ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Development of an Automated Health Coach (2022)

Human health coaching has been established as an effective intervention for improving clients' health, but it is restricted in scale due to the availability of coaches and finances of the clients. We aim to build a scalable, automated system for physical activity coaching that is similarly grounded in behavior change theories. In this paper, we present our initial steps toward building a flexible system that is capable of carrying out a natural dialogue for goal setting as a health coach would while also offering additional support through just-in-time adaptive interventions. We outline our modular system design and approach to gathering and analyzing data to incrementally implement such a system.
Personalizing Weekly Diet Reports (2022)

In this paper we present the main components of a weekly diet report generator (DRG) in natural language. The idea is to produce a text that contains information on the adherence of the dishes eaten during a week to the Mediterranean diet. The system is based on a user model, a database of the dishes eaten during the week and on the automatic computation of the Mediterranean Diet Score. All these sources of information are exploited to produce a highly personalized text. The system has two main goals, related to two different kinds of users: on the one hand, when used by dietitians, the main goal is to highlight the most salient medical information of the patient diet and, on the other hand, when used by final users, the main goal is to educate them toward a Mediterranean style of eating.
The NIEUW Project: Developing Language Resources through Novel Incentives (2022)

This paper provides an overview and update on the Linguistic Data Consortium`s (LDC) NIEUW (Novel Incentives and Workflows) project supported by the National Science Foundation and part of LDC`s larger goal of improving the cost, variety, scale, and quality of language resources available for education, research, and technology development. NIEUW leverages the power of novel incentives to elicit linguistic data and annotations from a wide variety of contributors including citizen scientists, game players, and language students and professionals. In order to align appropriate incentives with the various contributors, LDC has created three distinct web portals to bring together researchers and other language professionals with participants best suited to their project needs. These portals include LanguageARC designed for citizen scientists, Machina Pro Linguistica designed for students and language professionals, and LingoBoingo designed for game players. The design, interface, and underlying tools for each web portal were developed to appeal to the different incentives and motivations of their respective target audiences.
Use of a Citizen Science Platform for the Creation of a Language Resource to Study Bias in Language Models for French: A Case Study (2022)

There is a growing interest in the evaluation of bias, fairness and social impact of Natural Language Processing models and tools. However, little resources are available for this task in languages other than English. Translation of resources originally developed for English is a promising research direction. However, there is also a need for complementing translated resources by newly sourced resources in the original languages and social contexts studied. In order to collect a language resource for the study of biases in Language Models for French, we decided to resort to citizen science. We created three tasks on the LanguageARC citizen science platform to assist with the translation of an existing resource from English into French as well as the collection of complementary resources in native French. We successfully collected data for all three tasks from a total of 102 volunteer participants. Participants from different parts of the world contributed and we noted that although calls sent to mailing lists had a positive impact on participation, some participants pointed barriers to contributions due to the collection platform.
Fearless Steps APOLLO: Advanced Naturalistic Corpora Development (2022)

In this study, we present the Fearless Steps APOLLO Community Resource, a collection of audio and corresponding meta-data diarized from the NASA Apollo Missions. Massive naturalistic speech data which is time-synchronized, without any human subject privacy constraints is very rare and difficult to organize, collect, and deploy. The Apollo Missions Audio is the largest collection of multi-speaker multi-channel data, where over 600 personnel are communicating over multiple missions to achieve strategic space exploration goals. A total of 12 manned missions over a six-year period produced extensive 30-track 1-inch analog tapes containing over 150,000 hours of audio. This presents the wider research community a unique opportunity to extract multi-modal knowledge in speech science, team cohesion and group dynamics, and historical archive preservation. We aim to make this entire resource and supporting speech technology meta-data creation publicly available as a Community Resource for the development of speech and behavioral science. Here we present the development of this community resource, our outreach efforts, and technological developments resulting from this data. We finally discuss the planned future directions for this community resource.
Creating Mexican Spanish Language Resources through the Social Service Program (2022)

This work presents the path toward the creation of eight Spoken Language Resources under the umbrella of the Mexican Social Service national program. This program asks undergraduate students to donate time and work for the benefit of their society as a requirement to receive their degree. The program has thousands of options for the students who enroll. We show how we created a program which has resulted in the creation of open language resources which now are freely available in different repositories. We estimate that this exercise is equivalent to a budget of more than half a million US dollars. However, since the program is based on retribution from the students to their communities there has not been a necessity of a financial budget.
Fictionary-Based Games for Language Resource Creation (2022)

In this paper, we present a novel approach to data collection for natural language processing (NLP), linguistic research and lexicographic work. Using the parlor game Fictionary as a framework, data can be crowd-sourced in a gamified manner, which carries the potential of faster, cheaper and better data when compared to traditional methods due to the engaging and competitive nature of the game. To improve data quality, the game includes a built-in review process where players review each other`s data and evaluate its quality. The paper proposes several games that can be used within this framework, and explains the value of the data generated by their use. These proposals include games that collect named entities along with their corresponding type tags, question-answer pairs, translation pairs and neologism, to name only a few. We are currently working on a digital platform that will host these games in Icelandic but wish to open the discussion around this topic and encourage other researchers to explore their own versions of the proposed games, all of which are language-independent.
Using Mixed Incentives to Document Xi`an Guanzhong (2022)

This paper describes our use of mixed incentives and the citizen science portal LanguageARC to prepare, collect and quality control a large corpus of object namings for the purpose of providing speech data to document the under-represented Guanzhong dialect of Chinese spoken in the Shaanxi province in the environs of Xi`an.
Crowdsourced Participants' Accuracy at Identifying the Social Class of Speakers from South East England (2022)

Five participants, each located in distinct locations (USA, Canada, South Africa, Scotland and (South East) England), identified the self-determined social class of a corpus of 227 speakers (born 1986{--}2001; from South East England) based on 10-second passage readings. This pilot study demonstrates the potential for using crowdsourcing to collect sociolinguistic data, specifically using LanguageARC, especially when geographic spread of participants is desirable but not easily possible using traditional fieldwork methods. Results show that, firstly, accuracy at identifying social class is relatively low when compared to other factors, including when the same speech stimuli were used (e.g., ethnicity: Cole 2020). Secondly, participants identified speakers' social class significantly better than chance for a three-class distinction (working, middle, upper) but not for a six-class distinction. Thirdly, despite some differences in performance, the participant located in South East England did not perform significantly better than other participants, suggesting that the participant`s presumed greater familiarity with sociolinguistic variation in the region may not have been advantageous. Finally, there is a distinction to be made between participants' ability to pinpoint a speaker`s exact social class membership and their ability to identify the speaker`s relative class position. This paper discusses the role of social identification tasks in illuminating how speech is categorised and interpreted.
About the Applicability of Combining Implicit Crowdsourcing and Language Learning for the Collection of NLP Datasets (2022)

In this article, we present a recent trend of approaches, hereafter referred to as Collect4NLP, and discuss its applicability. Collect4NLP-based approaches collect inputs from language learners through learning exercises and aggregate the collected data to derive linguistic knowledge of expert quality. The primary purpose of these approaches is to improve NLP resources, however sincere concern with the needs of learners is crucial for making Collect4NLP work. We discuss the applicability of Collect4NLP approaches in relation to two perspectives. On the one hand, we compare Collect4NLP approaches to the two crowdsourcing trends currently most prevalent in NLP, namely Crowdsourcing Platforms (CPs) and Games-With-A-Purpose (GWAPs), and identify strengths and weaknesses of each trend. By doing so we aim to highlight particularities of each trend and to identify in which kind of settings one trend should be favored over the other two. On the other hand, we analyze the applicability of Collect4NLP approaches to the production of different types of NLP resources. We first list the types of NLP resources most used within its community and second propose a set of blueprints for mapping these resources to well-established language learning exercises as found in standard language learning textbooks.
The Influence of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation on the Creation of Language Resources in a Citizen Linguistics Project about Lexicography (2022)

In the field of citizen linguistics, various initiatives are aimed at the creation of language resources by members of the public. To recruit and retain these participants different incentives informed by different motivations, extrinsic and intrinsic ones, play a role at different project stages. Illustrated by a project in the field of lexicography which draws on the extrinsic and/or intrinsic motivation of participants, the complexity of providing the {\textquoteleft}right' incentives is addressed. This complexity does not only surface when considering cultural differences and the heterogeneity of the motivations participants might have but also through the changing motivations over time. Here, identifying target groups may help to guide recruitment, retention and dissemination activities. In addition, continuous adaptations may be required during the course of the project to strike a balance between necessary and feasible incentives.
Rice Cultivation in India -- Challenges and Environmental Effects (2022)

Rice is one of the most cultivated grain crops in India as well as in Asian countries. It is a staple food in India. India is the second largest producer of Rice next to China. This crop is grown mainly in tropical and rain fed areas. In this paper, major types of Rice crops cultivated in India, the major challenges of cultivating Rice in India and its adverse effect in the environment are discussed. We have also discussed how the Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Mobile Applications and other technologies and research works can help to overcome these issues.
A custom CNN model for detection of rice disease under complex environment (2022)

The work in this paper designs an image-based rice disease detection framework that takes rice plant image as input and identifies the presence of BrownSpot disease in the image fed into the system. A CNN-based disease detection scheme performs the binary classification task on our custom dataset containing 2223 images of healthy and unhealthy classes under complex environments. Experimental results show that our system is able to achieve consistently satisfactory results in performing disease detection tasks. Furthermore, the CNN disease detection model compares with state-of-the-art works and procures an accuracy of 96.8{\%}.
Social Norms Guide Reference Resolution (2022)

Humans use natural language, vision, and context to resolve referents in their environment. While some situated reference resolution is trivial, ambiguous cases arise when the language is underspecified or there are multiple candidate referents. This study investigates howpragmatic modulators external to the linguistic content are critical for the correct interpretation of referents in these scenarios. Inparticular, we demonstrate in a human subjects experiment how the social norms applicable in the given context influence theinterpretation of referring expressions. Additionally, we highlight how current coreference tools in natural language processing fail tohandle these ambiguous cases. We also briefly discuss the implications of this work for assistive robots which will routinely need to resolve referents in their environment.
Learning Natural Language Generation with Truncated Reinforcement Learning (2022)

This paper introduces TRUncated ReinForcement Learning for Language (TrufLL), an original approach to train conditional languagemodels without a supervised learning phase, by only using reinforcement learning (RL). As RL methods unsuccessfully scale to large action spaces, we dynamically truncate the vocabulary space using a generic language model. TrufLL thus enables to train a language agent by solely interacting with its environment without any task-specific prior knowledge; it is only guided with a task-agnostic language model. Interestingly, this approach avoids the dependency to labelled datasets and inherently reduces pretrained policy flaws such as language or exposure biases. We evaluate TrufLL on two visual question generation tasks, for which we report positive results over performance and language metrics, which we then corroborate with a human evaluation. To our knowledge, it is the first approach that successfully learns a language generation policy without pre-training, using only reinforcement learning.
Language Model Augmented Monotonic Attention for Simultaneous Translation (2022)

The state-of-the-art adaptive policies for Simultaneous Neural Machine Translation (SNMT) use monotonic attention to perform read/write decisions based on the partial source and target sequences. The lack of sufficient information might cause the monotonic attention to take poor read/write decisions, which in turn negatively affects the performance of the SNMT model. On the other hand, human translators make better read/write decisions since they can anticipate the immediate future words using linguistic information and domain knowledge. In this work, we propose a framework to aid monotonic attention with an external language model to improve its decisions. Experiments on MuST-C English-German and English-French speech-to-text translation tasks show the future information from the language model improves the state-of-the-art monotonic multi-head attention model further.
What Makes a Good and Useful Summary? Incorporating Users in Automatic Summarization Research (2022)

Automatic text summarization has enjoyed great progress over the years and is used in numerous applications, impacting the lives of many. Despite this development, there is little research that meaningfully investigates how the current research focus in automatic summarization aligns with users' needs. To bridge this gap, we propose a survey methodology that can be used to investigate the needs of users of automatically generated summaries. Importantly, these needs are dependent on the target group. Hence, we design our survey in such a way that it can be easily adjusted to investigate different user groups. In this work we focus on university students, who make extensive use of summaries during their studies. We find that the current research directions of the automatic summarization community do not fully align with students' needs. Motivated by our findings, we present ways to mitigate this mismatch in future research on automatic summarization: we propose research directions that impact the design, the development and the evaluation of automatically generated summaries.
ErAConD: Error Annotated Conversational Dialog Dataset for Grammatical Error Correction (2022)

Currently available grammatical error correction (GEC) datasets are compiled using essays or other long-form text written by language learners, limiting the applicability of these datasets to other domains such as informal writing and conversational dialog. In this paper, we present a novel GEC dataset consisting of parallel original and corrected utterances drawn from open-domain chatbot conversations; this dataset is, to our knowledge, the first GEC dataset targeted to a human-machine conversational setting. We also present a detailed annotation scheme which ranks errors by perceived impact on comprehension, making our dataset more representative of real-world language learning applications. To demonstrate the utility of the dataset, we use our annotated data to fine-tune a state-of-the-art GEC model. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our data in improving GEC model performance in a conversational scenario.
Semantic Diversity in Dialogue with Natural Language Inference (2022)

Generating diverse, interesting responses to chitchat conversations is a problem for neural conversational agents. This paper makes two substantial contributions to improving diversity in dialogue generation. First, we propose a novel metric which uses Natural Language Inference (NLI) to measure the semantic diversity of a set of model responses for a conversation. We evaluate this metric using an established framework (Tevet and Berant, 2021) and find strong evidence indicating NLI Diversity is correlated with semantic diversity. Specifically, we show that the contradiction relation is more useful than the neutral relation for measuring this diversity and that incorporating the NLI model`s confidence achieves state-of-the-art results. Second, we demonstrate how to iteratively improve the semantic diversity of a sampled set of responses via a new generation procedure called Diversity Threshold Generation, which results in an average 137{\%} increase in NLI Diversity compared to standard generation procedures.
LEA: Meta Knowledge-Driven Self-Attentive Document Embedding for Few-Shot Text Classification (2022)

Text classification has achieved great success with the prosperity of deep learning and pre-trained language models. However, we often encounter labeled data deficiency problems in real-world text-classification tasks. To overcome such challenging scenarios, interest in few-shot learning has increased, whereas most few-shot text classification studies suffer from a difficulty of utilizing pre-trained language models. In the study, we propose a novel learning method for learning how to attend, called LEA, through which meta-level attention aspects are derived based on our meta-learning strategy. This enables the generation of task-specific document embedding with leveraging pre-trained language models even though a few labeled data instances are given. We evaluate our proposed learning method on five benchmark datasets. The results show that the novel method robustly provides the competitive performance compared to recent few-shot learning methods for all the datasets.
Enhancing Self-Attention with Knowledge-Assisted Attention Maps (2022)

Large-scale pre-trained language models have attracted extensive attentions in the research community and shown promising results on various tasks of natural language processing. However, the attention maps, which record the attention scores between tokens in self-attention mechanism, are sometimes ineffective as they are learned implicitly without the guidance of explicit semantic knowledge. Thus, we aim to infuse explicit external knowledge into pre-trained language models to further boost their performance. Existing works of knowledge infusion largely depend on multi-task learning frameworks, which are inefficient and require large-scale re-training when new knowledge is considered. In this paper, we propose a novel and generic solution, KAM-BERT, which directly incorporates knowledge-generated attention maps into the self-attention mechanism. It requires only a few extra parameters and supports efficient fine-tuning once new knowledge is added. KAM-BERT achieves consistent improvements on various academic datasets for natural language understanding. It also outperforms other state-of-the-art methods which conduct knowledge infusion into transformer-based architectures. Moreover, we apply our model to an industry-scale ad relevance application and show its advantages in the real-world scenario.
Batch-Softmax Contrastive Loss for Pairwise Sentence Scoring Tasks (2022)

The use of contrastive loss for representation learning has become prominent in computer vision, and it is now getting attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP).Here, we explore the idea of using a batch-softmax contrastive loss when fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained transformer models to learn better task-specific sentence embeddings for pairwise sentence scoring tasks. We introduce and study a number of variations in the calculation of the loss as well as in the overall training procedure; in particular, we find that a special data shuffling can be quite important. Our experimental results show sizable improvements on a number of datasets and pairwise sentence scoring tasks including classification, ranking, and regression. Finally, we offer detailed analysis and discussion, which should be useful for researchers aiming to explore the utility of contrastive loss in NLP.
NewsEdits: A News Article Revision Dataset and a Novel Document-Level Reasoning Challenge (2022)

News article revision histories provide clues to narrative and factual evolution in news articles. To facilitate analysis of this evolution, we present the first publicly available dataset of news revision histories, NewsEdits. Our dataset is large-scale and multilingual; it contains 1.2 million articles with 4.6 million versions from over 22 English- and French-language newspaper sources based in three countries, spanning 15 years of coverage (2006-2021).We define article-level edit actions: Addition, Deletion, Edit and Refactor, and develop a high-accuracy extraction algorithm to identify these actions. To underscore the factual nature of many edit actions, we conduct analyses showing that added and deleted sentences are more likely to contain updating events, main content and quotes than unchanged sentences. Finally, to explore whether edit actions are predictable, we introduce three novel tasks aimed at predicting actions performed during version updates. We show that these tasks are possible for expert humans but are challenging for large NLP models. We hope this can spur research in narrative framing and help provide predictive tools for journalists chasing breaking news.