United Arab Emirates

Aspect-level multimodal sentiment analysis, which aims to identify the sentiment of the target aspect from multimodal data, recently has attracted extensive attention in the community of multimedia and natural language processing. Despite the recent success in textual aspect-based sentiment analysis, existing models mainly focused on utilizing the object-level semantic information in the image but ignore explicitly using the visual emotional cues, especially the facial emotions. How to distill visual emotional cues and align them with the textual content remains a key challenge to solve the problem. In this work, we introduce a face-sensitive image-to-emotional-text translation (FITE) method, which focuses on capturing visual sentiment cues through facial expressions and selectively matching and fusing with the target aspect in textual modality. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first that explicitly utilize the emotional information from images in the multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis task. Experiment results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017 datasets. The improvement demonstrates the superiority of our model in capturing aspect-level sentiment in multimodal data with facial expressions.

EMNLP 2022

Face-Sensitive Image-to-Emotional-Text Cross-modal Translation for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

face

absa

multimodal

sentiment analysis

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
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Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Prompt learning with immensely large Casual Language Models (CLMs) has been shown promising for attribute-controllable text generation (CTG). However, vanilla prompt tuning tends to imitate training corpus characteristics beyond the control attributes, resulting in a poor generalization ability. Moreover, it is less able to capture the relationship between different attributes, further limiting the control performance. In this paper, we propose a new CTG approach, namely DisCup, which incorporates the attribute knowledge of discriminator to optimize the control-prompts, steering a frozen CLM to produce attribute-specific texts. Specifically, the frozen CLM model, capable of producing multitudinous texts, is first used to generate the next-token candidates based on the context, so as to ensure the diversity of tokens to be predicted. Then, we leverage an attribute-discriminator to select desired/undesired tokens from those candidates, providing the inter-attribute knowledge. Finally, we bridge the above two traits by an unlikelihood objective for prompt-tuning. Extensive experimental results show that DisCup can achieve a new state-of-the-art control performance while maintaining an efficient and high-quality text generation, only relying on around 10 virtual tokens.

DisCup: Discriminator Cooperative Unlikelihood Prompt-tuning for Controllable Text Generation

Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to identify named entities with very little annotated data. Previous methods solve this problem based on token-wise classification, which ignores the information of entity boundaries, and inevitably the performance is affected by the massive non-entity tokens. To this end, we propose a seminal span-based prototypical network (SpanProto) that tackles few-shot NER via a two-stage approach, including span extraction and mention classification. 
In the span extraction stage, we transform the sequential tags into a global boundary matrix, enabling the model to focus on the explicit boundary information. For mention classification, we leverage prototypical learning to capture the semantic representations for each labeled span and make the model better adapt to novel-class entities. To further improve the model performance, we split out the false positives generated by the span extractor but not labeled in the current episode set, and then present a margin-based loss to separate them from each prototype region. Experiments over multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our model outperforms strong baselines by a large margin.

SpanProto: A Two-stage Span-based Prototypical Network for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

In the presented study, we discover that the so-called "transition freedom” metric appears superior for unsupervised tokenization purposes in comparison to statistical metrics such as mutual information and conditional probability, providing F-measure scores in range from 0.71 to 1.0 across explored multilingual corpora. We find that different languages require different offshoots of that metric (such as derivative, variance, and "peak values”) for successful tokenization. Larger training corpora do not necessarily result in better tokenization quality, while compressing the models by eliminating statistically weak evidence tends to improve performance. The proposed unsupervised tokenization technique provides quality better than or comparable to lexicon-based ones, depending on the language.

Unsupervised Tokenization Learning

Query-focused summarization has been considered as an important extension for text summarization. It aims to generate a concise highlight for a given query. Different from text summarization, query-focused summarization has long been plagued by the problem of lacking high-quality large-scale datasets. In this paper, we investigate the idea that whether we can integrate and transfer the knowledge of text summarization and question answering to assist the few-shot learning in query-focused summarization. Here, we propose prefix-merging, a prefix-based pretraining strategy for few-shot learning in query-focused summarization. Drawn inspiration from prefix-tuning, we are allowed to integrate the task knowledge from text summarization and question answering into a properly designed prefix and apply the merged prefix to query-focused summarization. With only a small amount of trainable parameters, prefix-merging outperforms fine-tuning on query-focused summarization. We further discuss the influence of different prefix designs and propose a visualized explanation for how prefix-merging works.

Few-shot Query-Focused Summarization with Prefix-Merging

Knowledge base completion (KBC) has benefitted greatly by learning explainable rules in an human-interpretable dialect such as first-order logic. Rule-based KBC has so far, mainly focussed on learning one of two types of rules: conjunction-of-disjunctions and disjunction-of-conjunctions. We qualitatively show, via examples, that one of these has an advantage over the other when it comes to achieving high quality KBC. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose learning both kinds of rules within a common framework. To this end, we propose to utilize logical neural networks (LNN), a powerful neuro-symbolic AI framework that can express both kinds of rules and learn these end-to-end using gradient-based optimization. Our in-depth experiments show that our LNN-based approach to learning rules for KBC leads to roughly 10% relative improvements, if not more, over SotA rule-based KBC methods. Moreover, by showing how to combine our proposed methods with knowledge graph embeddings we further achieve an additional 7.5% relative improvement.

Logical Neural Networks for Knowledge Base Completion with Embeddings & Rules

Retriever-reader models achieve competitive performance across many different NLP tasks such as open question answering and dialogue conversations. In this work, we notice these models easily overfit the top-rank retrieval passages and standard training fails to reason over the entire retrieval passages. We introduce a learnable passage mask mechanism which desensitizes the impact from the top-rank retrieval passages and prevents the model from overfitting. Controlling the gradient variance with fewer mask candidates and selecting the mask candidates with one-shot bi-level optimization, our learnable regularization strategy enforces the answer generation to focus on the entire retrieval passages. Experiments on different tasks across open question answering, dialogue conversation, and fact verification show that our method consistently outperforms its baselines. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that our method can be general, effective, and beneficial for many NLP tasks.

Passage-Mask: A Learnable Regularization Strategy for Retriever-Reader Models

Can machines know what twin prime is? From the composition of this phrase, machines may guess twin prime is a certain kind of prime, but it is still difficult to deduce exactly what twin stands for without additional knowledge. Here, twin prime is a jargon - a specialized term used by experts in a particular field. Explaining jargon is challenging since it usually requires domain knowledge to understand. Recently, there is an increasing interest in extracting and generating definitions of words automatically. However, existing approaches, either extraction or generation, perform poorly on jargon. In this paper, we propose to combine extraction and generation for jargon definition modeling: first extract self- and correlative definitional information of target jargon from the Web and then generate the final definitions by incorporating the extracted definitional information. Our framework is remarkably simple but effective: experiments demonstrate our method can generate high-quality definitions for jargon and outperform state-of-the-art models significantly, e.g., BLEU score from 8.76 to 22.66 and human-annotated score from 2.34 to 4.04.

Understanding Jargon: Combining Extraction and Generation for Definition Modeling

Hierarchical text classification aims to leverage label hierarchy in multi-label text classification. Existing methods encode label hierarchy in a global view, where label hierarchy is treated as the static hierarchical structure containing all labels. Since global hierarchy is static and irrelevant to text samples, it makes these methods hard to exploit hierarchical information. Contrary to global hierarchy, local hierarchy as a structured labels hierarchy corresponding to each text sample. It is dynamic and relevant to text samples, which is ignored in previous methods. To exploit global and local hierarchies, we propose Hierarchy-guided BERT with Global and Local hierarchies (HBGL), which utilizes the large-scale parameters and prior language knowledge of BERT to model both global and local hierarchies. Moreover, HBGL avoids the intentional fusion of semantic and hierarchical modules by directly modeling semantic and hierarchical information with BERT. Compared with the state-of-the-art method HGCLR, our method achieves significant improvement on three benchmark datasets.

Exploiting Global and Local Hierarchies for Hierarchical Text Classification

Since the meaning representations are detailed and accurate annotations which express fine-grained sequence-level semtantics, it is usually hard to train discriminative semantic parsers via Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) in an autoregressive fashion. In this paper, we propose a semantic-aware contrastive learning algorithm, which can learn to distinguish fine-grained meaning representations and take the overall sequence-level semantic into consideration. Specifically, a multi-level online sampling algorithm is proposed to sample confusing and diverse instances. Three semantic-aware similarity functions are designed to accurately measure the distance between meaning representations as a whole. And a ranked contrastive loss is proposed to pull the representations of the semantic-identical instances together and push negative instances away. Experiments on two standard datasets show that our approach achieves significant improvements over MLE baselines and gets state-of-the-art performances by simply applying semantic-aware contrastive learning on a vanilla Seq2Seq model.

Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning for More Accurate Semantic Parsing

Relational triple extraction is a critical task for natural language processing. Existing methods mainly focused on capturing semantic information, but suffered from ignoring the syntactic structure of the sentence, which is proved in the relation classification task to contain rich relational information. This is due to the absence of entity locations, which is the prerequisite for pruning noisy edges from the dependency tree, when extracting relational triples. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to tackle this challenge and incorporate syntactic information for relational triple extraction. First, we propose to automatically contract the dependency tree into a core relational topology and eliminate redundant information with graph pooling operations. Then, we propose a symmetrical expanding path with graph unpooling operations to fuse the contracted core syntactic interactions with the original sentence context. We also propose a bipartite graph matching objective function to capture the reflections between the core topology and golden relational facts. Since our model shares similar contracting and expanding paths with encoder-decoder models like U-Net, we name our model as Relation U-Net (RelU-Net). We conduct experiments on several datasets and the results prove the effectiveness of our method.

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Next from EMNLP 2022

DisCup: Discriminator Cooperative Unlikelihood Prompt-tuning for Controllable Text Generation

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