Korea, Republic of

Recent breakthroughs in NLP research, such as the advent of Transformer models have indisputably contributed to major advancements in several tasks. However, few works research robustness and explainability issues of their evaluation strategies. In this work, we examine the behavior of high-performing pre-trained language models, focusing on the task of semantic similarity for visual vocabularies. First, we address the need for explainable evaluation metrics, necessary for understanding the conceptual quality of retrieved instances. Our proposed metrics provide valuable insights in local and global level, showcasing the inabilities of widely used approaches. Secondly, adversarial interventions on salient query semantics expose vulnerabilities of opaque metrics and highlight patterns in learned linguistic representations.

COLING 2022

Towards explainable evaluation of language models on the semantic similarity of visual concepts

ranking evaluation

adversarial perturbations

explainability

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

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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).

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!<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.

Investigating the Performance of Transformer-Based NLI Models on Presuppositional Inferences

Multilingual pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several downstream tasks for both high-resourced and low-resourced languages. However, there is still a large performance drop for languages unseen during pre-training, especially African languages. One of the most effective approaches to adapt to a new language is language adaptive fine-tuning
(LAFT) — fine-tuning a multilingual PLM on monolingual texts of a language using the
pre-training objective. However, adapting to a target language individually takes a large disk space and limits the cross-lingual transfer abilities of the resulting models because they have been specialized for a single language. In this paper, we perform multilingual adaptive fine-tuning on 17 most-resourced African languages and three other high-resource languages widely spoken on the African continent to encourage cross-lingual transfer learning. To further specialize the multilingual PLM, we removed vocabulary tokens from the embedding layer that corresponds to non-
African writing scripts before MAFT, thus reducing the model size by around 50%. Our evaluation on two multilingual PLMs (AfriB-ERTa and XLM-R) and three NLP tasks (NER, news topic classification, and sentiment classification) shows that our approach is competitive to applying LAFT on individual languages while requiring significantly less disk space. Additionally, we show that our adapted PLM also improves the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer abilities of parameter efficient fine-tuning methods.

Adapting Pre-trained Language Models to African Languages via Multilingual Adaptive Fine-Tuning

Despite the great progress of Visual Question Answering (VQA), current VQA models heavily rely on the superficial correlation between the question type and its corresponding frequent answers (i.e., language priors) to make predictions, without really understanding the input. In this work, we define the training instances with the same question type but different answers as \textit{superficially similar instances}, and attribute the language priors to the confusion of VQA model on such instances. To solve this problem, we propose a novel training framework that explicitly encourages the VQA model to distinguish between the superficially similar instances. Specifically, for each training instance, we first construct a set that contains its superficially similar counterparts. Then we exploit the proposed distinguishing module to increase the distance between the instance and its counterparts in the answer space. In this way, the VQA model is forced to further focus on the other parts of the input beyond the question type, which helps to overcome the language priors. Experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on VQA-CP v2.

Overcoming Language Priors in Visual Question Answering via Distinguishing Superficially Similar Instances

Various historical languages, which used to be lingua franca of science and arts, deserve the attention of current NLP research. In this work, we take the first data-driven steps towards this research line for Classical Arabic (CA) by addressing named entity recognition (NER) and topic modeling (TM) on the example of CA literature. We manually annotate the encyclopedic work of Tafsir Al-Tabari with span-based NEs, sentence-based topics, and span-based subtopics, thus creating the Tafsir Dataset with over 51,000 sentences, the first large-scale multi-task benchmark for CA. Next, we analyze our newly generated dataset, which we make open-source available, with current language models (lightweight BiLSTM, transformer-based MaChAmP) along a novel script compression method, thereby achieving state-of-the-art performance for our target task CA-NER. We also show that CA-TM from the perspective of historical topic models, which are central to Arabic studies, is very challenging. With this interdisciplinary work, we lay the foundations for future research on automatic analysis of CA literature.

Tafsir Dataset: A Novel Multi-Task Benchmark for Named Entity Recognition and Topic Modeling in Classical Arabic Literature

Event Causality Identification (ECI) is the task of detecting causal relations between events mentioned in the text. Although this task has been extensively studied for English materials, it is under-explored for many other languages. A major reason for this issue is the lack of multilingual datasets that provide consistent annotations for event causality relations in multiple non-English languages. To address this issue, we introduce a new multilingual dataset for ECI, called MECI. The dataset employs consistent annotation guidelines for five typologically different languages, i.e., English, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. Our dataset thus enable a new research direction on cross-lingual transfer learning for ECI. Our extensive experiments demonstrate high quality for MECI that can provide ample research challenges and directions for future research. We will publicly release MECI to promote research on multilingual ECI.

MECI: A Multilingual Dataset for Event Causality Identification

Programmable Annotation with Diversed Heuristics and Data Denoising

Lexical simplification (LS) is the task of automatically replacing complex words for easier ones making texts more accessible to various target populations (e.g. individuals with low literacy, individuals with learning disabilities, second language learners). To train and test models, LS systems usually require corpora that feature complex words in context along with their candidate substitutions. To continue improving the performance of LS systems we introduce ALEXSIS-PT, a novel multi-candidate dataset for Brazilian Portuguese LS containing 9,605 candidate substitutions for 387 complex words. ALEXSIS-PT has been compiled following the ALEXSIS protocol for Spanish opening exciting new avenues for cross-lingual models. ALEXSIS-PT is the first LS multi-candidate dataset that contains Brazilian newspaper articles. We evaluated four models for substitute generation on this dataset, namely mDistilBERT, mBERT, XLM-R, and BERTimbau. BERTimbau achieved the highest performance across all evaluation metrics.

ALEXSIS-PT: A New Resource for Portuguese Lexical Simplification

A challenging task when generating summaries of legal documents is the ability to address their argumentative nature. We introduce a simple technique to capture the argumentative structure of legal documents by integrating argument role labeling into the summarization process. Experiments with pretrained language models show that our proposed approach improves performance over
strong baselines.

ArgLegalSumm: Improving Abstractive Summarization of Legal Documents with Argument Mining

Community Topic: Topic model inference by consecutive word community discovery

Framing is a political strategy in which journalists and politicians emphasize certain aspects of a societal issue in order to influence and sway public opinion. Frameworks for detecting framing in news articles or social media posts are critical in understanding the spread of biased information in our society. In this paper, we propose CLoSE, a multi-task BERT-based model which uses contrastive learning to embed indicators of frames from news articles in order to predict political bias. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model on subframes and political bias classification tasks. We also demonstrate the model’s classification accuracy on zero-shot and few-shot learning tasks, providing a promising avenue for framing detection in unlabeled data.

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Towards explainable evaluation of language models on the semantic similarity of visual concepts

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Investigating the Performance of Transformer-Based NLI Models on Presuppositional Inferences

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