Canada

This presentation introduces the participation of team HIT-SCIR to the WASSA 2023 Shared Task on Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification and Personality Detection in Interactions. We focus on three tracks: Track 1 (Empathy and Emotion Prediction in Conversations, CONV), Track 2 (Empathy Prediction, EMP) and Track 3 (Emotion Classification, EMO), and designed three different models to address them separately. For Track 1, we designed a direct finetuning DeBERTa model for three regression tasks at the utterance-level. For Track 2, we designed a multi-task learning RoBERTa model for two regression tasks at the essay-level. For Track 3, we designed a RoBERTa model with data augmentation for the classification task at the essay-level. Finally, our team ranked 1st in the Track 1 (CONV), 5th in the Track 2 (EMP) and 3rd in the Track 3 (EMO) in the evaluation phase.

ACL 2023

HIT-SCIR at WASSA 2023: Empathy and Emotion Analysis at the Utterance-Level and the Essay-Level

empathy detection

emotion classification

# 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. 

 
We wish you a wonderful conference! 
[**The ACL 2022 Organizing Committee**](https://www.2022.aclweb.org/organisers)
 
[**Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BUCMfhMVrjG9E2e71aHdHeE28KSje0l/view?usp=sharing) 
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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). 

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.

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)**

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.

This Shared Task, “Emotion Classification from essays written in reaction to news articles,” is about predicting emotions from essay-level texts. The target labels consist of thirty-one categories of emotions, including individual and mixed sets of emotion categories, making it a multiclass classification problem. Our system based on transformer architecture (BERT-Base) scored the tenth rank out of 13 reported teams. Our experiments conclude that although FLAIR are powerful word representations built to capture out-of-vocabulary words, they are less effective than contextual embeddings when used for small and imbalanced datasets.

VISU at WASSA 2023 Shared Task: Detecting Emotions in Reaction to News Stories Using Transformers and Stacked Embeddings

Code-mixing refers to the phenomenon of using two or more languages interchangeably within a speech or discourse context. This practice is particularly prevalent on social media platforms, and determining the embedded affects in a code-mixed sentence remains as a challenging problem. In this submission we describe our system for WASSA 2023 Shared Task on Emotion Detection in English-Urdu code-mixed text. In our system we implement a multiclass emotion detection model with label space of 11 emotions. Samples are code-mixed English-Urdu text, where Urdu is written in romanised form. Our submission is limited to one of the subtasks - Multi Class classification and we leverage transformer-based Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs), XLM-RoBERTa and Indic-BERT. We fine-tune
MLLMs on the released data splits, with and without pre-processing steps (translation to english), for classifying texts into the appropriate emotion category. Our methods did not surpass the baseline, and our submission is ranked sixth
overall.

PrecogIIITH@WASSA2023: Emotion Detection for Urdu-English Code-mixed Text

In this era of digital communication and social media, texting and chatting among individuals occur mainly through code-mixed or Romanized versions of the native language prevalent in the region. The presence of Romanized and code-mixed language develops the need to build NLP systems in these domains to leverage the digital content for various use cases. This paper describes our contribution to the subtask MCEC of the shared task WASSA 2023:Shared Task on Multi-Label and Multi-Class Emotion Classification on Code-Mixed Text Messages. We explore how one can build sentence transformers models for low-resource languages using unsupervised data by leveraging contrastive learning techniques described in the SIMCSE paper and using the sentence transformer developed to build classification models using the SetFit approach. Additionally, we’ll publish our code and models on GitHub and HuggingFace, two open-source hosting services.

BpHigh at WASSA 2023: Using Contrastive Learning to build Sentence Transformer models for Multi-Class Emotion Classification in Code-mixed Urdu

This paper describes the approach that we utilized to participate in the shared task for multi-label and multi-class emotion classification organized as part of WASSA 2023 at ACL 2023. The objective was to build models that can predict 11 classes of emotions, or the lack thereof (neutral class) based on code-mixed Roman Urdu and English SMS text messages. We participated in Track 2 of this task - multi-class emotion classification (MCEC). We used generative pretrained transformers, namely ChatGPT because it has a commercially available full-scale API, for the emotion detection task by leveraging the prompt engineering and zero-shot / few-shot learning methodologies based on multiple experiments on the dev set. Although this was the first time we used a GPT model for the purpose, this approach allowed us to beat our own baseline character-based XGBClassifier, as well as the baseline model trained by the organizers (bert- base-multilingual-cased). We ranked 4th and achieved the macro F1 score of 0.7038 and the accuracy of 0.7313 on the blind test set.

Generative Pretrained Transformers for Emotion Detection in a Code-Switching Setting

Assessing the capacity of numerical understanding of vision-and-language models over images and texts is crucial for real vision-and-language applications, such as systems for automated medical image analysis. We provide a visual reasoning dataset focusing on numerical understanding in the medical domain. The experiments using our dataset show that current vision-and-language models fail to perform numerical inference in the medical domain. However, the data augmentation with only a small amount of our dataset improves the model performance, while maintaining the performance in the general domain.

Medical Visual Textual Entailment for Numerical Understanding of Vision-and-Language Models

Valuable datasets that contain sensitive information are not shared due to privacy and copyright concerns. This hinders progress in many areas and prevents the use of machine learning solutions to solve relevant tasks. One possible solution is sharing models that are trained on such datasets. However, this is also associated with potential privacy risks due to data extraction attacks. In this work, we propose a solution based on sharing parts of the model's parameters, and using a proxy dataset for complimentary knowledge transfer. Our experiments show encouraging results, and reduced risk to potential training data identification attacks. We present a viable solution to sharing knowledge with data-disadvantaged parties, that do not have the resources to produce high-quality data, with reduced privacy risks to the sharing parties. We make our code publicly available.

Privacy-Preserving Knowledge Transfer through Partial Parameter Sharing

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects cognitive abilities and memory, especially in older adults. One of the challenges of AD is that it can be difficult to diagnose in its early stages. However, recent research has shown that changes in language, including speech decline and difficulty in processing information, can be important indicators of AD and may help with early detection. Hence, the speech narratives of the patients can be useful in diagnosing the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. While the previous works have presented the potential of using speech narratives to diagnose AD in high-resource languages, this work explores the possibility of using a low-resourced language, i.e., Hindi language, to diagnose AD. In this paper, we present a dataset specifically for analyzing AD in the Hindi language, along with experimental results using various state-of-the-art algorithms to assess the diagnostic potential of speech narratives in Hindi. Our analysis suggests that speech narratives in the Hindi language have the potential to aid in the diagnosis of AD. Our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/rkritesh210/DementiaBankHindi. 


Breaking Barriers: Exploring the Diagnostic Potential of Speech Narratives in Hindi for Alzheimer's Disease

Massively multilingual pre-trained language models (MMPLMs) are developed in recent years demonstrating superpowers and the pre-knowledge they acquire for downstream tasks. This work investigates whether MMPLMs can be applied to clinical domain machine translation (MT) towards entirely unseen languages via transfer learning. We carry out an experimental investigation using Meta-AI's MMPLMs ``wmt21-dense-24-wide-en-X and X-en (WMT21fb)'' which were pre-trained on 7 language pairs and 14 translation directions including English to Czech, German, Hausa, Icelandic, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese, and the opposite direction. We fine-tune these MMPLMs towards English-\textit{Spanish} language pair which \textit{did not exist at all} in their original pre-trained corpora both implicitly and explicitly. We prepare carefully aligned \textit{clinical} domain data for this fine-tuning, which is different from their original mixed domain knowledge. Our experimental result shows that the fine-tuning is very successful using just 250k well-aligned in-domain EN-ES segments for three sub-task translation testings: clinical cases, clinical terms, and ontology concepts. It achieves very close evaluation scores to another MMPLM NLLB from Meta-AI, which included Spanish as a high-resource setting in the pre-training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on using MMPLMs towards \textit{clinical domain transfer-learning NMT} successfully for totally unseen languages during pre-training.


Investigating Massive Multilingual Pre-Trained Machine Translation Models for Clinical Domain via Transfer Learning

The Coronavirus pandemic has heightened the demand for technological solutions capable of gathering and monitoring data automatically, quickly, and securely. To achieve this need, the Plantão Coronavirus chatbot has been made available to the population of Ceará State in Brazil. This chatbot employs automated symptom detection technology through Natural Language Processing (NLP). The proposal of this work is a symptom tracker, which is a neural network that processes texts and captures symptoms in messages exchanged between citizens of the state and the Plantão Coronavirus nurse/doctor, i.e., clinical conversations. The model has the ability to recognize new patterns and has identified a high incidence of altered psychological behaviors, including anguish, anxiety, and sadness, among users who tested positive or negative for Covid-19. As a result, the tool has emphasized the importance of expanding coverage through community mental health services in the state.

Tracking the Evolution of Covid-19 Symptoms through Clinical Conversations

Pretrained language models leverage self-supervised learning to use large amounts of unlabeled text for learning contextual representations of sequences. However, in the domain of medical conversations, the availability of large, public datasets is limited due to issues of privacy and data management. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of dialog-aware pretraining objectives and multiphase training in using unlabeled data to improve LMs training for medical utterance classification. The objectives of pretraining for dialog awareness involve tasks that take into account the structure of conversations, including features such as turn-taking and the roles of speakers. The multiphase training process uses unannotated data in a sequence that prioritizes similarities and connections between different domains. We empirically evaluate these methods on conversational dialog classification tasks in the medical and counseling domains, and find that multiphase training can help achieve higher performance than standard pretraining or finetuning.

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Next from ACL 2023

VISU at WASSA 2023 Shared Task: Detecting Emotions in Reaction to News Stories Using Transformers and Stacked Embeddings

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