Canada

*Warning: This paper contains several contents that may be toxic, harmful, or offensive.*In the last few years, text-to-image generative models have gained remarkable success in generating images with unprecedented quality accompanied by a breakthrough of inference speed. Despite their rapid progress, human biases that manifest in the training examples, particularly with regard to common stereotypical biases, like gender and skin tone, still have been found in these generative models. In this work, we seek to measure more complex human biases exist in the task of text-to-image generations. Inspired by the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT) from social psychology, we propose a novel Text-to-Image Association Test (T2IAT) framework that quantifies the implicit stereotypes between concepts and valence, and those in the images. We replicate the previously documented bias tests on generative models, including morally neutral tests on flowers and insects as well as demographic stereotypical tests on diverse social attributes. The results of these experiments demonstrate the presence of complex stereotypical behaviors in image generations.

ACL 2023

T2IAT: Measuring Valence and Stereotypical Biases in Text-to-Image Generation

association test

stereotypes and biases

text-to-image generation

diffusion models

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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EMNLP 2024

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poster

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
<br>The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023.<br><br>
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
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This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

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In this paper, we address the task of cloze-style multiple choice question (MCQs) distractor generation. Our study is featured by the following designs. First, we propose to formulate the cloze distractor generation as a Text2Text task. Second, we propose pseudo Kullback-Leibler Divergence for regulating the generation to consider the item discrimination index in education evaluation. Third, we explore the candidate augmentation strategy and multi-tasking training with cloze-related tasks to further boost the generation performance. Through experiments with benchmarking datasets, our best perfomring model advances the state-of-the-art result from 10.81 to 22.00 (p@1 score).

Distractor Generation based on Text2Text Language Models with Pseudo Kullback-Leibler Divergence Regulation

Norms, which are culturally accepted guidelines for behaviours, can be integrated into conversational models to generate utterances that are appropriate for the socio-cultural context. Existing methods for norm recognition tend to focus only on surface-level features of dialogues and do not take into account the interactions within a conversation. To address this issue, we propose NormMark, a probabilistic generative Markov model to carry the latent features throughout a dialogue. These features are captured by discrete and continuous latent variables conditioned on the conversation history, and improve the model's ability in norm recognition. The model is trainable on weakly annotated data using the variational technique. On a dataset with limited norm annotations, we show that our approach achieves higher F1 score, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods, including GPT3.

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NormMark: A Weakly Supervised Markov Model for Socio-cultural Norm Discovery

Deep text understanding, which requires the connections between a given document and prior knowledge beyond its text, has been highlighted by many benchmarks in recent years. However, these benchmarks have encountered two major limitations. On the one hand, most of them require human annotation of knowledge, which leads to limited knowledge coverage. On the other hand, they usually use choices or spans in the texts as the answers, which results in narrow answer space. To overcome these limitations, we build a new challenging benchmark named KoRC in this paper. Compared with previous benchmarks, KoRC has two advantages, i.e., broad knowledge coverage and flexible answer format. Specifically, we utilize massive knowledge bases to guide annotators or large language models (LLMs) to construct knowledgable questions. Moreover, we use labels in knowledge bases rather than spans or choices as the final answers. We test state-of-the-art models on KoRC and the experimental results show that the strongest baseline only achieves 68.3% and 30.0% F1 measure in the IID and OOD test set, respectively. These results indicate that deep text understanding is still an unsolved challenge. We will release our dataset and baseline methods upon acceptance.

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KoRC: Knowledge Oriented Reading Comprehension Benchmark for Deep Text Understanding

Named Entity Recognition (NER) state-of-the-art methods requires high-quality labeled datasets. Issues such as scarcity of labeled data, under-representation of entities, and privacy concerns with using sensitive data for training, can be significant barriers. Generating synthetic data to train models is a promising solution to mitigate these problems. We propose ECG-QALM, a contextual question and answering approach using pre-trained language models to synthetically generate entity-controlled text. Generated text is then used to augment small labeled datasets for downstream NER tasks. We evaluate our method on two publicly available datasets. We find ECG-QALM is capable of producing full text samples with desired entities appearing in a controllable way, while retaining sentence coherence closest to the real world data. Evaluations on NER tasks show significant improvements (75% - 140%) in low-labeled data regimes.

ECG-QALM: Entity-Controlled Synthetic Text Generation using Contextual Q&A for NER

Entailment graphs (EGs) with predicates as nodes and entailment relations as edges are typically incomplete, while EGs in different languages are often complementary to each other. In this paper, we propose a new task, multilingual entailment graph enhancement, which aims to utilize the entailment information from one EG to enhance another EG in a different language. The ultimate goal is to obtain an enhanced EG containing richer and more accurate entailment information. We present an align-then-enhance framework (ATE) to achieve accurate multilingual entailment graph enhancement, which first exploits a cross-graph guided interaction mechanism to automatically discover potential equivalent predicates between different EGs and then constructs more accurate enhanced entailment graphs based on soft predicate alignments. Extensive experiments show that ATE achieves better and more robust predicate alignment results between different EGs, and the enhanced entailment graphs generated by ATE outperform the original graphs for entailment detection.

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Align-then-Enhance: Multilingual Entailment Graph Enhancement with Soft Predicate Alignment

Disfluencies commonly occur in conversational speech. Speech with disfluencies can result in noisy Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts, which affects downstream tasks like machine translation. In this paper, we propose an adversarially-trained sequence-tagging model for Disfluency Correction (DC) that utilizes a small amount of labeled real disfluent data in conjunction with a large amount of unlabeled data. We show the benefit of our proposed technique, which crucially depends on synthetically generated disfluent data, by evaluating it for DC in three Indian languages- Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi (all from the Indo-Aryan family). Our technique also performs well in removing stuttering disfluencies in ASR transcripts introduced by speech impairments. We achieve an average 6.15 points improvement in F1-score over competitive baselines across all three languages mentioned. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to utilize adversarial training for DC and use it to correct stuttering disfluencies in English, establishing a new benchmark for this task.

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Adversarial Training for Low-Resource Disfluency Correction

Different ways of linguistically expressing the same real-world event can lead to different perceptions of what happened. Previous work has shown that different descriptions of gender-based violence (GBV) influence the reader's perception of who is to blame for the violence, possibly reinforcing stereotypes which see the victim as partly responsible, too. As a contribution to raise awareness on perspective-based writing, and to facilitate access to alternative perspectives, we introduce the novel task of automatically rewriting GBV descriptions as a means to alter the perceived level of blame on the perpetrator. We present a quasi-parallel dataset of sentences with low and high perceived responsibility levels for the perpetrator, and experiment with unsupervised (mBART-based), zero-shot and few-shot (GPT3-based) methods for rewriting sentences. We evaluate our models using a questionnaire study and a suite of automatic metrics.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/532fnPQGAZvefKDC1fZsuL/embed/polls/705df5d7-c926-4f7d-b48d-a302085092ff" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Responsibility Perspective Transfer for Italian Femicide News

The task of fact-checking deals with assessing the veracity of factual claims based on credible evidence and background knowledge. In particular, scientific fact-checking is the variation of the task concerned with verifying claims rooted in scientific knowledge. This task has received significant attention due to the growing importance of scientific and health discussions on online platforms. Automated scientific fact-checking methods based on NLP can help combat the spread of misinformation, assist researchers in knowledge discovery, and help individuals understand new scientific breakthroughs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of existing research in this emerging field and its related tasks. We provide a task description, discuss the construction process of existing datasets, and analyze proposed models and approaches. Based on our findings, we identify intriguing challenges and outline potential future directions to advance the field.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/532fnPQGAZvefKDC1fZsuL/embed/polls/b350cd4b-67b3-4dcf-9812-91ec35d4304e" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Scientific Fact-Checking: A Survey of Resources and Approaches

We present Claim-Dissector: a novel latent variable model for fact-checking and analysis, which given a claim and a set of retrieved evidence jointly learns to identify: (i) the relevant evidences to the given claim (ii) the veracity of the claim. We propose to disentangle the per-evidence relevance probability and its contribution to the final veracity probability in an interpretable way --- the final veracity probability is proportional to a linear ensemble of per-evidence relevance probabilities. In this way, the individual contributions of evidences towards the final predicted probability can be identified. In per-evidence relevance probability, our model can further distinguish whether each relevant evidence is supporting (S) or refuting (R) the claim. This allows to quantify how much the S/R probability contributes to final verdict or to detect disagreeing evidence. Despite its interpretable nature, our system achieves results competetive with state-of-the-art on the FEVER dataset, as compared to typical two-stage system pipelines, while using significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore, our analysis shows that our model can learn fine-grained relevance cues while using coarse-grained supervision and we demonstrate it in 2 ways. (i) We show that our model can achieve competitive sentence recall while using only paragraph-level relevance supervision. (ii) Traversing towards the finest granularity of relevance, we show that our model is capable of identifying relevance at the token level. To do this, we present a new benchmark TLR-FEVER focusing on token-level interpretability --- humans annotate tokens in relevant evidences they considered essential when making their judgment. Then we measure how similar are these annotations to the tokens our model is focusing on.

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/1kgCXjyZMgdV89PsksaJsj/embed/polls/9aaf15a6-0cab-43a0-ab49-34af2b066351" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Claim-Dissector: An Interpretable Fact-Checking System with Joint Re-ranking and Veracity Prediction

While Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved great progress in recent years, it still suffers from inaccurate translation of entities (e.g., person/organization name, location), due to the lack of entity training instances. When we humans encounter an unknown entity during translation, we usually first look up in a dictionary and then organize the entity translation together with the translations of other parts to form a smooth target sentence. Inspired by this translation process, we propose an Extract-and-Attend approach to enhance entity translation in NMT, where the translation candidates of source entities are first extracted from a dictionary and then attended to by the NMT model to generate the target sentence. Specifically, the translation candidates are extracted by first detecting the entities in a source sentence and then translating the entities through looking up in a dictionary. Then, the extracted candidates are added as a prefix of the decoder input to be attended to by the decoder when generating the target sentence through self-attention. Experiments conducted on En-Zh and En-Ru demonstrate that the proposed method is effective on improving both the translation accuracy of entities and the overall translation quality, with up to 35% reduction on entity error rate and 0.85 gain on BLEU and 13.8 gain on COMET.

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