Taiwan

Given the challenges and complexities introduced while dealing with Dialect Arabic (DA) variations, Transformer based models, e.g., BERT, outperformed other models in dealing with the DA identification task. However, to fine-tune these models, a large corpus is required. Getting a large number high quality labeled examples for some Dialect Arabic classes is challenging and time-consuming. In this paper, we address the Dialect Arabic Identification task. We extend the transformer-based models, ARBERT and MARBERT, with unlabeled data in a generative adversarial setting using Semi-Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks (SS-GAN).
Our model enabled producing high-quality embeddings for the Dialect Arabic examples and aided the model to better generalize for the downstream classification task given a few labeled examples. Experimental results showed that our model reached better performance and faster convergence when only a few labeled examples are available.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.16/)

IJCNLP-AACL 2022

Arabic Dialect Identification with a Few Labeled Examples Using Generative Adversarial Networks

semi-supervised networks

arbert

marbert

dialect arabic identification

dialects

arabic

generative adversarial networks

natural language processing

bert

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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 and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

poster

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 
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A registration is required to access this event. Access to the event site will be granted to all registered attendees on **November 16th**. If you have not already done so, please register using the link below:
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<br>https://conference.iis.sinica.edu.tw/servlet/Register?ConferenceID=411

Registration Is Required

The AACL, Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the AFNLP, Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing, invite you to participate in the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (AACL) and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). 

Recently, emerging approaches have been proposed to deal with robotic navigation problems, especially vision-and-language navigation task which is one of the most realistic indoor navigation challenge tasks. This task can be modelled as a sequential decision-making problem, which is suitable to be solved by deep reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, the observations provided from the simulator in this task are not fully observable states, which exacerbate the difficulty of implementing reinforcement learning. To deal with this challenge, this paper presents a novel method, called as attentive variational state tracker (AVAST), a variational approach to approximate belief state distribution for the construction of a reinforced navigator. The variational approach is introduced to improve generalization to the unseen environment which barely achieved by traditional deterministic state tracker. In order to stabilize the learning procedure, a fine-tuning process using policy optimization is proposed. From the experimental results, the proposed AVAST does improve the generalization relative to previous works in vision-and-language navigation task. A significant performance is achieved without requiring any additional exploration in the unseen environment.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.33/)

AVAST: Attentive Variational State Tracker in a Reinforced Navigator

We investigate the effect of varying citation context window sizes on model performance in citation intent classification. Prior studies have been limited to the application of fixed-size contiguous citation contexts or the use of manually curated citation contexts. We introduce a new automated unsupervised approach for the selection of a dynamic-size and potentially non-contiguous citation context, which utilises the transformer-based document representations and embedding similarities. Our experiments show that the addition of non-contiguous citing sentences improves performance beyond previous results. Evaluating on the (1) domain-specific (ACL-ARC) and (2) the multi-disciplinary (SDP-ACT) dataset demonstrates that the inclusion of additional context beyond the citing sentence significantly improves the citation classification model’s performance, irrespective of the dataset’s domain. We release the datasets and the source code used for the experiments at: https://github.com/oacore/ dynamic_citation_context

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.41/)

Dynamic Context Extraction for Citation Classification

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.7/)

Graph-augmented Learning to Rank for Querying Large-scale Knowledge Graph

Several multi-hop reading comprehension datasets have been proposed to resolve the issue of reasoning shortcuts by which questions can be answered without performing multi-hop reasoning. However, the ability of multi-hop models to perform step-by-step reasoning when finding an answer to a comparison question remains unclear. It is also unclear how questions about the internal reasoning process are useful for training and evaluating question-answering (QA) systems. To evaluate the model precisely in a hierarchical manner, we first propose a dataset, \textit{HieraDate}, with three probing tasks in addition to the main question: extraction, reasoning, and robustness. Our dataset is created by enhancing two previous multi-hop datasets, HotpotQA and 2WikiMultiHopQA, focusing on multi-hop questions on date information that involve both comparison and numerical reasoning. We then evaluate the ability of existing models to understand date information. Our experimental results reveal that the multi-hop models do not have the ability to subtract two dates even when they perform well in date comparison and number subtraction tasks. Other results reveal that our probing questions can help to improve the performance of the models (e.g., by +10.3 F1) on the main QA task and our dataset can be used for data augmentation to improve the robustness of the models.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.58/)

How Well Do Multi-hop Reading Comprehension Models Understand Date Information?

Word associations are among the most common paradigms for studying the human mental lexicon. While their structure and types of associations have been well studied, surprisingly little attention has been given to the question of why participants produce the observed associations. Answering this question would not only advance understanding of human cognition, but could also aid machines in learning and representing basic commonsense knowledge. This paper introduces a large, crowd-sourced dataset of English word associations with explanations, labeled with high-level relation types. We present an analysis of the provided explanations, and design several tasks to probe to what extent current pre-trained language models capture the underlying relations. Our experiments show that models struggle to capture the diversity of human associations, suggesting WAX is a rich benchmark for commonsense modeling and generation.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.9/)

WAX: A New Dataset for Word Association eXplanations

Social media often serves as a breeding ground for various hateful and offensive content. Identifying such content on social media is crucial due to its impact on the race, gender, or religion in an unprejudiced society. However, while there is extensive research in hate speech detection in English, there is a gap in hateful content detection in low-resource languages like Bengali. Besides, a current trend on social media is the use of Romanized Bengali for regular interactions. To overcome the existing research's limitations, in this study, we develop an annotated dataset of 10K Bengali posts consisting of 5K actual and 5K Romanized Bengali tweets. We implement several baseline models for the classification of such hateful posts. We further explore the interlingual transfer mechanism to boost classification performance. Finally, we perform an in-depth error analysis by looking into the misclassified posts by the models. While training actual and Romanized datasets separately, we observe that XLM-Roberta performs the best. Further, we witness that on joint training and few-shot training, MuRIL outperforms other models by interpreting the semantic expressions better. We make our code and dataset public for others.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.23/)

Hate Speech and Offensive Language Detection in Bengali

We use Chinese ba/bei construction to explore if pre-trained transformer-based language models are capable of integrating syntax and semantics like humans. Our experiment results show a similar performance between humans and models for agency, but not for telicity and individuation. This suggests that models and humans respond diversely to features affecting argument hierarchy construction.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.21/)

Who did what to Whom? Language models and humans respond diversely to features affecting argument hierarchy construction

Recent methods based on pre-trained language models have exhibited superior performance over tabular tasks (e.g., tabular NLI), despite showing inherent problems such as not using the right evidence and inconsistent predictions across inputs while reasoning over the tabular data (Gupta et al., 2021). In this work, we utilize Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET) (i.e., strategic MLM) on pre-trained language models to strengthen these tabular reasoning models' pre-existing knowledge and reasoning abilities. Our upgraded model exhibits a superior understanding of knowledge facts and tabular reasoning compared to current baselines. Additionally, we demonstrate that such models are more effective for underlying downstream tasks of tabular inference on INFOTABS. Furthermore, we show our model's robustness against adversarial sets generated through various character and word level perturbations.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.54/)

Enhancing Tabular Reasoning with Pattern Exploiting Training

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.10/)

Missing Modality meets Meta Sampling (M3S): An Efficient Universal Approach for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Missing Modality

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has attracted much attention in recent years for its necessity in widespread applications. With the development of graph neural network (GNN), recent state-of-the-art ERC models mostly use GNN to embed the intrinsic structure informa- tion of a conversation into the utterance fea- tures. In this paper, we propose a novel GNN- based model for ERC, namely S+PAGE, to bet- ter capture the speaker and position-aware con- versation structure information. Specifically, we add the relative positional encoding and speaker dependency encoding in the represen- tations of edge weights and edge types respec- tively to acquire a more reasonable aggregation algorithm for ERC. Besides, a two-stream con- versational Transformer is presented to extract both the self and inter-speaker contextual fea- tures for each utterance. Extensive experiments are conducted on four ERC benchmarks with state-of-the-art models employed as baselines for comparison, whose results demonstrate the superiority of our model.

To view the proceedings, please [click here](https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.12/)

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AVAST: Attentive Variational State Tracker in a Reinforced Navigator

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