ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Segmentation of the Speech Flow for the Evaluation of Spontaneous Productions in Pathologies Affecting the Language Capacity. 4 Case Studies of Schizophrenia (2022)

This paper aims to present a multi-level analysis of spoken language, which is carried out through Praat software for the analysis of speech in its prosodic aspects. The main object of analysis is the pathological speech of schizophrenic patients with a focus on pausing and its information structure. Spoken data (audio recordings in clinical settings; 4 case studies from CIPPS corpus) has been processed to create an implementable layer grid. The grid is an incremental annotation with layers dedicated to silent/sounding detection; orthographic transcription with the annotation of different vocal phenomena; Utterance segmentation; Information Units segmentation. The theoretical framework we are dealing with is the Language into Act Theory and its pragmatic and empirical studies on spontaneous spoken language. The core of the analysis is the study of pauses (signaled in the silent/sounding tier) starting from their automatic detection, then manually validated, and their classification based on duration and position inter/intra Turn and Utterance. In this respect, an interesting point arises: beyond the expected result of longer pauses in pathological schizophrenic than non-pathological, aside from the type of pause, analysis shows that pauses after Utterances are specific to pathological speech when {\ensuremath{>}}500 ms.
Exploring the GLIDE model for Human Action Effect Prediction (2022)

We address the following action-effect prediction task. Given an image depicting an initial state of the world and an action expressed in text, predict an image depicting the state of the world following the action. The prediction should have the same scene context as the input image. We explore the use of the recently proposed GLIDE model for performing this task. GLIDE is a generative neural network that can synthesize (inpaint) masked areas of an image, conditioned on a short piece of text. Our idea is to mask-out a region of the input image where the effect of the action is expected to occur. GLIDE is then used to inpaint the masked region conditioned on the required action. In this way, the resulting image has the same background context as the input image, updated to show the effect of the action. We give qualitative results from experiments using the EPIC dataset of ego-centric videos labelled with actions.
Do Multimodal Emotion Recognition Models Tackle Ambiguity? (2022)

Most databases used for emotion recognition assign a single emotion to data samples. This does not match with the complex nature of emotions: we can feel a wide range of emotions throughout our lives with varying degrees of intensity. We may even experience multiple emotions at once. Furthermore, each person physically expresses emotions differently, which makes emotion recognition even more challenging: we call this emotional ambiguity. This paper investigates the problem as a review of ambiguity in multimodal emotion recognition models. To lay the groundwork, the main representations of emotions along with solutions for incorporating ambiguity are described, followed by a brief overview of ambiguity representation in multimodal databases. Thereafter, only models trained on a database that incorporates ambiguity have been studied in this paper. We conclude that although databases provide annotations with ambiguity, most of these models do not fully exploit them, showing that there is still room for improvement in multimodal emotion recognition systems.
Development of a MultiModal Annotation Framework and Dataset for Deep Video Understanding (2022)

In this paper we introduce our approach and methods for collecting and annotating a new dataset for deep video understanding. The proposed dataset is composed of 3 seasons (15 episodes) of the BBC Land Girls TV Series in addition to 14 Creative Common movies with total duration of 28.5 hr. The main contribution of this paper is a novel annotation framework on the movie and scene levels to support an automatic query generation process that can capture the high-level movie features (e.g. how characters and locations are related to each other) as well as fine grained scene-level features (e.g. character interactions, natural language descriptions, and sentiments). Movie-level annotations include constructing a global static knowledge graph (KG) to capture major relationships, while the scene-level annotations include constructing a sequence of knowledge graphs (KGs) to capture fine-grained features. The annotation framework supports generating multiple query types. The objective of the framework is to provide a guide to annotating long duration videos to support tasks and challenges in the video and multimedia understanding domains. These tasks and challenges can support testing automatic systems on their ability to learn and comprehend a movie or long video in terms of actors, entities, events, interactions and their relationship to each other.
Cognitive States and Types of Nods (2022)

In this paper we will study how different types of nods are related to the cognitive states of the listener. The distinction is made between nods with movement starting upwards (up-nods) and nods with movement starting downwards (down-nods) as well as between single or repetitive nods. The data is from Japanese multiparty conversations, and the results accord with the previous findings indicating that up-nods are related to the change in the listener`s cognitive state after hearing the partner`s contribution, while down-nods convey the meaning that the listener`s cognitive state is not changed.
Examining the Effects of Language-and-Vision Data Augmentation for Generation of Descriptions of Human Faces (2022)

We investigate how different augmentation techniques on both textual and visual representations affect the performance of the face description generation model. Specifically, we provide the model with either original images, sketches of faces, facial composites or distorted images. In addition, on the language side, we experiment with different methods to augment the original dataset with paraphrased captions, which are semantically equivalent to the original ones, but differ in terms of their form. We also examine if augmenting the dataset with descriptions from a different domain (e.g., image captions of real-world images) has an effect on the performance of the models. We train models on different combinations of visual and linguistic features and perform both (i) automatic evaluation of generated captions and (ii) examination of how useful different visual features are for the task of facial feature classification. Our results show that although original images encode the best possible representation for the task, the model trained on sketches can still perform relatively well. We also observe that augmenting the dataset with descriptions from a different domain can boost performance of the model. We conclude that face description generation systems are more susceptible to language rather than vision data augmentation. Overall, we demonstrate that face caption generation models display a strong imbalance in the utilisation of language and vision modalities, indicating a lack of proper information fusion. We also describe ethical implications of our study and argue that future work on human face description generation should create better, more representative datasets.
Face2Text revisited: Improved data set and baseline results (2022)

Current image description generation models do not transfer well to the task of describing human faces. To encourage the development of more human-focused descriptions, we developed a new data set of facial descriptions based on the CelebA image data set. We describe the properties of this data set, and present results from a face description generator trained on it, which explores the feasibility of using transfer learning from VGGFace/ResNet CNNs. Comparisons are drawn through both automated metrics and human evaluation by 76 English-speaking participants. The descriptions generated by the VGGFace-LSTM + Attention model are closest to the ground truth according to human evaluation whilst the ResNet-LSTM + Attention model obtained the highest CIDEr and CIDEr-D results (1.252 and 0.686 respectively). Together, the new data set and these experimental results provide data and baselines for future work in this area.
Differential Privacy in Natural Language Processing: The Story So Far (2022)

As the tide of Big Data continues to influence the landscape of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the utilization of modern NLP methods has grounded itself in this data, in order to tackle a variety of text-based tasks. These methods without a doubt can include private or otherwise personally identifiable information. As such, the question of privacy in NLP has gained fervor in recent years, coinciding with the development of new Privacy- Enhancing Technologies (PETs). Among these PETs, Differential Privacy boasts several desirable qualities in the conversation surrounding data privacy. Naturally, the question becomes whether Differential Privacy is applicable in the largely unstructured realm of NLP. This topic has sparked novel research, which is unified in one basic goal how can one adapt Differential Privacy to NLP methods? This paper aims to summarize the vulnerabilities addressed by Differential Privacy, the current thinking, and above all, the crucial next steps that must be considered.
The Impact of Differential Privacy on Group Disparity Mitigation (2022)

The performance cost of differential privacy has, for some applications, been shown to be higher for minority groups fairness, conversely, has been shown to disproportionally compromise the privacy of members of such groups. Most work in this area has been restricted to computer vision and risk assessment. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of differential privacy on fairness across four tasks, focusing on how attempts to mitigate privacy violations and between-group performance differences interact Does privacy inhibit attempts to ensure fairness? To this end, we train epsilon, delta-differentially private models with empirical risk minimization and group distributionally robust training objectives. Consistent with previous findings, we find that differential privacy increases between-group performance differences in the baseline setting but more interestingly, differential privacy reduces between-group performance differences in the robust setting. We explain this by reinterpreting differential privacy as regularization.
Privacy Leakage in Text Classification A Data Extraction Approach (2022)

Recent work has demonstrated the successful extraction of training data from generative language models. However, it is not evident whether such extraction is feasible in text classification models since the training objective is to predict the class label as opposed to next-word prediction. This poses an interesting challenge and raises an important question regarding the privacy of training data in text classification settings. Therefore, we study the potential privacy leakage in the text classification domain by investigating the problem of unintended memorization of training data that is not pertinent to the learning task. We propose an algorithm to extract missing tokens of a partial text by exploiting the likelihood of the class label provided by the model. We test the effectiveness of our algorithm by inserting canaries into the training set and attempting to extract tokens in these canaries post-training. In our experiments, we demonstrate that successful extraction is possible to some extent. This can also be used as an auditing strategy to assess any potential unauthorized use of personal data without consent.
Training Text-to-Text Transformers with Privacy Guarantees (2022)

Recent advances in NLP often stem from large transformer-based pre-trained models, which rapidly grow in size and use more and more training data. Such models are often released to the public so that end users can fine-tune them on a task dataset. While it is common to treat pre-training data as public, it may still contain personally identifiable information (PII), such as names, phone numbers, and copyrighted material. Recent findings show that the capacity of these models allows them to memorize parts of the training data, and suggest differentially private (DP) training as a potential mitigation. While there is recent work on DP fine-tuning of NLP models, the effects of DP pre-training are less well understood it is not clear how downstream performance is affected by DP pre-training, and whether DP pre-training mitigates some of the memorization concerns. We focus on T5 and show that by using recent advances in JAX and XLA we can train models with DP that do not suffer a large drop in pre-training utility, nor in training speed, and can still be fine-tuned to high accuracy on downstream tasks (e.g. GLUE). Moreover, we show that T5s span corruption is a good defense against data memorization.
NewYeS: A Corpus of New Year`s Speeches with a Comparative Analysis (2022)

This paper introduces the NewYeS corpus, which contains the Christmas messages and New Year`s speeches held at the end of the year by the heads of state of different European countries (namely Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom). The corpus was collected via web scraping of the speech transcripts available online. A comparative analysis was conducted to examine some of the cultural differences showing through the texts, namely a frequency distribution analysis of the term {\textquotedblleft}God{\textquotedblright} and the identification of the three most frequent content words per year, with a focus on years in which significant historical events happened. An analysis of positive and negative emotion scores, examined along with the frequency of religious references, was carried out for those countries whose languages are supported by LIWC, a tool for sentiment analysis. The corpus is available for further analyses, both comparative (across countries) and diachronic (over the years).
Correlating Political Party Names in Tweets, Newspapers and Election Results (2022)

Twitter has been used as a textual resource to attempt to predict the outcome of elections for over a decade. A body of literature suggests that this is not consistently possible. In this paper we test the hypothesis that mentions of political parties in tweets are better correlated with the appearance of party names in newspapers than to the intention of the tweeter to vote for that party. Five Dutch national elections are used in this study. We find only a small positive, negligible difference in Pearson`s correlation coefficient as well as in the absolute error of the relation between tweets and news, and between tweets and elections. However, we find a larger correlation and a smaller absolute error between party mentions in newspapers and the outcome of the elections in four of the five elections. This suggests that newspapers are a better starting point for predicting the election outcome than tweets.
Debating Europe: A Multilingual Multi-Target Stance Classification Dataset of Online Debates (2022)

We present a new dataset of online debates in English, annotated with stance. The dataset was scraped from the {\textquotedblleft}\textit{Debating Europe}{\textquotedblright} platform, where users exchange opinions over different subjects related to the European Union. The dataset is composed of 2600 comments pertaining to 18 debates related to the {\textquotedblleft}\textit{European Green Deal}{\textquotedblright}, in a conversational setting. After presenting the dataset and the annotated sub-part, we pre-train a model for a multilingual stance classification over the X-stance dataset before fine-tuning it over our dataset, and vice-versa. The fine-tuned models are shown to improve stance classification performance on each of the datasets, even though they have different languages, topics and targets. Subsequently, we propose to enhance the performances over {\textquotedblleft}\textit{Debating Europe}{\textquotedblright} with an interaction-aware model, taking advantage of the online debate structure of the platform. We also propose a semi-supervised self-training method to take advantage of the imbalanced and unlabeled data from the whole website, leading to a final improvement of accuracy by 3.4{\%} over a Vanilla XLM-R model.
An Unsupervised Approach to Discover Media Frames (2022)

Media framing refers to highlighting certain aspect of an issue in the news to promote a particular interpretation to the audience. Supervised learning has often been used to recognize frames in news articles, requiring a known pool of frames for a particular issue, which must be identified by communication researchers through thorough manual content analysis. In this work, we devise an unsupervised learning approach to discover the frames in news articles automatically. Given a set of news articles for a given issue, e.g., gun violence, our method first extracts frame elements from these articles using related Wikipedia articles and the Wikipedia category system. It then uses a community detection approach to identify frames from these frame elements. We discuss the effectiveness of our approach by comparing the frames it generates in an unsupervised manner to the domain-expert-derived frames for the issue of gun violence, for which a supervised learning model for frame recognition exists.
Electoral Agitation Dataset: The Use Case of the Polish Election (2022)

The popularity of social media makes politicians use it for political advertisement. Therefore, social media is full of electoral agitation (electioneering), especially during the election campaigns. The election administration cannot track the spread and quantity of messages that count as agitation under the election code. It addresses a crucial problem, while also uncovering a niche that has not been effectively targeted so far. Hence, we present the first publicly open data set for detecting electoral agitation in the Polish language. It contains 6,112 human-annotated tweets tagged with four legally conditioned categories. We achieved a 0.66 inter-annotator agreement (Cohen`s kappa score). An additional annotator resolved the mismatches between the first two improving the consistency and complexity of the annotation process. The newly created data set was used to fine-tune a Polish Language Model called HerBERT (achieving a 68{\%} F1 score). We also present a number of potential use cases for such data sets and models, enriching the paper with an analysis of the Polish 2020 Presidential Election on Twitter.
Enhancing Geocoding of Adjectival Toponyms With Heuristics (2022)

Unstructured text documents such as news and blogs often present references to places. Those references, called toponyms, can be used in various applications like disaster warning and touristic planning. However, obtaining the correct coordinates for toponyms, called geocoding, is not easy since it`s common for places to have the same name as other locations. The process becomes even more challenging when toponyms appear in adjectival form, as they are different from the place`s actual name. This paper addresses the geocoding task and aims to improve, through a heuristic approach, the process for adjectival toponyms. So first, a baseline geocoder is defined through experimenting with a set of heuristics. After that, the baseline is enhanced by adding a normalization step to map adjectival toponyms to their noun form at the beginning of the geocoding process. The results show improved performance for the enhanced geocoder compared to the baseline and other geocoders.
Cause and Effect in Governmental Reports: Two Data Sets for Causality Detection in Swedish (2022)

Causality detection is the task of extracting information about causal relations from text. It is an important task for different types of document analysis, including political impact assessment. We present two new data sets for causality detection in Swedish. The first data set is annotated with binary relevance judgments, indicating whether a sentence contains causality information or not. In the second data set, sentence pairs are ranked for relevance with respect to a causality query, containing a specific hypothesized cause and/or effect. Both data sets are carefully curated and mainly intended for use as test data. We describe the data sets and their annotation, including detailed annotation guidelines. In addition, we present pilot experiments on cross-lingual zero-shot and few-shot causality detection, using training data from English and German.
Does Twitter know your political views? POLiTweets dataset and semi-automatic method for political leaning discovery (2022)

Every day, the world is flooded by millions of messages and statements posted on Twitter or Facebook. Social media platforms try to protect users' personal data, but there still is a real risk of misuse, including elections manipulation. Did you know, that only 10 posts addressing important or controversial topics for society are enough to predict one`s political affiliation with a 0.85 F1-score? To examine this phenomenon, we created a novel universal method of semi-automated political leaning discovery. It relies on a heuristical data annotation procedure, which was evaluated to achieve 0.95 agreement with human annotators (counted as an accuracy metric). We also present POLiTweets - the first publicly open Polish dataset for political affiliation discovery in a multi-party setup, consisting of over 147k tweets from almost 10k Polish-writing users annotated heuristically and almost 40k tweets from 166 users annotated manually as a test set. We used our data to study the aspects of domain shift in the context of topics and the type of content writers - ordinary citizens vs. professional politicians.
Political Communities on Twitter: Case Study of the 2022 French Presidential Election (2022)

With the significant increase in users on social media platforms, a new means of political campaigning has appeared. Twitter and Facebook are now notable campaigning tools during elections. Indeed, the candidates and their parties now take to the internet to interact and spread their ideas. In this paper, we aim to identify political communities formed on Twitter during the 2022 French presidential election and analyze each respective community. We create a large-scale Twitter dataset containing 1.2 million users and 62.6 million tweets that mention keywords relevant to the election. We perform community detection on a retweet graph of users and propose an in-depth analysis of the stance of each community. Finally, we attempt to detect offensive tweets and automatic bots, comparing across communities in order to gain insight into each candidate`s supporter demographics and online campaign strategy.
What Does the Indian Parliament Discuss? An Exploratory Analysis of the Question Hour in the Lok Sabha (2022)

The TCPD-IPD dataset is a collection of questions and answers discussed in the Lower House of the Parliament of India during the Question Hour between 1999 and 2019. Although it is difficult to analyze such a huge collection manually, modern text analysis tools can provide a powerful means to navigate it. In this paper, we perform an exploratory analysis of the dataset. In particular, we present insightful corpus-level statistics and perform a more detailed analysis of three subsets of the dataset. In the latter analysis, the focus is on understanding the temporal evolution of topics using a dynamic topic model. We observe that the parliamentary conversation indeed mirrors the political and socio-economic tensions of each period.