Dominican Republic

Despite their success in a variety of NLP tasks, pre-trained language models, due to their heavy reliance on compositionality, fail in effectively capturing the meanings of multiword expressions (MWEs), especially idioms. Therefore, datasets and methods to improve the representation of MWEs are urgently needed. Existing datasets are limited to providing the degree of idiomaticity of expressions along with the literal and, where applicable, (a single) non-literal interpretation of MWEs. This work presents a novel dataset of naturally occurring sentences containing MWEs manually classified into a fine-grained set of meanings, spanning both English and Portuguese. We use this dataset in two tasks designed to test i) a language model’s ability to detect idiom usage, and ii) the effectiveness of a language model in generating representations of sentences containing idioms. Our experiments demonstrate that, on the task of detecting idiomatic usage, these models perform reasonably well in the one-shot and few-shot scenarios, but that there is significant scope for improvement in the zero-shot scenario. On the task of representing idiomaticity, we find that pre-training is not always effective, while fine-tuning could provide a sample efficient method of learning representations of sentences containing MWEs.

EMNLP 2021

AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

technical paper

In this paper we study pejorative language, an under-explored topic in computational linguistics. Unlike existing models of offensive language and hate speech, pejorative language manifests itself primarily at the lexical level, and describes a word that is used with a negative connotation, making it different from offensive language or other more studied categories. Pejorativity is also context-dependent: the same word can be used with or without pejorative connotations, thus pejorativity detection is essentially a problem similar to word sense disambiguation. We leverage online dictionaries to build a multilingual lexicon of pejorative terms for English, Spanish, Italian, and Romanian. We additionally release a dataset of tweets annotated for pejorative use. Based on these resources, we present an analysis of the usage and occurrence of pejorative words in social media, and present an attempt to automatically disambiguate pejorative usage in our dataset.

A Computational Exploration of Pejorative Language in Social Media

One can find dozens of data resources for various languages in which coreference - a relation between two or more expressions that refer to the same real-world entity - is manually annotated. One could also assume that such expressions usually constitute syntactically meaningful units; however, mention spans have been annotated simply by
delimiting token intervals in most coreference projects, i.e., independently of any syntactic representation. We argue that it could be advantageous to make syntactic and coreference annotations convergent in the long term. We present a pilot empirical study focused on matches and mismatches between hand-annotated linear mention spans and automatically parsed syntactic trees that follow Universal Dependencies conventions. The study covers 9 datasets for 8 different languages.

Do UD Trees Match Mention Spans in Coreference Annotations?

There is an increasing interest in continuous learning (CL), as data privacy is becoming a priority for real-world machine learning applications. Meanwhile, there is still a lack of academic NLP benchmarks that are applicable for realistic CL settings, which is a major challenge for the advancement of the field. In this paper we discuss some of the unrealistic data characteristics of public datasets, study the challenges of realistic single-task continuous learning as well as the effectiveness of data rehearsal as a way to mitigate accuracy loss. We construct a CL NER dataset from an existing publicly available dataset and release it along with the code to the research community.

Towards Realistic Single-Task Continuous Learning Research for NER

Authorship attribution is the problem of identifying the most plausible author of an anonymous text from a set of candidate authors. Researchers have investigated same-topic and cross-topic scenarios of authorship attribution, which differ according to whether new, unseen topics are used in the testing phase. However, neither scenario allows us to explain whether errors are caused by failure to capture authorship writing style or by the topic shift. Motivated by this, we propose the \emph{topic confusion} task where we switch the author-topic configuration between the training and testing sets. This setup allows us to investigate two types of errors: one caused by the topic shift and one caused by the features' inability to capture the writing styles. We show that stylometric features with part-of-speech tags are the least susceptible to topic variations. We further show that combining them with other features leads to significantly lower topic confusion and higher attribution accuracy. Finally, we show that pretrained language models such as BERT and RoBERTa perform poorly on this task and are surpassed by simple features such as word-level $n$-gram.

The Topic Confusion Task: A Novel Evaluation Scenario for Authorship Attribution

Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) models are core components of efficient retrieval-based Question Answering (QA) systems. We present the Reference-based Weak Supervision (RWS), a fully automatic large-scale data pipeline that harvests high-quality weakly- supervised answer sentences from Web data, only requiring a question-reference pair as input. We evaluated the quality of the RWS-derived data by training TANDA models, which are the state of the art for AS2. Our results show that the data consistently bolsters TANDA on three different datasets. In particular, we set the new state of the art for AS2 to P@1=90.1%, and MAP=92.9%, on WikiQA. We record similar performance gains of RWS on a much larger dataset named Web-based Question Answering (WQA).

Reference-based Weak Supervision for Answer Sentence Selection using Web Data

Internet memes have become powerful means to transmit political, psychological, and socio-cultural ideas. Although memes are typically humorous, recent days have witnessed an escalation of harmful memes used for trolling, cyberbullying, and abuse. Detecting such memes is challenging as they can be highly satirical and cryptic. Moreover, while previous work has focused on specific aspects of memes such as hate speech and propaganda, there has been little work on harm in general. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we focus on two tasks: (i)detecting harmful memes, and (ii) identifying the social entities they target. We further extend the recently released HarMeme dataset, which covered COVID-19, with additional memes and a new topic: US politics. To solve these tasks, we propose MOMENTA (MultimOdal framework for detecting harmful MemEs aNd Their tArgets), a novel multimodal deep neural network that uses global and local perspectives to detect harmful memes. MOMENTA systematically analyzes the local and the global perspective of the input meme (in both modalities) and relates it to the background context. MOMENTA is interpretable and generalizable, and our experiments show that it outperforms several strong rivaling approaches.

MOMENTA: A Multimodal Framework for Detecting Harmful Memes and Their Targets

Emotion and empathy are examples of human qualities lacking in many human-machine interactions. The goal of our work is to generate engaging dialogue grounded in a user-shared image with increased emotion and empathy while minimizing socially inappropriate or offensive outputs. We release the Neural Image Commenting with Empathy (NICE) dataset consisting of almost two million images and the corresponding human-generated comments, a set of human annotations, and baseline performance on a range of models. In-stead of relying on manually labeled emotions, we also use automatically generated linguistic representations as a source of weakly supervised labels. Based on these annotations, we define two different tasks for the NICE dataset. Then, we propose a novel pre-training model - Modeling Affect Generation for Image Comments (MAGIC) - which aims to generate comments for images, conditioned on linguistic representations that capture style and affect, and to help generate more empathetic, emotional, engaging and socially appropriate comments. Using this model we achieve state-of-the-art performance on one of our NICE tasks. The experiments show that the approach can generate more human-like and engaging image comments.

NICE: Neural Image Commenting with Empathy

Shared tasks have a long history and have become the mainstream of NLP research. Most of the shared tasks require participants to submit only system outputs and descriptions. It is uncommon for the shared task to request submission of the system itself because of the license issues and implementation differences. Therefore, many systems are abandoned without being used in real applications or contributing to better systems. In this research, we propose a scheme to utilize all those systems which participated in the shared tasks. We use all participated system outputs as task teachers in this scheme and develop a new model as a student aiming to learn the characteristics of each system. We call this scheme "Co-Teaching." This scheme creates a unified system that performs better than the task's single best system. It only requires the system outputs, and slightly extra effort is needed for the participants and organizers. We apply this scheme to the "SHINRA2019-JP" shared task, which has nine participants with various output accuracies, confirming that the unified system outperforms the best system. Moreover, the code used in our experiments has been released.

Co-Teaching Student-Model through Submission Results of Shared Task

Many crowdsourced NLP datasets contain systematic artifacts that are identified only after data collection is complete. Earlier identification of these issues should make it easier to create high-quality training and evaluation data. We attempt this by evaluating protocols in which expert linguists work 'in the loop' during data collection to identify and address these issues by adjusting task instructions and incentives. Using natural language inference as a test case, we compare three data collection protocols: (i) a baseline protocol with no linguist involvement, (ii) a linguist-in-the-loop intervention with iteratively-updated constraints on the annotation task, and (iii) an extension that adds direct interaction between linguists and crowdworkers via a chatroom. We find that linguist involvement does not lead to increased accuracy on out-of-domain test sets compared to baseline, and adding a chatroom has no effect on the data. Linguist involvement does, however, lead to more challenging evaluation data and higher accuracy on some challenge sets, demonstrating the benefits of integrating expert analysis \\textit{during} data collection.

Does Putting a Linguist in the Loop Improve NLU Data Collection

Large-scale, pre-trained language models (LMs) have achieved human-level performance on a breadth of language understanding tasks. However, evaluations only based on end performance shed little light on machines' true ability in language understanding and reasoning. In this paper, we highlight the importance of evaluating the underlying reasoning process in addition to the end performance. Toward this goal, we introduce Tiered Reasoning for Intuitive Physics (TRIP), a novel commonsense reasoning dataset with dense annotations that enable multi-tiered evaluation of machines' reasoning process. Our empirical results show that while large LMs can achieve high end-task performance, they struggle to support their predictions with valid reasons. The TRIP dataset and our baseline results will motivate verifiable evaluation of commonsense reasoning and facilitate future research towards developing better language understanding and reasoning models.

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A Computational Exploration of Pejorative Language in Social Media

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AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models

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