Canada

Extracting generalized and robust representations is a major challenge in emotion recognition in conversations (ERC). To address this, we propose a supervised adversarial contrastive learning (SACL) framework for learning class-spread structured representations. The framework applies contrast-aware adversarial training to generate worst-case samples and uses a joint class-spread contrastive learning objective on both original and adversarial samples. It can effectively utilize label-level feature consistency and retain fine-grained intra-class features. To avoid the negative impact of adversarial perturbations on context-dependent data, we design a contextual adversarial training strategy to learn more diverse features from context and enhance the model&#39;s context robustness. We develop a sequence-based method SACL-LSTM under this framework, to learn label-consistent and context-robust emotional features for ERC. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that SACL-LSTM achieves state-of-the-art performance on ERC. Extended experiments prove the effectiveness of the SACL framework.

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ACL 2023

Supervised Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

representation learning

emotion recognition

dialogue system

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.<br><br>
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*<br><br><br><br>

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

Please register!

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.

Extracting generalized and robust representations is a major challenge in emotion recognition in conversations (ERC). To address this, we propose a supervised adversarial contrastive learning (SACL) framework for learning class-spread structured representations. The framework applies contrast-aware adversarial training to generate worst-case samples and uses a joint class-spread contrastive learning objective on both original and adversarial samples. It can effectively utilize label-level feature consistency and retain fine-grained intra-class features. To avoid the negative impact of adversarial perturbations on context-dependent data, we design a contextual adversarial training strategy to learn more diverse features from context and enhance the model's context robustness. We develop a sequence-based method SACL-LSTM under this framework, to learn label-consistent and context-robust emotional features for ERC. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that SACL-LSTM achieves state-of-the-art performance on ERC. Extended experiments prove the effectiveness of the SACL framework.

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience.<br>
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**
<br><br><br><br>

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Text image translation (TIT) aims to translate the source texts embedded in the image to target translations, which has a wide range of applications and thus has important research value. However, current studies on TIT are confronted with two main bottlenecks: 1) this task lacks a publicly available TIT dataset, 2) dominant models are constructed in a cascaded manner, which tends to suffer from the error propagation of optical character recognition (OCR). In this work, we first annotate a Chinese-English TIT dataset named OCRMT30K, providing convenience for subsequent studies. Then, we propose a TIT model with a multimodal codebook, which is able to associate the image with relevant texts, providing useful supplementary information for translation. Moreover, we present a multi-stage training framework involving text machine translation, image-text alignment, and TIT tasks, which fully exploits additional bilingual texts, OCR dataset and our OCRMT30K dataset to train our model. Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses strongly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model and training framework.

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Exploring Better Text Image Translation with Multimodal Codebook

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of pre-trained language models has recently demonstrated remarkable achievements, effectively matching the performance of full fine-tuning while utilizing significantly fewer trainable parameters, and consequently addressing the storage and communication constraints. Nonetheless, various PEFT methods are limited by their inherent characteristics. In the case of sparse fine-tuning, which involves modifying only a small subset of the existing parameters, the selection of fine-tuned parameters is task- and domain-specific, making it unsuitable for federated learning. On the other hand, PEFT methods with adding new parameters typically introduce additional inference latency. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of generating a sparse mask in a task-agnostic manner, wherein all downstream tasks share a common mask. Our approach, which relies solely on the magnitude information of pre-trained parameters, surpasses existing methodologies by a significant margin when evaluated on the GLUE benchmark. Additionally, we introduce a novel adapter technique that directly applies the adapter to pre-trained parameters instead of the hidden representation, thereby achieving identical inference speed to that of full fine-tuning. Through extensive experiments, our proposed method attains a new state-of-the-art outcome in terms of both performance and storage efficiency, storing only 0.03% parameters of full fine-tuning.

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Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning without Introducing New Latency

Monolingual word alignment is crucial to model semantic interactions between sentences.In particular, null alignment, a phenomenon in which words have no corresponding counterparts, is pervasive and critical in handling semantically divergent sentences. Identification of null alignment is useful on its own to reason about the semantic similarity of sentences by indicating there exists information inequality. To achieve unbalanced word alignment that values both alignment and null alignment, this study shows that the family of optimal transport (OT), i.e., balanced, partial, and unbalanced OT, are natural and powerful approaches even without tailor-made techniques.Our extensive experiments covering unsupervised and supervised settings indicate that our generic OT-based alignment methods are competitive against the state-of-the-arts specially designed for word alignment, remarkably on challenging datasets with high null alignment frequencies.

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Unbalanced Optimal Transport for Unbalanced Word Alignment

Pre-trained language models achieve superior performance but are computationally expensive. Techniques such as pruning and knowledge distillation have been developed to reduce their sizes and latencies. In this work, we propose a structured pruning method GRAIN (gradient-based intra-attention pruning), which performs task-specific pruning with knowledge distillation and yields highly effective models. Different from common approaches that prune each attention head as a whole, GRAIN inspects and prunes intra-attention structures, which greatly expands the structure search space and enables more flexible models. We also propose a gradient separation strategy that reduces the interference of distillation on pruning for a better combination of the two approaches. Experiments on GLUE, SQuAD, and CoNLL 2003 show that GRAIN notably outperforms other methods, especially in the high sparsity regime, and achieves 6~7x speedups while maintaining 93%~99% performance. Under extreme compression where only 3% transformer weights remain, the pruned model is still competitive compared to larger models.

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Gradient-based Intra-attention Pruning on Pre-trained Language Models

Cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) aims to train an NER system that generalizes well to a target language by leveraging labeled data in a given source language. Previous work alleviates the data scarcity problem by translating source-language labeled data or performing knowledge distillation on target-language unlabeled data. However, these methods may suffer from label noise due to the automatic labeling process. In this paper, we propose CoLaDa, a Collaborative Label Denoising Framework, to address this problem. Specifically, we first explore a model-collaboration-based denoising scheme that enables models trained on different data sources to collaboratively denoise pseudo labels used by each other. We then present an instance-collaboration-based strategy that considers the label consistency of each token's neighborhood in the representation space for denoising. Experiments on different benchmark datasets show that the proposed CoLaDa achieves superior results compared to previous methods, especially when generalizing to distant languages.

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CoLaDa: A Collaborative Label Denoising Framework for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition

The rapid growth of machine translation (MT) systems necessitates meta-evaluations of evaluation metrics to enable selection of those that best reflect MT quality. Unfortunately, most meta-evaluation studies focus on European languages, the observations for which may not always apply to other languages. Indian languages, having over a billion speakers, are linguistically different from them, and to date, there are no such systematic studies focused solely on English to Indian language MT. This paper fills this gap through a Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) dataset consisting of 7000 fine-grained annotations, spanning 5 Indian languages and 7 MT systems. We evaluate 16 metrics and show that, pre-trained metrics like COMET have the highest correlations with annotator scores as opposed to n-gram metrics like BLEU. We further leverage our MQM annotations to develop an Indic-COMET metric and show that it outperforms COMET counterparts in both human scores correlations and robustness scores in Indian languages. Additionally, we show that the Indic-COMET can outperform COMET on some unseen Indian languages. We hope that our dataset and analysis will facilitate further research in Indic MT evaluation.

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IndicMT Eval: A Dataset to Meta-Evaluate Machine Translation Metrics for Indian Languages

The task of Prior Case Retrieval (PCR) in the legal domain is about automatically citing relevant (based on facts and precedence) prior legal cases in a given query case. To further promote research in PCR, in this paper, we propose a new large benchmark (in English) for the PCR task: IL-PCR (Indian Legal Prior Case Retrieval) corpus. Given the complex nature of case relevance and the long size of legal documents, BM25 remains a strong baseline for ranking the cited prior documents. In this work, we explore the role of events in legal case retrieval and propose an unsupervised retrieval method-based pipeline U-CREAT (Unsupervised Case Retrieval using Events Extraction). We find that the proposed unsupervised retrieval method significantly increases performance compared to BM25 and makes retrieval faster by a considerable margin, making it applicable to real-time case retrieval systems. Our proposed system is generic, we show that it generalizes across two different legal systems (Indian and Canadian), and it shows state-of-the-art performance on the benchmarks for both the legal systems (IL-PCR and COLIEE corpora).

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U-CREAT: Unsupervised Case Retrieval using Events extrAcTion

Recent advances in pre-trained language models (PLMs) have facilitated the development ofcommonsense reasoning tasks. However, existing methods rely on multi-hop knowledgeretrieval and thus suffer low accuracy due toembedded noise in the acquired knowledge.In addition, these methods often attain highcomputational costs and nontrivial knowledgeloss because they encode the knowledge independently of the PLM, making it less relevant to the task and thus resulting in a poorlocal optimum. In this work, we propose MultiView Knowledge Retrieval with Prompt Tuning (MVP-Tuning). MVP-Tuning leveragessimilar question-answer pairs in the training setto improve knowledge retrieval and employsa single prompt-tuned PLM to model knowledge and input text jointly. We conduct our experiments on five commonsense reasoning QAbenchmarks to show that MVP-Tuning outperforms all other baselines in 4 out of 5 datasetswith less than 2% trainable parameters. MVPTuning even gets a new state-of-the-art resulton OpenBookQA and is number one on theleaderboard.

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MVP-Tuning: Multi-View Knowledge Retrieval with Prompt Tuning for Commonsense Reasoning

Due to the rapid upgrade of social platforms, most of today's fake news is published and spread in a multi-modal form. Most existing multi-modal fake news detection methods neglect the fact that some label-specific features learned from the training set cannot generalize well to the testing set, thus inevitably suffering from the harm caused by the latent data bias. In this paper, we analyze and identify the psycholinguistic bias in the text and the bias of inferring news label based on only image features. We mitigate these biases from a causality perspective and propose a Causal intervention and Counterfactual reasoning based Debiasing framework (CCD) for multi-modal fake news detection. To achieve our goal, we first utilize causal intervention to remove the psycholinguistic bias which introduces the spurious correlations between text features and news label. And then, we apply counterfactual reasoning by imagining a counterfactual world where each news has only image features for estimating the direct effect of the image. Therefore we can eliminate the image-only bias by deducting the direct effect of the image from the total effect on labels. Extensive experiments on two real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for improving multi-modal fake news detection.

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Causal Intervention and Counterfactual Reasoning for Multi-modal Fake News Detection

Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) bring new opportunities to challenging problems, especially those that need high-level intelligence, such as the math word problem (MWPs). However, directly applying existing PLMs to MWPs can fail as the generation process lacks sufficient supervision and thus lacks fast adaptivity as humans. We notice that human reasoning has a dual reasoning framework that consists of an immediate reaction system (system 1) and a delicate reasoning system (system 2), where the entire reasoning is determined by their interaction. This inspires us to develop a cooperative reasoning-induced PLM for solving MWPs, called Cooperative Reasoning (CoRe), resulting in a human-like reasoning architecture with system 1 as the generator and system 2 as the verifier. In our approach, the generator is responsible for generating reasoning paths, and the verifiers are used to supervise the evaluation in order to obtain reliable feedback for the generator. We evaluate our CoRe framework on several mathematical reasoning datasets and achieve decent improvement over state-of-the-art methods, up to 9.6% increase over best baselines.

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Exploring Better Text Image Translation with Multimodal Codebook

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