pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Ethical Considerations for Low-resourced Machine Translation
Authors: Levon Haroutunian
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

This paper considers some ethical implications of machine translation for low-resourced languages. I use Armenian as a case study and investigate specific needs for and concerns arising from the creation and deployment of improved machine translation between English and Armenian. To do this, I conduct stakeholder interviews and construct Value Scenarios (Nathan et al., 2007) from the themes that emerge. These scenarios illustrate some of the potential harms that low-resourced language communities may face due to the deployment of improved machine translation systems. Based on these scenarios, I recommend 1) collaborating with stakeholders in order to create more useful and reliable machine translation tools, and 2) determining which other forms of language technology should be developed alongside efforts to improve machine translation in order to mitigate harms rendered to vulnerable language communities. Both of these goals require treating low-resourced machine translation as a language-specific, rather than language-agnostic, task.
Integrating Question Rewrites in Conversational Question Answering: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Etsuko Ishii, Bryan Wilie, Yan Xu, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Pascale Fung
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Question Answering, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Resolving dependencies among dialogue history is one of the main obstacles in the research on conversational question answering (QA). The conversational question rewrites (QR) task has been shown to be effective to solve this problem by reformulating questions in a self-contained form. However, QR datasets are limited and existing methods tend to depend on the assumption of the existence of corresponding QR datasets for every CQA dataset.This paper proposes a reinforcement learning approach that integrates QR and CQA tasks without corresponding labeled QR datasets. We train a QR model based on the reward signal obtained from the CQA, and the experimental results show that our approach can bring improvement over the pipeline approaches.
GNNer: Reducing Overlapping in Span-based NER Using Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Urchade Zaratiana, Nadi Tomeh, Pierre Holat, Thierry Charnois
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

There are two main paradigms for Named Entity Recognition (NER): sequence labelling and span classification. Sequence labelling aims to assign a label to each word in an input text using, for example, BIO (Begin, Inside and Outside) tagging, while span classification involves enumerating all possible spans in a text and classifying them into their labels. In contrast to sequence labelling, unconstrained span-based methods tend to assign entity labels to overlapping spans, which is generally undesirable, especially for NER tasks without nested entities. Accordingly, we propose GNNer, a framework that uses Graph Neural Networks to enrich the span representation to reduce the number of overlapping spans during prediction. Our approach reduces the number of overlapping spans compared to strong baseline while maintaining competitive metric performance. Code is available at https://github.com/urchade/GNNer.
Combine to Describe: Evaluating Compositional Generalization in Image Captioning
Authors: George Pantazopoulos, Alessandro Suglia, Arash Eshghi
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Image Captioning

Compositionality – the ability to combine simpler concepts to understand & generate arbitrarily more complex conceptual structures – has long been thought to be the cornerstone of human language capacity. With the recent, notable success of neural models in various NLP tasks, attention has now naturally turned to the compositional capacity of these models. In this paper, we study the compositional generalization properties of image captioning models. We perform a set experiments under controlled conditions using model and data ablations, each designed to benchmark a particular facet of compositional generalization: systematicity is the ability of a model to create novel combinations of concepts out of those observed during training, productivity is here operationalised as the capacity of a model to extend its predictions beyond the length distribution it has observed during training, and substitutivity is concerned with the robustness of the model against synonym substitutions. While previous work has focused primarily on systematicity, here we provide a more in-depth analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of state of the art captioning models. Our findings demonstrate that the models we study here do not compositionally generalize in terms of systematicity and productivity, however, they are robust to some degree to synonym substitutions
AMR Alignment for Morphologically-rich and Pro-drop Languages
Authors: K. Elif Oral, Gülşen Eryiğit
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Abstract Meaning Representation, AMR Parsing, Sentence

Alignment between concepts in an abstract meaning representation (AMR) graph and the words within a sentence is one of the important stages of AMR parsing. Although there exist high performing AMR aligners for English, unfortunately, these are not well suited for many languages where many concepts appear from morpho-semantic elements.For the first time in the literature, this paper presents an AMR aligner tailored for morphologically-rich and pro-drop languages by experimenting on the Turkish language being a prominent example of this language group.Our aligner focuses on the meaning considering the rich Turkish morphology and aligns AMR concepts that emerge from morphemes using a tree traversal approach without additional resources or rules. We evaluate our aligner over a manually annotated gold data set in terms of precision, recall and F1 score. Our aligner outperforms the Turkish adaptations of the previously proposed aligners for English and Portuguese by an F1 score of 0.87 and provides a relative error reduction of up to 76%.
Sketching a Linguistically-Driven Reasoning Dialog Model for Social Talk
Authors: Alex Lưu
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Chunking, Natural Language Understanding, Open-Domain Dialog, Part-Of-Speech Tagging

The capability of holding social talk (or casual conversation) and making sense of conversational content requires context-sensitive natural language understanding and reasoning, which cannot be handled efficiently by the current popular open-domain dialog systems and chatbots. Heavily relying on corpus-based machine learning techniques to encode and decode context-sensitive meanings, these systems focus on fitting a particular training dataset, but not tracking what is actually happening in a conversation, and therefore easily derail in a new context. This work sketches out a more linguistically-informed architecture to handle social talk in English, in which corpus-based methods form the backbone of the relatively context-insensitive components (e.g. part-of-speech tagging, approximation of lexical meaning and constituent chunking), while symbolic modeling is used for reasoning out the context-sensitive components, which do not have any consistent mapping to linguistic forms. All components are fitted into a Bayesian game-theoretic model to address the interactive and rational aspects of conversation.
Scoping natural language processing in Indonesian and Malay for education applications
Authors: Zara Maxwelll-Smith, Michelle Kohler, Hanna Suominen
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Reading Comprehension, Sentiment Analysis

Indonesian and Malay are underrepresented in the development of natural language processing (NLP) technologies and available resources are difficult to find. A clear picture of existing work can invigorate and inform how researchers conceptualise worthwhile projects. Using an education sector project to motivate the study, we conducted a wide-ranging overview of Indonesian and Malay human language technologies and corpus work. We charted 657 included studies according to Hirschberg and Manning’s 2015 description of NLP, concluding that the field was dominated by exploratory corpus work, machine reading of text gathered from the Internet, and sentiment analysis. In this paper, we identify most published authors and research hubs, and make a number of recommendations to encourage future collaboration and efficiency within NLP in Indonesian and Malay.
English-Malay Cross-Lingual Embedding Alignment using Bilingual Lexicon Augmentation
Authors: Ying Hao Lim, Jasy Suet Yan Liew
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings, Machine Translation, text-classification, Text Classification, Word Embeddings

As high-quality Malay language resources are still a scarcity, cross lingual word embeddings make it possible for richer English resources to be leveraged for downstream Malay text classification tasks. This paper focuses on creating an English-Malay cross-lingual word embeddings using embedding alignment by exploiting existing language resources. We augmented the training bilingual lexicons using machine translation with the goal to improve the alignment precision of our cross-lingual word embeddings. We investigated the quality of the current state-of-the-art English-Malay bilingual lexicon and worked on improving its quality using Google Translate. We also examined the effect of Malay word coverage on the quality of cross-lingual word embeddings. Experimental results with a precision up till 28.17% show that the alignment precision of the cross-lingual word embeddings would inevitably degrade after 1-NN but a better seed lexicon and cleaner nearest neighbours can reduce the number of word pairs required to achieve satisfactory performance. As the English and Malay monolingual embeddings are pre-trained on informal language corpora, our proposed English-Malay embeddings alignment approach is also able to map non-standard Malay translations in the English nearest neighbours.
Towards Detecting Political Bias in Hindi News Articles
Authors: Samyak Agrawal, Kshitij Gupta, Devansh Gautam, Radhika Mamidi
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Articles, Bias Detection, Transfer Learning

Political propaganda in recent times has been amplified by media news portals through biased reporting, creating untruthful narratives on serious issues causing misinformed public opinions with interests of siding and helping a particular political party. This issue proposes a challenging NLP task of detecting political bias in news articles.We propose a transformer-based transfer learning method to fine-tune the pre-trained network on our data for this bias detection. As the required dataset for this particular task was not available, we created our dataset comprising 1388 Hindi news articles and their headlines from various Hindi news media outlets. We marked them on whether they are biased towards, against, or neutral to BJP, a political party, and the current ruling party at the centre in India.
Restricted or Not: A General Training Framework for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Zuchao Li, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, Hai Zhao
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Restricted machine translation incorporates human prior knowledge into translation. It restricts the flexibility of the translation to satisfy the demands of translation in specific scenarios. Existing work typically imposes constraints on beam search decoding. Although this can satisfy the requirements overall, it usually requires a larger beam size and far longer decoding time than unrestricted translation, which limits the concurrent processing ability of the translation model in deployment, and thus its practicality. In this paper, we propose a general training framework that allows a model to simultaneously support both unrestricted and restricted translation by adopting an additional auxiliary training process without constraining the decoding process. This maintains the benefits of restricted translation but greatly reduces the extra time overhead of constrained decoding, thus improving its practicality. The effectiveness of our proposed training framework is demonstrated by experiments on both original (WAT21 En\leftrightarrowJa) and simulated (WMT14 En\rightarrowDe and En\rightarrowFr) restricted translation benchmarks.
TeluguNER: Leveraging Multi-Domain Named Entity Recognition with Deep Transformers
Authors: Suma Reddy Duggenpudi, Subba Reddy Oota, Mounika Marreddy, Radhika Mamidi
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, XLM-R

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a successful and well-researched problem in English due to the availability of resources. The transformer models, specifically the masked-language models (MLM), have shown remarkable performance in NER during recent times. With growing data in different online platforms, there is a need for NER in other languages too. NER remains to be underexplored in Indian languages due to the lack of resources and tools. Our contributions in this paper include (i) Two annotated NER datasets for the Telugu language in multiple domains: Newswire Dataset (ND) and Medical Dataset (MD), and we combined ND and MD to form Combined Dataset (CD) (ii) Comparison of the finetuned Telugu pretrained transformer models (BERT-Te, RoBERTa-Te, and ELECTRA-Te) with other baseline models (CRF, LSTM-CRF, and BiLSTM-CRF) (iii) Further investigation of the performance of Telugu pretrained transformer models against the multilingual models mBERT, XLM-R, and IndicBERT. We find that pretrained Telugu language models (BERT-Te and RoBERTa) outperform the existing pretrained multilingual and baseline models in NER. On a large dataset (CD) of 38,363 sentences, the BERT-Te achieves a high F1-score of 0.80 (entity-level) and 0.75 (token-level). Further, these pretrained Telugu models have shown state-of-the-art performance on various existing Telugu NER datasets. We open-source our dataset, pretrained models, and code.
Using Neural Machine Translation Methods for Sign Language Translation
Authors: Galina Angelova, Eleftherios Avramidis, Sebastian Möller
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Machine Translation, NMT, Sign Language Translation, Translation

We examine methods and techniques, proven to be helpful for the text-to-text translation of spoken languages in the context of gloss-to-text translation systems, where the glosses are the written representation of the signs. We present one of the first works that include experiments on both parallel corpora of the German Sign Language (PHOENIX14T and the Public DGS Corpus). We experiment with two NMT architectures with optimization of their hyperparameters, several tokenization methods and two data augmentation techniques (back-translation and paraphrasing). Through our investigation we achieve a substantial improvement of 5.0 and 2.2 BLEU scores for the models trained on the two corpora respectively. Our RNN models outperform our Transformer models, and the segmentation method we achieve best results with is BPE, whereas back-translation and paraphrasing lead to minor but not significant improvements.
Flexible Visual Grounding
Authors: Yongmin Kim, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Articles, Visual Grounding

Existing visual grounding datasets are artificially made, where every query regarding an entity must be able to be grounded to a corresponding image region, i.e., answerable. However, in real-world multimedia data such as news articles and social media, many entities in the text cannot be grounded to the image, i.e., unanswerable, due to the fact that the text is unnecessarily directly describing the accompanying image. A robust visual grounding model should be able to flexibly deal with both answerable and unanswerable visual grounding. To study this flexible visual grounding problem, we construct a pseudo dataset and a social media dataset including both answerable and unanswerable queries. In order to handle unanswerable visual grounding, we propose a novel method by adding a pseudo image region corresponding to a query that cannot be grounded. The model is then trained to ground to ground-truth regions for answerable queries and pseudo regions for unanswerable queries. In our experiments, we show that our model can flexibly process both answerable and unanswerable queries with high accuracy on our datasets.
A large-scale computational study of content preservation measures for text style transfer and paraphrase generation
Authors: Nikolay Babakov, David Dale, Varvara Logacheva, Alexander Panchenko
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Paraphrase Generation, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Style Transfer, Text Style Transfer

Text style transfer and paraphrasing of texts are actively growing areas of NLP, dozens of methods for solving these tasks have been recently introduced. In both tasks, the system is supposed to generate a text which should be semantically similar to the input text. Therefore, these tasks are dependent on methods of measuring textual semantic similarity. However, it is still unclear which measures are the best to automatically evaluate content preservation between original and generated text. According to our observations, many researchers still use BLEU-like measures, while there exist more advanced measures including neural-based that significantly outperform classic approaches. The current problem is the lack of a thorough evaluation of the available measures. We close this gap by conducting a large-scale computational study by comparing 57 measures based on different principles on 19 annotated datasets. We show that measures based on cross-encoder models outperform alternative approaches in almost all cases.We also introduce the Mutual Implication Score (MIS), a measure that uses the idea of paraphrasing as a bidirectional entailment and outperforms all other measures on the paraphrase detection task and performs on par with the best measures in the text style transfer task.
Explicit Object Relation Alignment for Vision and Language Navigation
Authors: Yue Zhang, Parisa Kordjamshidi
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Object, Relation, Spatial Reasoning, Vision and Language Navigation

In this paper, we investigate the problem of vision and language navigation. To solve this problem, grounding the landmarks and spatial relations in the textual instructions into visual modality is important. We propose a neural agent named Explicit Object Relation Alignment Agent (EXOR),to explicitly align the spatial information in both instruction and the visual environment, including landmarks and spatial relationships between the agent and landmarks.Empirically, our proposed method surpasses the baseline by a large margin on the R2R dataset. We provide a comprehensive analysis to show our model’s spatial reasoning ability and explainability.
Exploring Cross-lingual Text Detoxification with Large Multilingual Language Models.
Authors: Daniil Moskovskiy, Daryna Dementieva, Alexander Panchenko
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Style Transfer

Detoxification is a task of generating text in polite style while preserving meaning and fluency of the original toxic text. Existing detoxification methods are monolingual i.e. designed to work in one exact language. This work investigates multilingual and cross-lingual detoxification and the behavior of large multilingual models in this setting. Unlike previous works we aim to make large language models able to perform detoxification without direct fine-tuning in a given language. Experiments show that multilingual models are capable of performing multilingual style transfer. However, tested state-of-the-art models are not able to perform cross-lingual detoxification and direct fine-tuning on exact language is currently inevitable and motivating the need of further research in this direction.
Discourse on ASR Measurement: Introducing the ARPOCA Assessment Tool
Authors: Megan Merz, Olga Scrivner
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has evolved from a pipeline architecture with pronunciation dictionaries, phonetic features and language models to the end-to-end systems performing a direct translation from a raw waveform into a word sequence. With the increase in accuracy and the availability of pre-trained models, the ASR systems are now omnipresent in our daily applications. On the other hand, the models’ interpretability and their computational cost have become more challenging, particularly when dealing with less-common languages or identifying regional variations of speakers. This research proposal will follow a four-stage process: 1) Proving an overview of acoustic features and feature extraction algorithms; 2) Exploring current ASR models, tools, and performance assessment techniques; 3) Aligning features with interpretable phonetic transcripts; and 4) Designing a prototype ARPOCA to increase awareness of regional language variation and improve models feedback by developing a semi-automatic acoustic features extraction using PRAAT in conjunction with phonetic transcription.
Pretrained Knowledge Base Embeddings for improved Sentential Relation Extraction
Authors: Andrea Papaluca, Daniel Krefl, Hanna Suominen, Artem Lenskiy
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Relation, Relation Extraction

In this work we put forward to combine pretrained knowledge base graph embeddings with transformer based language models to improve performance on the sentential Relation Extraction task in natural language processing. Our proposed model is based on a simple variation of existing models to incorporate off-task pretrained graph embeddings with an on-task finetuned BERT encoder. We perform a detailed statistical evaluation of the model on standard datasets. We provide evidence that the added graph embeddings improve the performance, making such a simple approach competitive with the state-of-the-art models that perform explicit on-task training of the graph embeddings. Furthermore, we ob- serve for the underlying BERT model an interesting power-law scaling behavior between the variance of the F1 score obtained for a relation class and its support in terms of training examples.
Improving Cross-domain, Cross-lingual and Multi-modal Deception Detection
Authors: Subhadarshi Panda, Sarah Ita Levitan
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Classification, Deception Detection, Misinformation, Translation

With the increase of deception and misinformation especially in social media, it has become crucial to be able to develop machine learning methods to automatically identify deceptive language. In this proposal, we identify key challenges underlying deception detection in cross-domain, cross-lingual and multi-modal settings. To improve cross-domain deception classification, we propose to use inter-domain distance to identify a suitable source domain for a given target domain. We propose to study the efficacy of multilingual classification models vs translation for cross-lingual deception classification. Finally, we propose to better understand multi-modal deception detection and explore methods to weight and combine information from multiple modalities to improve multi-modal deception classification.