United Arab Emirates

Knowledge about outcomes is critical for complex event understanding but is hard to acquire.
We show that by pre-identifying a participant in a complex event, crowdworkers are able
to (1) infer the collective impact of salient events that make up the situation, (2) annotate the volitional engagement of participants in causing the situation, and (3) ground the
outcome of the situation in state changes of the participants. By creating a multi-step interface and a careful quality control strategy, we collect a high quality annotated dataset of
8K short newswire narratives and ROCStories with high inter-annotator agreement (0.74-0.96
weighted Fleiss Kappa). Our dataset, POQue (Participant Outcome Questions), enables the
exploration and development of models that address multiple aspects of semantic understanding. Experimentally, we show that current language models lag behind human performance in subtle ways through our task formulations that target abstract and specific comprehension of a complex event, its outcome, and a participant&#39;s influence over the event culmination.

EMNLP 2022

POQue: Asking Participant-specific Outcome Questions for a Deeper Understanding of Complex Events

situations in stories

complex events

participant outcomes

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Knowledge about outcomes is critical for complex event understanding but is hard to acquire.
We show that by pre-identifying a participant in a complex event, crowdworkers are able
to (1) infer the collective impact of salient events that make up the situation, (2) annotate the volitional engagement of participants in causing the situation, and (3) ground the
outcome of the situation in state changes of the participants. By creating a multi-step interface and a careful quality control strategy, we collect a high quality annotated dataset of
8K short newswire narratives and ROCStories with high inter-annotator agreement (0.74-0.96
weighted Fleiss Kappa). Our dataset, POQue (Participant Outcome Questions), enables the
exploration and development of models that address multiple aspects of semantic understanding. Experimentally, we show that current language models lag behind human performance in subtle ways through our task formulations that target abstract and specific comprehension of a complex event, its outcome, and a participant's influence over the event culmination.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
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***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.

Unwanted and often harmful social biases are becoming ever more salient in NLP research, affecting both models and datasets. In this work, we ask whether training on demographically perturbed data leads to fairer language models. We collect a large dataset of human annotated text perturbations and train a neural perturbation model, which we show outperforms heuristic alternatives. We find that (i) language models (LMs) pre-trained on demographically perturbed corpora are typically more fair, and (ii) LMs finetuned on perturbed GLUE datasets exhibit less demographic bias on downstream tasks, and (iii) fairness improvements do not come at the expense of performance on downstream tasks. Lastly, we discuss outstanding questions about how best to evaluate the (un)fairness of large language models. We hope that this exploration of neural demographic perturbation will help drive more improvement towards fairer NLP.

Perturbation Augmentation for Fairer NLP

Treebanks have traditionally included only text and were derived from written sources such as newspapers or the web. We introduce the Aligned Multimodal Movie Treebank (AMMT), an English language treebank derived from dialog in Hollywood movies which includes transcriptions of the audio-visual streams with word-level alignment, as well as part of speech tags and dependency parses in the Universal Dependencies formalism. AMMT consists of 31,264 sentences and 218,090 words, that will amount to the 3rd largest UD English treebank and the only multimodal treebank in UD. To help with the web-based annotation effort, we also introduce the Efficient Audio Alignment Annotator (EAAA), a companion tool that enables annotators to significantly speed-up their annotation processes.

The Aligned Multimodal Movie Treebank: An audio, video, dependency-parse treebank

Current metrics for evaluating factuality for abstractive document summarization have achieved high correlations with human judgment, but they do not account for the vision modality and thus are not adequate for vision-and-language summarization. We propose CLIPBERTSCORE, a simple weighted combination of CLIPScore and BERTScore to leverage the robustness and strong factuality detection performance between image-summary and document-summary, respectively. Next, due to the lack of meta-evaluation benchmarks to evaluate the quality of multimodal factuality metrics, we collect human judgments of factuality with respect to documents and images. We show that this simple combination of two metrics in the zero-shot setting achieves higher correlations than existing factuality metrics for document summarization, outperforms an existing multimodal summarization metric, and performs competitively with strong multimodal factuality metrics specifically fine-tuned for the task. Our thorough analysis demonstrates the robustness and high correlation of CLIPBERTSCORE and its components on four factuality metric-evaluation benchmarks. Finally, we demonstrate two practical downstream applications of our CLIPBERTSCORE metric: for selecting important images to focus on during training, and as a reward for reinforcement learning to improve factuality of multimodal summary generation w.r.t automatic and human evaluation.

Evaluating and Improving Factuality in Multimodal Abstractive Summarization

Pre-trained language models encode undesirable social biases, which are further exacerbated in downstream use. To this end, we propose MABEL (a Method for Attenuating Gender Bias using Entailment Labels), an intermediate pre-training approach for mitigating gender bias in contextualized representations. Key to our approach is the use of a contrastive learning objective on counterfactually augmented, gender-balanced entailment pairs from natural language inference (NLI) datasets. We also introduce an alignment regularizer that pulls identical entailment pairs along opposite gender directions closer. We extensively evaluate our approach on intrinsic and extrinsic metrics, and show that MABEL outperforms previous task-agnostic debiasing approaches in terms of fairness. It also preserves task performance after fine-tuning on downstream tasks. Together, these findings demonstrate the suitability of NLI data as an effective means of bias mitigation, as opposed to only using unlabeled sentences in the literature. Finally, we identify that existing approaches often use evaluation settings that are insufficient or inconsistent. We make an effort to reproduce and compare previous methods, and call for unifying the evaluation settings across gender debiasing methods for better future comparison.

MABEL: Attenuating Gender Bias using Textual Entailment Data

Proper noun compounds, e.g., "Covid vaccine", convey information in a succinct manner (a "Covid vaccine" is a "vaccine that immunizes against the Covid disease"). These are commonly used in short-form domains, such as news headlines, but are largely ignored in information-seeking applications. To address this limitation, we release a new manually annotated dataset, ProNCI, consisting of 22.5K proper noun compounds along with their free-form semantic interpretations. ProNCI is 60 times larger than prior noun compound datasets and also includes non-compositional examples, which have not been previously explored. We experiment with various neural models for automatically generating the semantic interpretations from proper noun compounds, ranging from few-shot prompting to supervised learning, with varying degrees of knowledge about the constituent nouns. We find that adding targeted knowledge, particularly about the common noun, results in performance gains of upto 2.8%. Finally, we integrate our model generated interpretations with an existing Open IE system and observe an 7.5% increase in yield at a precision of 85%. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/dair-iitd/pronci.

"Covid vaccine is against Covid but Oxford vaccine is made at Oxford!" Semantic Interpretation of Proper Noun Compounds

In retrieval-based dialogue systems, a response selection model acts as a ranker to select the most appropriate response among several candidates. However, such selection models tend to rely on context-response content similarity, which makes models vulnerable to adversarial responses that are semantically similar but not relevant to the dialogue context. Recent studies have shown that leveraging these adversarial responses as negative training samples is useful for improving the discriminating power of the selection model. Nevertheless, collecting human-written adversarial responses is expensive, and existing synthesizing methods often have limited scalability. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a simple but efficient method for generating adversarial negative responses leveraging a large-scale language model. Experimental results on dialogue selection tasks show that our method outperforms other methods of synthesizing adversarial negative responses. These results suggest that our method can be an effective alternative to human annotators in generating adversarial responses. Our dataset and generation code is available at https://github.com/leenw23/generating-negatives-by-gpt3.

Pneg: Prompt-based Negative Response Generation for Dialogue Response Selection Task

Large multilingual language models generally demonstrate impressive results in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, yet often fail to successfully transfer to low-resource languages, even for token-level prediction tasks like named entity recognition (NER). In this work, we introduce a simple yet highly effective approach for improving zero-shot transfer for NER to low-resource languages. We observe that NER fine-tuning in the source language decontextualizes token representations, i.e., tokens increasingly attend to themselves. This increased reliance on token information itself, we hypothesize, triggers a type of overfitting to properties that NE tokens within the source languages share, but are generally not present in NE mentions of target languages. As a remedy, we propose a simple yet very effective sliced fine-tuning for NER (SLICER) that forces stronger token contextualization in the Transformer: we divide the transformed token representations and classifier into disjoint slices that are then independently classified during training. We evaluate SLICER on two standard benchmarks for NER that involve low-resource languages, WikiANN and MasakhaNER, and show that it (i) indeed reduces decontextualization (i.e., extent to which NE tokens attend to themselves), consequently (ii) yielding consistent transfer gains, especially prominent for low-resource target languages distant from the source language.

SLICER: Sliced Fine-Tuning for Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Transfer for Named Entity Recognition

Knowledge graphs are commonly used as sources of information in commonsense question answering, and can also be used to express explanations for the model's answer choice. A common way of incorporating facts from the graph is to encode them separately from the question, and then combine the two representations to select an answer. In this paper, we argue that highly faithful graph-based explanations cannot be extracted from existing models of this type. Such explanations will not include reasoning done by the transformer encoding the question, so will be incomplete. We confirm this theory with a novel proxy measure for faithfulness and propose two architecture changes to address the problem. Our findings suggest a path forward for developing architectures for faithful graph-based explanations.

Faithful Knowledge Graph Explanations in Commonsense Question Answering

Recent directions for offensive language detection are hierarchical modeling, identifying the type and the target of offensive language, and interpretability with offensive span annotation and prediction. These improvements are focused on English and do not transfer well to other languages because of cultural and linguistic differences. In this paper, we present the Korean Offensive Language Dataset (KOLD) comprising 40,429 comments, which are annotated hierarchically with the type and the target of offensive language, accompanied by annotations of the corresponding text spans. We collect the comments from NAVER news and YouTube platform and provide the titles of the articles and videos as the context information for the annotation process. We use these annotated comments as training data for Korean BERT and RoBERTa models and find that they are effective at offensiveness detection, target classification, and target span detection while having room for improvement for target group classification and offensive span detection. We discover that the target group distribution differs drastically from the existing English datasets, and observe that providing the context information improves the model performance in offensiveness detection (+0.3), target classification (+1.5), and target group classification (+13.1). We publicly release the dataset and baseline models.

KOLD: Korean Offensive Language Dataset

Despite tremendous progress in automatic summarization, state-of-the-art methods are predominantly trained to excel in summarizing short newswire articles, or documents with strong layout biases such as scientific articles or government reports. Efficient techniques to summarize financial documents, discussing facts and figures, have largely been unexplored, majorly due to the unavailability of suitable datasets. In this work, we present ECTSum, a new dataset with transcripts of earnings calls (ECTs), hosted by publicly traded companies, as documents, and experts-written short telegram-style bullet point summaries derived from corresponding Reuters articles. ECTs are long unstructured documents without any prescribed length limit or format. We benchmark our dataset with state-of-the-art summarization methods across various metrics evaluating the content quality and factual consistency of the generated summaries. Finally, we present a simple yet effective approach, ECT-BPS, to generate a set of bullet points that precisely capture the important facts discussed in the calls.

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Perturbation Augmentation for Fairer NLP

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