Thailand

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.

ACL 2024

Teaching Natural Language Processing in Law School

lawschool

legaltech

teaching

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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.

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.

Semantic Graphs for Syntactic Simplification: A Revisit from the Age of LLM

This paper presents a model for solving the Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) problem, focusing on the impact of subgraph extraction from a Knowledge Graph on model performance. The proposed method combines textual and graph information by adding linearized subgraphs directly into the main question prompt with separate tokens, enhancing the performance of models working with each modality separately. The study also includes an examination of Large Language Model (LLM) backbones and the benefits of linearized subgraphs and sequence length, with efficient training achieved through fine-tuning with LoRA. The top benchmark, using subgraphs and MPNet, achieved an F1 score of 0.3887. The main limitation of the experiments is the reliance on pre-generated subgraphs/triplets from the graph, and the lack of exploration of in-context learning and prompting strategies with decoder-based architectures.

nlp_enjoyers at TextGraphs-17 Shared Task: Text-Graph Representations for Knowledge Graph Question Answering using all-MPNet

This paper introduces a novel late interaction mechanism for knowledge base question answering (KBQA) systems, combining Graphormer and transformer representations. We conducted extensive experiments, comparing various pooling mechanisms and configurations. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in F1-score compared to traditional baselines. Specifically, we found that attention pooling, in conjunction with linearized graph and question features alongside sub-graph representations, yields the best performance. Our study highlights the importance of advanced interaction mechanisms and the integration of diverse modalities in KBQA systems.

TIGFORMER at TextGraphs-17 Shared Task: A Late Interaction Method for text and Graph Representations in KBQA Classification Task

This work describes an approach to develop Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) system for TextGraphs-17 shared task. The task focuses on the fusion of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Knowledge Graphs (KGs). The goal is to select a KG entity (out of several candidates) which corresponds to an answer given a textual question. Our approach applies LLM to identify the correct answer among the list of possible candidates. We confirm that integrating external information is particularly beneficial when the subject entities are not well-known, and using RAG can negatively impact the performance of LLM on questions related to popular entities, as the retrieved context might be misleading. With our result, we achieved 2nd place in the post-evaluation phase.

JellyBell at TextGraphs-17 Shared Task: Fusing Large Language Models with External Knowledge for Enhanced Question Answering

Argumentative Relation Classification is the task of determining the relationship between two contributions in the context of an argumentative dialogue. Existing models in the literature rely on a combination of lexical features and pre-trained language models to tackle this task; while this approach is somewhat effective, it fails to take into account the importance of pragmatic features such as the illocutionary force of the argument or the structure of previous utterances in the discussion; relying solely on lexical features also produces models that over-fit their initial training set and do not scale to unseen domains. In this work, we introduce ArguNet, a new model for Argumentative Relation Classification which relies on a combination of Dialogue Acts and Dialogue Context to improve the representation of argument structures in opinionated dialogues. We show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the Kialo benchmark test set, and provide evidence of its robustness in an open-domain scenario.

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

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Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system

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

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Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system

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PRESENTATIONS

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