propose PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation. We curate a corpus of personifications called PersonifCorp, together with automatically generated de-personified literalizations of these personifications. We demonstrate the usefulness of this parallel corpus by training a seq2seq model to personify a given literal input. Both automatic and human evaluations show that fine-tuning with PersonifCorp leads to significant gains in personification-related qualities such as animacy and interestingness. A detailed qualitative analysis also highlights key strengths and imperfections of PINEAPPLE over baselines, demonstrating a strong ability to generate diverse and creative personifications that enhance the overall appeal of a sentence.

PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation

The human recognition system has presented the remarkable ability to effortlessly learn novel knowledge from only a few trigger events based on prior knowledge, which is called insight learning. Mimicking such behavior on Knowledge Graph Reasoning (KGR) is an interesting and challenging research problem with many practical applications. Simultaneously, existing works, such as knowledge embedding and few-shot learning models, have been limited to conducting KGR in either ``seen-to-seen'' or ``unseen-to-unseen'' scenarios. To this end, we propose a neural insight learning framework named Eureka to bridge the ``seen'' to ``unseen'' gap. Eureka is empowered to learn the seen relations with sufficient training triples while providing the flexibility of learning unseen relations given only one trigger without sacrificing its performance on seen relations. Eureka meets our expectation of the model to acquire seen and unseen relations at no extra cost, and eliminate the need to retrain when encountering emerging unseen relations. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework also outperforms various state-of-the-art baselines on datasets of both seen and unseen relations.

Eureka: Neural Insight Learning for Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) is to detect and classify relation sense between two text segments without an explicit connective. Vanilla pre-train and fine-tuning paradigm builds upon a Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) with a task-specific neural network. However, the task objective functions are often not in accordance with that of the PLM. Furthermore, this paradigm cannot well exploit some linguistic evidence embedded in the pre-training process. The recent pre-train, prompt, and predict paradigm selects appropriate prompts to reformulate downstream tasks, so as to utilizing the PLM itself for prediction. However, for its success applications, prompts, verbalizer as well as model training should still be carefully designed for different tasks. As the first trial of using this new paradigm for IDRR, this paper develops a Connective-cloze Prompt (ConnPrompt) to transform the relation prediction task as a connective-cloze task. Specifically, we design two styles of ConnPrompt template: Insert-cloze Prompt (ICP) and Prefix-cloze Prompt (PCP) and construct an answer space mapping to the relation senses based on the hierarchy sense tags and implicit connectives. Furthermore, we use a multi-prompt ensemble to fuse predictions from different prompting results. Experiments on the PDTB corpus show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms, even with fewer training data.

ConnPrompt: Connective-cloze Prompt Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

Recent studies show that the attention heads in Transformer are not equal. We relate this phenomenon to the imbalance training of multihead attention and the model dependence on specific heads. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple masking method: HeadMask, in two specific ways. Experiments show that translation improvements are achieved on multiple language pairs. Subsequent empirical analyses also support our assumption and confirm the effectiveness of the method.

Alleviating the Inequality of Attention Heads for Neural Machine Translation

This article revisits statistical relationships across Romance cognates between lexical semantic shift and six intra-linguistic variables, such as frequency and polysemy. Cognates are words that are derived from a common etymon, in this case, a Latin ancestor. Despite their shared etymology, some cognate pairs have experienced semantic shift. The degree of semantic shift is quantified using cosine distance between the cognates’ corresponding word embeddings. In the previous literature, frequency and polysemy have been reported to be correlated with semantic shift; however, the understanding of their effects needs revision because of various methodological defects. In the present study, we perform regression analysis under improved experimental conditions, and demonstrate a genuine negative effect of frequency and positive effect of polysemy on semantic shift. Furthermore, we reveal that morphologically complex etyma are more resistant to semantic shift and that the cognates that have been in use over a longer timespan are prone to greater shift in meaning. These findings add to our understanding of the historical process of semantic change.

Revisiting Statistical Laws of Semantic Shift in Romance Cognates

Recently, pretrained language models (PLMs) have had exceptional success in language generation. To leverage the rich knowledge encoded by PLMs, a simple yet powerful paradigm is to use prompts in the form of either discrete tokens or continuous embeddings. In existing studies, these prompting methods are typically independent of the inputs, lacking sufficient consideration of input semantics. To address this issue, we propose a novel continuous prompting approach, called context-tuning, to fine-tuning PLMs for natural language generation. Firstly, the prompts are derived based on the input text to elicit useful knowledge from PLMs for generation. We refer to such prompts as contextualized prompts. Secondly, we use continuous inverse prompting to improve the process of natural language generation by modeling an inverse generation process from output to input, making the generated text more relevant to the inputs. Furthermore, we utilize a lightweight context-tuning method that finetunes only 0.12% of the parameters while maintaining good performance.

Context-Tuning: Learning Contextualized Prompts for Natural Language Generation

Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples. The adversary can successfully attack a model even without knowing model architecture and parameters, i.e., under a black-box scenario. Previous works on word-level attacks widely use word importance ranking (WIR) methods and complex search methods, including greedy search and heuristic algorithms, to ﬁnd optimal substitutions. However, these methods fail to balance the attack success rate and the cost of attacks, such as the number of queries to the model and the time consumption. In this paper, We propose PAthological woRd Saliency sEarch (PARSE) that performs the search under dynamic search space following the subarea importance. Experiments show that PARSE can achieve comparable attack success rates to complex search methods while saving numerous queries and time, e.g., saving at most 74% of queries and 90% of time compared with greedy search when attacking the examples from Yelp dataset. The adversarial examples crafted by PARSE are also of high quality, highly transferable, and can effectively improve model robustness in adversarial training.

PARSE: An Efficient Search Method for Black-box Adversarial Text Attacks

Systematic Offensive stereotyping (SOS) in word embeddings could lead to associating marginalised groups with hate speech and profanity, which might lead to blocking and silencing those groups, especially on social media platforms. 
In this work, we introduce a quantitative measure of the SOS bias, validate it in the most commonly used word embeddings, and investigate if it explains the performance of different word embeddings on the task of hate speech detection. Results show that SOS bias exists in almost all examined word embeddings and that the proposed SOS bias metric correlates positively with the statistics of published surveys on online extremism. We also show that the proposed metric reveals distinct information compared to established social bias metrics. However, we do not find evidence that SOS bias explains the performance of hate speech detection models based on the different word embeddings. 


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Document-level Event Factuality Identification via Machine Reading Comprehension Frameworks with Transfer Learning

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