Spain

We introduce what is to the best of our knowledge a new task in natural language processing: measuring alignment to authoritarian state media. We operationalize alignment in terms of sociological definitions of media bias. We take as a case study the alignment of four Taiwanese media outlets to the Chinese Communist Party state media. We present the results of an initial investigation using the frequency of words in psychologically meaningful categories. Our findings suggest that the chosen word categories correlate with framing choices. We develop a calculation method that yields reasonable results for measuring alignment, agreeing well with the known labels. We confirm that our method does capture event selection bias, but whether it captures framing bias requires further investigation.

COLING 2020

Measuring Alignment to Authoritarian State Media as Framing Bias

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, 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.

technical paper

The explosive growth and popularity of Social Media has revolutionised the way we communicate and collaborate. Unfortunately, this same ease of accessing and sharing information has led
to an explosion of misinformation and propaganda. Given that stance detection can significantly
aid in veracity prediction, this work focuses on boosting automated stance detection, a task on
which pre-trained models have been extremely successful on, as on several other tasks. This
work shows that the task of stance detection can benefit from feature based information, especially on certain under performing classes, however, integrating such features into pre-trained
models using ensembling is challenging. We propose a novel architecture for integrating features
with pre-trained models that address these challenges and test our method on the RumourEval
2019 dataset. This method achieves state-of-the-art results with an F1-score of 63.94 on the test
set.

Incorporating Count-Based Features into Pre-Trained Models for
Improved Stance Detection

Satire is a form of humorous critique, but it is sometimes misinterpreted by readers as legitimate news, which can lead to harmful consequences. We observe that the images used in satirical news articles often contain absurd or ridiculous content and that image manipulation is used to create fictional scenarios. While previous work have studied text-based methods, in this work we propose a multi-modal approach based on state-of-the-art visiolinguistic model ViLBERT. To this end, we create a new dataset consisting of images and headlines of regular and satirical news for the task of satire detection. We fine-tune ViLBERT on the dataset and train a convolutional neural network that uses an image forensics technique. Evaluation on the dataset shows that our proposed multi-modal approach outperforms image-only, text-only, and simple fusion baselines.

A Multi-Modal Method for Satire Detection Using Textual and Visual Cues

This paper presents a time-topic cohesive model describing the communication patterns on the coronavirus pandemic from three Asian countries. The strength of our model is two-fold. First, it detects contextualized events based on topical and temporal information via contrastive learning. Second, it can be applied to multiple languages, enabling a comparison of risk communication across cultures. We present a case study and discuss future implications of the proposed model.

A Risk Communication Event Detection Model via Contrastive Learning

We present a new comprehensive dataset for the unstandardised West-Germanic language Low Saxon covering the last two centuries, the majority of modern dialects and various genres, which will be made openly available in connection with the final version of this paper. Since so far no such comprehensive dataset of contemporary Low Saxon exists, this provides a great contribution to NLP research on this language. We also test the use of this dataset for dialect classification by training a few baseline models comparing statistical and neural approaches. The performance of these models shows that in spite of an imbalance in the amount of data per dialect, enough features can be learned for a relatively high classification accuracy.

LSDC - A Comprehensive Dataset for Low Saxon Dialect Classification

For languages with complex morphology, word-to-word translation is a task with various potential applications, for example, in information retrieval and dictionary creation, as well as in machine translation. In this paper, we confine ourselves to the subtask of character alignment for the particular case of families of related languages with very few resources for most or all members. There are many such families; we focus on the subgroup of Semitic languages spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea. We begin with an adaptation of the familiar alignment algorithms behind statistical machine translation, modifying them as appropriate for our task. We show how character alignment can reveal morphological, phonological, and orthographic correspondences among related languages.

Character Alignment in Morphologically Complex Translation Sets for Related Languages

Strong regional variation, together with the lack of standard orthography, makes Swiss German automatic speech recognition (ASR) particularly difficult in a multi-dialectal setting. This paper focuses on one of the many challenges, namely, the choice of the output text to represent non-standardised Swiss German. We investigate two potential options: a) dialectal writing – approximate phonemic transcriptions that provide close correspondence between grapheme labels and the acoustic signal but are highly inconsistent and b) normalised writing – transcriptions resembling standard German that are relatively consistent but distant from the acoustic signal. To find out which writing facilitates Swiss German ASR, we build several systems using the Kaldi toolkit and a dataset covering 14 regional varieties. A formal comparison shows that the system trained on the normalised transcriptions achieves better results in word error rate (WER) (29.39\%) but underperforms at the character level, suggesting dialectal transcriptions offer a viable solution for downstream applications where dialectal differences are important. To better assess word-level performance for dialectal transcriptions, we use a flexible WER measure (FlexWER). When evaluated with this metric, the system trained on dialectal transcriptions outperforms that trained on the normalised writing. Besides establishing a benchmark for Swiss German multi-dialectal ASR, our findings can be helpful in designing ASR systems for other languages without standard orthography.

ASR for Non-standardised Languages with Dialectal Variation: the case of Swiss German

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are typically trained by considering humans as end-users and maximizing human-oriented objectives. However, in some scenarios, their output is consumed by automatic NLP components rather than by humans. In these scenarios, translations’ quality is measured in terms of their “fitness for purpose” (i.e. maximizing performance of external NLP tools) rather than in terms of standard human fluency/adequacy criteria. Recently, reinforcement learning techniques exploiting the feedback from downstream NLP tools have been proposed for “machine-oriented” NMT adaptation. In this work, we tackle the problem in a multilingual setting where a single NMT model translates from multiple languages for downstream automatic processing in the target language. Knowledge sharing across close and distant languages allows to apply our machine-oriented approach in the zero-shot setting where no labeled data for the test language is seen at training time. Moreover, we incorporate multi-lingual BERT in the source side of our NMT system to benefit from the knowledge embedded in this model. Our experiments show coherent performance gains, for different language directions over both i) “generic” NMT models (trained for human consumption), and ii) fine-tuned multilingual BERT. This gain for zero-shot language directions (e.g. Spanish–English) is higher when the models are fine-tuned on a closely-related source language (Italian) than a distant one (German).

Machine-oriented NMT Adaptation for Zero-shot NLP tasks: Comparing the Usefulness of Close and Distant Languages

Public companies are obliged to include financial and non-financial information within their corporate filings under Regulation S-K, in the United States . However, the requirements still allow for manager’s discretion. This raises the question to which extent the information is actually included and if this information is at all relevant for investors. We answer this question by training and evaluating an end-to-end deep learning approach (based on BERT and GloVe embeddings) to predict the financial and environmental performance of the company from the “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Conditions and Results of Operations” (MD&A) section of 10-K (yearly) and 10-Q (quarterly) filings. We further analyse the mediating effect of the environmental performance on the relationship between the company’s disclosures and financial performance. Hereby, we address the results of previous studies regarding environmental performance. We find that the textual information contained within the MD&A section does not allow for conclusions about the future (corporate) financial performance. However, there is evidence that the environmental performance can be extracted by natural language processing
methods.

A Computational Analysis of Financial and Environmental Narratives within Financial Reports and its Value for Investors

We present a novel approach to unsupervised information extraction by identifying and extracting relevant concept-value pairs from textual data. The system’s building blocks are domain agnostic, making it universally applicable. In this paper, we describe each compo-nent of the system and how it extracts relevant economic information from U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statements. Our methodology achieves an impressive 96% accuracy for identifying relevant information for a set of seven economic indicators: household spending, inflation, unemployment, economic activity, fixed investment, fed-eral funds rate, and labor market.

Information Extraction from Federal Open Market Committee Statements



We present a transfer learning approach for Title Detection in FinToC 2020 challenge. Our proposed approach relies on the premise that the geometric layout and character features of the titles and non-titles can be learnt separately from a large corpus, and their learning can then be transferred to a domain-specific dataset. On a domain-specific dataset, we train a Deep Neural Net on the text of the document along with a pre-trained model for geometric and character features. We achieved an F-Score of 83.25 on the test set and secured top rank in the title detection task in FinToC 2020 (Bentabet et al., 2020).


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