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Visual dialogue is a challenging task since it needs to answer a series of coherent questions on the basis of understanding the visual environment. Previous studies focus on the implicit exploration of multimodal co-reference by implicitly attending to spatial image features or object-level image features but neglect the importance of locating the objects explicitly in the visual content, which is associated with entities in the textual content. Therefore, in this paper we propose a {\bf M}ultimodal {\bf I}ncremental {\bf T}ransformer with {\bf V}isual {\bf G}rounding, named MITVG, which consists of two key parts: visual grounding and multimodal incremental transformer. Visual grounding aims to explicitly locate related objects in the image guided by textual entities, which helps the model exclude the visual content that does not need attention. On the basis of visual grounding, the multimodal incremental transformer encodes the multi-turn dialogue history combined with visual scene step by step according to the order of the dialogue and then generates a contextually and visually coherent response. Experimental results on the VisDial v0.9 and v1.0 datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model, which achieves the new state-of-the-art results on substantial metrics.

ACL 2021

Multimodal Incremental Transformer with Visual Grounding for Visual Dialogue Generation

**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). 

This Joint Conference of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2021) was to be held in Bangkok, Thailand, during August 1-6, 2021 and is now virtual on the Underline platform.

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).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

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technical paper

With the popularity of smartphones, we have witnessed the rapid proliferation of multimodal posts on various social media platforms. We observe that the multimodal sentiment expression has specific global characteristics, such as the interdependencies of objects or scenes within the image. However, most previous studies only considered the representation of a single image-text post and failed to capture the global co-occurrence characteristics of the dataset. In this paper, we propose Multi-channel Graph Neural Networks with Sentiment-awareness (MGNNS) for image-text sentiment detection. Specifically, we first encode different modalities to capture hidden representations. Then, we introduce multi-channel graph neural networks to learn multimodal representations based on the global characteristics of the dataset. Finally, we implement multimodal in-depth fusion with the multi-head attention mechanism to predict the sentiment of image-text pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on three publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for multimodal sentiment detection.

Multimodal Sentiment Detection Based on Multi-channel Graph Neural Networks

Product reviews contain a large number of implicit aspects and implicit opinions. However, most of the existing studies in aspect-based sentiment analysis ignored this problem. In this work, we introduce a new task, named Aspect-Category-Opinion-Sentiment (ACOS) Quadruple Extraction, with the goal to extract all aspect-category-opinion-sentiment quadruples in a review sentence and provide full support for aspect-based sentiment analysis with implicit aspects and opinions. We furthermore construct two new datasets, Restaurant-ACOS and Laptop-ACOS, for this new task, both of which contain the annotations of not only aspect-category-opinion-sentiment quadruples but also implicit aspects and opinions. The former is an extension of the SemEval Restaurant dataset; the latter is a newly collected and annotated Laptop dataset, twice the size of the SemEval Laptop dataset. We finally benchmark the task with four baseline systems. Experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the new task and its effectiveness in extracting and describing implicit aspects and implicit opinions. The two datasets and source code of four systems are publicly released at \url{https://github.com/NUSTM/ACOS}.

Aspect-Category-Opinion-Sentiment Quadruple Extraction with Implicit Aspects and Opinions

Humor recognition has been widely studied as a text classification problem using data-driven approaches. However, most existing work does not examine the actual joke mechanism to understand humor. We break down any joke into two distinct components: the set-up and the punchline, and further explore the special relationship between them. Inspired by the incongruity theory of humor, we model the set-up as the part developing semantic uncertainty, and the punchline disrupting audience expectations. With increasingly powerful language models, we were able to feed the set-up along with the punchline into the GPT-2 language model, and calculate the uncertainty and surprisal values of the jokes. By conducting experiments on the SemEval 2021 Task 7 dataset, we found that these two features have better capabilities of telling jokes from non-jokes, compared with existing baselines.

Uncertainty and Surprisal Jointly Deliver the Punchline: Exploiting Incongruity-Based Features for Humor Recognition

Disentanglement of latent representations into content and style spaces has been a commonly employed method for unsupervised text style transfer. These techniques aim to learn the disentangled representations and tweak them to modify the style of a sentence. In this paper, we propose a counterfactual-based method to modify the latent representation, by posing a ‘what-if’ scenario. This simple and disciplined approach also enables a fine-grained control on the transfer strength. We conduct experiments with the proposed methodology on multiple attribute transfer tasks like Sentiment, Formality and Excitement to support our hypothesis.

Counterfactuals to Control Latent Disentangled Text Representations for Style Transfer

he product reviews summarization task aims to automatically produce a short summary for a set of reviews of a given product. Such summaries are expected to aggregate a range of different opinions in a concise, coherent and informative manner. This challenging task gives rise to two shortcomings in existing work. First, summarizers tend to favor generic content that appears in reviews for many different products, resulting in template-like, less informative summaries. Second, as reviewers often disagree on the pros and cons of a given product, summarizers sometimes yield inconsistent, self-contradicting summaries. We propose the PASS system (Perturb-and-Select Summarizer) that employs a large pre-trained Transformer-based model (T5 in our case), which follows a few-shot fine-tuning scheme. A key component of the PASS system relies on applying systematic perturbations to the model’s input during inference, which allows it to generate multiple different summaries per product. We develop a method for ranking these summaries according to desired criteria, coherence in our case, enabling our system to almost entirely avoid the problem of self-contradiction. We compare our system against strong baselines on publicly available datasets, and show that it produces summaries which are more informative, diverse and coherent.

PASS: Perturb-and-Select Summarizer for Product Reviews

Analysis of teacher evaluations is crucial to the development of robust educational programs, particularly through the validation of desirable qualities being reflected on in the text. This research applies Natural Language Processing techniques on a real-world dataset from a Filipino education non-profit to explore insights from analyzing evaluations written by Teacher Fellows who assess their own progress. Prior to this research, only qualitative assessment had been conducted on the text. Inspired by the use of word embedding similarities to capture semantic alignment, we utilize GloVe embeddings to determine to what extent these evaluations reflect concepts critical to measuring the competency of Teacher Fellows and upholding the organization’s Vision and Mission. As Fellows’ quantitative ratings improved, so too did their demonstration of competency in the text. Further, Teacher Fellow language was consistent with the organization’s Vision and Mission. This research therefore showcases the possibilities of NLP in education, improving our understanding of Teacher Fellow evaluations, which can lead to advances in program operations and education efforts.

Using Word Embeddings to Analyze Teacher Evaluations: An Application to a Filipino Education Non-Profit Organization

Relation classification aims to predict a relation between two entities in a sentence. The existing methods regard all relations as the candidate relations for the two entities in a sentence. These methods neglect the restrictions on candidate relations by entity types, which leads to some inappropriate relations being candidate relations. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm, RElation Classification with ENtity Type restriction (RECENT), which exploits entity types to restrict candidate relations. Specially, the mutual restrictions of relations and entity types are formalized and introduced into relation classification. Besides, the proposed paradigm, RECENT, is model-agnostic. Based on two representative models GCN and SpanBERT respectively, RECENT_GCN and RECENT_SpanBERT are trained in RECENT. Experimental results on a standard dataset indicate that RECENT improves the performance of GCN and SpanBERT by 6.9 and 4.4 F1 points, respectively. Especially, RECENT_SpanBERT achieves a new state-of-the-art on TACRED.

Relation Classification with Entity Type Restriction

Link prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs) is a key research topic. Previous work mainly focused on binary relations, paying less attention to higher-arity relations although they are ubiquitous in real-world KGs. This paper considers link prediction upon n-ary relational facts and proposes a graph-based approach to this task. The key to our approach is to represent the n-ary structure of a fact as a small heterogeneous graph, and model this graph with edge-biased fully-connected attention. The fully-connected attention captures universal inter-vertex interactions, while with edge-aware attentive biases to particularly encode the graph structure and its heterogeneity. In this fashion, our approach fully models global and local dependencies in each n-ary fact, and hence can more effectively capture associations therein. Extensive evaluation verifies the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. It performs substantially and consistently better than current state-of-the-art across a variety of n-ary relational benchmarks. Our code is publicly available.

Link Prediction on N-ary Relational Facts: A Graph-based Approach

Multi-task benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE have driven great progress of pretraining and transfer learning in Natural Language Processing (NLP). These benchmarks mostly focus on a range of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks, without considering the Natural Language Generation (NLG) models. In this paper, we present the General Language Generation Evaluation (GLGE), a new multi-task benchmark for evaluating the generalization capabilities of NLG models across eight language generation tasks. For each task, we continue to design three subtasks in terms of task difficulty (GLGE-Easy, GLGE-Medium, and GLGE-Hard). This introduces 24 subtasks to comprehensively compare model performance. To encourage research on pretraining and transfer learning on NLG models, we make GLGE publicly available and build a leaderboard with strong baselines including MASS, BART, and ProphetNet.

GLGE: A New General Language Generation Evaluation Benchmark

Pre-trained language models such as BERT have exhibited remarkable performances in many tasks in natural language understanding (NLU). The tokens in the models are usually fine-grained in the sense that for languages like English they are words or sub-words and for languages like Chinese they are characters. In English, for example, there are multi-word expressions which form natural lexical units and thus the use of coarse-grained tokenization also appears to be reasonable. In fact, both fine-grained and coarse-grained tokenizations have advantages and disadvantages for learning of pre-trained language models. In this paper, we propose a novel pre-trained language model, referred to as AMBERT (A Multi-grained BERT), on the basis of both fine-grained and coarse-grained tokenizations. For English, AMBERT takes both the sequence of words (fine-grained tokens) and the sequence of phrases (coarse-grained tokens) as input after tokenization, employs one encoder for processing the sequence of words and the other encoder for processing the sequence of the phrases, utilizes shared parameters between the two encoders, and finally creates a sequence of contextualized representations of the words and a sequence of contextualized representations of the phrases. Experiments have been conducted on benchmark datasets for Chinese and English, including CLUE, GLUE, SQuAD and RACE. The results show that AMBERT can outperform BERT in all cases, particularly the improvements are significant for Chinese. We also develop a method to improve the efficiency of AMBERT in inference, which still performs better than BERT with the same computational cost as BERT.

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