Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PROMT Systems for WMT22 General Translation Task

The PROMT systems are trained with the MarianNMT toolkit. All systems use the transformer-big configuration. We use BPE for text encoding, the vocabulary sizes vary from 24k to 32k for different language pairs. All systems are unconstrained. We use all data provided by the WMT organizers, all publicly available data and some private data. We participate in four directions: English-Russian, English-German and German-English, Ukrainian-English.
An Analysis of Acknowledgments in NLP Conference Proceedings

While acknowledgments are often overlooked and sometimes entirely missing from publications, this short section of a paper can provide insights on the state of a field. We characterize and perform a textual analysis of acknowledgments in NLP conference proceedings across the last 17 years, revealing broader trends in funding and research directions in NLP as well as interesting phenomena including career incentives and the influence of defaults.
DCU-ML at the FinNLP-2022 ERAI Task: Investigating the Transferability of Sentiment Analysis Data for Evaluating Rationales of Investors

In this paper, we describe our system for the FinNLP-2022 shared task: Evaluating the Rationales of Amateur Investors (ERAI). The ERAI shared tasks focuses on mining profitable information from financial texts by predicting the possible Maximal Potential Profit (MPP) and Maximal Loss (ML) based on the posts from amateur investors. There are two sub-tasks in ERAI: Pairwise Comparison and Unsupervised Rank, both target on the prediction of MPP and ML. To tackle the two tasks, we frame this task as a text-pair classification task where the input consists of two documents and the output is the label of whether the first document will lead to higher MPP or lower ML. Specifically, we propose to take advantage of the transferability of Sentiment Analysis data with an assumption that a more positive text will lead to higher MPP or higher ML to facilitate the prediction of MPP and ML. In experiment on the ERAI blind test set, our systems trained on Sentiment Analysis data and ERAI training data ranked 1st and 8th in ML and MPP pairwise comparison respectively. Code available in this link.
Mawqif: A Multi-label Arabic Dataset for Target-specific Stance Detection

Social media platforms are becoming inherent parts of people’s daily life to express opinions and stances toward topics of varying polarities. Stance detection determines the viewpoint expressed in a text toward a target. While communication on social media (e.g., Twitter) takes place in more than 40 languages, the majority of stance detection research has been focused on English. Although some efforts have recently been made to develop stance detection datasets in other languages, no similar efforts seem to have considered the Arabic language. In this paper, we present Mawqif, the first Arabic dataset for target-specific stance detection, composed of 4,121 tweets annotated with stance, sentiment, and sarcasm polarities. Mawqif, as a multi-label dataset, can provide more opportunities for studying the interaction between different opinion dimensions and evaluating a multi-task model. We provide a detailed description of the dataset, present an analysis of the produced annotation, and evaluate four BERT-based models on it. Our best model achieves a macro-F1 of 78.89%, which shows that there is ample room for improvement on this challenging task. We publicly release our dataset, the annotation guidelines, and the code of the experiments.
Exploring a POS-based Two-stage Approach for Improving Low-Resource AMR-to-Text Generation

This work presents a two-stage approach for tackling low-resource AMR-to-text generation for Brazilian Portuguese. Our approach consists of (1) generating a masked surface realization in which some tokens are masked according to its Part-of-Speech class and (2) infilling the masked tokens according to the AMR graph and the previous masked surface realization. Results show a slight improvement over the baseline, mainly in BLEU (1.63) and METEOR (0.02) scores. Moreover, we evaluate the pipeline components separately, showing that the bottleneck of the pipeline is the masked surface realization. Finally, the human evaluation suggests that models still suffer from hallucinations, and some strategies to deal with the problems found are proposed.
Ethics consideration sections in natural language processing papers

In this paper, we present the results of a manual classification of all ethical consideration sections for ACL 2021. We also compare how many papers had an ethics consideration section per track and per world region in ACL 2021. We classified papers according to the ethical issues covered (research benefits, potential harms, and vulnerable groups affected) and whether the paper was marked as requiring ethics review by at least one reviewer. Moreover, we discuss recurring obstacles we have observed (highlighting some interesting texts we found along the way) and conclude with three suggestions. We think that this paper may be useful for anyone who needs to write — or review — an ethics section and would like to get an overview of what others have done.
CycleKQR: Unsupervised Bidirectional Keyword-Question Rewriting

Users expect their queries to be answered by search systems, regardless of the query’s surface form, which include keyword queries and natural questions. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components of Search and QA systems may fail to correctly interpret semantically equivalent inputs if this deviates from how the system was trained, leading to suboptimal understanding capabilities. We propose the keyword-question rewriting task to improve query understanding capabilities of NLU systems for all surface forms. To achieve this, we present CycleKQR, an unsupervised approach, enabling effective rewriting between keyword and question queries using non-parallel data.Empirically we show the impact on QA performance of unfamiliar query forms for open domain and Knowledge Base QA systems (trained on either keywords or natural language questions). We demonstrate how CycleKQR significantly improves QA performance by rewriting queries into the appropriate form, while at the same time retaining the original semantic meaning of input queries, allowing CycleKQR to improve performance by up to 3% over supervised baselines. Finally, we release a datasetof 66k keyword-question pairs.
Ranking Environment, Social And Governance Related Concepts And Assessing Sustainability Aspect of Financial Texts

Understanding Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors related to financial products has become extremely important for investors. However, manually screening through the corporate policies and reports to understand their sustainability aspect is extremely tedious. In this paper, we propose solutions to two such problems which were released as shared tasks of the FinNLP workshop of the IJCAI-2022 conference. Firstly, we train a Sentence Transformers based model which automatically ranks ESG related concepts for a given unknown term. Secondly, we fine-tune a RoBERTa model to classify financial texts as sustainable or not. Out of 26 registered teams, our team ranked 4th in sub-task 1 and 3rd in sub-task 2. The source code can be accessed from https://github.com/sohomghosh/Finsim4_ESG
Narrative Why-Question Answering: A Review of Challenges and Datasets

Narrative Why-Question Answering is an important task to assess the causal reasoning ability of systems in narrative settings. Further progress in this domain needs clear identification of challenges related to understanding the causal structure of narration. In this paper, we give an overview of the challenges related to both narrative understanding and why-question answering, because Narrative Why-Question Answering combines the characteristics of these domains. We also identify narrative QA datasets containing why-questions and analyze their characteristics through the lens of these challenges.
On The Arabic Dialects’ Identification: Overcoming Challenges of Geographical Similarities Between Arabic dialects and Imbalanced Datasets

Arabic is one of the world’s richest languages, with a diverse range of dialects based on geographical origin. In this paper, we present a solution to tackle subtask 1 (Country-level dialect identification) of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task 2022 achieving third place with an average macro F1 score between the two test sets of 26.44%. In the preprocessing stage, we removed the most common frequent terms from all sentences across all dialects, and in the modeling step, we employed a hybrid loss function approach that includes Weighted cross entropy loss and Vector Scaling(VS) Loss. On test sets A and B, our model achieved 35.68% and 17.192% Macro F1 scores, respectively.
AraBEM at WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Propaganda Detection in Arabic Tweets

Propaganda is information or ideas that an organized group or government spreads to influence peopleś opinions, especially by not giving all the facts or secretly emphasizing only one way of looking at the points. The ability to automatically detect propaganda-related linguistic signs is a challenging task that researchers in the NLP community have recently started to address. This paper presents the participation of our team AraBEM in the propaganda detection shared task on Arabic tweets. Our system utilized a pre-trained BERT model to perform multi-class binary classification. It attained the best score at 0.602 micro-f1, ranking third on subtask-1, which identifies the propaganda techniques as a multilabel classification problem with a baseline of 0.079.
Evaluation of Response Generation Models: Shouldn’t It Be Shareable and Replicable?

Human Evaluation (HE) of automatically generated responses is necessary for the advancement of human-machine dialogue research. Current automatic evaluation measures are poor surrogates, at best. There are no agreed-upon HE protocols and it is difficult to develop them. As a result, researchers either perform non-replicable, non-transparent and inconsistent procedures or, worse, limit themselves to automated metrics. We propose to standardize the human evaluation of response generation models by publicly sharing a detailed protocol. The proposal includes the task design, annotators recruitment, task execution, and annotation reporting. Such protocol and process can be used as-is, as-a-whole, in-part, or modified and extended by the research community. We validate the protocol by evaluating two conversationally fine-tuned state-of-the-art models (GPT-2 and T5) for the complex task of personalized response generation. We invite the community to use this protocol - or its future community amended versions - as a transparent, replicable, and comparable approach to HE of generated responses.
Back to the Roots: Predicting the Source Domain of Metaphors using Contrastive Learning

Metaphors frame a given target domain using concepts from another, usually more concrete, source domain. Previous research in NLP has focused on the identification of metaphors and the interpretation of their meaning. In contrast, this paper studies to what extent the source domain can be predicted computationally from a metaphorical text. Given a dataset with metaphorical texts from a finite set of source domains, we propose a contrastive learning approach that ranks source domains by their likelihood of being referred to in a metaphorical text. In experiments, it achieves reasonable performance even for rare source domains, clearly outperforming a classification baseline.
Privacy Pitfalls of Online Service Terms and Conditions: a Hybrid Approach for Classification and Summarization

Verbose and complicated legal terminology in online service terms and conditions (T&C) means that users typically don’t read these documents before accepting the terms of such unilateral service contracts. With such services becoming part of mainstream digital life, highlighting Terms of Service (ToS) clauses that impact on the collection and use of user data and privacy are important concerns. Advances in text summarization can help to create informative and concise summaries of the terms, but existing approaches geared towards news and microblogging corpora are not directly applicable to the ToS domain, which is hindered by a lack of T&C-relevant resources for training and evaluation. This paper presents a ToS model, developing a hybrid extractive-classifier-abstractive pipeline that highlights the privacy and data collection/use-related sections in a ToS document and paraphrases these into concise and informative sentences. Relying on significantly less training data (4313 training pairs) than previous representative works (287,226 pairs), our model outperforms extractive baselines by at least 50% in ROUGE-1 score and 54% in METEOR score. The paper also contributes to existing community efforts by curating a dataset of online service T&C, through a developed web scraping tool.
Application of diffractive optical elements for controlling the light beam in ptychography

We designed two pieces of rotary diffractive optical elements (DOE) to control the incident light beam in ptychography. The incident light beam is shaped into the required complex amplitude as employed probes by using double DOEs. The high-quality probes are generated to illuminate on the different positions of the object, which leads to achieving superior ptychographical imaging by rotating DOEs. Consequently, mechanical movement of the specimen is avoided in the imaging process. The numerical experiments demonstrate the double-wheeling DOEs are effective for the ptychographical imaging. Further, the double discs containing several pairs of DOEs are designed for a larger field of view. As a result, the flexibility of ptychography may be improved by employing the rotary double DOEs.
Improving Event Coreference Resolution Using Document-level and Topic-level Information

Event coreference resolution (ECR) aims to cluster event mentions that refer to the same real-world events. Deep learning methods have achieved SOTA results on the ECR task. However, due to the encoding length limitation, previous methods either adopt classical pairwise models based on sentence-level context or split each document into multiple chunks and encode them separately. They failed to capture the interactions and contextual cues among those long-distance event mentions. Besides, high-level information, such as event topics, is rarely considered to enhance representation learning for ECR. To address the above two issues, we first apply a Longformer-based encoder to obtain the document-level embeddings and an encoder with a trigger-mask mechanism to learn sentence-level embeddings based on local context. In addition, we propose an event topic generator to infer the latent topic-level representations. Finally, using the above event embeddings, we employ a multiple tensor matching method to capture their interactions at the document, sentence, and topic levels. Experimental results on the KBP 2017 dataset show that our model outperforms the SOTA baselines.
Punctuation and case restoration in code mixed Indian languages

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are taking over in different industries starting from producing video subtitles to interactive digital assistants. ASR output can be used in automatic indexing, categorizing, searching along with normal human readability. Raw transcripts from ASR systems are difficult to interpret since it usually produces text without punctuation and case information (all lower, all upper, camel case etc.), thus limiting the performance of downstream NLP tasks. We proposed an approach to restore the punctuation and case for both English and Hinglish (i.e Hindi vocabulary in Latin script) languages. We have performed a classification task using encoder-based transformers which is a mini BERT consisting of 4 encoder layers for punctuation and case restoration instead of the traditional Seq2Seq model considering the latency constraint in real world use cases. It consists of a total number of 15 distinct classes for the model which includes 5 punctuations i.e Period(.), Comma(,), Single Quote(‘), Double Quote(”) & Question Mark(? ) with different combinations of casing. The model is benchmarked on an internal dataset which was based on user conversation with the voice assistant and it achieves a F1(macro) score of 91.52% on the test set.
A GlobalPointer based Robust Approach for Information Extraction from Dialog Transcripts

With the widespread popularisation of intelligent technology, task-based dialogue systems (TOD) are increasingly being applied to a wide variety of practical scenarios. As the key tasks in dialogue systems, named entity recognition and slot filling play a crucial role in the completeness and accuracy of information extraction. This paper is an evaluation paper for Sere-TOD 2022 Workshop challenge (Track 1 Information extraction from dialog transcripts). We proposed a multi-model fusion approach based on GlobalPointer, combined with some optimisation tricks, finally achieved an entity F1 of 60.73, an entity-slot-value triple F1 of 56, and an average F1 of 58.37, and got the highest score in SereTOD 2022 Workshop challenge
An Empirical Analysis of Memorization in Fine-tuned Autoregressive Language Models

Large language models are shown to present privacy risks through memorization of training data, andseveral recent works have studied such risks for the pre-training phase. Little attention, however, has been given to the fine-tuning phase and it is not well understood how different fine-tuning methods (such as fine-tuning the full model, the model head, and adapter) compare in terms of memorization risk. This presents increasing concern as the “pre-train and fine-tune” paradigm proliferates. In this paper, we empirically study memorization of fine-tuning methods using membership inference and extraction attacks, and show that their susceptibility to attacks is very different. We observe that fine-tuning the head of the model has the highest susceptibility to attacks, whereas fine-tuning smaller adapters appears to be less vulnerable to known extraction attacks.
Entity Retrieval from Multilingual Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are structured databases that capture real-world entities and their relationships. The task of entity retrieval from a KG aims at retrieving a ranked list of entities relevant to a given user query. While English-only entity retrieval has attracted considerable attention, user queries, as well as the information contained in the KG, may be represented in multiple—and possibly distinct—languages. Furthermore, KG content may vary between languages due to different information sources and points of view. Recent advances in language representation have enabled natural ways of bridging gaps between languages. In this paper, we therefore propose to utilise language models (LMs) and diverse entity representations to enable truly multilingual entity retrieval. We propose two approaches: (i) an array of monolingual retrievers and (ii) a single multilingual retriever, trained using queries and documents in multiple languages. We show that while our approach is on par with the significantly more complex state-of-the-art method for the English task, it can be successfully applied to virtually any language with a LM. Furthermore, it allows languages to benefit from one another, yielding significantly better performance, both for low- and high-resource languages.
Deterministic Production Planning: Algorithms and Complexity

A class of production planning problems is considered in which known demands have to be satisfied over a finite horizon at minimum total costs. For each period, production and storage cost functions are specified. The production costs may include set-up costs and the production levels may he subject to capacity limits. The computational complexity of the problems in this class is investigated. Several algorithms proposed for their solution are described and analyzed. It is also shown that some special cases are NP-hard and hence unlikely to be solvable in polynomial time.
Benchmarking transfer learning approaches for sentiment analysis of Arabic dialect

Arabic has a widely varying collection of dialects. With the explosion of the use of social networks, the volume of written texts has remarkably increased. Most users express themselves using their own dialect. Unfortunately, many of these dialects remain under-studied due to the scarcity of resources. Researchers and industry practitioners are increasingly interested in analyzing users’ sentiments. In this context, several approaches have been proposed, namely: traditional machine learning, deep learning transfer learning and more recently few-shot learning approaches. In this work, we compare their efficiency as part of the NADI competition to develop a country-level sentiment analysis model. Three models were beneficial for this sub-task: The first based on Sentence Transformer (ST) and achieve 43.23% on DEV set and 42.33% on TEST set, the second based on CAMeLBERT and achieve 47.85% on DEV set and 41.72% on TEST set and the third based on multi-dialect BERT model and achieve 66.72% on DEV set and 39.69% on TEST set.
A unified framework for cross-domain and cross-task learning of mental health conditions

The detection of mental health conditions based on an individual’s use of language has received considerable attention in the NLP community. However, most work has focused on single-task and single-domain models, limiting the semantic space that they are able to cover and risking significant cross-domain loss. In this paper, we present two approaches towards a unified framework for cross-domain and cross-task learning for the detection of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide risk across different platforms that further utilizes inductive biases across tasks. Firstly, we develop a lightweight model using a general set of features that sets a new state of the art on several tasks while matching the performance of more complex task- and domain-specific systems on others. We also propose a multi-task approach and further extend our framework to explicitly capture the affective characteristics of someone’s language, further consolidating transfer of inductive biases and of shared linguistic characteristics. Finally, we present a novel dynamically adaptive loss weighting approach that allows for more stable learning across imbalanced datasets and better neural generalization performance. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our unified framework for mental ill-health detection across a number of diverse English datasets.
Lexical Simplification using multi level and modular approach

Text Simplification is an ongoing problem in Natural Language Processing, solution to which has varied implications. In conjunction with the TSAR-2022 Workshop @EMNLP2022 Lexical Simplification is the process of reducing the lexical complexity of a text by replacing difficult words with easier to read (or understand) expressions while preserving the original information and meaning. This paper explains the work done by our team"teamPN"for English sub task. We created a modular pipeline which combines modern day transformers based models with traditional NLP methods like paraphrasing and verb sense disambiguation. We created a multi level and modular pipeline where the target text is treated according to its semantics(Part of Speech Tag). Pipeline is multi level as we utilize multiple source models to find potential candidates for replacement, It is modular as we can switch the source models and their weight-age in the final re-ranking.