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The prevalence of the COVID-19 pandemic in day-to-day life has yielded large amounts of stance detection data on social media sites, as users turn to social media to share their views regarding various issues related to the pandemic, e.g. stay at home mandates and wearing face masks when out in public. We set out to make use of this data by collecting the stance expressed by Twitter users, with respect to topics revolving around the pandemic. We annotate a new stance detection dataset, called COVID-19-Stance. Using this newly annotated dataset, we train several established stance detection models to ascertain a baseline performance for this specific task. To further improve the performance, we employ self-training and domain adaptation approaches to take advantage of large amounts of unlabeled data and existing stance detection datasets. The dataset, code, and other resources are available on GitHub.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Stance Detection in COVID-19 Tweets

twitter

stance detection

covid-19

deep learning

bert

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

poster

We present an instance-based nearest neighbor approach to entity linking. In contrast to most prior entity retrieval systems which represent each entity with a single vector, we build a contextualized mention-encoder that learns to place similar mentions of the same entity closer in vector space than mentions of different entities. This approach allows all mentions of an entity to serve as ``class prototypes'' as inference involves retrieving from the full set of labeled entity mentions in the training set and applying the nearest mention neighbor's entity label. Our model is trained on a large multilingual corpus of mention pairs derived from Wikipedia hyperlinks, and performs nearest neighbor inference on an index of 700 million mentions. It is simpler to train, gives more interpretable predictions, and outperforms all other systems on two multilingual entity linking benchmarks.

MOLEMAN: Mention-Only Linking of Entities with a Mention Annotation Network

Models pre-trained on large-scale regular text corpora often do not work well for user-generated data where the language styles differ significantly from the mainstream text. Here we present Context-Aware Rule Injection (CARI), an innovative method for formality style transfer (FST) by injecting multiple rules into an end-to-end BERT-based encoder and decoder model. CARI is able to learn to select optimal rules based on context. The intrinsic evaluation showed that CARI achieved the new highest performance on the FST benchmark dataset. Our extrinsic evaluation showed that CARI can greatly improve the regular pre-trained models' performance on several tweet sentiment analysis tasks. Our contributions are as follows: 1.We propose a new method, CARI, to integrate rules for pre-trained language models. CARI is context-aware and can trained end-to-end with the downstream NLP applications. 2.We have achieved new state-of-the-art results for FST on the benchmark GYAFC dataset. 3.We are the first to evaluate FST methods with extrinsic evaluation and specifically on sentiment classification tasks. We show that CARI outperformed existing rule-based FST approaches for sentiment classification.

Improving Formality Style Transfer with Context-Aware Rule Injection

Approaches to computational argumentation tasks such as stance detection and aspect detection have largely focused on the text of independent claims, losing out on potentially valuable context provided by the rest of the collection. We introduce a general approach to these tasks motivated by syntopical reading, a reading process that emphasizes comparing and contrasting viewpoints in order to improve topic understanding. To capture collection-level context, we introduce the syntopical graph, a data structure for linking claims within a collection. A syntopical graph is a typed multi-graph where nodes represent claims and edges represent different possible pairwise relationships, such as entailment, paraphrase, or support. Experiments applying syntopical graphs to the problems of detecting stance and aspects demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in each domain, significantly outperforming approaches that do not utilize collection-level information.

Syntopical Graphs for Computational Argumentation Tasks

CIs have been a long standing issue in theoreticallinguistics and the philosophy of language (Grice,1975; Karttunen and Peters, 1979; Bach, 1999;Potts, 2005, inter alia) and are highly frequent in natural, spontaneous language (Hautli-Janisz andButt, 2016). However, it is so far mostly scalar implicatures (Schuster et al., 2020, inter alia) and implicative verbs (and their veridicality) (Nairnet al., 2006; Ross and Pavlick, 2019, inter alia) that have drawn attention in theNLUcommunity. In this abstract we investigate a broader range ofCI items and constructions, with the ultimate goal of pro-viding a cross-linguistic dataset for modeling the interaction of explicit and implicit content in natural communication.

Variation in conventionally implicated content: An empirical study in English and German

Short-answer scoring is the task of assessing the correctness of a short text given as response to a question that can come from a variety of educational scenarios. 
As only content, not form, is important, the exact wording including the explicitness of an answer should not matter. However, many state-of-the-art scoring models heavily rely on lexical information, be it word embeddings in a neural network or n-grams in an SVM. Thus, the exact wording of an answer might very well make a difference. We therefore quantify to what extent implicit language phenomena occur in short answer datasets and examine the influence they have on automatic scoring performance. We find that the level of implicitness depends on the individual question, and that some phenomena are very frequent. Resolving implicit wording to explicit formulations indeed tends to improve automatic scoring performance.

Implicit Phenomena in Short-Answer Scoring Data

Commit message is a document that summarizes source code changes in natural language. A good commit message clearly shows the source code changes, so this enhances collaboration between developers. Therefore, our work is to develop a model that automatically writes the commit message.

To this end, we release 345K datasets consisting of code modification and commit messages in six programming languages (Python, PHP, Go, Java, JavaScript, and Ruby). Similar to the neural machine translation (NMT) model, using our dataset, we feed the code modification to the encoder input and the commit message to the decoder input and measure the result of the generated commit message with BLEU-4.

Also, we propose the following two training methods to improve the result of generating the commit message: (1) A method of preprocessing the input to feed the code modification to the encoder input. (2) A method that uses an initial weight suitable for the code domain to reduce the gap in contextual representation between programming language (PL) and natural language (NL).

CommitBERT: Commit Message Generation Using Pre-Trained Programming Language Model

Identifier names convey useful information aboutthe intended semantics of code. Name-based program analyses use this information, e.g., to detect bugs, to predict types,and to improve the readability of code. At the core of name-based analyses are semantic representations of identifiers, e.g., in the form of learned embeddings. The high-level goal ofsuch a representation is to encode whether two identifiers, e.g., len and size, are semantically similar. Unfortunately, it is currently unclear to what extent semantic representations matchthe semantic relatedness and similarity perceived by developers. This paper presents IdBench, the first benchmark for evaluating semantic representations against a ground truth created fromthousands of ratings by 500 software developers. We use IdBench to study state-of-the-art embedding techniques proposed for natural language, an embedding technique specifically designedfor source code, and lexical string distance functions. Our results show that the effectiveness of semantic representations varies significantly and that the best available embeddings successfully represent semantic relatedness. On the downside, no existing technique provides a satisfactory representation ofsemantic similarities, among other reasons because identifiers with opposing meanings are incorrectly considered to be similar,which may lead to fatal mistakes, e.g., in a refactoring tool.S tudying the strengths and weaknesses of the different techniques shows that they complement each other. As a first step toward exploiting this complementarity, we present an ensemble model that combines existing techniques and that clearly outperforms the best available semantic representation.

IdBench: Evaluating Semantic Representations of Identifier Names in Source Code

Question answering on knowledge bases (KBQA) provides a user-friendly interface to the massive structured knowledge in KBs. It presents an array of intertwined challenges including non-i.i.d. generalization, large search space, and schema linking. Existing studies have tackled some of these challenges, but a unified solution that can address all the challenges is still lacking, which limits the applicability of KBQA on large-scale KBs. In this work, we propose a novel model, ArcaneQA, that aims to tackle all the aforementioned challenges and achieve strong (non-i.i.d.) generalization on large-scale KBs. Our model is based on two mutually boosting components: dynamic program induction, which dynamically prunes the search space, and dynamic contextualized encoding, which guides the search process on the large-scale KB via implicit schema linking. Experiment results on multiple popular KBQA datasets demonstrate the highly competitive performance of ArcaneQA in both effectiveness and efficiency, especially on non-i.i.d. generalization and complex questions involving multiple relations and functions.

ArcaneQA: Strongly Generalizable Question Answering on Large-Scale Knowledge Bases

Most available semantic parsing datasets, comprising of pairs of natural utterances and logical forms, were collected solely for the purpose of training and evaluation of natural language understanding systems. As a result, they do not contain any of the richness and variety of natural-occurring utterances, where humans ask about data they need or are curious about. In this work, we release SEDE, a dataset with 12,023 pairs of utterances and SQL queries collected from real usage on the Stack Exchange website. We show that these pairs contain a variety of real-world challenges which were rarely reflected so far in any other semantic parsing dataset, propose an evaluation metric based on comparison of partial query clauses that is more suitable for real-world queries, and conduct experiments with strong baselines, showing a large gap between the performance on SEDE compared to other common datasets.

Text-to-SQL in the Wild: A Naturally-Occurring Dataset Based on Stack Exchange Data

Automated source code summarization is a popular software engineering research topic wherein machine translation models are employed to “translate” code snippets into relevant natural language descriptions. Most evaluations of such models are conducted using automatic reference-based metrics. However, given the relatively large semantic gap between programming languages and natural language, we argue that this line of research would benefit from a qualitative investigation into the various error modes of current state-of-the-art models. Therefore, in this work, we perform both a quantitative and qualitative comparison of three recently proposed source code summarization models. In our quantitative evaluation, we compare the models based on the smoothed BLEU-4, METEOR, and ROUGE-L machine translation metrics, and in our qualitative evaluation, we perform a manual open-coding of the most common errors committed by the models when compared to ground truth captions. Our investigation reveals new insights into the relationship between metric-based performance and model prediction errors grounded in an error taxonomy that can be used to drive future research efforts.

Stance Detection in COVID-19 Tweets

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