Korea, Republic of

The task of generating texts of different categories has attracted more and more attention in the area of natural language generation recently. Meanwhile, generative adversarial net (GAN) has demonstrated its effectiveness on text generation, and is further applied to category text generation in later works. Different from existing methods, which mainly consider the pairwise relations between the text embedding and the corresponding fixed one-hot class label (data-to-class relations), this paper proposes a novel Contrastive Category Generative Adversarial Net (CoCGAN) to incorporate contrastive learning into adversarial category text generation, considering more flexible data-to-class relations as well as relations between the multiple text embeddings in the same batch (data-to-data relations). The discriminator of CoCGAN discriminates the authenticity of given samples and optimizes a contrastive learning objective to capture both more flexible data-to-class relations and data-to-data relations among training samples. Accordingly, the generator tries to produce more realistic samples which can confuse the discriminator. Experimental results on both synthetic and real category text generation datasets demonstrate that CoCGAN can achieve significant improvements over the baseline category text generation models.

COLING 2022

CoCGAN: Contrastive Learning for Adversarial Category Text Generation

generative adversarial net

contrastive learning

text generation

# 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. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Mini Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qlBKl0wzmlVF1oCeMQl3BahLd9nLP5Ce/view?usp=sharing) 
[**Posters and Demo guides**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UucMAoCNncIOaH1rMMDa0owuG9qgvJTG/view?usp=sharing)

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). 

poster

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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.

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!

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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.

Automated radiology report generation aims to generate paragraphs that describe fine-grained visual differences among cases, especially those between the normal and the diseased. Existing methods seldom consider the cross-modal alignment between textual and visual features and tend to ignore disease tags as an auxiliary for report generation. To bridge the gap between textual and visual information, in this study, we propose a "Jointly learning framework for automated disease Prediction and radiology report Generation (JPG)" to improve the quality of reports through the interaction between the main task (report generation) and two auxiliary tasks (feature alignment and disease prediction). The feature alignment and disease prediction help the model learn text-correlated visual features and record diseases as keywords so that it can output high-quality reports. Besides, the improved reports in turn provide additional harder samples for feature alignment and disease prediction to learn more precise visual and textual representations and improve prediction accuracy. All components are jointly trained in a manner that helps improve them iteratively and progressively. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of JPG on the most commonly used IU X-RAY dataset, showing its superior performance over multiple state-of-the-art image captioning and medical report generation methods with regard to BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE metrics.

JPG - Jointly Learn to Align: Automated Disease Prediction and Radiology Report Generation

This article presents the specification and evaluation of DiaBiz.Kom – the corpus of dialogue texts in Polish. The corpus contains transcriptions of telephone conversations conducted according to a prepared scenario. The transcripts of conversations have been manually annotated with a layer of information concerning communicative functions. DiaBiz.Kom is the first corpus of this type prepared for the Polish language and will be used to develop a system of dialogue analysis and modules for creating advanced chatbots.

DiaBiz.Kom - Towards a Polish Dialogue Act Corpus Based on ISO 24617-2 Standard

Multilingual neural machine translation can translate unseen language pairs during training, i.e. zero-shot translation. However, the zero-shot translation is always unstable. Although prior works attributed the instability to the domination of central language, e.g. English, we supplement this viewpoint with the strict dependence of non-centered languages. In this work, we propose a simple, lightweight yet effective language-specific modeling method by adapting to non-centered languages and combining the shared information and the language-specific information to counteract the instability of zero-shot translation. Experiments with Transformer on IWSLT17, Europarl, TED talks, and OPUS-100 datasets show that our method not only performs better than strong baselines in centered data conditions but also can easily fit non-centered data conditions. By further investigating the layer attribution, we show that our proposed method can disentangle the coupled representation in the correct direction.

Adapting to Non-Centered Languages for Zero-shot Multilingual Translation

Automatic medical question summarization can significantly help the system to understand consumer health questions and retrieve correct answers. The Seq2Seq model based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) has been
applied in this task, which faces two general problems: the model can not capture well question focus and and the traditional MLE strategy lacks the ability to understand sentence-level semantics. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel question focus-driven contrastive learning framework (QFCL). Specially, we propose an easy and effective approach to generate hard negative samples based on the question focus, and exploit contrastive learning at both
encoder and decoder to obtain better sentence-level representations. On three medical benchmark datasets, our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art results, and obtains a performance gain of 5.33, 12.85 and 3.81 points over the baseline BART model on three datasets respectively. Further human judgement and detailed analysis prove that our QFCL model learns better sentence representations with the ability to distinguish different sentence meanings, and generates high-quality summaries by capturing question focus.

Focus-Driven Contrastive Learning for Medical Question Summarization

Moderating user comments and promoting healthy understanding is a challenging task, especially in the context of polarized topics such as climate change. We propose a moderation tool to assist moderators in promoting mutual understanding in regard to this topic. The approach is twofold. First, we train classifiers to label incoming posts for the arguments they entail, with a specific focus on minority arguments. We apply active learning to further supplement the training data with rare arguments. Second, we dive deeper into singular arguments and extract the lexical patterns that distinguish each argument from the others. Our findings indicate that climate change arguments form clearly separable clusters in the embedding space. These classes are characterized by their own unique lexical patterns that provide a quick insight in an argument's key concepts. Additionally, supplementing our training data was necessary for our classifiers to be able to adequately recognize rare arguments. We argue that this detailed rundown of each argument provides insight into where others are coming from. These computational approaches can be part of the toolkit for content moderators and researchers struggling with other polarized debates.

Detecting Minority Arguments for Mutual Understanding: A Moderation Tool for the Online Climate Change Debate

Many recent sentence-level event detection efforts focus on enriching sentence semantics, e.g., via multi-task or prompt-based learning. Despite the promising performance, these methods commonly depend on label-extensive manual annotations or require domain expertise to design sophisticated templates and rules. This paper proposes a new paradigm, named dialogue-based explanation, to enhance sentence semantics for event detection. By saying dialogue-based explanation of an event, we mean explaining it through a consistent information-intensive dialogue, with the original event description as the start utterance. We propose three simple dialogue generation methods, whose outputs are then fed into a hybrid attention mechanism to characterize the complementary event semantics. Extensive experimental results on two event detection datasets verify the effectiveness of our method and suggest promising research opportunities in the dialogue-based explanation paradigm.

DESED: Dialogue-based Explanation for Sentence-level Event Detection

Often questions provided to open-domain question answering systems are ambiguous. Traditional QA systems that provide a single answer are incapable of answering ambiguous questions since the question may be interpreted in several ways and may have multiple distinct answers. In this paper, we address multi-answer retrieval which entails retrieving passages that can capture majority of the diverse answers to the question. We propose a re-ranking based approach using Determinantal point processes utilizing BERT as kernels. Our method jointly considers query-passage relevance and passage-passage correlation to retrieve passages that are both query-relevant and diverse. Results demonstrate that our re-ranking technique outperforms state-of-the-art method on the AmbigQA dataset.

Diverse Multi-Answer Retrieval with Determinantal Point Processes

Lexical substitution, which aims to generate substitutes for a target word given a context, is an important natural language processing task useful in many applications. Due to the paucity of annotated data, existing methods for lexical substitution tend to rely on manually curated lexical resources and contextual word embedding models. Methods based on lexical resources are likely to miss relevant substitutes whereas relying only on contextual word embedding models fails to provide adequate information on the impact of a substitute in the entire context and the overall meaning of the input. We proposed CILex, which uses contextual sentence embeddings along with methods that capture additional Context Information complimenting contextual word embeddings for Lexical substitution. This ensured the semantic consistency of a substitute with the target word while maintaining the overall meaning of the sentence. Our experimental comparisons with previously proposed methods indicated that our solution is now the state-of-the-art on both the widely used LS07 and CoInCo datasets with P@1 scores of 55.96% and 57.25% for lexical substitution. The implementation of the proposed approach is available at https://github.com/sandaruSen/CILex under the MIT license.

CILex: An Investigation of Context Information for Lexical Substitution Methods

We will share the work for Customer Satisfaction Prediction in E-commerce Service Chatbots. Due to the increasing use of service chatbots in E-commerce platforms in recent years, customer satisfaction prediction (CSP) is gaining more and more attention. CSP is dedicated to evaluating subjective customer satisfaction in conversational service and thus helps improve customer service experience. However, previous methods focus on modeling customer-chatbot interaction across different turns, which are hard to represent the important dynamic satisfaction states throughout the customer journey. In this work, we investigate the problem of satisfaction states tracking and its effects on CSP in E-commerce service chatbots. To this end, we propose a dialogue-level classification model named DialogueCSP to track satisfaction states for CSP. In particular, we explore a novel two-step interaction module to represent the dynamic satisfaction states at each turn. In order to capture dialogue-level satisfaction states for CSP, we further introduce dialogue-aware attentions to integrate historical informative cues into the interaction module. To evaluate the proposed approach, we also build a Chinese E-commerce dataset for CSP. Experiment results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms multiple baselines, illustrating the benefits of satisfaction states tracking on CSP.


Tracking Satisfaction States for Customer Satisfaction Prediction in E-commerce Service Chatbots

Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) commonly employs the 2-stage extract-then-abstract paradigm, which first extracts a relatively short meta-document, then feeds it into the deep neural networks to generate an abstract. Previous work usually takes the ROUGE score as the label for training a scoring model to evaluate source documents. However, the trained scoring model is prone to under-fitting for low-resource settings, as it relies on the training data. To extract documents effectively, we construct prompting templates that invoke the underlying knowledge in Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) to calculate the document and keyword's perplexity, which can assess the document's semantic salience. Our unsupervised approach can be applied as a plug-in to boost other metrics for evaluating a document's salience, thus improving the subsequent abstract generation. We get positive results on 2 MDS datasets, 2 data settings, and 2 abstractive backbone models, showing our method's effectiveness.

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JPG - Jointly Learn to Align: Automated Disease Prediction and Radiology Report Generation

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