Croatia

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.

EACL 2023

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

situation entities

habituality

stativity

grammatical aspect

lexical aspect

telicity

verb semantics

survey

linguistics

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.

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.

On the inconsistency of separable losses for structured prediction

Integrating human feedback in models can improve the performance of natural language pro-
cessing (NLP) models. Feedback can be either explicit (e.g. ranking used in training language
models) or implicit (e.g. using human cognitive signals in the form of eyetracking). Prior eye
tracking and NLP research reveal that cognitive processes, such as human scanpaths, gleaned
from human gaze patterns aid in the understanding and performance of NLP models. However, the collection of real eyetracking data for NLP tasks is challenging due to the requirement
of expensive and precise equipment coupled with privacy invasion issues. To address this
challenge, we propose ScanTextGAN, a novel model for generating human scanpaths over text. We show that ScanTextGAN-generated scanpaths can approximate meaningful cognitive signals in human gaze patterns. We include synthetically generated scanpaths in four popular NLP tasks spanning six different datasets as proof of concept and show that the models augmented with generated scanpaths improve the performance of all downstream NLP tasks.

Synthesizing Human Gaze Feedback for Improved NLP Performance

Decision-makers in the humanitarian sector rely on timely and exact information during crisis events. Knowing how many civilians were injured during an earthquake is vital to allocate aids properly. Information about such victim counts are however often only available within full-text event descriptions from newspapers and other reports. Extracting numbers from text is challenging: numbers have different formats and may require numeric reasoning. This renders purely tagging approaches insufficient. As a consequence, fine-grained counts of injured, displaced, or abused victims beyond fatalities are often not extracted and remain unseen. We cast victim count extraction as a question answering (QA) task with a regression or classification objective. We compare tagging approaches: regex, dependency parsing, semantic role labeling, and advanced text-to-text models. Beyond model accuracy, we analyze extraction reliability and robustness which are key for this sensitive task. In particular, we discuss model calibration and investigate out-of-distribution and few-shot performance. Ultimately, we make a comprehensive recommendation on which model to select for different desiderata and data domains. Our work is among the first to apply numeracy-focused large language models in a real-world use case with a positive impact.

Extracting Victim Counts from Text

A universal classification model aims to generalize to diverse classification tasks in both zero and few shot settings. A promising way toward universal classification is to cast heterogeneous data formats into a dataset-agnostic "meta-task" (e.g., textual entailment, question answering) then pretrain a model on the combined meta dataset. The existing work is either pretrained on specific subsets of classification tasks, or pretrained on both classification and generation data but the model could not fulfill its potential in universality and reliability. These also leave a massive amount of annotated data under-exploited. To fill these gaps, we propose ConEntail, a new framework for universal zero and few shot classification with supervised contrastive pretraining. Our unified meta-task for classification is based on nested entailment. It can be interpreted as "Does sentence a entails [sentence b entails label c]". This formulation enables us to make better use of 57 annotated classification datasets for supervised contrastive pretraining and universal evaluation. In this way, ConEntail helps the model (1) absorb knowledge from different datasets, and (2) gain consistent performance gain with more pretraining data. In experiments, we compare our model with discriminative and generative models pretrained on the same dataset. The results confirm that our framework effectively exploits existing annotated data and consistently outperforms baselines in both zero (9.4\% average improvement) and few shot settings (3.5\% average improvement). Our code is available in supplementary materials.

ConEntail: An Entailment-based Framework for Universal Zero and Few Shot Classification with Supervised Contrastive Pretraining

Memes can sway people's opinions over social media as they combine visual and textual information in an easy-to-consume manner. Since memes instantly turn viral, it becomes crucial to infer their intent and potentially associated harmfulness to take timely measures as needed. A common problem associated with meme comprehension lies in detecting the entities referenced and characterizing the role of each of these entities. Here, we aim to understand whether the meme glorifies, vilifies, or victimizes each entity it refers to. To this end, we address the task of role identification of entities in harmful memes, i.e., detecting who is the ‘hero', the ‘villain', and the ‘victim' in the meme, if any. We utilize HVVMemes – a memes dataset on US Politics and Covid-19 memes, released recently as part of the CONSTRAINT@ACL-2022 shared-task. It contains memes, entities referenced, and their associated roles: hero, villain, victim, and other. We further design VECTOR (Visual-semantic role dEteCToR), a robust multi-modal framework for the task, which integrates entity-based contextual information in the multi-modal representation and compare it to several standard unimodal (text-only or image-only) or multi-modal (image+text) models. Our experimental results show that our proposed model achieves an improvement of 4\% over the best baseline and 1\% over the best competing stand-alone submission from the shared-task. Besides divulging an extensive experimental setup with comparative analyses, we finally highlight the challenges encountered in addressing the complex task of semantic role labeling within memes.

Characterizing the Entities in Harmful Memes: Who is the Hero, the Villain, the Victim?

Seq2seq models have been shown to struggle with compositional generalisation, i.e. generalising to new and potentially more complex structures than seen during training. Taking inspiration from grammar-based models that excel at compositional generalisation, we present a flexible end-to-end differentiable neural model that composes two structural operations: a fertility step, which we introduce in this work, and a reordering step based on previous work (Wang et al., 2021). To ensure differentiability, we use the expected value of each step, which we compute using dynamic programming. Our model outperforms seq2seq models by a wide margin on challenging compositional splits of realistic semantic parsing tasks that require generalisation to longer examples. It also compares favourably to other models targeting compositional generalisation.

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