Korea, Republic of

COLING 2022

In-the-Wild Video Question Answering

in the wild

evidence selection

video understanding

multimodal

vision and language

question answering

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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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).

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.

Entity linking, which aims at aligning ambiguous entity mentions to their referent entities in a knowledge base, plays a key role in multiple natural language processing tasks. Recently, zero-shot entity linking task has become a research hotspot, which links mentions to unseen entities to challenge the generalization ability. For this task, the training set and test set are from different domains, and thus entity linking models tend to be overfitting due to the tendency of memorizing the properties of entities that appear frequently in the training set. We argue that general ultra-fine-grained type information can help the linking models to learn contextual commonality and improve their generalization ability to tackle the overfitting problem. However, in the zero-shot entity linking setting, any type information is not available and entities are only identified by textual descriptions. Thus, we first extract the ultra-fine type information from the entity textual descriptions. Then, we propose a hierarchical multi-task model to improve the high-level zero-shot entity linking candidate generation task by utilizing the entity typing task as an auxiliary low-level task, which introduces extracted ultra-fine type information into the candidate generation task. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing the ultra-fine entity type information and our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Improving Zero-Shot Entity Linking Candidate Generation with Ultra-Fine Entity Type Information

Fact-checking has gained increasing attention due to the widespread of falsified information. Most fact-checking approaches focus on claims made in English only due to the data scarcity issue in other languages. The lack of fact-checking datasets in low-resource languages calls for an effective cross-lingual transfer technique for fact-checking. Additionally, trustworthy information in different languages can be complementary and helpful in verifying facts. To this end, we present the first fact-checking framework augmented with cross-lingual retrieval that aggregates evidence retrieved from multiple languages through a cross-lingual retriever. Given the absence of cross-lingual information retrieval datasets with claim-like queries, we train the retriever with our proposed Cross-lingual Inverse Cloze Task (X-ICT), a self-supervised algorithm that creates training instances by translating the title of a passage. The goal for X-ICT is to learn cross-lingual retrieval in which the model learns to identify the passage corresponding to a given translated title. On the X-Fact dataset, our approach achieves 2.23% absolute F1 improvement in the zero-shot cross-lingual setup over prior systems. The source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/khuangaf/CONCRETE.

CONCRETE: Improving Cross-lingual Fact-checking with Cross-lingual Retrieval

Patients with low health literacy usually have difficulty understanding medical jargon and the complex structure of professional medical language. Although some studies are proposed to automatically translate expert language into layperson-understandable language, only a few of them focus on both accuracy and readability aspects simultaneously in the clinical domain. Thus, simplification of the clinical language is still a challenging task, but unfortunately, it is not yet fully addressed in previous work. To benchmark this task, we construct a new dataset named MedLane to support the development and evaluation of automated clinical language simplification approaches. Besides, we propose a new model called DECLARE that follows the human annotation procedure and achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with eight strong baselines. To fairly evaluate the performance, we also propose three specific evaluation metrics. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of the annotated MedLane dataset and the effectiveness of the proposed model DECLARE.


Benchmarking Automated Clinical Language Simplification: Dataset, Algorithm, and Evaluation

Procedural text understanding is a challenging language reasoning task that requires models to track entity states across the development of a narrative. A complete procedural understanding solution should combine three core aspects: local and global views of the inputs, and global view of outputs. Prior methods considered a subset of these aspects, resulting in either low precision or low recall. In this paper, we propose Coalescing Global and Local Information (CGLI), a new model that builds entity- and timestep-aware input representations (local input) considering the whole context (global input), and we jointly model the entity states with a structured prediction objective (global output). Thus, CGLI simultaneously optimizes for both precision and recall. We extend CGLI with additional output layers and integrate it into a story reasoning framework. Extensive experiments on a popular procedural text understanding dataset show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results; experiments on a story reasoning benchmark show the positive impact of our model on downstream reasoning.

Coalescing Global and Local Information for Procedural Text Understanding

In the presentation, we present our work "Multi-Layer Pseudo-Siamese Biaffine Model for Dependency Parsing". In this work, we propose a multi-layer architecture for dependency parsing, where the biaffine method plays important roles in both scorer and attention mechanism at the same time in each layer. The presentation contains the following in order: 1) We introduce the task and our motivation. 2) We show the model. 3) We show the experiments for comparison of three aspects. 4) We show the key points of analysis. 5) We show the conclusion.

Multi-Layer Pseudo-Siamese Biaffine Model for Dependency Parsing

Achieving good performance on few-shot or zero-shot datasets has been a long-term challenge for NER. The conventional semantic transfer approaches on NER will decrease model performance when the semantic distribution is quite different, especially in Chinese few-shot NER. Recently, prompt-tuning has been thoroughly considered for low-resource tasks. But there is no effective prompt-tuning approach for Chinese few-shot NER. In this work, we propose a prompt-based Parent and Child BERT (PCBERT) for Chinese few-shot NER. To train an annotating model on high-resource datasets and then discover more implicit labels on low-resource datasets. We further design a label extension strategy to achieve label transferring from high-resource datasets. We evaluated our model on Weibo and the other three sampling Chinese NER datasets, and the experimental result demonstrates our approach's effectiveness in few-shot learning.

PCBERT: Parent and Child BERT for Chinese Few-shot NER

Dense video captioning aims to identify the events of interest in an input video, and generate descriptive captions for each event. Previous approaches usually follow a two-stage generative process, which first proposes a segment for each event, then renders a caption for each identified segment.
Recent advances in large-scale sequence generation pretraining have seen great success in unifying task formulation for a great variety of tasks, but so far, more complex tasks such as dense video captioning are not able to fully utilize this powerful paradigm.
In this work, we show how to model the two subtasks of dense video captioning jointly as one sequence generation task, and simultaneously predict the events and the corresponding descriptions. Experiments on YouCook2 and ViTT show encouraging results and indicate the feasibility of training complex tasks such as end-to-end dense video captioning integrated into large-scale pretrained models.

End-to-end Dense Video Captioning as Sequence Generation

In this work, we propose a new perspective that introduces some contrastive case relations to construct case triples as input, and a corresponding judgment prediction framework with case triples modeling (CTM). Our CTM can more effectively utilize beneficial information to refine the encoding and decoding processes through three customized modules, including the case triple module, the relational attention module, and the category decoder module. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets to verify the effectiveness of our CTM, including overall evaluation, compatibility analysis, ablation studies, analysis of gain source and visualization of case representations.

Augmenting Legal Judgment Prediction with Contrastive Case Relations

Social Norms-Grounded Machine Ethics in Complex Narrative Situation

To automatically correct handwritten assignments, the traditional approach is to use an OCR model to recognize characters and compare them to answers. The OCR model easily gets confused on recognizing handwritten Chinese characters, and the textual information of the answers is missing during the model inference. However, teachers always have these answers in mind to review and correct assignments. In this paper, we focus on the Chinese cloze tests correction and propose a multimodal approach (named AiM). The encoded representations of answers interact with the visual information of students’ handwriting. Instead of predicting ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, we perform the sequence labeling on the answer text to infer which answer character differs from the handwritten content in a fine-grained way. We take samples of OCR datasets as the positive samples for this task, and develop a negative sample augmentation method to scale up the training data. Experimental results show that AiM outperforms OCR-based methods by a large margin. Extensive studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our multimodal approach.

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Improving Zero-Shot Entity Linking Candidate Generation with Ultra-Fine Entity Type Information

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