Korea, Republic of

Word embeddings are critical for numerous NLP tasks but their evaluation in actual under-resourced settings needs further examination. This paper presents a case study in Bribri, a Chibchan language from Costa Rica. Four experiments were adapted from English: Word similarities, WordSim353 correlations, odd-one-out tasks and analogies. Here we discuss their adaptation to an under-resourced Indigenous language and we use them to measure semantic and morphological learning. We trained 96 word2vec models with different hyperparameter combinations. The best models for this under-resourced scenario were Skip-grams with an intermediate size (100 dimensions) and large window sizes (10). These had an average correlation of r=0.28 with WordSim353, a 76% accuracy in semantic odd-one-out and 70% accuracy in structural/morphological odd-one-out. The performance was lower for the analogies: The best models could find the appropriate semantic target amongst the first 25 results approximately 60% of the times, but could only find the morphological/structural target 11% of the times. Future research needs to further explore the patterns of morphological/structural learning, to examine the behavior of deep learning embeddings, and to establish a human baseline. This project seeks to improve Bribri NLP and ultimately help in its maintenance and revitalization.

COLING 2022

Evaluating Word Embeddings in Extremely Under-Resourced Languages: A Case Study in Bribri

low-resource languages

embeddings

evaluation

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. 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.

A common recent approach to semantic parsing augments sequence-to-sequence models by retrieving and appending a set of training samples, called exemplars. The effectiveness of this recipe is limited by the ability to retrieve informative exemplars that help produce the correct parse, which is especially challenging in low-resource settings. Existing retrieval is commonly based on similarity of query and exemplar inputs. We propose GandR, a retrieval procedure that retrieves exemplars for which outputs are also similar. GandR first generates a preliminary prediction with input-based retrieval. Then, it retrieves exemplars with outputs similar to the preliminary prediction which are used to generate a final prediction. GandR sets the state of the art on multiple low-resource semantic parsing tasks.

Generate-and-Retrieve: use your predictions to improve retrieval for semantic parsing

Cross-domain sentiment analysis aims to predict the sentiment of texts in the target domain using the model trained on the source domain to cope with the scarcity of labeled data. Previous studies are mostly cross-entropy-based methods for the task, which suffer from instability and poor generalization. In this paper, we explore contrastive learning on the cross-domain sentiment analysis task. We propose a modified contrastive objective with in-batch negative samples so that the sentence representations from the same class can be pushed close while those from the different classes become further apart in the latent space. Experiments on two widely used datasets show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art performance in both cross-domain and multi-domain sentiment analysis tasks. Meanwhile, visualizations demonstrate the effectiveness of transferring knowledge learned in the source domain to the target domain and the adversarial test verifies the robustness of our model.

Mere Contrastive Learning for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis

In weakly-supervised text classification, only label names act as sources of supervision. Predominant approaches to weakly-supervised text classification utilize a two-phase framework, where test samples are first assigned pseudo-labels and are then used to train a neural text classifier. In most previous work, the pseudo-labeling step is dependent on obtaining seed words that best capture the relevance of each class label. We present LIME, a framework for weakly-supervised text classification that entirely replaces the brittle seed-word generation process with entailment-based pseudo-classification. We find that combining weakly-supervised classification and textual entailment mitigates shortcomings of both, resulting in a more streamlined and effective classification pipeline. With just an off-the-shelf textual entailment model, LIME outperforms recent baselines in weakly-supervised text classification and achieves state-of-the-art in 4 benchmarks.

LIME: Weakly-Supervised Text Classification Without Seeds

We present LINGUIST, a method for generating annotated data for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging (IC+ST), via fine-tuning AlexaTM 5B, a 5-billion-parameter multilingual sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, on a flexible instruction prompt. In a 10-shot novel intent setting for the SNIPS dataset, LINGUIST surpasses state-of-the-art approaches (Back-Translation and Example Extrapolation) by a wide margin, showing absolute improvement for the target intents of +1.9 points on IC Recall and +2.5 points on ST F1 Score. In the zero-shot cross-lingual setting of the mATIS++ dataset, LINGUIST out-performs a strong baseline of Machine Translation with Slot Alignment by +4.14 points absolute on ST F1 Score across 6 languages, while matching performance on IC. Finally, we verify our results on an internal large-scale multilingual dataset for conversational agent IC+ST and show significant improvements over a baseline which uses Back-Translation, Paraphrasing and Slot Catalog Resampling. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate instruction fine-tuning of a large-scale seq2seq model to control the outputs of multilingual intent- and slot-labeled data generation.

[DEMO] LINGUIST: Language Model Instruction Tuning to Generate Annotated Utterances for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging

State-of-the-art neural (re)rankers are notoriously data-hungry which – given the lack of large-scale training data in languages other than English – makes them rarely used in multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval settings. Current approaches therefore commonly transfer rankers trained on English data to other languages and cross-lingual setups by means of multilingual encoders: they fine-tune all parameters of pretrained massively multilingual Transformers (MMTs, e.g., multilingual BERT) on English relevance judgments, and then deploy them in the target language(s). In this work, we show that two parameterefficient approaches to cross-lingual transfer, namely Sparse Fine-Tuning Masks (SFTMs) and Adapters, allow for a more lightweight and more effective zero-shot transfer to multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval tasks. We first train language adapters (or SFTMs) via Masked Language Modelling and then train retrieval (i.e., reranking) adapters (SFTMs) on top, while keeping all other parameters fixed. At inference, this modular design allows us to compose the ranker by applying the (re)ranking adapter (or SFTM) trained with source language data together with the language adapter (or SFTM) of a target language. We carry out a large scale evaluation on the CLEF-2003 and HC4 benchmarks and additionally, as another contribution, extend the former with queries in three new languages: Kyrgyz, Uyghur and Turkish. The proposed parameter-efficient methods outperform standard zero-shot transfer with full MMT finetuning, while being more modular and reducing training times. The gains are particularly pronounced for low-resource languages, where our approaches also substantially outperform the competitive machine translation-based rankers.

Parameter-Efficient Neural Reranking for Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Retrieval

Controllable story generation is a challenging task in the field of NLP, which has attracted increasing research interest in recent years.
However, most existing works generate a whole story conditioned on the appointed keywords or emotions, ignoring the psychological changes of the protagonist.
Inspired by psychology theories, we introduce global psychological state chains, which include the needs and emotions of the protagonists, to help a story generation system create more controllable and well-planned stories.
In this paper, we propose a Psychology-guIded Controllable Story Generation System (PICS) to generate stories that adhere to the given leading context and desired psychological state chains for the protagonist.
Specifically, psychological state trackers are employed to memorize the protagonist's local psychological states to capture their inner temporal relationships.
In addition, psychological state planners are adopted to gain the protagonist's global psychological states for story planning.
Eventually, a psychology controller is designed to integrate the local and global psychological states into the story context representation for composing psychology-guided stories.
Automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that PICS outperforms baselines, and each part of PICS shows effectiveness for writing stories with more consistent psychological changes.

Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generation

While there is much research on cross-domain text classification, most existing approaches focus on one-to-one or many-to-one domain adaptation. In this paper, we tackle the more challenging task of domain generalization, in which domain-invariant representations are learned from multiple source domains, without access to any data from the target domains, and classification decisions are then made on test documents in unseen target domains. We propose a novel framework based on supervised contrastive learning with a memory-saving queue. In this way, we explicitly encourage examples of the same class to be closer and examples of different classes to be further apart in the embedding space. We have conducted extensive experiments on two Amazon review sentiment datasets, and one rumour detection dataset. Experimental results show that our domain generalization method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.

Domain Generalization for Text Classification with Memory-Based Supervised Contrastive Learning

Medication recommendation is a crucial task for intelligent healthcare systems. Previous studies mainly recommend medications with electronic health records (EHRs). However, some details of interactions between doctors and patients may be ignored or omitted in EHRs, which are essential for automatic medication recommendation. Therefore, we make the first attempt to recommend medications with the conversations between doctors and patients. In this work, we construct DIALMED, the first high-quality dataset for medical dialogue-based medication recommendation task. It contains 11, 996 medical dialogues related to 16 common diseases from 3 departments and 70 corresponding common medications. Furthermore, we propose a Dialogue structure and Disease knowledge aware Network (DDN), where a QA Dialogue Graph mechanism is designed to model the dialogue structure and the knowledge graph is used to introduce external disease knowledge. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is a promising solution to recommend medications with medical dialogues. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/f-window/DialMed.

DialMed: A Dataset for Dialogue-based Medication Recommendation

Prompt-based fine-tuning for pre-trained models has proven effective for many natural language processing tasks under few-shot settings in general domain. However, tuning with prompt in biomedical domain has not been investigated thoroughly. Biomedical words are often rare in general domain, but quite ubiquitous in biomedical contexts, which dramatically deteriorates the performance of pretrained models on downstream biomedical applications even after fine-tuning, especially in low-resource scenarios. We propose a simple yet effective approach to helping models learn rare biomedical words during tuning with prompt. Experimental results show that our method can achieve up to 6% improvement in biomedical natural language inference task without any extra parameters or training steps using few-shot vanilla prompt settings.

Prompt Combines Paraphrase: Teaching Pre-trained Models to Understand Rare Biomedical Words


K-Nearest Neighbor Neural Machine Translation (kNN-MT) successfully incorporates external corpus by retrieving word-level representations at test time. 
Generally, kNN-MT borrows the off-the-shelf context representation in the translation task, e.g., the output of the last decoder layer, as the query vector of the retrieval task. In this work, we highlight that coupling the representations of these two tasks is sub-optimal for fine-grained retrieval. To alleviate it, we leverage supervised contrastive learning to learn the distinctive retrieval representation derived from the original context representation. We also propose a fast and effective approach to constructing hard negative samples. Experimental results on five domains show that our approach improves the retrieval accuracy and BLEU score compared to vanilla kNN-MT.

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Generate-and-Retrieve: use your predictions to improve retrieval for semantic parsing

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High-quality Data-to-Text Generation for Severely Under-Resourced Languages with Out-of-the-box Large Language Models