Canada

Though discourse parsing can help multiple NLP fields, there has been no wide language model search done on implicit discourse relation classification. This hinders researchers from fully utilizing public-available models in discourse analysis. This work is a straightforward, fine-tuned discourse performance comparison of seven pre-trained language models. We use PDTB-3, a popular discourse relation annotated dataset. Through our model search, we raise SOTA to 0.671 ACC and obtain novel observations. Some are contrary to what has been reported before (Shi and Demberg, 2019b), that sentence-level pre-training objectives (NSP, SBO, SOP) generally fail to produce the best performing model for implicit discourse relation classification. Counterintuitively, similar-sized PLMs with MLM and full attention led to better performance.

ACL 2023

A Side-by-side Comparision of Transformers for \\English Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

implicit discourse relation classification

transformer

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. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

Please register!

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.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
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
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
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.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Despite recent advances of AI, story understanding remains an open and under-investigated problem. We collect, preprocess, and publicly release a video-language story dataset, Synopses of Movie Narratives(SyMoN), containing 5,193 video summaries of popular movies and TV series with a total length of 869 hours. SyMoN captures naturalistic storytelling videos made by human creators and intended for a human audience. 
As a prototypical and naturalistic story dataset, SyMoN features high coverage of multimodal story events. Its use of storytelling techniques cause cross-domain semantic gaps that provide appropriate challenges to existing models. We establish benchmarks on video-text retrieval and zero-shot alignment on movie summary videos, which showcase the importance of in-domain data and long-term memory in story understanding. With SyMoN, we hope to lay the groundwork for progress in multimodal story understanding.

Synopses of Movie Narratives: a Video-Language Dataset for Story Understanding

In this paper, we describe the problem of automatically evaluating quality of knowledge expressed in a non-fiction narrative text. We focus on a specific type of documents where each document describes a certain technical problem and its solution. The goal is not only to evaluate the quality of knowledge in such a document, but also to automatically suggest possible improvements to the writer so that a better knowledge-rich document is produced. We propose new evaluation metrics to evaluate quality of knowledge contents as well as flow of different types of sentences. The suggestions for improvement are generated based on these metrics. The proposed metrics are completely unsupervised in nature and they are derived from a set of simple corpus statistics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metrics as compared to other existing baseline metrics in our experiments.

Evaluation Metrics for Depth and Flow of Knowledge in Non-fiction Narrative Texts

This paper presents the Candide model as a computational architecture for modelling human-like, narrative-based language understanding. The model starts from the idea that narratives emerge through the process of interpreting novel linguistic observations, such as utterances, paragraphs and texts, with respect to previously acquired knowledge and beliefs. Narratives are personal, as they are rooted in past experiences, and constitute perspectives on the world that might motivate different interpretations of the same observations. Concretely, the Candide model operationalises this idea by dynamically modelling the belief systems and background knowledge of individual agents, updating these as new linguistic observations come in, and exposing them to a logic reasoning engine that reveals the possible sources of divergent interpretations. Apart from introducing the foundational ideas, we also present a proof-of-concept implementation that demonstrates the approach through a number of illustrative examples.

The Candide model: How narratives emerge where observations meet beliefs

In this position paper, we contend that advancing our understanding of narrative and the effective generation of longer, subjectively engaging texts is crucial for progress in modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) and potentially the broader field of Artificial Intelligence. We highlight the current lack of appropriate datasets, evaluation methods, and operational concepts necessary for initiating work on narrative processing.

What is Wrong with Language Models that Can Not Tell a Story?

Stories about everyday situations are an essential part of human communication, motivating the need to develop AI agents that can reliably understand these stories. Despite the long list of supervised methods for story completion and procedural understanding, current AI has no mechanisms to automatically track and explain procedures in unseen stories. To bridge this gap, we study the ability of AI models to
transfer procedural knowledge to novel narrative tasks in a transparent manner. We design LEAP: a comprehensive framework that integrates state-of-the-art modeling architectures, training regimes, and augmentation strategies based on both natural and synthetic stories. To address the lack of densely annotated training data, we devise a robust automatic labeler based on few-shot prompting to enhance the aug mented data. Our experiments with in- and out of-domain tasks reveal insights into the interplay of different architectures, training regimes, and augmentation strategies. LEAP’s labeler has a clear positive impact on out-of-domain datasets, while the resulting dense annotation provides native explainability

Transferring Procedural Knowledge across Commonsense Tasks

This paper proposes a sentiment-centric pipeline to perform unsupervised plot extraction on non-linear novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a novel widely considered to be “plotless.” Combining transformer-based sentiment analysis models with statistical testing, we model sentiment’s rate-of-change and correspondingly segment the novel into emotionally self-contained units qualitatively evaluated to be meaningful surrogate pseudo-chapters. We validate our findings by evaluating our pipeline as a fully unsupervised text segmentation model, achieving a F-1 score of 0.643 (regional) and 0.214 (exact) in chapter break prediction on a validation set of linear novels with existing chapter structures. In addition, we observe notable differences between the distributions of predicted chapter lengths in linear and non-linear fictional narratives, with the latter exhibiting significantly greater variability. Our results hold significance for narrative researchers appraising methods for extracting plots from non-linear novels.

Mrs. Dalloway Said She Would Segment the Chapters Herself

We present a novel approach to modeling narratives using narrative chain embeddings.
A new dataset of narrative chains extracted from German news texts is presented.
With neural methods, we produce models for both German and English that achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Multiple Choice Narrative Cloze task.
Subsequently, we perform an extrinsic evaluation of the embeddings our models produce and show that they perform rather poorly in identifying narratively similar texts. We explore some of the reasons for this underperformance and discuss the upsides of our approach.
We provide an outlook on alternative ways to model narratives, as well as techniques for evaluating such models.

Narrative Cloze as a Training Objective: Towards Modeling Stories Using Narrative Chain Embeddings

Document-level context for neural machine translation (NMT) is crucial to improve the translation consistency and cohesion, the translation of ambiguous inputs, as well as several other linguistic phenomena.
Many works have been published on the topic of document-level NMT, but most restrict the system to only local context, typically including just the one or two preceding sentences as additional information.
This might be enough to resolve some ambiguous inputs, but it is probably not sufficient to capture some document-level information like the topic or style of a conversation.
When increasing the context size beyond just the local context, there are two challenges: (i) the memory usage increases exponentially (ii) the translation performance starts to degrade.
We argue that the widely-used attention mechanism is responsible for both issues.
Therefore, we propose a constrained attention variant that focuses the attention on the most relevant parts of the sequence, while simultaneously reducing the memory consumption.
For evaluation, we utilize targeted test sets in combination with novel evaluation techniques to analyze the translations in regards to specific discourse-related phenomena.
We find that our approach is a good compromise between sentence-level NMT vs attending to the full context, especially in low resource scenarios.

Improving Long Context Document-Level Machine Translation

Time pressure and topic negotiation may impose constraints on how people leverage discourse relations (DRs) in spontaneous conversational contexts. In this work, we adapt a system of DRs for written language to spontaneous dialogue using crowdsourced annotations from novice annotators. We then test whether discourse relations are used differently across several types of multi-utterance contexts. We compare the patterns of DR annotation within and across speakers and within and across turns. Ultimately, we find that different discourse contexts produce distinct distributions of discourse relations, with single-turn annotations creating the most uncertainty for annotators. Additionally, we find that the discourse relation anno- tations are of sufficient quality to predict from embeddings of discourse units.

The distribution of discourse relations within and across turns in spontaneous conversation

Our paper investigates the use of discourse embedding techniques to develop a community recommendation system that focuses on mental health support groups on social media. Social media platforms provide a means for users to anonymously connect with communities that cater to their specific interests. However, with the vast number of online communities available, users may face difficulties in identifying relevant groups to address their mental health concerns. To address this challenge, we explore the integration of discourse information from various subreddit communities using embedding techniques to develop an effective recommendation system. Our approach involves the use of content-based and collaborative filtering techniques to enhance the performance of the recommendation system. Our findings indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the use of each technique separately and provides interpretability in the recommendation process.

Downloads

Next from ACL 2023

Synopses of Movie Narratives: a Video-Language Dataset for Story Understanding

Similar lecture

Discourse Relation Prediction and Discourse Parsing in Dialogues with Minimal Supervision

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from ACL 2023

Synopses of Movie Narratives: a Video-Language Dataset for Story Understanding

Similar lecture

Discourse Relation Prediction and Discourse Parsing in Dialogues with Minimal Supervision

Downloads