Spain

Native language identification (NLI) – identifying the native language (L1) of a person based on his/her writing in the second language (L2) – is useful for a variety of purposes, including mar- keting, security, and educational applications. From a traditional machine learning perspective, NLI is usually framed as a multi-class classification task, where numerous designed features are combined in order to achieve state-of-the-art results. We introduce a deep generative language modelling (LM) approach to NLI, which consists in fine-tuning a GPT-2 model separately on texts written by the authors with the same L1, and assigning a label to an unseen text based on the minimum LM loss with respect to one of these fine-tuned GPT-2 models. Our method out- performs traditional machine learning approaches and currently achieves the best results on the benchmark NLI datasets.

COLING 2020

A deep generative approach to native language identification

openai-gpt2

native language identification

generative 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 
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NAACL 2024

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

technical paper

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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 and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Pretrained language models, neural models pretrained on massive amounts of data, have established the state of the art in a range of NLP tasks. They are based on a modern machine-learning technique, the Transformer which relates all items simultaneously to capture semantic relations in sequences. However, it differs from what humans do. Humans read sentences one-by-one, incrementally. Can neural models benefit by interpreting texts incrementally as humans do? We investigate this question in coherence modeling. We propose a coherence model which interprets sentences incrementally to capture lexical relations between them. We compare the state of the art in each task, simple neural models relying on a pretrained language model, and our model in two downstream tasks. Our findings suggest that interpreting texts incrementally as humans could be useful to design more advanced models.

Incremental Neural Lexical Coherence Modeling

We introduce CHIME, a cross-passage hierarchical memory network for question answering (QA) via text generation. It extends XLNet by introducing an auxiliary memory module consisting of two components: the context memory collecting cross-passage evidence, and the answer memory working as a buffer continually refining the generated answers. Empirically, we show the efficacy of the proposed architecture in the multi-passage generative QA, outperforming the state-of-the-art baselines with better syntactically well-formed answers and increased precision in addressing the questions of the AmazonQA review dataset.

CHIME: Cross-passage Hierarchical Memory Network for Generative Review Question Answering

Standard image caption generation systems produce generic descriptions of images and do not utilize any contextual information or world knowledge. In particular, they are unable to generate captions that contain references to the geographic context of an image, for example, the location where a photograph is taken or relevant geographic objects around an image location. In this talk, we will present a geo-aware image caption generation system, which incorporates geographic contextual information into a standard image captioning pipeline. We describe a way to build an image-specific representation of the geographic context and to adapt the caption generation network to produce appropriate geographic names in the image descriptions. We show the results of evaluating our system on a novel captioning dataset that contains contextualized captions and geographic metadata. The system achieves substantial improvements in BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR and CIDEr scores. We also present a new metric that assesses generated geographic references directly and empirically demonstrate our system's ability to produce captions with relevant and factually accurate geographic referencing.

Geo-Aware Image Caption Generation

This paper extends existing work on terminology integration into Neural Machine Translation, a common industrial practice to dynamically adapt translation to a specific domain. Our method, based on the use of placeholders complemented with morphosyntactic annotation, efficiently taps into the ability of the neural network to deal with symbolic knowledge to surpass the surface generalization shown by alternative techniques. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art systems and benchmark them through a well-defined evaluation framework, focusing on actual application of terminology and not just on the overall performance. Results indicate the suitability of our method in the use-case where terminology is used in a system trained on generic data only.

Integrating Domain Terminology into Neural Machine Translation

Recently, leveraging pre-trained Transformer based language models in down stream, task specific models has advanced state of the art results in natural language understanding tasks. However, only a little research has explored the suitability of this approach in low resource settings with less than 1,000 training data points. In this work, we explore fine-tuning methods of BERT - a pre-trained Transformer based language model - by utilizing pool-based active learning to speed up training while keeping the cost of labeling new data constant. Our experimental results on the GLUE data set show an advantage in model performance by maximizing the approximate knowledge gain of the model when querying from the pool of unlabeled data. Finally, we demonstrate and analyze the benefits of freezing layers of the language model during fine-tuning to reduce the number of trainable parameters, making it more suitable for low-resource settings.

Fine-tuning BERT for Low-Resource Natural Language Understanding via Active Learning

Question generation over knowledge bases (KBQG) aims at generating natural-language questions about a subgraph, i.e. a set of (connected) triples. Two main challenges still face the current crop of encoder-decoder-based methods, especially on small subgraphs: (1) low diversity and poor fluency due to the limited information contained in the subgraphs, and (2) semantic drift due to the decoder’s oblivion of the semantics of the answer entity. We propose an innovative knowledge-enriched, type-constrained and grammar-guided KBQG model, named KTG, to addresses the above challenges.

Knowledge-enriched, Type-constrained and Grammar-guided Question Generation over Knowledge Bases

In this paper, we approach the multilingual text classification task in the context of the epidemiological field. Multilingual text classification models tend to perform differently across different languages (low- or high-resource), more particularly when the dataset is highly imbalanced, which is the case for epidemiological datasets. We conduct a comparative study of different machine and deep learning text classification models using a dataset comprising news articles related to epidemic outbreaks from six languages, four low-resourced and two high-resourced, in order to analyze the influence of the nature of the language, the structure of the document, and the size of the data. Our findings indicate that the performance of the models based on fine-tuned language models exceeds by more than 50% the chosen baseline models that include a specialized epidemiological news surveillance system and several machine learning models. Also, low-resource languages are highly influenced not only by the typology of the languages on which the models have been pre-trained or/and fine-tuned but also by their size. Furthermore, we discover that the beginning and the end of documents provide the most salient features for this task and, as expected, the performance of the models was proportionate to the training data size.

Multilingual Epidemiological Text Classification: A Comparative Study

Recent image captioning models have made much progress for exploring the multi-modal interaction, such as attention mechanisms. Though these mechanisms can boost the interaction, there are still two gaps between the visual and language domains: (1) the gap between the visual features and textual semantics, (2) the gap between the disordering of visual features and the ordering of texts. To bridge the gaps we propose a high-level semantic planning (HSP) mechanism that incorporates both a semantic reconstruction and an explicit order planning. We integrate the planning mechanism to the attention based caption model and propose the High-level Semantic PLanning based Attention Network (HS-PLAN). First, an attention based reconstruction module is designed to reconstruct the visual features with high-level semantic information. Then we apply a pointer network to serialize the features and obtain the explicit order plan to guide the generation. Experiments conducted on MS COCO show that our model outperforms previous methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 133.4% CIDEr-D score.

Bridge the Gap: High-level Semantic Planning for Image Captioning

We focus on a recently deployed system built for summarizing academic articles by concept tagging. The system has shown great coverage and high accuracy of concept identification which could be contributed by the knowledge acquired from millions of publications. Provided with the explainable concepts and knowledge encoded in a pre-trained neural model, we investigate whether the tagged concepts can be applied to a broader class of applications. We propose transforming the tagged concepts into sparse vectors as representations of academic documents. The effectiveness of the representations is analyzed theoretically by a proposed framework. We also empirically show that the representations can have advantages on academic topic discovery and paper recommendation.

Explainable and Sparse Representations of Academic Articles for Knowledge Exploration

The automatic summarization of argumentative texts has hardly been explored. This paper takes a further step in this direction, targeting news editorials, i.e., opinionated articles with a well-defined argumentation structure. With Webis-EditorialSum-2020, we present a corpus of 1330 carefully curated summaries for 266 news editorials. We evaluate these summaries based on a tailored annotation scheme, where a high-quality summary is expected to be thesis-indicative, persuasive, reasonable, concise, and self-contained. Our corpus contains at least three high-quality summaries for about 90% of the editorials, rendering it a valuable resource for the development and evaluation of summarization technology for long argumentative texts. We further report details of both, an in-depth corpus analysis, and the evaluation of two extractive summarization models.

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