Korea, Republic of

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.

COLING 2022

MECI: A Multilingual Dataset for Event Causality Identification

causal relation extraction

event relation extraction

information extraction

# 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. 

 
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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). 

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.

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.

CLoSE: Contrastive Learning of Subframe Embeddings for Political Bias Classification of News Media

Behavioural consistency is a critical condition for a language model (LM) to become trustworthy like humans. Despite its importance, however, there is little consensus on the definition of LM consistency, resulting in different definitions across many studies. In this work, we first propose the idea of LM consistency based on behavioural consistency and establish a taxonomy that classifies previously studied consistencies into several sub-categories. Next, we create a new benchmark that allows us to evaluate a model on 19 test cases, distinguished by multiple types of consistency and diverse downstream tasks. Through extensive experiments on the new benchmark, we ascertain that none of the modern pre-trained language models (PLM) performs well in every test case, while exhibiting high inconsistency in many cases.

BECEL: Benchmark for Consistency Evaluation of Language Models

Chinese couplet generation aims to generate a pair of clauses (usually generating a subsequent clause given an antecedent one) with certain rules (e.g., morphological and syntactical symmetry) adhered and has long been a challenging task with cultural background. To generate high-quality couplet (antecedent) clauses, it normally requires a model to learn the correspondences between antecedent and subsequent clauses under aforementioned rules and constraint of few characters with their concise usage. To tackle this task, previous studies normally directly adopt deep neural networks without explicitly taking into account fine-grained analysis of the clauses, in this paper, we propose to enhance Chinese couplet generation by leveraging syntactic information, i.e., part-of-speech (POS) tags and word dependencies. In doing so, we identify word boundaries in the antecedent clause and then use a special attention module to encode the syntactic information over the words for better generating the subsequent clause. Experimental results on a dataset for Chinese couplet generation illustrate the validity and effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms strong baselines with respect to automatic and manual evaluation metrics.

Chinese Couplet Generation with Syntactic Information

We study the relationship between task-agnostic intrinsic and task-specific extrinsic social bias evaluation measures for Masked Language Models (MLMs), and 
find that there exists only a weak correlation between these two types of evaluation measures.
Moreover, we find that MLMs debiased using different methods still re-learn social biases during fine-tuning on downstream tasks.
We identify the social biases in both training instances as well as their assigned labels as reasons for the discrepancy between intrinsic and extrinsic bias evaluation measurements.
Overall, our findings highlight the limitations of existing MLM bias evaluation measures and raise concerns on the deployment of MLMs in downstream applications using those measures.

Debiasing isn't enough! -- On the Effectiveness of Debiasing MLMs and their Social Biases in Downstream Tasks

Automatically evaluating the coherence of summaries is of great significance both to enable cost-efficient summarizer evaluation and as a tool for improving coherence by selecting high-scoring candidate summaries. While many different approaches have been suggested to model summary coherence, they are often evaluated using disparate datasets and metrics. This makes it difficult to understand their relative performance and identify ways forward towards better summary coherence modelling.
In this work, we conduct a large-scale investigation of various methods for summary coherence modelling on an even playing field. Additionally, we introduce two novel analysis measures, intra-system correlation and bias matrices, that help identify biases in coherence measures and provide robustness against system-level confounders. While none of the currently available automatic coherence
measures are able to assign reliable coherence scores to system summaries across all evaluation metrics, 
large-scale language models fine-tuned on self-supervised tasks show promising results, as long as fine-tuning takes into account that they need to generalize across different summary lengths.


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MECI: A Multilingual Dataset for Event Causality Identification

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