Canada

Opinion summarisation is a task that aims to condense the information presented in the source documents while retaining the core message and opinions.
A summary that only represents the majority opinions will leave the minority opinions unrepresented in the summary. In this paper, we use the stance towards a certain target as an opinion. We study bias in opinion summarisation from the perspective of opinion diversity, which measures whether the model generated summary can cover a diverse set of opinions. In addition, we examine opinion similarity, a measure of how closely related two opinions are in terms of their stance on a given topic, and its relationship with opinion diversity. Through the lens of stances towards a topic, we examine opinion diversity and similarity using three debatable topics under COVID-19. Experimental results on these topics revealed that a higher degree of similarity of opinions did not indicate good diversity or fairly cover the various opinions originally presented in the source documents. We found that BART and ChatGPT can better capture diverse opinions presented in the source documents.

ACL 2023

Examining Bias in Opinion Summarisation through the Perspective of Opinion Diversity

bias in opinion summarisation

twitter summarisation

opinion summarisation

stance

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. 
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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.

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
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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.

Unsupervised text style transfer is a challenging task that aims to alter the stylistic attributes of a given text without affecting its original content. One of the methods to achieve this is controllable style transfer, which allows for the control of the degree of style transfer. However, an issue encountered with controllable style transfer is the instability of transferred text fluency when the degree of the style transfer changes. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that incorporates additional syntax parsing information during style transfer. By leveraging the syntactic information, our model is guided to generate natural sentences that effectively reflect the desired style while maintaining fluency. Experimental results show that our method achieves robust performance and improved fluency compared to previous controllable style transfer methods.

Fluency Matters! Controllable Style Transfer with Syntax Guidance

This paper presents a novel framework for quantitatively evaluating the interactive ChatGPT model in the context of suicidality assessment from social media posts, utilizing the University of Maryland Reddit suicidality dataset. We conduct a technical evaluation of ChatGPT's performance on this task using Zero-Shot and Few-Shot experiments and compare its results with those of two fine-tuned transformer-based models. Additionally, we investigate the impact of different temperature parameters on ChatGPT's response generation and discuss the optimal temperature based on the inconclusiveness rate of ChatGPT. Our results indicate that while ChatGPT attains considerable accuracy in this task, transformer-based models fine-tuned on human-annotated datasets exhibit superior performance. Moreover, our analysis sheds light on how adjusting the ChatGPT's hyperparameters can improve its ability to assist mental health professionals in this critical task.

ChatGPT for Suicide Risk Assessment on Social Media: Quantitative Evaluation of Model Performance, Potentials and Limitations

Domain adaptation is an important and widely studied problem in natural language processing. A large body of literature tries to solve this problem by adapting models trained on the source domain to the target domain. In this paper, we instead solve this problem from a dataset perspective. We modify the source domain dataset with simple lexical transformations to reduce the domain shift between the source dataset distribution and the target dataset distribution. We find that models trained on the transformed source domain dataset performs significantly better than zero-shot models. Using our proposed transformations to convert standard English to tweets, we reach an unsupervised part-of-speech (POS) tagging accuracy of 92.14 % (from 81.54 % zero shot accuracy), which is only slightly below the supervised performance of 94.45 %. We also use our proposed transformations to synthetically generate tweets and augment the Twitter dataset to achieve state-of-the-art performance for POS tagging.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Lexical Transformations and Label Injection for Twitter Data

Consumers of services and products exhibit a wide range of behaviors on social networks when they are dissatisfied. In this paper, we consider three types of cynical expressions -- negative feelings, specific reasons, and attitude of being right -- and annotate a corpus of 3189 comments in Spanish on car analysis channels from YouTube. We evaluate both token classification and text classification settings for this problem, and compare performance of different pre-trained models including BETO, SpanBERTa, Multilingual Bert, and RoBERTuito. The results show that models achieve performance above 0.8 F1 for all types of cynical expressions in the text classification setting, but achieve lower performance (around 0.6-0.7 F1) for the harder token classification setting.

Transformer-based cynical expression detection in a corpus of Spanish YouTube reviews

Emotions are experienced and expressed differently across the world. In order to use Large Language Models (LMs) for multilingual tasks that require emotional sensitivity, LMs must reflect this cultural variation in emotion. We present our investigation on whether the widely-used multilingual LMs in 2023 reflect differences in emotional expressions across cultures and languages. We find that embeddings obtained from LMs (e.g., XLM-RoBERTa) are Anglocentric, and generative LMs (e.g., ChatGPT) reflect Western norms, even when responding to prompts in other languages. Our results show that multilingual LMs do not successfully learn the culturally appropriate nuances of emotion and we highlight possible research directions towards correcting this.

Multilingual Language Models are not Multicultural: A Case Study in Emotion

As the e-commerce market continues to expand and online transactions proliferate, customer reviews have emerged as a critical element in shaping the purchasing decisions of prospective buyers. Previous studies have endeavored to identify key aspects of customer reviews through the development of sentiment analysis models and topic models. However, extracting specific dissatisfaction factors remains a challenging task. In this study, we delineate the pain point detection problem and propose Painsight, an unsupervised framework for automatically extracting distinct dissatisfaction factors from customer reviews without relying on ground truth labels. Painsight employs pre-trained language models to construct sentiment analysis and topic models, leveraging attribution scores derived from model gradients to extract dissatisfaction factors. Upon application of the proposed methodology to customer review data spanning five product categories, we successfully identified and categorized dissatisfaction factors within each group, as well as isolated factors for each type. Notably, Painsight outperformed benchmark methods, achieving substantial performance enhancements and exceptional results in human evaluations.

Painsight: An Extendable Opinion Mining Framework for Detecting Pain Points Based on Online Customer Reviews

Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) has been gaining increasing
importance as conversational agents become more and more common. Recognizing
emotions is key for effective communication, being a crucial component in the
development of effective and empathetic conversational agents. Knowledge and
understanding of the conversational context are extremely valuable for
identifying the emotions of the interlocutor. We thus approach Emotion
Recognition in Conversations leveraging the conversational context, i.e.,
taking into attention previous conversational turns. The usual approach to
model the conversational context has been to produce context-independent
representations of each utterance and subsequently perform contextual modeling
of these. Here we propose context-dependent embedding representations of each
utterance by leveraging the contextual representational power of pre-trained
transformer language models. In our approach, we feed the conversational
context appended to the utterance to be classified as input to the RoBERTa
encoder, to which we append a simple classification module, thus discarding the
need to deal with context after obtaining the embeddings since these constitute
already an efficient representation of such context. We also investigate how
the number of introduced conversational turns influences our model performance.
The effectiveness of our approach is validated on the open-domain DailyDialog
dataset and on the task-oriented EmoWOZ dataset.

Context-Dependent Embedding Utterance Representations for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

Social media provide a rich source of data that can be mined and used for a wide variety of research purposes. However, annotating this data can be expensive, yet necessary for state-of-the-art pre-trained language models to achieve high prediction performance. Therefore, we combine pool-based active learning based on prediction uncertainty (an established method for reducing annotation costs) with unsupervised task adaptation through Masked Language Modeling (MLM). The results on three different datasets (two social media corpora, one benchmark dataset) show that task adaptation significantly improves results and that with only a fraction of the available training data, this approach reaches similar F1-scores as those achieved by an upper-bound baseline model fine-tuned on all training data. We hereby contribute to the scarce corpus of research on active learning with pre-trained language models and propose a cost-efficient annotation sampling and fine-tuning approach that can be applied to a wide variety of tasks and datasets.

Combining Active Learning and Task Adaptation with BERT for Cost-Effective Annotation of Social Media Datasets

In this paper, we leverage the GPT-3.5 language model both using the Chat-GPT API interface and the GPT-3.5 API interface to generate realistic examples of anti-vaccination tweets in Dutch with the aim of augmenting an imbalanced multi-label vaccine hesitancy argumentation classification dataset. In line with previous research, we devise a prompt that, on the one hand, instructs the model to generate realistic examples based on the gold standard dataset and, on the other hand, to assign multiple pseudo-labels (or a single pseudo-label) to the generated instances. We then augment our gold standard data with the generated examples and evaluate the impact thereof in a cross-validation setting with several state-of-the-art Dutch large language models. This augmentation technique predominantly shows improvements in F1 for classifying underrepresented classes while increasing the overall recall, paired with a slight decrease in precision for more common classes. Furthermore, we examine how well the synthetic data generalises to human data in the classification task. To our knowledge, we are the first to utilise Chat-GPT and GPT-3.5 for augmenting a Dutch multi-label dataset classification task.

Improving Dutch Vaccine Hesitancy Monitoring via Multi-Label Data Augmentation with GPT-3.5

This paper introduces the first emotion-annotated dataset for the Dari variant of Persian spoken in Afghanistan. The LetHerLearn dataset contains 7,600 tweets posted in reaction to the Taliban’s ban of women’s rights to education in 2022 and has been manually annotated according to Ekman’s emotion categories. We here detail the data collection and annotation process, present relevant dataset statistics as well as initial experiments on the resulting dataset, benchmarking a number of different neural architectures for the task of Dari emotion classification.

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Fluency Matters! Controllable Style Transfer with Syntax Guidance

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