Ireland

Low-literate users with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD) and/or complex communication needs (CCN) require specific writing support. We present
a system that interactively supports fast and correct writing of a variant of Leichte
Sprache (LS; German term for easy-to-read German), slightly extended within
and beyond the inner-sentential syntactic level. The system provides simple and intuitive dialogues for selecting options from a natural-language paraphrase generator. Moreover, it reminds the user to add text elements enhancing understandability, audience design, and text coherence. In earlier development phases, the system was evaluated with different groups of substitute users. Here, we report a case study with seven low-literate users with IDD.

ACL 2022

A text-writing system for Easy-to-Read German evaluated with low-literate users with cognitive impairment

users with cognitive impairment

low-literate users

disability aware software design

writing workshop/schreibwerkstatt

natural language generation (nlg)

plain language

controlled languages (cl)

computer-assisted writing

leichte sprache

intelligent and interactive writing assistants

easy-to-read german

augmentative and alternative communication (aac)

paraphrase generation

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 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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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). 

Context-sensitive word search engines are writing assistants that support word choice, phrasing, and idiomatic language use by indexing large-scale n-gram collections and implementing a wildcard search. However, search results become unreliable with increasing context size (e.g., n   5), when observations become sparse. This paper proposes two strategies for word search with larger n, based on masked and conditional language modeling. We build such search engines using BERT and BART and compare their capabilities in answering English context queries with those of the n-gram-based word search engine Netspeak. Our proposed strategies score within 5 percentage points MRR of n-gram collections while answering up to 5 times as many queries.

Language Models as Context-sensitive Word Search Engines

Text revision refers to a family of natural language generation tasks, where the source and target sequences share moderate resemblance in surface form but differentiate in attributes, such as text formality and simplicity. Current state-of-the-art methods formulate these tasks as sequence-to-sequence learning problems, which rely on large-scale parallel training corpus. In this paper, we present an iterative in-place editing approach for text revision, which requires no parallel data. In this approach, we simply fine-tune a pre-trained Transformer with masked language modeling and attribute classification. During inference, the editing at each iteration is realized by two-step span replacement. At the first step, the distributed representation of the text optimizes on the fly towards an attribute function. At the second step, a text span is masked and another new one is proposed conditioned on the optimized representation. The empirical experiments on two typical and important text revision tasks, text formalization and text simplification, show the effectiveness of our approach. It achieves competitive and even better performance than state-of-the-art supervised methods on text simplification, and gains better performance than strong unsupervised methods on text formalization.

Text Revision by On-the-Fly Representation Optimization

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) for text generation in creative domains raises questions regarding the credibility of AI-generated content. In two studies, we explored if readers can differentiate between AI-based and human-written texts (generated based on the first line of texts and poems of classic authors) and how the stylistic qualities of these texts are rated. Participants read 9 AI-based continuations and either 9 human-written continuations (Study 1, N=120) or 9 original continuations (Study 2, N=302). Participants' task was to decide whether a continuation was written with an AI-tool or not, to indicate their confidence in each decision, and to assess the stylistic text quality. Results showed that participants generally had low accuracy for differentiating between text types but were overconfident in their decisions. Regarding the assessment of stylistic quality, AI-continuations were perceived as less well-written, inspiring, fascinating, interesting, and aesthetic than both human-written and original continuations.

The Pure Poet: How Good is the Subjective Credibility and Stylistic Quality of Literary Short Texts Written with an Artificial Intelligence Tool as Compared to Texts Written by Human Authors?

Storytelling in early childhood provides significant benefits in language and literacy development, relationship building, and entertainment. To maximize these benefits, it is important to empower children with more agency. Interactive story rewriting through parent-children interaction can boost children’s agency and help build the relationship between parent and child as they collaboratively create changes to an original story. However, for children with limited proficiency in reading and writing, parents must carry out multiple tasks to guide the rewriting process, which can incur high cognitive load. In this work, we introduce an interface design that aims to support children and parents to rewrite stories together with the help of AI techniques. We describe three design goals determined by a review of prior literature in interactive storytelling and existing educational activities. We also propose a preliminary prompt-based pipeline that uses GPT-3 to realize the design goals and enable the interface.

Interactive Children's Story Rewriting Through Parent-Children Interaction

Large-scale language models are rapidly improving, performing well on a variety of tasks with little to no customization. In this work we investigate how language models can support science writing, a challenging writing task that is both open-ended and highly constrained. We present a system for generating “sparks”, sentences related to a scientific concept intended to inspire writers. We run a user study with 13 STEM graduate students and find three main use cases of sparks---inspiration, translation, and perspective---each of which correlates with a unique interaction pattern. We also find that while participants were more likely to select higher quality sparks, the overall quality of sparks seen by a given participant did not correlate with their satisfaction with the tool.

Sparks: Inspiration for Science Writing using Language Models

Revision is an essential part of the human writing process. It tends to be strategic, adaptive, and, more importantly, iterative in nature. Despite the success of large language models on text revision tasks, they are limited to non-iterative, one-shot revisions. Examining and evaluating the capability of large language models for making continuous revisions and collaborating with human writers is a critical step towards building effective writing assistants. In this work, we present a human-in-the-loop iterative text revision system, Read, Revise, Repeat (R3), which aims at achieving high quality text revisions with minimal human efforts by reading model-generated revisions and user feedbacks, revising documents, and repeating human-machine interactions. In R3, a text revision model provides text editing suggestions for human writers, who can accept or reject the suggested edits. The accepted edits are then incorporated into the model for the next iteration of document revision. Writers can therefore revise documents iteratively by interacting with the system and simply accepting/rejecting its suggested edits until the text revision model stops making further revisions or reaches a predefined maximum number of revisions. Empirical experiments show that R3 can generate revisions with comparable acceptance rate to human writers at early revision depths, and the human-machine interaction can get higher quality revisions with fewer iterations and edits. The collected human-model interaction dataset and system code are available at \url{https://github.com/vipulraheja/IteraTeR}. Our system demonstration is available at \url{https://youtu.be/lK08tIpEoaE}.

Read, Revise, Repeat: A System Demonstration for Human-in-the-loop Iterative Text Revision

Recent work building open-domain chatbots has demonstrated that increasing model size improves performance. On the other hand, latency and connectivity considerations dictate the move of digital assistants on the device. Giving a digital assistant like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant the ability to discuss just about anything leads to the need for reducing the chatbot model size such that it fits on the user's device. We demonstrate that low parameter models can simultaneously retain their general knowledge conversational abilities while improving in a specific domain. Additionally, we propose a generic framework that accounts for variety in question types, tracks reference throughout multi-turn conversations, and removes inconsistent and potentially toxic responses. Our framework seamlessly transitions between chatting and performing transactional tasks, which will ultimately make interactions with digital assistants more human-like. We evaluate our framework on 1 internal and 4 public benchmark datasets using both automatic (Perplexity) and human (SSA - Sensibleness and Specificity Average) evaluation metrics and establish comparable performance while reducing model parameters by 90%.

Low-Resource Adaptation of Open-Domain Generative Chatbots

Question answering (QA) with disambiguation questions is essential for practical QA systems because user questions often do not contain information enough to find their answers. We call this task clarifying question answering, a task to find answers to ambiguous user questions by disambiguating their intents through interactions. There are two major problems in building a clarifying question answering system: data preparation of possible ambiguous questions and the generation of clarifying questions. In this paper, we tackle these problems by sentence generation methods using sentence structures. Ambiguous questions are generated by eliminating a part of a sentence considering the sentence structure. Clarifying the question generation method based on case frame dictionary and sentence structure is also proposed. Our experimental results verify that our pseudo ambiguous question generation successfully adds ambiguity to questions. Moreover, the proposed clarifying question generation recovers the performance drop by asking the user for missing information.

Pseudo Ambiguous and Clarifying Questions Based on Sentence Structures Toward Clarifying Question Answering System

A long-term ambition of information seeking QA systems is to reason over multi-modal contexts and generate natural answers to user queries. Today, memory intensive pre-trained language models are adapted to downstream tasks such as QA by fine-tuning the model on QA data in a specific modality like unstructured text or structured tables. To avoid training such memory-hungry models while utilizing a uniform architecture for each modality, parameter-efficient adapters add and train small task-specific bottle-neck layers between transformer layers. In this work, we study parameter-efficient abstractive QA in encoder-decoder models over structured tabular data and unstructured textual data using only 1.5% additional parameters for each modality. We also ablate over adapter layers in both encoder and decoder modules to study the efficiency-performance trade-off and demonstrate that reducing additional trainable parameters down to 0.7%-1.0% leads to comparable results. Our models out-perform current state-of-the-art models on tabular QA datasets such as Tablesum and FeTaQA, and achieve comparable performance on a textual QA dataset such as NarrativeQA using significantly less trainable parameters than fine-tuning.

Parameter-Efficient Abstractive Question Answering over Tables or Text

When multiple conversations occur simultaneously, a listener must decide which conversation each utterance is part of in order to interpret and respond to it appropriately. 
This task is referred as dialogue disentanglement.
A significant drawback of previous studies on disentanglement lies in that they only focus on pair-wise relationships between utterances while neglecting the conversation structure which is important for conversation structure modeling.
In this paper, we propose a hierarchical model, named Dialogue BERT (DialBERT), which integrates the local and global semantics in the context range by using BERT to encode each message-pair and using BiLSTM to aggregate the chronological context information into the output of BERT.
In order to integrate the conversation structure information into the model, two types of loss of conversation-structure loss and tree-structure loss are designed. 
In this way, our model can implicitly learn and leverage the conversation structures without being restricted to the lack of explicit access to such structures during the inference stage. 
Experimental results on two large datasets show that our method outperforms previous methods by substantial margins, achieving great performance on dialogue disentanglement.

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Language Models as Context-sensitive Word Search Engines

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