Croatia

Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content. While prior works have focused on identifying hateful/offensive language, they are not adequate for meeting the challenges of content moderation since 1) moderation decisions are based on violation of rules, which subsumes detection of offensive speech, and 2) such rules often differ across communities which entails an adaptive solution. We propose to study the challenges of content moderation by introducing a multilingual dataset of 1.8 Million Reddit comments spanning 56 subreddits in English, German, Spanish and French1. We perform extensive experimental analysis to highlight the underlying challenges and suggest related research problems such as cross-lingual transfer, learning under label noise (human biases), transfer of moderation models, and predicting the violated rule. Our dataset and analysis can help better prepare for the challenges and opportunities of auto moderation.

EACL 2023

Multilingual Content Moderation: A Case Study on Reddit

content moderation

social media

multilingual

dataset

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

### Welcome to the 17th 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 had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. 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.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

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.

PiC: A Phrase-in-Context Dataset for Phrase Understanding and Semantic Search

Dialogue summarization aims to condense a given dialogue into a simple and focused summary text. Typically, both the roles' viewpoints and conversational topics change in the dialogue stream. Thus how to effectively handle the shifting topics and select the most salient utterance becomes one of the major challenges of this task. In this paper, we propose a novel topic-aware Global-Local Centrality (GLC) model to help select the salient context from all sub-topics. The centralities are constructed at both the global and local levels. The global one aims to identify vital sub-topics in the dialogue and the local one aims to select the most important context in each sub-topic. Specifically, the GLC collects sub-topic based on the utterance representations. And each utterance is aligned with one sub-topic. Based on the sub-topics, the GLC calculates global- and local-level centralities. Finally, we combine the two to guide the model to capture both salient context and sub-topics when generating summaries. Experimental results show that our model outperforms strong baselines on three public dialogue summarization datasets: CSDS, MC, and SAMSUM. Further analysis demonstrates that our GLC can exactly identify vital contents from sub-topics.~\footnote{\url{this https URL}}

Enhancing Dialogue Summarization with Topic-Aware Global- and Local- Level Centrality

One of the major problems with text simplification is the lack of high-quality data. The sources of simplification datasets are limited to Wikipedia and Newsela, restricting further development of this field. In this paper, we analyzed the similarity between text summarization and text simplification and exploited summarization data to help simplify. First, we proposed an alignment algorithm to extract sentence pairs from summarization datasets. Then, we designed four attributes to characterize the degree of simplification and proposed a method to filter suitable pairs. We named these pairs Sum4Simp (S4S). Next, we conducted human evaluations to show that S4S is high-quality and compared it with a real simplification dataset. Finally, we conducted experiments to illustrate that the S4S can improve the performance of several mainstream simplification models, especially in low-resource scenarios.

Exploiting Summarization Data to Help Text Simplification

Current self-training methods such as standard self-training, co-training, tri-training, and others often focus on improving model performance on a single task, utilizing differences in input features, model architectures, and training processes. However, many tasks in natural language processing are about different but related aspects of language, and models trained for one task can be great teachers for other related tasks. In this work, we propose friend-training, a cross-task self-training framework, where models trained to do different tasks are used in an iterative training, pseudo-labeling, and retraining process to help each other for better selection of pseudo-labels. With two dialogue understanding tasks, conversational semantic role labeling and dialogue rewriting, chosen for a case study, we show that the models trained with the friend-training framework achieve the best performance compared to strong baselines.

Friend-training: Learning from Models of Different but Related Tasks

Text embeddings are commonly evaluated on a small set of datasets from a single task not covering their possible applications to other tasks. It is unclear whether state-of-the-art embeddings on semantic textual similarity (STS) can be equally well applied to other tasks like clustering or reranking. This makes progress in the field difficult to track, as various models are constantly being proposed without proper evaluation. To solve this problem, we introduce the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). MTEB spans 8 embedding tasks covering a total of 58 datasets and 112 languages. Through the benchmarking of 33 models on MTEB, we establish the most comprehensive benchmark of text embeddings todate. We find that no particular text embedding method dominates across all tasks. This suggests that the field has yet to converge on a universal text embedding method and scale it up sufficiently to provide state-of-theart results on all embedding tasks. MTEB comes with open-source code and a public leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark

Generation-based data augmentation (DA) has been presented in several works as a way to improve offensive language detection. However, the effectiveness of generative DA has been shown only in limited scenarios, and the potential injection of biases when using generated data to classify offensive language has not been investigated. Our aim is that of analyzing the feasibility of generative data augmentation more in-depth with two main focuses. First, we investigate the robustness of models trained on generated data in a variety of data augmentation setups, both novel and already presented in previous work, and compare their performance on four widely-used English offensive language datasets that present inherent differences in terms of content and complexity. In addition to this, we analyze models using the HateCheck suite, a series of functional tests created to challenge hate speech detection systems. Second, we investigate potential lexical bias issues through a qualitative analysis on the generated data. We find that the potential positive impact of generative data augmentation on model performance is unreliable, and generative DA can also have unpredictable effects on lexical bias.

Generation-Based Data Augmentation for Offensive Language Detection: Is It Worth It?

Many Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems use annotated corpora for training and evaluation. However, labeled data is often costly to obtain and scaling annotation projects is difficult, which is why annotation tasks are often outsourced to paid crowdworkers. Citizen Science is an alternative to crowdsourcing that is relatively unexplored in the context of NLP. To investigate whether and how well Citizen Science can be applied in this setting, we conduct an exploratory study into engaging different groups of volunteers in Citizen Science for NLP by re-annotating parts of a pre-existing crowdsourced dataset. Our results show that this can yield high-quality annotations and at- tract motivated volunteers, but also requires considering factors such as scalability, participation over time, and legal and ethical issues. We summarize lessons learned in the form of guidelines and provide our code and data to aid future work on Citizen Science.

Lessons Learned from a Citizen Science Project for Natural Language Processing

Task-oriented Dialogue (ToD) agents are mostly limited to a few widely-spoken languages, mainly due to the high cost of acquiring training data for each language. Existing low-cost approaches that rely on cross-lingual embeddings or naive machine translation sacrifice a lot of accuracy for data efficiency, and largely fail in creating a usable dialogue agent.
We propose automatic methods that use ToD training data in a source language to build a high-quality functioning dialogue agent in another target language that has no training data (i.e. zero-shot) or a small training set (i.e. few-shot). Unlike most prior work in cross-lingual ToD that only focuses on Dialogue State Tracking (DST), we build an end-to-end agent.

We show that our approach closes the accuracy gap between few-shot and existing full-shot methods for ToD agents.
We achieve this by (1) improving the dialogue data representation, (2) improving entity-aware machine translation, and (3) automatic filtering of noisy translations.

We evaluate our approach on the recent bilingual dialogue dataset BiToD.
In Chinese to English transfer, in the zero-shot setting, our method achieves 46.7\% and 22.0\% in Task Success Rate (TSR) and Dialogue Success Rate (DSR) respectively. In the few-shot setting where 10\% of the data in the target language is used, we improve the state-of-the-art by 15.2\% and 14.0\%, coming within 5\% of full-shot training.

Zero and Few-Shot Localization of Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents with a Distilled Representation

Designing dialog tutors has been challenging as it involves modeling the diverse and complex pedagogical strategies employed by human tutors. Although there have been significant recent advances in neural conversational systems using large language models and growth in available dialog corpora, dialog tutoring has largely remained unaffected by these advances. 
In this paper, we rigorously analyze various generative language models on two dialog tutoring datasets for language learning using automatic and human evaluations to understand the new opportunities brought by these advances as well as the challenges we must overcome to build models that would be usable in real educational settings.
We find that although current approaches can model tutoring in constrained learning scenarios when the number of concepts to be taught and possible teacher strategies are small, they perform poorly in less constrained scenarios.
Our human quality evaluation shows that both models and ground-truth annotations exhibit low performance in terms of equitable tutoring, which measures learning opportunities for students and how engaging the dialog is.
To understand the behavior of our models in a real tutoring setting, we conduct a user study using expert annotators and find a significantly large number of model reasoning errors in 45\% of conversations. Finally, we connect our findings to outline future work.

Opportunities and Challenges in Neural Dialog Tutoring

We introduce the StatCan Dialogue Dataset consisting of 19,379 conversation turns between agents working at Statistics Canada and online users looking for published data tables. The conversations stem from genuine intents, are held in English or French, and lead to agents retrieving one of over 5000 complex data tables. Based on this dataset, we propose two tasks: (1) automatic retrieval of relevant tables based on a on-going conversation, and (2) automatic generation of appropriate agent responses at each turn. We investigate the difficulty of each task by establishing strong baselines. Our experiments on a temporal data split reveal that all models struggle to generalize to future conversations, as we observe a significant drop in performance across both tasks when we move from the validation to the test set. In addition, we find that response generation models struggle to decide when to return a table. Considering that the tasks pose significant challenges to existing models, we encourage the community to develop models for our task, which can be directly used to help knowledge workers find relevant tables for live chat users.

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PiC: A Phrase-in-Context Dataset for Phrase Understanding and Semantic Search

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