Croatia

Syntax is a fundamental component of language, yet few metrics have been employed to capture syntactic similarity or coherence at the utterance- and document-level. The existing standard document-level syntactic similarity metric is computationally expensive and performs inconsistently when faced with syntactically dissimilar documents. To address these challenges, we present FastKASSIM, a metric for utterance- and document-level syntactic similarity which pairs and averages the most similar constituency parse trees between a pair of documents based on tree kernels. FastKASSIM is more robust to syntactic dissimilarities and runs up to to 5.32 times faster than its predecessor over documents in the r/ChangeMyView corpus. FastKASSIM&#39;s improvements allow us to examine hypotheses in two settings with large documents. We find that syntactically similar arguments on r/ChangeMyView tend to be more persuasive, and that syntax is predictive of authorship attribution in the Australian High Court Judgment corpus.

EACL 2023

FastKASSIM: A Fast Tree Kernel-Based Syntactic Similarity Metric

tree kernels

syntactic similarity

authorship attribution

reddit

persuasion

parsing

Syntax is a fundamental component of language, yet few metrics have been employed to capture syntactic similarity or coherence at the utterance- and document-level. The existing standard document-level syntactic similarity metric is computationally expensive and performs inconsistently when faced with syntactically dissimilar documents. To address these challenges, we present FastKASSIM, a metric for utterance- and document-level syntactic similarity which pairs and averages the most similar constituency parse trees between a pair of documents based on tree kernels. FastKASSIM is more robust to syntactic dissimilarities and runs up to to 5.32 times faster than its predecessor over documents in the r/ChangeMyView corpus. FastKASSIM's improvements allow us to examine hypotheses in two settings with large documents. We find that syntactically similar arguments on r/ChangeMyView tend to be more persuasive, and that syntax is predictive of authorship attribution in the Australian High Court Judgment corpus.

poster

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

In current NLP research, large-scale language models and their abilities are widely being discussed. Some recent works have also found notable failures of these models. Often these failure examples involve complex reasoning abilities. This work focuses on a simple commonsense ability, reasoning about when an action (or its effect) is feasible. To this end, we introduce FeasibilityQA, a question-answering dataset involving binary classification (BCQ) and multi-choice multi-correct questions (MCQ) that test understanding of feasibility. We show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-3, GPT-2, and T5 struggle to answer the feasibility questions correctly. Specifically, on (MCQ, BCQ) questions, GPT-3 achieves accuracy of just (19\%, 62\%) and (25\%, 64\%) in zero-shot and few-shot settings, respectively. We also evaluate models by providing relevant knowledge statements required to answer the question and find that the additional knowledge leads to a 7\% gain in performance, but the overall performance still remains low. These results make one wonder how much commonsense knowledge about action feasibility is encoded in state-of-the-art models and how well they can reason about it.

"John is 50 years old, can his son be 65?" Evaluating NLP Models' Understanding of Feasibility

Tongue twisters are meaningful sentences that are difficult to pronounce. The process of automatically generating tongue twisters is challenging since the generated utterance must satisfy two conditions at once: phonetic difficulty and semantic meaning. Furthermore, phonetic difficulty is itself hard to characterize and is expressed in natural tongue twisters through a heterogeneous mix of phenomena such as alliteration and homophony. In this paper, we propose PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically. We leverage phoneme representations to capture the notion of phonetic difficulty, and we train language models to generate original tongue twisters on two proposed task settings. To do this, we curate a dataset called TT-Corp, consisting of existing English tongue twisters. Through automatic and human evaluation, as well as qualitative analysis, we show that PANCETTA generates novel, phonetically difficult, fluent, and semantically meaningful tongue twisters.

PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically

Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks are naturally imbalanced, as some target categories occur much more frequently than others in the real world. In such scenarios, current NLP models tend to perform poorly on less frequent classes. Addressing class imbalance in NLP is an active research topic, yet, finding a good approach for a particular task and imbalance scenario is difficult.

In this survey, the first overview on class imbalance in deep-learning based NLP, we first discuss various types of controlled and real-world class imbalance.
Our survey then covers approaches that have been explicitly proposed for class-imbalanced NLP tasks or, originating in the computer vision community, have been evaluated on them.
We organize the methods by whether they are based on sampling, data augmentation, choice of loss function, staged learning, or model design.
Finally, we discuss open problems and how to move forward.

A Survey of Methods for Addressing Class Imbalance in Deep-Learning Based Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we seek to improve the faithfulness of TempRel extraction models from two perspectives. The first perspective is to extract genuinely based on contextual description. To achieve this, we propose to conduct counterfactual analysis to attenuate the effects of two significant types of training biases: the event trigger bias and the frequent label bias. We also add tense information into event representations to explicitly place an emphasis on the contextual description. The second perspective is to provide proper uncertainty estimation and abstain from extraction when no relation is described in the text. By parameterization of Dirichlet Prior over the model-predicted categorical distribution, we improve the model estimates of the correctness likelihood and make TempRel predictions more selective. We also employ temperature scaling to recalibrate the model confidence measure after bias mitigation. Through experimental analysis on MATRES, MATRES-DS, and TDDiscourse, we demonstrate that our model extracts TempRel and timelines more faithfully compared to SOTA methods, especially under distribution shifts.

Extracting or Guessing? Improving Faithfulness of Event Temporal Relation Extraction

Aspectual meaning refers to how the internal temporal structure of situations is presented.
This includes whether a situation is described as a state or as an event, whether the situation is finished or ongoing, and whether it is viewed as a whole or with a focus on a particular phase.
This survey gives an overview of computational approaches to modeling lexical and grammatical aspect along with intuitive explanations of the necessary linguistic concepts and terminology.
In particular, we describe the concepts of stativity, telicity, habituality, perfective and imperfective, as well as influential inventories of eventuality and situation types.
Aspect is a crucial component of semantics, especially for precise reporting of the temporal structure of situations, and future NLP approaches need to be able to handle and evaluate it systematically.

A Kind Introduction to Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, with a Survey of Computational Approaches

Due to the semantic complexity of the Relation extraction (RE) task, obtaining high-quality human labelled data is an expensive and noisy process. To improve the sample efficiency of the models, semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods aim to leverage unlabelled data in addition to learning from limited labelled data points. Recently, strong data augmentation combined with consistency-based semi-supervised learning methods have advanced the state of the art in several SSL tasks. However, adapting these methods to the RE task has been challenging due to the difficulty of data augmentation for RE. In this work, we leverage the recent advances in controlled text generation to perform high-quality data augmentation for the RE task. We further introduce small but significant changes to model architecture that allows for generation of more training data by interpolating different data points in their latent space. These data augmentations along with consistency training result in very competitive results for semi-supervised relation extraction on four benchmark datasets.

Semi-supervised Relation Extraction via Data Augmentation and Consistency-training

Local models have recently attained astounding performances in Entity Disambiguation (ED), with generative and extractive formulations being the most promising research directions. However, previous works have so far limited their studies to using, as the textual representation of each candidate, only its Wikipedia title. Although certainly effective, this strategy presents a few critical issues, especially when titles are not sufficiently informative or distinguishable from one another. In this paper, we address this limitation and investigate the extent to which more expressive textual representations can mitigate it. We evaluate our approach thoroughly against standard benchmarks in ED and find extractive formulations to be particularly well-suited to such representations. We report a new state of the art on 2 out of the 6 benchmarks we consider and strongly improve the generalization capability over unseen patterns. We release our code, data and model checkpoints at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/extend.

Entity Disambiguation with Entity Definitions

Non-autoregressive machine translation (NAT) has recently made great progress. However, most works to date have focused on standard translation tasks, even though some edit-based NAT models, such as the Levenshtein Transformer (LevT), seem well suited to translate with a Translation Memory (TM). This is the scenario considered here. We first analyze the vanilla LevT model and explain why it does not do well in this setting. We then propose a new variant, TM-LevT, and show how to effectively train this model. By modifying the data presentation and introducing an extra deletion operation, we obtain performance that are on par with an autoregressive approach, while reducing the decoding load. We also show that incorporating TMs during training dispenses to use knowledge distillation, a well-known trick used to mitigate the multimodality issue.

Integrating Translation Memories into Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation

Acquiring factual knowledge with Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) has attracted increasing attention, showing promising performance in many knowledge-intensive tasks. Their good performance has led the community to believe that the models do possess a modicum of reasoning competence rather than merely memorising the knowledge. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the learnable deductive (also known as explicit) reasoning capability of PLMs. Through a series of controlled experiments, we posit two main findings. 1) PLMs inadequately generalise learned logic rules and perform inconsistently against simple adversarial surface form edits. 2) While the deductive reasoning fine-tuning of PLMs does improve their performance on reasoning over unseen knowledge facts, it results in catastrophically forgetting the previously learnt knowledge. Our main results suggest that PLMs cannot yet perform reliable deductive reasoning, demonstrating the importance of controlled examinations and probing of PLMs' deductive reasoning abilities; we reach beyond (misleading) task performance, revealing that PLMs are still far from robust reasoning capabilities, even for simple deductive tasks.

Can Pretrained Language Models (Yet) Reason Deductively?

In this paper, we prove that separable negative log-likelihood losses for structured prediction are not necessarily Bayes consistent, that is minimizing these losses may not result in a model that predicts the most probable structure in the data distribution for a given input.
This fact opens the question of whether these losses are well-adapted for structured prediction and, if so, why.

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"John is 50 years old, can his son be 65?" Evaluating NLP Models' Understanding of Feasibility