Croatia

Assessing the quality of an argument is a complex, highly subjective task, influenced by heterogeneous factors (e.g., prior beliefs of the annotators, topic, domain, and application), and crucial for its impact in downstream tasks (e.g., argument retrieval or generation). Both the Argument Mining and the Social Science community have devoted plenty of attention to it, resulting in a wide variety of argument quality dimensions and a large number of annotated resources.
This work aims at a better understanding of how the different aspects of argument quality relate to each other from a practical point of view. We employ adapter-fusion (Pfeiffer et al., 2021) as a multi-task learning framework which a) can improve the prediction of individual quality dimensions by injecting knowledge about related dimensions b) is efficient and modular and c) can serve as an analysis tool to investigate relations between different dimensions. We conduct experiments on 6 datasets and 20 quality dimensions. We find that the majority of the dimensions can be learned as a weighted combination of other quality aspects, and that for 8 dimensions adapter fusion improves quality prediction. Last, we show the benefits of this approach by improving the performance in an extrinsic, out-of-domain task: prediction of moderator interventions in a deliberative forum.

EACL 2023

Bridging Argument Quality and Deliberative Quality Annotations with Adapters

adapter-fusion

deliberative quality

argument quality

moderation

argument mining

### 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.

findings / work in progress

Little attention is placed on analyzing nationality bias in language models, especially when nationality is highly used as a factor in increasing the performance of social NLP models. This paper examines how a text generation model, GPT-2, accentuates pre-existing societal biases about country-based demonyms. We generate stories using GPT-2 for various nationalities and use sensitivity analysis to explore how the number of internet users and the country's economic status impacts the sentiment of the stories. To reduce the propagation of biases through large language models (LLM), we explore the debiasing method of adversarial triggering. Our results show that GPT-2 demonstrates significant bias against countries with lower internet users, and adversarial triggering effectively reduces the same.

Nationality Bias in Text Generation

We motivate and introduce CHARD: Clinical Health-Aware Reasoning across Dimensions, to investigate the capability of text generation models to act as implicit clinical knowledge bases and generate free-flow textual explanations about various health-related conditions across several dimensions. We collect and present an associated dataset, CHARDat, consisting of explanations about 52 health conditions across three clinical dimensions. We conduct extensive experiments using BART and T5 along with data augmentation, and perform automatic, human, and qualitative analyses. We show that while our models can perform decently, CHARD is very challenging with strong potential for further exploration.

CHARD: Clinical Health-Aware Reasoning Across Dimensions for Text Generation Models

Medical doctors spend on average 52 to 102 minutes per day writing clinical notes from their patient encounters (Hripcsak et al., 2011). Reducing this workload calls for relevant and efficient summarization methods. In this paper, we introduce new resources and empirical investigations for the automatic summarization of doctor-patient conversations in a clinical setting. In particular, we introduce the MTS-Dialog dataset; a new collection of 1,700 doctor-patient dialogues and corresponding clinical notes. We use this new dataset to investigate the feasibility of this task and the relevance of existing language models, data augmentation, and guided summarization techniques. We compare standard evaluation metrics based on n-gram matching, contextual embeddings, and Fact Extraction to assess the accuracy and the factual consistency of the generated summaries. To ground these results, we perform an expert-based evaluation using relevant natural language generation criteria and task-specific criteria such as critical omissions, and study the correlation between the automatic metrics and expert judgments. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to introduce an open dataset of doctor-patient conversations and clinical notes, with detailed automated and manual evaluations of clinical note generation.

An Empirical Study of Clinical Note Generation from Doctor-Patient Encounters

Pretraining large language models has resulted in tremendous performance improvement for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. While for non-domain specific tasks, such models can be used directly, a common strategy to achieve better performance for specific domains involves pretraining these language models over domain specific data using objectives like Masked Language Modelling (MLM), Autoregressive Language Modelling, etc. While such pretraining addresses the change in vocabulary and style of language for the domain, it is otherwise a domain agnostic approach. In this work, we investigate the effect of incorporating pretraining objectives that explicitly tries to exploit the domain specific language characteristics in addition to such MLM based pretraining. Particularly, we examine two distinct characteristics associated with the legal domain and propose pretraining objectives modelling these characteristics. The proposed objectives target improvement of token-level feature representation, as well as aim to incorporate sentence level semantics. We demonstrate superiority in the performance of the models pretrained using our objectives against those trained using domain-agnostic objectives over several legal downstream tasks.

Exploiting Language Characteristics for Legal Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining

Determining the role of event arguments is a crucial subtask of event extraction. Most previous supervised models leverage costly annotations, which is not practical for open-domain applications. In this work, we propose to use global constraints with prompting to effectively tackles event argument classification without any annotation and task-specific training. Specifically, given an event and its associated passage, the model first creates several new passages by prefix prompts and cloze prompts, where prefix prompts indicate event type and trigger span, and cloze prompts connect each candidate role with the target argument span. Then, a pre-trained language model scores the new passages, making the initial prediction. Our novel prompt templates can easily adapt to all events and argument types without manual effort. Next, the model regularizes the prediction by global constraints exploiting cross-task, cross-argument, and cross-event relations. Extensive experiments demonstrate our model's effectiveness: it outperforms the best zero-shot baselines by 12.5% and 10.9% F1 on ACE and ERE with given argument spans and by 4.3% and 3.3% F1, respectively, without given argument spans. We have made our code publicly available.

Global Constraints with Prompting for Zero-Shot Event Argument Classification

Driven by encouraging results on a wide range of tasks, the field of NLP is experiencing an accelerated race to develop bigger language models. 
This race for bigger models has also underscored the need to continue the pursuit of practical distillation approaches that can leverage the knowledge acquired by these big models in a compute-efficient manner. Having this goal in mind, we build on recent work to propose a hallucination-free framework for sequence tagging that is especially suited for distillation. We show empirical results of new state-of-the-art performance across multiple sequence labelling datasets and validate the usefulness of this framework for distilling a large model in a few-shot learning scenario.

Distillation of encoder-decoder transformers for sequence labelling

We develop models to classify desirable evidence and desirable reasoning revisions in student argumentative writing. We explore two ways to improve classifier performance -- using the essay context of the revision, and using the feedback students received before the revision. We perform both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation for each of our models and report a qualitative analysis. Our results show that while a model using feedback information improves over a baseline model, models utilizing context - either alone or with feedback - are the most successful in identifying desirable revisions.

Predicting Desirable Revisions of Evidence and Reasoning in Argumentative Writing

Contrastive pre-training on distant supervision has shown remarkable effectiveness in improving supervised relation extraction tasks. 
However, the existing methods ignore the intrinsic noise of distant supervision during the pre-training stage. 
In this paper, we propose a weighted contrastive learning method by leveraging the supervised data to estimate the reliability of pre-training instances and explicitly reduce the effect of noise.
Experimental results on three supervised datasets demonstrate the advantages of our proposed weighted contrastive learning approach compared to two state-of-the-art non-weighted baselines.Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/YukinoWan/WCL.

Relation Extraction with Weighted Contrastive Pre-training on Distant Supervision

The task of multimodal referring expression comprehension (REC), aiming at localizing an image region described by a natural language expression, has recently received increasing attention within the research comminity. 
In this paper, we specifically focus on referring expression comprehension with commonsense knowledge (KB-Ref), a task which typically requires reasoning beyond spatial, visual or semantic information. 
We propose a novel framework for Commonsense Knowledge Enhanced Transformers (CK-Transformer) which effectively integrates commonsense knowledge into the representations of objects in an image, facilitating identification of the target objects referred to by the expressions. We conduct extensive experiments on several benchmarks for the task of KB-Ref. Our results show that the proposed CK-Transformer achieves a new state of the art, with an absolute improvement of 3.14% accuracy over the existing state of the art.

CK-Transformer: Commonsense Knowledge Enhanced Transformers for Referring Expression Comprehension

Transcript segmentation is the task of dividing a single continuous transcript into multiple segments. While document segmentation is a popular task, transcript segmentation has significant challenges due to the relatively noisy and sporadic nature of data. We propose pretraining strategies to address these challenges. The strategies are based on ``Next Conversation Prediction'' (NCP) with the underlying idea of pretraining a model to identify consecutive conversations. We further introduce ``Advanced NCP'' to make the pretraining task more relevant to the downstream task of segmentation break prediction while being significantly easier. Finally we introduce a curriculum to Advanced NCP (Curricular NCP) based on the similarity between pretraining and downstream task samples. Curricular NCP applied to a state-of-the-art model for text segmentation outperforms prior results. We also show that our pretraining strategies make the model robust to speech recognition errors commonly found in automatically generated transcripts.

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