United States

In most Vision-Language models (VL), the understanding of the image structure is enabled by injecting the position information (PI) about objects in the image. In our case study of LXMERT, a state-of-the-art VL model, we probe the use of the PI in the representation and study its effect on Visual Question Answering. We show that the model is not capable of leveraging the PI for the image-text matching task on a challenge set where only position differs. Yet, our experiments with probing confirm that the PI is indeed present in the representation. We introduce two strategies to tackle this: (i) Positional Information Pre-training and (ii) Contrastive Learning on PI using Cross-Modality Matching. Doing so, the model can correctly classify if images with detailed PI statements match. Additionally to the 2D information from bounding boxes, we introduce the object’s depth as new feature for a better object localization in the space. Even though we were able to improve the model properties as defined by our probes, it only has a negligible effect on the downstream performance. Our results thus highlight an important issue of multimodal modeling: the mere presence of information detectable by a probing classifier is not a guarantee that the information is available in a cross-modal setup.

NAACL 2022

Probing the Role of Positional Information in Vision-Language Models

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
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, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 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 and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recent natural language understanding (NLU) research on the Korean language has been vigorously maturing with the advancements of pretrained language models and datasets. However, Korean pretrained language models still struggle to generate a short sentence with a given condition based on compositionality and commonsense reasoning (i.e., generative commonsense reasoning). The two major challenges are inadequate data resources to develop generative commonsense reasoning regarding Korean linguistic features and to evaluate language models which are necessary for natural language generation (NLG). To solve these problems, we propose a text-generation dataset for Korean generative commonsense reasoning and language model evaluation. In this work, a semi-automatic dataset construction approach filters out contents inexplicable to commonsense, ascertains quality, and reduces the cost of building the dataset. We also present an in-depth analysis of the generation results of language models with various evaluation metrics along with human-annotated scores. The whole dataset is publicly available at (https://aihub.or.kr/opendata/korea-university). 

A Dog Is Passing Over The Jet? A Text-Generation Dataset for Korean Commonsense Reasoning and Evaluation

In recent years, the problem of misinformation on the web has become widespread across languages, countries, and various social media platforms. Although there has been much work on automated fake news detection, the role of images and their variety are not well explored. In this paper, we investigate the roles of image and text at an earlier stage of the fake news detection pipeline, called claim detection. For this purpose, we introduce a novel dataset, MM-Claims, which consists of tweets and corresponding images over three topics: COVID-19, Climate Change and broadly Technology. The dataset contains roughly 86000 tweets, out of which 3400 are labeled manually by multiple annotators for the training and evaluation of multimodal models. We describe the dataset in detail, evaluate strong unimodal and multimodal baselines, and analyze the potential and drawbacks of current models.

MM-Claims: A Dataset for Multimodal Claim Detection in Social Media

The aim of the paper is to apply, for historical texts,  the methodology used commonly to solve various NLP tasks defined for contemporary data, i.e. pre-train and fine-tune large Transformer models. This paper introduces an ML challenge, named Challenging America (ChallAm), based on OCR-ed excerpts from historical newspapers collected from the Chronicling America portal. ChallAm provides a dataset of clippings, labeled with metadata on their origin, and paired with their textual contents retrieved by an OCR tool. Three, publicly available, ML tasks are defined in the challenge: to determine the article date, to detect the location of the issue, and to deduce a word in a text gap (cloze test). Strong baselines are provided for all three ChallAm tasks. In particular, we pre-trained a RoBERTa model from scratch from the historical texts. We also discuss the issues of discrimination and hate-speech present in the historical American texts.

Challenging America: Modeling language in longer time scales

Te reo Māori, New Zealand's only indigenous language, is code-switched with English. Māori speakers are atleast bilingual, and the use of Māori is increasing in New Zealand English. Unfortunately, due to the minimal availability of resources, including digital data, Māori is under-represented in technological advances. Cloud-based multilingual systems such as Google and Microsoft Azure support Māori language detection. However, we provide experimental evidence to show that the accuracy of such systems is low when detecting Māori. Hence, with the support of Māori community, we collect Māori and bilingual data to use natural language processing (NLP) to improve Māori language detection. We train bilingual sub-word embeddings and provide evidence to show that our bilingual embeddings improve overall accuracy compared to the publicly-available monolingual embeddings. This improvement has been verified for various NLP tasks using three bilingual databases containing formal transcripts and informal social media data. We also show that BiLSTM with pre-trained Māori-English sub-word embeddings outperforms large-scale contextual language models such as BERT on down streaming tasks of detecting Māori language. However, this research uses large models `as is' for transfer learning, where no further training was done on Māori-English data. The best accuracy of 87% was obtained using BiLSTM with bilingual embeddings to detect Māori-English code-switching points. 

Language Models for Code-switch Detection of te reo Māori and English in a Low-resource Setting

Recent studies show that pre-trained language models (LMs) are vulnerable to textual adversarial attacks. However, existing attack methods either suffer from low attack success rates or fail to search efficiently in the exponentially large perturbation space. We propose an efficient and effective framework SemAttack to generate natural adversarial text by constructing different semantic perturbation functions. In particular, SemAttack optimizes the generated perturbations constrained on generic semantic spaces, including typo space, knowledge space (e.g., WordNet), contextualized semantic space (e.g., the embedding space of BERT clusterings), or the combination of these spaces. Thus, the generated adversarial texts are more semantically close to the original inputs. Extensive experiments reveal that state-of-the-art (SOTA) large-scale LMs (e.g., DeBERTa-v2) and defense strategies (e.g., FreeLB) are still vulnerable to SemAttack. We further demonstrate that SemAttack is general and able to generate natural adversarial texts for different languages (e.g., English and Chinese) with high attack success rates. Human evaluations also confirm that our generated adversarial texts are natural and barely affect human performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AI-secure/SemAttack.

SemAttack: Natural Textual Attacks via Different Semantic Spaces

Single-task models have proven pivotal in solving specific tasks; however, they have limitations in real-world applications where multi-tasking is necessary and domain shifts are exhibited. Recently, instructional prompts have shown significant improvement towards multi-task generalization; however, the effect of instructional prompts and Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has not been systematically studied in the biomedical domain. Motivated by this, this paper explores the impact of instructional prompts for biomedical MTL. We introduce the BoX, a collection of 32 instruction tasks for Biomedical NLP across (X) various categories. Using this meta-dataset, we propose a unified model termed as In-BoXBART, that can jointly learn all tasks of the BoX without any task-specific modules. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose a unified model in the biomedical domain and use instructions to achieve generalization across several biomedical tasks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model: 1) outperforms single-task baseline by ~3% and multi-task (without instruction) baseline by ~18% on an average, and 2) shows ~23% improvement compared to single-task baseline in few-shot learning (i.e., 32 instances per task) on an average. Our analysis indicates that there is significant room for improvement across tasks in the BoX, implying the scope for future research direction.

In-BoXBART: Get Instructions into Biomedical Multi-Task Learning

Inspired by human fact checkers, who use different types of evidence (e.g. tables, images, audio) in addition to text, several datasets with tabular evidence data have been released in recent years. Whilst the datasets encourage research on table fact-checking, they rely on information from restricted data sources, such as Wikipedia for creating claims and extracting evidence data, making the fact-checking process different from the real-world process used by fact checkers. In this paper, we introduce PubHealthTab, a table fact-checking dataset based on real world public health claims and noisy evidence tables from sources similar to those used by real fact checkers. We outline our approach for collecting evidence data from various websites and present an in-depth analysis of our dataset. Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art table representation and pre-trained models fine-tuned on our dataset, achieving an overall $F_1$ score of 0.73. 

PubHealthTab: A Public Health Table-based Dataset for Evidence-based Fact Checking

Mined bitexts can contain imperfect translations that yield unreliable training signals for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). While filtering such pairs out is known to improve final model quality, we argue that it is suboptimal in low-resource conditions where even mined data can be limited. In our work, we propose instead, to refine the mined bitexts via automatic editing: given a sentence in a language $x_f$, and a possibly imperfect translation of it $\mathbfx_e$, our model generates a revised version $x_f'$ or $x_e'$ that yields a more equivalent translation pair (i.e., <$x_f, x_e'$> or <$x_f', x_e$>). We use a simple editing strategy by (1) mining potentially imperfect translations for each sentence in a given bitext, (2) learning a model to reconstruct the original translations and translate, in a multi-task fashion. Experiments demonstrate that our approach successfully improves the quality of CCMatrix mined bitext for $5$ low-resource language-pairs and $10$ translation directions by up to ~$8$ BLEU points, in most cases improving upon a competitive translation-based baseline.

BitextEdit: Automatic Bitext Editing for Improved Low-Resource Machine Translation

The machine translation (MT) task is typically formulated as that of returning a single translation for an input segment. However, in many cases, multiple different translations are valid and the appropriate translation may depend on the intended target audience, characteristics of the speaker, or even the relationship between speakers. Specific problems arise when dealing with honorifics, particularly translating from English into languages with formality markers. For example, the sentence "Are you sure?" can be translated in German as "Sind Sie sich sicher?" (formal register) or "Bist du dir sicher?" (informal). Using wrong or inconsistent tone may be perceived as inappropriate or jarring for users of certain cultures and demographics. 

This work addresses the problem of learning to control target language attributes, in this case formality, from a small amount of labeled contrastive data. We introduce an annotated dataset (CoCoA-MT) and an associated evaluation metric for training and evaluating formality-controlled MT models for six diverse target languages. We show that we can train formality-controlled models by fine-tuning on labeled contrastive data, achieving high accuracy (82% in-domain and 73% out-of-domain) while maintaining overall quality.

CoCoA-MT: A Dataset and Benchmark for Contrastive Controlled MT with Application to Formality

News recommendation is different from movie or e-commercial recommendation as people usually do not grade the news. Therefore, user feedback for news is always implicit (click behavior, reading time, etc). Inevitably, there are noises in implicit feedback. On one hand, the user may exit immediately after clicking the news as he dislikes the news content, leaving the noise in his positive implicit feedback; on the other hand, the user may be recommended multiple interesting news at the same time and only click one of them, producing the noise in his negative implicit feedback. Opposite implicit feedback could construct more integrated user preferences and help each other to minimize the noise influence. Previous works on news recommendation only used positive implicit feedback and suffered from the noise impact. In this paper, we propose a denoising neural network for news recommendation with positive and negative implicit feedback, named DRPN. DRPN utilizes both feedback for recommendation with a module to denoise both positive and negative implicit feedback to further enhance the performance. Experiments on the real-world large-scale dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of DRPN.

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A Dog Is Passing Over The Jet? A Text-Generation Dataset for Korean Commonsense Reasoning and Evaluation

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