Thailand

While deep learning approaches represent the state-of-the-art of natural language processing (NLP) today, classical algorithms and approaches still find a place in NLP textbooks and courses of recent years. This paper discusses the perspectives of conveners of two introductory NLP courses taught in Australia and India, and examines how classical and deep learning approaches can be balanced within the lecture plan and assessments of the courses. We also draw parallels with the objects-first and objects-later debate in CS1 education. We observe that teaching classical approaches adds value to student learning by building an intuitive understanding of NLP problems, potential solutions, and even deep learning models themselves. Despite classical approaches not being state-of-the-art, the paper makes a case for their inclusion in NLP courses today.

ACL 2024

Striking a Balance between Classical and Deep Learning Approaches in Natural Language Processing Pedagogy

statistical models

teaching

deep learning

workshop paper

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Traditional lectures have poorer outcomes compared to active learning methodologies, yet many natural language processing classes in higher education still follow this outdated methodology. In this paper, we present, co-creational teaching, a methodology that encourages partnership between staff and lecturers and show how this can be applied to teach natural language processing. As a fast-moving and dynamic area of study with high interest from students, natural language processing is an ideal subject for innovative teaching methodologies to improve student outcomes. We detail our experience with teaching natural language processing through partnership with students and provide detailed descriptions of methodologies that can be used by others in their teaching, including considerations of diverse student populations.

Co-Creational Teaching of Natural Language Processing

In this work, we present a collaboratively and continuously developed open-source educational resource (OSER) for teaching natural language processing at two different universities. We shed light on the principles we followed for the initial design of the course and the rationale for ongoing developments, followed by a reflection on the inter-university collaboration for designing and maintaining teaching material. When reflecting on the latter, we explicitly emphasize the considerations that need to be made when facing heterogeneous groups and when having to accommodate multiple examination regulations within one single course framework. Relying on the fundamental principles of OSER developments as defined by Bothmann et al. (2023) proved to be an important guideline during this process. The final part pertains to open-sourcing our teaching material, coping with the increasing speed of developments in the field, and integrating the course digitally, also addressing conflicting priorities and challenges we are currently facing.

Collaborative Development of Modular Open Source Educational Resources for Natural Language Processing

The teaching laboratory we have created integrates methodologies to address the topic of hate speech on social media among students while fostering computational thinking and AI education for societal impact. We provide a foundational understanding of hate speech and introduce computational concepts using matrices, bag of words, and practical exercises in platforms like Colaboratory. Additionally, we emphasize the application of AI, particularly in NLP, to address real-world challenges. Through retrospective evaluation, we assess the efficacy of our approach, aiming to empower students as proactive contributors to societal betterment. With this paper we present an overview of the laboratory's structure, the primary materials used, and insights gleaned from six editions conducted to the present date.

From Hate Speech to Societal Empowerment: A Pedagogical Journey Through Computational Thinking and NLP for High School Students

Fuelled by technical advances, the interest in Natural Language Processing in the legal domain has rapidly increased over the last months and years. The design, usage, and testing of domain-specific systems, but also assessing these systems from a legal perspective, needs competencies at the intersection of law and Natural Language Processing. While the demand for such competencies is high among students, only a few law schools, particularly in Europe, teach such competencies. In this paper, we present the design for a Natural Language Processing course for postgraduate law students that is based on the principle of constructive alignment and has proven to be successful over the last three years.

Teaching Natural Language Processing in Law School

The rapid growth in natural language processing (NLP) over the last couple years has generated student interest and excitement in learning more about the field. In this paper, we present two types of students that NLP courses might want to train. First, an "NLP engineer" who is able to flexibly design, build and apply new technologies in NLP for a wide range of tasks. Second, an "NLP scholar" who is able to pose, refine and answer questions in NLP and how it relates to the society, while also learning to effectively communicate these answers to a broader audience. While these two types of skills are not mutually exclusive --- NLP engineers should be able to think critically, and NLP scholars should be able to build systems --- we think that courses can differ in the balance of these skills. As educators at Small Liberal Arts Colleges, the strengths of our students and our institution favors an approach that is better suited to train NLP scholars. In this paper we articulate what kinds of skills an NLP scholar should have, and then adopt a backwards design to propose course components that can aid the acquisition of these skills.

Training an NLP Scholar at a Small Liberal Arts College: A Backwards Designed Course Proposal

We address the task of human action representation and show how the approach to generating word representations based on co-occurrence can be adapted to generate human action representations by analyzing their co-occurrence in videos. To this end, we formalize the new task of human action co-occurrence identification in online videos, i.e., determine whether two human actions are likely to co-occur in the same interval of time.
We create and make publicly available the Co-Act (Action Co-occurrence) dataset, consisting of a large graph of ~12k co-occurring pairs of visual actions and their corresponding video clips. We describe graph link prediction models that leverage visual and textual information to automatically infer if two actions are co-occurring.
We show that graphs are particularly well suited to capture relations between human actions, and the learned graph representations are effective for our task and capture novel and relevant information across different data domains.

Learning Human Action Representations from Temporal Context in Lifestyle Vlogs

Ontology population, which aims to extract structured data to enrich domain-specific ontologies from unstructured text, typically faces challenges in terms of data scarcity and linguistic complexity, particularly in specialized fields such as retail banking. In this study, we investigate the application of large language models (LLMs) to populate domain-specific ontologies of retail banking products from Thai corporate documents. We compare traditional span-based approaches to LLMs-based generative methods, with different prompting techniques. Our findings reveal that while span-based methods struggle with data scarcity and the complex linguistic structure, LLMs-based generative approaches substantially outperform, achieving a 61.05% F1 score, with the most improvement coming from providing examples in the prompts. This improvement highlights the potential of LLMs for ontology population tasks, offering a scalable and efficient solution for structured information extraction in especially in low-resource language settings.

Financial Product Ontology Population with Large Language Models

This study explores a method for extending real-world knowledge graphs (specifically, Wikidata) by extracting triplets from texts with the aid of Large Language Models (LLMs). We propose a two-step pipeline that includes the initial extraction of entity candidates, followed by their refinement and linkage to the canonical entities and relations of the knowledge graph. Finally, we utilize Wikidata relation constraints to select only verified triplets. We compare our approach to a model that was fine-tuned on a machine-generated dataset and demonstrate that it performs better on natural data. Our results suggest that LLM-based triplet extraction from texts, with subsequent verification, is a viable method for real-world applications.

Prompt Me One More Time: A Two-Step Knowledge Extraction Pipeline with Ontology-Based Verification

A common approach to automatically assigning diagnostic and procedural clinical codes to health records is to solve the task as a multi-label classification problem. Difficulties associated with this task stem from domain knowledge requirements, long document texts, large and imbalanced label space, reflecting the breadth and dependencies between medical diagnoses and procedures. Decisions in the healthcare domain also need to demonstrate sound reasoning, both when they are correct and when they are erroneous. Existing works address some of these challenges by incorporating external knowledge, which can be encoded into a graph-structured format. Incorporating graph structures on the output label space or between the input document and output label spaces have shown promising results in medical codes classification. Limited focus has been put on utilizing graph-based representation on the input document space. To partially bridge this gap, we represent clinical texts as graph-structured data through the UMLS Metathesaurus; we explore implicit graph representation through pre-trained knowledge graph embeddings and explicit domain-knowledge guided encoding of document concepts and relational information through graph neural networks. Our findings highlight the benefits of pre-trained knowledge graph embeddings in understanding model's attention-based reasoning. In contrast, transparent domain knowledge guidance in graph encoder approaches is overshadowed by performance loss. Our qualitative analysis identifies limitations that contribute to prediction errors.

Towards Understanding Attention-based Reasoning through Graph Structures in Medical Codes Classification

Symbolic sentence meaning representations, such as AMR (Abstract Meaning Representation) provide expressive and structured semantic graphs that act as intermediates that simplify downstream NLP tasks. However, the instruction-following capability of large language models (LLMs) offers a shortcut to effectively solve NLP tasks, questioning the utility of semantic graphs. Meanwhile, recent work has also shown the difficulty of using meaning representations merely as a helpful auxiliary for LLMs. We revisit the position of semantic graphs in syntactic simplification, the task of simplifying sentence structures while preserving their meaning, which requires semantic understanding, and evaluate it on a new complex and natural dataset. The AMR-based method that we propose, AMRS$^3$, demonstrates that state-of-the-art meaning representations can lead to easy-to-implement simplification methods with competitive performance and unique advantages in cost, interpretability, and generalization. With AMRS$^3$ as an anchor, we discover that syntactic simplification is a task where semantic graphs are helpful in LLM prompting. We propose AMRCoC prompting that guides LLMs to emulate graph algorithms for explicit symbolic reasoning on AMR graphs, and show its potential for improving LLM on semantic-centered tasks like syntactic simplification.

Striking a Balance between Classical and Deep Learning Approaches in Natural Language Processing Pedagogy

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Co-Creational Teaching of Natural Language Processing

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Striking a Balance between Classical and Deep Learning Approaches in Natural Language Processing Pedagogy

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Next from ACL 2024

Co-Creational Teaching of Natural Language Processing

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PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

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RESOURCES

Downloads