Canada

Grammatical error correction (GEC) is a promising task aimed at correcting errors in a text. Many methods have been proposed to facilitate this task with remarkable results. However, most of them only focus on enhancing textual feature extraction without exploring the usage of other modalities&#39; information (e.g., speech), which can also provide valuable knowledge to help the model detect grammatical errors. To shore up this deficiency, we propose a novel framework that integrates both speech and text features to enhance GEC. In detail, we create new multimodal GEC datasets for English and German by generating audio from text using the advanced text-to-speech models. Subsequently, we extract acoustic and textual representations by a multimodal encoder that consists of a speech and a text encoder. A mixture-of-experts (MoE) layer is employed to selectively align representations from the two modalities, and then a dot attention mechanism is used to fuse them as final multimodal representations. Experimental results on CoNLL14, BEA19 English, and Falko-MERLIN German show that our multimodal GEC models achieve significant improvements over strong baselines and achieve a new state-of-the-art result on the Falko-MERLIN test set.

ACL 2023

Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Multimodal Feature Integration

multimodal gec datasets

mixture-of-experts

grammatical error correction

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Grammatical error correction (GEC) is a promising task aimed at correcting errors in a text. Many methods have been proposed to facilitate this task with remarkable results. However, most of them only focus on enhancing textual feature extraction without exploring the usage of other modalities' information (e.g., speech), which can also provide valuable knowledge to help the model detect grammatical errors. To shore up this deficiency, we propose a novel framework that integrates both speech and text features to enhance GEC. In detail, we create new multimodal GEC datasets for English and German by generating audio from text using the advanced text-to-speech models. Subsequently, we extract acoustic and textual representations by a multimodal encoder that consists of a speech and a text encoder. A mixture-of-experts (MoE) layer is employed to selectively align representations from the two modalities, and then a dot attention mechanism is used to fuse them as final multimodal representations. Experimental results on CoNLL14, BEA19 English, and Falko-MERLIN German show that our multimodal GEC models achieve significant improvements over strong baselines and achieve a new state-of-the-art result on the Falko-MERLIN test set.

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.

Translating training data into many languages has emerged as a practical solution for improving cross-lingual transfer. For tasks that involve span-level annotations, such as information extraction or question answering, an additional label projection step is required to map annotated spans onto the translated texts. Recently, a few efforts have utilized a simple mark-then-translate method to jointly perform translation and projection by inserting special markers around the labeled spans in the original sentence. However, as far as we are aware, no empirical analysis has been conducted on how this approach compares to traditional annotation projection based on word alignment. In this paper, we present an extensive empirical study across 57 languages and three tasks (QA, NER, and Event Extraction) to evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of both methods, filling an important gap in the literature. Experimental results show that our optimized version of mark-then-translate, which we call EasyProject, is easily applied to many languages and works surprisingly well, outperforming the more complex word alignment-based methods. We analyze several key factors that affect the end-task performance, and show EasyProject works well because it can accurately preserve label span boundaries after translation. We will publicly release all our code and data.

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Frustratingly Easy Label Projection for Cross-lingual Transfer

State-of-the-art natural language processing models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance in 'closed-world' settings where all the labels in the evaluation set are known at training time. However, in real-world settings, 'novel' instances that do not belong to any known class are often observed. This renders the ability to deal with novelties crucial. To initiate a systematic research in this important area of 'dealing with novelties', we introduce NoveltyTask, a multi-stage task to evaluate a system's performance on pipelined novelty 'detection' and 'accommodation' tasks. We provide mathematical formulation of NoveltyTask and instantiate it with the authorship attribution task that pertains to identifying the correct author of a given text. We use amazon reviews corpus and compile a large dataset (consisting of 250k instances across 200 authors/labels) for NoveltyTask. We conduct comprehensive experiments and explore several baseline methods for the task. Our results show that the methods achieve considerably low performance making the task challenging and leaving sufficient room for improvement. Finally, we believe our work will encourage research in this underexplored area of dealing with novelties, an important step en route to developing robust systems.

A Unified Evaluation Framework for Novelty Detection and Accommodation in NLP with an Instantiation in Authorship Attribution

We apply reinforcement learning techniques to topic modeling by replacing the variational autoencoder in ProdLDA with a continuous action space reinforcement learning policy. We train the system with a policy gradient algorithm REINFORCE. Additionally, we introduced several modifications: modernize the neural network architecture, weight the ELBO loss, use contextual embeddings, and monitor the learning process via computing topic diversity and coherence for each training step. Experiments areperformed on 11 data sets. Our unsupervised model outperforms all other unsupervised models and performs on par with or better than most models using supervised labeling. Our model is outperformed on certain data sets by a model using supervised labeling and contrastive learning. We have also conducted an ablation study to provide empirical evidence of performance improvements from changes we made to ProdLDA and found that the reinforcement learning formulation boosts performance. We open-source our code implementation.

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Reinforcement Learning for Topic Models

We introduce SexTok, a multi-modal dataset composed of TikTok videos labeled as sexually suggestive (from the annotator's point of view), sex-educational content, or neither. Such a dataset is necessary to address the challenge of distinguishing between sexually suggestive content and virtual sex education videos on TikTok. Children's exposure to sexually suggestive videos has been shown to have adversarial effects on their development (Collins et al. 2017). Meanwhile, virtual sex education, especially on subjects that are more relevant to the LGBTQIA+ community, is very valuable (Mitchell et al. 2014). The platform's current system removes/punishes some of both types of videos, even though they serve different purposes. Our dataset contains video URLs, and it is also audio transcribed. To validate its importance, we explore two transformer-based models for classifying the videos. Our preliminary results suggest that the task of distinguishing between these types of videos is learnable but challenging. These experiments suggest that this dataset is meaningful and invites further study on the subject.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/6qSnTPZvioRLfFJpZUjhCw/embed/polls/392d31f7-8600-4f46-acbd-518f8a451cb3" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

It's not Sexually Suggestive; It's Educative | Separating Sex Education from Suggestive Content on TikTok videos

Location information can support social media analyses by providing geographic context. Some of the most accurate and popular Twitter geolocation systems rely on rule-based methods that examine the user-provided profile location, which fail to handle informal or noisy location names. We propose Geo-Seq2seq, a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model for Twitter user geolocation that rewrites noisy, multilingual user-provided location strings into structured English location names. We train our system on tens of millions of multilingual location string and geotagged-tweet pairs. Compared to leading methods, our model vastly increases coverage (i.e., the number of users we can geolocate) while achieving comparable or superior accuracy. Our error analysis reveals that constrained decoding helps the model produce valid locations according to a location database. Finally, we measure biases across language, country of origin, and time to evaluate fairness, and find that while our model can generalize well to unseen temporal data, performance does vary by language and country.

Geo-Seq2seq: Twitter User Geolocation on Noisy Data through Sequence to Sequence Learning

Bias research in NLP seeks to analyse models for social biases, thus helping NLP practitioners uncover, measure, and mitigate social harms. We analyse the body of work that uses prompts and templates to assess bias in language models. We draw on a measurement modelling framework to create a taxonomy of attributes that capture what a bias test aims to measure and how that measurement is carried out. By applying this taxonomy to 90 bias tests, we illustrate qualitatively and quantitatively that core aspects of bias test conceptualisations and operationalisations are frequently unstated or ambiguous, carry implicit assumptions, or be mismatched.Our analysis illuminates the scope of possible bias types the field is able to measure, and reveals types that are as yet under-researched.We offer guidance to enable the community to explore a wider section of the possible bias space, and to better close the gap between desired outcomes and experimental design, both for bias and for evaluating language models more broadly.

This prompt is measuring <mask>: evaluating bias evaluation in language models

Semantic tasks are rarely formally defined, and the exact relationship between them is an open question. We introduce a taxonomy that elucidates the connection between several problems in lexical semantics, including monolingual and cross-lingual variants. Our theoretical framework is based on the hypothesis of the equivalence of concept and meaning distinctions. Using algorithmic problem reductions, we demonstrate that all problems in the taxonomy can be reduced to word sense disambiguation (WSD), and that WSD itself can be reduced to some problems, making them theoretically equivalent. In addition, we carry out experiments that strongly support the soundness of the concept-meaning hypothesis, and the correctness of our reductions.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/6qSnTPZvioRLfFJpZUjhCw/embed/polls/65cceebc-b951-4e8c-870b-9fcc4fa2265e" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Taxonomy of Problems in Lexical Semantics

Cutting-edge image generation has been praised for producing high-quality images, suggesting a ubiquitous future in a variety of applications. However, initial studies have pointed to the potential for harm due to predictive bias, reflecting and potentially reinforcing cultural stereotypes. In this work, we are the first to investigate how multimodal models handle diverse gender identities. Concretely, we conduct a thorough analysis in which we compare the output of three image generation models for prompts containing cisgender vs. non-cisgender identity terms. Our findings demonstrate that certain non-cisgender identities are consistently (mis)represented as less human, more stereotyped and more sexualised. We complement our experimental analysis with (a) a survey among non-cisgender individuals and (b) a series of interviews, to establish which harms affected individuals anticipate, and how they would like to be represented. We find respondents are particularly concerned about misrepresentation, and the potential to drive harmful behaviours and beliefs. Simple heuristics to limit offensive content are widely rejected, and instead respondents call for community involvement, curated training data and the ability to customise. These improvements could pave the way for a future where change is led by the affected community, and technology is used to positively ''[portray] queerness in ways that we haven't even thought of''' rather than reproducing stale, offensive stereotypes.

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Stereotypes and Smut: The (Mis)representation of Non-cisgender Identities by Text-to-Image Models

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in NLP and have recently been used for tasks in computational semantics. However, these tasks do not fully benefit from PLMs since meaning representations are not explicitly included. We introduce multilingual pre-trained language-meaning models based on Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs), including meaning representations besides natural language texts in the same model, and design a new strategy to reduce the gap between the pre-training and fine-tuning objectives. Since DRSs are language neutral, cross-lingual transfer learning is adopted to further improve the performance of non-English tasks. Automatic evaluation results show that our approach achieves the best performance on both the multilingual DRS parsing and DRS-to-text generation tasks. Correlation analysis between automatic metrics and human judgements on the generation task further validates the effectiveness of our model. Human inspection reveals that out-of-vocabulary tokens are the main cause of erroneous results.

Pre-Trained Language-Meaning Models for Multilingual Parsing and Generation

Although deep language representations have become the dominant form of language featurization in recent years, in many settings it is important to understand a model's decision-making process. This necessitates not only an interpretable model but also interpretable features. In particular, language must be featurized in a way that is interpretable while still characterizing the original text well. We present SenteCon, a method for introducing human interpretability in deep language representations. Given a passage of text, SenteCon encodes the text as a layer of interpretable categories in which each dimension corresponds to the relevance of a specific category. Our empirical evaluations indicate that encoding language with SenteCon provides high-level interpretability at little to no cost to predictive performance on downstream tasks. Moreover, we find that SenteCon outperforms existing interpretable language representations with respect to both its downstream performance and its agreement with human characterizations of the text.

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Next from ACL 2023

Frustratingly Easy Label Projection for Cross-lingual Transfer

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