Korea, Republic of

Prior studies addressing target-oriented conversational tasks lack a crucial notion that has been intensively studied in the context of goal-oriented artificial intelligence agents, namely, planning. In this study, we propose the task of Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planning (TGCP) task to evaluate whether neural conversational agents have goal-oriented conversation planning abilities. Using the TGCP task, we investigate the conversation planning abilities of existing retrieval models and recent strong generative models. The experimental results reveal the challenges facing current technology.

COLING 2022

Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planning

conversation

generation

evaluation

dialogue

**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).

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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.

During natural disasters, people often use social media platforms, such as Twitter, to post information about casualties and damage produced by disasters. This information can help relief authorities gain situational awareness in nearly real time, and enable them to quickly distribute resources where most needed. However, annotating data for this purpose can be burdensome, subjective and expensive. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage the copious amounts of unlabeled data generated on social media by disaster eyewitnesses and affected individuals during disaster events. To this end, we propose a semi-supervised learning approach to improve the performance of neural models on several multimodal disaster tweet classification tasks. Our approach shows significant improvements, obtaining up to 7.7% improvements in F-1 in low-data regimes and 1.9% when using the entire training data. We make our code and data publicly available.

Multimodal Semi-supervised Learning for Disaster Tweet Classification

Multi-class unknown intent detection has made remarkable progress recently. However, it has a strong assumption that each utterance has only one intent, which does not conform to reality because utterances often have multiple intents. In this paper, we propose a more desirable task, multi-label unknown intent detection, to detect whether the utterance contains the unknown intent, in which each utterance may contain multiple intents. In this task, the unique utterances simultaneously containing known and unknown intents make existing multi-class methods easy to fail. To address this issue, we propose an intuitive and effective method to recognize whether All Intents contained in the utterance are Known (AIK). Our high-level idea is to predict the utterance's intent number, then check whether the utterance contains the same number of known intents. If the number of known intents is less than the number of intents, it implies that the utterance also contains unknown intents. We benchmark AIK over existing methods, and empirical results suggest that our method obtains state-of-the-art performances. For example, on the MultiWOZ 2.3 dataset, AIK significantly reduces the FPR95 by 12.25% compared to the best baseline. Code and data are available at https://github.com/yawenouyang/AIK.

Towards Multi-label Unknown Intent Detection

Linguists distinguish between novel and conventional metaphor, a distinction which the metaphor detection task in NLP does not take into account. Instead, metaphoricity is formulated as a property of a token in a sentence, regardless of metaphor type. In this paper, we investigate the limitations of treating conventional metaphors in this way, and advocate for an alternative which we name 'metaphorical polysemy detection' (MPD). In MPD, only conventional metaphoricity is treated, and it is formulated as a property of word senses in a lexicon. We develop the first MPD model, which learns to identify conventional metaphors in the English WordNet. To train it, we present a novel training procedure that combines metaphor detection with word sense disambiguation (WSD). For evaluation, we manually annotate metaphor in two subsets of WordNet. Our model significantly outperforms a strong baseline based on a state-of-the-art metaphor detection model, attaining an ROC-AUC score of .78 (compared to .65) on one of the sets. Additionally, when paired with a WSD model, our approach outperforms a state-of-the-art metaphor detection model at identifying conventional metaphors in text (.659 F1 compared to .626).


Metaphorical Polysemy Detection: Conventional Metaphor meets Word Sense Disambiguation

The manner in which gender is portrayed in materials used to teach children conveys messages about people’s roles in society. In this paper, we measure the gendered depiction of central domains of social life in 100 years of highly influential children’s books. We make two main contributions: (1) we find that the portrayal of gender in these books reproduces traditional gender norms in society, and (2) we publish StoryWords 1.0, the first word embeddings trained on such a large body of children's literature. We find that, relative to males, females are more likely to be represented in relation to their appearance than in relation to their competence; second, they are more likely to be represented in relation to their role in the family than their role in business. Finally, we find that non-binary or gender-fluid individuals are rarely mentioned. Our analysis advances understanding of the different messages contained in content commonly used to teach children, with immediate applications for practice, policy, and research.

Tales and Tropes: Gender Roles from Word Embeddings in a Century of Children's Books

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify event-event causal relations in a document. Existing works usually build an event graph for global reasoning across multiple sentences. However, the edges between events have to be carefully designed through heuristic rules or external tools. In this paper, we propose a novel Event Relational Graph TransfOrmer (ERGO) framework for DECI, to ease the graph construction and im- prove it over the noisy edge issue. Different from conventional event graphs, we define a pair of events as a node and build a complete event relational graph without any prior knowledge or tools. This naturally formulates DECI as a node classification problem, and thus we capture the causation transitivity among event pairs via a graph transformer. Furthermore, we design a criss-cross constraint and an adaptive focal loss for the imbalanced classification, to alleviate the issues of false positives and false negatives. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that ERGO greatly outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (12.8% F1 gains on average).

ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification

Figures of speech, such as metaphor and irony, are ubiquitous in literature works and colloquial conversations. This poses great challenge for natural language understanding since figures of speech usually deviate from their ostensible meanings to express deeper semantic implications. Previous research lays emphasis on the literary aspect of figures and seldom provide a comprehensive exploration from a view of computational linguistics. In this paper, we first propose the concept of figurative unit, which is the carrier of a figure. Then we select 12 types of figures commonly used in Chinese, and build a Chinese corpus for Contextualized Figure Recognition (ConFiguRe). Different from previous token-level or sentence-level counterparts, ConFiguRe aims at extracting a figurative unit from discourse-level context, and classifying the figurative unit into the right figure type. On ConFiguRe, three tasks, i.e., figure extraction, figure type classification and figure recognition, are designed and the state-of-the-art techniques are utilized to implement the benchmarks. We conduct thorough experiments and show that all three tasks are challenging for existing models, thus requiring further research. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/pku-tangent/ConFiguRe.

ConFiguRe: Exploring Discourse-level Chinese Figures of Speech

Since empathy plays a crucial role in increasing social bonding between people, many studies have designed their own dialogue agents to be empathetic using the well-established method of fine-tuning. However, they do not use prompt-based in-context learning, which has shown powerful performance in various
natural language processing (NLP) tasks, for empathetic dialogue generation. Although several studies have investigated few-shot in-context learning for empathetic dialogue generation, an in-depth analysis of the generation
of empathetic dialogue with in-context learning remains unclear, especially in GPT-
3 (Brown et al., 2020). In this study, we explore whether GPT-3 can generate empathetic dialogues through prompt-based in-context learning
in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. To enhance performance, we propose new
in-context example selection methods, called SITSM and EMOSITSM, that utilize emotion and situational information. We also introduce a new automatic evaluation method, DIFF-EPITOME, which reflects the human tendency to express empathy. From the analysis, we reveal that our DIFF-EPITOME is effective in measuring the degree of human empathy. We show that GPT-3 achieves competitive performance with Blender 90M, a state-of-the-art dialogue generative model, on both automatic and human evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/passing2961/EmpGPT-3.

Does GPT-3 Generate Empathetic Dialogues? A Novel In-Context Example Selection Method and Automatic Evaluation Metric for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

This paper is devoted to the extraction of entities and semantic relations between them from scientific texts, where we consider scientific terms as entities. In this paper, we present a dataset that includes annotations for two tasks and develop a system called TERMinator for the study of the influence of language models on term recognition and comparison of different approaches for relation extraction. Experiments show that language models pre-trained on the target language are not always show the best performance. Also adding some heuristic approaches may improve the overall quality of the particular task. The developed tool and the annotated corpus are publicly available at https://github.com/iis-research-team/terminator and may be useful for other researchers.

TERMinator: A system for scientific texts processing

Multilingual pretrained models, while effective on monolingual data, need additional training to work well with code-switched text. In this work, we present a novel idea of training multilingual models with alignment objectives using parallel text so as to explicitly align word representations with the same underlying semantics across languages. Such an explicit alignment step has a positive downstream effect and improves performance on multiple code-switched NLP tasks. We explore two alignment strategies and report improvements of up to 7.32%, 0.76% and 1.9% on Hindi-English Sentiment Analysis, Named Entity Recognition and Question Answering tasks compared to a competitive baseline model.

Aligning Multilingual Embeddings for Improved Code-switched Natural Language Understanding

Hate speech detection has gained increasing attention with the growing prevalence of hateful contents. When a text contains an obvious hate word or expression, it is fairly easy to detect it. However, it is challenging to identify implicit hate speech in nuance or context when there are insufficient lexical cues. Recently, there are several attempts to detect implicit hate speech leveraging pre-trained language models such as BERT and HateBERT. Fine-tuning on an implicit hate speech dataset shows satisfactory performance when evaluated on the test set of the dataset used for training. However, we empirically confirm that the performance drops at least 12.5%p in F1 score when tested on the dataset that is different from the one used for training. We tackle this cross-dataset underperforming problem using contrastive learning. Based on our observation of common underlying implications in various forms of hate posts, we propose a novel contrastive learning method, ImpCon, that pulls an implication and its corresponding posts close in representation space. We evaluate the effectiveness of ImpCon by running cross-dataset evaluation on three implicit hate speech benchmarks. The experimental results on cross-dataset show that ImpCon improves at most 9.10% on BERT, and 8.71% on HateBERT.

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Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation Planning

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