Croatia

jTLEX is a programming library that provides a Java implementation of the TimeLine EXtraction algorithm~(TLEX - Finlayson et al., 2021), along with utilities for programmatic manipulation of TimeML graphs. Timelines are useful for a number of natural language understanding tasks, such as question answering, cross-document event coreference, and summarization \&amp; visualization. jTLEX provides functionality for (1) parsing TimeML annotations into Java objects, (2) construction of TimeML graphs from scratch, (3) partitioning of TimeML graphs into temporally connected subgraphs, (4) transforming temporally connected subgraphs into point algebra (PA) graphs, (5) extracting exact timeline of TimeML graphs, (6) detecting inconsistent subgraphs, and (7) calculating indeterminate sections of the timeline. The library has been tested on the entire TimeBank corpus, and comes with a suite of unit tests. We release the software as open source with a free license for non-commercial use.

EACL 2023

jTLEX: a Java Library for TimeLine EXtraction

timeml

temporal information extraction

timeline

Welcome to the 18th 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 has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. 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. 
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EACL 2024

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.

jTLEX is a programming library that provides a Java implementation of the TimeLine EXtraction algorithm~(TLEX - Finlayson et al., 2021), along with utilities for programmatic manipulation of TimeML graphs. Timelines are useful for a number of natural language understanding tasks, such as question answering, cross-document event coreference, and summarization \& visualization. jTLEX provides functionality for (1) parsing TimeML annotations into Java objects, (2) construction of TimeML graphs from scratch, (3) partitioning of TimeML graphs into temporally connected subgraphs, (4) transforming temporally connected subgraphs into point algebra (PA) graphs, (5) extracting exact timeline of TimeML graphs, (6) detecting inconsistent subgraphs, and (7) calculating indeterminate sections of the timeline. The library has been tested on the entire TimeBank corpus, and comes with a suite of unit tests. We release the software as open source with a free license for non-commercial use.

demo

### 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.

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Existing models to extract temporal relations between events lack a principled method to incorporate external knowledge. In this study, we introduce Bayesian-Trans, a Bayesian learning-based method that models the temporal relation representations as latent variables and infers their values via Bayesian inference and translational functions. Compared to conventional neural approaches, instead of performing point estimation to find the best set parameters, the proposed model infers the parameters' posterior distribution directly, enhancing the model's capability to encode and express uncertainty about the predictions. Experimental results on the three widely used datasets show that Bayesian-Trans outperforms existing approaches for event temporal relation extraction. We additionally present detailed analyses on uncertainty quantification, comparison of priors, and ablation studies, illustrating the benefits of the proposed approach.

Event Temporal Relation Extraction with Bayesian Translational Model

We present a novel iterative extraction model, IterX, for extracting complex relations, or templates, i.e., N-tuples representing a mapping from named slots to spans of text within a document. Documents may feature zero or more instances of a template of any given type, and the task of template extraction entails identifying the templates in a document and extracting each template's slot values. Our imitation learning approach casts the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), and relieves the need to use predefined template orders to train an extractor. It leads to state-of-the-art results on two established benchmarks -- 4-ary relation extraction on SciREX and template extraction on MUC-4 -- as well as a strong baseline on the new BETTER Granular task.

Iterative Document-level Information Extraction via Imitation Learning

Acronym Disambiguation (AD) is crucial for natural language understanding on various sources, including biomedical reports, scientific papers, and search engine queries. 
However, existing acronym disambiguation
benchmarks and tools are limited to specific domains, and the size of prior benchmarks is rather small. 
To accelerate the research on acronym disambiguation, we construct a new benchmark with three components: (1) a much larger acronym dictionary with 1.5M acronyms and 6.4M long forms; (2) a pre-training corpus with 160 million sentences;
(3) three datasets that cover the
general, scientific, and biomedical domains.
We then pre-train a language model, \textbackslash{}emph\{AcroBERT\}, on our constructed corpus for general acronym disambiguation, 
and show the challenges and values of our new benchmark.

GLADIS: A General and Large Acronym Disambiguation Benchmark

Text generation from Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) has substantially benefited from the popularized Pretrained Language Models (PLMs). Myriad approaches have linearized the input graph as a sequence of tokens to fit the PLM tokenization requirements. Nevertheless, this transformation jeopardizes the structural integrity of the graph and is therefore detrimental to its resulting representation. To overcome this issue, Ribeiro et al. (2021b) have recently proposed StructAdapt, a structure-aware adapter which injects the input graph connectivity within PLMs using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). In this paper, we investigate the influence of Relative Position Embeddings (RPE) on AMR-to-Text, and, in parallel, we examine the robustness of StructAdapt. Through ablation studies, graph attack and link prediction, we reveal that RPE might be partially encoding input graphs. We suggest further research regarding the role of RPE will provide valuable insights for Graph-to-Text generation.

Investigating the Effect of Relative Positional Embeddings on AMR-to-Text Generation with Structural Adapters

Image-guided story ending generation (IgSEG) is to generate a story ending based on given story plots and ending image. Existing methods focus on cross-modal feature fusion but overlook reasoning and mining implicit information from story plots and ending image. To tackle this drawback, we propose a multimodal event transformer, an event-based reasoning framework for IgSEG. Specifically, we construct visual and semantic event graphs from story plots and ending image, and leverage event-based reasoning to reason and mine implicit information in a single modality. Next, we connect visual and semantic event graphs and utilize cross-modal fusion to integrate different-modality features. In addition, we propose a multimodal injector to adaptive pass essential information to decoder. Besides, we present an incoherence detection to enhance the understanding context of a story plot and the robustness of graph modeling for our model. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for the image-guided story ending generation.

Multimodal Event Transformer for Image-guided Story Ending Generation

Pretrained language models (PLMs) for data-to-text (D2T) generation can use human-readable data labels such as column headings, keys, or relation names to generalize to out-of-domain examples. However, the models are well-known in producing semantically inaccurate outputs if these labels are ambiguous or incomplete, which is often the case in D2T datasets. In this paper, we expose this issue on the task of descibing a relation between two entities. For our experiments, we collect a novel dataset for verbalizing a diverse set of 1,522 unique relations from three large-scale knowledge graphs (Wikidata, DBPedia, YAGO). We find that although PLMs for D2T generation expectedly fail on unclear cases, models trained with a large variety of relation labels are surprisingly robust in verbalizing novel, unseen relations. We argue that using data with a diverse set of clear and meaningful labels is key to training D2T generation systems capable of generalizing to novel domains.

Mind the Labels: Describing Relations in Knowledge Graphs With Pretrained Models

A characteristic feature of human semantic cognition is its ability to not only store and retrieve the properties of concepts observed through experience, but to also facilitate the inheritance of properties (can breathe) from superordinate concepts (animal) to their subordinates (dog)---i.e. demonstrate property inheritance. In this paper, we present COMPS, a collection of minimal pair sentences that jointly tests pre-trained language models (PLMs) on their ability to attribute properties to concepts and their ability to demonstrate property inheritance behavior. Analyses of 22 different PLMs on COMPS reveal that they can easily distinguish between concepts on the basis of a property when they are trivially different, but find it relatively difficult when concepts are related on the basis of nuanced knowledge representations. Furthermore, we find that PLMs can show behaviors suggesting successful property inheritance in simple contexts, but fail in the presence of distracting information, which decreases the performance of many models sometimes even below chance. This lack of robustness in demonstrating simple reasoning raises important questions about PLMs' capacity to make correct inferences even when they appear to possess the prerequisite knowledge.

COMPS: Conceptual Minimal Pair Sentences for testing Robust Property Knowledge and its Inheritance in Pre-trained Language Models

We introduce small-text, an easy-to-use active learning library, which offers pool-based active learning for single- and multi-label text classification in Python. It features numerous pre-implemented state-of-the-art query strategies, including some that leverage the GPU. Standardized interfaces allow the combination of a variety of classifiers, query strategies, and stopping criteria, facilitating a quick mix and match, and enabling a rapid and convenient development of both active learning experiments and applications. With the objective of making various classifiers and query strategies accessible for active learning, small-text integrates several well-known machine learning libraries, namely scikit-learn, PyTorch, and Hugging Face transformers. The latter integrations are optionally installable extensions, so GPUs can be used but are not required. Using this new library, we investigate the performance of the recently published SetFit training paradigm, which we compare to vanilla transformer fine-tuning, finding that it matches the latter in classification accuracy while outperforming it in area under the curve. The library is available under the MIT License at https://github.com/webis-de/small-text, in version 1.3.0 at the time of writing.

Small-Text: Active Learning for Text Classification in Python

In this paper, we present kogito, an open-source tool for generating commonsense inferences about situations described in text. kogito provides an intuitive and extensible interface to interact with natural language generation models that can be used for hypothesizing commonsense knowledge inference from a textual input. In particular, kogito offers several features for targeted, multi-granularity knowledge generation. These include a standardized API for training and evaluating knowledge models, and generating and filtering inferences from them. We also include helper functions for converting natural language texts into a format ingestible by knowledge models — intermediate pipeline stages such as knowledge head extraction from text, heuristic and model-based knowledge head-relation matching, and an ability to define and use custom knowledge relations. We make the code for
kogito available at https://github.com/epflnlp/kogito along with thorough documentation at https://kogito.readthedocs.io.

kogito: A Commonsense Knowledge Inference Toolkit

We present ALAMBIC, an open-source dockerized web-based platform for annotating text data through active learning for classification tasks. Active learning is known to reduce the need of labelling, a time-consuming task, by selecting the most informative instances among the unlabelled instances, reaching an optimal accuracy faster than by just randomly labelling data. ALAMBIC integrates all the steps from data import to customization of the (active) learning process and annotation of the data, with indications of the progress of the trained model that can be downloaded and used in downstream tasks. Its architecture also allows the easy integration of other types of models, features and active learning strategies.

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Event Temporal Relation Extraction with Bayesian Translational Model

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