United States

This study explores Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) for Arabic mental health question answering using the novel MentalQA dataset. We establish a baseline for future research and compare PLMs to classical models. Fine-tuned PLMs outperform classical models, with MARBERT achieving the best results (0.89 F1-score). Few-shot learning with GPT models also shows promise. This work highlights PLMs&#39; potential for Arabic mental health applications while identifying areas for further development.

EMNLP 2024

A Comparative Study of Using Pre-trained Language Models for Mental Healthcare Q&amp;A Classification in Arabic

question/answer classification

mental health

large language models

natural language processing

text classification

This study explores Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) for Arabic mental health question answering using the novel MentalQA dataset. We establish a baseline for future research and compare PLMs to classical models. Fine-tuned PLMs outperform classical models, with MARBERT achieving the best results (0.89 F1-score). Few-shot learning with GPT models also shows promise. This work highlights PLMs' potential for Arabic mental health applications while identifying areas for further development.

A Comparative Study of Using Pre-trained Language Models for Mental Healthcare Q&A Classification in Arabic

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

Please register!

EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

This study focuses on developing a sentence-level automatic speech segmentation system for Amharic. Two approaches were explored. The first approach utilized an automatic tool for segmenting and labeling Amharic speech data, creating an acoustic model through HMM modeling. The system's segmentation was refined using forced alignment AdaBoost techniques. In the second approach, prosodic features were extracted directly from the speech waveform, and statistical methods including AdaBoost were employed. Additionally, LSTM and Bi-LSTM models were utilized, achieving impressive accuracies of 94.62% and 95.23%, respectively. These approaches contribute to advancing automatic speech segmentation for Amharic, promising improved accuracy and efficiency.

Enhancing Amharic Sentence Segmentation with Prosodic Features and Neural Network Models

The rise of video content on social media has led to toxic speech spread, necessitating effec tive moderation. This study addresses detect ing toxic speech in Bangla and Bangla-English videos using multimodal data and deep learn ing techniques. The BanTSS dataset, with 431 videos and 2021 annotated utterances, supports this research. We propose the BanVATLLM framework, a multimodal architecture integrat ing audio, video, and text data. Utilizing ad vanced models like Whisper, MMS, Video MAE, Timesformer, and ChatGPT-3.5, Ban VATLLMshows high accuracy in classifying toxicity, sentiment, and severity, with high F1 scores and Fleiss’ Kappa scores. Results in clude 95.78% F1 and 95.72% accuracy for toxi city, 88.27% F1 and 88.55% accuracy for sever ity, and 84.85% F1 and 83.86% accuracy for sentiment, enhancing detection in low-resource languages.

BanVATLLM and BanTSS: A Multimodal Framework and a Dataset for Detecting Toxic Speech in Bangla and Bangla-English Videos

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities. Compared to other NLP tasks, multilingual and multi-label emotion evaluation is under-explored in LLMs. In this paper, we present EthiopicEmotion, a multi-label emotion with intensity dataset for four Ethiopian languages, namely Amharic (amh), Afan Oromo (oro), Somali (som), and Tigrinya (tir). We perform extensive experiments with additional English multi-label emotion data from SemEval 2018: Affect in tweets work. Our evaluation includes zero-shot and in-context learning (ICL) from large language models. The result shows that accurate multi-label emotion classification is still insufficient, even for high-resource languages (English), and there is a large gap between the performance of English and low-resource languages.

EthiopicEmotion: Multi-label Emotion Dataset with Large Language Models Evaluation

NLP is severely hampered by a scarcity of digital resources. This is especially true for Amharic, a language with few resources but a rich morphology. In response, a total of 67,739 Amharic news documents from 8 different categories are gathered from web sources. A baseline document categorization experiment is carried out to validate the usability of the obtained corpora from various domains.

Document Classification for the Under-resourced Amharic Language

African languages are not well-represented in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The main reason is a lack of resources for training models. Low-resource languages, such as Amharic and Ge’ez, cannot benefit from modern NLP methods because of the lack of high-quality datasets. This paper presents AGE, an open-source tripartite alignment of Amharic, Ge’ez, and English parallel dataset. Additionally, we introduced a novel, 1,000 Ge’ez-centered sentences sourced from areas such as news and novels. Furthermore, we developed a model from a multilingual pre-trained language model, which brings 12.29 and 30.66 for English-Ge’ez and Ge’ez to English, respectively, and 9.39 and 12.29 for Amharic-Ge’ez and Ge’ez-Amharic respectively.

AGE: Amharic, Ge’ez and English Parallel Dataset

This study presents a comprehensive, long-term project to explore the effectiveness of various prompting techniques in detecting dialogical mental manipulation. We implement Chain-of-Thought prompting with Zero-Shot and Few-Shot settings on a binary mental manipulation detection task, building upon existing work conducted with Zero-Shot and Few-Shot prompting. Our primary objective is to decipher why certain prompting techniques display superior performance so as to craft a novel framework tailored for the detection of mental manipulation. Preliminary findings suggest that advanced prompting techniques may not be suitable for more complex models if they are not trained through example-based learning.

Enhanced Detection of Conversational Mental Manipulation Through Advanced Prompting Techniques

Jack and the BeansTALK: Towards Question Answering in Plant Biology

Jack and the BeansTALK : Towards Question Answering in Plant Biology

Aspect-based sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is an advanced NLP task that identifies sentiments related to specific aspects of a product or service, offering more detailed consumer insights than general sentiment analysis. The proposed research introduces a hybrid model, Instruct-DeBERTa, which combines InstructABSA for aspect term extraction (ATE) and DeBERTa-V3-baseabsa-V1 for aspect sentiment classification (ASC). Using datasets from SemEval Restaurant 2014,2015,2016 and SemEval Laptop 2014, the model demonstrated improved performance across domains. Further enhancements included category classification using cosine similarity, linear layers with ReLU activation, regularization methods, and optimized attention heads for the hospitality domain. These improvements address existing model limitations, providing a comprehensive solution for analyzing consumer feedback, valuable for enhancing customer satisfaction and product development.

Instruct-DeBERTa: A Hybrid Approach for Enhanced Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Category Extraction

Ranking a set of items based on their relevance to a given query is a core problem in search and recommendation. Transformer-based ranking models are the state-of-the-art approaches for such tasks, but they score each query-item independently, ignoring the joint context of other relevant items. This leads to sub-optimal ranking accuracy and high computational costs. We propose Cross-encoders with Joint Efficient Modeling (CROSS-JEM), a novel ranking approach that enables transformer-based models to jointly score multiple items for a query, maximizing parameter utilization. CROSS-JEM leverages (a) redundancies and token overlaps to jointly score multiple items (short-text phrases in search and recommendations), and (b) a novel training objective that models ranking probabilities. CROSS-JEM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on publicly available ranking benchmarks with over 4x-lower ranking latency compared to the baselines.

CROSS-JEM: Accurate and Efficient Cross-encoders for Short-text Ranking Tasks

Latin America (LatAm) is mainly represented by developing or under-developed countries, and given that their investment in research and development may be lacking, their presence in high-impact research communities such as computational linguistics (CL) could be marginal. This work aims to measure the presence of LatAm researchers in the CL community and improve the visibility of those underrepresented investigators. We extracted the metadata of all ACL Anthology publications with at least one LatAm researcher affiliated with an institution located in an LatAm country at the time of the publication. We found that only a small percentage (2.4 \%) of CL publications have affiliations with institutions based in LatAm and that Alexander Gelbukh (Mexico) and Luciana Benotti (Argentina) are the most productive researchers. Our analysis also reveals that some countries in the region have not contributed to any CL publications. Despite these challenges, our results highlight the potential for growth and improvement. By shedding light on the underrepresentation of LatAm researchers in CL, this study aims to promote greater visibility and inclusivity within the community, ultimately fostering a more diverse and vibrant research landscape.

Next from EMNLP 2024

Enhancing Amharic Sentence Segmentation with Prosodic Features and Neural Network Models

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES