Korea, Republic of

Designing in-depth educational questions is a time-consuming and cognitively demanding task. Therefore, it is intriguing to study how to build Question Generation (QG) models to automate the question creation process. However, existing QG datasets are not suitable for educational question generation because the questions are not real questions asked by humans during learning and can be solved by simply searching for information.
To bridge this gap, we present KHANQ, a challenging dataset for educational question generation, containing 1,034 high-quality learner generated questions seeking an in-depth understanding of the taught online courses in Khan Academy. Each data sample is carefully paraphrased and annotated as a triple of 1) Context: an independent paragraph on which the question is based; 2) Prompt: a text prompt for the question (e.g., the learner’s background knowledge); 3) Question: a deep question based on Context and coherent with Prompt. By conducting a human evaluation on the aspects of appropriateness, coverage, coherence, and complexity, we show that state-of-the-art QG models which perform well on shallow question generation datasets have difficulty in generating useful educational questions. This makes KHANQ a challenging testbed for educational question generation for further investigation.

COLING 2022

KHANQ: A Dataset for Generating Deep Questions in Education

datasets

question generation

natural language generation

education

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.

technical paper

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes but also in industrial research departments including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!

To gain access to this event page you are required to register. Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

People often utilise online media (e.g., Facebook, Reddit) as a platform to express their psychological distress and seek support. State-of-the-art NLP techniques demonstrate strong potential to automatically detect mental health issues from text. Research suggests that mental health issues are reflected in emotions (e.g., sadness) indicated in a person's choice of language. Therefore, we developed a novel emotion-annotated mental health corpus (EmoMent), consisting of 2802 Facebook posts (14845 sentences) extracted from two South Asian countries - Sri Lanka and India. Three clinical psychology postgraduates were involved in annotating these posts into eight categories, including 'mental illness' (e.g., depression) and emotions (e.g., 'sadness', 'anger'). EmoMent corpus achieved 'very good' inter-annotator agreement of 98.3% (i.e. % with two or more agreement) and Fleiss' Kappa of 0.82. Our RoBERTa based models achieved an F1 score of 0.76 and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.77 for the first task (i.e. predicting a mental health condition from a post) and the second task (i.e. extent of association of relevant posts with the categories defined in our taxonomy), respectively.

EmoMent: An Emotion Annotated Mental Health Corpus from two South Asian Countries

Recognizing the layout of unstructured digital documents is crucial when parsing the documents into the structured, machine-readable format for downstream applications. Recent studies in Document Layout Analysis usually rely on visual cues to understand documents while ignoring other information, such as contextual information or the relationships between document layout components, which are vital to boost better layout analysis performance. Our Doc-GCN presents an effective way to harmonize and integrate heterogeneous aspects for Document Layout Analysis. We construct different graphs to capture the four main features aspects of document layout components, including syntactic, semantic, density, and appearance features. Then, we apply graph convolutional networks to enhance each aspect of features and apply the node-level pooling for integration. Finally, we concatenate features of all aspects and feed them into the 2-layer MLPs for document layout component classification. Our Doc-GCN achieves state-of-the-art results on three widely used DLA datasets: PubLayNet, FUNSD, and DocBank.

Doc-GCN: Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks for Document Layout Analysis

Lifelong event detection aims to incrementally update a model with new event types and data while retaining the capability on previously learned old types. One critical challenge is that the model would catastrophically forget old types when continually trained on new data. In this paper, we introduce Episodic Memory Prompts (EMP) to explicitly retain the learned task-specific knowledge. Our method adopts continuous prompts for each task and they are optimized to instruct the model prediction and learn event-specific representation. The EMPs learned in previous tasks are carried along with the model in subsequent tasks, and can serve as a memory module that keeps the old knowledge and transferring to new tasks. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Furthermore, we also comprehensively analyze the new and old event types in lifelong learning.

Incremental Prompting: Episodic Memory Prompt for Lifelong Event Detection

Access to higher education is critical for minor-
ity populations and emergent bilingual students.
However, the language used by higher educa-
tion institutions to communicate with prospec-
tive students is often too complex; concretely,
many institutions in the US publish admissions
application instructions far above the average
reading level of a typical high school graduate,
often near the 13th or 14th grade level. This
leads to an unnecessary barrier between stu-
dents and access to higher education.
This work aims to tackle this challenge
via text simplification. We present PSAT
(Professionally Simplified Admissions Texts),
a dataset with 112 admissions instructions ran-
domly selected from higher education institu-
tions across the US. These texts are then profes-
sionally simplified, and verified and accepted
by subject-matter experts who are full-time em-
ployees in admissions offices at various insti-
tutions. Additionally, PSAT comes with man-
ual alignments of 1,883 original-simplified sen-
tence pairs. The result is a first-of-its-kind cor-
pus for the evaluation and fine-tuning of text
simplification systems in a high-stakes genre
distinct from existing simplification resources.

Text Simplification of College Admissions Instructions: A Professionally Simplified and Verified Corpus

Understanding and Improving Zero-shot Multi-hop Reasoning in Generative Question Answering

The current advancement in abstractive document summarization depends to a large extent on a considerable amount of human-annotated datasets. However, the creation of large-scale datasets is often not feasible in closed domains, such as medical and healthcare domains, where human annotation requires domain expertise.
This paper presents a novel data selection strategy to generate diverse and semantic questions in a low-resource setting with the aim to summarize healthcare questions. Our method exploits the concept of guided semantic-overlap and diversity-based objective functions to optimally select the informative and diverse set of synthetic samples for data augmentation. Our extensive experiments on benchmark healthcare question summarization datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed data selection strategy by achieving new state-of-the-art results. Our human evaluation shows that our method generates diverse, fluent, and informative summarized questions.

Towards Summarizing Healthcare Questions in Low-Resource Setting

Transforming the large amounts of unstructured text on the Internet into structured event knowledge is a critical, yet unsolved goal of NLP, especially when addressing document-level text. Existing methods struggle in Document-level Event Extraction (DEE) due to its two intrinsic challenges: (a) Nested arguments, which means one argument is the substring of another one. (b) Multiple events, which indicates we should identify multiple events and assemble the arguments for them. In this paper, we propose a role-interactive multi-event head attention network (CLIO) to solve these two challenges jointly. The key idea is to map different events to multiple subspaces (i.e., multi-event head). In each event subspace, we draw the semantic
representation of each role closer to its corresponding arguments, then we determine whether the current event exists. To further optimize event representation, we propose an event representation enhancing strategy to regularize pre-trained embedding space to be more isotropic. Our experiments on two widely used DEE datasets show that CLIO achieves consistent improvements over previous methods.

CLIO: Role-interactive Multi-event Head Attention Network for Document-level Event Extraction

Currently, human-bot symbiosis dialog systems, e.g., pre- and after-sales in E-commerce, are ubiquitous, and the dialog routing component is essential to improve the overall efficiency, reduce human resource cost, and enhance user experience. Although most existing methods can fulfill this requirement, they can only model single-source dialog data and cannot effectively capture the underlying knowledge of relations among data and subtasks. In this paper, we investigate this important problem by thoroughly mining both the data-to-task and task-to-task knowledge among various kinds of dialog data. To achieve the above targets, we propose a Gated Mechanism enhanced Multi-task Model (G3M), specifically including a novel dialog encoder and two tailored gated mechanism modules. The proposed method can play the role of hierarchical information filtering and is non-invasive to existing dialog systems. Based on two datasets collected from real world applications, extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance by improving 8.7%/11.8% on RMSE metric and 2.2%/4.4% on F1 metric.

Gated Mechanism Enhanced Multi-Task Learning for Dialog Routing

Background: 
Fine-tuning the pre-trained language model (PrLM) on labeled sentiment datasets demonstrates impressive performance.


Problems: 
- collecting labeled sentiment dataset is time-consuming;
- updating the whole PrLM brings about much computation cost.

Our work:
We focus on the multi-source unsupervised sentiment adaptation task with the pre-trained features from PrLMs, which is more practical and challenging. There are two proposed modules for each above problem:
- dynamic feature network;
- asymmetric mutual learning.


Asymmetric Mutual Learning for Multi-source Unsupervised Sentiment Adaptation with Dynamic Feature Network

Bantu languages are spoken by communities in more than  half of the countries on the African continent by an estimated third of a billion people. Despite this populous and the amount of high quality linguistic research done over the years, Bantu languages are still computationally under-resourced. The biggest limitation to the development of computational methods for processing Bantu language text is their complex grammatical structure, chiefly in the system of noun classes. We investigated the use of a combined syntactic and semantic method to disambiguate among singular nouns with the same class prefix but belonging to different noun classes. This combination uses the semantic generalizations of the types of nouns in each class to overcome the limitations of relying only on the prefixes they take. We used  the nearest neighbors of a query word as semantic generalizations, and developed a tool to determine the noun class based on resources in Runyankore, a Bantu language indigenous to Uganda. We also investigated whether, with the same Runyankore resources, our method had utility in other Bantu languages, Luganda, indigenous to Uganda, and Kinyarwanda, indigenous to Rwanda. For all three languages, the combined approach resulted in an improvement in accuracy, as compared to using only the syntactic or the semantic approach.

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EmoMent: An Emotion Annotated Mental Health Corpus from two South Asian Countries

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