Canada

Dogwhistles are coded expressions that simultaneously convey one meaning to a broad audience and a second, often hateful or provocative, meaning to a narrow in-group; they are deployed to evade both political repercussions and algorithmic content moderation. For example, the word &quot;cosmopolitan in a sentence such as &quot;we need to end the cosmopolitan experiment can mean &quot;worldly to many but also secretly mean &quot;Jewish to a select few. We present the first large-scale computational investigation of dogwhistles. We develop a typology of dogwhistles, curate the largest-to-date glossary of over 300 dogwhistles with rich contextual information and examples, and analyze their usage in historical U.S. politicians&#39; speeches. We then assess whether a large language model (GPT-3) can identify dogwhistles and their meanings, and find that GPT-3&#39;s performance varies widely across types of dogwhistles and targeted groups. Finally, we show that harmful content containing dogwhistles avoids toxicity detection, highlighting online risks presented by such coded language. This work sheds light on the theoretical and applied importance of dogwhistles in both NLP and computational social science, and provides resources to facilitate future research in modeling dogwhistles and mitigating their online harms.

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ACL 2023

From Dogwhistles to Bullhorns: Unveiling Coded Rhetoric with Language Models

abusive language

politics

computational social science

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference!  
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The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
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Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
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The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
<br><br>
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
<br><br>
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Dogwhistles are coded expressions that simultaneously convey one meaning to a broad audience and a second, often hateful or provocative, meaning to a narrow in-group; they are deployed to evade both political repercussions and algorithmic content moderation. For example, the word "cosmopolitan in a sentence such as "we need to end the cosmopolitan experiment can mean "worldly to many but also secretly mean "Jewish to a select few. We present the first large-scale computational investigation of dogwhistles. We develop a typology of dogwhistles, curate the largest-to-date glossary of over 300 dogwhistles with rich contextual information and examples, and analyze their usage in historical U.S. politicians' speeches. We then assess whether a large language model (GPT-3) can identify dogwhistles and their meanings, and find that GPT-3's performance varies widely across types of dogwhistles and targeted groups. Finally, we show that harmful content containing dogwhistles avoids toxicity detection, highlighting online risks presented by such coded language. This work sheds light on the theoretical and applied importance of dogwhistles in both NLP and computational social science, and provides resources to facilitate future research in modeling dogwhistles and mitigating their online harms.

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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)**
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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.

Despite recent progress in text-to-SQL parsing, current semantic parsers are still not accurate enough for practical use. In this paper, we investigate how to build automatic text-to-SQL error correction models. Noticing that token-level edits are out of context and sometimes ambiguous, we propose building clause-level edit models instead. Besides, while most language models of code are not specifically pre-trained for SQL, they know common data structures and their operations in programming languages such as Python. Thus, we propose a novel representation for SQL queries and their edits that adheres more closely to the pre-training corpora of language models of code. Our error correction model improves the exact set match accuracy of different parsers by 2.4-6.5 and obtains up to 4.3 point absolute improvement over two strong baselines.

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Text-to-SQL Error Correction with Language Models of Code

With the advent of pre-trained language models (LMs), increasing research efforts have been focusing on infusing commonsense and domain-specific knowledge to prepare LMs for downstream tasks. These works attempt to leverage knowledge graphs, the de facto standard of symbolic knowledge representation, along with pre-trained LMs. While existing approaches leverage external knowledge, it remains an open question how to jointly incorporate knowledge graphs represented in varying contexts --- from local (e.g., sentence), document-level, to global knowledge, to enable knowledge-rich and interpretable exchange across contexts. In addition, incorporating varying contexts can especially benefit long document understanding tasks that leverage pre-trained LMs, typically bounded by the input sequence length. In light of these challenges, we propose KALM, a language model that jointly leverages knowledge in local, document-level, and global contexts for long document understanding. KALM firstly encodes long documents and knowledge graphs into the three knowledge-aware context representations. KALM then processes each context with context-specific layers. These context-specific layers are followed by a ContextFusion layer that facilitates knowledge exchange to derive an overarching document representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KALM achieves state-of-the-art performance on three long document understanding tasks across 6 datasets/settings. Further analyses reveal that the three knowledge-aware contexts are complementary and they all contribute to model performance, while the importance and information exchange patterns of different contexts vary on different tasks and datasets.

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KALM: Knowledge-Aware Integration of Local, Document, and Global Contexts for Long Document Understanding

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are used for knowledge intensive tasks like question answering, but their knowledge gets continuously outdated as the world changes. Prior work has studied targeted updates to LMs, injecting individual facts and evaluating whether the model learns these facts while not changing predictions on other contexts. We take a step forward and study LMs' abilities to make inferences based on injected facts (or propagate those facts): for example, after learning that something is a TV show, does an LM predict that you can watch it? We study this with two cloze-style tasks: an existing dataset of real-world sentences about novel entities (ECBD) as well as a new controlled benchmark with manually designed templates requiring varying levels of inference about injected knowledge. Surprisingly, we find that existing methods for updating knowledge (gradient-based fine-tuning and modifications of this approach) show little propagation of injected knowledge. These methods improve performance on cloze instances only when there is lexical overlap between injected facts and target inferences. Yet, prepending entity definitions in an LM's context improves performance across all settings, suggesting that there is substantial headroom for parameter-updating approaches for knowledge injection.

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Can LMs Learn New Entities from Descriptions? Challenges in Propagating Injected Knowledge

k-nearest-neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) (Khandelwal et al., 2021) boosts the translation performance of trained neural machine translation (NMT) models by incorporating example-search into the decoding algorithm. However, decoding is seriously time-consuming, i.e., roughly 100 to 1,000 times slower than standard NMT, because neighbor tokens are retrieved from all target tokens of parallel data in each timestep. In this paper, we propose "Subset kNN-MT, which improves the decoding speed of kNN-MT by two methods: (1) retrieving neighbor target tokens from a subset that is the set of neighbor sentences of the input sentence, not from all sentences, and (2) efficient distance computation technique that is suitable for subset neighbor search using a look-up table. Our proposed method achieved a speed-up of up to 132.2 times and an improvement in BLEU score of up to 1.6 compared with kNN-MT in the WMT'19 De-En translation task and the domain adaptation tasks in De-En and En-Ja.

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Subset Retrieval Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

"Leichte Sprache", the German counterpart to Simple English, is a regulated language aiming to facilitate complex written language that would otherwise stay inaccessible to different groups of people.We present a new sentence-aligned monolingual corpus for Simple German -- German. It contains multiple document-aligned sources which we have aligned using automatic sentence-alignment methods.We evaluate our alignments based on a manually labelled subset of aligned documents.The quality of our sentence alignments, as measured by the F1-score, surpasses previous work.We publish the dataset under CC BY-SA and the accompanying code under MIT license.

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A New Aligned Simple German Corpus

We use both Bayesian and neural models to dissect a data set of Chinese learners' pre- and post-interventional responses to two tests measuring their understanding of English prepositions. The results mostly replicate previous findings from frequentist analyses and newly reveal crucial interactions between student ability, task type, and stimulus sentence. Given the sparsity of the data as well as high diversity among learners, the Bayesian method proves most useful; but we also see potential in using language model probabilities as predictors of grammaticality and learnability.

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Reanalyzing L2 Preposition Learning with Bayesian Mixed Effects and a Pretrained Language Model

Injecting external knowledge can improve the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) on various downstream NLP tasks. However, massive retraining is required to deploy new knowledge injection methods or knowledge bases for downstream tasks. In this work, we are the first to study how to improve the flexibility and efficiency of knowledge injection by reusing existing downstream models. To this end, we explore a new paradigm \textit{plug-and-play knowledge injection}, where knowledge bases are injected into frozen existing downstream models by a \textit{knowledge plugin}. Correspondingly, we propose a plug-and-play injection method \textit{map-tuning}, which trains a mapping of knowledge embeddings to enrich model inputs with mapped embeddings while keeping model parameters frozen. Experimental results on three knowledge-driven NLP tasks show that existing injection methods are not suitable for the new paradigm, while map-tuning effectively improves the performance of downstream models. Moreover, we show that a frozen downstream model can be well adapted to different domains with different mapping networks of domain knowledge. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/THUNLP/Knowledge-Plugin.

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Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to discover missing relationships between entities in knowledge graphs (KGs). Most prior KGC work focuses on learning embeddings for entities and relations through a simple score function. Yet, a higher-dimensional embedding space is usually required for a better reasoning capability, which leads to larger model size and hinders applicability to real-world problems (e.g., large-scale KGs or mobile/edge computing). A lightweight modularized KGC solution, called GreenKGC, is proposed in this work to address this issue. GreenKGC consists of three modules: representation learning, feature pruning, and decision learning, to extract discriminant KG features and make accurate predictions on missing relationships using classifiers and negative sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that, in low dimensions, GreenKGC can outperform SOTA methods in most datasets. In addition, low-dimensional GreenKGC can achieve competitive or even better performance against high-dimensional models with a much smaller model size.

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GreenKGC: A Lightweight Knowledge Graph Completion Method

Arguments often do not make explicit how a conclusion follows from its premises. To compensate for this lack, we enrich arguments with structured background knowledge to support knowledge-intense argumentation tasks. We present a new unsupervised method for constructing Contextualized Commonsense Knowledge Graphs (CCKGs) that selects contextually relevant knowledge from large knowledge graphs (KGs) efficiently and at high quality. Our work goes beyond context-insensitive knowledge extraction heuristics by computing semantic similarity between KG triplets and textual arguments. Using these triplet similarities as weights, we extract contextualized knowledge paths that connect a conclusion to its premise, while maximizing similarity to the argument. We combine multiple paths into a CCKG that we optionally prune to reduce noise and raise precision. Intrinsic evaluation of the quality of our graphs shows that our method is effective for (re)constructing human explanation graphs. Manual evaluations in a large-scale knowledge selection setup verify high recall and precision of implicit CSK in the CCKGs. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of CCKGs in a knowledge-insensitive argument quality rating task, outperforming strong baselines and rivaling a GPT-3 based system.

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Similarity-weighted Construction of Contextualized Commonsense Knowledge Graphs for Knowledge-intense Argumentation Tasks

Anxiety disorders are the most common of mental illnesses, but relatively little is known about how to detect them from language. The primary clinical manifestation of anxiety is worry associated cognitive distortions, which are likely expressed at the discourse-level of semantics. Here, we investigate the development of a modern linguistic assessment for degree of anxiety, specifically evaluating the utility of discourse-level information in addition to lexical-level large language model embeddings. We find that a combined lexico-discourse model outperforms models based solely on state-of-the-art contextual embeddings (RoBERTa), with discourse-level representations derived from Sentence-BERT and DiscRE both providing additional predictive power not captured by lexical-level representations. Interpreting the model, we find that discourse patterns of causal explanations, among others, were used significantly more by those scoring high in anxiety, dovetailing with psychological literature.

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Next from ACL 2023

Text-to-SQL Error Correction with Language Models of Code

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Distributional properties of political dogwhistle representations in Swedish BERT