pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Open-Domain Dialog Evaluation using Follow-Ups Likelihood
Authors: Maxime De Bruyn, Ehsan Lotfi, Jeska Buhmann, Walter Daelemans
Date: 2022-09-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Open-Domain Dialog

Automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogs remains an unsolved problem. Moreover, existing methods do not correlate strongly with human annotations. This paper presents a new automated evaluation method using follow-ups: we measure the probability that a language model will continue the conversation with a fixed set of follow-ups (e.g., not really relevant here, what are you trying to say). When compared against twelve existing methods, our new evaluation achieves the highest correlation with human evaluations.
Semantic-Preserving Adversarial Code Comprehension
Authors: Yiyang Li, Hongqiu Wu, Hai Zhao
Date: 2022-09-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10

Based on the tremendous success of pre-trained language models (PrLMs) for source code comprehension tasks, current literature studies either ways to further improve the performance (generalization) of PrLMs, or their robustness against adversarial attacks. However, they have to compromise on the trade-off between the two aspects and none of them consider improving both sides in an effective and practical way. To fill this gap, we propose Semantic-Preserving Adversarial Code Embeddings (SPACE) to find the worst-case semantic-preserving attacks while forcing the model to predict the correct labels under these worst cases. Experiments and analysis demonstrate that SPACE can stay robust against state-of-the-art attacks while boosting the performance of PrLMs for code.
VarArray Meets t-SOT: Advancing the State of the Art of Streaming Distant Conversational Speech Recognition
Authors: Naoyuki Kanda, Jian Wu, Xiaofei Wang, Zhuo Chen, Jinyu Li, Takuya Yoshioka
Date: 2022-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Separation

This paper presents a novel streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) framework for multi-talker overlapping speech captured by a distant microphone array with an arbitrary geometry. Our framework, named t-SOT-VA, capitalizes on independently developed two recent technologies; array-geometry-agnostic continuous speech separation, or VarArray, and streaming multi-talker ASR based on token-level serialized output training (t-SOT). To combine the best of both technologies, we newly design a t-SOT-based ASR model that generates a serialized multi-talker transcription based on two separated speech signals from VarArray. We also propose a pre-training scheme for such an ASR model where we simulate VarArray's output signals based on monaural single-talker ASR training data. Conversation transcription experiments using the AMI meeting corpus show that the system based on the proposed framework significantly outperforms conventional ones. Our system achieves the state-of-the-art word error rates of 13.7% and 15.5% for the AMI development and evaluation sets, respectively, in the multiple-distant-microphone setting while retaining the streaming inference capability.
Stability of Syntactic Dialect Classification Over Space and Time
Authors: Jonathan Dunn, Sidney Wong
Date: 2022-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

This paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification produces robust dialect models, we do not know what influence both changing grammars and changing populations have on dialect models. This paper constructs a test set for 12 dialects of English that spans three years at monthly intervals with a fixed spatial distribution across 1,120 cities. Syntactic representations are formulated within the usage-based Construction Grammar paradigm (CxG). The decay rate of classification performance for each dialect over time allows us to identify regions undergoing syntactic change. And the distribution of classification accuracy within dialect regions allows us to identify the degree to which the grammar of a dialect is internally heterogeneous. The main contribution of this paper is to show that a rigorous evaluation of dialect classification models can be used to find both variation over space and change over time.
Tutorial Recommendation for Livestream Videos using Discourse-Level Consistency and Ontology-Based Filtering
Authors: Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Huu Nguyen
Date: 2022-09-11 00:00:00

Streaming videos is one of the methods for creators to share their creative works with their audience. In these videos, the streamer share how they achieve their final objective by using various tools in one or several programs for creative projects. To this end, the steps required to achieve the final goal can be discussed. As such, these videos could provide substantial educational content that can be used to learn how to employ the tools used by the streamer. However, one of the drawbacks is that the streamer might not provide enough details for every step. Therefore, for the learners, it might be difficult to catch up with all the steps. In order to alleviate this issue, one solution is to link the streaming videos with the relevant tutorial available for the tools used in the streaming video. More specifically, a system can analyze the content of the live streaming video and recommend the most relevant tutorials. Since the existing document recommendation models cannot handle this situation, in this work, we present a novel dataset and model for the task of tutorial recommendation for live-streamed videos. We conduct extensive analyses on the proposed dataset and models, revealing the challenging nature of this task.
Improving Keyphrase Extraction with Data Augmentation and Information Filtering
Authors: Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh, Nicole Meister, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Huu Nguyen
Date: 2022-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, document understanding, Keyphrase Extraction

Keyphrase extraction is one of the essential tasks for document understanding in NLP. While the majority of the prior works are dedicated to the formal setting, e.g., books, news or web-blogs, informal texts such as video transcripts are less explored. To address this limitation, in this work we present a novel corpus and method for keyphrase extraction from the transcripts of the videos streamed on the Behance platform. More specifically, in this work, a novel data augmentation is proposed to enrich the model with the background knowledge about the keyphrase extraction task from other domains. Extensive experiments on the proposed dataset dataset show the effectiveness of the introduced method.
Chain of Explanation: New Prompting Method to Generate Higher Quality Natural Language Explanation for Implicit Hate Speech
Authors: Fan Huang, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An
Date: 2022-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Informativeness, Text Generation

Recent studies have exploited advanced generative language models to generate Natural Language Explanations (NLE) for why a certain text could be hateful. We propose the Chain of Explanation (CoE) Prompting method, using the heuristic words and target group, to generate high-quality NLE for implicit hate speech. We improved the BLUE score from 44.0 to 62.3 for NLE generation by providing accurate target information. We then evaluate the quality of generated NLE using various automatic metrics and human annotations of informativeness and clarity scores.
Detecting Suicide Risk in Online Counseling Services: A Study in a Low-Resource Language
Authors: Amir Bialer, Daniel Izmaylov, Avi Segal, Oren Tsur, Yossi Levi-Belz, Kobi Gal
Date: 2022-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10

With the increased awareness of situations of mental crisis and their societal impact, online services providing emergency support are becoming commonplace in many countries. Computational models, trained on discussions between help-seekers and providers, can support suicide prevention by identifying at-risk individuals. However, the lack of domain-specific models, especially in low-resource languages, poses a significant challenge for the automatic detection of suicide risk. We propose a model that combines pre-trained language models (PLM) with a fixed set of manually crafted (and clinically approved) set of suicidal cues, followed by a two-stage fine-tuning process. Our model achieves 0.91 ROC-AUC and an F2-score of 0.55, significantly outperforming an array of strong baselines even early on in the conversation, which is critical for real-time detection in the field. Moreover, the model performs well across genders and age groups.
Probing for Understanding of English Verb Classes and Alternations in Large Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: David K. Yi, James V. Bruno, Jiayu Han, Peter Zukerman, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld
Date: 2022-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Sentence

We investigate the extent to which verb alternation classes, as described by Levin (1993), are encoded in the embeddings of Large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) such as BERT, RoBERTa, ELECTRA, and DeBERTa using selectively constructed diagnostic classifiers for word and sentence-level prediction tasks. We follow and expand upon the experiments of Kann et al. (2019), which aim to probe whether static embeddings encode frame-selectional properties of verbs. At both the word and sentence level, we find that contextual embeddings from PLMs not only outperform non-contextual embeddings, but achieve astonishingly high accuracies on tasks across most alternation classes. Additionally, we find evidence that the middle-to-upper layers of PLMs achieve better performance on average than the lower layers across all probing tasks.
A Survey in Automatic Irony Processing: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Multi-X Perspectives
Authors: Qingcheng Zeng, An-Ran Li
Date: 2022-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10

Irony is a ubiquitous figurative language in daily communication. Previously, many researchers have approached irony from linguistic, cognitive science, and computational aspects. Recently, some progress have been witnessed in automatic irony processing due to the rapid development in deep neural models in natural language processing (NLP). In this paper, we will provide a comprehensive overview of computational irony, insights from linguistic theory and cognitive science, as well as its interactions with downstream NLP tasks and newly proposed multi-X irony processing perspectives.
Adaptive Meta-learner via Gradient Similarity for Few-shot Text Classification
Authors: Tianyi Lei, Honghui Hu, Qiaoyang Luo, Dezhong Peng, Xu Wang
Date: 2022-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Few-Shot Text Classification, Meta-Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

Few-shot text classification aims to classify the text under the few-shot scenario. Most of the previous methods adopt optimization-based meta learning to obtain task distribution. However, due to the neglect of matching between the few amount of samples and complicated models, as well as the distinction between useful and useless task features, these methods suffer from the overfitting issue. To address this issue, we propose a novel Adaptive Meta-learner via Gradient Similarity (AMGS) method to improve the model generalization ability to a new task. Specifically, the proposed AMGS alleviates the overfitting based on two aspects: (i) acquiring the potential semantic representation of samples and improving model generalization through the self-supervised auxiliary task in the inner loop, (ii) leveraging the adaptive meta-learner via gradient similarity to add constraints on the gradient obtained by base-learner in the outer loop. Moreover, we make a systematic analysis of the influence of regularization on the entire framework. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed AMGS consistently improves few-shot text classification performance compared with the state-of-the-art optimization-based meta-learning approaches.
Subdiffusive semantic evolution in Indo-European languages
Authors: Bogdán Asztalos, Gergely Palla, Dániel Czégel
Date: 2022-09-10 00:00:00

How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major Indo-European languages: that semantic evolution is strongly subdiffusive. Using an automated pipeline of diachronic distributional semantic embedding that controls for underlying symmetries, we show that words follow stochastic trajectories in meaning space with an anomalous diffusion exponent $\alpha= 0.45\pm 0.05$ across languages, in contrast with diffusing particles that follow $\alpha=1$. Randomization methods indicate that preserving temporal correlations in semantic change directions is necessary to recover strongly subdiffusive behavior; however, correlations in change sizes play an important role too. We furthermore show that strong subdiffusion is a robust phenomenon under a wide variety of choices in data analysis and interpretation, such as the choice of fitting an ensemble average of displacements or averaging best-fit exponents of individual word trajectories.
Adversarial Learning-based Stance Classifier for COVID-19-related Health Policies
Authors: Feng Xie, Zhong Zhang, Xuechen Zhao, Haiyang Wang, Jiaying Zou, Lei Tian, Bin Zhou, Yusong Tan
Date: 2022-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Stance Detection

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused immeasurable losses for people worldwide. To contain the spread of the virus and further alleviate the crisis, various health policies (e.g., stay-at-home orders) have been issued which spark heated discussions as users turn to share their attitudes on social media. In this paper, we consider a more realistic scenario on stance detection (i.e., cross-target and zero-shot settings) for the pandemic and propose an adversarial learning-based stance classifier to automatically identify the public's attitudes toward COVID-19-related health policies. Specifically, we adopt adversarial learning that allows the model to train on a large amount of labeled data and capture transferable knowledge from source topics, so as to enable generalize to the emerging health policies with sparse labeled data. To further enhance the model's deeper understanding, we incorporate policy descriptions as external knowledge into the model. Meanwhile, a GeoEncoder is designed which encourages the model to capture unobserved background factors specified by each region and then represent them as non-text information. We evaluate the performance of a broad range of baselines on the stance detection task for COVID-19-related health policies, and experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both cross-target and zero-shot settings.
Harnessing Abstractive Summarization for Fact-Checked Claim Detection
Authors: Varad Bhatnagar, Diptesh Kanojia, Kameswari Chebrolu
Date: 2022-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Fact Checking, Misinformation, Retrieval, Text Summarization

Social media platforms have become new battlegrounds for anti-social elements, with misinformation being the weapon of choice. Fact-checking organizations try to debunk as many claims as possible while staying true to their journalistic processes but cannot cope with its rapid dissemination. We believe that the solution lies in partial automation of the fact-checking life cycle, saving human time for tasks which require high cognition. We propose a new workflow for efficiently detecting previously fact-checked claims that uses abstractive summarization to generate crisp queries. These queries can then be executed on a general-purpose retrieval system associated with a collection of previously fact-checked claims. We curate an abstractive text summarization dataset comprising noisy claims from Twitter and their gold summaries. It is shown that retrieval performance improves 2x by using popular out-of-the-box summarization models and 3x by fine-tuning them on the accompanying dataset compared to verbatim querying. Our approach achieves Recall@5 and MRR of 35% and 0.3, compared to baseline values of 10% and 0.1, respectively. Our dataset, code, and models are available publicly: https://github.com/varadhbhatnagar/FC-Claim-Det/
An Analysis of the Differences Among Regional Varieties of Chinese in Malay Archipelago
Authors: Nankai Lin, Sihui Fu, Hongyan Wu, Shengyi Jiang
Date: 2022-09-10 00:00:00

Chinese features prominently in the Chinese communities located in the nations of Malay Archipelago. In these countries, Chinese has undergone the process of adjustment to the local languages and cultures, which leads to the occurrence of a Chinese variant in each country. In this paper, we conducted a quantitative analysis on Chinese news texts collected from five Malay Archipelago nations, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Brunei, trying to figure out their differences with the texts written in modern standard Chinese from a lexical and syntactic perspective. The statistical results show that the Chinese variants used in these five nations are quite different, diverging from their modern Chinese mainland counterpart. Meanwhile, we managed to extract and classify several featured Chinese words used in each nation. All these discrepancies reflect how Chinese evolves overseas, and demonstrate the profound impact rom local societies and cultures on the development of Chinese.
OPAL: Ontology-Aware Pretrained Language Model for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue
Authors: Zhi Chen, Yuncong Liu, Lu Chen, Su Zhu, Mengyue Wu, Kai Yu
Date: 2022-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

This paper presents an ontology-aware pretrained language model (OPAL) for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD). Unlike chit-chat dialogue models, task-oriented dialogue models fulfill at least two task-specific modules: dialogue state tracker (DST) and response generator (RG). The dialogue state consists of the domain-slot-value triples, which are regarded as the user's constraints to search the domain-related databases. The large-scale task-oriented dialogue data with the annotated structured dialogue state usually are inaccessible. It prevents the development of the pretrained language model for the task-oriented dialogue. We propose a simple yet effective pretraining method to alleviate this problem, which consists of two pretraining phases. The first phase is to pretrain on large-scale contextual text data, where the structured information of the text is extracted by the information extracting tool. To bridge the gap between the pretraining method and downstream tasks, we design two pretraining tasks: ontology-like triple recovery and next-text generation, which simulates the DST and RG, respectively. The second phase is to fine-tune the pretrained model on the TOD data. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves an exciting boost and get competitive performance even without any TOD data on CamRest676 and MultiWOZ benchmarks.
Yes, DLGM! A novel hierarchical model for hazard classification
Authors: Zhenhua Wang, Ming Ren, Dong Gao, Bin Wang
Date: 2022-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Hazards can be exposed by HAZOP as text information, and studying their classification is of great significance to the development of industrial informatics, which is conducive to safety early warning, decision support, policy evaluation, etc. However, there is no research on this important field at present. In this paper, we propose a novel model termed DLGM via deep learning for hazard classification. Specifically, first, we leverage BERT to vectorize the hazard and treat it as a type of time series (HTS). Secondly, we build a grey model FSGM(1, 1) to model it, and get the grey guidance in the sense of the structural parameters. Finally, we design a hierarchical-feature fusion neural network (HFFNN) to investigate the HTS with grey guidance (HTSGG) from three themes, where, HFFNN is a hierarchical structure with four types of modules: two feature encoders, a gating mechanism, and a deepening mechanism. We take 18 industrial processes as application cases and launch a series of experiments. The experimental results prove that DLGM has promising aptitudes for hazard classification and that FSGM(1, 1) and HFFNN are effective. We hope our research can contribute added value and support to the daily practice in industrial safety.
Text Simplification of College Admissions Instructions: A Professionally Simplified and Verified Corpus
Authors: Zachary W. Taylor, Maximus H. Chu, Junyi Jessy Li
Date: 2022-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Sentence, Text Simplification

Access to higher education is critical for minority populations and emergent bilingual students. However, the language used by higher education institutions to communicate with prospective students is often too complex; concretely, many institutions in the US publish admissions application instructions far above the average reading level of a typical high school graduate, often near the 13th or 14th grade level. This leads to an unnecessary barrier between students and access to higher education. This work aims to tackle this challenge via text simplification. We present PSAT (Professionally Simplified Admissions Texts), a dataset with 112 admissions instructions randomly selected from higher education institutions across the US. These texts are then professionally simplified, and verified and accepted by subject-matter experts who are full-time employees in admissions offices at various institutions. Additionally, PSAT comes with manual alignments of 1,883 original-simplified sentence pairs. The result is a first-of-its-kind corpus for the evaluation and fine-tuning of text simplification systems in a high-stakes genre distinct from existing simplification resources.
Convergence of Batch Updating Methods with Approximate Gradients and/or Noisy Measurements: Theory and Computational Results
Authors: Tadipatri Uday Kiran Reddy, M. Vidyasagar
Date: 2022-09-12 00:00:00

In this paper, we present a unified and general framework for analyzing the batch updating approach to nonlinear, high-dimensional optimization. The framework encompasses all the currently used batch updating approaches, and is applicable to nonconvex as well as convex functions. Moreover, the framework permits the use of noise-corrupted gradients, as well as first-order approximations to the gradient (sometimes referred to as "gradient-free" approaches). By viewing the analysis of the iterations as a problem in the convergence of stochastic processes, we are able to establish a very general theorem, which includes most known convergence results for zeroth-order and first-order methods. The analysis of "second-order" or momentum-based methods is not a part of this paper, and will be studied elsewhere. However, numerical experiments indicate that momentum-based methods can fail if the true gradient is replaced by its first-order approximation. This requires further theoretical analysis.