Korea, Republic of

Despite having achieved great success for sentiment analysis, existing neural models struggle with implicit sentiment analysis. This may be due to the fact that they may latch onto spurious correlations (“shortcuts”, e.g., focusing only on explicit sentiment words), resulting in undermining the effectiveness and robustness of the learned model. In this work, we propose a CausaL intervention model for implicit sEntiment ANalysis using instrumental variable (CLEAN). We first review sentiment analysis from a causal perspective and analyze the confounders existing in this task. Then, we
introduce an instrumental variable to eliminate the confounding causal effects, thus extracting the pure causal effect between sentence and sentiment. We compare the proposed CLEAN model with several strong baselines on both the general implicit sentiment analysis and aspect-based implicit sentiment analysis tasks. The results
indicate the great advantages of our model and the efficacy of implicit sentiment reasoning.

COLING 2022

Causal Intervention Improves Implicit Sentiment Analysis

instrumental variable

implicit sentiment analysis

causal intervention

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

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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.

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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.

Multi-hop reasoning requires aggregating mul- tiple documents to answer a complex question. Existing methods usually decompose the multi- hop question into simpler single-hop questions to solve the problem for illustrating the explain- able reasoning process. However, they ignore grounding on the supporting facts of each rea- soning step, which tends to generate inaccu- rate decompositions. In this paper, we pro- pose an interpretable stepwise reasoning frame- work to incorporate both single-hop supporting sentence identification and single-hop question generation at each intermediate step, and uti- lize the inference of the current hop for the next until reasoning out the final result. We em- ploy a unified reader model for both intermedi- ate hop reasoning and final hop inference and adopt joint optimization for more accurate and robust multi-hop reasoning. We conduct exper- iments on two benchmark datasets HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA. The results show that our method can effectively boost performance and also yields a better interpretable reasoning process without decomposition supervision.

Locate Then Ask: Interpretable Stepwise Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering

We present a subword regularization method for WordPiece, which uses a maximum matching algorithm for tokenization. The proposed method, MaxMatch-Dropout, randomly drops words in a search using the maximum matching algorithm. It realizes finetuning with subword regularization for popular pretrained language models such as BERT-base. The experimental results demonstrate that MaxMatch-Dropout improves the performance of text classification and machine translation tasks as well as other subword regularization methods. Moreover, we provide a comparative analysis of subword regularization methods: subword regularization with SentencePiece (Unigram), BPE-Dropout, and MaxMatch-Dropout.


MaxMatch-Dropout: Subword Regularization for WordPiece

Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) is the task of using the computer to evaluate the quality of essays automatically. Current research on AES focuses on scoring the overall quality or single trait of prompt-specific essays. However, users expect to obtain not only the overall score but also the instant feedback from different traits to help improve their writing. Therefore, we first annotate a multi-trait dataset ACEA including 1220 argumentative essays from four traits, i.e., the essay organization, topic, logic, and language. And then we design a Hierarchical Multi-task Trait Scorer (HMTS) to evaluate the quality of writing by modeling these four traits. Moreover, we propose an inter-sequence attention mechanism to enhance information interaction between different tasks and design the trait-specific features for various tasks in AES. The experimental results on ACEA show that our HMTS can effectively score essays from multiple traits, outperforming several strong baselines.

Automated Chinese Essay Scoring from Multiple Traits

Rule mining is an effective approach for reasoning over knowledge graph (KG). Existing works mainly concentrate on mining rules. However, there might be several rules that could be applied for reasoning for one relation, and how to select appropriate rules for completion of different triples has not been discussed. In this paper, we propose to take the context information into consideration, which helps select suitable rules for the inference tasks. Based on this idea, we propose a transformer-based rule mining approach, Ruleformer. It consists of two blocks: 1) an encoder extracting the context information from subgraph of head entities with modified attention mechanism, and 2) a decoder which aggregates the subgraph information from the encoder output and generates the probability of relations for each step of reasoning. The basic idea behind Ruleformer is regarding rule mining process as a sequence to sequence task. To make the subgraph a sequence input to the encoder and retain the graph structure, we devise a relational attention mechanism in Transformer. The experiment results show the necessity of considering these information in rule mining task and the effectiveness of our model.

Ruleformer: Context-aware Rule Mining over Knowledge Graph

The possible consequences for the same context may vary depending on the situation we refer to. However, current studies in natural language processing do not focus on situated commonsense reasoning under multiple possible scenarios. This study frames this task by asking multiple questions with the same set of possible endings as candidate answers, given a short story text. Our resulting dataset, Possible Stories, consists of more than 4.5K questions over 1.3K story texts in English. We discover that even current strong pretrained language models struggle to answer the questions consistently, highlighting that the highest accuracy in an unsupervised setting (60.2\%) is far behind human accuracy (92.5\%). Through a comparison with existing datasets, we observe that the questions in our dataset contain minimal annotation artifacts in the answer options. In addition, our dataset includes examples that require counterfactual reasoning, as well as those requiring readers' reactions and fictional information, suggesting that our dataset can serve as a challenging testbed for future studies on situated commonsense reasoning.

Possible Stories: Evaluating Situated Commonsense Reasoning under Multiple Possible Scenarios

Automatic evaluation of grammatical error correction (GEC) is essential in developing useful GEC systems. Existing methods for automatic evaluation require multiple reference sentences or manual scores. However, such resources are expensive, thereby hindering automatic evaluation for various domains and correction styles. This paper proposes an Impact-based Metric for GEC using PARAllel data, IMPARA, which utilizes correction impacts computed by parallel data comprising pairs of grammatical/ungrammatical sentences. As parallel data is cheaper than manually assessing evaluation scores, IMPARA can reduce the cost of data creation for automatic evaluation. Correlations between IMPARA and human scores indicate that IMPARA is comparable or better than existing evaluation methods. Furthermore, we find that IMPARA can perform evaluations that fit different domains and correction styles trained on various parallel data.

IMPARA: Impact-Based Metric for GEC Using Parallel Data

Answering natural language questions on knowledge graphs (KGQA) remains a great challenge in terms of understanding complex questions via multi-hop reasoning.
Previous efforts usually exploit large-scale entity-related text corpus or knowledge graph (KG) embeddings as auxiliary information to facilitate answer selection. However, the rich semantics implied in off-the-shelf relation paths between entities is far from well explored. This paper proposes improving multi-hop KGQA by exploiting relation paths' hybrid semantics. Specifically, we integrate explicit textual information and implicit KG structural features of relation paths based on a novel rotate-and-scale entity link prediction framework. Extensive experiments on three existing KGQA datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, especially in multi-hop scenarios. Further investigation confirms our method's systematical coordination between questions and relation paths to identify answer entities.

Exploiting Hybrid Semantics of Relation Paths for Multi-hop Question Answering Over Knowledge Graphs

We introduce a new text generation framework to exploit a selective token generation between the pre-trained language model and the task-specific adapter with RL-based additive learning for the tasks of few-shot natural language generation.

Selective Token Generation for Few-shot Natural Language Generation


Constituency Parse Extraction from Pre-trained Language Models (CPE-PLM) is a recent paradigm that attempts to induce constituency parse trees relying only on the internal knowledge of pre-trained language models. While attractive in the perspective that similar to in-context learning, it does not require task-specific fine-tuning, the practical effectiveness of such an approach still remains unclear, except that it can function as a probe for investigating language models’ inner workings. In this work, we mathematically reformulate CPE-PLM and propose two advanced ensemble methods tailored for it, demonstrating that the new parsing paradigm can be competitive with common unsupervised parsers by introducing a set of heterogeneous PLMs combined using our techniques. Furthermore, we explore some scenarios where the trees generated by CPE-PLM are practically useful. Specifically, we show that CPE-PLM is more effective than typical supervised parsers in few-shot settings.

Revisiting the Practical Effectiveness of Constituency Parse Extraction from Pre-trained Language Models

This presentation introduces a generative system for in-battle real-time commentary in mobile MOBA games. Event commentary is important for battles in MOBA games, which is applicable to a wide range of scenarios like live streaming, e-sports commentary and combat information analysis. The system takes real-time match statistics and events as input, and an effective transform method is designed to convert match statistics and utterances into consistent encoding space. This presentation presents the general framework and implementation details of the proposed system, and provides experimental results on large-scale real-world match data.

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Causal Intervention Improves Implicit Sentiment Analysis

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Locate Then Ask: Interpretable Stepwise Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering

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