Canada

Argumentation is ubiquitous in natural language communication, from politics and media to everyday work and private life. Many arguments derive their persuasive power from human values, such as self-directed thought or tolerance, albeit often implicitly. These values are key to understanding the semantics of arguments, as they are generally accepted as justifications for why a particular option is ethically desirable. Can automated systems uncover the values on which an argument draws? To answer this question, 39 teams submitted runs to ValueEval&#39;23. Using a multi-sourced dataset of over 9K arguments, the systems achieved F1-scores up to 0.87 (nature) and over 0.70 for three more of 20 universal value categories. However, many challenges remain, as evidenced by the low peak F1-score of 0.39 for stimulation, hedonism, face, and humility.

ACL 2023

SemEval-2023 Task 4: ValueEval: Identification of Human Values behind Arguments

schwartz taxonomy

human values

argumentation

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 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 will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
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ACL 2022

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 (NLP). 

Argumentation is ubiquitous in natural language communication, from politics and media to everyday work and private life. Many arguments derive their persuasive power from human values, such as self-directed thought or tolerance, albeit often implicitly. These values are key to understanding the semantics of arguments, as they are generally accepted as justifications for why a particular option is ethically desirable. Can automated systems uncover the values on which an argument draws? To answer this question, 39 teams submitted runs to ValueEval'23. Using a multi-sourced dataset of over 9K arguments, the systems achieved F1-scores up to 0.87 (nature) and over 0.70 for three more of 20 universal value categories. However, many challenges remain, as evidenced by the low peak F1-score of 0.39 for stimulation, hedonism, face, and humility.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
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. 
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.

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##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

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.

We describe SemEval-2023 task 3 on \textit{Detecting the Category, the Framing, and the Persuasion Techniques in Online News in a Multi-lingual Setup}: the dataset, the task organization process, the evaluation setup, the results, and the participating systems. The task focused on news articles in nine languages (six known to the participants upfront: English, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Russian), and three additional ones revealed to the participants at the testing phase: Spanish, Greek, and Georgian). The task featured three subtasks: (1) determining the genre of the article (opinion, reporting, or satire),
(2) identifying one or more frames used in an article from a pool of 14 generic frames, and (3) identify the persuasion techniques used in each paragraph of the article, using a taxonomy of 23 persuasion techniques. This was a very popular task: a total of 181 teams registered to participate, and 41 eventually made an official submission on the test set.

SemEval-2023 Task 3: Detecting the Category, the Framing, and the Persuasion Techniques in Online News in a Multi-lingual Setup

In populous countries, pending legal cases have been growing exponentially. There is a need for developing NLP-based techniques for processing and automatically understanding legal documents. To promote research in the area of Legal NLP we organized the shared task LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts at SemEval 2023. LegalEval task has three sub-tasks: Task-A (Rhetorical Roles Labeling) is about automatically structuring legal documents into semantically coherent units, Task-B (Legal Named Entity Recognition) deals with identifying relevant entities in a legal document and Task-C (Court Judgement Prediction with Explanation) explores the possibility of automatically predicting the outcome of a legal case along with providing an explanation for the prediction. In total 26 teams (approx. 100 participants spread across the world) submitted systems paper. In each of the sub-tasks, the proposed systems outperformed the baselines; however, there is a lot of scope for improvement. This paper describes the tasks, and analyzes techniques proposed by various teams.

SemEval 2023 Task 6: LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts

Clinical Trials Reports (CTRs) contain highly valuable health information from which Natural Language Inference (NLI) techniques determine if a given hypothesis can be inferred from a given premise. CTRs are abundant with domain terminology with particular terms that are difficult to understand without prior knowledge. Thus, we proposed to use domain ontologies as a source of external knowledge that could help with the inference process in the SemEval-2023 Task 7: Multi-evidence Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Data (NLI4CT). This document describes our participation in subtask 1: Textual Entailment, where Ontologies, NLP techniques, such as tokenization and named entity recognition, and rule-based approaches are all combined in our approach. We were able to show that inputting annotations from domain ontologies improved the baseline systems.

lasigeBioTM at SemEval-2023 Task 7: Improving Natural Language Inference Baseline Systems with Domain Ontologies

The naïve approach for fine-tuning pretrained deep learning models on downstream tasks involves feeding them mini-batches of randomly sampled data. In this paper, we propose a more elaborate method for fine-tuning Pretrained Multilingual Transformers (PMTs) on multilin-gual data. Inspired by the success of curriculum learning approaches, we investigate the significance of fine-tuning PMTs on multilingual data in a sequential fashion language by language. Unlike the curriculum learning paradigm where the model is presented with increasingly complex examples, we do not adopt a notion of “easy” and “hard” samples. Instead, our experiments draw insight from psychological findings on how the human brain processes new information and the persistence of newly learned concepts. We perform our experiments on a challenging news-framing dataset that contains texts in six languages. Our proposed method outperforms the naïve approach by achieving improvements of 2.57% in terms of F1 score. Even when we supplement the naïve approach with recency fine-tuning, we still achieve an improvement of 1.34% with a 3.63% convergence speed-up. Moreover, we are the first to observe an interesting pattern in which deep learning models exhibit a human-like primacy-recency effect.

BERTastic at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Fine-Tuning Pretrained Multilingual Transformers – Does Order Matter?

This paper describes our approach to Subtask 1 "News Genre Categorization" of SemEval-2023 Task 3 "Detecting the Category, the Framing, and the Persuasion Techniques in Online News in a Multi-lingual Setup", which aims to determine whether a given news article is an opinion piece, an objective report, or satirical. We fine-tuned the domain-specific language model POLITICS, which was pre-trained on a large-scale dataset of more than 3.6M English political news articles following ideology-driven pre-training objectives. In order to use it in the multilingual setup of the task, we added as a pre-processing step the translation of all documents into English. Our system ranked among the top systems overall in most language, and ranked 1st on the English dataset.

MELODI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: In-domain Pre-training for Low-resource Classification of News Articles

This paper describes our submission to the SemEval 2023 multilingual tweet intimacy analysis shared task. The goal of the task was to assess the level of intimacy of Twitter posts in ten languages. The proposed approach consists of several steps. First, we perform in-domain pre-training to create a language model adapted to Twitter data. In the next step, we train an ensemble of regression models to expand the training set with pseudo-labeled examples. The extended dataset is used to train the final solution. Our method was ranked first in five out of ten language subtasks, obtaining the highest average score across all languages.

OPI at SemEval 2023 Task 9: A Simple but Effective Approach to Multilingual Tweet Intimacy Analysis

The goal of visual word sense disambiguation is to find the image that best matches the provided description of the word's meaning. It is a challenging problem, requiring approaches that combine language and image understanding. In this paper, we present our submission to SemEval 2023 visual word sense disambiguation shared task. The proposed system integrates multimodal embeddings, learning to rank methods, and knowledge-based approaches. We build a classifier based on the CLIP model, whose results are enriched with additional information retrieved from Wikipedia and lexical databases. Our solution was ranked third in the multilingual task and won in the Persian track, one of the three language subtasks.

OPI at SemEval 2023 Task 1: Image-Text Embeddings and Multimodal Information Retrieval for Visual Word Sense Disambiguation

To improve the ability of language models to handle Natural Language Processing
(NLP) tasks and intermediate step of pre-training has recently been
introduced. In this setup, one takes a pre-trained language model, trains it on
a (set of) NLP dataset(s), and then finetunes it for a target task. It is
known that the selection of relevant transfer tasks is important, but recently
some work has shown substantial performance gains by doing intermediate
training on a very large set of datasets. Most previous work uses generative
language models or only focuses on one or a couple of tasks and uses a
carefully curated setup. We compare intermediate training with one or many
tasks in a setup where the choice of datasets is more arbitrary; we use all
SemEval 2023 text-based tasks. We reach performance improvements for most tasks
when using intermediate training. Gains are higher when doing intermediate
training on single tasks than all tasks if the right transfer task
is identified. Dataset smoothing and heterogeneous batching did not lead to
robust gains in our setup.


MaChAmp at SemEval-2023 Tasks 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12: On the Effectiveness of Intermediate Training on an Uncurated Collection of Datasets.

We describe our contribution to the SemEVAl 2023 AfriSenti-SemEval shared task, where we tackle the task of sentiment analysis in 14 different African languages. We develop both monolingual and multilingual models under a full supervised setting (subtasks A and B). We also develop models for the zero-shot setting (subtask C). Our approach involves experimenting with transfer learning using six language models, including further pretraining of some of these models as well as a final finetuning stage. Our best performing models achieve an f1-score of 70.36 on development data and a f1-score of 66.13 on test data. Unsurprisingly, our results demonstrate the effectiveness of transfer learning and finetuning techniques for sentiment analysis across multiple languages. Our approach can be applied to other sentiment analysis tasks in different languages and domains.

UBC-DLNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Impact of Transfer Learning on African Sentiment Analysis

The following is a description of the RIGA team’s submissions for the English track of the SemEval-2023 Task 2: Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition (MultiCoNER) II. Our approach achieves 17% boost in results by utilizing pre-existing Large-scale Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-3, to gather additional contexts. We then fine-tune a pre-trained neural network utilizing these contexts. The final step of our approach involves meticulous model and compute resource scaling, which results in improved performance. Our results placed us 12th out of 34 teams in terms of overall ranking and 7th in terms of the noisy subset ranking. The code for our method is available on GitHub1.

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SemEval-2023 Task 3: Detecting the Category, the Framing, and the Persuasion Techniques in Online News in a Multi-lingual Setup

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Identifying the Human Values behind Arguments

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Next from ACL 2023

SemEval-2023 Task 3: Detecting the Category, the Framing, and the Persuasion Techniques in Online News in a Multi-lingual Setup

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Identifying the Human Values behind Arguments

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