Croatia

In social sciences, recent years have witnessed a growing interest in applying NLP approaches to automatically detect framing in political discourse. However, most NLP studies by now focus heavily on framing effect arising from topic coverage, whereas framing effect arising from subtle usage of linguistic devices remains
understudied. In a collaboration with political science researchers, we intend to investigate framing strategies in German newspaper articles on the &quot;European Refugee Crisis&quot;. With the goal of a more in-depth framing analysis, we not only incorporate lexical cues for shallow topic-related framing, but also propose and operationalize a variety of framing-relevant semantic and pragmatic devices, which are theoretically derived from linguistics and political science research. We demonstrate the influential role of these linguistic devices with a large-scale quantitative analysis, bringing novel insights into the linguistic properties of framing.

EACL 2023

Towards a More In-Depth Detection of Political Framing

framing detection

linguistic theories

computational social science

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society was an in-person meeting held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands at the Postillion Hotel & Conference Centre.

**ON-DEMAND PROGRAM ACCESS AFTER THE CONFERENCE** 
Recordings of the invited program are now available. You can access them by clicking on the 'Schedule' icon on the left. Select view by week and navigate to the day and time slot of the recording you wish to view. Click on the time slot to access the recording.

Recordings available (click on each recording to view):

**Thursday, July 25** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Morgan Barense on Enhancing real-world event memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/17997/lecture/99084-dynamics-between-minds-and-the-environment) 
1000: [Gleitman Award Winner Isabelle Dautriche on Language Foundations: Insights from acquisition, communication, cognition, and more](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18000/lecture/99085-gleitman-talk) 
1415: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds and the environment](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18016&searchGroup=lecture) 
1700: [Rumelhart Prize Presentation Speaker Alison Gopnik on Exploit, explore, empower: Three ages and three intelligences](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18028/lecture/99161-rp1-rumelhart-prize-presentation) 

**Friday, July 26** 
0900: [C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize Keynote Speaker Kia Nobre on Focusing in memory](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18035/lecture/99162-hp1-c-l-de-carvalho-heineken-prize-keynote-address) 
1030: [Rumelhart Symposium: Childhood as exploration](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18038/lecture/100346-childhood-as-exploration) 
1415: [Elman Prize Symposium](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18053&searchGroup=lecture) 
1600: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics between minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18065&searchGroup=lecture) 
1745: [Keynote Speaker Andrea E. Martin on Neural dynamics encode the structure and statistics of language](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18077/lecture/99271-neural-dynamics-encode-the-structure-and-statistics-of-language) 

**Saturday, July 27** 
0900: [Keynote Speaker Gregor Schöner on How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions/18083/lecture/99273-dynamics-within-the-mind) 
1000: [Glushko Talks](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18086&searchGroup=lecture) 
1500: [Invited Symposium: Dynamics within minds](https://underline.io/events/465/sessions?eventSessionId=18100&searchGroup=lecture) 


#### **CogSci 2024 Program Book**
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**The Program Book can be downloaded [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yRVp1cBqRnAbdYi4GXWV_pZeyWNsRquv/view?usp=sharing).**

#### **Letter from the President**

Welcome to the 2024 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Rotterdam! CogSci 2024 brings together a large community of cognitive scientists who have traveled here from around the world, as well as a smaller group of remote presenters. I would like to extend an especially warm welcome to our first-time CogSci meeting attendees, and hope that 
their experience inspires them to join our future meetings for many years to come.

I want to thank this year’s conference co-chairs, Larissa K Samuelson, Stefan Frank, Mariya Toneva, Allyson Mackey, and Eliot Hazeltine, for putting together an amazing series of invited talks and symposia around the theme of Dynamics of Cognition. The co-chairs also deserve credit for handling a record-breaking number of submissions and producing a truly exciting conference program 

Beyond the invited talks and symposia dedicated to this year’s conference theme, I would like to highlight the presentations and events honoring the 
Rumelhart, Elman, Gleitman and C .L . de Carvalho Heineken prize winners, including the Rumelhart reception on Thursday. As you may know, we are recording all of the invited talks and symposia, and all prize-winners’ talks, and will be making this content available after the conference. 

The Cognitive Science Society relies on the volunteer efforts of our Governing Board members who work on matters related to our membership; conference policies; diversity and inclusion, international, and outreach initiatives; prizes and much more. We welcome interest from Society members who would like to become more involved in what we do. The 
Society is deeply grateful to Rick Dale and Andrea Bender, who serve as editors of the two Society journals, Cognitive Science and Topics in Cognitive Science respectively. We especially acknowledge our editors’ generosity in donating their stipends each year to D&I and outreach efforts. 

This year’s Annual Meeting depends critically on the support of Marischal De Armond and his team at Podium Conference Specialists: Sharon Zwack, Cendrine De Vis, Sarah-Kate Burke, and Rachel Waller worked tirelessly to secure the venue and handled a multitude of logistical and organizational issues, from arranging coffee breaks and receptions to making sure that a huge number of posters fits comfortably into the available space. Finally, and importantly, I would like to acknowledge the Cognitive Science Society Executive Officer, Erica Wojcik, for managing the complex and ever expanding sphere of our Society’s activities.

I hope you enjoy this year’s meeting and the many different opportunities to engage with the vibrant community of cognitive scientists gathered here. I also hope you get a chance to explore the great city of Rotterdam with its many attractions, museums, restaurants and scenic views. If you’d like to talk more about our Society, or simply want to say hello, please stop by!

![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/3c66d0e21fff30e204df1138ffd15173.jpeg)

**Anna Papafragou** 
President, Cognitive Science 
Society 2023-2024

**CODE OF CONDUCT** 
By attending the CogSci 2024 Conference, you are required to adhere to the society’s [Code of Conduct](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16-6KkptF0Gn3ZYGJDlpqpwTdImw45Ng0/view?usp=drive_link).

**ABOUT THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE SOCIETY** 
The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education.

The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

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CogSci 2024

The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

In social sciences, recent years have witnessed a growing interest in applying NLP approaches to automatically detect framing in political discourse. However, most NLP studies by now focus heavily on framing effect arising from topic coverage, whereas framing effect arising from subtle usage of linguistic devices remains
understudied. In a collaboration with political science researchers, we intend to investigate framing strategies in German newspaper articles on the "European Refugee Crisis". With the goal of a more in-depth framing analysis, we not only incorporate lexical cues for shallow topic-related framing, but also propose and operationalize a variety of framing-relevant semantic and pragmatic devices, which are theoretically derived from linguistics and political science research. We demonstrate the influential role of these linguistic devices with a large-scale quantitative analysis, bringing novel insights into the linguistic properties of framing.

workshop paper

### 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.

This paper investigates the identification of populist rhetoric in text and presents a novel cross-lingual dataset for this task. Our work is based on the definition of populism as a "communication style of political actors that refers to the people" but also includes anti-elitism as another core feature of populism. Accordingly, we annotate references to people and elite in German and English parliamentary debates with a hierarchical scheme. The paper describes our dataset and annotation procedure and reports inter-annotator agreement for this task. Next, we compare and evaluate different transformer-based model architectures on a German dataset and report results for zero-shot learning on a smaller English data. We then show that semi-supervised tri-training can improve results in the cross-lingual setting. Our dataset can be used to investigate how political actors talk about elite and people and to study how populist rhetoric is used as a strategic device.

Our kind of people? Detecting populist references in political debates

Assessing the quality of an argument is a complex, highly subjective task, influenced by heterogeneous factors (e.g., prior beliefs of the an- notators, 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 be- tween different dimensions. We conduct experiments on 6 datasets and 20 quality dimen- sions. 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 mod- erator interventions in a deliberative forum.

Bridging Argument Quality and Deliberative Quality Annotations with Adapters

Solving substitution ciphers involves mapping sequences of cipher symbols to fluent text in a target language. This has conventionally been formulated as a search problem, to find the decipherment key using a character-level language model to constrain the search space. This work instead frames decipherment as a sequence prediction task, using a Transformer-based causal language model to learn recurrences between characters in a ciphertext. We introduce a novel technique for transcribing arbitrary substitution ciphers into a common recurrence encoding. By leveraging this technique, we (i) create a large synthetic dataset of homophonic ciphers using random keys, and (ii) train a decipherment model that predicts the plaintext sequence given a recurrence-encoded ciphertext. Our method achieves strong results on synthetic 1:1 and homophonic ciphers, and cracks several real historic homophonic ciphers. Our analysis shows that the model learns recurrence relations between cipher

Decipherment as Regression: Solving Historical Substitution Ciphers by Learning Symbol Recurrence Relations

This paper presents work on novel machine translation (MT) systems between spoken and signed languages, where signed languages are represented in SignWriting, a sign language writing system. Our work seeks to address the lack of out-of-the-box support for signed languages in current MT systems and is based on the SignBank dataset, which contains pairs of spoken language text and SignWriting content. We introduce novel methods to parse, factorize, decode, and evaluate SignWriting, leveraging ideas from neural factored MT. In a bilingual setup--translating from American Sign Language to (American) English--our method achieves over 30 BLEU, while in two multilingual setups--translating in both directions between spoken languages and signed languages--we achieve over 20 BLEU. We find that common MT techniques used to improve spoken language translation similarly affect the performance of sign language translation. These findings validate our use of an intermediate text representation for signed languages to include them in natural language processing research.

Machine Translation between Spoken Languages and Signed Languages Represented in SignWriting

In many humanitarian scenarios, translation into severely low resource languages often does not require a universal translation engine, but a dedicated text-specific translation engine. For example, healthcare records, hygienic proce- dures, government communication, emergency procedures and religious texts are all limited texts. While generic translation engines for all languages do not exist, translation of multi- lingually known limited texts into new, endan- gered languages may be possible and reduce hu- man translation effort. We attempt to leverage translation resources from many rich resource languages to efficiently produce best possible translation quality for a well known text, which is available in multiple languages, in a new, severely low resource language. We examine two approaches: 1.) best selection of seed sentences to jump start translations in a new language in view of best generalization to the remainder of a larger targeted text(s), and 2.) we adapt large general multilingual translation engines from many other languages to focus on a specific text in a new, unknown language. We find that adapting large pretrained multilingual models to the domain/text first and then to the severely low resource language works best. If we also select a best set of seed sentences, we can improve average chrF performance on new test languages from a baseline of 21.9 to 50.7, while reducing the number of seed sentences to only ∼1,000 in the new, unknown language.

Train Global, Tailor Local: Minimalist Multilingual Translation into Endangered Languages

Data augmentation (DA) is a popular strategy to boost performance on neural machine translation tasks. The impact of data augmentation in low-resource environments, particularly for diverse and scarce languages, is understudied. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet novel metric to measure the impact of several different data augmentation strategies. This metric, which we call Data Augmentation Advantage (DAA), quantifies how many true data pairs a synthetic data pair is worth in a particular experimental context. We demonstrate the utility of this metric by training models for several linguistically-varied datasets using the data augmentation methods of back-translation, SwitchOut, and sentence concatenation. In lower-resource tasks, DAA is an especially valuable metric for comparing DA performance as it provides a more effective way to quantify gains when BLEU scores are especially small and results across diverse languages are more divergent and difficult to assess.

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Our kind of people? Detecting populist references in political debates

Similar lecture

Linguistic Framing in Large Language Models